The Secret at the Heart of Alchemy
Excerpt from A Monument to the End of Time: Alchemy,
Fulcanelli, & the
Great Cross by Jay Weidner & Vincent Bridges
Unlike Christianity, which denounced its mystical origins as
heresy,
Judaism retained a powerful connection with those same mystical
roots.
Our earliest alchemical text, "Isis the Prophetess to her
son Horus,"
points to an Egypto-Hebraic source for its transformational
philosophy.
Interestingly enough, a Hebrew contemporary of the author of
"Isis the
Prophetess" story, Rabbi Nehuniah ben HaKana, revealed to
his students
the magical technology behind these transformational processes.
In the
latter centuries of the Dispersion, his teachings would form the
basis
of the traditional Kabbalah.
The oldest and most influential of all Kabbalistic texts, The
Bahir, or
The Illumination (from Job 37:21 "And now they do not see
light, it is
illumination (bahir) in the skies.") was also called the
"Midrash of
Rabbi Nehuniah," to emphasize his authorship. Although the
Bahir is the
primary text of the Kabbalah, it does not use that term.
Kabbalah, from the Hebrew root QBL meaning received or given,
came into
fashion much later when the teachings of the first century
mystics were
indeed just "received traditions." The sages of the
Bahir preferred the
more ancient term Maaseh Merkabah, literally "Workings of
the Chariot."
The name possesses connotations of an active mystical experience
as
opposed to a received tradition. The Bahir combines the ideas of
the
work of creation, animating matter, with the radical concept of a
celestial projection as a way to return to the divine source. By
juxtaposing these ideas, The Bahir reveals the secret at the
heart of
alchemy.
The key concept is the Tree of Life, Etz Chaim, as described in
the work
of creation texts such as the Sepher Yetsirah. The Tree of Life
is a
diagram that pictures reality as the intersection of four great
realms,
or levels of abstraction. A geometric pattern crystallizes within
the
intersection planes like a moiré pattern in a holographic
projection.
Ten localities, spheres or sephiroth, are connected by twenty-two
paths,
processes or states of becoming. The entire diagram was thought
to
describe the nature of creation. God's artistic technique if you
will.
But it's true importance to the sages was its application to the
human
condition.
As God is supposed to have made man in his image and likeness,
then man
was thought to contain, in microcosm, the entire Tree of Life. To
the
western esotericists, the Tree of Life functioned much like the
Kundalini diagrams of the Hindu mystics. By mapping the internal
power
centers, and then projecting outward and aligning them with the
forces
of nature, the magician sought to re-enact the process of
creation. And
so become, like God, a co-creator of the universe.
The sephiroth and the paths are arranged in a few basic patterns.
The
top three localities, Kether, Chokmah, and Binah, (Crown, Wisdom
and
Understanding) create a triangular motif that is then inverted
and
projected downward through the pattern. The first inverted
triangle,
Chesed, Geburah, Tipharesth, (Mercy, Strength and Beauty) is
repeated by
the third and last triangle, Netzach, Hod and Yesod (Victory,
Splendor
and Foundation.) The whole pattern is then resolved by, and
enfolded
into, the last sephiroth, Malkuth (Kingdom.)
Each of these triangular patterns represent one of the realms or
levels
of abstraction. The repetition of the pattern also creates three
columns
or pillars on the Tree. Facing the Tree, the three columns are
Mercy,
Transformation (note this column connects Malkuth with Kether,
Heaven to
Earth), and Severity. These repetitions of three can also be seen
as the
three persons of the trinity, the law of threes, or thesis,
antithesis
and synthesis to the modern philosopher.
The first three verses of the sixth chapter of Rabbi Akiva's
Sepher
Yetsirah supplies the key to astronomical alchemy, although in a
truly
oblique fashion. The first verse informs us that as proof of the
existence of the Tree of Life, the twelve, the seven, and the
three, "He
set them in the Teli, the cycle and the Heart."
The secret lies in the mysterious word Teli. It occurs in neither
the
Torah nor the Talmud, although it is used in the Bahir. There is
considerable dispute among scholars as to its precise meaning.
The only
similar word in the Bible is a single reference to some kind of
weapon
in Genesis. Apparently, from the root of the word, talah or to
hang, it
must have been some kind of bolo, or a weight, suspended on a
rope for
throwing.
This suggests that the Bahir is talking about the celestial axis
around
which the heavens rotate. This means that the celestial axis is a
kind
of imaginary string from which the celestial globe hangs. But
what is
the string connected to? An ancient Midrash, "The Prayers of
Rabbi "In
The Beginning," tells us that it "hangs (by a thread)
from the fin of
the Leviathan." This ancient serpent can be nothing other
than the
constellation of Draco, the Pole Serpent mentioned in Job 26:13
"By His
Spirit the heavens were calmed, His hand pierced the Pole
Serpent." And
in 2nd Isaiah 27:1 "On that day (the day of judgment) with
His great
sharp sword, God will visit and overcome the Leviathan, the Pole
Serpent, and the Leviathan, the Coiled Serpent, and He will kill
the
dragon of the sea." It is important to note that three such
dragons are
mentioned.
To understand this, we must look up to the stars. We can find the
Pole
Star, Polaris in the tail of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. This
marks our
north celestial pole, directly above the north pole of our
planet. There
is another pole in the sky however. This is the pole of the solar
ecliptic, the path of the sun through the constellations. The
earth is
tilted at 23.5 degrees away from the ecliptic. This tilt causes
the
celestial pole above our planetary pole to describe a great
circle in
the sky over long periods of time. In 4500 BCE, Thuban, a star in
the
tail of Draco, marked the celestial pole. This pole has, over
time,
shifted to Polaris.
The ecliptic pole however does not change, since the path of the
sun
through the sky never changes. Around this point, which has no
star
visible to the naked eye to mark it, the constellation of Draco,
the
Great Dragon, spirals through all of the zodiacal signs, the
stars
appear to hang, talah, from it. Draco thereby becomes the Teli,
which
the Sepher Yetsirah in chapter 6:3 tells us, is "over the
universe like
a king on his throne." This is perhaps an echo of an ancient
form of
worship, that of the God Most High identified with Baal, that
predated
the arrival of the Hebrews in Palestine.
It is also the serpent of the garden, climbing its way up the
Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the brazen serpent used by Moses
in the
wilderness and even Hermes caduceus staff. The Gnostic Ophites,
who
worshipped the serpent in the Garden of Eden for giving us the
gift of
knowledge which provided an escape from the Demiurge, formulated
the
image of a snake spiraling around an egg. In simple terms, this
is the
serpent of Draco coiled around the ellipse made by the celestial
pole.
The Bahir, in verse 106, announces that the Teli is nothing but
"the
likeness before the Blessed Holy One," or the face of God.
Verse 96 of
the Bahir addresses key alchemical symbols, and may in fact be
our
earliest mention of The Philosopher's Stone. It begins "What
is the
earth from which the heavens were graven (created)? It is the
throne of
the Blessed Holy One. It is the Precious Stone and the Sea of
Wisdom."
>From the Bahir, we learn that the Tree of Life is actually
the Precious
Stone whose facets are projected onto the celestial sphere and
which is
part of the continuous flow os the Sea of Wisdom. John's
Revelation is a
version of this, with the Tree of Life on the banks of the
flowing
river, deep inside New Jerusalem's Cube of Space. We can also see
that
all of this weird symbolism actually has a context and a meaning,
and is
grounded in firm reality.
So what happened to the Tree of Knowledge? Is it banished from
the
perfected schema? The Bahir suggests, in many subtle references,
that
the Tree of Knowledge forms itself round the axis of the
celestial pole,
whose Teli or dragon axis would be the backward spiraling axis of
the
precession of the equinoxes.
The north celestial pole, as it circles around the fixed point of
the
ecliptic pole, first leans in toward the angle of the galactic
axis,
that is toward the center of the galaxy. It then moves away, in a
large
precessional cycle. The Fall occurs when the Tree is tilted away
from
the galactic axis. The resurrection and redemption, the arrival
of the
kingdom of heaven, happens when the Tree tilts toward the
galactic axis.
The four great ages then are the tilting in towards the center of
the
galaxy, which translates into the Golden and Silver ages and the
tilting
away from the center of the galaxy, which brings on the Bronze
and the
current Iron age.
The mystical experience of the galgal, or cycle, of the Tree of
Knowledge is the whirlwind, or Sufah in our Talmudic reference.
The
galgal is also spoken of in the Bahir as a womb. This is a cycle
of time
in which the future is born. All of time happens within the
Sphere
defined by the Teli. The Bahir also tells us that the Teli is
revealed
in the Heart of Heaven. This is both our own human, personal,
spiritual
center, the heart of man, and the heart at the center of our own
Milky
Way galaxy. Together they pulsate in harmony of the same wave.