Esoteric Coffeehouse

Until recently, the field of Western Esotericism, like other academic fields, has had an “Iron Curtain” of its own, staying away from Eastern Europe or Russia. In many ways, this omission was not intentional, but resulted from the lack of access to documents trapped on the other side of the Wall. It was then salutary that at this ESSWE conference in Strasbourg (of which you can read more in my previous post) there were presentations on the esotericism of Russia, the Czech Republic and Romania. In many ways, Eastern European countries are an unearthed treasure-trove that demands recovery.

My presentation focused on the town of Sibiu (also called Hermannstadt or Nagyszeben) in Transylvania, a historical province of Romania. Sibiu was named in 2007 as one of the two European capitals of culture, and Sibians are still very proud of this honour, the first one bestowed to an Eastern European city. Sibiu is by many standards a peculiar place, as it was for almost a millennium inhabited mainly by ethnic Germans, locally called “Saxons”, in a province dominated by a Romanian majority and a Hungarian minority. The Germans came here around 1100s, invited by the Hungarian kings to protect the border of Transylvania from Tartar and later Turkish raiders. The Germans occupied a land they called “Siebenburgen” (the seven cities) out of which Sibiu was the most important and best fortified. It was so well fortified that the Pope once praised it for being one of the foremost bastions of Christianity, successfully withstanding Moslem attacks. In 1526, however, Hungary fell to the Turks, and Transylvania (together with Sibiu) became a vassal of the Turks. This was not as bad as it sounded, because the principality was virtually independent, paying a formal tribute to the Ottoman Empire. Hence, when the Austrian Empire tried to take over Transylvania in the 1600s, there was strong local resistance. Eventually, the Austrians did occupy the principality, which became part of the Empire until 1918. Since then, Transylvania (and Sibiu) was part of Romania. However, after 1945, most Germans began to leave the country, with the result that now there are only 3% of them left in Sibiu (albeit the mayor of the town is a German).

From my investigations, Sibiu appears to have a rich esoteric background, focused particularly on alchemy and freemasonry. The key alchemist figure here was Melchior Cibinensis, a mysterious author which composed a famous alchemical work in the 1500s called “the Alchemical Process in the form of a Mass”. This was an audacious piece that made an analogy between alchemy and the Catholic Mass. In the 20th century, Carl Jung used this work to describe his theory of the correspondence between the lapis philosophorum and Christ.

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I have intended for sometime to write a little piece on the stages of alchemical work. There are several books on alchemy, but I’m afraid not very many talk in a clear manner of the alchemical process itself. Surely, throughout the centuries alchemical techniques underwent a natural evolution, and matters are complicated by the personal touch each alchemist set on the process. However, it appears that the Western alchemical tradition maintained a consistency of four phases expressed in colors: nigredo (blackness), albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowing) and rubedo (redness). This habit of expressing alchemical change through color was called ‘dyeing’ and underlay a belief that colors expressed fundamental stages of nature (1). Carl Jung thought this sequence originated with Heraclitus, although no reference from the ancient Greek philosopher is given (2).

Alchemical work was rooted in the philosophy of a gradual but irreversible process of improvement in nature. Perhaps the best summary of the worldview pervading alchemy was Mircea Eliade’s lesser known work The Forge and the Crucible. According to him, alchemical practice was rooted in a primordial human impulse as homo faber (3). The fundamental idea was that Nature was perfectible and that it was in a perpetual process of self-improvement. All metals tend, or wish, to become gold, and they do so over centuries of change. However, man can intervene and quicken the process of natural growth. This human implication into the course of Nature was accompanied by a feeling of sacredness and reverence toward her. This was not inert, inferior matter: but matter hiding the very seeds of divinity. It was by delving deep into the heart of Nature that the alchemist discovered the secrets of Creation and immortality.

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My earlier two-episode vampire analysis has prompted me to thinking about the quest for immortality, which is probably as old as mankind. The first known hero story, that of the Sumerian Gilgamesh, has the prince unsuccessfully seeking the plant that would bestow him immortality. In the Bible, the first human beings, Adam and Eve, were apparently created immortal only to lose the gift due to evil temptation. Adam and Eve’s story assumes that humanity was initially meant to be immortal. But if immortality is the natural state of mankind, would it be possible to recover it by some means?

I shall conspicuously pick from the countless attempts at achieving immortality those related to alchemy. Commonly described as the art of making gold, alchemy often had the goal of achieving life-extension or immortality. In fact, scholars consider that life extension, not gold was the foremost goal of Chinese alchemy (1). In the West, the attainment of the elixir vitae was initially secondary to the art of goldmaking (2). The first author to emphasize it was the Arab alchemist Jabir (3). He conceived of the “elixir vitae”, another name for the magical Philosopher’s Stone, which transformed metals into gold. The alchemists who came to possess the Stone would then be expected to live many years, or even forever.

From this concept an entire legend of immortal alchemists was born. One of the earliest embodiments was the French alchemist Nicholas Flamel (1330 – 1418), which was reputed to have faked his own death (4) and was recently featured in a novel as an ‘immortal’ (5). The Renaissance magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, though less associated with alchemy, was portrayed as having lived several hundreds of years in Mary Shelley’s The Mortal Immortal (6). Yet perhaps the most influential ‘immortal’ in his age was the mysterious Count of St Germain, whom I have talked about in my previous article. He was reputed to have lived hundreds or even thousands of years, a legend that he apparently cultivated as well (7).

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I have spent my last few weeks researching the German theosophist Jacob Boehme, and I thought – why not write an introduction to this esotericist who has influenced so much of modern thinking, including Romanticism, Hegel or Schopenhauer?

Boehme (1575-1624) is mostly known and revered today as the forerunner of modern theosophy, a major esoteric movement made famous by Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Krishnamurti (the latter two in their early years). As conceived by Boehme, theosophy was an eclectic mixture of Christian theology, natural philosophy and mysticism. He perceived the Bible as containing esoteric knowledge about God that he felt he had a duty to reveal.

It all started with a mystical revelation. In 1600, at age 25, Boehme was a rather prosperous shoemaker in the eastern German town of Gorlitz. He had just married, acquired his license to practice shoemaking, and all was set for him to become a respected and average citizen of Gorlitz. But, the legend goes, Boehme was not a happy man; he was depressed and often fell into melancholy. One day, however, as Boehme was sitting at home, he suddenly saw the light of the sun reflected in a tin dish. In one flash, Boehme experienced a mystical vision of God which changed his life forever.

Moved by such a powerful revelation, Boehme began to write his first book, Aurora, which he only finished twelve years later. He never abandoned his ‘day-job’, so to speak: he continued to work as a shoemaker until l613, when he began a yarn business. Yet his mystical-esoteric side got him into trouble with the local Lutheran church, which pronounced him a heretic and forbade him to write. That, of course, did not happen; his Aurora became very popular in several influential circles and subsequently Boehme wrote more than fifteen thick books, which expanded on the first revelations of Aurora.

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Like all things of Hermetic extract, alchemy hails from Egypt, and its recorded origins can be traced back to the late antique world. The etymology of the name ‘alchemy’ is not clear – it may have referred to Egypt as the “black land” (chemia) or perhaps to the first stage of the alchemical work, nigredo (blackness) (1, 2). The beginnings of alchemy are shrouded in mystery, but it is known that, by 300-400 AD, Greek alchemists such as Pseudo-Democritus, Zosimos and Synesius were writing about the process of gold-making in mystical, obscure terms.

Alchemy has survived throughout the centuries based on a few fundamental concepts, which I have summarized as:

1. the tradition that viewed gold as the highest, and purest of metals.

2. the belief that matter was not inert, but continuously transformed itself into something ‘higher’. Thus all metals would eventually become gold, given enough time.

3. human beings could hasten the work of nature, transforming metals into gold by means of an intermediary substance called the Philosopher’s Stone. This Stone was seen as not only bettering metals but human beings as well, lengthening life and curing illnesses (3).

4. the process of going to the heart of matter and enacting its change was seen as something sacred or even mystical; thus there was a fundamental participation of the alchemist in the work resulting in an inner change as well as an outer one.

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