Esoteric Coffeehouse

The other day, being hit with an annoying bout of cold, I was (re)reading a short treatise by the medieval Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi. Suggestively called “A Tale of the Western Exile”, the story follows the saga of a wisdom-seeker in the “Western” lands (1). In this story of esoteric initiation, the “West” stands as a negative symbol of materialism and bodily pleasure. Suhrawardi was heretic philosopher who was executed in 1191 by the Sultan. Yet, if you ask an average Middle Eastern man today, chances are that he will hold similar views regarding the West being decadently materialistic. The resilience of this perspective of the West coming from the East is remarkable. Yet the views of the West in Europe were often different. Let’s now briefly switch to another mythical tale, this time written on the other extremity of the medieval world, in Ireland. Here, the adventures of St Brendan tell us how the saint sailed to the fairy islands in the West. The voyage takes him to the borders of Christian paradise whence he must return (2). Here we have a dramatically different view of the West as a spiritual, if real, land of the blessed.

This over-simplistic analysis is not meant to say that the Westerners always looked to the West and Easterners to the East for salvation. Things are much more complicated than this, and they probably go to the core of what we feel about the cardinal points of East and West. They are obviously linked with the Sun’s path in the sky. In the East, the Sun is just rising, foretelling a new day. Hence the East is about renewal, hope, the promise of a new beginning. The West is the mysterious end – the unknown at the end of the road. The West is about death, afterlife, the latter times, and frequently about the hopes of earthly survival beyond natural death.

Indeed, the Greeks, Celts and other cultures viewed the West as the direction souls departed after death. Yet the good souls did not simply vanish, but would continue to dwell in the “Western” islands. Hence mythologies such as the Greek Islands of the Blessed and Avalon of the Britons focused on the existence of islands where dead souls continued on living. These islands were physical places in the people’s minds at the time: Christopher Columbus himself believed in the existence of St Brendan’s Island (3).

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Everyone remembers the witch hunts of the 1500 and 1600s as an ugly chapter of Western history. Thousands of so-called witches were burned, drowned, or tortured in an attempt to get rid of what the Inquisitors called ‘devil worship’. Today, we rarely believe that the witches were in league with the devil. In fact, during the early 20th century, scholars thought that witchcraft itself was a complete invention of the witch hunters (1). Even when some reality to the phenomenon was admitted, witch beliefs were dismissed as the matter of ‘female hysteria’ or peasant superstition (2).

Beginning with the 1960s and 70s, scholars began to consider witchcraft as more than a fiction of the Inquisition, and concentrated on analyzing its meaning for the peasant society (3), (4). Yet even this attempt was marred by a tendency of dismissing witchcraft as pure imagination.

If most scholarship believed witchcraft had no reality to it, there was one early dissenting voice: Margaret Murray, who maintained in 1926 that witchcraft was real, and that it actually represented a European-wide pagan religion dedicated to a horned god identifiable as Janus or Cernunnos (5). The medieval civilization was thus divided into the true Christians and the pagan “secret society” that adopted Christianity only as a facade. In an era of rationalism, numerous scholars rejected Murray’s work as pure fantasy (6).

Murray may have used her imagination to embellish the facts, but this does not necessarily mean that the whole phenomenon of witchcraft was imaginary. However, it was not until Carlo Ginzburg’s landmark studies that scholars began to really consider this possibility.

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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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