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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Homeopathy is the brainchild of Samuel Hahnemann, a German doctor practicing at the beginning of the 19th century. As a young physician, Hahnemann became discontented with the mainstream medicine practiced during his era, which often employed harsh and doubtful measures such as bloodletting, purging, blistering and excessive doses (1). His own experience and observation led him to propose a radically new medicine, homeopathy, which could be translated as “the cure is like to the disease”. Homeopathy is based on a few pillar principles developed by Hahnemann, which I will attempt to summarise below:

1. The law of “similars”. This law, which is rightfully considered as the basic tenet of homeopathy, had been the mainstay of several ‘dissident’ physicians such as Hippocrates, Paracelsus or Stahl. The law maintains that cure should be similar, rather than opposed to disease. In other words, patients should take medicine that is apparently ‘stimulating’ the illness. This may sound rather absurd in our day-and-age, when it is ‘self-understood’ that the medicine should be contradictory to the disease: thus, when we have an infection we take antibiotics to ‘reduce’ or ‘eliminate’ it. Who would even consider taking something that would increase the infection? Yet some famous physicians, including Hahnemann, thought that a contrary medicine only quashes the symptoms, without addressing the real problem. The infection may be reduced or eliminated, but the body’s disease would only find some other outlet to express itself. That is because, in Hahnemann’s views, disease goes deeper than what we normally think as illness. Disease is a spiritual entity, rather than a physical one (2).

2. Theory of the vital force (“vitalism”). Homeopathy belongs to a long lineage of scientists or philosophers that believed that, behind the apparent materiality of the universe lay a spiritual force that organized matter (3). Proponents of this theory include Aristotle, Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Stahl, Bergson, Driesch and others (4, 5). Hahnemann subscribed to this view, maintaining that the body was animated by a spiritual force he called “dynamis”, which was responsible for maintaining and regulating the body (6). Far before the ideas of homeostasis and immunity were introduced into medicine, he believed that the body had the capacity of self-regulating itself. However, he also considered that, when disease takes over, the body is no longer able to protect itself and the physician must then intervene.

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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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