Étienne Perrot, picture page 84 of the special edition

of ‘Le Monde Inconnu’, dedicated to Alchemy.

October 20, 1978 issue.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA-is Part 3 of our sampler series dedicated to the memory of Étienne Perrot-the French Jungian psychologist and influential dream interpreter: an excerpt from the foreword to his French translation of Michael Maier’s ‘Atalanta Fugiens‘ published in 1969 by Editions Librairie de Médicis and here in the second edition issued by Editions Dervy in 1997. From page 14 to 19.

We will follow up with Part 4, ‘The key to alchemical symbolism‘. The foreword, being lengthy, will provide more material for later. The text, ‘Clarification upon the Alchemical Path‘, written earlier in 1964’-composed as a presentation of a few translated chapters of the ‘Atalanta Fugiens‘ published in a magazine and found here as an appendix to the present edition we are using-will be shared also, in a forthcoming publication.

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(this is an immediate follow-up to the final paragraph in part 2: ‘The burning of the Great Pan in the ‘Second Faust’ is the first act of the Great Transformation. Is it now getting really close to us?’)

…But the old sciences that help us to read the dreadful signs of the times contain also the most comforting and serene message. Life, they tell us, is a generous and tireless mother. Her essence is wisdom and harmony, because she has as a principle and aim complete perfection. The frightening and excessive production we are now witnessing also has its place in the game of the universe. They subsequently carry in them a greatness and a beauty that we can and must admire, but without being fascinated by them. When they will have achieved their ephemeral role, when the intoxication will fade away and when our eyes will have been reopened again, a new rhythm with its primeval qualities-will establish itself; wisdom will let its child-like voice be heard among the cacophony of the engines and the explosions; its ageless teachings will regain their strength and their obviousness; therefore, Man-guided again-will learn to know himself and to recognize the universe and the gods. It is for tomorrow? For after-tomorrow?  Whatever! A certitude, somehow, possesses me and dictates these lines: A faith tried in the world and the spirit that animates it; a faith that finds its very foundations in what we know of Man and in his sacred destiny.

The merry-go-round of the existence driven by the inseparable couple Love & Hate never stops: ‘Corruptio unius est generatio alterius‘ (‘The corruption (destruction) of one thing is the generation (birth) of another‘), say the ancient philosophers. Our society can, just in front of our eyes, set in a feverish manner the very conditions of its demise. The newspapers can announce that in less than five years artificial satellites, loaded with weapons properly evil, will orbit around planet earth, ready to throw onto her their fire and poison. (A Via-Hygeia note: Remember that this text was written in December 1965…). While some men build with their hands the Wormwood-Star of the prophecy (Apocalypse, VIII, 10-11, in French it is called the ‘Etoile-Absinthe’ echoing the English ‘Wormwood‘): ‘…And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as if it were a lamp, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood…‘, some of their brothers, in the shadow and the opprobrium of society, anticipate this event and alive confront the death of a world. While manufactured objects are multiplied around them, mesmerizing more and more the face of the earth and of Man, its child, these men feel the darkness spreading and the void deepening in its center. And when instead of fleeing, they find the courage to look straight into the pit and the fear it provokes; their eyes slowly distinguish an unknown light-germ shining, feeble like the sun at the Christmas solstice, and alike it carrying the promise of spring and summers achievements. This germ is what the Hebrew prophets saw birthing in the ruins of burned cities: it is the miraculous child that Michael Maier celebrates in his first emblem of his ‘Atalanta‘. Blessed are those who have recognized and welcomed it, because they possess the stepping stone of the path of the New Man, leading to the Eternal Man!

Already, voices have risen among us to tell us of the chaos and its despair, the fertile death and the aurora it prefigurates. We will retain only a few of them in this essay, the frailest but the purest also: the voices of real poets. Carrying on the legacy of the ancient bards and seers, a Rainer-Maria Rilke (with his ‘Duino Elegies‘ and his ‘Sonnets to Orpheus‘), and a Thomas Stearns Eliot (with his ‘Waste Lands‘, his ‘The Hollow Men‘ (1925), his ‘Ash Wednesday‘ , and finally his ‘Four Quartets‘), have enriched the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon heritage with those masterpieces, precious common-threads to follow through our dark night.

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France was also visited by the angel: For more than ten years, a song started to be heard from the voice of Yves Bonnefoy (with his ‘Of movement and Immobility at Douve‘) and immediately it had awakened a significant echo. The names of ‘Douve‘ evokes at the same time the black water pit (moat) and the white bird of peace (dove), The poet place as an epigraph this sentence from Hegel: ‘ The life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself…Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’.

Our friend from ‘Douve’ has delineated, without any pathetic artifice nor any vain revolt, how life is undone, how Man lucidly penetrates into his own destruction and gains access the the ‘true place‘. By writing these words, we are not straying from the alchemical path. If someone doubts it, we will recall for him the advice of the very last Adept-Fulcanelli-gave, in-which he summed up his teaching: ‘It is at the moment when corporeal inertia declares itself, at the very time when nature closes its labor that the wise man initiates his. We ought then to bend towards the abyss and the void will instruct us. Birth finally does not teach us much, but death, from which life is born, can reveal everything to us. Death only holds the keys of nature’s laboratory; Death only delivers the captive spirit from its material body’s jail.’ (Fulcanelli, ‘The Philosophical Dwellings‘. Second Edition, 1960, page 162). This praise of the Nigredo phase that we give here in an abridged version, is a pure reflection of the hermetic tradition. The reader will discover the same content in ‘Atalanta”s twelfth discourse.

It is not without reason, having to introduce an alchemical treatise, that we have chosen to invoke the patronage of poets. Michael Maier would be the first to applaud us, whose works contain, besides the poetry we will find in ‘Atalanta’, a whole volume of ‘Intellectual Songs upon the Resurrection of the Phenix‘; they are poems in Latin, of an original and rigorous form.

Since Gerard de Nerval and Arthur Rimbaud, the honest man in France knows that Poetry is Alchemy. This very conviction verifies an assertion of the philosophers of old who would rank Orpheus, Homer and Virgil among their forerunners and would give them the title-sounding odd for our modern ears-of ‘Chymical Poets‘. But, despite the interest of this formula, we would like here, not to comment it, but to ‘turn it around‘ and say: Alchemy is Poetry. There is here nothing new. Among the numerous epithets our Science is graced with, we can find ‘art of Music‘; which means of the Muses, daughters of Zeus. In a more precise manner, the Greek manuscripts give to the seeker of the Stone the name of poets (ποιεται, poietai). There is no need to understand this to resort to philology. Alchemy, like true poetry, refuses any linear discourse, any rugged vocabulary, and finally any univocal meaning. Banishing explanation, it pleases itself in evocations. It set into movement symbols and their powerful waves uplift the deepness of the soul and, alike the sea at the time of the equinox, leaves upon the shores of our waking consciousness treasures from the marine depth, seaweeds, shells, pearls, precious amber stones, etc…

Plato, in time when myths could step upon the legitimate domain of clear intelligence, had someone engrave on the pediment of the door of his academy the famous inscription: ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter.’ For us, after two centuries of rationalism-without any serious counterpart-have made the western soul similar to a dry tree, we dare declare, and this without sacrificing anything of the demands of sacred geometry: ‘None shall enter the garden of the Hesperides, if he is unwilling to become a poet!’

Here, we are pointing at an essential fact. This is why, at the risk of repeating ourselves, we will turn ourselves more eagerly towards the reader who, formed to the still predominating scientific methods, opens this book to find ‘tangible realities‘ and we will speak to him in this way: ‘Friend, may you put to sleep the part of you that constantly make threads of concepts and observe phenomenon outside of their contexts. Place yourself in communion with the universe; let yourself resonate with the deep voice that sings within you, as it does for everyone but nobody is paying attention. Only then, you would be able to hear the chymical language, and grasp things true and, if it pleases God (Deo Concedente), you will reach the aim that young Arthur Rimbaud had glimpsed: ‘To possess Truth in a soul and a body’.’

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-‘So, to sum up, these pretty words are an invitation for us to feast upon the wind?’

-‘I grant you that: ‘The wind carried it in its belly‘.’

-‘Do you ignore, as you are eager to teach us or just pretend to do so, that Fulcanelli claims loudly for his discipline the quality of ‘exact science‘?’

-‘Exact, the chymical operations certainly are; but, not like you would conceive it. We ought first with a bit of madness strip out this very rigidity that hinders and blinds you. At the price of this rough and joyous ascesis you will see phenomena following each other within the harmony of planetary revolutions. But do not forget that in this second part of the twentieth century, science is shaking the iron yoke of determinism and testify that nature is before everything else, game, danse and freedom. (A Via-Hygeia note: Should we see here an allusion to quantum physic?).

By making ours the words of the young poet from Charleville, we think we have succeeded in avoiding the risk to be classified among the tenants of the so-called ‘spiritual alchemy‘. Such an expression is for us devoid of any meaning and we know too well what it costs to separate what God has united! The hermetic tradition is in this aspect unanimous in claiming that the sacred art only bothers with spirits so to embody them. On the opposite, the departure point of the alchemical work is a body that will be transformed into a spirit. This is why this art will remain for ever sealed to anyone who is afraid of the perils of the laboratory, of sweat and of coal that dirty the hands and clothes.

(To be continued)

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Source

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Coming soon:

A Little Étienne Perrot Sampler: Part 4

-‘The key to alchemical symbolism‘.

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