Elie-Charles Flamand in 1981,

picture by Gwen Garnier-Duguy.

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‘Alchemy claims the necessity of a material foundation in order to support the building of a spiritual work.’ Elie-Charles Flamand.

🌿Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA are the Introduction of ‘Erotique de l’Alchimie‘ by Elie-Charles Flamand and its foreword by Eugène Canseliet. From Editions ‘Le Courrier du Livre’, Paris, 1989. From page 13 to 19 and from 7 t0 10. English working translation by Via-HYGEIA

🌿’If Elie-Charles Flamand is seeking, through poetry, a certain spiritual light, this will only be anticipated and then perceived after a long journey through the night to the “incandescent freshness” of the depths of language. A language that must be worked on by the poet with a commitment comparable to that of the alchemist when undertaking the operation of sublimation. This does not mean that one should read our poet’s work as if it were conceived according to the science of Hermes Trismegistus. Flamand himself sought to dispel this possible misunderstanding: “For a true poet, it is obviously not a matter of taking from the philosophical art a number of its most specific symbols, chosen for their unusual or picturesque character, and then arranging them in a pseudo-hermetic manner. Nor should one attempt to create a coded writing where some knowledge of the art of Hermes would be expressed didactically, and which the reader could only decipher if they had the key to the sanctuary. It is essentially the Purification, the Sublimation of language that must be accomplished in any poetry worthy of the name.’ Michel PASSELERGUE. ‘Elie-Charles FLAMAND, une quête du Verbe dans les méandres du sens.’, published in ‘Arts & Jalons‘, Saint-Mandé (94), 27 octobre 2018.

For any impartial observer, it is obvious that our epoch has perverted eroticism. Without doubt, a battle had to be fought against the puritanism and the hypocrisy our preceding generations were complacent with. The victory is, for the better of us, mostly at hand. But, this freedom, what did the commoner from the middle of the twentieth century do with it? More and more trapped inside a materialism blind to the subtiles planes, he is unable to handle in a meaningful manner the related forces of these planes to which eroticism engagingly participates. Therefore, it is, most of the time, dominated and disaggregated by the eros of the time. It knows only to use it for low aims (advertisement) or aiming at a travesty of a real sacred and ritual participation (strip-tease). If we rely on the traditional doctrine of the successive ages of the world, we may see that we have reached the fourth age: the iron age, the dark age, the Kali-Yuga, of which Hesiod, Ovid and the Vishnu-Purana have given us vivid descriptions, in which we recognize our own dark age. In these times that will harbor deep changes-before we could finally achieve the return to the bliss of the primitive state, or golden Age-spiritual light has been veiled. Only the most material of the dark lights guide Humanity. This is why eroticism which is of a sacred essence is mercilessly assaulted by the inherent desecration faculties of the Kali-Yuga.

In his 1804 ‘Key of Mythology‘, C.P. Douin has perfectly described this phenomenon by studying the process of the progressive degeneration of the myth of Venus. After taking note that this goddess represented for the Ancients ‘the celestial light that gives birth to divine love in the heart of Man and fostering him into the production of the spiritual act and fruit.’ He goes on: ‘The first Venus was daughter of the heavens and of the day and was considered as the emblem of the most dazzling light. In a time when human intelligence was of a lesser expression, it started to rely upon supernatural explanations, hence Venus was described as born from the white foam of the sea blended with the productive strength (semen) of Caelus-Uranus who had just been castrated; in this second degree, Venus still represented a divine light, that took its source in what the supernatural forces could produce of their most luminous nature: then, she is the image of a quasi-divine being, hovering above water, named Aphrodite, which means ‘cream of the sea’. But in the following degree of degradation, she is represented coming out of the sea, soaking, and she was given the name, ‘Anadiomene’, a Greek word meaning the ‘drowning moon’, or the light of Men drowned in the chaos of the supernatural and magical sciences of all kinds. Then, Venus was once more represented as daughter of Jupiter and Dione; finally, we count an infinity of representations that mark the gradual extinction of the divine lights of humanity.’

The importance the people of our epoch attach to eroticism, shows well that they have but a confuse conscience of its sacred value. That some of them have undertaken a search for the Absolute through the most aberrant manifestations of the eros is a kind of proof of it. But, all quest that is not metaphysically founded remains vain, and in the last resort, becomes of a dissolving nature.

The person who wants to  bring back a metaphysical sense to eroticism can probe the remote civilisations in which the traditional spirit has remained alive. The study of some points of doctrines and some techniques taught by Tibetan tantrism, Hinduism, Daoism, will certainly offer precious indications about eroticism, envisioned not only in its repercussions in the subtile planes, but above all as a foundation for spiritual realization. Nevertheless, these teachings are kept carefully hidden by their practitioners. What we may know in the West is but fragmentary and often difficult to interpret. Moreover, these techniques are blended with the mentality and the particular aptitudes of the people who practice them. Finally, the absence of qualified masters prevents their implementation in our countries.

If the same person tries to turn his attention to what has reached us in the West of the old esoteric knowledge, in order to find some remnant of information about mystical eroticism, his search will be but a huge deception. He will in fact, realize that we do not have traditions of the sort in our home countries. Practiced during the whole Antiquity, still lively with the last Romans through the perpetuation of the mysteries of Bacchus, Cybele and Isis, sacred eroticism has been violently fought by Christianity, which with its contempt for the flesh, could not admit such practices. All the survivals of these cults, such as the Sabbat of the witches and sorcerers of the Middle Ages, were methodically dealt with and annihilated, but Alchemy was not. It is one of the rare esoteric discipline that is still alive in the West, which does vehicle a great number of information regarding sacred eroticism. Therefore, we have decided to look closely into the key texts of the Hermetic Science, in order to see whether we could find some valid teachings about it.

Alchemy claims the necessity of a material foundation in order to support the building of a spiritual work. According to its tenets, the transformations the alchemist imposes to his first matter are analogically linked to the initiatic process that is simultaneously happening in him. Due to involution, matter seems to be what remains as far as possible from the Divine. But, it is in the depth of the fallen hylean mass that the operator will find the sparkle of the un-created Fire and could then transmute himself spiritually in communion with the transcendance. The world, is truly but a sort of illusory form upon which the Absolute can appear. This is why Limojon de Saint-Didier in his ‘Hermetic Triumph‘, says: ‘The philosophers say that we ought to seek perfection in imperfect things and this is where we will find it.’ According to the Hermetic Cosmogony, Creation is happening through a union, described under its most carnal manner, between two initial potentialities sexually opposed. ‘Hence, the best authors did limit themselves to describe allegorically the union of sulfur and mercury, generators of the stone, that they called sun and moon, philosophical father and mother, fixe and volatil, agent and patient, male and female, eagle and lion, Apollo and Diana (that a few called ‘Appolonius of Tyana’), Gabritius and Beya, Urim and Thummim, the two columns of the Temple: Jakin and Boaz, the old man and the virgin, and finally, in a more exact manner, the brother and the sister.’ (Fulcanelli). But, we ought to point out the existence of another alchemical ‘couple’ that we could call ‘vertical’, if we would admit that the other one acts ‘horizontally’. It is the ‘Earth’ and the ‘Sky’ and the Masters have kept it more secret. These last two hermetic entities are, them too, linked by a love principle and, alike the preceding ones quoted earlier, alchemy must provoke their union, manifested by the carnal penetration, so to speak, of the ‘materialized spirit’ (the Spiritus Mundi) into the ‘spiritualized matter’, or holy land of the Wise. Jean-Baptiste Le Brethon says in his ‘Keys to the spagyric philosophy‘: ‘Therefore through the union of the two sperms, fix and volatile. in which are enclosed the two spirits, the subject of the influences and celestial virtues is specified and sublimed at the highest degree of magnetic strength; The sky has been made earth, and the earth sky, and the energies of both are gathered.’

As we can see, alchemical pan-sexualism is completely explicite; it manifests at every pages of the treatises. Most of the detailed alchemical operations are described under the form of erotic allegories. This is what a chemist of the XVIII th century was noting, whose conceptions were already turned upon modern science, but while criticizing the ‘souffleurs‘ (literally: the blowers; means the fake teachers with no real experience but are like the sophists of old, speak and write well to hide the void of their being), was not denying the value of the old alchemy and believed in the reality of transmutations: ‘We wouldn’t believe that serious philosophers, meticulous, always locked-up in their laboratory, would seek in love the origin of chemistry; they went even further: in their works, we only see constant hints about love-the wedding bed of the Philosophical King, Venus and Vulcan’s rest, the mixing of the seeds, menstrual flows, etc…everything that has a link with the generation of Man is applied to the Great Work.‘ and later the same author studies the myth of the birth of the science of Hermes, and after having stated that ‘chemistry was born out of love, he add further on: ‘Moses, in Genesis, says that the children of God united with the daughters of Man; on this, Zozimus of Panopolis writes: ‘It is told in the Scriptures that there were genii that had relationships with women; Hermes mentions this in his Books upon Nature; there are almost no recognized or apocryphal books were we do not find the remnants of this tradition. These genii blinded by their love for women made them discover the wonders of Nature; because of this, the genii were cast out of Heaven for having taught humans about evil and what was not useful to the soul; from these genii came the giants of old; the book were all of their secrets were compiled is called ‘Kema’, and from this came our word ‘Chemistry‘.’ (Jean-Baptiste Sénac -1693–1770). This curious tradition is obviously originating from the Book of Enoch.

As in sacred eroticism, we find in alchemy the idea that carnal encounter initiates the dissolution of the self necessary to reach a new state. This is the initiatic principle of death & rebirth. Many are the disciples of Hermes who have insisted upon this key point. Here are some of their testimonies:

‘We have already called death ‘darkness’ (noirceur), and following this metaphor further, we can call ‘whiteness’ (blancheur), a life that comes back only and through resurrection.’ Nicolas Flamel. From the ‘Book of Hieroglyphic Figures‘.

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‘When you have extracted me partly from my nature, and my wife partly from hers, and having united us again, you will kill us, so that we may resurrect in one body, to not die anymore and perform great deeds.’ (The ‘Rosary of the Philosophers‘)

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‘These Natures (the Philosophical Sun & Moon) are conjoined together by the mean of a true marriage, and they are but one sole Nature, one sole body renewed and resurrected, which will not die anymore and will become immortal.’ (‘The Book of Artephius‘).

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‘Ascuboffes said: ‘Put the Red Man with the White Woman in a circular house surrounded by a continuous slow heat and leave then in it until everything has been converted into Water, not the vulgar one but the Philosophical one. Then, if you had steered well, you will discover a blackness upon it, which is a sign of rotting and this will last forty or forty-two days. Leave them there until there is no more blackness and proceed in the end like at the beginning. Know also, that the end is only the beginning and that death is the cause of life and the beginning of the end. See Black, White, Red, that’s all; because this death is eternal life after the most glorious and perfect death.’ (‘The Turba Philosophorum‘).

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The only important point through in which alchemical eroticism is distinguishing itself from all the other forms of traditional eroticism is that the Great Work (le Grand Oeuvre) has for aim material birth: Alain Danielou in his ‘l’érotisme divinisé’ states: ‘The notion of fertility is completely foreign to the sacred value the Indus attribute to eroticism, to sensuality and love. The participative character into the divine attributed to the sexual act does not come from its reproductive purpose, but from its voluptuous character. It is pleasure that gushes out of the love for principles.’ And this quote can very well be applied to all the other forms of metaphysics of sex to the exclusion of alchemy. There is here only but an apparent contradiction. In fact, the birth of the ‘Son of the King’, born out of the hermetical intercourse is the seal of a radical change of state. This philosophical child fully participates into the divine, differing in this from his parents. He is a substance entirely sanctified by the Word and it has reached a state of supreme sublimation. It could be called matter’s ‘glorious body’. The philosophical stone or Universal Medicine are called ‘stone of the absolute’. Western alchemists frequently have assimilated it to the figure of Christ, or God incarnated into Man alike the stone is God incarnated in matter.

A remarkable little book was published anonymously in 1625, the ‘Hydrolithus Sophicus Seu Aquarium Sapientum’ (the waterstone of the wise) intends to show ‘how the true terrestrial philosophical stone becomes the type and harmonises itself with the true celestial and spiritual stone, Jesus-Christ, which is given to us in a corporeal mode and shown in advance in a visible aspect‘ and the author further adds: ‘If the sophists did not want to simply believe in God and in His divine Word, they could still know its essence and feel it with their fingers through the works we call today ‘chymical’, where this conjunction is operated through the union of two waters, those of Mercury and those of the Sun.’

These few considerations and the choice of texts and images that follow now do not pretend anything other than to bring together a few scattered pieces necessary to open a file. We leave it to the meditations of those who will examine them to draw a conclusion of a spiritual nature that made them feel is of a logical nature. But, we also want to warn them against the danger to deduct from extrapolation any practice what so ever. It would be vain and dangerous to introduce alchemical eroticism in the frame of a so-called ‘western tantrism’ (an expression that is by itself contradictory in its terms and carry the stigmates of the worst syncretism) that some self-deluded and delirious contemporary occultists seek to spread.

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Original French

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Source

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Appendix

Eugène Canseliet’s Foreword

Elie-Charles Flamand, who we know well, offers the best guaranty that eroticism under his pen would not be downgraded to the banality our epoch has sadly been the witness of. Artist and poet, he has too much in him the care for beauty so that he would lack conjointly the attraction for this purity that the alchemists of old invite us to seek with exaltation. The purest of the pure remains for them the ultimate goal, the philosophical stone that they call also Rubi, the Phenix, ‘purple’ from the Latin purpura, the color of courage and royalty.

Without having an practical experience of the alchemical laboratory and its kiln, Elie-Charles Flamand can be considered nonetheless an alchemist, for the imperious reason that he is in love with this poetry that draws its deep and true signification in the corresponding Greek word:  ποιησις, poiesis, which means action, achievement, efficiency. So, it is the very task of the poet, ποιητες, poietes (the one who creates, executes and practices) more than any other writer, to examine what the most important part of the alchemical iconography and literature had to offer in the subject of eroticism, especially in the domain of the philosophical Art of Love. Elie-Charles Flamand was fully conscious of what his task would demand, and what it needed to be completed: A sound choice of figures and texts. I must say, he did not fail.

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It is here the proper space for me to give again my feeling about the meaning of the substantives erotic and eroticism, as it matters to differentiate them, especially because the second dwells most of the time in the vulgar and morbid waste land of pornography. Taken as an adjective, erotic, attribute or epithet, attaches itself to the meaning of the name, eroticism. It is of a rather recent creation, the beginning of this present century, as Littré (a major influential French dictionary) does not mention it in its 1897 vintage edition. It is because the antic substantif refused to express a deviant and value-less art, that the  neologism flatly owns its own signification.

Erotic, reproduces obviously the Greek  εροτικος, erotikos, taking its root from ερως, eros itself formed by contracted form of the verb en, αω,vεραν, eran that gives us the definition of Eroticism, that is to love. Here we can relate with the word  ηρως, eros, hero, demi-god, which designates without any misplaced pride the alchemist, who is truly the demiurge of his own creation.

For his personal genesis, alike the God of the Bible, the ‘artist’ (the one who practices the Art) spread his spirit to glide upon the waters provided by the very fountain of the lovers of science. This source of life, here a wood engraving from Basile Valentin‘s 1659 ‘Azoth‘ in its French translation, ‘revised and expanded’ by Mister Lagneau, Doctor, shows it to us personified by a siren pressing between her index and middle fingers her two nipples, gushing its milk into the sea upon which she swims and which is also the elected domain of all true philosophers.

Is it not surprising and instructive, that the Church (here the Catholic Church), has displayed such a merciless oppression towards sorcerers and witches, zealous enactors during their nocturnal gatherings of the worst sexual excesses, but it has also allowed on its worship and cult buildings by its stone makers countless licentious images that would offend modesty itself! We know of many sculptures and reliefs of common churches-but also of main cathedrals-that are hidden from the eyes of the common worshiper and visitors. At the time of their building, initiation was widespread into the high clergy, who was of a rather tolerant nature towards the symbolism of the hermetic science, and had chosen to keep a blind eye to the provocative art of the builders guilds and stone makers loges.

Nothing is of a licentious and condemnable nature that obeys to the laws of nature, and among them, in the fore front, the law of conjunction is of prime importance, as it was formulated by God Himself, judging at the time of the Genesis, that is was not good that Man would be alone (non est bonum esse hominem solum). The imperative plural had to be observed and similarly transmitted, in the passive form by Saint Jerome : ‘Multiplicamini!’ (be multiplied!).

In the ‘Flower of the flowers‘ (Flos Florum) (which the ‘Mutus Liber‘ illustrated with its striking panels), Arnaldus de Villa Nova, referring to Morienus, declares in the name of plurality, that the labor of our work is, assimilated with the making of Man- Quod factum nostri magisterii assimilatur in odrinem hominis creationi. Because, adds this doctor who was a contemporary of the Templar Order, first is coitus, then reception, followed by impregnation, fourthly, birth and fifthly, nourishing-‘Nam primo est coitus, postmodum conceptio, deinde impregnatio, quarto ortus & qinto sequitur nutrimentum.’

Mineral ontogenesis, the Great Work is entirely based upon copulation, in which it renews itself, the more the better. The adept, Alexander Sethon, a.k.a. as the Cosmopolite, was bold enough to write that it was only after eleven times (coit undecies) that the male shares his semen, that he enters then a debilitated state that will remain until the moment of death (debilitatur fere ad mortem usque) and that the female conceives and gives birth to a son, clearer than his father.

It is true that all of this is made easy because of the looks, the goods– dare we say-of the young bride, which are: her intelligent condescending posture, followed by her provocative coquetry and finally, the attractiveness of her bodily presence.

The themes, so varied, of this Art of Love preliminaries were understandably exploited, through writing and artistic compositions, with as much talent and often genius, that poetry was interweaved with them, as a sovereign mistress, of wich we have spoken earlier, and which seems paradoxically fit to better convey positive speculations and abstract realizations.

Elie-Charles Flamand, as we have said, has managed to balance the legitimate desire for knowledge with the simple attraction of curiosity.

Daringly, tabous are to be shaken: the brother maries his sister in carnal sensuality; Orpheus bonds with Eurydices and Gabritius with Beya (scenes that the anonymous author of the ‘Book of the Chemical Art’ (author incertus) had seen painted on a few pieces of silk of a very high quality:

‘Nude virgin, young of age, with ivory hair, dark eyes, white and crimson cheeks, whose breasts were filled with milk and perfect of shape and circumference. And this virgin was of such a shining whiteness of a body of an extraordinary nature, that she was worthy of the bed of a king.’ (‘Virgo nuda, aetate viridis, coma eburnea, oculis fuscis, albicantibus rubentibusque genis, cuius papillae erant lacteae & admodum teretes atque tornatae. Eratque ea virgo toto corporis candore adeo insignis, …ut regio thalamo dignissima censeri posset.’)

The mother, also, will not escape incest, which the philosophers explain with the customs of the Antiquity, and, especially with the myth of Oedipus and Jocasta. For them, the mother-mater- is the matter-maria-being at the same time wisdom, who was standing close to God, at the beginning of the world. It is represented by the Free-Masons at the center of the symbol of the flaming star, with the letter G.

Fulcanelli declares in his ‘Les Demeures Philosophales‘ that it is the initial of the common name of the ‘subject of the wise‘. We can note that the letter G is a the same time the beginning and the end of the physical Great Work, that it places itself between the alpha and the omega, that it separates the A and the O to add to the Latin VIR and form, the untranslatable word, VIRAGO, the ancient translations were attempting to give as ‘fe-male’:

‘She will be called VIRAGO, because she was taken from Man.‘ (‘Haec vocabitur Virago, quoniam de viro sumpta est’./Genesis, II, 23).

With this substantif-that would receive its pejorative meaning only in our modern times-Ovid, by two times designate Minerva, in his ‘Metamorphosis‘. Of the virgin goddess, in a failing competition with Arachnea, in particular, the poet tells us, in book six:

‘The blond virago suffered of this success, and teared the painted canvas representing the divine adulteries.‘ (‘Doluit successu flava virago, et rupiit pictas, caelestia crimina vestes.’)

Mythology is full of these adventures, seemingly guilty of outrages against public morals and in which alchemy has largely drawn its waters from, so to express the eternal truth embodied in its Art of Love.

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Original French

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English translation of the detail taken

from the Altona 1785 publication.

here in its 1967 AMORC modern print.

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