Henri Coton-dit ‘Alvart’,

collection particulière,

Editions Le Mercure Dauphinois.

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Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA is a excerpt from Henri Coton-Alvart’s posthumous collection of writings, ‘Les Deux Lumières’ (The Two Lights), published in 1996 by his grandson Vincent Coton and his friend and disciple Henri La Croix-Haute @ Editions Dervy. From page 47 to 54. English translation by Via-HYGEIA from the original French. The quality of this book is such, that it is difficult to understand why it hasn’t been translated in English yet, fully. We continue to offer our Bibliotherapy friends a taste of his wisdom, hoping someone will respond to this challenge and will bring into the English speaking world the fascinating work of this elusive scientist, alchemist and philosopher.

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A the time of the splendor of Man, before he would betray his creator by rallying the angel of darkness, he had been taught a universal and deep science directly by God. He was also destined to learn much more; and there was the real growth. This science was about Essences, Structures and Relationships. It was not the science of good & evil because all of this happened in a world where evil did not exist. After the betrayal, Man was expelled from the world of the perfect creation; he was pushed back in the region infested by the koïlon, in simple words, mass. It is the region of generation and corruption, in which life is inevitably linked with death, a world of curses that followed the Fall.

When Man arrived into gravity, he still knew what God had taught him; and could, through that knowledge, measure what he had lost. He was conscious of it, but throughout successives generations, he progressively became oblivious of this divine science that gradually…vanished. Today, it is obvious that nothing of it remained.

This, the people of the first generations had forecasted it. The essential was recorded within signs & symbols, of which aim was to perpetuate this knowledge unto their descendants in order to save it from total disappearance. This was a bold stand their hope fixed upon their eventual return from this miserable exil and therefore restore Man’s original Crown. It had been proven difficult to transmit such a science through language, because it was in contact with thoughts themselves, and became a mere reflection, suffocating in the cerebral materiality, of the things from below and not from the Edenic world.

Therefore, the Ancients, who were eager to transmit what was left of this little flamme, agreed to give to an idea a double meaning, in some cases a triple one. Behind its apparent sound, the symbol evokes for the person who remembers the relevant meaning connected to the Edenic realm. The reel understanding of the symbol can only happen through the recalling of an Edenic remembrance. Outside of this deep imprint, the symbol cannot convey anything to anybody. The interpretations that were tried were useless, because they only super-impose a dead idea to another. An interpretation is a mental form that believes into explaining another mental form it fancies to cast light upon. But, the mental thought is a but a dream of the Mind (note: there is here a word play in French: Mens–Songe, Mens & Dream, but in also means a LIE: mensonge…), which took the place of the Spirit (spiritus) by usurpation due to the fallen condition.

Anybody who tries to interpret a symbol through a simple reasoning or a riddle wastes his time and is mistaken, what ever is the appearance discovered he flatters himself to have found. Many proofs are to be found in books that are said to require a key. For instance, the circular figure found in Basile Valentine’s ‘Azoth or the way to make the hidden gold of the philosophers’, whose legend says: ‘Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando, Invenies Occultum Lapidem‘.

The keenest seekers discovered that the initials were forming the word, vitriol. Like they were really getting somewhere! And because of that, many brought ruin to their affairs, and have lost time & money by working iron or copper sulfate, in vain, naturally. Believing they have found the pot of gold (Note: in French: ‘La pie au nid‘, a magpie in its nest, with the same meaning), they endeavored to explain a symbol by a more obscure one. Because, if they would have avoided the trap and had followed the advice, to examine the intimacy of this earth by meditating upon it, they would effectively have discovered what was the hidden stone: a glassy-oil (vitri–oleum), that has nothing to do with what they had initially interpreted!

There is nothing to interpret in the symbol; it’s  only aim is to awake an ancient spiritual state, deeply buried in the mind under a mountain of lies pilled up by the spirit of darkness. Only the re-connection with the watch-light taken from Eden can bring light to the mind. Only then Man is qualified to know in a worthy manner, and this understanding has a double gaze:

1. He sees in the inferior world that amount of reality which was given by the Edenic world, which is solely animating it .

2. He see that part of lies that plagues the world of the mind and of our thoughts.

Only then can it be said the he possesses a science of good & evil analog to that of Adam’s at the very beginning of his exil in our beaten down world. Because the promise of the spirit of darkness was but a swindle, as he only gave Man the tasting of the science of good & evil for a very short time; he eventually left him a blinding and a certain bigot vanity. The Fall nevertheless did continue with an accelerating speed.

In order to know, to discern good from evil, one needs a light, the very one Man had abandoned for a mere empty shadow; and this light is only to be found (and in which measure?) by repudiating darkness and move away effectively from the satanic hoax…if we lucky even to get rid of it, as it is quite sticky!

Also, the (real) science of good & evil is actually not a final aim, it can only be a beginning in order to opt from one to another. I cannot continue to lean further on this topic as it would force us to get out of the frame I wish to stay for the moment, light.

The whole collection of symbols and their attached teachings is called, Tradition. All the worthy religions (and they are not all valid, notwithstanding what the lord of lies may assert) are necessarily established on the bases of Tradition; it is the only solid foundation, because it links us to the epoch when divine reality dwelled among a not yet fallen Man. Traditions are diverse; when we have the luck to study them in depth, we can distinguish in some of them the identical bottom layer of divine truth. Those which stray from them are without any value, perhaps remains a historical one, but i really doubt it.

In the gradual layers of the inevitable darkening process, we disputed on the forms of things without agreeing on the essence of them. We have witnessed the triumph of words and the abuse of force. Therefore we moved away from the deep memory of the science given by God. The temptation to lay bricks upon bricks to rise up to the heavens only produced the confusion of Babel, the irony of it we never could appreciate the beauty of it until the time we now live in.

On the contrary, some simple men that have inherited the Treasure, have devoted their lives and their strength to come closer to the light, in a hereditary manner found deep inside of them. They searched after their kind, either from the same time, or from times past. They all belong, outside of Time, to the spiritual assembly of the faithful who have achieved to restore, up to some levels, a part of this divine science given by God at the very beginning. They rally under the banners of the twenty-four Elders, the Apocalypse speaks about.

But, for the person who has more or less re-connected the link of light with Eden’s inheritance, always, out of duty, he can only deny to hand over to the forces of evil & death the entrusted knowledge. He knows that this will not cure the blind but just add to the abuse of power the evil forces are so drunk about. He knows that the prostitution of truth is just another evil climbing up a great mountain of deception. This is the very reason why the transmission of the divine science is only limited to legitimate heirs-organically confirmed by their true way of life, and under such a form that those who understand are those who are illuminated by God, like all the hermetists in one voice assert.

Among the symbols that have reached us, one that is quite successful is undeniably the short text known under the name of, The Emerald Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. It is useless to gloss about the personality of this legendary author, as it does not matter at all. We ought better to try to use wisely what he has left us with. This text is said to have been engraved-we ignore in which language-upon a stone tablet, ‘after the flood, in the valley of Hebron‘, as Bernard Trevisano tells us. We give here the latin and French versions:

Thomas Taylor’ s English translation

(provided by us)

‘It is true without a lie, certain, and most true, that what is beneath is like is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is beneath, for the purpose of accomplishing the miracle of one thing. Ans as all things were from one through the mediation of one, so all things were generated from this thing by adoption (i.e. by participation). The Sun is the father, and the moon its mother. The wind carried it in its belly. The earth is a nurse. This is the father of all perfection of the whole world. Its power is entire when it is converted into earth. You must separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the thick sweetly with great genius. It ascends from earth to heaven, and again descends to the earth, and receives the power of things superior and inferior. Thus, you will have the glory of the whole world, and thus all obscurity will fly from you. This is the strong fortitude, because it vanquishes every subtle thing, and penetrates all solid substances. Thus, the world was fabricated. Hence admirable adoptions will take place of which this is the mode. I am therefore called Hermes Trismegistus possessing three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I have said concerning the work of the sun is complete.’ 

This brief statement is an integral summary of the doctrine & practice of Alchemy. By this word, we mean the science of the living nature in all of her mutations, in the light of the Edenic knowledge. We also ought to carefully sort it out with all the aberrations that have accumulated due to the degeneration of the mind and its ceaseless flow of chaotic thoughts. Alchemy has nothing in common with the phantasms of the half-backed pseudo-initiates. But this abusive confusion entertained by them has made it difficult for the sincere seeker to navigate out of those dead Sargassos seas to find the authentic transmission.

Do we have to add that Alchemy has nothing in common with chemistry, as we know of it nowadays? It is certainly not chemistry’s first steps and babbles, like some famous scientist, more or less informed of the texts and the spirit of Alchemy. The early babbling steps of chemistry, in its utilitarian vision, are  quite distant from those of Tradition. Both have succeeded but it is not the same endeavor. One has followed the mutations of the primeval light throughout the living world, the other has locked itself up in the koïlon (mass, as stated earlier), where the Moon is thought of being made of  cheese is the sole criteria! (Note: the equivalent of ‘prendre des vessies pour des lanternes‘, literally: to take bladders for lanterns).

What do an Edenic primitive knowledge and the practice of Alchemy have in common? Is it by distillation and calcination of some matter that our spirit will recover something of its blissful Edenic condition?

Such a question is forgivable for the contemporary person, because he was taught that Alchemy, ‘was the fastest way to get rich and powerful‘, through the usage to stills and crucibles to produce gold-at will. We ought to put this question deeper in context. It is not in doing alchemy that we enlighten our spirit: it is on the contrary by providing light to the spirit that we are able to understand the world; that we are can compare the sick nature of today with the original healthy nature of the origins that allows us to follow the process of its alteration and its ultimate restoration.

The renewal of contact with the light of the spirit obviously brings to the mind a crowd of thoughts that were obscure before. The way we see the world clarifies. It is not, unlike some vain philosophies, to juggle with ideas, but rather to follow in the steps of the living reality of the divine natural world. Then, the only ambition that remains to the beholder of the Great Work (Note: Le Grand Oeuvre) is to put your hand at it, to verify what one’s believes to know. It is, in fact, to conceive an anatomy, a physiology, a pathology and a therapeutic of Nature, but only after having stepped out of the corner of shadow we have inherited, and having replaced it by a radiant primitive clarity. The whole coherent groupage of such concepts, observations and experimental practices defines Alchemy in its simplest apparel.

It is obvious, like in all spiritual matters, that the spirit of evil has attacked Alchemy in many ways. The devil had suggested to the imbeciles that it was his work, at times when people would still believe it. To those who did not buy such non-sense, he demonstrated that it was an impossible science, because it was in disagreement with the basic tenets of rationality that he had imposed over them. We understand his un-happiness, as we know for a fact that the alchemical operation consists to strip away the satanical disease from nature by using the divine primeval light. In the finer world that rules over all the others, MiKaEL had gotten rid the angelical realm of the spirit of evil by casting it all the way down to our worldly dimension. In this world below, ELKaMi, in turn, gets the metallic realm to throw the evil that is infecting it into a much baser earth, the terra damnata. Again, like here, it is the separation of the pure and the impure.

A transmutation is something completely different than a mere change in an atom, of the number and the setting of hypothetical particles. It is rather the deliverance of the organic living spirit of a body, that makes it reject the pathogen elements it contains, and allows then a perfectioning of the legitimate form it was  originally assigned. One does not change lead into silver, because they are essentially different. But, lead is an ailing silver that can be purged, awaken, animated, in order for its potentialities to be eventually actualized. The slow and painful effort of nature gradually transmutes lead into silver in the mines. There is, in fact no lead that is not more or less silver-bearing. If we know the agent of this essential purification, we can achieve this operation in a rather limited time frame. It is about casting out the agent of death by the agent of life.

The weapon of the archangel and the agent that the alchemist-his humble servant-uses are but one and the same thing, the only one able to overcome the dragon, the only one that makes it withdraw. It is the Primeval light, the marvel of the initial Creation, orchestrated by God, without any intermediaries.

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