(Terence McKenna wrote several books on the role of psychedelics in
the formation of consciousness, "Food of the Gods," The Archaic
Revival," and "True Hallucinations," were among some of his books. He
was an evangelist for psilocybin mushroom use and believed that the
current state of repression in the use of psychedelics has left us
with an unconscious craving for the vehicles by which our ancestors
expanded their own consciousness. I ran across this transcript of a
taperecorded speech he gave on alchemy on the web. It had many
transcription errors that I have attempted to correct, but I probably
didn't catch them all, some of them are pretty obscure. The ones I
didn't catch, or weren't sure of the reference, I marked with "(?)",
my Latin isn't very good either. What I think is remarkable about this
speech is that it touches upon many of the same people and topics that
Dr. Theaux covers at Akhnaton.com, although sometimes with a slightly
different viewpoint. For instance, TM seems to accept Casaubon's
dating at face value, yet seems to think that the Chaldaean Oracles
are the key to showing the antiquity of Hermetic thought. Terence
McKenna died on April 3, 2000 from brain cancer. His friends said he
met the end with hope and optimism.)


Well, it is a small group and this was my intent by focusing on the
Hermetic Corpus and alchemy. I've just gotten tired of talking about
psychedelic drugs and always saying the same things over and over
again, nevertheless it's a challenge to go outside my own bailiwick. I
mean I've had an interest in Hermeticism and alchemy since I was about
14 and read Jung's psychology and (of) alchemy and it opened for me
the fact of the existence of this vast literature, a literature that
is very little read or understood in the modern context. The Jungians
have made much of it, but to their own purposes and perhaps not always
with complete fidelity to the intent of the tradition. We'll talk a
lot about the Jungian approach but there are other approaches even
within the 20th century. I believe, since I don't have the catalog I'm
not absolutely certain, but I believe the catalog urged you to read
"Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" by Dame Frances Yates and
this is, though Frances Yates scholarship is very controversial, I
think that to get an overview of the landscape her book is probably
the best single book between covers. It's not pleasing to some
factions and we can talk about that, I mean, we will probably discover
within the group all strains of alchemical illusions and delusions
that have always driven this particular engine, but I thought to get
one book that sort of covered the territory that was a good one to
start with. Well then I found out that it's very hard to get this
book. I didn't realize that because it's been sitting on my shelf for
years. Richard Bird found a reprint at the Bodhi Tree. I wasn't aware
of this particular edition so, though probably none of you brought it
with you in heavily underlined form, if after this weekend you want to
try and get it, it is available and if you can't get that edition,
why, a good book service can probably come up with the first edition
which is Routledge Kegan Paul.

I wouldn't hold a weekend like this simply to go over a body of
ancient literature if I didn't think it had some efficacy or import
for the modern dilemma and some of you may know the song by the
Grateful Dead in which the refrain is "I need a miracle every day." I
think any reasonable person can conclude that the redemption of the
world, if it's to be achieved, can only be achieved through magic.
It's too late for science. It's too late for hortatory politics.

Well, it's very interesting - every ancient literature has its
apocalypses and in the Hermetic literature there is a prophecy, I
think it's in book two but that really doesn't matter, and the
prophecy is that a day will come when men no longer care for the earth
and at that day the gods will depart and everything will be thrown
into primal chaos and this prophecy was very strongly in the minds of
the strains of non-Christian thought that evolved at the close-at the
centuries of closure-of the Roman Empire. When you look back into
historical time it's when you reach the first and second centuries
after Christ that you reach a world whose psychology was very much
like the psychology of our own time. It was a psychology of despair
and exhaustion. This is because Greek science which had evolved under
the aegis of Democritus' atomism and Platonic metaphysics had
essentially come to a dead end in those centuries. We can debate the
reasons why this happened. An obvious suggestion would be that they
failed to develop an experimental method and so everything just
dissolved into competing schools of philosophical speculation and a
profound pessimism spread through the Hellenistic world and out of
that pessimism and in the context of that kind of universal despair
which attends the dissolution of great empires a literature was
created from the first to the fourth centuries after Christ which we
call the Hermetic Corpus or in some cases the Trismegistic Hymns. Now
this body of literature was misunderstood by later centuries,
especially the Renaissance, because it was taken at face value and
assumed to be at least contemporary with Moses if not much older. So
the Renaissance view of Hermeticism was based on a tragic
misunderstanding of the true antiquity of this material and there are
people, hopefully none in this room, who still would have us believe
that this literature antedates the Mosaic Law, that it is as old as
Dynastic Egypt. But this is an indefensible position from my point of
view. In the early 16th century two men, a father and son, Isaac and
Meric Casaubon, showed through the new science of philology, that this
material was in fact late Hellenistic. Now, I've always said that I am
not a Classicist in the Viconian(Victorian?) sense, in the sense that
there is a certain strain of thought that always wants to believe that
the oldest stuff is the best stuff. This is not the case to my mind.
To my mind what is amazing is how recent everything is. So I have no
sympathy with the fans of lost Atlantis or any of that kind of
malarkey because to me what is amazing is how it all is less than
10,000 years old. Anything older than 10,000 years puts us into the
realm of an aceramic society relying on chipped flint for it's primary
technology.

What the Hermetic Corpus is is the most poetic and cleanly expressed
outpouring of ancient knowledge that we possess. But it was reworked
in the hands of these late Hellenistic peoples and it is essentially a
religion of the redemption of the earth through magic. It has great
debt to a tradition called Sevillian(?) which means to mean
Mandaeanism and Mandaeanism was a kind of proto-Hellenistic gnosis
that laid great stress on the power of life, Zoa(?), Bios(?), and in
that sense it has a tremendously contemporary ring to it.

We also are living in the twilight of a great empire, and I don't
particularly mean the American empire, I mean the empire of European
thinking created in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the
rise of modern industrialism, the empire, in short of science. Science
has exhausted itself and become mere techni. It's still able to
perform its magical tricks, but it has no claim on a metaphysic with
any meaning because the program of rational understanding that was
pursued by science has pushed so deeply into the phenomenon of nature
that the internal contradictions of the method are now exposed for all
to see. In discussing alchemy especially we will meet with the concept
of the coincidentia oppositorum-the union of opposites. This is an
idea that is completely alien to science. It's the idea that nothing
can be understood unless it is simultaneously viewed as both being
what it is and what it is not and in alchemical symbolism we will meet
again and again symbolical expression of the coincidentia oppositorum.
It may be in the form of a hermaphrodite, it may be in the form of the
union of soul and Luna, it may be in the form of the union of Mercury
with lead, or with sulfur, in other words alchemical thinking is
thinking that is always antithetical, always holds the possibility of
by a mere shift of perspective its opposite premise will gain power
and come into focus. I think it was John, when we went around the
circle, who mentioned his interest in shamanism. There's a wonderful
book called "The Forge and the Crucible" by Mircea Eliade in which he
shows that the shaman is the brother of the smith, the smith is the
metallurgist, the worker in metals, and this is where alchemy has its
roots. In a sense, alchemy is older than the Trismegistus Corpus and
then it is also given a new lease on life by the philosophical
underpinnings which the Corpus Hermeticum provides it. Alchemy, the
word alchemy, can be traced back to mean Egypt or a blackening and in
its earliest strata it probably refers to techniques referring to
dying, meaning the coloring of cloth, and gilding of metals, and the
forging and working of metal. I mean, we who take this for granted
have no idea how mysterious and powerful this seemed to ancient people
and in fact it would seem so to us if we had anything to do with it. I
mean how many of us are welders or casters of metal. It's a magical
process to take for instance cinnabar, a red, soft ore and by the mere
act of heating it in a furnace it will sweat liquid Mercury onto its
surface. Well, we have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science
where we have Mind firmly separated out from the world. We take this
for granted, it's effortless, because it's the ambiance of the
civilization we've been born into but in an earlier age, and some
writers would say a more naive age, but I wonder about that, but in an
earlier age Mind and matter were seen to be alloyed together
throughout nature so that the sweating of mercury out of cinnabar is
not a material process, it's a process in which the Mind and the
observations of the metalworker maintain an important role, and let's
talk for a moment about mercury because the spirit Mercurius is almost
the patron deity of alchemy.

You all know what mercury looks like-at room temperature it's a
silvery liquid that flows, it's like a mirror. For the alchemists, and
this is just a very short exercise in alchemical thinking, for the
alchemists mercury was Mind itself, in a sense, and by tracing through
the steps by which they reached that conclusion you can have a taste
of what alchemical thinking was about. Mercury takes the form of its
container. If I pour mercury into a cup, it takes the shape of the
cup, if I pour it into a test tube, it takes the shape of the test
tube. This taking the shape of its container is a quality of Mind and
yet here it is present in a flowing, silvery metal. The other thing
is, mercury is a reflecting surface. You never see mercury, what you
see is the world which surrounds it, which is perfectly reflected in
its surface like a moving mirror, you see. And then if you've ever, as
a child, I mean I had no idea how toxic this process is, but I spent a
lot of time as a child hounding my grandfather for his hearing aid
batteries which I would then smash with a hammer and get the mercury
out and collect it in little bottles and carry it around with me.
Well, the wonderful thing about mercury is when you pour it out on a
surface and it beads up, then each bead of mercury becomes a little
microcosm of the world. And yet the mercury flows back together into a
unity. Well, as a child I had not yet imbibed the assumptions and the
ontology of science. I was functioning as an alchemist. For me,
mercury was this fascinating magical substance onto which I could
project the contents of my mind. And a child playing with mercury is
an alchemist hard at work, no doubt about it. Well, so then, this is a
phenomenon in the physical world and then Mind is a phenomenon in the
Cartesian distinction, which is between the Res Extensa and the Res
Cogitans. This is the great splitting of the world into two parts. I
remember Al Wong once said to me, we were talking about the yin yang
symbol, and he said you know the interesting thing is not the yin or
the yang, the interesting thing is the s shaped surface that runs
between them. And that s shaped surface is a river of alchemical
mercury. Now, where the alchemists saw this river of alchemical
mercury is in the boundary between waking and sleeping. There is a
place, not quite sleeping, not quite waking, and there, there flows
this river of alchemical mercury where you can project the contents of
the unconscious and you can read it back to yourself. This kind of
thinking is confounding to scientific thought where the effort is
always to fix everything to a given identity and a given set of
behaviors.

Now, the other Hermetic perception that is well illustrated by just
thinking for a moment about mercury is the notion, and this is central
to all Hermetic thinking, of the microcosm and the macrocosm. That
somehow the great world, the whole of the Cosmos is reflected in the
mystery of man, meaning men and women, it's reflected in the mystery
of the human mind/body interface. So, for an alchemist, it makes
perfect sense to extrapolate from this internal, what we call internal
psychological processes, to external processes in the world. That
distinction doesn't exist for the alchemist, and let me tell you, the
longer I live the more I am convinced that this is absolutely the
truth.

The myth of our society is the existential myth that we are cast into
matter, that we are lost in a universe that has no meaning for us,
that we must make our meaning. This is what Sartre, Kierkegaard, all
those people are saying, that we must make our meaning. It reaches its
most absurd expression in Sartre's statement that nature is mute. I
mean, this is as far from alchemical thinking as you can possibly get
because for the alchemist nature was a great book, an open book to be
read by putting nature through processes that revealed not only its
inner mechanics, but the inner mechanics of the artifex (person
performing experiment)-the person working upon the material, in other
words, the alchemist.

Well, in other contexts I've talked about the importance of language
and how our world is made of language and part of the problem in
understanding alchemy is that the language is slipping out of our
reach. We are so completely imbued with the Cartesian categories of
the Res Cogitans, the world of thought, and the Res Extensa, the world
of three dimensional space, and causality, and the conservation of
matter and energy, and so forth that in order to do more than carry
out a kind of scholarship of alchemy we have to create an alchemical
language, or a field in which alchemical language can take place. Some
of you may have been with me a couple of weeks ago in Malibu when Joan
Halifax and I debated the roots of Buddhism and I think Joan deserves
great credit for saying that Buddhism would never have taken root in
America were it not for the psychedelic phenomenon. Not that Buddhism
is psychedelic, it in fact is fairly touchy about that, but Buddhism
would have gotten nowhere in America had not psychedelics created a
context for Buddhist language to take root, And I wager that I would
never have gotten to first base with proposing a weekend on alchemy at
Esalen were it not understood that psychedelics have prepared people
for the notion that Mind and world can be pureed together like mercury
and sulfur, like the Sophic waters, to create a new kind of
understanding because otherwise modernity has fixed our minds in the
category of Cartesian rationalism and so I will not claim, and do not
in fact think it's so, that there was anything overtly psychedelic in
the sense of harmacologically-based about alchemy. When we look back
through the alchemical literature there's very little evidence that it
was pharmacologically driven. Only when you get to the very last
adaptations of the alchemical impulse in someone like Paracelsus do
you get the use of opium. But it is interesting that the great drugs
of modern society were accidentally discovered by alchemists in their
researches; distilled alcohol is a product of alchemical work and
then, as I mentioned, opium was very heavily used by the Peracelsian
school. But what they possessed was an ability to liquefy their mental
categories and then to project the contents of the mind onto these
processes and read them back.

Now this is what made alchemy so fascinating to the Jungian school
because the Jungians were discovering the unconscious and they
realized, before Jung's involvement with alchemy, that the best
material for psychotherapy to work upon was dreams and mythology and
these were the two poles of the data field that the discovery of the
unconscious was working on. Well then Jung had the prescience to
realize that alchemy, which to that point, as the gentleman over here
said, had been dismissed as a naïve effort to turn base metals into
gold-this is the first fiction that you have to absolutely purge from
your mind, the only alchemists who ever tried to turn base metals into
gold were charlatans, the so-called puffers. They were called that not
only for their exaggerated speech but for their use of bellows to
drive their fires. Alchemy has always had a core of true adepts and
then a surround of misguided souls and outright con artists who were
trying to change base metals into gold. Now, it's interesting that
science, in its naiveté, in the 20th century has actually completed
the program of pseudo-alchemy. You can, if you have a sufficiently
powerful nuclear reactor, change lead into gold. I mean, the cost is
staggering. It has no economic importance whatsoever but it can be
done by bombarding gold with a sufficient amount of heavy particles.
Lead, you can change it into gold, but this is not what the original
intent was. In fact, when we look at the history of 20th century
science we will see that, in a way, it's a misunderstanding of what
the alchemical goals were to be and, one by one, it has done these
things that were stated goals of the alchemists except that the
alchemists always spoke in similes and in a secret control language
that was symbolic. O.K., now, another point that was brought up in
going around the circle was the externalization of the soul and what
we're trying to do in this weekend is study and talk about the idea of
redeeming the world through magic. And how is this to be done? Well,
the Philosopher's Stone is a complex of ideas that, no matter how you
divide it, no matter how you slice it, it's very difficult to hold the
pith essence of this concept, but what it really comes down to is the
idea that spirit is somehow resident in matter in a very diffuse form.
The goal of Hermetic thinking and later alchemy is the concentration
and redemption of this spirit, a focusing of it, a bringing of it
together. This is an idea that was common in the Hellenistic world not
only to Hermetic thinking but also to Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is the idea that somehow the pure, holy, real light of
being was scattered through a universe of darkness and of Saturnine
power and that the goal is that by a process which we can call yogic
or alchemical or meditative or moral/ethical, the light must be
gathered and concentrated in the body and then somehow released and
redeemed. All esoteric traditions, East and West, talk about the
creation of this body of light and we will not, in this weekend, talk
very much about alchemy, non-western alchemy, Taoist and Vedic
alchemy, but in those systems too the notion is about the creation of
this vehicle of light. This is one metaphor for the externalization of
the soul.

The Philosopher's Stone is another and I will challenge you to try and
imagine what the achievement of the Philosopher's Stone would be like
because it's in trying to think that way that you begin to dissolve
the categories of the Cartesian trap. So, image for a moment an
object, a material, which can literally do anything. It can move
across categorical boundaries with no difficulty whatsoever. So what
do I mean? I mean that if you possess the Philosopher's Stone and you
were hungry, you could eat it. If you needed to go somewhere you could
spread it out and sit on it and it would take you there. If you needed
a piece of information, it would become the equivalent of a computer
screen and it would tell you things. If you needed a companion, it
would talk to you. If you needed to take a shower you could hold it
over your head and water would pour out. Now, you see, this is an
impossibility. That's right, it's a coincidentia oppositorum. It is
something that behaves like imagination and matter without ever doing
damage to the ontological status of one or the other. This sounds like
pure pathology in the context of modern thinking because we expect
things to stay still and be what they are and undergo the growth and
degradation that is inimical to them, but no, the redemption of spirit
and matter means the exteriorization of the human soul and the
interiorization of the human body so that it is an image freely
commanded in the imagination.

Imagination. I think this is the first time I've used this word this
evening. The imagination is central to the alchemical opus because it
is literally a process that goes on the realm of the imagination taken
to be a physical dimension. And I think that we cannot understand the
history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey
into the imagination. We have exhausted the world of three dimensional
space. We are polluting it. We are overpopulating it. We are using it
up. Somehow the redemption of the human enterprise lies in the
dimension of the imagination. And to do that we have to transcend the
categories that we inherit from a thousand years of science and
Christianity and rationalism and we have to re-empower and
re-encounter the Mind and we can do this psychedelically, we can do
this yogically, or we can do it alchemically and Hermetically.

Now there is present in the world at the moment, or at least I like to
think so, an impulse which I have named the archaic revival. What
happens is that whenever a society really gets in trouble, and you can
use this in your own life-when you really get in trouble-what you
should do is say "what did I believe in the last sane moments that I
experienced" and then go back to that moment and act from it even if
you no longer believe it. Now in the Renaissance this happened. The
scholastic universe dissolved. New classes, new forms of wealth, new
systems of navigation, new scientific tools, made it impossible to
maintain the fiction of the Medieval cosmology and there was a sense
that the world was dissolving. Good alchemical word-dissolving. And in
that moment the movers and shakers of that civilization reached
backwards in time to the last sane moment they had ever known and they
discovered that it was Classical Greece and they invented classicism.
In the 15th and 16th century the texts which had lain in monasteries
in Syria and Asia Minor forgotten and untranslated for centuries were
brought to the Florentine council by people like Gemistus Plethon, and
others, and translated and classicism was born-its laws, its
philosophy, its aesthetics. We are the inheritors of that tradition
but it is now, once again, exhausted and our cultural crisis is much
greater. It is global. It is total. It involves every man, woman and
child on this planet, every bug, bird and tree is caught up in the
cultural crisis that we have engendered. Our ideas are exhausted-the
ideas that we inherit out of Christianity and its half-brother
science, or its bastard child science. So, what I'm suggesting is that
an archaic revival needs to take place and it seems to be well in hand
in the revival of Goddess worship and shamanism and partnership but
notice that these things are old-10,000 years or more old-but there
was an unbroken thread that, however thinly drawn, persists right up
to the present.

So the idea of this weekend is to show the way back to the high magic
of the late Paleolithic, to show that there were intellectual
traditions, there were minority points of view that kept the faith,
that never allowed it to die. And, to my mind, this alchemical,
Hermetic, Gnostic, Egyptian, Chaldaean thread is the thread and if we
unravel it with sufficient care and attention then we can build a
bridge from the otherwise nearly incomprehensible high magic of the
late Paleolithic. We can get it as near to ourselves as John Dee, who
died in 1604. We can discover that it's no further away form us than
the beginning of the Thirty Years' War and, for my money, after that,
it gets pretty mucked up. I mean, after Ulias Levy(?), who's already
waffling, I'm not very interested in the occultism of the 17th, 18th
and 19th century but it's not necessary because scholarship gives us
the Chaldaean oracles, the Trismegistic Hymns, the library at Nag
Hammadi, and so forth and so on. So my impulse is to, in the most
austere sense, repopularize, reintroduce this kind of thinking so that
people can live it out. Then, step, by step, we can evolve our
language and evolve our understanding to make our way back to the
garden, back to Eden.

It's occurred to me recently, you know it's said that Christ opened
the doors to paradise, yes, but he closed the doors to Eden and
paradise is a very airy place where everybody sits around on clouds
strumming their lyres. I think that what we want to do is make our way
back to the alchemical garden. That's where our roots are. That's
where meaning is. Meaning lies in the confrontation of contradiction,
the coincidentia oppositorum. That's what we really feel, not these
rational schemas that are constantly beating us over the head with the
"thou shalts" and "thou should," but rather a recovery of the real
ambiguity of being and an ability to see ourselves as at once powerful
and weak, noble and ignoble, future-oriented, past-facing. We each
need to become Janus-faced and to incorporate into ourselves the
banished contradictions of being that so haunt the enterprise of
science. We can leave that behind and when we do we reclaim authentic
being. And authentic being, make no mistake about it, is what
alchemical gold really is. That's what they're talking about-authentic
being.

(Question from the group): So right now we're lead?

That's right, we're Saturnine and we'll talk about Saturn and Pluto
and all of that. Yes, tomorrow we'll talk about the stages of the
alchemical opus and though the stages are many and multifarious, it
all begins in what is called the negrado, the blackening, the depths
of the leaded, Saturnine, chaotic, fixed place. And that's where we
have been left by science and modernity and so forth and so on. That's
where the alchemist loves to begin. That's where he or she stokes the
fire and begins the dissolucio et coagulatio that leads to the
appearance of the stone.

I'll show you some books and this is by no means exhaustive. The
literature on Hermeticism and alchemy is vast and I could have brought
5 or 6 boxes of this size from my own library. This a smattering. It
doesn't mean that what I show you is the best. It simply tries to
spread over a large area. Oh, someone put this here. This is a new
novel that's just been published by Lindsay Clark called "The Chemical
Wedding" and I see last week it was number 10 on the New York Time's
best sellers list which is astonishing for such an obscure subject.
It's a retelling of a famous incident in alchemy in the 19th century
when a woman named Mary Alice Datwood, who had a very, very close
relationship to her father, Dr. South, and the two of them worked
together, she on a text, he on a long poem and to make a long story
short, eventually they decided to destroy both the poem and the book
feeling that they had said too much and given the secret away, at
least that's one version. So this is fictionalized retelling of that
incident interlaced with a modern cast of characters very clearly
modeled on the poet Robert Graves. So if you like to absorb your
information in a fictionalized form, this is a wonderful book. John
Borman, the movie director, recently optioned this book-the guy who
made "The Emerald Forest" and "Excalibur"- so we may have an
alchemical movie downstream, in a year or two.

A number of compendiums of alchemical texts have been published over
the centuries and if you wish to study alchemy you have to obtain
these. If you're fortunate enough to read French you should read
Vespugiare(?) and Berthelo(?). They collected alchemical texts into
encyclopedic-sized volumes but unfortunately these have never really
come into English. One that did come into English is the "Musæum
Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum," I think, which A.E. Waite, who
some of you may know for his role in the Golden Dawn, collected. There
are about 40 alchemical texts and all the greats are in here: Lull,
Vilanova, Michael Maier, Basil Valentine, Kramer, Edward Kelly and so
on and so forth.