The Tree, the Serpent and the Titans Pt. 2

View Part One here.

   But the religious view is not the only one. As we have already shown above, this point of view is associated with a humanized and secularized variation on the "sacerdotal" (as opposed to "royal") tradition and is in no way superior to the other - the heroic - which has been affirmed in both Eastern and Western traditions and whose spirit is reflected in great measure by hermetism. One exegesis gives us, in fact, the "rod of Hermes" [footnote: In Athenagoras we find also an interference in the heroic cycle of Hercules; the one in which Rhea is bound by the "rope of Hercules"] as a symbol of the union of a son (Zeus) with his mother (Rhea, symbol of the universal force), whom he has won after killing the father and usurping his kingdom: this is the symbol of "philosophic incest" that we shall encounter in all of the hermetic literature. Hermes himself is, of course, the messenger of the gods, but he is also the one who wrests the scepter from Zeus, the girdle from Venus, and from Vulcan, god of "Fire and Earth," the tools of his allegorical art. In the Egyptian tradition, as the ancient authors tells us, Hermes, invested with treble greatness - Hermes Trismegistus - is confused with the image of one of the kings and teachers of the primordial age that gave to men the principles of a higher civilization. The precise meaning of all this can escape no one.

   But there is still more. Tertullian refers to one tradition that reappears in Arab-Syrian alchemical hermetism and brings us back to the same point. Tertullian says that the "damned and worthless" works of nature, the secrets of metals, the virtues of plants, the forces of magical conjurations, and "all those alien teachings that make up the science of the stars" - that is to say, the whole corpus of the ancient magico-hermetic sciences - was revealed to men by the fallen angels. This idea appears in the Book of Enoch, wherein it is completed within the context of this most ancient tradition, betraying its own unilaterality to the religious interpretation. Merejkowski has shown that there is an apparent correspondence between the B'nai Elohim, the fallen angels who descended to Mount Hermon that are mentioned in the Book of Enoch, and the lineage of the Witnesses and Watchers (about whom we are told in the Book of Jubilees,) and who came down to instruct humanity. In the same way Prometheus "taught mortals all the arts." Moreover, in Enoch, Azazel, "who seduced Eve," taught men the use of weapons that kill, which, metaphor aside, signifies that he had infused in men the warrior spirit. Here we can understand how the myth of the fall applies: the angels were seized with desire for "women." We have already explained what "woman" means in connection with the tree and our interpretation is confirmed when we examine the Sanskrit word shakti, which is used metaphysically to refer to "the wife" of a god, his "consort," and at the same time to his power [ftnt: Fabre d'Oliver (The Hebraic Tongue Restored) in his commentary on the biblical passage (Gen. 4:2), sees in "women" a symbol of the "creative powers." A special pertinence to what we will say about the compelling character of the hermetic art is shown in the Tibetan symbolism wherein Wisdom appears again as a "woman," while the "method" or "Art" plays the part of the male in coitus with her. Dante (Convivio, 2.15.4) calls the Philosophers the "paramours" of the "woman," which in the symbology of the Fideli D'Amore represents Gnosis again, the esoteric Knowledge].

   These angels were prey to the desire for power and, in "mating," fell - descended to earth - onto an elevated place (Mount Hermon). From this union were born the Nephelim, a powerful race (the Titans says the Giza Papyrus), allegorically described as "giants," but whose supernatural nature remains to be discovered in the Book of Enoch: "They need neither food, nor do they thirst and they evade physical perception."

   The Nephelim, the "fallen" angels, are nothing less than the titans and "the watchers," the race that the Book of Baruch calls, "glorious and warlike," the same race that awoke in men the spirit of the heroes and warriors, who invented the arts, and who transmitted the mystery of magic [ftnt: In the more original conception, which we also find in Hesiod, "the watchers" are identified as beings of the primordial age, the Golden Age, who never died but simply made themselves invisible to men down through the ages thereafter]. What more decisive proof concerning the spirit of the hermetico-alchemical tradition can there be than the explicit and continuous reference in the texts precisely to that tradition? We read in the hermetic literature: "The ancient and sacred books," says Hermes, "teach that certain angels burned with desire for women. They descended to earth and taught all the works of Nature. They were the ones who created the hermetic works and from them proceeds the primordial tradition of this Art [ftnt: The same tradition is found in the Koran (2:96), which speaks of the angels Harut and Marut, both "enamored" of the "woman" and who descended to teach magic to men: and who fell into a hole with their feet sticking up. This could be interpreted as the Vedic tree, whose head is below and its roots are "above"]." The very word chemi, from chema, from which derive the words alchemy and chemistry, appears for the first time in a papyrus of the Twelfth Dynasty, referring to a tradition of just this kind.

   But what is the meaning of this art, this art of "the Sons of Hermes," this "Royal Art"?

   The words of the theistically conceived God in the biblical myth of the tree are the following: "The man has become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also the tree of life, and eat, and live forever." (Gen. 3:22-24). We can distinguish two points in this quotation: first of all, the recognition of the divine dignity of Adam, which he has won; and after that the implicit reference to the possibility of transferring this achievement to the rank of universal power, symbolized by the Tree of Life, and of confirming it in immortality. In the unfortunate result of Adam's adventure, God, being hypostatized, was unable to interfere but he could keep him from the second possibility: access to the Tree of Life would be barred by the flaming sword of the cherubim. In Orphism, the myth of the Titans has an analagous sense: lightning strikes and scorches "with a thirst that burns and consumes" those who have "devoured" the god, a thirst that is itself symbolized by the bird of prey that pecks at Prometheus. And in Phrygia Attis was mourned, "corn cut while still green," and his emasculation, that is to say, the deprivation of the virile power that Attis suffers, corresponds well enough to the prohibition "of the powerful tree at the center of Paradise" and to the chaining of Prometheus to the rock.

   But the flame is not extinguished, rather it is transmitted and purified in the secret tradition of the Royal Art, which in certain hermetic texts is explicitly identified with magic, extending even to the construction of a second "Wood of Life" as a substitute for the lost one. It  persists in seeking access "to the center of the tree in the midst of the terrestrial paradise" with all that that terrible struggle implies [ftnt: In S. Trismosin's Aurum vellus is an illustration of great significance: we see a man in the act of climbing the Tree whose trunk is traversed by the symbolic stream. References to Hercules, to Jason, and their deeds are explicit and frequent in the literature, and in them - which is even more important - the soul is unexpectedly called Prometheus]. It is no more and no less than a repetition of the old temerity, in the spirit of the Olympain Hercules, conqueror of the Titans and liberator of Prometheus, of Mithras, subjugator of the Sun; in a word, of that very personality that in the Buddhist Orient received the name of "Lord of Men and Gods."

   What distinguishes the Royal Art is its character of necessity or compulsion. Berthelot, by way of Tertullian's statements cited above, tells us: "Scientific law is fatalistic and indifferent. The knowledge of nature and the power derived from it can be turned equally to good or evil," and this is the fundamental point of contrast with the religious vision that subordinates everything to elements of devout dependency, fear of God and morality. And Berthelot continues, "Something of this antinomy in the hatred for the hermetic sciences runs through the Book of Enoch and Tertullian. Nothing can be more exact than this: although hermetic science is not material science, which is all it could have been in Berthelot's view, the amoral and determining character that he sees in the latter pertains equally to the former. A maxim of Ripley in this regard is quite significant: "If the principles on which is operates are true and the steps are correct, the effect must be certain, and none other is the true secret of the hermetic Philosophers. Agrippa, quoting Porphyry, speaks of the determining power of the rites, in which the divinities are forced by prayer, overcome and obliged to descend. He adds force the occult energies of the astral entities to intervene, who do not obey prayers but act solely by virtue of a natural chain of necessity. Plotinus' idea is no different: the fact in itself of the oration produces the effect according to a deterministic relationship, and not because such entity pays attention to the words or intention of the prayer itself. In a commentary of Zosimos, we read: "Experience is the supreme taskmaster, because on the foundation of proven results, it teaches those who understand what best leads to the goal." The hermetic Art consists, then, in an obligatory method that is exercised over the spiritual powers, by supernatural means, if you will (the symbolic hermetic Fire is often called "unnatural" or "against nature"), but always excluding every kind of religious, moral, or finalistic tie or any relationship that is alien to a law of simple determinism becween cause and effect. To return by way of the tradition to those who "are watching," those who have robbed the tree and possessed the "woman," this reflects a "heroic" symbolism and is paplied in the spiritual world to constitute something that - as we shall see - is said to possess a worthiness higher than anything we have mentioned before [ftnt: It must be borne in mind that this superiority depends on the specific perspective of the heroic point of view; to which, in the final analysis, it is relative. The dark ages of the primordial tradition can be seen here, with their "generations." From the purely metaphysical point of view the essense of all authentic initiation is always the reintegration of man with the "primordial" state]; and this is not defined by the religious term "holy," but by the warrior of the "King." It is always a king, a being crowned with a royal color, the purple, the final color of the hermetico-alchemical opus, and with the royal and solar metal, gold, that constitutes, as we have said, the center of all this symbolism.

   And as for the worthiness of those who have been reintegrated by the Art, the expressions in the texts are precise. Zosimos calls the race of Philosophers: "autonomous, nonmaterialistic and without king," and "custodians of the Wisdom of the Centuries." "He is above Destiny" - "Superior to men, immortal," says Pebechius of his master [ftnt: That the alchemists were conscious of fashioning an immortality contrary to the intention of "God," is observed, for instance, in Geber, who in the Livre de la misericorde says, "If he [God] has put in him [man] diverging elements it is because he wanted to assure the purpose of the created being. God did not want every being to survive forever, apart from him, so he inflicted on man this disparity of the four natures, which lead to man's death, and the separation of his soul and body. But elsewhere, the same author proposes to equilibrate the natures in man, once decomposed, to give him a new existence "such that he will no longer be able to die," because "once this equilibrium is attained, beings do not change, nor become corrupt nor ever modify themselves again"]. And the tradition passed on as far as Cagliostro will be: "Free and master of Life," having "command over the angel natures." Plotinus has already mentioned the temerity of those who have entered into the world, that is, who have acquired a body, which, as we can see, is one of the meanings of the fall [ftnt: In the Corpus Hermeticum we see the analagous audacity in "leaving the spheres" in the same sense that Lucifer had exited from the "harmony" of the world], and Agrippa speaks of the terror that inspired man in his natural state, that is before his fall, when instead of instilling fear, he himself succumbed to fear: "This fear, which is the mark imprinted on man by God, makes all things submit to him and recognize him as superior" as carrier of that "quality called Pachad by the Qabalists, the left hand, the sword of the Lord."

   But there is something else: the dominion of the "two natures" that contain the secret of the "Tree of Good and Evil." The teaching is found in the Corpus Hermeticum: "Man loses no worthiness for possessing a mortal part, but very much on the contrary, mortality augments his possibility and his power. His double functions are possible for him precisely because of his double nature: because he is so constituted that it is possible for him to embrace both the divine and the terrestrial at the same time [ftnt: Boehme, Aurora 11.72: "The soul of man sees much more deeply than the angels, because it sees as much of heaven as of hell," and he adds that "because of that man lives in great danger in this world." In the Sepher Yetzirah (Ch. 6) the seat of the heart is assimilated to that of the "King in war"]. "So let us not be afraid to tell the truth. The true man is above them [the celestial gods], or at least equal to them. For no god leaves his sphere to come to earth, whereas man ascends to heaven and measures it. Let us dare to say that a man is a mortal god and a celestial god is an immortal man."

   Such is the truth of the "new race" that the Royal Art of the "Sons of Hermes" is building on earth, elevating what has fallen, calming the "thirst," restoring power to the enfeebled, bestowing the fixed and impassive gaze of the "eagle" to the wounded eye blinded by the "lightning flash," conferring Olympian and royal dignity to what used to be a Titan. In a gnostic text pertaining to the same ideal world in which Greek alchemy received its first expressions it is said the "Life-Light" in the Gospel of John is "the mysterious race of perfect men, unknown to previous generations." Following this text is a precise reference to Hermes; the text recalls that in the temple of Samothrace there stood two statues of naked men, their arms raised to heaven, their members erect [By way of constituting the figure Y schematically, which is the sign of "Cosmic-man-with-upraised-arms," one of the fundamental symbols of the Hyperborean, Nordic-Atlantic tradition has been preserved as a rune (Rune of Life) in the Norse-Teutonic tradition], "as in the statue of Hermes on Mount Cyllene," which represented the primordial man, Adamas, and reborn man, "who is completely of the same nature as the first." And it is said: "First is the blessed nature of Man from above; then the mortal nature here below; third the race of those without a king that is raised up, where Mary resides, the one whom we seek" [ftnt: Hyppolytus, Philosophumena, 5.8. This Mariam is evidently the equivalent of the symbolic "woman" with whom the "Philosophers" joined, the "Virgin" who is mentioned in this passage of d'Espagnet (Arcanum hermeticae philosophiae opus, 58, in BCC 2): "Take a winged Virgin, impregnated with the semen of the First Male but still preserving the glory of her virginity intact"; whose meaning is, in sum, the same as Rhea - the shakti aspect or "power" aspect of the One - which, the father having been killed (the First Male of whom d'Espagnet speaks, Zeus possesses, making of his mother his wife. Also in the Qabalah the "Matrona" is mentioned in whom all the powers of the king have been entrusted, (that is to say, Jehovah), who is the wife (shakti) also of the king and who was "espoused" by Moses as well (Zohar). "This being, blessed and incorruptible," explains Simon Magus, "resides in every being hidden; potential rather than active. It is precisely the one who keeps standing, who has kept standing above and who will continue to remain standing, who has continued standing here below, having been engendered by the image (reflection) in the flood of waters; and who will again stand on high, before infinite potentiality, whereupon he will be made perfectly equal to it."

   This same teaching is repeated in the many texts of the hermetic tradition [ftnt: Cf. for example, the "Tables of the Theorems" of John Dee, Monas heiroglyphica wherein are also mentioned the three stages: the first refers to a "seed of power" prior to the elements and self-conceived"; the second to "punishment and sepulcher"; the third to a state "existing after the elements," which is resurrection by one's own power and "triumph of glory"], and holds the key to all its meanings, as we shall attempt to illustrate in its principle aspects in the pages that follow.