I’ve been thinking about the concept known as Rebis. In the Alchemical Tradition that word denotes the culmination of the “Great Work” … which includes the union of opposites. I don’t think there’s much chance of Rebis being achieved in actuality. And in the arena of the mind, I think it’s a wonderfully worthwhile project, but one that probably always proceeds one step forward and two steps back. I say this because the union-of-opposites-like enterprise I’m preoccupied with these days is the collaboration of my conscious and unconscious faculties. And my experience so far is that the unconscious is vast, and by comparison consciousness is miniscule. Like the difference in scale between the earth and the entire rest of the universe.
An idea I’ve been toying with is that what I’m consciously aware of expands in response to experiences in actuality and as a consequence of contributions shared by my unconscious faculties, either while on the edge of sleep or as ideas that present themselves to me while I’m awake. Such day-time gifting usually takes place during moments when I’m not actively responding to a pressing need in actuality, or on those occasions when I’m engaged in some manual task like putting leaves on the tree in the image above. While performing almost automatic, largely repetitive actions with my hands, unsought ideas present themselves that often feel wildly out of left field and at the same time also wonderfully pertinent.
Shortly after I first began noodling over Rebis several weeks ago I happened upon a particularly wonderful Tarot deck called Visconti Sforza. I do not read Tarot cards myself, but I’m always grateful for the ideas that cross my mind when I look at them. While looking at the Visconti Sforza deck the “Rebis Card” above began to take shape in my thoughts.
Antimony
Before social media, isolation was the heavy tax levied on the luxury of minority views. The daring might attempt to reach out to others of like mind, but it was often risky and the cost was sometimes dear.
Nonetheless, as now, advances in information technology offered options. Starting about 560 years ago enterprising and determined Europeans employed movable type and published under assumed names to hide in plain sight, where only those looking for their own reflection might find each other.
In 1685 a book called Currus Triumphalis Antimonii (The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony), ostensibly the work of a 15th-century Benedictine monk, was published in Amsterdam. A colorful excerpt from the book’s “Dedicatory Epistle” follows here.
ercury appeared to me in a dream, and brought me back from my devious courses to the one way. “Behold me clad not in the garb of the vulgar, but in the philosopher’s mantle!” so he said, and straightway began to leap along the road in headlong bounds. Then, when he was tired, he sat down, and, turning to me, who had followed him in the spirit, bade me mark that he no longer possessed that youthful vigour with which he would at the first have overcome every obstacle, if he had not been allowed a free course.
Winter Solstice 2013
Before physics and chemistry there was alchemy. The alchemists asked questions that were beyond the resources available to them to provide satisfactory answers. Many of the gaps between what they wanted to know and what they could find out through experimentation were filled in with speculation and imaginings – usually added on top of the speculations and imaginings of those who came before them. (Hmmm…any chance we still do that now?)
Substances, like people, generally behave in fairly predictable ways consistent with their personalities. Since the alchemists were intensely interested in substances, and studied them over long periods of time, they felt they knew them. And they saw a little of themselves in their glowing caldrons.
When the alchemists projected aspects of themselves on the substances they studied lots of internal stuff – psychological stuff – was revealed. The image above is composed of 12th Century alchemical symbols arranged to suggest the ongoing process of individual experience.
represents the sun and gold and is a metaphor for consciousness.
represents the moon and silver and is a metaphor for the unconscious.
represents mercury, a fluid state, and is a metaphor for a personality in transition. This symbol is composed of both the symbols for gold and silver, plus a cross that represents space and time divided into quadrants – crosshairs suggesting “you are here.”
through to and sometimes it flows the other way.Image: Silver & Golden Apples
Through his poems, prose, plays, and the friendships he fostered, W.B.Yeats encouraged the recovery of aspects of Irish cultural that were fading away, including a considerable amount of mystical lore.
In 1890 he was admitted to a magical fraternity called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and in 1899 he composed this poem: