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Note: The following letters are reprinted with
permission.
On the Forbidden Letters
- by Maud Perkins
'Wherefore it is said that the Stone is in every man.'
(propter hoc dicitur quod lapis est in quolibet homine.)
[Albertus Magnus]
[ Carl Jung ]
Rarely have I been so fascinated by a piece of prose as I was by the
Forbidden Letters to Gary Osborn and Philip Gardiner. Here, no doubt, for the
first time in history, the actual scenario of the Great Work of Alchemy was
revealed, and revealed in astounding detail. All the mysteries of Alchemy seem
solved. 'From the ludus puerorum to the decapitation, and from the role of the
stone to the alchemist having to visit the center of the earth. Everything fits,
and fits neatly. Even the Phoenix is explained being a metaphor for the human
body consumed and recomposed in Kundalini-fire.' [J. Rice]
In spite of the Bible warning us not to give to the dog what is holy, Paris
relentlessly published what they had discovered about Alchemy. This, I'm sure,
they could do because they had understood that they were not dealing with a
secret here, but with a mystery. A mystery that has apparently been with us for
at least 200 generations.
Carl Jung thought that mystery represented some kind of psychotherapy ('the
goal of the Work is the unity of the personality'), thereby missing the core:
deification and immortalization of a human being from within. Nonetheless, as
Mark O'Neill points out, Jung's books on Alchemy 'are a feast and full of
frightfully interesting alchemical data' if you are familiar with the alchemical
theory of the Paris 4.
In this article I would like to present you with exactly such data taken from
a work on Alchemy by Carl Jung not yet discussed on World Mysteries, the
Mysterium Coniunctionis (MC), being 'an inquiry into the separation and
synthesis of psychic opposites in Alchemy,' a book Jung had been engaged
on for more than a decade and that was completed in 1954. Here we go.
1.
'In Dorn's view there is in man an invisible sun, which he identifies with
the Archeus. This sun is identical with the sun in the earth.' [Jung,
MC:pars 49/italics by me]
2.
'You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the
base of your spine.' [Ibn Rumi on the Great Work of Alchemy]
3.
'In the eyes of the alchemist the fire-point, the divine centre in man, was
something dangerous, a powerful poison which required very careful handling if
it was to be changed into the panacea.' [Jung, MC:pars 49]
4.
'Kundalini either saves, or destroys.' [de Beaumont]
5.
'End of august till September 4 1986 : our gay man becomes a child. That is,
psychologically during certain minutes. During those minutes, and to his own
surprise, he even produces a child's voice. (...) This reminds us of the words
of Jesus: you must become like a little child again if you want to enter the
Kingdom of God.' [The Paris 4]
6.
'If by God's Holy Ghost thou art beguiled, there will be born in thee the
Eternal Child.' [Angelus Silesius quoted by Jung, MC:pars 444]
7.
'Jung gave his very best separating the alchemical redeemer from the
Christ of his faith.' [H. Breitner]
8.
'The redeemer figure of Alchemy is not commensurable with Christ. Whereas
Christ is God and begotten by the Father, the filius regius (the victorious
alchemist) is the soul of nature, born of the world-creating Logos. The filius
is also a son of God, though of more distant descent and not begotten in the
womb of the Virgin Mary but in the womb of Mother Nature.' [Jung, MC:pars 124]
9.
'I do not doubt the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth.' [Jung, MC:pars
146]
10.
"Such was the power of the world's theocracies that, despite the
publication of thousands of scholarly books and articles refuting every part of
the Judaeo-Christian bible, to this day the existence of unchallengeable proof
that the bible is a work of fiction is unknown to ninety percent of the
population in Christian-dominated societies." [W. Harwood]
11.
'If an alchemist travels through the earth, he's doing that in the
microcosmos of the body. Remember what we said: the real sun and moon (and
earth) are in you. Not outside. And this explains why our friend could still
hear common street noise outside his apartment when he traveled to the centre of
the earth over 19 years ago with tremendous speed.' [The Paris 4]
12.
'It may well be a prejudice to restrict the psyche to being 'inside the
body.' In so far as the psyche has a non-spatial aspect, there may be a psychic
aspect 'outside the body,' a region so utterly different from 'my' psychic
space, that one has to get outside oneself or make use of some auxiliary
technique in order to get there. If this view is at all correct, the alchemical
consummation of the royal marriage (...) could be understood as a synthetic
process in the psyche 'outside' the ego.' [Jung, MC:pars 410]
13.
'By the way, your man is a gay man, born on the 17th of January and in
possession of that very special balance in microcosmic male and female forces. A
balance never possessed by heterosexual men.' [The Paris 4]
14.
'The androgyne has everything it needs.' [Senior, de chemica, p. 108]
15.
'These are they that were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.'
[Rev. 14:4]
16.
'Rev. 14:4 might then not be about celibate priests, but about the homosexual
alchemist. Especially since celibacy is unbiblical.' [Forum-post on the
Forbidden Letters]
17.
'In Gnosticism the original man Adamas, who is nothing but a parafrase of
Adam, (...) was equated with the ithyphalic Hermes and with Korybas, the
pederastic (i.e. homosexual/Perkins) seducer of Dionysus.' [Jung, MC:pars 589]
18.
'They told that (on a evangelical) talk-show somebody told a very strange
little story. It went like this: The Son of God descended from heaven, saw Adam,
loved Adam, kneeled down, kissed his feet and tickled (!) his feet. End of
story.' [The Paris 4 in part 2 of the Forbidden Letters]
19.
'The appearance of Adam Kadmon (i.e. the alchemical redeemer/Perkins) (...)
brings about an illumination of the 'inwards of the head.' This is a veiled but
for the psychology of alchemy typical allusion to the transfiguration of the
adept or of his inner man.' [Jung, MC:pars 606]
20.
'It is said of Adam Kadmon (the Letters part 2, email 8) that he has light
'coming from his mouth, ears, and nose'.' [M. Strom on the Forbidden Letters]21.
'It is strange that, as Eleazar says, this earth is 'mingled with fire.' This
recalls the alchemical idea of the 'ignis gehennalis,' the central fire. (...)
In it dwells the Mercurial Serpent, the Salamander whom the fire does not
consume and the Dragon that feeds on that fire.' [Jung, MC:pars 632]
22.
'Fire getting stronger. (...) The snake is driven out. Our friend doesn't
know where it went. Up the spine, but after that: no clue. Into the earth?' [The
Paris 4]
23.
'The Peacock's Tail (cauda pavonis) is the only phase that seems not
explained in the Forbidden Letters. Mather Walker though may have vital
information on that tail, linking it to the third eye. 'In Egypt the third eye
was depicted by the upright cobra, the uraeus, at the center of the forehead.
China had a peacock feather there, and India a small red dot.'[Walker] According
to Walker in the alchemical treatise The Secret of the Golden Flower 'contact
with the third eye is followed by the process known as the Circulation of
Light.' A circulation reminding me of a specific paragraph in the Second
Newsletter by the Paris 4:'The Lightbody is by now so strong that there are
strong 'electrical' currents in his body, mainly in his hands. If for instance
he washes his hands in warm water then the current becomes so strong that the
hand starts to pulsate. The pulsation cannot be seen though, but he can feel
it.' [The Paris 4] Could that current be light circulating?
The third eye is in my opinion also discussed in Matthew 6:22: 'The light of
the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single (aplous), thy whole body
shall be filled with light.'[Matthew 6:22 King James Version] The keyword here
is single (aplous). The original meaning of aplous is 'not double.' Most bibles
translate with 'simple' here.' [P. Martin]
24.
'Alchemy has performed for me the great and invaluable service of providing
material in which my experience could find sufficient room, and has thereby
made it possible for me to describe the individuation process at least in its
essential aspects.' [Jung, MC:pars 792]
25.
'Fundamental to alchemy is a true and genuine mystery which since the
seventeenth century has been understood unequivocally as psychic. (...) But I do
not imagine for a moment that the psychological interpretation of a mystery must
necessarily be the last word. If it is a mystery it must have still other
aspects. Certainly I believe that psychology can unravel the secrets of Alchemy,
but it will not lay bare the secrets of these secrets.' [Jung, MC:pars 213]
The secrets of these secrets.
Norwich, England, December 2007.
References
- Jung, Carl G., Mysterium Coniunctionis, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, N.J., USA, 1970.
- Dorn, Gerardus, Theatrum Chemicum, Strasbourg, 1613.
Copyright 2007
Note: Presented with permission
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