[BLANK_AUDIO]
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 What I'm in Europe to do is to be part of a film making effort.
 And I wanna describe the project to you a little bit,
 simply because it's what's on my mind, naturally.
 [MUSIC]
 It's not a film about rave culture, it's not a film about Albert Hoffman,
 it's not a film about body piercing or any of these things
 that great films need to be done about and have been done about.
 It's about one of your local heroes who is a great hero of mine.
 And I'm talking about Frederick V,
 Elector Palatine, Prince of Heidelberg, King of Bohemia,
 who was not content to sit back and let things happen.
 But was willing to launch a grand
 alchemical dream of a reformation of human society.
 [MUSIC]
 Okay, this is a prophecy in the hermetic literature.
 A day will come when men will no longer care for the earth, and
 at that day the gods will depart and everything will be thrown into primal chaos.
 This prophecy was strongly in the minds of the strains of non-Christian
 thought that evolved at the centuries of closure of the Roman Empire.
 A world whose psychology was very much like the psychology of our own time,
 a psychology of despair and exhaustion.
 [MUSIC]
 LSD was not sufficient, even coupled with rock and roll, it only brought oppression.
 It was like a failed alchemy.
 Instead of the dissolving and
 recrystallizing at a higher and more angelic level,
 thousands of prisons were built and the entire thing failed.
 But this spirit is the spirit,
 the spirit of life itself, the spirit of novelty itself.
 And it will not be suppressed for long in any time or place.
 [MUSIC]
 So now again, it comes.
 It's a spirit of descent that says we will not serve
 the values of materialism, the values of the ego,
 and the values that separate and break down the community.
 [MUSIC]
 In the 120 years from 1500 to the beginning of the 30 Years War,
 Europe was caught in a number of conspiracies and
 political intrigues directed toward moving Europe toward a magical and
 alchemically based society.
 The Protestant princes of the Northern League of Germany,
 especially Frederick the Elector Palatine, came to culminate this movement.
 But its roots lie further back in the 1580s of the 16th century.
 It was in this period that the English astrologer, astronomer,
 mathematician, navigator, and expert of espionage, John Dee,
 launched his famous and mysterious mission to Bohemia,
 a little known incident in European history which holds clues to
 understanding the fate and evolution of modern science and
 the nature of a lost world of magical and alchemical thinking that once
 claimed the attention of the European imagination.
 [MUSIC]
 John Dee, the greatest mind of the Elizabethan era,
 friend of Queen Elizabeth, colleague of Sir Philip Sidney,
 converser with angels, mathematician par excellence,
 determined under the influence of the mysterious Edward Kelly,
 that he was to be the center of an alchemical renaissance and
 a secret society that would lay the groundwork for
 the continuation of the dream of Australia,
 the dream built around the Elizabethan Queen, Elizabeth I.
 [MUSIC]
 He associated himself intensely with the Arthurian mythical and
 mystical side of the Elizabethan idea of British Empire.
 [MUSIC]
 He was a Welshman, like the Queen he was so intensely devoted to, and
 like her he shared the renaissance mood of Saturnian melancholy.
 A collector of books, a builder of scientific instruments,
 a composer of codes and ciphers, fascinated with alchemy.
 Dee was both the figure of the introspective melancholic and
 the world planning, empire building, political visionary.
 [MUSIC]
 Dee was under the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland, and
 it was Northumberland who looted the Catholic monasteries at the time of
 Henry VIII.
 [MUSIC]
 We have reason to believe that John Dee had virtual carte blanche in
 selecting manuscripts from those libraries that interested him.
 [MUSIC]
 Not only was Dee a scholar of the classics and the magical past,
 but he was an intimate friend with some of the great movers and
 shakers of his own time, particularly Sir Philip Sidney and
 the entire coterie of poets and artists who had gathered themselves
 around Elizabeth, Astraea, to celebrate her reign and
 to make of her the paradigmatic sovereign of Europe that Dee believed
 led the way toward the establishing of a universal alchemical monarchy.
 It was essentially a poetic enterprise, as alchemy always is.
 Merlin in the Arthurian legends has come down to us,
 basically disguised as John Dee.
 The image we have of Merlin is Dee's image.
 So Dee possessed an enormous power over the imagination of his contemporaries.
 They were in awe of his learning.
 [MUSIC]
 Or let my lamp at midnight hour be seen in some high lonely tower,
 where I may oft outwatch the bear with thrice great Hermes,
 or unsphere the spirit of Plato to unfold what worlds or what vast regions hold.
 [MUSIC]
 Perhaps we are the naive ones.
 Perhaps we too quickly assume that we had understood all there was to know about
 matter.
 After all, even to this moment,
 we cannot locate the seat of the imagination in matter.
 We cannot trace the evolution of a human thought or hope in matter.
 [MUSIC]
 It's almost as though the alchemists, through their humility,
 had a deeper insight into the workings of the world than we have achieved today.
 [MUSIC]
 The transformation of matter into a universal panacea for
 the redemption of mankind.
 This was Dee's great passion.
 This was the overarching theme of his life,
 a deep, deep commitment to the reformation of society.
 And a deep, deep exhaustion and
 rejection of the values of Christendom that he saw betrayed all about him.
 [MUSIC]
 And then by distillation, and then by coagulation, and
 then by concentration through firing, the alchemical body is brought to completion.
 These are processes that go on both within the chemical retort,
 the alembic, in the alchemist's laboratory, and
 they are processes which go on in the heart and mind of the alchemist.
 [MUSIC]
 One process dissolves, another process separates the dross,
 the gross matter from the precious, another concentrates the subtle essence,
 another raises the subtle essence to another level of refinement.
 [MUSIC]
 And over time, the great friend of the alchemist,
 this process of rarefaction and growth, both metallic and
 psychological, both internal and external,
 both personal and impersonal,
 proceeds and feeds upon itself, and
 eventually, not through any logic discernible to the scientific mind,
 there is a kind of miracle, the production of the stone,
 the union of spirit and matter, the fusion of these two
 contradictory aspects of the universe into a new and third thing,
 the quintessence, the rubato, the lapis philosophorum,
 the aqua vitae, the nostri lapis philosophorum vivici.
 [MUSIC]
 I would place Dr. D at the center of this business, and
 then it's a dissolve, to morph like 1582,
 and then it's a philosophical, angelic encounter.
 [MUSIC]
 All you that feign philosophers would be, and night and
 day in Gelber's kitchen broil, wasting the chips of ancient Hermes' tree,
 leaning to turn them to a precious oil, the more you work, the more you lose and
 spoil, to you I say, how learned so e'er you be,
 go burn your books and come and learn of me.
 [MUSIC]
 >> He was unusually susceptible to the claims of Edward Kelly,
 who came to D with two bona fides, a mysterious book written in hieroglyphics,
 and a red powder, which he claimed to be a partially
 completed approach to the alchemical elixir.
 With these two bits of evidence in hand,
 D fell fully under the spell of Kelly and his scrying ability.
 [MUSIC]
 And communing with spirits and entities discerned within,
 he was at last obtaining entrance into the angelic realms he had so long sought.
 [MUSIC]
 The diaries of D show that over a period of years and on a daily basis,
 he and Edward Kelly would regularly retire to the inner chambers of D's house,
 first at Mortlake, and then in a series of courtly settings as they moved about Europe.
 And in these seances, in these settings, a vast cast of angels and
 voices passed in parade, always egging our protagonists
 deeper into the Rosicrucian enlightenment and the political dispensation that they sought.
 [MUSIC]
 In 1583, they arrived at last in Prague.
 Prague at that time was ruled by Rudolf II.
 The occult emperor, collector of dwarves and
 giants, patron of alchemy and astrology,
 one of the most eccentric and extravagant rulers in the entire panoply of European history.
 [MUSIC]
 And it was to Rudolf, and it was to the people around Rudolf,
 and the emperor's private secretary, Count Palatine, Michael Meyer.
 It was to these established and renowned alchemists that D brought his plan and
 drew them forward toward the idea of an alchemical reformation.
 [MUSIC]
 He was able to lay the groundwork for events which a generation
 later would blossom into the Rosicrucian enlightenment.
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 The whole of the cosmos is reflected in the mystery of man and woman,
 the mystery of the human mind-body interface.
 [MUSIC]
 It's important to see D as a kind of culmination of a tradition
 that had been at work for over 150 years in Europe.
 The use of astrology, numerology, Hebrew Kabbalah,
 and the doctrine of signatures to produce a magical theory of nature and
 man's place in it can be traced to a generation before D.
 People like Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettlesheim,
 who became the prototype for Faust.
 The Bishop Trithemius, the great developer of codes and
 ciphers, one of D's great passions.
 The Florentine magician Marcello Ficino, who was the great rediscoverer and
 promoter of the hermetic knowledge, and upon which he drew very heavily.
 He took their work and added the dimension of the idea of an angelic
 intercession into politics of the time, essentially in support of
 the values of the young Queen Elizabeth and her Astraea reign.
 [MUSIC]
 Alchemy and the history of alchemy is full of contradictions,
 inconsistencies, unions of opposite, if you will.
 The very year that the Rosicrucian manifestos claimed the attention of
 the European public, 1608, D died in poverty and disappointment in his
 now half-looted and abandoned home at Mortlake.
 The alchemical dream that D had sought to live was to be completed,
 if at all, by personalities other than himself.
 [MUSIC]
 >> Our revels now are ended.
 These are actors, as I foretold to you,
 but all spirits are melted into thin air.
 [MUSIC]
 And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
 the cloud-covered towers, the gorgeous palaces,
 the solemn temples, the great globe itself,
 they, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
 and like this insubstantial pageant, fade,
 and leave not a rack behind.
 We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
 and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 >> Frederick the Elector, the fifth Palatine prince of Heidelberg,
 at sixteen years old, was betrothed by an arranged marriage
 to Elizabeth Stuart of England, the daughter of James I,
 the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII of England.
 She, too, was but sixteen years old when they were married
 in one of the most dramatic nuptials that London had ever witnessed.
 [MUSIC]
 Frederick had come to England to claim his queen,
 accompanied by courtiers, alchemists,
 and his advisor, Christian von Anhalt, an alchemical dreamer
 who saw in the marriage of the young couple
 the opportunity for the establishment of a Protestant alchemical kingdom
 in central Europe.
 [MUSIC]
 The young couple, lost in love,
 made their way back to Frederick's beautiful Palatinate
 in southern Germany, and there they intended to dwell
 and found a dynasty.
 But such was not to be.
 [MUSIC]
 And they were the center of a movement of alchemical reformation
 and revolution of spiritual freedom,
 and to my mind, a very sort of psychedelic world.
 [MUSIC]
 A rarefaction, a good alchemical word,
 a rarefaction of the human imprint on this planet,
 a spiritualization of humanity,
 and a new order of mind folded in to this pair of 16-year-olds.
 [MUSIC]
 So to take an incident like the career of Frederick the Elector Palatine
 of Heidelberg and his bride
 and make of it a kind of exemplar, a parable, a myth,
 if you will, the myth of the alchemical marriage,
 a myth that takes innocence and naivete
 and belief in the power of ideas to make a new world.
 [MUSIC]
 In the decades immediately before the birth of modern science,
 the exploration of the new world
 and the flowering of the alchemical imagination
 confronted European man with a bewildering complexification of nature.
 And the primary symbol used to understand
 this bewildering variety of phenomena
 was the labyrinth, the palace, the Acropolis complex,
 stretched through time and space, architectonic,
 pregnant with mnemonic possibility.
 The palace, the court, became the symbol
 at the center of the social mandala of the European imagination,
 and never more so than here at Heidelberg,
 where Frederick and Elizabeth literalized
 the mnemonic and alchemical intentions of the age
 in a vast, sprawling complex of red sandstone
 cut with secret passageways, hidden doorways,
 and complexity found ordinarily
 only in the depths of the human unconscious
 and the alchemical imagination.
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 This is ground zero for the Rosicrucian enlightenment.
 [MUSIC]
 Standing here in the alchemical laboratory
 of the palace in Heidelberg,
 we are essentially at the center of the alchemical hopes
 of the Rosicrucian enlightenment.
 It was here in the years before the adventure in Bohemia
 that Frederick's alchemists, astrologers, and soothsayers
 toiled directly under the king's observation and control.
 Here came Michael Maier, Heinrich Kundrath,
 the great names of alchemy.
 It's entirely possible that John Dee was in this room.
 It's entirely possible that Edward Kelly
 stood where I am standing now.
 It's almost impossible to conceive of the hopes
 and the fantasies and the labors and the dreams
 that have been generated by and are centered on this room
 and the objects in it.
 This is the last alchemical laboratory in the world
 to fully function before the rise of modern science.
 And these tools in many ways reflect the internal cosmology
 of the men and women who used them.
 This, for example, a typical alchemical distillery,
 is called the pelican.
 Another example of the colorful nature
 of alchemical vocabulary, it's called the pelican
 because it is associated with the myth of a bird
 which plucks blood from its own breast.
 Primamateria, feces, black coal, charcoal, salt niter,
 heated in here, brought to a high temperature,
 a fevered caloric state, rises into the higher imperium
 of the vessel and there, rarefied, it condenses,
 liquefies, and flows down into the cooler domain
 of the child of the pelican.
 Here the essence is collected, the quintessence,
 and always the hope was that the next experiment,
 the next combination of materials,
 would yield the elixir vitae, the lapis philosophorum,
 the completion that the alchemists sought.
 And so all this fantastic apparatus that we see around us
 is really not so much in the service of channeling liquids,
 gases, but in the service of channeling spirit
 out of matter and into the higher realms
 where it then can be refluxed, recondensed,
 and the lapis philosophorum, the stone of the philosophers,
 the central mystery brought to completion.
 [Music]
 It's the self that we are trying to recover.
 This is lumina de lumina, the light trapped in matter,
 the lux natura.
 This is universal medicine curing all ills.
 It is the answer.
 It is what everyone is looking for and no one can find.
 [Music]
 And so the alchemists toiled over the centuries,
 the torment of the sulfur, the torment of the cinnabar,
 the search for the triumphant chariot of antinomy,
 the search for the quintessential essence
 that represented the union of all the world
 that the alchemists saw around them.
 [Music]
 We have come to understand that the work of alchemy
 was not about the transmutation of crude metals into gold,
 but was in fact a kind of dance of the imagination
 in which the psychological complexes within the alchemist
 were mingled in an amalgam with chemical processes,
 creating a kind of mythology of matter,
 a landscape in which the green lion, the red dragon,
 the hermaphroditic queen, the four-headed dog
 were figures moving to and fro in the fevered speculations
 of the so-called philosophers.
 [Music]
 And the belief was that man could work with nature,
 a full partner with the divine process,
 and redeem the light fallen into matter,
 and in so doing, redeem himself.
 [Music]
 The alchemical philosophers were living in a waking dream,
 and many of their recipes were designed to wipe out the boundaries
 between waking and sleeping.
 [Music]
 The stages in the great work, beginning in the negredo, the blackening,
 then the rubedo, the reddening, the citrinitas, the yellowing,
 the verititas, the greening, the albedo, the whitening,
 and finally, the purificatio.
 So at each stage there are sub-stages of dissolucio and coagulatio.
 It's a melting and a recasting and a purifying of psychic contents.
 [Music]
 Images are full of ravening beasts, incestuous mother-son pairs,
 brother-sister pairs, hermaphrodites, all taboos are broken.
 This stuff just boils up from the unconscious,
 then is sublimed through the stages and is somehow fixed,
 and this fixing is the culmination of alchemy.
 If you bring off this trick, then you possess our stone,
 the philosopher's stone, the lapis, the sophic hydrolith of the wise.
 [Music]
 In the swirling of the alembic, in the chemical processes going on in the retorts,
 you begin to be able to project your unconscious material.
 [Music]
 We are never really able, except in the psychedelic state,
 to transcend the belief in the inner world and the outer world as being somehow separate.
 [Music]
 Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary,
 the psychedelic experience as brought to us through plants,
 long in the possession of aboriginal people,
 appears to be the identical phenomenon.
 [Music]
 And the plants lift the imprisoning structures of the ego,
 and the ego flows out into the world.
 [Music]
 Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy
 that is not seeking the stone, but has found the stone.
 [Music]
 The shamans of the Amazon have attained a sufficient sophistication
 to explicitly understand that the vessel of alchemical transformation
 is the body and the head of the experience.
 [Music]
 This is the alchemical vessel.
 This is where you will encounter the three-headed dog
 and the queen dissolving in her bath,
 and the incestuous couple that combine soul and luna
 to produce the white essence of the panacea of the universal medicine.
 These are psycho-mental processes.
 [Music]
 Nature is a great distillery of complexity,
 alchemical gold, novelty, connection.
 [Music]
 We have re-understood what was forgotten
 during the reductionist centuries of modern science.
 We've re-understood that the world is one thing,
 and it's a living thing.
 It's a thing with an intent and a spirit.
 [Music]
 And rational analysis tells us that matter is simply atoms
 flinging themselves through space,
 obedient to certain mathematical laws that are invariant.
 All the creativity, all the sense of connectedness
 that we experience as living beings,
 as members of a society, as human beings in contemplation of nature,
 all of that was denied.
 And it reaches its ultimate culmination in a statement
 made by Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist,
 who said, "Nature is mute."
 You understand what I mean?
 "Nature gives no clue," he tells you.
 "Man is alone in the cosmos with his complexes and his obsessions.
 He confers meaning."
 I reject this.
 I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience,
 which is that nature seeks to communicate,
 all being is pregnant with language,
 all reality wants to include the human side of nature
 in its ongoing intent.
 One of the most famous of all alchemical axioms is,
 "As above, so below,"
 meaning always that in every small part of reality
 there is a tiny reflection of the great over-structure of reality,
 and in the largest structures are hidden the secrets of the smallest,
 and vice versa.
 We have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science
 where we have mind firmly separated out from the world.
 But in an earlier age,
 mind and matter were seen to be alloyed together throughout nature.
 And I think it's very interesting that at this very high-tech moment
 in our adventure,
 the plants return and almost stand before us
 as a beacon and a promise.
 They stand for absolute Tao.
 They stand for the correct way for life to relate to its environment.
 If you look around you,
 the entire global civilization is undergoing some kind of meltdown.
 The planet itself is now to be seen as a kind of alchemical retort.
 The prima materia to be transformed are the nuclear stockpiles,
 the toxic waste dumps, the industrial wastelands.
 The I Ching says never confront evil directly,
 and never name it directly,
 because it finds weapons to defend itself.
 We are not an army, so our strategy must be stealth.
 It's an alchemical strategy.
 And what do I mean by stealth?
 I mean the house of constipated reason
 must be infiltrated by art, by dreamers, by vision.
 Find the others. Find the others, and then you will know what to do.
 All truth which springs from the individual is subversive.
 Find the others, and then using this technology,
 which was designed to keep track of us,
 to pick our pockets, and to sell us junk we don't want,
 use this technology to produce art,
 massive amounts of subversive art.
 All culture is some kind of myth.
 All cultural stories then have a psychic dynamic to them.
 We are not an army.
 This is what Frederick didn't understand.
 He was a king, but he was not an army.
 Frederick, the elector, was one of seven electors,
 seven German princes whose combined vote could choose a new emperor.
 The politics of the situation were not lost on Christian van Anhalt
 and other alchemical advisors close to the young prince.
 Frederick began to plan beyond the fairy tale world of his Heidelberg Palatinate
 and dream of himself, the alchemical emperor,
 returned to the throne of the kingdom of Bohemia in Prague.
 And in the winter of 1618, I believe, moved with his bride and his court
 all these alchemists, magicians, casters of horoscopes, herbalists, visionaries,
 moved the entire court from Heidelberg to Prague
 to create an alchemical reformation that had been hatched in the mind
 of the English alchemist and mathematician John Dee.
 Unfortunately, the alchemical dream was not to be.
 Frederick's advisors had seriously misjudged the situation.
 James was not supporting an alchemical revolution.
 He was playing one side against the other,
 and to the idealists in Prague, such cynicism was unimaginable.
 The Habsburgs back in Madrid quickly got wind of what was going on
 and laid siege to Prague.
 And the story of the alchemical kingdom and the Rosicrucian enlightenment,
 for all purposes, ended at an incident called the Battle of White Mountain.
 Elizabeth fled to the Netherlands with her children.
 Frederick was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain.
 And the alchemical dream died.
 This was really, in some sense, the beginning of the Thirty Years' War.
 And as you know, going into the Thirty Years' War,
 Europe was a place of popes and kings.
 At the end of the Thirty Years' War, it was a place ruled by parliaments and peoples,
 and the entire medieval world was swept away.
 And these angel-dealing, horoscope-casting, alchemy-pursuing visionaries
 of this Rosicrucian renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity.
 But there was an unbroken thread that, however thinly drawn,
 persists right up to the present moment.
 So the idea is to show the way back to the high magic of the late Paleolithic.
 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,
 of incidencia positorum, a rediscovery of the real ambiguity of being,
 a deeper possibility, a rebirth of the human spirit.
 In their way, Frederick and Elizabeth were acting out the dream of Camelot.
 In their way, they were acting out the alchemical dream of the rebirth of the king and queen.
 In their way, they were laying the groundwork for a new dispensation of human thought,
 freed from the medieval assumptions of guilt and the need for redemption,
 a point of view that made human beings co-creators in a magical universe with a loving deity.
 All that passed away with the fall of the winter king and queen.
 Well, until recently I thought that that was the end of the story,
 but there is a coda that is amusing, if nothing else.
 This Habsburgian army, having laid siege and destroyed the alchemical kingdom,
 began to retreat across Europe.
 In that Habsburgian army, there was a young soldier of fortune, only 19 years old,
 still wet behind the ears, happily soldiering and wenching his way around Europe,
 and his name was René Descartes.
 On the night of September 16th, Descartes had a dream,
 and in this dream, an angel appeared to him.
 And the angel said to Descartes,
 "The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number."
 And that revelation laid the basis for modern science.
 It's the alchemical angel, which will not die.
 It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and peoples
 toward an unimaginable conclusion.
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]
 [music]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.65 sec
Decoding  : 4.59 sec
Transcribe: 3256.58 sec
Total Time: 3261.82 sec