The idea that human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being, this is the basis of all magic.
 You see, in a Christian context, magic is heresy because it implies that man can command God to act.
 In other words, that in some strange way, the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires.
 In Hermeticism, it isn't so much put in terms of compel, but the idea is that humanity, human beings,
 men and women of great spiritual accomplishment, are co-partners in the project of being.
 And that God, as it were, stepped off the stage of creation with it only 90% completed,
 and the rest is left in the hands of his brother.
 Hermetica actually refers to humanity as the brother of God.
 So it's a completely different attitude toward being human. It's an empowering attitude.
 With power comes the potential to abuse power because you're no longer a worm.
 You remember that image in Jonathan Edwards' sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,"
 where he says you're like a worm suspended over an abyss, held there only by the love of a merciful God,
 implying that if he weren't a merciful God, he'd just let go of your thread and you'd go down the tubes.
 In the Hermetic magical view, human beings are not tainted by original sin.
 And no ideology is without the potential of abuse.
 The Hermetic attitude in the Renaissance was summed up in a single aphorism
 by the great Renaissance Platonist, Marcello Ficino, and what he said was,
 and I have to, you know, there's no sexism in all of this.
 You just have to realize these guys were primitive types and they hadn't confronted the political issues we've confronted.
 So when they say man, they mean humanity.
 The Renaissance magical attitude is summed up in Ficino's aphorism, "Man is the measure of all things."
 And this is a double-edged sword because in a single affirmation, you cast off the guilt trip.
 You cast off the view of ourselves as a flawed creature.
 But when you say man is the measure of all things,
 I mean, you could be the chairman of the board of Louisiana Pacific or Dow Chemical.
 I mean, this is approximately their attitude.
 In other words, it ain't rain forests, it's not the life of the earth, it's none of that malarkey.
 We are to be the measure of all things.
 So it has to be tempered.
 We'll probably end up talking a bit here about what is about the pathological expression of the hermetic position,
 which is called Faustianism.
 And Faustianism is where you have unbridled ego, unbridled faith in the intellect,
 so that you proceed forward without self-doubt.
 If you haven't read Faust recently, it's a surprising read.
 First of all, you know, it's very funny. It's hilarious.
 It's funnier than any of Shakespeare's plays, I think.
 And the way it ends is in the guy dedicates himself to land reclamation and the draining of swamps
 to build low-cost housing for poor people.
 And people don't know this.
 They're caught up in the images of the center of the story, where, you know, magical power is running rampant.
 But Faust's final conclusion is that he should do some good work for the least of society
 and give up these Promethean and titanic dreams of the mastery of power.
 Well, a little bit of history about this hermetic ideal.
 It's an interesting story in the light of our discussion of time yesterday.
 Western civilization, in a way, can be thought of as an accumulated series of misunderstandings.
 And one of the most severe of these misunderstandings has to do with this whole business of hermeticism.
 The Renaissance really believed that Hermes Trismegistus was a great teacher of antiquity
 who preceded Moses, who was in time older than Moses.
 And they had what they called the Prisci Theologica, the three theologians.
 And they were Hermes Trismegistus, Moses, and Orpheus, in that order.
 And the reason that I say Western civilization is built on a series of misunderstandings
 is because they got it all wrong about Hermes Trismegistus.
 And there was great confusion and unhappiness in the 16th century
 when Marie Cassabon, who was an early philologist, attacked the dating of the hermetic corpus
 and argued correctly that this could not possibly have been written in a period preceding Moses,
 that in fact this was post-Christian, written no earlier than the first century AD.
 This is the equivalent of us finding out that, you know,
 George Washington was alive in Greenwich Village in the 1930s or something.
 I mean, it was a completely mind-bending realignment
 of how people thought the history of the world had unfolded
 because they had up to that time thought that when you studied Hermes Trismegistus
 you were reading the oldest philosopher in human history.
 Actually, it's very late.
 And in a way, this is what destroyed the magical alternative.
 The advent of modern philology showed that these so-called ancient texts were not ancient at all.
 They were late Roman. They were Hellenistic.
 And so strongly was imprinted in the Western mind
 what's called, and we've talked about it here this weekend,
 what's called the nostalgia for paradise.
 In other words, the belief that the older it is, the better it is.
 And Guillaume-Baptiste Avicco in La Sciencia Nuova laid the basis for this kind of thinking.
 It's called classicism in the Renaissance context.
 So once they found out that the Hermetic Corpus had been written in late Roman times,
 it was like it was finished.
 And science was able to use the confusion in the magical community at that point
 to force its own agenda very strongly.
 And there have been numerous episodes of misplaced dating like this
 that have contributed to the confusion around the history of magic.
 For example, and I hope this doesn't bring somebody rising out of their chair in an air-clawing rave,
 but Rosicrucianism rests on a whole bunch of phony dates
 because they want to tell you that somebody named Christian Rosencrantz
 wrote a book called The Chemical Wedding and sealed it up in a time capsule in the 12th century
 and that it was then dug up in the 15th, 15th? 16th, dug up in the 16th century.
 But actually, all these Rosicrucian documents were ponied up by people in the 16th century
 who had a very complicated political agenda, which we will probably discuss as part of this weekend.
 Hermetic philosophy is based on what is called the Hermetic Corpus.
 This is a group of books, the most important of which is called the Asclepius.
 And these books, most of them, were completely lost during the Middle Ages.
 At the fall of the Roman Empire, copies of these Hermetic manuscripts
 were systematically destroyed by enthusiastic Christian barbarians.
 And the Hermetic manuscripts were scattered and they only survived then in monasteries in Syria
 and places like that.
 Well then, in the Renaissance, the Council of Florence, under the patronage of the Borgias and people like that,
 they became very, there was this great interest suddenly in antiquities
 because these Roman statuary and stuff was coming out of the ground.
 So the Council of Florence commissioned a character named Gemistus Pletho
 to go to Syria and bring back these manuscripts, and they established a translation commission.
 And they had, in manuscript, the works of Plato, the works of Hermes Trismegistus,
 a whole bunch of ancient literature.
 And to show you what the psychology of the Renaissance was, here they had Plato,
 which they hadn't been able to read for a thousand years, sitting there waiting for translation.
 And Cosimo de' Medici said to Marcello Ficino, "Plato can wait. Translate the Hermetic corpus first."
 And so it was done.
 If you're interested in Renaissance Hermeticism, you can't do better than read Dame Frances Yates' book,
 Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.
 Well, I want to read you some of this stuff because it's very interesting,
 and it has a modernity that is astonishing.
 It's also very psychedelic.
 Here's a little passage on the imagination.
 I'm reading from Book 9 of the Corpus Hermeticum in the Scott translation.
 This is a four-volume set.
 I only brought the text and translation volume.
 But if you read Greek, it's all here. If you don't, it's all here in English.
 But this will just give you a feeling for the approach.
 "If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God, for like is known by like.
 Leap clear of all that is corporeal and make yourself to a like expanse with that greatness
 which is beyond all measure. Rise above all time and become eternal.
 Then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible.
 Deem that you too are immortal and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought,
 to know every craft and every science. Find your home in the haunts of every living creature.
 Make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths.
 Bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity.
 Think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven.
 Think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young,
 that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave.
 Grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places,
 all substances and qualities and magnitudes together. Then you can apprehend God.
 But if you shut up your soul and your body and abase yourself and say,
 "I know nothing. I can do nothing. I am afraid of earth and sea. I cannot mount to heaven.
 I know not what I was nor what I shall be."
 Then what have you to do with God? Your thought can grasp nothing but evil and good.
 If you cleave to the body and are evil.
 Interesting. Very different from the humble yourself, hard labor, spun wool and watery beer approach of medieval Christianity.
 Here's an amazing passage.
 You know, people like to think people thought the world was flat until the Renaissance.
 This is an incredible psychedelic image of outer space that is second century A.D.
 Would that it were possible for you to grow wings and soar into the air, poised between earth and heaven,
 you might see the solid earth, the fluid sea and the streaming rivers, the wandering air, the penetrating fire,
 the courses of the stars and the swiftness of the movement with which heaven encompasses all.
 What happiness were that, my son, to see all these born along with one impulse
 and to behold him who is unmoved, moving in all that moves,
 and him who is hidden, made manifest through his works.
 And it goes on and on. It's very readable. It's very literary. It's highly poetic.
 It's a celebration of nature. The notion of sin is completely absent.
 And it rings with a kind of confidence, a kind of joy that was completely running counter
 to the brimstone and damnation point of view of Christianity.
 Here's a, to me, a psychedelic passage.
 But he who presents all things to us through our senses and thereby manifests himself through all things
 and in all things and especially to those to whom he wills to manifest himself.
 Begin then, my son, Tot, with a prayer to the Lord and Father who alone is good.
 Pray that you may find favor with him and that one ray of him, if only one, may flash into your mind
 so that you may have power to grasp in thought that mighty being.
 For thought alone can see that which is hidden inasmuch as thought itself is hidden from sight.
 And if even the thought which is within you is hidden from your sight,
 how can he, being in himself, be manifest to you through your bodily eyes?
 But if you have power to see with the eyes of the mind, then, my son, he will manifest himself to you.
 For the Lord manifests himself ungrudgingly through all the universe
 and you can behold God's image with your eyes and lay hold on it with your hands.
 If you wish to see him, think on the sun, think on the course of the moon, think on the order of the stars.
 Who is it that maintains that order? The sun is the greatest of the gods in heaven.
 To him, as to their king and overlord and all the kings of heaven, yield place.
 And yet this mighty God, greater than earth and sea, submits to having smaller stars circling above him.
 Who is it then, my son, that he always obeys with reverence and awe?
 Each of these stars, too, is confined by measured limits and has an appointed space to range in.
 Why do not all the stars in heaven run like and equal courses?
 Who is it that is assigned to each its place and marked out for each the extent of its course?
 And so forth.
 So it's a nature-oriented celebratory...
 It glories in the exercise of the mind.
 It is not doctrinal.
 It is not pietistic.
 It is magical, psychedelic, expansive.
 And I'm not implying that they used psychedelic substances.
 The evidence for that is incredibly murky and hard to get at.
 And probably they didn't.
 I mean, one of the real tragedies of Western history is that Western Europe is so poor in psychoactive plants.
 I mean, had Western Europe stayed in touch with the mystery religions of ancient Greece,
 Christianity would never have been able to force its agenda to the degree that it did.
 I think you can make an argument that there were psychedelic mysteries in Europe,
 probably up until the time of the fall of Eleusis.
 Hermeticism is only one heterodox strain among many that were in existence in Europe in the late Roman period,
 and that then partially survived into the Dark Ages.
 I mean, you have Neoplatonism, which is a group of philosophers in the third and fourth century,
 Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and that crowd.
 And they took Plato, the late Plato, and contorted that into a mystical doctrine of emanation.
 They were what are called emanationists.
 What this means is you start with, it's either called the one or the unnameable or Brahman, Atman, or something like that,
 and then you have a series of declensions into more and more material and more and more multiplicity expressions of being.
 These Neoplatonists were emanationists, and their theories about how the universe is constructed
 have become sort of the unconscious basis of all later magical speculation.
 They are the people who brought the angels into the picture so intensely,
 because they were trying to create a descending hierarchy of being from the most high down to the most low.
 And angels, once set in place, became a real problem for Christianity,
 because they are not very easy to distinguish from the old stellar demons of paganism.
 Paganism was largely the belief that the power of the stars could be drawn down to Earth through a series,
 through sympathetic magic, really.
 By setting up resonances in a ritual situation, you could draw the power of the stars down into your projects and your intentions.
 And the late Middle Ages was a period of intensely working out all the associations between minerals, colors, perfumes, plants,
 musical notes and styles, so that you could then bring together all these things for purposes of magical evocation.
 And if any of you are interested in this, the book to read, which will point you toward many other interesting books,
 is a wonderful book called Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella.
 Some of you may remember Campanella. Hell of a fighter. Anyway. Hello?
 And in the Renaissance, over a period of about three generations, this became a real problem,
 because what starts out as angel magic ends up as out-and-out demonic conjuration,
 something which I've noticed my 14-year-old son has an incredibly unhealthy interest in,
 which I did as well at his age. I hope it's not the family curse coming back.
 Yeah. So I mentioned the dating error. It was Lactantius, who was one of the fathers of the early Church,
 one of the patristic writers. That's that generation of theologians that followed Christ, who canonized the Christian religion.
 And he placed Hermes Trismegistus as older than Moses, older than Pythagoras, older than Plato.
 And then it wasn't until Marie Cassebon corrected that problem.
 See, we forget how the really transformative breakthrough that was represented for Western Europe
 by the recovery of all of this ancient literature, it had been completely lost.
 And also a misimpression that probably needs correcting is I think most people who are not schooled in Western history
 think that the further back in time the more "superstitious" people were.
 This isn't actually the case. It isn't a case of the further back in time you go,
 the more belief in demons, magical conjuration, and stuff like that you get.
 The 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries in Europe were periods of remarkable piety and intellectual cohesion.
 Of course, it was also some kind of a fascist nightmare. That's how they achieved it.
 They had stamped out paganism. They had pushed heresy and heterodox thinking to the very distant frontiers of the empire,
 of the Holy Roman Empire. And people were not superstitious.
 And people were not obsessed with horoscopes and conjuration and this sort of thing.
 Where that all began was...
 Well, where it reached its culmination is in the 16th century.
 The 16th century, the 1500s, was the most magical obsessed century in the last 10.
 And alchemy and conjuration and talismanic magic and sympathetic magic, all of these things flourished,
 really not as a throwback, but as a kind of prelude to modern science.
 Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise. And we will see as we discuss this stuff,
 that in a curious and little, rarely discussed way, the program, the agenda of magical dissidence in Europe
 have been entirely achieved by the forces of what we call modernity.
 It's simply that it has been done in an entirely secular metaphor.
 I mean, if you take even the trivial belief about alchemists, that they were concerned with changing lead into gold,
 of course, that isn't what it was about. But there were plenty of con artists running around on the periphery of these deeper scenes
 who were claiming they could change lead into gold.
 Well, in the 20th century, we routinely change lead to gold.
 You do it with neutron bombardment in particle accelerators.
 And of course, it costs far more to do it than the worth of the gold that you get out.
 But that really wasn't the point, was it? It was to prove that it could be done.
 The dreams of creating the homunculus are dreams that dovetail directly into the aspirations of modern biology, genetics, so forth and so on.
 The great chain of being of Aristotle is animated, given a dimension of motion,
 and lo and behold, it becomes the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution.
 Mercilio talks about this, about how all the alchemical dreams of the 15th and 16th century have been brought to fruition in the 20th century,
 but again, in the absence of magical rhetoric, but certainly in a spirit of magical and Faustian recklessness, for sure.
 I mean, this is scientists, you know, they claim such a devotion to truth that decency must never stand in the way,
 because they serve a higher god than human values.
 They serve the golem of the truth in some weird way that makes the truth okay, even if it kills you.
 I studied philosophy from Paul Feyerabend, and he used to say at the beginning of his epistemology 101 course,
 "I will teach you to recognize the truth, and I will teach you to ask the question, 'What's so great about it?'"
 You know, I mean, so now you've got the truth, so what's so great about it?
 It was 1460 when these manuscripts were brought to Florence.
 Those of you with photographic memories can see the time wave signature as it turns over and heads through the floor.
 And Cosimo de' Medici immediately ordered Ficino to abandon his work on Plato,
 and the Paimander, which was one of these books, which had been—it was the only one which existed in Europe,
 even in partial form during the Dark Ages.
 Cosimo died in 1464, but the translation project went forward.
 And just so you understand, the tree, the developmental process in Western magic goes—
 basically all goes back to this Florentine translation project,
 and from there, people who were well-placed got a hold of this stuff.
 The most important person probably being a person, certainly an unsung hero in the development of Western thought,
 Trithemius, Bishop of Sponheim.
 And Trithemius wrote a book—it was really a manuscript, it was never printed as a book in his lifetime, but later—
 called the Stenographica.
 And in it, he put forth many of these magical doctrines and also encryption methods for code-making and breaking,
 so that this stuff could be circulated under the eyes of the clergy without causing a problem.
 And then the development of Western magic splits into two strains.
 The Bruno strain, Giordano Bruno—I understand he's running for President of the United States this year.
 Giordano Bruno and his school—he was a Franciscan monk who ended up being burned at the stake.
 His sin for which he was burned at the stake was he was sitting on a rooftop of one of these Italian city-states one evening,
 presumably smoking some pretty decent boo that they'd brought in from North Africa.
 And he was looking at the stars, and it occurred to him, "These things are suns.
 These little points of light are like the sun.
 Jesus Christ!"
 And in a single moment, the universe became infinite.
 And he said, "If these are suns!"
 And he just, you know, his mind was boggled, literally.
 I mean, can you imagine inside the medieval worldview where they have these concentric shells of angels and demons and all this?
 Suddenly, this guy gets it in a single moment, and he sees that the universe is infinite.
 And he begins to say so.
 And this is against Aristotle.
 And the church just goes nuts, and they drive him out of Italy, and he has a whole bunch of adventures in England and other places.
 Eventually, he makes the mistake of coming back to a place in northern Italy where he's betrayed by his patron,
 and he's burned at the stake for a point of view which all of us take quite for granted.
 The other strain of magic coming down from Trithemius is the D-strain.
 And it is a bit more accessible to people like ourselves because John D. was an Englishman, and he wrote in English.
 And so you don't have to conquer 16th century Italian or late Latin in order to read him, although he wrote a lot in Latin as well.
 D is a very interesting character worth spending some time on because D is the last person to be able to unify into one worldview
 science and mathematics and magic and astrology all together.
 So he is the greatest magician of his age and the greatest scientist of his age.
 He designed the navigation instruments that Sir Francis Drake used to go around the Cape Horn and sail up the coast of California.
 He was an intelligence operative serving Queen Elizabeth on the European continent.
 He could cast the best horoscope in Europe, and that was his entree into these various royal families of these various capital cities of Europe.
 And then he was making maps of battlements and of the deployment of war facilities and ship building capacity and stuff like that,
 and sending it all back to Elizabeth in these codes that he had learned from Trithemius, not personally, but from the stenographica.
 And D, a very strange incident happened, which was on a cold day in April at his house in Mortlake, which is on the outskirts of London.
 Now it's completely surrounded by modern London.
 I should say he had the largest library in England.
 He had 6,000 books. Sir Philip Sidney and the Queen would occasionally call upon him to shoot the bull.
 And he was a very learned man.
 So one day in April of 1582, he's working at his desk at his room in Mortlake, and he goes outside.
 There's some disturbance in the garden, and he goes outside.
 And his story, and we have only his story, is that an angel descended in a ball of light and gave him an object,
 which is to this day on exhibit in the British Museum.
 If you ever have a chance, it's worth hunting it down.
 It's in the Renaissance Hall, and it's a piece of black polished obsidian, roughly about this big and about that thick and very highly polished.
 He called it the show stone, S-H-E-W.
 And what the deal was, was you could look into the show stone, if you had the right talent, and it was a magical theater.
 There were gods and demons and female spirits and all kinds of things swirling around this thing.
 Well, for the next many years, the show stone was the major guiding force on Dee's life.
 And a guy came to him named Edward Kelly.
 And Edward Kelly, legend has it that he had no ears, which in England at that time meant that you had committed some infraction in the province,
 and they had removed your ears.
 It was the mark of a con artist.
 So you couldn't fool anybody else.
 They took your ears off.
 So then if you met somebody with no ears and a big scheme, you knew to keep your wallet in your pocket.
 So this guy Kelly had an immense facility with this show stone.
 I mean, he could just sit down with it, and it is one of the most puzzling and undiscussed episodes in the evolution of Western thought.
 The straight people just say, "Whoa, this is a bunch of crap."
 This guy Kelly, first of all, Dee was married to a much younger woman named Ann Dee.
 And at one point in the ten years or so that Dee and Kelly were together,
 the angels of the show stone gave very explicit instructions that Dee should allow Kelly to bear down on Ann.
 And it says, "In the light of God's will, it was done," he says in his diary.
 So this guy was a sharpie for sure.
 However, it's very puzzling because if he was a con artist, he must have been a con artist of immense cleverness
 because often the way the Dee angels would work is they would deliver very, very long messages in Latin backwards.
 And Kelly would just dictate this stuff at a very rapid speed, and Dee would write it down,
 and then they would put away the show stone, and then they would very laboriously rewrite this stuff from back to front.
 And then there would be these long, coherent harangues about what they should be doing,
 about which courtly figures they should support with money, and who should be introduced to who.
 It was very political, you know.
 Well, what kind of a polymathic talent was Edward Kelly that he could invert whole pages of Latin and reel it off
 and then have it be reconstructed and make sense?
 Also, there are, you see, we know about this because Dee kept a diary over the years that this was all going on.
 It's one of the most astonishing books in all of English literature, and until the last ten years,
 the 1658 edition was the only edition ever published.
 It's called "A True and Faithful Relation," or in full, "A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years
 Between Dr. Dee and Some Spirits," with annotation by Maric Casabon, the guy who did the correct dating on Hermetica.
 And it's very interesting reading.
 It's, as I say, one of the most puzzling incidents in the whole history of science.
 What Dee was doing was eventually he came to rest at the court of Rudolf II, Rudolf I of Bohemia, who ruled from Prague.
 Now, you have to understand, is that a handout? Yeah.
 Is there evidence of drug use by Dee?
 Not strong enough to warrant any getting thrilled about it.
 The great awareness of drug use came slightly later, and strangely enough, the drug was opium.
 It's interesting, the history of opium.
 You know, we think of opium and its derivatives, junk and heroin, as just the lowest, well, maybe crack is now the lowest of the low,
 but anyway, it's a real scuzzball drug, according to most people's opinion.
 But did you know that no, they had been using opium for 3,000 years before anybody noticed that it was an addicting drug?
 It was not ever noted that opium was addicting until 1611, when John Playfair, a very famous English physician,
 wrote a book in which he commented on opium and said, "Once one has begun the habit of opium, it must be maintained unto death."
 So in the 30 years after Dee, there was a great hermeticist and alchemical thinker named Paracelsus,
 who arose on the European continent. Paracelsus is an interesting guy.
 He's essentially the inventor of drugs, because he was the first person to extract herbs and to get this notion of the essence,
 that if you have a medicinal plant, then there's something in there which you want to get out and concentrate.
 He called his school of alchemy, "Iatrochemistry," the doctor's chemistry.
 And he invented pills of the ordinary sort, and he said, "I have made a great discovery.
 The center of my alchemical opus rests with the magic of laudanum," which was, of course, gum, opium.
 There was a craze in the late 15th century among alchemists for opium.
 The alchemist von Helmut, he signed some of his alchemical tracts, "Dr. Opiatus."
 He was the first croaker.
 [laughter]
 Yeah?
 [inaudible]
 Did it, you say?
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