Burning chemistry was Igne Natura Renovatur Integra.
 It means that natura is renovated by fire.
 So what Jesus Christ was telling to everybody was that we have an aura, you know, like gold.
 And gold in Latin is aureus.
 And what we have to do is do alchemy with our fire, with our core,
 to transmutate the dirty elements we have in our body and transmute our soul and become something more purified.
 Was it really interesting?
 Well, yes. I mean, you make an interesting point.
 Christ can be seen in this alchemical context because what he was saying was what I claimed here tonight is the alchemical faith.
 He was saying that man is divine.
 This doctrine got raked over the coals by the patristic fathers.
 But the career of Christ is very interesting because there does seem to be this confluence of elements
 that hint at a transformation that was not simply spiritual, but that was spiritual and physical at the same time.
 You know, one of the most puzzling incidents in the Gospels, I can't remember which one it is,
 but after the resurrection, when the Marys go to the tomb, there's this amazing encounter between the risen Christ and the Marys.
 And he actually says, "Touch me not, woman, for I am not yet completely of the nature of the Father."
 But yet he is resurrected. He is speaking.
 He stands before them alive, but he says, "Touch me not, I am not yet completely of the nature of the Father."
 So you're right, there is this alchemical suggestion in the life of Christ.
 The story about Christ that I always like to tell, because it seems to vindicate some of what we've indicated here tonight,
 is a wonderful story. You know, Christ is said to have appeared to the apostles in the upper room
 40 days after the crucifixion, I believe. But the apostle Thomas was not present.
 And so then Thomas comes after this incident, and the apostles gather around him, and they say,
 "The Master was with us. He came in the flesh." And Thomas says the equivalent of,
 "You guys have been smoking too much of this red Lebanese that you've been getting."
 And then Christ comes again. Oh, oh, and he says in that incident, Thomas says,
 "Unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it."
 And so then Christ comes again to the upper room, and he looks over the assembly,
 and he gestures Thomas forward, and he says, "Thomas, put your hand into the wound."
 And so he does. Now, different people have different interpretations of what's going on here.
 And Thomas is always called then in Christian exegesis, "Thomas the doubter."
 My interpretation of what's going on here is that because Thomas doubted,
 he alone of all the apostles touched the resurrection body.
 He alone was vouchsafed this immense privilege, and it was because he doubted.
 So it's a tremendous inspiration to doubt, which is what I urge you all to do about this kind of thing.
 [Applause]
 On the other hand, I went back to the Amazon to meet my roots there with Yanomanos and Macdui-Tares Indians.
 For two years I was teaching Portuguese and Spanish.
 And what I learned from there is that when they take drugs, when they take the herbs,
 they take it to be good warriors, and that's what my concern in society is right now,
 that in here if we take any kind of like psych substances to the nervous system,
 we don't understand why we're trying to become a warrior in that way.
 Well, no, you're right that this Yanomami folk way is definitely about male aggression and this sort of thing.
 But I also wonder if in that situation they actually encounter the reality obliterating psychedelic ecstasy
 that comes when those substances, which are DMT specifically, are purified out.
 No, my method is skeptical.
 It goes back to the Thomas the Doubter story.
 It's not a cult of the primitive. It's not a cult that ancient is best.
 It's a cult of experience. Direct experience is what needs to be empowered,
 and you have to trust your own intuition.
 There are horrifying experiences that can come as a result of plant use.
 In Madagascar, the modern Malagasy Republic, there's not a highly developed psychedelic usage,
 but they have concentrated on and developed what are called ordeal poisons,
 and they have about a dozen of these things.
 And what these are are plants that you take the preparation, you believe that you're going to die,
 you want to die, you beg to die, and you don't die.
 Instead, you come through it, and then you're so damn glad that you came through it,
 that it's an ecstasy, just the mere fact of having lived through it, you see.
 Isn't it what we have right now with all the ventilator systems?
 That's right.
 That's the same idea.
 Sure. Thank you.
 Once one has acquired the bundle weed, how does he consume it?
 Technical questions here, detail freaks, cooks, and recipe mongers.
 For the benefit of those not initiated into this, it's interesting.
 You know, aboriginal human beings have searched the world for psychedelic sources
 and have been, such as in the Amazon, very successful, but not exhaustively successful,
 so that it's recently become known in the phytochemical literature that a plant,
 Desmanthus ellenoyensis, which this gentleman is referring to, the ellenoy bundle weed,
 appears to have one of the highest concentrations of dimethyltryptamine of any plant that's been looked at,
 and it has no history of aboriginal usage.
 And the question is how to activate this into a usable psychedelic.
 Probably the way to do it would be to attempt to create an analog to the South American drug,
 plant drug, ayahuasca, by combining the bundle weed with a North American source of a beta-carboline,
 such as harming, which is what's in ayahuasca, and that would activate it.
 And the obvious candidate for that would be a succulent plant that grows in the deserts of New Mexico
 and Nevada, pergamin harmala.
 And pergamin harmala combined with Desmanthus ellenoyensis in the correct proportions
 would probably deliver a stunning psychedelic experience.
 Do you eat it or smoke it?
 Drinking. You would boil them together. No, smoking you can't. It's too diffuse in these things.
 No, you would perform an alchemy.
 You would boil the two for many hours in a large volume of water, pour off the wash, add new water,
 boil more hours, pour off the wash, combine the two fractions, get rid of the physical material,
 and drive it down until it looks like thick coffee.
 But, you know, don't be consumed by your alchemical investigations.
 I mean, proceed carefully with this stuff because it's going to work if you get it right.
 In the absence of a scale, how might one measure five grams of psilocybin, dry psilocybin?
 Spring for the scale.
 Terrence, I was here the last time you were in L.A. I think it was about a year and a half, two years ago.
 And I mentioned at that time I felt there was a need for something set up where in between times that you aren't here,
 there could be some interaction between we who are here.
 And I don't know what the reaction was, but it finally ended up with you telling me,
 "Somebody please take this lonely guy out for dinner."
 But I may come out that I wasn't.
 But the truth is, you know, when you live out in Bellflower, California,
 which is really like, you know, the boondocks, you're not in the midst of daily interacting with people,
 you know, of your nature or like of mine.
 Now, I know Roy Tuckman did have a meeting of listeners for KPFK, I think about two weeks ago, which is great.
 This is the first time I think he's done that.
 And I didn't make it, but I really --
 And what I did last time was simply volunteer myself as anybody wanting to further get together or explore something,
 some type of organization or some type of group.
 Are you familiar with the Utne Reader?
 Uh-huh.
 Now, their April -- did you see their March/April issue where they were championing salons?
 Uh-huh.
 They took a lot of heat for that, too, because people said,
 "What are you talking about salons when the world is aflame?" But I thought it was a good point to push it.
 Yeah. Well, my understanding -- I re-subscribe to them that they're going to match up their readers in areas in the country
 to see if they can ferment some of these salons.
 I think it's a great idea for empowering the individuals for that message of hope, you know?
 It's hard to hang onto hope out in the boondocks.
 And it's like we need something besides every two years a shot in the arm type of thing or just listening, you know, to Roy,
 which he was great. I mean, I thank God for him.
 But some interaction, I think, with the people.
 Well, yeah, no, you make a very good point.
 I mean, what I often say at these kinds of events is it's a unique moment when you all self-select to be here.
 I mean, this is a city of what, 14 million people, something like that?
 And you have self-selected, even over being at the Dead concert, to be here.
 And so this is some kind of a core community.
 And it is true that we look like everybody else.
 There's no real way to tell.
 So whatever you need, somebody in this room has it.
 And we've reduced the problem from finding them in a city of 12 million to finding them in a crowd of 800.
 That's about the best I can do for you.
 But I urge you to look around you and see who's here and remember.
 It's tricky, of course, because motivations are complex and loyalties are complex and not everybody knows who they work for.
 But nevertheless, we have considerably simplified the problem of community by gathering ourselves into this room this evening.
 And I don't like these big events because I don't like sitting up here in the light and looking out over the sea of faces.
 I'm against guruism, leader trips.
 And anyway, the whole point of this message has to be that it's for everybody.
 Nobody is special.
 If it can only happen to some kind of elect, then it's got no impact, no ability to save the planet.
 It's a human mystery.
 It doesn't belong to the intelligentsia.
 It doesn't belong to the wealthy.
 It doesn't belong to the Irish, regardless of how we kid around about that.
 It's got to be for everybody.
 So take this man seriously.
 Here he is, second year in a row, pleading for community.
 And community is the backbone of the thing.
 When I first started doing this, one of the most empowering experiences that I could have after talking to a crowd like this is someone would come up
 afterwards and say to me, "I thought I was crazy till I talked to you, till I heard you talk."
 And what they meant was that they had done psychedelics in the '60s, and they had seen the elves and the machinery of joy.
 But then it had all -- other people had turned to market analysis and international banking and what have you, and it all seemed to flow away.
 And so people need to find like-minded people.
 And as I say, this is about as far as I can go for you, and then you have to do the rest.
 But this is your affinity group.
 This is your family.
 You have narrowed it down.
 It still seems to be a little hit and miss.
 What I did last time, before I sat down, is if anybody was interested, I was going to be somewhere, stand here.
 And about 14 people, to my surprise, came up.
 We switched names and addresses.
 I mailed out just the names and addresses.
 I really didn't follow up.
 And I think those people are tonight.
 You need someone better to do a newsletter than me.
 But I'm willing to support the people getting together and just be a focus point of them getting together.
 So I'll stand.
 Yes, drive this man.
 He'll be outside.
 And just explore how we can get together more often than once every year and a half or two years, and whatever that may take.
 Sounds good.
 Terrence, I was interested in your concept of fate.
 It reminded me of a quote by Jung where he says that fate is doing willingly that which I must do.
 And I was wondering about this concept of fate.
 You were talking about the Greek thought of fate as the one thing that you couldn't go beyond.
 Even Zeus himself was terrified of the fate, the moira, and the idea of not being able to pass beyond the physical body,
 not being able to pass beyond boundaries, that we are bounded by fate, even the gods themselves.
 And yet you were talking about the concept of the alchemist believing about going beyond one's fate.
 I find this idea very delicious.
 So I thought maybe you could elaborate on the idea of going beyond one's fate or this kind of freedom in the Hermetic tradition.
 Yes, the way they did it, as I briefly indicated but didn't get into, was through magic.
 And the kind of magic was the following.
 It was the style of the Renaissance magic that developed in the wake of the translation of this Hermetic corpus.
 Previously, magic had been sort of as the cartoon image we have of it,
 the lonely wizard off in the woods grinding up his potions and toads or that sort of thing.
 But in the Renaissance, in the courts of the Medici court,
 people like Marcello Ficino and Campanello and these people took the idea of astrological associations,
 in other words, that plants and minerals and odors and this sort of thing could all be associated to given zodiacal signs.
 And they created a theatrical style of magic, a ceremonial magic,
 where by, say you wanted to counteract a Saturn aspect of some sort,
 well then by choosing the opposite, the herbs and gems and perfumes associated with the opposite sort of situation
 and gathering them to you, you could make a model of the universe, a new model of the universe.
 And they did this in round rooms and built orreries and practiced a kind of ceremonial magic
 that made them then the companions of princes.
 And the dark figure of the lonely magician in the woods was replaced by the Renaissance magus
 who was manipulating political realities, counseling popes and taking magical power into his hands
 specifically for the purpose of counteracting the machinery of fate.
 It had to do with this idea of if fate is decreed by God's cosmos, but man is the co-creator with God,
 then by setting up a magical microcosm, the ordinary asterisms, the ordinary influences of astrology can be deflected.
 And if you're interested in this sort of thing, Dame Frances Yates wrote a wonderful book called Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.
 And there's another book by D.P. Walker called Demonic and Spiritual Magic from Ficino to Campanella.
 These are not easy books to find. Try the Bodhi Tree and William and Victoria Daly down on Melrose can help you out.
 If they were easy to find, what fun would it be? I mean, part of the quest is getting this stuff together.
 But that's the basic theory of Renaissance magic is to create a microcosm to counter the fatalistic machinery of the macrocosm.
 Yeah.
 Hi.
 Hi.
 I've heard you talk a lot about themes repeating themselves a lot. And one of the things I've thought about--
 About what?
 Themes in history repeating themselves.
 Oh, yeah.
 And one of the things I've thought about is popular Western music, how it changes and recreates itself.
 And I'm just curious about your insight on that and its role in using music as a language to communicate things in the future and so forth.
 Well, it seems there are a couple of questions here. I mean, there's an impulse which comes and goes in music, which is to be evocative of the spirit.
 I mean, you feel it in Van Morrison and you feel it in Locatelli, and then you flash back another 200 years and you get it in Johannes O'Kagan.
 These people, where it's liturgical, but it's liturgical because there was no other space in society for that.
 Music, this question really reflects on the previous question, music is the divine medium of exchange between man and these higher levels.
 And what I've always felt about rock and roll, and I feel it about what I do as well, is that it's such a pale reflection of what it wants to be and could be.
 I mean, at a dead concert, you know, when they get to noodling, you actually begin to feel the dimensions shift and you actually feel the possibility of a doorway opening into another dimension.
 This is sacral music in the highest sense of the word. It goes back to the Pythagorean theory of octaves and the mysterious relationship of the shortening of a string to the demunition of the tone.
 And also resonance. Resonance is a very strange phenomenon, thinking of it in terms of we pluck the string of a cello here and a piano sitting across the stage emits a sound.
 I mean, this is action at a distance, incontrovertibly, which was always the goal of magic and always what was denied by science as a possibility.
 You see, we forget that it wasn't until the middle of the last century, with Helmholtz and Faraday and those people, that fields gained any kind of respectability at all.
 And the science of the mid-19th century resisted the idea of fields very furiously because it looked to them like magic.
 The Newtonian model of the cosmos is all little hard balls moving through empty space and reacting in absolutely calculable ways.
 We now live in a world where, you know, if I had an FM radio beside me, I could demonstrate to you that hundreds of messages are moving through every cubic centimeter of space and time, and we think nothing of this.
 It seems trivial, but in a way, it's a realization of the magical intent.
 One of the things I didn't say in the main body of my talk is how, in spite of science's resistance to magical ideas, how thoroughly it has unconsciously realized the major points on the agenda of magic.
 For thousands and thousands of years, electricity was something that you would see if you took an amber rod and a piece of cat fur and locked yourself in a darkened room and let your eyes adjust to the darkness,
 and then furiously stroked the cat fur, and then you would see a little static electrical discharge.
 This was a parlor trick of magicians from the Hellenistic period on.
 Well, who would have imagined that you could light cities with that, that you could move pictures and sound of political activities and theatrical performances and propaganda from one side of the planet to the other in the wink of an eye with that.
 Science did that, but it has in a way created an entirely magical world which we have grown blasé to because along with it has come some fancy mathematics that I would wager to say there's not a person in this room who could fully explicate,
 and yet because that mathematics exists, we think that this is all very humdrum.
 You know, it took Marshall McLuhan to say that the age of electricity was nothing less than the descent of the Holy Ghost onto this planet.
 I mean, that electricity is the third person of the Trinity.
 Nothing like dabbling in a little heresy here, but that's the fact of the matter, folks.
 Let's do one more here, and then we yield to convention.
 Hi, Jared.
 How are you?
 Fine.
 Once I went to New Year's Eve, I went to a church service where we had communion and then all howled like wolves and from there moved to a Grateful Dead show.
 Tonight I went to a Grateful Dead show, and now I'm here.
 Would you like to howl like a wolf?
 How about for a second and before or any time?
 We'll close in on the microphone.
 Okay.
 I just read some Rupert Sheldrake recently.
 He's like the art I try to do.
 It's resonance systems he's talking about all the way.
 A friend came to me and said, "If you're going to this, ask Terence if de Mantis, the bundle weed, is really 6% DMT?"
 No.
 .6?
 Probably.
 Closer.
 .8, I think.
 I said once it was 6%, and my mailbox filled with letters from people better informed than I, so I'll pull back on that.
 Any references that I can -- on that quantity?
 I can't give it to you off the top of my head, but if you talk to me, it's known.
 I think it's in the Journal of Phytochemistry, but maybe if you talk to the guy who asked the other question, he's well informed.
 This obscure plant is certainly getting a high profile here this evening.
 And since Robert brought up the notion of interacting so elegantly, I would be willing to have a salon if someone is interested.
 And on the net, on internet, or Usenet, on USC, bang, Coriolis, bang, D-Van.
 Very good.
 So here is another person interested in building community, and they offer the possibility of another dimension of community,
 which is a computer networking possibility that preserves the anonymity that is very important to this kind of work.
 I just want to leave you with one story, because it sort of fills out the theme
 and shows how peculiarly the spirit moves and how the coincidencia positorum is present in so many unexpected situations.
 I think somewhere in the body of my talk, I got a dig in at Cartesian logic or Cartesian rationalism.
 As you know, modern scientific materialism was founded by Rene Descartes, a French philosopher of the 17th century.
 But what the historians of science have been at great pains to keep from view is the following story,
 which is attested to in Descartes's own journal.
 When he was a young man of about 22 years old, he decided to go soldiering and wenching around Europe,
 which was something young men of that era did.
 And he joined a Habsburg army, which was on a mission to lay siege to the city of Prague in Bohemia
 to suppress what was essentially an alchemical revival.
 I won't go into the details, but a young prince of the Northern Leagues and his queen,
 who was the daughter of James of England and was named Elizabeth after her grandmother,
 had managed to gain control of the empire, had been elected in fact.
 He was called Frederick the Elector Palatine.
 And this Habsburg army was sent to destroy this Protestant alchemical reformation.
 And it did so, laid siege to the city and killed this young man, and his queen fled to the Hague.
 And then they retreated across Germany.
 And I believe it was the 17th of August of that year, which was 1619, the beginning year of the Thirty Years' War,
 they made camp at Ulm in southern Germany.
 And just as an aside, Ulm later was the birthplace of Albert Einstein.
 But that night Descartes had a dream.
 And in the dream, a radiant angel appeared to him and said,
 "The conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measure."
 And in that moment, René Descartes went from being a nobody to being the founder of modern science.
 Modern science was founded at the direction of an angel.
 And the angel showed how it was.
 And to this day, modern science has made all of its strides through the application of number,
 mathematical analysis, and measure.
 That is the secret of the scientific conquest of nature.
 And it's a secret that was imparted to René Descartes by an angelic entity.
 So I'd like you to leave this evening wondering, who do we work for?
 [Applause]
 And how does it work?
 Thank you very, very much.
 [Applause]
 Good night.
 [Applause]
 This marks the end of the talk. Thanks for listening.


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