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We can debate the reasons why this happened - an obvious suggestion would be that it was because they failed to develop an experimental method - and so everything just dissolved into competing schools of philosophical speculation and a profound pessimism spread through the Hellenistic world. This is because Greek science, which had evolved under the aegis of Democritean atomism and Platonic metaphysics, had essentially come to a dead end in those centuries. It was a psychology of despair and exhaustion.
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When you look back into historical time it’s when you reach the 1st and 2nd centuries after Christ that you reach a world whose psychology was very much like the psychology of our own time. This prophecy was very strongly in the minds of the strains of non-Christian thought that evolved at the close of the Roman Empire. Well, it’s very interesting, every ancient literature has its apokalupsis and in the Hermetic literature there is a prophecy, I think it’s in Book Two but that really doesn’t matter, and the prophecy is that 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. Some of you may know the song by the Grateful Dead in which the refrain is, “We need a miracle every day.” I think any reasonable person can conclude that the redemption of the world, if it’s to be achieved, can only be achieved through magic. I wouldn’t hold a weekend like this simply to go over a body of ancient literature if I didn’t think it had some efficacy or import for the modern dilemma. I wasn’t aware of this particular edition, so though probably none of you brought it with you in a heavily underlined form, if after this weekend you want to try and get it, it is available and if you can’t get that edition, a good book search service can probably come up with the first edition, which is Routledge & Kegan Paul. Richard Bird found a reprint at the Bodhi Tree. I didn’t realize that, because it’s been sitting on my shelf for years. Well, then I found out that it’s very hard to get this book. We will probably discover within the group all the strains of alchemical illusion and delusion that have always driven this particular intellectual engine, but I thought that to get one book that sort of covered the territory that was a good one to start with.
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It’s not pleasing to some factions and we can talk about that. I urged you to read Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Dame Frances Yates, and although Frances Yates’ scholarship is very controversial, I think that to get an overview of the landscape her book is probably the best single book between covers. We’ll talk a lot about the Jungian approach, but there are other approaches, even within the 20th century. The Jungians have made much of it, but to their own purposes and perhaps not always with a complete fidelity to the intent of the tradition. I’ve had an interest in hermeticism and alchemy since I was about 14 and read Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, and it opened for me the fact of the existence of this vast literature, a literature that is very little read or understood in the modern context. I’ve just gotten tired of talking about psychedelic drugs and always saying the same things over and over again nevertheless, it’s a challenge to go outside my own bailiwick. Well, it is a small group and this was my intent by focusing on the Hermetic Corpus and alchemy.