These mandalogs or numberwheels are variations on the symbol of the spiralling serpent. The serpent is Mercurius, the fundamental substance, which forms itself in water and swallows the nature to which he is joined. The transcendental recursive movement (biting the tail) implies "trans-gression" not regression. The Stone itself--or the secret of its production--is revealed to the operator by God. Knowledge of the procedure is a gift of God, generally through the instruction of most experienced Master.
The source of it all is the Divine Will. In Chaos, Kunrath states that we can "perfectly prepare our Chaos Naturae (=prima materia) in the highest simplicity and perfection" from a special Secret Divine Vision and revelation. This divine illumination transcends reason and only a supernatural and divine knowledge knows the exact time for the birth of the stone. This means that God alone knows the prima materia.
The dragon symbolizes the visionary experience of the alchemist as he works in his laboratory and "theorizes." The dragon in itself is a monstrum--a symbol combining the chthonic principle of the serpent and the aerial principle of the bird. It is a variant of Mercurius, or the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter as the god of revelation, lord of thought and sovereign psychopomp or soul guide--the liquid metal argentum vivum, which glistens and animates from within--the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisioned in matter.
The dragon is probably the oldest documented pictorial symbol in alchemy. It appears as the tail-eater in the Codex Mercurius of the tenth or eleventh century, as the One, the All. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. It is therefore called circulare (circular) or rota (wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work; he is the prima materia.
As dragon he devours himself and dragon he dies, to rise again as the lapis. He is the play of colors in the cauda pavonis and the division into four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison yet healing draught--a symbol uniting all opposites.
As Caduceus, Mercurius unities the paired opposites of mythic polarities: creation/apocalypse; nurturance/deprivation; achievement/failure; completion/fragmentation; affirmation/cynicism; acceptance/debilitation; hope/despair; reconciliation/polarization; wisdom/ignorance; celebration/betrayal; rebirth/death; questing/passivity; intimacy/separation. The issues are love, redemption, identity and acceptance--teleology rather than reductionism. A similar idea appears in Kundalini yoga: all higher levels of consciousness exist in us as unrealized potential, which lies coiled up like a serpent.
Maslow found that people who were persistent self-actualizers were prone to peak experiences--akin to mystical awareness, the 'oceanic feeling,' a sense of fuller vision extending to apparently limitless horizons. Maslow's description of peak experiences are like acute, episodic experience of Atman-consciousness: there is loss of identity with the purely personal ego and its replacement by a sense of general identity with everything that exists, that will ever exist, and has ever existed. In this way we become 'what we are capable of becoming.'
True alchemy was never a business or career, but a genuine opus to be achieved by quiet, self-sacrificing work. Each individual tries to express his own particular experiences, quoting the dicta of masters only when they seemed to offer analogies. All agreed their art was sacred and divine and only completed with the help and grace of God. This science of theirs is given only to the few, and none understnds it unless God or a master has opened his understanding. The material of the materia lapidis may be found only by divine inspiration.
Sometimes the nature of the coveted substance will be revealed in a dream. Since all the essentials are expressed in metaphors they can be communicated only to those who possess the gift of comprehension, rather than making literal interpretations. Rather than compensating for the disintegrative forces at work in our culture, the arts in the twentieth century have become symptomatic of them.
Hillman conceives of soul and 'soul-making' as a self-sustaining and imagining process on which consciousness rests -- 'an unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern'. . .'the imaginative possibility of our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy--that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.' It is what happens below (depth, darkness) that reveals the signficance of what happens above (consciousness, light).
9th~ As it is above it is below~
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