With the Hermetic overview in mind and the cosmos in view, it's time to look down at our hands.
What can you create? What fails when you try? What mysteriously works with pure grace? What does this clearly reflect back to you about your spiritual progress?
Traditionally this was the domain of alchemy.
Metallurgic alchemists (at least the ones who had decent alchemical teaching) weren't just trying to turn lead into gold. They were trying to create "the philosophers' stone".
This fact is a coded hint about what alchemy is actually doing.
Recall that the whole point of Hermeticism is to fully embody divinity here on Earth.
Or said differently, it is to navigate death skillfully. To "produce the elixir of life".
Alchemy is the Hermetic science of consciousness. How life and death interact.
It's immensely empirical. This is where science learned empiricism from.
But as with all things, the truth becomes hard to trace when led by tradition, authority, and literalism rather than gnosis.
In this 3rd session on Pareto Hermeticism, I name the core of Hermetic alchemy as I understand it. It's a vast topic, but as with Hermetic astrology I think the essence is approachable in one talk.
Further Resources
If you want to dive deep into alchemical symbolism, and you like the Harry Potter series, I very highly recommend John Granger’s analysis as a rich trailhead. He has a large collection of articles on Rowling’s series as “literary alchemy”. His book “Unlocking Harry Potter” is also excellent. This is an introduction to both alchemy and English literature that I really would have loved to know about decades sooner.
Carolyn Elliott teaches a technique, called “Existential Kink”, that’s just dynamite for most folk. It’s an approach to the rubedo stage of (inner) alchemy. Her book by the same title goes into a lot of depth about her approach.
The Wikipedia page on prima materia is pretty good. The name and idea of the prima materia is the origin of something dear to my 1990s RPG gamer heart: the Sphere of Prime from the game “Mage: the Ascension”.
The Elysian Fields — sometimes just called “Elysium” — form a kind of mythical afterlife. Elysium has a lot in common with our conceptions of Heaven. One way to articulate the goal of Hermeticism is to enter Elysium and embody its heavenly qualities on Earth. The reason for its symbolism in alchemy makes more sense when connected to Hermetic Qabalah: Elysium corresponds to Tiphareth, the Sphere of the Sun, which lies above the Veil of Forgetting that defines normal mortal life.
The closest analog to the philosophers’ stone in Buddhism seems to be the cintamani.
Snakes show up surprisingly often in spiritual work. In Hermeticism they appear on the caduceus of Hermes (i.e., the twin snakes around a staff that’s now associated with medicine). Across the world they’re associated with wisdom and insight — which is awfully strange if you think about it. Why would we associate snakes with higher consciousness? Andrew Cutler has a curious theory about this that I mentioned in passing in this talk: the Eve Theory of consciousness.
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