Notes on alchemy

Mercury was, for them, the seminal essence of a god who (pro-)creates the universe sexually; indeed the origin myth of mercury tells us that quicksilver first arose when Siva spilled his seed at the end of a long bout of lovemaking with his consort, the goddess Parvati. This seed once spilled, became polluted through its contact with the earth. The alchemist’s craft therefore consists of returning mercury, through a series of chemical reactions of incredible complexity, to its original pristine state. Once he has perfected it in the laboratory, the alchemist may then ingest this mercury, which then transforms him into an immortal human, a “second Siva”.

-David Gordon White, “The Ocean of Mercury: An Eleventh-Century Alchemical Text” in Religions of India in Practice

Oración de la rosa de Jericó

Divina rosa de Jericó: Por la Bendición que de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo recibiste, por la virtud que tu encierras y por el poder concedido ayúdame a vencer las dificultades de la vida, dame salud, fuerzas, felicidad, tranquilidad y paz para ganar más dinero con que cubrir mis necesidades y las de mi hogar y toda mi familia.

Divina ROSA DE JERICO: Todo esto te lo pido por la virtud que tú encierras en amor a Cristo Jesús y su grandiosa misericordia. AMEN

(SE DICEN TRES PADRES NUESTROS)

INSTRUCCIONES: La rosa debe ponerse en un platillo hondo con agua a las nueve o a las tres, del día Martes o Viernes, Déjese en agua por tres días consecutivos, quitándose a la misma hora en que se puso y hagase la oracion con todo fervor religioso.

La FE es la que salva y si usted no tiene FE, nada podrá alcanzar de las muchas virtudes atribuidas a esta planta, tenga presente que una planta completamente seca, recobra la vida y su color verde natural al contacto del agua. Úsese el agua que queda después de sacar la planta para rociar las esquinas de la puerta del frente de la casa para ahuyentar las malas influencias, trayendo al hogar la Paz, Poder y Abundancia.

New to the blogroll

From The Lonely Goth’s Guide to Independent Catholicism

Found this essay, on fairies in early modern Scotland, from of all people, David B. Hart, and from all places, First Things. Seriously, I like what they are smoking over there, because this essay is completely jaw-dropping. Maybe the world is finally coming around after all.

Secondly, a comment by the blogger himself, on the book, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism:

The author makes an ugly and sharp high magic/low magic distinction (also going back to his Neoplatonic sources – the old distinction between theurgy in which magic is transformational and sacramental and witchcraft in which magic is directed towards instrumental goals). I think this betrays serious class bias, since only the most elite have the luxury to divorce their practice of magic entirely from practical concerns in order to realize this absolute distinction. It also amounts to a kind of slick polemic – my magic, the magic of the right and authorized group of people, is spiritual and good, but everyone else’s magic is mere technical trickery and a manifestation of technological will-to-power rather than spiritual Gelassenheit. (He didn’t claim to have read Heidegger or directly reference him, but the basic Heideggerian opposition between techne and Gelassenheit and critique of modern technological society seems operative in much of his work). In the end, it’s not necessarily that I thought anything the author came up with was wrong or dreadfully uninsightful. It’s just that the implicit spirituality came across as tedious, over-codified, and ideologically-overdetermined – pretty much exactly how I feel reading medieval scholastic commentaries on Indian philosophy like the Tattvasamgraha.

This is something that I have also perceived as a problem in the Neoplatonic system: the completely hierarchical, ordered descent of all things from the One, and the stark distinction between theurgical or sacramental acts and their dark, “superstitious” counterparts. Basically, if we like you and you are from a civilization we consider “civilized” (i.e. you’re white), you practice theurgy, or at the very least, you have a “real religion”. If we don’t like you, and you are black or brown, what you practice is demonic and dangerous. Athena and Zeus, good. Yemanja and Erzulie, bad. Get how this works?

Similarly, if a priest prays some weird prayer in Latin, baptizes bells, or excommunicates locusts, that is God-given, real religion. If a curandero sweeps you with rue or a Creole treater whispers a French prayer over you, that is superstition. No wonder people think religion is such bullsh*t. The categories that we often consider obvious these days are really very arbitrary.

On the margins of theology – III

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On magic (black, white, and various shades of gray)

Veracruz is known as the “witch capital” of Mexico. Many of the esoteric movements in underground Mexican Catholicism are believed to have started there. For those who know their history, you will also know that it was near Veracruz that Cortes first landed, beginning the conquest of all of Mexico and its subjugation to the powers of altar and crown. The reasons for the reputation of Veracruz, however, do not have to do solely with survivals of autochthonous tendencies in the religious consciousness of the people. Equally important are the contributions of European and African elements. If anything, some of the more bizarre practices in Mexican “folk Catholicism” have less to do with indigenous belief than with the survival of religious elements that the Spaniards brought with them from the Old World.

The lodestone in Hoodoo conjuring

As a supplement to last week’s post, I present more information on the lodestone as it was used in African-American conjuring, by the scholar Catherine Yronwode

Read the rest here

On the margins of theology – II

The primitive ontology of the Laguna region of Mexico in the 1950’s

In the year 1953, my mother was born on the U.S. – Mexico border, in the town of Sullivan City, Texas. Within three months, she and her parents returned to their native village of Florencia, in the state of Coahuila, just outside the city of Torreon, in what is known as the Laguna region of northern Mexico.

That same year, an American anthropologist, Isabel Kelly, began to do field studies into the healing practices and popular beliefs in that same region of Mexico. She would later compile these into a small book titled, Folk Practices in North Mexico: Birth Customs, Folk Medicine, and Spiritualism in the Laguna Zone. While her book appears more as a series of field notes, almost verbatim accounts of various practices from the area around the city of Torreon, they reveal that the popular vision of the world was shaped by various cross currents, both ancient and modern, that informed the how people from my mother’s homeland dealt with the various travails of their harsh existence.

On Sight

But, that there is some light, though small, in the eyes and brain, many animals which see at night can attest. Their eyes glow in the dark. And also, if anyone has pressed the corner of his eye in some certain way with his finger and twisted it, he seems to see a certain luminous circle inside himself. And it is said that the deified Augustus had eyes so bright and shining that when he stared at someone very hard, he forced him to lower his eyes, as if before the glow of the sun. Tiberius also is said to have had very large eyes which (this would be amazing) saw at night and in the dark, but only for a short time, and when they first opened from sleep; then they grew dim again.

-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love

In Mexico, it is said that people who give small children the evil eye (el mal de ojo) have la vista muy fuerte (a strong sense of sight). It is even said that a person can kill someone if his sense of sight is strong enough. This is almost always completely involuntary. Spanish speakers can see the short documentary, El Mal Visto, regarding this phenomenon. One wonders if such beliefs are remnants of the esoteric sciences of the Renaissance and earlier.

Enchanted Protestantism – II

Robert Fludd’s Anti-Papist Quest for the Philosopher’s Stone

Petra autem erat Christus

As I have written previously, to say that Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” took place along strictly confessional lines is erroneous. While Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the long run left more room for ancient visions of the world to persist, in its more official sphere, it was just as scrupulous and rationalistic as its Reformed counterpart. Within the last fifty years, what we have seen in the Catholic Church, at least in the developed world, is the consumation of the Council of Trent, not its negation. Theological principle becomes the only fountain of Catholic praxis, whether that principle be feminism, liberation theology, postmodern liberalism, or the official “party line” of the Vatican. Catholicism has been dissected and rationalized; no longer are practices encouraged that are “off the grid” of some institutionalized ideology. While these spontaneous practices still emerge in the survival of atavistic attitudes and in such phenomena as the charismatic movement, the Catholic mainstream has long ago tried to re-form itself along the lines of theological perfection and correctness. It is not the religion of saints and sinners, but of technocrats and specialists; it is not a faith in spirits and demons, but in committees and political action.

Protestantism in many ways went that route a long time ago, but at the beginning of it all, and at the margins of the Protestant world until recently, the blurring of the line between the sacred and the profane, of nature and supernature, was very much present even in this seemingly iconoclastic religion. I have written already of the persistence of such attitudes amidst the popular classes, so now it is time to speak of the religion of the elites at the time that the Reformation was still getting off the ground. In many ways, it would seem that, just as in Catholicism, “folk Protestantism” often received its inspiration from the religion of the elites that had been discarded in the name of “theological purity”. In the case of Reformation England, the “enchantment of the world” was not seen as something contrary to the reformation of Christianity, but rather intrinsic to it.

Mal’ Occhio

Somewhat related is the following quote from Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance :

Ficino remains of the same opinion as Plato and Galen: in the act of seeing, “the internal fire” is externalized through the eyes, mixed with the pneumatic vapor and even with the thin blood that engendered spirit. That theory is confirmed by Aristotle himself, who relates that menstruating women who look look at themselves in the mirror leave little drops of blood on its surface. This can only mean that it is the thin blood brought to the eyes along with the pneuma.

See also this post on the existence of the evil eye in Mexican culture.

Between High Theory and Low Praxis

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Some notes towards a Christian theory of magic

In response to some of Christina’s concerns :

I think Christina is correct in asserting the first principle to consider: magic that manipulates and does harm is demonic and against the will of God. In Mexican folk practices, the women and curanderos who practice these feats of preternatural healing are usually devout Catholics. Magic is often considered a defensive mechanism against los brujos  and la brujeria  (witches and witchcraft). As E. Bryant Holman, an expert in Mexican folk religion, points out, it would be an insult to these people to associate them with Wicca or other New Age forms of the occult. Most curanderos  are merely trying to clean up the mess that witches cause, and they do so using common objects: a cross, an egg, a branch from a tree, water etc. Many sociologists would like to see in these practices survivals of a pagan past, but in reality these practices are tied into the Catholic nature of these societies. The priest is often seen as the curandero  par excellence, and many treatments in Mexican folk medicine involve taking the patient to the priest.