(1st draft: This text has been updated in the book version of the reincarnation protocols.) Alchemy is generally thought of as the practice of transmuting base metals such as lead and mercury into the more complete and perfect forms of gold and silver. It was hoped that commitment to the “Great Work” would eventually lead the practicing Alchemist to the secrets of the “Philosopher’s Stone” – that legendary elixir of immortality that has come to stimulate the imagination of many a writer of fantastical literature, myself included. Whilst its practical aspects can be traced back to the Hellenistic period of Ancient Egypt (305 – 30 BCE), Alchemy’s philosophical aspects stretch back a few hundred years earlier to the to the time of Pythagoras (570 – 495BCE) and likely beyond. Pythagoras is known for the mathematical theory we are taught in high school, even though there is no evidence to suggest he invented such a theorem: it seems likely he learned it during his time abroad and brought it back to Greece, where he then expanded upon it. Even still, the attribution of Pythagoras to such a theorem did not pop up until many centuries after his death through the second hand accounts of other authors such as Iamblichus and Porphyry. What makes the history surrounding Pythagoras so hard to ascertain is that he authored no books, so it is the above sort of accounts we have to rely on to get a picture of that which he actually taught. The earliest sources that mention Pythagoras, however, do not mention any association to the Pythagorean theorem. Part of the confusion comes from a community of followers Pythagoras had established in the Greek city of Kroton – known as the Pythagoreans. Originally the Pythagoreans consisted of the acusmatici who practiced and followed the “Pythagroean way of life” – as dictated in the acusmata – which was eventually superseded by the mathematici during the times of Plato (423- 348BCE) and absorbed into his Academy during the 4th century BCE. Although the acusmatici – who were considered as blind followers of Pythagoras’ teachings – never mentioned Pythagoras as a mathematician, the mathematici, who considered themselves as “true Pythagoreans” make this association. The mathematici argued that Pythagoras taught the acusmata to those who did not have time to study the mathematical sciences at length, to at least give them moral guidance, whereas the mathematici were given the full discourse on such sciences The acusmatici on the other hand argued that such mathematics actually derived from Hippasus. Whatever the source of the Pythagorean theorem, overwhelming evidence does suggest that Pythagrous himself was known as an “expert on the fate of the soul after death” and had a profound impact on steering Greek eschatological beliefs away from the Homeric idea of a bleak existence after death towards those that postulated reincarnation and a “possibly ok existence there afterwards”. Such accounts suggest Pythagoras considered the soul immortal and that upon death it could transmigrate into other animals, a concept which he termed as “metempsychosis”. Whether or not Pythagoras ever thought we escape the cycle of reincarnations is not clear, as there is simply not enough reliable information to go off. Again, the source for Pythagoras’ inspiration on the soul’s experience after death is not clear. Some sources claim he influenced Orphism and had a hand in writing the original Orphic texts, whilst others, such as Proclus, suggest he was actually an initiate of the religion and was simply teaching the secret mysteries he’d learned within it: “All that Orpheus transmitted through secret discourses connected to the mysteries, Pythagoras learnt thoroughly when he completed the initiation at Libethra in Thrace, and Aglaophamus, the initiator, revealed to him the wisdom about the gods that Orpheus acquired from his mother Calliope.” - Proclus
Regardless, the parallels between Pythagorean Philosophy and Orphic tradition are so evident that some consider them as a single entity they term as “Orphico-Pythagoreanism”.
If we delve into the Orphic tradition we can find a heavily moralised aspect that distinguishes its belief structure from Pythagoras’ metempsychosis: the idea that our physical body acts as a prison for the soul whilst we undergo punishment through our (perpetual) mortal incarnations. Pythagoras himself never mentioned such a grim outlook on metempsychosis and seems to have treated the subject with optimism that a reincarnated life wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The beliefs of the Orphics were based on literary works ascribed to the mythical Orpheus, the son of a Thracian King named Oeagrus – and one of Jason’s Argonauts that sought the Golden Fleece –, and his descent into the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, before returning (what was termed katabasis).
The Orphics believed that Orpheus was an incarnation of the god Dionysis for the reason that he was also said to have made an expedition into the underworld, and thus the reverence of Dionysis as one who suffered and died at the hands of the Titans became a central theme within the Orphic religion.
The myth, as found within the Orphic Theogonies, relates how Zagreus – the previous incarnation of Dionysis – is born as the son of Zeus and his mistress, Persephone, which angers Zeus’ wife, Hera who seeks to kill the boy by employing the Titans. The Titans trick Zagreus and tear him apart before eating him. Athena saves Zagreus’ heart and tells Zeus of the crime to which he hurls a thunderbolt at the Titans in an act of retribution, which turns them to ash. From the ash, “sinful” humanity arises, alluding to the Orphic belief that humanity has a duel nature: body/sin – inherited from the Titans – and a divine spark/ soul – inherited from Dionysis/Zagreus. It was thus declared that the soul (spark of Dionysis) returns to a host (Titanic body) ten times bound by the wheel of rebirth.
The Orphic idea of salvation thus equates to an escape from the bondage of the Titanic body, ie material existence. In order for one to achieve this salvation one had to be initiated into the Dionysian mysteries and undergo “teleté” – a ritual of purification and reliving the suffering and death of the god. The Orphic tradition suggested that successful initiates would, after death, go on to spend eternity alongside other heroes, whilst the uninitiated would go on to be reincarnated indefinitely.
One should be able to see the similarities arising within Orphic beliefs and the Lurianic Kabbalist ideas of reincarnation, but to the astute student of Egyptology, we can also find hints reminiscent of the myths surrounding Osiris and the mysteries based upon him. Orphism itself is believed to also have gone on to influence Gnosticism.
An important note here is that because of this affinity for Dionysis, Orphism is considered as a reformation of the earlier Dionysian Mysteries, which are a set of rituals found within both Ancient Greek and Roman culture belonging to an initiatory mystery cult thought to have originated in Asia Minor (Anatolia - Turkey). Much of the history regarding the initiation process of this cult has, alas, been lost to time, but what is known is that the rituals can be found both with the Greek Cult of Dionysis and the Roman Bacchanalia (named after the Roman god Bacchus who was synonymous with Dionysis).
The central rite of the Cult of Dionysis/ Bacchanalia involved the consumption of wine, as well as philosophical understanding of the grape’s life cycle and fermentation methods from its “dismembered body” as an embodiment of the “living god”, the intoxicating effects of which were considered as possession by the god’s “spirit”. Spirit possession, in this sense, was seen as an escape from civilisation’s confines and constraints, as well as an escape from the personality and ego of the Titanic body into a deified state or one that paralleled a primal mentality. Thus Dionsysis came to be associated within modern psychology – thanks to Freud – as “the unconscious mind”: those parts of our being that occur automatically and do not allow for introspection (self analysis), which are only recognisable in their disguised and distorted forms through the psychoanalytical evaluation of dreams, neurotic symptoms and consciousness manifestations. The unconscious mind is considered by such students of psychology as the source of dreams and automatic thoughts, as well as the repository of forgotten memories and locus of implicit knowledge.
So we can get the idea these cults related to Dionysis/Bacchus were in a ways conducting rituals to access this aspect of their mind, and in the context of the reincarnation theme that was heavily present within them we can suppose this likely had something to do with “past life recognition” in some form of the other. Wine was thus a sacrament for these cults more than half a century before the idea to use it to symbolize the blood of Christ became popular. It doesn’t take much further imagination to notice the symbology of the bread of the eucharist bearing a striking resemblance to the Titan’s devouring Dionysis’s body.
To understand the relevance of the Dionysian mysteries and Orphism to my experiences, we first must delve deeper into how the core beliefs that structured such ideologies went on to influence Plato through the mathematici arm of the Pythagoreans.
It was mentioned the mathematici were absorbed into Plato’s Academy around the 4th century BCE, in which their knowledge of Pythagorean philosophy on the soul they had brought with them had a profound and obvious influence on Plato’s works, as is evidenced in his Timaeus, and elements of Republic. It is with Plato and his views of the world as it appears to our senses as being in some ways faulty that we can derive association with the Kabbalah, Gnosticism and, in a way, Jung’s core concepts of the archetypes in which he based his psychoanalytic theory (remember, Jung was indirectly influenced by the Kabbalah through the Alchemical manuscripts he was reading).
Plato’s suggested that above our faulty world, outside of space time exists a more real and perfect realm populated by entities he called “forms” or “ideas.” Such a conceptualization draws our attention to the soul being of a different substance to the body which does not depend on said body or its faculties for its functionality. We are driven to consider that the soul may, therefore, comprehend the nature of the forms more easily when not attached to such corporeality. Cue wake induced lucid dreaming, where consciousness gets to experience existence without a bias of sensory input from the body.
We can start to get an understanding that Plato’s philosophies provide a perfect medium by which to try and explain that which goes on during lucid dreaming, which falls outside of the familiarity of experience we come to expect through reliance on those same bodily senses.
His analogy of the cave, found in Republic – in which several prisoners have been chained to the cave’s walls since birth, unable to move even their heads, and therefore unable to obtain experience of the reality outside the cave like their escapee friend – can be taken in a very literal sense as a division between those who can lucid dream and those who can’t; the non lucid dreamer finds themselves “chained” to only knowing experience of a material world through that which is presented to them through their senses, whereas the lucid dreamer comes to experience the reality of consciousness that lies outside of any attachment to the body, which is just as “experientially real”, but very, very different. No longer material, it is a world of forms where thoughts can be seen to manifest around the experiencer as a tangible environment. I would be willing to bet good money that this realm is exactly what these philosophers were trying to describe.
Scrutinizing Timeaus we find a philosophical treatise on the construction of the universe and its “four elements” from “nous”; the intelligence of a higher mind of “the artificer”/”demiurge” of the world of forms that was placed within the soul before the soul was placed within the body. Nous as a concept among such philosophers was considered as a faculty of the mind which was necessary for understanding what is “true” or “real”. Although it has become equated with such terms as “the mind”, “thought”, “reason”, “awareness” and “intuition” in modern day English, it is clear that it was not exclusively used in this manner by the Ancient Greek philosopher’s. Aristotle, for example made an effort to distinguish it from the processing of sensory perception – including imagination and memory – by defining it as “a basic understanding or awareness that allows human beings to think rationally. His discussion of nous was based around how the human mind is biased towards setting definitions that are consistent and communicable, and pondered whether people could be born with some innate potential to understand higher metaphysical concepts through applying a similar logic that was free from such bias.
Though nous was mentioned by Homer as the mental activities of both mortals and immortals alike, the earliest recorded explanation of the word comes from Anaxagoras (500BC- 428BC) – whose ideas are very obviously present within Timeaus. Anaxagoras gives us the idea that nous refers to a “cosmic mind” in which all matter is derived, through the “mixing of the elements”, of which nous originally set into motion, but was not necessarily still present after that motion had been started.
Plato – deriving influence from both Parmenides and Anaxagoras – then argued that relying on sense perception alone cannot lead to an understanding of real “truth”, but instead only an opinion of what truth is. His suggestion was thus that nous must somehow perceive truth directly in the same ways gods and daimons – lesser spirits – perceive “truth”, ie through the world of forms and ideas. Not through the world of material manifestation.
This gets to one of the core concepts of alchemy that must be understood and firmly grasped before a proper conceptualisation of what Timeaus affords us can be gleaned: nous is the fundamental “mercurial” ingredient by which “all things are made”. More importantly, it is the state of consciousness and perception of real “truth”. We can make the suggestion that nous is a reference to the completely seperate and distinct state of awareness one comes into through lucidity, unbiased by corporeality and “sensible” reasoning; a place which must be experienced before a determination of what is “real” and what is “true” can be made, for it is only through such a disconnection can we ever truly realise how much of a slave to our body and its experience within the material world we really are.
Those who are unable to lucid dream will never comprehend the profundity of just what Plato is telling us here.
Diagram of the Preceding Division of Spheres.
As understood in medieval times. Derived from Aristotle and as per the standard explanation given by Ptolemy. It came to be understood that at least the outermost sphere (marked "Primũ Mobile") has its own intellect, intelligence or nous – a cosmic equivalent to the human mind. Taken from Wikipedia entry on Nous.
Note the spheres are comparable to Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Like the prisoners of the cave, this world is right there behind us – we know this from the idea we all seem to “go somewhere” when we dream, but our perception of what exactly it is has become distorted through our unconscious interaction with it – if only we can shed the inaccurate shackles (beliefs) that keep our heads locked and our focus us persistently fixated upon the cave wall (material reality) so that we can turn and experience it for ourselves. If only we can remain persistently and constantly aware of what happens when we fall into that place which we have come to know as sleep.
Now that we understand this importance of nous, we can state that Timeaus, holds the proper formula by which memories involving the soul can be accessed through the art of lucid dreaming.
If we study only a few passages we can see the obvious associations with the Kabbalistic tree of life which became hidden through the bastardisation of lettering in Kircher’s diagrams and later:
“Now whatever has come to be must have bodily form and be visible and tangible, but nothing could ever have become visible without fire or tangible without something solid or solid without earth: hence, as he began to construct the body of the universe, god made it from fire and earth.”
We also find:
So then, if the body of the universe had to come into being having surface but no depth, a single mean would have sufficed to bind its constituents together with itself. But now, since it has a solid structure, and solids are never conjoined by one middle term but by two, god therefore placed water and air between fire and earth, and insofar as it was possible he arranged that they have the same proportion to one another, so that as fire is to air, air is to water, and as air is to water, water is to earth. These he bound together and constructed a visible and tangible heaven. And for these reasons and from such constituents as these, four in number, the body of the cosmos was generated, having been harmonised by proportion and endowed from these with affection so that having come to sameness with itself, it was rendered indissoluble by anyone except he who conjoined it:
We find association of these four elements each with a platonic solid – earth with the cube, water with the icosahedron, air with the octahedron, fire with the tetrahedron and the universeas a whole with the dodecahedron.
Timeaus then goes on to explain the creation of the world soul in what appears to be a very similar manner to what is found within the Sepher Yetzirah with association to specific organs being given, before explaining the planetary effect on the soul of man, a creative process which has been delegated to the “lesser gods”.
This aligns with a similar treatise found within the Turba Philosophorum, one of the oldest European books on alchemy (900AD) that went on to influence Arabic thoughts on the subject. The Turba was purported to be an account of a meeting between 9 sages of Philsophy, namely Anaximander (610 – c. 546 BC), Anaximenes (586/585 – c. 526/525 BC), Anaxagoras (500 – c. 428), Empedocles (494 –434 BC), Archelaus, Leucippus, Ecphantus, Pythagoras(570 - 495)and Xenophanes, after the text has been transcribed back to the original Arabic .
Obviously, given the time periods each philosopher was alive in (assuming they are correct) this cannot be a correct assessment. What we come to find in the Turba , therefore, is reminisce of Plato’s affinity to use multiple characters to draw attention to a philosophical point without defining it in the context of a doctrine:
“Thus , fire and water are enemies between which there is no consanguinity , for the fire is hot and dry , but the water is cold and moist . The air, which is warm and moist, joins these together by its concording medium; between the humidity of water and the heat of fire the air is thus placed to establish peace . And look ye all how there shall arise a spirit from the tenuous vapour of the air, because the heat being joined to the humour, there necessarily issues something tenuous, which will become a wind. For the heat of the Sun extracts something tenuous out of the air, which also becomes spirit and life to all creatures . All this, however, is disposed in such manner by the will of God , and a coruscation appears when the heat of the Sun touches and breaks up a cloud .” – 1st Dictum
And Also:
“Yet I testify that God is one , having never engendered or been begotten , and that the head of all things after Him is earth and fire, because fire is tenuous and light, and it rules all things on earth , but the earth , being ponderous and gross , sustains all things which are ruled by fire . – Fifth Dictum”
It should be fairly evident by now that the what is being spoken of by both Plato in Timeaus and the 9 sages in the Turba Philosophroum is a conceptualization of the soul’s creation and its descent through the upper metaphysical worlds to the material world in a very similar manner to how the Kabbalists understood it. We can now get an idea of how this relationship is not readily apparent using Kircher’s Tree of Life diagram , but when we place the 3 mother letters of the Hebrew alphabet on the 3 horizontal pathways of the Cordovero variant, their elemental associations line up perfectly with those that are explained in both Timeaus and the Turba philosophorum.
We have of course shown how this concept can be traced back to the Orphics and their affinity for the God Dionysis. Dionysis, can be thus be likened to the original “divine messenger” who gave the Orphics the knowledge of the soul through lucid dreaming. Those who study Platonist philosophy who have never had a wake induced lucid dream will have a hard time properly understanding what he is trying to convey to us. The philosophies must be pondered during a wake induced lucid dreaming state before their profound nature can be truly realized.
If we delve even further into Plato’s Phaedrus and Phaedo we can find this Orphic influence taking on an obvious form with Plato
expanding upon his knowledge of the soul in the typical fashion of a dialogue between Socrates and other interlocutors.
In Phaedrus we find Socrates speaking of the chariot allegory which explains the idea of souls riding a chariot with imperfect horses up to heaven where they get to “glimpsethrough heaven and out onto reality”. It is thus job of the charioteer to train their “horse” away from it’s weighted instincts of “forgetfulness” – in this context, following the path of virtue rather animalistic desire – that would pull the soul back to earth: those who are unable to do this fall back to earth without ever “experiencing the reality of the world of forms”, where they are eventually reincarnated as one of nine different kinds of men. Phaedrus thus becomes an attempt by Plato to describe the emotion of love as being a form of “divine madness” inspired by the gods. Plato gives a rough timeline of 10 000 years for an uninitiated soul to “grow its wings” to the point it can return to heaven, whilst recommending that for philosophers it only takes 3000 years.
In Phaedo.Socrates – now on his death bed – engages in yet another discussion regarding the soul and sets out to prove its immortality. Phaedo takes the perspective of one of Socrates students of the same name, relaying the story of the man’s final day on earth to a Pythagorean philosopher named Echecrates.
Socrates , in an attempt to settle the hearts of his followers upset with his impending execution, offers four arguments as proof for the soul’s immortality:
The cyclical argument presents the idea that the living are generated from the dead, and the dead from the living, in much the same way one moves from being asleep to awake and vice versa. The logical conclusion Socrates arrive sat is that there must be an intermediate “place” to which the soul dwells after death before they can return to life.
The Theory of Recollection suggests that a priori knowledge someone may have of a subject proves the soul’s immortality arguing that they are simply recollecting knowledge gained during a previous life.
The Affinity Argument speaks of the soul as resembling that which is invisible and divine, as opposed to the physical body which is mortal. Socrates speaks on the virtuousness of man, warning of a soul in death, caught up with worshipping the physical body and its materialistic desires being dragged back to a world of corporeality (reincarnation), whilst the philosopher and his love of truth is taken to a good afterlife. Seemingly failing to convince his followers, Socrates ends the Affinity Argument and continues with the Argument of the Form of life.
Socrates reasons beauty and life as being forms, and that anything exhibiting a property as being animated with life can be considered as participating in the form of life. Since the soul gives life to the body, and death is the opposite of life, the soul will never accept anything that goes against the life it always provides, so it must therefore be immortal.
It is with Phaedo that one of Plato’s well known doctrines is again presented: the soul is a self mover, life is self motion and the soul brings life to a body by animating it.
The takeaway from what Plato is conveying to us is that “the soul is real and the body is not”, as it is the soul that is responsible for allowing our body to move in the first place. Given the body only exists for a certain period of time until its death, it cannot be considered in the context of real to the same degree of the soul, because the soul’s immortality allows its existence in not only the material plane, but also that of the “afterlife”.
The analogy could be made of the body being like a suit that we wear. The suit is a static object that simply covers our body. It holds no value beyond acting as a cover: all intelligence and personality is thus not an aspect of the suit but of the “body” which inhabits it. Once the suit is removed, it becomes a static object where it remains until worn again. Depending on the activity, the suit may be of a casual type or it might be of a professional type. Regardless, there comes a point in which all suits deteriorate beyond wearability. The body is the suit of the soul: it is simply a garment we wear for the experience of material life, which we take off and discard at death when it becomes no longer wearable, worn out beyond usability. What constitutes “us” is not the body, but rather that invisible, indiscernible element that allows our life/body suit to function for its period of operability: the divine spark of life. The difference between a lucid dreamer and those who cannot lucid dream is that we can take our suits off and put other ones on in between life and death. Well, that is not exactly true: everyone removes their suit during dreaming, but it is the only the lucid dreamers that remember the experience.
Expanding upon this idea, the Demiurge of Timeaus can be thought of as a big ball room where the invited guests enter wearing a themed costume which they keep on for the duration of the party. Upon entering, the guests become intoxicated, so that everyone’s awareness becomes severely reduced. They eventually leave the ball room, go home and shed their costumes, only to put on another one in their inebriated state before returning to the ball (reinarnation). They consume more alchohol keeping up their inebriation, and lose themselves within the excitement of the party, to the point they forget all about the previous costume they have just worn. At times some of the pay goers costumes off and hang them in the cloak room whilst they go outside for a break (sleeping).
What I find particularly interesting is my involvement in the Hell Fire Club around the time of my mystical experiences and its very obvious relationship to the Dionysian Mysteries and its rituals I was unknowingly participating in. Whilst the club itself derived from Francis Dashwood’s English version of the 1700s club, it was based on very little surviving information on what Dashwood’s club was actually about; a single ledger mentioning its past members for a time and not much beyond that apart from some symbolism well known within Hermetic-occult circles.
The club, in this sense, could be considered more along the lines of a “Hermetic Revival” of scattered fragments pilfered from various different occult backgrounds – such as those of Aliester Crowley with its Abbey of Theleme, Eliphas Levi and other renaissance figureheads. What is striking is the very obvious Bacchanalian frenzy Dashwood’s club was purported to emulate – the idea of it being a place where one could go to escape from the confines of what was considered socially acceptable behavior to engage in various acts of debauch without a care for contrition. This Orphic practice was not emphasized within the modern revived version of the club that I was part of.
Unfortunately, further scrutiny of the club’s symbology contained within the modern Hellfire Club’s chapter papers, is seemingly marred by its author masking his lack of knowledge of Dionysian history with an encouragement to “ponder the mysteries of the club and arrive at one’s own conclusions”. So whilst I recognized some of the symbolism, I cannot say that I really understood or knew about any obvious connection of the club with reincarnation, simulation or prison planet theory.
Setting aside this loosely defined “Alchemical tradition” I was involved in with this club, we can state that, like the Dionysian Mysteries it was very definitely centered around rituals dedicated to Dionysis and the consumption of wine – both physically and philosophically – and the willingness of the candidate to escape from the societal constraints of materialism. Such an act was done through the throwing of a coin at the bottle symbolizing their higher regard for spiritual knowledge/ experience than that of material riches . The main ritual consisted of navigating the Hell Fire Caves of West Wycombe in England down to the “river of Styx”, and returning as a soul transmuted from the rearrangement of the Sephiroth of the Tree of Life using the Tarot’s Major Arcana. As these caves were not readily close by or accessible to me , such a ceremony was conducted with much emphasis placed on a visual reenactment and me trying to astral project to such a location.
Whilst I never considered this ritual in the context of reincarnation – more of a refining my soul into a purer form – one can deduce that it very much aligns with the Orphic myths on the subject, given that the river of Styx is a river from this same Ancient Greek antiquity surrounding the underworld and Hades. In hindsight, it seems apparent that I was inadvertently initiating myself within an extension of the Dionysian Mysteries, which ultimately culminated in mystical experiences which just so happened to expand in intricate detail upon core themes central to the Orphic beliefs: through my lucid dreaming practices, I was able to navigate the “underworld” of lucidity just like Dionysis had done.
One could argue my mind was influenced by my involvement with this club, but that does not explain how I came to have revelations about content I had not yet come into contact with; most of what is written above was researched for the sake of this book. How can one explain I was given the exact same information regarding the body being a prison for our soul/consciousness when this particular subject had never been broached within this club, and I was not learned enough of Dionysian history to realize it was something the Orphics believed? It was a concept that was very, very far from my mind until the information was presented to me.
Neither was it as if this club was a big part of my life: I originally joined it to gain access to old alchemical manuscripts which I enjoyed pondering and mixing in with my own philosophies – the ritual aspect was conducted on very rare occasion due to a somewhat lazy attitude on my part in not wanting to bother with such effort. My initiation into the club can therefore be considered from a perspective of something I did not really have a clue of what I was doing, and the rituals themselves can be considered to have been more pondered in thought than they were conducted in practicality. Even though the Steward of the English Chapter assured me he would offer whatever guidance was necessary, I often times felt that his vagueness left much to be desired, and found myself deriving my own interpretations on what my Chapter should have been about, rather than following some pre determined charter of Rites.
The Main symbol of the Hellfire Club – the Inner Temple Lamp – with its ourobourus wrapped around its sphere compared with the obvious snake coiled around the Orphic Egg. This association with orphism and reincarnation was not known to me during my active presence within the HFC. In the Orphic theogonies, the Orphic Egg symbolizes a cosmic egg from which emerged the primordial hermaphroditic deity Phanes/Protogonus. This deity is sometimes associated with various other gods, including Zeus, Pan, Metis, Eros, Erikepaios, and Bromius. The egg is frequently depicted with the serpent-like entity, Ananke, coiled around it. Phanes is the golden-winged, primordial being that hatched from this radiant cosmic egg, serving as the wellspring of the universe. An ancient Orphic hymn refers to him as Protogonos (the First-Born) and Eros (Love) in the following manner:
My somewhat inaccurate Tree of Life used within my chapter (of Dragon Flame) of the Hell Fire Club. Note the inner temple lamp, ,set within Kether, the topmost spehiroth, symbolising it as the Ain Soph Aur of the Kabbalists. This particular tree was based on the Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn’s tree, and follows the inaccurate evolution from Kircher’s diagram, which, in hindsight, I now believe is inadequate for the alchemical teachings of the club. Given the above, and what was revealed in my mystical experiences, it seems quite obvious to me that the lost initiatory rites of the Orphics and what it called the ”underworld” were to do specifically with lucid dreaming and using it as a means for discovering information about the soul and its composition coupled with exploring questions of our universe’s creation. Plato seemingly then went on to describe this domain as the “world of forms and ideas” where the process of such soul discovery eventually became split into three separate conceptual pathways – Gnosticism , Kabbalah and Alchemy. – before the lucid dreaming element became completely lost, and it was picked up and reinterpreted in the context of unconscious dreaming.
Dare I say that much of the philosophy of the soul originating from Orphic ideologies is therefore not meant for the eyes of those cannot lucid dream: this comes from the fact I was told by the Elder Guardians that lucid dreaming is considered as “the most divine and holy of all arts”, as it a lesser form of how “god consciousness” actually operates. In other words, those who can lucid dream are considered as the closest consciousnesses in existence to being able to understand the complexity of God, who operates in a “world of forms and ideas” that far defies the logic and physics of the material plane. God cannot therefore be known until the commitment of one’s consciousness has been made to understanding the world of dreaming as a conscious entity engaging with it, rather than an unconscious one passively observing it. To those who are proficient in wake induced lucid dreaming practices, this task is much more easier said than done, for one is met with a seemingly hostile resistance the more this world is explored.
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