Salón Arcano

These were not the sands of my forefathers, the soil of my land; pierced by rocks, cut by rivers and broken by weeds and springs.

This was a barren land. A barren land with no shape nor form. No beacon of light in the darkness, no forest for shelter, no firm ground to steady my feet, no mountain  in the distance to mark my journey.

I looked up, but there were no stars in the sky. Only the endless void of the night, covering the desert in a vast, unending veil of nothing.

After sculpting and coagulating my original Bronze Baphomet in Seattle USA in 2010  to exhibit at the second Esoteric Book Conference, I subsequently in Australia made these four copies. Before being posted to their new owners they were to be ritually hatched from Alchemic Eggs as a part of the ritual theatre for the launch of my second Alchymic art book from Fulgur Limited, 'Coagula' -dramatically illustrating the birth of the Golden HermAphrodite this tome explicates.

These four Baphomets were consecrated with plants sacred to Mercury: Marjoram, Parsley, Fennel and a Valerian spagyric.  The Alchymic Marriage in operations of practical alchemy is often represented materially by minerals as the feminine aspect and plants as the masculine (ref. Bartlett's 'Real Alchemy'). Bronze is 93% copper, the metal/mineral of Venus/Aphrodite, so by counterpointing this with plants of Mercury/Hermes the HermAphroditic qualities of Baphomet were reified.

The plaster eggs used in the ritual performance were theatrical echoes of the actual sand-and-plaster eggs the Baphomets were cocooned in for casting. However when these were cracked open at the foundry, I was appalled to discover the four were born disfigured. Lumps marred their surface, some even on the faces. Apparently the casting mixture this foundry had given me was quite different from the one used in the USA, and because I had treated it the same the process had  gone wrong.

What upset me besides the wasted time was that having performed such specific Alchemical operations with the procedure, I felt I had failed on a magical as well as practical level.

However it turned out that three of the four were salvageable after all, for two of the people I lived with surprised me that they had power tools with which I could work the deformed metal.  With applied labour I shaped them up to presentable appearance for the performance, but the real surprise came when after thus preparing them I first struck them to test their tones:

Due to the remarkable resonance of the first one made, I had already thought of using these bronze Baphomets as bells in the final chorus of my 'Ardhanarishvara-An'  (Hindu HermAphrodite God/dess) song at the end of the ritual performance. What amazed me when I lined the new three up with the original and struck each, is that they resounded clearly with the exact four different notes used in this chorus.

If they had not been mutant their form would have been much more consistent and thus the tones would not have differed substantially.

The Goddess of all possibilities
spread her legs before me

She sang the joy of the body
And unleashed the forbidden

She released the energy of the centuries
The primordial fire

Destroying the past with beauty
Releasing the new life with passion

The chains of life have been released
The light shines in the dark

Lux Natura

The empty chair.

Few things are as upsetting as moving out.

So many changes. Orientation changes, things, the energies in the house change. Life changes.

You know how it starts. Books in boxes. Suitcases full of clothing, both everyday and forgotten for years. More boxes with books.

In the living room, the new tenant's furniture looks eye-to-eye the former owners's, covered in dust, waiting their fate.

Every chair in the dining room is in use. The scene is rather static. The light turns on and the empty chair goes back into action.

A strange presence. Dread fills it.

The house moves owners.

(text by: Joaquín Aras)

Advanced being, with an almost magical capacity for sensory communication, as they crawl on your skin, you can feel them reading your energy, and how your senses respond to this unconscious calling that makes us become like a perfect figure of the universe... the snail. An animal we disregard and loathe, while we forget that it was part of our ancestors's life, in health, in beauty, in the magical arts... In this picture we can see the beauty in the mating of a pair of snails, how the spermatozoa travels from one of themto the other one through a translucent thread..

So much is new and weightless.
Sea wind-wild void.
I float in a mad air -intense.
Resting space, rocky, enveloping.
It aligns me until I see you again.

(text by: Florencia Leone)

 First revelation of Hermes is known from the ancient Egypt as Thoth, later in ancient Greece as Hermes, in North Germanic tradition as Wotan, in Norse mythology as Odin and finally in alchemy as Mercurius. While hellenistic times we can say about an amalgamation of Hermes and Thoth in the figure of Hermes Trismegistus ('Hermes Thrice Greatest')- which was the patron and teacher of all arts and alchemy. Hermes was the master of the ancient mysteries of initiation, mediator between the worlds of the visible and invisible. As the Psychopomp ('guide of souls') he carried the souls of the dead to Underworld to provide safe passage. In psychology of Carl Gustav Jung the psychopomp was regarded as mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms.

During a process of High Spagery using mercury, I had the surprise to witness the vegetation of gold in a proper matrix, all the process happened at cold temperature, it was a wonder to witness because I could see all the changes of colours of the metal, at first it was silvery mat, then taking a peacock colour, and pinkish hue, then this shiny golden colour.

One can really meditate on the formation of the metals, and transmutations after that.

Open to the Ancient wisdom that is part of you...Sweetness Fairies, tell me about tenderness

(Text by: Karen Woodley)

I have seen you, great fields bathed in dawn's whiteness; blue lakes, I have bathed in your waves -- and that every caress of the laughing air has made me smile, this is what I will never tire of repeating to you -- Nathaniel. I will teach you fervor.

(André Gide, The fruits of the Earth)

Sometimes, in this verge between two intensities; two radical possibilities facing each other in oddity... I become.

a flycatcher. a clowd.
a paralytic that runs in dreams.
a scrudge.

defeat the wave of forces within me
or let me defeat your tides.

and when I see such epiphany. so sublime taste of grace
I draw back, not with tears
but with haste.

It was a little over midnight and the city was eerily quiet, no noise was heard, not even the wind that roars in the morning, as it slides down the corridor formed between the trees and the wall that encloses the park . Nothing. Everything halted for a moment, like a photograph. The landscape was changing as a ray of light slowly covered it all, and the wind roared again, and on the threshold of the street appeared a mysterious figure, he secretly wanted to flow, but his vastness imade it impssible. He was thin and dark, he did not inspire fear, his steps and movemets were slow and secure. I had to follow him, because with every step he was leaving behind a halo of light that rose flashes, which became crystal droplets. Who was this giant, who pierced avenues, crossed bridges and parks, and only stopped in front of a huge cave at dawn? He was the Guardian. The Guardian who walked till he reached his destination, then he opened his arms and stood petrified, to remain there, forever and for the whole of eternity.

The wind did change,
the ruling forces doff their disguise,
there are no human words
sound flows in the infinity and in the rock.
Colors being born in darkness
another light is coming,
it sheds no light on the garden of men,
it is the substance that throbs behind

I suspect that there wasn’t a God of the Ocean, nor a God of the Sun; both concepts are meaningless to primitive minds. There was the Ocean and there was Poseidon, who was also the Ocean.The Theogonies and Homer would come much later... (Jorge Luis Borges)

The Gods, the Ancient Gods…

Anciently the world was inhabited by gods, entities, spiritual creatures that animated the rivers, stones, forests, roads; beings who were in contact with us. It’s just a matter of reading the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, or the one thousand and one the Arabian Nights, to find the registry that men left from those times.

Later came the one and only God, a jealous God, who became the cause and the destiny of all that is. A God that being in all things, can not be apprehended in any. A God that, according to the mystics of monotheism, involved for us a leap into the abstraction, the universal principle, omnipresent and ferocious.

The infinite gods and spirits that inhabited the world, had then become invisible, hidden, they escaped to the limits of the world. Our eyes got used to the new perception, and yet they are here, and sometimes we can hear them whispering, breathing, sometimes we see them in dreams, in the fog, and in the lost shores.

Live in harmony with Nature, o child of Earth! For she will dazzle you with her beauty. So she nourishes you. But above all, she teaches you.

A being of air with solar banners drinks its potion among petaline silks.

To the tune of wings waving in the wind, this magical dance echoes in the rainbow fields that cover our Earth, it being responsible for almost everything you will find on your table.

Out of soil's blackness, and by the powerful will of the hidden roots, a flower blooms crowning with delicate petals the supremacy of vegetable life, life distilled into nectar through the alchemy of Earth.

Osiris launched his powerful ray towards the night of the ground. The ray found itself materialized by way of tangled roots that rose to the sky to produce the coronation. And there the sap was transformed into life-giving nectar, that which was coarse transmuted towards subtleness.

To the call of the source of life come on the winged Venusian dancers that by drinking perform their own alchemy, where the crown's nectar turns into eternal honey, fit for the treasury of hexagonal palaces.

Child of Earth! Born from the dust! Walk the path of Nature, and through your practice you will make spring the divine nectar, that shall make you desirable to the gods and allow you to dwell among them in Eternity.

Be vigilant, pilgrim! The path to the crown -- which is your center -- might be crossed by numerous thorns.

Persist, o traveler! So that from the stone shall spring the honey and you shall live in the Infinite Light.

You will perform your Alchemy

Splendor and downfall of the substance that breaks through the chaos of the world to plant there the seed of the beginning; systole and diastole, contraction and expansion, nothing is a repetition of the cycle, differentiation reigns over all things, the harmony is mutable.

Simultaneity.

(Text by Julian Moguillansky + Ume Zeeb)

Invisible good, necessary movement and Breath. An empty conjunction: man. He understands life, because he sees both the intelligible and the sensible. There's no life without seeing. If no one saw the man, he would be unable to live. Intellect, breath and soul, none of them are strangers to him. There isn't any incomprehensible conjunction or separation in an eternal mixture. Eye. The smoke of the spiral abaxial circumference of the chained spheres. Pontiffs. For our vision is what makes the colors live. Lux is the universal solvent. Collection of rainfall.