(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
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Alchemy
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Among other aims, tried to
transform base metals such as lead or copper into silver or gold
and to discover a cure for disease and a way of extending life.
Alchemy was the name given in Latin Europe in the 12th century to
an aspect of thought that corresponds to astrology, which is
apparently an oldertradition. Both represent attempts to discover
the relationship of man to thecosmos and to exploit that
relationship to his benefit. The first of these objectives may be
called scientific, the second technological. Astrology is
concerned with man's relationship to “the stars” (including the
members of the solar system); alchemy, with terrestrial nature.
But the distinction is far from absolute, since both are
interested in the influence of the stars on terrestrial events.
Moreover, both have always been pursued in the belief that the
processes human beings witness in heaven and on earth manifest the
will of the Creator and, if correctly understood, will yield the
key to the Creator's intentions.
Nature and significance
That both astrology and alchemy may be regarded as fundamental
aspects of thought is indicated by their apparent universality. It
is notable, however, that the evidence is not equally substantial
in all times and places. Evidence from ancient Middle America
(Aztecs, Mayans) is still almost nonexistent; evidence from India
is tenuous and from ancient China, Greece, and Islāmic lands is
only relatively more plentiful. A single manuscript of some
80,000words is the principal source for the history of Greek
alchemy. Chinese alchemy is largely recorded in about 100 “books”
that are part of the Taoist canon. Neither Indian nor Islāmic
alchemy has ever been collected, and scholars are thus dependent
for their knowledge of the subject on occasional allusions in
works of natural philosophy and medicine, plus a few specifically
alchemical works.
Nor is it really clear what alchemy was (or is). The word is a
European one, derived from Arabic, but the origin of the root
word, chem, is uncertain. Words similar to it have been foundin
most ancient languages, with different meanings, but conceivably
somehow related to alchemy. In fact, the Greeks, Chinese, and
Indians usually referred to what Westerners call alchemy as “The
Art,” or by terms denoting change or transmutation.
The chemistry of alchemy
Superficially, the chemistry involved in alchemy appears a
hopelessly complicated succession of heatings of multiple mixtures
of obscurely named materials, but it seems likely that a relative
simplicity underlies this complexity. The metals gold, silver,
copper, lead, iron, and tin were all known before the rise of
alchemy. Mercury, the liquid metal, certainly known before 300 BC,
when it appears in both Eastern and Western sources, was crucial
to alchemy. Sulfur, “the stone that burns,” was also crucial. It
was known from prehistoric times in native deposits and was also
given off in metallurgic processes (the “roasting” of sulfide
ores). Mercury united with most of the other metals, and the
amalgam formed coloured powders (the sulfides) when treated with
sulfur. Mercury itself occurs in nature in a red sulfide,
cinnabar, which can also be made artificially. All of these,
except possibly the last, were operations known to themetallurgist
and were adopted by the alchemist.
The alchemist added the action on metals of a number of corrosive
salts, mainly the vitriols (copper and iron sulfates),alums (the
aluminum sulfates of potassium and ammonium),and the chlorides of
sodium and ammonium. And he made much of arsenic's property of
colouring metals. All of these materials, except the chloride of
ammonia, were known in ancient times. Known as sal ammoniac in the
West, nao sha in China, nao sadar in India, and nushādir in Persia
and Arabic lands, the chloride of ammonia first became known to
the West in the Chou-i ts'an t'ung ch'i, a Chinese treatise of the
2nd century AD. It was to be crucial to alchemy, for on
sublimation it dissociates into antagonistic corrosive materials,
ammonia and hydrochloric acid, which readily attack the metals.
Until the 9th century it seems to have come from a single source,
the Flame Mountain (Huo-yen Shan) near T'u-lu-p'an (Turfan), in
Central Asia.
Finally, the manipulation of these materials was to lead to the
discovery of the mineral acids, the history of which began in
Europe in the 13th century. The first was probably nitric acid,
made by distilling together saltpetre (potassium nitrate) and
vitriol or alum. More difficult to discover was sulfuric acid,
which was distilled from vitriol or alum alone but required
apparatus resistant to corrosion and heat. And most difficult was
hydrochloric acid, distilled from common salt or sal ammoniac and
vitriol or alum, for the vapours of this acid cannot be simply
condensed but must be dissolved in water.
Goals
“Transmutation” is the key word characterizing alchemy, and it may
be understood in several ways: in the changes that are called
chemical, in physiological changes such as passing from sickness
to health, in a hoped-for transformation from old age to youth, or
even in passing from an earthly to a supernatural existence.
Alchemical changes seem always to have been positive, never
involvingdegradation except as an intermediate stage in a process
having a “happy ending.” Alchemy aimed at the great human “goods”:
wealth, longevity, and immortality.
Alchemy was not original in seeking these goals, for it had been
preceded by religion, medicine, and metallurgy. The first chemists
were metallurgists, who were perhaps the most successful
practitioners of the arts in antiquity. Their theories seem to
have come not from science but from folklore and religion. The
miner and metallurgist, like the agriculturalist, in this view,
accelerate the normal maturation of the fruits of the earth, in a
magico-religious relationship with nature. In primitive societies
the metallurgist is often a member of an occult religious society.
But the first ventures into natural philosophy, the beginnings of
what is called the scientific view, also preceded alchemy. Systems
of five almost identical basic elements were postulated in China,
India, and Greece, according to a view in which nature comprised
antagonistic, opposite forces—hot and cold, positive and negative,
and male and female; i.e., primitive versions of the modern
conception of energy. Drawing on a similar astrological heritage,
philosophers found correspondences among the elements, planets,
and metals. In short, both the chemical arts and the theories of
the philosophers of nature had become complex before alchemy
appeared.
Regional variations
Chinese alchemy
Neither in China nor in the West can scholars approach with
certitude the origins of alchemy, but the evidences in Chinaappear
to be slightly older. Indeed, Chinese alchemy was connected with
an enterprise older than metallurgy—i.e., medicine. Belief in
physical immortality among the Chinese seems to go back to the 8th
century BC, and belief in the possibility of attaining it through
drugs to the 4th century BC. The magical drug, namely the “elixir
of life” (elixir is the European word), is mentioned about that
time, and that most potent elixir, “drinkable gold,” which was a
solution (usually imaginary) of this corrosion-resistant metal, as
early as the 1st century BC—many centuries before it is heard of
in the West.
Although non-Chinese influences (especially Indian) are possible,
the genesis of alchemy in China may have been a purely domestic
affair. It emerged during a period of politicalturmoil, the
Warring States Period (from the 5th to the 3rd century BC), and it
came to be associated with Taoism—a mystical religion founded by
the 6th-century-BC sage Lao-tzu—and its sacred book, the Tao-te
Ching (“Classic of the Way of Power”). The Taoists were a
miscellaneous collection of “outsiders”—in relation to the
prevailing Confucians—and such mystical doctrines as alchemy were
soon grafted onto the Taoist canon. What is known of Chinese
alchemy is mainly owing to that graft, and especially to a
collection known as Yün chi ch'i ch'ien (“Seven Tablets in a
Cloudy Satchel”), which is dated 1023. Thus, sources on alchemy in
China (as elsewhere) are compilations of much earlier writings.
The oldest known Chinese alchemical treatise is the Chou-i ts'an
t'ung ch'i (“Commentary on the I Ching ”). In the main it is an
apocryphal interpretation of the I Ching (“Classic of Changes”),
an ancient classic especially esteemed by the Confucians, relating
alchemy to the mystical mathematics of the 64 hexagrams (six-line
figures used for divination). Itsrelationship to chemical practice
is tenuous, but it mentions materials (including sal ammoniac) and
implies chemical operations. The first Chinese alchemist who is
reasonably well known was Ko Hung (AD 283–343), whose book
Pao-p'u-tzu (pseudonym of Ko Hung) contains two chapters with
obscure recipes for elixirs, mostly based on mercury or arsenic
compounds. The most famous Chinese alchemical book is the Tan chin
yao chüeh (“Great Secrets of Alchemy”), probably by Sun Ssu-miao
(AD 581–after 673). It is a practical treatise on creating elixirs
(mercury, sulfur, andthe salts of mercury and arsenic are
prominent) for the attainment of immortality, plus a few for
specific cures for disease and such other purposes as the
fabrication of precious stones.
Altogether, the similarities between the materials used and the
elixirs made in China, India, and the West are more remarkable
than are their differences. Nonetheless, Chinese alchemy differed
from that of the West in its objective. Whereas in the West the
objective seems to have evolved from gold to elixirs of
immortality to simply superior medicines, neither the first nor
the last of these objectives seems ever to have been very
important in China.
Chinese alchemy was consistent from first to last, and therewas
relatively little controversy among its practitioners, whoseem to
have varied only in their prescriptions for the elixir of
immortality or perhaps only over their names for it, of which one
Sinologist has counted about 1,000. In the West there were
conflicts between advocates of herbal and “chemical” (i.e.,
mineral) pharmacy, but in China mineral remedies were always
accepted. There were, in Europe, conflicts between alchemists who
favoured gold making and those who thought medicine the proper
goal, but the Chinesealways favoured the latter. Since alchemy
rarely achieved any of these goals, it was an advantage to the
Western alchemist to have the situation obscured, and the art
survived in Europe long after Chinese alchemy had simply faded
away.
Chinese alchemy followed its own path. Whereas the Western world,
with its numerous religious promises of immortality, never
seriously expected alchemy to fulfill that goal, the deficiencies
of Chinese religions in respect to promises of immortality left
that goal open to the alchemist. A serious reliance on medical
elixirs that were in varying degrees poisonous led the alchemist
into permanent exertions to moderate those poisons, either through
variation of the ingredients or through chemical manipulations.
The fact that immortality was so desirable and the alchemist
correspondingly valued enabled the British historian of science
Joseph Needham to tabulate a series of Chinese emperors who
probably died of elixir poisoning. Ultimately a succession of
royal deaths made alchemists and emperors alike more cautious, and
Chinese alchemy vanished (probably as the Chinese adopted
Buddhism, which offered other, less dangerous avenues to
immortality), leaving its literary manifestations embedded in the
Taoist canons.
Indian alchemy
The oldest Indian writings, the Vedas (Hindu sacred scriptures),
contain the same hints of alchemy that are found in evidence from
ancient China, namely vague references to a connection between
gold and long life. Mercury, which was so vital to alchemy
everywhere, is first mentioned in the 4th- to 3rd-century-BC
Artha-śāstra , about the same time it is encountered in China and
in the West. Evidence of the idea of transmuting base metals to
gold appears in 2nd- to 5th-century-AD Buddhist texts, about the
same time as in the West. Since Alexander the Great had invaded
India in 325 BC, leaving a Greek state (Gandhāra) that long
endured, the possibility exists that the Indians acquired the idea
from the Greeks, but it could have been the other way around.
It is also possible that the alchemy of medicine and immortality
came to India from China, or vice versa; in any case, gold making
appears to have been a minor concern, and medicine the major
concern, of both cultures. But the elixir of immortality was of
little importance in India (which had other avenues to
immortality). The Indian elixirs were mineral remedies for
specific diseases or, at the most, to promote long life.
As in China and the West, alchemy in India came to be associated
with religious mysticism, but much later—not until the rise of
Tantrism (an esoteric, occultic, meditative system), AD 1100–1300.
To Tantrism are owed writings that are clearly alchemical (such as
the 12th-century Rasārṇava, or “Treatise on Metallic
Preparations”).
From the earliest records of Indian natural philosophy, which date
from the 5th–3rd centuries BC, theories of nature were based on
conceptions of material elements (fire, wind, water,earth, and
space), vitalism (“animated atoms”), and dualisms of love and hate
or action and reaction. The alchemist coloured metals and on
occasion “made” gold, buthe gave little importance to that. His
six metals (gold, silver, tin, iron, lead, and copper), each
further subdivided (five kinds of gold, etc.), were “killed”
(i.e., corroded) but not “resurrected,” as was the custom of
Western alchemy. Rather, they were killed to make medicines.
Although “the secrets of mercurial lore” became part of the
Tantric rite, mercury seems to have been much less important than
in China. The Indians exploited metal reactions more widely, but,
although they possessed from an early date not only vitriol and
sal ammoniac but also saltpetre, they nevertheless failed to
discover the mineral acids. This is the more remarkable because
India was long the principal source of saltpetre, which occurs as
an efflorescence on the soil, especially in populous tropical
countries. But it lacks thehigh degree of corrosivity of metals
possessed by the vitriols and chlorides and played a small part in
early alchemy. Saltpetre appears particularly in 9th- to
11th-century-AD Indian and Chinese recipes for fireworks, one of
which—a mixture of saltpetre, sulfur, and charcoal—is gunpowder.
Saltpetre first appears in Europe in the 13th century, along with
the modern formula for gunpowder and the recipe for nitric acid.
Arabic alchemy
Arabic alchemy is as mysterious as Greek in its origins, and the
two seem to have been significantly different. The respect in
which Physica et mystica was held by the Greek alchemists was
bestowed by the Arabs on a different work, the Emerald Tablet of
Hermes Trismegistos, the reputed Hellenistic author of various
alchemical, occultic, and theological works. Beginning “That which
is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below
is like to that which is above,” it is brief, theoretical, and
astrological. Hermes “the thrice great” (Trismegistos) was a Greek
version of the Egyptian god Thoth and the supposed founder of an
astrological philosophy that is first noted in 150 BC. TheEmerald
Tablet, however, comes from a larger work called Book of the
Secret of Creation, which exists in Latin and Arabic manuscripts
and was thought by the Muslim alchemist ar-Rāzī to have been
written during the reign of Caliph al-Maʾmūn (AD 813–833), though
it has been attributedto the 1st-century-AD pagan mystic
Apollonius of Tyana.
Some scholars have suggested that Arabic alchemy descended from a
western Asiatic school and that Greek alchemy was derived from an
Egyptian school. As far as is known, the Asiatic school was not
Chinese or Indian. What is known is that Arabic alchemy was
associated with a specific city in Syria, Harran, which seems to
have been a fountainhead of alchemical notions. And it is possible
that the distillation ideology and its spokeswoman, Maria—as well
as Agathodaimon—represented the alchemy of Harran,which presumably
migrated to Alexandria and was incorporated into the alchemy of
Zosimos.
The existing versions of the Book of the Secret of Creation have
been carried back only to the 7th or 6th century but are believed
by some to represent much earlier writings, although not
necessarily those of Apollonius himself. He is the subject of an
ancient biography that says nothing about alchemy, but neither
does the Emerald Tablet nor the rest of the Book of the Secret of
Creation. On the other hand, theirtheories of nature have an
alchemical ring, and the Book mentions the characteristic
materials of alchemy, including, for the first time in the West,
sal ammoniac. It was clearly an important book to the Arabs, most
of whose eminent philosophers mentioned alchemy, although
sometimes disapprovingly. Those who practiced it were even more
interested in literal gold making than had been the Greeks. The
most well-attested and probably the greatest Arabic alchemist was
ar-Rāzī (c. 850–923/924), a Persian physician who lived in
Baghdad. The most famous was Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, now believed to be
a name applied to acollection of “underground writings” produced
in Baghdad after the theological reaction against science. In any
case, the Jābirian writings are very similar to those of ar-Rāzī.
Ar-Rāzī classified the materials used by the alchemist into
“bodies” (the metals), stones, vitriols, boraxes, salts, and
“spirits,” putting into the latter those vital (and sublimable)
materials, mercury, sulfur, orpiment and realgar (the arsenic
sulfides), and sal ammoniac. Much is made of sal ammoniac, the
reactive powers of which seem to have given Western alchemy a new
lease on life. Ar-Rāzī and the Jābirian writerswere really trying
to make gold, through the catalytic action of the elixir. Both
wrote much on the compounding of “strongwaters,” an enterprise
that was ultimately to lead to the discovery of the mineral acids,
but students have been no more able to find evidence of this
discovery in the writings ofthe Arabic alchemists than in those of
China and India. The Arabic strong waters were merely corrosive
salt solutions.
Ar-Rāzī's writing represents the apogee of Arabic alchemy, so much
so that students of alchemy have little evidence ofits later
reorientation toward mystical or quasi-religious objectives. Nor
does it seem to have turned to medicine, which remained
independent. But there was a tendency in Arabic medicine to give
greater emphasis to mineral remedies and less to the herbs that
had been the chief medicines of the earlier Greek and Arabic
physicians. The result was a pharmacopoeia not of elixirs but of
specific remedies that are inorganic in origin and not very
different from the elixirs of ar-Rāzī. This new pharmacopoeia was
taken to Europe by Constantine of Africa, a Baghdad-educated
Muslim who died in 1087 as a Christian monk at Monte Cassino
(Italy). The pharmacopoeia also appeared in Spain in the 11th
century and passed from there to Latin Europe, along with the
Arabic alchemical writings, which were translated into Latin in
the 12th century.
Latin alchemy
In the 12th century the Christian West began to shed its habitof
indifference or hostility to the secular literature of ancientand
alien civilizations. Christian scholars were particularly
attracted to Muslim Spain and Sicily and there made translations
from both Arabic and Greek works, many of which were in some
degree familiar, but some of which, including the literature of
alchemy, were new.
The Greek alchemy of the Venice–Paris manuscript had much less
impact than the work of ar-Rāzī and other Arabs, which emerged
among the voluminous translations made in Spain about 1150 by
Gerard of Cremona. By 1250 alchemy was familiar enough to enable
such encyclopaedists as Vincent of Beauvais to discuss it fairly
intelligibly, and before 1300 the subject was under discussion by
the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon and the German
philosopher, scientist, and theologian Albertus Magnus. To learn
about alchemy was to learn about chemistry, for Europe had no
independent word to describe the science of matter. It had been
touched upon in works concerned with other forms of change—e.g.,
the motion of projectiles, the aging of man, and similar
Aristotelian concepts. On the practical side there were also
artists' recipe books; but for the first time in the works of
Bacon and Albertus Magnus change was discussed in a truly chemical
sense, with Bacon treating the newly translated alchemy as a
general science of matter for which he had great hopes.
But the more familiar alchemy became, the more clearly it was
understood that gold making was the almost exclusive objective of
alchemy, and Europeans proved no more resistant to the lure of
this objective than their Arabic predecessors. By 1350, alchemical
tracts were pouring out ofthe scriptoria (monastic copying rooms),
and the Europeans had even taken over the tradition of anonymity
and false attribution. One authority wrote at length about
supposed disagreements between two Arabs, Iahiae Abindinon and
Geber Abinhaen, who were probably two versions of the name of
Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. The most famous Jābirian work in Europe, The Sum
of Perfection , is now thought to have been an original European
composition. At about this time personal reminiscences of
alchemists began to appear. Mostfamous was the Paris notary
Nicolas Flamel (1330–1418), who claimed that he dreamed of an
occult book, subsequently found it, and succeeded in deciphering
it with the aid of a Jewish scholar learned in the mystic Hebrew
writings known as the Kabbala. In 1382 Flamel claimed to have
succeeded in the “Great Work” (gold making); certainlyhe became
rich and made donations to churches.
By 1300 alchemists had begun the discovery of the mineral acids, a
discovery that occupied about three centuries between the first
evidence of the new strong water (aqua fortis—i.e., nitric acid)
and the clear differentiation of the acids into three kinds:
nitric, hydrochloric, and sulfuric. These three centuries saw
prodigious efforts in European alchemy, for these spontaneously
reactive and highly corrosive substances opened a whole new world
of research. And yet, it was of little profit to chemistry, for
the experiments were inhibited by the old objectives of separating
the base metals into their “elements,” concocting elixirs, and
other traditional procedures.
The “water of life” (aqua vitae; i.e., alcohol) was probably
discovered a little earlier than nitric acid, and some physicians
and a few alchemists turned to the elixir of life as an objective.
John of Rupescissa, a Catalonian monk who wrote c. 1350,
prescribed virtually the same elixirs for metal ennoblement and
for the preservation of health. His successors multiplied elixirs,
which lost their uniqueness and finally simply became new
medicines, often for specific ailments. Medical chemistry may have
been conceived under Islām, but it was born in Europe. It only
awaited christening by its great publicist, Paracelsus
(1493–1541), who was the sworn enemy of the malpractices of
16th-century medicine and a vigorous advocate of “folk”
and“chemical” remedies. By the end of the 16th century, medicine
was divided into warring camps of Paracelsians and anti-Paracelsians,
and the alchemists began to move en masse into pharmacy.
Paracelsian pharmacy was to lead, by a devious path, to modern
chemistry, but gold making still persisted, though methods
sometimes differed. SalomonTrismosin, purported author of the
Splendor solis, or “Splendour of the Sun” (published 1598),
engaged in extensive visits to alchemical adepts (a common
practice) and claimed success through “kabbalistic and magical
books in the Egyptian language.” The impression given is that many
had the secret of gold making but that most of them had acquired
it from someone else and not from personal experimentation.
Illustrations, often heavily symbolic, became particularly
important, thoseof Splendor solis being far more complex than the
text but clearly exercising a greater appeal, even to modern
students.
Hellenistic alchemy
Western alchemy may go back to the beginnings of the Hellenistic
period (c. 300 BC–c. AD 300), although the earliest alchemist whom
authorities have regarded as authentic is Zosimos of Panopolis
(Egypt), who lived near the end of the period. He is one of about
40 authors represented in a compendium of alchemical writings that
was probably put together in Byzantium (Constantinople) in the 7th
or 8th century AD and that exists in manuscripts in Venice and
Paris.Synesius, the latest author represented, lived in Byzantium
in the 4th century. The earliest is the author designated
Democritus but identified by scholars with Bolos of Mende, a
Hellenized Egyptian who lived in the Nile Delta about 200 BC.He is
represented by a treatise called Physica et mystica (“Natural and
Mystical Things”), a kind of recipe book for dyeing and colouring
but principally for the making of gold and silver. The recipes are
stated obscurely and are justified with references to the Greek
theory of elements and to astrological theory. Most end with the
phrase “One nature rejoices in another nature; one nature triumphs
over anothernature; one nature masters another nature,” which
authorities variously trace to the Magi (Zoroastrian priests),
Stoic pantheism (a Greek philosophy concerned with nature),or to
the 4th-century-BC Greek philosopher Aristotle. It was the first
of a number of such aphorisms over which alchemists were to
speculate for many centuries.
In 1828 a group of ancient papyrus manuscripts written in Greek
was purchased in Thebes (Egypt), and about a half-century later it
was noticed that among them, divided between libraries in Leyden
(The Netherlands) and Stockholm, was a tract very like the Physica
et mystica. It differed, however, in that it lacked the former's
theoretical embellishments and stated in some recipes that only
fraudulent imitation of gold and silver was intended. Scholars
believe that this kind of work was the ancestor both of the
Physica et mystica and of the ordinary artist's recipe book. The
techniques were ancient. Archaeology has revealed metal objects
inlaid with colours obtained by grinding metals with sulfur, and
Homer's description (8th century BC) of the shield of Achilles
gives the impression thatthe artist in his time was virtually able
to paint in metal.
Democritus is praised by most of the other authors in the
Venice–Paris manuscript, and he is much commented upon. But only
Zosimos shows what had become of alchemy after Bolos of Mende. His
theory is luxuriant in imagery, beginningwith a discussion of “the
composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and
disembodying, drawing the spirits from bodies and binding the
spirits within bodies” and continuing in the same vein. The “base”
metals are to be “ennobled” (to gold) by killing and resurrecting
them, but his practice is full of distillation and sublimation,
and he is obsessed with “spirits.” Theory and practice are joined
in theconcept that success depends upon the production of a series
of colours, usually black, white, yellow, and purple, and that the
colours are to be obtained through Theion hydōr(divine or sulfur
water—it could mean either).
Zosimos credits these innovations mainly to Maria (sometimes
called “the Jewess”), who invented the apparatus, and to
Agathodaimon, probably a pseudonym. Neither is represented (beyond
Zosimos' references) in the Venice–Paris manuscript, but a tract
attributed to Agathodaimon, published in 1953, shows him to be
preoccupied with the colour sequence and complicating it by using
arsenic instead of sulfur. Thus, the colour-producing
potentialities of chemistry were considerable by the time of
Zosimos.
Zosimos also shows that alchemical theory came to focus onthe idea
that there exists a substance that can bring about the desired
transformation instantly, magically, or, as a modern chemist might
say, catalytically. He called it “the tincture,” and had several.
It was also sometimes called “the powder” (xērion), which was to
pass through Arabic into Latin as elixir and finally (signifying
its inorganic nature) as the “philosopher's stone,” “a stone which
is not a stone,” as the alchemists were wont to say. It was
sometimes called a medicine for the rectification of “base” or
“sick” metals, and from this it was a short step to view it as a
drug for the rectification of human maladies. Zosimos notes the
possibility, in passing. When the objective of alchemy became
human salvation, the material constitution of the elixir became
less important than the incantations that accompanied its
production. Synesius, the last author in the Venice–Paris
manuscript, already defined alchemy as a mental operation,
independent of the science of matter.
Thus, Greek alchemy came to resemble, in both theory and practice,
that of China and India. But its objectives included gold making;
thus it remained fundamentally different.
Modern alchemy
The possibility of chemical gold making was not
conclusivelydisproved by scientific evidence until the 19th
century. As rational a scientist as Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727)
had thought it worthwhile to experiment with it. The official
attitude toward alchemy in the 16th to 18th century was
ambivalent. On the one hand, The Art posed a threat to the control
of precious metal and was often outlawed; on the other hand, there
were obvious advantages to any sovereignwho could control gold
making. In “the metropolis of alchemy,” Prague, the Holy Roman
emperors Maximilian II (reigned 1564–76) and Rudolf II (reigned
1576–1612) proved ever-hopeful sponsors and entertained most of
the leading alchemists of Europe.
This was not altogether to the alchemist's advantage. In 1595
Edward Kelley, an English alchemist and companion of the famous
astrologer, alchemist, and mathematician John Dee, lost his life
in an attempt to escape after imprisonment by Rudolf II, and in
1603 the elector of Saxony, Christian II, imprisoned and tortured
the Scotsman Alexander Seton, whohad been traveling about Europe
performing well-publicized transmutations. The situation was
complicated by the fact that some alchemists were turning from
gold making not to medicine but to a quasi-religious alchemy
reminiscent of the Greek Synesius. Rudolf II made the German
alchemist Michael Maier a count and his private secretary,
although Maier's mystical and allegorical writings were, in the
words of a modern authority, “distinguished for the extraordinary
obscurity of his style” and made no claim to gold making. Neither
did the German alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (c. 1560–1601), whose
works have long been esteemed for their illustrations, make such a
claim.
Conventional attempts at gold making were not dead, but by the
18th century alchemy had turned conclusively to religious aims.
The rise of modern chemistry engendered notonly general skepticism
as to the possibility of making gold but also widespread
dissatisfaction with the objectives of modern science, which were
viewed as too limited. Unlike the scientists of the Middle Ages
and Renaissance, the successors of Newton and the great
18th-century French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier limited
their objectives ina way that amounted to a renunciation of what
many had considered the most important question of science, the
relation of man to the cosmos. Those who persisted in askingthese
questions came to feel an affinity with the alchemists and sought
their answers in the texts of “esoteric,” or spiritual, alchemy
(as distinct from the “exoteric” alchemyof the gold makers), with
its roots in Synesius and other late Greek alchemists of the
Venice–Paris manuscript.
This spiritual alchemy, or Hermetism, as its practitioners often
prefer to call it, was popularly associated with the
supposititious Rosicrucian brotherhood, whose so-called
Manifestoes (author unknown; popularly ascribed to the German
theologian Johann Valentin Andreä) had appeared inGermany in the
early 17th century and had attracted the favourable attention not
only of such reforming alchemists as Michael Maier but also of
many prominent philosophers who were disquieted by the mechanistic
character of the new science. In modern times alchemy has become a
focal point for various kinds of mysticism. The old alchemical
literature continues to be scrutinized for evidence, because
alchemical doctrine is claimed to have on more than one occasion
come into the possession of man but always again been lost. Nor is
its association with chemistry considered accidental. In the words
of the famous 19th-century English spiritual alchemist Mary Anne
Atwood,
Alchemy is an universal art of vital chemistry which by
fermenting the human spirit purifies and finally dissolves it. . .
.
Alchemy is philosophy; it is the philosophy, the finding of the
Sophia in the mind.
Assessments of alchemy
Accomplishments
The most persistent goals of alchemy have been the prolongation of
life and the transmutation of base metals into gold. It appears
that neither was accomplished, unless one credits alchemy with the
consequences of modern chemotherapy and the cyclotron.
It has been said that alchemy can be credited with the development
of the science of chemistry, a keystone of modern science. During
the alchemical period the repertoire of known substances was
enlarged (e.g., by the addition of sal ammoniac and saltpetre),
alcohol and the mineral acids were discovered, and the basis was
laid from which modern chemistry was to rise. Historians of
chemistry have been tempted to credit alchemy with laying this
base while at thesame time regarding alchemy as mostly “wrong.” It
is far from clear, however, that the basis of chemistry was in
fact laid by alchemy rather than medicine. During the crucial
period of Arabic and early Latin alchemy, it appears that
innovation owed more to nascent medical chemistry than to alchemy.
But those who explore the history of the science of matter, where
matter is considered on a wider basis than the modernchemist
understands the term, may find alchemy more rewarding. Numerous
Hermetic writers of previous centuries claimed that the aims of
their art could yet be achieved—indeed, that the true knowledge
had been repeatedly found and repeatedly lost. This is a matter of
judgment, but it can certainly be said that the modern chemist has
not attained the goal sought by the alchemist. For those who are
wedded to scientific chemistry, alchemy can have no further
interest. For those who seek the wider goal, which was also that
of the natural philosopher before the advent of “mechanical,”
“Newtonian,” or “modern” science, the search is still on.
Interpretations
Charlatanism was a prominent feature of European alchemy during
the 16th century, and such monarchs as Rudolf II—even if they had
mainly themselves to blame—were not entirely without reason in
incarcerating some of their resident adepts. The picturesqueness
of this era, which also saw the birth of the modern science of
chemistry, has led many historians of chemistry to view alchemy in
general as a fraud.
Other historians of chemistry have attempted to differentiate the
good from the bad in alchemy, citing as good the discovery of new
substances and processes and the invention of new apparatus. Some
of this was certainly accomplished by alchemists (e.g., Maria),
but most of it is more justifiably ascribed to early pharmacists.
Scholars generally agree that alchemy had something to dowith
chemistry, but the modern Hermetic holds that chemistry was the
handmaiden of alchemy, not the reverse.From this point of view the
development of modern chemistry involved the abandonment of the
true goal of the art.
Finally, a new interpretation was offered in the 1920s by the
Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who, following the earlier work of
the Austrian psychologist Herbert Silberer, judged alchemical
literature to be explicable in psychological terms. Noticing the
similarities between alchemical literature, particularly in its
reliance on bizarre symbolic illustrations, and the dreams and
fantasies of his patients, Jung viewed them as manifestations of a
“collective unconscious” (inherited disposition). Jung's theory,
still largely undeveloped, remains a challenge rather than an
explanation.
Robert P. Multhauf
Robert Andrew Gilbert
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Mysticism
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In general, a spiritual
quest for hidden truth or wisdom, the goal of which is union with
the divine or sacred (the transcendent realm). Forms of mysticism
are found in all major world religions, by analogy in the shamanic
and other ecstatic practices of nonliterate cultures, and in
secular experience.
In the 20th century mysticism (“the treasure hidden in the centres
of our souls”) has undergone a renewal of interest and
understanding and even amood of expectancy similar to that which
marked its role in previous eras. Such a mood stems in part from
the feeling of alienation that many persons experience in the
modern world. Put down as a religion of the elite, mysticism (or
the mystical faculty of perceiving transcendental reality) is said
by many to belong to all men, though few use it. The British
author Aldous Huxley has stated that “a totally unmystical world
would be a world totally blind and insane,” and the Indian poet
Rabindranath Tagore has noted that “Man has a feeling that he is
truly represented in something which exceeds himself.”
Nature and significance
The goal of mysticism is union with the divine or sacred. The path
to that union is usually developed by following four stages:
purgation (of bodily desires), purification (of the will),
illumination (of the mind), and unification (of one's will or
being with the divine). If “the object of man's existence is to be
a Man, that is, to re-establish the harmony which originally
belonged between him and the divinized state before the separation
took place which disturbed the equilibrium” (The Life and Doctrine
of Paracelsus), mysticism will always be a part of the way of
return to the source of being, a way of counteracting the
experience of alienation. Mysticism has always held—and
parapsychology also seems to suggest—that the discovery of a
nonphysical element in man's personality is of utmost significance
in his quest for equilibrium in a world of apparent chaos.
Mysticism's apparent denial, or self-negating, is part of a
psychological process or strategy that does not really deny the
person. In spite of its lunatic fringe, the maturer forms of
mysticism satisfy the claims of rationality, ecstasy, and
righteousness.
There is obviously something nonmental, alogical, paradoxical, and
unpredictable about the mystical phenomenon, but it is not,
therefore, irrational or antirationalor “religion without
thought.” Rather, as Zen (Buddhist intuitive sect) masters say, it
is knowledge of the most adequate kind, only it cannot be
expressed in words. If there is a mystery about mystical
experience, it is something it shares with life and consciousness.
Mysticism, a form of living in depth, indicates that man, a
meeting ground of various levels of reality, is more than
one-dimensional. Despite the interaction and correspondence
between levels—“What is below is like what is above; what is above
is like what is below” (Tabula Smaragdina, “Emerald Tablet,”a work
on alchemy attributed to Hermes Trismegistus)—theyare not to be
equated or confused. At once a praxis (technique) and a gnosis
(esoteric knowledge), mysticism consists of a way or discipline.
The relationship of the religion of faith to mysticism (“personal
religion raised to the highest power”) is ambiguous, a mixture of
respect and misgivings. Though mysticism may be associated with
religion, it need not be. The mystic often represents a type that
the religious institution (e.g., church) does not and cannot
produce and does not know what to do with if and when one appears.
As William Ralph Inge, an English theologian, commented,
“institutionalism and mysticism have been uneasy bedfellows.”
Although mysticism has been the core of Hinduism and Buddhism, it
has been little more than a minor strand—and, frequently, a
disturbing element—in Judaism, Christianity, and Islām. As the
15th- to 16th-century Italian political philosopher Niccolò
Machiavelli had noted of the 13th-century Christian monastic
leaders St. Francis and St. Dominic, they had saved religion but
destroyed the church.
The founders of religion may have been incipient or advanced
mystics, but the inner compulsions of their experience have proved
less amenable to dogmas, creeds, and institutional restrictions,
which are bound to be outward and majority oriented. There are
religions of authority and the religion of the spirit. Thus, there
is a paradox: if the mystic minority is distrusted or maltreated,
religious life loses its sap; on the other hand, these “peculiar
people” do not easily fit into society, with the requirements of a
prescriptive community composed of less sensitive seekers of
safety and religious routine. Though no deeply religious person
can be without a touch of mysticism, and no mystic can be, in the
deepest sense, other than religious, the dialogue between mystics
and conventional religionists has been far from happy. From both
sides there is a constant need for restatement and revaluation, a
greater tolerance, a union of free men's worship. Though it
validates religion, mysticism also tends to escape the fetters of
organized religion.
Relation of mystical experience to other kinds of experience
Mysticism shares a common world with magic, theurgy (power of
persuading the supernatural), prayer, worship, religion,
metaphysics (transcendent levels of reality), and even science. It
may not be always easy to distinguish mysticism from these but its
approach and emphasis are different. Though there is an element of
magic, psychism, and the occult in much of what passes for
mysticism, it is not to be equated with a science of the unseen or
with voicesand visions. Powers of the occult (or siddhis) are
viewed as real, but they can also be dangerous and are not of
interest to genuine mystics, who have warned against their likely
misuse.
Prayer and worship may form part of mysticism, but they are viewed
as means and not as essence; also, they are usually continuations
of sensory experience, whereas mysticism is a pure unitary
consciousness, or a union with God. As for science, it is analytic
and discursive and expresses its findings in precise and abstract
formulas; mysticism, however, like poetry, depends more on
paradoxes and an unusual use of language. Philosophies may lead to
or follow from mysticism, but they are not the same. Nature
mysticism is another prominent variant, to which poets and artists
are particularly prone. This has often been described or dismissed
as pantheism (the divine in all) though it is perhaps other than a
simple assertion of identity.
Emotionalism and purified emotion are quite different.
Emotionalism, a kind of unsuccessful ecstasy, may arise from
unpurged elements in the being; it could also be a concession or
inability to hold the flow or touch from above. The natural state
of man and, even more, that of the true mystic is serene and not
agitated, not at the mercy of what the medieval mystical book The
Cloud of Unknowing calls “monkey tricks of the soul.” “Be still,
and still, and know.” Mysticism, among the many forms of
experience, confirms the claims of religion and is viewed as
providing a foretaste of the life after death.
Definitions of mysticism and mystical experience
Differences between mysticism and similar phenomena
To define is to limit, and no single definition will cover every
aspect of mysticism. Some have objected to the word itself and
believed that “enlightenment” or “illumination” might be better.
Though they meet, mysticism has to be distinguished from prophetic
religions as well as from shamanism (a belief system built around
psychic transformations). Working through chosen individuals—not
necessarily saints and chosen for no other reason than God'swill—prophetic
religions emphasize action to a far greater extent than most forms
of mysticism, with its penchant for inwardness and the beyond.
Though in ecstasy the barriers seem to disappear, in prophetism
God and man are rarely identified. Shamanism, a technique of
ecstasy generally found in Siberia and Central Asia but with
parallels in primitive society, provides a sort of correspondence
with thepurgative stage of mysticism (in which physical needs are
negated). The closeness to paranormal (or supernatural) phenomena
seems more pronounced, however, in shamanism. Both the shaman and
the mystic, as communicants with a world beyond normal experience,
reveal an identity of goal, if not of practice and content.
Basic patterns
Paradigmatic pronouncements in regard to mysticism poseproblems of
their own. The classic Indian formula—“that thou art,” tat tvam
asi (Chāndogya Upaniṣad, 6.9)—is hedgedin with the profoundest
ambiguity. The difficulty reappears in the thought of the medieval
Christian mystic Meister Eckehart, who had the church raising
questions for such unguarded statements as “The knower and the
known are one. God and I, we are one in knowledge” and “There is
no distinction between us.”
Mysticism may be defined as the belief in a third kind of
knowledge, the other two being sense knowledge and knowledge by
inference. Adolf Lasson has written:
The essence of Mysticism is the assertion of an intuition which
transcends the temporal categories of the understanding. . . .
Rationalism cannot conduct us to the essence of things; we
therefore need intellectualvision.
This same view was held by the 3rd-century-AD Greek philosopher
Plotinus. But the pattern misses the other dominant quality of
mystical experience—love, or union through love. The medieval,
theistic view of mysticism (as of religious life) was that it was
“a stretching out of the soul into God through the urge of love,
an experimental knowledge of God through unifying love.” Its other
name wasjoy, and the endeavour of the mystic to grasp the divine
essence or ultimate reality helped him to enjoy the blessedness of
actual communion with the highest. This was considered both a
science and an art. As a science (i.e., intuitive knowledge, or
the “science of ultimates”), mysticism is viewed as being able to
help in “the overcoming of creatureliness,” and also as being able
to maintain “the tendency to stress up to an extreme and
exaggerated point the non-rational aspect of religion.”
Reality, a kingdom of values, is viewed not as a faceless
infinite, an impersonal something or somewhat. If not an ego,it is
a being, and most mystics would call it God. Mysticism arises when
man tries to bring the urge toward a communion with God—a “Being
conceived as the supreme and ultimate reality,” according to the
British scholar William Ralph Inge—toward a higher consciousness
and being in relation with the other contents of his mind and
total personality, when he tries to realize the presence of the
living God in the soul and in nature or, more generally, in the
attempt to realize (in thought and feeling) the immanence of the
temporal in the eternal. A 19th-century scholar, Otto Pfleiderer,
indicated that religious mysticism is “the immediate feeling of
unity of the self with God; it is nothing, therefore, but the
fundamental feeling of religion, the religious life at its very
heart and centre.” Against such exclusive concentration the
British writer Richard Nettleship suggests a corrective element,
that of wholeness and symbolism. “Mysticism is the consciousness
that everything that we experience is an element, and only an
element, in fact, i.e. that in being what it is, it is symbolic of
something else.”
Introvertive mysticism
Certain forms of mysticism, however, would seem to strive toward a
naked encounter with the Whole or All, without and beyond symbols.
Of this kind of direct apprehension of the absolute, introvertive
mysticism offers examples from different times and traditions.
Instead of looking out, the gaze turns inward, toward the
unchanging, the undifferentiated “One without a second.” The
process by which this state is attained is by a blotting out or
suppression of all physical sensations—indeed, of the entire
empirical content of consciousness. Cittavṛttinirodha (“the
holding or stopping of the mind stuff”) was how the 2nd-century-BC
Indian mystic Patañjali described it. The model of introvertive
mysticism comes from the MāṇḍūkyaUpaniṣad:
The Fourth, [aspect of self] say the wise, . . . is not the
knowledge of the senses, nor is it relative knowledge, nor yet
inferential knowledge. Beyond the senses, beyond the
understanding, beyond all expression is The Fourth. It is pure
unitary consciousness wherein [all] awareness of the world and of
multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace. It
is the supreme good. It is One without a second. It is the Self.
(From The Upanishads, Breath of the Eternal; trans. by Swami
Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester.)
Other definitions and experiences of
mysticism
Such undifferentiated unity or union between the individual and
the supreme self is unacceptable to certain traditions and
temperaments. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber emphasized an
“I–Thou” relationship: “All real living is meeting,” and one Thou
cannot become It. But even his own “unforgettable experience” of
union he would explain as “illusory.” With a wider range, a
British scholar, R.C. Zaehner,has tried to establish different
kinds, or types, of mysticism: of isolation, the separation of
spirit and matter, eternity from time; pantheistic, or “pan-enhenic,”
in which the soul is the universe—all creaturely existence is one;
the theistic, in which the soul feels identified with God; and the
beatific, with its hope of deification when “the perishable puts
on the imperishable.”
Definitions of mysticism include a bewildering variety, ranging
from the biological through the psychological to the theological.
The origin of the word and certain of its features strongly
suggest the possibility that mysticism is the science of a hidden
life. But there is also a growing belief among 20th-century
scholars that “the people of the hidden”should not remain hidden
too long and should come out in the open, befitting an era of
“open development” and “open realization.” Some 20th-century
scientists, among them physicists, biologists, and
paleontologists, have shown a marked mystical bias. A biologist,
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, has confessed to “peak experiences” of a
great unity and liberation from ego boundary: “In moments of
scientific discovery I have an intuitive insight into a grand
design.” He finds no necessary opposition between the rational way
of thinking and intuitive experience culminating in what the
mystics have tried to express. Both have their place and may
coexist. Earlier there had been a sharp dichotomy between
scientific and mystical knowledge. The logic of levels may never
be amenable to analysis or intellectual understanding, but that is
not to deny the role of reason.
Attitudes toward mysticism since the middle of the 20th century
have been considerably modified by an awareness of subliminal
consciousness, extrasensory perceptions, and, above all, an
evolutionary perspective. The Roman Catholic paleontologist
Teilhard de Chardin asked if in an expanding universe mysticism
would not burst the limits of narrow cults and religious rigidity
and move toward an ecumenical future. In a larger view, mysticism
has not so much to be defined as renewed and redefined.
Universal types of mystical experience
Intellectual and contemplative forms
Mystical experience, which is centred in a seeking for unity,
admits of wide variations but falls into recognizable types: mild
and extreme, extrovertive and introvertive, and theistic and
nontheistic. Another well-known typology—corresponding to the
faculties of thinking, willing, and feeling—employs the Indian
formula, the respective ways of knowledge (jñāna ), works (karma
), and devotion (bhakti ). Claims have been made on behalf of
each, though maturer mystics have tried to accord to each its
place and also to arrive at a synthesis, as in the Bhagavadgītā
(Hindu sacred scripture). Depending on the powers of
discrimination, the intellectual or the contemplative type tries
to reach the Highest, the One, or the Godhead behind God. In its
approach toward the supreme identity it tends to be chary of
multiplicity, “to deny the world that it may find reality.”
Plotinus was “ashamed of being in the body.” In the 17th century,
Spinoza's nondenominational concept of intellectual love of God
revealed a sense of aloofness or isolation reminiscent of the
ancient Hindus.
Man, however, does not live by thought alone; to live is to work,
and faith without works is dead. The mystic injunction is that
works should be done in a spirit of nonattachment, with the ego
sense (I, the doer) taken away. In a larger sense, not merely the
doing of religious chores but all activity is offered to the
Supreme. All life, according to many mystics, turns into a
sacrament. “All life is yoga (meditation practice).”
Devotional forms
For the emotional type of person there is the mysticism of love
and devotion. A theistic attitude, or devotional mysticism,
depends upon mutual attraction. In the words ofa Ṣūfī poet, “I
sought Him for thirty years, I thought that it was I who desired
Him, but no, it was He who desired me.” The path of devotion
includes the rituals of prayer, worship, and adoration, which—if
done with sincerity, inwardness, andunderstanding—can bring some
of the most rewarding treasures of the religious life, including
ecstasy (or samādhi). There is a paradox and a danger here: the
paradoxof avoiding the loss of personality, the danger of
self-indulgence.
Ecstatic and erotic forms
Also, in an unpurified medium, the experiences may and do give
rise to erotic feelings, a fact observed and duly warned against
by the wiser spirits and the Fathers of the Church. (Zen Buddhism
avoids both the overly personal and erotic suggestions.) Sometimes
the distinction between eros (Greek: “erotic love”) or kāma
(Sanskrit: “sexual love”) and agapē (Greek: “a higher love”) or
prema (Sanskrit: “higher love”) can be thin. In the Indian
tradition the Vaiṣnava (devotional) and Tantric (sexual)
experiments were, in their apparently different ways, bold and
honest attempts at sublimation, though the majority of these
experiments turned out to be failures and disasters.
The same fate is likely to overtake the craze for psychedelic
drugs and pharmacological aids to visionary experience—practices
that are by no means new. A yogic writer, Patañjali, speaks of the
use of auṣadhi (a medicinal herb) as a means to yogic experience,
and the Vedas (Hindu scriptures) and Tantras (Hindu occultic
writings) refer to wine as part of worship and the initiatory
rites. The Greek Mysteries (religions of salvation) sometimes used
sedativesand stimulants. Primarily meant to remove ethical,
social, and mental inhibitions and to open up the subconscious no
less than the subliminal, these techniques, as a rule, were
frowned upon, even though those who took the help of such
artificial aids had undergone prior training and discipline.
A whole new life-style and vocabulary have developed around
medicinal mysticism in the 20th century. Peyote, mescaline,
hashish, marijuana, Cannabis indica, LSD, and other similar
products have become familiar to much of the world's population.
The visions induced by such aids at best resemble the extrovertive
type and cannot be easily equated with genuine mystical
experience. According to taste, temperament, and tradition, the
experience—a parodyof creative spontaneity—may come from
unexpected sources. In any case, utilizing such medicinal aids
rarely achieves union with Self or God, and no permanent change of
personality (in the mystical sense) has been known to occur.
Goal of mystical experience and mysticism
Experience of the divine or sacred
The goal of mysticism is “ghostly,” a state or condition in which
the soul is “one'd with God,” according to the Western medieval
work The Cloud of Unknowing. This “one-ing” is because all men,
according to mystics, are called to their origin. Self-realization
is basically one in intent with the injunctions of the Greek
Mysteries: “Know thyself.” This knowing, union, or communion with
the divine and the sacredis of the essence of the ascent of man.
As the only answer to the problem of identity, mystics look upon
it as the final end, the summum bonum. At the journey's end waits
the knowledge by identity. The direct, intuitive perception is
more akin to revealed religion than to science and philosophy,
though it is of itself a science, and philosophies spring from as
well as lead to it.
Goal of mystical experience and mysticism
Union with the divine or sacred
In the movement toward the goal there are, naturally, stages and
processes, marked differently in different traditions.
Thediscipline of prayer, purification, and contemplation
culminates in the highest wordless union with the divine and the
ultimate. As the process unfolds itself along the mystic way, an
alteration of personality—a conversion, if not
reintegration—occurs. The unregenerate “old man” (in Christianity)
is replaced by the new being. The “twice born” (in Hinduism)
becomes more than a metaphor or sacrosanct social arrangement.
There is a change of level and mind. Oneof the aims or methods of
mysticism is to make possible this change and conversion, a shift
from the profane to the sacred, from “here” to “there”: “Lead me
from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to
immortality” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad). Before the transition, or
the “great passage,” is completed, however, the individual or
pilgrim feels successively or simultaneously his oneness with
nature, with people, and with things—an extension of awareness or
expanded selfhood to which no limits can be assigned. Cosmic
consciousness is thus a stage in a progressive self-discovery.
Experience of the universal
The nature of the goal, however, introduces a paradox. Like every
other aim and activity, mysticism operates in a historical
context. Yet, sooner or later, it also tends to reveal a timeless
stance. The mystic is both in and out of time. The eternal now is
a kind of release from the temporal order. Such a release may lead
to a shift from the local to the universal, to a growing sense of
unity of all experience. Though not a declared or conscious aim,
this result could be looked upon as a not unworthy goal as well as
a pragmatic standard.
To cure man of a provincialism of the spirit, from which more
people suffer than either know or admit it, is one of the goals of
a mysticism that has come of age. The true mystic is a
cosmopolitan. In man's many-sided growth toward the real, asane
and mature mysticism leads to an ecumenical insight and
obligation. Local colour, particulars, and uniqueness will not
cease, but, in the perspective of the future and of wholeness, the
universal alone will have survival value.
Experience of oneness with people
The apotheosized (divinized) field of consciousness is mysticism's
ultimate goal and gift to the life of an evolving humanity. It
alone is fitted to mediate between the anguish of existence and
the serenity of essence, between saṃsāra (“cycle of birth and
rebirth”) and Nirvāṇa (the State of Bliss). According to an
American Roman Catholic mystic, Thomas Merton, “The spiritual
anguish of man has no cure but mysticism.”
Though the mystic goal may seem to be tied to a transcendent
reality, this does not mean a sundering of all relations and
responsibilities. On the contrary, it is the guarantee of a set of
altered relationships and a rehabilitation of what may be called
the higher reason. Intuitions that sink into private fancy and
morbidity have a short life to live. As for the mystic's “yonder,”
it is not spatially or posthumously remote but rather refers to a
different order of reality and consciousness. The healthier forms
of mysticism do not abjure action or the claims of love. It is an
ancient maxim that one becomes what one loves. This is how the
psychic birth repeats itself in the mystic soul, as stated, for
example, by Meister Eckehart, a medieval German mystic: “It is
more worthy of God that he should be born spiritually of every
virgin, or of every good soul, than that he should have been born
physically of Mary.”
The mystic is not always amorous of the beyond, leaving an
unredeemed world to its own ways. Not escape but, rather, victory
is mysticism's inner urge and promise. The more sober among the
mystics do not merely withdraw; they also return to the base and
attempt the ancient alchemy, the transformation of men. A solitary
salvation does not satisfy either head or heart.
Mystical relationship between man and the sacred
Nature of the relationship
Within man is the soul of the holy, said Ralph Waldo Emersonin the
19th century. This is true of society, too. As the French
sociologist Émile Durkheim saw it, the sacred is but a personified
society. Mysticism, one might say, is the art and science of the
holy. Theologically, it is but “the experience of the Holy Ghost,
. . . the realization of the Spirit of Holiness.” As the opposite
of the profane and as a distinct and irreducible quality of the
religious and mystical life, the sacred has always existed. It is
indeed a mark of the real, and, when the German theologian Rudolf
Otto isolated the sacred as a “quite distinctive category” of
mystical apprehension, he had no lack of evidence. The emphasis,
however, was not unanimously accepted. Some, like Inge, thought
the sacred might as well be elicited from such ultimate values as
“truth, goodness, and beauty.”
According to the respective world view, the interpretation or
emphasis varies, but the universal core remains unaffected. The
sacred is in its own way a coherent system, though not rational.
The dualists no less than the theists insist on the unqualified
and irreducible “otherness,” the unbridgeable gulf, even when one
speaks of union or communion. It is the distance that preserves
the sacred.
Christian mystics, who often speak of “union with God,” generally
do not imply identity with the divine, since this might lead to
heresy. The 16th-century Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Avila could
write with impunity: “It is plain enough what unity is—two
distinct things becoming one.” But most others could not be so
plain and had to use special strategy to cover up traces of
possible deviation from what was permissible. Even if there had
been a semblance of interpenetration between man and the divine,
there could beno substantial identity. “Each of these,” wrote the
medieval Dutch mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck, “keeps its own nature.
There is here a great distinction, for the creature never becomes
God, nor does God ever become the creature.” The same doctrine is
preached in the Middle Ages by the mystic Heinrich Suso:
In this merging of itself in God the spirit passes away and yet
not wholly;
for it receives indeed some attribute of God, but it does not
become God by nature.
It is still something that has been created out of nothing, and
continues to be this everlastingly.
Identification of man with the divine, according to many the heart
of mysticism, raises problems from other points of view as well.
Pantheism, which asserts that all is God (or Nature), and God (or
Nature) is all, is looked upon as a false doctrine in many
religions. To John Calvin's leading question—“The Devil also must
be God, substantially?”—theunsuspecting Spanish theologian and
physician Michael Servetus had answered smilingly: “Do you doubt
it?” The opinion cost him his life. The Hindus' Upaniṣads,
however, insist on this identity in passage after passage. Closely
looked at, this may not be simple pantheism but an identity in
difference, a paradox present in even Vedānta (a Hindu monistic
system). Islām has been fiercely critical of these claims of
oneness and the medieval mystic al-Ḥallāj had to pay with his life
(922) for making the unorthodox announcement of his identity with
the divine: “Anā al-ḥaqq” (“I am the Truth”). He was not the only
one to speak in this manner. The more moderate Maḥmūd Shabestarī
had reported an experience (c. 1320):
In God there is no duality. In that presence “I” and “we”and
“you” do not exist.
“I” and “you” and “we” and “He” become one.
Since in the unity there is no distinction, the Quest and the Way
and the Seeker become one.
But Muslim theologians as a rule tended to dismiss those who
“boasted of union with the Deity” as merely “babblers.” In the
Jewish tradition, it is generally considered improper and
indecorous for any man to give a personal account of his own
mystical experience.
Mystical relationship between man and the sacred
Awe and mystery
Behind these and other interpretations, the reality of the
sacred—and its persistent ambiguity—appears to be too trueto be
denied or ignored. Awe may or may not be the best part of man, but
without it a necessary dimension is left out of theimage of man,
the dimension of what Otto called the mysterium tremendum et
fascinans (“the mystery that repels and attracts”). The mystics
are loath to leave this dimension out and, directly or indirectly,
insist on its inclusion. The reason was suggested in the 5th–4th
centuriesBC by the Greek philosopher Plato, who maintained that
the divine was the head and root of man. The mystic's is the eye,
the third eye, with which the world beholds itself and knows
itself divine. Though the vision is partial and passes away, there
could be an ideal state of unbroken awareness of the Real
Presence, an epiphany (manifestation).
According to the mystical point of view, the rational content of
religion is not enough; it is not of the essence of religion. The
sense of the holy, the mark of man's encounter with the “other,”
is usually invested with an ethical aura or undertone. This is how
most people understand it. But this lowers its potency
considerably. There is clearly an overplus,below good and evil and
beyond good and evil. The numinous(spiritual) is not altogether
free of the ominous. Thus, thoughthe holy may be discussed, it
cannot be well defined. It can, however, be experienced and
evoked, as part of that wordless mystery that man must face—even
if he is not able to explain satisfactorily—in his journey toward
the real. This may happen early or late in his mystical journey,
and the notion of evolution may not be applied to it uniformly.
The holy is not always and altogether a pleasant experience.Often
shrouded in a fear that is more than fear, it is an inward dread
and shuddering. The holy as awe-inspiring can be found in the
Indian pantheon in such figures as Rudra andKālī, the dark and
wrathful faces of the divine, in which—in a collapse of
finitude—majesty and unapproachability are inexplicably blended.
The feeling of being consumed in the presence of the divine is a
profound expression of man's relation to the holy. As for the
ultimate mystical identity withthe Supreme, Self, God, or the
Unknowable, that also confirms the nonrational and suprarational
nature of the experience in which ego, logic, and grammar are
shattered alike. A frightful and traumatic adventure, not unlike
the Greek Mystery rites, it can erupt at every crisis, break
through an insulated universe. A clergyman cited by William
Starbuck, an American psychologist of religion, spoke of having
experienced
a [silent] presence [in the night], all the more felt because
it was not seen.
I could not any more have doubted that He was there than that I
was.
Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the
two.
Diminution apart, the holy generally gives rise to a sense of
energy and urgency, which may take different forms. At a higher
level, the consuming fire of love reported by mystics could be an
extension or refinement of the same energy, for “Love is nothing
else than quenched Wrath.” The “nothing else” may be an
exaggeration, but such paradoxes of the religious life—e.g., the
unity of opposites—meet man at every turn. The void in Buddhism,
like the nothing in Western mysticism, may be a numinous ideogram
of the “wholly other.”
Means and modes of the relationship
As means to meet the divine, some mystics have taken recourse to
fasting, breath control, meditation, ecstasy, simplification,
autosuggestion, and monoideism (absorption in a single idea).
Rituals, in some cases, provide contact. An old method is the via
negativa (“negative way”): “the emptier your mind, the more
susceptible are you to the working of the presence.” In other
words, the impediments have to be removed. Among other
indirect—but no less effective—means would be the shock therapy of
the blood-curdling images that one notes in Tibetan iconographyand
symbology, which have their links with the archaic and the
chthonian (infernal). On more negotiable levels, works of art—as
far apart as Sung (Chinese) paintings, Gothic cathedrals, medieval
temple architecture in India, the Egyptian Sphinx, music such as
the Missa Solemnis or Sanskrit (Hindu) hymns—are accredited
conductors of the numinous. Darkness, solitude, silence, and
emptiness are sometimes enough for the sensitive soul, and the
doors of perception open to a wider world beyond. A wide stretch
of land or cranes flying against a cloudy sky were enough to throw
the 19th-century Indian saint Ramakrishna into transport. But,
always, it is less the object than something seen through the
object, a bodiless presence, that forms the essence. Without
symbols in which the holy is embodied, the experience of the holy
vanishes.
Though it creates a sense of awe and exaltation, the idea of the
holy also produces a mood of dependence, leading to action aimed
at appeasing the deity or the powers behind the universe. At
first, the policy of appeasement may have been inspired by fear
and hope of reward. But, since the deityis not ultimately
malevolent, it could also evolve into an idea of grace. Mystical
theology, both in the East and in the West, has sometimes been
divided over the issue whether the union with the divine is the
result of one's unaided effort or supernatural grace.
The approaches to the divine or sacred are various rather than
uniform. Moving through physical, intellectual, devotional, and
symbolic rituals and disciplines, it moves toward the ultimate
goal: the annihilation of the self, unio mystica (“mystical
union”) in Western Christianity, moka (“salvation”) in Hinduism,
Nirvāa (the State of Bliss) in Buddhism, and fanā (“the snuffing
out of self”) in Islām. Though the words differ, the experiences
are perhaps allied, if not the same. In a ūfī (Islāmic mystical)
poem the divine voice speaks exultantly:
Annihilate yourself gloriously and joyously in Me,
and in Me you shall find yourself;
so long as you do not realize your nothingness,
you will never reach the heights of immortality.
The description could as well be applied to the Buddhist śūnyatā
(“void”) and the self-negating of the Christian mystics.
The ultimate has been, as a rule, thought of as something “other”
and apart, even if in mysticism what is sought is union or unity.
Hierophany (manifestation of the holy) implies a choice and a
distinction: between that which manifests the sacred and that
which does not. Also, though a hierophany may represent a historic
event that does not minimize its larger validity (and in any
culture there may be local as well as general hierophanies), a
hierarchy is not unlikely. On occasions, the sacred may manifest
itself in something profane. Ideally, to a mystic, “the integrated
quality of the cosmos is itself a hierophany.” From this follows
the possibility of consecrating the whole of life, so that by
sacramental transformation, at any moment, “the flash of a
trembling glance” may be inserted into the great time and project
the man amphibian (having dual life) into eternity. Deification,
without doubt one of the goals of the mystical life and a
fundamental concept of orthodox Christendom, is part of the
dialectics of the sacred. The alchemic undertone, in the man–God
idea, has never wholly been extinguished. But, as part of the
continuing paradox, one should also mention a resistance to the
sacred. Depending on the ambivalence of the response to the
sacred, which at once repels and attracts, the resistance is
ultimately a flight from reality.
Semantics and symbolism in mystical experience
Union of opposites
Mystical experience is flanked with a communication hazard,a
“polar identity.” The linguistic liberties and extravagances are
part of the logical impossibility of having to describe oneorder
of experience in terms of another. Hence, the rhetoric of
mysticism is largely one of symbols and paradoxes. The most
striking of the strategies, as the medieval Christian scholar
Nicholas of Cusa put it, is coincidentia oppositorum (“union of
opposites”). Since the opposites coincide without ceasing to be
themselves, this also becomes an acceptable definition of God, or
the nature of the Ground. God, said Heracleitus, is day and night,
summer and winter, war and peace, and satiety and hunger—all
opposites. A 5th- to 6th-century-AD Christian mystical writer
called Dionysius theAreopagite advised people to
strip off all questions in order that we may attain a naked
knowledge of that
Unknowing and that we may begin to see the superessential
Darkness which is hidden by the light that is in existent things.
This use of language or view of things is obviously not normal.
Old myths and archetypes are full of examples of such dichotomy.
The Zoroastrian tradition has Ormazd (the Good Lord) and Ahriman
(the Lie); the Gnostic myth speaks of Christ and Satan as
brothers; and the same idea is found in the Vedas, where the suras
(“good spirits”) and asuras (“badspirits”) are shown to be
cousins. In a different context there is the androgyne
(“man–woman”), the ardhanārīśvara in Indian myth. As for the Hindu
jīvanmukta, the liberated individual, he is liberated from
duality. This is also part of what the Lord Kṛṣṇa (Krishna) said,
when he asked the hero Arjuna to rise above the three guṇas
(“modes”). The Tantras refer to the union of Śiva (a Hindu god)
and Śakti (Śiva's consort) in one's own body and consciousness and
provide appropriate practices to this end. The Chinese had their
Yangand Yin (opposites), the Tibetans their Yab and Yum
(opposites), and Buddhism its saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa as aspects of
the Same. In Prajñāpāramitā, a Mahāyāna (northern Buddhist) text,
the Illumined Ones are supposed toengage in a laughter in which
all distinctions cease to exist.
Emptiness and fullness
Mystical experience permits complementary and apparently
contradictory methods of expression: via affirmativa (“affirmative
way,” or fullness) as well as via negativa (“negative way,” or
emptiness). For fullness and freedom both are needed. This is
because the reality affirmed contains its own opposite. In fact,
the apparent negations—neti-neti, (“not this, not that”) of the
Upaniṣads, the śūnyatā (“void”) of the Buddhists, or the Darkness
beyond Light of Dionysius—perform a double function. They state a
condition of being as well as its utter freedom from every
determination. As Dionysius explains it, “While God possesses all
the attributes of the universe, being the universal Cause, yet in
a stricter sense He does not possess them, since He transcends
them all.” The “negative way,” a way of turning the back upon the
finite, is part of an old, positive, verified insight, at once the
last freedom and, as faras many men are concerned, perhaps a lost
freedom.
Symbolism of divine messengers
Experiences relating to these realities could not at any time have
been common or widespread and must have come mainly through
consecrated channels: yogis (Hindu meditation practitioners),
gurus (Hindu teachers), prophets, mystics, saints, and spiritual
masters of the inner life. This channelling through human agents
has given rise to a host ofdivine messengers: a hierarchy of
angels, intermediaries, and incarnations, singly or in succession.
This manner of approaching or receiving the divine or holy is the
justification of avatars (incarnations of God) and the man–God in
various religions. “God was made man in order that man might be
made God.”
The mystical experience is a renovation of life at its root; that
is, of the forgotten language of symbols and symbolism.The mystic
participates in two worlds at once, the profane and the sacred.
Rituals and ceremonies become the means of integration with a
higher reality and consciousness. But symbols cannot be
deliberately manufactured, nor do they make an arbitrary system.
“Being for ever communicating itsessence” is the source of their
abundance, potency, and unity. Even a nontheistic mysticism, such
as Buddhism, hasdeployed symbols freely, of which perhaps the most
well-known is the formula oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ (“the jewel inthe
lotus”).
Symbols point beyond themselves, participate in that to which they
point, open up levels of reality that are otherwise closed to man,
unlock dimensions and elements of the soul that correspond to
reality and cannot be produced intentionally or invented. Symbols
may be inner or outer. To some, nature symbolism comes easily.
Symbolism of love and marriage
A far more risky but inescapable mode of symbolism than pantheism
has been the use of the analogy of human love and marriage. Not
all the mystics have been deniers or champions of repression. The
soul, it may be added, is always feminine. The Christian mystics
St. Bernard and St. John of the Cross, the Islāmic Ṣūfī poets, and
the Hindu Dravidian and Vaiṣṇava saints could teach lovers. Not
only the church but the faithful are viewed to be among Christ's
brides and speak the language of love. “O that you would kiss me
with the kisses of your mouth!” The speaker is the bride,
thirsting for God. St. Bernard has shown that through carnal,
mercenary, filial, and nuptial love the life of man moves toward
the mystery of grace and union.
The hermeneutics (critical interpretation) of “the
Bridegroom-Word” is that “the soul's return is her conversion to
the Word, to be reformed through Him and to be conformed to Him.”
In the West, the roots of the tradition go back to the Song of
Solomon in the Bible, not, perhaps, thebest of models. The Hindu
līlās (“love plays”) of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa have been freely
misunderstood in spite of the repeated disclaimer that the events
described are not facts but symbols. The charge of immorality has
been loudest against the Tantras, which had made a subtle, bold,
and strictexperiment in sublimation, whose inner sense may fail to
be intelligible even to those who are attracted by it. That the
marriage symbol should find a readier response among the brides of
Christ is only to be expected. In The Interior Castle ,St. Teresa
has been fairly outspoken: “He has bound Himselfto her as firmly
as two human beings are joined in wedlock and will never separate
Himself from her.” But this was not a monopoly of nuns. The
medieval theologian Richard of Saint-Victor has described as well
as explained the “steep stairway of love” made up of betrothal,
marriage, wedlock, and fruitfulness. In a slightly different set
of symbols, St. John of the Cross states that after the soul has
driven away from itself all that is contrary to the divine will,
it is “transformed in God by love.”
Symbolism of the journey
Another prominent mystical symbol is the way, quest, or
pilgrimage. Having lost the paradise of his soul, man, as the
16th-century physician and alchemist Paracelsus says, is a
wanderer ever. A Christian monk, St. Bonaventure, has written
about the mind's journey to God, and an English mystic, Walter
Hilton, has described the Christian journey thus:
Right as a true pilgrim going to Jerusalem, leaveth behind him
his house and land, wife and child,
and maketh himself poor and bare from all that he hath, that he
may go lightly without letting:
right so, if thou wilt be a ghostly pilgrim, thou shalt make
thyself naked from all that thou w
ouldst be at Jerusalem, and at none other place but there.
(From The Ladder of Perfection .)
According to the Ṣūfīs, the pilgrim is the perceptive or
intuitional sense of man. Aided by attraction, devotion, and
elevation, the journey leads, by way of many a wine shop (divine
love), to the tavern (illumination), “the journey to God in God.”
In his Conference of the Birds , the 12th-centuryPersian Ṣūfī ʿAṭṭār
refers to the seven valleys en route to the king's hidden palace:
the valleys of quest, love, knowledge, detachment, unity,
amazement, and, finally, annihilation. Others have gone further
and spoken of “annihilation of annihilation.” In the symbolic
universe, denudation may be viewed as a way of fullness.
Men are called to the journey inward or upward because of a homing
instinct. Eckehart put the matter simply: earth cannot escape the
sky. All men are called to their origin, which implies God's need
of man. A mutual attraction, the tendency toward the Divine cannot
be stifled indefinitely, since it returns after every banishment.
For some, paradise is not enough; it is too localized and perhaps
perishable. They strain toward eternity, a leap beyond history
into the incommunicable forever. A white radiance to some, to
othersit is “a ring of pure and bright light.” The Veda speaks of
the kālahahaṃsa (“the swan of time”) winging back to the sky and
nest, eternity.
Essentially a way of return, ricorso, the final aim of mysticism
is transfiguration. But
by what alchemy shall this lead of mortality be turned into
that gold of divine Being?
But if they are not in their essence contraries?
If they are manifestations of one Reality, identical in substance?
Then indeed a divine transmutation becomes conceivable.
(From Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine .)
This is a clue to the Vedas, those hymns to the mystic fire and
the inner sense of sacrifice, burning forever on “the altarMind.”
Hence the abundance of solar and fire images: birds of fire, the
fire of the sun, and the isles of fire. The symbol systems of the
world religions and mysticisms are profound illuminations of the
human-divine mystery. Be it the cave of the heart or the lotus of
the heart, “the dwelling place of that which is the Essence of the
universe,” the third eye, or the eye of wisdom—the symbols all
refer back to the wisdom entering the aspiring soul on its way
toward progressive self-understanding. “I saw my Lord with the Eye
of the Heart. I said, ‘Who art Thou?' and he answered, ‘thou'.”
Throughout the ages man, homo symbolicus, has been but exploring
the endless miracle of being. Mystical experience is a living
encyclopaedia of equations and correspondences, pointer readings
that partly reveal and partly conceal.
Psychological aspects of mysticism
Awareness
Mysticism has been accused of passing off psychological states for
metaphysical statements. But the psychological base has never been
questioned seriously. It would, however, be proper to call it
autology (the science of self). If the word psychology is to be
retained, it must be in the original sense of the word now
discarded. The contrast between the old and the new has been well
expressed by theRussian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky:
Never in history has psychology stood at so low a level,
lost all touch with its origin and meaning, perhaps the oldest
science and, unfortunately,
in its most essential features, a forgotten science, the science
of [man's] possible evolution.
Mysticism is that science in which the psychology of man mingles
with the psychology of God. The major change or orientation is
from the level of the profane to the sacred, an awareness of the
divine in man and outside. The source and goal of such a
psychology was revealed in the 18th-century Methodist leader John
Wesley's dying words: “The best of all is this, that God is with
us.”
A mark of the mystic life is the great access of energy and
enlarged awareness, so much so that the man who obtains the vision
becomes, as it were, another being. Mansions of the mind, maqām
(Arabic: “place”), and bhūmi (Sanskrit: “land”), open up to the
gaze of the initiate, a wayfarer of the worlds. This means a
renewal or conversion until one knows that the earth alone is not
man's teacher. The mystic begins to draw his sustenance from
supersensuous sources. He has “drunk the Infinite like a giant's
wine,” and a hidden bliss, knowledge, and power begin to sweep
through the gates of his senses.
Role of identification
The state of energizing is facilitated by controlled attention. It
is customary to fix the mind on some object or idea, some focus of
contemplation. According to the Indian formula, to worship God one
must become like him (devam bhutva devam yajet). Exercises,
physical no less than mental, including methods of worship and
prayer, have been developed to this end until one becomes what one
contemplates. The ranges and creative aspects of the mind are part
of the psychology of the mystics and one of the oldest traditions
of mankind. The old Indian psychology divided consciousness into
three provinces: waking state (jāgrat), dream state (svapna), and
sleep state (suṣupti), andadded a fourth (turīya), which is the
consciousness of man's pure self-existence or being. The fourfold
scale represents the degrees of the ladder of being by which man
climbs back to the source, the absolute divine. The change, from
“here” to “there,” is not an uneventful process. There come dry
periods, deviations, violent alterations, and temptations. If
there are raptures and blue heavens, there are python agonies and
absolute abandonments, howling deserts and “dark nights of the
soul” to go through. Tears of joy, horripilation (bristling of the
hair), stigmata (bodily marks or pains), and parapsychological
phenomena have been known to develop.
The earlier phases of a naturalistic psychology had no qualms in
relegating most of these experiences to the scrap heap of obsolete
and archaic vanities, disorders, and morbidities—in a word,
hallucination. One reason for such overall denigration was that
complacent aliens to the mystical life did not care to distinguish
between abnormal and supernormal phenomena. To them all were the
same, at best some kind of religious sport. An American Quaker
philosopher, Rufus Jones, has noted that psychology, as
20th-century man knows it, is empirical and possesses no ladder by
which it can transcend the empirical order.
According to mystics, most men live in a prison, the walls thick
with ego, the senses, and restricting interests. But some
prisoners develop a passion to scale the walls and move toward an
unwalled horizon, an adventure of ideas, if nothing more. Thus,
the hypothesis that there might be cherubs and seraphs (angels of
knowledge and of love) who call and guide men in the upward way is
difficult to ignore. But if the distinction between love and
knowledge is at all valid, the achievements of men would seem to
be the products of love, since, as Aristotle maintained, the
intellect by itself moves nothing. Without “the driving and
drawing that we feel in the heart,” mysticism would lack power and
might sink into quiescence, as has sometimes happened. To will
what the Supreme wills is the supreme secret, the primum mobile.
“Nothing burns in hell but self-will” (Theologia Germanica, ch.
34). The mystic approaches this knowledge and mobility even when
he is compelled to withdraw from society for long or short
periods. But withdrawal without return is not complete. As
scientists of the psyche, the mystics insisted on the primacy of
the inner factors. Modern psychoanalysis claims to have made
available to man's knowledge areas of darkness beneath the
conscious levels. However revealing these evidences of the ape and
the tiger, psychoanalysis is debarred from understanding the
superconscious, and it is viewed by mystics as being less than
correct in its reading of the irrational in man. The inescapable
pessimism of the psychoanalytic conclusion stands in contrast to
the possibilities of self-development and sublimation to which
mystics have always pointed.
Among other discoveries on the mystical way is that of
ambivalence, or the alternate ways of looking at the world:
temporal as against eternal. The double vision characterizes the
saint whose life forms a point of intersection between time and
timelessness. Mystical psychology assumes a transcendental
faculty, in the hiddenness, beyond the threshold. It is committed
to a breakthrough and could never have sustained itself without
constant verification. In many ways a guarded secret, meant for
the competent few, the experiment has hazards and could upset any
but the most disciplined. The rousing of energy, the infusion of
grace, and confrontation of the levels of reality create tensions
and difficulties. Hence, the insistence on moderation and balance
on all hands. “The higher the love, the greater the pain,” a voice
had consoled a 13th-century German mystic, Mechthild von
Magdeburg. “Believe me, children,” wrote a 14th-century German
mystic, Johann Tauler, “one who would know much about these
matters would often have to keep to his bed, for his bodily frame
could not support this.”
These upheavals of “mystic ill health” are part of a developing
consciousness that has to move through and adjust to habits of
inertia and resistance in the system and to an inability to
support the emerging powers and their demands. A little imbalance
now and then should take no oneby surprise. The possibility of
ranges of consciousness without thinking is one of the basic
premises of yogic or mystical psychology. It constitutes a
confutation of the formula of the 17th-century French philosopher
René Descartes: cogito ergo sum (“I think; therefore, I am”).
Beingcan exist without cogito (or ratio, “reason”) in a direct
awareness of things that is the function of intuition, prajñā.
Systematic exposition of mystical experience
Attempts of mystics to record the nature of their experiences
The theory or interpretation of mysticism is not mysticism.
Generally, there are two sides to the theory: philosophical and
practical. There may be another: confessional and justificatory.
Though some mystics have been content to record what happened,
others have worked out manuals of praxis (techniques), or sādhāna.
As a rule, mystical method, experience, and exegesis cannot be
sharply set apart from one another. However ineffable, raids on
the inarticulate and expositions of the same have not ceased. The
expositions have formed part of a particular framework of culture,
tradition, and temperament. The 8th- to 9th-century-AD Indian
philosopher Śaṅkara and the 16th-century Spanish mystic St. John
of the Cross are not likely to talk in the same tone or accent.
However universal in intent, all expositions tend to be localized.
The study of comparative mysticism as well as the spirit of the
age make it possible and perhaps mandatory for modern man to move
toward an open and untethered mysticism, the “ocean of tomorrow.”
Indications of this change in attitude and emphasis are not
wanting, especially in the 20th-century writings of the Indian
mystic philosopher Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin, who
represent something totally new but allied. R.C. Zaehner has
explained that both, though unknown to each other,
not only accepted the theory of evolution, but enthusiastically
acclaimed it, indeed were almost obsessed with it.
Both were profoundly influenced by Bergson, both were deeply
dissatisfied with organized religion,
and both were vitally concerned not only with individual salvation
or “liberation,”
but also with the collective salvation of mankind.
The value and meaning of mystical experience
Among the attempts to explain the value and meaning of mystical
experience, a few features may be indicated. Claimed to be a
guarantee for order and reconciliation, mysticism does not take
away mystery from the world, nor is it essentially irrational.
Though in their penchant for the beyond or God-intoxication some
mystics have inclined to reject the world, the maturer variety has
not divided the world of spirit and matter but has tried to
mediate between spirit and matter with the help of emanations,
correspondences, and a hierarchy of the real. As a giver of life,
mysticism is meant to fulfill and not to destroy. Thus, itneed not
be world negating.
Pointing to a scale of senses and levels of mind, mysticism
provides an escape from a life of uninspired existence. It
magnifies man and gives him a hope and destiny to fulfill. With
its abiding sense of the “more,” mysticism may be called the
religion of man or the religion of maturity. It offers not
irrational developments or inducements but the working out of
inherent potentials. Evolution, according to mystics, isnot yet
ended.
The mystical life is not for those who are well adjusted and other
oriented. In Ramakrishna's homely phrase, at some point or other
one has to “take the plunge.” A change so radical calls for a kind
of attention other than what most people seem prepared to give. To
make it his supreme business one must have a call to holy living.
He who seeks the divine must consecrate himself to God and to God
only.
Problems of communication and understanding
The problem of communication, of tidings from another country, is
obvious. Transvaluation of values is not easy to accept, adjust
to, or express. The dialogue between mystical and other pursuits
is an unsolved problem. After he had undergone a spiritual
experience, the 13th-century Christian philosopher St. Thomas
Aquinas is reported to have said, “I have seen that which makes
all that I have written and taught look small to me. My writing
days are over.” This, fromthe author of the voluminous Summa
theologica (“Summary of Theology”), is not without its importance.
Even if it is difficult to describe visions and dangerous to
systematize, the direction in which mysticism points is clear:
relational transcendence. The 20th-century crises and the mass
media suggest the possibility of a mysticism brought up to date
that will serve “the Creative Intention that past ages have called
God.” Whether it comes through symbols, systems, paradigmatic
examples, or extreme situations, there will probably always be
some response to the call of the real.
Mysticism as a social factor
Mystical experience is no doubt solo, the experience of a singular
person. But more than “a flight of the alone to the Alone,” it
could also be a redemption of solitude no less than of society. In
the mystic experience, as Jakob Böhme said, the world is not
destroyed but remade. At times a protest against heteronomy (i.e.,
external authority and ecclesiastical machinery), mysticism has
expressed itself in diverse backgrounds and flourished during dark
periods of history.
Because of its other-worldly bias, the belief still persists
thatthe solitary mystic, absorbed in a vertical relation with God
or reality, owes no social responsibility. Altogether an outsider,
he has deliberately undergone a civil death. This is not an ideal
or wholly accurate picture. “A Mystic who is not of supreme
service to the Society is not a Mystic at all” (frompreface to
R.D. Ranade, Mysticism in Maharashtra). According to Zen Buddhism,
the great contemplative—even when “sitting quietly, doing
nothing”—has been a man of action, perhaps the only kind of action
that leaves no bitter residue behind. The less extravagant forms
of mysticism represent attitudes and principles of charity,
detachment, and dedication, which should guide the relation of the
individual to the group. The mystics have fought the inner battle
and won, creating themselves and their world.
Mysticism proves the individual's capacity to rise above the
conditioning factors of nature, nurture, and society and to
transform collective life, though this has not been generally
recognized. With a hidden and potent force, mystics have tried, as
best as circumstances permitted, to mend the universal ill. As in
the classic resolve of the bodhisattva (“buddha-to-be”), they have
looked forward to universal enlightenment. If the attempt by
mystics to create a new order or a better society has failed, the
incapacity or defection of the majority may be the reason for the
failure.
“Revolution” is a word too often profaned. The change suggested is
mainly, if not wholly, from without. In such contrived salvation
by compulsion, the inner core is hardly touched. “But it is an
eternal law that there can be no compulsion in the realm of the
spirit. It is essentially a world of free creative choices” (Rufus
Jones, Some Exponents of Mystical Religion). Mystics insist on a
change of consciousness, a slower and more difficult process, and
also on a scrupulous equation between ends and means. Impatience,
deviations, and subterfuges in this respect can be costly, ironic,
and instructive. According to mystics, the individuals who will
most help the future of humanity will be those who recognize the
unfinished and ultimate revolution—the evolution of
consciousness—as the destiny and therefore the great need of all
men as of society.
Holiness does not mean a retreat from or a rejection of the world.
To be a mystic or a seer is not the same thing as beinga spectator
on the fence. As the Swedish secretary-general of the United
Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, proved with his life, in the modern era
the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of
action. Many with a mystical frame of mind look beyond what
mystics call quasi-revolutions to a great life—an entire
civilization, the civilization of consciousness. The need of
synthesis places its stake on the future and the All.
The outcome of the world, the gates of the future,
the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown
opento a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the
exclusion of all others.
They will open only to an advance of all together.
(From Teilhard de Chardin, ThePhenomenon of Man .)
According to mystics, here may be the outline of a revolutionwhose
message has reached but a few. The hope of a Kingdom of Heaven
within man and a City of God without remains one of mysticism's
gifts to what many mystics view as an evolving humanity.
Sisirkumar Ghose
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