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The History of The Occult Hermaphrodite · The Occult Rejects

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  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen.
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  Speaker 2: What? What's going to happen?
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  Speaker 1: Something wonderful.
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  Speaker 2: What? I understand how you feel.
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  Speaker 1: You see, it's all very clear to me now. The Rebus,
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  Speaker 1: like a hermaphrodite, is born from two mountains. Of Mercury
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  Speaker 1: and of Venus. Michael Meyer, Atalanta, Fujian's Emblem 38. There
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  Speaker 1: is a peculiar figure that repeatedly appears throughout the history
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  Speaker 1: of Western esotericism. A body that is simultaneously male and female,
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  Speaker 1: sometimes represented with two heads, sometimes with mixed sexual characteristics,
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  Speaker 1: sometimes accompanied by the sun and moon, and sometimes transformed
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  Speaker 1: into something far stranger, such as the 19th century Baphomet
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  Speaker 1: of Elvis Levi.
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  Speaker 2: The temptation is to treat all.
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  Speaker 1: Of these figures as expressions of a single ancient occult doctrine,
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  Speaker 1: as though the same teaching passed intact from Greece into Judaism,
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  Speaker 1: from Judaism into Kabbalah, from Kabbalah into alchemy, and eventually
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  Speaker 1: into the Golden Dawn and Alistair Crowley. The history is
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  Speaker 1: not nearly that simple, and reducing it to a secret
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  Speaker 1: tradition of male and female energies strips away much of
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  Speaker 1: what actually makes this symbol interesting. What we are dealing
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  Speaker 1: with instead is a collection of images and ideas that
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  Speaker 1: developed in different cultures and at different times, but repeatedly
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  Speaker 1: became useful for thinking about a similar problem. How something
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  Speaker 1: divided might be restored to unity without simply erasing the
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  Speaker 1: distinction between its parts. In one tradition, that problem concerned
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  Speaker 1: human sexuality. In another, it concerned the creation of Adam.
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  Speaker 1: In another, it became a question about masculine and feminine
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  Speaker 1: attributes within divinity. And in alchemy, It was transformed into
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  Speaker 1: a theory about substances, generation, death, purification, and the production
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  Speaker 1: of a perfected body. 19th and 20th century occultists inherited
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  Speaker 1: these older traditions and deliberately combined them, which is one
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  Speaker 1: reason modern occultism can make history appear considerably more unified
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  Speaker 1: than it originally was. The best place to begin with
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  Speaker 1: is the word itself, although even here the story starts
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  Speaker 1: earlier than the version most people know. The history of Hermaphroditos,
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  Speaker 1: Latinized as Hermaphroditus, does not begin with Ovid. By the
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  Speaker 1: time the Roman poet wrote the Metamorphoses around the beginning
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  Speaker 1: of the Common Era, a divine figure combining masculine and
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  Speaker 1: feminine characteristics had already been known in Greek religion, literature,
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  Speaker 1: and art for several centuries. The surviving evidence is fragmentary,
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  Speaker 1: but Hermaphroditus is attested before Ovid. And by the Hellenistic period,
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  Speaker 1: the figure was sufficiently recognizable to appear in literature and
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  Speaker 1: visual art independently of the later story of Salmacus. Theophrastus,
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  Speaker 1: writing in the late 4th century BCE, appears to preserve
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  Speaker 1: one of the earliest literary references to hermaphroditus. In his
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  Speaker 1: Portrait of the Superstitious Man, he describes religious behavior involving
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  Speaker 1: images traditionally identified with hermaphroditus. The precise textual interpretation has
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  Speaker 1: been debated. but the passage belongs to a religious environment
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  Speaker 1: centuries earlier than Ovid's Metamorphoses. By the early 3rd century BCE,
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  Speaker 1: the comic poet Poseidopus had also written a play titled Hermaphroditus,
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  Speaker 1: now almost entirely lost. But that indicates that the figure
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  Speaker 1: was already sufficiently recognizable to serve as the subject of
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  Speaker 1: a dramatic work. By the 1st century BCE, the evidence
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  Speaker 1: became much clearer. Diodorus Siculus identifies Hermaphroditus as as the
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  Speaker 1: offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite, and explicitly explains the name
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  Speaker 1: as a combination of those.
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  Speaker 2: Of both parents.
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  Speaker 1: More importantly, Diodorus reports traditions in which hermaphroditus already possesses
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  Speaker 1: a body, combining masculine and feminine characteristics. He describes feminine
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  Speaker 1: beauty and delicacy alongside qualities understood as masculine and also
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  Speaker 1: discusses naturally occurring individuals possessing sexual characteristics associated with both
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  Speaker 1: sexes as extraordinary births that could be interpreted as prodigies.
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  Speaker 1: This distinction matters because Diodorus does not tell the story
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  Speaker 1: most modern readers associate with hermaphroditus. There is no Salmacus
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  Speaker 1: transforming an originally male youth into a dual-sex being. The
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  Speaker 1: combined body already belongs to hermaphroditus. Ancient art points in
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  Speaker 1: the same direction. hermaphroditus became a recognizable subject of Hellenistic
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  Speaker 1: and Roman artists, frequently represented through a body combining developed
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  Speaker 1: breasts with male genitalia. The artistic type was established independently
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  Speaker 1: of Ovid's transformation narrative, which means that the familiar mixed-sex
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  Speaker 1: body belonged to the identity of hermaphroditus before the metamorphosis
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  Speaker 1: supplied its most famous literary explanation. This reverses the way
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  Speaker 1: the myth is often casually presented. Rather than beginning with
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  Speaker 1: a male hermaphroditus who only later becomes sexually dual through
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  Speaker 1: encounter with Salmacus, the surviving pre-Ovidian evidence indicates that the
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  Speaker 1: dual-sex divinity came first. Ovid appears later in the tradition
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  Speaker 1: and gives that already recognizable body a dramatic explanation by
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  Speaker 1: making it the result of two physically separated beings becoming inseparable.
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  Speaker 1: That difference becomes extremely important once the figure enters later occultism.
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  Speaker 1: because antiquity ultimately supplied later readers with two related but
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  Speaker 1: distinct ideas. The older hermaphroditus embodied masculine and feminine characteristics
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  Speaker 1: in one divine being, while Ovid supplied a narrative in
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  Speaker 1: which previously separate bodies were literally transformed into one. The
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  Speaker 1: first offered an image of combined sexual nature. The second
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  Speaker 1: offered a story of conjunction. Ovid's version appears in Book
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  Speaker 1: 4 of Metamorphoses. Hermaphroditus is again identified as the child
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  Speaker 1: of Hermes and Aphrodite, but the older divine figure is
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  Speaker 1: now placed inside one of Ovid's characteristic stories of bodily transformation.
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  Speaker 1: At about 15 years old, Hermaphroditus leaves Mount Ida and
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  Speaker 1: eventually reaches the spring inhabited by the nymph Salmacus. She
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  Speaker 1: becomes sexually attracted to him and attempts to seduce him,
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  Speaker 1: but he rejects her. After apparently withdrawing, Salmacus watches while
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  Speaker 1: Hermaphroditus enters her pool throws herself upon him, and prays
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  Speaker 1: that the gods will never allow them to be separated.
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  Speaker 1: Her request is granted, and their bodies become fused into
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  Speaker 1: a single form possessing characteristics of both. There is something
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  Speaker 1: important about Ovid's story that gets lost when it's immediately
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  Speaker 1: turned into an alchemical allegory. Ovid was not writing an
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  Speaker 1: instruction manual for the Philosopher's Stone. The transformation belongs first
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  Speaker 1: to the larger world of the Metamorphoses, where boundaries separating
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  Speaker 1: human beings, animals, plants, minerals, gods, and natural phenomena repeatedly collapse.
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  Speaker 1: Hermaphroditus belongs to that literary and mythological environment before he
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  Speaker 1: belongs to occult philosophy.
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  Speaker 2: Or so they say.
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  Speaker 1: At the same time, it is easy to understand why
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  Speaker 1: later alchemists found Ovid's version particularly useful. The older figure
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  Speaker 1: already contained masculine and feminine attributes, but Ovid added an
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  Speaker 1: actual process through which two beings became one body. For
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  Speaker 1: a later tradition fascinated by conjunction, dissolution, recombination, and the
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  Speaker 1: generation of a new substance from differentiated principles, that narrative
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  Speaker 1: could carry considerably more symbolic weight than anatomical ambiguity alone.
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  Speaker 1: The name itself created another opportunity for reinterpretation. Hermaphroditos combines
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  Speaker 1: Hermes and Aphrodite, and that relationship was explicit long before Ovid.
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  Speaker 1: Diodorus had already explained the name through the divine parents.
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  Speaker 1: Hermes possessed associations with boundaries, communication, exchange, travel, interpretation, and
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  Speaker 1: movement between worlds, while Aphrodite represented attraction, sexuality, beauty, desire,
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  Speaker 1: and generation. Hermes would also become inseparable in European esoteric
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  Speaker 1: thought from Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary sage of the Hermetic
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  Speaker 1: writings whom Renaissance thinkers believed belonged to extreme antiquity. It
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  Speaker 1: would be historically irresponsible to claim that the ancient Hermaphroditus
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  Speaker 1: therefore already encoded Renaissance Hermetic philosophy. The Greek Hermes should
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  Speaker 1: not simply be collapsed into the later esoteric Hermes Trismegistus.
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  Speaker 1: And ancient worshippers of Hermaphroditus were not secretly practicing Renaissance
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  Speaker 1: alchemy 2,000 years early.
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  Speaker 2: What happened was reinterpretation.
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  Speaker 1: Once Renaissance and early modern thinkers encountered an ancient figure
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  Speaker 1: whose very name united Hermes and Aphrodite, and whose body
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  Speaker 1: combined masculine and feminine characteristics, they possessed an unusually adaptable
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  Speaker 1: mythological form that could be absorbed into entirely new systems
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  Speaker 1: of thought. There was also another ancient story available to
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  Speaker 1: anyone interested in a primordial condition in which sexual differentiation
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  Speaker 1: was less fixed than it appeared in ordinary humanity. In
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  Speaker 1: Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes tells his famous story of the first
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  Speaker 1: human being. According to the speech, humanity originally existed in
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  Speaker 1: three forms, male, female, and an androgynous form composed of both.
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  Speaker 1: These beings were spherical, possessed double limbs and organs, and
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  Speaker 1: were eventually cut apart by Zeus. Human erotic longing is
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  Speaker 1: then explained as a desire for recovery of the missing half.
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  Speaker 1: Plato's story therefore establishes a pattern of original completeness, division,
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  Speaker 1: and attempted reunion. But even here, we have to resist
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  Speaker 1: making the history too neat. This is not yet alchemy,
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  Speaker 1: and there is no reason to assume that every later
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  Speaker 1: image of conjunction descends directly from Plato. What matters is
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  Speaker 1: that the ancient Mediterranean world had already produced several different
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  Speaker 1: ways of imagining humanity before, beyond, or across the ordinary
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  Speaker 1: distinction between male and female. Later esoteric thinkers did not
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  Speaker 1: have to invent the possibility from nothing, because they inherited
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  Speaker 1: a cultural library already filled with such material. The next
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  Speaker 1: major development takes place within Jewish interpretation of Genesis, where
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  Speaker 1: the notion of primordial androgyny becomes attached not simply to
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  Speaker 1: a mythological being, but to Adam, the first human. Genesis
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  Speaker 1: contains two creation accounts whose relationship naturally invited interpretations. Genesis
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  Speaker 1: 1 speaks of humanity created male and female, whereas the
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  Speaker 1: familiar narrative in Genesis 2 presents the woman as subsequently
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  Speaker 1: differentiated from Adam. One rabbinic solution was to imagine that
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  Speaker 1: the first human originally contained both. Genesis Rabbah 8.1 preserves
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  Speaker 1: two closely related interpretations. Rabbah Yirmiah ben Alazar states that
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  Speaker 1: when God created the first Adam, the human was created
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  Speaker 1: as androgynous. while Rabbi Nachman gives a different but related
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  Speaker 1: explanation in which the original Adam is du parsovim, commonly
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  Speaker 1: understood as double-faced or double-sided, and is subsequently divided. When
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  Speaker 1: the objection is raised that Genesis says God took one
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  Speaker 1: of Adam's ribs, the interpretation responds by reading the Hebrew
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  Speaker 1: zela as a side or flank rather than specifically as
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  Speaker 1: a rib. This material is substantially earlier than medieval Kabbalah,
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  Speaker 1: And that chronology matters because the idea that the primordial
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  Speaker 1: Adam possessed a combined or double sexual form was not
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  Speaker 1: invented by Kabbalists. Primordial androgyny appears in earlier Jewish and
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  Speaker 1: Jewish Hellenistic interpretation and continued to be discussed by medieval
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  Speaker 1: Jewish thinkers before the rise of Kabbalah as a distinct
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  Speaker 1: medieval phenomenon. The implications, however, could become much larger once
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  Speaker 1: Kabbalists entered the conversation because Genesis does not merely say
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  Speaker 1: that humanity was created. It says that humanity was created
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  Speaker 1: in the image of God. If Adam in the divine
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  Speaker 1: image originally contained male and female characteristics, then an obvious
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  Speaker 1: theological question follows. What exactly does this imply about the
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  Speaker 1: divine image itself? Transition from the rabbinic androgyne to medieval
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  Speaker 1: Kabbalah needs to be handled carefully, because this is one
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  Speaker 1: of the places where cult history's are most likely to
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  Speaker 1: compress several centuries of development into a single supposedly ancient doctrine,
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  Speaker 1: and some conspiracy theorists like to make it just some
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  Speaker 1: satanic Jew shit. The interpretation of primordial Adam as androgynous,
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  Speaker 1: or double-sided, is considerably older than Kabbalah, but later Kabbalists
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  Speaker 1: inherited those traditions and placed them inside increasingly elaborate theories
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  Speaker 1: concerning the relationship between the human form and the structure
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  Speaker 1: of divinity. Older scholarship, particularly work influenced by Gershom Scholem,
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  Speaker 1: sometimes treated divine androgyny as though it was securely present
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  Speaker 1: at the very beginning of medieval Kabbalah and could be
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  Speaker 1: traced directly to some of its earliest provincial representatives. More
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  Speaker 1: recent scholarship has complicated that reconstruction. Jeremy Philip Brown has
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  Speaker 1: argued that some of the textual evidence once used to
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  Speaker 1: establish a fully articulated doctrine of divine androgyny among the
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  Speaker 1: earliest provincial Kabbalists cannot confidently bear the historical weight placed
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  Speaker 1: upon it. The significance of this correction is not that
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  Speaker 1: masculine and feminine structures disappear from Kabbalah, because they clearly
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  Speaker 1: become enormously important, but that the mature doctrine should not
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  Speaker 1: automatically be projected backward into the earliest stages of the tradition.
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  Speaker 1: With an increasingly elaborate Kabbalistic speculation, the Sefirot, the divine
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  Speaker 1: emanation or attributes through which the hidden God becomes manifest
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  Speaker 1: and active, could be understood through networks of gendered relationships.
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  Speaker 1: Masculine and feminine symbolism become especially significant in Theosophical Kabbalah
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  Speaker 1: and eventually reach extraordinary complexity in the Zohar and later systems.
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  Speaker 1: Father and mother, bridegroom and bride, giving and receiving, potency
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  Speaker 1: and receptivity, mercy and judgment, could all function within descriptions
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  Speaker 1: of the divine world. while the relationships among these structures
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  Speaker 1: were not merely decorative metaphors laid over an otherwise complete theology.
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  Speaker 1: Their harmony, separation, and conjunction could become part of the
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  Speaker 1: actual drama of cosmic existence. This is considerably more complicated
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  Speaker 1: than saying that Kabbalah simply teaches that God is a hermaphrodite.
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  Speaker 1: The Kabbalistic material is often relational rather than anatomical. Masculine
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  Speaker 1: and feminine dimensions exist within a divine totality whose structure
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  Speaker 1: exceeds ordinary human sexual categories, and the significance lies in
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  Speaker 1: the interaction between differentiated aspects rather than imagining God as
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  Speaker 1: a biological body possessing two sets of sexual characteristics. Human
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  Speaker 1: religious action could participate in those relationships, allowing sexual union, prayer,
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  Speaker 1: ritual observance, and mystical intention to become connected with processes
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  Speaker 1: of supernal harmony. Primordial Adam becomes particularly important within this
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  Speaker 1: environment because Adam occupies the meeting point between anthropology and theology.
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  Speaker 1: If humanity was created in the divine image, then the
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  Speaker 1: form of primordial humanity might disclose something about the structure
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  Speaker 1: reflected through that image. Earlier rabbinic traditions concerning Adam as
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  Speaker 1: androgynous could therefore be re-read within later mystical frameworks in
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: which masculine and feminine differentiation is existed inside a more
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  Speaker 1: encompassing divine reality. The later Kabbalistic tradition developed numerous variations
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  Speaker 1: on these themes, and they should not be collapsed into
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  Speaker 1: a single doctrine. Neither should Adam Kadmon, the primordial or
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  Speaker 1: archetypal human of later Kabbalistic cosmology, simply be treated as
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  Speaker 1: another name for the androgynous Adam of Genesis Rabbah. The
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  Speaker 1: traditions could eventually be brought into conversation with one another,
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  Speaker 1: but they emerged from different interpretive problems and acquired different functions.
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  Speaker 1: What matters for the history of Western occultism is what
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  Speaker 1: happened when this material began moving beyond Jewish mystical communities
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: and into Christian intellectual culture during the Renaissance. Beginning in
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  Speaker 1: the late 15th century, figures such as Giovanni Pico di
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  Speaker 1: Mirandola attempted to incorporate Jewish Kabbalistic material into a Christian framework,
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  Speaker 1: while Johannes Rookland, developed Christian Kabbalah further in works such
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  Speaker 1: as De Verbo, Morifico, and De Arte Kabbalistica. Neither man
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: simply transmitted Jewish Kabbalah intact. Hebrew divine names, letter speculation,
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  Speaker 1: Sephirotic concepts, Biblical exegesis, Neoplatonism, Christianity, and Renaissance ideas about
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  Speaker 1: ancient wisdom were recognized within a new theological system. That
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  Speaker 1: transformation becomes especially important for the history we are following.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: because Christian Kabbalah increasingly occupied the same intellectual world as
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Hermetic philosophy, astrology, natural magic, and theories of hidden sympathies
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  Speaker 1: connecting different levels of the cosmos. Once those traditions began
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  Speaker 1: to interact, ideas originally belonging to Biblical commentary or Jewish
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: mysticism could enter an environment in which correspondences among divinity, humanity, planets, elements, metals,
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  Speaker 1: and natural substances were understood as parts of an interconnected universe.
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  Speaker 1: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa became one of the most influential organizers
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  Speaker 1: of that Renaissance synthesis.
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  Speaker 2: His three books of occult philosophy, published in its.
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  Speaker 1: Complete form in 1533, attempted to gather elemental, celestial, intellectual, religious, hermetic, magical,
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  Speaker 1: and Kabbalistic materials into one philosophical structure. Agrippa was strongly
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  Speaker 1: influenced by Rookland and incorporated Kabbalistic ideas concerning divine names
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: and angelic powers into a broader theory of magic. He
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: was personally interested in alchemy and laboratory work, even though
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: alchemy itself occupies surprisingly little space in the three books.
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  Speaker 2: Agrippa matters here not because he.
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  Speaker 1: Supplied a missing illustration of the hermaphrodite, but because he
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  Speaker 1: demonstrates how porous the boundaries between Christian Kabbalah, natural magic,
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  Speaker 1: hermetic philosophy, and alchemy had become. A Renaissance occult philosopher
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  Speaker 1: could move among these disciplines because they were understood as
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  Speaker 1: investigations of different levels of the same created order. Natural
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  Speaker 1: substances possessed hidden virtues. Celestial bodies influenced terrestrial things. Divine
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  Speaker 1: names mediated higher powers, and humanity stood at the intersection
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: of these worlds. This intellectual environment is what makes Heinrich
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: Kuhnroth comprehensible. Kuhnroth did not suddenly decide to mix unrelated
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  Speaker 1: subjects together. when he placed Christian Kabbalah, alchemy, divine magic,
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: Adamic symbolism, and laboratory practice into a single work. He
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: belonged to a Renaissance current that had already spent generations
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  Speaker 1: constructing systems in which ancient philosophy, Christian theology, Jewish mystical material,
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: natural magic, and the investigation of nature could reinforce one another.
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  Speaker 1: The movement from Jewish Kabbalah into Christian Kabbalah, therefore, does
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  Speaker 1: more than explain how Kabbalistic terminology is eventually entered ceremonial magic.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: It establishes one of the routes by which traditions concerning
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: primordial humanity and divine polarity entered the same intellectual environment
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: as our theories of conjunction. Once that happens, the history
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: of the androgyne changes dramatically because the question is no
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: longer confined to what Adam once was or how masculine
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: and feminine relationships function within divinity. The same basic problem
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  Speaker 1: begins appearing in psych theories about matter itself. Alchemy cannot
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: be reduced just to spiritual allegory. Historical alchemists experimented with minerals, metals, salts, acids, pigments, distillation, furnaces, medicines, metallurgy,
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  Speaker 1: and laboratory techniques while simultaneously developing theories about matter, generation, corruption,
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  Speaker 1: and perfection. Some sought metallic transmutation, others pursued medicines or
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: universal remedies. and some embedded laboratory practice within explicitly religious
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: or cosmological frameworks. These traditions varied enormously across Greek, Arabic, Latin, medieval, Renaissance,
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  Speaker 1: and early modern contexts, which is why the modern claim
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: that alchemists were never really trying to make gold is
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  Speaker 1: just as misleading as the opposite claim that alchemy was
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  Speaker 1: nothing more than primitive chemistry. Material practice and symbolic interpretation
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  Speaker 1: frequently existed beside one another, and sometimes became almost impossible
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  Speaker 1: to separate. One of the ideas that became particularly important
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  Speaker 1: in European alchemy was coniunctio, conjunction or union. Nature was
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  Speaker 1: understood through paired qualities and substances, and alchemical writers repeatedly
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  Speaker 1: transformed those relationships into marriages. Sol encountered Luna, the king
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: met the queen, sulfur joined mercury, red met white, and
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: fixed and volatile principles were brought into relationships. These terms
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: never possess one universal meaning. Mercury might refer to actual
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: quicksilver in one context, the philosophical principle in another, or
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: the much more elusive philosophical mercury, while sulfur could likewise
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: signify considerably more than the familiar yellow substance. Historical alchemy, therefore,
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: cannot be reduced to a rigid correspondence table in which
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: sulfur always means male, sun male, fire, and consciousness, while
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Mercury always means female, moon, water, and unconsciousness. Nevertheless, the
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  Speaker 1: tendency to personify complementary substances or principles as male and
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  Speaker 1: female became widespread enough that sexual generation developed into one
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  Speaker 1: of alchemy's most persistent languages. Two differentiated bodies unite and
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  Speaker 1: produce a third body possessing characteristics derived from both parents.
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  Speaker 1: If minerals were believed to grow within the earth, If
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: metals matured, and if nature itself possessed generative processes, then
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  Speaker 1: sexual reproduction could provide an obvious model for laboratory transformation.
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  Speaker 1: The alchemist was not merely mixing inert substances but attempting
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: to understand, imitate, accelerate, or perfect processes attributed to nature.
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  Speaker 1: That framework explains why erotic and reproductive imagery so frequently
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: appears beside furnaces, baths, vessels, and chemical operations. The presence
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: of sexual imagery does not automatically mean that the author
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: was teaching literal sexual magic. Rather, sexual generation provided a
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: familiar natural process through which material generation and transformation could
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: be imagined. Importantly, this symbolic language predates the famous 16th
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: century Rosium Philosophorum. Medieval manuscripts already contain striking representations of
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: alchemical conjunction in composite bodies. and one important visual tradition
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: appears in the Aurora Consurgence. The work survives in several
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: manuscripts and has traditionally, though very uncertainly, been associated with
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: Thomas Aquinas. Whatever its precise authorship, its manuscript tradition demonstrates
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: that by the late medieval period, alchemical writers and artists
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: were already working with sexualized and composite imagery rather than
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: waiting for Renaissance emblem books to invent it. This changes
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: the chronology because the hermaphroditic result of conjunction belongs to
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: a developing medieval alchemical visual culture. The later printed tradition preserved, reorganized,
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: and amplified symbolism that had already been circulating in manuscripts.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: The Rosarium Philosophorum nevertheless became one of the most influential
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: expressions of that tradition. Printed at Frankfurt in 1550 as
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: part of De Alchemia, its sequence of 20 allegorical woodcuts
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: organizes the work around the relationship between soul and luna
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: and represents complementary alchemical principles through the forms of man
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: and woman. The sequence becomes far more meaningful when read
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: as a process instead of being dismantled into isolated occult images.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: The royal pair initially appear as differentiated figures. Their relationship
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: deepens and they eventually enter a common space and then
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: the mercurial waters or vessels. Sexual imagery makes their conjunction explicit,
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: but the union itself is not the completion of the process.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: The united body still passes through death, decomposition, separation of
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: soul and body, purification, return, and regeneration. That changes the
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: meaning of the alchemical marriage considerably. The point is not
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: simply that male and female belong together, because if that
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: were the entire message, the process could end with the wedding. Instead,
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: conjunction destroys the previous condition of both participants. The king
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: cannot remain merely king and the queen cannot remain merely
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: queen because the great work requires the production of a
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: state that neither possessed independently. Their identities as separate principles
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: are subjected to transformation, which means that alchemical generation involves
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: not merely union but the dissolution of prior form. This
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: is where Solvay and Coagula acquire their real significance. Something
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: must be dissolved, broken apart, separated from its previous organization,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: or returned toward a more fundamental condition before it can
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: be reorganized in another form. The transformed body is therefore
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: not assembled by placing two untouched principles beside one another.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: It emerges because those principles have undergone a process that
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: changes both their condition and their relationship. The hermaphrodite becomes
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: an especially powerful image because an ordinary king and queen
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: is can represent alliance while remaining two bodies, whereas the
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: alchemical hermaphrodite represents a more radical conjunction in which the
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: result is one body that visibly retains qualities belonging to
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: both original participants. One of these names eventually attached to
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: this being was rebus, traditionally connected with the Latin res bina,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: the double thing or two-fold thing. The phrase captures the
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: paradox because the being is simultaneously singular and doubled, Representations vary,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: but the rebus commonly possesses one body with male and
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: female heads or characteristics, often accompanied by solar and lunar
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: imagery and sometimes positioned above a dragon, globe, or other
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: symbolic foundation. The rebus, therefore, cannot be adequately explained as
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: a generic picture of male and female energies. Its meanings
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: derive from the transformation process that precedes it. It is
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: not simply the coexistence of two principles, but a new
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: state generated through conjunction dissolution, and recombination. By the end
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: of the 16th century, this alchemical hermaphrodite was being integrated
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: into an even larger Christian, Kabbalistic, and Theosophical system, and
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: Heinrich Kuhnroth provides one of the clearest surviving examples. Kuhnroth
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: was a physician, Paracelsian alchemist, Christian Kabbalist, and Theosophical writer
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: whose Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom, which first appeared in 1595
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: and was later issued posthumously in expanded form. His importance
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: lies partly in the fact that he did not treat alchemy,
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: Christian theology, Kabbalah, divine magic, and practical laboratory work as
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: independent subjects. They belonged to a single theosophical pursuit in
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: which revelation and the investigation of nature were supposed to
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: illuminate one another. The famous Oratory Laboratory engraving from the
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: amphitheater is often reproduced by itself, but separating it from
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: the other major plates obscures the structure of Kunrat's program.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: The large circular theosophical figures include Christ's cruciform, Adam-Androgyne, Rebus
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: or alchemical hermaphrodite, and the Oratory Laboratory, creating a sequence
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: in which primordial humanity and alchemical conjunction inhabit the same
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: deliberately Christian Kabbalistic and alchemical architecture. The Adam-Androgyne figure brings
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: primordial humanity into Kuhnrock's theosophical cosmology. Adam is represented within
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: a structure connecting humanity with larger spiritual and cosmological relationships,
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: while the neighboring Rebus image transfers combined polarity into explicitly
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: alchemical terms. Kuhnroth does not simply declare that Adam and
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: the Rebus are the same thing, and the fact that
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: they receive separate figures is part of their significance. Adam
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: belongs primarily to a Christian Kabbalistic anthropology concerned with primordial
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: humanity and the relationship between human structure and divine order,
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: whereas the rebus belongs directly to the alchemical work. Their
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: placement together nevertheless demonstrates that. By the end of the
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: 16th century, primordial androgyny and the alchemical hermaphrodite could be
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: deliberately positioned within one theosophical system. Scripture, the human microcosm, nature,
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: divine wisdom, and laboratory transformation could all be treated as
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: reflecting different dimensions of a connected reality. The Oratory Laboratory
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: completes that movement by shifting the emphasis toward practice. Prayer
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: and experimental work appear within one environment rather than being
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: treated as competing activities. The adept seeks divine illumination through
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: the oratory and engages nature through physical operations in the laboratory,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: making spiritual and material investigation complementary aspects of the same pursuit.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: Kunroth is therefore a crucial hinge in the history. The
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: medieval manuscript tradition shows that composite alchemical imagery already existed,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: while the Rosarian Philosophorum develops conjunction into an extended visual
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: drama of union, death, purification, and regeneration. Kunroth then places
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: the hermaphrodite within a larger Christian Kabbalistic cosmology in which
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: primordial Adam and the rebus appear as neighboring parts of
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: one theosophical program. Only a generation later, Michael Meyer makes
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: another connection even more explicit. Meyer's Atalantia Fugiens, first published
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: in 1617, is one of the most extraordinary works of
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: alchemical emblem literature, combining engraved images, Latin mottos, epigrams, prose, commentary,
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: and 50 musical fugues. In Emblem 38, Meyer explicitly compares
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: the rebus with hermaphroditus and associates its generation with Mercury
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: and Venus. This is particularly important because the connection between
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: the ancient mythological hermaphrodite and the alchemical rebus is no
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: longer something a modern historian has to infer from visual resemblance.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Meyer himself draws the comparison. The historical development becomes much
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: clearer when the different layers are kept separate. The older
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: hermaphroditus was already understood as the child of Hermes and Aphrodite,
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: possessing a combined sexual nature, while Ovid later supplied the
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: enormously influential story in which that condition resulted from fusion
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: with Salamachus. Medieval alchemy developed composite bodies as representations of conjunction.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: Kuhnroth placed primordial Adam and the rebus inside the same
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: Christian Kabbalistic alchemical cosmos, and Meyer then explicitly invoked hermaphroditus
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: as an analog for the rebus. The ancient figure had
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: not simply survived unchanged. It had been repeatedly reinterpreted until
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: it became part of a theory of nature and transformation.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: The development continued in the Azoth tradition associated with Basil Valentine,
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: where one of the most recognizable later representations of the
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: alchemical hermaphrodite appears at the center of an elaborate diagram
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: of the work. The attribution to Basil Valentine belongs to
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: a complicated synonymous textual tradition, so it is safer to
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: speak of works circulating under that name than to imagine
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: a securely documented medieval monk responsible for everything eventually attributed
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: to him. The Azoth image nevertheless matters because it demonstrates
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: how thoroughly the rebus had become integrated into alchemical emblematic culture.
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: Male and female characteristics appear within a larger visual structure
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: involving planets, elements, transformative processes, and the cyclical movement of
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: the work. The hermaphroditic figure no longer functions merely as
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: a picture of sexual combination, but as a concentrated image
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: of an alchemical subject capable of bearing apparently contradictory properties.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: By the early 17th century, the alchemical hermaphrodite had therefore
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: accumulated several overlapping meanings. It could represent the product of conjunction,
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: the reconciliation of complementary substances, the perfected body of the work,
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: an analog of primordial humanity, a microcosmic figure, and the
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: material embodiment of paradox itself. That complexity is precisely what
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: allows the rebus to overlap with one of alchemy's most
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: famous mysteries, The Philosopher's Stone The relationship between the hermaphrodite
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: and the Philosopher's Stone becomes easy to understand once we
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: stop imagining the stone as a literal magical rock. Historical
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: descriptions vary enormously, but the stone could be imagined as
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: the agent or result of perfected transformation, something capable of
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: bringing imperfect matter toward completion, effecting transmutation, or participating in
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: the production of extraordinary medicines and tinctures. Because the stone
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: represented the successful completion of processes that ordinary matter cannot accomplish,
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: alchemical literature frequently surrounded it with paradoxical language. The perfect
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: product could be described as telestial and celestial, bodily and spiritual,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: fixed and transformative, generated yet somehow incorruptible. The hermaphrodite was
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: particularly suited to representing this kind of contradiction because it
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: visually demonstrated that categories normally treated as mutually exclusive were
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: could coexist within a transformed substance. Many representations deliberately preserve
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: sexual distinction. A male head and a female head remain
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: visible so that the spectator understands that the final unity
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: has been generated from differentiated principles. The image therefore represents
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: something more complicated than sameness. The alchemical solution to opposition
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: is not necessarily to prove that the opposites were illusions
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: but to produce a larger structure within which their difference
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: no longer prevents unity. This also helps explain why Christian
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: language became entangled with alchemy. Early modern European alchemists inhabited
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: overwhelmingly Christian cultural environments, and Christian theology already possessed the
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: vocabulary of death followed by renewed life. Alchemical texts could
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: describe corruption, burial, washing, purification, resurrection, glorification, and the birth
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: of a perfected body without those words functioning in a
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: religious vacuum. Christ himself could become an analog for the stone.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: This did not mean that Orthodox Christianity taught that Christ
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: was literally an alchemical hermaphrodite. Nor should every alchemical resurrection
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: image automatically be identified as Christian allegory. The analogy worked
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: because Christological doctrine already presented apparently incompatible categories, particularly divine
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: and human. united in one person without simply reducing one
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: nature to the other. The Christian resurrection supplied another useful
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: structure because the old body passes through death and emerges transformed.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: Alchemy could therefore arrange natural philosophy, Christian symbolism, sexual generation,
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: and laboratory practice inside the same imaginative world. The broader motif,
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: or sacred marriage, developed within that environment as well. Modern
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: writers often use the Greek phrase, Hyros, Gamos, very loosely,
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: but the alchemical royal wedding clearly does more than depict
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: an ordinary marriage. King and queen personify larger principles. Their
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: wedding becomes a cosmological event, and what they generate can
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: represent perfected matter. Rosicrucian literature intensified this atmosphere. The Chemical
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: Wedding of Christian Rosencruz, published in 1616, uses an elaborate
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: initiatory narrative built around royal marriage, death, transformation, testing and regeneration.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: It should not simply be treated as another manual explaining
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: the rebus, but it demonstrates how deeply marriage and transformation
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: had become intertwined with early 17th century esoteric culture. By
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: this point, the hermaphrodite had become much more than an
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: anatomical curiosity inherited from classical mythology. It had become one
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: of the most efficient visual devices available for expressing alchemical completion.
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: The intellectual environment eventually changed. Chemistry developed along increasingly different lines,
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: and although alchemy did not simply vanish, its symbolic literature
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: was gradually inherited by people whose primary interests were less
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: likely to involve metallurgy or laboratory transmutation and more likely
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: to involve occult philosophy, initiation, ritual, kabbalah, tarot, and ceremonial magic.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: When 19th century occultists encountered the alchemical androgyne, They encountered
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: an enormous historical archive waiting to be reorganized, and Elvis
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: Levi became one of the most influential people to do
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: exactly that. Levi's famous image, commonly called Baphomet, has become
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: so thoroughly absorbed into modern satanic and popular imagery that
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: its 19th century occult context is often forgotten. Levi was
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: not simply attempting to draw the devil. His figure combines
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: attributes that ordinary classification keeps apart. Human, and animal, masculine
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: and feminine, terrestrial and celestial. Breasts coexist with conspicuously phallic symbolism.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: One hand points upward while the other points downward. A
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: torch rises between the horns, and a caduceus-like form appears
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: at the body. Most revealing for the present subject, the
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: arms carry the words solve and coagula. Those words immediately
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: place the image inside an alchemical language of dissolution and recombination.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: This does not prove that Levi copied an individual rebus
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: illustration and simply placed its head with a goat, nor
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: do we need that claim. The stronger historical observation is
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: that both images operate within a symbolic environment where a
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: composite body can express the relationship or equilibrium of differentiated principles.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: The sexual ambiguity of Baphomet is consequently functional. If Levi
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: wanted to represent only masculine generative force, there would be
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: little reason for the breasts. If you wanted only feminine fertility,
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: there would be little reason for the phallic symbolism. The
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: composite body allows the figure to carry multiple polarities simultaneously,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: while the upward and downward gestures articulate mediation between opposed
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: directions or planes. This prevents two equally misleading interpretations. One
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: reads every attribute of Levi's Baphomet as evidence of straightforward
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: Satan worship, while the other reduces the figure to the
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: vague modern statement... that everything is balanced. Levi was constructing
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: a densely coated magical image out of material inherited from alchemy, Christianity,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: Kabbalistic speculation, ceremonial magic, and his own occult synthesis. And
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: the hermaphroditic body allowed several apparently incompatible forces to be
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: represented at the same time. That image became enormously influential
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: on the generation that followed, including British occultists associated with
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: The Golden Dawn is.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: Often mentioned vaguely whenever people discuss masculine and feminine energies,
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: but the actual ritual structure allows us to say something
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: far more precise. The Order built initiation around spatial and
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: symbolic relationships among forces. Its tree of life placed the
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: pillar of mercy and the pillar of severity on opposing
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: sides of a central axis, while the black and white
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: pillars in its temples materialized polarity within ritual space. Elemental
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: forces had to be encountered, purified, balanced, and controlled, which
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: meant that the initiate did not merely read about equilibrium,
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: but was physically positioned within a symbolic architecture designed to
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: represent it. Golden Dawn ritual material repeatedly emphasizes the need
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: for balance between forces that become destructive when pushed into isolation.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: Severity without balance becomes cruelty, while mercy without balance becomes weakness.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: In the neophyte ritual, the candidate is placed between the
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: black and white pillars. An accompanying commentary describes the higher
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: soul as being formulated between them in the place of equilibrium.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: This gives us something considerably stronger than the vague claim
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: that the Golden Dawn simply believed in opposites. because the
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: candidate is physically placed between differentiated forces and taught to
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: understand their position through the language of equilibrium. The magical
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: project involves learning to encounter those forces without becoming dominated
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: by either extreme. And later, Golden Dawn material similarly places
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: the practitioner at the center of elemental structures, where opposing
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: powers can be brought into ordered relationship. None of this
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: means that Golden Dawn initiates were explicitly told that they
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: were becoming a rebus. and there is no reason to
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: manufacture that genealogy. What it does show is that a
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: problem represented visually in alchemical literature had become operational within
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: ceremonial initiation. In alchemy, differentiated principles enter the vessel and
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: undergo transformation. Within Golden Dawn Ritual, the candidate enters a
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: symbolic environment structured by differentiated forces and is taught to
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: establish equilibrium among them. Alchemy itself remained part of the
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: Golden Dawn curriculum. Particularly within the Inner Order, so the
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: resemblance was not occurring in complete isolation from the older material.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: The 19th century magical emphasis increasingly placed the human practitioner
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: inside a transformative process that earlier texts and images had
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: represented through substances, kings, queens, furnaces, and hermaphroditic bodies. The
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: center of the operation was gradually shifting from what the
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: alchemist attempted to produce toward what the magician attempted to become.
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: That development leads directly into Alistair Crowley. Alistair Crowley inherited
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: nearly every major strand that had become attached to this history.
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: He trained in the Golden Dawn, immersed himself in Kabbalah,
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: studied alchemical symbolism, revered Eliphas Levi, became deeply involved in
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: the OTO, and developed a magical system in which sexuality, polarity, union,
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: and the overcoming of apparent contradiction repeatedly acquired ritual and
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: theological significance. His relationship with Levi was particularly intense. Crowley
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: regarded the French occultist as one of his most important
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: predecessors and famously entertained the possibility that he was Levi reincarnated.
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: It is therefore significant that Crowley eventually took Baphomet as
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: his OTO motto and identity. This was not a later
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: title imposed upon him after his death. Crowley's own OTO
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: documents were issued under the name Baphomet, and in his confessions,
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: he explicitly states that he had taken Baphomet as his
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: motto within the Order. Whatever we make of Crowley's own
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: etymological and geometric speculations concerning Baphomet, his personal investment in
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: the name is unmistakable, and the association matters because he
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: knows Levi's figure and understood the symbolic tradition surrounding it. Baphomet,
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: for Crowley, was not simply an obscure medieval Templar name.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: His Gnostic mass, Libra XV, makes Baphomet part of Thelemic theology.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: The Creed invokes Chaos as the father of life and
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: Babylon as the mother, and then declares belief in the
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: serpent and the lion under the name Baphomet. Crowley's system
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: once again organizes itself through generative and polar relationships, although
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: chaos in Babylon, serpent and lion, should not be flattened
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: into interchangeable versions of one simple male-female formula. The same
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: caution applies to the relationship between Nuit and Hadith in
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: the Book of the Law. Nuit is associated with infinite extension,
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: the totality of possibility, and the starry body of space.
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: while hadith appears as a contracted point or center. One
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: represents limitless extension and the other concentration without dimension. Yet
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: the lima does not resolve the polarity by discarding one side.
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: Experience emerges through relationship. Crowley's sexual magic pushes the oldest
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: symbolism into another context. Alchemy had frequently used sexual generation
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: as an analogy for material generation, with king and queen
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: joining inside the vessel and producing transformed matter. Within sexual magic,
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: the human body itself can become part of the operative apparatus,
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: which considerably narrows the distance between metaphor and ritual practice.
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: Sexual union is no longer merely an image used to
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: explain conjunction, because under particular ritual circumstances, conjunction can be
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: enacted physically. Sexual difference, arousal, union, bodily substances, intention, and
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: magical concentration can all become part of the operations. This
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: is one reason Crowley should not be treated as somebody
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: who simply discovered what Renaissance alchemists had really meant. He
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: inherited older symbolism and changed how it was used. His
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: adoption of Baphomet belongs to that same development. Levi had
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: already transformed the composite and sexually ambiguous body into a
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: ceremonial magical emblem. Crowley then adopted the name Baphomet as
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: an initiatory identity inside an order deeply concerned with sexual mysteries.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: The symbolic movement has therefore come considerably closer to the practitioner.
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: Hermaphroditus began as an ancient divine being, the rebus represented
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: a product of the alchemical work, Levi's Baphomet became a
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: magical emblem, and Crowley eventually signed initiatory documents under the
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: name Baphomet itself. That does not mean Crowley was claiming
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: to be biologically hermaphroditic. It means that a figure associated
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: with synthesis, polarity, esoteric knowledge, Transgression and magical mediation had
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: become something a modern occultist could assume as part of
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: a magical identity. The next major transformation comes not from
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: an occult order, but from psychology. Carl Gustav Jung became
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: deeply interested in alchemy because he believed its images corresponded
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: to patterns he encountered in dreams, fantasies, mythology, and psychological development.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: He eventually interpreted the alchemist's symbolic world as, among other things,
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: a projection of unconscious psychic processes onto matter. Philalchemical works
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: became as important to this interpretation as the Rosarium Philosophorum.
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: In The Psychology of the Transference, Jung used the Rosarium
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: sequence to discuss psychological relationship and transformation, reading the royal
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: couple and their conjunction through the interaction of conscious and
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: unconscious contents and through the broader process he called individuation.
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: This is where the hermaphrodite became deeply entangled with the
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: modern psychological idea of integration. Jung's anima and animus concepts
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: provided one way of interpreting masculine and feminine psychic contents,
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: allowing the coniunctio to be read as the recollection of
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: psychological oppositions and the hermaphroditic product as a symbol of
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: a more integrated self. That interpretation has probably done more
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: than almost anything else to shape the way 20th and
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: 21st century occultists discuss alchemy.
• 47:50
  Speaker 2: But it also creates a serious historical problem.
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: Once Jung becomes the lens, it is easy to describe
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: 16th century alchemists as though they were unconsciously practicing 20th
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: century depth psychology. The furnace becomes the psyche, the king
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: becomes consciousness, the queen becomes the unconscious, and the hermaphrodite
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: becomes individuation. Such readings can be illuminating, as Jungarian interpretations,
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: but they should not automatically be treated as descriptions of
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: what historical alchemists thought they were doing. Alchemists worked with matter,
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: developed theories of metals and generation, distilled substances, manufactured compounds,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: experimented with medicines, and pursued actual transmutations. Some undoubtedly spiritualized
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: their work, and early modern alchemy could become profoundly religious,
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: but there is no justification for reducing the entire historical
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: tradition to disguised psychotherapy. Jung is therefore better understood as
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: another stage in the history of the hermaphrodite rather than
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: the person who finally revealed its hidden meaning. He inherited
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: a symbol that had already passed through mythology, biblical interpretation, Kabbalah,
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: Christian Kabbalah, alchemy, and ceremonial magic, and he translated much
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: of that inherited material into the psychological vocabulary of the
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: 20th century. This layered history explains why discussions of the
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: occult hermaphrodite become confused so quickly. A modern practitioner can
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: look at an image of the rebus and simultaneously see
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: Greek mythology. primordial Adam, Kabbalah, alchemy, Jungian psychology, gender symbolism,
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: sexual magic, Baphomet, and the Golden Dawn, even though the
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: original maker of the particular image would not necessarily have
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: recognized half of those interpretations. The modern symbol has accumulated
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: its history, which is very different from having possessed the
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: entire history from the beginning. Recognizing that distinction does not
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: weaken the symbol. It makes its survival more interesting. Hermaphroditus
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: originally belonged to an ancient mythological and religious environment in
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: which a divine being could possess masculine and feminine characteristics.
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: Ovid supplied an enormously influential story of physical conjunctions. Rabbinic
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: interpreters imagined primordial Adam before the familiar division of male
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: and female. Kabbalists developed increasingly complex relationships among gendered structures
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: within divinity, while Christian Kabbalists moved portions of that material
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: into Renaissance occult philosophy. Medieval and early modern alchemy made
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: the composite body part of a theory of generation and transformation.
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: Kuhnroth deliberately positioned Adam androgyne beside the rebus, and Meyer
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: explicitly connected the alchemical double being with hermaphroditus. Levi reorganized
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: the older language of composite polarity in Baphomet. The Golden
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: Dawn made equilibrium part of the initiatory practice. Crowley incorporated
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: Baphomet and conjunction into Thelemic and OTO contexts, and Jung
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: reinterpreted the older imagery psychologically. There is continuity here. but
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: much of that continuity lies in the repeated usefulness of
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: the image rather than the uninterrupted transmission of one doctrine.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: One of the most revealing features of the rebus is
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: that many versions retain visible distinction within the final body.
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: The figure does not necessarily become an undifferentiated sexless form.
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: Male and female characteristics remain recognizable even though they belong
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: to a single transformed being. This suggests that at least
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: some form of alchemical conjunction exists were not imagined as
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: the annihilation of difference. The operation instead produced a state
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: in which difference no longer prevented unity. That possibility helps
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: explain why the hermaphrodite proved capable of surviving so many
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: intellectual environments. It could represent sexual combination without being restricted
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: to sexuality, material conjunction without being reduced to chemistry, divine
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: totality without requiring God to be imagined as a biological organism.
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: ceremonial equilibrium without claiming that all distinctions were illusions, and
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: psychological integration without requiring historical alchemists to have been 20th
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: century psychologists. The image accomplished visually what abstract language often
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: struggles to express, and allowed apparently contradictory characteristics to be
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: present at the same time. That visual paradox becomes particularly
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: powerful in traditions that imagine the human being as a microcosm,
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: a small reflection of the greater cosmos. If the universe
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: contains solar and lunar forces, elemental tensions, expansion and contraction,
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: severity and mercy, spirit and matter, and masculine and feminine
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: forms of generation, then a perfected microcosm cannot simply embody
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: one half of the larger order. The human being must
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: somehow contain relationships among forces that appear separate when viewed individually.
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: This is where the history circles back strangely toward Hermes.
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: Hermes is a god of boundaries, but also of crossing them,
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: moving between Olympus and the human world, between the living
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: and the dead, and between languages and meanings. The later
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: Hermes Trismegistus becomes an imagined master of knowledge, joining celestial
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: and terrestrial realities, while Mercury becomes one of alchemy's most
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: elusive substances and principles precisely because it resists stable classification.
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: There is no need to claim that this.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: Entire later history was secretly encoded inside the ancient hermaphroditus.
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: The development is far more interesting when we allow the
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: question to change. Ancient writers and artists explored a divine
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: body combining sexual characteristics and, with Ovid, a dramatic fusion
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: of two beings. Rabbinic interpreters used primordial human doubleness to
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: address Genesis. Kabbalists asked what human structure might reveal about
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: divine structure. Christian occult philosophers placed Kabbalah inside a larger
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: universe of correspondences. Alchemists asked how differentiated substances could be
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: transformed into something neither could become independently. Ceremonial magicians increasingly
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: placed the practitioner inside systems of balanced forces. Crowley brought
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: conjunctions into explicitly sexual, initiatory, and religious practice, while Jung
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: asked what the inherited imagery might reveal when translated into
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: psychological terms. The occult hermaphrodite endured because each of those
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: worlds could look at the same impossible body and find
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: a different problem reflected there. There was never one immutable
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: doctrine passed untouched through a hidden brotherhood, and it never
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: needed to be. A mythological body became material for theological speculation.
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: Theological and cosmological ideas entered alchemical symbolism. The alchemical body
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: became a magical emblem. The magical emblem became something an
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: initiate could identify with, and the same image eventually became
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: a psychological symbol. By the time modern occultism inherited the figure,
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: hermaphroditus carried more than 2,000 years of reinterpretation within a
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: single body. The rebus is therefore more than a strange
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: person with two heads or a convenient symbol for saying
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: that everything contains a masculine and feminine side. It is
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: the residue of a much longer historical argument about division, generation, transformation,
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: and whether things that appear mutually exclusive can become parts
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: of a larger whole without simply ceasing to be different.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: That is why later occultists keep returning to the hermaphrodite,
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: even when they radically change what the figure meant. The
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: body could change, the explanation could change, the question remained.
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: And that's the end of another Occult Rejects. Hope you
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: all enjoyed, and until the next one.