Dan Merkur: Hermeticism vs. Gnosticism

Hermetism is often and wrongly confused with Gnosticism, which similarly originated in Egypt in roughly the same era. For present purposes, a few salient points of contrast will suffice. Like the God of Stoicism, the Hermetic God was omnipresent and omniscient through the material cosmos. In Gnosticism, by contrast, God was transcendent, and the physical universe was an evil place created by an evil Demiurge (van den Broek 1998). Hermetic ethics celebrated the divine within the world; Gnostic ethics were abstemious, ascetic efforts to escape from the world (Mahé 1998).

Stages of Ascension in Hermetic Rebirth

Were the Alchemists Medieval Heads?

Excerpted from Dan Merkur, The Angelic Stone in English Alchemy

I have been remarking since 1990 that there is simply no evidence of Western spiritual alchemy in the history of religions prior to the Renaissance.

the English school can be traced back to the Elizabethan period and concerned itself with psychoactive substances

Elias Ashmole presented a coded discussion of psychoactives and spiritual alchemy

Ashmole indicated that differing from the mineral stone, and so from metallic
alchemy as a whole, are three further stones: vegetable, magical, and angelic.

Ashmole may have been indicating that the magical and
angelic stones were both vegetables.

Ashmole asserted that the angelical stone was edible. It could neither be seen, felt, nor weighed, but only tasted. It was equally explicitly psychoactive. It “affords the Apparition of Angells” and provided “a power of conversing with them, by Dreams and Revelations.” The angelical stone was called “the Food of Angels”--a biblical designation of manna. It was incorruptible, in the sense that the spiritual gifts of the angelical stone retained their integrity as gifts against the fire. Because the sun is fiery, the fire against which the angelic stone was
proof were presumably the magical beliefs that the solar, masculine, magical stone
encouraged. Ashmole also remarked that tasting the angelical stone provided access to
eternity, implicitly meaning the Eternal. His claim that its manifestations of glory were present to fleshly eyes indicated that these several spiritual gifts were experienced in the body.

To conclude: at least some English alchemical writers openly discussed psychoactive
drugs that they associated with mystical deaths, verbal revelations, and prophecies.

Dan Merkur on Spiritual Alchemy

In the Paracelsian tradition of spiritual alchemy, initiates sought four specific mystical experiences in a deliberate sequence in order to inculcate a particular doctrinal orientation to mystical practice and metaphysics. Comparably complex mystical initiations have rarely been documented in the general history of religion. The literature occasionally suggests that a single technique of ecstasy, such as reciting a Hindu or Buddhist mantra, or the Muslim la illaha, or the Christian Jesus prayer, is able to induce several experiences en route to the desired experience of union. However, the use of multiple techniques to induce more than one desired experience is comparatively rare. One may point to shamanism (Merkur 1992) and Tibetan tantra (Hopkins 1977:191-2); but the gnostic tradition is the only instance in a Western culture that has been documented to date.