Prophecies of the Alchemists

by Dennis William Hauck

The philosophy revealed by Thoth and expressed by the founding fathers of America, taught that there exists a vertical connection to the cosmos through which the true seeker can pass and witness the thoughts of the divine mind becoming reality. Having seen how to change reality by traveling to its source Above, the initiate returns to the physical world and participates in the creation of the universe according to the divine plan, which is to make the Above and Below One, to make all matter conscious, to make all darkness light. It was what Akhenaten called “living in truth,” and the Cosmic Code Book containing the formula for doing that is the Emerald Tablet.

However, the saturnic forces of darkness deny anything higher than themselves, resist change, and therefore seek to control everything. Those who are invested with worldly power believe the universe should never change, and they see consciousness and knowledge as tools that can only be used to maintain the status quo. Their motto throughout history has been “whoever controls the truth, controls the masses” and their justification is always materialistic. For them, altered states of consciousness are a threat. Individuals, even those who have conquered their own egos, are forbidden to enter the Hermes Field under the auspices of the superego of a society in which freedom of consciousness is denied. But there are universal principles at work that go beyond human whims, and if we deny Hermes, he comes back with a vengeance in frightening and enlightening borderline events designed to force all of society to change its way of thinking. The universe is a living process in which mankind can play an active part, and if he does not, there is no use for his consciousness. The alchemists recognized this, and were careful in to keep their motives pure and their worldly greed in check, else their beloved Stone would become a powerful nemesis they named the Rejected Stone.

We must be doing something wrong, for the Rejected Stone is all around us. Since World War II, the number of paranormal encounters throughout the world has risen exponentially, and in that same period, our mechanistic Newtonian universe has fallen and been replaced with surrealistic quantum visions that no commoner can grasp. Even the rational basis of mathematics, the Queen of the Sciences, has been shown to be an illusion. Our diseases seem to punish us for overindulgences, and their mercurial agents quickly alter their properties to elude us. We have built up a matter-grabbing industrialized society that is using resources faster than the planet can replace them, while the spiritual essences of our people are being ignored. Taken as a whole, our religious and educational institutions have hardly risen to the task but only reflect the same materialistic values. As history attests, the self-proclaimed representatives of God on this planet have been responsible for more death, pain, and loss of property than any number of military leaders.

Must a planetary Calcination take place to cleanse our planet of its hundreds of ego nations? Must planetary Dissolution be repeated but this time with a Great Flood from the Unconscious? Will we begin our Separation from illusion and our Conjunction of new beliefs in time to move on, or will Fermentation begin without us? Will the intrusion of paranormal realities destroy our feeble consciousness before it takes form under our own control? The imaginal realm is a potent independent force in our world that demands recognition. Any individual or society, psychology or religion, that holds it at bay, that denies its presence, is bound to suffer at its hands. It will eventually break through, and it will speak to us in unintelligible whispers, taking the form of gods or angels, or appear to us as shimmering phantasms or alien creatures standing at the foot of our beds. Psychology has shown that you cannot reject a part of yourself without it coming back at you, becoming a “shadow” that follows you everywhere you go. In fact, one of the terms alchemists used to describe the Rejected Stone was the Umbra Horrenda, the “Horrendous Shadow.”

Many religious descriptions of apocalyptic events can be interpreted in terms of the appearance of the Rejected Stone or even the complete opening of the gates that hold back the forces of chaos. Golden Dawn magician Aleister Crowley considered himself to be the reincarnation of alchemist Edward Kelly, whose Conjunction experience we examined in Chapter 6. Crowley alleged that he had contacted the same Enochian angels that Kelly and Dr. John Dee had worked with and learned the so-called Apocalypse Working Ritual that the angels will complete to open the Four Watchtower Gates and begin the Apocalypse of St. John. In 1909, Crowley performed this ritual himself and believed he was able to crack open the Watchtower Gates enough to release some of the chaos into the world. However, in reading the descriptions of the Apocalypse from Crowley and Dee and even the Bible, it appears to be more an unleashing of the Umbra Horrenda in psychological and spiritual terms than a physical upheaval. Perhaps we are the real workers of our own apocalypse; perhaps we are the ones who perform the Apocalypse Working Ritual without even realizing it and initiate the devastating process of Putrefaction.

By all indications, planetary Putrefaction has already begun. The earth has failed in her duty to “nurse” the child of the Sun and Moon, and the loss of personal self-esteem is the curse of our society. Many modern ills - drug addiction, eating disorders, learning disabilities, neurotic behavior, crime and violence, the high rate of suicide - all result from loss of respect for individual essences that transcend time and space. As Hermes prophesized in The Perfect Discourse in Asclepius: “In that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the world worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. This whole good thing, than which nothing was or is or will be deemed better, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms. Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought brave, and the wickedest will be regarded as good. Only the evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches by main force into all manner of reckless crime, into wars and robberies and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul. Then will the earth no longer stand unshaken, and the sea will no more be navigable; heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, nor will the stars pursue their constant course in heaven; the voice of the gods will of necessity be silenced and dumb; the fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken in sullen stagnation.”

In that same treatise, Hermes explains that in Egypt “all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven above have been transferred down to earth below,” and in another of his prophecies, Hermes links Putrefaction to changes taking place in the land of the pharaohs: “Our land is the temple of the world; but, as wise men should foresee all things, you should know that a time is coming when it will seem that the Egyptians have by an unfailing piety served God in vain. For when strangers shall possess this kingdom, religion will be neglected and laws made against piety and divine worship, with punishment on those who favor it. Then this holy seat will be full of idolatry, idols’ temples, and dead men’s tombs. O Egypt, Egypt, there shall remain of your religion but vague stories which posterity will refuse to believe, and words graven in stone recounting your piety. Some barbarous neighbor shall dwell in Egypt. Their Divinity shall reascend into heaven; and Egypt shall be a desert, widowed of men and gods.”

As authors Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval have demonstrated, Egypt is very much a part of our millennial transformation. Using precise measurements, they have linked the Sphinx at Giza with the cosmic Age of Leo. Such astrological epochs are determined by an astronomical phenomenon caused by the slow wobble of the earth on it axis. Known as the precession of the equinoxes, it is the time it takes an imaginary line drawn from the north pole to complete a circle in the heavens. It is estimated that this precessional line takes about 26,000 years to pass through all twelve signs of the Zodiac. This cosmic horoscope indicates the highest spiritual forces at work on the entire planet. The Age of Leo, which ended approximately 10,000 years ago, was a period in which life on the planet was dominated by superior forces of utter destruction that resulted in a state of luxuriant fertility. This was the era of the Great Flood and the Sphinx, and some say, when the Emerald Tablet first appeared on the planet. The spiraling alchemy of the planet continued until the present Age of Pisces that began about 2,000 years ago and is marked spiritually by introspection and self-sacrifice. The coming Age of Aquarius, which may have already began, will be a time of vision and tolerance. Carl Jung estimated that the era of Hermes would begin sometime between 1997 and 2200, and scientists at the French Institute for Geophysics have predicted the actual astronomical passage will occur in 2010, remarkably close to the 2012 date which marks the end of the ancient Mayan calendar. In the Zoroastrian Oracles, written in the sixth century before Christ, we find an ancient confirmation of the same hidden precession of earth’s axis that determines the planet’s alchemical horoscope. The writings describe the final stages of the alchemy of creation and how it will unfold on earth in four periods of about 3,000 years each. We are living in the end times of the third such period, as the final epoch begins to unfold on earth before we leave the planet entirely and travel on to the stellar realm.

Unfortunately for us, the transitions between cosmic epochs are notoriously disruptive. The apocryphal prophecies of Enoch, who according to legend is really Hermes in another of his disguises, describe a violent period of destruction that will even the score for our mishandling of the mystical and Hermetic revelations granted us. The French alchemist Michel de Notredame (1503-1566), better known as Nostradamus, also detailed much chaos and destruction during our transition into the next millennium. Even the great alchemist Paracelsus saw the difficult times ahead: “At present the palm is given to debauchery, until one third part of mankind or of the population of the whole world shall be killed, another shall be finished off by disease, and the remaining third only shall be saved and survive.” This all sounds like the waves of planetary holocaust predicted by so many modern psychics, though in the minds of indigenous people everywhere, it is just the planet shaking us off after raping her for the glory of our technology. As we look at the spiritually-charged monuments of the pyramids, Stonehenge, sacred moundworks and medicine wheels, one cannot help but wonder what our civilization’s legacy will be after the oft-foretold Technocalypse. Towering skeletal skyscrapers once filled with power hungry people dedicated only to moving money around? Great ribbons of asphalt that criss-cross the land like so much graffiti? A million lost golf balls?

Will we really fail so miserably? Whether is was an incarnation of Hermes, an alien intelligence, or the Supreme Being who gave us the Emerald Tablet, its author saw the possibility of perfecting the life force on this planet. “Its inherent Strength is perfected,” he tells us, “if it is turned into Earth.” On our journey in from the stars, on the Planetary Ladder through Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, to our Conjunction on Earth, we are now ready to proceed into the higher phase of our alchemy, which is beyond the Moon to Venus, Mercury, and the Sun. After the coming Putrefaction, Nostradamus saw a Fermentation of amazing spiritual development. “The body without a soul is no longer at the sacrifice. At the day of death it comes to rebirth. The divine spirit will make the soul rejoice seeing the eternity of the World.” In envisioning the final Coagulation, the alchemist prophet wrote: “The divine Word will give to the substance which contains heaven and earth, occult gold in the mystic act. Body, soul, and spirit are all powerful. Everything is beneath his feet, as at the seat of heaven.”

Psychonaut Terrence McKenna believes we will return to the stars together, as a species. He heard this from the mouth of Hermes himself, which for McKenna is the Psilocybe Cubensis mushroom, a true entheogen or independent intelligence that he believes is actively promoting human evolution. In a recent interview, he described a prophetic encounter he had with this Hermetic ally in which the Mushroom clearly said: “When a species prepares to depart for the stars, the planet will be shaken to its core.” “All evolution has pushed for this moment,” McKenna elaborated, “and there is no going back. What lies ahead is a dimension of such freedom and transcendence, that once in place, the idea of returning to the womb will be preposterous. We will live in the imagination.”

Perhaps, like the tragic members of Heaven’s Gate, we all sense that our home is really in the stars. In his translation of the sacred Egyptian text Rebel in the Soul, Bika Reed discusses the notion of suicide, which is what the ancient author of the papyrus is contemplating. Like the Heaven’s Gate participants, he sees this act as a sacrifice of body for spirit. “He wanted his soul to participate in this destructive act,” notes Reed, “because he knows that only in union with his soul can his spiritual essence rise from the ashes like the Phoenix. This Phoenix will be his Heir. The concept of Heir, one of the main themes of Egyptian mythology, is central to the papyrus. The Heir is the final result of human genesis: a spiritual, indestructible form of life in which the soul is exalted. The image of this blissful state is haunting this desperate mind. The man understands that despair is blocking the way to his spiritual evolution. Unable to overcome this despair he tries to shortcut it.” But the suicidal shortcut is a shortcut in the processes of alchemy too. We can go through Calcination and Dissolution repeatedly, through all eternity if need be, but we will never survive the transition intact without achieving the Stone of Coagulation.

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