3/24/2021 The Hermetic Caduceus And The Mirror - Brotherhood of Miriam

e Herme c Caduceus And e Mirror

Posted on March 23, 2021by oldatanor

This piece presents itself

Taken from "Introduction to Magic" volume 1, author Abraxa

Each of our teaching is illusory until it is translated into a practice and an act . Therefore, the directives
for the first operations in the direction of the road are communicated to you, of which you know from
what I have told you previously.

You have to master a part of your life or day first in order to firmly and actively fix a new quality in it,
like that.

Detach yourself internally from yourself and from what surrounds you, and keep to a sober life,
without efforts, without excesses, neutral and balanced.  Get enough sleep and be sparing in your
food.

Your body is whole, calm, harmonized.  Your soul temper it with the power of you, purify it of
impulsiveness, passion, agitation, then fix it and amalgamate it in the body.

Other beings do not exist. Their actions and their thoughts or judgments do not touch you - whatever
they are.

Make sure that nothing is able to sneak into you: watch over everything, what comes from the outside
and what

it emerges from the depths still penetrated by your consciousness; observing in silence with intellect
and imperturbability, with a quick energetic hand, restraining all judgment.

If passions harass you, do not react or upset yourself. Instead, lead them deliberately to satisfaction
and then let them go.

Climb up in this direction until you are able to feel the frivolity, the uselessness and the snare of every
thought, so that your mind too gradually calms down and comes to crouch silently at your feet.

In this way you will slowly set up a strength of yourself, similar to a gentleman whose gaze imposes
silence, respect or confusion on the servants around him. This is our Gold :.

When you have done all this with subtle and constant art, strong and sweet; when the balanced and
neutral state in you has become a continuous and natural thing, then you will feel as if you are
reunited with yourself in a sense of interiority that you previously knew nothing about.

At this point you will experience a propensity to rest in you, and from this calm and enlightened rest
will arise a sense of spiritual and liberated contentment.

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Spy on this feeling and hold it back. When you have fully mastered it, with an inner act about which I
cannot tell you anything, because you will only learn it after having invented it , try to connect it with
the body so that, like heat in the water, it spreads there and in the end of the two it does not result
that one thing , that one state .

This state is the  fluid  state  .  And the operation in our Tradition is called:  the first extraction of
Mercury (or Hermes) from the mine .

Hold your consciousness, this state, with a calm firmness.  Then let it go, then re-evoke it, several
times: study it, learn it , until it is felt by you as a reality waiting in the subconscious, ready to emerge
at your call.

When you have achieved this point, be sure that you have gone far enough. You will be told  of the
various properties of the fluidic body only in connection with the various operations, the first of which I
will now instruct you.

Just know that any sexual intercourse that is dominated by thirst for voluptuousness paralyzes him,
renders him inert and limp, especially in nervous temperaments.  Know that it is energized by the
vegetarian diet  [1]  , by fasting, and also by magical scents, as one of its names suggests, which is
"aromal body" and, in one particular aspect, "vampire".

Know that any sudden imbalance or emotion that occurs when the conscience is in relationship with it
can cause damage, even serious, in the physical and psychic. Finally, know that his virtues must be
refined through a special discipline.

I will give you an elementary hint on it so that you can understand the meaning of the initiatory
education of feeling. You must not destroy the feeling, but you must destroy your murky adhesion to
it, that is, the voluptuousness, the desire and the aversion, the anguish in feeling.

Purified from such dross: release yourself from the  bond of the heart  , made, in feeling, open, free,
without fear and without narrow-mindedness . Like clear water, not moved, it lets the things that are
in the bottom shine through, so no longer identified with the feelings, welcome them and observe
them as you would for things of the external world. "Just as I am not the food I taste, likewise I am not
the feelings that I allow to resonate freely in me - they are not mine, they are not me", let this evidence
arise in you.

Only then can the feelings speak to you when you cease to be caught in them, intent only on enjoying
or suffering. They will reveal to you a new organ of the senses beyond the animal ones, as "objective"
as these, although aimed at a more subtle aspect of reality.  This new meaning is taught with inner
attention, aimed at the ear of the heart : make it very refined.

At the center of you, like a spider that holds all the threads of its web and controls every vibration of
them, be a domain and a calm and scrutinizing lucidity at the center of a perfect, purified and intrepid
sensitivity, open to every voice.

This education of the heart, which you will operate by "persuasion", with a slow and sweet "fire", will
instill in your fluidic body a power of supersensible knowledge.  It creates a "distilled water", a
transparent water consecrated in the sign of your neutrality, which dominates it:   [2] .

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Having reached this point, he attempts the liberation of the central power and the encounter with the
Serpent. This happens when the consciousness of your "I" is able to transfer itself to the seat of the
fluidic body and this is detached from the animal senses and consequently isolated from the physical
world.

The techniques used are various. He despises the prudence of small methods of "meditation", which
are rarely able to draw you away, really and not in your imagination, from the swamp of mental forms
and the prison of the brain. Turn to direct methods. For example, use the " Mirror ".

To isolate the fluidic body, you need to make the sensitivity of the animal body neutralized and
inert. The "Mirror" technique acts on the optic nerve and tires it until the power concentrated in the
gaze is released from the physical organ and is implemented in the fluidic light. [3]

It goes like this. Find yourself a very clear room, possibly out of the agitated turbid atmosphere of the
big cities, in the countryside, in a place where silence reigns high and nothing distracts your
attention. Hermetically sealed.

Auspicious are the dry and clear nights.  Do not wear clothing that tightens your body, nor is it
burdened with food.  Burn a little, of myrrh with open windows, then a smaller dose with closed
windows, and sit in front of the mirror.

Having clearly formulated your will, it recalls on several occasions, persuasively, the fluidic state that
the slow and deep aspiration of the perfume will make more alive, and attaches it tightly to the sense
of you as "presence" and impassive superiority act in command [4] . Then stare at the mirror.

The mirror can be in crystal, or in steel, copper, bronze, concave in any case, so as to collect the light of
a lamp located in a central point so that the operator does not see it and that everything remains in a
dim light. exception of the mirror  [5]  .  So stare at that point without batting an eye, until you see
nothing else.

Insist. It will change into a black point. The black point will widen into a bluish spot which will then
become a halo at first indecisive, then milky-white. One more step, and from this dawn an illuminated
clarity will unfold in a rapid expansion, a freedom-freshness-light.

It is the threshold of the supersensible, the first contact with the " Astral Light ", where the conditions
to which the embodied beings at the bottom of the " Waters " cease to weigh on the subsistent core of
the psyche .

I told you: fix . This is all and this is nothing. It is a word that contains a long attempt, an uncertain
path built by the secret art of a careful, subtle, prudent dose, combine and balance the active and the
passive, the sensitive and the determinative of the soul. Little can I tell you here, to help you.

You have to make your own way and legs to walk. Let your gaze, effortlessly, without apparent will,
as if you were about to fall asleep sweetly (fire under ashes). Let it stare and then abandon it, try not to
think about it anymore, to forget about it.

Sight is the starting point, but in truth your whole soul will be operating in the operation, and its gaze
is only a means of fixing itself.  The abandonment intensifies it by  loving it  , condescending and
tempering it with sweet obstinacy until it becomes a  continuous thing  that no longer tries to escape
from your pushing it even deeper.

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On the other hand you have to hold firm to a subtle and tenacious presence to yourself, you as a simple
point that has no stops of fear, that knows how to keep itself and in keeping itself does not hinder the
direction of abandonment, which is carried by abandonment slipping and melting and in the transitions
not dissolving but rising with the unexpected experience of greater clarity, simplicity and strength.

Here a first joining of Sulfur and Mercury, of the Moon and of the Sun takes place; therefore you know
the work as the first preparation of the Caduceus of Hermes .

The obstacles, abstracting from those that will intervene at the end of the report, lie in the excess or
unbalanced dosage of the Mercurial and the Sulphurous. I have told you about the preparation, which
must make the corporeal nature calm, supple and harmonious under you.  You must now take this
nature gently, leading it to the operation almost without her knowing.

If, impatient and clumsy, you exceed in strength, it will react, it will melt away from you and suddenly
you will be thrown back to the starting point.  These instinctive reactions to the beginning are
inevitable; but they must not discourage you: try again, with a new spirit, at the same hour, you subtly
insist, Éliphas Levi says: like "the wave that always returns and ends up gnawing at even the iron".

The reactions and instinctive alarms of your body will be followed by those of your not sufficiently
tempered spirit. It will happen that you feel like fainting, a sense like you are suddenly falling and
you will jump, you will hold back very quickly - and again you will be at the point you were
before [6] .

The way will remain closed until you have awakened in you an even more rapid readiness with which
you will suddenly stop the reaction even before it can intervene to suspend the fluidic
detachment. The opposite defect lies in the possibility of an abandonment to abandonment that dissolves
the presence to yourself.

This would make the world of magicians decay into the world of mediums and visionaries , the world of
the  supersensitive  into the world of the  subsensitive  .  In the medium the center dissolves and its
consciousness slips down, immerses itself in the body, becomes that of the body itself.  He is fully
dependent on the body, and what he experiences are precisely the outcrops and "projections" of the
murky tendencies and elementary forces that are contained in his organism.

The sign of this perverting and aborting of the operation is a sense of deadly fatigue that will take you
as soon as you are back to normal: because other forces will have fed on your strength.

To create an ever more decisive preponderance of the intellectual center over peripheral sensitivity in
contact with the external world and also over organic and subconscious elements in general, such was
the task of the "preparation" indicated at the beginning of this paper. This preponderance leads to the
state I told you about = where the mind joins itself and realizes the experience of independence,
subsistence and superiority over all that is corporeal and animal.

When the detachment of the fluidic body occurs in your fixed continuity and intrepidly intensified on
the internal direction, it is a basis that fails, and you must hold yourself absolutely still in this pure,
immaterial, extracerebral state of mind and "I".

If you are not capable of it, the mediumistic and sleepwalking state takes over in which the liberated
fluidic body is devoid of a nucleus and becomes a passive instrument of the lower world.

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If, on the other hand, you actively surpass the neutral point, you will realize in the " Magnesia of the
Sages" the " Rebirth in the mind ". I mean that from the golden core of your integrated, collected and one
= mind, an intellectual light will blossom , in which you will realize a new, powerful, transformed sense
of yourself. You will see. You will be awake.

Says Filalete (Introitus, chapters I and XIII): «For« our gold (= sun which is the nucleus aroused and
constituted by the preparation) it happens the same (as for the seed); at the beginning it is dead or,
better, its vivifying virtue is hidden under the hard shell of its body ... As soon as it is wet in
our Water(that is, the fluidic) it is reborn, it comes back to life and becomes the Gold of Philosophers ...
fixed = it becomes volatile for a certain time in order to inherit a more noble quality which then serves
to hoist the bird "

With this experience, your "I" therefore leaves the animal vehicle, slave of the "waters", and assumes a
fluidic body or "body of air", as an organ of action, with which and with adequate determinations it is
possible to operate multiple and admirable works.  And when to summarize the animal body you
encounter difficulties, remember, the means is: to evoke its image and want it .

For the magician it is a question of getting out in one way or another from the atmosphere of servitude
and drunkenness which is the "soul of the earth";  to enter into conscious contact with the world
beyond, and from there act actively, directing congruous reactions and effects in real life. His spirit -
says Kremmerz - is like a flame that rises and falls: he knows how to go up to the surface of the
current of "waters" where, consecrated in "air", the possibility of subduing the beings that depend on it
is virtually opened to him. same current, which now appears as the "astral Light" itself [7] .

I gave you a way. Try what I told you before thinking about any other operation. Do not think that the
task is easy and free of dangers, nor expect anything from the first attempts. If you are constant and
lord of doubt, you will succeed. Dare and be quiet.

The most powerful force is the will of the man who knows what he wants.  So set the purpose and
never change it. Once you have started, do not give up without a precise reason because, as I have
already told you, the path of Magic does not know "dead corners": you thought before entering it.

[1] An occult law wants that every energy of a being that is not in act in that being constitutes a weight and
an impediment in every initiatory operation. There are particular organizing forces in man, from which
food is taken and transformed. Now since going from the mineral world to the human one there is an
increasingly organized matter, in eating vegetables, forces are forced to come into action that would
not manifest themselves by eating animals.

This is how vegetable food can propitiate a greater degree of presence and fluid dynamism.  In
addition, the danger of certain psychic infections is avoided, which otherwise can be resolved
positively only by applying the internal fire in a special work of transmutation, intended to change the
"poisons" into "vital juices". [N. d. U.]

[2] The Catholic Church preserves various symbols which are likely to have an esoteric meaning. For
example, the "heart" that Jesus "carries in his hand" surmounted by a cross and surrounded by flames,
it is enough to slightly stylize it to have an alchemical sign that has the aforementioned meaning. And
its "flaming" is connected to the "ignification of the astral Light" which has a very different meaning
from that supposed by the devotees.

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[3] We detect the identity of purpose with the yogic technique of pratyàhàra, which also consists in
fixing a given point on one's body or outside of oneself.

[4]  This succeeds even more organically and directly if the translation of the sense of self into the
heart, which was mentioned in the previous chapter, is carried out. [N. d. U.]

[5] Various useful technical details on the construction and use of magic mirrors can be found in PB
Randolph, Magia sexualis, Paris, 1952, pp.  133-215.  (Italian translation at Edizioni Mediterranee,
Rome, 1969).

[6] Note, the reader, the analogy with those jolts that often occur for no apparent reason on the verge
of falling asleep; in fact, in sleep there is a natural, involuntary, unconscious detachment of the fluidic
body, which is followed by a state of passivity of the ego in front of the forces to which it owes its own
life and which, in sleep, take its place .  To those who understand, this analogy may already offer
guidelines for a second method.

Let us remember that in the previous chapter Meyrink said precisely that the whole secret lies in
becoming aware of the "form" of one's ego, of one's "skin", immersed whether one is in sleep or, better,
in the moment of passing into sleep. [N. d. U.]

[7] From these teachings, among other things, the meaning of the symbols of the "bird", an animal that
"lives in the air", and of the "fish", an animal that moves freely in the "waters" emerges.

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