Posts Tagged ‘Arthur Edward Waite’

Waite on Alchemy, again

BY: Mark

The profound subtleties of thought seldom find adequate expression even when the whole strength of a truly intellectual nature is brought to bear upon the resources of language, and where the force of direct appeal is unwillingly acknowledged to be insufficient, the vague generalities of allegory can scarcely expect to succeed. It is the province of symbolism to suggest thought, and the interpretation of any sequence of typology inevitably varies in direct proportion with the various types of mind. Each individual symbol embodies a definite conception existing in the mind of its inventor, and in that symbol more or less perfectly expressed, but every student of allegory out of every individual symbol extracts his own meaning, so that the significance of typology is as infinite as the varieties of interpreting intelligence. For this reason, the best and truest adepts have always insisted on the necessity of an initiated teacher, or of a special intellectual illumination which they term the grace of God, for the discovery of the actual secret of the Hermetic art.

Without this light or guidance the unelected student is likely to be adrift forever on a chaotic sea of symbols and the prima materia, concealed by innumerable names and contradictory or illusionary descriptions, will for ever escape him. It is in this way that a thousand unassisted investigators have operated upon ten thousand material substances, and have never remotely approached the manufacture of the Great Magisterium, and, after the same manner, outwearied by perpetual failures in the physical process, that others have rejected the common opinion concerning the object of alchemy, and with imaginations at work upon the loftier aspirations expressed by Hermetic adepts, have accredited them with an exclusively spiritual aim, and with the possession of exclusively spiritual secrets.

– Arthur Edward Waite

Not too much different from the practice of being a successful writer, isn’t it?

Arthur Edward Waite on Alchemy

BY: Mark

This method of interpreting the Hermetic allegories is calculated to exalt the alchemists indefinitely in the estimation of all thinking minds. From possibly avaricious investigators of a by-way of physical science, they are transfigured into dreamers of the sublimest imaginable dream, while if that which they conceived was accomplished, they are divine and illuminated monarchs who are throned on the pinnacles of eternity, having dominion over their infinite souls.

     — Arthur Edward Waite.

Part of his argument that alchemy wasn’t about transforming dross into gold. Of course, he couldn’t say as much in plain language because part of the charm of the alchemical process was having the initiate reduce materials down to their most primal expression. That applies to the instructions as well.