I went into the village to buy a paper and mushrooms, and returned sometime later to find the kitchen floor strewn with, of all things, egg shells. The pan still in the sink told me F— had made herself an omelette for her lunch. Instead of discarding the shells, she had opted to leave them for me in a kind vivid but, I must say, annoying and somewhat smelly tableau on the floor. It seemed, in fact, like she had collected a whole week’s worth of egg shells so that she could impede my progress in this manner.

As I cleaned this mess, I felt as though I was Atalanta, having to stoop to pick each fragment up, just so I could proceed through the kitchen, on the way to my library.

F—‘s eggshell display was actually a joke, one that only an Adept such as myself might get. Yet it struck me, as I deposited the last of the remains in the rubbish bin, that one of the greatest sources of ignorance and misunderstanding concerning our Art is this business of symbolism and concealment. It occurred to me: What if I could explain this joke just enough that an interested student of Hermetic philosophy could perhaps see some of its meaning? Were I successful, the student might then go the rest of the way toward his own proper laughter, on his (or her!) own two feet. So here goes.

Many an alchemical writer has utilized the symbol of the egg. Our Art, like the process unfolding inside an egg, requires darkness, warmth, and quiet—obscurity and silence, in other words. The calcinous shell protects the inner environment—the mercurial albumen and the sulfurous yolk.

If the threefold nature of the egg is like our Art, the tiny embryo hidden deep within is akin to the process of understanding. At first it is microscopically small – a state that could be called confusion, or even foolishness. Yet if the embryo is also humble and persistent, this “foolish” body slowly grows, assimilating the sulfurous matter and the mercurial medium in which it is suspended; this body is itself the synthesis of these two principles. Countless commentaries deal with this process of bringing the original sulfur and mercury into perfect balance, so I will not touch on that here. Suffice it to say that, through this process, the chick gradually exhausts also the space allotted to it, and arrives at its ‘final destination.’

That is to say, with nowhere else to go, the chick finally sees the shell, illuminated from behind, and breaks through. In this, its moment of birth, the chick, our ‘completed understanding,’ pokes its head out and gazes down and sees the shell, which, because there is no sulfur or mercury anymore, is all that’s left of “where it came from.” This is a true and correct perception.

Now, let’s pause a moment. Great delicacy is required here, if we are not to take this object lesson on eggs as merely some cliché about darkness and light. We are not talking about Plato’s cave, about the “reality of the world outside,” nor are we indicating the “esoteric secrets concealed from the view of the masses.” Both formulations make me shudder in annoyance and boredom.

Many a would-be hermetic philosopher goes astray because he neglects to remember that our Hermes is “thrice great.” The central issue is not mercury and sulfur (any more than we are concerned with the world either inside or outside the egg). The—I won’t say “greatest mystery” but perhaps final destination of alchemical inquiry—is Salt. The Salt is identical in many ways to the eggshell in our allegory. Looking around with new eyes, casting aside the veil of illusion, seeing the light, is the effect that happens after you have seen (which means, correctly identified) the Salt.

Although I really shouldn’t say more, here is a further clue. To truly understand Salt, consider the proper order of things, and then consider that order in reverse. Remember what all the masters hint at about Time, and you will know that we willingly give over our ordinary consciousness of nature and matter to a delusion fomented by our parents. Being able to envision a process in reverse gives you important clues to its true nature and direction.

When we subject a substance, vegetable or mineral, to the fire, it decomposes rapidly into a volatile component and an earthy residue. Understood on this mundane level, the salt is, as it were, the leftover. Any process of volatilization achieves a similar result, and we need not look solely to the laboratory for examples, for it can be seen all around us. Some consider alchemy a hastening of the work of the seed. Yet in some ways it is a reversal, a transposition of temporal sequence, accomplished through what may appear to the uninitiated to be a falsification of the ordinary process.

Consider a meal, the bones left on the plate, the dried residue in the glass, the peel or seeds of a lemon. While not true salts in a chemical sense, these things, so beloved of the Flemish and Dutch painters, express the hermetic function of Salt. Now, picture the process backwards, putting flesh back on the bone, even going back to the still-alive fish or hog in the barnyard. A glass as it is being blown.

Saturn spits up a stone on Mt. Helicon, yet consider: He first had to swallow it, in ignorance, when it was substituted for his True Son. There are, needless to say, important and instructive parallels here with Abraham and the ram in the thicket, in the story of that great test of faith that foreshadowed the coming of Christ. One of these stones began, the other completed, the alchemical process. What, indeed, are fossils, according to the followers of Ussher, but things salted in the ground to test our faith in the true recency of Genesis? Youth, Salt. Meditate on these matters, and you may come to a better understanding of what Fulcanelli hinted at about “primitive chiliasm.” (And I need not repeat the importance of the ram, under whose sign all our work begins.)

All this is what the eggshells F— left scattered on the kitchen floor pointed toward: You must look down before you look up. As above, so below. The Salt has a way of confusing us about before and after, the proper sequence of things. Even now, I sense, you are confused and ashamed of your confusion. I can only recommend that you keep silent about your confusion, and pray.

My assistant F. is, in her Lilith-like fashion, a lover of serpents. She often goes out in the village with her pet python draped over her shoulders, so when she is not being stared at for her own natural gifts, she is being stared at for her python, because, well, you don’t see that every day, especially in the country.

I have had an interest in reptiles and snakes since my childhood, when my sisters and I occasionally came upon them when tramping in the hills near Zakopane. The mountains and valleys of Southern Poland possess several local varieties; one species would often sit on their coiled tails, with their heads standing straight up, mimicking cat-tails, no doubt to attract small unwary birds. My childhood fascination with our limbless cousins found rich expression in my adult pursuit of the esoteric science.

The symbolic usefulness of the serpent in all societies and in all religions is generally said to be due to the fundamental smoothness and linearity of the animal, and to the fact that it may assume the form both of a line and a circle. Thus Ouroboros, the serpent devouring his own tail, is a central hermetic and alchemical figure, found in all the best books. In any popular exposition on the subject of our Art, you will read that this figure represents the cyclical course of time, and the union of opposites.

But if you are at all discerning you won’t be satisfied by such a trite explanation. You see immediately how unsatisfying it is, a circle formed from an animal. What can one do with such a vague formulation? Why do we need a snake to help us see it? Why not a wheel, or a bug walking around the rim of a plate?

Alchemy teaches that we must follow in the footsteps of nature, so I will teach you about the true esoteric meaning of Ouroboros by means of actual serpentine behaviour. I am informed that tail-biting is a real phenomenon in domestic snakes—ask any veterinarian. The one that treats F—’s python for his eczema once took the time to answer my questions on the subject. It is not unrelated to the tail-chasing often seen in cats and wolves, and it is also analogous, in some ways, to certain neurotic disorders of teenaged girls. Snakes come to mistake their own bodies for food for similar reasons that unhappy girls mistake their thin bodies for fat ones. It is a problem of self-image.

If the autorexia of the domestic serpent is indeed a matter of self-devouring, you quickly see how ridiculous it is to take the famous symbol, Ouroboros, as a sign of mere circularity. Does merely biting the tail satisfy the hunger of the snake? Of course not. The reptile takes its own tail in its slavering jaws for the same reason it would bite down on a rat or a small child: to devour it. Yet its self-devouring is quite evidently an error: mistaking its own body, its self, for its prey.

It is in this mistake that we see the real meaning of Ouroboros. It is not simply that its forming a circle signifies unity. It is that it’s attempt at self-devouring represents the error of duality, the mistake of seeing self as other. This is what makes the Ouroboros the quintessential hermetic symbol: It essentially points toward the same truth–nonduality (or “advaita” in Sanskrit)–through two paths: signifying unity (the circle) and signifying the error of disunity, the illusion of two-ness. Effectively it acts as a doorway from error to truth. In contemplating such an image, note how you yourself become that serpent.

This is why I keep a large oil painting of Ouroboros in my laboratory, presiding (as it were) over my experiments. Although coated in years of soot, its glaring eyes still awaken my mind to the error of not seeing God, and thus myself, in every object and being that crosses my path.

There is a further avenue of thought to pursue in relation to this eating-disordered snake. I often ask my pupils to meditate on the consequences of a serpent actually devouring itself, beginning with the tail. What would happen? What would the inner structure begin to look like? The aforementioned veterinarian was able, in fact, to provide a quite concrete image (which he says he had come across in his studies) that will perhaps be useful to you as you undertake the recommended meditation: A boa constrictor in a Brazilian zoo famously attempted to devour itself and actually managed to consume most of its own body. It had worked itself into a tighter and tighter circle or toroid, becoming fatter and fatter in the process, ultimately taking on the appearance of a heavy, scaly sphere. The bizarrely contorted animal weakened because it could not get any actual nourishment—it had, so to speak, filled itself—so the veterinarians cut into its side in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to provide nourishment via a tube; I pointed out to my friend that what had been created was a kind of Klein bottle, and thus the effort failed for reasons of theoretical topology.

The Brazilian boa shows us the third fundamental philosophical and Hermetic possibility embodied by all serpents, which I daresay not even the hermeticists of old have recognized: and that is, not simply the bending of a thing around upon itself, but the much more mysterious alimentary possibility of a thing taking itself wholly inside itself, in topologic terms the transformation from a tube to a sphere and back again.

I am watchful of F.’s python for signs of such tail-biting, but thankfully they have not so far arisen in him.

E. and I made a day trip to Kutna Hora to visit an Alchemy Museum run by an acquaintance from my Prague days, Michal Pober. A mutual friend, Dan Kenney, had introduced us back in ‘97 in a quiet teahouse on a secluded street in Old Town. It had been one of those Prague conversations: a long meandering chat about everything esoteric — alchemy, the astrological layout of Prague, the Battle of White Mountain (and how Descartes may have been involved), Frances Yates, and myriad other subjects.

I don’t think Michal recognized me when he found E and I quietly poking among the dusty displays (which include lots of equipment, retorts, ovens, and giant bellows) in his museum 12 years later. But he gave us the grand tour of the building anyway, and talked at length about his discoveries regarding alchemical and related activities that once transpired in the region during its golden age (well, silver age — it had been a center of silver mining in the Middle Ages).

We went up to a tower room with still-surviving Renaissance frescoes and now outfitted to look like an oratory, and our guide discoursed on a number of subjects, including the alchemical activities of one of the house’s former owners, the illegal metallurgy that had gone on in the basement during the Middle Ages, and the hermetic interests of Casanova, who had lived out his last years as a librarian in the North Bohemian town of Duchcov. (Although obviously a follower of Casanova’s teachings, I had overlooked the occult side of the famous lover’s interests.)

Michal also told us of his discovery of the location of the original house where John Dee and Edward Kelly stayed when they first arrived in Prague. When our guide had himself first returned to Bohemia, he said, he repeatedly found himself eating fish soup at a particular table in a pub next to Bethlehem Chapel, a beautiful church in a still-mostly-quiet square just slightly off the main tourist drag in Prague’s Old Town (just up the street from the tea room where we had met for tea 12 years ago). Only later, he said, did study of old maps reveal that his favorite seat in this pub, U Betlemske Kaple, had been just adjacent to what (the maps revealed) was the no-longer-existing house of Emperor Rudolf II’s courtier Dr. Hageck. It was here, “at Bethlem,” that Dee and Kelly stayed temporarily; a previous occupant of their room had been an “A –” who had covered the walls with alchemical symbols and a Latin inscription.

Now, curiously, Michal then asked if I knew what “A–” meant. It was an uncanny moment. I had been asked the same question about “the meaning of A–”, very significantly, in an alchemical dream almost exactly a decade ago. In that dream, I had been of the opinion, possibly mistaken, that it stood for “Androgyne”; this time, when I hesitated to answer, Michal explained: “Adept.”

At the point I had been asked about “A–” in my dreams, I had been studying hermetic philosophy quite actively, to the detriment of my “official” anthropological studies. But I had largely ignored Dee’s writings (other than the Monas Hieroglyphica), because as “angel magic” it struck me as less relevant. Now I really wish I had read A True and Faithful Relation sooner. Needless to say, I quickly obtained a copy on my return home — both Casaubon’s version and the recent abridgement by Edward Fenton.

Dee records that the “student, or A– skilfull of the holy stone” who had occupied the chamber, Simon Baccalaureus Pragensis, had written on the walls this message (in Latin):

“This art is precious, transient, delicate and rare. Our learning is a boy’s game, and the toil of women. All you sons of this art, understand that none may reap the fruits of our elixir except by the introduction of the elemental stone, and if he seeks another path he will never find the way nor attain the goal.”

La tirette est la plus érotique des attaches, mais non? The zipper, she is violent, yet sensual–cold to the touch, yet promising–how can I say it?–Mystère illimité.

This dress, all from zippers, could not go without remark. It is to be found at the site of Sebastian Errazuriz.

(As I always am saying: L’extérieur est relié, détourné et répréhensible, à l’intérieur.)

E. and I are increasingly of the opinion that the healthiest possible food is fatty sausage, esp. kielbasa. No joke. So on weekends I am now cooking up batches of bigos, or Polish “hunter’s stew,” and bringing it for my lunch during the week.

Here’s how you make it (totally easy): Chop up three slices of raw Niman Ranch applewood smoked bacon and put it in a big pot on low heat. Let the fat render, until you have a bunch of nice pork fat in the bottom. Turn up the heat and add 1/3 to a 1/2 of a finely sliced yellow onion and one finely chopped garlic clove. Let the onion get a little brown in the fat (but make sure the garlic doesn’t burn), and then add a half of a big jar of Polonia sauerkraut (the good stuff–fermented cabbage, not just soaked in vinegar) and enough water to just cover the ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat so it is just simmering. Add a lot of marjoram and crushed caraway seeds and a shitload (3 Tbs?) of paprika (if you can find smoked Spanish paprika, that is all the better), and about three teaspoonfulls of Better-Than-Boullion chicken boullion paste. Then chop up about 1 1/2 feet of kielbasa (I do half and half smoked and nonsmoked) and add it to the mix, and stir. Then just simmer the mixture, covered, for several hours … and maybe add some more paprika, and water as needed to keep the mixture just barely of a stew-ey consistency. Mmmmmmmm. Then stick in tupperware, in the fridge.

This, I shit you not, is just about the easiest, healthiest, and most tasty, lunch you can pack for yourself.