The story of Hercules’ theft of the apples in the Garden of the Hesperides necessarily also reminds us of the story, even more commonly alluded to by alchemical writers, of Jason and the golden fleece. This story is commonly considered to be one of the most explicit mythological expressions of the alchemical process and objective. I will only briefly summarize it: Hermes had sent a winged ram, Chrysomallus, to rescue Phrixus and Helle from their wicked stepmother. Helle fell into the sea and was drowned, but Phrixus made it safely to Colchis, and in thanks sacrificed the ram to Zeus. He gave the fleece of the ram to the king, Aeetes, who put it under a dragon’s guard in a garden sacred to the god Ares (Mars). Later, the king’s daughter, the famous Medea, using divine magic, helped Jason and his crew of 50 Argonauts slay the dragon and steal the fleece. This last woolly substance is taken by all the great authors to symbolize the culmination of the Great Work.

The astrological significance of Ares is important. Many writers emphasize that the work must begin under the sign of Aries—astrologically, the Spring—and standing also for the planet Mars and the metal it rules, iron. And there are other things that rams and their mates symbolize—consider them all carefully. The dragons that guard the golden fleece, as well as the golden apples of the Hesperides, reward consideration too. “Dragon” comes, as Fulcanelli reminds us, from the Greek word derkesthai meaning looking or glancing, or “eyes always open.” It is sometimes said that a dragon is awake while it is sleeping.

It is traditional to place lions, not dragons, as guardians of our courts and other edifices of the Law, and this practice descends from the ancient practice of using lion statues to guard temples. Horapollo, an ancient exegete of the esoteric glyphs of the Egyptians, explains why: The Egyptians believed that lions, like dragons, are awake when they are asleep, and asleep when they are awake. Consider then what dragons and lions may have to do with rams, let the relationship simmer in your mind, and you will be rewarded.

“Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” (Aldous Huxley)

In thinking about Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens, we should consider not just the story of the race of Hippomenes and Atalanta, but also how Venus obtained the golden apples in the first place.

Retrieving the golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, at the Western end of the earth, was one of the labors of Hercules. Hesperides comes from hesperios [fem. of Gr. hesperis, meaning ‘of the evening’ or ‘western’]. Hesperis is Venus in its appearance as the Evening Star. (Hesta, in Greek, became the Roman deity Vesta, from which we also get vesper, meaning evening, and vespers, the sixth of the seven canonical hours and the prayers said in the early evening–but I digress.) The garden was guarded over by nymphs (the Hesperides themselves) and by a dragon, Ladon. Dragons are omnipresent in our Art. This one, Ladon, connects to latona, mother of Apollo and Diana and cabalistically equivalent to latten or brass. This is the theme of emblem XI: “Whiten Latona and Burn Your Books.” It should also be noted, for what it may be worth, that Latona also resembles Latin, the literary language of the ancient world and the language in which most European alchemical texts (including this one) were penned.

If we divide the name of the garden differently, we arrive at hes+perides: hes- may remind us of haes, L. haeserare, “to hold fast” (as in hesitate). And perides may relate to pyrite—i.e., fool’s gold, a form of iron. Could it be that the “golden apples” aren’t true gold, but rather some false gold merely meant to capture Atalanta’s desire? The English word “fool” actually has an alchemical origin, by the way: It comes from the Latin word follis, which means “bellows.” The very definition of a misguided alchemist was a “puffer,” someone who wasted his life with his bellows, stoking a fire, slavishly, literal-(letter-al)-mindedly, following the instructions in his books.

Iron pyrite, or Iron sulfide, takes a metallic crystalline form, and was used in firearms of the period Maier was writing because it sparks when struck against a flint. Pyrite was also sometimes used to mean flint because it was believed that the fire was inside of this stone. Flint had other uses near to the heart of our Art, however: A ‘touchstone’ is a hard piece of flint used to test the purity of gold or silver. The streak left by the metal when scratched across its surface was compared with that of a standard alloy. The origins of flint are mythologically attributed to Mercury, and can also be found in Ovid. The story makes an irresistible digression:

While he was thinking only of his love, and comforting himself with his reedpipes, his cattle, unguarded, so the story goes, strayed into the fields of Pylos. There Maia’s son, Mercury, espied them, and by his cunning drove them off and hid them in the woods. No one had noticed the theft, except one old man, well-known in the neighborhood, whom everyone called Battus. His duty was to patrol the glades and grassy meadows of wealthy Neleus, keeping watch over his herds of pedigree mares. Mercury was afraid of Battus, and so he led him aside and said coaxingly: ‘Whoever you are, my friend, if anyone should happen to ask for these herds, say that you haven’t seen them. Here is a sleek cow, as a reward for doing me this favour.’ The other took the cow he gave him, and replied: ‘Go on your way, you are quite safe.’—and pointing to a stone, he added: ‘Sooner will that stone tell of your theft than I.’ Jove’s son pretended to depart; but later he returned in a different guise, and spoke in a different voice. ‘Herdsman,’ he said, ‘if you have seen any cattle passing this way, help me, and do not be party to a theft by keeping silent. In return you will have a bull and its mate for yourself.’ Now when the reward was doubled, the old man was tempted. ‘You will find them at the bottom of those hills’—and in fact, that was where they were. Mercury laughed. ‘You rogue,’ he said. ‘You would betray me to my face? Actually betray me to myself?’ and he turned the faithless heart to hard flint, the stone which even today is called ‘touchstone.’ The innocent rock still bears the stigma of that shameful deed of long ago.

So, there is perides and pur … and if you are at all getting the hang of cabala certain other possibilities will no doubt have occurred to you. But file those away in the back of your mind and return your attention to me, your teacher and guide, for one more minute, because I want to impart to you one last observation. It may be worth noting that Hesperides sounds very much like experiment, the very method of the Art we are considering. Most dictionaries will assert that experiment comes from L. experire, “to try or test”—of which we may take the touchstone as a model—but the real root will be obvious even to a schoolchild: Ex-, as anybody knows, means “from,” and peri means “near” or “around.” The same two roots form the basis of experience.

Here it is useful to remember what every alchemical writer says about the First Matter chosen for the subsequent transformation into the Philosopher’s Stone: It is something that is all around us, close at hand, and thus cheap, or even despised by the majority of people.

The loveliest alchemical text of the whole 17th Century is Atalanta Fugiens, literally “Atalanta Fleeing,” by Michael Maier. The title refers to the story, told by Ovid, about the race between the beautiful fleet-footed virgin Atalanta and her would-be suitor Hippomenes. The frontispiece of the book depicts various scenes from this story, and the 50 emblems and commentaries in the book all relate in various ways to the Hermetic themes it symbolizes. It seems to me that it might be helpful to you, reading at home and no doubt bewildered by the baroque symbolism of Maier’s masterpiece, for me to initiate you into certain of its themes.

The main story is this: Atalanta, the fastest in the land, didn’t want to marry but was pressured to do so by her father. She agreed to a race with her suitors—whoever could beat her would win her hand, but whoever didn’t would die. To help him win the prize, Venus provided Hippomenes with three golden apples. During the race, he threw down the apples one by one, and each time Atalanta was distracted enough by them, bending to pick each one up, that he was able to surge ahead and crossed the finish line first. He thus won the race and married his prize.

On the surface, it is a nice story to tell children, but on another level much of the alchemical method is symbolically expressed or alluded to by its imagery. Most crucially, there is the fundamental dualism between fast and slow, or volatile and fixed. This opposition is central to Alchemy and to Hermetic philosophy generally, and Maier regarded it as so important that he made it central to his own (self-designed) coat of arms: An eagle attempts to fly upward but is kept from doing so by a crawling toad to which it is chained. (Meditate on that chain, and you can go far in our Art. I will say no more about this.)

Atalanta herself obviously indicates something fast and quick (like quicksilver or vulgar mercury) and also elusive—something that flees and so must, via some operation involving real or figurative gold, be detained or slowed. This problem, fixing the volatile, necessarily calls to mind the question of Time. All the great writers are concerned with Time, timing, and different qualities of unfolding. All writers emphasize, for example, the great care and patience to be taken in the hermetic work. Patience implies slowness, sluggishness, detaining, and waiting. Why should ‘great care and patience’ be part of the hermetic picture at all? Such a requirement, which seems at first most obvious and unworthy of consideration, because it strikes us as so familiar and universal—found in every initiatory tradition, every philosophical tradition—is actually a very mysterious point. The nature of the ‘great care and patience’ should be reflected on, thought about, because such thought may help reveal the identity of the matter we are concerned with.

Our subject, without the help of “Hermetic patience” (quite different from vulgar patience), could literally flee our grasp. What are other things besides Time that behave like Atalanta, and that it would be worthwhile to detain or fix? What on earth requires such great care and patience, subordinating ourselves or submitting ourselves to it? All the great philosophers have warned of this difficulty of beginning the work: the beginning requires knowing the identity of the first matter, the despised/overlooked substance upon which all subsequent transformations are performed.

It is also apparent that this allegory concerns the role of gold in the alchemical work, but not in the way we might expect. All the great writers agree that gold is not simply an end product of the work but is also a necessary ingredient, as something that needs to be given to Mercury in order to fix it or hold it in place. Yet we must be cautious, and not merely think of the apples as common gold. Common (or “vulgar”) gold is often disparaged by alchemical writers. Fulcanelli, for example, called gold the gaudy slut of metals.

Fulcanelli seduced generations of would-be adepts with the etymological games so beloved of the French, which he called cabala. Fulcanelli’s cabala derived, he said, not from the Jewish Kabbalah but from the similar-sounding Latin word caballus, for “horse,” sharing thereby a close connection with the science and art of chivalry. I am not above imitating Fulcanelli’s amusing method, if it will shed some light on Maier’s work.

How better than to consider the name of the ancient hero whom our legend concerns. On one level it can be linked to hip-, a decline or depression or throwing down, plus pom, apple or fruit. But Fulcanelli would go on to insist that there is no contradiction to say that the word may yet be parsed a second way: Hippomenes contains the prefix hippo, the Greek word for “horse,” plus menes, mens, or “mind.”

But there is something else again: Hippomenes is closely similar to hypomnema, a Greek word that meant “note” or “reminder”—a supporter or foundation (hypo-) of memory (mnema). Consider memory, then, and reflect on why (and how) the gifts of Venus may be an aid to it, in fixing the volatile mercury. In this connection, and with just a little cleverness, you might just find the meaning of Emblem VI: “Sow your gold in the white foliate earth.”

But I have already written too much.

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.”

Alchemy was and remains the only science and art of bowing to the perception, of submitting to what can describe, in worldly terms, as “beauty,” so long as we understand that true beauty, which is formed in the eye of the beholder, is a perception of spirit in flesh, not of flesh alone. (It was never flesh alone, and anyone who thinks that it is is misguided.)

The Hermetic meaning of the Annunciation has to do with the same problem treated in Genesis—what you could call “the Immaculate Conception of Will.” How do you generate something from nothing? Something as simple as an action?

Spirit is the mediator, but that means nothing without understanding what is being mediated. The receptive pole, Mary, the Virgin, is the easiest to understand. Yet we should not slip so easily into the cliché that she is simply the receptive vessel. We need to understand what is meant by her purity. Like an empty, clean cup, she is fully capable of being filled by spirit. Receptivity is an abstraction as long as it is not expressed through a gesture of allowing to be filled. The ‘Mary function’ is revealed in the moment she says “Be it unto me according to thy word”—that is to say, in her gesture of willingness. The decomposition of moments in the Annunciation by the Medieval painters amounted to an analysis of this key mystery at the heart of the feminine.

Willingness must not be confused with will. Essentially, willingness is one part of will. In the analysis of will, you must confront both its male and female components.

The male component of will is a form of perception first described in Genesis I: “He saw that it was good” and repeated, by proxy, through the mouth of the Angel in Luke: “You have found favor with the Lord.” This perception that sees, and is gladdened or heartened by what it sees, is also completed, given form, by a gesture, and the Medieval painters quite aptly expressed this aspect of the larger mystery via the courtly idiom.

So, we have in this scene a chivalrous gesture expressing a perception, met in a gesture of willingness. But to understand the true quality of willingness, we must understand its viscosity, its inherent resistance. Willingness is paradoxically both avid and hesitant. You can unfold it, as it were, in time, to examine its discrete aspects: There is an initial shock or surprise, which proceeds to inquiry, then reflection, and lastly culminates in an agreement. These “moments” unfold in an instant—they are aspects of the willingness function that can only be analyzed when decomposed. The Medieval painters followed the schema of Luke’s narrative, in which Mary’s response is separated into discrete moments, but this temporal unfolding is itself a declination to our human faculties of understanding, bowing to our mind so that we, in our own sluggishness, may be pulled upward toward knowledge, toward Gnosis.

How can we not also see the temptation of Eve as wonderful, in this way? There too we have a seduction, a beguiling through promises whispered, an inquiry and reflection, and lastly a collusion, though it earned such opprobrium from the simpleminded dogmatists that Eve’s sex has always been discredited. Innocent and hesitant, but also completely receptive, the Virgin, the Mother (whether we refer to Eve, our First Mother, or to Mary, the Mother of Our Stone) shows us the Matter of divine practice: the inert earth, the substance, the first substance of Our Art.

Yet we should not get sidetracked into matters of chemistry. We were talking of will and its components. How can there arise in a universe of causes a truly original action? An Hermetic reading of Scripture gives us an answer: Will is not an exertion. It is a perception infused into an attitude, a response of the body to the divine, accepting the infusion of spirit. The act is originally empty of spirit. It arises as a natural consequence of this interpenetration of gestures; it is gestated by Nature in the womb of the Virgin. Christ, the birth, is the Act. The Act comes from God and goes back to God. Its perfection is solely a function of its exalted origins. It is Noble because it is of Noble birth. Its vicissitude is pain. Its result is the salvation of the world, the redemption of Man.

When I agreed to write on Hermetic philosophy for “The Nightshirt,” I never intended to discuss my accumulated knowledge of seduction, like those sites that teach shy young men “how to talk to girls.” My seduction art I teach on the other site. Yet there are numerous points of contact between Hermes’ teachings and the arts of Venus, and when I am asked about esoteric meanings contained in ancient myths I do like to remind the student of the occult not to forget that Venus concerns our Golden Art in direct as well as indirect ways.

Consider for example the story of the Annunciation and Incarnation, related in the Gospel of Luke. It is full of Hermetic symbolism, providing great insight into the true philosophical meaning of Jesus as Stone. But even before we dig that deep, there’s a more mundane but equally rewarding way of reading the story, which nevertheless, in a roundabout way, carries us back to the Hermetic layer of understanding.

Luke, as you know, is the only one of the canonical gospels to include the account of the Lord’s conception. But there are other accounts, including the apocryphal Protevangelum Jacobi, which elaborate somewhat upon what happened. That version says Mary was first addressed by the angel when she went out to the well. The angel then followed her back to the temple and concluded his business there.

I am sitting right now, even as a write these words, in a well. A cafe is a well. It is a place where I might very likely contrive to run into a pretty young woman who has caught my eye, greet her, perhaps tease her. I might even scare her a little, or shock her. The next part is to take her somewhere more private and tell her lies and exaggerations, telling her things about herself that she wants to hear.

I am obviously describing a game of seduction. The aim is obvious. And a young woman—the Hebrew word transcribed as “virgin” just means young woman, a nubile teenager—she wants the very same thing the man does, only there are somewhat greater and graver restrictions on her freedom and reputation. This delicious imbalance is what creates the game called seduction. It’s what makes life interesting, for both sexes.

So I will put it to you this way. What if you were a lovely 14-year-old girl in a tiny village in the Middle East, and a handsome stranger, perhaps a merchant, some Casanova, came through town and you caught his eye, at the well, and he pursued you. He would flatter you and tell you that you were so beautiful and so innocent, that God himself had even noticed it. In order to win his way into your heart and perhaps win a pleasant hour with you under yon fig tree, he would have appealed not to your baser nature but to your highest vision of yourself, and told you not only how lovely but also how virtuous you were. If he were very, very clever, he might have persuaded you that God himself desired it that you and he should give in to your urges.

If you are a ladies man, like I am, you know perfectly well the kind of story that gets a girl’s juices flowing. When I was younger, I myself used these kinds of tricks, although perhaps without quite that much theological audacity. And God knows how ignorant girls sometimes are about the birds and the bees, especially in the country.

The brilliance of the story of Mary and her divine visitor is that no one pays attention to the angel. He seems to be just the middleman, the messenger. It’s the perfect disguise for one who wants to achieve something in secret, and it’s the classic guise of the seducer. You can read the Gospel of Luke as a children’s story about how God sent an angel to Earth, but it’s really a story about an all-too-human seduction and its aftermath.

The ancient world was full of such stories. In the Romans’ religion, God seduced lots of earth women, usually in disguise—a shower of gold, a swan, et cetera. He did it to keep his wife from finding out. But you could turn a story like that around to protect a poor Jewish girl too. You take a small town, and a clever and persuasive girl who’s desperate to save herself, and perhaps a somewhat dotty family, and a foolish husband that loves her or needs her enough to go along with a ridiculous cover story … Or who knows, maybe her husband was sick, or there was some other reason he couldn’t get her pregnant, and everybody in the village knew why. Maybe it was an open secret. There are countless such marriages.

You get my meaning.

The story of Mary and the angel Gabriel and the whole “Be it unto me according to thy word” is the sort of thing, then and now, that children believe, and you say it like you say Santa Claus is coming, and you say it with a wink, and everyone winks. It’s a face-saving lie that anyone with half a brain doesn’t literally believe but they go along with it. They go along with it, I might add, because they are basically good people, humane people, and in the end they don’t want to see her or anybody humiliated, or anybody’s life ruined. We all keep open secrets, and dissemble at times to keep a façade up. Especially in the country.

All of mythology is a soap opera, and the New Testament is no different. I’m not going to explain the whole thing to you or even pretend that it is a single coherent plot. Let’s just say that it solves a lot of a man’s problems, removes a lot of the normal inhibitions, to know He’s not actually His father’s son. Such a story wrapped around one’s origins could lead a young man from humble origins to go on and do great things.