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.