Thursday, May 05, 2005
ALCHEMY - CATHOLIC AND ROSICRUCIAN
One aspect of alchemy that I've glossed over in the past because it didn't seem all that important is that of finding a way to turn objects into gold. Those who sought esoteric experiences using alchemy tend to dismiss this economic aspect of the practice. Yet it remains a significant part of the field, and is sometimes thought to have been the source of funds for some Medieval magicians.
As the Crystal Links website explains it:
During medieval and Renaissance times, alchemy spread through the Western
world, and was further developed by Kabbalists, Rosicrucians, astrologers and
other occultists. It functioned on two levels: mundane and spiritual. On a
mundane level, alchemists sought to find a physical process to convert base
metals such as lead into gold. On a spiritual level, alchemists worked to purify
themselves by eliminating the "base" material of the self and achieving the
'gold' of enlightenment.
Today I'm looking again at this aspect of alchemy because of a passage in THE MEDJUGORJE DECEPTION. Dr. Jones is describing a letter he received from a friend, Denis Nolan, who became obscessed with Medjugorje. He writes:
On July 10, 1988, Nolan set off again but before leaving wrote to say that he
had "received an excited letter from Gerry Faust [former Notre Dame football
coach]. He had just returned from a pilgrimage to Fatima, Lourdes, and
Medjugorje. He was excited about the power of God he experienced in Medjugorje.
A friend of his had a rosary that turned gold there and when he got back to
Akron, he found that the rosary that he keeps in his car in order to say it when
driving had turned bright gold. (p. 138)
Is this an example of alchemical gold? It's a curious coincidence, isn't it? Rosaries turning to gold comes up repeatedly in Catholic visionary literature.
Something else turned up in relation to alchemy in the passages about Denis Nolan. Nolan wrote to Dr. Jones:
Your mind is very bright...but sometimes your spiritual senses are way
off....And I am most shocked by what I consider an incredible density of heart,
or just plain stubborn bullheadedness, your lack of zeal for what God is so
obviously doing through Medjugorje....Now I'm beginning to understand. You won't
recognize the incredible thing that God is doing right now if you simply let
your critical mind lead you everywhere [emphasis mine] (p. 137)
The requirement to set one's critical mind aside is a technique that appears in occult literature. Rudolf Steiner proposes it:
The learner must be able each moment to make himself a perfectly empty vesselSteiner's techniques
into which the new world flows. Knowledge is received only in those moments in
which every judgment, every criticism coming from ourselves, is silent.
(Rudolf Steiner, THEOSOPHY, 1910, p. 201)
serve the purpose of detaching the human soul from sense-perception and from
the brain instrument to which the intellect is bound at the outset. This
detachment cannot occur in man prior to his feeling the following: I now
visualize something by means of forces in connection with which my senses and my
brain do not serve me as instruments. (Rudolf Steiner, THE OUTLINE OF OCCULT
SCIENCE, p. 273)
And the result, according to Steiner:
I produce no thought associations; I surrender myself to what 'thinks in me.'
Then one is fully justified in saying, "Something possessing the nature of being
acts within me..." (THE OUTLINE OF OCCULT SCIENCE, p. 296)
the forces of Lucifer have penetrated into the human soul, [man] will bear itThis ability to channel is the spiritual goal of alchemy that goes along with the ability to turn base mental into gold. To find a Catholic encouraging a fellow Catholic to engage in the same pursuits is discouraging.
without difficulty when he becomes aware that the Luciferic beings with all
their effects are contained within the image of his own nature. (THE OUTLINE
OF OCCULT SCIENCE, p. 331)
Once this diabolical power gets a hold on an individual, it becomes very difficult to break. Dennis Nolon, a teacher of religion at Notre Dame High School, became obscessed with Medjugorje. However, Jones writes that
Nolan said that when he first arrived in Medjugorje, he couldn't pray and had
a deep spiritual sense that Satan was behind the whole thing. (THE
MEDJUGORJE DECEPTION, p. 134)
How could the hierarchy, including John Paul II, permit such a site of spiritual destruction to exist without condemnation for all these years?
