The Golden One - March 15, 2022


Three Ways to View Alchemy – The Hermetic Tradition

Hosted by
Marcus Follin
Mentioned
Julius Evela
I Forgot To Mention Something Vlad Dracula – Two Reasons He Became a National Hero

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

141.91

Word count

661

Sentence count

37

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Julius Evola's book, The Hermetic Tradition: A Guide to Alchemy, is a fascinating book about the Hermetic tradition and the teachings of the alchemists. In this episode I discuss the similarities between alchemy and Hindu metaphysics and how they are similar in many ways.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Greetings, Laddingtons! This is a follow-up video to the book review I wrote on the Hermetic
00:00:15.960 Tradition. Now, if you don't read all my book reviews, no worries, I don't judge you at all,
00:00:23.100 it's fine. Well, okay, I judge you a little bit, but it's all good. Now, anyway, I thought to mention
00:00:30.740 something when we're talking about the Hermetic Tradition. So this is a book about alchemy, by the
00:00:36.120 way, and I wanted to point something out, and that is that you can view alchemy in a few different
00:00:41.180 ways. So this book, when he's talking about alchemy, when Julius Evola, as an esoteric master,
00:00:47.960 he's talking about alchemy, what he means is a metaphysics and spiritual teachings. So this is
00:00:54.700 not about the pseudoscience of, you know, turning a certain metal into gold, that there were some,
00:01:03.320 you know, charlatans back in the day, during the Middle Ages, they claimed to be able to do this,
00:01:08.080 but yeah, we now know that they couldn't. Then, of course, you have alchemy as the humble origins
00:01:14.780 of chemistry, so the modern science of chemistry. So you have basically three different things that
00:01:22.020 you can view alchemy as. The charlatan pseudoscience, a spiritual, a collection of
00:01:29.660 spiritual teachings, or the humble origins of modern chemistry. What this book is, and what is
00:01:36.160 interesting to us, what is interesting to me in my journey for, in my quest for esoteric knowledge,
00:01:43.300 that is, of course, the spiritual teaching within. So perhaps you read my book reviews on
00:01:49.500 Introduction to Magic. It's quite... many teachings are similar. You will recognize some teachings in
00:01:56.380 here, if you have read Introduction to Magic, because, of course, they draw quite heavily upon the
00:02:01.240 teachings of older mystics and alchemists. So basically, something to keep in mind here as well,
00:02:08.860 that, which I mentioned in the book review. By the way, first link in the description box below.
00:02:15.060 In the cast of characters, I name a few different alchemists that Evola, he draws upon their
00:02:22.780 teachings to explain alchemy. Now, these individuals, they were also quite accomplished in other areas,
00:02:30.060 in terms of philosophy or medicine and stuff like that. So you had, of course, many charlatans,
00:02:37.300 pseudoscience, but you also had many, many men who were interested in alchemy as a spiritual teaching,
00:02:43.480 and that is what I found interesting as well. Now, when you see certain alchemical symbols,
00:02:50.260 you see a symbol for gold or salt or mercury, sulfur, whatever it might be, the formulas,
00:02:58.540 they aren't to transform actual material things, such as sulfur or salt. It's metaphors for what's
00:03:07.120 going on here. So you can say that it's not about finding gold or creating gold, it's about finding
00:03:13.900 god within you or finding the animating life force or whatever we shall call it. So that is what alchemy is
00:03:23.740 about. And when they're talking about, you know, separating, separate these substances, it can be to
00:03:30.220 separate soul, body, spirit, and then joining them again, liberating something. So it's quite similar as
00:03:37.360 to certain teachings you find in Hindu metaphysics, in Hindu spirituality, which also brings me to my
00:03:44.840 second point. This will be the book review, the next book review I write. And I've read some of it
00:03:52.020 already. And yeah, I can see that the Hindu spirituality and the teachings of the alchemists, 0.92
00:04:00.160 yeah, they are similar in many ways. And as you all know, I meditate every day, I do breathing
00:04:05.640 exercises. So getting a bit more deeper into it is highly interesting. So anyway, I just wanted to
00:04:13.180 point that out, that you can view it in three different ways, alchemy, as the origins of modern
00:04:20.720 chemistry, as pseudoscience for charlatans, and then most importantly for us, a set of spiritual
00:04:28.860 teachings. So anyway, if that all sounds interesting, check out the book review. And thank you for
00:04:36.380 watching. I will see you in the next video. XOXO, BOOM!