In this blog post Pansophers welcomes internationally recognized author and lecturer P.D Newman! Phillip Newman is the author of “Alchemically Stoned: The Psychedelic Secret of Freemasonry.” His acclaimed title provides final evidence, once and for all, on the use of hallucinogenic entheogenic substance within old time Rosicrucian Orders, such as the Fratres Lucis, Gold und Rosenkreuzer, and the Rite of Cagliostro. In this series Mr Newman shares some of his brilliant insights for readers.
From visions of mystical beings of light to abductions by transdimensional alien-like spirits, one of the most common experiences reported by users of DMT and other entheogenic compounds is that of contact with what is repeatedly described as angelic entities.
“All spiritual disciplines describe quite psychedelic accounts of the transformative experiences… [Encounters] with…angelic entities…heavenly sounds…contacting a powerful and loving presence underlying all of reality—these experiences cut across all denominations. They also are characteristic of a fully psychedelic DMT experience.”[1]
Holy books aside, perhaps the most famous example of angelic close encounters comes from the private diaries of astrologer, alchemist, and occultist, Dr. John Dee, suspected English spy and personal advisor to Queen Elizabeth I.
Though a seasoned astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher, Dee’s primary interest was that of discourse with angels. Unable to see or hear the angels himself, Dee was wont to employ the aid of a seer or skryer. It was in this capacity that, in 1582, Dee hired one Edward Kelley (aka Edward Talbot), an occultist, alchemist, and suspected charlatan of ill repute that was pilloried before having his ears cropped for the alchemically-relevant crime of “coining;” that is, forgery “which involved counterfeiting silver or gold coins with adulterated metals.”[2] Where Dee had hired a number of skryers in the past for the purpose of initiating angelic communication, all to no avail, Kelley was apparently amazingly successful in the endeavor, producing immediate and remarkable results. For the following seven years, until 1589, Dee regularly held intensive séance-like sessions with the angels, Kelley always acting in the capacity of seer.
While it was clearly Dee who benefited most from the two men’s relationship and arrangement, it was actually Kelley who sought Dee out. Indeed, at some point before going into Dee’s employ, Kelley had come in possession of a strange alchemical manuscript, called The Book of Dunstan, and a small amount of mysterious red powder, identified by Kelley as the magical Philosopher’s Stone of alchemical lore. It was Kelley’s suspicion that the manuscript held the key to a) the preparation of more of the red powder and b) how to prepare from said powder an elixir that
“was accessible only to a very few alchemists. Just as molecules of metal are transformed under great increase of temperature, so the emotional elements in human nature undergo an increased intensity of vibrations, which transforms them and makes them spiritual. [The] secret of the Philosopher’s Stone enabled a man’s soul to attain unity with the divine spirit.”[3]
And, it was Kelley’s sincere but secret hope that Dee, already an accomplished Alchemist, might assist him in deciphering the contents of the Dunstan manuscript.
Kelley waited a year or longer, gaining the good doctor’s trust while dazzling him with alleged angelic apocalypses, before he unveiled the red powder and Book of Dunstan before Dee. We know from the latter’s diaries of the period that the yarn Kelley spun at the time for Dee, whose ambition to communicate with angelic beings no doubt subdued his skepticism and rendered him naive and gullible, was that he and another man, one John Blokey, had been led to the mysterious objects at Northwick Hill by a “spiritual creature” (read angel).[4] This colorful explanation was no doubt titillating to Dr. Dee. However, it was also most likely a lie. The more probable explanation is that Kelley acquired the powder and manuscript from an innkeeper while traveling through Wales.
“One night, the innkeeper brought out a tattered old book. He was accustomed to showing his customers, as a curiosity, an unintelligible old manuscript. He showed it to Kelly, who was quite well aware of the profit sometimes to be derived from old papers, and inquired the origin of the manuscript. It appeared that a few years before, during the religious wars, some Protestant soldiers had rifled the grave of a Catholic bishop, who, during his lifetime, had been a very rich man. In the grave they found this manuscript and two ivory balls, one red and the other white. …Even as the innkeeper was showing Kelly the manuscript, his children were playing with the…ball.”[5]
As the story goes, thinking the ivory balls worthless, one of the soldiers tossed the white ivory ball aside, thereby breaking it on the hard ground to reveal a strange white powder contained inside that, what wasn’t blown away by the ensuing wind, was completely lost to the moist soil. Seeing this oddity, the unnamed soldier thought it better to take the red ball of ivory back with him and see if he might sell it in town. It was in this manner that the innkeeper came to be in its possession, who then sold the relics to Kelley.
As to the composition of these mysterious red and white powders, with a remarkable flash of insight into the mysteries of Alchemy, the Swiss psychiatrist, C.G. Jung, declared:
“Originally [the white powder] was ‘gum arabic’… Thus [Heinrich] Khunrath declares that the ‘red’ gum is the ‘resin of the wise’ – a synonym for the transforming substance.”[6]
Gum arabic, otherwise known as acacia gum, is produced from the saps of a number of Acacia species, most predominantly Acacia senegal and Acacia nilotica, both of which are known carriers of dimethyltryptamine. DMT, on the other hand, is found within the crimson-purple inner root bark of various species of Acacia.
Do not be fooled, gentle reader, by the use of the term ‘gum’ here. As anyone who has dabbled in incense-making knows well, gum arabic is regularly sold in a white powder form – just as DMT (also often found as a white powder), when crudely extracted from Acacia, is commonly found instead in the form of a reddish orange-pink goo or ‘gum.’
If, as Jung suggests, the white powder does indeed answer to gum arabic, it is perhaps obvious then that the red powder, identified by Khunrath as “red gum” or the “resin of the wise,” must correspond to the ruddy, DMT-rich layer of bark inside the roots of Acacia senegal, Acacia nilotica, and other related species that produce both gum arabic and DMT. As we’ve shown elsewhere in our researches into the Alchemico-Masonic rites of Cagliostro, Melissino, and others, the treatment of the Acacia as the primal matter of Alchemy and of its produce, DMT, as the legendary philosopher’s stone or “resin of the wise” is not without precedent.
Significantly, the notion of two mystical substances being produced from a single tree isn’t without precedent either. Consider, for example, the mythical tree of Eden.
“And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. …And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it…”[7]
As Mark Hoffman rightly observes in his paper, Conjuring Eden: Art and the Entheogenic Vision of Paradise,
“The ‘Tree’ (Hebrew ETZ), in fact, is not translated by the ordinary words for ‘tree’ in Greek (dendron) and Latin (arbor) but literally by ‘wood’ (xylon, lignum), ‘stick, timber, and only secondarily a living tree…’”[8]
The “wood” of life and the “wood” of the knowledge of good and evil could therefore theoretically have both come from one and the same tree. Similarly, the Hebrew word usually translated as “fruit” (PRI) could just as well imply a ‘product,’ i.e., a substance ‘produced’ from ‘wood.’ Moreover, like vegetable starches, gum arabic serves to this day as a foodstuff in many parts of the world and may actually sustain one for extended periods. In that respect, gum arabic is a veritable ‘product’ of the ‘wood’ that gives life. DMT, however, is ‘produced’ from the ‘wood’ which imparts knowledge; that is, its found in a different part of the Acacia altogether: the roots.
Coincidentally, in his Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro actually identifies the biblical tree of Eden as a species of Acacia.
“The acacia is the primal matter… My child, you are receiving the primal matter… Learn that the Great God created before man this primal matter and that he then created man to possess it and be immortal. Man abused it and lost it, but it still exists in the hands of the Elect of God and from a single grain of this precious matter becomes a projection into infinity.”[9]
It doesn’t take much to see that what Cagliostro here describes is nothing short of the entheogenic potential of Acacia ‘wood.’ Further, it is perhaps notable that, for the singular purpose of communicating with unseen angelic presences, not unlike Dee’s sessions with Kelley, the enigmatic Cagliostro was in the practice of using young seers during the rituals of his Egyptian Rite.
Kelley provides us with yet a further clue regarding the nature of this red powder in his poem, Metrical Treatise on Alchemy. Chiding the pseudo-alchemists and so-called puffers for their inadequate learning in the royal art, Kelley ironically instructs his reader to “Go burne your Bookes and come and learn of me.”
All you that faine philosophers would be,
And night and day in Geber’s kitchen broyle,
Wasting the chips of ancient Hermes’ Tree,
Weening to turn them to a precious oyle,
The more you work the more you loose and spoile;
To you, I say, how learned soever you be,
Go burne your Bookes and come and learn of me.[10]
Kelley’s smug arrogance aside, one cannot help but wonder as to which “Tree” and to what “precious oyle” prepared therefrom our Alchemist-cum-skryer may be referring.
That Kelley’s red powder could have been a form of DMT would go far in explaining the regular angelic visitations experienced by Kelley during his sessions with Dee. As we noted in the opening, contact scenarios with angel-like beings is one of the most common experiences reported by users of DMT. Furthermore, we know that psychoactive compounds truly did play a rather significant role in both Alchemy[11] and in Dee’s séances. As Chris Bennett observes in his magnum opus, Liber 420: Cannabis, Magickal Herbs and the Occult,
“In Dee’s own accounts of his invocations, or ‘Actions’ as he referred to them, there are numerous references to smoke, indicating the possibility of some sort of fumigation, as well as references to the use of potions and ointments. …In Dee’s record of these Actions, we read how ‘smoke filled the place’ and an invoked entity states, ‘I smell the smoke: proceed Syr, in your purpose’ and these could indicate sufumigation. Other references indicate some sort of elixir in use… ‘taste of this potion yay the savour onely of the vessel worketh most extremely agaynst the maymed drowsiness of ignorance. Yf the hand be heavy, how weight and ponderous shall the whole world be?’
In one account from John Dee’s Actions With Spirits, (1581-1583) there is a lament about the lack of drugs for an operation, and with the use of ointments in their place: ‘I haue forgotten all my drvggs [drugs] behind me. But since I know that some of you are well stored with sufficient oyntments, I do intend to visit you onely with theyr help. You see, all my boxes are empty? – EK [Edward Kelly] he showeth a great bundell of empty potecharie [apothecary] boxes.’ This brings a response from the figure invoked ‘How cometh it, you pretend to come for a favorable diuine power and all your boxes are empty.’ The exchange over the lack of drugs also indicates that drugs were not an unusual part of these skrying sessions, as Kelley says he ‘forgot’ them, as if he usually had them.”[12]
Remarkably, that Dee and Kelley habitually employed the use of drugs during their “Actions” has been picked up on by a number of authors, including Ben Johnson, author of The Alchemist (1610), a satirical play which makes a number of references to Dee’s use of elixirs, potions, drugs, and a “sacred medicine” that “will work some strange effect, if he but feel it,” M. Kineholz, an ex-police officer who, in Opium Traders and Their Worlds, Vol.1 (2008), connects Dee and Kelley with a narcotic incense composed of “olibanum, storax, dictamus, opium, and hashish,” and most importantly, Gustav Meyrink, author of Der Golem (The Golem, 1914), a novel that makes “cloaked references to psychoactive drugs, in the language of alchemy,”[13] and Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (The Angel of the West Window, 1927), which tells the tale of a delusional man who, after inheriting a cache of Dee’s papers from a relative, comes to believe that he is in fact a reincarnation of the Elizabethan magus. Acting on this grandiose psychological inflation, the protagonist of the story pursues initiation at the hands of an adept, who presents our hero with a familiar red ivory sphere containing “flaky purple granules” and a “grayish-red powder.” From Dan Merkur, a professor at Syracuse University,
“Meyrink referred to two alchemical drugs. They are kept in ‘two small ivory spheres, the one red and the other white’… The colour coding referenced the red king and white queen, or sun and moon, of the alchemical wedding. The white sphere and its powder do not lay a role in the novel. The ‘red ivory sphere’ contains ‘the royal powder,’ the ‘Red lion,’ which consists of ‘flaky purple granules’… It can be used to transform base metals into gold…but when it is prepared as an incense…it has a psychoactive effect. ‘Inhaling the red smoke’ enables them to ‘step out’ of their bodies and cross the threshold of death; there, through marriage with their female ‘other half,’ which in their earthly existence almost always remains hidden, they acquire unimaginable magical powers such as personal immortality as the wheel of birth comes to a standstill; in short they achieve a kind of divine status which is denied other mortals as long as they are ignorant of the secret of the [white] and red spheres…”[14]
If nothing else, what all of these fictionalized accounts indicate is a long-standing tradition directly associating Dee and Kelley with the use of what Aleister Crowley, an English magician who, interestingly, not unlike Meyrink’s hero, claimed to be the reincarnation of both Kelley and Cagliostro, called “strange drugs.”
Kelley and Dee finally parted company when, according to Kelley, the archangel Uriel, during one of Dee and Kelley’s drug-fueled “Actions,” instructed the two men to share all of their possessions – their wives included. After much protest, Dee finally conceded. However, the adultery proving too much for the pious Dee, shortly thereafter he closed their sessions permanently. To make matters worse, not long after the two men shared partners, the aged Dee’s young wife became pregnant. As Dee was sixty at the time and Kelley was only thirty-two, it doesn’t take much to determine that the likely father of the child was Sir Edward. Kelley would eventually go on to be the court Alchemist for Emperor Rudolf II, who knighted him “Sir Edward Kelley of Imany and New Luben” on Feb. 23, 1590. But, failing to produce Alchemical gold for the emperor, Kelley was imprisoned and, attempting to escape, fell from a high window to his demise. But, Dee and Kelley’s angelic “Actions” continue to fascinate, inspire, and perturb.
We leave the reader with a haunting excerpt from Meyrink’s novel, Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (The Angel of the West Window, 1927), which finely illustrates the smoky, narcotic air that surrounded the angelic activities of Dee and Kelley.
“Without further ado he handed me the red sphere. After a brief search I soon found where the two halves were screwed together. – Was this not one of the spheres of John Dee and his apothecary, Kelley? – The sphere opened up: in the hollow was a greyish-red powder, about enough to fill a walnut shell. …I…took the onyx bowl I use as an ashtray…poured some spirit from the scaling-lamp…into the bowl, lit it, took the half of the red sphere with the powder and poured it onto the flame. Soon the alcohol had burnt off. Slowly the remains in the bowl began to glow and smoulder. A cloud of greenish-blue smoke formed and rose curling up from the onyx bowl. …[The adept]…or the devil in person or whoever it was – grasped me from behind by the hair with irresistible force and forced my face down into the onyx bowl and the incense rising from the red powder. A bitter-sweet aroma rose through my nostrils, and I was in the grip of an indescribable trepidation, I was wracked by death throes of such long-lasting, excruciating violence that I felt the mortal terror of whole generations flow through my soul in an unceasing, icy stream. Then my consciousness was obliterated.
I have retained almost nothing of what I experienced ‘on the other side.’ And I think I am justified in adding ‘Thank God!’, for the torn-off scraps of memory which swirl through my dreams like leaves in a storm are so steeped in horror that it seems a blessing not to be able to understand them in detail. All I have is a vague, dark memory of having seen and passed through worlds such as those Frau Fromm described when she spoke of the depths of the sea steeped in a dull greenish glow where she claims she met Black Isais. I, too, met something awful there. I was fleeing, terrified, from – I think it was from black cats with gleaming eyes and gaping mouths shining white; my God, how can one describe half-forgotten dreams!
And as I was fleeing, numb with nameless terrors one last saving thought surfaced: ‘If only you could reach tree! If only you could reach the Mother, the Mother…of the red and blue circle – is that it? – you would be saved.’ I believe I saw the Baphomet in the distance, high above glassy mountains, beyond impassable swamps and painful hazards. I saw Elizabeth, the Mother waving to me from the tree – I cannot remember what the gesture signified, but at the sight of her my racing heart was gradually soothed and the numbness left me. I woke feeling I had spent hundreds of years in the green depths.
When I looked up, my head still whirling, [the adept] was sitting before me, his gaze fixed upon me, playing with empty halves of the ivory sphere. I was in my study everything around was as it had been before…before…
Three minutes. That is sufficient,’ said [the adept] in a tone, his features haggard, as he put his watch into his waistcoat pocket. I will never forget the puzzlingly disappointed expression on his face as he said to me: ‘So the Devil didn’t take you, after all. That indicates a sound constitution. – Congratulations, anyway. I think from now on you will be able to use this coal with a certain degree of success. It is charged, that I have been able to establish.’ I bombarded him with questions about what had happened to me. It was clear I had been through one of the hallucinatory experiences that have always played an important role in supposed magic practice.[15]
On behalf of all our fans at Pansophers.com, thank you Dany PD Newman for this excellent post and for joining this community. Fans, stay tuned for more. Dany has more for us!
New readers, subscribe to this blog. We’ll only ever send you top posts updates!
WORKS CITED
Alchemy Lab. Edward Kelley and John Dee: Alchemists Who Transmuted the Stone. https://www.alchemylab.com/kellydee.htm. Accessed Feb. 7, 2019.
Bennett, Chris. Liber 420: Cannabis, Magickal Herbs and the Occult. Trine Day. Walterville, OR. 2018.
Faulks, Philippa. The Masonic Magician: The Life and Death of Count Cagliostro and His Egyptian Rite. Watkins. London. 2008.
Hoffman, Mark. “Conjuring Eden: Art and the Entheogenic Vision of Paradise.” Entheos 1:1, Summer 2001.
Partridge, Christopher. “Drugs and the Occult.” The Occult World. Routlage Handbooks Online. 2014.
Smith, Charlotte F. The Life of Dr. Dee (1527-1608). Constable and Company. London. 2014.
Strassman, Rick. DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Park Street Press. Rochester, VT. 2001.
Tyson, Donald. Enochian Magic for Beginners: The Original System of Angel Magic. Llewellyn Publications. Woodbury, MN. 2005.
Footnotes:
[1] Strassman, p. 73
[2] Tyson, p. 19
[3] Alchemy Lab
[4] Dee’s biographer, Elias Ashmole, was the first to commit Kelley’s adventure to writing. In his Theatricum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), Ashmole falsely claimed that Dee and Kelley had discovered the substance and text while investigating the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey: “‘Tis generally reported that Doctor Dee, and Sir Edward Kelly were so strangely fortunate, as to finde a very large quantity of the Elixir in some part of the Ruines of Glastenbury-Abbey, which was so incredibly Rich in vertue (being one upon 272330) that they lost much in making Projection, be way of Tryall; before they found out the true weight of the Medicine.” Ashmole published a collection of Alchemical manuscripts in 1650, Fasciculus Chemicus, which included a work by one Arthur Dee, the son of Dr. John Dee. Two years later he published his more important work, Theatricum Chemicum Britannicum, an extensively annotated compilation of Alchemical poems in the English language. Not surprisingly, in The Origins of Tantra, Drugs and Western Occultism (1990), O.T.O. ritual discloser, Francis King, said of Theatricum Chemicum Britannicum: “I think [Ashmole refers] to processes designed to extract hallucinogens from plant and animal substances.”
[5] Ibid.
[6] Bennett, pp. 205
[7] Genesis 2:9-17 (KJV)
[8] Hoffman
[9] Faulks, p. 225
[10] Smith, p. 139
[11] From Zosimos’ use of cannabis-infused wines to Llully’s discovery of alcohol distillation to Paracelsus’ fondness for opium to Cagliostro’s elixir of Acacia, the royal art is by no means ignorant of the divine, psychoactive mysteries possessed by Mother Nature.
[12] Ibid. at p. 391
[13] Ibid. at p. 271
[14] Partridge
[15] Ibid. at 272-274
Outstanding. I found the white, didn’t know it is red primarily.
Thanks.