NIGREDO
The work of "blackening" is considered the most difficult of initiatory operations; some even say that the other phases of self-work are like child's play compared to it. Through NIGREDO, one temporarily separates oneself from the world of appearances and plunges headfirst into the cosmic essence of one's inner abyss, into the power of the spirit that one intends to awaken within oneself and learn to master. The work of blackening is thus like a death to the world or an inverted birth, within the hidden side of reality. The individual frees themselves from that which prevents them from reaching the state of grace (illusions, fears, and obsessive concerns with the social defense of self-image) through a prolonged agony in which they are subjected to a profound sense of anguish, which some medieval alchemists called the MERCURIAL WAY. I disembarked at the Salvador bus station at 5:30 p.m., thinking I should quit smoking immediately and begin an energetic blackening process, synthesized over the course of a few days, until I left for Belém. Obviously, I was already a complete initiate at this point, and the blackening process I intended to do was just a miniature reproduction of the NIGREDO I had experienced (or survived) years earlier. And I immediately thought of Ilhéus and a hotel room with a round glass door on a balcony facing the sea, where I had once gone to do exactly the same thing: blacken. But also of the quiet town of Juiz de Fora, in Minas Gerais, where I had lived for a long time and been married (or reunited) with two very important girls in my life, but which now no longer harbored any trace of that part of my life. The last time I visited the city, I drove past the addresses where I had lived with those two girls and felt absolutely nothing. The city was now emotionally deserted for me and a perfect stage for a quick season of blacken. I lit a cigarette in the taxi, a hot, humid wind blew down the white sand dunes on the way to the airport, ruffling the hair of some women standing at bus stops and giving an air of fatigue and frazzled nerves to most people walking the streets. Salvador is a giant favela, and in the sea of shacks that surrounds the city's smallest pockets of elegant neighborhoods, from 6 p.m. onward, the lit lamps transform the open windows into orange squares where anything can happen at any moment. I was thinking of MERCURY, the MERCURIAL WAY of the medieval alchemists. For a prospector like me, what matters are other properties of mercury, but there is indeed some possible analogy between the mercury used in gold prospecting and the work of alchemical blackening. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW (Hermes Trismegistus).
First, the ability to form amalgams, which is essential in mining, where tiny grains of gold need to be separated from sediment dredged from the riverbed. After this gravel spends a period on conveyor belts, so that the metals settle and are separated from the lighter sediments, the concentrated material is thrown into cement mixers where it is mixed with water and mercury. This also works in the energy tracking process during the alchemical blackening phase, which prepares the mercury—that is, the subtle matter of the world—within which a small death of the personality is experienced so that the mercury can gather the individual's spiritual sparks, forming a more compact psycho-spiritual amalgam, cleansed of the personality's lower sediments, such as negative emotions and repetitive mental dialogues. The mercurial waters are, so to speak, frozen within the person. In medieval alchemical texts, this is also called SEPARATION.
ResponderExcluirThe individual separates himself from his fragmented personality, conditioned by the inferior habits of worldly life, and draws his life force from the attractions of sleep and altered states of consciousness achieved through sexual abstinence and meditation (and occasionally, power plants), prolonging this for days and days. During a regular initiation, this can become especially painful because automatically, the person's habitual world (mainly their structure of interpersonal relationships) begins to crumble like a sandcastle. But for an initiate who has already successfully completed this part of the initiatory work and mastered the entire mechanism of energetic tracking, it is simply another experience of withdrawing within himself again like stagnant water. He uses mercury as a vehicle to return to a state of increased energetic potency: it is the return to the spiritual raw material or source of psychic energy. In mines where heavier machinery is used, such as barges, the lower sediments are dredged into mixers, called "smoking snakes" by miners, where mercury is also used to prevent gold particles from being wasted or lost.
ResponderExcluirAnd the initiate also does the very same thing with the spiritually superior substances he wields within his perception of the world, dissolving the HARDENED EARTH into the unity of the PRIMORDIAL WATERS. Through "discretio intellectualis" (intellectual discretion), he discerns the presence of subtle forces and archetypes within the universe. He discovers NATURAE DISCRETAE (the ultimate nature of things), that "latent inner foundation" of which medieval alchemists spoke and which we could call the QUANTITY of the soul of the world that each thing takes into itself. Consequently, he begins to perceive nature and his own body as a cosmic interchange upon which the illusion or shadow of personality, which clouds the vision of spiritual reality within most people, is no longer projected. This discovery is like a liberating dissolution or marriage with the energetic essence of the universe. In Gichtel's diagram of subtle centers, Saturn must unite with the Moon and Jupiter with Mercury.
ResponderExcluirSaturn is like the materialistic point, the solidity of the weighty spirit, a symbol of a certain inferior way of seeing the world, that particular vision of the personality that fixes the world's appearances in their state of opacity and spiritual blindness, keeping the individual trapped in the illusion of being awake, when in reality they are merely a sleepwalker possessed by a low-quality materialistic dream. Gichtel clarifies this perspective by locating the Saturnian center in the physical brain and attributing to it, in Macrobius's expression, RATIOCINATIO (rationalization). Therefore, Saturn must be "dissolved" in the lunar center, located in the sacral region represented by the PHUSIKON, the totality of vital energies. And Jupiter is the PRAKTIKON, the will to power, which must be "dissolved" in Mercury, the "imagination" that sees nature as the setting of a dream, more precisely as the setting of THE DREAM OF GOD.
ResponderExcluirIt is as if the soul were now "coagulated" in the human mind---as the mental continues to be reabsorbed into the soul's potency. It turns out that this return to the potentiality of the human soul begins as a return to obscurity or a descent into hell, for the chaos of matter remains obscure until its contents are opened. During the blackening phase, it spontaneously blossoms into the poisonous flower of worldliness. Throughout the journey of opening perception, the initiate must gather all his strength to reject the charm of the poisonous flower and welcome the fire of God into his body. In gold mining, mercury also liquefies and evaporates at temperatures lower than that of gold. When performed outdoors, this part of the process releases mercury into the atmosphere as a poisonous gas.
ResponderExcluirAs above, so below. Finally, the initiate descended into the depths of the base matter of desires to convert it into a regenerating spiritual force. Just as in the impulse that gives birth to precious metals in the Earth's matrix and to the fetus in the Mother's womb, the initiate constantly operates a yearning for the Immortality of the Energy Body, the reward of all successfully accomplished initiatory work. From then on, the initiate deliberately refuses to distance himself from his newly discovered mystery; he is no longer fit for the world, nor could he be: immersing himself within the primordial waters, he takes as his most precious possession in life this yearning for immortality that led him to have a divine vision and to infinitely expand his life force, and unites sulfur with mercury on all sides, which in turn compels him to desire God uninterruptedly and in ever-increasing doses, for he knows that stopping halfway is suicide and that by doing so he will only bring down upon himself the wrath of God.
ResponderExcluirVISITA INTERIORA TERRAE E RECTIFICANDO OCCULTUM LAPIDEM (visit the interior of the earth and by rectifying you will find the philosopher's stone). When describing the "descent into hell" summarized by the acronym VITRIOL, medieval alchemists preserved very ancient symbols: they speak, for example, of a nocturnal journey under the sea in which the hero is swallowed by a monster, but soon after, the belly of the Leviathan that swallowed him becomes a matrix of regeneration. The SEA mixed with the NIGHT is the OBSCURE MATTER, the moisture of mercury. The monster is OUROBOROS, the guardian of vital energy, analogous to the KUNDALINI of tantric yoga. And finally, the heat that invades the hero's body in the belly of the monster is the spiritual fire that floods his heart with the fervor of energetic renewal, thanks to which he will be reborn infinitely strengthened and rejuvenated like a teenager. Then you can return to the world to fight in the name of the Holy Spirit, where the envy and hatred of your enemies will certainly be waiting for you.
ResponderExcluirAnd now, as I sipped coffee at the Luís Eduardo Magalhães Airport cafeteria, I vaguely decided on Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, to do the energy tracking work to a level where I could once again trust my own strength and depart for the Xingú River in adequate physical and psychological condition to survive a few months of hard labor aboard Seu Adamastor's raft. I thought I should quit smoking immediately, but decided to have one last cigarette at the airport entrance. As I smoked that last cigarette, I inevitably remembered (laughing deeply inside) a passage from the brilliant novel by Italian writer and playwright Italo Svevo, The Conscience of Zeno: "On the title page of a dictionary I find an entry of mine written in beautiful handwriting and some ornaments (Today, February 2, 1886, I leave the study of law to devote myself to chemistry. Last cigarette!) -
ResponderExcluirIt was a very important 'last cigarette.' I remember all the hopes that accompanied it. I had lost my taste for Canon Law, which seemed distant from the world, and I turned to science, which is the very basis of life, albeit reduced to a retort. That last cigarette represented the very yearning for activity (also manual) and for sober, serene, and solid meditation. To escape the carbon-binding chains, in which I no longer believed, I decided to return to law. Much worse! It was a mistake also recorded with a last cigarette, the date of which I find recorded on a page of a book. This 'last cigarette' was also very important. I resigned myself to returning to the intricacies of law with the best intentions, abandoning carbon chains forever. I convinced myself of my lack of inclination for chemistry, even due to my manual inability. How could I have it if I continued to smoke like a Turk? Now that I'm analyzing myself, a doubt strikes me: wouldn't I have become so attached to cigarettes that I blamed them for my incapacity? Would I have truly become the strong, confident man I imagined myself to be by quitting? Perhaps it was this very doubt that enslaved me to addiction, since it's quite comfortable for us to believe in our latent greatness.
ResponderExcluirNow that I'm old and no one demands anything of me, I often go from cigarettes to good intentions and from these back to cigarettes. What do such intentions mean today?'' I went to the check-in desk of the airline (which I won't name, so as not to be sued in the next chapters) where I worked as a porter when I was seventeen, at Pampulha Airport in Belo Horizonte, and bought a ticket to Rio de Janeiro. From there, I would take a bus to Juiz de Fora, already an ex-smoker. Before boarding, however, I went back to the airport entrance and smoked one more 'last cigarette'. This one was also very important to me, lol
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