RUBEDO
Alchemical reddening (RUBEDO) is not exactly a work, but a state that the initiate achieves and seeks in every way to prolong indefinitely. After offering his soul in sacrifice as a chalice to the wine of the Holy Spirit during the blackening and whitening—the magnet of psychic energy in which matter is now in ecstasy—the initiate's spirit suddenly begins to burn. The "gold" finally appears at the end of the process in the form of reddening, or solar awareness of God's omnipresence, the AUREA APREEHNSIO. The fire spoken of here is not the element of fire—or not only it—it is the fire that is "super omnia elementa" and that acts as one of the tongues of fire of Pentecost in the Old Testament. XANTOSIS --- the appearance of alchemical gold ---- marks the arrival of reddening or RUBEDO, which consists of the direct intervention of transcendent power. In Gichtel's illustration, the dragon that covered the initiate's heart and restricted its radiation, allowing the concentration of the light of his consciousness only on objects of individual affirmation, is "dissolved" in the power of divided contact. This is the definitive celebration of NUPTIA CHYMICAE (alchemical nuptials): the Sun unites with the Moon, sulfur "fixes" mercury --- in the individual, the spirit retains life and makes it bear fruit lovingly, as in the encounter between the Red King and the White Princess. I called Dayse, the girl I had met on the street, and she kindly invited me to go for a drink later. Fourteenth day: At 10:30 p.m., I paid my bills at the hotel reception in the lower part of Halfeld and said I would leave the city in the morning. I had a flight booked to Belém the next day, at 6:00 p.m., from Rio de Janeiro's international airport. Dayse had arranged to meet me at eleven o'clock at night at a pub in Alto dos Passos, a famous spot in the city of Juiz de Fora, home to a cluster of bars whose tables are fought over by an army of university animals from Thursday night onwards. Dayse stood at the pub entrance, motionless, her brown hair blowing in the wind, and I watched her from a distance as she approached, with an admiration that quickly reached the limits of awe. I hadn't imagined that the girl I'd met by chance on Avenida Independência, dressed rustically in jeans and an orange T-shirt, returning from law school, would reappear before me, even if only ten meters away, so beautiful and elegant. And her beauty wasn't isolated, a mere sum of features and perfections; it was a whole made up of everything that made up her, from her hair, her eyes, her skin, to the slightest vibration that escaped her nostrils as she breathed. She was impeccably dressed, like an erotic offering for the night, which undoubtedly added an even more sophisticated air to her radiant beauty. Her dress was red, dark and full-bodied, as pleasant to the touch as satin. Its line was simple, wrapping her like a tunic that left most of her breasts exposed, to flow below, in a single wave, onto her bare calves, perfectly shaped like those of a classical ballerina. And what awareness of her own charm she possessed, now still, now moving with studied slowness, infallible as women who are certain of what they are wearing. ---- Hello, good evening (.) Do you have a free moment (?) ----, I began. She was about twenty-five years old, her forehead was indeed a little narrow, looking up close, perhaps even more so than would be considered elegant by a fashion magazine. Her nose was small and indiscreet, her upper lip a little too large, and her mouth as a whole more than a little too large. Her eyes were black as petroleum and contrasted slightly with her excessively white skin. She had a charming smile and seemed to have slept well all afternoon. As Raymond Chandler would say in one of his novels: "From ten meters, she looked like a goddess. From three meters, she looked like something made to be seen from ten meters.
---- I wasn't sure you'd come, and I ended up arranging to show up at some friends' apartment(.) To tell you the truth, those pubs in Alto dos Passos get on my nerves(...) They make me think of emaciated university professors taking glucose on a hospital gurney after abandoning a naked student at some motel in the city(...) ----, while I was laughing at what she had just said, she came closer to me and I smelled a vague scent of very dry sandalwood. ---- I see(...) and I can walk you to your friends' apartment(?) I mean, it's an invitation(?) ----, she nodded and suggested we take a cab on me. ---- Sure, sure(..) this place here ---- I said, looking at the crowded bars on the street around us ---- looks more like a artistic leg contest for drunken, bulldog-faced guys with nothing to talk about after class or work (.)
ResponderExcluirShe also found my observation funny and said: ---- I have a friend of mine who calls this the defeat circuit(.) I prefer to save my money drinking at friends' houses, talking about things I enjoy(.) ----, she said, twisting her face more seriously, and took a cigarette from her suede bag. I burned my finger with a match, lighting it for her. ---- I understand perfectly(.) ----, I said, she exhaled a fan of smoke and smiled through it. Nice teeth, a little big. ---- You don't smoke(?) ----, she asked. ---- No, I only light other people's cigarettes(.) It's an addiction(.) -----, I replied. ---- You don't seem that pleased to see me, or is it just me(?) -----, I must have been staring into the distance inside my mental images and she soon realized it: neither real nor dollar... in a newly emerged gold mine in the middle of the Xingu River, in the state of Pará, everything was already being traded in gold. Around 600 people, including some 500 prospectors, organized a massive riot on the banks of the riverbanks of the mining site. At least 70 rafts like Seu Adamastor's, just as I was talking to Dayse, were siphoning the bottom of the Xingu River day and night, madly claiming that the gold they were extracting reached a purity level of 96. I could already imagine the chaos that awaited me.
ResponderExcluir----It's just you, I think I exercised too much this morning(...) besides, I'm leaving town early tomorrow, and it's going to be a long trip(.) ----, I said, trying to keep her off the subject of gold, the river, energy tracking, and my recent sojourn through the dark sea of consciousness amidst a jungle of dangerous inorganic scouts. It's not the kind of subject to bring up to a lady on a cold, starry night outside a college pub with a vigorous palmetto tree adorning the neon-lit entrance steps. ---- Anyway, that's not my problem(.) Let's get going(?) ----, she said, but she seemed to be thinking about it a little. I meant nothing to her, and she meant nothing to me, and we both seemed acutely aware of that in every word we exchanged. But the possibility of having any drink, in any apartment, talking privately about anything with any people, was something that started to make me think a little better, after so many days isolated in complete silence in that interdimensional darkness of any hotel room.
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ResponderExcluirThe alchemical achievement that culminates in the reddening (rubedo) is essentially the making of the spirit flesh. It is not an attempt to escape the world, as in the blackening (nigredo) phase, but rather a battle to bring the light of the Holy Spirit into it, hence the need to renew human relationships. The symbolism that emphasizes this "triumphant return" to the world is as profuse as it is astonishing. Within the human physical body exists a body of energy that Jacob Boheme compares to "flammable oil," which must be ignited in order to convert each minute of life into a joyful breath of the soul, exalted by everything it sees or touches. Medieval alchemy greatly emphasizes this heroic vitality that self-work must bring forth in the initiate. The spiritual alchemist is a "solar hero" who must transform the poison of life into the elixir of longevity and eternal youth, transforming the torrential waters of materialistic desire into a life-giving stone for the spirit. Through the success of a higher cosmogony, he confers on human sexuality the nobility of a love that liberates the sexual act from everything that does not lend itself to the evolution of consciousness, such as financial interests, preoccupation with the status quo,
ResponderExcluirthe observance of social conventions, pure and simple usury, or the viewpoint of the mere porcine satisfaction of a biological need that makes most people practice sex as gratuitously as they defecate. A true initiate seeks in Tantrism (sexual yoga) the power of what Carlos Castaneda called a "strong sexual act." We got out of the taxi in front of an aged-looking building at the top of Santo Antônio Street. Before ringing the intercom, Dayse leaned toward me, her eyes crinkling slightly at the corners. I kissed her automatically, the noise of the street traffic washing over me like waves. "You haven't offered me a(...) yet," she said. "A 'what'(?)," I asked, not understanding. "Kiss, now(!)," she replied, looking at me disapprovingly. I didn't say anything for a few seconds, I just felt a little less respectable. ---- You didn't seem to be waiting for this anxiously(.) I preferred to wait a little(.) ----, she didn't seem hurt, but playfully amused by the fact that she had just exchanged oral fluids with a complete stranger of my lineage. ---- It doesn't matter, now it's settled(.) ----, Dayse conciliated, as soon as the gate
ResponderExcluir, as the building's gate opened with a small metallic clang. "You have such beautiful black eyes," I said, and we entered. It was a cramped two-bedroom apartment, with a cramped kitchen and a single bathroom in the hallway that separated the living room, where we entered, from the bedrooms at the back. In the living room, two blonde girls shared a white plastic table where two bottles of vodka and a few cans of energy drinks sat next to a metal bucket of ice and three ashtrays filled with red-filtered cigarette butts. On the sofa, a white guy in a black wool cap and flowered shorts held a remote control in front of the television, while another guy, a black guy with thick dreadlocks running down his head to his shoulders, made it look like a crab-eating octopus camped on his head, rolled a joint as thick as a PVC pipe. Dayse enthusiastically introduced me to her friends, and I tried to return the most convincing smile I could to our friendly and exotic hosts. From two large, dusty, old wooden speakers in the corner of the room, connected to a vinyl player, came a rush of jazz that at first glance sounded like John Coltrane.
ResponderExcluir---- Good music (...) what is it (?) ----, I asked, curious, to the Rastafarian, who now seemed to be doing the final art on his "green tit", as William Burroughs would say. ---- Coltrane playing with Cannoball Aderley (.) I forgot the name of the album (...) ----, he said, without taking his eyes off the joint between his fingers. ---- Coltrane is my favorite Jazz musician(.) when I was eighteen I wrote an article about him for a music website(.) I remember it began like this: ''Even when he was still alive, there was an indisputable consensus that he had been Great long before he did enough to prove it, and even that he had been A GREAT JAZZ GENIUS while still young(...) he he, good times, when I still bought vinyl(.) -----, the blonde girls at the table, with whom Dayse was chatting animatedly now, didn't even hear what I said, the Jazz in the house seemed to be an exclusive product of that rasta's mind. He, on the other hand, even without turning his eyes in my direction, nodded his head in an affirmative gesture to what I had said. Soon after, he commented: ----- He started with the old swing-based apparatus of the 1930s mixed with the neo-bopper of the 1950s and quickly reduced it all to dust (.) ----, he said it in such a reductionistly comical way that I laughed, vaguely agreeing out of sheer lack of enthusiasm to deepen the discussion.
ResponderExcluirI went over to Dayse and ended up giving in to the temptation to ask her for a cigarette, happily thinking that there in that apartment there was at least a little intelligent life, compared to Alto dos Passos. ----- My favorite Jazz musician is Thelonious Monk (.) Before playing with Monk, Coltrane wasn't exactly a simple beginner saxophonist, but anyone who has a clear idea of the transformation Coltrane went through playing with Monk understands the depths any musician could reach under his influence (...) It was only after playing with Monk that Coltrane had the opportunity to become a new and omnipresent influence in the history of Jazz (.) ----, said the Rastafarian, who left the joint on the arm of the sofa and walked over to a yellow beer crate on the floor next to the TV full of old vinyl records and took out a Thelonious Monk LP. He lit a cigarette and before changing the records on the record player, he said: ----- Monk's way of playing the piano was brilliantly unique (...) he reached the most hidden spaces of the piano, wherever he wanted to take the music, it would go (..)
ResponderExcluir...a spiritual pianistic illumination capable of taking root in fulminating careers that any classical pianist with "a hundred fingers" should listen to very carefully. Monk once said in an interview: "No one inspired my ideas. I looked for them within myself. Everything I play is different. . . melody, harmony and structure. Each piece is different from the others." (.) ---- in fact, that rasta sounded like Monk himself speaking, THE CRAZY PIANO MONK. I limited myself to listening carefully to everything he said. The truth was, I hadn't heard an entire jazz track in at least five years. It's not the kind of music that suits the rhythm of my life, unless I was going to pan for gold in the Mississippi River Delta in Louisiana, in the southern United States. But I confess that some of John Coltrane's songs still play in my head to this day, like "My Favorite Things" and "A Love.
ResponderExcluirAs soon as Monk's disc came to an end, the white guy in the black wool cap pressed play on the DVD remote control, and the title of the film FIGHT CLUB appeared on the television. I immediately thought back to the energy tracking work I had been doing for the past fourteen days and how the culmination of all that in the alchemical reddening (RUBEDO) was also intimately related to the sanctification of art and social authority. Ontological anarchism seems to have had a significant impact on the imagination of young people around the world, especially when Hakim Bey's idea of the TAZ (Temporally Autonomous Zone) was brought to the big screen with the film Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Eduard Norton. In the film, there is a man submissive to the system who does not dare to free himself from his conditioned position within society. Right off the bat, he tells us: "I was a stagnant person... I would open a sales catalog and ask myself what kind of dinner set or car defined me as a person."
ResponderExcluirThe TAZ, a concept forged by the anarchist mystic Hakim Bey, is like a revolt that doesn't connect with the State (much like those carried out by the Black Blocs in recent demonstrations throughout Brazil, which will now have sites on the outskirts of large cities and may further develop the TAZ idea), a "guerrilla operation" that liberates an area—of land, time, or imagination—and then immediately dissolves itself to avoid being crushed by the State—in the case of the Black Blocs, by the police. The main practice of medieval alchemy also seems to have been "imagination," not, obviously, "imagination" in the ordinary sense, but the "true imagination," which alchemical texts carefully contrast with the notion of "fantasy." ET VIDE SECUNDUM NATURAM, DE QUA REGENERATUR CORPORA IN VISCERIS TERRAE ET HOC IMAGINARE PER VERAM IMAGINATIONEM ET NON PHANTASTICAM. The "true imagination" sees the energetic processes of nature and its archetypes, as a capacity for permanent creation and recreation of the world (such as Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones, in his anarchist Solve et Coagula dynamic) in the sense that all creation and recreation is, ultimately, a product of GOD'S IMAGINATION.
ResponderExcluirIt is also the ability to interpret biblical accounts and Greco-Roman myths as ever-present realities, leading the UNIVERSE back to GOD through the mediation of sacred time. The imagination of medieval alchemy is a vision: it sees space as a symbol and time as a liturgy. Indeed, the goal of medieval alchemy was not a simple union with the transcendent, but the establishment of a contact with it that would unite the Holy Spirit with the physical world to transform it, and this began to occur in the individual's own body, through blood and breath. This poetry of the organism present in medieval alchemy seems to have focused on meditation on the great bodily rhythms of man. Classical texts suggest the methodical use of respiratory rhythm. According to Galen and Averroes, who linked the "vital spirit" to a substance of a psychic nature that permeates the cosmic atmosphere and is assimilated by the human being who aligns himself parallel to its rhythm through the control of breathing.
ResponderExcluirThis concept is so close to the Hindu concept of "prana" (vital breath) that it is ridiculous to doubt that medieval alchemists knew breathing exercises analogous to those of Yoga and, more precisely, Laya-Tantric Yoga. On the other hand, the "imaginative soul" is the "spirit of life," the classical texts further state, and it "dwells in the blood." Concentration in the blood through circulatory rhythm and the sensation of body heat play a crucial role in alchemical transmutation. Blood is the "lamp of life," the support or vehicle of the soul, mercury in its form closest to sulfur, with which it unites in the heart of the initiate to produce the fire of illumination.
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