Catherine Introduces Herself

I'm the host of this blog and author of the book you see at left, published by Shambhala and coming out in early 2008.

Raised Catholic, I practiced Tibetan Buddhism for many years. About a decade ago, I began to gravitate toward Christian hermeticism. I am particularly interested in magical healing and currently at work on a book about Jesus as a healer.

I'm also the author of a romance novel. It was originally called The Age of Miracles, but when Shambhala reissued it last year, they renamed it Beyond the Abbey Gates.

When not writing my own stuff, I supplement my income by ghostwriting business and self-help books. I'm single (widowed, actually), and live in Chicago.

The Real Life Alchemist in Harry Potter

Speaking of Harry Potter, one of the minor characters—Nicholas Flamel--was a real alchemist who lived in the 14^th century—which would have made him over 600 years old by the time the Potter books take place! Here’s how I tell his story in On Becoming an Alchemist.

In 1365, or thereabouts, Nicholas Flamel, a young scrivener living in Paris, purchased a gilded book for two florins. In an age when books were luxury items, two florins was ridiculously cheap. It was like finding the Gutenberg Bible on the remainder table at Barnes and Noble. He suspected the book had been stolen, or perhaps hidden then discovered by someone who had no idea of its value.

The volume was hand written on some strange material that looked to Flamel like shavings of tree bark. It was divided into three sections of seven leaves each, and every seventh leaf was covered with hand-painted images. The first page named the author as “Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher” then went on to rain down curses on anyone who dared to read further, unless he be a priest or a scribe. Though probably not the kind of scribe this Abraham had in mind, Flamel figured he was covered by the exemption, and went on reading.

He gathered that the book was a self-help manual for Hebrews who were having trouble paying their taxes to the Roman Empire. It claimed that base metals could be transmuted into silver and gold with the aid of a philosopher’s stone, and went on explain how to make one. The text was as forthright as a cookbook, but for one point: it neglected to specify the main ingredient, referring to it vaguely as the prima materia (i.e. first matter). This was about as helpful as saying, “The main ingredient is the main ingredient.”

There were, however, some beautiful illuminated figures illustrating the prima materia. One depicted a young man with winged feet whom Flamel took to be the god Hermes/Mercury. An old man with a hourglass on top of his head and a scythe in his hand was chasing after Mercury. Next came a picture of a flower with a blue stem and red and white petals, growing on a mountain top, surrounded by dragons and griffins. After this came a picture of a rose bush growing near a hollow oak tree. From the base of the rose bush sprang an underground stream. Many people were digging, trying to find the stream, while one man was trying to weigh it. The pictorial narrative concluded with an image of soldiers killing babies and collecting their blood.

Flamel made painstaking copies of the puzzling illustrations and showed them to every scholar he could find. Most of them were clueless, and scoffed at the notion of a philosopher’s stone. But one, a physician named Anselm, claimed to know exactly what the symbols meant, and went on to offer explicit instructions. He said, for example, that quicksilver (mercury) could only be fixed—that is, deprived of volatility—through a six year decoction in the blood of very young children.

Alas, Anselm’s exegesis proved “more subtle than true.” Flamel writes that it “sent me astray through a labyrinth of innumerable false processes for one and twenty years, it being always understood that I made no experiments with the blood of children, for that I accounted villainous.”

After twenty one years of being stuck at the very beginning, Flamel reckoned he’d better seek out the source of the text. Perhaps in Spain he could find a Jewish priest who would clue him in on the Cabbala. With his wife’s blessing, he set off on the traditional pilgrimage to the church of St. James Compostela. Though he failed to find such a priest in Spain, he met a merchant on the return voyage who introduced him to a very learned converted Jew named Master Canches. Based on Flamel’s copied illustrations, Canches immediately recognized the book. He was keen to know where the original might be found. Flamel offered to show it to him in exchange for an interpretation of the pictures. Canches agreed, and from him Flamel learned the identity of the prima materia. But before he could explain how to prepare it, Canches took sick. He died after seven days of profuse vomiting. Flamel buried him and returned home.

Now, at long last, he knew where to start. After three more years “pondering the words of the philosophers and proving various operations suggested by their study” he was at last able to prepare the basic ingredient. Once that was accomplished, the rest turned out to be so easy he “could scarcely miss.” He need only follow the book’s instructions word for word. On 17 January 1392, in the presence of his wife, he used the philosopher’s stone to transmute half a pound of mercury into pure silver. On the 25^th of April, he applied the stone to the half a pound of mercury and this time produced pure gold. After that, he and Peronelle went on to make gold together three more times. Together they endowed fourteen hospitals and seven churches, built three chapels, and restored seven cemeteries.

Did all this really happen? Hard to say. All historians know for sure is that Flamel was a real person who died in 1415 and was buried at the Church of St. Jacques-la-Boucherie. According to the inscription on the gravestone, Flamel, a scrivener, made numerous gifts to charity, including endowments to various churches and hospitals in Paris. In those days, a scrivener was roughly the equivalent of a typist—a low paid clerical worker. How did a scrivener manage to become a philanthropist?

No Muggles Here, Part 1

In my work with the Lorian Assocation (http://www.lorian.org/), I write a biweekly letter that is sent to anyone on our mailing list who requests it . I may share some of those letters here in this blog, though this is also an opportunity to explore other topics as well.

To start off my contribution, though, here is the latest letter I've sent out, the subject matter of which seems perfectly appropriate to The Hermeticist.

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I don’t know if your family is a fan of Harry Potter. Mine is. As the books have come out over the years, we have enjoyed more and more J. K. Rowling’s engaging tale of the boy wizard and his friends. In fact, my youngest daughter and I have made a ritual of attending the midnight release parties at our local bookstore whenever a new Potter book has come out. When our four kids were younger, we would all gather in the living room and listen while my wife read the latest installment. It was fun and exciting. Rowling tells a great yarn.

In Harry Potter’s universe, the world is divided into magic-users, known collectively as wizards and witches, and non-magic-users, known as muggles. Much of the fun of the books comes from reading the author’s invention of new words and terms; as neologisms go, muggles is about as good as it gets.

The big difference between Rowling’s fictional universe and ours is that, however fun a word it is, there are no muggles here. We are all magic-users.

Now I’m not talking about fantasy magic, the kind that Harry uses or a wizard in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Stories, while fun, deceive us about magic by turning it into something implausible. We come to think of magic as wizards hurling thunderbolts and flying through the air.

But there is an everyday magic that surrounds us that is so common, even in its occasional unexpectedness, that we don’t pay attention to it. And I’m not talking about the “magic of life” or the “magic of our senses” or any other metaphor for the wonderment we can find in life.

Here are some examples. I’m about to say something, and someone else says the same thing before me. I’m thinking of a friend and she calls unexpectedly. I need to see someone and I accidentally run into that person in a store. I need money that I don’t know how to get and a check arrives out of the blue in the mail from an unexpected source.

Here’s a true story of magic at work. A friend of mine wanted to buy some special bells for her mother but could not find them anywhere. One afternoon she phoned a friend but accidentally dialed the wrong number. The person at the other end turned out to be the clerk in a gift store she had never heard of. More importantly, this store turned out to be the sole importers in the whole city of these special bells.

We call these kinds of events synchronicities, manifestations, good luck, God’s hand, or coincidences. We see the way people long married can complete each other’s sentences, and we talk about them “being in resonance.”

What all these kinds of events and experiences have in common is that something intangible—a thought, a desire, an intent—is having an effect upon something tangible. The immaterial and invisible is affecting the material and the visible. For example, one day I had to give a lecture in the city at a place that is notorious for having very limited parking as one has to park on busy city streets. It was raining, and I was not anticipating a long walk from wherever I could park back to the lecture hall. So I visualized an empty parking place right in front of the hall. When I got there, though, all the parking spaces were full, but on a hunch, I went around the block. Nothing was available, but as I came in view of the lecture hall again, a car pulled out right where I had visualized my parking place. I was able to park conveniently right in front of the hall. An invisible, intangible thought in my head had a visible, tangible consequence.

We can call this coincidence, but it happens time and again in everyone’s life in one way or another. Our thoughts, feelings, intents, desires, wishes, fears, and hopes have a way of manifesting, the invisible world becoming visible.

The evidence is that life responds to us; it configures to our inner nature, to our thoughts, feelings, and spirit. This is real magic.

Why does it do this? How does it happen? What makes this magic work and create a response? Over the centuries, people have come up with different theories: the law of attraction, or the power of thought, of imagination, or of the will. All of these undoubtedly contribute and are part of this magic. At the same time, we all have examples of when they don’t work, of when we thought positively about something and it did not happen or wasn’t attracted or when our will or imagination did not bring about the result we wished.

The point then is not that there is no magic but that it operates more holistically than we may have thought. It isn’t just the law of attraction or the power of thought or the use of the imagination. Other things may be involved, at least some of the time. And if you think about it, this makes sense. Life responds to us as whole beings, not just as thinking beings or feeling beings or imagining beings. What evokes a response at a given moment may be a mystery; we may have to do some attentive observation and experimentation to gain clues about what works for us and what doesn’t. Each of us may come to this magic uniquely, based on our particular individuality; what works for someone else may not work for us because we are different people. But what is certain is that life will and does configure to us. It does respond. Who we are affects and shapes the world we experience. We are the makers and unmakers of worlds. This is everyday magic.

Experiment with this. Try it out. It may not for you be as straight-forward as thinking, “I want that new car,” and it will appear. How magic works for you may operate differently based on your unique relationship with life, the way your interiority and inner nature relates and configures to the world and vice versa. But your magic will work for you and is working all the time. Be a scientist of your own invisible world and investigate to find out how.

The first step into using your magic may be the same for everyone. I believe it is. It consists of simply acknowledging to oneself, “I am not a muggle. I am a magician.”

David Introduces Himself, Sort of...

My name is David Spangler. It's an honor to join with Catherine in this blog. I believe she has written one of the finest books on alchemy and hermetic magic, On Becoming an Alchemist; it's a pleasure to join with her in exploring spirituality and magic in this space.