In love is death - in death is love.

The Anima Mundi

Content mirrors form. The chiasmic connection between immortality and mortality that we meet in Heraclitus is not merely coincidental. What we find here is more explicitly mirrored in perhaps the most difficult passage in Plato—Timaeus 35a–37b—in which the formation of the World Soul (psychē kosmou, anima mundi) is described as the very link between the eternal and the transient. [6] In this most alchemical of Plato’s dialogues, the indivisible (the ‘circle of the same’) is linked to the divisible (‘the circle of difference’) via what he calls ‘the best of possible bonds’ (desmōn de kallistos). When the two circles, which do not want to join, are united, their point of union forms an x or cross (chi). This chiasmus defines the paradoxical juncture of spirit and matter, fire and earth. It is the spiritual point in the material world and the material point in the spiritual world.

In Platonic cosmology, the demiurge or divine artisan brings the infinite and the finite together to form a single point, and the result is the World Soul. In other words, this absolute chiasmic juncture is the very thing that animates the world (anima mundi). The world soul, moreover, is mirrored in the Platonic conception of the embodied soul, which is precisely conceived as a mean term between the divine and the human. It puts human perception in a privileged but also torn condition, enabling perspective on both the metaphysical and the physical worlds.

Through its ‘counter-stretched harmony’, the taut and tensile human psychē mirrors the macrocosmic chiasmus. Herein, the tension that mitigates against unity is secretly vital to its greater integrity. Like the dissonant seventh in musical harmony, tension anticipates the resolution of the fundamental tonos in the octave, while simultaneously maintaining perfect distance and equilibrium. Like the divine artisan, the human soul must not only wed the eternal to the transient, it must comprehend life’s grandest structures through its most contradictory details. Like the artisan, the artist embraces contradiction to encompass the feeling of infinity.

The counter-stretched nature of creation was sensed very keenly in modern times by Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker who likened film to ‘sculpting in time’, and directing to literally being able to ‘separate light from darkness’ and ‘dry land from the waters’ (Genesis 1: 9–18).‘The work of art’, remarks Tarkovsky, ‘lives and develops, like any other natural organism, through the conflict of opposing principles’.

Hideousness and beauty are contained within each other. This prodigious paradox, in all its absurdity, leavens life itself, and in art makes that wholeness in which harmony and tension are unified. The image makes palpable a unity in which manifold different elements are contiguous and reach over into each other. […] The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act.

(Image: Arthea (Elena Frasca Odorizzi)

Proceeding through opposition, art makes infinity tangible. All authentic ars, all traditional technē, seek to render the universal creative act present through finite creation. Here, we take ars and technē in their archaic senses, in which both ‘art’ and ‘craft/technology’ were not dualised, but were each seen to participate in the divine intelligence (nous, epistemē, scientia), and by virtue of this were distinguished from artless labour (atechnos tribē). According to the medieval dictum ars sine scientia nihil (art is nothing without knowledge), no separation was made between a work of art per se and ordinary, ‘utilitarian’ objects, as is the case in the modern world; rather, handcrafted objects were not soullessly manufactured, but transformed into works of art through the very act ofpoēsis (creation). They were vivified, hence life-giving. The false dichotomy between high art and low technology has come about precisely because manufactured objects (cheirotechnē) are no longer made by hand: they have lost their soul, their animating connection to the human and transcendent. As the Alsatian Hermetic philosopher, René Schwaller de Lubicz, once remarked:

If someone were to tell you that mechanised civilisation clouds the soul, this would be an affirmation without practical impact. On the other hand, if I say to you that mechanised civilisation clouds and even kills consciousness, you will comprehend this warning: if between yourself and the object of your labour you interpose an automatic tool which eliminates your will and above all your sensibility, all living contact between you and the fashioned material is cut off. The artisan no longer ‘feels’ (sent) and no longer comprehends the wood, the leather, the metal, his work is inanimate; it cannot emanate nor radiate any life for it has not received any. You must then resort to analyses, to statistical studies of the qualities of the material relinquished to the automatism of the machine, for you have stretched a veil between yourself and the thing; and although the thing subsists, you—the conscious living being—lose your life by suffocating your consciousness. It is the same with the doctor, who must sympathetically feel (éprouver) his patient’s illness, or otherwise become a mechanic. Observe the phases of history: the most fruitful, the most genial and the most ‘living’ epochs have always had a flourishing community of artisans. The Consciousness of a people can only be renewed through the crafts and not through doctrines. Mechanised civilisation is the agony of the world.

Plato, as Coomaraswamy reminds us, ‘knows nothing of our distinction of fine from applied arts. For him painting and agriculture, music and carpentry and pottery are all equally kinds of poetry or making’ (poēsis).

Ars and technē thus conceived are not merely mirrors or simulacra, but instruments and instances of creation, of making infinity tangible. Creation, in this sense, is regarded as continuous and ever-present, and all true creativity is thus participation in the ever-presence of origin. The artist creates an image of the absolute, according to Tarkovsky, and ‘through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite: the eternal within the finite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form’. The animating paradox at the heart of life is thus the hidden ferment through which harmony and tension are unified.

(Source: aaroncheak.com)

Spiritual Corporification and the Resurrection Body

The thing that is sown is perishable, but what is raised is imperishable. The thing that is sown is contemptible, but what is raised is glorious. The thing that is sown is weak, but what is raised is powerful. When it is sown it embodies the soul (psyche), when it is raised it embodies the spirit (pneuma).
—I Corinthians 15:42-44.

Having surveyed the ambivalent yet ultimately integrating symbolism of salt, we are now in a position to understand the Hermetic application of this principle to the aims of hieratic alchemy: the transmutation of the physical corpus into an immortal resurrection body: an act of spiritual concretion in which the body is spiritualised and the spirit corporified. The deeper valences of alchemy thus unfold as both a material and a spiritual process, and become comprehensible as a form of theurgic apotheosis and demiurgy. As the words of the sixth century Syrian theurgist, Iamblichus, make clear, the decidedly anagogic nature of the divine energies (theon ergon) emerge as central to the metaphysics of perception:

The presence of the Gods gives us health of body, virtue of soul and purity of mind. In short, it elevates everything in us to its proper principle. It annihilates what is cold and destructive in us, it increases our heat and causes it to become more powerful and dominant. It makes everything in the soul consonant with the Nous [mind, consciousness]; it causes a light to shine with intelligible harmony, and it reveals the incorporeal as corporeal to the eyes of the soul by means of the eyes of the body.

The idea of the fixed alchemical salt finds its most significant forebears in the concept of the corpus resurrectionis. In this respect, Schwaller is one of the few modern (Western) alchemists to possess what Corbin, in reference to Jaldakī, called a ‘very lucid consciousness of the spiritual finality and of the esoteric sense of the alchemical operation accomplished on sensible species’. This spiritual finality, in the metaphysical purview of Islamic illuminationist theosophy, is no less than the creation of a resurrection body (corpus resurrectionis). In Schwaller’s alchemy one sees very clearly that all the intensifications made on material species occur through an inscription on the entity’s indestructible nucleus (alchemically, a mineral salt); because this nucleus is the foundation of the body, the more intensifications it experiences, the more its essential (primordial but also future) body will approach the perfect equilibrium of an indestructible (and paradoxically, incorporeal) physical vehicle until the point is reached where, ultimately, luminous consciousness itself becomes its own perfect body. Thus, the abstract and the concrete, the volatile and the fixed, are ultimately conjoined through a process of intensification registered permanently in the being’s incorruptible aspect—the salt in the bones or ashes (cf. the Hebrew luz or os sacrum).

What is the nature of this spiritual body? In a remark by Saint Gregory the Sinaite, the spiritual body is equated with the process of theōsis (deification) and thus becomes amenable to a theurgical interpretation:

The incorruptible body will be earthly, but without moisture and coarseness, having been unutterably changed from animate to spiritual, so that it will be both of the dust and heavenly. Just as it was created in the beginning, so also will it arise, that it may be conformable to the image of the Son of Man by entire participation in deification.

The matter of the spiritual body is clearly nondual (‘both of dust and heavenly’). Robert Avens, in a preface to a discussion of Corbin and Swedenborg’s contributions to the understanding of the spiritual body, helps situate the deeper meaning that pertains to the “matter” of the resurrection body:

It seems clear, then, that whatever Paul might have meant by the expression “spiritual body”, he did not mean that the resurrected bodies were numerically identical with the earthly bodies—a view that was advocated by most writers for the Western or Latin church. The crucial question in all speculations of this kind has to do with Paul’s treatment of “matter”. We are naturally perplexed with the notion of a body that is composed of a material other than physical matter. Probably the best that can be said on this score is that Paul had chosen a middle course between, on the one hand, a crassly materialistic doctrine of physical resurrection (reanimation of a corpse) and, on the other hand, a dualistic doctrine of the liberation of the soul from the body.

Thus, the resurrection body, like the alchemical salt, forms a paradoxical ligature between transcendence and concretion, metaphysics and physics, spirit and body. While orthodox theologians such as Seraphim Rose draw on this and other passages to emphasise the Patristic doctrine that the body of Adam, the body that one will return to in resurrection, was (and is) different to one’s current, corruptible body, the ultimate nature of the “matter” of the resurrection body must remain a mystery. In this respect, Gregory of Nyssa’s remarks, from a treatise entitled ‘On the Soul and Resurrection’ may perhaps be taken as final:

The true explanation of all these questions is stored up in the treasure-houses of Wisdom, and will not come to the light until that moment when we shall be taught the mystery of Resurrection by the reality of it. […] to embrace it in a definition, we will say that the Resurrection is “the reconstitution of our nature in its original form”.

The original form he refers to is, of course, the Adamic, i.e. adamantine body, with obvious parallels to the Indo-Tibetan vajra (diamond) body. As Rose emphasises, the only thing that is certain is that the resurrection body will be different from its current, i.e. corruptible, form. As to whether it is “spirit” or “matter”, or a nondual state that embraces yet supersedes both (per Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, which spiritualises bodies and embodies spirit), it is perhaps best to remain apophatic.

As C. F. D. Moule notes, however, the somewhat ambiguous relationship between the mortal and incorruptible bodies may well inhere in the fact that transmutation between them was possible: for Moule, the Pauline resurrection theology was ‘perhaps wholly novel and derived directly from his experience of Christ—namely, that matter is to be used but transformed in the process of obedient surrender to the will of God’. ‘Matter is not illusory’, continues Moule; it is ‘not to be shunned and escaped from, nor yet exactly destined to be annihilated […] Rather, matter is to be transformed into that which transcends it’. These remarks approach the essence of the (nondual) alchemical œuvre in a way that confirms what one may call its theurgic and perhaps even tantric sense insofar as it recognises and embraces the body and matter as vehicles or foundations for liberation. In short, macrocosmically and microcosmically, material substance becomes a spiritual vehicle and instrument.

addendum for photo above:

The Rainbow Bridge connects realities through the frequencies of light and color. This is a photo of Tibetan Buddhist   monk, the Ven. K. C. Ayang Rinpoche,  blessing the deer in Kyoto’s Nara   Park, July 26th, 1985 (year of the  buffalo). He only asked once for a photo of him to be taken, saying: “Take a photo now!“ No one saw the rainbow until the print was developed. Rinpoche, on seeing the photograph, said he felt that his  prayer blessing of the deer had been  answered by the Buddha Amitabha at the very moment the photo was taken,   when he had made contact with the deer, and that the power of His blessing appeared in rainbow form.

(Source: aaroncheak.com)