In the Hermetic magical view, human beings are not tainted by original sin. You remember that image in Jonathan EdwardsвЂ™ sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, where he says youвЂ™re like a worm suspended over an abyss, held there only by the love of a merciful God implying that if he werenвЂ™t a merciful God, heвЂ™d just let go of your thread and youвЂ™d go down the tubes. ItвЂ™s a completely different attitude toward being human, itвЂ™s an empowering attitude with power comes the potential to abuse power, because youвЂ™re no longer a worm. The Hermeticum actually refers to humanity as the brother of God.

In Hermeticism, it isnвЂ™t so much put in terms of вЂњcompel,вЂќ but the idea is that men and women of great spiritual accomplishment are copartners in the project of being and that God, as it were, stepped off the stage of creation with it only 90% completed and the rest is left in the hands of his brother. In a Christian context, magic is heresy because it implies that man can command God to act in other words, that, in some strange way, the magician compels nature to behave as the magician desires. Human beings are copartners with deity in the project of being: this is the basis of all magic. ItвЂ™s what Western civilization makes you think, whether you want to think it or not, even if you donвЂ™t come out of these traditions for us, the concept that youвЂ™ve got to pay your dues. This is deep in us you may not think youвЂ™ve bought in because youвЂ™re black or Chinese, but itвЂ™s just in the air we breath.

We can be redeemed through Christ, but we donвЂ™t deserve it if you are saved it is because there is a kind of hand extended to you from a merciful God who is willing to overlook your wormy nature and draw you up in spite of yourself. We are doing penance as we speak, the world is a vale of tears, the lot of human beings is to till hard land and we are cursed unto the nineteenth generation by the fall of our first parents. The Christian view is very strongly marked by the idea of manвЂ™s fall, that we screwed up early on and somehow then, by virtue of that, were forced into a secondary position in the cosmic drama. The great tension in the late Middle Ages was between the magical schema, the magical view of human beings, and the Christian view. The agenda is to talk about Hermeticism and alchemy the way in which this tradition - which is counter- intuitive and heterodox, if not heretical from the point of view of Christianity - what it can mean for the present, what it means for the psychedelic experience, what it means for the notion of the end of history and how the loss of this point of view has probably done us a certain amount of damage. TodayвЂ™s thing is sort of a return to a more orthodox educational kind of mode, hopefully not to such a degree that itвЂ™s boring.

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