I have already mentioned the contribution which Steven Sutcliffe and I made to the volume Intentional Transformative Experiences, edited by Sarah Perez, Bastiaan van Rijn, and Jens Schlieter: https://www.josephazize.com/2024/10/06/only-this-will-bring-results/

I will now deal with two essays from that volume. First, Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s “A Suggestive Inquiry into Hermetic Rebirth: Nondual Noesis and Bodily Fluids in Victorian England.”  His point of departure is A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery … by Mary Anne Atwood (nee South) published anonymously in 1850. As he notes, scholars like Newman and Principe had said that Atwood was wrong to see in alchemy a spiritual or psychological practice. It was in sober fact, they say, a laboratory science. (149-150). That view has been challenged by Mike A. Zuber, who contends that: “… the spiritual alchemy of A Suggestive Inquiry was rooted in a heterodox Protestant tradition that can be traced back to … (a period) by the end of the sixteenth century.” (150) Wouter adds to this thesis that Atwood also used the Hermetic work of the ancient world, and its concern was not merely theoretical but practical. (150-151)

Hanegraaff argues that the aim of the Hermetic current was “a radical experience of rebirth (palingenesia).” (151) This meant that  divine or “noetic” light could be introduced into the individual soul to drive the “dark energies” out. As a result, the soul is reborn, “literally reborn in a perfect spiritual body, made entirely of noetic light and endowed with a cosmic consciousness unrestricted by time and space.” (151) He refers here to his own 2022 book, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination. This rebirth was “a radical liberation from cosmic dominion that enabled the soul to achieve gnosis.” (151) This was fully grasped not by Ficino but by Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500) the second and fuller translator of the Hermetic Corpus. He identified “the supreme noetic Light of divinity” with Poimandres, the divine Logos in Christ, and in Giovanni da Correggio, Lazzarelli’s own teacher. One who had been reborn could pass the “rebirth” on to others. (151-152) This was picked up by Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535/6) as the secret of Christian salvation. (152) It is to Atwood’s credit that she realised this fact by “uncanny intuition … remarkable intelligence and hermeneutical skills.” (153)

I have read a good deal of literature on Atwood, including Waite, and Principe’s Secrets, but I do not recall their mentioning that she had belonged to a “Christian-theosophical community” in Kent, following the ideas of James Greaves; or that she was responsible for the first and more interesting part of the book Early Magnetism, attributed to her father. (153-4) However, Hanegraaff extracts a passage from the second part of the book which is quite valuable, and will burst into meaning for anyone who is working with the Gurdjieff system:

… it is what only and alone the trance presents, the sabbath of the senses; deep inner retirement from the every day routine of worldly thoughts and occupations, for central self-communion; to feel, to see and know the yet unstirred, unapproached, unappreciated, unbelieved, unrevered Divinity within us; to waken up the buried Conscience like a Guardian Spirit … into a freer state of being … (154)

On a hasty reading, this could appear to be similar to those in the Gurdjieff system. But this idea of the “sabbath of the senses” is one in which the “body is immobile” (159). On a prima facie reading, this is the opposite of Gurdjieff’s ideal of awakening all faculties, all senses. The references to “trance” points to this as a defensible interpretation. The idea of a “buried conscience” is consistent with Gurdjieff.

Like Gurdjieff, Atwood also said that Mesmer had rediscovered an ancient wisdom. (155) Magnetic healing of the mind could, she said, restore the mind’s capacity for “direct noetic perception of … ‘the things that really are’.” (156) Both father and daughter made some circumspect claims to have proved this from their own experience. (161-162)

Hanegraaff paraphrases Atwood’s views when he says that: “Because individual thought is a transitive activity predicated on the subject-object duality, it is excluded from immediate positive knowledge of the Absolute in its essential oneness.” (157) I would say that “individual” does not strike me as the right word – what thought is not? It is the quality of our thought, the mind we use, for the intellectual centre has levels, and then are the higher centres. Atwood herself seemed to be striving for some such formulation. (158) Probably from 1849, it seems, the father continued to practice whatever it was they were doing, while Atwood was disillusioned with what she had seen, but pursued the study of ancient texts which led to her Suggestive Inquiry in 1850. (162-164)

It is well known that South made a bonfire of almost all printed copies of the book. Hanegraaff suggests that this was South’s moral panic at the paganism in his daughter’s book, and that she dissented from his decision. (164-165)

Part one of the Suggestive Inquiry described the transmutation of matters as the “exoteric” side of alchemy, culminating in the translation of a medieval alchemical treatise. Part two moved to esoteric Hermetic ideas of the “Light of Nature” and related these to mesmerism and that “divine assimilation” by which the human spirit made “vital contact with its Source.” (166-167) Part three deals with the laws and conditions of the work; and Part four distinguishes the “gross” from the “subtle” work, and provides a conclusion. (167)

It is fascinating to observe that Atwood wrote that there is a “certain pure matter” in nature, identical with the “true clear Light of Nature” which can be perfected through (human) art. When perfected, it “converts to itself proportionately all imperfect bodies that it touches.” It is said to be equivalent to the Spirit / Ether of magnetic practice. (168-19)

The “pure matter” manifests in Man as a divine image, which can, through rebirth transcend the limits of this low world (“nether sphere”).  The rebirth needs a vessel, but while she did not explicitly state what that was, she left enough traces for an ardent researcher to find the answer in Agrippa: the human body through which bodily fluids circulate. (169-170) Hanegraaff’s exegesis concludes that: “The spiritual principle required for rebirth was believed to reside in the semen … It had to be brought into contact with a purified form of menstrual blood …” transmuted “by means of urine (sic).” (171)

I have no idea at all of what was supposed to happen: was one to drink the concoction? We are told that the process had to be accompanied by prayer and trance had to be used. (172) But how? Hanegraaff says that it had nothing to do with physical sex. (174) But beyond this negative, it is by no means apparent how all this worked out in practice.

Hanegraaff correctly notes Waite’s disagreements with Atwood. (175) When I read Waite, I formed the impression that Atwood was a gifted amateur who had a “fatal quarrel with quotation marks” to paraphrase him just a little. This was indeed a stimulating article, even if the central mystery is not, and perhaps cannot be revealed (which is not Hanegraaff’s fault).