Study Circle 03 on
Reading Chapter 01
Conducted by:
Taimoor K. Mumtaz (Director)
Raheel Ahmed (Coordinator Sacred Psychology Program)
Participants
Irshad, Mubarika, Kausar, Saba, Mehr, Bushra, Raza.
Highlights:
- Completed Reading of Chapter 1 : The Origin of Western Alchemy
- Reading of an extract from 'Tazkira-e-Ghausiya'- the biography of Ghous Ali Shah Qalandar of Panipat.
-Extracts from Alchemy:
Extract 01
'Even more
easily did the Hermetic art enter into the spiritual world of Islam. The latter
was always ready in principle to recognize any pre-Islamic art which appeared
under the aspect ‘wisdom’ (hikmah) as
a heritage of earlier prophets. Thus in the Islamic world Hermes Trismegistos
is often identified with Enoch (Idris).
It was the
doctrine of the ‘oneness of existence’ (wahdat
al-wujud) — the esoteric interpretation of the Islamic confession of faith
— which gave to Hermetism a new spiritual axis, or, in other words,
re-established its original spiritual horizon in all its fullness and freed it
from the suffocation of late Hellenistic ‘naturalism’.'
Extract 02
'The seventeenth century has often been regarded
as marking the full flowering of European Hermetism. In reality, however, its
decadence had already begun in the fifteenth century, and proceeded apace with
the humanistic and already fundamentally rationalistic development of Western
thought, by which any spiritual and intuitive universality of outlook was
deprived of its very basis.'
Extract 03
'In general,
European alchemy following the Renaissance had a fragmented character; as a
spiritual art, the metaphysical background was lacking. This is especially true
of its last remnants in the eighteenth century — even despite the fact that, amongst all the ‘charcoal burners’,
men of real genius such as Newton and Goethe concerned themselves with it — though
unsuccessfully.
At
this point it seems opportune to state categorically that there can be no
‘freethinking’ alchemy hostile to the Church, for the first prerequisite of
every spiritual art is that it should recognize everything that the human
condition, in its pre-eminence and in its precariousness, needs by way of means
of salvation.'
