SOLVE ET COAGULA

JOSHUA HUMPHREY

1 Contents

Grain Clouds

Chaos Magic I

Music of the Spheres

Chaos Magic II

The Elixir Vitae

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GRAIN CLOUDS

To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of you hand, and eternity in an hour.

- William Blake

3 Autopoetic patterning aperiodic order Alternating process of break it down build it up break it down Oscillatory ossification Degenerating sonic particles Grains of sound

Acoustic quanta Temporal Corporeal Coreshine scattered and domain decomposed Cosmic hourglass swallows its children like chronos son Sands of time

Maelstrom1 Swirling vortices vaporize synchronous variables Clock decomposition, organic, rotting Evaporation and coalescence of granulated matter Clouds of sound Particle generated neural reverberatory circuits

4 Cellular automata2 Physical models mattered mind additive quiescent Moving towards a burned nerve cell Massa confusa3 the void matrix mother births elementary particles Prophetic sines

Sublimated Gaseous vapors then condensed into undifferentiated clouds Vibratory fields of interference Recombine the discontinuous into interminable comprehension

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The seed must die before it's born Mercury and Sulphur wed calcinatio, solutio, putrefactio4 Ah the peacock's tail cauda pavonis5 Resplendent plethora of brilliant colorful eyes

Ablution of alchemical opus Palindromic color, uniform texture, text, tactile traces, tacit tessellation, fractalized poetry Hermeneutic exegesis of human history

6 CHAOS MAGIC I

The Great Work is, above all things, the creation of man by himself.

-Eliphas Levi

7 Chaosynthesis

Granular synthesis is a generative process utilized in digital sound design. It can be used to create evolving atmospheres, lush organic pads and alien landscapes. In the process, an audio sample is broken into tiny oscillating fragments called grains. These grains are then reformed and condensed into a probabilistic mass known as a grain cloud. Playing with granular synthesis is rather like playing God. Time, space and frequency become plastic and soluble. The operator controls the causal nature of acoustic quanta, bending them to the will of intent, sorting and sifting through the skeletal remains of the old in the synthesis of the new. The operator is the alchemist who recycles base lead into shining gold; the adept who sculpts their art from the black swirling cloud of chaos-void or the massa confusa. A reduction of basal metal is needed to sublimate this vaporous cloud. Oscillating sound sampled audio snapshot moving image frozen into bits.

The Recipe

First cut the sample into small pieces, between one and fifty milliseconds. Then layer them on top of each other to create holographic soundscapes - vibrating manifolds of sampled sound. Separate time and frequency domains. Vary wavelengths, phase, and spatial location. Soundscapes are carved by grinding and pulling – the movement of aether to mind to muscle to machine and back to void again. Switching binary emerges complexity. Stretch time elastic sound is malleable like soul.

The Pythagorean School

Music and poetry are the aparati used to make the measure. Language is the compass used to locate self in the cosmos. Rising and falling melodies are formed by a colorful palate of sounds from which the artist dips their brush. “That which is like above is like that which is below.” Planets vibrate like fireflies flickering in softly humming summer night sky – their distances from each other form

8 harmonious chords. Black holes bang on space-time like the membrane of a drum. The universe is alive and sentient. Living information living in formation. The adept among stars is a resonating string in a celestial symphony. The music of the spheres permeates every fold and pleat of cosmic fabric. Seven metals of the alchemist’s laboratory correspond to seven planets, to seven notes of the chromatic scale, and to seven energy systems of the human body. From all spheres unto all spheres there stretches an indestructible network of astral light. Like a spider web holding glimmering drops of mercurial dew, we are suspended and sustained recycling bits of information in the mind matrix mother.

Genesis 2:7

God-nature is at the heart of all forms. The heat of intent sublimes nestled demiurges, which lay sleeping crystalized images of captured sounds. Imagination latent seeds form drops of grain. Clouds are condensed into Mercurial rain, the aqua permanens, which irrigates the soil of the soul. We are levees, where water meets form creates consciousness. Astral body eros* is the spirit medium that connects source and substance, chaos and gaia.

* In the book Chaos, Gaia, Eros by systems theorist Ralph Abraham, Eros is seen as the medium that connects the void of Chaos to the substance of Gaia. Erodynamics, named in 1989, applies dynamical systems theory to human social phenomena.

9 MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.

-Pythagoras

10 Word comes through the mist of music Sacred secrets spiral vibrating voices Ascending harmony is drawn from dissimilar proportions Pluck the stars and watch them vibrate spinning round a central fire Emblazoned circle Embryonic state of soul spheres Pillar of creation

Compose the scale etched earth and father matter’s muse Play strings, whose death god bodies stone kissed movements of evaporating form Adore the sun under figure of black stone Most brilliant luminary wisdom Milk and blood of salt

11 First matter meddled Golden ratios sing sweetly Saturn frozen Salient and somber Elements ascend smoke of purest incense Churning melodies draw auspicious amber-citrine sirens upwards Purest One Pure Stone

Effulgent under the sacred circle stars of rhythmic origin The immaculate soul of fire is temple of diversity Mind and music stand marble scales Broken spheres stone celestia Picked harmonic God bodies from metal black abodes Basal blueprints Decomposed signs figured words motives of the ages Sphera Lunae Sempiternum Auxilium6

12 Illuminated cherub of Ezekiel7 scribed in sky Augmented apotheosis Inverted virtue Images of place and being preserved in astral light Suspended Sustained Death

Transfigured bodies blend earth and Sky One terrestrial and elementary the other aerial and sidereal Ink across soul parchment folded in on self All is surface Harmonia est discordia concord Volatilization of the fixed Fixation of the volatile

13 Shoreless ocean Fathomless void Sacred Tetractys8 magnificent edifice of scales harmonizing heavens Rounds of angels preserve the golden stone Absolute Fixed Central

Complete and cyclic numbered nature Hieroglyphic theory of composition nested within an incommunicable tetragram9 The name of the redeemer Monad point source Dyad line excess defect Triad plane Unity Diversity

14 CHAOS MAGIC II

…as if God Himself had come thundering down through the symbols, off the page and into the room, fertilizing and impregnating the mind with his Ghostly, unmistakable presence.

-Grant Morrison

15 Vitriol

The operator may uncover the elixir in their clockwork tinkering of prima materia. This elixir is a great river of energy and life ever pouring though us all, into the grave from where it is simultaneously being born. “Here falls the heavenly dew, to lave/ the soiled black body in the grave” Life is a passing from the realm of death mirrored ad infinitum. Falling dew signifies this divine death and resurrection. Rain signs resuscitation of a new light. Descent, or katabasis, into the deep ocean of the unconscious leads to the illuminated stone.

From Aether to Form

Cellular automata are rigid sets of sound cell membranes, each in a finite number of states at any finite number of dimensions. Vibratory fields that intersect create iridescent patterns of rippling liquid mercury. Plasma. Aether. King and Queen are wed in a divine union. Consubstantiality of opposites leads all artifice to fall away. What is left is most venerable nature of which we are agent and organ. Tool too we are before all else, both creatrix and destructor. Poet. Genesis.

Transmigrations, Astral Body Mental Time Travel

New generations are created from the ashes of the old. Through the thread of memory - information stored as Logos – we walk corporeal ghosts. Retroactive and projective. Chronesthestic and self-aware. Memory is the hourglass and the swallowed sands of time - the uruburus-mobius strip of past and future interlaced. Life moves ever forward always still. Magic is the bending of imagination infused reality. We are all Magus, master, messer - the adept who models whole universes of out clay. Gods are freed from their slumber in the reduction of complex waveforms into elementary particles and prophetic sines. For the alchemist

16 the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but deity* who is lost and sleeping in matter. The individuation of the self is a liberation of God from black fertile earth. The new is now the living center.

* Jung observed that the alchemist’s consideration or hope that some benefit may accrue to him from the transformed substance as the pancea, the medicina catholica, was secondary. His attention was not directed to his own salvation through God’s grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter.

17 THE ELIXIR VITAE

…whereof boiled a fountain of most white water, which ran head-long down into the depths, notwithstanding it first passed among the hands of infinite people, who digged in the earth seeking for it; but because they were blind, none of them knew it, except here and there one who considered the weight.

-Nicholas Flamel

18 Frequencies fall tonic wellsprings Conductive currents cast dancing glyphs Gold stone of sages Blazing star Conscious truth of living thought

Radiant Merkaba Light of eyes Ears harmony Fall turned perfume Truth the same man touch All ghosts spirits living word flesh Life thought Star scry Light tattered shadow Lapis philosophum Great magus God sealed eyes set the spring of death Exercise desire Impassioned ecstasy engenders absolute superiority

19 Work primal matter extrapolate Endless patterns play Phasing functions follow orphic augurs Sky scribed angel sign sigils10 Compressed spirit Self- conscious sample genesis Synthesized chronesthesia Synchronous soma rises rarefied…

20 ENDNOTES

1 Malström Graintable Synthesizer – The Malström device creates its sounds using Graintable technology. This technology is a cross between granular synthesis and wavetable synthesis. Malström features many filtering and modulation options. It is capable of real-time waveform stretching, spectral modulation, and wavetable sweeping. Malström comes with a wide range of Graintables. Wikipedia

2 Cellular automata are mathematical models of dynamic systems in which space and time are discrete and quantities take on a finite set of discrete values. [They] were originally introduced by John von Neumann as a model of biological self-reproduction. He wanted to know if it is possible for a machine to reproduce – that is, to automatically construct a copy of itself.

3 The first operation of alchemy addresses itself to the breaking up (torturing, bleeding, dismembering) of this confining structure and reducing it to a condition of creative chaos (massa confusa, prima materia). From this, in the process of transformation, the true, creative binaries emerge and begin their interaction designed to bring about the coniunctio or alchemical union. In this ultimate union, says Jung, the previously confined light is redeemed and brought to the point of its ultimate and redemptive fulfillment.

4 Referring to the reduction of base matter. Calcinatio is commonly defined as the reduction of a subtance to an ashy powder or calx through intense heat. Solutio refers to the process of solve et coagula. Putrefactio implies that the seeds of metals must also die if they are to be reborn as more perfect forms.

5 Cauda pavonis is the cycling of colors that occurs in the alchemist’s still, occurring after the nigredo and before the albedo stages.

6 Sphera Lunae Sempiternum Auxilium – sphere of the moon, eternal helper. This appears as a header under the chapter Transmutations in the book Transcendental Magic by Eliphas Levi .

7Eliphas Levi mentions the wheel of Ezekiel, a pentacle analogous to the wheel of Pythagoras, possibly a reference to the Merkaba.

8 The tetractys or tetrad is a triangular figure consisting of ten points arranged in four rows: one, two, three, and four points in each row, which is the geometrical representation of the fourth triangular number. As a mystical symbol, it was very important to the secret worship of the Pythagoreans.

9 The term tetragrammaton refers to the Hebrew theonym transliterated to the Latin letters YHWH. It may be derived from the verb that means "to be", and is considered in Judaism to be a proper name of the God of Israel used in the Hebrew Bible.

10 A sigil (latin for seal) is a symbol used in magic. The term has usually referred to a type of pictorial signature of a demon or other entity; in modern usage, especially in the context of chaos magic it refers to a symbolic representation of the magician's desired outcome.

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"Tetractys." Wikipedia. 19 Apr. 2013. Wikimedia Foundation. 31 May 2013 .

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