SOLVE ET COAGULA JOSHUA HUMPHREY 1 Contents Grain Clouds Chaos Magic I Music of the Spheres Chaos Magic II The Elixir Vitae 2 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 5 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