Chronos Apollonios' "Home On Olympus"

I'm already keenly aware that many of my kindreds labor under what I am forced to consider are false auspices of secrecy and mystery, and furthermore that these auspices are built on purportedly long-standing traditions of the very same rationale. I have no assurance, however, that a single one of these statements is intended to be anything more than hilarious. I could conjure you a formidable list of persons who simultaneously rant about the virtues of secrecy and cryptic languages while they are in essence divulging their brains out, from the likes of Pellegrino Ernetti, to an outstanding example of this, the alchemist Paracelsus himself.

All of this is still for each of us to decide, and I refuse to judge others on the merits of their decisions, but I cannot ever pretend nor delude myself that my silence has circumvented the only means by which the "unworthy" might come across the knowledge in question. To me, this would not only be a staggering act of egotistical declaration of myself as a somehow singular fountainhead of knowledge, but it would take an absurd twisting of the present reality that by the traditional standards, an enormous amount of knowledge has fallen into the hands of those who literally insist on being abusive of it, in spite of the fact that the veils of secrecy have been tried and tried again.

In the long run, whatever may be said about those who are "unworthy" to receive knowledge, even in the course of the act of parenting, we are forced to be aware of our role in shaping the worthiness of others. If I never trust my child with responsibilities that are not yet warranted by their maturity or experience, I can expect that child never to learn responsibility, no matter how risky or painful the process may be. If I refuse to let my child borrow the car on the grounds that they are not yet worthy, I might as well expect that as a result of it they may never be worthy.

Likewise, if I enjoy the alchemically-produced wealth of a Comte de Saint-Germain and refuse to teach such arts to my "unworthy" brother, if he cuts my throat in an alley for a pittance to keep from starving to death far beyond the ability of the available spagyrist to restore my wholeness, I may linger in my afterlife wondering if I had been a contributor to his "unworthiness" and had only myself to blame.

Just as much, if I am caught drinking at the Fountain of Youth without offering a sip to my fellow man, I might as well expect to be acquainted by them with a fate from which no magick I know might rescue me. As any sibling should know, envy can be a mere means to equanimity.

Shall I now confuse myself that I am the first philosopher to grasp this wisdom, or must I ponder whether when the Comte de Saint-Germain offered proof of his skills to anyone, let alone went dispensing his fabulous elixir, he was breaching the silence in that alone, and knew fully well that any of it would be the "talk of the town"? (Come to think of it, I have often heard the present day referred to as an age when "there are no secrets", but gossip has, allegedly, always spread as fast as wildfire).

We have reason therefore, to think of the mysterious ones as sufficiently generous, and yet still this peculiar preoccupation with keeping secrets. Fear of persecution, of many kinds, does manage to be a modern rationale for silence, and yet what can we say of those who seem to have long gone out of their way to keep as high a profile as possible?

We might as well look at the history of language itself, and its very nature, because in all fairness, these questions which seem to plague and mislead so many, are still more alive and "well" now than they ever were. We might as well try to examine every possible reason for what is ostensibly evasiveness that we can. Any one of them will suffice to justify what has become an often painful lack of mutual respect and understanding, but we may require as many as possible of the turns that understanding has taken in order to be able to reverse those twists and possess understanding.

The Bible, whether or not we can count on it as a factual history source, describes the possibility of the disorganization of human communication through an incident involving the tower of Babylon. However preposterous the source or the particular story may seem to be, the possibility has been raised. Even if we convert into the vocabulary of energy and biology, the possibility has been raised- basically, that some sort of electromagnetic disaster may be capable of inducing certain deviations in speech patterns, causing a collapse of communication between human beings. We have much evidence that they could communicate very well nonetheless, and such evidence often consists of examples of symbols rather than the like of the Rosetta Stone, but we do indeed have adequate evidence of a division of languages extending into the present day.

Symbols, it must be remembered, perhaps like any tool, capable of being as difficult as helpful if they have not been mastered. The very best bridge between divisions of understanding threaten to be the worst obstacles to understanding if we are not respectful of just that very thing. Hence, the expressions that the alchemists used, for example, can be considered as means to facilitate communication amongst themselves as opposed to a means of excluding others. While it's quite possible that anyone who refuses to acquaint themselves with the particular language may of course be left out, it's quite possible for such a specialized language to come about by purely innocent means.

Hence, and I may repeat this here, an antagonist of the alchemists and their particular expressions, or the purportedly "secret" language of any "mystery tradition" who refuses to acquaint themselves with the particular language is risking being much like the pompous imperialist ass who rants, "why don't these bloody yellow devils learn to speak English like civilized people instead of that sing-song gobblety-gook?". In the real world, it's just as fair for him to learn some Chinese if he wishes to communicate, than for all of China to learn English to appease one man. Even though we much despise the image of such a man, we have been perhaps rather spoiled in the English-speaking world by how readily others have gone out of their way to speak to us in our own language when we have returned the favor with relatively great rarity.

The classic example, however, that the foreigness of a magickal language automatically excludes an ego that size, sadly does not prevent such a fellow from hunting the "yellow devils" as trophies. Such an insurance is imaginary at best. There is nothing an alchemist could teach anyone that could cause anyone to be "more dead" than could be accomplished with the rocks and sticks that occur in astonishing abundance. Again, I defer that this is to be realized, that the Comte de Saint-Germain, to name only one, especially having mastered numerous languages, knew exactly this long before I. Systematically excluding anyone from any tradition would be like keeping children out of candy.

In the case of the Biblical example of the Tower of Babylon story, there exists signs of a conscious awareness that man's intellectual glory is a fragile one; we can begin to grasp that the symbols that can be at once both so eloquent and yet so misleading may have best prevailed as our assurance against some catastrophic dyslexia or amnesia such as this. There is much ancient mythology that attempts the very same or similar issues. The Chinese have proverbialized the expression, "The best memory is not so good as faded ink", and be it or not there may be a hidden alchemic prescription within that very phrase, what if the memory has become so poor that it can no longer read at all? What then? Add another proverbial expression, "a picture is worth a thousand words", and we are left with a premium placed on symbols because they are powerful enough to command understanding even if one cannot read or even hear the written word. In the event that a complex and powerfully intelligent mind should be afflicted with a great forgetting of its contents, just as familiar surroundings and faces are employed to help "jog" the memory of amnesia victims, should the human race undergo some cataclysmic purging of its mental graces, symbols, carved in enduring stone, may scratch through the shell beneath which such eternally retrievable treasures would be buried.

Likewise, they strike deep enough can be that which can first cleave the cloud of amnesia that is said to descend on man when he reincarnates into another body, yet another "collective" amnesia for the ancient remarks to be referring to.

In other words, such "cryptic" languages may well proportionally appropriate to the value of what they are being used to communicate- even when the goal is anything but exclusion or secrecy.

There is also a fluency that comes with the abbreviation of symbols. We think in symbols, use symbols for our intellectual processes. A mind-numbingly complex equation will be symbolised as "x" to be factored into "y", the symbol representing the sum of another equation that is likewise of staggering intricacy. In much the same way, the human mind can use two symbols, or concepts, like the object and reference beams in holography, to recreate a whole entire spectrum of possibilities in the mind. If I take everything I know, even if it is very little, about time-reversal and factor it into everything I know about biological energy, which may also be very little, in my mind appears the first inkling of a hundred thousand pages of knowledge of how to combine the two areas into endless permutations of methods and devices capable of absolutely miraculous healing. More and more, we are coming into awareness that holographic is the actual nature of the brain, but in truth, it has long been evidenced by the capabilities of the mind.

Should I forget all of this, however, I might think of two symbols that will strike into the very depths of my subconscious to bring it all back in a flash.

Here too is a powerful rationale for the use of symbols, namely condensation and abbreviation. What a single collection of Greek Mythology implies, by means of allegory, symbol, euphemism, innuendo, and every other "trick" in the book, for example, would doubtless take tons of written texts to record if "spoken plainly". Beside the issue of respect for, and conservative use of material resources to contend with, materialization or no materialization, there is also the issue of portability. One may take that one book and travel the world with it; traversing the globe with sheer tons of paper is another matter altogether. Knowledge that is condensed with these abbreviatory tools is knowledge that is physically earmarked for distribution and dissemination.

In such formats, while there is indeed the hint of conscious character development on the part of the benefactor of knowledge- the outward riddle form challenges the intellect and encourages in dependent thought. It's always gratifying when telling stories to children, and you inform them that the hero proceeded to subdue ten bulls with his teeth, to see them look up and giggle, and say, "No way! Get real!"- that's the beginnings of individual and independent intellect, even though there may be few who, if they are not specifically encouraged to do so, will tell you what the "teeth" and the "bull" actually represent.

The fact may be that it takes considerable knowledge to know what the "teeth" and the "bull" represent, which is further testament, just like our own Native storytellers telling "medicine stories" to all of the villagers, of all ages, that the necessary acquaintance with the finer details of these "cryptic" materials not only begins as early as possible, when persons cannot command the worthiness that the mystery schools allegedly require.

Accordingly, apprenticeship in shamanism, whatever particular flavor, ideally begins as early as possible, and in the interest of continuity and community well-being, is ideally distributed beyond the narrow confines of a single, mortal apprentice. Ideally, entire villages are intimately acquainted with the details of medicine stories, and at times not even that has been broad enough of a distribution for intents and purposes, just as surely as we are told the "mystery" rites of Elusinium, the supernatural growth of the vine, were performed in public in broad daylight.

That's a far different picture than the rare and elusive "worthiness" we are told about. Ideally, though, such mythical "worthiness" is as much a glaring idiosyncracy as the idiosyncrasies that adulterate the mythologies of all traditions so that the recipient, left to their own devices, is able to glean that something is not as it appears at face value and may be, hopefully, encouraged to dig deeper for truth, rather than settling for feeling cheated by it.

Reticence has also no doubt proved a another good rationale for the "disguising" of knowledge. Pity the physician who is taken captive by the king who needs a personal physician. If the king dies, the physician will be put to death, so he cannot poison his way out of his predicament. Soon, the physician begins telling the king little stories. One day, the physician says, "You remember the stories I taught you, including the one about the rabbit and the beaver? Well the rabbit is your liver, the beaver is your kidney, and so now you know how they work, and how to take care of them, so you can let me out of this dungeon now". Be it an uncooperative patient or a stubborn child, the anthromorphicizing and zoomorphicizing of organs and functions and other hygenic knowledge has long availed no doubt from being turned into tales of heroes and talking animals.

Fluidity deserves repeating here as an operative rationale. There are times when the mind can achieve such speed embracing the whole of a complex matter by using abbreviations that it in fact refuses to slow down and do otherwise. It's probably that we have people in institutions who give vocalizations to these cryptic phrases, simply because they are employing this idiom.

If I stood around during an outbreak of a lethal flu, and screamed at the top of my lungs, "God is a duck! God is a duck!", the great likelihood is that I will be considered a hindrance and especially during a crisis. But my "Muse" as it were has pumped me full of excitement and inspiration until I am the very word "Eureka" dancing about on two legs. "God is a duck" is the only thing I can manage to utter. If I cannot translate this wisdom to you, why "God is a duck", I will be shipped off to a padded cell, post haste.

If I am only forced to receive a mild sedative, I may be able to slow down to translate for you that my superconscious mind has told me that this lethal flu is, like the magnetotactic micro-organisms that seem to "hijack" birds to migrate in the first place, and our biochemical experience of the comforting presence of God, something that interacts with the opiate receptor, and can be effectively combatted by blocking its access to that receptor, be it bringing in a minister to lead prayer or a stiff draught of mugwort for the patient, will delay its progress enough to give people's immune systems a fighting chance. Provided I was actually conscious of any of that precarious technobabble in the first place, that is.

"God is a duck", an annoying and senseless phrase, which on any other day would be atrocious nonsense, would be exactly the "atrocious nonsense" the occasion demands nonetheless. If I had had to slow down enough to think of it in "rational" terms, it may never have occurred to me at all. I may not have had conscious tools at all. Be it a Christian hospital I had burst into with my revelation, no doubt my predicament could well be compounded by sacrilege and blasphemy, but all the times I can repeat the Biblical adage, "Out of the mouths of babes may come great wisdom", may never repair my prospects for social status or employment that have been likely to be damaged by such an incarceration.

Clearly, we might actually need a few more interpreters around here...

There's a very thin line in this example between a historically-revered minor savior like the legendary "Joe Pye" and a forgotten lunatic sedated right out of coherence. But where does the responsibility lie here? Is there some rule written somewhere that our divinely inspired Godsends are required to speak to us in our language any more than the Chinese are "required" to learn English because we demand it? We might have been blessed that it wasn't spoken in tongues! Pity the initiate who pities the fact that half of the time, our society may be punishing and impairing those who have found their higher minds, erroneously believing they have "lost their minds entirely". What has become of our responsibility to try to listen to people in their own language, or what may be, and at least try to give them the benefit of doubt that in some manner of speaking, they may be saying something important.

Bottom line? In a crisis, when quick thinking is required, expect bilingual and polylingual people to perhaps think in their native tongue. To the alchemist who envisions that his "Great Work" is not the making of gold or potions or other sundry miracles, but the dissemination of this knowledge to every sentient being, there never has been a moment to lose, there has always been someone imperiled by the want of the ancient wisdom to consitute a human crisis.

Additional reasons for "cryptic" languages? Having mastered the secrets of the universe and immortality, what does one do for entertainment when one has a serious risk of being bored by everything? There is the possibility that the seeker will encounter the extant works of people enormously old, whose gentlemanly past-times consisted of taking the same knowledge and seeing how many times they could permutate it and still have it prove recognizable, how rich they could make the tapestry of expression, how many sliding doors and hidden panels they could install in their writing. Every day brings a shining new metaphor and challenge to the mind. It's a respectable enthusiasm.

Like a warm fire to someone locked out on a freezing porch, however, it naturally looks a bit suspicious and elite from outside, and alas, the responsibility for communicating effective does effectively fall on both sides of the fence, on that of the ancient master, too.

Had we, however, not enough alibi for this "elusive" style already, I have no personal experience to tell you that it is not so that the master key to these formidable "locks" is simply to apply the smallest portion of common sense, believe in and accept the highest possibilities as your goals, and study what interests you. Indulge your hunger for knowledge. Quite the contrary, these alone have consistently proven to be adequate as far as I am concerned, and if it comes to that, I must stand with the alchemists when they finally insist that if someone is determined to ignore their most heart-felt offerings and greet them with endless cynicism (even where the appropriate amount of cynicism is freely invited and encouraged), putting it all in "plain English" would all be a futile gesture. Indeed. Worthiness is not the issue. Obstinance is. This doesn't alter the fact, of course, that even those who refute the ancient wisdom may have already accidentally absorbed a great deal of it in some other form! Frequently people enjoy its use and show no admission of it.

The avid reader of esoteric material will come across the expressions, "The Green Language", and "The Language of Birds". I often encounter those who are quite aware of what these words mean, but I do not know if I can tell you if I know of any who seem to possess a sizable mastery of the concepts and connotations, and perhaps there are no such individuals any more. You are likely to find as many interpretations of those phrases as you can find those willing to attempt interpreting them. Have we lost, therefore, something infinitely precious, some priceless key to the past? What are these things, and more importantly, how can we rebuild and reclaim them if our knowledge of them has become damaged or lost? If we remember that the goal of communication is ideally to say as much as possible to as many as possible, like what is forged in these languages itself, these terms will mean hopefully mean all that you will hear they mean, and them some.

Specifically? If you focus on the most superficial behaviors of animals and liken them to principles of the behavior of matter and energy, or liken their shapes or patterns to those of certain animals, you may rapidly and effortlessly achieve a good grasp of the way the ancients tended to symbolize chemical elements and physical forces with animals and with deities. If you keep in mind the basic goals or needs of existence (food, water, shelter, warmth...), you may do better still. If you keep thinking in simple abstractions, you may master the Doctrine of Signatures, and nature will be like an open book to you. If you dwell on the basic root syllables of all languages, you may suddenly approach fluency in many languages. If you do this with the basic goals of magick and alchemy in mind, you may succeed in recreating an ancient and singular language of ancient wisdom, whose very first words may have elaborated complex mastery of nature. If you persist even further, you mind find a level where "understanding the language of birds" becomes a literal thing, not a figurative one. You may find that where magick spells, herbs and rituals have promised to give you these powers, you may indeed find them.

After all, when we look at ancient oracles, which I have described in some detail, and which have obvious patterns, we're likely to be looking at holographic memory. So what do these devices which know everything have going for them that technically we do not? Our own latent omniscience might as well be the deus ex machina which sprang from them were it not to be remembered that if it is one way or the other, it is our own latent omniscience which is the model for theirs!

At length, there is somewhere in the world of the fractal, of the holographic, of the artificially omniscient, of the akashic memory and the morphic feild, of past life regressions complete with speaking of a foriegn language, of a comprehensible speaking in tongues, a great capability to convert into sheer and utter reality the most outlandish of devices, the "universal translator" of Star Trek, whereby the Enterprise crew can "magically" speak to, and hear, aliens in plain ordinary English, and have perfect communication, somehow, without ever having been programmed with the alien vocabulary in question!

There's also a lovely anecdote, I might add, from a book by Tedlock & Tedlock about a wonderful gift of understanding foreign languages that magically happens in the context of a Native American ritual setting. The trick is not to allow yourself to be misled that hallucinogens have any intergral part to play in the process at all. There are certain characteristic shifts in neutrotransmitters that are accessable countless ways, and again, we witches and pagans seem to have long had a few tricks up our sleeve how they can be facilitated without emulating such an unlikely role model as Hunter Thompson.

Gentle psychic herbs of the Goddess, like perhpas mugwort, or others that are traditonally prescribed for this purpose, may be a far more rational choice for those who choose this route at all.

Fact of the matter? It's merely an occurance in the mind of the same old thing that's always gone on in the magick. I don't know why any oracle man ever made by magick or any magick mirror shouldn't speak every language known, and readily be able to translate as you so desire. For the hard jobs, I'd rather have the latter, and for the easy ones, I can think those out on my own, since no one's been that helpful per se.

Given a good grasp of icons and plant iconography, you may come to some rather luxurious sets of rationale as to exactly why it's called "the language of the birds", or the "green language".

In the meantime, please check back to this page now and then, I'm sure I'll find more to say on the matter. It could be a big issue in changing the world. After all, I've said much on these pages on how we have the technology and we've had it for a long, long time. What we need now, is the absolute ability to truly communicate, beyond the flash here and the glimmer there, so we can work together to put it all together, once and for all.

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