Terence McKenna--Lectures on Alchemy - Shroomery

fur you would see the crackle of static electricity through the cat fur. For thousands of years that's whatelectricity was. Who would dream that you could light cities, that you could smelt metals, that you couldilluminate the earth with this energy and yet from the 1850s to the present, this was done. It's almost the finalliteralizing of the alchemical dream.But to go back now, I digress, I fear, let's go back to the climate of the 1580s and the central culprit here,and to my mind a giant figure casting an enormous shadow over the landscape of alchemy and of modern science, isthe Englishman John Dee. John Dee united in himself the complete spirit of the Medieval Magus and the completespirit of the modern scientist. He invented the navigational instruments that allowed the conquest of the roundearth. When Frances Drake sailed up the coast of California he had navigational instruments that were top secret.The French, the Spanish, must be kept away from this stuff and these were navigational instruments created byJohn Dee that allowed him to locate himself anywhere on the globe. But John Dee was a man who, on a late summerevening in Mortlag, his house in Mortlag outside of London, the angel Gabriel descended into his garden and gavehim what he called the shewstone, shew being show in Old English, and the shewstone exists to this day, you cansee it in the British Museum and what's amazing about it is it's a piece of polished absidion, it's an Aztecmirror, is what it is. There was a ruler of the Aztecs called smoky mirror. How John Dee got this thing, wecannot even imagine. He says he got it from an angel, nobody can really nay say that, however I suspect thatCortez, on his first return to Spain from the new world, he brought a number of objects with him that he hadcollected in Central Mexico and somehow John Dee got his hands on this thing and it was for him a televisionscreen into the logos and he used it over a number of years to direct the foreign policy of England.He was the confidante of Queen Elizabeth the First and he also was the most accomplished astrologer in Europe andhe used his ability to cast horoscopes as an entre into all the great houses of Europe, the kings and nobles ofEurope. He was functioning as an intelligence agent, he was a spy for the British crown insinuating himself intothese various courtly scenes and then writing back to Elizabeth in cyphers, cyphers that had previously only beenused for magical purposes. He was sending back data on the strengths of military garrisons and the placement offortifications and this sort of thing. This is what he was doing in the 1580s, he kept the shewstone for a numberof years and he didn't seem to be able to make much progress with it. He had other methods too, he had wax tablesand sigils but finally into his life came a very mysterious character named Edward Kelly and some accounts saythat Edward Kelly had no ears. That indicates that he had had his ears removed for being a charlatan and amontebank. This was a common punishment in the provinces of England. So Edward Kelly was a very dubious character,I think. One strong piece of evidence that he was a shady character was, John Dee was married to a much youngerwoman named Ann Dee who by all accounts was quite a beauty and after gaining Dee's confidence as a scryer, theperson who could look into the shewstone and lay out these scenarios that the angels and the entities coming andgoing in the shewstone were putting forth, Kelly revealed to Dee that the angels had instructed him to hit thehay with Ann. This was a great crisis in their relationship. However, according to Dee's diary "and so it wasdone," we read. So, hanky panky didn't begin with the Golden Dawn, believe me. In 1582 Ann Dee, John Dee, andEdward Kelly set out for Bohemia and Rudolph, the mad king of Bohemia held sway at that time. This is another oneof those bizarre figures in the whole story of this...(tape cuts off a bit here)...a wonder cabinet, you see, before Linaius, before modern scientific classification these great patrons of thearts and natural sciences, they would just collect weird stuff. And that was all you could say about it. I mean,it was rhinoceros horns, fossil amenities, broken pieces of statues from antiquity, giant insects from SouthernIndia, seashells, all this stuff would just be thrown together in these wundercabina, these wonder cabinets.Rudolph was a great patron of the arts. Well, Kelly sent the word that he and Dee had perfected the alchemicalprocess and Rudolph immediately paid their way to Prague and patronized them very lavishly over a number ofmonths but then they didn't seem to be coming through and he rented, he ordered a castle put to their disposal,in Bohemia and they still weren't able to come through. The Voynitch manuscript figures in here too because27