Notes from The Elixer and the stone.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.                   Blakes vision was Hermetic.

Beuys equated the artist with a Hermetic Shaman,
" the healer and wise man of primitive tribes."

Only art can again reactivate all of mans senses in the face of the exclusive thought
of rationality. All of Beuys artistic actions and provocations, were directed towards
regenerating mans creativity, submerged beneath constant use of reason.
Beuys hoped that the man whose creativity was thus revitalized, would then no
longer comprehend himself as an individual, but rather as a creative element,
within an all embracing organism. As a microcosm of a universal macrocosm.

Pop music as both shamanistic and Hermetic.

The idea that music could bring about states of altered consciousness,
needed no extra evidence for rock and roll musicians.
They were all familiar with the trance like states, that some of the more
ardent fans could get themselves into.
Could this effect be extended to introduce states of peace, moments of insight.
or flashes of transcendence? Could rock and roll bring healing and harmony,
if the right notes were found.

From Shakespeare: As you like it.

All the worlds a stage,and all the men and women merely players,
They have their exits, and their entrances, and one man, in his time, plays many parts.

A long lasting influence to Carl Gustav Jung was Goethe.

One of Goethe's offspring Faust, was to remain for him his most sacred book.
He perceived it as a work of Hermetic Magic, an alchemical transmutation
in itself, and Goethe as an alchemical magus.
" I regard my work on alchemy, as a sign of my inner relationship to Goethe.
His secret was that he was in that process of archetypal transformation,
which has gone on through the certuries."

The English alchemist Thomas Norton wrote:

Join your elements musically
for two causes, one is for Melody:
Which there accords will make to your mind
The true effects when, that you shall find.

With other accords which music be,
With their proportions causing Harmony
Much like proportions be in Alchemy.