P.O.N. Seminars 1992

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The Secret Fire

Lecturer: Jean Dubuis
Translator: Patrice Malézé
Commentary by Russ House is indicated as [RH: ...]

This morning's lecture will be on the Secret Fire and you will not have the handout. You'll have them afterwards. Since on the paper there (D1-D5) following next to a contact I change a lot of what was expected. [RH: Inner contacts change the course of the lectures from the intial plans.] The Secret Fire is something very interesting, because it doesn't exist. Truly, apart from the 4 elements there are no other powers in nature. All the energies in nature are varied aspects of the 4 elements. And what the ancients named the Secret Fire is actually the secret use of the Fire. So we'll only speak about this and all it's aspects.

The first thing you must know is that the so-called Fire has to be set, then it has to be risen in power, and in certain cases it has to be animated. So we'll see one after another, all these problems.

The Fire energy comes from the invisible sun as (does) all the invisible energy. I spoke of that yesterday. It's a general rule that the invisible energies come from invisible things and the visible energies come from the visible things. The Fire energy on the earth is emitted by what we call the invisible sun or the black sun. And it comes to the earth's atmosphere. And then this energy is undetermined and this is the first thing we are going to see now.

For instance, if this energy is caught in air's wetness or in water it remains undetermined. If it's freed by the vegetable leaf, the Fire energy will be determined to the vegetable kingdom. If it's freed or drunk it will be set to the animal kingdom, and the water that comes to the earth will be generally set to the mineral kingdom. In our alchemical work we will need the Fire energy. So you need to set the Fire and then determine it according to what you want to do with it. In our L.P.N. paper we have published a column explaining how to get the wetness of the air as water. And this water contains an undetermined Fire that stays, and you can set it where you want, for instance, by dissolving the necessary salt in this water. But some other methods exist to get the Fire, where determination is automatic.

Before this, I forgot a little detail. Dew - the condensation of water contains an undetermined Fire that allows for gur and Archæus experiments. But if you work in alchemy this will give you very little Fire. To have enough Fire for our work there is only deliquescence. We can practically not obtain Fire by deliquescence in the animal kingdom. And we will not thoroughly go through this aspect, since for essentially ethical reasons, we have never spoken of animal alchemy in our lessons, except for correspondence (lesson) 30 of the mineral lessons. That is the only appearance of animal alchemy we learned and one that he ----- and I think that we should never attempt to do experiments on the animal kingdom.

To get the vegetable Fire the best method is to get what the ancients called calcined tartar. According to modern chemistry, this is potassium carbonate. And we explained yesterday in the Mendeleiev table of elements, that potassium is the element that determines things in the vegetable kingdom. Since potassium carbonate can be very easily deliquesced, it's put to deliquesce during springtime and you get a liquid that the ancients called oil of tartar. This deliquescence must be distilled and then we get water that's called Angel Water. It's ordinary water, but it's loaded with vegetable Fire. I'll explain afterwards what we can do with it.

The second practical deliquescence - I'm not speaking about theory - I'm talking about practice and what we've tried - is the butter of antimony one. The butter of antimony will give you a very unique Fire, consider it as universal. That is, the alchemical product that you can get from the deliquescence of the butter of antimony can be set 2 ways. Simply by the temperature of the incubation afterwards. If the incubator is at 40 C the vegetable life will develop. If the incubator is at roughly 90 C the metallic life will develop, but the vegetable life is destroyed. I'll repeat again, to determine afterwards if you want Fire to be set to mineral, you must dissolve salts in angel water, it's a problem according to your path, but if you want the Fire to remain metallic you must not dissolve the salt containing potassium. The different salt you can use to get the metallic Fire will be sulfate.

If you take dead copper sulfate, the ones you use to cure vines for instance, you dissolve it in angel water, you will have a Fire charged in the Netzach world. This is the determination of Fire. For beginners I think this is enough, but we can have a more complex exposure of this later on. We don't have time now. The second problem is that you have to get this Fire, and the power of this Fire has to be great to get it to go up the sephirotic levels. There are different methods. For instance, yesterday we explained how to get the Fire to go up by successively melting the antimony. But in liquids, the best would be several distillations. And these several distillations allow the sephirotic level of the Fire to raise.

In the case of alcohol this problem is often not solved. That is, if you really want to have a useful alcohol for a stone you must free this Fire by at least 7 distillations no matter if the alcoholic degree raises or not, it's not a very liberating effect. It's the invisible energy of alcohol that raises. If you raise properly your alcohol up to 6, 7, or 8 (times) you have a peculiar phenomenon, some yellow drops of oil appear on the alcohol. Not on the one that's distilled, but on the one you distill. You must eliminate these drops. The ancients would call it death oil, and when you've gotten rid of this death oil the ancients say that you have the water of life. ("Eau de Vie")

This is said for the vegetable mercury (alcohol), so you raise the vegetable Fire by distillation. We've now seen determination of Fire and raising it farther, now we'll see another point of view, which is its animation. Which is something different. I have not spoken of Fire in the mineral extractions, because it's a complex problem that maybe we can see in another seminar. What must be understood afterwards is that fundamental - and that if you want to make proper stones, mineral or vegetable, the Fire provokes, makes the evolution of the stone. But the Fire has 2 states. In it's normal state we could say it has something but it's not really animated and in this state it's not strong enough. But when you put your tincture or your stone in the incubator - and the temperature is at the proper temperature 38, 39, 40 C for the vegetable, the Fire will have grown a new property inside that will make things evolve. The best comparison you can get is the egg and the hen. And this is why the ancients probably called the incubator the flask of the philosophical egg. So when the inner Fire is awakened through the effect of the ordinary fire, the evolution of your substance starts, like the evolution in the egg.

During all the length of this evolution the Fire becomes very, very fragile. As with eggs, if the temperature is broken (varied or stopped) everything fails. In the work you cannot break down temperatures until the work is done. And just as the chicken hatches it must have a healthy temperature - the work is similarly a healthy temperature. For instance, a vegetable stone that's done can be between 0 C degrees and 90 C degrees with no risk.

A very special property of the Fire that's very secret - I've never found it in a book - is that the Fire has the property to open substances according to the alchemical sense. And I'll describe an experiment we have done on this and that shows pretty well this. If you want to make a stone on this level (Hod), you go to a chemistry shop and you buy a salt that has potassium and that crystallizes in rhombohedric, and then if you dissolve this salt in water, purify it, crystallize it, on Wednesdays on the hour that follows the rising of the sun, you try to imbibe it with the sulfur of this level, the essential oil of caraway, and you will see that it does work.

If the salt does not open you take potassium carbonate, deliquesce, distill the deliquescence to angel water and dissolve this salt in the angel water, crystallize it and the Fire of the angel water has vivified the crystals. Do the same experiment on Wednesday morning and you see that the salt is able to drink the sulfur (essential oil of caraway). The ancients say that the salt has opened the pores of the substance. We think we gave the butter of antimony because we think that it's something to think of in the future. And agreeing or disagreeing with the boss, we won't pause for answering questions because I already heard that next to yesterdays stone experience people telling me about their very funny experience. So if you had something that might be felt - did you have any special dreams yesterday?

(Note: some dream experiences were shared with the group at the seminar.)