The Holy Mountain - Albedo

"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance." - Socrates



"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." - Bertrand Russell



"In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met along the way." - Havelock Ellis

The introductory scene for this movie features the director and writer, Alexander/Alejandro Jodorowsky playing the character of The Alchemist (which he will be called from now on). The Alchemist is in the process of ritualistically cleaning two women. The process involves makeup and hair removal which he does with very smooth and deliberate movements. He acts as the zen-influenced Japanese might, where one meditates in every action with no-mind, or total awareness on the subject at hand. The next time we see The Alchemist is when The Thief reaches his tower in the center of town, right where I left off at the end of the first part of this series: Nigredo. For this and the next post I'm going to refrain from too much speculation and let you, the viewers/readers, make up your own minds as to what this stuff means. The tarot cards seen further down are especially interesting. Then the last part of this series, "Rubedo," will be all ViolatoR, baby! (That's me, incase you didn't know.)

The Thief and The Prostitute with chimp/Pan have walked out of the desert into the town. Here they find the town's people gathered for a possibly Christian meal of fish. They are all at the base of a tall red tower, and at the moment, they are all staring upward as a large golden fish hook is lowered from the only opening in the tower. The hook carries a small bag with a solar symbol (circle-dot, also the symbol for gold) which is filled with small pieces of gold. Someone takes the gold and places fruit on the hook as thanksgiving for the gold. The Thief takes this oppertunity to ride the hook back up to the tower's port-hole to murder who ever is in the tower and take the rest of the gold.

Once he reaches the portal, The Thief steps inside the circular opening to find a thin paper veil between the window and whatever lies inside. He pierces the paper-hymen with his phallic-representing knife. Once he knows it's thin and easily broken, he steps back then lunges forward through the veil into the arched room of The Alchemist.

Readers might recognize this scene from various synchromystic videos. The room its self is painted with bands of the colors of the rainbow. The arched roof of the room might also indicate rainbow symbolism, and that The Thief has "gone over the rainbow" upon breaking through the veil. As a matter of fact, the soundtrack for this part of the movie has the song: "Rainbow Room." The Thief progresses from red to violet which represents a vertical movement of the kundalini through the chakras. He is following the rope which is attached at one end to the large golden hook, and at the other end, dissaperes under the trilithon-shaped (two stones topped with a lintel, like at Stonehenge), or maybe pi-suggestive chair which The Alchemist sits upon.

original aum/om symbol

The rope, to me, feels like a spiritual umbilical cord, similar to the hook and anchor which I discuss in Opening the Stargate.

The back wall of the arched room is a golden yellow color, possibly representative of a sunrise where the sun, half over the horizen, forms a golden arch/half circle. There is a raised platform of 3 steps upon which sits The Alchemist, between two goats and two pillars, one black and one white. To his left is a 2-humped camel making it a East-Asian camel as opposed to the Middle-Eastern variety. To The Alchemist's right is a naked black woman covered in esoteric tattoos and silver jewlery, who will be known as The Written Woman from here on out.

anyone care to translate?

The Thief makes it known he plans to attack The Alchemist, so The Alchemist movies, in his typical deliberate fashion, to face The Thief. The fight is decidedly one-sided as The Alchemist appears to be trained in Tai Chi. It's been said that it takes about two years to master any martial art's style, while it can take 20 years or more to master Tai Chi, but it is the ultimate fighting style once mastered. The Alchemist disables The Theif by touching certain chakra points in a specific order. Once paralyzed and unconscious, The Written Woman lifts The Thiefs hair from the back of his neck to find a large tumor there. She slices it open as blue liquid leaks out. The Written Woman pulls out a blue-goo covered squid (?) from the tumor in the back of The Thief's neck and seals the wound with a touch.

Whatever the thing she pulls out is, it reminds me of multiple "pod people" type movies where humans are infected by a parasite which controls their actions. Or, perhaps, even the millenial Y2K movie Strange Days, where a "squid" is a device which uses electrodes to record and play back memories, so that a person can take a "memory vacation" similar to Total Recall's memory vacation business "Recall." Speaking of which, Total Recall's Arnold Schwarzenegger plays character "Jericho Cane" in millenial End of Days (same name of the protagonist in Dwane Johnson's movie script, "The Power," which his character writes in end-of-world movie Southland Tales), which brings us back to where we started when the death of a "Jeriko One" is the spark which ignites the end-of-world(-as-we-know-it) movie Strange Days. The tentacled thing that was in The Theif's neck may represent the pre-programmed behaviours that society sticks in all of our heads. Over-indulgance (in alcohol in his case), devotion to political and religious institutions, and a lust for money. The Alchemist then awakens The Thief by activating his chakra points again, whereupon The Thief no longer feels like attacking The Alchemist.

The Alchemist then says to The Theif: "Do you want gold?" And The Theif replies: "Yes." Next, The Alchemist and The Written Woman take The Thief to an octagonal fountain with a baby hippopotamus in it and give The Thief an extremely thorough bath/baptism. Much attention is paid to the end of the "human stargte." The hippo may represent the Egyptian goddess of childbirth. Taweret/Taueret; so, this is The Theif's re-birth.

Next we enter the Alchemical Room, where more practical alchemy takes place. The room is shaped like a hexagram (heart chakra) with a circular area in the middle where the alchemical apperatus is located. There is a dual-flame athanor/oven/furnace which may be based on a "pelican" design, though usually more complicated designs are left for the flask or retort (usually made of glass, or sometimes clay). Pelican flasks have two "arms" which feed back into the body of the flask, and they represent the idea of a pelican feeding it's (dead) young with it's blood (to give them life). There is also a pelican walking around the room to let you know that there's some serious alchemy going on in here!

The pelican pecking at it's white breast (to get pieces of fish that fell in there), looks like it's biting it's self to get drops of blood with which to feed it's young, and this may represent the "reddening" stage in alchemy where the white material becomes red. The pelican also represents the stage of multiplication where the power of projection is multiplied (the ability of the Stone to turn base metals to gold). The glass retort is cleary shaped as an egg, and this is what it represents: a "hermetically sealed" vessel of creation. Even the athanor/furnace is called the "House of the Chick" indicating the egg symbolism is fitting.

Many of the deifinitions of alchemical symbolism which I used are paraphrased from Sorcerer's Stone by Dennis William Hauck, including this quote here: "The mountain is a symbol for the athanor, since the perfection of the metals takes place under the guise of Nature within mountains." The anathor(furnace) is the mountain, or rather, The Holy Mountain.

When The Thief enters the room, he is given a glass jar to "relieve" himself into. His excrement is collected in it and carried to the alchemical apperatus where it will under go the same change which The Thief will undergo. Traditionally, any external progress in the Great Work will mirror internal progress of the alchemist himself.

"A soul cannot develop and progress without an appropriate body, because it is the physical body that furnishes the material for its development." - Franz Hartmann (quoted from Secret Teachings of All Ages) When the AlchemyLab.com website first opened, one had to answer a riddle before gaining access to the site. The riddle was:

"The key to life and death is everywhere to be found, but if you do not find it in your own house, you will find it nowhere. Yet, it is before everyone's eyes; no one can live without it; everyone has used it. The poor usually possess more of it than the rich; children play with it in the streets. The meek and uneducated esteem it highly, but the privileged and learned often throw it away. When rejected, it lies dormant in the bowels of the earth. It is the only thing from which the Philosopher's Stone can be prepared, and without it, no noble metal can ever be created."

Here's a more concise version of the riddle:

In speaking of the Philosopher's Stone, recieve this stone which is not a stone, a precious thing that has no value, a thing of many shapes that has no shape, this unknown which is known by all.

Nobody was getting into the website though, but some answers were pretty close; things like: consciousness, light, love, god, aether, blood, quintessence, etc. Dennis Willian Hauck says in his book that "even such answers as urine, menses, manure, and dirt would be considered by alchemists to be fitting responses." The correct answer is, of course, the prima materia, or First Matter. He goes on, "even things such as urine and manure also have a ring of truth in talking about the First Matter, since they are things associated with the life force that humans tend to reject or not want to touch. Similarly, the whole concept of the First Matter has been rejected by modern civilization."

"It takes a seed of gold to make gold," and all things have that seed within, the prima materia.

The Thief is made to sweat out his "mercury" which is recycled in the flask until a pure bowl of mercury fills before him. I covered the idea of the extraction of the spirit and soul as steam in my post, Purification: "But the philosophers have described this 'spirit' and this 'soul' as 'steam' (...), and as there is moisture and dryness in man, our work is nothing but steam and water." (Turba philosophorum, Berlin, 1931) I connected it to the symbol of the dove which "signifies the change from the Black Phase to the White Phase," or Nigredo to Albedo. The excrement in the glass container has been on fire (like The Thief) and changing through various states. It sits over a bowl of red liquid, as opposed to the blue on the other side. This may represent the Red Stone and Dry Way/Path of the Great Work, which I believe is the quickest path to the Stone. Next, the liquid extracted from The Theif is collected in a heart-shaped container and added to the excrement which changes through several more phases of liquids and solids such as crystals until it becomes pure gold. The Alchemist: "You are excriment. You can change yourself into gold."

The Thief exits the egg of transofmation and is presented with a vesica pisces shaped mirror called a "looking glass." The Thief sees his reflection and immediately breaks the glass with the lump of gold that used to be his feces. He's exited the egg/ego and no longer is self-obsessed.

compare to "fool" tarot card later on

Next, The Thief and The Alchemist are in a room of mirrors with a small stone obalisk/pyramidion/capstone type object in the center of the room. The Alchemist says: "You broke the looking glass. Now break the stone," and hands The Thief a silver hatchet which The Theif uses to no avial to break the stone open. The Alchemist takes the hatchet and breaks the stone open in one light hit; revealing a hidden crystal sphere in the center of it. (See the image in lower-left of below picture.) He says of it: "This stone has a soul formed by the work of millions of years."

Recently, television station "SyFy" (Sci-Fi) released a two night miniseries, "Alice," which was a new interpretation of the "Alice in Wonderland" story. The world of Wonderland is run by the tyrranical Red Queen who desires only to feel the good all the time, and to accomplish her goal, she extracts positive emotions from enslaved humans from the "real world." These people are called "oysters" because of the "pearls" they carry inside them. The pearls are the emotions, but they are extracted through the soles/souls of the feet. At one point I believe a person who wakes up during the process says "my sole(soul) hurts." The vampiric theft of emotional energy spans several belief systems going from shamaic beliefs to even alien conspiracies. Some believe that our pain is felt as pleasure "through the looking glass" where everything is inverted. So, these entities attempt to cause suffering here so that they feel pleasure there. Fear mongering in our world may be feeding the chtchonic beings of the Otherworld. Careful with what you're sending out into the (Other)world!

The clear crystal "soul" of the stone may reference the book, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. A quote from the novel: "Its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible." The novel also has a spherical crystal which is called a "peradam," an "object that is revealed only to those who seek it":

One finds here, very rarely in the low lying areas, more frequently as one goes farther up, a clear and extremely hard stone that is spherical and varies in size - a kind of crystal, but a curved crystal, something extraordinary and unknown on the rest of the planet. Among the French of Port-des-Singes, it is called peradam. Ivan Lapse remains puzzled by the formation and root meaning of this word. It may mean, according to him, “harder than diamond,” and it is; or “father of the diamond,” and they say that the diamond is in fact the product of the degeneration of the peradam by a sort of quartering of the circle or, more precisely, cubing of the sphere. Or again, the word may mean “Adam’s stone,” having some secret and profound connection to the original nature of man. The clarity of this stone is so great and its index of refraction so close to that of air that, despite the crystal’s great density, the unaccustomed eye hardly perceives it. But to anyone who seeks it with sincere desire and true need, it reveals itself by its sudden sparkle, like that of dewdrops. The peradam is the only substance, the only material object whose value is recognized by the guides of Mount Analogue. Therefore, it is the standard of all currency, as gold is for us.

So, this "Soul-Stone" is the equivalent to "Gold" which is the end-result of the alchemical work. Mount Analogue (and the peradam) "can only be viewed from a particular point when the sun's rays hit the earth at a certain angle." Kinda like a rainbow, huh? "Peradam" can be arranged into the anagrams: "A Red Map," or, "Read Map." Adam of the Bible means "red earth," so the red map of the red earth is Adam, the human microcosm, and we "Read (the) Map" to find the treasure, per Adam. Interestingly, the peradam has already been seen in the movie as it lies at the end of the necklace of The Prostitute (who walks around with an ape "ancestor" of Adam/Man: "This stone has a soul formed by the work of millions of years".

The Alchemist takes The Thief into the Tarot Room and tells him, "The Tarot will teach you how to make a soul." There appears to be 12 large Tarot card paintings on the 12 walls of the room. These are all original Alejandro Jodorowsky paintings, as are other works of art in the movie, and are presumably designed based on his intimiate understanding of the original Marseille's Tarot. Here again we can see his use of red and blue to indicate duality.

click for larger

I'll let you guys meditate on the paintings without my interference. The floor of the room has a lotus with a triangle with a circle in the center. The Theif lays on the floor while The Alchemist adorns him with 4 symbolic items representing the 4 suits of the Tarot. He lays a Wand/staff between The Thief's legs to represent a phallus, and says, "To know." Then a Sword along the spine (in front) with the words, "To dare." Then a Cup/chalice in front of his heart with the words, "To want." And then a Pentacle/disk upon The Thief's brow with the words, "To be silent."

Next they are in the same room which now has a vulture seated upon the back of an bull or ox which has a symbol drawn upon it's side which seems to be the Hebrew letter Teth which means: serpent. (I mentioned this symbol in a previous post: The Journey Back Home.) The letter is also under the belly button of The Written Woman, perhaps as a hint of the kundalini. On the Andean festival of Yawar,a condor is tied to a bull, the condor represents the Andean people and the bull the Spanish. The bull struggles until it dies and then the condor is set free to fly away symbolizing the freeing of the native Andean people. The Alchemist explains to The Thief, "The same force the vulture uses to seize the ox, is needed by the ox to receive the vulture." (At least that's what I heard through his thick accent!) Sort of an equal-but-opposite reaction there. The vulture has been shown by me in a previous post (Opening the Stargate) to represent "the power of reconcilliation (after the serpent who represents dissection). In Alchemy, the subject of the work is first broken down into its individual parts, purified, and then put back together in a more perfect, or more evolved state."



Continue this series with part 3 here: The Holy Mountain - Cauda Pavonis