The Up And The Down

In Alchemy, direction matters. Up and down. In and out. But these directions aren’t necessarily ones that would show up on a compass. You can’t find alchemical up and come back to it by turning your feet the right way. Up today isn’t necessarily up tomorrow. Rather, existence is like an Escher print, with directions changing depending on whether you are looking with your eyes or your heart.

Rather than learn which direction is kept where, we must learn to recognize paths wherever they appear. Paths have flavors and textures. Directions are also places that have denizens to meet, activities to do, special foods and even architectural styles. You don’t learn where a path is, but what it feels like, what it tastes like.

What is Down? Down under earth, the roots plough through the dark dirt. They branch, and branch again, blindly reaching out. At the tip of each root end, is a cluster of hard cells that can press through bedrock. But along their sides, the skin of the roots are open to the world, drawing in nutrients: nitrogen and potassium, phosphorus and magnesium. Roots are opportunistic. They do not plan ahead and contrary to popular perception, they do not grow towards water or food. Instead they take the path of least resistance, using what is already available such as cracks in the soil, worm tunnels, and old root channels. When they find a resource in abundance, they proliferate, but such a discovery is always a happy surprise rather than the result of a deliberate plan.

What is Up? Leaves open, airy, light gathering. So short a life span, just a year or less, while the tree lives for years and years. Evergreens shed all year round keeping their canopies continuously intact. Evergreen means always shedding leaves, a continuous sacrifice. Leaves are high up, sometimes hundreds of feet above the roots. they create the outer edges of the tree. They grow at the foremost edges of trees, creating a field of energy collection. The leaves themselves work to shed rainfall down to the ground where it will be absorbed by the roots and brought back up through the trunk. The real purpose of the leaves is to collect sunlight energy. To receive. And here, at the other edge of the being, we find another kind of absorption. The absorption of light.

This is one example of the Up and the Down.

What Fell?

This is one story about how the universe was born.

There is a school of thought in Qabalistic circles that the Tree of Life originally had just four sepira. It was perfect. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Nothing died. Nothing loved.



And that was just too unbearable. So we cracked it open, dropped the bottom out of the whole shebang and came up with the universe. All sorts of things happening now.


What was the sound of the Tree falling at the beginning of time? It was the sound of a billion billion particles of light bursting out of a singular point of possibility. Duh.

We call the stuff that fell furthest “matter” and some people believe that's all that's left of the Big Bang. These materialists can't tell you why the Big Bang happened nor anything about what happened right before, but they will think you are awfully silly if you think there's more to the universe than this far-flung stuff.

Other people believe that this far-flung stuff is eeeevil. Flesh is evil, sex is evil, eating is evil. They call the distance we've fallen a sin and work to flee towards the center by leaving all this shit behind.

But every bit of stuff, no matter where it landed, was once part of perfection. So what really fell? G*d (whatever that is.) We did this. We the people, and the animals, the plants, the minerals. Thoughts had a hand as did hunger, beauty and sorrow.

The story goes that the journey back to the perfect source is actually amazing. We can't always tell because we're too caught up in it. And it's not really a journey back because we are what we came from and by journeying we are changed. But whatever...

The stuff that fell furthest is the stuff that has the longest journey. It's the stuff that believed in the plan the most, leaped off the cliff with the greatest trust and the biggest YEEHAW! Let's get this incarnation party started! They say that's why Malkuth, the lowliest sepira, the kingdom of Earth, looks up at Kether, the Crown, and blows kisses.

That's the story, anyway.