“Al-Kemi: A Memoir”
Hermetic, Occult, Political, and Private Aspects of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz
by André VandenBroeck

Published by Lindesfarne Press
Hudson, New York 12534
Copyright 1987 André VandenBroeck
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-940262-31-2

“Al-Kemi recounts the story of the eighteen months that Andrew VandenBroeck, a painter and writer, spent in daily contact with the remarkable French philosopher, hermetist, and Egyptologist, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961). Structured like a mystery, and distilled in the crucible of memory for fifteen years, Al-Kemi provides a passionately felt, personal, and dramatic introduction to the startling world of this contemporary alchemist.” (from back cover)

INTRODUCTION

The material underlying the following pages was gathered in 1959 and 1960, years I spent in daily contact with R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Thereafter, fifteen years were occupied assessing and corroborating the information that stemmed from this encounter, tracking down neglected and abandoned leads that had opened in our far-flung conversations and needed attention even after direct consultation had become impossible. De Lubicz died several months after I interrupted my work with him.

    In 1975, I made a first attempt at my subject, only to find a crucial element of the equation still incomplete. That element was myself. It took another eight years to round out the experience that would capacitate me for this task. It became clear in those last years that an autobiographical aspect was part and parcel of what I was attempting to formulate, and I had hitherto been unable to come to grips with a self that seemed to throw out constantly changing parameters. And so it is a full twenty-five years after the facts and at the ripe age of sixty that I feel confident of telling my story with some chance of success. I can only proffer slight consolation to the reader who might find some of my pages difficult of access: neither was living them easy at times, and both living and writing demanded assiduous efforts. Yet it has been miraculously interesting, and I hope the reader’s endeavor will be similarly rewarding.

    In previous attempts at committing my story to paper, I had intended to limit myself to the Hermetic aspects of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, to what I have come to call the Hermetic Aor [1]. Fortuitous encounters and chance discoveries rather than systematic research convinced me that the esoteric aspect could not be sundered from an occultistic one, and that a political component, to my surprise, was barely hidden behind the latter. This sharpened the biographical function and gave prominence to some private aspects I first had no intention of touching. It also brought up a question too speculative to be represented in this factual account, but that must nevertheless be mentioned, as it continues to loom beyond the limits of this book: what is the extent of the responsibility an author shoulders on behalf of his ideas?

    As to insights I may have gathered into the personal and even intimate existence of this very seclusive individual, I hope to convey them through the general tone of our relationship rather than by the accumulation of incidents. The relationship, by and large, was based on ideas.

    Although these various aspects have all received the attention they deserve, the initial bias has nevertheless prevailed, and we will find ourselves more often than not in the company of the Hermetic Aor, certainly the man with whom I entertained my closest relationship.

    Lives lived under the sign of the Hermetic Oeuvre are not lived by the standards of society at large; both his and mine were and are lived well removed from the beaten track. As our paths crossed in a far-off region where traffic is scarce, the encounter was intense, total, and not meant for the long term. For Schwaller de Lubicz was an autocratic master, while discipleship, as a condition, is acute for a relatively short time, although it remains chronic thereafter. Indian sages advise the disciple to flit from flower to flower, gathering knowledge at every moment wherever it may be found. Finally, guru is seen everywhere, which means that self has become guru.

    The intention here is not a comprehensive presentation of the ideas that motivated the philosopher: this much can be gathered from the published material [2].  As the work progressed and took on a life of its own, it became clear that one single theme had taken precedence over all others in our discussion: the theme of evolution. In itself this fact is hardly surprising, as a definition of evolution is arguably the center of his Oeuvre altogether. Yet this theme entered our conversations by an avenue that finds little development in the written work, although the principal elements are present, suitably dispersed as was the author’s pedagogic wont. If I were to characterize somewhat simplistically this complex theme and its corollaries by a term, I would call its subject perception; and I would call its object form.

    Before reaching these particulars, it must be known that de Lubicz held the traditional conception of an esoteric science and its transmission: true knowledge is inaccessible to the rational mind. This epistemological tenet caused his writings to be spiked with metaphor, innuendo, and at times, obscurity. He mistrusted the written word, disliked writing because truth was inevitably degraded when committed to paper through a profane language. This attitude most clearly ordinates the lineage along which he inscribes himself by his premises and his results. His low regard for “demotic” writing as a means of truth-communication made personal contact with him invaluable, for he had no such reservations concerning the spoken word, the word of gesture. Thus he actively believed in oral transmission of a kind of knowledge best called “gnosis,” [3] and in private, I always found him accessible to leisurely conversation on the most exalted topics. As our relationship soon proved more than casual, his information became increasingly direct, in contrast to his written expression which often presents problems of meaning and referent.

    To such an epistemology, personal contact is the kingpin of communication, and I found out later to what extent his frame of reference was tailored to his correspondent. We both had a background in the plastic arts, and I know that his exploration of the theme of perception and form was often initiated by formal and perceptual considerations that referred directly to paint and canvas. Yet I have come to feel that the centrality of these themes was nevertheless mainly a reflection of his own intellectual preoccupations at that moment, and I have become convinced that had he been given time for one more creative outburst, perception and form would have been foremost in his last teaching.

    I came to realize, as I have indicated, that it would be senseless to limit myself to the exposition of de Lubicz’s ideas. Concerned with the Hermetic aspects of the man, I feel that it is pertinent to relate how I made contact with him, seeing that at the time he and his work were quite unknown not only to myself, but to the world at large as well. My first attention therefore goes to relating the experience that sensitized me to the sphere of thought I subsequently entered, blindly, almost by mistake, inasmuch as such a contact, being made with the unknown, cannot be established at will. These events confirmed for me (should confirmation be in order) a subtler sphere of attraction and affinity in itself reflecting a cosmic organization; and it is the search for cosmological structure that formed the magnet for our interchange.

    If up to the time of my meeting with Aor a first part of my enterprise is therefore overtly and purposely autobiographical, the center of the piece, our time in common, is no less prone to subjectivity. On the contrary, as the Hermetic work demanded constant identification of subject and object, and as the difference between them had perforce to be eliminated to achieve abstraction in thought and concreteness in gesture, realization of self deepened accordingly so that its notation again is autobiographical, though now on a different plane. There will be no attempt at objectivity, because the subject does not stand aside from, but rather penetrates the object.

    As the work done with Aor did not lie fallow with me, my understanding is now greater than it was at the time. But perennial concerns are timeless, and there is no pretending a return to an understanding I had then, when encompassing my subject now. If reality exists, it certainly does so in a present moment. Truth (or language structured in similarity to such reality, perhaps the very aim of philosophical endeavor) must therefore look no further than the moment, not further back and not further ahead. The present moment at all times contains the full measure of knowledge.

    The question naturally arises: what is that knowledge which can be thus perceived? [emphasis added]

    It has a name; its name is Al-Kemi, our title. In conformance to a rigorous theory of language which arises from the very discipline that occupies us, our title must be absolutely void of content. As the work is no less than the perfect extension of the title, we must wait until we have read the work before passing judgment on the title’s meaning. That is one of the reasons why every seriously constructed text is to be twice read. The first reading will adhere as closely as possible to terminology, and only with the second reading, undertaken after noting the extension of the title, should we begin to let the hitherto undefined terms flower into meaningful words. That is not saying that the term, in its empty comprehension of all content, cannot play a powerful role by itself, by its position in syntax and grammar which makes it a locus in a structural game, and by its identity through etymology [4]. And our title has a venerable etymological background.

    Al-Kemi, Aor’s central concern throughout his career, stems from a Pharaonic hieroglyph for the Black Land, the Nile valley. Invading Arabs learned the name for the region and added their article: Al-Kemi means Pharaonic Egypt, and for a mind steeped in myth, Pharaonic Egypt is Al-Kemi. De Lubicz had occupied himself with medieval and Arabic alchemical texts for many years prior to his encounter with Pharaonic Egypt, and his intuition of Al-Kemi as an application of Hermetic gnosis became a certainty with the accumulation of detailed proof in texts and monuments. The significance of this intuition and its impact on history, philosophy, and science; the role of myth in all intellectual and spiritual disciplines in light of the equating of Al-Kemi with Pharaonic Egypt; the relation of myth to mythology, and Egypt and Greece as the twin cradle of an Aquarian Age of civilization in contrast to Greco-Christian Pisces; the possibility of a renaissance through Al-Kemi; and particularly the nature of Al-Kemi itself, explored through the parallel of medieval and Pharaonic expressions - all are topics of great interest that threaded their way through our discussions, but will not be prominently represented in my narrative. My attention in this memoir is to show certain aspects of the man, mainly those I may have been alone to witness, or that have never been brought out or discussed. That will allow me to report what he chose to reveal of his intellectual state in the course of our conversations. Furthermore, I have done my best to eliminate material that can be gathered by a thorough study of his published work, even when his oral presentation in my ear is far clearer and more compelling than his printed syntax. In no other way could I guarantee myself the slim volume I desire.

    It should be understood that our exchanges took place in French, whereas I shall note them in English. The importance of this divergence from the actual state of affairs can only be appreciated by the bi- or multilingual: it is considerable, and constantly endangers the entire enterprise. Whenever certain expressions are irrevocably wedded to the French in my ear, I shall therefore reproduce them in their original language, and the quotations will always be exact.

    The language complication goes further yet, as there was also occasional use of German words or phrases whenever that language provided the correct and irreplaceable term or syntax for a meaning. As a rule, however, we shied away from our common bilingualism as if we felt its dangers, a feeling which events were to confirm. Considerations of language and of theory of language will recur time and again. They are basic to Al-Kemi, as they are basic to the Hermetic controversy of “hiding and revealing,” a related topic of consequence. Language and its decipherment is by necessity a basic component in the study of glyph and an aspect of de Lubicz that has to my knowledge hardly been retained in the succession of his ideas. Terminology sustains language, as we have mentioned, but in the Hermetic sciences, terminology is less a syntax than it is a symbolique. [5] “Rien ne marque tant l-esprit que le nombre,” [“Nothing stamps the mind more surely than does number”] was one of Aor’s firm contentions, but he usually added that in order for this function of number to inscribe itself, it had to form a symbolic language [6]. And the best example of this process lay in the evidence of Al-Kemi.

    At the beginning of my sojourn in his presence, Aor considered me practically illiterate for the purpose of the work at hand, and I was put through an intensive course of reading. He was aghast at the fact that I had encountered the Holy Scriptures only in passing, and was not thoroughly familiar with Genesis 1 - 3, for instance, or the Gospel according to John. I now read, and we discussed all the great texts, from the Emerald Tablet to Jabir to Basil Valentine and Nicolas Flamel. Based on a lifetime of obedience to the principle of “ora, lege, lege, lege, relege. . .,” his exegeses guided my first steps in the crucial art of slow reading, then of decipherment as such. Writings hitherto seeming to be but mystifications began to address the objects of my search with utmost clarity. I had learned to read, and I began to realize that good texts (of which there are few), far from being exercises in obscurantism, were indeed clear statements concerning perennial questions of cosmic existence. An Hermetic cliché like “as above, so below,” at one time a mere posture in pseudophilosophy and devoid of content or proof, now became a living truth everywhere manifest. And this in turn gave meaning to the tantalizing information repeated time and again in all good Hermetic texts that the philosopher’s stone indeed could be found anywhere because it was everywhere. What could be its value under these conditions? I came to understand the possibility of a constant moment when everything becomes feasible, the creative putrefaction in the chaos of the beginning. Such concepts ceased being metaphysical and became evident, as if I were studying a science of the obvious. How much can be taken for granted and how much goes without saying: these are questions that must be reconsidered. It is of no greater futility to study the becoming of duality out of oneness, than it is, with Peano and theory of number, to have the number two, and all subsequent numbers, become through the addition of a unit. The difference may simply be that the former point of view has faced the vexing question of the provenance of this ever ready unit at every operation. To that mentality, which we call Pythagorean, once the whole, the All, is given in an all-encompassing oneness, whence this “second” oneness that is conjured in order to make two? Much goes unseen by a secular mentality, because it goes unquestioned.

    We see enormous distances into the past, but the moment is a closed book. We do not reach it; we cannot know it. Meditation alone opens the sesame of intuition. But Aor’s meditation was not one of folded hands and erect unmoving spine. His meditation was a gesture, and its result was art. He was proud of having studied with Matisse, but painting was not his chosen manipulation, and I have seen only one work of Aor’s hand, a work which survived not in honor of the draftsman, but as a memento of his subject. It is a portrait in pencil, simply and boldly drawn, breathtaking in its similitude: one knows the man without every having seen him! I can voice this absurdity, for it corresponds to my experience. Concerning the model of this portrait we shall have much to say as he was frequently present in our conversations. Here I shall only mention his name: “Fulcanelli.” I place it in quotes this one time to alert the reader: Hermetic authors always hide behind names. The heaviest burden I carried away from this contact with Hermetic circles was the knowledge I obtained concerning Fulcanelli. It has so far been impossible to transmit. I shall commit it to language and send it to its uncertain future. Perhaps it will disappear, or perhaps posterity will have occasions to judge between truth and fantasy. The future, however, is no longer my concern, but the reader’s.

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Footnotes (see book  http://www.amazon.com/Al-Kemi-Hermetic-Political-R-Schwaller/dp/0940262312)