Journeys With Alchemists and Alternative Spiritual Masters

Russell Yoder's roots are in the radical Pietist tradition of Ephrata and the Universalist tradition of my Family's ancestral mentor and mage, George de Benneville. Common to both aspects of this heritage is an awareness of "alchemy" as a tool for effecting physical and spiritual change in our perceived reality -- perception being the key, of course; or as our seminal source of inspiration, Jacob Boehme has it,"our world must be made heaven, and heaven the world." Such an effectual outlook requires a wholistic approach, but its ground or foundation can be laid nowhere other than, or prior to, what is raised up as a newborn clarity in ourselves. The alchemists were savvy and self-honest enough to know that, first, our dark nights of faulty mis or pre-conception had to be dissolved and dispensed with; in order to conceive a Pearl of genuine worth. For even abiding within seemingly "right traditions" can be exposed as an iron-cold sarcophagus, leading to "death" rather than gold; as the alternate-reality "dream" of my experience at a latter day outpost of Ephrata suggests.* But if we die to those constricting parameters, whatever their nature, breakthrough does occur and precise insights emerge; because our alchemically-forged faculties have themselves become the light!** What you will find herein, then, are pithy penetrations of such light; offered by me as practical handles for engaging the wonderful realizations of those predecessor spiritual masters and practitioners, who, like us, aspired to a self-clarifying and world-reconciling awareness.

Russell Yoder experienced an awakening upon first hearing the name of “Jacob Boehme” when he was a boy. While actually learning to apply the precious medicaments within Boehme’s “little cabinet of divine Magia” has engaged an entire lifetime; the first and foremost ingredient has always been the necessity of holding onto a childlike heart. Over the course of a lifetime, Russell has also received teachings and empowerments within the Tibetan tradition, as well as serving for a time as the last named “Elder” within the teaching tradition of Johann Conrad Beissel, founder of the colonial Ephrata Community. Russell’s previous writing on this subject was published by J.D. Holmes (2005), as “Light Dawning: Boehme, Gichtel, Ephrata, and the Origin of Rosicrucian Mysticism in the New World”; as well as his translation and introduction to American adept and friend of Ephrata, Doctor George DeBenneville’s “Fasciculus: A Little Bundle, or the True and Acknowledged Universal Process of the Philosopher’s Stone,” published by Holmes as “An Early American Alchemical Treatise” in 2010. Translations of Henricus Khunrath’s “Universal Chaos: Companion Volume to the Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom” and “Three Treatises of Art” (including ‘Alchemy for the Behmenist Adept’) followed in 2013, as Unearthed Arcana publications of Salamander & Sons; and most recently, the Institute for Hermetic Studies has issued Russell’s edition of Conrad Beissel’s own trance-meditations, “Wonderful Mysteries of Eternity” (2014). Russell is now retired and living in Thailand.