December 2016
Sean Ferris : A Modern Alchemy
The Great Work in a Consumerist Society
Many in the Tamar Dowsers were clearly hugely impressed by this fresh new approach to getting some purchase on our world’s contemporary convulsions.
Sean Ferris is a medical dowser and allergy specialist by trade, but the dowsing that has provided him with a worthwhile career has also led him to consider the wider implications of the craft.
Alchemy, like dowsing and many other aspects of the ‘old worldview’ disappeared, or at least were comprehensively overwritten, from the late Middle Ages onwards. Yet the information field that fed the minds and the ideas of people from John Dee to Isaac Newton to Robert Boyle, is the same etheric background that supports us today. The times and the personnel may have changed, but the underlying trends that underpin our development – our destiny, if you like – may yet be echoing down the years, unacknowledged.
Sean started out on this quest by finding that many of his clients were deficient in certain key elements – and that those deficiencies were associated with certain allergies and intolerances. Furthermore, he found that a deficiency in one element corresponded with the over-representation of another. Clients whose bodies were short of the precious metal palladium, were oversupplied with the base metal copper. He came to appreciate that if he could reduce the one and increase the other, he could restore the balance of his subject – and their health would subsequently improve.
It was a comparatively short step from there for him to re-evaluate the alchemist’s pursuit of converting a base metal, such as lead, into gold. Attempting such a feat in the pre-scientific laboratory was probably missing the point, but the idea that in a world where everything – including the distribution of chemical elements – is in a state of balance when seen from sufficient distance, is as intriguing as it is persuasive.
The breakthrough in finding some structure for this odd line of enquiry came with Sean chancing upon the work of Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), who formulated a pre-medical theory of disease based on ‘miasma’. Originally used to denote a smell or vapour exuded by a diseased person, the concept of the miasm has morphed into a template – possibly an informational template – that can cause a patient to be vulnerable to a certain disease. In the last century, it was the tubercular miasm that was the great spectre to be feared by the populous and, before that, the syphilitic miasm stalked the darker regions of our subconscious for over two hundred years.
It has been Sean’s appreciation, through his work as a medical dowser, that people (including himself) who have a predilection towards the tubercular miasm, are also the same type of patients who are low in palladium and high in copper. Rebalance the elements, stave off the miasm and improve the health of the individual in question.
Sean presents a well-considered hypothesis that this is a persistent global undercurrent, which can account for many aspects of the human condition, including the presence of the most serious and widespread diseases of our species.
He then goes one stage further in associating the ‘ages of mankind’ with their astrological elements, and also with the most widespread affliction of their eras.
So, what we might generally term the Stone Age, the period of the Earth element, was plagued by the psoric miasm (leprosy), epitomised by a population low in lithium and high in strontium. From the early Bronze Age to the late Middle Ages, it was the sycotic miasm (gonorrhoea) that haunted the era of Air. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was Fire that symbolised our existence, while in recent times the element of Water has held sway.
But Sean’s approach is not limited to dowsing and documenting the undercurrents of the past. He is fascinated by the possibility that we may be able to cast some illumination on our emerging and future patterns of life. There is little doubt that the present miasm, at least in alchemic terms, is that of cancer. It is a condition that, for all of our advanced academic experience and financial muscle, we are still struggling to comprehend – just as our ancestors were dogged to desperation by leprosy or syphilis. Sean’s dowsing indicates that many of us are suffering from a deficiency of silver and an over-abundance of nickel – and that the astrological element of the future world will be aether.
While some will argue that Sean is stretching the envelope of alchemy to its limits, his conclusion that aether is the next environment of human development actually chimes rather well with other sources of intuitive information. Dowsers have latched on to the concept of the information field as a mechanism by which our ageless craft can be understood. Philosophers have no objection to the idea that an all-pervading consciousness exists, both within us and without us. Even younger mainstream scientists have started to expound the cliché that we are ‘all just information, really’. Each of these approaches is describing the aether, in all but name.
The aether was one of the babies that were flushed out with the sullied bathwater of accumulated moss and muddle that had all but swamped the Old Religion. From the Renaissance onwards, science appeared to have replaced it, first with the discovery of physical air, then with the idea of the void of space. Einstein didn’t need aether either to make his formulae work (although, to be fair he never actually said it didn’t exist). Vibrations may need a medium of transmission to convey feelings to the tangible senses, but a background where information is ubiquitous, self-organising and interactive would be so much more logical that the current attempts to make personal experience fit into pre-determined explanations.
And what of our current condition? We have a society that sees no end – indeed sees no need to reach an end – to consumption. Yet we live on a physically finite planet, and something about round pegs and square holes comes to mind. Can we adapt our worldview without causing a crevasse in the glacier? Or will the changing template of the time wipe us from the slate altogether – the tribe that failed to see a fork in the road, and chose a cul-de-sac instead?
Many thanks to Sean for giving us this thought-provoking presentation, especially as he had been up into the early hours that morning moving house!
Nigel Twinn, Tamar Dowsers, December 2016
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