Alchemy Manuals as Out-of-Body Guides: The Precognition Thesis

In the early 1990s, a young American bartender in Prague stumbled into a city that was busy rediscovering its own occult past, and the detour he took would eventually lead him to a thesis few scholars would dare to put in print: that the future reaches backward into the present, and that out-of-body states are one of the ways we catch glimpses of it. Anthropologist Eric Wargo, author of Time Loops, laid out this argument at length in a long-form conversation with Michael Phillip on the Third Eye Drops channel. The talk moves from the Hermetic workshops of Rudolph II's Prague to the fringes of UFO discourse, from seventeenth-century alchemical manuals to Wargo's own out-of-body episodes, and it arrives at a proposition that is at once esoteric and rigorously logical: that "out of time" may be a more accurate phrase than "out of body."

How did a bartender in Prague end up reading alchemy?

Wargo's account of the period is worth lingering on, because it explains the texture of everything that follows. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague filled with American expatriates drawn by low costs and a city that, in his telling, was "a magical fairyland." He arrived with plans to do anthropological research. Those plans, as he put it, "just kind of evaporated," and he stayed on for a few years, bartending and living well on very little money.

The turn came through an exhibition. Prague was reconnecting with its history as the court of Rudolph II, the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century patron of the strange and the arcane, whose cabinets of curiosities drew alchemists, astrologers, and the English magus John Dee and his associate Edward Kelly. Around the exhibition, the city hosted satellite events, including a conference on alchemy. A friend dragged Wargo along, and he found himself meeting a local alchemist and sitting through scholarly talks on Renaissance and Reformation-era alchemy. By his own account he knew nothing of the subject beforehand. The experience opened what he called a new intellectual frontier.

The reading that followed shaped him. He picked up Fulcanelli's The Mystery of the Cathedrals, a book he says has continued to nourish his curiosity for decades; he recently pulled it off the shelf again, he said, because of new ideas he had about it. Like many readers of the period, he then followed the contemporary literature to Carl Jung, whose writings on alchemy and hermeticism became the next phase of his reading. What began as a romance with a city became a working method: read the old texts, then read the psychology and anthropology that tried to make sense of them.

Were alchemical manuscripts really guides to leaving the body?

This is the claim that gives the conversation its spine, and Wargo makes it with the care of someone who knows how strange it sounds. His position, stated in the opening minutes, is specific:

"Two maybe three of the 17th century alchemical texts uh that I really love that I think were lucid dreaming man manuals, what we would now call lucid dreaming manuals or manuals for having out-of-body experiences."

— Eric Wargo, on Third Eye Drops with Michael Phillip [0:02:07 in the conversation's opening exchange]

The argument is not that alchemists were chemists who happened to write poetry. It is that certain symbolic texts, read through the lens of altered consciousness, describe a sequence of practices: a method for moving attention, for recognizing the dream state, and for stepping outside the ordinary bodily frame. Wargo says he has written about this on his blog over the years, and he treats symbols in these texts as instructions that a practitioner could unlock in a trance. The alchemical vessel, the stages of transformation, and the cryptic imagery become, in his reading, a kind of navigational chart for consciousness rather than a diagram of matter.

It helps to see why this reading appeals to someone trained in anthropology. Esoteric traditions across cultures routinely encode their methods in allegory, and the anthropologist's habit is to ask what a text was for, who used it, and what they were trying to do. Wargo applies that question to the alchemists and comes away with a practical answer: they were trying to get somewhere.

What does "out of time" mean instead of "out of body"?

The conversation's most arresting turn comes when Wargo describes his own experiences of leaving the body. He has had four. The pattern he noticed afterward is the reason he reframes the phenomenon:

"Three of my four out-of-body experiences have all turned out to have been vividly precognitive experiences of a later situation in my body in a different location."

— Eric Wargo, Third Eye Drops conversation [0:02:07 segment]

In other words, the out-of-body experience did not simply show him a distant room or a hovering vantage point. It showed him a later moment in his own life, one he would physically inhabit at a different place and time. For Wargo this is why "out of time" is a more precise term than "out of body." The consciousness that leaves the body is not wandering through a fixed present; it may be landing in a future state of the same person, and the body's position in space becomes secondary to its position in time.

The same logic, he suggests, can account for a cluster of phenomena that have long resisted explanation: precognitive dreams, premonitions, synchronicities, sudden images, and out-of-body states. Each may be a glimpse of information from moments not yet lived. The host put the appeal plainly in his introduction, noting that the framework makes "all manner of psychic phenomena suddenly make sense" by supplying a mechanism.

Can the future really influence the present?

This is the philosophical hinge, and Wargo does not pretend it is comfortable. The conversation runs through the physics of time with a deliberate, almost stubborn seriousness. The host acknowledges in the discussion that the idea is provocative, and Wargo's answer leans on the notion that our everyday sense of time as a one-way conveyor belt may be a feature of consciousness rather than a complete description of reality.

The conversation also takes up the question of free will. If the future can shape what you glimpse, does your choice remain open, or is the future already in some sense fixed? The talk treats this as a live debate instead of settling it, which is part of its value. The stakes are not abstract: a model in which information flows from later moments to earlier ones forces you to ask whether a precognitive dream is a report of something inevitable or a signal that could be acted on differently.

Wargo also brings in the deterministic framing of the physicist David Deutsch, whose ideas about information and causation give him a route to taking time-reversed influence seriously without abandoning rigor. The point, as Wargo presents it, is not that physics has proven precognition. It is that the mechanistic picture of billiard-ball causation is not the only defensible one, and that a serious inquirer should be willing to stress-test it.

Could UFO visitors be our own descendants?

The conversation's most dizzying idea arrives almost casually. If interstellar travel is fast enough, the host notes, then talking about it becomes talking about time travel. Wargo's time-faring argument, developed in Time Loops, suggests that the time-travel hypothesis and the extraterrestrial hypothesis could merge into one account. In his words from the exchange, "our descendants could have colonized, you know, our region of the our spiral arm or of the whole galaxy long in the past." The visitors we report seeing might not come from another star system at all, but from our own future, returning to a past they have already shaped.

This is the kind of idea that can sound like pure speculation, and Wargo's contribution is to treat it as a hypothesis with internal logic rather than a revelation. The reader is free to find it fanciful; the value is in watching how one idea, that the future can leave traces in the present, reorganizes several separate questions at once.

Where does the esoteric meet the intelligence apparatus?

The talk does not let its wonder go unchallenged. The host, who describes himself in the conversation as a skeptical and somewhat irritated observer of current UFO culture, pushes on a central worry: that the UFO discourse is widely framed as an esoteric, almost spiritual quest, even though the subject is shaped by governments, military contractors, and intelligence agencies that may benefit from encouraging exactly that reading. Wargo's willingness to explore metaphysical readings sits uneasily beside this concern, and the conversation is better for holding both. The overlap between esotericism and intelligence operations is one of the uncomfortable truths the host flags at the outset, and it is a reminder that the most compelling story is not always the most innocent one.

What the conversation models, finally, is a method. Read the old texts with respect and suspicion at once. Take anomalous experience seriously enough to test it against your own memory. Be willing to say that a physical model might be incomplete. And hold a provocative idea long enough to see what it explains before deciding whether it is true.

Where to go from here

If the conversation has you curious, start with the sources Wargo returns to: the seventeenth-century alchemical texts he reads as dream and projection manuals, Jung's writings on alchemy, and Fulcanelli's The Mystery of the Cathedrals. Then read Wargo's own Time Loops for the full version of the future-influences-present argument. Pay attention to the questions he leaves open, especially free will, and to the host's warning about where esoteric narratives can be shaped by institutions with their own agendas. The full episode runs close to two hours and rewards patience; the best moments come when the two speakers test their ideas against each other rather than agree.