Notes on Alchemy the Cosmological
"Yoga" of Medieval Christianity
By Maurice Aniane
Article appeared in "Material for
Thought" Magazine, San Francisco,Ca.,Spring
1976, which we consider as the most detailed and clear explanation of Alchemy
work
(Opus Alchimicum ).
Alchemy in most "traditional"
civilizations is none other than the science of the sacrifice of terrestrial
substances, the liturgy for transfiguring those crafts which deal with
"inanimate" matter. We find it everywhere from archaic Mesopotamia to
ancient China and in India throughout the ages. In these traditions,
"mythological" in form, alchemy is not restricted to any particular
place: if the Spirit is everywhere, obviously it is also in a stone; when the
one and only light, that of Divine Intelligence, is manifest in the sun, in an
eagle, and in honey, it is surprising that it is also manifest in gold, that
every metal is gold which does not know itself, and even in its ignorance is a
"state" of gold? If man has no other role than to worship in the
undivided sanctuary of his body and of nature, is it surprising that he should
"transmute" lead into gold? Neither can sanctity be divided, and the
"miracle" of transmutation reveals its omnipresence.
Alchemy in the metaphysical and mythological
traditions had no more importance than the dance which expressed the sacred
nature of rhythm, showed the worshipful circling of the dancers to be the same
as that of the stars, and, in the sudden immobility of the body,
"transmuted" time, the sleep of lead, into the pure gold of a moment
of eternity.
However, alchemy was destined to have a
special significance in the realm of the "monotheistic" traditions,
and particularly in Christianity. Apart from traces of folklore, which still
exists in some rural communities of Europe, alchemy, or, more generally,
Hermeticism, seems to have been the only cosmological doctrine to survive in
the Christian world. It has therefore been called upon to play a major role
"beneath" a religion, which stressed "contempt of the
flesh" and shunned cosmology.
In fact, during the early Middle
Ages and up to the beginning of Gothic Art, alchemy was no opposed to
Christianity but completed it. Through it the Eucharistic effusion radiated
even into the heaviest states of matter. It was no longer only bread and wine
that were transubstantiated, but stone, lead, the lime of bones and rocks.
Vivified by Christianity, alchemy gave the latter a "technical"
application in the "psycho cosmic" realm, which Christianity had
neglected because its aim was not to establish man in the world, but to lead
him out of it.
So alchemy could not have survived in the
West without the tremendous initiatic effusion of
Christianity: just as the archaic house only exists because of the chimney by
which it communicates with "heaven", so there is no possible
cosmology except around the "central" state, through which one can
find a way out of the cosmos.
But without alchemy Christianity could not
have been "incarnated"in a total order:
there would have been monks and saints; there would not have been the sacred
idea of a nature which could endow the arts and crafts, and heraldry, with
their character of "lesser mysteries".
In a time when we are weighed down by
heaviness, it is perhaps urgent to remind Christianity that it not only
accepted but, in the centuries of its noblest
incarnation, animated a true "yoga" of heaviness.
I. Outline of the Doctrine
The meaning of Gold
Despite the insistence of historians of
science, alchemy was never, except in its degenerate aspects, a primitive
chemistry. It was a "sacramental" science in which material phenomena
were not autonomous, but represented only the "condensation" of psychic
and spiritual realities. When the spontaneity and mystery of nature is
penetrated, it becomes transparent: on the one hand it is transfigured under
the lightning-flashes of divine energies, and on the other it incorporates and
symbolizes those "angelic" states which fallen man can only glimpse
for brief moments, when listening to music or when contemplating a human face.
Symbols are not meant
to be "stuck onto" things: they are the very structure,
the presence, and the beauty of things such as they are in the process of
perfection in God. For alchemy, the science of symbol, there was no question,
as has sometimes been said, of a "material" unity of nature, but of a
spiritual unity, one could almost say a spiritual Assumption of nature; for nature,
ultimately, is none other than the place of a metaphysical principle: through
man it becomes the body of the Word and, as it were, the bride of God.
This Assumption of matter is the key to the
alchemical work, which simply helps substances "to plunge into the Father-nature,"
that is, to incorporate, according to their mode of being, the greatest
possible spiritual light. "Creatures must plunge into this Father-nature
and become Unity and only Son....," for
"...nature, which is God, seeks only the image of God." "Copper,
because of its nature, can become silver, and silver, by its nature, can become
gold: so neither one nor the other stops or pauses until this identity is
realized." For gold is the most perfect of metals, the one whose luminous
density best expresses the divine presence in the mineral realm: through
spiritual continuity each metal is virtually gold and each stone becomes
precious in God.
This transfiguration of nature-memory of Eden
and expectation of the second coming ( Parousia
)- can at present only take effect in the heart of man, the central and
conscious being of the creation. Indeed, that being so, "the eye of the
heart" can see gold in lead and crystal in the mountain, because it can
see the world in God.
Alchemy, like all the "traditional"
sciences, was therefore an immense effort to awaken man to the divine
omnipresence. Its importance is to have emphasized this omnipresence in the
darkest heaviness: there where the pseudo-mystical, "idealistic"
perspective would be least likely to look for it; there, on the contrary,
where, according to the analogical inversion of a "sacramental"
vision, the divine omnipresence "contracts "and most strongly
withdraws into itself.
If the production of metallic gold has
sometimes been achieved, then it was simply a sign. It was no
more of a miracle than that of a saint whose look transforms a sinner. Just as
the saint sees in the sinner the possibility of sanctity, so the alchemist-sage
saw in the lead the possibility of metallic sanctity, that is, of gold. And
this vision was "operative."
But the alchemist did not seek to make gold.
That was not the true meaning of his work. His purpose was to unite his soul so
intimately with that of the metals that he could remind them that they are in
God, that is, that they are gold. The medieval alchemist actualized the Word of
Christ to the letter: he proclaimed the good news to all creatures. "The
stone is the Christ," all the Hermetic texts of the Middle
Ages hopefully repeat. Through his vision of Christic
Gold, the alchemist could transmute every "imperfect metal": but he
did it only rarely, for as a saint, he knew that the time for cosmic
transfiguration had not yet come.
The true role of the alchemist was twofold:
on the one hand, he helped nature, suffocated by human decadence, to breathe
the presence of God. Offering up to God the prayer of the universe, he achored the universe in being and renewed its existence.
The texts call him king; as secret king, he confirmed the order of time and of
space, the fecundity of the earth producing grain and diamond, as did the kings
of ancient societies, like the emperor of China up to the beginning of the
twentieth century. In the second place, the alchemist, on the human plane,
"awakening"substances and gold itself to
their true nature, used them to prepare elixirs which gave
"longevity" to the body and strength to the soul: "drinkable
gold" was a gold awakened to its spiritual quality, and reflected in its order
the "immortality medicine" as St.Ambrose
said of the Eucharist.
The true role of the alchemist was to
celebrate analogically a mass whose species were not only bread and wine, but all of nature in its entirety.
The Logic of Alchemy
The logic of alchemy implies a twofold
movement: "vertically," it was a symbolic logic, leading
manifestation back to its principle, appearance to reality, word to God : a logic of reintegration. " Horizontally,"
on the humano-cosmic plane, it was a dialectic of
complementaries which emphasizes everywhere the living tension of contraries: a
logic of war and love.
A logic of Reintegration
Alchemy implied, in sensation itself, a
peaceful and detached love of the world. For the world of alchemy, like that of
the "mythological" traditions whose heritage is transmitted, was a
world at once living and transparent, a great a sacred body, an immense
Anthropos in all respects resembling the small one. Nature, it could be said,
was at once the body of God and the body of man. Everywhere was life,
everywhere soul, everywhere the holy breath of God. The blood of the sun made
the golden embryo grow in the matrix of the mountains. The seven planets in the
sky, the seven metals engendered by them on earth, the seven centers of life
which, from the sex to the head, gravitate in man around the sun-heart, were so
many embodiments of the same structure of the Word; and the seven notes of the
scale manifest also that "music of the silence" which bathes
creation, haloes the saints, ands is immobilized in gold.
That is why the alchemist, like the knight
whose "proud kiss" delivers Melusine from her ambiguous condition,
revealed in the nature which veils God the nature which
makes Him manifest.
"Learn that the aim of the science of
the Ancients which elaborated simultaneously the sciences and the virtues is
that from which all things proceed, God invisible and unmoving, whose Will
arouses the Intelligence; through the Will and the Intelligence the Soul in its
unity appears; through the Soul are born the distinct natures which, in their
turn, generate all the compounds. Thus one sees that a thing can only be known if one
knows what is higher than it. The soul is higher than nature, and
through it, nature can be known; the Intelligence is higher than the Soul and
by it the Soul can be known; finally, the Intelligence can no more than direct
us back to what is higher than it, the One God, who encompasses the Intelligence
and whose essence cannot be grasped."
This text, which makes remarkably clear the
metaphysical background of alchemy, proves that it was essentially
"inner"; the "Science of Balance" weighs and satisfies at
once the desire of the Soul of the World which is concealed in each
"nature", and the desire of the Divine Spirit which is concealed in
the Soul of the World. The alchemist reverses cosmogony: dissolving
material "hardenings" in pure life, he makes in himself, by
meditating on natural beauty and on that "sympathy" which holds all
things together, the unity of the Soul of the World, until, in its center,
which is in his own heart, he causes the solar fire of the Spirit to rise.
Then, the fire becomes incarnate, through a higher Cosmogony in which the Spirit, instead
of involving itself in matter, embraces and transforms it: transforms lead into
gold, and the body of man into body of glory. Alchemy is performed, as Henry
Corbin has said, in a "physics of resurrection."
A logic of War and Love
Therefore, the proper domain of alchemy is
essentially that of the soul, that humane-cosmic environment psychic in nature which links the world of "sensory"
appearances to that of "spiritual realities. It is the "intermediate
world" of all the traditions, the "mesocosmos" of the Iranian
alchemy of Jabir (called Geber by the Latins). Now
this "mesocosmos" is governed by a logic of war, by essentially
"dual" forces whose never-ending struggle is that of the two serpents
of the Caduceus. In this domain, the alchemical work is wholly one of
mediation: it strives to transform war into love, so that it may culminate not
in a sterile death but in a glorious birth.
The "mode of operation" of Nature
in the Universe of form consists of a continuous rhythm of "coagulations
and "dissolutions." Form is impressed on matter and matter dissolves
it in order to offer itself to another form. Everything is alternation, evolution
and involution, birth, life, death, and rebirth, solve et coagula. "Nature
disports itself with Nature" in a play of perpetually interacting tensions
which neutralize each other at one moment by their very opposition, and then
destroy each other only to arise again in a new guise. Nothing symbolizes this
"world of dissimilarity" better than the dragons
which devour each other on the pillars of certain Romanesque churches.
This never-ending war which presides over the
metamorphoses of nature as well as over the interactions between men is related
by alchemy to the polarization of the two "subtle forces analogous to the
Chinese ying
and yang : Sulphur and Mercury.
Common Sulphur, by its igneous nature, and
mercury, because it is elusive and cannot be grasped, indeed embody these
forces in their dynamic aspect. Gold and silver "crystallize" them in
their static aspect, just as do the sun and the moon." These two poles on
either side of the "intermediate world" regarded as their "field
of force," participate closely in the two divine poles which preside over
"manifestation": Pure Action and Total Nature in Sufism, Shiva and
his Shakti in Tantrism. Sulphur, relatively active or essential, represents
Spirit in one way, while Mercury corresponds more directly to the passive and
feminine nature of the Soul.
To Sulphur are
attributed two fundamental tendencies symbolized by "heat" and
"dryness". Heat or sulphuric expansiveness
affirms life, expands forms. Dryness or fixation incarnates in the vital flux
the divine "signature," which gives every being its "face."
Thus, the principle of Sulphur, of Gold, and of the Sun is a principle of
stability and of measure: a heritage of Greek thought, it is the virile
principle of the "limit." But, by itself, it is only a receptacle
which tends to close up again over its emptiness: "...its aspect then is
an acute and terrifying harshness, in which its binding, astringent quality
affirms itself as excessive attraction, constricted and hard"; it becomes
a force of individuation which transforms a necessary protection into a refusal
of life. In the human being, it ends by breeding abstraction and egoism.
Therefore, in order that the seed may die and the heart may melt, the
intervention of the complementary force, of the feminine principle, Mercury, is
needed.
To Mercury-alchemists also spoke of Water,
Silver, and the Moon- are attributed "cold" and "humidity."
Cold or mercurial "contractivity" offers itself as a womb to the
"fixing" will of Sulphur; it envelops form and gives them consistency
and density. As for the humidity of Mercury, it is the power which "dissolves" these
forms once their virtualities have blossomed.
Mercury is untamed and necessary life, as
ambiguous as total Nature in which it intimately participates. It is the
"burning thirst" which, if unappeased, flares up and destroys itself;
it is the "viscous humidity" which is wasted or dissolved in
amorphous stagnation. In the human body, it manifests variously as desire for
pleasure, insatiable motherhood, dull laziness, and morbidity. But is is also the humble service of life, the creative submission
of the "Virgin of the World," who is always the servant of the Lord.
"This Water subsists throughout all
eternity," writes Boehme. "It is the Water of Life which penetrates even
death..." It is also in the body of man and the body of the world.
Nature, as seen by divided man, is thus basically nothing but an inmense battlefield strewn with corpses: corpses
"precipitated" endlessly, in the chemical sense, by the collision of
the two great forces which polarize the cosmic
psychism. The sensory world in its opacity is then only a "sepulchre" in which the soul has buried itself.
We now understand that alchemy is at the same
time a "science of balance" and an art of marriages. It elucidates
and utilizes the "cosmic sexuality" of Sulphur and Mercury, first
"neutralized" in Salt. The alchemists begins by dissolving these
imperfect coagulations and by reducing their matter to soul: then, between the
Sun and the Moon appearing in their purity, the alchemist brings about a
hierogamy which will cause them to crystallize in a perfect form: gold and the
body of glory.
Thus the stages of the Work appear in
outline: first "mortification," descent and dissolution in the
waters, dissapearance into the womb of the Mother,
the Anima
Mundi, who devours and kills her Son, that is, takes back into herself
man who has gone astray in the individual condition. This is the domination of Woman over Man, of
the Moon over the Sun, until the Soul, restored to its original virginity, the
luminous center, the Spirit is manifested. Then the regenerated Sun, the solar
hero, is born: in his turn, he subjugates the Moon to the Sun, Woman to Man,
and trough the consummation of "philosophical incest," he makes his
Mother into his Wife and also into his Daughter.
"The Mother generates the Son and the
Son generates the Mother and kills her."
"The Female must be made to mount the
Male, and then the Male to mount the Females."
"Once the Little Child has become robust
and strong enough to combat Water and Fire, he will put the Mother who gave
birth to him into his own belly."
These drastic writings introduces us to the
phases of the Work.
II. The Phases of the Work
The alchemical texts divide the work into
three or four essential phases: "the work of blackening," Nigredo or Melanosis--"the
work of whitening," Albedo or Leucosis--and finally "the work of reddening," which
alchemists originally separated into two complementary moments, that of gold (
Citrinitas or Xantosis ) and that of purple or transmutation of venom ( Iosis).
The work of
Blackening
"The work of blackening" is
considered the most difficult of the operations, in comparison with which the
other stages seem "woman's work" or "child's play." Through
it man in fact separates himself from appearances and lets
himself be drowned in the cosmic feminine nature, the full power of which he
wishes to awaken and master. The work of blackening is thus at the same time a death, a marriage (or
better, a parturition in reverse
), and a descent into hell.
"A being frees himself from death
through an agony which is undergone in a vast impression of anguish, and this
is the Mercurial way." The work of blackening, which prepares Mercury,
that is, the world's subtle materia, presents itself as a death to cosmic illusion in which
the Mercurial waters are so to say "congealed." This is why the texts
call it "separation" or "division." Man detaches himself
from his separate existence; he extracts his vital force from mental and bodily
attractions, from dream and from agitation. Painfully, quietly, he re-collects
it in himself as still water. He brings Mercury back to its state of
indeterminate possibility: this is the "return to materia prima."
He does the same in the substances that he
handles in his global perception of thins: reversing the cosmogonic process of
Genesis, he dissolves hardened earth into the unity of primordial water.
Through discretio
intellectualis, he distinguishes the presence of subtle forces and
spiritual archetypes in the midst of the universe. He discovers the naturae discretae , the actual nature of things, that "latent
inner basis" of which Geber speaks and which one could call the
"quantity" of the World Soul that each thing has taken for itself.
Then he perceives nature and his body as a
cosmic interplay upon which the illusion of individuality is no longer
projected.
The discovery of this interplay is a marriage
in which cosmic femininity prevails over masculine objectification. It is a
liberating dissolution
which draws the virile force back from separative modes of action
and of knowledge in order to bathe it in the baptismal water of universal life.
In Gichtel's diagram of the subtle centres,
Saturn has to be united to the Moon and Jupiter to Mercury. Saturn is lead, the
concretion of the spirit of weight: it will thus be above all the symbol of a
certain way of seeing the world, that particular vision which fixes appearances
in their opacity and separation, and keeps man in his illusion of being awake,
while he is only a sleep-walker possessed by a "leaden sleep."
Gichtel clarifies this view by situating the Saturnian center in the brain and
attributing to it, following Macrobius, the ratiocinatio. This is why Saturn has to
be "dissolved" in the lunar center, situated in the sacral region and
representing to
phusikon, the totality of the vital energies. And Jupiter,
("Masculine" center of the will, localized in the frontal region.) to
praktikon,
the vis agendi, the will to power, must be "dissolved" in
Mercury,
( "Feminine" center of the imagination, situated in the umbilical
region ) that feminine "imagination" which sees nature as the scenery
of a dream, perhaps the dream of God.
This marriage in which the masculine is
dissolved is often described as parturition. Just as in the cosmogonic process of
generation the Soul is "coagulated" in the human mind, so in the
process of regeneration that could be called "theogonic," the mental
must be reabsorbed in the potentiality of the Soul. Man enters the uterus of
Woman and is there dissolved.
But this return to potentiality begins with a
return to darkness, a descent into hell. The chaos of "matter" is
dark so long as its virtual content has not opened: it blossoms spontaneously
into the poisonous flower of the world; man has rejected the enchantment of
this flower; he must now take into himself the force which made it bloom so as
to make possible its fulfillment in a new flower, pure and noble, which will
again collect the divine fire.
The alchemist therefore descends into the
depths of "Matter," that is into the depths of life. He proceeds to
awaken the "inner Mercurial femininity" which lies asleep at the root
of cosmic sexuality, so as to make it into a force of regeneration. In the desire which
gives birth to metals in the womb of the earth and to the child in the womb of
a woman, a will for immortality is at work. But so long as this desire is
oriented only toward the outside, immortality is fragmented in time, is
objectified in the chain of generations. Outer birth so to say
"syncopates" eternal birth-cuts it up. As Evola writes:
"Heterogenesis replaces autogenesis."
The alchemist refuses to run away from this
mystery: he enters into it. He comprehends it, that is, "takes inti himself" the desire which everywhere links Sulphur to
Mercury; he obliges it to wish for God.
Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Occultum
Lapidem: to describe the "descent into
hell," summed up in the word VITRIOL, alchemy has preserved some very
ancient symbols: it speaks of a night journey below the sea in which the hero,
often compared to Jonah, is swallowed by a monster. But the belly of Leviathan
becomes a matrix: an egg forms around the imprisoned man; it is so extremely
hot there that the hero loses all his hair; ejected by the monster he springs
forth from the primordial sea, bald as a newborn babe.
He is indeed reborn, and every detail of this
symbolism is weighty with significance: the sea mingled with night is the dark materia
, the humidity of Mercury. The monster is Ouroboros, the guardian
of the latent energy, analogous to the serpent of Kundalini in Tantric
doctrine. Finally, the heat is that of passion: the hero's victory will lie in
making it into a heat of "self-incubation," a fervor of renewal; then
the world is no longer a grave but a womb, fertilizing himself, becomes the egg
from which he will be reborn.
In the "work of whitening," the
alchemist deploys, by "elevating" them, the potentialities of the materia
whose force he has just captured ( one could say he
opens up their "sattvic" dimension ). He in fact discovers them not
in their state of sensory obscurity, but in their subtle luminosity, in the
transparency of a purified humano-cosmic psychism, through which the light of
the Intellect filters more and more. Whereas ordinary man knows the elements
only in their "telluric" aspect (since he knows them only through his
earthly senses-themselves made of earth ), the
alchemist directly perceives their "animic" substance ; once the
"spirits" of earth, water, air, and fire have been revealed to him,
he understands the "language of the birds." He "rectifies"
these ambiguous "spirits," reabsorbs them into their angelic
prototypes, turns them toward God. Within him, the passions and their
corresponding instincts "are made cosmic," are pacified, and recover
little by little their primordial innocence. Heaviness is melted in life; life
is exalted and surpassed in pure adoration. Finally, cosmic "matter,"
becomes transparent, is enraptured in the virginity of the Soul of the World,
eternally intoxicated with God. The alchemist whose soul is the place of this
exaltation sees nature from within, so to say in its immaculate conception.
"Paradise is still on earth, but man is far from it so long as he has not
regenerated himself."
The work of
Reddening
Let there be no mistake: the fire here spoken
of in these texts is not ( or is not only ) one of the
elements. It is the fire which is "super omnia elementa" and acts "in eis"
--one of the tongues of the fire of the pentecost.
Xantosis--the
appearance of the gold--which marks the beginning of the "red work,"
implies a direct intervention of a trascendent power,
a contact between cosmic life and its supraformal pole.
In Gichtel's illustration, the dragon which
enfolded the heart and restricted its radiation to touch only objects of
individual affirmation, is reborn after being "dissolved" in the
virginal purity of the soul and transfigured by this contact with the divine:
its own "rectified" energy gives birth to gold, the solar vision of
unity.
The symbolism which emphasizes the necessity of this "return"
is so profuse that it is bewildering. The vessel in which the work is
accomplished must remain "hermetically" sealed, so that the subtle
part of the compound, called the "angel," cannot escape, but will be
forced to condense anew and to descend again and again until the residue is
transformed. Within the visible body there resides a spiritual body which
Boehme compares to an "oil" which must be set on fire so that it may
become a "life of joy exalted by everything." Alchemy emphasized al
length and above all the heroic virility which the
work must arouse. The alchemist is a "solar hero" who must make the ios,
the poison of life, into an elixir of longevity; he is the "lord of the
serpent and of the mother" he binds the hands of the virgin, that elusive
demon,"he transforms torrential waters into
vivifying stone, he subordinates "nature which delights in itself" to
"nature which is able to surpass itself." Through the accomplishment,
as we have said, of a higher cosmogony, he confers on cosmic sexuality the
nobility of a liberating love: love of man for the woman whom he wishes to
guide toward her perfection; of the craftsman for the matters whose secret
beauty he releases; of the king for his people whom he supports in the
performance of the "lesser mysteries," that is, in the transmutation,
through all human activity, of the cosmic order into a liturgy.
That is why it would be better to translate rubedo as
"work in the purple" rather than "work in the red." The
purple results from the union of light and darkness, a union
which marks the victory of light. Purple is the royal color. It is also,
according to Suhrawardi, the color of the wings of the archangel who presides
over the fate of humanity, whenever a wise man discovers the sacredness of all
things; the archangel has soiled one of his wings with shadow; the "Silent
One," by his presence alone, brings together the white wing with the black
wing and unites them in the purple.
In Gichtel's design, the firts movement toward the heart, which is realized as an
inner purification, is succeeded by an inverse movement of outer unification.
And this time the masculine centers absorb the feminine centers.
The Sun is projected onto Venus and
transforms her into Mars, penetrating animal energy and turning it toward holy
inner warfare. Mars in its turn fixes Mercury so as to extract Jupiter from it,
Jupiter the King who dispenses justice under the tree of peace: the Spirit
penetrates vegetal dream and transforms the nightmare of the world into a Dream
of God. Through Jupiter, the Sun descends into the root force of the Water, of
the Moon, and of Sex, in the night in which it is wrapped so that it may be
received by creatures. Fecundity is transfigured: it no longer transmits anything
but life. This is an eternalized autumn, the appearance of man-fructified.
Finally, there arises a regenerated Saturn, henceforth the God of The Golden
Age: lead is transformed into gold, the consciousness of the alchemist
penetrates mineral sleep, in stones as well as bones; returning to the
Kabbalistic teaching relating to the luz, to the "tiny
bone" which "resists the fire," and whose body by wakening from
his sleep in death the God who sleeps in the stone of bones. "Such is the
secret as it concerns chalk, the all-powerful limestone, the titanic element:
it is the incorruptible body, the only useful one....Whoever
has found it trumps over privation," that is, over the absence of God. As
the apokatastasis of heaviness, the transfiguration of Saturn
is also the transfiguration of the Titans.
From now on the silent presence of the
alchemist is a benediction on all beings. He is the secret king, the conciously central being who relates heaven and earth and
ensures the good order of things. Unum ego sum et multi in
me: He is a dead man bringing life. Dead to himself, become
inexhaustible nourishment, in him there operates the mystery of
"multiplication" and "increase." He is the
"panacea," the "elixir of life." "Drinkable gold."
From the Christic stone with which it is identified
there flows a red and white tincture which comforts
the soul and the body. He is the phoenix from whose ashes a vast flock of
golden birds take flight.
The "Humid Way" and the
"Dry Way"
The true imagination of alchemy is a
vision: it sees space as a symbol and time as a liturgy.
This "true poetry" seems to
have become incarnate through meditation on the great bodily rhythms.
"The
imaginative soul "is the "spirit of life," say the texts, and
"it dwells in the blood." Concentration on the blood through the circulatory
rhythm and the sensation of bodily heat seems to have played a major role in
the ascetism of alchemy.(underline is ours) The blood is the
"lamp of life," the support of the soul, Mercury in its modality
closes to Sulphur, with which it is united in the heart. In a certain way, the
alchemical work can be brought back to transmutation of the blood, which,
initially colored by the dark sun of the ego ,
is illuminated by the radiation from the heart of the world.
Finally, alchemy seems to have known a sacred
eroticism curiously similar to that of Tantrism. Hermetic cosmology is in this
realm closely linked, but in a way that is quite difficult to state precisely,
to the practices in "courtly love," to provenal love, and finally to
conceptions chivalry inherited from the old peasant societies of the West
through the channel of initiations of young men and which implied a
"chthonic" and "feminine" symbolism of divinity.
Thus, apart from the patriarchal society of the Middle Ages which chiefly emphasized the biological function of marriage and saw in the perpetuation of the species the excuse for sins of the flesh, another, more primordial tradition has survived: one which emphasizes the positive symbolism of love and endows it with the aim of spiritual regeneration.
It seems that there
must have existed an alchemical marriage consecrated to the pursuit of the
great work and similar to the Tantric marriage of Tibet whose acknowledged
aim is not the procreation of children but illumination. Allusions to the Soror
Mystica, to the "consort in service," are frequent in the
alchemical texts; all the operations represented in the Mutus Liber are
performed by a couple who in end are transfigured into the hieros gamos of the
Sun and the Moon; moreover, several texts specifically state that the combined effort of a
man and a woman is necessary for the completion of the work; finally the
almost mythical renown of Nicholas Flamel and of Dame Pernelle emphasizes the
importance accorded by the alchemists to the spiritual marriage. In fact, it is clear that human
love could be expanded by alchemical ideas about cosmic sexuality ( and
perhaps, secretly, about divine "sexuality"). It is also clear
that desire; experienced in detachment and innocence, could help the "red
man" and the "white woman" to capture at its very source the
femininity of "matter." For western Christianity, love can at best be
sanctified. For alchemy, it could become sanctifying.
This union in
the service of the work was not easy. It implied at least three requirements.
The first
seems to have been an uncompromising purity and an extreme "spiritual
sensitivity," so that pleasure might never close up on itself, but might
awaken an ever-expanding love, become less and less individual. Following the
Platonic schema often used by alchemy as well as by the trobadours, such love
leads from the beauty of the body to that of the soul and finally is reabsorbed
in "the love of God who created beauty." Thus the unity of all the
states of love" could lead from the embrace which blindly transmits mort
(death) to the a-mors(deathless), which, following the deep play on words of
"the courts of love," awakens the sense of eternity.
The second
requirement was therefore to transpose this love into cosmic love. In the end,
it was no longer this man or that woman but the Sun and the Moon which were
united "to give birth to God."
"In this
second operation," wrote Flamel to a painter who had illustrated one of
his works, "you have to put together two natures, the masculine and the
feminine, and you have married them....that is, they form but one single body,
which is the Androgyne or Hermaphrodite of the ancients. The man as outlined
here certainly resembles me dowm to the last detail, and the woman depicts
Pernelle in a lively manner. The painter had only to represent the Masculine
and the Feminine, but it pleased him to draw us, here as them."
Thus
"the hermaphrodite" is the aim, that is, the secret origin, which
impels man and woman toward one another, just as in Eastern doctrines the child
wishing to be born reunites them in a purely carnal union. In order to prepare
this "passage to the end" the alchemical marriage was not presented
as a vague fusion, but as a meeting face to face slowly transformed by the
"Art" into a union of complementaries.
The third
requirement of this love, the union of complementaries, relates the steps of
the alchemical work to the relation of man and woman: the
"dissolving" of the negative masculine in the positive feminine, the
"fixation" of the negative femine by the positive masculine. However,
it is less a question here of succesive phases than of a constant interaction
that brings about more and more noble "crystallizations" of love,
until the final transmutation is achieved. This interaction is the key to the
"operation with two vessels," between which a vivifying and perfectly
circulation has to take place: these "twins"( Gemini) were so
arranged that the product distilled from each, its "angel," might
pour in order to purify it into the opaque part of the other. A creative
exchange which also seems to have constituted one of the foundations of
Provenal love:
"Everything
takes place," writes R.Nelli, "as if Provenal Erotica had tried to
graft onto man the dominant 'quality' of woman: compassion for the body,
'mercy'; and onto woman courage and masculine virtue."
This graft,
which seeks to actualize the androgyne in each partner, is wonderfully
symbolized by two miniatures in a fifteenth century manuscript which Jung has
reproduced in his work, Psychology and Alchemy: during the "mortification
"which is a preparation for the marriage and which strikes both sexes simultaneously,
the Tree of Life is seen to grow out of the belly of the man and out of the
head of the woman; as if man, in order to become worthy of an authentic union,
had to awaken the feminine part in himself, has to renounce the reasoning of
the head in order to feel the motion of his entrails; and as a woman had to
awaken her masculine part by freeing herself from the sensual and maternal
despotism of her belly to take part lucidly in the vocation of man.
Finally, it
may be that alchemists knew, not only of the marriage properly so-called, but
of certain erotic "techniques" similar to those of Tantrism and
intended to awaken the energy of sex without allowing to be wasted in seminal
emission The texts often present the Greco-Roman symbol of the : naked
Diana"which they liken to the Soul of the World, the vision of which is
the goal of "the work in the whitening." Now we know that the
medieval "pure love," that is love without carnal union, included the
contemplation of the Lady in the nude. As in Tantrism, where the
"denudation of the virgin" symbolizes "purification," the
garments here represented the outer appearances. This practice implied a
complete sublimation: the texts predicted that the profane who dare to gaze
lustfully at the "naked Diana "would share the fate of
Acteon-transformation into an animal which would be devoured by the dogs.
Finally
alchemy may have employed a maithuna, that is a ritual sexual union in which
the sperm, in the moment of emission, is abruptly stopped and must "reascend,"
so that the highest concentration of life which it embodies might immediately
enter into movement on the psychic plane and provoke a liberating shock.
In a
Hermetico-Kabbalist text, the Asch-Mzareph, we find a hint of a procedure of
this kind in the reference to the biblical symbolism of the thrust of Phinea's
spear: "The lance pierces at the same time the solar Israelite and the
lunar Medianite at their moment of their union and in locis genitalibus...The
point of force of the iron, acting on Matter, cleanses it of all its
defilement. Here the Israelite is nothing other than masculine Sulphur and the
Medianite should be understood as Water...Phineas's lance not only kills the
masculine Sulphur, but also mortifies his wife; and together they are transmuted
by mingling their blood in a single act of generation: it is then in fact that
the miracles of Phineas begin.
As we have
frequently noted, the resemblances between Tantrism and alchemy are striking.
This should not be surprising if it is borne in mind that these two traditions
revitalize the same ancient symbolism, mytho-cosmic in nature, and make
"identification" with the world in its positive aspect the first and
necessary step of liberation. Just as alchemy has allowed the sacred character
of the flesh of the world to be maintained beneath the lofty ascetiscism of
Christianity, so Tantrism seems to have been born from a lucid systematization
of the concepts which underlie the deeply poetic and chastely carnal rites (
and myths) of Hindu daily life, but which Vedantic speculation neglected more
and more in favor of an apparently discursive and discarnate expression of the
mystery of unity. These common roots, this partly analogous role, explain why
the attitudes of Tantrism and alchemy coverge. Both take the material body as
their point of departure in order to transfigure it, since it is nothing other
than the spiritual body identified with its own objectification by the process
of cosmogonic "desire". Thus the "diamond body" of Tantrism
corresponds to the corpus glorificationis of Latin alchemy, and the symbol of
the diamond is identical to that of the "stone," which is also a
diamond. It is because the two traditions have a similar conception of Nature:
alchemy is clearly a "Shaktism" which assumes, even in its final
obscuration, the immanent power of the Principle so as to save man--according
to the Tantric saying--through the same means that habitually cause his
downfall. Finally in both cases its is the same assumption of positive
sexuality, which stops, explicitly at least, on the cosmic plane in alchemy,
whereas it begins in divinis for Tantrism: the opposition of Sulphur and
Mercury thus appears as a relatively contingent application of the metaphysical
polarization between Shiva and his Shakti.(*)
Under these
conditions, its is normal to observe the very great resemblances between the
subtle "physiology"of Tantrism and that of alchemy. The multiplicity
of nadis, those currents of subtle force which furrow and
"animate"the organism, culminate in a duality, that of two opposed
arteries called pingal and id . Id, whose symbolic color is a very pale
white, represents a "lunar" current linked to the Shakti principle;
pingal, a brilliant red in color, is a "solar"Shivaic current. These
two nadis, which emerge from the sacral region and intertwine around the
vertebral column, correspond in alchemical language to the two serpents of the
caduceus, opposed to each other as are the white, lunar Mercury and the red,
solar Sulphur. Just as the duality of id and pingal is resolved at the moment
of spiritual realization in the unity of the central artery, hitherto virtual
of the sushmna, so the two serpents which were fighting each other, now having
been struck by the staff of Hermes, entwine themselves around it, and
henceforth tame, bring to the god of twofold theurgical power to
"bind" and "unbind." Cosmic nature in its latent state,
needing to be awakened and mastered, is symbolized, in alchemy as in Tantrism,
by a serpent coiled around itself: Ouroboros and Kundalini. Both traditions
relate this serpent with heaviness, sleep, and earth: to the Hermetic visita
interiora terrae corresponds the "descent "to the muldhra-chakra,
the subtle center which is at the root of bodily existence and which
corresponds to the tattva of the "earth": Tantrism locates this
chakra at the base of the spinal column, and one might suppose that an
analogous localization was known to alchemy, since it, like Tantras, relates
the earth force to the sexual function, and often situates the lunar
center--which corresponds, as we have seen to phusikon, the totality of the
vital energies--at the base of the spinal column.
There
remains, in order to complete this brief comparison of two subtle
"physiologies," the problem of the "centers of life."
"The
quality of freedom passes through the astringent quality [which can be likened to
imprisonment in the hard earth], rends the Body and emerges from the Body,
outside and above the earth [The Body and the Earth seem analogous here to the
muldhra-chakra] and thus advances persistently until a long stem has grown.
The qualities [ The union of id and pingal] ascend through this stem
[sushmna]. There they generate the colors... A bud of flowers on the stem
later, which is a new body, resembling the one which originally had its roots
in the Earth, and from then on assuming a more subtle form."
It seems ,
nevertheless, that a true correspondence cannot be established between the
subtle centres of alchemy and those of Tantrism, except for the four centers
rising by steps from the sacral region to the heart. Or rather, its is only in
the case of the heart that the correspondence is complete; the three lower
alchemical centers represent only the Shaktic, Mercurial modality of the
corresponding chakras, their Shivaic or Sulphurous modality being found in the
alchemical centers situated above the heart: for example, the muldhra-chakra
is identified, not with Gichtel's single lunar center, but with the union
between the lunar center and the Saturnian center, which is localized in the
brain; this chakra is in fact not only related to the vital force of the
Kundalini, but also to the "god of the earth" symbolized by the
massiveness of the elephant and which corresponds most clearly to Saturn and
the heaviness of lead. The centers which alchemy places above the heart
consequently have nothing to do with the chakras whose localization is
approximately the same. In Tantric terms, the alchemical realization stops at
the heart. This difference is easy to understand: Tantrism is an integral
spiritual way, the last "adaptation" of the Hindu tradition: the
conquest of the heart, that is, of the center of the human being in which the
supreme center is reflected, is thus in that context no more than a stage
leading to the "ascent" toward higher states of being. The heart
marks the moment where the man who has discovered his center "is made
cosmic"; above, the highest chakras symbolize the supraformal
"heavens," and the passage to the fontanel, union with the
transcendent.
Alchemy, on
the contrary, is a cosmological science
which has never claimed to be self-sufficient. It has always been
subordinate to a spiritual way of union properly speaking, whether one is
considering the "sacerdotal" part of the Egyptian tradition, of
Sufism, of Byzantine Hesychasm, or of the great Western "intellectual"
mystical tradition up to Meister Eckhart and even Angelicus Silesius. That is
why it limits itself to establishing a contact in the heart with the
"solar" ray of transcendence and sees the dissolving of the world in
its center as subsequent to an equally important restoration.
The
alchemical realization is a "horizontal" realization in the direction
of cosmic breath. The Tantric realization assumes thinks breath and absorbs it
in a vertical which no longer has to do with space. What finally corresponds to
Tantrism is not medieval alchemy by itself alone, but medieval spirituality
complete with its alchemical underpinnings and its purely Christian
achievement.
Thus the
alchemical hollow Tree is no identical with the Tantric Tree of Life: one could
say that it is the undoubled reflection in the cosmic environment of the root
of the latter, since the trunk which ist lost in the heavens leaves no other
trace than the luminous center of the heart.
Profoundly
Christianized, situated at the point where the initiations of the guilds and of
the Order of Chivalry come together, alchemy constituted in medieval
Christianity the central doctrine of the cosmic "lesser mysteries." Son
of God throgh the mediation of Christ, the craftsman or the emperor was equally
father and mediator in relation to the world, through the archetype of Hermes,
always represented as an aged king.
This alliance
was broken by certain internal disasters
which need not to be assessed here and which took place from the end of
the twelfth century to the end of the fourteenth. "Metacosmic" in
essence, Christianity became, in the West at least, more and more
"anticosmic ": the faithful forbidden to receive the wine, that is,
blood, in the communion; the long battle of moralizing usurpation waged by the
papacy against the sacred function of the Emperors; the autonomous and profane
character ascribed to nature by Thomism--all of them are aspect of this gradual
divorce of the sacred from life.
For its part,
alchemy became more and more enclosed in a divinized cosmos: the disappearance
from the texts of citrinitas (the Greek xantosis), that is, the disappearance
of the intervention of a transcendent influence in the formation of gold,
emphasizes this triumph of inmanentism.
The
opposition between the Filius Macrocosmi and the Son of God has made the modern
world possible. Their reconciliation may perhaps be foreshadowed by the
rediscovery of the profound meaning of alchemy and of the whole body of
"mythological" traditions.
For "The
Stone is the Christ
And I tell
you that, if these [ the disciples ] hold their peace, the stones would
immediately cry out.
(*)Transcribers
note: Potential energy to manifest needs a potential difference- or, more
plainly,-a separation of poles.