Alchemy, otherwise known as “the science of music”, “the gay science”, or “the celestial gardening”, is a word shrouded in a veil of mystery that promises initiation into forgotten mysteries. Historically, alchemy dates back to the mysteries of early metallurgists, sacred Egyptian temple teachings, Greek-Alexandrian hermeticism, and Byzantine and Arabic alchemical practices (the science of balance). As a tradition, alchemy is most familiar to us in the form associated with Christianity, for example, the teachings of the Rosicrucians. Less known to Westerners are the equally developed and still unbroken traditions of Chinese and Indian alchemies. For the practitioner, who may have little or no interest in these separate histories, alchemy is a spiritual and transformative teaching whose goal is the “philosopher’s stone”: a remedy (whether in the form of powder, tincture, edible vermilion, drinkable gold, or spagyric quintessence) or transformation of consciousness whose effect is not limited to the body, but extends to the soul and spirit, manifesting itself in all the natural realms, from minerals to humans. In other words, the alchemical quest corresponds to a state of body, mind, and spirit which seeks harmony between the human soul and the soul of the world.
What distinguishes alchemy from purely mystical or “spiritual” paths is above all the loving work, or practice, with substances, matter, materials (particularly with metals), since matter – through all the ways in which it can be refined, perfected, and revitalized -- reflects the inner growth of the laboring alchemist and, in turn, has a retroactive effect on him. This means that by changing matter, or metals, in particular, the alchemist has the power to change him or herself. Why metals? According to alchemical cosmology, the lowest form of matter in the golden chain, or hierarchy, of creation corresponds to the highest form of matter; and even while metals correspond to the lowest level, they also embody the greatest potency and healing power. The prerequisite for this dialectical interplay of substance and spirit lies within the alchemist themself. It relates to their “inner chymic wedding” at the “heart of the heart”, which is the way in which their inner self or spirit affects their work. This is also referred to as the intersection of the cross, whose horizontal axis manifests two contrary poles (male and female, animus and anima), and whose vertical axis is the medium of divine influence on the world. The inner union of the “male and female principle” is thus the sacrifice of one’s own ego to the divine Spirit, the mysterious passage through death, and the transformation of limited consciousness and its preparation for enlightenment. This transformation, if achieved, can also be understood as the marriage of substance and Spirit.
The unity of spirit and body – or of divine and material principles – emphasized by alchemists, is perhaps even more important to alchemy than the Aristotelian notion of the transformation of elemental qualities, which can be best understood as the transmutation of metals. Mythically, this transformation echoes a much older, archaic concept, which conceived of metals as organic, living things that ripened in the womb of the Earth. According to Stoic teachings, God equals substance, in other words, “God is a quality inseparable from substance and passes through it as the seed passes through genitals.” While in their power or force, the two principles of spirit and body (active and passive, God and substance, or Sulphur and Mercury) are understood as the cosmos, manifested, they are at the same time inseparably connected. In this way, they form a unity. This unity in alchemy is symbolized by the rebis (“doublet”): the hermaphrodite of the alchemical Great Work.
Since Hellenistic alchemy, the traditional process mentioned above has been carried out in three basic phases. These, in turn, are symbolized by three colors: the phase of putrefaction and decomposition of the substance into primordial matter (black or nigredo), the phase of purification of the body (white work or albedo), and the final phase of the red work (rubedo), which represents the attainment of the royal philosophical stone, which equals the entire transformation of one’s mind, body, and spirit.
A person unfamiliar with alchemy will certainly be impressed by the wide array of diverse imagery associated with it. As a knowledge system, alchemy speaks in the form of images, stories, fairy tales, dreams, and visions. Thanks to the Christian world’s trust in the power and efficacy of images, the mythological bedrock of “paganism”, which we see visualized in alchemy, not only continued but thrived, albeit with meanings that flourished. In esoteric Christianity, this very trust in images even provided a counterpoint to iconoclastic tendencies within modern science which emerged from one conceptual version of Christianity that emphasized detachment, inaccessibility, and transcendence of the hidden God.
Historically, while alchemy assumes an interconnection between the two fundamental dimensions of the world – heavenly/divine and earthly/ephemeral - it struggled as a philosophy to be accepted because of the ways in which it conflicted with ideas upheld by the mainstream Chirstian Church. For example, within alchemy, this connection between the spirit and body is understood as an incarnation of the divine. This is in direct contradiction to the dualistic tendencies which gave birth to the disembodied perspective of modern science, we can see the birthright of Western materialism. God, when thought of as pure spirit, who is fully Himself and nothing else, and to whom one can relate only and exclusively by faith and not by cognitive powers of any kind, in this way, became the forerunner of the “modern abstract conception of objective reality.”
In the eminently hermetic art of alchemy, which is focused on the ancient and occult traditions, the mediating role of the planet Mercury is central. Mercury is the guide of souls and a messenger of the gods: a mutable or flexible principle whose domain is the imagination. In this role, Mercury is understood as the mediator between the world of phenomena, which is accessible to the senses, and the world of angelic intelligence, which is otherworldly and only reachable by a higher sense. Like a meditator, the alchemist enters the world of alchemical visionary reality by moving within him or herself to a space where all that is external becomes internal.
Yet the imagined world, or world of the imagination, is not a Jungian collective unconscious: a term introduced by Carl Jung that represents the unconscious as a space or thing that contains memories and impulses common to all human beings and part of our internal brain structure. In the case of the alchemical imagination, the images are not given to everyone in the same way. On the contrary: that world is always personal and unique. It is not purely material. Nor is it wholly immaterial, or intellectual in character. The alchemical imagination has its own unique dimension and space which Henry Corbin calls “imaginal” and is described as a world of “subtle bodies” or “suspended images”. Within that world, the imagination’s main role is that of mediating between gross matter and the spirit. Furthermore, it is this feature of the alchemical imagination, through which this world emerges and becomes known, that makes it possible to transform the spiritual world into the phenomenal or material world and to ensure their mutual communication. This cognitive function of the imagination enables an act of thinking that avoids banal rationalism. This is because this spiritual exchange between the outer and inner world is in contradiction to any form of reductive rationalism which oscillates in vain between “matter” and “spirit” while facing an unsolvable dilemma, which is that history and myth cannot be separated. This includes the myth of rationalism and Western Materialism.
In alchemy, it is precisely this acknowledgment of the imagination and its corresponding connection to the spiritual world that sets it apart from other knowledge systems. In this case, the imagined world has a metaphysical reality. It is a thing that exists. This is why it plays a crucial role in our world. It is a mediator and one that validates those who commit themselves to spiritual narratives, which is why reports on “events in Heaven” can be taken seriously. The same is true about the validity of dreams, symbolic rituals, and the reality of places that are shaped by the imagination, especially those that inspire visions, cosmogonies, and theogonies. Finally, the truth and meaning which grow out of the connections between the spiritual world and the imagination are where prophetic revelations come from, which is to say prophecy itself depends on this connection.
In western culture, the theophanic vision, which is the idea that one can personally encounter God in an observable or sensible way, faded away after the era of Paracelsus, a German-Swiss alchemist, and physician of the 16th century. From that time on, the scientific worldview and the subsequent mathematization and “mechanization” of cosmology took over, as did the transference of the soul to a psychological state. Other conceptions of the soul and God would come from Eastern theosophy, which developed the idea of the “creative imagination” which teaches us how to recognize the hidden meaning in the manifest forms. In other words, in the West, the soul and God ceased to exist as objective, observable, and sensible phenomena.
In alchemy, the experience of the soul taking the form of the body and the body being the image of the soul would later manifest in initiatory narratives that included the acquisition of “physiognomic” knowledge, an idea or practice which believes that you can access a person’s personality (or to learn the inner quality of the plant or other substance) through their outer appearance. Within alchemical and hermetic traditions, this practice of insight, which unmasks reality, so as to make the invisible visible, is identified with Angelic knowledge. It is otherwise known as the Journey to the Angel. “In order to embark on the pilgrimage of knowledge at all, one needs a guide, whom the tradition calls the inner master, the perfect Nature, the Witness, or the Angel Gabriel, or the active Intellect, who will help one to master the three fickle companions of the soul: desire, anger, and false imagination, and will help the pilgrim to an ontological metamorphosis that will create a subtle and immortal body that alone is capable of penetrating the imaginal world. On the ethical level, this means that “the neurotic desire for any object associated with desire must be reoriented into a desire for the Beautiful. The appetite for sensual pleasures must be moved while striving for the dream of heaven, and the wrath of impulsive emotions, is to be transformed into the courage to wage that ʻgreat warʼ against oneself rather than to fight little wars against others.”
Pierre-Yves Albrecht aptly describes the archetypal thresholds, or doorways to this experience, as a passage through an initiatory form of death which finds its equivalents in each of the genuine spiritual traditions whose authenticity is attested to by their ability to overcome the psychic-bodily conditioning of the personal self. After the passage through the darkness, which corresponds to the dark night of the soul, the pilgrim awaits the passage through the elements, the aim of which is to get to know the composition of the self as “consciousness-body”. He or she then passes through the various mansions, or levels of reality, that previously enslaved him.
“The substance one encounters mostly on the surface is that with which the ordinary self is constantly identified: the psyche, the ordinary reflexive dynamic mechanisms. When the soul recognizes and masters them, it is blessed by ‘omnipresent and pervading’ virtue that can directly influence other spirits, the ability to read minds, and to evoke certain images in other minds. A new phenomenon emerges: it is no longer dominated by “cerebral” reflection, but by the emergence of profound and radical idea-energies, perceived directly, as it were, without the ubiquitous filter of judgment and reasoning. Subsequently, the exploration ventures into the deeper layers of being, towards the seat of global affectivity where the influences of the primordial energies associated with animality are manifest and of which the external animal species are but a relative opening for the senses. The soul recognizes its animal world and its “sacred animals,” its totems and zodiacal faculties, the roots of the bestiary that continually return the emotional currents to their sources. As the immersion deepens, the soul begins to touch the subtle forces which correspond to the plant kingdom. This is a uniquely shamanic plane, which opens the way to a “supersensory” perception of plant essences associated with corresponding abilities. The soul acquires knowledge of magical medicine associated with the wisdom of plants, i.e., direct knowledge of the appropriate medicines, the “signatures” or spirits of herbs capable of acting with incredible efficiency on diseases of the body, heart, and spirit. The final stage is reached when the descent into the depths reaches the telluric structure of the body and when the soul recognizes the minerality and the “atomic and molecular” networks of its being. It gains thus the power to act upon substances and upon the “laws of external minerality,” always in accordance with the hom*ology according to which he who has been able to transform his own metals within himself can now effect such a transformation externally. Each step of the descent into the inwardness of existence takes place under the patronage of a certain category of Angel-energies. The Cherubim, for example, govern the plane of the mineral kingdom. In the narrative, the climate of the Elements and Species follows that of the Earthly and Celestial Substances. Let us bear in mind that reality is structured according to two principles: the Substance and the Form (Idea).”
Yves-Albrecht further compares the liberation of these virtual energies extracted from the Shadow, or the dark part of the soul, to finding a bride hidden in the very heart, which in the Christian hermetic tradition corresponds to the encounter with the celestial goddess or archetype Sophia. Then, according to the Christina mystic Gichtel, the soul itself becomes an angel of God who inhabits the heavens and speaks with God. Initiation is thus accomplished through cardiognosis: the traditional “thinking of the heart.” From the point of Christian Hermeticism, this heart-based knowledge cannot be acquired by any external or internal technical procedure; the grace of God cannot be “earned”, it cannot be the object of any effort; one does not initiate oneself, one becomes initiated.
The acquisition of this “quintessence” is at the same time “the middle way”, the way of balance and tempering, which makes possible the action of what has been called the “third force”, or the efficacy of divine grace. Alchemically speaking, this “sharing” of initiation is only possible as consciousness extends simultaneously in both directions, along the Sun-Heart-Gold axis.
As a knowledge system, alchemy returns to us the abandoned and seemingly outmoded motifs and themes that were central to Hermetic thought, in particular, the role of imagination as the bond that ensures the inner interconnectedness of the world, the way of thinking in analogies, the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm, and the concept of man as the keystone of the universe and the image of God, not only as the ruler or subjugator of nature, but especially as the one who, by his very being in the world, orders the world in a certain way: his responsibility for himself is also his responsibility for the world, and vice versa.
