Sabine Stuart Chevalier often speaks out from the pack. Here she goes deeply inside the four elements and three principles sustained by her personal researches.
Fire, Air, Water, and Earth, together with Sulphur, Mercurius, and Salt. Lessons and observations by an alchemist quoted by Canseliet on many occasions.
All we know about her is the scarce news revealed by her husband, french physician Claude de Chevalier, which does not exceed the fact she may have belonged to the Scottish royal family.
If most alchemical treatises very often tend to replicate the same concepts, so it is not for Sabine Stuart de Chevalier, indeed featuring a courageous independence of thought. Thus be prepared, in her Discours Philosophique sur les Trois Principes, Animal, Vegetal and Mineral ou La Clef du Sanctuaire Philosophique or the key of the philosophical sanctuary, Paris 1781, to find some discrepancies between her and other more orthodox authors. For this reason, her book should be taken as a whole, without extracting excerpts, then very difficult to place among other authors. This post presents her beliefs on metals’ origin and interesting and clear considerations on alchemical principles and elements. A reading I would recommend. Here is my translation of “ Discours” outstanding parts from original French:
Discours Philosophique, page 1: “Fire began to act inside Air, whereby it produced Sulphur. Air began to act inside Water, whereby it produced Mercurius, Water then began to act inside Earth, whereby it produced Salt”.
Try replacing the element Fire with our most subtle kind of Secret Fire, something we alchemists believe comes from electronic clouds and stars. Then replace Air with a more coagulated Secret Fire and so on, till Salt, nothing less than Mercurius Philosophorum, or more fixed Mercurius, and we have a real genesis for principles and elements. Sulphur and Mercurius are just sub-principles. Salt their sum. Or simply a Mercurius turned into Sulphur.
Page 2: …” The three Principles ( Mercurius, Sulphur, and Salt) are constituted by the four alchemical Elements. Then they are reduced to the two, or Man and Woman. There it is a quadrangular inside a Pentagon, where you can find Quintessence”.
Stuart Chevalier’s geometric symbolism should be explored elsewhere. A modern alchemist should ignore the theory of the four elements because he would mistake it for a chemical arrangement transposed into alchemy. For now, let’s assume that chemical fire, air, water, and earth are about changes in the state of molecular matter; the same four in Alchemy are about changes in the state, or density, of the Secret Fire/Mercury. Mind that alchemists often indifferently mix up disciplines, and consequently, you can lose yourself but don’t worry: that’s just what they want. The nasty rule of three (by which every symbol stands for at least three different concepts) affects quadrangular terms too. If you remember my post on Father/Sun and Mother/Moon, where a Quadrangular means the first volatile fixation or the achieving of our Mercurius Philosophorum or Salt, in Stuart Chevalier, it designates the same thing, although the concept is slightly different: the four elements are reunified, so they become a Pentagon, or the four plus the grand total which is Salt. Quintessence, Quinta Essentia, or Fifth Essence, is the essence of the fifth one or Salt (1). Our Mercurius Philosophorum is out of the box, literally.
Page 3: …” The artist is compelled to separate this Quintessence, purifying it by a great number of “Contraries” in order to have three essences inside every composition, namely a Body, a Spirit, and a Soul. And after having operated in such a way, one must reunify them, in so doing imitating Nature”.
Contraries are Solve et Coagula repetitions, or dissolving-fixing series to extract the Universal Dissolvent from raw Matter. Here Stuart Chevalier is using a symbolism quite different from the orthodox one: in fact, she’s putting body, spirit, and soul at the end of our preparatory work to achieve our Mercurius Philosophorum. But that seems to me quite spagyric. I prefer putting an alchemical Body, Spirit, and Soul in the Main Work (2). The final sentence is an authentic compendium of the whole alchemical work. In fact, once we have achieved Mercurius Philosophorum or Universal Dissolvent, all we have to do is divide and reunify the very Universal Dissolvent (3) or Mercurius.
“… metals are all made from mercury and sulfur, which are more subtle than coagulated steam. sulfur is the grease of Earth cooked in the mine by a tempered heat, while Mercurius is a heavy water containing a very fine white clay. The success of the whole operation depends on natural mercury, but it must be mixed with sulfur. That’s why all the mines exhale a sulfur smell… and it is for this reason that alchemists should know about Salt, which is the Key since it is sulfur that retains salt where it is…”
It is clear enough that Stuart Chevalier means Sulphur and Mercurius, our alchemical aforementioned principles, and not the chemical elements. Very interesting, she defined a texture for our two principles: grease-like for Sulphur and white emulsion-like for Mercurius. But do not take for granted that all Sulphur and Mercurius must look like that. Just in some ways, of course.
…“The shape and tincture of gold are within Mercurius Philosophorum, like the heart in animals. But one has to add an external Sulphur, which by its virtue and active power, keeps moving the Mercurius, strengthens it, separating all Sulphur from the vulgar one and converting it into perfect metal depending on the nature of the same sulfur”.
In this paragraph, we can summarize the whole Alchemy: the metallic gold thrown into the Mercurius and the real essence, which is indeed the same metallic gold, become Mercurius/Secret Fire in its turn. And then this golden Mercurius which enhances a Mercurius extracted out of other materials than gold (4). Pay attention to the parallel between Mercurius and Heart since this is a learned Alchemy key that we are bound to encounter repeatedly (5).
Page 11:… “In fact, this is a Mercurius other than vulgar, since this one can dissolve gold and silver and then get indissolubly joined with them” …“The crude sulfur never produces a perfect metal, as the subtle one which instead always converts the mercury in a perfect metal, because it contains a perfect dye”.
In this case, mercury is the chemical element whereby our perfect Sulphur, or projection powder, can transmute into gold because our perfect Sulphur contains a considerable quantity of Secret Fire or dye (6).
The alchemists of the time, and I mean those who did not belong in secret circles, quite often had a transmutation into gold as a starting point and final purpose. All their science and genesis of metals were thought to explain this. Stuart Chevalier, when saying that metals are formed by a significant amount of Mercurius making the body and little of Sulphur making the seed and the life-giving agent, in fact, derives her knowledge from an archaic concept, in total ignorance of the reproductive animal cells, by which the female specimen provides the matter or Mercurius, the body, while the male, or subtle sulfur, the strange life-giving agent. Since projection powder is made out of gold significantly dissolved in Mercurius, this is just one of the possible definitions we can apply to Sulphur.
... Sulphur goes subtilized along with vapors temperated through natural sublimations in mines. When the utmost purity is reached, sulfur converts in gold all parts of mercury”. Sometimes Stuart Chevalier means metallic mercury, as in this case, sometimes Mercurius Philosophorum.
“The proof of what I’m saying is that there is always a bit of gold and silver mixed in iron, tin, and copper mines. In the mines, we constantly observe some imperfect minerals transmuted into gold. Thus a certain amount of Mercurius is certainly contained in imperfect metals… Nature has provided us with many ways to destroy the imperfect metals and open and free them from the wastes through the powerful spirits in the animal kingdom”. In this paragraph, we can find the whole alchemical operative theory. Mercurius can also be a destructive spirit.
“There are three subjects in the composition of Magisterium: it is the one and same subject matter that we call remote, proximate or proxima, and very close. Philosophers have called it these names because it is triple in operation. We call it remote or raw matter when we take it away from the mine. When we have it separated from impurities, it is proximate, and finally, when it is reduced to be ready for Alchemy, it is very close. We must take the remote one to obtain Mercurius Philosophorum and abandon the proximate matter, and we should not imitate those who work without principles as they take on the proximate, not knowing the price of the remote matter”.
The working state of the remote matter enriches it with analysis and magnetization. And Secret Fire/Mercurius is greatly improved by that (7)”.
“All Philosophers have told us that we must take the Prima Materia and that we must look into the belly of Aries. But we should not confuse the philosophical ram with the astronomical one”.
I think Stuart Chevalier could spare us this sentence since it’s somewhat confusing and inaccurate. At this point, she explains nothing. And when one won’t go any further into a subject, it would be better not to speak at all. Very Fulcanelli style, indeed. Necessary external influences or signatures cannot be resumed in that way (8). But further down, we shall be able to understand Stuart Chevalier’s signification.
The Elements, page 26: “Philosophers have agreed to represent the four elements with figures. They painted Water in the form of a dragon, Air as a bird, Fire under that of an angel, and Earth under that of a ram. Water gives life to Earth, Earth being the vessel that contains Water; if the whole Earth is the pot for water, it goes without saying that Water inhabits Earth. Philosophers have chosen the ram to represent the earth; it is clear that the water inhabiting the earth will be the belly of the very earth. Hermes says, “Visit the interior (entrails) of earth, and you will find the hidden stone there.”
Or V.I.T.R.I.O.L. Now we can make out what Stuart Chevalier meant above for ram. All that is about Solve et Coagula operations (9).
“It is essential to know the quality of the elements as well as the quantity … one cannot find Earth otherwise than into Water and water is not found but in the earth, that’s to say in the cold. This is primarily to convert Water into Air so that Water will convert the opposite element of fire. Then if you want to convert Heat into Water, you should convert heat into cold, and thus fire will become Earth, which is its middle element, but to do this, one needs to convert the dry of heat into water”.
Dissolving, subliming, fixing, dissolving again, heating and cooling. In this way, Secret Fire will come out to the surface.
“On Water: here we’re not talking about ordinary water but the philosophical one, that is, that one stripped of all vulgar parts of the vulgar elements through a philosophical manipulation. When it is so purified, it can be considered a true spirit because it contains all that is necessary for the Magisterium ( look up in the site dictionary). This spirit need be free of his body by means of repeated purgations till seven and often times over”.
Purgations or distillations, or sublimations. Pay attention here because a dove must become an eagle (10).
On Air, page 29: “When you will have the philosophical water, you will also have philosophical air, which is the water vapor. And you will have a pure and philosophical spirit, with whom you will do wonderful things if you discover the secret within. Geber says that this spirit has something dry. Hence the air contains a philosophical fire and a virginal land with which they can do wonders”.
An element turns into another, and every dissipation of matter will enhance Secret Fire.
On Fire, page 30: “Pontanus wrote a great treatise on philosophical fire, but few are able to understand it. The philosophical fire is the fermentation fire and ferment caused by the elevation of sulfur particles. It is impossible to cause a fermentation without having broken and opened a thing. And nothing can ferment without a sweet liqueur since acids of salt niter and common salt cannot ferment at all. If fermentation goes beyond the prescribed period, the saline particles will rise and dominate over the sulfur parts resulting in a distilled vinegar.”
The fermentation involved here is both common and a dissolution in Mercurius.
“It is impossible to acquire a fiery spirit without fermentation, after which three things result: the feces, the middle substance, the acidic substance, and the spiritual”.
And if arithmetic is not an opinion, we have four things. But as Stuart Chevalier knows quite well, a substance between feces and the middle one will be discarded in the end.
“Nothing can burn or ignite in a matter which is not open or in a closed vessel: closed coals go off if deprived of air.”
... Stuart Chevalier is talking of Putrefaction, both chemical and alchemical, which is performed in the presence of air.
”Nothing flames and burns which is not a grease and sulfurous substance. If combustion is beyond the time necessary for fermentation, the saline parts rise and dominate saline over sulfides which from coal become acid salts, such as soot. After the combustion of a substance, it remains coals, ashes, and soot since oily ones have rarified and become flames and then soot. Another part stays in the ashes, where the salt alkali is collected, which is nothing more than a highly condensed and concentrated sulfur. At the same time, the volatile salt is in the soot because its sulfur content is very condensed and concentrated. When feces are earthy after fermentation, they can attract the spirit. We can say that fermentation and combustion share the same goal and are like a single method which gets more rarefy, more subtle and alter the mixed”.
Don’t panic; please go and see my post on chemical operations by Glaser and look up the Fermentation term. Then you may find interesting what Lancillotti says about extraction without distillation. Fermentation is performed by means of a natural and inner mixed fire. Of course, back in the eighteenth century, to a chemist’s eye, there was little or no difference between a chemical exothermic reaction and the alchemical cooking by Secret Fire/Mercurius, even on a mere chemical calcinating proceeding. All we have to do here is to believe in the existence of a strange and ineffable kind of fire extracted from electronic clouds. Be aware that our alchemical salts are generally collected after a first fermentation. In this paragraph, we must read Secret Fire, where Sulphur and Spirit are involved. Only an extreme magnetization of non-volatile salts, such as soot, can give the massive amount of Secret Fire we need.
When, like ancient alchemists, we operate in a somewhat chaotic way, repeating processes, careless of any molecular purity, and according to a theory of spirits and souls extraction… well, chemistry really becomes an opinion. Like most ancient alchemists, Stuart Chevalier doesn’t perform systematically but instead literally moves behind matter transformations in vessels. It’s very unlikely they strictly came after an Opus Magnum scheme. But above and beyond a comparison between the two kinds of fires, chemical and alchemical, pay attention to salt extraction from the first fermentation.
To be continued at Stuart Chevalier, Lessons on Fire.
- See Also Basilius Valentinus, Salt, Azoth or Philosophers Gold;
- See also Blaise de Vigenère or Eros, Psyche & a New Alchemical Body;
- See also Splendor Solis Multiplications and/or Kamala Jnana from Black to White or Atalanta Fugiens & the Golden Apples or Artephius & the Secret Book;
- See also Weidenfeld & Basilius Oleum Vetriolis;
- In Gnostic Gems & the art of drawing spirits we can find an introduction to the heart topic;
- See also Guido Montanor & Latin Verb Tingo-Tinxi;
- See also Archarion & Analysis inside a Mortar;
- See also Thesaurus Hermeticum & the Dry Pythagorean River, or Fulcanelli & External Influences or Hortulus Hermeticus & two Starry Goats;
- See also Basilius Valentinus & Solve et Coagula;
- See also Dorneus and the need for two eagles;