Empedocles says: “There is no birth of any of all mortal things, nor end in baneful death, but only a mixing and separation of what is mixed; and ‘birth’ is only a name humankind give to these things”. We have always heard of Alchemy as the art of transmutation, but where do alchemists get this statement from?
In fact, alchemists are so verbose in their use of the word “transmutation” that one might think they actually know what they are talking about. However, when they are asked to explain the concept of transmutation in Alchemy, they are mostly at a loss and simply quote from memory the sayings found in the books.
I’ll begin by citing some examples of alchemical axioms on transmutation. The most classic: the transmutation of elements into one another.
I will deal with the elements one by one and the struggle between them in the appropriate chapters, here we are talking about death, birth and, possibly, some kind of immortality. We can roughly define the alchemical elements as gears of physics, whereby each element sets the next in motion. Alchemists might naively mistake this foundation for the transformations of matter occurring before their eyes. These stages can be compared to chemical transformations, plus the ineffable forces and energies of Mercurius, or the spirit of life. At most alchemists can speak of transmutation into gold from lead or tin. But when it comes to addressing the topic of “reverse genesis” – which philosophically translates into “Everything tends towards the One”, or the “return to the origin” – alchemists have the feeling of being in uncharted territory, and tend not to understand what they are saying.
In fact, already from a philosophical point of view, “everything tends towards the one” is a phrase that necessarily leads to indeterminacy. I expected something more empirical from an alchemist.
Only when one reaches the end of the Last Cooking of the philosophical egg does he/she understand the meaning of this sentence. To be clear: only at the end of that phase does the private channel open. Communication occurs. A resonance occurs
Am I to understand that opening the private channel corresponds to union with the One?
What happens during the opening of the private channel is proof that many mythologies about the beginning of the world have deep roots in truth.
One becomes two, two becomes three, three becomes two, and two becomes one.
I understand that the sentence is poetically very evocative, but from the empirical point of view of the alchemists, those are the subdivisions of the Mercurius and its reunifications in the philosophical egg.
Pull out the body from that which has a body and give a body to that which has no body.
This sentence from Turba Philodophorum exemplifies the whole practice of alchemical works: destruction/rarefaction of the first body and introduction of a new suphurous spark and revitalization of the mercurial “metallic” life spirit in a new agglomerate.
“Alchemists know that metals killed in a certain way can germinate again as their forms endure over time in the materials that had made their graves”. How can we handle the necessity of the grave?
The (metallic) corpse is its own tomb. The tomb is the corpse. The spark of life is hidden in the crust. Only matter hides and encapsulates the sparks/particles. Only matter can resonate. Ultimately, never dispose of the corpses.
I quote from Plotinus, Enneads: “(70-75) Matter is incorporeal because it is prior to the body… The part of the soul that is in the body is asleep; true awakening consists in truly rising without the body and not connected to it. To rise with the body means to pass from one sleep to another, almost from one bed to another; instead, to truly rise is to separate oneself completely from the bodies.” So, where is this crust/grave?
Plotinus also says: “But we must return to the matter that is the substratum of bodies and to what are called the qualities of matter, and from this we will know that it is non-being and impassible. It is incorporeal, since body is posterior to it, and it is a composite, since it forms a body by uniting with another. Indeed, it is called incorporeal like being, since matter, like being, is different from bodies.”
At this point, we can also add Plato’s idea of
… the material substrate existed at different levels, the first of which was the recalcitrant receptacle (fully undetermined and formless matter), to be gradually taken up in the Demiurgic design of order.”
Going further, we would end up in Theurgy, but remaining in the field of Alchemy, you can understand how the alchemist sees the material before him/her becoming almost indistinct matter in search of form. The very chemical composition of the substances worked by the alchemist as he/she progresses is highly complex and indefinable.
Olympiodorus of Thebes wrote a commentary on Plato’s Phaedo and said: “For the soul to descend, it must stabilize an image of itself in the body, and subsequently sympathize with its own image. And this can occur because of the similarity of form”.
For Plato, numbers and forms were closely linked. He argued that numbers are “causal principles for other things” and that the same connotation applies to forms. Nevertheless, I repeat, only those who have reached the end of the Last Cooking of the philosophical egg can understand what this is all about. If we believe that the form Olympiodorus is talking about has the traits of a visual image, a sort of small portrait, would be disorienting.
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