Palingenesis, Seeds in the Wind

In Construction…

Because those who “stole” the name Alchemy have hardly read the original texts of the ancient Greeks, but only excerpts written in the modern era. Raise your hand if you’ve actually read all of Plato and the commentaries by Damascius and Olympiodorus of Thebes. Raise your hand if you know that Orpheus is a legendary figure and as such never wrote anything; raise your hand if you know that Pythagoras never left anything written.

I am forced to summarize into a lapidary sentence: Plato’s metemsipcosis is a strange “implantation” of the soul into a body that was not the original one. The pure concept of metempsychosis, in fact. To this we can only add the idea of “chains” of incarnations within which this phenomenon would occur. However, there is a difference to be understood between incarnation and embodiment.

In construction…

Modern scholars place Plotinus among the Neoplatonists, although he did not even consider the possibility of the definition. But, returning to his startling revelation, we modern still have hope of simplifying the thorny issue of “body and soul” if we consider the soul as a “field” in which a body ends up.

This ancient idea goes beyond the modern granite belief in the separation between consciousness and objects.

For alchemists, the secret of everything lies in the “connections” and the substances that compose them.

So do we want to go back to introducing the anatomy of an alchemical machine? If you want, step back to Alchemy & Light, Introduction. But then you’ll come to the page dedicated to “death”.

In construction…

In Construction…

The similarities that an alchemist cannot fail to notice are mainly three: the belief that in the mineral salts of human bones lies the residual spark for the “reconstruction” of the individual; the final intervention of the world of sound; the idea that an intact metal experiences the death of its soul as when it is reduced to its Prima Materia (or death of the metal) its soul experiences the end of its corporeal integrity has so many similarities with Heraclitus’ idea that we experience the death of souls as souls experience our death.

This seems like a topic that should be further developed in The Subtlety of the Exact Proportions. It is undeniable, however, that death and rebirth have to do with generation and corruption, condensation and rarefaction, almost like a metal.

In Alchemy and Modern Physics Particles, we have already seen that the second law of thermodynamics leads to the entropic decay of every isolated system and that the only way to escape this decay might be to become an open system.  Alchemists claim to have overcome this impasse by breaking the isolated system of a metal, transmuting it and thus making it an open system: what continuously transmutes cannot decay, in fact.

Of course, we cannot “break” the biological isolated system to transmute it into an open one, but we must imagine that even in this complicated realm there may exist a “spark” that does not decay. Or, at least, a quasiparticle from which to start again. The “metallic” alchemists might call it a “seed”. See Alchemy and Modern Physics Particles and Solar Alchemy.

The seed/spark must be somehow amplified into a ray, and the practice, as far as metals are concerned, is highly “disrespectful”: they are killed. It is clear that palingenesis and metempsychosis of biological beings could not be so crude.

This is to repeat what was said above, but in terms more appropriate to the world of quasiparticles: modern physicists thought that quasiparticles, in an interacting system, decay after a certain time. Instead, it turns out that the opposite can happen: a strong interaction can completely stop the decay of the quasiparticle.

In Construction…

Is is said that alchemists are forbidden the immaterial and immutable, even hypercosmic, the first vehicle of souls, what Proclus calls augoeides ochêma. It is the third vehicle of the souls, the “kingdom” of the alchemists: Ostreoides ochêma, Proclus’s name, was the earthly body.  Between the forbidden world and the world of the alchemists was the pneumatic vehicle, pneumatikon ochêma. It comprises what the soul carries with it on its journey from the immaterial to the material. From the point of view of alchemists, pneuma is not only “spirit” but also air and what it captures. The primary purpose of alchemical works was to enter and exit the second world, that of air. See also Air Alchemy, the Dust.

Almost all Renaissance and Baroque literature on palingenesis ultimately treated it almost exclusively as resurrection from the ashes. There must have been something in the ashes if even theurgists and philosophers relied on Alchemy (the supposed omnipotentiarial art of resurrection from the ashes) to give a physical explanation to what was a “magical or divine act” par excellence: palingenesis.

In fact, when it came to resurrection, alchemists in turn relied on theurgists and philosophers to “trigger the magical and divine act”. Alchemists had already attempted experiments on ashes other than those of metals for a resurrection. Obviously without success. So they had understood that there had to be something else. And, the failure with biological ashes had also generated in them deep doubts about the generative capacity of metallic ashes.

In fact, the alchemists began to think that the very few successes of resurrection from biological ashes were due to chance, but since chance does not exist, to nature.

Nature could provide the exact proportions between sky and earth. Which the alchemist called “proportions” between fixed and volatile. But which in reality was not a chemical proportion. See The Subtlety of the Exact Proportions.

We can only say that alchemists see “nature” as something not fleeting, but flowing. And this makes a world of difference. Note that I wrote “nature” in quotation marks. If I had meant generic nature, I wouldn’t have done so.

The culminating act of the story of Christ was his resurrection after three days. I understand that the matter is now put aside and not even talked about anymore, transforming the whole thing into a “psychological” key. Nevertheless, the millenary past cannot be erased with a simple marketing move.

As for palingenesis, clearly, it was a topic to be avoided like the plague: can you imagine what the idea of someone who is continually reincarnated and so, literally, never dies would mean to those in earthly power? Death sentences would no longer be a deterrent.

Leaving aside the Platonic palingenesis (which we leave to the theurgists), with this word the alchemists always mean a resurrection. If for a modern apprentice the concept of resurrection is certainly more acceptable for metallic salts, it is less easy to understand what these “materials that had made their graves” are (which the ancient alchemists called Prima Materia). On the contrary, the same modern apprentice does not believe in the resurrection of individuals with DNA, of which however it is much more immediate to understand what the “materials that had made their graves” are.

Until the mid-18th century, there is a vast literature and scientific reports on successful and failed experiments, accompanied by various drawings and sketches, by countless researchers who experimented with the possibility of “resurrection” of plants from their ashes. The few successful experiments turned out to be unreplicable, they seemed to be random arrangements of nature.

See Alchemy & Light, Introduction, and Alchemy & Light, Known Authors.

As we shall see in The Subtlety of the Exact Proportions, the search for the measures was not chemical – which would not have been impossible to discover with a little practice – but physical, in the sense of ritual. In fact, it was about the exact proportions between “Sky” and “Earth”. Where, by sky we mean a symbol of the element fire and by earth a symbol of the element water. We’ll see what this is about later.

De Natura Rerum is just attributed to Paracelsus, anyway, here is the recipe: subject a live bird in a tightly sealed retort to the third degree of fire, burn it and reduce it to dust and ashes. Then let it putrefy closed in its primary shell to the highest degree of putrefaction inside the belly of a horse until the state of mucilaginous phlegm. This phlegm can be hatched again, renewed and regenerated, and eventually become a bird, provided that this phlegm is closed again in its first vessel or shell. It means resurrecting the dead by rebirth and transfiguration, representing a great and noble mystery of Nature. Through this process, every bird can be killed and brought back to life, renewed, and regenerated”.

The work on metals cannot be true for any truth value of the elements that compose it, although I have no doubt that someone took the process with birds literally. The symbolic part here is not the assumption of resurrection from the ashes as an alchemical process – in fact, this is not the truth that was meant to be revealed – but a detail that the work on earthy ashes has always put in the background.

Perhaps it has escaped most people’s attention, but the recipe for how to resurrect a bird from the phlegm of its ashes is not so much the act of closing again something that was opened, but of “returning” it to its origins of hatching from the egg, that is, of reliving its birth. And that’s not gruesome, that’s impossible.

Even if it had been a matter of resurrecting a metal from its salt, instead of lively little birds, an expert alchemist would have immediately noticed that the phrase “reduction to Prima Materia” was missing from Paracelsus’ recipe. Because even a neophyte would have understood that “enclosing” in his first vessel could only be symbolic.

In fact, to resurrect a corpse from the grave, even metallic, at least an embryo will be needed.

It is not exactly so, but still, and we are only talking about metals, for a neophyte it is just a matter of fixing the fixed and the volatile in a new body.

Alchemists are so accustomed to metals, chosen on purpose because they are very resilient to life, that they always consider adding a third salt, precisely what they call “dry water”. They think of adding a “glue” to “marry” soul and spirit, Sulfur and Mercurius. And, in fact, most of the time it goes well for them (see Second-Main Work).

In any case, water intervenes, not ordinary, but as a principle. We have already seen in Water Alchemy that the principle of water gathers together everything that flows, even the air around us when it moves. So, sometimes it’s just salt, sometimes it’s not.

Here, a sacred libation cannot be read as an ordinary salt.

I am convinced that some form of water, however, had to be present at the ceremony.

It has been handed down to us that the Egyptian rituals of “making a god” also included rites of “opening the mouth”. As we can see, this is far from the work of obtaining the resurrection of a metal.

We were taught that the Mercurius, obtained after exhausting volatilizations (in the humid path) or after dangerous fusions and separations (in the metallurgical path) contained within itself the embryo of the raw metal or earth. At most we were able to guess what it was in the transmutation phase (see Transmutation of Metals).

It is beginning to become clear that the Prima Materia is a set of different factors, which are able to convey a “message”.

Many alchemists did not identify gold with the Prima Materia of metals, but with the seed of metals. In fact, for them, the transmutation of common metals into gold was equivalent to a sowing. See Transmutation of Metals.

It is difficult to think that Ariadne’s thread was made of tangible matter, when the initiate who had to enter the labyrinth (in this case, Theseus) could not be made of tangible matter other than the wind. The Mysteries of Demeter say: No one can enter the labyrinth with the body, but only in the form of wind.

Yet when we are born, we forget everything. Unless… we get the help of someone’s memory, which is not us of course.

The putrefaction of a body produces gaseous parts, liquid parts and solid parts. Like minerals, on the other hand. The first school of thought prescribes not to let the gaseous parts escape, as this would mean letting the “spirits” escape (just like the minerals. See First-Preparatory Works, Introduction). The second school of thought instead recommends reducing the body to ashes, because only in its mineral salts would the “spark” of reproduction be preserved. The third sees the perpetual presence of the “spark” only in the bones. Even in this case there is no univocal thought: someone says the femur, someone else the skull.

In fact, the individual conservation of what remains is prescribed, that is, without mixing it with other individualities.

There is little else to add to this statement. One might only wonder whether “music” and “soul” should be taken literally or whether there is a whole range of analogies. In any case, a beautiful union.

Not only was great importance given to sound, but also great attention was paid to the perpetuation of details of sound tonality. Some of these rituals were performed on exact imitations.

The soul of the deceased was represented by the ancients as traveling on a ray. Metempsychosis was said to occur through rays.

In the case of Metempsychosis the “spark” must be enlarged until it becomes a “ray”. Symbolically this phase is called “igneous vapour”. In short, the residual spark must be dispersed in the air to return to its nature as a full “ray”. This will strike another individual.

The journey of progressive density is represented by the symbol of a more or less thick tunic. The tunic starts out light and gradually thickens.

The journey of progressive density is represented by the symbol of a more or less thick tunic. The tunic starts out light and gradually thickens.

“Pneuma” already tied to the soul even before leaving. Then it seems to connect to our imagination. As we have already seen in Alchemy & Light, Known Authors, 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”.

As we will see in Fire Alchemy, igneous, from fire, means “bearing information”.

In construction…

In construction…

In construction…