The Foundations of Alchemical Symbolism, Doubles

Mercurius is a supreme solvent extracted from the raw material, which tends to “reduce” the raw material it comes into contact with it. In Alchemy, the circumstance that Mercurius had to be fractionated, divided into many parts, then reunited and added in pre-established doses led to the accentuation of the concept of a mercurial “double”.

These doublings are the basis of alchemical cooking. From the second work on we will see how the main cooking factor is the addition of Mercurius. From a purely chemical point of view, from whatever starting material it is extracted, Mercurius is a powerful oxidant. and this is due to the exhausting processes and continuous state changes.

True, in Alchemy nothing travels but everything doubles. Obviously, no copy retains the same appearance as the original. In this case, the symbol of the mirror is appropriate: the reflected image is only an analogy of the original. Of course, as happens with an image reflected in a mirror, the image that comes out is more impalpable and only vaguely attributable to the original. If this comparison seems risky to us it is because today we are accustomed to the idea of mirror surfaces and lenses that reflect images truly similar to the original. However, if we think of ancient mirrors composed of sheets of silver or polished bronze, or even ponds and puddles, we understand how the reflected image was approximate and recalled the idea of a distant and unreachable world. In fact, even the concept of soul was translated by the ancients with the word “mirror”. In many mythologies, the earth is spoken of as the double of the sky, only with something less.

In fact, alchemists call this operation “repetition of Genesis”.

Alchemists speak of the Sun-Moon coupling. Sun/father, as a spark, and Moon/mother, as a “wetter”. Ultimately, a spark that converts into a real ray.

That they called Sky and Earth.

It is difficult to find anything better to explain the analogy between sky and earth than the symbol of the “mirror”. For this reason, mirrors were sacred in many ancient cultures and were part of funerary objects.

… And that something in between had necessarily to participate in the nature of both.

In Alchemy, the underworld is what unites Sky and Earth. The trait d’union, world of the dead, that is not a defined place but that could be very similar to air, instead. An air, a continuum that unites. Some call it light, others resonance. The alchemists were not shy about calling the trait d’union “Nigredo”, or black putrefactive hell.

Decay allows the spirit to escape from the structure, and is an alchemical operation of great spirituality, indeed.

Because heaven is too abstract a concept for an alchemist and because heaven is extracted from the sky. Which, being too far away, is extracted from the earth. We can say that they are double. One mirrors the other.

Basically, everything that exists has a wave frequency. We can say that everything is a wave frequency. The ancient alchemists called it “journey”.

Small changes lead to the original no longer being recognized from the final “copies”. In alchemical works, we speak of transmutations, and these are not immediate phenomena.

True. The ancients believed that the biological father deposited an invisible miniature individual in the woman’s womb, which would develop if inserted into a culture medium, called “mother”. If this idea was a biological superstition, it had instead its validity in the mathematical field. Thus, alchemically, the father represents an element that, although indispensable for the offspring, is invisible and destined to always have to be “amplified”. This practice was the considered as the release of the alchemical “seed”, which, at least in theory, should be an infinitesimal double of something.

In general, for alchemists, everything that grows is nothing but an expansion of the form already found in the mineral, vegetable and animal seed. Ashes are ultimately a salt, and alchemists know how to extract the spirit of life and the soul. This tautology, attributed to Paracelsus, was often used to refute the alchemical ideas of the resurrection of a mixed mineral from its ashes or salts. See also Palingenesis, Seeds in the Wind.

If abstract and conjectural thinking can easily affirm the concept of alchemical “seed” as the point of contact between one link in the alchemical chain and another, more difficult to translate into technical laboratory language. However, accepting the fact that both the word “seed” and “chain link” are only symbolic conventions, we must recognize that the metaphor is suitable for correct developments.

Surely alchemists had heard of it, but they had no idea how their plant-like seeds could compare to the sonic seeds of Genesis if most of them had never gotten around to the Philosophical Egg. See Third Work and Alchemy Resounds.

The ancients had already developed the theory that sounds and winds had the same origin. But perhaps they did not dare to compare the divine voice to an ordinary wind.

Once enclosed in the earth, the wheat in its aspect of seed/grain is subjected to a multiplicity of transmutations until it has completed its work. But, to crown it all, it returns the primitive seed.