The Foundations of Alchemical Symbolism, Increase and Decrease

First of all because all these references to people’s private and sexual lives were not considered private, secondly because they represented “practical” life, that is, the mechanical nature of survival. The common denominator was “growth“. Behind the doubles, the unions, the births, and the processions lies the concept of growth. A “Growth” that comes from so far away that it seems like the continuity of a movement. In fact, it is.

Ancient mathematics was born as a computation of growth. And degrowth too. In ancient mathematics, the idea of “principle” recurred hidden within successive envelopes and according to a hierarchy reflected in a cosmological structure. For the ancients, everything was affirmed as if by degrees, with a movement of expansion and repetition and which could be expressed symbolically in geometry, in particular with figures built on the repetition of the same “archetypal” module, and which therefore presented properties of self-similarity. The alchemical lexicon is less abstract and has the prevailing concept of transmutation.

To better represent the movement of Mercurius, the ancients used the symbol of the serpent, that is, a swift, slippery, and unpredictable animal. But, in turn, the symbol of the serpent was profoundly based on the allegorical movement of fire, unpredictable and unstoppable. A concept not difficult to grasp in the humid path, much more enigmatic in the metallurgical path. The most enigmatic and mysterious aspect of both the dry and wet paths is the phenomenon of Mercurius being “projected” into the surrounding air, with properties that belong more to the realm of physics than chemistry.