Lives of alchemystical philosophers To which is added a...

Quotation might be continued indefinitely. The Centrum Naturæ Concentratum, ascribed to Alipili, and a treatise of some reputation, declares that “The highest wisdom consists in this, for man to know himself, because in him God has placed his eternal word, by which all things were made and upheld, to be his Light and Life, by which he is capable of knowing all things in time and eternity.... Therefore let the high inquirers and searchers into the deep mysteries of nature, learn first what they have in themselves, before they seek in foreign matters without them; and by the divine power within them, let them first heal themselves and transmute their own souls; then they may go on prosperously and seek with good success the mysteries and wonders of God in all natural things.”

These quotations, some of which are unknown to, or, at any rate, uncited by Hitchcock, do not by any means establish the points which are debated in his book. If the philosophers from whom they are selected were in possession of the whole secret of wealth, they saw fit to conceal it from the profane, and their works, full of practically insoluble enigmas, are proclamations of the fact of their success, rather than lights for those who sought to follow in their steps. Under these circumstances, they saw that in the blind guess-work which their symbols created of necessity, no student would ever attain to the true light of alchemy except by pure chance—in other words, by the favour of Heaven, which, accordingly, they counselled him to supplicate. None of the passages in question are inconsistent with the physical object of alchemy, and in the citation from Alipili, it is evident that the mysteries and wonders referred to include metallic transmutation in the mind of the writer. The investigator of natural secrets was advised to take counsel with the Author of natural secrets after the only possible manner.

“Whoever attempteth the search of our glorious stone, he ought, in the first place, to implore the assistance of the all-powerful Jehova, at the throne of his mercy, who is the true and sole author of all mysteries of nature; the monarch of heaven and earth, the King of kings, omnipotent, most true and most wise; who not only maketh manifest in the microcosm, the truth of every science to worthy philosophers, and liberally bestoweth both natural and divine knowledge on the deserving and faithful; but also layeth open his treasures of wealth and riches which are locked up in the abyss of nature to those who devoutly worship him. And forasmuch as none are permitted to touch the mysteries of nature with foul fingers, therefore it behoveth all who attempt such matters, to lay aside their natural blindness from which, by the light of the holy Scripture and a stedfast faith, they may be freed, that being the means by which the Holy Spirit doth clearly make manifest the most profoundly hidden light of nature, which light alone lays open the way to the wisdom of nature, and to unlock the most abstruse mysteries thereof.”

Even the subdued imagination which is claimed by the author of “Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists,” is likely to go astray in the labyrinth of alchemical symbolism, and some of the interpretations of Hitchcock are exceedingly forced and unnatural. His citations are indiscriminately gathered from the most transcendental writers, and from those who, like George Starkey, have exhausted language in emphatic declarations that their subject and their object are actual metallic gold.

“Zoroaster’s Cave, or the philosopher’s intellectual echo to one another from their caves,” is the title of a small work quoted by Hitchcock. It opens thus:—“Dry water from the Philosophers’ Clouds! Look for it and be sure to have it, for it is the key to inaccessibles and to those locks that would otherwise keep thee out. It is a middle nature between fixed and not fixed, and partakes of a sulphureous azurine. It is a raw, cool, feminine fire, and expects its impregnation from a masculine solar sulphur.” Hitchcock’s interpretation is this:—a pure conscience! Look for it and be sure that you have it, &c. It is of a middle nature between soul and body, and partakes of a heavenly spirit. It expects its life from God.

It is needless to say that with this method any meaning could be extracted from any allegorical writings. The author of the “Suggestive Inquiry” is far more profound and evinces a far keener insight. It is evident, however, that the truth (or the fallacy) of both methods of interpretation depends on the connection of the alchemists with practical chemistry. On this vital question, the uniocular condition of both writers is utterly astounding.

“No modern art or chemistry has anything to do with alchemy, beyond the borrowed terms which were made use of in continuance chiefly to veil the latter.” That is to say, the alchemists did not lay the foundations of the science, the beginnings of which are attributed to them, and in this matter we are not by any means indebted to them. This extreme statement is qualified by the later commentator, who gives a more detailed expression to his views.

“That chemistry is indebted for its introduction among the sciences indirectly to the alchemists is certainly true; at least I have no disposition to question it; but not to the immediate labours of the alchemists themselves, whose peculiar work was one of contemplation and not of the hands. Their alembic, furnace, cucurbit, retort, philosophical egg, &c., in which the work of fermentation, distillation, extraction of essence and spirits, and the preparation of salts is said to have taken place, was man—yourself, friendly reader; and if you will take yourself into your own study, and be candid and honest, acknowledging no other guide or authority but Truth, you may easily discover something of Hermetic philosophy; and if at the beginning there should be ‘fear and trembling,’ the end may be a more than compensating peace.

“It is a plain case, that, for the most part, the experiments which led the way to chemistry were made by men who were misled by the alchemists, and sought gold instead of truth; but this class of men wrote no books upon alchemy. Many of them no doubt died over their furnaces, ‘uttering no voice,’ and none of them wrote books upon the philosopher’s stone, for the simple reason that they never discovered anything to write about. I know that some impostors purposely wrote of mysteries to play upon the credulity of the ignorant, but their works have nothing alchemical about them. It is true also that many books were written by men who really imagined that they had discovered the secret, and were nevertheless mistaken. But this imaginary success could never have had place when gold was the object, because in the bald fact no man was ever deceived: no man ever believed that he had discovered a method of making gold out of inferior metals. The thing speaks for itself. It is impossible that any man can ever be deluded upon this bare fact; but it is quite otherwise with the real object of alchemy, in which men have been deceived in all ages ... for the subject is always in the world, and hence the antiquity claimed for the art by the alchemists.”

This passage is a long series of simply incredible misstatements. The history of chemistry and the lives of the adepts alike bear witness against it. My object in publishing this book is to establish the true nature of the Hermetic experiment by an account of those men who have undertaken it, and who are shewn by the plain facts of their histories to have been in search of the transmutation of metals. There is no need for argument; the facts speak sufficiently. It is not to the blind followers of the alchemists that we owe the foundation of chemistry; it is to the adepts themselves, to the illustrious Geber, to that grand master Basilius Valentinus, to Raymond Lully, the supreme hierophant. What they discovered will be found in the following pages; here it will be sufficient for my purpose to quote the views of a French scientist who has made a speciality of alchemy, and who is also a high authority on the subject of modern chemistry.

“It is impossible to disown that alchemy has most directly contributed to the creation and the progress of modern physical sciences. The alchemists were the first to put the experimental method in practice, that is, the faculty of observation and induction in its application to scientific researches; moreover, by uniting a considerable number of facts and discoveries in the order of the molecular actions of bodies, they have introduced the creation of chemistry. This fact ... is beyond every doubt. Before the eighth century, Geber put in practice the rules of that experimental school, the practical code and general principles of which were merely developed later on by Galileo and Francis Bacon. The works of Geber, the ‘Sum of all Perfection,’ and the ‘Treatise on Furnaces,’ contain an account of processes and operations wholly conformed to the methods made use of to-day in chemical investigations; while Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, applying the same order of ideas to the study of physics, was led to discoveries which, for his time, were astounding. It is impossible, therefore, to contest that the alchemists were the first to inaugurate the art of experience. They prepared the arrival of the positive sciences by basing the interpretation of phenomena on the observation of facts, and openly breaking with the barren metaphysical traditions which had so long checked the progress of the human mind.”[B]

With all their mystery, their subterfuges, and their symbolism, the testimony of the alchemists themselves to the physical nature of their object is quite unequivocal and conclusive. One of the most celebrated experimental treatises in the English language is that entitled “The Marrow of Alchemy.” It professes to discover the secrets and most hidden mystery of the philosopher’s elixir, both in theory and practice. It was published by Eirenæus Philoponos Philalethes, that is George Starkey, and is generally supposed to be the work of the true Philalethes; at any rate it develops his principles, and derives its inspiration from the author of the Introitus Apertus. Now, this little book testifies over and over again, and that in the most emphatic manner, to the physical object of the alchemists, and to the fact that they operated on common gold.

“The first matter which we take for our work is gold, and with it mercury, which we decoct till neither will forsake the other, in which work both die, rot by putrefaction, and after that are regenerate in glory. It is actual gold and nothing else. What does not equal a metal in weight will never enter it in flux. Nothing but the metalline will dwell with metals.” A severe criticism is passed on the blind folly of those who endeavour to reap the secret stone from strange material subjects. “Gold is the subject of our art alone, since by it we seek gold.” Those who, like the noble son of art, Morien, advise students to descend into themselves to find the true matter, only intended to point out how kind begets kind:—

Morien adds that the secret stone must be sought in the dunghill, which signifies, says the “Marrow of Alchemy,” that the metal must be brought to putrefaction. “Those who assert that common gold is not the matter are in error. Gold is one. No other substance under Heaven can compare with it. Gold is the noble seed of our art. Yet it is dead. It needs to be unloosed, and must go to water. It must be tempered with its own humidity; it must be blent with our true water, disposed in a due vessel, closed with all caution, settled in a due nest, and with due fire inclined to motion.” It becomes the true gold of the philosophers when by a retrograde motion it tends to resolution. “Then it is our Sun, our Marchasite, and, joined with our Moon, it becomes our bright crystal Fountain.”

But if the lives and the writings of the alchemists so clearly establish the physical nature of the Hermetic aim and opus, it may well be demanded how a psychical or moral interpretation could be reasonably set upon the symbols and the ambition of all the adepts. Such interpretations can never be wholly exonerated from the charge of extravagance, and of a purblind indifference to the most plain and notorious facts, but they may be to some extent justified by a consideration of the allegorical methods of the alchemists and by the nature of the Hermetic theory.

The profound subtleties of thought seldom find adequate expression even when the whole strength of a truly intellectual nature is brought to bear upon the resources of language, and where the force of direct appeal is unwillingly acknowledged to be insufficient, the vague generalities of allegory can scarcely be expected to succeed. It is the province of symbolism to suggest thought, and the interpretation of any sequence of typology inevitably varies in direct proportion with the various types of mind. Each individual symbol embodies a definite conception existing in the mind of its inventor, and in that symbol more or less perfectly expressed, but every student of allegory out of every individual symbol extracts his own meaning, so that the significance of typology is as infinite as the varieties of interpreting intelligence. For this reason, the best and truest adepts have always insisted on the necessity of an initiated teacher, or of a special intellectual illumination which they term the grace of God, for the discovery of the actual secret of the Hermetic art. Without this light or guidance the unelected student is likely to be adrift for ever on a chaotic sea of symbols, and the prima materia, concealed by innumerable names and contradictory or illusory descriptions, will for ever escape him.

It is in this way that a thousand unassisted investigators have operated upon ten thousand material substances, and have never remotely approached the manufacture of the Grand Magisterium, and, after the same manner, outwearied by perpetual failures in the physical process, that others have rejected the common opinion concerning the object of alchemy, and with imaginations at work upon the loftier aspirations expressed by Hermetic adepts, have accredited them with an exclusively spiritual aim, and with the possession of exclusively spiritual secrets.

If the authors of the “Suggestive Inquiry” and of “Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists” had considered the lives of the symbolists, as well as the nature of the symbols, their views would have been very much modified; they would have found that the true method of Hermetic interpretation lies in a middle course; but the errors which originated with merely typological investigations were intensified by a consideration of the great alchemical theorem, which, par excellence, is one of universal development, which acknowledges that every substance contains undeveloped resources and potentialities, and can be brought outward and forward into perfection. They applied their theory only to the development of metallic substances from a lower to a higher order, but we see by their writings that the grand hierophants of Oriental and Western alchemy alike were continually haunted by brief and imperfect glimpses of glorious possibilities for man, if the evolution of his nature were accomplished along the lines of their theory.

Eugenius Philalethes enlarges on the infinite capacity of our spiritual nature and on the power of our soul’s imagination. “She has an absolute power in miraculous and more than natural transmutations,” and he clothes his doctrine of human evolution in the terminology of alchemical adepts.

In one of the twelve treatises attributed to Sendivogius, there are the following remarkable passages:—“We know the composition of man in all respects, yet we cannot infuse the soul, which is out of the course of nature. Nature does not work before there be material given unto her....” The problem that all composites are subject to dissolution, and that man is composed of the four elements, and how, therefore, he could have been immortal in Paradise, is considered thus. “Paradise was and is a place created of the most pure elements, and of these man also was formed, and thus was consecrated to perpetuity of life. After his fall, he was driven into the corruptible elementated world, and nourished by corruptible elementated elements, which infected his past nature and generated disease and death. To the original creation of man in state immortal the ancient philosophers have likened their stone, and this immortality caused them to seek the stone, desiring to find the incorruptible elements which entered into the Adamic constitution. To them the Most High God revealed that a composition of such elements was in gold, for in animals it could not be had, seeing they must preserve their lives by corrupt elements; in vegetables also it is not, because in them is an inequality of the elements.

And seeing all created things are inclined to multiplication, the philosophers propounded to themselves that they would make tryal of the possibility of nature in this mineral kingdom, which being discovered, they saw that there were innumerable other secrets in Nature, of which, as of Divine secrets, they wrote sparingly.”

Here the reference probably intended is to the possibilities which their theory revealed for other than the mineral kingdoms, a theory the truth of which they believed themselves to have demonstrated by accomplishing metallic transmutation. In this connection, it should be noticed that the philosophical stone was generally considered a universal medicine—a medicine for metals and man, the latter, of course, by inference.

The occasional presence of these possibilities in the minds of adepts, and the comprehensive nature of the Hermetic theory, fully explain the aberrations of mystical commentators, who have mistaken the side issues for the end in view, not altogether inexcusably, because the end in view sinks into complete unimportance when compared with the side issues, and all that is of value in alchemy for the modern student of occultism is comprised in these same possibilities, in the application of the Hermetic theory to the supreme subject, Man. It is impossible within the limits of a brief introduction to do justice to an illimitable subject, to the art of psychic transmutation, to the spiritual alchemistry, the principles of which are contained in the arcane theory of the adepts, and which principles are by no means dependent for their truth on the actuality of metallic transmutation, so I must confine myself to a few general observations.

The admirable lesson which we may learn of the alchemists is the exaltation of things in virtue beyond the unassisted ability of Nature. Such exaltation is possible, according to the adepts, both within and without the metallic kingdom. Man and the animals are alike included by this comprehensive theory of development, and it is therefore conceivable that a few of the Hermetic symbolists taught in their secret and allegorical fashion the method of alchemical procedure when man was the subject, and revealed the miraculous results of this labour in the typewritten books which they bequeathed to posterity. That Henry Khunrath was in search of the transmutation of metals up to a certain point and period is, I think, very clearly indicated by his visit to Dr Dee. That the Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ, which was published in 1609, treats of a spiritual alchemy, is, however, evidenced by the nature of its symbols and by the general tenor of the strange esoteric commentary on some of the Hebrew psalms. Those who worked in metals may, or may not, have failed; it is by no means a point of importance to the discriminating student of occultism; but they have left behind them a theory which is wholly true in its application to that one substance in Nature which we know to be capable of indefinite perfectibility, and the splendour and glory of the accomplished Magnum Opus, when the young King issues from the Everlasting East, from the land of the Morning and of Paradise,

though it be a dream—say even, which no one can actually affirm—though it be an impossibility for the metal, is true for the man; and all that is beautiful and sublime in alchemical symbolism may be rigorously applied to the divine flower of the future, the young King of Humanity, the perfect youth to come, when he issues from the Spiritual East, in the dawn of the genuine truth, bearing the Crescent Moon, the woman of the future, upon his bright and imperial crest.

I am of opinion, from the evidence in hand, that metallic transmutations did occur in the past. They were phenomena as rare as a genuine “materialisation” of so-called spirits is generally considered at the present day among those believers in physical mediumship who have not been besotted by credulity and the glamour of a world of wonders. Like modern spiritualism, the isolated facts of veritable alchemy are enveloped in a crowd of discreditable trickery, and the trade of an adept in the past was as profitable, and as patronised by princes, as that of modern dealers with familiar spirits.

But the fact of an occasional transmutation gives little reason to suppose that the praxis alchemiæ in metallic subjects is ever likely to succeed with modern students of the turba philosophorum. The enigmas of the alchemists admit, as I have said, of manifold interpretations. Their recipes are too vague and confused to be followed. They insist themselves that their art can only be learned by a direct revelation from God, or by the tuition of a master. Their fundamental secrets have not only been never revealed in their multitudinous treatises, but they scarcely pretend to reveal them, despite the magnificent assurances which are sometimes contained in their titles. The practical side of alchemy must be surrendered to specialists in chemistry, working quite independently of the books or the methods of the philosophers. Only the theory is of value to neophytes, or initiates, or to any student of the higher occultism; and it is of value, as I have said, because it can be applied outside the kingdom of metals, as the alchemists themselves acknowledge, and as some of them seem to have attempted.

The psychic method of interpretation as propounded in the “Suggestive Inquiry” exalted the seekers for the philosophical stone into hierophants of the mystery of God; it endowed them with the altitudo divitiarum sapientiæ et scientiæ Dei. They had crossed the threshold of eternity; they had solved the absolute; they had seen Diana unveiled; they had raised the cincture of Isis, and had devoured her supernatural beauties—that is, they had accomplished the manifestation of the incarnate spirit of man, and had invested it with deific glory. They did not grope after physical secrets; they did not investigate, with Paracelsus, the properties of ordure and other matter in putrefaction; they did not work with mercury and sulphur; they did not distil wine; they did not decoct egg-shells. They were soul seekers, and they had found the soul; they were artificers, and they had adorned the soul; they were alchemists, and had transmuted it. Sublime and romantic hypothesis! But we know that they worked in metals; we know that they manipulated minerals; we know that they ransacked every kingdom of nature for substances which, by a bare possibility, through some happy guess, might really transform the baser metals into gold.

They were often extravagant in their views, they were generally absurd in their methods; they seldom found their end, but, judged as they actually were, stripped of all glamour and romance, self-educated seekers into Nature at the dawn of a physical science, they are eminently entitled to our respect, because, in the first place, unenlightened and unequipped, with their bare hands, they laid the foundations of a providential and life-saving knowledge, and in the second, because their furnaces were erected, intellectually, “on a peak in Darien”—that is, they worked in accordance with a theory which had an unknown field of application, and through the smoke of their coals and their chemicals they beheld illimitable vistas where the groaning totality of Nature developed its internal resources, and advanced by degrees to perfection, upon lines which were quite in accordance with their vision of mineral culture. “A depth beyond the depth, and a height beyond the height,” were thus revealed to them, and their glimpses of these glorious possibilities transfigured their strange terminology, and illuminated their barbarous symbolism.

Eliminating obviously worthless works, the speculations of needy impostors and disreputable publishers, it is from those who have least contributed to the advancement of chemical science that we must seek information concerning the spiritual chemistry—those who have elaborated the theory rather than those who exclusively expound the practice. In all cases, we shall do well to reflect that the object in view was metals, except in such rare instances as are presented by Henry Khunrath and the anonymous author of the treatise concerning Mary of Alexandria, with a few Rosicrucian philosophers. We must read them for what they suggest, and not for what they had in view.

The dream of the psycho-chemistry is a grand and sublime scheme of absolute reconstruction by means of the Paracelsian Orizon Æternitatis, or supercelestial virtue of things, the divinisation, or deification, in the narrower sense, of man the triune by an influx from above. It supposes that the transmutation or transfiguration of man can be accomplished while he is on this earth and in this body, which then would be magically draped in splendoribus sanctorum. The Morning Star is the inheritance of every man, and the woman of the future will be clothed with the sun, and Luna shall be set beneath her feet. The blue mantle typifies the mystical sea, her heritage of illimitable vastness. These marvels may be really accomplished by the cleansing of the two-fold human tabernacle, the holy house of life, and by the progressive evolution into outward and visible manifestation of the infinite potencies within it.

In the facts and possibilities of mesmerism and in the phenomena of ecstatic clairvoyance, in ancient magic and modern spiritualism, in the doctrines and experiences of religious regeneration, we must seek the raison d’être of the sublime dream of psycho-chemistry—that, namely, there is a change, a transmutation, or a new birth, possible to embodied man which shall manifestly develop the esotoric potencies of his spiritual being, so that the flesh itself shall be purged, clarified, glorified, and clothed upon by the essential light of the divine pneuma. Those of my readers who are interested in this absorbing subject I must refer to a work entitled, “Azoth, or The Star in the East,” which, I trust, will be ready for publication early in 1889, and which will treat of the First Matter of the Magnum Opus, of the evolution of Aphrodite Urania, of the supernatural generation of the Son of the Sun, and of the alchemical transfiguration of humanity.