Quite apart from common table salt, or any other purely chemical salt
for that matter, the medieval alchemists refer to the ‘Salt of the
Philosophers’ or ‘Salt of the Sages’ (Sal Sapientie). One thing
that distinguishes what is often designated as “our Salt”—i.e.
“philosophical salt”—from common chemical salts is the fact that it is
seen to possess the ability to preserve not plants but metals. Basil Valentine, in Key IV of his Zwölf Schlüssel, states:
Just
as salt is the great preserver of all things and protects them from
putrefaction, so too is the salt of our magistry a protector of metals
from annihilation and corruption. However, if their balsam—their
embodied saline spirit (eingeleibter Salz-Geist)—were to die,
withering away from nature like a body which perishes and is no longer
fruitful, then the spirit of metals will depart, leaving through natural
death an empty, dead husk from which no life can ever rise again.
Once
again, through its dual nature—preserving and corrupting—a fundamental
ambivalence adheres to the reality embodied in salt. And yet, the key to
salt resides in its ultimately integrating function. It is the clavis which
binds and unbinds, preserves and corrupts. It itself does not undergo
the process which it enacts, embodies or disembodies. Importantly,
however, as one learns from Schwaller, salt acts as the permanent
mineral “memory” of this eternal process of generation and corruption.
Perhaps
the most interesting and influential synthesis of esoteric theological
and cosmological ideas on salt are those that crystallise in the
tradition of Jacob Boehme, where salt emerges as a spiritual-material
integrum central to a trinitarian theosophia. Here one learns that earthly or material salt recapitulates a heavenly potency called by Boehme salliter; this heavenly salt is an explosive force of light and fire likened to gunpowder (sal-nitre,
cf. Paracelsus’ ‘terrestrial lightning’). For Boehme, this
heavenly and earthly salt are indicated by the two “halves” of the
conventional salt symbol, which resemble two hemispheres, one turned
upon the other (one “giving” and the other “receiving”). These theories
reach a magnificent depth of expression in Georg von Welling’s Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum
(1721). Welling (1655–1727), an alchemist for whom the books of
theology and nature were thoroughly complementary, worked as a director
of mining in the town of Baden-Durlach (a position that allowed him to
explore his extensive knowledge and passion for both the practicalities
and the mysteries of geology). His monumental Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum explores
how the rich relationship of salt as fire/air/sulphur on one hand, and
water/earth/mercury on the other, is played out in all its intricacies
to convey the mysterious dynamic of the fire-water juncture embodied in
heavenly and earthly salt (Welling uses the Hebrew term for heaven, schemajim, literally,
‘fire-water’ alongside the superimposed alchemical triangles of fire
and water to form the Star of David). In his initial chapters, Welling
describes the common symbol of salt as a ‘cubical’ figure and thus the
figure of an ‘earthly body’; ‘its form is diaphanous or transparent,
like glass’; it is ‘malleable and fluid and all bodies penetrate it with
ease’. ‘Its taste is sour or acidic and a little astringent’; it is of a
‘desiccating nature and character’; moreover, it is ‘cooling’ and yet
‘in its interior there is a natural or genuine fire’.
As
Magee has demonstrated, hermetic influences in general, and Paracelsian
and Boehmian ideas in particular, fed into and informed the work of G.
W. F. Hegel. ‘According to an ancient and general opinion’, writes
Hegel, ‘each body consists of four elements. In more recent times,
Paracelsus has regarded them as being composed of mercury or fluidity,
sulphur or oil, and salt, which Jacob Böhme called the great triad’. To
this, Hegel adds: ‘It should not be overlooked […] that in their essence
they contain and express the determinations of the Concept’. According
to Magee, this admission is highly significant, for Hegel is saying that
‘if the alchemical language of Paracelsus, Böhme, and others is
considered in a nonliteral way, its inner content is, in essence,
identical to his system’ (i.e. the ‘determinations of the Concept’).
Interestingly, despite Boehme’s known influence on mainstream
academic philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel, it is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that
emerges from the modern German academic tradition with the most abiding
insights into the phenomenon of salt. Curiously, although it possesses
no apparent connections to esoteric or alchemical discourse, Zarathustra as
a whole is nevertheless pervaded with a pronounced Hermetic ambiance;
somehow, Nietzsche’s remarks on salt penetrate right to the heart of its
mysterium. At the end of book three, Zarathustra not only speaks of
salt as binding opposites, but also connects this to a desire for
eternity which cannot be satisfied through simple procreation:
If ever I drunk a full draught from that vessel of foaming spice, in which all things are well-blent: If ever my hand fused the nearest to the farthest, fire to spirit, desire to suffering and the worst to the best: If I myself were a grain of that redeeming salt that makes all things in the vessel well-blent:— —for there is a salt that binds good with evil; for even the most evil is worthy to be a spice for the final over-foaming— O how should I not be rutting after eternity and after the conjugal ring of rings—the ring of recurrence! Never have I found the woman by whom I wanted children, for it would be this woman that I love: for I love you, O Eternity! For I love you, O eternity!
Salt
as the redeeming juncture of opposites is framed by Nietzsche in terms
that evoke the themes of autonomous morality expressed in his Jenseits von Gut und Bösen.
Running deeper, however, is the surprising link that Nietzsche makes
between salt and a desire for eternity that cannot be met through
procreation; here one recognises not only the Indo-European ‘path of the
fathers’ versus the ‘path of the gods’, but also the two paths in
alchemy known as la voie humide and la voie sèche—the wet and the dry ways. Nietzsche taps directly into the crux of the human œuvre.
Genetic continuity, i.e. continuity of and through the species, does
not satisfy the soul’s desire for eternity; only the desire that is
fixed in the salt, deep in the bones, has the capacity to survive
biological generation and corruption. Nietzsche’s love for eternity
expresses the same reality that Schwaller articulated in terms of the
saline nucleus in the femur: the path of eternity, palingenesis and resurrection, hinges not on the chromosomes but upon a fixed mineral salt.
Occult Aspects 