From
numerous ancient sources describing the nature of salt, one arrives at
the view that salt’s piquant effect was seen to extend beyond the
sensation on the tongue. Salt stimulated not only the appetite but
desire in general. And because desire polarises the religious
impulse more than anything else—a path of liberation to some, a
hindrance to others—it is understandable why the Egyptians, according to
Plutarch, ‘make it a point of religion to abstain completely from
salt’. Equally, one can understand how salt, as an aphrodisiac, was
connected specifically to the cult of Aphrodite, the goddess of desire par excellence. As Plutarch notes, the stimulating nature of eroticism evoked by the feminine is expressed using the very language of salt:
For
this reason perhaps, feminine beauty is called ‘salty’ and ‘piquant’
when it is not passive, nor unyielding, but has charm and
provocativeness. I imagine that the poets called Aphrodite ‘born of
brine’ […] by way of alluding to the generative property of salt.
Plutarch
is referring to a tradition preserved by Hesiod, which will be looked
at presently, but before the origin of the ‘brine-born’ goddess is
examined, it is worth noting that our own language still preserves this
deep association between salt and provocative beauty. Latin sal
lies, phonetically and semantically, at the root of words such as salsa
and sauce (both meaning ‘salted’), whence the deep connection between
sexuality and food implicit in the habit of referring to provocative
objects of desire as ‘saucy’ or ‘sassy’ (both derivations of sal). And so the most stimulating flavours—the saltiest, those that make us salivate—are the ones most readily appropriated to express our desire.
The ancient etymology of Aphrodite as ‘brine-born’ (from aphros, ‘sea-spume’) is deeply mired not only in desire but also enmity, the twin impulses that Empedocles would call ‘Love and Strife’ (Philotēs kai Neikos). Aphrodite, one learns, is born from the primordial patricide (and perhaps a crime of passion). Hesiod’s Theogony
tells us how the goddess Gaia (Earth), the unwilling recipient of the
lusts of Ouranos (Heaven), incites the children born of this union
against their hated father. Not without Oedipal implications, Cronus
rises surreptitiously against his progenitor and, with a sickle of
jagged flint, severs his father’s genitals:
And
so soon as he had cut off the members with flint and cast them from the
land into the surging sea, they were swept away over the main a long
time: and a white foam (aphros) spread around them from the
immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden. […] Her gods and men call
Aphrodite, and the foam-born goddess […] because she grew amid the
foam.
As will be seen, these two primordial impulses prove
pivotal to the alchemical function of salt that is met in Schwaller—the
determiner of all affinities and aversions. And if Aphrodite is
connected to salt’s desire-provoking aspect, it will come as no surprise
to find that her ultimate counterpart was associated with just the
opposite: war and strife. As is well known, Aphrodite is paired with
Ares among the Greeks (as Venus is to Mars among the Romans), but the
origins of her cult are intimately bound to Ancient Near Eastern
origins; [33] moreover, in her Phoenician incarnation
(Astarte), she embodies not only eros and sexuality, but war and strife.
Presumably because of these traits, the Egyptian texts of the early
Eighteenth Dynasty saw fit to partner her with their own untamed
transgressor god, Seth-Typhon—a divinity who, like Aphrodite, was
associated specifically with sea-salt and sea-spume (aphros).
Typhon’s Spume
Tomb of Typhon, Tarquinia, first century BCE.
‘Sea’,
writes Heraclitus, ‘is the most pure and the most polluted water; for
fishes it is drinkable and salutary, but for men it is undrinkable and
deleterious’. For the Egyptians, anything connected with the sea
was, in general, evaluated negatively. Sea-salt in particular was
regarded as impure, the ‘spume’ or ‘foam’ of Typhon (ἀφρος τυφωνις, aphros typhōnis). Plutarch explains this by the fact that the Nile’s pure waters run
down from their source and empty into the unpalatable, salty
Mediterranean. This natural phenomenon takes on cosmological
ramifications: because of the southern origin of the life-giving Nilotic
waters, south became the direction associated with the generative
source of all existence; north on the other hand—culminating in the Nile
delta where the river is swallowed by the sea—was regarded as the realm
in which the pure, living waters were annihilated by the impure, salty
waters. Comments Plutarch:
For this
reason the priests keep themselves aloof from the sea, and call salt the
‘spume of Typhon’, and one of the things forbidden to them is to set
salt upon a table; also they do not speak to pilots; because these men
make use of the sea, and gain their livelihood from the sea […] This is
the reason why they eschew fish.
While sea salt was avoided,
salt in rock form was considered quite pure: Egyptian priests were known
to access mines of rock salt from the desert Oasis of Siwa. Arrian, the third century BCE historian, remarks:
There
are natural salts in this district, to be obtained by digging; some of
these salts are taken by the priests of Amon going to Egypt. For
whenever they are going towards Egypt, they pack salt into baskets woven
of palm leaves and take them as a present to the king or someone else.
Both Egyptians and others who are particular about religious observance,
use this salt in their sacrifices as being purer than the sea-salts.
Thus, like the arid red desert and the fertile Nilotic soil,
the briny sea was contrasted with the fresh waters of the Nile to oppose
the foreign with the familiar, the impure with the pure, and,
ultimately, the Sethian with the Osirian. So too, sea salt and rock
salt.
The deeper implications of the Typhonian nature of seawater emerge in the Greek Magical Papyri
where the Egyptian deity Seth-Typhon is found taking on many of the
epithets typically accorded by the Greeks to Poseidon: ‘mover of the
seas great depths’; ‘boiler of waves’; ‘shaker of rocks’; ‘wall
trembler’, etc.—all intimating the vast, destructive powers deriving
from the ocean’s primal depths. This numinous power must be understood
as the potency underpinning the materia magica prescribed in
the invocations to Seth-Typhon, where, among other things, one finds the
presence of seashells or seawater in Typhonian rituals. One does
not have to look far before one realises that magic employing shells
from the salt-sea forms part of a wider genre within the magical
papyri—spells that have the explicit aim of effecting intense sexual
attraction. The role of Typhon in such spells is clear: he is invoked to
effect an affinity so strong that the person upon whom this agonistic
and erotic magic is used will suffer psychophysical punishments (e.g.
insomnia: ‘give her the punishments’; ‘bitter and pressing necessity’,
etc.) until their desire for the magician is physically consummated.
Interestingly, the premiere substance sympathetic to
Seth-Typhon was iron: the metal most drastically corrupted by salt.
Moreover, iron and salt-water are the primary constituents of human
blood, a microcosmic recapitulation of the primordial salt ocean
(mythologically conceived: the cosmogonic waters; evolutionarily
conceived: the marine origin of species). Blood is the symbol par excellence
for intense passion, and its two poles are love and war, a fact which
precisely explains Seth-Typhon’s overwhelming functions in the magical
papyri: eros and enmity. Again, it is no surprise that intense sexual
attraction (desire, affinity, union) and intense hatred (repulsion,
aversion, separation) evoke Empedocles’ principles of ‘Love and
Strife’—the very functions governing the unification and separation of
the four elements. Moreover, the connection of Seth with redness, blood,
eros, war and the like equates with everything that the Indian sages
placed under the rubric of rajas, the excited passions, which,
as has been seen, are distinctly associated with the stimulating power
of salt. Be that as it may, the same divine energeia fed
and informed the functions of the Greek and Roman war gods, Ares and
Mars, both of whom take the association with iron in the scale of
planetary metals, as did Seth-Typhon among the Egyptians.
Seth is not only connected to salt, but to the power of the bull’s thigh,
the instrument by which the gods are ritually killed and revivified.
Here the connection of Seth to the power of the thigh suggests the
pivotal role played by this god in the quintessentially alchemical
process of death and rebirth, of slaying and nourishment. This theme
will be reiterated more than once in the course of this study, and it
should be pointed out that any deliberations on this myth are intended
as so many historical and phenomenological “circumambulations” around
the deep resonances generated by de Lubicz’s emphasis on the role of the
fixed femoral salt in palingenesis.
In the middle ages, the meaning of the term ‘salt’ was widened to
include substances that were seen to resemble common salt (e.g. in
appearance, solubility and so forth). Chemically speaking, a salt
is a neutralisation reaction between an acid and a base. The two have a
natural affinity for each other, one seeking to gain an electron (the
acid), the other seeking to lose one (the base). When this occurs, the
product is a salt. While more complex chemical definitions of salt can
be given, this one, advanced by Guillaume Francois Rouelle in 1744,
allows one to perceive the broader principles that motivated the
alchemists to select salt as the mineral image of the interaction of
sulphur and mercury (cinnabar, HgS, a salt in the chemical sense formed
from sulphur and mercury). As Mark Kurlansky points out:
It
turned out that salt was once a microcosm for one of the oldest
concepts of nature and the order of the universe. From the fourth
century BC Chinese belief in the forces of yin and yang, to most of the
worlds religions, to modern science, to the basic principles of cooking,
there has always been a belief that two opposing forces find
completion—one receiving a missing part and the other shedding an extra
one. A salt is a small but perfect thing.
More precise
chemical definitions specify that a salt is an electrically neutral
ionic compound. Here, the same principle of perfect equipoise between
opposing energies prevails. Ions are atoms or molecules whose net
electrical charge is either positive or negative: either the protons
dominate to produce an ion with a positive electric charge (an anion,
from Greek ana-, ‘up’), or the electrons dominate to produce an ion with a negative electric charge (a cation, from Greek kata-,
‘down’). When anions and cations bond to form an ionic compound whose
electric charges are in equilibrium, they neutralise and the result is
called a salt.
The chemical definition opens up the conception of
salt beyond that of mere sodium chloride. Chemically, the coloured
oxides and other reactions of metals—of especial significance to the
alchemical perception—are often salts (the metal itself taking the role
of base; oxygen the acid). Alchemically, or at least
proto-chemically, because the reactions of metals were coloured, they
were important signifiers of the metal’s nature, often seen as an index
of its spirit or tincture (ios, ‘tincture, violet/purple’). The
seven planetary metals were often signified by their coloured salts or
oxides: e.g. lead is white; iron, red (rust); copper is blue/green;
silver is black. Gold remains pure (unreacting) but its tincture was
identified with royal purple (seen in the red-purple colour of colloidal
gold, gold salts, ruby glass etc.)
Although
the purview of hieratic alchemy was far wider than mere
proto-chemistry, chemical and technical processes were undeniably
integral to the alchemists’ savoir-faire. As such it is no
surprise to find salts of various kinds figuring in the earliest strata
of alchemical writings, East and West. In the Greek “proto-chemical”
texts that Marcellin Berthelot brought together under the rubric of
alchemy, several different salts are distinguished and listed in the
registers alongside the lists of planetary metals and other chemically
significant minerals. In addition to salt (halas), one finds common salt (halas koinon) and sal ammoniak (halas amoniakon). More importantly, however, is the significant prefiguration of the tria prima and tetrastoicheia (four
element) relationship that is found in Olympiodorus (late fifth century
CE). Olympiodorus depicts an ouroboric serpent to which some
important symbolic nuances are added. In addition to the usual henadic
(unitary) symbolism of this ancient motif, the text displays its serpent
with four feet and three ears. The glosses to the image inform us that
‘the four feet are the tetrasōmia’ (the four elemental bodies) while the three ears are ‘volatile spirits’ (aithalai).
As will be seen in the balance of this study, this relationship of
unity to duality, duality to trinity, and trinity to quaternary is
pivotal to the Hermetic physics that Schwaller would attempt to convey
in terms of an alchemical Farbenlehre (cf. the Pythagorean tetraktys).
The
four elemental bodies have been interpreted as lead, copper, tin and
iron, (Pb, Cu, Sn, Fe), while the three sublimed vapours have been
identified with sulphur, mercury and arsenic (S, Hg, As). Although
salt is not included in this depiction, what is significant is that here
one finds the exact framework in which salt would later be situated as
one of the three principles (tria prima: sulphur, mercury, salt) alongside the four Empedoclean elements (tetrastoicheia:
fire, air, water, earth); here salt may be seen to replace arsenic due
to its more integral relationship to sulphur and mercury in the form of
cinnabar (mercuric sulphide, HgS): the salt of mercury and
sulphur. In regards to the metaphysical and cosmological nuances of the
symbolism, it may be noted that the three ears are outside the circle
while the four legs are inside, a fact that coheres with the view of the
trinity as creative and therefore standing outside of creation, while
the four elements, being created, are circumscribed within (cf. the
distinction in Neoplatonism between hypercosmic and encosmic forces, or
in Eastern Orthodox theology between uncreated and created energies). The distinct relation of salt to the body and the elements may
account for the cross-like sign it takes in the Greek manuscripts.
In
Arabic alchemy, salt figures most prominently in an alchemical text
that became influential in the West via its Latin translation: The Book of Alums and Salts (Arabic: al qawl fīl ‘l-milh, ‘a tradition on salt’; Latin: Liber de aluminibus et salibus). This text appears to be a practical handbook describing various
substances and operations, such as alum, different kinds of salt
(including the use of alkaline and ammoniac salts), the preparation of
arsenic for laboratory use, the comparison of arsenic and sulphur, as
well as the features of silver, tin, lead, iron, copper and glass.
Contrary to the habit of many scholars of alchemy to attribute the
sulphur-mercury-salt theory to Paracelsus, the triad in fact emerged as
an alchemical motif before Paracelsus.
As both Eberly and Haage inform us, it was Abu Bakr Muhammad Zakariyya
Ar-Razi (d. 925) who added the third principle of salt to the
primordial alchemical principles (sulphur and mercury) inherited from
Greek antiquity (implicit in the exhalation theory of metallogenesis),
and already existing in Jabir’s system. This and related traditions
must be recognised as clear precursors to Paracelsus’s conception of
the tria prima. Comments Eberly:
Razi
had an extremely well equipped laboratory and followed all of the
essentials of Jabir’s systems. In one area in particular, he expanded
upon Jabir’s theory. Razi added a third principle, philosophically
representing Spirit [Sulphur] as Mind, and Mercury as Soul, while adding
Salt as the principle of crystallization or body. […] Razi’s
descriptions of alchemical processes were closely studied and put into
practice by later European alchemists including Nicolas Flamel and
Paracelsus.
In the earliest strata of medieval hermetic texts, such as the Turba Philosophorum and Rosarium Philosophorum, salt is already accorded an abundance of alchemical significations. In the Turba, salt water and sea water are synonyms for the aqua permanens. In the Rosarium, Senior
tell us that mercurius is made from salt: ‘First comes the ash, then
comes the salt, and from that salt by diverse operations the Mercury of
the Philosophers’. Arnaldus de Villanova (1235?-1313) reveals that
‘Whoever possesses the salt that can be melted, and the oil that cannot
be burned, may praise God’. (The idea of salt in connection to an
oil that cannot be burned will be seen to persist in de Lubicz’s
alchemical texts). Salt is both the ‘root of the art’ and ‘the soap of
the sages’ (sapo sapientum) and is described as ‘bitter’ (sal amarum). Perhaps the most interesting signification in the Rosarium,
in light of the role salt would take as the pivot of death and
revivification, is the description of salt as ‘the key that closes and
opens’.
Here one begins to meet the same duality of function
that gives salt its inherent ambiguity. However, its identification with
the function of a key (clavis) helps considerably in conceiving salt with more clarity. The Gloria Mundi
would later reveal that salt ‘becomes impure and pure of itself, it
dissolves and coagulates itself, or, as the sages say, locks and unlocks
itself’. Here one gains a good intimation of the function that
salt would be later accorded in the traditions that emerge in Schwaller.
Perhaps the most concise encapsulation, in relation to the idea of salt
as the pivot of death and palingenesis, is Johan Christoph Steeb’s
remark that sal sit ultimum in corruptione, sed & primum in generatione, ‘salt is the last in corruption and the first in generation’.
A child of metallurgy and the
traditional crafts, alchemy cannot be easily separated from the concrete
aspect of existence any more than it can be separated from the
transcendent. Indeed, both become interfusible, interdependent and
interchangeable. If alchemy appears elusive, it is precisely because it
cuts across categories ordinarily seen as mutually exclusive. For this
reason, alchemy may be better approached not so much as a fixed domain
of activity, but as a nondualprocess. Indeed, its sphere of operation is better comprehended as existing betweendomains, or better yet, as the medium in
which more ‘fixed’ domains proceed. Like the fusible nature of metals,
this medium may be regarded as the ‘substance’ from which fixed forms
‘solidify’, and into which they ‘dissolve’. As such, it is the conditio sine qua non for
transmutation and dissolution, for converting one form into another,
and for dissolving and abrogating the familiar boundaries or borders
between apparently fixed states.
One
explicit example of this is the fact that the key object of the western
alchemical quest itself—the philosopher’s stone or ‘universal medicine’
(the perfecting agent par excellence)— is also, literally, a universal poison. In the Greek alchemical manuscripts, the expression is given as katholikon pharmakon. The word katholikonmeans ‘universal, whole’, while pharmakon,
a very ambiguous word, means not only ‘medicine’, but also ‘poison’,
and ‘magical philtre’. According to the mercurial Jacques Derrida (who
perhaps understood ambivalence better than anyone):
this
‘medicine’, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already
introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its
ambivalence. This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of
fascination, can be—alternately or simultaneously—beneficent or
maleficent’.
‘If the pharmakon is
ambivalent’ continues Derrida, ‘it is because it constitutes the medium
in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links
them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into
the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness,
speech/writing, etc.)’ Thus, in conjunction with its ability for transformation, the (universal) pharmakon is also a medium for cosmic enantiodromia.
This
capacity for fluid interweaving between different states of existence
is perhaps most eloquently expressed within alchemical tradition proper
by the seventeenth century Sufi, Muhzin Fayz Kāshānī, who described a
process in which ‘spirits are corporealised and bodies spiritualised’, a
process that, according to Henry Corbin, takes place in an
ontologically real, yet liminal, zone—the mundus imaginalis—which Corbin defined precisely as a juncture between the eternal and the transient, the intelligible and the sensible: the intermonde or intermediary realm par excellence. Importantly,
Corbin’s phraseology is not only drawn from Persian and Arabic mystical
texts (which deeply tinctured the alchemy of the time), it is also
consonant with other, earlier Islamicate alchemical sources, such as
the Kitab Sirr al-Asrar(Latin: Secretum Secretorum), whose Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald
Tablet) famously states: ‘that which is above is like that which is
below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to perform
the miracles of the one thing’. This formula, which is further ascribed to [pseudo] Apollonius of Tyana’s Book of the Secret of Creation, orBook of Causes (Kitāb Sirr al-ḫalīqa, or Kitāb al-῾ilal), bears a still deeper identity to the hieratic art as practiced by the Neoplatonic theurgists. According to Proclus,
the
theurguists established their sacred knowledge after observing that all
things were in all things from the sympathy that exists between all
phenomena and between them and their invisible causes, and being amazed
by that they saw the lowest things in the highest and the highest in the
lowest.
In
the alchemical purview, the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ aspects of existence
are ultimately reciprocal and interdependent expressions of a deeper,
more inclusive reality. Thus, to separate alchemy into a purely material
and a purely spiritual aspect in a mutually exclusive fashion, without
recognising their fundamental complementarity, is to miss the greater
flux between the volatile and the fixed with which alchemy is almost
invariably concerned. As a hieratic art, the alchemical vision of
reality encompasses all levels of existence within the holarchical monad, and as such engages the
world—including the world of duality, which is subsumed in the greater
whole—as a nondual reality: a simultaneously abstract and concrete
integrum.
In speaking of
alchemy as a nondual process it is important to understand just what is
meant when the term ‘nondual’ is used. The word itself is a formal
translation of the Sanskrit word advaita (a- + dvaita, ‘not dual’), and
is used to indicate an epistemology in which both ‘seer’ and ‘seen’ are
experienced not as separate entities but as a unity, a single act of
being in which both the subject and object of experience become agent
and patient of one divine act. While nondualism forms the basis of three
of the broadest currents in eastern metaphysics (Buddhism, Taoism and
Vedānta), it is also expressed explicitly or implicitly in the western
philosophical canon by figures such as Plotinus, Eckhart, Böhme, Blake,
Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead and Bohm, to
name but a few. Despite this, the idea of nondualism has not been
readily understood or accepted in the west, and this is because western
constructions of reality, especially after Decartes and Kant, are based
precisely upon a strict affirmation of mind-matter or subject-object
dualism. At the root of the matter lie two fundamentally different ways
of experiencing the world. One is the ‘everyday’ experience available to
everyone; the other proceeds from a metaphysical experience
theoretically available to, but not necessarily attained by, everyone.
Although dualism and nondualism describe two different experiences of
the world, it is not simply a recapitulation of the materialist-idealist
divide (which is simply another dualism). As David Loy remarks:
none
of these three [Buddhism, Taoism, Vedānta] denies the dualistic
‘relative’ world that we are familiar with and presuppose as ‘common
sense’: the world as a collection of discrete objects, interacting
causally in space and time. Their claim is rather than there is another,
nondual way of experiencing the world, and that this other mode of
experience is actually more veridical and superior to the dualistic mode
we usually take for granted. The difference between such nondualistic
approaches and the contemporary Western one (which, given its global
influence, can hardly be labelled Western any more) is that the latter
has constructed its metaphysics on the basis of dualistic experience
only, whereas the former acknowledges the deep significance of nondual
experience by constructing its metaphysical categories according to what
it reveals.
What
is proposed, therefore, is to begin to understand certain forms of
alchemy as an expression of a nondual experience of (and engagement
with) the world, not only with regard to the dualities of spirit and
matter, but also their corollaries: subjective experience and objective
experiment. As Prussian poet and Kulturphilosoph Jean Gebser
observes with regard to the structures of consciousness that underpin
entire modalities of civilisation, nondualistic or aperspectival
epistemologies do not exclude but integrate more perspectivally-bound epistemologies within a diaphanous whole. [ What
this means is that apparent dualities are not ultimate; rather, they
are relative expressions of a deeper reality that is ultimately free
from the limitations of dualism and opposition. It means that one can
see all things in the ‘ultimate’ reality, and reciprocally, the
‘ultimate’ reality in all things. It is to see, with Blake, ‘a World in a
Grain of Sand’ and ‘Eternity in an hour’. According
to this view, one eventually fails to distinguish between the ultimate
and the relative in a rigidly dualistic way, abandoning the attribution
of any inherent ontological primacy to one or the other. Because there
is no longer any essential contradiction or opposition
perceived to exist between them, so-called ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’
realities become co-present, interdependent expressions of a deeper,
‘existentiating’ field of being. What
is more, according to the ancient epistemology ‘like knows like’, the
nondual, aperspectival or integral nature of reality, in both its
relative and ultimate expressions, can only be known by the nondual,
aperspectival or integralconsciousness. It is in this sense that alchemy, in its more profound sense, necessitates a metaphysics of perception.
From our garden here at The Black House, we offer Solstice greetings to all in harmony with the Earth’s seasonal changes! We in the Northern Hemisphere embrace the longest day of the year as sultry Summer begins. Those in the Southern Hemisphere mark the longest night as Winter begins its chill dominion.
Wherever on this wondrous planet you might be, it is always a delight to celebrate the glories of nature and the abundant pleasures that life offers!
Here’s to a splendid new season filled with indulgence galore!
More engravings from Claude Paradin’s Les Devises Heroiques—first published in 1556, reprinted in Occult Images (Agile Rabbit Editions) by Pepin Press in 2002 (various unknown artists, pre-16th century CE).
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.
Unity manifests itself as Trinity. It is the
“creatrix” of form, but still not form itself; form emerges through
movement, that is, Time and Space. —Schwaller de Lubicz
Schwaller’s understanding of the tria prima
as the creatrix of form is essentially consonant with the trinitarian
conceptions of Egyptian (and later Pythagorean) cosmogonic theology.
Here, the creator’s divine hypostases—Hu, Sia and Heka—manifest as the
extra- or hyper-cosmic forces that exist before creation; they are the forces necessary to the establishment of creation rather than creation per se.
This may be compared to the identical conception that emerges in
Iamblichean theurgy, which distinguishes between hypercosmic and
encosmic divinities, or the same essential principles as carried through
into the trinitarian theology of Eastern Orthodoxy, which distinguishes
between uncreated and created energies. Beyond these general point of
orientation, Schwaller’s hermetic metaphysics accorded the tria prima some very specific characteristics:
The
Trinity, that is to say the Three Principles, is the basis of all
reasoning, and this is why in the whole “series of genesis” it is
necessary to have all [three] to establish the foundational Triad that
will be[come] the particular Triad. It includes first of all an abstract
or nourishing datum, secondly a datum of measure, rhythmisation and
fixation, and finally, a datum which is concrete or fixed like seed.
This is what the hermetic philosophers have transcribed, concretely and
symbolically, by Mercury, Sulphur and Salt, playing on the metallic
appearance in which metallic Mercury plays the role of nutritive
substance, Sulphur the coagulant of this Mercury, and Salt the fixed
product of this function. In general, everything in nature, being a
formed Species, will be Salt. Everything that coagulates a nourishing
substance will be Sulphur or of the nature of Sulphur, from the
chromosome to the curdling of milk. Everything that is coagulable will
be Mercury, whatever its form.
The image of coagulation—with
Sulphur as the coagulating agent, Mercury as the coagulated substance,
and Salt as the resulting form—is used repeatedly by Schwaller. The
formal articulation of this idea, as published in his mature œuvre, connects the motif to the embryological process:
In
biology, the great mystery is the existence, in all living beings, of
albumin or albuminoid (proteinaceous) matter. One of the albuminoid
substances is coagulable by heat (the white of the egg is of this type),
another is not. The albuminoid substance carrying the spermatozoa is of
this latter type. The albuminoid sperm cannot be coagulated because it
carries the spermatozoa that coagulate the albuminoid substance of the
female ovum. As soon as one spermatozoon has penetrated the ovum, this
ovum coagulates on its surface, thus preventing any further penetration:
fertilisation has occurred. (In reality, this impenetrability is not
caused by a material obstacle, the solid shell, but by the fact that the
two equal energetic polarities repel one another). The spermatozoon
therefore plays the role of a “vital coagulating fire” just as common
fire coagulates the feminine albumin. This is the action of a
masculine fire in a cold, passive, feminine environment. Here also,
there are always material carriers for these energies, but they manifest
the existence of an energy with an active male aspect and a passive
female aspect that undergoes or submits to it. Ordinary fire brutally
coagulates the white of an egg, but the spermatozoon coagulates it
gently by specifying it into the embryo of its species. This image shows
that the potentiality of the seed passes to a defined effect through
the coagulation of a passive substance, similar to the action of an acid
liquid in an alkaline liquid, which forms a specified salt. Now the
sperm is no more acid than the male albumin, but it plays in the animal
kingdom [animalement] the same role as acid; ordinary fire is
neither male nor acid and yet it has a type of male and acid action.
This and other considerations incline the philosopher to speak of an
Activity that is positive, acid and coagulating, without material
carrier, and of a Passivity, a substance that is negative, alkaline, and
coagulable, also without material carrier. From their interaction
results the initial, not-yet-specified coagulation, the threefold Unity, which is also called the “Creative Logos” (Word, Verbe) because the Logos, as speech, only signifies the name, that is, the definition of the “specificity” of things.
To
salt as the mean term between the agent and patient of coagulation, he
occasionally adds other revealing expressions, such as the following:
In geometry, in a triangle, the given line is Mercury, the Angles are Sulphur, and the resultant triangle is Salt.
Whereas here, Schwaller identifies Salt with a ‘datum’ or ‘given’ which is ‘fixed like seed’ (une donnée concrète ou fixée comme semence), elsewhere he identifies the active, sulphuric function with that of the seed (semence).
What this means is that the neutral saline product, once formed, then
acts in the sulphuric capacity of a seed and ferment, but also
foundation:
It can only be a matter of an
active Fire, that is, of a seminal “intensity”, like the “fire” of
pepper, for example, or better: the “fire” of either an organic or a
catalysing ferment. The character of all the ferments, i.e. the seeds,
is to determine into Time and Space a form of nourishment—in principle
without form; clearly, therefore, it plays a coagulating role. The
coagulation of all “bloods” is precisely their fixation into the form of
the species of the coagulating seed, the coagulation being, as in other
cases, a transformation of an aquatic element into a terrestrial or
solid element, without desiccation and without addition or diminution of
the component parts.
In the identification of both sulphur and salt as semence,
one discerns a specific coherence of opposites that, in elemental
terms, is described by the expression ‘Fire of the Earth’. The salt is
described in the passage quoted above as a seed (semence). This seed “becomes” seed again through the process of tree and fruit (growth, ferment, coagulation). It is at once a beginning and a finality (prima and ultima materia).
The reality described is non-dual. Beginning and end partake of
something that is not describable by an exclusively linear causality;
and yet it is seen to “grow” or “develop” along a definite “line” or
“path” of cause and effect; at the same time it partakes of a cyclic or
self-returning character; and yet, for Schwaller, it is not the circle
but the spherical spiral that provides the true image of its
reality: a vision which encompasses a punctillar centre, a process of
cyclic departure and return from this centre (oscillation), as well as
linear “development”, all of which are merely partial descriptors of a
more encompassing, and yet more mysterious, reality-process. The
fundamental coherence of this vision to the Bewußtwerdungsphänomenologie of
Jean Gebser (1905–1973) consolidates the significance of Schwaller’s
perception for the ontology of the primordial unity which is at once
duality and trinity. For Gebser, consciousness manifests through
point-like (vital-magical), polar-cyclic (mythic-psychological) and
rectilinear (mental-rational) ontologies, each being a visible
crystallisation of the ever-present, invisible and originary ontology
which unfolds itself not according to exclusively unitary, cyclic or
linear modalities of time and space, but according to its own innate
integrum.
Thus there is no contradiction in finding the presence
of fiery sulphur in the desiccating dryness of the salt, for it is
precisely in the one substance that the sulphuric seed (active function)
and saline seed (fixed kernel) cohere. The fixed, concrete seed-form
(itself a coagulation of mercury by sulphur) contains the active
sulphuric functions (the coagulating rhythms) which it will impose upon
the nutritive mercurial substance (unformed matter). ‘One nature’, as a
Graeco-Egyptian alchemical formula puts it, ‘acts upon itself’.
Images are from the Tarot deck designed by de Lubicz himself.
Among
the various perspectives that have been surveyed on the nature and the
principles inherent to salt, it is perhaps the Pythagorean
statement—‘salt is born from the purest sources, the sun and the
sea’—that pertains most directly to the deeper meaning of Schwaller’s
hermetic phenomenology. Salt for Schwaller was placed in a septennial
relationship comprising the tria prima and the four elements.
Elementally, salt was situated by Schwaller at the end of a progression
beginning with fire and air and ending in water and earth. Fire and air
form a triad with sulphur; air and water form a triad with mercury;
water and earth form a triad with salt. But salt was also understood to
join the end of this progression to a new beginning, to a new
fire/sulphur, exactly as the octave recapitulates the primordial tonos in
musical harmony. For Schwaller, it was precisely this ‘juncture of
abstract and concrete’ (fire and earth) that was identified with the
formation of the philosopher’s stone (or at least the key to the formation of the philosopher’s stone):
Relationship between Tria Prima
and Tetrastoicheia. Trinity (Sulphur-Mercury-Salt) begets quaternary
(Fire-Air-Water-Earth). The juncture of Fire and Earth (abstract and
concrete) is the means by which the end of the series is linked to its
beginning. Diagram after Schwaller and VandenBroeck.
In
this configuration (which prefigures the discussion of de Lubicz’s
colour theory undertaken elsewhere), one begin to see the hermetic
“problem” of salt, i.e. its mysterium. Salt partakes of something that
stands between water and fire (Pythagoras’ ‘purest sources’) in a way
that is intimately related to earth, to which it imparts its dryness.
Here one finds an imbroglio that suggests at once an element and a
principle. Its connection to fire is felt in the hermetic associations
of the elements (the sulphuric triad, fire and air, is characterised by
heat; the mercurial triad, air and water, is characterised by humidity
or wetness, while the saline triad, water and earth, is characterised by
coldness; however, it salt’s dryness—its desiccating quality—can only come from fire. Visser’s remarks, once again, prove cogent and penetrating:
Salt,
once isolated, is white and glittering. It is the opposite of wet. You
win it by freeing it from water with the help of fire and the sun, and
it dries out flesh. Eating salt causes thirst. Dryness, in the
pre-Socratic cosmic system which still informs our imagery, is always
connected with fire, heat, and light.
Thus, inherent to salt
is an equal participation in fire, sulphur and heat (+) and water,
mercury, and wetness (–), such that it may be analogised with a chemical
neutralisation reaction in which the positive and negative values
become electrically equalised. This neutral condition is for Schwaller
the very ground of being in which we are existentially and
phenomenologically situated (‘everything in nature, being a formed
Species, will be Salt’). Thus, to see existence—reality as we know it—as
a neutralisation reaction between an active sulphuric function (divinity, logos, eidos) and passive mercurial substance (prima materia),
to perceive the coagulating sulphur and the nourishing mercury through
the “cinnabar” of all things, this is to “find” the philosopher’s stone.
It is fundamentally, for Schwaller, a metaphysics of perception.
We devised the Alchemy Thoth Tarot Spread primarily for the
purpose of problem solving, though no doubt it has more subtle uses. The
three-card groups allow the Tarot dignities to be used. One advantage of this
layout is its simplicity; it is based on the idea that Rajas (Sulphur, action)
acts upon Tamas (Salt, inertia) to bring about Sattwas (Mercury, wisdom).
Alchemical Salt (5 2 8): The inertia that must be overcome; the
problem or any difficulties around the question.
Alchemical Sulphur (6 3 9): Activity; the action that is most likely to be taken by the Querent.
Alchemical Mercury (4 1 7): A synthesis of forces; the solution; that
which will come to pass.
If desired, a card may be chosen and placed in the centre of
the triad before shuffling and laying the other cards, to represent the
Querent.
Occult Aspects 