A
L C H E M Y may be described, in the words of Baudelaire, as a process
of ‘distilling the eternal from the transient’. As the art of
transmutation par excellence, the classical applications of alchemy have
always been twofold: chrysopoeia and apotheosis
(gold-making and god-making)—the perfection of metals and mortals. In
seeking to turn ‘poison into wine’, alchemy, like tantra, engages
material existence—often at its most dissolute or corruptible—in order
to transform it into a vehicle of liberation. Like theurgy, it seeks not
only personal liberation—the redemption of the soul from the cycles of
generation and corruption—but also the liberation (or perfection) of
nature herself through participation in the cosmic demiurgy. In its
highest sense, therefore, alchemy conforms to what Lurianic kabbalists
would call tikkun, the restoration of the world.
Almost
invariably, the earliest alchemical texts describe procedures for
creating elixirs of immortality—of extracting transformative essences
from physical substances in order to render metals golden and mortals
divine. Through this, the earliest alchemists innovated physical
processes such as distillation and fermentation, extraction and
refinement, and the analysis and synthesis of various chemical
substances. However, it must not be forgotten that the earliest contexts of ‘material’ alchemy were not proto-scientific, but ritualistic.
Whether one looks at the Taiqing (Great Clarity) tradition of
third-to-sixth century China, the Siddha traditions of early medieval
India, or the magical and theurgical milieux of Hellenistic Egypt, the
most concrete alchemical practices were always inseparable from ritual
invocations to and supplications of the divinities whose ranks the
alchemist wished to enter. Moreover, in east and west alike, the
alchemical techniques themselves were allegedly passed down from
divinity to humanity. Alchemy was a divine art (hieratikē technē).
Whether
stemming from the entheogenic properties of physical elixirs, or
developing independently, the desire to encounter the divine directly
through inner experience (gnōsis, jnāna) was soon cultivated
via internal practices of a meditative or metaphysiological character.
Here the elixir began to be generated within the vessels of the human
body in order to transform it into an alchemical body of glory. Thus,
the two basic traditions—external and internal alchemy; neidan and waidan,
laboratory and oratory—can, in the final analysis, be regarded as
complimentary approaches to the same end: the attainment of perfection
through liberation from conditioned existence.
Despite
these generalising remarks, and despite the unusual aptness of
Baudelaire’s phrase, it must nevertheless be conceded that the effort to
define alchemy to everyone’s satisfaction may well be impossible. On
one hand, alchemy needs to be defined in a way that encapsulates the
living breadth and depth of the world’s alchemical traditions. On the
other hand, such a definition must also be internally consistent with
the many specific, historically contingent (and at timescontradictory)
expressions of alchemy. Moreover, the very attempt to strike such a
‘golden mean’ between the universal and particular, between the
‘synchronic’ and the ‘diachronic’, is something of an alchemical act in
and of itself—the elusive, indeed transformative, point where ‘art’
becomes science and ‘science’, art. In this respect, alchemy may well be
seen to inhere precisely in such ‘nodal points of qualitative change’
(as Jack Lindsay called them in his landmark study of Graeco-Egyptian
alchemy), or in instances of
‘qualitative exaltation’ (as the twentieth-century alchemist, René
Schwaller de Lubicz, described them with regards to the ‘teratological
proliferations’ of biological species).
Rather
than offer a single, rigid definition (which will quickly become
restrictive), what I would like to do in this introduction is present a
series of linguistic, historiographical, and phenomenological
‘circumambulations’ around the alchemical mysterium. In so
doing, I seek to trace some of the more salient contours of the
alchemical landscape, and, if possible, glimpse the presence of its
elusive ‘centre’. One of the merits of approaching alchemy by
circumambulation is that it affords a much wider circumscription of the
phenomenon than the narrowly fixed parameters of disciplinal specificity
usually permit; it therefore allows a more eidetic or phenomenological
insight to develop—an approach that, in German philosophical traditions,
is seen to promote actual understanding (Verstehen) rather mere explanation (Erklären). As Hans Thomas Hakl points out in a recent study of Julius Evola’s alchemical works, circumambulatio is
precisely the approach taken in order to engender an actual experience
of the realities that allegedly underpin the multiplicity of Hermetic
symbols. It is, potentially, a
method of ‘knowledge by presence’ rather than simple ‘representational
knowledge’. Of course, such approaches, which are fundamentally
morphological in their method, are also ahistorical in character, and so
what must be offered here is not an exclusivelyphenomenological
approach, but a circumambulation that is also tempered in the fires of
historical rigour. Such an approach, in my experience, is fundamentally
more balanced than either of the extremes.
At
the same time, it must be recognised that there is an inherent tension
to this balance; a tension that requires one to embrace a Heraclitean
‘harmony of contraries’ between deeply opposed methodologies. In
circumambulating a centre, whether as an ‘essentialist’ or ‘relativist’,
the ultimate nature of the centre, indeed the substantial existence of
the centre itself, must remain an open question. As the Dao de Jingremarks,
‘thirty spokes meet in the hub of the wheel, but the function of the
wheel is in the empty part’. Without the concrete spokes of
empirical-historical data, we may not become aware of the centre, and
yet this centre, which is empty, is precisely the function (the
phenomenological Verstehen) around which the spokes revolve,
giving them their form, their function and thus their meaning. Both
aspects are interdependent and both must be equally accounted for. Thus,
before we open up to any deeper phenomenological perceptions, our
circumambulations must begin by first situating alchemy in its concrete
historical-linguistic and historiographic contexts.
The
historical purview of what came to be called alchemy includes an
undeniable current of influence stemming from Pharaonic and Hellenistic
Egypt on one hand, and another stemming from ancient China, medieval
India and Tibet on the other―currents that appear to have
cross-fertilised before converging in Arabic alchemy, whence the term
proper: al-kīmiyā. Scholars have long known that the word alchemy points to an Arabic transmission (alkīmiyā becomes Spanishalquimia, Latin alchimia, French alchimie, German Alchemie, etc.) [The Arabic definite article al- points clearly to this, yet the precise origin of the lexeme kīmiyā is far from certain. Academic consensus has generally favoured Greek sources, notably those published by Marcellin Berthelot, suggesting an origin from the term chyma(‘that
which is poured out’; ‘flows, fluid’; ‘ingot, bar’; metaphorically,
‘confused mass, aggregate, crowd’; ‘materials, constituents’), whence chymeia, ‘the art of alloying metals’) named from its supposed inventor, Chymēs. As Harris observes in his 1704 Lexicon Technicum:
Chymisty,
is variously defined, but the design of this Art is to separate
usefully the Purer Parts of any mix’d Body from the more Gross and
Impure. It seems probably to be derived from the Greek word chymos, which signifies a Juice, or the purer Substance of a mix’d Body; though some will have it to come from cheein, to melt. It is also called the Spagyrick, Hermetick, and Pyrotechnick Art, as also by some Alchymy.
The
idea of fluid essences, extracts or elixirs is clearly central to the
alchemical purview, and as will be seen throughout this volume, it is
also inherent to the very names for alchemy in Chinese and Indo-Tibetan
traditions (Chinese dao jindan, Sanskrit rasāyana, Tibetan bcud len).
In addition, the Greek etymology distinctly emphasises the idea of
metallic fusibility, and the idea that metals are fundamentallyfusible entities proves central to the alchemical perception. The word ‘metal’ itself (metallon, metalleion) is homophonous with—and most likely derived from—a whole series of words indicating ‘transformation’, such as metalloiōsis, which is formed from the preposition meta– (‘between, with, after; taking a different position or state’) and the substantive alloiōsis (‘alteration’ or ‘change’).
Whether derived from chyma, chymeia, Chymēs, or chymos, the term alchemy appears to
come to the Latin west from late Greek sources through the same kinds
of channels that preserved Platonic and Aristotelian texts, in Arabic
translation, after the fall of the Greek Academy. While the lines of
historical transmission are well known, matters are not quite as simple
as they first appear. Egyptologists and Sinologists have both brought
forward diverging evidence that the origins of alchemy lay not in Greece
but in the Ancient Near or Far East.
The Egyptian Etymology
In addition to the Greek etymology, the root kīmiyā has also been traced to the Egyptian name for Egypt, km.t (Coptic keme, kēmi), which Plutarch gives as chēmia,‘the blackest earth’ (malista melangeion). The implications of this etymology are explored in detail elsewhere in this volume. Suffice
it to say for now that a wealth of theological and cosmological
significations deeply pertinent to alchemy emerge from Plutarch’s
identification of the name of Egypt with not only the blackness of the
soil, but also with the blackness of the pupil of the eye. On a basic,
symbolic level, this coheres with the fact that the Nilotic black earth,
which literally (and geographically) defined Egypt, was fertile soil—the
perfect receptor of life-giving seed; in the same way, the transparent
openness that forms the pupil of the eye is the perfect receptor of
light.
As will be seen,
these significations directly tie the early conception of alchemy to
genuine Egyptian theological conceptions on one hand, and to the Greek
Hermetic corpus on the other, a point that has already been articulated
in some detail by Erik Iversen with regard to the Memphite cosmology of
the Shabaka stone and its clear recapitulation in the Corpus Hermeticum itself. Furthermore,
as the late Algis Uždavinys makes abundantly clear, this current of
alchemy cannot be divorced from the numerous morphological continuities
that exist between Egyptian mortuary cult on one hand, and Homeric,
Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic and hieratic Neoplatonic traditions on the
other. And as scholars such as
Peter Kingsley have shown, these morphological connections are not
merely apparent: they are deeply rooted in a fine web of mutual
historical and geographical interactions between the initiatic
traditions not only of Egypt itself, but those of southern Italy and
Sicily (whence the Pythagorean current that would retain such a strong
presence in the Hermetic tradition down through the centuries, from
Bolus of Mendes to the Turba Philosophorum).
The Chinese Origin of the Chem- Etymon
Joseph Needham, in the alchemical volumes of his magisterial Science and Civilisation in China, makes a very plausible case for the Greek and Arabic borrowing of the Chinese term jin (‘gold’) or jin i (‘gold
juice, gold ferment’), terms explicitly linked to aurifaction,
aurifiction and elixirs for perfecting bodies, all of which appears to
place kīmiyā in an original context not only of Taoist
metallurgical practices, but also of traditions of physical immortality
(macrobiotics). After one of the most lucid and thorough surveys of the existing etymological evidence for alchemy, Needham, concludes:
If some have found an influence of jin (kiem) on chēmeia (chimeia, chymeia) difficult to accept, there has been less desire to question its influence on al-kīmiyā.
No Arabic etymologist ever produced a plausible derivation of the word
from Semitic roots, and there is the further point that both jin i and kīmiyā could and did mean an actual substance or elixir as well as the art of making elixirs, while chēmeia does
not seem to have been used as a concrete noun of that kind. We are left
with the possibility that the name of the Chinese ‘gold art’,
crystallised in the syllable jin(kiem), spread over
the length and breadth of the Old World, evoking first the Greek terms
for chemistry and then, indirectly or directly, the Arabic one.
Needham
makes it saliently clear that alchemy is not simply a product of
Hellenistic culture. Although it is difficult to accept an exclusively Chinese
origin for alchemy, the copious evidence adduced by Needham and his
collaborators over four large volumes irrevocably transforms (and
complicates) the overall picture of the genesis of alchemy. In short,
not only must one come to terms with the Ancient Near Eastern influence
upon Hellenistic and Islamicate alchemical traditions, one must also
contend with the Ancient Far Eastern influences upon the intellectual
and technical history of alchemy. This is especially pertinent given the
attested lines of cultural exchange between the Asian, European and
African landmasses along the Silk Road, which were established during
the Han Dynasty (206 bce – 220 ce).
The most important Chinese term for alchemy was jindan,
or ‘golden elixir’, which was conceived in both an external sense (as a
macrobiogen) and an internal sense (as a spiritual embryo). Jindan also
referred especially to cinnabar, the red salt of sulphur and mercury,
and the raw ingredient from which mercury was refined. As such, cinnabar
points to one of the most ancient and pervasive mineral theophanies of
the world’s alchemical traditions: the marriage of mineral sulphur and
metallic mercury to form a red crystalline stone (mercuric sulphide).
Around this naturally occurring substance, multiple layers of
historical, cultural and mythological meaning would accrue not only in
Chinese and Indo-Tibetan but also in Islamicate and European alchemical
traditions.
With regard to
our previous remarks on metal as a quintessentially fluid substance, it
may also be added here that in ancient Chinese cosmology, metal (for
which jin was also a generic term) was regarded as one of the five elements (wu xing);
not only was it regarded as the ‘mother’ of the water element, the
metal element itself was defined precisely by its double capacity to melt and to solidify into new form (as in a mould). This
ability to revert from a solid form to an amorphous or liquid state,
and back again, is a very important principle. In the western alchemical
canon it would inhere in the formula: solve et coagula,
‘dissolve and coagulate’, a formula that possesses deep symbolic value
in regards to ontologies of ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ (pointing to a more
paradoxical ontology embracing both ‘permanence in flux’ and ‘flux in
permanence’). It also underscores the universal value almost unanimously
given to mercury as the ‘essence’ of metals. For next to gold and
cinnabar, mercury figures as the most universal of all alchemical
substances in eastern and western traditions alike. When alchemically
refined, moreover, it came to be regarded less as a ‘substance’ per se, as more as the underlying principle of pure sublimity—of absolute volatility—with the unique power to penetrate and transform all things, especially minerals and metals (the most dense things).
If you are new to numerology, please see the earlier articles in the archive – for a menu of the detailed information behind this.
Sometimes it is helpful to access the link between numerology and
astrology, to call on the additional symbolic vocabulary which
astrologers have developed to a very sophisticated level.
If we are working in pure number – for the story told by numbers, or
for their manifold interrelationships, or even working with dates – we
can use the astrological linkages (see below) directly. However, if we
are working with words or names then we have an intermediate step to go
through.
The astrological vocabulary of numerology was brought in by the
Romans, and further developed in mediaeval times. So we have to work
with the number-values of letters which traditional European numerology
has used since Roman times:
1 is the value of A, I, J, Q, and Y
2 is the value of B, K, and R
3 is the value of C, G, L, and S
4 is the value of D, M, and T
5 is the value of E, H, N, and X
6 is the value of U, V, and W
7 is the value of O, and Z
8 is the value of F, and P
No modern letters are evaluated at 9
This is very different from the “normal” sequential values used by
modern numerology. It actually arose out of the letter sequence of the
pre-roman Etruscan alphabet. The Romans kept the old values when
working in Latin, and modern letters such as J, U, W, and Y were fitted
in later as they arose. So it looks a bit of a mess now, but a lot of
powerful people have been energising it for over 2,000 years. You may
sometimes find this called the “Chaldean System”, but the Chaldeans
wrote in cuneiform characters, so that name does not really stand up.
If we were to use the astrology with the much easier direct
letter-values which are normal in modern numerology, we would usually
get complete rubbish in the interpretation. Please stay with the
Aura-Soma Equilibrium Bottles as your deep vocabulary when working with
sequential modern letter-values.
The astrological linkages are:
ZERO was a concept unknown in Europe until about 1300, so it has no
old attributions, but has latterly been associated with the element
aether, and by some people with the planet Pluto.
ONE has positive polarity, and is associated with the fire element and the cardinal quality. It is ruled by the Sun.
TWO has negative polarity, and is associated with the water element and the fixed quality. It is ruled by the Moon.
THREE has positive polarity, and is associated with the air element and the mutable quality. It is ruled by Jupiter.
FOUR has negative polarity, and is associated with the earth element
and the cardinal quality. In Roman times it was ruled by Saturn, but
the Mediaeval revision (see below) gave it to the Sun, now in modern
times it is ruled by Uranus.
FIVE has positive polarity, and is associated with the air element and the fixed quality. It is ruled by Mercury.
SIX has negative polarity, and is associated with the air element and the mutable quality. It is ruled Venus.
SEVEN has positive polarity, and is associated with the water element
and the cardinal quality. In Roman times it was ruled by Jupiter, but
the Mediaeval revision (see below) gave it to the Moon, now in modern
times it is ruled by Neptune.
EIGHT has negative polarity, and is associated with the earth element and the fixed quality. It is ruled by Saturn.
NINE has positive polarity, and is associated with mutable quality.
It is ruled by Mars. Its elemental attribution is less clear.
Originally it was given the fire element, but the Mediaeval revision
suggested that it related to all elements, and some more recent
authorities associate it with aether.
The Mediaeval Revision
In Mediaeval times they thought that it was unfair that Saturn and
Jupiter should have two numbers each (although that can be traced back
to Chaldean astrology); so they decided that the “two great luminaries” –
the Sun and Moon – should have two numbers each and ordinary planets
only one. Likewise the fire element was identified as unfairly having
three numbers rather than two, so they associated the NINE with “all”
elements.
Identifying the Signs which will be revealed
Aries is positive cardinal fire
Taurus is negative fixed earth
Gemini is positive mutable air
Cancer is negative cardinal water
Leo is positive fixed fire
Virgo is negative mutable earth
Libra is positive cardinal air
Scorpio is negative fixed water
Sagittarius is positive mutable fire
Capricorn is negative cardinal earth
Aquarius is positive fixed air
Pisces is negative mutable water
In analyses, the elements and qualities are more important than the
polarities, as it is possible to have a result showing such as “negative
cardinal air” – a combination which does not exist in a real sign. In
such cases we would ignore the polarity.
How can we use this?
Let’s try an example of finding the astrological vibrations in the name of “Fred Smith”:
FRED SMITH
8254 34145
using the traditional letter-values.
First we count the occurrences of each factor:
Positive has 4 occurrences, from 5, 3, 1, and 5
Negative has 5, from 8, 2, 4, 4, and 4
Fire has 2 occurrences, from 3 and 1
Air has 2 from the two fives
Water has 1 from the single 2
Earth has 4 from the 8 and three 4s
Cardinal has 4 from the 1 and three 4s
Fixed has 3 from the 2 and two 5s
Mutable has 1 from the single 3
Sun has 1 occurrence
Moon 1
Jupiter 1
Uranus 3
Mercury 2
Venus <none>
Neptune <none>
Saturn 1
Mars <never occurs on an individual letter>
The total value of “Fred Smith” is 36, which reduces to (3+6=) 9, so the overall ruler is Mars.
Within the detail above, we have Negative slightly greater than
Positive, Earth out-ranking the other elements, Cardinal out-ranking the
other qualities, and Uranus (followed by Mercury) out-ranking other
planets.
Result
The Cardinal Earth sign in astrology is Capricorn, and it happens to be negative. So the dominant astrology is of Uranus in Capricorn. This could be refined to be seen as a Uranus-Mercury conjunction in Capricorn, with Uranus the stronger.
So words and names and pure number carry astrological influences.
Their vibration resonate to a harmonic in sympathy with normal planetary
astrology. If you are doing a personal reading, this enables you to
use numerology and astrology together. If you are working with the
symbolism of pure number, the astrology will bring out additional subtle
tones.
Details when using traditional letter-values
Accents
Umlaut = 5
Circumflex = 3
Cedilla = 3
Other accents = 0
Double letter ß = 10
The rationale here is that the umlaut represents a missing letter
“e”, and circumflexes or cedillas represent a missing letter “s”.
Whilst “ß” now represents “ss”, it originally represented “sz”. Other
accents are pronunciation indicators only.
Abbreviations
Spell out all abbreviations: including
“&” becomes “and”, or “et”, or “und”, etc.
“@” becomes “at”, or “à”, or “zu/bei” etc.
“U.N.” becomes “United Nations”
Extra information on number, unrelated to the use of astrology
Every individual rises again in the very form which his Work
(in the alchemical sense) has fixed in the secret (esoteric) depth of
himself.
— SHAIKH AHMAD AHSA’I —
S I N C E P A R A C E L S U S (1493-1541), salt has played a role
in alchemy as the physical “body” which remains after combustion, the
corporeal substance that survives death to reinaugurate new life. It was
both ‘corruption and preservation against corruption’ (Dorn); both the
‘last agent of corruption’ and the ‘first agent in generation’ (Steeb). As such, the alchemical salt functions as the fulcrum of death and
revivification. The idea that the agent, instrument and patient of the
alchemical process are not separate entities but aspects of one reality
prefigures the significance accorded in this study to ‘the Hermetic
problem of salt’. Just as in chemistry a salt may be defined as the
product of an acid and a base, alchemically, salt is the integral
resolution to the primordial polarities embodied in the mineral symbolique of cinnabar (HgS), the salt of
sulphur and mercury. In the alchemy of René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz
(1887-1961), salt forms the equilibrium between an active function
(sulphur, divinity, peras) and its passive resistance (mercurial substance, prima materia, the apeiron),
aspects which are latently present in the primordial (pre-polarised)
unity, but crystallised into physical existence as “salt”. With
Schwaller’s concept, one is dealing with a juncture of the metaphysical
and proto-physical. As will be seen, however, this also inheres in the
body as a fulcrum point of death and palingenesis.
Leap, Salve, Balsam
‘Salt arises from the purest sources, the sun and the sea’. —Pythagoras
In
order to understand the nature of alchemical salt one must first
understand the nature of common salt. In doing this, however, it is soon
realised that salt is anything but common; like many everyday things,
salt is so familiar that its singular peculiarity is taken for granted.
Visser, in an extraordinary study of the elements of an ordinary meal,
aptly encapsulates the cultural purview of salt in the following words:
Salt
is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves,
desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for
thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was willing to
labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and of mythic
meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its
links with experience of the sacred.
European languages derive their word ‘salt’ from Proto-Indo-European *sāl- (*sēl-) reflected directly in Latin as sal, ‘salt, salt water, brine; intellectual savour, wit’, Greek hals, ‘salt, sea’ (cf. Welsh halen) and in Proto-Germanic as *saltom (Old English sealt, Gothic salt, German Salz). In addition to its mineral referent, sal also gives rise to a number of cognates that help crystallise its further semantic and symbolic nuances. Saltus, saltum, ‘leap’, derives from the verb salio, ‘leap, jump, leap sexually’, whence Saliī,
‘priests of Mars’ from the ‘primitive rites (practically universal) of
dancing or leaping for the encouragement of crops’; saltāre, ‘dance’, salmo, ‘salmon’ (leaping fish), (in)sultāre, (‘insult’, literally ‘leap on, in’; figuratively, ‘taunt, provoke, move to action’), all from Indo-European *sēl-, ‘move forth, start up or out’, whence Greek ἁλλομαι, άλτo, ἁλμα (hallomai, halto, halma), ‘leap’; Sanskrit ucchalati (*ud-sal-),
‘starts up’. Importantly for the alchemical conception, alongside
‘leap’ one finds the meanings at the root of English ‘salve’ (balm,
balsam), derived from Indo-European *sel-p-, *sel-bh-, and giving rise to Cyprian elphos (butter), Gothic salbōn, Old English sealfian; in Latin: salus, ‘soundness, health, safety’; salūbris, ‘wholesome, healthy’; salūtāre, ‘keep safe, wish health, salute’; salvus, ‘safe, sound’; salvēre, ‘be in good health’; salvē, ‘hail!’; cf. also *sēl-eu-; Avestan huarva, ‘whole, uninjured’; Sanskrit sarva-, sarvatāti, ‘soundness’ and Greek ὁλοειται, ὁλος (holoeitai, holos), ‘whole’. These meanings are further connected to solidus, sollus, sōlor, with an ultimate sense of ‘gathering, compacting’, hence ‘solidity’.
In
addition to its salvific, balsamic and holistic aspect, which must be
regarded as the meaning most central to the alchemical perception, the
significance of salt as both ‘leap’ and ‘solidity’ must also be
recognised as integral. In particular, it pertains to Schwaller’s
conception of salt as the fixed imperishable nucleus (solidus)
regarded as the hidden mechanism underpinning the ontological ‘leaps’ or
mutations of visible evolution (contra the Aristotelian dictum, natura non facit saltum,
‘nature does not proceed by a leap’). For Schwaller, the seemingly
disconnected leaps of biological mutation are in fact bound by a hidden
harmony grounded in the saline alchemical nucleus.
Although it is
the intention of this study to explore the deeper meaning of salt in the
work of Schwaller de Lubicz—alchemically configured as the determiner
of an entity’s form—a number of studies have pointed to the crucial role
of salt as a significant shaper of civilisation. Perhaps the
earliest point of departure for this is the fact that salt only rises to
especial prominence with the emergence of an agricultural economy. Salt
intake, initially bound to blood and meat, had to be supplemented.
Comments Darby:
When man first learnt
the use of salt is enshrouded in the mists of the remotest past.
Parallel to the Ancient Greek’s ignorance of the seasoning, the original
Indo-Europeans and the Sanskrit speaking peoples had no word for it.
This apparent lack of salt-craving in early people could have been a
result of their reliance on raw or roasted meat. Later, when with the
invention of boiling the sodium content of meat was reduced, and when
the shift to an agricultural economy introduced vegetables in increasing
amounts, sodium chloride became a basic need to provide an adequate
sodium intake and, more important still, to counterbalance the high
potassium content of plants.
Commodity histories show that
salt was not always the easily available resource it is today; it had to
be striven for; it required effort and ingenuity (perhaps even wit).
It created trade and war; it was used as pay and exploited as a tax.
Nor did salt have the current stigma of being an unhealthy excess (a
problem symptomatic of modern surfeit). Quite to the contrary, salt
was typically a sign of privilege and prestige. ‘Salt like speech is
essentially semiotic’, Adshead remarks; ‘As such it could convey a
variety of meanings, of which the clearest in early times was social
distance: high cooking, low cooking, above and below the salt’. Considerations such as these help contextualise many of the ancient
values surrounding salt, some of which have become proverbial. In the New Testament,
for instance, but also elsewhere, the sharing of salt (often with bread
at a table), represented a deep bond of trust, of communal solidarity,
while the spilling of it was considered a grave faux pas.
Indeed, if salt was as freely available for liberal exploitation as it
is today, such ethical and social implications would scarcely carry any
weight at all.
Most of salt’s social meanings reflect its deepest functional value as a preservative. Just
as salt keeps the integrity of plants and meats intact, so salt was
seen to keep the integrity of a body of people together. As a prestige
substance that could preserve food through the death of winter and bind
people in communal solidarity, salt was highly regarded; during Roman
times, salt even became a form of currency, whence our word ‘salary’
(from Latin salārium, ‘salt money’) after the Roman habit of
paying soldiers in pieces of compressed salt (hence the phrase: ‘to be
worth one’s salt’). Because of its integrating character, salt
bridges opposites. Paradoxically, however, the more one attempts to pin
salt down in a strictly rational manner, the more the contradictions it
embodies abound.
‘There are totally different opinions concerning
salt’, writes Plutarch (c. 46–120 CE), who preserves a number of
contemporary beliefs, including the view that salt possesses not only
preservative qualities, but animating and even generative power:
Some
include salt with the most important spices and healing materials,
calling it the real ‘soul of life’, and it is supposed to possess such
nourishing and enlivening powers that mice if they lick salt at once
become pregnant.
Consider also
whether this other property of salt is not divine too […] As the soul,
our most divine element, preserves life by preventing dissolution of the
body, just so salt, controls and checks the process of decay. This is
why some Stoics say that the sow at birth is dead flesh, but that the
soul is implanted in it later, like salt, to preserve it […] Ships
carrying salt breed an infinite number of rats because, according to
some authorities, the female conceives without coition by licking salt.
The connection of salt to the soul, a balsam to the body,
will be explored in more detail when the alchemical contexts of salinity
are examined. Its fertilising, generative power, on the other hand,
bears obvious comparison to salt’s known capacity to stimulate the
growth of the earth—a leavening function extended to the role of the
Apostles in the Christian Gospels: ‘Ye are the salt of the earth’.
And yet too much salt will make the earth sterile.
In ancient
times, offerings to the gods were made with salt among the Israelites:
‘with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt’, but without salt
among the Greeks: ‘mindful to this day of the earlier customs, they
roast in the flame the entrails in honour of the gods without adding
salt’. The Egyptian priests favoured rock salt in sacrifices as
purer than sea salt; and yet ‘one of the things forbidden to them
is to set salt upon a table’; they ‘abstain completely from salt as
a point of religion, even eating their bread unsalted’. Although
the Egyptians ‘never brought salt to the table’, Pythagoras, who
according to the doxographic traditions studied in the Egyptian temples,
tells us that:
It should be brought to
the table to remind us of what is right; for salt preserves whatever it
finds, and it arises from the purest sources, the sun and the sea.
The understanding of salt as a product of sun and sea, i.e. of fire and water, ouranos and oceanos,
touches on its broader esoteric and cosmological implications, not all
of which were peculiar to Pythagoras. These aspects become central
in alchemy, where, as will be seen, salt acts as the earthly ligature
between fire (sun) and water (sea), the arcane substance whose patent
ambiguities stem from its role as embodiment and juncture of opposites:
purity and impurity, eros and enmity, wetness and desiccation, fertility
and sterility, love and strife. One thing that the present discussion
of the mythological and historical aspects of salt hopes to emphasise is
that none of these ideas are really born of speculation or abstraction;
rather, they are all intimately linked to the basic phenomenology of
the substance itself.
Above all, salt is ambiguous. While some of
these ambiguities may be attributed to the unevenness of the sources,
and while some points of contradiction may be cleared up upon closer
examination (the negative Egyptian views on salt, for instance, mainly
seem to apply to times of ritual fasting), this does not eclipse the
overarching sense that salt, by its very nature, defies strict
definition.
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.
Occult Aspects 