gold in the crucible

8/13/2019 Gold in the Crucible

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Gold in the Crucible

By I. M. Oderberg

Study what thou art,

Whereof thou art a part,What thou knowest of this Art,

This is really what thou art.All that is without thee,

Also is within,

Thus wrote Trismosin. -- From theAurum Vellus, 1498

THERE is a strange allure about the medieval pictures of alchemists laboring at furnacesand scientific retorts, seeking the elusive means to make gold and to discover the secret

of long life. Yet . . . were they really doing these things? Some commentators believe that

many meanings of a psychological and metaphysical kind were hidden within their

drawings and the essays that accompanied them. This opinion is based upon traditionscoming down to us from ancient days.

Classic and other writers of the far past have informed us that the Mystery Schools ofantiquity were concerned mainly with the development of character, or the unfoldment of

the spiritual potentials of their students. Their system of education disappeared when the

Schools were closed, but was replaced later by a new method called "the work,"employed by the alchemists to fit in with the conditions of their times. This "divine

science" made its first strong penetration in Europe in the eighth century through Geber,

the Arabian. It was widely known before that, however, in China, India, Egypt, and othernations, and we have, too, a book by Zosimus written in Greek about 400 AD. The well-

known writings ascribed to Hermes 'the Thrice Great' may be derived from old Egyptiansources in versions filtered down through the alchemists, but whereas some modern

defenders and exponents of alchemy have thought the 'Emerald Tablet' of Hermes wasmerely a chemical recipe for preparing sulphuric acid, others have seen in it a profound

statement of the Law of Correspondences. For it asserts that what prevails in the large

universe, pertains in all its parts, from solar system to atom, from the heavens to man --

the knowledge of one is the key to all.

Today we are witnessing a revival of interest in alchemy, as shown by the publication of

numerous books and articles on the subject. Enterprising publishers, in an attempt to meeta demand apparently greater than the supply, have also been reprinting indiscriminately

old alchemical works or commentaries of good, bad and indifferent quality. The

alchemists of the Middle Ages, indeed of all times and races, threw a veil of secrecy

about their work, even about their objectives. Two phrases that have come to be jeeringlyassociated with them are thephilosopher's stone and the elixir of life. It has been thought

that the former was a kind of catalyst bastening. If not enabling, 'base' metals like lead to

be turned into 'noble' ones like gold and silver. Similarly, the 'elixir' has been deemed torefer only to a liquid essence capable of extending the normal span of human existence.


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Some historians of science ascribe to these terms strictly chemical meanings, conveying

formulas for making acids, other reagents and materials.

The word alchemy itself is believed to be from the Arabic Ul-Khemi, suggesting the

"science of nature"; but it is also linked with Egypt, the old name for which was Khem or

Chem. It is known that the alchemists used a cryptic language nicknamed 'lunar caustic.'This has been sarcastically derided by scholars and laymen until recent years, for theythought it a jargon coined by ignorant, superstitious men and that it also masked the

activities of charlatans and rogues who battened on the credulity of the populace. In our

days, we have grown accustomed to the symbolism used in various sciences, such aschemistry, where letters of the alphabet stand for the scores of elements out of which it is

believed all substance has been produced. These signs are applied to show in a shorthand

way bow compounds are made, and their atomic structure. Similarly, in the field ofbotany, they are used to depict the 'floral formulas' or composition of flowers, on which

are based the groupings of plants in their species, families and natural orders. Thus today

it is being recognized ever more widely that the alchemists were as entitled to their own

specialized language as modern scientists are to theirs.

But alchemical hieroglyphics were more than a quick means of expressing ideas that

otherwise would require awkward or complex sentences. The European alchemists lived

in a time of strictly enforced clerical orthodoxy, with drastic punishment for infringementof the credal dogmas. So they obscured their teachings and the requirements of their

system of training, which diverged drastically from Church policy and doctrine. They

used, for instance, such terms as sulphur, mercury and salt to stand for body, soul andspirit (some of the existing literature stresses that 'philosophical mercury' is distinct from

the metal of the same name, thereby indicating what other works preferred to leave to the

intuition of the student).

'Gold in the crucible' was the end of this educative process. It was what was left when allthe dross in man's nature had been burned off in the furnace of life's tests and

experiences. What the alchemists called thehomunculus to be created in the laboratory

was neither a kind of Frankenstein's monster nor a delusion, but St. Paul's "new man"born of or sublimated from the "old man" of unreformed and unenlightened habit. The

performers of the magnum opus (the 'great work') were not really the men who had found

the secret of making metallic gold, but rather those who were completing the work ofrefinement carried out on one's self. Stairway of the Sages is the suggestive title of an old

book in this field.

Despite the piety and devotion of Nicolas Flamel (1330(?)-1417) and others like him, the

Church was opposed to alchemy because it recognized that this was not just a search for

commercial gold, but that it provided a channel for the continued transmission of

heretical doctrines. In his Subterranean Physics (1669), Becher writes:

False alchemists seek only to make gold; true philosophers desire only knowledge. The

former produce mere tinctures, sophistries, ineptitudes; the latter enquire after theprinciples of things.


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The alchemical gnosis or wisdom was based on the correspondence between progressivestages of illumination and successive material operations. The psychotherapist Carl G.Jung realized but one aspect of the symbolism of alchemy when he delved into the

subject and equated it with twentieth century psychology (Psychology and Alchemy and

Alchemical Studies, Vols. 12 and 13 Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen

Foundation, Pantheon Books, New York); his association of the glyphs with theprocesses taking place within the mind of the human being was intuitive, but the full

parallelism seems to have been broader and deeper than he envisaged. He referred to

Paracelsus as the first scientist in psychology, and to his alchemical writings as providingvery brilliant insights into such phenomena as the basic bipolarity within each individual.

But some other commentators have maintained that Paracelsus' references to the elixir of

life and to gold are screens for his profound esoteric doctrines. When Paracelsus says thephilosopher's stone is white, obtainable only after nine months' work, he seems to be

pointing to the quality of purity and also making an analogy with the gestation period: the

physical course is a perfect symbol for the spiritual one, though the time cycle may be

much greater for the one than for the other.

Is this not a variant of the myths of the Quest for the Holy Grail, with the Holy Vessel a

synonym for the philosopher's stone, as Caron and Hutin suggest? (The Alchemists,

Evergreen Profile Books, 1961. 192 pages.) They have not been alone in this, nor in thepointer to Parsifal, with his similarity to the Celtic Pair Cyffail, the Cup of Regeneration,

to give added force to the comparison. There is certainly a parallel between alchemical

research and the gnostic illumination of the earliest Christian as well as pre-Christian

communities:

Traditional alchemy claims that it knows the principles of all the sciences; it seeks to

explain the nature, the origin, and the purpose of every existing thing; it has grandiose

plans for regeneration; it is gnosis and thaumaturgy. The adept seeks to sanctify reality.The art of alchemy is always accompanied, moreover, by a special ascetic discipline:

alchemy aims at the purification of Being, and endeavors to make man capable of

attaining supreme knowledge - his effective transmutation from the illusory to the real.The alchemist evidently regarded himself as having a mission to redeem the universe, for

in transmuting himself, the microcosm, he must also affect the macrocosm, that larger

system of which he is an inseparable part. Hence he must be completely involved in hiswork: all that he is as well as all that he has. The spiritual nature of this task was

indicated by the demand that "the artist be pure, humble, patient, chaste, intelligent,

wise." (op cit.,p. 106)

An article, "The Ancient Art of Alchemy" (Natural History Magazine, August-Septemberissue, 1963), by David Pramer, appears to take the view that the genuine alchemists were

but the forerunners of the present day scientists. He rates highly their contributions which

have resulted in our industrial science. But, as Caron and Hutin point out, they weresurely more than the first laboratory workers. There were three categories of people

loosely called alchemists: a) those who had gone after the magnum opus or 'great work;

b) the so-called 'puffers' (the men who did not know the secrets of the art of alchemy andso tried to discover them by experiment), and c) the charlatans. Unfortunately, the noise


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raised by the impostures drowned out the voices of the real thing, of which the former

were the counterfeits.

The 'puffers' tried everything, even the most ridiculous procedures. An amusing

aberration cited by Caron and Hutin states that

Because they grossly misinterpreted certain alchemical treatises, some of them were

convinced that a block of ice buried in the ground for a thousand years would infallibly

turn into rock crystal; or that lead required only four periods of two years each to pass insuccessive stages from its primitive state to red arsenic, from this state to tin and finally

to silver. -- p. 78

Although they worked in an unorganized way, they placed us in their debt because we

owe to them many features of our modern technology.

The 'puffers' may often have been amazed by the results of their experiments, for they

were really voyaging an unknown sea; but the genuine alchemists, the 'proficients,' basedtheir work on their own traditional principles, and not on experience gained through thesenses. They cannot be described as "wandering through the unknown," to use Diderot's

phrase. For the basis of all they did and wrote, as it appears from the very nature of their

system and procedures, is that there is no such thing as chance in this well-ordereduniverse of cause and effect. There is the continual implication that inner self-mastery

and "laboratory work" take place together, the symbolism of the one applying potently to

the other. We may note in this connection the similarity between what has just been said

and the way the language of the old crafts was used: artistic and warrior disciplines wereemployed to represent stages in the unfoldment of high qualities inside the human being.

For instance, what is called the Zen of flower arrangement, or of archery, as well as what

used to be the interior accompaniment of the jiu jitsu training before the physical aspectwas violently divorced from it to become judo, used words for physical actions to suggest

interior progression.

The decline of the Schools that should have been transparent vessels of the ancient light(of which gold was a symbol), led to the rise or use of alchemy in their stead. In China,

the objective of the alchemists was to "Make men like unto the gods." For the alchemists,

making gold meant a process taking place at the human level, within the man, and itimplied a mystical relationship between him and the 'noble metal." This seems to have

been a world-wide concept, for gold had a special place also in the sacred symbology of

the ancient Central and South American peoples.

But what was thephilosophers stone? One view is that the alchemists taught about a'universal solvent," by which all complex or compounded bodies are resolved into the

homogeneous or single substance from which they are evolved: this one element in

nature is .Pure gold" or summa materia. This implies a remarkable forecast of the latestscientific theory of matter or substance as being fundamentally composed of concreted

light! The solvent is thephilosopher's stone, which has been described as having "the

power to remove the seeds of disease from the human body, of renewing youth and


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prolonging life." But this appears to be far from a complete definition. Because man is a

miniature universe, his composite nature and the relationships between the parts reflect,in essence, the forces of his source and home. Thus Julius Sperber, a Rosicrucian

alchemist, says in hisIntroduction to the Philosopher's Stone (1674):

Lastly it [the philosopher's stone] so purifies and illuminates the soul and the body that hewho possesses it sees, as if in a mirror, all the celestial movements of the constellationsand the influences of the stars; remaining in his chamber with the windows closed, he

need not even contemplate the firmament.

Apparently each individual must discover it for himself as he steadfastly transforms andthus illumines his own nature. Similarly, we find pointers to this thought in early

alchemical writings of the 13th century:

The philosopher's stone has so marvelous a power that those who draw near to it ... afterthey have seen themselves therein, . . . will no more be the puppet of any illusion, so

clear-seeing and wise will they return therefrom. -- Jean de Meun,Romance of the Rose,

part 2 (1270)

If one could have such an experience, there is no doubt that there would be a brightperception that could see the flow of causes, that could pierce through the veils of

appearances into the heart of the cosmos as it actually is. Our impressions of the world

and life itself, colored as they are by ideas absorbed from our environment as wen asfrom our own personal preferences in one direction or another, must be an illusion

clouding our vision of the reality.

What then, did the alchemists mean by "attaining theElixir of Life"? Was it the "grace of

the awareness of God" of the Christian mystic or what the Hindu terms moksha or

"deliverance" from the wheel of earthly existence?

The genuine alchemists, perhaps few and far between as compared with the many who

were so called, were oriented towards service for the good of their fellows. Their names

shine as healers of the sick and benefactors of the poor. In an age when travel wasextremely hazardous, they went far and wide in order to share their insights and their

methods. As Dr. John Dee wrote in theHieroglyphic Monad: "We teach the true mystical

sympathy." This is the divinely human spirit (spiritus mundi) which they sought soassiduously to embody, and which it would be well if we tried to emulate. There is little

doubt that all the credal and racial bitternesses bubbling up in various parts of the world

would end their acid attacks upon the fine qualities that man has evolved through the

history of his earthly sojourn. The sour "tartaric" would be changed into the sweetening

agency of brotherly love.

(From Sunrise magazine, October 1963. Copyright 1963 by

Theosophical University Press)

gold in the crucible

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