Alchemy

Alchemy was for nearly two thousand years the name for the most ambitious work a learned person could undertake: the transformation of base matter into gold, and of the mortal body into something that would not die. It is also the ancestor of chemistry, which separated from it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The left-hand path has never forgotten it. Its language of dissolution and recombination, of a matter that must be blackened before it can be made gold, describes the work of self-initiation better than most of what was written for the purpose.

This page describes alchemy as reference: its history, its principal ideas, and the ways in which practitioners read it now. The Order's texts teach no alchemy, and nothing on this page should be attempted in a laboratory.

The Name and Its Origins

The English word comes from the Arabic al-kimiya, which came from a Greek word whose origin is disputed. One theory derives it from an old name for Egypt, the black land, so that alchemy is "the Egyptian art." Another derives it from a Greek word for pouring or casting metal. Neither is certain.

The Western tradition began among Greek-speaking craftsmen and philosophers in Egypt in the first centuries of the common era. It passed to the scholars of the Islamic world, who greatly extended it, and reached Latin Europe in the twelfth century in translation. Independent traditions arose in China, where the aim was chiefly an elixir of long life, and in India. The European tradition flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The greatest natural philosopher of the seventeenth century left behind something like a million words on alchemy, and kept them to himself, as alchemists had always done.

The Emerald Tablet

The most famous text of alchemy is very short. It is attributed to the thrice-great Hermes, the legendary sage of the Hermetic writings described on the page Origins of the Left-Hand Path, and it first appears in Arabic sources of about the eighth or ninth century. It says, in the line everyone quotes, that what is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below, for the working of the miracle of the one thing. The phrase "as above, so below" compresses it. For the alchemist it meant that the transformation of metals and the transformation of the soul were one work seen from two sides.

Two Alchemies

From the beginning, alchemy had an outer and an inner side. The outer work took place in the laboratory, with furnaces, vessels, and real substances, many of them poisonous. The inner work took place in the alchemist, who was expected to be purified by the labor, the patience, and the prayer that the outer work required. Over the centuries the balance shifted, and by the Renaissance many alchemists regarded the inner work as the real one, and the laboratory as its school.

In the twentieth century a Swiss psychiatrist read the alchemists' images, their marriages of king and queen, their black crows and white doves and red stones, as projections of a process of inner development that he believed every person could undergo. His reading has been enormously influential, and is the one most practitioners of the left-hand path now assume. It is one reading among several, and historians of alchemy have shown how much of the laboratory it leaves out.

The Three Principles

A sixteenth-century Swiss physician taught that all things are made of three principles, which later alchemists called the three first things.

• Sulfur, the principle of combustion, corresponding to the soul.
• Mercury, the principle of fluidity and volatility, corresponding to the spirit.
• Salt, the principle of solidity, corresponding to the body.

These are not the substances that now bear those names. They are qualities, and the work of alchemy was to separate them, purify them, and join them again in a better proportion. Modern accounts sometimes exchange the roles of the three. The scheme given here is the usual one.

The Seven Metals

The alchemists knew seven metals, and joined each to one of the seven wandering lights of the sky, which in the ancient reckoning included the sun and the moon.

The great work of turning lead into gold was, read inwardly, the work of turning what is heaviest and most limited in a person into what is most complete. Modern books add to each metal a gland, a chakra, and a color. Those additions are recent, and the page The Subtle Body says what is known of their history.

The Stages of the Work

The older alchemists described the work by the colors the matter passed through.

• The blackening. The matter is broken down, putrefied, and reduced to a black mass. Nothing can be built until the old form has been destroyed.
• The whitening. The black matter is washed and purified until it turns white.
• The yellowing. A stage named by some authors and dropped by others.
• The reddening. The purified matter is fixed and perfected, and becomes the red stone.

Many modern books instead give a list of seven operations: calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, fermentation, distillation, and coagulation. It is a useful list, but it is a modern arrangement, and the old texts give their operations in many different numbers and orders.

Solve et Coagula

The whole of alchemy is often compressed into two Latin words: solve, dissolve, and coagula, bind. What is fixed must first be dissolved, and what has been dissolved must be bound again in a new form. The two words are written on the arms of the goat-headed figure drawn in France in the 1850s, described on the page Faces of the Adversary, and the figure is a diagram of exactly this: opposites taken apart and joined.

A practitioner of the Order will recognize the formula. The third coil, the Shedding, is a dissolving: what was given is taken apart and examined. The fourth, the Venom, has much in common with the blackening. The fifth, the Coil, is a binding: what has been kept and recovered is gathered into a single will. The Order's texts do not use alchemical language, and the comparison is offered for contemplation, not as doctrine.

The Stone

The end of the work was the philosophers' stone: a substance that would turn base metal to gold, heal every illness, and prolong life. Read inwardly, the stone is a self that has been through the furnace and been made whole, and that can transform what it touches. Many alchemists insisted that the stone could not be bought, and could be won only by the one who would possess it, slowly and with many failures. In that respect, at least, they were self-initiates.

Everyday Alchemy

Practitioners who use alchemy as a way of thinking find it in ordinary things. Cooking is alchemy: ingredients joined and changed by heat and time into something none of them was. A bath of warm salt water before a working is a small solution in which the practitioner is the matter. And a process that is followed gives the result expected, a lesson the page Designing a Working applies to every working.

Why the Path Returns to It

Alchemy offers the left-hand path three things. It offers a vocabulary for transformation that is neither the vocabulary of salvation nor that of therapy. It offers the insight that the old form must be broken before the new one can be made, and that the breaking is dark work, which the path has always held. And it offers a model of a work that is done by the practitioner alone, at their own furnace, over years, which no one else can do for them and no one else can confer. The alchemists kept their art secret. The Order holds that the art is better in the open, and that the furnace belongs to everyone who is willing to tend it.