The Alchemical Journey

Alchemy is best understood as a journey rather than a recipe. The alchemists wrote about a transformation of matter — the conversion of base metals into gold, the preparation of an elixir of long life — but the work they described was almost always also, and usually primarily, a transformation of the practitioner. To read the alchemical texts in their literal, chemical sense is to miss what the tradition is doing. To read them as pure allegory is to miss the seriousness with which the alchemists took their furnaces. The argument that alchemists were really only doing chemistry and the argument that they were really only doing Jungian psychology are both modern, and both miss the deliberate double-reading that defines the tradition (Principe 2013; Newman 2004).

The Prima Materia

The alchemists began from the premise that all metals, and indeed all things, are composed of a single underlying substance, the prima materia. This was not an element in the modern chemical sense. It was a kind of raw potential, an undifferentiated substrate out of which all particular forms arise.

The search for the prima materia generated a great deal of alchemical writing, much of it deliberately obscure. Some alchemists identified it with common substances: lead, mercury, sulphur, salt, the black residue left in a flask after distillation. Others insisted that it could not be identified with any single substance and that the seeker must recognise it by its qualities, not by its appearance. The alchemical motto that the prima materia is to be found “everywhere and nowhere” captures the sense that the work begins with a kind of recognition rather than a discovery.

In the symbolic reading, the prima materia is the human being in the unworked state: the soul as it is before the work of purification begins. The vessels and furnaces are also the soul and its faculties, and the prima materia is the very material of the self.

The Four Stages

Whatever the prima materia might be, the alchemists agreed that the work proceeded through a sequence of stages, most often described as four, often assigned characteristic colours. The first stage is nigredo, the blackening. The matter is “killed” — dissolved, decomposed, putrefied — and reduced to a black, formless mass. In the symbolic reading, this is the descent, the encounter with the shadow, the breaking of the ego. The alchemists used the language of death and burial freely: the matter is “buried in the earth,” “rotten in the dung-heap,” “swallowed by the dragon.”

The second stage is albedo, the whitening. The matter is washed, distilled, rectified, and emerges in a state of purity often represented as a white powder, a white stone, or a white queen. The alchemists often associated the albedo with the silver of the moon and with the feminine principle.

The third stage, citrinitas, the yellowing, is recognised in some traditions as a transitional state, often associated with the sun at dawn. In the older Latin and Arabic traditions, citrinitas is often folded into the albedo, and the four-stage scheme is reduced to three. In the Paracelsian and later traditions, citrinitas is treated as a distinct stage.

The fourth stage is rubedo, the reddening. The matter is fixed, made stable, brought to the final perfection, and the philosopher’s stone is produced. The symbolic reading is that of the integration of the opposites, the union of the male and the female, the solar and the lunar, in a single perfected being. The alchemists often represented the rubedo as a marriage, a king and queen conjoined, a hermaphroditic figure, or a red stone or powder.

The four stages are not a recipe to be followed mechanically. They are a description of the inner logic of the work, and individual alchemists arranged their operations in many different ways. Some, like the Rosarium Philosophorum of 1550, do present a strict sequence; others, like the Aurora Consurgens (c. 1350, attributed in the manuscript tradition to Thomas Aquinas but in fact of uncertain authorship), treat the sequence as a meditation rather than a procedure.

The Central Motto

The running summary of the whole procedure is the alchemical motto solve et coagula — dissolve and coagulate. The motto is attested from the earliest Latin alchemical texts onward (it appears in the Tractatus aureus attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and in the Rosarium), and it gives the alchemical work its essential form: break the compound down into its components, then re-combine the purified components into a new and more stable whole. The two operations are inseparable; the coagulatio without a prior solutio is dead matter, and the solutio without a subsequent coagulatio is mere dissolution. The motto is also one of the most useful entries into the symbolic reading, because the alchemists themselves use the solutio and coagulatio as images for the dissolution of the ego and its reconstitution in a higher form.

Symbols of the Work

The alchemists used a dense and highly developed symbolic vocabulary, much of it shared across the entire Western tradition. The most important symbols include the king and queen, the rebis, the green lion, the ouroboros, the philosopher’s stone, the dragon, the eagle, the peacock, the salamander, the hermaphrodite, the mountain, the garden, the tree, the bath, the marriage chamber, the child, the crow, the swan, the phoenix, and the king in his redness.

The king and the queen represent the solar and the lunar principles, the fixed and the volatile, the gold and the silver, the male and the female, the sulphur and the mercury. They are often shown being joined in a chemical marriage, the chymos gamos (chymical wedding), in which the two are conjoined to produce the perfected stone.

The rebis is the “double thing,” the conjoined male-female figure that appears in the final stage of the work. The famous image in the Rosarium Philosophorum of 1550 shows a single figure with two heads, one male and one female, on a single body, and it is one of the most reproduced images in the alchemical tradition.

The green lion is one of the most ambiguous symbols. In some texts it represents the prima materia, the raw and unworked base. In others it represents the dissolvent, the strong acid that breaks down the form of the metal. In still others it represents the spirit of mercury. The famous alchemical motto, “the green lion devours the sun,” is a warning that the unworked, raw, primal force will consume the higher, fixed principle if the work is not done properly.

The ouroboros, the serpent or dragon that devours its own tail, is one of the oldest symbols in the Western esoteric tradition. It appears in Egyptian funerary art, in Gnostic texts, in the magical papyri, and from there in the alchemical tradition. The ouroboros represents the cyclic nature of the work: the end of the process is also its beginning. The most famous alchemical ouroboros illustration, from the Theatrum Chemicum of 1659, carries the inscriptions Unus est Omnia and Hen to pan (“The All is One”), drawing on the Greek and Latin formula that the alchemists inherited from the Kitāb Sirr al-Khalīqa.

The philosopher’s stone, the lapis philosophorum, is the supposed product of the work. The alchemists gave it many names — the elixir, the magistery, the tincture, the powder, the red stone, the white stone, the fifth element — and they attributed to it the power of transmuting base metals into gold and of prolonging life. Many alchemists — though not all — insisted that the stone was not a substance in the ordinary sense.

The Western Lineages

The Western alchemical tradition is not a single lineage but a series of overlapping traditions. The most important are the Arabic, the Latin, the Paracelsian, the iatrochemical, and the Rosicrucian syntheses.

The Arabic tradition begins with the translation of Greek alchemical texts into Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries, and is most strongly associated with the figures of Jabir ibn Hayyan, al-Razi, and the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ (the Brethren of Purity, a tenth-century encyclopaedist group whose Epistles include significant alchemical material — though the Brethren are not alchemists in the strict sense). The Arabic tradition systematised the planetary-metal correspondences, the sulphur-mercury theory of metallic composition, and the laboratory techniques of distillation and sublimation. The Arabic alchemical vocabulary — alkali, alembic, elixir, athanor — has passed into the modern European languages (Principe 2013; Newman 2004; Holmyard 1957).

The Latin tradition begins with the translation of Arabic and Greek alchemical texts into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The most important Latin alchemical texts include the Summa perfectionis attributed to the Latin Geber (Paul of Taranto, fl. c. 1250–1300, distinct from the Arabic Jabir), the Rosarium Philosophorum of 1550, the Tractatus aureus (attributed in the manuscript tradition to Hermes Trismegistus but probably a Latin compilation of the thirteenth or fourteenth century), the works attributed to Arnald of Villanova, Ramon Llull, and John of Rupescissa (Jean de Roquetaillade, c. 1310–1366), and the writings of the English alchemists George Ripley and Thomas Norton, and the anonymous author of the Aurora Consurgens. The Latin tradition is the soil in which the modern European alchemical tradition grew (Principe 2013; Newman 1991).

The Paracelsian tradition begins with the work of Theophrastus von Hohenheim in the early sixteenth century. Paracelsus added to the older Arabic and Latin traditions the tria prima of salt, sulphur, and mercury, and insisted that the proper aim of alchemy was the making of medicines rather than the making of gold. The Paracelsian tradition is the source of much of the iatrochemical revolution of the seventeenth century, and of much of the magical and theurgical dimension of later European esotericism (Principe 2013).

The iatrochemical tradition treats alchemy as the proper foundation of medicine. The iatrochemist uses alchemical processes to prepare medicines, and sees the human body as an alchemical vessel in which the operations of nature are to be assisted and corrected. The tradition runs through van Helmont, Glauber, and the rest of the seventeenth-century iatrochemists, and is the direct ancestor of modern chemistry.

The Rosicrucian synthesis of the early seventeenth century attempted to bring together the Paracelsian medical tradition, the older Latin alchemical tradition, the Christian Kabbalistic tradition, and a new programme of mystical and social reform. The Rosicrucian manifestos — the Fama Fraternitatis of 1614, the Confessio Fraternitatis of 1615, and the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz of 1616 — were widely read in early seventeenth-century Europe. The Rosicrucian tradition is the direct ancestor of many later esoteric orders, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn of the late nineteenth century (Principe 2013; Faivre 1995).

Chinese and Indian Alchemy

The Chinese alchemical tradition is a parallel development with which the Western tradition had little contact. The earliest named figure is Wei Boyang, who in the second century CE composed the Cantong qi, a waidan (“external alchemy”) text on the preparation of elixirs of immortality. The fourth-century Taoist Ge Hong is the most important figure of the waidan tradition; his Baopuzi (c. 320 CE) contains the first extended Chinese treatment of laboratory alchemy. The later neidan (“internal alchemy”) tradition rerouted the waidan vocabulary inward: the elixir is no longer a substance compounded in the furnace but a state cultivated in the body. The standard reference in English is Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 2 (1974).

Jung’s Reading

A special note is owed to the modern psychological reading of alchemy, most influentially developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. In a long series of works, beginning with Psychology and Alchemy of 1944 and continuing through Mysterium Coniunctionis of 1955–56, Jung treated the alchemical images and procedures as symbolic descriptions of the process of individuation, the integration of the conscious and unconscious parts of the self. The reading has been extraordinarily influential, both within psychology and within the contemporary esoteric community.

The reading has been criticised from several directions. William R. Newman, in The “Summa perfectionis” of Pseudo-Geber (1991) and Promethean Ambitions (2004), and Lawrence Principe, in The Aspiring Adept (1998) and The Secrets of Alchemy (2013), have argued that Jung and his followers selected alchemical texts that fit the psychological model and ignored those that did not, and that the symbolic reading collapses the distinction between alchemical matter and the alchemist’s mind in a way the alchemists themselves would not have recognised. Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung’s principal collaborator, did much of the detailed alchemical-symbol work at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. The criticisms are serious. Jung’s reading remains a powerful and influential interpretation.

The Enduring Work

The alchemical tradition has been declared dead many times, and it has refused to stay dead. Modern occultists continue to work with the four stages, the symbols, and the philosophical vocabulary of the alchemists. Contemporary practitioners describe the alchemical work as a path of inner transformation that uses the older alchemical imagery as a kind of contemplative technology. The same practice, in different language, is the subject of much of sacred symbolism and geometry, of ritual magic, and of much of the modern Western esoteric tradition.

Sources and Further Reading

Copenhaver, Brian P., trans. Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Faivre, Antoine. The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus. Grand Rapids: Phanes Press, 1995.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Holmyard, E. John. Alchemy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957.
Kahn, Didier. Alchemical Poetry in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: A Critical Anthology. London: Continuum, 2009.
Newman, William R. The “Summa perfectionis” of Pseudo-Geber. Leiden: Brill, 1991.
Newman, William R. Promethean Ambitions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Principe, Lawrence M. The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Principe, Lawrence M. The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Read, John. The Alchemist in Life, Literature and Art. London: Thomas Nelson, 1947.
von Franz, Marie-Louise. Aureum Speculum: The Mirror of Gold. Zürich: C. G. Jung Institute, 1980.