The admirable lesson which we may learn of the alchemists is the exaltation of things in virtue beyond the unassisted ability of Nature. Such exaltation is possible, according to the adepts, both within and without the metallic kingdom. Man and the animals are alike included by this comprehensive theory of development, and it is therefore conceivable that a few of the Hermetic symbolists taught in their secret and allegorical fashion the method of alchemical procedure when man was the subject, and revealed the miraculous results of this labour in the typewritten books which they bequeathed to posterity. That Henry Khunrath was in search of the transmutation of metals up to a certain point and period is, I think, very clearly indicated by his visit to Dr Dee. That the Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ, which was published in 1609, treats of a spiritual alchemy, is, however, evidenced by the nature of its symbols and by the general tenor of the strange esoteric commentary on some of the Hebrew psalms. Those who worked in metals may, or may not, have failed; it is by no means a point of importance to the discriminating student of occultism; but they have left behind them a theory which is wholly true in its application to that one substance in Nature which we know to be capable of indefinite perfectibility, and the splendour and glory of the accomplished Magnum Opus, when the young King issues from the Everlasting East, from the land of the Morning and of Paradise,
“Bearing the crescent moon upon his crest,”
though it be a dream—say even, which no one can actually affirm—though it be an impossibility for the metal, is true for the man; and all that is beautiful and sublime in alchemical symbolism may be rigorously applied to the divine flower of the future, the young King of Humanity, the perfect youth to come, when he issues from the Spiritual East, in the dawn of the genuine truth, bearing the Crescent Moon, the woman of the future, upon his bright and imperial crest.
I am of opinion, from the evidence in hand, that metallic transmutations did occur in the past. They were phenomena as rare as a genuine “materialisation” of so-called spirits is generally considered at the present day among those believers in physical mediumship who have not been besotted by credulity and the glamour of a world of wonders. Like modern spiritualism, the isolated facts of veritable alchemy are enveloped in a crowd of discreditable trickery, and the trade of an adept in the past was as profitable, and as patronised by princes, as that of modern dealers with familiar spirits.
But the fact of an occasional transmutation gives little reason to suppose that the praxis alchemiæ in metallic subjects is ever likely to succeed with modern students of the turba philosophorum. The enigmas of the alchemists admit, as I have said, of manifold interpretations. Their recipes are too vague and confused to be followed. They insist themselves that their art can only be learned by a direct revelation from God, or by the tuition of a master. Their fundamental secrets have not only been never revealed in their multitudinous treatises, but they scarcely pretend to reveal them, despite the magnificent assurances which are sometimes contained in their titles. The practical side of alchemy must be surrendered to specialists in chemistry, working quite independently of the books or the methods of the philosophers. Only the theory is of value to neophytes, or initiates, or to any student of the higher occultism; and it is of value, as I have said, because it can be applied outside the kingdom of metals, as the alchemists themselves acknowledge, and as some of them seem to have attempted.
The psychic method of interpretation as propounded in the “Suggestive Inquiry” exalted the seekers for the philosophical stone into hierophants of the mystery of God; it endowed them with the altitudo divitiarum sapientiæ et scientiæ Dei. They had crossed the threshold of eternity; they had solved the absolute; they had seen Diana unveiled; they had raised the cincture of Isis, and had devoured her supernatural beauties—that is, they had accomplished the manifestation of the incarnate spirit of man, and had invested it with deific glory. They did not grope after physical secrets; they did not investigate, with Paracelsus, the properties of ordure and other matter in putrefaction; they did not work with mercury and sulphur; they did not distil wine; they did not decoct egg-shells. They were soul seekers, and they had found the soul; they were artificers, and they had adorned the soul; they were alchemists, and had transmuted it. Sublime and romantic hypothesis! But we know that they worked in metals; we know that they manipulated minerals; we know that they ransacked every kingdom of nature for substances which, by a bare possibility, through some happy guess, might really transform the baser metals into gold. They were often extravagant in their views, they were generally absurd in their methods; they seldom found their end, but, judged as they actually were, stripped of all glamour and romance, self-educated seekers into Nature at the dawn of a physical science, they are eminently entitled to our respect, because, in the first place, unenlightened and unequipped, with their bare hands, they laid the foundations of a providential and life-saving knowledge, and in the second, because their furnaces were erected, intellectually, “on a peak in Darien”—that is, they worked in accordance with a theory which had an unknown field of application, and through the smoke of their coals and their chemicals they beheld illimitable vistas where the groaning totality of Nature developed its internal resources, and advanced by degrees to perfection, upon lines which were quite in accordance with their vision of mineral culture. “A depth beyond the depth, and a height beyond the height,” were thus revealed to them, and their glimpses of these glorious possibilities transfigured their strange terminology, and illuminated their barbarous symbolism.
Eliminating obviously worthless works, the speculations of needy impostors and disreputable publishers, it is from those who have least contributed to the advancement of chemical science that we must seek information concerning the spiritual chemistry—those who have elaborated the theory rather than those who exclusively expound the practice. In all cases, we shall do well to reflect that the object in view was metals, except in such rare instances as are presented by Henry Khunrath and the anonymous author of the treatise concerning Mary of Alexandria, with a few Rosicrucian philosophers. We must read them for what they suggest, and not for what they had in view.
The dream of the psycho-chemistry is a grand and sublime scheme of absolute reconstruction by means of the Paracelsian Orizon Æternitatis, or supercelestial virtue of things, the divinisation, or deification, in the narrower sense, of man the triune by an influx from above. It supposes that the transmutation or transfiguration of man can be accomplished while he is on this earth and in this body, which then would be magically draped in splendoribus sanctorum. The Morning Star is the inheritance of every man, and the woman of the future will be clothed with the sun, and Luna shall be set beneath her feet. The blue mantle typifies the mystical sea, her heritage of illimitable vastness. These marvels may be really accomplished by the cleansing of the two-fold human tabernacle, the holy house of life, and by the progressive evolution into outward and visible manifestation of the infinite potencies within it.
In the facts and possibilities of mesmerism and in the phenomena of ecstatic clairvoyance, in ancient magic and modern spiritualism, in the doctrines and experiences of religious regeneration, we must seek the raison d’être of the sublime dream of psycho-chemistry—that, namely, there is a change, a transmutation, or a new birth, possible to embodied man which shall manifestly develop the esotoric potencies of his spiritual being, so that the flesh itself shall be purged, clarified, glorified, and clothed upon by the essential light of the divine pneuma. Those of my readers who are interested in this absorbing subject I must refer to a work entitled, “Azoth, or The Star in the East,” which, I trust, will be ready for publication early in 1889, and which will treat of the First Matter of the Magnum Opus, of the evolution of Aphrodite Urania, of the supernatural generation of the Son of the Sun, and of the alchemical transfiguration of humanity.
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