In the year 1850 “A Suggestive Inquiry concerning the Hermetic Mystery and Alchemy, being an attempt to recover the Ancient Experiment of Nature,” was published anonymously in London by a lady of high intellectual gifts, but was almost immediately withdrawn for reasons unknown, and which have given occasion, in consequence, to several idle speculations. This curious and meritorious volume, quaintly written in the manner of the last century, originated the views which are in question and opened the controversy.
Fifteen years after the appearance of the “Suggestive Inquiry,” an American writer, named Hitchcock, after apparently independent researches arriving at parallel conclusions, made public, also anonymously, in the year 1865, some “Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists,” in a small octavo volume of very considerable interest. A psychic interpretation was placed by the previous author on the arcana of Hermetic typology, and Mr Hitchcock, by adopting a moral one, brought the general subject within the reach of the most ordinary readers, and attracted considerable attention in consequence.
The views thus enunciated have filtered slowly through, and, combined with the Paracelsian theory of the psychic manufacture of material gold by the instrumentality of the interior magnes, have considerably influenced the revived occultism of the present day. The question in itself, taken at its lowest standpoint, is one of the most curious to be found within the whole circle of esoteric archæology; and for students whose interest in the great alchemical mystery is of another than antiquarian kind, it is truly of palmary interest, and of supreme importance. In an account of the lives and labours of the Hermetic adepts, it calls for adequate consideration; and, after careful researches, I believe myself to have discovered a true alchemical theory which will be equally acceptable to all schools of interpretation.
The supreme and avowed object of every hierophant, as well as of every postulant and pretender, in the ars magna discovered by Hermes Trismegistus, has been commonly supposed to be the chemical manufacture of material gold from commercially inferior substances. On the other hand, Hitchcock, marshalling an impressive series of verbatim citations from writers of all ages and all nationalities, undertakes to demonstrate that the concealed subject of every veritable adept is one only—namely, Man, the triune, and that “the object also is one, to wit, his improvement, while the method itself is no less one, to wit, nature directed by art in the school of nature, and acting in conformity therewith; for the art is nothing but ‘nature acting through man.’” Again, “the genuine alchemists were not in pursuit of worldly wealth or honours. Their real object was the perfection, or, at least, the improvement of man. According to this theory, such perfection lies in a certain unity, a living sense of the unity of the human with the divine nature, the attainment of which I can liken to nothing so well as to the experience known in religion as the New Birth. The desired perfection, or unity, is a state of the soul, a condition of Being, and not a mere condition of Knowing. This condition of Being is a development of the nature of man from within, the result of a process by which whatever is evil in our nature is cast out or suppressed, under the name of superfluities, and the good thereby allowed opportunities for free activity. As this result is scarcely accessible to the unassisted natural man, and requires the concurrence of divine power, it is called Donum Dei.”
When the individual man, by a natural and appropriate process, devoid of haste or violence, is brought into unity with himself by the harmonious action of intelligence and will, he is on the threshold of comprehending that transcendent Unity which is the perfection of the totality of Nature, “for what is called the ‘absolute,’ the ‘absolute perfection,’ and the perfection of Nature, are one and the same.”
In the symbolism of the alchemists this writer tells us that sulphur signifies Nature, and mercury the supernatural. The inseparable connection of the two in man is called Sol, but “as these three are seen to be indissolubly one, the terms may be used interchangeably.” According to Hitchcock, the mystical and mysterious instrument of preparation in the work of alchemy is the conscience, which is called by a thousand misleading and confessedly incongruous names. By means of this instrument, quickened into vital activity under a sense of the presence of God, the matter of the stone, namely, Man, is, in the first place, purged and purified, to make possible the internal realisation of Truth. “By a metonymy, the conscience itself is said to be purified, though, in fact, the conscience needs no purification, but only the man, to the end that the conscience may operate freely.”[A]
One of the names given by the alchemists to the conscience, on this theory, is that of a middle substance which partakes of an azurine sulphur—that is, of a celestial spirit—the Spirit of God. “The still small voice is in alchemy, as in Scripture, compared to a fire, which prepares the way for what many of the writers speak of as a Light.”
Hitchcock elsewhere more emphatically asserts that there is but one subject within the wide circle of human interests that can furnish an interpretation of the citations which he gives, and it is that which is known under the theological name of spiritual Regeneration. This gift of God the alchemists investigated as a work of Nature within Nature. “The repentance which in religion is said to begin conversion, is the ‘philosophical contrition’ of Hermetic allegory. It is the first step of man towards the discovery of his whole being. They also called it the black state of the matter, in which was carried on the work of dissolution, calcination, separation, &c., after which results purification, the white state, which contains the red, as the black contained the white.” The evolution of the glorious and radiant red state resulted in the fixation or perfection of the matter, and then the soul was supposed to have entered into its true rest in God.
As this interpretation is concerned chiefly with the conscience, I have called it the moral theory of alchemy; but Hitchcock, as a man of spiritual insight, could not fail to perceive that his explanatory method treated of the way only, and the formless light of an “End,” which he could not or would not treat of, is, upon his own admission, continually glimmering before him.
For the rest, when the alchemists speak of a long life as one of the endowments of the Stone, he considers that they mean immortality; when they attribute to it the miraculous properties of a universal medicine, it is their intention to deny any positive qualities to evil, and, by inference, any perpetuity. When they assert that the possession of the Stone is the annihilation of covetousness and of every illicit desire, they mean that all evil affections disappear before the light of the unveiled Truth. By the transmutation of metals they signified the conversion of man from a lower to a higher order of existence, from life natural to life spiritual, albeit these expressions are inadequate to convey the real meaning of the adepts. The powers of an ever active nature must be understood by such expressions as “fires,” “menstruums,” &c., which work in unison because they work in Nature, the alchemists unanimously denying the existence of any disorder in the creation of God.