So gold must gold, this law’s to Nature set.”
Morien adds that the secret stone must be sought in the dunghill, which signifies, says the “Marrow of Alchemy,” that the metal must be brought to putrefaction. “Those who assert that common gold is not the matter are in error. Gold is one. No other substance under Heaven can compare with it. Gold is the noble seed of our art. Yet it is dead. It needs to be unloosed, and must go to water. It must be tempered with its own humidity; it must be blent with our true water, disposed in a due vessel, closed with all caution, settled in a due nest, and with due fire inclined to motion.” It becomes the true gold of the philosophers when by a retrograde motion it tends to resolution. “Then it is our Sun, our Marchasite, and, joined with our Moon, it becomes our bright crystal Fountain.”
But if the lives and the writings of the alchemists so clearly establish the physical nature of the Hermetic aim and opus, it may well be demanded how a psychical or moral interpretation could be reasonably set upon the symbols and the ambition of all the adepts. Such interpretations can never be wholly exonerated from the charge of extravagance, and of a purblind indifference to the most plain and notorious facts, but they may be to some extent justified by a consideration of the allegorical methods of the alchemists and by the nature of the Hermetic theory.
The profound subtleties of thought seldom find adequate expression even when the whole strength of a truly intellectual nature is brought to bear upon the resources of language, and where the force of direct appeal is unwillingly acknowledged to be insufficient, the vague generalities of allegory can scarcely be expected to succeed. It is the province of symbolism to suggest thought, and the interpretation of any sequence of typology inevitably varies in direct proportion with the various types of mind. Each individual symbol embodies a definite conception existing in the mind of its inventor, and in that symbol more or less perfectly expressed, but every student of allegory out of every individual symbol extracts his own meaning, so that the significance of typology is as infinite as the varieties of interpreting intelligence. For this reason, the best and truest adepts have always insisted on the necessity of an initiated teacher, or of a special intellectual illumination which they term the grace of God, for the discovery of the actual secret of the Hermetic art. Without this light or guidance the unelected student is likely to be adrift for ever on a chaotic sea of symbols, and the prima materia, concealed by innumerable names and contradictory or illusory descriptions, will for ever escape him. It is in this way that a thousand unassisted investigators have operated upon ten thousand material substances, and have never remotely approached the manufacture of the Grand Magisterium, and, after the same manner, outwearied by perpetual failures in the physical process, that others have rejected the common opinion concerning the object of alchemy, and with imaginations at work upon the loftier aspirations expressed by Hermetic adepts, have accredited them with an exclusively spiritual aim, and with the possession of exclusively spiritual secrets.
If the authors of the “Suggestive Inquiry” and of “Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists” had considered the lives of the symbolists, as well as the nature of the symbols, their views would have been very much modified; they would have found that the true method of Hermetic interpretation lies in a middle course; but the errors which originated with merely typological investigations were intensified by a consideration of the great alchemical theorem, which, par excellence, is one of universal development, which acknowledges that every substance contains undeveloped resources and potentialities, and can be brought outward and forward into perfection. They applied their theory only to the development of metallic substances from a lower to a higher order, but we see by their writings that the grand hierophants of Oriental and Western alchemy alike were continually haunted by brief and imperfect glimpses of glorious possibilities for man, if the evolution of his nature were accomplished along the lines of their theory.
Eugenius Philalethes enlarges on the infinite capacity of our spiritual nature and on the power of our soul’s imagination. “She has an absolute power in miraculous and more than natural transmutations,” and he clothes his doctrine of human evolution in the terminology of alchemical adepts.
In one of the twelve treatises attributed to Sendivogius, there are the following remarkable passages:—“We know the composition of man in all respects, yet we cannot infuse the soul, which is out of the course of nature. Nature does not work before there be material given unto her....” The problem that all composites are subject to dissolution, and that man is composed of the four elements, and how, therefore, he could have been immortal in Paradise, is considered thus. “Paradise was and is a place created of the most pure elements, and of these man also was formed, and thus was consecrated to perpetuity of life. After his fall, he was driven into the corruptible elementated world, and nourished by corruptible elementated elements, which infected his past nature and generated disease and death. To the original creation of man in state immortal the ancient philosophers have likened their stone, and this immortality caused them to seek the stone, desiring to find the incorruptible elements which entered into the Adamic constitution. To them the Most High God revealed that a composition of such elements was in gold, for in animals it could not be had, seeing they must preserve their lives by corrupt elements; in vegetables also it is not, because in them is an inequality of the elements. And seeing all created things are inclined to multiplication, the philosophers propounded to themselves that they would make tryal of the possibility of nature in this mineral kingdom, which being discovered, they saw that there were innumerable other secrets in Nature, of which, as of Divine secrets, they wrote sparingly.”
Here the reference probably intended is to the possibilities which their theory revealed for other than the mineral kingdoms, a theory the truth of which they believed themselves to have demonstrated by accomplishing metallic transmutation. In this connection, it should be noticed that the philosophical stone was generally considered a universal medicine—a medicine for metals and man, the latter, of course, by inference.
The occasional presence of these possibilities in the minds of adepts, and the comprehensive nature of the Hermetic theory, fully explain the aberrations of mystical commentators, who have mistaken the side issues for the end in view, not altogether inexcusably, because the end in view sinks into complete unimportance when compared with the side issues, and all that is of value in alchemy for the modern student of occultism is comprised in these same possibilities, in the application of the Hermetic theory to the supreme subject, Man. It is impossible within the limits of a brief introduction to do justice to an illimitable subject, to the art of psychic transmutation, to the spiritual alchemistry, the principles of which are contained in the arcane theory of the adepts, and which principles are by no means dependent for their truth on the actuality of metallic transmutation, so I must confine myself to a few general observations.