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Alchemy was an art of all kinds of transmutation and ‘perfection’: of metals, human bodies, souls, agriculture, pottery, politics and so on.

Those alchemists working on metals, usually attempted to transform Mercury, rather than lead, into gold. The lead is a popular story and I’m not sure when it originated. However, the mercury may not be what we call mercury, it is the ‘Mercury of the Philosophers’ which is something completely different but like mercury…. alchemy is confusing in that way.

As many people are aware, Isaac Newton was an alchemist and spent far more effort on alchemy and biblical interpretation than on physics which was simply a sideline. Some have argued that alchemy was important in supporting Newton with the otherwise unpopular idea of action at a distance. Robert Boyle and lots of other members of the original Royal Society were also alchemists, although Newton was the most traditional of all of them and incredibly secretive about what he was doing – as he was with everything. The others tended to exchange notes and procedures.

I have read of people using nuclear reactors to do transmutation of the elements but ,as everyone notes, that is way too expensive at the moment – although it can be taken as demonstrating that alchemy is possible 🙂

There are alchemists operating today doing the work on metals, although they seem to be more interested in medical alchemy than gold making. There are also those who see alchemy as more of a psychological or spiritual procedure.

This psychologizing has a surprisingly long history but, while it simplifies, it basically arises because alchemists generally did not see a difference between interior work and exterior work. Everything was connected, the change in the alchemist was as important as the change in the material, and the two were linked. Everything was mutable. Psychologising also serves the function of explaining why any particular alchemist did not make the transmutation, and further explained and justified the altered states of consciousness that arise through inhaling and tasting various substances and concentrating on being a human thermostat for weeks on end. It may also be true of course 🙂

However, separating the spirit work into its own domain becomes more usual during and after the 17th century. By the late 19th century it was often considered that work on the spirit was the secret of alchemy, probably because it became increasingly difficult to see spirit and matter as related.

More interestingly, Carl Jung argued that Western alchemical symbols arose as a kind of collective dream, acting as compensations for the kind of psyche produced by official Christianity. If that is the case, then alchemy can, even today, act as a map of psychological transformation – what he called individuation. James Hillman expanded on this, pointing out that alchemical symbols actually give us a very concrete embodied way of seeing, feeling and engaging with psyche.

I personally think that alchemical symbols can give us a way of thinking about transformations of all kinds, and that they are particularly useful for thinking about chaotic, complex and messy processes. But that is a subject for another blog post sometime.

Addenda from 2021

This is basically here because it might be relevant about alchemy and spirituality:

As far as I can tell, alchemists tend not to divide the world into ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’, ‘matter’ or ‘mind’ or whatever. The spiritual is as much a part of the work as the physical. ‘Spiritual’ is grounded in ‘physical’ and vice versa. The alchemical ‘Raymond Lull’ seems to have argued that spirit and matter are a continuum. The modern alchemist Frater Albertus, says something like alchemy is about “raising vibrations” which makes sense in that context….

However, alchemy does divide into foci: there are people who primarily work on transmutation of metals (or ennobling, or improving, metals), there are those who work on medicine (improving the body, and increasing life span), and there are those who primarily work on spirit or psyche, purifying and transmuting themselves. There may be other varieties. I suggest you see which appeals to you most, but remember you cannot apparently succeed in one without the other. If spirit ascends it comes back to matter and raises its state.

However, I’m not an adept. So I could well be wrong.

Tags: 'nature', depth psychology, disorder, knowledge

This entry was posted on June 19, 2017 at 10:59 pm and is filed under complexity, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.