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Circumambulating The Alchemical Mysteriu
Circumambulating The Alchemical Mysteriu
C I R C U M A M B U L AT I N G
THE ALCHEMICAL MYSTERIUM
Aaron Cheak
1
‘Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra’, in Marcellin Berthelot, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs
(Paris: Georges Steinheil, 1887), vol. 1., 132, ig. 11.
2
Charles Baudelaire, ‘L’Art romantique’, in Œuvres completes de Charles Baudelaire (Paris:
Calmann Lévy, 1885), vol. 3, 68: ‘de tirer l’éternel du transitoire’.
introduction 19
3
Jack Lindsay, he Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt (London: Frederick Muller,
1970), 382-92. Lindsay came very close to encapsulating the ‘essence’ of the alchemical pro-
cess when he said it consisted in ‘the vision of unitary process and nodal points of qualitative
20 al chemical traditions
change’. It was this qualitative and unitive element which deined the spirit of alchemy; mod-
ern chemistry, lacking this qualitative spirit, was by contrast ‘not just alchemy without the
nonsense; it was alchemy tamed, reduced wholly to a quantitative level, and thus giving up
its ghost’. Lindsay observes that the methodological precisions of quantitative science were
necessary but the science that emerged developed at the expense of the essential vision of and
relationship with the qualititative aspect of nature that was the unique province of alchemy.
4
See my contribution to part two of the present volume: ‘Agent of all Mutations: Metallurgi-
cal, Biological and Spiritual Evolution in the Alchemy of René Schwaller de Lubicz’.
5
Principally Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. See in particular
Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. 1 (ed. and trans. Makkreel and Rodi, Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1989), who was in fact reviving a long-standing tradition of textu-
al interpretation rooted in biblical exegesis; and Steven D. Kepnes, ‘Bridging the Gap between
Understanding and Explanation: Approaches to the Study of Religion’, Journal for the Scientif-
ic Study of Religion 25 (1986): 504-12.
6
H. T. Hakl, ‘he Symbology of Hermeticism According to Julius Evola’ in Lux in Tenebris:
he Visual and the Symbolic in Western Esotericism (ed. Peter Forshaw, et al.; forthcoming).
introduction 21
Etymologies
he historical purview of what came to be called alchemy includes
an undeniable current of inluence stemming from Pharaonic and
Hellenistic Egypt on one hand, and another stemming from ancient
China, medieval India and Tibet on the other―currents that appear
to have cross-fertilised before converging in Arabic alchemy, whence
the term proper: al-kīmiyā.7 Scholars have long known that the word
alchemy points to an Arabic transmission (alkīmiyā becomes Spanish
alquimia, Latin alchimia, French alchimie, German Alchemie, etc.)8
7
Given this interweaving lineage, the term alchemy itself is perhaps intentionally polyvalent,
being intended to evoke not a single linguistic origin, per modern linguistic requirements,
but rather, through the associations of ‘folk’ etymology, to encapsulate something of the mul-
tiplicity of meanings that have adhered to the term over time. Be that as it may, the clearest
notes of etymological resonance have been struck in the Chinese and Graeco-Egyptian lin-
guistic registers.
8
See in particular: F. Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrittums (Leiden: Brill, 1971), iv,
1-299; M. Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaten im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972),
144-270; Ullmann, ‘al-kīmiyā’ in Encyclopedia of Islam, second edition (Leiden: Brill, 1986),
v, 110-15; Ullmann, ‘al-kīmiyā,’ in Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache, 1 (Wies-
baden, 1970-); Z. R. W. M. von Martels, ed., Alchemy Revisited (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Charles
Burnett, ‘he Astrologer’s Assay of the Alchemist: Early References to Alchemy in Arabic
and Latin Texts,’ Ambix 39.3 (1992): 103-9.
22 al chemical traditions
he Arabic deinite article al- points clearly to this, yet the precise or-
igin of the lexeme kīmiyā is far from certain. Academic consensus has
generally favoured Greek sources, notably those published by Mar-
cellin Berthelot,9 suggesting an origin from the term χυμα (chyma,
‘that which is poured out’; ‘lows, luid’; ‘ingot, bar’; metaphorically,
‘confused mass, aggregate, crowd’; ‘materials, constituents’), whence
χυμεια (chymeia, ‘the art of alloying metals’) named from its supposed
inventor, Χυμης (Chymēs).10 As Harris observes in his 1704 Lexicon
Technicum:
he Egyptian Etymology
In addition to the Greek etymology, the root kīmiyā has also been
traced to the Egyptian name for Egypt, km.t (Coptic keme, kēmi),
which Plutarch gives as χημια (chēmia), ‘the blackest earth’ (μάλιστα
μελάγγειον, malista melangeion).13 he implications of this etymolo-
gy are explored in detail elsewhere in this volume.14 Suice it to say
for now that a wealth of theological and cosmological signiications
deeply pertinent to alchemy emerge from Plutarch’s identiication of
the name of Egypt with not only the blackness of the soil, but also with
the blackness of the pupil of the eye. On a basic, symbolic level, this
coheres with the fact that the Nilotic black earth, which literally (and
geographically) deined Egypt, was fertile soil—the perfect receptor of
life-giving seed; in the same way, the transparent openness that forms
the pupil of the eye is the perfect receptor of light.
As will be seen, these signiications directly tie the early concep-
tion of alchemy to genuine Egyptian theological conceptions on one
hand, and to the Greek Hermetic corpus on the other, a point that
has already been articulated in some detail by Erik Iversen with re-
gard to the Memphite cosmology of the Shabaka stone and its clear
recapitulation in the Corpus Hermeticum itself.15 Furthermore, as the
late Algis Uždavinys makes abundantly clear, this current of alchemy
neglected work of K. Stephanides, who ‘in fourteen publications between 1903 and 1910, com-
mented on and corrected the work of Berthelot, and by consideration of other sources threw
much light on this obscure and misunderstood aspect of the history of chemistry’ (116).
13
Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 33; Frank Cole Babbitt (trans.), Moralia vol. V (Loeb, 1936),
83. he Egyptian thesis (chēmia chem-) appears to have been irst put forward in modern
times by Hermann Conring, De Hermetica Medicina (1648), 19; though, as Bain suggests
(see discussion in chapter 1, with refs), it appears to have been current in antiquity.
14
Cheak, ‘he Perfect Black: Egypt and Alchemy’.
15
Erik Iversen, Egyptian and Hermetic Doctrine (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press,
1984), passim.
24 al chemical traditions
16
See Uždavinys’ contribution to the present volume: ‘Telestic Transformation and Philo-
sophical Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism’.
Peter Kingsley, ‘From Pythagoras to the Turba Philosophorum: Egypt and Pythagorean
Tradition’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 1-13; Ancient Philosophy,
Mystery, Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1995), 55-
68, 298-9, 317 f, 335-347, 371-91.
Joseph Needham, et al., Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 4: Spagyrical Dis-
covery and Invention: Apparatus, heories, Gits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980), 353, citing Mahdihassan: jin i, ‘gold juice, gold liquid’; on ‘gold luid, potable gold’,
cf. further: Wu Lu-ch’iang, and Tenney L. Davis, ‘An Ancient Chinese Alchemical Classic:
Ko Hung on the Gold Medicine and on the Yellow and the White; he Fourth and Sixteenth
Chapters of the Pao-p’u-tzu’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 70
(1935): 221-84; of jin i, Needham remarks: ‘the ancient pronunciation […] would have been
kiem iak’. Cf. Homer H. Dubs, ‘he Origin of Alchemy’, Ambix 9 (1961): 34: ‘his Chinese
phrase, jin-yi […], was pronounced in T’ang times at the imperial capital as ki[e]m-iök. his
phrase means, literally, ‘the juice (or sperm) of gold’. It was one of the common Chinese
names for the elixir of immortality. Like other alchemical phrases, it disappeared from usage
with the decay of Chinese alchemy’.
introduction 25
cosmology, metal (for which jin was also a generic term) was regarded
as one of the ive elements (wu xing); not only was it regarded as the
‘mother’ of the water element, the metal element itself was deined
precisely by its double capacity to melt and to solidify into new form
(as in a mould).21 his ability to revert from a solid form to an amor-
phous or liquid state, and back again, is a very important principle. In
the western alchemical canon it would inhere in the formula: solve et
coagula, ‘dissolve and coagulate’, a formula that possesses deep sym-
bolic value in regards to ontologies of ‘lux’ and ‘permanence’ (point-
ing to a more paradoxical ontology embracing both ‘permanence in
lux’ and ‘lux in permanence’). It also underscores the universal value
almost unanimously given to mercury as the ‘essence’ of metals. For
next to gold and cinnabar, mercury igures as the most universal of all
alchemical substances in eastern and western traditions alike. When
alchemically reined, moreover, it came to be regarded less as a ‘sub-
stance’ per se, and more as the underlying principle of pure sublim-
ity—of absolute volatility—with the unique power to penetrate and
transform all things, especially minerals and metals (the most dense
things).
historio graphical considerations
Due to the very nature of the topic, the study of alchemy has bordered
on a surprisingly large number of disciplines. Generally, and signii-
cantly, it may be said to straddle both the history of science and the
history of religions. Moreover, due to the wide, cross-cultural pur-
view of alchemy, these dual histories have converged in Egyptological,
Sinological, Classical, Islamic, Indo-Tibetan, medieval western, early
modern and modern western contexts.22 More recently, following the
21
Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2: History of Scientiic hought (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 243 f.
22
Notable studies in these ields include M. Berthelot and C. E. Ruelle, Collection des
anciens alchimistes grecs, 3 vols. (Paris: Georges Steinheil, 1888–1889); Ruska, Arabische Al-
chimisten (Weisbaden, 1924; reprint 1977); Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina: Ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte der hermetischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1926); Ruska, Turba Phi-
losophorum: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Alchemie (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1931); Ruska,
Das Buch der Alaune und Salze: Ein Grundwerk der spätlateinischen Alchemie (Berlin: Verlag
Chemie, 1935); Ruska, Al-Razes Buch Geheminis der Geheimnisse mit Einleitung und Erläuter-
ungen in deutscher Ubersetzung (Berlin, 1937); Paul Kraus, Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution
à l’histoire des idées scientiiques dans l’Islam, 2 vols. (Cairo: 1942-3; Paris: Les Belles Lettres,
1986); E. O. von Lippman, Austehung und Verbreitung der Alchemie 3 vols. (Berlin: Springer,
1919, 1931; Weinheim/Bergstrasse: Verlag Chemie, 1954); Joseph Needham, Science and Ci-
introduction 27
24
Cf. Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (Lon-
don: Equinox, 2005), 6–11, who makes the distinction between a religious or esoteric ‘tra-
dition’ and a religious or esoteric ‘ield of discourse’; he also discusses the importance of
recognising the complexity of esoteric identities.
25
See Kingsley, ‘Poimandres: he Etymology of the Name and the Origins of the Hermetica’,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 1-24.
26
Signiicant studies in this respect include the work of J. R. Partington, A History of Chem-
istry, 4 vols. (London, MacMillan. 1961–1970); Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to
Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: Karger, 1982); Allen G. Debus, he
English Paracelsians (Oldbourne Press: History of science library, 1965); Debus, he Chemical
Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1977,
introduction 29
31
Lawrence M. Principe, ‘Alchemy’, DGWE, 12.
32
Carl Gustav Jung, Psychologie und Alchemie (Zurich, 1944); Jung, Mysterium coniunctio-
nis: Untersuchungen über die Trennung und Zusammensetzung der seelischen Gegensatze in
der alchemie (Zurich, 1955); Jung, ‘Studien über alchemistische Vorstellungen’, C. G. Jung Ge-
sammelte Werke, vol. 13 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1978).
33
Principe, ‘Alchemy’, DGWE, 14.
introduction 31
34
Hereward Tilton, he Quest for the Phoenix: Spiritual Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in the
Work of Count Michael Maier (1569–1622) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 256, with 9–18,
235–6, 253–6.
35
Rasārnava 17. 164–5: yathā lohe tathā dehe kartavhah sūtakah sadā/ samānam kurute devi
pravishan dehalohayoh/ pūrvam lohe parīksheta tato dehe prayojayet; David Gordon White,
he Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1996), 315 with 446 n. 21, and passim.
36
Nathan Sivin, Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1968); Sivin, ‘Chinese Alchemy and the Manipulation of Time’, Isis 67, no. 4 (1976):
513–26; Sivin, ‘he heoretical Background of Elixir Alchemy’, in Joseph Needham et al.,
Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), vol. 5.4,
210–305; Fabrizio Pregadio, Awakening to Reality: he ‘Regulated Verses’ of the Wuzhen pian,
a Taoist Classic of Internal Alchemy (Golden Elixir Press, 2009); Pregadio, he Seal of the
Unity of the hree, vol. 1: A Study and Translation of the Cantong qi, the Source of the Taoist
Way of the Golden Elixir (Golden Elixir Press, 2011).
37
See especially Kim Lai’s ground-breaking contribution to the present volume: ‘Iatrochem-
istry, Metaphysiology, Gnosis: Tibetan Alchemy in the Kālacakra Tantra’.
32 al chemical traditions
the work of Henry Corbin on the Persian alchemist Jaldakī shows the
deep insistence that was placed in Islamicate tradition on alchemy as
an ars hieratica, and the distinct relationship that was seen to exist
between the metallurgical process, the animation of statues, and the
creation of a resurrection body.38
he deep relationship that emerges here between metallurgical
and physiological processes all pertain strongly to the hidden conti-
nuity between all bodies, from the mineral to the divine. herefore,
inasmuch as general statements about alchemy are to be advanced
cautiously, if at all, the fact that alchemy has traditionally been studied
from the twin vantages of the history of science and the history of
religions appears to relect a strong tendency in alchemy toward the
uniication of the material and the spiritual.
‘acts as both remedy and poison’ and ‘already introduces itself into
the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence’; ‘this charm, this
spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be—alternately or
simultaneously—beneicent or maleicent’.39 ‘If the pharmakon is am-
bivalent’ continues Derrida, ‘it is because it constitutes the medium in
which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links
them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over
into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forget-
fulness, speech/writing, etc.)’40 hus, in conjunction with its ability
for transformation, the (universal) pharmakon is also a medium for
cosmic enantiodromia.
his capacity for luid interweaving between diferent states of ex-
istence is perhaps most eloquently expressed within alchemical tra-
dition proper by Maria Prophetissa: ‘if you do not render corporeal
substances incorporeal, and incorporeal substances corporeal, and
if the two are not made one, nothing will be achieved’.41 he seven-
teenth century Sui, Muhzin Fayz Kāshānī describes an equivalent
process in which ‘spirits are corporealised and bodies spiritualised’,
a process that, according to Henry Corbin, takes place in an ontolog-
ically real, yet liminal, zone—the mundus imaginalis—which Corbin
deined precisely as a juncture between the eternal and the transient,
the intelligible and the sensible: the intermonde or intermediary realm
par excellence.42 Importantly, Corbin’s phraseology is not only drawn
from Persian and Arabic mystical texts (which deeply tinctured the
alchemy of the time), it is also consonant with other, earlier Islamicate
alchemical sources, such as the Kitab Sirr al-Asrar (Latin: Secretum
secretorum), whose Tabula smaragdina (Emerald Tablet) famously
states: ‘that which is above is like that which is below, and that which
is below is like that which is above, to perform the miracles of the one
thing’.43 his formula, which is further ascribed to [pseudo] Apollo-
nius of Tyana’s Book of the Secret of Creation, or Book of Causes (Kitāb
Sirr al-ḫalīqa, or Kitāb al-῾ilal), bears a still deeper identity to the hi-
eratic art (hieratikē technē) as practiced by the Neoplatonic theurgists.
39
Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination (trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 70.
40
Derrida, Dissemination, 127.
41
CAAG, 2.4, 40 (irst to third centuries c e ) .
42
Kalimāt maknūna (Sayings Kept Secret), ch. xxx (Teheran, 1801), 68-70; (Bombay,
1296/1878), 69-72; trans. Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, 177.
43
In Latin: Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est
inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.
34 al chemical traditions
According to Proclus,
able to, but not necessarily attained by, everyone. Although dualism
and nondualism describe two diferent experiences of the world, it is
not simply a recapitulation of the materialist-idealist divide (which is
simply another dualism). As David Loy remarks:
46
David Loy, Nondualism: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (New Haven, Conn: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 3.
47
Gebser’s seminal work, Ursprung und Gegenwart, is contained in his Gesamtausgabe, vols.
2-4 (ed. Hämmerli, Schahausen: Novalis, 1999); cf. he Ever-Present Origin (trans. Noel
Barstad and Algis Mickunas, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985). What Gebser describes
requires an efort to place the entire basis of rational epistemology within a deeper, more
complex, and ultimately more integral process—one that incorporates, but is not exclusively
reduced to, the ontologies of its component ‘parts’.
36 al chemical traditions
56
Berthelot, CAAG, 1.1. Synthemata is a technical term in theurgy; it can be translated as
‘synthemes, symbols, signatures, talismans’.
introduction 39
57
Zosimos, ‘Peri tou theiou hydatos’; Berthelot, CAAG, 3.9.
58
Needless to say, this commonplace of comparative mythography also applies to the sun-
moon or sulphur-mercury dyads of the Graeco-Egyptian, Islamicate and European alchem-
ical traditions.
59
Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5.4, 382-3.
40 al chemical traditions
One nature transforms itself. For all things are woven together and
all things are taken apart and all things are mingled and all things
combined and all things mixed and all things separated and all
things are moistened and all things are dried and all things bud
and all things blossom in the altar shaped like a bowl. For each,
by method and by weight of the four elements, the interlacing and
separation of the whole is accomplished for no bond can be made
without method. he method is natural, breathing in and breathing
out, keeping the orders of the method, increasing and decreasing.
And all things by division and union come together in a harmony,
the method not being neglected, the Nature is transformed. For the
Nature, turning on itself, is changed. And the Nature is both the
nature of the virtue and the bond of the world.66
67
Gebser, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2, 15: ‘Der Ursprung ist immer gegenwärtig. Er ist kein An-
fang, denn aller Anfang ist zeitgebunden. Und die Gegenwart ist nicht das bloße Jetzt, das
Heute, oder der Augenblick. Sie ist nicht ein Zeitteil, sondern eine ganzheitliche Leistung
und damit auch immer ursprünglich. Wer es vermag, Ursprung und Gegenwart als Ganzheit
zu Wirkung und Wirklichkeit zu bringen, sie zu konkretisieren, der überwindet Anfang und
Ende und die bloß heutige Zeit’. Gebser, he Ever-Present Origin (trans. Noel Barstad and
Algis Mickunas, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), xxvii.