Alchemy, Archaic, and Industrial: A Spirituality of Metallurgy

At the heart of all alchemical perspectives and practices lies the coincidentia oppositorum, the striking proposal that the way to the highest is through the lowest. The dark realm of matter is understood to contain the essence of its opposite. It is through the material that we attain the spiritual. It is paradoxical from the outset. It is the blacksmith, the crude metalworker, who, of all people, is witness to the secrets of fire and knows the inner mysteries of nature. The blacksmith tending his hearth is the prototypal alchemist. The alchemical laboratory, regardless of how sophisticated and subtle, is ultimately a development of the smithy.

In this respect, alchemy is, by definition, an industrial spirituality. It is a spirituality of metallurgy, in the first instance. Historically, it accompanies metalworking and smelting. It is one of the arts of Vulcan. It proposes that spiritual treasures lie hidden in the most base processes of nature, and in the metals especially, that gold lies concealed in lead. It embraces Nature as the materia of spiritual transformation and the metals as ripe for transformation.

This is also to say it is archaic, and it preserves and assumes an archaic cosmology. Its deepest roots are as old as fire. The metallic ores in the womb of the earth are taken to be of celestial origin and are understood to be seeds that mature over long periods. They embody the great celestial cycles observed in the heavens since neolithic times. With the advent of metalworking, countless centuries of observation were reconfigured into what might be characterized as a new spiritual technology. What we find in alchemy is the persistence of an archaic worldview and the essentializing of extremely ancient observational knowledge along with its accompanying treasure-store of symbols.

The symbolism of alchemy follows from its implicit cosmology. In particular, the metals are both seminal and embryonic, and so wherever alchemical traditions emerged—east, west and everywhere in between, in China, India, Tibet, the Middle East, Europe—this metallurgical spirituality was also gynecological. This is the conjunction of symbolisms that makes alchemy seem arcane and inpenetrable to us today. The transformation of metals is analogous to embryonic growth. The blacksmith is joined, at the same time—and strange to relate—by the midwife. This itself is a coincidence of opposites: the brute with the tender.

All metalworking is mimetic: it imitates the natural processes of nature and specifically the smelting of metals in volcanic settings. Alchemy purports to capture, refine and accelerate these processes, nurturing the metallic embryos to their maturation. What happens over aeons and ages within the earth—the maturation of the base metals into noble metals—can be accomplished in short order by those who know the secrets, and in the traditional crafts it is the smith and the midwife who have the relevant esoterica.

For all its mystique, and its persistence, however, alchemy has an unhappy history. As a spiritual perspective it is radically non-dual or even, to use a contemporary misnomer, 'tantric': it embraces the material and the corporeal. Moreover, much of its symbolism is reproductive and sexual. For the most part, therefore, it has been a heterodox perspective, or its accommodation within religious orthodoxies has been uncomfortable. All the same, it often prospered on the fringes or in the courts of aristocrats and kings; thus its designation as 'The Royal Art.'

In most places and times, though, it was quickly populated with charlatans and 'puffers', or it retreated into obscurantism. Inevitably, it became intermixed with other esoteric perspectives, such as Kabbalah, while at the same time it was increasingly sundered from its original symbiosis with astrology. It is a fair summary to say that, over the centuries, it fell into decline. Practitioners of the Royal Art are always struggling against cosmic decline, in any case. The great cosmic cycles that underpin alchemy constitute a hardening of cosmic conditions, a falling away from order into chaos: transformations become increasingly difficult over time and decadence is to be expected.

Nevertheless, it is conspicuously an 'End-Time' methodology that supplements wider traditions rather than being a full entity in itself. At no time in its history does it become a self-sustaining spiritual path on its own; it is attached to larger superstructures but also remains aware that, like metalworking, it transcends boundaries across diverse cultures. It maintains a claim to primordiality and universality, even where this is unwelcome in religious particularisms.

Ultimately, the alchemist seeks the complete transformation of Creation, which is to say a rectification of the cosmos itself. Spiritually, alchemy seeks the full realisation of the human state: cosmic salvation. This entirely noble objective was very often lost to greed and deception, bringing the Art into wide disrepute.

Emerging from Antiquity, alchemy fell foul of the profound bifurcation at the heart of the Western tradition, and to some extent the Islamic tradition too, namely the divide between Plato and Aristotle. Plato preserves the archaic alchemical cosmology. In his Republic, the Ideal State inevitably declines through metallic grades—first gold, then silver, then bronze, then iron. But in its praxis alchemy drew mainly upon Aristotle and the Aristotelean account of the elements. These two streams interacted in complex ways, but were never united again into a coherent whole.

In the later Middle Ages, the emphasis the Devotio Moderna placed upon the humanity of Christ invited alchemical accommodations: the dual nature of Christ, fully God and fully man, is the ultimate coincidence of opposites. The Transfiguration invites rich parallels from the storehouse of alchemical symbols as do the mysteries of the Trinity. In the Christian world, alchemy took a particularly theological and soteriological turn.

Consequently, in the European tradition—where much alchemical knowledge was imported from the east and only partially absorbed and understood—the revival of alchemy, as a legitimate spiritual art, became part of the wider project of the Protestant Reformation. Most importantly, it was championed by Paracelsus who attempted to rescue and reformulate it against the 'puffers' and pretenders. He made a radical move, or several, and it has shaped the modern European alchemical tradition ever since.

Paracelsus separated alchemy from its metallurgical roots. He retained metallurgical methodologies, but otherwise developed an entirely plant-based alchemy. At the same time, unwittingly, he brought it more in line with Chinese traditions by making the focus of the art health and longevity. Immortality, for which gold, or jade, is only a metaphor, is the immediate spiritual objective. The alchemy of metals would continue in Europe as a separate stream, but the reformed alchemy of Paracelsus became widespread and influential.

A further liberating consequence of the Paraceslean reform was that the archaic doctrines underpinning the alchemical worldview could emerge as legitimate philosophical structures. We find their wholesale appropriation in the thought of Jacob Boehme, for example. He presents schemes of unfolding ages, and marries this distinctly alchemical perspective with Judeo-Christian schemes of cosmic salvation. Remarkably, it allows him a platform from which to contemplate the transcendent unity of religions, presenting the spiritual history of mankind like an alchemical process. Alchemy here has become a philosophy, or theosophy, rather than a praxis, but it finds a productive and creative place in European ideas in this form.

Regrettably, though, it also paves the way for the contemporary desanguination of the word "alchemy" which is today so widely over-used and abused—"the alchemy of...[add whatever you want]"—that it is almost empty of real meaning, and we almost start to grasp for an alternative. (Some people try the Persian misnomer "Irfanic".) It is not alone in this degradation, of course, but it has no orthodox canon to protect it from popular and commercial violation. On the bright side, a good body of the alchemical heritage has made its way into natural therapy regimes in Germany (due to Paracelsus) but also in the modern consolidation of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

We should also mention that the French enthusiasm for aromatherapy is a legacy of a school of alchemical perfumery that was highly developed in the east—in Sufism, especially, where one of the Masters is none other than Attar the Perfumer, and where the Divine Presence is a 'fragrance'—and which was (imperfectly) imported into the Provence in the Middle Ages. On the whole, the European tradition is peculiarly fragmented and falls into distinct geographical schools or streams. Metallic alchemy prospered in regions with mining. Paracelsus drew upon the forests, alpine regions and abundance of flora in rural Germany. The sunny world of southern France had access to perfumed oils and resins.

In the Black Forest region was another school worth noting, the so-called Mutus Liber school, dedicated to the pursuit of the Prima Materia. This became notorious, because practitioners used the gross wastes and exudates of nature as their starting point. In an infamous case, an alchemist collected the urine of adolescent boys, proposing that it contained concentrations of the Quintessence - a grossly physical application of the coincidentia oppositorum. Yet, this strand of European alchemy has made a direct and positive contribution to contemporary organic farming, most notably in the 'biodynamic' system of Rudolf Steiner.

In the other conspicuous development, Carl Jung famously analogized the processes of psychological maturation—which he described as 'individuation'—with the stages of alchemical transmutation. Paracelsus had advanced alchemical medicines: Jung extended it to a psychotherapy. It is influential in that arena as a guide to the psyche of industrial man but never heals the breach between psyche and soma which must be the proper alchemical objective.

Stepping back even further, we can perhaps see the imprint of this industrial mode upon the wider currents of our time. In Marxism, for example, it is the "masses" – noting that the term has been borrowed from physics – who are to redeem us. Utopia lies buried in the morass of the lowly. This is a deeply alchemical notion, or at least we find ourselves at an historical impasse to which alchemical perspectives might be usefully applied, extracting a spiritual lesson from this age of triumphant materialism.

In the end, this is the promise of alchemy. The human state is physical, corporeal, embodied. Nature is our given reality. Felix culpa. The cycles of heaven run down. Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Dark times will come. The alchemical perspective proposes that this earthly sojourn, and its inevitable dissolution, is but a stage in a greater scheme of universal metamorphosis. It acts, above all, as a prolongation of this archaic insight.