Circumambulating the Alchemical Mysterium

AARON CHEAK, PHD

The following article is reproduced from my book, Alchemical Traditions. 

‘One is the serpent whose poison is doubly composed’ — Cleopatra.

A L C H E M Y  may be described, in the words of Baudelaire, as a process of ‘distilling the eternal from the transient’. [1] As the art of transmutation par excellence, the classical applications of alchemy have always been twofold: chrysopoeia and apotheosis (gold-making and god-making)—the perfection of metals and mortals. In seeking to turn ‘poison into wine’, alchemy, like tantra, engages material existence—often at its most dissolute or corruptible—in order to transform it into a vehicle of liberation. Like theurgy, it seeks not only personal liberation—the redemption of the soul from the cycles of generation and corruption—but also the liberation (or perfection) of nature herself through participation in the cosmic demiurgy. In its highest sense, therefore, alchemy conforms to what Lurianic kabbalists would call tikkun, the restoration of the world.

Almost invariably, the earliest alchemical texts describe procedures for creating elixirs of immortality—of extracting transformative essences from physical substances in order to render metals golden and mortals divine. Through this, the earliest alchemists innovated physical processes such as distillation and fermentation, extraction and refinement, and the analysis and synthesis of various chemical substances. However, it must not be forgotten that the earliest contexts of ‘material’ alchemy were not proto-scientific, but ritualistic. Whether one looks at the Taiqing (Great Clarity) tradition of third-to-sixth century China, the Siddha traditions of early medieval India, or the magical and theurgical milieux of Hellenistic Egypt, the most concrete alchemical practices were always inseparable from ritual invocations to and supplications of the divinities whose ranks the alchemist wished to enter. Moreover, in east and west alike, the alchemical techniques themselves were allegedly passed down from divinity to humanity. Alchemy was a divine art (hieratikē technē).

Whether stemming from the entheogenic properties of physical elixirs, or developing independently, the desire to encounter the divine directly through inner experience (gnōsis, jnāna) was soon cultivated via internal practices of a meditative or metaphysiological character. Here the elixir began to be generated within the vessels of the human body in order to transform it into an alchemical body of glory. Thus, the two basic traditions—external and internal alchemy; neidan and waidan, laboratory and oratory—can, in the final analysis, be regarded as complimentary approaches to the same end: the attainment of perfection through liberation from conditioned existence.

Despite these generalising remarks, and despite the unusual aptness of Baudelaire’s phrase, it must nevertheless be conceded that the effort to define alchemy to everyone’s satisfaction may well be impossible. On one hand, alchemy needs to be defined in a way that encapsulates the living breadth and depth of the world’s alchemical traditions. On the other hand, such a definition must also be internally consistent with the many specific, historically contingent (and at timescontradictory) expressions of alchemy. Moreover, the very attempt to strike such a ‘golden mean’ between the universal and particular, between the ‘synchronic’ and the ‘diachronic’, is something of an alchemical act in and of itself—the elusive, indeed transformative, point where ‘art’ becomes science and ‘science’, art. In this respect, alchemy may well be seen to inhere precisely in such ‘nodal points of qualitative change’ (as Jack Lindsay called them in his landmark study of Graeco-Egyptian alchemy), [2] or in instances of ‘qualitative exaltation’ (as the twentieth-century alchemist, René Schwaller de Lubicz, described them with regards to the ‘teratological proliferations’ of biological species). [3]

Rather than offer a single, rigid definition (which will quickly become restrictive), what I would like to do in this introduction is present a series of linguistic, historiographical, and phenomenological ‘circumambulations’ around the alchemical mysterium. In so doing, I seek to trace some of the more salient contours of the alchemical landscape, and, if possible, glimpse the presence of its elusive ‘centre’. One of the merits of approaching alchemy by circumambulation is that it affords a much wider circumscription of the phenomenon than the narrowly fixed parameters of disciplinal specificity usually permit; it therefore allows a more eidetic or phenomenological insight to develop—an approach that, in German philosophical traditions, is seen to promote actual understanding (Verstehen) rather mere explanation (Erklären). [4] As Hans Thomas Hakl points out in a recent study of Julius Evola’s alchemical works, circumambulatio is precisely the approach taken in order to engender an actual experience of the realities that allegedly underpin the multiplicity of Hermetic symbols. [5] It is, potentially, a method of ‘knowledge by presence’ rather than simple ‘representational knowledge’. Of course, such approaches, which are fundamentally morphological in their method, are also ahistorical in character, and so what must be offered here is not an exclusivelyphenomenological approach, but a circumambulation that is also tempered in the fires of historical rigour. Such an approach, in my experience, is fundamentally more balanced than either of the extremes.

At the same time, it must be recognised that there is an inherent tension to this balance; a tension that requires one to embrace a Heraclitean ‘harmony of contraries’ between deeply opposed methodologies. In circumambulating a centre, whether as an ‘essentialist’ or ‘relativist’, the ultimate nature of the centre, indeed the substantial existence of the centre itself, must remain an open question. As the Dao de Jingremarks, ‘thirty spokes meet in the hub of the wheel, but the function of the wheel is in the empty part’. Without the concrete spokes of empirical-historical data, we may not become aware of the centre, and yet this centre, which is empty, is precisely the function (the phenomenological Verstehen) around which the spokes revolve, giving them their form, their function and thus their meaning. Both aspects are interdependent and both must be equally accounted for. Thus, before we open up to any deeper phenomenological perceptions, our circumambulations must begin by first situating alchemy in its concrete historical-linguistic and historiographic contexts.

AL-KIMIYA

Etymologies

The historical purview of what came to be called alchemy includes an undeniable current of influence 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. [6] Scholars have long known that the word alchemy points to an Arabic transmission (alkīmiyā becomes Spanishalquimia, Latin alchimia, French alchimie, German Alchemie, etc.) [7] The Arabic definite article al- points clearly to this, yet the precise origin of the lexeme kīmiyā is far from certain. Academic consensus has generally favoured Greek sources, notably those published by Marcellin Berthelot, [8] suggesting an origin from the term chyma(‘that which is poured out’; ‘flows, fluid’; ‘ingot, bar’; metaphorically, ‘confused mass, aggregate, crowd’; ‘materials, constituents’), whence chymeia, ‘the art of alloying metals’) named from its supposed inventor, Chymēs. [9] As Harris observes in his 1704 Lexicon Technicum:

Chymisty, is variously defined, but the design of this Art is to separate usefully the Purer Parts of any mix’d Body from the more Gross and Impure. It seems probably to be derived from the Greek word chymos, which signifies a Juice, or the purer Substance of a mix’d Body; though some will have it to come from cheein, to melt. It is also called the Spagyrick, Hermetick, and Pyrotechnick Art, as also by some Alchymy. [10]

The idea of fluid essences, extracts or elixirs is clearly central to the alchemical purview, and as will be seen throughout this volume, it is also inherent to the very names for alchemy in Chinese and Indo-Tibetan traditions (Chinese dao jindan, Sanskrit rasāyana, Tibetan bcud len). In addition, the Greek etymology distinctly emphasises the idea of metallic fusibility, and the idea that metals are fundamentallyfusible entities proves central to the alchemical perception. The word ‘metal’ itself (metallon, metalleion) is homophonous with—and most likely derived from—a whole series of words indicating ‘transformation’, such as metalloiōsis, which is formed from the preposition meta– (‘between, with, after; taking a different position or state’) and the substantive alloiōsis (‘alteration’ or ‘change’). [11]

Whether derived from chyma, chymeia, Chymēs, or chymos, the term alchemy appears to come to the Latin west from late Greek sources through the same kinds of channels that preserved Platonic and Aristotelian texts, in Arabic translation, after the fall of the Greek Academy. While the lines of historical transmission are well known, matters are not quite as simple as they first appear. Egyptologists and Sinologists have both brought forward diverging evidence that the origins of alchemy lay not in Greece but in the Ancient Near or Far East.

The 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 chēmia,‘the blackest earth’ (malista melangeion). [12] The implications of this etymology are explored in detail elsewhere in this volume. [13] Suffice it to say for now that a wealth of theological and cosmological significations deeply pertinent to alchemy emerge from Plutarch’s identification 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) defined 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 significations directly tie the early conception 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 regard to the Memphite cosmology of the Shabaka stone and its clear recapitulation in the Corpus Hermeticum itself. [14] Furthermore, as the late Algis Uždavinys makes abundantly clear, this current of alchemy cannot be divorced from the numerous morphological continuities that exist between Egyptian mortuary cult on one hand, and Homeric, Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic and hieratic Neoplatonic traditions on the other. [15] And as scholars such as Peter Kingsley have shown, these morphological connections are not merely apparent: they are deeply rooted in a fine web of mutual historical and geographical interactions between the initiatic traditions not only of Egypt itself, but those of southern Italy and Sicily (whence the Pythagorean current that would retain such a strong presence in the Hermetic tradition down through the centuries, from Bolus of Mendes to the Turba Philosophorum). [16]

The Chinese Origin of the Chem- Etymon

Joseph Needham, in the alchemical volumes of his magisterial Science and Civilisation in China, makes a very plausible case for the Greek and Arabic borrowing of the Chinese term jin (‘gold’) or jin i (‘gold juice, gold ferment’), terms explicitly linked to aurifaction, aurifiction and elixirs for perfecting bodies, all of which appears to place kīmiyā in an original context not only of Taoist metallurgical practices, but also of traditions of physical immortality (macrobiotics). [17] After one of the most lucid and thorough surveys of the existing etymological evidence for alchemy, Needham, concludes:

If some have found an influence of jin (kiem) on chēmeia (chimeia, chymeia) difficult to accept, there has been less desire to question its influence on al-kīmiyā. No Arabic etymologist ever produced a plausible derivation of the word from Semitic roots, and there is the further point that both jin i and kīmiyā could and did mean an actual substance or elixir as well as the art of making elixirs, while chēmeia does not seem to have been used as a concrete noun of that kind. We are left with the possibility that the name of the Chinese ‘gold art’, crystallised in the syllable jin(kiem), spread over the length and breadth of the Old World, evoking first the Greek terms for chemistry and then, indirectly or directly, the Arabic one. [18]

Needham makes it saliently clear that alchemy is not simply a product of Hellenistic culture. Although it is difficult to accept an exclusively Chinese origin for alchemy, the copious evidence adduced by Needham and his collaborators over four large volumes irrevocably transforms (and complicates) the overall picture of the genesis of alchemy. In short, not only must one come to terms with the Ancient Near Eastern influence upon Hellenistic and Islamicate alchemical traditions, one must also contend with the Ancient Far Eastern influences upon the intellectual and technical history of alchemy. This is especially pertinent given the attested lines of cultural exchange between the Asian, European and African landmasses along the Silk Road, which were established during the Han Dynasty (206 bce – 220 ce).

The most important Chinese term for alchemy was jindan, or ‘golden elixir’, which was conceived in both an external sense (as a macrobiogen) and an internal sense (as a spiritual embryo). [19] Jindan also referred especially to cinnabar, the red salt of sulphur and mercury, and the raw ingredient from which mercury was refined. As such, cinnabar points to one of the most ancient and pervasive mineral theophanies of the world’s alchemical traditions: the marriage of mineral sulphur and metallic mercury to form a red crystalline stone (mercuric sulphide). Around this naturally occurring substance, multiple layers of historical, cultural and mythological meaning would accrue not only in Chinese and Indo-Tibetan but also in Islamicate and European alchemical traditions.

With regard to our previous remarks on metal as a quintessentially fluid substance, it may also be added here that in ancient Chinese cosmology, metal (for which jin was also a generic term) was regarded as one of the five elements (wu xing); not only was it regarded as the ‘mother’ of the water element, the metal element itself was defined precisely by its double capacity to melt and to solidify into new form (as in a mould).[20] This ability to revert from a solid form to an amorphous 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 symbolic value in regards to ontologies of ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ (pointing to a more paradoxical ontology embracing both ‘permanence in flux’ and ‘flux 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 figures as the most universal of all alchemical substances in eastern and western traditions alike. When alchemically refined, moreover, it came to be regarded less as a ‘substance’ per se, as more as the underlying principle of pure sublimity—of absolute volatility—with the unique power to penetrate and transform all things, especially minerals and metals (the most dense things).

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Due to the very nature of the topic, the study of alchemy has bordered on a surprisingly large number of disciplines. Generally, and significantly, it may be said to straddle both the history of science and the history of religions. Moreover, due to the wide, cross-cultural purview of alchemy, these dual histories have converged in Egyptological, Sinological, Classical, Islamic, Indo-Tibetan, medieval western, early modern and modern western contexts. [21] More recently, following the efforts of scholars such as Antoine Faivre, alchemy has become a topos in the history of western esotericism (i.e. the history of Hermeticism, gnosis, alchemy and related currents), which has become increasingly established as an academic discipline. [22]

As in other areas, scholars have started to speak less of ‘alchemy’ and more of ‘alchemies’, and an increasing effort has been made to distinguish and contextualise the individual currents or expressions of alchemy over and against the idea of alchemy as a sweeping, monolithic tradition. With this distinction comes the recognition that the idea of alchemy as a single, unified phenomenon is more the product of an esoteric interpretation of history (e.g. metahistory or hierohistory) rather than a strictly empirical description of historical phenomena. The idea of a Hermetic or alchemical ‘tradition’ thus says as much about the formulation of esoteric identity as it does about the complex historical and social vicissitudes of the phenomenon in question; [23] and yet, as Kingsley has noted, the idea of Hermeticism itself is bound precisely to a tradition of interpretation and translation (hermēneus) between traditions. [24] Moreover, as Faivre has noted, alchemy, like magic and astrology, evinces a strong cross-cultural character. With these considerations in mind, it is important to speak of alchemical traditions in the plural to emphasise the diversity and uniqueness of the different historical expressions of alchemy; this is not to preclude the possibility that broader unities may be discerned among them, but simply to ensure that they do not displace the individual care and attention that each current or tradition requires in order to be understood on its own terms. At the same time, grand, unifying perspectives, often unpopular in the post-modern academy, should not be abandoned, for they provide important heuristic tools that help elucidate and coordinate deeper thematic and morphological integrities.

Because a large part of the historiography of alchemy has typically been formulated within the context of the history of science, and because a virulent polemic against alchemy was pivotal to the establishment of a rationalised science, this has resulted in an overwhelmingly positivist and dualistic intellectual heritage in the study of alchemy. In the one-sided criticism advanced by positivist histories of science, alchemy is summarily dismissed as merely erroneous proto-chemistry. Fortunately, much of the effort in the historiography of alchemy over the past fifty years has been successful in slowly dismantling this lingering attitude so that more balanced perspectives have been able to prevail. [25]

Misconceptions in the historiography of alchemy from the perspective of science are, of course, matched by those advanced from the perspective of religion and spirituality. With the turn of the scientific revolution towards the end of the seventeenth century, alchemy and chemistry, previously synonymous under the term chymistry, were vociferously differentiated and, although the esoteric rhetoric of alchemy continued, its operative aspect was largely (though by no means entirely) abandoned. [26] By the Victorian era, this current culminated in the works of Mary Anne Atwood and the affirmation of an exclusively spiritual alchemy in which the operative element would be dismissed entirely. [27] ‘There is no evidence’, remarks Principe, ‘that a majority, or even a significant fraction of pre-18th century European alchemical writers and practitioners saw their work as anything other than natural philosophical in character, as even the prolific occult writer, A. E. Waite (1857–1942) was forced to admit toward the end of his career in 1926’. [28] Such remarks are useful for establishing broad lines of development, and while on the large accurate, must also be taken with a grain of salt, especially in light of statements by pre-eighteenth century alchemists such as Stephanos of Alexandria (seventh century), who explicitly emphasises intellectual and theological aims, most notably in his admonition: ‘Put away the material theory so that you may be deemed worthy to see with your intellectual eyes the hidden mystery’. [29] (This counter-example is important, for Stephanos’ work is explicitly linked to the Byzantine and Arabic traditions that form the foundations of European alchemy).

Despite such nuances, many scholars remain increasingly critical of not only the spiritual interpretations of alchemy popular in the nineteenth century, but also the psychological interpretations of alchemy that emerged in the twentieth. The scholarly discontent with these interpretations appears to derive from the fact that they strongly colour many people’s assumptions about alchemy. These scholars therefore see themselves as undertaking the ‘continuous dismantling of erroneous views of alchemy promulgated since the Enlightenment which have, despite their dubious qualifications and origins, deeply tinctured a major part of the literature on alchemy written during the 19th and 20th centuries’. [30] Such attitudes are particularly directed against the very influential work of Carl Jung, for whom processes in the alchemical vessel are a screen for the archetypal projections of the psyche. [31] Not surprisingly, Jung has come under increasing historical criticism in this regard; Lawrence M. Principe, for instance, has suggested that the work of Jung is merely an extension of the ‘deleterious outgrowth’ of Victorian occultism. [32]Principe, whose own area of specialty is early modern European alchemy, is particularly critical of the occult-spiritual and psychological interpretations as he finds them in especial contrast to his findings in the works of early modernchymists, such as Starkey, Philalethes, Boyle, and Newton, among others.

While the excesses of the spiritualist and psychological interpretations are recognisable when circumscribed to their proper contexts, this by no means precludes more nuanced approaches to the question of psychological and spiritual alchemies. In this respect, in the early modern period alone, some of Principe and Newman’s own oversimplifications have been countered by the more nuanced studies of the spiritual dimension in early modern alchemy proffered by scholars such as Hereward Tilton, who observes: ‘The historiography proposed by Principe and Newman can only be upheld by portraying early modern laboratory alchemy as purely ‘chemical’ research (conceived in crypto-positivist terms), and by erasing from history the development of alchemical thought subsequent to the seventeenth century. For researchers in the history of western esotericism, this modus operandiis entirely inadequate’. [33] Indeed, too rigid an insistence on an overtly or exclusively operative alchemy cannot be sustained nor extended beyond its proper contexts, any more than can an exclusively spiritual alchemy; this becomes especially evident once one steps outside the relatively narrow period of early modern and modern western Europe, whereupon the picture changes drastically. The broader picture offered by the history of religions opens up a far deeper perspective on the relationship between operative and spiritual alchemies. David Gordon White’s magisterial study of rasāyana siddha traditions in Medieval India, for instance, lays bare a blatantly alchemical world in which the transmutation of the mortal human body into an immortal, divine body was explicitly homologised with metallurgical transmutations according to the formula: ‘as in metals, so in the body’. [34] Here, the whole elixir tradition takes centre stage, the origins of which take us back to the deeply Taoist alchemy of ancient China, which, per the work of Needham, Sivin and Pregadio, shows no contradiction at all between the inner (neidan) and outer (waidan) elixirs. [35] The case becomes even more explicit in the Tibetan Buddhist alchemy of the Kalacakra Tantra, in which metallurgical, medicinal, and metaphysical aims are thoroughly intertwined; here, metallurgical and botanical processes are used in the creation of iatrochemical elixirs designed to prolong life not for its own sake, but in order to ‘buy time’ to achieve liberation in life (jivanmukti) through the actualisation of the initiate’s Buddha Nature (buddha-dhātu,tathāgatagarbha). [36] Elsewhere, 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. [37]

The deep relationship that emerges here between metallurgical and physiological processes all pertain strongly to the hidden continuity between all bodies, from the mineral to the divine. Therefore, 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 reflect a strong tendency in alchemy toward the unification of the material and the spiritual.

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