Alchemy and the Healing Art (Medicine) - Alchymie und Heilkunst

ALEXANDER VON BERNUS
Alchemy and the Healing Art (Medicine) - Alchymie und Heilkunst

Translated to English by Nicholas Sharma

PREFACE

The essays united in this book form a whole in themselves. The author is aware that, in them, he has gone much further in his statements about the reality of alchemy and about the alchemical secret carefully guarded by the adepts throughout the ages and almost only hinted at in symbolic language than anyone previously knowledgeable on the matter has done. To fully lift the veil would mean: to forfeit the blessing. For the one who is on the path, what is revealed in this book will lead up to the outer court of the Hermetic temple.

What the author primarily aims for in these explanations, however, is to present alchemy in its capacity as a cosmogenetic worldview system in contrast to modern chemistry, which is a scientifically conditioned discipline of its time, and to demonstrate its truth in its practical effects.

CONTENTS
Alchemy and the Art of Healing
Alchemical Connections
Iatrochemistry
The Mystery of Healing
Goethe’s Original Encounter
The Secret Fire and the Secret Wine Spirit of the Adepts

ALCHEMY AND THE ART OF HEALING
Whoever seeks to fathom
Nature in its innermost depths
Must first remember
What the origin of man is.
A.V.B.

The interest in the borderline sciences, which had reawakened in the years before the First World War, despite all obstacles, deepened increasingly during the period from 1933 to 1945. Physics and biology have come to entirely new insights and discoveries. Laws that, a generation ago, were still considered unshakable have fallen, and the spirit free, never to be bound faces a new horizon.

Even at the beginning of the century, no one, at least in Germany, would have dared to speak seriously of astrology without risking their reputation as a scientist once and for all; today, it is taken for granted. And the same applies to graphology, chirology, radiesthesia, iridology, and all other related disciplines. Materialistic views of nature still dominated thought around the turn of the century and, in universities the strongholds of materialistic modes of thinking and training they largely still prevail today, even though they have already had to abandon the majority of their main bastions.

Above all, it is medicine, with its corps of doctors trained through the university system, that fights with all the means at its disposal to maintain its now thoroughly shaken supremacy perhaps precisely because it was in the field of medicine that the first major breach in materialistic methodology and thinking was made. Indeed, over the past four to five decades, medicine has received the most from other non-traditional disciplines and has, naturally and silently, assimilated them, only to deny their original source once assimilation had occurred:

From Kneipp’s hydrotherapy and the impulses of Louis Kuhne developed what is today the generally recognized hydrotherapeutic treatment method; the entire foundational chapter of dietetics has its origin in naturopathy and a natural approach to the human organism as a whole; isopathy is more or less an offshoot of homeopathy, as it combats infectious diseases with substances derived from the same disease, through the use of specific vaccines (serum therapy: transfer of antitoxin-containing serum for immunization); and finally, the various plant extracts and alkaloids are, albeit imperfectly, a substitute for the former tea cures and tinctures, because the components obtained in this way, torn from their organic context, are deprived of the living plant’s healing powers (vitamins). The technical vitamin tablets of today are indispensable to the body.

Nonetheless, the original plant-based healing has been revived, even if mechanized. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. Today’s medicine, therefore, is by no means justified in claiming too much credit for the independence of its achievements over the past decades, even though one cannot deny its serious and relentless, though entirely one-sided, will to research. Surgery alone is an exception: its achievements and technical results are convincingly evident indeed, because they are one-sided in their methods and, insofar as they remain within their limits, one can entrust oneself to them without reservation. However, the clinician’s precise work is only truly ensured through collaboration with the pathologists, who, in the laboratories of the large hospitals, place the entire range of hematology, serology, bacteriology, biodynamics, toxicology, and pathological anatomy at his service.

For the vast array of internal diseases, however, where the scalpel cannot help beginning with influenza the licensed physician of today, despite penicillin and sulfonamide preparations, is temporarily more or less at a loss, unless he makes use of natural healing methods himself. Is it therefore surprising that the individual, and with him the population as a whole composed of many individuals, increasingly turns to unofficial healing methods: naturopathy, biochemistry, homeopathy, and spagyrics?

Naturally, the one-sided, non-allopathic physician does not fall into the error of attempting to heal everything by a single method, since all orthodox pharmacists reject any medicine fundamentally. Biochemistry, for example, is not comprehensive enough to meet every need.

Homeopathy and complex homeopathy, on the other hand, have the advantage over other disciplines in that they encompass the entire chemical-pharmaceutical arsenal. Yet this medicinal treasure is so immense that even the experienced practitioner runs the risk of erring in indications and high potencies are not always appropriate for the non-materialistic thinker, although they are indicated for sensitive natures and in certain chronic disease states.

Spagyrics remains, which, since the First World War, through the author’s impulse in Germany, has regained new recognition, but even today compared to biodynamics and homeopathy can only claim a relatively limited following. Yet spagyrics at least in its pure form is the healing method that unites both complex homeopathy and biochemistry and even goes beyond them: on one hand, it covers the entire medicinal repertoire of both, and on the other, it delivers the indicated ingredients to the diseased organism in a state that has passed through the spagyric treatment, has been opened up, and is therefore assimilable, particularly metals, semi-metals, and minerals.

Healing herbs, however which are always subjected to the spagyric process, meaning the fermentation process are neither advantageous nor advisable to treat in this way, because many of their most effective constituents are more or less lost in the process. While a reputable and recognized South German laboratory still refers to this treatment of medicinal herbs as spagyric, for metallic and mineral substances, it does not act differently from allopathy and homeopathy, adding them unprocessed, in raw form, to the medication.

In doing so, he bases this naming on the authority of Johann Rudolf Glauber, which is conditionally justified, since it is precisely Glauber who emphasizes in his Pharmacopea Spagyrica: there are not many plants that require this “corrective” treatment; rather, they can be prepared in their essentials as they are.

This position of Glauber remains ours even today, which we wish to specify even more sharply by establishing the following rule: Only toxic medicinal herbs such as Conium maculatum (hemlock), Nux vomica (strychnine seed), Semen strychnine, etc. require spagyric treatment in the sense mentioned, whereas, for example, all non-toxic, bitter-containing medicinal plants such as Chelidonium (celandine), Lignum Quassiae (quassia wood), Taraxacum (dandelion), Cichorium intybus (chicory), etc. must by no means be deprived of their bitter constituents through inappropriate fermentation, since according to the law similia similibus curantur, in diseases of the liver and gallbladder, it is precisely these bitter substances that are effective.

A similar situation applies to many other bitter substances and alkaloids, which, when left in their organic context as an integral part of the whole plant, have great medicinal significance, and their loss through fermentation must therefore be carefully avoided.

However, the commonly used vegetable tinctures (alcoholic plant extracts), as they are officinal in allopathy and also, with perhaps somewhat longer and more careful extraction, in homeopathy as mother tinctures, are considered insufficient by the spagyric practitioner, because these tinctures lack both the salts to be extracted and the essential oils of the plant to be processed. Yet both the salts and the essential oils are essential for the complete overall effect of the medicinal herb, often even decisive.

Why, then, follow the late Johann Rudolf Glauber, who was largely alienated from the true alchemical worldview and method, when one can take Paracelsus himself as the starting point?
The most complete preparation method of medicinal herbs which always exists, with the exception of the toxic ones to be subjected to fermentation can be found in Paracelsus in the Book of Archidoxes under the chapter: De Magisteriis. The instruction reads literally:

“THE MAGISTERIA of CRESCENTIBUS
“But as for Herbs, and other such like, they are to be permixt with burning Wine, and to be putrified there­with for a month; then are they to be Distilled by B. M. and that which is Distilled must be again poured on; and it must be thus proceeded withal so long un­til the whole Quantity of the burning Wine be four­times less then the Juyces of the Herbs: Distil this same by a Pellican, with new Additaments, for one month, then Separate it; Having so done, thou shalt have the Magistery of that Matter or Herb wch thou tookest.”

The preparation of metals, semi-metals (such as antimony), and minerals through the spagyric process, however, presents much higher demands, and the one who turns to Paracelsus for this, without reference to other chemical masters accessible to him, will lack understanding of alchemy, even those who have approached it so far will, without this key, never find access to the workshop and the preparations of Paracelsus. Nevertheless, from the same Book of Archidoxes, the instruction of Paracelsus for the preparation of the magisteria from metals is given:

THE MAGISTERIUM FROM METALS

Take the Circulatum well purified and place it in the highest vessel; into it put the beaten or filed metals you desire, finely and subtly powdered and purified; combine them in sufficient weight. After the Infusio circulatum for four weeks, the lamella will take on a uniform appearance, and then float solidly, hardened according to the nature of its metals.

Then distill it through the Atratorium Argentum Herb, which has been brought by the circulatum, and so you obtain aurum potabile and argentum potabile. The same applies to other metals: without any harm, follow the same procedure. Let what is to remain, remain, as the understanding suffices to indicate.

The practise thereof is thus;
Take Circulatum purged excellently well, yea to the highest essence, whereto put the thinnest Metaline Leaves or filings of any Metal you please, excellenly and most subtilely wrought and mundified.

These two being put together in a sufficient weight must be circulated for four weeks, and the Leaves will be reduced by this temperate medium into an oyl, and into a form of fatnesse swimming at top, and co­loured according to the condition of the Metal, the which you shall Separate by a Silver drawer from the Circulatum; this therefore is Potable Gold or Silver, &c. The like may be also extracted with the other Metals, and may be taken in drink, or with your food, with­out any detriment.

(ENGLISH RENDITION OF THE SAME TEXT ABOVE)

Regarding the last salt: let it remain as it is, as Paracelsus unambiguously emphasizes, because this preparation is only accessible to the one who already possesses the key to the hidden workshop of the adepts, which is in fact also the secret key to spagyrics in general. Its handling is now also indicated for the preparation of the mighty metallic arcana.

Take the Circulatum well purified and place it in the two highest vessels. Here lies the rare and mysterious treasure, buried and only to be raised to acquire citizenship in the territory of alchemy, the realm of Hermes.

What were these Circulata, the Circulatum majus and Circulatum minus, this temperature, this Aqua Solves of Paracelsus? Nothing other than the Alkahest, the always sought, deeply hidden, praised under countless names, great universal solvent the famous and secret wine spirit of Raimundus Lullus and the adepts.

On nothing else have the masters of Hermeticism spread the veil of secrecy so thoroughly as over this solvent, threatening with curse and death anyone who lifts it before the uninitiated and reveals the secret preserved over millennia.

It was, therefore, centuries ago, when the tradition was still alive, almost a hopeless undertaking to approach this cosmophysical mystery without being initiated (the Mysterium magnum, as Jacob Boehme calls it), and the seeker today even the already prepared stands before this gate, adorned with mysterious inscriptions.

The early alchemical masters wrote so obliquely that it already requires years of dedication to matter to become familiar with their way of speaking; they commonly reveal most things only in images and symbols. And once one has diligently familiarized oneself with their worldview, one then realizes that one is not even yet standing in the outer courtyard.

All the more aggrieved justly aggrieved one becomes regarding those who, peripherally at some time, have once touched this domain, yet only superficially, and those who merely saw, stand from a distance or observed him from afar, in order then to arrogantly pass judgment from the standpoint of time-bound, one-sidedly positivist-oriented science, would be mistaken.

If one now continues to survey the extensive contemporary literature on alchemy in general and spagyrics in particular literature already quite substantial in itself seeking writings from which theoretical discussion and practical guidance for alchemical work in the laboratory, in the sense of the Hermetic tradition, can be drawn, one comes to the conclusion: there is none.

Regarding applied astrology which in its fundamental elements is a prerequisite, one of the prerequisites, for alchemy there exists today already a considerable number of authors and astrological periodicals worthy of serious attention, although even here one cannot be sufficiently strict in selection and careful review. Astrology, however, does not demand any specialized knowledge or training of any kind, aside from certain elementary mathematical knowledge at least not for those who do not aim to inform themselves deeply about astrology, to practice it personally and for others, and, after some years of observation, experience, and collection of statistical material, to write a readable and flawless book about it, naturally without having arrived at essential personal insights or deeper interpretations grasping the metaphysical connections.

But is the situation in other empirical sciences very different? Astrology is indeed an empirically exact science, at least in its practical form (horoscopy). Mistakes in prediction are no more frequent there than misdiagnoses in modern scientific therapy, although the latter, thanks to its numerous eminent technical aids, is far more unfortunate when errors occur. But precisely because practical astrology considering that its results can be handled purely statistically must be counted among the empirical sciences, it appears entirely illogical for its opponents, particularly if they are modern scientists, to reject it; for in doing so they contradict their own methods and reasoning. The modern scientist does not know, for example, why two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen combine to form water, nor why, for instance, the fusion of Sb₂S₃ + 3 Fe yields 2 Sb + 3 FeS. Likewise, he cannot answer the epistemological question of why chemical affinities exist at all, or why like and unlike poles attract or repel, without merely pushing the question back by one or two stations. Even today’s advanced atomic research provides no answer to the epistemological “why.”

Just as little as this questioning of chemical affinities and the attraction and repulsion of magnetic poles seems justified, so too is it unjustified with regard to the “why” of planetary attractions and repulsions resulting from the constellations, and the affinities in astrology based on cosmophysical laws these belong to two separate areas of epistemology: the former is the subject of an epistemology of chemistry and physics, while the latter belongs to the epistemology of astrology. Neither, however, falls within the domain of empirical sciences; both belong to the realm of supersensible knowledge (gnosis), visionary perception, spiritual investigation, and esoteric science.

For the people of yesterday, today, and probably still tomorrow especially for those trained in the natural sciences this term has a certain defensive, even antagonistic connotation, and while a one-sided perspective, it is still defensible and justifiable from the standpoint of modern mentality. The objection is always logically the same and is expressed by the modern natural scientist approximately as follows:

Modern science is no longer the exclusive possession or privilege of a single caste or secret society, as it was in earlier times, when the educational and developmental conditions of humanity, as well as the economic and social circumstances, made it so. Today, science, in all its disciplines, methods, and achievements, is common property international and accessible to everyone. The laboratories of physics, chemistry, physiology, biology, bacteriology, etc., with their almost unlimited and ever-improving technical aids, provide the greatest possible opportunities for free research in all areas; the great public libraries, manuscript collections, and international communication give everyone the chance to study past and present knowledge in detail, to acquire it, and to expand it.

The unrestricted collaboration of the humanities, natural sciences, and technology, which characterizes the spirit of the modern age an age in which there are no arbitrarily drawn limits guarantees for the future an unstoppable progress along all lines. How, then, can there still be talk of “secret knowledge” in the original sense of the term today?

Leaving aside the possible retention of truly far-reaching inventions and research results that are of significance for humanity in economic or hygienic terms at a time when every individual is able to emerge from isolation in a completely different way than in the past and become a living member of human society such secrecy would be highly antisocial and even immoral.

In response to this: the aforementioned standpoint, and its associated demands, are quite justified and valid for modern science in all its breadth, and thus for all the achievements that arise from it, insofar as they appear according to their time-bound state.

But in esoteric science, it is not about secrecy or hidden knowledge of any field in that sense. Anyone who interprets the word in this way completely misunderstands its original and always consistent meaning. Wherever genuine esoteric science has been discussed, throughout the millennia and to this day, it concerns knowledge that does not lie within the domain of any scientific discipline or technical field, but is accessible only through supersensible knowledge attained via spiritual-soulful training, and through initiation just as in the past.

The experiences and visions reached through this path are the same everywhere. The knowledge gained is therefore not subjective but of objective spiritual reality, and its summary as a worldview is precisely what the esotericist designates as secret knowledge: knowledge that each individual can grasp by virtue of their own soul structure and mental readiness.

The one who has thus gained access to this knowledge is its unrestricted guardian and administrator. As Paracelsus says, it means: to find the macrocosm within the microcosm in the language of the stars, the “little world,” to observe the “stars of the great world” (spiritual astrology). In this way, man becomes the measure of things, or, as Leonardo formulated it as an artist: Man is the model of the world.

Whoever has crossed the threshold of that temple, according to Paracelsus, stands in the light of nature, viewing it with the inner eye of the soul; that person is an esotericist. This is how the alchemist, the spagyricist, distinguishes the false from the righteous. This is the wisdom of the name (Paracelsus).

With these remarks, the reason why there are no writings in modern German or foreign literature over the last one hundred fifty years, by anyone knowledgeable, that could convey to the seeker theoretical insight or practical instruction in alchemy or spagyrics, is also explained. Although the French were allowed a significantly less prejudiced, more dedicated, and purposeful approach to this border region than Germans in the most recent and current educational epochs, the German treatments such as those by Hermann Kopp in 1886 (History of Alchemy, Heidelberg) or the compendium Origin and Expansion of Alchemy by Prof. Dr. Edmund O. von Lippmann (vol. I, Berlin 1919; vol. II, 1931) provide an extremely rich collection of material and are culturally and historically significant. Yet the rationalist approach of the authors toward the treated subject, and their inability due to the limits of their time to reach the true essence and spirit of Hermeticism as esoteric science, do not equip the unprepared reader to find the secret harbor from which alone the adventurous voyage toward the Golden Fleece can be undertaken.

The closing stanza of an old English alchemical poem, in translation, reads:

For he who wanders, wanders far,
Over foreign lands and seas,
Who follows the ancient mountains,
Where the Philosopher’s Stone once lay…

By far the most alchemistically oriented book in the German language since the withdrawal of the true Hermeticists or the outbreak of the French Revolution is Karl Christoph Schmieder’s History of Alchemy, Halle 1832 the year of Goethe’s death which, for anyone with an inkling of inner connections, will appear not merely as a coincidental collection or play of superficial history. The chronological unfolding of historical and intellectual events is subject to specific cosmophysical laws, which are often expressed symbolically, especially in the silent but no less essential occurrences.

Schmieder was not a Hermetic adept, but his upbringing was still under the almost forgotten alchemical tradition of the time, and his state of mind was such that, during his decades of impartial immersion in this worldview and careful scrutiny of its traditions, he could feel a reverent calm toward realities and substances that demanded restraint and respect. It is from this fundamental attitude that the book was written.

A brief and exemplary preface, reflecting the author’s inner disposition toward every subject, may speak for itself:

Just criticism would have been deserved if this painstaking, long-conducted search had been placed in doubt, which to many might seem to be the case. It is true that alchemy initially lost its process; yet, if it has since found legal or just grounds, it is unreservedly admissible to appeal for revision. Even if centuries have passed in the meantime, the recent cannot deny it; for truth is enduring and must not be condemned.

In many lectures, the search is considered abandoned, and what is customarily studied belongs merely to the conventional. All lectures, however, require one to think independently, and study must follow. I came of age at a time when the aforementioned process was said to have reached its end. In my twenties, I swore by the words of the master that alchemy was a fairy tale, devised for deceit, and at that time the young doctor was naturally scornful of dissenting opinions. In my thirties, I already ignored many things I could not reconcile. In my forties, I read more and more, which made me uneasy. By my fifties, I had arrived at the point of not knowing what to believe.

I was ashamed of this, and it produced the resolve to finally investigate the matter thoroughly to seek the actual grounds of the matter. The masters we had heard from had indeed done so; doubting that was far from the truth. Yet in the intervening years, new facts had come to light, and older ones had become better known. Moreover, in these thirty years of my study, certain occurrences had taken place that gave reason to doubt whether the law by which the process was previously judged still applied.

Not everyone finds the time and opportunity to gather the documents necessary for a comprehensive overview of the matter. Where this is lacking, I therefore ask that one accept what I have collected and compared. If it serves the reader, I shall be pleased, though not all will find it useful. What I report is documented; what I believe is clearly distinguished as such, and I wish thereby to forestall objections.

In such cases, one must be capable of distancing oneself from a cherished viewpoint in order to examine anew what has been proven. One must also be able to allow an improbable search to attempt the improbable. To this, great thinkers have long encouraged us.

Seneca confesses:

What at first appears incredible is not therefore false; for truth often retains the appearance of falsehood.

Almost identically, Voltaire says:

Truth is not always plausible.

Although more than one hundred and twenty-five years have now passed since the appearance of this preface, what is expressed therein still retains its full validity today.

Certainly, Schmieder’s work, viewed externally, is only a historical survey of alchemical seeking and finding of erring and attaining from its historically verifiable beginnings up to the turning point of the nineteenth century, when alchemy withdrew step by step before the advancing positivistic natural sciences. Whoever therefore takes this book in hand with the expectation of finding instructions or hints for practical chemical work will be disappointed. Likewise, the therapeutic side of spagyrics which probably interests the majority of readers of such writings most is scarcely addressed. For so-called iatrochemistry is in truth only a subsidiary and accompanying phenomenon of alchemy proper.

Indeed, the great alchemists were initially also great physicians Paracelsus and van Helmont above all which follows naturally; for the Philosopher’s Stone is also the Elixir of Life and the highest medicine. Yet for the true alchemist, the ability to heal and rejuvenate was no more the goal or final purpose than the making of gold, or more precisely, the transmutation of a base metal into a noble one. Rather, the lapis philosophorum is the most perfect temporal and earthly gift, which once a certain stage has been reached is granted as a ripe fruit falling, as it were, into the lap of the one who has walked the initiatory path of the alchemist into the depths of Nature.

By contrast, all those who approached the Great Work merely for the sake of the Elixir of Life or gold-making generally remained ordinary chemists and wanderers astray to the very end people who spent their entire lives groping with blindfolded eyes in the foggy perimeter of the Hermetic temple. For scarcely does the word of Christ apply so fully to anyone else as to the alchemist:

Seek first the treasures of heaven, and all else shall be added unto you.

Yet there have always also been those who, from inner illumination, knew of the Philosopher’s Stone and its preparation and wrote extensively about it, but never themselves prepared it, because for them the inner work had already been accomplished. Such a lofty theosophist and mystic was Jakob Böhme. Only his students and successors, such as Valentin Weigel and Sincerus Renatus, then represented the Stone in practical form.

At the beginning of their writings and of the hermetic work, all alchemical masters place the Invocatio Dei, the invocation of God. Thus begins Basilius Valentinus his treatise On the Great Stone of All the Wise:

Therefore I tell you in true sincerity, that if you wish to make our universal great Stone, then follow my teaching and above all things pray to your God, the Creator of all creatures, that He may grant you blessing and success therein.

And elsewhere he says:

Thus the first teaching and admonition can be confirmed in no better way than through prayer, which is called and is the Invocatio Dei, the invocation of God.

A codicil attributed to Raimundus Lullus begins:

God in the power of the Trinity, whereby the one Godhead is neither violated nor confused in unity, in whose name we undertake this compendium.

The oldest French alchemist, Alanus, writes:

Son, set your heart more upon God than upon the art, for it is a gift from God; and when He wills it, He gives it. Therefore take refuge and rejoice in God, and you shall possess the art.

Sebald Schwaertzer opens with the words:

On the day of St. Michael, 1584, I began to write this great secret of the wondrous transmutation of metals and the particular revelation of the Most High God, which the Almighty God revealed to me through special means; for this may praise, honor, and thanks be given to the Almighty God Himself and to our Redeemer Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Such was the state of soul and spiritual preparedness of the alchemist when he entered his laboratory and set himself to the execution of the Great Work.

The natural scientist, physician, physicist, and chemist of today and tomorrow may smile at this old-Frankish manner of approaching Nature yet in return he obtains from the air merely nitrogen instead of Mercury.

And is it not spoken out of the very same spirit of the Hermeticists when Rudolf Steiner, pointing toward the future, says:

The laboratory table must once again become an altar.

A final after-echo of this consciousness of standing here before a borderland and holy territory can still be felt in Schmieder’s book itself; and this is sensed throughout, also in the calm, carefully weighed language and the self-restrained reserve of the conscientious scientific researcher and historian. This is what elevates this book above all other publications of the last one hundred and fifty years that treat the same subject.
Thus, whoever takes this book as the starting point of his alchemical studies will indeed find no instructions for practical laboratory work within it; but it will create around him the atmosphere that is required as a prerequisite in order to approach the undertaking at all in the right, inwardly deepened manner.

Even in more recent German literature there are, here and there, writings whose origin is of the same or at least a closely related kind such as the treatise on the art of healing by Hans Blüher, which appeared shortly after the First World War. What distinguishes this book, which confronts Freudian psychoanalysis and its line of development from a position of intellectual sovereignty, is the superior spiritual clarity of its interpretation and classification of that which, since Hippocrates, has been practiced as medicine and therapy placing it within intellectual history as a whole and the unequivocal distinction between temple wisdom and knowledge as a problem of depth (Hermeticism, Alchemy, and initiatory knowledge) on the one hand, and the empiricism of the foreground and surface on the other, which since Hippocrates emerged as valid natural science and became dominant.

A few arbitrarily selected passages may serve as illustration:

… A second great dislocation was suffered by medicine through chemistry. Within this now entirely modern science, over the course of centuries, there occurred precisely the same falling-away from a priestly knowledge of origins as in medicine. This primordial science (governed by insights of the first order) is called alchemy.

The fundamental idea of alchemy is that of refinement or “perfection” of minerals in the direction of gold (and of plants in the direction of “wheat”). But all sciences of the first order are always constructed with two arms, and alchemy in its true sense contains the idea that man (the microcosm) undergoes the path toward “gold” (the macrocosm). The gold-making of minerals must therefore proceed in parallel with an inward path of man, which likewise leads to perfection.

As is well known, medieval alchemy failed because of the corruption of the alchemists (by which are of course not meant the masters and adepts, but rather, in the period of alchemy’s decline, the alchemical charlatans, adventurers, and vagabonds author’s note). Leonardo da Vinci and Pico della Mirandola had every reason to oppose the alchemists and astrologers of their time and to accuse them of charlatanism. For in truth it is indeed the case that minerals can be transformed into gold the path is predetermined by nature; but to find this path requires qualities such as one searches for in vain among today’s natural scientists.

Thus, as is known, alchemy collapsed due to the corruption of the alchemists, who had nothing else in mind than “making gold” and becoming rich. From the ruins of alchemy arose modern chemistry; from the outset one must know that it is a science of the second order, and thus stands beneath alchemy and may not be named in the same breath with it; yet it is at first simpler, and that makes it easier for its students.

In following the consequences of this scientific degeneration, we encounter a series of similar phenomena, all of which flow into the same riverbed. Thus the ancient science of the stars (astrology) perished for the same reasons and re-emerged as a science of the second order in modern astronomy. Yet one must not forget that the founders of this science above all Copernicus, Kepler, and even Newton bore scarcely any resemblance to modern astronomers. Copernicus was not only an astrologer but also a physician, and one may imagine that the canon of Frauenburg was not exactly a pure Hippocratic practitioner.

Let us therefore return once more to chemistry and its theme. Since it is a science of the second order and thus possesses no microcosmic tendency, anyone with a clever head can practice it. It threw itself upon medicine and in particular upon medicinal herbs.

Concerning this, Paracelsus spoke the most profound words. Today we no longer suspect what kinds of forces stand in meadow, marsh, and rock.

The chemist’s standpoint is simply this: it is not the whole plant that produces healing, but only an isolate contained within it, which can be extracted and (this is the triumph) synthetically reproduced. Thus not the tea, but “theine”; not coffee, but “caffeine”; not the poppy, but the “opiates.” The chemist regards the entire plant, as it were, as a completely indifferent обол обол essentially a useless, though perhaps aesthetically pleasing, plaything of God. Through certain chemical procedures, applied entirely without restraint, this isolate is torn from the plant, until finally a little white powder lies upon the table.

Alchemy called these chemical procedures “cooking” and during its period of flowering restricted their use from the outset by defining them as that “which summer does to fruits.” “The ripening of fruits is a natural cooking,” says Paracelsus. From these little white powders arise the pills with which the public trade now concerns itself, and thus begins the great witches’ sabbath of the pharmaceutical industry. With healing, all this naturally has nothing at all to do.

Just as every gardener knows that an apple must be picked on a particular day, otherwise it tastes sour or becomes mealy, so ancient medicine knew the hour that is, the time element of living medicinal herbs. It can be read from the positions of the stars, provided one truly knows who the rulers of the individual plants are. It is not enough simply to take the healing power of the plant as something given; it is not always present like gravity, but must be “directed.” If it was not harvested and administered at the proper hour, it passes “through the body without effect” (Paracelsus).

In the book Paragranum, Paracelsus writes the following marvelous words on this matter:

“Then note herein what it is that makes the medicine you give to women for the womb ineffective, if Venus does not lead it there? What was the medicine for the brain, if the Moon did not guide it thither? And so with the others: they all remained in the stomach and passed again through the intestines and remained without effect. From this arises the cause that heaven is unfavorable to you and will not lend the medicine, so that you accomplish nothing: heaven must guide it.”

Opposed to this stands the “chemically pure” product of the refined and cooked procedures of alchemy. Thus the medicine of Hippocrates was destroyed throughout its entire domain; it must first be newly conquered again. For there is no doubt that the medicine of our present day like everything else finds itself in a severe crisis. Faith in academic medicine is steadily declining, and the dark intuition that ancient alchemy and all other sciences of the first order are in the right is correspondingly increasing.

Among the first, it will be the naturopathic physicians who are tasked with restoring the lost power of medicine. By a naturopath I mean one who dissolves the unnatural bond between medicine and natural science and restores the former to religion.

This excerpt from Hans Blüher’s Treatise on Medicine shows that an author who is inwardly rooted in the spirit even when approaching from a different direction arrives at the same insights, for what is at stake here are cosmic realities.

In contrast to the one-sided assumption advanced by the theosophical physician Dr. Franz Hartmann who died around the turn of the century and belonged to the circle of H. P. Blavatsky that the alchemical process is an exclusively spiritual–psychic event, as presented in his books The Medicine of Theophrastus Paracelsus and Outline of the Teachings of Theophrastus Paracelsus, Professor Dr. R. Bernoulli brings this question, in a highly significant essay published in the Eranos Yearbook of 1936, into the only correct focus.

He does so through recognition of the doctrine of correspondences as the necessary foundation for understanding namely, that whatever unfolds in the spiritual–psychic realm must also possess its counter-pole and counter-effect in the material world, and that it can be realized there physico-physiologically just as truly as metaphysically.

“If we consider,” Bernoulli writes, “that the bubbling in the retort corresponds to a psychic, a physiological, an astral process; indeed, that in it a phase of the divine world-drama is somehow expressed; that this single event is mirrored across all domains that are conceivable at all, and at the same time presents itself as the effect of all these factors then alchemy reveals itself as a truly all-embracing analysis, as an attempt to recognize the totality in the individual.

If we forget this, then we find ourselves in the fatal position of seeing alchemy merely as an early, imperfect chemistry. It is imperfect chemistry but not only that. It is the doctrine of correspondences across all realms.

This line of thought is admittedly something that we cannot accept within our present mode of thinking. It asserts something that is unprovable, and thus cannot count as science. But if we wish to understand alchemy even approximately, we must accept this doctrine of correspondences for its domain in its full extent.”

Bernoulli’s essay accompanied by several illustrations of alchemical symbols deals, as its title already indicates, primarily with the spiritual-psychic developmental process of the alchemists. For alchemy, true alchemy, is an experience of initiation, and what the adept performs in the laboratory is only a concomitant phenomenon, the cosmo-physical correspondence.

The one as well as the other both are real processes: the first unfolds in the crucible of the soul, the second in the crucible of the alchemical laboratory.
Of this inner experience Bernoulli then speaks with urgency and conviction, and with true reverence, in the penultimate short section of his lecture:

THE PATH OF TRANSFORMATION, ALCHEMICAL TRANSMUTATION

And now we come to that great and important chapter:
How does one do this? Where is the path that leads to the goal? It is the path of transmutation, of transformation. I can state this briefly.

At the base of the portal of the cathedral of Trogir in Dalmatia there is a finely executed small relief depicting the alchemist as he sits before his furnace, in which a fire is burning. He has placed his retort above it. In his left hand he holds a portal vessel. An angel hovers toward him, pouring the water of life into the vessel. This means: this path cannot be walked by one’s own power alone; but perhaps it succeeds if, somehow, within the human being himself, the guide and leader is awakened who then leads us to the goal.

This practice of the path thus, of transmutation, of transformation from the imperfect or even the over-perfect this exceedingly great and difficult work, was the goal, the striving of mystical alchemy throughout the centuries. But however much we read about it, and however diligently we strive to grasp its meaning, it always remains a mystery.

I myself have experienced in recent times how difficult it is to communicate anything essential about this transformation. Even if one strives as earnestly as possible for clarity, it is almost impossible to make oneself understood. For the practice of this path involves experiences that one must undergo oneself. When one speaks of them, as the alchemical texts do, the matter does not become clearer. What is peculiar about this path is that one only truly understands afterward what was meant in the texts namely, when one has actually experienced the matter oneself.

Alchemy itself knew well that words say very little here. Therefore it takes refuge in symbolic images. They are meant to circumscribe the unsayable. Through images the path is to be indicated which must be walked.

In the same Eranos Yearbook in which Rudolf Bernoulli’s essay appears, there is also a lecture by Professor Dr. C. G. Jung, serving as a preliminary study for his book Psychology and Alchemy, published in 1944, in which he attempts a fundamental engagement with alchemical symbolism and the underlying psychic experiential forms in their relationship to alchemy.

To what extent this attempt drawing upon extensive material illustrated by 270 images can be regarded as confirmation of Jungian theories need not be discussed here. What matters here solely is to oppose Jung’s view, which coincides with that of Dr. Franz Hartmann, in the most decisive manner, since the authority of the Swiss depth psychologist is such that it could elevate a completely one-sided aspect of alchemy into a scientific axiom.

Against Jung’s erroneous and, when viewed from a higher spiritual standpoint, utterly superficial assertion that alchemical instructions and imagery concern exclusively interpretations of psychic developmental processes, it must be stated, by one who is familiar with alchemical experiential realms and who has also walked the alchemical path in the sense of practical alchemy and has not merely speculated upon its sign-language and symbolic world:
The so-called Philosopher’s Stone, the mysterious elixir, is producible.

The great, time-transcending masters of Hermeticism such as Basilius Valentinus, Isaac Hollandus, Nicolas Flamel, Count Bernhard of Treviso, Paracelsus, and many others give in their writings, albeit veiled and parabolic, clear indications of the path for practical work. Anyone who approaches their writings without prejudice must arrive at this insight and conclusion, even if he is still far from finding the key himself. For that, an extensive imaginative preparation is required. In this Jung is indeed correct.

But it is an arbitrary and fundamentally false assumption on the part of the Swiss depth psychologist, arising from the historically conditioned state of natural science, when he writes:

“Moreover, it is beyond all doubt that in all the many centuries during which people seriously labored, never was a real tincture or artificial gold produced. What then one may ask motivated the old alchemists to continue laboring unceasingly, or as they said to operate, and to write further treatises on the ‘divine art,’ when their entire undertaking was of the most impressive hopelessness?”

A later time and it may not even be very far away will arrive at a different judgment. In fact, there exist unquestionably authenticated testimonies of transmutations from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and moreover one need not even reach that far back: such events still occur sporadically today, just as they did in earlier times.

It is as incomprehensible as it is regrettable that a researcher of renown such as C. G. Jung, in his depth-psychological investigation of alchemy, was so little perceptive as not to hear, in the authentic alchemical masters, the deep, compelling truthfulness with which they speak from their own experience of the reality of the Great Work that they themselves accomplished. One would have expected a surer instinct for this in Jung.

In view of the psychologically incontestable significance of C. G. Jung’s book, which for the first time places alchemy as a whole within a visible field for all future depth psychology (the alchemist himself needs the book least of all), the one who knows alchemy and knows of the practical realizability of its facts must nonetheless reject Jung’s book most emphatically because of its one-sidedness, for it leads the seeker away from the goal instead of toward it.

Certainly, this was not the author’s intention. Yet by denying the realization of alchemical striving within the material world because he himself has not experienced it he violates, and this is the charge brought against him, the law of correspondences:
As above, so below.

In a circular letter of the English adept Theodore Mundane to Edmund Dickinson, who had approached him seeking instruction, it is stated:

It seems not without special providence that not only the rude and ignorant rabble, but even the learned and the most sharp-witted people, obstinately reject this secret and curse the art as a folly and the most deceptive of all undertakings, without ever examining or investigating what has actually taken place, or considering whether the matter might be possible by its very nature. In other disputes, prudent and reasonable men are accustomed first to obtain a correct understanding of the matter before they dismiss something as an absolute impossibility; but here one usually rejects the whole question outright at the very beginning with complete mistrust. The adepts are accustomed to pay as little attention to such words as to the braying of a donkey. Such slanders will not stain their honor, since for the preservation and safeguarding of their persons as well as of their secrets it is necessary that they walk in clouds.

Now one should not expect from this treatise that the veil of the secret guarded by the hermetic masters for thousands of years will be lifted and revealed as knowledge, which can be acquired either only through initiation or transmitted today, just as in earlier times, by occult teachers to tested pupils solely from mouth to mouth in silence.

How merit and fortune intertwine,
That the fool never understands.
If they possessed the philosopher’s stone,
The wise would lack the stone.

These verses, spoken by Mephistopheles, wonderfully condense what was for the alchemists of old the reason and motive to conceal the mystery or to speak of it only in veiled terms something which Theodore Mundane expresses elsewhere in his reply to Edmund Dickinson in the following words:

Now however, if the stone possesses such power and such marvelous virtue as we know, then it is no wonder that the sages of all centuries have taken such great pains to conceal its matter, since they well knew how easily both evil and good could be corrupted by it if it became common property and fell into the hands of the unworthy and the wicked. This is the sole reason why they have applied such careful effort to hide their first matter in every possible way and to veil and obscure the truth of the work in dark and enigmatic expressions.

And likewise the objection often raised in earlier times as well as today why the hermetic masters describe the alchemical process at all, if they nevertheless withhold or at least obscure the essential Theodore Mundane answers with the following justification:
As difficult and mystical as the philosophical writings may appear at first glance, the students of this science nevertheless owe them thanks for the labor invested in these works, which was undertaken with absolute certainty solely out of love and devotion toward them.

For the authors sought neither fame nor profit for themselves, since they had to conceal both their names and their persons. What they did arose purely and entirely from their heartfelt desire to offer, as it were, an Ariadne’s thread that might serve as a guiding line for the children of the Art within the chymical labyrinth. They wished, as far as possible, to further their efforts and yet not expose the Art to the profane rabble nor surrender the chaste Diana to the lusts of the powerful and the rich, for whom it would be easiest to gain possession of their desires as soon as they could procure the necessary money. And since the philosophers have completely done their part, the students of the Art must now do theirs namely, accustom themselves to labor and diligence, and through strenuous reflection and well-considered, tireless experiments, which are the best commentaries on these writings, seek to discover their interpretation.

In order, however, to make the beginning easier for those who feel inclined to devote themselves to alchemy both theoretically and practically, the principal writings that form the best point of departure are listed here. For the alchemical books are legion, misleading and confusing, so much so that most will already despair before they have grasped anything firmly at all. The works named here are entirely unambiguous and contain no deliberate misdirection, even though they naturally express the hermetic secret only in veiled and parabolic form. They are: The Secret of the Salt, written and published by Elias Artista Hermetica; ABC of the Philosopher’s Stone (a collection of the most important alchemical writings); The Compass of the Sages; Georg von Welling: Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum, in which the origin, nature, properties, and use of salt, sulfur, and mercury are described in three parts; Johann Kunkel von Löwenstern’s Laboratorium chymicum; the royal Rosicrucian work Aurea Catena, or The Golden Chain of Homer; and finally the work mentioned at the outset, History of Alchemy by Karl Christoph Schmieder.

To approach the great hermetic masters Paracelsus, Basilius Valentinus, Isaacus Hollandus can only then become fruitful once, through immersion in the aforementioned writings, a foundation has been laid for understanding these latter authors as well.

Whoever conducts their alchemical studies in this sequence has provided their inner disposition permits it the distant prospect of reaching the final and true goal without straying onto excessively long or remote detours that ultimately lead into a labyrinth from which there is no escape without the hermetic thread of Ariadne. In this connection, the titles of some alchemical writings are: Filum Ariadnes, Abyssus Alchymiae, Purgatory of the Chymists, Redemption of the Philosophers from the Purgatory of the Chymists, Coelum reseratum chymicum, but also: The Hermetic Triumph or the Victorious Philosophical Stone, Clavis Sapientiae, Aula Lucis, and finally, after victory has been achieved, The Golden Fleece or the Most Ancient Hidden Treasure of the Sages.

Is it any wonder that this strange, pathless, and eccentric realm because of the timeless, enticing treasure that is to be lifted there has over the course of centuries, indeed millennia, attracted so many enthusiasts, charlatans, rogues, and adventurers into its ban and its mysterious chiaroscuro? Certainly the history of alchemy, like scarcely any other, is full of reports of the most fantastic and improbable events, well suited to cause everything that comes from this quarter to be met with caution; and the disrepute in which alchemy still stands today can be traced back solely to this. Yet this does not justify rejecting the impeccably authenticated transmutations as well, nor lumping the genuine adepts who stood on a very high spiritual and moral level together with swindlers or, at best, self-deceived deceivers. The matter cannot be dismissed so superficially, amateurishly, and irresponsibly.

Even if the science of yesterday, today, and tomorrow has not minted this coin and therefore refuses to recognize it as valid, a time not too far distant will arrive at a completely different judgment. Indeed, the extent to which alchemy, because of the aura that still surrounds it today, continues to lead to temptations and aberrations of the most peculiar kind of this the author, from a span of more than forty years during which he has devoted himself to alchemy, could tell many things that scarcely fall short of the reports from earlier centuries.

When one looks back over the past two thirds of our century, it becomes evident as the first section of this work already expressed that a turning away from a purely materialistic mode of observation and a turning inward toward the so-called borderline sciences has increasingly made itself noticeable and has become a fact. This is the case not only among the middle levels of education and semi-education, but precisely also among the truly educated and extending even into strictly scientific circles, particularly since the First World War. As proof of this, one need only cite the well-founded astrology of modern times already brought into view at the beginning of these discussions through a whole number of excellent contemporary writings, and then, in connection with this, other disciplines represented by researchers no less worthy of serious consideration, such as misdiagnosis (Liljequist, Felke, Schnabel), chirology, or radiesthesia.

The movement away from academic medicine, however despite all the still so eminent technical achievements of modern therapy and diagnostics is the most significant expression of that will toward reorientation which dominates all strata of the population and which cannot be permanently suppressed even by the most arbitrary and resolute countermeasures, as even the Third Reich failed to do despite its rigorous approach. Thus, in the future at least such is the appearance the fundamentally divergent attitudes toward the ultimate and penultimate questions of life will increasingly split into two opposing camps separated by a wide gulf.

Yet, even if matters may presently appear otherwise, the newly emerging tendency in the evolution of humanity toward a more spiritually animated relation to the world can at most be temporarily retarded; it can no longer be eliminated.

From all this it becomes apparent that, despite the numerous opponents still omnipotent even today the breakthrough of a new, spiritually borne wave of worldview is increasingly asserting itself, supported by all those experiences and results that justify the ever-growing spread of these and other borderline disciplines.

Certainly, from here it is still a considerable distance to the threshold of insight at which the alchemical mode of thought begins. From an esoteric astrology, however, access to it is in any case the most direct, since both proceed from a knowledge oriented toward the total cosmophysical network of forces of the sub- and translunar spheres: as above, so below.

Mysticism and the like, however, have nothing in common with such a worldview; rather, it represents, on the contrary, the logically consistent carrying through to the end of the modern scientific method of thought within its own territory. All the more incomprehensible, therefore, is the fact that the majority of its most prominent representatives still today close themselves off so stubbornly from drawing the decisive and final conclusions from all the revolutionary achievements of modern natural science in their full significance. They cling to the threads all the same and yet the outlook remains barred to them, or rather they block themselves, because they persist in thinking analytically instead of synthetically.

One single discipline that emerged around 1923 and since its appearance has drawn ever wider circles and spread further though it is purely spagyric-alchemical, even if its practitioners do not wish to acknowledge this and may object that it rests exclusively on anthroposophical spiritual-scientific foundations must be mentioned here. Granted; yet the method as practiced is alchemical, and it must be so, because the path of knowledge in this direction can lead to no other goal. Cosmophysical realities and laws are immanently given, and the clairvoyant initiate today can arrive at no different result than the initiated alchemist of earlier times, if, in the light of nature as Paracelsus called this visionary seeing he spiritually experiences the cosmic interconnections (how nature lives and works, as Goethe put it). Only the path of schooling by which this spiritual-psychic capacity is developed is, in our time, different from earlier periods, a fact conditioned by the fundamentally different psychic constitution of modern humanity.

The discipline that must be addressed as spagyric-alchemical, and which over its now more than fifty-year existence has recorded such extraordinary successes, is the biological-dynamic fertilization method founded by Rudolf Steiner. For horticulture, agriculture, and forestry this represents a fundamental innovation and reorientation, and it will only in the future come into its full effect. Anyone wishing to inform themselves more precisely and in detail will find clarification both in the journal Demeter and, above all, in the book series Gaia-Sophia of the Natural Science Section of the Free School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

It is, however, an error when it is claimed from the anthroposophical side that the biological-dynamic fertilization method, as it was brought into being by Rudolf Steiner and so successfully carried out and developed by his followers in accordance with his instructions, is something entirely new, something never before existing. Those who make such claims know nothing of alchemy and its essence; otherwise it would be known to them that the problem of fertilization, of putrefaction, fermentation, and combustion, is in fact the fundamental problem of the whole of alchemy. For anyone who possesses even a superficial knowledge of this, every form of soil treatment with artificial fertilizers is naturally excluded from the outset.

The soil chemists who, as the great proponents of the major industrial trusts, advocate the treatment of soil with artificial fertilizers are still today trapped in similar, schematic, and mechanistic modes of thought as were, up until the First World War and partly even beyond, the physiologists and unofficial nutrition statisticians. These scientists, based on relevant laboratory investigations, identified proteins, carbohydrates, and fats as the main components of the human organism, and accordingly calculated the ongoing consumption and daily minimum requirement of these nutrients for mental workers, as well as for average and heavy laborers.

Thus, in 1877, the well-known Munich physiologist Carl von Voit, through experiments, arrived at the result that a worker of 70 kilograms body weight required, on average per day, at least 500 grams of carbohydrates, 56 grams of fat, and 120 grams of protein (dietary standard). Only much later was it realized that the daily minimum protein requirement does not exceed about 40 grams. Voit’s minimum, roughly three times higher, nevertheless entered textbooks and remained dogma for decades. Mechanistically, one must understand that, aside from the completely erroneous estimation of protein requirements, the replacement of the substances consumed in a living organism cannot be treated scientifically if one does not first recognize that intake and consumption must correspond.

Since the First World War, however, nutrition science through the precise work of nutrition researchers such as Dr. Raise, Dr. Hindhede, Dr. Ragnar Berg, and others has made great progress. It has become generally known that nutrition does not depend solely on protein, fat, and carbohydrates, but also on previously overlooked minerals or nutritive salts, and not at all on extractives, flavoring, bitter substances, and finally on vitamins or supplementary compounds. Nevertheless, regarding the nutrition of the soil, the professional knowledge has remained fixed at the old, outdated position.

This is because soil is still considered, in terms of the materialistic approach, as something inorganic, to which potassium salts and phosphates must continually be added in the same amounts as were extracted, analogous to the content of a retort in a laboratory.

The goal is not merely to maintain the same yield permanently, but depending on the quantity of added fertilizer, to increase it manifold and keep it at an artificially elevated level. Seemingly, the successes of the past fifty years have only reinforced this theory for its proponents.

It may appear to the superficial observer that it suffices to return to the soil the substances removed year after year, in precisely the same amounts, in order to make it forever productive and that thus the main problem of agriculture has been finally solved. But the period used to validate this theory is far too short to allow the full consequences of the simultaneously evoked, but far slower-acting, catastrophic counter-effects to manifest with all their resulting chain reactions.

Meanwhile, the steadily increasing occurrence of deficiency diseases and the associated decline in overall national vitality provide a clear and eloquent warning today, and this is by no means merely attributable to the scarcity of the postwar years. For human beings and soil are, after all, bound together in a cosmophysical causal nexus, and metabolic and nutritional diseases, cancer, nervous disorders, progressive deterioration of dental material, and so many other cultural phenomena will continue to manifest until a fundamentally different, no longer purely materialistic, approach to soil management becomes dominant.

The claim of the complete erroneousness and absurdity of the school theory which holds that soil requires the regular, materialistic addition of exactly the same amounts of potassium salts and phosphates it has given up to maintain and reproducibly increase its productivity is unequivocally and indisputably refuted by the fact that in the biological-dynamic fertilization method, in which minimal quantities of spagyric-alchemical preparations are incorporated into the soil, the productivity of the soil does not follow the same pattern as in conventionally treated soil. Rather, the quality of the yield is demonstrably different and far superior.

Thus, this provides proof both of the untenability of the industrial-technical fertilizer theories on the one hand, and of the correctness of the biological-dynamic or equivalently, spagyric-alchemical approach on the other, in full measure.

This consequently means, for a lively and intuitive way of thinking, nothing less than a clear confirmation of the old alchemistic worldview, according to which the soil is nothing other than an inorganic, lifeless body analogous to a living organism.

The long and principled discussion in the previous section was motivated by its particular importance for both general and specific understanding, as it concerns the biological-dynamic fertilization method, which, as already stated, is purely alchemistic in nature and has proven itself over its now more than fifty years of application through clearly positive results.

However, this topic has been treated in such detail because, from this material, which is accessible to the willing layperson, one can gain the clearest conception of the essence and structure of alchemy. An older spagyric-alchemical work in this field bears the title The Secret of Decay and Combustion of All Corpses, printed in 1729. The subtitle of this or an earlier work reads: How, at little cost and with little effort, one can prepare the field or soil in such a way that it produces a thousandfold yield (biological-dynamic fertilization).

When at that time the procedure of biological-dynamic fertilization received the term derived from modern scientific terminology that accurately describes the essence of the method, this was presumably done for two reasons: on the one hand, because its founder had created this discipline through his own powers of observation, and on the other hand, to prevent any otherwise foreseeable prejudice that it was an antiquated branch of science, incompatible with our completely differently oriented modes of thought.

For the average educated person today, and even more so for the modern scientist, alchemy and everything connected with it is considered merely a childish, fairy-tale-like precursor, looked down upon with both pride and pity by contemporary chemistry, which is blind to its primitive methods. This is how it is taught in schools and universities. But this is utter nonsense. The perspective from which this judgment or rather, prejudice is made is fundamentally mistaken.

The domain in which alchemy has worked spiritually and actively for thousands of years is precisely the domain to which the barely 150-year-old science of chemistry has only recently ventured: the domain of substances. Chemistry believes itself entitled to draw conclusions about this domain, yet it always stands beyond it, relying simultaneously on a fundamental ignorance that prevents it from seeing that in the full approach to nature practiced throughout the Middle Ages, which was called spagyric-alchemical, it was not about a “discipline” in the modern sense. Rather, it was about an entirely different worldview in which all that alchemy had thought, developed, and accomplished from the time of the Chaldeans, Persians, and Egyptians up to the turn of the nineteenth century was neither aimless fog nor, at worst, a three-thousand-year preparation for the results of its own later analytical and one-sided experimental methods.

The narrow-minded arrogance of dogmatic university scholarship the so-called great pioneers fails to grasp that the intellectual framework and observational level of the alchemist was not substantially lower than that of today’s chemistry professors. The former was not incapable of determining or recognizing the formula of a compound; rather, such questions were meaningless for him, because the fundamental way in which matter was approached and understood could not be directly translated into the much more transparent framework of chemical theory as it existed in the alchemist’s time, which already knew the inner structure of the material world and its cosmophysical laws.

The alchemist did not require such orientation to find his way in nature, because he was still spiritually alive in her and experienced her directly just as a physician in the time of Paracelsus did not need a thermometer to determine the fever of a patient. He could feel the temperature through touch and the urine, using far more finely tuned, receptive senses and a vastly sharper observational capacity than any modern academic with his technical apparatus. And this applies across the board. The fact is that, in relation to the progress of technology, the more intimate human sensory capacities have gradually atrophied and for us today, this is not a matter of judgment but of simply standing elsewhere in perspective.

The prejudice, however, that alchemy in its full, world-encompassing scope was nothing other than the primitive precursor of modern chemistry as is presented everywhere in cultural-historical and specialized textbooks, and which then passes into the intellectual assumptions of older circles must in every case be refuted.

Just as astrology can at best be called the precursor of modern astronomy, so too the many-thousand-year-old alchemy cannot be considered merely a precursor to modern chemistry, which is only around one hundred and fifty years old. The former are closely related, esoteric, ancient, and firmly established systems of worldview, while the latter are time-conditioned disciplines, dependent on the current state of research results.

Even though this work has attempted to highlight the fundamental differences between these two starting points and to make them clear, the objection may still arise that the heyday of alchemy belongs to a time when the Ptolemaic worldview prevailed, and thus one or the other conceptual system was built upon fundamentally mistaken assumptions. Here it must again be emphasized, against the complete lack of objective basis for such a claim, that this is not a question of the correctness or incorrectness of some seemingly or even actually relevant astronomical, chemical, or physical fact. Rather, it concerns the fundamentally different orientation of thought: a dynamic, spiritual worldview as opposed to the science of nature of the present day, which, despite quantum mechanics and relativity theory, remains alienated from the spirit.

During the National Socialist era in Germany, Paracelsus was seized upon as the precursor and herald of modern chemotherapy. This one-sided interpretation is still spread by some today and has penetrated the thinking of the wider circles of educated and semi-educated people, to the detriment of true public enlightenment, because the name Paracelsus has regained prominence and increasingly begins to exert authoritative influence. Against the propagandistic abuse of his authority, it is hardly possible today to raise a serious scientific objection, yet Paracelsus’s entire life’s work was devoted to the theoretical and practical negation precisely of what these circles uphold both doctrinally and practically.

The fact that Paracelsus, at the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era, applied himself to more precise chemical-pharmaceutical laboratory work in the apothecaries at a time of general cultural reorientation on the one hand, and the increasing neglect of traditional apothecary practices on the other, in order to bring order to the accumulated chaos and superstition of the centuries, does not justify arbitrarily labeling him a pioneer of modern chemotherapy. His struggle was above all directed against the contemporary apothecary establishment, because in the apothecaries the original hermetic-alchemical knowledge and methods had reached a dead end. The meager and distorted remnants of original temple wisdom that still existed were not capable of meeting the emerging requirements of the new, elsewhere-directed, scientific orientation that was beginning to prepare the modern positivist approach, which eventually led in one of its branches to today’s chemotherapy.

This was not due to the inadequacy of true alchemy, but rather to the cultural-historical decline, whereby the original cosmophysics, emerging from esoteric insights and knowledge, was inevitably forced to fail and decay as soon as the superficially learned “modern science” sought to appropriate it holding the tools in hand but having lost the spiritual bond.

That this had to happen, and was necessary, in the development of humanity, to be understood, would be too far-reaching here and would take us away from the main theme. In another essay, Goethe’s Original Encounter, the author has already discussed the fateful sense of this lawfulness. Here it is sufficient simply to state these facts.

To preserve awareness of this decline, the hermetic masters of the late Middle Ages, through spiritual foresight, and to maintain the original reverent disposition toward the hermetic secrets of nature across the gradually diminishing number of people capable of this transition, and for a span of several more centuries, brought into existence the Fraternity of the Gold- and Rosicrucians. From there, the outer world more or less unnoticed was supplied, here and there, with an underground spiritual influx into the time and contemporary world.

Just as every pole has its opposite, at that time there simultaneously appeared more and more fraudsters, charlatans, and falsifiers of the hermetic truth, traveling from country to country, from princely court to princely court, who defamed alchemy through their dishonest manipulations and thereby everywhere delivered a distorted image of once highly celebrated temple wisdom inherited from the distant past. Against this type of alchemical peddler, the Rosicrucian Lodge repeatedly took the sharpest stand and publicly condemned such activity, as in the Fama Fraternitatis, first published in 1617. To cite one such passage (pp. 31–32):

“Concerning the godless and cursed pursuit of gold, it is noted here that the most corrupt of people practice great trickery in this matter, and instructions are given by many fools to encourage their credulity; and while some may hold the transformation of metals to be the highest aspect and pinnacle of philosophy… we here publicly testify that this is false, and that the true philosophers deal with gold only as a minor matter and in parergon.”

For those who open to Nature, it is not joy in making gold, nor, as Christ says, to have the devils obey, but rather to behold the heavens and the angels of God ascending and descending and His name inscribed in the Book of Life.

At the same time, however, to counteract the damage to the reputation of true alchemy threatened and indeed caused by the steadily increasing number of charlatans, itinerant alchemists, and vagabonds, the Rosicrucian Lodge periodically appeared to demonstrate, through one or another credible witness, a genuine transmutation, thereby affirming the validity of the authentic art. Thus, the seventeenth century is rich in reports of sudden appearances of an unknown individual who, in the laboratory of some apothecary or elsewhere, demonstrates a flawless metallic transmutation, thereby proving the integrity of hermetic natural knowledge only to vanish the next day, for example, when he had descended to an inn and could no longer be found.

The Rosicrucians upheld the authority and prestige of the hermetic art and wisdom until the outbreak of the French Revolution. In the 1779 Assembly Speeches of the Gold- and Rosicrucians, as well as in the 1781 republication of the Aurea Catena by the Lodge, they once again provided seekers after hermetic secrets with a more contemplative and tangible key to the hidden temple than ever before a lasting legacy, preserved for a few more years until the impending advent of a new, spiritually alien epoch.

It was therefore no mere coincidence that, at that time, through the healing power of a spagyric arcanum, life was preserved for the last time in a being of paramount importance for all of the German world and indeed for all of Western humanity namely, the young Goethe.

In the fifth essay of this book, Goethe’s Original Encounter, the author first interpreted this mysterious and decisive event for the course of Goethe’s entire life. It is cited here to show, in this context, that at the close of the Rosicrucian-hermetic epoch, this singular, fate-symbolic event stands: the life of Goethe, who embodied the German essence and participated in the outgoing Middle Ages in his youth while breaking and guiding the advent of modernity in his maturity, owed its preservation to the hermetic-alchemical arcanum. At the critical moment, when the condition of the long unsuccessfully treated case seemed to threaten the utmost danger, the arcanum was administered for the first and only time, resulting in a turning point and rapid recovery.

Goethe himself reports this entire occurrence in the eighth book of Poetry and Truth, recounting how his mother, in her greatest agitation, compelled the doctor to produce his universal medicine, who, after considerable resistance, brought a crystallized dry salt from the laboratory, which, dissolved in water, was taken by the patient and had a distinctly alkaline taste. Among the faithful, this salt was regarded as sacred, even if some had neither seen it directly nor perceived its effects.

Thus Goethe alone received the blessing of the spagyric arcanum, as the last great legacy of true alchemy to its contemporaries and posterity, shortly before its departure. Symbolically and subtly, this almost silent, yet in its significance so profound and meaningful event stands at the turning point of an era: Goethe’s Original Encounter (Urbegegnung).

Alchemy and healing art here they meet in their final, unsurpassable perfection. What were the celebrated and revered arcanums? They were the secret great remedies of the masters and adepts; they represented the pinnacle of alchemical occult medicine and were accessible and attainable only to those who had already reached a very high degree of hermetic initiation.

If today, therefore, a renowned chemical-pharmaceutical factory in southern Germany, which for decades has produced a number of medications through fermentation and certain preparation methods regarded as spagyric, releases onto the market partly effective remedies, and assigns the high-sounding title of “Arcanum” to some of these preparations, this is considered by true alchemy as mistaken. For an arcanum presupposes the knowledge of the preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone.

A basic understanding of what is meant by the term arcanum can be gleaned from some passages in Paracelsus’ Ardoidoxa, Liber Quintus: De Mysteriis Arcani. For example:

“Thus it is to be understood, of these arcanums, that they are all of four kinds… So prima materia is the first arcanum. Accordingly, Lapis philosophorum. And the second, Mercurius vitae. Tinctura, the last… And finally, we will be instructed in what distinguishes the four arcanums, which belong to work, to art, and to virtue; for therein it is necessary to recognize what is virtuous, meaning: they contain the means to maintain health, dispel diseases, relieve sorrowful moods, preserve against all unhealthy afflictions, and assign the body to its predestined course, which otherwise would have no purpose, due to the exhaustion of consumption, as we set forth in life and moral practice.”

Having now discussed the first three arcanums individually, Paracelsus comes to the fourth, the tincture, and explains:
Thus, the Acer Tincture, the fourth arcanum, immediately imparts to the rebis the unified being that produces silver, gold, and other metals its tincture into the body. It penetrates its essence, its unformed nature, its coarseness, and transforms all of this into the finest and most noble, into that which is permanent.

And then he continues:

“Thus we must not blindly follow the medians or the philosophers, who wish to set limitations upon what is possible, for they presuppose belief. We must not confine ourselves to belief, teaching, or adherence unless it can be verified by experience and actual practice.”

Paracelsus then treats the four arcanums once more in detail, giving instructions for their preparation so that the knowledge of the arcanums may be properly transmitted to those capable of comprehending them. In short, he writes concisely, but meaningfully, about these matters, so that those who read superficially may scoff, yet all true alchemists understand.

The cited passages from Paracelsus leave no doubt about the once-controversial and indeed wrongly controversial points. They decisively refute the notion that the arcanums and their preparation should be understood purely as a mental or spiritual process. The instructions are valid in a dual sense: physically as well as metaphysically. Furthermore, they show clearly that Paracelsus was by no means merely a precursor of modern chemo-therapy. Rather, he was a high-degree adept of alchemy who, when touching upon the last alchemical secrets, explicitly addressed all alchemists. Similar and related references appear repeatedly in his writings.

This is precisely the remarkable and unique aspect of Paracelsus: he stood at the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era, yet his mission was to realize in his work and life what seemed mutually opposed: both to present the mastery of thousand-year-old and even older alchemy to his contemporaries and posterity, and simultaneously to point toward a new, gradually emerging scientific research orientation.

From this perspective, the bridge leads to modern natural science, which, from its standpoint, may appear arbitrary, yet not entirely unjustified when viewed from a higher vantage. In reality, the matter is far more complex and subtle: from his insight and initiation, Paracelsus knew that a completely new era was coming, a time in which all previously established and valued norms would be re-evaluated, and that the ancient tradition, derived from mystery-knowledge, was approaching its death because a fundamentally different worldview was preparing itself in the West according to the law of humanity’s course.

Through his initiation which was preserved in the Rosicrucian lodges (Paracelsus himself was not a Rosicrucian) he saw and understood that the esoteric paths available until then would gradually become inaccessible over the next centuries. Only on these paths could one penetrate the deep and hidden secrets of nature, which constitute true alchemy, or, in Paracelsus’ own terms, to behold the light of the mysteries. When Paracelsus speaks of the light of the mysteries, he does not mean the “light of enlightenment,” as many modern interpreters assume, but precisely the opposite: the sidereal, visionary light the unmanifested light, in the language of esotericism.

Because Paracelsus experienced the preparation of a completely new and differently oriented age, and on the other hand still held in full possession the living heritage of the past, he placed this legacy once again in the esoteric-alchemical valley of his work, so that those called to it could adopt it for a nearer and more distant future according to the stage of understanding they had attained.

This is one side of Paracelsus the one partially understood by the representatives of modern natural science, partially still bound by the superstition and prejudices of his own time, and partially not considered at all a great and secretive Paracelsus.

The exoteric Paracelsus, accessible to today’s thinking and scientific approach albeit with limitations is regarded as a precursor in all fields of modern scientific knowledge, particularly in medicine and pharmaceutical methods, which in turn led to the development of chemotherapy. But this must be taken with caution. Even the “second Paracelsus” of 1513 cannot be reduced to a simple formula, as representatives of each discipline often attempt.

And he himself honestly and in the spirit of the thought- and perception-habits of his time approached problems in a way very different from modern modes of inquiry.

From the broadest possible acknowledgment of all practical results of modern science and technology, the onset of our current era occurred with a speed of succession so great that it nearly overwhelms the observer. It must be recognized that the spiritual and inner state of contemporary humanity has declined just as drastically as the external achievements have risen. Yet there was no necessary reason for this result to occur; the positive and negative outcomes of this rapid development were entirely conceivable. The one-sided effect toward materialism was neither predetermined nor required. That it happened as it did was due to certain dark forces seizing control during this transitional period, forces that in some respects still exert influence today.

It is not the place here to reveal the spiritual inner connections that determined this outcome suffice it to say that the materialistic aspect in the consideration of all existential questions became decisive. That this ultimately led to complete disorientation along the Western line was, after all, inevitable.

From this one-sided perspective which almost exclusively still defines the view of today’s exact sciences Paracelsus is likewise judged, as are all revolutionaries and pioneers of new beginnings. Yet it is overlooked that Paracelsus approached the problems of natural and spiritual sciences from entirely different assumptions, namely by simultaneously drawing on two lines that today’s natural science would consider mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, according to the “formula of correspondences,” these lines harmonized to a very large extent.

For even if Paracelsus inaugurated modern chemotherapy (if one allows that formulation), he did so directly in the context of a deeper and valid insight: that all chemical and physical processes observed and carried out in the laboratory are always underpinned by a spiritual-soul process, a supersensible phenomenon perceivable to visionary or inner observation.

With this fact, however, scientific research, without diminishing its inner exactness, enters a completely different perspective. And from this perspective, Paracelsus must be considered the precursor of today’s chemotherapy. Yet in doing so, the entire situation is fundamentally reoriented.

So, if Paracelsus, based on the circumstances and necessities of his age, took it upon himself to provide valid guidelines and perspectives for therapy and particularly for the pharmacy toward his differently oriented future he always did so with the awareness that there existed, beyond this, another spiritual and higher mode of perception, which, however, would gradually diminish over the coming centuries.

Similarly, this course and decline within the development of Western humanity was known in the Rosicrucian lodges.

It was a tremendous act of reorientation that Paracelsus accomplished: it meant nothing less than the complete refoundation of medicine and pharmacy in a manner corresponding to what we today consider research methods and scientific methodology. But the crucial point with Paracelsus is that the framework he outlined was, in a sense, only a surrogate for the alchemical Arcanum, which would no longer be effective in the future.

With each new decisive intervention that Paracelsus made in the development of scientific thought and methodology, his successors great physicians and naturalists such as van Helmont, Boerhaave, Beddoes, Glauber, and Agricola gradually lost the dual perspective that connected the worldly and the spiritual. By the time of the French Revolution, the purely materialist worldview had definitively taken over.

Even in these later times, belief in the Philosopher’s Stone still persisted, and they knew that the true alchemy had a particular significance. Yet their intellectual structure was such that on their investigative paths they increasingly focused only on the material side of natural processes. And even when they still respectfully mentioned the Philosopher’s Stone and the hermetic secret in their writings, they no longer possessed the key of the Adept themselves.

From this already narrowing perspective, van Helmont wrote The First Piece on the Alkahest.

If one cannot attain it, he says, one may at least make use of tartar (crystalline potassium salt, Sal tartar) to effect certain solutions through mediation.

This is a very thoughtful and instructive remark for anyone searching alchemically. The long-sought and famed Alkahest was the great solvent of the hermetic masters, and without it, the Stone could not be produced. Van Helmont, who was not an Adept, yet admits that he had insight into alchemy, came upon the Alkahest and immediately linked it to tartar.
If we then bridge this to the highly significant passages of Basil Valentine, which critique the alchemical process, we find the lines:

TARTARUS – WINSTEIN (Tartar – Potassium Tartrate)

“I call myself Vegetabilis,
Those who know the strong wine know me well.
When the other salts are added to me,
I lead them to the key
Through my subtle spirit, so that they are reduced,
And break all metals completely:
With me, they turn from the earth
Into pure quicksilver.
No herb in the world can do this anymore;
Nature herself has assigned it to me.
Such friendship and such powerful deeds
A thousand men cannot fathom.”

Van Helmont remarks of tartar:
The tartar (wine stone) becomes entirely fluid and, at times, in the furnace, partially fluid and partially in sublimated form. This salt is proven in experiments, though only a few have handled it personally.

Silvius, then Dean of the University of Leiden, adds:
The fixed lye salt (meaning tartar) can be made fluid by combination with a fluid spirit. Such a fluid lye salt rises without strong fire and sublimates. Such a fluid salt is granted only to the diligent and patient artist, not to others who flee from labor. Such a salt has large crystals.

Modern Chemist’s View:
Sal tartar (potassium carbonate, K₂CO₃ – potash – tartar) would, from the standpoint of a modern chemist, be considered undoubtedly non-sublimable and incapable of being made fluid over a distillation helm. Never! Today’s scientific chemistry does not know this process and therefore denies both the fluidification and the distillation of potash and lye salts in principle.

This ignorance cost the author a legal process: a so-called competitor tried to suppress the spagyric distillates produced in his laboratory, claiming they could not be legally marketed. Because today’s chemical understanding deems these salts non-distillable, the court’s ruling relied entirely on expert testimony which failed to recognize what had been known in alchemy for centuries.

Yet the masters had deliberately kept these methods secret not out of idle concealment, but because the key to producing the Philosopher’s Stone lies in the salts.

Sal metallorum est lapis philosophorum – The salt of metals is the Philosopher’s Stone.

The old alchemists understood this. Anyone who thinks that today’s metal salts hold any comparable secret is gravely mistaken.

Revealing the secret might have won the legal case, but what had always been hidden by the Adepts cannot today be revealed. Moreover, the process itself takes months; one cannot simply force the salts in a few hours, as is technically possible with modern compounds like sodium chlorate or potassium chlorate. Such a conversion is mechanistic and not the true way the Adepts worked.

Additionally, the fluidification and distillation of the salts require prior preparation “cohibing” in alchemical terminology so that through combination with a solvent, they undergo a transformation. The result is no longer strictly NaCl or KCl; it is now another K- or Na-compound trending toward the acetates. While modern chemistry may know the distillation of acetates, the formulas are no longer exactly the same; the substances are different in today’s terms.

Thus, the process was lost in practice because legal decisions are formal they rely on formulae. Even if the distillation could be proven, the formula would be considered altered.

The dramatically increased physiological or dynamic efficacy of the spagyric salts is irrelevant here; that belongs to a completely different discussion.

For alchemy, this was decisive: it was the effect that mattered, not whether the distilled salts were chemically K₂CO₃ or perhaps C₂H₃KO₂. The alchemists were interested only in the action of the preparation, and they knew, from endless tradition, that the fluidified salts were extremely penetrating.

Van Helmont writes about this:

“It is good to know which single tartar (wine stone) becomes fluid, for it removes all impurities from the body… And elsewhere: When fire-resistant salts are made fluid, they become similar to the potent medicines. They reach the entry of the fourth stage and remove all blockages.”

In modern terminology, this means: they dissolve uric salts, clearing obstructions. Here we are in the heart of true alchemical homeopathy the predecessor to later forms inaugurated by Hahnemann but already passed through the Enlightenment. The great iatrochemical physicians treated gout and related diseases almost exclusively with fluidified salts.

A prescription from Basilius Valentinus reads:

“Ten or twelve grains (roughly half a dram) of this Magisterium Tartari (tartar, wine stone) promotes urine, purifies the blood, removes water retention, breaks bladder stones, and relieves podagra.”

Ordinary potassium carbonate, potassium chloride, or other so-called “Schiifler salts” of modern chemistry cannot reliably achieve this result. Clearly, the alchemical substances required spagyric preparation to fully realize their healing power.

Alchemical homeopathy goes even further: it is microcosmic, meaning it is grounded in the cosmos. The homeopathic axiom Similia similibus curantur (“like is healed by like”) is in a sense the exoteric expression of Paracelsus’ principle: The planet is healed by the planet.

Two examples illustrate this:

Lunar influences (Lunaris) act cosmically on the brain and central nervous system. This is the origin of the saying “Nadú de Moon gehen” (something like “guided by the moon”). Among metals, the moon governs silver; among gemstones, especially opal and pearls. (Here one must not think chemically pearls consist largely of CaCO₃, opals of SiO₂ alchemy requires a different perspective.) Among plants, poppy is lunar. These ingredients are therefore indicated for diseases of the CNS of any kind: the celestial influence heals the corresponding organ. This is cosmic homeopathy.

Thus, the hermetic physician in such a case would primarily use silver in a spagyric preparation, possibly combined with pearls and poppy, prepared spagyricly for application.

Another carefully chosen example, significant for its astrological correspondence: antimony ore (Sb₂S₃, stibnite, grey antimony). In alchemy, this is expressed through the element Earth (astrologically: the Earth sign). In a sense, it represents the configuration of the Earth itself.

Rudolf Steiner explains this in his 1920 lectures on medicine:

“Man is essentially antimony. If one abstracts everything that is externally imposed, man is himself antimony.”

Hence, the extraordinary and comprehensive efficacy of antimony, especially when prepared through spagyric methods.

Consequently, in homeopathic materia medica, antimony occupies a primary position alongside the various polychrest remedies. That this is the case has its own reason: it reflects a characteristic moment in the rise of the materialist epoch, in which humans increasingly lose consciousness and, subsequently, sensitivity for what constitutes their true nature.

Within pharmacopoeia and therapy, this manifests, among other ways, in the progressive adoption of antimony. And since homeopathy, despite its own subtlety, is still subject to the spirit of the times, this tendency naturally emerges here as well.

One could argue that antimony fell into disrepute because, in earlier times, it was sometimes misused or administered excessively, causing harm. This is true for those who did not know how to handle it correctly. Yet this explanation only addresses one side of the issue. The broader context, as the alchemical tradition teaches, is much more far-reaching.

It is no coincidence that one of the most important hermetic masters and adepts, writing under the pseudonym Basilius Valentinus, devoted significant portions of his works to antimony under the title Triumphwagen des Andiron. Furthermore, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the editor of the Aurea Catena, himself an esoterically initiated Rosicrucian, provided commentary on these texts, entitled Microscopium Basilisk Valentini sive Commentariolum et Cribellum über den großen Kreuzapfel der Welt.

On page 75 of that volume, where the author emphasizes the curative power and nearly universal efficacy of antimony, it is stated:

“It is antimony in substance, from which a complete apothecary can be prepared: it is a vomitive, a purgative, a blood purifier, and a urinary remedy; it opens obstructions and is a coagulant and solvent; it is in balsam, ointment, and pill; in short, it can be applied in all conditions with maximum benefit. It is masterful in ancient diseases, in the operations of human nature; if correctly applied by the practitioner, it exhibits a ubiquitous virtue.”

Thus, in this unassuming gray mineral, which bears the sign of Earth in its alchemical symbolism, lies according to the law of cosmic homeopathy, and when unlocked and made assimilable through spagyric preparation one of the most comprehensive remedies for humanity, past, present, and future. In Arabic alchemy, this is called Azinat.

Only recently has modern science, in therapeutic terms, again turned its attention to antimony, particularly in the form of organic antimony compounds for injections, used successfully, for example, against sleeping sickness. This modern revival is not coincidental: it reflects the rehabilitation of an element long neglected. However, when antimony is prepared and opened spagyricly for internal and external use, it surpasses all other remedies, allowing one to avoid unnecessary experimentation with other substances.

For the independent thinker who follows and develops the ideas presented here, the conceptual framework of homeopathy has its roots in the astrological-alchemical approach, which is spiritually grounded and hermetically oriented.

This leads directly into the Doctrine of Signatures, though it primarily applies to plants and must be approached with caution and restraint to avoid speculative excess. Esoterically, it rests on the principle that planetary formative forces, which guided the development of particular human or animal organs over millions of years, manifest homologous properties in plants subject to the influence of the same planet. Even under varying conditions, these properties remain active. For example:

* Herbs that influence the blood often show a reddish coloration, as seen in bloodroot (Tormentilla) and St. John’s Wort (Hypericum), both of which are esteemed wound remedies.

* Greater celandine (Chelidonium), a top hepatic and biliary remedy among plants, secretes a yellow, bitter juice through its root. Similarly, most bitter herbs (e.g., dandelion, gentian, centaury) positively affect the gallbladder and liver.


These examples can be multiplied indefinitely. In the Herrgottsapotheke of the Tübingen physician and homeopath Schlegel (active in the 1920s), one finds abundant lively and inspiring material illustrating this principle.

The preceding discussion demonstrates that all older and modern clinical disciplines required spagyrics for their refinement and sublimation; without it, they remain grossly material. It is unsurprising that, historically and even today, these disciplines have not fully adopted this understanding. Homeopathy, aware of this gap, compensates with high potencies.

Here arises the question: Can the term “spagyrics” be reduced to a simple formula?

The succinct answer is no. Spagyrics is not a sharply defined chemical-therapeutic procedure, though its etymology introduced by Paracelsus in alchemical terminology from anaw and ayetgw (to separate and to join) reflects the fundamental alchemical axiom solve et coagula (“dissolve and coagulate”).

Thus, spagyrics is indeed an art, but not in the modern analytical sense. It involves the separation of subtle, ethereal elements from terrestrial, gross substances, assimilable from non-assimilable an entirely different way of thinking and working from modern chemistry, yet equally rigorous and scientific in its own context.

To separate subtle from gross substances, various methods are employed depending on the material: distillation, sublimation, and fermentation are primary, with fermentation not limited to plant substances. Brewing, for example, represents a true alchemical process: only wine can be considered a spagyric natural product, where pure and impure are separated through fermentation. All plants can be treated in this way, particularly to extract the subtle, etheric, and medicinally active constituents of flowers.

It would exceed the scope here to discuss all spagyric procedures in detail, as most especially the most important are extremely complex. A key process is digestion, where a substance to be opened is exposed to a solvent (e.g., acid) for a certain time, often months, at a specific temperature. Another is cohobation, where the solvent is repeatedly distilled off and reintroduced, sometimes dozens of times, leading to increasingly refined structuring of the treated matter.

Through such prolonged processes, metals can be rendered unreducible in alchemical terminology, they are “set in their essence.” For example, gold can have its color extracted and the substance of gold (e.g., gold chloride) decolorized in the retort. The resulting product is the true gold tincture of Paracelsus and the alchemists a concept that defies modern chemical thinking.

Similarly, the extraction and distillation of salts has medicinal and alchemical significance. Spagyrics is foundational for the production of the Philosopher’s Stone, as the earlier stanzas of Basilius Valentinus on Tartarus (potassium carbonate / cream of tartar), salt (NaCl), saltpeter (KNO₃), and vitriol (metal salts) illustrate. Each salt played a critical role in the alchemical process as both medicinal agent and preparatory step for the Stone.

SAL COMMUNE

I am a balsam, wondrous indeed.
What is found in the eagle is clear,
It also dwells entirely and equally in me,
Otherwise I would enrich no metals,
Then I would break them all,
Purify and cleanse their kind,
Draw from them their color and tincture,
So I am sweet and not at all sour.
The wine-spirit brings me fear and woe,
The aurum potabile is my emblem.

SALT PETER

I am a wondrous salt on Earth,
My equal is scarcely seen,
Without me, nothing can be accomplished,
I must assist in every work.

The eagle cannot be discovered,
When it seeks to refine metals:
Common salt can achieve nothing without me,
Even if it seeks to turn away from me.
My form is poor, in solid ice,
Within it dwells a sacred spirit,
In which nature bathes herself
And reveals herself in many forms.

VITRIOLUM

From Venus’ body, make a stone,
And draw from it the spirit of all,
Red, dense, and turbid, like blood,
Thus it can completely shatter death.
Within it, make another stone,
Exactly like the one before:
There stands great art and wonder,
To clothe the pure Luna alone.
Without it, nothing else can act,
It transforms mercury into effect:
If you can order the matters rightly,
Then they will render judgment.

In the stanzas on saltpeter and common salt, reference is made to the eagle. This refers to the eagle of ammonium chloride (Sal Ammoniac), the fluid, easily sublimable, ascending substance, which likewise has special applications in alchemy. Therefore, also in the stanzas of Basilius:

SAL AMMONIAC

Should my wings be broken off
And I am freed into the water bath
With the stone enemy of the Earth,
Then such a thing can emerge from me,
For I shatter the form of metals,
And drive them all by force.
Tartarus must therefore be present,
So that from it arises a refined mercury:
I can bring you no more,
For Sol and Luna are not in me.

This style of alchemical poetry is full of deep meaning, and at times not without clear beauty. One can see how vividly and imaginatively the true alchemist observed and experienced. At the same time, it shows a completely different imaginative world and worldview, from which the alchemist regarded everything as it appeared in nature.

The foundational principles underlying the entire alchemical worldview, found imaginatively and repeatedly discoverable in this way, are called Sal, Sulfur, and Mercury. The latter is named by Basilius Valentinus in the stanzas on vitriol. These three substances, however, are by no means identical with the chemical salts, sulfur, and mercury; rather, the chemical forms represent only the material, external manifestation of these primal substances.

The entire material world – so alchemy teaches – arises from these three principles: Sal, Sulfur, and Mercury. Depending on how much of each energy is present in the body (in modern terminology), it is more or less fluid, fire-resistant, or combustible. Sal is the stabilizing principle, Sulfur is the combustible principle, Mercury is the fluid and liquefying principle. On a higher level of understanding, Mercury is also the spiritual essence of all things, the universal world-spirit, or Spiritus Mundi.

In many symbolic alchemical depictions and allegories, Mercurius is represented. Very often, according to ancient tradition, he appears as Hermes with his caduceus, the messenger of the gods, who channels the spiritual forces above and below. Sometimes he is depicted as traveling through the clouds “above ether virus”; but he is also seen radiating from Sol and Luna down to Earth, between two mountains, and there hovering over the crucibles in the workshop of the adept.

The master is able to capture him, the elusive bird, and fasten him to the chain, that marvelous and mysterious little bird of Hermes. When this winged dragon from the upper sphere descends upon the wingless, earthly one and consumes it, then the fluid becomes fixed, and the fixed becomes fluid triangle stands within triangle.

This symbol of the upper winged dragon and the lower wingless one, which do not destroy each other but rather consume each other mutually, is one of the deepest and most significant in all alchemical symbolism. Whoever understands this symbol holds the key to the entire alchemical process. I will now explain it in the language of Hermetics:

The upper winged, sometimes fire-breathing dragon, is the symbol of the upper astral fire. This is to be united with the lower terrestrial fire, the secret salt of the sages. This is to be obtained from an earthly matter, of which Basilius Valentinus writes:

"A stone is found, it is not tar,
From which one makes a fluid fire,
Of which the stone itself is formed,
Together brought of white and red.
It is in the stone and yet not a stone,
Within it works all of Nature."

Upon this stone, its proximate material, the masters of Hermetics have always placed the deepest veil of secrecy, and precisely in this matter, the entire alchemical literature is full of hints and secret references to this extremely closely guarded, yet outwardly visible, material: Adam received it from paradise; the poor had it in great abundance, the children played with it on the straw; the material merchants offered it to a few in small quantities, and the stone that the farmer threw after the harvest was more valuable than the harvest itself…

Thus all these veiled allusions indicate the original substance from which the secret salt of the sages is to be obtained. This salt is the lower wingless dragon, which is to be combined with the upper winged one. When this is done and the two dragons are united, the conjunctio has occurred, and the double, dry, magical fire the Alkahest of the ancient sages and hermetic masters is prepared. This fire is Regis, and is also symbolized by the lion’s head. The salt thus obtained is the much-sought and renowned Sal sapientiae (Salt of Wisdom).

In this process, this preliminary work, which can also be expressed in chemical formulas, lies the entire alchemical secret clearly contained. The next step is almost child’s play: sow the seeds of gold in your field (the Sal sapientiae), hermetically seal the flask, and let the fire gradually pass through the contents in colors. Then the great work approaches completion; the Son of the Sun moves toward his birth the Philosopher’s Stone is prepared.

The Aurea Catena expresses this process thus:
"One calls another out: come forth,
They together form a solid bundle:
The fluid of gold shall be fixed,
Steam and water shall be contained in earth.
The heavens themselves must be earthly,
Otherwise no manna enters the earth.
The highest shall be the lowest,
The lowest again the highest.
The fixed shall become entirely fluid,
A water and vapor shall be the elements.
The earth must fly highest toward heaven,
A heaven must crawl into the center of the earth.
Thus heaven and earth must be reversed,
So that the lowest becomes the highest:
The fluid dragon kills the fixed,
The fixed kills the fluid.
Thus must the quintessence be revealed to the day,
And all that it is capable of."

This is alchemy, the timeless, ancient art, which leads step by step upward in knowledge through cosmic worlds, reaching back to the origin and the Tree of Life.

ALCHEMICAL CONNECTIONS

Thus, truly, the wanderer must
travel over foreign lands and seas,
who follows the old mountains,
where the Philosopher’s Stone is found.

If one considers the numerous documented metal transmutations in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, anyone who does not understand the deeper background and the essence of alchemical world affiliation is very likely to assume that it has always been about nothing other than making gold. However, this conclusion, as plausible as it may seem, is completely mistaken.

In the early centuries from the sixteenth onward the living awareness of the truth of alchemy was still so widespread, general, and present that the adepts at the time did not need to prove the reality and credibility of the art and teaching through evidence or demonstration. This only gradually declined in modern times, as the mentality of humanity increasingly detached itself from the spiritual and, therefore, from the alchemy that arose and was inspired from the spiritual world and intuitive insight.

Yet even in these times, every now and then, an adept or sometimes a messenger from the Rosicrucian lodge, unknown from where would appear, remain for a while, indisputably testify to alchemy, and then, as it seemed, retreat again into concealment. In the events described in this book, this is particularly clear in the almost mythical, unreal-yet-true figures of Philalethes and Laskaris. The fate of Setoninus, however, was tragic perhaps far too daring and he perished because of it. Others, like Eva Seinfeld, were different, depending on the level of their adeptship.

For the majority who were masters themselves and at some point received something of the Philosopher’s Stone to act as a messenger and validate the Arcanum, the required trial sooner or later became their downfall. These instances are also reported in this book. From all these accounts, it is very clear how justified the behavior of the adepts was at the time to appear as unknown, if they wished to make themselves known, or to have third parties testify because generally these third parties were not at risk. And if they boasted themselves as the producers of the tinctures entrusted to them, they experienced the deserved punishment, like Starkey, Böttidler, Cajetan, and so many others.

For the appointed masters and adepts, making gold was truly not the central concern. Their focus with the Philosopher’s Stone was on entirely different matters. Yet they knew that in the present and future, there would be no other proof of the mystery of alchemy and its spiritual origin than the tangible, precise transmutation of metals, and therefore for this reason alone they recorded it publicly and indisputably, letting it be documented. They did not do it for personal gain or vanity, as the old masters never did, because in earlier times this external testimony was not necessary to awaken belief and awareness at that time the feeling for it was already effective and alive without it.

Thus, the modern, one-sided, and misguided handling of this still entirely unexplored border area, conditioned by the abstract, analytical mentality of the present, becomes clear. In all modern writings of the last hundred years whether focusing more on the historical or on the purely practical aspects of alchemy the same fundamental error keeps appearing: the beginning and purpose of alchemical endeavor is assumed to be the gradual transmutation of base metals through the intermediate silver into the royal state of perfected gold via the Philosopher’s Stone Lapis Philosophorum which, however, does not merely have the power to transform all metals. Its true function, due to its inherent regenerative principle, is to act as a life elixir, heal all diseases, extend human life beyond the limits set by nature, and maintain it in the royal state of youth.

Unending gold and unending youth what more is needed for earthly bliss? Yet the Tree of Knowledge stands on this side of the Tree of Life and all who seek it for earthly purposes have always tasted death from it. Earthly drama is, after all, real as well, and the adept knows well from where the four streams of Eden flow.

Modern writers on alchemy, from whatever perspective, must have looked only superficially or, at best, very one-sidedly at the works of the hermetic masters; otherwise, they could not have missed that all truly authentic writings (to recognize this requires some training) do not begin with parabolic instructions for chemical processes, but always with a reference to the spiritual origin of what follows more or less hidden from those who, on the path of initiation, have only reached the periphery of the hermetic mystery temple in this labyrinth of error. This is the Ariadne thread handed to the seeker the true Ariadne thread.

To illustrate what has been said, let us select one writing: One of the true adepts, Sebald Schwarzer, to whom the house of Sadasen owed its reputation around the second half of the 16th century, begins his manuscript On the True Preparation of the Philosophical Stone with these words:

Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

On the day of Saint Michael, 1584, he began to write this great secret of the wonderful transmutation of metals and the unique revelation of the Highest God, which the Almighty had revealed to him through special means. Therefore, to the Almighty eternal God and our Lord Jesus Christ, let praise, honor, and thanks be given, that He has revealed to me, a mere sinner, such a great secret and hidden knowledge, which will remain concealed from the godless and will never come to light because the Highest and Almighty God keeps it in His hands and gives it as He wills, as He deems fit, for if it were left to the weak and the insignificant, it would be impossible for them. This is, therefore, a special gift from God, as all other gifts are and must be.

Such an opening is by no means merely a relic of the period’s characteristic phraseology, used at the time to introduce theological, philosophical, or naturalistic treatises, but is a clear and unmistakable indication that the insights on which this work is based were preceded by a Christian-esoteric initiation. And as with Sebald Schwarzer, one encounters this type of prelude in nearly all genuine alchemical and Rosicrucian writings an opening that, in the terminology of the time, meant: “An initiate speaks to an initiate.” If it is absent as a preliminary note, the same indication can almost certainly be found elsewhere in the course of the work. One can, in fact, recognize the alchemical work precisely by the manner and attitude of this reference.

Of course, adventurers, charlatans, and spagyric counterfeiters, countless in any era, also employed the same language to lend credibility and recognition to their chemical concoctions. But anyone with even a modest ear for such matters can distinguish the genuine from the false, the true from the untrue regardless of the material content itself, which, for the initiate, is represented in the Tabula Smaragdina and not in books or visible seals.

Thus, when, for example, in the 1915 Leipzig publication The Philosopher’s Stone and the Art of Making Gold by Dr. Willy Bein, the incomprehensibility of the alchemical-parabolic mode of presentation is explicitly emphasized on page 15, this claim is indeed correct but the more or less dismissive attitude toward this fact in nearly all modern works on alchemy is unjustified. Such works are based on an entirely erroneous assumption: that the purpose of the adepts was to provide their contemporaries or today’s natural scientists with easy, practical recipes for transmuting base metals into gold via the Philosopher’s Stone.

“How merit and fortune intertwine,
The fool will never see,
If he were to hold the Philosopher’s Stone,
The wise lack the Stone...”
(Goethe, Faust II)

This is not the case. Once again, to make it perfectly clear: all genuine alchemical writings are guides and milestones for those who already know the direction and have already progressed through some stations along the path. In short, they are initiation writings, whose access has always been and will always remain hidden to the unprepared. One who possesses the key that opens them and no one else may touch it, nor close it has been initiated.

The futile wandering of the uninitiated around the hermetic temple is symbolized in the allegorical-alchemical images, often by a figure who, with eyes blindfolded, chases after a hare in vain and strives in vain to grasp it the true, world-sought Easter hare, which lays black-and-white-red, and sometimes golden, eggs for the one who knows how to see it.

Thus, one sees in this a fundamental and clear point: the background of alchemy is initiation, a mystery-training spanning millennia. In pre-Christian times, it arose from the soul-attitude of Egyptian, Chaldean, and Hellenistic world-affiliation consciousness, later flowing from the Orient through the Arab cultural world into the Occident, and is tinged (to use an alchemical expression) by the substance of Christianity, becoming the Grail mystery.

Therefore, when Dr. Willy Bein in the aforementioned work writes in the introduction of salt, “Alchemy means the art of transforming one substance into another,” this is indeed the commonly accepted statement to which all other modern works on alchemy subscribe. Yet it is very one-sided and superficial, as it only considers the purely material and peripheral aspect of a metaphysical worldview complex and esoteric method of understanding nature, whose deepest and most mystical expressions are found in the words of Christ: “As it is in heaven, so will it be on earth.”

Certainly, the idea of transmutation is central to the alchemical path of initiation but not in the sense of transforming metals. Rather, it refers to the inner mystical process of transmutation, where the external chemical-physical metal transformation is merely the material manifestation of what has already taken place internally. This is what the true adepts meant when they said: “Only then will the Philosopher’s Stone succeed, which first was made in heaven; as it is above, so the earthly follows of its own accord.”

This complete ignorance and passing over by modern sciences and historians, who have treated alchemy more materially or historically, neglects the essential metaphysical, cosmogonical central aspect as the starting point of alchemical worldview behavior and, by extension, the theoretical and practical consequences of alchemy. Modern science, deprived of this art, tends to dispute the priority of the adepts. As Goethe remarks:
“What it does not grasp, it distances itself by miles;
What it does not see, it deems entirely absent;
What it does not hear, it believes is not true;
What it does not dare, weighs for it nothing;
What it does not coin, it assumes to be worthless.”
(Faust II)

If, however, the testimony and confirmation of so many great, inviolable hermetic masters those who stood on very high ethical and cultural levels, such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Arnold of Villanova, Robert Fludd, and others are considered, regarding the reality of the Philosopher’s Stone and the possibility of a metal transmutation that they themselves did not deny having carried out, modern science dismisses these as error, folly, fantasy, or at best as self-deception. Since they concern the spirit that they grasped, one would think that at least the historically well-documented and verified accounts of a number of metal transmutations (the clearest of which are presented in this book) would be allowed to stand. But no: these accounts are casually relegated to the realm of ignorance, superstition, or fraud.

With the same justification, one could also dismiss any other historical occurrence as invented and fabricated, even though one is confirmed by the testimony of contemporaries, especially since the consequences of these events were of such significance that we can still trace them today. Thus, on both sides, the same situation arises only with the difference that we are accustomed to accept historical reports of war, treaties, violence, and oppression as credible and factual without question, while a no less serious account, strictly confirmed by many eyewitnesses, of accomplished metal transmutation is rejected as false simply because it concerns a phenomenon that exceeds the capacity of contemporary science. Not even is the mere possibility denied. On the contrary, one now constantly reads that alchemical dreams are beginning to become reality for example, in the final paragraph of Harry Schmidt’s Problem of Modern Chemistry (Hamburg):

“So much is already known today: the dreams of alchemists are no longer delusions. We may indulge in their magic with well-founded hope, to one day discover ways that will safely lead us from lead to pure gold…”

Or, in the previously mentioned work on alchemy by Dr. Willy Bein:
“One may well ask, how could so many learned and practical minds have engaged in such seemingly futile pursuits? Where is the true core? In the substance itself. Modern science, with its understanding Faraday, Helmholtz, Kekulé has joined in the insights that the alchemists had dimly grasped. It has now been recognized which relationships exist between the chemical elements. They are arranged in the periodic system. Lockyer in astronomy made it probable, through studying the light of the faintest stars, that elements developed from the earth, albeit only over geological epochs. Now transmutation has been made observable in metals through the study of radioactivity, following the work of Röntgen, Becquerel, and the Curies. The primordial substance has been found: it is negative electricity, which is atomically structured in the cherishing body. Its atoms are electrons; their mass and velocity are known. And finally, among many others, Sir Ramsay’s observation: radium, during its spontaneous decay, releases enormous energy. Thus, one may conclude that if ordinary elements’ atoms could be made to absorb such energy, changes might occur not destructive, but constructive in nature. If it were found that the particular forms of these new substances depend on the elements that emit beta rays, the transmutation of elements would no longer be a senseless dream; then the Philosopher’s Stone would be discovered. It would no longer lie beyond the realm of possibility that the other medieval alchemists’ dreams could be realized, namely the elixir of life, whose effect on living cells is likewise determined by the quantity and quality of the energy it contains. Can we really say that it would be impossible to influence their activity if means are found to supply energy and direct it?”

(Translated from the English essays, London 1908, by W. Ostwald, under the title Past and Future in Chemistry, Leipzig 1909, p. 235)

Thus, the transmutation of one element into another short, the transformation no longer seems impossible to modern and future science. Until the turn of the century, it was considered a fantastical, fundamentally unfeasible problem, and even raising it, despite the questioning by Schleich and Strindberg, seemed entirely absurd. Today, this narrow-minded viewpoint is largely overcome.

Nevertheless, when modern science which recognizes the possibility of transmutation through radioactive transformation addresses the question of whether the true alchemists, working from precisely this side, might have discovered and actually pursued the method, the answer is often dismissed with a dismissive smile or a patronizing pity. The matter, however, cannot be so superficially set aside. The statements and testimonies of masters and adepts regarding the actual reality of the transmutation processes they carried out are so clear, so penetrating, and filled with love of truth, that the only way to doubt their bona fides is in a time that lacks the living sense for vibrations and for the substantial nature of the expressed word, and which no longer possesses the organ to discern whether it speaks in truth or falsehood.

The fact that ninety-nine percent of alchemical treatise authors’ assurances are false does not mean that not one in a hundred of a credible adept is true. The inviolability of the language provides the decisive criterion for the truly discerning. That this ability to distinguish has been lost in our time may become a fate so it is on the whole line. The ultimate and deepest sense of responsibility toward every sentence one writes and speaks is precisely where it counts: not what enters the mouth, but what proceeds from it. This sacred sense of responsibility is what guided those true masters who acknowledged the Philosopher’s Stone and thus their testimony is true and inviolable.

“But they meant it honestly,” respond today’s sophists and natural scientists “they were simply deceived themselves, and science was still in its infancy, so it happened that they mistook alloys for genuine transmutations. They judged scientifically as we do today, and they laughed at their own superstition…”

Yes, they may have laughed, but consider the illogic and simplicity of such a view! For apart from the fact that gold samples were already known in the earliest antiquity (the Pharaohs, Solomon, and later the Roman emperors hardly paid the tribute of their provinces in alloys), one can see from every history of chemistry and alchemy that already around 3000 BCE and even earlier in Egypt there existed a fully developed metallurgy. Therefore, people there, as in other cultures, had for 5 to 6 millennia been able to accurately and reliably carry out metal compounds and separations, and consequently also to distinguish and recognize alloys.

The repeatedly cited work of Dr. Willy Bein explains on page 10: as archaeological findings show, people had already achieved pure metals in prehistoric times. Pure copper is found as early as around 3500 BCE. It is hardly remarkable that in the reign of Ramses the Great, in the 13th century BCE, copper was completely free of arsenic. Zinc, mixed with copper as brass, was known as early as 1900 BCE, and lead was known at least by the time of Ramses. Mercury is found in residues from graves dating to 2000 BCE. Metallic bismuth and antimony are attested in Assyria and Egypt at the same time.

Of alloys, especially Asem, an alloy of gold and silver, played a significant role. The effect of mercury on gold also seems not to have been unknown. Egyptian and Mycenaean finds from the time before the Dorian migration show knowledge of alloys, marvelous enamels, and other substances whose production presupposed far-reaching chemical-technical expertise.

Beyond arsenic and antimony compounds, the Egyptians also knew substances later important to alchemy: lead, mercury, cinnabar, and tin.

A papyrus written around 1550 BCE, obtained by the renowned researcher and writer Ebers in Luxor, contains a number of technical instructions that presuppose a transmission of knowledge across many generations. In the temples where workshops for the production of precious god- and kingly images were located especially the temple at Edfu practical chemistry was still practiced even in the time of the Alexandrians. There, for centuries, a secret society, the “Poinmander community,” gathered and practiced the sacred art under Thoth’s guidance. The legacy can still be found in the ruins in the form of numerous implements for chemical work.

Thus, there existed a gold-silver alloy at that time the Asem. Yet the same scientists who report this insist on the absurd claim that the hermetic masters, in the midst of their self-certified metal transmutations, mistook alloys for transmuted gold out of ignorance.

Because this fact might influence the evaluation of whether earlier transmutation reports were ultimately based on ignorance, additional evidence from the very advanced state of metallurgy in antiquity, compiled from the most comprehensive modern works on the emergence and spread of alchemy (first volume 1919, second volume 1931) by Prof. Dr. Edmund L. von Lippmann, further underscores the untenability of this absurd view:

Metallic antimony, easily obtained by reducing stibnite, was already well known before the time of the Babylonian king Sargon I (around 2850 BCE); a large bowl made of this metal dates to the era of King Gudea (around 2600 BCE). For the early Sumerians, knowledge of gold and some base metals is documented (see below for individual metals). Certain minerals such as frit, magnesite, alumina, silicates, and also cinnabar and stibnite (antimony sulfide) were already known in very early times.

Lead: In Egypt, lead was in use already before the Old Kingdom (around 3000 BCE), as legend reports that lead was melted for the “chest” of Osiris; by the end of the Middle Kingdom (around 1900 BCE), it was obtained in ingots from Sinai. In Babylon, lead (anaku) was already known in the 28th century BCE, apparently as a byproduct of silver extraction in Taurus. Sargon I conquered the region. Ancient Rome claims to have cast the first statues in lead.

Gudea (25th century BCE) reports that his treasury contained gold, silver, and lead; even in ancient Assyria, the latter served as currency and fines. In Crete, certain objects and weapons (daggers) were already made of lead in the Early Minoan period (around 3000–2000 BCE). From there or from Cyprus comes the lead idol of a goddess, which appears in the Mycenaean layers (II–V) of ancient Troy; around 2000–1100 BCE, Cyprus exported large quantities of lead to Egypt. Biblical references mention lead extraction and silver smelting from lead ores. For India, lead (sis) seems to have become known only in the later Vedic period.


Bronze: In the Levant, bronze was known already to the Sumerians (Sumerian zabar, Akkadian zipparu), as early as Sargon I (27th–28th century BCE). However, this was likely lead or antimony bronze, which the smith produced by mixing (alloying), as evidenced by inscriptions dedicated to the fire god Gibil: “You are the purifier of silver and gold; you mix copper and lead; only later did tin take the place of lead…” It is very remarkable that, at the beginning of their expansion into Asia Minor (around 2500 BCE), the Hittites already had sufficient bronze weapons to secure superiority over the older inhabitants; regarding the original sources of the metals used, however, nothing definite is known.


And now another passage, which shows for the first time that the process of distillation was already known 3–4 thousand years ago, since the preparation of aromas and essential oils at that time in Babylon presupposes knowledge of distillation:

In Babylon, under the rule of Hammurabi around 2000 BCE, cypress, cedar, and myrtle oils were known, and myrrh, spikenard, and bdellium were imported from Arabia… (Vol. II, p. 45)
With these references, it should be clear that in all cultural regions so far as can be traced not only was exact metallurgical knowledge actually present, so that the main metals such as copper, arsenic, and others were known both in purified form and in various alloys and could be combined and processed accordingly, but also that other technical-chemical fields already drew on a long-standing tradition.

It is well known that in the mummies of Egypt, dental fillings have been found which, in their technical perfection both regarding the materials and execution match or even surpass the most complicated work of our modern dental technology. And regarding mummification itself, even today the exact methods and means by which it was possible to preserve a body for millennia as we still find it in the mummies have not been completely reconstructed.

According to the historical records, the body, after the brain and internal organs were removed, was first washed with palm wine and aromatic oils, then filled with either myrrh and cassia or with so-called natron various alkaline salts known today by that name and then prepared with resins or other aromatic, preservative substances.

Thus, the extraordinary knowledge of the ancients not only matches but even surpasses that of modern practitioners.

Despite this extensive and still extendable body of evidence, today’s pseudo-writers are unable to acknowledge that the true masters of Hermeticism in ancient times were indeed capable of verifying whether the transmutation results shown by themselves or by others concerned alloys or pure gold and silver.

It should therefore be clear to anyone unbiased where the logical and intellectual failure lies when one considers these deliberately extensive examples.

All the more absurd it seems that modern authors on alchemy compilers and historiographers while discussing the same question, nevertheless maintain the assumption that all transmutation reports, insofar as they did not deliberately aim at fraud or deception, were simply self-deceptions, because the metallurgical knowledge of the time supposedly prevented them from distinguishing gold from a gold alloy.

Even if such authors insist, patiently or impatiently, on their untenable position, they only confirm the words of Piebald Schwarzer cited earlier, which will continue to hold true for all time:

For if something is written in this way, when it is read or received by the world, it either is not understood at all, or is regarded as incredible or impossible; and it is only through other causes, or by divine connection, that the truth can be grasped.

The irrefutable conclusion (as long as one does not act against better knowledge and conscience) is as follows:
The bona fides of the statements and testimonies of the true masters and adepts regarding transmutations performed by themselves or by others is beyond any doubt.

The state of metallurgical experience and knowledge had been such for centuries and millennia that it was already impossible in principle not to distinguish between gold and ordinary alloys, and therefore this matter cannot even be questioned today.

From this, the logical and necessary conclusion follows: The transmutation reports transmitted by the masters and adepts are justified and based on truth.

IATROCHEMISTRY

What is a doctor? He is the one who can make the sick healthy.

But if we consider it carefully: who can be a doctor without the three without being a philosopher, without knowledge of astronomy, without knowledge of alchemy? None; rather, he must be experienced in these three things, for in them lies the truth of medicine.

Thus, the doctor must understand human beings and recognize their illnesses; he must know all the diseases of all things, just as nature suffers in the great world.

Paracelsus

IATROCHEMISTRY – IATOS: THE DOCTOR – DOCTOR CHEMISTRY

This name refers to the preparation methods of the remedies presented by the great physicians of the 16th and 17th centuries in their own laboratories using spagyric methods.

Apart from the fact that these physicians, immersed in the secrets of nature, had no reason to reveal their insights and discoveries which would have been necessary if their prescriptions were to be executed in apothecaries the state of apothecaries at the time was so low that the conditions for conscientious execution of the recipes, which often required an experienced hand, were simply not present.

Thus, the masters prepared their magisteries and arcana themselves iatrochemistry. The lengthy and time-consuming preliminary work was carried out by their assistants and laboratory aides. One must remember that every acid and every solvent had to be prepared from scratch, and the number of solvents they used was very large and highly specialized. In the first line were distilled and concentrated substances such as wine vinegar, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, aqua regia, and sulfuric acid. They also had at their disposal other very concentrated solvents that they prepared themselves. The differentiation and variety of solvents were one of the most important aspects of their spagyric work.

And then there was wine spirit spiritus e vino, not some crude potato alcohol… The prescription commonly reads: take the best old and strong wine, digest it for a month in a retort, then distill it… This distillation, carried out with utmost precision using a very meticulous apparatus, separated the subtlest components, including the ethereal oils of the wine, producing a highly refined spiritus e vino for the preparation of plant and even mineral tinctures. This spiritus e vino, so prepared, is already similar in effect to aquavit and has a tonic, stomachic, and cordiacum-like effect, comparable to the best French cognacs.

The preparation of this spiritus e vino was treated with the utmost care by the iatrochemists, and there exists an extensive, unbroken record of instructions in the relevant literature. It is clear that tinctures and extracts obtained in this way are physiologically far more effective than those prepared with ordinary ethyl alcohol (spirit) commonly used today. Moreover, the alkali (salt) of the respective plant was often added to the plant essence. That the plant itself became part of the tincture was a consequence of the method of processing. In this way, the iatrochemists achieved a true quinta essentia, a substance of very high and far-reaching medicinal power, incomparable to modern homeopathic or allopathic tinctures.

However, the iatrochemists prepared their medicines for personal use at the bedside of their patients, so large quantities were not required. The production of such essences for the modern pharmaceutical market presents apart from the cost technical challenges, which, if cost is set aside, can be overcome today with properly designed apparatus.

Of course, the careful preparation of spiritus e vino and the correct processing of the ingredients is not the only reason for the remarkable successes of the iatrochemists. They also used a second, very different wine spirit: the gold wine spirit of the adepts, which, because of certain properties shared with alcohol, was also called wine spirit. Its chemical formula is known, and the iatrochemists gradually intensified and modified it through further cohobations and digestion processes. Finally, by treatment with acids and mineral salts, they produced their mineralia menstrualia (to remain in their terminology), which allowed them to manipulate metals without dissolving them and to guide potassium carbonate during their work.

As Sylvius, the renowned physician of the University of Leyden, writes (page 850) about sal tartar volatile: the fixed alkaline salt can be made volatile through cohobation with a volatile spirit. Such a volatile alkaline salt rises over a not very strong fire and sublimates. Only the patient and skilled artist could achieve this; not others who rushed the work. Such salts have large crystals.

The famous Dutch physician Van Helmont, who first recognized the medicinal power of volatile alkaline salts, writes (page 377 of the German edition of his works): if impurities remain in the first stage, dissolving agents are needed; if they are harder, volatile alkaline salts must be used, which remove all impurities as if by magic. (Page 1142) When fire-resistant salts are made volatile, they become powerful arcanes, capable of removing all blockages.

Thus, uric salts were dissolved and carried away by applying volatile sal tartar. The volatile sal tartar became the indicated remedy for all so-called uric-acid diseases (Paracelsus).

At another place (page 351) Van Helmont writes: “The first piece is the alkahest. If you cannot obtain it, at least make the tartaric salt volatile so that it can effect dissolutions…” (page 329) It says: the tartaric salt becomes completely volatile and rises into the air, sometimes liquid, often as a sublimation. This salt has been proven in experiments, though few know the handling technique… This handling lies precisely in treating sal tartar with properly prepared spiritus vini philosophici.

In numerous writings of the iatrochemists, including Basil Valentine and Johannes Agricola, references to volatile wine-tartar as one of the most powerful remedies exist, but the method for its preparation is almost universally kept secret.

But what about the Alkahest, of which Van Helmont writes: “If you cannot obtain it…” The Alkahest was indeed possessed by the adepts, though not all iatrochemists were so, despite their profound alchemical and therapeutic knowledge. Van Helmont and Agricola, for example, were not adepts, since the degree of adeptship is acquired through knowledge of the preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone, which presupposes the hermetic path of initiation.

In this sense, Van Helmont’s statement should be understood, and it nevertheless clearly shows that the reality of the so-called Alkahest, and consequently of the Philosopher’s Stone, was self-evident to him. In his essay Aletheomystische Zusammenhänge, as evidence of many reliably documented metal transmutations, Van Helmont recounts his encounter with an unknown individual, who during a conversation about alchemy revealed himself as an adept.

Upon parting, he gave Van Helmont one-quarter gram (1/4 g) of the Philosopher’s Stone in the form of a saffron-yellow heavy powder. Van Helmont then projected it and, using silver he had purchased in 19186 Talers, personally transformed it into high-quality gold in the presence of witnesses.

In the first volume of his Chymische Medien, Leipzig 1638, Johannes Agricola reports on the preparation of a lead-based oil highly effective both internally and externally in medicine (the iatrochemists and alchemists understood "oil" to mean all viscous liquids). After a time, he had collected a good quantity of this oil and was eager to test whether there was anything further hidden in it, as the authors of his sources write. He considered the Saturnus oil, believing there to be a secret in it, for all philosophers held it in esteem.

Though they knew much, they also understood that much labor had been in vain, and nothing was wasted other than time and money. Nevertheless, he attempted to find in it, according to the literal sense, a specimen of truth. He reflected on the Sendivogium, thinking that material or metallic substances should never enter the fire, for in fire they would lose their spirit or anima.

He extracted his mineral as best he could and obtained its salt, which was very beautiful and pleasant, unlike anything he had seen before. He did not use ordinary vinegar but made a special vinegar, the recipe of which he did not disclose. He drew the salt out in a way unlike common vinegar or the usual Saturni salt. This salt, treated in this way, produced a blood-red oil, very beautiful, which he poured onto well-prepared Flores Sulphuris, which had been treated with oleum vitrioli and fixed to the highest degree, transforming them into what resembled Zinoher ore. He sealed them in a vial and allowed them to digest in a vapor bath. The Flores Sulphuris thickened like honey, producing a pleasant fragrance. He closed the glass again, placed it in sand, applied moderate fire, and it coagulated into a stone.

When he wanted it to coagulate, it took a long time, nearly a month, because sulfur has a strong fat content, as the philosophers justly called pinguedo terra. Once coagulated, he opened it, added more oleum Saturni, and allowed it to digest in the vapor bath again, resulting in a product even more beautiful than before. He repeated the process in sand until it became a hard stone. Afterward, he broke the vials and tasted the result on his tongue it was entirely pleasant. He ground it into a fine powder, added the oil for a third time, and it coagulated again. At first, it would not fully coagulate; he applied heat from the Vulcanum, which completed the process. When everything was finally hardened, he placed it in strong fire for a month, producing a transparent red ruby-like substance.

He placed it on a goldsmith’s anvil, applied moderate heat, and it flowed without igniting.

He then separated the silver-lime, mixed it with the powder, and placed it in a cement container for 24 hours. When opened, it had merged into a red mass resembling cinnabar. He hammered it it was very unyielding. He tested it with some lead, laminated it, poured on separating water, and it turned black. After further digestion, he added more silver, melted it, laminated it, and poured separating water again, producing a fine black calx. He poured out the separating water, broke the calx into pieces, and melted them with a little borax, producing the corpus Solis. Though not perfectly colored, he passed it through antimony, producing pure gold like minted ducats.

He calculated the yield not enough for enormous piles of gold, but enough to demonstrate experimentally and provide proof that transmutation in principle was possible. Anyone who does not believe this, and laboratory work as he performed it, will find that the process cannot behave differently. Even though many would doubt or publicly write against it, he demonstrates that transmutation could indeed be achieved through this careful method.

From Agricola’s account, it becomes clear that in the pursuit of his medical-chemical work, he occasionally and incidentally succeeded in producing gold. The truthfulness of Agricola’s statement is beyond doubt, and the way he describes it allows any impartial reader to recognize that his work was not intended to bring him fame as an adept, but solely to demonstrate the possibility of producing gold by chemical means.

The great iatrochemists of the early centuries, even if they were not adepts themselves, nevertheless followed tradition regarding the necessary conditions for gold production, and in this regard they were far more cautious than modern scientists, who contemplate atomic fission at hundreds of thousands of volts in their minds. The discoveries that led to the creation of the atomic bomb and through which we have entered the era of stellar chemistry will in the future lead to an even greater transformation of perspectives on the entire technical field. This, according to Hoffman, does not imply in any negative sense that the Philosopher’s Stone could be attained by atomic means, as the Stone’s path is biogenetic.

I have not personally replicated Agricola’s process because it is lengthy and cumbersome; there are considerably shorter and simpler ways to reach the same goal. Nevertheless, it is clear that his description is accurate and that it leads to the results he reported. Any practitioner who has not simply followed the alchemical symbolism but has worked in the laboratory and gained experience knows what is crucial in the process (the symbolism then becomes understandable). Even by reading the instructions of an alchemical process, one can recognize whether the procedure is correct and likely to succeed.

Nevertheless, the process can always be performed in various ways. For example, Agricola conceals the special vinegar he used in his description, stating that he will not reveal it, cunningly adding this detail. Thus, the process itself is already correct. Perhaps Professor C. G. Jung will one day experiment with it in his workshop using Agricola’s description; in the new edition of his 1944 work Psychology and Alchemy, he omits the salt, noting that it is beyond any doubt that no genuine tincture or artificial gold was ever produced in all the centuries in which serious laboratory work was done.

One may reasonably ask: what motivated the ancient alchemists to continually labor, or, as they said, “operate,” and to write about tinctures in the context of the “divine” art, if the entire undertaking seemed so hopeless? It is feared, however, that the process, as detailed in Agricola’s instructions, cannot be shortened, because first the so-called lead-oil must be prepared, which Agricola assumed in his work. The specific instructions for this are provided in the same chapter.

The process is long and cumbersome, and the archaic style of the author is not immediately inviting to a modern scholar. Nevertheless, one should not be discouraged from pursuing it, for therein lies the “golden grain.” I suspect that Professor Jung will follow this, so I provide him with an alternative, unfortunately more practical, method for producing gold in exact scientific formulation. The only detail omitted here is the specific quantities of the required ingredients, which are nevertheless easy to determine:
Dissolve copper vitriol (copper sulfate) and ammonium chloride separately in distilled water. Then mix the solutions in a vessel as used for photographic purposes. Into this mixture, carefully introduce ammonia. On the surface, an iridescent metallic film forms.

This film is nothing other than gold. Carefully remove the film and amalgamate it with mercury. From the mercury, the gold can then be separated by the usual method.

Perhaps the authority of the French scholar Tiffereau, who conducted unsuccessful alchemical experiments toward the end of the previous century, will further encourage Professor Jung to replicate the instructions of the noted French chemist for producing gold. The instructions read as follows: mix two parts concentrated sulfuric acid and one part nitric acid at 40° and fill glass vessels to one-fourth of their capacity. Introduce filings of pure silver and copper, copper being one-tenth of the silver. After the initial reaction, the solution acquires a beautiful violet coloration. Bring the solution to a boil and maintain it for several days, adding pure concentrated sulfuric acid from time to time until all nitric acid is expelled. Long boiling is necessary, as the acids form a very strong compound; as long as this persists, no gold forms.

If water is added after several days of boiling, weak emissions of nitrous gas still appear, showing that the concentrated sulfuric acid has a closer affinity to water than to the nitric acid. To remove any remaining traces of nitrous fumes, a small amount of ammoniacal sulfuric solution is added and boiled further. In this procedure, the gold appears to remain suspended by the nitrous gas; as the gas diminishes, the gold settles in extremely fine flakes, which adhere to the walls of the vessel and can be observed with a magnifying glass.

If the mass of gold is sufficiently large, it accumulates at the bottom of the vessel. Another method, which is slower, involves using potassium nitrate instead of nitric acid.

After this digression, we return to the iatrochemists: only a few of the iatrochemical physicians of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were adepts like Paracelsus. The foundation of their medicines was therefore not the Alkahest or the secret great elixir, the Philosopher’s Stone which, as Agricola’s gold-making account shows, presupposes the Stone of the Philosopher but the extraordinary healing successes of the iatrochemists were based on a profound knowledge of nature acquired over centuries of tradition. In general terms, one can say they practiced a kind of chemo-therapy, using entirely different methods than modern scientists.

A clear example: they did not know that tartar (potassium carbonate, Sal tartar, K₂CO₃) is chemically identical to purified potash, which can also be obtained by evaporating and ashing degreased sheep’s wool or by burning and leaching any plant. The iatrochemists were not concerned with this they understood tartar as a medicinal substance and used it to treat kidney and gallstone disorders, to dissolve and remove uric salts deposited in the body, and to restore balance. They did not know that the tartar prepared by calcining cream of tartar, potash, is chemically the same as that obtained from the bark of elm or any other plant (rosemary, wormwood, etc.); nevertheless, they observed that the salt from oak leaves and fruit was effective for the bladder, rosemary salt strengthened the heart and aided digestion, and wormwood salt stimulated bile and sweat, and was effective for prolonged fevers and stomach troubles (according to Basilius Valentinus).

Thus, the different plant salts had, according to Basilius Valentinus and the iatrochemists, the same functional domain as the organic components of the corresponding plants, even though the chemical formula of potash regardless of its plant origin remains the same.

Therefore, despite the same chemical formula, the physiological effects of different plant salts varied according to the effects of the specific plant itself. This observation of the iatrochemists is correct, and numerous experiments I personally conducted as a sensitive confirm it.

Yesterday’s and the day-before-yesterday’s chemists often denied the possibility of physiologically differentiating a substance determined by the same chemical formula; modern biology, which in recent years has traced the effects of minute quantities, now confirms the iatrochemists’ observations, validating the long-dismissed theory of homeopathic “potencies.” The various plant salts act highly selectively and comprehensively, sometimes even more strongly than the plant extracts themselves. For the perfection of a tincture, it is therefore very important to incorporate the respective plant salt. Today, after so many years, the instructions of the iatrochemists are once again validated.

Basilius Valentinus’ instructions: To extract salts from all herbs and vegetables, he writes: “Take whichever herb you wish, burn it to ashes, make its ashes into a solution in water, allow it to coagulate, then dissolve the salt in spirit of wine. Remove the settled residue and repeat the distillation until the salt is pure and clear. If no residue remains, it is fertile.” When the spirit of wine is properly prepared, all salts from the herbs can be added, clear and pure, so that they crystallize transparently, like refined nitrate.

The iatrochemists possessed living knowledge of the medicinal virtues of herbs, derived not from books but from direct contact with nature; nature itself was their teacher. Their methods of diagnosis were therefore completely different from those of today. Their senses were finer and more differentiated than ours; they did not need a thermometer to determine the degree of fever, and their sense of smell was so developed that they could recognize certain diseases by scent alone. This skill was present even in lesser-trained physicians and remains rare today.

Modern researchers often make the mistake of judging humans of past centuries and especially of earlier epochs by today’s standards of organization and mental structure. This leads to entirely false conclusions. The psychological-physical constitution of Western humans up until the 17th century was increasingly different and more relaxed than that of modern humans. From this configuration arose atavistic clairvoyance in some regions, such as the “second sight” in Münsterland, which persists in isolated individuals even today. It is entirely mistaken to assume something still common today that ancient Persians, Egyptians, archaic Greeks, or the Nordic peoples of the Edda experienced life as modern humans do. Their mental and spiritual constitution was fundamentally different.

Modern scholars are therefore forced to misinterpret the great revelatory writings of past epochs when approaching them from a contemporary perspective. The same principle applies to religious and historical studies: the further back in time one goes, the more one must take into account the different mental and spiritual constitution of the people being studied.

Edgar Dacqué expresses a similar view: “We are entering an age in which the inner meaning of nature begins to reveal itself to us again, and only then can the full depth and magnificence of the mythic world be understood.”

But how were the legends and myths recorded by those early humans? How have they come down to us? The ancient storytellers without writing provide us with a clue. Similarly, when early humans lacked a fully reflective intellect capable of temporal reasoning and instead lived with a natural, immediate, instinctively clairvoyant consciousness, they could, via internal paths, always and unhindered access a common collective memory of their species and crystallize their experiences there. In this memory, they participated as naturally as they did in other species-wide instincts abilities that have, for civilized modern humans, almost entirely disappeared.

Thus, there were, perhaps even into historical times, rare exceptions among us: naturally gifted seers and sages who could look deep into the past, descend into the living realm of the dead, and drink from its sources knowledge transmitted to them without words or writing, connecting them to the most distant eras and mental states of prehistorical humanity. To them and to those who learned from them, we owe perhaps the known versions of fairy tales, legends, and myths, whose ultimate origins in time and consciousness remain impossible to specify.

In the coming era, it will be the task of an intuitive and deeply nature-attuned study of natural phenomena, soul, legend, and history to advance to these sources of myths, legends, and tales, and to reveal treasures still hidden from our collective wisdom (Edgar Dacqué, Essay: Fairy Tales, Legends, and Myths, 1925).

For all future spiritual and psychological research, and in the pursuit of natural science, such a worldview is a prerequisite for reaching the substances themselves. The path to this knowledge must once again be made passable.

A last remnant of this way of seeing the world and approaching its secrets was possessed by the great iatrochemists and physicians, and thus their knowledge, deeply rooted in nature, was so alien to us. And yet or perhaps precisely because of this they can be trusted unreservedly. One must always remember: they built upon experiences transmitted over centuries. If one begins, with some basic knowledge, to explore the old herbal compendia, such as Tabernaemontanus (1664), one will find that our modern botanical texts rest on them.

A comparison between the descriptions of any given medicinal plant in Tabernaemontanus and the most comprehensive, scientifically grounded 1938 Handbook of Medicinal Plants by Dr. Georg Madaus (2864 pages plus an index) makes this clear. Regarding the scope of Chelidonium majus (greater celandine), Tabernaemontanus states its essential internal use: the plant drives yellow bile through the stool and urine … Celandine root, cleaned and boiled with anise seeds in white wine, taken several days in the morning and evening, expels yellow bile, opens liver obstruction … powdered root mixed with wine vinegar acts similarly … externally, the root applied in lard or as a poultice cleanses all lesions … wart treatment: fresh juice applied repeatedly removes them quickly.

According to Madaus: Chelidonium is a preferred remedy for liver and gall disorders; prescribed for liver swelling, cholelithiasis (gallstone colic Berberis is particularly indicated in alternation), gall colic, bilious headaches, hypochondria, gastritis, enteritis, diarrhea, dyspepsia, spleen swelling, and asthma with hepatic origin. External use of juice and ointment is effective against warts, corns, psoriasis, skin cancer, freckles, lupus, and wounds.

Modern pharmacology can now identify the active alkaloids in celandine root chelerythrine, chelidonine, α-, β-, and γ-homochelidonine, protopine, and sanguinarine, as well as the pigment chelidoxanthin but the basis of its application lies entirely in the experience and knowledge of the old and natural herbalists.

One might ask: did each great iatrochemist have his own unique system of healing? The answer is not a simple yes or no. Paracelsus, who revolutionized medicine in his era, influenced the iatrochemists, but they generally worked with minerals, plants, and tinctures, and the potency of their doses was not negligible. Their successes in diseases now considered incurable were extraordinary.

For example, in chemical medicine, Agricola describes the use of Aurum potabile (potable gold not gold chloride in solution) for cancer treatment. Against cancer, it acts as a powerful remedy, working systemically, provided it is not left in the veins too long, allowing metastasis. In Leipzig, 1619, I treated a distinguished patient with this preparation: she had previously tried many remedies without success. Following Agricola’s method, I prepared five “loth” (measure) of gold into the specified process and administered three times a week, five drops per dose in wine. The patient experienced cleansing of the infected tissue, and the pain gradually decreased. Externally, I applied Sal Saturni, which further reduced pain, though complete healing was slow. She was able to continue her daily life and maintained improvement over six years, at age 46 remarkable, since most contemporary physicians considered cancer incurable.

Such examples of healing severe chronic and supposedly incurable diseases are found throughout the reports of the iatrochemists. The same applies to the many complex, time-consuming, and difficult-to-prepare recipes they developed. To give the reader a sense of their methods, here is the preparation of Agricola’s Aurum potabile, used in his cancer treatment: [recipe details as previously discussed].

Take the best purified gold, as much as you want,
have a goldsmith make it into thin laminations: the thinner it is, the better. Avoid making it larger than a thaler coin. Then cut pieces of deer antler into blocks as large and thick as half a thaler coin, enough to fit inside a cement box, which should not be too large compared to the pieces of deer antler or half a thaler, so that the pieces can fit together. Such pieces can be prepared from outer metals according to preference. Place at the bottom of the box a layer of sand about the thickness of a finger, or powdered white mineral, which is better. On top of this, place the deer antler pieces, then place pieces of gold on top, then again deer antler, then gold layer upon layer, as the Chymists prescribe until the box is full, or until you have used all the gold you have. Cover it again with powdered white mineral. Press the box carefully, let it dry, then place it in a medium-strength circular furnace. Begin with gentle heat, gradually increasing to the final heat, so that the contents are heated for an hour or more. Let it cool, then break open the box. You will find that the gold is almost flesh-colored and calcined.

This work must be repeated a third time; the gold will become completely brittle, and you should grind and rub it with calcined deer antler, but not too strongly, in a mortar for a whole day. The gold will then be almost brick-colored, properly calcined, and you should take care to achieve the best calcination. This way, the gold is ready for further use in medicine, as the calcination is complete and the gold is purified.

Into this fine, pure gold powder pour the prepared menstruum (solvent), which will extract the tincture, leaving the metallic residue behind. Pour the menstruum over, remove it, and repeat this process, pouring and extracting, until all tincture is obtained. Filter the menstruum through sand to remove impurities and dry it. The resulting tincture will have a deep purple-red color. On top of this, pour proper wine spirit.

If you wish to further refine this, you may use tartar or the “quintessence of the sun,” as taught in the Tractates, and place it in a sealed digestion, which will produce an even purer tincture. Extract the wine spirit from it as before, and you will have a beautiful aurum potable (potable gold), or you can pour quintessence salts over it, leaving it to settle and using it medicinally. This tincture works as a substantial remedy, almost like gold itself. In many illnesses, it can be used effectively, as its essence is strong and acts subtly through almost imperceptible transpiration.

Take note of the calcination of gold in a special menstruum. Now I will explain how it should be prepared so that the work and process are completely perfected, as here lies the main hand-grip and the proper method:

Take a good portion of boy’s urine and distill it carefully. Collect the distillate in the receiver, then distill it again onto the receiver. Repeat this process a third time, so that the subtle spirit rises into a beautiful, transparent, shining salt. Mix the salt with all the spirits from the receiver, weigh the spirits, and add as much of the best spirits beneath. Let it putrefy gently for eight days, then distill it. You will obtain a wonderful menstruum capable of working with all metals, minerals, and stones. Through this, you can achieve a potent tincture. Do not expect to find a better and more reliable process in other authors, even if they use many words and praise their method. In this case, their words are like singing; do not question or doubt whether this process is suitable or not you have heard from me that nothing can be achieved without pure eyes and pure hands, for these labors do not come from the silent books, read and collected, but from what the active vulcanus (fire) gives into the hands, so that it may gratify and benefit the diligent student.

Today, no art, especially of this process, can be invented except by verifying it with fire, and this is difficult. One must say: if nothing is learned from these many labors, one will understand and learn even less elsewhere. It is clear: these works are not simple; they require time, patience, and abundant experience. Agricola otherwise conceals that this aurum potable also holds other secrets, which only the clever and experienced in the art of fire can pursue.

The entire revealed doctrine of iatrochemistry extends further into other fields, connecting in a cosmophysical context to astrology. Here again, Paracelsus is guiding. Not every Paracelsus, as propagated in Germany from 1933 to 1945 and highlighted during the 1941 Paracelsus celebration, but the esoteric and initiated Paracelsus, who knew, from inner insight, the interplay of the upper and lower spheres and the star within man. From this, which he called the inner light, comes the path to the inner nature and how the firm substance dissolves into spirit while preserving the spirit-generated essence. (Goethe)
The trend from 1933 to 1945 aimed to make the image of Paracelsus visible to the wider public, to use his authority for certain purposes, similar to what was done with Master Edi, producing a falsified Paracelsus. They particularly tried to extract from isolated condemnatory statements about astrology that he supposedly rejected it entirely. This is not true. On the contrary, he did not reject it. Or, put differently: would he otherwise have been asked by the true physician to work simultaneously as an alchemist and in astrology?

One must know: the date (of birth) impresses the heavens into man (understand: the star within the human). Every illness requires the full application of philosophy and astronomy.

Likewise, if medicine recipes are not aligned with the qualities of the stars, which govern the illness’s location or cause, nothing is properly treated: the star corresponds to the illness, and he who knows the star knows the illness.

Thus, much in the heavens affects and governs medicine. Hence, one should not act outside this framework. Also, the law of correspondences: as above, so below. The stars in the macrocosm correspond to the stars in the microcosm, in man. The stars are interpreted through the stars. The principle of “like cures like” in homeopathy is a derivative aspect of this cosmophysical axiom of Paracelsus.

An astrologically oriented therapy applies the minerals and plants, processed medicinally, which are cosmogenetically assigned to the affected organ. For example, in eye diseases, all solar substances are applied, since the eye is formed from the forces of the sun.

Recall Goethe’s stanza:

Were the eye not solar,
The sun could never shine upon it.
Lying not in God’s own power,
How could it ignite from the divine?

Thus, for eye diseases, the main substances are: minerals – gold; plants – saffron (Crocus orientalis), Euphrasia, Ruth graveolans, and Chelidonium. These are indicated provided the eye condition is not secondary to a kidney disorder as described by Rademacher. In the latter case, kidney remedies must be combined with solar remedies.

From astrology also comes the seemingly abstruse doctrine of signatures, which the iatrochemists used in their work. It is based on the astrologically recognized correspondence of metals, minerals, and plants to the respective planets, from which they were cosmogenetically derived in ancient times. For example, iron contains all properties of Mars, including the red color of blood; similarly, the Tormentilla root in plants. If the Mars-star in man is affected, for instance in blood disorders, Mars remedies are indicated, and when properly prepared and applied, they can lead to rapid healing.

Throughout, the doctrine of signatures is found in Paracelsus to contain much that is instructive; its true metaphysical foundation, however, was elaborated by Jacob Böhme in his book De Signatura Rerum or On the Birth and Designation of All Beings: how all beings arise from a single mystery, and how that same mystery perpetually manifests from eternity to eternity, and how the good is transformed into the evil, and the evil into the good.

Likewise: how the external cure of the body, out of illness, must be guided by its similarity back into the original essence; what is the beginning, destruction, and healing of each thing.

The ninth chapter, entitled On the Signature, How the Inner Marks the Outer, begins: The entire visible external world, in all its being, is a sign or figure of the inner spiritual world; all that exists internally, and how it manifests externally, thus has its external character. Just as the spirit of the Creator manifests His inner shape and form in the body and reveals it, so too the eternal essence … Likewise, every thing born from the internal has its signature. The highest form, as it manifests in power, is the one that marks the body most, indicating the wandering forms, as one sees in all living creatures in the shape of the body, in posture, and gestures: in the hall, voice, and speech, so full is the energy of the spirit, so is also the figure of the body presented, and thus expresses its will, as large in spirit-life as it is signified.

After Jacob Böhme, in pursuing his exposition of the interplay of disharmonious planetary influences which lead to the generation of poisons in herbs had spread his views, he continues: According to this property, the physician should know the herbs; they are not for the lab, but are poisonous. Whatever their name, it is because they are under a certain planetary conjunction, and sometimes in the herb it is good if it is under Saturn and Mars.

Therefore, it is recommended: from a good conjunction, what is at the beginning in menstruum may counteract evil, which can be recognized in the signature. Therefore, the physician who understands the signature is best suited to gather the herbs himself.

The physician should not administer Saturn for an acute illness, nor cold without heat; otherwise he ignites death in wrath, because he forces the mercury in a harsh impression, causing the properties of death to manifest.

For a martial illness, which arises from heat and stiffness, Mars prescribes the cure: The physician should combine Mars with the influences of the Sun and Venus, so that Mars’ wrath is transformed into joy, and thus the disease in the body is converted into delight. Cold, however, is entirely opposed to this.

Even though in the first essay of this work both applied astrology and the therapeutic side of the doctrine of signatures have already been discussed in some detail, a repetition of what has already been said is unnecessary here. The purpose of these lectures and essays, which is to bring the essential aspects of this vast and far-reaching field into proper focus, does not allow for every individual question that arises to be exhaustively answered.

What matters here is stimulation and, beyond that, the clearing of the path for those who seek it, coming from contemporary forms of thought and conceptual frameworks.

In particular, in this essay, which could easily be expanded into a more comprehensive book, it is appropriate to include the wider context of the territory explored by the iatrochemists, even aphoristically, and to incorporate as many numerous and characteristic passages from their writings as possible, allowing them to speak for themselves in order to illustrate their way of thinking and conceptual approach. The author is aware that today’s natural scientists must find these lines of thought fantastic, antiquated, and unscientific; he himself knows all the objections that can be raised, but he also knows that progressive contemporary biology, even starting from completely different premises, is already, unnoticed, moving toward the same goals.

In this context, reference is made to the works recently published by Otto J. Hartmann with the publisher Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt a. M., professor at the University and Technical College of Graz: Man as the Self-Designer of His Destiny – Earth and Cosmos, a Cosmological Biology and Anthropology, the Physiognomy of Life Manifestations as a Basis for an Expanded Medicine.

In line with the worldview represented in the present discussion, Otto J. Hartmann writes in the first section of his aforementioned work: “From various perspectives, today attention is being drawn to the necessity of renewal and expansion of medical art.”

To make this clear, one must first keep the following in mind: Modern medicine, as represented in its most complete form by our university clinics, is, both in worldview and in methodology, partly part of the modern natural-scientific way of thinking and researching, which arose during the Renaissance and has manifested especially in all technical fields (and consequently particularly in diagnostics, surgery, radiation treatment, etc.). Likewise, man regards this scientific mindset as part of “nature,” as described by physics and chemistry.

Thus, when today, particularly from a therapeutic standpoint, attention is drawn to the limitations of previous medical knowledge, this means nothing less than that our concept of “nature” and “man” must undergo a fundamental revision. The nature concept of the Renaissance, based on measure, number, and weight, has today, at its completion, revealed its limitations. An expansion of medicine cannot merely consist of adding to the previously existing university knowledge or of applying novel remedies and techniques for reasons of expediency. The true expansion of medicine, as with biology, presupposes a total rethinking of the foundations of our natural-scientific worldview.

However, the existing foundations and the results gained through them are not to be discarded, but rather extended and supplemented. It is necessary to recognize the justified and significant aspects of previous approaches, without thereby denying the possibility of other paths, even if they seem foreign and strange at first. Therefore, both physicians and natural scientists today cannot avoid the effort of reflecting on the methodological and epistemological foundations of their science.

A total rethinking of the foundations of our natural-scientific worldview: that is what matters. A transformation along the full line, not only along the political and social line.

Returning to the working methods and techniques of the old iatrochemists in the field of medicine and natural-scientific research is not the goal; it would be fundamentally wrong to rely on old and long-abandoned methods in order to reach meaningful results and healing successes as the iatrochemists of the past once achieved. Modern technique today provides unlimited possibilities and facilitation.

The essential and decisive task for today’s Western humanity, standing before spiritual and mental nihilism, on all levels of its relationship to the world, is the release of medicine from all previous purely rational constraints, including mathematical ones, and the reillumination of the inner light, which must now be pursued along this new path of knowledge. Otherwise, a spiritually alienated, God-distant humanity would become entirely and irrevocably enslaved to the demon of technique and matter.

THE MYSTERY OF HEALING

The poet understands nature better than the scientific mind
NOVAILS

The answer to the question: What brings about healing in a diseased organism? is, from the exact scientific side as well as from the naturopathic side, the same: It occurs through an act of self-protection, whether triggered by an external cause (vaccination or other medicinal treatment) to defend against or combat the substances (viruses or bacteria) causing the disease, which in turn calls forth the organism’s own power, which heals itself.

The axiom already expressed by Hippocrates (460–377 BCE): “Nature is the healer of disease” … Physis finds its own way, has since then been guiding for all trained physicians from Paracelsus and the great iatrochemists of the Middle Ages to our time and in Krehl’s Naturheilkunde, Heidelberg 1935, we find almost literally the same statement: “Physis is the property or capacity of the organism to restore the functional orders of its organs to their proper state. If we call these disorders diseases, then the body is capable, through the power of its physis, of healing itself.”

Hippocrates’ understanding, however, does not arise, as is commonly assumed superficially, from early popular experience, but from ancient mystery wisdom, originating in the temples of Asclepius. Hippocrates, who stood at the beginning of medical-scientific engagement with disease and was, in a sense, the inaugurator of therapy in the modern sense, does not represent a beginning but rather an endpoint; from him, the ancient temple and mystery knowledge first emerges in a form adequate to our contemporary conceptual thinking. At the same time, philosophy as it arises with Plato, who was contemporary with this period, comes into view; Western humanity, which at that time reached its culmination in Hellas, had entered the age of intellectual consciousness.

What, then, are the properties and capacities of the organism by which the functional disorders of an organ are restored? What power is called forth in the organism, which enables it to engage in the defensive struggle against viruses and bacteria? Vaccines or medicines administered to the organism, and the microphysiological army set in motion by them, are, in a sense, the forces that carry out the battle.

But what is the force that sets them in motion, and where is it located in the human or animal organism? In the state of cells? No; the cellular state is merely the biological theater where the struggle takes place. The force itself is not present in the organism in any form accessible or explainable by physical-biological means, but exists in the pervading human or animal fluidic body, which stands beyond all methodological measurability at least for the present. Parapsychology works with it, but it does not view it cosmologically.

This human life force, this fluidic body, has been known to the initiated and enlightened of all times and peoples, who also designated it in various ways. Ancient Indian wisdom refers to it as Linda Shbarim. In Kabbalah, it is also considered a metaphysical reality.

Paracelsus calls it Schema. Justinus Kerner and the Seer of Prevorst referred to it as the nervous spirit. Modern theosophical-anthroposophical terminology calls it the etheric body, a designation that will be retained in the following explanations.

The etheric body, which is the bearer of the animal life force, survives the physical body for a certain time after death in order to dissolve into the world ether. However, it should not be identified with the hypothetical ether once assumed by science.

The composition of the human being is, according to Ovid, who was initiated into the Mithras mysteries and exiled by Emperor Augustus for betraying their secrets, given in the following distich, which expresses the mystery of humanity in wonderfully compressed form:

Terra legit carnem I tumulum circumfuolet umbra
Orcus loabet manes I Spiritus Astra petit

An untranslatable rendering into German hexameters reads:
The earth receives the body, the grave hill shelters the soul,
Between them dwells the spirit, the spirit-I flees to the star world.

As we can see, Paracelsus adopted the term Schema for the life body or etheric body from Latin. An interpretation of Ovid’s multi-layered distich in the sense of esotericism would go far beyond the scope of these explanations; for those familiar with esoteric traditions, the meaning is self-evident.

The task here is to give room for the concept of the etheric body as the bearer of the life functions of the organism, a concept which, for now, may still appear to modern biology as an outdated vitalism, though some individual biologists today do not entirely reject it. It is likely that in not too distant a future, this concept will spread further into scientific circles. Modern man is on this path, and modern physics, in the sense of Goethe’s verse:

"What more can man gain in life,
Than what God-nature reveals to him:
How it lets the solid dissolve into spirit,
How it preserves the spirit-created in firmness,"

… has opened all doors.

What Goethe spoke of as the archetype of the plant is nothing other than the etheric form; in all organisms, the etheric body is the carrier of life, and to the clairvoyant, it hovers above the seed as the etheric model of the plant that will arise from it.

With the onset of death, the etheric body separates from the physical body, remaining for a certain time around it tumulum circumvolet umbra and then dissolves into the world ether. What endures beyond time are the soul body and the spirit.

At the moment of death, immediately after the heart stops, the etheric body can, through injection of a certain serum invented in 1933 by the English physician John E. Madsen, be temporarily restored to the physical body for a brief moment by injection into the heart muscle. In this way, the recently deceased can, for minutes or at most a few hours, be called back to life, only to then finally succumb to the forces of death.

Great hope was placed in this technical revival albeit for a vanishingly short period that the deceased might be able to report on what the afterlife truly looks like. This hope, however, was bitterly disappointed, because all that those temporarily returned to life could communicate was the memory of thoughts and ideas they held at the moment of passing, as a great veil fell before them. These thoughts were entirely focused on earthly experiences and states, professional interests, or concerns for their relatives, or whatever else had preoccupied them internally during their lives; there was no trace of revelations from the afterlife. And how could there be? Complete ignorance of death matters necessarily means that such expectations for revelations cannot be fulfilled by the technically revived immediately after death.

The complete separation of the etheric body from the physical corpse does not happen spontaneously but takes a certain amount of time, lasting hours. This period allows the artificial, temporary revival to occur at all, during which the recently deceased exists in a state of total unconsciousness, similar to deep sleep. What impressions from the afterlife could they possibly bring back during this artificial revival? It is simply impossible to access the mysteries of death through serum injections into the heart of the recently deceased.

Returning to the living organism: the invisible carrier of all the inherent, formative, and sustaining forces within it is the etheric or formative-body, which, during illnesses, sets the defense forces in motion. This raises the question: What is it that, in the material media introduced into the organism, acts on the etheric body and calls forth the development of these defensive forces? And how does this influence pass onto the etheric body?

When administering curative or vaccination substances of a more coarse material nature, the etheric body is in a sense called from below (one may also speak figuratively here) to develop defensive forces. As a result, strong reactions are triggered in the organism, often including more or less severe side effects. The subtle materia medica, that is, the high potencies of homeopathy, does not act indirectly through the organism, but directly on the etheric body itself in its own sphere, and the healing process occurs without disturbing after- or side-effects. Here perhaps lies the explanation for the often wonderful efficacy of high potencies, in which the material components can no longer be detected even by the most meticulous analysis, and whose application is condemned by conventional medicine as merely symbolic.

It must be admitted that in a very coarse, dense organism one that requires something to be “added from below” homeopathic high potencies are less indicated.

With the medications intensified and refined through spagyric methods, the situation is similar to homeopathic high potencies, with the additional advantage that all disturbing side- and after-effects are eliminated. In the case of spagyric organ remedies, however, there is an additional factor of great significance: they are astrophysically oriented. That is, the individual organ remedies are composed of those minerals and plants that are cosmologically assigned to the corresponding organ.

Astrosophy teaches that the individual organs are under very specific planetary influences, which, over millennia of developmental stages, have worked via the etheric body on the respective organ. Similarly, all minerals and plants are cosmophysically determined.

Thus, each organ comes under the healing power of the planetarily determined minerals and plants: the heart and eyes are solar, the brain is lunar, the skeletal system is Saturnian, etc.

According to Paracelsus’ axiom, “The star is healed by the star” (which is also the metaphysical background of homeopathy), a medication composed of ingredients arranged astrologically can act directly on the etheric forces of the corresponding organ and call them into action for defense and healing. This appears to be a very consistent and convincing therapy.

Astrosophy (here meaning not common astrological horoscope practice) has today been largely rehabilitated. Attention is also drawn to the very important works of Thomas Ring: The Solar System in the Organism, The Living Being in the Rhythm of Space, Man in the Field of Fate (all published by Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart). A therapy based on cosmophysical principles is therefore cosmophysically founded.

Undoubtedly, there are still many doctors and biologists tied to materialistic modes of thinking who reject the standpoint represented here. Let them do so; time will pass over them as it passed over the opponents of Paracelsus.

Moreover, there is a very simple and convincing way in which they themselves can easily be convinced of the correctness of this standpoint: through the testing of the medications through empirical verification.

GOETHE – ENCOUNTER IN THE CITY

Indeed, one sooner uses an instrument,
With wheel and hinge, roller and bolt:
I stood at the gate, it should have been a key;
True, your beard is curly, yet it does not lift the latch.
Mysterious on the gloomy day,
One does not rob nature of her veil,
And what she will not reveal to the human spirit,
You cannot force from her with levers and screws.
FAUST I


The wondrous scene of alchemical world-belonging today lies, as in the last third of the 18th century, shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution, when the hermetic masters finally closed the doors, still in Rembrandt-like half-darkness, and the key, which locks and sometimes opens, which opens and sometimes lets in, still today rests sunk in deep wells.

The last starting period, in which the tradition was at least still alive and still seemed accessible and attainable, was the time of young Goethe.

In certain books of service and truth, Goethe commemorates a mysterious event in his life that intervened in him, which has remained symbolically unexplained to this day: Goethe’s primordial encounter.

There is a spiritual-real sequence of fateful occurrences, which in their irrational interconnection elude superficial historical writing. And so, because for exactly this reason, despite almost the immeasurably extensive Goethe literature, there is still no cosmological spiritual biography of Goethe, indeed not even a first attempt to understand this world-historically significant figure in its transcendent individuality and make it visible and interpretable, people have blindly passed by those silent but formative moments of his life, in which cosmic fate moments, becoming transparent as they surface, allow the inwardly receptive to experience the supra-personal, life-shaping forces briefly: to experience Goethe’s myth. For spiritual biography and myth are identical.

In individual and collective life, the myth-forming is originally built by the seerically perceived, later the intuited spiritual, which is active in the background of each life and gives it meaning and direction. For this, the key is the horoscope, the cosmic-karmic hieroglyph of existence.

From this spiritual-law necessity, Goethe therefore also places at the beginning of his life description the short and clear outlines of his horoscope.

Each individual life, no matter how seemingly insignificant, must likewise have its myth, because each individual, in its repeatedly recurring incarnations, comes from the supersensory and lives out its karmically conditioned fate, to return again, and therefore its biography, its spiritual biography, exists. And this conclusion is correct, because the fate of many, still unconsciously self-contained souls, is too undifferentiated and therefore still insignificant for the course of human development to emerge vividly.

Yet, with inward perception of the myth-forming structure, one especially recognizes in certain types the more typifying myth formation, in a sense the more general myth of the “common man” (miners, shepherds, fishermen, craftsmen, country wanderers, and others).

The extraordinary individuals and human representatives of humanity, however, shape and continue to shape, in their rarity, the symbolism of the myth of their existence during an incarnation in their individual uniqueness and exemplary validity.

The enumeration of a few names, which already fall into the period of first historical writing and participate just as much in myth as in superficial history, are: Homer, Pherecydes, Pythagoras, Alexander the Great, Simon Magus, Dionysius the Areopagite, Theoderic the Great, Charlemagne, Albertus Magnus, Frederick Barbarossa, Saint Francis, Dante, Paracelsus, Shakespeare…

In the same way as the outstanding individuals, the communities shaped by the diverse individualities of the spiritual-real, non-abstract constructed collective soul also appear mythically, to the extent that we are temporally removed from them.

Not least, because all secondary, merely historical aspects increasingly fall away from the essential, they still remain visible and endure.

Thus, the myth, especially the early pre-historical, originating from primeval times, was still perceived as the world of the supersensory, the forces and spiritual beings effective behind all earthly events, and the matter perceived in this way was preserved and shaped in mystery places and legend. It is the only true, purely spiritually derived, unburdened by all ephemeral trappings, history.

The early human, still close to its original spiritual home and still living in the seerically perceived appearances, perceived the material world around him as far too weak as a measure for action, and only considered worth preserving that which took place super-sensually and not what happened physically before his scarcely awakened eye.

And so he experienced himself and that which guides and continues the human fate, imaginatively as myth; the starry and celestial world, as worlds of gods writing their own laws, in the sense of astrology; the sensory-supersensory nature in its rising and falling, receiving and returning; “as above, so below” reflected in that which is consciously experienced in alchemy.

At the same time, however, the awakening of the judging intellect and of logical-conceptual thought formation within human development, after the inner spiritual-living exchange with the supersensory had been severed, which finds its first expression in speculative reflection on self and world and appears for the first time as philosophy, goes hand in hand with the birth of external historical writing as a record of increasingly superficial events.

For that which concerns and occupies the observing human of any epoch most closely is what directly affects him: the events of his immediate and distant surroundings.

In place of the spiritually and soul-filled myth, there increasingly arises, from century to century, the materialized, clouded by sympathies and antipathies, tossed back and forth by opinions and counter-opinions, dependent on countless contingencies, ultimately spiritually completely alienated history, which no longer captures the spiritual background and interconnections.

Much later, after historical writing had already developed as the only way to preserve human and collective experience in memory, the myth-forming soul-forces continued to show themselves effectively up into the Renaissance. This begins, when the Ptolemaic worldview is replaced by the Copernican, the medievalist astronomy seems to displace the millennia-old astrology as apparently hollow.

For the longest time, until the transition of the Enlightenment into the purely materialistic age, the soul resisted the abandonment and loss of alchemy, from the intuitive feeling that with this, the last access to the spiritual world would be blocked. Only with the outbreak of the French Revolution did alchemy decline. With the year 1789, it indeed disappeared. A human generation later, it was as if it had never existed. It seems incomprehensible how it was possible that this oldest, most deeply rooted, and widely branched field of knowledge could vanish so abruptly and relentlessly for it is a unique result in the human intellectual history.

If one does not seek the explanation in those who understood it, it can only be attributed to the complete and immediate passing and forgetting of alchemy, this esoteric, spiritually living natural knowledge, for the duration of a certain period, allowing materialistic natural science to emerge and become dominant.

Indeed, modern thinking is not far removed from a worldview in the sense of a transcendent teleology, and it must be admitted that many of its conclusions, applied to the material world, may appear grotesque; yet opposed to this stands the spiritually recognized truth, to which, even in the midst of the Enlightenment in its last stages of human education, Lessing was aware: that the course of human development is subject to a direction- and goal-setting divine-spiritual will.

Man, as he becomes increasingly distant from his original spiritual source, becomes more and more materialized, and in the advancing materialization, he loses the living connection with the spiritual and soul-world, until at last he is completely deprived of it.

Through this path of descent into matter, down to the strictest, unconditional materialism and the gradual self-awareness within it, man develops his individuality and the God-given, individual freedom connected with it, and thereby, through free self-determination, the ultimate overcoming and spiritualization of matter itself becomes possible for the future.

It is therefore not a value judgment, but merely the objective statement of a cosmological fact: namely, that from the spiritually and soul-filled myth emerged the spiritually abandoned superficial history; from the spiritually and soul-filled astrology, the spiritually abandoned medievalist astronomy; and from the spiritually and soul-filled alchemy, the spiritually abandoned materialist physics and chemistry.

Thus, history, astronomy, and physics-chemistry are nothing other than the ephemeral material reflection of myth, astrology, and alchemy, and in this sense, the distance from the original is not an illusion, but in a sense a reflective reality, a Maya-reality.

At present, humanity has already surpassed the lowest point of its developmental curve, the nadir, and stands beyond it at the beginning of a new ascent, which will slowly unfold as the descent into matter had slowly occurred.

However, man will carry into this preparatory reintegration of spirit and gradual return to the supersensory, through his descent through matter to individual freedom, an intellectual judgment capacity and an emerging clairvoyant perception connected with his daily consciousness.

Thus, he will once become, in the true sense of the word, a “Berger of Two Worlds”: no longer like Homer, blind, but still experiencing the world of gods and elemental forces through inner vision, shaping what he sees spiritually and visually (symbol and myth of Homer); nor like the clairvoyant, who is like the mistletoe branch, the moon fruit of Loki-Lucifer, blind-shot by Baldr for spiritual recognition (Twilight of the Gods), seeing only with physical eyes, but double-seeing symbolically: the Janus-Man.

The first steps toward this distant goal are already being taken today, though still initially small and few. The future spiritually and perceptually congruent attitude and behavior toward the experienced and supersensory world will gradually prepare the completion of this process: a historical description that views background and foreground together, history and newly experienced myth; astronomy grounded even more securely in astronomical results; physics and metaphysics, chemistry and metadynamics combined, truly spiritual-natural knowledge.

Mysterious in the daylight:
Do not deprive nature of its veil,
And what it will not reveal to a steadfast mind,
You do not force Igor to disclose with levers or screws.

These Faust-stanzas of Goethe, which in all of Goethe scholarship have nowhere found their final, revealing, and indicative interpretation, originate from his early and suffering struggles with the riddle of alchemy in Georg von Welling’s great cosmological work Opus magocabbalisticum et theosophicum and in the royal Rosicrucian books Aurea Catena.

In this stanza lies, until now almost unrecognized, the key to Goethe’s own secret and to his inner workshop in general. And the “publicly sacred secret” later named by him is the same. Repeatedly, whenever he returns to the depths, he consciously and unconsciously circles this pole.

The restrained, cautious, judgmental tone in which the twenty-two-year-old, having entered that very different world during the turning of those forty years, in his early studies of poetry and truth, allowed the memory of the Aurea Catena to influence him he who still sensed the aftereffects of substances, unconscious in his soul, emanating from this work was particularly strong, since he had undertaken alchemical studies in memory of Susanne von Klettenberg.

Goethe soon desired, after each Frankfurt winter semester of alchemical immersion and the still incomplete experiments, to undertake the descent to the miners, gradually influenced by the Sturm und Drang of newly awakening literature, destined to lead to the purest heights, and by more outwardly effective currents of the times. Not long after, the appearance of his Götz and Werther placed him on his predestined path, while in his constant striving for natural knowledge he found compensation for what was denied to him at that time, in his comprehensive, methodically guiding scientific endeavor: in his deepest inner self, ultimately even in the subconscious, he had experienced this necessity in the Temple of Hermes.

Yet this boundary experience transmuted within him and became the ferment of his creativity thus he continually touches again on the primal subject; Faust, which accompanied him his whole life, bears witness to this from beginning to end. He, entrusted with the German-European mission, alone was granted the privilege of beginning to perceive the primal secret and truly see the veiled image of Sais, while unconsciously receiving initiation; thus, at the turn of life, the transition of the Eros forces into the Persephone forces could occur within him, while anyone unable to effect this within their soul must falter at each threshold.

This is most clearly proven in the poet, for he drew from the Eros forces most freely and profusely; Hegel and Nietzsche kept themselves in the shadows, Schiller squandered his life, Friedrich Schlegel and Brentano retreated into the Church, Eichendorff fell almost completely silent, Stefan George created his own monument in his lifetime, and Hofmannsthal and Rilke deviated from their destined paths.

In every significant individuality, whose work and life more or less lie before us, one can just as it has happened here record the underlying secret driving forces (though they cannot be found through the methods of psychoanalysis), which, unknown to the conscious mind, from a higher (karmic) necessity, bring the individual personality into contact with those states and events that then, seemingly by fate, appear from outside, and at which they are precisely able to have experiences and to make knowledge, which, as the “I” that advances from incarnation to incarnation, serves its temporal-transcendent development; thus destiny manifests as the individual soul-substance. Here we also have the key and the law of astrology in the interaction of the stars within and outside of man, in the sense of Paracelsus.

At the same time, however, this also frames the arc of the presentation of the initially emphasized event, which Goethe recalls so mysteriously in his mature Book of Poetry and Truth and through which he received the impulse to immerse himself in alchemy, backstruck: He was not without riskily ill when he returned from Leipzig in September 1768, and his illness, which could not properly be determined, gradually worsened.

Apart from a surgeon, who played a minor role, the treatment lay in the hands of a now almost forgotten iatrochemical doctor, about whom Goethe writes:

The doctor, an inexplicable, curious, friendly-spreading, moreover abstruse man, who had acquired particular trust in devout circles, was active and attentive, and he tended the patient carefully; more than anything else, he revealed his expertise through the provision of some mysterious, self-prepared remedies in the background, about which no one spoke, because the physicians had strictly forbidden their own dispensation.

With certain powders, which were some kind of digestives, he acted similarly; but with that important salt, which was used in the greatest doses, there arose among the believers the question whether it had already been taken and whether its effects had been felt. To excite and strengthen belief in the possibility of such a universal remedy, the doctor asked his patients, as he noted some receptivity, certain mystical, chemical-alchemical preparations recommended and first administered, that one could, through one’s own study of the same, come to possess a small jewel oneself, which was all the more necessary as the preparation could not safely be entrusted to others for physical and especially moral reasons, so that in order to comprehend, preserve, and use the great work, one must know the secrets of nature in connection, for it is something universal, not a single isolated thing, and could be manifested under different forms and shapes.

I, however, was still very young at the time: his constitution, one might say, required certain moments of incomplete digestion, and such symptoms occurred, so that under great anxiety I believed I might lose my life, and no applied remedies could have any effect. In this final crisis, my urgent mother brought the embarrassed doctor, by his iatrochemical medicine, to intervene. After long resistance, he hurried in the night to the house and returned with a crystalline, dry salt, which was dissolved in water and swallowed by the patient, and had a decidedly alkaline taste.

The salt being taken, a relief of the condition appeared, and from that moment the illness took a turn, which gradually led to improvement. I do not say how much this strengthened the faith in this doctor and diligence, and inspired hope in the effect of such a remedy.

Goethe’s Myth! At the starting point of this most decisive, direction-setting life of the German-European human stands that event which determined his physical, soul, and spiritual fate. Here the secret threads that connect the temporal to the timeless being come so close to the surface, as hardly in any other life, that the complete silence and failure of all Goethe-biographers seem utterly incomprehensible regarding this most important and profound event, for the explanation is not to be sought in the fact that, on one hand, certain original organs intended for the perception and reception of the irrational in the course of the last hundred years have completely atrophied, and that, on the other hand, we are touching here a most foreign domain, a territory already far beyond yesterday’s and today’s research tracks and modes of thought.

Only a later, spiritually livelier era will be fully aware that for the true understanding of Goethe’s deepest essence, his fundamental relationship to God and the world (his “worldview”), and his entire fused creative output, the secret access lies here.

If it is said above and below that Goethe received his consecration and profound insights in the forecourt of the hermetic temple and that the experiences and the dissatisfaction at what remained unexperienced became a spiritual-soul ferment within him, this must not be misunderstood as claiming that the Rosicrucian-hermetic experience was the only essential, fate-shaping, decisive factor in his life. Rather, it was among all experiences the deepest and most long-lastingly effective, and at the same time the one least consciously realized by him in its scope and metaphysical significance.

Impulses, stimulations, images expanding the mind, he received in extraordinary receptivity and range, before and after, in the richest diversity, and he alone knew how to draw from everywhere what was useful and necessary at the moment he needed it, insofar as it did not offer itself spontaneously. Hence his so far-reaching educational radius.

But this is so well known and often discussed that in these explanations, where something entirely different matters, it can remain unmentioned. Only to prevent any possible misunderstanding, this note.

Now, concerning the event reported by Goethe himself: I was, however, very little prepared for it; his constitution, one might say, required at certain moments of incomplete digestion such symptoms to occur, so that one might believe life was about to be lost, and no remedies were of any use…

In this utmost crisis, he was saved, as we now read, by the most insistent urging of his mother, by the iatrochemical doctor through the mysterious salt, which, as Goethe writes, was known only in a closely trusted circle, though no one had yet received it and felt its effect. A moment, aside and silent, but of cultural and world-historical significance: the doctor-adept came, according to Goethe’s own report, for the first time to administer that subtle spagyric arcanum to preserve a single life, the life of Goethe.

Here the veil opens, and a ray of light fills the hidden mystery-workshop of humanity’s guidance and destiny, on which the human eye otherwise sees an invisible boundary, where myth and history flow into one another.

Goethe’s Leipzig illness was indeed one that brought him to the brink of death. Now, illness is not merely an organic-physiological phenomenon in the sense of a one-sided materialistic conception, but it has its spiritual-soul counterpart as its cause and determination.

To shape Goethe’s organic-physical configuration in such a way that it could make the fulfillment of his world-impacting earthly mission possible, it was necessary that at precisely each point an event occur for him, which would trigger a kind of “lodging” of the spiritual-soul forces within him by his physical nature, and which would reverberate throughout his entire life. And precisely this process was triggered by the illness that, being close to death and initially indecipherable to school diagnostics, began in Leipzig.

Through this illness, the lodgment of the soul-forces (his etheric body), which had been latent in him and only through this condition brought into effect, was, on the one hand, protected from burning too quickly and painfully, as it manifested in Schiller and Novalis, and on the other hand, his entire soul-state experienced such an enhanced capacity for reception that he came into a wholly different, more spiritual relationship with the world and the beyond than his contemporaries, who approached it with their outwardly reasoning intellect, in the Enlightenment.

From these created prerequisites, he was able later to increase his inner perceptive ability so that he could truly experience the archetypes of the Ideas as described by Plato:
The spirit-world is not closed,
Your sense is shut, the heart is dead.

From this starting point, it became possible for him in the further course of his development to reveal the fundamental forms of perception for a transformed view of nature that would only become effective in the future.

The described spiritual-soul connections of Goethe’s so significant youth illness make it understandable that the healing could not occur in a common or ordinary way especially since the boundary, beyond which no return is possible, had already been crossed, which Goethe himself clearly expresses in the words: “…no applied remedy would have any effect…”
It therefore required a very special intervention for the preservation of the already threatened life, to lodge the spiritual-soul (the etheric body), so that from there it could again attach to the organism. This could not be achieved with ordinary medicines. It required reaching into an already then very foreign domain, namely into the great alchemical arcana.

This too was of decisive significance, both for Goethe himself and for the history of the spirit in general, for his healing did not and could not succeed through external therapy and science alone, but clearly visible required that the hermetic-Rosicrucian esoteric knowledge once more be called upon.

Whether or not the almost forgotten doctor-adept, who was in any case on a high level of spiritual knowledge (without which no one ever attains the arcanum), knew from his own perception and foresight what and whom he was dealing with, and what type and degree the saving mysterious salt might have been, about which Goethe can only report that it tasted alkaline (perhaps a tincture on white), cannot be determined today. But that does not matter.

The decisive point is this: Goethe, who stands at the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age, and who, even in his youth, increasingly participated in it, experienced for himself the blessing and salvation of alchemy to the greatest degree; his life was saved through it for humanity. Symbolically, this event stands at the turning point of the ages.

For decades afterward, from 1789 onward, no first alchemical book appeared; the masters had voluntarily withdrawn into secrecy, and what alchemy was then still practiced in the lodges of the Illuminati was, without true knowledge, a fruitless groping after the sealed secret.

Before the French Revolution, as the visibly expressed transition to the modern age, and with the hermetic masters stepping into darkness, the tradition, as described above, gradually disappeared; the Hermeticists of the eighteenth century left here and there still unambiguous testimony both for the transmutational power inherent in the Philosopher’s Stone and for its irresistible healing power. The undeniability of these facts is corroborated by numerous reliable eyewitnesses, just as any other historical event is.

It therefore appears absurd that some historical accounts, because their surface connections are visible and apparently interpretable, gain unquestioned validity and recognition, while other, equally well-attested accounts, due to insufficient understanding, are relegated to legend, fabrication, or fraud. For example, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, a hermetic master who posed as a Greek Archimandrite named Laskaris traveled across Europe, and in various places provided unimpeachable evidence for the transmutation of metals, partly himself, partly by gifting some grains of the Philosopher’s Stone during his travels at least as verifiably hidden as many other historical results.

What is here described for the first time is one of the last timeless mysteries that alchemy symbolically conveyed to Western culture: the preservation of that single life, Goethe’s.

Humanity has since then been ungrateful, for already a generation later it dismissed this as fable, superstition, deception, or at best as self-deception, and blindly denied the phenomena, which could, however, be executed with the highest cosmophysical knowledge.

Goethe himself, however, experienced the healing owed to the spagyric art; it lasted for the duration of a winter half-year, but he applied himself to its study with his characteristic passionate devotion, and thus, though not entering the inner sanctum, he reached the forecourt of the hermetic temple. To open the curtain to the innermost sanctuary for him would have required an even higher effort.

Also, the task and mission of his existence lay elsewhere. But without the consecration he received in the forecourt, he could not have completed the tower of skill, the last attainment of Lynkeus; for the higher one is led in the construction upward, the more one needs the securely founded and deeper fundamental.

Only through the internalization and appropriation of the formative forces of all primordial substances on one side, and on the other side through the not yet fully penetrated full point of light and the vision of the midnight sun (as the perspective is otherwise obscured hence the poetry The Secrets was from the beginning destined to remain fragmentary), which expressed itself in the unsatisfied moment and throughout life in Faustian struggles, was the ultimate maturity achieved, and that which appeals to the observer as Goethe’s harmonious completion.

Even the instrument, one spares the wheel and comb, roller and yoke.
Ida stood at the gate; it should be the key,
Though her beard is curly, she does not lift the latch.
The cunning spirit has misunderstood me;
Before me, nature has concealed itself.

Because he had stood at the gates to the inner nature, and it remained closed to him despite levers and screws, Goethe-Faust was driven to Mephistopheles and took the external path. But because he dared the path to the innermost to understand the All in the Nothing and received the blessing there, he is redeemable and triumphs over death. He returns as an initiated one, with unconsciously received consecration, to the forecourt of the hermetic temple.

Nothing else that he finds stands as the guidance of a great alchemist. The rare ones who have found this, Goethe-Faust had in mind in the following verses. Even if he apparently generalizes the sense of the passage (it would be a triviality that Goethe would not have liked) the context from which Faust speaks leaves no doubt:
Should one read in a thousand images,
That everywhere humanity is tormented,
That here and there it has been fortunate?

A fortunate one who has unveiled the innermost sanctuary of the hermetic temple. Such masters, upon whom we may look with historical certainty, are, however, not many. Goethe himself recalls two of them in precisely the eighth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit: Theophrastus Paracelsus and Basilius Valentinus.

With this interpretation, the causal connection and inner necessity are revealed, explaining why Goethe, precisely in the eighth chapter of Dichtung und Wahrheit, lays the foundation for the development of the Rosicrucian cosmophysical worldview he had acquired through his then deep engagement with the Aurea Catena, Wellings’ Opus Mago-Cabalisticum, and the Hermeticists. It is not about countering what an unspiritual, philistine perspective might object to in what has been said, that the careful, 16-year-old Goethe, who had since taken a wholly different path, introduces this cosmology with deliberate turning; and in doing so, he built within himself a world not strange in appearance, but such that the experience had taken root so deeply in him, had become such soul-ferment in him, that even forty years later, it drove him to give it form and duration, and ultimately the entire Faust rests upon it, carrying it from beginning to end, even as he gradually moves further away from it in terms of content.

Regarding the “mystical” elements, which in this context should not be left entirely unmentioned, it would lead too far and away from the main topic to enter into them here especially as some explanatory notes would be required, which, while relevant, would digress too much. It should only be noted that, in their elements, they are entirely alchemical, especially if one seeks their ultimate interpretation by examining them from several mutually congruent, equally weighted levels of perception.

Whoever approaches, without prejudice and with a certain inner readiness, these deeper observational methods touching upon the substances, and studies the mysterious, underlying connections at perhaps the most significant turning point in Goethe’s life, will recognize how his physical existence was preserved, how his spiritual-soul configuration was purposefully and directionally influenced and illuminated, through every event that, emerging from the hermetic temple, became active and ultimately decisive for his inner and outer destiny. This event stands at the threshold of his beginnings and ascent and provides the hidden key to a spiritual biography his myth.

THE SECRET FIRE

AND THE SECRET WINE-SPIRIT OF THE ADEPTS
“The best thing you can know
you may not tell to the uninitiated.”
Faust

In the work Les Demeures Philosophales et le Symbolisme Hermétique dans les Rapports avec l’Art Sacré et l’Esotérisme du Grand Œuvre by Fulcanelli (pseudonym), Paris 1930, which gave many artistic inspirations to the French surrealists, there is on pages 79–81 a very significant and instructive passage suggesting that the author knew at least theoretically the secret of the adepts. I therefore place the French excerpt at the beginning of this study:

THE SALAMANDER OF LISIEUX

Now to the last decorative element of our door. It is a salamander, which serves as the capital of the half-column on the central post. It seems, in a certain sense, to be the guardian spirit of this pleasant abode, for it was carved from the console on the middle post at ground level and continued up to the window gable of the attic. It seems, where the repetition is so deliberate, that our alchemist had a special fondness for this heraldic reptile. We do not intend to suggest that he gave it the erotic or grandiose significance that Francis I so boldly assigned in his time. This would insult the craftsman, diminish the science, and alter the truth, which is pursued like a “living messenger,” while maintaining the modest rank of a Renaissance man.

But in the peculiar character of humans, it is natural to value most what one has suffered through and practiced most. This reasoning allows us to interpret the threefold repetition of the salamander as the hieroglyph of the Secret Fire of the Wise. Indeed, among all the products that alchemical work generates, in the form of assistants and servants, none is more indispensable or more difficult to represent than this. Not even in the minor preliminary works can one substitute anything for the necessary helper to achieve the same result; in the work on Mercury, nothing can replace the Secret Fire, this fugitive spirit that animates and elevates matter, which becomes incarnate after being extracted from impure matter.

As Limojon de Saint Didier writes, you would greatly regret if, after fifteen years devoted solely to the knowledge of true matter in a laborious and meditative state, you failed to extract from the Stone the precious essence it encloses because you do not know the Secret Fire of the Wise, which emanates from this dry, dark substance in water and does not burn the hands. Without this Fire, hidden in salt, the prepared matter cannot fully manifest its power nor fulfill its task as Mother. Our work would therefore remain forever chimerical and vain. Every birth requires the help of a pure helper, whose forces correspond to the way nature has formed it. Everything contains its seeds: animals come from eggs, plants from seeds, and minerals and metals also have seeds that are made fertile by the mineral Fire.

This is the true helper, introduced in the most artful way into the mineral seeds. As Philalethes says, it “sets the axle in motion and starts the wheel.” From this, one easily understands the importance of this metallic light, this invisible, secret light, and the care with which we must study and extract it in its own unique, hidden, and secret properties.

Etymology of Salamander:

Latin salamandra comes from sal (salt) + mandra (stable, grotto, hermitage). It can mean “salt of the stable, salt of the rock, or salt of solitude.” In Greek, it has a different connotation related to movement, derived from the agitation it causes. Salamander is composed of sale (movement, excitement, wave, storm, flood) and mandra (same as in Latin).

From this, we conclude that this salt, spirit, or fire emanates from a stable, a rock cave, a grotto… Enough! Lying on the straw of his manger in the grotto of Bethlehem, is it not Jesus himself, the new Sun, who brings light to the Earth? Is it not God himself in his fleshly, perishable shell? Did he not say, “I am the Spirit, I am Life; I have come to bring fire into things”?

This spiritual fire, which has taken form in salt, is the hidden sulfur, for it never manifests visibly to the eye during its action. Yet this sulfur, however invisible, is not a mere invention or an artistic concept. We know how to separate it, extract it from the body in which it is hidden, and prepare it in secret, resulting in a dry powder that, in this state, is inert and powerless in philosophical art. This pure Fire, of the same essence as the sulfur of gold but less calcined, is stronger than the Fire of the noble metal.

Therefore, it unites with Mercury of imperfect minerals and metals.

Philalethes informs us that it is hidden in the belly of Aries or the Ram, under a constellation through which the Sun passes in April. To clarify further: this Ram, which conceals the magical ore, bears on its shield the image of the hermetic seal, the six-pointed star. Thus, in this seemingly common matter, which appears of little use, we seek the secret Solar Fire, the subtle salt, the spiritual sulfur, the heavenly Fire, which spreads through the darkness of the body, unable to manifest fully, and cannot be replaced by anything else.




Though this passage may seem obscure, it touches on three of the four secrets most deeply guarded by the adepts:
The Secret Fire
Mercury
The prepared matter for the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone


The fourth secret, the Secret Wine-Spirit of the adepts, is not mentioned in this passage. Yet without the key to all four secrets, the process of preparing the Philosopher’s Stone cannot be fully carried out, and no so-called “particular” can be obtained.

The Secret Wine-Spirit of the Adepts is mentioned in numerous alchemical writings by various authors under different names. Some of these are: Circulate minor et mains, Aqua sowens, Aqua Mercurialis, Spiritus Mercurii universalis, Menstruum mineralis, etc. However, the method of preparation is either not given at all, or, if indicated, deliberately vague and only partially explained. The beginning the very long and extremely difficult preliminary work is everywhere omitted, yet it is precisely this that matters most.

Johannes Seger Weidenfeld, in his almost impossible-to-find, very comprehensive Latin work De Secretis Adeptorum sive de usu Spiritus Vini Lulliani, London 1684 (second edition: Hamburg 1685), which cites 150 instructions from various alchemical authors on the preparation of the secret wine-spirit, the Spiritus Vini Lulliani, gives nowhere the key to the initial preparation. Weidenfeld promises clarification in the fifth book, but this fifth book was never published, and it is unclear from the work whether he ever possessed the key at all.

This secret wine-spirit, the Spiritus Vini Lulliani, is the Alpha and Omega of the French Hermetic art. It is the famous Alkahest sought in vain by so many, whose preparation method is nowhere to be found in the alchemical books. Hermetic masters have never kept anything so secret as the substance from which this spirit is distilled, and the secret fire that is its prerequisite, also called Aqua ardens.

When the Hermetic masters give instructions for the preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone, they generally begin with their secret wine-spirit:

Recipe (Vinum ruben vel album): Take red or white wine, following the prescription of Raymond Lull, and allow it to putrefy in horse manure thus in uniform warmth for a certain time. You will find oil floating on top and the heavier part sinking to the bottom. This instruction misled many seekers after the Stone, causing them to mistakenly think they should take ordinary red or white wine and set it in digestion, believing that separation would eventually occur but they waited in vain. No matter how long wine digests, oil will never rise to the top.

The secret wine-spirit of the adepts comes from a completely different origin. For understanding, some of Johannes Seger Weidenfeld’s instructions from De Secretis Adeptorum are cited below:

SPIRITUS VINI PARACELSI

Place white wine in a pelican and allow it to draw in horse manure for a set number of minutes, uncovered. Then it will become so fine and pure that it separates its essence to the surface this is the Spiritus Vini. Everything below this level is phlegm and has nothing to do with true Vinum.

ESSENTIA VINI GUIDONIS

Take two wines (red or white) of the best quality and distill until the matter reaches the consistency of honey. Divide it into portions, mix the portions into a “double gourd” with the distilled liquid, and after leaving the mixture for six weeks, oil will float on top, which you must skim off.

SAL HARMONIACUM VEGETABILE LULLII

Take excellent white or red wine and distill it into a spirit that burns cotton. Let the phlegm evaporate until the remaining matter is like liquid pitch. Add enough spirit until it stands four fingers above the matter. Digest for a week in a bath, then distill in ashes to obtain the Spiritus animatus. Add spirit again to the earth and repeat until the earth is dry and powdery.

Alternate SAL HARMONIACUM VEGETABILE LULLII

Recipe: Vinum ruben vel album (take red or white wine). Let it putrefy in a bath for up to 20 days, separating its components. Then distill in the bath slowly over fire to obtain Aqua ardens and rectify it until no phlegm remains. Draw the phlegm through the ash bath by distillation until a liquid pitch-like matter remains on the bottom. Set this phlegm aside.

Add the phlegm to the previously prepared matter and pour over Aqua ardens until it stands four fingers above. Leave the mixture in a bath for 2 days, then one day in ashes for gentle cooking. The result will be strongly colored phlegm, which you transfer to another vessel.

Repeat the cycle with fresh phlegm until the phlegm no longer colors the matter. If you run out of phlegm, draw more from the bath. If the phlegm no longer colors, the base has absorbed all the oil.

To separate the oil, distill in a bath: the phlegm rises while the oil remains red at the bottom. Take this earth and pour over it Mercurius (vegetable or Aqua ardens) until it stands two fingers above. Place the vessel in ashes for one day, then extract by distillation. Repeat until no trace of spirit (or anima) remains in the earth, and everything develops into Aqua ardens.

Digest the earth in an Athanor for six days, then transfer to ashes over stronger fire until, in sublimation, Mercurius vegetabilis forms on the walls, leaving “Terra damnata” at the bottom, which does not enter the work. Collect this Mercurius quickly and set it aside for 2 days to mix with water so that it can dissolve all metals while preserving their essence. This water is called Menstruum vegetabile.

Fulcanelli emphasizes that this process from Vinum ruben vel album to obtaining the Mercurius shows how lengthy and difficult alchemical work is. The Hermetic masters, when describing the path to the Philosopher’s Stone, start with the Spiritus Vini without revealing its preparation, then move on to the so-called rotations, since the Mercurius has already been prepared, and the gilded seed is sown in virgin earth to proceed with coloring.

The adepts could safely reveal entire sections of the universal process, provided the preparation of the Spiritus Vini philosophici, the secret wine-spirit, and the secret fire remained hidden. Over centuries, the secret wine-spirit is repeatedly mentioned in veiled terms, but the secret salt-fire is almost nowhere found in texts. They may speak occasionally of fire, saying it is not elemental fire, yet it is everything. The secret salt-fire begins the great work and all its operations; without it, even Vinum ruben vel album, the Spiritus Vini philosophici, cannot be prepared.

This is why the salamander, symbolizing the secret fire, is carved as the capital of the half-column on the central post of the gate in Lisieux, as Fulcanelli describes: in a sense, the guardian spirit of this pleasant dwelling, carved from the console of the central post to ground level and up to the window gable of the attic.
It is well known in alchemy that there are two ways to reach the goal of the Hermetic work: the so-called short, dry way and the so-called long, wet way. However, the terms “dry” and “wet” are only conditionally correct, because as already mentioned what must be prepared first is the salt fire, which cannot be done without the use of water.

This preliminary work is very long and laborious; the alchemists compared it to the work of saltpetre makers (at least in its early stages) and even called it women’s work due to the preparation of the lye involved. In later stages, however, the work is entirely different from women’s work; it becomes a highly meticulous process and is by no means completely safe.

The so-called short, dry way does not lead directly to the Philosopher’s Stone; rather, it goes via the secret wine-spirit (Spiritus Vini), the treatment of minerals and metals, and the salt of fire (Feuersalz), which justifies the name “dry way.” In contrast, the long, wet way is much more noble but also far more difficult and time-consuming. It leads to a far more complete result, and its name comes from the many distillations required.

In the encoded book Des Hermes Trismegistus waret alter Naturweg by a certain Freemason, Leipzig 1781, the wet and dry ways are discussed. On page 34, it says:

“The philosophers mention in their writings two ways by which one may reach the tincture, of which they call one the dry way and the other the wet way. One may work toward the tincture by either way; the difference at the beginning is that in the dry way one operates with fire salts and dryness. They have different names because the tincture prepared by the dry way dissolves gold in dry powder in a crucible and brings it to a more perfect, tinctural state, whereas in the wet way the gold is dissolved by the resolved, sophisticated Mercurius and through the inversion of the elements reaches a tinctural state.”

The previously mentioned work of Johannes Seger Weidenfeld concerns the long, wet way. This path leads via the preparation of the so-called Gumming, which produces the famous Prima Materia a substance found nowhere else but which must be painstakingly prepared. From this, the Mercuries are distilled. Only at this point does one reach the Spiritus Vini philosophic, or the secret wine-spirit of the adepts. Here, one finally has Vinum ruben vel album in hand, from which the work continues to the treatment of gold or silver (or both) through the rotations to the tincture, red or white.

The Prima Materia is one of those things that has given desperate alchemists headaches to this very day. Where does it come from? Where can it be found? Count Bernhardt (1406–1490), after sixty years of wandering and failed attempts, finally prepared the Stone at a very old age. He writes about the Prima Materia that one should not look for it in mineral, vegetable, or animal substances, because it is not found in any of them. Other reliable alchemical authors give the same warning.

So where is it, and how can one obtain it? In Wasserstein Der Weiser (1619), a very good but still difficult alchemical work, it is stated briefly and simply:

“If you consider all this carefully and have recognized the true prime material, you may then proceed to the hands-on work…”

The point is that knowledge of the prima materia (also called materia secunda at later stages) is so necessary that even the philosophers constantly remind those who seek it that it is a unique substance from which the Stone must be prepared without any foreign addition, no matter how many names it already has. Its quality, nature, and properties have been wonderfully described in an almost summary manner: it is initially composed of multiple parts yet is still one.

First, one must take the mentioned material (prima ens, also called the “good of the philosopher”) and dissolve and separate all substances. Similarly, as in Wasserstein Der Weiser, one finds references in other trustworthy alchemical writings: once recognized, the material can also be called materia secunda. From this, it becomes clear that the Prima Materia is not found anywhere; it must be prepared.

In Count Bernard’s time (of the Trevisan Mark, hence often called Bernardus Trevisanus), before the invention of the printing press, hints in scattered alchemical manuscripts were so rare that it is understandable that the Count spent decades believing he must search for the Prima Materia in three kinds of natural substances. It is amusing to read how, in his naive way, he recounts all the things he tried working for years with experienced masters who knew everything yet never revealed anything, experimenting with vitriol and alum, various minerals, birds, blood, human excrement, urine, semen, eggs, and similar substances trying to make the Stone, always in vain.

He describes decades of meticulous, sometimes misguided work: calcining, sublimating, distilling, circulating in pelicans, conjugating, heating and melting practicing countless, often absurd regimens of fire, consuming many years. By the time he reached his 38th year, he was still working on the Lapide Vegetable, attempting the coagulation of Mercury by herbs and animals. Despite all these complex procedures, the final result cost him thousands of crowns but ultimately, his belief was not rewarded until very late.

As an old English alchemical poem says:

“Then must the wanderer cross foreign lands and seas,
Following the ancient mountains where the Stone of the Wise was…”

The Prima Materia lies on a long and truly legendary path: from the furnace to the lair of the red lion. The main stations of the work are:

1. Preparation of the secret salt-fire.
2. Preparation of the Mercury of metals (Mercurius Metallorum).
3. Preparation of the dry water of metals.
4. Preparation of the Prima Materia or gum of the wise masters, from which the Spiritus Mercurii is distilled.
5. Preparation of the red and white oils (Vinum ruben vel album).
6. Dissolution of pure gold in Spiritus Mercurii.
7. Union of Spiritus Mercurii, in which the gold is dissolved, with the red and white oils (Vinum ruben vel album).
8. Gradual circulation in a pelican under increasing warmth (Rotations).
9. Preparation of the Elixir.
10. Side tasks required by the main work, such as preparation of Electrum immature.


To my knowledge, neither in earlier nor later times has the process of the great alchemical work been published in the proper sequence as thoroughly and openly as in these descriptions. The preparation of the secret salt-fire and the Spiritus Vini Philosophorum has remained a closely guarded secret for centuries.

Even Johannes Seger Weidenfeld, who answered many questions in De Secretis Adeptorum, guarded the secret:

“Every adept who knows the secret of the Spiritus Vini may reveal all other things, but the secret itself brings no advantage to anyone.”

From these considerations, neither the wrath of the adepts nor any anathema they cast on traitors should be feared. What they scattered here and there has now been organized as best as possible.

Books have their destinies.
Strange is the fate of this work on the secret wine-spirit of the adepts by Johannes Seger Weidenfeld, one of the most illuminating and important books in all alchemical literature.

Already one year after its first appearance in London (1684), it was reissued in Hamburg (which shows that there was great interest), yet since then it has never been reprinted.

Among neither the alchemical authors of the 17th nor of the 18th century does one find even a single mention of it, and I know of no state library in which it can be found. It belongs to the rarest and most difficult-to-obtain books of alchemy.

This circumstance suggests that both editions were bought up immediately after publication by the Rosicrucian lodge and the Illuminati, and that any reprinting or further dissemination of the book was suppressed from that side. Otherwise, the mysterious fact of the almost complete disappearance of this unique work in alchemical literature cannot be explained. It may well be that to the Rosicrucians and Illuminati, the guardians of the alchemical secret at that time, this book pointed too clearly to where the secret lies and where the seeker of the correct path must apply the lever. It is also likely that the fifth book announced by Weidenfeld, in which he promised further clarification, did not appear for the same reason.

As for myself, chance let us call it chance placed both editions into my hands. The second edition was lost to me during my absence when Baden-Baden was occupied and my apartment there confiscated; strangely enough, the far greater part of my small but carefully selected library was preserved. Thus, once again, one of the few remaining copies disappeared.

I emphasize once more: even Weidenfeld did not hand over the key to the preparation of the secret wine-spirit, let alone that of the secret fire. But he did show the way and the direction, and what he writes is true and must be taken literally. The process itself cannot be carried out directly from his text; nowhere in the printed French alchemical literature is a clear instruction to be found. This knowledge must come from elsewhere.

As already stated, in the entire alchemical literature of the 17th and 18th centuries one searches in vain for any mention of Weidenfeld’s decisive work. Yet in 1862, in Mühlhausen in Thuringia, a small booklet of 62 pages appeared, written by the district physician and medical councillor Dr. Christian August Becker, bearing the title The Secret Wine-Spirit of the Adepts / Spiritus Vini Lulliani sive philosophici and its Medical Application for Physicians and Chemists. This booklet is also very rare and peculiar, although it is only a little over a hundred years old.

I too obtained this book purely by chance. Through the mediation of Gustav Meyrink, even during the First World War, just as I was beginning my first practical experiments in alchemy, an acquaintance of Meyrink who urgently needed money sent me an entire crate of alchemical books, among which was also the booklet by Dr. Christian August Becker. On the last blank page it bears a handwritten note:

“Still in the year 1867, when I published the pharmaceutical journal Die Retorte in Berlin, Dr. Becker of Mühlhausen had the kindness to send me his excellent treatise on acetone, the secret wine-spirit of the adepts, and its medical application.”

Like so many valuable things, this work too was “buried” by the specialists, for in burying they perform something outstanding. Such burial was already the order of the day back then.

I myself have never found this booklet in a public library nor seen it listed in an antiquarian catalogue.

However, I did come to know a man in an original way who knew and valued it as well. This was the pharmacist Müller, who died in the 1930s, at that time owner and director of the chemical-pharmaceutical factory in Göppingen, who introduced himself to me in a rather unusual manner.

This occurred in the summer of 1921, shortly after I had opened my pharmaceutical-spagyric laboratory at Stift Neuburg in Ziegelhausen near Heidelberg, following seven years of alchemical experimental and preparatory work. One morning, at an unusual visiting hour shortly after eight o’clock, a Dr. med. Lang from Ulm announced himself. I received him: a stately, well-groomed man of about fifty, who inspired confidence. He said that he had heard of the founding of my spagyric laboratory and that since he had so far prescribed the Zimpel remedies of the pharmaceutical factory in Göppingen, he was interested in getting to know the Soluna remedies (then still called the Stift Neuburg remedies) and trying them out in his practice. For this purpose, however, he needed more detailed information about their qualitative composition and their method of preparation.

I readily granted the first request as justified; regarding the method of preparation, I was more reserved. In the course of the conversation, we also came to speak of the preparation of the Zimpel remedies, about which he was astonishingly well informed. When I expressed my surprise, he explained that he had been friends for years with the manufacturer, the pharmacist Müller.

In this way I learned that the so-called Zimpel arcana were pure simplicia and contained the mineral components mixed in their raw state a completely unique type of arcana. He asked me to send him a trial shipment of the remedies from my laboratory to his address in Ulm, Münsterplatz, and took his leave politely, without having cost me anything. For my part, I was entirely satisfied with what he had told me.

When I sent the requested samples to Ulm a few days later, the package soon returned to my laboratory with the postal note “addressee unknown in Ulm.” An inquiry at the registration office revealed that a Dr. med. Lang had never existed in Ulm.

A few weeks later, the young assistant of the already long-deceased naturopath Gottlieb visited me. Gottlieb was the manufacturer of the very good skin-function oil and publisher of a relevant journal, and was a friend of pharmacist Müller. This assistant told me that recently pharmacist Müller had come to Gottlieb in the morning, and since he was working in the adjoining room with the door open, he had involuntarily been a witness to a conversation in which Müller reported to Gottlieb about his recent visit to me and confessed that now that it had happened, he deeply regretted his inexcusable conduct, since I had received him in such a friendly manner but now nothing could be changed.

Two or three years later, a naturopaths’ conference took place in Heidelberg, in which pharmacist Müller also participated. For the afternoon, a joint visit of all participants to Stift Neuburg was planned. Müller was among them. During the general greetings, he drew me aside and said he wished the ground would open and swallow him. He said he himself did not know what devil had ridden him at the time to introduce himself to me in such a manner, and asked me to do with him whatever I wished. I replied that I was pleased to get to know him now as pharmacist Müller and that he was most welcome.

I do not report this to blacken his memory for of the dead, nothing but good. Apart from this small blemish (what will people not do to track down competition?), he was an entirely respectable, sympathetic, and knowledgeable man with great merits in the chemical-pharmaceutical factory in Göppingen, even if his arcana consisted of raw minerals. I recount this only to show what can happen to someone who practices alchemy openly. I could relate a whole series of similar experiences.

And not to mention all those people who, over the years, have come to me wishing to work in my laboratory and, of course, to prepare the Philosopher’s Stone most of whom cannot even distill proper nitric acid. For example, there is one who for forty years has wanted to obtain the Mercurius Philosophorum directly from the air. He will take his air-locks to the grave with him.

Just as I write this, I learn that very recently a so-called spagyric laboratory has been established near Freiburg im Breisgau, which calls itself, in plagiarism of my Soluna Laboratory, “Laboratorium Solaris.” The medicines produced there also bear primitive modifications of the Soluna names for example, instead of Cordiak: Cordina; instead of Hepatik: Hepaticus. The manufacturer and owner of this “spagyric laboratory” is (or was) by profession an electrical technician. Years ago, he also worked on the side as a naturopath (whether licensed or not, I cannot say).

He approached me at the beginning of the Hitler era regarding the prescription of Soluna remedies, and some time later came to me with the request that I give him instructions for preparing the Philosopher’s Stone. One cannot imagine what kinds of people even today wish to prepare the great elixir, the Stone of the Wise. He firmly and sincerely believed that from humus soil, if one kept it for a long time at gentle warmth and allowed it to putrefy, one could obtain the Mercurius Philosophorum. What the Mercurius has caused in the minds of the half- and quarter-educated over time!

At that time, in order to lead him onto another path, I suggested that he work a vitriol process which, although it does not lead to the acquisition of the Mercurius, does serve to prepare a truly effective medicinal product and belongs to the subsidiary works of the great alchemical opus. But he did not wish to undertake it then presumably it was too difficult for him and so he remained, at least at that time, with his humus soil.

Concerning such alchemical dilettantes and profiteers, the Rosicrucians already wrote more than 180 years ago in the assembly speeches of the Gold and Rosy Cross of Amsterdam, 1779:

It is with great pleasure to observe how the chemical Count Bernhard of Mark and Trevis takes this society seriously. Despite their great ignorance, since they scarcely know how to pronounce Latin words, indeed cannot even properly read their mother tongue, these helpless fellows dare to adorn their beggar’s wares with the most ridiculous inscriptions …

But now enough of anecdotes. I say that even the well-read and widely experienced pharmacist Müller, knowledgeable in his field, was acquainted with Dr. Becker’s little book On the Secret Wine-Spirit of the Adepts and found its contents interesting and worth reading. It is indeed a remarkable little book. It proceeds entirely from the great work of Johannes Seger Weidenfeld, De Secretis Adeptorum, and attempts to trace the Spiritus Vini philosophici or rather, Dr. Becker firmly believes that he has traced the secret; he substantiates his view in a thoroughly plausible and scientifically impeccable manner. He arrives at the conclusion that it is acetone.

At first this sounds somewhat surprising, but when one has read the little book together with all the arguments presented therein, one at least becomes thoughtful. I state in advance that the secret wine-spirit is naturally not acetone. If only it were so easily prepared! Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that many aspects point toward Dr. Becker’s assumption. Pure acetone, C₃H₆O or CH₃COCH₃, as it is obtained from chemical factories, is indeed not identical with Dr. Becker’s acetone, since he designates as Spiritus Vini philosophicum the total distillate obtained during the distillation of acetates, which also contains the oil that passes over with it (which floats on top), that is, the acetate with all its derivatives.

Dr. Becker named this distillate, prepared according to his instructions in his pharmacy from sodium acetate, Spiritus Aceti oleosus. This preparation was applied by Dr. Becker with success in numerous illnesses, of which he lists an entire series. This small treatise by Dr. Becker is, in this aspect of the Spiritus Vini philosophici, so interesting and stimulating that it is worthwhile to examine it more closely.

After Dr. Becker first briefly reports in the preface on his years-long engagement with alchemy and the arcana, which he strove in vain to fathom with the greatest dedication, he continues:

On this path I progressed further and arrived at a number of remedies that are not found in the pharmacopoeia, but which allow me to achieve reliable results in practice. Weidenfeld’s writing De Secretis Adeptorum led me to expect more precise clarification, but the main matter, the Spiritus Vini Lulliani, remained concealed from me in the hidden description, except for a vague intuition, until I now, after nearly twenty years, recognized acetone through renewed study. This now casts a new light upon the medicines of the adepts and illuminates the darkness of their writings.

And now some of the most important passages from the main part of Dr. Becker’s small book, in which he deals with the Spiritus Vini Lulliani and its supposed origin:
The basis of this investigation is the writing by Johannes Seger Weidenfeld, De Secretis Adeptorum sive de usu Spiritus Vini Lulliani, libri IV, 1685. It is striking that this Spiritus Vini philosophici, whose preparation is treated by Weidenfeld, is not mentioned by later chemists. Norbert Port in Exerc. chym. Berolini 1738, p. 21 describes it with the words:

There exists a certain menstruum that has not yet received a name and has not been revealed by any chemist. It is a pure, clear, volatile liquid like alcohol, oily, burns with a very bright flame, tastes sour like strong vinegar, passes over during distillation like snowflakes, attacks all metals, even gold, which it extracts red, and when the menstruum is drawn off, the tincture remains behind like a resin, which dissolves blood-red in Spiritus Vini and leaves a black residue, from which, I believe, the salt of gold can be prepared. This menstruum mixes with water and oils, and if I am to state my true opinion, I consider it to be the true menstruum of Weidenfeld, the Spiritus Vini philosophici. Its preparation is easy and simple, but secret and Port does not disclose it either.

After several pages, Dr. Becker now turns to the various prescriptions for preparing the secret wine-spirit, of which he cites many, in order then to draw his conclusions. He begins with the original prescription of Raimundus Lullus:

The original prescription is given by Raimund Lullus in Liber de quinta essentia, and Weidenfeld begins with it. Its content is as follows:

One distills the best red or white wine Vinum rubrum vel album in the usual manner into aqua ardens. This is rectified three times and well preserved so that the inflammable spirit does not escape. The unmistakable sign is that sugar ignited with it and brought to the flame burns like brandy. When this water is thus prepared, one has the substance from which the quintessence is drawn. One places it into a circulating vessel, seals it hermetically, and sets it in horse manure, where the warmth remains constant. It is necessary that the warmth does not diminish, otherwise the circulation (digestion) of the water would be disturbed and what is sought would not be obtained. But if constant warmth is applied, then through continued digestion the quintessence separates out, which one can recognize by the line that separates the upper part, namely the quintessence, from the turbid lower part. When the digestion has lasted long enough, one opens the vessel, and if a marvelous odor emerges, such as no pleasant smell in the world can compare with and which irresistibly draws everything toward it, then one has the quintessence. If this has not yet occurred, the vessel is set back again and allowed to stand until the mentioned sign is attained.

This aqua ardens, the Spiritus Vini philosophici, bears great resemblance to ordinary alcohol, which has prevented its recognition, but it differs from it in that during continued digestion an oil separates on the surface, which does not occur in the former. It is the basis, the beginning, and the end of all solvents of the adepts. In its simplicity it is the weakest, but in combination with other substances the strongest menstruum. It appears in a twofold form: once like ordinary alcohol and miscible with water, secondly as an oil floating on top. Yet it is always the same; the difference lies only in fineness and purity.
The prescription of Lullus is indeed correct, but it encompasses only a part of the process, which is elucidated by other recipes that I have assembled from Weidenfeld.

In order to be able to follow Dr. Becker’s train of thought, it is necessary to connect at least two of the processes he cites; page 128:

COELUM VINOSUM PARISINI

After the distillation of the Aqua ardens and the phlegm, a black mass like melted pitch remains behind. This is washed out with the phlegm, mixed with the spirit, digested, and distilled, which is repeated with fresh spirit as often as necessary until the residue is dry. The distillate is called Spiritus animatus. This is poured in increasing portions onto the residue and digested until it is completely absorbed and the residue swells. It is then sublimed. The sublimate is clear and bright like a diamond. It is placed in a water bath, where it becomes liquid, then the excess water is distilled off; thereafter it is repeatedly distilled with fresh portions of spirit. The distillate is digested for 60 days. That the work has succeeded is recognized by the fact that at the bottom a sediment forms similar to that of healthy urine. From this one separates the quintessence, which is so clear and bright that one doubts whether it is present in the glass at all, and one preserves it in a cold place.

Somewhat modified, it reads on page 134:

COELUM VINOSUM LULLII

Here the Aqua ardens is poured directly onto the black residue, digested, and the Aqua animata and, with stronger fire, the oil are distilled off. The residue is calcined until it is white. Then it is imbibed four times with the Aqua animata and sublimed. The shining sublimate is mixed with the Aqua animata and distilled once, whereby the salt passes over.

The distillate is placed in digestion for 60 days and transforms into the pleasantly fragrant quintessence, clear and bright like a star. At the bottom there is a salt like that in the urine of a healthy youth.

Dr. Becker now presents seven further processes of similar kind, each with variations, then once again explains from his point of view the manner of the procedure, then brings two further related processes for the volatilization of Sal Tartari (tartar salt), and finally arrives at the following result:

EXPLANATION OF
THE SECRET WINE-SPIRIT OF THE ADEPTS

In the second section on the mineral solvents, Weidenfeld gives indications concerning the secret of the Spiritus Vini philosophici that shed sufficient light upon it. From the compilation of various prescriptions relating to this, the following content emerges:
The secret substance, concealed under many names, for the Stone of the Wise (Prima materia lapidis), is calcined to redness and dissolved in distilled wine vinegar. The solution is evaporated to the thickness of a gum. From this, first with gentle fire, tasteless water is distilled. When then white vapors appear, another receiver is attached and thus the Aqua ardens is obtained. This water has a very sharp taste and partly also a stinking odor; therefore it is called Aqua foetens, Menstruum foetens. With continued distillation, under stronger fire red vapors appear and finally clear red drops. Then one gradually lets the fire die down and preserves the distillate in a well-closed glass so that the volatile spirit does not escape.

The residue in the retort is black like soot; it is spread on a stone and ignited at one end with a glowing coal. Within half an hour the fire runs through the entire residue and calcines it to a yellow color; thereafter it is dissolved in distilled vinegar, evaporated to a gum, and distilled. This is repeated until the greater part is reduced to a liquor.

These liquors are called the first distillate, are digested for 14 days and distilled. First the Aqua ardens passes over, upon which a white oil floats. This distillate is rectified seven times until a cloth moistened with it burns when ignited. Remaining behind is a yellow oil, which is distilled with stronger fire.

The sublimate in the neck of the retort is allowed to liquefy on an iron pan in a cold place; to the filtered liquor one pours a little Aqua ardens, whereby a green oil separates on the surface, which is removed. Then the distillation is continued; first water comes over, then a thick black oil. As soon as white vapors now appear, another receiver is attached; the whitish distillate is drawn off under mild warmth until a thick oily mass like melted pitch remains behind.

This black mass is then further treated until complete exhaustion of the residue, the detailed description of which is not necessary.

Ripley explains that in the Menstruum foetens prepared from the mentioned gum the following substances are contained:
1. the Aqua ardens, which, when ignited, burns like ordinary wine-spirit.
2. a thick whitish water, the Lac Virginum of the adepts.
3. a red oil, the blood of the green lion of the adepts.

(This paragraph contains the entire secret of Vinum rubrum vel album, for that is the true red or white wine of the adepts, not as Dr. Becker seemingly plausibly but erroneously assumes acetone and its derivatives.)

Dr. Becker continues: Ripley says that Raymond spoke of it so often and therefore feared the wrath of God and the adepts. With this, remarks Weidenfeld, he revealed the great secret of the art. The adepts indeed openly and undisguisedly taught the use of the Vinum Philosophicum in their practical instructions, but how it is to be obtained they concealed.

Ripley first and alone explains that the key to the entire secret art lies hidden in secretly holding the Menstruum foetens with its Lac Virginis and the Sanguis Leonis for 14 days in gentle digestion; it is the Vinum rubeum vel album Lullii, and to confirm this he adds that from this Menstruum foetens the Aqua Vitae rectificata Lullii is prepared.

Dr. Becker continues: The primordial substance, the prima materia, is named with the most varied terms in order to conceal the secret. The adepts sometimes worked in metals, sometimes in metallic salts and ores. The green lion is so called because its solution is green. It is first dissolved in sulfuric acid for purification and yields saffron-yellow crystals upon dissolution. The prepared primordial substance is then calcined to redness, whereby the acid is removed, after which it is dissolved in distilled vinegar and thickened to a gum, whose distillation yields the Spiritus philosophici.

From the circumstance that

1. the primordial substance calcined to redness is dissolved in vinegar, whereby an acetate salt forms,
2. the black residue in the retort can be ignited and burns away, which is a property of acetate salts,
3. the distillation yields a spirit burning like ordinary wine-spirit and a volatile oil,


it becomes completely clear that nothing else is taught here than the preparation of acetone.

In the following, Dr. Becker then provides, for clearer understanding of his explanations, some excerpts from Weidenfeld’s description of the nature of the Spiritus Vini philosophici.

To reproduce these here is unnecessary, since they were already presented at the beginning of this essay.

One sees: the explanations and conclusions of Dr. Becker, that by the Spiritus Vini philosophici of the adepts acetone and its method of preparation are meant, have something seductive and apparently convincing about them, and for that very reason I have reproduced them here so extensively, in order to show how closely error and truth lie together in this mysterious territory.

The circumstances previously cited, from which Dr. Becker believes he can infer that the instructions of the adepts for preparing their secret wine-spirit concern the production of acetone, do indeed apply to the manufacture of acetone, at least conditionally; for this is distilled, among other things, from lead acetate, potassium acetate, or sodium acetate, from which Dr. Becker had the acetone he used medicinally prepared by his pharmacist, together with its derivatives, which he named Spiritus Aceti oleosus, through distillation. Yet these salts are not first calcined to redness, which is not possible at all. This prescription applies only to the production of acetone from verdigris. But even then, after distillation no black residue remains that can be ignited and burns away. Dr. Becker’s statements are therefore only partially correct.

But what, in general, is to be understood by the substance to be calcined to redness?

Perhaps the prima materia? This is, as stated at the beginning of this treatise, not a primordial substance, but the result of long and complicated processes and is identical with the so-called gum of the hermetic masters.

From this prima materia of the adepts, indeed as the final step, a spirit is produced that in reality is the true much-sought Mercurius Philosophorum, which, once prepared, can be augmented at will with ordinary mercury; the virgin’s milk and the red oil are distilled: Vinum rubrum et album. Only here do the adepts begin with the description of the process; all preceding works that lead to the preparation of the prima materia they conceal or veil in darkness. In every case the so-called massa magna path is meant.

To return to a salt mentioned shortly before by Dr. Becker: the green lion is first dissolved in sulfuric acid for purification and yields saffron-yellow crystals upon dissolution. The prepared primordial substance (?) is then calcined to redness, whereby the acid is removed, after which it is dissolved in distilled vinegar and thickened to a gum, whose distillation yields the Spiritus Vini philosophici.

This single sentence contains an accumulation of false notions and confusions, for first, the green lion is a royal end product and is never dissolved in sulfuric acid for purification; secondly, the prepared primordial substance, which does not exist as such at all, is not calcined to redness (the writer perhaps thought here of vitriol), therefore cannot be dissolved in distilled vinegar and thickened to a gum. But even if the writer had the production of acetone in mind, it is inexplicable how he arrives in this connection at the red lion and what purpose the gum is supposed to serve. Acetone is distilled from acetate salts. Dr. Becker obtained it from sodium acetate. It is correct that the distillation of the true gum of the adepts that is, the prima materia of the wise prepared through long and meticulous processes yields the Spiritus Vini philosophici, more precisely the white and the red oil and the mercury of the wise masters Vinum rubrum et album.

The misunderstanding that leads Dr. Becker to his erroneous conclusions lies in the fact that he confuses and mixes up the statements of Weidenfeld, which deal exclusively with the Spiritus Vini philosophicus, with the prescriptions of the iatrochemists such as Agricola or Zwelfer, who merely taught the preparation of Spiritus Saturni from sugar of lead (that is, something similar to acetone, but containing much more water). In the course of his very readable writing he then presents a series of instructions that relate exclusively to the preparation of the spirit and red oil from sugar of lead for medicinal purposes. Here, however, there is neither any mention of the gum of the wise masters nor of the Vinum rubrum vel album in the sense of the adepts.

The great iatrochemical physicians of the late 16th and 17th centuries were not adepts and did not claim this rank, not even van Helmont. But their knowledge of spagyric pharmacy and materia medica was extraordinary, and they knew how to heal diseases against which our modern therapy stands helpless. Thus the spagyrically prepared Spiritus Saturni is in fact a sovereign remedy for all saturnine diseases that lie under the field of force of lead and must be treated from that standpoint.

Dr. Becker reproduces Agricola’s prescription from his medical work, Part I, page 842, in abbreviated form:
Sugar of lead is digested for four weeks with good Spiritus Vini in a steam bath, then the spirit is drawn off, and a saline thick liquor remains behind. This is mixed with pure sand (which must be calcined) and distilled per gradus from a retort, whereby one obtains a beautiful white spirit and a fine yellow and red oil. The spirit and the oil must be rectified together from a glass retort in a steam bath. First the spirit passes over drop by drop, then the yellow oil comes; then one must attach an earthen receiver, and there passes over a fine spiritual odor, more pleasant than amber and musk. When the yellow oil has distilled over, the phlegm comes in many beautiful white streaks; then one must attach another receiver and drive over all the phlegm. Finally a fine red oil comes over, for which stronger fire must be given, since it does not rise readily.

The black residue in the retort is calcined with strong fire until it is snow-white, then dissolved in distilled vinegar and crystallized.

The salt is held in digestion for eight days in a steam bath with the previously rectified spirit and then distilled, whereby the salt for the most part rises up. The distillate is poured back onto the residue, digested again and distilled, and this is repeated as often as necessary until the entire salt has risen over in the form of a spirit. Now the red oil is added, whereby both mix inseparably and yield an exceedingly precious medicine.

This is Agricola’s prescription for the preparation of Spiritus et Oleum Saturni for medicinal purposes.

That the spirit and the white and red oil mix inseparably is not correct and is also not found in Agricola, but is a probable addition by Dr. Becker, which he borrows from the hermetic instructions for the preparation of the true Vinum rubrum vel album. Otherwise this process and the spagyrically prepared medicine are of extraordinary effect. In what follows, Dr. Becker presents an excerpt from Agricola’s reports concerning the healings achieved with this medicine. These include, among others: lung ulcers, kidney inflammation, virulent gonorrhea, poisoned stings, and panaritium, concerning which Agricola expressly remarks:

Applied against panaritium, it acts quickly. The author, who has himself prepared this remedy in his laboratory, can confirm Agricola’s statement regarding the eminent healing power of this preparation in cases of panaritium.

As becomes unmistakably clear from Agricola’s above-mentioned prescription for the preparation of his Spiritus Saturni, the matter here is not at all the production of acetone, but the process aims at the preparation of an extremely complex and spagyrically highly opened medicinal remedy from lead. Dr. Becker, in the erroneous belief that the matter concerns above all acetone, even if retaining the by-products obtained during its preparation, had the Spiritus Acetis oleosus used by him medicinally prepared by his pharmacist from sodium acetate. He writes about this as follows:

At my instigation, in the year 1840 the pharmacist Klauer undertook the preparation of the same and gave the following report: Four pounds of sodium acetate yielded ten ounces of distillate. The distillation from the sand bath was completed in three days. The distillate was rectified in a water bath. What first passed over was acetone with some water, since acetone already passes over at 55°. The further stronger distillation yielded water, acetic acid, and some oil (metacetone). The residue was a dark-brown oil of thick consistency, which dissolves very easily in acetone. In order to obtain the acetone free of water, it was rectified over calcium chloride. Six and a half ounces of water-containing acetone, obtained from four pounds of sodium acetate, yielded four and a half ounces of water-free acetone.

The acetone combined with the two oils was prescribed by me as a medicinal agent under the designation “Spiritus Acetis oleosus.” I have used acetone very frequently since the year 1840. The preparation was good, but did not entirely correspond to the description of the old chemists, in that it lacked the famous exquisite pleasant odor, which probably rests on the fact that the formerly customary preparation through long and repeated digestion and distillation brought this remedy, as it were, to maturity, as wine is refined by being stored in a heap of moistened hay through the warmth thereby produced over a period of three months, as if it had been stored in bottles for three years. It is, as emerges from the old prescriptions, a very delicate operation whose basic condition is expressed by the saying: haste makes waste.

The dehydration of acetone by distillation over calcium chloride is chemically correct, but not in the sense of medicine. Pure acetone, as it is now obtained from chemical factories, is not so powerful, neither in odor and taste nor in medicinal effect. It has no healing effect on rheumatism like the Spiritus Acetis oleosus; the ethereal oil is therefore essential for its medicinal constitution.

In what follows, Dr. Becker gives ten reports on the successful treatment of various diseases, above all rheumatism, with his Spiritus Acetis oleosus, also in cases of spinal meningitis. In febrile diseases the remedy is not indicated, as he remarks, since it acts too heatingly. Had he had his preparation made from lead acetate, he would have arrived at a completely different result, since lead contains great coldness within itself. It is utterly incomprehensible why Dr. Becker did not have his Spiritus Acetis oleosus prepared from lead acetate instead of sodium acetate, since he himself almost exclusively presents all relevant processes as proceeding from lead and moreover cites, additionally emphasized, the sentence of Raymundus Lullius: Ex plumbo nigro extrahitur Oleum Philosophorum aurae coloris vel quasi, et scias, quod in mundo fere secretius est…

For Dr. Becker, who is firmly convinced that the matter concerns acetone as the secret wine-spirit of the adepts, this passage ought to have been decisive in choosing lead acetate rather than sodium acetate for the preparation of his Spiritus Acetis oleosus. His healing successes with the former would have been all the greater, even if the Spiritus Saturni is not the Spiritus Vini Philosophorum, as he assumed. However, in the statement of Lullius, Ex plumbo nigro extrahitur Oleum Philosophorum, it is not ordinary lead that is meant at all, but the lead of the wise masters, who often designated their gum, their prima materia, with the misleading name plumbum nostrum. As stated, Dr. Becker mixes up concepts and ideas here.

It is, however, in fact almost impossible to arrive at the correct understanding of this so strictly guarded secret without spiritual guidance.

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, it is emphasized once again that throughout this entire treatise only the so-called wet or long path for the preparation of the prima materia has been discussed, from which the Spiritus Vini philosophici is distilled. But even in this process, not only in the so-called short or dry path, the preparation of the secret fire of the adepts is required.

Even though the shorter path is usually followed, something supplementary must still be said about the Spiritus Saturni, even if acetone and the by-products obtained in its preparation are not identical with the secret spirit of wine. The spagyrically prepared Spiritus Saturni is, in fact, a medicinal agent of the highest order, even if it may be meaningless for the preparation of the Great Elixir of the Philosophers. A spagyric-pharmaceutical laboratory could base its entire existence upon this preparation alone.

However, it must unquestionably be produced according to the prescriptions of the iatrochemists, and not according to abbreviated methods such as that by which Dr. Becker prepared his Spiritus aceti oleosus from sodium acetate. It is a very meticulous and lengthy work involving many manipulations and requires an experienced worker or, as Paracelsus puts it, one “tested in the fire” in order to avoid mistakes. Moreover, the preparation is costly, since all the required ingredients, beginning with lead sugar, must be prepared by oneself. Commercial lead sugar is useless. One must start from litharge, or better still from galena.

Pure wine vinegar is required, and above all an authentic spiritus e vino, distilled by oneself either from grape pomace or from good sweet wine, highly rectified not the commercial alcohol obtained from potatoes or wood. The production of this medicinally extremely potent preparation takes about four months, due to repeated digestions lasting weeks and repeated distillations. Furthermore, it cannot be prepared in large quantities; therefore it must be set up in numerous vessels.

In doing so, it must be observed that only glass, porcelain, or rock crystal retorts and flasks may be used. The glass retorts must be very well coated during the distillation of the white and red oils, since they crack every time due to the expansion of the mass and can only be used once.

Thus one sees that Spiritus Saturni is not an easily prepared medicine, but its healing power richly rewards the labor, for its sphere of action includes the following ailments: all diseases of the spleen, arteriosclerosis, conjunctivitis and inflammation of the eyelid margins, corneal ulceration, burns of the first, second, and third degree, paronychia, hemorrhoids, and not least erysipelas (St. Anthony’s fire, rose).

It should be noted here that erysipelas is known not to tolerate moist treatment; however, this confirms the exception to the rule. Johann Agricola writes on this matter in his Chymische Medizin (Leipzig, 1638):

“I know well that it is commonly said that erysipelas should not be wetted, which has its reason and meaning; but if it is treated with its appropriate specific, then it not only has no danger, but removes all heat and swelling, wherever it may be on the head or on the thighs. But if the damage is open, then one must often wash it with this water and finally apply compresses, doing this three times a day; thus it draws out the fiery pus and removes it thoroughly from the ground up.

In sum: it is not only useful in erysipelas, but also in all burning, fiery ulcers and wounds, for it dissolves hard swellings and draws the malignant, compacted matter out through the skin, and one could write an entire book about this single balm.”

By a related method, the great antiepileptic of Paracelsus can be prepared from copper vitriol. But for this, too, the naturally grown vitriol is required, which is very difficult to obtain.

From this one sees that for the preparation of many genuine, highly effective spagyric medicines, the secret fire of the adepts is by no means always a prerequisite, even though the great arcana cannot be produced without it.

What is the Secret Fire? And how is it produced?

In none of the countless alchemical writings is anything revealing found on this subject.

The adepts have concealed their secret fire even more deeply in darkness than their secret spirit of wine.

I would not dare to say anything about it myself, had not Max Retschlag by profession a naturopath, who penetrated very deeply into alchemy who died in the early 1930s, pointed very clearly to it in his small work From Primordial Matter to the Primordial Force Elixir, the Path to the True Stone, published in 1926 in only 333 copies.

In the section From the Starting Material to the Preparation of the Elixir, he writes:
According to our knowledge of the structure of the body, of the structure of the cells and the smallest living units and their functions, it lies entirely within the realm of possibility that a specific agent could be found which consists of a latent, concentrated force and therefore acts universally as a healing agent for all diseases. Since the vital force is an electromotive force, the agent must be conceived as consisting of substances which, upon dissolution in the bodily fluids, release a concentrated electrical force.

In a similar way, in galvanic elements it is specific salts whose solution produces a more or less constant current between carbon and metal. That the starting materials for the preparation of the life elixir are also specific salts follows from innumerable hints by the ancient Hermeticists, as well as among the Pythagoreans, Essenes, and all such philosophical schools whose masters such as Pythagoras or Moses had attained the highest degrees of Egyptian initiation.

Salt, as the collective concept of everything that crystallizes, is according to these ancient teachings the primordial being, for all matter can be reduced back into its salt form. It is the Word of God made material. In specialized salt, a heavenly agent the son of the divine solar fire unites with a passive earthliness into a salt incarnation. This salt differentiates itself into its mercurial moisture and its sulfurous fatness, and both opposing principles together with salt form, like alkali and acid, the Trinity, the origin of life.

Salt remains identical with itself; its living crystal soul always produces the same crystal forms; it differs only according to the place and conditions of its origin. It reveals its noble descent in the close kinship of the Latin names Sol and Sal, and true alchemy is Haldchemia, salt-cooking (chyō = I melt, I cook).

In antiquity, salt was accorded high honors: salt and fire were placed at the center of great covenants; salt was always brought to the table first and removed last, accompanied by a bow of reverence. At the communal meal of the early Christian community, salt was always present alongside bread and wine, and the baptized were given a pinch of salt in the mouth.

Salt and bread are still symbolically revered today, as is also mentioned in the Old Testament.

In the second chapter of Genesis, verses 10–15, one reads a mysterious reference that has given rise to many controversies, since the lands and rivers mentioned there have been sought in vain by geographers and are found on no map, no matter how ancient.

The metallic salt is indicated by the well-known occult saying: Visitabis Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem. And by the highest symbolic sign, the “secret salt of the philosophers” is represented: in the imperial orb as the sign of Cancer, a horizontal line passing through the center and a half-vertical line reaching from above down to the middle, forming a cross within the circle. The deep meaning of this sign is intelligible only to the initiated.

The salt, of heavenly origin, conceived by an earthly mother, is born in a stable. After overcoming death, it rises again in a new, clarified body and becomes a redeemer from the sufferings of sick humanity just as Christ became the redeemer of spiritual humanity.

One should reread this sentence and compare it with a passage cited at the beginning of this treatise from Fulcanelli’s work: Placed upon the straw of His manger, in the grotto of Bethlehem, is not Jesus Himself the new Sun that brings the Lion to Earth? I am the Spirit and I am Life. I have come to bring fire to the Earth.

This spiritual fire, which has incarnated itself in salt, is the hidden sulfur, because throughout its activity it never shows itself tangibly or perceptibly to our eyes. In both statements lies the same esoteric insight of cosmological depth, and it is not merely symbolic, as the Swiss depth psychologist C. G. Jung would have it, but spiritually real as above, so below, valid for all planes.

Sol, Sal, Salamander salt of the rocky cavern Haldchemia, salt-cooking that leads to healing: Salus!

Within salt (salt in the broadest sense) light is enchanted. To liberate it again that is alchemy. And this reborn salt is the Secret Fire of the Adepts.

That light is enchanted in salt and can be released again from it this is without doubt an absurd idea to today’s physicist, and yet: it is so. Indeed, the adepts have concealed their secret salt-fire most deeply in darkness, and yet toward the end of the 18th century, shortly before the French Revolution, the Hermetic masters before withdrawing into secrecy once more bore witness to the reality of alchemy.

From the time of the young Goethe there exists a work devoted to the mystery of salt, published anonymously (the author is suspected to be F. C. Oetinger), titled The Mystery of Salt, as the Most Noble Essence of the Highest Beneficence of God in the Realm of Nature, by Elias Artista Hermeticus, 1770.

This book begins with the sentence: “Salt is a good thing, says Christ, the mouth of eternal wisdom.”

To go into this almost unfindable work in detail would exceed the scope of this treatise, but a few passages are quoted here as a supplement to the above statements of Max Retschlag:
“Salt has its essence, origin, and birth from two extremes or centers, the heavenly and the earthly, where a third also contributes what is its own, as its constituents demonstrate, which give it its being. The first is the heavenly, which acts as a spiritual, invisible, and intangible essence, called spirit the active force, the mercurial fire-spirit and heavenly saltpeter.

The second is the earthly, although there is nothing earthly in it as such, but rather the heavenly spirit, as astral seed, has coagulated in its field or womb, thickened and become fixed, assumed form or body, and become stone-like in consistency.

The third is the ether or the active element, as Hermes says: ‘The wind has carried it in its belly’; that is, it has imparted to it its airy powers, the sulfurous soul, the sulfurous fire-spirit, the fiery spiritual essence, which is in fire as light-essence and power-essence, a soul and life, the heavenly saltpeter or astral semen, born into it, implanted and impressed, and then delivered to the earth as mother, nourisher, wet-nurse, and bearer, which must bring it forth into its essential being namely, into the salt of nature.”

And in §56 one reads:
Salt from the ashes is capable of much, and many virtues are hidden within it; yet salt is of no use, writes Basilius, unless its inner being is brought forth and the same transformed. For the spirit alone is it that gives power and also life; the mere body is capable of nothing in this respect. If you know how to find it, then you possess the salt of the Wise Masters and the truly incombustible fire. Yet be cautious in the extraction of this salt, for it is only one single salt useful to the Wise, of earthly–metallic and saturnine nature, from which this salt is drawn forth. Thus not the mere salt, but rather an inner power-being, its essence that is its spirit, its soul which is hidden in its interior and which is in oil, the incombustible. This we say finally in conclusion: that salt in such a creature, whose virtue and properties no tongue is capable of sufficiently recounting or writing according to necessity, to the honor of God and the welfare of the world, whatever its nobility and usefulness may be. Rhasius says that under the vault of the Moon there is no thing so noble as salt, unless it be inverted and its innermost brought forth. “Blood of Nature,” he says, that the whole science thereof consists in this: how its fixed part may be made volatile and the volatile part fixed.

And finally from §42:
The ancient Romans, Spartans, Egyptians, and other peoples held salt in high esteem, venerated and revered it, since, as chronicles attest, they erected pyramids and honor or memorial columns to it, upon which they placed a dragon that held its tail in its mouth, as if it were devouring and consuming itself, yet always remaining the same. Upon another pillar they placed two dragons, one with wings and the other without wings, where one seized the other by the tail and held it in its mouth, as if they were devouring and consuming one another. By this they indicated how the volatile and the fixed are to be united with one another, or how the volatile may overcome the fixed, as Nicolaus Flamel has written of it.

The symbol of the two dragons, the upper winged and the lower wingless, devouring one another: this is the most commonly used sign of the Hermetic symbolic language, and also the most meaningful, yet probably the least understood. For by merely stating that the upper dragon represents the volatile and the lower dragon the fixed, very little is said for true understanding; and the inquisitive person who sets about the preparation of the arcana or even of the Lapis without knowing which substance the upper and which the lower dragon symbolizes will miss the path from the very beginning.

In the final section of the first treatise of this book an interpretation of the double dragon symbol is given; but in order to illuminate it for the reader from another angle, it shall here be discussed further. Of the nature of the winged dragon, the Rosicrucians and Masters have never made a secret. In the second edition of the Aurea Catena, published in 1781 with extensive commentaries by the Rosicrucian physician Anton Joseph Kirchweger of Mährisch-Kronau (the first, still uncommented edition, which Goethe had before him, appeared in Leipzig in 1723), this is stated openly and without concealment. And even more clearly, in his book Microscopium Basilisk Valentini, or On the Great Imperial Orb of the World, in Euphoriston of All Medicine, published in Berlin in 1790, Anton Joseph Kirchweger gives clear and plain information concerning the upper dragon. He writes:

We have in our realm a certain red lion, the governor and actor of all sublunary things, very well known in all places; not only men, but even the simple sheep tread upon him with their feet, because he is gracious to them and provides them in part with their sustenance.

This lion, in the wrath of his majesty and authority, is very violent and fierce, which causes all gods to be subject to him. In this lion’s blood the blood of salt and sulfur reigns so powerfully that no one believes it, although he is daily surrounded by it and almost entirely esteems it only for the most trivial uses. Yet the true sulfur, white and red, is hidden within it, as it openly shows in its resolution its milky and bloodlike color, for which all the Wise sigh and which very few recognize out of natural contempt; they deal with it daily and consider it worthless because it comes from dung; they treat it with the most common uses, whereas the Ancients found it with so much labor and study. And when they have found and recognized this son of Sol and Luna, they receive him with great refreshment of heart.

One does not esteem him because he is found so commonly in filth, and despite all contempt they cannot dispense with him in the smallest works, especially in medicine; he must help them in all dissolving and coagulating. He is the true bath of our Saturn, in which Diana or silver is melted. Apollo gains a more beautiful brilliance from this; he is the true golden rain of Jupiter; Mars and Venus acquire their colors, Mercury is his best friend, for his body is raised into heavenly form. When this lion devours an eagle, then he is so powerful as to fight the greatest kings and all their subjects, completely destroying them and regenerating them again more perfectly than they were before.

O blind world, that you do not recognize the concentrated essence of nature, the quinta essentia of Sol and Luna and of all salts! You see before your eyes the sufficient fire, the raging substance of the burning juice, the greatest corrosive of biting nature; you flee from it as from the devil out of sheer ignorance and inattention! O if you knew its glory and its power, your knees would bend before it more often than before the mightiest lord of the earth. You seek the center of the center and do not know what you have in your hands; you seek the spirit of the world throughout the whole earth, even as far as the Nile of Egypt, and do not see it standing before you; you see its power manifestly and let it pass by carelessly and do not serve it. Is it not worth the effort, when it shows itself visibly in wisdom, so clear as the sun, that just as all things are made from water, it can turn all things, except the nature of fire, back again into water and watery form? Is this not worthy of reflection? You fear its cruelty and have not learned that in small but worthy salt in the realm of Bacchus its cruelty and sharpness are transformed into pure sweetness. You alchemists, open your eyes, grasp the light of nature, seek the balm where it is; it is not far away, it lies before your nose in all things of this world and can well be found in every shop.

Even for the layperson it becomes evident from these statements that nitric acid is being indicated here, which the alchemists referred to as astral fire and under which they understood the upper winged dragon. No secrecy was made in alchemical writings regarding the method of preparing nitric acid. At all times there were saltpeter refineries, and the saltpeter boiler was a distinct profession. The alchemists knew very well that with nitric acid alone, as the upper fire, nothing could be achieved either for the preparation of the arcana or of the Lapis. All the more readily they made use of the upper winged dragon, their astral fire, in order thereby to conceal the lower one all the more deeply in darkness and to lead away from it.

This is also the very clever machination in the otherwise so splendid Aurea Catena: that it contains no deliberate deception or misguidance, and yet the one who works according to its instructions arrives at no satisfying result, because it focuses attention entirely on the upper dragon, while silently passing over the lower dragon, so that the overly trusting reader does not realize that something essential has been omitted and therefore strives in vain for the so-called sweetening according to the given prescriptions, since that which effects the sweetening has been suppressed. For the worthy juice from the realm of Bacchus, as stated at the end of the last cited passage by Kirchweger, alone is not sufficient to achieve this purpose, important as it is. For this, the double secret fire is required as a prerequisite, which is represented only by the intimate union of the upper and the lower dragon.

The first verses of the poem De Prima Materia Lapidis Philosophici by Basilius Valentinus, in his treatise On the Great Stone of the Ancient Wise:

A stone is found, it is not dear,
From it one breeds a volatile fire …

about which something has been said in the final section of the first essay of this book, may perhaps bring the seeker somewhat closer to the matter, although this strangely veiled poem ultimately has nothing to do with the preparation of the fire-salt, but rather like almost all instructions of the Wise Masters concerns the further treatment of the already prepared Prima Materia; and the stone from which one proceeds is solely the laboriously won Prima Materia itself.

A wonderfully illuminating poem:
A stone is found, it is not dear,
From it one breeds a volatile fire,
From which the stone itself is made,
Brought together from white and red.
(Recipe red wine and white) … and further:
It is a stone and yet no stone.
In it nature alone works,
So that from it springs a little fountain clear;
It thoroughly drinks its fixed father …

(The little fountain: the Spiritus Mercurii distilled from the Prima Materia.) Sapiens sat! In this poem there is no talk of the preparation of the fire-salt, the secret fire of the Adepts, but, many-sided as the statements and indications of the Adepts always are, with some discernment one may perhaps nonetheless find from it the hiding place of the lower dragon …

The conclusion of the poem reads thus:
It is nothing, says the Philosopher,
For it is double Mercury.
I say no more, it is named;
Well is he who has rightly recognized this!

And in his concluding words Basilius Valentinus once more speaks of that stone which is yet no stone:
Thus the coagulated spirit in metals must through art be reduced again to living Mercury, and then to water, to its primary matter, that is, mercurial water. This is then a stone and yet no stone, from which volatile fire is made in the form of a water, which drinks, dissolves, and washes its fixed father and volatile mother … Thus our gold has also a magnet, which magnet is the first material of our great stone. If you understand these my words, then you are rich and blessed before all the world.

And in order to shed light from another side on the ambiguous question of the materia remota and materia prima, a passage from Marsilio Ficino’s little book On the Stone of the Wise, translated into German, Nuremberg 1667:

The philosophers assert that the Lapis is to be found everywhere, on mountains and in valleys, also in holes and hollow rocks of the earth. From this proposition, which many have misunderstood, I am wholly of the opinion that all errors have arisen, down to us and from the ancestors to their descendants, who have sought their stone in blood, in eggs, in human hair, also in such useless and unsuitable things, laboring wholly in vain, weary and exhausted, even working themselves to death. But this proposition must be understood thus: just as the heavenly sun in the great world is everywhere with its rays, so too is this our earthly sun, gold, everywhere in the whole glass, that is, in the little world with its streams on the mountains, that is, openly in the helmet of the alembic, as in heaven, so also in the caverns of the earth, that is, in the bottom of the glass as in the earth. They also say that our stone is born upon two mountains, that is, in heaven and on earth understand: in glass.

Furthermore they say that the stone is in all things, that is, in all metals. Likewise, the stone is in every single thing, that is: nature is in every single thing, because nature contains all things within itself, and nature is the whole world. Therefore this stone has all realms, and it is said of it that it is in every single thing, although it is more and nearer in one thing than in another, since the philosophers desire and require only the proper nature of the metals. Therefore they also say that the rich, that is, the perfect bodies namely gold and silver possess this proper nature. The poor, that is, the imperfect and lower metals, do not possess it. Yet the proper nature of gold and silver is much more perfect and more resistant to fire than in the other metals.

The philosophers also seek something eternal and everlasting, which governs the whole world, namely the sun and the moon. Therefore the sun says: I am the stone, or: in me is the stone.

Thus the philosophers also say: this work of the stone is women’s work and children’s play.

At times the woman is the earth, at times mercury, sometimes it appears as if it alone accomplishes the whole work and mastery.

The children have their play with the stone, that is: the three elements with the fourth.

Or, our bodies play with the golden and silver stone when they have augmented it in the end.

Likewise they say that the peasants play with this stone and throw it away, that is: the uncomprehending and inexperienced fools, when they have extracted its elements through improper sublimation, then they throw away the black earth which has remained behind in the glass at the bottom and regard it as nothing.

The preparation of the double secret fire (there is also a triple fire, prepared from the three realms) is the great and indispensable preliminary work, which the alchemists called women’s handiwork, because it has similarity to the craft of the saltpeter boiler, at least at the beginning; but in its continuation it is, as was said at the outset, exceedingly complicated and can only be carried out with exact knowledge of measure, number, and weight the alchemists also called it the labor of Hercules. When this secret double or triple salt fire has first been prepared and spiritually purified, to speak in the language of the Hermetists (this too is a chemical process), then the further path to the arcana and to the Lapis is given for the experienced, with emphasis placed on the word experienced.

The process for the preparation of the arcana is the same as that for the preparation of the Lapis on the so-called dry short way and represents a stage on this path, indeed an advanced one, for without the spiritually prepared double salt fire, the Alkahest, the arcana also cannot be produced.

This double or triple salt fire is also the aqua solvens, the circulatum minor or majus of Paracelsus, according to its degree. For the preparation of the arcana, the metals and minerals, also corals, are treated with the secret salt fire and finally carried over with it through the helm. In doing so it must be noted that only the natural, that is, grown minerals are to be used for this purpose, which applies especially to antimony.

The so-called large mass path, which leads via the preparation of the Spiritus Vini Philosophorum to the Mercury of the Wise and to the wine-spirit Recipe Vinum rubrum vel album does not aim at the Arcana. The Lapis, the Elixir, or the finished Tincture in white or red is indeed the highest of all Arcana, and, as Max Retschlag aptly says: a remedy that, from a latent concentrated power, acts healingly upon all diseases by way of the cells universally; an idea that entirely corresponds to our present knowledge of the structure of the body and the structure of the cells. Max Retschlag, who himself worked practically as an alchemist, had arrived at a salt-elixir of great healing power, even though he did not possess the Stone. About this salt-elixir he writes in the chapter Practical Experiments and Their Results of the previously cited book:

Long-term experiments, stimulated by intensive study of the accessible works of the old Hermeticists, resulted in the creation of an elixir whose effect, in various respects, is not unlike that attributed to the universal elixir. Its preparation requires months of work of the most subtle kind and is possible only on a very small scale; the successes, however, surpass all expectations in relation to the time, effort, and not inconsiderable costs expended. Carbon and its elemental companions, especially nitrogen, must, according to what has been said earlier (see the previously cited section), be contained in it in the form of activating salts. By these salts one must by no means understand biochemical or purely organic ones; rather, they are previously unknown or disregarded compounds. The dose of this elixir is relatively small, administered more or less frequently depending on the severity of the disease to be treated. That such an elixir also has a favorable effect in the animal kingdom is understandable in view of what has been said above about its influence on human diseases. In the plant kingdom as well, a favorable influence on growth and flourishing could easily be observed by means of this elixir. … In order, however, to exert an effect in the mineral kingdom corresponding to the plant-stimulating action of the secret elixir of the ancient Hermeticists, a differently constituted preparation would probably be necessary.

Whether Max Retschlag knew of the secret fire of the Adepts or prepared it himself, the author cannot say, since he did not know Max Retschlag personally and never saw the salt-elixir prepared by him. When Retschlag says that his elixir can be produced only in very small quantities, that is true; but in a larger laboratory one could of course run several operations simultaneously and accordingly prepare larger quantities of the fire-salt. Producing it industrially in vats, however, is not feasible. One of the main difficulties lies in the lack of suitable apparatus today, for the alchemists worked under entirely different conditions and requirements than modern chemistry, so that for chemical work one must have the necessary apparatus specially made, which encounters no small difficulties, since the chemical industry is not at all geared to such needs.

Moreover, the alchemists worked however unexpected it may sound in many respects far more purely and precisely than modern chemical laboratories. The distillation of alcohol or even aqua destillata from tinned copper stills, the shipping of spirits in zinc cans instead of wicker-covered bottles, or the storage of essential oils in white-tin containers, as often happens today, would have appeared entirely inadmissible to the alchemists, since spirits and essential oils absorb the emanations of metallic vessels. All distillations may be carried out only in glass, rock-crystal, or porcelain retorts and vessels.

And here lies the crux: they often burst already during the first distillation because of the expansion of the substances treated in them by heat, so that they are usable only once, even if they were ever so well annealed. Hence Kunkel also complains: If only the glassmakers did not exist… Thus, anyone who follows this arduous path finds himself compelled to prepare everything himself, beginning with Spiritus e Vino, distilled from southern wine or grape pomace, up to the procurement of natural saltpeter and native vitriol. This much merely to give those interested an idea, at least, of the peripheral hardships of alchemical work today, whereas the chemical industry of former times was adapted to the working methods then in use.

In the course of these explanations, mention has been made in passing of various oddities that the author has encountered on his crisscross paths through the alchemical labyrinth. Thus also of one who believes he can obtain Mercury directly from the air through certain manipulations. Although this man, now over seventy-five years old, lacking all chemical knowledge and prerequisites, has been chasing a phantom for fifty years, he nevertheless has a distant scent of the greatest and most deeply concealed secret of the highest Adepts of the millennia. Even among those Adepts who knew how to prepare the Stone by the dry and wet paths, there were only very few who also possessed the key to this final and greatest secret. In alchemical writings this secret is only rarely mentioned, and then always in an extremely veiled and parabolic manner; and it is questionable whether those who wrote about it by way of hints actually walked this path themselves or merely heard of it from others probably the latter. Neither in Isaac Hollandus, nor in Basilius Valentinus, nor in the Aurea Catena is there, to my knowledge, anything to be found about it (everywhere the dry and wet paths are discussed). Heinrich Khunrath, however, seems to have known of it, judging by his work Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum (1599), or Instruction to Attain the Hidden Catholic Magnesia of the Secret Universal Stone of the True Philosophers.

And in Montfaucon (1670) one finds the passage: One needs only to concentrate the fire of the world (meaning the sun) by means of concave mirrors into a glass sphere. This is an artifice that all ancient authors have concealed. It forms solar powder in glass vessels, and after this has purified itself from the admixtures of earthly elements and has been artistically prepared, it becomes, in a very short time, suitable for all metals, filling them with life-force. He calls it Pulvis Solaris. In agreement with this, a theosophist of this century, van der Meulen (1922), writes:

The ether is set in motion by the rays of the sun. Whoever succeeds in capturing and strengthening them with the aid of mirrors and lenses can call forth specific waves in the ether (by which is meant not the hypothetical ether of modern science, but the prana of the Indians). And when the power of the elemental fire is united with that of the Ignis essentialis to a certain degree, it will be observed that very slowly, but regularly, drops of a liquid appear which, as a remedy against numerous diseases such as tuberculosis, dropsy, etc., find no equal. One is reminded here of the remarkable lenses of the ancient Indians, lenses of special constructions that enabled them to reflect, collect, etc., certain kinds of solar energy; likewise of a lens system resembling a mirror, with the special property of attracting or repelling certain forces of sunlight as needed.

These indications and hints, which concern the most ancient and most mysterious path, are, however, not complete. Besides the Pulvis Solaris to be collected by burning mirrors which in the alchemical sense is most appropriately called Sal Naturae the Philosophical Water must also be added, which is obtained in a similar, no less peculiar manner, and which, when evaporated, leaves behind a red salt. Only from the combination of these two secret ingredients is the great Elixir prepared.

So much concerning this darkest and most closely guarded path of the ancients to the life-bestowing Stone. As already said, this path has nothing in common with the so-called dry and wet path to the preparation of the Tincture and the Lapis Philosophorum by means of the secret fire and the secret wine-spirit, as Basilius Valentinus, Isaac Hollandus, and most of the known Adepts followed it, and which is the subject of this treatise. Only in order to satisfy possible questions about this other path has it been touched upon here at the end. I myself have no practical experience with it and likewise no corresponding knowledge, and therefore cannot say more about it. In Germany, and generally in the more northern countries, where summer as Heinrich Heine once wrote is a green-painted winter, this path is probably not practicable in itself because of the insufficient heat and weak solar radiation; but it may well be so in Italy and the southern regions. In ancient Egypt it was presumably followed by the initiates.

It is, however, scarcely sufficient merely to concentrate the sun’s rays in a concave mirror to obtain this solar powder, even if one exposes the mirror to the sun’s rays for a very long time. Without the magnet required for this purpose which is kept secret every such attempt would probably be futile, and one would reach no goal. The once-famous Abbé de Villersceau (Comte de Gabalis) speaks in his book Entretiens sur les Sciences secrètes of such concave mirrors in order to hear, by means of them, the inhabitants of the element of fire, brought into contact in a magical way. On this Georg von Welling comments in his book Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum on the origin, nature, properties, and use of salt, sulfur, and mercury (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1760), with which Goethe also dealt intensively in his early Frankfurt period:

Here we cannot refrain from saying that the Comte de Gabalis must have been a very poor philosopher: he may have known how to read, but not how to understand, otherwise he would not have written so casually that one can concentrate the red solar powder in a glass sphere, since, truthfully, something else is required to obtain this red, masculine sulfur of the Wise. He does indeed say something about the glass sphere, but of the magnetic vehicle he says nothing.

I repeat: this entire process is obscure to me and the magnet required for it is unknown, but after forty years of belonging to the alchemical worldview I must affirm it intuitively, even though for a long time I was of the opinion that this too was merely a albeit very opaque symbolic veiling of the manipulations involved in the preparation of the Spiritus Vini rubri vel albi and, in the course of that, of the production of the Red Lion and the Virgin’s Milk derived from it; for the symbolic and parabolic descriptions of the process given by the Adepts are sometimes not to be deciphered even by one who knows the process.

Yet today I can no longer close myself off from the assumption that there also exists this other and most secret path to obtaining the so-called Pulvis Solaris, and that by means of it and of the Philosophical Water obtained in a similar way, the Lapis Philosophorum can be prepared.

In this treatise on the Secret Fire and the Secret Wine-Spirit of the Adepts, the author has gone to the very limits of what may permissibly be stated about it, indeed even beyond them.

The preparation of the Magisterium by the one and the other path cannot be disclosed, but the direction in which one must think and search is given in these explanations as clearly and without reservation as nowhere else in alchemical literature. The path via the Secret Wine-Spirit to the Mercurius Philosophorum from Vinum rubrum vel album and ultimately to the Lapis is by far the more lengthy and incomparably more difficult one, but also the sovereign, royal one, and the Stone prepared on this path tinges many times more strongly than that prepared on the so-called “dry” short path merely with the aid of the fire-salts.

The former path is unfindable unless insight is bestowed; the second path one might reach through years of searching and persistent labor, as seems to have been the case with Max Retschlag, but he did not attain the tinging elixir. Earlier it was said: the Light is enchanted into the salt; it is a matter of freeing the Light again from the salt, for: the salt is in all good things, says the mouth of him who is the Light of the world.

END.