From Nigredo to Elixir

 

Alchemy, the transmutation of base metal into gold, is an ancient art like astrology, and appears in many civilisations around the world: China, Tibet, Sri Lanka, the world of Islam, ancient Egypt and Greece, and since the 13^th century, Western Europe. There are some cross-cultural links, and it seems that Western alchemy comes from Egypt and Greece via the Arabs of Sicily and Spain. The word itself comes from the Arabic al kimiya. Also Marsilio Ficino at the Platonic Academy near Florence was responsible for translating Greek texts. Western alchemy seems more concerned with producing gold, whereas the Orient is more concerned with longevity. But I postulate that alchemy is in fact a symbolic representation of psychic integration, what depth psychology calls individuation, the merging of conscious and unconscious, the unity of spirit, soul and body.

 

Alchemy thrived for five hundred years, but eventually died out in Europe by the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who is regarded as the last of the old-style alchemists. It was prevented from disappearing completely by the Rosicrucian movement, which began in Germany in the early 1600s, but it was the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung who brought the art to back to life. He had a dream one night in 1926 in which he was travelling through Lombardy with a companion, quaintly described as a ‘peasant’. He discovered a manor house near Verona, and when they went inside the courtyard the gates slammed shut, and his companion said, “Now we are caught in the 17^th century”. His interest was further stimulated by reading “The Secret of the Golden Flower”[1], a text on Chinese alchemy. However his initial reaction to the alchemical texts was,

 

“… what nonsense. This stuff is impossible to understand”.

 

It seems to have been the “Rosarium Philosophorum” (Rose Garden of the Philosophers), a series of 20 woodcuts, which helped him decipher alchemical symbols, and he began work on a lexicon.

 

Modern interest in alchemy has been gathering pace since Jung’s investigations, and in recent years it’s come alive again. Adam McLean started a quarterly called the 'Hermetic Journal', which ran from 1978 to 1992. More recently he’s founded a web site dedicated to the subject[2]. Here’s an interesting quote from Mr McLean:

Article: An Interview with Adam McLean by Russell House Reprinted from Issue 30 of The Stone, January - February 1999.   Scotland is an important country in the history of alchemy as it has within its borders by far the best collection of alchemical books in the world. The Ferguson collection in Glasgow University Library, which I visit at least once a week to undertake research, the Young Collection also in Glasgow, and the John Read Collection in St Andrews, provide access to the texts of about 95% of all alchemical books. It is in this sense that Scotland is important, and seems to have some destiny in relation to alchemy.

 

How does alchemy fit in with astrology? I’d say it complements astrology. Both make much use of the four elements, but whereas astrology deals with the zodiac and planets, alchemy deals with metals. There’s a well-known correspondence between planets and metals, which I’ll outline.

 

 

The planetary glyphs are common to both. The alchemists didn’t refer much to copper, iron or tin, but concentrated on gold, lead, silver and, of course, mercury. Mercury steps out of his shadow in alchemy, where he is acknowledged as Mercurius or Hermes. This can be highlighted if we look at the components of his symbols:

 

 

Hermes links soul, spirit and body, and is therefore a symbol for integration. One major difference between the two arts is that alchemy has a goal, a final destination, but astrology does not. Astrology can be used to start a business, predict the stock exchange, pair couples… but it’s only fairly recently that depth psychology has been added to its uses. Has astrology stolen alchemy’s clothes? In addition, not only does alchemy provide a final target to aim for, it also lays out staging posts along the way.

 

My own introduction to alchemy came when I was about ten. I was going home from school at lunchtime with a friend, and there was a partial eclipse of the sun underway. If we’d been told by our teacher to ignore it, we disobeyed. We looked up and saw a wonderful sight. A quarter of the sun was missing, hidden by the moon. It looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. After lunch, back at school, my friend drew a cartoon. He was very good at this (his birthday followed mine - I’m sure he was a Piscean). It was a very clever drawing, of a lion with a flame coming out of its mouth, and the sun with a bite out of it. Unfortunately the original is long gone, but I’ve managed to reproduce it:

 

Does anyone see anything significant in it?

It has an uncanny resemblance to this illustration[3] which represents an advanced stage in the development of the philosopher’s stone, ‘the green lion swallowing the sun’. Lions were also favourites of the alchemists, as it was considered the finest of animals. I find it very remarkable that a ten-year old boy should have been able to reproduce a drawing from a 16^th manuscript. I don’t think he did this consciously, but it was a universal symbol appearing spontaneously – he was a Piscean!

 

I’m sure most of you will have had alchemical images appearing in dreams, or spontaneously as doodles. Some typical images would be:

 

·        A precious red stone

·        A magical white stone

·        Pairs fighting (e.g. eagles - one aerial and the other chthonic)

·        A hermaphrodite

 

Does anyone remember the Third Ear Band? Their music was a fairly eclectic mixture, based on Indian music, and possibly the thing they’re most famous for is the soundtrack for Polanski’s “Macbeth”. In 1969 they brought out an LP called “Alchemy”, and that was my introduction to the ‘art’, by means of this picture[4]:

 

It depicts a Roman soldier in a courtyard holding up a sword, about to slice open the philosophical egg. Thus the alchemist separates the elements from their initial unity. The egg symbolises the vessel on which the stone incubates.

 

But I really started reading up on the subject in the early '80s, when, like so many others, I couldn’t get a job. To give some shape to my day, I’d go up to the Central Library and take out one of Jung’s collected works. And once you start reading him it’s not long before you come up against alchemy. Volumes 12, 13, and 14 of his Collected Works are devoted to the subject.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’d now like to show you a source document, the “Emerald Tablet of Hermes”, also known as the “Tabula Smaragdina”. It’s a very short text, and considered to be one of the arch authorities of alchemy, the seed from which later development came. According to one legend, the text was originally carved by Hermes on tablets of emerald and placed in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. It has been traced back to the Islamic Jabirian corpus. Jabir ibn Hayyan (c 721-c815), is regarded as the father of European and Islamic Alchemy.

 

What’s so striking about the text is its simplicity, an attribute not associated with most alchemical texts. This probably points to Hellenistic origins. A motto of the alchemists was “the obscure by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown”, and it seems as if they were deliberately trying to put off adherents.

 

The first paragraph will have a familiar sound to anyone involved with astrology. The above mirrors the below. It claims that although Being might be split in two, in fact there is only One Reality, and that all things created are made in the same way: everything has a common source. At its core, everything has a reality beyond duality.

 

The second paragraph is a description of the magical stone, as macrocosm. It combines male and female, Sun and Moon, and is engendered in an airy womb, fed by the Earth. This could be a reference to the synthesis of aerial and chthonic, the winged and wingless dragons or ouroboros. This stone is the mother of everything. It can spiritualise the corporeal. And here we have a description of how the stone is made:

 

The ‘fine’ is to be separated from the gross by heating. The resulting spirit becomes ethereal, floating heavenward until regression inevitably takes over and it falls back to earth, marrying the powers of upper and lower. Thus we have an outline for the alchemical or spagyric[5] process:

 

1.      Initial material

2.      Separate the earth, and the rest will aspire upwards

3.      A high point is reached after which the ‘fine’ returns to the earth

4.      The two components which were once separate are conjoined

 

This entity acts as an interface between above and below.

 

The text now switches to the personal, the microcosm, and implies that this is where one’s consciousness should be. One will be beyond duality, and darkness will disappear. It promises one the ability to spiritualise the physical.

 

The last part claims that this is how objects come from non-being to being. By implication the human soul and metals are made in the same way. Alchemy is a template for extracting the essence from an object. That object can be a lump of lead or the human psyche. Alchemy’s like one of those British Standards. Take BSI 5750. You follow the rules it sets out and you can make an office block or a computer system. So with alchemy if you follow the rules you can make an elixir or stone to create gold from a base material. And with a human being you can extract the essence from the human psyche.

 

Possibly the ‘thrice’ relates to the three levels of spirit, soul and body, which in alchemy are analogous to Sulphur, Quicksilver and Salt. There might be an astrological explanation of the sentence order. It’s possible that every statement corresponds to a sign of the Zodiac, for example, ‘Separate the Earth’ would be the Virgoan part. The start of each sign’s portion is marked.

The Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina)   Truly, without Deceit, certainly and absolutely—   That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, in the accomplishment of the Miracle of One Thing. And just as all things have come from One, through the Mediation of One, so all things follow from this One Thing in the same way.   Its Father is the Sun. Its Mother is the Moon. The Wind has carried it in his Belly. Its Nourishment is the Earth. It is the Father of every completed Thing in the whole World. Its Strength is intact if it is turned towards the Earth. Separate the Earth by Fire: the fine from the gross, gently, and with great skill.   It rises from Earth to Heaven, and then it descends again to the Earth, and receives Power from Above and from Below. Thus you will have the Glory of the whole World. All Obscurity will be clear to you. This is the strong Power of all Power because it overcomes everything fine and penetrates everything solid.   In this way was the World created. From this there will be amazing Applications, because this is the Pattern. Therefore am I called Thrice Greatest Hermes, having the three parts of the Wisdom of the whole World.   Herein have I completely explained the Operation of the Sun.

 

There were two sides to the work of the alchemists. The practical side (operatio) involved actual experimentation, and genuine scientific discoveries were made. This is the origin of the modern chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The other side of the coin was the amplificatio, or theoretical alchemy, referred to as Hermetic Philosophy. A well-known quotation is, “tam ethice quam physice”, “as much ethical as physical”. This is the area which relates most closely to analytical psychology.

 

The method of creating the philosopher’s stone (lapis) is a colourisation process, during which the base material (prima materia) is subject to chemical changes. The alchemists carried out real experiments, were familiar with a range of chemicals, and also discovered a few new ones. Sulphur[6] "the stone that burns," was crucial. It was known from prehistoric times in native deposits and was also given off in metallurgic processes (the "roasting" of sulphide ores). Mercury unites with most of the other metals, and the amalgam formed coloured powders (the sulphides[7]) when treated with sulphur. Mercury itself occurs in nature in a bright red sulphide, cinnabar[8]. All of these were operations known to the metallurgist and were adopted by the alchemist.

 

The alchemist added the action on metals of a number of corrosive salts, mainly vitriols[9] (copper and iron sulphates), alums[10] (the aluminium sulphates of potassium and ammonium), and the chlorides of sodium and ammonium. And he made much of arsenic's property of colouring metals. All of these materials, except chloride of ammonia, were known in ancient times. It was to be crucial to alchemy, for on sublimation[11] it dissociates into antagonistic corrosive materials, ammonia and hydrochloric acid, which readily attack the metals.

 

Finally, the manipulation of these materials was to lead to the discovery of the mineral acids[12], the history of which began in Europe in the 13th century. The first was probably nitric acid[13], made by distilling together saltpetre (potassium nitrate) and vitriol or alum. More difficult to discover was sulphuric acid, which was distilled from vitriol or alum alone but required apparatus resistant to corrosion and heat. And most difficult was hydrochloric acid, distilled from common salt or sal ammoniac and vitriol or alum, for the vapours of this acid cannot be simply condensed but must be dissolved in water.

They also had their own equipment, such as alembic (Arabic al ambiq = still), used for distillation, aludel (Arabic) used for sublimation, and athanor[14] (Arabic at-tannur = furnace) to incubate the egg-shaped Hermetic vessel, to preserve a constant heat over long periods.

 

The alchemists split up the opus into stages, and these were based on colours: black, white, yellow and red.

 

 

Sometimes citrinitas is omitted from later texts. Some alchemists give nigredo as the start of the opus, but I disagree and feel it’s quite an advanced stage. Also some writers give albedo as the end of the work, whereas others go on to the rubedo. There isn’t a lot of agreement about how the opus should be done. The three main colours, black, white and red can be found elsewhere in religion and myth. Robert Graves attributes these to the White Goddess as regards the phases of the moon:

 

 

In addition to the three or four colours were several others stages, to describe the whole opus. The total number of stages was usually seven or twelve, though there isn’t a lot of consistency in their descriptions. But these follow and amplify the pattern set out originally in the “Emerald Tablet”:

 

 

If the “Emerald Tablet” is correct, then it follows that these stages apply to a base material such as lead, and also to the human personality. Alchemy is a symbolic account of the integration of the human psyche.

 

The transformation of the base material was made possible by the Rotation of the Elements, a cyclical process which brings the four elements into play. As each element is made up of two qualities, changing a quality changes the element. This is made easier by the fact that adjacent elements have qualities in common:

 

Rotation of the Elements
Element	Qualities		Result
Fire	Hot	Dry	Separation
Earth	Dry	Cold	Rigidity
Water	Cold	Moist	Association
Air	Moist	Hot	Fluidity

 

Rotation is caused by the tension of opposites, primarily heat. The most common rotation is: earth to water by melting or dissolving in a solvent; water to air by boiling; air to fire by further heating; fire to earth by condensing vapours onto a solid. Thus the essence of each element is combined, in an ever-decreasing spiral, until a central point is reached, the quintessence. This combines all elements and qualities:

 

At first glance, the stage which perhaps correlates most easily to a process within the psyche is separatio. Does this not refer to a spiritual awakening, with the spirit breaking free from earthly bonds, into a state of ethereal bliss? It’s important to note that this experience, so lauded by mystics and religious, is only the third stage in the process. There are at least four more stages to be undergone before producing the elixir.

 

If we take separatio in this way as a point of reference, then the two preceding steps, calicinatio and solutio can then be seen as the necessary purgative and purifying processes for attaining some of sort of spiritual awakening. “Until all be made water perform no operation”.

 

After the separatio, in our lab we have the remnants of the original prima materia, heated, blackened, soluble, with its ‘spirit’ soaring to the top of the vessel. And on the other hand we have the human psyche, split into body and spirit. This is where alchemy diverges from the religious or mystical approach. The religious point of view is that after initial difficulties the spirit ascends into an ethereal sphere, ‘per ardua as astra’, but the alchemical view is that the ascension is followed by a fall. The alchemical journey has only just begun.

 

The next stage, coniunctio, is really what defines alchemy. For this step is a marriage which brings about the reunification of formerly separated opposites. Back in the lab, it entails combining fiery Sulphur ‘fixing’ watery Mercury. Within the psyche this is taken to mean the joining together of solar and lunar consciousness, spirit and soul, and is symbolised by several types of pairs: gold/silver, unicorn/stag, wolf/dog, but is usually referred to as the Conjunction of Sun and Moon (Coniunctio Solis et Lunae). It’s the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ part of the opus, and it’s my opinion that this is brought about by the love between man and woman. In the opus the masculine spirit and feminine soul are attracted to one another, and in human terms this comes about by projection. A man projects his feminine soul onto a woman, a woman projects her masculine spirit onto a man, and they fall in love. In the Middle Ages some of the illustrations for this stage were quite explicit, notably the “Rosarium Philosophorum”, which shows a couple embracing. Again differing from the prevailing medieval attitude, the opus couldn’t be achieved in a monastery or nunnery, it was for real people leading normal lives.

 

A point to note. The lovers are usually depicted as brother and sister[15], as shown in the illustration from Maier, a motif which turns up in the myth of Osiris and Isis.

 

But just as in “Romeo and Juliet”, true love brings about a death, and the product of the union of Sun and Moon dies. The combined soul and spirit sinks into the abyss of the physical. This stage is known as the nigredo, mortificatio or putrefactio, and significantly we have to go outside the Christian tradition to find mythical equivalents, such as Theseus descending into Hades to rescue Persephone – where he gets trapped and has to be rescued by Hercules.

 

 There are two illustrations to show this stage. The first one[16] shows a none-too-happy alchemist sitting in a hole in the earth. The stars are the seven planets. The two birds in flight are doves, birds of Aphrodite, representing the exhaled soul and spirit. The black bird at the bottom is a crow or raven, showing that this is the domain of Saturn, whose glyph represents the dominance of matter over the soul. The raven has a long association with Saturn. The nigredo is the ‘dark night of the soul’, a soul-less state, and is an extremely dangerous and difficult phase.

The other illustration[17] shows more clearly the death of the lovers after the conjunction. The ‘grim reaper’ figure on the right must be Saturn:

 

So we now have the prerequisites for the magical stone and integrated psyche. The Mercury/Sulphur amalgam, and the soul/spirit subsumed by the physical.

 

After the nigredo, which was supposed to last for forty days, comes resurrection, a quickening brought about by a baptism or washing (ablutio). This is performed by a magical water (aqua permanens) preceded by a fall of dew. The illustration[18] for this comes from the “Rosarium” (woodcut 15), and depicts the union of the marriage as a two-headed hermaphrodite figure about to be cleansed by rain from heaven. This is reminiscent of the Osiris-Isis myth, when Isis gathers the dismembered corpse of her husband and washes it with her tears. The aqua permanens is connected with salt and seawater.

 

 According to the Treatise of Ostanes[19]:

 

“This divine water makes the dead living and the living dead, it lights the darkness and darkens the light…”

 

A synthesis now starts to take place, as the fragmented elements within the psyche become energised and united. This is quite a violent time as the reborn consciousness tries to regain the ascendancy it lost when it sank into the body. Unconscious complexes must be awakened and then assimilated into consciousness. The personal unconscious, the shadow must be conquered. A pair joined together, such as winged and wingless dragons, or the ouroboros depicts this phase.

 

This merging is known as the peacock’s tail[20] (cauda pavonis). The eyes on the peacock’s tail graphically portray an unconscious come alive. It also reminds me of the wonderful dream sequence in Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound [21], directed by Salvador Dali.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the fragmented psyche is finally one, the uniting of all the ‘colours’ of the psyche brings about the albedo, by which the white stone is produced. Some alchemists see this as the end of the opus. This is daybreak after a very dark night, at which point soul and spirit have become joined to an incorruptible body. But there is one more stage, the rubedo, sunrise, by which the red tincture is produced. This can then be projected onto base metals and transform them into gold.

 

The alchemists of medieval Europe were very familiar with astrological usage, and knew about synchronicity. The opus is to be performed at certain fixed, symbolic times. The first is from Michael Maier[22], who was a Rosicrucian:

 

1.      “The umbra solis [Sun’s shadow] cannot be destroyed unless the sun enters the sign of Cancer”.

 

2.      “The first work towards the redness [coniunctio] should end in the second house of Venus”[23].

 

So it appears that Maier worked out that solar (male) consciousness creates a shadow, which can be integrated when the Sun enters the Moon’s sign. And the writer of the Arcanum refers to a marriage which, quite rightly, takes place in Libra.

 

Trees have long been associated with myth. Jung considers the tree a natural archetypal symbol of spiritual growth within the human psyche. In Norse myth there was Yggdrasil, an ash-tree which was the chief sanctuary of the gods, where they held their daily court. Its branches spread out over the whole world and reached up over heaven. Odin was reputed to have received wisdom whilst suspended from the ash. This could be a fitting image of the solutio, as the consciousness has been inverted, and must fight to regain its ascendancy. In Druid lore the oak was considered sacred, as it was a host for mistletoe, ‘the golden bough’.

 

The alchemists too used trees to symbolise the opus. This illustration[24] shows the arbor philosophica (philosophical tree) with the stages of the opus ascending to the top and the sought-for stone (lapis). These stages are not quite the same as in the table above, but the diagram shows the split into corpus (body) and anima (spirit). This split is then followed by the union brought about by the matrimonium coeleste, which is in turn followed by putrefactio before the creation of the stone.

 

 

In conclusion, alchemy has had a very influential past, but does it have a future? I’d say that it doesn’t in its medieval form, despite attempts to bring it back to life. It’s rather male-orientated, though there were certainly female alchemists, and that goes against the spirit of the times. We seem to be creating a new religion at the moment, which is a mixture of several inputs, and no-one knows what the final blend is going to be, or if it ever will reach a conclusion. But alchemy could and should be a major strand in this development. Its roots go back to classical times and beyond, and it offers a spiritual and psychological model for growth which surpasses anything the West has at present. It deserves to be understood and re-integrated into our culture.

 

Suggested Reading

 

Jung, Carl Gustav (1967) Alchemical Studies

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press and London: Routledge & Keagan Paul

 

Jung, Carl Gustav (1963) Mysterium Coniunctionis

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press and London: Routledge & Keagan Paul

 

Jung, Carl Gustav (1954) Practice of Psychotherapy, The

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press and London: Routledge & Keagan Paul

 

Jung, Carl Gustav (1953) Psychology and Alchemy

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press and London: Routledge & Keagan Paul

 

Von Franz, Marie-Louise (1980) Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology

Toronto: Inner City Books

 

Robert Stokes

1^st July, 2001