V.3

On the Art of the Hermetic Philosophers

In the present study we intend to shed light on the principles of the system of spiritual science contained in the Hermetic Tradition—in the limited sense of this term by which we refer to alchemical Hermetism. Its currents are various, but they stem from a single trunk, ramifying here and there through the half-light of the Middle Ages, then descending more resolutely to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Some “cultivated” people will surely be taken aback by this simple statement, in which we join the concept of alchemy with that of a “spiritual science.” Nowadays, they will say, we know very well what alchemy is: modern chemistry in its infantile and mythological state. Certainly it had its value in preparing the experimental method. It also arrived at a certain knowledge of chemistry, obtained fortuitously through all sorts of experiments made in pursuit of the chimera of “transmutation.” Through some happy intuition it even anticipated certain truths that our modern science seems to confirm. But that is all. It is inconceivable that “spiritual science” could have anything in common with alchemy, and that any serious person could be interested in the latter from anything but a historical point of view, regarding it as the old and now dead trunk from which modern chemistry has “evolved.”

Such, more or less, is the current opinion of alchemy: an opinion that flagrantly displays the progressivist mentality, which has no doubt that the light of true knowledge only began to shine today, with modern European civilization. All the rest remains an uncertain twilight, an “evolutionary stage” now surpassed, with no value beyond having contributed to the advent of that light. We do not intend to dwell here on the naïvety and bias of this way of thinking. It would take too long to explain it, and there would be little hope of any result. One would need the staunch faith of someone who thought that a person wearing red lenses, and refusing to take them off, could be made to see green.

It is only natural that the modern mentality, which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of a knowledge different from its own, finds it difficult to conceive of a traditional spiritual science behind the strange remnants of alchemy. The same applies to astrology, magic, and other “obsolete” sciences. What is less natural, and much less “scientific,” is to take no account of the precise statements of the texts, which should at least make one consider the matter to be more complex that one had supposed. Keeping only to our present subject, which is alchemy, the old authors never tired of repeating, in every key, that their expressions were not to be taken literally; the metals and other substances they spoke of were not the visible ones known to the profane; their “fire,” for example, is a “fire that does not burn,” nor does their “water” wet the hands—and so on, in an endless stream of such sayings. Braccesco says it outright: “Do not be deceived, nor believe literally what the Philosophers say in this science, because where they have spoken most openly, there they have spoken most obscurely, either in enigmas or by analogy.”¹He adds that “what the Wise have said by similitude or analogy, many take literally and find themselves deceived.”²

Schroeder says the same: “When the philosophers speak frankly, I mistrust their words; when they explain themselves through enigmas, I reflect.” Artefio is positively drastic in addressing the reader: “Poor idiot!” he exclaims, “are you so simple as to believe that we are teaching you the most important secrets openly and clearly, and to take our words literally? I assure you that anyone who tries to explain what the Philosophers write through the ordinary and literal sense of the words will find himself caught in a labyrinth with no way out . . . and all the money he spends on experiments will be thrown away.”³

We could fill pages and pages with such declarations, embarrassed only by the choice. We doubt that they would comfort the opinion of those who, holding on to appearances, reduce alchemy to the infancy of chemistry. And suspicion would only increase when in the middle of an alchemical treatise, it is said, for example, that the subtle substance to be extracted from the “earth” is the soul; when what has to be heated in the “stone” to complete the operation is the “occult spirit of the world”;⁴ when someone does not hesitate to relate the alchemical world to the “magical world of the Heroes”;⁵ when one suddenly reads that by “Sulfur of the Wise” or “living Gold” one should understand the will;⁶ when it called a “true resurrection of the glorified body” when a purified “metallic soul” is returned to its body;⁷ when, miracle of miracles! among the gifts of the stinking “Sulfur” to him who can liberate it are the cosmic vision, immortality, and prophetic knowledge;⁸ when we come across alchemical terms spontaneously occurring in mystical-metaphysical systems, like Jacob Boehme’s, or therapeutic-magical ones, like Paracelsus’s and Agrippa’s; or find those terms mixed up with Templar and Rosicrucian elements and persisting in the symbolism and rituals of secret societies whose original initiatic character is beyond doubt; lastly, when we discover that the descriptions of operations that should be simply chemical are continually interspersed with references to divinities, to inner illumination, to spiritual dignity.

It seems all too convenient, considering the quantity of elements in the Hermetic-alchemical literature that are manifestly unintelligible through the chemical interpretation, to dispose of them by the simple recourse to mystification, to camouflage, or to the “mystical mentality.” Admittedly, this literature contains passages when one least expects them in which the jargon of chemical formulae and manipulations, complete with figures and dosages, surrounds a perfect void, for the evident purpose of disconcerting and disorienting the unknowing reader. But if we consider that from the moment when it was preached to Western peoples that “the Wisdom of this world is folly,” a holy zeal stopped at nothing to save the Wise from their folly, even by means of the flames of a fire more consuming than the “philosophic fire,” and less gentle than those that Christians picturesquely show around the heart of Jesus! When we consider that, we can understand why those guardians of a science, secret by its very nature, took pains to multiply their ruses and expedients, the better to misdirect those zealous for their “salvation.”

However, even when this element is taken into account, there remains in the alchemical literature a very wide margin of nonsense, of absurdities and loose ends. It may be useful here to employ a method similar to that which Valli applied to the secret language of the so-called “Fedeli d’Amore”:⁹ to try assuming a different standpoint from the usual one, even merely as a working hypothesis, and to see if things appear in a different mode: in this case, to see if a different conception from that of historians of chemistry succeeds in shedding some gleam of intelligibility on the inextricable and impracticable forest of alchemical terminology.

In questions of this kind we have little trust in the efficacy of arguments when the listener lacks a certain openness to points of view differing from his preconceptions, yet we believe that the preceding may already induce him to entertain the possibility that alchemy is not only what modern historians of science think of it. We are not denying that alchemy also contains that chemical aspect, and that in that regard—though there alone—the contemporary opinion of it and of its relationship to modern chemistry is approximately correct. But what entirely escapes the moderns is the sense of that aspect in relation to the whole of alchemy, to genuine alchemy.

When this “sense” is understood, one also realizes that the truth is the opposite to the evolutionists’ conception: namely, that modern chemistry is not the “evolution” of ancient alchemy, but a monstrous excrescence from it, which has “proceeded” from it not through “evolution” but through degeneration. This is the proper term for any unilateral development (no matter how perfect in its own quality) of a part separated from its whole, which acts as though it were the whole and absorbs or obscures the rest. Guénon is absolutely right when he says:

Genuine alchemy was essentially a science belonging to the cosmological order, and at the same time it was also applicable to the human order, by virtue of the analogy between the “macrocosm” and the “microcosm”; furthermore, it was constituted particularly with a view to allowing of a transposition into the purely spiritual realm, which lent a symbolical value and a higher significance to its teaching, placing it among the most complete types of “traditional sciences.” It is not from this alchemy, with which, as a matter of fact, it has nothing in common, that modern chemistry has sprung; modern chemistry is a corruption and, in the strictest sense of the word, a deviation having its origin, perhaps as early as the Middle Ages, in a lack of understanding on the part of persons who, from incapacity to penetrate the true meaning of the symbols used, took everything literally and launched out into a more or less confused experimentalism on the supposition that alchemy was purely and simply a question of material manipulations. These people, sarcastically referred to by the alchemist as “blowers” and “charcoal burners,” were the real forerunners of the chemists of today.¹⁰

One may retort that this is a big leap. In fact, it can be nothing else. Even if it were possible to persuade the historian of chemistry that there is a region in alchemy before which he must hold back—if only out of methodological prudence—to demonstrate that this empty region is in fact filled by spiritual science, and to explain what this science is about, implies an utter discontinuity that we honestly admit, and which corresponds exactly to the hiatus separating the profane mentality from the initiatic mentality.

We have said that the very notion of a traditional science as a holistic entity has been lost today. To avoid complications, let us keep to our subject. On the margins of “official culture” there are some milieus in which alchemy is interpreted in a purely moral, ideal, and lately even a psychoanalytic sense. They think that Hermetic-alchemical terminology has none but a symbolic value, not suspecting that a real aspect can coexist with it. Thus they reduce it all to complicated transcriptions of certain doctrines of regeneration and salvation. If this is so, its use of such difficult jargon is as inexplicable as it was when treating purely chemical operations, given that we find analogous doctrines expounded at the same time and place without any veil of mystery and even within an orthodox Catholic context.

In another sense, such an interpretation is as unilateral as the chemical one, and misses the essential character of every initiatic teaching, which is to have a real aspect and a symbolic aspect at the same time, sympathetically and “magically.” An initiatic teaching in its highest aspect has a metaphysical and “formless” character, with a value beyond any particular application. At the same time it indicates points at which, thanks to analogous correspondences, meanings and laws from different planes come together. The realization of such a teaching in a spiritual act gathers these planes into a synthesis from which one can arrive at distinct systems relative to each particular domain, whether from the point of view of knowledge or of action.

We have no more to say about the alchemy that is nothing but the caprices of “charcoal burners.” However, beyond that, a physical alchemy does exist, in the sense of the physical application of alchemy. In other words, traditional science can be adapted to furnish an effective and determinative knowledge of the forces at work behind physiochemical phenomena, giving rise to a special art applied to this or that combination or transformation of substances. Thus alchemy can arrive at the place where the world of modern chemistry begins, but it arrives from elsewhere, and even while it treats the same phenomena, they have another meaning and value altogether. The method of this science is the contrary of empirical observation: it works by identification, by the meeting of inner and outer, of the intellectual and the real.¹¹ Thus we can say that while modern chemistry is merely “physics,” alchemy is simultaneously “physics” and metaphysics. And in speaking of “physics,” we mean something that also contains the possibiity of apprehending forces and influences which also act in man’s psychic and organic reality: a knowledge susceptible in its turn of various practical applications. Hermetism is in essence this transposition of the re[g]al¹² alchemical science of combinations and transmutatations that enables the latter to work on the equally re[g]al plane of the integrative work, of the initiatic transmutation of the human being, based on the ontological and magical analogies and correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm. And it is on this plane that alchemy is one with the Royal Art.

Given this, it is natural that explanations such as those of alchemical Hermetism may, and also must be taken in diverse senses; but these senses are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. They tend rather to lead the spirit to something that transcends language and signs, and constitutes a wholeness of knowledge, a re[g]al and essential knowledge. The substances, operations, and transmutations mentioned in alchemy are then interpreted in the literal sense as referring to natural substances and forces, yet also in the magical sense, and in the symbolic-initiatic sense.

Concerning the principles that make it possible to frame the expressions of the Hermetic philosophers and give them a sufficiently precise meaning, one may well ask how far we are imagining them, and how far they were known to the various authors while compiling the texts. There are arguments to dispel such doubts, but we fear that they are not likely to convince so-called “critical spirits.”

One of these is direct evidence. If someone does not merely read the texts, but undertakes what is needed to start the initiatic mutation of his own consciousness, he will find that on encountering traditional symbolic expressions he sees instantly that their meaning is such, and can be nothing else. From that moment, the words and signs speak to him in a language that leaves no possible doubt.¹³ And others who have trodden the same path will arrive at the same evidence, just as all who study algebra find themselves understanding algebraic symbols in the same way. But let us not be under any illusions: such arguments are only valid for those who have made the “leap,” or at least are disposed to do so.

For their part, the alchemical authors are unanimous in asserting the impenetrability of their science, whose expositions, some say, are as though written for themselves alone; consequently they are only intelligible by those who have received illumination from God or from a Master. For example, Nicolas Flamel (chap. II), explaining the symbolic figures in the Cemetery of the Innocents, says precisely: “The philosophers have written their ideas solely for those who already know the principles, which are not to be found in any book, because they leave it to God who only reveals it to whom it pleases him, or has it taught by the voice of a Master through cabbalistic tradition [i.e., orally].” It is an understanding of principles, moreover, whose secret is a transformation of consciousness, and whose way is therefore essentially practical. Thus the alchemist Synesius, after repeating that the Hermetic philosophers speak so as to be understood only by those who have the knowledge, says:¹⁴ “Still, in their works they have pointed out a certain way and prescribed certain rules with which a wise one can understand what they have written occultly, and attain the goal that they propose, even if after falling into certain errors, as happened in my own case.”¹⁵ This is generally valid for any transcendent knowledge and any initiatic “mystery.” In this context, we will move on to two special considerations, one regarding the general technical value of symbols, the other the meaning of the Hermetic-alchemical form taken by the esoteric tradition in the West.

Concerning the first point, one of the principal causes of the disconcerting aspect of symbolism, especially ideographic, is the obstinate insistence on a way of understanding that, far from being the only possible one, is completely unsuited to this domain: the presumption of reducing everything to rational understanding, whereas esoteric teaching always calls on faculties other than pure rationality, and neither can nor should express itself in terms that satisfy the rationalist.

The symbol has the same place in esoteric knowledge as the concept in rational and logical knowledge. The basic technical justification for using symbols (and especially graphic ones) can be stated thus: to train the spirit to understand through seeing rather than through thinking, bypassing the intermediary of the brain (which for integral knowledge is not so much an intermediary as a neutralizer) and the discursive, rational formulation to which today’s “educated man” is habituated.

Oswald Wirth has rightly called Hermetic philosophy a philosophy of silence. “Our ambition,” he writes, “is to train the reader to connect his thought not to words, in the scholasic manner, but to silent figures, graphic emblems, symbols and ideograms. All the initiatic schools combine meditation on the elements of a symbolism rich in meaning with a philosophy of silence,”¹⁶ as a way to escape the tyranny of words—whether pronounced or thought of—which have become the only currency accepted by modern intellectuality.

The symbol offers no footholds to reason (no one is further from understanding it than he who complicates it with labored philosophizing). If comprehension is to occur, other faculties must come into play: faculties in which, to a certain extent, understanding is simultaneously seeing and “realizing.” If one cannot block the path by which knowledge rushes in as a series of thoughts formulated by the brain into words, hence having a merely discursive and communicative value, one will certainly get nothing from the treasury of esoteric wisdom. The symbolism in which this wisdom has always been clothed thus preserves its purity, at the same time as it guarantees the liberty of the individual.

In this regard, it is important to note that the symbol, unlike an argument that seeks to convince or “constrictive” reasoning, does not impose itself. It allows the individual his independence. It does not speak, except when one wants to make it speak with an internal act, in silence, in an active rapport, so to speak, of the “alone with the alone.” The very sense that the word “hermetic” still has in common parlance (hermetic style, a hermetic person, etc.) shows how this general law of every initiatic teaching has been followed by the expositions of those who call themselves the “Sons of Hermes.”

In connection with that, one should consider the role that traditional myth plays in alchemical Hermetism. The point of view here is that it is one form in which esoteric teaching has been preserved and secretly transmitted, even in its operative aspects.

Braccesco, for example, also says: “The Ancients have concealed this science [of resurrecting the ‘Wood of Life’] under poetic fables, and have spoken by similitude”;¹⁷ and even more explicitly: “He who has no knowledge of this science cannot know the intention of the Ancients, and what they chose to signify by the many names of gods and by their generation, loves, and metamorphoses; nor even think that they have hidden moral matters in those fables.”¹⁸ This point of view is corroborated by a host of Hermetic authors, notably Pernety and Della Riviera. Apart from a sporadic and secondary use of Christian mythology, they refer essentially to classical pagan mythology.