Transcription
More than any of the other occult sciences, alchemy continues to inspire and allure. From popular culture to video games, contemporary spirituality, and even a recent and pretty significant renewed interest by academics of various fields, alchemy, with its mysterious personages, its symbolisms, and its promise of radical transformation, has become virtually synonymous with hermetic philosophy and esoteric spirituality.
However, the study of alchemy itself is undergoing a profound re-evaluation, and we are currently right now in the midst of a paradigm shift in our understanding of its history, purpose, and historical evolution. Emerging from the quasi-vitalist interpretation of Mircea Eliade, the psychologizing interpretation of Carl Jung, both of which are marked by a profoundly ahistorical approach to the topic, a new position has emerged, referred to as the new historiography of alchemy, which attempts to locate alchemical theory and practice precisely as a historically developing theory of nature and natural transformation.
However, and very much witnessed by the comments on every single alchemy video I do, is the same resounding question by most interested in alchemy: "But what about the spiritual dimension of alchemy? Isn't alchemy really about inner or spiritual transformation?" In this episode, the first of several that are going to be part of a series, I'm going to be exploring just that question: the origins and development of the spiritual alchemical tradition in Europe. If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, Kabbalah, or the history of the occult, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my numerous other content in esotericism, including curated playlists. Also, if you want to support this work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube for free, I'd hope you make that possible by supporting my work over at Patreon with a one-time donation, with the Super Thanks option, or picking up a cool shirt over at our merch store on the channel.
But now, let's turn to the origins of spiritual alchemy in the European tradition. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
[Music]
[Music]
Alright, before turning to the origins of spiritual alchemy in Europe, we should first discuss a bit about the pre-European history of the concept, and a bit about how the history of alchemy has been interpreted in the past few hundred years. These are both going to have a bearing on the whole topic of spiritual alchemy, so let's cover each of those in turn.
First, this episode is going to be restricted to European alchemy from its introduction in the 12th century, on February the 11th, 1144, February the 11th, around here, Alchemy Day, just FYI, to the decline of laboratory alchemy through the 18th century and the transition to modern chemistry on the one hand, and alchemy understood as a mystical or quasi-psychological practice on the other. Not that these two were ever absolutely separated, and that's especially true in the French occult tradition.
But learned students of alchemy will be quick to note: "What about the spiritual elements of the alchemical practices of Zosimus, for instance? Or the esoteric spirituality of the alchemists in the Baghdad Islamic Gibberian circles?" Well, those existed, and the Neoplatonic/Hermetic alchemy of Zosimus definitely did have an impact in Islamic alchemy, though to be honest, that impact isn't clearly understood to this day. In fact, the manuscript history and transmission history from the Greek to the Arabic alchemical context is really only now in its infancy, and we just now have a rough idea about how many manuscripts, for instance, of Zosimos appear in the Islamic world.
Secondly, and more to the point, what we do know is that the transmission from Arabic to Latin largely did not. It did not include these more Neoplatonic, Hermetic, philosophical, speculative elements in the texts that were part of the early translation movement. There, mostly in the 12th century, mostly because Christians were interested in just the technical literature, and as Christians, they didn't, they didn't want to have it mucked up with all that Hermeticism stuff. We should never forget also, by the way, that texts like Aristotle's Meteorology were incredibly popular, and virtually all of the alchemical literature that passed from Arabic to Latin was almost purely technical in nature, with its philosophical elements stemming almost certainly and primarily from the Islamic Aristotelian milieu, rather than the Neoplatonic Hermetic ones typically found in the old alchemists of the late classical world. Here, I'm thinking mostly of Zosimus.
Now, of course, names like Bezosi, Moves, Hermistry, Mcgeister, Zoroaster, Ostani's, Maria the Jew, Cleopatra the Alchemist, not that Cleopatra, these are all name-dropped in a variety of these texts like the Turbo Philosophy Forum. But the philosophy under the hood of almost all of these texts, virtually all of them, is strictly Islamic Aristotelian. That is to say, the exhalation theory and the mercury-sulfur theory of the metals developed in the Islamic world. You won't find much of the Divine Waters theory, for instance, found in Zosimus.
So, while you might point to texts of Zosimus as a precursor of spiritual alchemy in Europe, the actual text and spiritual philosophy of Zosimus were virtually unknown in Europe until they were published in French in the 19th century, with perhaps some very indirect influence from the Book of Pictures, which is still really debated by experts. Thus, the kind of heavy Neoplatonic, Hermetic, philosophical elements of Alexandrian alchemy, again, Zosimus was basically, it was basically unknown to the entirety of the European alchemical tradition for the virtual 800 years of its existence. And to just crack open the largest compilation of European alchemy contemporary to the actual practice of alchemy ever produced, the six-volume monumental Theatrum Chemicum, with its puny little English appendix, the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, which most people know because there are chunks of it in English, it's filled with hundreds of alchemical texts, and you'll scarcely find anything to contemporary conceptions of spiritual alchemy, especially the way that it appears in the New Age or New Think movement. The potential exception to that being the early Paracelsian and Gerhard Dorn to be found in volume 1 of Theatrum Chemicum, but we'll come back to him shortly, though I would say that that owes more to his own Maverick intellect than to his inheritance of previous Hermetic speculations. And of course, European alchemists employed a range of metaphors and symbolisms of human gestation and transformation for alchemical changes that were, that were just that, they were metaphors and symbols.
Further, medieval alchemists did sometimes emphasize the moral character of the alchemist in the furtherance of transmutation, but so did every other craft. That's not at all unique to alchemical literature. It's just, just true for brewing manuals, linen production, and smithery manuals of the time. And frankly, that was just good press for alchemy, making themselves look real righteous, because just as they were often thought of as alchemists, they were thought of as frauds at best and conjurers at worst throughout most of the Middle Ages. And again, this was the Christian Middle Ages, and all success and failure in life was due, well, at least in significant part, to God bestowing blessings upon a person's work because of their good Christian standing.
And further, some, but definitely not all, alchemical texts engaged in significant, prolonged allegories of the transmutational process. But again, allegory was just a standard trope of medieval literature, including what we might now call to all the branches of medieval science. I even had allegories of things like geography. Again, that's none of that's unique to alchemy. Thus, what most people take to be the spiritual element of European alchemy was just, it was just part and parcel of how medieval and early modern Christians thought and wrote generally. It was a literary conceit, not a theory of change, and certainly not them hiding much of anything. And it's striking us as strange or esoteric, certainly doesn't automatically make it mystical by any stretch of the imagination.
So, the mistaken view that European alchemists were primarily interested in an inner or spiritual transformation, rather than a theory for understanding and transforming nature, especially transforming metals and mineral compounds, is honestly, it's mostly a lack in our understanding of medieval and early modern technical literature. But it is also motivated significantly, inspired by a misinformed 19th century and 20th century revisionism of what alchemy was in the first place. Then, to grasp that, we need to discuss the historiography, or the history of how something, in this case, the history of how alchemy was told, how that history developed at all.
Now, even by the 17th century, alchemy was undergoing enormous shifts of its fundamental aims, especially beginning in Central Europe. Increasingly, alchemists were were professionalizing. They were bound by legal contracts to do what they said they could do, and they were shifting their aims from the ever-elusive metallic transmutations to other aims, such as improving or separation and mining precious metal assaying, and the early industrial production of chemicals like potassium nitrate, saltpeter, it's a chief component in gunpowder. Turns out gunpowder is a more reliable means of actually getting gold and silver than mucking about trying to make a philosopher's stone.
Further, in other regions of Europe, the avant-garde Paracelsian movement, with its renegade emphasis on experimentation, can you believe that? Experimentation and personal observation rather than appeal to authority, which was how medieval science basically operated up to that point. No, no, no matter how sacred or ancient or mysterious, were niching down in precisely those experiments and escaping the centuries-old theory of the exhalations that we find in Aristotle's Meteorology and the sulfur-mercury theory of the minerals and matter. In fact, avant-garde alchemists were laying siege to what had been the very theoretical and practical foundations of alchemy itself.
The alchemists were tearing alchemy apart. French alchemists were revealing that air, you know, earth, air, fire, and water, that air wasn't a homogeneous thing, and thus not elemental in any sense. There's Boyle over there in England speculating that invisible corpuscles of various species might explain the diversity of the elements. And further, emergent capitalism and the industrial need for high-quality, pure, and systematically produced substances and procedures, like, you know, sulfuric acid, propelled a purely practical shift in alchemical concerns more generally.
Thus, by the 1720s or so, these laboratory alchemists, somewhere between alchemist and modern chemists, began to publicly denigrate those that still labored under the old medieval exhalation theory, the mercury-sulfur theory, or even the kind of newer salt-sulfur-mercury theory of the Paracelsians, who were justifying these beliefs basically out of appeals to authority or secret esoteric talk that never produced results. These were alchemists calling out other alchemists for hiding behind esoteric secrets, "and you don't know what I really know, and I'm really an adept." It was a call to say, "If you can do these things, do them. But if you can't, go play somewhere else."
And to be honest, this shouldn't be surprising. These avant-garde alchemists, post-alchemists, chemists with a 'y', or transitional chemists, everybody you want to call them, had done more to unlock the secrets of nature and reliably transform it in 50 years than nearly 800 years of alchemical toil and speculation through the Middle Ages. Now, that's not to say that the alchemists had accomplished nothing. That's certainly not true. But they had labored under a fundamentally wrong theory of nature, and despite their real experimental developments, which we should give them all the credit to, they still clung to tradition and appeals to authority. They hid behind jargon, and they appealed to the esoteric above all, even and especially when contradicted by repeated experimental failures and dead ends.
Thus, given the meteoric success of early alchemical chemistry, which again, I want to reiterate, was originally led by avant-garde alchemists, especially Paracelsians, and the rise of Enlightenment values more generally, the alchemists of the Middle Ages, the alchemists of old, were increasingly disparaged as backwards, degenerate vestiges of a time of intellectual super-religious superstition and the general darkness of medieval nonsense. And with the success of the new sciences, as they were called then, as opposed to the old science of Aristotle, which was inclusive, really, of alchemy in so many ways, the theory and practice of the alchemical arts came to be, well, it came to be cast into the trash bin of pseudoscience. And thus, it basically lay for nearly 200 years.
The exception to the story is going to be the history and development of spiritual alchemy, beginning sometime early in the 17th century, but we're going to circle back to that in just a moment. However, this situation would somewhat turn around in the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, where both the sorcerer and the alchemist were largely fused, despite the continuous protestations of the latter that they were not sorcerers. Through the Middle Ages, especially given the acrimonious history of the art versus nature debate that plagued alchemy through the Middle Ages, of course, despite the technological, theoretical, and even political successes of the Enlightenment, you know, rights, it came with social upheaval, with cities that were slums, the disruption of traditional life for better and for worse. And this all led to a romantic view of the medieval past by people who didn't have to live in it.
While the character of the alchemist was starting to undergo the process of romantic rehabilitation from the pseudoscientists to holding long-lost occult secrets of life and nature, you could think of Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein as being part of this rehabilitation, although Frankenstein himself was an insufferable jackass. Actual knowledge of alchemy and how to understand actual historical alchemical texts, it was effectively lost by the Romantic period. Thus, our understanding of the actual theories and practices of historical alchemy during this period were mostly fanciful and speculative, in the same way that Renaissance people tried to figure out how hieroglyphics worked by thinking it meant like "birds, squiggly line, dog," and it was into this lack of historical understanding that ahistorical speculation about the nature of medieval and pre-modern alchemy thrived. They didn't know any better; they just made up stuff.
The most famous examples of those being the Romanian-born scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, and the Swiss-born psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. For Eliade, alchemical texts were expressions of a perennial inner mystical or spiritual quest of the alchemist, encoded in symbolic language beyond logic and language, and were inherently nonsensical at some level. They were mystical expressions, not code for something else. For Jung, alchemical texts and their laboratory experimentations, which puts doing a little better than Eliade, were essentially projections of the psychological processes going on within the mind of the alchemist, especially that of their own psychological individuation and modernity. In fact, in his famous, infamous 1946 article in Ambix, this was the academic journal concerned with the study of alchemy and chemistry at that time, still, he declared all of alchemy to be a museum of projections that should be treated by psychoanalysis and not by chemists. Thus, alchemy was worthy of serious study, but because it revealed data about psychology and psychological development.
Now, as profoundly misguided as this was, it did at least open up alchemy as a field worthy of scholarly analysis, rather than just being the waste bin of pseudoscience as it had been previously. And for 40 or so years, Eliade and Jung's "Alchemy as an ahistorical mystical journey or museum of projections" was the dominant mode by which alchemy was studied academically. And even more so, that was how it was known publicly. In fact, it's probably the understanding of alchemy virtually everyone of y'all to this channel probably had at least at some point, at least at some point. And that's evidenced by every single comment I get almost on every alchemy video I do. They come from an Eliadian or a Jungian perspective.
However, further study of actual alchemical literature through the 20th century began to seriously call into question the actual viability of these readings, at least from a, you know, historical point of view. Now, of course, if Eliade or Jung's interpretation of alchemy speaks to you psychologically or spiritually, for whatever reason, that's fantastic. It's super interesting. But Jung and Eliade's interpretation of alchemy was just that, they were interpretations. And interpretations, I'll be very frank here, not really informed by rigorous understanding of historical alchemy. Something similar is actually going on with another Jungian guru who's teaching historically about the Bible these days, teaching about the Bible. So apparently, it's kind of a thing in that crowd. They, they arrest. But what's interesting, what's impactful on 20th century psychology or spirituality, and what's historically the case, what the alchemists actually did, and what they actually thought, those are just two fundamentally different matters.
And by the latter 20th century, it was becoming increasingly evident that Eliade and Jung's interpretation, while again, admittedly fascinating, I've studied and read them and think they're deeply fascinating, I really like psychoanalysis, they were radically out of step with what historians of forensic chemists were discovering about the historical alchemical practice and theory. It just didn't make a lot of sense when you look at the history. Starting generally with our historian Barbara Obrist, and continuing with chemist historians like Bruce Moran and William Newman and Lawrence Principe, along with the many, many others who've done this work, an ahistorically and forensically grounded interpretation of alchemy has now emerged that's now referred to as the new historiography of alchemy, as opposed to the other one, which wasn't terribly historiographical, ironically enough.
The new historiography seeks to understand the history, theories, and practice of alchemy by framing it as a theory of and a transformation of nature, very broadly construed. Thus, by situating alchemy among other similar crafts of the time, such as medicine and cosmetic production, yeah, lots of alchemists wrote about cosmetic production, mining, assaying, metallurgy, philosophies of nature that existed at the time, even culinary theory, transforming non-food into food, and by decoding their texts and recreating their experiments in modern labs, which we've had a lot of success doing, along with grasping the profound theoretical differences between alchemical theories and practices, alchemists did not agree about even basic things through most of their history, the new historiography has given us an interpretation grounded in the historical context and their forensic reproduction.
Now, that's not to say the new historiography isn't without its critics. The Jungians don't like them, of course. There's danger that just as Jung and Eliade ahistorically reduced alchemy to mysticism and psychology, the new historiography is actually anachronistically just re-baptizing the alchemists as, I don't know, proto-positivists. And I'd agree that's a real concern on my part as well. As a philosopher of science has shown us that whatever science is is a deeply contested category, and that simple, stupid oppositions of science to religion are laughably untenable. The alchemists were never a homogeneous group. Modern philosophical and scientific categories are only ever going to at best provisionally capture their theories and practices. And it is only when we suspend our beliefs to understand them, the alchemists on their own terms, without judgment, without sneering and looking down our nose at them, that we might then, just then, begin succeeding in understanding them. Though I'll be very honest here, I strongly believe that the new historiographers have done a far better job of doing just what I described than the admittedly ahistorical Jungian and Eliadian interpretations.
Now, that said, one of the honest-to-goodness blind spots of the new historiography has been the actual developments of, and here it is, spiritual alchemy in the European alchemical tradition. But thanks to scholars like Mike Azuber and others, although Azuber's really done a really great job of this, there is an important course correction occurring, and the rise, development, and historically evidenced, historically evidenced reality of spiritual interpretations of early modern alchemy is being appreciated for its important role, especially in the history of Western esoteric philosophy and spirituality. And it's there, I know, at long last, that we turn now.
Now, just to reiterate this, as I mentioned earlier, the roots of European spiritual alchemy can't really be traced to the world of Neoplatonic Hermetic speculation and practice represented by people like Zosimus there in the late classical world. There's just very little substantial evidence of the transfer of those kinds of ideas through the Islamic filter, either in direct translation or through a kind of vague process of intellectual osmosis. Again, what the possible exception of Zosimus is the Book of Pictures. The best proof for this, at some level, is just a comparative reading of medieval and early modern alchemical literature compared to other technical texts of that time. Allegory, symbolism, and moral admonitions are just part and parcel of the literature of the Middle Ages and early modern period and just aren't unique to alchemy. It's just that most people interested in alchemy don't go reading other technical manuals of the time and don't see the connection.
Further, most medieval and early modern alchemical manuals are, they're downright Spartan in their technical emphasis, even if they do have a kind of distinct air of esotericism and mystery, mostly protecting trade secrets. This is much to the disappointment of actually people who are spiritual seekers trying to read them for the first time. They're just manuals for transforming metals. Further, while analogies between the Stone of the Philosophers and religious imagery, especially the execution and resurrection of Jesus, famously found, I think first or really in a big way in the 1550 Rosarium Philosophorum, would set the stage for a shift in alchemical theory, or at least its representation, it's a century later about the necessary features of spiritual alchemy began to appear.
So, what are those elements that compose and give rise to spiritual alchemy? Because really, it came into existence. The first of those was an innovation pioneered in German mystical theology, beginning with the Beguines, but also reaching systematic exposition in folks like Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Johannes Tauler. There was a shift in just how salvation was effectuated for and by the redeemed Christian believer. In earlier soteriological theories, or theories of salvation, grace flowed from the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus upon a believer as a kind of object of salvation through the administration of the sacraments and confession, and especially, especially baptism, all of which were mediated by the church and initiated into one's faith. That's kind of the classical mode. Thus, in this model, the person achieved salvation from outside, and perhaps from the very past sacrifice of Jesus, made possible through their inward conversion, again, as mediated by the church. This is something you're getting from the outside.
Salvation, however, in this Germanic mysticism, there was an increasing shift in how Christ inwardly regenerated the sinful spiritual state of the believer in the eternal present, as the Son was birthed continuously in the soul of the believer. For instance, Meister Eckhart had it, "Christus in nobis," or "Christ among us," or really "Christ within us," has New Testament roots and existed in the Orthodox theory of salvation, but was truly radicalized in the German context, again, especially by Meister Eckhart, who was, as you probably know, spared excommunication only by, by dying before he could be subjected to it.
The second major shift would be within alchemy itself, obviously. Paracelsus would explode upon the alchemical and medical scene in the 16th century, earning a radical shift in methodology, the rejection of authority as absolute, and the need to do ground-up experimentation. A shift in the aim of alchemy, largely away from metallic transmutation and towards alchemical medicine or pharmaceutics, something you might know as spagyrics. And a shift in overall chemical theory from the old sulfur-mercury theory to a mercury-sulfur-salt theory. Now, this would be reflected in the theory of both health and, to, in fact, a lesser degree, his theory of baptismal salvation.
Now, for Paracelsus, the human being was composed of both a physical body that was perishable and an eternal soul, but also a third kind of substance that he called spiritus, a kind of divine spark, which was either implanted in us or regenerated in us through salvation. This Paracelsian spiritus was literally the God-Christ within the self, which was activated through baptism and then nourished through the Eucharist as a form of spiritual regeneration of the believer. Now, the word spiritus had an extraordinarily complex usage during this period, even now, and was typically thought of as a kind of pervasive, quasi-material, quasi-spiritual substance, which was the essential element, the quintessential element, the fifth element of a thing. Think of how we talk about distilled spirits of grapes or barley, it's as if in the alcohol, the pure spirit of the grapes or the grains have been extracted and stored.
While Paracelsus rarely bridged the gap between his alchemy and theology in his writings, he remained, well, a Catholic his whole life, though shockingly, a really idiosyncratic one, to be sure. He provided both a mechanism of the interiority and a process by which that very inner spiritual spiritus transformation were possible in alchemical terms and processes. And yes, that was my dog walking.
A third was a general shift seen in Protestant theology away from the theory of salvation achieved through the mediation of the church and the sacraments, because the Protestants were aimed, were not about that mediation game. As the Protestant Reformation really burst onto the scene and developed this idea, would of course lead to the exclusive purview of the church as being the mediator of even baptism, or none of this being effective of salvation. Sola fide, faith alone, eventually becoming a mere outer sign of a fundamentally even exclusively interior salvific process of spiritual rebirth. This being born again in Christ, in radical Protestant circles, even born as Christ, with the inner Christ born always in the soul. In this regenerative process, à la Meister Eckhart, was foundational to the process of salvation itself.
Of course, if one is to be born again in Christ, or among the radicals, as Christ, there logically must be a transformative process of the old self perishing, being born again, and the regenerative process by which ultimately salvation is achieved and an eternal glorified body generated. That last part, the generation of a new body, alchemy, and this is where Paracelsian alchemy is brought to bear on that process. Whereas in previous alchemical literature, Christ was sometimes represented metaphorically or analogically as a transformative Stone of the Philosophers, in this radical new form of Protestant mysticism, Christ is literally the Philosopher's Stone, which affects subtle but fundamental, substantial changes, salvific changes, in the spiritus of the person, who, when regenerated, can perform a similar, perhaps the same, alchemical process in nature, regenerating the spiritus which pervades nature itself.
Thus, through the 1590s, an actual tradition of spiritual alchemy begins to flicker into existence in radical Protestant and Paracelsian circles, well, really where those overlap. One which would survive the decline of laboratory alchemy through the 18th century and persist into the world of esoteric spirituality by folks like Hitchcock and Atwood. But to put a finer point on this, we are talking about a very, very small crowd here, radical Paracelsian-informed heterodox Lutherans, and an exclusively German-speaking context, basically. Now, while spiritual alchemy would grow, it would always remain a kind of niche, and it was a rather late development in how alchemical history. So yes, spiritual alchemy did begin to exist at this time period. Yes, it did have an impact, but not, let's not overplay our hand here.
However, through the very late 16th, really about the 1590s and afterwards, and the 17th century, the conditions for the development of spiritual alchemy continued to blossom in this area. In the mining world, for instance, where Central European alchemy was always pretty closely connected, the language of the metals as being born, growing, and dying within the earth was increasingly emergent and common in the mining literature of that time. And on the spiritual front, spiritual rebirth, or being again born again in Christ, or as Christ, was increasingly becoming detached, detached from the sacrament of baptism by those radical Protestants and seen as an inner regeneration or rebirth accomplished by the Christus in nobis, the Christ within us.
And it would be in those heterodox Protestant theologians, folks like Schwenckfeld and Vögel and Oetinger, but this would lead the way in some ways. Unlike in Orthodox Lutheran theories of salvation, where the righteousness of Christ was imputed to the believer as if by a decree secured through faith, irrespective of the deeds of the believer that matter, all kinds of bad things you did, you just got salvation if you believed. This is often called the forensic theory of salvation, although scholars are less comfortable with that these days. This more heterodox movement held to the more radical and mystical notion of salvation as being a regenerative unity with Christ as an inward spiritual state, as a kind of rebirth. And of course, this had serious consequences for both the destiny of the sacraments, but also the necessity of just an outward church at all, priests, or rituals whatsoever. Those were all taken to be increasingly unnecessary for salvation.
In such a position was held by people like the mathematician Andreas Oetinger and the Paracelsian theologian Valentine Vögel, to some degree or another. At the same time, the German alchemical world was also turning in the direction of theology as well. They are also getting on the theology bandwagon in a way that alchemists really hadn't previously, with Paracelsian luminaries going far beyond their teacher Paracelsus in combining alchemy and theology. You have folks like Gerhard Dorn, Heinrich Khunrath, and Oswald Croll, who would be some of the most important to really link the Incarnation of Christ as both divine and human with the transformatory power of the Philosopher's Stone, with the regeneration of the human being in nature more generally, as part of a three-step process.
At this point, I should probably mention Gerhard Dorn was one of the most picked over of Jung's favorite alchemists, but it should be made really clear here. Dorn is not really representative of the state of alchemy at that time, and really not even representative alchemy of any time in the history of the alchemical tradition. So the fact again that Jung really picks out Dorn and really makes Dorn representative of alchemy in totality just shows how much he cherry-picked things. However, it's into mysterious and pretty obscure alchemical tracts written, but well ascribed but not written by Valentine Vögel, that a truly spiritual form of alchemy does seem to first take shape.
"Azoth and Fire," and "Concerning the Dialogue of Death." The first, "Azoth and Fire," has mysterious origin and switches the number 666 from describing the Antichrist to describing Christ. So this book's real short and weird, and from the number 666, say, discover all kinds of weird, interesting secrets. This is a theme taken up by several of these early spiritual alchemists, people. So that's interesting. But the central thrust of "Azoth and Fire," which is admittedly very obscure, is an identity of the Philosopher's Stone with the celestial Stone, which is, which is Christ. It's the only thing with the ability to regenerate the world itself. Thus, lacking the regeneration provided by the celestial Stone, the terrestrial alchemist, i.e., the non-radical Lutheran and alchemist, well, labor in vain.
Thus, this inward regeneration is achieved not by the exterior rituals or the mediation of the church, but through self-knowledge, self-knowledge which is to recognize the divine within oneself as the regenerative Christ spiritus. You hear how this sounds really radically modern. Again, this is a huge blow against Orthodox Lutheran forensic theory of salvation, and ditto terrestrial transformation. Just as Christ had to die to be resurrected, so too the believer has to perish and thin to be regenerated. So too gold must undergo death in the Mercurial Waters of the Azoth before becoming reborn in the alchemical fire. This tri-level macrocosm-microcosm of God, Christ, human being, and nature is classic Hermetic, e.g., kind of structure. But the key shift here is a kind of pantheism and a pantheistic insertion of Christ in the human being and nature as the key to universal regeneration, using alchemical theory as a means by which this is achieved. It's nothing less than a kind of alchemical religiosity or alchemical mysticism. Indeed, "Azoth and Fire" even describes the process of human salvation as being tinged, like a medalist hinge, or transmuted by Christ as the Philosopher's Stone. And in turn, base metals transmuted by the stone, generated by the pious, truly Christian, heterodox Lutheran alchemist alone. This is a physical transformation in the soul, thus it's a mystical identification with Christ as one's true spiritual self, as a result of inner self-knowledge. That's the key to "Azoth and Fire," with the text going so far as to describe any other theory of external salvation, including Orthodox Lutheranism, much less Catholicism, as fictitious theology of the devil.
Also, you may be wondering about all this rebirth language and being born again. If this being born again language has anything to do with contemporary born-again Christians, yeah, the answer is an unlikely yes. They are remotely and indirectly downstream of this extraordinarily interesting theology-alchemy stuff. It's funny how history turns out.
Now, the other text, this other pseudo-Vögel text, "Concerning the Dialogue on Death," is again written to sound like the theology of Valentine Vögel, and it kind of does sound more like it than the gonzo "Azoth and Fire" text. This one puts the emphasis on the necessity that the believer undergo a kind of death and rebirth in Christ, which the text refers to as Divine Alchemy. Now, the term "Divine Alchemy," you can see in some medieval texts, but it doesn't have the same literal transformatory power in the self that these texts do. And of course, terrestrial alchemy is an extension of divine alchemy. In fact, this text follows in the extraordinarily controversial and minor antimony tradition, linking the image of Jesus holding the world sphere with the cross as linking to his regenerative power to that substance as the Philosopher's Stone. This is a thing, like, very minoritarian and alchemical tradition, Bernard Trevisan started with, awfully stupid. By extension, just as Jesus was rejected, so too was antimony rejected, and that which is rejected everywhere is actually the rejected cornerstone. So it kind of relates the rejected cornerstone to the rejected theory of antimony.
Both of these texts were among the first to link the inward salvific power of Christ within this radical Protestant theology with the Paracelsian alchemical substances and processes as a means by which inner spiritual transformation, but also outer natural transmutation, are achieved. And these are really among the very first European texts of true spiritual alchemy. Although, notice between these two texts, they take radically divergent practical alchemical beliefs. One's based on antimony, which is a very minoritarian position in alchemy. The other is still using Mercurial Waters. So even among these early spiritual alchemists, there's not a lot of agreement.
Now, while these early and radical tracts would set the theological, spiritual, and alchemical tone of this discussion, a subsequent literature would actually temper this a bit, but further popularize these notions, especially the very famous text "Västerstein Darvazen," or "The Water Stone of the Wise," one of the most important alchemical texts of this period, which continued to link the inner knowledge, spiritual rebirth, and the alchemical process, thus uniting the divine alchemy achieved by Christ and the terrestrial alchemy performed in the alchemical labs. Indeed, the "Västerstein" will see the entire life of Christ as an alchemical performance, experiment, whatever, par excellence, and thus as a roadmap for the would-be alchemist toiling away in the transformation or perfection of nature. Of course, earlier texts would establish a metaphorical relation to the life, death, and resurrection of Christ as analogous to the alchemical process. And in this new radical Protestant mystical alchemy, the analogy became a physical fact of transformation within the believers themselves, and in the life of Christ. Just as the alchemist perfected nature, so did the alchemical Christ perfect the human being, just as Jesus had been transformed from God to divine and human at the same time, and then back again. While the "Västerstein" is less aggressive than "Azoth and Fire," its underlying message is surprisingly similar for such a popular composition. Thus, by its composition in 1607 or so, spiritual alchemy had actually arrived in the public sphere.
Similarly, the astrologer Paul Nagel, whose commentary/edition of the "Azoth and Fire" actually greatly aids anyone who wants to comprehend that text, he actually expanded on that odd, weird 666 number speculation. He flips it over to 999, but says, you know, "the real adepts, the real philosophers will know." But he develops his alchemical mysticism in his 1620 "Azoth et Ignis" from Salivicatum, or "Azoth Becomes Gold." This text deals with what he calls the natural Azoth, the Philosopher's Stone, which is capable of transforming all physical bodies into a regenerated state of pre-lapsarian, that is to say, you can go back to the way you were before you were in, you know, before the sin in the Garden of Eden. But also the supernatural Azoth of Christ, which has the power, well, to glorify the human being into a state of deified perfection. Just that, indeed, this term, which by the way, Azoth has its origins in the Arabic for just the word mercury, is construed to represent the Alpha and Omega, which is Christ, the A and the Z of it. Azoth, even though there's a 'th' at the end, but maybe that's just the Hebrew word for, I don't know.
This supernatural Azoth is found within the believer through introspection, again, and personal piety, especially continual prayer. In Nagel's text, this personal piety takes the form of the alchemical process by which, just as a stone goes through the process of purification, so does the believer, and so too did Jesus Christ while on Earth. It is only through identity with Christ at every stage of that process that can this inner regeneration occur, and in turn, such that the regeneration of the alchemical art upon nature is possible. It's like you have to unlock one regeneration to unlock the next one. Thus, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, was an ontological alchemy, the inner regeneration of the believer, one of spiritual alchemy, and the physical laboratory alchemy, all became linked into one alchemical totality.
So, between 1590 and 1620, spiritual alchemy as a distinct blending of German mysticism, Paracelsian alchemical theory and practice, and heterodox Lutheran theology, blended together to form the basis of what would become truly a European tradition of spiritual alchemy, a form of mysticism that would reach its most powerful articulation in that very founder of Christian theosophy, the Mystic of Görlitz, Jakob Böhme. It would be Böhme's theosophy and his uptake of this novel spiritual alchemy into his religious philosophy that would dramatically impact Western occultism and esoteric spirituality for centuries to come, down till now. And it will be to Jakob Böhme's spiritual alchemy that we will turn to in the next episode of this series on spiritual alchemy. Until then, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.