Transcription
Alchemy remains, perhaps, the most alluring and mysterious of the Hermetic or occult sciences. Trying to grapple with its theories of nature, its mysterious language and symbolism, and the exact meaning of that symbolism, of the processes it takes to reveal the transformation of reality, remain as much an esoteric as they remain a scholarly struggle.
However, recent developments in the forensic reproduction of historical laboratory alchemy have indeed called into question the dominant 19th, 20th, and frankly 21st-century narrative that alchemy was primarily a process of internal, spiritual, or psychological transformation, primarily of the alchemist. However, just how did alchemy as a spiritual transformation exist in the European alchemical tradition? This is the second part of a series tracing the development of European spiritual alchemy, a theory and a practice which only really began to exist around the turn of the 17th century, in fact, very near, very near the end of historical alchemy in Europe itself.
In this episode, we'll turn to the central figure in all of European spiritual alchemy, the theosophist Yakov Böhme, whose elaborate system of divine unfolding, salvation history, and alchemical theory would be confined into a system of frankly startling complexity. And it would be in that system of highly heterodox Lutheranism that spiritual alchemy would come to be transmitted all the way into occult modernity.
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 other content on topics in esotericism, including curated playlists. Also, if you want to support this work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free—all very important, accessible, scholarly, and free—content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube, I'd hope you consider supporting the work of Esoterica by looking at my Patreon with a one-time donation, perhaps with PayPal, with the Super Thanks option you can find beneath the video, or you can pick up some of our, I think, pretty cool merch over at the store tab on the channel.
But now, let's turn to the true historical birth of European spiritual alchemy in the elaborate world of theosophy. I'm Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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As I mentioned in the introduction, this episode is part two in a series on the development of European spiritual alchemy. You might want to check out the first episode to get more fully acquainted with this one and get kind of caught up on the core elements of the discussion, especially the historiography of the study of alchemy itself.
But to very briefly summarize, while Greco-Egyptian and Islamic alchemy did infuse Neoplatonic and Hermetic spiritual elements into their alchemical theory and practice, there is frankly just little to no evidence of this material being transferred into Europe. Starting with the introduction of alchemy into Europe on February the 11th, 1144, yeah, we have a kind of birthday for alchemy in Europe. Of course, European alchemy would employ religious symbolism to describe alchemical processes, though the inverse is very rarely attested. Why? Because the very goal of alchemy, substantial transmutation, was highly contested, both physically, seems to go up against some ideas in Aristotelian physics, but also, and maybe even more importantly, theologically in the so-called art versus nature debate that raged at the time when alchemy was being introduced into Europe.
Generally speaking, as alchemy transformed into early chemistry, forensic knowledge of past theories and practices were just, they were lost. I mean, think about how many working physicists today, for instance, have a deep grasp of the world of Aristotelian physics, or medieval theories of intensive magnitudes, or the inner workings of the logiston theory of heat? They don't need to know that stuff because it was all wrong. Honestly, most modern mathematical physicists can't even really read Newton's Principia, not because they're not intelligent, but because he, well, he composed it in Latin, but he also composed it in Euclidean notation, and now, a long outmoded system.
So, at some point during the 18th century, a lot of knowledge about alchemy was just lost. Thus, with early chemists largely distancing themselves also from basically failed medieval alchemy, and through the 18th and 19th centuries, it advances and the reactions to the Enlightenment, alchemy underwent a kind of romantic revival and interest, though with very little actual understanding of what alchemy was or what alchemists did. It became much more akin to sorcery than proto-science during this period. Thus, alchemy became associated with backwardness and superstitious and just general medieval stupidity.
However, some sought to rescue alchemy from this obscurity. Mary Ann Atwood, in her 1850 *A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery*, would claim that true alchemy was, in fact, a spiritual process rather than a mere material one. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, not that Hitchcock, would claim in his 1855 *Remarks Upon Alchemy and The Alchemist* that laboratory alchemy was simply code for the ultimate processes that would actually perfect the human being, primarily through ethics. Coral Jung, most famously, would understand the alchemist as unconsciously describing the processes of psychological individuation. Through the early to mid-20th century, and Mircea Eliade, the famed scholar of religion, would understand alchemy primarily as expressions of a kind of perennial inner mystical or spiritual quest of the alchemist, one that was encoded in symbolic language that was, in some sense, beyond all logic and, well, beyond all logic and language, and shared perennially throughout most cultures.
What all of these shared in common was a largely ahistorical, ahistorical, non-historical appreciation of alchemy, basically uninformed by historical alchemical practice and theory. They weren't really concerned about the history. These views became dominant through the 20th century, and well, on my YouTube videos, these views are dominant in the comments on my alchemy videos. I mean, it's just amazing the impact that Jung and especially Eliade, and to a lesser degree Atwood, although Atwood actually represents an actual continuity of ideas about spiritual alchemy that we'll come back to.
However, especially Jung's publications on alchemy fired the imagination of a generation, and by the 1980s, those very students were beginning to realize just how detached his theories were from the historical reality of alchemy, and just how much he had cherry-picked the sources to fit his paradigm rather than let the rich and complex history of alchemy speak for itself. He would often pick incredibly strange alchemists like Gerhard Dorn to kind of get them to say what he wanted alchemy to say.
Through the 1990s and the turn of the millennium, a revolution has taken place in alchemical studies generally, now referred to as the new historiography, which seeks precisely to understand the theory and practice of alchemy fully within its historical and forensic laboratory context. And amazing strides have been made in recreating alchemical experiments and processes, such that previously obscure elements we just thought were nonsense before, they've actually been made clear precisely through that forensic analysis. We now see why they randomly referred to red dragons flying around, because sometimes red chemicals would shoot out of things.
Now, that's not to say that the Jungian or the occult understanding of alchemy aren't important or even useful. Useful, it's just to say that it's important to separate myth from history. Myths about alchemy might be symbolically valuable, they might be psychologically powerful, and they could be spiritually fulfilling, like, like any religious myth. But to insist that European alchemy was about inner spiritual or psychological transformation and not laboratory analysis and transformation, that's no longer a viable historical claim, with, with one exception we'll come back to the subject of this video, in fact.
But this is typically the part where people just often move the goalposts, you know? But what about India, or Taoist China, or Zosimos, or the Brethren of Purity over there in Baghdad? But none of those have much to do with historical European alchemical theory and practice. Why do they move the goalposts? Because this myth is so important to them. Well, it must be true somehow. Myths are important, but when one trades history for mythology, you do so with the currency of intellectual integrity, and we ain't doing that around here.
As we discussed in the previous episode, around the turn of the 17th century, and among a very small group of heterodox Protestants, alchemy and Lutheran soteriology were being combined into what would become the first and really only genuine theory of European spiritual alchemy up to that point in history, from roughly about 1144 until the turn of the 17th century. One that will become highly developed by the prophet of Görlitz, the founder of Christian theosophy, Jacob Böhme. And this would eventually be transmitted all through Europe, just as alchemy was beginning to go into its twilight. The school would eventually make its way over to England, and would, with the final articulation, it would actually be, it would appear in the 1850 *A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery* by Marianne Atwood, mentioned earlier. She does represent a continuation of this idea of spiritual alchemy, and she's going to be super important in the story a bit later.
In the last episode, we discussed how medieval German mystical theology, along with a shift, a theological shift in the late work of Paracelsus, would open the door to describing theology in alchemical terms, a rather shocking and bold move. Remember, it went one way in the European Middle Ages, not the other. Though if anyone could pull this off, you know, doing something daring and shocking, it would of course be, be Paracelsus.
Further, emergent Protestant theology shifted the locus of salvation away from mediation of the church, you know, the Pope and Christianity, Catholic Christianity, via the sacraments, to an inner rebirth of the soul via faith, by grace, in the atoning power of Christ's self-sacrifice. It's an inward thing, no longer a mediated thing. For the Protestants, this alchemical language of salvation from Paracelsus would be combined with concepts from German mysticism of how the birth of the sun and the soul, the idea of *Christus in nobis*, was the very process of salvation, which further would be combined with the Lutheran inner transformation of the believer.
This process of inner transformation, which occurred in parallel to alchemical transformation of, you know, the base metals like lead via the healing tincture of the Philosopher's Stone, would first appear in obscure and strange tracts like *Azoth et Ignis* (you can hear the *Azoth* part there) for Paracelsus by Valentine Weigel, or really pseudoweigel, and more famously in the 1607 *Water-Stone of the Wise*, which also saw the life of Christ as itself a kind of alchemical process, a case where a previous alchemical allegory, previously just in allegory, was now being taken literally.
Thus, by the early 17th century, spiritual alchemy, a literal transformation of the believer by Christ as the Philosopher's Stone, which could, of course, also transform nature, it was on the agenda, at least for a tiny group of heterodox Lutherans. However, that circle was about to greatly expand, as spiritual alchemy was about to become the core of Christian theosophy developed by Jakob Böhme.
So, what this episode is not, and cannot be, is a presentation of Böhmean theosophy in any detail. I'll come back to that sometime in the future, but you can find a really wonderful summary of it in *Modern Esoteric Spirituality*. But Böhme himself had a series of revelations beginning in the early 17th century, which revealed to him, you know, just like the inner evolution and development of the Godhead, the emanations of reality, with a special focus on the origins of evil and salvation, along with the structures of the cosmos, all of it in the fundamental forces of nature, all of which are parallel and fractal-like, you know, both of their structures and their causations. No big whoop, he just discovered the fundamental nature of reality and light reflecting off of pewter.
This makes for a positively dizzying system. For Böhme, God emerged from an abyssal *Ungrund* as the Eternal Nature, with a dark, wrathful core as God the Father, contained within a cloak of life and love as God the Son. Lucifer, an angel of the highest light of the Eternal Nature, attempted vainly to ascend even higher, to be himself reborn as the Eternal Nature itself. This insane vainglory disrupted the harmony of the Eternal Nature itself, unleashing the once-concealed Divine Wrath, shattering the world, such that our lower world of time and change resulted.
Born into this realm, kind of Gnostic-y in this way, we must seek an inner transformation of rebirth provided in the salvific power of Christ, reversing our fall by mirroring the very processes by which the Divine itself first emerged from the *Ungrund*. In doing so, we restore ourselves to our own divine nature, we regenerate nature itself, and eventually, in the final salvation, we restore harmony to the Eternal Nature itself, with and through that very Divinity.
Now, this doesn't do justice to the extreme beauty and the uncanny glory of Böhme's speculation, but the core idea that matters, at least for our discussion today, is that the whole system is marked fully by a kind of hype or dynamism, and that everything in the world of the Eternal Nature is mirrored and synced with our world, and in the natural and spiritual processes that occur here. This is the classic Hermetic "As Above, So Below," and vice versa, but in an extremely fractaled form. It's just so amazingly rich and complex. And also, if you're getting some Kabbalah vibes, there's some evidence of influence of Kabbalah. And if you're getting Gnostic vibes, there's not really evidence of effect on Gnosticism, but he was actually declared a kind of neo-Valentinian in his own time, so really, really interesting stuff.
However, in Böhme's earliest work, the 1612 *Morgenröte im Aufgang* (Dawn of the Day in the East), often just referred to in English as *The Aurora of Alchemy*, alchemy plays a relatively minor role in his cosmology and virtually no role in his core theosophical vision, which is really about the nature of salvation. However, it is clear that Böhme does have some working knowledge of Paracelsian theory, which was surely current in his milieu, but also some access to some relatively avant-garde elements of alchemical theory and practice of that time.
Specifically, in the Central European context of the 17th century, alchemy was undergoing a kind of professionalization revolution, which was bringing it much more in line with things like metal assaying and mining more generally. A specific topic of discussion in those circles, from the medical alchemist in France all the way to the more mining-oriented alchemist in Poland, was the extraction and purification of saltpeter, or salt nitrate, potassium nitrate, then long known for its role in gunpowder, its ability to seemingly detonate, although it doesn't technically detonate as a rapid oxidizer, not that the alchemist would have used that language, while also being able to lie dormant in the earth as dung, with a curious property: it could be both dormant and incredibly active from one moment to the next. This kind of dynamism hidden in subtlety, or even degradation.
In fact, despite this theological acceptance of the threefold Paracelsian salt, sulfur, mercury theory of substance, Böhme also seems to have actually reduced them to just two at some points in *The Aurora*: the *Salz* and the *Mercurius*. These are further thought to have a lower, more base nature, the murderous power of mere saltpeter found in caves and dung, and of course, the poisonous nature of quicksilver, but also higher, divine natures. It is perhaps this inward, subtle, divine dynamism which could also function as, well, life-giving fertilizer and thus inspirational to more of the more meta-aligned Paracelsians over there, especially in France. That perhaps brought Böhme to make what he developed as a frankly idiosyncratic term, *Solitär*, as a kind of fundamental substance in his theory of nature. Although exactly how the *Solitär* functions in *The Aurora* is up for debate. A lot of how things function in that text is up for debate.
But again, the core element here was that the world are mirrored in the Eternal Nature. The *Solitär* is a kind of bridge between the two. Along with *Solitär* discussions, Böhme also provides a theory for the production of the metals from the noble metals of silver and gold, going through a very elaborate sevenfold physical, spiritual process of purification in chapter 22 of *The Aurora*, driven by wrathful fire and luminous love interacting with the various source spirits of Böhme's system deep down within the earth, through the alchemical processes primarily of distillation and sublimation, which is actually pretty typical of how most people thought the metals were formed back at that time.
Though these spiritual interactions and divine processes, the metals and precious gems are, well, they're created deep within the earth. In fact, he also describes why we people are so drawn to precious metals and gems: they're just actually closer to pure divinity, and thus the higher aspect of ourselves relish and delight in gold and silver and precious gems. Of course, the lower aspects of us actually crave these not for their divine beauty, but for, you know, senseless evil and avarice.
But if gold and silver can be created deep within the earth, the alchemist, of course, can also purify them, but also recreate them as a kind of theurgist, co-divine in the process of redeeming the base metals. This is the particular theosophical bent to his theory of alchemy. And Böhme gives detail, though frankly very obscure, processes for these alchemical transformations, which again are both divine and natural simultaneously. Things are always mirroring each other in the Böhmean theosophical system.
But he makes it clear to the reader near the end of the text that, famously, "You should not take me as an alchemist, for I write only in the knowledge of the spirit and not from experience." He basically admits the fact that he wouldn't even know how to tend an alchemical fire. Thus, we're learning alchemical secrets from Böhme in his theosophical revelations, or as he puts it, "how the Divinity abides in love and anger, giving birth to itself now in this world." Birth to itself now in this world is gold and silver and precious gems, but not from his own experimentation as an alchemist. But the germ of his theory is certainly there, that the Divine operates in the world through the processes that we would recognize as alchemical, and in those very processes are also the means by which the natural world can be redeemed by the alchemist.
But what about the redemption of the alchemist themselves? Böhme never spells this process out much in *The Aurora*. In fact, he never really finishes the book at all. But one can do a bit of logic and kind of sort it out in advance. So, from a will at length to describe it later. If alchemy just is the process by which the Divine gives birth to the world, and if human salvation is the rebirth of the divine within the soul, that process will itself also have to be alchemical. This is apparently just how the Divine works, period.
But what is the medium of the transformation? What is the medium of the transformation within the soul? Of course, it's going to be the Son of God acting as the Philosopher's Stone. Böhme would actually go on to state this exact point in a later work: "The eternal birth of the deity unto itself is the exact same process as the restoration after the sinful fall of man, and the use of the Philosopher's Stone by the alchemist to redeem nature." And he is crystal clear on this. This is not a parable or a metaphor. It's literally the same process for Jakob Böhme.
In fact, by 1619, in his second major work, alchemy has simply become the mechanism by which all of these processes happen, *simpliciter*. It's alchemy all the way up, and it's alchemy all the way down. But this shouldn't be terribly surprising. The process of the coming to be of the Divine, the salvific restoration, and the redemption of nature must all have the same process in common. For Böhme, reality is just one big emanation from the Divine.
Paracelsian alchemy, especially with its theological dimension, was a perfect fit in so many ways. And honestly, it was enjoying some experimental success, especially over in France, kind of putting wind in the sails of both Paracelsians and theosophists. In fact, it would be among those post-Paracelsians that would really transform alchemy into early analytic chemistry as we know it. But it would be with this rough-and-ready Paracelsian theory of transformation that Böhme would begin to describe the processes by which the Divine Son would effectuate redemption within the human soul itself. But also, let me just put a plug-in for 17th-century French alchemists. Those people were amazing.
Specifically here, however, the problem was the twofold fall of human beings for Böhme. Yes, twofold fall. The first fall was the sleep of Adam, which split the original androgyne into a binary of man and woman, which had to be reconstituted. Secondly, the consumption of the fruit further degenerated both Adam and Eve from the more subtle divine body, which again, at that time, the body and spirit were still thought of as a kind of subtle substance, to the fully fallen gross body of the four or three natural elements. Thus, alchemy again is the perfect fit. It has the ability to purify the natural elements into their more divine counterparts, and at a more abstract theoretical level, it, it was the tool by which one reconciled opposites or dualities into a greater unity, the reconstruction of the primeval divine androgyne, which we all originally were.
So, what is the pure divine body to which the human being must be restored? Böhme reveals to us that it is the divine body of Sophia, wisdom, which is the same as the divine body of the Son of God, Christ, before his descent into the physical body and after his return to the divine realm. Thus, to be born again in Christ, here Böhme is very typically Lutheran, although or the twist is also to be born again as Christ through the body of Christ as Sophia.
This subtle body of Christ as Sophia is also linked by Böhme to the famed quintessence, the physical-spiritual substrate of reality, in which the four elements are reconciled, from which they emerge, and to which they will be returned in the final fiery perfection of the cosmos. Thus, out of the elemental four-fold body, a purified, quintessential body can be produced through and as the Sophia body of the Son of God within the reborn believer, with Christ as the thing that tinges us as the Philosopher's Stone. Thus, Christ-Sophia functions as the divine Philosopher's Stone, which acts to tinge the soul back into redemption.
Also, note carefully here, the restoration of the androgyne character of both the restorer, Christ-Sophia, but also, given at least this ideal subtle body, the soul itself will therefore be corrected back to its true androgyne state: Christ and Christ-Sophia, male and female, masculine and feminine.
Further, and to touch a bit on alchemical practice here, it's only through being tinged with the power of the Christ-Sophia upon the soul of the alchemist that the alchemist can do the very work of transforming nature. Ditto, only the Christian truly tinged with the power of Christ can actually do the work of converting other people. One can only transform nature after having been transformed, because that which actuates the very transformation in both cases is, of course, none less than the redemptive power of the Christ-Sophia. The Christ-Sophia is just literally the Philosopher's Stone applied to the soul. It restores the inner subtle body as androgynous quintessence, and applied to matter, it restores base material to divine eternal nature as silver and gold or precious gems.
Thus, by this point in Böhme's philosophy, or theosophy, not only do we have a spiritual alchemy, but also a theory of alchemy that creates an absolute continuum from the depths of spiritual reality to the depths of natural cosmic reality, a unified means of a unified means of redemption, the restorative power of the Christ-Sophia, but also the very process of that redemption, interestingly enough, a version of Paracelsian alchemy.
But how did the Christ-Sophia come to have this redemptive power? Well, because Christ, as incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth via Mary, his mother, had himself undergone the redemptive process of re-achieving the subtle body and unifying the masculine and the feminine, life and death, thus unlocking the potential for all that would learn it from him. He becomes reconciled with those opposites. His mother is a woman, obviously, he's born as a man. Those are the kind of coincidences of opposites that Jesus of Nazareth was able to accomplish in his lifetime.
Just as the arrogance of Lucifer's ascent disrupted the Eternal Nature and released the Divine Wrath, so too did it begin Christ's descent into the lower world to redeem it through light and love. I keep seeing those light and love murals that people have, yeah, we drink rose with light and love. As you see, these parallel dynamisms mark off the system of Christian theosophy. It's really those dynamisms and parallelisms that are so fascinating. Christ as male becomes enveloped in the feminine through Mary, thus taking on the feminine quality of embodiment, such that Christ could be subjected to physical and spiritual challenges through which redemption could be unlocked for all of humanity. Christ is just like the substance within the alchemical egg, subjected to all kinds of trials and tribulations and tortures, precisely to reveal the secrets of reality.
Even Christ's teachings are set to reconcile opposites: "Love thy neighbor as thyself," collapsing the very distinction between self and radical other through the power of love. Thus, his birth, teachings, persecution, death, resurrection, and the final revelation at Pentecost are themselves spiritual and physical alchemy lived through the person of Christ as revelation for the world on how to achieve redemption itself. Thus, Böhme reads the life of Christ through the lens of alchemical transformation, transmutation, just because it is, just alchemical transmutation. It isn't a metaphor like you find in texts like the *Rosarium Philosophorum*. The Divine became human so humanity could become divine, all through the alchemical process, of course, by inversion.
The process of the alchemical redemption of nature would mirror that of the life of Christ. The Incarnation as the coagulation of the substance, the baptism in the River Jordan is the philosophical baptism in Mercury, the death as *nigredo*, and the final moment of Pentecost was the projection or the multiplication of the golden goodness of redemption of the Gospel being generalized to the world population in as many languages as they could be heard in, all available to those who sought it. Alchemy becomes the infinite fractal by which the dynamism of redemption is played and replayed at the largest divine scale and in the smallest atomic redemption of nature.
Of course, if alchemy could describe the process of redemption, it could also describe the process of the initial corruption or fall of human beings. And Böhme takes up that charge in his polemic with the even more heterodox Lutheran, Matthias Flacius Illyricus. Böhme and Flacius were first seen as kind of complementary. They were both doing heterodox Lutheran stuff in their theosophical speculations, but of course, they all did all eventually just just descended into acrimony, it's rivalry. Flacius pushed the process of redemption even further than Böhme did. For him, to be redeemed by Christ meant to become Christ, literally become Christ, a process he referred to as *Christificatio*, to become Christ such that one was actually unable to sin after redemption.
Böhme was himself closer to Luther's forensic theory of salvation, such that Christ had provided sufficient grace that one could achieve redemption even if one did sin following salvation through faith. Flacius just argued that if you're going to be redeemed at all, it could only mean that you were redeemed by becoming Christ, not Christ-like, Christ through Christ, and therefore never afterwards being able to sin again. This does survive some in some forms of Christianity as a theory of total sanctification, like the Nazarene movement, but not that radical. It was pretty extreme. I mean, I mean, I say extreme, but have you heard the things I've been saying for the past like 20 minutes? I mean, on a spectrum of extreme, yeah, it's extreme.
But all this is kind of like, I wonder if Flacius ever sinned after he got redeemed. Probably. But Böhme largely rejected this position on alchemical grounds. In fact, the tinging of the soul did, in fact, redeem it, but not yet the body. The body, for its part, had, like the body of Christ, although it was going to take our body a little longer than Christ. He did it in like 40 hours, it'll take us a little bit longer. We had to go through the process of both living and dying such that it could be resurrected, our body could be resurrected into glory. This is basically Lutheran ideas expressed, well, basically Lutheran ideas explained in terms of alchemy, again, much in the same way that the alchemical processes weren't instantaneous, many months or years were often required for the heating of the alchemical vessel. So too, the body had to mature, perish, and be buried in Mother Earth. Mother Earth, that being in Mother Earth, was key to Böhme. Again, it's like our Marian womb, and thus it provides us our androgynous aspect all over again. Although Böhme never really mentions what this means for women, and how they still pretty dude-centric, and we'd all be finally reborn for the final act of physical redemption.
Thus, his polemic with Flacius hinges on an alchemical procedure, if not just plain good old-fashioned Lutheran teachings, such that alchemy is just now a part and parcel of theosophy. In fact, Böhme could actually lean heavily on Luther's passing, though frankly positive comments on the importance of alchemy in thinking about the process of redemption. You kind of had a blank check with some of those statements from Luther.
But by 1622, just two years before his death, Böhme had also began to shift his attention not only to the process of alchemical rebirth, but also to the process of the alchemy of the fall of human beings, taking a rather Orthodox alchemical position that lead was, or all the metals originally gold, that had been tinged with malefic *mercurium*, or Mercury, which could only be restored by them being broken down into a kind of prime matter or quintessence and then subsequently restored. Something similar must have occurred with the physical body of Adam. Though Böhme does admit that this sequence is a bit more like a parable, a religious parable, than a literal transformation. But the lines with that stuff with Böhme can be very, very ambiguous.
But he contends that the golden Adam was tinged with poison from the fruit, thus becoming a kind of a leaden body. But the secret of transformation actually remained in the feminine body, whereby the power to crush the head of the snake was hidden away. Thus, when the Divine Mercury of Christ was poured into the feminine body of Mary, the secret power that was secreted there inside of Mary's body was unlocked, such that Christ as Jesus of Nazareth was transmuted into gold, with the power, along with the power to finally crush the head of the serpent, that is to say, to defeat death itself, and provide the alchemical power for all of humanity to transmute themselves and the cosmos to a final restoration with and as the Eternal Nature of the Divine.
Thus, the history of salvation becomes a kind of history of the alchemical process of de-transmutation: the individual transmutation of Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, the spiritual transmutation of humanity and nature itself through our practice of alchemy, before a final physical transmutation of all of reality, most specifically our bodies, as the reconciliation with the Divine itself. All of which is just one vast alchemical symphony.
Of course, I've only scratched the surface of Böhme's immensely complex and difficult thought, but I think his genius should be apparent to you. I mean, Hegel called him the first true German philosopher, assuming you like Hegel. But here we have the history of German Catholic mysticism of the *Christus in nobis* type, combined with Paracelsian alchemy, Lutheran theology and soteriology, and of course, Böhme's own revelations, to generate a truly, truly extraordinary thought world.
This thought world would eventually find partisans following Böhme's death in 1624, and his theosophy, and the role alchemy played in his theosophy, in various forms, would go on to become one of the core pillars of modern esotericism, thus creating an underground by which spiritual alchemy would actually come to outlast laboratory alchemy altogether. But insofar as we can talk about a real historical spiritual alchemy at work in European alchemy, its most representative person is without any doubt the prophet of Görlitz.
Be sure to check out my recommended readings in the description if you want some really reliable readings in the history of alchemy. Literature and alchemy can be all over the place, including Zuber's text on spiritual alchemy, with absolutely without which this episode would have just been impossible. Zuber's book on spiritual alchemy is just a sublime work of scholarship, and I thank him for it.
Until next time, I'm Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.