Arts · Alchemy · Operations

Operations

An operation is a thing done to the matter: heat it, dissolve it, let it rot, drive it off as a vapour and catch it again. Alchemical books differ about how many there are and what to call them, and the most familiar English ordering is George Ripley's, who in 1471 divided the work into twelve gates and gave each a chapter.

Ripley's twelve gates

The names below are this study's modern spelling of the list Ripley's preface gives, and they are not a quotation. Both printings of the Compound of Alchymy — 1591, and Ashmole's reprinting of 1652 — are blackletter, and the scans' OCR turns the gates into “Cjiatjon” and “ConiuntFion”. A quote no reader could trust is worse than no quote, so each gate carries its citation and none carries quotation marks.

  1. Calcination glossary

    Burning the body to a powder.

  2. Solution

    Reducing the calcined body to a liquid.

  3. Separation

    Parting what has been dissolved into its elements.

  4. Conjunction

    Joining the separated parts again, as a marriage.

  5. Putrefaction

    Letting the joined body rot, which is where the work turns black.

  6. Congelation

    Fixing the rotted matter into a white solid.

  7. Cibation

    Feeding the matter with more of its own moisture.

  8. Sublimation glossary

    Raising the matter as a vapour and catching it again.

  9. Fermentation

    Adding gold to the work, as leaven to dough.

  10. Exaltation

    Raising the fermented matter to a higher power.

  11. Multiplication

    Increasing the quantity and the strength of the stone.

  12. Projection

    Casting the finished stone on a base metal.

Cited to The Compound of Alchymy, London 1591, The Preface — the same citation each gate carries in the correspondence network.

What the operations were done with

The apparatus is as concrete as the operations: an alembic for distilling, a retort, a crucible for melting, and the athanor, the furnace built to hold an even heat for weeks. Alchemy's signs for them are on the symbols page, under Apparatus, beside the signs for the operations themselves.

Several of these operations left chemistry with its vocabulary — distillation, sublimation, calcination, dissolution — and the glossary's alchemy entries give each with the source it was read from.