Arts · Alchemy · Spiritual alchemy
Spiritual alchemy
Spiritual alchemy is the reading that takes the work in the vessel to be a description of something happening in the practitioner: the blackening as a breakdown, the whitening as a purification, the stone as a finished self. It is the way most people meet alchemy today. It is also the part of the subject historians argue about most, because the question is not whether the books sound religious — they plainly do — but what that language was for.
Where the reading comes from
The modern version begins with Mary Anne Atwood's A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery of 1850, which treats the literature as an account of an inner process and connects it to mesmerism. She and her father withdrew the book and burned most of the edition soon after it appeared. This study cites it by page rather than quoting it: the 1850 scan's OCR breaks and misreads enough words that no quotation from it could be trusted.
Herbert Silberer gave the reading a psychology in 1914, thirty years before Jung's Psychology and Alchemy (1944), and his book is out of copyright, so it can be quoted here where Jung cannot.
Any one that makes a thorough study of the alchemistic literature must be struck with the religious seriousness that prevails in the writings of the more important authors.
In plain English Silberer's starting point, in 1914: the seriousness of the religious language in the best alchemical writers is a fact about the books that any reader meets, whatever it is taken to mean.
The hermetic art, or alchemy in the wider sense, is not exclusively limited to gold making or even to primitive chemistry.
In plain English His claim, and the one modern historians contest: that the art was never only gold-making, and that reading it as failed chemistry misses what its writers thought they were doing.
The argument against it
Historians of science have made a strong case that this reading tells us more about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than about alchemy. Lawrence Principe and William Newman set it out in “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy”, in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (MIT Press, 2001): the spiritual interpretation, they argue, is built by Victorian occultists and then by Jung, and it does not survive contact with what the alchemists wrote about what they were doing at the bench. Both that essay and Jung's book are in copyright, so this study cites them by locator and quotes neither.
The case for the other side is not that the alchemists were mystics rather than experimenters. It is that the distinction is ours. Alchemists worked with fire and glass and wrote prayers into their recipes, and the operations and the colours are laboratory language throughout — which is why this section quotes the practical books first and puts this page last.
What this study does with it
- It records the reading as a claim about the books, attributed to the people who made it, and not as a fact about alchemy.
- It quotes the practical language as it stands. The colours are quoted from a 1597 book about metals, not from a modern book about the soul.
- It marks what the sources do not say. The four-stage scheme is later than the books it is read back into, and the citrine stage is flagged contested wherever it appears here.
- It leaves the argument open, because it is open. The honest position is that alchemy's writers did both things at once, and that every summary of what they “really” meant is a choice about which half to keep.