What is the purpose of alchemy?

Tagged:

Alchemy comes in two flavors. There’s the exoteric form and the esoteric form. The exoteric form is the one most are familiar with, the discipline that was loosely affiliated with chemistry ostensibly aimed at, among other things, chrysopoeia, the transmutation of base metals into gold.

In reality, it was an elaborate scam to bilk the upper class out of massive sums of money that would make Bernie Madoff proud. In Europe, the distinction between chemia and alchemia didn’t start to matter until the 1700s when Renaissance scientists needed to distance themselves from the folk charlatans. Until then the bedrock principles of chemistry hadn’t yet been formulated, and a medieval chemist might be asked one day to work on new metallurgical alloys and the next to search for the philosopher’s stone. When your lord holds the purse strings, he gets to tell you what to do. And of course that didn’t stop the sham men from coming out the woodwork.

The term would enjoy a revival in the 19th century in its esoteric form. Exoteric refers to the world without, with its metals and reagents and whatnot, while the esoteric was getting at the inner world. The world of the mind and soul. Folk writers mined the old alchemical treatises looking for transcendent ideas towards inner transformation. They promised to turn the base components of self, our iron and lead and copper, into pure, spiritual components of silver and gold.

One way they tried to simultaneously distance themselves from the charlatans of the past as well as legitimize their own practice was to claim that the alchemists of old were cloaking an esoteric practice in exoteric clothes. That they’d hid their real knowledge and wisdom under the cloak of a scientific practice in order to keep the inquisitors at bay. It was, of course, nonsense, but as esoteric practices go, alchemy wasn’t as detailed and storied as, say Astrology or Kabbalah, nor did it require an organization as Rosicrucian High Magick did.

So it achieved a certain amount of popularity as a 19th century form of self-help. This was a growing form of literature in Europe and America at the time, people hungered for ways to improve their lives, as the Western world’s burgeoning middle class had just enough money with which to buy books and small things, but not enough to move social classes. Religious authorities could no longer curtail the spread of information that they considered heretical, and folk healers roamed the land. John D. Rockefeller’s father was just such a “doctor,” devising cure-all elixirs was just one of his many schemes.

Modern alchemy, if you squint really hard, greatly resembles chakra work. You read books and absorb the ideas within, and use them to inform a personal mystical journey, typically involving meditative practice. Components of self are visualized and mixed together to create other elements, with the eventual goal being to change all the base, ugly, lethargic, distasteful parts into light, powerful, divine, magickal parts. It’s fun, from a thematic perspective, to steep yourself in 18th century lore and cadences. And there’s nothing wrong with meditating, the mind is amazingly pliable. While you can’t actually turn iron and lead into gold using mere chemistry, the mind is much more readily approached with esoteric practice.

Definitely pick up a book or two if it appeals to you. Fun times.