What is Alchemy?

André Savoret




I. - Some Mistakes

For ordinary mortals, as no doubt for certain alchemists (or believing themselves to be such), alchemy is essentially “the art of making gold”. The only difference between these and those is that the former hold such an art as chimerical while the latter affirm its reality.

As for “enlightened” laymen, even people of science, their appreciation is more nuanced. If they assume, in general, that chemistry has swiftly and rigidly done justice to the bizarre or fallacious recipes which abound in the lucubrations of the followers, they concede, on the other hand, that the most recent scientific theories overlap on many points with the ideas of the hermetists (their “daydreams”, they still said in the not-so-distant days of Lavoisian chemistry). Today's conceptions of the unity of matter, of the inanity of the notion of "simple" bodies, of the possibility of transmuting them, of universal analogy (the atom, say the scholars, is a small solar system), etc., are an involuntary homage paid to the hermetists who, at all times,

Perhaps, before condemning apparently defective operations and manipulations outright, the scientists in place would do well to ask themselves how these mad alchemists were able to derive such correct principles from such fallacious experiments, when chemistry , since Scheele and Lavoisier, starting from rigorous experiments, had to burn more than once what she adored the day before?

There is no need to enter into superfluous controversies here.

Moreover, alchemy - true - has no need to seek any justification whatsoever from the proponents of modern physico-chemistry.

Quite the contrary! Because it is perhaps for having succumbed to this mania for approval, for having yielded to the chimerical hope of converting some profane people to the convictions of the sons of Hermes that, from concessions to abandonments, most hermeticists ended up confining themselves to the sole field of metallic transmutation, especially for two or three centuries - at least in their public writings.

And the impression that alchemy is nothing more than a kind of bad chemistry, complicated with quirky ideas and extravagant pretensions, is what the layman must feel when reading them without preparation.

But what had to happen happened. Some chemists, seduced by the breadth of the philosophical views of the disciples of Hermes and impressed by their doctrinal unanimity, believed in good faith that it would suffice to "rejuvenate" an obsolete terminology, to transpose into modern chemical terms the manipulations described in half-word and to disregard the "mystical" part of the doctrine to reconcile the irreconcilable. But their efforts, out of step, only succeeded in creating a hybrid monster, baptized "hyperchemistry" and of which - rightly - neither chemists nor alchemists cared to endorse the paternity, no one there no longer recognizing his own!

The hyperchemists, of which François Jollivet-Castelot was the most representative type (1), remained, with one or two exceptions (Delobel, for example), patient and tenacious "prompters" as much as badly inspired and unlucky.

Previous to ponder...


II. - Living Alchemy


Certainly, the transmutation of metals by alchemical means is - all theory aside - a fact on which it is difficult to quibble. And the only book of the very official Louis Figuier, L'Alchimie et les Alchimistes, mentions two or three examples of transmutations by projection (including that of the scholar Van Helmont, declared adversary of Alchemy, offers all the circumstances of control and impartiality desirable), of which only one would suffice to prove the reality of the transmutatory art and the considerable advance taken by the Hermetists over MM. physical chemists, notwithstanding their lack of electric furnaces and cyclotrons.

But the part is not the whole and if Alchemy were only a kind of transcendent chemistry or secret metallurgy, we could not value it so much as to break a spear in its favour.

If gold and the passions it arouses, gold and the evils it provokes, gold and the crimes that accompany it had been the only or the main goal pursued by the alchemists, if its brilliance fascinator had been the sole light of their soul, we could only pity them and rightly regard their pretended wisdom as folly.

But is it really so?

If we read true initiates in the science of Hermes, such as Khunrath, Jacob Böhme, Eckhartshausen, Grillot de Givry or the admirable author of the Hortulus Sacer, we end up realizing that while also discussing the 'Metallic work, they mostly talk about something else.

What does that mean?

Let us explain it as we understood it, without claiming to have understood everything.

True Alchemy, traditional Alchemy, is the knowledge of the laws of life in man and in nature and the reconstitution of the process by which this life, adulterated here below by the Adamic fall (2) lost and can recover its purity, its splendor, its plenitude and its primordial prerogatives: What, in the moral man is called redemption or regeneration (3); reincrudence in the physical man; purification and perfection in nature, finally, in the mineral kingdom properly so called: quintessence and transmutation.

Its domain therefore embraces all creation (4) and, for militant humanity, all the portion of creation that it dragged down with it in its decline and which must resurrect with it and through it, such as it was before the Transgression.

Although its most central domain is the spiritual plane, Alchemy has a hundred more or less contingent applications, at all levels and in all aspects of life.

There is therefore an intellectual alchemy, a moral alchemy, a social, a physiological, an astral, an animal, a vegetable, a mineral, and many more. But spiritual Alchemy remains the model, the key and the reason for the others. And, in accordance with the statement of Hermes in the famous Emerald Table, the knowledge of any one of these adaptations (5) implicitly discovers that of all the others. The universe is one and this unity is the seal of Truth.

Now the supreme Great Work, the only one that can be called without exaggeration "the Way of the Absolute", is the reintegration of man in his primordial dignity (6) according to a process rarely carried out here below (but not impossible), a process which the ancients, we believe, called "the Work of the Phoenix" and which can be read, here and there, between the lines of certain passages in the Bible, the Gospels, the Apocalypse and a few works, Rosicrucian or otherwise, more than one of which does not seem to deal, at first sight, with what is commonly understood by "alchemy".

And this Work is neither to taste nor in the chords of lovers of "little individuals", collectors of recipes good only for uselessly torturing metals, manufacturers of homunculi, distillers of herbs, of blood , of marrow or sperm, nor of those who dream of bodily longevity only in the miserable hope of repeating the follies and disorders of a tumultuous youth!

It is even, quite probably, beyond the reach of more than one adept admired as such for his success, real or supposed, in the field of metallic alchemy.

Because this science (at all the degrees of its realization, including the Transmutatory Stone) is science of life, living science, living science forever - and science of the Living (7). And only the “Living” can practice it completely without lies and without damage (8).

Such is the origin of the misfortunes which have marred, and sometimes ended, the existence of quite a few gold makers who were, alas, nothing more than "gold makers" - not to mention those who were only "thieves of gold" (9).

Only he who has regenerated, with assistance from On High, his own microcosmic metals and stripped them of the leprosy of the seven sins can by right, by divine right, regenerate at will the physical metals. This one only acts wisely, in the Light of the Word (10).

The others - who are not there - either make the Great Work a simple magical operation (because one can achieve apparent transmutations by magical means, but this has nothing to do with Alchemy) or many have seen their efforts, their sufferings, their work, their perseverance and their charity crowned with gold - physical - by the goodness of Heaven, always indulgent towards beginners of goodwill; or else their only wisdom was the art of listening at doors and spying through keyholes (11). These, if there are any who have succeeded, have forged with their cursed gold a chain heavier than that of many common criminals.

Mention has been made, a few lines above, of a category of researchers, sometimes happy, who represent, we think, the honest average of hermetists. These are, internally, in the preliminaries of the Work of the Phoenix. Heaven (taking into account their good will and the difficulties at the beginning of the Way) inspires them either directly by an interior revelation, or indirectly by directing them towards a true Master, allows them to access the knowledge adequate to such part of the science and puts the means of realization within their reach. They also have a mandate to act, but within certain limits and under certain conditions (of which selflessness, patience in trials, charity and humility are the most universally required).

But this right is a special grace, by which Heaven discounts their good will and gives credit to their merits.


III. - Of the Mystical Work and the Physical Work


In summary, regenerated man is the philosopher's stone of fallen nature, just as unregenerate man is the materia bruta of that Great Work of which the divine Word is the Alchemist and the Holy Spirit the secret fire: there are two Ways in the Work, but there is only one Agent: Love! And all true Christian hermetists (12) - not prompters - are unanimous on this point (13) as on that of the subordination of the physical Work to the mystical Work (14).

As for "physical" man, his Great Work is his transformation into a "glorious body", into a regenerated and incorruptible body(15). And this transformation (of an absolute rarity) is possible only because it differs from it only because of this accident, this obscuration that the Christian tradition calls the Fall. The glorious body is the body of man as it was before the Fall (and this touches on one of the aspects of the “resurrection of the flesh”); the physical body is the glorious body such as the Fall transformed it, made corruptible by the heterogeneous impurities of all the places crossed by it during its descent here below (impurities whose root is "gluten" or matter of sin of which this true alchemist, Eckhartshausen, speaks on several occasions).

As in the interior of metals, there is in the interior of man a certain "virgin earth", which the Basilian Aphorisms call with Paracelsus the "limbo of the great and the small world" and which must clear "filth of the earth” and reviving a “spirit of both the great and the small world”, to use the same terminology. As Jacob says (Alchemical Revelation): "The end of the great work is (for the adept) to get rid of corruptible flesh when he wants without passing through death".

And does not Saint Paul tell us that what is sown corruptible is made to be reborn incorruptible? Not to be “destroyed” but to be “transfigured”. And this applies universally.

The physical Great Work and the mystical Great Work are analogous but not identical. To have realized the last is to be able to sovereignly realize the first; to have achieved the first is to know what path can lead to the achievement of the last, but it is not necessarily to have traveled this path. Nuance is of prime importance.


IV. - Alchemical Method and Profane Methods


Since we are talking about the Great Work, let us take advantage of this to return to a capital point, already touched on, that is to say the abyss which separates it from the tests of transmutation by physico-chemical means, tests to which the atomic dissociation gives renewed relevance.

First of all, let us notice at what expense, with what waste of energy, in what titanic laboratories (which no private fortune could afford the luxury of financing) our modern Fausts operate in serried ranks. This also leads to “transmutations” of the order of one ten-millionth of a gram.

It is the mountain that gives birth to a mouse!...

In comparison, the physical Great Work requires only a few fairly widespread bodies, a little coal, two or three very simple vases, none of the sources of energy that current science consumes, like a veritable ogress, and can be accomplished in its entirety. by one man with patience and length of time. This to obtain possibly massive transmutations.

Something else. Today's science, in its fury to dissect matter, ultimately results in exploding the atom by brutally disintegrating it. This outcome obviously prevents him from taking any new step forward in the knowledge of things, at least by this way. To make a crude and regrettably irreverent comparison, we do not see a very fundamental difference between the gesture of the scientist who shreds the atom in order to know it better and the gesture of the child who breaks a mechanical toy in the naive hope to "know what's in the belly", as they say! Only, the first game turns out to be infinitely more dangerous than the second...

And, in spite of a barbaric terminology that grows every day, where ions, electrons, protons, neutrons, deuterons and other ingredients of the nuclear kitchen play an impressive role, matter remains "unknown land ".

As if one could, moreover, explain matter by matter? ...

Also, the atomic bombing didn't just explode the atom. It shattered the whole modern scientific edifice at the same time. And it is on the threshold of our super-laboratories that we could engrave the famous sentence: "You who enter here, leave all hope behind?" »

And those who enter it - the "initiates" at least - have indeed few illusions as to the philosophical and metaphysical value (16) of their research. And no doubt also as to their contribution to the happiness of humanity...

Since we are speaking of atomic disintegration, let us recall a small fact which might make us inclined to some modesty.

During certain metapsychic experiments we have seen material objects - a gold ring, for example - dematerialized before the eyes of the spectators, without noise or gigantic explosion, or cyclotron. Then we saw them rematerialize a few minutes later, without alteration of weight, substance or form.

It is that, in the disintegration of nuclear chemistry, the only elements implemented are physical, material forces, and aggregates of physical matter. The result can therefore only be a change in the material balance between the said elements, whatever the degree of subtlety granted to some of them. It is always only matter in action on matter, under this same modality which constitutes the form of the world through which we pass as materially alive. Life and matter, as clothed in other states - perfectly inaccessible to the investigations of modern physico-chemistry - intervene in the metapsychic disintegration related above, as in all normal hermetic work.

No, a hundred times no, the royal road of Hermeticism does not pass and will never pass through the laboratories of official science, Luciferian in its principles and in its inspiration, as also in its human results.

And the possession of this exterior science is not made to facilitate access to the alchemical sanctuary, on the contrary. Our late friend Auriger (who added to his hermetic knowledge that of the chemical engineer and was therefore well placed to judge) wrote to us shortly before his death: "Alchemy is obviously the sister of mysticism, it suffices to read Jacob Böhme to be convinced of it, and it is in this sense that I replied these days to your friend N.., who had written to me. He almost apologized for ignoring chemistry; on the contrary, it is an asset in his game and he will not risk having his mind distorted by modern theories on the constitution of matter. Chemistry, as we understand it today, can no doubt play a useful role in biology and sometimes in therapy, but for the rest I deny it any interest. Her role during the accomplishment of the Great Work is worth little more than that of the chair during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass! I believe that its knowledge is rather an obstacle to the clear perception of the aims and methods of alchemy. »

Any comments would weaken the scope of this particularly authoritative opinion.


V. - Simple glimpses of the Great Work


In summary, in the metallic work, the artist uses as an agent - and it is in this that he most profoundly differentiates himself from the chemist - a living and universal energy which it is not useful to specify for the instant. As a substrate, he uses a purified substance, revived by this universal energy and carried progressively by him to the degree required to operate the transmutation or reincrude the human compound.

In the Spiritual Work, same process: purification, simplification, descent of the Spirit (no longer universal or cosmic but divine). This constitutes the true and definitive "baptism of fire" of which Saint John the Baptist spoke and which the Word of God alone can confer.

Not only does the description of the physical work adapt strictly to the phases of the spiritual Work, but it is possible to draw from a description of the spiritual Work a perfect adaptation to the physical work (provided that one has of one or the other a little more than a merely bookish and superficial knowledge).

The first part of the Apocalypse of John is addressed "to the Seven Churches which are in Asia" and promises to the "conqueror", among other rewards, "the fruits of the Tree of Life", "the hidden Manna and the pebble white on which a new name is written”, “the Morning Star”, etc., so many symbols veiling realities which, for being “spiritual”, are none the less precise and not very cloudy.

Now, a fact worthy of meditation, all this has its palpable correspondences in elementary Alchemy, where the work is addressed "to the seven metals which are in the earth" and where the "conqueror of the dragon" must also successively find the tree of life (which could be the Mercury of the Sages), the hidden manna, the morning star, and so on.

Those who are familiar with hermeticism will fully understand what it is about and will be grateful to us for postponing its interpretation until better times.

As for the others, we in no way advise them to devote themselves to the difficult labors of the Work, if they do not feel internally called. This is the place to quote the warning that closes the letter of invitation to the Chymic Weddings, by Valentin Andreae:

Examine yourself.
If you haven't purified yourself diligently
The wedding will hurt you.
Woe to him who lingers there.
Let him who is too light abstain.

A warning that recalls, not fortuitously, the Gospel episode of the guest who had not put on his wedding garment and who is thrown "into the outer darkness where there will be tears and gnashing of teeth" (17) (Matthew XXII ).

Everything that can be said about the material part of the Work has been said by the true adepts, as completely as possible. They only reserved or described in riddles the preparatory work, their living fire and the name of the raw material from which the stone of the philosophers will come. Those who feel the inspiration to work in this way must address themselves to them and not to us. All we have to do is give them some very simple advice, or rather remind them:

1° Mineral life is not a figure of speech; the mineral has its flower, its fruit, its time of maturity.

2° The alchemical operations are - materially - simple. Sometimes all the more simple as their description becomes more complicated.

3° The weather and temperature conditions play a key role. Like the "vitamins" of food, metallic ferments are destroyed if the temperature exceeds the required cooking regime.

4° That the inquisitor of science beware of little recipes, which lie around in so many books: the Way of the Universal is universal.

It is not that such recipes are without teaching, but they are only worth referring to the search for the way, as subjects for reflection on the course of nature and the meaning of its operations.

5° As Jacob says, the artist must prepare his working instruments himself and purify himself - carefully - his materials.

6° A single matter is true matter. Another, however, is an adjuvant material. This is the crux of a problem that is delicate to resolve and impossible to elude.

7° The alchemist is not a magician. And the fire he uses for his work is not, despite the opinion of some moderns, his own “astral”. It is, however, an "astral" fire if one considers it from a certain point of view. Nothing alchemical is done without it, nothing chemical is done with it. Knowing this fire is also necessary before undertaking anything other than knowing or suspecting what matter is.

8° Do not become hypnotized by questions of terminology. Under the labels of the terms of art hide fixed realities. If some have changed the labels, the realities they designate are still similar to themselves and it is their knowledge that matters. In his concise but quite explicit Alchemical Revelation, Jacob says (§§ 15 and Ì6): “All things have three principles: sulphur, salt, mercury of the wise. All three form the living Azoth which is the fourth principle. These three principles are extracted from the raw material by the Azoth of the Sages. This Azoth is drawn from the heavens by the red clay, called Adama, where the dew is neutralized by the subterranean vapours. This is a fine example of a terminological trap!

Venting this trap carries with it its precious reward.

9° There are two ways: the dry way or abbreviated way, and the wet way. The longer one is no less instructive than the shorter one. Most authors mix them quite inextricably.

10° In the true Alchemy of the Rose-Croix, an axiom must be meditated on carefully: "The great Arcanum is a celestial spirit descending from the sun, the moon and the stars, which is made perfect in the saturnine object by a continual cooking until he had reached the degree of sublimation and the power necessary to transform base metals into gold. This operation is accomplished by means of hermetic fire. The separation of the subtle and the gross must be done carefully, by continually adding water; because the more terrestrial the materials, the more they must be diluted to be made mobile. Continue this process until the separated soul is reunited with the body again. »

The whole process is therefore to separate and to bring together: to embodied the spirit and spiritualize the body, one by the other. And Spiritual Alchemy proceeds from the same method. This is why Jesus tells us to raise our soul to God through prayer and to reincorporate it again through the exercise of charity, so that we become "one", as he is "one" with the Father.

11° Theory precedes practice and accompanies it. Practice does not supplement theory but demonstrates or condemns it. Anyone who practices without sufficient knowledge of the principles and methods runs the risk of dying in the skin of a prompter. The spagyric analysis of metals - as for example Roger Bacon gives - the essential notions of sulphur, salt, mercury, fire, and so on must be studied and meditated on assiduously, until sufficient understanding, above all really useful work.

12° Observe nature!... Advice often given and rarely followed. As well as this one which is analogous to it: Art must begin its work at the point where nature leaves its. So you have to open your eyes and look around you. The earth teaches something. The starry vault too... What good alchemist could make an intelligent and pious gardener!

13° The herbaria teach nothing. Neither do dead metals. A mine, were it abandoned, is worth ten laboratories; a walk in the forest is sometimes more beneficial to the intellect and the soul than ten rooms in a museum. There is also an aesthetic Alchemy: how a beautiful moonlight, a dewy aurora benefits the mind and the brain is a serious subject for meditation!

14° The metallic work and the spagyric preparations have some analogy in certain operations (in particular in the wet process). There are, however, irreducible differences between these two kinds of work. He who trains himself to understand and to manipulate spagyrically, as a preface or preparation for his work on metals, is not wrong, but on the condition of remembering that extracting the quintessence from a mixture is something different from extracting the Elixir of matter. It is at most a half of the Work.

15° Avoid superfluous complications and possible dangers by leaving ordinary mercury its most useful job, which is, without question, to fill the ball of thermometers.

16° To work on the real subject and in the right way entails at a certain moment dangers pointed out, more or less openly, by serious authors. Know that the most extensive knowledge in ordinary chemistry does not allow you to foresee them and to deal with them. Instead, rely on the help and inspiration of Heaven: Orare and Laborare!

17° Study the old authors and do not accept without reservation the words of the spagyrists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Read and re-read without discouragement and with simplicity. Don't study a medieval Hermeticist with a twentieth-century scientist mentality. Sometimes remember that one can be all the more hyperbolic the closer one is to operative reality.

18° Neglect the fantasies of modern occultists: Neither the "magnetized electricity" of Eliphas Lévi, nor the "electric battery" of Stanislas de Guaita, nor the "Will of the Magus" of Jollivet-Castelot first way, will ever cause the least alchemical transmutation.

19° The great epochs of faith - and of art - were the blessed epochs of Alchemy. Ages of skepticism marked its decline. To be an alchemist is to have faith!

20° The Way is narrow which leads to Life; narrow and stony. There is no shortage of spacious and easy paths for those who fear hurting their feet or who dream of making a fortune quickly!... The body is hungry for rest; the soul thirsts for trials. No one has ever picked the "snow rose" without first injuring their thorns. Like the beginnings of the physical work, the beginnings of the spiritual Work are "labors of Hercules", but, like his Mercury, the alchemist acquires strength by walking.

21° Who wants Light, must first ask God, the Father of Lights. Whoever wants to walk the path must follow Him who is The Path. To live according to the truth that one knows is to bring down in oneself a little of the truth that one does not know.

22° That the divine Spirit is incarnated in the double waters to glorify them, here is the whole program of the Work: Ignis et Azoth tibi sufficiunt, say the Adepts. First find this water within you, free it from the superfluities and the infernal darkness, this is the preparatory work for the true Great Work. When this purification which falls to you will be finished, the Spirit will descend. But this is not your responsibility. It is God who will choose his hour. This is the true Great Work, by which your name will be written in the Book of Life. The other, the physical Great Work, will be given to you in addition.

The few preceding remarks will, we believe, be of service to those who think they are “called”. It depends only on God and on them that they will one day be “chosen”. We did not want to turn these few pages into a “course in Hermeticism”.

We hope to have shown what true Alchemy is, freed from its counterfeits.

It is up to the reader to judge whether we have not been too presumptuous.


NOTES

1. “Mr. Jollivet-Castelot, whose perseverance I admire..., will no doubt allow me to comment on the qualification of alchemicals that he gives to his experiments:

... By the materials implemented and the processes employed, they belong to the field of pure and simple chemistry. If they were alchemical in the truest sense of the word, there would be, at least to my knowledge, no professor at the Sorbonne, whatever his erudition, capable of controlling them. Moreover Mr. Jollivet.Castelot only claims the control of chemists, it is therefore that the transmutations that he claims to obtain are carried out by chemical means without more. Auriger, "Alchemy in front of Science" (Review Le Voile d'Isis, n° 84, 1926).

2. “The true royal and priestly science is the science of regeneration, or the science of reuniting fallen man with God. D'Eckhartshausen (Cloud on the Sanctuary).

3. “There is no difference between eternal birth, reintegration and finding the Philosopher's Stone. Everything having come out of eternity, everything must return to it in the same way. Jacob Böhme (De Signatura Rerum).

4. “In dealing with Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, I only mean to speak of a single thing, spiritual or corporeal; all creatures are that one thing; but the properties differentiate it. When I speak of a man, an animal, a plant or any being, it is all the same unique thing. All that is corporeal is the same essence, plants, trees and animals; but each differs according to whether in the beginning the Word fiat imprinted a quality on it. J. Böhme (De Signatura Rerum).

5. The whole Emerald Tablet is indeed, as it is written, the basis of the doctrine of unity, universal analogies and correspondences between all parts of creation, as between creation and the Creator , between the worker and his work. What is above is like what is below, as the wise seeker must see by looking from earthly things to heavenly things and vice versa. (Isn't this how Sage Fo-Hi is said to have created the sacred characters?) If he knows how to separate the subtle from the gross, to spiritually contemplate spiritual things and physically observe material things, "with delicacy and prudence", he will discover, within himself and outside him, the hermetic Sun and Moon, Aurim and Thumim, and the virgin earth which is their womb.

6. "You are the very material of the Great Work"... "The nobility of the Work requires the nobility of the work"... Grillot de Givry (The Great Work).

7. “A dead man does not wake another. the Artist must live, if he wants to say to the Mountain: Get up and throw yourself into the sea.” Böhme (De Signatura Rerum).

8. “I warn the seeker, if he wants to take care of his temporal and eternal salvation, not to get in the way of the earthly process until he has first rid himself of the curse of death by the divine Mercury...otherwise his labors will be in vain and his science useless. Böhme (I cit.).

“Alchemy can be practiced without danger only by those who are protected by divine Power and whom God authorizes to use the philosopher's stone. The others become mad or unhappy about it. Jacob (Alchemical Revelation).

9. “You who long for the accomplishment of the great work, be great and simple like Elisha. What you want is royalty and not robbery. Wealth must be sought, not usurped. “Ash Mezareph.

10. “The object of the wise man is to use the advantages he acquires and the influence he exercises over other men to win them to Jesus Christ their Redeemer, and to make them happy. This is the true eternal great work. Jacob (I. cit.).

11. “There must always be a sentry at the door of the laboratory armed with a flaming sword to examine all visitors and to dismiss those who are not worthy of admission. Madathanus.

12. The special aspect of the Word for traditions other than Christian engenders the special Way which suits each one and not the others. The shortest path - except in extraordinary cases - is always that of ancestral tradition. In initiatory matters, the "uprooting", the change of Way is always perilous and rarely profitable. As for syncretism, if it is a theoretician's amusement, it is initiatory either impossible or catastrophic.

13. See the admirable little poem by the Hortulus Sacer, "Hunting Love."

14. The metallic work is part of what the Rose-Croix call the Parergon or secondary work. Although they did not indicate by name what was their main work or Ergon, everything suggests that it is the Work of the Phoenix or the inner regeneration that Fludd, one of their probable spokespersons, expresses thus: "To him who will possess the Word uttered from the cloud, and will unite himself to the Spirit shining with divine splendor, will belong the destiny of Moses or Elijah". Let us add that it is also that of Enoch, that it is to Enoch that the Rosicrucian tradition would go back, and that, in this case, he would identify himself spiritually with Elias artista, protective genius of the Rosicrucians.

15. "In our blood there is a sticky matter (called gluten) hidden, which is... the matter of sin..." "Regeneration is nothing but a dissolution and release of this impure and corruptible matter, which binds our immortal being and which keeps the life of the oppressed active forces plunged into a deathly slumber...” “Rebirth is threefold: first, the rebirth of our reason; second, that of our heart or our will. And finally the rebirth of our whole being. The first and the second are called spiritual rebirth; and the third bodily rebirth. Many godly and God-seeking men have been regenerated in spirit and will; but few have experienced bodily rebirth. D'Eckhartshausen (Cloud over the sanctuary).

16. “When we speak of an atom, we have in view, according to the goal which we propose to ourselves, sometimes the planetary system of Bohr, sometimes the matrix atom of Heisenberg; we know that it is the latter which best corresponds to the expected behavior of what we have baptized atom, but we would really be incurably candor if we imagined that this latter is indeed nothing other than a table of numbers. Behind this array of numbers, there is something, just as there is something behind Louis de Broglie's wave-particle. This is something we call reality. What could this reality be? How can we imagine an atom as a local warping of space?...

We already knew that the objects we handle daily... were only agglomerations of particles whose rapid movements were best described by the mathematician. We must now take one last step and admit to ourselves that this mathematical painting itself is only a more or less faithful image of the unknowable reality.

“Yes, our seven constants, and these groups, and these matrices, and all this vast arsenal of which we have laid out here one by one the complicated parts, are only shadows of something which is beyond us and outside of our understanding, because it is beyond our space and our time. » Pierre Rousseau (The Conquest of Science, pp. 338-339).


17. This whole parable can be interpreted alchemically, both physically and spiritually.