§ 7. The Meaning of Alchemy.
If we are ever to understand the meaning of Alchemy aright we must
look at the subject from the alchemistic point of view. In modern times
there has come about a divorce between Religion and Science in men's
minds (though more recently a unifying
tendency has set in); but it was otherwise with the alchemists, their
religion and their science were closely united. We have said that
"Alchemy was the attempt to demonstrate experimentally on the material
plane the validity of a certain philosophical view of the Cosmos"; now,
this "philosophical view of the Cosmos" was Mysticism.
Alchemy had
its origin in the attempt to apply, in a certain manner, the principles
of Mysticism to the things of the physical plane, and was,
therefore, of a dual nature, on the one hand spiritual and religious, on
the other, physical and material. As the anonymous author of
Lives of
Alchemystical Philosophers (1815) remarks, "The universal chemistry,
by which the science of alchemy opens the knowledge of all nature, being
founded on
first principles forms analogy with whatever knowledge
is founded on the
same first principles.... Saint John describes
the redemption, or the new creation of the fallen soul, on the same
first principles, until the consummation of the work, in which the
Divine tincture transmutes the base metal of the soul into a perfection,
that will pass the fire of eternity;"
6
that is to say, Alchemy and the mystical regeneration of man (in this
writer's opinion) are analogous processes on different planes of being,
because they are founded on the same first principles.
