Spiritual Alchemy: Renaissance Thought and Paracelsus

This conference provides an introduction to Alchemy, offering the basic guidelines of Renaissance alchemical thought with particular reference to the thought and philosophical work of Paracelsus, who more than anyone inspired Renaissance and post-Renaissance medicine until the 17th and 18th centuries. His indications, once reworked and absorbed by the scientific community, ended up laying the foundations for modern pharmacology. Paracelsus was one of the first to resort to the use of Alchemy, that is Chemistry, for healing diseases at a time when it was not believed possible that inanimate objects such as minerals or metals could heal vital beings like humans.

However, in this conference we want to make a more general discourse that allows in some way to get an idea and orient oneself on what are some guidelines related to one of the most complex and articulated movements that have crossed history transversally over the centuries, that is, Alchemical thought. So the idea of this conference is to provide some guidelines that are at the basis of Renaissance alchemical thought, then see their practical and medical application according to Paracelsian doctrines and finally examine some phases of the Great Work according to the interpretative lens of spiritual Alchemy.

THE ALCHEMIST AND THE GREAT WORK

First of all, let us try to contextualize the discourse. When we speak of Alchemy we refer to a movement of thought whose first testimonies for the Western world (we do not take into account for simplicity Chinese Alchemy, nor Indian) date back to the Greco-Roman period and refer to an even earlier period, plausibly Egyptian or anterior. If you think that Sumerian Ziggurats were in antiquity colored Black, White and Red, that is, the typical colors of alchemical work, you can thus intuit how certain symbols are lost in the mists of time.

Now when we speak of Alchemy we actually refer to an extremely varied world of thoughts, people and cultures. There are alchemists of every civilization, social class; history presents Christian, Islamic, Jewish, pantheist, polytheist and skeptical alchemists; rich, young, old and poor. Since antiquity we find male alchemists alongside female alchemists, alchemists considered as saints like Albert Magnus and Saint Thomas Aquinas and those investigated for heresy like Arnaldus de Villa Nova, rejected by modern science like Paracelsus or praised by it like Isaac Newton.

It is clear that such a complex and articulated vision of thought cannot be framed and treated in a unitary way. However, all Alchemists referred to some principles that were more or less explicitly considered as foundational:

1. Definition of Alchemy
"Alchemy is the science that teaches how to prepare a certain medicine or elixir which, projected onto imperfect metals, communicates perfection to them at the very moment they are obtained." - Roger Bacon, The Mirror of Alchemy

The definition of alchemy agrees with that of common sense, but we must not think of alchemy as a picturesque chemistry in which alchemists perform mechanical experiments because there is the second point.

2. Distinction from chemistry prehistory: the visible is the exteriorization of the invisible.

The Philosopher's Stone, the Universal Medicine and the transformation of lead into gold were the fruit of a grace and the demonstration of a spiritual power achieved by the alchemist. For this reason, as we will see, all the main alchemical experiments required a spiritual action and exercise that guaranteed their correct execution, and physical transformation could not be separated from a state of grace of the operator. For this reason, in every alchemical laboratory, until at least the 17th century, alongside the actual laboratory there was an oratory where the corresponding spiritual exercises were performed.

According to alchemists, and this is an element to always keep in mind, everything that exists, metals, chemical principles, sulfur, mercury, all matter is nothing but the sensible exteriorization of forces and realities of a spiritual character.

• They had a concept of a Cosmos as a single living and conscious being of which Man was a fundamental and not separate part.

First point: Man and Universe were not separate: Everything is in Everything and what is visible is the expression of what is invisible.

• Matter does not have its own absolute reality. A wall is hard even in a dream, so what is the distinction between dream and reality? Is reality perhaps the dream of a man? No, it is the dream of Man. Of Universal Man, a reality to which the individual man can access under certain conditions and of which he can become conscious.

Therefore - and this is to be understood - every metal or fundamental physical reality external to Man, in the alchemical thought of spiritual alchemy, corresponded to an interior reality.

• So often they used chemical terms to indicate realities of a spiritual character.

• And what is found in this universal consciousness in its primordial state? Essentially an undifferentiated state that the Alchemists called $hylé$. This conception is fundamental in all alchemical thought because if everything did not derive from a single substance, then it would be impossible to transform one element into another.

And what was found in this primordial consciousness? They distinguished 3 fundamental currents in the collective consciousness that produce physical matter:

• Sulfur principle: that which is inflammable and volatile, a solar, projective, affirmative aspect of this unique substance that makes form appear from the depths of matter;

• Mercury principle: that which is mutable, a receptive aspect of this unique substance capable of assuming the forms and inspirations projected by sulfur;

• Salt principle: that which is fixed, the...