Alchemical Transformation: Spiritualizing the Body and Corporifying the Spirit
Magnesia (another name for the subject of treatises) "through repeated destructions of it, dissolving and sublimating" (Bernardo Trevisano) in such a way that the virtues of the extract, purified through sublimations, condenses, ultimately, into a small mass. Coming to practice as a state of consciousness, the idea transmitted by the texts is to spiritualize the body and corporeify the spirit in a single interior movement, that is, to immerse bodily sense into this spiritual state (of prima materia). From what can be understood from the texts, the idea seems to be to start from the body, from an organic function, from a bodily sense and spiritualize it - that is, to make contact with those spiritual forces of which it is the product and assimilate them spiritually so that the bodily function or bodily sense is no longer dependent on the body but becomes a faculty proper to the spirit. Subsequently, there must then occur a return to the body and a consequent resolution of it: "Every flesh born from earth shall be destroyed and then again rendered to earth; since it was earth before, then the terrestrial salt gives a new generation with the celestial breath of life. Where indeed there was not earth before, the resurrection of our work cannot follow" - B. Valentino, op. cit., IV key. In this regard, we find it useful to report a passage by S. de Guaita that seems to refer also to this process when he says: "The Truth is that the Sage, to elaborate here below his glorious body, must somehow make the perishable astral body [De Guaita calls the vital element 'astral body'] re-enter the material organism, which, far from suffering from it, will become more subtle [spiritualizing the body]. This reabsorption can only be effected very slowly, and, so to speak, atom by atom. As an astral molecule is assimilated into the physical body, it will eliminate a molecule of its grosser substance. Inversely, as the astral body reabsorbs itself, the glorious form, developing little by little, will occupy the place left free. At the death of the Sage, all that is mortal - the material organism and the astral body fused together - will dissolve together and the soul clothed in the glorious form of the elect will be immediately assumed into the kingdom of pure Ether" - S. de Guaita. Fulcanelli says in this regard: "the body has spiritualized itself, and the metallic soul, abandoning its dirty garment, clothes itself in another of greater value, to which the ancient masters gave the name of philosophical mercury (...) composed of fixed and volatile, not yet radically united, but susceptible to coagulation" - The Philosophical Dwellings. Returning to the acquisition of spiritual senses, to give an example we can start from a bodily sense such as taste, which as we have said is like the final expression or product of forces of a spiritual character. The Alchemist's task then seems to be to re-evoke this bodily function in its spiritual character and assimilate it by placing it under the dominion of his spirit, thus acquiring a new sense, for example spiritual taste. This procedure effects a change in the dependency relationship between Spirit and Body in which it is no longer that the spirit perceives tastes because it possesses taste buds, but rather perceives tastes therefore it has taste buds. In doing so, an immortal body is formed - we are at the White Work. To understand what an immortal body means, we can give an example: suppose we have a sheet of paper written with a sentence in a language unknown to us; being unknown, the message that this sentence transmits is unknown to us and the transmission of the message depends directly on the sheet of paper. Regarding these letters, we can do nothing but note that they exist. This is generally our situation regarding the body, not knowing the deep forces that have brought it to constitute and organize itself. The only thing we can do about it is note its existence and study its exterior aspects like someone who, faced with a note in an unknown language, can only study the forms that compose it. Conversely, by learning the language in which this sentence is written, we acquire autonomy from the piece of paper; the sheet of paper does not change, but our relationship to it changes: the paper can be burned, but it doesn't matter because if there were another blank sheet we could reproduce it, eventually we could only visualize it and leave it on a mental plane. Understanding the concept of the sentence, we could even formulate another sentence that means it, etc... Here then is the concept that alchemists had of the immortal body: physically the body could even remain the same as before without exterior modifications, but it was lived not as the product of contingency, but as a deliberation, an act of the spirit that would therefore remain intact even after the disintegration of the flesh. Here then is how one could understand Hartmann's sibylline phrase - referred however in this case to the final stage of the work: "He will then be capable of directing the organic functions of his own body because he will already be master of the functions of his soul, of which the physical organism is simply the exterior expression" - The Secret of the Great Work. To deepen the subject of spiritual senses in relation to material senses, we refer to the book Techniques of Initiatic Awakening. To show how this first interpretative key of Alchemy is not the fruit of speculation circumscribed to a few authors relative to a precise historical period, but has its roots in the very roots of Alchemy itself, we have now decided to report one of the first texts from Ptolemaic Egypt concerning Alchemy to note the terminological and conceptual analogy: "When the dark fetid spirit is repelled [the entity we spoke of previously], so much so that neither its odor remains [even the characteristics remain the same: the nauseating and toxic odor], nor the dark color, then the body becomes luminous, the soul rejoices and with them the spirit. Having fled the shadow of the body [term used