perfect and purified form. Often referred to as the âdivineâ or âsacredâ art, alchemy has complex and deep roots that reach back to ancient China, India, and Egypt, but it came into its own in medieval Europe and flourished well into the seventeenth century.
The ways of the alchemists were shrouded in secrecy. They tended to be solo practitioners who maintained their own laboratories and rarely took pupils or associated in societies, even secret ones. They did leave records, however, and they quote one another extensively, for the most part in evident agreement. Agreement as to what is another question. On the one hand, their work, or opus , was practical, resembling a series of chemistry experiments. And indeed the alchemists deserve credit for refining the process of distillation, which was of enormous importance to the evolution of perfumery, not to mention wine-making, chemistry, and other branches of industry and science. Yet it is difficult to discern from their writings almost anything definite about their processes. âIn my opinion it is quite hopeless to try to establish any kind of order in the infinite chaos of substances,â fumed Carl Jung 17 , who was fascinated by alchemy and wrote about it extensively. âSeldom do we get even an approximate idea of how the work was done, what materials were used, and what results were achieved. The reader usually finds himself in the most impenetrable darkness when it comes to the names of substancesâthey could mean almost anything.â The alchemists themselves had difficulty understanding one anotherâs symbols and diagrams, and sometimes they seem confounded even as to the meaning of their own.
Loading myrrh trees on a ship, after fifteenth-century B.C. relief
There was a reason for this obscurity, Jung explains:
Although the alchemist was interested in the chemical part of the work he also used it to devise a nomenclature for the psychic transformations that really fascinated him. Every original alchemist built himself, as it were, a more or less individual edifice of ideas, consisting of the dicta of the philosophers and of miscellaneous analogies to the fundamental concepts of alchemy. Generally these analogies are taken from all over the place. Treatises were even written for the purpose of supplying the artist with analogy-making material. The method of alchemy, psychologically speaking, is one of boundless amplification. The amplificatio is always appropriate when dealing with some obscure experience which is so vaguely adumbrated that it must be enlarged and expanded by being set in a psychological context in order to be understood at all.
At bottom, the alchemists believed that their work was divinely inspired and could be brought to fruition only with divine assistance. Theirs was not a âprofessionâ in the usual sense; it was a calling. Those who were called to it would comprehend its metaphors and express them, in turn, in their own.
The philosophy of alchemy expressed the conviction that the spark of divinityâthe quinta essentia 18 âcould be discovered in matter. In the words of Paracelsus, the enormously influential sixteenth-century doctor and alchemist, âThe quinta essentia is that which is extracted from a substanceâfrom all plants and from everything which has lifeâthen freed of all impurities and perishable parts, refined into highest purity and separated from all elements ⦠The inherency of a thing, its nature, power, virtue, and curative efficacy,
without any ⦠foreign admixture ⦠that is the quinta essentia. It is a spirit like the life spirit, but with this difference, that the spiritus vitea, the life spirit, is imperishable ⦠The quinta essentia being the life spirit of things, it can be extracted only from the perceptible, that is to say material, parts.â The ultimate goal was to reunite matter and spirit in a transformed state, a miraculous