Alchemy in the Nineteenth Century

[Note: Blavatsky draws heavily from Alexander Wilder, “Alchemy or the Hermetic Philosophy,” New Platonism and Alchemy, 1869, throughout the course of the following article, translating and paraphrasing from his text into her French article; because Blavatsky does not take Wilder verbatim, we back-translate these passages from her French to better retain her own meaning.]

I.

The language of archaic Chemistry, or Alchemy, was at all times symbolic, like that of the ancient religions.

We have shown, in The Secret Doctrine, that every thing, in this world of effects, has three attributes, or the triple synthesis of the seven principles. To be more clear, let us say that all that is here below has, like man, three principles and four aspects. Like man, who is a compound of a body, a rational soul, and an immortal spirit, each object in nature has its objective exterior, its vital soul, and its divine and purely spiritual or subjective spark. The first proposition cannot be denied; the second could hardly be denied, logically; for, in admitting the influence of metals, of certain woods, of minerals, powders, and drugs, official Science tacitly recognizes it. As for the third, that is to say, the presence of the absolute quintessence in every atom, materialism, which has nothing to do with the anima mundi, denies it absolutely.

So much the better for it. Materialism being an indisputable proof of moral and spiritual blindness, let us leave the blind to lead the blind, and not trouble ourselves about it.

As with every thing, each science has its three fundamental principles, and may be practised upon all three, or upon one alone. Before Alchemy existed as a science, it was its quintessence which acted alone (as indeed it still acts) in the correlations of nature and on all her planes. When men endowed with superior intelligence appeared upon the earth, they let it act, and it is from it that they received their first lessons. They had but to imitate it. In order to produce at will the same effects, however, they had to develop, in their human constitution, a power called, in occult language, Kriyāśakti. This faculty, creative in its effects, is in truth such only because it serves as the active agent of that attribute upon an objective plane. As the lightning-rod conducts the electric fluid, so the faculty of Kriyāśakti only conducts and directs the creative Quintessence. Directed at random, it kills; directed by the human intellect, it creates according to a premeditated plan.

Thus were born Alchemy, magnetic Magic, and many other branches on the tree of occult science.

When there appeared in their turn the nations which, in their fierce egoism and vanity, delighted to consider themselves infinitely superior to all others past and present; when the development of Kriyāśakti became more and more difficult and the divine faculty almost disappeared from the earth, these nations gradually forgot the science of their earliest ancestors. They went farther; they even rejected the tradition of those antediluvian forefathers, scornfully denying the presence of spirit and soul in that science, the oldest upon this lower world; of the three great attributes of nature, they accepted only matter, or rather its illusive aspect; for of true matter, or substance, the materialists themselves confess they do not know the first word; and assuredly they have never seen it, not even at a distance.

Thus was born modern Chemistry.

Everything changes under the effect of cyclic evolution. The perfect circle becomes unity, triangle, quaternary, and quinary. The creative principle, issuing from the rootless root of absolute Existence, which has neither beginning nor end, and whose symbol is the serpent, or perpetuum mobile [eternal cyclic motion], swallowing its tail in order to reach its head, has become the Azoth of the Alchemists of the Middle Ages. The circle becomes the triangle, which emanates from it, as Minerva from the head of Jupiter. The circle represents the hypothesis [abstract postulate] of the Absolute; the line, or the right leg, the metaphysical synthesis; and the left, the physical synthesis. When Mother Nature shall have formed from her body the horizontal line which unites the two lines, it will be the moment of the awakening of cosmic activity. Meanwhile, Purusha, Spirit, is separated from Prakriti, material nature, which is not yet evolved. It has legs in the potential state, and cannot yet move, and no arms to work at the objective form of sublunary things. Deprived of limbs, Purusha will build only when it has mounted upon the shoulders of Prakriti, the blind;¹—then the triangle will become the pentagon, the microcosmic star. Until then, the two must pass into the state of the quaternary and of the generative cross. It is the cross of the terrestrial mages, who make a parade of their deflowered symbol: the cross divided into four pieces, and which may be read at will “Taro,” “Tora,” “Ator,” and “Rota.” The virgin substance, or adamic earth, the Holy Spirit of the old Rosicrucian Alchemists, has become with the Kabbalists,—all lackeys of modern Science,—Na²CO³, soda, and C²H⁶O, alcohol!

Ah! how art thou fallen from heaven, O morning star, daughter of the dawn,—poor alchemy! Tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse [all grows weary, all passes away, all breaks apart] on our old planet thrice disordered; and yet that which was, is still, and will always be, unto the end of the ages. Words change, and swiftly their meaning is disfigured. But eternal ideas remain always and will never pass away. Under the “donkey-skin” with which Princess Nature had to disguise herself, to deceive fools, as in Perrault’s tale—the disciple of the philosophers of antiquity will always recognize the truth—and will adore it. The donkey-skin, one must believe, is more agreeable to the taste of modern philosophism and the materialist Alchemist—who sacrifice the living soul to the dead form—than a naked Princess Nature. Therefore does that skin fall only before the Prince Charming who recognizes the pledge of marriage in the ring that was sent. For all those courtiers who fuss and circle about Dame Nature while tearing her material envelope to pieces, she has but her epidermis to offer them. That is why they console themselves by giving new names to things as old as the world, while declaring that they have made new discoveries. The necromancy of Moses has now become modern Spiritism; and the Science of the ancient Initiates of the Temple, the Magnetism of the Gymnosophists of India, the beneficent and curative Mesmerism of Aesculapius, “the Saviour,” are accepted only on the condition of being called hypnotism—that is to say, black magic under its true name.

False noses everywhere! But let us rejoice; the more false and long they are, the sooner are they sure to unstick and fall off by themselves.

Modern materialists would fain make us believe that Alchemy, or the transmutation of metals of low value into gold and silver, has at all times been nothing but sheer and simple charlatanism. According to them, it is not a science, but a superstition;—consequently all those who believe in it or pretend to believe in it are dupes or impostors. Our Encyclopaedias are filled with harsh epithets levelled against Alchemists and Occultists.

Very well, Gentlemen of the Academy. But then give us reasons which demonstrate peremptorily the absolute impossibility of transmutation. Tell us how it comes to pass that one finds a metallic basis even in the alkalis. We know physicists—very learned indeed, I assure you—who maintain that the idea of reducing the elements to their first form, and even to their primordial and single essence (see rather Mr. Crookes and his meta-elements) is not so foolish as it appears. These elements, gentlemen, once you permit yourselves the hypothesis that they existed at first in the igneous mass from which the terrestrial crust was formed, as you say, may very well be dissolved again and arrive, by a series of transformations, at becoming again what they have been. The whole question is to discover a solvent strong enough to act and operate, in a few days or even in a few years, what nature accomplishes in the duration of ages. Chemistry, and Mr. Crookes especially, have sufficiently proved to us that there exists a kinship between metals, sufficiently marked to indicate not only the same provenance, but an identical genesis.

Further, oh Learned Gentlemen who make light of Science and so heartily laugh at alchemy and alchemists, how comes it that one of your foremost chemists, the author of La Synthèse Chimique [Chemical Synthesis], Marcellin Berthelot, nourished throughout on their labours, cannot refrain from recognizing in the alchemists a knowledge of the most profound kind of matter?

How comes it again that Michel Eugène Chevreul, that venerated man of science, whose learning, no less than the great age to which he attained, endowed to his last day with all his faculties, has astonished our self-sufficient century, which is so very difficult to impress—how comes it, I ask, that he who made so many discoveries so useful to industry possessed so many works on alchemy?

Might not the key to the secret of his great age be found in those masses of books which, according to you, are but a heap of superstitions as senseless as they are ridiculous?

The fact that this same great man of science, the dean of modern chemistry, took care to bequeath, after his death, the numerous volumes treating of that “false science” to the Library of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, is in itself a revelation. We have not heard, moreover, that the luminaries of Science, attached to that sanctuary, have thrown those books on alchemy into the waste-basket as useless lumber, filled, so they say, with fantastic reveries engendered by sick and disordered brains.

Moreover, our men of science forget two things:—first, that, never having found the key to the jargon of the hermetic books, they have hardly the right to decide whether that “jargon” preaches falsehood or truth; second, that Wisdom was certainly not born with them, and will not die with our modern sages.

Each Science, we say, has its three aspects; two, in any case: the objective and the subjective. Under the first division, one may class alchemical transmutations, with or without the powder of projection; under the second, speculations of a mental order. Under the third is concealed a meaning of the highest spirituality. Now, since the symbols of the first two are identical in form, having moreover, as I have sought to show in The Secret Doctrine—seven interpretations, according to whether one wishes to know their meaning as applied to one of the domains of physical, psychic, or exclusively spiritual nature—one will easily understand that it is given only to great Initiates to interpret correctly, the jargon of the hermetic philosophers. And yet! as there exist in Europe more false alchemical treatises than true ones, Hermes himself would lose his latin over it. Who does not know, for example, that a certain series of formulæ may find their concrete application and possess an absolute value in technical alchemy, while differing entirely in meaning when that same symbol is employed to express an idea belonging to the psychological domain? As our late brother Kenneth Mackenzie very justly says, speaking of the Hermetic Sciences:

“For the practical alchemist, whose object was the production of gold by means of the special laws of his art, the evolution of a mystical philosophy was of secondary importance, that art being capable of being pursued without any direct relation to any system whatsoever of theosophy; while the Sage who had raised himself to a higher plane of metaphysical contemplation naturally rejected the merely material part of these studies, finding it beneath his aspirations.”²

It thus becomes evident that the symbols taken as guides when it was a question of transmuting metals have very little to do with the methods which we now call chemical. Another question:—which of our greatest men of science would dare to treat as impostors men such as Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Roger Bacon, Boerhaave, and so many other illustrious Alchemists?

Now, while the Gentlemen of the Academy make light of the Kabbala as well as Alchemy (while drawing from them their inspirations and their finest discoveries), the Kabbalists and European occultists, in general, begin to covertly persecute the secret Sciences of the East. In fact, Eastern Wisdom does not exist for our Sages of the West; it died with the three Magi. Yet alchemy, which, if one searches well, will be found at the foundation of every occult science—alchemy, we say, comes to them from the Far East. There are those who pretend it is but the posthumous evolution of the magic of the Chaldaeans. We shall endeavour to prove that the latter was but the heir of antediluvian Alchemy first, and Egyptian Alchemy afterwards. Seek its cradle in the remotest antiquity, says Olaus Borrichius [Ole Borch], who knew much on this subject.

To what epoch may the origin of alchemy be traced? No modern writer could tell us exactly. Some name Adam as its first adept; others attribute it to the indiscretion “of the sons of God, who, seeing that the daughters of men were fair, took them for their wives.” Moses and Solomon are late adepts in the science, for they were preceded by Abraham, who was himself preceded in the Science of Sciences by Hermes. Does not Avicenna [Ibn Sina] tell us that the “Emerald Tablet”—the oldest treatise extant on alchemy—was found upon the body of Hermes, buried for centuries at Hebron, by Sarah the wife of Abraham? But “Hermes” has never been the name of a man; it is a generic name, like that of Neo-Platonist in former days, or of “Theosophist” today. What, indeed, does one know about Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice greatest”? Less than we know about Abraham, his wife Sarah, and his concubine Hagar, whom Saint Paul declares to be an allegory.³ Hermes was already identified with the Egyptian Thoth in the time of Plato. But the word thoth does not only signify “Intelligence”; it also signifies “assembly” and school. Thoth-Hermes is, in fact, but the personification of the voice (or sacred teaching) of the priestly caste of Egypt—that is to say, the voice of the great Hierophants. And, we shall ask: if it be so, at what prehistoric epoch began the hierarchy of initiated priests in the land of Chemi? Even if that question were resolved, it would not yet bring us to the end of our problems. For ancient China, no less than ancient Egypt, claims to be the native land of the Alkahest and of physical and transcendent alchemy; and China may well be right. A missionary, long resident at Peking, William A. P. Martin, declares it “the cradle of Alchemy.” Cradle is perhaps not quite the word, but it is certain that the Celestial Empire would have the right to take rank among the oldest schools of the occult Sciences. In any case, it is from China that Alchemy penetrated into Europe, as we shall prove.

Meanwhile the reader has the choice; for another pious missionary, Hood, formally assures us that it was in the garden “planted in Eden toward the East” that Alchemy was born. If we are to believe him, it is an invention of Satan, who tempted Eve under the form of the Serpent; but he forgot to take out a patent; and the worthy man proves it to us by the very name. The Hebrew word for Serpent is Nahash, in the plural Nehashim. It is from the last syllable, -shim, as one sees, that the words “chemistry” and Alchemy have been derived. Is it not clear as day and established according to the severest rules of modern philology?

Let us pass to our own proofs, however.

The foremost authorities on the archaic sciences—William Godwin among others—show us, with proofs in hand, that, although Alchemy was much cultivated by almost all the peoples of antiquity long before our era, the Greeks began to study it only after the Christian era, and that it fell into the public domain only very late. It is well understood, of course, that we are speaking only of the lay Greeks, the uninitiated. For the adepts of the Hellenic temples of Magna Graecia have known it since the days of the Argonauts. The origin of Alchemy in Greece dates therefore from that time, as the allegorical narrative of the “Golden Fleece” demonstrates very well.

In fact, one has but to read what Suidas [Suda] says, in his Lexicon, concerning the expedition of Jason, too well known to be related here:

“Δέρας, deres, the golden fleece, which Jason and the Argonauts, after a voyage on the Black Sea to Colchis, carried off together with Medea, the daughter of Aeëtes, king of Aea. Only what they carried off was not what the poets pretend, but a treatise written upon a skin (δέρμασιν; δέρμα, derma), which taught how gold could be made by chemical means. Contemporaries called this ram’s skin the golden fleece, probably because of the great value of the instructions it contained.” (Suda, Δέρας; δ 250 Adler)

This is a little clearer and far more probable than the learned ravings of our modern mythologists;⁴ for let us remember that the Colchis of the Greeks is modern Imeretia on the Black Sea; that the Rion, the great river that traverses that country, is the Phasis of the ancients, which carries along particles of gold even today; and that the traditions of the indigenous peoples who inhabit the coasts of the Black Sea, such as the Mingrelians, the Abkhazians, and the Imeretians, are all full of this old legend of the golden fleece. Their ancestors, they say, were all “makers of gold,” that is to say, they possessed the secret of transmutation which is called today Alchemy.

Be that as it may, save for their initiates the Greeks remained ignorant of the Hermetic sciences until the days of the Neo-Platonists (toward the end of the fourth and into the fifth century), and they knew nothing of the true alchemy of the ancient Egyptians, whose secrets certainly did not run about the streets. In fact, in the third century of the Christian era, the Emperor Diocletian published his famous edict, ordering the most minute search in Egypt for all the books treating of the making of gold, and a public auto-da-fé [book burnings] was made of them. After that, there remained not a single work of Alchemy upon the surface of the land of the Pharaohs, says William Godwin, and for two centuries one heard no more of it. He might have added that there remained enough such works in the interior of the earth, in the form of papyri buried with mummies tens of thousands of years old. The essential thing is to know how to recognize a treatise on Alchemy under the form of a fairy-tale like that of the golden fleece, or of a “romantic narrative” from the time of the first Pharaohs. But it was not the secret wisdom buried under the allegory of the papyri which introduced Alchemy, nor the hermetic sciences, into Europe.

History teaches us that Alchemy was cultivated in China more than sixteen centuries before our era, and that it had never been more flourishing than in the first centuries of Christianity. Now it was toward the end of the fourth century, when the East opened its doors to commerce with the Latin races, that Alchemy penetrated, once again, into Europe. Byzantium and Alexandria, the two principal centres of that commerce, were suddenly inundated with treatises on transmutation, at the very time when it was known that Egypt possessed not a single one. Whence came, then, those treatises full of recipes for making gold and prolonging human life? Certainly not from the sanctuaries of Egypt, since those Egyptian treatises no longer existed. We affirm that most were but more or less correct interpretations of allegorical stories of green, blue, and yellow dragons, and pink tigers—Chinese alchemical symbols.

All the treatises which one now finds in the public libraries and museums of Europe are but the bold hypotheses of certain mystics of various ages, who have halted halfway along the path of the great Initiation. One has only to compare some of the treatises called “hermetic” with those which have been recently brought from China, to recognize that Thoth-Hermes—or rather the science of that name—is innocent of all this. It follows, therefore, that all that came to be known of Alchemy in the Middle Ages, and thence into the nineteenth century, was imported into Europe from China and afterwards transformed into hermetic writings. Most of those writings were manufactured by Greeks and Arabs in the eighth and ninth centuries, refashioned in the Middle Ages, and remain misunderstood in the nineteenth. The Saracens, whose most famous school of Alchemy was at Baghdad, though bringing with them more ancient traditions, had themselves lost the secret. The great Geber deserves rather the title of Father of modern Chemistry than that of Hermetic Alchemy, though it is to him that the importation of alchemical science into Europe is attributed.

The key to the secrets of Thoth-Hermes lies indeed buried in the initiatic crypts of the ancient East alone, since the act of vandalism committed by Diocletian.

II.

Let us compare then the Chinese system with that which is called the Hermetic Sciences.

1. The double aim pursued in the two schools is identical: the production of gold, the rejuvenation and prolongation of human life by means of the menstruum universale [universal solvent] or lapis philosophorum [philosopher’s stone]. The third object—or the true meaning of “transmutation”—having been completely neglected by Christian adepts, satisfied as they were with their religious belief in the immortality of the soul, has never been well understood by the adherents of the old alchemists. Today, half from neglect, half from disuse, it has been completely expunged from the catalogue of the summum bonum pursued by Alchemists of Christian countries. It is, however, only this last object which interests the true Eastern Alchemists. All the Initiated Adepts, despising gold and having a profound indifference to life, make little account of the double aim of alchemy.

2. These schools both recognize the existence of two elixirs, the great and the small. The use of the latter on the physical plane was applied to the transmutation of metals and the restoration of youth. The great “Elixir,” which was an elixir only symbolically, conferred the greatest treasure of all: the conscious immortality of the Spirit, Nirvana throughout the cycles, which is the precursor of Parinirvana—absolute identification with the One Essence.

3. The principles underlying the two systems are also identical, namely: the composite nature of metals and their mineral vegetation emanating from one and the same seminal germ. The Chinese character tsing [精, jing], which indicates “germ,” and t’ai [胎, tai], “matrix,” which are found constantly in Chinese works on alchemy,⁵ are the ancestors of the same words met with at every step in the alchemical treatises of the Hermetists.

4. Mercury and lead, mercury and sulphur, are employed in the East as in the West, and, together with so many other ingredients held in common, we find that the two schools of alchemy accept them in a triple sense. It is this third sense which escapes European alchemists.

5. The alchemists of these two schools equally accept the doctrine of the cycle of transformations, during which the precious metals return to their original element.

6. The alchemy of both schools is intimately linked with astrology and magic.

7. Finally, both make use of an extravagant phraseology, as the author of “On the Study of Alchemy in China” remarks,⁶ who finds that the language of European alchemists—which differs so completely from that of all other Western sciences, yet perfectly imitates, in its metaphorical jargon, that of the peoples of the Far East—constitutes an excellent proof that alchemy in Europe had its origin in the Far East.

And when we affirm that alchemy is intimately linked with magic and astrology, let there be no outcry. The word magic is an old Persian term which signifies knowledge embracing all the physical and metaphysical sciences cultivated in days of old. The learned priestly classes of the Chaldaeans taught magic, whence Magism and Gnosticism arose. Is not Abraham called a “Chaldaean”? It is Josephus, a pious Jew, who, speaking of the patriarch, says that he taught mathematics, or esoteric science in Egypt, the science of the stars included. A professor of Magism was necessarily an astrologer.

But one would greatly err in confounding the alchemy of the Middle Ages with antediluvian alchemy. As it is known today, it has three principal agents: the philosopher’s stone, serving for the transmutation of metals; the Alkahest, or universal solvent; and the elixir of life, whose property was to prolong human life indefinitely. But neither the true philosophers nor the Initiates attached importance of the last two. The three alchemical agents became, after the fashion of the Trinity—one and indivisible—three distinct agents only when the science fell into the domain of human egoism. While the priestly class, avid and ambitious, anthropomorphized the spiritual and absolute Unity by dividing it into three persons, the class of false mystics separated the divine Force from universal Kriyāśakti and made of it three agents. In his Magia Naturalis [Natural Magic], Baptista Porta says it very clearly: “I promise neither mountains of gold, nor the philosopher’s stone . . . nor yet that liquor of gold which makes him who drinks it immortal . . . All that is but a dream; for the world, being mutable and subject to change, all that it produces must be destroyed.”

Geber, the great Arab alchemist, is still more explicit. He seems to have written these remarks with a prophetic eye toward the future:

“If we have concealed anything, ye sons of learning, wonder not; for we have not concealed it from you, but have delivered it in such language as that it may be hid from evil men, and that the unjust and vile might not know it. But, ye sons of Truth, search and you shall find this gift, the most precious of those reserved for you. Ye sons of folly, impiety and profanity, abstain from seeking after this knowledge; it will be destructive to you, casting you, covered with contempt, into the deepest misery.”

Let us now see what some other authors have revealed on this subject. Having come to believe (which is an error) that alchemy was, after all, but a purely metaphysical philosophy rather than a physical science, they declared that the extraordinary transmutation of base metals into gold was only the figurative expression of the transformation of man, ridding him of his hereditary ills and infirmities so as to attain a regenerated state that made of him a divine nature.

Indeed, that is the synthesis of transcendental alchemy and its principal aim; yet that aim does not represent all the objects of this science. Aristotle, in telling Alexander that the philosopher’s stone “is no stone at all; it is in every man, everywhere, at all times, and is called the final aim of all philosophers,” was mistaken in his first proposition and was right as to the second. In the physical domain, the secret of the Alkahest produces an ingredient called the philosopher’s stone; but for those who care not for gold that perishes, the Alkahest, as Professor Wilder tells us, is but the allgeist, the divine spirit, which dissolves gross matter so that unsanctified elements may be destroyed. The elixir of life would then be but the water of life, which, as Godwin expresses it, is “a universal medicine, having the quality of renewing the youth of man, and causing him to live forever.”

Dr. Kopp, in Germany, published a History of Chemistry some forty years ago. Speaking of alchemy, regarded in its special character as the precursor of modern chemistry, the German doctor employs a very significant expression, which the Pythagorean and the Platonist would understand immediately:

“If,” says he, “under the term world is meant the microcosm which man represents, then the interpretation of the writings of the alchemists becomes easy.”

Irenaeus Philalethes declares that “the philosopher’s stone is the representative of the great Universe (or Macrocosm) and possesses all the virtues of the great system, comprised and collected in the little system. The latter has a magnetic virtue which attracts its like throughout the universe. It is the celestial virtue universally diffused throughout all creation, but epitomized in its little abridgment—man.”

Hear what Alipili [Ali Puli] says in one of his translated works:

“He who has the knowledge of the microcosm cannot remain long ignorant of that of the macrocosm. That is why the Egyptians, those zealous investigators of nature, so often said: ‘Man, know thyself.’ But their narrow disciples, the Greeks, took that adage in an allegorical sense, and in their ignorance inscribed it in their temples. But I declare to thee, whosoever thou art who desirest to plunge into the depths of nature: if what thou seekest thou findest not within thyself, thou wilt never find it without. He who aspires to the first place in the ranks of the students of nature will never find a field of study vaster or better than himself. Therefore, following herein the example of the Egyptians, and in accord with the truth demonstrated to me by experience, I repeat aloud and from the deepest of my soul that the very words of the Egyptians: ‘Oh man, know thyself; for the treasure of treasures is buried in thee!’”

Irenaeus Philalethes, the Cosmopolite, English alchemist and hermetic philosopher, writing in 1659 and alluding to the persecutions to which philosophy was subjected, declares:

“Many who are strangers to the art believe that, in order to obtain its enjoyment, one must do this or that; as so many others have done, we too once believed this. But having become, because of the great peril we have run, more prudent and less ambitious of the three benefits (offered by Alchemy), we have chosen the only infallible and the most secret one . . .”

And the alchemists were indeed well advised. For at a time when, for a slight difference of opinion in religious matters, men and women were branded as infidels, outlawed and proscribed; when science was stigmatized and called sorcery, it was quite natural, Professor A. Wilder tells us, “that men who cultivated ideas outside of the common order should invent a symbolic language and means of communicating among themselves, while remaining unknown to adversaries who thirsted for their blood.”

The author reminds us of the Hindu allegory of Krishna, commanding his adoptive mother to look into his mouth. She did so, and beheld therein the entire universe. This relates directly to the Kabbalistic teaching affirming that the microcosm is but the faithful reflection of the macrocosm—the photographed image, for him who knows how to understand. Here is why Cornelius Agrippa, perhaps the most widely known of the alchemists, tells us:

“There is a created thing, the subject of wonder, in heaven as on earth. It is a compound of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms; it is found everywhere, though it is known to a very few, and called by its true name by no one, for it is buried in numbers, figures, and enigmas, without which neither alchemy nor natural magic could ever attain their perfection.”

The allusion becomes still clearer if one reads the following passage published in the Alchemists’ Enchiridion of the in 1672:

“Now I will make manifest before thine eyes, in this discourse, the natural condition of the philosopher’s stone, enveloped in its triple garment—that stone of riches and charity which contains all secrets, and which is a divine mystery whose sublime nature has no equal in the world. Observe well what I tell thee, therefore, and remember that it possesses a threefold constitution, namely: body, soul, and spirit.”

In other words, that stone contains the secret of the transmutation of metals, that of the elixir of long life, and that of conscious immortality. It is this last secret that the ancient philosophers delighted to discover, leaving to the little philosophers—the modern pretenders—the task of breaking their heads over the first two.

It is the Word, or the “ineffable name,” of which Moses said there was no need to send messengers to seek it, “for the Word is very nigh unto thee; it is in thy mouth and in thy heart.”⁷

This also is what Philalethes, the English alchemist, says in other terms:

“In the world our writings will be as a double-edged knife; some will use it to carve delicate works, others will succeed only in cutting their fingers with it. Nevertheless it is not we who are to blame, since we seriously warn all who attempt the work that they are undertaking therein the highest philosophy of nature. And this whether we write well or ill. For though we write in English, our writings will remain Greek to some, who nevertheless will persist in believing they have well understood us, while they most perversely distort the meaning of what we teach; for can one imagine that those who are fools in nature can become sages merely by reading books, when books are but the witnesses of nature?”

Espagnet warns his readers in the same spirit. He beseeches the “lovers of nature” to read only a few authors, and only those whose truthfulness and intelligence are above suspicion. Let the reader discern what the author merely hints at, especially when it concerns mystical names and secret operations; for, he adds, truth lies hidden in obscurity. The (Hermetic) philosophers deceive the most when they seem to write most clearly, and never reveal more secrets than when they express themselves in the most obscure manner.

Truth cannot be given to the public; still less today than in the days when the apostles received the counsel not to cast their pearls before swine. All the fragments we have just cited are therefore so many proofs of what we have advanced. Outside the schools of Adepts, almost inaccessible to Westerners, there does not exists, in the whole universe—least of all in Europe—a single book on the occult sciences, and especially on alchemy, written in clear and precise language, or offering to the public a system or a method to follow as in the physical sciences. Every treatise coming from an Initiate, or even from an Adept, whether ancient or modern, being unable to reveal the whole, limits itself to casting light upon certain problems which might, if necessary, be revealed to those who deserve to know, while remaining veiled for those who are unworthy to receive the truth, for they would abuse it.

Therefore he who, while complaining of the obscurity and confusion which seem to reign in the writings of the disciples of the Eastern school, would oppose to them works—whether medieval or modern—written with apparent clarity, would prove only one of two things: either that he deceives his public by deceiving himself, or that he is advertising modern charlatanism while knowingly misleading his readers. It is easy to find some semi-modern works written with precision and method, but offering nothing more than the author’s personal hypotheses—that is to say, works having value only for those who know absolutely nothing of true occult science.

People have begun to make much of Éliphas Lévi, who alone perhaps knew more in truth than all our great European mages of 1889 put together. But once one has read, reread, and learned by heart the half‑dozen volumes of Abbé Louis Constant, how far will one really have advanced in the practical occult sciences, or even in the theories of the Kabbalists? His style is poetic and charming; his paradoxes—and almost every phrase in his books is one—are wholly French in spirit. But when one has learned them well enough to recite them from memory from beginning to end, what will those volumes have taught, I ask? Nothing—absolutely nothing—except perhaps French.

We know several pupils of the great modern mage in England, in France, and in Germany — all serious people of unshakable will, several of whom sacrificed years to these studies. One of his disciples had settled upon him a life annuity for more than ten years, paying him besides 100 francs per letter during his enforced absences. Yet that person, at the end of ten years, knew less of magic and Kabbalah than a chela of ten years with an Indian astrologer! We possess those letters on magic, in several manuscript volumes, in the library of Adyar, in French and translated into English; and we defy the admirers of Éliphas Lévi to name to us a single person who has become an occultist, even in theory, by following the teaching of the French mage. Why was this so, if it is evident that he had received those secrets from an Initiate? Simply because he had never had the right to initiate others in turn. Those who know something of the occult sciences will understand us; the pretenders will contradict us and will only hate us the more for these hard truths.

III.

Occult sciences—or rather the key which alone can explain their jargon and their symbols—cannot be divulged. Like the Sphinx which dies at the moment when the riddle of its being is guessed by an Oedipus, they are occult only so long as they remain unknown to the uninitiated mortal. Afterwards they are not sold, nor can they be bought. A Rosicrucian becomes, “he is not made,” says an old adage of the Hermetic philosophers, to which occultists add: “The science of the gods is acquired by violence: it is conquered but not given.” This is precisely what the author of the Acts of the Apostles meant when he wrote Peter’s answer to Simon the Magician: “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.”⁸ Occult knowledge must serve neither to make money, nor any selfish end, not even personal vanity.

Let us go farther and say it at once. Unless in some exceptional case where gold might serve to save an entire nation, the very act of transmutation—where the idea of acquiring wealth would be the sole motive—becomes black magic. Therefore neither the secrets of magic, nor of occultism, nor those of alchemy, can ever be revealed during the existence of our race which worships the golden calf with an ever-increasing frenzy.

What value, then, could any work have that promises to give us the key to initiation in either of these two sciences, which in truth are but one?

We understand very well Adept-Initiates such as Paracelsus or Roger Bacon. The first was one of the great precursors of modern chemistry; the second of physics. Roger Bacon, in his treatise On the Admirable Force of Art and Nature, demonstrates this well. All the sciences of our day are there foreshadowed. He speaks there of gunpowder and predicts the use of steam as a force of propulsion. The hydraulic press, the diving-bell, and the kaleidoscope are described; and he predicts the invention of flying instruments constructed in such a manner that the man seated in the middle of the instrument need only turn a mechanism which sets artificial wings in motion, beating the air after the manner of birds! After this he defends his brethren, the alchemists, against the accusation of using a secret cryptography:

“The reason for this mystery among the wise men of all countries is the contempt and neglect shown for the secrets of wisdom by the ignorant, who know not how to use the things that are most excellent. Even those among them who conceive some useful idea owe it only to chance and good fortune, and greatly abuse their knowledge to the great detriment and misfortune of many persons, sometimes even of entire societies. All this proves that he who publishes our secrets is worse than a fool, unless he carefully veils what he reveals to the multitudes and delivers it in such disguise that even the studious man understands it only with difficulty . . . There are among us some who conceal their secrets under a certain manner of writing, for example by using only consonants, so that he who reads that kind of writing can decipher its true meaning only when he knows the signification of the words (the hermetic jargon).”

This genre (of cryptography) was in use among the Jews, Chaldaeans, Syrians, Arabs, and even the Greeks, and was formerly very widespread, particularly among the Jews.

That is demonstrated to us by the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament—the books of Moses or the Pentateuch—which the introduction of the Masoretic points has rendered ten times more fantastical. But just as with the Bible, which the Massorah and the cunning of the Fathers of the Church have made to say whatever they wished, except what it really said, so it has been with the Kabbalistic and alchemical books. The key to both having been lost for centuries in Europe, the Kabbalah (the “proper Kabbalah” of the Marquis de Mirville, according to the ex-Rabbi, Chevalier Drach, the pious and very Catholic Hebraist), now serves as a witness for the defence as much for the New as for the Old Testament. According to these modern Kabbalists, the Zohar is a book of prophecies of the Catholic dogmas of the Latin Church and the foundation-stone of the Gospel; which might perhaps contain truth, if it were admitted at the same time that, in the Gospels and the Bible, every name is symbolic just as every narrative is allegorical, as in all the sacred writings that preceded the Christian canon.

Before closing this article, which is becoming too long, let us breifly summarize what we have put forward.

I do not know whether our arguments and abundant quotations will produce their effect upon our readers in general. What I am quite certain of, however, is that for the Kabbalists and the modern “Masters” our article will produce the effect of the red cloth upon the bulls in the arena; but the sharpest horns have long since ceased to frighten us. These “Masters” owe all their knowledge to the dead letter of the Kabbalah, and to the fantastical interpretations of certain mystics of the past and present centuries, upon whose themes the “Initiates” of libraries and museums have in their turn composed variations; and therefore they will defend them tooth and nail. The public will be none the wiser, and he who cries the loudest will remain the victor. Nevertheless, Magna est veritas et prævalebit [Truth is great and will prevail].

1. It is well established that alchemy entered Europe from China, and that, having fallen into profane hands, alchemy (like astrology) is no longer the pure and divine science of the schools of the Egyptian Thoth-Hermes of the first dynasties.

2. It is also certain that the Zohar, of which Europe and other Christian countries possess only fragments, is not the Zohar of Simon Ben Jochai, but a compilation of old traditions and writings collected by Moses de Leon of Cordova in the thirteenth century; who, according to Mosheim, in many cases followed the interpretations supplied to him by the Christian Gnostics of Chaldaea and Syria, where he went to seek them out. The old and true Zohar exists in its entirety only in the Chaldaean Book of Numbers, of which there exist today but two or three incomplete copies in the hands of initiated Rabbis. One of them lived in Poland, in great retirement, and destroyed his copy before dying in 1817; as for the other, the most learned Rabbi of Palestine, he emigrated from Jaffa some years ago.

3. Of the true Hermetic books there exists only the fragment known as the “Smaragdine Tablet,” of which we shall speak presently. All the writings compiled from the books of Thoth were destroyed and burned in Egypt by order of Diocletian in the third century of our era. All the rest, the “Pymander” included, is, in its present form, merely reminiscences, more or less vague and erroneous, from various Greek and even Latin authors, who often did not hesitate to pass off their own interpretations as genuine Hermetic fragments. And even if some such texts should exist by chance, they would remain as incomprehensible to the “Masters” of today as the books of the alchemists of the Middle Ages. This is proved by their own personal and very sincere confessions, of which we have cited some passages. We have shown their reasons for this: (a) their mysteries were too sacred to be profaned by the ignorant, being written and explained in their treatises only for the use of the small number of initiated adepts; and they were too dangerous in the hands of those capable of abusing them; (b) in the Middle Ages precautions became ten times greater: to depart from them was to risk being roasted alive, to the greater glory of God and His Church.

4. The key to the jargon of the alchemists and to the true meaning of the symbols and allegories of the Kabbalah exists now only in the East. Since it has never been rediscovered in Europe, what guiding star do our modern Kabbalists possess for discerning truth in the works of the alchemists and in the small number of treatises written by true initiates that exist in our national libraries?

It follows from all this that once they reject the hand which alone, in this century, is capable of furnishing them with the key to the ancient esotericism and the Wisdom-Religion—the Gentlemen Kabbalists—including the “Elect of God” and modern “Prophets”—cast to the wind their only chance of studying the promordial truths and profiting by them.

It is not the Eastern school that loses anything thereby.

We have been told that many French Kabbalists have often expressed the opinion that the Eastern School could hardly be worth anything, or claim to possess secrets unknown to European occultists, for the good reason that it admits women into its ranks.

To this we might reply by repeating a certain fable related by a “Grand Patron” of the Masonic Lodge of women in the United States, Brother James S. Nutt,⁹ to show what woman would do if she were not by the male, whether that male be man or God:

“A lion passing near a monument representing in relief an athletic and powerful man tearing open the jaws of a lion, said: ‘If the scene represented had been executed by a lion, the two figures would have changed roles!’”¹⁰

It is the same with woman. Were she permitted to depict the scenes of human life, she would distribute the roles in reversed It was she who first led man to the tree of knowledge and made him know good and evil; and if she had been allowed quietly to do what she wished, she would have led him to the tree of life and thus rendered him immortal.

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This content is part of the Writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

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