Contraindicaciones y precauciones

The diverse forms in which this resurgence is manifested, beginning in the years 1850 to 1860, cannot all be put on the same plane.

The name of Marcellin Berthelot ( 1827-1907) remains associated with the rediscovery of ancient alchemical texts. He published successively Les origines de l'alchimie ( 1885),

Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs ( 1888), and La Chimie au moyen âge ( 1893). We must not forget, however, that Karl Christoph Schmieder had already published Geschichte der

Alchemie in 1832 and that Hermann Kopp, between 1843 and 1847, had published Geschichte der Chemie. Berthelot presents his undertaking as a strictly historical investigation, directed at shedding as much light as possible on the alchemical origins of thenceforth scientific chemistry. The motivations of the scientist are inscribed within the vast humanistic current which,

elucidating the archaic foundations of positivist thought, only exalts more thoroughly its value and significance, social and intellectual. Nothing human must remain alien to a scientist worthy of the name--not even the aberrations (alchemical, as it happened) of the human mind. This point of view was shared by E. Chevreul (who also put together a very fine collection of ancient treatises), F. Hoefer, M. Deherrypon, and Louis Figuier, to whom we owe a study on L'alchemie et les alchimistes ( 1854). Such presuppositions explain the disdain of all these scholars for passages they judged too mystical," their errors of translation, as well as their barely disguised perplexity in the face of the Work's symbolism.

In fact, Berthelot's thought proves to be considerably more complex: that he had been in passing fascinated by his readings seems evident more than once; that he himself had had the ambition to reconstruct, solely on the historical plane, a kind of Ars Magna of alchemical-chemical

knowledge stands out quite clearly in his remarks. What appears certain is that he also foresaw, no doubt thanks to alchemy, the limits of "positivist" knowledge, recognizing the existence of a necessity just as pressing within the human spirit to have reference to an "Ideal" science, open not only to what is currently unknown but also to what cannot be known, which not only serves as a driving force generating new discoveries but satisfies a "gnostic" need. If Berthelot does not pronounce the word it is because positivist orthodoxy imposes its limits on him; but the study of alchemy enabled him to see the possibility of another type of "science," with other forms of relation between theory and practice.

By contrast, the works of Ethan Allen Hitchcock ( Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists, 1857) and those of Mary Anne Atwood, published about the same time, open certain perspectives closer to contemporary anthro-

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pology, comparative history of religions, and Jungian depth psychology than to the views of Berthelot. Indeed, they both affirm in effect that the "subject" of the Work is none other than the human being in search of a superior unity acquired during a "new birth." If there is novelty here, it Is found first of all in the act of proclaiming this traditional platitude in a context so little prepared to receive it! Atwood, however, goes further still, suggesting that ancient wisdom no longer dwells in philosophy emptied of all spiritual significance by both rationalism and empiricism. From this point of view, her work A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery ( 1850) is the first protest raised against Western philosophy's loss of its philosophical

dimension.

In the path thus reopened, other works were to follows such as those of Arthur Edward Waite, Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers ( 1888) and The Secret Tradition in Alcberny ( 1926); H. Stanley Redgrove, Alchemy. Ancient and Modern ( 1911); M. Pattison Muir, The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry ( 1902); without forgetting the important works of Eduard O. von Lippmann, Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchemie ( 1919-1931). Alchemy occupies only a secondary place by contrast in the summa of Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science ( 1923-1958). Finally, we must mention the remarkable contribution made by the collaborators of the journal Ambix ( 1938 to the present) to a better understanding of the history of alchemy.

In the majority of the preceding investigations, with few exceptions, there was no longer a question of taking account of the esoteric significance of alchemy, but rather of studying its origins and historically accessible forms by relating them to chemical science, of which it is considered the ancestor. At the end of the nineteenth century, the neohermeticist and occultist movement, to which hyperchemistry must be linked, seems to proceed in an exactly opposite manner, since it asks that science to guarantee gnosis and to justify its unifying procedures. One might well ask, however, to what extent it did not itself also serve to institute another

"positivism," this time spiritualist. But what can one expect of a hermeticism thus exhumed, at the end of the nineteenth century, and what place does alchemy occupy within the "primordial wisdom" being sought after--an alchemy called, moreover, depending on the circumstances, "neo-alchemy," "dynamochemistry," "hyperchemistry"?

In the commentaries he devoted to Poimandres ( 1866), Louis Ménard writes that "the books of Hermes Trismegistus are a hyphen between the dogmas of the past and those of the future, and it is in this way that they are connected to current and living questions." 26 _{Indeed, did not Hermes}

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excellence, he "who explains, appeases and reconciles"? If hermeticism knew in the first centuries of our era, themselves so troubled, how to secure a transition between gnostics and Neoplatonists, can it not once again restore the unity of knowledge, lost through the dissociation between science and spirituality?

Hermeticism, occultism, and indeed theosophy are thus only diversified formulations of a single unique aspiration: the elaboration of a "great synthesis" between wisdom and science, East and West. Hermes is seen as the most "synthetic" of all the gods and prophets of an otherwise highly eclectic pantheon. Thus revised and corrected, hermeticism appears, still more than in the Renaissance, as the most broadly "comprehensive" movement, and is therefore the most

receptive to new investigations. Beginning with the resolution, many times affirmed, to struggle against all forms of materialism, dualism, mechanism, people continue either to ask the ancient wisdom to ground and legitimize science or to ask the latter to prove rationally the intuition of the first sages and prophets. A circle so obviously vicious does not seem to shock anyone in this period.

All this leads to a summary amalgam of the great traditions. Christianity, Hinduism, Kabbalah, alchemy are all called upon with the sole end of showing that they all admitted the existence of a unique "ubiquitous agent, flowing through everything and from which everything issued. In other words, they already knew that matter was one and living. Issuing from this primordial unity, can the diverse realities be anything other than analogies? The principle of analogy, erected into a unique explanatory principle, is then used and abused, just as are references to the "occult," the vast reservoir of mystery and hope in a world otherwise more and more given over to demystification.

What is to be retained, and according to what criteria, from a production as obsessively repetitive as it is uselessly dazzling? Hardly credible scientifically, hardly rigorous philosophically

(whether they are judged from a rational or a traditional point of view changes nothing), often mediocre in literary terms, the works conceived then can nevertheless touch by their very enthusiasm and naïveté, by their awkward desire for spiritual proselytism and for humanitarian and social commitment: such are the concerns of La clé des grands mystères by Eliphas Levi ( 1861), Essais de sciences maudites by Stanislas de Guaïta ( 1890), and Traité élémentaire de sciences occultes by Papus ( 1898). Moreover, is not everything for them "high" and "great"? Witness La grande loi of Maurice Maeterlinck, or his other stories La grande porte, Le grand secret. In their spirit, does not the very amplitude of the synthesis thus undertaken reconnect with the no less grandiose project of the Ars Magna? Still, it is not enough to evoke, however loftily, the mysterious

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and the occult in order to constitute a real esotericism; nor is it enough to proclaim one's nostalgia for unity in order to put oneself in a condition to realize it alchemically.

It is clearly among the collaborators of the journal Hyperchimie (founded in 1896 by F. Jollivet- Castelot) that we find the most determined effort to demonstrate experimentally the unity of matter to spiritualist ends. Besides the founder, the author of numerous works in praise of neo- alchemy ( Le grand oeuvre alchimique, 1901; La science alchimique, 1904), most of the authors have real laboratory experience: Albert Poisson ( L'initiation alchimique, 1900); August

Strindberg, Brévaire alchimique, Occult journal, Inferno); and Theodore Tiffereau ( L'art de faire de l'or, 1896). "At the dawn of the nineteenth century," writes Jollivet-Castelot, "triumphant materialism, led astray by immoderate love of excessive Analysis, denied Alchemy, the same Alchemy to which this very dying century returns, eager in its decline for mysticism and for synthesis." 27

Their program is clear: "To militate for the Unity of Matter and therefore the possibility of transmutation ." 28_{Every experiment capable of proving that "metals are not simple bodies, but} rather composite bodies," is favorably welcomed. Unfortunately, Tiffereau's experiments only succeeded in producing an allotropic variety of silver. Unluckily, the evolutionist theories of Darwin are marshaled in defense of hylozoism, while the discoveries of Becquerel and Curie are seen as lending their guarantee to a possible "transmutation" of matter. Rare are those who, like R. Schwaeblé, ask themselves, "But where are this always identical life and this always identical matter taking us? Toward more perfection? Will lead one day be totally transmuted into silver? Will virtue triumph?" 29_{To say that ether is perhaps the equivalent of alchemical mercury Is} really only a verbal substitution if what is essential is left out: the process of inner

transformation which allows Nature and humankind to work one for the other toward their "aurification."

It is nevertheless significant that the hermeticists and the hyperchemists had hoped, through the great synthesis, to redirect society toward objectives other than those set down by the socialism and Marxism then rampant. Thus, Louis Lucas wrote in his Roman alchimique ( 1857): "Very fine social ideas are contained in the books of the alchemists. A vast fraternal, humanitarian religion is concealed by their works, although at first they give the impression of being directed toward a profane and material goal." To be sure, the hypothesis of a sudden proliferation of gold, reversing economic and moral values, had at one time shocked adepts and worried or tempted princes. But to realize the social Great Work can also be, because of the unity of matter and the analogies everywhere present

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between matter and spirit, to incite peoples to "rectify" societies corrupted by individualism and mercantilism--unity reconstructed in this way "working" in turn for a higher cosmic unity. Such was the most surprising avatar of a hermeticism become "popular," of an alchemy called upon to sustain a social and spiritual transmutation to rival Marxism, but close on the other hand to certain ideals of Charles Fourier ( 1772-1837) and Joseph Maria Höene-Wronski ( 1776- 1853), which were also, in a way, preoccupations of René Allendy, author of a thesis on alchemy and medicine ( 1912). The "fatal flaw" of this hermeticist medicine, closer to Jung than to Freud if it must so be situated, the generator of incalculable cultural disasters, is first of all the

misunderstanding of our "esoteric" destination, which is to make of us "royal" people.

"Modern" Alchemy and Tradition

An essential question arises, at the end of the previously mentioned research: May we hope for a social and cultural change that would allow collective attainment of the reality of the inner accomplishment, in a nontraditional context like that of modern Western society? It is this central problem with which "traditionalists" such as René Guénon and Julius Evola have grappled. If "alchemy" exists for them, it resides first of all in the aptitude of a culture--that of the West in particular--to perform a salutary "transmutation," capable of reversing the entropic cycle of its decline. Is not the West the place and the time where the sunlight, associated by alchemists with becoming, falls upon the dangerously multiform diversity of "manifestation, which the Great Work must properly reunify and orient after having integrated its creative potential?

The operative Art of Hermes nevertheless occupies only a secondary place in the metaphysical vision of which Guénon has become the spokesman. Thus Eugène Canseliet could legitimately reproach him for having been ignorant of its fundamental texts and overestimated alchemy's relevance to royal initiation, which he regards as subordinate to sacerdotal initiation, a point of view opposed to the one Evola developed in La tradizione hermetica ( 1931), which made of alchemy a solely cosmological science, an initiation solely into "little mysteries." No doubt Guénon can also be reproached for having taken little account of operative alchemy, work on "matter" being for him no more than the indirect and secondary continuation of spiritual "transmutation." But is this really transmutation, or transformation?

For Guènon, in fact, alchemy, the technique of hermeticism, could not constitute a true metaphysics, if by that is meant an intuitive science (one

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of Intellectus) that would make it possible to trace back "manifestations" to their "principal" source and thus effect a liberating return toward the "formless." In a way Guénon takes alchemy at its word, which speaks of trans-mutation and not of trans-formation. And his disdain for any philosophy of Nature confirms still further the subordination in which he holds alchemy, dedicated to remain operative only in the intermediary world. Only its symbolism could be transposed, "giving it a truly spiritual and initiatic value." 30 _{This is why Guénon frequently}

integrates the symbols of the Work--sulfur and mercury, vessel, crucible-heart--among the Symboles fondamentaux de la science sacrée ( 1962).

Moreover, like Evola, Guénon tended to interpret the alchemical antagonism of "natures" in terms of a heroic battle of the male and solar principle against the dispersing, lunar, and female fascination, whereas it was in fact a matter--as Jung clearly saw--of the intersecting of reciprocal properties allowing the constitution of a balanced quaternity of which the "quintessence" is the center. In René Daumal as well, a misunderstanding of the erotic" dynamic of the Work was to transform the famous "chemical wedding" into "holy war" and orient the poet toward Hindu asceticism more than toward hermetic wisdom.

By contrast, Evola accords more importance to the role of the West as the possible crucible of a Work of spiritual and cultural regeneration still to come ( Rivolta contra il mondo moderno, 1969), thereby implicitly revaluing the function of the intermediary world. This appears still more clearly in certain remarks of Raymond Abellio (born in 1907), even if he often substitutes the notion of transfiguration for that of transmutation: even if he makes of the background of La structure absolue ( 1977) the equivalent of a neognostic Philosopher's Stone that is too strongly opposed to the mystical" feminine to be the fruit of a true coincidentia oppositorum. He can also

conclude that alchemy, "the science of open systems. . . . appears as a simple specific case of a general science of energy still to be disclosed in its universality." 31

Generally speaking, the "traditionalist" approaches that were thus made to alchemy appear to us, with the exception of those emanating from operative alchemists such as Fulcanelli or Canseliet, to have underestimated the originality of alchemical gnosis and especially the privileged role it could be made to play in the West--to be sure, a place of antitradition, a place where all is rent asunder, but also, because of this very fact, a place where the inversion of signs prefiguring transmutation can be most legible, a place where the cross can at every moment be molded into the crucible. This is illustrated in its own way by the eminently esoteric work of an Ernst

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Jünger, for example. Perhaps it would have been necessary to meditate still further on the famous turning of venom into theriac, of which the texts constitute the mystery of the work. In this context, the magisterial work of Henry Corbin ( 1903-1978) takes its place more and more with each day that passes as that of an "alchemist" in whom the oriental detour invites the West to "work" toward its own reorientation.

This is why the proliferation of "alchemists" throughout the last centuries must not in any way make us forget that a gnostic quest such as that undertaken by the Art of Hermes is first of all a reunifying and orienting enterprise. Numerous historical, anthropological, and aesthetic works have indeed come to counterbalance the reductive influence of scientism and give alchemy back its place in culture. But exactly what place, and for what culture? Is it a question of knowing whether there always exist operative alchemists or of proposing a guided tour of the places that were important to alchemy? Whatever may be the interest in such an undertaking, does it suffice to bring to light the identity of the symbolic and archetypal images found within alchemy, dreams, and artistic works, if the whole of these steps, or each one separately, does not itself engender a more central and vital questioning and does not achieve a change of plane, without which it is not esotericism? Is an alchemical quest still possible for a modern person? With what "matter"? For the sake of what "gold"? It is fine to speak of the eternal human, but that may not suffice when it comes to taking account of a datum infinitely more complex and murky -- "modernity" as such.

Now it seems that in the contemporary cultural context, particularly the West, this quest is undertaken more through these substitutes for the Great Work, the works of culture, than through the work of the furnace or mysticism. Can the quest in this case be isolated in a hermeneutics of and by culture? The difficulty of such a situation appears to us to have been foreseen remarkably by the French poet Joë Bousquet ( 1897-1950):

Today the Great Work is forgotten, he who follows its paths does not even know that he has entered. And more than one questions himself, in the manner of the Kabbalist who, however, is ignorant of his entire doctrine. If he knew the power which leads him, he would no longer be bewitched. He would make of it a truth, that is to say nothing much: his ignorance has been cooperating in maintaining the principle, and keeping it from being formulated and lost in reasons. 32

It is in fact in this intermediary zone between total unknowing and the formulation of "reasons" that alchemical esotericism is most often situated, acrobatically and paradoxically. We must now specify the links that unite it to the "poetic."

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