Estructura molecular y composición

and Pico de la Mirandola ( 1463-1494), people began to seek out in the hermetic teaching the most widely "comprehensive" vision of the world, one that could unite the Judeo-Christian and Platonic traditions, root the nascent science of modern times in some ancient wisdom (prisca theologia), and thus safeguard the "dignity of man" (Pico de la Mirandola), in danger of fragmentation from the very explosion of knowledge. Thus the movement of the Christian

kabbalists was born, for whom alchemy, through its unique art of transmutation, can Join forces in striving for the assumption of the glorious body of the resurrection. Jacob Boehme ( 1575- 1624), Heinrich Kunrath (d. 1605), Robert Fludd ( 1574-1637), and later Karl von

Eckartshausen ( 1752-1803), author of the Chimische Versuche (Chemical essays, 1801) and Die Wolke über dem Heiligthum (Cloud upon the sanctuary, 1802) were still to remain "alchemists." What unites these three genres in the face of the oppositions discussed above is the acceptance of a certain philosophy of Nature, without which alchemy would not be possible. But it can also be said, conversely, that a certain vision of nature almost necessarily brings with it thought

processes and language "alchemical" in nature. For, in contrast to the proofs which the physical and chemical sciences supposedly bequeathed to the nineteenth century and which are

themselves today brought into question by modern conceptions of matter, 17 _{and in contrast to the} recent historicist and neoscientistic writings of Barbara Obrist, 18 _{Nature and matter, understood} alchemically, can only be one and animated. Any demonstrative process that seeks to prove the opposite is mistaken not only in its manner but also in its mode of observation.

Nature in reality is not a thing for the mind to meditate on in order to -79-

extract its laws and so increase its mastery over the created world. It is the divine Mirror thanks to which the reflective possibility of catching a glimpse of itself is offered to each mind that sincerely renounces the inevitably violent appropriation of such an "object." The invocation of Nature as sole mistress of the Work, which punctuates all the treatises on alchemy, was therefore not a concession to a naturalism whose collusion with scientism was only to increase in the course of history; nor was it a return to a primitivism always ideologically suspect. It was, rather, a reference to that supplication which is at once the materia prima and the evolutionary and regulatory dynamic of all creative processus. Although it is the power of self-regulation, of mediation, and of orientation, Nature requires guidance, accompanied by the Art of Hermes, which elevates its latent "virtues" without ever infringing on its alms or abusively exploiting its resources.

This is why Ganzenmüller could justifiably say that "the alchemists are not Faustian types of people" 19 _{-- considering Faust as the epitome of the "black magician," one who, for the price of}

his damned soul, thinks he obtains an ever-increasing ascendancy over a world that is in fact devastated, made a wasteland by the rupture with "the Spirit of the earth" generated by this type of conquest. But an evolution is very clearly perceptible in a number of alchemical and

hermetical texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One finds a decline of symbolism in the service of allegory, a pedagogical desire to strip away the veils, a socialization of spiritual preoccupations, and finally, above all, an insidious slide from the prerogatives of Hermes to those of Prometheus: one no longer assists Nature; one takes it by force and competes against it! In this respect Goethe Faust Part I ( 1808) and especially Part II ( 1832) mark a critical moment in the history of thought, that in which "modern" Faustian Man, breaking definitively with the chthonian energies that had until then been divinized by Spirit, displays before an ever-darkening horizon a look thenceforth perpetually troubled. And if Goethe ( 17491832) was an "alchemist,"

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this is not only because his extremely concrete knowledge of the principles of the Work enabled him to sprinkle his writings with symbols referring to it or to create a tale like Das Märchen (The green serpent, 1795) and above all the drama of Faust, following the progression of the phases of transmutation. It is also because he reflected the crisis which was beginning to

shake the West and which, imperiling the hermeticist vision of the world and Nature, perhaps also suggested that an escape from it must be found that was itself alchemical, by means of a redemptive turning back of a history doomed to decline 21 _{on the part of Faustian Man.}

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2. Frontispiece. Johann Joachim Becher, Psychosophia oder Seelen-Weisheit (Lauenburg, 1707 ).

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Conversely, however, far from having succumbed to scientistic attacks or to Faustian

undertakings, the alchemical vision of Nature was to survive and undergo a resurgence in a very large number of works inspired in different respects by the Art of Hermes. We would go so far as to say that the preservation or rediscovery of a philosophy of Nature reveals, in most cases, the sign or trace of at least the potential for an alchemy. From the end of the eighteenth century, however, it appears that a dividing line must be traced, inasmuch as the alchemical tradition gradually loses its official standing even while giving birth, in a manner more difficult to retrieve because of its multiformity, to ramifications that we must now undertake to recognize as

"alchemical."

Germany played an incomparable conserving role in this regard. The Hermetic Society of Westphalia, for example, was to carry on its activities from 1796 to 1819 , and Naturphilosophie constitutes a cultural and spiritual tradition within it. The development of the diverse branches of Freemasonry was also to preserve the permanence of an initiatic way (both operative and

speculative) in the West. Again, isolated works proliferated in which the alchemical process, its phases, and its end constitute the oftenhidden dynamic of a creation that also belonged to the history of cultureliterature, philosophy, aesthetics, etc.

Thus a panoramic view of the nineteenth century, in which scientistic positivism triumphs, nevertheless allows us to observe that alchemy, having changed its terrain and in most cases left the laboratory, continues its progress nonetheless, especially in the first and last quarters of the century. Still, the multiplication of "alchemies" doubtless makes it necessary, each time

something presents itself as one, to redefine it and determine its worth, and to attempt to evaluate its soteriological significance in a culture that has become antitraditional. Without this effort, the alchemical process and the symbols of the Work will be used only metaphorically, in the most flatly rhetorical sense of the term and not according to what its etymology (metaphorein,

"transport") would otherwise suggest: a directed itinerary of the soul through transformations of matter, in a vessel of transmutation.

Romanticism and Generalized Chemical Philosophy