Alchemy is a vast subject and the Philosophers’ Stone is one of its most enigmatic ideas. The Stone was considered the ultimate achievement of the “Great Work” of alchemy and the elusive goal of alchemical transformation. The Philosophers’ Stone has been described in numerous ancient manuscripts and in many recipes for its production, and with considerable disagreement about its nature and appearance as well as about how it was to be discovered and/or made. These disagreements have followed the Stone throughout its history and alchemists have argued with one another about the materials, procedures, and the reality of the Stone. In spite of overlapping claims, many alchemical treatises proclaim their own recipes as the correct one for the achievement of alchemy’s sought-after goal. It was not unusual at the beginning of an alchemical treatise for the writer to begin by mercilessly denouncing other adepts, calling them charlatans, “puffers,” and fools. In the midst of such controversy and confusion, the Philosophers’ Stone remained shrouded in mystery.
Richard Grossinger has noted that “[a]lchemy is primeval. Those who would give its origin must also realize: there are no origins.”1
Alchemy is a form that comes to us from the most ancient times. Its survival bespeaks numerous redefinitions and rebirths, many of them known to us from texts (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Christian, European, Islamic, Hindu, Taoist);2 but [he speculates] an equally large number no doubt occurring in preliterate times and among unknown people whose writings never reached us.3
Philosopher George David Panisnick (1975) likewise states that the reason why the Stone’s origin is so problematic is due to the supposition “that it seems to have evolved out of a pre-alchemical consciousness which was concerned with … lithic myths.”4 Mircea Eliade, the well-known historian of religion, identifies a number of these myths, some of which play an important role as background for the alchemical idea of the Philosophers’ Stone. Two provocative mythologems include the idea that the Stone generates and ripens in the bowels of the earth and that men are born from stones.5 Alan Cardew amplifies these myths noting the living qualities of what we now consider inorganic materials. In them he finds what “were like veins of blood in animal life… [and] were akin to stars.”6 The implications of such ideas point to a way of thinking in which man and nature were intrinsically co-implicated and what Cardew calls a “dark hermetic equivalence,”7 a way of imagining that is implicit in the well-known alchemical idea “as above so below.” For Cardew, “[d]escending into the black labyrinths of the earth and exploring caverns was a journey back to the archaic, which was still at work with a daemonic magical force.”8 In such a descent into our history one could learn to discover and read the “primal plant … primal animal … and the primal stone (or Urstein)” which, according to E.T.A. Hoffmann, mirror the “secrets which are hidden above the clouds.”9
It is hard for our modern consciousness to enter into such archaic and mythical thinking, but for Eliade it is necessary to do so to gain some sense of the worldview that lies behind many alchemical ideas, including the Philosophers’ Stone. For Eliade, entering into the archaic and mythic imagination gives us a glimpse of how early societies related to what we now call “matter.” He writes that the purpose of his study was
to gain an understanding of the behavior of primitive societies in relation to Matter and to follow the spiritual adventures in which they became involved when they found themselves aware of their power to change the mode of being of substances.10
Eliade points out that the idea of the modification and transformation of substances is a key element of the alchemists’ “raison d’être.” In the world of the alchemists, “nature” was animated by a natural telos and entelechy that moved it toward its destiny and completion. The role of the ancient metallurgists and smiths, like that of the alchemists, was to cooperate with nature and to assist in the acceleration of the birth process helping it to bring to fruition its implicit goal. For many alchemists, this goal was the Philosophers’ Stone. In this view, nature was alive, animated, and the engagement with “matter” was a sacred work, intertwined with initiation rites and mysteries.
While Eliade does not claim an unbroken connection between the early miners and smiths and the alchemists, he does posit a common “magico-religious”11 worldview in which subject and object, psyche and matter, philosophically overlap and are intrinsically interrelated. From Eliade’s perspective, contrary to some historians of science, alchemy was not simply a rudimentary chemistry, but was a sacred discipline first. It only became rudimentary chemistry when, “for the majority of its practitioners, its mental world had lost its validity and its raison d’être.”12 So, for Eliade, “chemistry was born … from the disintegration of the ideology of alchemy.”13 But, we will see, this is a point of view denied by many contemporary historians of science. Historians of science typically distinguish a fundamental discontinuity between alchemy and chemistry. Eliade maintains the validity of his research into the origins of science and technology, but also states that “the perspective of the historian of chemistry is perfectly defensible” in the sense that alchemy and chemistry each “work on the same mineral substances, uses the same apparatus, and generally speaking applies itself to the same experiments.”14 In this sense, alchemy and chemistry share these functional similarities. However, if we view the relationship between these similar but different endeavors “from the standpoint of the history of the human spirit we see the matter quite differently.”15 Alchemy continued to be a sacred science and “chemistry came into its own when substances had shed their sacred attributes”16 and the alchemists their ritual practices.
This divide in the way of understanding the relationship of alchemy and chemistry continues to this day, and the history of science and the history of religion constitute very different historiographic positions; there remains a split in our contemporary imagination reflecting different philosophical perspectives. While it is clear that both alchemists and chemists carried out physical experiments in their laboratories, how these operations were understood and experienced were considerably different. Eliade notes that the chemist
carries out his exact observations of physico-chemical phenomena and performs systematic experiments in order to penetrate to the structure of matter. The alchemist on the other hand, is concerned with the “passion,” “the death,” the “marriage” of substances in so far as they will tend to transmute matter and human life. His goals were the Philosophers’ Stone and the Elixir Vitae.17
Eliade’s main concern in and through his analysis of the “historico-cultural context … has been to pierce through to the mental world which lies behind them.”18 For Eliade, “[o]nly by looking at things from the standpoint of the alchemist will we succeed in gaining insight into his mental world and thereby appraise the extent of its originality.”19 It was this intention that opened Eliade to Jung’s perspective, which was both a psychological and philosophical shift in worldview with implications for religious studies as well. He notes that “Jung’s observations are of interest not only to depth psychology; they also indirectly confirm the soteriological [the study of religious doctrine of salvation] function which is one of the main constituents of alchemy.”20
For Eliade, as for Jung, “soteriological” applies to the alchemists and to the perspective that alchemy was a philosophy of religion. For Eliade, “Without a shadow of doubt, the Alexandrian alchemists were from the beginning aware that in pursuing the perfection of metals they were pursuing their own perfection.”21 Eliade confirms the above position historically by noting the Liber Platonis quartorum (which in its original Arabic cannot be later than the tenth century), which “gives great importance to the parallelism between the opus alchymicum and the inner experience of the adept.”22 The alchemist’s work to achieve the state of an i...
