Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul

The Age of Reason saw in alchemy nothing but a form of primitive chemistry, whose practitioners laboured in a rather utopian fashion to change base metal into gold. This super-rational viewpoint came to be the one most widely accepted, despite the reiteration of the alchemists themselves that their work referred to an inner process, and that the use of metallurgical terminology was not to be taken literally. In fact, an intelligent study of the symbolic language of alchemy, in comparison with similar 'arts' still practised today in the East, does reveal clearly a spiritual method whose aim is to become conscious of a timeless inner Reality. It is man himself who is the dull, raw lead, which, by means of a gradual refining process can become Gold of the Sun, a process understood as a rediscovery of the primal condition of the soul which rests in the timeless being of consciousness. That alchemy takes its form and beginnings from a natural mineral art cannot be contested. On the contrary, this stems from the very vision of the alchemist in which man and the cosmos, the inner and outer aspects of nature, are seen related together as images of one another. This universal vision is the key to alchemical symbolism, which is found to reveal unsuspected spiritual horizons. In this volume the author tries to show the true alchemical vision and how true symbols are a manifestation of the very mind of nature, through which one may come to an understanding of the material universe.