Geber's work also gave his followers clues as to the critical question of the state of mind of the alchemist when undergoing alchemical operations. Alchemy was a psychic experience for the successful operator. As Jung puts it : “what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious35.” The making of the Stone transcends reason - as we should expect of a noetic, out of the ‘body’ (ego) experience. Geber's Liber perfecti magisterii demands that the operator, or artifex, be of a most subtle mind, with an adequate knowledge of metals and minerals. He must not have a coarse or rigid mind, nor should he be greedy or avaricious, irresolute or vacillating. He must not be hasty or vain. Firmness of purpose, perseverence, patience, mildness, a capacity for long-suffering, good-temper will be rewarded by God's enlightening the artifex and making Himself known. Morienus, said to have been the teacher of the Omayyad prince Khalid ibn-Jazid ibn-Muawiyah (635-706 AD), is quoted with approval : “This is the science that draws its master away from the suffering of this world and leads to the knowledge of future good.”
Another Moslem who passed on the Greek and Graeco-Egyptian alchemical inheritance was al Rhazi, known to the west as Rhazes (c.865-925). His immediate sources were Christian and Sabian Syriac translations of Greek texts, made at the heyday of the Sabian presence in Baghdad. Al-Razi, a Persian Muslim born at Rayy near Teheran, is known as the greatest physician of the Islamic world, having studied alchemy as a youth. This connection between medicine and alchemy, noted also in respect of Jabir is a most significant one, and is central to the early seventeenth century conception of the ‘Rosicrucian Brother’ as a healer, using the divine powers hidden in nature for the good of humanity : an image partly based on the example of Paracelsus (d.1541) who followed, somewhat belatedly, these oriental sages in stressing the need for observation, experiment and sensible classification37. Although partly dependent on the same Greek sources as Jabir, al Razi excelled in exact classification of substances with clear descriptions of chemical processes and apparatus, consistently devoid of unnecessary mystical elements. This is demonstrated in his great Book of the Art (of alchemy) discovered in the library of an Indian prince in the 1920s. While Jabir and other Arabian alchemists divided mineral substances into ‘Bodies’ (gold, silver &c.), ‘Souls’, (sulphur, arsenic &c.), and ‘Spirits’ (mercury and sal-ammoniac), al Razi classified the alchemical substances as vegetable, animal or mineral - now a well-known division, and opened the way for a more objective chemistry. His classification did however allow for a restated concept of spirits and bodies. He divided minerals into spirits, bodies, stones, vitriols, boraxes, and salts, and distinguished volatile ‘bodies’ from non-volatile ‘spirits’, placing among the latter, sulphur, mercury, arsenic and salmiac.
The second half of the fifteenth century saw an explosion of interest in Europe in the newly printed works of Graeco-Arabic alchemy, but this movement had abated by 1550, partly as a result of the catastrophically divisive effects of the Reformation, (the dissolution of the greater and lesser monasteries in England in the 1530s may well have been injurious to the movement), and the growth of Aristotelian and Platonic classicism, along with a high-brow Ciceronian complacency and Averroistic scepticism.
One figure in particular stands at the twilight of the high Middle Ages, testifying to the power of medieval alchemy before Christendom finally broke apart. That figure was Sir George Ripley.
Sir George Ripley (c.1415-1490?)
Ripley was an Augustinian monk and sometime canon of Bridlington in Yorkshire, born at about the time of Agincourt. In 1471 he compiled the Compound of Alchemie and was also the author of the Medulla Alchimiae (1476). His works were collected into the Opera omnia chemica38 (from which the quotations following have been taken), a work central to that of his pupil, the more famous Thomas Norton39, author of the Ordinall of Alchemy (in English verse) which was to be included wholesale in Elias Ashmole's ground-breaking Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), and a work subject to the intense study of no less a personage than Isaac Newton, alchemical enthusiast.
It is highly significant that Ripley was part of the monastic system in England, for it is now clear that it was this system which provided the major conduit of Hermetic alchemical lore throughout the Middle Ages. The prime reason that this picture has taken so long to become clear is simply the criminal wastage of monastic libraries which took place during the Dissolution in England. According to J.C Dickinson, before the Dissolution “Some large monastic libraries had about 2000 manuscripts and many houses must have had several hundred. Hence it does not seem rash to estimate the total books in the 900 English monasteries existing in the opening of the sixteenth century as several hundred thousand. If this were so the surviving element [about 3600 works] cannot represent more than a very minute percentage - perhaps 5% would over-estimate it.”40 It is not uncommon to see the Dissolution of the Monasteries as a final (if cruelly brusque) clearing-away of the detritus of an age which had - as the vulgar phrase has it - ‘passed its sell-by date’. The question is too great a one to be gone into in this particular work41, but one thing is clear, that if Ripley's alchemical work is anything to go by, a flame of spiritual inspiration was still bright at least in some quarters of the English monastic world as that age (later) called medieval passed into that period posthumously called the Renaissance42.
Ripley's work seems to bear out the modern view, first established by Professor Carl Jung,43 that while transformation as a principle was the chief aim of the alchemist, it was transformation of the ‘wet’, earth-bound soul into spirit which was held in greatest esteem by those ‘chymists’ who so fervently distinguished themselves from the vain seekers of “vulgar gold” : spiritual gold was their primary aim; material benefits were regarded as parergons or by-products of the spiritual opus.44 Again, one must bear in mind the sitz in leben of the spiritual alchemist : the cloistered, sacral life.
The alchemist projects his purified mind (imagination) into the natural world : “The aerial soul is the secret fire of our philosophy, our oil, our mystic water.”45 Into the vision of the natural world - and in particular into the world of chemical change - the alchemist actualised the contents of his unconscious - the archetypal world ‘outside’ of nature - which are constellated on seeing analagous processes in the chemical vase. Of course, the alchemists did not use concepts such as the ‘unconscious’ and as a result held their perceptions as emanating from a divine source. Ripley was aware that he was employing imagery, that is the imaginative life : the creative principle of the mind. He says that all his secrets are formed from an “image” (imago) 46. The alchemist begins the operation with the ‘first matter’ or prima materia : something of the world - the first ‘stone’ of the work (recall Ostanes' stone of the Nile in chapter 2). This ‘stone’ can be found everywhere; it passes unnoticed by worldly eyes : “The philosophers tell the inquirer that birds and fishes bring us the lapis [stone], every man has it, it is in every place, in you, in me, in everything, in time and space.”47 “It offers itself in lowly form. From it there springs our eternal water [aqua permanens].”48
The implicit identification of the stone's mercurial secret with Christ is clear enough. Christ the lowly messenger was “in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.” (John I.10). By taking the alchemical root to spiritual awareness, Ripley automatically found himself (though probably unbeknownst to himself) in the gnostic territory where the “living Jesus” is actualised in himself. The Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas (unknown to Ripley of course) elucidates this mysterious territory with remarkable clarity:
From Me did the All come forth, and unto Me did the All extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find Me there. (46.25)
It [the Kingdom of the Father] will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it. (50.14ff.)
According to
Jung, “Ripley belonged to an age when God and his mysteries still dwelt in nature, when the mystery of redemption was at work on every level of existence, therefore unconscious happenings still lived in untroubled, paradisal participation with matter and could be experienced there.”49
Ripley was content to use Christian typology for the alchemical work in a way which when seen by uncomprehending eyes would certainly have appeared blasphemous : one of several reasons why the alchemist worked in secret.
Christ said : “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.” From that time forward, when both parts, having been crucified and exanimated [souls separated], are betrothed to one another man and wife shall be buried together and afterward quickened again by the spirit of life. Then must they be raised to heaven, so that body and soul may be there transfigured and enthroned on the clouds; then they will draw all bodies to their own high estate. (Opera omnia chemica. p. 81).
The life and passion of Christ is clearly taken here as the archetypal alchemical process : something to be enacted both by and within the being of the artifex himself. Substances could be ‘redeemed’ through transformation of their inner life. That inner life was normally called the mercurius, a word not necessarily denoting the chemical of that name (mercury) but the animating spirit which alchemists believed to be diffused throughout nature. In the words of the alchemist Paracelsus (who was born when Ripley was in his sixties) “There are as many mercuries as there are things.” Mercurius is usually the penetrating agent of the transformative work : the spirit which acts upon the ‘souls’ of lesser substances.
This concept of the alchemical mercurius50 is directly linked to the ancient Egyptian god Thoth who as the communicative, transformative and binding deity was worshipped by the ancients in his Roman form of Mercury and Greek form as Hermes at particular geographical features such as hills, streams, wells, springs and groves. These were the places where the unhappy wanderer might experience panic, that is to say an experience of the god Pan : the All - Nature as an immeasurable and overwhelming immensity. Such a place could put ‘the fear of god’ into the uninitiated51. When Hermes Trismegistos in Libellus I of the Corpus Hermeticum encounters the “authentic Nous”, this being (called Poimandres) is described as “a Being of vast and boundless magnitude.” The gnostic faculty of nous (mind or spirit) is thus identified with the substance of the All : in Ripley's alchemy the source of the “All” is clearly identified with Christ, to whom “all bodies” are drawn (cf : “from Me did the All come forth, and unto me did the All extend.” - Gospel of Thomas).
It is remarkable how the essence of gnostic psychology was so well preserved within the polyvalent traditions of Hermetic alchemy, without the benefit of the explicitly Gnostic texts now known to us.
Chapter Four
The Hermetic Renaissance
1484 : one year before the battle of Bosworth will end the English Wars of the Roses. In Florence : the Neo-neoplatonists Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino are actively re-asserting the value of Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus. They believe they are reaching back to the One, to the pristine theology (prisca theologia).
A new spirit is in the air. Printing has arrived. From the model of Gutenberg's press in Mainz, moveable metal type has spread to Paris (1470), London (1477) and Stockholm (1483). The art of printing has now been established in Italy for nineteen years. Among the first and most popular works to become available in print : the Latin Asclepius, a dialogue between Hermes Trismegistus and his disciple, the work which would give Pico della Mirandola's revolutionary Oratio52 its primary text : A great miracle, O Asclepius, is man. Printed in 1469, it was followed two years later by the publication of Ficino's translation into Latin of the Hermetic Pimander at Treviso : the first fourteen books of the Corpus Hermeticum, a revolutionary publication which would appear in at least sixteen editions before the year 1500.
Kept alive by the Harranian and Baghdad ‘Sabians’ from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the mid-eleventh century, and then passed on to safety in Constantinople, the Hermetic books had been brought to Cosimo dei’ Medici from a Macedonian monastery in 1460 by Cosimo's agent Leonardo da Pistoia, seven years after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. As far as Cosimo, Ficino and Pico are concerned, the works of Hermes contain the principal prophetic message of the century.
Palm Sunday (11 April) 1484, in the Papal reign of Sixtus IV. A man, thirty-three years old, stops by the banks of the river Manara outside Rome with a group of excited followers. He puts on a pair of winged shoes and then a crown of thorns. Above the crown is a crescent moon on which is written : This is my son Poimandres whom I have chosen. He then mounts a white ass and makes a speech in which he announces himself as the “angel of Wisdom, Poimandres, in the most sublime manifestation of the Lord Jesus Christ.” He says that he has descended from heaven. He then rides the ass into the streets of Rome, preaching to the people, while his followers distribute papers to the throng : papers whose subject is Rebirth, regeneration, or in French, renaissance. He performs a number of symbolic rites and then makes his way to the Vatican to deposit a number of objects on the throne of S. Peter. His work accomplished, he returns home to Bologna, to his wife and sons. This man is Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio : a footnote in history, a man almost completely forgotten.
‘Who are you?’ I [Hermes] said. ‘I,’ said he, am Poimandres, the authentic Mind [Nous].’ ‘I want to know,’ said I, ‘the things that are, and understand their nature, and get knowledge [gnosis] of God. These,’ I said, ‘are the things of which I want to hear.’ He answered, ‘I know what you wish, for indeed I am with you everywhere; keep in mind all that you will to learn, and I will teach you. (Libellus I. Corpus Hermeticum : Hermes encounters Nous.)
The Mercurial Spirit
The historian H.A.L. Fisher in his History of Europe (1935) wrote of how “The soul of a people will never be greatly stirred by the religion of the artist or the savant. Philosophy, erudition, the critical examination of texts, the passionate pursuit of art for art's sake, these activities will always be confined to a small intellectual minority of the human race. So it is now, so it was then. If the humanist of the Renaissance elevated taste, he also enlarged the distance between man and man.” It is rarely considered that a reverse operation might take place. What when the humanist takes his religion from a ‘man of the people’?
Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio was one such man, a man of no oratorical or academic learning but one who nevertheless ‘turned around’ the soul of an Italian humanist. The name of the humanist was Lodovico Lazzarelli, a poet and scholar who, he claimed, owed his salvation and rebirth to this Giovanni Mercurio, a man who claimed to be a manifestation of the “authentic Nous”, and a living embodiment of the Hermetic principle. Were it not for the fact that Mercurio gained this humanist for a disciple, and stirred the interest of one other ‘respectable’ humanist, we should never have known that he even existed. Giovanni Mercurio, with the freedom which stems from inspiration unspoilt by too much learning, actually carried out in himself that which the humanist scholars, for all their brilliance, largely only wrote about. In the case of minor humanist Lodovico Lazzarelli, even his biographer (a certain Lancilotti, writing in c.1700) omits to mention any contact between his subject and Giovanni, the Hermetic messiah. Furthermore, more famous scholars who used Lazzarelli's works on the Hermetic writings took no interest at all in the fact that they were dedicated to “my father” Ioannes Mercurius de Corigio.
What little we do know of Mercurio we owe largely to some chance discoveries made by the 20th Century Renaissance scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller53 in the 1930s, discoveries made when he was investigating the vogue for Hermetism among Neapolitan and Florentine humanists at the Community Library of Viterbo, seventy miles north-west of Rome. The account of Mercurio's appearance in Rome in 1484 was found by Kristeller in a unique work, the Epistola Enoch : “The Epistle of Enoch concerning the wonderful and portentous
apparition of the new and divine prophet to the whole human race.” The Epistle consists of the account given in outline above, and is prefaced by a sermon to humanity in which people are exhorted, in highly convincing terms, to accomplish regeneration in order to bring the soul to the true gnosis of God. The author, ‘Enoch’, makes it clear that he owes his own regeneration from secular poetry to sacred studies, practice and consciousness to Ioannes Mercurius.
The name Enoch is a special name, presumably given to Lazzarelli by Mercurio as a sign of his new sonship. It may be a reference to the patriarchal Enoch of the Book of Genesis under whose name an apocryphal and apocalyptic work was circulating privately. The Book of Enoch was held in reverence by some Hermetic scholars. However, it should also be mentioned that Enoch was a name given to Hermes Trismegistus by the Harranian and Baghdad Sabians, to tie their prophet into the realm of acceptable figures from the Koran (19.57; 21.85). The name would thus intend to put Lazzarelli under the spiritual guidance of the Thrice Greatest Hermes himself.
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