On the Shoulders of Giants

by Umberto Eco

  The manipulations of first matter involve three phases, characterized by the color that the matter gradually takes on: the black work, the white work, and the red work. The black work calls for cooking (and therefore the intervention of fire) and the decomposition of the matter; the white work is a process of sublimation or distillation; and the red work is the final stage (red is the color of the sun, which often stands for gold, or vice-versa). The essential instrument of manipulation is the hermetic furnace, the athanor, but other equipment used includes alembics, vessels, and mortars, all known by symbolic names such as the philosopher’s egg, maternal womb, bridal chamber, pelican, sphere, sepulchre, and so on. The basic substances are sulfur, mercury, and salt. But the procedures are never clear, because the language of alchemists is based on three principles:

  Since the object of the art is the greatest of secrets and cannot be revealed—the secret of secrets—no expression ever says what it seems to say, and no symbolic interpretation will ever be definitive, because the secret will always lie elsewhere: “Poor fool! Are you so ingenuous as to believe that we would openly teach you the greatest and the most important of secrets? I assure you that anyone wishing to explain the writings of the Hermetic Philosophers in accordance with their ordinary and literal meaning will soon find himself in the twists and turns of a labyrinth from which he cannot escape, nor will he have an Ariadne’s thread to show him the way out” (The Secret Book of Artephius, c. 1150).

  When it seems that they are speaking of ordinary substances, gold, silver, or mercury, they are really talking about the gold and mercury of the Philosophers, which are a different matter altogether.

  While no account ever says what it seems to say, conversely, all accounts will always regard the same secret. As it says in the thirteenth-century Turba Philosophorum: “Know that we are all in agreement, whatever we say.… One clarifies what the other has concealed and he who really searches can find everything.”

  At what point does fire come into the alchemical process? If we take alchemical fire to be analogous to the fire that governs digestion or gestation, it ought to come into play in the course of the black work—that is, when heat, acting on and against viscous, oily, radical, metallic humidity, produces nigredo. If we are to believe a text such as the Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique of Dom Pernety (1787), this is how it goes:

  when heat acts on these materials, they turn first into powder and an oily, viscous water that rises vaporous to the top of the vessel and then falls back down to the base as dew or rain, where it becomes almost like a black, oily broth. That is why this process has been described as sublimation and volatilization, ascension and descension. When it has coagulated, the water becomes first like black pitch, which is why it has been called fetid, stinking earth, and also because it gives off the stench of mold, tomb, and sepulchre.

  But the literature contains statements to the effect that the terms distillation, sublimation, calcination, or digestion and cooking, reverberation, dissolution, descension, and coagulation are none other than a single “Operation,” carried out in the same vessel—in other words, a cooking of the matter. So, Pernety concludes:

  it is necessary to consider and hold this Operation to be one but expressed in different terms; and it will be understood that all the following expressions always mean the same thing: to distil in the alembic; to separate the soul from the body; to burn, calcinate; to unite the elements; to convert them; to turn one into the other; to corrupt; to fuse; to generate; to conceive; to bring into the world; to attain; to moisten; to wash with fire; to beat with the hammer; to blacken; to putrefy; to rubify; to dissolve; to sublimate; to crush; to reduce to powder; to pound in the mortar; to pulverize on marble—and many other similar expressions all mean merely to cook through the same regime, down to dark red. Care must be taken, therefore, not to remove the vessel and take it off the fire, for if the matter were to cool, all would be lost (Règles Générales, 202–206).

  So what kind of fire are we talking about, given that different treatises speak variously of fire of Persia, fire of Egypt, fire of the Indies, elemental fire, natural fire, artificial fire, fire of ashes, fire of sand, fire of filings, fire of fusion, fire of flames, fire against nature, Algir fire, Azothic fire, celestial fire, corrosive fire, fire of matter, fire of lion, fire of putrefaction, dragon fire, manure fire, et cetera, et cetera?

  Fire keeps the furnace hot at all times, from the beginning to the red work. But could not the term fire also be a metaphor for the red matter that appears during the alchemical process? Here, according to Pernety again, are some names for the red stone: red gum, red oil, ruby, vitriol, ashes of tartar, red body, fruit, red stone, red magnesium, starry stone, red salt, red sulfur, blood, poppy, red wine, red vitriol, cochineal, and, naturally, “fire, fire of nature” (Signes, 187–189).

  Alchemists have always worked with fire and fire is the basis of alchemical practice, yet it is fire that constitutes one of the most impenetrable mysteries of alchemy. Since I have never produced gold, I am unable to provide an answer to this problem and so I will move on to another type of fire, another alchemy, the artistic kind, where fire becomes the instrument of a new genesis and the artist sets himself up as an imitator of the gods.

  Fire as the Cause of Art

  In Protagoras, Plato says:

  Once upon a time, there were gods but no mortal creatures. And when the preordained time of their birth came, the gods molded them within the earth, combining earth and fire and all the compounds of earth and fire. When they were ready to lead the creatures into the light, they ordered Prometheus and Epimetheus to equip them and distribute abilities to each as was fitting. But Epimetheus begged Prometheus to let him make the allotment himself, saying, “When I’ve made the allotment, you can look it over.” Once he’d persuaded him, Epimetheus made the allotment. And in making the allotment, he gave strength without speed to some, but he decked the weaker ones out with speed. He gave weapons to some, but for the weaponless, he came up with some other capacity for their preservation. Those he’d made small, he gave wings or an underground home as an escape, while those he’d made large—that’s just how he kept them safe. He gave out everything else in the same way, ensuring a balance.… And when he had supplied them to avoid mutual destruction, he also came up with protection against the elements by covering them with thick hair and solid hides, which were up to the task of staving off winter cold and burning heat alike. And when each creature went to sleep, these same things would serve as its very own natural bedding. And under their feet, he gave some hooves and others firm, bloodless skin. Next, he provided different food for different creatures: for some, the grass of the earth, for others, the fruit of the trees, and for others still, roots. But there were others whom he gave the meat of other animals as food. These he made less fertile, while he made their prey very prolific to ensure the preservation of their kind.

  As you know, Epimetheus wasn’t exactly the smartest guy around, so he didn’t realize that he had already used up all the powers on irrational creatures. He was left with the human race lacking proper arrangements and had no idea what he could do for them. So when Prometheus came to look over the allotment, he found a clueless Epimetheus and saw that the other animals were cared for and had everything, while human beings didn’t have clothes or shoes, shelter, or defense.… So Prometheus, getting nowhere with figuring out how to save humans, went and stole the technical knowledge from Hephaistos and Athena, along with fire—since you can’t get this knowledge or use it without fire—and he gave them as a gift to mankind.

  The conquest of fire marked the birth of the arts, at least in the Greek sense of technical skills, and hence mankind’s dominion over nature. It is a pity that Plato had not read Lévi-Strauss and had not also said that with the introduction of fire came the cooking of food, but basically cooking is an art and so it was covered by the Platonic notion of techne.

  Just how much fire has to do with the arts is explained very well by
Benvenuto Cellini in his Life (1567), where he tells us how he cast his Perseus, covering it with a clay tunic and then using a slow fire to draw off the wax,

  which escaped through many air-vents I had made because, the more of them you make, the better the molds will be filled. And once I had finished draining the wax, I made a furnace shaped like a funnel around my Perseus with bricks laid one atop the other in such a way as to leave many spaces so that the fire might breathe better: after that I began to stoke it assiduously with logs and kept it burning constantly for two days and two nights; then, after having drained all the wax, and on seeing that the said mold had been baked perfectly, I immediately began to dig a ditch in which to bury my mold, using all the fine techniques that this beautiful art commands.… And having straightened it perfectly so that it was hanging over the center of the ditch, I gradually lowered it to the bottom of the furnace.… When I saw it was perfectly stable and that the little tubes for venting the air were in place … I turned to my furnace, which I had filled with numerous blocks of copper and pieces of bronze and set them in accordance with the rules of the art, namely one on top of the other to allow the flames of the fire to pass through and make the metal heat up and liquefy quicker. Then I called out loudly for the fire to be lit. And what with the mass of pine logs full of the oily resin that the tree produces, and because my little furnace was so well made, things worked only too well, so well that … the workshop caught fire and we feared the roof might fall in upon us; on the other hand, the heavens sent down so much wind and rain from the side toward the kitchen garden that my furnace cooled down. So, after struggling with these adverse mishaps for several hours, battling fatigue so fiercely that even my strong constitution could no longer resist, I was seized by a sudden and unimaginably high fever, and so I was obliged to take to my bed.

  And so, what with accidental fires and artificial fires, after much planning the statue took shape.

  While fire is a divine element, at the same time by learning to make fire mankind mastered a power that until then had been reserved for the gods, and so even the fires men lit in the temples are the effect of an act of pride. Greek civilization immediately associated the conquest of fire with this connotation of pride and it is curious how all the celebrations of Prometheus, not only in Greek tragedy, but also in the art that came after it, do not dwell so much on the gift of fire but on the punishment that came in its wake.

  Fire as Epiphanic Experience

  When artists accept and recognize with pride and hubris that they are similar to the gods, and see the work of art as a substitute for divine creation, then with the advent of the decadent sensibility comparisons between the aesthetic experience and fire and between fire and epiphany begin to make headway.

  The concept (if not the term) of epiphany arose with Walter Pater and his “Conclusion” to The Renaissance (1873). It is no accident that the famous conclusion begins with a quotation from Heraclitus. Reality is a sum of forces and elements that come into being and gradually decline, and only superficial experience makes them seem solid and fixed in an importunate presence: “But when reflection begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic.” We are, then, in a world of unstable, fleeting, incoherent impressions: custom is broken, everyday life is rendered vain, and of this, beyond this, there remain only single moments that may be grasped for an instant before they instantly fade away.

  Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only.…

  To maintain this ecstasy is success in life …

  While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.

  All decadent writers describe aesthetic and sensual ecstasy as something radiant. But perhaps the first to link aesthetic ecstasy to the idea of fire was Gabriel D’Annunzio, who we are not so banal as to connect solely with the tired old idea that flame is beautiful. The idea of aesthetic ecstasy as the experience of fire appears in D’Annunzio’s novel The Flame (1900). The main character, Stelio Effrena, sees the beauty of Venice in terms of fire:

  Every instant, then, pulsed through things like an unbearable flash of light. From the crosses standing on top of cupolas swollen with prayer to the fragile salt crystals hanging beneath the bridges, all things shone in a supreme exultation of light. As the lookout on the battlement’s piercing cry warns of the gathering storm below, so, wreathed in flame, the golden angel on the highest tower finally proclaimed His coming. And He came. He came sitting on a cloud as on a chariot of fire, the hem of his purple raiment trailing behind him.

  Inspired by The Flame, which he had read and loved, here is the greatest exponent of the epiphany, James Joyce: “By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself” (Stephen Hero, 1944). In Joyce this experience always appears as a fiery experience. The word “fire” appears in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) fifty-five times, “flame” and “flaming” thirty-five times, not to mention other associated terms such as “radiance” or “splendor.” In The Flame Foscarina listens to Stelio and feels “drawn to an atmosphere as fiery as a forge.” For Stephen Dedalus aesthetic ecstasy always appears as a blazing radiance, and is expressed through solar metaphors, and it is the same for Stelio Effrena. Let’s compare only two passages.

  D’Annunzio, in The Flame:

  The boat veered violently. A miracle caught it. The first rays of the sun pierced the flapping sail, struck the angels on the campaniles of San Marco and San Giorgio Maggiore, set alight the sphere of the Fortuna and crowned with lightning flashes the five domes of the Basilica.… Glory to the Miracle! A superhuman feeling of power and liberty swelled the young man’s heart, just as the wind swelled the sail that was transfigured for him. In the deep red splendor of the sail he stood as if in the deep red splendor of his own blood.

  And Joyce, in the Portrait:

  His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendor that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fireconsumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes, for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle.

  Regenerating Fire

  We have seen that, for Heraclitus, the universe is regenerated in all ages through fire. The person who seems to have had greater familiarity with fire was Empedocles, who, perhaps to become a god or to convince his followers that he had become one, threw himself (according to some) into Etna. This final purification, this desire for annihilation in fire, has seduced the poets of all ages. We need only consider Hölderlin’s words in The Death of Empedocles (1798):

  Have you not seen? They are recurring

  The lovely times of my entire life again today

  And something greater still is yet to come;

  Then upward, son, upward to the very peak

  Of ancient holy Etna, that is where we’ll go,

  For gods have greater presence on the heights.

  With my own eyes this very day I shall survey

  The streams and islands and the sea.

  And may the sunlight, hovering golden over all

  These waters, deign to bless me in departure,

  The splendid youthful light of day, which in

  My youth I loved. Then all about us both

  Eternal stars will scintillate in silence as

  The glowing magma surges from volcanic depths

&nbs
p; And tenderly the all-impelling spirit of the ether will

  Arrive and touch us. Oh, then!

  Between Heraclitus and Empedocles, however, we find another aspect of fire, seen not only as a creative element but also as one that destroys and regenerates at the same time. The Stoics talked of ekpyrosis as a universal conflagration (or fire and the end of the world) in which all things, since they derive from fire, return to it at the end of their cycle of evolution. In itself the notion of ekpyrosis by no means suggests that purification through fire can be attained by man’s design or efforts. But underlying many sacrifices based on fire there certainly is an idea according to which fire purifies and regenerates things by destroying them. Hence the sacrality of the stake.

  Past centuries are full of burnings at the stake, and not only of medieval heretics but also of witches in the modern world, at least until the eighteenth century. And it is only D’Annunzio’s aestheticism that had Mila de Codro say that flames are beautiful. The fires that punished so many heretics were horrible, also because they followed other tortures, and it suffices to read the description (in the History of Fra Dolcino, Heresiarch, twelfth century) of Dolcino’s torture and execution, when along with his wife Margherita he was handed over to the secular authorities. While the city bells rang the tocsin, they were placed on a cart, surrounded by their torturers and followed by the militia, which made its way clear across the town while at every corner the flesh of the offenders was torn by red hot pincers. Margherita was burned first, in front of Dolcino, whose face remained completely impassive, just as he had not cried out when the pincers tore his limbs. Then the cart continued on its way, while the torturers thrust their irons into vats of burning feces. Dolcino was subjected to other tortures, and never made a sound, except when they cut off his nose, making him shrug a little, and when they tore off his manhood, for at that point he gave a long sigh, like a groan. His last words smacked of impenitence, and he warned them that he would arise again on the third day. Then he was burned and his ashes scattered to the winds.