I know that Aurora, dawn in Latin, was a deity…
Night, the true mother of the gods, came before her. Yet you are right: dawn is the moment when the stars reign supreme. And often, this happens through the moon. Furthermore, to give a relevant alchemical importance to the night, the Spiritus Mundi, spirit of the world, uses to be extremely active during the night-time hours. We’ve already said that in day time, the Spiritus, stirred by the sun, tends to hover in the upper atmosphere. Only at night, with the help of the moon, will it descend toward the Earth’s crust and into the deepest recesses.
Besides descending at night, is the Spiritus Mundi also particularly active during those hours?
Indeed, the Spiritus Mundi is extremely active at night. To the point that, if one wants to work on the Spiritus Mundi, one must necessarily do it at night.
Given that alchemists work with this Spiritus Mundi, I gather that, of necessity, all alchemical operations should also be performed at night.
Alchemical works are mostly performed at night, apart from some purely chemical refinement work. To get an idea of the best times, we can follow the progress of the fire. Those fortunate enough to have a fireplace or a wood-burning stove know that the fire tends to spontaneously die down around nine/ten o’clock in the evening. If left to themselves, the embers, which appear to be extinguished, will surprisingly resume activity a little before midnight. This is the same time that those who have ghosts in their homes begin to notice activity and noise. Thus, the Spiritus Mundi tends to be most accessible to the alchemist around midnight. Its peak, however, will be an hour before dawn, obviously with the right moon (which is usually a very dark moon).
Aside from the sun’s distance, what is so peculiarly alchemical about the night?
Precisely the distance of the earth from sunlight. The sun, as we’ll see later, has many advantages for life on Earth but just as many disadvantages if you want to practice Alchemy. We’ll talk about the sun later, but for now it’s enough for you to know that the sun’s distance doesn’t mean there’s a lack of cosmic emissions, but the opposite: at night, stellar emissions reach Earth more easily.
And the Spiritus Mundi is the child of the stars…
Not exactly, it is the Mercurius made by alchemists that is the true child of the stars.
Is there any “kinship” between Spiritus Mundi and Mercurius?
Grandfather Spiritus Mundi, grandson Mercurius. But, to be truly precise, it would be more indicative to say grandmother Spiritus Mundi and granddaughter Mercurius.
Why do you speak of mothers when talking about Mercurius?
Because Mercurius “encompasses” and continuously gives birth to the entire series of alchemical transmutations.
Grandmother, granddaughter… so who would Mercurius’s mother be?
We are not tracing a genealogy of deities; there is no identifiable mythological mother, but rather a series of alchemical mothers—that is to say, The mother of Mercurius is the black putrescence of raw matter, the Nigredo/black phase, which could not exist if the Spiritus Mundi had not “given birth” to it from the night. But we’ll talk about it when the time is right, now it’s night’s turn. Then, there is the case of the divine night huntresses. In alchemy, a huntress is a symbol of dissolution. Are you familiar with the Universal Solvent? Well, it’s a synonym of Mercurius. Isis, the quintessential Egyptian mother-goddess, says to her son Horus: “I was given the gift of perfect blackness”.
I didn’t know that Isis was a figure in alchemical mythology.
There is no such thing as an alchemical mythology. Rather, alchemists simply discern a resemblance and a connection to their art within certain mythological sagas. The Isis-Osiris-Horus trilogy brilliantly interprets the narrative of alchemical operations.
Between two midnights or between two auroras?
Between two start times of work, therefore between two midnights. The ban on the stellar/lunar calendar was equivalent to the ban on all wisdom based on the governance of the stars. From then on, the fear of the night and its population of “demons” began.
So when we talk about night, we talk about stars…
Inevitably. But above all we are talking about human proximity to an ultra-lunar world. Alchemist calculates with the ancient stellar calendar. Alchemists are pragmatic and reason on the alternation of hot/cold and sunlight/stellar emissions, as well as on the lunar humidity. Of course, not all days of the solar year are the same. Not only are the days of the solar year not all the same, but each day has its own peculiarities. For alchemists, every day is different. And every night too, of course. At night you can also find water in the desert, if that matters. An ancient saying holds that the prospector at night is traversed by stars searching for water for him/her deep within the earth.
Then the sun rises and interrupts this nightly stellar transmission.
For the ancients, the cause of the momentary end of the night was not the sun, but the earth. And this is also obvious to modern astronomers: it is the earth that revolves around the sun. Indeed, sunlight alters the consistency of the atmospheric air, which is no longer set in motion by the stars. For its part, the sun is of great importance in alchemy because it determines the seasons. And the seasons are crucial for alchemical work.
Indeed, most myths involving transformation/transmutation are nocturnal. Immortality rites are performed at night, and people set sail for mythological shores at night. The events of the Argonauts’ voyage unfold in nocturnal scenes. At night, people become stars; at night, they find the sacred springs. However, from a theurgical perspective, this isn’t always the case; the night doesn’t always represent transmission. Indeed, sometimes the night is a real impediment to ascending and descending the chains. For example, in Orphic rites, Night was a deity capable of introducing a kind of rift that preserved the transcendence of the First.
I can’t find any equivalent in alchemical physics. However, for alchemists there is a night produced by the Earth and a cosmic night, which extends beyond Saturn. And which returns to visit the earth once a year, at the time of the winter solstice. But in Alchemy, this period of cosmic night in which the sun momentarily and cyclically re-enters the all-encompassing Ocean, father of Nix/Night, is not a moment of breaking chains… quite the opposite. But I believe I cannot go beyond this. Be careful, theurge, of laying your hand on indefinable chains. For us alchemists, these doors are closed. Luckily. Anyway, There is also something else that alchemists define as “Ocean”, and this is light.
Hecate presides over the magical-mysterious aspects of life, the impressive encounters on the streets at night. In theurgy, Hecate is actually also linked to light.
We alchemists have the concept of “black light”, and unpretentiously handle with Hecate as a “binder” between opposites. For example, the link between Apollo and Hermes is Hecate herself—who, at this point, is part of a triad.
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