Air, “pantogenesis” or generator of all things.
Take Care, Alchemist, not to cut the ties.
Air, oscillating and teeming, weaves at the loom and builds palaces. Ultimately, air is moved by that which has the property of moving. Dust, nourishment of life, primary matter and bridge between different densities, the alchemists’s air has very little to do with the modern conception: in fact, it is closer to fire than to a void.
Water, everything that flows and grows.
Water, in all its forms, is originally shaken. And this causes its perpetuity.
When you dip your hand into a river, have you ever considered that that water, wherever it is now, has touched its source? What we compare today to a journey, the ancients would have recognized as water agitated at its source. It couldn’t be interrupted, nor could it originate in the middle. If that were to happen, no one would call it water anymore. From the rushing roar of the waves to the slow, imperceptible rustle of a puddle, it had been shaken at its source. And the shaking continued in its midst. The role of water in Alchemy is to bring the spirit back to its earth. It is no wonder that, for the ancient Greeks, the gods were considered “those who flow”.
Earth, everything that can exist only in the world of the living.
When sky is repeated on earth, alchemists call this resonance the “Philosophers’ Stone”.
Alchemists knew full well that Earth was not astronomically the center of the cosmos. But they assigned the Earth’s center the function of receptacle for stellar influences. This made Earth their alchemical “furnace”, their athanor. The alchemical Earth is supreme not because it is made of earth or stone, but because it “repeats” the universe. Alchemists, perhaps mistakenly, consider their alchemical learth a true “land”. That is, the only “place” where the cosmos can reveal itself, not merely through revelation, but to actually open a private channel. The “furnace” would thus become a “portal”. But I am certain that alchemy operates in many “places”, precisely to preserve the sources. Indeed, once one place is struck, another immediately opens. Unsuspected.
Fire, unruly–unrestrained–unstoppable.
Simply, the spark.
The alchemical fire can be defined as ‘that which gives a form’. More than an element, it is a directive. If alchemical works are accomplished through burning fire, it is because we need to generate changes in the state of matter, thus bringing to the surface the spirit of the world, the Spiritus Mundi. As for the other fire, the one produced by the “seed” of time, we only know that it is the “carrier” of information, uncontrollable and growing, and only symbolically represented by ordinary fire.
However, although it is called a “spark”…
… it needs to be “swollen” by the moon, so as to be made terrestrial.
In alchemical symbolism, female figures are entrusted with the task of giving birth to heaven, and then to sky in earthly form. The figure of the Magdalene is perhaps the representation closest to us in time, but it is also the least sophisticated and exhaustive, although it is the most comprehensible from an alchemical perspective. Theurgists would certainly prefer the figure of Isis the Black in relation to Osiris.