Let us pick up where we left off in the previous section: you stated that we cannot translate Proclus’s scale of the vehicles of the soul into the alchemical nomenclature of Mercurius, Sulfur, and Salt—or body.
Let me ask you a question now: in light of Plotinus’s definition—that it is not the soul that is in the body, but the body in the soul—how do you position Proclus’s scale of pneuma?
I hadn’t actually thought of that. I kept thinking in terms of the concept of the soul within the body. But apparently, in Alchemy, the prevailing principle is that of a soul “field” into which the body is drawn.
So, philosophically speaking we have these three vehicles: the immaterial, immutable, and hypercosmic vehicle; the one which the soul carries with it on its journey from the immaterial to the material; the third vehicle, the earthly body.
Vehicles—so the soul travels…
The soul does not travel; only the pneuma travels, in the sense of whether or not it swells. In alchemical jargon, a vehicle is a symbol of a “carrier”. Today, we are accustomed to registration documents for cars, motorcycles, and watercraft—that is, vehicles. As we will see in another section, igneous, from fire, means “bearing information”.
So we are talking about a “fire”, at least symbolically.
In Alchemy, fire is a symbol of that which “moves”. For example, the alchemical “fire”—often in conjunction with ordinary fire—is what “cooks” or transforms.
Therefore, alchemists are searching for this symbolic fire. But given that it is a symbol of movement, I cannot conceive of it as static or overly abstract—like wave-particle information.
I am not a physicist, but alchemists say that this fire has the characteristic of “rotating”.
In physics, everything is said to rotate. But a rotation takes place around something.
I won’t bring up the rotation of the cosmos, the stars, the planets, the electrons…
I have to stop you there, because electrons might not be spinning at all. Perhaps it is their electric charges that do so. When venturing into the world of the infinitely small, the laws of macrophysics can differ.
In fact, it was just a poor example. But let’s get to the point: alchemists claim to work on the “vehicles”, extracting them.
So here is the Mercurius, which extracts the Sulfur, which then becomes Salt…
No. Mercurius, Sulfur, and Salt are indeed extracted from raw matter, but they are merely “tools” for working on the true “vehicles”.
To recap, with Mercurius, Sulfur, and Salt, the alchemist works on the vehicle/pneuma /ochêma.
Bear in mind that we are talking about Alchemy, not philosophy or religion. Anyway, yes, the alchemist works on the pneuma. Given that everything owns a pneuma, or intermediate intermediary. For this intermediate intermediary, we can now introduce another symbol, widely used by alchemists: “fish bladder”. This fish bladder can vary in thickness. It thus symbolically becomes a “tunic”.
At this point, I think, we can define the alchemical tunic a sort of enveloping medium that bears many analogies to the astral body. Am I mistaken, or did you say that fish don’t have bones, but rather cartilage that dissolves quickly?
Paracelsus called this entity—I mean the pneuma/ochêma or the fish’s bladder—the “little inner alchemist that all things possess”. Note that fish do not have bones, but cartilage that quickly dissipates. The comparison to fish cartilage stems from the ease with which the raw material can be dissolved to work on the “little alchemist”—which, in fact, “cooks” itself once set in motion. The little alchemist is the intermediary for everything. If we understand the little alchemist, we also understand the transmutations—at least, certainly, those that take place before the alchemist’s eyes.
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Main Index: Anatomy of an Alchemical Machine