It is said that Plato’s Timaeus, Al-Kindi’s On Stellar Rays, and the Picatrix were virtually the only texts on Alchemy during the Early Middle Ages—roughly the Merovingian era.
The so-called “Dark Ages”—the period between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the new order established by Charlemagne—were actually an era of cultural renaissance. You know how the Romans always sought to suppress the alchemical art, treating it on a par with necromancy and counterfeiting. Thus, scholars simply waited for the Roman Cerberus to breathe its last before freely bringing in manuscripts and translating them—from Arabic in Spain, from Greek in Venice, and from Syriac in Byzantium. From there, they spread across continental Europe. However, this dawn of the classical world’s rebirth lasted only a couple of centuries. Then, the restored political order closed the door on tolerance, and Christian bigotry relegated everything to the darkness of the cellars. But let us turn to Plato’s Timaeus: practically the only Platonic text to be officially preserved, it ultimately found its way into clandestine alchemical schools—given that there could be no talk of philosophical schools for at least ten centuries. The Neoplatonists were neglected and confused with the School of Alexandria, where the last head of the School of Athens, Damascius, had fled to spend his final days. Returning specifically to the Timaeus, it is a difficult book to read. Yet all of Plato’s work is hard to grasp, precisely because of his writing style. Without the mediation of the Neoplatonists, Plato might well have fallen into obscurity by now.
Nature is as if modeled – or even printed – in the series of numbers that are articulated in different proportions.
Plato said that the soul establishes relationships between antithetical things and to compare the past and the present with the future.
In the previous chapter you talked about seeds, which is alchemical jargon, then you corrected it in canon, which is harmonic-mathematical jargon…
Well, you got straight to the point. But I didn’t correct myself, because alchemical seed and canon are different concepts. In the Timaeus, Plato says: the world was composed and placed within the soul. A concept later taken up by Plotinus: it is not the soul that is in the body but the body that is in the soul.
Does this insertion of the world into the soul have anything to do with the canon you mentioned?
We should delve deeper into Plato’s understanding of the world and the soul, but that would take up too much attention, so let’s leave it at the level of intuition. It’s too confusing to even begin to discuss the difference between soul and intellect. I’ll leave these diatribes to the philosophers, who love to refute themselves.
Returning to more scientific jargon, can we compare the soul to a force field? Or at least to an influence field?
It might work. So, let’s imagine the body is inserted into a force or influence field. Of course, always bear in mind that Plato writes in Greek, a very subtle language, but with very heavy etymological legacies of words. To understand Plato one must be more of a historian of the Greek language than of philosophy. An in-depth study of his thought was conducted only starting from the 19th century.
Oddly enough, we know Plato from Latin translations, instead. But fortunately, we also have treatises by Arab scholars who drew on him.
Despite the not insignificant detail that Arab scholars also had many other sources at their disposal. But returning to alchemy, legend has it that Plato’s Timaeus and Al-Kindi’s On the Rays of the Stars were the official textbooks in medieval alchemy schools. So, let’s imagine the body is inserted into a force or influence field. Indeed.
But already in the time of Charlemagne … in construction…
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