One of the principal branches of Western occult theory and practice, alchemy is the occult science of matter and its transformations. Commonly misunde1stood as a futile effort to tum lead into gold, as a precuxsor of modern chemistry, or as a primitive form of depth psychology, alchemy is actually a complex, wide-reaching, and subde assemblage of disciplines, united by a common theoretical structure but extending into nearly every imaginable field of human experience.

The basic concept of alchemy is the idea of transmutation. In alchemical thought, every material thing comes into being out of a common substance or combination of substances. This common basis follows patterns laid down by nature, but cannot always complete its naturali course. Thus, for example, all metals start out as a fusion of two principles, usually called "sulphur" and "mercury" (but not identical to the minerals now called by the same names). Given the right proportions of these principles, moderate heat beneath the earth, and enough time, the result of the combination is gold.

As the alchemical proverb has it, though, "Nature unaided fails." Most of the time, sulphur and mercury are not present in the right proportions or degree of purity, the subterranean heat is either inadequate or excessive, or the veins of the rock are broken open by human action before the substance has matured into gold. When this happens, the alchemist must complete Nature's work.

This is done by separating the substance into its components, purifying them, and recombining them under the right conditions to bring them to their perfection. The Latin words solve, "dissolve" and 'coagula', "coagulate:' are standard alchemical terms for the first and last stage of the essential alchemical process. When this is done with metals, according to alchemical tradition, the result is the transmutation of base metals into gold or silver. When it is done with healing herbs, the result is a powerful medicine. When it is done with the human mind, the result is spiritual enlightenment.

These changes, important as they are, are the lesser work of alchemy. They require that each substance to be transmuted has to pass through the whole slow process of separation and recombination. The Great Work of alchemy is the production of a substance that brings perfection to matter quickly, by simple contact: the Philosopher's Stone.

The Philosopher's Stone, or Stone of the Wise, is the result of the Great Work of metals; heated together with lead, mercury, or some other base metal, it is held to transmute the entire mass of base metal to gold in a matter of minutes. While current scientific theories insist that this is impossible, the process of transmutation by means of the Stone was witnessed repeatedly by reputable observers in the Renaissance and early modern periods. It remains possible, despite modern scientific advances, that matter has possibilities that have not yet been discovered though, of course, this by itself does not prove the reality of transmutation.

The word "alchemy" has complex origins. Its English form comes from the Latin 'alchemia', which is from the Arabic 'al-kimiyya', which in turn comes from a Greek word spelled two different ways--'chymia' or 'chemtia. 'Chymia' means "smelting" or "casting," and is related to 'myma', "fluid." 'Chemeia', on the other hand, probably descends from the ancient Egyptian word 'Khem', "the Black Land" which is what Egyptians in pharaonic times called their own country; chemeia thus means something close to "the Egyptian art." While some scholars have insisted on one or the other of these origins as the "real" one, the traditional literature of alchemy is full of meaningful puns and wordplay of this sort, and it's quite possible that the creators of alchemy relished the idea of a term that implied both what they were doing and where they originally learned to do it.

The origins of alchemy, like those of the Western occult tradition as a whole, are to be found in the fusion of Greek philosophy with the ancient cultural legacies of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The two older cultures brought a wealth of practical experience and a strong connection with spirituality to this union. Throughout the ancient world, the craft of the metalworker had been deeply interwoven with magic and religion. ln ancient Egypt, the god Ptah was the master goldsmith of Heaven, and the chief priests of his primary temple in Memphis had tides such as Great Wielder of the Hammer and He Who Knows the Secret of the Goldsmiths. In the equally ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, the secrets of metalworking were sacred mysteries guarded by elusive language; copper was called "the eagle," crude mineral sulphur was referred to as "bank of the river," and so on. To this fusion of sacred and practical concerns Greek philosophy brought an insistent search for fundamental unities. The Greek philosophers constantly searched for one substance or one process that could explain the world. By the time of alchemy's emergence, the most important school of philosophical thought in the Greek-speaking world was Stoicism, with its teaching of a semi-material 'pneuma' or "breath" that shaped all things;  This concept of the "One Thing" that produced all things became deeply woven into alchemical thought.

The actual genesis of alchemy out of these disparate currents of thought and practice was apparently the work of one man, a Greek-speaking Egyptian named Bolos of Mendes. Essentially nothing is known for sure about Bolos' life. He probably lived in the second century B.C.E., and he wrote several books, which he published under the name of the fifth-century Greek philosopher Democritus of Abdera. He is said to have studied with the Persian magus Ostanes, about whom even less is known. After his time, perhaps in the first century, were two famous female alchemists, Maria and Cleopatra, who were respectively Jewish and Egyptian and were confused by later writers with Miriam, sister of Moses, and Cleopatra the Egyptian queen. Maria was particularly influential as a major theorist as well as the inventor of several important items of alchemical equipment.

Later, in the early third century C.E., Zosimos of Panopolis wrote a number of important alchemical texts and codified the work of many anonymous alchemists who had gone before him. Other later Greek alchemists include Olympiodorus of Thebes, who lived in the early futh century C.E. and wrote an important commentary, and Stephanos of Alexandria, one of the fint Christian alchemists, who lived in the early eighth century C.E.

By that time, on the verge of the great Arab conquests, alchemy was already making its transition out of Greek culture into the Middle East as a whole. An important alchemical school had been established at Harran, on the road east from the Mediterranean coast to India, sometime in late Roman times. The Harranian alchemists pioneered the use of copper as an ingredient in alchemical processes, and left some important books.

By the middle of the fifth century, additionally, Pagans and Christian heretics had begun to flee the Roman Empire in large numbers to escape religious persecution; many of them ended up in the Persian Empire, where they taught Greek philosophy and alchemy, among other things, to their hosts. When the Arabs conquered the Persian Empire in the eighth century, the exiles and their descendants began passing on the same lore to their new Muslim overlords, and launched the long and highly creative tradition of Arabic alchemy. Arab alchemists such as Geber (Jabir ibn Hayyan. 72Q-800 C.E.) and Rhazes (Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Zakariya al-Razi, 85()-923 C.E.) made massive improvements in alchemical theory and practice alike. Geber, among the most influential of all alchemists, wrote a crucial work on furnaces, providing detailed information on most of the furnace types that would be used until the end of the Renaissance, and was the first writer to describe the preparation of nitric acid. His contributions to theory were equally substantial; he introduced the sulphur-mercury theory of metals, holding that all metals were formed from the fusion of sulphur, the principle of dryness and flammability, and mercury, the principle of moisture and volatility.  Rhazes, for his part, was a physician with an international reputation, and the author of medical works that were prized from Spain to India; his alchemical contributions included important works on the interface between alchemy and medicine.

Western Europe had little contact with alchemy dwing the time of the Roman Empire, and Rome's fall cut off contact between the West and the areas where alchemical research and wnong were still continuing. It was not until 1144, when Robert of Chester made the first translation of an Arabic alchemical text into Latin, that European scholars and occultists began to get access to alchemical lore. The work Robert translated was a dialogue between the alchemist Morienus and King Khalid of Egypt - both of them, in typical alchemical style, fictional characters - in which some of the basic alchemical terms and processes are outlined. Where many other branches of Arabic learning found an instant audience in the West, alchemy was slower to catch on, partly because of the obscurity of alchemical literature and partly because alchemical practice required a great deal of expensive, complicated equipment. Still, an alchemical subculture gradually emerged, and within a century or so of Robert of Chester's translation, the first European works on alchemy were in circulation.

The alchemy of Europe started out as a tradition closely derived from its Arabic sources, but by the fourteenth century original ideas were entering into it, and the great flowering of alchemical writing and research in the Renaissance and early modern periods saw the emergence of original alchemical theories and operations. The Arabic theory of the two principles, sulphur and mercury, was widely used, but later adapted by Paracelsus (1493-1541), who added sale as a third principle. Another important approach was the Central Niter theory of Michael Sendivogius (1566-1636), which postulated a single substance linked with life energy that made all things by its transformations.

In the last centuries of its prevalence in the West, alchemy expanded into many other fields of knowledge, and for a time seemed likely to become the foundation of a universal science embracing every possible field of knowledge. Approaches to economics based on alchemical ideas were current, and traced out paths that would be followed for centuries to come: in Germany, the alchemist johann Joachim Becher (1632-1682) argued for an alchemical view of trade that prefigured mercantilist economic theory and modern "Free Trade" ideology, while in England, the radical theoretician Gerrard Winstanley (1609-c. 1676) proposed a form of alchemical communism, complete with a labor theory of value closely akin to that of Karl Marx.

Alchemical interpretations of agriculture and biology were common, and gave rise to alchemical fertilizers and a wide range of alchemical medicines. Even theology was not immune-there were entire Christian theologies based on alchemy, of which the writings of Jakob Bohme are the most important.

This final blossoming of alchemical thought was followed, throughout nearly all of the Western world, by a near-total eclipse. The rise of scientific ideologies to dominance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries forced alchemy underground. There it survived mostly in the German-speaking areas of central Europe.

German Romanticism, with its extensions into science and nature philosopy, drew to some extent on alchemical ideas, and figures of the stature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dabbled in the Great Art. Several German occult orders, most prominently the Orden des Gold- und Rosenkreuz of the late eighteenth century, also included alchemical lore in their secret teachings. Homeopathy, a health-care system that emerged in nineteenth-century Germany, also drew substantially on older alchemical ideas, especially those of Paracelsus.

Alchemy also survived for a time in the American colonies, with their close cultural ties co Germany and their openness to almost any form of radicalism. Alchemy reached America at a fairly early date -John Winthrop Jr. (1606-1676), governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, was an ardent Hermeticist and a srudent of alchemy who amassed an impressive collection of alchemical writings-and by the eighteenth century had given rise to an alchemical underground that combined Hermetic and alchemical studies with mystical offshoots of Christianity and attempts to fmd buried treasures by magical means. This underground eventually gave rise to the Mormon Church, among other American spiritual movements. By the nineteenth century, however, practical laboratory alchemy was rarely practiced even in America.

Renewed interest in alchemy in recent years has mostly come out of the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his followers, who interpreted alchemy as an ancient art of psychological transformation wrapped up in the language of metalworking. This view has be come extremely popular in the twentieth century, at least in part because it allows alchemy to be reinterpreted in a way that doesn't come into conflict with the concepts of modem materialist science. By way of Jung's theories, alchemical ideas and imagery have been borrowed wholesale for a variety of psychological and spirirual projects, many of which have nothing to do with alchemy in any sense that the old alchemists would have understood.

In the meantime, traditions of alchemical practice have been revived and are practiced today. The work of Frater Albertus (Albert Reidel, 1911-1984), whose Paracelsus Research Society offered one of the first public instructional programs in alchemy in the Western world, was crucial in bringing alchemy into a renewed popularity in the larrer half of the twentieth century; . Reidel's teaching like those of most recent alchemists, take spagyrics as the starting point, and his Alchmist's Handbook (1960) is one of the few practical handbooks of spagyric alchemy available in English.

By John Michael Greer in "The New Encyclopedia of the Occult", Llewellyn Publications, USA, 2003, excerpts pp. 29-32. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.