A Short Discourse on Salt
Welcome back, dear reader, I hope the last week has found you well. Over the last few weeks we have sought to discuss the three essentials of alchemy; We have discussed the spirit of the material, it’s Mercury; we have discussed the undying soul of the material, it’s Sulfur; and today we will discussing the basic physical structure or body of our material, it’s Salt. The salt derived from a living thing and it’s “caput mortuum,” or dead body, has raised many a suspicion around alchemy and those crazy enough to practice it, hopefully today we can dispel a little of that with our best weapon, information.
To begin let us define the term salt when used alchemically as this is different from our normal table salt (NaCl). Unlike table salt, each material we work with will have a salt that is composed of different scientific elements. This salt produced by the alchemical process is sometimes called the philosophical salt, the essential salt, or the body. Because each organism is different and made up of different building blocks, the salt of each different thing is composed of something specific to that organism[1][2][3][11][12]. If a rose is put through the process, we will discuss shortly in order to produce alchemical salts, they will be undeniably different than the salts produced by lemon balm. This difference gives rise to the first main thing to note between the salt and the mercury, any spirit from the kingdom in which you are working (animal, vegetable, mineral) can be used but the salt from another material cannot be used on your working material. I will try to explain this a little better:
When we were discussing the process of removing the mercury a few weeks ago we used a strong grain alcohol, commonly Everclear, on our lemon balm. As was stated there, because the spirit within a member of the vegetable kingdom is universal, through other members of the vegetable kingdom one spirit can be used from one material to another. However, when we are making a spagyric tincture of lemon balm we can only use the salt of the lemon balm plant to gain the benefits of that plant[1][2][3][5][16][17][18][19][20].
The process of obtaining this salt is a fairly simple process to follow, while the difficulty does scale upward as you move from one kingdom to the other. In order to keep the process as simple as possible and to maintain continuity between the discourses on the essentials we will be discussing obtaining the salts of lemon balm. The point where we will pick up in the process of separating the three essentials is right after our lemon balm has been soaking in the Everclear for a time. As stated in a previous discussion, the lemon balm mash should be strained off and squeezed in order to get as much of the alcohol and oil out of the material as possible. We then set the mash aside and called it our “caput mortuum” or dead body. The name dead body comes from the idea that the soul and spirit had been removed from the material and the only thing left behind was the mortal shell that had encased them. We will now take that mash and place it in a heat resistant mortar and light it on fire. A mesh screen can be placed over the top of the bowl to keep the flames from moving to anything else or to keep ash from flying out, it is not required but I do highly recommend. The strong alcohol that was used to draw out the spirit of the plant will be enough to keep the fire going for quite a while, so be sure to do this in a safe place.
Once the material has burned the alcohol off it will be time to move to the next stage. At this point your ashes will likely be black to grey in color and dry of all alcohol. Take the ashes and spread them out on a baking tray and place them in the oven. I prefer to use a heat around 400 degrees F, this does make some material take longer to complete the process, but I feel like I am better able to control the process safely. In the oven while baking the ashes will turn from a black/grey color to a red color and finally fully white. Take the white ashes out of the oven and place them into a glass jar with a lid. The next step in the spagyric process will need to be down with warm ashes, but we will not be discussing that further here. These are the essential salts of lemon balm. These salts are what will be added back to the mercury and the sulfur in the proper quantities in order to produce an alchemical medicine[1][2][3][5].
Symbolically speaking, the alchemical salt is the physical body of the material as we said before. To take humans for example, when each of us is born we incarnate an eternal soul, which is bound to the source from which it emanated, into a material body in order for that body to live and learn the lessons needed for its evolution. Those physical aspects of you are just as important to your development in this lifetime as the less tangible aspects, as this is the medium in which the learning takes place. This is one of the differences alchemy has with some other schools of thought in which the physical body can be seen as only a vehicle to move the soul around or worse yet, as a detriment to the evolution of the soul itself[14][15]. Alchemically speaking, the body, soul and spirit must all be present for life to happen, but their existence in the proper amount is the key to the perfection the alchemist strives for[1][2][3]. Other theories about the symbolism for salt in alchemy have been put forth as well over time, for instance Carl Jung considered the salt to be a symbol for the emotions and psyche within each of us. Some have taken that and said that it is because those thoughts, feelings, and reactions are what precipitates out of our personality into the physical world[4][9][10].
As with all symbols, there can be many meanings that have grown and evolved along with the people using them, because of these nuances it is not my place to pass judgement on any of these theories as right or wrong, just to provide the information as I come across it, so feel free to believe or disbelieve. With any time spent studying alchemy you will find a multitude of different information on almost every term, symbol, or operation, this is more due to the individual nature of the evolution than to the divergence from alchemical dogma, of which there should be none. Our work is one that is personal, for each of us conducting the Great Work our spirit, soul, and body have to be purified multiple times before we can even begin to add them back together in the proper amount to produce within ourselves the Stone we seek.
With this we bring to a close our set of discourses on the subject of the three alchemical essentials. We have briefly covered the spirit (mercury), soul (sulfur), and body (salt) and how they appear in alchemy, their production in the lab, and their possible symbolic meanings. I hope this short discussion has piqued your interest in alchemy or the spagyric process. I also hope that you will take the concepts briefly discussed over the last few weeks and meditate on them, working to apply the concepts of alchemy to your day-to-day lives.
Finally, a little housekeeping, since we have completed our discussion of the three essentials, I am going to be beginning a series of lessons involving divination. After a reader requested the topic, I had planned at most a couple weeks on the subject, since then things have changed. I will be working on topics such as Tarot, runes, scrying, and more, and their relations to astrology, theurgy, and alchemy as a hermetic art. I have found there to be quite a bit of information on the subject, and much of it conflicting, so I hope you are as excited for the subject as I am. In addition, if anyone else has anything they would like me to discuss in in relation to alchemy, please let me know and I will do my best to cover it. There are more good changes coming in the future and I hope you will stick around to see them.
References:
[1] Hauck, D. W. (2008). The complete idiot's guide to alchemy. Penguin.
[2] Bartlett, R. A. (2009). Real alchemy: A primer of practical alchemy. Nicolas-Hays, Inc..
[3] Albertus, F. (1987). The Alchemists Handbook: Manual for Practical Laboratory Alchemy. Weiser Books.
[4] Jung, C. G. (1995). Jung on alchemy. Princeton University Press.
[5] Principe, L. M. (2012). The secrets of alchemy. University of Chicago Press.
[6] Principe, L. M. (2003). Alchemy. In The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition (pp. 643-649). Routledge.
[7] Morris, R. (2003). The Last Sorcerers: The Path from Alchemy to the Periodic Table. National Academies Press.
[8] Bleakley, A. (2023). Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance (Vol. 1). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
[9] Endredy, J. (2019). Shamanic Alchemy: The Great Work of Inner Transformation. Simon and Schuster.
[10] Fabbrizzi, L. (2008). Communicating about matter with symbols: evolving from alchemy to chemistry. Journal of chemical education, 85(11), 1501.
[11] Greenwood, N. N.; & Earnshaw, A. (1997). Chemistry of the Elements (2nd ed.), Oxford:Butterworth-Heinemann. ISBN 0-7506-3365-4.
[12] Cotnoir, B. (2006). The Weiser concise guide to alchemy. Weiser Books.
[13] Stavish, M. (2006). The path of alchemy: Energetic healing and the world of natural magic. Llewellyn Worldwide.
[14] Principe, L. M. (2003). Alchemy. In The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition (pp. 643-649). Routledge.
[15] Burckhardt, T. (1979). Insight into Alchemy. Studies in Comparative Religion.
[16] Salin, S. (2020). Anti-witchcraft rituals against depression in Assyro-Babylonian therapeutic texts. Mastrocinque, A./Sanzo, JE/Scapini, M.(edd.): Ancient Magic Then and Now. Stuttgart, 83-96.
[17] Agarwal, S., Kumar, V., Agarwal, P., Agarwal, S., & Rao, D. A. (2016). Esoteric Healing Touch—A Preliminary Report. Psychology, 6(8), 443-448.
[18] Dannaway, F. R., Piper, A., & Webster, P. (2006). Esoteric Cosmologies. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 38, 4.
[19] Moritz, S. (2016). Alchemy and contemporary spagyric medicine: a historical, medical and socio-scientific approach. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 41(1), 13-27.
[20] Junius, M. M. (2007). Spagyrics: The Alchemical Preparation of Medicinal Essences, Tinctures, and Elixirs. Inner Traditions/Bear & Co.
Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Salt_symbol_%28alchemical%29.svg