Welcome back, dear reader, I hope the last week has found you well. Over the last several weeks we have been trying to break down alchemical symbolism and explain what they mean, today we are going to change that slightly and discuss the way in which alchemists use these symbols. I spend a lot of my time discussing alchemy and one comment I hear often from those who are new to the Work is “why did they have to use symbols for everything!?” We can go the route most discussions do and say it is to keep things secret from other people but that is only a surface level answer and we covered that in our introduction. So, what then, is the other purpose of symbols in alchemy?
As we have said in each of our discussions on alchemical symbols, a single image can convey an entire idea with a lot less work than writing it down in words. When we discuss the sun as a symbol for the ultimate “god” we don’t mean that the giant ball of fire in the sky is a living being that blesses us with everything we have, that would be silly to believe. The sun gives us life, it gives us the warmth that we need each day to keep us alive; it allows the plants to grow and produce food for us and the other animals, that also produce food for us. The sun can be seen as a force that provides life for every single being on the planet, and the explanation of that idea can take up a lot of space, as you can see, so drawing a circle with some lines is much easier.
When we combine symbols in the form of a painting or an allegory the depth of the work can contain levels upon levels of meaning as I’m sure each of you knows if you have studied alchemy for any length of time. If we look at it like a flight of stairs, as soon as we reach an understanding of any alchemical work, we realize that that peak we have been chasing is only a landing to an entirely new flight of stairs to a higher meaning. So then if these images and stories are meant for us to gather deeper and deeper truths from, how do we do that? Do you read the story 100 times, or stare at the picture for hours on end? You definitely can, I’ve tried both and saw some progress with each one. If anyone has studied Kabbalah, you have probably heard of the method of reading the entire work in a day, then a chapter a day, then a verse, then a letter, and you will undoubtedly gain a deeper understanding of the kabbalah. Does this work? I feel like it kind of has to, you are becoming intimately familiar with a book, it will change the way you think, if you did that with harry potter you would probably reference everything in your life to the world of harry potter too. When I have applied this method to alchemical texts or pictures (focusing on a certain symbol within or portion of a greater image for extremely long periods of time) I have reached levels of understanding I don’t think I would have reached otherwise but let’s be honest, its 2025 and most of us can’t sit still in front of a painting for an entire day. Luckily the alchemists built in a way to focus on the work without having to sequester yourself away as a hermit in order to do it. They told us to meditate on the symbols.
But what does that mean? If you were like me and were raised Christian (Baptist specifically) you may have no understanding of what meditation means or a skewed idea of it, so I will try to break it down in a way that we can all be on the same page. The way meditation is explained in media is that you are supposed to sit with your legs crossed in the lotus position, close your eyes, and make your mind completely silent, and while that can be a helpful method of meditation in general it isn’t the only way to do it. If I want to meditate on the symbol of the sun for instance, I can visualize the symbol for the sun or the sun itself (not staring at the sun itself) and keep my focus on that during the meditation. When you focus on it like this your mind will tend to be brought to the meanings of this symbol. While you think about the sun you will think about how warm it is, how it lets us know a new day is here, and how it gives life to everything around us. It is the natural thing your mind does when you “let it wander” on a certain subject. If you have ever worked a job where you are alone for long periods of time and you sat in silence with yourself, you may have noticed those were the times you gained the most insights on yourself and the situations you were in. That is because when you remove all the extra noise around you and you force yourself to sit with yourself or an idea in the quiet you are get to get past that noisy surface to a deeper level.
You may have noticed at the end of every discourse on symbols I have closed with some way of saying that I will let these images and symbols sit in your mind over the next week so you can come to a fuller understanding of them, and this was not an accident. If you found a symbol in the discussion that stood out to you, like the color black, you may have spent the following week thinking about the things the color symbolizes, how it is the first stage of the Great Work, how it shows the difficult process of breaking down the ego and the aspects of the original material that shouldn’t be there. If you were focused on the idea of black you probably started to notice more black cars, more black images, black clothes, then maybe you noticed other symbols that black stands for, like a raven or crow, maybe a dead bird on the side of the road, maybe a fire burning something to ash and you were captivated by the way you noticed something alchemical in your day to day life. During that captivation maybe you even had an epiphany about the color or about calcination, or about death, or maybe even about yourself and your own ego.
This is the grand goal of symbolism in alchemy. The pictures speak the language of the soul, the spirit, the unconscious mind, whatever you want to call it, and when you spend your time speaking to your own mind in that language you gain a deeper understanding of yourself. The whole point of this Work is to generate change, in the lead ore we start with, in the person you started this journey out as, and in the entire world around us, and the best part of it all is that you generate these changes at the same time due to the way the law of correspondence operates in the Great Work.
I know this discourse is different than most of them and it is much more informal and less academic than I tend to write but I don’t think this topic can be addressed through academia, this lesson has to be given at the level of the soul. So, with that I will let you meditate on what we discussed today and how the information you have been letting yourself focus on has already changed the way you think and act. I wish you well on your continued journey and growth and I hope the next week finds you well.
Resources:
Abraham, Lyndy. A dictionary of alchemical imagery. Vol. 45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Bayley, Justine. "Society and Environment: The Social Position of the Alchemist and Alchemy in the Court, in the Church, and in Society." A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Middle Ages 2 (2023): 93.
Blanchard, Joël. "A Religion in Its Time: Numerology and Moral Alchemy in Philippe de Mézières’ Work." Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinki et Kiril Petkov, éd., Philippe de Mézières and his Age: Politics and Piety in the late 14th Century, Leyde, Brill (2012): 225-236.
Davis, Tenney L. "Pictorial representations of alchemical theory." Isis 28, no. 1 (1938): 73-86.
Dee, John. The Hieroglyphic Monad. Weiser Books, 2000.
Dictionary, Merriam-Webster. "Merriam-webster." On-line at http://www. mw. com/home. htm 8, no. 2 (2002): 23.
Dubs, Homer H. "The origin of alchemy." Ambix 9, no. 1 (1961): 23-36.
Edinger, Edward F. "Anatomy of the psyche: Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy." (1985).
Fanthorpe, Lionel, Fanthorpe Lionel, and Patricia Fanthorpe. Mysteries and secrets of numerology. Vol. 16. Dundurn, 2013.
Gilstrap, Candace. "The Ripley Scrolls: Alchemical Patronage in Early Modern England." Master's thesis, Oklahoma State University, 2016.
Gray, Ronald Douglas. Goethe the alchemist: A study of alchemical symbolism in Goethe's literary and scientific works. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Hall, Manly P. The secret teachings of all ages. Lulu. com, 1973.
Hauck, Dennis William. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Alchemy: The Magic and Mystery of the Ancient Craft Revealed for Today. Penguin, 2008.
James, Stuart. "A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery." Reference Reviews 13, no. 4 (1999): 13-14.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychology and alchemy. Routledge, 2014.
Kitch, Aaron. "The “Ingendred” Stone: The Ripley Scrolls and the Generative Science of Alchemy." huntington library quarterly 78, no. 1 (2015): 87-125.
McCallum, R. I. "The Ripley Scroll of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh." Vesalius 2 (1996): 39-49.
Neihardt, John G. Black Elk speaks: The complete edition. U of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Olderr, Steven. Symbolism: a comprehensive dictionary. McFarland, 2012.
Rampling, Jennifer M. "The catalogue of the Ripley Corpus: Alchemical writings attributed to George Ripley (d. ca. 1490)." ambix 57, no. 2 (2010): 125-201.
Sheppard, H. J. "A Survey of Alchemical and Hermetic Symbolism." Ambix 8, no. 1 (1960): 35-41.
Silberer, Herbert. Hidden Symbolism of ALCHEMY and the OCCULT ARTS. Courier Corporation, 1971.
Stratford, Jordan, and Jeffrey S. Kupperman. A dictionary of western alchemy. Quest Books, 2014.
Willard, Thomas. "Astrology, Alchemy and other Occult Sciences." Handbook of Medieval Culture (2015): 120-133.
York, Michael. "Magic, Astrology and Alchemy." In Science and Religion, pp. 238-252. Routledge, 2