Alchemy is a para-scientific, spiritual and philosophical discipline that combines chemistry, philosophy, astrology, medicine, metallurgy, nature, art and mysticism. It was born about 10,000 years ago in the land of Khem, in Ancient Egypt, where people lived with advanced knowledge in metallurgy and chemistry, who knew the secrets to extract essential oils, dye cloth and glass, ferment fruit juices, extract honey. .. Chaldeans, Babylonians and Phoenicians already followed the principles of alchemy, considered science and art, a form of knowledge.
Centuries later, in Alexandria, Egyptian metalworkers and craftsmen came into contact with the philosophical ideas of Greece. Sages and alchemists from all over the world visited the mythical Alexandria bookstore, the most important temple of knowledge of Antiquity, which housed manuscripts that kept the Chinese, Indian, Babylonian, Hebrew and Persian alchemical traditions, an amalgam of philosophies and concepts that allowed that alchemy survived and prospered in the Middle Ages, when it was considered a kind of rebellion against established power and ignorance, which hid its philosophical background under the allegory of the search for the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life.
Although alchemy was a practical discipline in its beginnings, based on concrete recipes for metallurgy and tincture, little by little it acquired more mystical accents, and it became a "spiritual science" that requires a balance between the heart and the body. and the mind, as described by Toth, one of the greatest alchemists of all time. His teachings were summed up in the mythical Emerald Tablet, a brief symbolically expressed alchemical text, of which each medieval alchemist, from Albert the Great to Isaac Newton, had his own version, as a guide in his alchemical work.
What was the mission of these alchemists? Throughout the centuries, his goal was to perfect or develop any substance, metal, chemical element, plant, body, mind or spirit ... Therefore, alchemy was the art of transformation, and alchemists tried it apply to any level of physical, mental or spiritual reality.
One of the fundamental principles of alchemy is that we live immersed in a material world that is only the shadow, or the projection, of a much more complex reality that our senses are not capable of perceiving. This duality - matter and non-matter - is also reflected, according to alchemists, in our physical body: on the one hand, our physical body is subject to the physical laws of birth and death; but we also possess, they assure, a non-material body, a soul, a spirit, called in alchemy "the fifth essence." The alchemists argued that we are all capable of detecting and perceiving this non-material reality, but that society trains us to ignore it from birth. His mission was therefore to find a way to recover this dimension of existence, to be able to incorporate it into our daily life.
In their laboratories, the alchemists did an apparently enigmatic, slow and laborious work with which they tried to manage to distill the essence of nature, to enhance it and thus understand its healing secrets. They described the vital flow, "that which gives life to all things," like a flash of light enclosed in a dark mass. They wanted to make a philosopher's stone with which to release this vital flow.
To achieve this, they studied to become experts in the production of herbal extracts, tinctures and spagyric essences, rock oils, vegetable stones and alchemical stones ... And as their techniques improved, alchemy acquired an increasingly intense symbolic potential .
Of course, each alchemist interpreted and applied the knowledge in their own way: some simply pursued getting rich learning to transform a cheap metal into gold (and many died punished for not getting it); others sought ways to isolate the "life flow" to gain the secret of eternal youth; and many others, including the scientist Isaac Newton, focused on investigating the existence of hidden forces, correspondences, synchronicities, and invisible influences in nature.
Alchemy thus became a magnificent metaphor to describe and travel our journey through life, through its stages, through its constant cycles of transformation, at any of its levels: physical, psychological or spiritual. In its physical application, alchemy is a precursor to chemistry; In its psychological application, it is a metaphor that describes the work we must do to manage the flow of our mind and free ourselves from its less pleasant elements: fears, mistaken personal beliefs or low self-esteem, among many others.
The extraordinary work of psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung around alchemy focuses on this symbolic meaning, on the inner search to know, understand and manage ourselves better. Alchemy is useful to better understand the human mind because it has a poetic, dreamlike, and metaphorical language that easily tunes into our unconscious part (which operates in a dimension of intuitions and dreams). In addition, alchemy has developed over the centuries a specific vocabulary to describe the stages of transformation that we go through, both physically and mentally, forming a guide available to everyone to navigate changes and crises.