Canon emerged from the medieval period having acquired all sorts of magical and occult associations ranging from alchemy to the magic of the 13th century Spanish philosopher and mystic Ramon Lull, the 14th century work of the alchemist Nicholas Flamel, 15th century kabbalists as Mirandola and Reuchlin and especially the 16th century magician, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa. Hermetic works as the Emerald Tablet and the Corpus Hermeticum were also appealed to as well as Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. By the 17th and 18th centuries, people as Mattheson were longing to rid Europe’s music of canon and counterpoint in favor of more “popular” forms of music.
Mattheson felt, perhaps with some justification, that music theory needed to be demystified. In this, he found an opponent in Heinrich Bokemeyer. They waged a public debate each arguing the merits of his position. Bokemeyer stated that canon was the highest form of music. That compositional skills were at their peak when composing canon. Mastering canon was the highest of musical disciplines. Mattheson, on the other hand, felt that while canon should be continued to be practiced, it should not be over-emphasized because free-flowing melody is more important now than stuffy, old canon which is obsolete and a hindrance to musical progress. In the end, Mattheson won the day. Bokemeyer threw in the towel and admitted Mattheson presented a superior argument to his own and that he no longer believed in the centrality of canon in music. The real problem for Bokemeyer was that Mattheson rallied many a respected composer to advocate for him including Telemann one of the most respected composers in all of baroque music. Bokemeyer was having trouble in that area. Many composers simply saw no reason to enshrine a musical form so encrusted with medieval magical and hermetic detritus. It seemed to serve no purpose and they were ready to move to more lucrative ventures with free-flowing melody. Mattheson’s attack was too relentless and overwhelming for Bokemeyer to withstand.
However, the fact Mattheson had to repeatedly resort to this attack on occult canonism in the first place indicated just how prevalent and entrenched it was in European society. This was, of course, a different age. These Europeans, barely out of the medieval era, still harbored a belief in magic, demonology and alchemy. While they may have outwardly proclaimed their praise of the Enlightenment, they still had a private, inner fear that the devil was real and that demons, spells and curses could be cast upon them by witches and magicians practicing the Black Arts. Of these ancient disciplines, alchemy was the most respectable and the one containing the most truth. We tend today to look upon alchemy as a silly pseudoscience pushed by hucksters claiming they could turn lead into gold and there is truth in this characterization. Many alchemists were scammers taking advantage of one sovereign or other in exchange for patronage. This sovereign would believe these alchemists could make gold because they enough tricks with chemistry to produce reactions that seemed to make gold appear but this only proves that alchemists did know a good deal about chemistry.
Alchemy in the West appears to have started about the 2nd century really began to catch on in about the 14th century with the works of Nicholas Flamel but alchemy is known in many forms the world over. Alchemy entered and flourished in Europe contemporary with the Kabalah. The term “alchemy” is obscure. A possible derivation comes from kam or kême or “black earth,” a reference to Egypt (the Egyptians called themselves “kamites”). Indeed, the oldest known alchemical drawings are on Egyptian papyrus. From this, came the Arabic al-kimiya which, in turn, gave rise to the Greek alchemia. There is also a possible derivation from the Greek chyma or “smelting” as some of the earliest forms of alchemy were really metallurgy. Indeed, alchemy in the West would be known for its attempts to transmute “base metals” into gold, an endeavor long sought as the story of King Midas and the golden touch would demonstrate.
The intertwining of Greek, Arabic and Egyptian traditions in alchemy are not due only to the name. The Corpus Hermeticum became the virtual scripture of alchemy. Its Platonic mode of thought and language strongly suggests its Greek origins. And since it claims to be the body of work of Hermes Trismegistus, scholars and occultists alike believe that the aforementioned Emerald Tablet was originally a part of Corpus Hermeticum even though the oldest existing translations are Arabic and Latin.
While alchemy was primarily concerned with transformations, the art itself represented a transformation from magic to science. Alchemy did indeed give birth to modern chemistry which partly derives its name from the earlier tradition and, like the earlier tradition, is primarily concerned with transformation. Yet much of the language of alchemy read like spells taken from a magician’s black book. Alchemy represents one of the earliest and more successful attempts to use magic on a practical and analytical level. Its many failures only served as guideposts to the practitioner of how operations must be performed in order to achieve results. Once results were achieved, others became involved who had no interest in the magical aspects but were intrigued by the various chemical reactions and sought to understand and explain them and this led directly to founding of Western chemistry.
Alchemy was based on the ancient principle of unchanging, divine unity underlying all changing phenomena. The alchemists applied this principle to matter. Adopting the theory of the four elements, they posited a “primal matter” that was devoid of all characteristics and attributes which they called the prima materia. Adopting the Gnostic concept of a demiurge or lesser god, the alchemists believed that this god either found or made the prima materia and “animated” to form the four elements of earth, wind, fire, and water. Each of the four elements combines two characteristics of the other so that fire would be hot and dry, air would be hot and moist, water would be cold and moist, and earth would be cold and dry. By varying these characteristics, all matter is composed of these four basic elements. They further believed that any form of matter could have all its attributes stripped off to reveal the materia prima underlying it and that different attributes could be added in order to transmute it into another form of matter. So earth could have its cold characteristic removed and replaced with hot to form the element of fire as smoke. Water could have its wet characteristic replaced with dry to form the element of air as vapor. And so on. This belief formed the very foundation of alchemy.
In the above diagram, the prima materia has a dual nature bound through a mysterious union of opposites. The Greeks held that prima materia was composed of hyle and chaos, matter and energy. These opposites divided into Celestial Salt and Celestial Niter. When alchemy talks of salts or mercury or niter, these should not be taken literally as today’s chemical elements or compounds but rather as properties possessed by various elements and compounds. Celestial Salt was so named because salts were seen as passive, magnetic, stable, fixed. It is called celestial because it is of a higher more refined quality than any salt found on earth. Likewise, niter was seen as active, electrical, unstable, volatile. The fixed quality produced to earthly elements of earth and water while the volatile quality produced the earthly elements of air and fire. The two former elements are more solid while the latter two are gaseous and ephemeral. Earth represents all solids, water represents are liquids, air represents all gases and fire represents the temperature required for transformation. From these four elements, three principles are derived. Earth and water form the principle of salt, air and fire from the principle of sulphur and the combination of water and air produces the principle of mercury. Again, these are the actual chemical elements of sulfur and mercury but rather describes an essence. The mercuric principle is easy to deduce because it partakes of two opposites—one fixed and one volatile, i.e. one female and one male, respectively. Through this chart, all chemical reactions are described.
To the alchemist, all matter was composed of spirit and body. A piece of wood could be burned, for example, to produce smoke and ash. The rising smoke was the spirit while the inert ash was the body. Likewise, was man’s spirit released from the body upon death. While spirit means “breath” and the breath certainly leaves the body upon death, the alchemist did not intend for such a materialist interpretation. For them, the spirit was akin to the breath, that is, they bore some of the same characteristics. To the alchemist, the spirit was the Gnostic/Manichean/Zoroastrian conception of a “light seed” or “luminous self” or “pneuma” that inhabited living matter put there either unconsciously by the demiurge or deliberately hidden there by the powers of darkness.
The pneuma was believed to move through the cosmos as per the Stoic conception of wave motion. The spirit traveled as a wave travels over water. The water in this case was matter and the spirit animated it by using it as the medium in which it waves but otherwise has no body. The waves have varying frequencies which determine the characteristics of each type of living creature.
Alchemy called this spirit mercury and applied it to all matter not just living creatures. Mercury was the spirit of matter whether it be a metaphysical principle, breath, vapor, or smoke. Mercury is a metal that is silvery in appearance. Silver to the alchemist represents the rational intellect which reflects the divine intellect the way the silvery moon reflects the light of the sun. Since mercury is also liquid as life-giving matter is—rainwater, semen, blood, the ocean, amniotic fluid, and so on—it was seen as a “living” silver or quicksilver. Spirit was called the “philosopher’s mercury” and the element of mercury merely approximated it in nature because it shared some of its characteristics.
Because the element of mercury is a metal that does not wet a surface upon which it sits despite its liquid nature, mercury was seen as a unity the opposites and was termed the Spirit of God because all things are unified in God. Alchemists represented mercury as the conjoining of man and woman. Mercury partook of Hermes’ male nature and Aphrodite’s female nature and so was called the Hermaphrodite. The astrological sign of the planet Mercury depicts the circle surmounting the cross, Venus’s symbol, topped with a pair of horns which are phallic in nature. The alchemists depicted Mercury as half-man half-woman called the Androgyne (Greek for “man-woman”).
Alchemy did not spring into the world complete but, like any other discipline, grew over the centuries from the early work of Arabs such as Geber and Rhazes to Europeans as Lull and Flamel some centuries later. Alchemy continued to develop in the 16th century under Paracelsus (1493-1541). Paracelsus developed the principle of matter containing a trinity. He wrote: “The world is as God created it. In the beginning He made it into a body, which consists of four elements. He founded this primordial body on the trinity of mercury, sulphur and salt, and these are the substances of which the complete body consists. For they form everything that lies in the four elements, they bear in them all the forces and faculties of perishable things. In them are day and night, warmth and coldness, stone and fruit, and everything else still unformed.” Hidden in the statement is the Pythagorean tetraktys. The 4 elements occupied by 3 principles that unite 2 opposite natures into the divine 1. 4321 is also a sacred number in the Hindu system which expresses it as 4320 since 0 and 1 are the same in this case. Hindu cycles of time are measure in yugas of 4000, 3000, 2000 and 1000 years respectively. The last is known as the Kali Yuga and we supposedly are living in it now. Hinduism also has cycles of time that are 432,000 years long and part of a 4,320,000-year cycle.
Whether we are talking the tetraktys or alchemy or Hindu time cycles, we are ultimately dealing with purification, a calming of passions and a recovery of the light seed from within, that is, a sprouting of God within man. God was symbolized by the element of gold. Gold shone yellow like the sun and so represented the Divine Intellect. As a metal, gold also did not rust representing the incorruptible spirit. Alchemists believed that the Platonic gold permeated all matter and could be found in even the most raw, corrupted substances. The corrupt characteristics could be stripped away to the prima materia and replaced with the characteristics of gold. Man could likewise be purified into a God. To prove it, alchemists sought way to turn a base substance into gold. The golden nature underlying all matter was called the Philosopher’s Stone—Stone here meaning the One. The discovery of the Stone would later become the famous search for the Holy Grail or Saint Graal.
Alchemy united several disciplines in one. Gnosticism/Manicheanism, astrology, Hermetica, Pythagoreanism, and shamanism to name a few. It was also combined with tarot and Kabbalah. We remember that shamans of a very early time climbed the ladder from earth to sky and beyond. The ladder appears in the Hebrew Bible as what was envisioned by Jacob while in what might be called a shamanic trance. The ladder appears in alchemy via Hermetica as the one formed by the orbits of the seven celestial bodies of the geocentric universe of Ptolemy. The alchemists viewed each body as a different temporal mode of the Divine Intellect cycling through its twelve zodiacal archetypes as it descends to earth to animate all matter. The alchemist sought to scale the planetary rungs of the ladder to reach the communion with the One. This they called “The Ascent of the Soul throught the spheres.”
All metals were born from the earth under the influence of the various planets. Each celestial body then was assigned the metal it influenced: Luna with silver, Mercury with quicksilver, Venus with copper, Sol with gold, Mars with iron, Jupiter with tin, and Saturn with lead.
The planetary signs although accepted utterly by astrology are really alchemical and consist of three symbols of cross, circle and crescent. The circle represents gold and purity but also completion—a full orbit. The cross represents the four elements, the equinoctial cross and corruption. The crescent represents silver but also incompletion—a half-orbit. Venus, for example, is a cross surmounted by a circle. Her metal is copper. Copper has the same outward appearance as gold but internally it is not the same and can rust. So her sign tells us that the circle on top means outwardly gold but the cross beneath signifies internal corruption. We explained in the opening chapter that Saturn’s metal is lead and is shown as a crescent surmounted by a cross, that is, silver at the lowest level of the elemental balance. Jupiter’s metal is tin and is depicted as a cross with a crescent attached the left arm. This represents silver in the middle of the elemental balance or halfway between lead and silver. There is no sign of a cross surmounted by a crescent, for that is the same as a crescent by itself which is the moon—silver. So lead and silver are opposites and in the geocentric scheme this is true as well: the moon is closest to earth while Saturn is farthest away.
While there is much more to alchemy than this, needless to say, I don’t wish to dwell on the subject for too long. I simply wish the give the reader some familiarity with the principles and tenets of occultism. Suffice it to say that alchemy was far more than some pseudo-scientific bumpkins trying to make an elixir to turn lead into gold. While they did seek out such a process, it was to verify the divine nature of homo sapiens.
Robert Boyle may have been the first true chemist. He began to do away with a lot of the occultic ideas of alchemy (while still retaining some) about 20-25 years before Bach’s birth. Early scientists they were. Let us give them their due. Laboratory techniques as emulsion and distillation were invented by alchemists as are good deal of the laboratory equipment still in use. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) was the first to describe the chemical composition of cinnabar, ceruse and minium as well as making the first known caustic potash. The aforementioned Ramon Lull (Raymond Lully) (1235-1315) prepared the first known bicarbonate of potassium. Paracelsus was the first to discover and describe the element of zinc and introduced the idea that diseases could be controlled or cured by the introduction of chemical compounds into the body. Johann Rudolf Glauber (1604-1668) discovered the salts that now bear his name—Glauber salts or sodium sulfate (which he erroneously thought to be the Philosopher’s Stone). Phosphorus, sulfuric acid, tin oxide, porcelain, calamine, turpentine, quicklime, sodium hydroxide, hydrochloric acid, ammonium chloride, potassium nitrate and benzoic acid to name a very few were all discovered by alchemists. The Chinese were also superb alchemists (probably invented alchemy) and let us not forget one of their greatest discoveries that changed the world: gun powder. Alchemy also planted the seeds for medical science, metallurgy, porcelain, dye-making and glass-working. For a pseudoscience, alchemy spawned a lot of science.