In Arabic alchemy, salt figures most prominently in an alchemical text that became influential in the West via its Latin translation: The Book of Alums and Salts (Arabic: al qawl fīl ‘l-milh, ‘a tradition on salt’; Latin: Liber de aluminibus et salibus). [52] This text appears to be a practical handbook describing various substances and operations, such as alum, different kinds of salt (including the use of alkaline and ammoniac salts), the preparation of arsenic for laboratory use, the comparison of arsenic and sulphur, as well as the features of silver, tin, lead, iron, copper and glass. [53] Contrary to the habit of many scholars of alchemy to attribute the sulphur-mercury-salt theory to Paracelsus, the triad in fact emerged as an alchemical motif before Paracelsus. As both Eberly and Haage inform us, it was Abu Bakr Muhammad Zakariyya Ar-Razi (d. 925) [54] who added the third principle of salt to the primordial alchemical principles (sulphur and mercury) inherited from Greek antiquity (implicit in the exhalation theory of metallogenesis), and already existing in Jabir’s system. [55] This and related traditions must be recognised as clear precursors to Paracelsus’s conception of the tria prima. Comments Eberly:

Razi had an extremely well equipped laboratory and followed all of the essentials of Jabir’s systems. In one area in particular, he expanded upon Jabir’s theory. Razi added a third principle, philosophically representing Spirit [Sulphur] as Mind, and Mercury as Soul, while adding Salt as the principle of crystallization or body. […] Razi’s descriptions of alchemical processes were closely studied and put into practice by later European alchemists including Nicolas Flamel and Paracelsus. [56]

In the earliest strata of medieval hermetic texts, such as the Turba Philosophorum and Rosarium Philosophorum, salt is already accorded an abundance of alchemical significations. [57] In the Turba, salt water and sea water are synonyms for the aqua permanens. [58] In the Rosarium, Senior tell us that mercurius is made from salt: ‘First comes the ash, then comes the salt, and from that salt by diverse operations the Mercury of the Philosophers’. [59] Arnaldus de Villanova (1235?-1313) reveals that ‘Whoever possesses the salt that can be melted, and the oil that cannot be burned, may praise God’. [60] (The idea of salt in connection to an oil that cannot be burned will be seen to persist in de Lubicz’s alchemical texts). Salt is both the ‘root of the art’ and ‘the soap of the sages’ (sapo sapientum) and is described as ‘bitter’ (sal amarum). [61] Perhaps the most interesting signification in the Rosarium, in light of the role salt would take as the pivot of death and revivification, is the description of salt as ‘the key that closes and opens’. [62]

Here one begins to meet the same duality of function that gives salt its inherent ambiguity. However, its identification with the function of a key (clavis) helps considerably in conceiving salt with more clarity. The Gloria Mundi would later reveal that salt ‘becomes impure and pure of itself, it dissolves and coagulates itself, or, as the sages say, locks and unlocks itself’. [63] Here one gains a good intimation of the function that salt would be later accorded in the traditions that emerge in Schwaller. Perhaps the most concise encapsulation, in relation to the idea of salt as the pivot of death and palingenesis, is Johan Christoph Steeb’s remark that sal sit ultimum in corruptione, sed & primum in generatione, ‘salt is the last in corruption and the first in generation’. [64]



Paracelsus’ Balsam and the Tria Prima



As has been mentioned, the keynote of alchemical precept and praxis pertaining to salt was struck by Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, alias Paracelsus (1493–1541). Although it is important to recognise that the essential structure of the tria prima was already in place before Paracelsus (indeed, it is inherent to the composition of cinnabar), it is undeniable that the triad of sulphur, mercury and salt is raised by Paracelsus to a previously unparalleled prominence.

Of course, Paracelsus was hardly one to follow ancient authorities merely at their word. Indeed, it is imperative to recognise from the start that Paracelsus learnt much of his knowledge about minerals directly from the mines. While Paracelsus travelled widely, he lived and worked chiefly in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland. If anywhere is to be regarded as “Paracelsus country”, it is the Alpine regions of Salzburg and its surrounds. Now, Salzburg, as its name (‘salt mountain’) attests, has long been the chief source of sodium for the surrounding regions: that is to say, rock salt, mined from the mountains, not sea salt. To this day in Austria and southern Germany common table salt is sold in an iodised form (Jodsalz) because its rock form, which is pure sodium, lacks the beneficial “impurities” that accrue to sea salt (iodine being an essential nutritional mineral).

In Paracelsus’ writings, the tria prima are often compared to the three aspects that are present during the process of combustion (i.e. fire, smoke, ash): ‘Whatever burns is sulphur, whatever is humid is mercury, and that which is the balsam of these two is salt’. [65] Paracelsians also employed the tria prima to represent the composition of the human microcosm: spirit (mercury), soul (sulphur) and body (salt), and this correlation was extended to some extent to the Christian trinity: father (sulphur), holy spirit (mercury), son (salt). [66] ‘In this manner’, states Paracelsus, ‘in three things, all has been created […] namely, in salt, in sulphur, and in liquid. In these three things all things are contained, whether sensate or insensate […] So too you understand that in the same manner that man is created [in the image of the triune God], so too all creatures are created in the number of the Trinity, in the number three’. [67]

Given the foregoing, it is tempting to oversimplify the meaning of salt as the “physical body”, but if this were the case, if salt was merely representative of corporeality, any mineral could have served the function of “body”. It does not answer the question: why salt? One key to answering this question—while also avoiding the narrow bind of oversimplification—lies in Schwaller’s observation that salt is the ‘foundation and support of the body’ and the ‘guardian of form’. [68] This is underscored by the fact that Paracelsus describes salt as a balsam:

God, in his goodness and greatness, willed that man should be led by Nature to such a state of necessity as to be unable to live naturally without natural Salt. Hence its necessity in all foods. Salt is the balsam of Nature, which drives away the corruption of the warm Sulphur with the moist Mercury, out of which two ingredients man is by nature compacted. Now, since it is necessary that these prime constituents should be nourished with something like themselves, it follows as a matter of course that man must use ardent foods for the sustenance of his internal Sulphur; moist foods for nourishing the Mercury, and salted foods for keeping the Salt in a faculty for building up the body. Its power for conservation is chiefly seen in the fact that it keeps dead flesh for a very long time from decay; hence it is easy to guess that it will still more preserve living flesh. [69]

Moreover, in German, Balsam possesses the meaning of something that heals or preserves, and it is easy to see how this balsamic function is specific to salt, a substance which is still used widely to preserve the flesh of plants and animals. Indeed, salt is a salve (from Latin sal), and it is worth noting in this connection that Balsam forms the German word for mummification (Balsamierung, ‘em-balm-ing’), and that one of the main substances used by the Egyptians for preserving their mummies was a salt (natron), which served as an anhydrous (drying) agent, desiccating the flesh and therefore preventing putrefaction. [70] Once again, the function of salt is to preserve, and yet at the same time, salt also corrodes or is corrosion. [71]



Sal Philosophorum



Quite apart from common table salt, or any other purely chemical salt for that matter, the medieval alchemists refer to the ‘Salt of the Philosophers’ or ‘Salt of the Sages’ (Sal Sapientie). One thing that distinguishes what is often designated as “our Salt”—i.e. “philosophical salt”—from common chemical salts is the fact that it is seen to possess the ability to preserve not plants but metals. Basil Valentine, in Key IV of his Zwölf Schlüssel, states:

Just as salt is the great preserver of all things and protects them from putrefaction, so too is the salt of our magistry a protector of metals from annihilation and corruption. However, if their balsam—their embodied saline spirit (eingeleibter Salz-Geist)—were to die, withering away from nature like a body which perishes and is no longer fruitful, then the spirit of metals will depart, leaving through natural death an empty, dead husk from which no life can ever rise again. [72]

Once again, through its dual nature—preserving and corrupting—a fundamental ambivalence adheres to the reality embodied in salt. And yet, the key to salt resides in its ultimately integrating function. It is the clavis which binds and unbinds, preserves and corrupts. It itself does not undergo the process which it enacts, embodies or disembodies. Importantly, however, as one learns from Schwaller, salt acts as the permanent mineral “memory” of this eternal process of generation and corruption.

Perhaps the most interesting and influential synthesis of esoteric theological and cosmological ideas on salt are those that crystallise in the tradition of Jacob Boehme, where salt emerges as a spiritual-material integrum central to a trinitarian theosophia. Here one learns that earthly or material salt recapitulates a heavenly potency called by Boehme salliter; this heavenly salt is an explosive force of light and fire likened to gunpowder (sal-nitre, cf. Paracelsus’ ‘terrestrial lightning’). [73] For Boehme, this heavenly and earthly salt are indicated by the two “halves” of the conventional salt symbol, which resemble two hemispheres, one turned upon the other (one “giving” and the other “receiving”). These theories reach a magnificent depth of expression in Georg von Welling’s Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum (1721). Welling (1655–1727), an alchemist for whom the books of theology and nature were thoroughly complementary, worked as a director of mining in the town of Baden-Durlach (a position that allowed him to explore his extensive knowledge and passion for both the practicalities and the mysteries of geology). His monumental Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum explores how the rich relationship of salt as fire/air/sulphur on one hand, and water/earth/mercury on the other, is played out in all its intricacies to convey the mysterious dynamic of the fire-water juncture embodied in heavenly and earthly salt (Welling uses the Hebrew term for heaven, schemajim, literally, ‘fire-water’ alongside the superimposed alchemical triangles of fire and water to form the Star of David). In his initial chapters, Welling describes the common symbol of salt as a ‘cubical’ figure and thus the figure of an ‘earthly body’; ‘its form is diaphanous or transparent, like glass’; it is ‘malleable and fluid and all bodies penetrate it with ease’. ‘Its taste is sour or acidic and a little astringent’; it is of a ‘desiccating nature and character’; moreover, it is ‘cooling’ and yet ‘in its interior there is a natural or genuine fire’. [74]

As Magee has demonstrated, hermetic influences in general, and Paracelsian and Boehmian ideas in particular, fed into and informed the work of G. W. F. Hegel. ‘According to an ancient and general opinion’, writes Hegel, ‘each body consists of four elements. In more recent times, Paracelsus has regarded them as being composed of mercury or fluidity, sulphur or oil, and salt, which Jacob Böhme called the great triad’. To this, Hegel adds: ‘It should not be overlooked […] that in their essence they contain and express the determinations of the Concept’. According to Magee, this admission is highly significant, for Hegel is saying that ‘if the alchemical language of Paracelsus, Böhme, and others is considered in a nonliteral way, its inner content is, in essence, identical to his system’ (i.e. the ‘determinations of the Concept’). [75]

Interestingly, despite Boehme’s known influence on mainstream academic philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel, it is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that emerges from the modern German academic tradition with the most abiding insights into the phenomenon of salt. Curiously, although it possesses no apparent connections to esoteric or alchemical discourse, Zarathustra as a whole is nevertheless pervaded with a pronounced Hermetic ambiance; somehow, Nietzsche’s remarks on salt penetrate right to the heart of its mysterium. At the end of book three, Zarathustra not only speaks of salt as binding opposites, but also connects this to a desire for eternity which cannot be satisfied through simple procreation:

If ever I drunk a full draught from that vessel of foaming spice, in which all things are well-blent:

If ever my hand fused the nearest to the farthest, fire to spirit, desire to suffering and the worst to the best:

If I myself were a grain of that redeeming salt that makes all things in the vessel well-blent:—

—for there is a salt that binds good with evil; for even the most evil is worthy to be a spice for the final over-foaming—

O how should I not be rutting after eternity and after the conjugal ring of rings—the ring of recurrence!

Never have I found the woman by whom I wanted children, for it would be this woman that I love: for I love you, O Eternity!

For I love you, O eternity! [76]

Salt as the redeeming juncture of opposites is framed by Nietzsche in terms that evoke the themes of autonomous morality expressed in his Jenseits von Gut und Bösen. Running deeper, however, is the surprising link that Nietzsche makes between salt and a desire for eternity that cannot be met through procreation; here one recognises not only the Indo-European ‘path of the fathers’ versus the ‘path of the gods’, but also the two paths in alchemy known as la voie humide and la voie sèche—the wet and the dry ways. Nietzsche taps directly into the crux of the human œuvre. Genetic continuity, i.e. continuity of and through the species, does not satisfy the soul’s desire for eternity; only the desire that is fixed in the salt, deep in the bones, has the capacity to survive biological generation and corruption. Nietzsche’s love for eternity expresses the same reality that Schwaller articulated in terms of the saline nucleus in the femur: the path of eternity, palingenesis and resurrection, hinges not on the chromosomes but upon a fixed mineral salt.



Sulphur, Mercury and Salt in Lubiczian Alchemy



Unity manifests itself as Trinity. It is the “creatrix” of form, but still not form itself; form emerges through movement, that is, Time and Space. [77]

—Schwaller de Lubicz

Schwaller’s understanding of the tria prima as the creatrix of form is essentially consonant with the trinitarian conceptions of Egyptian (and later Pythagorean) cosmogonic theology. Here, the creator’s divine hypostases—Hu, Sia and Heka—manifest as the extra- or hyper-cosmic forces that exist before creation; they are the forces necessary to the establishment of creation rather than creation per se. This may be compared to the identical conception that emerges in Iamblichean theurgy, which distinguishes between hypercosmic and encosmic divinities, or the same essential principles as carried through into the trinitarian theology of Eastern Orthodoxy, which distinguishes between uncreated and created energies. Beyond these general point of orientation, Schwaller’s hermetic metaphysics accorded the tria prima some very specific characteristics:

The Trinity, that is to say the Three Principles, is the basis of all reasoning, and this is why in the whole “series of genesis” it is necessary to have all [three] to establish the foundational Triad that will be[come] the particular Triad. It includes first of all an abstract or nourishing datum, secondly a datum of measure, rhythmisation and fixation, and finally, a datum which is concrete or fixed like seed. This is what the hermetic philosophers have transcribed, concretely and symbolically, by Mercury, Sulphur and Salt, playing on the metallic appearance in which metallic Mercury plays the role of nutritive substance, Sulphur the coagulant of this Mercury, and Salt the fixed product of this function. In general, everything in nature, being a formed Species, will be Salt. Everything that coagulates a nourishing substance will be Sulphur or of the nature of Sulphur, from the chromosome to the curdling of milk. Everything that is coagulable will be Mercury, whatever its form. [78]

The image of coagulation—with Sulphur as the coagulating agent, Mercury as the coagulated substance, and Salt as the resulting form—is used repeatedly by Schwaller. [79] The formal articulation of this idea, as published in his mature œuvre, connects the motif to the embryological process:

In biology, the great mystery is the existence, in all living beings, of albumin or albuminoid (proteinaceous) matter. One of the albuminoid substances is coagulable by heat (the white of the egg is of this type), another is not. The albuminoid substance carrying the spermatozoa is of this latter type. The albuminoid sperm cannot be coagulated because it carries the spermatozoa that coagulate the albuminoid substance of the female ovum. As soon as one spermatozoon has penetrated the ovum, this ovum coagulates on its surface, thus preventing any further penetration: fertilisation has occurred. (In reality, this impenetrability is not caused by a material obstacle, the solid shell, but by the fact that the two equal energetic polarities repel one another). The spermatozoon therefore plays the role of a “vital coagulating fire” just as common fire coagulates the feminine albumin. This is the action of a masculine fire in a cold, passive, feminine environment. Here also, there are always material carriers for these energies, but they manifest the existence of an energy with an active male aspect and a passive female aspect that undergoes or submits to it. Ordinary fire brutally coagulates the white of an egg, but the spermatozoon coagulates it gently by specifying it into the embryo of its species. This image shows that the potentiality of the seed passes to a defined effect through the coagulation of a passive substance, similar to the action of an acid liquid in an alkaline liquid, which forms a specified salt. Now the sperm is no more acid than the male albumin, but it plays in the animal kingdom [animalement] the same role as acid; ordinary fire is neither male nor acid and yet it has a type of male and acid action. This and other considerations incline the philosopher to speak of an Activity that is positive, acid and coagulating, without material carrier, and of a Passivity, a substance that is negative, alkaline, and coagulable, also without material carrier. From their interaction results the initial, not-yet-specified coagulation, the threefold Unity, which is also called the “Creative Logos” (Word, Verbe) because the Logos, as speech, only signifies the name, that is, the definition of the “specificity” of things. [80]

To salt as the mean term between the agent and patient of coagulation, he occasionally adds other revealing expressions, such as the following:

In geometry, in a triangle, the given line is Mercury, the Angles are Sulphur, and the resultant triangle is Salt. [81]

Whereas here, Schwaller identifies Salt with a ‘datum’ or ‘given’ which is ‘fixed like seed’ (une donnée concrète ou fixée comme semence), elsewhere he identifies the active, sulphuric function with that of the seed (semence). What this means is that the neutral saline product, once formed, then acts in the sulphuric capacity of a seed and ferment, but also foundation:

It can only be a matter of an active Fire, that is, of a seminal “intensity”, like the “fire” of pepper, for example, or better: the “fire” of either an organic or a catalysing ferment. The character of all the ferments, i.e. the seeds, is to determine into Time and Space a form of nourishment—in principle without form; clearly, therefore, it plays a coagulating role. The coagulation of all “bloods” is precisely their fixation into the form of the species of the coagulating seed, the coagulation being, as in other cases, a transformation of an aquatic element into a terrestrial or solid element, without desiccation and without addition or diminution of the component parts. [82]

In the identification of both sulphur and salt as semence, one discerns a specific coherence of opposites that, in elemental terms, is described by the expression ‘Fire of the Earth’. The salt is described in the passage quoted above as a seed (semence). This seed “becomes” seed again through the process of tree and fruit (growth, ferment, coagulation). It is at once a beginning and a finality (prima and ultima materia). The reality described is non-dual. Beginning and end partake of something that is not describable by an exclusively linear causality; and yet it is seen to “grow” or “develop” along a definite “line” or “path” of cause and effect; at the same time it partakes of a cyclic or self-returning character; and yet, for Schwaller, it is not the circle but the spherical spiral that provides the true image of its reality: a vision which encompasses a punctillar centre, a process of cyclic departure and return from this centre (oscillation), as well as linear “development”, all of which are merely partial descriptors of a more encompassing, and yet more mysterious, reality-process. The fundamental coherence of this vision to the Bewußtwerdungsphänomenologie of Jean Gebser (1905–1973) consolidates the significance of Schwaller’s perception for the ontology of the primordial unity which is at once duality and trinity. For Gebser, consciousness manifests through point-like (vital-magical), polar-cyclic (mythic-psychological) and rectilinear (mental-rational) ontologies, each being a visible crystallisation of the ever-present, invisible and originary ontology which unfolds itself not according to exclusively unitary, cyclic or linear modalities of time and space, but according to its own innate integrum.

Thus there is no contradiction in finding the presence of fiery sulphur in the desiccating dryness of the salt, for it is precisely in the one substance that the sulphuric seed (active function) and saline seed (fixed kernel) cohere. The fixed, concrete seed-form (itself a coagulation of mercury by sulphur) contains the active sulphuric functions (the coagulating rhythms) which it will impose upon the nutritive mercurial substance (unformed matter). ‘One nature’, as a Graeco-Egyptian alchemical formula puts it, ‘acts upon itself’.



Salt and the Fire of the Earth



Among the various perspectives that have been surveyed on the nature and the principles inherent to salt, it is perhaps the Pythagorean statement—‘salt is born from the purest sources, the sun and the sea’—that pertains most directly to the deeper meaning of Schwaller’s hermetic phenomenology. Salt for Schwaller was placed in a septennial relationship comprising the tria prima and the four elements. Elementally, salt was situated by Schwaller at the end of a progression beginning with fire and air and ending in water and earth. Fire and air form a triad with sulphur; air and water form a triad with mercury; water and earth form a triad with salt. But salt was also understood to join the end of this progression to a new beginning, to a new fire/sulphur, exactly as the octave recapitulates the primordial tonos in musical harmony. For Schwaller, it was precisely this ‘juncture of abstract and concrete’ (fire and earth) that was identified with the formation of the philosopher’s stone (or at least the key to the formation of the philosopher’s stone):