Alchemy Is the Quintessence in Nature's Highest Correlations

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Paracelsus · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 53 pages

Fifty-three pages, one of the largest studies in this section, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts which gives each position with its page number, so it can be consulted as well as read.

The claim it defends is that true alchemy is a noble philosophy, purely metaphysical, rather than an attempt on gold — and that before alchemy existed as a science its quintessence was already at work in nature's correlations. The mechanism proposed is Kriyashakti, the inherent power of creative thought, by which a virtuous man is said to produce external and perceptible results and to become a co-worker with nature in her higher departments. The image used to explain it is a good one: like a lightning conductor directing the electric fluid, Kriyashakti conducts the quintessence of life and gives it direction — led haphazardly it can kill, but directed by human will and magnetic force it can create to a predetermined plan. A compressed cosmogenesis follows, drawn largely from Plotinus and stated geometrically: the One as the centre which is everywhere, the Intellectual Principle as an unmoving circle which is its outward veil, and then, when the hour strikes, the circle becoming a triangle — the right line a metaphysical synthesis, the left a physical one — so that when the creative principle issuing from the rootless root has drawn the horizontal line, cosmic activity awakens and begins producing forms out of pre-existent matter. The phrase repeated at each stage is that the Sons of Light then clothe themselves in the fabric of Darkness. The tone turns elegiac where the study looks at what has become of the subject: poor alchemy, star of the morning, daughter of the dawn, how fallen from thine high estate — with the consolation that words change and their meanings become disfigured while the eternal ideas remain.

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