Spiritual Alchemy: The Esoteric Science of Alchemy

As with much of esoteric knowledge, alchemy has become bastardized of its roots and sterilized into an exoteric teaching, one that blocks us from harnessing the true power through spiritual understanding. Alchemy is understood most commonly on only it’s most basic level. This basic understanding has been misleading humanity for ages. Hermes mourned our descent into darkness, being cut off from the truth that alchemy is a process of spirit. It is the order of operations of our ascension into enlightenment.

What is Alchemy?

The Arabic root of the word “alchemy” is “al-kamiya,” which means “divine chemistry” or “god’s chemistry.” Alchemy has also been referred to as “the black art” or “the golden elixir.” Within each of these meanings lies the deeper truth.

Alchemy is the relationship between consciousness and matter. It is how consciousness shifts matter.

Another way of perceiving the alchemical process is the relationship between art and nature. Whenever our free will consciousness comes in and improves upon matter, this is art. Art is when nature is taken on an expedited process of evolution, being alchemized. Nature alone takes an incredibly long time to evolve and art helps it along the way. Additionally, without the art of consciousness, natural evolution alone would not be able to achieve the highest perfected state of evolution. We would not be able to go for gold.

In the spiritual process of alchemy, the art of our consciousness interacts with the nature of our own evolution. Through this process, we have the chance to reach a golden state of enlightenment. Through our active participation, we become alchemists alchemizing spirit and matter. 

Alchemy = Ascension

This spiritual alchemy is the ascension process. Ascension is when consciousness plays an active role in transforming our soul through its involvement with matter. Alchemy and ascension are deeply intertwined being this dance between spirit and matter that leads to enlightenment.

Regardless of what you apply the term to, spirit or the more common metallurgical understanding of alchemy, the process is the same. As a metal, it ascends by transmuting from its base form through the different stages until it reaches gold.

Metallurgy, what we mistake as the whole of alchemy, is one facet of alchemy that mirrors the higher order of operations. The many sister arts of spagyrics, chemistry, metallurgy, and homeopathy also reflect the higher order of operations that takes place across all planes of consciousness and at all levels of being and density within this universe. Alchemy does not only happen in the plant and mineral kingdom, this is simply the most accessible understanding of the alchemical process. It is a way through which we observe the Hermetic axiom, “as within, so without.” 

This process never happens the other way around. It is not the material that transmutes the spiritual. Consciousness creates the material realm. The metaphysical order of operations on which alchemy is based manifests matter. As within births the without. It would be against nature for it to happen the other way around, and yet much of our terrestrial understanding would like to function on an “as without, so within” paradigm.

What, Then, is Spiritual Alchemy?

The black art is so much more than simply turning lead into gold. It is the transformation of the soul through the vessel of the body that houses that soul. That body can be plant, mineral, and, of course, it can be flesh and blood. It can even be a planet or even celestial. Alchemy is the process of awakening the soul or essence from its adhesion to matter. It is both the art and science of transforming matter from one density into another.

In this age, it is the human evolution from a carbon-based life form to crystalline. This spiritual process is oft misunderstood in our age because, in an effort to keep secret these esoteric practices, the texts were encoded. In any legitimate ancient text that remains from before the Hellenistic era, these terms always point to the occult anatomy of the human vessel. 

The mystics' interior constellations that are projected outward as their fate.
Most importantly, these texts are always pointing to an internal transmutation that is meant to awaken the mystic from stenosis. 

In representation of the human anatomy, one of the words for mind was metals. But the transmutation of the mind is not the great work, nor the esoteric form of the work of alchemy.

It is the Divine Chemistry

Alchemy is to spiritualize matter and to materialize spirit. As the divine chemistry, alchemy takes place within the cosmos itself. It takes place across higher orders or operations and higher orders of nature.

To illustrate, calcination, the first stage of alchemy, is when the base metal is purified through fire, being reduced to its very ashes. This is the physical representation of the process that happens to consciousness at higher orders of operation. Consciousness is reduced to its very ashes through fire.

When you reduce the elements, you expose them to different stages of purification. This purification happens through the reduction process. A metal or consciousness is reduced and reduced until what remains is ready to be put back together in a higher order. 

This order of operations happens in all manifestations in this universe as they are exposed to different stressors: fire, water, air, and earth. Through these pressures, reduced matter is then recombined into new forms of life, new celestial bodies.

The divine alchemy is the magnificent order of operations that creates this universe. In it is a constant cosmic reduction and then recombination. It is evolution. It is ascension.

We manifest the physical realm from source consciousness in the divine alchemy. Sulfer, mercury, and salt represent the soul, spirit, and body.

In the order of operations for divine chemistry, consciousness first filters itself through each of these “elements,” through sulfur or soul, which is the essence of whatever is being created, through mercury or spirit which is the conductive capability of whatever is being created, and through salt or body which is the final form of whatever is being created: the physical form.

The second stage is where consciousness meets the environmental elements of fire, air, earth, and water. In other dimensions, there are different ratios of the elements. This creates environments that support different types of life from what we experience on this earth. There are many ways consciousness can play with the ratios of all the elements. This is the most esoteric science that is involved in the creation of celestial worlds and life forms within those worlds.

We can better understand this process through the animal kingdom. It is the elements, the environment of a species that helps determine the attributes of that species. An animal in a more watery environment will have attributes to thrive in water. Fish are adapted to water. Birds are adapted to air. The ratio of elements within their physical environment determines the animal’s physical structure.

Alchemy for the Soul

Consciousness goes through the process of soul, spirit, and body, projecting itself into different emanations. From there, it projects itself into different ratios of elements and those different ratios of elements will determine the type of life form created. 

Through this process of alchemy, the divine chemistry, this cosmos is created. From the purification process is manifested a physical realm of art.

Our consciousness and its relationship to the material realm is how we perfect our evolutionary process. When our consciousness is actively participating in the alchemical process of purification and transmutation, we reconfigure our soul essence. We dismember and separate our consciousness from the elements. Each time we separate spirit and matter, we’re allowing more of our soul essence to come through until we reach a purified state of enlightenment. That is the alchemical process of ascension. 

Carl Jung

Academia has constricted alchemy to a process involving only metals. Luckily, this bastardization of this process has been challenged in our new era.

Carl Jung reclaimed the art of alchemy from this academic science by bringing it into the psychological landscape. He explained the transformative process of what happens on an intellectual and even spiritual level. This was not a new or radical theory. This was a revival of what he synthesized from ancient texts and different spiritual systems. He was rediscovering the pieces of the puzzle of what alchemy truly is. 

Academia believes that Carl Jung spiritualized a strictly metallic concept, when in fact, he simply revived these encoded arts to bring to light the truth of the ascension process. He showed the world the truth of alchemy.

You can see this by looking into the father of alchemy’s biggest text, The Hermetica. 

The Hermetica begins with a sad omen depicting a future that will be dark. The text predicts the Dark Ages when humanity loses sight of true spiritual gnosis and falls into materialism. 

Whatever you believe Hermes to be, a philosophical group, a prophet extending his life through elixirs, or a god; he was not crying over the lost art of transforming metals into gold. He was mourning humanity’s loss of the true gnosis of spiritual alchemy, this process of enlightenment and ascension.

Carl Jung filtered this knowledge through a psychological paradigm as a new way of understanding this long-lost gnosis, but he did an amazing job of keeping the essence intact. Even though it’s filtered through this psychological lens, it still contains the elements of the chore of alchemy, all metallurgy aside.

This “metals only” thought is the real dark ages that Hermes foretold. What we lost was the understanding that the physical is always reflecting the metaphysical, even down to our anatomy.

The ascension process is a collapsing and reassembling of base consciousness into unity consciousness. This is the true power we can all access as alchemists of our own ascension.