For the past several years, I have been working on a personal project to better understand spiritual alchemy. This entailed researching and reading historical alchemical texts as well as modern (and not-so-modern) interpretations of those texts. The result was a model that is a conglomeration of all the pieces and parts I found from various texts and authors that seemed to align with my personal cosmology (heavily influenced by Dion Fortune’s A Cosmic Doctrine and Greek mythology). The model is dynamic, flexing to accommodate new ideas and understandings. I suspect it will continue to flex as I continue down my esoteric path, but I will delay sharing details about it until after some mental groundwork has been laid with these posts.
One of the first texts I attempted to study was The Book of Lambspring. I (naively) thought that since it was a shorter text (with lots of pictures!), it would be easier to understand. Nope. Not by a long shot. (You can see my initial thoughts on it here.
I decided it was time to revisit Lambspring, now that I have a bit more understanding of alchemy in general. And I decided I would add Substack to my repertoire (in addition to Dreamwidth and my personal website), as I follow other authors on Substack and appreciate getting their posts via email.
And, full disclosure, I am a member of the Order of Spiritual Alchemy (and serve on its Council of Guardians). You can learn more them here. (And you can access the curriculum for the first grade, the Octagon Society, for FREE!)
Now onto some alchemy!
First, there is no consensus in alchemy. Different authors, different traditions, different interpretations… they all use the same words but not necessarily with the same meaning. It can be frustratingly confusing, but if you can just let yourself accept that the same word can have multiple meanings across different texts rather than fighting to force your definitions on someone else’s vocabulary, you will start to see trends and patterns and that (at least for me) is when understanding starts to peek through the confusion.
Second, there are two things that are mostly consistent in alchemy. One is Solve et Coagula, dissolve and coagulate. That is the basic process of alchemy. Take something apart, purify it, and then put it back together. Two is Nigredo, Albedo, and Rubedo… the stages of alchemy. Nigredo is the blackening, using heat to burn off what is not pure. Albedo is the whitening, using water to purify what is left. Rubedo is the reddening, the transformation.
Some traditions include the stage of Citrinitas, the yellowing. Some traditions consider Citrinitas to be the transition between Albedo and Rubedo. I am not convinced it really matters if Citrinitas is considered a transition or a stage, but I wanted to include it so if you see it somewhere else, you will have a basic idea of what it is.
In addition to “stages”, alchemy also has “paths”. The most commonly referred to paths are the Solar Path and the Lunar Path. The Solar Path is associated with Fire; the Lunar Path is associated with Water.
Some traditions think you can choose one path or the other to reach Rubedo. In other words, the Solar Path contains Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, and Rubedo and the Lunar Path contains Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, and Rubedo. However, other traditions consider the Solar Path to be equivalent to the Rubedo stage and the Lunar Path to be equivalent to the Albedo stage. (And Nigredo is referred to as the Saturnine Path and Citrinitas is referred to as the Dawn Path.)
The last little bit of vocabulary to get out of the way is Body, Soul, and Spirit. The easiest way to distinguish them is to consider the Body as Matter and Spirit as Energy. The Soul is what connects them to each other. (And for those of you who follow JMG’s blog, the Body is the Physical Body, not the Etheric or Astral Bodies.)
The purpose of spiritual alchemy is to purify the Soul and purify the Body, so the Body can unite with the Spirit. (Easier said than done!) Or, to quote Splendor Solis, another wonderful alchemical text:
“The Spirit dissolves the body, and in the Dissolution extracts the Soul of the Body, and changes this body into Soul, and the Soul is changed into Spirit, and the Spirit is added again to the Body, for thus it has stability.”
This is the plot of Lambspring in a nutshell:
- Nigredo: “The Spirit dissolves the body” (disintegration)
- Albedo: “extracts the Soul of the Body and changes this body into Soul” (purification)
- Citrinitas: “the Soul is changed into Spirit” (illumination)
- Rubedo: “the Spirit is added again to the Body” (transformation)
The last little bit of housekeeping to get out of the way is what version of Lambspring these posts be analyzing. For the images, I am using the 1556 version, which you can view here. The text is in German and Latin, so I mostly used text from A.E. Waite’s edition (1893), a translation based on Nicolas Barnaud Delphinas’ Latin translation (1599) of the 1556 version.
In the next post, we’ll start analyzing the Preface!