Hermetic Symbols and Philosophy

"Emphasizing their broad theoretical foundations, the alchemist often termed themselves "philosophers", describing their work simply as "art" (ars) or "philosophical art". Although the alchemical concept of art is derived from Aristotle's techne, and refers very generally to skill in both theoretical and practical matters, its similarity to the extended concepts of art in the modern age is unmistakable. It is not, as one might immediately assume, the illustrative and fantastic spheres of the traditional visual arts, in which the links to the hermetic Opus Magnum, the 'Great Work' of the alchemists, are revealed, but rather those areas that involve the aspect of process in the experience of reality, such as Conceptual Art and Fluxus.

The heyday of hermetic emblems and the art of illustration coincided with the decline in "classical" alchemy, which was still capable of combining technical skills and practical experience with spiritual componets. Theosophical alchemists like the Rosicrucians and practising laboratory chemists like Andreas Libavius, who sought to improve the empirical foundations of alchemy and thereby brought it closer to analytical chemistry, were already irreconcilable by the beginning of the 17th century. Althought Rosicrucians did boast that "godless and accursed gold-making" was easy for them, this was a ludicrous and marginal pursuit in comparison with the main pursuit of inner purification: their gold was the spiritual gold of the theologians.

But these two divergent trends could lay claim to the same founding father, Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, also known as Paracelsus (1493-1541). In his work, the empirical study of nature takes place against a visionary and mystical background. His prodigious body of work contains both numerous instructions for the manufacture of pharmaceutical preparations on a vegetable and metallic basis and a practically inexhaustible wealth of natural mystical concepts in the spheres of astral magic, the Cabala and Christian mysticism. Dressing these up in highly individual "bombastic" linguistic creations did nothing to reduce their wide dissemination. These writings would exert an influence for centuries, extending from the speculative interpreters of alchemy, from Valentin Weigel, the Rosicrucians and Jacob Bohme, to the Romantics and modern branches of anthroposophy and theosophy."

-Introduction, Alchemy &Mysticism,
by Alexander Roob