And so we arrive at the last secret of Fatima by Sister Lucia, exshepherdess:
The secret consists of three distinct parts, two of which I am now going to reveal. The first part is the vision of hell. Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire, which seemed to be underground. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, The Message of Fatima, June 26, 2000)
ALCHEMICAL FIRE
Halfway between holy fire and hellfire is fire as an alchemical operator. Fire and crucible seem to be essential in alchemical practice, which seeks to operate on a raw material so as to obtain from it, through a series of manipulations, the philosopher’s stone. This is capable of projection, transmuting base metals into gold.
The manipulations of the raw material take place through three stages, distinguished by the color the material gradually assumes: the black work, the white work, and the red work. The black work involves a heating (and therefore the use of fire) and decomposition of the matter, the white work is a process of sublimation or distillation, and the red work is the final stage (red is the color of the sun, which often symbolizes gold, and vice versa). The hermetical furnace, the athanor, is an essential instrument, but alembics, vessels, and mortars are also used, each with their symbolic names, such as the philosophical egg, maternal womb, wedding chamber, pelican, sphere, sepulcher, and so forth. The essential substances are sulfur, mercury, and salt. But the procedures are never clear, since the language of alchemists is based on three principles:
- As the object of the art is highly secret and not to be divulged—the secret of secrets—no expression ever says what it seems to say, no symbolic interpretation will ever be definitive, because the secret will always be elsewhere: “Poor fool! Can you be so naive as to believe we are openly teaching you the greatest and most important of secrets? I assure you that anyone who wants to explain what the Hermetic Philosophers write according to their ordinary and literal meaning will find himself caught up in the twists and turns of a labyrinth from which he cannot escape, and won’t have Ariadne’s thread to guide him out of it.” (Artefius)
- When it seems that ordinary substances such as gold, silver, or mercury are being spoken of, other substances are in fact being described—philosopher’s gold or mercury—which have nothing at all to do with them.
- While no description is ever what it seems, everything always relates to the same secret. As the Turba philosophorum states, “Know that we are all in agreement, whatever we say . . . One person clarifies what the other has concealed and he who really searches will find everything.”
When does fire intervene in the alchemical process? If alchemical fire can be compared with the fire that precedes digestion or gestation, it ought to intervene during the course of the black work, when heat, acting over and against radical, metallic, viscous, oily humidity, produces the nigredo. If we can accept a text like the Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique by Dom Pernety (Paris: Delalain, 1787), we read that
when heat acts on these matters, they are changed first into powder, and oily and gluey water, which rises as a vapor to the top of the vase, then descends again in dew or rain, to the bottom, where it becomes almost as an oily black broth. This is why it has been called Sublimation and Volatilization, Ascension and Descension. The water then coagulating more and more, becomes like black tar, which has caused it to be named fetid and stinking earth, also because it emits a musty odor of sepulchers and tombs. (“La clef de l’oeuvre,” pp. 155–56)
But statements can also be found in the textbooks to the effect that the terms distillation, sublimation, calcination, or digestion, or the terms firing, reverberation, dissolution, descent, and coagulation, are none other than the same “Operation,” carried out in a single vessel, in other words, a firing of the substance. Thus, concludes Pernety,
this Operation must be regarded as unique, but expressed in different terms; and it will be understood that all the following expressions signify the same thing: distil by alembic; separate the soul from the body; burn; calcinate; unite the elements; convert them; change one into the other; corrupt; melt; engender; conceive; bring into the world; exhaust; moisten; wash with fire; beat with the hammer; blacken; putrefy; rubify; dissolve; sublimate; grind; reduce to powder; crush in the mortar; pulverize on marble—and many other similar expressions all mean simply to cook in the same way, until dark red. Care must therefore be taken not to remove the vase from the fire, because if the material cools down, all is lost. (“Règles générales,” pp. 202–6)
But what fire is being described, seeing that different writers speak from time to time about fire of Persia, fire of Egypt, fire of the Indies, elementary fire, natural fire, artificial fire, fire of ashes, fire of sand, fire of filings, fire of fusion, fire of flames, fire against nature, Algir fire, Azothic fire, celestial fire, corrosive fire, fire of matter, lion fire, fire of putrefaction, dragon fire, dung fire, and so forth?
Fire heats the furnace throughout, from the beginning to the red work. But is the word fire also perhaps a metaphor for the red matter that appears in the alchemical process? And here, in fact, according to Pernety, are some of the names given to the red stone: red gum, red oil, ruby, vitriol, ashes of tartar, red body, fruit, red stone, magnesium, red oil, starry stone, red salt, red sulfur, blood, poppy, red wine, red vitriol, cochineal, and also “fire, fire of nature” (“Signes,” pp. 187–89).
Alchemists have therefore always worked with fire, and fire is the basis of alchemical practice. Yet fire itself constitutes one of the most impenetrable mysteries of alchemy. As I have never produced gold, I cannot provide the answer to this problem, and so pass on to another type of fire, another type of alchemy, that of the artist, where fire becomes an instrument of new birth, and artists set themselves up to imitate the gods.
FIRE AS THE ORIGIN OF ART
Plato recounts in Protagoras that once upon a time there were gods, but no mortal creatures . . . and when they were about to bring these creatures to light, they charged Prometheus and Epimetheus to provide and distribute the most appropriate faculties for each race. But Epimetheus asked Prometheus to let him do the distribution himself: “And when I have completed the distribution,” he added, “you shall come and see.” And so, having thus persuaded him, he started the work of distribution. And to some races he gave strength without speed, while the weaker races he equipped with speed.
And to others he gave weapons of defense and attack, while for others, who were defenseless by nature, he devised other faculties to guarantee their safety. To those races that he made small, he gave the capacity to escape using their wings, or to hide underground; whereas to those he made large he gave the possibility of saving themselves with their size. And he distributed all other faculties in this way, so that they balanced each other . . . and when he had provided the various races with the means to avoid mutual destruction, he devised a way for them to defend themselves against the inclemency of the seasons sent by Zeus, covering them with thick hair and leathery skin, sufficient to defend them from coldness and capable of protecting them from hot weather, and such that, when they slept in their lairs, these would serve as natural blankets suitable for each of them.
And some he shod with hoofs; others he gave tough skin and no blood. Then he provided different food for the different races: to some he gave the grass of the land, to others the fruits of trees, to others roots. And he allowed some races to devour other races of animals for food; and he provided that the former would have fewer offspring, and that the offspring of the latter would be numerous, to ensure the preservation of the race.
Now Epimetheus, who was not particularly clever, had failed to notice he had used up all the
