SEA SALT
& ALCHEMY
By Jacques de Langre
Salt, the sublimation of the oceans of the planet, has held the highest interest for the alchemists of all past periods. Still, it continues to reveal fragments of its secrets to serious contemporary alchemists.
The much older ideology, astrology, which proceeded and ushered alchemy into human consciousness, sought not only to discover the relationship of man to the cosmos and to explore how this kinship `could benefit mankind but pointed to the ocean as the strongest manifestation of astral influence on earth.
Since alchemy was concerned to mans relationship to terrestrial nature and the phenomena of the planets elements, salt-through its sublimation by the sun, or by fire in the alchemists workshop- was the pivotal substance that merited deep study and reverence as the primary transmutation element. Professor Louis Caravan understands transmutation at low energy and has succeeded in discrete experiments in transforming chemical elements. His scientific explanations and formulae are accepted world wide by the scientific establishment and he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Having thus discovered and codified a new property of matter and has demonstrated alchemy’s most noble achievement in the realm of medical physiology. Even physics embraces the fourth state of matter being plasma which alchemists have called many names, one being Aether. It is the cosmic Aether in the oceans and its quality in sea salt which is our focus here.
Oriental and European alchemy has spent countless years studying the use of morning dew to create ’’the gold of the thousandth dawn,’’ The study of seawater and its mother liquor proceeds from the same quest and truly accomplishes miracles. The riches of the sea contain the essence of all minerals of this planet. Extremely bitter in taste, this mother liquor not only serves to cure many grave illnesses, coagulate vegetable protein as in tofu making, but also duplicates the human body’s most complex chemical assemblage of essential minerals. If it is taken in diluted liquor form it serves as an immunization against all diseases but it also cures countless illnesses.
The alchemist Dr Alexis Carrell (1873-1912) kept a pulsing chicken heart alive for 37 years by immersing it in a solution of sea salt proving that seawater is a symbiotic culture medium for human living cells, its saltiness the basis of all body fluids, amniotic water and blood plasma. The experiment was willfully ended having proven that living cells could be immortal. The true healing bitterns are hand made avoiding polluting machinery from sun and wind dried sea salt sublimated on clay bed flats retaining enough moisture to be delinquesent, thus their name; Liquor of Mother. The method for making the mother liquor is described in Sea salt and your life published by Happiness Press, Magalia, California. In great contrast the crude salt made by industrial methods use contaminating bulldozers and machinery from mine rock salt gathered from alchemically dead and grossly unbalanced salt deposits, without the 84 sea elements, with the addition of aluminum anti caking agent.
The chemical demands of the body require that the salt concentration in the blood and body fluids be maintained at a constant. If the body does not get enough salt, or too much of the wrong refined variety, a hormonal mechanism compensates by reducing the excretion of salt in the urine and sweat. But it cannot reduce this output to zero. On a completely saltless diet the body looses it through the kidneys and sweat glands. It attempts to adjust its loss by accelerating its secretion of water so that the blood’s salt concentration can be maintained at a survival level leading to desiccation dehydration and finally death, preceded by loss of rational thinking, early dementia and running amok..
The bodies craving for salt and water are both aspects of the same hormonal homeostasis maintaining vital internal saline fluid. When sea salt complete with 84 trace elements is withheld, the bodily functions that depend on these noble chemical elements such as normal rational mental awareness, vitiate, that is either slow down or stop altogether. Mental and muscular fatigue are soon followed by stress, pain, depression, epilepsy madness and folly.
The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne observed that during the middle ages Europe experienced a mini ice age and the loss of Atlantic ocean ancient salt flats and coastal salt pans by the phenomenon of eustatic ebb and flow resulting in flooding salt production areas.. This produced human salt deprivation and dehydration which lasted the 500 year period known as the dark ages. Pirenne notes that most European history minimizes detail of the extent of social decline of that period, and we again have missed an opportunity to learn from history. Weather patterns causing ergotine poisoning from wheat mould account for short parts of the 500years social dissolution. For the greater damage he found alchemists records suggesting they attempted to remedy the cause of salt deprivation. Famine and social breakdown led to mass insanity, wars and witch hunts and human flesh sold on the open air markets increasing epidemic cannibalism of crazed people who to replenish their salt, ate the people they had slain. Quick to exploit a desperate situation the powerful grabbed the remaining stock and salt was exchanged for its weight in gold. Salt mined from mines was passed off as sea salt and increased the effects of mental imbalance and social chaos.
Despite the modern appearance of abundance, this mersamus continues under another form. Out of the worlds total salt production sea salt production is only 3%. Today the chemical industry competes with the food industry for the worlds sea salt production for mineral extraction for alloys, explosives, fertilizers and other rare trace minerals for the manufacture of chemical compounds. This has forced the food industry to cheaper alternate salt use away from sea salt perpetuating a contemporary salt famine. Alchemists insisted upon “total salt” from the ocean shunning mined deposits as lifeless and fossilized because the basis of alchemical philosophy is promotion of the vital life force.
The Emerald Tablet is not so cryptic if the crystallization and subsequent sublimation of the mother liquor from sea salt is understood.
Separate the Earth from Fire, the subtle from the crude with much travail….
It rises from the Earth towards the sky, and immediately comes back on Earth where it gathers the force of superior and inferior creations.
You will then have all the glory of the world and that is why all darkness will leave you.
The ‘plasma of Quinton’, a name registered in 1907 by one of France’s most renowned modern day alchemists, is a life giving fluid. Still made by a secret natural process, it is a far cry from what is being used today as blood plasma, the crude Ringer solution that will never reconstitute the true composition of human fluids. Quintons plasma continues to save lives as it has for the past eighty years.
The biologist who began using it for athrepsia created hundreds of clinics through out Europe and dispensed the precious plasma in a victory of life over death for thousands of moribund patients. In the plasma Quinton, the bitterness of sea water has been naturally transmuted to the sweetness of saliva and other healing fluids of the body as sea salt dissolved in spring water has no bitterness of crude salt.
After the second world war the rise of drug companies forced the clinics out of existence. Their close association with the military industrial complex with its reverse philosophy to alchemy, focused on killing the disease led to the elimination of numerous alternative healing modalities already successfully established and functioning legally in hospitals throughout Europe. The anti cancer therapy MWO invented by G. LaKhovsky called the Multiple Wave Oscillator electrically amplified the Astral Aether which was used in union with mineral colloids and Quintons plasma raised the background matrix vibrations of life to eliminate conditions for cancer and replace the ideal conditions for health. The French call it the Eaux-meres literally raising the mother waters, the Japanese nami no hana the flowers of the waves. Jabir ibin Hayan, a Musulman Sufi alchemist not only mentions Regal water but makes allusions to Lustral water as well, that form of oceanic fluid that shimmers and fluoresces from the charged energy and all of the dissolved chemical elements necessary for life dissolved in it. Today these modalities forced into secrecy continue quietly and discreetly honoring there alchemical legacy.
Later Popes such as Sylvester II who read Arabic alchemical works from Spain shocked at the cruelty of the inquisition unleashed by earlier popes sent emissaries to halt its progress when they learned children being burned at the stake accused of witchcraft in Germany and Switzerland. Sylvester established techniques of salvation, physical as well as moral, beginning with the renewal of the alchemical science of sweetening sea salt.
C.G. Jung in his Psychology and Alchemy, sees alchemy as seeking to impart the vital spark of eternal light out of the abyss of the darkness of matter.
Mikhael Ivanov, symbolizes it this way; The blood of the Earth is Water. The Oceans are its Heart , the vast planetary heart where plasmic blood is in abundance. The rivers, lakes and streams are the arteries and veins. The lungs are the earths atmosphere where blood is purified.
Max Retschlag a German alchemist who died in the 1930’s sums it up this way:
“Our knowledge of the constitution of the human body, the structure of the cells and that of the smallest living entities leads us rightfully to believe that a certain remedy can be found, made up of a latent and concentrated energy, that will act as a universal remedy for all illnesses. Since the vital energy is an electro-motive force, this specific remedy must be composed of matter capable of liberating a concentrated electric charge; after that matter has dissolved in the body fluids, just as occurs in galvanic batteries where certain salts whose dissolution produce a more or less constant current between the poles. “From the large number of references made by the ancient hermetic masters it would appear that it is those same salts that enter as base material in the preparation of the elixir of life. Salt in its broadest meaning, describes anything that crystallizes; according to the ancient masters, it is the very first being, since all matter can be reduced to the saline form. One particular salt, a celestial instrument and son of the divine solar fire, ultimately unites to passive earth in order to yield a saline incarnation.
This salt is made up of a mercurial humidity and of a sulpherous fat, and these two essences, antagonistic to one another, form the original trinity of life as alkali, acid and salt. Still quoting Retchlag: “Its crystalline living soul constantly gives birth to the same configurations; only the location and the circumstances of origin change.”
Alchemical medicine thus shuns the material and physical action of remedies upon the mere physical sphere of the organism. It much prefers to effect the cure” from above” as direct action of the constituting forces of the remedy. Whatever the various realms that are covered by alchemical medicine, the preferred manner of the magisters is by the utilization of energy, of light and of vibration.
Alexander von Bernus quotes an anonymous author; “Salt is derived from the ashes of a great power and there are virtues hidden there in.” To say it is the Word of God turned into matter is not simply an allegorical illusion. It is no coincidence that the amniotic fluid bathes the human embryo is salty like the ocean from which all life on this planet has issued. Nor is it a coincidence that the most healing salt today is only available by sun drying and not by kiln or flash pan drying as modern refined salt is. Drying by the sun and exposure to the moon alone alchemically sublimates opposites and all of the noble minerals into a cosmic vibration for tissue salts and essential macro nutrients such as calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, sulfur, and trace elements : copper bromide, tin, rubidium, manganese, iodine boron cobalt lithium valine, nickel, fluor, chromium, silver, zinc, and gold, is ……sea salt.
A German alchemist wrote’’ Iron carries the mystery of magnetism and the mystery of the blood. Iron and its dissolving agent of salt are the essential constituents of hemoglobin. Both of these elements are found, as a single pair or in combination, in the human blood. Iron is totally lacking in sea water less than 3 parts per trillion, by weight. The magnetic cosmos is made up of iron with all of the metallic macro nutrients and 84 trace elements in the oceans.
In the alchemical art, sulfur and mercury stand for the two antagonistic properties of opposite matter everywhere in the cosmos. Salt, in this trilogy, represents the means of uniting these two first principals. However, we must bear in mind that sulfur, mercury and salt are not chemical elements of those same names but define fundamental qualities and properties.
The salt that allows fusion of mercury to sulfur can be compared to the vital spiritual force that permits the union of body and soul, the true anima that makes all creature come and stay alive like Dr. Carrells chicken heart. Hermetic chemistry has been passed to us through a series of symbolic images; sulfur represented by a king robed in red; mercury a queen gowned in white; and salt which united them both, gowned black or grey as a priest celebrating their marriage.
The Philosophers stone, as described by Paracelcus(1493-1541), would present as a dazzling red color, that of rubies, and be sparkling and heavy. Derived from metallic mineral salts carried to their highest vital potency. It heals the human body of all weaknesses and restores the health. People become what they eat. Alchemy’s altruistic attitude is still an exemplary force; it can be a guide and lead all of humanity to hope again. The day will come when all men will arrive at the full knowledge of alchemy in its pure simple thought form and it will no longer be a physical science but an ethic of living. Sanity and peace come from equilibrium and harmony and can replace aggression and madness by applying the understanding the alchemy of sea salt.
Adapted from The Alchemical Tradition in the late 20th. Century, edited by Richard Grossinger Published by North Atlantic Books Berkley California 1979.
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
Schopenhouer |
