Chapter XI: The Six Keys of Eudoxus: The Labyrinth
The Six Keys finally unlocked the labyrinth. What looked like alchemical misdirection began to read as a guarded map of stone, sulfur, water, and the hidden essence released from rock.
The First Key: The Trap of Literal Reading
Although presented last in this sequence, The Six Keys of Eudoxus proved to be exactly what its title suggests: not just a key, but the key through which the rest of the Hermetic canon began to resolve for us.
If the Emerald Tablet gave the symbolic picture of the cycle, and Sternbuchta gave the portrait of the essence brought forth within it, The Six Keys turns to the work itself: the guarded sequence of openings, dissolutions, separations, washings, coagulations, and fixations by which that essence is brought forth from stone.
A brief note on the history of The Six Keys of Eudoxus is warranted. The text appears to come out of the late seventeenth century, and scholars have long noted its resemblance to writings attributed to Eirenaeus Philalethes, the alchemical pseudonym widely associated with George Starkey. Starkey was an American born in Bermuda, educated at Harvard, and later active in London in the 1650s, during the same period as Robert Boyle, of Boyle’s law, one of the founders of modern chemistry and a central figure in arguing that scientific inquiry and theology were not in conflict but deeply aligned.
While no definitive attribution can be made, the text most likely emerged from the same Western European alchemical world, carrying the same preoccupation with guarded method, symbolic compression, and deliberate misdirection that defines that period of the Hermetic tradition.
What cost me months to see was that the six Keys are not six procedural steps. They are six symbolic vantage points onto one underlying process, repeating it in shifting language so the reader cannot lock onto it too early. Once that became clear, the text no longer read like a sequence of separate instructions.
For that reason, I will not walk through all six Keys in equal detail. I will begin by moving slowly through the First Key, with our role-grammar already in place and with Shimanishi’s process fully in view. The remaining Keys recast that same work in different symbolic forms.
For that reason, I will not walk through all six Keys in equal detail. I will begin by moving slowly through the First Key, with our role-grammar already in place and with Shimanishi’s process fully in view. The remaining Keys follow the same basic structure, repeating the same work under different symbolic forms.
For brevity, I include only the First Key below; for the complete text, readers can consult the text here.
THE FIRST KEY
The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up: this is it which knows how to extract the seed out of the body, and which forms the Stone of the philosophers by the conjunction of the spirit with the body—of sulphur with mercury.
Hermes has manifestly demonstrated the operation of this First Key by these words: In the caverns of the metals there is hidden the Stone, which is venerable, bright in colour, a mind sublime, and an open sea.
This Stone has a bright glittering: it contains a Spirit of a sublime original; it is the Sea of the Wise, in which they angle for their mysterious Fish.
But the operations of the three works have a great deal of analogy one to another, and the philosophers do designedly speak in equivocal terms, to the end that those who have not the Lynx’s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost in this labyrinth, from whence it is very hard to get out. In effect, when one imagines that they speak of one work, they often treat of another.
Take heed, therefore, not to be deceived here; for it is a truth that in each work the Wise Artist ought to dissolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven’s head, whiten the Black, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven.
Hence, Hermes says, What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art. Consider that it is by separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that our astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at this shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.
The Key to The Six Keys
