Chapter XII: Alchemy in Modern Life
The alchemical texts stopped reading like riddles and began reading like records: of a process, a substance, and the kind of long, disciplined life required to bring the work through.
The chemistry in the three Hermetic texts was only the beginning of what they contained.
I realized this only very late in my reading of The Six Keys. I had spent an immense amount of time on the first three Keys because that was where most of the procedural detail lay. Only when I neared completion of the prior chapter did I give sufficient attention to the later Keys. What I found was that although the language remained symbolic, the perspective began to shift. The author was no longer writing mainly as someone leaving behind cryptic instructions, but as someone who had lived through the journey required to produce the extract and was now describing what he had learned after going through it.
Because what follows depends heavily on the Sixth Key, I want the reader to see the central passages before I interpret them.
“The Sixth Key teaches the Multiplication of the Stone, by the reiteration of the same operation, which consists but in opening and shutting, dissolving and coagulating, imbibing and drying; whereby the virtues of the Stone are infinitely augmentable.”
“I should much bewail, if, like me, after having known the true matter, you should spend fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation, without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice which it encloses in its bosom, for want of knowing the secret fire of the wise . . .”
“But I give you notice, moreover, that even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career.”
“. . . which makes to run out of this plant (dry and withered in appearance) a water which wets not the hands, and which by a magical union . . . is dissolved into a viscous water—into a mercurial liquor, which is the beginning, the foundation, and the Key of our Art.”
“But remember, ye sons of philosophy, that the knowledge of our Magistery comes rather by the Inspiration of Heaven than from the Lights which we can get by ourselves. This truth is acknowledged by all artists; it is for good reason that it is not enough to work; pray daily, read good books, and meditate night and day on the operations of Nature, and on what she may be able to do when she is assisted by the help of our Art; and by these means you will succeed without doubt in your undertaking.”
Read this way, the Sixth Key is no longer just describing a set of operations. It is describing the conditions under which the work actually succeeds. The repetition of the same act, the long span of years, the failure even after partial understanding, and the insistence that effort alone does not get you there—these are not incidental details.
That is what makes the parallels that follow hard to dismiss. Because once the text states the conditions plainly—repetition, time, failure after partial understanding, and the need for something to be received—the question becomes straightforward: do we see that pattern anywhere in the modern world?
The first place I saw that pattern clearly was in the life of Shimanishi. The first place I saw that pattern clearly was in the life of Shimanishi. He remained with one stone and one question for almost fifteen years before the answer finally came. That alone made the Sixth Key hard to ignore.
That is why the Sixth Key hit me as hard as it did. Eudoxus is no longer speaking only as a cryptic instructor. He is speaking as a man who has lived through the work and paid for it. He writes of “a thousand labours and a thousand troubles,” and then says;
“I should much bewail, if, like me, after having known the true matter, you should spend fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation, without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice which it encloses in its bosom . . .”
What began to strike me was not only how difficult that road was, but how few people seemed to stay on it. If the text is giving a portrait of the kind of person who can remain with such a work long enough to bring it through, Shimanishi comes astonishingly close.
Other aspects of his character deepen the resemblance. I have repeatedly been told that Shimanishi spoke of his discovery with reverence, not ownership, describing it as “a gift from our Creator.” At one international conference, during a lecture, he is said to have remarked that “working with this material is like working with Angels,” which is not the language of a typical engineer. If the Great Work is, as Eudoxus says, “a gift of Heaven,” then The Six Keys is describing not only a sequence of operations, but also the sort of person who can carry such a sequence through to completion: one marked by discipline, reverence, and a willingness to labor for years without recognition.
In the earlier Keys, Eudoxus makes it clear that the way to discovering the Secret Fire is difficult. No alchemist had ever openly revealed it. The Six Keys is written in language that is ambiguous and can carry multiple meanings because the philosophers “do designedly speak in equivocal terms,” and those without “Lynx Eyes,” the ability to discern what is true from what is false, will become “lost in a labyrinth” from which it is “very hard to get out.”
Those who approach the text impatiently, or who insist on forcing literal meanings onto symbolic language, will be turned away almost immediately. Those who misidentify the roles of materials will become trapped in contradictions they cannot resolve. Those who lack the patience to remain with the problem long enough will simply abandon it. I began to see the difficulty of The Six Keys itself as a filter for the kind of man who might succeed.
But Eudoxus goes further than that. Although he urges the reader to read, to work, to observe, and to persist, he also makes clear that getting through the text is still not enough. The writings can point, warn, and test, but they do not carry the practitioner to the end. He has to remain with the work long enough for something more to arrive. And Eudoxus ultimately presents only two ways one reaches the knowledge sought: either by divine intervention, or through the help of a companion capable of seeing what the solitary practitioner cannot.
One of the most striking passages in all of The Six Keys occurs in the Second Key, and the more time I spent in alchemy, the more it read like a man speaking after a long struggle, trying to tell the reader that the work yields only to a particular kind of effort.
