‘Inner’ and ‘outer’, ‘materialistic’ and ‘idealistic’, ‘mental’ and ‘physical’, all these binary pairs are simply manifestations of one and the same dichotomy on different levels on the scale of reality, and both of these — the scale and the reality — are simple attributes of our consciousness.
In the Aristotelian school of philosophy this corresponds to the pair eidoz - ulh. Essence plays role of the ‘wand’ of differentiation raising the world up from the boundless sea of substance, that in its ‘profoundest’ substantiality is stripped of all characteristic to such a degree that it can be easily defined as nothing. Modern physicists, exploring ‘the depths of matter’ encounter just this problem, consequently declaring a ‘materiality of the vacuum’ or announcing that the universe is made up of various phantasmagoric sub-units, always turning out to be pure nothing after appropriate experiments. Such conclusions are close to the truth in some sense, but if profane researchers want to overcome the deadlock they will have forget the materiality of phenomena and turn back to their essence.
Thus, going down the imagined ladder of ideas they might ultimately come to the pair of chemical elements sulfur-mercury, the reaction of which gives us a mellow red stone known as cinnabar, a symbolic name for the result of the Magnum Opus in all world traditions. The correspondence between this stone and the Philosophic Stone is exactly the same as that between chemical sulfur and Philosophic Sulfur or chemical mercury and Philosophic Mercury, and the distance between them is in fact just several steps on the hierarchical ladder.
As we move along the abovementioned scale of classification with a great deal of attention, we note certain errors and inconsistencies in so–called ‘commonsense judgments’ concerning it which have become the basis for some very enduring conceptions.
For instance, when speaking of spirit (pneuma), it is obvious that we cannot oppose it to the body. We have to remember that intermediate entity known as soul (psyche) that forms the two pairs: pneuma-psyche and psyche-soma. Then the contraposition of pneumatic and psychic typical of many Gnostic schools will assume a logical for us; moreover, interpretation of alchemy undertaken by so–called ‘depth psychology’ will look like the blatant fallacy it is since the Magnum Opus is essentially the cleansing of the Stone of a substance which is the very subject of that science.
When our virtual ladder stands firmly on the earth with its top resting on the primal dichotomy, we have a sufficiently clear picture of the things. But in the actual Hermetic treatises we see just a part of the hierarchy of ideas, and its interpretation depends on what step the reader takes as a referential. An old alchemical maxim aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi is usually interpreted as ‘our gold is not the one that you make your coins of’. This is completely true on some very high level of the hierarchy; but there are other levels, and the same maxim can be read somewhat differently on these. ‘The gold we start out with is not the one we are speaking of on the later stages’. There is an even lower interpretation: ‘What we called vulgar gold is now dissolved in the primary Mercury’.
Here we should rather stop and consider some important notions. First, Hermetic language is characterized by an extremely precise terminology that never allows any liberties. A noun with the attribute after the word, a noun with the attribute before the word, a single noun – all define completely different things. The second notion relates to the adjective vulgar. Profane terms in the Hermetic language are extremely rarely used; one almost never comes across an actual chemical term in a Hermetic text. A reader, tired of ‘deciphering’ Hermetic symbols and having met ‘vulgar gold’ somewhere in a text, sighs with relief – he believes that there at last he has found some solid ground. This is rather widespread sort of error, but it is unfortunately not so. Everything depends on the hierarchical level to which the notion refers. In certain particular contexts quicksilver may correspond exactly to what in another context is called Mercury of the Philosophers, but the context where this term corresponds to the chemical mercury is very hard to imagine and would, in that case, have rather pejorative flavor. In other words, vulgar gold and vulgar gold are homonyms in Hermetic language, and this language contains a great number of such homonymic pairs. (Gleb Butuzov)
