Alchemy in Modern Practice

In a small laboratory in the German countryside, a young practitioner is macerating lavender in a mixture of alcohol and water. The lavender was harvested at the full moon in July. The vessel is sealed and set in a warm ash bath. In a few weeks the alcohol will be drawn off, the plant matter calcined in a small furnace, and the resulting salt dissolved in the distillate. The preparation will be bottled and sold as a spagyric essence. The work being done in the laboratory is, in its basic operations, the same work being done in fifteenth-century Paracelsian workshops, and the lineage from the Renaissance alchemist to the contemporary practitioner is direct. It is a small community — perhaps a few thousand serious practitioners worldwide — but it is persistent, and the persistence is one of the more interesting features of the contemporary esoteric landscape (Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 2012; Asprem & Strube, New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism, 2021).

The spagyric revival

The spagyric revival is the most visible part of the modern alchemical revival, and it is centered in the German-speaking lands, the Netherlands, France, and (more recently) the United States. The Soluna group in Germany, the Heidak group in Switzerland, and the spagyric lines produced by various French and Italian laboratories are the most established modern producers. The preparations are sold as dietary supplements and herbal remedies, mostly through herbal shops, alternative-medicine clinics, and online retailers.

What is striking is how little the basic operations have changed since the seventeenth century. The modern practitioner, like the Paracelsian, calcines the plant matter to produce the salt, distills to produce the spirit, and recombines the principles in a tincture. The new generation of practitioners has its own body of literature — Manfred M. Junius’s Practical Handbook of Plant Alchemy (1979) is the modern classic, and Albert Giedke, Jean-Michel Garnier, and a handful of others have produced useful practical guides. The literature is uneven, and some of it is closer to devotional reading than to laboratory manual, but the best of it is serious.

The Weleda question

The Weleda pharmaceutical company, founded by Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman in 1921, is the most successful commercial enterprise in the broader anthroposophic-medicine field, and the company is often described in the spagyric literature as a continuation of the alchemical tradition. The description needs to be qualified. The Weleda tradition is a synthesis of anthroposophic medicine, homeopathy, and biodynamic agriculture. Weleda’s medicines are produced from plants grown on the company’s biodynamic farms, and the medicines are prepared by a combination of conventional extraction, homeopathic dilution, and biodynamic principles. Classical spagyric operations in the sense of the older Paracelsian tradition are not the principal production method. Weleda’s product literature emphasizes anthroposophic pharmaceutical methods, not the Paracelsian or Junius-style spagyric operations (Steiner & Wegman, Extending Practical Medicine, 1925/2013).

The distinction matters because the spagyric revival has sometimes presented Weleda as a model, and the presentation is misleading. Weleda is a real and important anthroposophic pharmaceutical enterprise, and the company’s reach — operations in more than fifty countries — is impressive. But the lineage from Weleda to Paracelsus is indirect. The more direct lineage runs through the smaller spagyric laboratories, and the most useful introductions to the modern spagyric art (Junius, Giedke, Garnier) are the right ones to consult.

The Hermetic orders

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in the 1880s, is the most important of the modern Hermetic orders, and the Golden Dawn’s alchemical vocabulary is a working vocabulary for a large part of the contemporary Western esoteric community (Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Companion, 1986; Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 1937-1940). The Golden Dawn was a major influence on W. B. Yeats, on Aleister Crowley, on Dion Fortune, and on most of the more interesting figures of the early twentieth-century Western esoteric revival. The Golden Dawn is not primarily a laboratory alchemical tradition. The Golden Dawn practitioners work with the alchemical tradition as a symbolic and meditative framework rather than as a laboratory practice. The alchemical symbolism is used in the Golden Dawn rituals — the black, white, and red grades are essentially the color stages of the magnum opus, ritually enacted — and the alchemical concepts are integrated into the broader Golden Dawn system.

After the original order dissolved in the early twentieth century, the lineage was carried forward by the Alpha et Omega, the Stella Matutina, and a long list of independent temples. The successor orders have continued to develop the Golden Dawn tradition, and the alchemical symbolism is a major part of their work. A reader who wants to engage with the contemporary Hermetic tradition should start with Regardie’s The Golden Dawn and then move to the more specialized literature.

Theosophy and Anthroposophy

The Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875, and the Anthroposophical Society, founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1912-1913, are the two largest modern esoteric organizations, and both draw on the alchemical tradition as a major source of their teachings (Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 1888; Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom, 1894). The Theosophical tradition treats alchemy as a universal wisdom tradition with roots in the ancient mystery schools, and the Theosophical writers — Blavatsky, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater — wrote extensively on the alchemical symbolism. The Anthroposophical tradition, more Christian in its orientation, integrates the alchemical tradition with the Goethean scientific method, and Steiner’s biodynamic agriculture, Waldorf education, and Anthroposophic medicine are all alchemical in their conceptual underpinnings, even when they are not alchemical in their laboratory practice.

The associations

A number of contemporary alchemical associations have formed to support the modern revival: the International Alchemy Guild, the Alchemy Guild, the Spagyric Institute, the Paracelsus Ring (Germany), the Alchemische Vereniging (Netherlands), and others. The associations provide educational resources, host workshops, and publish journals. The journals are uneven in quality, but the workshops are useful, and the associations have helped to develop a genuine community of practitioners. A serious student of the contemporary revival should plan to attend at least one workshop in person, because the spagyric tradition is one of those practices that is significantly harder to learn from a book.

The challenges

The modern alchemical revival faces real challenges, and the most fundamental is the tension between the alchemical theoretical framework and the modern scientific framework. The alchemical claims about transmutation, the elixir of life, and the integration of the human being with the cosmos are not supported by modern science, and modern practitioners have to navigate the tension. The most thoughtful of them — and the spagyric journals publish this debate openly — accept the modern scientific framework and treat the alchemical tradition as a contemplative and practical discipline rather than as a competing science. The Weleda approach, with its integration of homeopathy and biodynamic agriculture, is one model. The pure spagyric laboratory, with its calcinations and distillations, is another. The two are not mutually exclusive.

The regulatory environment for spagyric preparations varies by jurisdiction, and compliance with food-supplement, herbal-medicine, and homeopathic regulations is a constant concern. The alchemical practice is also labor-intensive, and most modern practitioners balance the alchemical work with other forms of employment. The combination of small commercial scale, regulatory burden, and the time demands of the work itself means that the spagyric revival is unlikely to become a mass movement, and it is also unlikely to disappear. The middle path, in my view, is the most likely future.

What the revival is for

The modern alchemical revival is significant for several reasons, and they are not the reasons usually given. The revival is not a rejection of the modern scientific tradition. The serious practitioners I have read are explicit on this point. The revival is an attempt to recover a dimension of human experience that the modern scientific tradition has tended to neglect — the contemplative, the symbolic, the contemplative-ritual — and to integrate that dimension with the modern scientific inheritance. The alchemical tradition offers an integrative vision of the human being as a participant in a meaningful cosmos, and the vision is worth taking seriously, even by readers who do not accept the literal alchemical claims. The revival is small, it is real, and it is one of the more interesting things happening in the contemporary Western esoteric landscape.