What Is Salt in Alchemy? The Principle of Fixity and the Body
Salt as the third principle of the tria prima in alchemy, the principle of fixity and the body, its role in metallic composition, and the spagyric art.
Salt is the youngest of the three principles of the tria prima, and the youth is the first thing to understand about it. The full tria prima — including salt — is a 16th-century Paracelsian development; the earlier Jabirian system has mercury and sulfur only. The Paracelsian addition of salt to the older mercury-sulfur duality is one of the more consequential theoretical moves in the early modern alchemical tradition, and the move is what gives salt its central place in the system (Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, 2013, pp. 88-95; Newman, Promethean Ambitions, 2004, pp. 91-105; Pagel, Paracelsus, 1958; Newman & Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002, pp. 30-50). Without the Paracelsian move, salt would be a useful mineral reagent and nothing more. With the move, salt is the body of every substance, and the body carries the heaviest theoretical weight of the three principles.
The principle and the substance
In the alchemical theory, salt is the common table salt of modern chemistry and something larger at the same time. Alchemical salt is a principle, a fundamental constituent of matter that is present in all substances in different proportions, and the principle is the most material of the three. The alchemists identified the principle of salt with the qualities of fixity, solidity, stability, and the body-like aspect of matter.
The principle of salt is the most material of the three principles, and the materiality is part of what makes salt useful in the Paracelsian framework. Salt is the principle that gives matter its stability, its solidity, its capacity to resist change. Where the principle of mercury gives matter its fluidity and its spirit, and the principle of sulfur gives matter its activity and its soul, the principle of salt gives matter its body, its substance, its capacity to persist through time.
The alchemists used the term “salt” because the ordinary substance of salt — the white, crystalline, soluble mineral — was the most visible embodiment of the principle. The ordinary salt is fixed (it does not evaporate at room temperature), solid (it forms crystals), and soluble in water. The alchemists saw these properties as expressions of the deeper principle that they called salt, and the seeing is what made the term useful.
Salt in the theory of metallic composition
Salt is the third principle that the Paracelsian tradition added to the original Jabirian theory of mercury and sulfur, and the addition was theoretically motivated. The alchemists recognized that the two-principle theory of the metals was inadequate to account for the solidity and the fixed character of the metals, and they added the principle of salt to account for these properties.
The metals are, in the Paracelsian theory, made of mercury, sulfur, and salt in different proportions. The mercury provides the metallic property of fusibility. The sulfur provides the combustible, soul-like quality. The salt provides the solid, fixed, body-like quality. The character of each metal is determined by the balance of the three. Gold is the metal in which the three principles are pure and perfectly balanced. Lead is the metal in which the three principles are impure and unbalanced.
The Paracelsian alchemists developed a sophisticated account of the role of salt in the metals. The salt is what allows the metal to maintain its form, to resist the action of heat, to hold its shape under pressure. Without the salt, the metal would be a fluid, volatile, formless mass, and the Paracelsians were not being metaphorical when they said so.
The doctrine of the tartar
The Paracelsian doctrine of the tartar is one of the most important and most distinctive features of the Paracelsian medical system, and it is built on the principle of salt. Paracelsus taught that diseases are caused by the precipitation of salts in the body, and that the proper remedy is a purified chemical preparation that can dissolve the precipitated salts and restore the body to its natural state (Pagel, 1958; Principe, 2013, pp. 105-110). The doctrine is one of the more important and more durable features of the Paracelsian inheritance.
The doctrine of the tartar derives its name from the tartar that precipitates from wine, the potassium bitartrate that forms on the inside of wine casks. Paracelsus saw the tartar as a model for the disease process: the wine is healthy, but when it is exposed to certain conditions, a salt precipitates from it and forms a hard, crystalline deposit. Similarly, the body is healthy, but when it is exposed to certain conditions, salts precipitate from the blood and the juices and form hard, crystalline deposits in the tissues and the organs. The deposits are the cause of the disease.
The Paracelsian treatment of the tartaric diseases is the administration of purified salt remedies — preparations that can dissolve the precipitated salts and restore the body to its natural state. The most important of the salt remedies are the alkahest (the universal solvent) and the specific salt dissolvers prepared from particular minerals. The Paracelsian salt remedies were the ancestors of the modern diuretics, the modern antilithics, and the modern treatments for kidney stones, gallstones, and other “tartaric” diseases. Van Helmont’s De Tartaro (c. 1640s, posthumous) and Thomas Willis’s De Anima Brutorum (1672) extended and modified the Paracelsian tartaric doctrine in the seventeenth century, providing the modern salt-chemistry context for the Paracelsian theory.
The doctrine of the tartar is one of the more striking examples of an alchemical theoretical claim that turned out to be productive in the longer run, and the productivity is part of what makes the doctrine worth attending to. The alchemists were wrong about transmutation. The alchemists were right about the precipitation of salts as a model for disease, and the rightness has had a long afterlife in modern medicine.
Salt in the spagyric tradition
The spagyric tradition, examined in the cluster on spagyric alchemy, is the practical application of the tria prima theory, and salt is the most demanding of the three principles to prepare. The spagyric alchemists developed a sophisticated set of procedures for separating, purifying, and recombining the three principles in plant and mineral substances.
In the spagyric preparation of plants, the salt is the fixed, solid, body-like component that is extracted from the plant by calcination. The plant material is burned, and the ash is dissolved in water, filtered, and crystallized. The resulting salt is the “body” of the plant, the principle that gives the plant its substance and its medicinal properties. The spagyric alchemist purifies the salt by repeated crystallization, and recombines it with the purified mercury and sulfur to produce the spagyric tincture.
The spagyric preparation of salt is the most demanding of the three operations, and the demand is what makes the spagyric salt the most rewarding of the three. The calcination of the plant material must be done carefully to avoid losing the volatile components. The dissolution and crystallization must be done repeatedly to obtain a pure salt. The spagyric salt is the body of the plant, and the body is the most stable of the three principles, and the stability is the quality that makes the spagyric salt the most useful of the three for long-term storage.
Salt in the alchemical symbolism
Salt is represented in the alchemical symbolic tradition by a small set of distinctive images, and the images are the most stable of the three principles. The most common:
- The circle divided by a cross, the standard alchemical symbol for salt. The circle represents the cosmos, and the cross represents the four elements and the four corners of the material world. The symbol is the ancestor of the modern symbol for the planet Earth, and the descent is one of the more interesting pieces of alchemical iconographic survival.
- The cubic crystal, the symbol of the salt as a fixed, solid, geometric form. The cube is the symbol of the material world, of the earth, of the body.
- The white queen, the symbol of the albedo, the second stage of the magnum opus in which the salt is brought to its white, purified form.
- The moon, the celestial counterpart of the salt. The moon is the receptacle of the celestial influences, the body that receives the light of the sun, and the alchemists saw a close correspondence between the moon and the principle of salt.
The pillar on alchemical symbols shows the full range of symbols associated with salt, and the long-tail page on the color stages examines the albedo, the stage in which the salt reaches its white, purified form.
The three salts: an important refinement
The Paracelsian tradition developed a refinement of the salt principle into three sub-principles, and the refinement is one of the more interesting features of the late Paracelsian inheritance. The three sub-principles, each corresponding to a different kind of salt:
- Salt of the sea (sal marinus), the common salt, the principle of fixity and solidity in the mineral world.
- Salt of the earth (sal terrae), the nitre or saltpeter, the principle of fixity and solidity in the plant world.
- Salt of the sun (sal solis), the philosophical salt, the principle of fixity and solidity in the solar or spiritual world.
The three salts are present in different proportions in different substances, and the alchemist who can identify the three salts in a substance can understand the substance’s character and its medicinal properties. The three-salt refinement is one of the more distinctive features of the Paracelsian tradition, and it was developed by the Paracelsian alchemists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Pagel, 1958). The refinement is part of the late Paracelsian corpus, and the corpus is the most theoretically ambitious of the Paracelsian inheritances.
Salt in modern chemistry and alchemy
The modern chemist knows salt as a class of ionic compounds formed by the reaction of an acid with a base. The modern chemist knows sodium chloride, the common table salt, as the most familiar example, but also recognizes a wide range of other salts, including potassium nitrate, calcium carbonate, copper sulfate, and many others. The modern chemical concept of salt is precise and well-defined, and the precision is one of the things the modern chemist takes for granted.
The alchemical concept of salt is a useful complement to the modern chemical concept, and the complementarity is one of the things the modern practitioner can work with. The modern chemical concept of salt is precise and well-defined. The alchemical concept is broader and more symbolic. The two concepts are not incompatible. They are two ways of understanding the same family of substances, and the modern alchemist who works with both has a richer understanding than the modern chemist who works with only one. The richer understanding is one of the things the spagyric revival is trying to recover.
The alchemical legacy of salt is also visible in the modern medical tradition, and the visibility is one of the more useful pieces of the alchemical inheritance. The Paracelsian doctrine of the tartar is the ancestor of the modern understanding of kidney stones, gallstones, and other “tartaric” diseases. The Paracelsian salt remedies are the ancestors of the modern diuretics and antilithics. The salt tradition thus remains a living part of the modern medical inheritance (Newman & Principe, 2002, pp. 30-50). The alchemists were wrong about the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists were right about the tartar, and the rightness has had a long afterlife in modern medicine.