In alchemical terms, the
mercury of the heart centre is compounded with the lead
of the kidney  centre to produce the elixir of life. The Blue
Dragon and White Tiger , Fire and Water, are uniﬁed, yin
and yang  are uniﬁed and the Golden Flower is born. The
region of the navel is known as the ‘burning cauldron’ or
stove, and when the vital force is roused it ascend s to the
‘precious cauldron’ in the head and is transformed into
spirit. This is the ‘cavity of the spirit,’ between and behind
the eyes. From this it will be seen that there is a considerable
similarity between Taoist and Tantric yoga. The perfect
health of the body as a vehicle for the spirit is basic to
both and various techniq ues in Tantrism are at one with
Chinese alchemy in being  designed to ‘destroy old age and
conquer death.’ Many of the famous Tantric yogins were
also well-kn own alchemists; both traditions developed
siddhi  powers and both aimed at the same transmutation
of the lower body, or base metal, into the perfect  body of
the True Man. An analog y can also be traced betw een theTaoist circul ar movemen t of the force or energ y in the
body and the Indian kundalini , the power symbolized by
the serpent coiled at the base of the spine, which lies
dormant until, awakened by yogic practices, it begins the
ascent up the spinal region through the chakras , each
represented by a lotus, until, increasing in power at each
stage, it reaches the highest point in the head and beings
about realization, enlightenment. Kundalini , like ch'i, is spoken of as an ‘energy ,’ a ‘cosmic
life energy;’ when roused it transverses all the chakras , or
‘ﬁelds,’ upwards to ﬁnal union of the opposites at the
highest point. This is also spoken of as symbolizing the
Sacred Marriage and in Hinduism as the union of Siva
with the female goddes s or shakti. The ﬁrst chakra  in
kundalini  symbolism can be compared with the ﬁrst or
‘mortal gate’ in Taoist yoga, from whence the vital force
ascends the spinal region; but in Chinese yoga the
movement and force are cyclic, ascending in a spiral form
to the ‘head gate,’ then returning from the ‘cavit y of the
spirit’ to the source, passing downwards again through the
other centres of the heart, navel and womb, thus
activating the ‘foetal breath’ and bringing about a union of
the yin and yang  powers to form a total unity in the body
as a medium for the spirit. This process of ascending and
descending sets up a cycle of vitality . The spine in both
Indian and Chinese yoga symbolizes the world axis, while
the ascent is the alchemical change from the lower to the
higher , lead to gold. There is also an analogy between the
lotus of the chakras  and the Golden Flower of Taoism, in
that when the yogic-alchemical process is fulﬁlled and the
inner light is found, the lotus, or ﬂower , begins to
circulate, to move of its own volition—the Mover  at Will. This is also paralleled in many western texts which state
that the Philosophers' Stone has to circulate.Chinese alchemical yoga combined both mental control
and physical exercises with a diet designed to contain the
‘vital forces’  and to avoid any that were inimical to their
development. The taking of alchemical medicines also
played a part. Diet varied, but in yoga it was largely
vegetarian, although the ‘ﬁve pungent roots,’ the garlic
and onion family ,' were to be avoided as aphrodisiacs,
while anothe r dietary course advocated abstaining from
cereals, ‘the ﬁve grains,’ and eliminating ﬁsh, fowl and
meat. Fasting was also recommended as beneﬁcial and
was, indeed, essential to many alchemical practices that
lead towards hsien -hood. Eatin g too much coarsens the
body and as the body increases so the soul decreases. It is
said in the Book of Lieh Tzu that those who dwell in the
Isles of the Immortals ‘do not eat the ﬁve grains but inhale
air and drink dew.’ In fact when the ‘vitality’ is fully
developed the yogin or hsien  is said to be able to ‘disp ense
with eating and forget about sleep,’ and there were those,
such as the female hsien  Mao Nü, who, on a diet of pine
needles, recommended by a Taoist hermit, became
immune from  hunger and cold and whose body became so
etherialized that she appeared to ﬂy . There was also a wine which appeared to have the
qualities of the elixir in conferring immortality: ‘There is a
jade rock on Ying Chou Island, about 10,000 feet in height,
from which issues a sprin g resembling wine in taste. It is
called Jade-wine Spring. If one drinks several pints of this
wine one will immediately become intoxicated. It confers
immortality on human beings.’
Many of the rules on diet and hygiene which were
recommended for the yogin and alchemist are still
recognized today; for example, when Huang-fu Lung met a
Taoist Sage riding on a buﬀalo, the Sage made known to
him the following rules concerning ‘nourishing the spirit’:
‘If you desire to keep your body youthful do not workbeyond the limits of your strength. Do not eat fat or rich
food; use salt and spices with moderation. Abstain from
worry , curta il pleasures  and wrath, dismiss hurry and
bustle. See that your house is well prepared to withstand
the cold of Autumn and W inter and is well drained.’
All foods, like everything else in creation, have their yin-
yang  natur e and must be kept in balance to main tain
health. If that balance is disturbed sickness results;
medicine is then a matter of ﬁnding the cause of this
disturbance and restoring the balance physically or
mentally by diet and medicines of the right compensating
proportions. The yogin and hsien  used massag e, and gymnastics were
also practised: ‘The human body requires toil and exertion,
only it must not be carried to excess. It is exercise that
enables the food to be properly digested, makes the blood
circulate through the veins and prevents the onset of
disease, just as the hinges of a door, being constantly in
motion, will never get rusty .’ This was said by Wu P'u, a
hsien  who was a pupil of the famous physician-surgeon
Hua T'o, who himself taught the Five Animal Antics. He
wrote:
The Immortals of ancient days, while performing the
inhalation process, passed their time like dormant
bears, looking about like owls, twitched and
stretched their limbs and joints in order to hinder the
advance of old age. I have an art, called ‘The Sport of
Five Animals,’ namely a tiger, a stag, a bear, a
monkey and a bird, by which illness can be cured and
which is good for the movements of the feet when
they accompany the process of inhalation . . . Whenever you feel unwell, stand up and imitate the
movements of one of these animals.As for the ancient Taoist yoga of T'ai Chi Chuan,  it has
swept into the West and is now familiar in T'ai Chi classes
everywhere. The T'ai Chi, the Great Ultimate is all-
pervasive. ‘Every single human has T'ai Chi and every
single thing has T'ai Chi . . . for all things there is only one
T'ai Chi . . . but everything in the world is endowe d with it
and with the whole of it.’ This was said by a neo-
Confucianist, Chu Hsi. As the Great or Supreme Ultimate,
containing and contained in all things, it is represented by
the yin-yang  symbol representing the perfect balance of
the two forces in the universe, the two powers being
contained within the circle of totality , of cyclic revolution
and dynamism. T'ai Chi yoga uses rhythmic movement and
breath contr ol to bring the yin-yang  forces  into harmony
with themselves and the cosmos. Like all yogic practices it
requires long and persi stent application and cannot be
properly learned in short ‘courses’ or weekend ‘schools;’
nor can it be learned from books; it requires a competent
master . The position adopted for sleep also imitates the natural
postures of animals, such as the curved position of a dog
or the coiling of a dragon . The correct position for sleep is
to lie on one side, it does not matter which, with one arm
bent under the head and the other stretching down to the
stomach; one leg is straight and the other bent, the eyes
should be closed and concentrated on each other . Breathing is, naturally , controlled and rhythmic and
slowed down. Although Chuang Tzu speaks of the
dreamless sleep of the Sage, in yoga dreams are taken as
an indication of progres s until the state of perfection is
reached. Bad dreams are a sign of imperfection and
indicate that something is wrong; the Tan Ching  says that
the True Man is free from them. In sleep the oblivion of death is experienced and death
itself must be understoo d before the new being can beborn. Alchemy in general, and its yogic branch in
particular , either aims at death, or total transformation,
which is the same thing; it seeks the death of the old life
and the birth  of the new. In the West this is the solve et
coagula  in which the opposites are dissolved and die
before rebirth in the ‘body of glory ,’ or of the ‘diamond
body’ of Buddhism and the ‘jade body’ of T aoism. The solve
et coagula  can well be translated ‘puriﬁcation and
integration.’ Reference to the ‘ﬁxing’ or death of mercury
is, in India n yoga, symbolic of the activities  of the
conscious mind, from which the yogin is liberated and
therefore breaks through to the timeless state which is
immortality . The yogin who conquers time also conquers
death. As Eliade says: ‘Immortality cannot be gained
except by arresting manifestation , and hence the process
of disintegra tion . . . one must ﬁnd the primordial,
motionless unity , which existed before the rupture.’ The
dissolution of the metals in alchemy is the death of the ego
and the sensory life before being reborn as the selﬂess. The soul has to be dissolved and freed of its conventional
closed-mind before it can become ‘open’ and receptive to
new states, possibilities and potentialities. This is also the
death and rebirth of initiation. Taoist and Tantric yoga have much in common in the use
of sexual techniques for bringing about realization, but the
theory and practice of this yoga is far too complicated and
technical to be understood by any uninitiated westerner . In
the ﬁrst place it requir es a competent master;  it then
demands a total dedication and application only possible in
a monastic setting, since times of day, of months and
sexual cycles, must all be regularly and rigidly observed
over long years of practice. Sex yoga deals with the
generative forces (ching ) merging with the spirit (shen ) in
the vital force (ch'i). It is known as the White Tiger and
Green Dragon yoga, the White Tiger representing lead andthe semen and the Green Dragon symbolizing cinnabar
and the feminine ﬂuid, the yang  and the yin; the two are
combined and fused to produce the Golden Pill, the foetus. The yang , male  ﬂuid is exhaustible; the yin, female, is
inexhaustible. This also introduces the inexhaustibility of
love. In Tantric Buddhist legend a Sage, shocked at
representations of Buddha surrounded by mistresses, was
told ‘women are the gods, women are life, women are
adornment, be ever among women in thought.’ This
feminine power represen ts the spontaneous aspect of love
and ecstasy which overcomes duality and is thus the great
unifying force; it is the archetypal feminine. If correctly
used the two forces create life-force or immortality; if
incorrectly used they are a sure way to early death. The
generative forces must be preserved, not dissipated in
ordinary sexual activity . Based on the yin-yang  balance and harmony , each sex,
providing stimulus, draws forth and supports the power of
the other . Taoism parts company with Buddhism, except in
its Tantric branch, in regarding celibacy as unnatural and
therefore productive of imbalance and neurosis. The yogic
techniques are governed by times, seasons, lunar phrases
and astrology; they were kept esoteric to a large extent
and hidden under alchemical terms, since considerable
danger accompanies some of the practices, as it does also
with the breathing exercises. In Taoist yoga the woman
adept plays an important part, both sexes being necessary
to each other; but the yin power , as remarked, is the
inexhaustible force. It was believed that the ‘reverted sperm’ nourished the
brain and one of the techniques was to hang upside down
so that ‘the essence of the sperm ﬂows to the brain;’ the
generative forces were thus to be translated into vitality in
the brain. Sexual techniques, according to Ko Hung, ‘may
be compared with water and ﬁre, either of which can slayman or bring him to life, depending solely on his ability to
deal with them.’
The marvellous powers attributed to the Taoist yogin,
the hsien , are the same as the Eight Great Powers of the
yoga of Maha-siddhi Buddhism. They are: (1) to make
oneself small  or invisible, (2, 3) to decrease or increase in
height, (4) to have the most distant objects at the tip of
one's ﬁngers, (5) all wish-fulﬁlment, (6) perfect body
control, (7) the ability to change anything in nature, (8) to
be anywhere at will. Included in these are knowledge of
the past and future, understanding the language of
animals and communication with the dead. In these
powers the association with Shamanism and magic is
clear . OceanofPDF .com– 13 –
M A G I C
There is no land without its magic lore and beliefs in which
there occur unexplained  phenomena and relat ionships
with invisible powers. These are called occult or arcane
because their workings are not understood in the ordinary
world of the senses and reason. In China, popular religious
Taoism, as opposed to the classical philosophical branch,
has always been associated with magic, stemmi ng back
deﬁnitely to the Han dynasty , and in tradition to such
wonder-workers as the Yellow Emperor , some 3,000 years
BC, and the hsien  Ch'ih Fu who became completely
rejuvenated after taking the elixir . The proximity of
Shamanistic tribes also introduced magic al and
spiritualistic cults, while magical lore was again widened
by contact with Indian thought, brought into China by
exchange of culture when Chinese emissaries were sent to
study Indian  scholarship and when Buddhist missionaries
arrived in China
Magic is closely associated with alchemy in experiments
and experim ental scienc e, with the ‘powers’ of religious
beliefs and with the medicinal knowledge of making
potions, poisons and drug s. It concerned all aspects of life,
in this world and the next, and was not limited to either . It
is probably true of Chinese magic that it was, as E. A.
Wallis Budge said of Egypt, ‘older than belief in God.’
Professor Needham states that science arises out of magic:
‘In their earliest steps they are indistinguishable. Taoist
philosophers, with their emphasis on Nature, were bound
in due course to pass from the purely observational to the
experimental . . . That the mastery of Nature by manualoperations is possible was the ﬁrm belief of magicians and
early scientists alike.’ In fact in ‘the early sixteenth
century in Europe science was commonly called  Natural
Magic . . . even Newton has with justice been called “the
last of the magicians” . . . one cannot emphasize too much
that in their initial stages there is nothing to distinguish
magic from science.’
Olympiodoros, an oﬀicial at the early Byzantine court, in
the ﬁfth century , was a famous alchemist but was also
noted for his knowledge of medicine and as a magi cian. He
maintained that the success of alchemical experiments did
not depend on the exact following of recipes but required
the assistance of magic and magical powers. V arious rulers
and Popes in Europe were known as sorcerers: Popes
Honorious III, Leo III, John XXII and Silvester II were
known to be magicians, while Catherine de Medici  and her
son Henry III encourage d magicians and sorcer ers who
dealt with ‘unknown drugs.’ In the West, as much as the
East, magicians were part of the court scene, of
government and of the priesthood. Among monks were
Roger Bacon and Albertu s Magnus, and at the lower level
among the ordinary people the village sorcerer , witch or
wizard fulﬁlled the same functions. In China these were
paralleled by the noted alchemists and magicians at the
courts of the Emperors, by the Taoist priests of the local
temples where the populace worshipped, and by the lower
orders of hsien  who worke d the same wonders as the
western sorcerer and dealt with the same practices and
powers such as fortune telling, making amulets and
talismans, commanding spirits and raising ghosts. Nor
have these customs died out in either East or W est. Although there is obviously a close link between
Shamanist and Taoist alchemical-magic practices, they
functioned on diﬀerent levels in that the shaman was
trained only on the magico-religious plane while theTaoist-alchemist was a scholar and searcher after  ‘ancient
wisdom’ on an intellectual level, though in Taoism there
was the division betw een the esoteric and exoteric
branches, the latter being as full of magic and spiritism as
was Shamanism. Shamanism, however , represents the
oldest respo nse of humanity to the world around. It is
‘primitive’ in both senses, in that it is the magico-religious
belief of a simple and unsophisticated civilization and in
being an originally pure doctrine of the macro-
microcosmic relationship which has since dege nerated. Shamanism still shows traces of a once highly-developed
cosmology . Like the alchemist, the Shaman contacts not
only demons but also cures diseases; he is a diviner ,
exorcist, invoker of spirits, a medium, healer , fortu ne-teller
and rain-mak er; or, in reverse, he can arrest storms; he
also uses ‘words of power .’ The reason for concentration
on and contending with demons, rather than being
concerned with good spirits, is that the latter are helpful
in any case and there is nothing to be feared from them;
the former are continuall y intent on doing harm and must
be guarded against incessantly . There is no doubt that the
Shaman has ‘powers;’ even if his spirit powers are called
in question, it is certain that he can carry out an ecstatic
dance, in a crowded yurt, with some thirty to ﬁfty pounds
of iron discs and other objects attached to his robes,
ﬂinging himself about with closed eyes yet never touching
any of the audience and able to lay his hands on any object
he requires while still in trance. There have always been two kinds of magic: the ‘black,’
which involves the invocation and co-operation of the
demonic world and attempts to coerce and control these
dark powers  and force them to work in harness, and the
‘white,’ which deals with beneﬁcial spirits and aims at
working good and healing. There is also a misty
borderland between black and white in the use oftalismans, charms and words of power , practice s which
have endure d for thousands of years and are still fully
alive in the modern scientiﬁc-rationalist climate. People or
teams still carry their mascots, have lucky numbers, wear
amulets and ‘touch wood’ after any boast. It has always been assumed that the future can be
foretold and accepted that certain people have divinatory
power . Oracles and seers were consulted and signs and
portents read in such things as the ﬂights of birds, the
entrails of sacriﬁced animals, the throwing of sticks or
coins, the markings on tortoise-shells; mirrors, crystal
balls, bowls of water , and bones were also used in
divination. Many of these practices, though, had an
esoteric aspect beyond the outward-seeming supe rstition. Exoterically , talismans, charms and other means of
avoiding or curing misfortune or calamities, both natural
and spiritual, were belie ved actually to encapsu late the
spirit concer ned; esoter ically , they were the means of
conveying the idea of psychic balance of the forces of the
cosmos and the sense of the mystical unity of all things. In the East there was no reason why all such powers
should not be beneﬁcent provided the necessary
precautions were taken, the good spirits were consulted
and evil ones kept at bay; but in the West the connection
between spirits and humanity was dubious, since magic
had been learned from fallen angels who married the
daughters of men; as the angels were ‘fallen,’ the arts they
taught were tainted with evil. Magic was practised not only to bring about alchemical
transformations but also to summon the Immortals. The
court magicians employed by the Emperor Wu were used
not so much to produce gold as to call up the Immortals
and spirits—particularly , in this case, the spirit of the
greatly-mourned favourit e, the Lady Wang. The Chinese
Festival of the Moon Palace rose from Taoist magic andcommemorated the court magician's feat in enab ling the
Emperor to visit this beautiful maiden who lives in the
Moon P alace. Alchemical altar with oﬀerings
In the realm of the occult, good and evil spirits can be
used against each other , but as there is considerable
danger in such an encounter the magician, shaman or
alchemist must be under the protection of forces of a
superior spiritual order . Hence, the alchemist puts himself
under the tutelage of some deity—for example, the God ofthe Stove or, on a higher level the Great Spiri t or the
White Light. In Hinduism, the Vedas allow magic to be
lawful only for the pure in heart, while, like the alchemist,
sadhus and fakirs concerned with the occult must undergo
severe discipline. There are also spiritual visitants who take an interest in
operations on the earth plane. As Ko Hung says: ‘Spirits
and gods frequently cause miraculous and strang e things
to occur among men. In our classics there is much
evidence regarding them.’ Among these interested persons
must be ranked the dead  who, for some reason or other ,
wish to make their presence felt in the mortal world. A
powerful magician or hsien  could also summon the dead to
serve his purpose, as in the case of the noted hsien  Liu
Ken. He was once a court oﬀicial at the capital of Ch'ang-
an, in the Later Han dynasty . He abandoned court life and
retired to a cave on the edge of a precipice. He also
abandoned clothing and grew a covering of hair a foot
long, but when visited, or in company , he could suddenly
assume the conventiona l brocade robes of the scholar-
oﬀicial. He used his magical powers to help the local
populace, providing food and healing illness, but a new
governor of the province  regarded him as a wizard and
intended to have him tried and executed. Commanding Liu
Ken to appear before him, the Governor challenge d him to
call up some spirits to his aid in his present predicament. Liu Ken wrote at the Judge's table and there followed an
eerie whistling and clanking. The wall of the courthouse
fell in and through the gap came a troop of soldiers
escorting an enclosed carriage. The wall then closed
behind them . Liu Ken then ordered the occupan ts to be
brought out and an old man and woman appea red with
hands bound and a noose round the neck. T o his horror the
Governor recognized his dead parents, who upbra ided him
for having been of no use to them in his life, since hisoﬀicial prefe rment had not taken place until after they had
died; now, in death, he was causing them harassm ent and
humiliation in persecuting a blameless hsien. The
Governor immediately prostrated himself before Liu Ken
and pleaded that his father and mother might be released. The hsien  then ordered the chariot away; the wall opened
and closed again behind it and Liu Ken vanished. But this
was not the end of it for the Governor; his wife died soon
after but came back from the next world to tell him that
his parents were so enraged at his unﬁlial behaviour that
they were going to kill him. A month later he and his son
and daughter all died. As a background to this story it must be realized that in
China the whole family was held responsible for the
misdeeds of any member and was involved in any
punishment. Similarly , the entire family was aggrandized
when a success was achieved or honour conferred, even
when the honour was posthumously awarded; this had the
advantage that, if anyone had been accused falsely or
executed when innocent , he—and his family—c ould be
exonerated and recompensed after death. The next world
was regulated on the same hierarchic-bureaucratic lines
as that of imperial times,  when there were distinct grades
of oﬀicials and classes of persons. This ﬁrm and practically
applied belief in the spirit world permeated Chinese social
and religious practices: the realm of spirits was taken
seriously , nor have these beliefs died out, as witness a
recent account of a spirit-marriage in Peking. A girl,
having been killed in an accident before she was married,
was saved the ignominy of arriving unwed in the after-life. A recently-dead youth was found; the normal match-
making ceremonies were undertaken by a go-betw een who
settled the dowry with the girl's father; there was the
normal wedding ceremonial and feast and then both
bodies were buried in the husband's tomb. The usualoﬀerings of money , clothing, food and wine were oﬀered at
the graveside. Traditionally , all the requisites for a
comfortable life in the next world—servants, clothing,
money—were taken in the funeral procession in paper
eﬀigies or forms and burned at the grave to ascend in
smoke to the heavens. Spirits, if the body had been properly interred and there
was a home  to live in, were contented and well looked
after in the ancient ancestor reverence; but if the right
conditions were not followed, or if there were no home to
go back to, the spirit then became a wandering ghost,
unhappy in itself and a threat to the living; hence the
many rites for preventing such ghosts from causing harm
and for banishing them. This, too, explains the great
importance of having sons. Daughters marry into other
families, but sons perpetuate the family home and provide
the necessary home for the ancestors. There are various
methods of keeping ghosts at bay. ‘If you meet a ghost
coming and shouting continually to you for food, show it a
white reed and it will die instantly . In the mountains
ghosts are continually creating confusion to make people
lose their way.’ They also cause illness and disease, but if
the right magic is employed they can be controlled and
made to serve the living. For this purpose spells,
incantations and ‘words of power’ were used, both oral
and written. There is a universal belief in the power of
sound in words. In Egypt the cult of immortality was as
much of an all-absorbing interest as in China, not only in
the preservation of the physical body but also in magical
formulas which helped the dead in the next world. Both
Isis and Thoth/Hermes held the secret of sound and Isis
reviviﬁed the dead Osiris , killed by his brother Set, with
magic words ; the exact pronunciation and understanding
of their meaning was of the utmost importance. InHinduism the sound OM penetrates and sustains the whole
cosmos. Servants for the Dead Eﬀigies following the funeral. Summoning spirits or demons is universally done by the
magic Power of the Name. Spirits serve the magicians,
shamans and priests, and are often treated with contempt
by the masters who exercise power over them. Incantations could force demons to leave their abodes and
appear before the sorcerer at his will. Divine names were
used in incantations and invocations; these were esoteric
and a jealous guard was kept on them. There was a
constant struggle between the shaman-magician-alchemist
and the spirits he needed to serve him; either he obtained
the mastery over them or they mastered him and he would
become ‘possessed.’ In Chinese alchemy possessionbelonged only to the failures who, in consequence, require
the rites of exorcism. Wandering ghosts and spirits could
also take possession of the body of those making mistakes
or trespassin g on forbidden ground while insuﬀiciently
‘protected.’ Possession was taken seriously and in
religious Taoism priests were trained in exorcism , while
magicians used their powers to expel possessing spirits. Possession can be voluntary or involuntary . Pries ts and
mediums could be possessed by spirits when in trance. In
the lower orders these entities could be demons; in the
higher states, gods, goddesses or hsien  could speak
through the medium. It was in cases where demons or
ghosts took over against the intentions of the person that
the individual became possessed to his or her detriment
and so required exorcism . Priests, shamans and mediums,
once possessed, had command over all magical powers:
they could slash themselves with knives and remain
unhurt, swallow ﬁre, walk on live coals, cause objects to
ﬂy through the air or levitate themselves; such powers
have been examined and attested to in modern times. I
witnessed them myself at close quarters when itinerant
magicians displayed their abilities in the market place with
people crowding round within touching distance. Swords,
oﬀered to the crowd to test, were ‘swallowed’ and coals
taken from a brazier were also oﬀered for inspection then
put into the mouth and held there and spat out, still
blazing hot. These magic powers were used by the ‘bellows blowers’
alchemists in their work, but the true hsien  did not use the
mastery of spirits in his work on the spirit; that was done
by yoga, self-mastery and by co-operation with Nature to
become one with her rhythms. The Sorceress (wu) played a vital part in ancient
Chinese magic. She puriﬁed herself with perfumed water ,
donned ritual robes, took a ﬂower in her hand and mimedher journey in search of the gods or goddesses. She
danced ecsta tically to the music of drums, ﬂutes and song
until she fell exhausted and the deity invoked then spoke
through her . Like the hsien , the wu could become invisible,
levitate, travel great distances in the spirit and could
produce all the magical and mediumistic phenomena. Her
male counterpart was called a hsi. A sword swallower
Chinese alchemists were  experts in making perfumes,
which occupied an important place in all religious rites
and any ritual-social occasion. Indeed, scents have always
been valued and used in all aspects of Chinese life: witness
the numerous scents employed in perfuming Chinese teas. Among ritual perfumes incense sticks were prom inent. In
Taoist temples incense burning is a central rite and tracesof its ancien t alchemical connections can be seen in the
name of those who attend the burners or the altar
—‘furnace masters.’ Incense also has magic qualities in
that it dispels evil spirits and other undesirable entities
such as wandering ghosts and prevents them from
interfering in either religious or social rites or in
alchemical experiments. Incense sticks are an essential
part of divination, especially when consulting the I Ching. Other uses were as timing devices for alchemical
experiments and for fumigation. Incense has always been
employed in puriﬁcation and as a homage to divinities; it
suggests the ‘subtle body’ rising as a spiritual substance
and a ‘perfume that deiﬁes.’ It is also ch'i and symbolically
the principle of change. The smoke rising upwards forms
an axis mundi  betw een the two worlds and carries
messages and prayer heavenwards; it is a combination of
ﬁre and air, symbolizing the power of both, but especially
the former in alchemy . Books can also work magic. The Chinese have always
had a great reverence for books and printed matter. (As a
child one's amahs would  never allow a book to lie on the
ﬂoor or be dropped. They could not read the books or
know their trivial nature, but they were printed and
therefore to be revered.) Classics must be wrapped in silk
and stored in a ‘puriﬁed place’ and ‘whenever anything is
done about them one must ﬁrst announce it to them, as
though you were serving a sovereign father .’ If certain
classics are kept in a house they will ‘banish evil and
hateful ghos ts, soften the eﬀects of epidemics, block
calamities and rout misfortunes.’ It also helps to give a
sick person, or a woma n in labour , a certain classic to
hold. In building a new house or preparing a tomb, copies
of the ‘Earth August Text’ should be taken to the site; the
household will then become rich and prosperous, the
grave protected from robbers and ghosts. Some scrollsenable people to change sex, age or character , to produce
miraculous food, change into birds or animals, or raise
wind, rain or snow . Talismans and amulets are universally employed to ward
oﬀ evil spirits. Peach stones, as the kernel of the fruit of
immortality , are particularly eﬀicacious and are frequently
carved into apotropaic forms, such as a ﬁgure of a hsien  or
of a Buddha, while peac h wood is used for the pen in
automatic writing. Swords made of cash linked together by
red thread work magic in cutting oﬀ demons and the cash
sword is used in rites of exorcism. The red thread is in
itself eﬀectiv e and red and yellow are used to bring luck
and ward oﬀ evil on all occasions. Yellow and red paper is
employed for charms, as being also the colours of gold and
cinnabar . Bells, too, are used in magic and eﬀectively
scare oﬀ evil spirits; for this purpose they were often hung
from the points of temples or pagodas. The seal of Lao Tzu, an all-powerful talisman and
bringer of good fortune, worn by mediums. Mirror magic is widespread. Mirrors can be used for
summoning gods and genii, but in this case it is important
to know the names and the types of clothes worn by each,
otherwise one might fail to recognize him or her on arrival
and so cause considerable umbrage, with potentially
disastrous results. Mirrors enable the shaman andmagician to see things far oﬀ and to ﬁnd things which are
lost; they also reveal the true nature of the person; for
example, if, when one is approached by a supernatural
person, one looks into a mirror , a fox or a tiger may be
reﬂected masquerading as a human. The ‘burning mirror’
could create ﬁre and was yang;  the ‘dew mirror’ collected
dew at night called ‘moon water’ and was yin. Mirror
magic was also used in the West to hold over herbs
collected for alchemical purposes; the plants had to be
picked before sunrise, under a waning moon, and the
process required the person to be ‘barefoot,  chaste,
ungirded and wear no ring.’ One can also divine from sun
or moon rays reﬂected in a mirror or water . As can be seen from this, herbs are subject to both
astrological and magical inﬂuences and gathering them
demanded an exact knowledge of times and seasons; this,
again, obtained in eastern and western alchemy . In the
West instructions were given for ﬁnding one's guiding star,
which involved the herb being gathered at the right time,
in a state of purity , kept in linen, with a whole grain of
wheat from a loaf of bread, then placed under the pillow . After prayers  are said to the seven planets, repeated seven
times, one's guiding star will be revealed in sleep. Magic
also enters when one is instructed to make a circle round
the herb, using gold, silver or ivory , the tooth of a wild
boar or the horn of a bull.A cash sword
Messages and instructions could be received from the
spirit world and from hsien  through automatic writing,
which was known to have been used in early Sung times. It
was said that the Immortal Tung Pin, after invocation,
communicated through a willow stick held by a blindfolded
person over a tray of sand. This method of commu nication
is of considerable interest since it is still in use today. Thewillow or peach stick, or pencil, can be held by one
blindfolded, or it is supported on the upturned palms of
the medium's hand, a position in which no muscular
control can be exerted. The pencil appears to assume a life
of its own, characters are formed in the sand and
interpreted either as messages or alchemical instructions. Even books could be so transmitted: the Secret of the
Golden Flower  was reputed to have been written in this
way. As in all things Chinese, absolute courtesy must be
observed. A spirit summoned to give aid is oﬀered a chair
to sit on and asked to give his honourable name and to
identify himself by enumerating his august titles and the
period of history he honoured with his presence. The spirit
is bowed to and ritually thanked for help given; in return
he depreciates his eﬀorts and thanks the company for
their invitation. There were endless schools of magicians, soothsayers,
horoscopists, geomancer s and those who watched the
heavens for portents. There was a huge trade in talismans
and charms and, on the less magical side, there also
existed a science of physiognomy which studied physical
features and characteris tics, but also drew from them
conclusions as to the fate of the individual. Associated with both ch'i and magic was the practice of
geomancy , known as feng-shui , literally wind-and-water . It
was the scien ce of favourable conditions, climatic, physical
and of the spirit world and was used in locating the right
situations for temples, houses, graves, or the best places
for business transactions. The abodes of both the living
and the dead had to be in harmony with the cosmic
currents and the breath of Nature, the ch'i of the earth. It
required the oﬀices of diviners, known as ‘professors of
divination,’ the geomancers, to determine favourable
situations which must also be governed by the yin-yangfeatures of the scene. For this the geomantic compass was
used. At the centre of the instrument there is a mariners'
compass, an early Chinese invention, the ‘South pointing
needle,’ also called the Tai Chi. The sixteen successive
circles round the compass depict, ﬁrst, the pa kua, then
the twenty-four celestial constellations and after that the
various numerical and occult calculations based  on the
sexagenary cycle, the constellations and the Twelve
Terrestrial Branches. Naturally , favourable sites, times and
seasons also aﬀected the times and places for alchemical
experiments.Talisman of one hundred forms of the character shou:
Longevity . The ability to work magic is not, according to K o Hung, a
special endowment but is acquired through learning from
Masters and taking elixirs. These individuals were not
born with the knowledge of these things: ‘It is thought that
the divine process canno t be acquired through study so I
would remind you of bodily metamorphoses , sword
swallowing, ﬁre eating, disappearing at will, raisin g cloudsand vapours, snake charming, walking on knife blades
without being cut.’ In another passage he wrote: ‘Narrow-
minded and ignorant peop le take the profound as if it were
uncouth and relegate the marvellous to the realm of ﬁction
. . . what narrow-mindedn ess and ignorance.’ But for all its
powers he decided that magic will not be able to confer
Fullness of Life on its practitioners. ‘They may cure illness,
raise people from the dead, go years without hunger ,
command ghosts and gods, disappear at will, see what is
occurring a thousand miles away . . . and know misfortune
and good fortune for things that have not yet occurred, but
none of those things beneﬁts their longevity or
immortality .’ And again: ‘Only those who have Tao can
truly perform these actions, and, better still, not perform
them, though able to perform them.’
OceanofPDF .com– 14 –
ALLIED SYMBOLISM
The symbolism of alche my uses a language of its own
which, like all symbolism, when understood, opens up
hidden meanings. Symbolism is always ambivalent, on the
one hand it makes more accessible and universal ideas
which transcend the limitations of ordinary langu age and
is the only language which is both international and
capable of adaptation to all levels of understanding and
experience and of endless expansion; on the other  hand, it
can be used to veil knowledge, to keep it hidden from
those incapable of using it correctly . These are the
exoteric and esoteric aspects. It is mainly the latter which
is used in alchemy , since much of its knowledge could be
dangerous, physically and spiritually , in the wrong hands. Both eastern  and western technical terms were disguised
under strange and often bizarre names employed for the
substances, instruments and methods used; hence, much
of the langu age and symbolism used is incompre hensible
to the modern world. For example, an ancient Chinese
treatise read:
Red sand, cinnabar is of wood and will combine with
metal [gold]; gold and water live together; wood and
ﬁre keep each other company . In the beginning these
four were in a confused state. They came to be
classiﬁed as Tigers and Dragons. The numbers for
the Dragon which are odd are yang , and those for the
Tiger are yin and even. The blue liver is the father ,
and the white lungs are the mother . The red heart is
the daughter , the yellow  spleen is the grandfatherand the black kidneys are the son. The son is the
beginning of the Five Elements . . . As Holmyard points out, modern science uses signs and
symbols, an esoteric language unintelligible to the
uninitiated but diﬀering from alchemy in that the latter's
symbols are allegorical; in other words, modern  science
uses signs rather than symbols in the strict sense of the
word. He also writes of alchemical symbolism as being of
two kinds, the literary and the graphic:
Literary symbolism in its simplest form is seen as the
inveterate habit of adepts of applying fanciful names
to the substances and apparatus used in alchemy ,
principally by metaphor or real or supposed analo gy. Thus an oval or a spherical vessel which could be
hermetically sealed was commonly referred to as the
‘philosophers' egg,’ and not merely because of its
shape, but with a reference to the egg out of which
the universe was hatched; so that in a particular
context it may be hard to decide whether the author
is describing  a piece of apparatus or trying to convey
a fragment of doctrine. This oval or round vessel as the egg is a universal
symbol of creation. Its function is the bringing of new life;
it encloses the whole universe and is the Potential; as such
it is also the womb. In Chinese alchemy this is known as
the luted vase; it is the place of metamorphosis from which
new life emerges. The womb is also equated with the
mine, the earth, the Earth  Mother , the ore being in embryo
in her. The alchemist is, as has been said, the midw ife who
brings the embryo to birth. The T'ai I Chin Hua Tsung
Chih, a work in the Taoist Canon, says: ‘The work must be
directed to the warming and nourishing of the spiritual
embryo .’ Thus the foetus or embryo represents thespiritual development which grows until full maturity
when it is born spiritually as the True Man. The womb
naturally leads to the symbolism of water; the waters
being the fundamental material of creation, the life
substance, the ‘waters of life,’ the prima materia , the great
yin power. Its yang  opposite is, of course, ﬁre; together
they are the two great principles, the passive and the
active; they represent all the contraries in the elemental
world; both are creators  and destroyers. As Burckhardt
says, it is through the union of these opposites that ‘the
soul becomes  “ﬂuid ﬁre” or “ﬁery water”, and at the same
time also acquires the positive qualities of the other
elements, so that its water becomes “stable” and its ﬁre
“non-burning.”’ The alchemical ﬁre does not burn and
destroy but viviﬁes; it is a divine power . Fire can stabilize
and harden, as in the potter's kiln, or make ﬂuid in
smelting, but it must be contained and controlled since
any excess becomes destructive. The sixty-third hexagram
of the I Ching  combines the trigrams for ﬁre and water
and symbolizes the cauldron of water heated over the ﬁre;
hence alche mical fusion . The Taoist Canon says: ‘The
essence of yang  is ﬁre; that of yin water . When yin and
yang  control each other , water and ﬁre are mutually
upholding.’
In this conne ction mercury , or quicksilver , is partic ularly
signiﬁcant as it contains both the elements of ﬁre and
water , being liquid yet luminous. It can be represented as
a metal, but because of its ‘volatile’ nature it is also
regarded as spirit. Its dual nature makes it symbolic of the
tensions of the complementary opposites, expressed by
such symbols as the ‘contending dragons’ and the
caduceus, containing and uniting the opposites. It
represents the ﬁrst and the last as the prima materia
which divide s into the opposites of all dualism, to be
reunited in the conjunctio  and to emer ge in the ﬁnal unityof the spirit. Exoterically , it is the quicksilver of the
laboratory alchemist; esoterically , it is the spirit concealed
in base matter . Mercury , regarded as a spirit, is volatile
and transforming; it ‘whitens all metals and attracts their
souls . . . having in itself the principle of all liquidi ty, when
it has undergone decomposition, it changes colours
everywhere,’ as Synesius said in commenting on the
Physics and Mysteries of the pseudo-Democritus. This
dissolving power of quicksilver is the feminine in its
terrible aspect, its sign is dominated by the feminine lunar
symbol as the Earth Mother , the womb of all meta ls, but it
is also the triad in unity 
  incorporating the cross, circle
and crescent symbols; again, it is ‘burning water’ and
‘non-burning ﬁre,’ the androgynous. The alchemist succeeded in joining the two great powers
of ﬁre and water; sulphur , the hot and dry , the spirit of ﬁre,
was the colour of gold, but gold could be fused and
reduced to liquid and so also had the spirit of water , the
moist and the cold; the contraries were thus made one in
gold. But the ﬁre must be controlled and this introduces
the symbolism of the bellows by which the ﬁre was
regulated. Fire must not be allowed to burn too ﬁercely at
ﬁrst; it must be kept steady and quiet in the early stages of
the work; nor may it be allowed to die down, this being
symbolic of indolent or intermittent eﬀort, and of
destruction. Once the ﬁre is fully controlled the ‘quick ﬁre’
can be brought into play that ignites the bright inner ﬁre
of illuminatio n. It is easy to see that the bellows are a
natural symbol for the controlled breathing exercises of
alchemical yoga. The Patriarch Lu Tzu said: ‘Only those
who know what ﬁre, cauldron and bellows really mean can
use them eﬀectively .’
Flight, which plays a minor role in western alchemy ,
assumes a major one in the East where powers of ﬂight
appear in all yogic traditions: the Rishis of India, theArhats of Buddhism and the Immortals of Taoism, all
manifest the power . The feather is the natural symbol of
ﬂight and typically shamanistic. In early Chinese alchemy
the hsien  was ‘the feathered scholar ,’ or ‘the feathered and
transformed,’ and was depicted in iconography as having
feathers. In Indian alchemy those who have attained yogic
powers ‘can ﬂy like fowls in the air’ or ‘pass
instantaneously from one place to another .’ In the West the
soul is sometimes depicted as winged or ﬂying
heavenwards. The Shaman,  who adopts the feathered robe to ﬂy to the
spirit world, can also visit the underworld; but although
there appear to be close aﬀinities between shamanism and
the magical element in Taoist alchemy , there is more of
ascent than descent in the latter . The Shaman merely
visits the other worlds then returns to the body; the
alchemist, the feathered hsien , represents a totally
spiritualized body, total freedom from the limits of the
earthly and physical state, freedom from the world of
senses. Flight is also often another term for ecstasy , for
the mystic's experience of total liberation and freedom; it
is also symbolic of the unrestricted powers of the mind. As
the Rig V eda says: ‘He who knows has wings.’ For Chinese
alchemy it is one of the chief powers of the hsien  and is
associated closely with the cult of immortality since it
implies the ability to transcend all mortal limitations and
to pass from one world to another and enter the realm of
spirits. There is the story of King Chao (515-488 B C) who said to
his minister: ‘The writing s of the Chen dynasty state that
Chung-li was actually sent as an envoy to the inaccessible
parts of heaven and earth; how was such a thing possible? Tell me whether there is any possibility for people to
ascend to heaven?’ The minister explained that the true
meaning of this tradition was spiritual; those who wereupright and could concentrate were able ‘to rise to the
higher spheres and to descend to the lower , and
distinguish there the things which it would be proper to
do.’
Flight is one of the most fundamental longings of
humanity and runs through all myth, religions (‘taken up
into the seventh heaven’), legends and fairy tales and
dominates the dream world. Jung's extensive studies in
alchemy rose from the discovery of alchemical symbolism
frequently occurring in the dreams of patients who knew
nothing of alchemy . This dream-ﬂight alchemical
symbolism conformed to the ‘work’ of alchemy in helping
to bring about the proces s of integration in the individual;
these symbols ‘are part and parcel of the self, bringing
with them something of the unconscious which ﬁnds
expression in a feeling of eternity and immortality .’
There was no question of ‘possession’ in the ﬂight of the
Taoist hsien  who ‘went up to heaven’ since the ability to ﬂy
was the result of long years of yogic practices and of the
search for the elixir; it presupposed self-mastery , a perfect
incorporation into the cosmic rhythms and a balanced,
healthy , scholarly mind which had nothing to do with
shamanistic-mediumistic possession. On the other hand,
many of the accounts of going up to heaven may be
symbolic of out-of -the-bod y experiences, when, relieved of
the weight of the body, the soul is freed from the laws of
gravity , or of the mystic experience of total liberation from
all earthly limitations. Although actual ﬂight is less employed symbolic ally in
western alchemy, the symbol of ascent is introduced in the
form of the ladder . Initiation ceremonies are depicted by
the alchemist climbing a seven-runged ladder , blindfolded,
but the blindfold is removed at the seventh rung and the
initiate then faces a closed door. Symbols of ascent all
imply the passage from one realm to a higher and thesame seven stages are found in the Shaman's seven-
notched pole of ascent to the heavens, the number seven
representing completeness as the sum of the earth number
four and the heavenly number three—hence the
macrocosm. The seven heavens symbolism appears almost
universally in ascent to the heavens, which, like ﬂight,
implies aspirations towards the divine, reaching the
dwelling place of supreme powers and achieving
immortality therein. Among the ‘feathered tribe’ in China,
the crane is one of the best known symbols of longevity; it
is ‘the Patriarch of the Feathered Tribe’ and an
intermediary between heaven and earth. The Phoenix is universal in alchemy and is the
archetypal death-and-rebirth symbol. In the West, Wolfram
von Eschenbach wrote: ‘The phoenix burns to ashes, but
the ashes give him life again. Thus does the phoenix molt
and change its plumage, which afterwards is shining and
lovely as before.’ It is the consummation of the Great
Work, ﬁnal regeneration . In China it is one of the Four
Spiritually Endowed, or Sacred, Creatures: the Tortoise,
Ky-lin, Drago n and Phoenix, the last three being fabulous
and composite creatures that combine both the yin and
yang  powers. The phoenix or feng-huang , is the Vermilion,
or Fire, Bird, the substance of ﬂame. As ﬁre it is yang ,
solar , but it dies and rema ins dead for three days, the dark
of the moon, and so has lunar qualities. Its composition is
also yin-yang  as it has the head of a cock, its eyes are the
sun, its beak is the cresce nt moon and it has the back of a
swallow with its wings as the wind; its tail represents trees
and ﬂowers and its feet are the earth. It also conforms to
the Five symbolism, combining the ﬁve colours which
represent the ﬁve cardinal virtues. This combi ned yin-
yang , lunar-solar quality emphasizes the interdependence
of the two powers in alchemy and their ﬁnal union. Esoterically , the death of the phoenix, which is a self-immolation, is the death of form in the old nature to rise as
the new transformed, a higher state of consciousness. The mirror is not only used in magic but in speculative
alchemy it is of the highest importance, the word
speculatio  meaning to mirror or reﬂect. This is the
reﬂection of cosmological truths in the rhythms of Nature,
expressed in Arabic alche my by Ibn Arabi as: ‘The world of
nature consi sts of many forms which are reﬂected in a
single mirror —nay , rather , it is a single form reﬂected in
many mirrors.’ This, again, is the ‘as above so below’ of
the hermetic tradition in which the mirror symbolizes the
intellect, the reﬂection of the cosmos. Its power , as the
Emerald Tablet says, ‘Rises from earth to heaven and
comes down again from heaven to earth, and thus acquires
the power of the realities above and the realities below .’ It
also reﬂects  the state of the soul; in perfection it is
perfectly clear and unclouded. A mirror hanging face-downwards in a temple
establishes an axis of light by which the soul can ascend
heavenwards, but as reﬂected light it also represents the
manifest world of illusion. In this way the mirror also
combines the two great powers; it is the reﬂected light of
the moon, known as the ‘golden mirror ,’ and at the same
time the disc of the sun. The ﬂash of light given oﬀ by a
mirror also symbolizes sudden spiritual realization or
enlightenment. Mirror symbolism is used frequently in
Taoism, neo-Confucianism and Buddhism, with the
diﬀerence that ‘with Buddhism external reality is to be
transcended, whereas with Chuang Tzu and the neo-
Confucianists, external reality is to be responded to
naturally and faithfully , like a mirror objectively reﬂecting
all.’ As Chuang Tzu said: ‘The mind of the Sage, being in
repose, becomes the mirror of the universe.’
Symbolism and alchemy cannot be separated. Eliade
writes: ‘To symbolic think ing the world is not only “alive”but also “open”: an objec t is never simply itself (as is the
case with modern consciousness), it is also a sign of, or a
repository for, something else.’ The whole of the
alchemical work was symbolic, covering, as it did, the
metaphysical and religious aspects in transforming base
man into the gold of perfection. OceanofPDF .com– 15 –
THE ESOTERIC AND EXOTERIC
Early alchemists, whose writings were purely personal and
never intended for publication, could write as they pleased
without fear of giving secrets away to the uninitiated, the
merely curious or the grasping, but later, with the
invention of paper and printing, the possibility of a wide
distribution of knowledge occurred, and with it the need to
keep dangerous knowledge secret and out of the hands of
the ignorant or evil-minded. Thus there arose the division
between the esoteric, or secret, and the exoteric or
general knowledge, the one for initiates only, the other
open to all. Once written material became generally
available, esoteric lore ceased to be written down and was
transmitted orally and only to chosen disciples who could
be trusted with knowledg e that was potentially dangerous
or beyond the limited understanding of the ordinary
individual. Added to this there were practices, formulas
and knowledge which were the result of the exper ience of
those who had made themselves adepts and acquired lore
which they deemed could only be passed on to those of
suﬀicient mental, moral and spiritual calibre. Books, then,
when they became readily available and in general use,
were only for beginners and the uninitiated. A book can be
taken up or put down at will, read carefully or skimmed
through and no discipline is involved; but esoteric
knowledge, imparted by a master , demanded, ﬁrst, the
judgement of the master  that the pupil was of the right
quality and then serious discipline and dedication on the
part of the pupil; these conditions being met, knowledge
could be passed on by personal instruction only .Alchemy is essentially an initiatory science or art and
esotericism runs through all initiatory traditions; religions,
the mysteries, tribal lore, shamans, magicians, secret
societies, all employ a hidden language and symbolism. Though the secrets were reserved for a privileged elite, it
was not an elite of chance; it was a matter of quality of
understanding and being in the individual, and a matter of
choice in the desire for an understanding and degree of
knowledge which is absent in the vast majority of people
who remain satisﬁed with the outward and exoteric and
are not willin g to undergo serious discipline to develop the
necessary mental and moral qualities. The need for
greater and more signiﬁcant knowledge must be felt and
recognized; nor is it enough merely to desire such
knowledge without having the ability to understand it,
and, in the ﬁrst place, accept it as a valid system. There were, however , other reasons for esotericism. During those periods when alchemy was illegal and could
only be practised by imperial permission, alchemy had to
go underground and treatises were written in allegorical
terms; for example, Liu An disguised the transm utation
processes in the following passage, totally unintell igible to
the uninitiated:
When the eﬄuvia [ch'i] from the coastal regions
[East] ascend to the azure heavens, the azure
heavens in 800 years give birth to azurite, azurite in
800 years gives birth to azure quicksilver , azure
quicksilver in 800 years gives birth to azure metal
[lead] and azure metal in 1000 years gives birth to
the Azure Dragon. Ch'i from the bull-lands [South]
ascends to the red heavens in 700 years and gives
birth to cinnabar and in 700 years to red copper and
in 1000 years to the Red Dragon. Ch'i from the weak
lands [West] ascends to the white heavens in 900
years and gives birth to white arsenic, white arsenicgives birth to white quicksilver and quicksilver gives
birth to silver and in 1000  years to the White Dragon. Ch'i from the cow lands [North] ascends to the dark
heavens in 600 years and gives birth to black
whetstones which give birth to black quicksilv er,
which in 600 years gives birth to black metal [iron]
and in 1000 years to the Black Dragon. These various
Dragons give birth to springs of their own colour and
region, the particles of which, ascending to heav en,
become clouds of yin and yang  then beat on one
another , producing peals of thunder and ﬂy out as
lightning and come down as rain and running water
into various seas—Azure, Red, White and Black. Another justiﬁcation for keeping the Work secre t was
the universal human weakness of greed and envy, which
operated particularly in respect of two alchemi cal end-
products, gold and power , coveted equally by rulers and
the general mob. In both East and West alchemy was
practised or patronized by people hoping for either riches,
power or immortality . Such a patronage could have
disastrous results for those failing to deliver the goods, so
that it is not surprising that alchemists of every land and
age spoke with one voice of the need for keeping quiet and
warned against getting involved with princes and
potentates. Albertus Magnus wrote in his de Alchemica:
You ought to beware before all else of involving
yourself with princes and potentates in any
operations because of two evils, for if you have
involved yourself , they inquire after you from time to
time and say, ‘Master , how do you succeed? When
shall we see something good?’ and not being able to
wait for the end of the work, they say that it is
nothing, and then you will have the great est
annoyance. And if you have not obtained a goodresult, you acquire everla sting indignation from it. If
however you have obtained a good result, they think
to detain you for ever and will not allow you to go
away , and so you will be ensnared by the words of
your own mouth and entangled by your own
speeches. It is not surprising, then, that all traditions are
unanimous in giving this warning from the time of the
Yellow Empe ror, three centuries BC, to moder n times. Tradition says that the Yellow Emperor transmitted the
divine process of making the elixir with the admonition
that: ‘This is a highly essential divine process and must be
transmitted only to those of the highest calibre. Although
an improper person oﬀers jewels piled up mountain-high,
you are not to divulge it.’ K o Hung says:
Taoists prize and keep secret the recipes leading to
hsien -hood. They take pains selecting the very best
pupils, and only after a long time do they give them
the all-important oral instructions . . . These treatises
will bring unlimited fecility and longevity to the
gentleman of perfect sincerity who obtains and
treasures them. He who reveals them lightly to
others will bring calamities upon all his relatio ns,
close and distant. Nor are they to be spoken of
maliciously , obscuring their tao. Take care not to
copy them to show to the vulgar . Take the measure of
a man's virtue ﬁrst; only when you have clear
indication of it may you teach these treatise to him. The Ts'an T'ung Ch'i says that the works are not
intended to be understoo d by the uninitiated or to make
sense of them:They are so cautiously worded that they are not
easily unders tood by people of the world . . . There
are directions for processes, the more important
principles of which shall be set forth, but the details
shall not be divulged . . . One's projects are only to be
divulged on personal interview . . . The way is long
and obscure ly mystical . . . careful reﬂection is in
order , but no discussion  with others should take
place. The secret should be carefully guarded and no
writing should be done for its conveyance. In the West the hermetic tradition, derived from Egypt,
was developed in the philosophical Hermes of the Greeks,
in the works of Plato and Aristotle and later in the
religious philosophy of the neo-Platonists. This passed into
medieval Christianity , which fused with the Arabic, Syrian
and Hebrew elements, all inﬂuenced by Babylonian and
Chaldean lore. All carry the same instructions. Aristotle
says in his liber Secretorum:  ‘He is a breaker of the
heavenly seal who communicates the secrets of Nature
and of Art . . . many evils follow the man who reveals
secrets.’ Albertus Magnus in his tract de Alchemica  writes:
‘Wherefore I abjure you, by the Creator of the World, that
you hide this book from all stupid persons. To you indeed I
will reveal the Secret, but from others I conceal the Secret
of Secrets because of the envy of the noble science. For
the stupid despise it because they are unable to grasp it,
and thence hold it hateful and believe it not to be possible,
and so envy those who work it and call them forgers. Therefore beware lest you reveal any of our secrets in this
operation.’ Roger Bacon says, laconically: ‘Keep this secret
most secret,’ while Alphidius wrote that ‘the philosophers
who have preceded us have hidden their principal
intention under divers enigmas and innumerable
equivocations to the end that the world may not be ruined
by the publication of their doctrine.’The need for esotericism was not only enjoined verbally
in alchemy but was also symbolized by such well-known
illustrations as the Alchemical Citadel of Heinrich
Khunrath. The Citadel stands in a circle which has twenty-
one entrance s, twenty of which have no way out, being
blocked by a great wall. There are twenty sections
enumerating the by-ways in which seekers can go astray . There is only one true path, but even that is made
hazardous by the diﬀiculties to be overcome and, in the
ﬁnal stages, for the so-far successful aspirant, the
Philosophers' Stone, the ﬁnal prize, is in the centre
guarded by a dragon which has to be overcome before
winning through. In Chinese alchemy the exoteric side, the wei tan, dealt
with tangible  ingredients , such as mercury , lead, realgar
and cinnabar; it was a laboratory alchemy concerned with
the transmutation of metals and the preparation of
medicines and the drug, or elixir , of immortality . It was
involved in scientiﬁc expe riments and ultimately gave rise
to the modern science of chemistry , making many
interesting discoveries on the way. Esoteric alchemy , the
nei tan , on the other hand, was only interested in the ‘soul’
of these substances and with the workings and operations
of the body and soul of the aspirant, using yogic
disciplines and methods and psychological practices. The
wei tan was concerned with the material, the nei tan with
the spiritual; the latter thus associated with religion rather
than science . A Taoist alchemist of the ﬁrst century AD
said that the true lead is not the vulgar lead, but may be
found in every house. ‘If the secret is disclosed it will be so
simple that everyone may get a good laugh.’ In other
words the lead is the psychological quality present in
everyone. Even though regarded as exoteric, the wei tan kept its
recipes and instructions secret in that they were couchedin symbolic terms and were withheld from the ignorant. Examples of esoteric names are ‘Young-woman-along-the-
river is not a female; Peach-male-lightness is not a male’
(both are terms for mercury). Lead is ‘Metal Lord,’ or
‘River Chariot.’ Su Tung  Po, who wrote a treatise on the
Dragon and Tiger in AD 1110, said ‘The Dragon is
mercury; it is semen and blood. The Tiger is lead, it is the
breath and bodily strength. Lead is also sperm and the
blood mercury .’ Among plants used Dragon's gall is
gentian; Tiger's paws, jack-in-the-pulpit; Chicken heads,
euryale; Rat tail, sage; Sky Dog, ginseng, and so on.
_OceanofPDF.com_Chinese_Alchemy_-_Jean_Cooper.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        In alchemical terms, the
mercury of the heart centre is compounded with the lead
of the kidney  centre to produce the elixir of life. The Blue
Dragon and White Tiger, Fire and Water, are uniﬁed, yin
and yang  are uniﬁed and the Golden Flower is born. The
region of the navel is known as the ‘burning cauldron’ or
stove, and when the vital force is roused it ascend s to the
‘precious cauldron’ in the head and is transformed into
spirit. This is the ‘cavity of the spirit,’ between and behind
the eyes. From this it will be seen that there is a considerable
similarity between Taoist and Tantric yoga. The perfect
health of the body as a vehicle for the spirit is basic to
both and various techniq ues in Tantrism are at one with
Chinese alchemy in being  designed to ‘destroy old age and
conquer death. ’ Many of the famous Tantric yogins were
also well-kn own alchemists; both traditions developed
siddhi  powers and both aimed at the same transmutation
of the lower body, or base metal, into the perfect  body of
the True Man. An analog y can also be traced betw een theTaoist circul ar movemen t of the force or energ y in the
body and the Indian kundalini, the power symbolized by
the serpent coiled at the base of the spine, which lies
dormant until, awakened by yogic practices, it begins the
ascent up the spinal region through the chakras, each
represented by a lotus, until, increasing in power at each
stage, it reaches the highest point in the head and beings
about realization, enlightenment. Kundalini, like ch'i, is spoken of as an ‘energy,’ a ‘cosmic
life energy;’ when roused it transverses all the chakras, or
‘ﬁelds,’ upwards to ﬁnal union of the opposites at the
highest point. This is also spoken of as symbolizing the
Sacred Marriage and in Hinduism as the union of Siva
with the female goddes s or shakti. The ﬁrst chakra  in
kundalini  symbolism can be compared with the ﬁrst or
‘mortal gate’ in Taoist yoga, from whence the vital force
ascends the spinal region; but in Chinese yoga the
movement and force are cyclic, ascending in a spiral form
to the ‘head gate,’ then returning from the ‘cavit y of the
spirit’ to the source, passing downwards again through the
other centres of the heart, navel and womb, thus
activating the ‘foetal breath’ and bringing about a union of
the yin and yang  powers to form a total unity in the body
as a medium for the spirit. This process of ascending and
descending sets up a cycle of vitality. The spine in both
Indian and Chinese yoga symbolizes the world axis, while
the ascent is the alchemical change from the lower to the
higher, lead to gold. There is also an analogy between the
lotus of the chakras  and the Golden Flower of Taoism, in
that when the yogic-alchemical process is fulﬁlled and the
inner light is found, the lotus, or ﬂower, begins to
circulate, to move of its own volition—the Mover  at Will. This is also paralleled in many western texts which state
that the Philosophers' Stone has to circulate. Chinese alchemical yoga combined both mental control
and physical exercises with a diet designed to contain the
‘vital forces’  and to avoid any that were inimical to their
development. The taking of alchemical medicines also
played a part. Diet varied, but in yoga it was largely
vegetarian, although the ‘ﬁve pungent roots,’ the garlic
and onion family,' were to be avoided as aphrodisiacs,
while anothe r dietary course advocated abstaining from
cereals, ‘the ﬁve grains,’ and eliminating ﬁsh, fowl and
meat. Fasting was also recommended as beneﬁcial and
was, indeed, essential to many alchemical practices that
lead towards hsien -hood. Eatin g too much coarsens the
body and as the body increases so the soul decreases. It is
said in the Book of Lieh Tzu that those who dwell in the
Isles of the Immortals ‘do not eat the ﬁve grains but inhale
air and drink dew. ’ In fact when the ‘vitality’ is fully
developed the yogin or hsien  is said to be able to ‘disp ense
with eating and forget about sleep,’ and there were those,
such as the female hsien  Mao Nü, who, on a diet of pine
needles, recommended by a Taoist hermit, became
immune from  hunger and cold and whose body became so
etherialized that she appeared to ﬂy. There was also a wine which appeared to have the
qualities of the elixir in conferring immortality: ‘There is a
jade rock on Ying Chou Island, about 10,000 feet in height,
from which issues a sprin g resembling wine in taste. It is
called Jade-wine Spring. If one drinks several pints of this
wine one will immediately become intoxicated. It confers
immortality on human beings. ’
Many of the rules on diet and hygiene which were
recommended for the yogin and alchemist are still
recognized today; for example, when Huang-fu Lung met a
Taoist Sage riding on a buﬀalo, the Sage made known to
him the following rules concerning ‘nourishing the spirit’:
‘If you desire to keep your body youthful do not workbeyond the limits of your strength. Do not eat fat or rich
food; use salt and spices with moderation. Abstain from
worry, curta il pleasures  and wrath, dismiss hurry and
bustle. See that your house is well prepared to withstand
the cold of Autumn and W inter and is well drained. ’
All foods, like everything else in creation, have their yin-
yang  natur e and must be kept in balance to main tain
health. If that balance is disturbed sickness results;
medicine is then a matter of ﬁnding the cause of this
disturbance and restoring the balance physically or
mentally by diet and medicines of the right compensating
proportions. The yogin and hsien  used massag e, and gymnastics were
also practised: ‘The human body requires toil and exertion,
only it must not be carried to excess. It is exercise that
enables the food to be properly digested, makes the blood
circulate through the veins and prevents the onset of
disease, just as the hinges of a door, being constantly in
motion, will never get rusty. ’ This was said by Wu P'u, a
hsien  who was a pupil of the famous physician-surgeon
Hua T'o, who himself taught the Five Animal Antics. He
wrote:
The Immortals of ancient days, while performing the
inhalation process, passed their time like dormant
bears, looking about like owls, twitched and
stretched their limbs and joints in order to hinder the
advance of old age. I have an art, called ‘The Sport of
Five Animals,’ namely a tiger, a stag, a bear, a
monkey and a bird, by which illness can be cured and
which is good for the movements of the feet when
they accompany the process of inhalation. Whenever you feel unwell, stand up and imitate the
movements of one of these animals. As for the ancient Taoist yoga of T'ai Chi Chuan,  it has
swept into the West and is now familiar in T'ai Chi classes
everywhere. The T'ai Chi, the Great Ultimate is all-
pervasive. ‘Every single human has T'ai Chi and every
single thing has T'ai Chi. for all things there is only one
T'ai Chi. but everything in the world is endowe d with it
and with the whole of it. ’ This was said by a neo-
Confucianist, Chu Hsi. As the Great or Supreme Ultimate,
containing and contained in all things, it is represented by
the yin-yang  symbol representing the perfect balance of
the two forces in the universe, the two powers being
contained within the circle of totality, of cyclic revolution
and dynamism. T'ai Chi yoga uses rhythmic movement and
breath contr ol to bring the yin-yang  forces  into harmony
with themselves and the cosmos. Like all yogic practices it
requires long and persi stent application and cannot be
properly learned in short ‘courses’ or weekend ‘schools;’
nor can it be learned from books; it requires a competent
master. The position adopted for sleep also imitates the natural
postures of animals, such as the curved position of a dog
or the coiling of a dragon. The correct position for sleep is
to lie on one side, it does not matter which, with one arm
bent under the head and the other stretching down to the
stomach; one leg is straight and the other bent, the eyes
should be closed and concentrated on each other. Breathing is, naturally, controlled and rhythmic and
slowed down. Although Chuang Tzu speaks of the
dreamless sleep of the Sage, in yoga dreams are taken as
an indication of progres s until the state of perfection is
reached. Bad dreams are a sign of imperfection and
indicate that something is wrong; the Tan Ching  says that
the True Man is free from them. In sleep the oblivion of death is experienced and death
itself must be understoo d before the new being can beborn. Alchemy in general, and its yogic branch in
particular, either aims at death, or total transformation,
which is the same thing; it seeks the death of the old life
and the birth  of the new. In the West this is the solve et
coagula  in which the opposites are dissolved and die
before rebirth in the ‘body of glory,’ or of the ‘diamond
body’ of Buddhism and the ‘jade body’ of T aoism. The solve
et coagula  can well be translated ‘puriﬁcation and
integration. ’ Reference to the ‘ﬁxing’ or death of mercury
is, in India n yoga, symbolic of the activities  of the
conscious mind, from which the yogin is liberated and
therefore breaks through to the timeless state which is
immortality. The yogin who conquers time also conquers
death. As Eliade says: ‘Immortality cannot be gained
except by arresting manifestation, and hence the process
of disintegra tion. one must ﬁnd the primordial,
motionless unity, which existed before the rupture. ’ The
dissolution of the metals in alchemy is the death of the ego
and the sensory life before being reborn as the selﬂess. The soul has to be dissolved and freed of its conventional
closed-mind before it can become ‘open’ and receptive to
new states, possibilities and potentialities. This is also the
death and rebirth of initiation. Taoist and Tantric yoga have much in common in the use
of sexual techniques for bringing about realization, but the
theory and practice of this yoga is far too complicated and
technical to be understood by any uninitiated westerner. In
the ﬁrst place it requir es a competent master;  it then
demands a total dedication and application only possible in
a monastic setting, since times of day, of months and
sexual cycles, must all be regularly and rigidly observed
over long years of practice. Sex yoga deals with the
generative forces (ching ) merging with the spirit (shen ) in
the vital force (ch'i). It is known as the White Tiger and
Green Dragon yoga, the White Tiger representing lead andthe semen and the Green Dragon symbolizing cinnabar
and the feminine ﬂuid, the yang  and the yin; the two are
combined and fused to produce the Golden Pill, the foetus. The yang, male  ﬂuid is exhaustible; the yin, female, is
inexhaustible. This also introduces the inexhaustibility of
love. In Tantric Buddhist legend a Sage, shocked at
representations of Buddha surrounded by mistresses, was
told ‘women are the gods, women are life, women are
adornment, be ever among women in thought. ’ This
feminine power represen ts the spontaneous aspect of love
and ecstasy which overcomes duality and is thus the great
unifying force; it is the archetypal feminine. If correctly
used the two forces create life-force or immortality; if
incorrectly used they are a sure way to early death. The
generative forces must be preserved, not dissipated in
ordinary sexual activity. Based on the yin-yang  balance and harmony, each sex,
providing stimulus, draws forth and supports the power of
the other. Taoism parts company with Buddhism, except in
its Tantric branch, in regarding celibacy as unnatural and
therefore productive of imbalance and neurosis. The yogic
techniques are governed by times, seasons, lunar phrases
and astrology; they were kept esoteric to a large extent
and hidden under alchemical terms, since considerable
danger accompanies some of the practices, as it does also
with the breathing exercises. In Taoist yoga the woman
adept plays an important part, both sexes being necessary
to each other; but the yin power, as remarked, is the
inexhaustible force. It was believed that the ‘reverted sperm’ nourished the
brain and one of the techniques was to hang upside down
so that ‘the essence of the sperm ﬂows to the brain;’ the
generative forces were thus to be translated into vitality in
the brain. Sexual techniques, according to Ko Hung, ‘may
be compared with water and ﬁre, either of which can slayman or bring him to life, depending solely on his ability to
deal with them. ’
The marvellous powers attributed to the Taoist yogin,
the hsien, are the same as the Eight Great Powers of the
yoga of Maha-siddhi Buddhism. They are: (1) to make
oneself small  or invisible, (2, 3) to decrease or increase in
height, (4) to have the most distant objects at the tip of
one's ﬁngers, (5) all wish-fulﬁlment, (6) perfect body
control, (7) the ability to change anything in nature, (8) to
be anywhere at will. Included in these are knowledge of
the past and future, understanding the language of
animals and communication with the dead. In these
powers the association with Shamanism and magic is
clear. OceanofPDF. com– 13 –
M A G I C
There is no land without its magic lore and beliefs in which
there occur unexplained  phenomena and relat ionships
with invisible powers. These are called occult or arcane
because their workings are not understood in the ordinary
world of the senses and reason. In China, popular religious
Taoism, as opposed to the classical philosophical branch,
has always been associated with magic, stemmi ng back
deﬁnitely to the Han dynasty, and in tradition to such
wonder-workers as the Yellow Emperor, some 3,000 years
BC, and the hsien  Ch'ih Fu who became completely
rejuvenated after taking the elixir. The proximity of
Shamanistic tribes also introduced magic al and
spiritualistic cults, while magical lore was again widened
by contact with Indian thought, brought into China by
exchange of culture when Chinese emissaries were sent to
study Indian  scholarship and when Buddhist missionaries
arrived in China
Magic is closely associated with alchemy in experiments
and experim ental scienc e, with the ‘powers’ of religious
beliefs and with the medicinal knowledge of making
potions, poisons and drug s. It concerned all aspects of life,
in this world and the next, and was not limited to either. It
is probably true of Chinese magic that it was, as E. A. Wallis Budge said of Egypt, ‘older than belief in God. ’
Professor Needham states that science arises out of magic:
‘In their earliest steps they are indistinguishable. Taoist
philosophers, with their emphasis on Nature, were bound
in due course to pass from the purely observational to the
experimental. That the mastery of Nature by manualoperations is possible was the ﬁrm belief of magicians and
early scientists alike. ’ In fact in ‘the early sixteenth
century in Europe science was commonly called  Natural
Magic. even Newton has with justice been called “the
last of the magicians”. one cannot emphasize too much
that in their initial stages there is nothing to distinguish
magic from science. ’
Olympiodoros, an oﬀicial at the early Byzantine court, in
the ﬁfth century, was a famous alchemist but was also
noted for his knowledge of medicine and as a magi cian. He
maintained that the success of alchemical experiments did
not depend on the exact following of recipes but required
the assistance of magic and magical powers. V arious rulers
and Popes in Europe were known as sorcerers: Popes
Honorious III, Leo III, John XXII and Silvester II were
known to be magicians, while Catherine de Medici  and her
son Henry III encourage d magicians and sorcer ers who
dealt with ‘unknown drugs. ’ In the West, as much as the
East, magicians were part of the court scene, of
government and of the priesthood. Among monks were
Roger Bacon and Albertu s Magnus, and at the lower level
among the ordinary people the village sorcerer, witch or
wizard fulﬁlled the same functions. In China these were
paralleled by the noted alchemists and magicians at the
courts of the Emperors, by the Taoist priests of the local
temples where the populace worshipped, and by the lower
orders of hsien  who worke d the same wonders as the
western sorcerer and dealt with the same practices and
powers such as fortune telling, making amulets and
talismans, commanding spirits and raising ghosts. Nor
have these customs died out in either East or W est. Although there is obviously a close link between
Shamanist and Taoist alchemical-magic practices, they
functioned on diﬀerent levels in that the shaman was
trained only on the magico-religious plane while theTaoist-alchemist was a scholar and searcher after  ‘ancient
wisdom’ on an intellectual level, though in Taoism there
was the division betw een the esoteric and exoteric
branches, the latter being as full of magic and spiritism as
was Shamanism. Shamanism, however, represents the
oldest respo nse of humanity to the world around. It is
‘primitive’ in both senses, in that it is the magico-religious
belief of a simple and unsophisticated civilization and in
being an originally pure doctrine of the macro-
microcosmic relationship which has since dege nerated. Shamanism still shows traces of a once highly-developed
cosmology. Like the alchemist, the Shaman contacts not
only demons but also cures diseases; he is a diviner,
exorcist, invoker of spirits, a medium, healer, fortu ne-teller
and rain-mak er; or, in reverse, he can arrest storms; he
also uses ‘words of power. ’ The reason for concentration
on and contending with demons, rather than being
concerned with good spirits, is that the latter are helpful
in any case and there is nothing to be feared from them;
the former are continuall y intent on doing harm and must
be guarded against incessantly. There is no doubt that the
Shaman has ‘powers;’ even if his spirit powers are called
in question, it is certain that he can carry out an ecstatic
dance, in a crowded yurt, with some thirty to ﬁfty pounds
of iron discs and other objects attached to his robes,
ﬂinging himself about with closed eyes yet never touching
any of the audience and able to lay his hands on any object
he requires while still in trance. There have always been two kinds of magic: the ‘black,’
which involves the invocation and co-operation of the
demonic world and attempts to coerce and control these
dark powers  and force them to work in harness, and the
‘white,’ which deals with beneﬁcial spirits and aims at
working good and healing. There is also a misty
borderland between black and white in the use oftalismans, charms and words of power, practice s which
have endure d for thousands of years and are still fully
alive in the modern scientiﬁc-rationalist climate. People or
teams still carry their mascots, have lucky numbers, wear
amulets and ‘touch wood’ after any boast. It has always been assumed that the future can be
foretold and accepted that certain people have divinatory
power. Oracles and seers were consulted and signs and
portents read in such things as the ﬂights of birds, the
entrails of sacriﬁced animals, the throwing of sticks or
coins, the markings on tortoise-shells; mirrors, crystal
balls, bowls of water, and bones were also used in
divination. Many of these practices, though, had an
esoteric aspect beyond the outward-seeming supe rstition. Exoterically, talismans, charms and other means of
avoiding or curing misfortune or calamities, both natural
and spiritual, were belie ved actually to encapsu late the
spirit concer ned; esoter ically, they were the means of
conveying the idea of psychic balance of the forces of the
cosmos and the sense of the mystical unity of all things. In the East there was no reason why all such powers
should not be beneﬁcent provided the necessary
precautions were taken, the good spirits were consulted
and evil ones kept at bay; but in the West the connection
between spirits and humanity was dubious, since magic
had been learned from fallen angels who married the
daughters of men; as the angels were ‘fallen,’ the arts they
taught were tainted with evil. Magic was practised not only to bring about alchemical
transformations but also to summon the Immortals. The
court magicians employed by the Emperor Wu were used
not so much to produce gold as to call up the Immortals
and spirits—particularly, in this case, the spirit of the
greatly-mourned favourit e, the Lady Wang. The Chinese
Festival of the Moon Palace rose from Taoist magic andcommemorated the court magician's feat in enab ling the
Emperor to visit this beautiful maiden who lives in the
Moon P alace. Alchemical altar with oﬀerings
In the realm of the occult, good and evil spirits can be
used against each other, but as there is considerable
danger in such an encounter the magician, shaman or
alchemist must be under the protection of forces of a
superior spiritual order. Hence, the alchemist puts himself
under the tutelage of some deity—for example, the God ofthe Stove or, on a higher level the Great Spiri t or the
White Light. In Hinduism, the Vedas allow magic to be
lawful only for the pure in heart, while, like the alchemist,
sadhus and fakirs concerned with the occult must undergo
severe discipline. There are also spiritual visitants who take an interest in
operations on the earth plane. As Ko Hung says: ‘Spirits
and gods frequently cause miraculous and strang e things
to occur among men. In our classics there is much
evidence regarding them. ’ Among these interested persons
must be ranked the dead  who, for some reason or other,
wish to make their presence felt in the mortal world. A
powerful magician or hsien  could also summon the dead to
serve his purpose, as in the case of the noted hsien  Liu
Ken. He was once a court oﬀicial at the capital of Ch'ang-
an, in the Later Han dynasty. He abandoned court life and
retired to a cave on the edge of a precipice. He also
abandoned clothing and grew a covering of hair a foot
long, but when visited, or in company, he could suddenly
assume the conventiona l brocade robes of the scholar-
oﬀicial. He used his magical powers to help the local
populace, providing food and healing illness, but a new
governor of the province  regarded him as a wizard and
intended to have him tried and executed. Commanding Liu
Ken to appear before him, the Governor challenge d him to
call up some spirits to his aid in his present predicament. Liu Ken wrote at the Judge's table and there followed an
eerie whistling and clanking. The wall of the courthouse
fell in and through the gap came a troop of soldiers
escorting an enclosed carriage. The wall then closed
behind them. Liu Ken then ordered the occupan ts to be
brought out and an old man and woman appea red with
hands bound and a noose round the neck. T o his horror the
Governor recognized his dead parents, who upbra ided him
for having been of no use to them in his life, since hisoﬀicial prefe rment had not taken place until after they had
died; now, in death, he was causing them harassm ent and
humiliation in persecuting a blameless hsien. The
Governor immediately prostrated himself before Liu Ken
and pleaded that his father and mother might be released. The hsien  then ordered the chariot away; the wall opened
and closed again behind it and Liu Ken vanished. But this
was not the end of it for the Governor; his wife died soon
after but came back from the next world to tell him that
his parents were so enraged at his unﬁlial behaviour that
they were going to kill him. A month later he and his son
and daughter all died. As a background to this story it must be realized that in
China the whole family was held responsible for the
misdeeds of any member and was involved in any
punishment. Similarly, the entire family was aggrandized
when a success was achieved or honour conferred, even
when the honour was posthumously awarded; this had the
advantage that, if anyone had been accused falsely or
executed when innocent, he—and his family—c ould be
exonerated and recompensed after death. The next world
was regulated on the same hierarchic-bureaucratic lines
as that of imperial times,  when there were distinct grades
of oﬀicials and classes of persons. This ﬁrm and practically
applied belief in the spirit world permeated Chinese social
and religious practices: the realm of spirits was taken
seriously, nor have these beliefs died out, as witness a
recent account of a spirit-marriage in Peking. A girl,
having been killed in an accident before she was married,
was saved the ignominy of arriving unwed in the after-life. A recently-dead youth was found; the normal match-
making ceremonies were undertaken by a go-betw een who
settled the dowry with the girl's father; there was the
normal wedding ceremonial and feast and then both
bodies were buried in the husband's tomb. The usualoﬀerings of money, clothing, food and wine were oﬀered at
the graveside. Traditionally, all the requisites for a
comfortable life in the next world—servants, clothing,
money—were taken in the funeral procession in paper
eﬀigies or forms and burned at the grave to ascend in
smoke to the heavens. Spirits, if the body had been properly interred and there
was a home  to live in, were contented and well looked
after in the ancient ancestor reverence; but if the right
conditions were not followed, or if there were no home to
go back to, the spirit then became a wandering ghost,
unhappy in itself and a threat to the living; hence the
many rites for preventing such ghosts from causing harm
and for banishing them. This, too, explains the great
importance of having sons. Daughters marry into other
families, but sons perpetuate the family home and provide
the necessary home for the ancestors. There are various
methods of keeping ghosts at bay. ‘If you meet a ghost
coming and shouting continually to you for food, show it a
white reed and it will die instantly. In the mountains
ghosts are continually creating confusion to make people
lose their way. ’ They also cause illness and disease, but if
the right magic is employed they can be controlled and
made to serve the living. For this purpose spells,
incantations and ‘words of power’ were used, both oral
and written. There is a universal belief in the power of
sound in words. In Egypt the cult of immortality was as
much of an all-absorbing interest as in China, not only in
the preservation of the physical body but also in magical
formulas which helped the dead in the next world. Both
Isis and Thoth/Hermes held the secret of sound and Isis
reviviﬁed the dead Osiris, killed by his brother Set, with
magic words ; the exact pronunciation and understanding
of their meaning was of the utmost importance. InHinduism the sound OM penetrates and sustains the whole
cosmos. Servants for the Dead Eﬀigies following the funeral. Summoning spirits or demons is universally done by the
magic Power of the Name. Spirits serve the magicians,
shamans and priests, and are often treated with contempt
by the masters who exercise power over them. Incantations could force demons to leave their abodes and
appear before the sorcerer at his will. Divine names were
used in incantations and invocations; these were esoteric
and a jealous guard was kept on them. There was a
constant struggle between the shaman-magician-alchemist
and the spirits he needed to serve him; either he obtained
the mastery over them or they mastered him and he would
become ‘possessed. ’ In Chinese alchemy possessionbelonged only to the failures who, in consequence, require
the rites of exorcism. Wandering ghosts and spirits could
also take possession of the body of those making mistakes
or trespassin g on forbidden ground while insuﬀiciently
‘protected. ’ Possession was taken seriously and in
religious Taoism priests were trained in exorcism, while
magicians used their powers to expel possessing spirits. Possession can be voluntary or involuntary. Pries ts and
mediums could be possessed by spirits when in trance. In
the lower orders these entities could be demons; in the
higher states, gods, goddesses or hsien  could speak
through the medium. It was in cases where demons or
ghosts took over against the intentions of the person that
the individual became possessed to his or her detriment
and so required exorcism. Priests, shamans and mediums,
once possessed, had command over all magical powers:
they could slash themselves with knives and remain
unhurt, swallow ﬁre, walk on live coals, cause objects to
ﬂy through the air or levitate themselves; such powers
have been examined and attested to in modern times. I
witnessed them myself at close quarters when itinerant
magicians displayed their abilities in the market place with
people crowding round within touching distance. Swords,
oﬀered to the crowd to test, were ‘swallowed’ and coals
taken from a brazier were also oﬀered for inspection then
put into the mouth and held there and spat out, still
blazing hot. These magic powers were used by the ‘bellows blowers’
alchemists in their work, but the true hsien  did not use the
mastery of spirits in his work on the spirit; that was done
by yoga, self-mastery and by co-operation with Nature to
become one with her rhythms. The Sorceress (wu) played a vital part in ancient
Chinese magic. She puriﬁed herself with perfumed water,
donned ritual robes, took a ﬂower in her hand and mimedher journey in search of the gods or goddesses. She
danced ecsta tically to the music of drums, ﬂutes and song
until she fell exhausted and the deity invoked then spoke
through her. Like the hsien, the wu could become invisible,
levitate, travel great distances in the spirit and could
produce all the magical and mediumistic phenomena. Her
male counterpart was called a hsi. A sword swallower
Chinese alchemists were  experts in making perfumes,
which occupied an important place in all religious rites
and any ritual-social occasion. Indeed, scents have always
been valued and used in all aspects of Chinese life: witness
the numerous scents employed in perfuming Chinese teas. Among ritual perfumes incense sticks were prom inent. In
Taoist temples incense burning is a central rite and tracesof its ancien t alchemical connections can be seen in the
name of those who attend the burners or the altar
—‘furnace masters. ’ Incense also has magic qualities in
that it dispels evil spirits and other undesirable entities
such as wandering ghosts and prevents them from
interfering in either religious or social rites or in
alchemical experiments. Incense sticks are an essential
part of divination, especially when consulting the I Ching. Other uses were as timing devices for alchemical
experiments and for fumigation. Incense has always been
employed in puriﬁcation and as a homage to divinities; it
suggests the ‘subtle body’ rising as a spiritual substance
and a ‘perfume that deiﬁes. ’ It is also ch'i and symbolically
the principle of change. The smoke rising upwards forms
an axis mundi  betw een the two worlds and carries
messages and prayer heavenwards; it is a combination of
ﬁre and air, symbolizing the power of both, but especially
the former in alchemy. Books can also work magic. The Chinese have always
had a great reverence for books and printed matter. (As a
child one's amahs would  never allow a book to lie on the
ﬂoor or be dropped. They could not read the books or
know their trivial nature, but they were printed and
therefore to be revered. ) Classics must be wrapped in silk
and stored in a ‘puriﬁed place’ and ‘whenever anything is
done about them one must ﬁrst announce it to them, as
though you were serving a sovereign father. ’ If certain
classics are kept in a house they will ‘banish evil and
hateful ghos ts, soften the eﬀects of epidemics, block
calamities and rout misfortunes. ’ It also helps to give a
sick person, or a woma n in labour, a certain classic to
hold. In building a new house or preparing a tomb, copies
of the ‘Earth August Text’ should be taken to the site; the
household will then become rich and prosperous, the
grave protected from robbers and ghosts. Some scrollsenable people to change sex, age or character, to produce
miraculous food, change into birds or animals, or raise
wind, rain or snow. Talismans and amulets are universally employed to ward
oﬀ evil spirits. Peach stones, as the kernel of the fruit of
immortality, are particularly eﬀicacious and are frequently
carved into apotropaic forms, such as a ﬁgure of a hsien  or
of a Buddha, while peac h wood is used for the pen in
automatic writing. Swords made of cash linked together by
red thread work magic in cutting oﬀ demons and the cash
sword is used in rites of exorcism. The red thread is in
itself eﬀectiv e and red and yellow are used to bring luck
and ward oﬀ evil on all occasions. Yellow and red paper is
employed for charms, as being also the colours of gold and
cinnabar. Bells, too, are used in magic and eﬀectively
scare oﬀ evil spirits; for this purpose they were often hung
from the points of temples or pagodas. The seal of Lao Tzu, an all-powerful talisman and
bringer of good fortune, worn by mediums. Mirror magic is widespread. Mirrors can be used for
summoning gods and genii, but in this case it is important
to know the names and the types of clothes worn by each,
otherwise one might fail to recognize him or her on arrival
and so cause considerable umbrage, with potentially
disastrous results. Mirrors enable the shaman andmagician to see things far oﬀ and to ﬁnd things which are
lost; they also reveal the true nature of the person; for
example, if, when one is approached by a supernatural
person, one looks into a mirror, a fox or a tiger may be
reﬂected masquerading as a human. The ‘burning mirror’
could create ﬁre and was yang;  the ‘dew mirror’ collected
dew at night called ‘moon water’ and was yin. Mirror
magic was also used in the West to hold over herbs
collected for alchemical purposes; the plants had to be
picked before sunrise, under a waning moon, and the
process required the person to be ‘barefoot,  chaste,
ungirded and wear no ring. ’ One can also divine from sun
or moon rays reﬂected in a mirror or water. As can be seen from this, herbs are subject to both
astrological and magical inﬂuences and gathering them
demanded an exact knowledge of times and seasons; this,
again, obtained in eastern and western alchemy. In the
West instructions were given for ﬁnding one's guiding star,
which involved the herb being gathered at the right time,
in a state of purity, kept in linen, with a whole grain of
wheat from a loaf of bread, then placed under the pillow. After prayers  are said to the seven planets, repeated seven
times, one's guiding star will be revealed in sleep. Magic
also enters when one is instructed to make a circle round
the herb, using gold, silver or ivory, the tooth of a wild
boar or the horn of a bull. A cash sword
Messages and instructions could be received from the
spirit world and from hsien  through automatic writing,
which was known to have been used in early Sung times. It
was said that the Immortal Tung Pin, after invocation,
communicated through a willow stick held by a blindfolded
person over a tray of sand. This method of commu nication
is of considerable interest since it is still in use today. Thewillow or peach stick, or pencil, can be held by one
blindfolded, or it is supported on the upturned palms of
the medium's hand, a position in which no muscular
control can be exerted. The pencil appears to assume a life
of its own, characters are formed in the sand and
interpreted either as messages or alchemical instructions. Even books could be so transmitted: the Secret of the
Golden Flower  was reputed to have been written in this
way. As in all things Chinese, absolute courtesy must be
observed. A spirit summoned to give aid is oﬀered a chair
to sit on and asked to give his honourable name and to
identify himself by enumerating his august titles and the
period of history he honoured with his presence. The spirit
is bowed to and ritually thanked for help given; in return
he depreciates his eﬀorts and thanks the company for
their invitation. There were endless schools of magicians, soothsayers,
horoscopists, geomancer s and those who watched the
heavens for portents. There was a huge trade in talismans
and charms and, on the less magical side, there also
existed a science of physiognomy which studied physical
features and characteris tics, but also drew from them
conclusions as to the fate of the individual. Associated with both ch'i and magic was the practice of
geomancy, known as feng-shui, literally wind-and-water. It
was the scien ce of favourable conditions, climatic, physical
and of the spirit world and was used in locating the right
situations for temples, houses, graves, or the best places
for business transactions. The abodes of both the living
and the dead had to be in harmony with the cosmic
currents and the breath of Nature, the ch'i of the earth. It
required the oﬀices of diviners, known as ‘professors of
divination,’ the geomancers, to determine favourable
situations which must also be governed by the yin-yangfeatures of the scene. For this the geomantic compass was
used. At the centre of the instrument there is a mariners'
compass, an early Chinese invention, the ‘South pointing
needle,’ also called the Tai Chi. The sixteen successive
circles round the compass depict, ﬁrst, the pa kua, then
the twenty-four celestial constellations and after that the
various numerical and occult calculations based  on the
sexagenary cycle, the constellations and the Twelve
Terrestrial Branches. Naturally, favourable sites, times and
seasons also aﬀected the times and places for alchemical
experiments. Talisman of one hundred forms of the character shou:
Longevity. The ability to work magic is not, according to K o Hung, a
special endowment but is acquired through learning from
Masters and taking elixirs. These individuals were not
born with the knowledge of these things: ‘It is thought that
the divine process canno t be acquired through study so I
would remind you of bodily metamorphoses, sword
swallowing, ﬁre eating, disappearing at will, raisin g cloudsand vapours, snake charming, walking on knife blades
without being cut. ’ In another passage he wrote: ‘Narrow-
minded and ignorant peop le take the profound as if it were
uncouth and relegate the marvellous to the realm of ﬁction. what narrow-mindedn ess and ignorance. ’ But for all its
powers he decided that magic will not be able to confer
Fullness of Life on its practitioners. ‘They may cure illness,
raise people from the dead, go years without hunger,
command ghosts and gods, disappear at will, see what is
occurring a thousand miles away. and know misfortune
and good fortune for things that have not yet occurred, but
none of those things beneﬁts their longevity or
immortality. ’ And again: ‘Only those who have Tao can
truly perform these actions, and, better still, not perform
them, though able to perform them. ’
OceanofPDF. com– 14 –
ALLIED SYMBOLISM
The symbolism of alche my uses a language of its own
which, like all symbolism, when understood, opens up
hidden meanings. Symbolism is always ambivalent, on the
one hand it makes more accessible and universal ideas
which transcend the limitations of ordinary langu age and
is the only language which is both international and
capable of adaptation to all levels of understanding and
experience and of endless expansion; on the other  hand, it
can be used to veil knowledge, to keep it hidden from
those incapable of using it correctly. These are the
exoteric and esoteric aspects. It is mainly the latter which
is used in alchemy, since much of its knowledge could be
dangerous, physically and spiritually, in the wrong hands. Both eastern  and western technical terms were disguised
under strange and often bizarre names employed for the
substances, instruments and methods used; hence, much
of the langu age and symbolism used is incompre hensible
to the modern world. For example, an ancient Chinese
treatise read:
Red sand, cinnabar is of wood and will combine with
metal [gold]; gold and water live together; wood and
ﬁre keep each other company. In the beginning these
four were in a confused state. They came to be
classiﬁed as Tigers and Dragons. The numbers for
the Dragon which are odd are yang, and those for the
Tiger are yin and even. The blue liver is the father,
and the white lungs are the mother. The red heart is
the daughter, the yellow  spleen is the grandfatherand the black kidneys are the son. The son is the
beginning of the Five Elements. As Holmyard points out, modern science uses signs and
symbols, an esoteric language unintelligible to the
uninitiated but diﬀering from alchemy in that the latter's
symbols are allegorical; in other words, modern  science
uses signs rather than symbols in the strict sense of the
word. He also writes of alchemical symbolism as being of
two kinds, the literary and the graphic:
Literary symbolism in its simplest form is seen as the
inveterate habit of adepts of applying fanciful names
to the substances and apparatus used in alchemy,
principally by metaphor or real or supposed analo gy. Thus an oval or a spherical vessel which could be
hermetically sealed was commonly referred to as the
‘philosophers' egg,’ and not merely because of its
shape, but with a reference to the egg out of which
the universe was hatched; so that in a particular
context it may be hard to decide whether the author
is describing  a piece of apparatus or trying to convey
a fragment of doctrine. This oval or round vessel as the egg is a universal
symbol of creation. Its function is the bringing of new life;
it encloses the whole universe and is the Potential; as such
it is also the womb. In Chinese alchemy this is known as
the luted vase; it is the place of metamorphosis from which
new life emerges. The womb is also equated with the
mine, the earth, the Earth  Mother, the ore being in embryo
in her. The alchemist is, as has been said, the midw ife who
brings the embryo to birth. The T'ai I Chin Hua Tsung
Chih, a work in the Taoist Canon, says: ‘The work must be
directed to the warming and nourishing of the spiritual
embryo. ’ Thus the foetus or embryo represents thespiritual development which grows until full maturity
when it is born spiritually as the True Man. The womb
naturally leads to the symbolism of water; the waters
being the fundamental material of creation, the life
substance, the ‘waters of life,’ the prima materia, the great
yin power. Its yang  opposite is, of course, ﬁre; together
they are the two great principles, the passive and the
active; they represent all the contraries in the elemental
world; both are creators  and destroyers. As Burckhardt
says, it is through the union of these opposites that ‘the
soul becomes  “ﬂuid ﬁre” or “ﬁery water”, and at the same
time also acquires the positive qualities of the other
elements, so that its water becomes “stable” and its ﬁre
“non-burning. ”’ The alchemical ﬁre does not burn and
destroy but viviﬁes; it is a divine power. Fire can stabilize
and harden, as in the potter's kiln, or make ﬂuid in
smelting, but it must be contained and controlled since
any excess becomes destructive. The sixty-third hexagram
of the I Ching  combines the trigrams for ﬁre and water
and symbolizes the cauldron of water heated over the ﬁre;
hence alche mical fusion. The Taoist Canon says: ‘The
essence of yang  is ﬁre; that of yin water. When yin and
yang  control each other, water and ﬁre are mutually
upholding. ’
In this conne ction mercury, or quicksilver, is partic ularly
signiﬁcant as it contains both the elements of ﬁre and
water, being liquid yet luminous. It can be represented as
a metal, but because of its ‘volatile’ nature it is also
regarded as spirit. Its dual nature makes it symbolic of the
tensions of the complementary opposites, expressed by
such symbols as the ‘contending dragons’ and the
caduceus, containing and uniting the opposites. It
represents the ﬁrst and the last as the prima materia
which divide s into the opposites of all dualism, to be
reunited in the conjunctio  and to emer ge in the ﬁnal unityof the spirit. Exoterically, it is the quicksilver of the
laboratory alchemist; esoterically, it is the spirit concealed
in base matter. Mercury, regarded as a spirit, is volatile
and transforming; it ‘whitens all metals and attracts their
souls. having in itself the principle of all liquidi ty, when
it has undergone decomposition, it changes colours
everywhere,’ as Synesius said in commenting on the
Physics and Mysteries of the pseudo-Democritus. This
dissolving power of quicksilver is the feminine in its
terrible aspect, its sign is dominated by the feminine lunar
symbol as the Earth Mother, the womb of all meta ls, but it
is also the triad in unity 
  incorporating the cross, circle
and crescent symbols; again, it is ‘burning water’ and
‘non-burning ﬁre,’ the androgynous. The alchemist succeeded in joining the two great powers
of ﬁre and water; sulphur, the hot and dry, the spirit of ﬁre,
was the colour of gold, but gold could be fused and
reduced to liquid and so also had the spirit of water, the
moist and the cold; the contraries were thus made one in
gold. But the ﬁre must be controlled and this introduces
the symbolism of the bellows by which the ﬁre was
regulated. Fire must not be allowed to burn too ﬁercely at
ﬁrst; it must be kept steady and quiet in the early stages of
the work; nor may it be allowed to die down, this being
symbolic of indolent or intermittent eﬀort, and of
destruction. Once the ﬁre is fully controlled the ‘quick ﬁre’
can be brought into play that ignites the bright inner ﬁre
of illuminatio n. It is easy to see that the bellows are a
natural symbol for the controlled breathing exercises of
alchemical yoga. The Patriarch Lu Tzu said: ‘Only those
who know what ﬁre, cauldron and bellows really mean can
use them eﬀectively. ’
Flight, which plays a minor role in western alchemy,
assumes a major one in the East where powers of ﬂight
appear in all yogic traditions: the Rishis of India, theArhats of Buddhism and the Immortals of Taoism, all
manifest the power. The feather is the natural symbol of
ﬂight and typically shamanistic. In early Chinese alchemy
the hsien  was ‘the feathered scholar,’ or ‘the feathered and
transformed,’ and was depicted in iconography as having
feathers. In Indian alchemy those who have attained yogic
powers ‘can ﬂy like fowls in the air’ or ‘pass
instantaneously from one place to another. ’ In the West the
soul is sometimes depicted as winged or ﬂying
heavenwards. The Shaman,  who adopts the feathered robe to ﬂy to the
spirit world, can also visit the underworld; but although
there appear to be close aﬀinities between shamanism and
the magical element in Taoist alchemy, there is more of
ascent than descent in the latter. The Shaman merely
visits the other worlds then returns to the body; the
alchemist, the feathered hsien, represents a totally
spiritualized body, total freedom from the limits of the
earthly and physical state, freedom from the world of
senses. Flight is also often another term for ecstasy, for
the mystic's experience of total liberation and freedom; it
is also symbolic of the unrestricted powers of the mind. As
the Rig V eda says: ‘He who knows has wings. ’ For Chinese
alchemy it is one of the chief powers of the hsien  and is
associated closely with the cult of immortality since it
implies the ability to transcend all mortal limitations and
to pass from one world to another and enter the realm of
spirits. There is the story of King Chao (515-488 B C) who said to
his minister: ‘The writing s of the Chen dynasty state that
Chung-li was actually sent as an envoy to the inaccessible
parts of heaven and earth; how was such a thing possible. Tell me whether there is any possibility for people to
ascend to heaven. ’ The minister explained that the true
meaning of this tradition was spiritual; those who wereupright and could concentrate were able ‘to rise to the
higher spheres and to descend to the lower, and
distinguish there the things which it would be proper to
do. ’
Flight is one of the most fundamental longings of
humanity and runs through all myth, religions (‘taken up
into the seventh heaven’), legends and fairy tales and
dominates the dream world. Jung's extensive studies in
alchemy rose from the discovery of alchemical symbolism
frequently occurring in the dreams of patients who knew
nothing of alchemy. This dream-ﬂight alchemical
symbolism conformed to the ‘work’ of alchemy in helping
to bring about the proces s of integration in the individual;
these symbols ‘are part and parcel of the self, bringing
with them something of the unconscious which ﬁnds
expression in a feeling of eternity and immortality. ’
There was no question of ‘possession’ in the ﬂight of the
Taoist hsien  who ‘went up to heaven’ since the ability to ﬂy
was the result of long years of yogic practices and of the
search for the elixir; it presupposed self-mastery, a perfect
incorporation into the cosmic rhythms and a balanced,
healthy, scholarly mind which had nothing to do with
shamanistic-mediumistic possession. On the other hand,
many of the accounts of going up to heaven may be
symbolic of out-of -the-bod y experiences, when, relieved of
the weight of the body, the soul is freed from the laws of
gravity, or of the mystic experience of total liberation from
all earthly limitations. Although actual ﬂight is less employed symbolic ally in
western alchemy, the symbol of ascent is introduced in the
form of the ladder. Initiation ceremonies are depicted by
the alchemist climbing a seven-runged ladder, blindfolded,
but the blindfold is removed at the seventh rung and the
initiate then faces a closed door. Symbols of ascent all
imply the passage from one realm to a higher and thesame seven stages are found in the Shaman's seven-
notched pole of ascent to the heavens, the number seven
representing completeness as the sum of the earth number
four and the heavenly number three—hence the
macrocosm. The seven heavens symbolism appears almost
universally in ascent to the heavens, which, like ﬂight,
implies aspirations towards the divine, reaching the
dwelling place of supreme powers and achieving
immortality therein. Among the ‘feathered tribe’ in China,
the crane is one of the best known symbols of longevity; it
is ‘the Patriarch of the Feathered Tribe’ and an
intermediary between heaven and earth. The Phoenix is universal in alchemy and is the
archetypal death-and-rebirth symbol. In the West, Wolfram
von Eschenbach wrote: ‘The phoenix burns to ashes, but
the ashes give him life again. Thus does the phoenix molt
and change its plumage, which afterwards is shining and
lovely as before. ’ It is the consummation of the Great
Work, ﬁnal regeneration. In China it is one of the Four
Spiritually Endowed, or Sacred, Creatures: the Tortoise,
Ky-lin, Drago n and Phoenix, the last three being fabulous
and composite creatures that combine both the yin and
yang  powers. The phoenix or feng-huang, is the Vermilion,
or Fire, Bird, the substance of ﬂame. As ﬁre it is yang,
solar, but it dies and rema ins dead for three days, the dark
of the moon, and so has lunar qualities. Its composition is
also yin-yang  as it has the head of a cock, its eyes are the
sun, its beak is the cresce nt moon and it has the back of a
swallow with its wings as the wind; its tail represents trees
and ﬂowers and its feet are the earth. It also conforms to
the Five symbolism, combining the ﬁve colours which
represent the ﬁve cardinal virtues. This combi ned yin-
yang, lunar-solar quality emphasizes the interdependence
of the two powers in alchemy and their ﬁnal union. Esoterically, the death of the phoenix, which is a self-immolation, is the death of form in the old nature to rise as
the new transformed, a higher state of consciousness. The mirror is not only used in magic but in speculative
alchemy it is of the highest importance, the word
speculatio  meaning to mirror or reﬂect. This is the
reﬂection of cosmological truths in the rhythms of Nature,
expressed in Arabic alche my by Ibn Arabi as: ‘The world of
nature consi sts of many forms which are reﬂected in a
single mirror —nay, rather, it is a single form reﬂected in
many mirrors. ’ This, again, is the ‘as above so below’ of
the hermetic tradition in which the mirror symbolizes the
intellect, the reﬂection of the cosmos. Its power, as the
Emerald Tablet says, ‘Rises from earth to heaven and
comes down again from heaven to earth, and thus acquires
the power of the realities above and the realities below. ’ It
also reﬂects  the state of the soul; in perfection it is
perfectly clear and unclouded. A mirror hanging face-downwards in a temple
establishes an axis of light by which the soul can ascend
heavenwards, but as reﬂected light it also represents the
manifest world of illusion. In this way the mirror also
combines the two great powers; it is the reﬂected light of
the moon, known as the ‘golden mirror,’ and at the same
time the disc of the sun. The ﬂash of light given oﬀ by a
mirror also symbolizes sudden spiritual realization or
enlightenment. Mirror symbolism is used frequently in
Taoism, neo-Confucianism and Buddhism, with the
diﬀerence that ‘with Buddhism external reality is to be
transcended, whereas with Chuang Tzu and the neo-
Confucianists, external reality is to be responded to
naturally and faithfully, like a mirror objectively reﬂecting
all. ’ As Chuang Tzu said: ‘The mind of the Sage, being in
repose, becomes the mirror of the universe. ’
Symbolism and alchemy cannot be separated. Eliade
writes: ‘To symbolic think ing the world is not only “alive”but also “open”: an objec t is never simply itself (as is the
case with modern consciousness), it is also a sign of, or a
repository for, something else. ’ The whole of the
alchemical work was symbolic, covering, as it did, the
metaphysical and religious aspects in transforming base
man into the gold of perfection.
To produce the elixir of life.
What is the purpose of combining the mercury of the heart center with the lead of the kidney center in alchemy?
To promote balance and harmony between the yin and yang forces.
What is the significance of the position adopted for sleep in Taoist yoga?
It is concerned with the material, tangible ingredients, such as mercury, lead, and cinnabar, and is not interested in the spiritual aspects of alchemy.
What is the purpose of the 'wei tan' in alchemy?
To maintain a balanced and harmonious relationship with the yin and yang forces, and to achieve a higher state of consciousness.
What is the role of the 'Taoist-alchemist' in the process of alchemy?
To prevent them from falling into the wrong hands, as they can be used for evil purposes, and to maintain the secrecy of the process, as it is only accessible to those of the highest caliber.
Why is it important to keep certain knowledge and symbols secret in alchemy?