12 | Sulphur, Mercury and Salt

ANALYSIS of the ternary spirit, soul and body leads us on quite naturally to a consideration of the alchemical ternary Sulphur, Mercury and Salt.^[1] The two ternaries are in many ways compatible, in spite of the fact that each is the expression of a somewhat different perspective. This difference emerges clearly from the fact that in the case of Sulphur, Mercury and Salt the complementary aspect of the first two terms is much more strongly marked: this produces a symmetry which, as we saw earlier, simply does not exist in the case of spirit and soul.

One factor that makes for perhaps the greatest difficulty of all in trying to understand alchemical or hermetic texts in general is the way in which the same terms are frequently used in different senses, each sense corresponding to a different perspective. Sulphur and Mercury are no exceptions to this rule; and yet this does not affect the central fact that Sulphur is consistently viewed as an active or masculine principle, and Mercury as a passive or feminine principle. As for Salt, it is so to speak neuter, or neutral; and that it should be so is altogether appropriate for a product of two complementary terms which by its very nature counterbalances and neutralises the opposing tendencies inherent in those terms.

Without entering into details which would here be quite out of place, we will simply state that Sulphur, because of its active nature, must be considered an igneous principle, and that fundamentally it is a principle of inner activity which, in the case of an individual being, can be thought of as radiating outwards from its very centre. In man (or on the basis of analogy with man) this inner force is often equated with the power of will. But this equation will only be valid if we understand ‘will’ in a much deeper sense than its usual psychological connotation. Instead, we would have to think of it analogously to the way it is used for example in the phrase ‘Divine Will’,^[2] or in the Far-Eastern expression ‘Will of Heaven’. The reason for this qualification is that the origin of will lies at the ‘centre’, and yet psychology is exclusively concerned with things of a ‘peripheral’ nature and ultimately is only concerned with superficial modifications of the being.

It is no mere accident that we have just mentioned the ‘Will of Heaven’, for although Sulphur cannot actually be equated with Heaven itself, its inwardness clearly places it in the category of celestial influences. As for equating Sulphur with the will, this is not really justifiable in the case of the ordinary man whom psychology makes the exclusive object of its investigations. However, in the case of ‘true man’ the equation is totally justified, for the place of ‘true man’ is at the centre of all things and this means his will is necessarily one with the ‘Will of Heaven’.^[3]

Turning now to Mercury, its passive nature when contrasted with the active nature of Sulphur has led to its being viewed as a principle of humidity.^[4] It is also represented as reacting from outside, thereby playing the role of a centripetal and compressive force in opposition to—and also in a sense limiting—the centrifugal and expansive action of Sulphur. All these complementary attributes—activity and passivity, inwardness and outwardness, expansion and contraction—make it clear that in the language of the Far East, Sulphur is yang and Mercury yin, and that if Sulphur is to be classed among the celestial influences, Mercury must be included among the terrestrial.

Be this as it may, we must be careful here to avoid locating Mercury in the corporeal realm. Its rightful place is in the subtle or animic domain, and its outward nature entitles us to view it as representing the ‘ambience’, by which we mean the totality of the currents of the dual cosmic force that we spoke of earlier.^[5] The dual nature or dual aspect of this force is an inherent characteristic of everything belonging to the ‘intermediary world’, and this is why Mercury—although primarily a principle of humidity as we mentioned above—is sometimes described as an ‘igneous water’ or sometimes even as a ‘liquid fire’.^[6] These paradoxical expressions are chiefly used to describe Mercury when it is being subjected to the influence of Sulphur, which ‘elicits’ this dual nature by causing it to pass from potency to act.^[7]

From the combined inward action of Sulphur and outward reaction of Mercury, a kind of ‘crystallisation’ takes place. This creates a common boundary, so to speak, between inward and outward, or a neutral zone in which the opposing influences are able to meet and stabilise. The product of this ‘crystallisation’ is Salt,^[8] which is represented by a cube, not only because this is the classical example of crystalline structure, but also because it is a symbol of stability.^[9] Because, from the point of view of the individual manifestation of a being, it marks the separation between inward and outward, this third term represents a kind of ‘envelope’ which on the one hand gives the being contact with the environment but on the other hand isolates it from it. In this it corresponds to the body, which in the case of the human individuality plays precisely this ‘bounding’ role.^[10] The reasons for associating Salt and body become even clearer when we remember the obvious relationship between Sulphur and the spirit on the one hand, and Mercury and the soul on the other. But, here again, we must be very much on our guard when comparing one ternary with another, for although the terms of one ternary may closely correspond to certain terms in the other when viewed from one perspective, from another perspective they may not. Hence, when viewed as ‘animic principle’ Mercury corresponds to the ‘intermediary world’ or the median term in the _Tribhuvana_, and Salt when viewed as equivalent (if not identical) to the body occupies the same terminal position as the sphere of gross manifestation. And yet when these two terms are viewed from a different angle their roles are apparently reversed, with Salt becoming the median term. It is this standpoint which is truest to the specifically hermetic conception of the ternary in question, because of the symmetrical role it attributes to Sulphur and Mercury. Salt is then intermediary between the two, firstly because it is in a way their resultant, and secondly because it occupies a borderline position between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ domains to which the two terms correspond. It is in this respect, even more than in relation to the process of manifestation, that ‘Salt’ can be represented as a ‘terminating’ factor, although in reality the one does not exclude the other.

These observations will, we hope, have made it clear why Salt cannot be equated with the body without qualification or reservation. The most we can say without the sacrifice of accuracy is that the body corresponds to Salt if viewed from one perspective and provided we interpret the alchemical ternary in one particular way. In another, less restricted application Salt will correspond to the individuality as a whole.^[11] In that case Sulphur is always the internal principle of the being, and Mercury is the subtle ‘ambience’ of a given world or state of existence. The product of the encounter between the internal principle and the surrounding ‘ambience’ will—assuming that we are dealing with a state of formal manifestation such as the human state—be the individ- uality. One can say that the being manifested in this way is as it were ‘enveloped’ in the individuality, just as at a different level the individuality itself is ‘enveloped’ in the body. If we turn again to the symbolism we used earlier, Sulphur can be compared to the ray of light, Mercury to the plane of its reflection, and Salt to what is produced when the light meets that plane. This raises the whole question of the relationship of a being to the environment in which it manifests, and this is a subject which deserves a more detailed treatment of its own.