Say the letter mem aloud and your lips close in a hum. Say shin and the breath hisses through the teeth. Say alef , and there is almost nothing: an opening of the throat, a breath that has not yet become a sound. The author of the Sefer Yetzirah , the "Book of Formation," noticed this. He called these three letters the "mothers" of the Hebrew alphabet and said that they stand for water, fire and air. In a book that tries to explain how the world was built from letters and numbers, they are the first foundation. The Setting The Sefer Yetzirah is a short, terse text of Jewish mysticism, probably written between the first and the sixth centuries, though nobody knows exactly when. It survives in several versions that differ in wording. Its main claim is that God created the world through thirty-two paths of wisdom: ten numbers called sefirot and twenty-two letters. The letters are sorted into three groups. The seven "double" letters and the twelve ...

After eleven gates, the alchemist's labor comes down to a pinch of red powder and a crucible of molten lead. He lets the powder fall, the metal hisses, and when the crucible cools it holds gold. This is Projection, the twelfth and last of George Ripley's gates in the Compound of Alchymy . The word comes from the Latin proicere , "to throw forward," and it names the moment when the stone, long prepared, is finally used. It is also the point at which the story most often leaves the realm of symbol and makes a claim about the real world. The Last Gate George Ripley was a fifteenth-century English writer, remembered as a canon of Bridlington, who dedicated his Compound of Alchymy to King Edward IV in 1471. His poem leads the reader through twelve gates: Calcination, Solution, Separation, Conjunction, Putrefaction, Congelation, Cibation, Sublimation, Fermentation, Exaltation, Multiplication and Projection. By the time the reader reaches the last, the elixir has been...

Anyone who has baked bread knows a small miracle. A little sour dough, mixed into fresh flour, wakes the whole lump and makes it rise. The alchemists noticed it too. Their word for the starter was "ferment," and in the ninth step of the work they used the picture of leaven to say something about gold, about life and about the way a small, living part can change the whole. This is Fermentation, the ninth of the Twelve Gates of George Ripley, an English alchemist of the fifteenth century. Who Was George Ripley? George Ripley lived from about 1415 to 1490. He was an Augustinian canon in Bridlington, a priory in Yorkshire, and he was said to have studied abroad, in Italy and perhaps elsewhere. His best-known book is The Compound of Alchemy , written in English verse in 1471 and dedicated to King Edward IV. It is a long poem in twelve parts, called gates, each one describing a step on the road to the Philosopher's Stone. Some later legends gave Ripley a colorful biograph...

Put a lump of sal ammoniac in a heated vessel and, after a time, a white crust grows on the cool upper wall, as if the solid had climbed the glass by itself. This is sublimation: a solid rising as vapor, and settling again as a solid, without a visible liquid stage in between. Alchemists watched it with wonder for centuries, and in the Compound of Alchymy the English writer George Ripley made it the eighth of his twelve gates. Ripley and His Twelve Gates George Ripley lived in the fifteenth century, and he is remembered as an Augustinian canon of Bridlington in Yorkshire, who studied abroad and returned to England. He wrote his Compound of Alchymy in verse and dedicated it to King Edward IV in 1471. The book lays out the Great Work as a castle with twelve gates, each of which the alchemist must pass. The text circulated in manuscript, and it was printed later, notably in Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum in 1652. The usual order of the gates is Calcination, Sol...

Every parent knows that you cannot feed a newborn all at once. The food must come in small amounts, at the right temperature, again and again, and a hurried hand can do more harm than hunger. The alchemists took this ordinary lesson and gave it a place in their art. In the seventh of George Ripley's Twelve Gates, called Cibation, the matter of the work is treated like a living infant, and the practitioner is told to feed it with patience. The Word and the Gate "Cibation" comes from the Latin cibus , food, and means feeding. In the alchemical tradition it was one of the standard operations, and many authors list it among the stages of the work. Ripley, the fifteenth-century English canon who wrote The Compound of Alchemy in 1471, makes it the seventh of twelve gates, after congelation and before sublimation. The order of the gates is part of the teaching. By the time the matter reaches Cibation, it has been purified, joined and made solid. It is a fragile thing, new...

Anyone who has watched water freeze knows a small marvel: something that flows and cannot be held becomes still, clear and firm. The alchemists admired this change, and they saw in it a lesson about the work. In the sixth of George Ripley's Twelve Gates, called Congelation, the matter that has been dissolved, purified and joined is made solid again. The liquid becomes a body. The fleeing thing is fixed. The Sixth Gate "Congelation" comes from the Latin word for freezing or thickening. In The Compound of Alchemy , written in 1471, Ripley places it after putrefaction and before cibation, and it is the point at which the long process of loosening reverses into one of tightening. After the matter has been broken down and rotted into blackness, it must now be gathered into a stable form. The order of the gates teaches in itself. A thing must be dissolved before it can be rebuilt, and rebuilt before it can be fed. In this view, the gates are less a recipe than a rhythm, a ...

Every kitchen knows the smell of what has been left too long: the soft brown fruit, the bread gone dark. To most people it is the end of something. To the alchemists it was a beginning. In George Ripley's Compound of Alchymy , the fifth gate is Putrefaction, the stage where the matter turns black and seems to die, and where, if the old books are to be believed, the real work of change starts. Where the Fifth Gate Stands George Ripley was an English writer of the fifteenth century, remembered as a canon of Bridlington in Yorkshire. He wrote the Compound of Alchymy in verse and dedicated it to King Edward IV in 1471. The poem leads the reader through twelve gates: Calcination, Solution, Separation, Conjunction, Putrefaction, Congelation, Cibation, Sublimation, Fermentation, Exaltation, Multiplication and Projection. Putrefaction comes right after Conjunction, the joining of the two principles. The order is telling. First the pair is united, and only then does it decay. The marr...

A woman falls from the heights of heaven, trapped in a dark and chaotic region where lion-faced beings torment her. She cries out to the Light she once saw, and she does not stop crying out. Thirteen times she sings a prayer of repentance, and thirteen times her voice rises. This is Pistis Sophia, "Faith-Wisdom," the heroine of one of the longest and most colorful Gnostic books, and her thirteen songs are the center of the story. The book that bears her name is a long conversation between the risen Jesus and his followers, and it is among the main sources for ancient Gnostic belief. A Codex Bought in London The Pistis Sophia survives in a single Coptic manuscript, called the Askew Codex, after Dr. Anthony Askew, a London physician who bought it in the 1770s. It is now in the British Library. The Coptic text is a translation of a Greek original, which scholars place in the third or fourth century. For a long time the book was known only to specialists. A Latin edition a...

A manuscript passed through the hands of London collectors in the eighteenth century before anyone could read it. A physician and book lover named Anthony Askew owned it, and after his death it passed, by way of a sale, to the British Library's predecessor, the British Museum. It was written in Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt, and it turned out to be a long dialogue between the risen Jesus and his disciples about the structure of the heavens. The work is called Pistis Sophia , "Faith-Wisdom," and one of its most striking ideas is a heavenly place called the Thirteenth Aeon. Not from Nag Hammadi A correction is useful at the start. The Pistis Sophia is often grouped with the books of Nag Hammadi, but it is not one of them. The Nag Hammadi library was found in Egypt in 1945. The Pistis Sophia survives in the Askew Codex, which was known in Europe nearly two centuries earlier. The manuscript is Coptic, from around the fourth century, and the work itself is th...

Every few years, according to the old story, a ship with black sails left Athens carrying fourteen young people to Crete. They would be sent into a maze beneath the palace of King Minos, and only a monster would come out. One year a prince named Theseus joined the ship by his own choice. He meant to end the tribute. The tale that follows has a hero, a princess, a craftsman and a thread, and it is the best-known labyrinth story in the Western world. Its meanings have been argued about from Plutarch to the present. A Prince from Troezen Theseus was the son of Aegeus, king of Athens, though some versions give his father as the sea god Poseidon. He was raised by his mother, Aethra, in the town of Troezen, far from Athens. When he was grown, he lifted a great rock under which his father had hidden a sword and a pair of sandals, and he set out to find the king. On the road to Athens, he met a series of brigands and monsters and defeated each in turn. Among them were Sinis, who bent pin...

When Odysseus goes down to the land of the dead in the eleventh book of the Odyssey , he sees many punished souls. One of them stops him. A man is shoving a huge stone up a hill with both hands and feet, straining until the sweat pours off him. Just as he is about to push it over the top, a force turns the stone back, and the heavy block bounds down to the plain. The man starts again. That scene, a few lines in Homer, gave the world a word, "Sisyphean," for any task that never ends. Who Was Sisyphus? In Greek tradition, Sisyphus was the founder and king of Ephyra, an old name for the city of Corinth. He was known as the cleverest and most cunning of men. Homer calls him the most crafty of mortals. Later writers tell of his schemes, and some of them contradict each other, as myths do. Homer does not say why Sisyphus is punished. Other sources offer reasons. One tradition says that he betrayed a secret of Zeus, who had carried off the nymph Aegina, by telling her father, ...