The Great Work culminates in the magnificent, fiery climax of the Rubedo, the reddening. This is the supreme achievement of the alchemical art, the final stage where the golden dawn of the Citrinitas intensifies into the blazing, crimson glory of the zenith sun. Here, the long and arduous journey through the void, the washing of the soul, and the awakening of the intellect find their ultimate purpose. The Rubedo is the manifestation of the Lapis Philosophorum, the Philosopher's Stone, the universal medicine and the elixir of immortal life. The matter in the hermetic vessel, having been broken down, purified, and spiritually elevated, is now fully integrated and crystallized into a perfect, incorruptible form. This is the sacred marriage, the coniunctio oppositorum, where all dualities are extinguished in the supreme unity of the divine fire.

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...

A man in a wide hat leans over a quiet pond, holding a long pole. At the end of the pole, a branched growth is being lifted out of the water. Below the surface lie more of these branches, spreading like small trees. Behind him, a wooden footbridge crosses the stream, a hut stands on stilts, and a town rises among hills under a sky with a single ray of sun. This is the thirty-second emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto says: as coral grows under water and hardens in the air, so does the Stone. The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, took many of his images from nature. The Motto The Latin line is a comparison. Coral and the Stone grow in the same way. Both are soft under water, and both harden when they meet the air. T...

A potter sits on a low stool in a workshop, shaping a tall jar on the wheel. Jugs and bowls stand on the shelves, a basin of wet clay waits on the floor, and light comes through a window of small panes. This is the fifteenth emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto speaks to the reader: the work of the potter, made of dry and wet, should teach you. The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, wanted his book to be seen, read and sung. The Motto The Latin line is almost a classroom instruction. Look at the potter and learn. His work consists of dry and wet, and nothing more is said. There is no secret formula here. The emblem points at a common craft and asks the reader to understand what it teaches. Dry and Wet Clay alone is...

A seated woman in a long robe looks up in alarm while a bearded man in a cloak pours water over her head from a shallow basin. Two naked children stand against her knees: one has a sun for a face, the other carries a crescent moon. At the right, a plumed man in armor holds a bundle of books, tearing them open, and torn pages lie scattered at his feet. This is the eleventh emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto is an order: whiten Latona and tear your books. The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, knew how many books the seekers of his day had read, and how little they agreed. The Motto The Latin line is two commands joined by an "and." First, whiten Latona. Second, tear your books. The second command is the sur...

Very few animals have been drawn, carved and written about as much as the lion. It watches from city gates and royal thrones, from coats of arms and church doors, from the stone steps of a thousand libraries. People who had never seen a living lion still knew what it meant: strength, courage and the right to rule. The alchemists took this ancient meaning and added a twist of their own, because in their books the lion appears twice, once green and once red, and the first one eats the sun. King of Beasts The lion's place at the head of the animal kingdom is very old. In Mesopotamia, the kings of Assyria had themselves carved hunting lions in huge stone reliefs, such as those from the palace of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the seventh century BCE, to show that the ruler could master the fiercest of creatures. The goddess Ishtar was shown standing on a lion. In Egypt the lioness-goddess Sekhmet embodied the burning power of the sun, and the Great Sphinx combines a lion's body w...

In 1940, as German troops entered Copenhagen, a Hungarian chemist named George de Hevesy faced a problem. Two gold Nobel Prize medals, belonging to the German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck, sat in his laboratory at Niels Bohr's institute. The medals had been sent to Denmark for safekeeping, and carrying gold out of Germany was forbidden. If the occupiers found them, the owners would be in danger. Hevesy did something no thief would think of. He dropped the medals into a flask of aqua regia and let them vanish. The Solvent That Dissolves Kings Aqua regia, Latin for "royal water," is a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, usually in a ratio of one part to three. Neither acid alone will touch gold, the most unreactive of the familiar metals. Together they do, producing a golden-orange liquid that holds the metal in solution as a chloride compound. The name is old. Alchemists called gold the king of metals, and gold and platinum, which the acid also ...

Anyone who has heated cinnabar knows it is a stubborn teacher of color. Mercury and sulfur, ground together, give a dull black powder. Heat that powder in a closed vessel, and it rises as vapor and settles on the glass as a brilliant scarlet crust. Nothing was added, and the same substances now show a new face. For the early alchemists of Egypt and Greece, who watched changes like this on their furnaces, color was not decoration. It was the signal that a substance was moving toward perfection, and it became the language in which the Great Work was told. Four Colors in Greek Egypt The oldest known scheme comes from Greek-speaking Egypt, in the writings of Zosimos of Panopolis, around 300 CE, and in works attributed to Maria the Prophetess. They speak of four stages named after colors: melanosis , blackening; leukosis , whitening; xanthosis , yellowing; and iosis , reddening. The sequence was related to the making of alloys that looked like gold or silver, and it described real col...

Hermes Trismegistus — the mythical patron of alchemy, depicted in a medieval mosaic in Siena Cathedral.

To the uninitiated, Alchemy is a historical farce—a primitive, superstitious attempt by greedy charlatans to turn base lead into physical gold. It is a spectacular misunderstanding. If you approach Alchemy as a chemistry experiment, you have missed the entire point. Alchemy was never about the metallurgy of the laboratory. It was the "Great Work" (Magnum Opus)—a highly sophisticated, metaphorical technology for the radical transmutation of the human consciousness. It is the science of burning away the dross of the ego to reveal the latent, divine gold of the spirit.