‘Salt arises from the purest sources, the sun and the sea’. As will be seen, however, this also inheres in the body as a fulcrum point of death and palingenesis. With Schwaller’s concept, one is dealing with a juncture of the metaphysical and proto-physical. In the alchemy of René Adolphe Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961), salt forms the equilibrium between an active function (sulphur, divinity, peras) and its passive resistance (mercurial substance, prima materia, the apeiron), aspects which are latently present in the primordial (pre-polarised) unity, but crystallised into physical existence as “salt”. Just as in chemistry a salt may be defined as the product of an acid and a base, alchemically, salt is the integral resolution to the primordial polarities embodied in the mineral symbolique of cinnabar (HgS), the salt of sulphur and mercury. The idea that the agent, instrument and patient of the alchemical process are not separate entities but aspects of one reality prefigures the significance accorded in this study to ‘the Hermetic problem of salt’. As such, the alchemical salt functions as the fulcrum of death and revivification. It was both ‘corruption and preservation against corruption’ (Dorn) both the ‘last agent of corruption’ and the ‘first agent in generation’ (Steeb). S I N C E P A R A C E L S U S (1493-1541), salt has played a role in alchemy as the physical “body” which remains after combustion, the corporeal substance that survives death to reinaugurate new life.
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