Jeremy Crow goes in depth explaining the three principal elements of alchemy: Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. Also explained are the forth element of Earth and the fifth element of Quintessence and how they all relate to one another.
The Three Principal Elements
Salt/Water
Sulphur/Fire
Mercury/Air
The Fourth Element
Earth
- The combination of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury in an impure state
The Alchemical Process
- Take Earth and break it down into a Chaos of it's component parts: Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury with impurities
- Separate out each of the three principal elements
- Purify each of these three elements individually
- Recombine the purified elements
The Fifth Element
Quintessence
- The combination of purified Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury
Video Transcript:
Hi,
Jeremy Crow here. In this video I wanted to go over the Elements of occultism and how they're related to alchemy. Really define them, because I think that there's a lot of people that don't actually really know what they're about.
Okay, so let's get into this. So what I think, you know, what I've noticed is that you'll have people writing articles, doing videos, whatever, even, you know, book authors and you'll read the description of the elements, the five Elements of Western occultism and I'll be like, "You know what? I actually don't think that they really understand what this is or what... or how they relate to each other properly." And I wanted to kind of address that and give you guys the real scoop, the 411. If you haven't studied alchemy, if you haven't read, you know, some of the old alchemical texts and try and decipher them and figure out what they're actually talking about you don't really know what the Elements are. Sorry to say.
You know, I'll see people saying things like, "Oh that's the Element of Spirit which is Akasha and it contains all the memories of all the world" and all kinds of weird things that people come up with that they either parroted from, you know, some other author or speaker or it's just something that they've kind of intuitively come up with themselves. But these concepts are not just arbitrary. These are... It's a worldview that's used to describe how the physical universe operates.
So let's get into it. First off you have to talk about the three principal Elements. And these are in alchemy... often they're referred to as Salt, Sulfur and Mercury. And I like those terms. I think that it helps clarify the fact that there are three principal Elements that are at the core of all of it. You can also map those three principal Elements onto the more familiar Elements that you probably have heard of that are on the pentagram, etc... Salt is Water. Sulfur is Fire. And Mercury is Air. So I'm talking about Elemental Mercury, not planetary Mercury. So that's a little bit of a confusion there, so that is one reason you might want to use "Water, Fire, and Air" instead of "Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury."
So what is each of these? And when I say, "Principal Elements" I mean as in First or Primary. I don't mean like a... like a "principle" or a quality. Salt or Water is the physical matrix of a thing. It is sometimes referred to as the etheric body of something. It's really... It's the pattern or the blueprint of the physical thing itself. So essentially, you know, the shape, the quality, the pattern. The pattern that is then filled in with the building blocks of, you know, matter. So that's what Salt or Water is.
And then the next thing that we'll will address, you know, in no particular order, would be Sulfur or Fire. Now this is the very personal aspect of an individual. The soul, in a sense, whereas the Salt or Water Element, that can be thought of as the body, and Sulfur or Fire is a Soul. The personal Soul. And this is the part that kind of makes you... This is the thing that really, kind of, differentiates you from any other individual unit of whatever, you know, an apple. Or, you know, it separates one apple from another. And there's massive commonalities between one apple and another but that's kind of part of what that Element represents. The other aspect of that Element Sulfur or Fire would be just the energy of it. It's what kind of makes a thing go, in a sense. You can almost say, "What gets you up in the morning." You know, that type of energy; that kind of, "What makes you go."
The final principal Element would be Air or elemental Mercury or alchemical Mercury, you could even say. When you get to the more subtle realms you start to get these non-local phenomenon. So you can have a piece of software that is on multiple pieces of hardware. That, in a sense, is kind of what spirit, you know, the spirit, you know, that is represented by that Element of Mercury or Air as we're talking about in alchemy.
And I know some people are gonna get confused because they think of the body as the Element of Earth and they think of spirit as the Element Spirit, you know, which isn't even really an Element. But yeah, just think of it in the three principal Elements first, so you've got "Body, Soul, and Spirit." You've got "Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury." You've got "Water, Fire, and Air." Different words to describe the same concept here.
Everything that is manifest... everything that has been manifested exists as a combination of those three principal Elements in various quantities and qualities of each. So there's different types of Sulfur. There's different types of Salt. You know, the Salt for an apple is gonna be different than the Salt for lead. So when you combine those three principal Elements to manifest something, that is generally referred to as Earth: the Element of Earth. So the Element of Earth is the fourth Element. It's not a principal Element. It's a derivative Element. It's derived from the combination of the three principal Elements in an impure state.
The impurities in alchemy are referred to as Caput Mortuum or Terra Damnata. And those are just Latin words that mean "Death's Head" or "Damned Earth." You know, one of my alchemy mentors referred to it as almost like the principle of entropy in a sense that it is kind of holding it steady or holding it in a stasis, in a sense. And that's what the kind of impurity is. It's kind of holding it back or binding it or even just stabilizing it, you could even say. So that's what Earth is: everything that you encounter.
An apple - That is the Element Earth and if you break it down using, you know, in alchemy this would be the stage of Fermentation. Or sometimes it's referred to as Putrefaction. This stage breaks it down; breaks down the bonds between the different components; between the different principal Elements and creates a Chaos of those three principal Elements in their impure state. What you then do in alchemy is then you separate out the Salt, the Sulfur, and the Mercury components from that Chaos. And you can do that. There's lab methods of doing that but you can also do it on more subtle realms as well. That would be like in internal alchemy or inner alchemy.
Then what you do is then you take each of those separated out principal Elements and purify each of them. You remove the Terra Damnata or Caput Mortuum from each of those and you... there's methods of doing each of those. And then you recombine those three principal Elements that have been purified and once they re-form it's almost like a resurrection of the Earth but in a pure state; in a pure manner. So what you get is not the fourth Element anymore. It's something that has such a different quality to it because of the lack of the impurities; the lack of that entropy, it's a considered a Fifth Element: The Fifth Element. Literally "Quintessence."
That's what the Latin word Quintessence means: It's the fifth Element. That's what that whole thing means. That's how the elements connect to each other. The three principal Elements combine in an impure to create Earth, which is basically everything you encounter, is the element Earth which is a derivative Element. It's not an Element on its own. You break it down to its components: the three principal Elements of Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury. Purify them. Remove that Caput Mortuum. Recombine those purified. Once they bond you have created the Quintessence: The Fifth Element._
Don't say, "Spirit." I, you know, I don't like it when people say "Spirit" because it betrays their lack of understanding of what it actually means. It's the Quintessence. This is the Fifth Element. It's a New Earth; a perfected Earth, in a sense. You know, if you want to get Gnostic about it it's the resurrection body of Christ. It's the Rainbow body of Tibetan Buddhism. You know? It's a Taoist immortal. If you're talking about it in the human realm, you know, which is probably the most applicable to, you know, people who are occultists. But there is lab alchemy as well, where you can produce physical products using this worldview; this paradigm.
That's really what I wanted to get across is that, you know, these Elements they're not just these arbitrary categories that you, kind of, can throw anything into for convenience or for a mental trick, you know? This is a real way of looking at the world from an alchemical perspective and there are very real implications of that worldview and there are very real techniques and technologies that you can derive from that paradigm, that you can apply to lab alchemy you can apply to internal alchemy and you can apply to a lot of different things.
You know, basically every occult practice that I engage in is informed by this, you know? That we're trying to do this process, you know. We're trying to square the circle, in a sense, you know? We're trying to manifest the Philosopher's Stone. We're trying to, you know, become immortal; become Ascended Beings, in a sense, you know, ascended from those limitations of the Caput Mortuum, the Terra Damnata, you know? And be able to apply them when we want to, as well when we need to apply that binding force.
So I hope this clarified a few things for you. I hope this gave you a more deeper understanding of what the Elements actually are and how they relate to one another and how this is all tied up in alchemy. If you have any other questions... did I gloss over something that you wanted me to get a little more in depth into? Was there something that was... Did I make a mistake that you wanted to point out that I can issue a correction?
Or you know, did it really kind of resonate with you? Did it click something? Did it cause some sort of Epiphany where you're like, "oh! Now I understand that whole thing that I've been studying for years and now it actually clicks!" because that's what happened to me, actually. I wasn't studying alchemy for the first bunch of years. The first several years that I was studying occultism I wasn't doing lab alchemy or any type of alchemy whatsoever. I wasn't studying the old instructional texts. I wasn't doing any of that stuff but once I did get into that and I did start figuring out, "Okay, this is what you do in the actual lab. This is what you do internally..."
You know, it all just clicked and I was like, "Oh okay, and that's what they're talking about when they say that, you know, all the other Elements came out of Water, Air, and Fire." And I never really kind of understood that. I just, kind of been... I thought I understood it, to be honest. I had convinced myself that just knowing that kind of concept... that the other Elements come out of those three principle ones. That just knowing that concept made me think that I understood the concept. I had heard of the concept.
Anyway, so now I'm rambling about it. But it was such a huge revelation for me when it... when I did got, kind of... finally get access to that information and it clicked in my brain it's just been such a powerful thing that it's informed my occult practice and experience ever since. It's such an important concept. That's the sublunary realm. It's what we encounter for the most part most of the time in our daily lives. So I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it was illuminating.
And until next time everybody,
Stay Lucid!
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