Julius Evola’s The Hermetic Tradition studies alchemy as its practitioners actually understood it: not the proto-chemistry of popular imagination but a complete physical and metaphysical science, at once cosmology and anthropology, concerned with the whole man—body, soul, and spirit. Writing from within the Italian esoteric milieu of the early twentieth century and drawing on Greek, Arabic, Latin, and later European alchemical texts, Evola sets out to show that the royal art was a discipline of regeneration, and that its strange symbols encode a doctrine of inner transformation. The book moves from first principles through the stages of the “Great Work,” treating alchemy as a path of self-conquest rather than a chapter in the history of science.
From First Matter to the Red Work
Hansen’s Foreword: Alchemy as Sacred Science
H. T. Hansen opens by insisting that Julius Evola (1898–1974) treated alchemy not as a narrow study of metals but as a complete physical and metaphysical system embracing cosmology and a full anthropology of body, soul, and spirit. Hermetism and alchemy, on this reading, are one and the same discipline, aimed at understanding an ensouled “holy” organism; man is the microcosm to the macrocosm, and “As above, so below” governs the whole. Alchemical symbol language becomes a universal key across the mystery traditions. Hansen traces Evola’s formation: alongside Arturo Reghini (1878–1946) he grasped the parallel between hermetism and ancient theurgy, publishing in 1926 an article on the Mithras cult, and in the UR group (1927–29) alchemical symbols served to teach “Magic.” Against C. G. Jung, Hansen stresses that alchemy is neither abstract thought nor merely psychic process but an exercise of soul and spirit in the Platonic line.
The sources behind the book come into view: Reghini’s magazines Athanor and Ignis (1924–25), early translations of Guénon’s Le voile d’Isis, and access to records of the Fraternity of Myriam founded by Giuliano Kremmerz (Ciro Formisano, 1861–1930), whose “Pamphlet D” grounded Evola’s grasp of the four elements. Ercole Quadrelli trained under Kremmerz; Kremmerz’s Dialoghi sull’ermetismo and Commentarium aided Evola, as did the Chymica vannus and Philalethes. The strongest influence was Cesare Della Riviera’s Il mondo magico degli heroi (1603), a hermetico-alchemical text placing alchemy beside magic and astrology. Evola first aired the material in Krur, then in 1930 wrote “The Doctrine of Transmutation in Medieval Hermetics” for Bilychnis; the book appeared with Laterza in 1931 (revised 1948, again 1971), with Benedetto Croce’s mediation. Evola answered reproaches of excessive annotation by arguing he wrote to show alchemy was a forgotten mystery-science, not merely the cradle of chemistry, and he saw the work as completing his earlier studies in philosophy, magic, and Tantrism, stressing the tradition’s pre- or super-Christian character.
Guénon’s Objections and the Kshatriya Path
René Guénon’s April 1931 review in Voile d’Isis was largely positive but rejected the claim that alchemy is a complete metaphysical doctrine, reducing it to cosmology; he held that a true tradition could not have passed from Egypto-Hellenic origins through Islamic into Christian esotericism, and that alchemy belonged to the Kshatriya caste while only Brahmins pursued metaphysics. Evola accepted the last point, seeing himself as Kshatriya. The disagreement ran deep: for Guénon “Redness” is the highest alchemical stage, above “Whiteness,” while Evola set the “purple” king as pontifex between Heaven and Earth. Jung dismissed the book as a “derailed account of Hermetic philosophy” yet cited a section approvingly. Guénon repeated his reproach when reviewing Evola’s 1932 edition of Della Riviera, blaming him for letting magic absorb alchemy; Eugène Canseliet doubted Guénon’s competence here. After that edition Evola grew more politically defined and quieter about alchemy, though traces survive in Eros and the Mysteries of Love and in his work on Chinese alchemy, where liberation is the passage from “lower” to “higher” cinnabar, born of Sulfur and Mercury.
The Tree, the Dragon, and the Perilous Conquest
The argument turns to vegetable symbolism as the expression of a universal force, predominantly feminine, underlying a supernatural science that grants immortality and dominion—and warns of danger. The Tree appears as the tree of dominion and universal empire in the legends of Holger and Prester John, often doubled as the Tree of the Sun and the Tree of the Moon. In Hermetism the tree shelters Bernard of Treviso’s “fountain,” at whose center coils Ouroboros, the “All”: it personifies “Mercury,” the first principle of the Opus, the divine Water of Life that resurrects the dead—but also the Dragon, a dissolving, killing force. The tradition is permanent and universal, yet whoever contacts the universal force must withstand overwhelming grandeur. Myths show heroes confronting the tree and its divine defenders: Adam, who sought to “become as God,”
The Two Orders as One Reality in Two Modes
The “two orders” are not two separate realities but a single reality manifesting in two modes, and the passage between them is the “sleep,” the forgetting, the loss of spiritual consciousness that the Corpus Hermeticum describes. Georg Gichtel, a disciple of Boehme, explains the mechanism: a fire of ego-power separated from the Light turns into desire, devouring the “oily wetness” until the light is extinguished and a black precipitation—Saturn’s color—forms. This is the corruption of the luminous paradisiacal body, replaced in sleep by the black terrestrial body, seat of insatiable appetite, sickness, and death. The inwardly dead Soul becomes “Hell,” and seven forms appear, daughters of the Fire Dragon and Spirit-of-this-World, the seals that keep the non-regenerated from perceiving the Divine Fire. Fairy tales of seven-headed dragons guarding caverns and treasures preserve this, the gems signifying “powers.” In Mithraism the soul passes seven spheres guarded by angels of the God of Light, each gate matching an initiation degree—transcendental forms of consciousness paralyzed by the power acting on those conquered by symbolic sleep.
The Seven Centres and the Descent of the Soul
What hermetists call Spirit, the “life body,” corresponds to the planetary region, its forces matching each planet; Plotinus taught forces within us analogous to planetary powers. Seven points admit the higher powers into the body, becoming vital currents, and because they are two-way portals the flow can be reversed—equivalent to passing the seven gates, breaking the seven seals, ascending the seven heavens. The Hindu tradition calls these centres chakras or lotuses; the lotus, like the hermetic rose, signifies resurrection and awakening, the flowering of seven higher forms freed from the body’s obstruction, the reconquest of the integral primordial being of Gold. Hermetism rarely locates these points so rigorously as the Orient; the most explicit reference is the fourth illustration of Gichtel’s Theosophia practica, marking coronal, frontal, laryngeal, cardiac, lumbar, umbilical, and sacral regions with planetary ideograms, showing “the dark and terrestrial nature of man.” A spiral runs from Saturn through all centres to the heart, where a serpent coils around the solar principle—the “falling” process down to the restriction where ego-power manifests as the vulgar human personality, each centre named for a passion. This matches the Hellenistic descent of the soul through the planetary spheres, each contributing a garment of passion, the soul becoming “a slave of bodies of strange form.”
The Return Through the Spheres
The return journey, per the Corpus Hermeticum: once separated from irrational nature, the Soul passes back up the spheres, divesting itself of each, transcending the Lords of Destiny, arriving “cloaked in its sole power” at the eighth stage, the sphere of identity and being in itself as against the spheres of alteration and difference—the place of “those who are,” not “becoming.” There one reaches transcendent Knowledge: “birth according to essence” and “becoming a god.” The symbols are those “saved from the waters,” who walk on the water, cross the sea, swim upstream—reaching the state of “those who have attained Gnosis,” “no longer inebriated,” inebriation signifying symbolic sleep, forgetting, the Lethean waters.
Seven Operations, Seven Gates
Ostanes speaks of seven distillations to obtain the Divine Water that kills the living and revives the dead; Lully’s water of life is rectified seven times; Flamel advises entering the Jordan seven times to purify the “leprous head of the raven”; Pernety describes a bathing through the seven planets via seven successive operations up to Gold. In the Great Book of Nature a dyke is overcome on the instruction of an infant guide “not the son of man,” commanding “Strip off your robes,” explained in seven grades of expiation. In Andreae’s Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, bridal candidates pass the test of seven burdens, and seven are the tower’s stories where the King and Queen’s resurrection occurs. Philalethes: seven times the doves of Venus must circle, “all perfection resides in the number seven,” and Mercury must be purified at least seven times before the Bath of the King is ready. The Book of El Habir: “Wash ye seven times the lime that is not yet exhausted,” working over the ashes with heat and irrigation seven times, making them “sweet, good and fair,” so “ye will no longer see death.” The seven gates of Mithras appear in the Arabic Book of Ostanes: after asceticism, fasting, and prayer, a being conducts the author to seven doors guarded by an animal devouring its own parts—desire feeding on itself, the obstacle to transcendent states.
The Trial of the Balance and the Wet Path
Andreae’s warning sets the tone: by immutable destiny one cannot abandon a decision without the greatest peril, and the unpurified will find the wedding “for ill.” Whoever is unsure should flee rather than take on what exceeds his strength. The texts agree on preparing substances—whittling them down—never using them as they are. Two themes recur: getting rid of the heterogeneous parts (whatever is not oneself, or the irrational interference of one faculty with another), and denudation, which extracts and isolates the useful elements. The initiate’s “nudity” is traditional, but two understandings of hermetic garments and their stripping must be kept apart: first, ascetic preparation, the innermost simplification of a soul returned to itself while general human conditions remain; second, a plane of reality corresponding to separation, putting into action the consciousness and power beneath garments that represent general human corporeality.
The Thirst for God and the Corrosive Waters
The wet path’s essence is to provoke separation artificially or violently so that Life liberates the ego and cures its leprosy. One technique elevates the forces of desire to abnormal intensity, directed elsewhere. Boehme calls “hunger” the principle of corporeal birth and rebirth; Gichtel says everything comes down to conversion of the soul and directing desire inwardly, desiring God until Sophia and the Holy Spirit meet the desire, with the obsolete body’s perpetual hunger serving as fertilizing manure, exhausting everything to disgust and anguish until one is constrained to turn to the Father. The magical or magnetic desire of the soul’s will is architect and creator of what the soul conceived in imagination; under powerful desire of prayer the soul is enflamed with clear light, causing the celestial Virgin to ascend, and the Fire swallows up this celestial presence of Light, producing a beautiful clear Light in the heart. Images work as transformers in a transcendent sense, regarding deep emotion concentrated in the release of the fire of desire.
The Book of Ostanes tells of love for the Magnum Opus driving sleep from the author’s eyes, keeping him from food and drink to emaciation, until prayer and fasting delivered him; in vision a being leads the alchemist to seven doors, as Gichtel says God introduced his spirit into the seven centers. Cyliani speaks of having lost everything and having no more hope, when “life is a reproach and death a duty.” Disgust for the world, death of free will, total submission, and faith can serve practically for the Work if one lacks the capacity to make the separation oneself (the dry path) but longs for the supernal, having the center of self in the “Waters,” the viscous Soul, in which the self must be used up. All this is justified hermetically only by very real effects following initiation, not by moral or religious values; if results are the same, other methods may be used—violent orgiastic ecstasy among the Cybellenes, Dionysians, or Maenads, brought to self-transcendence by evoking elemental forces.
Hermetism’s Corrosive Waters, or poison, are substances artificially provoking dissociation between the elements of the human composition. The texts advise against these waters and “violent Fires,” or recommend utmost precaution, because they burn rather than wash, dissolve bodies but cannot save spirits, and work with an impatient haste proceeding from the Devil rather than the slow fire of nature; their action is abrupt and discontinuous, making it harder to keep them active. Greek texts indicate magic herbs—Botavai. Mostly one must refer to ancient traditions of sacred or immortality-conferring drinks: soma of the Vedas, haoma of the Iranians, mead of the Eddas, even wine. Originally these were symbols: the holy drink was the Ether of Life, principle of exaltation and inner regeneration, more accessible to man in the beginning; tradition maintains that at a certain point such a drink ceased to be “known” and something else was substituted—no longer just a symbol but a real drink of substances adapted to produce a psychophysical state favorable for the spirit to realize the true immaterial soma. In the hermetic use of the Botavam, one such artificial means to exaltation or inebriation was probably thought to arrive at effective ecstasy.
The same applies to what some texts call urina vini, “urine of a drunken man.” “Urine” is explained by the root ur, Chaldean for fire (Latin urere, to burn), and by the anagram UR Inferioris NAturae—the humid Fire agent in these methods. “Urine of a drunken man” alludes to exaltation, inebriation, or enthusiasm—pavía—linked to a manifestation of such Fire. When others add that the urine must be infantile and prepubertal, they allude to simplicity and purity (or elementarity, the nascent state)
Degeneration, Not Progress
The book turns to the fate of alchemy in the West and makes a deliberately uncomfortable claim: modern chemistry did not evolve out of hermetic science but grew from its wreckage. In the Middle Ages, people incapable of reading symbols took them literally, assumed the texts described nothing but material operations, and threw themselves into disorganized experiment. Hungry for gold, they stumbled on real discoveries—and these were the true forerunners of chemistry. The relation between initiation and modern science is therefore one of degeneration, not progress: the new science is built on the remains of an older one, gutted of its substance and abandoned by the ignorant and the profane.
The book grants modern science its precision, its technical mastery, even its pragmatic transmutation of metals through the disintegration of atomic nuclei. All of it is impressive to the profane and says nothing to anyone who knows what consciousness and power actually are. Airplanes, penicillin, radio, the atomic bomb—these carry only their physical meaning. In the premodern world such conquests were sporadic and enigmatic, flashes of lightning; every phenomenon was a sign testifying to a spiritual level or a sacred tradition, evidence of what was possible for one who had overcome the human condition and torn a small rip in the veil.
Pearls Before Swine
Because turning such signs into utilities would mean profanation, the hermetic masters felt a natural repugnance toward producing them, and the alchemists repeated: do not cast pearls before swine. So alchemy withdrew from the technological West. A few adepts still appeared here and there—perhaps to confound the positive mentality with gold made before witnesses, perhaps to steady someone on the edge of despair, perhaps to change a life through gifts of an irrational, capricious form. The making of gold stayed a mystery for those who thought it depended on a secret formula or rare substances, never understanding that the missing thing was the mystery of inner transmutation.
The Work Is Not Done by the Hands
Artephius and Morienus say plainly that the magister’s work is not a work of the hands, that it depends on subtle plans and procedures; the substances the alchemists name are not those of the common man. Pernety draws the line: hermetic chemistry takes the Principles as its material and acts on them following nature itself, while vulgar chemistry works on mixtures already at their goal, decomposing them from outside, destroying their natures, producing monsters. Profane chemistry handles the corpses of used-up processes; hermetic chemistry begins from spiritual understanding of the primordial powers and acts on the formative processes that precede the very state in which a substance becomes this or that metal. What separates the two is a metaphysic, an order of consciousness beyond the senses—which presupposes the initiatic transmutation of man himself. Between that transmutation and the transmutation of metals there are analogical correspondences, and certain teachings apply to both, “because the furnace, the path to be followed and the Work are all one.”
An Arab text insists that converging spiritual and corporeal forces are necessary, similar so they can help each other: the operator must be immersed in the work. Petrus Bonus says the work is completed by the adjunction of the Occult Stone, acquired not by the senses but by intelligence, inspiration, revelation, or the teaching of one who knows. The intellectual principle that is man’s form is the beginning and end of the preparations; with the saffron color it appears that man is the principal force in the spagyric Work. “Our Work is interior and exterior.” Psychic energy and the dignity of the operator act on mineral forces through a relation utterly beyond normal consciousness.
The Powder of Projection and the Universal Medicine
From the powder of projection the book draws consequences: as a real substance it transmutes metals into gold; used on man it can serve as one means—dangerous if the subject is unprepared or unaided—of producing the “separation.” Generalized, this yields the Universal Medicine, acting analogously on the three kingdoms to overcome imperfection and privation. Renovation and prolongation of physical life become a symbol of spiritual reintegration; traditions hold that life shortens as man recedes from the primordial state, and some primitive peoples still regard death itself as violent, an act against nature.
The Invisible Masters
Salmon says the Rosicrucians can spiritualize their bodies, travel instantly, become invisible at will. Langlet du Fresnoy reports their founders’ meditations surpass all known since creation; they are destined to accomplish the general reestablishment of the universe, subject to neither hunger, age, nor nature’s inflictions, recognizing by revelation those worthy of admission. Cagliostro declares: “I belong neither to any century nor to any particular place… I am that which is… free and master of life.”
The Rosicrucians serve as a warning to those demanding tangible, theatrical proofs, who picture the magus exhibiting wonders so all eyes converge on him.
The Vulture, the Naked Soul, and the Fire of the Sages
The closing apparatus of the book turns to the mythic imagery that runs beneath the alchemical surface. The vulture buried in the earth and in the body is read through Prometheus: the stolen or infinite Fire—hermetism calls the soul Prometheus as readily as it calls it infinite—becomes the principle of thirst that consumes man in his fall, chained to the rock or to the Stone “fixed” in the body and deprived of the Living Water. The vulture shrieking from the mountaintop is a familiar alchemical allegory, the mountain standing for the highest state still attainable on “Earth,” while the Vulture of the Mountain longs to fly into the Air and promises the supreme prize to whoever endures him and restores his “liquor.” Philo of Alexandria supplies the initiatory reading of nakedness: those who abandon the life of death and share in immortality contemplate the ineffable mysteries, so renouncing “clothes” and “ornaments” elevates poverty to a spiritual precept. A gnostic testament ties nudity to spiritual virility in relation to the “Gate of Heaven,” reserved for pneumatic men who cast off their garments on entering and become bridegrooms through the virility of the Virgin Spirit—the Mercury in “white.” Plotinus describes the same ascent: those climbing the rungs of the sacred Mysteries drop their vestments and go forth naked.
Boehme, the Vine, and the Two Sulfurs
Boehme’s oily quality exercises its vivifying faculty only when compressed in the anguish of death, escaping to generate vegetative life—the symbolic growth that answers to Sophia and “Light.” The change of state that follows may be read as the grace of the mystics, and the “sacred orgies” of classical mystery literature name states of enthusiasm, even frenzy, leading to a particular initiation. The Assyrian karana, “the tree of the drink of life,” and the wine of tantric ritual—called “savior in liquid form” and “semen or power of Shiva,” the very name Hindu alchemy gives Mercury—carry the same thread. Two sulfurs, one of Venus and one of Mars, frame the work: Philalethes describes cooking ordinary Gold with “our Mercury” over hot fire until a “lunar” juice exits, yielding true sulfur united first to Mercury in the fixation of the white and then to “the blood peculiar to it” in the red work. The Zohar’s saint elects to dwell only where male and female are united, the occult sense of sexual union being the path of the spiritual Androgyne destroyed by “sin.” Plotinus gives ambrosia as an inebriating force spinning around itself; when the power of stopping acts on desire, amor turns into a-mors, non-death—a phonetic assimilation dear to troubadour esotericism. Geber recommends balance: unite the balance of Water to that of Fire and everything comes out complete, though Fire alone can also lead to perfection.
Natural Fire and Fire Against Nature
A crucial distinction separates natural Fire, specialized and personalized, from Fire against nature—the not-yet-individualized power of creation, sometimes called the “poisonous” Mercury. D’Espagnet locates the Fire against nature in the stinking menstruum, which turns the stone into a poisonous, voracious Dragon, while the innate Fire is the Archeus of Nature, the “Son and Vicar of the Sun,” which digests and ripens everything if left free. Lenselt calls the Fire of the Sages the only instrument of sublimation, never openly revealed; whoever fails to understand must stop and ask God for light. Bernard of Treviso’s attributes—vaporous, digesting, continuous, not violent, subtle, enveloping, airy, closed, non-combustible, altering—each carry a direction, and Artephius says “our” Fire destroys, dissolves, congeals and calcines while encircling and containing. “Cooking” names fire’s action ripening crude substances; the Turba commands cooking at beginning, middle and end so that Nature is borne to completion.
Air, the White Work, and the Peacock’s Tail
Agrippa holds Air to be the body of the life of our sensitive spirit, of a spiritual and elevated virtue, the sensitive Soul rejuvenating the surrounding Air and feeling qualities in a living Air joined to the spirit. White Gold, White Sulfur and White Stone symbolize the ego principle in this state, and Bernard of Treviso calls White Sulfur “the simple soul.”
The Stone That Is Not a Stone
The conceptual heart of the book is the hermetic identification of the seeker with the sought. The First Matter of the Wise—called chaos, the egg, the dragon Ouroboros, the water of life—is not a substance to be found in a laboratory but the undifferentiated ground of experience itself, the state in which the opposition between self and world has been suspended. The texts Evola assembles insist on this with almost comic persistence: the stone is “found everywhere, base and precious, hidden and visible to everyone”; it accompanies the traveler and stays at home; no one can live without it, and few notice it. Morienus tells a king that God has placed this marvelous thing within him, and that whoever seeks any other stone will be deceived. What looks like obscurity is deliberate: the philosophers wrote, as one maxim has it, only for themselves.
From this follows the book’s most striking reversal. The body, which mystical traditions usually treat as a prison to be escaped, appears in hermeticism as the true mine and vein of gold—the necessary condition of consciousness, the “root and origin” of the soul’s faculties. Evola returns again and again to the alchemical exhortation not to fly into the heavens but to search here below, in the humus. The work is not escape from the body but a transformed relationship to it: the dissolution of the early stages is only a passing phase, after which the correct natural relations are reestablished. This is what he means by calling hermeticism affirmative and magical in spirit, and it is why he insists, against C. G. Jung, that alchemy was never merely a psychic process but an exercise of soul and spirit in the Platonic sense.
The Two Paths and the Risk of the Work
Evola distinguishes two techniques for reaching the goal. The wet path works through the liberated waters of desire, violently provoking separation so that life frees the ego; the dry path works through fire, the ego acting directly on itself, without the crisis of the “black” stage. The first is more accessible to ancient and Oriental man, whose individuality was less developed; the second suits the modern Occidental, for whom the barrier of ordinary faculties must be broken by those same faculties—a task that demands a natural dignity or a prior initiation. The book is candid about the danger on both routes. The corrosive waters burn rather than wash; they dissolve bodies but cannot save spirits, and they work with an impatient haste that the texts attribute to the Devil rather than to the slow fire of nature. The myths of the tree encode the same warning: Adam falls where the Buddha triumphs, Prometheus is chained where Hercules passes, and the King of the Woods at Nemi must guard his crown because whoever seizes it takes his power. Evola reads this as the distinction between the magical hero and the religious saint—the one who fails is, for the hero, merely a man whose fortune did not equal his courage; for the saint, the enterprise itself is sacrilege. He sides, unmistakably, with the hero.
The later chapters turn to the culmination: the White Work, in which a new “body of light” is formed and the stone is said to espouse a celestial nymph; then the Red Work, in which the fire is increased until it reaches the mineral depths of the body, the region of Saturn and lead, and the ego is returned to the consciousness of its primordial act. Purple, sceptre, and crown belong to this stage, for only here is regeneration complete. The Emerald Tablet’s “strong strength of all strength” is fulfilled only when it is “converted into Earth.”
A Kshatriya’s Alchemy
The book’s reception history is inseparable from its author’s quarrels. René Guénon, reviewing it in 1931, accepted much but denied that alchemy was a complete metaphysical doctrine, reducing it to a cosmological system; he also held that a true tradition could not have passed from Egypto-Hellenic origins through Islamic to Christian esotericism, and that alchemy belonged to the Kshatriya caste while only Brahmins were dedicated to metaphysics. Evola accepted the last point and made it his own, setting the “purple” king as pontifex between Heaven and Earth against Guénon’s contemplative white. The disagreement is telling: what Evola offers is a warrior’s alchemy, a doctrine of dominion rather than contemplation, and his book is best read as the statement of that position. H. T. Hansen’s foreword traces the lineage behind it—Arturo Reghini and the UR group, the Fraternity of Myriam and Giuliano Kremmerz, and above all Cesare Della Riviera’s Il mondo magico degli heroi of 1603—and notes that Evola saw the work as the completion of his earlier writings on philosophy, magic, and Tantrism, stressing the pre- or super-Christian character of the tradition. Whether or not one accepts its premises, the book remains a serious attempt to take alchemy at its word: as a forgotten science of the self, and a royal art in the most literal sense.
