(Burkhardt's) Alchemy, the Anathor, and the Zendo

Last Updated: 2025-11-18 09:00:00 -0600

For arcane (hah) reasons known only to me and my browsing history, I’ve recently taken an interest in alchemy, and to that end, was tipped to Titus Burkhardt’s Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. I’ve made no small amount of noise in the past that I generally try to take a syncretic view of the world, and as part of that general attitude, I’ve been interested in examining how some western mystical traditions relate to (and differ from) my own practices. I’ve always been the “chop wood, carry water” student of the mysteries of life — since long before I knew that particular phrase, I’ve always considered the weight of a practice against what it brings into The Work - and day to day living. So, now that I’ve finally finished digesting the text, I thought it would be good to opine a while on Burkhardt’s views of Alchemy, and where I think Alchemy fits quite nicely into the rest of The Work.

Who is Titus Burkhardt and What is This Book?

Titus Burkhardt was a prolific writer on esoteric and religious topics who was active in the middle of the twentieth century. Alchemy is actually not considered one of his more important works, but it did make its way onto a short list of works that feed into each other and ultimately build to some readings of Jungian psychology, which is how it grabbed my attention.

For my money, I would describe the book as a primer on the understanding of Alchemy As Spiritual Practice and the basic symbolism used by older (even ancient) documentation, such as the Emerald Tablet or the works of paracelsus. In that respect, it does its job very well. It probably didn’t need to be my active read for several months, or be picked apart quite as thoroughly as my notes and marginalia covered, especially if you aren’t using it as a stepping stone to some other work. In my case though, I am working on a thorough synthesis of ideas from multiple - at times, esoteric - traditions, so I wanted to make sure I had a firm grip of the material.

A Caution on Historical Authors

Something you have to keep in mind about Burkhardt was that he was born at the outset of the 20th century and wrote through the middle century. This leads to two particular quirks of his writing and argumentation that you have to sort of tease out, or at least be prepared for, and adjust your writing in kind. The first is that very early on he makes an argument thusly:

There can be no free-thinking alchemy whose interpretation is hostile to the Church.

Burkhardt was a Catholic, from what I could gather, and it’s somewhat clear based on his writing that - while he freely references other religions (occasionally even with a reasonable amount of understanding), he considers Catholic Christianity specifically correct in a way that he seems to consider all other doctrines slightly in error. This is made particularly ironic by the lovely quotation from him which comes earlier the book, and which I’m tempted to do an illumination of:

The growth of a genuine tradition resembles that of a crystal, which attracts homologous particles to itself, incorporating them according to its own laws of unity.

And, honestly, I believe in this respect that Burkhardt is approaching the topic in the same way I am, but just with a different position. He considers the Church to have papal inerrancy, so he has to interpret the mysteries in that light. I believe (as I’ve explained before) in the Mahayana (specifically, Zen) understanding of reality that is best articulated through the Three Truths (which I go into more detail about here), and have to approach Alchemy in that light - this essay is overall a piece of that.

The other caution worth throwing at Burkhardt immediately is that he has a very early understanding of mental health. At Freud and Jung were contemporaries (but not likely correspondants). At various points in the book he’s going to say things along the lines of “Alchemy is not a cure for mental illness”. When he says this, he is not necessarily meaning the phrase ‘mental illness’ the way you or I would today. This was an era when only the most abject forms of mental illness were noted. Think less neurodivergence and anxiety or mood disorders, and more in terms of severe, inadequately treated psychosis. Certainly, no purely-mental process is going to address that.

What is Alchemy (According to Titus Burkhardt)

Burkhardt begins with a well-sourced (and most likely correct) assertion: Alchemy is best understood less as a strict precursor to chemistry or metallurgy and more as an outright spiritual practice. The “lead” to be turned into “gold” is nothing more or less than the Alchemist themselves. What it means to become such a “golden” person is left nearly as an exercise to the reader, but the assertion that this was the primary goal of the practice is robustly argued. It has at its center a single tenant: reality (such as it is) is an onion or matrushka of concentric micro- and macrocosms.

Saying it that way sounds more fantastic than it actually is. What Burkhardt is driving at with this model is the idea that various processes at all levels of reality are symbolic of one another - not merely alegorically, but in actual practice. In a more concrete example, we can see the process of calcining a mineral by combusting the hell out of it to drive off impurities as an analogy and model for perhaps applying stringent and ruthless “heat” in terms of attention to a knot in the personality to try and burn it away.

To put it in the shortest way possible, Burkhardt believes that the secret alchemical teachings are a path by which the “spirit can be embodied, and the body imbued with the spirit”. Throughout the book, he explains this teaching by alluding to the alchemical working processes as ways of thinking about, and thereby acting upon, three elements of the self: the body, the soul, and the spirit.

The Body, The Soul, and the Spirit

If we take our micro-macrocosmic onion model and pick an arbitrary axis running through it to explore, Burkhardt posits there are essentially four layers the “self” passes through - three that are ‘truly’ the self, and a fourth that’s a bit special. From order of most to least mundane, those are the body, the soul, the spirit (or, sometimes ‘the intellect’), and the Logos. I told you it was a bit special. He places this argumentation near the beginning of the book, where it is at its most esoteric. It is, however, important argumentation to establish the idea that all the layers of the cake are coherent with one another, because quite a bit of it falls apart without this idea of a Logos.

By the Logos, Burkhardt is referring to “the Substance of God”. At various times he also calls this same concept the “Universal Intellect”, with the idea being that “The Spirit/Intellect” which is part of the self could be seen as a facet or constituent part of the Logos. He uses this term, Logos, I think out of reflex, though I could certainly see it being included in any Christian Mystic tradition. It derives from the first verse of the Gospel of John, which of course in English can be read:

In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

You can make of that what you will but it’s important that you remember this for the upcoming section: I believe he is correct about the position of the Logos in this model. And again, if you’re a Christian building the model, the Logos is probably what goes there.

The other three elements bear some explaining. I think we all know what a body is. Having both the Soul and the Spirit in the same model can be, however, a bit confusing. To massively abbreviate, the Soul is the part of the self (which Burkhardt calls the Psyche) which forms the “base” of our behaviours, physical and mental. Conversely, the Spirit (our little sliver of the divine intellect), is the “higher” mentality of our thought processes, among its properties being that of discernment. To put it one way, the body is what does yelling at your co-worker, because the soul knows how to perform anger, and the spirit is the part of you that is disgusted when you do it.

Armed with this knowledge we can now furnish ourselves with a better idea of what Burkhardt thinks philosophical alchemy was for: a process by which the Alchemist slowly embodies, or realizes (in the sense of “making real”), that enlightened/purified/”higher” self.

“Please install Logos or a compatible Library”

I believe that the relationship between Spirit and Logos in this model is extremely important when it comes to making the rest of the model make sense, I just don’t believe that it necessarily has to be the very, very Christian idea of the “Logos” as in “YHWH and His Son” specifically that makes the model make sense. What’s important here is an understanding of a “selfish” versus “universal” intellect. Burkhardt himself makes this somewhat clear:

The Intellect has direct and immediate knowledge of itself, but this knowledge lies beyond the world of Distinction.

Burkhardt assumes this is a relationship of top-down inheritance: a universal intellect begets Mankind, and therefore Mannish (or Selfish) Intellect. I would however argue that it’s just as valid to assert the relationship flows the other way. The self is an engine by which the universe percieves itself, and in a universe that is (a)strongly causal and (b) contains Intellects, you will necessarily arrive at a Universal Intellect.

In my notebook almost every time Burkhardt wrote “Logos” or “The Intellect” (meaning the universal intellect), I found the text was equally intelligible if you wrote “Indra’s Net”. What’s important here is actually not the presence of that fourth piece (beyond insisting that a world of causes and effects means micro-macrocosmic symbols are valid), it’s that you understand the “self” as a layer-cake of things… which are ultimately part of that one Allness.

Speedrunning the Alchemical Process

Titus, usually through attribution to ancient alchemists (Flammel and Paracelceus being the standouts), insisted that the alchemical process could be quite easily explained. He modeled it after two different, and somewhat cyclical, processes, at the root of which was the single idea “solve et coagula” - dissolve and coagulate. In short, it’s only by dissolving and “re-forming”, or the process of actively changing, that the Alchemical process can be achieved.

His two models were a “progression of the planets” (by which I need to remind everyone involved the term ‘planet’ has a significantly different meaning here than it would in an Astronomy lecture), and the progression of the colours. If one considers the seven relevant planets in order: mercury, saturn, jupiter, the moon, venus, mars, and the sun; his model divided them thusly:

Mercury is the planet which governs Quicksilver (which is the Prima Materia (or like the Prima Materia)), and is therefore the key to the work.
Saturn, Jupiter, and The Moon are the progression of the silver-bearing planets through lead, tin, and finally to silver, and completing this work is known as the “Lesser Work”
Venus, Mars, and The Sun is the progression of the gold-bearing planets through copper, iron, and finally gold, which of course is the ‘Great Work’.

It’s very important to state now that quite obviously chemistry will not let you turn any of these elements into any of the other elements. That is a job for applied nuclear physics and explaining how to achieve it is beyond the scope of this essay.

He also considered these three processes in the lens of another three-step alchemical model, named for the colours representatives of the step:

Nigredo or “Blackening”, which can be analogized to “dying to the world” or in some interpretations “fermentation”
Albedo or “Whitening” or “Bleaching”; purifying that which is created in Nigredo.
Rubedo or “Reddening”; giving form to the purified thing.

Armed with this explanation, we can further understand that the lesser and greater work each proceed through a step of blackening, whitening, and reddening. In the Lesser Work, there is a “spiritualization of the body” which takes place, which Burkhardt likens to the action of solve. The work proceeds thusly:

Saturn(Lead) - The Nigredo of the lesser work, which is dying to the world (what Burkhardt calls a “nox profunda”). During this stage, it is said that we are “producing the ash”. This phrase has some importance which I will explain further in the section on the Anathor. He explains:

“Thus man can only know his immutable essence when he has renounced all that is in him as perishable, including the soul”

Which is very interesting because it’s both (a) a poor Christian doctrine, and (b) consistent with the Zen concept of anatman, which of course is the idea that there is no permanent and inviolable kernel of the self (atman).

Jupiter/Tin - The start of Albedo in the lesser work. The soul has now been freed by the destruction of the body. This leads to something he refers to as the “sublimation of the subtle power”, meaning the ability of the soul/quicksilver/prima materia to take forms. It is now possible to bring the soul back into the now-purified body.
Luna/Silver - The conclusion of the Albedo and the last step of the lesser work. This is the “most dissolved” state of being. Of it, Burkhardt says:

All the potentialities of the soul contained in the initial chaos have now been fully developed and united in each other.

From there, we proceed immediately to the Great Work, which brings us through the full process of Reddening. In a way, you could see the lesser work both as “dissolution” and as the creation of a volatile, imprintable “self”. At the conclusion of the lesser work, the alchemist is in the state of being able to be formed. The active principle of gaining form (Sulphur), then acts upon our prima materia/quicksilver-like selves. Sulphur is an important concept here; it is the form-giving capacity of “the Spirit”, that is that piece of ourselves that is a face of the Divine Spirit (Logos/Indra’s net).

Venus/Copper - An unstable and coarse reception of the colouring or “forming” power of Sulphur.
Mars/Iron - Completing the penetration of the Body (which is now coterminous with the soul!) with the “incombustible sulphur”. Titus refers to this stage as “incarnation of the Logos”; if we think earlier of the model with Indra’s Net in place of the Logos, this could be “reception of the expression of Buddha-Nature” or perhaps “dharma transmission”.
Sun/Gold - The completion of the great work, and the final reddening. The Sulphur has reshaped the solution of spirit in body fully. Put another way, we have given colour and form to a fluid Bodymind.

Solve et Coagula (et Solve… ad mortem)

In the final analysis, we see that Burkhardt is outlining a relatively simple process: by dying to the world, we can take pains to make ourselves into a fluid self-substance (“dissolve” and become a formable prima materia), which can then be shaped by the shape-bearing power of Sulphur. At a first blush, this makes it seem as though the process of Alchemical Great Work is a “one and done” firing; that this describes an enlightened or purified “Golden” state which can be definitively obtained. I do not think this is actually so, and I can argue it from physical reality, as well as from Burkhardt’s own text.

The argument from physical reality relies on the previously-established premise of the Alchemical Philosophy which is that processes and arts which take place in the physical microcosm are reflective of processes in the mental-spiritual “macrocosm”. Specifically, it has to do with the process of chemical purification. When chasing a very high purity end-product, it is almost never viable to go through your purification process a single time. We see this in everything from synthetic chemistry to metallurgy. The writer knows the first pass at a passage is rarely the perfect distillation of the idea you’re trying to communicate. So too, then, with the Alchemical great work. Every nigredo combusts the alchemist more completely, allowing each albedo to drive off more of the impurity, and the purer the resulting substrate, the more perfectly it can be shapde during Rubedo. This interpretation is broadly consistent with the thrust of the Genjokoan as interpted by Okamura. And let’s not forget that in addition to purifying the target substance, you also need catalysts and reagents of high purity and instruments of increasingly precise sensitivity. We see this not just in chemistry but other disciplines: in metrology and machining, for example, we have reached levels of precision that no human sense could validate, and we got there by first establishing a very high standard for flatness, which is no more sophisticated than a particular way of grinding stones together.

I believe Burkhardt means to at least imply this, though I cannot point to a singular passage where he actually makes it clear that the great work is a repetitive endeavour. My strongest argument for this is the entirety of Chapter 14, which is a discussion of the story of Nicholas and Perrenelle Flammel, and their repeated successes and failures to perform the work themselves. It is only by nearly-extreme repetition that they supposedly complete the work.

The Divine Androgyne, the Union of Opposites, and “Universal Nature”

Burkhardt spends several chapters setting up his big reveal of the alchemical process. In “speedrunning”, we skipped over a few of his salient ideas that didn’t directly relate to the process itself, but in so doing, I failed to establish the meanings and symbols for three specific “substances” he was discussing: Quicksilver and Sulphur, and then a more allegorical substance he calls materia prima.

Quicksilver, which is now known by the chemical name Mercury (which you can remember by its old alchemical symbol being that for the planet mercury!), is an allegorical construct describing the most form-receptive condition a material can be in and still be classed as a material. It is ascribed a feminine nature, because it is receptive to form.

In contrast, Sulphur is considered a masculine compound, because of its inerrant rigidity and its ability to give form. I do not think that it is a coincidence that the combination of mercury and sulphur results in a variety of compounds, some of which form the distinctive red mineral Cinnabar, or that the philosopher’s stone is usually described as red. This of course a solid, and thus sulphur is symbolic of coagulation or crystallization (coagula). I also do not think that it is a coincidence that Cinnabar is not gold, but the action of quicksilver and sulphur is said to produce the gold of the Great Work. The solution to this problem is hinted at in the description of Materia Prima.

Materia Prima is an esoteric and hard to describe “substance”, so much so that Burkhardt dedicates an entire chapter to attempting to describe it. Fundamentally, it is not to be thought of as a “substance” the way that “mercury” and “sulphur” are things which you can obtain and keep in your workshop - if you do so, however, please follow the appropriate material safety guidelines, as mercury metal and sulphur compounds can be hazardous to the health. Of it, Burkhardt writes:

Only when the soul is freed from all its rigidities and inner contradictions, does it become that plastic substance. […] The unity of the soul with prima materia is lived and known only to the extent which the work has progressed along the road to completion.

He calls it the “fundamental substance of the psyche/soul”, but draws a clear line that it is not synonymous with the “unconscious mind”. He invites us to consider the mind like geological strata. At the topmost, is the live and loamy level of conscious thought. Beneath the conscious thought is a bedrock unconsciousness, of which the Prima Materia is just a part. It is “locked” in the physical matrix of unconsciousness, like an ore in limestone, and that matrix (in the geological sense of the word) is made up of our habits, behavioural modes, and “psychic impressions”, by which he seems to mean those experiences which have had a lasting impact on us, for good or ill. Through allusions to Morenius and Abdul-Qasim al Iraqi, he goes on to say that, in order to perform the alchemical work, we have to mine this substance out of us, and the two keys to that are Sulphur and Mercury. This refinement of Prima Materia is necessary to perform the work, and is itself the work.

Putting it another way, the Alchemist must use both masculine (form-driving) and feminine (form-receptive) energies and attitudes in order to dig past the conscious soil and mine valuable ores of the unconscious, and, using both energies, “burn away” or “refine off” the habits, rote behaviors, and (for want of a better term) “baggage”. This makes the soul or unconscious increasingly fluid and receptive. The true Prima Materia “is the faithful mirror of all truths”.

In the shortest way I can get around it: a person must use both masculine and feminine energies in their life to perform the heavy work that is known elsewhere as “dropping off bodymind”. This could be difficult for people who adhere strictly to the idea of binary gender, but remember: all in Alchemy is allegory. The idea that femininity is form-receptive and masculinity is form-projecting is important to understanding what is meant by the Divine Androgyne. The Alchemist should be both unattached to specific forms (form-receptive) and capable of assuming arbitrary forms (form receptive.) This is “dropping off bodymind”, couched in western alchemical terms. It is the active practice of passive processes.

Quicksilver is samadhi, Sulphur is Theory

In Philosophical Alchemy, the “Quicksilver” is said to be the key of all the latter processes. So what is this quicksilver? Surely, Burkhardt is not suggesting we huff mercury vapour (though that would certainly produce a marked change in personality)!

Burkhardt expressly mentions Zen buddhism by name when describing Quicksilver as “the heart made liquid by meditation”. It’s not the best definition he could have given, since throughout the text he demonstrates a different understanding of zen practice than we might be used to today, but by thorough reading together with what will make up the final section of the essay, I have come to understand that he is essentially saying Quicksilver is samadhi - the intense focus and attention that is cultivated in the practice of Zazen. It’s a clear, flowing mind-state.

This then helps understand a bit more what he means by sulphur, which he goes on to describe, on its own, as “theoretical understanding”. It is rigid and inflexible. It’s form-giving without necessary awareness, unable to react to what is going on around it.

He describes the alchemical work as in part being the act of dissolving “sulphur” in quicksilver thusly:

When the attraction of feminine nature dissolves masculine nature from its torpor […] calls forth by tension its truly masculine and active power.

Further: “Dissolving sulphur in mercury causes it to become liberated from conceptual limitations”.

From this, I can draw a straight line to the idea of “every minute zen”. By holding theoretical understanding and samadhi in tension, we are essentially exercising the “three truths” I referenced above, and maintaining a state of samadhi which, armed with proper theory, we can use to refine our “prima materia”.

The Athanor and the Zafu are the Same Instrument

Burkhardt devotes significant time to the study of a particular alchemical symbol - that of the “athanor” (from the arabic at-tannur), a specialized oven used for performing alchemical work. This is important to him, because his micro-macrocosmic model equates the cosmos to the human body, and the human body to the oven, meaning all three symbolically interconnect in important ways. The symbolism to the human body is more functional than anatomical, of course. The Athanor is best understood through two concepts: the three-fold envelope and the three-fold heat.

The Three-Fold Envelope describes the enclosure and structure of the oven, consisting of:

The earthen oven itself, which is the outermost layer, and where we build the “open fire”, perhaps best thought of as the world of deliberate action. The oven contains a small space for this open fire, and is built around an ash-bed and space for the glass vessel.
The “ash-bed” which is heated by the oven’s fires and diffuses and redirects them into the vessel. It is therefore one of the forms of heat as well as a component of the oven. The ash itself (as opposed to sand) is said to be symbolic of the uncombustable material “which cannot be obtained by the passions” - it is that which is left over during nigredo.
The glass vessel itself, of which there is much more to right. This is a sealed, transparent vessel that contains the substances being worked upon. It is also itself the source of the third form of heat: the latent heat of the reaction taking place. It is said to both be symbolically placed at the body’s solar plexus and symbolic itself of the soul.

The description of the oven is not necessarily a construction guide to middle-first-millennium or earlier metallurgical equipment, and there are two keys to fully understanding that. The first is the description of the glass vessel as a sealed bottle symbolic of the soul and which is being actively boiled. Of this process, Burkhardt says:

The Powers which are developed in it must not leak out, if the work is to proceed.

And I believe that quote to be directly referencing the idea that a state of samadhi (the “clear glass”) is needed to perform the refining work upon the raw soul to purify it into prima materia.

The second key is the idea of the placement at the solar plexus together with what we will now discuss as the three fires. This is similar to the idea of the three heats, except these only describe the sort of fire that can be built in the “open fire” of the oven:

The ‘artificial fire’, which is an analogy of methodical contemplation and breathwork (he describes this by analogy to bellows). If you take this together with the placement of the vessel at the solar plexus, it is not then hard to see the slightly lower position known as the tanden, which plays a key role in the cultivation of samadhi by the practice of zazen.
The ‘natural fire’ which is the “vibration of the soul initiated by the artifical fire”. This is the samadhi itself.
The ‘anti-natural fire’, which Burkhardt refers to as the spontaneous action of Grace, but by which we could mean something like Kensho (spontaneous realization of the buddha nature).

Following this model, it is relatively easy to see that this alchemical model points the finger straight at the like practice of zazen. I do not feel that there is a meaningful difference in practice between one or the other. In both practices, the physical body is being used to contain a spiritual process; one that begins at the cultivation through breath-work of a specific and focused state of mind. Whether you call that “refining prima materia” or “cultivating deep samadhi”, I believe you are pointing toward the same, ineffable, truth.

In short, I believe that the Alchemical Great Work and the Goalless Goal of Zazen are pointing to the same fundamental thing. There is no difference between philosophical gold and buddha-nature.