Mystic forms

Some Paracelsian alchemists, especially Heinrich Khun rath (ca. 1560-1605) and Stefan Michelspacher (active ca. 1615-23), were objects of persecution on the part of hoth Lutheran and Catholic authorities. Khunrath was an alchemist from Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, but his theological stance was characteristic of the second generation of Protestants who felt that Luther s work had been left incomplete and that another religious reform was essential. In Khunrath s ideas this would take the form of a Lutheranism that could accommodate an autonomous personal piety. To express their Lutheran piety intellectually the alchemists employed the terms of Paracelsian theosophy, while they found an emotive outlet in the mystical experience of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. They felt themselves to be inspired (literally breathed ) by the Spirit, a force that they identified with alchemical pneuma. Khunrath called himself an enthusiast, hlled with the presence of the divine. 

He also discussed the mystical manner in which the human heart was linked to the heart of the cosmos, the sun. This was governed by the Archangel Michael, the guardian of the world who deputised for the Messiah Christ, or even was another form of the Son of God. ... 

I also taught Malcolm mystical Alchemy, which is the Yoga of the West. I taught him how to pick up the forces from the earth center and draw them up the spine. These form the basis of all that follows. Only those who can do this can do magic. We in the West work with a tree in the East they work with flowers [lotuses], but it is the same thing.6... 

Hermetic and Neoplatonic tenets into their Islamic asceticism. Like all mystics, they strove for a personal experience of the divine, so it was natural that Jabir would be attracted to alchemy. Jabir developed a theory that became common to all subsequent alchemical texts. He said that all metals seemed to contain a balance of the four qualities that is, they are cold and dry externally, and hot and moist internally. This was due to the fact that they were formed in the earth by the union of a substance that he called sulphur or earthy smoke, and another, which he called mercury or moist vapor. Sulphur and mercury became a masculine and feminine polarity in alchemy. 

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