Tria prima

Mahdihassan, S. The Arabian origin of the terms Alcohol and Tria Prima used by Paracelsus. Islamic World 7, no. 2 (1989) 129-136. 

Two additional material principles were added to the tria prima in the seventeenth century to form the five-principle view that characterized the iatrochemistry until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the four Aristotelian elements returned largely through the influence of the French chemist Pierre-Joseph Macquer. Robert P. Multhauf has given a splendid account of these pre-modern years in The Origins of Chemistry. ... 

An early step in the direction of viewing composition in material terms was taken by Beguin when he suggested that two empirically identified components might be added to the tria prima ... 

Beguin was not the first to suggest the addition of earth and phlegm to the tria prima, but his is the first text in which it appeared. 

Boyle was not the first to challenge the validity of the four elements and the tria prima many of his arguments date back at least a century before, and many of them come right out of the writings of van Helmont, for whom Boyle had great respect. But his sustained attack on these... 

By the end of the seventeenth century, the old traditional elements from Aristotle had been either abandoned by the new Paracelsian iatrochymists or absorbed under new terminology. Paracelsus tria prima of mercury, SULPHUR, and salt became the new set of elements or principles, each more narrowly focused on a single property than had been the four elements of Aristotle. Yet the tria prima clearly derived from the older tradition. Salt assumed the role of the Aristotelian earth, while sulphur took that of FIRE. The mercury of Paracelsus rather absorbed the characteristics of both AIR and water, becoming the carrier of all spiritual, i.e., volatile qualities of the products of fire analysis. Mercury also carried the basic metallic properties from the mercury/sulphur theory of metals brought to the Latin West from Arabic alchemy. 

Salt was one of Paracelsus tria prima. Like the other principles and the four elements of the alchemists, salt as principle took its qualities as well as its name from the material bodies with the same properties. In a fire analysis, salt was to be found in the non-volatile residue and extracted from the non-soluble earth by water. This real salt demonstrated the more or less universal presence of the salt principle in all such bodies. The presence of SALT as principle accounted for the body s solidity and resistance to fire. In its material manifestation, it was recognized by its solubility and its saline taste. 

In one particular, however, Paracelsus contributed a theoretical concept which exerted a dominating influence on the theory of following centuries. This was the doctrine known as the tria prima, the idea that all matter from... 

This theory of the tria prima which is reiterated and discussed very extensively in numerous treatises of Paracelsus, made a strong appeal to the public of his own and later centuries. It indeed almost completely dominated chemical theory and philosophy until the rise of the theory of phlogiston. It was adopted by the authors of the later works ascribed to Basil Valentine and Johann and Isaac Hollandus, and so long as these works were believed to have been written in the fifteenth century, Paracelsus was naturally supposed to have acquired this concept from the works of those writers. 

The one important theoretical advance is the notion of the three Paracelsan principles constituting substances, mercury, sulphur, and salt, replacing in interest, to a great extent, the Platonic-Aristotelian concept of the four elements, and the more mystical Greek-Arabian concept of sulphur and mercury as the constituents of metals. Unquestionably, the appeal of the tria prima to the chemists of the period lay in its more comprehensible relation to experimental observation. Mercury, as the embodiment of whatever was merely volatile in the heat, sulphur of what burned away, and salt as the constituent which was fixed and nonvolatile and noncombustible, was a concept the... 

Becher, in his earlier writings, adopts the tria prima— mercury, sulphur, and salt—as the composition of matter. Later he framed a new formulation which, however, is rather verbal than essentially new. Though not always clear or consistently expressed, his concept seems to be practically as follows °°... 

It is difficult to see in the characteristics and properties of the three earths of Becher any substantial improvement on the tria prima of Paracelsus and his successors, other than the avoidance of the use of the three names which were in common use in two different meanings. For the three principles of that name, as chemists of that school took great pains constantly to explain, were not the same as the common substances so named. Nevertheless, the new name terra pinguis or fatty earth for the older sulphur, as the substance which departs in combustion, certainly gave the stimulus which incited Stahl and his followers to develop the influential phlogistic hypothesis and Becher thus played a not unimportant part in the history of chemical theory. 

Medieval alchemists had generally adhered to a dyad theory, in which Sulfur and Mercury were the principles of all metals and change was produced by the interaction of these two principles. Substances rich in Sulfur were more combustible, while those rich in Mercury were less so. Paracelsus took this dyad theory and added a third principle of Salt to it. His three principles—the tria prima, or three first things—were able to explain the alchemical transformations of all bodies. This material trinity matched the Holy Trinity in heaven as well as the three principles of which we are made vital spirit, soul, and body. Important in this scheme are correspondences between the great world, the... 

When Robert Boyle began his work, alchemy was alive and well. It was widely although far from universally used in medicine. The search for the philosophers stone was still taken seriously by leading natural philosophers, and many kings and princes were keen to have their own alchemists. Corpuscularianism was also alive and well, and Boyle was able to combine the latest brand of corpuscularianism with alchemy, to powerful effect. He did not accept Paracelsus s element theory, nor was he keen on Van Helmont s and he was not much impressed by the way in which seventeenth-century iatrochemists had added phlegm and earth to Paracelsus s tria prima. But he did believe that transmutation was possible and that the alchemical production of gold by multiplica-... 

In 1661 Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, which demolished what he regarded as either fallacious reasoning or incompetent experiment or both. It was above all an attack on theories of the elements devised by those seduced more by theory than by experimental evidence. We have already encountered the principal element theories that Boyle attacked. Aristotelians had their four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. Paracelsians had three, the tria prima of Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt, which were not the same as the common mercury, sulfur, and salt of the laboratory, apothecary s shop, or even (in the case of table salt) the kitchen. Van Helmont had either one or two, depending on how you interpreted him water, or, taking the biblical account literally, water and air,... 

What were principles for Stahl They were not universal elements, like Aristotle s four elements or Paracelsus s tria prima. They were, however, like Aristotle s elements in one crucial respect although they were material, they could not be isolated. Most importantly for Stahl, they were the causes of particular properties of chemical bodies, and they conferred those properties on the mixt bodies that contained them as constituents. Bodies burned if they contained the phlogistic earth or principle. If they did not contain that principle, then they could not burn. The phlogistic earth could therefore reasonably be called the principle of combustibility. 

Chemists inherited from the sixteenth century an odd mix of the Aristotelian elements and the Paracelsian principles. In attacking the scholastic philosophy, " Paracelsus (1493-1541) had not abandoned the four elements, but he had introduced the tria prima of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury without clarifying the relationship between the two systems. The French Paracelsians who taught at the Jardin were, on the... 

To the alchemist, the universal life-giving principle within Nature is spirit, while the unique essence of each thing is its soul. These, together with the third principle, the body, form the tria prima. The easiest way to approach this central theme is to turn to the willing guidance of the plant kingdom, whose three principles are easily identified. 

The salt of plants obligingly acts as a bridge between the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, the entry point to mineral alchemy, the operations of which mysteriously reflect the processes within the transforming soul of the alchemist. The key to these processes is the interaction of the tria prima, so let s take a closer look at them and the rich symbolism with which alchemists clothe them. 

The beginnings of all material things, Paracelsus asserted, were not the elements of Aristotle (earth, air, fire, and water) but the three principles, or tria prima, of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury. These were as much symbolic categories as rudimentary components of matter. Salt represented an unburnable, nonvolatile ash or earth Sulphur stood for combustible natures and Mercury denoted the volatile and metallic constitutions of bodies. Creation of the physical world was itself a process of separation. The mother and parent of all generation, he proclaimed, has always been, even from the very beginning, separation. Separation was the first divine act (hght separated from darkness), and as such was a miracle... 

He accepted the Aristotelian theory of the four elements, but he extended the sulfur-mercury theory and applied his theory to all substances, not just metals. He did this by adding a third basic constituent, salt, as Rhazes had done seven hundred years previously. For Paracelsus, salt represented the principle of incombustibility and non-volatility. This theory which became known as tria prima, referred to three basic qualities, not to ordinary mercury, sulfur, and salt ... 

In the alchemical worldview, Mercury refers to the mercurial quality of matter rather than to the element we now call mercury. The alchemists believed that metals differed from one another because they contained greater or lesser amounts of particular qualities. According to Paracelsus theory of tria prima, the three fundamental properties of matter were represented by mercury sulfur, and salt.22 Sulfur was associated with Sol, the sun, and thus with the Masculine Principle, while mercury was closely associated with silver, the Moon, and the Feminine Principle.23 Salt—the fixed, immutable, quality of matter—was associated with body and earth. 

Rise and Spread of Alchemy. The Nature of Alchemy. Alchemical Theory. The Sulphur-Mercury Theory. Alchemical Representations of the Sulphur-Mercury Theory. The Emerald Table of Hermes. The Tria Prima of Paracelsus. 

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