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In the course of a research expedition to Sicily in 1638, the alchemist Athanasius
Kircher had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius. There, perched on a rock in
the midst of a torrid lake of magma, he was able to see for himself the workings of the
Earth's creative fire. As the light of the secret sun radiating at the Earth's centre
spilled forth, Kircher was accorded an excellent view of "a fiery subterranean
workshop," a spectacle that reinforced his alchemical conviction that the Earth was a
physical creature with a drive for technological creation. For Kircher and other
alchemists, volcanoes represented safety valves whereby a living earth let-off steam
via a subterranean network of lava canals. Seas, in turn, were seen to represent a vast
cooling system that clamed the heat radiating from the Earth's inner furnace, enabling
life to flouring in the moist heat of the atmosphere. Another student of alchemy,
Goethe, described the Earth as a "great living creature, constantly breathing in and
out," like a self-generative forge that created and coalesced an array of organic and
inorganic life forms both within its bowels and on its surface.
Places of volcanic activity such as Vesuvius didn't only hold fascination for the
alchemists. Ancient Greek and Chaldean myths held that these fiery furnace-mouths
were the birthplaces of a race of magic-working smiths, who, in an age long-past, had
instructed humans in the art of metal-working and civilisation. Delivered from the
chthonic "enwrapping fire" or membrane (Hymên) of the Goddess, the magical smiths
(known as the Daktuloi, Telkhines and the Kabeiroi), had brandished lightning bolts
and sparks as they breathed a fiery life into early civilisations, teaching them the
secret arts of the gods.
Described as the "gnome-like midwives of metals" by contemporary scholar of
comparative religion, Mircea Eliade, alchemists drew direct inspiration from the
mythical shamen/smith's magical crafting of metals. Legend tells that when the Greek
mystical mathematician Pythagoras overheard the sounds of hammers pounding in a
smith's forge, he realised that tones could be expressed in quantitative relationships,
and hence in numerical values and geometrical measures. This insight of the world as
harmony, number and vibration, formed the metaphysical basis of mathematics and
inspired the alchemical notion of the Harmonices Mundi, the Music of the Spheres.
This sacred music, derived from the industrial sounds of a forge, represented the
harnessing of the Earth's secret fire by science. But deeper still in the alchemical
imagination, the roar of hammers beating on anvils and the thunder of volcanoes
erupting were interchangeable. Smiths and volcanoes alike represented the murmuring
of a dreaming Earth, the linking of heaven and Earth through sound, the anchoring of
humanity to the energies of an inherently technological and creative planet.
There is a discreet warning, however, to those would play with fire without a healthy
respect: "You must listen closely to my rhythms," whispered the Earth to the 17th
century alchemist Stolcius; "within me lies the seed of all things. … But you must not touch me without compassion and without a deep contemplation of my mysteries, for
you do so at your own peril."
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