ISF Publishing

‘Alchemy is like the man who told his sons that he had buried gold for them in his vineyards. They dug and found no gold, but this turned the mould for the vine roots and caused an abundant harvest.’

The Seeker is given an enterprise to complete. It may be an alchemical problem, or it may be the effort to reach the conclusion of an enterprise just as unlikely of attainment. For the purposes of his self-development he has to carry that undertaking out with complete faith. In the process of planning and carrying through this effort, he attains his spiritual development. The alchemical or other undertaking may be impossible, but it is the framework within which his constancy and his application, his mental and moral development, is carried out. To this extent it is secondary. Insofar as it is permanent for him and for his lifetime, perhaps, it is not secondary at all, because it becomes his permanent anchor and frame of reference.

The stone, the hidden thing, so powerful, is also called the Azoth in the West. Azoth is traced by Orientalists to one of two words — el-dhat (or ez-zat), meaning essence or inner reality; or else to zibaq, mercury. The stone, according to the Sufis, is the dhat, the essence, which is so powerful that it can transform whatever comes into contact with it. It is the essence of man, which partakes of what people call the divine. It is ‘sunshine’, capable of uplifting humanity to a next stage.
We can go much further than this. Three elements went toward the production of the dhat, after being submitted to the ‘work’, which is a translation of the word amal. These elements are sulphur (kibrit, homonym of kibirat, ‘greatness, nobility’); salt (milh, homonym of milh, ‘goodness, learning’); and mercury (zibaq, sharing the radix for ‘to open a lock, to break’).