“Alchemy cannot be reduced to a protochemistry,” states Eliade. He writes as a historian of religion, which means he writes about the human quest to influence and control and shape the physical world of matter. People are also matter. The quest embraces the renewal and the reshaping of the physical person. The great mystery and power generated by this process becomes that which is spiritual.

“The ‘conquest of matter’ began very early, perhaps in the palaeolithic age, that is, as soon as man had succeeded in making tools from silex and using fire to change the states of matter. In any case certain techniques - mainly agriculture and pottery - were fully developed during the neolithic age. Now these techniques were at the same time mysteries, for, on the one hand, they implied the sacredness of the cosmos and, on the other, were transmitted by initiation (the ‘craft-secrets’). Tilling, or the firing of clay, like, somewhat later, mining and metallurgy, put primitive man into a universe steeped in sacredness. It would be vain to wish to reconstitute his experiences; too much time has elapsed since the cosmos has been desanctified as a result of the triumph of the experimental sciences. Modern man is incapable of experiencing the sacred in his dealings with matter; at most he can achieve an aesthetic experience. He is capable of knowing matter as a ‘natural phenomenon’. But we have only to imagine a communion, no longer limited to the eucharistic elements of bread or wine, but extending to every kind of ‘substance’, in order to measure the distance separating a primitive religious experience from the modern experience of ‘natural phenomena’.
“Not that man in primitive society was still ‘buried in Nature’, powerless to free himself from the innumerable ‘mystic’ participations in Nature, totally incapable of logical thought or utilitarian labour in the modern sense of the word. Everything we know of our contemporary ‘primitives’ shows up the weakness of these arbitrary judgements. But it is clear that a thinking dominated by cosmological symbolism created an experience of the world vastly different from that accessible to modern man. To symbolic thinking the world is not only ‘alive’ but also ‘open’: an object is never simply itself (as is the case with modern consciousness), it is also a sign of, or a repository for, something else.” pp. 143-144

“Alchemy cannot be reduced to a protochemistry. In fact, when it became an elementary chemistry, the alchemical world of meaning was on the verge of disappearing. Everywhere we find alchemy, it is always intimately related to a ‘mystical’ tradition: in China with Taoism, in India with Yoga and Tantrism, in Hellenistic Egypt with gnosis, in Islamic countries with hermetic and esoteric mystical schools, in the Western Middle Ages and Renaissance with Hermetism, Christian and sectarian mysticism, and Cabala. Consequently, to understand the meaning and function of alchemy, we must not judge the alchemical texts by the possible chemical insights which they may contain. Such an evaluation would be tantamount to judging - and classifying - great poetical creations by their scientific data or their historical accuracy.
“That the alchemists DID contribute also to the progress of the natural sciences is certainly true. But they did this indirectly and only as a consequence of their concern with mineral substance and living matter. For they were ‘experimenters,’ not abstract thinkers or erudite scholastics. Their inclination to ‘experiment,’ however, was not limited to the natural realm…. the experiments with mineral or vegetal substances pursued a more ambitious goal: to change the alchemist’s own mode of being.” pp. 182-183

Readers should heed the word origins in the subtitle of Eliade's monograph on alchemy. In fact, the first two-thirds of the book is given over to discussions of the religious and mythic dimensions of metallurgy in ancient and "primitive" cultures. The next few chapters perform a cross-cultural survey of alchemical traditions, moving west from China, through India and the Near East, to Europe. Eliade makes a reasonably persuasive case for the existence of similar conceptual mechanisms in the alchemy of various different societies, and he uses a presentation of Indian alchemy as a basis for explaining European alchemy.

Eranos-participant Eliade references Jung as the authority on the psychological interpretation of alchemy, and he attributes validity to Jung's approach, but he doesn't claim to share it--being interested in the history of religions rather than individual psychology. He also cites Julius Evola as an expositor of alchemy as a "traditional science."

This book suffers as much as any of Eliade's work (with the stand-out exception of The Myth of the Eternal Return, which must be hands-down the worst) from a nostalgic conception of the primitive. He insists, "Modern man is incapable of experiencing the sacred in his dealings with matter; at most he can achieve an aesthetic experience." (143) At every turn, he identifies the objects of his greatest scholarly care and concern with an earlier, more sacralized period of human awareness. And yet he attempts to disavow it: "These considerations are no more a criticism of the modern world than they are a eulogy of other, primitive or exotic societies." (177)

Aside from its comparativism, The Forge and the Crucible has the most to offer those who are interested in ideas of great dispensations of human consciousness, whether they are construed as magical aeons or Foulcauldian discursive epistemes. Eliade proposes that alchemical culture was a precondition for modern science and industrialization, which is poised to transform human society as dramatically as did the first introduction of agriculture.

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