Thank you for this interesting discussion with Professor Sperl and his on-going work relating to Plotinus and the Neoplatonic tradition, to which I would like to offer some thoughts. Undoubtedly, the Neoplatonic tradition has been a huge spiritual influence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, nurtured, according to the article, by scholars and philosophers from the Levant, even though Plotinus himself was Egyptian. I was very struck, though, by certain remarks, particularly that modern poets ‘locate the transcendent world in the phenomenon of nature’ and their ‘divinization of the material’. As, to my mind at least, these have far more the ring of that much-derided art of alchemy than Neoplatonism, an alchemical aura beautifully captured in the lines quoted from the poem ‘The Lemons’. Indeed, Plotinus’s teachings quoted in the article -that every oneness is ‘composite’, and that if a ‘oneness in this world is beautiful, it is because different parts have come together to create a harmonious whole’ – could equally apply to the alchemy practised already by Graeco-Egyptian alchemists, and continuing right through into Western alchemy. For it is a central alchemical aim to turn a ‘composite’ substance into flowing, harmonious unity, ‘to distil the eternal from the transient’, to use Baudelaire’s phrase, as I have tried to set out in my book ‘Hathor’s Alchemy: The Ancient Egyptian Roots of the Hermetic Art’ (2019) and in an article in ‘JMIAS 71 (2022)’ and ‘JMIAS 72 (forthcoming 2023).

Alchemy, too, is a formative tradition, with which mystics and poets have engaged. One need but mention Rumi and Ibn Arabi, or William Blake who was steeped in alchemy, as were George Herbert, Goethe and the German mystic Jacob Boehme. Shakespeare has innumerable references to alchemy. The list could go on. However, the roots of this alchemy are in Egypt, not the Levant; and there are also important differences from Neoplatonism. Firstly, the Feminine is essential to the alchemical work of creating balance and harmony. Secondly, alchemists see the material world, not as ‘the least real thing, because it is simply a transient image of eternally perfect forms’, but rather as inherently sacred, enclosing an eternal ‘essence’, which they seek to bring into manifestation by purifying the ‘mixed’ and returning it to ‘Oneness’. The goal is not to leave the material world behind, though, but rather ‘to make the hidden manifest’, in other words a ‘divinizing’ work revealing the Philosophers’ Stone; and as a revelatory art, alchemy offers a spiritual path, which, with its reverence for earthly life, can speak to modern-day seekers, artists and poets in Gaia’s suffering world.

This is a comment to our article ‘Faces of the Infinite’ in issue 22, 2022