Origin 1 to 400 CE
Fermentation is the fifth operation of the Great Work. A living ferment is introduced into the conjoined matter so that it first putrefies and blackens and then is quickened to a new and higher life, as yeast raises must into wine; it thus has two movements, the death of putrefaction and the golden rebirth that follows. On the inner path it is the breathing of a new spiritual life into the purified self, an inspiration from above. In the common planetary scheme it is attributed to the Moon, presiding over death and renewal.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1 to 400 CE 1Tradition: Greco-Egyptian alchemy Origin Period1100 to 1700 1Tradition: Latin operative alchemy Origin Period1944 2Tradition: Psychological reading (C. G. Jung, Psychologie und Alchemie) Place of OriginGreco-Roman Egypt, and Alexandria in particular 1 Place of OriginTransmitted through Arabic alchemy into Latin Europe from the 12th century 1 Attributed Author / CompilerCirculates under names like Hermes Trismegistus, Geber, Basil Valentine 1 Attributed Author / CompilerNo single author; the corpus is anonymous and pseudonymous 1 Attributed Author / CompilerSeveral of those names belong to no historical person at all 1 Learn More
The Alchemical Operation of Fermentation
Fermentation is counted the fifth of the seven operations into which the alchemical Great Work is often divided. In the laboratory it named the introduction of a living ferment to quicken the joined matter.
Operation and its meaning
Read symbolically, as the alchemists read their own work, Fermentation stood for the infusing of new life into the work, often figured as a putrefaction from which a fresh growth arises. In the scheme of correspondences that links the operations to the seven classical planets, it is attributed to the Moon.
The alchemists worked at once with real chemical processes and with a language of spiritual transformation, so that a single term carried both a bench meaning and an inner one. The operation is described here within that documented tradition of European alchemy, whose sources run from the Hellenistic and Arabic writers through the Latin Middle Ages and the early modern laboratory.
Fermentatio in the Laboratory, and the Trouble With Counting Seven
Fermentation is the operation in which the alchemists were closest to a process the modern world understands completely, and furthest from understanding it themselves.
What the word describes
Fermentatio means the change a substance undergoes when a small quantity of an active material is added to a larger inert mass and the whole is left in gentle warmth. Bread, wine and beer were the everyday models, and the sources use them constantly. Closely related in the literature is putrefactio, the rotting that precedes the change, which some authors treat as a separate operation and some as the same one under another name.
That a pinch of leaven can transform a whole vessel was, before microbiology, one of the most genuinely astonishing observable facts available, and the alchemical use of it as a model for transmutation is a reasonable inference from what could be seen.
Where the number seven comes from
A numbered sequence of exactly seven operations tied to the seven planets is a modern arrangement. Historical treatises vary: Ripley's fifteenth-century Compound of Alchymy has twelve gates, and fermentation and putrefaction appear as separate items in some lists and as one in others.
The atlas records the seven-step scheme as the version in general circulation and records here that it smooths over a real disagreement in the sources.
Connections
Originates in Language
Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe
Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe
Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe
Produces
Aqua Vitae begins as a fermented grain mash or wine before distillation concentrates the alcohol.
Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe
Vinegar was understood historically as arising from a further souring fermentation of wine or ale, though the underlying process is bacterial oxidation rather than fermentation in the strict modern sense.
Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe
Related To
The athanor's defining use was sustaining the weeks-long low heat that digestion and fermentation stages required.
Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe
A steady water bath was also the standard heat for the gentler, weeks-long stages of fermentation and digestion.
Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe
A sealed matrass was also the standard vessel for slow, weeks-long fermentation and digestion.
Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe
Sources
1. The Secrets of Alchemy
Lawrence M. Principe, University of Chicago Press, 2013The operations of alchemy and their joined bench and spiritual meaning; the Greco-Egyptian, Arabic and Latin transmissionView the Source 2. Psychology and Alchemy
C.G. Jung, Princeton University Press, 1968on the reading of the alchemical operations as stages of psychic transformationView the Source Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Cambridge University Press, 2012The doctrine of correspondences under which the operations are mapped to the seven classical planets
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