The Alchemical Operation of Distillation

Distillation is counted the sixth of the seven operations into which the alchemical Great Work is often divided. In the laboratory it named the raising and re-condensing of the volatile part through repeated boiling.

Operation and its meaning

Read symbolically, as the alchemists read their own work, Distillation stood for the refining and purifying of the quickened matter, the separation of the subtle from the still-gross by many passes. In the scheme of correspondences that links the operations to the seven classical planets, it is attributed to Mercury.

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.