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eparation," according to the alchemical authors, is "a most difficult thing, a labor of Hercules.” compared to which the rest of the operations ate mere "woman’s work” and "children’s games": so strong is the irrational tie that binds all the elements together in the human "mixture." The authors exhort tenacity, constant patience, and tireless application; they counsel against haste and repeat that "any precipitousness is of the devil"; we must work, they say, without becoming discouraged, with ardor, but without letting ourselves be carried away, lest the Work that has begun be ruined.¹
The difficulty is the breaking into and opening up of the Gold, that is, in the setting aside of the personality. For it has been said that it is harder to undo the Gold than to make it.^{278 279} The second difficulty is to preserve, in the midst of this destructive stage, no matter what happens, a "quintessence," an active, subtle and
essential principle from within this same Gold, The vulgar Gold is found and preserved mostly in fixed natures and it is very difficult to reduce it to a state of ''dissolution'' without its losing its inner, buried principle, or "Soul,” as well.
To depart from the metaphor: as long as external consciousness linked to the brain and settled in the organic individuality prevails, we feel ourselves to be a person, "I,” but we are barred from the other, deeper states of being. But let the Gold be broken -"put to the sword,” "crushed,” "pulverized,” or "flattened thin,” etc., (all equivalent expressions in the ciphered language)—and one passes on to these noncorporcal and "fluid” states. It is at this time that a negative condition for the sense of the ego is encountered. And hardly have these states been encouiv tered—the inner experience feels as if there is no ground underfoot—when there is an instinctive, irrestistible reaction, an automatic fear-response that suddenly startles and jerks us back to the point of departure—to the "fixed,” to the "body” or "Earth”—and the gates are shut again. ^
We must therefore proceed patiently, persistently and subtly learning the symbolic "science of balances” or "dosages,” that is, the quantity of activity and passivity necessary to use and equilibrate; filing down little by little the "Iron”^{280 281} in order to avoid those automatic jumps mentioned above, that would hold back the process of separation—but at the same time taking care that there remains a sufficient quantity of the solar © element in order not to end up in diminished forms of consciousness, which would lead not to the hermetic realization but to the negative states of trance, somnambulism, or medtumship.
So we can have some presentiment of what we have been told: of the weary peregrinations and running through the darkness, of the fear and trembling, sweats and horrors, before coming to see the Light described in the mystery literature;²⁸² and we can see what the passage through the elements would be, after reaching the confines of death and crossing the threshold of Proserpine,²⁸³ and what might be that analogue of Earth dissolving itself in Water, Water in Fire, Fire in Air that is mentioned in a Tibetan text as the experience that comes immediately after death.²⁸⁴ There are successive losses of solid support (Earth, i.e., the body) that distinguish che phases of the detachment: losing the sense of Earth, and suddenly feeling the Void—being precipitated or dropped—finding oneself as if dissolved in a great sea or in a diz;z;ying expansion of the Air.²⁸⁵ And the Red Lion, that is, the irresistible and savage instinct ot the animal ego’s self-preservation, has to be "reduced to extreme weakness,” in order to pass such trials and complete the final process of "mortification” and "separation.”²⁸⁶
Everything said up to now enables us to understand a wide range of symbols and alchemical allegories that disguise similar experiences: birds with wings that carry other birds without wings in order not to "lose the ground under foot”; seas through which, one is carried to and fro; currents that one must swim against; falls, aerial captures, etc. We shall leave it to the sagacity of the reader who will find all this in the texts, to take it sub specie interioritatis and understand.