The Forge and the Crucible Quotes

“Nature maintains the same rhythm of birth and death in metals as in vegetables and animals. For, as Bernard Palissy writes in....(long french title of a book I don't feel like repeating here) 'God did not create all these things in order to leave them idle. The stars and the planets are not idle...the sea is in constant motion...the earth likewise is not idle...what is naturally consumed within her, she renews and refashions forthwith, if not in one way then in another. Everything, including the exterior of the Earth, exerts itself to bring something forth; likewise, the interior and matrix strains itself in order to reproduce.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“It is known that for the Greeks delta was a symbol for woman. The Pythagoreans regarded the triangle as the arche geneseoas because of its perfect form and because it represented the archetype of universal fertility. A similar symbolism for the triangle is to be found in India.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“The sexual classification of ores and stones was maintained in the alchemical writings and lapidaries of the Middle Ages;”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“Alchemy posed as a sacred science, whereas chemistry came into its own when substances had shed their sacred attributes.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“Without us, the harvest would not ripen in the fields; without our millstones the corn would not turn to flour; nor the flour to bread by stirring and baking. Let us then cooperate with nature in its mineral as well as in its agricultural labours, and treasures will be opened to all.

Alchemy, we shall see, takes its place in the same spiritual category: the Alchemist takes up and perfects the work of Nature, while at the same time working to 'make' himself.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“The sacred rivers of Mesopotamia were supposed to have their source in the generative organ of the Great Goddess. The source of rivers was indeed considered as the vagina of the earth. In Babylonian the term pu signifies both 'source of a river' and 'vagina'. The Sumerian buru means both 'vagina' and 'river'. The Babylonian nagbu, 'stream', is related to the Hebrew neqeba, 'female'. In Hebrew the word 'well' is also used with the meaning of 'woman', 'spouse'. In Egyptian the word bi means 'uterus' and 'gallery' of a mine'. It is worth remembering, too, that the caves and caverns were compared to the matrix of the Earth-mother.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“The Arabian scholar and mystic, Ibn Sina (980 - 1037), declared that 'romantic love (al'-ishaq) is not peculiar to the human species but permeates all things, heavenly, elemental, vegetable and mineral, and its sense is neither perceived nor known; it is rendered even more obscure by the explanations made to account for it.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“The art of creating tools is essentially superhuman-either divine or demoniac (for the smith also forges murderous weapons).”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“For, adds Barba, those who think that metals were created at the beginning of of the world are grossly mistaken: metals 'grow' in mines.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“The second group of beliefs, those relating to the generation of ores and stones in the belly of the earth - deserve particular attention. Rock engenders precious stones. The Sanskrit name for Emerald is, acmagarbhaja, 'born from rock', and the Indian minerological treatises describe its presence in the rock as being in its 'matrix'. The author of the Jawaher nameh (The Book of Precious Stones) distinguishes diamond from crystal by a difference in age expressed in embryological terms: the diamond is pakka, i.e. 'ripe', while the crystal is kaccha, 'not ripe' , 'green' , insufficiently developed.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“By accelerating the process of the growth of metals, the metallurgist was precipitating temporal growth: geological tempo was by him changed to living tempo. This bold conception, whereby man defends his full responsibility vis-a-vis Nature, already gives us a glimpse of something of the work of the alchemist.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“The formation of the embryo and childbirth repeat the primeval fact of the birth of humanity, looked upon as an emergence from the deepest chtonian cavern-matrix.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“As we shall see later, according to certain traditions, metals are also supposed to have issued from the flesh or blood of some immolated primordial, semi-divine being.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“This idea finds its echo today in the conception that nothing can be created without the sacrifice of something very important, usually one's own being. Every vocation implies the supreme sacrifice of the self.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“The Bedouins of Sinai are convinced that the man who is successful in making a sword of meteoric iron becomes invulnerable in battle and assured of overcoming all his opponents.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“Metallurgy as such, in Central and South America, is probably Asiatic in origin. Most recent researches tend to relate it to the South Chinese Culture of the Chou epoch (middle and late eight to fourth centuries B.C.) That would make it more or less of Danubian origin, for it was Danubian metallurgy, which in the ninth to eighth centuries B.C. arrived via the Caucasus in China.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“But our own culture has become so excessively jealous of its values, that it tends to regard with suspicion any attempt to boost the achievements of other, primitive or exotic cultures. Having for so long (and so heroically!) followed the path which we believed to be the best and only one worthy of the intelligent, self-respecting individual, and having in the process sacrificed, the best part of our soul in order to satisfy the colossal intellectual demands of scientific and industrial progress, we have grown suspicious of the greatness of primitive cultures.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy

“Ancak simyacılar çalışırlarken Tanrı'nın yardımını aldıklarına inanıyorlardı ve bu yüzden onlara göre yaptıkları iş Tanrı'nın teşvik ettiği değil ama izin verdiği bir doğayı kusursuzlaştırma etkinliğiydi. Sy.187”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy