What is alchemy? The question still exists, despite all the resources and interpretations that have emerged in the modern period. We can easily find images of alchemists working with furnaces, herbs, chemical, and metals. But what is the goal? Is alchemy aimed at the creation of gold? Is its aim the philosopher’s stone, or great longevity, or a panacea? For all the alchemical texts and images that became available in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and for all the practicals alchemists and schools of alchemy that appeared during the same period, as well as the scholarship in a number of European languages, the fact is that alchemy retains its enigmatic, mysterious, and multivalent qualities. At times it seems that alchemical texts and imagery are like a screen upon which various interpreters project their views. And alchemical writings and imagery are so rich that they surely can support a great number of interpretations. Here, will turn our attentions to only one theme, which is the prevalence of sexual imagery in some alchemical works.
That sexual imagery plays a major role in various series of alchemical images can hardly be doubted, as we will see when we look at a few such works and images. But is this imagery suggestive of some chemical processes, to be worked out via a chemical apparatus and a furnace? Or is it possible that, as the imagery itself would suggest, alchemical imagery and writings might be multivalent, conveying multiple levels of meanings at once? This is the line of inquiry posed by Karen-Claire Voss, who, after long study, came to interpret late medieval or early modern alchemy as reflecting a process of ‘multileveled union of the two,’ from whose union emerges ’ the Child of the Work,’ a third, which also 'signifies the second birth in a theosophical [or gnostic] sense.’ She continues: 'The nature of the conjunction seems to me to suggest that the tradition of the alchemist and the soror mystica was not simply intended as a symbol with no corresponding reality in time and space, but that it was a form of Western tantra.’
— Arthur Versluis (The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism: Sacred Practices and Spiritual Marriage)
