Sulphur

Sulphur is one of the tria prima, the three philosophical principles that the physician and alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541) set at the root of all substances, alongside Sulphur, Mercury and Salt. It stands for the soul, the active and combustible principle; the fiery, expansive quality that gives a thing its character and its power to burn and to change.

The three principles

Paracelsus taught that every material thing is composed of these three, whose balance accounts for its nature: Sulphur the soul, Mercury the spirit and Salt the body. In the scheme of correspondences the principle is linked with the Sun.

These principles are not the ordinary substances that share their names; they are qualities or philosophical elements. They are described here as part of the documented tradition of European alchemy and Paracelsian medicine, in which they became a standard framework for thinking about matter and transformation.

Sources The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe with Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the RenaissanceWalter Pagel

The three alchemical principles were two for several centuries before they were three, and Sulphur is one of the original pair.

The two-principle theory

The doctrine that all metals are composed of two principles, a sulphur and a mercury, comes out of the Arabic alchemical tradition and passed into Latin Europe with the translations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It is a theory of metals, and it did real explanatory work: differences between metals were accounted for by the proportions and the purity of the two constituents, which made transmutation a question of adjusting a mixture rather than of creating a substance from nothing.

Not the yellow powder

The principle called Sulphur is not brimstone. Alchemical writers were explicit that they meant a philosophical sulphur, a principle of combustibility and of fixed, formative nature, and that the mineral of the same name was at best an instance of it. Readers who take the principle for the element will misread almost every passage in which it appears.

How a third arrived

A third principle, Salt, was added in the sixteenth century in the work of Paracelsus, giving the set of three, the tria prima, that this atlas records. The addition is datable and attributable, which is unusual in this literature, and it made the scheme a theory of all bodies rather than of metals alone.