Hellfire was certainly more prevalent in baroque writings, with descriptions of the torments of hell that exceed the violence of Dante, not least because they are unredeemed by the inspiration of art—like this passage by Saint Alphonsus de Liguori:
The punishment that most torments the senses of the damned, is the fire of hell . . . Even in this life, the pain of fire is the greatest of all; but there is much difference between our fire and that of hell which, says Saint Augustine, makes ours seem painted . . . Thus the wretched will be surrounded by fire, like wood inside a furnace. The damned will find themselves with an abyss of fire beneath, an abyss above, and an abyss around them. If they touch, see or breathe, they will touch, see or breathe nothing but fire. They will be in the fire like fish in water. But this fire will not only surround the damned, but will enter even their bowels to torment them. Their body will become all fire, so that their bowels will burn within their belly, their heart within their breast, their brains within their head, their blood within their veins, even their marrow with their bones: every lost soul will become in himself a furnace of fire. (Apparecchio alla morte, consideration 26)
And Ercole Mattioli, in Pietà illustrate (1694), wrote,
Great wonder will it be that a fire alone contains perfectly within it, according to great theologians, the coldness of ice, the stings of thorns and iron, the venom of asps, the poisons of vipers, the cruelty of all wild beasts, the malevolence of all elements and stars . . . Yet greater wonder, et supra virtutem ignis, will be that such fire, though one specie alone, can make distinction in tormenting those who sin most, being called by Tertullian sapiens ignis, and by Eusebius of Emesa ignis arbiter, since, having to match, according to the greatness and diversity of supplicants, the greatness and diversity of their sins . . . , the fire, almost as if it were endowed with reason and full knowledge, to distinguish between sinner and sinner, shall make its rigors felt with more or less severity.
And so we arrive at the last secret of Fatima by Sister Lucia, exshepherdess:
The secret consists of three distinct parts, two of which I am now going to reveal. The first part is the vision of hell. Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire, which seemed to be underground. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, The Message of Fatima, June 26, 2000)
ALCHEMICAL FIRE
Halfway between holy fire and hellfire is fire as an alchemical operator. Fire and crucible seem to be essential in alchemical practice, which seeks to operate on a raw material so as to obtain from it, through a series of manipulations, the philosopher’s stone. This is capable of projection, transmuting base metals into gold.
The manipulations of the raw material take place through three stages, distinguished by the color the material gradually assumes: the black work, the white work, and the red work. The black work involves a heating (and therefore the use of fire) and decomposition of the matter, the white work is a process of sublimation or distillation, and the red work is the final stage (red is the color of the sun, which often symbolizes gold, and vice versa). The hermetical furnace, the athanor, is an essential instrument, but alembics, vessels, and mortars are also used, each with their symbolic names, such as the philosophical egg, maternal womb, wedding chamber, pelican, sphere, sepulcher, and so forth. The essential substances are sulfur, mercury, and salt. But the procedures are never clear, since the language of alchemists is based on three principles:
As the object of the art is highly secret and not to be divulged—the secret of secrets—no expression ever says what it seems to say, no symbolic interpretation will ever be definitive, because the secret will always be elsewhere: “Poor fool! Can you be so naive as to believe we are openly teaching you the greatest and most important of secrets? I assure you that anyone who wants to explain what the Hermetic Philosophers write according to their ordinary and literal meaning will find himself caught up in the twists and turns of a labyrinth from which he cannot escape, and won’t have Ariadne’s thread to guide him out of it.” (Artefius)
When it seems that ordinary substances such as gold, silver, or mercury are being spoken of, other substances are in fact being described—philosopher’s gold or mercury—which have nothing at all to do with them.
While no description is ever what it seems, everything always relates to the same secret. As the Turba philosophorum states, “Know that we are all in agreement, whatever we say . . . One person clarifies what the other has concealed and he who really searches will find everything.”
When does fire intervene in the alchemical process? If alchemical fire can be compared with the fire that precedes digestion or gestation, it ought to intervene during the course of the black work, when heat, acting over and against radical, metallic, viscous, oily humidity, produces the nigredo. If we can accept a text like the Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique by Dom Pernety (Paris: Delalain, 1787), we read that
when heat acts on these matters, they are changed first into powder, and oily and gluey water, which rises as a vapor to the top of the vase, then descends again in dew or rain, to the bottom, where it becomes almost as an oily black broth. This is why it has been called Sublimation and Volatilization, Ascension and Descension. The water then coagulating more and more, becomes like black tar, which has caused it to be named fetid and stinking earth, also because it emits a musty odor of sepulchers and tombs. (“La clef de l’oeuvre,” pp. 155–56)
But statements can also be found in the textbooks to the effect that the terms distillation, sublimation, calcination, or digestion, or the terms firing, reverberation, dissolution, descent, and coagulation, are none other than the same “Operation,” carried out in a single vessel, in other words, a firing of the substance. Thus, concludes Pernety,
this Operation must be regarded as unique, but expressed in different terms; and it will be understood that all the following expressions signify the same thing: distil by alembic; separate the soul from the body; burn; calcinate; unite the elements; convert them; change one into the other; corrupt; melt; engender; conceive; bring into the world; exhaust; moisten; wash with fire; beat with the hammer; blacken; putrefy; rubify; dissolve; sublimate; grind; reduce to powder; crush in the mortar; pulverize on marble—and many other similar expressions all mean simply to cook in the same way, until dark red. Care must therefore be taken not to remove the vase from the fire, because if the material cools down, all is lost. (“Règles générales,” pp. 202–6)