Salt - An Introduction
Philosophical salt is the body of matter, its concrete or permanent qualities. While today we know that all salts are compounds of a metallic cation and a nonmetallic anion, such chemical knowledge was beyond ancient peoples' perception and experimental toolsets. Salt was the result of processes intended to remove unwanted impurities from a material, and at the human scale, very much appears to be a singular, uniform substance.
Stone from seawater, the solid from the fluid, the end product of dissolution and crystallization, salt is distilled substance. In the eyes of the ancients, salt was the condensation of base matter, leading purified chemical salts to be interpreted as the isolated qualities of materials wholly divorced from their animating principles.
Salt was identified closely with the fundamental goal of philosophical alchemy, which was the self-knowledge that expunged impurity from the practitioner and consequently strengthened the alchemist’s knowledge of and relationship with God.
Salt was regarded as feminine as the earthiest substance of elemental earth, and when personified, it is female. In the Western alchemist’s attempts to syncretize the Tria Prima with the Trinity, they identified salt with Christ.
Ash
Ash is a close analog to salt symbolically and as a technical term in alchemy. Both salt and ash were purified contractions of material exhausted and rendered inert by heat, salt being processed by boiling and ash by burning. Other than as a dietary preservative, they are synonymous.
Salt the Preservative
Salt was also an excellent preservative, staving off corruption by drawing the water out of preserved foods and providing a chemically hostile environment for microbes. Before germ theory, it was not understood why biological matter decomposed, so natural biological and chemical processes were regarded with some degree of supernatural mystery. Rot and disease were synonymous, and disease was regularly anthropomorphized in the form of demons. This is one of many reasons salt was regarded as an effective ward against evil spirits: it kept evil spirits away from the preserved food.
Because of this preservative quality and salt as a dietary necessity, it is also a key symbol of friendship, concord, and hospitality, especially in the ancient Near East—the Hebrews salt is a covenant offering in sacrifices in recognition of this common meaning.
Contractive Force
Salt was the product of condensation, a manner of contraction, and it drew water out of other materials, another form of contraction. Salt was then synonymous with the more abstract contractive force, or like-attracts-like, the predecessor of Newton’s formulation of the Universal Law of Gravitation.
Spiritual Elevation and Enlightenment
Salt symbolizes spiritual purification, a path with an upward trajectory. This derives not just from removing the impure during the processing of salt but also because salt not only adds flavor to food but also brings out the qualities of other ingredients. This is another layer to Christ’s description of the faithful in Matthew 5:13. The faithful are the distilled, noblest essence of Man, free of impurities, and bring out the best in those around them.
This line of thought is not wholly unique to Abrahamic religions, as salt was an emblem of purification, spiritual improvement, and incorruptibility employed from Greece to Japan.
Wit and Wisdom
Salt is necessary, but one can easily have too much of it. It brings out the best of other flavors but can quickly become unpalatable or even dangerous. This quality is analogous to sharp wit and wisdom. Both are necessary and can elevate, but they can also be bitter and unwelcome. A bright intellect can dispel closely held illusions, and wisdom can unpleasantly call out invested waywardness.
Abjuration
The preservative qualities of salt and the belief it warded off evil spirits are accompanied by a host of superstitions. In Voodoo, giving salt to zombies awakens them to their state of death and compels them to return to the grave. The Greeks and Romans regarded salt spilling from a salt cellar or other vessel as bad luck and responded by grabbing a pinch of the salt and throwing it over their left shoulder.
This is because the left-hand (sinister) side is weaker in a right-hand-dominant culture, and therefore, the direction evil spirits will attack from/the shoulder the spirit will latch onto. Consequently, spilled salt in iconography indicates ill-omen, as when Judas Iscariot spilled the salt in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c. 1495).
Essential Salts
"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated."
-Borellus
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| Pierre Borel, or Borellus, French physician and alchemist, (1620-1671) |
H. P. Lovecraft’s short horror novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward opens with this quote, laying out the inspirational germ of the story’s central premise: necromancy by essential salts. However, this is not a quote. Or, at least, it’s not a quote from Borellus; it’s a paraphrasing of Borellus by Cotton Mather.
Yes, of the Salem Witch Trials. That Cotton Mather.
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| Cotton Mather, Puritan minister and theologian (1663-1728) |
This paraphrase is worth examining in its larger context, as it covers the notion of essential salts rather well:
“§ 1. If such a renowned chymist, as Quercetanus, with a whole tribe of labourers in the fire, since that learned man, find it no easie thing to make the common part of mankind believe, that they can take a plant in its more vigorous consistence, and after a due maceration, fermentation and separation, extract the salt of that plant, which, as it were, in a chaos, invisibly reserves the form of the whole, with its vital principle ; and, that keeping the salt in a glass hermetically sealed, they can, by applying a soft fire to the glass, make the vegetable rise by little and little out of its ashes, to surprise the spectators with a notable illustration of that resurrection, in the faith whereof the Jews returning from the graves of their friends, pluck up the grass from the earth, using those words of the scripture thereupon, Your bones shall flourish like an herb : 'tis likely, that all the observations of such writers, as the incomparable Borellus, will find it hard enough to produce our belief, that the essential salts of animals may be so prepared and preserved, than an ingenious man may have the whole ark of Noah in his own study, and raise the fine shape of an animal out of its ashes at his pleasure : and, that by the like method from the essential salts of human dust, a philosopher may, without any criminal necromancy, call up the shape of any dead ancestor from the dust whereinto his body has just been incinerated. The resurrection of the dead, will be as just, as great an article of our creed, although the relations of these learned men should pass for incredible romances : but yet there is an anticipation of that blessed resurrection, carrying in it some resemblance of these curiosities, which is performed, when we do in a book, as in a glass, reserve the history of our departed friends ; and by bringing our warm affections unto such an history, we revive, as it were, out of their ashes, the true shape of those friends, and bring to a fresh view, what was memorable and imitable in them.”
-Magnalia Christi Americana, Book II, “The Life of his Excellency, Sir William Phips, KNT”
We apologize; the grammar may be difficult to interpret. This particular section of the book is the opening of a 56-page biography of Sir William Phips. The introduction reads as an extended joke made of the wild promises of future medical technology from the pens of alchemists, before segueing into proper eulogy by stating that the remembrance of friends resurrects the shape of the dead as surely as the processes and preparations of fringe medicine and magic.
Understanding the framing, we can parse this quote and discern the information that draws our genuine interest: the claimed properties of essential salts.
Chemical Extraction
Mather references the student of Paracelsus, Joseph Quercetanus, on the extraction of essential features of plants (framed as the “vital principle”). Under this formulation, so much of what makes the plant that plant is retained in the salt that the reintroduction of animation via gentle flame reinvigorates inert matter with the original plant’s life and shape.
The core idea of essential salts is that the whole being of a living thing can be rendered inert while that essence is still accessible through a reanimating reaction.
The same ideas that apply to vegetable matter under these lines of reasoning apply to animal matter, including human beings. Mather observed that resurrection would be achieved by chemical process rather than devilry or other criminal magic under such a formulation.
As with many alchemical presuppositions, the chemical resurrection of whole beings from salt is pure fantasy. However, pursuing this impossible end goal led to the development of many chemical extraction and isolation methods that formed the foundation of chemistry as a genuine scientific discipline.
Creative Musings
With knowledge and account of the history of salt, practically, culturally, and magically, we turn our attention to salt’s creative value to storytellers.
Salt Abjuration as Dysjunction
Preservative practices might not be the only dimension for a writer to consider when examining salt as an abjuring reagent. There is another way to look at the relationship between salt and the evil spirit grounded in its role in the Tria Prima: the concrete.
Spirits, be they ghosts, demons, or what have you, are typically thought of as not having solid bodies of their own or only the semblance of. Animated corpses like the upvakningr or various interpretations of the vampire notwithstanding, evil spirits/demons/what-have-you are thought of as immaterial anima, or particular animation without a physical body.
Salt, being a non-particular physical body without animation, is the relevant opposite of the evil spirit and, therefore, suggests the negation of the spirit. A writer who wishes to go in this direction could use the salt to lend the spirit physicality in the form of an ectoplasm or something similar, making the incorporeal vulnerable to physical action. They could also have the salt and the spirit negate each other in a literal sense, destroying both the spirit and the physical matter of the salt!
Essential Salts, Again
H. P. Lovecraft recognized and exploited the essential salts of Borellus, but his story pertains to necromancers seeking a kind of depraved immortality. The necromancer is already material. What about salts of more exotic provenance?
The Elder Scrolls video game franchise implements spirit-sourced essential salts through the elemental spirits known as atronachs.
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| A flame atronach, is they appear in TES V: Skyrim. |
Atronachs are extra-dimensional elemental beings made of fire, ice, and lightning. On being defeated or killed, atronachs collapse into a residue that can be harvested as an appropriate essential salt. Flame atronachs drop fire salts, frost atronachs drop frost salts, and storm atronachs drop void salts.
These essential spirit salts are used in alchemical concoctions (potions) and in improving commodities and tools. Food may be made both dry and cool for long periods without refrigeration by preserving it in frost salts, and furnaces might be made to burn hotter, longer, and with less fuel by introducing fire salts, and so on.
The essential qualities of the atronach’s element is made readily available for exploitation in novel forms!
While essential salts have been exploited, from the pulps to Bethesda’s flagship video game franchise, this compiler feels that the subject is still under-explored in popular fantasy media, both in itself and in combination with other materials.
Chemical or Spiritual?
For those considering using essential salt in their writing, there are two (non-exclusive) vectors for the reaction of essential salt: chemical and spiritual.
To explain, we propose a salt of tiger blood.
A concoction of salt of tiger blood is prescribed to improve the strength and stamina of a patient. What is its mechanism of action?
In the case of chemical action, the essential salt may have extracted nutrients from the blood necessary for building muscle or may have been deficient in the patient’s diet. The salt may even contain hormones that further promote muscle mass development and stamina.
In the case of spiritual action, the essential salt may have extracted the strength and ferocity of the tiger from its blood. This action is conceptual: tigers are strong; therefore, consuming the tiger’s vital essence will make the patient like the tiger.
Which vector do you, as a storyteller, choose?
Making the Choice
We apologize, as the question we just asked was based on two false premises:
1) that you have to choose one; and
2) that you have to choose one.
The first of these is the easiest to address: as the storyteller, you can choose not to explore your story's causal mechanism. This may be because the narrative point of view doesn’t leave room for teasing out the two for character or pacing reasons, or you simply don’t care to explore that side of the subject.
The second premise is more complicated by the wealth of options available. You might choose one mechanism of action over the other because it makes sense for your story, your magic system, or any other considerations.
You can also choose both. This is the most challenging path to take and potentially the most creatively rewarding because there’s more than one “both.”
You may be writing a story where the narrative considers both the chemical and spiritual action of salts valid. This might play out with different characters prioritizing one action over the other, providing two methods of material interpretation that the character must choose. This provides the characters with a material grounding and creative freedom in their problem-solving.
The characters might also prioritize one method of interpretation over the other, while their biases have no meaningful impact on the salt reaction. Their ignorance of one or the other could lead to unforeseen complications.
What writer doesn’t love unforeseen complications?
Binding via Spirit Salts
The Elder Scrolls video games source exotic salts from spirits, and the same salts are used to summon those spirits. Fire salts are necessary to create a Scroll of Summon Flame Atronach. This poses an ambiguity relevant: is a second flame atronach drawn into the world by the salts via sympathy, or is the first atronach resurrected?
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| Imagine freeze-drying a ghost so you can bring it back to death later. |
For our purposes, we shall explore the possibilities of the latter: capturing spirits whole for later reanimation.
We are not wholly informed by the contrivances of a 20th-century pulp author and a 21st-century video game studio. We have found similar ideas that are much older on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the Maya epic the Popol Vuh, the hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque tricked the earthquake giant Cabracan by feeding him a bird sprinkled with magical earth or chalk. The enchanted bird weakened Cabracan, and the hero twins buried him alive.
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| The Death of Cabracan by Diego Rivera |
While this story does not speak of salt, the logic is that Cabracan’s weakened state was likely the result of terrible thirst, which makes for a perfect analogy. If a mountain-splitting ogre like Cabracan can be brought low by thirst and rendered inert, why not other monsters?
In The Testament of Solomon, the King of Israel had the demon Kunopaston sealed in a “phial” or jar. Kunopaston’s escape following his sacrifices to Moloch tells us such monsters can also be released.
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| The brass vessel from the Ars Goetia. |
A spirit or monster might be bound to salt, rendered salt, or immersed in salt. They might be placed in the vessel as a salt, ground up with the salt, or as a shriveled mummy. In any case, they are rendered inert for later use, awaiting some form of activation. Quercetanus speaks of reanimation via soft flame, and both The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Elder Scrolls bring about reanimation by breath or word (an uttered spell).
For simplicity, our sample premises are predicated exclusively on liquid reagents of reanimation: water, wine, oil, blood, etc.
The Process of Reconstitution
Reconstituting a whole being from salt might involve multiple treatments of aqua regia and ethanol, etc., and you might make a scene or multiple scenes of it. It might take months. Depending on circumstances, it places the reconstituted being in a position of considerable vulnerability and may give the story a ticking clock.
Reconstitution could also be relatively quick, occurring in a flash of powder or a gust of wind. Maybe they reform their body from grains of salt. Perhaps they rise from a salt slurry like Frank Cotton from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser:
The performance of reconstitution could also reveal something about the materialized being. It may reveal the creature’s true nature if it normally wears a deceptive skin or mask, like the vampires in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels or the plaster-covered angels in the Bayonetta video games. A spirit or monster rising from the salt headfirst, standing erect as though being pushed up on an elevator platform, implies that the creature is perfectly aware when it begins reconstitution. It may have been conscious the entire duration it was salt-bound.
The process could also reveal a change in the essence of the reanimated thing, as in the case of the Sand Man, Flint Marko, in Spider-Man 3:
Utility
Essential salts are convenient as a delivery vehicle for preserved alchemical reagents. Being a powder, they readily dissolve in liquid media and mix with other powders. Salt can be thrown or scattered quickly, but it is solid enough that if a spill occurs, it’s much easier to recover than an aqueous solution (a potion). This makes them a valid substitute for liquid potions and spell scrolls, whether for your fantasy novel or your Dungeons and Dragons game.
Small jars of exotic essential salts and other powdered reagents might be available at a regional shop to convey something about the local culture, or the characters might encounter this as archaic magic in some remote crypt. Your heroes may have developed the method themselves to smuggle dangerous magic into a city with prohibitions on scrolls and the like.
One could quickly build a magical system predicated entirely on essential salts.
Complicating Spell Salts
Working from our list of liquid reagents, what if a spell salt requires a specific fluid to activate? Does using the wrong fluid interfere with the spell salt? Does it spoil the salt’s essence? Does it fundamentally change the salt’s reactivity?
Let’s explore a few sample premises:
Premise 1: Something in the Water
A magician, while fleeing from a gang of thugs, attempted to reanimate the salt of a demon he had bound. In haste, he poured water into the demon jar instead of wine, ruining the salt. He tossed the salt, which leeched into the ground after the next rain.
What might the demon do in the soil, plants, or drinking water?
Premise 2: Monsters on the Dock
When an adventuring party enters the dock, an over-enthusiastic customs official orders his underlings to thoroughly search the party’s cargo. The customs official’s goons fumble and drop a crate full of jars into the water.
What spells go off? What monsters rise from the foam? How much damage do they cause? How inconvenient is the mess for your heroes?
Premise 3: A Novel Explosive
A military engineer too clever for anyone’s good has made a terrible discovery: if he renders an entire wasp nest into a salt and blends it in with the gunpowder in the explosive cannonballs, the shrapnel homes in on anyone in the blast radius with the malice of a swarm of hornets.
Premise 4: A Radical Procedure
A terminal illness afflicts a wealthy prince. The court doctor/magician suggests a radical procedure to rid the prince of his affliction: complete calcination. The court doctor insists that once the prince has been burned to ashes, his ashes can be sifted for the impurity of the disease by various processes and that he might be reconstituted over a year from his purified essential salt.
Premise 5: Father of Chimeras
A mad alchemist renders animals to salt and blends their powders to reconstitute them into chimeric monsters.
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| And you wondered where the hell owlbears came from. |
Premise 6: No Blood, No Problem
The ambitious court wizard of a decadent and declining empire wishes to seize the throne from his master. Unfortunately for him, he is not of royal or even noble blood, being the son of a foreign land. The wizard resolves this by stealing the previous emperor's bones and, with his underlings' aid, renders both the old emperor and himself to salt. When he returns, he appears as brother to the sitting emperor, and his regicide goes unopposed.
Premise 7: An Ancient Evil Returns
A grave robber in the sandy wastes of the east burgles his way into a tomb whose name is lost to history. He eagerly tears the tomb apart, looking for gold and jewels. He finds a handful before his eyes fall on the prize: a great burial cask. He pries the lid off but finds only dust. He runs his fingers through the dust to the bottom and finds nothing. He curses and spits into the cask before searching the rest of the tomb for enough to break even on his journey.
Before he stoops to smash another pot, a mewling noise stops him. He returns to the cask, finding a shriveled, fetal form with a wizened face glaring at him with eyes as black as the void. He watches as it grows, hearing its voice deepen and its words become speech.
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See Also:
Clear Cosmology
Magical Materials
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Bibliography
-Drury, N. (2004). The Dictionary of the Esoteric: 3000 entries on the mystical and occult traditions. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.
-Chabbert, Pierre. Pierre Borel (1620?-1671). Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.
( https://www.persee.fr/doc/rhs_0048-7996_1968_num_21_4_2567 )
-Drury, N. (2005). The Watkins Dictionary of Magic: 3000 entries on the magical traditions. Watkins.
-Mather, Cotton. “Book II, The Life of His Excellency, Sir William Phips, KNT”.” Magnalia Christi Americana, or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England: From Its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698: In Seven Books, Published by Silas Andrus. Roberts & Burr, Printers, Hartford, 1820, p. 151.
( https://archive.org/details/magnaliachris01math/page/150/mode/2up )
-Tresidder, J. (2008). The Watkins Dictionary of Symbols. Watkins.
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