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SALT – STEROPES THE ELDER KYKLOPES (or Cyclopes) were the three, orb-eyed, immortal giants who forged the lightning-bolts of Zeus. As soon as they were born, their father Ouranos (the Sky) locked them away inside the belly of Earth, along with their stormy brothers, the Hekatonkheires. When the Titanes overthrew him, they then drove the giants into the pit of Tartaros. Zeus and his brothers eventually released them and in return they provided the god with his thunderbolt, Poseidon with his storm-raising trident, and Haides with a helm of invisibility. Some say there were a total of seven forging Kyklopes. The additional four, sons of the first, were slain by Apollon to avenge the death of his son Asklepios, who was struck down by lightning. The tribe of younger Kyklopes which Odysseus encountered on his travels were a different breed altogether, probably born from the blood of the castrated sky-god Ouranos. Salt is the third element in the trinity of the alchemical substances in the Great Work. As mercury is the water aspect, sulfur is the fiery aspect, so is salt the form aspect (salt is a crystalline form, or crystallized energy). So it is also a name for the ‘prima materia’, for the stone of the philosophers. The alchemists say that in its lower aspect salt is ‘bitter’. Here salt is symbol for knowledge and wisdom. Self-knowledge is bitter, painful. Sometimes they speak of the bitter ‘sea water’. As water or the sea stands for the soul, it is a reference to the same self-knowledge.
Salt is also seen as a symbol for the second phase of the Great Work, albedo, or whiteness, because here light breaks through, and thus also wisdom. Christ is called ‘Sal sapientiae’, the Salt of Wisdom’. In the beginning of the Great Work, the salt is called impure. Here it equals the earth, the body, our every day consciousness or being. The impure salt has to be dissolved (‘solutio’) into the divine water (quicksilver, or ‘prima materia’), by which it is purified. In albedo salt arises as a pure form and fixated, that is crystallized into a pure salt. As symbol for wisdom, salt is the breath of the divine energy. This wisdom vivifies the invisible fire that energizes entire Nature. This fire controls life, movement, energy, the heavens, the planets. Paracelsus called this fire ‘the light of Nature’ a reference to the ‘anima mundi', the soul of the world.
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