Alchemical Fire

The Ascending Triangle

Points up because fire rises: the heat that transforms, burns off the inessential, and cannot be stored.

Fire is one of the four elements Aristotle set out in On Generation and Corruption, hot and dry, and its sign is the plainest figure in the alchemical repertoire: an equilateral triangle standing on its base. The direction is the argument. Aristotle held that fire and air move naturally upward while water and earth move down, so the two light elements point their triangles up and the two heavy ones point theirs down. Within each pair the two members are then told apart by a horizontal bar, which air and earth carry and fire and water do not; the bar distinguishes them and is not recorded as meaning anything further. The same upward triangle set over a cross is the sign for Alchemical Sulfur, the soul of the tria prima. The forms were standardised by the printed symbol tables of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rather than by any single author.