Jorge Ben Jor's journey through the mysteries of alchemy

The story begins in 1973, when Jorge Ben Jor decided to take Gilberto Gil to see the place where a small group of alchemists met secretly. It was behind the Auberge Nicolas Flamel, a restaurant in Paris built in the mid-1400s. After dining, the two walked through the house, whose first owner was Nicolas Flamel - a famous alchemist in his time.

“We saw something there. Gil saw it too. We saw something. But beautiful, not ugly. A beautiful thing.” the singer commented in an interview in 2009. In the end, what they both saw was “a group of people dressed in 15th-century clothing in the doorway of the room. It was a group of alchemy” and one of the people they “saw” was, precisely, the boyfriend of the widow - Nicolas Flamel.

Six months after that vision, in May 1974, Jorge Ben Jor would release his favorite album of his career: ’The Emerald Tablet’.

The album can be seen as a kind of compilation, almost a musical treatise that elevates the work to the status of art and philosophy simultaneously, always under the genuine and unique interpretation of Jorge Ben Jor.

With 12 songs, almost all of them became popular. “The Alchemists Are Coming”, “Magnolia”, “Zumbi”, “Black Skin Woman” and “The Widow's Boyfriend” made it to the list of classic Brazilian songs. In the last one, Jorge refers to his vision with Gil but continues telling his own version, as if Flamel had told him in that vision in '73, or as if the singer himself had participated in the gossip of the streets of Paris 800 years ago.

In that same month of release, Jorge Ben Jor chose the song as one of the singles from the album and presented it on Fantástico - where he appears surrounded by figures manipulating potions, in outfits similar to the vision from a year prior, with Gil.

Alchemy

The album marks his first work on the path of alchemy. Scholars assert that the artist traverses three great themes: blackness, mysticism, and alchemy. Jorge himself stated that the album was a true “musical alchemy.”

These themes were already common in his life - one of his grandfathers was part of the Rosicrucian Order, a group that has dedicated over 100 years to mystical studies, and it was in his books that Jorge discovered alchemy. “I started to admire the way they saw the world, the perseverance in work…”.

In an interview, Ben also stated that he read many original texts by Thomas Aquinas - canonized as a Catholic saint in the mid-14th century, he is considered the one who embedded Aristotelian philosophy into the Christian faith. “He has some beautiful texts. I learned Latin because of him,” he told Trip in 2009, citing the Summa Theologica, a thick book full of solutions to questions about existence and humanity's relationship with God written in the mid-13th century. Aquinas was also an alchemist.

In ‘I Will Cheer,’ Jorge briefly mentions the saint: “For Saint Thomas Aquinas/ For my brother…”. Again, in his following album from 1975 (Let it Go), he dedicated an entire song to the saint: “Thus Spoke Saint Thomas Aquinas.”

Al-kīmīya

The magical procedure of trying to transform common metals, like lead, into gold or the philosopher's stone - the path to eternal life - is the principle of alchemy. And it’s in the first song of the album, The Alchemists Are Coming, that Ben explains how this would be possible through a sequence of chemical steps.

But, in between the lines, Jorge explains all his interpretations of what alchemy is, in fact. One of the deepest codes that Jorge Ben might have left in The Emerald Tablet lies in the historical event, in the etymology of the word "alchemy".

According to studies, the Egyptians referred to some processes, like the embalming of their dead, as khemeia - from which the word “chemistry” derives. The Arabs adopted similar practices, even before reaching the West, and they were called “al kimiya,” which meant “philosopher's stone.”

However, the word “kimiya” has roots in a language spoken only by Egyptian Christians (Copts) and its translation is simply “black.” It was so because “kimiya” was how they referred to the color of the clay along the banks of the Nile River, and consequently, the very Egypt: “black land.”

In The Emerald Tablet, alchemy is highlighted, above all, with a system of philosophical knowledge that is African - and black. But of course, the role of Nicolas Flamel's alchemy is also important: “He is my muse,” Jorge stated in an interview in 2009. However, Flamel's alchemy occurs through the path of mysticism.

As mentioned before, all of Ben Jor's interpretations about alchemy fit into his album. In The Man with the Florida Tie, the singer bases himself on Philippus von Hohenheim, a Swiss from the 17th century obsessed with alchemical knowledge, which he used to create a branch of science (iatrochemistry) and also medicines. The Swiss became known as Paracelsus - “better than Celso” in Latin, in reference to the great physician from Rome, Aulus Cornelius Celsus.

After all this time, alchemy is seen as a suspicious practice and philosophy in the eyes of scholars, surviving through Rosicrucians and Freemasons, through symbolism or scientists who worked secretly in laboratories. This supportive current runs through the entire album.

The Codes of ‘The Emerald Tablet’

Hermes Trismegistus wrote a set of 24 sacred texts - the emerald tablet - between the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D., which long after were compiled into a compendium called Corpus Hermeticum. In them, Hermes talks about the relationship of humanity with the divine, notions of truth, goodness, and beauty and about the origins of the world. Trismegistus comes from “three times great”: "the best philosopher, the best priest, and the best king".

The emerald tablet was written in topics, as if the next affirmed the previous, until all conformed a definitive explanation of everything. The first sentence of the text, "it is truth, without lie, certain and very true," does not appear in Ben's song, but is stamped on the album cover. The second topic, “what is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below,” serves as a synthesis of hermetic alchemy.

The emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus appears in the images of the iconic cover of the album, filtered through a dream that, for Jorge Ben's "muse" (Nicolas Flamel), served as a revelation.

The story is that Flamel dreamed of random figures, ranging from alchemists to the relationship of men with gods. Years later, he entered a bookstore and, flipping through one of the books, found the same images in the work. The texts were in another language, but from then on he believed he had found the recipe for the philosopher's stone.

The Books of the Album

There is a consensus among researchers of the album regarding the books that complete the universe of the record. One of them is The Mystery of the Cathedrals, in which Fulcanelli asserts how old Catholic temples in Europe, especially Gothic ones, would guard ancient alchemical secrets. It’s a book that helps to understand how Ben read alchemy.

It is possible to say that Fulcanelli's great influence on the album lies in the method that the author discovered and described in the book: just as medieval alchemists hid their secrets in temples, Jorge Ben hid many mysteries within the songs of the album.

Were They Astronaut Gods? was another book that the singer certainly read. The book supports the thesis that extraterrestrial beings circulated the Earth before the first human species, leaving various artifacts, structures, and even signs of the technologies they wielded. In Errare Humanum Est, the third song of the album, Jorge talks about this: speculating if the author's thesis might prove, in some way, through "our impulse to probe space".

Magnolia also came from the same book: one of the excerpts tells of the legend of a goddess named Orjana who descended in Tiahuanaco (Bolivia) to become the mother of the Earth, coming from the stars in a golden spaceship - "already on the way/ Flying in a golden motherly ship/ Beautiful and swift made of a miraculous metal".

In Zumbi, Jorge Ben revisited images from the French painter Johan Moritz Rugendas who, in the first half of the 19th century, published a book filled with engravings about the daily life of slavery after an expedition through Brazil. In them are the origins of the enslaved, in order: Benguela, Angola, Congo, Monjolo, Cabinda, Quiloa, Rebolla, and Mina.

"There is a whole recognition of our slave weight there, but without losing sight of the possibility of each one transcending through personal work. The fascinating thing is how, in The Emerald Tablet, he finds, in alchemy, an answer to the burden of being black in 20th-century Brazil", affirms the critic Paulo da Costa e Silva.

Considered by Rolling Stone magazine as the sixth best album released by artists from Brazil, The Emerald Tablet reflects the period of the singer of “Musical Alchemy”, where Jorge managed to unite his two greatest passions, music and alchemy. It is a true work of art, worthy of the sonic work it represents.

The album does not represent immortality, but it is something close to it. Jorge Ben Jor did not need success at the time when he released this grand album, but it was one of the ones that consecrated him.