The Wisdom of Salt

Sal Sapientia

Salt/Sapientia: Wise Salt

“There is another time and place for salt: when the soul needs earthing. When dreams and events do not feel real enough, when the uses of the world taste stale, flat and unprofitable, when we feel uncomfortable in community and have lost our personal ‘me-ness’ – weak, alienated, drifting – then the soul needs salt."

—James Hillman

Along with Sulphur and Mercury, Salt was one of the “Three Primes” or the fundamental principals that composed all things, according to the early alchemists. Salt represented base matter or the physical body. After all, we are constantly expressing through our salt: blood, sweat, and tears. So in many ways, it can be seen the human element in the equation. Let’s consider the term Salt of the Earth: we generally think of people with deep integrity and solid worth - those who are grounded, reliable, unpretentious, and embody practical wisdom. Salt, as we know it, represents character, someone like an olde sailor, perhaps, who has been through the storms of life and lived to tell the tale.

If we consider the alchemical salt to represent age, memory, and experience, salt can also remind us that we are in an earthly body. Despite all the external pressures that change us through our lives, and through our days, salt is an invitation to come back to the form you are. You may be a spirit in a body, but this body serves you best if it is grounded and healthy and HERE. It doesn’t matter how lofty your thoughts, how wealthy your bank account, or how uncomfortable you feel in your body, you are part of humanity, like it or not. Salt is a reminder that you are an Earthling above all. Simply put, you are matter. Simply put, you matter.

Once the element of salt was integrated in their experiments, the alchemists took it further as a spiritual metaphor. Sal Sapientia was the term for “Wise Salt.” They saw Sal Sapientia as the moment when hidden truth crystallized into something practical. When ideas became solid. When potential became lived experience. This is the wisdom that only comes by living. Time is the ultimate catalyst. But in the meantime, do whatever you can do to experience life in your body. Whatever it takes, honor the strength of your salt…ground yourself, embrace your body and surroundings, and be here now.

SALT is one of those paradoxical elements that stretches a spectrum…from the sting of salt in a wound to the playful buoyancy of salt water…salt is both dehydrating to a body and over-absorbent. A little salt can turn a dish into a Micheline star. For many of our ancestors, it kept meat edible and safe through the winter. For other ancestors, salt destroyed the fields so that nothing could grow again. It’s no wonder salt stays in the traditional Mysterium of Alchemy as one of the elemental Three Primes.

As someone who appreciates practical magic, my saltiest tip for self-care is found in a bag of drugstore Epsom Salts. Just get what you can afford…use cheap kitchen Sea Salt in a pinch (get it?!) If you want to get fancy, you can add essential oils or rose petals. But my go-to is Epsom salt and hot water in a tub. The salt does something to make the water heavier, coaxing the body to give up some aches and pains. The heavier salt-water draws out superficial toxins too, including the energetic ick from the day, the unprocessed projections of the collective emotional field that stick to sensitive, empathic folk like bees to honey. Especially in times that are shocking to us all, when the field has been stirred up and no one knows what belongs to them and what belongs to us. Instead of recognizing our personal experience, this becomes collective pandora’s box free-fall. The energetic swarm of bee-like emotions can’t orient themselves and go mad, flying every which way, waiting for the Queen to send the signal she is is safe and well. Only then can they begin to settle into synergetic service again. One tiny body at a time—or possibly, all of them at once. And so it is with us.

My simple routine in times like these, when you can’t tell the difference between your own emotions and those of the humans around you…whether they are people you were with that day or a general sense of oppression that seems impersonal but inescapable, is to sit in my bathtub, imagining my body like an empty wine bottle. The longer I lie in this heavy, hot water, the more the label wrapped around me begins to un-stick. I imagine the extra energies I’ve picked up through my day beginning to ease off the glass of my body, perhaps in small rubbed-off shreds of sticky, saturated paper…or maybe they slide off in one rectangular release. It doesn’t matter what your mind needs to do to help it all make sense. Bring your body to the story… you just have to feel it or imagine it: letting the collective anxiety, grief, and anger go for the night. When you find what is still there, you may find what is yours. And the salt will help draw a barrier. It will make you feel like a human, not just part of something bigger, but a person whose personal experience and emotions need to come first.

Find a taste for that again, and you may be able to make a difference. After all, YOU are the salt of the earth.

Salt painting and description from my Alchemy Series: www.allisonadams.net/alchemy-lab