SCHOLAR
ISLAND
ALCHEMY
"The Alchemist's vision continues in our own dreams born in later centuries-to improve the natural world through mastery of its parts."
Anthony Aven
Behind the Crystal Ball
"Alchemy was philosophy. Alternatively called hermeticism, alchemy had as its primary intention the regeneration of the human soul from its present sensory-dominated state into its original divine condition. It was about raising the life essence of things-metals in particular-to a nobler form."
Dick Teresi
Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science- from the Babylonians to the Maya
"Here stands the stone from heaven,
'Tis very cheap in price!
The more it is despised by fools,
The more loved by the wise."
-Arnaldus De Villanova, Alchemist 1313
"I know not what Experiment I have taken more pleasure in, than to free such a Crystalline Substance taken out of dirty Earth, so beautiful a Body out of Chaos, such a Spiritual Essence; as without a metaphor almost it may be called, drawn from a Caput Mortuum....the Mechanical Labourers at the work cannot behold it without admiration."
-William Clarke1610 a.d. (talking about Saltpeter)
"It is important to accept man in his totality, his shit, and his death. In the acceptance of obscenity, excrement, and death there lies a spiritual energy which I make use of."
-Salvador Dali
"He is a recluse who dreads crowds and discussions and avoids fame; he has a horror of verbal disputes and a great aversion to metaphysics; while everyone is brilliantly debating the universal, he spends his life in his laboratory, melting metals, handling bodies, inventing useful instruments of war, agriculture, and the trades. He is not ignorant, however, and can read Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chaldean; he practices alchemy and medicine; and he has learned to make as much use of his hands as of his intelligence!
(a verbal portrait of Fierre de Nariscourt by Roger Bacon)
"I belong neither to any country nor to any particular place; my spiritual being lives its eternal existence outside time and space. When I immerse myself in thought I go back through the Ages. When I extend my spirit to a world existing far from anything you perceive, I can change myself into whatever I wish. Participating consciously in absolute being. I regulate my action according to my surroundings. My country is wherever I happen to set foot in the moment....I am that which is...free and master of life. There are beings who no longer possess guardian angels: I am one of those."
-Cagliostro
"Take three pounds of genuine cinnabar and one pound of white honey. Mix them. Dry the mixture in the sun. Then roast it over a fire until it can be shaped into pills. Take ten pills the size of a hemp seed every morning. Inside of a year, white hair will turn black, decayed teeth will grow again, and the body will become sleek and glistening. If an old man takes this medicine for a long period of time, he will develop into a young man. The one who takes it constantly will enjoy eternal life, and will not die."
Ko Hung (400 A.D.)
from Joseph Campbell
The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology
If a prize were offered for the most obscure and intentionally baffling philosophy in history it would surely be awarded to alchemy, the much maligned parent of chemistry and, by extension, Jungians. Alchemy has from its inception suffered from an image problem, primarily because its practitioners claimed to be able to turn base metals such as iron or lead into gold, it wasn't so much the claim that tarnished their reputation as the fact that they were unable to do so.
On the surface the alchemist often appeared to be more or an enlightened quack., dabbling and experimenting at the frontiers of physical and metaphysical science. Sometimes, or perhaps often, he was a complete fraud making claims often false claims about what he could do; yet within the alchemical literature can be found gems of philosophic insight that demonstrate that some were alchemists of a different order, and that the stone of the philosophers, the elixir, did and does existClark Heinrich
Alchemy & Religion Alchemy
"Remember what I told you the world is only the visible aspect of God. And that’s what alchemy does is to bring spiritual perfection into contact with the material plane."
Paulo Cociho
The Alchemist
"The Alchemist's vision continues in our own dreams born in later centuries to improve the natural world through mastery of its parts."
Anthony Aveni
Behind the Crystal Ball
"We all think we know what alchemy is...In fact. many people do not realize that it is a spiritual way of life."
Chambers
"You are the material itself of the Great Work."
Grillot de Givry
"It is found in the country, in the village, and in the town, in all things created by God; Yet it is despised by all. Rich and poor handle it every day. It is cast into the street by servant maids. Children play with it. yet no one prizes it, though next to the human soul it is the most beautiful and precious thing upon the earth and has power to pull down Kings and Princes. Nevertheless it is esteemed the vilest and meanest of earthly things. It is cast away and rejected by all."
The Hermetic Museum
"Like the Romans and the Moabites and lovesick maidens in France, the alchemists of Europe believed in the spiritual powers of human waste, which ranked among the strongest of all magnetic medicines. The great Paracelsus, father of modern pharmacology, kept a store from which he hoped to conjure nothing less that the philosopher's stone. "Man's dung, or excrement, hath very great virtues, " he wrote, "because it contains in it all the noble essences."
-Frederick Kaufman
article WASTELAND Harpers Magazine/February 2008
"I must tell thee that all of these miracles grow out of a certain earth, a soft red clay, which is be found everywhere."
-Fama et Confessio Frater R: C:
"Assuredly he that seeth not his blackness, at the beginnings of his operations....shall altogether fail in the Mastery."
Nicholas Flamel
"Away with all those false disciples who claim that this divine science has but one aim: To make gold or silver….the alchemy that they dishonor and degrade has but one aim: To extract the quintessence of things to prepare arcane, tinctures, elixirs capable of returning to man the health he has lost."
Paracelsus
"Passing from primitive craftsmanship and magic to spirituality and nuclear chemistry, from the beginnings to Hiroshima...the secret most alchemists pursued was an erotic one. How could physical love be used to create a work of art? The process known as 'distillation' symbolizes that which we call (incorrectly) mastery of the sex drive and working in the black conjures up ideas of entering the unconscious... The fire burning in the alchemists furnace represents passion which has become a creative force.... By devoting himself to alchemy, the alchemist is able to 'work' on his emotions, forebodings and even instincts, just as a painter works with shape and colour."
Chambers
The Occult Compact Reference
"But the alchemistic operation. being a work of love, is a task for two. In producing the red colour, a kind of orgasmic circuit is set up; The current passes through the lovers as they embrace and helps them to discover the universe. Alchemy is simply the conquest of love, an 'alloy' of the erotic and the spiritual."
Chambers
The Occult Compact Reference
"The old alchemists maintained almost unanimously that the process of elixir preparation was guarded by dark powers of the underworld and as a result could lead to unspeakable disaster: poverty, incurable disease or a violent death. if it was at all possible, one must guard against an explosion of the glass vessel which contained the substance slowly transforming over the slow heat. According to the prescription. I warmed the contents steadily for weeks. My chemical advisor and I were surprised to notice inexplicably beautiful color changes which reached the iridescence of peacock's plumage. As I stood one day in front of the retort, it suddenly exploded with a loud bang, and its contents splashed up in my face. I repeated the experiment, this time in an open vessel. The play of the colors became still at the first stage of blackness. it remains utterly incomprehensible to me why the flask exploded again-and at the exact moment when I happened to be standing in front of it. When I wanted to repeat the operation for a third time, I fell sick with a hideous disease."
-Gustav Meyrink
"In essence, the alchemical worldview that we see enunciated in works like the 1678 collection entitled The Hermetic Museum requires a fundamental change in our approach to the world if we are to understand it aright. Alchemy, both as laboratory alchemy and as spiritual alchemy, holds that the cosmos is alive and that we are not separate from it. Whereas scientific rationalism and the technology derived from it are founded in the separation of subject from object, so that the subject can manipulate the object, alchemy in its various forms is based in a profoundly different approach, representing a discipline in which subject and object are revealed to be in fact inseparable. Given this profoundly different view of subject and object, one can see how the various aims of alchemy flow from it, including the possibility of turning lead into gold, or of creating an elixir that can prolong physical life indefinitely or bring about immortality. These aims are brought about, from an alchemical viewpoint, by the union or transcendence of subject and object by way of various laboratory or spiritual "operations."
An example of a brief alchemical account can be found at the beginning of Basilius Valentinus's treatise on the "Great Stone of the Ancient Sages," found in the 1678 Hermetic Museum collection of alchemical writings. Valentinus tells the story of how in his monastery there was an ailing brother with a kidney disease that responded to no treatment. Valentinus determined to cure him and so experimented for six years with all manner of herbal medicines, to no avail. Thus, he wrote, at last
I determined to devote myself to the study of the powers and virtues which God has laid into metals and minerals; and the more I searched the more I found. One discovery led to another, and after God had permitted unto me many experiments, I understood clearly the nature and properties, and the secret potency, imparted by God to minerals and metals.
Among the mineral substances, I found one which exhibited many colours, and proved to be of the greatest efficacy in art. The spiritual essence of this substance I extracted, and therewith restored our brother , in a few days, to perfect health.....And his prayers, together with my own diligence, so prevailed with God, that there was revealed to me that great secret which God ever conceals from those who are wise in their own conceits.
Thus I have been wishing to reveal to you in this treatises, as far as may be lawful to me, the Stone of the Ancients, that you, too might possess the knowledge of this highest of earthly treasures for your health and comfort in this valley of sorrow."
Arthur Versluis
The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance
"I continued thus with great labor up to the year 1654, at which time the Good God taught me the whole secret. This was the tenth year after my initial introduction to the art, which years I spent in incredible perseverance, with constancy of spirit, in highly erroneous labors.
Around the end of the year 1654, the whole secret was revealed to me by divine grace. From that time up to this year of 1660, I was impeded by various obstructions from brining the work to complete perfection. This is the sixteenth year from my first introduction to this pursuit, and the fifteenth from my labors."
George Starkey (part of a circle of student Alchemists at Harvard)
"On the face of it, of course, it is startling to discover just how accepted alchemy was in the North American colonies. Naturally, it is not as though every other neighbor might be an alchemists, but certainly it is the case that the possibility of alchemical transmutation was widely accepted among the highly educated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the late-eighteenth century, even if it had largely disappeared in practice, alchemy had become integrated into American legend. This widespread acceptance of alchemy in the early colonies is important for us because, when seen in light of the prevalence of astrology and magic during that era, it becomes quit clear that early American colonial life was very much informed by Western esotericism....."
-Arthur Versluis
The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance
"In as much as the wise and kind God has lately poured His mercy and kindness over the human race, our understanding of the universe and His Son has constantly increased and we have good reason to boast of a fortunate time. Not only has He uncovered for us half of the unknown and obscure worlds, but He has also given us many strange creatures and occurrences that have never before happened. He has also let enlightened spirits arise who are to restore the somewhat maligned and imperfect art of alchemy to its rightful place, so that man will finally discover his dignity and glory and recognize how he is but a microcosm and how deep his art is rooted in nature."
-Andrea-Fama Fraternitatis (Report of the Brotherhood, 1614)
The Basic Rosicrucian Concepts
1. The Origin of the Universe is Divine.
2. The Soul is a spark of the divine consciousness
3. The soul-force possesses potentially the powers of the divine principle at work in the Universe. The function of life on earth is to afford the opportunity of developing true potentiality in the personality.
4. The moral law is one of the basic laws of the universe. KARMA.
5. Life has a purpose. Life is not meaningless. Happiness is a very real thing and is a by-product of knowledge, action, and living.
6. Man has free choice. He has tremendous powers of both good and evil, depending on his conscious realizations.
7. Since the individual soul is part of the Universal soul, man has access to powers he does not know, but which time and knowledge and experience will gradually reveal to him.
8. Wisdom is acquired through righteous living.."
"Around midnight, early Autumn 1869, Yellow wavering kerosene light dances off jars of colorful compounds, retorts, old electrical devices, and other singular equipment in a little "electro-alchemical" laboratory near Utica, New York. Thirty-year-old Cyrus Teed has been working here all day and into the night, with great result.
"As he later wrote in The Illumination of Koresh, he had discovered "the secret law and beheld the precipitation of golden radiations, and eagerly watched the transformation of forces to the minute molecules of golden dust as they fell in showers through the lucid electro-alchemical fluid....I had succeeded in transforming matter of one kind to its equivalent energy, and in reducing this energy, through polaric influence, no matter of another kind....The 'philosopher's stone' had been discovered, and I was the humble instrument for the exploiter of so magnitudinous a result."
-David Standish
Hollow Earth
"I bent myself to the task of projecting into tangibility the creative principle. Suddenly, I experienced a relaxation at the occiput or back part of the brain, and a peculiar buzzing tension at the forehead of sinciput; succeeding this was a sensation as of a Faradic battery of the softest tension , about the organs of the brain called the lyra, crura pinealis, and conarium. There gradually spread from the center of my brain to the extremities of my body, and apparently to me, into the auric sphere of my being, miles outside of my body, a vibrations so gentle, soft and culciferous that I was seen impressed to lay myself upon the bosom of this gently oscillating ocean of magnetic and spiritual ecstasy. I realized myself gently yielding to the impulse of reclining upon this vibratory sea of this, my newly-found delight. My every thought but one had departed from the contemplation of earthly and material things. I had but a lingering, vague remembrance of a natural consciousness and desire."
Cyrus Teed
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Book: "Creations of Fire: Chemistry's Lively History from Alchemy to the Atomic Age." by Cathy Cobb
Book: "The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology of Renaissance Prague" by Peter Marshall
Book: "Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect nature" by William R. Newman
Book: "Book: "The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason" by Iain McCalman
Book: "Isaac Newton's Freemasonry: The Alchemy of Science and Mysticism" by Alain Bauer
Book: "Alchemy" by T. Burckhardt
Book: "The forge and the Crucible" by Mercea Eliade
Book: "Alchemy Rediscovered and Restored" by Archibald Cockren
Book: "The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire" by Pamel H. Smith
Book: "Alchemists Bible: The New Pearl of Great Price" by Petrus Bonus
Book: "Isaac Newton-The Last Sorcerer" by Michael White
Book: "Fulcanelli: Master Alchemist-Le Mystere de Cathedrals
Book: "Fulcanelli: His True Identity Revealed" by Patrick Riviere
Book: "The alchemist's Kitchen: Extraordinary Potions & Curious Notions" by Guy Ogilvy
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