Alchemy

Watch the matter in the vessel turn black, white, yellow and red, with the peacock's tail between, each stage with its bird, its planet and metal, read in the laboratory or as Jung read it, or tend the athanor yourself, raising the fire by degrees as the old books teach and keeping it gentle enough for the raven's head; and beside it the Chinese inner elixir, the three treasures refined in the body. Tap the emblems on an engraved plate and join the Red King and White Queen in the chemical wedding. Go round George Ripley's twelve gates, each with its sign, or walk the seven operations inwardly and map a change of your own onto them, with the month's inner work by the Moon; learn the symbols of the elements, the three principles and the metals, the grey wolf of antimony and the VITRIOL motto, and test yourself both ways; build the signs from their parts, and walk the week round the star of the seven metals; work a laboratory bench, each vessel on its own fire: distil wine or roses in the water bath or over the open fire, in the alembic or Maria's three-armed still, until the spirit burns, circulate the pelican, sublime flowers of sulphur, and complete seven experiments in a laboratory notebook; make a spagyric tincture step by step, its jar darkening as it digests, with a laboratory notebook, a shaking tracker and calendar dates; read the Emerald Tablet line by line in Isaac Newton's English and the Latin of 1541; and step through the history of the art from Maria the Jewess to Jung. Under a frontispiece of the furnace and still by night, the Matter tab shows the theory beneath it all: turn Aristotle's elements into one another on the square of their qualities, burn a log to see Paracelsus's sulphur, mercury and salt part, and dissolve matter into a cloud and fix it again into Michael Maier's figure of the Stone; and in the symbols, read five recipes written in signs. The Tablet tab now has the ouroboros of the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, turning round hen to pan, the All is One, and coloured if you like through the four stages. Then make it stick: put the Tablet's fourteen lines back in order and pick each line's Latin from four, put Ripley's twelve gates in order, and sort the flame, the smoke, the ash and nine more things to Salt, Sulphur or Mercury. The bench itself stands in a stone room by night, the Moon in an arched window, herbs drying from the beam, a candle to snuff, the fires lighting the wall as they are lit: drag a jar from the shelf into a vessel to charge it, carry the taper from the candle to light any fire, grind the herb in the mortar before the pelican, open the window when the sulphur fumes gather, work the bellows to hurry the still, and watch the vessel you are working close up in a lens, the whole room shifting a little as you move.

mixer

WORKS WELL WITH

LEARN THE BACKGROUND

5 lessons explain the ideas behind this tool.

Alchemy

Alchemy

WORKS WELL WITH

LEARN THE BACKGROUND

Alchemy

Nigredo

Refining essence into breath

READING THE COLOURS

The birds of the work

PRACTISE WITH IT

WORKS WELL WITH

LEARN THE BACKGROUND

Nigredo

Refining essence into breath

READING THE COLOURS

The birds of the work

PRACTISE WITH IT