To start with, is anyone already familiar with alchemy?

What metaphysics is to physics, alchemy is to chemistry, and as much as they might deny it, there are metaphysical assumptions running just as rampant now as there always have been. They just have a different flavour now. They call it “empirical.”

An example of such a metaphysical assumption… Right now in our world, mental illness is the biggest health problem around, even sometimes leading to premature death. You would think anyone producing medicines for this would be having a heyday, yes?

Yes. They seem to be in the commercials. They are not, because as much as it’s popularly believed in scientific circles, they aren’t finding target zones in the brain for meaningful treatment. Psycho-pharmacy, as big as it got, was just guessing, experimenting on people, and mostly guessing wrong. Well, this guessing can’t really be avoided. What I will offer you tonight is that the paradigm you base your guesses on is as meaningful if not more so than any “facts” you may or may not have.

Alchemy was a branch of metaphysical thought concerned primarily with the meaning behind the material world, material structure and behaviour. Metaphysics would be the branch that dealt with forces or energy, but they didn’t really think of energy or understand it the way we do today.

The basic assumption behind alchemy was simple. However the universe got started, the alchemist believed the process could be reversed, though preferably on a localized basis. They weren’t looking to destroy everything or any such nonsense as that. The reason they wanted to reverse the process that gave rise to physical reality, is they believed it would be possible to seize on the core principle that gave structure to matter of any form. They called this substance prima materia, or first matter. Another reason they sought to reverse the manifestation process was the observation that any state of matter seemed to change form when one of its qualities was stripped from it.

Sounds like the hadron collider. I see the comparison myself, and well, if it weren’t for alchemy originally, we would have no chemistry now.

So yes, strip cold from water and you get air. Strip dryness from earth and you get fire, etcetera, etcetera. The thinking was that the first matter was possessed of no manifest qualities but the potential for all of them, and by adding influences to any distilled amount of first matter you could create anything else.

Dark matter? Actually, that’s a good connection.

And like stem cells are in biology. Indeed.

The process of refining the first matter was said to go through four stages. The first being white, the second being black, the third being yellow, and the final being red.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~