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What is Alchemy?
Alchemy uses a series of beliefs that I myself practice. Both intuitive and literal observations of matter and the natural world, but it is more focused on artifice. It even had a doctrine that doesn’t really defy common sense; That nature doesn’t create finished products. This is why alchemy had an almost moral agenda to…
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Science, Spirit, Energy and Matter
Alchemy can be applied widely, and it’s more a way of thinking or philosophy rather then ‘stir a pot and out comes gold’ as it’s usually portrayed. The association with making gold was narrow even in the heyday of alchemy. However, some say philosophy is just a subjective stance and has no substance in the…
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The Keys of Alchemy
Did alchemists really try to change matter to something else like gold? They experimented with matter to confirm or refute their theories. What were their theories? A cycle of creation, or arising. The elements didn’t all just pop up, they stemmed from each other much like the cycle we can observe in water. Matter was…
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Reverse Manifestation
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…
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First Matter
There is a lot of religious symbolism that came to be admixed with alchemical lore as was perhaps inevitable. Much of Christian Gnosticism is heavy with alchemical symbolism, and with that connection, we move on to the philosopher’s stone itself. It could be created in two forms, a white stone and a red. The white…
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All is One
Alchemy was dual sided. On the flip side of alchemy with all its concern over material structure and physical evolution and behaviour, you have the concern for a mystery element, one that actually came to the fore more in eastern alchemy than western. Manu. Mind. Prakriti. There are many complex references to the physical behaviour…
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Gold Standard
Shall we talk about the significance of gold in alchemy? Sidebar first: In Egypt, where alchemy as we know it had its origin, gold was valued less than glass. It’s pretty significant in modern science too. Indeed, it is. The alchemical interest in gold really had nothing to do with making themselves wealthy. For alchemists,…
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Naturalistic vs Heuristic
Could you explain what you mean by naturalistic and heuristic? A heuristic is a cognitive bias. It’s simply the rule set our brains form without even trying. Each of these “rules” was intuited to be an elemental component of the human soul, and in their default state they were considered to be the reason that…
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Alchemical Life
Life is a strange thing. Even today we have yet to establish a clear definition of life from inanimate matter. We know life to experience it, but there is no concrete physical trait that identifies it for what it is. There is one theory, though, that says that life is identifiable as a system of…
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Evolutionary Pressures
Alchemists were very much students of life, and as much as they revered what appeared to them to be a naturally self perpetuating order in the world, they also observed what we now would call evolutionary pressures as is certainly in evidence. What is now commonly thought of as evolution can go to some very…
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Intuitive Perceptions of Alchemists
The process of attaining the philosophers stone was always described as being very dangerous as the different elements required to refine it were poisonous in their individual forms not unlike salt is in modern thinking… Actually, the concept of salt had a much broader application in alchemy. The crystallized product of anything once distilled was…
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Platonic Dynamics
Are these alchemical life forms considered to exist in the astral? Ah, indeed. In the region of platonic forms which could also be described as platonic dynamics. So their physical body in another dimension? Though in fact no static region exists. It’s more a field of general potentiation, root ideation, thus perceived beings there seem…
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Chinese Internal Alchemy
Neidan is Chinese internal alchemy. It’s a Taoist practice originally, and has played a fundamental roll in their traditional medicine up to the present day. It could be viewed as a meditative practice, as opposed to waidan, which relates to medicines as we commonly think of them these days, herbs and such. The primary concern…
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Chi, Shen, Jing
Chi and shen interact, and chi conforms to the behaviour of the structure it’s flowing through. Heart chi behaves differently than spleen chi, or kidney chi. The spleen is seen as the centre of the intellect. The heart as the centre of pure consciousness. Ah, wouldn’t that be heart shen and spleen shen? Ah no,…
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Neidan Whole System
Neidan sounds like a comprehensive system. Indeed, wu xing is the cosmologic element of what is ultimately an integrated body of wisdom. Everything that occurs in the body is thought to reflect everything that can occur outside of the body and to resolve itself in the same way. So rather than there being a difference…
Category: Alchemy
Alchemy is one of the corner stones of natural philosophy. The grandfather discipline of science. In it they operated on some metaphysical presumptions of the structure and virtues of matter. I see that as intuition getting the jump on reason as it often does. Regrettably it doesn’t fill in the blanks in between. At least not for most people.
How did the alchemists take into account the full picture? They used more in the way of inductive logic than deductive.
Alchemy is now possible as well as quantum teleportation. But with these changes, which support Hermeticism more than classical Platonism, people still adhere to a “science” based on primarily Platonic concepts. You can thank Roman Catholicism for that. Politically correct science for the masses. It is very amusing to me.
“If by fire Of sooty coal th’ empiric alchymist Can turn, or holds it possible to turn, Metals of drossiest ore to perfect gold.” John Milton, Paradise Lost