Archive for the ‘Alchemy’ Category

Alchemy and the Entropy of Being

BY: Mark

Over the last few years, my double life has been increasingly frustrating. The endless juggling of a full-time job with finding time to be a writer was talking its toll, both emotionally and spiritually. Six months ago, I got an opportunity to write full-time, and while I wasn’t so naive as to think that would solve all my existential angst, I hoped the lessening of my schizophrenetic lifestyle would help. And it has, don’t get me wrong–I am doing writerly activities all day long (The Mongoliad has published seventeen chapters in the last three months, and we’ve hit 150,000 words). But, in many other areas, I’ve come to a full-stop.

The myth we stay-at-homes perpetuate about working in our pajamas all day is not too far from the truth. Even though I have a standing desk now, and barely sit during working hours, I am getting less exercise. I’m eating less well–most meals have devolved back to the ‘cram carbs and protein in the pie-hole’ methodology. I might be reading more, though I’m not convinced; I think I am simply getting more frustrated about the ever-present pile of books around my desk because I see them all the time now.

There has been a perpetually unfinished document on my desktop called “blog.rtf” and it contains two quotes. The first is a tweet from Jeremy Keith, back on Nov 5, 2010 where he says, “First Law of Blogodynamics: a blog post in draft tends to stay in draft.” The second is a quote from Charles Dickens. “The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed, but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

The hardest road is the one that lies between creation to construction.

Entropy is, well, entropic, and I have a decidedly difficult time dealing with exercise. I do not like ‘going for a walk,’ because the whole point is to walk and not to have a destination, and I struggle with the essential pointlessness of doing the upright biped version of the hamster wheel. As you can imagine, exercise, in general, is just like going for a walk, but with different scenery. I am constantly searching for a way to trick my brain into regarding the ’round and round’ activities as something other than they are.

Which, round and round, brings me to alchemy.

Alchemical research, both metaphysical and analytical, is the medieval version of the exercise regime: you embark upon lenghty experiments that require rigorous observation and endless repetition of specific steps, ad infinitum. If you are lucky, you produce a few drops of aqua vita, and may then undertake the next step, which is even more complicated, convoluted, and rife with the looming promise of utter failure if your attention wavers in the slightest. The discipline, if you will, taught you discipline.

I am hesitant to have another blog post be about the concept of alchemy, which is short-hand for saying ‘oh, look, I want to talk about the occult, but I haven’t actually done my reading or spent any time thinking.’ And so, I will leave this one with the above idea. Discipline. We afford it less time and practice than we should.

I’ll come back in six months and see if I’ve actually acted on this notion or if i”m still falling asleep on the couch after dinner and let life flow past me.

Waite on Alchemy, again

BY: Mark

The profound subtleties of thought seldom find adequate expression even when the whole strength of a truly intellectual nature is brought to bear upon the resources of language, and where the force of direct appeal is unwillingly acknowledged to be insufficient, the vague generalities of allegory can scarcely expect to succeed. It is the province of symbolism to suggest thought, and the interpretation of any sequence of typology inevitably varies in direct proportion with the various types of mind. Each individual symbol embodies a definite conception existing in the mind of its inventor, and in that symbol more or less perfectly expressed, but every student of allegory out of every individual symbol extracts his own meaning, so that the significance of typology is as infinite as the varieties of interpreting intelligence. For this reason, the best and truest adepts have always insisted on the necessity of an initiated teacher, or of a special intellectual illumination which they term the grace of God, for the discovery of the actual secret of the Hermetic art.

Without this light or guidance the unelected student is likely to be adrift forever on a chaotic sea of symbols and the prima materia, concealed by innumerable names and contradictory or illusionary descriptions, will for ever escape him. It is in this way that a thousand unassisted investigators have operated upon ten thousand material substances, and have never remotely approached the manufacture of the Great Magisterium, and, after the same manner, outwearied by perpetual failures in the physical process, that others have rejected the common opinion concerning the object of alchemy, and with imaginations at work upon the loftier aspirations expressed by Hermetic adepts, have accredited them with an exclusively spiritual aim, and with the possession of exclusively spiritual secrets.

– Arthur Edward Waite

Not too much different from the practice of being a successful writer, isn’t it?

Arthur Edward Waite on Alchemy

BY: Mark

This method of interpreting the Hermetic allegories is calculated to exalt the alchemists indefinitely in the estimation of all thinking minds. From possibly avaricious investigators of a by-way of physical science, they are transfigured into dreamers of the sublimest imaginable dream, while if that which they conceived was accomplished, they are divine and illuminated monarchs who are throned on the pinnacles of eternity, having dominion over their infinite souls.

     — Arthur Edward Waite.

Part of his argument that alchemy wasn’t about transforming dross into gold. Of course, he couldn’t say as much in plain language because part of the charm of the alchemical process was having the initiate reduce materials down to their most primal expression. That applies to the instructions as well.