Intro to the seven operations of alchemy

Welcome back, dear reader, I hope the last week has found you well. Last week we finished our study of the Chymical Wedding, we covered some of the symbolism within the famous allegory and tried to understand it a little better than we had before. This week will be a shorter issue as we will be taking a break from the heavy language of allegory, and we will be discussing what our next series will consist of, the seven operations of alchemy.

Each operation we will be covering will encompass an explanation of the terms involved and the symbols used to denote it as well as the practical and laboratory processes, for instance the first state is calcination, and it involves burning to ash. However, we are not simply an alchemical lab textbook here, we have come to understand that the practice of alchemy is also symbolic of the stages of human life and different aspects of psychology, as well as a pathway to correcting the negative things we see in ourselves. We will be working to explore as many different aspects of each operation as we can, but it is unlikely that this will be comprehensive since each of us will have a different personal understanding of each operation.

As I just said, the first operation is Calcination. This consists of heating (most commonly with fire) to the point where the material is reduced entirely to white ash. This is part of the black stage of alchemy and when applied to psychology, one of the most painful stages that we will go through. While the material heats in the crucible, the alchemist’s soul is also heated in a purifying fire as well where it burns the material to its most basic elements. The fire fixes what is volatile and removes the water and air from the earth.

The second stage is Dissolution, which is done by dissolving the ashes we just produced into water or another solvent. This process further breaks down the earth using water, now that the earth has been brought to a place where it can be worked on in a more subtle way. This process is still part of the black phase, so psychologically this stage is still going to be a painful one, albeit less obvious than its predecessor. It may seem pointless to remove all the water from the material so that it can be broken down by water, but there is always a reason for the circular work that we are doing.

Third we have Separation, where the dissolved material is then filtered to collect a more purified essence. There are several ways this can be done in the lab, but the most common version is the simplest, by filtering out what is needed from what is not. Psychologically this could be described as filtering out the dross of your ego from the previous two stages and keeping the real you. This is the first operation that we get to after the black stages, it is the beginning of the white stage and is supposed to be less painful.

Our next operation is conjunction where we take the elements that we save from the separation and recombine them into a new element. In the lab this combination may require the use of a catalyst depending on the materials that are being worked with. It is also often said that if the materials from separation are not pure enough, the conjunction will fail, and the alchemist will have to restart the whole project over again. Psychological alchemy would be taking the different aspects of our true self that we have found through the breaking down of the ego and combining them in the proper amounts in order to create a new you that is truer to the real you.

The fifth operation is the first step of the final red stage, fermentation. The most common form that we think of is the creation of alcohol, where yeast is used to eat sugar and produce alcohol for humans to drink. When creating mead, yeast would be added to honey water and let sit for several months, the yeast eats the sugar dissolved in the water and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as a biproduct. There are many different ways to conduct alchemical fermentation, but it always involves the rotting and breaking down of the conjunction after it has been made. When we talk about mental alchemy, fermentation would be the bubbling personality that the alchemist experiences when the new purified portions of their personality are combined and brought forth without being dragged down by the ego.

The sixth operation is distillation and is what many people think of when they picture an alchemist doing his work. This involves heating the material in one container that is connected to a condenser tube, where the evaporated material condenses and is collected in another container. This process is also one commonly used in the creation of alcohol, it is used to purify hard liquor, and it is part of the reason we have named our strong drinks “spirits.” In mental alchemy this would be the further purification of the self that we have carefully watched grow over the last five operations, this version of ourselves is very volatile and can be easily corrupted before the final stage is completed.

The final stage of alchemy is coagulation, this stage consists of condensing the distilled product into a solid usable form. When I think of this in the realm of laboratory alchemy it can be the precipitation of a solid out of a liquid or solidifying a liquid like a cooling piece of wax. Mentally, this process is taking the volatile new self that we have produced through the work and solidifying it so that we are not easily swayed. This is turning the new ideas and goals that we have for ourselves into new habits that we constantly keep up with.

These operations have so much wisdom to teach us, and the process can be repeated over and over again with each negative aspect of ourselves until we become a more perfect material, just like the material we are working on. Remember dear reader, alchemy is not supposed to only be a mental exercise where we know all the concepts and definitions, it is supposed to be a practice that we put ourselves through every day and grow along with as we do so. I hope that you are looking forward to the next several weeks as we progress through these seven stages of alchemy, and I hope that the next week finds you well.

Image: https://www.alchemyguildohio.org/seven-operations-of-alchemy