Practical Alchemy: The Beginning

What is the point of all this?

Welcome back, dear reader, I hope the last week has found you well. I want to begin with a thank you to each of you for your patience with me, as things have been moving forward, I have had to take some time off from writing these discourses, but I want to assure you that the work has not been taking any breaks. Next, I would like to thank each of you who answered the survey that we sent out recently. Your answers gave me a lot of feedback on where the majority of readers are in their knowledge and their goals in alchemy and, as it always seems to go in the great work, your answers lined pretty much up with the directions that this publication is already headed in the coming months. Now that we have remembered to be grateful for everything we have, we can begin to take a look at our current topic.

Over the last year we have taken time and patience to build a strong foundation of alchemical theory and principles, we have talked about the seven hermetic principles, the seven operations of alchemy, the three parts of wisdom of the entire universe, and we have delved into different esoteric practices in order to give a unified framework we can view our world through. But once I can establish this worldview to people I am met with the same questions; if I am not interested in chemistry then why does any of this matter? How does any of this apply to me? And, most of all, what do we do with alchemy now? The “simple” answer is that we use it to make ourselves better and to make the world a better place. Because this can be confusing transition to make, we can make it easier by taking it slow and breaking it down, so this discourse and the ones following are going to be dedicated on “practical alchemy” and how to use what we have been learning about to achieve the goal of the Great Work.

We know that alchemy is made up of strange symbols, confusing allegories, and chemical reactions but how do those things transfer into making me or the world better? Carl Jung is the best person to go to when trying to figure out how alchemy translates into psychology. The vast majority of his work was spent making these connections that many of us in the field take for granted today, and as a reward for his work he is constantly ridiculed for being a mystic. I don’t want to do him the disservice of trying to oversimplify his works here, that is something I have time planned for another deep dive in the future, but I highly recommend that even if you are only interested in the chemistry side of alchemy you read Jung on Alchemy or Psychology and Alchemy and see how he unites the two sciences into a single unified practice. His basic principle is that the imagery and the terms used perfectly match the steps needed for a person to “perfect” their mind while also operating on the level of the subconscious in order to bypass conscious thought.

One of the most famous alchemical mantras that he applied this framework to is V.I.T.R.I.O.L. or visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying, you will find the secret stone. Jung describes this allegory as a silent retreat into your inner self that mirrors the difficulty and struggle of a journey to the center of the earth. Through this journey inward, facing your shadow, or the parts of you that are negative/ uncontrolled/ unwanted, and passing your psyche through the seven stages of the alchemical process you can take the basic and immature parts of your nature and turn them into well-adjusted reactions and a well-stocked mental health toolbox.

Now, we said at the beginning that the “simple” answer of what to do with alchemy is not just to make yourself better but to also make the world a better place as well, so how do we do that? There are a few ways and depending on your level of skill and dedication, some of those ways could be the ceremonial magic forms we talked about previously, but the easiest and most material way to do that is by making yourself better, like we already said. The personal work you do as an alchemist makes you a more levelheaded, evolved, mature, kind and loving person than you were when you started off and when a person like that interacts with another person it rubs off on them. If you are constantly moving through the world as someone who is intentional in what they do, someone who is a present and active force, and operate with the best intentions toward everyone around you, you will notice that things around you will start to look a little brighter and happier. If more people around you see that and begin to start applying those things to their own lives; growing from old habits, paying attention to patterns around them, maturing, being intentional and active in their lives, and caring for others, then the whole world begins to change for the better. We know that the Hermetic Axiom states, “as above so below” but many forget about the “as within so without,” all it takes for the world the be the perfect place it could be is for each of us to work on ourselves and grow from where we were yesterday. Quantum mechanics has shown in recent years that there is no such thing as objective reality, the universe you see is completely filtered through your own perception and by changing that perception you can change the world around you. By deciding to view the world through a lens of alchemy and seeing the problems ahead of you as Prima Materia that you can break down and reshape into good and constructive results, you stop seeing problems as hurdles that slow you down and more like tests to see if you did the homework right, and since you’ve spent so long doing the homework you can do the test without any stress at all. This reshaping of your mindset and the way you view the world is the same “transmuting of the archetypes/ elements/ demons/ spirits” that alchemists have spoken about for centuries or the basis for some of the ceremonial transmutations done by certain groups we spoke about, just to bring the symbolism from the last year full circle.

Now that we have started to cover what the purpose of all this is for, making the world a better place, and how it is done, journeying to the center of the earth, we can start to discuss what journeying to the center of the earth means. If we wanted to put it into one word, the journey can be simply broken down into “meditation” however for anyone who has meditated on a regular basis you may be thinking that doesn’t help at all. In the west, most of us think of meditation as sitting with our legs crossed and our eyes closed, maybe humming the om, and trying as hard as you can not to think, but that is an oversimplification that has done more harm than good I think. Meditation is different depending on the philosophy a form is based on, the specific practice being done, and the person doing the meditation, no two people are going to do it exactly the same so trying to make it a one-size-fits-all sort of thing rarely works out. Because meditation takes so many different forms and they all have their own benefits and drawbacks I won’t try to squeeze them all at the end of this post but we will be taking the next few discourses to cover different kinds of meditation and ways add them into your daily life to make these alchemical principles you’ve been studying more tangible, and so you can see the benefits of alchemy in your daily lives.

This is where we will pause our discussion for this week, I know that the concepts above will boil over and over in your minds for the next week and I truly hope you will be able to see the positive changes in your daily lives. Remember it is the tiny things you do that build up into big changes. I want to take the end of our time here to thank you again for your time and your help in responding to the surveys, I love having a chance to interact with you. I will be trying to push more products out soon and I have even been considering adding an audio podcast portion in order to try to break down more difficult ideas into simple usable tools. Thank you so much for your time, and I hope the next week finds you well.

Resources:

Bartlett, Robert Allen. Real alchemy: A primer of practical alchemy. Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 2009.

Knapp, Peggy Ann. “The Work of Alchemy.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (2000): 575-599.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Psychology and alchemy. Routledge, 2014.

Jung, Carl G., and R. F. C. Hull. “Basic concepts of alchemy.” In Collected Works of CG Jung, pp. v12_227-v12_241. Routledge, 2023.

Jung, Carl Gustav, and Nathan Schwartz-Salant. “Jung on alchemy.” (2024): 1-228.