Welcome back, dear reader, I hope the last week has found you well. In the last post we discussed the first operation of alchemy, calcination, where our original material is heated up to the point that all of the volatile material is burnt off and what is left is white or red ashes. This operation breaks down the material to its basic building blocks and what the alchemists call it’s salt. Our work today will explain what we will be doing with those ashes and end the black phase of alchemy with the second operation, dissolution.
Let us start by explaining what dissolution is; the technical explanation of dissolution is “to cause a solute to pass into a solution[6]” or to put it simply to place the material into a solvent (for most herbs water or alcohol are used) until it is completely broken down and is mixed with the water entirely. One way to visualize this is by placing a spoonful of salt into a glass of water and stirring it up. The salt that disappears and is mixed with the water is the dissolved salt and any salt that remains solid and sinks to the bottom would be undissolved. When working to dissolve your ash it is important to note the amount and type of liquid you will need as you don’t want your mixture to be under or supersaturated, instead you will want to balance the mixture as well as possible which may take trial and error to find.
If you have read the previous discourses on the Three Essentials you may remember our discussion about performing lab work with lemon balm, let us revisit this in order to take a closer look at dissolution. We began the work with lemon balm by chopping it finely, placing it in a glass jar, and pouring alcohol over it and letting it soak for several months. This will begin to break down the plant material and let the compounds that are alcohol soluble become dissolved in the liquid. You can see this as the plant is broken down by the alcohol taking on a deeper and deeper green color, once the jar is opened it will likely have a very strong smell of lemon balm. As we covered in the discourse on Salt, we would then separate the plant material from the alcohol and burn this down to a pure white ash of calcination from last week. To complete this process of dissolution we would then pour the alcohol back over the warm ashes and the entire material should dissolve. With each material you will have a slightly different process to take in each operation, for instance, it is sometimes recommended for the alcohol to be poured slowly in steps instead of all at once, it may have to be kept in a warm or cold bath to maintain the mixture, or have to be stirred constantly while mixed[1][3][5].
Turning from the physical lab work, the process of dissolution is also a very important one in the practice of mental alchemy. We spoke last week about how in the calcination process the ego is being destroyed and it is a very painful time for the person going through it, dissolution is a continuing of that breaking down by submerging the ego in the emotional mind. The water of dissolution is the irrational subconscious that is not only formless but also of immense power. Water is a feminine element and the emotional side of the mind is more often associated with femineity but do not take that to mean this is an easy process, as I said, it contains immense power both for creation and for destruction. This process can take many forms including dreams, synchronicities, intuition, unrestrained crying, even things like divinatory experiences, and due to their esoteric nature, they cannot be evaluated well using purely objective faculties. From my personal experience, the more you try to understand these things with the intellectual mind it is like the clumps of ash that try to resist dissolving. One of the easiest ways to deal with this in the lab is by stirring the solution until everything is broken down, in mental alchemy the stirring can often be difficult and stressful times that help us grasp that we must use something more than our objective mind. We must allow the subconscious the time and freedom to show us those parts of us that have been so covered by the grime of ego that we may have even forgotten them completely. While this experience is both intense and painful it is also incredibly freeing and can give your body and soul a new life that you didn’t believe was possible, however it is a very intimate experience that is specific for everyone so only you will understand your dissolution process.
As we get closer to the end of dissolution we near the end of the black phase of alchemy, this will lead us to the white phase, with stages that are more purifying. The process of breaking down to core components before purifying the remainder, rather than just working to clean and purify the whole person is a common tool used in the U.S. Military basic training. The process they use breaks down the person to their most basic survival values then replaces the missing components with the values of the group. This is similar to the processes we are looking at with alchemy except; to use an alchemical term, they are the profane version of the same divine processes. Chemistry as compared to Alchemy.
We will pause our discussion of alchemical processes here and let your mind sit in the water of the subconscious, letting the alchemical material we have covered break down and be incorporated into your own soul for the benefit of yourself and those around you. I hope you return next week to discuss the process of separation where we can take those core building blocks of your true self that we have broken down and purify them. I truly hope you have found these short discussions of alchemical processes useful in your own laboratory as well as your personal lives. Thank you, dear reader, and I hope this next week finds you well.
References:
[1] Albertus, Frater. The Alchemists Handbook: Manual for Practical Laboratory Alchemy. Weiser Books, 1987.
[2] Anawati, Georges C. "Arabic alchemy." In Encyclopedia of the history of Arabic science, pp. 807-839. Routledge, 2019.
[3] Bartlett, Robert Allen. Real alchemy: A primer of practical alchemy. Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 2009.
[4] Haschmi, Mohamed Yahia. "The beginning of Arab alchemy." Ambix 9, no. 3 (1961): 155- 161.
[5] Hauck, Dennis William. The complete idiot's guide to alchemy. Penguin, 2008.
[6] Helmenstine, Anne Marie. “Dissolve Definition in Chemistry.” https://www.thoughtco.com/definition-of-dissolve-604432. May 07, 2019.
[7]Holmyard, Eric John. Alchemy. Courier Corporation, 1990.
[8] Johnson, Obed Simon. A study of Chinese alchemy. Martino Publishing, 2009.
[9] Jung, Carl Gustav. Jung on alchemy. Princeton University Press, 1995.
[10] Moureau, Sébastien, and Nicolas Thomas. "Practice and Experiment: Alchemical Operations in the Middle Ages." A Cultural History of Chemistry: The Middle Ages, eds. Charles Burnett and Sébastien Moureau (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) (2022): 35-47.
[11] Principe, Lawrence M. The secrets of alchemy. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[12] Rubenstein, Elias. Alchemy-Secrets of Consciousness Transformation. XinXii, 2024.
[13] Tony, Alchemist. Alchemy for Beginners: Discover the Magic and Mystery of the Ancient Alchemy Craft and Use it to Your Advantage. Independently published, 2019.
[14] White, David Gordon. The alchemical body: Siddha traditions in medieval India. University of Chicago Press, 2012.
[15] Uddin, Riaz, Nadia Saffoon, and Kumar Bishwajit Sutradhar. "Dissolution and dissolution apparatus: a review." Int. J. Curr. Biomed. Pharm. Res 1, no. 4 (2011): 201-207.
[16] Jensen, William B. "The Chemical Interpretation of Alchemy."
Ref the Chinese method of dissolving metals
[17] Rubenstein, Elias. Alchemy-Secrets of Consciousness Transformation. XinXii, 2024.
Mental and ref the alkahest
IMAGE: https://www.alchemylab.com/flamel14.htm