Alchemical Process Research Articles

Spiritual Journey of Santiago in Coelho’s ‘The Alchemist’

Paulo Coelho's ‘The Alchemist’ entails Santiago's journey from a young shepherd in Andalusia, Spain, to a seeker of hidden treasure. The plot is deeply intertwined with a spiritual quest for self-discovery and enlightenment. Through a rich tapestry of symbols such as alchemy, omens, and dreams, Coelho illustrates Santiago's physical and spiritual growth. Santiago's recurring dream about finding treasure at the Egyptian pyramids and different encounters, along with the omens and signs he observes, guide him through numerous challenges through his spiritual journey. Santiago's journey is a metaphor for an inner alchemical process, symbolizing the transformation of his consciousness from a lower to a higher state. The novel suggests that true success is not a mere destination but a transformative journey filled with learning and personal growth. Coelho emphasizes the importance of faith, perseverance, and resilience in the face of adversity. By following his dreams and remaining attuned to the guidance provided by omens, Santiago undergoes a profound spiritual transformation, discovering the deeper interconnectedness and inherent order of human existence. The narrative underscores the significance of embracing the signs and omens encountered along the way, highlighting the interconnectedness of all things. Coelho conveys that the pursuit of one's goals should be accompanied by a broader acquisition of knowledge and personal growth. Santiago's perseverance and resilience, even amidst challenges and monotony, are crucial to reaching his ultimate destination and experiencing the joy of achievement. His story is a testament to the profound spiritual transformation that occurs when one pursues their dreams with faith and determination. It underscores the inherent order and interconnectedness of life, ultimately portraying Santiago's journey as a spiritual odyssey that reveals the deeper meaning of life and the spiritual enlightenment that comes from embracing one's personal legend.

Review on purification and incineration of Maharasa varga: Unveiling the alchemical processes in Rasashastra

Rasashastra is a distinctive branch of Ayurveda that focuses on the pharmaceutics of medicines derived from minerals, metals, animal products, and more, classifying drugs into various groups. Following Rasa, the next crucial category of minerals is named Maharasa. The most valuable medications are characterized within the Maharasa group. Purification and incineration are essential processes in the field of Rasashastra; Maharasa Varga undergoes these processes to enhance its therapeutic potential. Purification involves multiple stages of soaking, rinsing, and drying the raw material to eliminate impurities and toxins. Each purification step aims to refine the mineral, resulting in a purified product. Incineration, or calcination, follows purification and subjects the material to controlled high temperatures, transforming it into ash. This process further eliminates impurities and enhances the chemical and energetic properties of the substance. The resulting ash is then utilized in Ayurvedic formulations for medicinal purposes. This article provides an overview of the purification and incineration techniques employed in the preparation of Maharasa Varga, offering insights into the unique practices of Rasashastra and their significance in Ayurvedic medicine.

Ted Hughes, the Goddess and ‘An Alchemy’

Two of the books Ted Hughes took with him when he worked as a Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter plotter during his two years of compulsory national service, were Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Both, he read closely and often. He was already familiar, through his interest in the magical preoccupations of W. B. Yeats, with the philosophy of Hermetic Neoplatonism which had made its way to England during Shakespeare’s time and influenced the work of poets like Sir Philip Sidney, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spencer. All of these poets believed in, and used, the alchemical power of poetry which, as Sidney wrote in his Defence of Poetry, could ‘hold children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. And pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue’. This, and his immersion in Shakespeare’s work (which as Sylvia Plath told her mother, he ‘knew by heart’) led Hughes to discern a developing pattern, based on the transformative powers of the Goddess, through which he believed Shakespeare was performing a complex alchemical process. He expounded this theory in detail in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, but almost twenty years earlier he had written the poem ‘An Alchemy’ for a limited edition anthology published in 1973 by the Globe Theatre Trust. ‘An Alchemy’ is a difficult and allusive poem in which nothing is spelled out. In this article, I look at just one section of the poem in which Hughes created his own alchemical matrix through which he sought to reveal the underlying alchemical theme that he saw as the ‘Gold’ in Shakespeare’s work.

Metamodern Spell Casting

Metamodern Spell Casting

L’esperienza estetica come soglia della percezione. Il museo Schneiberg di Torino1


 
 
 Considering the case of the recent creation of the Schneiberg Foundation in Turin, an antique Chinese artworks installation in an historical building, this paper tries to produce a philosophical interpretation of both the artworks and the installation, underlines and investigate the attempt of this project to overcome the distinction between the spectator and his object, involving the viewer in a non- dualistic experience through which he is able to produce his own performance and in that way to create an immersive experience that, like an alchemical process, transforms both his perception and the object of his perception. This text intends also to highlight how this experience is strictly and symmetrically connected to the nature, the meaning and the aim of the objects, i.e. antique imperial Chinese carpets provided of alchemical and philosophical meaning for a performative transformation of their spectator. The paper tries to create, in the end, a performative meaningful experience of a visit to that space and collection.
 
 

Alchemical Metadynamics: Adding Alchemical Variables to Metadynamics to Enhance Sampling in Free Energy Calculations.

Performing alchemical transformations, in which one molecular system is nonphysically changed to another system, is a popular approach adopted in performing free energy calculations associated with various biophysical processes, such as protein-ligand binding or the transfer of a molecule between environments. While the sampling of alchemical intermediate states in either parallel (e.g., Hamiltonian replica exchange) or serial manner (e.g., expanded ensemble) can bridge the high-probability regions in the configurational space between two end states of interest, alchemical methods can fail in scenarios where the most important slow degrees of freedom in the configurational space are, in large part, orthogonal to the alchemical variable, or if the system gets trapped in a deep basin extending in both the configurational and alchemical space. To alleviate these issues, we propose to use alchemical variables as an additional dimension in metadynamics, making it possible to both sample collective variables and to enhance sampling in free energy calculations simultaneously. In this study, we validate our implementation of "alchemical metadynamics" in PLUMED with test systems and alchemical processes with varying complexities and dimensionalities of collective variable space, including the interconversion between the torsional metastable states of a toy system and the methylation of a nucleoside both in the isolated form and in a duplex. We show that multidimensional alchemical metadynamics can address the challenges mentioned above and further accelerate sampling by introducing configurational collective variables. The method can trivially be combined with other metadynamics-based algorithms implemented in PLUMED. The necessary PLUMED code changes have already been released for general use in PLUMED 2.8.

A Stress Test for the HPTD-M Transdisciplinarity through Alchemical Psychology

Many authors tend to think of Alchemy, especially the European Alchemical Tradition that remained until the 17th century, as a predecessor to modern chemistry, but it is much more. Alchemy arose in a context where there was no separation between the natural sciences, philosophy, psychology, and cultural traditions. In this context of the 17th-century European Alchemical Tradition, the Modern Western Culture emerges, based on the 18th-century technoscience development, as per the Enlightenment or “Age of Reason”, Newton’s classic physics, and Descartes mechanism. Nowadays human sciences tend to replicate mechanical patterns of hard sciences. The human conscience is not inherent to biological systems, and human processes can´t be well predicted like mechanisms. This is the basis of the Holopraxis Transdisciplinary Management (HPTD‑M) theory and praxis. So, the aim of this paper, in this connection, is to show the universality of the HPTD-M models, when stress-tested through the Alchemical Tradition, especially considering Hillman´s view in Alchemical Psychology. Tradition, philosophy, art, and technoscience are the four epistemic ways according to HPTD-M, the four main disciplines in a transdisciplinary approach. The alchemical work or opus can be divided into four parts, which relate to earth, water, air, and fire. Edinger describes these main alchemical operations, among others that we will detail below based on this author: Coagulatio, Solutio, Sublimatio, and Calcinatio. Coagulation" has to do with solids, "solution" with liquids, "sublimation" with gases, and "calcination" with fire. Also in the alchemical tradition there are four stages of the opus alchemica, which is the alchemical process of transmuting cheaper metals into more precious ones. It had four stages: nigredo (black), albedo (white/silver), citrinitas (yellow), and rubbed (red/gold). Naturally, the alchemical process was more than chemical or physical. Besides that four-element framework, Alchemy has also many dualities or complementarities involved. This author has created an alchemical model of quaternary complementarities to be compared to the already existing HPTD-M Model. The Alchemical Tradition corroborates the HPTD-M framework, through the result of this stress test represented by the analytic and synthetic models for Alchemical Tradition (Table 1 and Figure 3, respectively), in the same quaternary complementarities pattern, which suggests the universality of HPTD-M as a theory and praxis.

Environmental Alchemy: Mercury-Gold Amalgamation Mining and the Transformation of the Earth

Wherever mercury-gold amalgamation mining unfolds, alchemical processes abound. They are there as catalytic agents forming amalgams at atomic levels. They are there as cultural agents transforming rocks into cell phones and all kinds of consumer goods. And they are there as ideological agents mutually translating human understandings across whole worlds we describe as the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. These processes, we argue, are made more legible – more readily perceived and conceptualised – by peering through the lens of environmental alchemy, a new critical framework in which we apply the historical use of alchemical terms to investigations of environmental change, and to understand the extraordinary complexity that gold and mercury set in motion when mining entangles nature and culture.

One Year of School and The Island

One Year of School and The Island

Zosimos and Theosebeia

Abstract This paper fleshes out the relationship of the third-century alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis and his colleague, Theosebeia, which was later dramatized in the Book of Pictures, an illustrated Arabic manuscript (thirteenth century) that depicts the couple crowned with the sun and moon, representing various alchemical processes. Their relationship provides an important window into the historical development of erotic themes in alchemical literature. I argue that there is an erotics of pedagogy at work in this text, rooted in alchemical allegories of the fusion of male and female substances and Islamic notions of the initiatory relationship between teacher and student.

Os conhecimentos e sujeitos da Educação Ambiental: historicizando experiências formativas no Parque Nacional de Itatiaia (1937-2020)

ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to historicize the way in which the Itatiaia National Park (PNI) has signified knowledge of Environmental Education (EE) and, simultaneously, constituted subjects that “must” educate and be environmentally educated. It was produced by the Curriculum History Study Group, a research collective at the Nucleus of Curriculum Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (NEC/UFRJ), articulating investigations interested in operating with Curriculum History as History of the Present. The PNI was selected because it was the first space that was designated as a National Park in Brazil, creating a visitation “model” that articulates, through alchemical processes, the EE knowledge that is to be taught and the different subjects for whom this knowledge is intended. In dialogue with Michel Foucault and Thomas Popkewitz, we focus on the historical constitution of the visiting subjects for whom the park’s formative actions were taken. We then show how the EE knowledge produced through these actions came to be alchemically transformed in the midst of a logic that has historically constituted what we call “school”, in close dialogue with the processes of disciplinarization that have organized the time and space of this institution. In this process, we highlight how the boundaries between the two institutions have been “blurred”, allowing us to establish an in-between place of subjects/visitors/students amid disciplined EE knowledge.

Textual Transformations: Iain Sinclair’s Black Apples of Gower and the Merlin Legend

This paper explores the connections between Iain Sinclair’s 2015 travelogue Black Apples of Gower and the Merlin legend. Despite the fact that, on the surface, Sinclair does not refer to the early Welsh merlinistic tradition, on closer inspection both share what M. Wynn Thomas has described as “hidden attachments” – cross cultural connections and experiences between the two literatures of modern Wales. The archaic bedrock of the Merlin legend and the alchemical imagery in Sinclair’s book are both rooted in the mythico-ritualistic complex of symbolic regeneration based on the repetition of the act of original creation. Both Merlin and the alchemical process involve an ontological transformation which is mirrored in Black Apples of Gower by the transcendence of textual and medial boundaries: a complex network of intertextual allusions and word-image relationships (ekphrases, reproductions and illustrations). By exploring these relationships, along with the merlinistic and alchemical imagery present in the text, I argue that the work employs the strategy of what I call textual nigredo – a process of intertextual and intermedial transformation. The affinities identified between the Merlin legend and Sinclair’s travelogue provide an argument for seeing Iain Sinclair as a Welsh writer and shed new light on the links between the Welsh-language literary tradition and English-language Welsh writing which may be pursued further in the future.

“Always Symmetrize!: Forging Bonds in Heart of Darkness”

Abstract “Always Symmetrize!,” the title of this essay – which echoes Fredric Jameson’s better-known admonition to “always historicize” – alludes to a type of literary analysis, inspired by the Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco’s concept of “symmetric logic,” which I have been working on for several years. Briefly, it treats the makers of literary monuments as engaged – like the alchemists discussed by Mircea Eliade in The Forge and The Crucible – in the task of perfecting the work of nature, a project that they pursue under the guidance of what I call the “symmetrical imperative.” The “unsurpassable horizon” of this literary endeavor is Homer’s Iliad, whose perfectly achieved, albeit covert, bilateral symmetry (magisterially detailed by Cedric Whitman in his classic Homer and The Heroic Tradition) is made overt in the undisputed masterpiece of Greek geometrical pottery – Exekias’s amphora, “Achilles and Ajax Playing Dice,” which I discuss briefly at the outset of my essay. The greater part of this essay is devoted to an analysis of the similarly covert workings of the symmetrical imperative in Joseph Conrad’s modernist masterpiece Heart of Darkness. In the initial phases of this “alchemical process,” Conrad treats as symmetrical the two otherwise asymmetrical stages of Marlow’s journey (first to the Central Station and then to the Inner Station). In its second phase, he creates a container within which to contain this pairing of symmetrized episodes in the form of a narrative whose covert bilateral symmetry achieves, as Fernando Pessoa recommends in The Book of Disquiet, “a realization freed from the taint of reality” (30). Having completed my analysis of this twofold alchemical process in Heart of Darkness, I then devote a few concluding pages to its return in “The Secret Sharer,” a short-story which Conrad wrote several years after publishing Heart of Darkness, and in which he may well have “perfected the work of nature” even more impressively.

Vial Movies

Abstract In the 16th and 17th centuries vials played a prominent role in the visualization of nature’s driving forces as recreated in the laboratory. While in technical drawings the vial was often depicted as empty, there were also elaborate images—mainly pertaining to alchemical knowledge—in which vessels were filled, usually not with actual liquids, but with allegorical scenes. Vials functioned as visual devices, as virtual stages in illuminated manuscripts as well as in engravings in books—contrary to the reality in the laboratory where heat-resistant stoneware was normally used. This study focuses on a lavishly illustrated manuscript—Coronatio naturae—which circulated in numerous versions throughout Europe in the 17th century. The second part of this article presents the manuscript in detail, while the first part examines the serial “vial portraits” that appeared in books and manuscripts—the principal medium of alchemical communication at the time. It will be argued that the visualization of the individual stages of the alchemical process has an additional, inherent dimension of movement that can be described as cinematographic.

Glacial Grieving: Melting the Ice Within to See the World Renewed

Later in his life, Carl Gustav Jung became increasingly interested in the alchemical process as a symbolic representation of the individuation journey. By focusing on the stages of the nigredo and the albedo, this paper expands upon the importance of these steps in the psychological process of individuation. Jung (1970a) wrote that individuation “gathers the world to oneself” rather than shutting one out from the world (p. 136). This is an aspect of the journey toward wholeness that is especially relevant in our current era of climate crisis. By exploring the nigredo and the albedo deeply, we can begin to see the many shades of blue that lie underneath. These blues, and the idea of feeling blue, offer a pathway to empathy and understanding through our shared grief. With a careful examination of The Red Book: Liber Novus (Jung, 2009), after a time of traumatic ambiguous loss, and amplified with the images of ice in our warming world, this paper takes a paradoxical journey. From the blues of the Arctic ice to the bright red of Liber Novus, this black and white path becomes illuminated with a variety of colors. This expanded, empathetic view of the complex image of ice brings with it the gift of the rubedo, a renewed hope born out of death, grief, and chaos.

Rock: Symbol of Self in the Process of Individualization - Alchemy Transformation in Sandplay Therapy -

This study investigated the process leading to individuation by examining the symbolism of rocks that emerged from sandplay therapy for a middle-aged woman from the perspective of analytical psychology and alchemy. The rock symbolizes an unchangeable life force, nurturing, recovery, source of living water, grave, and place in contact with spiritual energy. The alchemical process of creating new substances using existing substances proceeds in the order of calcification, dissolution, solidification, sublimation, decay, separation, and unity. In this study, the client expressed her unconscious through the rocks in the sand tray, which corresponded to the calcification of alchemy. Afterwards, the client expressed feelings such as despair and sadness that existed deeply within her, which were linked to the process of dissolution and coagulation of alchemy. Finally, the client could proceed with the process of individuation through self-integration with her shadow by accepting the suppression and wounds of her heart that were suppressed for a long time in consciousness, which is connected with the process of sublimation, corruption, separation, and unity in alchemy. The process of individuation involves completing the true Self by integrating the Self that exists inside the individual. We can integrate these processes through a confrontational dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious through symbols.

Classical poetic motifs as alchemical metaphors in the Shudhūr al-dhahab and its commentaries

Abstract Traditionally prized as much for its poetic artistry as its didactic content, Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs’s (fl. twelfth century) dīwān of alchemical verse, the Shudhūr al-dhahab (Shards of Gold), is one of the most important and influential works in the literary canon of Arabic alchemy. Drawing on commentaries by both Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs himself and Aydamir al-Jildakī (d. 743/1342 [?]), the present article explores a core feature of Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs’s allegorical style – one that appears to have captured the attention of his medieval readership – namely his novel use of stock poetic motifs as metaphors for alchemical processes and substances. As well as focusing on the commentators’ theoretical interpretations, the article situates Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs’s deliberate appropriation of pre-Islamic and Nuwāsian motifs in its broader literary context, noting the extent to which it foreshadows similar techniques in the poetic allegories of the thirteenth-century Sufi poets, Ibn ʿArabī and Ibn al-Fāriḍ.

Reckoning with Einstein: Writing to Cultivate the Subjective Field

ABSTRACT As a practice, writing about the moments inside therapy opens an alchemical process: More of my experience, more reflection, more depth, and more input from other writers flow into the work, transmuting my hours with my patient I call Ethan. Rereading what I’ve written, writing more, and playing with the ephemeral experience of our time together further his freedom by shaping my presence in our work.

Alchemy and the Transformation of Matter in Richard Crashaw’s Poetry (1612-1649)

This paper studies the English poems of Richard Crashaw (1612-1649) from a historicist and formalist perspective. It specifically considers Crashaw’s poetry in its religious but also intellectual and early scien­tific context to investigate the frequently overlooked influence of science on his poetry. Metaphors drawn from alchemy and particularly from the trans­formation of matter to achieve its purification and spiritualisation enrich the poet’s expression of mystical devotion to underline that access to the spiritual as well as mystical union with Christ are deeply rooted in the devotee’s body. Representations of the earth as a chemical laboratory focus on materiality and corporality to emphasise the constant movement animating matter. A form of spiritual alchemy underscores Crashaw’s Christocentrism and references to the metamorphoses of matter consistently aim to express mystical union. A meta-poetic analysis eventually highlights a significant analogy between reading and alchemical processes in order to demonstrate the anagogical aim of Crashaw’s verse and the way his poems work on his reader’s heart to lift his soul. References to liquefaction, distillation or sublimation echo the published works of mystics but alchemical conceits based on symbolically evocative topoï and polysemic vocabulary reinforce the importance of the corporal in the expe­rience of mystical union.

Dalí, Disney and Destino: Alchemy in Animation

Salvador Dalí claimed that he made his whole life “a work of alchemy.” He saw in alchemy the principle of metamorphosis and “the transmutation of bodies.” Carl Jung recognized “imaginatio” as the key to alchemy. As Patrick Harpur suggests: “The Work takes place in a realm intermediate between mind and matter. It is a daimonic process, a ‘chemical theatre’ in which processes and psychic transformations interpenetrate.” The alchemist does not simply work on matter, but on the self.
 In Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method,” objects similarly seem to exist in an “intermediate realm between mind and matter”; they are animated presences, with a life of their own. The Dalínean double-image is itself a kind of alchemical magic, invoking the “transmutation of bodies.”
 In 1946, Dalí began work for the Walt Disney Company on a short film, Destino. This would be, he claimed, the “First Surrealist Cartoon.” The appeal of animation for him may have been based in part in what Eisenstein termed “plasmaticness”: the “ability to dynamically assume any form.” Animation, then, may be seen as a kind of “chemical theatre.” As a “realm between mind and matter,” it also functioned for Dalí as a form of mundus imaginalis, in which he could engage with the “obsessing” images in his psyche.
 In Destino, Dalí invoked the alchemical process as a journey to tranfiguration and psychological “rebirth.” The film was not completed in his lifetime; this account is based on the original storyboards which he produced.