Two January Things:
ALCHEMY OF THE WORD: many hours of recordings and slides w/ music by CONTAIN, plus live study halls on January 6, 13, 20, 27. Join from anywhere. Doors close Sunday.
COSMIC PLANNER: 2024 Year Ahead Readings (space limited)
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in a float tank zone before the new year, i’ve been planning ALCHEMY OF THE WORD:
….an alchemical study hall which begins January 6 (doors close in 3 days) and thus been flipping through my scribbles and books on alchemy, the planets and their buried metals, its bonkers and beautiful processes. this weird science has helped me immensely
you can bring anything to the alchemical process (& January’s class) & put it through the glimmering wringer——
(i’ve seen it done with poetry collections, albums, paintings…)
what follows i’ve culled from my lecture notes::::::::::::
solve et coagula
permanent water
magnum opus
miniature world of vessels—alembics, globes, tiny fires—-mirroring the world around it—-(see above)—-work/world/words altered by what happens—-(see below)—-plus kings and queens changing hues and moods, wearing puff sleeves and crowns or sometimes nothing much
A 16th century text, The Mirror of Alchimy defines alchemy as: “a Science, teaching how to transform any kind of metal into another... by a proper medicine... Alchemy therefore is a science teaching how to make and compound a certain medicine, which is called Elixir, the which when it is cast upon metals or imperfect bodies, doth fully protect them.”
These, then, are the two goals of the art:
To transmute metals into gold
To make an elixir that is also a MEDICINE. Sometimes this elixir is called the philosopher’s stone, meant to perfect and to rarefy
not necessarily literal gold!
our gold is not ordinary gold, they’d say, sing
a language of symbol and scribble: linguistic tincture for what so ails us today—-what James Hillman called “the insanity of literalism”
plus weird occulted utterances: