TOPICS

alchemist

alchemist

Zosimos_of_Panopolis

Zosimos_of_Panopolis

AUTH

Paracelsus

BOOKS

CHAPTERS

1.04_-_ALCHEMY_AND_MANICHAEISM

32.06_-_The_Novel_Alchemy

PRIMARY CLASS

subject

SEE ALSO

SIMILAR TITLES

Alchemy

Alchemy

alchemy ::: any magical or miraculous power or process of transmuting a common substance, usually of little value, into a substance of great value. alchemies.

alchemy ::: Alchemy The science, both physical and spiritual, of transforming base materials into superior forms, i.e. gold. Transmutation of base metals into gold was based on the belief that naturally occurring gold, silver and other precious substances were originally formed within the earth from lesser substances, and could be reconstituted through alchemical operations. The operations of alchemy were based on the Hermetic principle that everything on earth had a heavenly counterpart, and that through the 'principle of vibration', heavenly things could affect their earthly counterparts, and vice-versa. Consequently, each mineral, plant, and metal corresponded with a heavenly body, and thus contained the properties of its associated heavenly body. As a result, alchemical formulae for medicines were created, and the concept of spiritual development through alchemical work was developed. The Great Work became not simply transmuting base metals into precious ones, but the perfection of the divine in man himself.

alchemy ::: n. --> An imaginary art which aimed to transmute the baser metals into gold, to find the panacea, or universal remedy for diseases, etc. It led the way to modern chemistry.
A mixed metal composed mainly of brass, formerly used for various utensils; hence, a trumpet.
Miraculous power of transmuting something common into something precious.

Alchemy ::: A process of transmutation. In respect to the occult sciences this refers to inner alchemy, the process of changing the lead of mechanistic, habitual personality into the gold of the solar personality and even to shift clarity of perception into the Causal.

Alchemy [from Arab al-kimiya from al the + kimiya philosopher’s stone from Greek chyma fluid] The art of divine magic under a chemical symbolism. The ancient alchemists, more conscious of the unity of nature, perhaps did not need to distinguish between a natural and spiritual alchemy or to regard one as symbolic of the other. Alchemy was introduced into Europe by the Arabs, from whom it may be traced to Egypt and India. Modern Europe knows it best from medieval alchemists, who studied its physical aspects, though some could interpret the symbolism and work out the analogies between the physical elements and processes and their spiritual counterparts.

Alchemy, p. 128.

Alchemy seeks the primal unity beyond diversity: a homogeneous substance from which the many elements were derived; a pure gold which could be obtained from baser metals by purging them of the dross with which the pure element was alloyed; an elixir of life which would cure all diseases. The transmutation of metals was their magnum opus; the agent to be employed was the philosopher’s stone. Though these processes are possible physically, the spiritual processes to which they correspond are incomparably more important. The base metals are the passions and delusions of the lower mind; and the pure gold is the wisdom of the manas in alliance with buddhi.

Alchemy.

Alchemy: The science of decomposing and recomposing things, as well as of changing their essential nature and raising it higher—transmuting them into each other. While chemistry deals with lifeless matter, alchemy employs life as a factor, and deals with higher forces of nature and the conditions of matter under which they operate. In its lowest aspect, it deals with physical substances, but in its highest aspect it teaches the regeneration of the spiritual man, the purification of mind, will and thought, and the ennobling of all the faculties of the human soul.

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   3 Sri Aurobindo
   2 Manly P Hall
   1 William Gibson
   1 Wikipedia
   1 Tom Butler-Bowdon
   1 The Mother
   1 Terence McKenna
   1 Saul Williams
   1 Peter J Carroll
   1 Mircea Eliade
   1 Imam al-Ghazali
   1 Carl Jung
   1 Aleister Crowley

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   11 Paulo Coelho
   8 Michael Scott
   7 Hiromu Arakawa
   7 Fred Alan Wolf
   6 Rajneesh
   6 Paracelsus
   6 Anonymous
   5 Paramahansa Yogananda
   5 J K Rowling
   5 James C Collins
   5 Carl Jung
   5 Arthur Rimbaud
   4 Sophia Amoruso
   4 Karen Armstrong
   4 Haruki Murakami
   4 Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875)
   4 Carl Jung
   3 William Shakespeare
   3 Thomas Moore
   3 Terence McKenna

1:For, adds Barba, those who think that metals were created at the beginning of of the world are grossly mistaken: metals 'grow' in mines. ~ Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy,

2:Overtaken by the spirit’s sudden spell, Smitten by a divine passion’s alchemy, Pain’s self compelled transformed to potent joy Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,

3:...a man should say to his soul every morning, "God has given thee twenty-four treasures; take heed lest thou lose anyone of them, for thou wilt not be able to endure the regret that will follow such loss. ~ Imam al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness,

4:Yet how can such contraries pass into each other? By what alchemy shall this lead of mortality be turned into that gold of divine Being? But if they are not in their essence contraries? If they are manifestations of one Reality, identical in substance? Then indeed a divine transmutation becomes conceivable.    ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,

5:Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish. ~ William Gibson,

6:To merely gaze upon the images of alchemy, is to in a sense, enter into a kind of psychoanalytical process because what alchemy was, and I should stress this or the rap makes no sense at all alchemy was not the vulgar pursuit of the transmutation of lesser metals into gold or silver. That was the charlatan's game played in every market in Europe for centuries among the simple people. Alchemy is the body of symbols and of literature that accreted around the effort to extract a universal medicine out of Nature for the transformation of societies and human beings. ~ Terence McKenna,

7:Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness, and all other things shall be added unto you." The alchemist, therefore is assured that if he achieved the inner mystery, the fulfillment of the outer part will be inevitable. But practically every charlatan in alchemy has determined primarily to achieve the physical purpose first. His primary interest has been to make gold, or perhaps one of the other aspects of it, such as a medicine against illness. He has wanted the physical effect first but because the physical effect was not intended to be first, when he starts to study and explore the various texts, he comes upon a dilemma, HIS OWN INTERNAL RESOURCES CANNOT DISCOVER THE CORRECT INSTRUCTIONS. The words may be there but the meaning eludes him because the meaning is not part of his own present spiritual integrity. ~ Manly P Hall,

8:Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the "superman" Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche's Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to "create a god for yourself out of your seven devils." Here we find the true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter. ~ Carl Jung, "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon" (1942), CW 13, § 163.,

9:The alchemist of today is not hidden in caves and cellars, studying alone, but as he goes on with his work, it is seen that walls are built around him, and while he is in the world, like the master of old, he is not of it. As he goes further in his work, the light of other people's advice and outside help grows weaker and weaker, until finally he stands alone in darkness, and then comes the time that he must use his own lamp, and the various experiments which he has carried on must be his guide. He must take the Elixir of Life which he has developed and with it fill the lamp of his spiritual consciousness, and holding that above his head, walk into the Great Unknown, where if he has been a good and faithful servant, he will learn of the alchemy of Divinity. Where now test tubes and bottles are his implements, then worlds and globes he will study, and as a silent watcher will learn from that Divine One, who is the Great Alchemist of all the universe, the greatest alchemy of all, the creation of life, the maintenance of form, and the building of worlds. ~ Manly P Hall, The Initiates of the Flame,

10:Received him in their deathless harmonies.    All things were perfect there that flower in Time;    Beauty was there creation's native mould,    Peace was a thrilled voluptuous purity.    There Love fulfilled her gold and roseate dreams    And Strength her crowned and mighty reveries;    Desire climbed up, a swift omnipotent flame,    And Pleasure had the stature of the gods;    Dream walked along the highways of the stars;    Sweet common things turned into miracles:    Overtaken by the spirit's sudden spell,    Smitten by a divine passion's alchemy,    Pain's self compelled transformed to potent joy    Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell.    All life's high visions are embodied there,    Her wandering hopes achieved, her aureate combs    Caught by the honey-eater's darting tongue,    Her burning guesses changed to ecstasied truths,    Her mighty pantings stilled in deathless calm    And liberated her immense desires.    In that paradise of perfect heart and sense    No lower note could break the endless charm    Of her sweetness ardent and immaculate;    Her steps are sure of their intuitive fall.    After the anguish of the soul's long strife    At length were found calm and celestial rest    And, lapped in a magic flood of sorrowless hours,    Healed were his warrior nature's wounded limbs    In the encircling arms of Energies    That brooked no stain and feared not their own bliss.    In scenes forbidden to our pallid sense    Amid miraculous scents and wonder-hues    He met the forms that divinise the sight,    To music that can immortalise the mind    And make the heart wide as infinity    Listened, and captured the inaudible    ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,

11:reading :::    50 Spiritual Classics: List of Books Covered:    Muhammad Asad - The Road To Mecca (1954)    St Augustine - Confessions (400)    Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)    Black Elk Black - Elk Speaks (1932)    Richard Maurice Bucke - Cosmic Consciousness (1901)    Fritjof Capra - The Tao of Physics (1976)    Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan (1972)    GK Chesterton - St Francis of Assisi (1922)    Pema Chodron - The Places That Scare You (2001)    Chuang Tzu - The Book of Chuang Tzu (4th century BCE)    Ram Dass - Be Here Now (1971)    Epictetus - Enchiridion (1st century)    Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth (1927)    Al-Ghazzali - The Alchemy of Happiness (1097)    Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet (1923)    GI Gurdjieff - Meetings With Remarkable Men (1960)    Dag Hammarskjold - Markings (1963)    Abraham Joshua Heschel - The Sabbath (1951)    Hermann Hesse - Siddartha (1922)    Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (1954)    William James - The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)    Carl Gustav Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1955)    Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe (1436)    J Krishnamurti - Think On These Things (1964)    CS Lewis - The Screwtape Letters (1942)    Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964)    Daniel C Matt - The Essential Kabbalah (1994)    Dan Millman - The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (1989)    W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge (1944)    Thich Nhat Hanh - The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)    Michael Newton - Journey of Souls (1994)    John O'Donohue - Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1998)    Robert M Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)    James Redfield - The Celestine Prophecy (1994)    Miguel Ruiz - The Four Agreements (1997)    Helen Schucman & William Thetford - A Course in Miracles (1976)    Idries Shah - The Way of the Sufi (1968)    Starhawk - The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)    Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)    Emanuel Swedenborg - Heaven and Hell (1758)    Teresa of Avila - Interior Castle (1570)    Mother Teresa - A Simple Path (1994)    Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (1998)    Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973)    Neale Donald Walsch - Conversations With God (1998)    Rick Warren - The Purpose-Driven Life (2002)    Simone Weil - Waiting For God (1979)    Ken Wilber - A Theory of Everything (2000)    Paramahansa Yogananda - Autobiography of a Yogi (1974)    Gary Zukav - The Seat of the Soul (1990)    ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Spirital Classics (2017 Edition),

12:INVOCATION    The ultimate invocation, that of Kia, cannot be performed. The paradox is that as Kia has no dualized qualities, there are no attributes by which to invoke it. To give it one quality is merely to deny it another. As an observant dualistic being once said:    I am that I am not.    Nevertheless, the magician may need to make some rearrangements or additions to what he is. Metamorphosis may be pursued by seeking that which one is not, and transcending both in mutual annihilation. Alternatively, the process of invocation may be seen as adding to the magician's psyche any elements which are missing. It is true that the mind must be finally surrendered as one enters fully into Chaos, but a complete and balanced psychocosm is more easily surrendered.    The magical process of shuffling beliefs and desires attendant upon the process of invocation also demonstrates that one's dominant obsessions or personality are quite arbitrary, and hence more easily banished.    There are many maps of the mind (psychocosms), most of which are inconsistent, contradictory, and based on highly fanciful theories. Many use the symbology of god forms, for all mythology embodies a psychology. A complete mythic pantheon resumes all of man's mental characteristics. Magicians will often use a pagan pantheon of gods as the basis for invoking some particular insight or ability, as these myths provide the most explicit and developed formulation of the particular idea's extant. However it is possible to use almost anything from the archetypes of the collective unconscious to the elemental qualities of alchemy.    If the magician taps a deep enough level of power, these forms may manifest with sufficient force to convince the mind of the objective existence of the god. Yet the aim of invocation is temporary possession by the god, communication from the god, and manifestation of the god's magical powers, rather than the formation of religious cults.    The actual method of invocation may be described as a total immersion in the qualities pertaining to the desired form. One invokes in every conceivable way. The magician first programs himself into identity with the god by arranging all his experiences to coincide with its nature. In the most elaborate form of ritual he may surround himself with the sounds, smells, colors, instruments, memories, numbers, symbols, music, and poetry suggestive of the god or quality. Secondly he unites his life force to the god image with which he has united his mind. This is accomplished with techniques from the gnosis. Figure 5 shows some examples of maps of the mind. Following are some suggestions for practical ritual invocation.    ~ Peter J Carroll, Liber Null,

13:Mother, suffering comes from ignorance and pain, but what is the nature of the suffering and pain the Divine Mother feels for her children-the Divine Mother in Savitri? It is because she participates in their nature. She has descended upon earth to participate in their nature. Because if she did not participate in their nature, she could not lead them farther. If she remained in her supreme consciousness where there is no suffering, in her supreme knowledge and consciousness, she could not have any contact with human beings. And it is for this that she is obliged to take on the human consciousness and form, it is to be able to enter into contact with them. Only, she does not forget: she has adopted their consciousness but she remains in relation with her own real, supreme consciousness. And thus, by joining the two, she can make those who are in that other consciousness progress. But if she did not adopt their consciousness, if she did not suffer with their sorrow, she could not help them. Hers is not a suffering of ignorance: it is a suffering through identity. It is because she has accepted to have the same vibrations as they, in order to be able to enter into contact with them and pull them out of the state they are in. If she did not enter into contact with them, she would not be felt at all or no one could bear her radiance.... This has been said in all kinds of forms, in all kinds of religions, and they have spoken very often of the divine Sacrifice, but from a certain point of view it is true. It is a voluntary sacrifice, but it is true: giving up a state of perfect consciousness, perfect bliss, perfect power in order to accept the state of ignorance of the outer world so as to pull it out of that ignorance. If this state were not accepted, there would be no contact with it. No relation would be possible. And this is the reason of the incarnations. Otherwise, there would be no necessity. If the divine consciousness and divine force could work directly from the place or state of their perfection, if they could work directly on matter and transform it, there would be no need to take a body like man's. It would have been enough to act from the world of Truth with the perfect consciousness and upon consciousness. In fact that acts perhaps but so slowly that when there is this effort to make the world progress, make it go forward more rapidly, well, it is necessary to take on human nature. By taking the human body, one is obliged to take on human nature, partially. Only, instead of losing one's consciousness and losing contact with the Truth, one keeps this consciousness and this Truth, and it is by joining the two that one can create exactly this kind of alchemy of transformation. But if one did not touch matter, one could do nothing for it. ~ The Mother, Question And Answers,

14:Coded Language Whereas, breakbeats have been the missing link connecting the diasporic community to its drum woven past Whereas the quantised drum has allowed the whirling mathematicians to calculate the ever changing distance between rock and stardom. Whereas the velocity of the spinning vinyl, cross-faded, spun backwards, and re-released at the same given moment of recorded history , yet at a different moment in time's continuum has allowed history to catch up with the present. We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue. Statements, such as, "keep it real", especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or physically or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active and not representative of the individually determined is. Furthermore, as determined by the collective consciousness of this state of being and the lessened distance between thought patterns and their secular manifestations, the role of men as listening receptacles is to be increased by a number no less than 70 percent of the current enlisted as vocal aggressors. Motherfuckers better realize, now is the time to self-actualize We have found evidence that hip hops standard 85 rpm when increased by a number as least half the rate of it's standard or decreased at ¾ of it's speed may be a determining factor in heightening consciousness. Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth. Equate rhyme with reason, Sun with season Our cyclical relationship to phenomenon has encouraged scholars to erase the centers of periods, thus symbolizing the non-linear character of cause and effect Reject mediocrity! Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that which as been given for you to understand. The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the diet of an infant. The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce and crushed pears Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness. The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, Ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen. Thus, in the name of: ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AHKENATON, HATHSHEPUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN LENNON, KHALO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITH, LOURDE, WHITMAN BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GHANDI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GURDJIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMANINOV ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHAWAY, HENDRIX, KUTI, DICKINSON, RIPPERTON MARY, ISIS, THERESA, HANSBURY, TESLA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERÓN, MARLEY, MAGDALENE, COSBY SHAKUR, THOSE WHO BURN, THOSE STILL AFLAME, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter. We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stone Our music is our alchemy We stand as the manifested equivalent of 3 buckets of water and a hand full of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down supply the percussion factor of forever. If you must count to keep the beat then count. Find you mantra and awaken your subconscious. Curve you circles counterclockwise Use your cipher to decipher, Coded Language, man made laws. Climb waterfalls and trees, commune with nature, snakes and bees. Let your children name themselves and claim themselves as the new day for today we are determined to be the channelers of these changing frequencies into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry, crafts, love, and love. We enlist every instrument: Acoustic, electronic. Every so-called race, gender, and sexual preference. Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking World. Any utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed - two rappers slain Any utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed - two rappers slain ~ Saul Williams,

15:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study    Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work.    The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation.    Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law.    Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner.    Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems.    Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy.    The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick.    The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism.    Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled.    The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism.    The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment.    The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece.    Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good.    The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices.    The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita.    The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment.    The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science.    The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals.    Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style.    The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other.    The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion.    Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind.    The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism.    The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley.    The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics.    The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues.    Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.    Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment.    Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject.    Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick.    The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism.    The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical.    The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy.    The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master.    The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy.    The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium.    Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy.    Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years.    Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students.    The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students.    The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition.    Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation.    Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism.    Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism.    First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism.    Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics.    The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah.    The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject.    The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose.    ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants

16:One goal of alchemy, the transmutation of base substances into gold, is now known to be impossible by chemical means but possible by physical means. Although not financially worthwhile, Gold was synthesized in particle accelerators as early as 1941. ~ Wikipedia, Alchemy

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1:Clutter-clearing is modern-day alchemy. ~ Denise Linn

2:Awareness is the greatest alchemy there is. ~ Rajneesh

3:What is love if not a form of alchemy? ~ Beth Fantaskey

4:I deny morality as I deny alchemy. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

5:The voice that U hear is the alchemy of Ur mind. ~ Prince

6:What alchemy there was in human beings. ~ Agatha Christie

7:Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science. ~ Jim Morrison

8:I absolutely adore the alchemy of a bit of an idea. ~ Glen Hansard

9:Somewhere mixed in with her mutated alchemy is ~ Patricia Cornwell

10:Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision. ~ Henry A Kissinger

11:Cineama, heir of alchemy, The last erotic science ~ Jim Morrison

12:Americans don't want leadership. They want alchemy. ~ Michael Kinsley

13:This process is alchemy: its founder is the smith Vulcan. ~ Paracelsus

14:I went because I was interested in the alchemy of issues. ~ Joan Didion

15:Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love... ~ Seanan McGuire

16:The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. ~ Gloria E Anzaldua

17:All artists give birth. It's alchemy and it's really an amazing process. ~ Jewel

18:if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. ~ Anonymous

19:My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy. ~ Cai Guo Qiang

20:Witnessing is the alchemy of enlightenment. It can transform mud into gold. ~ Amit Ray

21:Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart, Tara Bennett-Goleman ~ Kristin Neff

22:Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy. ~ Ana s Nin

23:This is the love of God, an alchemy that can turn enemies into children. ~ Mark Buchanan

24:Attention is an alchemy that turns dullness to beauty and anxiety to ease. ~ Steve Taylor

25:What is cheaper than lust or of less value than alchemy or aphrodisiacs? ~ Avram Davidson

26:Medicine rests upon four pillars - philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. ~ Paracelsus

27:Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. ~ Anais Nin

28:The Alchemy's secret key is hidden in the laboratory of the man and woman. ~ Samael Aun Weor

29:The alchemy of life is to turn coins into cents, by making sense of change. ~ Jennifer Sodini

30:what you are searching for,you already have,in the alchemy of your garden ~ Robin Craig Clark

31:Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it. ~ Sharon Salzberg

32:Meditation, perhaps, is the only alchemy that can transform a beggar into an emperor. ~ Rajneesh

33:Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. ~ Terence McKenna

34:mental alchemy you can effect by thinking of any adversity as an opportunity for power. ~ 50 Cent

35:So if we could not have love, my husband and I, then at least I could have alchemy. ~ Sarah Dunant

36:You can download the learner I’ve just described from alchemy.cs .washington.edu. ~ Pedro Domingos

37:Do it for you. ~ Kate Bush, in "You Want Alchemy" (B-side of "The Red Shoes" single) (4 April 1994)

38:The alchemy of time transforms everything into comedy. Everything. Even crucifixion. ~ Josef kvoreck

39:Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate. ~ Laini Taylor

40:See ye not, Courtesy is the true Alchemy, turning to gold all it touches and tries? ~ George Meredith

41:At it's essence, art is an alchemical process. Alchemy is a process of transformation. ~ Julia Cameron

42:Despite all its successes, machine learning is still in the alchemy stage of science. ~ Pedro Domingos

43:There was no "me" in Alchemy. Well, phonetically there was, but that wasn't the point. ~ Richelle Mead

44:Everything that the modern mind cannot define it regards as insane. ~ Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

45:The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous - large souled. ~ Sam Keen

46:I have invented nothing. I have simply documented a magical alchemy that I want to share. ~ Gregory Colbert

47:Alchemy has never been a science for the dilettante. It’s a lifelong journey for enlightenment. ~ Layton Green

48:But utopias don't exist, of course, anywhere in any world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion. ~ Haruki Murakami

49:Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy. ~ Brad Stone

50:Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy ~ William Shakespeare

51:Richard Shindell works impressive alchemy with the plainest, most primal American pop melodies. ~ Glen Hirshberg

52:She matched his steps, and by her body’s alchemy transformed his unfinished movements into gold. ~ Max Gladstone

53:The powerful alchemy of his storytelling transforms the atthanni—the half a rupee coin—into a rupaiya. ~ Gulzar

54:Language is the alchemy of transforming a thought into a word, and the word into a new reality. ~ Jennifer Sodini

55:There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy. ~ Maggie Nelson

56:This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and chemist of the medicine. ~ Paracelsus

57:As hard as you try to write a good script and you have great intentions, this alchemy has to occur. ~ Carlton Cuse

58:I cannot explain how it begins, or why it happens, what strange alchemy puts such things in motion. ~ Megan Chance

59:But utopias don’t exist, of course, anywhere in any world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion. What ~ Haruki Murakami

60:his fucking an alchemy that transmuted my days-long torment into a bliss I could’ve never imagined. ~ Sierra Simone

61:...Moonlight possesses no alchemy to transmute good motives to base, but it does excite love magic... ~ John Geddes

62:I let the remainder of the morning drift by between the alchemy of the music and the perfume of books, ~ Carlos Ruiz Zaf n

63:Learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you've been given the door with open. ~ Rumi

64:The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk. ~ Nate Silver

65:My parents would call it genetics. To me it seems like alchemy—the luminous space between science and magic. ~ Claudia Gray

66:There is an alchemy of quiet malice by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

67:...a redoubtable alchemy was at work behind impenetrable veils as the forest prepared its nocturnal mysteries. ~ Julien Gracq

68:Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone. ~ Terence McKenna

69:In a sense the secret of alchemy is to imagine a world in which it is possible to transmute base metal to gold. ~ Patrick Harpur

70:In a place that promised alchemy but dealt more in perfume than potion, was it any wonder that wonder had run out? ~ Stephen King

71:Money is a form of alchemy, [...] it turns kind, normal people into greed-mongers, intent only on acquisitiveness. ~ Jasper Fforde

72:I'm not a magician. I'am an alchemyst, a man of science, though perhaps not the science you would be familiar with. ~ Michael Scott

73:True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’. ~ Arthur Rimbaud

74:It is indeed a wondrous universal alchemy, is it not? When one's heartfelt intentions cause mountains to move. ~ Jacqueline Winspear

75:What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it. ~ Linda Hogan

76:That odd alchemy of married love - passion, betrayal, fury, kindness, and companionship - lay there exposed between them. ~ N M Kelby

77:Dissolution is the secret of the great work (alchemy) --dissolve certainty so that a new, enlarged vision can emerge. ~ Caroline Casey

78:He seemed not to need mere physical sustenance anymore, surviving instead on a spiritual alchemy of memory and desire. ~ Mark Beauregard

79:The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

80:All sorcerers had studied alchemy to some extent, and all alchemists, at least those worth their salt, knew how to cook. ~ R Scott Bakker

81:Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins. ~ Richard Dawkins

82:Clakkers carried complex geasa by dint of alchemy; humans carried heavy obligations, too, but called them culture. Society. ~ Ian Tregillis

83:I draw the line at letting people into my songwriting cave. To me, that's where the alchemy happens and where the mystery is. ~ Amanda Palmer

84:When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. ~ James C Collins

85:None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry. ~ Edith Hamilton

86:The secrets of alchemy exist to transform mortals from a state of suffering and ignorance to a state of enlightenment and bliss. ~ Deepak Chopra

87:Because it is a process of alchemy: it transforms a vast manifestation of spiritual energy, which is love, into a physical gesture ~ Paulo Coelho

88:Chymia, or Alchemy and Spagyrism, is the art of resolving compound bodies into their principles and of combining these again. ~ Georg Ernst Stahl

89:The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.” Alfred Adler ~ Tom Butler Bowdon

90:The real alchemy is transforming the base self into gold or into spiritual awareness. That's really what new alchemy's all about. ~ Fred Alan Wolf

91:In the peculiar alchemy of literature, the daughter was adept at creating in fiction what she had not known in her own childhood. ~ Caroline Fraser

92:Political science came into being as alchemy was being discredited, although history has since proved that alchemy had a better record. ~ L E Modesitt Jr

93:Poverty of young men alone behind the stairways, who practice alchemy inside bottle caps, who know the altruism of a last syringe. ~ Jim Carroll

94:Writing fiction has always, for me, been an alchemy of turning pain into poetry, ugliness into beauty. It has been a kind of redemption. ~ Nancy Springer

95:When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology ~ James C Collins

96:The great difficulty is to save the fantasy which is life giving and cut away the childishness of the wish to realize it. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy

97:Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly. ~ Jean Genet

98:As in the instances of alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and other such popular creeds, political economy, has a plausible idea at the root of it. ~ John Ruskin

99:The alchemist of the West has turned stone into glass But my alchemy has transmuted glass into flint Pharaohs of today have stalked me in vain ~ Muhammad Iqbal

100:The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost. ~ Edith Wharton

101:...the world is only the visible aspect of God. And that what alchemy does is to bring spiritual perfection into contact with the material plane. ~ Paulo Coelho

102:Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physicain should not be influenced by such judgements. ~ Paracelsus

103:Meditation is the alchemy of transforming. The unconscious into the conscious. It gives you a tremendous power, Far greater than anger, greed and lust. ~ Rajneesh

104:What do you mean 'lower myself'? That's the only thing I've ever been. Just a simple human who couldn't save a little girl. Not even with alchemy. ~ Hiromu Arakawa

105:Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology. ~ Christopher Hitchens

106:[T]o gain greater access to the gold of our nature in relationship, a certain alchemy is required: the refining of our conditioned defensive patterns. ~ John Welwood

107:Alchemy should have no part in a Je’daii’s experience. It is a dark force, arcane and dangerous. It has the power to upset balance. There are other ways. ~ Tim Lebbon

108:The mine owners did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them! ~ Bill Haywood

109:...for through some subtle alchemy his presence had allowed her to be who she truly was, and now, without him there, she could not manage it at all. ~ Susanna Kearsley

110:I like to use the term alchemy, which is the soul of the world, or those of Jung's collective unconscious. You connect with a space where everything is. ~ Paulo Coelho

111:The alchemist of the West has turned stone into glass But my alchemy has transmuted glass into flint Pharaohs of today have stalked me in vain ~ Muhammad Iqbal

112:Music was alchemy. Music was sex. When it was right, when everything fit together just perfectly, it was better than any feeling he’d ever experienced. ~ Lauren Dane

113:The goal of astrology is the alchemy of personality. It is to transform chaos into cosmos, collective human nature into individual and creative personality. ~ Dane Rudhyar

114:The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things. ~ Joanne Harris

115:Hence one could say cum grano salis that history could be constructed just as easily from one’s own unconscious as from the actual texts. ~ Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

116:Alchemy is a costly hobby, I fear. I barely make ends meet selling my phylactery. Frigid Hells, if it wasn't for the limp dicks of Conthas I'd be flat broke! ~ Nicholas Eames

117:Bezos proclaimed at the time, according to numerous employees: “Developers are alchemists and our job is to do everything we can to get them to do their alchemy. ~ Brad Stone

118:Joy, it seemed, was a strange alchemy of mind over matter. The path to joy, like with sadness, did not lead away from suffering and adversity but through it. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

119:Khem was an ancient name for the land of Egypt; and both the words alchemy and chemistry are a perpetual reminder of the priority of Egypt's scientific knowledge. ~ Manly Hall

120:What kind of alchemy could create a perfume that would make a reaction to a person lukewarm, indifferent and apathetic?If such a scent could be made I'd like some. ~ Bob Dylan

121:It is entirely possible to have an interest in alchemy, religious history and other assorted old-fashioned things while maintaining a perfectly materialistic stance. ~ Lucretius

122:Keda's oldness was the work of fate, alchemy. An occult agedness. A transparent darkness. A broken and mysterious grove. A tragedy, a glory, a decay. - Titus Groan ~ Mervyn Peake

123:Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines. ~ Paracelsus

124:Religion isn’t about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness. ~ Karen Armstrong

125:Remember what I told you: the world is only the visible aspect of God. And that what alchemy does is to bring spiritual perfection into contact with the material plane. ~ Anonymous

126:The light of awakeness itself is the deepest transformative agent, and the deepest alchemy takes place in the willingness to stay conscious to our own unconsciousness. ~ Adyashanti

127:Success, in every case, comes from the alchemy of your health, your mind, your positive energy, and the real world situations you persistently improve for yourself. ~ James Altucher

128:Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmitted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness. ~ Pearl S Buck

129:He sits high in all the people's hearts, And that which would appear offense in us, His countenance, like richest alchemy, Will change to virtue and to worthiness. ~ William Shakespeare

130:A former exile who dabbles in alchemy and spent weeks in the employ of pirates. Yes, that sounds like someone they would want to mold the minds of the next generation. ~ Samantha Shannon

131:Alchemy comes from a time when people considered science a process and a philosophy, and took allegories seriously enough to learn from them. This shows in their thinking. ~ Simon Sarris

132:I so connected to symbolically being able to turn lead into gold. My grandmother used to say, "Life give you a lemon, you go ahead and make lemonade." To me, that's alchemy. ~ Will Smith

133:Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy ~ Djuna Barnes

134:Or perhaps it is some combination of spirit and desire, love and hope, some alchemy that we each possess and can put to use, if we first know where to look without flinching. ~ Libba Bray

135:In my book (and this is my book!) magical thinking is the alchemy that you can use to visualize and project yourself into the professional and personal life that you want. ~ Sophia Amoruso

136:But rereading is not like remembering. It's more like rewriting ourselves: the subtle alchemy of reinventing our past through the twice-underscored words written by others. ~ Valeria Luiselli

137:Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology. ~ Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great (p. 256)

138:Alchemy is the key, lost for centuries, that gives us the way to reconnect with the soul, to come to know and understand it and to release it from the prison of our neglect of it. ~ Anne Baring

139:Clean indoor studies in the dark arts, military history, and alchemy didn’t preclude messy outdoor classes in strategic combat, duelling, open-field assassination, and rugby. ~ Genevieve Cogman

140:Full many a glorious morn I have seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy. ~ William Shakespeare

141:In alchemy, it’s called the Soul of the World. When you want something with all your heart, that’s when you are closest to the Soul of the World. It’s always a positive force.” He ~ Paulo Coelho

142:One of the oldest secrets of alchemy is that every living thing, from the most complex creatures right down to the simplest leaf, carries the seeds of its creation within itself. ~ Michael Scott

143:One of the reasons we think this market will start to run out of gas at some point is that you've essentially created as much gold from straw as you can from this financial alchemy ~ Scott Simon

144:The great secret of social alchemy is to profit best from each stage in our lives, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in summer, and all its fruits in autumn. ~ Honore de Balzac

145:As Indians, we must of course learn from the past; but we must remain focused on the future. In my view, education is the true alchemy that can bring India its next golden age. ~ Pranab Mukherjee

146:You're responsible for yourself as an actress, you know that your personal growth goes through that alchemy, and you give as much importance to your life as you do to your acting. ~ Jeanne Moreau

147:Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything. ~ Terence McKenna

148:On evil's cushion poised, His Majesty, Satan Thrice-Great, lulls our charmed soul, until He turns to vapor what was once our will: Rich ore, transmuted by his alchemy. ~ Charles Baudelaire

149:Without respect, the subtle alchemy that binds an organization or that serves as the impetus for a business transaction would dissolve into mutual suspicion and hostility. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

150:Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science. ~ Jim Morrison

151:[E]ven when a dream crosses the threshold of consciousness, consciousness in reporting it does something to it, amends it and makes it a little more understandable. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy

152:The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

153:expression—that alchemy by which the performer not only comprehends the sentiments of the composer, but somehow communicates them to her audience through the manner of her play. Whatever ~ Amor Towles

154:I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science. ~ Thomas Szasz

155:Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. ~ Karen Armstrong

156:This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. This act, the act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

157:Soros regards himself as more a philosopher than a hit man. His book The Alchemy of Finance (1987) begins with a bold critique of the fundamental assumptions of economics as a subject, ~ Niall Ferguson

158:Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well. ~ Florence King

159:To summon things into being by the mysterious alchemy of language. Atlantic. Atlas. Aloft. He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under. ~ Colum McCann

160:Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy. ~ Stanis aw Lem

161:When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing. ~ Matthew Pearl

162:. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules. ~ Neal Stephenson

163:Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy. So ~ Stanis aw Lem

164:I wear my loneliness like a taffeta dress riding up my thigh, and you cannot help but want me. You think it's cruel how I break your heart, to write a poem. I think it's alchemy. ~ Warsan Shire

165:Taking this view, it is possible to see financial markets as a laboratory for testing hypotheses, albeit not strictly scientific ones. The truth is, successful investing is a kind of alchemy. ~ George Soros

166:Gratitude helps us stop trying to control outcomes. It is the key that unlocks positive energy in our life. It is the alchemy that turns problems into blessings, and the unexpected into gifts. ~ Melody Beattie

167:But you can create conditions that allow a deeper alchemy to work—that is, conditions that help leaders in a system to broaden and deepen their view of the system from ego to eco, from “me” to ~ C Otto Scharmer

168:In one of the books he learned that the most important text in the literature of alchemy contained only a few lines, and had been inscribed on the surface of an emerald. “It’s the Emerald Tablet, ~ Paulo Coelho

169:I entered adulthood believing that capitalism was a scam, but I've instead found that it's a kind of alchemy. You combine hard work, creativity, and self-determination, and things start to happen. ~ Sophia Amoruso

170:I had never seen her wearing lipstick, but knew better than to say so in case she did that mysterious alchemy some girls do and transformed the comment into my accusing her of having gained weight. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

171:Against the alchemy of two naked bodies in a bed in the darkness, and against all the complex longings and attachments and commitments such intimacy might arouse, he had nothing with which to fight. ~ Robert Harris

172:Fukada was supposedly looking for a utopia in the Takashima system,' the Professor said with a frown. 'But utopia's don't exist, of course, anywhere in the world. Like alchemy or perpetual motion. ~ Haruki Murakami

173:The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy. ~ Francis Ford Coppola

174:So, one last time, Tom climbed the hundreds of stairs. One last time, he performed the alchemy of brilliance from sulphur and oil. One last time, he sent his signal to mariners for miles about: beware. ~ M L Stedman

175:If you have strength of character, you can use that as fuel to not only be a survivor but to transcend simply being a survivor, use an internal alchemy to turn something rotten and horrible into gold. ~ Zeena Schreck

176:Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. ~ Marilynne Robinson

177:That sort of alchemy, assigning a meaning---turning what some might view as the lowly act of foraging into a direct communion with God, for instance---is often the only sort of power a poor person has. ~ Sarah Smarsh

178:Alchemy is a science, but a science that acknowledges certain principles of magic. This. . . this is a mathematical expression of quintessence, Archimedes' fifth element, which binds all things together. ~ Rachel Caine

179:Nicholas: One of the oldest secrets of alchemy is that every living thing, from the most complex creatures right down to the simplest leaf, carries the seeds of its creation within itself. Josh: DNA. ~ Michael Scott

180:For, adds Barba, those who think that metals were created at the beginning of of the world are grossly mistaken: metals 'grow' in mines. ~ Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy,

181:When we speak of psychological projection we must, as I have already pointed out, always remember that it is an unconscious process that works only so long as it stays unconscious. ~ Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

182:Anna took her solace where she always did. The smell of the earth, the touch of the sky held for her a special alchemy, able to turn loneliness into aloneness, and so make it, if not sacred, at least bearable. ~ Nevada Barr

183:Regweld is really a fine wizard," he continued, patting the shoulder again. "And his ideas for crossbreeding a horse and a frog are not without merit; never mind the explosion! Alchemy shops can be replaced! ~ R A Salvatore

184:Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy , looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find. ~ Fritz Leiber

185:The Internet is the world’s biggest cocktail party, anonymity replacing alcohol in the alchemy of gossip, and who doesn’t stop to listen if someone uses their name? Only someone a lot stronger than I am. ~ Catherine McKenzie

186:There's an alchemy that happens during sex that causes 1 + 1 to add up to much more than 2, even as those halves meld in an almost magical way to form a single unit that's more complete than either of them alone. ~ Dale Peck

187:In Western alchemy, too, several masters suspected that it was a question of a meditative development of one’s own inner personality which, it was hoped, would then complete itself in the outer world. ~ Marie Louise Von Franz

188:Italian cuisine, at its very best, is a math problem that doesn't add up. A tangle of noodles, a few scraps of pork, a grating of cheese are transformed into something magical. 1+1=3: more alchemy than cooking. ~ Matt Goulding

189:Jung's move to investigate alchemy as premodern art/science before its separation into rhetoric versus chemistry was an effort to imagine a possible reunion or, at least, reclassification of art and science. ~ Craig Stephenson

190:The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities ~ Adrienne Rich

191:It might be said that the secret of Merlin was carried on by alchemy, primarily in the figure of Mercurius. Then Merlin was taken up again in my psychology of the unconscious and – remains uncomprehended to this day! ~ Carl Jung

192:Fear and sorrow inhibit action; anger generates it. When you learn to make proper use of your anger, you can change fear and sorrow to anger, then turn anger to action. That’s the body’s secret of internal alchemy. ~ Dan Millman

193:I want to explain the new alchemy [in the "From Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to a New Vision of Mind and Time"], which has to do with understanding what I call the subjective and objective qualities of existence. ~ Fred Alan Wolf

194:The beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into pardon. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

195:Alchemy... as Newton and others have stressed, does not trade in metals, but gives pregnant allegories, impenetrable by the uninterested. It describes a process, not a compendium. It cannot be opened, it must be done. ~ Simon Sarris

196:can’t explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency. ~ Tana French

197:It should therefore be an absolute rule to assume that every dream, and every part of a dream, is unknown at the outset, and to attempt an interpretation only after carefully taking up the context. ~ Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

198:I can't explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency. ~ Tana French

199:Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego's rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche. ~ Carl Jung

200:Overtaken by the spirit’s sudden spell, Smitten by a divine passion’s alchemy, Pain’s self compelled transformed to potent joy Curing the antithesis twixt heaven and hell. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Paradise of the Life-Gods,

201:All movies are alchemy and time is one of the ingredients that goes into the alchemy. You want the time to be right; you don't want to rush it. You need the right script, the right cast and the right feeling in the culture. ~ Drew Goddard

202:The alchemy that is friendship mixed with attraction is important. The alchemy that is two hearts, two minds, two lives, two particular laughs in silly melody is important. And, it is yet unknown, as you are, to me. ~ Waylon H Lewis

203:We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war. ~ Keith Ablow

204:Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. ~ C sar Aira

205:Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. ~ Karen Armstrong

206:Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth, - that of alchemy, operational success. ~ George Soros

207:The mind is brought into harmony with the spirit and includes the body, achieving an organic, harmonious unity of all aspects of the person's being, what we might call 'bio-psychosynthesis'. This is true spiritual alchemy ~ Roberto Assagioli

208:I got into magic because I got into alchemy. Which I got into because I was into chemistry, which I was learning about because I wanted to get better with botany, which I had taken up studying in an effort to grow some killer weed ~ Drew Hayes

209:listen to this: “Professor Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragon’s blood and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel”! ~ J K Rowling

210:Much early alchemy seems to have been adventure. You heated and mixed and burnt and pounded and to see what would happen. An adventure might suggest an hypothesis that can subsequently be tested, but adventure is prior to theory. ~ Ian Hacking

211:The confessional singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s was in full swing, and Bob Dylan's emotional album [ Blood on the Tracks] resonated with the times. There would be other hits, but never the same alchemy of emotion and time. ~ Bob Dylan

212:The first way has been excellently presented by David Holt in his lecture on “Jung and Marx.” [1] There Holt shows that Jung imagined his work to be theoretically and historically substantiated by alchemy, and that Jung spent a ~ James Hillman

213:Strive to preserve your health; and in this you will better succeed in proportion as you keep clear of the physicians, for their drugs are a kind of alchemy concerning which there are no fewer books than there are medicines. ~ Leonardo da Vinci

214:The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy. ~ Patricia Hampl

215:"Like alchemy, erotic love contains within itself the possibility of uniting two elements. In love the sexual and the spiritual may be united." ~ Arlene Landau, Ph.D., Jungian analyst, Tragic Beauty, p. 63, on the next episode of Speaking of Jung

216:Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten. ~ Ernest Hemingway

217:That’s the principle that governs all things,” he said. “In alchemy, it’s called the Soul of the World. When you want something with all your heart, that’s when you are closest to the Soul of the World. It’s always a positive force. ~ Paulo Coelho

218:the outcome, if successful, in both alchemy and individuation is a union of opposites—the coniunctionis or transcendent function—leading to alchemical gold, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, or, in Jungian terms, the Self. ~ Gary Lachman

219:Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science Can from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore? What craft of alchemy can bid defiance To time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower? ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

220:...a man should say to his soul every morning, "God has given thee twenty-four treasures; take heed lest thou lose anyone of them, for thou wilt not be able to endure the regret that will follow such loss. ~ Imam al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness,

221:Force gratitude until it becomes habitual. Gratitude helps us stop trying to control outcomes. It is the key that unlocks positive energy in our life. It is the alchemy that turns problems into blessings, and the unexpected into gifts. ~ Melody Beattie

222:If the ways of this world are based on equivalent exchange, as alchemy says, then in order to allow for a new generation to enjoy good fortune, then the price that we must pay is to carry the bodies of the dead across a river of blood. ~ Hiromu Arakawa

223:A storm came chasing the sky away. And virgin sands Drank all the water of the evening woods, God's wind blew icicles into the ponds; As I wept I saw gold,- and could not drink. - Delirium II - Alchemy of the Word ~ Arthur Rimbaud

224:Both Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, the two giants of twentieth-century psychology, used metaphors from alchemy to describe deep psychological processes that cut across the boundaries of body and mind, conscious and unconscious processes. ~ Ralph Metzner

225:Because on the off chance that Galahad keeps you in a human jail, you’re gonna have to get really good at it. A whole life of sweaty man love and sorcerer’s bands. Never to use your alchemy. That would be a very long life for you, I think. ~ Steve McHugh

226:If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

227:I think that every collective that you witness occurring on a stage, it's not about any one of the individuals. There's something that's happened that's kind of put all that stuff together into a much bigger result ... some alchemy. ~ Maynard James Keenan

228:Arya Maloney updates the basis and practice of transpersonal psychology by using the spiritual principles of India's masters and the transformational alchemy inherent in his clients' processes. His work is both enlightening and informative. ~ Arnold Mindell

229:Choicelessness is the alchemy of transformation, of inner mutation. A new being is born who has nothing to do with the past, who is absolutely discontinuous with the past. He has no desire. And when there is no desire, for the first time you live ~ Rajneesh

230:For I am every dead thing In whom love wrought new alchemy For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not. ~ John Donne

231:601If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

232:[Jung] began to become aware of the unbroken lineage linking and connecting the ancient Gnostics to the modern world: often hidden, sometimes persecuted, always to some degree submerged. That was the western tradition of alchemy. ~ Peter Kingsley, Catafalque

233:Historically speaking, however, the synthetic path of development—which includes the stage of the hero fight—was never followed in Christianity as it grew up under Gnostic influences, but only in alchemy, the cabala, and above all in Hasidism. ~ Erich Neumann

234:Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit. ~ Upton Sinclair

235:No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth's nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities. ~ Brooke Bolander

236:Riza: Without his Alchemy he's just... Jean: A little brat who swears a lot Maes: An arrogant pipsqueak Roy: Useless. Just useless Alphonse: Sorry big brother, I don't know how to add to that... Ed *starts to cry*: YOU'RE ALL PICKING ON ME!!! ~ Hiromu Arakawa

237:By observing dreams, visions, and hallucinations, etc., modern man can now for the first time look in an unprejudiced way at the phenomena of the unconscious. What comes from the unconscious can be observed through individuals. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy

238:I remembered when my oldest brother married Malgosia, and suddenly the two of them stopped running around with us and started sitting with the parents: a very solemn kind of alchemy, one that I felt shouldn't have been able to just sneak up on me. ~ Naomi Novik

239:In the Greek way of dealing with alchemy, which was earth, air, fire and water, these were the objective qualities. Within the objective qualities - things of earth, air, fire and water - are our subjective experiences of hot, cold, dry, and moist. ~ Fred Alan Wolf

240:Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy to sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness. ~ Pearl S Buck

241:Thanks to his complex convictions, made strong with the forces of animus and anima, the alchemist believes he is seizing the soul of the world, participating in the soul of the world. Thus, from the world to the man, alchemy is a problem of souls. ~ Gaston Bachelard

242:Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places; every one, from the commonest Liebfraumilch to imperious 1945 Veuve Clicquot, a humble miracle. Everyday magic, Joe called it. The transformation of base matter into stuff of dreams. Layman's alchemy. ~ Joanne Harris

243:Sex is a kind of alchemy. It's the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything, like that first night with Madison, it's all in my head like a beautiful dream. I remember her skin. Its texture made me believe I'd never die. ~ Darcey Steinke

244:"In 1932, Jung received a collection of alchemical treaties called the Rosarium Philosophorum, carrying illustrations from 1550. He was moved by these pictures, which led him to view #alchemy as a #projection of the alchemist's #individuation process." ~ Arlene Landau

245:One goal of alchemy, the transmutation of base substances into gold, is now known to be impossible by chemical means but possible by physical means. Although not financially worthwhile, Gold was synthesized in particle accelerators as early as 1941. ~ Wikipedia, Alchemy

246:Everybody can close their eyes, picture a dream house or a perfect place [where] they'd like to have a picnic. But actually creating it - how do you create something from nothing? Anyone who's creative understands that that's the magic, that's the alchemy. ~ Billy Corgan

247:Humankind cannot gain something without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. This is Alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only, truth. ~ Hiromu Arakawa

248:The ancient study of alchemy is concerned with making the Philosopher’s Stone, a legendary substance with astonishing powers. The Stone will transform any metal into pure gold. It also produces the Elixir of Life, which will make the drinker immortal. There ~ J K Rowling

249:Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids... mixed together with powdered stones to give color... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal. ~ James Elkins

250:Perhaps it is only the light. Perhaps it is the power of the realms at work through me. Or perhaps it is some combination of spirit and desire, love and hope, some alchemy that we each possess and can put to use, if first we know were to look without flinching. ~ Libba Bray

251:Riza: Without his Alchemy he's just... Jean: A little brat who swears a lot Maes: An arrogant pipsqueak Roy: Useless. Just useless Alphonse: Sorry big brother, I don't know how to add to that... Ed *starts to cry*: YOU'RE ALL PICKING ON ME!!! ~ Hiromu Arakawa

252:It is not the literal return to alchemy that is necessary but a restoration of the alchemical mode of imagining. For in that mode we restore matter to our speech – and that, after all, is our aim: the restoration of imaginative matter, not of literal alchemy. ~ James Hillman

253:Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science. ~ Jim Morrison, in The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision

254:I was always looking for something to link remote past with the present moment. I found to my amazement that it was alchemy...it showed me the development of our unconscious relation to the collective unconscious and the variations our consciousness has undergone. ~ Carl Jung

255:Whatever service the works of C. G. Jung may have rendered to make alchemy better known, they are inadequate in that they limit alchemy to a psychology that is devoid of a transcendent and spiritual origin for the symbols that appear to the human psyche. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

256:We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness. We trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone. Our music is our alchemy. ~ Saul Williams

257:just as instinct may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man’s cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation, or, on an individual level, the confused mind may substitute, by some terrible alchemy, cruelty for love. The ~ Loren Eiseley

258:The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands. ~ Carl Jung

259:He [Jung] discovered alchemy absolutely empirically. He once told me that he frequently came across certain motifs in his patients' dreams which he could not understand, and then one day he started to look at old books on alchemy and noticed a connection. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz

260:In one of the books he learned that the most important text in the literature of alchemy contained only a few lines, and had been inscribed on the surface of an emerald. “It’s the Emerald Tablet,” said the Englishman, proud that he might teach something to the boy. ~ Paulo Coelho

261:Jung's [work on alchemy] was grounded in analysis of the dreams of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. These thinkers explored symbolism of cosmologies in search of unifying principle. For Pauli, the fourth element to be introduced would be Eros as a connecting principle. ~ C Stephenson

262:Alchemy is unique in the Western Tradition for the way in which it brings spirit and matter together rather than separating them. It is profoundly non-dualistic in this sense, as opposed to the orthodox Christian Church, and also to alternative sects like the Gnostics. ~ Jay Ramsay

263:Alchemy is a science which teaches the way to the transformation and to that inner marriage which gives us deep insight into life & to the complexes which stand in the way of a creative relationship with the soul. No one can write about alchemy who is not living it. ~ Anne Baring

264:Mona Sandqvist writes that “alchemy has been kept alive in art, music & literature by a chain of masters: painters like Bosch, Brueghel the Elder, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte; musicians like Mozart, Scriabin, Schönberg; writers like E. T. A. Hoffman, Balzac, Yeats and Joyce ~ S Marlan

265:If the sky, by sinister alchemy, or diabolical prestidigitation, transformed into a mirror of the mother sea, the primordial cradle; and if leviathans swam that breadth and hovered, softly undulating over the teaming habitations of the globe, feasting; what should you wear? ~ Laird Barron

266:There is “mystic marriage,” the union of yin & yang, male and female, microcosm & macrocosm, that forms part of alchemy as well as Hermeticism...Here we are “reunited” with a lost or forgotten other half— in our case, our other brain [referencing McGilhcrist's work] ~ Gary Lachman

267:What the great mentor is always looking for is a person who is willing to tap his genius, to put it through the refiner's fire, to do the hard work to develop it. Indeed, mentoring is the medieval art of alchemy-turning plain old human steel into hearts and minds of gold. ~ Oliver DeMille

268:Patricia Williams has pointed out in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: “The cold game of equality staring makes me feel like a thin sheet of glass…. I could force my presence, the real me contained in those eyes, upon them, but I would be smashed in the process.” Interviewed ~ Claudia Rankine

269:Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison. ~ Eduardo Galeano

270:I could feel my body temperature - I knew I was bright red. It was so humiliating, I was so upset, and it was nothing I had planned to do. It was just one of those beautiful moments, the alchemy of acting that is so mysterious, where you sort of go, "How did that come out of me?" ~ Sarah Paulson

271:I never sit and fill a journal with lyrics. Most of the time I'm trying to write a feeling, not a story. I'm not necessarily trying to describe the details of a place or event so much as the feeling of the thing. It is a kind of weird alchemy that is elusive until it feels right. ~ Matt Berninger

272:We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness. We trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone. Our music is our alchemy. ~ Saul Williams

273:...it's just a matter of time, and the words, before you return to me, knowing, in fact, that the possibility of our ever being together will require an altogether less linear, less knowable set of possibilities, an alchemy of which I am neither the scientist nor the author. (p. 150) ~ Tahmima Anam

274:Sawyer Effect: A weird behavioral alchemy inspired by the scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom and friends whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence. This effect has two aspects. The negative: Rewards can turn play into work. The positive: Focusing on mastery can turn work into play. ~ Daniel H Pink

275:If you become more sensitive to beauty, to poetry, that means your love has blossomed. And all the energy that has been left by fear, anger and hate, will be taken over by your love, your sensitivity, your compassion, your creativity. This is the whole alchemy of changing base metals into gold. ~ Rajneesh

276:Alphonse: Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only truth. ~ Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist, (2003)

277:I've learned a thing or two from Barrons: Power is sexy. It shapes my spine, infuses my beckoning hand. I have not been devastated by Barrons' death. The alchemy of grief has forged a new metal. I have been transformed. There's only one way I can make his death okay. Undo it. ~ Karen Marie Moning

278:There will be whys—people gossiping and speculating as to what Meke-damned trial drove her to it. Whatever thoughts spurred her on, Ilven’s not going to spill them now. And any ill luck that comes to Pelimburg now will be blamed on Ilven’s dive, on the alchemy of falling girls and broken-glass sea. ~ Cat Hellisen

279:Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find. ~ Fritz Leiber, in "Poor Superman" (1951), also in the anthology Tomorrow (1952) edited by Robert Heinlein

280:Set any one to talk about himself, instead of about other people, and you will have a seam of the precious mental metal opened up to you at once; only ore, most likely, that needs much smelting and refining; or it may be, not gold at all, but a metal which your mental alchemy may turn into gold. ~ George MacDonald

281:distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

282:These days vampires gravitated toward particle accelerators, projects to decode the genome, and molecular biology. Once they had flocked to alchemy, anatomy, and electricity. If it went bang, involved blood, or promised to unlock the secrets of the universe, there was sure to be a vampire around. ~ Deborah Harkness

283:Consider the case of alchemy: it fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself for most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence. ~ Sam Harris

284:Terror came. I would fall into a slumber of days, and getting up would go on with the same sad dreams. I was ripe for death and along a road of perils my weakness led me to the confines of the world and of Cimmeria, home of whirlwinds and of darkness. - Delirium II - Alchemy of the Word ~ Arthur Rimbaud

285:A dwarf who can't get the hang of metal? That must be pretty unique." "Pretty rare, sir. But I was quite good at alchemy.." "Guild member?" "Not any more, sir." "Oh? How did you leave the guild?" "Through the roof, sir. But I'm pretty certain I know what I did wrong. ~ Terry Pratchett

286:The Alchemyst had discovered that the seats revolved and had been amusing himself by swinging back and forth. His chair squeaked with each turn.Finally Prometheus turned and glared at the immortal. "If you do that one more time, I'm going to feed you to the Lotan myself." "And I will help," Niten added. ~ Michael Scott

287:The ancient art of alchemy shows a way: Pay attention to your deep and complex interior life, become more sensitive about your relationships, consider your past thoughtfully, and use your imagination at its full power. Work from the ground up toward finding the work that will make your life worthwhile. The ~ Thomas Moore

288:The Alchemyst had discovered that the seats revolved and had been amusing himself by swinging back and forth. His chair squeaked with each turn.Finally Prometheus turned and glared at the immortal. "If you do that one more time, I'm going to feed you to the Lotan myself." "And I will help," Niten added. ~ Michael Scott

289:The discipline of joy requires holding in the mind simultaneously that this too shall pass and that this too is good. This alchemy of mind isn't easy, but the good life is not always the easy life. Happiness requires effort. It is not just bestowed; it is the earned interest on what you choose to pay in. ~ Laura Vanderkam

290:huigan—causes us to turn inward and reflect as the liquor coats our tongues, shimmers down our throats, and then rises again as fragrance. The Daoists see tea as a way to regulate internal alchemy, be in harmony with the natural world, and serve as an ingredient in the elixir of immortality. Together, these three ~ Lisa See

291:Alchemy, however, is a chaste prostitute, who has many lovers but disappoints all and grants her favors to none. She transforms the haughty into fools, the rich into paupers, the philosophers into dolts, and the deceived into loquacious deceivers…. —Trithemius, Annalmm Hirsaugensium Tomi II, S. Gallo, 1690, 141 ~ Umberto Eco

292:His need for her ran so deep that it seemed to be part of his blood, woven into his bones. He didn’t understand all the reasons for such mysterious alchemy. But did reasons really matter? One could pick apart love, examine every filament of attraction, and still it would never be fully explained. It simply was. ~ Lisa Kleypas

293:I think there is an element of magic in photography - light, chemistry, precious metals - a certain alchemy. You can wield a camera like a magic wand almost. Murmur the right words and you can conjure up proof of a dream. I believe in wonder. I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things. ~ Keith Carter

294:He turned away and I turned to him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. Ignorant of alchemy they put their faith in technology and turned the whole world into gold. The dead sand shone. ~ Jeanette Winterson

295:The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been. The public does not fully understand the world into which it is going. Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision. Those leaders who do not are ultimately judged failures, even though they may be popular at the moment. ~ Henry A Kissinger

296:When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. ~ James C Collins

297:that year I discovered the secret of every experienced cook: desserts are a cheap trick. People love them even when they’re bad. And so I began to bake, appreciating the alchemy that can turn flour, water, chocolate, and butter into devil’s food cake and make it disappear in a flash. Boys, in particular, seemed to like it. ~ Anonymous

298:It was an interminable labor, and he had always known it to be as hopeless as alchemy. The gold, the great and glowing masterpiece, would never shine amongst the dead ashes and smoking efforts of the crucible, but in the course of the life, in the interval between the failures, he might possibly discover curious things. ~ Arthur Machen

299:Marriage wasn’t a beer. It wasn’t some product that you sweat over and cooked up and then consumed. No, it was alchemy. It was taking two disparate ingredients and merging them together in just the right way at just the right time so that you got something new and wonderful and delicious out of it that lasted forever. ~ Jacqueline Sweet

300:WITH THEM, Joe Fernwright thought, there is not life but merely a synopsis of life. We are a thread that passes through their hands; always in motion, always flowing, we slip by and are never fully grasped. The slipping away is continuous, and carries all of us with it, on and on, toward the dreadful alchemy of the tomb. ~ Philip K Dick

301:You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger; Ride the lion and play with the cobra; By alchemy you may earn your livelihood; You may wander through the universe incognito; Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful; You may walk on water and live in fire: But control of the mind is better and more difficult. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

302:scores of scientists working in widely separated unrelated disciplines are crossing the threshold into the world of ancient science. We call it progress, but Merlin will have the last laugh. Science is inching into magic, and the science of the twenty-first century will probably be nothing more than a revival of alchemy. In ~ John A Keel

303:I don't doubt that at the dawn of martial arts, the main goal was to beat up one's opponents in the most effective way possible. But then, indirectly, the alchemy of martial arts began to strike some chords deep within the spirit of many individuals, transforming living war-machines into poets, artists, and philosophers. ~ Daniele Bolelli

304:I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do. ~ Linus Torvalds

305:Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish. ~ William Gibson

306:Yet how can such contraries pass into each other? By what alchemy shall this lead of mortality be turned into that gold of divine Being? But if they are not in their essence contraries? If they are manifestations of one Reality, identical in substance? Then indeed a divine transmutation becomes conceivable.    ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,

307:Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish. ~ William Gibson,

308:Some writing courses will advise you to write what you know. I've always thought this is very odd advice ... because it means, for example, that I should not be writing about Nicholas Flamel, because I didn't live in France in the 15th Century, I was not an alchemyst, am not immortal (despite the rumours) and do not know magic. ~ Michael Scott

309:On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfils itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. ~ Salvador de Madariaga

310:What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an “alternative” to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge. We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of “alternatives” to religious faith is to miss the point. ~ Sam Harris

311:I've never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that's a different matter. To invent this wizard world, I've learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy. Perhaps much of it I'll never use in the books, but I have to know in detail what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories' internal logic. ~ J K Rowling

312:[Annie] Sprinkle is a many-gendered mother of the heart. And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: Just because you have enemies doea not mean you have to be paranoid. They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy. ~ Maggie Nelson

313:In the end, alchemy, whether it is metallurgical or financial, fails. A base business can not be transformed into a golden business by tricks of accounting or capital structure. The man claiming to be a financial alchemist may become rich. But gullible investors rather than business achievements will usually be the source of his wealth. ~ Warren Buffett

314:Time is our most precious currency. So it's significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies. ~ Mohsin Hamid

315:Time is our most precious currency. So it’s significant that we are being encouraged, wherever possible, to think of our attention not as expenditure but as consumption. This blurring of labor and entertainment forms the basis, for example, of the financial alchemy that conjures deca-billion-dollar valuations for social-networking companies. ~ Mohsin Hamid

316:Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature. ~ Adam Gopnik

317:I knew all about the three branches of alchemy from Mama’s books: the aurumsmiths, who could create gold from base metal and so would never be poor; the philtersmiths, who could concoct the Elixir of Life and so would never be ill; and the vitasmiths, who could animate a homunculus, or - more terribly - a golem and so would never be alone. ~ Melinda Salisbury

318:/Farsi Where have you taken your sweet song? Come back and play me a tune. I never really cared for the things of this world. It was the glow of your presence that filled it with beauty. [2200.jpg] -- from Love's Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, Translated by David Fideler / Translated by Sabrineh Fideler ~ Hafiz, The Glow of Your Presence

319:The old alchemy, or what was just called alchemy, has a history. Most people, if they've been trained in sciences, think of alchemy as the precursor to chemistry. Back in time, people were called alchemists and they worked for kings and rich people, smelting metal and trying to change base metal into gold, because the king wanted to be richer. ~ Fred Alan Wolf

320:The point is not merely to succeed but to become a deeper, more complex, more mature person through your struggle. You allow the alchemy of your challenging journey to etch itself into your character, making you into a rich personality. Then whatever work you do will have the quality of your experience and your capacity to be ripened by it. Doing ~ Thomas Moore

321:Because real alchemists understand that the test tube is just a vehicle. Alchemy is about the process of transformation, my boy. Not of lead to gold, but of the spirit. Understanding the universe. Applying the secrets of the ancients to the follies of the present. The elixir, the philosopher’s stone: they’re not just recipes. They are life itself. ~ Layton Green

322:/Farsi Your heartrending fire made me bloom like a rose. I died at your feet and returned fast to life. My inborn freedom offered nothing in profit; but now I am free, since becoming your slave. [2200.jpg] -- from Love's Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, Translated by David Fideler / Translated by Sabrineh Fideler ~ Hakim Sanai, Bloom Like a Rose

323:Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light from them and to draw them away from it. p.104-5 ~ Albert Pike

324:Books are not just things, but dynamic artifacts, milestones showing where the road took a sudden turn on our individual journeys -- our very individual journeys, since a book that changed one person's life is another person's dreaded English assignment. There's no rhyme or reason to what impacts whom except the alchemy of timing, temperament, and title. ~ Wendy Welch

325:You may control a mad elephant; You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger; Ride the lion and play with the cobra; By alchemy you may earn your livelihood; You may wander through the universe incognito; Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful; You may walk on water and live in fire: But control of the mind is better and more difficult. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

326:Emotion is energy in motion. When you move energy, you create effect. If you move enough energy, you create matter. Matter is energy conglomerated. Moved around. Shoved together. If you manipulate energy long enough in a certain way, you get matter. Every Master understands this law. It is the alchemy of the universe. It is the secret of all life. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

327:You may control a mad elephant; You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger; Ride the lion and play with the cobra; By alchemy you may learn your livelihood; You may wander through the universe incognito; Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful; You may walk in water and live in fire; But control of the mind is better and more difficult. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

328:She blamed the lack of real flowers on both weather and the war, and instead put four or five pieces of coal in glass bowls, added water, salt, and ammonia, before finally pouring a mixture of violet and blue ink over them. It was a complete mystery to me how this alchemy would result in anything resembling flowers, but they were “blooming” within the hour. ~ Sara Gruen

329:You may control a mad elephant; You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger; Ride the lion and play with the cobra; By alchemy you may earn your livelihood; You may wander through the universe incognito; Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful; You may walk on water and live in fire: But control of the mind is better and more difficult. In ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

330:It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning , witchcraft and sacerdotalism. ~ H L Mencken

331:The more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego-your need to posses and control-and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous-lar ge souled. ~ Sam Keen

332:Above all, every relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, as the prodigies of Livy: And no less so, everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable. ~ Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book II, Aphorism 29 (1620)

333:Soul-making is a journey that takes time, effort, skill, knowledge, intuition, and courage. It is helpful to know that all work with soul is process—alchemy, pilgrimage, and adventure—so that we don’t expert instant success or even any kind of finality. All goals and all endings are heuristic, important in their being imagined, but never literally fulfilled. In ~ Thomas Moore

334:He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed. ~ Mal Peet

335:Tara Bennett-Goleman uses the metaphor of alchemy to symbolize the spiritual and emotional transformation that’s possible when we embrace our pain with caring concern. When we give ourselves compassion, the tight knot of negative self-judgment starts to dissolve, replaced by a feeling of peaceful, connected acceptance—a sparkling diamond that emerges from the coal. ~ Kristin Neff

336:It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life. ~ Rebecca West

337:There are some directors who don't like the set much. They like post-production, where you have all the ingredients in the can - you've got all the footage, all the music, the various effects - and then you have to do the alchemy necessary to make it all good, a long and very key process of putting everything together and making it into the cogent thing that you want. ~ Fred Melamed

338:But what does soulful even mean? The dictionary has it this way: “expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling.” The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. First shade: soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing, and—as it reaches a pitch—ecstatic. It is an alchemy of pain. ~ Zadie Smith

339:It’s the subtle shudder when you hear the other’s person’s name. The times when you think about their smile and find it impossible to keep a straight face. It’s those small, precious moments you wish they were with you, because nothing means anything until you share it with them. More than a passion and love alone, it’s that internal alchemy that makes them part of you. ~ Leisa Rayven

340:Until she'd known him she'd never experienced sorcery. Never known what it was like to feel passion. For the sheer blinding alchemy of that she would be forever grateful. But being with him was oddly more. It was the taste of an orange, the smell of a rose, the touch of the first spring raindrop expanded and multiplied and folded over itself. The meaning, perhaps, of joy. ~ Karen Ranney

341:Her books on alchemy were marvellous objects, every page a work of the engraver's art, but they nowhere contained instructions like "Be sure to open a window". They did have instructions like "Adde Aqua Quirmis to the Zinc untile Rising Gas Yse Vigorousky Evolved", but never added "Don't Doe Thys Atte Home" or even "And Say Fare-Thee-Welle to Thy Eyebrows. ~ Terry Pratchett

342:Because in our pain we must find each other – mirror to mirror the grace of our shared humanity, the stunningly broken beauty of our shared grief. And you can let your grief see my grief and let our tears mingle into some kind of healing alchemy, and you’ll know what i know. That we are never alone. I promise. You and me? We are never, ever alone. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

343:You may control a mad elephant; You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger; Ride the lion and play with the cobra; By alchemy you may learn your livelihood; You may wander through the universe incognito; Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful; You may walk in water and live in fire; But control of the mind is better and more difficult. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

344:ALBUS DUMBLEDORE  CURRENTLY  HEADMASTER  OF  HOGWARTS Considered by many the greatest wizard of modern times, Dumbledore is particularly famous for his defeat of the Dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for the discovery of the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, and his work on alchemy with his partner, Nicolas Flamel. Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and tenpin bowling. Harry ~ J K Rowling

345:We have seen that the process of stellar alchemy takes time – billions of years of it. And because our Universe is expanding it needs to be billions of light years in size if it is to have enough time to produce the building blocks for living complexity. A universe that was only as big as our Milky Way galaxy, with its 100 billion stars, would be little more than a month old. ~ John D Barrow

346:I saw immediately what they were: human technology that had become haunted, possessed by quick, gleaming cleverness. I had seen smart machines before then, but nothing with the agility and cunning of true intelligence. I knew instantly that these were a different order of machine. Some alchemy of chaos and complexity had given their minds powers of consciousness and free will. ~ Alastair Reynolds

347:Suppliant Grant me, dear Lord, the alchemy of toil, Clean days of labour, dreamless nights of rest, And that which shall my weariness assoil The sanctuary of one beloved breast: Laughter of children, hope and thankful tears, Knowledge to yield, with valour to defend, A faith immutable, and stedfast years That move unvexed to their mysterious end. ~ Alan Sullivan

348:The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk. They took highly novel securities, subject to an enormous amount of systemic uncertainty, and claimed the ability to quantify just how risky they were. Not only that, but of all possible conclusions, they came to the astounding one that these investments were almost risk-free. ~ Nate Silver

349:In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. ~ Eric Hoffer

350:It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher. And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty. ~ Rajneesh

351:the others, but he failed to catch anybody’s eye. He coughed, adding, “I suppose I’ve dreamed of what comes afterward—that is, what the gold might lead to, what it might become.” The man seemed pleased by this answer. “Reverse alchemy, is what I like to call it,” he said, “the whole business, I mean—prospecting. Reverse alchemy. Do you see—the transformation—not into gold, but out of it— ~ Eleanor Catton

352:Tragedy belongs to the poets. Only they have “trod the sunlit heights and from life’s dissonance struck one clear chord.” None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry, and if poetry is true knowledge and the great poets guides safe to follow, this transmutation has arresting implications. Pain changed into, ~ Edith Hamilton

353:The Secret of Enlightenment is not in Perfection but in Completeness. Everything that is below the Abyss carries the imperfection within. After the Infinite establishes Divine Order, the Life of Duality as we know it on Earth begins. It is Yin and Yang in its Manifestation, and only through the two meeting, marrying, merging, they both reach God.’ Ama Alchemy of Love by Nuit Quote ~ Nata a Nuit Pantovi

354:Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves...working forty or even fifty hours on paper but effectively working fifteen hours...since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles, or downloading TV box sets. ~ David Graeber

355:Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. ~ Duane Michals

356:the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego—your need to possess and control—and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous—large souled. —Sam Keen, philosopher ~ Marshall B Rosenberg

357:In one of the books he learned that the most important text in the literature of alchemy contained only a few lines, and had been inscribed on the surface of an emerald. "It's the Emerald Tablet," said the Englishman, proud that he might teach something to the boy. "Well, then, why do we need all these books?" the boy asked. "So that we can understand those few lines," the Englishman answered... ~ Paulo Coelho

358:By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry succeeded alchemy, probability theory displaced luck and fortune, insurance attenuated anxiety, banks replaced mattresses as the repository of people’s savings, city planning reduced the risks from fires, social hygiene and the germ theory dislodged disease, and the vagaries of life became considerably less vague. ~ Michael Shermer

359:Our task is to take suffering in stride, not as if it is a pleasure (it isn’t), but in the knowledge that God will not let it overwhelm us and that He will use it, by His own supernatural alchemy, to three good ends, at least. 1) Our suffering produces character; 2) Our suffering glorifies God; 3) Suffering fulfills the law of the harvest (John 12:24), Rediscovering Holiness by J.I. Packer, pgs. 232-239. ~ J I Packer

360:The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself. ~ Peter Ackroyd

361:The Yahuda collection gives us an intimate view of Newton's religious thinking, which was as intense and idiosyncratic as his thinking about alchemy and mathematical physics. He saw clearly that there is no firm basis in scripture for the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity. He was a Unitarian, deducing from the evidence of scripture that God the Father reigns alone. There is one God and not three. ~ Freeman Dyson

362:"This is why alchemy exists," the boy said. "So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life. Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That's what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too." ~ Paulo Coelho

363:This is why alchemy exists," the boy said. "So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life. Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That's what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too. ~ Paulo Coelho

364:I was always amazed at Cambridge how quickly people appeared to take offence at everything I said, but now I see plainly that it was not my words they hated - it was this fairy face. The dark alchemy of this face turns all my gentle human emotions into fierce fairy vices. Inside I am all despair, but this face shows only fairy scorn. My remorse becomes fairy fury and my pensiveness is turned to fairy cunning. ~ Susanna Clarke

365:They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. ~ Carl Sagan

366:What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash. ~ Aldous Huxley

367:When the sun went down, and touches of blue filtered into the fading afterglow, an orange lamp would light up in the knob of the bell and slowly begin to revolve. The beacon always pinpointed the onset of nightfall exactly. Against the most gorgeous sunsets or in dim drizzling mist, the beacon was ever true to its appointed moment: that precise instant in the alchemy of light and dark when darkness tipped the scales. ~ Haruki Murakami

368:(Aristotle, whose name is so much taken in vain by our logicians, would turn in his grave if he knew that so many Logicians know no more about Logic to-day than he did 2,000 years ago.) The author has not taken the slightest notice of the great work of the modern mathematical logicians – work which has brought about an advance in Logic comparable only to that which made Astronomy out of Astrology, and Chemistry out of Alchemy. ~ Anonymous

369:In a non-traditional culture such as ours, dominated by technology, we value information far more than we do wisdom. But there is a difference between the two. Information involves the acquisition, organization, and dissemination of facts; a storing-up of physical data. But wisdom involves another equally crucial function: the emptying and quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling. ~ Ram Dass

370:As the last of the debris fell behind her and the crash of thunder rolled away through the city, as she came to the east end of the park, the once-dark sky paled, abruptly glaucous, and cataracts of rain fell hard, fat droplets hissing through the trees and grass, snapping off the pavement, plinking the metal hoods on trash cans, carrying with them the faint bleachy odor of ozone, a form of oxygen created by lightning’s alchemy. ~ Dean Koontz

371:The Dao is no longer understood. There is an endless number of side doors and twisted byways, constituting a few basic groups. There are those who are fixated on voidness and those who are attached to forms, and those who do psychosomatic exercises. There are actually 72 schools of material alchemy, and 3600 aberrant practices. Since the blind lead the blind, they lose the right road; they block students and lead them into a pen. ~ Liu Yiming

372:All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don't need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don't need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don' t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. ~ James C Collins

373:The belief, not only of the socialist but of those so-called liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them is that by due skill an ill working humanity may be framed into well-working initiations. It is delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of laden instincts. ~ Herbert Spencer

374:Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway. ~ James J Kilpatrick

375:I've published over 100 books - and that is divided about 50/50 adult and young adult. Lately, I have been writing more YA, which is such a great genre to write it. I don't have a favourite (I usually say it's the last book I've written), but certain books do stick in the mind. My very first YA novel, The Children of Lir, will always be special to me, and, of course The Alchemyst because it was a series I'd wanted to write for ages. ~ Michael Scott

376:If the photographers are soul-thieves, whose soul is being stolen in a photograph of the night sky? The soul of the last one to go to bed and the soul of the first one to rise in the morning, perhaps? Photography is a black art like alchemy. It turns matter into spirit and spirit into matter. Still, there are moments when looking at a photograph of a night sky we have a hunch what the word soul means, what the word infinity encompasses. ~ Charles Simic

377:In the thirty years sine Yanik had tied an apron around her belly and shown Nina how to separate eggs, she had explored countless recipes, decoded the subtleties of Persian food, its ancient alchemy of sweet and sour, hot and cold, its deference to plants and herbs, soliciting Naneh Goli's palate to measure and fine-tune. What triumph to turn out a pot of rice with a golden potato tadig- that magical crust beneath the steamed rice. ~ Donia Bijan

378:The Hindus do not pay particular attention to alchemy, but no nation is entirely free from it, and one nation has more bias for it than another, which must not be construed as proving intelligence or ignorance; for we find that many intelligent people are entirely given to alchemy, whilst ignorant people ridicule the art and its adepts. ~ Alberuni, quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1

379:Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk. ~ Orson Scott Card

380:[C]ivilization needs a myth to live by ... And I think that the Christian myth, on which we have lived, has degenerated and become one-sided and insufficient. I think alchemy is the complete myth. ~ Marie-Louiose von Franz„Civilization tries to persuade us we are going towards something, a distant goal. We have forgotten that our only goal is to live, to live each and every day, and that if we live each and every day, our true goal is achieved.“Jean Giono

381:In the new alchemy, we have a similar kind of way of thinking. Our internal space includes our intuitions, our thoughts, our senses and our feelings, and from these we construct or build a picture of the outside world. From intuition and thought, we construct time. We also construct space from thought and our sensations. From our senses and our feelings, we experience energy, and from our intuitions and our feelings, we experience motion. ~ Fred Alan Wolf

382:Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as "Mother of Chemistry", and confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work. ~ Jim Morrison, in The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision

383:Fear and work weren't all bad, as companions went. They were both better than loneliness, and the deeper fears, the worse ones that I knew would come true: that I wouldn't see my mother and father for ten years, that I'd never live again in my own home, never run wild in the woods again, that whatever strange alchemy acted on the Dragon's girls would soon begin to take hold of me, and make me into someone I wouldn't recognize at the end of it. ~ Naomi Novik

384:We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup. I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it. ~ Beryl Markham

385:The Watchers spread out over all the land, claiming their peoples and unveiling secrets to the sons of men — dark occult secrets that humanity should never have known. They taught mankind the ways of sorcery and alchemy, incantations and the cutting of magical roots, casting of spells and the arts of divination, necromancy, and astrology. Elohim fast became a distant memory for mankind as they worshipped and served the creation instead of the Creator. ~ Brian Godawa

386:Perhaps, if you were in a laboratory of alchemy, this would be the right time to study the best way to understand the Emerald Tablet. But you are in the desert. So immerse yourself in it. The desert will give you an understanding of the world; in fact, anything on the face of the earth will do that. You don't even have to understand the desert: all you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation. ~ Paulo Coelho

387:Turn from that road's beguiling ease; return to your hunger's turret. Enter, climb the stair chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent and the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone to show you how your longing waits alone. What alchemy shines from under that shut door, spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart? ("The Sea's Wash In The Hollow Of The Heart") ~ Denise Levertov

388:Writing is alchemy. Dross becomes gold. Experience is transformed. Pain is changed. Suffering may become song. The ordinary or horrible is pushed by the will of the writer into grace or redemption, a prophetic wail, a screed for justice, an elegy of sadness or sorrow. ... There is always a tension between experience and the thing that finally carries it forward, bears its weight, holds it in. Without that tension, one might as well write a shopping list. ~ Andrea Dworkin

389:So the crew fly on with no thought that they are in motion. Like night over the sea, they are very far from the earth, from towns, from trees. The clock ticks on. The dials, the radio lamps, the various hands and needles go though their invisible alchemy. . . . and when the hour is at hand the pilot may glue his forehead to the window with perfect assurance. Out of oblivion the gold has been smelted: there it gleams in the lights of the airport. ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery

390:Alchemy and Kabbalah are later developments in my thinking. I think the primary interest has been the relationship of magic and mystery to logic and understanding. Those are the primary driving forces of my life. I have this ability, for some reason, to be able to hold both the Magical MysteryTour we're on in conjunction with the logical rigor of understanding theoretical physics, which makes me kind of a rare bird, because usually you're one or the other. ~ Fred Alan Wolf

391:Mid-summer ... when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. ~ H P Lovecraft

392:She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it—infants, angels, priests, the dead; why—should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?' She thought: 'He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special; in a room that giving back evidence of his occupancy, is as mauled as the last agony. ~ Djuna Barnes

393:Roses surrounded the raven, thorns wrapping around its talons. Runes and archaic symbols stretched along my forearms: Romanian, Sumerian, Gaelic. An amalgamation of all those who had come before me. Marks of alchemy, of fire and water, of silver and wind. They had been carved into me by my father over a period of years, the raven being the last. All except for the one on my chest above my heart. That’d been mine. My choice. It wasn’t magic, but it’d been for me. ~ T J Klune

394:A Culture of Discipline. All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology ~ James C Collins

395:It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. ~ H P Lovecraft

396:Opinions differ on the details, but most serious students today recognize that alchemy was, and is, a spiritual pursuit, and that whether or not an actual outer physical transformation takes place during its operations, if these are carried out correctly, an inner spiritual one does. “Aurum nostrum es non vulgi” (“Our gold is not the vulgar gold”), Gerhard Dorn, one of Jung’s favorite alchemists, said. The “gold” the true alchemists sought was inner transformation. ~ Gary Lachman

397:I do not want to study alchemy, Lord Carlston," she hissed. "It is heretical nonsense. Nor do I want to fight. All you have shown me is a world of danger and threat, and yet you expect to step into it without even asking me if I wish to do so.".........."I am no warrior, sir, nor do I aspire to be. I have been taught to sew and sing and dance, and my duty is to marry, not fight demons. Look at me: I am an Earl's daughter, not a man versed in swords and fisticuffs. ~ Alison Goodman

398:As a consequence of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the questions once asked by philosophy have now passed into the realms of poetry. The way poetry is going, it looks as if they won’t be asked much longer here either. We have learned to do without God, and it looks as if we will learn to do without philosophy. It will now, alas, join the ranks of subjects which are completed (and have become completely spurious), such as alchemy, astrology, platonic love, and stylitism. ~ Paul Strathern

399:Life is a complex cycle, so vast that we can’t see it with our own eyes. Maybe it’s “The World,” maybe it’s “The Universe”…But whatever it’s called, you and I are only a tiny part of that great flow. One part of the whole. But all those individual parts come together so that the whole can exist. And the cycle keeps on flowing because all of nature follows this fundamental law. Understanding that flow. Deconstructing and then reconstructing…That’s the meaning of Alchemy. ~ Hiromu Arakawa

400:Just in same way medicine as a magical or sacred art was prior to alchemy; for... before thinking of forming new substances, men employed already existing herbs, stones, drugs, perfumes, and vapours. The medical art was indissolubly bound up with astrology, but, judging from the natural inventiveness of the ancients, we should have expected... that chemical preparations would have played a more important part among the instruments of priestly thaumaturgy. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875)

401:The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence. ~ Salman Rushdie

402:Vonnegut had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable. ~ Steve Almond

403:There was an old belief that in the embers Of all things their primordial form exists, And cunning alchemists Could re-create the rose with all its members From its own ashes, but without the bloom, Without the lost perfume Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science Can from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore? What craft of alchemy can bid defiance To time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower? ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

404:It was always with her now, that sadness, like one of those rare orchids you saw clinging to jungle branches on TV, always blooming in her at unexpected moments, and even on the move, scuffing down the hall toward Doodle's room, the thought of evading it called it into being. Sadness. The word itself didn't do the feeling justice. What she felt was a more complicated alchemy of emotion, equal parts grief and loneliness and longing, with measures of resentment and self-pity drizzled in. ~ Michael Knight

405:And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. ~ Anonymous

406:We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man's experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose. ~ Alberto Manguel

407:The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk. They took highly novel securities, subject to an enormous amount of systematic uncertainty, and claimed the ability to quantify just how risky they were. Not only that, but of all possible conclusions, they came to the astounding one that these investments were almost risk-free. Too many investors mistook these confident conclusions for accurate ones, and too few made backup plans in case things went wrong. ~ Nate Silver

408:If people ever look down upon you for crying for fictional characters, you should give them a gentle, pitying look and feel bad for them. If they've never cried for a fictional character, then they've never loved one (and what a joy that is). If they've never cried at a book, a movie, a piece of music, then they've missed one of the great pleasures life has to offer. Just because fiction does not contain things that are real doesn't mean it doesn't contain truth, and we find it through the alchemy of our tears. ~ Cassandra Clare

409:Alchemy was... the sickly but imaginative infancy through which modern chemistry had to pass before it attained its majority [i.e.,] became a positive science. The search for gold was only one crisis in this infancy. This crisis is over, and alchemy is now a thing of the past. There is no longer any need to exhort adventurous spirits, who hope to find Golconda at the bottom of their crucibles, to leave such visions and turn to the safer paths of science or industry. The battle has been fought and won... ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875)

410:Every singer has three or four or five techniques, and you can force them together in different combinations. Some of the techniques you discard along the way, and pick up others. But you do need them. It's just like anything. You have to know certain things about what you're doing that other people don't know. Singing has to do with techniques and how many you use at the same time. One alone doesn't work. There's no point to going over three. But you might interchange them whenever you feel like it. It's a bit like alchemy. ~ Bob Dylan

411:We find that alchemy has to do with magicians or magic and may even have roots in the Chaldean people who lived in the land that we now call Iraq.Abraham emerged and took a flock of people with him into Egypt. They were later called the Hebrews because of the valleys that they came out of. The alchemy that they saw was a transformative power within the individuals to affect the "out there" reality - and that, of course, is the basis of shamanism and is the basis for most magical and so-called Third World belief systems. ~ Fred Alan Wolf

412:Our difficulties require our most compassionate attention. Just as lead can be transformed into gold in alchemy, when we place our leaden difficulties, whether of body, heart, or mind, into the center of our practice, they can become lightened for us, illuminated. This task is usually not what we want, but what we have to do. No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way. The ~ Jack Kornfield

413:The experience of the ages that are past, the hopes of the ages that are yet to come, unite their voices in an appeal to us;– they implore us to think more of the character of our people than of its numbers; to look upon our vast natural resources, not as tempters to ostentation and pride, but as means to be converted by the refining alchemy of education into mental and spiritual treasures; ...and thus give to the world the example of a nation whose wisdom increases with its prosperity, and whose virtues are equal to its power. ~ Horace Mann

414:Are his parents taking him to Coney Island because of the cartoon? she muses. Did the innocent little sugar-sucker beg and plead to go because that’s where the finale dumps its sad, angry but good-at-heart heroine when things are at their darkest? Deeply fucked up, but also deeply probable. No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth’s nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities. ~ Brooke Bolander

415:I did speak out about celebrities because I thought it was appalling. I thought that if the cartoon became popular, it was only going to last as long as the career of the people who are in it. They didn't make up timeless voices. They used their own. They brought nothing to the table, in other words. There was no alchemy. That's why a cartoon was so alluring, was that a human being went into a place and created this supernatural sound, or whatever sound it was supposed to be that was totally unlike their own, and did it in multiples. ~ Billy West

416:He still loved her, loved her more for her wrinkles because they could not defeat his need for her. Or his love. His young lust had turned to love and then his love had aged back into lust. It was a circle. It was a miracle. It was the alchemy of flesh. They ate only what they caught from the sea - wahoo, barracuda, and mahi mahi, and they ate what they picked from the trees - papaya, banana, and coconut. Don't forget cerveza from the bodega. They did not run, they walked. They needed nothing but themselves. This was them: They were. ~ David Duchovny

417:One of the big misconceptions is that affairs or trysts are flings about sex. And sometimes they are, but much more often they are about desire. And that is very different. The desire to feel special, to feel seen, to feel appreciated, to be laughed at or with. The desire to be desired. That does not manifest in a sexual act per se. Affairs make you feel alive. Alchemy means it's not about the actual sex, but the sexuality, the energy, the aura. It's the imagination and anticipation of it as much or instead of the actual experience of it. ~ Esther Perel

418:There were other delights as well. Sorcerers lined the streets with potions and rituals, enabling the citizens to be possessed by a god, a great honor to plebeians who might otherwise never find themselves in the physical presence of deity. Of course, there were exorcists as well for those stubborn “deities” who would not find themselves ready to leave so soon after a possession. Astrological readings, magical potions of fertility and abortion, alchemy, spells, and enchantments—everything an idolater could desire in this panoply of paganism. ~ Brian Godawa

419:The first question I can answer, but the second is difficult indeed, for endurance of inescapable sorrow is something which has to be learned alone. And only to endure is not enough. Endurance can be a harsh and bitter root in one’s life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying other lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance and the knowledge that sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness. ~ Pearl S Buck

420:Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice. ~ Karen Armstrong

421:The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for. ~ John Fowles

422:Is attention soul? If I pay attention to my mother’s sorrow, does that give it soul? If I pay attention to her unhappiness—if I put it into words, transform it, and make it into something new—can I be like the alchemists, turning lead into gold? If I sell this book, I will get back gold in return. That’s a kind of alchemy. The philosophers wanted to turn dark matter into gold, and I want to turn my mother’s sadness into gold. When the gold comes in, I will go to my mother’s doorstep, and I will hand it to her and say: Here is your sadness, turned into gold. ~ Sheila Heti

423:I needed to pay attention, to be ready to step through and descend into it, whatever it was. It felt archetypal. Something in me was being slain in the fires of pain so that some new thing could be born. I knew it and went with it, and in the alchemy of my pain, like flowers whose seeds open only in the presence of fire, tendrils of something new began to sprout. Pain for me was a Trojan horse, penetrating the protective walls I’d erected around my heart, bearing within it hints of a future I might never have awakened to had I tried to numb myself with busyness. ~ Jane Fonda

424:Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar. To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like. ~ Anonymous

425:To merely gaze upon the images of alchemy, is to in a sense, enter into a kind of psychoanalytical process because what alchemy was, and I should stress this or the rap makes no sense at all alchemy was not the vulgar pursuit of the transmutation of lesser metals into gold or silver. That was the charlatan's game played in every market in Europe for centuries among the simple people. Alchemy is the body of symbols and of literature that accreted around the effort to extract a universal medicine out of Nature for the transformation of societies and human beings. ~ Terence McKenna,

426:We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself. ~ Stefan Zweig

427:Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars. ~ Paracelsus

428:After the alarm clock, it is the turn of Mr Kellogg to shame us into action. 'Rise and Shine!' he exhorts us from the Corn Flakes packet. The physical act of crunching cornflakes or other cereals is portraied in TV advertising as working an amazing alchemy on slothful human beings: the incoherent, unshaven sluggard (bad) is magically transformed into a smart and jolly worker full of vigour and purpose (good) by the positive power of cereal. Kellogg himself, tellingly, was a puritanical health-nut who never had sex (he preferred enemas). Such are the architects of our daily life. ~ Tom Hodgkinson

429:We're both of the invented Caribbean, Nesto says, a Nuevo Mundo alchemy of distilled African, Spaniard, Indian, Asian, and Arab blood, each of us in varying mixtures. He likes to compare our complexions, putting his arm next to mine, calls me 'canelita, ni muy tostada ni muy blanquita' showing off his darkness, proof, his mother told him, of his noble Yoruba parentage and brave cimarron ancestors, la raza prieta of which he should be proud no matter how much others have resisted mestizaje, hanging onto the milky whiteness of their lineage like it's their most precious commodity. ~ Patricia Engel

430:The first authentic record on this subject (alchemy) is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries. ~ William Godwin, quoted by**H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. I, (1877) (p. 504)

431:With his divine alchemy he turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries, yea, every meal into a eucharist, and the jaws of the sepulchre into an outgoing gate. I do not mean that he makes any change in the things or ways of God, but a mighty change in the hearts and eyes of men, so that God's facts and God's meanings become their faiths and their hopes. The destroying spirit, who works in the commonplace, is ever covering the deep and clouding the high. For those who listen to that spirit great things cannot be. Such are there, but they cannot see them, ~ George MacDonald

432:But as St. Simon has well observed, chemical phenomena are much more complicated than astronomical—the latter requiring only observation, the former experiment—and hence astrology preceded alchemy. But there was then no hard and fast line between the several branches of science, and hence the most opposite were united, not, as now, by a common philosophical or philanthropical object, but by reason of their common theological origin. Thus alchemy was the daughter of astrology, and it was not till the end of the 16th century A.D. that she passed from a state of tutelage. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875)

433:I would have sooner believed in fairy tales coming true. Of course, we all believe in fairy tales now. The Scarlet Varulv has slunk out of the pages and lives with me in this cottage. The Sleeping Prince has woken and sacked Lormere, an army of alchemy-made golems behind him as he murders his way across the country. Stories are no longer stories; characters run rampant through the world these days. All I’m waiting for is Mully-No-Hands to knock on the window, begging to come in and warm himself, and my life will be complete. Actually, no, that’s not what I’m waiting for. ~ Melinda Salisbury

434:To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the guilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or climbing into their favelas, were all natural scene designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theater is as vivid, voluble, and cheap. ~ Derek Walcott

435:... throughout his long life Newton continued to experiment in alchemy; indeed, he was, as Gleick writes, "the peerless alchemist of Europe". These studies in the dark art were conducted in deepest secrecy, and did not come to light until centuries after his death, when a large portion of his papers were reassembled. The economist John Maynard Keynes, the saviour of much of this documentation, was astonished by what he read. "Newton," Keynes told his students at Trinity, "was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians." ~ John Banville, (29 August 2003)"Review of Isaac Newton by James Gleick". The Guardian.

436:Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those good things, withdraw from them the applause of the populace and discourage the spread of them, make them once more the concealed chastities of solitary souls, and say: morality is something forbidden! Perhaps you will thus attract to your cause the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the heroic. But then there must be something formidable in it, and not as hitherto something disgusting! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

437:one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosques, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guaranty Trust Company and the Ile de la Cité, of Foyot’s old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy. ~ Ernest Hemingway

438:But truly, the Autumn Provinces provide the most ideal situation for our program. Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter—which is the door of death—but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile. If you wrote a letter of requisition, you could ask for no better place to practice alchemy. ~ Catherynne M Valente

439:Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward. It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity ~ Jim Thompson

440:In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. Nature has no compassion. It is, in the words of William Blake, "a creation that groans, living on the death; where fish and bird and beast and tree and metal and stone live by devouring." Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death. ~ Eric Hoffer

441:We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality. We sleep in a long reproachful dust against ourselves. We are full to the gorge with our own names for misery. Life, the pastures in which the night feeds and prunes the cud that nourishes us to despair. Life, the permission to know death. We were created that the earth might be made sensible of her inhuman taste; and love that the body might be so dear that even the earth should roar with it. Yes, we who are full to the gorge with misery should look well around, doubting everything seen, done, spoken, precisely because we have a word for it, and not its alchemy. ~ Djuna Barnes

442:She pushed the book toward them, and Harry and Ron read: The ancient study of alchemy is concerned with making the Sorcerer’s Stone, a legendary substance with astonishing powers. The Stone will transform any metal into pure gold. It also produces the Elixir of Life, which will make the drinker immortal. There have been many reports of the Sorcerer’s Stone over the centuries, but the only Stone currently in existence belongs to Mr. Nicolas Flamel, the noted alchemist and opera lover. Mr. Flamel, who celebrated his six hundred and sixty-fifth birthday last year, enjoys a quiet life in Devon with his wife, Perenelle (six hundred and fifty-eight). ~ J K Rowling

443:Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. ~ liphas L vi

444:The seventh lesson is about alchemy. By any measure, alchemy is magical. You can’t turn lead into gold by heating it, beating it, molding it into different shapes, or combining it with any known substance. Those are simply physical changes. Likewise, you will never cause an inner transformation by taking your old self and hammering it with criticism, heating it up with exciting experiences, reshaping how you look physically, or connecting with new people. How, then, does the magic work? It works according to the principles that make up the universe’s operating system. When you consciously align with them, you give yourself an opening for transformation. ~ Deepak Chopra

445:Most changes in perception are gradual: we grow to hate or love an idea, a person, or a place over a period of time. I had certainly nursed a hatred of Nora Jansen over many years, placing much of the blame for my situation on her. This was not one of those instances. Sometimes, rarely, the way we see something is subject to alchemy. My emotions changed so rapidly, and I felt so strongly all the things I had in common with these two women, there was no way not to take immediate notice and stock of what was happening. Our troubled history was suddenly matched by our more immediate shared experience as prisoners on an exhausting journey. We huddled together ~ Piper Kerman

446:One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: “There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!” Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play, ~ Stephan A Hoeller

447:Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

448:Credulity in arts and opinions... is likewise of two kinds viz., when men give too much belief to arts themselves, or to certain authors in any art. The sciences that sway the imagination more than the reason are principally three viz., astrology, natural magic, and alchemy... Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons that he had left them gold, buried somewhere in his vineyard; while they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould about the roots of the vines procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavours to make gold have brought many useful inventions to light. ~ Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) as quoted by Edward Thorpe, History of Chemistry, Vol. 1, p. 43.

449:And yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman whereof Aesop makes the fable, that when he died he told his sons that he had left unto them gold buried under the ground in his vineyard: and they digged over the ground, gold they found none, but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year following: so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man's life. ~ Francis Bacon

450:Mystical Alchemy is a personal science, a sublime and effective system of Self-Initiation. Only you, as a single individual, can calculate and follow your way up the Great Mountain of Hermetic Attainment. It is entirely a matter of your own practical application and devotion. All essential guidance is within you, in the inmost center of your heart where your own Holy Guardian Angel, or Inner Self, resides. To depend upon any other thing than your own Holy Guardian Angel to accomplish the Great Work is to insult your Angel who is with you to instruct and guide you. All essential wisdom by which to achieve the Great Work is to be ascertained only within you; nowhere else will you find the Truth. ~ David Cherubim

451:The glow flares bright—bright as the billion-year-old light around us. Bright as a sun. Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star. First, hydrogen condensing and collapsing, bringing radiance to the void. Furnaces burning bright, then fading, giving all they had left back into the cosmos. Carbon and oxygen. Iron and gold. Vast clouds swirling with their own gravity. Coalescing and disintegrating. Generation to generation. The remnants of stellar alchemy, stirring into life, then consciousness. Crawling from the oceans. Taking to the skies. And from there, back to the stars that birthed them. A perfect circle. ~ Amie Kaufman

452:It is absurd to think that the scientific views of a Muslim scientist are necessarily connected with his religious belief, or that he necessarily derives inspiration for his scientific work from faith. This was as true a thousand years ago as it is now. Alchemy provides an excellent example. Developed extensively by Jabir Ibn Hayyan and AI-Razi, and based on certain myths going back to Arius and Pythagoras, it was one of the most important Muslim contributions. Of course, today everyone knows that alchemy was scientific nonsense: there cannot be anything like the Philosopher's Stone, and the transformation of base metals like copper or tin into silver or gold by chemical means is an impossibility ~ Pervez Hoodbhoy

453:A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, Someday I shall tell of your mysterious births: A, black velvety corset of dazzling flies Buzzing around cruel smells, Gulfs of shadow; E, white innocence of vapors and of tents, Spears of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of Queen Anne's lace; I, purples, spitting blood, smile of beautiful lips In anger or in drunken penitence; U, waves, divine shudderings of green seas, The calm of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of furrows Which alchemy prints on wide, studious foreheads; O, sublime Bugle full of strange piercing sound, Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels; - O the Omega, the violet ray of her Eyes! ~ Arthur Rimbaud

454:Solomon resumes talking to the envoys of Sheba: "Go back and tell her what you have seen, how the rare substance she thinks we value can be scraped up anywhere as soil. Tell her the elaborate throne she loves looks more like a bandage over a hurt place. We admire Ibrahim, who left his kingdom so quickly. With us, one genuine kneeling down in total humility would buy hundreds of governments. Our currency is an eagerness to accept the gift of soul change. Nothing else. Sheba's sumptuous life is just a hole in the ground with children playing in it, pretending to be kings and prime ministers. We perform reverse alchemy, transmuting gold mines into abandoned sites! ~ Rumi

455:A, Black, E, white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, Someday I shall tell of your mysterious births: A, black velvety corset of dazzling flies Buzzing around cruel smells, Gulfs of shadow; E, white innocence of vapors and of tents, Spears of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of Queen Anne's lace; I, purples, spitting blood, smile of beautiful lips In anger or in drunkin penitence; U, waves, divine shudderings of green seas, The calm of pastures dotted with animals, the pece of furrows Which alchemy prints on wide, studious foreheads; O, sublime Bugle full of strange piercing so und, Silences crossed by Worlds nad by Angels: - O the Omega, the violet ray of her Eyes! ~ Arthur Rimbaud

456:Now if Newton had been a very plain, very dull, very matter-of-fact man, all that would be easily explicable. But I must make you see that he was not. He was really a most extraordinary, wild character. He practised alchemy. In secret, he wrote immense tomes about the Book of Revelation. He was convinced that the law of inverse squares was really already to be found in Pythagoras. And for such a man, who in private was full of these wild metaphysical and mystical speculations, to hold this public face and say, ‘I make no hypotheses’ – that is an extraordinary expression of his secret character. William Wordsworth in The Prelude has a vivid phrase, Newton, with his prism and silent face, which sees and says it exactly. Well, ~ Jacob Bronowski

457:Modern science dates from three discoveries—that of Copernicus, the effect of which... was to expel the astrologers from the society of astronomers; that of Torricelli and Pascal, of the weight of the atmosphere... which was the foundation of physics; lastly... Lavoisier... by discovering oxygen, destroyed the theory of Stahl, the last alchemist who can be excused for not being a chemist. Before these three grand stages in the progress of science, the reign of astrology, magic, and alchemy was universal and almost uncontested. Even a genius like Kepler, who by his three great laws laid the foundations for the Copernican system, was guided in his investigations by astrological and cabalistic considerations. ~ Encyclopedia Brittanica (1875)

458:Chemistry is not a primitive science, like geometry or astronomy; it is constructed from the debris of a previous scientific formation; a formation half chimerical and half positive, itself founded on the treasure slowly amassed by the practical discoveries of metallurgy, medicine, industry, and domestic economy. It has to do with alchemy, which pretended to enrich its adepts by teaching them to manufacture gold and silver, to shield them from diseases by the preparation of the panacea, and finally to obtain for them perfect felicity by identifying them with the soul of the world and the universal spirit. ~ Marcellin Berthelot Les Origines de l'Alkimie (1885) as quoted by M. M. Pattison Muir, A History of Chemical Theories and Laws (1907) Ch.1, p. 2.

459:Certain Rosicrucian scholars have given special appellations to these three phases of the sun: the spiritual sun they called Vulcan; the soular and intellectual sun, Christ and Lucifer respectively; and the material sun, the Jewish Demiurgus Jehovah. Lucifer here represents the intellectual mind without the illumination of the spiritual mind; therefore it is "the false light. " The false light is finally overcome and redeemed by the true light of the soul, called the Second Logos or Christ. The secret processes by which the Luciferian intellect is transmuted into the Christly intellect constitute one of the great secrets of alchemy, and are symbolized by the process of transmuting base metals into gold. ~ Manly P Hall, The Secret Teachings of all Ages

460:The thing is, you're beautiful. Yes, you… In your wild, mundane glory. Your daily life hides from you the possibilities of why you’re here And who you are. But never forget that every breath you take is actual alchemy. With your eyes you record visions of this place. With your fingertips you read the bumps in life, Sending messages back from whence you came. You’re a soul traveler, An explorer. You make this place home for now; Trying on the costumes, Playing out your roles. Every so often, take off your masks. Drop your robes. See yourself reflected in the very mirror of your life. And remember… When you leave this stage, The only thing you will wonder is, “Did I love brilliantly? ~ Jacob Nordby

461:The Poetry Of A Root Crop Underneath their eider-robe Russet swede and golden globe, Feathered carrot, burrowing deep, Steadfast wait in charmed sleep; Treasure-houses wherein lie, Locked by angels' alchemy, Milk and hair, and blood, and bone, Children of the barren stone; Children of the flaming Air, With his blue eye keen and bare, Spirit-peopled smiling down On frozen field and toiling townToiling town that will not heed God His voice for rage and greed; Frozen fields that surpliced lie, Gazing patient at the sky; Like some marble carven nun, With folded hands when work is done, Who mute upon her tomb doth pray, Till the resurrection day. Eversley, 1845. ~ Charles Kingsley

462:THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE You come to us from another world From beyond the stars and void of space. Transcendent, Pure, Of unimaginable beauty, Bringing with you the essence of love You transform all who are touched by you. Mundane concerns, troubles, and sorrows dissolve in your presence, Bringing joy to ruler and ruled To peasant and king You bewilder us with your grace. All evils transform into goodness. You are the master alchemist. You light the fire of love in earth and sky in heart and soul of every being. Through your love existence and nonexistence merge. All opposites unite. All that is profane becomes sacred again. ~ Rumi

463:Butter. Butter Butter, like love, seems common enough yet has so many imitators. I held a brick of it, heavy and cool, and glimpsed what seemed like skin beneath a corner of its wrap; the decolletage revealed a most attractive fat! And most refined. Not milk, not cream, not even creme de la creme. It was a delicacy which assured me that bliss follows agitation, that even pasture daisies through the alchemy of four stomachs may grace a king's table. We have a yellow bowl near the toaster where summer's butter grows soft and sentimental. We love it better for its weeping, its nostalgia for buckets and churns and deep stone wells, for the press of a wooden butter mold shaped like a swollen heart. ~ Connie Wanek

464:There is a kind of alchemy in the transformation of base chocolate into this wise fool's-gold, a layman's magic that even my mother might have relished. As I work, I clear my mind, breathing deeply. The windows are open, and the through-draft would be cold if it were not for the heat of the stoves, the copper pans, the rising vapor from the melting couverture. The mingled scents of chocolate, vanilla, heated copper, and cinnamon are intoxicating, powerfully suggestive; the raw and earthy tang of the Americas, the hot and resinous perfume of the rain forest. This is how I travel now, as the Aztecs did in their sacred rituals: Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia. The court of Montezuma. Cortez and Columbus. The Food of the Gods, bubbling and frothing in ceremonial goblets. The bitter elixir of life. ~ Joanne Harris

465:In 1701, a braggadocian teenager named Johann Friedrich Böttger, ecstatic at the crowd he’d rallied with a few white lies, pulled out two silver coins for a magic show. After he waved his hands and performed chemical voodoo on them, the silver pieces “disappeared,” and a single gold piece materialized in their place. It was the most convincing display of alchemy the locals had ever seen. Böttger thought his reputation was set, and unfortunately it was. Rumors about Böttger inevitably reached the king of Poland, Augustus the Strong, who arrested the young alchemist and locked him, Rumpelstiltskin-like, in a castle to spin gold for the king’s realm. Obviously, Böttger couldn’t deliver on this demand, and after a few futile experiments, this harmless liar, still quite young, found himself a candidate for hanging. ~ Sam Kean

466:The Sea's Wash In The Hollow Of The Heart... Turn from that road's beguiling ease; return to your hunger's turret. Enter, climb the stair chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent and the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone to show you how your longing waits alone. What alchemy shines from under that shut door, spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart? Enter the turret of your love, and lie close in the arms of the sea; let in new suns that beat and echo in the mind like sounds risen from sunken cities lost to fear; let in the light that answers your desire awakening at midnight with the fire, until its magic burns the wavering sea and flames carress the windows of your tower. ~ Denise Levertov

467:She pinned him to the bulkhead with a kiss that was pure alchemy, and his hands found their way down her tunic, down to her breeches, where he unhitched her weapons belt with as much gratuitous fondling of the areas not covered by it as he could manage. She took the belt from his hands and flung it against one of the stiffened canvas walls, where it struck with a clattering racket and slid to the floor. "If there is no way, make a way, Jean Tannen. Losers don't fuck in this particular cabin." He picked her up, making a seat for her from his crossed arms, and whirled her around so that her back was against the bulkhead and her feet were dangling. He kissed her breasts through her tunic, grinning at her reaction. He stopped to put his head against her chest; felt the rapid flutter of her heart against his left cheek. ~ Scott Lynch

468:I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don’t live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten. ~ Marie Howe

469:But the ability to hold the means of exchange (in defiance of Say’s law) also awakens a passion, a “lust for gold.” “The hoarding drive,” he says, “is boundless in its nature.” Witness Christopher Columbus: “Gold is a wonderful thing! Its owner is master of all he desires. Gold can even enable souls to enter Paradise” (229–30). Here Marx, quoting Columbus, returns to the idea that once you can hang a price tag on something, you can hang it on anything—even a person’s soul, as his allusion to the Catholic Church’s infamous medieval practice of selling indulgences (i.e., papal pardons that promised entry into heaven) suggests: Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it. (229) ~ David Harvey

470:Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness, and all other things shall be added unto you." The alchemist, therefore is assured that if he achieved the inner mystery, the fulfillment of the outer part will be inevitable. But practically every charlatan in alchemy has determined primarily to achieve the physical purpose first. His primary interest has been to make gold, or perhaps one of the other aspects of it, such as a medicine against illness. He has wanted the physical effect first but because the physical effect was not intended to be first, when he starts to study and explore the various texts, he comes upon a dilemma, HIS OWN INTERNAL RESOURCES CANNOT DISCOVER THE CORRECT INSTRUCTIONS. The words may be there but the meaning eludes him because the meaning is not part of his own present spiritual integrity. ~ Manly P Hall,

471:A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other's individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension -- seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence. This means recognizing that we both have an important part to play in helping each other become more fully who we are....A soul connection not only inspires us to expand, but also forces us to confront whatever stands in the way of that expansion. ~ John Welwood

472:Mine is the best theology, the theology of utter hostility to all beings whose sufferings may mitigate mine. In this flattering theory, your crimes become my virtues,–I need not any of my own. Guilty as I am of the crime that outrages nature, your crimes (the crimes of those who offend against the church) are of a much more heinous order. But your guilt is my exculpation, your sufferings are my triumph. I need not repent, I need not believe; if you suffer, I am saved,–that is enough for me. How glorious and easy it is to erect at once the trophy of our salvation, on the trampled and buried hopes of another's! How subtle and sublime that alchemy, that can convert the iron of another's contumacy and impenitence into the precious gold of your own redemption! I have literally worked out my salvation by your fear and trembling. ~ Charles Robert Maturin

473:Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only, truth. But the world isn't perfect, and the law is incomplete. Equivalent Exchange doesn't encompass everything that goes on here, but I still choose to believe in its principle, that all things do come at a price, that there's an ebb and a flow, a cycle, that the pain we went through did have a reward, and that anyone who's determined and perseveres will get something of value in return, even if it's not what they expected. I don't think of Equivalent Exchange as a law of the world anymore. I think of it as a promise, between my brother and me. A promise that, someday, we'll see each other again. ~ Hiromu Arakawa

474:Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before. It was from the spirit of alchemy that Goethe wrought the figure of the "superman" Faust, and this superman led Nietzsche's Zarathustra to declare that God was dead and to proclaim the will to give birth to the superman, to "create a god for yourself out of your seven devils." Here we find the true roots, the preparatory processes deep in the psyche, which unleashed the forces at work in the world today. Science and technology have indeed conquered the world, but whether the psyche has gained anything is another matter. ~ Carl Jung, "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon" (1942), CW 13, § 163.,

475:See Cook [op.cit.] for a discussion of Huygens’s unusual wartime visit to Cambridge and the Royal Society. His philosophical contretemps with Isaac Newton in 1675 (referenced in Society minutes as “The Great Corpuscular Debate”) would mark the last significant intellectual discourse between England and the continent prior to the chaos of the Interregnum and the Annexation . . . Some Newton biographers [Winchester (1867), &c] indicate Huygens may have used his sojourn in Cambridge to access Newton’s alchemical journals and that key insights derived thusly may have been instrumental to Huygens’s monumental breakthrough. However, cf. Hooft [1909] and references therein for a critique of the forensic alchemy underlying this assertion. From Freeman, Thomas S., A History of the Pre-Annexation England from Hastings to the Glorious Revolution, 3 Vols. New Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1918. ~ Ian Tregillis

476:With such theories, economists developed a very elaborate toolkit for analyzing markets, measuring the "variance" and "betas" of different securities and classifying investment portfolios by their probability of risk. According to the theory, a fund manager can build an "efficient" portfolio to target a specific return, with a desired level of risk. It is the financial equivalent of alchemy. Want to earn more without risking too much more? Use the modern finance toolkit to alter the mix of volatile and stable stocks, or to change the ratio of stocks, bonds, and cash. Want to reward employees more without paying more? Use the toolkit to devise an employee stock-option program, with a tunable probability that the option grants will be "in the money." Indeed, the Internet bubble, fueled in part by lavish executive stock options, may not have happened without Bachelier and his heirs. ~ Beno t B Mandelbrot

477:What did you get her for the wedding gift?” “Dude, I bought her a fucking Steinway.” “Are you kidding me?” “No, I had to. She saw it in a store and played it in the showroom. The entire staff gathered around to watch her. She kept her eyes closed and wept while she played “Isolde’s Love Death” from Tristan and Isolde. She played the whole fucking thing without any sheet music. The crowd clapped and whistled. I offered to buy it on the spot; I said we could write it off, but she said absolutely not. She wouldn’t let me.” “How much was it?” “A lot.” “Dude, tell me, how much?” “A hundred.” “A hundred what?” Tyler said in disbelief. “A hundred fucking shillings. A hundred thousand dollars, you moron.” “You bought her a hundred-thousand-dollar piano?” “Well, technically, Alchemy Sound Studios bought it for her, but yeah ~ Renee Carlino

478:In my book (and this is my book!) magical thinking is the alchemy that you can use to visualize and project yourself into the professional and personal life that you want. I’m not talking about stuff like ”the secret self-help book, which basically tells you to tape a picture of a car to the wall and then sit on the couch and wait for someone to drop it off in your driveway. I am talking about visulatization that works when we actually get off our asses and do stuff. How totally crazy it that? Each time you make a good decision or do something nice or take care of yourself; each time you show up to work and work hard and do your best at everything you can do, you’re planting seeds for a life that you can onlye hope will grow beyond your wildest dreams. Take care of the little things – even the little things you hate- and treat them as promises to your own future. Soon you’ll see that fortune favors thhe bold who get shit done. ~ Sophia Amoruso

479:In my book (and this is my book!) magical thinking is the alchemy that you can use to visualize and project yourself into the professional and personal life that you want. I’m not talking about stuff like The Secret self-help book, which basically tells you to tape a picture of a car to the wall and then sit on the couch and wait for someone to drop it off in your driveway. I am talking about visualization that works when we actually get off our asses and do stuff. How totally crazy is that? Each time you make a good decision or do something nice or take care of yourself; each time you show up to work and work hard and do your best at everything you can do, you’re planting seeds for a life that you can only hope will grow beyond your wildest dreams. Take care of the little things—even the little things that you hate—and treat them as promises to your own future. Soon you’ll see that fortune favors the bold who get shit done. ~ Sophia Amoruso

480:Alchemy is neither a premature chemistry nor a psychology in the modem sense, although both of these are to be found in alchemical writings . Alchemy is a symbolic science of natural forms based on the correspondence between different planes of reality and making use of mineral and metal symbolism to expound a spiritual science of the souh For alchemy, nature is sacred, and the alchemist is the guardian of nature considered as a theophany and reflection of spiritual realities . A purely profane chemistry could come into being only when the substances of alchemy became completely emptied of their sacred quality. For this very reason, a re-discovery of the alchemical view of nature, without in any way denying the chemical sciences which deal with substances from another point of view, could reinstate the spiritual and symbolic character of the forms, colours and processes that man encounters throughout his life in the corporeal world. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

481:Some two years since, I printed a small pamphlet on the subject of Alchemy, my object being to throw out an idea with which I was strongly impressed, that the Philosopher's Stone was a mere symbol, and that the Alchemists were not in pursuit of gold, but of wisdom, carefully and conscientiously leaving the latter word undefined... I did not then, nor do I now, undertake to say precisely what the Alchemists sought. I was positive, however, that they were not in pursuit of 'gold or of worldly honors; and I am still of this opinion. I thought their object was religious, in which I am also fully confirmed by a further examination of alchemical works, of which I have obtained many since my pamphlet was printed... My pamphlet, in which I express the opinion that the Philosopher’s Stone is a mere symbol, signifying something which could not be expressed openly without incurring the danger of an auto-da-fe. ~ Remarks upon alchemy and the alchemists... Published by James Miller (1865)

482:The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it’s hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die. ~ Bruce Springsteen

483:The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it’s hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That's when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die. ~ Bruce Springsteen

484:More precisely, it is a question of dissolving contradictions in the fires of love and desire and of demolishing the walls of death. Magic rites, primitive or naïve civilizations, alchemy, the language of flowers, fire, or sleepless nights, are so many miraculous stages on the way to unity and the philosophers’ stone. If surrealism did not change the world, it furnished it with a few strange myths which partly justified Nietzsche’s announcement of the return of the Greeks. Only partly, because he was referring to unenlightened Greece, the Greece of mysteries and dark gods. Finally, just as Nietzsche’s experience culminated in the acceptance of the light of day, surrealist experience culminates in the exaltation of the darkness of night, the agonized and obstinate cult of the tempest. Breton, according to his own statements, understood that, despite everything, life was a gift. But his compliance could never shed the full light of day, the light that all of us need. ~ Albert Camus

485:To make a tarte of strawberyes," wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, "take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four eggs, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it." And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant's Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to "cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast." Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another. ~ Allegra Goodman

486:I'm simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I'm saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes. It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process. It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher. And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty. That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being. ~ Osho

487:What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. The artist says, 'I will make that event happen again, altering its shape, which was disfigured by its contacts with other events, so that its true significance is revealed'; and his audience says, 'We will let that event happen again by looking at this man's picture or house, listening to his music or reading his book.' It must not be copied, it must be remembered, it must be lived again, passed through those parts of the mind which are actively engaged in life, which bleed when they are wounded and give forth the bland emulsions of joy, while at the same time it is being examined by those parts of the mind which stand apart from life. At the end of this process the roots of experience are traced; the alchemy by which they make a flower of joy or pain is, so far as is possible to our brutishness, detected. What is understood is mastered. If art could investigate all experiences then man would understand the whole of life, and could control his destiny. ~ Rebecca West

488:Then, as Mag worried the crock into her basket, trying not to squash goats' eyes and violets, the young man reached across the counter and seized her hand. She gazed at him in wonder. He had thick, moist fingers, and she needed her hand to shift the eyes. 'Mag,' he said huskily. His heavy, earnest face was sheened with sweat and the bluish shadow of his first beard. 'How can you not see how we belong to one another? We've grown up together, like night and day. You are moon to my sun, you are silver to my aspiring gold - You would complete me -' 'Wait,' she pleaded. 'The crock is on the violets.' 'Marry me. Together we would become the marvel we seek, the transmutation of time into eternity -' She snorted inelegantly, and felt something peculiar flowing through her bones, an unaccustomed panic, a desperate urgency she barely knew words for. He thought he recognized her as human. 'You are mistaken,' she said coldly. 'And from what I've seen of both alchemy and marriage, all the marvels lie in the expectation. ~ Patricia A McKillip

489:Atheists tend to pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but this is to overlook secular societies’ equally powerful and continuous calls to prayer. A libertarian state truly worthy of the name would try to redress the balance of messages that reach its citizens away from the merely commercial and towards a holistic conception of flourishing. True to the ambitions of Giotto’s frescoes, these new messages would render vivid to us the many noble ways of behaving that we currently admire so much and so blithely ignore. We simply will not care for very long about the higher values when all we are given to convince us of their worth is an occasional reminder in a modestly selling, largely ignored book of essays by a so-called philosopher – while, in the city beyond, the superlative talents of the globe’s advertising agencies perform their phantasmagorical alchemy and set our every sensory fibre alight in the name of a new kind of cleaning product or savoury snack. ~ Alain de Botton

490:The Perfect Poet He says he is a perfect poet. He lives alone, with his perfect mate. & sometimes they don't even speak, So perfectly do they 'communicate.' He lives alone, his greatest pleasures are His pipes, his books, his wife's behindWhich he will often pinch to hear her laugh; He's got a perfect love for womankind. He seldom writes, distrusting language as A clumsy tool, unequal to his thoughts: He uses it as rarely as he can (No doubt to punish it for all its faults). But when he writes, he keeps the upper hand (On principle, since words are enemies). He melts them down, then counterfeits his ownA kind of literary alchemy. He's fortunate to have a perfect muse. A live-in muse, who cooks inspiringly; And sometimes after an ambrosial meal, He'll grab his pen, composing feverishly A perfect poem, describing in detail The salad, wine, the roast in buttery baste. And reading it, his musing wife agrees That every line smacks of his perfect taste. ~ Erica Jong

491:She shrugged her shoulders, then shifted her attention to the hand-labeled glass jars of honey. "Which one do you want to use?" "Something mild to go with the cheese." "The milkweed blossom?" Isabel nodded. "We're probably the only ones who'll notice." "The different flavors of honey have always been obvious to me," Jamie said. "Not to me. I've had to train my palate. Same with wines. But I'm not a natural, but I love the alchemy of pairing flowers. If you were twenty-one and not pregnant, I'd give you a taste of this nice new sauvignon blanc from Angel Creek. It's going to go perfectly with the appetizers." She turned off the heat under the fried marcona almonds and gave the pan a shake. "One sip," Jamie insisted, nibbling a bit of the goat cheese and honey on a cracker. "One, young lady." Isabel poured a bit of the chilled white wine in a goblet and held it out to her. Jamie savored a tiny sip, and smiled blissfully. "You're right. It's delicious." Isabel took back the goblet. "Look at me, corrupting a minor. ~ Susan Wiggs

492:It is a mistake to confound Alchemy with Chemistry. Modern Chemistry is a science which deals merely with the external forms in which the element of matter is manifesting itself. It never produces anything new. We may mix and compound and decompose two or more chemical bodies an unlimited number of times, and cause them to appear under various different forms, but at the end we will have no augmentation of substance, nor anything more than the combinations of the substances that have been employed at the beginning. Alchemy does not mix or compound anything, it causes that which already exists in a latent state to become active and grow. Alchemy is, therefore, more comparable to botany or agriculture than to Chemistry; and, in fact, the growth of a plant, a tree, or an animal is an alchemical process going on in the alchemical laboratory of nature, and performed by the great Alchemist, the power of God acting in nature. ~ Franz Hartmann, in In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom, containing the History of the True and the False Rosicrucians (1890), p. 129

493:This fear of dying would haunt me for the next forty years. It was an anguish that drove me to travel the world studying religions, magic, esotericism, alchemy, and the Kabbalah. It drove me to frequent initiatory groups, to meditate in the style of numerous schools, to seek out teachers, and in short wherever I went to search without limits for something that might console me in light of my transient existence. If I did not conquer death how could I live, create, love, prosper? I felt separated not only from the world but also from life. Those who thought they knew me only knew the makeup on a corpse. During those excruciating years, all the works I accomplished, as well as all my love affairs, were anesthetics to help me bear the anguish that gnawed at my soul. But in the depths of my being, in a hazy kind of way, I knew that this state of permanent agony was a disease that I had to cure by becoming my own therapist. At its heart, this was not about finding a magic potion to keep me from dying, but above all about learning to die with happiness. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

494:The alchemist of today is not hidden in caves and cellars, studying alone, but as he goes on with his work, it is seen that walls are built around him, and while he is in the world, like the master of old, he is not of it. As he goes further in his work, the light of other people's advice and outside help grows weaker and weaker, until finally he stands alone in darkness, and then comes the time that he must use his own lamp, and the various experiments which he has carried on must be his guide. He must take the Elixir of Life which he has developed and with it fill the lamp of his spiritual consciousness, and holding that above his head, walk into the Great Unknown, where if he has been a good and faithful servant, he will learn of the alchemy of Divinity. Where now test tubes and bottles are his implements, then worlds and globes he will study, and as a silent watcher will learn from that Divine One, who is the Great Alchemist of all the universe, the greatest alchemy of all, the creation of life, the maintenance of form, and the building of worlds. ~ Manly P Hall, The Initiates of the Flame,

495:The observation and experiments necessary for the pursuit of alchemy did not comport with the Greek idea of philosophy. This is shown by the saying of Socrates, that the nature of external objects could be discovered by thought without observation, and by the renunciation of all natural sciences by the Cynics. This came largely from the fact that they saw in the nature around them the mutable only. Plato separated logic, as the knowledge of the immutable, from physics, the knowledge of the mutable. That which was subject to indefinite change would not repay observing nor recording, therefore they could not conceive of astronomy and physics as serious objects of mental occupation. There was nothing to be learned from fields and trees and stones. One of the philosophers is said to have gone to the length of putting out his eyes, in order that his mind might not be influenced by external objects, but might wholly give itself to pure contemplation. The intellectual power and grasp of these philosophers were wonderful, but faulty and misleading, since the real and practical was left out. ~ Francis Preston Venable, A Short History of Chemistry (1894) pp. 9-10.

496:Godwin James Harry Wilmans! You who fell in a swamp Near Manila, following the flag, You were not wounded by the greatness of a dream, Or destroyed by ineffectual work, Or driven to madness by Satanic snags; You were not torn by aching nerves, Nor did you carry great wounds to your old age. You did not starve, for the government fed you. You did not suffer yet cry "forward" To an army which you led Against a foe with mocking smiles, Sharper than bayonets. You were not smitten down By invisible bombs. You were not rejected By those for whom you were defeated. You did not eat the savorless bread Which a poor alchemy had made from ideals. You went to Manila, Harry Wilmans, While I enlisted in the bedraggled army Of bright-eyed, divine youths, Who surged forward, who were driven back and fell, Sick, broken, crying, shorn of faith, Following the flag of the Kingdom of Heaven. You and I, Harry Wilmans, have fallen In our several ways, not knowing Good from bad, defeat from victory, Nor what face it is that smiles Behind the demoniac mask. ~ Edgar Lee Masters

497:It is not so much what people suffer that makes the world mysterious; it is rather how much they miss when they suffer. They seem to forget that even as children they made obstacles in their games in order to have something to overcome. Why, then, when they grow into man’s estate, should there not be prizes won by effort and struggle? Cannot the spirit of man rise with adversity as the bird rises against the resistance of the wind? Do not the game fish swim upstream? Must not the chisel cut away the marble to bring out the form? Must not the seed falling to the ground die before it can spring forth into life? Must not grapes be crushed that there may be wine to drink, and wheat ground that there may be bread to eat? Why then cannot pain be made redemption? Why under the alchemy of Divine Love cannot crosses be turned into crucifixes? Why cannot chastisements be regarded as penances? Why cannot we use a cross to become God-like? We cannot become like Him in His Power; we cannot become like Him in His Knowledge. There is only one way we can become like Him, and that is in the way He bore His sorrows and His Cross. And that way was with love. It is love that makes pain bearable. ~ Fulton J Sheen

498:/Farsi Hey you, parrot! speaking in riddles, Sugar wouldn't melt in your mouth! Clear your head so your heart will be happy, And then mimic the words of the Beloved! To everyone who walks by, you have given mixed messages; For God's sake, tell us something we don't know. O Winebringer, throw some of Your best wine in our face, For it is time to wake up! What chord was it last night that the Minstrel played That caused the drunk and the pious both to dance? What drug did You put in their cups That caused them to lose both their hats and their heads? Not even to Alexander the Great would Your lovers give the Wine of Life; He hadn't the power or the gold for that price. Today, treason is the currency of the world, But compared with Love, even alchemy has lost its flash. Come, and listen to our stories of pain; Even with few words, the truth is still there. O Lord, don't tell our secrets to those who don't drink; One cannot give a picture on the wall Your enlightened touch. To a millionaire, money is the standard of the world; Hafiz says: O beggars, I have exchanged all my money for these poems! [1512.jpg] -- from Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved: 100 Poems of Hafiz, by Thomas Rain Crowe ~ Hafiz, It Is Time to Wake Up!

499:Niccolo Machiavelli folded his arms across his chest and looked at the alchemyst. “I always knew we would meet again,” he said in French. “Though I never imagined it would be in these circumstances,” he added with a smile. “I was certain I’d get you in Paris last Saturday.” He bowed, an old-fashioned courtly gesture as Perenelle joined her husband. “Mistress Perenelle, it seems we are forever destined to meet on islands.” “The last time we met you had poisoned my husband and attempted to kill me,” Perenelle reminded him, speaking in Italian. Over three thousand years previously, the Sorceress and the Italian had fought at the foot of Mount Etna in Sicily. Although Perenelle had defeated Machiavelli, the energies they unleashed caused the ancient volcano to erupt. Lava flowed for five weeks after the battle and destroyed ten villages. “Forgive me. I was younger then, and foolish. And you emerged the victor of the encounter. I carry the scars to this day.” “Let us try and not blow up this island,” she said with a smile. Then she stretched out her hand. “I saw you try to save me earlier. There is no longer any enmity between us.” Machiavelli took her fingers in his and bent over them. “Thank you. That pleases me. ~ Michael Scott

500:When Someone Says I Love You" the whole room fills up with iced tea, something gives: the sun peels from your window, a sugared lemon, whole, flaming, hanging there. You tell them they must: puncture your chest with a straw to suck all the empty out, but because they say love they think they can't hurt you, even to save your life, which is why you float up up up, knocking your curled toes and bedeviled breath hard against the tea- stained ceiling, why you swim sentry over the oxheart that flooded your bed, hollowed you out. See it there: big and bobbing wax fruit, sweating with the effort of its own improbable being, each burst of wetness a cry to which you are further beholden, a sweetness trained against your own best alchemy. Witch, you can only watch this bloodletting from above, can only amend the deed to your body: see it say it back, see it like a little rabbit with a twist on its neck and wish you could be that, being had, being held, but instead you grow wooden and spin on your back. Propeller? No, there is no getting away from this, and so: ceiling fan, drowning their hushed joy, going schwa schwa schwa in the bed's sheath of late afternoon light. ~ Karyna McGlynn

   63 Psychology
   58 Occultism
   32 Integral Yoga
   8 Poetry
   6 Fiction
   2 Mythology
   1 Yoga
   1 Philsophy
   1 Philosophy
   1 Mysticism
   1 Hinduism
   1 Education
   1 Alchemy


   66 Carl Jung
   23 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   9 Sri Aurobindo
   8 Aleister Crowley
   7 The Mother
   4 Jordan Peterson
   4 H P Lovecraft
   3 Satprem
   2 Percy Bysshe Shelley
   2 Joseph Campbell
   2 Hafiz


   35 Mysterium Coniunctionis
   11 The Practice of Psycho therapy
   11 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   9 Aion
   6 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   5 The Secret Doctrine
   5 Liber ABA
   5 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   4 Savitri
   4 Maps of Meaning
   4 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
   3 Questions And Answers 1954
   3 Magick Without Tears
   3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
   2 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
   2 Shelley - Poems
   2 On the Way to Supermanhood
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03

00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       It may be asked why the dog has been chosen as the symbol of Intuition. In the Vedas, the cow and the horse also play a large part; even the donkey and the frog have their own assigned roles. These objects are taken from the environment of ordinary life, and are those that are most familiar to the external consciousness, through which the inner experiences have to express themselves, if they are to be expressed at all. These material objects represent various kinds of forces and movements and subtle and occult and spiritual dynamisms. Strictly speaking, however, symbols are not chosen in a subtle or spiritual experience, that is to say, they are not arbitrarily selected and constructed by the conscious intelligence. They form part of a dramatization (to use a term of the Freudian psychology of dreams), a psychological Alchemy, whose method and process and rationale are very obscure, which can be penetrated only by the vision of a third eye.

01.03 - Mystic Poetry, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       The religious poet seeks to tone down or cover up the mundane taint, since he does not know how to transcend it totally, in two ways: (1) by a strong thought-element, the metaphysical way, as it may be called and (2) by a strong symbolism, the occult way. Donne takes to the first course, Blake the second. And it is the Alchemy brought to bear in either of these processes that transforms the merely religious into the mystic poet. The truly spiritual, as I have said, is still a higher grade of consciousness: what I call Spirit's own poetry has its own matter and mannerswabhava and swadharma. A nearest approach to it is echoed in those famous lines of Blake:

01.05 - Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, a Great Man, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       The world being nothing but Spirit made visible is, according to Tagore, fundamentally a thing of beauty. The scars and spots that are on the surface have to be removed and mankind has to repossess and clo the itself with that mantle of beauty. The world is beautiful, because it is the image of the Beautiful, because it harbours, expresses and embodies the Divine who is Beauty supreme. Now by a strange Alchemy, a wonderful effect of polarisation, the very spiritual element in Tagore has made him almost a pagan and even a profane. For what are these glories of Nature and the still more exquisite glories that the human body has captured? They are but vibrations and modulations of beauty the delightful names and forms of the supreme Lover and Beloved.

02.05 - Robert Graves, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       This "little slender lad, whose flesh is bitter, lightning engendered, born from dungs of mares" is perhaps a symbol of our human receptacle. We have to carry this mortal frame with its clay feet and make the effort towards self-transcendence: the Alchemy's other name is self-purification and self-perfection. This tender shoot is a mysterious chemical storehouse, its fermentation and purification and use awaken in us the sleeping divine will, give a clear vision, guide us through the secret worlds and ultimately to the home of Immortality. The Vedic Rishis sang to the Soma creeper or god Soma,Tatra mm. amtam kdhi, O Somadeva, carry us where thou flowest down and there make us immortal. For there abound all delight, all ecstasy, all enjoyment, all lure and the supreme Desire ofdesirenanda, moda, mud, pramud, kma4are these not the five fruits of heaven the poet of the West mentions?

02.09 - The Paradise of the Life-Gods, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   Overtaken by the spirit's sudden spell,   Smitten by a divine passion's Alchemy,   Pain's self compelled transformed to potent joy

03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga   A godhead drawn from her transmuted limbs,   An Alchemy of Heaven on Nature's base.   Adept of the self-born unfailing line,

03.08 - The Standpoint of Indian Art, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       Indian art, too, possesses a perspective and an anatomy; it, too, has a focus of observation which governs and guides the composition, in the ensemble and in detail. Only, it is not the physical eye, but an inner vision, not the angle given by the retina, but the angle of a deeper perception or consciousness. To understand the difference, let us ask ourselves a simple question: when we call back to memory a landscape, how does the picture form itself in the mind? Certainly, it is not an exact photograph of the scenery observed. We cannot, even if we try, re-form in memory the objects in the shape, colour and relative positions they had when they appeared to the physical eye. In the picture represented to the mind's eye, some objects loom large, others are thrown into the background and others again do not figure at all; the whole scenery is reshuffled and rearranged in deference to the stress of the mind's interest. Even the structure and build of each object undergoes a change; it does not faithfully re-copy Nature, but gives the mind's version of it, aggrandizing certain parts, suppressing others, reshaping and recolouring the whole aspect, metamorphosing the very contour into something that may not be "natural" or anatomical figure at all. Only we are not introspective enough to observe this phenomenon of the mind's Alchemy; we think we are representing with perfect exactitude in the imagination whatever is presented to the senses, whereas in fact we do nothing of the kind; our idea that we do it is a pure illusion.

03.09 - Art and Katharsis, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       Whatever is ugly and gross, all the ills and evils of life that is to say, what appears as such to our external mind and senseswhen they have passed through the crucible of the poet's consciousness undergoes a sea-change and puts on an otherworldly beauty and value. We know of the Alchemy of poetic transformation that was so characteristic of Wordsworth's manner and to which the poet was never tired of referring, how the physical and brute natureeven a most insignificant and meaningless and unshapely object in it attains a spiritual sense and beauty when the poet takes it up and treasures it in his tranquil and luminous and in-gathered consciousness, his "inward eye". A crude feeling, a raw passion, a tumult of the senses, in the same way, sifted through the poetic perception, becomes something that opens magic casements, glimpses the silence of the farthest Hebrides, wafts us into the bliss of the invisible and the beyond.

03.15 - Towards the Future, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       We know today, thanks to modern science, of the mystery of particles. The ultimate constituents of the material world consist of particles (or wave-particles), that is to say, packets of material energy strung together or merely juxtaposed, but held together somehow. Now the Buddhists added that these are particles of energy no doubt, but the energy is not mere material, i.e., electrical energy; they are desire-energy. Human being or consciousness is an aggregate of cells of desire-energy. The task man has before him the Alchemy or laboratory work man is to do is to empty the cells of desire and so annihilate "them; desire gone, cells crumble awayexistence becomes Nihilan inexpressible stillness or tranquillity.      --       This world, this material existence is to be transmuted the portion of earthly human existence at least, with which we are most concerned. It is at present made of ignorance and sorrow and incapacity-composed of the particles of these entities; poor and sorry as they are, these have to be replaced by entities of light and joy and love, of peace and strength and wideness. Well, it is a transmutation or transubstantiation of the kind which Nature has already attempted as an experiment; I am referring to the Alchemy of fossilisation. The present human formation must be dipped and soaked-and held under high pressure in an environment of the desired material or materials that one has in view.

04.02 - Human Progress, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       We can thus note, broadly speaking, three stages in the human cycle of Nature's evolution. The first was the period of emergence of self-consciousness and the trials and experiments it went through to establish and confirm itself. The ancient civilisations represented this character of the human spirit. The subject freeing itself more and more from its environmental tegument, still living and moving within it and dynamically reacting upon itthis was the character we speak of. Next came the period when the free and dynamic subject feeling itself no more tied down to its natural objective sphere sought lines of development and adventure on its own account. This was the age of speculation and of scholasticism in philosophy and intellectual inquiry and of Alchemy in natural sciencea period roughly equated with the Middle Ages. The Scientific Age coming last seeks to re-establish a junction and co-ordination between the free and dynamic self-consciousness and the mode and pattern of its objective field, involving a greater enrichment on one side the subjective consciousness and on the other, the objective environment, a corresponding change and effective reorganisation.

04.03 - Consciousness as Energy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       We have spoken of the Inner Consciousness. But there is also, we must now point out, an Inmost Consciousness. As the Superconsciousness is a consciousness-energy in height, the Inmost Consciousness is a consciousness-energy in depth, the deepest depth, beyond or behind the Inner Consciousness. If we wish to put it geometrically, we can say, the vertical section of consciousness represents the line from the superconsciousness to the subconscious or vice versa; the horizontal section represents the normal waking state of consciousness; and there is a transverse section leading from the surface first to the Inner and finally to the Inmost. This inmost consciousness the consciousness most profound and secreted in the cave of the heart, guhhitam gahvaretham,is the consciousness of the soul, the Psychic Being, as Sri Aurobindo calls it: it is the immortal in the mortal. It is, as has often been described, the nucleus round which is crystallised and organised the triple nature of man consisting of his mind and life and body, the centre of dynamic energy that secretly vivifies them, gradually purifies and transforms them into higher functions and embodiments of consciousness. As a matter of fact, it is this inmost consciousness that serves as the link, at least as the most powerful link, between the higher and lower forms of consciousness, between the Superconscient and the Subsconscient or Inconscient. It takes up within itself all the elements of consciousness that the past in its evolutionary career from the very lowest and basic levels has acquired and elaborated, and by its inherent pressure and secret gestation delivers what was crude and base and unformed as the purest luminous noble substance of the perfectly organised superconscient reality. Indeed, that is the mystic Alchemy which the philosophers experimented in the Middle Ages. In this context, the Inner Consciousness, we may note, serves as a medium through which the action of the Inmost (as well as that of the Uppermost) takes place.

05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       We have spoken of the stability, the fixity, the rigidity even, of the god type and we contrasted it with the variability, the many-sidedness, the multiple character of the human consciousness. In another view, however, the tables are turned and the opposite appears as the truth. Man, for example., has a physical body and nothing is more definite and fixed and rigid than this material sheath. The gods have no body, but they have a form which is supple and changeful, not hard and crystallised like the human figure. Gods, we said, are cosmic forceslines (or vectors, if we wish to be scientifically precise) of universal forces; this does not mean that they have no shape or form. They too have a form and can be recognised by it even as a human being is recognisable by his body. In spite of variability the form retains its identity. The form changes, for a god has the capacity to act in different contexts at the same time; within his own universe a god is multi-dimensional. The Indian seer and artist often seeks to convey this character of the immortals by giving them a plurality of arms and heads. In modern times the inspiration behind the surrealist movement lies precisely in this attempt to express simultaneity of diverse gestures and activities, a synthetic close-up of succeeding moments and disparate objects or events. But in spite of all changes Proteus remains Proteus and can be recognised as such by the vigilant and careful eye. The human frame, we have said, is more fixed and rigid, being made of the material substance. It has not evidently the variability of the body of a god. And yet there is a deeper mystery: the human body is not or need not be so inflexible as it appears to be or as it usually is. It has considerable plastic capacities. We would say that the human body holds a marvellous juste milieu. By its solid concreteness it acts as a fortress for the inner consciousness to dwell in safe from easy attacks of the hostiles: it acts also as a firm weapon for the same inner consciousness to cut into the material world and indent and impress its pattern of truth upon an otherwise hard and refractory material made of ignorance and obscurity and falsehood. Furthermore, it is supple enough to receive and record into its grain the pattern and substance of the higher reality. The image of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ is symbolic of the Alchemy of which the human body is capable when one knows how to treat it in occult knowledge and power. The human body can suffer a sea-change which is not within the reach of the radiant body of an immortal.

05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       The humanist said, Nothing human I reckon foreign to me," In a deeper and more absolute sense the divine Mystic of the integral Yoga says the same. He is indeed humanity incarnate, the whole mankind condensed and epitomised in his single body. Mankind as imbedded in ignorance and inconscience, the conscious soul lost in the dark depths of dead matter, is he and his whole labour consists in working in and through that obscure "gravitational" mass, to evoke and bring down the totality of the superconscient force, the creative delight which he is essentially in his inmost and topmost being. The labour within himself is conterminous with the cosmic labour, and the change effected in his being and nature means a parallel change in the world outside, at least a ready possibility of the change. All the pains and weaknesses normal humanity suffers from, the heritage of an inconscient earthly existence, the Divine takes into his incarnated bodyall and more and to the highest degreeinto a crucible as it were, and works out there the Alchemy. The natural man individually shares also each other's burden in some way, for all are interconnected in lifeaction at one point has a reaction at all other points: only the sharing is done unconsciously and is suffered or imposed than accepted and it tends to be at a minimum. An ordinary mortal would break under a greater pressure. It is the Avatar who comes forward and carries on his shoulders the entire burden of earthly inconscience.

05.02 - Satyavan, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga      An Alchemy worked, the transmutation came;   The missioned face had wrought the Master's spell.

05.04 - The Immortal Person, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       In the process of making the body personal and divine and immortal, death or what appears as such may be a needed operation. It is no longer an ineluctable destiny forced upon you, but an instrument which you use consciously for a definite purpose. It is a mystic or occult work (kriy:) which we can try to understand by an analogy. The evolution of the ideal or divine man, the assumption of the mortal by the immortal involves a twofold operation: rejection and integration. Rejection means throwing out the elements that belong exclusively to the lower grade and cannot be taken up and incorporated into the higher; while integration means taking up and absorbing utilisable elements of the lower into the higher. This double process goes on on all the levels, on the mental, on the vital, on the subtle physical and even on the physical level. At a certain stage or in a concentrated process of Alchemy the process of rejection may demand a mode of reshuffling and redisposition which physically appears like death, but it is inevitably followed or accompanied by the process of integration or recreation.

05.05 - In Quest of Reality, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       Let us leave the domain, the domain of inorganic matter for a while and turn to another set of facts, those of organic matter, of life and its manifestation. The biological domain is a freak in the midst of what apears to be a rigidly mechanistic material universe. The laws of life are not the laws of matter, very often one contravenes the other. The two converging lenses of the two eyes do not make the image twice brighter than the one produced by a single lens. What is this Alchemy that forms the equation 1=1 (we might as well put it as 1+1=1)? Again, a living wholea cellfissured and divided tends to live and grow whollyin each fragment. In life we have thus another strange equation: part=whole (although in the mathematics of infinity such an equation is a normal phenomenon). The body (of a warm-blooded animal) maintaining a constant temperature whether it is at the Pole or at the Equator is a standing miracle which baffles mere physics and chemistry. Thirdly, life is immortal the law of entropy (of irrevocably diminishing energy) that governs the fate of matter does not seem to hold good here. The original life-cells are carried over physically from generation to generation and there is no end to the continuity of the series, if allowed to run its normal course. Material energy also, it is said, is indestructible; it is never destroyed, but changes form only. But the scientific conception of material energy puts a limit to its course, it proceeds, if we are to believe thermodynamics, towards a dead equilibrium there is no such thing as "perpetual movement" in the field of matter.

1.00 - The way of what is to come, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Integral Yoga      30 In the text, Jung identifies the white bird as his soul. For Jung's discussion of the dove in Alchemy, see Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955/56) (CW 14, 81)   31. The Corrected Draft has: First Nights (p. 13)

1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   tial points Christian. Otherwise he would have become a dualist.   On the other hand it was undoubtedly Alchemy, long brewing   the union of opposites in secret, that came to his aid. Neverthe-   --      38 Cf. the motif of the "old king" in Alchemy. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 434ff.      --   81 If one wants to form a picture of the symbolic process, the   series of pictures found in Alchemy are good examples, though   the symbols they contain are for the most part traditional   --      47 Cf. Symbols of Transformation. 49 Psychology and Alchemy.

1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   things, to the modern mind. The question of the nature of the substance of sol the sun (to take a single   example) occupied the minds of those who practiced the pre-experimental science of Alchemy for many   hundreds of years. We would no longer presume even that the sun has a uniform substance, unique to it,   --   alchemist knew, gold owes its red color to the admixture of Cu (copper), which he interpreted as Kypris   (the Cyprian, Venus), mentioned in Greek Alchemy as the transformative substance. Redness, heat, and   dryness are the classical qualities of the Egyptian Set (Greek Typhon), the evil principle which, like the

1.01 - the Call to Adventure, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology      C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works, vol. 12; New York   and London, 1953), pars. 71, 73. (Orig. 1935.)

1.02 - MAPS OF MEANING - THREE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   its meanings springs from the encircled interplay and union of the light, spiritual, masculine yang, and the   dark, material, feminine, yin.279 According to the adepts of medieval Alchemy, discernible objects of   experience (and the subjects who experienced them) emerged from the round chaos, which was a spherical

1.02 - The Concept of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology      7 Psychology and Alchemy, Part II.

1.02 - THE QUATERNIO AND THE MEDIATING ROLE OF MERCURIUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   Ostanes said, Save me, O my God, for I stand between two exalted brilliancies known for their wickedness, and between two dim lights; each of them has reached me and I know not how to save myself from them. And it was said to me, Go up to Agathodaimon the Great and ask aid of him, and know that there is in thee somewhat of his nature, which will never be corrupted. . . . And when I ascended into the air he said to me, Take the child of the bird which is mixed with redness and spread for the gold its bed which comes forth from the glass, and place it in its vessel whence it has no power to come out except when thou desirest, and leave it until its moistness has departed.25   [6] The quaternio in this case evidently consists of the two malefici, Mars and Saturn (Mars is the ruler of Aries, Saturn of Capricorn); the two dim lights would then be feminine ones, the moon (ruler of Cancer) and Venus (ruler of Libra). The opposites between which Ostanes stands are thus masculine / feminine on the one hand and good / evil on the other. The way he speaks of the four luminarieshe does not know how to save himself from themsuggests that he is subject to Heimarmene, the compulsion of the stars; that is, to a transconscious factor beyond the reach of the human will. Apart from this compulsion, the injurious effect of the four planets is due to the fact that each of them exerts its specific influence on man and makes him a diversity of persons, whereas he should be one.26 It is presumably Hermes who points out to Ostanes that something incorruptible is in his nature which he shares with the Agathodaimon,27 something divine, obviously the germ of unity. This germ is the gold, the aurum philosophorum,28 the bird of Hermes or the son of the bird, who is the same as the filius philosophorum.29 He must be enclosed in the vas Hermeticum and heated until the moistness that still clings to him has departed, i.e., the humidum radicale (radical moisture), the prima materia, which is the original chaos and the sea (the unconscious). Some kind of coming to consciousness seems indicated. We know that the synthesis of the four was one of the main preoccupations of Alchemy, as was, though to a lesser degree, the synthesis of the seven (metals, for instance). Thus in the same text Hermes says to the Sun:   . . . I cause to come out to thee the spirits of thy brethren [the planets], O Sun, and I make them for thee a crown the like of which was never seen; and I cause thee and them to be within me, and I will make thy kingdom vigorous.30   --   Finally, there will appear in the work that ardently desired blue or cerulean colour, which does not darken or dull the eyes of the beholder by the healing power of its brilliance, as when we see the splendour of the outward sun. Rather does it sharpen and streng then them, nor does he [Mercurius] slay a man with his glance like the basilisk, but by the shedding of his own blood he calls back those who are near to death, and restores to them unimpaired their former life, like the pelican.51   Mercurius is conceived as spiritual blood,52 on the analogy of the blood of Christ. In Ephesians those who are separated are brought near in the blood of Christ. He makes the two one and has broken down the dividing wall in his flesh. Caro (flesh)53 is a synonym for the prima materia and hence for Mercurius. The one is a new man. He reconciles the two in one body,54 an idea which is figuratively represented in Alchemy as the two-headed hermaphrodite. The two have one spirit, in Alchemy they have one soul. Further, the lapis is frequently compared to Christ as the lapis angularis (cornerstone).55 As we know, the temple built upon the foundation of the saints inspired in the Shepherd of Hermas a vision of the great building into which human beings, streaming from the four quarters, inserted themselves as living stones, melting into it without seam.56 The Church is built upon the rock that gave Peter his name (Matthew 16 : 18).   [12] In addition, we learn from the scholia that the circle and the Hermetic vessel are one and the same, with the result that the mandala, which we find so often in the drawings of our patients, corresponds to the vessel of transformation. Consequently, the usual quaternary structure of the mandala57 would coincide with the alchemists quaternio of opposites. Lastly, there is the interesting statement that an Ecclesia spiritualis above all creeds and owing allegiance solely to Christ, the Anthropos, is the real aim of the alchemists endeavours. Whereas the treatise of Hermes is, comparatively speaking, very old, and in place of the Christian Anthropos mystery58 contains a peculiar paraphrase of it, or rather, its antique parallel,59 the scholia cannot be dated earlier than the beginning of the seventeenth century.60 The author seems to have been a Paracelsist physician. Mercurius corresponds to the Holy Ghost as well as to the Anthropos; he is, as Gerhard Dorn says, the true hermaphroditic Adam and Microcosm:

10.37 - The Golden Bridge, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga       The mantra of Savitri wields a language and expresses a physical mind that already shows how the Alchemy will be done or is being done: the transmutation of the ordinary experience into a supra-sensuous or the supra-sensuous embodying itself in the sensuous. The process is still in a state of transition, and as a sample of the process in action and a prefigure or for taste of the achievement, may be recognisable in the famous sonnet of Sri Aurobindo which I quote here in full and conclude.

1.03 - Concerning the Archetypes, with Special Reference to the Anima Concept, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   monastery at Chalis, in Normandy. Cf. Delacotte, Guillaume de Digulleville: Trois   Romans-poemes du XIV siecle. [Also cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 315ft.    Editors.]   --   29 Schultz, Dokumente der Gnosis, especially the lists in Irenaeus, Adversus   haereses. 30 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy.

1.03 - Supernatural Aid, #The Hero with a Thousand Faces, #Joseph Campbell, #Mythology   wisdom into the world which is represented also in the incarnations of divine   saviors (see infra, pp. 342-345). (See C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy,   part III, "Religious Ideas in Alchemy." (Orig. 1936.) For the retort, see   par. 338. For Hermes Trismegistus, see par. 173 and index, s.v.

1.03 - THE ORPHAN, THE WIDOW, AND THE MOON, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology      [13] In the text cited at the end of the last section Dorn continues: Hermes Trismegistus called the stone orphan.66 Orphan as the name of a precious stone is found in Albertus Magnus. The stone was called orphan because of its uniquenessit was never seen elsewhere and it was said to be in the Emperors crown. It was wine-coloured and sometimes shone in the night, but nowadays it does not shine [any more] in the darkness.67 As Albertus Magnus was an authority on Alchemy, he may have been the direct source both for Dorn and for Petrus Bonus (see n. 66). Orphan as the name of a gem may therefore mean something like the modern solitairea very apt name for the unique lapis Philosophorum. Apart from Dorn and Petrus Bonus, it seems that this name is found only in the Carmina Heliodori.68 There it refers to the      --      , the Black One.86 Apuleius stresses the blackness of her robe (palla nigerrima, robe of deepest black),87 and since ancient times she was reputed to possess the elixir of life88 as well as being adept in sundry magical arts.89 She was also called the Old One,90 and she was rated a pupil of Hermes,91 or even his daughter.92 She appears as a teacher of Alchemy in the treatise Isis the Prophetess to her Son Horus.93 She is mentioned in the role of a whore in Epiphanius, where she is said to have prostituted herself in Tyre.94 She signifies earth, according to Firmicus Maternus,95 and was equated with Sophia.96 She is      --   The absconditus sponsus enters into the body of the woman and is joined with the abscondita sponsa. This is true also on the reverse side of the process, so that two spirits are melted together and are interchanged constantly between body and body. . . . In the indistinguishable state which arises it may be said almost that the male is with the female, neither male nor female,124 at least they are both or either. So is man affirmed to be composed of the world above, which is male, and of the female world below. The same is true of woman.125   [19] The Cabala also speaks of the thalamus (bride chamber) or nuptial canopy beneath which sponsus and sponsa are consecrated, Yesod acting as paranymphus (best man).126 Directly or indirectly the Cabala was assimilated into Alchemy. Relationships must have existed between them at a very early date, though it is difficult to trace them in the sources. Late in the sixteenth century we come upon direct quotations from the Zohar, for instance in the treatise De igne et sale by Blasius Vigenerus.127 One passage in this treatise is of especial interest to us as it concerns the mythologem of the coniunctio:   [The Sefiroth] end in Malchuth or the moon, who is the last to descend and the first to ascend from the elemental world. For the moon is the way to heaven, so much so that the Pythagoreans named her the heavenly earth and the earthly heaven or star,128 because in the elemental world all inferior nature in respect to the heavenly, and the heavenly in respect to the intelligible world, is, as the Zohar says, feminine and passive, and is as the moon to the sun. In the same measure as [the moon] withdraws from the sun, until she is in opposition to him, so does her light increase in relation to us in this lower world, but diminishes on the side that looks upwards. Contrariwise, in her conjunction, when she is totally darkened for us, she is fully illuminated on that side which faces the sun. This should teach us that the more our intellect descends to the things of sense, the more it is turned away from intelligible things, and the reverse likewise.129   The identification of Malchuth with Luna forms a link with Alchemy, and is another example of the process by which the patristic symbolism of sponsus and sponsa had been assimilated much earlier. At the same time, it is a repetition of the way the originally pagan hierosgamos was absorbed into the figurative language of the Church Fathers. But Vigenerus adds something that seems to be lacking in patristic allegory, namely the darkening of the other half of the moon during her opposition. When the moon turns upon us her fullest radiance, her other side is in complete darkness. This strict application of the Sol-Luna allegory might have been an embarrassment to the Church, although the idea of the dying Church does take account, to a certain extent, of the transience of all created things.130 I do not mention this fact in order to criticize the significance of the ecclesiastical Sol-Luna allegory. On the contrary I want to emphasize it, because the moon, standing on the borders of the sublunary world ruled by evil, has a share not only in the world of light but also in the daemonic world of darkness, as our author clearly hints. That is why her changefulness is so significant symbolically: she is duplex and mutable like Mercurius, and is like him a mediator; hence their identification in Alchemy.131 Though Mercurius has a bright side concerning whose spirituality Alchemy leaves us in no doubt, he also has a dark side, and its roots go deep.   [20] The quotation from Vigenerus bears no little resemblance to a long passage on the phases of the moon in Augustine.132 Speaking of the unfavourable aspect of the moon, which is her changeability, he paraphrases Ecclesiasticus 27 : 12 with the words: The wise man remaineth stable as the sun, but a fool is changed as the moon,133 and poses the question: Who then is that fool who changeth as the moon, but Adam, in whom all have sinned?134 For Augustine, therefore, the moon is manifestly an ally of corruptible creatures, reflecting their folly and inconstancy. Since, for the men of antiquity and the Middle Ages, comparison with the stars or planets tacitly presupposes astrological causality, the sun causes constancy and wisdom, while the moon is the cause of change and folly (including lunacy).135 Augustine attaches to his remarks about the moon a moral observation concerning the relationship of man to the spiritual sun,136 just as Vigenerus did, who was obviously acquainted with Augustines epistles. He also mentions (Epistola LV, 10) the Church as Luna, and he connects the moon with the wounding by an arrow: Whence it is said: They have made ready their arrows in the quiver, to shoot in the darkness of the moon at the upright of heart.137 It is clear that Augustine did not understand the wounding as the activity of the new moon herself but, in accordance with the principle omne malum ab homine, as the result of mans wickedness. All the same, the addition in obscura luna, for which there is no warrant in the original text, shows how much the new moon is involved. This hint of the admitted dangerousness of the moon is confirmed when Augustine, a few sentences later on, cites Psalm 71 : 7: In his days justice shall flourish, and abundance of peace, until the moon shall be destroyed.138 Instead of the strong interficiatur the Vulgate has the milder auferaturshall be taken away or fail.139 The violent way in which the moon is removed is explained by the interpretation that immediately follows: That is, the abundance of peace shall grow until it consumes all changefulness of mortality. From this it is evident that the moons nature expressly partakes of the changefulness of mortality, which is equivalent to death, and therefore the text continues: For then the last enemy, death, shall be destroyed, and whatever resists us on account of the weakness of the flesh shall be utterly consumed. Here the destruction of the moon is manifestly equivalent to the destruction of death.140 The moon and death significantly reveal their affinity. Death came into the world through original sin and the seductiveness of woman (= moon), and mutability led to corruptibility.141 To eliminate the moon from Creation is therefore as desirable as the elimination of death. This negative assessment of the moon takes full account of her dark side. The dying of the Church is also connected with the mystery of the moons darkness.142 Augustines cautious and perhaps not altoge ther unconscious disguising of the sinister aspect of the moon would be sufficiently explained by his respect for the Ecclesia-Luna equation.   [21] All the more ruthlessly, therefore, does Alchemy insist on the dangerousness of the new moon. Luna is on the one hand the brilliant whiteness of the full moon, on the other hand she is the blackness of the new moon, and especially the blackness of the eclipse, when the sun is darkened. Indeed, what she does to the sun comes from her own dark nature. The Consilium coniugii143 tells us very clearly what the alchemists thought about Luna:   The lion, the lower sun,144 grows corrupt through the flesh. [His flesh is weak because he suffers from quartan fever.145] Thus is the lion146 corrupted in his nature through his flesh, which follows the times of the moon,147 and is eclipsed. For the moon is the shadow of the sun, and with corruptible bodies she is consumed, and through her corruption is the lion eclipsed with the help of the moisture of Mercurius,148 yet his eclipse is changed to usefulness and to a better nature, and one more perfect than the first.   --   After this151 is completed, you will know that you have the substance which penetrates all substances, and the nature which contains nature, and the nature which rejoices in nature.152 It is named the Tyriac153 of the Philosophers, and it is also called the poisonous serpent, because, like this, it bites off the head of the male in the lustful heat of conception, and giving birth it dies and is divided through the midst. So also the moisture of the moon,154 when she receives his light, slays the sun, and at the birth of the child of the Philosophers she dies likewise, and at death the two parents yield up their souls to the son, and die and pass away. And the parents are the food of the son . . .   [22] In this psychologem all the implications of the Sol-Luna allegory are carried to their logical conclusion. The daemonic quality which is connected with the dark side of the moon, or with her position midway between heaven and the sublunary world,155 displays its full effect. Sun and moon reveal their antithetical nature, which in the Christian Sol-Luna relationship is so obscured as to be unrecognizable, and the two opposites cancel each other out, their impact resultingin accordance with the laws of energeticsin the birth of a third and new thing, a son who resolves the antagonisms of the parents and is himself a united double nature. The unknown author of the Consilium156 was not conscious of the close connection of his psychologem with the process of transubstantiation, although the last sentence of the text contains clearly enough the motif of teoqualo, the god-eating of the Aztecs.157 This motif is also found in ancient Egypt. The Pyramid text of Unas (Vth dynasty) says: Unas rising as a soul, like a god who liveth upon his fathers and feedeth upon his mothers.158 It should be noted how Alchemy put in the place of the Christian sponsus and sponsa an image of totality that on the one hand was material, and on the other was spiritual and corresponded to the Paraclete. In addition, there was a certain trend in the direction of an Ecclesia spiritualis. The alchemical equivalent of the God-Man and the Son of God was Mercurius, who as an hermaphrodite contained in himself both the feminine element, Sapientia and matter, and the masculine, the Holy Ghost and the devil. There are relations in Alchemy with the Holy Ghost Movement which flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was chiefly connected with the name of Joachim of Flora (11451202), who expected the imminent coming of the third kingdom, namely that of the Holy Ghost.159   [23] The alchemists also represented the eclipse as the descent of the sun into the (feminine) Mercurial Fountain,160 or as the disappearance of Gabricus in the body of Beya. Again, the sun in the embrace of the new moon is treacherously slain by the snake-bite (conatu viperino) of the mother-beloved, or pierced by the telum passionis, Cupids arrow.161 These ideas explain the strange picture in Reusners Pandora,162 showing Christ being pierced with a lance by a crowned virgin whose body ends in a serpents tail.163 The oldest reference to the mermaid in Alchemy is a quotation from Hermes in Olympiodorus: The virginal earth is found in the tail of the virgin.164 On the analogy of the wounded Christ, Adam is shown in the Codex Ashburnham pierced in the side by an arrow.165   [24] This motif of wounding is taken up by Honorius of Autun in his commentary on the Song of Songs.166 Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast wounded my heart with one of thy eyes, and with one hair of thy neck (DV).167 The sponsa says (1 : 4): I am black, but comely, and (1 : 5) Look not upon me because I am black, because the sun hath scorched me. This allusion to the nigredo was not missed by the alchemists.168 But there is another and more dangerous reference to the bride in 6 : 4f.: Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners. Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me . . . 10: Who is this that looketh forth as the rising dawn [quasi aurora consurgens],169 fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?170 The bride is not only lovely and innocent, but witch-like and terrible, like the side of Selene that is related to Hecate. Like her, Luna is all-seeing, an all-knowing eye.171 Like Hecate she sends madness, epilepsy, and other sicknesses. Her special field is love magic, and magic in general, in which the new moon, the full moon, and the moons darkness play a great part. The animals assigned to herstag, lion, and cock 172are also symbols of her male partner in Alchemy. As the chthonic Persephone her animals, according to Pythagoras, are dogs,173 i.e., the planets. In Alchemy Luna herself appears as the Armenian bitch.174 The sinister side of the moon plays a considerable role in classical tradition.   [25] The sponsa is the dark new moonin Christian interpretation the Church in the nuptial embrace 175and this union is at the same time a wounding of the sponsus, Sol or Christ. Honorius comments on Thou hast wounded my heart as follows:   --   Thi fruyt me florysschith in blood colour.179   [27] The motif of wounding in Alchemy goes back to Zosimos (3rd cent.) and his visions of a sacrificial drama.180 The motif does not occur in such complete form again. One next meets it in the Turba: The dew is joined to him who is wounded and given over to death.181 The dew comes from the moon, and he who is wounded is the sun.182 In the treatise of Philaletha, Introitus apertus ad occlusum Regis palatium,183 the wounding is caused by the bite of the rabid Corascene dog,184 in consequence of which the hermaphrodite child suffered from hydrophobia.185 Dorn, in his De tenebris contra naturam, associates the motif of wounding and the poisonous snake-bite with Genesis 3: For the sickness introduced into nature by the serpent, and the deadly wound she inflicted, a remedy is to be sought.186 Accordingly it is the task of Alchemy to root out the original sin, and this is accomplished with the aid of the balsamum vitae (balsam of life), which is a true mixture of the natural heat with its radical moisture. The life of the world is the light of nature and the celestial sulphur,187 whose substance is the aetheric moisture and heat of the firmament, like to the sun and moon.188 The conjunction of the moist (= moon) and the hot (= sun) thus produces the balsam, which is the original and incorrupt life of the world. Genesis 3 : 15, he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel (RSV), was generally taken as a prefiguration of the Redeemer. But since Christ was free from the stain of sin the wiles of the serpent could not touch him, though of course mankind was poisoned. Whereas the Christian belief is that man is freed from sin by the redemptory act of Christ, the alchemist was evidently of the opinion that the restitution to the likeness of original and incorrupt nature had still to be accomplished by the art, and this can only mean that Christs work of redemption was regarded as incomplete. In view of the wickednesses which the Prince of this world,189 undeterred, goes on perpetrating as liberally as before, one cannot withhold all sympathy from such an opinion. For an alchemist who professed allegiance to the Ecclesia spiritualis it was naturally of supreme importance to make himself an unspotted vessel of the Paraclete and thus to realize the idea Christ on a plane far transcending a mere imitation of him. It is tragic to see how this tremendous thought got bogged down again and again in the welter of human folly. A shattering example of this is afforded not only by the history of the Church, but above all by Alchemy itself, which richly merited its own condemnationin ironical fulfilment of the dictum In sterquiliniis invenitur (it is found in cesspools). Agrippa von Nettesheim was not far wrong when he opined that Chymists are of all men the most perverse.190   [28] In his Mysterium Lunae, an extremely valuable study for the history of alchemical symbolism, Rahner191 mentions that the waxing and waning of the bride (Luna, Ecclesia) is based on the kenosis192 of the bridegroom, in accordance with the words of St. Ambrose:193

1.04 - ALCHEMY AND MANICHAEISM, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology   object:1.04 - Alchemy AND MANICHAEISM   author class:Carl Jung   --    (Cubricus); later he changed it to Manes, a Babylonian word meaning vessel.201 As a four-year-old boy he was sold as a slave to a rich widow. She came to love him, and later adopted him and made him her heir. Together with her wealth he inherited the serpents poison of his doctrine the four books of Scythianos, the original master of his adoptive father Terebinthos, named Budda.202 Of this Scythianos there is a legendary biography which equates him with Simon Magus;203 like him, he is said to have come to Jerusalem at the time of the apostles. He propounded a dualistic doctrine which, according to Epiphanius,204 was concerned with pairs of opposites: white and black, yellow and green, moist and dry, heaven and earth, night and day, soul and body, good and evil, right and wrong. From these books Mani concocted his pernicious heresy which poisoned the nations. Cubricus is very like the alchemical Kybrius,205 Gabricus,206 Kibrich,207 Kybrich, Kibric,208 Kybrig, Kebrick,209 Alkibric,210 Kibrit,211 Kibrith,212 Gabricius, Gabrius,213 Thabritius, Thabritis,214 and so on.215 The Arabic word kibrit means sulphur.   [32] In the Aurora consurgens sulphur nigrum stands side by side with vetula, the first being a synonym for spirit and the second for soul. Together they form a pair roughly comparable to the devil and his grandmo ther. This relationship also occurs in Rosencreutzs Chymical Wedding,216 where a black king sits beside a veiled old woman. The black sulphur is a pejorative name for the active, masculine substance of Mercurius and points to its dark, saturnine nature, which is evil.217 This is the wicked Moorish king of the Chymical Wedding, who makes the kings daughter his concubine (meretrix), the Ethiopian of other treatises,218 analogous to the Egyptian in the Passio Perpetuae,219 who from the Christian point of view is the devil. He is the activated darkness of matter, the umbra Solis (shadow of the sun), which represents the virginal-maternal prima materia. When the doctrine of the Increatum220 began to play a role in Alchemy during the sixteenth century, it gave rise to a dualism which might be compared with the Manichaean teaching.221   [33] In the Manichaean system matter (hyle) is personified by the dark, fluid, human body of the evil principle. As St. Augustine says, the substance of evil had its own hideous and formless bulk, either gross which they called earth, or thin and tenuous like the air; for they imagine it to be some malignant mind creeping over the earth.222 The Manichaean doctrine of the Anthropos shares the dual form of its Christ figure with Alchemy, in so far as the latter also has a dualistic redeemer: Christ as saviour of man (Microcosm), and the lapis Philosophorum as saviour of the Macrocosm. The doctrine presupposes on the one hand a Christ incapable of suffering (impatibilis), who takes care of souls, and on the other hand a Christ capable of suffering (patibilis),223 whose role is something like that of a spiritus vegetativus, or of Mercurius.224 This spirit is imprisoned in the body of the princes of darkness and is freed as follows by angelic beings who dwell in the sun and moon: assuming alternately male and female form they excite the desires of the wicked and cause them to break out in a sweat of fear, which falls upon the earth and fertilizes the vegetation.225 In this manner the heavenly light-material is freed from the dark bodies and passes into plant form.226   [34] The inflammation by desire has its analogy in the alchemists gradual warming of the substances that contain the arcanum. Here the symbol of the sweat-bath plays an important role, as the illustrations show.227 Just as for the Manichaeans the sweat of the archons signified rain,228 so for the alchemists sweat meant dew.229 In this connection we should also mention the strange legend reported in the Acta Archelai, concerning the apparatus which the son of the living Father invented to save human souls. He constructed a great wheel with twelve buckets which, as they revolved, scooped up the souls from the deep and deposited them on the moon-ship.230 In Alchemy the rota is the symbol of the opus circulatorium. Like the alchemists, the Manichaeans had a virago, the male virgin Joel,231 who gave Eve a certain amount of the light-substance.232 The role she plays in regard to the princes of darkness corresponds to that of Mercurius duplex, who like her sets free the secret hidden in matter, the light above all lights, the filius philosophorum. I would not venture to decide how much in these parallels is to be ascribed directly to Manichaean tradition, how much to indirect influence, and how much to spontaneous revival.   [35] Our starting-point for these remarks was the designation of the lapis as orphan, which Dorn mentions apparently out of the blue when discussing the union of opposites. The material we have adduced shows what an archetypal drama of death and rebirth lies hidden in the coniunctio, and what immemorial human emotions clash together in this problem. It is the moral task of Alchemy to bring the feminine, maternal background of the masculine psyche, seething with passions, into harmony with the principle of the spirittruly a labour of Hercules! In Dorns words:   Learn therefore, O Mind, to practise sympathetic love in regard to thine own body, by restraining its vain appetites, that it may be apt with thee in all things. To this end I shall labour, that it may drink with thee from the fountain of strength,233 and, when the two are made one, that ye find peace in their union. Draw nigh, O Body, to this fountain, that with thy Mind thou mayest drink to satiety and hereafter thirst no more after vanities. O wondrous efficacy of this fount, which maketh one of two, and peace between enemies! The fount of love can make mind out of spirit and soul, but this maketh one man of mind and body.234

1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology   disrupt the stable cosmos and to extend the domain of consciousness. It was unconscious (imagistic)   apprehension of this idea that led medieval Alchemy to treat the serpent as the arcane substance that   transformed itself inside the tree, and to regard the serpent as the trees life.454

1.04 - The Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology      C. my "Psychology of the Child Archetype"; also Psychology and Alchemy,   index, s.v. "Alius Philosophorum," "child," "hermaphrodite."   --      10 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, Part II, ch. 3. 11 [Cf. infra, par. 340.]

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Wikipedia - Alchemy

Wikipedia - Al-Jawbari -- Medieval Syrian Arab author and scholar known for his denunciation of alchemy.

Wikipedia - Cantong qi -- Earliest book on alchemy in China

Wikipedia - Category:Alchemy

Wikipedia - Chinese alchemy

Wikipedia - Doctor Alchemy -- Name of several supervillians

Wikipedia - Early Alchemy -- jazz compilation

Wikipedia - Gnome -- Diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy

Wikipedia - Internal alchemy

Wikipedia - Magnum opus (alchemy) -- Alchemical procedure for creating the philosopher's stone

Wikipedia - Multiplication (alchemy)

Wikipedia - Natural Elements (Acoustic Alchemy album) -- 1988 studio album by Acoustic Alchemy

Wikipedia - Outline of alchemy

Wikipedia - Papyrus Graecus Holmiensis -- Papyrus on alchemy

Wikipedia - Projection (alchemy)

Wikipedia - Psychology and Alchemy

Wikipedia - Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry -- British academic society

Wikipedia - SQLAlchemy

Wikipedia - Taoist alchemy

Wikipedia - Template talk:Alchemy

Wikipedia - Template talk:Islamic alchemy and chemistry

Wikipedia - The Alchemy of Happiness

Wikipedia - The Book of the Composition of Alchemy

Fullmetal Alchemist (2003 - 2004) - Edward Elric, a young, brilliant alchemist, has lost much in his twelve-year life: when he and his brother Alphonse try to resurrect their dead mother through the forbidden act of human transmutation, Edward loses his brother as well as two of his limbs. With his supreme alchemy skills, Edward binds...

Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa(2005) - Germans discover the existence of an alternate reality and try to harness its power of alchemy to further their war effort.

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Baccano! -- -- Brain's Base -- 13 eps -- Light novel -- Action Comedy Historical Mystery Supernatural -- Baccano! Baccano! -- During the early 1930s in Chicago, the transcontinental train, Flying Pussyfoot, is starting its legendary journey that will leave a trail of blood all over the country. At the same time in New York, the ambitious scientist Szilard and his unwilling aide Ennis are looking for missing bottles of the immortality elixir. In addition, a war between the mafia groups is getting worse. On board the Advena Avis, in 1711, alchemists are about to learn the price of immortality. -- -- Based on the award-winning light novels of the same name, Baccano! follows several events that initially seem unrelated, both in time and place, but are part of a much bigger story—one of alchemy, survival, and immortality. Merging these events together are the kindhearted would-be thieves, Isaac and Miria, connecting various people, all of them with their own hidden ambitions and agendas, and creating lifelong bonds and consequences for everyone involved. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America, Funimation -- 735,544 8.41

Escha & Logy no Atelier: Tasogare no Sora no Renkinjutsushi -- -- Studio Gokumi -- 12 eps -- Game -- Fantasy -- Escha & Logy no Atelier: Tasogare no Sora no Renkinjutsushi Escha & Logy no Atelier: Tasogare no Sora no Renkinjutsushi -- This world has gone through many Dusks, and is slowly nearing its end. Within this world, in the western reaches of the "Land of Dusk," there was a nation that prospered thanks to its use of alchemy. -- -- There, in order to survive the eventual arrival of the "Dusk End," the people devoted their efforts to rediscover and recreate lost alchemic technologies. Rediscovered technology from the past era was gathered in the alchemy research city known as "Central," where research was conducted on how to halt the advance of the twilight. -- -- One of the heroes is a young man who researched alchemy in Central, the other a girl living in a small town on the frontier. This girl's name is Escha. In the process of using her knowledge of ancient alchemy to help others, she was assigned to the Development Department. The young man's name is Logy. Having learned the newest alchemic techniques in Central, he requested a transfer to this understaffed town to make use of his abilities, and meets Escha when he is assigned to the Development Department as well. The two make a promise to use their alchemy together, and bring success to the Development Department. -- -- (Source: Tecmo Koei Europe) -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- TV - Apr 10, 2014 -- 55,103 6.44

Fullmetal Alchemist -- -- Bones -- 51 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Comedy Drama Fantasy Magic Military Shounen -- Fullmetal Alchemist Fullmetal Alchemist -- Edward Elric, a young, brilliant alchemist, has lost much in his twelve-year life: when he and his brother Alphonse try to resurrect their dead mother through the forbidden act of human transmutation, Edward loses his brother as well as two of his limbs. With his supreme alchemy skills, Edward binds Alphonse's soul to a large suit of armor. -- -- A year later, Edward, now promoted to the fullmetal alchemist of the state, embarks on a journey with his younger brother to obtain the Philosopher's Stone. The fabled mythical object is rumored to be capable of amplifying an alchemist's abilities by leaps and bounds, thus allowing them to override the fundamental law of alchemy: to gain something, an alchemist must sacrifice something of equal value. Edward hopes to draw into the military's resources to find the fabled stone and restore his and Alphonse's bodies to normal. However, the Elric brothers soon discover that there is more to the legendary stone than meets the eye, as they are led to the epicenter of a far darker battle than they could have ever imagined. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America, Funimation -- 1,197,219 8.15

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood -- -- Bones -- 64 eps -- Manga -- Action Military Adventure Comedy Drama Magic Fantasy Shounen -- Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood -- "In order for something to be obtained, something of equal value must be lost." -- -- Alchemy is bound by this Law of Equivalent Exchange—something the young brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric only realize after attempting human transmutation: the one forbidden act of alchemy. They pay a terrible price for their transgression—Edward loses his left leg, Alphonse his physical body. It is only by the desperate sacrifice of Edward's right arm that he is able to affix Alphonse's soul to a suit of armor. Devastated and alone, it is the hope that they would both eventually return to their original bodies that gives Edward the inspiration to obtain metal limbs called "automail" and become a state alchemist, the Fullmetal Alchemist. -- -- Three years of searching later, the brothers seek the Philosopher's Stone, a mythical relic that allows an alchemist to overcome the Law of Equivalent Exchange. Even with military allies Colonel Roy Mustang, Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye, and Lieutenant Colonel Maes Hughes on their side, the brothers find themselves caught up in a nationwide conspiracy that leads them not only to the true nature of the elusive Philosopher's Stone, but their country's murky history as well. In between finding a serial killer and racing against time, Edward and Alphonse must ask themselves if what they are doing will make them human again... or take away their humanity. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America, Funimation -- 2,372,958 9.18

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Specials -- -- Bones -- 4 eps -- Manga -- Military Adventure Drama Magic Fantasy Shounen -- Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Specials Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Specials -- Amazing secrets and startling facts are exposed for the first time in the Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood OVA Collection, a new assortment of stories set in never-before-seen corners of the FMA universe. Join Ed and Al as they chase rumors of successful human transmutation into a web of shocking family drama and lies. Sneak a glance at hidden sides of Winry and Hawkeye's personalities. Survive the frigid north with a young Izumi Curtis as she fights to gain a deeper understanding of alchemy. Explore the legendary friendship shared by Mustang and Hughes and watch them grow from military school rivals into hardened brothers transformed by the horrors of the Ishvalan War. You thought you knew the whole story. You thought all the tales were told. The Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood OVA Collection offers proof: You were wrong. -- -- (Source: FUNimation) -- -- Licensor: -- Aniplex of America, Funimation -- Special - Aug 26, 2009 -- 130,344 8.03

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Specials -- -- Bones -- 4 eps -- Manga -- Military Adventure Drama Magic Fantasy Shounen -- Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Specials Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood Specials -- Amazing secrets and startling facts are exposed for the first time in the Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood OVA Collection, a new assortment of stories set in never-before-seen corners of the FMA universe. Join Ed and Al as they chase rumors of successful human transmutation into a web of shocking family drama and lies. Sneak a glance at hidden sides of Winry and Hawkeye's personalities. Survive the frigid north with a young Izumi Curtis as she fights to gain a deeper understanding of alchemy. Explore the legendary friendship shared by Mustang and Hughes and watch them grow from military school rivals into hardened brothers transformed by the horrors of the Ishvalan War. You thought you knew the whole story. You thought all the tales were told. The Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood OVA Collection offers proof: You were wrong. -- -- (Source: FUNimation) -- Special - Aug 26, 2009 -- 130,344 8.03

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa -- -- Bones -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Military Comedy Historical Drama Fantasy Shounen -- Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa -- In desperation, Edward Elric sacrificed his body and soul to rescue his brother Alphonse, and is now displaced in the heart of Munich, Germany. He struggles to adapt to a world completely foreign to him in the wake of the economic crisis that followed the end of World War I. Isolated and unable to return home with his alchemy skills, Edward continues to research other methods of escaping the prison alongside colleagues who bear striking resemblances to many of the people he left behind. As dissent brews among the German citizenry, its neighbors also feel the unrest of the humiliated nation. -- -- Meanwhile, Alphonse continues to investigate Edward's disappearance, delving into the science of alchemy in the hopes of finally reuniting with his older brother. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Jul 23, 2005 -- 285,281 7.56

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa -- -- Bones -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Military Comedy Historical Drama Fantasy Shounen -- Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa -- In desperation, Edward Elric sacrificed his body and soul to rescue his brother Alphonse, and is now displaced in the heart of Munich, Germany. He struggles to adapt to a world completely foreign to him in the wake of the economic crisis that followed the end of World War I. Isolated and unable to return home with his alchemy skills, Edward continues to research other methods of escaping the prison alongside colleagues who bear striking resemblances to many of the people he left behind. As dissent brews among the German citizenry, its neighbors also feel the unrest of the humiliated nation. -- -- Meanwhile, Alphonse continues to investigate Edward's disappearance, delving into the science of alchemy in the hopes of finally reuniting with his older brother. -- -- Movie - Jul 23, 2005 -- 285,281 7.56

Ta ga Tame no Alchemist -- -- Satelight -- 1 ep -- Game -- Action Adventure Magic Fantasy -- Ta ga Tame no Alchemist Ta ga Tame no Alchemist -- The game is set in the continent of Babel, where the Tower of Babel looms large over seven nations. After the invention of alchemy led to its use as a tool of war that brought humanity to the brink of extinction, the seven nations struck an uneasy peace that led to a prohibition on alchemy for hundreds of years since. In the Continental Year 911, the nation of Lustrice broke the pact by assembling an army bolstered by alchemy, with ambitions of conquest over the continent. Led by Envylia, the six nations allied and struck down the rogue nation, casting alchemy once again to darkness. But 20 years after the war, alchemy once again begins to cause chaos in the land. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- Movie - Jun 14, 2019 -- 8,105 6.45

Trinity Seven Movie 1: Eternity Library to Alchemic Girl -- -- Seven Arcs Pictures -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Comedy Ecchi Fantasy Harem Magic Romance School Shounen -- Trinity Seven Movie 1: Eternity Library to Alchemic Girl Trinity Seven Movie 1: Eternity Library to Alchemic Girl -- The film's story begins when Arata inadvertently touches "Hermes Apocrypha," Lilith's Grimoire. Suddenly, he is enveloped by a bright white light, and a girl appears before him. She calls herself Lilim, and treats both Arata and Lilith as her parents. At the same time she appears, something changes in the world. The forbidden Eternal Library awakens. In the Library is sealed the ultimate culmination of Alchemy, the White Demon Lord. The White Demon Lord plots to eliminate Arata and the Trinity Seven to usurp the position of Demon Lord. Bristling with untold power, the White Demon Lord attacks Arata, and triggers a desperate crisis where Arata and the Trinity Seven must save the world in this last battle. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- Movie - Feb 25, 2017 -- 129,344 7.26

Ulysses: Jehanne Darc to Renkin no Kishi -- -- AXsiZ -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Action Fantasy -- Ulysses: Jehanne Darc to Renkin no Kishi Ulysses: Jehanne Darc to Renkin no Kishi -- The story is set in the 15th century, during the Hundred Years' War between France and England over the succession to the French throne. Montmorency, the son of a noble, immerses himself in the studies of magic and alchemy at a royal knight training school. However, following France's crushing defeat at Agincourt, the school is dissolved. Having lost everything and now a wanted man, Montmorency, who had just become an alchemist, encounters a mysterious village girl named Jehanne. -- -- (Source: MAL News) -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 76,100 5.34

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Acoustic Alchemy

Against the Grain (Acoustic Alchemy album)

A Kind of Alchemy

Alchemy

Alchemy and chemistry in the medieval Islamic world

AlchemyAPI

Alchemy (company)

Alchemy: Dire Straits Live

Alchemy (disambiguation)

Alchemy (event)

Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival

Alchemy in art and entertainment

Alchemy (Leah Andreone album)

Alchemy (microarchitecture)

Alchemy (novel)

Alchemy Records

Alchemy (Yngwie Malmsteen album)

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab

Body Alchemy

Chinese alchemy

Digestion (alchemy)

Doctor Alchemy

Experiments in Alchemy

Indian alchemy

Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy

MY Alchemy

New Alchemy Institute

Outline of alchemy

Projection (alchemy)

Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry

SQLAlchemy

Suns in alchemy

The Alchemy Index

The Alchemy Index Vols. I & II

The Alchemy Index Vols. III & IV

The Alchemy of Happiness

The Alchemy of Race and Rights

The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

The Book of the Composition of Alchemy