How To Practice Spiritual Alchemy

Spiritual alchemy is an ancient occult discipline that aims to free the soul from its physical bonds. Let's take a closer look at each of the seven stages.

What are the 7 stages of spiritual alchemy?

Calcination is the process of heating and decomposing raw stuff – or, to put it another way, breaking down elements of ourselves that are impeding our enjoyment. We often prefer to be correct or achieve an ideal of “perfection” above being actually happy, so we continue to disregard self-exploration.

Calcination is the stage in our lives when we begin to dismantle our egos, self-doubt, stubbornness, self-destructive conduct, pride, and arrogance and put them aside in order to discover what is beneath.

What is spiritual alchemy?

Do you consider yourself a Spiritual Alchemist? Alchemy is about much more than turning metal into gold. It is the act of transforming oneself from the inside out. By aligning our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with our best and most true selves, we can all alter our lives. The search for spirit in matter was the ancient art of alchemy. It is a technique of improving your own relationship with the divine component of existence in modern living. The greatest achievement of alchemy is the creation of a link between our inner and outward worlds. While physical alchemy is concerned with changing and modifying physical properties, spiritual alchemy is concerned with liberating your spiritual self from anxieties, restrictive belief systems, and a lack of self-acceptance. Alchemy is the art of change, transformation, and inner emancipation.

In our yoga practice, we are taught about gaining enlightenment. The ultimate stage of change – the gold – in spiritual alchemy is to be in a state of enlightenment, or soulful consciousness. One can release themselves from fundamental wounds, restricting core beliefs, and other thinking processes and behaviors that hurt the soul through introspection and self-meditation.

1. Calcination: Reconnecting to our natural state of being by breaking down our egos, self-doubt, self-sabotaging conduct, and pride.

2. Dissolution: Taking a step back and seeing oneself, both positive and negative aspects, and refusing to let either determine our sense of self.

3. Distancing: Distinguishing our true thoughts and emotions from those we've been taught to think and feel. This allows us to perceive ourselves more clearly and explore our shadow work in more depth.

4. Conjunction: Allowing our unconscious thoughts to arise so that we can view them with conscious awareness is the fourth step.

5. Fermentation: Fermentation is the initial step in the regeneration process. Through inner calm, stillness, and introspection, it is both the death of our old thoughts, patterns, and beliefs and the early stages of the birth of our highest self.

6. Distillation: A higher level of purification requires us to seek inner calm in the ordinary events of our lives. The state of illumination is another name for this stage.

7. Coagulation: The universe is no longer independent from the inner thought or spiritual reality, but rather a reflection of it in this state. We produce what we think.

Gold

The Sun is the celestial body that Gold represents. Ancient Egyptians, Irish, Romans, Asians, Africans, and Central Americans all prized this metal. It was thought to symbolize perfection and purity. Gold was frequently utilized as a god's offering and for ceremonial purposes. Gold has long been seen as a sign of wealth, prosperity, authority, and allure over the world. Healing, protection, growth, and knowledge are all things that it can help with.

Copper

Venus is the planet that governs copper. It is one of humanity's oldest metals, and it has long been revered in cultures as diverse as Native American, Asian, European, South American, and Middle Eastern. Copper represents women's nurturing qualities as well as their divine feminine energy. It represents charisma, beauty, creative inventiveness, tenderness, kindness, and equilibrium, and is related with love and lust.

Silver

The Moon is associated with silver. It is one of the oldest and most versatile metals known to man. It's linked to intuition, self-reflection, and inner wisdom as philosophical attributes. It's a feminine metal that's associated with divine goddesses and feminine spirits, and it's a symbol of purity. Protection, emotional healing, love and heart healing, ancient wisdom, lucid dreams, luck, and money are some of its potent healing properties. Clarity, awareness, focus, persistence, and internal knowing and strength are all aided by it.

How do I learn alchemy?

Crafting potions (experience is provided according on the worth of the potion you generate), paying skill trainers, reading skill books, and performing specified miscellaneous tasks are the four ways to level your Alchemy Skill.

However, before you start focusing on improving your Alchemy talent, you need look for The Thief Stone, which can be discovered among the Guardian Stones southwest of Riverwood. Activating this stone speeds up the leveling of Alchemy (and other talents) by 20%. You need also make sure you have the Well Rested buff for a 10% boost or the Lover's Comfort buff for a 15% boost (gained by sleeping with your spouse).

How do you know if you're an alchemist?

Alchemists are somewhat of like wizards. All you see when you look into the future is magic, possibilities, and world-changing ideas. They take outlandish concepts and make them a reality. Other archetypes may believe Alchemists are crazy, but a true magician is unconcerned.

Is alchemy biblical?

The link between alchemy and eschatology appears to have been particularly strong: alchemy not only confirmed biblical and other prophecies about the operations of nature and the unfolding of earthly time, but it also provided true Christians with tools with which to engage the impending Last Days, either by enduring the tribulations of the End Times or by restoring the world in its final moments. Even Martin Luther saw how alchemical labor may, in a sense, confirm prophecies about the world's fate.

What is alchemy in magic?

Alchemy is a Magic: The Gathering Arena revolving format and play mode that was released in December 2021 as a rapid and ever-evolving experience. It deliberately deviates from the metagame of Standard and other formats in order to create a unique gaming experience.

What is soul alchemy?

Soul Alchemy is the process of transforming oneself through Soul Work. We can learn to listen to the advice of Soul as Inner Wisdom by using both traditional and modern healing and inquiry tools. We must care for our bodies, minds, hearts, souls, and spirits in order to be whole.

What are the colors of alchemy?

If you were a Renaissance painter, you were almost certainly an alchemist as well. That isn't to say you spent your time trying to produce gold, but you would have been conversant with the chemistry of matter manipulation. You had to be, since there were no art stores back then, no Winsor and Newton, and you had to manufacture your own paints.

Alchemy was essentially a chemical technology to some of those artists: a practical manufacturing procedure for generating colors and other helpful substances like turpentine and varnishes. Cennino Cennini, a Florentine craftsman who wrote in 1390, explains that vermilion is “produced by alchemy, prepared in a retort,” but he doesn't bother to educate his readers how to make it because “it would be too tiresome.” Instead, he recommends purchasing it from apothecaries; however, do not purchase it ready-ground, as swindlers will combine it with brick dust.

Alchemy was more meaningful to other painters, and they employed its symbolism in their work. Alchemy and other esoteric disciplines are represented in works by Drer, Cranach, Grnewald, Giorgione, Campagnola, and Parmigianino, to name a few Northern and Italian Renaissance artists.

For artists of the period, there was no getting away from alchemy, because both painting and alchemy are inextricably linked with color. Color shifts signaled the completion of the Great Work: the synthesis of the Philosopher's Stone to alchemists. Colors have been chosen by painters since the Middle Ages for their symbolic connections rather than their beauty. In both times, color chemistry was a necessary practical skill as well as a mystical process.

Alchemy was considered desirable to any educated person in Shakespeare's time, and both he and John Donne were well-versed in it, as was Ben Jonson, despite his mockery of it in The Alchemist. Men with a practical bent often shared Jonson's skepticism: both Leonardo da Vinci and Georgius Agricola, author of the renowned metallurgical treatise De re metallica (1556), remarked that if you wanted gold, you should dig it out from the ground, not try to create it out of lead. A Siennese metal worker, Vannoccio Biringuccio, wondered why, if alchemists could make gold, they were always so poor. Even he had to acknowledge, though, that alchemy was a fantastic technique to create colors.

Alchemists tended to concentrate their efforts on brilliantly colored compounds, which was unsurprising. They believed that in order to create the Philosopher's Stone, the initial ingredients had to be transformed through a specific color sequence: black, white, yellow, purple, or red. As a result, the recipes drifted toward lead, arsenic, and antimony compounds, which can exhibit these colors.

Painters have known how to turn lead white (by making lead carbonate) and red since antiquity (lead tetroxide). Lead monoxide is a yellow pigment that was used in the Middle Ages under the name massicot. Meanwhile, arsenic sulphide may be synthesized in both yellow and orange-red forms: these were the poisonous pigments orpiment and realgar.

All of them, according to Cennino, can be created by alchemy. Vermilion, on the other hand, was one of the most enticing compounds for both artists and alchemists. It's mercury sulphide, and it's manufactured by combining the two raw materials. Cinnabar, a mineral form of the combination, was long thought to be the most powerful of all chemicals in Chinese alchemy.

In the ninth and tenth centuries, Arabic alchemists believed that all metals are made up of two basic ‘principles': sulphur and mercury. These ‘principles' are a kind of ‘ideal' version of the physical elements, much as Aristotle's elements were not exactly the same as real earth, air, fire, and water. Regardless, alchemists regarded the union of common sulphur and mercury as particularly significant.

Vermilion's synthesis was undoubtedly an alchemical breakthrough. The monk Theophilus wrote a formula in his craftsman's manual in the twelfth century that was free of alchemical jargon and mysticism. Nonetheless, his method is definitely alchemical, because he recommends far too much sulphur: these ‘wrong' numbers make sense in Arabic alchemical theory, even if a practical guy like Theophilus would have caught the error.

According to art historian Daniel Thompson, the synthesis of vermilion was crucial in medieval painting. ‘No other scientific breakthrough has had such a profound and long-lasting impact on painting practice as the invention of this color,' he claims. The alchemical meaning of vermilion may have been used in the painting itself in Grnewald's Resurrection (c.1515). The Philosopher's Stone, also known as the Red King, is created by combining alchemical Sulphur and Mercury in exact proportions (for it was reputed to be red). Grnewald depicts Christ as a vermilion-robed Red King, encircled by an astonishing halo of orange and green light—spiritual perfection embedded in the painting's fundamental substance.

The formulas for medieval pigments are rife with alchemical concepts. One vermilion prescription includes a component that appears to be useless: sal ammoniac. The inclusion of salt, on the other hand, satisfies the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus' theory that all things include three ‘principles': sulphur, mercury, and salt. These three components are also present in Cennino's recipe for mosaic gold, a golden pigment, however they are not all required (the pigment is tin sulphide). The same can be said about Naples yellow (lead antimonate), a yellow pigment that was frequently given some more salt. Even if they have little interest in goldsmithing, craftspeople like Cennino and Theophilus leave traces of alchemical theory in their workshop manuals (perhaps unknowingly).

Artists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance could never have acquired some of their most valuable pigments if it hadn't been for the alchemical search for the Philosopher's Stone. Justus von Liebig noted that it was the quest's futility that spurred chemical research: “In order to know that the Philosopher's Stone did not truly exist, it was necessary that every substance accessible be inspected and examined.” However, early color chemistry should not be viewed as merely a technological offshoot of alchemy's greater goal; rather, benchtop experimentation and philosophical and spiritual notions were inextricably linked in the minds of artists,'scientists,' artisans, and philosophers alike.

‘Paradigms and pigment recipes: vermilion, synthetic yellows, and the nature of the egg,' Zeitschrift fr Kunsttechnologie 13(1), 140. S. Bucklow, ‘Paradigms and pigment recipes: vermilion, synthetic yellows, and the nature of the egg,' Zeitschrift fr Kunsttechnologie 13(1), 140. (1999).

Il libro dell'arte (The Craftsman's Handbook), Cennino Cennini (c.1390), transl. D. V. Thompson (Dover, New York, 1960).

‘Alchemy and art,' Transactions of the Royal Institution 30, 286. J. Read, ‘Alchemy and art,' Transactions of the Royal Institution 30, 286. (1952).

The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting, D. V. Thompson (Dover, New York, 1956).

What are the three types of alchemy?

The alchemists were a diverse group of intellectuals and charlatans with two goals: to build the Philosopher's Stone (which caused lead to be transmuted into gold) and to discover the Elixir of Life (bestowing immortality on the person who possessed it). The term “alchemy” has an ambiguous origin. Greek, Arabic, and ancient Egyptian terms all have roots. There are three major lines of alchemy: Chinese, Indian, and European, all of which share some characteristics. We won't get into the philosophical or religious sides of alchemy, but we will take a look at some of the techniques created in the European stream that affected the development of chemistry.

Many of the precise methods utilized by alchemists when attempting to turn lead into gold remain hazy and unclear.

Each alchemist kept track of his data using his own code.

The procedures were kept hidden so that no one else might profit from them.

As they recorded the information they came up with, each scholars established their own set of symbols.

Many alchemists were dishonest, stealing money from noblemen by pretending to be able to turn lead into gold and then fleeing town in the middle of the night.

When the nobleman discovered the scam, he would hang the alchemist.

By the 1300s, several European kings had declared alchemy to be unlawful and imposed severe penalties on individuals who practiced it.