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Lovers Of Old Alchemical Texts!!


Turtle

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I stumbled on this somewhere asurfin'. Beautifully illustrated photo plates of Alchemy from the 1700's. In German und Hebrew.

http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-idx?type=gallery&entity=HistSciTech001603290001&id=HistSciTech.GeheimeFiguren&posn=start&isize=M

 

Ohhhhhh boy I love this stuff!! :naughty: Enjoy! :confused:

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The alchemists were not just pre-chemistry hacks, many were doctors and well educated priests. Alchemistry was also more than pre-chemistry. it was mystical philosophy that was the precursor of modern psychology. If fact, if one uses collective human symbolism to analyse their writings and charts, they were diagramming the make-up of the unconscious mind. It may seem backwards, but their crude understanding exceeded the more narrow confines of modern ego-centric psychology.

 

In other words, when humans reach the limits of knowledge, projections from within will attempt to make-up for the short comings. For example, there are psychological tests that use ink blots. Depending on how one interprets the random blots tells the psycholgists something about what is going on inside the individual at an unconscious level. In the case of the alchemists, the true nature of chemistry was unknown in the modern or real sense, and much of what they imagined was stemming from inner unconscious projections. These projections helped map out the collective human psyche, i.e, personality software. This was true because many alchemists were doctors and priest, who were not only highly intellegent but also were psychologically healthy. They were seeking truth apart from the religion of the day.

 

For example, mercury or the mercurial serpant, quicksilver, was often a central figure. It was projected as being a union of good and evil. It was also very elusive but it could be fixed with sulfur (sulfur fires of hell) (mercury sulfide is one of the most insolubule compounds on earth). It could also be fixed by forming amalgoms with copper (Venus the goddess of love) and well as with silver (wisdom) and gold (divine spirit).

 

Being a union of opposites, it wa a projection of the inner self or the center of the unconscious mind. Mercury was analogous to natural instinct that is morally neutral at some deep level. It differntiates through religion and eduction into the polarization of good and evil. Being quicksilver, natural instinct was hard to pin down since its output is usually defined by culture as the polarized essense of good and evil.

 

They would go to the lab trying to purify mercury or natural instinct apart from its cultural modifications. They would boil and condense it as a projection of a inner self purification ritual. The boiling process symbolized an animation of the unconscious mind (polarized) and the condensation semi-rational analysis of what was going on inside to separate out natural instinct from cultural training. In the process of purifying their own inner natures, they would make note of the chemistry that was parallelling their mystical journey.

 

I remember a project I did as an engineer. It involved taking mercury out of water to meet EPA standards tens years in the future. Because this hadn't been done yet, the scientific literature was lacking. At that time, my hobby was collective human symbolism and I had read a lot about alchemy writings. The alchemists knew a lot about mercury. What I did was use their projected analysis about mercury to see what would happen.

 

I needed to fix the elusive quicksilver-mercury in the water. To Alchemists like attracts like, and this was bad mercury I used sulfur as sodium sulfide to attract the mercury, since the sulfur fires of hell would attract the evil mercury. This worked but not good enough. I needed a secondary lure. So I combined sulfure with iron to form ferric sulfide. Iron is symbolic of Mars or the god or war; another darkside of human nature. This worked better getting me down to only 2PPB, due to extra fine mercury sulfide staying in suspension making it hard to filter.

 

Since mercury was not only bad but had a good side I needed something symbolically good to fix the ferric sulfide and use this to attract the mercury and fix it. I chose an anion exchange resin, full of "positive charge". I reacted this with sulfide to make a modified cation exchange resin and used that modified resin to fix the ferric ions. When I ran the mercury water through it, I got down to <100PPT(trillion). That was the limit of the analytical equipments, so who knows.

 

Here is was alchemy being used to create the best available modern technology at that time. I remember writing a report, and being an honest scientist, I reports my alchemy method. It didn't go over too well but the tech got the job done which balanced everyone's doubt about my sanity. They must have thought I had inhaled too much mercury. I became the world expert in mercury water remediation in only three weeks using pre-chemistry.

 

I wish psychology wasn't so closed minded, since alchemy is a diamond in the rough.

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It's a pity the resolution makes it all the harder to read the Gothic script, it would take an expert with better vocab. I only dragged my eyes through Racoon's one, worth the effort but my eyes are still reeling. :warped:

 

I notice that The Name has markings for the pronunciation, I wonder how well the Rosicrucians guessed it.

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It's a pity the resolution makes it all the harder to read the Gothic script, it would take an expert with better vocab. I only dragged my eyes through Racoon's one, worth the effort but my eyes are still reeling. :)

 

I notice that The Name has markings for the pronunciation, I wonder how well the Rosicrucians guessed it.

 

:ud: Yeah, the versions at the archive I linked to are much more clear.

http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-idx?type=turn&entity=HistSciTech001603290025&isize=

Racoon's posted image is a good general example of the content and I do appreciate it as I haven't figured out how to properly make those links.

I will have to read up on the Rosicrucians to get the import of your jibe. :)

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:D I really hadn't noticed it was one of yours! Yep there's a slight difference in colouring that makes it ever so slightly easier to read. I've also looked at the arbor aurea and others but it would take a while to go through the whole thing. :(

 

I don't know all that much about the Rosicrucians either, I only noticed that these were their work. The Name also appears in other figures, with the same markings, and so does JEHOVA so I imagine that must be the pronunciation according to those markings. Disappointing, I thought they might have made a different guess from the usual one...

 

Actually I've just noticed that this seems to be a book about them but not by them, but it is from an old manuscript so figures and inscriptions presumeably would be copied.

 

In any case, thanks for the great link! :)

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