Tag: alchemy
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Building an Alchemical Incubator: Modern Heat for Ancient Work
In our series on spagyric alchemy, we mentioned the benefits of letting an alchemical preparation extract or mature at a consistent temperature. In herbal spagyrics, and doubly so for more advanced types of alchemy, there is a distinct benefit to being able to hold the work at some prescribed temperature for a long period of…
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Planetary Hours: Unlocking Celestial Timing for Magic
I’ve referred a couple times now to planetary hours, or doing a working “in the day and hour” of a particular planetary power. What is a planetary hour, and how do we find them? In short, a planetary hour is a particular time that is viewed as having a special affinity for some celestial power.…
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Ink Making II: Carbon Black Ink Revisited
In the last ink-making post, I shared an experiment making carbon black ink – specifically with vine charcoal. The results were disappointing; the ink was pale, and struggled to flow evenly from a glass dip pen. This time I tried a couple different things. First, I doubled the amount of pigment in the ink, increasing…
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Spagyric Alchemy III: Bringing It All Together
Over the course of the last couple posts, we’ve been discussing the field of alchemical spagyics: the application of alchemical principles to create plant-based medicines. In the first post, we talked about the high level theory of alchemy – solve et coagula – and different theoretical models for how that separation can be effected in…
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Spagyric Alchemy II: The Selection of Ingredients
In last week’s post, we talked about the general theory of alchemy – solve et coagula – and how it relates to the vegetable kingdom in the form of spagyric alchemy. We covered a number of different theoretical frameworks for how alchemical separation can be effected, but stopped short of actually delving into the specifics…
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Spagyric Alchemy I: Theory of Herbal Transformation
For centuries, alchemy has been seen as a transformative art – a mystical science wherein base lead is turned into gold, the mundane elevated into the extraordinary. While the scope of alchemy as a whole is huge and sprawling, many texts recommend students start first with spagyric alchemy: the application of alchemical principles to extract…
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Materia: Lemon Balm – Melissa Officinalis
Overview Lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) is an herb of gentle power, offering profound rejuvenation to body and spirit alike. Its cooling, drying energetics, combined with its uplifting nervine properties, make it a soothing remedy in times of turbulence. It calms the anxious mind, brightens melancholy, and eases digestive discomfort born of stress, embodying the nurturing…
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Ink Making I: Vine Black Ink
In the last post I discussed something of the theory of ink and ink making. Since then (while taking several weeks hiatus from new posts for the holiday season), I’ve started experimenting with ink making in actual practice. For a first attempt, I wanted to take a shot at preparing one of the oldest and…
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On Ink and Ink Making
In a previous post I wrote about my fascination with writing as it pertains to magic. An important part of this practice is the creation and use of magical inks. Up to this point, that has involved taking commercial inks and adding my own materia and consecrations to them as appropriate.1 But recently I’ve gotten…
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What They Meant Was…
One of my biggest pet peeves with modern analyses of historical texts is when an author states – with authoritative confidence – they have decoded the true meaning of a text, and that it is something only tenuously implied by the text itself. And this happens all the time with magic and occult topics. Things…