Tag: Calcination

topographia

Calcination (blackening) is the first process of “the great work” of Alchemy. Its processes are roasting, conflagration, reduction, and trituration; its element fire and its metal lead. Chemicals involved are sulfuric acid (vitriol), with an odor of “biting brimstone.” Its colors are black and magenta.

  • Hour of Lead

    Hour of Lead

    Unfortunately, we don’t get to choose the means of our transitions and transformations. What changes us is proportionate to our own nature.

  • The Hidden Seed

    The Hidden Seed

    Devastating losses in the temporal world have led to corresponding psychological losses, so that a person experiences a state of nearly complete loss of ego identity and identification with the material world.

  • The Slime of the Small World

    The Slime of the Small World

    These depressions, anxieties, compulsions, headaches, knots in the stomach, irritations, petty and not-so-petty arguments—that’s where the gold is. This is because the only way the psyche has of speaking its distress is through our symptoms.

  • From the Darkness

    From the Darkness

    Every break, every dissolution, everything that comes to an end after a time is part of the inner process of transformation. What changes outside changes the inside.

  • The Affliction of the Soul

    The Affliction of the Soul

    The beginning of anything new portends eventual difficulty for the pilgrim. We begin with hope but often lose it along the way, for what begins with romance inevitably ends with reality.