Valis' alchemical allegory

[Valis]

Pop Alchemy (part 1 of 7)

I'm working on a long article about the relations between music and alchemy.
I found 7 songs, which to me relate to the 7 stages of alchemy.
So I'll drop them all here as a reminder for myself and hopfully to entertain you.
This is still a work in progress, sit back grab a beer and enjoy.

1. calcination/saturn/fire/lead





Pop Alchemy (part 2 of 7)

2. dissolution/jupiter/water/tin

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind o...f optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for
us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few
persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."-Albert Einstein




Pop Alchemy (part 3 of 7)

3. separation/mars/air/iron

"We're gonna smoke them out of their holes"-George W




Pop Alchemy (part 4 of 7)

4. conjunction/venus/fire/copper

"Every deed done out of love takes place beyond good and evil"-Friedrich Nietzsche




Pop Alchemy (part 5 of 7)

5. fermentation/mercury/the aether

"The archetypes are our past, we are their future"- Carl Jung

Mercury,communication, death and rebirth, the connection betwen mind and body, as above so below




Pop Alchemy (part 6 of 7)

6. distillation/moon/silver

"And in my darkest moment, fetal and weeping.
The moon tells me a secret. My confidant.
'As full and bright as I am, this light is not my own
A million light reflections pass over me'

It's source is bright and endless.
She resuscitates the hopeless
Without her we are lifeless satellites drifting.

And as I pull my head out
I am without one doubt
Don't want to be down here
Soothing my narcissism I

Must crucify the ego
Before it's far too late
I pray the light lifts me out
Before I pine away.

So crucify the ego
Before it's far too late
To leave behind this place so
Negative and blind and cynical

And you will come to find
That we are all one mind
Capable of all that's
Imagined and all conceivable

Just let the light touch you
And let the words spill through
Just let them pass right through,
Bringing out our hope and reason.
Before we pine away."





Pop Alchemy (part 7 of 7)

7. coagulation/sun/gold

"In Brahmanism, we would say that
a great cycle has ended and that Brahman stirs and wakes again, or
that it falls asleep from being awake; in any case the universe which
... we experience which is an extension in space and time of its Mind
is experiencing the typical dysfunctions that take place at the end
of a cycle. You may say if you prefer, "Reality is collapsing; it's
all turning to chaos," or, with me, you may wish to say, "I feel the
dream, the dokos, lifting; I feel Maya dissolving: I am waking
up, He is waking up: I am the Dreamer: we are all the Dreamer." One
thinks here of Arthur Clarke's Overmind. "-Philip K Dick

"Infinite love is the only truth. everything else is an illusion"-David Icke

[B]

The Black Knight from Space

By John Carter

In (the book) Disneyland of the Gods, (the late) John Keel writes of the Black Knight satellite. Never mind the almanac. You won't find it listed with Sputnik or Explorer. Black Knight is the name given to a radar blip discovered in 1960. This mystery satellite was found in a polar orbit, something neither the US nor the Soviets had accomplished. It was several times larger and several times heavier than anything capable of being launched with 1960 rockets. It shouldn't have been there, but it was.

If that weren't enough, ham operators began receiving odd messages from the Black Knight. One operator decoded a series of these messages as a star map. The map centered on Epsilon Boštes as seen from the earth 13,000 years ago. Remember, stars don't move very far even after 13,000 years, and Epsilon Boštes is moving towards us. Only the neighboring stars appear different after that amount of time. Was the Black Knight an alien calling card?

Perhaps the strangest effect associated with the Black Knight is the Long Delay Echo (LDE). The effect observed is that radio or television signals sent into space bounce back seconds (or even days) later, as if recorded and retransmitted by a satellite. They didn't begin with the Black Knight, but they were part of its mystery. Keel places the earliest LDEs in the 1920s. It's not in Keel's book, but in 1974 another mystery entered earth orbit. No radar saw it. No ham operator listened to it. One man contacted it- or rather, was contacted by it. That man was science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). Dick is probably best known to the public for writing the stories on which the movies Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), and Screamers (1996) were based. Before the movies, there were the books. That's where we'll find Dick's own encounter with a Black Knight.

Beginning in February of 1974, Dick had a series of "mystic" experiences (substitute "paranormal" or "fortean" or "psychotic" if you like). When he died eight years later, he was still unsure of their origin or their meaning. Left behind was what he called the Exegesis, an 8000- page, one-million-word continuing dialogue with himself written late, late at night. This is where we go to find the Black Knight's return.

Very little of Dick's Exegesis has been published. The Black Knight material formed the core of four novels - Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. They remain in print. All four read as autobiography. The pivotal element in each is Dick's own contact with the Black Knight, which he called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, VALIS for short. In a series of visions and coincidences, VALIS revealed itself to Dick as an ancient satellite from another world. It was sent here long ago by three-eyed, crab-clawed beings from a planet orbiting Fomalhaut. They built our civilization, taught us writing and science, then returned to their own world. VALIS was left behind to prod certain individuals when civilization needed a boost. If it sounds like Von DŠniken meets Scientology, read on.

Albemuth is the name Dick gave Fomalhaut in Radio Free Albemuth. I believe he derived it from the Arabic al-Behemoth, which he took to mean "whale." Fomalhaut is the fish's mouth in the constellation of Piscis Australis, the Southern Fish. In VALIS he moved its origin to Sirius, probably after reading Robert K.G. Temple's The Sirius Mystery. He also offered an alternate name for the satellite: Zebra. He called it Zebra because of its ability to mimic its surroundings. We'll discuss that in a moment, when we return to LDEs.

Dick's contact began with a vision of St. Elmo's Fire filling his apartment. It was a strange pink flame which burned but did not consume. He says his cat saw it too. It was strongest at night. Dick would lie in bed unable to sleep, watching the light show. He compared it to a rapid-fire succession of modern paintings by the likes of Klee and Kandinsky. At one point he wondered if Soviet scientists were working with the aliens on psychotronics experiments. He thought they might be beaming images at him from a Moscow Museum. His dreams during this period took on a whole new nature, so much so that he began referring to them as tutelary dreams because of their information-rich content. He experienced numerous waking visions as well.

In some of his visions, Dick saw Soviet scientists rushing around behind the scenes to keep the alien satellite functioning. Strange texts which appeared to be Russian operating manuals were held up for him to see. The Builders, as he came to call the aliens, were sometimes seen floating in large vats of water, observing the operation. The whole complex system was apparently set up solely for his benefit!

Dick saw VALIS as a benign entity. He saw its position as teacher, sometimes protectress. (I say "protectress" rather than "protector" because VALIS reminded Dick of his twin sister Jane, who died in infancy.) He credited VALIS with taking charge of his life, recovering a lot of income due from unpaid royalties, and even re-margining his typewriter.

While listening to the radio one day, Dick heard the words of the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" change to a warning from VALIS: "Your son has an undiagnosed right inguinal hernia. The hydrocele has burst, and it has descended into the scrotal sac. He requires immediate attention, or will soon die." Dick rushed him to the hospital and found every word to be true. The doctor scheduled the operation for the same day.

Dick occasionally heard other, less positive messages from his radio at night, even when it was turned off. Admittedly, hearing voices and claiming harassment from an energy beam are symptoms of mental illness, but there seems to be something more at work here. Anybody can claim crazy, incredible things, but only Philip K. Dick produced works of art because of it. In the end, though, he may have overexposed himself to it. As he hinted in VALIS, too much of a good thing can kill you.

Dick had another vision. He saw the pink St. Elmo's fire coalesce into a door perfectly proportioned to the Golden Mean. Through the door he saw ancient Greece, or some other Mediterranean land. He later regretted never stepping through it. This brings us full circle to the subject of Long Delay Echoes. As Dick sat staring at the Y in an ICHTHYS sticker in his window one afternoon, he pondered these strange occurrences. As he did, he saw first-century Rome fade in and remain superimposed on top of 1974 California. The experience lasted through February and March. He still knew which was the vision and which was real, but when he looked away and then looked back, Rome was still there.

The message he decided VALIS was sending him is that we still live in Roman times. Nothing has changed, we still live under the rule of a cruelly corrupt empire, and the Christian apocalypse is near. VALIS predicted the downfall of a King. Nixon left office soon after. As Dick said in VALIS, "The Empire Never Ended." This catch-phrase was made known to him in one of his tutelary dreams.

If this concept of one "reality" superimposed onto another is difficult to conceptualize, let's consider a parallel from more orthodox (!) sources. Without trying to establish or deny its validity, the field of psychic archeology tries to do exactly what Dick had happen to him. This is akin to remote viewing with a time element involved, rather than one of space. This author is in possession of a small number of unpublished correspondence describing others' experiences of this phenomenon. One called the satellite "Max." Dick was not the only one.

Though Dick's vision of Rome faded, his tutelary dreams continued for six more years. So did the AI voice (Artificial Intelligence), a soft feminine voice he heard in times of stress and during hypnagogic revery. This was the aspect of VALIS which reminded him of his late twin sister Jane. He claimed to have first heard it during a high school physics exam (it gave him the answers) 25 years earlier. During the VALIS days it told him, "The Head Apollo is about to return. St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before. The Buddha is in the park. Siddhartha sleeps (but is going to awaken). The time you have waited for has come." It's in The Exegesis. Dick quoted it in VALIS.

It all appeared to end November 17, 1980. Dick claimed to have had a theophany that day, though witnesses noticed nothing unusual. Dick suddenly comprehended God as infinite, by nature incomprehensible. In other words, the Exegesis would never solve anything because there was no answer to be had. Dick actually stopped writing for a time because of this, but was at it again before too long. It was the search that was important to him, after all. He wrote The Divine Invasion around this time, which was when the voice finally stopped.

Dick persisted in speculating for the remaining year of his life, and managed to produce one more novel before the end - the posthumously-published The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Dick suffered the first of several strokes in February 1982 and died a few days later in the hospital, on March 2. He was 53.

www.excludedmiddle.com/valisknight.htm

Article courtesy of Nanabird at PID Miss Him

[P(D)enny La(i)ne]

Feb 16, 2010 10:27:44 GMT -5 B said:

The Black Knight from Space

By John Carter

In (the book) Disneyland of the Gods, (the late) John Keel writes of the Black Knight satellite. Never mind the almanac. You won't find it listed with Sputnik or Explorer. Black Knight is the name given to a radar blip discovered in 1960. This mystery satellite was found in a polar orbit, something neither the US nor the Soviets had accomplished. It was several times larger and several times heavier than anything capable of being launched with 1960 rockets. It shouldn't have been there, but it was.

If that weren't enough, ham operators began receiving odd messages from the Black Knight. One operator decoded a series of these messages as a star map. The map centered on Epsilon Boštes as seen from the earth 13,000 years ago. Remember, stars don't move very far even after 13,000 years, and Epsilon Boštes is moving towards us. Only the neighboring stars appear different after that amount of time. Was the Black Knight an alien calling card?

Perhaps the strangest effect associated with the Black Knight is the Long Delay Echo (LDE). The effect observed is that radio or television signals sent into space bounce back seconds (or even days) later, as if recorded and retransmitted by a satellite. They didn't begin with the Black Knight, but they were part of its mystery. Keel places the earliest LDEs in the 1920s. It's not in Keel's book, but in 1974 another mystery entered earth orbit. No radar saw it. No ham operator listened to it. One man contacted it- or rather, was contacted by it. That man was science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). Dick is probably best known to the public for writing the stories on which the movies Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), and Screamers (1996) were based. Before the movies, there were the books. That's where we'll find Dick's own encounter with a Black Knight.

Beginning in February of 1974, Dick had a series of "mystic" experiences (substitute "paranormal" or "fortean" or "psychotic" if you like). When he died eight years later, he was still unsure of their origin or their meaning. Left behind was what he called the Exegesis, an 8000- page, one-million-word continuing dialogue with himself written late, late at night. This is where we go to find the Black Knight's return.

Very little of Dick's Exegesis has been published. The Black Knight material formed the core of four novels - Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. They remain in print. All four read as autobiography. The pivotal element in each is Dick's own contact with the Black Knight, which he called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, VALIS for short. In a series of visions and coincidences, VALIS revealed itself to Dick as an ancient satellite from another world. It was sent here long ago by three-eyed, crab-clawed beings from a planet orbiting Fomalhaut. They built our civilization, taught us writing and science, then returned to their own world. VALIS was left behind to prod certain individuals when civilization needed a boost. If it sounds like Von DŠniken meets Scientology, read on.

Albemuth is the name Dick gave Fomalhaut in Radio Free Albemuth. I believe he derived it from the Arabic al-Behemoth, which he took to mean "whale." Fomalhaut is the fish's mouth in the constellation of Piscis Australis, the Southern Fish. In VALIS he moved its origin to Sirius, probably after reading Robert K.G. Temple's The Sirius Mystery. He also offered an alternate name for the satellite: Zebra. He called it Zebra because of its ability to mimic its surroundings. We'll discuss that in a moment, when we return to LDEs.

Dick's contact began with a vision of St. Elmo's Fire filling his apartment. It was a strange pink flame which burned but did not consume. He says his cat saw it too. It was strongest at night. Dick would lie in bed unable to sleep, watching the light show. He compared it to a rapid-fire succession of modern paintings by the likes of Klee and Kandinsky. At one point he wondered if Soviet scientists were working with the aliens on psychotronics experiments. He thought they might be beaming images at him from a Moscow Museum. His dreams during this period took on a whole new nature, so much so that he began referring to them as tutelary dreams because of their information-rich content. He experienced numerous waking visions as well.

In some of his visions, Dick saw Soviet scientists rushing around behind the scenes to keep the alien satellite functioning. Strange texts which appeared to be Russian operating manuals were held up for him to see. The Builders, as he came to call the aliens, were sometimes seen floating in large vats of water, observing the operation. The whole complex system was apparently set up solely for his benefit!

Dick saw VALIS as a benign entity. He saw its position as teacher, sometimes protectress. (I say "protectress" rather than "protector" because VALIS reminded Dick of his twin sister Jane, who died in infancy.) He credited VALIS with taking charge of his life, recovering a lot of income due from unpaid royalties, and even re-margining his typewriter.

While listening to the radio one day, Dick heard the words of the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" change to a warning from VALIS: "Your son has an undiagnosed right inguinal hernia. The hydrocele has burst, and it has descended into the scrotal sac. He requires immediate attention, or will soon die." Dick rushed him to the hospital and found every word to be true. The doctor scheduled the operation for the same day.

Dick occasionally heard other, less positive messages from his radio at night, even when it was turned off. Admittedly, hearing voices and claiming harassment from an energy beam are symptoms of mental illness, but there seems to be something more at work here. Anybody can claim crazy, incredible things, but only Philip K. Dick produced works of art because of it. In the end, though, he may have overexposed himself to it. As he hinted in VALIS, too much of a good thing can kill you.

Dick had another vision. He saw the pink St. Elmo's fire coalesce into a door perfectly proportioned to the Golden Mean. Through the door he saw ancient Greece, or some other Mediterranean land. He later regretted never stepping through it. This brings us full circle to the subject of Long Delay Echoes. As Dick sat staring at the Y in an ICHTHYS sticker in his window one afternoon, he pondered these strange occurrences. As he did, he saw first-century Rome fade in and remain superimposed on top of 1974 California. The experience lasted through February and March. He still knew which was the vision and which was real, but when he looked away and then looked back, Rome was still there.

The message he decided VALIS was sending him is that we still live in Roman times. Nothing has changed, we still live under the rule of a cruelly corrupt empire, and the Christian apocalypse is near. VALIS predicted the downfall of a King. Nixon left office soon after. As Dick said in VALIS, "The Empire Never Ended." This catch-phrase was made known to him in one of his tutelary dreams.

If this concept of one "reality" superimposed onto another is difficult to conceptualize, let's consider a parallel from more orthodox (!) sources. Without trying to establish or deny its validity, the field of psychic archeology tries to do exactly what Dick had happen to him. This is akin to remote viewing with a time element involved, rather than one of space. This author is in possession of a small number of unpublished correspondence describing others' experiences of this phenomenon. One called the satellite "Max." Dick was not the only one.

Though Dick's vision of Rome faded, his tutelary dreams continued for six more years. So did the AI voice (Artificial Intelligence), a soft feminine voice he heard in times of stress and during hypnagogic revery. This was the aspect of VALIS which reminded him of his late twin sister Jane. He claimed to have first heard it during a high school physics exam (it gave him the answers) 25 years earlier. During the VALIS days it told him, "The Head Apollo is about to return. St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before. The Buddha is in the park. Siddhartha sleeps (but is going to awaken). The time you have waited for has come." It's in The Exegesis. Dick quoted it in VALIS.

It all appeared to end November 17, 1980. Dick claimed to have had a theophany that day, though witnesses noticed nothing unusual. Dick suddenly comprehended God as infinite, by nature incomprehensible. In other words, the Exegesis would never solve anything because there was no answer to be had. Dick actually stopped writing for a time because of this, but was at it again before too long. It was the search that was important to him, after all. He wrote The Divine Invasion around this time, which was when the voice finally stopped.

Dick persisted in speculating for the remaining year of his life, and managed to produce one more novel before the end - the posthumously-published The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Dick suffered the first of several strokes in February 1982 and died a few days later in the hospital, on March 2. He was 53.

www.excludedmiddle.com/valisknight.htm

Article courtesy of Nanabird at PID Miss Him

Great.

I JUST started a new book last night that I was really looking forward to, and now I have to re-read Valis.

[P(D)enny La(i)ne]

A few months ago, Fortean Times had a very interesting story about Philip K. Dick.

www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/2860/the_strange_tale_of_solarcon6.html

Dick claimed that:

There had to be an FBI file on his activities because, as he told the Bureau in the letter requesting access to it: “In the early ’fifties, two agents of the FBI, Mr George Scruggs and Mr George Smith, approached me.” Undoubtedly, one of the prime reasons why Dick attracted attention from the FBI was a series of bizarre letters he penned to the Bureau in the early 1970s, in which he described his personal knowledge of an alleged underground Nazi cabal that was attempting to covertly manipulate science fiction writers to further advance its hidden cause.

And the nature of that cause was even more bizarre: to initiate a Third World War by infecting the American population with syphilis.

...several months ago I was approached by an individual who I have reason to believe belonged to a covert organization involved in politics, illegal weapons, etc., who put great pressure on me to place coded information in future novels ‘to be read by the right people here and there’, as he phrased it. I refused to do this.”

“The reason why I am contacting you about this now is that it now appears that other science fiction writers may have been so approached by other members of this obviously Anti-American organization and may have yielded to the threats and deceitful statements such as were used on me. Therefore I would like to give you any and all information and help I can regarding this, and I ask that your nearest office contact me as soon as possible.

“I stress the urgency of this because within the last three days I have come across a well-distributed science fiction novel which contains in essence the vital material which this individual confronted with me as the basis for encoding. That novel is CAMP CONCENTRATION by Thomas Disch, which was published by Doubleday & Co.

So of course, I just HAD to read Camp Concentration, and on top of it being a terrific book, it also plays into our little drama.

It was published in 1968.

Here's a synopsis:

Thomas M. Disch is one of the overlooked masters of science fiction, and Camp Concentration is one of his finest novels. The unlikely hero of this piece is Louis Sacchetti, an overweight poet who's serving a five-year prison term for being a "conchie," or conscientious objector, to the ongoing war being fought by the United States.

Three months into his sentence, Sacchetti is mysteriously taken from prison and brought to Camp Archimedes, an underground compound run by General Humphrey Haast. This is the so-called "camp concentration" of the book's title, a strange oubliette where inmates are infected with a special strain of syphilis that will raise their intelligence to astounding levels, as it gradually kills them over the course of nine months.

Sacchetti's job is to chronicle the goings-on at Archimedes in a daily journal that is sent to Haast and other select members of the project. Through his writings, readers get to know the various characters that inhabit the camp, geniuses whose intellectual fires burn brightly even while their bodies slowly go cold. Although these latter-day Einsteins are supposed to be thinking up new ways of killing the enemy, most of the inmates are instead focusing their studies on alchemy, which Haast hopes will allow them to discover the secret of immortality.

Eventually, Sacchetti realizes that he's been infected as well, and that he is destined to die a horrible death.

SPOILER ALERT!

The surprise ending is that the inmates have secretly discovered how to implant the the consciousness of one individual into the dead body of another, thus granting immortality. So, Sacchetti startlingly finds himself in a new body at the very end of the book.

Fouis Facchetti?

[P(D)enny La(i)ne]

Did Philip K. Dick Disclose the Matrix in 1977?

[Valis]

excerpt from the PKD Exegesis 2-25-1980

"There is a direct causal relationship between karma and the Black Iron Prison.
You are released from karma (heimarmane) and see the world you have been in as it is, as the Black Iron Prison the basic conditions of which are ignorance (involvement in delusion) and slavery (domination by causality).
This karma extends over a series of lifetimes.
When released from it ignorance gives way to enlightenment and you see the world as illusory and yet at the same time that it has been the prison.
Then the prison departs, karma having been burned up, and the absolute is visible, which seems to be a cosmic being (perhaps the Dharmakaya Buddha).
After that you are in the Palm Tree Garden which I suppose to be nirvana.
This all seems to be Sankara-Buddhism.
So the twin conditions of karma are: enslavement and ignorance; i.e. the Prison and delusion.
The opposite of this is freedom and waking up (enlightment) and an abolition of the delusional.
There is a communion with a cosmic being which is neither matter nor mind but something else.
All reality--the totality of everything-- is contained in this cosmic being.
correction: "It is neither mind or matter--nor something different from them both" (The Dharmakaya Buddha or Diamond Body of the Trikaya bodies).

[Valis]

"There is another-- and a melancholy, but necessarily so-- dimension to this simulated world, a determenism, a programming that I call by the gnostic term heimarmene.
You are totally programmed by the twin tapes and the re-created sequences, which is to say world, fed to you by Valis.
Everything must unfold as it originally unfolded when there was a real world and you were alive (at which time there was not this absolute determenism).
Now you are on tape, and, like a tape or LP played back, unless something goes wrong, it will always unfold exactly as it unfolded originally, in the genuine world that is now gone."

philipkdick.com/new_ex-thereisanother.html

[Valis]

We've come a long way since PKD died 28 years ago.
So the oppression comes from ignorance and enslavement.

Well since Al Gore invented the internet we have all the tools to know better.
And now that we can know that we are spirits in this frozen quantum wave world we can laugh off all tricks our own dark side pulls off to try to enslave us.

You may say that I'm a dreamer...

All Love jan

[P(D)enny La(i)ne]

May 18, 2010 14:35:32 GMT -5 Valis said:

We've come a long way since PKD died 28 years ago.
So the oppression comes from ignorance and enslavement.

Well since Al Gore invented the internet we have all the tools to know better.
And now that we can know that we are spirits in this frozen quantum wave world we can laugh off all tricks our own dark side pulls off to try to enslave us.

You may say that I'm a dreamer...

All Love jan

The empire never ended.

[Valis]

Our mind still has to figure out the empire never existed, except in that matrixmind

"Those who look outside dream, those who look inside awaken"-Huxley

"by "world" we mean nothing more or less than Mind -- the immanent Mind which thinks -- or rather dreams -- our world. That dreamer, like the dreamer in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, is stirring and about to come to consciousness. We are within that dream; these manifold dreams are about to fold into themselves, to disappear as dreams, to be replaces by the true landscape of the dreamer's reality. We will join him as he sees it once again and is aware that he has been dreaming. In Brahmanism, we would say that a great cycle has ended and that Brahman stirs and wakes again, or that it falls asleep from being awake; in any case the universe which we experience which is an extension in space and time of its Mind is experiencing the typical dysfunctions that take place at the end of a cycle. You may say if you prefer, "Reality is collapsing; it's all turning to chaos," or, with me, you may wish to say, "I feel the dream, the dokos, lifting; I feel Maya dissolving: I am waking up, He is waking up: I am the Dreamer: we are all the Dreamer." One thinks here of Arthur Clarke's Overmind. "-PKD

[iameye]

The empire never ended.



[/quote]

It was a trilogy.


alchemy
mid-14c., from O.Fr. alkemie, from M.L. alkimia, from Arabic al-kimiya, from Gk. khemeioa (found c.300 C.E. in a decree of Diocletian against "the old writings of the Egyptians"), all meaning "alchemy." Perhaps from an old name for Egypt (Khemia, lit. "land of black earth," found in Plutarch), or from Gk. khymatos "that which is poured out," from khein "to pour," related to khymos "juice, sap." The word seems to have elements of both origins.*
Mahn ... concludes, after an elaborate investigation, that Gr. khymeia was probably the original, being first applied to pharmaceutical chemistry, which was chiefly concerned with juices or infusions of plants; that the pursuits of the Alexandrian alchemists were a subsequent development of chemical study, and that the notoriety of these may have caused the name of the art to be popularly associated with the ancient name of Egypt. [OED]

The al- is the Arabic definite article, "the." The art and the name adopted by the Arabs from Alexandrians and thence returned to Europe via Spain. Alchemy was the "chemistry" of the Middle Ages and early modern times; since c.1600 applied distinctively to the pursuit of the transmutation of baser metals into gold, which, along with the search for the universal solvent and the panacea, were the chief occupations of early chemistry.


* also of note, Khem was the ancient Egyptian god of fertility.

[Valis]

After consciously studying Alchemy and Magick for 10 years it feels like I've graduated.
Time to put it in practice in everything I do, say, think and feel.

It's funny that I "coincidentally" wrote about Alchemy in a schoolpaper for the second year of the gymnasium back in 1989, over 20 years ago.
I just came across that paper again a few weeks ago, one of the few relics I still have from those days.

Our assignment was to write a paper about a museum.
So I chose the Groningen tobacco and seafaring museum.
Funny enough they had an 8 week exposition on alchemy with a rebuild alchemylaboratorium.

After a huge struggle with my scanner and photobucket here are the first 4 pages of the report, page 5 are pics of the rebuild lab.

s266.photobucket.com/albums/ii266/valis1979/alchemy/

The report is ofcourse written in Dutch, one day I'll translate it.
Page 4 is on alchemy, most of you can't read dutch but will get the gist while looking at the text.

I was tempted to use gloves handling these historical documents of my personal past

Strangely enough this tobaccomuseum was in the news just last week. The owner, our local tobaccofactory, closes it since they feel it is no longer of these times.
historiek.net/museum/niemeyer-tabaksmuseum-sluit-deuren-3614

Let's replace it with an alchemymuseum...oh no I mean an alchemical reality.

"White labs are cooking up the silver ghost"

[iameye]

"White labs are cooking up the silver ghost"

egg-zactly