Light that Can Be Seen with the Ears

“Light seen with the ears” is, of course, “light heard with the ears”. We begin to understand that this “light” could cover a spectrum of frequencies much wider than the simple visual range. So, you know that, in addition to the humid paths, there are also dry metallurgical paths.

We are, indeed. In many humid paths, the Mercurius that emerges from the blackness of putrefaction is in fact called “light coming out of the darkness”, but in metallurgical environments this does not happen. Although many alchemists have called Mercurius “light”, as the white coming out of black, this does not occur in metallurgical paths. This aspect has often disoriented alchemists who dedicate themselves only to a specific method. Also for this reason, but not only for this, alchemists prefer to treat their Mercurius more generically as “water fallen from the sky”.

We said that in humid streets the whiteness, or even glow, which announces the reaching of Mercurius is called “light that comes out of the darkness”. But the conquest of Mercurius in metallurgy is completely different.

The conquest of Mercurius in metallurgy is announced by strange sounds like creaks or whistles. This is the light that alchemists can see with their ears.

Not strictly. Like the white or glow of the humid paths could not be defined as Mercurius, but only as its announcement.

The only misleading thing is the univocal meaning given to the word “light” in Alchemy.

So even the persistence of the word “watery” takes on its own meaning.

Because, in Alchemy, water represents everything that flows. In fact, alchemists do speak of “upper waters and lower waters” when they mean those that even theurgists define as “spirits”.

No, I’ve never heard of that. Alchemists pay particular attention to the sounds of nature, of the matter they are working with and of what is happening around them.

I’m Venetian, so I can confirm those strange collecting. But, generally, alchemists steer clear of anything that involves too direct interaction between humans and what are known as “forces” beyond their control. Too much mental strength is involved. Alchemists pay particular attention to the sounds of nature, of the matter they are working with and of what is happening around them. I’ll give you an example: in Die Sonne von Osten, 1783, we can read: “Hermetic Philosophers say that their Materia is being born like the thunder and leaves behind similar signs”. Actually, they speak of thunder and not lightning, which is no small difference.

I wouldn’t be surprised. Alchemists say that their art/science was born perfect at the dawn of time and then deteriorated over the millennia.

The sacred places of antiquity are almost all built over underground watercourses.

As could the Mercurius, for that matter. Indeed, if it were not weakly electric, how could it dissolve gold by simply immersing it?

Let us remember that some ritual objects very similar to primitive Leyden jars have been found during archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia, which suggests that low electricity was used during rituals.

And also in Egypt they did, and their use is still an enigma to archaeologists. Even more puzzling that in Egypt these oblong pieces of quartz were found at the end of the so-called ventilation shaIs of the pyramid of Cheops. More specifically, three of them were almost completely uprooted, leaving only traces of what they may have been originally, while one was found damaged but not enough to not be able to understand that it was an object that today we would call a lens. Even more interestingly, the ventilation ducts of the Great Pyramid do not run in a straight line. In fact, they have been called air carriers. In fact, at least two of the air ducts curve above the grand staircase leading to what is called the “kingʼs chamber”. It is therefore difficult to think that these quartz lenses were intended to be used for light rays propagating in a straight path. In any case, the ventilation ducts lead directly to four star coordinates, amomg them the north star and Sirius.

In Alchemy, talking about frequencies is always a sticky topic. Anyway, Indeed, this could be. Among the properties of an elongated quartz object there is also the possibility of being a frequency receiver.

Indeed, this could be. Today we know that an elongated quartz object, when compressed or struck in some way, emits a mild form of electricity, called piezoelectricity. I guess that just as a modern radio receiver tuned to exactly the same frequency as a transmitter, it behaves as if it were connected to the transmitter by some invisible medium, so the ancient quartz “lenses” would need a connection between them and the original bodily form from which the frequency was taken. In the alchemical field, all assumptions are open considering air (the classic medium of connection), water, the Mercurius of the alchemists, the Spiritus Mundi, the Anima Mundi, the stars, the moon, the sun, colloidal beings and even rocks. And the waterways, of course.

By “astral rays” of light the Renaissance alchemists meant the “agents” of Anima Mundi, soul of the world. Note that the word “agent” in Alchemy means “that which acts upon that which is acted upon”. Mind that Anima Mundi is a different entity from Spiritus Mundi, but we’ll see that later..

When speaking of the rays of light let through the openings in closed spaces, we must divide into different cases: they could be “celebrations” of historical or calendar cycles; they could be symbolic representations of the plastic possibility of “radiant” entities; they could be “activating” wave-particle functions and, alchemically so to speak, causing tangible effects on “radiant” entities. In conclusion, we should not be surprised by the “weakness” of the activation signal as Alchemy prefers weak signals.

In my opinion, this is not contradictory. We know that neither the Mercurius nor the electron cloud around the nuclei must necessarily be associated with luminous phenomena. On the other hand, Roger Bacon said that certain phenomena attributable to radiance were not strictly linked to light.

Indeed, of course, even the alchemists recognize in the moon the property of being an excellent polarizer, not only of the sun but also of the stars. What we know today as chiral molecules had an important role in Alchemy. Even if ancient alchemists obviously did not know the modern nomenclature, tradition taught them to choose only certain substances, and coincidentally dextrorotatory (or right-handed, that is, the mirror image and non-superimposable of the leI-handed
version of the same molecule). For example, the alchemists claimed that only what they called Tartarus Crudus from the barrels, or potassium bitartrate or potassium hydrogen tartrate, which is dextrorotatory, could provide the basis for their “path of tartar”. Today we know that these chiral molecules have the ability to rotate the plane of polarized light. This ability, called rotatory power, is equal in absolute value, but opposite in sign for each of the two enantiomers.

Today, we discovered that Beetles of the scarab family have been found to reflect circularly polarized light from incident unpolarized light. The ancients knew that this phenomenon led to an objectʼs invisibility. It is difficult to say whether the phenomenon in question also served purposes other than the point of view of the
human eye. In any case, it is universally known that scarabs had a sacred function in ancient Egypt; it is difficult to say whether it was only symbolic (heart memory) or practical.

I don’t think so, there is a fundamental difference between the two types of waves: the sound wave is longitudinal, that is, the vibration occurs in the same direction of propagation of the wave; the light wave is transverse and this means that the plane of vibration is always perpendicular to the direction of propagation. Polarization is a phenomenon typical of transverse waves (it is in fact unknown in acoustics) and to understand it it is enough to keep in mind the behavior of a light wave that is produced by an oscillating electromagnetic field.

Today it is accepted that all beings emit a faint luminosity, or “biophoton” emission. I had already said at the beginning that any heated matter emits photons.I have nothing further to say on the subject. Everyone can draw their own conclusions.

Letʼs say it right away, we moderns do not know what an initiation really is, apart from a tradition of gestures and movements called rituals performed by humans or imposed by humans. Those are precisely rites, the real initiation is something else. It is intriguing to note how no one was allowed to enter the labyrinth with the body – unless he was an initiate, a figure in ancient times equated to a deceased person. In the Mysteries of Demeter, it was said that both (the initiate and the deceased) would become a thing carried by the wind. The ancient Egyptians foresaw two types of initiation, the inevitable one for everyone, that is, death, and that of the sun … not better specified.

I could now make an absurd list of alchemical symbolism, but just know this: alchemists never spoke of their alchemical light as an abstract entity but as a “salt,” which for them was equivalent to defining light as a physical and tangible reality. But we’ll get to this topic later.

Personally, I think so. The Philosophersʼ Stone could be an example of the visual spectrum/sound spectrum correspondence. And this would involve some still mysterious properties of the photon. It was Schwaller de Lubitz’s obsession. But, long before him, it had been Robert Fludd’s. In the Baroque era, it was even thought that the new science of optics could replace the exhausting alchemical cooking.