Is the contact between two links in the chain ever mentioned directly, or is it a secret?
Alchemists use to say: Like a fruit that must generate another fruit, this one has a seed. Here a new concept opens up, doubling occurs through tiny contact details and not through “printing” of similar ones.
Could the seed be analogous to the number?
The seed moves itself, grows itself. Movement and growth take place because of an intrinsic availability of the Spiritus Mundi to grow and change its state by itself, through successive expansions, as from an initial biological seed. This definition could bring seed closer to the meaning of number in mathematics.
I don’t understand these chains and transmutations very well. We’ve already said that for a modern physicist, they might be different frequencies. Can we use this frequency metaphor to better understand the concept of seed?
The seed moves itself, grows itself. Movement and growth take place because of an intrinsic availability of the Spiritus Mundi to grow and change its state by itself, through successive expansions, as from an initial biological seed. This definition could bring seed closer to the meaning of number in mathematics.
In ancient times, seeds were considered tiny copies of a formed individual.
True. The ancients believed that the biological father deposited an invisible miniature individual in the woman’s womb, which would develop if inserted into a culture medium, called “mother”. If this idea was a biological superstition, it had instead its validity in the mathematical field. Thus, alchemically, the father represents an element that, although indispensable for the offspring, is invisible and destined to always have to be “amplified”. This practice was the considered as the release of the alchemical “seed”, which, at least in theory, should be an infinitesimal double of something.
Was it precisely this idea of
The ancients believed that the biological father deposited an invisible miniature individual in the woman’s womb, which would develop if inserted into a culture medium, called “mother”. If this idea was a biological superstition, it had instead its validity in the mathematical field. Thus, alchemically, the father represents an element that, although indispensable for the offspring, is invisible and destined to always have to be “amplified”. This practice was the considered as the release of the alchemical “seed”, which, at least in theory, should be an infinitesimal double of something.
Have alchemists, who treat their seeds as if they were analogous to miniature undeveloped plant ever heard of the seeds as a sound that can be found in many Genesis myths?
Alchemists had certainly heard of it, but they could hardly understand the analogy with the sound seeds of Genesis if most of them had never successfully reached the end of the Last Cooking.
Why is there no seed more alchemical than the grain of wheat?
Once enclosed in the earth, the wheat in its aspect of seed/grain is subjected to a multiplicity of transmutations until it has completed its work. But, to crown it all, it returns the primitive seed.
Could the “seed” metaphorically represent the point of contact between one link in the alchemical chain and another?
If abstract and conjectural thinking can easily affirm the concept of alchemical “seed” as the point of contact between one link in the alchemical chain and another, more difficult to translate into technical laboratory language. However, accepting the fact that both the word “seed” and “chain link” are only symbolic conventions, we must recognize that the metaphor is suitable for correct developments.
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