The Genesis on a Small Scale

… and they are three attributes with incontestably different meanings. The suspicion – or rather, the certainty – is that those who wrote about Alchemy were mostly those who had never passed the Last Cooking, so how could they describe what they had never witnessed? Furthermore, we must consider the Baroque mindset: enrich with astonishing details, not to explain but to enchant. They were more aesthetes than scientists. In conclusion, uncertainty remains.

More reasonably, it was in fact a question of repeating Genesis, in the sense of Creation.

What was frightening was the intermediate step, the necessary link between Sky/archetype and its copy Earth: the descent into hell/Tartarus. A famous alchemical saying goes: “If you don’t want to go to hell alive, you have to go there dead”.

Dealing with metals gave alchemists the safety to send metals to hell in their place. Metallic hell was the Nigredo, the black phase. But we have already seen how putrefaction was actually the most spiritual phase because it was the one that released the spirits into the air.

Dealing with metals gave alchemists the safety to send metals to hell in their place. Metallic hell was the Nigredo, the black phase. But we have already seen how putrefaction was actually the most spiritual phase because it was the one that released the spirits into the air.

Dealing with metals gave alchemists the safety to send metals to hell in their place. Metallic hell was the Nigredo, the black phase. But we have already seen how putrefaction was actually the most spiritual phase because it was the one that released the spirits into the air.

… and they are three attributes with incontestably different meanings. The suspicion – or rather, the certainty – is that those who wrote about Alchemy were mostly those who had never passed the Last Cooking, so how could they describe what they had never witnessed? Furthermore, we must consider the Baroque mindset: enrich with astonishing details, not to explain but to enchant. They were more aesthetes than scientists. In conclusion, uncertainty remains.

We have already seen in Alchemy and Modern Physics Particles, how alchemists consider time a “substance” that can take off the chains from tight molecular bonds – an operation that alchemists define as “rarefying” raw matter. In the same section, we have mentioned the photon/time interaction, so here we will not discuss modern physics.

What is new is that alchemists have shown that they consider “time” as a real alchemical substance, which one should be able to “work”.

Pherecydes of Syros speaks of time as a primordial substance between Zeus and Chthonia (that which has penetrated into the recesses of the earth).

Referring to “untying the chains” So we must go back to the Pre-Socratics, to Pherecydes of Syros, for example, who speaks of time as a primordial substance between Zeus and Chthonia (that which has penetrated into the recesses of the earth).

To answer this question, one should have successfully reached the conclusion of the Last Cooking, a situation that, if no mistakes have been made, could even be within the reach of the perfect alchemist. But, as we have seen, success is truly beyond human capacity, as it involves waiting for an answer that one has no perception of where it should come from.

Is it genesis in the sense of creating new life? In the sense of great power? In the sense of entering unknown worlds? Yet, the alchemists of the Baroque era often used the word genesis to indicate the victorious end of the works. Interestingly, the alchemists of the “pagan” era did not use the term Genesis, but rather the idea of “and by doing so you will know who you really are”. This concept implies the ancient belief in reunification with an archetype. Without this mysterious “Genesis” Alchemy would be meaningless.

Alchemists said that Alchemy is the search for a Genesis in reverse. They claim to go back to the first cause, so “rewinding” Genesis. According to alchemists, the Philosopher’s Stone is the return to the first day of Genesis. In a certain sense, they claim to reduce the philosophical egg to a “word”, which in every mythology seems to have been the origin of creation. See Alchemy Resounds.

Alchemists said that Alchemy is the search for a Genesis in reverse. They claim to go back to the first cause, so “rewinding” Genesis. According to alchemists, the Philosopher’s Stone is the return to the first day of Genesis. In a certain sense, they claim to reduce the philosophical egg to a “word”, which in every mythology seems to have been the origin of creation. See Alchemy Resounds.

Alchemists said that Alchemy is the search for a Genesis in reverse. In the sense that they claim to go back to the first cause, so “rewinding” Genesis. According to alchemists, the philosopher’s stone is the return to the first day of Genesis. In a certain sense, they claim to reduce the philosophical egg to a “word”, which in every mythology seems to have been the origin of creation. See Alchemy Resounds.

In both Genesis and Operative Alchemy there are seven repetitions of similar situations. Or, to be more precise, six plus one because the seventh in the list of repetitions is the result. See also Alchemy and Modern Physics Particles.

Alchemists throughout the ages have always mixed arcane teachings and the scientific knowledge of their time. But, in this case, the alchemists went beyond the banal fact of the chicken and the egg, because they meant the philosophical egg and the philosophical hen. What the philosophical egg is we have seen in Third Work; What they meant by “nature” we have already said – but we repeat: it is a world of strange oscillations; What the alchemical hen is remains a mystery, given that here they were referring to the real philosopher’s stone and not to the well-known symbolism of the “cock and hen”, that’s to say the Sulfur and the Mercurius preceding the construction of the philosophical egg. We can venture that, given the already complete hen represented by the end of the last cooking, she awaits the arrival of an invisible and ineffable cock built not by the alchemist, but by “nature”. And this process is truly something that deserves the epithet of Genesis.

Many alchemists called the union of the microcosm with the macrocosm, of the individual with his archetype, an ancestral rite. We know that, at the level of choice of raw materials, lab alchemists spoke of microcosm and macrocosm when it came to their own urine and blood that had to flow into the Lapis Medicinalis (see Testamentum Fraternitatis, for example). A modern biologist would not view this choice with horror: in fact today we have discovered DNA which, at least in theory, could seek a “connection” to certain “private channels”.

Beyond the Lapis Medicinalis, and thus arriving at the threshold of the Last Cooking, the true ancestral rite is the awaiting of the eighth note of the philosophical egg. True opening towards an “ancestral” world. See Alchemy Resounds.

The obtaining of the seed of matter, or Mercurius, at the end of the first work, is only the first step towards the philosophical egg.

We have already seen how much “time” there can be in the philosophical egg (see What is the Philosophers Stone?). To understand how the factor “time” played a crucial role in the mental form of the ancients, it is enough to observe what the Greek philosophers wrote about it. For example, for Ferekydes of Tyre (presumably a teacher of Pythagoras) time was the essential factor of genesis.

Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize 2004, reports on a collision of two high-energy ions of gold. Fireball results and the subsequent expansion recreate the physical conditions of the Big Bang on a small scale and for a short time.

Luc Montagnier’s team’s experiment, in which they managed to induce DNA transmission between two adjacent but non-communicating containers filled with water and subjected to the same low frequencies, has never been successfully replicated. If Genesis means “formation of the world,” then Montagnier’s experiment had a sensational scope.

Alchemists know that metals killed in a certain way can germinate again as their forms endure over time in the materials that had made their graves.

“Take the body from that which has a body and give a body to that which has no body” – Turba Philosophorum. 

Raimondo di Sangro expresses the concept of the alchemical tripod with the metaphor of the candlestick: The body is a tripod, that is, it is three things at the same time; the body/tripod holds/hosts the candle or spirit of life; the candle/spirit represents the wick/fuel for the soul.

If we accept the idea that the candle’s fire is not individual but something ineffable (certainly more than the candle/spirit) that can appear anywhere without locking itself into a specific individuality, then we can understand Plotinus’ illuminating sentence that wants the body inside the soul and not the opposite. For alchemists it is a simple concept, for philosophers less so. 

The Romans called some rituals to be performed with the living person “sacred private ceremonies” because these had the power to establish a bond between a human being and a certain vital force. A similar rite, but performed in reverse, would instead have animated the soul of a post-mortem man. Given that the rites fell within the scope of sacrifices, the moral problems that arose were so controversial and debated that they led to the end of paganism in Rome. Did the Romans take literally what was symbolic? The alchemists, for example, would have had no hesitations in this regard: they would have sacrificed a metal since, for them, the spirit of life is the same in all kingdoms of nature. 

Is it better to risk with metals or living beings? I say this because, brutally, and reduced to the bone, the difference between alchemists and theurgists has always run along these lines.

Absolutely. The crown symbol is a symbol of the creation of a new world.

In Solar Alchemy we have seen how the Sun is the director of a planetary orchestra whose movements determine the cycles of a small Genesis.

In fact, the ancient alchemists say that the movement of this orchestra is given by the cycles of the seven planets.

Without going to bother Plato’s palingenesis, there are few authors who openly deal with this topic. Generally, historians call them “alchemists” because they wrote in the Baroque era when the topic of Alchemy was ubiquitous. Reading their treatises, they declare Paracelsus as a common source, according to which it was possible to make an animal individual reborn from its ashes. Since this proved impossible, it is thought that Paracelsus either boasted about this possibility or veiled something else under symbolism. In my opinion, under the name Palingenesis hides the same intent as a Genesis on a small scale. Therefore, I take the responsibility of saying that perhaps, the authors of the past intended the same phenomenon. For more information see Palingenesis, Seeds in the Wind.

When we talk about possibilities, we talk about the alchemist, so I believe that the alchemist is kept far away from this possibility. However, I also believe that the “journey” between major and minor scales is a “property” of Alchemy, and when this happens (perhaps in the last cooking) the alchemist passively undergoes what was anciently defined as the intervention of the divinities.

Alchemists may in fact understand the transmutation of a metal into gold as “Genesis in reverse”. See also Transmutation of Metals and Gold & Alchemy, or Adorn with a Star Ray.

Not only in alchemists, but also in many mythologies of genesis we find cycles of seven.

Yes, according to the alchemists, the Sun has a role in the Genesis on a small scale. See also Solar Alchemy.