Quotes About Alchemy

Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light from them and to draw them away from it. p.104-5

All sorcerers had studied alchemy to some extent, and all alchemists, at least those worth their salt, knew how to cook.

Alchemy is a science, but a science that acknowledges certain principles of magic. This. . . this is a mathematical expression of quintessence, Archimedes' fifth element, which binds all things together.

Think of it this way: alchemists of old relied on the energy provided by tides, the moon, sun, planets in alignment. Every experiment was delicate and had to be balanced just so, or there couldn't be a proper result. Obscurists have an inborn talent to provide that energy from within and not from the world around us; we are born with quintessence.

thaumaturge

As the last of the debris fell behind her and the crash of thunder rolled away through the city, as she came to the east end of the park, the once-dark sky paled, abruptly glaucous, and cataracts of rain fell hard, fat droplets hissing through the trees and grass, snapping off the pavement, plinking the metal hoods on trash cans, carrying with them the faint bleachy odor of ozone, a form of oxygen created by lightning's alchemy.

he pours three types of blood into the hole—cat, rat, and human.

And as far as metals are concerned, they are all composed of sulphur and mercury and can be condensed or materialised by means of a salt.

I discarded jars of dried snails; OIL OF EARTHWORMS—which appeared to be exactly that; VINUM MILLEPEDATUM—millipedes, these crushed to pieces and soaked in wine; POWDER OF EYGYPTIANE MUMMIE—an indeterminate-looking dust, whose origin I thought more likely a silty streambank than a pharaoh's tomb; PIGEONS BLOOD, ant eggs, a number of dried toads painstakingly packed in moss, and HUMAN SKULL, POWDERED. Whose? I wondered.

the curious alchemy of cookery, that process of making the transfer of life from one being to another palatable.

I could feel Roger's eyes on the barrel, watching the curious alchemy of cookery, that process of making the transfer of life from one being to another palatable.

They who search after the Philosopher's Stone [are] by their own rules obliged to a strict and religious life.

There's an alchemy that happens during sex that causes 1 + 1 to add up to much more than 2, even as those halves meld in an almost magical way to form a single unit that's more complete than either of them alone.

If you let the alembic cool, metaphor becomes superstition.

Poison. One of the greats.

I come in a world of iron...to make a world of gold

The Herbs ought to be distilled when they are in their greatest vigor, and so ought the Flowers also.

The boundaries between us had been breached for good, we gave a new meaning t the notion that man and wife were one flesh. You could track back this kind of alchemy in books: '...intimately to mix and melt and to be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of two.' This is Shelley translating Plato, who was putting words into the mouth of Aristophanes, who's the only defender of heterosexual sex in the Symposium, although he makes it sound perverse.

El verdadero fin de las operaciones de la alquimia, que acaso son residuos de una ciencia muy antigua perteneciente a una civilización desaparecida, es la transformación del propio alquimista, su ascenso a un estado de conciencia superior.

Ferdinand took up some books: he found them to contain strange unintelligible characters, circles and lines, with many curious plates; and from the little he could read, they seemed to be works on alchemy; he was aware already that the old man had the reputation of a gold-maker. A lute was lying on the table, singularly overlaid with mother-of-pearl, and coloured wood; and representing birds and flowers in very splendid forms.

In life, things do not always stay the same. There are certain alchemies that marry together at particular moments in particular places with particular people.

Emotional Alchemy, Tara Bennett-Goleman

Come, make us into magic.

And if thou begin to work in Mercury itself, where nature hath left it imperfect, thou shall find perfection and shall rejoice.