Reddit reviews The Complete Idiot's Guide to Alchemy: The Magic and Mystery of the Ancient Craft Revealed for Today (Complete Idiot's Guides (Lifestyle Paperback))

Having studied this to the best of my ability for the past two years, there are many people who claim to practice alchemy or have attained some sort of change via alchemy, but I continue to have my doubts.

As a matter of fact, I have increasing doubts that most historical alchemists knew as much as they pretended to. The fact that Isaac Newton spent as much time as he did studying the subject to no apparent avail really demonstrates the, cough quintessence of alchemy: a lot of promise, a lot of possibilities...but does it deliver?

In any case, the basic idea of alchemy is to take some sort of base matter and through various ways of pulling it apart and reassembling it, create or isolate the higher substance within it. The alchemical tradition (by which I mean the centuries of attempting to do this in various context) tends to rely upon a worldview derived from neoplatonism, hermeticism, and mysticism -- all three of which some would put under the heading of "superstition."

The essence of the art is to observe nature -- in particular, change in nature - and, having recognized patterns, apply these same patterns deliberately toward change of something in your purview.

It tends to be, that God, the Creator, or whatever you want to call him, is thought of as something within nature; as present a thing as gravity or electromagnetism -- this in contrast to being something "beyond" nature.

The way most newcomers to alchemy get started is through spagyrics -- plant alchemy. This is because, in large part, the materials and equipment are generally less dangerous and more available than working with dangerous chemicals. Of course, most spagyric stuff will involve you timing your work with the planets, and if you can, in 2014, do that with a straight face...you're wired differently than I am. That things correspond in interesting and often meaningful ways seems self-evident. That they correspond in that way - astrologically - is not something I can accept as a modern man. Correspondence is something consciousness looks for; an ordering principle which overlays reality and competes with the idea of a chaotic and random universe. About an hour ago I was watching a documentary on Netflix about Amish people leaving their communities to go live in the World, and just as I was doing that, a tweet came in about the Amish. Something there is about human consciousness which doesn't like coincidence!

Alchemy's biggest problem currently is that it is mired in bad science from the past. In the past, this could be forgiven -- after all, alchemy presaged modern science. My larger point is that if you could go back in time and zap alchemists from the 1500s to now, and enroll them in science courses at a university, they'd probably find the idea of working with 4 elements and planets in a lab to be absurd.

What is salvageable - I think (all of this is "I think"), is the symbol set or template of looking at change in terms of psychology: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water can be thought of as emotional states or attributes of the self (for example, specifically, fire as the creative, volitional element: that which chops and sculpts wood or makes war or paints or builds, and water as the intuitive, empathetic, or emotional element - water is what we allow to come "into" ourselves and fire is that which we put "out" in the world as our creation, or exercise of will. Air as intellect/thought. Earth as the material with which you start: the physical matter of the body and the environment. It is then thought that each of these elements contains some measure of the others within it. This is something which repeats across cultures -- the yin-yang's symbol most interesting features are the black and white dots in each swirl.) The alchemical process - in particular, I think the three stage model - may, and I use this word tentatively at this point - provide a path forward for personal growth and change; in particular the transmutation of the base within the self to something more refined, or even holy" death if the self/"solve"/nigredo -> purification/albedo -> coagula/recombination into something new and indivisible/rubedo. But this is far less...cinematic, and far more sitting on hillsides and diving deep within the sea of self.

So the first thing you need to think about is whether you're really going to try to use outdated pseudoscience and buy beakers and retorts and build an athanor on your patio, or whether you are concerned specifically with yourself -- with what is base in yourself. If the former, there is a lucrative market of books on alchemy and a thousand budding capitalists selling limited-run grimoires on ebay.

There are spagyric courses you can take, but these have a strong whiff of things like homeopathy and nonspecific/unproven "herbal medicine." If that's your trip, you can actually go to an alchemy school. It is conceivable that herbs have healing compounds, but modern science has hardly been hostile to discovering these, and I have a rough time believing there some kitchen alchemist out there who knows more than Parke Davis about what's good in basil or rosemary.

I observe, that I have yet to meet a person into alchemy, or the occult, or anything along these lines, who I'd trade places with. There may be great value in alchemy, but I keep getting the sense that if there is, I'm going to discover it on my own, in a Eureka Moment.

Start with alchemical emblems and art. Look at them hard and try to figure out what they mean. This is, by far, the best place to begin your journey (I think.): http://www.levity.com/alchemy/

Research the symbols in these, and in particular the mythology behind them. Understanding what is going on here requires unifying, in your mind, religion and god, natural science, and intuition, as if they are all part of the same system. What makes alchemy so difficult to wrap your head around in the modern age is that God has been banished to "somewhere else," and we've separated ourselves from nature: we think of the synthetic as something different from, and alien to, nature. Only by considering all of these as one system will any of this make sense. And that is how some people used to see the world.

And never forget: even in the time of the classic alchemists like Paracelsus, there were skeptics who thought it was all a bunch of horse hockey. It is easy to get caught up in this idea that there is ancient forgotten wisdom which is there to discover, and maybe there is. Also it is possible that everyone was superstitious and full of shit; that it was a dead end, and that it sort of created modern lab science as a byproduct. (Frankly I think the alchemical dream is linked to an archetype of redemption -- that of the Gnostics, and even that of the mainstream Christian trying to purge himself of sin and become filled with the Holy Spirit (Charismatic Christians in particular), but this is controversial.)

There is a book called The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Buy the Phanes Press translation linked to here.

Read it, and don't get bogged down in deciphering it the first time through. Read it and just let it wash over you the way you would an absurd dream (in dreams, you accept weirdness without saying "That is downright strange." In fact, if you think to say, "Now that is just weird" in a dream, you're probably about to go lucid). This will give you a tour of the alchemical mind.

If you're going to learn alchemy, you're going to discover it -- I have serious doubts that it can be taught in a classroom. I could be completely wrong about this, but I think the idea that "we encrypted alchemy in symbols because of censorship and oppression" is only a cover story -- it may have some truth, but it's not the essence. My theory is alchemy is encoded in all of these weird symbols, because it must be discovered within - it is something you will find simply through meditation and thinking. And when you discover it, you will have a hard time putting it into words.

The Chamber of Reflection in Freemasonry, is said to have written on the wall, the bacronym "V.I.T.R.I.O.L.":

Visit the interior of the earth and through rectification, discover the hidden stone.

What is the interior of the earth?

What is the hidden stone?

They're not talking about digging in the literal soil.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Idiots-Guide-Alchemy-Revealed/dp/1592577350