different sections
Adam's Alchemy WeblogI have decided to start a weblog of my activities related to my work with alchemy and the alchemy website. The Alchemy Website now at www.alchemywebsite.com was established in 1996 and is the most established and authoritative site devoted to alchemy on the internet.
The weblog provides a continual update on my work with alchemy as well as providing tidbits of news and information relevant to alchemy.
I try and keep to a daily schedule, though if I am rather busy or immersed in some project, this may slip a day or so.
Questions from my inbox.
18 June 2009
I have begun working on a further volume for the Magnum Opus series. This is an allegory from a mid 17th century Italian manuscript. This has a series of images associated with it. The text has been translated by a colleague and I have started the proofreading and shortly will move to create the layout. If all goes well it might be possible to publish this in late July, though August perhaps seems more realistic. This will be number 38 in the Magnum Opus series. I sometimes wonder just how many more books I will add to this. There are two more pencilled in for later this year and a load of half finished projects. The first title, the Magical Calendar was issued in 1979, so this year is the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the series. I know that a number of scholars think of me as rather lightweight, and most esoteric people see me as blinkered as I don't embrace their mindset, but at least I think I have demonstrated that I do have the willpower and stamina the follow through and get things done - I will happily settle for that.
16 June 2009
The new find system seems to be working okay. This system is very useful as it provides me with a log of how many people are using it and which key words they are searching for. The figures for searches in the first few days are quite encouraging. I am sure this new feature will prove a success and useful to users of the site.
Wed Jun 10 - 50
Thu Jun 11 - 40
Fri Jun 12 - 80
Sat Jun 13 - 46
13 June 2009
Martin Stewart has kindly sent me some transcriptions of texts from the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, so I have now set these up on the website:-
The Ordinall of Alchimy - Thomas Norton
Chanons Yeoman Tale
Bloomefields Blossoms
The Compound of Alchymie by Sir George Ripley
I have also set up a page of the texts of the English Bohemists, with some material by John Pordage and D.A. Freher. More Freher will be added shortly.
Sadly, I don't have much time, nowadays, to update the website, but I will try and add some more material over the next weeks and months.
10 June 2009
Yesterday one of my supporters and long-term users of this web site alterted me to the fact that he had only just discovered a page on my site which was not accessible to the search box. I was aware of the the fact that the free Google site search I had been using had limitations as it does not index all the files nor the total text of each file. So yesterday I decided to buy some software that would enable me to have an onsite search engine that I could customise to suit. I found some software whose selling point was that it could index thousands even millions of pages and provide fast response. So I bought a copy and began installing it. After about an hour of indexing a 134 megabyte index file was written and this took almost an hour to ftp onto the website. The results were totally disappointing. It was so, so slow to find things. I had bought the more expensive professional edition which states "This professional version is specifically designed to deal with large sites that have thousands and millions of pages". My site has 7600 html pages. In many cases when searching for two words such as "Fludd" and "gold" the search took so long that it timed out and gave an error message. I immediately wrote to the software writers and explained the problem I was having. They just ignored three emails. So I have given up on them and will try and get them to refund me for their inadequate software. If not I will have lost over $100 on this - the profit on five or six books. The old "caveat emptor" strikes again. I went looking on the internet and found another type of solution which uses an off-site indexing system. This I have now installed and am testing out. It gives almost instantaneous finds and can handle multiple word searches just as quickly. At the moment I have their free trial version which does throw up adverts, but if after a day or so of testing I find it okay, I will pay for the full version so as not to impose the adverts on my users. At least this system provides users with a fully working trial to test out thoroughly. You can yourself test out the new find system if you click here. I have not yet explored all the ways of configuring the search box nor the ways in which the finds are displayed.
5 June 2009
Sorry for the long hiatus in this weblog. May has been such a busy month and I have been absorbed in many projects. The latest Magnum Opus book, the Bonacina. The Preparation of Potable Gold is now available and I have sold a few copies. This is number 37 in this long running series. Over the last few weeks I have been working with the translator of the text for the next volume, which will be published in the next few months. My workload has substantially increased recently. I have taken a more intense interest in the emblematic tradition which alchemy drew on for many aspects of its symbolism. So I have set up a parallel web site on emblematic art. During the last few months I have felt impelled to devote time to painting, and have completed three works I began last year, and worked on two new paintings. As I get older I feel I have to allocate more of my time to painting. It is important to me. Another project that took up much of my time recently was my Art of Japanese Tarot Exhibition which after its opening in the Glasgow School of Art is now moving to its second venue. I also continue to collect modern tarot art and now have possibly the largest such collection in the world. I am just at the moment printing out an amazing tarot by the British occultist and surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun.
So the lack of postings in this weblog reflects my having to devote much time to a variety of projects
21 April 2009
Today I worked on the layout for the next book in the Magnum Opus series. I had finished painting the illustrations last week and now have linked these into the text and sorted out all the little details of the layout. This will need checked over the next few days, then when I have time I will move on to printing out copies for sale.
20 April 2009
A few weeks ago I managed to obtain a relatively good quality copy of the frontispiece engraving to the Toyson d'Or, Paris 1613, which was a French edition of the Splendor Solis. The imagery on the engraving draws from the illustrations in the German printed book of 1598, Aureum vellus, oder Güldin Schatz und Kunstkammer. Once I had a good quality image I set about colouring it. When I get the time I will set this up, together with some other recent coloured emblems, onto my Galleries of Coloured emblems.
15 April 2009
In running the alchemy website there are moments of great amusement and terrible tragedy, coupled with the usual annoyances.
Amusement - a week or so ago I received an email from someone requesting a link exchange. When I scrolled down the page I noticed it was from a website for dog lovers. Apparently they were using some automatic link scanning software and, finding mentions of animals on the alchemy web site, the software flagged me up as a potential linker (so they could increase their rankings in Google). I was mildly amused, but a further email an hour later from their sister website for cat lovers with the same request, reduced me to howls of laughter. Today another pair of emails arrived from the cats and dogs indicating that they had removed my link on their site because I had failed to reciprocate.
Tragedy - I was made rather sad recently by the arrival of a message from a gentleman suffering from a life threatening cancerous condition. He contacted me in the hope that I might put him in touch with the person who popularised the 'White powder gold' some years ago, in order that he might obtain some and become cured. I get two or three letters a month about this fantasy substance. Usually people are just curious, but occasionally someone in desperate straits, sees this much hyped substance as a solution to their health problem.
Annoyance - I also received an email from some promoter of hallucinogenic mushrooms. His website provides all sorts of justifications and encouragment for people to use these dangerous toxins. He refers often on his website to alchemical ideas and indicates that the use of hallucinogenics was, in some way, a key part of alchemy. I have spent 61 years developing my brain cells, and find it rather unsettling that someone would want to take an untested poisonous substance of which they know nothing, with the aim of messing up the chemical balance of their brains. I have sadly, like most people, come across the casualities created by drug abuse. Back in the late 70's while I was in Edinburgh, I remember one friend who got totally absorbed in these magic mushrooms. Eventually he became so weird that I just could no longer bear to be in his company. One wishes that this absurdity had died out in the 1970s and it saddened me to see someone today using alchemy as a justification for experimenting in the use of dangerous hallucinogenic substances. People can be so self-delusive and sadly, in this case this is coupled with self-destructive. People like this, promoting the use of such untested toxins, seem totally unaware of the responsibility they are taking on themselves and the lives they will ruin. Just how many casualities will result ten years down the line? Obviously they are so blind to this that they don't care. I, for one, like to treat my brain cells well, and not fry them along with the mushrooms.
7 April 2009
I recently began a new website dedicated to emblems in art. From this emblematic background, the iconography in alchemical emblems emerged, so it is important to investigate this obscure area. You can have a little preview of what I have been working on by going to.
One of the first research projects on that site is the Children of the Planets series. This is an intesting emblematic device that emerged in the 15th Century and remained an important form for artists well into the 17th Century. Today I discovered yet another series, this time as wall paintings in the Borgia Apartments in the Vatican (late 15th Century). Sadly I have only been able to find a rather poor quality black and white image.
5 April 2009
I have made some considerable progress on painting facsimiles of the Bonacina images for inclusion in the forthcoming Magnum Opus book. Most of these are almost finished, only requiring some minor work on details and modelling to bring them to completion. I should be able to finish these during this week or early next week if I get delayed. I have my exhibition on the Art of Japanese Tarot to arrange over the next ten days or so, and work on this might well interrupt painting the Bonacina.
30 March 2009
Over the weekend I managed a few more hours work on painting the Bonacina images. These probably need about twenty more hours of work to bring to completion. Creating one of my Magnum Opus books requires many, many hours of work. Also in the case of the Bonacina book, I don't dare even think of how many hours the translator, Paul Ferguson, spent working on the book. No doubt many times my input. Still, some people moan about the price of my books. In fact, many of my books cost more secondhand than they do bought direct from me. As these are small limited editions they are collected by some bibliophiles. After all, my Magnum Opus Hermetic Soureworks is one of the longest lasting of modern publishers. My first publication in the series was the Magical Calendar on the 20th of April 1979, so this will be the 30th Anniversary ! I wonder how many other small unsubsidised publishers from the early 1980's still survive. Perhaps I should issue a special print of the Magical Calendar engraving to mark this. There I am, giving myself even more work to do. I am still very concerned about how to preserve my work in the longer term. I now have accreted a vast amount of material and would not like it to be entirely broken up, dispersed or thrown away, if for some reason I was unable to continue. As one gets older one does dwell on such matters.
27 March 2009
Today I began adding some further large format prints to my bookshop pages. I have been producing these giclee prints for over a year but the sales are extremely slow, which is rather disappointing, both because I would like to gain some sales and because people are missing out on having some of these wonderful images to contemplate. I, of course, am immersed in that material and so enthused by alchemical, astrological, and emblematic imagery that I find it difficult to understand why others would not also not wish to have such imagery. I do also produce standard format print at A4 size, but many images really become striking when available in the large format. Not all are suitable to be printed in the larger size but I have now added about 15 further images. It takes quite a time as the original paintings have to be rescanned at 1200 dpi in order to provide the best quality for printing. Anyway you can browse the items by clicking here. I have also reduced the prices to USA and Worldwide customers to reflect the recent currency fluctuations.
26 March 2009
Today a big envelope arrived from the Post Office announcing their latest price increases. These are quite high at about 8%, so I will have to start thinking about revising my prices, otherwise I will find these new postal costs erode my income from the sales. I have adopted a policy of including the postage costs in the price of the items I sell - the books, prints and study courses. I now wonder if this is a correct strategy and that I should perhaps quote a price for the item then the costs of the postage. The real postage costs, of course, include the not inconsiderable cost of the packaging and the fee I have to pay to have the Post Office uplift mail from my address every day, as well as the actual stamps. This would have effect of making people aware of the true costs involved and appear to reduce the price of my books. I think most people expect to see the cost of postage when they buy items. When I sell a book for 50 pounds then up to 10 pounds can be the post and packing charges. When I have the time I will begin moving over to this new way of working. So, when you see the prices of my books fall, then please remember there is postage on top of that !
11 March 2009
I have had to temporarily abandon work on the Bonacina images and devote most of my time to preparing the exhibits for my forthcoming exhibition on the Art of Japanese Tarot. This opens on 17th of April and I will have to work on framing the exhibits for all this week and part of the next. Happily the catalogue is now completed and in the hands of the designer. A few days ago I received some facsimiles of the printed version of the Bonacina which was previously unknown to me. It contains woodcuts of the emblems, some of which have been coloured.
8 March 2009
As each year peels away from the span of ones life, one encounters in closer and closer focus the reality that one has a relatively short time left to bring ones work to some kind of completion. I have been very fortunate that at certain phases of my life I had the financial support of a number of people whose generosity enabled me to progress my work. Currently I am entirely self supporting and am becoming very aware of the fact that I have created and gathered a considerable body of material that documents alchemy and the related emblematic traditions. In the longer term I would hope that something could be done to preserve this in some coherent form, but I doubt that I will ever be able myself to create sufficient resources to perpetuate my work in such a way. The income I make from sales of my books, prints and study course material is all absorbed in capitalising my publications and acquiring materials for research. If I were forced through ill-health (or worse) to give up my work then I expect my things would just be sold off piecemeal. I was very saddened a few years ago that when the major British artist Robert Lenkiewicz died, much of his work had to be sold off. He had hoped to have been able to establish a permanent library that documented the various obsessions he found so fascinating, but his amazing book collection had to be sold off. I will have to begin looking for some means by which all that I have gathered together over the decades could be held together in some way as an educational resource which people could use. I have enough material to form the basis for an alchemical museum, art gallery and research library, but no personal finance to facilitate this.
1 March 2009
Over the last few weeks I have found a few hours here and there to begin work on making the series of facsimile paintings that will be used in the forthcoming edition of the Bonacina manuscript. There are ten images in all, and as I am painting them as a totality moving from one to another to keep the colours consistent, I have not yet actually completed any of the paintings. The one closest to being completed is the second illustration. I have still to work on the foreground, rework the sky to make the layers cohere, and do some general tidying up and adding detail to some parts of the image. Here is my version alongside the original. Once I have completed the images and scanned them in for the book, I may try and sell them as a complete set. I am working them quite small, 7 by 5 inches, (a bit larger than the originals). I think they will look rather good together on a wall. The sequence naturally divides into two sets of five.
24 February 2009
A recent discussion on my scholarly alchemy discussion forum illustrates the sort of detailed investigation that scholars have to undertake in order to discover the truth about some source. A colleague alerted me some months ago to a manuscript of the Theatrum Astronomiae Terrestris by Edward Kelly described as being dated to 1594, shortly before he died. I wrote to the holding Library (Harvard College Library) and obtained a microfilm of the work. On first seeing this I was not convinced that it was actually of that date, so I posted out a message onto the forum to see what other scholars might make of it. It is important to discover whether this was close in time to the original, or merely a copy made from the printed book which appeared in 1676.
We will have to look at the handwriting, the people through whose hands the manuscript passed before it found its way to Harvard, as well as any internal evidence that might help with dating it.
This all will appear boring and mere pedantry, far removed from the excitement of speculating wildly and without restraint about Dee and Edward Kelly or ancient manuscripts, but it is through such painstaking detail that one arrives at something substantial and closer to the truth of things. I have kept the forum restricted to people who adopt a scholarly and collegiate approach, and this seem to be working. Sadly a few speculators and belief-driven people rapidly destroy the positive exchange of information, as we have so often seen in the past with alchemy discussion groups. The discussion forum is open for the public to read, and over its first year of operation there have been 350,000 page views and over 80,000 visits to the pages by the public. The discussion forum shows how alchemical research is pursued in a scholarly way. Those who seek the excitement of believing in an alchemical fairyland will only find disappointment here.
19 February 2009
I have now made a start on making some facsimile paintings of the illustrations from the Bonacina manuscript. I decided to make these in the rather small size of 7 by 5 inches. This is actually about double the size of the originals. Making them any larger would be rather difficult and time consuming. I estimate about a days work for each of the ten paintings. Of course I will not be able to allocate that time in a single block, as I have so many oither things to work on, so they will be done gradually over a few months, a few hours at a time.
4 February 2009Most of the past weeks I have been working on my forthcoming exhibition on the Art of Japanese Tarot, however, I have now received the translation by Paul Ferguson of an early 17th century work by Bonacina on the aurum potabile. I first came across this twenty years ago when I met up with an Italian researcher who had visited the libraries in Prague looking at alchemical manuscripts. I remember talking with him in the Library of the Wellcome Institute in London and he drew out a folder containing slides of the illustrations in this manuscript. These really intrigued me, and I was immediately drawn to the work. Then about ten years ago I came across illustrations of another manuscript version, dated a bit later, which had some very high quality paintings of the ten illustrations in the work. Last year I was contacted by a museum curator in the Czech Republic who was creating an exhibit on the alchemist Bonacina, and I managed to get a copy of the original manuscript. Paul very kindly agreed to translate this from the Latin. I was not entirely sure if the text was going to be as interesting and engaging as the illustrations, but Paul proved me wrong and now I have the text available in English I can see that it is a clear exposition of many of the well known ideas current in early 17th century alchemy. Now I have to make my own facsimile paintings in order to use these as illustrations in the book. This should take a few months. Interestingly, back in 2000 I did make a facsimile of one of the Bonacina illustrations. I had intended to work on more, but never was able to allocate the time. The next few months are going to be extremely busy and creative ones for me.
14 January 2009
Today I received one of those amusing though at the same time insulting emails. A gentleman wrote enquiring about my study courses, appending a list of questions about my background and other details to enable him to make his mind up as to whether my course was worthwhile or not. I ploughed through answering the questions till I came to final one "Have any of the materials you provide been "harvested" from other programs?" At first I laughed out loud, then this became a wry smile, then I felt rather insulted, bordering on annoyance. Just a few days ago someone had informed me that, once again, some of my courses and other copyright material was being made available for free on one of those torrents that supply material (mostly pirated videos, music files and software) for free or even paid download. This material of mine was also illegally put onto a Czech server over last summer and made available. So this person dares to suggest that I might have "harvested" material from the Internet to make up my courses, when it is entirely the other way round ! It is insulting because I am a creative individual, who researches material in great depth, and spent many hundreds of hours writing each study course. Harvesting, indeed! What an insult !
13 January 2009
It must seem as if I have been on a long vacation as I have not made an entry here for some weeks. I have in fact been very busy with various projects and had my focus entirely on those. Among other things I have been working to finish the latest book in my Magnum Opus series. I have now completed the layout and can now begin production. This is number 36 in the series and is a translation of Robert Fludd's book On the Music of the Spheres which is a part of his great two volume work on the Macrocosm and Microcosm. The book was translated over the summer months by Paul Ferguson and during this we rediscovered some original musical compositions by Fludd. Paul and I decided to issue versions of these on a CD-Rom with the book. For those who do not know the Fludd book it is the section of his Macrocosm and Microcosm with the now famous monochord engraving. I am so pleased to have been able to publish this work. Back in 1980 I remember looking at this piece and truly wanted to publish this in English. I had such limited resources and there was no way at that time that I could do this. I still have limited resources, but with the assistance of people such as Paul Ferguson wonders can be achieved. I have had to wait nearly thirty years to make this happen.
The book together with the CD-Rom is now available to purchase from www.alchemywebsite.com/bookshop/mohs36.html
18 December 2008
Following on from yesterdays entry I found this double-beaked pelican flask surviving from the 17th or 18th century. This is in the Jagiellonian University Museum, in Cracow, Poland. The entry on their web site says that is probably the only extant example of such a form of vessel in the world. These pelican flasks with their narrow re-entrant arms must have been easily cracked. This one, in distinction to most of the illustrations in books and manuscripts, has an opening at the top through which the substances could be added. In most of the woodcuts and engravings, there seems no provision for adding the substance. Perhaps pelican flasks were made for a single use and the substance added through a hole in the side before this was closed with one of the re-entrant tubes or arms, and at the end of the work, they would be broken to remove the substance. This would also explain the fact that so few have survived over the centuries. Otherwise, we might see the little nipple-like form on the top of pelican illustrations might be intended to indicate a stopper in a hole for filling the flask. It is not entirely clear, like much in alchemy.
17 December 2008
An american sculptor from the Seattle area has been in touch with me a few days ago. He sent me some photos of alchemical vessels he had made based on an image in Hieronymus Braunschweig's Book of Distillation (1500) which he saw on my website. This is a vessel tied to a weight so that it would always stand upright when placed in a waterbath. Waterbaths were often used in order to distil subtle oils and perfumes from plant material which would have become chemically altered if heated at too high a temperature. Early alchemical apparatus was not always made from glass, as this was vulnerable to heatshock and the consequent cracking. It appears that many flasks were made from some kind of ceramic material, and even glazed inside to seal in the pores of the clay.
16 December 2008
For a bit of alchemical amusement, one cannot do better than looking at the work of the artist Suzanne Treister. In the last two years she has produced a number of alchemical diagrams, drawings taking the form of well known alchemical emblems, works of Fludd, Kircher, Schweighardt, Freher, and so on. These she constructs with text from the front pages of newpapers, mostly from the UK, but some American, French, German and other international sources. She takes the text from a particular issue, and works it into the form of the alchemical emblem. Thus here is a wonderful reworking of a Freher diagram from the works of Boehme, using text from the Jüdischer Allgemeine, 10th April 2008, and another using the structure of a Theophilus Schweighardt emblem and the text from The Guardian, 20th September 2008. She was born in Britain but now lives and works in Australia. Her irreverence I found quite refreshing.
You can see more of her work on ensemble.va.com.au/Treister/ALCHEMY/ALCHEMY.html
15 December 2008
A few days ago I saw a television documentary on the Medici family and their art collections. During a section on the Studiolo, a small painting-encrusted barrel-vaulted room in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, commissioned by Francesco I de' Medici, the presenter pointed to a well known alchemical painting by Jan van der Straet, which shows an alchemical laboratory within which a distillation is taking place. Of course, I know this painting well, but I was surprised to hear the presenter say that one of the figures in the painting is a portrait of Francesco de Medici. Apparently, he is the figure on the right gazing towards the apparatus in the foreground. Whether this it correct or not I am unable to say without further research. I am afraid I tend to feel unable to put full trust in the research presented in television documentaries. Perhaps some art historian has looked at this matter and compared the image with accepted portraits of Francesco de Medici.
10 December 2008
I have been rather busy recently. Much of the earlier part of this week has been devoted to creating the penultimate audio-visual presentation for my Exploring Emblems series. This image was especially complex and had over fifty components to assemble into the final narrative structure. Once I had completed it I found it ran for over 14 minutes. Sadly, only a few people seem interested in my new approach. Maybe they will catch up with me in a few years time when I have then moved on to something else. Sometimes I do feel like giving up on trying to present the truth about alchemy to people, when most people seem to prefer to follow the nonsense put out by various writers and groups purporting to teach alchemy - writers who have little understanding and knowledge of the subject, and who certainly have never spent time in libraries looking at the original material, but instead merely rehash and rework the writings of 20th century popular writers. I find now that I am often tempted to give up my work with alchemy and instead devote the remaining years of my life to painting.
5 December 2008
My colleague Paul Ferguson has uncovered a manuscript of Edward Kelly's Theatrum astronomiae terrestris dated to 1594, within the last years of Kelly's life. This was printed in 1676 but I had assumed that there was no earlier source than this book. It just goes to show that, in the alchemical tradition, little has indeed been lost, and that there are still many interesting discoveries to be made.
By contrast, how tedious it is to read the churned out drivel that appears in much of modern "esoteric" writings on alchemy. These are so lacking in any solid scholarship. These writers think that research means reading though a few books published in the 1980s and 90s, and rehashing those ill-conceived accounts of alchemy.
It is only by looking at the original material that one will get any grasp at all of what alchemy is about. Primary research into the source material of alchemy still turns up amazing finds.
30 November 2008
This weekend I had some new bookshelving installed. This will help me get all the books temporarly piled up on the floor onto shelves which will make them so much more accessible. I also had another set of shelves installed in my store room as I have so much material, images, research notes, correspondence and other such stuff that I am reluctant to throw away. When looking through this muddled mass of papers for something, I often find in this unsorted material other items of import and interest to me. It is, I suppose, a kind of archive of all the work that I have done over the last 30 years and I don't feel able to just throw it away. Unfortunately, this material has just been stacked up in amorphorous piles, but now I can hopefully get it into a more structured form.
26 November 2008
Last night and for most of the first part of today I have been creating a new coloured version of one of the alchemical emblems from the late 18th century Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer. I stripped out almost all of the text to reveal the emblematic core and coloured it, following a copy of the original printed book which had this emblem coloured. The colouring in the original is rather poorly executed, lacking subtlety and, as the pigments have faded, I have restored this and hopefully remained sensitive to the original. I was hoping to have been able to create a study course on this work in the style of the presentations in my new study course in audio visual format Exploring Alchemical Emblems, but as there has been such a poor response to that course, I will sadly have to abandon that idea. I will, however, include this item as one of the final lessons in the Exploring Alchemical Emblems course.
24 November 2008
This afternoon I decided to update the thumbnail images on my galleries of alchemical emblems. The earliest of these had file dates back in the mid 1990s. I remember that in those days the scanner (top of the range) had to do three passes when scanning an image. These early scans were also rather contrasty and oversaturated and did not adequately represent the originals, so I created a new set of thumbnails for the earliest of the emblems (up to about 150). I also tried to normalise the heights (though the broader images could not be set to the standard height). They look much better now !
24 November 2008I added a few new coloured emblems to my growing series. I was particularly pleased to be able to colour the engraving from Benedictus Figulus, Thesaurinella olympica. I have been trying to get a good quality copy to colour for a few years. Still, if one is persistent and patient one does eventually find what one wants. I have quite a backlog of images to colour, particularly items from emblem books and 16th century woodcuts which influenced alchemical illustration.
21 November 2008
I have been spending a great deal of time recently on the final presentations in my new study course in audio visual format Exploring Alchemical Emblems. Creating these lessons requires research and writing the text, but that is just the beginning as the images have to be scanned at the highest possible resolution, then edited and corrected for the video format. Then the commentary has to be recorded in short sections and all these individual components assembled into a coherent structure. I am, as usual, rather ahead of people, and there has been a poor take up of the course. Perhaps when I eventually put the material onto a CD-Rom there will be rather more customers for it. Creating this course has absorbed many hundreds of hours of work, and I seem to have earned merely one pound an hour from doing this. It is rather dispiriting. I perhaps should have worked instead on publishing a new book or making some paintings. I have paid dearly for the mistake of thinking that people might be interested in seeing the way I work with alchemical emblems. I had thought this audio-visual method would be a good vehicle for showing and explaining complex visual material, and had provisionally planned other projects. These will now have to be shelved as it seems few are interested.
21 November 2008Today I received notice of a interesting video from from someone demonstrating the old method for extracting metallic antimony from its ore at 800 degrees centigrade. The video was taken using only the light from the furnace and the red hot crucible, which makes it very dramatic and evocative. It is currently on Google video, You can see it by clicking on the image opposite.
11 November 2008
In repackaging the Hermetic Journal for the DVD format, I was musing on the period in which I created that magazine. In those days, I was much influenced by the esoteric and Jungian approach. I remember in the late 60s and early 70s having the view that the speculative and esoteric approaches were much more free than what I, and others, saw as the academic reductionism of that period. Many of us then felt that the scholarly approach was blinkered and essentially designed to strip everything away from the subject of alchemy, and reduce it to a backwater of history. In recent years, this whole picture has become entirely reversed. The speculative, esoteric, Jungian approach is now the status quo, the established one in most people's minds. Now I find myself having to fight against the narrow mindedness of these established esoteric views. Today we find many people wishing to reduce alchemy to some one dimensional viewpoint, as they seek to project some simplistic interpretation (usually derived from some 20th century speculative ideas) onto alchemy. Thus people want to reduce the delightful complexity of alchemy to some set of principles - they want us, for example, to see alchemy as a kind of emanation of people's dreams, a coded message hidden in ecclesiastical and domestic architecture, a secret tradition of illuminati and Freemasons, visions induced by taking hallucinogenic mushrooms, ergot or even cannabis, and so on. People today seem to have no inhibitions against imposing a narrow, restrictive view on alchemy.
Of course, such people have no real contact with the original writings of the alchemists. They have not spent hours in a library, trying to read a particularly difficult 16th century hand, or looking through the sequence of editions of key alchemical printed books. The scholarly approach is now delightfully diverse, some scholars taking a history of ideas approach, others relying on textual analysis, others looking at historical context, some deciding merely to research and uncover material, while other scholars look at how a manuscript was written, its target audience and its intention. It is now the scholarly approach that is diverse and vibrant, while the speculative esotericists are bankrupt of ideas and merely recycling outdated and superceded perspectives. The scholarly approach with its focus on deep research into the source material is constantly being refreshed by new discoveries in manuscripts and printed material, in contrast to the empty recyling of tired old ideas from the twentieth century speculative writers, who want to reduce the diversity of alchemy to their one dimensional perspective.
10 November 2008
I have decided to issue the Hermetic Journal back issues in a new format. Originally I wrote a program which gave access to scans of the pages. I wrote this back in 1996 and it has remarkably remained compatible with all the new versions of Windows. However, as it seems that there can be problems for some Vista users, I have now converted all the files and put them into a large Adobe Acrobat pdf file. This also makes this compatible with the wide range of Macintosh computers. The file is 1.6 gigabytes in size and as I cannot get this onto a CD-Rom, I will have to issue this on DVD. It is unclear as to how many people do not have DVD drives, so I will probably have to keep selling the older version for a year or so. I have set this up on the website page www.alchemywebsite.com/bookshop/hj_cdrom.html
7 November 2008
Recently, a number of users of the web site have made it obvious to me that my collection of links are useless as most of these pages no longer exist and one gets a broken link error. This shows that the alchemy web site is outliving many other sites. I had thought I might update these, but as it would take so much time, I have instead decided to remove the link to that series of pages from the main navigation sidebar, so that users do not find their way to these pages. I will actually keep the original pages on the site until I find the time to update them. This should be a medium term solution.
Yesterday, I spent a lot of time on trying to speed up my computer, which is often going very slow. I tried all the usual tricks one is supposed to do, cleaning the registry, deleting unnecessary files, uninstalling all those small utilties that one downloaded to try out and then forgot about, and so on, but it made little difference. I expect the only realistic solution would be to buy a new faster computer system, however, as I had a terrible problem with incompatiblities when I installed Vista last year, and had quickly to uninstall it and go back to XP, I am a trifle reluctant to buy a new system as these are now all supplied with Vista. I have a number of older programs in which I have a mass of data installed and I would not wish to lose it. I may have to go for a two computer solution, but this takes up so much desk space. There is also the problem of keeping the two computers synchronised. On a network one can sometimes lose track of which is the more up to date version of a file, and sadly lose one edits by overwriting a newer version with the older.
6 November 2008There seems to be a sudden rush of interest in alchemical music recently. Yesterday I received some copies of an audio CD of the recording of the Fifty Fugues of Atalanta Fugiens which has just been issued. This is a remastered version of the recording which Joscelyn Godwin arranged back in 1986, and which I provided on cassette tape with the edition Joscelyn edited for my Magnum Opus series. It is good that it is now available again. It is issued by Claudio Records here in the UK. You can see details and buy a copy here.
A day or so ago, a correspondent contacted me to tell of a project he had begun, to inspire some musicians to arrange settings of the famous Alchemical Mass by the late 16th century alchemical writer Melchior Cibinensis. A few years ago the avant-garde jazz musician Jeff Kaiser, who is very influenced by alchemy, produced his working of the alchemical mass, together with a suite entitled Solution. You can hear samples of some of the tracks here. The Introitus is in abrasive avant Jazz style which not everyone will find easy, but the Kyrie is more conventional.
29 October 2008
I had a number of orders for books over the weekend so I had to dedicate almost of the last two days to bookbinding chores. This was a little frustrating, as I have also received recently a number of items, articles and books, which I would really like to be able to read, if not in depth, at least skim through. I had some rather positive correspondence with two Italian editors of works by a late 17th century alchemical writer Federico Gualdi, whose emblematic alchemical sequence I only just discovered recently. During the exchange of emails, I discovered an edition of a late 18th Century work for which I have been looking for many years, the Telescope of Zoroaster, now issued in a French edition available through Amazon.fr Telescope de Zoroastre. It is not an alchemical work as such, but presents a divinatory system. My main interest in it are the rather unique emblematic devices. I have bought a copy and should have it in hand in a few weeks. There are so many interesting items still to uncover. I wish sometimes that people would share my enthusiasm for this material. Instead most people seem to prefer to read the inconsequential and vapid theories of modern writers - whom I would describe as esoteric entertainers. The actual source material is so much more interesting than the waffle and imaginary garbage of modern authors - but few seem to get this !
27 October 2008
This weekend I worked again on the pieces of music by written by Robert Fludd back in the early 1600s. During last week I managed to obtain a better recorder patch for my synthesiser. One of the problems with the synthesiser is that for some sounds this only seems to imitate the instrument within a tight range. The original recorder voice I had sounded very bell like in the upper notes, but the new patch sounded much better, so this weekend I created versions of Fludd's pieces with recorder + recorder + string bass (actually a violin). Of course, it is folly to try to create an "authentic" performance using a synthesiser, but I thought I would like to try this using a virtual recorder voice. Hopefully, I should be able to record a performance by a real recorder consort some time next year, but for now these synthesiser versions will have to do. Here is a short piece by Fludd entitled A Toy. This, of course, is the first recorded performance of this piece for over 400 years. I wonder if Fludd ever thought that his music would be available four centuries after he had written it ?
24 October 2008
In my weblog entry of a month ago I mentioned a manuscript with a series of alchemical illustrations which was new to me. It is not often I come across an unknown alchemical sequence. This was in an 18th and 19th century source but I have now found an earlier version. This appears to have much better quality illustrations so I will try and get the library to make me some colour prints or scans of these illustrations. There are always interesting things still to uncover. Why on earth do people waste their time speculating and theorising about alchemy when the real excitement lies in discovering and researching items like this ?
23 October 2008
This week I have been trying to work on some of my audio visual lessons for the Exploring Alchemical Emblems project. Unfortunately, builders have been working on the apartment below mine and the occasional hammering and drilling stopped me being able to work on the spoken commentary. Today, however, there was a little bit of peace as the builders did not seem to have turned up, so I was able to complete one of the presentations at least. Maybe I will get another quiet day tomorrow.
22 October 2008
The Alchemy Discussion Forum I set up earlier this year has proven very successful. This is due to my only allowing bona fide scholars to register on the system. Thus we have a small group of people interested in looking at aspects of alchemical research in a scholarly way, which has resulted in some very interesting discussions and exchange of information. This is not proceeding in a vacuum, however, as the forum is open to the wider alchemical community to read. It is proving to be a useful tool for furthering scholarly alchemical research. Here are the recent statistics from the alchemy discussion forum.
20 October 2008
I spent most of the weekend having a little holiday from books, manuscripts, and emblems, but not entirely from alchemy. I decided to program the Robert Fludd music on my synthesiser. This required quite a bit of experimenting with the different sounds and effects till I could create versions which seemed listenable. Fludd's music, to my ear at least, seems really interesting and competant and stands beside many other pieces composed during the early decades of the 17th century. For my synthesiser versions I used bowed bass with strings for the lower treble and often a horn for the lead. I also programed in some ambience and thickened the sound using some resonance. They need a little bit more work but, for me, they enable us to hear Fludd's music again, perhaps not as he intended but hopefully with some sensitivity to the integrity of the pieces. Here is an MP3 version of Fludd's piece A Dreame.
16 October 2008
Yesterday a correspondent of mine told me about the collection of the papers of M.A. Atwood, the writer of the key work on alchemy in the mid 19th century A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery. This consists of 700 items of her letters and notes and would be invaluable for anyone researching for a biography. I think such a study would be timely. Perhaps someone looking for a subject for their Ph.D. might care to look at this as a possible project. The papers are in the John Hay Library in Brown University in Rhode Island. Among the items are autograph letters letters to Mme. de Steiger; drafts of manuscripts by Mrs. Atwood concerning alchemy, heraldry, metaphysics, mythology, neo-Platonism, ontology, theosophy, typewritten notes by the previous owner of her papers. The letters contain explanation and discussion of Mrs. Atwood's views as a theosophist, with repeated condemnation of "Modern occultism" and of modern science. Frequent references to Mrs. Besant, H. P. Blavatsky , A. P. Sinnett, Max Mueller, and to the periodicals Light, Theosophical Review, Lucifer, Broad Views.
15 October 2008
I have decided on a new strategy in order to deal with questions from anonymous individuals. What I propose is that:-
- If someone, known to me or writing under their real verifiable name, asks a question or wants some information from me, I will answer this by a normal private email.
- If someone writes to me anonymously, or is entirely unknown to me, then I will post their question or observations together with my reply onto the Questions from my Inbox web page, and inform them that I have done so. This information will thus be publicly available, and this should help restrict postings from those who wish merely to posture, or use email postings as a way of getting at me. People hiding behind an anonymous email address have no absolutely right to privately abuse and insult others.
15 October 2008
Recently one of my correspondents gently took me to task, making the point that the wacky theories that seem so absurd to me are the brain-children and cherished ideas of the questioner and that this kind of questioner perhaps deserved some compassion. To this I could only reply that it is also compassionate to reveal to someone that they are basing their view on a falsehood, otherwise they are believing in a fantasy. This led me to recall a recent communication I had from an anonymous correspondent who wrote to me asking why I did not believe in the "phonetic cabala". I had replied :
It is not a matter of belief. If one studies the writings of the original alchemists you do not find such a phonetic cabala. This is entirely invented by the person who wrote under the name of Fulcanelli in the 1930's.A simple question and a seemingly innocuous reply. But to this I received the rant:
To the Comic Book Collector,This sort of thing makes it difficult for me to answer correspondents, as here I gave a simple straightforward and in no way aggressive or disparaging reply and I received in return a torrent of abuse. One never knows who one is dealing with behind an anonymous email address. Earlier on today, I spent nearly half an hour writing to someone who asked my advice about how he could embark on and make a career as a professional alchemical scholar. I tried to provide him with some contacts and practical advice. This was an example of a straightforward request for information and I don't expect any venomous rant in return. However, the earlier correspondent also asked me a straightforward seeming simple question. How am I to tell the difference between these two ? Either I ignore all such questioners, or I reply to them all, as there is no way of judging from their initial email as to their state of mind or attitude towards me. It is sometimes very frustrating working in a public way with alchemy.
You're quite petulant in your ignorance...it must be nice to be so dim yet so sure of yourself. Please know that I loathe you,
I loathe what you stand for. Ridiculous "experts" all of you - you are all the same to me. You might be better off reading
those books with your ass - because it's quite clear that your eyes see nothing. Oh no, I'm not hurt that you don't believe
what is quite true and evident - that the cabala is the key to understanding. I was expecting your dim response,
as I have come to expect certain things from people of your caliber (the scholarly know it all type). I could care less that
another rotund, senile, old, white man doesn't believe in it or heed my warnings. Mark my words comic book collector, remember
that date...it was found on the Cross of Hendaye and is the start date for a war between the U.S. and Russia. I found that date
using the Cabala, in addition to four other dates of importance...I don't need a response from you - this is just a venomous warning
to yet another blubbering idiot "expert".
13 October 2008
I am being rather bombarded at present with emails from people taking me to task on some point. I seem to be getting about two or three a week at present. This seems to arise from the fact that people often write to me essentially wanting me to endorse their particular take on alchemy. I suppose they see me as a knowledgeable person and having my endorsement will enable them to quote this when they write to others. The problem arises when somone has almost no understanding of alchemy except what they have read in some speculative popular book on the subject. From this they come up with some nonsense theory and want me to say that they are right in their approach. As I never know what they will do with my replies - they may well use my words for some purpose of their own, getting something published or whatever - I now feel I have to express my own viewpoint, rather than saying something seemingly non-committal such as "how interesting", "a fascinating theory", or whatever. Sadly when I do reject their theory, I often get an abusive reply. The abuse level now seems to be increasing considerably to the extent that I never want to have to meet such people face to face. I have now to restate that in no circumstances will I allow anyone unknown to me to visit me in my home. Anyone turning up will be politely but firmly turned away. I really should not have to put up with this abuse. Long years of email communication have developed in me a thick skin, and I can easily put such things aside, but I don't want my day ruined by a face to face encounter with some irrational individual.
I am also now getting many people wanting to join my Alchemy Discussion forum. This is for scholars only. I know I upset people when I reject their application to join. Please understand that it is open for anyone to read but only for scholars of alchemy to register and contribute postings. This is in order that orderly and sensible scholarly discussion can ensue, without the wild, free for all, nonsense often found on other alchemy forums. The discussion forum has been quite successful so far, with many informative postings. Merely stating that you are a scholar, does not make you one. I am not entirely stupid!
5 October 2008
I constantly receive a number of emails from enquirers in which they want some further information about some aspect of alchemy which they have read about, but which is a myth or misunderstanding. Alchemy being obscure and poorly served by the popular writers on the subject, people are being fed with discredited myths and stories about aspects of alchemy. It does get rather tedious for me to to write back and explain that they have a misunderstanding. It is also rather unrewarding for me, as these correspondents often totally refuse to accept my correction of the idea they have picked up, and often this ends in them expressing annoyance with me as they want me to endorse, rather than criticise, the view they have come to accept. Sadly, all my research and study of alchemy counts for nothing, as these individuals want to believe the myth, and don't respond well to me undermining this. So I have decided to set up a section on the website exploring these myths, in which I will try and clear them up in detail, then I can just point people to that particular page or section. Running the website does generate a large number of enquiries from people, most of whom are happy to have a reply from me, but I seem to be getting an increasing number from correspondents who want to take me to task, rather than listen to what I have to say. Perhaps this new section will help. I will begin setting it up over the next few weeks.
4 October 2008
One of the great problems I have is dealing with people who adopt an ahistorical view on alchemy. This arises often from their main source for reading being 20th and 21st century popular books on alchemy and related ideas, in which the authors mix together all sorts of traditions and sources that seem to have some superficial similarities. People who read such popular books are exposed to sloppy thinking and often become unable to think about history in a linear way. They take a Doctor Who or time tunneling attitude to history. Thus they find nothing wrong with quoting something written at a particular time, as a source for ideas hundreds of years earlier. Now, for some strange reason, I seem to live in a linear world, where what I have for my evening meal, does not seem to assuage my hunger earlier on in the day. Call me irresponsible, a pedant, someone with a blinkered view, but I prefer to put my centuries in ascending order. I recently had a extended email exchange with someone who was putting forward certain views on the origins of alchemy in Europe. One of the points he was trying to make to me was that alchemy in its early period might have been influenced by (among other things) the Hebrew Zohar from Spain. Now as the Zohar was written in the 13th century, and I know of no alchemical manuscript of that period which displays any knowledge of the Zohar or the influence of Zoharatic ideas, I wrote back to say that there was no influence of Kabbalah (Zoharatic or otherwise) on alchemy, as if there were one would see it in the manuscripts. I made the point that alchemy was of no interest to Kabbalah until many centuries later with the rise of Christian Kabbalah in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sadly, this individual was unable to read what I said, and instead turned my words against me, saying
"While I have no great desire to rock your boat of certitude, I feel it incumbent upon me to at least mention in passing that (in no particular order) Blasius Vigenerus (1523-96), Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-89), Gerhard Dorn (1530-84), Marsillus Ficinus (1433-99), Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) and Dr. John Dee (1527-1608) are just some of the alchemists who are known to have been influenced by the Kabbalah/Zohar."He must think me a total fool that he thought he might point out my ignorance. I have been studying alchemy for so many years that my hair is now turning grey, and yet I had not realised this ! He must have thought I was entering my twilight years and early onset dementia was already eroding my memory, or was he merely patronising me? Had I entirely forgotten that I had published a translation of a book from the great volume of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, or the first ever translation of a work of Dorn? The point I was clearly making was that these were Christian Kabbalists from the 16th and 17th centuries. This is not evidence, except to someone who has perhaps seen too many episodes of Quantum Leap, of the influence of Zoharatic ideas on 13th century alchemy. How can one deal with people whose ideas are all over the place ? A rhetorical question with no answer. I despair sometimes about the way in which people think nowadays.
3 October 2008
Is anyone reading this weblog ! Happily the answer seems to be YES. My counter shows a steadily increasing daily audience, which though a very small subset of the thousands accessing the alchemy website every day, nevertheless, I find that I currently have about 100 readers a day for the weblog, growing from the initial 20 or so readers at its inception a year ago.
2 October 2008
I have been rather busy recently undertaking some research and also with my art tarot activities, so have been unable to allocate much time in the last few days to the website. My new audio visual study course on exploring alchemical emblems has now reached its halfway point. The few people who have elected to take this course seem to find the material interesting and instructive. As always, I seem to be a bit ahead of people with such projects, and very few have signed up, probably because it seems a bit of a new format - it is not a book or a conventional text-driven study course - so they are not willing to take this course. In reality, it provides a clear way of looking in depth at alchemical emblems, and exploring the symbolism presented there. In these audio visual presentations, I do not impose an interpretation onto the emblems, instead I try and reveal what is found there, and in many cases base my commentary on the text associated with the emblem itself. Today I am putting the finishing touches to my presentation of an emblem from an 18th century French book. Happily the book itself provides an explanation of the symbolism so I am using this as the basis for my commentary. This study course on exploring alchemical emblems will no doubt in a few years time, once people have gotten used to my way of working, become more popular, but at the moment a small, elite group of less than 20 people, are benefitting from the many hundreds of hours I have put into this project. Most of my work is long term. I never expect a project to attract many people to start with. I have to invest so much time up front. It is a great pity that so few people seem to share my excitment and interest in alchemical symbolism - perhaps they will catch up with me in a few years time.
28 September 2008
Many alchemical notebooks contain details of idealised processes. The alchemist outlines the process and presents it to the reader as a fait accompli. There are very few actual descriptions of how such a process proceeded.
I have found two actual alchemical diaries, one in which the alchemist recorded the progress of one of his experimental processes and the other of an unidentified alchemical enthusiast who records his observations and conversations with various alchemists during the period 1687-89.
26 September 2008
I have made a small start to reorganising the texts section of my website. I decided to leave the original page as it is as people are used to this and not everyone likes to find a key index page changed, but I have installed a little toolbar at the top which leads one to pages with the items from the 16th century and earlier, the 17th century and the 18th century and later. Now I can begin to add all the new material, which I have neglected adding to the texts page over the last year.
24 September 2008
There are so many alchemical manuscripts yet to discover and research. While I was at the recent alchemy conference in Spain, my attention was drawn to a series of alchemical emblems of which I had not before been aware. This is described in a German book which includes some black and white illutrations of the series together with an extract of the text. I am not sure of the present location of the manuscript which was, in the 1930's, in the Archive of the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons in Berlin, but may well have been lost or moved during the Nazi period. The manuscript itself is from the 18th century Golden and Rosy Cross period of the integration of alchemy and Freemasonry and is a work by Frederico Gualdo on the Hermetic Philosophy. The work seems entirely alchemical with no masonic content. I hope to be able to research it further over the coming months. Here are four of the thirteen illustrations known to me.
23 September 2008
Last night I decided I would add a section on Questions from my Inbox. I receive many questions by email. Often these are requests for simple facts or some explanation of some point, even for help finding things on my website ! Sometimes they are from people who have just discovered the subject and want more information or even to ventilate their initial opinions about alchemy. I also get emails asking me to try and identify some image that the sender believes is alchemical in origin. Many of these questions and my answers are only of importance to the sender, but occasionally someone asks a question that perhaps states a point that perhaps has some wider interest to other readers of the alchemy website. So I have decided to occasionally place these interesting questions onto this page. I will, of course, remove details of the sender, as I only wish to share the contents of the email and my replies.
22 September 2008
Today while searching through Google for the words "alchemy texts" I discovered a site new to me www.alchemytexts.com. I thought I would find yet another site that had lifted all the alchemy texts from the alchemy website and repackaged these. However, I received a surprise when I logged on - for this was a site specialising in adult cartoons ! Not an alchemy text in view. I have no concept as to why should they use this title.
21 September 2008I spent some time this weekend painting part of a series on the Hand of the Philosophers and also took the opportunity to complete a couple of emblems I had been working on. It took such a long time to set up the web pages for these emblems as I had somehow gotten the file names into a bit of a muddle. Later today I will check this over again to make sure everything is okay and post them up. Yesterday I had some new ideas as how to structure the website. I thought it might be a neat idea to provide users with different sections which would highlight their especial interests.
19 September 2008
My next main task with the website is to bring some order into the section of alchemical texts. I have added so much material that it is almost impossible for people to find items when they are all listed on the same page. The present texts page has not even been updated to include all the texts on the site. My initial thought is to create a series of linked pages dealing with different groupings of texts. It will take some time to sort out this problem. Hopefully I will allocate some time in the coming week to this task. I am determined to make the alchemy web site easier to access. It might also be a good idea to create a searchable index for the alchemy texts, so that one can search for a word or phrase, such as "antimony" or the "green lion" across all the texts on the site. This will require some radical reorganisation as to create an actual search all these texts have to be moved into a new sub-directory and this would mean that links on external sites to these texts would be lost. I may have to create two copies of each text one in the original place and one in a directory in order to preserve the links from external sites. Organising a website can be a complex task !
19 September 2008
Every few days I seem to get an email from someone who appears to have recently discovered alchemy and wants me to tell them how they should proceed. Usually I write back a short reply, saying something like "read the original alchemical texts" and "I am sorry but I don't have time to give personal instruction". This is perhaps a bit abrupt and unhelpful, so yesterday I decided to write a few pages for the website for beginners. Then in future, I can point enquirers to this section. It is short but tries to engage with the main problems that someone new to the subject will face. I will probably, in time, develop this section for beginners further, but for now it is just a series of four pages.
18 September 2008
Last night I converted my descriptive listing of early printed books on alchemy published in English into an online searchable database. This adds to and complements the other bibliographic databases I set up earlier this week. 18 September 2008
Last week I attended the interational Chymia 2008 conference on alchemy, which was held in Spain at the conference Centre attached to the El Escorial Palace. I rarely travel to conferences but I could not miss this one as so many of the major scholars of alchemy were presenting papers. There were people from many countries, Japan, Taiwan, Poland, Czech Republic, Portugal, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, among others, as well and many from Spain, the USA and the UK. The Conference was organised primarily by Miguel López with some support from the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The organisers could not have been more welcoming and provided an excellent environment for the conference. It was held in a building with a central courtyard and many of us spent long hours socialising and discussing various points about the papers, and exchanging information about source material. One of the contributors, María Tausiet, took a group photo on the final day, with many of the attendees posed around the central fountain. I came away from the conference with lots of new information on source material, contacts and ideas for re-envigorating my work. Certainly, it made me realise, that it was important that I further develop my alchemy web site. I have been neglecting the site over the past year, due to my having to spend so much time on other projects. Being at the conference made me decide to allocate the time to work on my website. This photograph contains most of the major scholars seriously working on alchemy in the present age. There were a variety of different viewpoints and perspectives represented in this group, but alchemical scholarship, being so diverse and multifaceted, was pursued in a totally respectful and positive atmosphere. Arising out of the Conference was the establishing of a new Spanish Society for the History of Alchemy.
17 September 2008
I have made up a small audiovisual presentation of two of the images from the Atalanta fugiens, which can be played on a Windows computer. This has my coloured version of the emblems and my versions of Michael Maier's 'fugues' on synthesiser. The file is quite large (4.5 megabytes) so a full version with the 50 emblems and music would be far too long to place on the website.
17 September 2008
Another day working with the searchable databases. Having done all the difficult computer coding yesterday, I was able to create the online database for the alchemical manuscripts realtively quickly as I only had to adapt the code. This is now set up online. I also decided to make some adjustments to the onl;ine database of books. In my database I have a field with descriptions of illustrations in the book. Initially I included it in the online files but this was giving many hits that people might not wish to see. So I have now divided this into two separate searchable databases - one without the descriptions, and the other only including books with illustrations. This seems to me to be a better setup. All three databases can be searched through my
16 September 2008
When I was at the alchemical conference in Spain last week, I became aware of the fact that among the features of my web site that were most accessed by scholars were the databases of manuscripts and printed books that I had developed in the mid 1990's. I felt rather bad that I had not continued to develop these further and made a promise to myself that I would make this information easier to access and also gradually add more material and build these databases further. The first task I set myself was to create a search facility for the database of alchemical printed books. This proved quite difficult. One can set up what is termed a SQL database which can be indexed by a program run on the web server. This was problematic as the costs were quite substantial (around 40 UK pounds a month for each database) on my web host. It also meant that the data did not exist as actual HTML files on the web site, but the finds for each search were built dynamically by this program. I spent some hours hunting around and managed to find a piece of software that could create search indexes accessed through an asp code. It was also relatively inexpensive at 65 UK pounds. This meant that each page describing a book could remain as a text on the site and potentially be indexed by Google - a perfect solution. So I next had to write some code in my database of alchemical books which could export the data as a series of formatted HTML files. Once I had this set up online, I could get the Zoom software to index this and create a quick and easy find. Needless to say the whole process took many hours and it is still not complete. Getting the data correctly formatted is quite a struggle. There are 4640 books in my database, so 4640 web pages in the BOOKS folder. It takes a long time to upload these and I had to do this ten or more times in order to correct formatting errors in the code. It is amazing how slow Windows is in dealing with folders containing 4600 files, the computer ground to a halt for minutes while it went through the process of accessing the files during the process of developing the database. After twelve hours I have the search index working but it needs a lot more polishing to get the search program fully integrated with the data. Online it is nice and fast and does Boolean searches which makes it really neat at focussing in on the finds. Anyway, for those who have any interest in this, you can access the search through
www.alchemywebsite.com/books/search.aspNow I have to move on to the equally demanding task of creating a similar search engine for my alchemical manuscripts database.
13 September 2008
I have been away all week at the Chymia 2008 conference in Spain. I got back to a mass of emails, letters and book and CD-Rom orders which I have now to answer and deal with. Thus I have not been able to keep up the weblog over this past week.
3 September 2008
Today was a total washout as I tried to recover from a computer disaster. My archives on my computer have now grown so much, due mostly to the need for me to store thousands of 600 dpi images of emblems, paintings and pages scanned from manuscripts, that earlier this year, I had entirely outgrown a 200 gigabyte hard disc, and my work was consequently spread over two discs. Earlier this year I added a 500 gigabyte disc so I could have a backup for all my work, but because this was located on the only available disc slot behind the CD-Rom, this compromised access speeds and my computer really began noticeably to slow. Thus I decided to buy a RAID card and another 500 gigabyte disc and run these as a single mirrored system, thus creating two copies of each file automatically. Well, these things are supposed to work, and clever people write the software to run these system, but they sometimes get things wrong. So the installation of the hardware yesterday went well enough, and I set up the RAID system and instructed it to copy all the data on the existing disc to the new one. It seemed to be working but was taking so long that I left it running overnight. I woke up in the morning to two blank discs! The stupid software had reformatted my original data disc. Not everything was backed up as I could not squeeze eveything onto the 200 gig disc and my external hard drive unit won't work with large format drives! I got a utility to unformat the drive. This took six long, long boring hours during which time I could not use the computer and at the end of this seemingly interminable process I was dismayed to find that it had recovered the files but renamed them all as FILE0029145.jpg or whatever, absolutely useless. Thus it had lost the directory structure and filenames. After a bit of frustrated ploughing through the online manual, I found a feature that could help restore the structure, so another few hours of the program churning away before I found whether it was successful. It found and restored about 80 percent of the data in its original form and what was irrecoverable luckily had been backed up onto existing hard discs. Needless to say I abandoned the idea of the RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Discs) and settled for setting my discs up as conventional hard discs and will have to manually backup every few days. My computer now contains nearly 1.5 terabytes of storage. I am old enough that the first computer I had with a hard disc, a Lisa (precursor to the Macintosh), had a 5 megabyte hard disc! I now have 300,000 times that storage space (if my calculations are correct). The day ended with my resolving the problem, but with very little work done. I was cheered up when I found that an artist sent me a banner he designed for my web site and I have added this to the top of the pages.
25 August 2008
Today I felt extremely tired and realised I could not work on anything creative. Rather foolishly I thought I would revamp my alchemy web bookshop to make it easier for people to locate the various prints I have for sale there. I always underestimate the time and concentration required to program web pages, so this proved to be a considerable task and I found I had taken up six hours in doing this. Once I started I realised that many of my images for the CD-Roms were totally out of date, so I had to rescan these and add them in. I think the CD-Rom section is now much clearer and easier for visitors to grasp. Hopefully I won't have to do this for a while. I do hope I can sell a few of the Art Prints. I know these are expensive, but they are really very fine and totally unique. I recently added a few more prints to this section
25 August 2008
While answering a question posed by an email correspondent today, I found this reading in Latin of the text of the Tabula Smaragdina (the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus) on Youtube recited by Denis Y. Boulet
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHSjYg0iMsM
and for a bit of fun he even sang this in the style of a church chant!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjlJJ6tbVrw
21 August 2008
When, back in 1970, I first began to seriously investigate alchemy, I realised that I would have to base this on studying the original texts. Luckily I had access to most of these through the Ferguson and Young collections in Glasgow. At that time I was, however, still very much under the influence of the Jungian and esoteric approaches and this coloured my way of looking at alchemical imagery and reading alchemical texts. As I grew away from these narrow perspectives, I began to see instead what the alchemists themselves had written and pictured, rather then viewing this through a limited filter. It does depress me somewhat that few have followed this approach, but instead people still read alchemical works through the filter of their own preconceptions. They read a work to find in it confirmation of their own ideas, and usually miss what the alchemist was trying to communicate. I get many emails from people who have some weird idea that they feel can be confirmed by alchemy. They write to me, essentially asking me to endorse their approach. One thing that alchemy has taught me is to think clearly, and to immediately recognise when someone is completely convinced by their own rhetoric. This does not apply only to alchemy, but to any discipline, cultural history, the analysis of artworks, and even to modern science. For example, I find the scientific establishment view that global warming is a result of human driven atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, riddled with such rhetorical science. In the last few years one sees constantly on television programmes, pictures of a glacier in Iceland which is melting and has retreated some kilometres from the sea. This is presented, in a rhetorical way, as incontroversial evidence for human driven global warming. Sadly, what these scientists fail to mention, is that as the glacier retreats, on the exposed ground one can see evidence of human occupation, the foundations of houses and farmsteads. Indeed, this area was extensively farmed in the 16th and 17th centuries but was abandoned in the 18th and 19th centuries as the glacier grew and overran the land surface. The melting and regrowth of this glacier seems more likely to be a long term cyclic event. What is totally wrong is for climate scientists to present this rhetorically as incontroversial evidence for their case, and to ignore its true context. They never mention the archeological evidence of earlier human occupation of this area. Through my study of alchemy, I am trying to get people to see it in its proper context, and to release themselves from the bond of rhetorical thinking, for if you look into alchemy to merely confirm some wacky new age or esoteric idea, you will miss out on seeing its true nature and what the alchemists were engaged with and attempting to communicate.
20 August 2008
Today I visited the Ferguson Collection here in Glasgow and among a number of things I wanted to look at was Libavius' Commentariorum alchymiae of 1606. I managed to clear up the little confusion about the diagrams. It turns out that both of these are in the book. They occur in a section devoted to the Philosophers' Stone. I took a half hour or so to have a read through some of the text, and was surprised that his Latin was quite easy for me to read. Usually I get a bit lost in the clauses and complex sentences, but Libavius writes wery clearly, in short simple sentences.
I also took the opportunity of looking at the various editions of Paracelsus' Prognosticatio, printed from around 1536 when he was still alive. Most of the Paracelsus books were edited and printed after his death and consequently it is in some cases uncertain as to whether some of these were not perhaps written by the editors, so this is an early item in the Paracelsus corpus. I have been intending to publish this with my coloured versions of the woodcuts, however, today as soon as I saw the later edition with engravings, I immediately decided to use this instead. So I will have a few weeks of colouring to do.
The Libavius image of the Globe of the Philosophers' Stone printed out very well on my large format printer, so I am making this available as one of my art prints. Click here to view.
17 August 2008
This afternoon I finished colouring the Libavius engraving that I mentioned a few days ago. I have coloured it strictly according to Libavius' description in his Commentariorum alchymiae of 1606. I will include an analysis of it in my Exploring Alchemical Emblems study course, that I began a month ago. This has raised a puzzle for me as in 1999 I coloured a similar emblem which I thought was from the same book. Although superficially similar, there are some major departures in the symbolism. This is rather a mystery which I will now have to try and clear up. I will hopefully find time this coming week to go and see the original versions of Libavius' books which are in the Ferguson collection here in Glasgow, and try to find how these two images are related.
15 August 2008
Today I have been colouring a version of a well known image from an early 17th century work by Libavius. Some ten or more years ago I coloured the woodcut that was printed in the original book, but I have found that the description in Libavius' text was not followed by the artist/wood-engraver. Instead an engraved version from over 150 years later, in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, much more closely follows Libavius' conception. So I managed to obtain a copy of this large engraving and have today begun colouring it following the indications given in Libavius' text.
15 August 2008
I am still getting bombarded with various email newsletters that someone went to the enormous bother of subscribing me to. It seems to be a puerile revenge for some minor thing I said on a discussion forum. Some people seem to be on a hair trigger and any rejection of their ideas results in a rush of fury. Sadly the choice of these newsletters/mailing lists that this person has subscribed me to, reveals something about that individual. They subscribed me to many newsletters on geriatrics, and older peoples' health issues, and a large number of gay newsletters. How sad it is is for someone to think to do this in order to get revenge. It reveals so clearly the sheer smallness of their mind. It would be rather amusing if it were without its inconveniences, and having to manually unsubscribe from a mass of such newsletters. Unfortunately people like myself who openly use my real name and use a public email address are at the mercy of people on the internet who hide behind pseudonyms and handles, so that they are never held responsible for what they say or do. Such people are merely cowards and bullies. Luckily I am a strong person and not hurt by such things, but I could imagine a more sensitive soul being upset to the point that they withdrew from using discussion groups and email communication.
8 August 2008This evening I finally managed to understand and extract the descriptive material from the Steganographick preface to Beroalde de Verville's Tableau de Riches Inventions. This now enables me to fully grasp the intention behind the symbolism on the wonderful engraved frontispiece to this book.
8 August 2008
Someone has just today gone to the enormous bother of subscribing me to hundreds of mailing lists. Prima facie, this would seem to be a vindictive or vandalistic person trying to mess up my email. The rubbish people I have to deal with ! Luckily most of these lists seem to request that I reply in order to actively subscribe, so hopefully email returns from these subscriptions will be minimal. This sort of thing is so childish !
8 August 2008
This past week I have been continuing to work on my audio visual study course on exploring alchemical emblems. This seems to be going very well and I have included some very complex emblems which though difficult to explain in the conventional format of a written description, work well when forensically investigated using this particular way of working. The feedback from the users has been rather positive, so I am already thinking ahead to other courses I could implement in this new medium. Last week I received a rather large order for books, which was very gratifying, however, making up the books took up a great deal of my time. Usually I find I can do the bookbinding in the evenings and free up my days for more creative work but when I get a large order for books, I end up having to do this during the daytime as well. It can become quite exhausting. Producing books to order is becoming more and more difficult as I get older. In the longer term I will have to give up on the bookbinding. I have, after all, been doing this for 30 years. However, as no one else is publishing editions of this rare alchemical material, and I do feel impelled to make this material available. My life has been substantially given up to letting the work of the original alchemists speak again to us - I only wish it did not involve the burden of my doing all the bookbinding. Most other editors just sit at their computer and originate the material, then it is passed on to a publisher to issue and sell, whereas, I have to do all the work myself, layout, printing, bookbinding, making up the packets. It has allowed me the freedom to publish what I like, but it has been quite a struggle, and as I get older I become more and more aware that I will not be able to continue in this way indefinitely. Perhaps the best solution would be to find a financial partner who could help capitalise the printing of my small specialist editions, which would then free up more of my time for creative work.
30 July 2008
My new course exploring alchemical emblems through a series of audio visual presentations has been going for two weeks and has so far attracted eight users. It is probably a bit of a departure from my usual format, thus people are wary of it. Often I find myself getting a little way ahead of people but eventually they catch up and find what I am doing has some value and interest for them. A similar thing has happened with the book on the Solidonius manuscript. This has been available for two months and only attracted nine purchasers. It is, certainly, a rather obscure item, and though few people have seen its images or even heard of the work, it is an important alchemical sequence. Surely there must be somewhat more than nine people interested in this work. Last week was a rather expensive one for me, as my colour printer which has produced such excellent output for the last three years had a major components failure. I had to have this replaced at a cost of £450 ($900) and this coincided with the expiry of four colour print units which cost £150 ($300) each - so I suddenly had to spend nearly a thousand pounds just to keep this printer going. I suppose in a year or so I will have to think about replacing it. It was a very expensive printer but the quality is superb so I may try and get a few more years out of it.
17 July 2008
I have now created a number of presentations for my Exploring Alchemical Emblems course. It took a while to get familiar with the software, and to discover how to best use the medium, but after a bit of work on these I feel this to be a rather interesting way to explain detailed and complex alchemical illustrations. These are not deeply scholarly investigations but rather intended for those not especially familar with alchemical material and yet interested in finding out what lies hidden in the amazing alchemical emblems. The shortest presentation is about 5 minutes and the longest about 10. Because of the detailed graphics these are large files. For this course will be issuing one every week for the next six months. If people choose to study an emblem a week they will soon become quite familiar with the intricacies of alchemical sysmbolism.
13 July 2008
A few days ago I noticed that one of the copies of my Magnum Opus Three Tables of Man which I sold a few months ago for £125 ($250) has been auctioned on Ebay and sold for $300 (plus postage). Perhaps the seller was expecting a little bit more, but he at least made a modest profit within a few months of purchase. This book will no doubt increase in value over the years ahead, as it is in an edition of only 60 copies and I am holding back 10 copies from sale for my own collection. Thus there are 50 copies to sell, 40 have sold so far and I have another batch of 10 copies to produce and sell. I intend to do this later this year, but I may have to reconsider the way in which I will sell these if people are merely going to buy and resell quickly. I have about 20 people so far wanting the ten copies for sale, though it always happens that people put their name down for something then don't actually buy when it comes available. I may sell five to previous customers whom I know are primarily interested in collecting the material rather than being people investing in rare material like this, then offer the final five on an Ebay Auction and let the market decide the price. It is a difficult problem to sort out.
10 July 2008
I have made a start on my new project, which I am entitling Exploring alchemical emblems. This extends my well known Foundation Study Course on Alchemical Symbolism by my creating a series of audio-visual presentations in which I explore the symbolism in an emblem. Each lesson will consist of a five to ten minute presentation. These will be issued approximately every fortnight. Each file is quite large (5-13 megabytes) and so it will not be possible to send these by email attachments. I plan to set up password protected website from which people who have registered will be able to download the lessons. The course will last about a year, so we will have say 24 lessons amounting to three to four hours of audio-visual material. This will give the student an insight into the structure and meaning of many alchemical emblems found in manuscripts and printed books. I have today completed the first lesson and will work on more over the coming weeks. When I have five or six completed I will announce this on my mailing list and hopefully a few people might be interested in buying the course material. I find this a really interesting way of presenting information. It is like conducting a seminar, rather than writing a course book. I think people will be engaged by this new means I am developing for presenting information and it will help them appreciate and understand the significance of alchemical imagery.
3 July 2008
Recently I have taken on so many projects that my workplace is becoming totally chaotic and muddled. I just cannot seem to find the time to try and clear things up and tidy items away. Also I dont have space to store everything, so books and images pile up on any available horizonal surface. My library and study room is usually quite tidy but has now degenerated completely so it has become almost as bad a muddle as my workshop. I am hoping over the next month to get some more bookshelves to store away some of the debris!
Here are a few photos I took this afternoon of my library space.
My workshop, of course, is never tidy - but almost total chaos.
3 July 2008
I have decided to create a series of complex slide show presentations on the reading of alchemical emblems to follow up on my study courses. I have now obtained a really powerful software package which enables me to do pans and zooms. This will enable me to provide a commentary on a number of complex alchemical emblems as the software zooms and pans into the parts of the image being discussed. It will take some time to create a disc of such presentations, and I am not sure how I will find the time to do this as I have so many projects to work on at present, but it does excite me that I now have the software tools to be able to create such presentations and thus allow people to study alchemical emblems in greater detail.
1 July 2008
Over the last week I have had a number of emails from a correspondent which gradually came to rather depress me. He started off asking me some straightforward questions about my work, saying that he, metaphorically, sat in the same place as me, by which I understood that he shared and respected my approach. I quite happily answered his questions, but from his replies I quickly realised that he had some underlying agenda and belief driven approach to alchemy. Today he sent a rather hurtful and depressing email accusing me of being at it so long and merely going through the motions and saying that my motivation for my work is, so to speak, to pay the bills. People can be so cruel. Because I do not endorse his belief driven ideas he entirely misses the essence of my work. I made the point that I am one of the most active researchers into alchemy. Every day I discover new things. It is the continual discovery of new information about alchemy, through my focussing on the original source material, that drives and motivates me.
People want to sit in their chairs and theorise, imagine and invent all sorts of interpretations. I prefer to actually read the original material and try and find what the alchemist was trying to communicate. Thus I have little time for modern speculators and commentators. It is only through a direct study of the original works that one can penetrate through to a meaningful understanding of alchemy. That is the way I work. He sees this as me going through the motions. Sadly, he is missing the opportunity and delight of undertaking true research and totally misunderstands the focus of my work.
I have been receiving recently a number of these carping criticisms. Sadly it only shows to me that some people are determined not to see the point of my work. It seems weird to me that someone interested in alchemy, would turn away from looking at the original writings and instead base their perspective on some contrived and invented interpretation of a modern commentator. Indeed, it seems strange that someone supposedly interested in alchemy would prefer to make hurtful remarks to me, which can only result in my withdrawing from any serious dialogue. Obviously he does not value my work or see it as having any validity - for him I am, after all, merely going through the motions.
24 June 2008
In my entry for 9 Apr 2008 I recounted an email exchange with someone (possibly a younger person) who wrote to me to bring up some points about alchemy. He continues to send me images of paintings on which he has created a grid of lines, supposedly with some significance. However today he excelled himself by sending me a text file in which he has gathered together many quotations from alchemy texts to support his contention that the prima materia of alchemy is cannabis. It totally amused me and I had quite a few minutes of fun reading through it. He tends to look for any mention of such words as "gum", "green lion", "grass", "herb", "white vapour". I must say I totally cracked up when I saw his extract from Geber "Let it be sublimed in an high body and head…" Surely the term "high" did not mean "enthused by psychedelic substances" in the 16th and 17th centuries, I seem to recall that first being used in the 1960's, not the 1560's. Whoever said that alchemical research was not great fun ! Sadly, I am inclined to think that he believes his rhetoric. Perhaps a too frequent acquaintance with the prima materia is affecting him.
24 June 2008
Having received the microfilm of the manuscript containing music written by Robert Fludd, I was able yesterday to scan the images using a microfilm scanner. This is a terribly slow process as the scanners have to do 4800 lines per inch in order to create a sufficiently detailed image. It took about six hours. I then printed these out and will now send them to a colleague in England who has kindly offered to transcribe them into modern musical notation. The manuscript is in fact a series of partbooks. The music is in three parts, played by different instruments, so each player had his own book of parts to play. This, compounded by the fact that early 17th century music did not use bar lines and often assumes the player knows the rests or periods they don't play notes, could make it difficult to reconstruct the pieces, but I am sure it will be done successfully. There are eleven pieces by Robert Fludd in the manuscript. The four pieces already transcribed sound really interesting and are definitely not mere technical exercises. In fact, the bulk of the manuscript includes short pieces by well known English composers of the period, William Lawes, John Jenkins and other such figures, so Fludd's compositions are amongst distinguished company. The manuscript itself came from the Filmer family. During the relevant period of Robert Fludd's lifetime we find that Sir Edward Filmer (1566-1629) was the owner of Little Charlton, East Sutton and three other manors in Kent. Fludd, of course, came from Kent and would have known Sir Edward Filmer well.
This is a really interesting project for me, as once we have the transcriptions we will be able to record these pieces. It is very rewarding to be able to recover these lost musical pieces and let Robert Fludd's music be performed and listened to again.
19 June 2008
This morning I listened to an interesting discussion on the 'Music of the Spheres' on Radio 4 here in the UK. The discussion involved three British scholars - Peter Forshaw, Angela Voss and and Jim Bennett. The discussion did not touch on alchemy as such, but on many of the ideas that played into the alchemical tradition. You can hear this on the website
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/inourtime
Click on the link "In our Time".
14 June 2008I have rather neglected the large art prints I produce. I have not sold very many of these over the past year, but I feel I should now try and develop this further and try and encourage people to buy these. About a year ago I bought a large format giclee art printer at considerable cost. It took a while to discover the correct settings for the different papers one can use, but I managed to solve the problems within the first month or so and now produce consistently high quality output. As I was not selling many prints I rather forgot about this section of my website, but this weekend have made some progress and put up a lot more material. The prints I produce are on 24 by 16.5 inch (61 by 42 cms) 280 gram white matte paper and being pigment based will not fade as do many prints produced on dye based printers. A complete set of pigment tanks (there are twelve of these) costs over £500 ($1000). Some people have said that these prints are too expensive, but I cannot see how these could be produced at a lower price, unless these were done in large volumes. One cannot compare individually produced prints with mass market high volume items. My prices even include air mail post in a study large diameter tube, which costs me in total over £7.50 ($15) per item. These are unique items which cannot be purchased elsewhere. Unlike the books it seems unlikely that these will appreciate much in value, but as so very few are sold, they could become quite rare if I had for some reason to stop production. I have now added prints of alchemical sequences. This is a useful way of seeing at once all the images in a alchemical series. I have put up six of these series to start with. Should there be some interest I will create a further set of these. To see my art prints pages please click here. The site includes alchemical, astronomical/astrological, and general emblems, together with the new section of alchemy series.
6 June 2008
I am always moaning on about email, but things are really getting serious now. All the mail sent to my contacts on Comcast.com, one of the largest USA ISP's, is now being returned with a "server refused mail service". This has happened on six occasions over the last few days. This is really annoying as there is no way now for me to communicate with these contacts. When they write to me my email replies will be refused and returned. How can people allow their ISP's to arbitrarily block mail in this way ? These ISP's just cut their customers off from receiving genuine emails. If this junk mail paranoia goes on much further none of us will be able to be sure of communicating by email. These dumb and arbitrary junk mail filters are killing the Internet ! I am so fed up with this situation.
5 June 2008
I finally completed the Solidonius and bound up the first three copies. I have now written the next issue of my alchemy mailing list and sent this out to the subscribers. Last year I cleared out my mailing list which had grown to around two thousand, most of which were totally inactive and never responded to any communication. So early this year I set up a new mailing list which now has gathered over 300 members. However, this is still problematic with over 20 (8%) email addresses discontinued in only a few months. Email communication is getting more and more difficult. People seem to use a whole mass of different email addresses which they then abandon a few months later. I cannot see the point of doing that. Anyway, for what it is worth, I announced the publication of the Solidonius and also the Dorn Speculative Philosophy. I also brought to peoples' attention the fact that there are now only three copies left to sell of my Coloured version of the Rosary of the Philosophers. This edition of 100 copies has sold out quite quickly in about two years. The next few days I will spend doing bookbinding.
2 June 2008
Over the weekend I finalised the layout for my next volume in the Magnum Opus series. This is a translation and reproduction of facsimiles of the Solidonius manuscript. This was translated for me by Vincent Matley who earlier translated the Marinier manuscript. I love these obscure alchemical emblematic sequences of coloured emblems and intend to issue further such items in the Magnum Opus series. As this is a specialist item I have decided to issues this as a limited editon of 100 copies, of which 75 will be available for sale. I have begun producing copies and they are now available to buy.
30 May 2008
Yesterday while in the University library I took a look at a 17th century book which dealt with a strange and enigmatic inscription which had so intrigued people since its appearance in 1548 that they puzzled over it and tried to come up with some interpretation. A number of alchemical writers were drawn to it looking for some kind of alchemical allegory, possibly because of the reference to the hermaphrodite. The book I was looking at, written by Carlo Cesare, Marchese Malvasia [1616-1693] Aelia Laelia Crispis non nata resurgens... Bologna, 1683, documents the many interpretations that had been put forward. Chapter 1 lists the various authors who have brought forth explanatory interpretations, including Richard Vitis of Basinstoke, Ioannes Turris of Brouge, Nicolas Reusner, Franciscus Scottus of Antwerp, Athanasius Kircher, Nicolaus Barnaud, and so on. I counted 43 authors in all. There are a number of illustrations in the text, and the final chapters refer to and make parallels with classical seals and inscriptions.
Aelia Laelia Crispis,
Neither man nor woman, nor androgyne, nor maid, nor boy, nor crone, nor chaste, nor whore, nor virtuous, but all.
Carried away neither by hunger, nor by sword, nor by poison, but by all.
Neither in heaven, nor in earth, nor in water, but everywhere is her resting place.
Lucius Agatho Priscius,
Neither husband, nor lover, nor kinsman, neither mourning, nor rejoicing, nor weeping; raised up neither mound, nor pyramid, nor tomb, but all.
He knows and knows not what he raised up to whom.
This is a tomb that has no body in it.
This is a body that has no tomb round it.
But body and tomb are the same.
29 May 2008
Today I will make a visit to Glasgow University Library to take a last look at the copies of the Solidonius manuscript in the Ferguson Collection just to make sure that I have not missed anything. Then I should be able to finalise my Magnum Opus edition of this and move to publishing it next week. If I have time, when in the library, I will take a look at some emblematic material I have discovered. I always have a pile of items I want to research.
25 May 2008
Over the last few days I have made considerable progress with the Solidonius, both in finalising my facsimiles of the emblems and in writing a short introduction to the piece. It is almost unknown except to a few specialists, but is a significant alchemical sequence which was rediscovered in the 18th century. If nothing else gets in the way next week, I should be able to finalise the layout and move on the production. I first thought about publishing this back in the late 1980s. It is amazing how long it can take to bring all the material together to create one of my books. In this case, I needed to find a translator, good quality images and some research into the manuscripts. I managed to find in Vincent Matley, an excellent translator of French, whom I could easily work with. With the images, I could not find a source for high quality images so I decided late last year, that I would have to make my own facsimiles. About five years ago, by serendipity, I came across an early German version of this work, dating to 1541, and I have brought some of this into the introductory material, though the book itself is based entirely on the later 18th century French manuscripts. This will be number 35 in the Magnum Opus series.
22 May 2008
Today I noticed a copy of my Three Tables of Man book which I sold for £125 ($250) already being sold secondhand for $350 after just a few months!
21 May 2008
Today I made some further progress with the Robert Fludd music. This is developing into an interesting project though it will take many months to come to fruition. I have ordered a microfim of the original manuscript, then will have to have the music transcribed into modern notation. We already have, through the generosity of Todd Barton, access to his transcriptions of four of Fludd's pieces. I also made considerable progress with the Solidonius illustrations, tidying up some details, scanning in the images and making some further corrections in Paint Shop Pro. I now only have Emblem Four to complete. This is the most complex of all the emblems and there are a lot of details to clear up. In the original image from I am working, the flesh colours of the figures have had to be restored and the colours brightened considerably. Here is the original I am copying from and my copy as it stands at the moment. I hope it will only require three or four hours more work.
19 May 2008
I am just trying to finalise my travel arrangements to the Chymia 2008 conference on alchemy at El Escorial in Spain later this year. I rarely travel but this conference, which has nearly fifty speakers, will give me the opportunity to meet many scholars who I have only known through their books, articles or emails, so I reckoned I could not let it go by. The travelling arrangements are not especially easy for one such as me, who finds the whole process of travelling an enormous struggle, but I have, at least, been able to find a direct flight to Madrid from Scotland. I did hope to attend the conference in Philadelphia a few years ago but the travelling was a bit difficult and expensive to arrange, so I dropped out. There are few scholarly conferences on alchemy each decade, so I am pleased to be able to get to this one. I am sure it will be very informative and I will make some new contacts as well as renewing old friendships. The programme is a very full one exploring many topics in seven sessions: Alchemy and Patronage; Vernacular alchemy and Local Knowledge; Chymia and Matter; Collectors of secrets; Chymia and New Philosophy; Books and libraries; Mediaeval Alchemy.
18 May 2008
Today I had to send a reply to a correspondent writing to me from an Earthlink address. This email provider is notorious for its spam blocking, which requires anyone sending a mail to an Earthlink address to fill in a request, so that the recipient can okay your email. What a load of rubbish that is ! And they dare to call it Earthlink when it is actually getting in the way of linking people. I have been rather annoyed by this system for some years, but today I found that they had changed their authentication which involves reading a series of printed letters and numbers, to make it even more difficult to read. I had to try three times, as I could hardly make out the characters from the background, and misread these two times before getting it right the third time. People on Earthlink must think themselves smart not to have any spam in their inbox, but they do try the patience of busy people like myself. I will probably in future not bother to reply to Earthlink emails.
14 May 2008
I have begun again to work on my paintings for the Solidonius book. These probably need about four or five full days of work to complete. There are 18 paintings in all and I suppose I have spent more than ten hours on each image - so about two hundred hours in total.
13 May 2008
Tonight I had to make up another batch of copies of my Alchemy: Treasure house of symbolism book as I got another order for this today. I made up ten copies and this should keep me going for a while. This has been a rather successful publication. It was well worth doing the exhibition, though it was a great deal of work at the time. I still have quite a few of the covers left, but when these run out I will not be able to afford to reprint them. This book was kindly subsidised by one of my supporters who thus enabled me to print the high quality laminated covers, and to keep the price down. I hope one day to be able to mount another exhibition. I am continually gathering new material and recently have been exploring the illuminated manuscript tradition and emblematic panel paintings of the late 14th and 15th centuries, out of which alchemcial symbolism emerged. In a few years time I should have made a reasonable number of paintings of this material, so that could be used as the basis for an exhibition. I am also planning to have an exhibition of the various Splendor solis artworks I have collected.
13 May 2008
Last night I spent five hours uploading a full set of files into Levity.com/alchemy. I had to do this in batches as the large number of files rather swamped the system. FTP is so slow and can be a total pain as the server often times out halfway through a batch ! I have now restructured the files on Levity in order to reduce the load somewhat and shift this onto alchemywebsite.com. The alchemy web site gets so many hits every day that it can overwhelm the servers. The recent problems with Levity being offline are now completely resolved as Dan Levy has moved Levity onto a new server. I also took this opportunity to remove the animated graphic from the top left hand corner of each page as this does take too long to load for people without broadband connections and hope this will make the site less frustrating for these users to access. I continued uploading the files this morning, and I also will upload the alchemywebsite.com files which have also had to be rebuilt.
12 May 2008
Today I received a recording of an initial play through, by Franzeska and her friends, of Dr Flud's Dreame on three instruments, treble, tenor and bass recorders. It appear to me as amazingly competent music and has some rather interesting musical devices, with fine embellishings of the melodic line and some inventive harmonic tricks. At the end it adopts the unusual device of short pauses or silences which lead on to the final cadence. I look forward, in time, to hearing some further pieces from Robert Fludd's book of compositions. I do not know if this piece has been played in recent times. The musicologist and composer Todd Barton did research and transcribe some of Fludd's compositions back in the early 1980's, but I am not sure if he then managed to get a group of players to play through the pieces. The Dreame certainly sounds rather good played by a recorder consort.
12 May 2008
Readers of this weblog may have noticed recently my growing frustration with some of the people who write to me. I have always been open to discussing ideas and receiving information about alchemy, but over the past year there seems to be an increaing tide of difficult email correspondents.
There are people with weird idiosyncratic ideas about alchemy, some strange theory they have thought up or got from reading someone else. They then write to me, essentially wanting me to endorse their ill thought out ideas. When I write back, indicating the flaws in their theories, they get rather annoyed with me and then keep writing emails, taking me to task for being narrow-minded and even a repressor of their wonderful new insights. This is getting totally tedious, so I will now have to desist from responding to such emails. People should try to understand that I have been studying alchemy almost full time for over forty years. I have read my way through all sorts of interpretations of the subject, but now base my work with alchemy entirely on the source material and the established historical facts about the subject. I am always interested in engaging with people who have the same respect for historical facts and wish to share information about texts, images and source material. These are the kind of person I will always want to keep in touch with.
There also appears to be a growing number of people who seem determined to misunderstand my motives. They assign all sorts of motives to me on the basis even of a missing email. It has happened a few times that, when an email did not get delivered, people interpret this as me slighting them in some way. This is so childish. Email is no longer a reliable method for communication, with all the complex junk mail filters getting in the way. If people do not receive an email for me then they should not immediately jump to conclusions that I am ignoring them, or have some strange agenda or attitude to them.
My main motivation is to research and find out new facts about historical alchemy, source material (manuscripts, books and images) which have not been explored. I also try to publish and make such material available to others. I do work long hours, often not finishing up till midnight. I have limited financial resources and cannot easily do things for people that they might wish me to. I have no assistants or secretaries and must do all the work myself. I write all the HTML code for my websites as I cannot afford to pay to have someone manage the site. Setting up a page can take many hours. One correspondent recently said to me that I was making too much of my lack of resources and that I should be more positive. I don't know what can be more positive for a 60 year old to do than working till midnight most nights. I am the one publishing the books - who else has now issued well over fifty books on alchemy ! What is negative, surely, is for me to wake up reading a load of carping criticism and mean spirited remarks. Struggling against a continual drip of criticism is no fun.
Now I will go and make up some book orders and then work on the Solidonius paintings.
11 May 2008
On Friday I received transcriptions of two of the pieces of music composed by Robert Fludd. My friend Franzeska, who is a fine recorder player played these through for me and I was so surprised to find them to be excellent pieces of music. These were not mere exercises in harmony but very competant and interesting co