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.
4 May 2008
Last night I decided to rebuild the printing file for my edition of the Mutus Liber Coloured. This has been unavailable since I bought my new printer and I found the old file structure would not then print properly. I have put off doing this for some years, partly because I don't get that many requests for copies but also because it required some rescanning and much fiddling about to get the layout right. So I have made a start on that and will work on it for most of today. So I should be able to put copies up for sale next week.
3 May 2008
Sorry, it is a day for another of my moans. Yesterday I had an email from a university professor in America taking me to task for pricing my most recent book the Speculative Philosophy at $80 and suggesting that I make the text of this available more widely (with the implication that I put it on the website). I found this rather deflating and totally unrealistic. 80 dollars is hardly a high price for an academic book ! I recently had to pay $116 for Stanton Linden's Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy And Renaissance Culture produced by a subsidised University Press. My books are signed limited handbound editions and usually the second hand price exceeds the price at which I sell them. I don't have the luxury of a professor's salary let alone a regular secure income, and would go bankrupt quickly if I gave my work away for free. I have provided 150 megabytes of free information on my alchemy website, which actually cost me many thousands of hours of my time to prepare as well as the ongoing costs of hosting the web space and bandwidth. I don't think I should be expected to further give up my income. Of course if someone were to subsidise and fund my time I would be very willing to do this, but it is totally unrealistic to expect me to give my work away for free.
This recent email just demonstrated to me how someone can have no idea of, or sensitivity to, the difficulties I have to face up to in trying to survive from my work promoting alchemy. Because I do not have a high income, regrettably I have to live in the cheap side of town amongst the poorer communities of this city. Just a few days ago the apartment below mine was broken into. I have to live alongside such low level criminality as I cannot afford to reside in a reasonably secure part of town. These are the realities I have to face in my life and being told by someone on a university professor's salary that my books are too expensive is really rather hurtful.
2 May 2008
There are always things to discover about historical alchemy, but sometimes one is totally surprised. Today a colleague informed me of some pieces of music written by the well known alchemist Johann Daniel Mylius, famous for his Philosophia reformata, 1622 and Opus medico-chymicum, 1618. I had not known that he wrote music, but three of his pieces have been included on a recently issued CD Lute Music for Witches and Alchemists performed on the lute by Lutz Kirchhof. These are three dances, two courantes and a volte. I managed to download some mp3 samples and to my ears these sound very fine indeed. You can get some previews on this page. The CD includes one of Michael Maier's well known fugues from the Atalanta fugiens. I will now go and buy the complete CD.
1 May 2008
In my weblog entry for 3 Apr 2008 I mentioned that the artist J. Karl Bogartte had created an image for my Splendor solis art project. The print arrived early this morning. It is a large format giclee print and wonderfully detailed. The scanned images of his work that Bogartte has placed onto his web site just cannot do his artwork justice - you really have to see a print to fully appreciate his art. He creates complex interwoven textured layers against which the main images are set. These layers are not merely decorative but incorporate all sorts of imagery, so when you look at a large format print your eyes go on a journey exploring these interlinked overlapping layers. In a sense the work appears like a dark mass of alchemical prima materia out of which the main images are seen struggling to emerge. His art style is very appropriate for the Splendor solis image. I am so pleased to have this for my project.
30 Apr 2008
This last week I have been so very busy binding up books for customers. For some reason, I have been inundated with a rush of orders and have had to spend almost every evening making up books. Tonight I have received a further three orders so the workload continues. I have not had much time to keep up this weblog, but hopefully things will slacken off soon. I will probably go for a week without a book order and then be moaning about the lack of sales ! Today I spent some hours in the University Library undertaking research primarily into imagery, and later in the afternoon came back to a little drama as there had been an attempt to break into the apartment immediately below me.
27 Apr 2008
Most of the weekend was spent reading through the Solidonius translation and working further on the colouring of the Prognostications. The alchemy web site on Levity.com seems to have settled down and is working well now the files have been uploaded.
24 Apr 2008
There has been a catastrophic disaster for my web site, the consequences of which I am only just beginning to realise. The primary site has been on Levity.com/alchemy for about 12 years and over this period had built a reputation across the Internet as a source for information on alchemy. Over the last week or so, there has been a technical problem at levity.com and it has been offline. Unfortunately it seems Google has, during this period, undertaken a routine spidering or indexing of the site and finding it missing has now removed it from the Google search listings. Usually my site was close to the top of the first page on any search related to alchemy. Now it is invisible. I have run in parallel, the alchemywebsite.com site for about five years, but it has not achieved the rankings that levity.com/alchemy has, being well down in the fifth or sixth Google pages. I suppose it gradually will creep up the rankings over the next few years, but it is likely that my work will be somewhat less visible for some time, until people start putting links to alchemywebsite.com onto their pages. Losing my rankings in Google is going to have quite an impact on my work and booksales, I expect. People are going to think I have died. For those who have set up my site as a favourite on their browsers, it would be best now to set this to www.alchemywebsite.com
The engineers are working hard on replacing the Levity server which lost all the files but replacement files should be uploaded soon and we will see what happens when Google reindexes the site. Maybe some of the earlier rankings will be preserved. It is all very uncertain.
23 Apr 2008
Today I have my faith in the power of the internet restored. Alex Griffin emailed me a few days ago and sent me a scan of an image from the Splendor solis manuscript that he had made in charcoal and pastel. He had seen my Splendor solis art project in which I have collected a number of different artists interpretations of the figure of the man emerging from the swamp. He had made his interpreted facsimile of the image of the young king and the dying old king, which is set immediately before in the Splendor solis manuscripts.
I wrote to him and asked if he would make a version for the Splendor Solis art project, and today I received a positive response. It will take him a long time to complete this as he works large scale, but I will be happy to commission this drawing. The image above is about 60 by 40 inches. Such positive news helps lift my mood.
22 Apr 2008
Some days I just wonder if I live on the same planet as some people. Today I received a rather annoying series of emails from someone (who sounds like a rather spoilt child), taking me to task for my not providing him immediately with information he wanted, and for some links on my web site not functioning. The Levity.com server is still offline and I do not have any direct access to this and I have to wait on the engineers who run that server to get that working again, but this person seems to expect me to immediately fix it for him. He takes me to task further for not replying to an email over the weekend. Well, as it happens, I was away from home this weekend. I do have a life outside of replying to emails ! This person seems to think I should be at his disposal 24/7. It is depressing that someone should write to me in such a tone. I am an easy going sort of person but I do not take well to being lectured to by some spoilt child. All he has succeeded in doing is to make me unwilling ever to correspond with him again.
I have had an increasing amount of problems with email communications recently. People take you so much for granted. Also they immediately take offence if I criticise their pet half-baked theories, and want me to endorse their ideas. Why write to someone like me asking for an opinion and critical assessment if they are unwilling to listen to the answer ?
Usually I just put this down to their being silly adolescent boys - but you never know they might be grown up adults ! You cannot tell who anyone is on the internet. A depressing thought.
I now NEVER, NEVER, NEVER accept unannounced visitors to my home. NEVER , NEVER, NEVER.
People will be politely turned away. I don't care if people have come a great distance - I am unwilling to accept unknown people into my home.
People will be politely turned away. I don't care if people have come a great distance - I am unwilling to accept unknown people into my home.
20 Apr 2008
Over the weekend I received the final version of a translation I asked one of my colleagues to undertake of the Solidonius manuscript. Over the next month or so I hope to find the time to work this into another book for the Magnum Opus series. It has a wonderful series of coloured illustrations.
On Saturday I spent a great deal of time colouring some the woodcut images from the Prognostications of Paracelsus. I begun this earlier this year, in January I think, but have not had time to work further on it. I have now made about half the images. Eventually, given time, I will publish this in the Hermetic Studies series. I have so many projects under way at present.
17 Apr 2008
I finally have issued the latest volume in the Magnum Opus Series, Number 34, the first ever translation into English of Gerhard Dorn's Speculative Philosophy. I have waited some ten years to make this key early work of spiritual alchemy available and despite a number of failed attempts to enthuse people to make a translation, I finally found Paul Ferguson who quickly produced an accurate translation for me. This work was much quoted by Jung as a 16th century forerunner for the ideas of his psychological philosophy. I was never very convinced by this and I always have wanted to let Dorn speak for himself, rather than have an interpretation projected onto his writings through selective quotation. One of the great delights I find in publishing, is in allowing a writer whose work has been buried for 400 or more years, to speak to us again. I decided not to provide any interpretation but just let Dorn speak directly to us. A handful of my regular customers have already bought copies which will be posted out tomorrow. It is rather a nice feeling to know that Dorn's ideas will be studied and pondered over again in our generation.
15 Apr 2008
I spent much of this afternoon and evening writing my introduction to the new Magnum Opus book. Tomorrow I will proofread the whole work one last time and then move on to production. This will be number 34 in the Magnum Opus series. I wonder if I will ever reach 50 books in the series ! There is a whole life's work in the Magnum Opus books. When I look at one title I can remember something of my life at that time I was producing it - the madness of thinking I could handcolour 67 illustrations of the Crowning of Nature, the Dee Five Books produced during my short stay in a cottage in rural mid-Wales, the Kabbalistic Diagrams with its need for much Hebrew characters produced on my first Mac, the Fludd Divine Numbers marking my return to publishing after the wonderful period when through the generosity of Mr Ritman I was able to devote myself to research, the delight of realising that I could make the Three Tables of Man with its complex opening out illustrations, and so on. Of course, keeping this crazy project going for 29 years has meant my having to spend hours and hours some days handbinding books for customers. Now I wonder just how many books I have handbound? I could work it out if I had the interest to go back and count through the limited edition lists for each book. It is certainly many thousands. I will promise to do that for the 30th anniversary of the Magnum Opus series which will occur on the 20th April 2009.
15 Apr 2008
Yesterday afternoon and evening I printed out a new batch of the illustrated catalogue Alchemy - A Treasure House of Symbolism. Today I will allocate the time to binding them up. I only have a limited number of the printed covers left in my storeroom and I doubt I will ever be able to afford to reprint the covers, so when these run out, I will have to abandon producing the catalogue. There are still plenty copies left at the moment. Once I have done this binding I will do some more work on the next book in the Magnum Opus series. I have already printed out and bound a sample, in order to solve any problems with the layout. Once I have this done I will have to write a short introduction then we can move to production. It is a rather interesting book and will surprise some people who have only read short phrases and extracts from it in some Jungian works, but after many attempts over the last ten years at getting it translated, Paul Ferguson undertook the task and completed it quickly producing an accurate and readable translation. I have to decide now on the size of the edition. Recently I have been making the Magnum Opus volumes in editions of around 100. This may be too low for this particular book.
13 Apr 2008
Over the last couple of days Levity.com has been offline. This is the original site for my alchemy web site, and is operated by Dan Levy from New York City since 1996. I have tried to fnd out what the problem may be but so far without any success. The mirror of the website at alchemywebsite.com which I set up in 2001 is unaffected and running as normal. For those who access my site through a favourite on their browser, it might be best to change this to www.alchemywebsite.com
11 Apr 2008
Yesterday afternoon I found a manuscript previously unknown to me, containing two beautifully coloured emblems derived from the Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit. These are two disbound leaves obviously belonging to the same manuscript, which are now in the Free Library of Philadelphia. This library seems to have been endowed with a considerable number of early illuminated manuscripts, though as far as I am able to determine, this is the only alchemical one. This item is in the Lewis collection. The library assigns this to the 15th century. These are rather wonderful examples of alchemical emblems, beautifully drawn and coloured. The stylised Sun and Moon trees giving rise to the red and white tinctures, in the emblem on the right, are exquisite. There are always more treasures to uncover. If only I had more time to devote to research! I do find undertaking any substantial research nowadays is very difficult as I have to steal that time from other of my projects, however, I was glad to give a few hours of my time to find these wonderful images.
10 Apr 2008
I had an enquiry today regarding the book Finis gloriae mundi. This immediately reminded me of yesterday's entry in this weblog. This is a book written in the last decade and published as if it were the output of the 1930's French writer who used the pseudonym Fulcanelli. So we essentially have a contrivance published as the genuine work of the contrived author Fulcanelli. Isn't modern alchemical publishing a fascinating minefield! How on earth can people work out what is actually going on? The title of this book supposedly written by Fulcanelli, refers partly to a painting of that title by the 17th century Spanish artist Juan de Valdes Leal (1622-1690). This painting has nothing at all to do with alchemy. It is a vanitas genre painting. These were rather popular during the 17th century and many artists turned to creating these images, which are essentially morality paintings about the vanity of seeking the riches of life. There are hundreds of such paintings in art collections around the world. Leal was part of that tradition and also a conventional religious painter of the period. One thing one can be sure about the person who wrote the two works under the pseudonym Fulcanelli, is that he was a rather melancholy soul, who would be drawn to and respond to such artwork. There is absolutely no evidence that Valdes Leal had any interest in or influence from alchemy. Indeed, this interpretation arises out of an inability of people today to read paintings for what they are. Solid art history has been overrun with pseudo art historians who project whatever they want into a painting. It is rather interesting that another vanitas painting, Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego, was misappropriated as having some hidden mystery by the authors of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail nonsense. Anyway Juan de Valdes Leal's Finis gloriae mundi made in 1671-2 is, appropriately, in a Church in Seville the 'Hospital de la Caridad' (Hospital of Charity). A wonderful painting but nothing to do with alchemy.
Probably my correspondent of yesterday will now go looking for his Reshel grids and the hidden secret geometry in this painting, and will later inform us about the nature of the philosophers' stone. One might find it in an anagram of the mysterious words written in the pans of the scales - 'nimas nimenos'. We should expect nothing more nor less than some secret code or instruction, or should I first reach for my Spanish dictionary?
9 Apr 2008
I had an interesting email exchange with someone (possibly a younger person) who wrote to me to bring up some points about alchemy. He mentioned such things as Reshel grids, Templar sacred geometry, mentioning Henry Lincoln and also an absurd web site as authorities. I am afraid I can be a bit condescending, even patronising (forgive me it is my age!) to people who uncritically accept spoof, fiction, cynically manipulative pseudo-historians and the totally whacky as truth. Many people nowadays seem incapable of assessing the truth of a statement, or the credentials of the writers of this drivel. Of course, it is so much more exciting to read something that is actually written like a film script storyboard, than plough through difficult academic articles on alchemy. Truth is hard to attain and rarely seductive. It requires much struggle and a willingness to let go of ones preconceptions. Of course, there has grown up in recent years a substantial industry of writers, gurus, lecturers, pseudo-historians and cult leaders, willing to provide simple, easy to digest, accounts of all kinds of esoteric twaddle. One of the weapons in their armory, sadly, is the subject of alchemy, which they feel able to misrepresent at will, because they know that few people understand or have studied this subject in sufficient depth to see through their nonsense.
At the end of one of my correspondents emails he told me a great secret "The Ubigerani MS says quite clearly that marijuana - the Green Dragon - is the first matter" and to prove it he quoted the relevant passage:
4 Apr 2008
After a long break I am again working on a new Magnum Opus title. It is not that I have a lack of material, indeed I have about six provisional new titles in the pipeline, but I find it not always easy to allocate my time to this task. Just keeping my web bookshop going takes up a considerable amount of my time, and as I have no income apart from the sales of my books, CD-Rom courses, and prints, this has to get priority. Last night for example I had to bind up three books for customers and didn't get finally finished till midnight. Earlier this year I decided that I would want to focus on making some more paintings, partly because I enjoy doing this, but also because I feel that time is slipping away from me now I have entered my sixties. In the passed months I have had some rather painful back problems which are now beginning to limit what I can do, so I feel I have to focus on things that are important to me. I have always loved the imagery of alchemical emblems, and am astounded that so few people seem to share my enthusiasms. Making good quality facsimile oil paintings of alchemical emblems seems to me to be of major importance in the longer term, even if I do not sell many of these, as it is such a delight to have these on the walls of my workshop. Anyway a colleague has now translated an important 16th century alchemical work from the Latin for me, and we are now working on the final revisions. Hopefully, in the next few weeks I will be able to work on the layout and produce some copies for sale. This is an interesting work, much misunderstood, as it has been contextualised by the depth-psychologists, who seem to want to project their interpretations onto this 16th century text. I will publish it without a commentary as I feel this author must be allowed at last to speak for himself, and not have his ideas and intellectual perspective pressed into a mould of modern ideas. It is so good that there are still people about who are willing to take on such translations. I have two other such translations in my publishing pipeline and these should be ready later this year. So although the first part of 2008 has seen little activity from Magnum Opus, by the end of the year a number of important works will have seen publication.
3 Apr 2008
One of my contacts, the artist J. Karl Bogartte, www.photomorphose.com has kindly created an image for my Splendor solis art project. This is a wonderfully detailed and layered piece of digital art. He is going to provide it to me as a large format print. I have been in touch with him over many years as he has a deep interest in alchemy and reflects this in his work.
J. Karl Bogartte is shortly (Spring 2008) to publish a book The Mirror Held Up In Darkness a collection of prose poems, alchemical and surreal. Do check his web site and consider buying one of his unique prints. Unlike much art today, Bogartte's work is deeply considered and arises out of an intense immersion in alchemical ideas. He is not someone using alchemical ideas in a superficial or trivial way, but they are an essential part of his artistic and intellectual landscape.30 Mar 2008
I am not one to spend time flicking through YouTube looking for material, but today I came across a video of a lecture at the University of California at Los Angeles by history Professor Margaret Jacob, a noted historian of science. In this 2004 UCLA Faculty Research Lecture she explores cosmopolitanism -- the ability to accept the foreign, the strange, the different. Much of her lecture deals with the science of the last half of the 17th century, Robert Boyle, Newton, the Royal Society, and the influence of alchemy.
It certainly gives us a picture of how alchemy is being seriously discussed in US university courses.
27 Mar 2008
I have recently been working on making a facsimile painting of one of the images from the Splendor solis. I decided to use the 1545 Nurnberg version made nearly forty years before the most familiar copy in the British Library. The London is an almost exact copy of the earlier version but it does have a few differences. In particular, the artist making the London copy chose not to reproduce the facial styles from the earlier version. The earlier version uses particularly stylised faces which are perhaps rather too heightened with red blush.
This is a facet of the style of a particular artist/illuminator, as he uses it throughout the manuscript, and thus he could be identified through this feature. Simon Bening one of the obvious candidates does not use this blushed face. Albrecht Glockenden has also been proposed as the artist but I have not yet been able to see reproductions of his work. When I have time I will visit the University Library and look through the early and mid 15th century manuscript illuminators to see if this feature can be seen in other manuscripts. I have not looked at the original manuscript, but only at scans, and it could be that this rose blushing on the faces was added later. One cannot be sure without looking at the original if this blushing was painted into the face or later applied as a layer on top of the painted face. To me it looks as if it has been applied on top in a broad sweep with a relatively large brush.
19 Mar 2008
Yesterday I received an email from someone I had previously corresponded with about books and manuscripts. We had also worked together on a couple of my publishing projects. So I was rather surprised to be taken to task for ignoring him about some book he had emailed me about. He viewed my lack of response as both discourteous and due to some motive of envy that he projected upon me - somehow I was supposed to be envious of him and thus ignoring him. This was a rather strong overreaction to the fact that he assumed I had received the email he had sent me.
It is ridiculous that people seem to rely on email. I find that many emails I send get lost in people's junk mail filters, so much so that I even expect them to get lost. Yesterday I had to send some large attachments to someone in the Czech Republic. Rather than just sending these, I also sent, at the same time, a small text email asking them to confirm that the attachment files had arrived (I find that large attachment file often get trapped by junk mail filters). I never assume that an email has got through. Email nowadays is severely flawed and unreliable due to the need to filter out the junk mail.
Happily, this gives me the opportunity of informing people that my old email address alchemy@dial.pipex.com is no longer valid - from now on I am using the mail adam@alchemywebsite.com which I have used for many years - having given up on Pipex. All my mail has had adam@alchemywebsite.com as my return address for some years now. It still is rather depressing that people rush to ascribe motives to me based on not receiving a reply to an email I do not appear to have received. However, my mood was lifted somewhat when I received the second letter in two days from people wanting me to tell them the method for turning cheap metal into gold. As I don't really know how to respond to such people these ever hopeful seekers must think I keep this knowledge to myself in order to pay for the running of my web site.
18 Mar 2008
Yesterday afternoon I finally got reconnected to broadband. This went offline on 26 February, so for the last three weeks I have been struggling with a slow dialup connection. It turned out that my internet connection had been wrongly set up at the telephone exchange during some modifications, and they just had to plug it into another piece of equipment. Three weeks of frustration and it was fixed in five minutes. Having to log on using dialup made me realise how slow my web site pages loaded. This was partly due to some animated graphics at the head of each page which had to load before the text component would appear. I really liked this animated graphic which I made from the final 21 images from the Crowning of Nature manuscript, but I have decided to remove it from the pages, to give those struggling on dialup a better chance of getting to read my pages. I have already implemented this on www.alchemywebsite.com and will do the same for levity.com/alchemy over the next week or so.
18 Mar 2008
Today I received an invitation to speak at a conference on Traditional Alchemical Medicine organised by a student group at Bastyr University at Kenmore near Seattle. It is nice to be asked, but I almost never accept invitations to speak at conferences. I really cannot spare the time, especially if it involves any travelling. Attending a conference usually requires four or five days of my life, and I lose all those days work. Also when I get back I have a backlog of emails and orders to catch up on and this takes another few days. As I get older I find I also just cannot face the struggle of travelling. So I will have to decline this one, as I do most invitations.
17 Mar 2008
The Chateau Moravska Trebova in the Czech Republic is organising an exhibition in April on the theme of The Alchemy laboratory of Doctor Bonacina. They are going to use some of my coloured illustrations as part of a slide slow running during the exhibition.
16 Mar 2008
I live in Glasgow, primarily to be close to the most comprehensive collection of alchemical books and manuscript in the world, in the Ferguson Collection. When I find time to do research I usually find my way there for an afternoon among the books and manuscripts. There is an interesting article by David Weston, the current Keeper of Special Collections in Glasgow University Library, entitled A Magus of the North? Professor John Ferguson and his Library, contained in a collection of articles edited by Amy Wygant The Meanings of Magic. From the Bible to Buffalo Bill, Berghahn Books, 2006. This gives the background to Ferguson's collecting enthusiasms, as well as giving us an overview of the importance of this library. There are a couple of other essays in this book which touch on alchemy.
12 Mar 2008Today I received a copy of a new book by the scholar Claude Gagnon, L'alchime dans l'Europe naissante. This is a gathering of various essays written by the author, some of which have been published in journals, on the theme of the birth of European alchemy in the Middle Ages. I look forward to reading through it over the next few weeks.
Running the alchemy web site does have its amusing moments. I do get some rather weird emails from people, often offering me their particular take on alchemy, or asking me for samples of the philosophers' stone. Today I had a rather charming email from someone not overly impressed by my work. It was quite short but to the point.
go fuck your mother, son of a bitch
This site is a ball shit. Kill yourself!
Get a live, idiot!
I am afraid the spelling errors rather got to me and the impact of the email was to make me laugh rather than question the point of my work.
10 Mar 2008
It is almost unbelievable that I still do not have my broadband connection working after two weeks ! I have moved to another provider after my original broadband company let me down, but transferring to another company seems a bit of a struggle as it takes so long. I am sure it is just a matter of adjusting some switches at the local telephone exchange and setting up the account details on some network computer, but us customers just get messed about as usual. At the moment I have to access the internet using a dial-up modem which is very slow and also expensive in terms of phone calls. Eventually it will get sorted out, but it does make one realise how poor a quality of service we currently get in the UK. When something goes wrong, we customers are just left hanging. A broadband connection should be seen as a utility, like gas, elecricity and water services, as so much of ones life depends on it, but here in the UK providers we customers just get the runaround. You are given no priority, but just have to wait and wait and wait. It is not as if I am using one of those cheap providers, but I pay a high monthly fee in the hope of getting a good stable, continuous, quality service.
Over the last few days I have received two books of scholarly essays on alchemy Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on alchemy and Renaissance Culture edited by Stanton Linden, and Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry edited by Lawrence Principe. These are really useful volumes for me and I have been dipping into these to take a glance at an article or two when I have a few minutes to spare from my other work. Both of these are mines of information and will take me some time to absorb.
6 Mar 2008
Thanks to the kind assistance of a colleague in the Czech Republic I have been able to obtain microfilms of two versions of the work by Bonacina in Prague. I have long known this work through its wonderful sequence of emblematic images, but I had only seen the later 18th century copies and not these earlier examples. The first appears to be written in the 17th century and is set up like a printed book, with dedicatory epistle and a Preface to the Reader. The title is set out as Compendiolum de praeparatione Auri Potabilis Veri M.E. Bonacina. D. Medici Mediol. I have not been able to locate a printed book under this title, so I will have to assume that this is not a copy of a printed work but rather the author's holograph or a copy of this set up for the printer, or a one off presentation copy to Bonacina's benefactor Ladislav Velen. The illustrations are not particularly skilled pen drawings which could even be by Bonacina himself. The text is in relatively easy Latin and in a good legible hand so it could be possible to have it translated and published.
The second manuscript is probably from a little later. The illustrations are by a more skilled artist, who is able to model the forms.
The third illustration that I show here is from the 18th century manuscript with which I am more familiar. It is interesting to note how the artist has reversed the direction of the chevron on the shield. I wonder if that is intentional or a slip of the pen. Such are the mysteries of alchemical research.
29 Feb 2008The last few days have been very difficult as far as my work is concerned, as my broadband connection is still not working. I have now discovered that my internet provider Pipex recently sold its 570,000 customers (myself included) for 210 Million UK pounds ($400Million) to another company called Tiscali. The failure of my broadband connection (now four days) appear to be a result of some problem arising from the migration of my service to the Tiscali system. Of course no one at Pipex will admit this ! I am disgusted that my connection can be sold to another company without my permission, or even informing me of the change. Thus I have not been able to get on line easily to do research and keep up with what is going on. I have been logging on using an old 56K modem, but it is obvious that many other Pipex customers are doing the same, so the dial-up service is congested so much that it takes up to a minute to send a single email! Thus I can still get the orders for books and CD-Roms and send these out and answer emails as usual, but the speed of the dial-up service is so slow that doing any research or browsing is so frustrating as to be useless. I am now in the process of changing to a better quality provider and I expect this will be set up over the weekend.
Anyway, this has given me the opportunity to press on with my painting and I have been able to do some further work on my copy of the Mona Lisa. As I must wait a while for the paint to dry between adding new layers I also began to work on making a copy of an amazing painting by the 15th Century Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, his rather melancholy image of Mary Magdelene. His work is delightfully detailed and wonderfully bright compared to the Mona Lisa so it is quite a contrast and a different challenge. I love the idealised landscape used in many Flemish 15th century paintings. So far I have only had time to work on the face and some of the landscape background. It will take a few weeks of work.
27 Feb 2008
Yesterday and today my broadband connection through Pipex went offline. I have been with this company for well over ten years and for much of that time they did provide a good service, however since December I have experienced three major outages, one lasting a week (though there were intermittent periods of connection), one of about 12 hours and the most recent lasting now over 36 hours. They are obviously having severe technical problems, however, their helpline staff are totally unhelpful, and even try and shift the blame onto my equipment, suggesting that I replace filters and routers, when they have a blanket email message on their phone helpline stating that they have a current outage ! So I have decided to shift away from them and find a new provider for my broadband. I am temporarily having to go back to an old 56K dialup modem which is ridiculously slow. Hopefully Pipex will get their system running properly shortly so I can go back to that. I will probably use the same company that provides my alchemywebsite.com site to supply me with a broadband connection as this site has not had any technical problems that I have noticed. I will now phase out the alchemy@dial.pipex.com email address which I have used for at least 10 years and will then be released from the mass of junk mail it receives - I get about 3000 emails a day of which most are junk and sadly I cannot simply filter these out as, if I set the junk filter too high, then it locks out genuine emails. I will be glad to dispense with that old address and the problems it has now brought me. All my mail will in future be handled through the address adam@alchemywebsite.com which I have been using in any case as my primary email address for at least a year.
25 Feb 2008
I have made considerable progress with my painting of the Mona Lisa. You can see details and some images here. Much remains to be done, and I suppose I am a bit less than half way through.
21 Feb 2008
Today I decided to take a little time off from alchemy research and instead do some painting. A few weeks ago I decided to challenge myself to make a facsimile copy of the Mona Lisa. This is a bit different from the usual sorts of paintings that I work on, which are usually illuminations from alchemical manuscripts, or some other allegorical or emblematic manuscripts that capture my interest. I have decided to work not from the Leonardo's original in the Louvre but from a 17th century copy as this has better preserved the brightness of the colours and also has not had the original framing pillars painted out. There are at least ten early copies of the painting made in the 16th and 17th centuries - one indeed is even in a private collection here in Scotland. I like the image when it has the pillars, as it reminds me of some 15th century Flemish paintings by s Van Eyke, Rogier van der Weyden among others, where it was quite a convention, and this device was also often used in the 17th century Dutch vanitas genre paintings. It will probably take me months to make the facsimile paintings at two or three hours a week ! I never seem to be able to allocate much time to painting, but I don't have that many years left to do things like that, and I will regret it if I neglect painting.
20 Feb 2008
The new scholarly discussion forum seems to be going well and it should develop further over the next month. It will always be a select group, restricted to scholars, rather than those more drawn to an esoteric or psychological approach, but at the same time open for everyone to read the contributions. Today I was able to spare a few hours to making some more of my coloured emblems. I am now determined to make available, for the first time to most people, a significant number of emblematic images that are part of the context for the images, woodcuts and engravings, found in alchemical printed books.
In the last week I have been able to obtain some wonderful source material of alchemical imagery. Much of this I found during a day long, concerted session of research using the internet. I don't usually have time to do such a thing, as my attention is diverted to the mundane tasks fo bookbinding and making up the various orders. I was then able to find some important material for sale and arrange to purchase it. So my bill for books this month will be rather high.
13 Feb 2008
Yesterday I decided to make yet another attempt to create a discussion forum on alchemy. In the past I have had to abandon various discussion groups I have set up, when they degenerated into nonsense and babble. There are some seriously weird people interested in alchemy, who have highly charged beliefs, who do not like to be challenged or have their beliefs examined. Also there are some complex game players who get some kind of perverted fun out of pretending to be alchemical adepts - these people also react very aggressively when exposed. So the domain of alchemy discussion groups is truly a minefield, and moderating these has been a great waste of my time in the past. However, since 1999 I have been running the Alchemy Academy email discussion group which has been very successful and there are some wonderful enlightening discussions in its archives. This discussion group was conducted by email but this has now become a real obstacle, as so many people use junk mail filters that screen out postings, and the email box itself gets 300 plus junk mails a day which I have to wade through. So I have decided to set this up as a web based discussion forum.
Before people get too excited, I am going to restrict the discussions to a scholarly and academic one, and only deal with historical alchemy. It will not be an open forum free for all, as that will only attract the weirdos and game playing manipulators and result in it rapidly descending into nonsense and babble. Only scholarly people will be able to join the forum and post messages. People will have to use their true names, with no hiding behind silly, pompous, posturing pseudonyms or internet 'handles'.
I will create a space where scholars and those with a academic approach to alchemy will be free to discuss the various facets of alchemy with their peers, and not have to deal with the difficult and weird people who seem in our time to be drawn towards alchemy. It will take a few weeks to get going and build up momentum, but I hope eventually it will provide a safe space for the scholarly discussion of alchemical matters. Anyone can access the site as a guest and read the postings and information, but I can only register as active posters those people who are known to me as scholars or as people who adopt an academic approach.
12 Feb 2008
Yesterday I managed to bind up five of the ten copies of the Three Tables of Freher book and today I posted these out to my customers. Later this evening I will put the covers onto the remaining five copies. Four of these are already sold and the other will probably go later today as there was quite a lengthy waiting list for copies. I worked out that it takes about ten hours of my time to make up each book and that does not include the many hours I spent originally researching, painting the images, and doing the layout for the book. I won't make up the final batch for a while, definitely not till later this year. It is an expensive book but I expect it will appreciate in value once the edition is sold. Over the weekend I grabbed a few hours away from bookbinding and managed to colour three emblems. Here are two from the 17th century English emblem book by George Wither. I chose these because they symbolically quoted from some earlier alchemical emblems.
7 Feb 2008
I finally finished making up the complex engravings that constitute the Three Tables of Freher. This has taken nearly six days of solid work and has required a lot of will power to push on with making up ten copies. Although it is great to see the completed tables, it is rather tedious cutting them out and pasting them in with all the little flaps and opening out sections. Now I have to bind them into book form, which I will probably do early next week, as I want to have some time to devote to more creative tasks over the next few days.
6 Feb 2008
Today I took a few hours to examine in detail the scans of the Splendor solis manuscript, with which the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg kindly supplied me. It is immediately obvious that the London manuscript is copied directly from the Nurnberg, however, although most of the detail is copied precisely, the expressions on the faces of the figures are quite different. Most interestingly I have noticed a date on image 16, the Peacock in the flask. In the lower right a musician playing the lute is sitting on a cubical stone. In the London manuscript this has the date '1582' clearly drawn, and the earliest manuscript in Berlin has the date '1532'. In the Nurnberg there is a date '154-' the last figure of which is unclear. I tried all sorts of filters, contrast adjustments and other ways of manipulating the image in order to try to make out the last figure, but with no success. It is probably rubbed away, and could only be seen by someone inspecting the manuscript in indirect illumination. Perhaps, one day I will find someone in Nurnberg to take a look at it. In the book on the Splendor solis by Jorg Vollnagel (2004) he gives the date as '1545' so perhaps he was able to read the final figure. The history of this work through its series of manuscripts really interests me. It may be that the Berlin (1532) manuscript is not actually the original. The illustrations for the most part have little coloured panels obviously intended for text. Many of these (though not all) in the Nurnberg have short Latin phrases, the London copies only some of these, while the Berlin has many left blank. It could be that there was some earlier original bearing the full set of Latin tags which has been lost.
4 Feb 2008
I have received a number of requests recently from people wanting to visit me. One person visiting Glasgow even phoned up and asked if he could come immediately. I am sorry but there is no way I can accept such unannounced visits from people. I will just turn people away if they arrive on my doorstep. I am much too busy to abandon what I am doing and make time for people. Indeed, I can now only accept visits from people that I know well, or have some knowledge of their background or some clear context (fellow writers, artists, researchers) with bona fides. I do make myself available on the Internet through email, but I am no longer prepared to accept unknown visitors into my home.
3 Feb 2008
I received an email today which though it initially amused me now has left a rather bitter taste on the palate. It was an advanced promo for a new audio book about the 'Order of the Alchemists'. The author seems to suppose that there was some secret 'Alchemical Order' working behind outer history which still exists today and has incredible power. I really despair sometimes that such rubbish should be published. I have been trying for years to get people to look at alchemy clearly, to examine its wealth of surviving documents, and base their understanding of alchemy on this source material. But authors come along and create an alluring fiction which they present as facts. If there ever was such an 'Alchemical Order' then myself and other scholars would have found its traces in the historical record as we are surely not entirely stupid! The Da Vinci Code was bad enough, but it was clearly a novel and only some rather sad people took it seriously as an account of history, but this new polished production on the 'Order of the Alchemists' seems to blur the clear divisions between facts and fiction. Sadly, the authors of such faction seem just to be manipulating people, and they rely on the fact that few people have the critical apparatus or the background reading to be able to make any clear assessment. The authors of such material seem not to have the ability to do any real research, so instead they just invent history. This is not a new phenomenon, of course, as we see from various theosophical publications from the beginning of the 20th century and the well known Holy Blood, Holy Grail among many, many others. However, people never learn from such publications and authors still feel free to fill the world with ever more contrived history. It will be left to people like myself for years ahead to have to argue that such an 'Order' only existed in the mind of a 21st century writer, and, because we speak in measured, informed, prosaic tones, we will be ignored - people prefer to read or hear a fictionalised account, as it seems more exciting and engaging. I have to struggle on against these tides of nonsense and drivel, though this does make me feel sometimes that my work is so easily blown away - truth being so very fragile in today's world.
2 Feb 2008
I spent most of the day cutting out sections of the coloured engravings which I need in order to make up another batch of the Magnum Opus Volume 31, the Three Tables of Man by D.A. Freher. I have already made up and sold 30 copies (nos 11-40) of this book back in 2005-2006 and have 20 copies (41 -60) still to make up for sale. I limited the edition to only 60 copies as I realised that it would be an enormous amount of painstaking work to make up the engravings with their many opening-out flaps. This is a truly amazing book requiring many hours of work, printing, cutting out the 50 individual pieces of paper, and glueing them into the correct position so as to create the effect intended by Freher. I intend to keep back numbers 1 to 10 for my own collection and will only sell them when I have effectively retired and can no longer work at publishing. This book will definitely increase in value as no one else would have the will power and committment to push this through. I managed about eight hours of cutting with scissors (this cannot be done any other way) and got about half of the task completed. I then have to accurately position, paste and make up the images, then bind them into large format book form. Hopefully, I should get this completed this month. I have about 20 customers waiting for the batch of 10 copies ! So they will have to fight it out. I will try to find time to make up the final 10 copies later this year.
25 Jan 2008
This year should be a rather productive one as I have four new Magnum Opus titles in preparation. I will give details later when publication is immanent, and these items will be great additions to the series. I will be 60 this year so am becoming more and more aware of the limitations on my mortality and the need to press on with making this material available. I am also deepening my research into the early manuscripts and this might possibly lead to some new publications in future. I am not sure if I will have time, but I am hoping to begin work on a further study course.
24 Jan 2008
I had some rather good news today. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg has agreed to supply me with some high resolution scans of their copy of the Splendor solis manuscript. The British Library version is well known and often reproduced in books, so much so that most people seem to think of it as the original. I had already discovered, back in November, that the British Library version must be a copy of the Nürnberg, as in attempting to copy the perspective it makes some errors, whereas if one traces back the vanishing point in the Nürnberg one clearly sees a mark on the parchment. I have only ever seen a few illustrations of the Nürnberg Splendor solis, so I look forward to making some further discoveries when I can see all the illustrations in detail.
23 Jan 2008
I spent most of the afternoon and much of the evening reformatting the web pages about my paintings. I hope to be able to devote at least some time this year to painting, so I thought I might just make the site about my work a little bit more accessible. I will try and find some time next week to take some further photographs of my workshop as things have changed greatly in the years since the last photographs were taken. My paintings website may be a bit messy over the next few days as I tweak and modify the pages. It never ceases to amaze me how much time it takes to set up web pages. One works away, then looks at the clock to find that three hours have just slipped away.
This evening I sold the last copy of the Chymical Wedding. This is one of the few books that I produced in the 1980's of which I had copies left for sale. The few other titles from that era are quickly diminishing as the numbers approach 250 (the usual size of the editions I then issued). As I am now considerably older, and may not have 20 more years left in me to hand-produce books, the current issues in the Magnum Opus series will be restricted to around 100 copies or so. It is always wise to buy my books while you can and not think to wait for a few years. I may not always be able to do the necessary hand-binding. A year or so back I did have, what appeared to be, some arthritis in my finger joints. Happily this seems to have resolved and I am able to make up books with no problems at the moment. This week has seen the start of the mail uplift from my home, which saves me having to go and wait in line in the local Post Office every day. It is all working out easily at the moment.
18 Jan 2008
I have long been looking for someone to translate a key work, on what we might describe as spiritual alchemy. This is the Philosophia speculativa by Gerhardt Dorn, written in the closing decades of the 16th century. Small pieces of this were translated by Jung and von Franz and quoted in their books, however, I am very aware that these translations are not accurate, but seem to filter Dorn's ideas through Jungian constructs. What this needs is for someone to translate it literally from the Latin, so that we can get a clearer picture of what Dorn was trying to say, rather than what the Jungians wish to gloss into his text. I have had a go at translating it but it proved a bit too difficult for me to render it into readable English. It really needs someone with good Latin and a willingness to make a literal translation. Any offers ? The text itself is not too long. I have the entire text available and would definitely publish this in my Magnum Opus series should someone offer to translate it.
17 Jan 2008Today I received a gift of a book from an Italian writer and researcher of alchemy, Massimo Marra. This consists of a series of extended essays on various alchemical themes, by Massimo Marra, Paolo Aldo Rossi, Andrea De Pascalis and two other contributors. Rossi contributes a piece on Greek alchemy, while De Pascalis has a lengthy article on the early 17th century 'Golden Age Revived' by Madathanus and translates the Latin text into Italian. Massimo Marrara provided a number of short essays, including an account with transcription of some alchemical poems he found in a manuscript in the Bibliotheca Vittorio Emanuele in Naples. Just last week I bought another recent Italian work on the Liber Vaccae. In recent decades there has been a serious interest in alchemy flourishing in Italy, which few people recognise or have any contact with. Many of the major scholars of alchemy living today are Italian. I must try and keep up with what is being published there and check the online bookstores often. Sadly, Italy, as yet does not have an amazon.it so one has to search through a number of smaller online bookstores.
15 Jan 2008
For many years I have been absorbed in the Ripley Scroll, having made a full-sized facsimile painting restoring the fresh colours of the original, and creating a study course on the Scroll itself. Like many others, I have often puzzled over the figure found on the bottom left corner of the Scroll. This is thought to be a depiction of the scribe, or even of Ripley himself. Today, while in the library, I found an illustration of parchment making from a medieval manuscript in Bologna. Outside the workshop where parchment is being made, we see an itinerant scribe setting out, no doubt having replenished his stock of parchment. This figure, with his pointed stick, and the inkwell at his waist, reminded me immediately of the figure on the Ripley Scroll. Strangely he has a shell in his hat, which at that time indicated that he had completed the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella. Perhaps this particular scribe specialised in writing absolutions or indulgences.
11 Jan 2008
In the last few days I have had to become an accountant and prepare my records for the tax authorities. This is such a boring yet exacting task and doing it is very frustrating as I really want to push on with understanding the Aurora consurgens, so any relief from the boredom of accounting is very welcome. So I got a quick rush of amusement today from someone emailing and asking if I lent out books from my Alchemy Research Library. I mean, just how out of touch can anyone be, to think that I would lend valuable books by post to complete strangers on the other side of the world. 10 of out of 10 for having the cheek to ask, but also 10 out of 10 on the out-of-touch-with-reality scale.
9 Jan 2008
Yesterday my spirits were lifted later in the day by the postman delivering a book. I had been trying to get hold of a copy of this for some months from a bookshop in Italy but they were very slow in getting it to me. It contains a translation of the text of the Aurora consurgens. As I indicated here, back in November I decided to embark on a quest to understand and contextualise the imagery of the Aurora consurgens, one of the most mysterious of early alchemical emblematic manuscripts. The work is well known through the Marie-Louise von Franz book, however, few people realise just how misleading her book is, as she focusses on only one section of the text and mines it for Jungian concepts rather than placing it in its proper context. Thus her book, for me, throws little light on the true nature of the Aurora consurgens. Last night I began studying the material and wrote up short piece on the mystery of the Aurora consurgens which I finished this morning. You can see this here. It shows one of the illustrations with the actual text that comments upon it. Perhaps one day I will publish an edition of the work restoring the images and translating the text so that people can read the commentary which goes with the images. It will take much work, however, and I have so many other projects in hand. It will make a major addition to my Magnum Opus series.
8 Jan 2008
Another miserable day. I have found that yet another person is selling material lifted from my web site and selling it on a CD-Rom as his illustrated library of alchemy. A few months ago a found that a French publisher was using my hand painted images for the covers of his books and he never responded to my requests to cease doing this. Such people are parasites. They steal my research and long hours of work, remove my name (of course) from the files, and then sell these to people as their own work. It is thoroughly dispiriting. I fear that my study courses will also be targetted and possibly my books. I live on a very modest income, and work very long hours to make enough money to sustain my work. I have just had to pay 500 pounds ($1000) for scans of images from an alchemical manuscript. I need this for my research. If I eventually publish this, will some parasitic nobody just lift this material and sell it as his own? It makes me so angry and at the same time rather depressed.
7 Jan 2008I have known the work of the american artist Ann McCoy for some time. Her work is very much influenced by alchemy and she has made a deep study of the subject. She emailed me recently to tell me about her current exhibition in Berlin, The Transformation of the King and the Alchemist of Pfaueninsel which is based on the 17th century alchemist Johannes Kunckel. She is also working on a performance piece she has written on this theme. Do have a look at the exhibition pages which shows the work in the gallery setting.
http://www.zero-project.org/ann_mccoy.html
5 Jan 2008
At this time of the year, there is one chore I have to do and that is to make up the Alchemy Website CD-Rom for 2008. It might seem like an easy task but it takes quite a while to get right, as my website is now rather complex and it is difficult to make sure that all the necessary files are in their correct place on the CD-Rom. I had to spend some hours struggling to get all the image files in the correct folder, and after making a few test burnings of CD-Roms I finally got a fully working version. The web site today has 164 megabytes of text and images. I used a rather nice little program that I have had for some years which scans the directory and builds the whole web site into a single exe file. I needed to repeat this a few times to get the setup exactly right so that all the text and images fitted together correctly. This also indexes the text so the purchaser can do a full search on the CD-Rom without connecting to the internet and using the local Google search that I have set up on the online site. I then had to make up the new labels for the CD-Roms, set up the files for burning onto blanks, then edit the pages on the alchemy web bookshop to reflect the new version. All in all it took about five hours. I will have to sell a large number to make back the costs of all that investment of time.
4 Jan 2008
This morning I had a request from someone asking for the text of Robert Fludd's Summum Bonum. Not too difficult to answer, as the book is well collected in libraries and one can easily obtain a microfilm at a price. However, I think my correspondent really wanted the text in English translation. I pointed him to the short extract in Paul Allens' Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, issued back in the late 1970's. This made me realise again how so little of the key corpus of hermetic and alchemical works has been translated, and what a miniscule contribution I have made to making such material available. Having devoted 30 years of my life to this task, so little seems to have been accomplished, and so much remains undone. It is almost depressing. If I were not such an optimist, I might be forgiven for sinking into despair. Instead I will just push on with making new publications. I have at least three new volumes in the Magnum Opus series in the pipeline for 2008.
3rd January 2007
This New Year I decided to treat myself and pay for the mail to be uplifted from my premises every day. This is a rather expensive service, but my back problems have become rather chronic recently and that combined with the fact that my local post office closed down and relocated a little bit further away, meant that it was becoming a bit of a struggle to have to carry the daily packages of books and CD-Roms to the Post Office and wait in line for service. The Post Office here in the UK is now offering a pick up service for small business with a limited volume - it used to be you had to be a major business for them to do that. I also am now set up to print my own stamps using the Post Office SmartStamp service. It will take a week or so to set all this up but it will be a blessing. Being an alchemical publisher is not all poring over ancient manuscripts struggling to understand the nuances of the text, it has its more prosaic moments - bookbinding, packaging, accounts, being a mailboy.
2nd January 2007
Today one of the supporters of my work paid me a visit. He brought his digital recorder with him a made an interview which once edited I will put up on the website. Today, after the New Year holiday, had a little flurry of emails and some telephone calls from people, some more amusing than others. If I was to let you have a little look into my email inbox, you would see a communication from someone taking me to task for not providing on my web site a clear set of dates for Maria the Jewess, indeed conflicting dates were mentioned by different people on the site. I wrote back to say that as it is not even certain that Maria the Jewess was a real person, there being little trace of her in the historical record, it is probably difficult to establish a realistic set of dates for her. That did not satisfy my correspondent and he immediately replied with a series of quotes from various 20th century sources. I then had to explain I wished that alchemical research was as easy as accepting the information in modern encyclopaedias or in the works of modern commentators and we have to realise that modern writers usually are trying to push their world view through their writings and are not neutral observers. Patai, Lindsay and Jung each had strong agendas underlying their writings. Their "history" is a component of their rhetoric. Sadly, my views did not seem to get through and a reply quickly returned. I had then to explain that most of the early alchemical writings don't exist as early manuscripts but rather in later copies. There are no 'Dead Sea Scrolls' for alchemical texts, so these early writings have been filtered through a series of later copies of a presumed original corpus of writings. I don't think I convinced him - he preferred certainty. Next, a series of phone calls from a young man desperately trying to find alchemical books. He had been reading some works of Jung and wanted to read the original works. He seem to think that one could just go out and buy these. I had to explain that most of the works he was interested in were in Latin and had neither been translated nor reprinted. I told him that he could see them in The British Library. He seemed to think one could borrow original 16th and 17th century books from libraries, and he also believed that Routledge and Kegan Paul (the English publishers of Jung) must have had copies of all these books in order to print the illustrations. I wasn't getting through here either. Next up was some emails from a man who wanted my advice about selling alchemical products. He did not appear to know much about alchemy but had heard of the Hudson White powder gold. I told him that if I were him I would take care with such products as they are not medically tested and he may be legally liable for any damage they do to the purchasers. He could could easily be sued. He quickly wrote back asking my advice about some "red lion" made in the traditional way that someone had offered to sell him. So I don't think he got the point I was making either. It seems to be a day when I was entirely missing the target. Next, I get an email from someone asking for samples of my writings, one of my lessons or something, so he could be clear if I was a good teacher, but I managed to resist the impulse to write back an ironic reply. In between all this, I managed to bind up three books that people had ordered over the past days. A good start to the New Year.
22nd December 2007
While I have been making paintings of the Solidonius series recently, I decided to make a portrait of a friend of mine. This worked it quite well and I rather enjoyed the discipline of making an exact photorealist portrait, so much so that I was suddenly impelled to make a small copy of the portrait of John Dee which was made in the early 1690's, later owned by Elias Ashmole and now in the Ashmolean in Oxford. I have painted this in oils on a panel 11.5 by 9 inches, and once it is finished I may try and sell this. It still needs quite a bit of work, but the main forms are well established. A year or so back I also made a copy of the early portrait of Paracelsus by the Flemish artist Quentin Metsys (c.1465-1530). I took the opportunity to finish this off, and will shortly varnish it and possibly offer it for sale - though I do rather like it and make keep it for a few more years. No doubt one day people will want to collect my work.
9th December 2007I have been so busy with production recently that I have rather neglected this weblog. Well a day or so ago I received the painting I had commissioned from Erin McCauley for my Splendor solis art project, so I would like to draw peoples' attention to this rather fine addition to the collection. This Splendor solis project will seem a bit strange to those who are not enthused, as I am, by the wonderful emblematic imagery of alchemy. I managed a steal a few hours from the task of bookbinding to work on my paintings of the Solidonius series and also on a portrait. I do enjoy making photorealistic portraits (usually of friends).
29th November 2007
This week I have found myself deluged by orders for my books and as these are hand made it takes about three hours to make up a book for sale. Consequently, I have had to devote many hours this week to book production. I have also been very busy with my another major activity producing the lates of my art tarots, so I have not been able to allocate any time to painting. This is rather frustrating as I wanted to make some progress with the Solidonius series.
24th November 2007
I recently comissioned Miguel Calle, an artist working in Brazil who describes himself as a 'Piroalquimista', to make an version in his medium of an image from the Splendor solis. He has now completed the work, and was kind enough to send me a scan of the final piece.
I am very pleased with the result, the exquisite detail and the way he has handled the sphere on the man's head. I would recommend others to get him to make pieces for them. He is especially interested in alchemical symbolism and it seems he is able to sensitively reproduce an alchemical engraving, woodcut, or even manuscript drawing in pyrography. You can contact the artist Miguel Calle through his website at piroalquimista.vilabol.uol.com.br/principal.htm
21st November 2007
Today someone called Dan, has posted a video he has made using the coloured emblems from my web site onto the YouTube system. The accompanying music is not entirely to my taste, being by The Cage from their album Hell Destroyer. I suspect his interests lie more with The Cage rather than alchemical imagery, but it was nice to see it. You can view it on www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-bzgjRlOUw
20th November 2007
I spend some of Sunday and much of Monday preparing tracings for making oil paintings of images from the Solidonius manuscript. Hopefully I will be able to allocate some time, over the next week or so, to make the paintings. I will do these in oil on board. I had considered working in watercolours but I do so much prefer the medium of oils for this subject.
19th November 2007
Those who read Spanish should take a look at the new issue Number 5 of Azogue edited by José Rodríguez Guererro www.revistaazogue.com/azogue5.htm. I noticed, in particular an article exploring the relationship between alchemy and mythology during the Late Antiquity and Middle Ages. There is also a important critique of the Jungian approach to alchemy in Azogue 4, which is well worth reading. It would be excellent if this article could be made available in English and reach a wider audience. José Rodríguez Guererro is one of the finest scholars of alchemy living today, with a growing body of work.
17th November 2007
I had a realisation when looking at the Nurnberg and London versions of the Splendor solis. I happen to have a high quality image of one of the Nurnberg paintings (in van Lennep's book) and also the London. When I looked at these in detail I noticed that the perspective on the London version was slightly wrong. The Nurnberg painting has the perspective drawn tighly and correctly and if one traces back the vanishing point one clearly sees a mark on the parchment. On the London version, when one traces back the vanishing point it is not in the same place for all the perspective lines. This no doubt means that the Nurnberg version is the original and the London is a later copy. I really must try and get access to high quality images of the Nurnberg (Nuremberg) version.
16th November 2007
Last night I had the impulse to look into the possible source for the artwork of the Splendor solis manuscripts. This was produced around 1530 and obviously draws on the Aurora consurgens for some of its emblematic content. There are a number of beautiful illuminated manuscripts of the Splendor solis, the best known example being that in the British Library. This is of supreme quality and one feels that it must be by one of the top artist/illuminators of the period. It is a work painted on vellum with trompe d'oeil floral and animal borders of which similar examples are seen in the Flemish miniature paintings in Books of Hours and other works emanating especially from artists from Bruges. Some years ago I saw the exhibition Illuminating the Renaissance at the Royal Academy and noted the similarities between the work of Simon Bening and the London Splendor solis. The London manuscript is probably not made from the supposed original in the Kupferstichkabinnet in Berlin dated 1531-1532, but rather from the copy in Nurnberg. The Kupferstichkabinnet manuscript does not have the floral and animal borders but the images are framed in architectural structures. The Nurnberg copy, dated to 1545, does have the floral borders and the London version is directly related to this. Unfortunately I only have a few images from the Nurnberg to compare with the London. I may write to them and ask if they can sell me some scans or photographs. The history of the Splendor solis manuscript has still not yet been entirely explored. In 2005 a facsimile of the 1531 Cod. 78 D 3 in Berlin was published by Coron-Exclusiv Splendor Solis" (Sonnenglanz) 1531/32. It would be nice to have a copy but the price is £3000 ($6000), and people think my book prices are high !
15th November 2007
I have had no reply from that French publisher who appears to be using my coloured images for the book covers of fifteen of his books without my permission. I will have to write to him by snail mail using registered post. This sort of problem really annoys me as it is stealing my work and using it to sell books. It is difficult enough for me trying to make a living out of publishing obscure books on alchemy without people appropriating my material for their own profit. I have made over a thousand coloured emblems, many of which took ten or more hours of work each. Researching and painting these has taken up many years of my life. It is so dispiriting to have my work stolen. People who think they have the right to use my work in this way are thoughtless, selfish and without conscience. The fact that I have not even had the courtesy of a reply to my emails, seems to confirm that this was not done by honest error.
13th November 2007
As I have not yet received good copies of the Aurora consurgens manuscript illustrations, I have decided to push on and make facsimile paintings of the equally unknown Solidonius manuscript. This is a later work, dating apparently to the 17th century, though most of the manuscripts are from the 18th century. I will, over the next few days, make some tracings in preparation for making oil paintings of these. I will work on a small scale, just slightly larger than the originals, as I find that these images do not work well when expanded too large. There are eighteeen images in this rather beautiful series. A colleague is currently translating the text into English for me and hopefully this will eventually become a volume in my Magnum Opus series.
11th November 2007
I have received a number of orders for books over the past few days, so much of the weekend will be taken up with binding up these copies for my customers. I noticed that I now have only three copies left to sell of my Chymical Wedding book (1984).
I had a talk with an artist colleague yesterday and hopefully he will agree to accepting a commission for a work for my Splendor Solis art project. I showed him much of the material and I think I inspired him a little to consider undertaking this. This is a crazy idea of mine but I hope an engaging one. By early next year I will have added another three works to this project so will have at least eight. I have some other artists in mind, from which to commission a painting, but I don't necessarily have the funds to buy more than a few paintings each year. All the many hours spent bookbinding does, happily, help pay for such projects. One day I will organise a little exhibition of these here in Glasgow, and perhaps issue a book with each work illustrated. Back to the bookbinding chores !
9th November 2007
Today the Robert Lenkiewicz manuscript arrived. It is exactly as it remembered seeing in his library some years ago. Robert Lenkiewicz in creating this work combined his artistic abilities with his love of books and manuscripts, and made an exact copy of a section of manuscript Sloane 3772, mimicing the handwriting and including all the marks on the paper, the foliation numbering, the stains and flaws in the paper. It is a wonderful facsimile of a alchemical manuscript. He even pasted in his British Library reader's slip which shows that he examined and probably copied this work in January 1974.
8th November 2007
I was shattered today to discover that a French publisher appears to be using my coloured images for the book covers of fifteen of his books. I cannot understand how he would have managed to get hold of high resolution images in order to print these. It is so annoying that my many hours of work seems just to be lifted and used to help sell someone else's books, without asking my permission. A number of publishers have used my images and I am happy for them to do so, but only if they recognise my copyright and pay me a modest fee for the high resolution scans. I do allow free use of the thumbnail images for people to use on their web sites, but not for publication in print media.
It is absolutely unacceptable for someone to just steal my work and use it in this way. I have emailed them, and wonder what sort of reply I will receive. If it is a genuine error I will understand, but it will be so galling if I discover that someone has purposively stolen and misappropriated my work. It is difficult for me to see how they can have obtained my high resolution scans.
I had a similar problem about eight years ago when someone sold my study course lessons, having removed my name from them. I also find that a number of people have copied the texts from my alchemy web site and put them onto a CD-Rom and sell these. I have given up on trying to stop them as the texts themselves are not actually in copyright and I cannot see that they will get many sales when people can read all the texts from my web site for free. It is actually rather amusing as they carefully remove my name from all the files, but preserve the artificial division of some texts. I created this division into small parts when making up these files back in the 1996 when people were on very slow internet connections (1200 and 2400 modems in those days) so large files took a long time to download. These copying buffoons preserve this artificial structure.
6th November 2007
I am continuing to get more and more drawn into the wonders of the imagery in the Aurora Consurgens manuscripts. I have known of this manuscript since the early 1970's and over the decades have made a few tentative attempts to explore its iconography. I have now decided that the time has come for me to make an intense study of this key early work of symbolic alchemy. The earliest manuscript probably dates to the first decades of the 15th century, and thus is contemporary with the Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit but unlike this German work is not suffused with Christian religious imagery. I have now managed to locate a translation of the text of the second part of the manuscript (left out of the von Franz translation as it did not suit her thesis to include it) and should have this in a week or so. What I do lack are good quality images of the manuscript paintings. I have been trying to obtain copies from the holding libraries but without success so far. If anyone can help me with this I would be most grateful. I am especially looking for a contact in Berlin who might look at the manuscript there for me. Happily there is a late copy here in Glasgow.
5th November 2007
Today I picked up a package from the Post Office. Inside were two new scholarly books on alchemy I had bought through Amazon. The first is Chymists and Chymistry which consists of the papers presented at the 2006 Conference at the Chemical Heritage Foundation conference on alchemy. I had planned to go to that conference but the costs rather went against me and I had to pull out. So it will be good, at least, to be able to read the contributions. This is edited by Lawrence Principe. The other book by Bruce Moran is entitled Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy. This will be quite a challenge to read as it is densely written and structured, certainly not a work one can skim read.
I am planning to create a web page devoted to new publications on alchemy. I managed to give this an hour or so later in the afternoon, but it probably needs about four hours to get it structured. It is always amazing how long it takes to make up a web page, gathering the material, making scans and fiddling about with the layout.
4th November 2007
Last week I was contacted by someone from Slovenia, who told me, among other things, about a conference held in Solvenia in 2002 on alchemy. For those unfamiliar with European geography, Slovenia is the country lodged between Italy on the West, Austria to the North, Hungary to the East and Croatia on its southern border. In earlier centuries this area under Habsburgs rule and later formed the part of the Austrian Empire. It is not entirely surprising that during the 17th century there are records of a number of alchemists, the foremost being Count Rein from Strmol castle, who was an enthusiastic alchemist in the 17th century who had a small laboratory, as did Janez Vajkard Valvasor, a geographer and member of the English Royal Geographical Society, who had an interest in alchemy and international and domestic connections with alchemists. I am hoping to be able to obtain a copty of the proceeding of this conference for my library. The papers presented there included items on - An overview of metallurgical practises in the Idrija mine - Argentum vive and cinnabar in alchemy and in production of argentum vive in Idrija (technical article about the production of cinnabar in Idrija mine, including an overview of technical innovations in the mine) - The early natural scientists in Carniola (overview of the beginnings of chemistry, medicine and physics in Carniola with a short biography of some notable persons) - Alchemy in the works of Istrian medicine doctors (a study about Petrus Bonus) - Janez Vajkard Valvasor, hermetism and alchemy - A song of Daniel from Justinopolis (an alchemical poem about the Lapis philosophorum) - Symbolic explanation of alchemy and its symbolical meaning (a Jungian oriented study about alchemical symbolism) - Alchemical experiment as a ritual (a sociological study of the alchemists role in society and the role of experiment) - On the spirit of gold. Language and alchemy in medieval texts (a study about the language that alchemists used) - Alchemistic mistakes. Mistaken interpretation of texts (linguistic and hermeneutical study) - Enochian magic of John Dee (a brief biography of John Dee and his encounter with Edward Kelly and the influence of Enochian magic on Golden Dawn and some modern magical groups in Slovenia). The conference seems to have been organised under a Jungian focus with with the well known Jungian writer Edward F. Edinger presenting a paper.
2nd November 2007
I spent a great deal of time this week painting two images from the Aurora consurgens manuscript. This early 15th century manuscript has truly amazing and engaging images, but they have become rather damaged through the years. I decided I would like to paint 'restored' facsimile versions of these. One, the monkey violinist, is almost complete, now just needing a few details retouched. Here is the original alongside my restored version. I hope I can follow this through (there are nearly 30 images to paint). It will be a major investment of my time, but if I can sell some of these small paintings it would help cover this investment. Anyone interested in acquiring these unique items (available for the first time in 500 years !) please email me at adam@alchemywebsite.com These are painted in oils on smooth untextured board and are around 9 by 6 inches (230 by 150mm).
1st November 2007I am delighted to have been able to buy one of the great British artist Robert Lenkiewicz's bound copies of an alchemical manuscript. We were in touch for some years by phone when he often asked my advice on alchemical books to buy, then in the late 1990's he invited me to visit him at his studio. Among other things, he showed me copies he had made of alchemical manuscripts, so I am very happy to have been able to buy one from the Weiser sale as a reminder of this remarkable artist and bibliophile. The sale catalogue states (I summarise) "This is a handwritten and bound copy of a transcription by Robert Lenkiewicz of MS. Sloane 3772. The original British Library reader's slip, showing that Robert Lenkiewicz viewed the manuscript on 4 January, 1974, has been affixed to the inside front cover. Ingeniously - and cheaply - hand bound by Lenkiewicz. The covers are quite literally boards, that is two sheets of plain plywood, secured together with a linen backstrip, over which has been placed a paper spine, down which Lenkiewicz has hand lettered the author and title details." I well remember looking at a number of these hand-bound volumes when I visited his library, and perhaps even this very volume !
31th October 2007I got quite a surprise today when I received a fine gift from an artist in South America that I had been in contact with a few weeks ago. He has sent me a beautiful diary, the front and back of which has alchemical emblems burnt into the wooden fibreboards using pyrography. This is not one of those poor quality items manufactured by a laser, but is hand-crafted using a heated graving tool. It even has that distinctive charred wood smell! The artist, Miguel Calle, describes himself as a 'Piroalquimista'. He was born in Lima in Peru but now lives in São Paulo in Brazil. He makes many articles using pyrography but is especially interested in alchemical imagery. The first book he read on alchemy was A mandala alquímica (the Brazilian-Portuguese translation of my old book The Alchemical Mandala. He has a comprehensive web site of his work
piroalquimista.vilabol.uol.com.br/Produtos_Piroalquimista.htm
I am going to commission him to make one of his pyrographs of the Splendor solis image for my Splendor Solis art project. Perhaps some of my readers here would be interested in commissioning a piece from him. I think his style and medium would work very well with woodcuts.
30th October 2007Today I received a copy of a interesting little French Book, Jean Beauchard's L'alchimie dans la Franc-Maçonnerie: Art et Initiation, Editions Vega, 2007. Jean Beauchard is a fine artist who has created two tarot decks, the Masonic Tarot (1987) and an Alchemical Tarot (2006). Of course, tarot has nothing to do with historical alchemy, but is merely a modern reworking of alchemical imagery into the form of tarot designs. I was very struck by Beauchard's fine draughtsmanship and the way in which he has redrawn many images from alchemical emblems, often giving these his own particular artistic spin. Although his book is suffused with the usual modern esoteric interpretations, his artwork is very fine and he has obviously studied the imagery of alchemy in considerable depth.
28th October 2007
I spend most of the afternoon and early evening tracing and redrawing two of the images from the Aurora consurgens series preparatory to making oil paintings of these wonderful images. My versions will be good facsimiles of the originals but with the erasures and damaged parts of the images repaired. Some years ago I attempted this task but made the images too large and when scaled up they did not really work well. Now I intend to paint them about the same size as the originals and am quite hopeful that this will give a better result. I would like to use these eventually as the basis for an edition of the 'Aurora consurgens restored'. Perhaps I might even be able to sell these pictures in due course. I am now just hoping that I will be able to free up enough time over the next few weeks to work on these paintings. It will be a good exercise and really enable me to grasp something of what the illustrator was attempting to convey through his imagery.
I managed to find a little bit of time to make up a page with a reading of the chemical process contained in the Lully 'Chymical experiments'. You can see this here. There is unlikely to be much enthusiasm for a straightforward reading of an alchemical text, but I would be willing to repeat the exercise with other texts, if people have any interest. Sadly, everyone nowadays prefers a 'Da Vinci Code' interpretation of alchemical material rather than reading what the writer actually described in their work.
27th October 2007This morning I found time to take a quick look through a new book which arrived a few days ago. This is a study of Ithell Colquhoun : Pioneer Surrealist artist, occultist, writer and poet, by Eric Ratcliffe. It includes a number of illustrations of some of her paintings. Among these are some with distinct alchemical resonances, such as The Second Adam and the related Mystic Figure. I was pleased to discover that one of her paintings is in the Hunterian Art Gallery here in Glasgow, though I have never seen it on public display. I will ask them if I might get to see the work, as I always like to see how a painter worked their paint. I never met Ithell Colquhoun, though I did have a short correspondence with her back in 1978-79, when she wrote some short pieces for my Hermetic Journal.
26th October 2007
I have now with great relief closed my Alchemy Discussion Forum. I suppose it was worth trying to establish a place where people could sensibly discuss alchemy. There was no single incident or person that led me to decide to close the forum, rather a steady drip, drip, drip of criticism, and blatant misunderstanding of my motives. As the days wore on it became more and more of a chore, and I eventually came to dread logging on to the site each morning to see what nonsense had been posted there, and what tiresome games and interpersonal disputes were being played out. People are really rude and unpleasant to one another, and it is surprising that they think they can act in this way and yet expect the person running the Forum and thus dealing with all the flak and personal emails, to feel that his task is worthwhile. Such people drained the fun I had from setting up the Forum. The owner of such a Forum must get fun from doing it, and the contributors bear a responsibility towards conducting themselves in a way which does not give more and more grief to the organiser. With their cantankerous, narrow minded, often ill-informed, relenteless criticism, they deplete the energies and enthusiasm of the organiser, so that eventually one has to decide whether it is worth continuing. I have a relatively sanguine and forgiving character, but even I get worn down. I have, after all, so many things I want to do with my life. I was hoping to spend the last few days looking at the Aurora consurgens, but that went out the window with all the demands of running the Forum. Now, having made this decision, I can relax and turn my attention to more positive things. Sadly, those individuals, who valued the Forum and respected what I was trying to do, have lost out.
26th October 2007
The last few days on my Alchemy Discussion Forum have seen a number of little dramas. It seems to be increasingly impossible to run such a group and expect straightforward and sensible discussion of alchemy. The main culprit may be the Internet itself. It allows people to hide behind aliases and thus, since they feel free of any censure or repercussions, or personal responsibility for their words, they often end up making unpleasant remarks that they would never make in a personal email or in a face to face conversation. It is all a bit sad really. It may well be that sensible discussion of alchemy is now becoming impossible. I have put quite a bit of time into running the Alchemy Discussion Forum, but I am now wondering if this is worthwhile. I do run another discussion forum devoted to tarot collecting. That is a complete delight with no troublesome people and everyone is so courteous and helpful towards others. It is a joy to log on and see what everyone wants to share and contribute. In contrast, the online alchemical community seems at times full of sour, unhelpful, overly critical people who are ready to jump on and even misinterpret ones every word.
In an attempt to bring some serious focus back to the discussion section on practical alchemy, I decided to give a reading of a 17th century text that someone had posted onto the Forum inviting comment. I attempted a straightforward line by line reading of the text showing that it described a reproducable chemical process. Few on the Forum seem to think it has any validity. I will over the next day or so make it up into a page for the website.
It seems I am always a rebel against established ideas. When I was young I rebelled against the stranglehold that academia seemed to have over the perception of alchemy and I tried through my publications to open people to more of the wonders of alchemical manuscripts and imagery. Now, I rebel against the stranglehold that modern contrived esotericism has imposed on the perception of alchemy. All I ask is that people read what is actually in the source material. That is what I try to do.
24th October 2007I am going to spend as much time as I can make available over the next week or so to investigate the iconography of the Aurora consurgens manuscripts. This is one of the earliest alchemical manuscripts with illustrations dating to the early 15th century. There appears to be almost nothing written about this work in English, apart from the Marie-Louise von Franz book on the Aurora consurgens which is frustrating in that she entirely ignores the illustrations and focusses on the first part of the text and provides a massive commentary which draws the reader into a mass of Jungian interpretations. She focusses our attention on the existential/religious content of the text and chooses only to translate one part of the text associated with this work. Luckily there are some studies in French by Barbara Obrist and in Italian by Mino Gabriele. I am determined to read through these then attempt to make some sense of the series of illustrations. One of the most enigmatic is the monkey violinist - a truly amazing image to ponder over.
22nd October 2007
It has been a month now since I set up my most recent attempt to foster sensible discussion about alchemy through the Internet. This is the Alchemy Discussion Forum www.alchemydiscussion.com
In general the discussions have been quite reasonable, though it still depresses me somewhat to see how little that people know about alchemy and the fact that they rely so much on modern 'esoteric' and popular books for their information. The section on modern practical laboratory alchemy is dominated by people trying to upstage one another and pretending to have secret knowledge. It is quite amusing, and well worth an anthropological study. Outside the practical section, I try my best to keep people focussed on realities and not let them drift off into meaningless speculation. The sections on alchemical symbolism and on alchemy texts are worth keeping in touch with, as are the sections on recent publications and on news about conferences and events on alchemy.
20th October 2007
I just noticed that a complete set of back issues of my Hermetic Journal is for sale through a secondhand book dealer for £517.50 ($1050). That is a staggering price to me. Sadly I am not benefitting from this increase in its value ! Maybe I should hunt around among my piles of stored papers and see if I could not assemble a full set. Another dealer is selling a number of my books for £150 ($310) which I still have in stock and sell for £45-50 ($90-105). Maybe I should increase my prices.
19th October 2007
I coloured another emblem from Johann Theodor de Bry’s Proscenium vitæ humanæ sive Emblematum Secularium Frankfurt, 1627. This is Emblem XXVI, 'In love is grief'.
18th October 2007
Here is a rather fine emblem from Johann Theodor de Bry’s Proscenium vitæ humanæ sive Emblematum Secularium, which was published in Frankfurt, in 1627. This is Emblem LXV, the 'Doctor of Fools'. I spend this evening colouring it. It is obviously satirical, as are most of the emblems in de Bry's emblem book this "theatre of human life". De Bry's emblems are richly allegorical and he draws on Breughel and other paintings of that time. The de Bry family, of course, were responsible for publishing many of the great alchemical masterpieces of the opening three decades of the 17th century. This image shows a doctor holding up a urinal to inspect it. This was a common diagnostic technique in 17th century medicine. In the urine flask is a small homunculus. One of his patients is seated on the left and is being tended by the doctors assistant. His distended belly is being tapped and a stream of strange creatures spills out into a wooden tub. On the right another patient is being treated in heated bath. Here it appears that it is his head that is is infected with all sorts of dreams and obsessions. His head has become a still head or alchemical alembic and mice are being distilled off and fall to the floor.
I was drawn to this image, not only because of its delightfully humorous content and the strength of the imagery, but especially because this image is derived from an earlier alchemical manuscript.
17th October 2007
I just found a rather fine manuscript painting of Valentine's Ninth Key. It is probably 18th century. It is apparently in private collection but the book I found it illustrated in does not identify that collection. I place alongside the more familiar engraving from 1618.
16th October 2007
Today I received notice that Weiser Antiquarian Books is currently preparing a catalogue of Books on Alchemy and Hermetica, mostly from the Lenkiewicz Collection.
Robert Lenkiewicz was a remarkable British artist, who sadly died too young, a few years ago. He also had a great interest in books and in alchemy, magic and hermeticism. I met him at his workshop in Plymouth about 10 years ago. Although surrounded by his wonderful large photorealistic paintings, he told me that he valued his library above his artwork. He had plans to leave behind him a vast library as his legacy. He gave me a whole evening in which he showed me his treasures, early editions of key alchemical and hermetic works, but I was most impressed by his own painted copies of alchemical and magical manuscripts from the British Library. He had lovingly evoked the images in the original manuscripts.
It saddened me that his library project was never realised. He died too young (at about 60). Had he lived another decade or so he would probably have been able to raise the money from the increase in the price of his paintings. Now, it appears, some of the volumes from that library are to be sold off.
15th October 2007
Here is the second painting I recently discovered. This one is a kind of alchemical fountain, on which the planets gaze down.
Sadly, few people have any interest in these paintings. I have now printed both these images out on my large format press and they now have pride of place in my workroom. Almost no one has any interest in this material.
12th October 2007
I have just commissioned the artist, Erin McCauley, whose Phantomwise Tarot I recently published, to make a painting of the Splendor solis image for me. I find her artstyle rather engaging. For her tarot she made paintings in a restricted pallette of blacks and warm greys. I look forward to seeing what she makes of the image.
12th October 2007
Today I managed to obtain a copy of a 1960's French art magazine. In this was an article by the art historian Philippe Audoin, who has written extensively on surrealism. This particular article presented illustrations of two large gouache alchemical paintings. One is of an alchemical grotto and the other of an alchemical fountain. Annoyingly, Audoin does not give us any details of who painted these images, their age or their present location. I suspect they are late 18th century, but they could even be modern recreations by a skilled artist. The imagery is strikingly similar to the coloured emblems in the Marinier manuscript which I published a few months ago. Here is the first image, which Audoin describes as the 'alchemical grotto'.
11th October 2007
This evening I decided to make a coloured version of one of the emblems in the Salamandram super triplici ararum foco..., a work on the salamander written by Johann Wurffbain and printed at Altdorf in 1676.
11th October 2007I have always been fascinated by the eighth image from the Splendor Solis manuscripts. This shows the strange figure of a man emerging from a swamp. One arm is white, the other red and his body black, thus incorporating the main colour changes in the alchemical process. His head is metamorphosed into a glassy sphere, and that I find a wonderful image. As he walks out of the swamp, an angel figure appears and hands him a red robe. Some years ago I made a facsimile copy of the main part of the image. It sat on my wall for a few months and then I sold it. A year or so later I found I was somewhat missing this image and I asked an artist friend of mine, Phil Gibson, to make a version of it in his own style, but keeping the central core of imagery. I was so pleased with this that I decided to ask other artists to make a version of this image in their own style. Bob Ellaby and Laurel Price next made versions for me. This is an ongoing project and I am now going to commission other artists, whose painting styles I admire, to make further copies. Eventually, if I can afford to continue with this project, hopefully I will in time gather ten to twenty such paintings and then I may be able to mount an exhibition of this theme.
www.alchemywebsite.com/splendor_solis_art_project.html
10th October 2007
One of my contacts has brought to my attention the alchemists' garden, Le Jardin de l'Alchimiste, in the French village of Eygaliere in South East Provence (not far from Saint Remy de Provence).You can see some photos of this remarkable garden on their web site
www.jardin-alchimiste.com/ac0gb.htm
It is composed of a number of different architectural and horticultural elements including the Berechit maze, Magical garden, and the Alchemical Garden, which has three components - the Black Work garden, The White Work garden, and the Red Work Garden. It sounds like a wonderful place in which to hold a small seminar on alchemy.
9th October 2007
I have had to spend the last few five days making up batches of my coloured books in the Magnum Opus series. After 30 years of doing bookbinding it is now a rather tedious chore, but absolutely necessary. I have had quite a few orders recently for the coloured books and decided I needed to build up a small stock to deal with incoming orders and free up some of my time for more creative work.
6th October 2007
A few weeks ago I was able, at great expense (£100, $200) to obtain a copy of a book for which I had been looking for over 10 years. This is an Italian book presented by the art historian Bruno Nardini entitled Zoroaster Ermetismo e Alchimia which contains reproductions of 38 coloured drawings in an 18th century German manuscript Zoroaster: Clavis Artis. This manuscript is in three volumes and was bought by Nino Rota, the Italian film composer, who worked with the director Fellini and is best known for his music for the Godfather trilogy of films. Rota was able to collect a substantial library of alchemical books and manuscripts and this was ultimately given to the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. Nardini wrote a introductory commentary to the set of images. This is rather poor and displays his lack of understanding of alchemical imagery. Indeed he is, obviously, unaware of other similar alchemical emblems, and instead waffles on in a tiresome way with inappropriate explanations and psychological interpretations that just display his ignorance of the alchemical context. He also misdates this work to the 17th century when it is 18th, and misses the key clue to its origins, as the phrase 'R. et A. C.' appears on one of the opening folios. This locates it to the circle of the Rosae et Aurea Crucis the mid to late 18th century Masonic-Alchemical ritual group. Anyone with any grasp of alchemical imagery will immediately see in the images in the second volume references to the Nicolas Flamel series in Abraham Eleazar, Uraltes chymisches Werck, Erfurt, 1735. The third book has many images of dragons/snakes and I look forward to working to understand the structure of this complex sequence. I am so pleased to have this work in my hand after 10 years of trying to find it.
19th September 2007
My new alchemy discussion forum is now up and running www.alchemydiscussion.com Within the first few days it has attracted 58 people to register, with many more visitors. There have already been a number of postings and the system seems to be working well. One of the best features is the fact that one can post images directly into your message. It is relatively easy to use and the division into categories and threads means that one can easily find the posting you are interested in.
14th September 2007
I have now decided to set up a discussion board on alchemy. Over the last twelve years I have run various dicussion forums on alchemy based on email. I have now set up a new bulletin board software which is so much more useful than simple email. It allows the discussions to be posted in definite topics which are divided into different categories. Users can set up avatars and also post graphics into their messages. They can also watch various threads and have email alerts when there are replies or new messages. Although the site is still under development, you can be among the first to join to test out the system. Just go to this page and register www.alchemydiscussion.com I will be announcing this discussion board on my mailing list next week.
12th September 2007
I am currently looking for someone to translate a short alchemical allegory from Italian into English for publication in one of my Magnum Opus books. Please email me at adam@alchemywebsite.com if you think you could help with this.
11th September 2007
The lack of postings on this weblog is not due to lack of activity but quite the opposite. The past few months have been extremely busy for me. My exhibition in Edinburgh took up a great deal of time. I still have some copies of the book connected with this exhibition for sale. It is entitled Alchemy: A Treasure House of symbolism and you can see details on this page www.alchemywebsite.com/bookshop/treasure_house.html
I also spent some weeks finishing the latest book in the Magnum Opus series. This is the The alchemical manuscript of the Seven Keys of Honoratus Marinier, possibly the last alchemical emblem series ever created. As the manuscript contains large emblems, I have issued this as a large A3 book.
24th July 2007
Went through to Edinburgh for the first day of installing my exhibition. We kept a photolog of us setting up the exhibition. A few photos are currently included and more will be added over the next few days
17th July 2007
After many weeks of concerted work, the catalogue for my forthcoming exhibition of alchemical artwork at the Edinburgh Festival in August is now printed. It is looking rather a nice production, being a large format (A4 size) paperback with a rather beautiful cover and in full colour throughout, with 65 colour illustrations. This will go on sale to coincide with the opening of the exhibition on the 3rd of August. Now I have a further period of hard work installing the exhibits and setting up the exhibition.
23rd May 2007A few days ago I managed to get a high quality copy of an emblem I have been keen to colour for some years, but was never able to obtain a good copy. It is from an emblem book by Otto Vaen of 1607 and has always intrigued me since I first saw it as an illustration in a book. It is not alchemical as such, but somehow it captured my interest. I coloured it last night and have now put it online in my growing galleries of coloured emblems into my third gallery of emblems related to alchemy.
21st May 2007
I spent much of last week creating a new CD-Rom of my coloured emblems. This is the fourth in the series providing a further 280 emblems for people to study. I have now created over 1100 of these emblems and this is the most significant resource ever created on alchemical symbolism and emblems. I have recently been drawn to early astronomical and astrological imagery as well as expanding the section on related emblems from religious and other sources. It is amazing how much time is absorbed in just making up the CD-Roms as all my original scans have to be reprocessed and built into pdf files. I also had to create printable images with watermarks so it just took days and days. Some people seem to think one can just do this sort of thing in a few hours - they obviously have never undertaken such a task. Of course creating the images themselves was an emormous amount of work over the last three years. Some of the larger and more complex images took 12 or even 15 hours to colour and even a seemingly simple image can take well over 2 hours. It is not just a matter of applying colour on a whim - as what makes my work distinctive is the deep study I have made of original coloured manuscript material, which I try and echo in my colouring scheme. Often it takes quite a long time to decide on just how I will colour an image, indeed, I have a little pile of such images which I still am puzzling over. This is quite a crazy project as I estimate it has absorbed over 10,000 hours of my time over the past ten or so years. Many of these emblems were almost entirely unknown before I uncovered them and produced my coloured versions. You can see details on the recent disc of emblems by clicking here.
11th May 2007
I reserved much of my time this week to painting some more coloured emblems. I concentrated on a number of astronomical/astrological as well as some emblematic materials as I feel it is important now to contextualise alchemical imagery within the artwork of its period. I have now made over 1000 coloured emblems and provided the most significant resource for this material that has ever been gathered together. Over the next few weeks I will be putting much of the new material I have created over the last year onto a fourth volume of my emblems CD-Roms. I have already put up the thumbnails onto my galleries of astronomical/astrological material and the emblematic material.
7th May 2007
A rather weird thing happened recently. A few days ago I received an email from a company wanting to buy the alchemy web site. I thought it was just a marketing ploy for one of those web design companies, and sent them a facetious reply saying "Sure, for five million dollars!" Strangely the company replied and said they were interested but not at such a price. After a bit of two and fro emails I discovered that their plan was to buy the site and use it for marketing, with onscreen adverts and so on. Of course I would not do this, as I would lose editorial and content control and then my readership would be barraged with adverts for Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code books, but it was interesting that a commercial venture had recognised the substance of the alchemy web site. The site does attract a growing number of readers, but I would no doubt frighten them all away by selling it out for advertising purposes. So my regular readership can rest assured that the site will continue to be run by this rather obsessive enthusiast for all things alchemical, and remain independent of the mass marketers.
30th April 2007I have now set up an Alchemy Art section on my website to sell large format art prints of my coloured alchemical, astrological, astronomical and other emblems. A few weeks ago I took delivery of a high quality printer that can produce art prints up to 24 by 17 inches in size. This has enabled me to produce quality artwork at a more affordable price. I had already been selling a few such items which I had to get printed for me, but I found that the high price I had to charge made these prints inaccessible to most people. Now I am able to sell these at half that price. Only a few images in my galleries can be printed at such a large size, and I have selected a few to start with and will be adding more over the next months. I have decided to discontinue selling the A3 prints and instead will sell the standard prints on A4 (11.75 by 8.25 inches) and these new large format prints. The production of these prints is very timely as I work towards my exhibition in August at the Edinburgh Festival. I hope that this will help people come to view alchemical imagery as an art form.
25th April 2007
I managed to put aside a couple of days to do some painting, making some further coloured emblems for my galleries. I hope to be able to devote a week or so to painting over the next months.
19th April 2007
I am setting up a new section of my website devoted to the artwork of alchemy, astrology/astronomy and emblems. I have selected a few items that can be provided as large format art prints. With my new printer I am now able to sell this artwork at an affordable price. See this page
I will develop this section over the next few weeks. At the moment it is under construction.
18th April 2007
Tonight the History Channel in the UK aired a documentary entitled The Real Sorcerer's Stone in its 'Decoding the Past' series, which was a reasonable, straightforward account of alchemy. It used a number of my coloured alchemical emblems as dissolves between various scenes. Among the main contributors were the scholars Lawrence Principe and Deborah Harkness. The opening and closing sections were rather good, sensible summaries of alchemical history, but for me the documentary got a little bit bogged down in two central sections on Flamel and John Dee (complete with the obligatory wife-swapping