Vol.8 No.1

Summer 2007

CONTENTS

Spagyric Medicine and Vitiation of Blood and Lymph

By Dr. Ajit Singh

Before going into depth about the meaning of “Vitiation of Blood and Lymph,” let me explain first why I have chosen Spagyric medicine as the only possible solution to offer recovery from all kinds of ailments whose roots always lay hidden in the “Vitiation of Blood and Lymph.”

What are Spagyric Medicines?

The medicines, tinctures or essences, if prepared by following the procedures of Separation, Purification and Recombination are called the Spagyric way of making a medicine. By the methods of Separation and Purification we get the three purified elements of the Plants (Herbs) and then recombine these, which is also called “Cohobation” (Reassembling of the three purified elements of the Plant by means of Spagyrism).

It is proved by various researchers that it is mostly Spagyric essences that are the true medicines and also only the Spagyric essences that are able to overcome the “Vitiation of Blood and Lymph.”

How and Why?

While making Spagyric essences, they get empowered with the three things:

a)    Organic compounds basically of lower molecular weight that can easily diffuse through the semi permeable membranes of the cells of tissues,

b)    Inorganic elements such as macro, micro and trace elements,

c)    Energy that can also be described as a chain of atoms bearing the properties of cations and anions, that is ions with positive or negative charges, that are able to take part in the biochemical process or reactions happening within the body’s cells.

Thus, we can conclude ultimately that a Spagyric essence is rich in inorganic material, i.e. plant derived minerals salts which can be easily absorbed by the body of living organisms. Physiology revealed that mineral salts are important for all types of biochemistry or biochemical reactions that occur within the cells or tissues. Similarly, trace elements found in very small quantity in living organisms are very crucial for life, play an important role in metabolic reactions and act as catalysts.

Now what is the “Vitiation of Blood and Lymph” and how does it occur? How are Spagyric Essences Suitable for De-vitiation?

We know our body is a result or made up of 24 different elements, but just four of these make up the major part of our body weight. These four are: oxygen (O), hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), and carbon (C). Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. The balance of chemicals in our body depends on our age.

Chemical Make up of Our Body or Living Organisms

Chemicals are carried around the body dissolved in water. The most important of these is salt or sodium chloride (NaCl). The chemical make up of the body consists of three basic elements: major or macro elements, minor or micro elements and trace elements. The body needs specific amounts of chemicals so that essential chemical reactions can take place to keep the body in good working order.

1)    Major elements are: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen.

2)    Minor elements are: calcium (1.5%), phosphorus (1.0%), potassium (0.4%), sulfur (0.3%), sodium (6.2%), chlorine (0.2%) and magnesium (0.1%).

3)    Trace elements are 0.1% of the body’s weight but are very crucial for life. The main trace elements are: chromium, cobalt, copper, fluoride, iodine, magnese, molbedinum, selenium, silicon, tin and vanedium.

The need for water is one of the strongest human driving forces. Water is a transport system and a laboratory for vital chemical reactions. A drop in body water content of 5% causes strong thirst and a drop of around 20% results in death. The human body is composed of many different types of molecules. Molecules consist of one or more atoms of one or more elements joined by chemicals bonds.

So Then What is “Vitiation of Blood and Lymph?”

We know that the formation of specific proteins-enzymes may be hampered by the known availability of specific amino acids/elements in the body and this may cause the stopping or malfunctioning of a specific physiological activity which, if not overcome early, may lead to pathology of the cells and tissues.

Blood and lymph are the only two channels to provide all kinds of transportation of the precursors of biomolecules required for biochemical reactions and, if hampered, may cause the stopping or malfunctioning of a specific physiological activity in specific cells and tissues. Thus we can say that if the precursors of biomolecules required for the proper metabolism of cells and tissues get deficient during transportation through the blood and lymph “Vitiation of Blood and Lymph” occurs.

Therefore, only Spagyric medicines, which are rich in precursors of required biomeolecules, can overcome the problem of this deficiency of cells and tissue. So, when they are prescribed for the ody, they are able to de-vitiate the blood and lymph by supplying the required deficient precursors of the biomolecules to the body cells for their normal structure and function.

Are Spagyric Essences Rich in Precursors of Biomolecules?

Yes, biomolecules play an important role in living systems and are made up of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen as major constituents. These major constituents are possible to get naturally only by means of Spagyrism. This process is widely used in the system of electrohomoepathy medicine that believes in the cure of diseases by de-vitiation of the blood and lymph.

Dr. Ajit Singh practices electrohomeopathy and acupuncture as well as conducts research on medicinal plants in Punjab, India. Dr. Singh can be contacted at: drajit_7@hotmail.com. Website: www.sbeamattie.com.

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Three Poems from liber xix: differentia liber

By Paul Hardacre

Poetry, like alchemy, is largely ignored, and is effectively marginalized from mainstream culture.  Most people couldn't care less about either artform, and yet both house so much of value to humanity.  Poets, like alchemists, are dwellers on the fringe; often characterized, somewhat tragically, as undesirables, freaks or lunatics.  Poets are interpreters of, as A.E. Waite put it in his little-known masterpiece, Azoth; or The Star in the East, “the unrealizable beauty of that which is behind the veil,” doing so ‘by the graciousness of the veil.” 

As he so eloquently states:

“In this matter the poets are our only interpreters – that is, legitimately – because the problem is outside science, which is concerned with the veil alone; and it is outside ordinary philosophy, because ordinary philosophy has affirmed that the reality is unknowable; and the best conclusions from analogy are to be learned of the masters of analogy, of the kings of interpretation, of those who see furthest, who possess that intuition which is the deepest instrument of supersensual research, and is in fact that higher faculty, that sixth sense, at which we have already hinted, which we now openly affirm is par excellence the mystical instrument.  Those only who are in touch with poetry can have part in the life to come.  It is therefore eminently, and before all things necessary, that we should see after the manner of the poets, and the mystical philosophy of Nature is to be found in them.”

Writing poetry for more than ten years, I have explored poetic styles, starting with early lyrical and confessional works, and gradually drifting across the dream-sea towards less sentimental shores, to the sometimes chilly intellectual islands of language poetry (langpo) and other post-modern, non-traditional and non-narrative forms where the reader plays the significant role of extracting – or perhaps even allocating – meaning from a poem.  The ‘true’ meaning of the poem is often hidden or encoded within multi-layered, largely unpunctuated, stream-of-consciousness-esque flow of allusive words and sentences and phrases and images ... not always images, but with my own poems, I tend towards image-scapes.  One might call them image-puzzles; telling some kind of exoteric 'story' on the surface, but obfuscating the true meaning.  In this sense, my poems are acts of the occult, whereby I tantalize and stimulate language lovers (i.e. the mind) but shield or disguise the truth (i.e. the pearl, the heart) – a kind of poetic 'Green Language' tapping into various traditions and lineages in contemporary Australian and North American poetics.

My exploration of the Language of Thoth, the Gay Speech, the Language of the Birds, the Language of God – call it what you will – intensified significantly during the time of the protracted deaths of both my mother and father.  During this nineteen-month period I began to think about magic and alchemy, reconnecting with a life-long fascination that had slipped for some years.  The spirit of poetry still burned within me, but it had been joined by something else.  I became overtaken with the desire to realize the Stone – not simply to understand it conceptually or philosophically, but to facilitate its manifestation. 

As both my parents crept closer to their time to sleep with the earth, the Universal essence flung alchemy before me, every step of the way ... so many markers along an apparent path, so long as I kept myself ‘open’ and didn't try to force anything.  There was a transmutation of this matter known as 'me’ whereby a poetic-alchemical product was created ... for the Hermetic Child of Sun and Moon to be born, both parents must die.  This is a painful birth, to be certain.  I honestly see myself as a living alchemical product, heading towards the Stone.  The poems in liber xix: differentia liber record this transmutation process, this evening of myself to include more 'heart' to balance all of my out-of-control intellectualism. 

The nineteen x nineteen-line poems that comprise the suite also document the difference between modern man, the immature Adam (45) and God (26).  It took nineteen months to write the nineteen-poem suite; nineteen months for both parents to die, and indeed, there are many other nuances of nineteen of significance, both inside and out, above and below.  Writing each poem required me to establish contact with the source, the essence, which wasn't always easy or pleasant.  These poems changed me, and I know that neither my self nor my writing will be the same again. 

Coinciding with the agonizing demise of my mother and father, and with my desire for manifesting the Stone (spiritual and physical), I had a chance meeting with an alchemist/spagyricist who quickly became like a brother to me.  I read more and more, discussing the Hermetic arts with my long-time partner and soror mystica, and my newfound brother.  I was soon introduced to his alchemical mentor, and since that time, I have had the pleasure of knowing other aspirants to the Stone.  All the while, my poetry and alchemy became united together, as one art for interpreting Nature.

Poetry has been my gateway to alchemy, as has the death of my solar and lunar progenitors.  It hasn't been an easy path, but I am happy with what I have seen and learnt and felt along the way, and where my path seems to be heading in the future.  And why not?  As Waite put it, “The possession of the spirit of poetry is … an indispensable condition of achievement; it is the agent of transfiguration; it is the philosophic stone which transmutes the world and man.”

burning god

“With a great howl of rage and hate he snatched

the body of his murdered brother out of the chest,

tore it into fourteen pieces, and scattered them far

and wide over the land of Egypt.”

– Roger Lancelyn Green, Isis and Osiris

“Egypt, then, was the eye and heart of the Earth;

the Heavenly Nile poured its light-flood of wisdom

through this dark of the eye, or made the land throb

like a heart with the celestial life-currents.”

– G.R.S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes (vol. iii)

black dirt heart he licks her secret

parts or waters stars a swallow nursed

by isis wagered light & shoulders clay

so made & moist or reared from grass

he burns as summer beams a world of

river skin like siamese moon her rock

beside the sea the great green fire or

flower of the clouds towards the night

his wordless book & blankets soaked

with dew she bends the sun to white

the were-not-days a ros that starts with

spring: the oldest death a pearl he swiftly

seized & flayed the skin from head &

mixed the bones with flesh & burned

the mountain / forged his ruddy head

from blackness stained with acid gift the

stink of furnace leaves or bark & fruit her

awful look a coffin-boat & spotted red like

blood her young are fed (or slain / or gold

called down from the air

“Out of chaos God formed substance, making what is not

into what is.  He hewed enormous pillars out of ether

that cannot be grasped.”

– Sefer Yetsirah 2:6

“The whole secret of the art was said to be contained in

the maxim Solve et coagula, ‘Dissolve and combine’. 

To ‘dissolve’ means to strip away a substance’s

characteristics, to ‘combine’ is to build up a new substance.”

– Richard Cavendish, Alchemy

clothe itself in flesh & whiplike bones

his troubled dreams already dead she

rose to shake from far below in earth

& walked the house the dark & faintly

red he blew the lamp or trees or massed

outside in firetop weeds & rain his tank

of stone & tears he calls it lux it hurt to

call in bedroom graveyard light like winter

aires the heart as meat immersed in rills &

freshets closed the middle span his box

or trunk collected blood or rings the edge of

woods & birds an elder snare or ghoulsign 

hollow sun her august keys beneath the open

slate & stuffed or hollow men suggested rats

the never white in glass or made the walls a

spark not black not red not green she chops

in tantric battle all we are & would be (change:

drums that fade to desert pixies dress she sends

her cement wings & wine a no place empty face

from the dark skies, from the dark moon

“Naked the goddess mother lies in hell;

naked.  Ninazu’s mother lies exposed,

the holy garment fallen from her shoulders,

bare are the breasts of the mother, Ereshkigal.”

– Cry of the Dead, from Gilgamesh

“There is no death of anyone, save in appearance, just as

there is no birth of any, save only in seeming.”

– Apollonius of Tyana

dog or sometimes cat assailed he claws

at legs or clothes his horns & bells the end

of moon of lotus seat the love of clouds &

death-like sounds like wheels a sea of jewels

all kinds of bones her noose & skull in red

& feeding wolves her tears on beating wings

all snaky-tressed & wordless / book of birds

at dawn a falling dew from too dark skies &

forests earth & dust the light (in beauty cheeks

the forehead bright & high the neck like shell

the heart at times eats stones & lastly thunder

cuckoos flutes & bees the tree as food a house

or road & coiled for certain worms or one she

blinks & rips & hooked in hair her fingers rent

the bloody head her face & breasts she shrieks

& swathed in glitter tries to crawl his corpse-light

eyes & lower (dead) she cries the skins of beasts &

set but made not known the day she lost or hides

as dark or maybe emptied / missed with dread

___________________________

Paul Hardacre was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1974. He is the Managing Editor of papertiger media, publishers of the papertiger: new world poetry CDROM, hutt poetry ezine, anything i like art ezine, and the soi 3 modern poets imprint. And he is a published poet. The nineteen nineteen-line poems of his latest work, liber xix: differentia liber, took one and a half years to complete and explore the mysteries, hermetic and alchemical cosmology, cabala and the 'green language', occult and devotional systems, the reconciliation of opposites, and death - both familial and mythological. With his long-time partner, artist and graphic designer Marissa Newell, he currently divides his time between Brisbane, Australia, and Chiang Mai, Thailand.

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Planetary Attributions of Plants III:

A Compilation According to Eleven Bibliographic Sources Currently in Print.

By Johann F. W. Hasler

Editor’s Note: The previous two issues of the Alchemy Journal featured the bibliographic research conducted by Johann Hasler with the publication of the first two parts of a series identifying the planetary attributions of plants. The first part included the table for the Sun. The second part included the publication of the next three tables for the Moon, Mercury and Venus. This issue includes the third and final part with the publication of the tables for Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Introduction to the Series, Notes to the Tables and the Bibliographic Key, published in the previous issues, are included again for easy reference.

Introduction to the Series

During the several years in which I have been studying the magical and alchemical properties of plants according to the Wiccan and Hermetic traditions, I have several times faced at first the confusion, and later the frustration, of noticing that different sources assign different planetary attributions and correspondences to the same plants.

One is often faced, while preparing a recipe or determining the components which are more appropriate for a certain working, with the possibility of a certain plant one wishes to work with being assigned to the influence of three, four, and sometimes even five different planets, according to different authors.

When these planets are somehow related (like Mars and Saturn being considered in the past as ‘evil’ or of detrimental, limiting energy), one might attribute this to the development of astrological understanding through time and consequently consider them of the same general limiting intention in light of the more current knowledge. But when the possibilities offered can not be so clearly grouped into one general aura or type of energy, one is left with no other solution than to make an almost random choice based more on the preference one might have for a certain author, publisher, tradition or period of the history of magic than on any other data, especially if one has limited previous experience in working with the problematic plants in question.

In time I have come to accept this as a rather typical – and actually something to be expected – of spiritual sciences such as the Hermetic or Occult sciences, in which personal insight and individual discoveries through meditation, contemplation, or actual communion and communication with the spiritual essences or patron spirits of the plants are considered as valid sources of information as their pharmacological constituents would be. As a matter of fact several of the sources that cite the planetary attributions of plants are well aware of this fact and specifically list more than one planetary correspondence in the entries for some plants, pointing out this fact clearly in their prefaces, footnotes or correspondence tables.

In this series of seven compiled tables of correspondences I do not wish to comment or establish a judgment over the validity of this and other problematic and strongly criticized epistemological approaches of the alchemy, magical herbalism, Hermeticism and other occult sciences. Yet as a complement to the existing qualitative data which such approaches yield, and which exist profusely, I present here some quantitative data, in this case of a bibliographical nature, so that a decision on the planetary correspondences of plants may be taken by the practitioner based on his or her preference of certain well-known authors in the field.

I have gotten a hold of eleven recently printed sources that include if not whole tables at least a mention of the planetary correspondences of plants. They include a manual of evocation of spirits, a manual on planetary magic, a commented and edited re-print of Agrippa, a manual on the construction of talismans, two manuals on practical alchemy and several magical reference works, either specifically devoted to botanical magic, magical herbalism and magical aromatherapy, or of a wider scope.

Apart from Donald Tyson’s reprint of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (first appeared in Antwerp in 1531) all of the sources are modern, and most are still in print and easily obtainable through bookstores or the Internet. I have chosen these types of sources because the intention of this series is to be an aid to practicing spargyricists, rather than a bibliographical referencing source for historical studies. I have included the Agrippa not only because it is perhaps the single most important original source of contemporary natural magic (magia naturalis) but also because, as the rest of the sources I refer to, it is readily available commercially, having been reprinted by Llewellyn in 2004.

Notes to the Tables

All types, parts and components of plants (trees, shrubs, herbs, seeds, fruits, barks, roots, etc.) have been included in the same table. Likewise, what authors divide in their books into categories such as trees, herbs, oils, essences or incenses/perfumes, has been included in the same table.

There is one table for each of the seven ancient planets of alchemy. The plants that different authors assign to each of the planets are listed here, alphabetically. After the name or variations of the name of plants, a list of superscript letters appears. The key is the first letter of the surname of author or authors of the specific books surveyed, listed below under “Bibliographic Key”. When there are variations in spelling but it is clearly the same plant, the bibliographic key specifies which author uses what spelling. For example, CamomileFA, D&Ph, Z, ChamomileW means that Frater Albertus, Denning & Phillips and Zalewski spell the plant camomile, but Whitcomb spells is chamomile.

When there are variations in spelling, as listed above (camomile and chamomile, hellbore and hellebore and so forth), all variations have been listed, usually one after the other in the same line of the table, but sometimes also separately, in alphabetical order. No attempt of correcting possible errors or inconsistencies in this respect has been attempted; the tables simply refer to which book refers to what in what way. If Zalewski, for example, writes celadine while most other authors write celandine, this has been duly noted but not expurgated or corrected in any way.

As these tables are thought as an aid for practicing spargyricists, they are designed as a practical directory for quick reference. This is why, for easier location of particular plants, some have been entered twice, always in alphabetical order. For example, black pepper appears both as Black pepper but also as Pepper, black. The same rule applies to all plants with composite names, or in the case when spelling varies so greatly as to warrant a different line in the table.

Bibliographic key: