Practical Alchemy & Physical Immortality

An Interview with Art Kunkin
by Christopher Farmer

Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Tradition
#8, Summer 1988

"Everything possible to be believed is an
image of truth." —William Blake

With a twinkle in his eye. Art Kunkin gladly shared his experiences and initiations into alchemy. His mentor, Frater Albertus, died without a successor so Albertus’s school and laboratory remain empty after four years.

Art's latest incarnation as a practical alchemist would seem to contrast sharply with his '60s persona as editor and founder of the notorious L.A. Free Press until he orients you in the path he's taken over the last couple of decades and you see how eclectic he really is.

The interview took place in mid-May, 1988 in a Santa Monica health food restaurant conveniently adjacent to the busy offices of the Whole Life Times, where he has been Senior Editor for the past two years. When we briefly touched upon politics, he just smiled when I reminded him that Queen Elizabeth I had consulted John Dee (unofficial royal astrologer) when she wanted to know the date of her coronation. He is an easy person to interview, as he can anticipate questions.

I went to a workshop Art taught and was enchanted. Here we have the smith as the protagonist, dominating matter by transforming the "prima materia." As that prophet of Romanticism, Novalis, put it "Alle Erfahrung ist Magie, und nur magisch erklarbar." / "All practical knowledge is magic and only explicable magically."
—Chris Farmer

GNOSIS: What sparked your transition from '60s social activism to working in an alchemical laboratory?

KUNKIN: Toward the end of the '60s I had some psychic experiences. One event involved precognition and the other a long-range healing. As editor of the L.A.Free Press, I was being invited to all these New Age groups and one of them invited me to a workshop where they told me that on the third day I would have a certain psychic experience...and I did! Later I met a psychic who did a reading for me and, 45 minutes later, things I had been told by the psychic began to come true.

So I began to ask why and how these events could possibly happen. At first I thought that developing these abilities would help make me a better activist. Then I realized that these abilities would also make me a happier and better person. So I studied for several years with a Gurdjieff-Spinoza group and then helped form a Sufi dance group here in Los Angeles — always seeking for the most powerful traditional teachings as if inner guided.

Finally I studied Tibetan Buddhism and, almost immediately, was attracted toward a very small and little known tendency in Lamaism called Dzogchen. I then found someone in Los Angeles who was teaching it although he, Andrew DaPassano, did not know to call it by this name.

G: Doesn't this involve Tantric visualizations as part of the Vajrayana school?

K: This was a teaching considered in Tibet to be the highest yogic teaching of Tibetan Buddhism, a rapid way of developing the most clear mind, balanced emotions and a strong body. After experiencing a two and a half million dollar bankruptcy and stressful dealings with the IRS, I studied meditation with Andrew for five years and established a school with him that eventually had 300 students, a sizeable operation because I had so many contacts and the teaching was so powerful.

G: Much of your training in practical alchemy came from attending a modem-day "mystery school" in Utah called Paracelsus College, operated by Albert Riedel who called himself Frater Albertus. When did you first hear about this?

K: Sometime in late 1978 a young man who had joined one of our meditation classes approached me and said that I was teaching spiritual alchemy. Jimmy explained that the meditation Andrew and I were teaching for human development was identical in principle to procedures of laboratory alchemy he had been learning from an alchemist in Utah. He urged me to write Frater Albertus and apply for admission to his Salt Lake City class. I did write but Albertus did not answer my letter for a whole year.

I later learned that Albertus selected his students according to their astrological chart and it was just not my time yet. Eventually I got a letter from him inviting me to
come to a two week Prima (first) Class in February, 1980.

G: Paracelsus College was a seven-year program with two week residency classes each year.

K: Yes. While I was waiting to be invited to a class, I received their publications including the Alchemical Laboratory Bulletins and was intrigued with learning something really new and valuable. The registration involved getting to Paracelsus College on your own and renting a room at $125 per week although the room charge would be waived if you could not afford it. So I set off for Utah. But at the same time, because I was very skeptical, I packed a suitcase full of books and was prepared to have a two-week vacation if this all did not prove to be useful. However, when I got there and started class I never even opened the suitcase of books because I was involved 16-20 hours a day in studies and in the laboratory.

G: In our time most people studying alchemy know Carl Jung's writings on alchemical phenomena and his conclusions that the resultant transmutations are visions or projections of the alchemist's unconscious upon the matter contained in the alchemical vessels. In their own praxis, what did the Paracelsus students expect to leam there?

K: Although I know of no official statistics, I believe that most of the students at the Paracelsus Research Society (PRS) never did much laboratory work after their Salt Lake City experience. Most seemed to consider their studies with Frater Albertus to be a type of philosophical training, Even though I have traveled to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria in the past two years visiting Frater’s students, I have only found a handful of people continuing laboratory work. My own interest in alchemy always has been to make the medicinal Philosopher's Stone and extend my years of healthy life, not in accomplishing metallic transmutations.

G: My favorite book on alchemy is Prelude To Chemistry (MIT Press, 1960) by John Read, but even more fascinating is to read AMBIX, The Journal of the Society for Alchemy and Early Chemistry (Cambridge, 1939-Present). As you know, AMBIX has articles which actually describe what alchemists did in their laboratories.

K: Yes, I have read many back issues of AMBIX in the Paracelsus library. Michael Walsh, a good friend of mine who lives in Salt Lake, writes for that unique quarterly. My recommendation for the best short history of alchemy, one that evaluates what various people did, is Alchemists & Gold by Albert Sadoul. He is critical of Paracelsus, but, on the other hand, acknowledges that Eiraneus Philalethes, a hermetic writer of the 17th century, demonstrated credible transmutations.

G: How did Frater Albertus conduct his classes? What did he expect to happen in only two weeks?

K: Well, it was a seven-year course, after all. What he taught during those first two weeks, consisted of three disciplines: Astrology, Kabbala, and the theory and practice of actual laboratory work. Astrology and Kabbala were taught to get an understanding of how the medieval alchemists perceived the structure and laws of the universe. Also, to read the old alchemical books, one has to know the symbolic codes they used then. {Kunkin shows me his notebooks from those days full of diagrams and drawings).

Fortunately I had been told in advance of the procedures at the Paracelsus Research Society by Jimmy in Los Angeles, the young man who first told me about Frater Albertus. Jimmy advised me that if at all possible I should volunteer to be class librarian in Salt Lake because only the librarian had the key to the vault where the important alchemical books were kept. If I was librarian, I would have access to those books whenever I wanted to read them. Therefore, as soon as the librarian post was mentioned, I immediately volunteered.

Consequently, whenever I wasn't in the classroom or laboratory, I was able to spend all my free time in the library. I became absolutely fascinated with what I found there. There were over 400 manuscripts representing thousands of years of documentation about alchemy. It became obvious to me that the old alchemists were very serious and intensely spiritual. They seemed to be very ethical, people who would tell the truth and not lie.

G: What do alchemists do and how do they do it?

K: In the library was a book by Frater Albertus called The Alchemists Handbook in which he outlined what he taught in the laboratory during the first two weeks of the Prima Class, namely, how to take an herb and separate it into its three components: body, soul, and spirit (salt, sulphur, and mercury in the alchemical code) or, as we would say today, into its salts, oils, and alcohol, and how to make an herbal medicine using all those three essentials. At the end of the Prima Class Albertus gave us homework to do until we came to class next year.

First of all, we were to get distilling and other laboratory glassware to set up our own laboratory at home. Then we were to collect seven herbs that grew in our immediate area, selecting them according to their astrological day of the week and then, using all three essentials of the plant as we had been taught in Salt Lake, to make and take each of the seven medicines on the appropriate day of the week.

The rational for this as presented by Albertus was that the entire zodiac represented the perfected individual and what was important in one’s astrological chart was not only the major Sun Sign that people usually concentrate on but which of the four elements (fire, earth, air, water) might be missing in one’s chart.

Making and taking the seven astrologically prepared medicines on their appropriate day of the week was part of his program for balancing the individual and overcoming the limitations shown in one's natal or birth chart.

During the course of this Prima Class instruction on making herbal medicines, Frater also gave hints about completing what in alchemy is called the "Small Work," i.e. the making of an herbal stone, that in the herbal kingdom is the equivalent of making the mineral philosopher's stone used for the transmutation of metals. In the library was also such books as They Made The Philosopher’s Stone by Richard and Isabel Ingalese that told, in their own words, of their presumably successful alchemical experiments in Pasadena in the 1920s.

G: But how is it done? Could one make an herbal stone from his instructions? Did you?

K: He gave us some sense of how to do this but, in my opinion, these instructions were not complete. Nevertheless, this too was to be part of our "homework" during the rest of the year — to see what we could do on our own.

In my own case, during the Prima Class I read a book by Louis Kervran titled ”Biological Transmutations.” Kervran was a scientist in France during the 1950's-1970's who observed transmutations that occurred in nature. He published his observations and his book was translated into English. I decided that when I got back to L.A. I would attempt one or two of the experiments in this book. (To answer your question directly: yes, I eventually learned how to make the herbal stone but this was years after I completed my studies with Frater Albertus).

The two weeks in Salt Lake City went by rapidly. When I got back to L.A. I re-connected with my meditation school and began to obtain equipment to prepare the alchemical herbal medicines. I am very good at manifestation so I got seven pick-up truck loads of glassware and other laboratory equipment from a University of California chemistry professor who wanted to clean his garage. Then from people who experimented with making drugs in the 60s I got half a dozen other small laboratories that were also gathering dust in various garages.

I also heard that Israel Regardie, the well known writer who had been occultist Aleister Crowley’s secretary and had attended all seven classes at Paracelsus Research Society, was selling his laboratory in Studio City so I called him on the phone and went to see him. During the 60's I had published some articles Regardie had written but I never met him until I returned from Salt Lake in 1980. The result of my contact with Regardie was that I did get some of his laboratory supplies and, eventually, after we became close friends he gave me his entire alchemical library worth about $3,000 in cash but priceless in its content.

After putting together a small laboratory with all the equipment I had manifested I began doing the herbal work that Albertus had outlined as well as one experiment from the ”Biological Transmutation” book by Kervran. In a Petri dish I put in some soil bacteria I had found in a mud puddle at UCLA, fed the bacteria some manganese metal and the bacteria turned the manganese into iron.
(Kunkin shows me photos of the transmutations.]

G: How did this happen?

K: The Kervran book did not specify the bacteria so I went to the library, looked through a copy of Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology and found a section on a sheathed bacteria called Leptothrix that seemed to fit the qualifications of the bacteria that Kervran had used. I lucked out, first in finding the bacteria without too much trouble, then in making a pure culture of the bacteria on a growth media that the bacteria liked, put in manganese and got the streaks of iron that showed in Kervrans’s photos of his results. My test for the iron using potassium permanganate was entirely qualitative (I could not measure the small amount of iron that was produced) but it was definitely iron that had not been there before.

Then I redid the experiment using a culture media I obtained from the Hughes Corporation that definitely was free of iron. Again iron appeared.

Next I did a computer search of the journal Chemical Abstracts. (This was 1980, before the Internet, but I knew the science librarian at a large electronics company and she had a computer and access to Arpanet, the military predecessor of the Internet). I had my librarian friend enter some keywords (Sphaeritilus Natans or Leptothrix, iron, manganese, Kervran, etc) and we came up with a listing in Chemical Abstracts (1978) where a U.S. Army group in Virginia had successfully done the Kervran experiment.

(Incidentally, I did this experiment over a period of many weeks with a friend, Steve Peake, who had not been at alchemy class in Salt Lake at all but he should get much of the credit for my results if this is published because he found the bacteria in a mud puddle at UCLA).

In short, I discovered that this Army Mobility Command in Virginia was interested in making new kinds of batteries and, when they heard of Kervran’s work, had mathematically calculated that, if a transmutation of manganese into iron had really taken place, there was a surplus of energy created that could be used to design a totally new kind of battery. So they also replicated the Kervran experiment and found that it worked: there was a transmutation of metals even though only a very tiny biological energy was involved and a surplus of energy resulted.

Not only did it work but they came up with a novel theory (involving the mitochondrial organelles in the bacteria) that might explain how alchemists could have transmuted metals in medieval Europe without using a high energy atom smasher. At this point I became extremely excited.

(Note by Art Kunkin: In the book “Alchemy Secrets of Life Extension” advertised on this website, I explain my Kervran experiment more completely than Christopher Farmer elicited in this 1988 interview. Incidentally, the original interview was taped but, in rereading this interview in 2006, it was obvious that in editing the tape, Mr Farmer reconstructed some of my sentences. Therefore, in this present version, I have taken the liberty of rephrasing a few of these sentences to express what I really intended to say. However, I also thank Mr. Farmer for his excellent interview).

G: What was the point of all this detective work?

K: Only everything. I became aware of what alchemy was really about. Alchemy is isolating the principle of life. This is what the ancients called the vital force. Certainly they believed that everything was alive, including the mineral kingdom, and that there was this spirit — as they called it — in its most undifferentiated form. So the old alchemists thought that if you isolated
the life force in the mineral kingdom, you can prove that you have done so by speeding up the evolution of metals, i.e., by doing transmutations. Once you did that and had this life force isolated, then you could process it further and make an elixir of immortality. The legends speak at that point of your hair falling out, as well as your fingernails and teeth, and everything grows anew as your cells are revitalized.

G: In order to achieve this elixir of life, your description of the alchemist's task thus far appears to be part of that same closed universe, or it certainly sounds like the scientism that it wants to augment or even replace. When the Egyptians mined their gold ("nub") in Upper Egypt (Nubia), the priests would invoke the blessings of the gods on their work. Do you see, to take this example, any conflict in doing similar incantations over such experiments such as those you have been describing?

K: The ancient alchemists said that spiritual development had to go hand in hand with the laboratory work because, if what we know about the atom is true, you are in fact working inside the nucleus — not with the high-energy atom smashers of the modern scientist — but you are doing some kind of low-energy manipulation in the nucleus and transforming the nucleus. It is almost as if the alchemist has to be in tune with this sub-atomic finer force of nature, and surely the alchemists' subtle bodies had to be in some sort of communication with the mineral, animal, or plant kingdoms — whatever it was.

There is also a sense that the medicine of immortality that is produced comes from some very poisonous substances, and that there had to be a preparation of the being in order to take it and for it to be a maximum effective medicine.

In fact, even before going to Salt Lake as I told you, I had been exploring a meditational system which indeed did correspond better with the alchemical tradition than did the psychological insights of Jung. I had discovered that behind the Tibetan tradition of Dzogchen one found the alchemists of Tibet, and that the philosophical correspondence was not at all accidental.

Later I actually met a lama from the
Dzogchen community in Tibet and, although he himself wasn't instructed in laboratory alchemy, he acknowledged that the philosophical approach of Dzogchen had developed out of alchemy! However, even though this lama was very knowledgeable about Dzogchen philosophy and meditation, he wasn't able to tell me anything about Laboratory Alchemy and admitted it was part of his tradition that had been neglected.

Anyway, by this time I am totally excited, having seen a little transmutation take place in low-energy conditions although this is something that modem science says cannot happen! So I decided to go back to Salt Lake for the remainder of the seven-year work, concluding that there wasn't any place in the world that I wanted to be but in Salt Lake. I made plans to move there; however, I had had no commitment from Frater Albertus, nor any idea of what I would do for a living.

Then, as I was actually getting ready to move there — I had my furniture and 10,000 books packed into a 40 foot railroad container parked in front of my house in L.A. -- and some people (a caravan, really) from my meditation center, who planned to join me in Salt Lake City — I began receiving calls from some of the students in Salt Lake telling me not to come. They told me that Frater Albertus was a total phony. Although he always spoke of his wife, Emmy, as his soulmate he had actually been sleeping around with his secretary and three other women. He was not a spiritual Master at all, they told me, but a fraud.

Nevertheless, after many phone conversations with the students there in Salt Lake, I finally asked them, "Are you folks going to have an alchemical set-up of any kind? Are you going to teach alchemy" They said no and that Frater Albertus was the Devil. After some consultation with Regardie, 1 had to tell all the people close to Albertus who were advising me not to move to Salt Lake, that I was sorry but I needed to learn alchemy and that if he is the Devil then I will go to study with the Devil.

Regardie and I had several talks about this incident and we both concluded that Albertus was an important teacher even though he had disillusioned many of his students by his personal behavior.

G: What do we know about Albertus? I noticed that his earliest book, published in German in 1931, was fiction. He was bom in Dresden in 1911 and met Emmy in Germany before he came to America when he was 17 or so. Didn't he come to Utah from Santa Cruz, where he'd been teaching alchemy with the Rosicrucians (AMORC)?

K: Yes. Frater was a character — one of the great egotistical personalities of our time — and very difficult to work with. He did write some strange poetry and he was into fiction much earlier in his life. But my story of my time at Paracelsus College will tell you much more about him.

So I moved to Salt Lake and, when I arrived, I simply asked to meet with Albertus and said, "Here I am!" I appeared on a scene now left in a vacuum. The woman editing the society magazine, Essentia, had left, and his secretary had also resigned.

I'd had editorial and publishing experience so when Frater Albertus began to tell me how much it cost him to produce Essentia (an outrageous amount because he was not taking advantage of computerized typesetting or modern printing procedures), I told him that if he continued to pay for the magazine at the rate he'd been paying, I could produce the same quality magazine without taking any editorial or production salary and simply be paid out of the savings I made by changing printers and using new typesetting procedures.

It was an offer that he couldn't refuse since all of his staff had resigned and, with me, he was getting an experienced editor for free. So this is why I was taken in immediately, given an office and was available to help him with other projects. I had a base and was there at PRS for the next 3 1/2 years.

During the course of that period I took all seven years of the PRS course, photocopied the entire PRS alchemical library, and set up a laboratory in my home. (I had now about $50,000 worth of laboratory equipment that filled up three rooms, glassware and microscopes and centrifuges and furnaces that I had purchased for pennies on the dollar at university surplus stores in California and Utah and Arizona.), And as PRS students would visit Salt Lake to attend classes, my house became a second laboratory for them.

I had been a tool and die maker and a master machinist so I could build laboratory equipment. Soon my house became the scene for the most advanced work going on around Albertus. When any PRS student would come up with some new ideas, we would do the experiments at my house. I had rented a big Mormon style house, had my lab in the basement and used the big family room upstairs to teach meditation classes.

By posting and passing out leaflets at various local meetings, I recruited about 100 new local students for my meditation classes (many of them Rosicrucians and Freemasons who never had a local teacher) and by charging $5 a week per student this was how I supported myself in Salt Lake, plus what I made from Essentia.

G: What was the reaction of Albertus to all this? Wasn't he jealous of losing his power?

K: Definitely. He always wanted his students to bring new ideas and new information only and directly to him and here, even though I am recruiting people to him and urging people to work with him regardless of his personal behavior and being totally loyal to him, he did not like the fact that I was making so many friends and also being a teacher on my own.

Eventually Albertus told me that I couldn't have discussions with the students — he forbade me to talk with them, and this was while I was editing his magazine! By this time I really hadn't learned anything new from him for about a year, And so I told him that I couldn’t continue to edit the magazine without talking to the readers of the magazine, the students.

Frater's nature was to teach up to a certain point and be "exceedingly generous" (the cliche he used constantly), but then he would freeze up and nothing more would be forthcoming. But despite all the problems at Paracelsus College, it was a precious experience, since there wasn't a place like this anywhere else in the world. I am forever grateful to Albertus for opening up to me the most fundamental science in the esoteric tradition.

Incidentally, I had learned so much about metallurgy and chemistry at Paracelsus Research Society while studying ancient alchemy that within two months after leaving I took a new job in Salt Lake City as president of a mining company located in Tucson, Arizona.

G: Is alchemy a science or an art? I saw the word used in reference to Irving Berlin's music. Berlin is still alive at 100 and since he doesn't read music, because of his intuitive craft, someone called his music-writing powers "alchemy that converts the diatonic scale to nuances of logic and emotion."

K: The alchemist's view of the universe is that it consists of a physical level, but also of other levels — whatever you want to call them, spiritual or subtle. Homeopathy is a remnant of this kind of thinking, i.e., the notion that you can make medicines out of herbs or minerals that preserve the emotional, mental, and spiritual qualities of the herbs and therefore make the medicines work not only physically but on the emotional and mental levels of the human being who uses these medicines.

But there is something else. One of the core aspects of all religions, of all spirituality, is the idea that the physical human can evolve and this evolution is spoken about in terms of the human becoming more god-like. For example, humans have limitations that the gods do not, humans are mortal while God or the gods are immortal. So the Tibetans, for example, deal with the limitation of human death by developing various meditational methods for continuing consciousness after physical death.

In the Jewish and Christian and Islamic religions there are also the stories of Ezekiel and Mohammed entering heaven in the physical body and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Tibetans have their rainbow body where the physical body totally disappears from this level and enters another phase.

This core belief also goes back to Egyptian mummification procedures, a degenerated form of a regeneration theory that originally was supposed to happen in the physical body.

So this is what the alchemists were striving for, this kind of evolution: sometimes it was expressed as being one with God or being able to sit in God's company, but there was always this concept of evolution into a level of being closer to God.

G: Jacob Boehme would be most uncomfortable with the conversation we are having but, of course, Boehme used mystical language far from the laboratory, as did the Rosicrucians, for that matter, who consider alchemy a mental (or spiritual) process.

K: The subtle world and the physical worlds are considered to be parallel, but the adept is considered as one who is master both on the physical and subtle levels. Historically these two worlds split apart. Science began to deal with (dead) nature while the metaphysicians dealt with the subtle, non-physical levels they concentrated on in a very ungrounded way. The alchemical vision is for these two to come together, the physical world and the world of consciousness.

If they do come together it is not only for the personal goals but for social evolution. If you can make scarce materials through transmutation, then we indeed have left the realm of scarcity behind. If it is possible to have medicines which normally keep one functioning for a hundred years — like Mr. Berlin — medicines which develop the spiritual aspect and also develop this physical longevity, then all of humanity changes.

G: Frater Albertus said "All things are not for the use of everyone, although they were created for the benefit of all." That most famous ancient alchemist, Zosimus of Panopolis, spoke of the good of the kingdom being upheld by the arts of exploiting metals, but that no one but the priests could exercise power over them. Do you agree with such elitist views?

K: When I first had the psychic experiences I spoke of earlier and could see that some aspects of the future could be known before they happened or that somehow healings could happen through mental concentration, my sense was that this could be a big part of the answer to the problem of leadership that the radical movements have been struggling with. Trotsky says that the problem with the radicals was one of leadership.

But radicals have never had a way of training leaders — to them a communist and socialist leadership only meant knowing the party program, being able to run a mimeograph machine, to make a speech, write leaflets and represent the party. But all the leaders, Marx, Trotsky and Lenin, for example, were extraordinary people who, while having firm principles, were still able to be incredibly adjustable flexible within the context of each situation, so that the principles manifested within an actual historical time frame.

When I became familiar with the possibilities for spiritual development, for the development of consciousness, I came to realize that it was possible to train individuals able to become be psychic and intuitive and, therefore, genuine leaders who had no inner need or desire to manipulate other people.

G: Does this mean you disagree with Colin Wilson's popularizing the notion of the "dominant 5%" concept of humanity, which at least is an alternative to Freud's idea of thanatos, or the basic urge to death and destruction: hardly evolutionary, that.

K: When you look around it is obvious that there is a hierarchical development and that some people seem to be ahead of others in consciousness. I think this is an objective conclusion. The differences between the high and the low, however, are pretty small.

In the Tibetan tradition which I mentioned, there is a conception that every individual consists of 15 billion-year-old atoms; therefore, every individual has access to memories and a level of maturity far beyond what we know today — in effect, that every individual has the ability to become a Buddha. But the personality conditioning prevents an individual from breaking through to this inner wisdom. So this tradition, entirely in the tradition of alchemy, speaks about the enlightenment experience or direct knowledge not being necessarily reserved for a few, even if in practice at this level of development of the human brain and the human nervous system only a few do seem to break through into a greater experience of this collective human consciousness..

G: The use of ceremony in tandem with alchemical operations interests me, especially after attending your recent workshop on alchemical rituals, working with earth, water, fire and air. How highly do you value this activity?

K: If the alchemist is simply manipulating dead substances and dead chemicals like an ordinary chemist then I would expect any results to be limited. However, if the alchemist develops an atunement — the language and formulations of rituals to develop this resonance mean less to me than the intent — there can be results that to the uninitiated seem totally magical.

If for thousands of years people have been performing a ceremony in a certain way, then it is useful to do that ceremony that way as an experiment to determine if you can vibrate any of the atoms inside you to evoke a consciousness that has a precise experience in making that ceremony effective. Yes, ritual is important but not from the intrinsic nature of a formula of words and gestures. Ritual achieves results, in my opinion, because of the focused power of intention..

G: What makes magic so conservative?

K: People blindly repeat the forms of ritual because people don't know how to tap into the power of mental concentration. Once a person has focused intention then that person can break with the form of the ritual and go right to the essence of the matter. Certain alchemists argue about the importance of planting only at sunrise or taking an herb starting at the vernal equinox or whether you have to start your operations at the first hour, etc. It is true that it is useful for a person who wants to manifest to be sensitive to certain rhythms and cycles of nature or of a prevailing context but that intuition naturally comes to a person who has a focused nervous system.

G: What about the magic of, say, a Kenneth Grant?

K: Spiritual development has a lot to do with the success of alchemical rituals — Jung worked on this too — and with balancing male and female energies, bringing about the development of a being who is fundamentally androgynous. The difference between men and women is incredibly small. So in alchemy certain male and female or yin and yang chemicals are described in detail, and if the alchemist has a certain approach to sexuality, I believe that the code will be opened more easily.

Since I'm a Tantric I've tried various regeneration systems and realize that if you don't have a sexual balance you could possibly take powerful alchemical medicines and they might not work. The ancients knew this and, for example, Thomas Vaughan and other alchemists were involved with sexual alchemy.

I spoke with Regardie about this — he used Reichean techniques (derived from the work of Wilhelm Reich), of course — and he agreed that there was little written information on this.

G: Parcelsus coined the word "spagyric" for alchemy. A Greek cognate, but related to the Latin alchemical motto "solve et coagula." What do you think about spagyrics?

K: It is a crucial concept and now you are asking me what the core of alchemy is, so I will try to give you my answer.

Paracelsus meant spagyric to specifically define the separation, purification and cohobation that led to the production of medicines without necessarily preserving the life force. In other words, you can take wheat, which contains the principle of life in it, as a basic food and you can bake and prepare it to be a food, but in the process you have lost the capacity for it to be a seed. Therefore baking bread would be spagyric, whereas making what I will call "philosophical bread" would allow for one to take a slice of that bread and put it in the ground and it would grow!

At one point I went to Albertus and simply asked him, what are you really teaching? He very frankly admitted to me that he wasn't teaching alchemy in the early classes but rather spagyrics. The implication was that he knew what alchemy was and that he could teach that but he didn't. My conclusion from that conversation is that he never really "made it."

G: "Made it"?

K: An alchemist makes it, in my opinion, if he or she doesn't die but can access the life energy that regenerates the body. I am convinced that transmutations have taken place. They have been documented. This business about longevity and immortality is much harder to pin down. But witness all these anecdotal tales about St. Germain and Francis Bacon; someone certainly was wandering around Europe for several hundred years making alchemical demonstrations and that person was keeping a tradition alive.

Sadoul says that a lot of these legends revolve around one or two or a few who really knew how to locate and use the life force right to the present. At least that's an interesting hypothesis.

G: A final comment?

K: What the alchemist does in his laboratory — and Jung was correct here — is exactly the same process of Solve et Coagula (Separate, Purify, Put Back Together) that is done in any therapy or metaphysical or the most ultimate enlightenment training program. The differences between the levels are what you Separate — in other words, what you consider essential — how much do you Purify, and when do you stop the process, when are you satisfied with the cohabation or Unification of the evolved essentials.

Bacstrom, in one of his mysterious letters, wrote to someone and said "Now I told you how to make silver (from lead), and it's not gold yet — but this will keep you wealthy —but I know a science that is even greater than alchemy." You know, if he’s talking about alchemy simply as the transmutation of metals (as he seems to be doing here), he's right!