How to explore alchemical symbolism

our chemical symbolism has passin ated me for over 50 years since I first encountered it in John Wayne's Oak Pro you to chemistry somehow is challenging enigmatic nature engaged me and I wanted to pursue it and try to grasp its significance thus I have spent much of my life researching and documenting alchemical symbolism and publicizing it through my many books study courses and online our website although alchemy symbolism has become more widely known in recent years does not necessarily mean better understood so I have decided to create this presentation in the hope of revealing the problems and obstacles that have arisen in a present-day manner approaching the subject I myself have been rather lucky in that as my interest in alchemical symbolism began in the mid 1960s when there were only a handful of books published on the subject and few reproductions available I had to gradually find sources and ways to research the injury someone coming to our chemical symbolism today is instead thrown immediately into a sea of images through the mass of books Internet image sharing sites and blogs even YouTube videos this easy availability and access to this material has paradoxically led rather to confusion and loss of clarity in our present-day understanding of our chemical symbolism a disjunction has arisen between the ways in which our chemical symbolism was created in 15th through into the late 18th century and how people perceive the symbolism today many still become fascinated by the enigmatic nature of alchemical symbolism but now can only see it through modern eyes and are unable to form any meaningful encounter with what originally give rise to this imagery now cut off by the way in which our present culture has come to characterise or chemical symbolism and the path back to a true understanding or appreciation of this is a very difficult one for an individual now to discover for themselves this investigation into a chemical imagery will be in three audio-visual presentations this first one will deal with what alchemical symbolism is how it appears in historical sequence its various forms and the components of its structure the second presentation will look at the ways in which are chemical symbolism arose the influence is upon it and the sources from which it drew the third presentation will show how alchemical imagery has now become embedded subsumed almost swallowed up by various extraneous cultural traditions of our time an important thing we must remain aware of is that there is a clear break in your chemical tradition though we can trace the entry of our chemical ideas into the European historical record back to the 11th century we find a lacuna with a clear breakpoint at the end of the 18th century into the 19th century alchemy and European culture was always carried sustained by its literature and crossed by manuscripts and later by printed books it is essentially a literary tradition nearly 5,000 printed books our alchemy appeared from the 16th through to the late 18th century and and at present in Easton but clearly considerably greater number of manuscripts with the rise of modern chemistry towards the close of the 18th century people turned away from alchemy as its key idea of metallic transmutation became increasingly unsustainable and the intellectual excitement of the emerging chemistry much more engaging to the inquiring mind there was then an almost complete dearth of writing about alchemy until a revival began in the second half of the 19th century this however was clearly a new conception of the subject and we'll explore this in the second half of this presentation what is essential to realize is that these two periods historical alchemy and the modern construct are disjoint few people seem to realize that an instead problem view that there is a continuity so that they see historical alchemy as following the same agendas as the modern constructed forms of alchemy we see today I would suggest that one can only clearly see the true nature of our community symbolism when one places this in its proper historical context so let us now look at the ways in which our chemical imagery emerged in the manuscripts and printed books its sources and the influences upon it the illustrators of alchemy books and manuscripts were not always the author of the text in some manuscripts and quality and immediacy of the drawing is such that one is probably create and assuming that these were created by the author or the copyist here is an example from 1550 when it seems entirely likely that the drawings were created by the alchemist writing the text in complete contrast with this our manuscripts like the well-known splendor solvers a small number of copies of this work were created throughout the 16th century these were obviously made by highly skilled manuscript painters and they draw on the then long-established style of book suppose these will have been created for wealthy patrons here is the copy now in nürnberg which was made in 1545 so it is contemporary with the rough sketchy drawings we have just looked at we find that the images and manuscripts are thus on a continuum between these two here are some examples from rather naive drawings through to more accomplished artwork the quality of the artwork however does not necessarily reflect the importance of the emblem in some cases a naive unskilled pane drawing should be seen as a major piece of all chemical imagery in the case of printed books the situation regarding the relationship between the creator of the text and the illustrations is somewhat more difficult the printer of an alchemical book would employ skilled craftsmen to design and cut the route cuts or copperplate engravings that they used here is a woodcut of the six key of Bazell bound time from mangas biblioteca chemica curiosa of 1702 with a photo etch metal printing plate used to print some 19th or 20th century reproduction the original woodcut block is unlikely to have survived but this gives us an idea of the way would have appeared being an intaglio process the woodblock must be carved mirror reversed to what extent printers drew on suggestions even sketches from the author is unrecorded so it may be that in some cases the author only saw the illustrations when his work was printed or they were added posthumously possible example of this concerns twelve engravings found in 1695 latin edition of the works of iranian co ladies these are almost exact copies of the drawings in an area manuscript the speculum veritatis now in the Vatican Library feel atheist was likely long dead by the time this work was issued certainly if he has identified the George Starkie 1628 to 1665 so it may be that these were chosen by the printer who considered them relevant to Iranian seized writings another thing we must consider is the way imagery is situated within the printed book printers often chose to create Illustrated title pages and frontal spaces these can be seen as essentially promoting the book by providing the potential reader with a sort of summary or emblematic representation of the content of the work here's an example of an emblematic title page it is from the 1611 edition of the Basilica chemica of Oswald the crawl this page has been printed twice the complex imagery on the copper plate was printed leaving us blank space in the central rectangle then the author and title was printed they're using letterpress this meant that the copper plate could be used on different books and additions as we see it used again in the 1647 Commish klein odd of chrome in german title pages could even be hand colored by the printer or binder as in the 1629 in addition basilica chemica within an ornamental frame the printer indicates the authors who have influenced crew and presents two circular emblems the uppermost representing spiritual forces in the heavenly world while below a circular diagram summarizes or brings together various aspects and ways in which these forces make their appearance in the outer world and the center of the upper circular space a triangle points upwards while the form below the triangle points downwards for various technical reasons to do with the fact that engravings and letterpress were printed separately on two different printing machines it was often easier for the printer to use an engraved frontispiece which was usually tipped in that is glued along its aged to face the printed title page rather than being sewn into the structure of the book thus the frontispiece and a different semiotic situation than the title page and being set free of the need to declare the author title printer and date of the book it could become more emblematic thus frontispiece is often signal to the potential reader an alluring an engaging image that would draw them to the book I've shown here a number of examples images that are printed in the text are again in a somewhat different semiotic position they are likely to illustrate an idea in a particular section of the text rather than present some overview as with a frontispiece a good example of this is seen in the 18th century Abraham eliazar ancient or chemical work here the woodcuts illustrations amplify the text by picturing abstract ideas many of these illustrations are flasks and other apparatus but there are some sections where we find these small woodcut emblems the book also contains a seas of engravings which are printed in a group at the end of the book though they clearly relate to each chapter in many cases emblematic images appear as a series the Creator designed these images to be linked together usually in a linear sequence a good example of this is a pretty or sesamum Dhanam d the most precious gift of God which was created in manuscript during the 15th century but had such significance that it continued to be reworked in both manuscripts and printed books well into the 18th century I've now lost count of having examples that are but it must be close to 100 the images form a series usually of twelve or sometimes eleven that reflect a no chemical process here are two examples one from an early 17th century manuscript or grasshop copying one of the 15th century versions and the other from a set of engravings included in tres Mawson's array on bailiffs of 1708 an emblem within a sequence has again a different semiotic content the structure that signals to the viewer is intended to be the total sequence not the individual emblem to remove and view a single image out of the sequence is distribute its context and entirely loses what has been signified sadly many books today plunder these images strip them from the context and this leads to the people viewing them being unable to grasp the original signification and exposes them to interpretations and explanations which are totally erroneous indeed often ridiculously so these are chemical sequences are a totality a gestalt not to be broken into fragments here we see the entire sequence of this manuscript re working in pain drawings of a series of wood cuts from the late 16th century book Edward Kelley's theater of terrestrial astronomy this rather beautiful later version can be found in the welcome library the sequence is complex and is envisage just taking place in ten stages each image thus builds upon the earlier one in the sequence understanding a single image without knowing a sequence of stages is impossible the process unfolds gradually as components are changed by the work of the alchemist with only the single image we first looked at in fact the sixth in the sequence we could devise a multitude of erroneous interpretations once seen in the context of the sequence the reading more in line with that of the creator of the series can be made imagine that one only had access to the final image of the sequence one can see that there is no way from this one could appreciate the entire work indeed one might not even view it as having any alchemical content but rather as a conventional picture of the triune God creating the creatures of the earth now we must turn to nomenclature and try and more precisely define the terms we are using to many people these are chemical symbols the little graphic signs found in many alchemical manuscripts and books these are actually signs that stand for chemical substances apparatus processes weights etc for the most part they're used as in rebates or shorthand for the objects they signify they were sometimes created uniquely for a particular manuscript but over the centuries the Delta consensus as to what a particular sign was to signify though in time more and more diverse forms were added thus in the early period a list of such graphic signs was simple but by the mid 18th century there were many signs recorded as being used for a particular chemical object on the left is an example from a manuscript of 1550 while on the right is merely a small part of a series of over 1,800 such signs in a book of 1755 it would be best to be called these signs and avoided using the word symbols for them as we should reserve this for another specific concept the imagery we find in our chemical manuscripts and books is perhaps best described using the word emblem of course the term emblem is now often used in a precise technical way to apply to the emblem books that first appeared in 1530 's and continued well into the 18th century these emblem books brought together a picture and a text usually with an underlying didactic or moral often religious message with intention of the self-improvement of the reader there is an obvious interaction of the emblem tradition and alchemical emblems but is essential that the two are not confused many people today with perhaps an inadequate knowledge or chemical imagery often identify a picture from an emblem book as being our chemical here is an image taken from the emblem a turnover of sixteen seventeen remove from its context within the emblem book it is very easy to come to see this as alchemical in inspiration this is not perhaps difficult to understand as many printers and their engravers what both on all chemical and enmund books the only way to come to see this clearly is to have sufficient experience of looking at all chemical imagery if one lacks this knowledge and it is wise to reserve judgment on an image one finds on the internet or in a modern Duke stripped of its context until one is able to identify its source by the end of 2016 I hope to have a comprehensive list of our chemical emblems available on my alchemy website we should come to see an alchemical emblem as a bringing together of various symbols within a frame or structure there is a large the coherent number of these individual symbols some of which of a meaning fixed in the O chemical context though others are more general and their meaning can be modified in different emblems among these symbols are many now quite well known ones such as the black crow or Raven the king in the Queen the flask being heated the Aruba rose various Birds the Peacocks tail mercury with caduceus a variety of animals and Dragons the green lion the Sun and Moon of course an in-depth analysis of the structural or chemical Inghams is necessarily complex so not be possible to explore this in detail in this presentation however I have written a study cause of 24 lessons on the subject which even although being written in 1999 is still very much relevant this is available both as a PDF download and as a printed book I've also created a series of 24 audio-visual presentations each of which is devoted to an emblem or a related group of emblems these are available here on YouTube you you

Channel: Adam McLean

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Id: n9x-GmPs3oE

Length: 24min 45sec (1485 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2016