What Brought you to Alchemy?

[taceyoto]

Hey Everyone, I hope this is the right category, I did a search and I couldn't find anything like this, if I missed it my apologies!

What brought you to Alchemy? How did you make this choice?

[BeautifulEvil]

Hey Everyone, I hope this is the right category, I did a search and I
couldn't find anything like this, if I missed it my apologies!

This seems like the perfect spot for such a thread.

What brought you to Alchemy? How did you make this choice?

I had a rather weird "spiritual" experience early in my life as a teenager. I would go into more detail here, but I believe I wrote about this experience in my introduction thread.

Anyway, ever since then I've been deeply interested in the occult. Around a year ago I realized alchemy and the occult are very similiar, and can't be seperated. Up until that point I mainly had occult knowledge without much alchemical knowledge. Sure, I understood most of the spiritual aspects of alchemy, but I didn't understand the practical physical aspects of alchemy. To make a long story short: after much uncertainty I finally decided to watch Fullmetal Alchemist, and after watching the anime I began to intensly research laboratory alchemy and the Elixir of Life/Philosophers Stone.

I didn't make this choice to get rich or anything, but I just believe it's the next phase of my evolutionary process. It brings me closer to Godhead and the union with all.

Heh, I was brainscattered while writing this post -- I hope it's understandable.

[deviadah]

I was actually studying Thoth and I thus stumbled upon the Emerald Tablet. It took a while before I understood the alchemical significance (and in those days I didn't even know what alchemy was). The reason I was studying Thoth was because I had stumbled upon a book on Atlantis... and I was deep into Ancient Egypt. In fact alchemy came to me through a combination of several things that just naturally seemed to unite, and once it all clicked in my brain I was stuck - and here I am!

[sleeveless]

My friend told me that some of my pictures look kind of alchemistic....at that time I didn't know what alchemy was....It was one year ago!

And he told me so much interesting stuff... that fits in to my kind of thinking... so now I'm very interested and just want to know more about it!

My brain is open to learn...so just continue to post so I can fill me up...

[taceyoto]

I have read about and had an interest in it since I was 13, I was homebound with illness at the time so I wasn't in school. All I did was read. I read everything, novels, texts, dictionaries and encyclopedias (I am currently 20 pages form finishing my Encyclopedia of the Occult) and have had a fondness for history, religion, and mysteries my entire life. The one thing that got me was a story about the Comte St. Germain. I saw something about him (I fancy documentaries as well) and was interested so I did further research and discovered gained a bigger interest in Alchemy. I also find the Comte himself interesting still.

[deviadah]

Yeah I love that guy too... a real inspiration!

It is only lack of time that has stopped me from creating a topic about him...

I will soon unless you want to beat me to it (which is ok)... place it in History of Alchemy if you do!

[LadyHydralisk]

Hmm, well I'd known about the Emerald tablet for a good long while but I wasn't familiar with how it connected to a larger body of Alchemy and Hermetics.

I consider myself a hermeticist because of the Emerald Tablet, and like all really brilliant individuals you simply must have many facets to draw upon to manage efficiently in magick or the occult.

Actually Visceral/Spagyrical (aka Logos on abrahadabra) pointed me in the right direction to classical European alchemy when I asked him what the hell he was talking about on Occult Forums. I was fascinated with it, and dropped all of my Qabalal studies to research it.

I'm not very interested in this author or that author as far as alchemy goes - I like the emerald tablet and I like the core principles of alchemy, the scientific methodology and the aesthetics of laboratory alchemy appeal to me. That's not shallow, it's merely Satanic. If I could I would have a arcane laboratory with brains in jars on the shelf and skeletons and I would probably sample a great amount of the specimens even.

Alchemy is not my primary path and if I had to say I had one it would be the path of absolute reality, nothing else will do.

[m1thr0s]

I was forcibly driven to alchemy based upon an in-depth investigation of magick that ultimately left me feeling saturated in corrosive rhetorical goo, signifying nothing and accomplishing even less...

my interest in magick was purely academic anyway...it was always the tech that intrigued me the most and little by little I came to discover that the tech itself...where it actually had anything real to offer...was all begged, borrowed or stolen from alchemical sources anyway...

But for myself, alchemy fails to qualify as a spiritual path per se...I think of it much more as a scientific discipline...maybe the science end of occultism in general. So it's the methodology I embrace - not so much the aesthetic which I find just as full of double-talk as anything else...though I am still partial to its symbolisms which tend to be better evolved than most...But I am a globalist and I don't need alchemy to define God for me...I can turn to the entire world to sort that crap out.

It's the Body of Light I am tracking in this immediate incarnation...that's all I really have much time for or ongoing interest in. I keep an eye on things but that's always where it all comes back to for myself. And what I have discovered is that the whole language of the Body of Light is horribly under-developed even in alchemy which might have fared better than it has by now if it hadn't become so peculiarly arrested coming out of the middle-ages in Europe and all but completely abandoned in the far east...They were building this really great starship and suddenly everybody seems to have laid down their tools and walked off the job.

Which leaves us with a bunch of decent tools and a perfectly good starship 80% built to specs already...suits me. So I'm mainly just picking up where everybody seems to have left off at...I think I probably drew my personal vision of what alchemy ought to be from Albert Hoffman's work, actually....that and certain eastern sources of course which ultimately empowered that vision more fully.

m1

[LadyHydralisk]

Oh Albert Hoffman, yeah cool dude...still alive too, at 101....

Yes - it's hard to discuss the body of light, I think a few words might need to be coined...

China suffered a lot at the end of the Sui dynasty, and one could argue Britain only confounded things, but on the contrary I think that was quite beneficial for the world in general, in many unexpected ways...

[Radiant Star]

Its kind of strange how I have ended up in the Alchemy wing. Its almost unwillingly since I only ever joined my first occult forum looking for an answer to just one question and I fully expected to get into witchcraft if anything at all. I read a little, it was all gobbledegook and made no sense to me but a few nights later, there were these apparitions or hallucinations or something - I still have no idea what they were or even what they mean and that was in 2003. The only thing I was sure about is that they were somehow important.

Months later, not really having chosen any kind of pathway and just as an experiment, I decided to try a ritual and got a good result, so I tried something else and got another outstanding result, since that ritual seemed historically to lead back to Hermes, I read the Kybalion; that made sense to me more than any other kind of thing I had come across at that time.

Over the past couple of years, not really making Alchemical connections, I took a few local courses basically in the history of magic with no real understanding or expectations of what the classes would be about. A clear pattern emerged of Hermeticism and Alchemy. A short while after that I had been sitting in a mind-fog at home wondering what to do next and I had some kind of vision. It was a timeline running from Hermes to the future. I was viewing it as if from above the earth and the timeline was like a road on a map below, as I zoomed in I could see my name etched in among others in a whole line right from Hermes Trismegistus to future names as if I had a place in the history of Hermeticism and Alchemy. There were a few other coincidences around this too and I realized that this was a way forward for now at least.

I have no idea what my particular role is, I am only aware of playing a part in it all.

[LadyHydralisk]

Well that's cool as all hell Ricci, thanks for sharing...

[deviadah]

Yeah Ricci... coincidences is a key word when it comes to alchemy/hermeticism. I see this a lot with people who are into it and how they became involved. I think it is a result of the fact that this Sacred Art is present as a subtext of mankinds entire culture since the dawn of consciousness! That is why all other things shrink when placed next to this Art!

It has been around for thousands of years, and it will remain with us till the end of our race!

Hermes, or whatever name you want to fix to what s/he represents, is the constant companion of us all and s/he is truly (hu)mans best friend - dogs are the second best (or cats depending on your karma)!

[BeautifulEvil]

Yeah Ricci... coincidences is a key word when it comes to alchemy/hermeticism. I see this a lot with people who are into it and
how they became involved. I think it is a result of the fact that this Sacred Art is present as a subtext of mankinds entire culture since the dawn of consciousness! That is why all other things shrink when placed next to this Art!

The divine speaks to us in the language of coincidence and synchronicity. It's my belief that reaching godhead results in infinite synchronicity (or insanity, take your pick!).

[Radiant Star]

Hermes, or whatever name you want to fix to what s/he represents, is the constant companion of us all and s/he is truly (hu)mans best friend...

Not sure I have ever really thought about what Hermes represents to me personally; this is a good line of investigation for me right now I think.

Cheers : )

[Radiant Star]

The divine speaks to us in the language of coincidence and synchronicity. It's my belief that reaching godhead results in infinite synchronicity (or insanity, take your pick!).

There has certainly been a lot of that over the last few years, well in fact, it has been there all along but I have only just noticed how much in recent years.