Writings about Alchemy by Adam McLean

Adam McLean
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
I have been writing and researching alchemical and hermetic literature for many years and between 1978 and 1992 edited the Hermetic Journal. I also published during those years the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks a series of twenty-five editions of key source texts of the hermetic tradition. In the course of my research I often come across important texts, both in printed books and manuscripts, which have been neglected. Some of these I have transcribed and eventually I hope to publish these in the revived Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks and other related series which I sell through my alchemy web bookshop. An important part of my work is to attempt an analysis of and commentary on the ideas and symbolism of key hermetic works. I am especially drawn to the rich vein of allegorical and symbolic material in the alchemical tradition. I recently returned to producing paintings based on alchemical emblems.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/adam.html

Coloured alchemical emblems
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
Over the past ten years or so I have been making handcoloured emblems by painting with watercolours copies of woodcuts and engravings from printed books and some manuscript drawings. In colouring these I made use of my intensive study of the original coloured manuscripts of the 15th to 18th centuries, which have been the main focus of my research over the past years.
I have often found that by contemplating and meditating on these handcoloured images one can resonate with and enter into the complex symbolic world of alchemy.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/amcldraw.html

Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
The Magnum Opus Hermetics Sourceworks is a series of primary texts relating to the Hermetic tradition. The original series of twenty-three volumes was published between 1979 and 1987 by Adam McLean. Each work was edited or translated from original source material, and many of the volumes contained extensive commentaries and introductory material. These were issued in small editions of 250 signed and numbered copies, handbound by the editor.
http://phanes.com/magnum-opus.html

A Threefold Alchemical Journey Through the Book of Lambspring
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
The Book of Lambspring is well known as one of the gems from the Musaeum Hermeticum published in 1625 by Lucas Jennis in Frankfurt, especially for its series of fifteen emblematic plates. It seems that this little book was first published, under the title De Lapide Philosophico Triga Chemicum (Prague 1599) compiled by the Frenchman Nicolas Barnaud prominent in the alchemical circles around Rudolf II.
The Book of Lambspring is a short work with an introductory section in verse and an emblem showing a threefold furnace. Following the tradition of emblem books of the period its series of fifteen emblems each bears a motto or title with a verse on the facing page. The Book of Lambspring is a work of spiritual alchemy, has few references to physical alchemical processes, and it seems unlikely that it could ever have provided any clues that might help someone engaged upon physical experimentation. Instead, it is a clear, powerful and extremely useful statement of the inner work of the spiritual alchemist. Its verses point to the soul and spirit involved in the alchemical transformation and its fifteen emblems are evocative symbols of these inner processes.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/lambjrny.html

The Alchemical Drama of Goethe's Faust
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
The alchemy in Goethe’s Faust is central to its dramatic conception, and is not merely added for effect. For Goethe’s working of the Faust story differs from other dramas based on the archetypal legend of a conjuror who sells his soul to the devil, sealing his pact with a drop of blood, ultimately to suffer the fires of Hell, in that Goethe reveals through his drama various transformational processes working in the human soul, personified in Faust. Goethe struggles to weave the personal inner journey of Faust towards some enlightenment, together with the collective social forces that are undergoing transformation through the historical process, so here Faust is also a representative of Northern European humanity striving for evolution from the limitations and strictures of the 16th century Reformation to the new aspirations of humanity that Goethe saw developing during the 18th century Enlightenment era.
The main characters in the play are thus polarised facets of the one human soul, whose journey to enlightenment is demonstrated in the drama.

Helen

       Homunculus  - Faust  -  Mephistopheles

Gretchen

We can see Faust as the core of a complex being living within a net of polarities. Helen the ideal archetypal feminine, and Gretchen the earthly female from which he cuts himself off. Homunculus a potential inner hermaphroditic soul guide, whom he could have developed in his being had he stuck to his alchemical work, however, he turns to the Mephisto facet for guidance. At the end of the play he has been stripped of all these polarities and lies open and vulnerable in death.
Goethe always tried purposively to mystify his audiences and readers, as he wanted to lead them beyond intellectual appraisal of his ideas. To grasp the allegorical riddles in Faust requires no mere intellectual analysis of the drama and characters but an encounter with the Mephisto, Gretchen, Helen, Homunculus as well as the Faust within ourselves.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/faust.html

The Alchemical Vessel as Symbol of the Soul
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
As students of the hermetic tradition we all recognise that the alchemical work takes place on many different levels - the physical work with substances, the experience and manipulation of etheric forces, the interior work on the soul, as well as the spiritual and planetary/cosmic aspects of alchemy. These different facets of the work interpenetrate and overlap each other. Indeed, in a sense, if we are to make any progress in alchemy, we must pursue the different facets concurrently, paralleling interior development with experience of the outer work. One symbol that belongs to all these different realms of this work is that of the alchemical vessel. In this article I would like to outline some ways in which we can use this symbol in our inner exercises.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/vessel.html

Animal Symbolism in Alchemy
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
Alchemy, as I perceive it, is a spiritual tradition, a means for exploring our inner space and the layers which clothe the precious essence of our innermost soul. It is a path, a way, a practical method for investigating the substance of our being, by meditating upon chemical processes. They used events in their experiments as seed images for meditations, forming visual mantras from chemical changes. The alchemists reflected and mirrored these outward events into their interior world. They saw the processes in their flasks as an interaction and linking of the spiritual and the material. As the alchemists reworked these experiments over in their souls, they further drew parallels with the greater laboratory of Nature. They saw the work within their flasks as a kind of microcosm of macrocosmic Nature. The living energies and beings in Nature were metaphorically drawn into their retorts, as they began to picture the living alchemical processes through animal symbols. It was the coherence and universality of this set of alchemical symbols that lead Carl Jung to the concept of the collective unconscious. The alchemists though pursuing their inner work independently as individuals, nevertheless found in their interior descent a coherent language of symbols.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/animal.html

The Birds in Alchemy
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
In alchemical writings we meet a seemingly bewildering multiplicity of animal symbols - red lions, white eagles, stags, unicorns, winged dragons and snakes. Although at first glance all this complex mass of symbolism seems tortured and confused there is an inner coherence to these symbols, which the ancient alchemists used in specific ways reflecting their esoteric content. In this article I wish to consider a particularly tight knit group of these animal symbols, the birds of alchemy - the Black Crow, White Swan, Peacock, Pelican, and Phoenix - which are descriptive of certain stages of the alchemical process. Of course it would be wrong to suggest that there are fixed rigid meanings with regard to these symbols. The alchemists always integrated the symbols they used, so that one has to look at the total context, the background against which they stand, but when the birds appear in this sequence it is almost certain that the following interpretation can be applied:
The essential thing about birds is that they, having as their domain the air element, mediate between the earthly realm and the heaven world. The alchemist in observing the flight of birds, recognised in them a picture of the human soul undergoing spiritual development. The soul, aspiring upwards, flying free of the restraints of the earth bound body seeking the heavenly light, only to have to return to the earthly consciousness again after the meditation, the alchemist symbolised by the bird.
http://levity.com/alchemy/alcbirds.html

The Crowning of Nature
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
The Crowning of Nature is one of the most important alchemical manuscripts, and contains a famous series of 67 illustrations of the alchemical work taking place in flasks. The following pages are based on the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks edition of 1980. The coloured figure included are my own redrawing of the coloured figures, based on a number of manuscripts.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/crowning.html

The Inner Geometry of Alchemical Emblems
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
Over the past five years of the Hermetic Journal, I have often illustrated in the Alchemical Mandala feature and other articles the profound symbolism wrapped up in the old sixteenth and seventeenth century emblematic engravings of alchemists and Rosicrucians. I have sometimes indicated how certain of these diagrams can be seen to have an underlying geometric skeleton structure upon which the symbols are arrayed. However, I never analysed this aspect in great depth and merely pointed out some simple geometric features. I had not considered that this aspect was of paramount importance, until I recently requested from the British Library a microfilm of an important Rosicrucian book in their collection, the 'Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum' of Theophilus Schweighardt, published in 1618.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/innergeo.html

Kabbalistic Cosmology
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
In earlier articles I have tried to point out the links between hermetic and alchemical ideas and the developing current of thought in modern physics and cosmology. In this present piece I would like to pursue the strange parallels between the late 16th century reformation of kabbalistic cosmology that arose through the insights of Isaac Luria, and the recent reformulation of the ‘big-bang’ into the so-called ‘inflationary model’ of cosmic creation.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/luria.html

Quantum Consciousness
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
The hermetic tradition has long been concerned with the relationship between the inner world of our consciousness and the outer world of nature, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the below and the above, the material and the spiritual, the centric and the peripheral. There was a grand platonic metaphysical clockwork, as it were, through which our inner world was linked by means of a hierarchy of beings and planes to the highest unity of the Divine.
This view though comforting is philosophically unsound, and the developments in thought since the early 17th century have made such a hermetic world view untenable and philosophically naive. So do we now have to abandon such a beautiful and spiritual world view and adopt the prevailing reductionist materialist conception of the world which has become accepted in the intellectual tradition of the West ? I am not so sure. There still remains the problem of our consciousness and its relationship to our material form - the Mind / Brain problem. In treating our consciousness as if it were a digital computer or deterministic machine after the model of 19th century science, I believe we foster a limited and false view of our inner world. We must now take the step towards a quantum view of consciousness, recognising that at its base and root our consciousness behaves like the ever flowing sea of the sub-atomic world. The ancient hermeticists pictured consciousness as the "Inner Mercury". The brain can no longer be seen as a vast piece of organic clockwork, but as a subtle device amplifying quantum events. If we trace a nerve impulse down to its root, there lies a quantum uncertainty, a sea of probability. The inner sea of quantum effects in our brain is in some way coupled to our ever flowing consciousness. The central point within our consciousness, our "spirit" in the hermetic sense, can now be seen as an entity that can work to control quantum probabilities. To our "spirits" our brain is a quantum sea providing a rich realm in which it can incarnate and manifest patterns down into the electrical/chemical impulses of the nervous system.
We are challenged by quantum theory to build new ways in which to picture reality, a physics, moreover, in which consciousness plays a central role, in which the observer is inextricably interwoven in the fabric of reality. In a sense it may now be possible to build a new model of quantum consciousness, compatible with contemporary physics and which allows a space for the inclusion of the hermetic idea of the spirit.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/quantum.html

Bacstrom's Rosicrucian Society
Adam McLean - alchemy@dial.pipex.com
Dr Sigismund Bacstrom was one of the most important scholars of alchemy in the last few centuries, being active at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Little is known of his life, except that he was probably of Scandinavian extraction, and that he spent a deal of his early life travelling around the world as a ship's surgeon. Later he was to settle in London and gather around him a small circle of contacts (including Ebenezar Sibley and General Rainsford), amongst whom he circulated a number of his own translations of alchemical texts from Latin, German, and French into English.
On 12th September 1794, Dr Sigismund Bacstrom was initiated into a Societas Roseae Crucis by Comte Louis de Chazal, on the island of Mauritius. The Count, then a venerable old man of some 96 years, seemed to have recognised in Bacstrom, his greatness as an hermetic student, and offered to take him on as a pupil and teach him the great work, and during this period, Bacstrom was allowed to perform a transmutation under Chazal's guidance and using his substances. Chazal seems to have obtained his own alchemical knowledge while he was in Paris in 1740, and J.W. Hamilton Jones in his edition of Bacstrom's Alchemical Anthology (1960 Stuart and Watkins, London) even suggests that his teacher was the Comte de St Cermain. Perhaps we have in Bacstrom a direct connection through Chazal and the Comte de St Germain with a continuing stream of Rosicrucian mystery wisdom.
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