When grape juice is fermented, it dies to its old state and is reborn as Wine. Grape juice lives not very long before it putrefies and spoils. When through nature’s alchemy it is transmuted into wine, the newborn state of wine can live hundreds of years. Then when we use nature’s alchemy further and distill the wine, we separate out the Spirit of Wine as alcohol. This alcohol is now immortal as it lives for ever. Such analogies, similes and allegories when transposed inwardly help us understand our own three alchemical principles of body, soul and spirit. Yet the laboratory process of distillation granted us alcohol, which we use in tonics, tinctures and elixirs. Which products again help the spiritual alchemist understand his inner elixir of life. When I ascend the most fixed aspect of the life principle as the Salt of a herb or plant, I am volatilizing the salt and exalting it which will make a glorified elixir. A true alchemist can see through correspondence the similarity of inner work as the astral salt being elevated in one as a body of light.
Alchemy is a Universal Science and a Universal Process that affects all Levels of Being. We are both Spiritual and Physical beings. You well know my deep spiritual alchemy practice, but you also know that I am very much , as are many others, deep into Laboratory alchemy and very passionate about the work. A true Laboratory alchemist knows that his experiments are very initiatic and reveal to him the universality of the process, for he knows that he is always in the crucible with his matter. Will we deliberately ignore all the laboratory references of the ancient alchemists? They have shown us alchemical procedures such as Distillation, fermentation , putrefaction, circulation, calcination, ect ect terms we use today in the art of the Transmutation of Ourselves. ……………….Claude d’Ygé in his New Assembly of Chemical Philosophers said, “Let him forebear, who believes that Alchemy is concerned sole with mundane, mineral and metallic nature of things. Let him forbear, who believes that Alchemy is purely spiritual. But those who understand that Alchemy is but symbol used to reveal by analogy the process of achieving ‘Spiritual Realisation’, in a word, that man is at once the prime matter and the athenor of the Work – let them pursue it with all their might.”
The Nodin Manuscript says man is a dual being both, physical and Spiritual. Baudelaire said, alchemy is the Distillation of the Eternal from the Transient.
Wine Vinegar Distillation from Steve Kalec on Vimeo.
via Steve Kalec: text from https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2660848244141235&id=100006482551597 and video from https://vimeo.com/240615979