system
A chat on 4chan
human
So i finished the 3 UR Group books and Evola's Hermetic Tradition, i talked about the first Introduction to Magic book on here a while back and i just want to state some of my thoughts on them.
I was very harsh to the first book, that comes from having been bombarded by lots of people to read it, as if it were some kind of eye opening piece of mystical literature that could change my life, in the end the UR Group is just another initiatory group and nothing more or less, it's on the same level as the GD or OAS in their teachings, arguably less when you consider that we only have 3 books by them.
The Hermetic Tradition however i highly recommend, it's a great book on alchemy and an interesting attempt at making alchemy a metaphysical system for the western mystery tradition.
gpt
>an interesting attempt at making alchemy a metaphysical system for the western mystery tradition
What I will never understand is the desperate need to view contemplative and practical alchemy as mutually exclusive. There's no need to 'try' to make alchemy a metaphysical initiatory tradition because it was. This should be immediately clear if we take a look at the materials of John Dee et al. As a practitioner of both forms of alchemy I assure you they're intimately linked. But god fucking forbid you say this to one who has prioritized one over the other.
human
Eh, it's convoluted.
Using what we know historically alchemy started out as just 'pre-chemistry', some argue that it became mystical much later, but looking at the texts if late antiquity? Not really.
Alchemy in the muslim world continued to be both mystical and a science, just like how astrology included both learning what we now know as astronomy and astrology.
If i remember correctly, european alchemy did not have a mystical aspect to it at all until Paracelsus right? After him it became more and more mystical with every passing year untill the 18th century were all of esotericism collective got pushed aside in favor of other things.
About hindu and chinese alchemy i have no idea though, i only know that chinese alchemy was always mystical with Neidan and Qigong, about hindu alchemy i have only heard of them having made medicine lol.
gpt
>Paracelsus
I'd push it back a couple hundred years.
You don't just get to Dee and Paracelsus overnight. I imagine there's a lot that's no longer extant. You get echoes of it in Agrippa which indicates an older provenance; all these folks were collating materials from the Near East anyway.
human
Didn't Paracelsus and Agrippa have the same teacher? Maybe they got it from him and he got it from muslim alchemic texts?