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have the Understanding of Our Fire, which is both secret and natural, you have the Keys of the Art, and
you can calcine Our Stone; not by the common calcination which is made by the violence of fire, but by
a philosophic calcination which is purely natural. Yet observe this, with the most enlightened
philosophers, that there is this difference between the common calcination which is made by the force
of Fire and the natural calcination; that the first destroys the body and consumes the greatest part of its
radical humidity; but the second does not only preserve the humidity of the body in calcining it, but still
considerably augments it. Experience will give you knowledge in the Practice of this great truth, for you
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Israel Regardie - The Philosophers Stone
will in effect find that this philosophical calcination, which sublimes and distils the Stone in calcining it,
much augments its humidity; the reason is that the igneous spirit of the natural fire is corporified in the
substances which are analogous to it. Our stone is an Astral Fire which sympathizes with the Natural
Fire, and which, as a true Salamander receives its nativity, is nourished and grows in the Elementary
Fire, which is geometrically proportioned to it.
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Israel Regardie - The Philosophers Stone
CHAPTER SEVEN
COMMENTARY
At the outset the text informs us that the object of this first key is triple. That is, it opens up (a) the dark
prisons in which the Sulphur or the Fire, that is the emotional life or vital magnetism or prana, is
confined. (b) The Seed is the philosophic Salt, the opposite of the Sulphur on the Qabalistic Tree, that
Salt which, when purified, serves as the vehicular foundation of the enlightened mind, or the seed from
which the Aurific Stone is formed. (c) It forms the Stone by the conjunction of the Sulphur and
Mercury.
Clearly, the Stone represents the union of Mercury, which is Consciousness, and Sulphur, the fire
of emotion, the anima principle of the psyche, using Salt as their basis of action, the astro-mental
sheath. The psychological interpretation in its theoretical aspect is still applicable here. As in the former
commentary, the analytical method may be employed to induce the dissolution of consciousness in its
own light; that is to say, by immersing its contents in that from which it originally issued, in the
Unconscious. According to the magnetic theory, the approach to the first alchemical stage of dissolution
is by means of the magnetic trance. Because of the transmission of great vitality from a skilled and
initiated operator, consciousness suffers an eclipse, enabling the secondary consciousness, or the divine
core of the Unconscious, to hold unrestricted expression. Exactly what occurs to consciousness during
hypnosis or mesmerism remains even to this day a moot point. Some hold one view, others another. In
Dr. Milne Bramwell's book on hypnotism, some hundred pages or so are taken up in a consideration of
the various opinions as to the true state of consciousness. A footnote by Mrs. Atwood in her Suggestive
Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery expresses the following opinion:
We adopt the term dissolve here in accordance with the old doctrine; varying theories have
been proposed to explain the change that takes place in the vital relationship of the patient in the
mesmeric trance; some have thought the sensible medium is drawn away by a superior attraction of
life in the agent; others, that it is overcome, or included, or arrested, or destroyed; but the
Alchemists, with one accord, say it ought to be dissolved; and, in default of better authority, shall
we not suppose it so to be dissolved, or that it ought to be, the alkali by the acid, the dark dominion
of the selfhood by the magnetic friction of its proper light, the sensible or animal into the vegetable,
the cerebral into the ganglionic life? Corpora qui vult purgare oportet flux facere, says the author
of the Rosarium, that the compact earthy body of sense may be rarefied and flow as a passive
watery spirit. The beginning of the work, says Albertus Magnus, is a perfect solution; and all those
that we teach is nothing else but to dissolve and recongeal the spirit, to make the fixed volatile and
the volatile fixed until the total nature is perfected by the reiteration, both in its Solary and Lunar
form.
2. The compound of metals, or the aggregate of the astrological planets, with which the Sephiros
of the Qabalistic Tree of Life and the metals are in correspondence, is the constitution of man.  Cavern
in symbolism quite frequently stands for the darkness of the bodily life, the womb and the dark creative
interior of the Mother. Hence it is a generic universal symbol for the Unconscious itself, since it is from
the vital dynamic urges and the inchoate mass of instincts that the conscious faculties gradually issue
and evolve in the course of millions of years of evolution. The cave denotes an interior state or
condition from which external things issue, or from which they are born - as in the case of the conscious
intellectual life. In the Unconscious, then, are we to seek for the hidden Stone of the Wise. Our text
affirms the speculation that every state of consciousness has associated with it, or functions in, a vehicle [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]