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It can only be made by the Self's imagining and never by what sometimes looks like this-the self-serving fantasies of the ego. In his struggle to transform the world he is also transforming himself, making his own soul.Authentic art always entails initiation, both for the artist and his client. The alchemist merely collaborates with, and accelerates, the movement just as an artist does. It is the movement of the mythopoeic imagination itself. Alchemy is always going on whether we know it or not. No matter how unattainable the goal, the Work absolutely has a purpose in the way that all deep imaginative activity has not so much a fixed goal as a volatile Way. Its symbol of reunion is the Stone in which all the pairs of elements are ravelled up in a grand marriage. He also noted that the overall aim of mythology, though never quite realized, is similar to alchemy in its seeking to reunite the opposites. The alchemical myth seems largely to have exhausted itself in Europe by the end of the 17thCE, but it reappeared as C G Jung realized, as the psychology of the unconscious. A mythology, we recall, goes on permutating its elements and generating variants of its constituent myths until it is imaginatively exhausted whereupon it springs up again in a different guise.

At every 'circulation', the pairs of elements rearrange themselves such that the analogy which applies to the stage of Calcination, say, is reversed at Separation. We read that our sulphur is a fixed body and, in the next breath, a volatile spirit or that our mercury is at one moment water, at the next, fire.

“Students of alchemy are often bewildered by the mass of contradictions in the recipes. Excerpt from Patrick Harpur’s The Philosopher’s Secret Fire