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Black Sun (alchemy)
In alchemic and Hermetic traditions, suns () are used to symbolize a variety of concepts, much like the sun in astrology. Suns can correspond to gold, citrinitas, generative masculine principles, imagery of "the king", or Apollo, the fiery spirit or sulfur, the divine spark in man, nobility, or incorruptibility. Recurring images of specific solar motifs can be found in the form of a "Dark" or "Black Sun", or a green lion devouring a sun. Sol niger Sol niger (black sun) can refer to the first stage of the alchemical magnum opus, the nigredo (blackening). In a text ascribed to Marsilio Ficino three suns are described: black, white, and red, corresponding to the three most used alchemical color stages. Of the sol niger he writes: The black sun is used to illuminate the dissolution of the body, a blackening of matter, or putrefaction in ''Splendor Solis'', and Johann Daniel Mylius’s ''Philosophia Reformata''.Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. ''The Golden Game: Alchemical Engraving ...
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Green Lion Consuming The Sun
Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combination of yellow and cyan; in the RGB color model, used on television and computer screens, it is one of the additive primary colors, along with red and blue, which are mixed in different combinations to create all other colors. By far the largest contributor to green in nature is chlorophyll, the chemical by which plants photosynthesize and convert sunlight into chemical energy. Many creatures have adapted to their green environments by taking on a green hue themselves as camouflage. Several minerals have a green color, including the emerald, which is colored green by its chromium content. During post-classical and early modern Europe, green was the color commonly associated with wealth, merchants, bankers, and the gentry, while red ...
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Magnum Opus (alchemy)
The Great Work (Latin: ''Magnum opus'') is an alchemical term for the process of working with the prima materia to create the philosopher's stone. It has been used to describe personal and spiritual transmutation in the Hermetic tradition, attached to laboratory processes and chemical color changes, used as a model for the individuation process, and as a device in art and literature. The magnum opus has been carried forward in New Age and neo-Hermetic movements which sometimes attached new symbolism and significance to the processes. The original process philosophy has four stages: *''nigredo'', the blackening or melanosis *''albedo'', the whitening or leucosis *''citrinitas'', the yellowing or xanthosis *''rubedo'', the reddening, purpling, or iosis The origin of these four phases can be traced at least as far back as the first century. Zosimus of Panopolis wrote that it was known to Mary the Jewess. The development of black, white, yellow, and red can also be found in the ...
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Five Suns
In the context of creation myths, the term Five Suns describes the doctrine of the Aztec and other Nahua peoples in which the present world was preceded by four other cycles of creation and destruction. It is primarily derived from the mythological, cosmological and eschatological beliefs and traditions of earlier cultures from central Mexico and the Mesoamerican region in general, and fits into a broader category of Fifth World mythologies. The Late Postclassic Aztec society inherited many traditions concerning Mesoamerican creation accounts, while modifying some aspects and supplying novel interpretations of their own. In the creation myths which were known to the Aztec and other Nahua peoples of the Late Postclassic era, the central tenet was that there had been four worlds, or "Suns," before the present universe. These earlier worlds and their inhabitants had been created, then destroyed by the catastrophic action of leading deity figures. The present world is the fifth sun, ...
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Classical Planets In Western Alchemy
In classical antiquity, the seven classical planets or seven luminaries are the seven moving astronomical objects in the sky visible to the naked eye: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The word ''planet'' comes from two related Greek words, πλάνης ''planēs'' (whence πλάνητες ἀστέρες ''planētes asteres'' "wandering stars, planets") and πλανήτης ''planētēs'', both with the original meaning of "wanderer", expressing the fact that these objects move across the celestial sphere relative to the fixed stars. Greek astronomers such as Geminus and Ptolemy often divided the seven planets into the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets. The term ''planet'' in modern terminology is only applied to natural satellites directly orbiting the Sun (or other stars), so that only five of the seven classical planets are planets in the modern sense. The same seven planets, along with the ascending and descending lunar node, are mentioned in ...
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Alchemical Symbol
Alchemical symbols, originally devised as part of alchemy, were used to denote some elements and some compounds until the 18th century. Although notation like this was mostly standardized, style and symbol varied between alchemists, so this page mainly lists the most common ones. Three primes According to Paracelsus (1493–1541), the three primes or ''tria prima'' – of which material substances are immediately composed – are: * Sulfur or soul, the principle of combustibility: 🜍 () * Mercury or spirit, the principle of fusibility and volatility: ☿ () * Salt or body, the principle of non-combustibility and non-volatility: 🜔 () Four basic elements Western alchemy makes use of the four classical elements. The symbols used for these are: * Air 🜁 () * Earth 🜃 () * Fire 🜂 () * Water 🜄 () Seven The seven metals known since Classical times in Europe were associated with the seven classical planets; this figured heavily in alchemical symbolism. The exact ...
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Johann Daniel Mylius
Johann Daniel Mylius (c. 15831642) was a composer for the lute, and writer on alchemy. Born at Wetter in present-day Hesse, Germany, he went on to study theology and medicine at the University of Marburg. He was the brother-in-law and pupil of Johann Hartmann (1568–1613). In 1616, while still a medical student, Mylius published Duncan Burnet's ''Iatrochymicus''. The ', Mylius' own alchemical work, was published two years later. He is known for the collection ' (1622) of pieces for the lute. In the same year his ' was published. Mylius was the personal physician of Moritz of Hessen and his patrons included Maurice Maurice may refer to: People * Saint Maurice (died 287), Roman legionary and Christian martyr * Maurice (emperor) or Flavius Mauricius Tiberius Augustus (539–602), Byzantine emperor *Maurice (bishop of London) (died 1107), Lord Chancellor and ... and Frederick Henry of Nassau. Works *''Opus medico-chymicum.'' 1618. *''Antidotarium.'' 1620. *''Philosophia re ...
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Splendor Solis
''Splendor Solis'' ("The Splendour of the Sun") is a version of the illuminated alchemical text attributed to Salomon Trismosin. This version dates from around 1582. The earliest version, written in Central German, is dated 1532–1535 and is part of the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin collection at the State Museums in Berlin. It is illuminated on vellum, with decorative borders like a book of hours, meticulously painted and highlighted with gold. The later copies in London, Kassel, Paris and Nuremberg are equally fine. Twenty versions exist worldwide. The original of ''Splendor Solis'', which contained seven chapters, appeared in Augsburg. In miniatures the works of Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein and Lucas Cranach were used. The author of the manuscript was considered to be the legendary Salomon Trismosin, allegedly the teacher of Paracelsus, though the name is believed to be a pseudonym. The work consists of a sequence of 22 elaborate images, set in ornamental borders and nich ...
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Marsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficino (; Latin name: ; 19 October 1433 – 1 October 1499) was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy. Early life Ficino was born at Figline Valdarno. His father, Diotifeci d'Agnolo, was a physician under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici, who took the young man into his household and became the lifelong patron of Marsilio, who was made tutor to his grandson, Lorenzo de' Medici. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Italian humanist philosopher and scholar was another of his students. Career and thought Platonic Academy During the sessions at ...
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Nigredo
In alchemy, nigredo, or blackness, means putrefaction or decomposition. Many alchemists believed that as a first step in the pathway to the philosopher's stone, all alchemical ingredients had to be cleansed and cooked extensively to a uniform black matter. In analytical psychology, the term became a metaphor for "the dark night of the soul, when an individual confronts the shadow within." Jung For Carl Jung, "the rediscovery of the principles of alchemy came to be an important part of my work as a pioneer of psychology". As a student of alchemy, he (and his followers) "compared the 'black work' of the alchemists (the nigredo) with the often highly critical involvement experienced by the ego, until it accepts the new equilibrium brought about by the creation of the self." Jungians interpreted nigredo in two main psychological senses. The first sense represented a subject's initial state of undifferentiated unawareness, "the first nigredo, that of the ''unio naturalis'', is an obje ...
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Philosophia Reformata Emblem 9 - Putrefactio
''Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering philosophy from different traditions that was established in 1971. The journal publishes five issues per year, and it is published by Springer Nature. The editors-in-chief are Asa Kasher (Tel Aviv University) and Mitchell Green (University of Connecticut The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut, a village in the town of Mansfield. The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km2) campus is in Storrs, approximately a half hour's drive from Hart ...). Abstracting and indexing The journal is abstracted and indexed in: External links * Publications established in 1971 Philosophy journals English-language journals Springer Science+Business Media academic journals Biannual journals {{Philo-journal-stub ...
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Alchemy
Alchemy (from Arabic: ''al-kīmiyā''; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, ''khumeía'') is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe. In its Western form, alchemy is first attested in a number of pseudepigraphical texts written in Greco-Roman Egypt during the first few centuries AD.Principe, Lawrence M. The secrets of alchemy'. University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 9–14. Alchemists attempted to purify, mature, and perfect certain materials. Common aims were chrysopoeia, the transmutation of "base metals" (e.g., lead) into "noble metals" (particularly gold); the creation of an elixir of immortality; and the creation of panaceas able to cure any disease. The perfection of the human body and soul was thought to result from the alchemical ''magnum opus'' ("Great Work"). The concept of creating the philosophers' stone was variously connected with all of the ...
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Titus Burckhardt
Titus Burckhardt (24 October 1908 – 15 January 1984) was a Swiss writer and a leading member of the Perennialist or Traditionalist School. He was the author of numerous works on metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, esoterism, alchemy, Sufism, symbolism and sacred art. Life Scion of a patrician family of Basel, Switzerland, Titus Burckhardt was the son of the sculptor Carl Burckhardt (1878–1923) and the grand-nephew of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), an art historian and Renaissance specialist. His genealogical tree also includes John Lewis Burckhardt (1784–1817), the explorer who discovered the Nabatean city of Petra and the Egyptian temples of Abu Simbel. He was born in Florence, Italy, on October 24, 1908. The following year his family settled in Basel. He attended the same primary school as Frithjof Schuon, who became a lifelong friend. In 1920, his family left Basel for Ligornetto in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where his father died three years later. Around 1927, ...
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