Can /lit/ recommend any essential books when it comes to Alchemy

>>8610377
Interested in this as well.

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The Lemegeton,: The lesser key of Solomon The King is basically the standard introductory text for aspiring Goetic magicians; those who practice the art of conjuring, commanding and abjuring the 72 spirits bound by Solomon under mystical compact.

It is available with a foreword by Aleister Crowley if that's your thing; and contains references for other texts too.

Goetic magic is probably best not taken literally; I study it as a cultural and artistic curiosity, but I do recognise it as a "legitimate" mystical tradition such as it is.

Hell, one night I was carrying my Lemegeton back from an argument with a friend at their house and incanting the an invocation to Astaroth to pass the long quiet walk; some feral kids tried to jump me and I somehow successfully fought a 40-minute running battle against them.

It was all right queer, though my rational brain passes it off as coincidence; maybe something about ritual actions like incantation and prayer have a calming effect that allow a person to compose themself.

>>8610377
Read Psychology and Alchemy by Jung like right now

>>8610907
Here's a spoiler:
Alchemy isn't actually about turning literal lead into literal gold

It's just another esoteric tradition, like Gnosticism or Hermeticism or whatever

>>8610946
That's one modern interpretation of certain alchemy texts. There were plenty of people who thought they could literally turn lead into gold and such other things, which is why a lot of early discoveries on chemistry were derived from alchemical processes and why we can easily interpret most alchemy text as crude chemistry

>>8611026
There are plenty of people who take the Bible literally to this day, I don't see your problem.

>>8611044
The problem is that there's no reason to think most alchemists took alchemy purely as a philosophy, or that the whole of chemistry sprouted from a philosophical movement that coincidentally also gave a lot of insight on the way the material world worked when misinterpreted by literal-minded students

>>8610907
>dressing up as wizards and pretending to shoot lightning at each other?

And this isn't a description of Joyce/Proust/Keats/Pound if they hadn't been sociophobic introvert misfits how?

>>8610946
And why not both.

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Banks worldwide HATE him!
CLICK THIS
Watch how he turns LEAD ---> GOLD with ONE simple TRANSMUTATION!

The symbols will make sense when you know what they represent. Start with basic geometry and Plato

>>8610931
Speaking of jung I just picked up the readers edition of the red book at a used book store for like 15 bucks.

OP id suggest anything by e a koetting