The Basic Tenets Of Alchemy:

astronomical/astrological diagrams

from an astronomical-astrological composite manuscript, alsace, 15th c.

source: Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1370

The Moon’s path shown along the Earth’s orbit during the years 1888 and 1889.

The real root of alchemy is to be sought less in philosophical doctrines than in the projections of individual investigators. I mean by this that while working on his chemical experiments the operator had certain psychic experiences which appeared to him as the particular behavior of the chemical process. Since it was a question of projection, he was naturally unconscious of the fact that the experience had nothing to do with matter itself . . . He experienced his projection as a property of matter; but what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious. In this way he recapitulated the whole history of man’s knowledge of nature. As we all know, science began with the stars, and mankind discovered in them the dominants of the unconscious, the “gods,” as well as the curious psychological qualities of the zodiac: a complete projected theory of human character. Astrology is a primordial experience similar to alchemy. Such projections repeat themselves whenever man tries to explore an empty darkness and involuntarily fills it with living form.

Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Taxonomies of misdirection overview

When confronted with a magic trick, you first perceive the relevant sensory information, then store key aspects of it in your memory, and then perhaps use this to reason about how the trick was done. A magician can prevent a spectator from discovering the method by simply manipulating any one of these processes.

These categories define misdirection in terms of the psychological mechanisms affected. The first set of principles manipulate your perception, preventing you from perceiving selected parts of the performance.

—Gustav Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible

Lawrence R. Alschuler, The Psychopolitics of Liberation: Political Consciousness From a Jungian Perspective

Hildegard von Bingen’s 23 litterae ignotae, letters for her constructed mystical language Lingua Ignota, ca. 1200.

from Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

A table of Chimical Characters in Le Fèvre’s 1670 edition of A Compleat Body of Chymistry.