An important part of his work is to attempt an analysis of and commentary on the ideas and symbolism of key hermetic works. In he began to produce a series of in-depth study courses on the interpretation of alchemical symbolism.
He is especially drawn to the rich vein of allegorical and symbolic material in the alchemical tradition. To make these more accessible to the modern eye he has produced coloured versions of key woodcuts and engraved alchemical emblems. He has also made some facsimile paintings oil on canvas of alchemical pictures. I have sometimes indicated how certain of these diagrams can be seen to have an underlying geometric skeleton structure upon which the symbols are arrayed.
However, I never analysed this aspect in great depth and merely pointed out some simple geometric features. I had not considered that this aspect was of paramount importance, until I recently requested from the British Library a microfilm of an important Rosicrucian book in their collection, the 'Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum' of Theophilus Schweighardt, published in Kabbalistic Cosmology Adam McLean - alchemy dial.
Quantum Consciousness Adam McLean - alchemy dial. There was a grand platonic metaphysical clockwork, as it were, through which our inner world was linked by means of a hierarchy of beings and planes to the highest unity of the Divine.
This view though comforting is philosophically unsound, and the developments in thought since the early 17th century have made such a hermetic world view untenable and philosophically naive.
So do we now have to abandon such a beautiful and spiritual world view and adopt the prevailing reductionist materialist conception of the world which has become accepted in the intellectual tradition of the West?
I am not so sure. In treating our consciousness as if it were a digital computer or deterministic machine after the model of 19th century science, I believe we foster a limited and false view of our inner world. We must now take the step towards a quantum view of consciousness, recognising that at its base and root our consciousness behaves like the ever flowing sea of the sub-atomic world.
The ancient hermeticists pictured consciousness as the "Inner Mercury". The brain can no longer be seen as a vast piece of organic clockwork, but as a subtle device amplifying quantum events. If we trace a nerve impulse down to its root, there lies a quantum uncertainty, a sea of probability. Based in the UK, he has been writing and researching alchemical and hermetic literature for many years.
Between and he edited the Hermetic Journal and during those years he also began publishing the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks , the important series of twenty seven editions of key source texts of the hermetic tradition. From through he was supported by the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica to undertake research into hermetic texts. This enabled him to devote much of his time to research and projects making alchemical ideas available to people. In , when the internet became more widely available, he began to construct the alchemy web site in order to make alchemical ideas more accessible to the wider community.
More Some of these he has transcribed and published in the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks and other related series which are sold through the alchemy web bookshop. The Alchemy Web Site on Levity. The Alchemy of Sculpture Pangolin Editions epub.
The Alchemy of Ecstasy epub. How to read alchemical texts : A study course for the perplexed. Click for access to different sections. Divided into over sections and providing tens of thousands of pages of text, over images, over complete alchemical texts, extensive bibliographical material on the printed books and manuscripts, numerous articles, introductory and general reference material on alchemy.
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