Monthly Archives: November 2010

“…and we must put aside the aside the conventional image of the alchemist as a threadbare, etiolated individual, filthy and stinking from sulphurous smoke and half-poisoned by mercury, and picture a well-dressed, articulate man surrounded by noble men and women in a vaulted chamber of a castle or palace, lecturing deferentially to people who most certainly well understood what he was talking about and who had examined his equipment to obviate any chances of fraud. Demonstrations by members of the Academie des Sciences in the presence of Louis XIV, or by Fellows of the Royal Society of London before Charles II, provide close parallels, the demonstrators being some of the foremost scientists of the day.” – P.G. Maxwell-Stewart, “The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy”

veryone judges by appearances, and yet they should not. London, for all its history and culture, is just barely more than a filthy industrial town. The scientists and heralds of new hope in the new age of technology have done nothing to usher in the New Aeon into the backstreet squalor that surrounds their hallowed, columned halls. We, the Magus, have kept close to our Highest Ideals and strove very toward them, and we struggle against the Masters that through their production, and technology and promise of work in their gilded age, offer thinly disguised collars of slavery to those who would but hand over both their minds and souls and settle for a pittance for the privilege to wait upon their lords and masters. Those industrial barrons fear that we can look at their brave new world and see the opposite of the dark moonlight that we do not fear to embrace. Continue reading →