Frater Albertus, The Alchemist’s Handbook: A Practical Manual, Samuel Weiser, York Beach, Maine, 1974.
“Frater Albertus” was the pseudonym of Dr. Albert Riedel who was born in Dresden, Germany in 1911. In the second half of his life he operated the Paracelsus Research Institute in Salt Lake City where he also wrote The Alchemist of the Rocky Mountains. The initial illustration of The Alchemist’s Handbook is a painting, likely by Albertus, of a dozen robed men and women walking toward a circular temple. The caption below states that, “Out of the mists of doubt and despair, Alchemy is one of the gateways into the sacred mysteries, at the very heart of life, which can be entered through other paths as well.”
Albertus emphasizes the crucially important inter-relationship between inner and outer. “If one has not,” he writes, “undergone the Alchemy of the inner self, or transcendental Alchemy, as it has been termed, he or she will find it extremely difficult to obtain results in his or her practical laboratory experimentation.” Real transmutation, he emphasizes, “always takes place on a higher plane.” We must “do this inner work ourselves,” he reminds us. “No one can do it for us.”
Albertus describes the culmination of generation of the philosopher’s stone:
“Having thus completed the operation, let the vessel cool, and on opening it you will perceive your matter to be fixed into a ponderous mass, thoroughly of a scarlet color, which is easily reduced to powder by scraping, and in being heated in the fire flows like wax, without smoking, flaming, or loss of substance, returning when cold to its former fixity, heavier than gold, bulk for bulk, yet easily dissolved in any liquid, in which a few grains being taken its operation most wonderfully pervades the human body, to the extirpation of all disorders, prolonging life by its use to its utmost period; and hence it has obtained the appellation of Panacea or universal remedy.”
Underlying the practice of alchemy is the presence of “spirit” within all of the kingdoms of matter. Albertus cites Basil Valentine’s statement that:
“You should know that all things contain operative and vital spirits which derive their substance and nourishment from their bodies; nor are the elements themselves without these spirits. Human beings and animals have within them an operative and vitalizing spirit, and if it forsakes them, nothing but a dead body is left. Herbs and trees have spirits of health, else no art could turn them to medicinal uses. In the same way minerals and metals possess vital spirits which constitute their whole strength and goodness; for what has no spirit has no life, or vitalizing power.”
This inner spirit can itself be even further purified, yeilding the “quintessence” of the universal life force. To achieve this, all impurities must be purged. Chaos must become order. These processes must occur within us as well as “outside” and in union with each other. The alchemist must go beyond false and illusory distinctions between his or her own interior world and what seems, to most, to be “outside us”.
Alchemy, Albertus asserts, is the “very truth of philosophy itself.” Transmutation of metals, he declares, is a mere beginning. This accomplishment, however, “may justly be said to have opened the gates of Nature, and cleared the way for profounder and more advanced study.” Sustained investigation “of the workings of Nature enable the adept to ultimately lift the veil, and enter her innermost sanctuary.” When the “inner gates of secret knowledge” are finally, at the completion of this quest, “flung open”, Albertus entreats those who enter there “not to reveal this mystery to any unworthy person.”
The alchemist must become profoundly conversant in the interplay between mind and matter. “All that IS,” Albertus reminds us, “exists because of our own consciousness.” For the alchemist, Albertus reiterates, all, including all that is down within the alchemist himself or herself, is very much alive. At the heart of all creation is spirit, soul, consciousness, the unfolding of the divine quintessence. The task of the alchemist is to nurture, feed, and foster this spark, this seed, to its full fruition.
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