r/alchemy

The Concept 'awakening Lilith' in the inner Alchemy, how can you explain it,and does this image align with the main idea?

The videogame is still in development and won't be out until next year. But if we had to share the board full of images we've gathered and all the books we have read, this post would be endless. There's still so much work to do, but all the imaginary, potion crafting, and esotericism that the game has fits this subreddit's theme. The game's name is AlcheMice!

We'd love to hear your thoughts!

I found a book the other day that featured on its cover what I later on found out was an alchemical emblem, and I've since become fascinated and perplexed about them. any insight would be greatly appreciated

My grandfather dug this up while tilling a small plot of land to plant potatoes, in a very remote village in Portugal (only accessible by 4x4). It was wrapped in a velvet pouch, its heavy and was buried in the soil.
I took it to a large antique dealer who confirmed it’s “esoteric” but had never seen this exact design before, even after searching his own reference photos.
Any help identifying the specific origin or symbolism would be hugely appreciated. Happy to share more photos.

I’ve managed to identify most of them except the ones with question marks. Would anyone be nice enough to maybe share what they are?

Sorry for spamming the brimstone emoji because the title needs to have 50 letters

What if the story of the nahualli is, in itself, an alchemical narrative?

In the mesoamerican worldview, every person is born with a sacred connection to an aspect of nature, most often an animal such as a jaguar, eagle, coyote, or hummingbird. This companion isn't simply symbolic; it reflects something essential about the person's character, destiny, and inner nature.

But the nahualli was something more.

The nahualli was the individual who consciously cultivated that relationship until transformation became possible. Through ritual, discipline, altered states of consciousness, and profound self knowledge, they were believed to project themselves into, or even become, their animal counterpart.

Whether one interprets this literally, psychologically, or spiritually isn't what fascinates me.

What fascinates me is the process.

To me, it resembles an alchemical operation.

The human identity is broken down. Instinct is confronted instead of avoided. The boundary between the civilized self and the wild self begins to dissolve. Eventually, something new emerges, not by becoming something different, but by remembering what was already there beneath the surface.

With that idea in mind, I composed a soundscape that narrates this transformation.

The journey begins with the breath of a pre hispanic ceramic jaguar whistle that belonged to my grandmother, a traditional healer from the Puebla and Veracruz mountains in Mexico. Rather than using the whistle as an instrument, I treated it as the opening of the vessel, the first breath before transformation. Fire, deep percussion, and low resonances follow, representing the confrontation with the most instinctive layers of the self.

As the piece unfolds, the listener enters an acoustic landscape built from field recordings gathered in those same mountains: wind, goat bells, birds, and a short poem recited in Náhuatl. This is the stage where identity becomes porous, where memory, ancestry, and landscape cease to feel separate.

The final movement gradually dissolves all recognizable musical elements into an almost empty sonic field centered on slow pulses and sustained resonance. Everything unnecessary falls away. What remains is stillness.

Not an ending. A transmutation.

I don't claim this is "how" the nahualli experience was understood historically. It's simply the symbolic reading that emerged while composing the piece, a sonic interpretation of transformation through an alchemical lens.

I'd be genuinely interested in hearing how others in this community interpret the parallels. Does the nahualli resonate with any alchemical archetypes or stages that come to mind?

For anyone curious, I'll leave the complete soundscape here! I'd love to know whether the narrative comes through without any explanation at all...

Dr. Karsten was an inner-circle collaborator, editor, and the official German translator for Frater Albertus. These are his personal copies. I have his copies of The Alchemist's handbook , Praxis Spagyrica Philosophica and Practical Alchemy in the Twentieth Century (in German). These are also signed and numbered by Frater Albertus.

I have other books from his library as well: The Hermetic Museum Vol. 1 & 2, a 4 volume set of Alchemy published by Vincent Stuart Ltd only 500 impressions, Alan Leo set of Astrological Text Books, etc.

Although a modest value book, Prelude to Chemistry, it is signed by Frater Albertus to Dr. Karsten by Frater Albertus' real name with his wife. Newspaper clipping of his passing is included.

Dr. Karsten's library stamp is included on all of these books and other books I have of his.

Made by a modern adaptation of the Hartmann process. If there's interest I'll tell you where I learned it.

The milky liquid is one dose of the Ens in 30mL of water.

Catnip is very anxiolytic and dissolves tension in the body, Oak is very focussing and sharpens the internal view.

Image: The Slav Epic cycle No.20: The Apotheosis of the Slavs, Slavs for Humanity (1926) - Alphonse Mucha

Spirit entered the living unity of soul and body as a dividing power. It turns participation into observation, rhythm into measure, image into concept, and the living self into an ego that stands apart from the world. In this sense, spirit appears as the enemy, not merely because it thinks, but because it mistakes its abstractions for reality and its distance for freedom.

Yet perhaps the best possible world is not one in which separation never appears, but one in which separation can be experienced without ever becoming ultimate. The illusion of division is allowed because even estrangement can become a path of recognition. Unity passes through the dream of otherness and returns conscious of what it had always been.

History is therefore the history of the ego where it attempted to secure its imagined independence through naming, measuring, possessing, and mastering. It imagined it needed to be saved or that it was the true master of the cosmos. The ego created a world of objects because it had to first make the world other before it could rule over it. It called this distance knowledge and this mastery freedom, while beneath both remained the unbroken life of soul and body.

Returning does not mean travelling backward into a lost age or destroying consciousness. It means relinquishing the ego’s claim to sovereignty. The ego is not annihilated but restored to its proper scale, a function within life rather than the ruler of life. Spirit, insofar as it can be reconciled, ceases to stand over life and becomes its servant, thought without domination, distinction without severance, and consciousness without exile.

Soul and body do not need to be reunited, because they were never truly divided. What must end is our allegiance to the division. How many have chosen a side? Sides aren’t a real thing, haha, only perpetuation of the confusion. The world appears lost in that division today, or because of it. The ego has played all its cards and now is collapsing back into itself. So we see every kind of delusion and confusion.

We can’t think, religion, science, or politic our way out of this.

Return is not an achievement but a recognition, not the recovery of something absent but the acceptance of what has always been true. We do not cross the distance separating us from life, we awaken to the fact that the distance existed only in the act of measuring it.

There is no real distance between anything.

History is our long dream of separation.

Awakening is the discovery that no one ever left.

It’s all gonna be just fine, it always has been and will be just fine.

We are how cosmos knows itself.

When you awaken, the dream of “I” will dissipate.

There won’t even be any mess to clean up.

Your ashes will blow away in the wind.

Sounds awful to the grasping ego, I know.

It’s not at all.

It’s perfectly natural.

What I’m pointing to is jivanmukta, deep surrender to the mystery of Daath.

The knowing of not-knowing, doing not-doing.

It feels like extinction.

Like the blowing out of the flame of life.

But this is where we become most truly, madly, deeply ourselves.

This is Ipsissimus.

This is the chemical marriage.

Asar un nefer.

From here, a state of spontaneous union, we may exist in samadhi.

What is the name of God?

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, “I AM what I AM.”

You are the wind.

To be the wind is sahaja samadhi.

In “I-I” eternally, there is no night and day or ignorance.

Sing prayers and praises at our good fortune!

Fully participate with whatever arises before you.

Those strange attractors in your life are all drawing you toward this…

Apotheosis!