It's art, duh

“When a man undertakes to create something,” wrote Paracelsus, “he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him.”

Alchemy is an old science, a forerunner of chemistry, best known as a quest to turn any metal into gold. It didn’t start out that way, but it is now known as an occult science.

To be honest, I’ve spent quite a lot of time reading about alchemy, and I don’t know much about it other than that it kind of makes my skin crawl and bores me at the same time. I think they speak in a code language, kind of like Slytherin, but they don’t say it’s a code language. You only know it is one because you immediately start thinking about what’s for lunch or where did you put your yellow socks, while feeling a little dirtier than you normally would while thinking of lunch or socks.

In the 1930s to the 1960s, Salt Lake City was home to a great school of alchemy. According to researcher Richelle Hawks, the Paracelsus Research Society, was a fully functioning school, with classes lasting from a few weeks to up to seven years. The school was advertised via pamphlets, and looked a lot like a bail bondsman’s office.

The building is still here in the heart of the homeland today. I don’t have the exact address, but it was somewhere near 3300 S and 700 E. It is utterly, boringly ordinary and brownish.

Do you ever find yourself MORE curious and confused by things that just blend in? When walking past your neighbors homes, do you think about everything that happens within those walls that goes unspoken in the outside world? Dreams born and dashed within its walls? Blood spilled? Religious awakenings? Birth? Old souls slipping away in the night?

I do. I sometimes think every home and every building is a temple of alchemy, or worship or rebirth or – worst -  a home to agonizingly, slow suicide. The Paracelsus Research Institute is a great example. I bet you’ve seen it a million times without seeing it. Within these walls, a significant part of the U.S. occult practices of the 20^th century spattered forth out of a magik practitioner’s body in that home – and it died inside a manure oven despite being painstakingly fed human blood with great science and care.

This post goes out to Carrie de Azevedo Poulsen for introducing us to the Paracelsus Research Society. Happy Halloween!

Roger the Homunculus

There are many systems of magick (gratuitous “k” included) that I find very interesting. The idea of bending the rules of the world to your personal will. The truth is, many modern scientific accomplishments have their origin and beginnings with magick and occult wisdom. A lot of what we’d consider to be modern science actually evolved from magickal thought and practice. Doesn’t science try bend and change the physical world to our collective will? It is easy to find the origins of chemistry in the ancient practices of alchemy, for example. With science, we just tend to understand the rules of the game a little bit better.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many strange practices and dead ends in magick and alchemy. Take the homunculus. I’d heard of the homunculus before, but about a year or so ago a friend was telling Anna and I about a group here in Salt Lake that was trying to create their own. It is one thing to know about a legend, but to hear that modern people are actually spending their life and time trying to do something so… bizarre. Since that conversation, the homonculus has kind of taken over our imagination, and we seem to come across these strange little people everywhere. In art, jewelry, literature, all over!

The homonculus is a man-made artificial human being, similar to the unthinking and dumb Jewish golem, except the homonculus has it’s own will, personality and is usually thought to be about the size of your thumb. There are many different legendary ways to make a homonculis, but the local SLC alchemists buried a mixture of semen and blood under a pile of dung during the full moon. A fully formed miniature human was supposed to emerge from that pile of dung to do their creator’s bidding, as long as the creator fed it blood. From what I understand, after extracting their experiment from the poop our local alchemist’s thought they might have seen some sort of cell division, but even that is in doubt. Wasn’t successful. How strange is that? I just don’t understand why they’d go through all that trouble. If they wanted to create human life, why not just do it the old fashioned way? Seems like it’d be a lot more enjoyable.