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What is Alchemy?

To: alt.metaphysics.alchemy
From: adepti 
Subject: What is Alchemy?
Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2003 14:29:01 -0500

Reformated, with fewer typos. http://www.adepti.com/docs/alchemy.pdf

"What is Alchemy?", published anonymously by Arthur Edward Waite.

From "Hermetic Papers of A.E. Waite", edited by R.A Gilbert (Aquarian
Press, 1987):

"[First printed in the monthly journal The Unknown World from August to
December 1894 and in April, 1895. It was reprinted in The Alchemical
Papers of Arthur Edward Waite, ed. J. Ray Shute, Monroe, N.C., 1939,
a privately printed collection limited to seventy copies.]

In his earlier writings on alchemy Waite maintained that the spiritual
interpretation of alchemy was first systematically presented by Mrs.
Atwood in her Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery -a point of
view that he was later to reject completely, to the extent of saying
that the book 'is not, however, final or satisfactory as a critical
study, indeed, in some respects it is a morass rather than a pathway'
(The Secret Tradition in Freemasony, 1911, Vol.2, p. 414). For this he
was taken to task, in the pages of the Occult Review, by Isabelle de
Steiger; but he justified himself by stating that 'What I said of the
Suggestive Enquiry in 1888 and 1893 was in the light of my knowledge at
those dates; that which I have recorded since has been under a fuller
and clearer light' (Occult Review, Vol. 15, No.1. January 1912, p. 50).
Nonetheless, his early essays on alchemy retain their value for the
obscure information they contain and for their critical comments on
Madame Blavatsky's dubious manipulation of her source material on
alchemy."

Text scanned from the periodical "The Unknown World".

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