The deeper I get into alchemy, the more I look at components of electional astrology, correspondences and alignments.  Here’s how things shake down for my Yule vigil over Friday night into Saturday.

From sunset to sunrise can be (almost perfectly) broken into nine equal time portions.  I apply an alchemical framework to those divisions, something I first learned as part of a ritualized community but I don’t work with just seven alchemy phases anymore because I feel the classical seven is a good metaphor for teaching but actually incomplete for genuine magickal workings.  I fee the practitioner is able to be more effective by performing Multiplication and Projection after Coagulation, and before cycling back to Calcination.  I like to see how the planetary hours flow when compared to the framework and I look for alignments, what I think of as significant power points, those are the moments that might be appropriate for ritual what-not.

The actual moment of winter solstice is 2:23pm Pacific time.  According to alchemical astrology, Friday is attuned to Congelation and has active/positive energy, and Saturday is not only a Full Moon but it’s attuned to Fixation and is also active/positive, more so than Friday.  This is where stuff I've been doing more internally since Samhain comes out and becomes external work.  This is when the seed of Projectio from Samhain, which was been planted in the fresh black Nigredo and has been undergoing Mortificatio and Putreficatio in the six weeks since will now have heated enough to ignite, and move into the phase of Calcination.  

Christmas has come. The God is in the egg. I have prepared a rug for my God, an expensive red rug from the land of morning. He shall be surrounded by the shimmer of magnificence of his Eastern land. I am the mother, the simple maiden, who gave birth and did not know how. I am the careful father, who protected the maiden. I am the shepherd, who received the message as he guarded his herd at night on the dark fields. - Carl Jung, artwork and writing from, THE RED BOOK  

All of the below times were calculated by a person in Seattle, WA.  Your timings will vary.  When I mark out points of significance, I'm indicating a point that can be used to start, a point that could be the peak in the middle, or a point which could be chosen as a finish.  It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. 

2:13pm - Moon planetary house starts

2:23pm - the Winter Solstice 

2:55pm - Saturn planetary hour starts

3:37pm - Jupiter planetary hour starts

4:19pm, Mars planetary hour starts  

4:20pm - sunset in Seattle and the beginning of the Calcination phase.  Something about a Mars hour colliding with 4:20 reminds me of the 4 of Swords from the Tarot of the Silicon Dawn where the two figures are sitting out the fight for a moment to smoke a pipe together.

5:37pm - Sun planetary hour starts

6:04pm - Dissolution 

6:55pm - Venus planetary hour starts

7:48 pm - Separation

8:13pm - Mercury planetary hour starts

9:31 - Moon planetary hour starts

9:32pm - Conjunction - here we have another alignment, where the Moon hour and Conjunctio work come together.  Alchemically, Conjunction aligns with Venus, the heart and the completion of the Lesser Work.  The Moon in alchemy is Distillation.  How can you work with Moon and Venus energies, to both refine and combine?

10:49pm - Saturn planetary hour starts

11:16pm - Fermentation

12:07am - Jupiter planetary hour starts

1:00am - Distillation

1:25am - Mars planetary hour starts

2:43am - Sun planetary hour starts

2:44am - Coagulation - in alchemy, Coagula is the Sun and the completion of the Great Work, so about a quarter to three in the morning by my reckoning and ritual is double Sun and may be one of the most potent moments of the night.  

4:01am - Venus planetary hour starts

4:28am - Multiplication

5:19am - Mercury planetary hour starts

6:12am - Projection

7:55am - Saturn planetary hour begins Saturday

7:55am - sunrise in Seattle - And with one final alignment, the vigil ends right as a hour of Saturn which starts Saturday begins.  Stay up or plotz as you need.

8:37am - Jupiter planetary hour starts

9:19am - Mars planetary hour starts

9:49am - Full Moon - bonus.  You can work this energy now or tonight.

10:01am - Sun planetary hour starts

What I find really interesting is that I wrote out the alchemical phases on paper first, then marked which points would break the nine into three equal chunks and when I added the planetary hours, they aligned with the start, the two division points and the end.  That’s part of why I opted to share this.  

Back in May 2018, a post on Tumblr (now deleted, I wonder what it was?) triggered me to do some lab work around the New Moon.  I was given freshly-laid eggs laid that morning and suddenly I could sense that one of those bouts of magickal formulation was about to happen.  Saffron and  chamomile (both grown by me), and a variation on Oil of Egg, all infused together.  It takes gold to make gold.  I dream in clumps, not singularly. 

The eggs came from my body worker, who lives just a dozen or so blocks away, and were hard-boiled Sunday evening (Sun day, Moon hour).  I set an alarm for early Monday morning to wake up just ahead of the actual new Moon at 4:47am.  I went from sleep to performing alchemical processes in just over 20 minutes with no shower or breakfast.  I wake up like a light switch.  

I got the saffron into the vodka and into the cordial maker and the egg yolks into the oven at the start of the new moon.   The cordial maker was set to run for 24 hours.  After just a couple hours, the saffron released all it’s color and bleached out completely.

The egg yolks spent a few planetary hours in the oven at a very low temp, drying out.  I turned and crumbled them once per planetary hour.  They released water content and got discernibly oily, which is the point.  

At the first hour of the Sun on Tuesday, the chamomile was added.  After that, the yolks went into the fridge, and I went back to sleep for a couple more hours.  The infuser runs on a timer, so it just kept infusing right along.

Just after 3:30pm, when the next hour of the Sun started, I added the cooked, dried yolks to the mix, and left the blend to complete the timer cycle.

Post-active crafting thought: Citrinitas, duh.  Yellow, yellow and more yellow occurrences and while it has been saffron for a while I didn’t really think Citrinitas until NOW.  Okay, okay, clue-by-four received.  

I filtered the blend and put it back into the cordial maker for another six hours to get sweetened and mellow a bit, and become a cordial instead of a tincture.  

The unsweetened taste has too much bite and the chamomile and saffron should reappear a bit flavor-wise with sweetening. Oil of Egg quality readily apparent in the mouth of it. That is some wildly oily fluid.  

And it’s the absolute most yellow thing I’ve ever made too.  May Moon Citrinitas Cordial.

Long time no alchemic blogging.  Really, 2017 and 2018 have been those kinds of years.  I have few things I formulated that I will have to note here, like my wild Citrinitas Cordial.

I think I finally got enough saffron in my 2018 crop to go forward with the recipe that got me started on saffron in the first place, almost eight years ago: the Elixir of Propriety.  This is a medicine crafted by Paracelsus, and one which he regarded most highly.  I'm not using his exact 16th century formula because it requires a Pelican, a type of glassware I do not have.  And it takes several months to make following his process.

But this essential formula stayed in play up until the early 20th century, with many healers compounding their own versions.  One recipe which caught my attention and seems quite replicable is from Herman Boorhaave from the 18th century.  This version also uses vinegar.  The vinegar base would be especially suited to using my radiant heat cordial infuser but it needs about three cups of liquid to operate and as near as I can calculate, I'm need to have about 5 ounces of vinegar based on the weight of my ingredients.

“Take choice aloes, saffron, and myrrh, of each half an ounce, cut and bruise them, put them into a tall bolt-head, pour twenty times their own weight of the strongest distilled vinegar thereon, let them simmer together in our little wooden furnace for twelve hours: now suffer the whole to rest, that the fæces may subside, and gently strain off the pure liquor through a thin linen; put half the quantity of distilled vinegar to the remainder, boil and proceed as before, and throw away the fæces. Mix the two tinctures together, and distil with a gentle fire till the whole is thickened to a third; keep the vinegar that comes over for the same use; and what remains behind is the Elixir Proprietatis, made with distilled vinegar.”

I still have a small amount of saffron from last year's crop, but I'd like to make a couple dishes for the impending winter solstice with saffron in them, as that's how it gets used by so many European cultures, so I don't want to put every thread I can find in the house into this.  However, as I sit here writing this, my brain is telling me I should use the ingredients I have, use the cordial infuser even if the product will be a lesser concentration than traditional, and let the 12 hours of simmering take place on the actual winter solstice.  My vigil, due to my northern latitude, is almost sixteen hours, and since I want to share my night between my options (home vigil and friends vigil) that could actually work, where I start the elixir infusing early in the vigil and that part runs overnight.  In the morning vigil hours, I can set the elixir to rest, and then after I sleep for a while, I can finish the reduction and thickening process that afternoon while still enjoying the full moon and alchemically fixative influences.

I'm liking this plan.  Time to mix up enough saffron paste to cover my cooking needs, and then I need to figure the weight of everything I have left and that will go in the elixir.

Ten months.  This past year has not been as outwardly productive, and yet there have been so many internal shifts and changes.  It continues primarily as such, both comforting and uncomfortable in its processes. 

On and off as I have done lab work, there was always the vagaries of the fountain pump to contend with.  That's what you get when you accept a gift of a free, used pump and then do things to it that are non-fountain-like.  After many experiments where I felt the pump was on its last legs....I took a bit of time and online credit and now have a new pump for the condenser portion of my distiller.  When I last searched for new pumps, pricing was double what I found this go around. 

I sort of love the Pagan heresy in the quote above, that fire isn't really an element.  That's just me, continually poking at shit that stirs people up. 

Also over the mundane holiday season, I had the opportunity to unpack a shipment of gifted meat for another person, stuff where pounds and pounds arrive, specially packed with dry ice and sent overnight.  The sort of shipment that comes in an incredibly dense and thick foam insulation container.  The sort of thing that can act as a cooler, but with a few easy modifications, could potentially become a macerating vessel.  This would be a simple as making just enough of an opening somewhere to run a power cord into the container and then it's your pick of either a low wattage lightbulb or an old heating pad that preferably doesn't have a shut-off feature.  This is where you can then gently warm things. 

Why would you gently warm things?  Because that's actually how most lab processes start, with Putrefaction or Maceration.  Only purely inner alchemists are the folks who think you just zip straight into 'burn it to white ash' and even the ones who really know what they are doing don't act like that.  They hang back and start ritual slowly, letting others get all hot and bothered right off the bat.  Warming up slowly before getting on with it actually works well for the predominant number of human activities but we have a really good thing about "do as I say, but don't watch how I actually do it" going in our modern culture at the moment.

Solstice evening I got a big batch of roses out of my freezer from when this one bush all came into bloom simultaneously over the summer, right near the summer solstice, and distilled rose water from that.  You can't do steam with roses, the petals wilt into mush, this calls for a bath distillation.  Like in a big cooking pot.  Once that step was done, I ground up the bottle of expired saffron that an acquaintance gave me and added it to steep.  I strained it the next day.  That is the most yellow-stainingest fluid I have ever created.  But it also shows that fabrics which are orange, which people call saffron-colored are not actually dyed with saffron.  The fluid looks orange but the stain is close to lemon yellow when fresh, and butter yellow when faded.  Not actually orange at all.

I have a couple of spagyrics that I wish to make, and with that process comes Calcination.  It's how most people think of the start of the alchemical process, skipping the Putrefaction and Mortificatio that come ahead of it.  That's one of the first lessons of lab alchemy versus a purely spiritual approach.  It becomes clear that almost no process starts with fire, and that spiritual alchemy probably shouldn't either.

Recently, there was a post I read on Tumblr from an acquaintance, himself working on Calcination, and he was describing how difficult it was to achieve it.  He had plant material in a closed crucible in his home oven, running as hot as it could for several hours, and did not have white ash.  I sat down, went over a lot of my notes, looked in a few books and here's my post-Calcination interpretation of what is happening.  Or more accurately what is not happening.

Calcination is where a material is burnt to the point of white ash.  As much as a kitchen oven will clean itself by burning the layer of cooking grease on it's interior to ash, that does not mean a stove can burn anything else to white ash.  In all honesty, it's not hot enough.  The whole point of an oven is to provide controlled, precise heat so as to NOT burn what you are heating.

Really hot fires have access to lots of oxygen, and they have extreme temperatures.  Let's look at campfires.  They burn to white ash if made hot enough, but will leave blacken chunks of charred wood if not.  Campfires burn between 700-1200 degrees depending on the wood used, the structure of the fire (how the wood is stacked) and turbulence (airflow over the burning material).

The first thing Robert Bartlett said to us about calcination  when I took his Prima class was not to do it in our kitchens, and then he just started laughing.  Apparently he gets asked about this all the time.  Unless you have a wood-burning stove, and calcine inside that (which Robert sometimes does), a conventional cooking stove is not the tool to be using.  Aside from a lack of heat, you also don't want all the crap that gets burnt off to get in your house or all over where you prepare food.  You're doing chemistry, not baking a cake. 

So, if kitchens are not the place to calcine, then what?

Good question.  Calcination is best accomplished in the open air, with an open container, over open flame.  Get outside and use your barbecue or a camp stove or a fire.  Put your material to be calcined into a steel container.  Have something with which to turn or stir the material as it cooks. 

If you have plant material that has been in pure grain alcohol, you can light the alcohol and burn the material somewhat, but that's not enough fuel to consume the entire quantity at a level to produce white ash.  That's another Calcination assumption beginning alchemists make that doesn't work for them. 

With a kitchen stove, you can heat a material for five or six hours and just have black carbon.  Over a camp stove, you can usually get to white ash in an hour because the area you are heating is focused and concentrated. It will always vary with what you are working with, and how large a quantity you are attempting to burn. 

Take any and all fire precautions.  Wear fire gloves when handling anything you have been heating, even if only for a little while.