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.  

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. 

It was while I was growing my microbial leather that I figured it out.  Alchemically my life is about fermentation right now.  Everything I read or hear that I don't like makes me feel like my face is making the same face I feel when I smell fermenting material.  Slightly sour.  I had just gotten some books from the library on bread-making, having made poolish starter bread for a few years now and wanting to get into levain, and suddenly my neighborhood blog announces there is a new backyard bakery opening just one street over from my house, specialzing in levain breads and offering a bread share program where they deliver to your house once a week.  Then I had a conversation with someone and something they said made me feel my fermentation smell face and inside I had the "a-ha!" moment.

"Take oil of olive, honey, rectified spirit of wine, of each a pint.  Distill them all together in ashes.  Then separate all the phlegm from the oils which will be distinguished by many colors.  Put all these colors into a pelican, and add to them the third part of the essence of balm and sallendine, and digest them for the space of a month.  Then keep it for use.  The liquor is so subtle that it penetrates everything."

- "Elixir Substilitatis" from ALCHEMY RISING: THE GREEN BOOK, Scarlet Imprint, 2015.

So I've got some rough sheets of microbial leather drying.  One is very thick and one very thin.  It was a nice experiment but it's clear the time to master the growing would be longer than I wish for general use.  Moving on to levain and continuing to explore fermentation will be more useful overall.  I'm going to try one of the bread shares for four weeks, where I will get a loaf of bread per week.  I need to observe my desire/consumption at that rate and volume, and see what this baker's bread is like.  I also need to read up on seed cultures and mother cultures and watch the thrift stores for containers and a few tools. 

It's not just doing fermentation, it's acting like fermentation.  I have to go a little slower than I might prefer.  I have to watch how things develop more.  I have to trust that smelling bad psychically can be a sign of either bad or good, and I have to pay attention to tell the difference.  I have some person work that is forming, a series of three rituals, and as they came into being and went from one ritual to three, I realized that was a fermentation too.  That work is in the fall and winter.  My pendulum and working with alchemical timings led to specific dates and influences, and it's clear I have to ferment before and between those works, like how dough is folded and proofed while developing. 

Talking with a friend about sweetening work led to a discussion of how I'm always just a bit off the usual, and that led to "what if the flavor I've been looking for all this time isn't sweet?"  More reading and meditating and it's clear that where most people might do sweetening work magickally, the flavor that is more appropriate to the feelings I want is umami.  All the fermented foods are in that grouping. Just like my tiny house has to be designed for how I am going to use it, I have to take the time to find the strange, liminal counterparts to everything I do in my magick too.

Alchemy is a distillation process by which a great quantity of matter is purified until there is a small amount of something related but different at the end.  How one goes from a conventional, modern, Western lifestyle to one of a tiny houser is not unlike alchemy.  It's just that suddenly my equation for calculating dross just shifted so that something like ninety percent of my life is now judged as dross.

Some aspects of the lifestyle really do suit me and hopefully, I will find a way to exist inside current society in a way that is more comfortable for me by making these shifts.  So far, shifting over to a slightly parallel track just feels...wrenching...  I had an excellent conversation with my housemate the other day, as she too is working to live in a way that is more "true" and also finds it discomfiting in similar ways when moving away from the predominant mainstream.  

My first official load of downsizing went to the thrift store the other day when I was out doing errands with my father.  I have plans to ditch another infinitely significant load this coming weekend, as I will need a vehicle to get rid of what I have on hand.  The city is doing a recycle event where they will take anything with a plug.  I'm going to take advantage of that and let go of a desktop computer, a large television, a carousel DVD player and a VHS player.  Thirty years of technology now obsolete.  Everything will be environmentally recycled, reclaimed and disposed of properly.   

The impulses that attach us to things is strange.  Right before I came home from Las Vegas, my friend there gave me five teacups, things she'd purchased just for me...despite knowing that I had just spent three months getting rid of possessions in her home and about to come home to mine and attempt to get rid of even more.  I just took them to be polite and now they are in a pile to be donated away at the next opportunity.  I have yet another load of books the pendulum separated out for removal, and it's even larger than the last two chunks I sold.  There's a good chance those will remain piled on hand until I head south for Ashland and pass through Portland.  If I have to let go of books, I'm going to do it at Powell's.