The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

Preface
Colleagues often ask me why I wrote this unusual book. At first,
it was simply so I could sleep at night. It was a way to marshal the
extraordinary facts and histories that constantly rotated in my mind and
became graphically alive at bedtime! Now I think my reason is to restore,
in a humble way, richness to the mystery tradition at a time when the old
arts of the philosopher are all but lost.
There are many paths to the mysteries. The most predominant
organizations in western societies are usually composed of people we
might call literalists. They would not like the more accurate label of antiphilosophers.
Literalists believe their traditional histories are unique,
explain everything and provide enough wisdom to make the rest of
civilization irrelevant. Usually, they treat their stories as fact rather than
myth and rarely think about it any further. These people often join many
societies; yet groan at the mention of a lecture. Archeology provides
them interesting asides but discoveries are rarely important enough to
change the faith.
Then there are capital P and small p philosophers. Capital P
philosophers deride literalists and small p philosophers alike as
fundamentalists, a dirty word. These capital P philosophers know all
myths are just that, myths without a historical basis. Unless archeology
proves something happened then it did not, and the myth is just a story
having no more merit than a fairy-tale.
This book is for the small p or Gnostic philosophers who have a
bit each way when it comes to myth. They see myth as having merit and
are not surprised when archeologists discover a Troy, or if they hear a
story in the Bible is proved true. Most think that Atlantis will eventually
be located. Small p philosophers see myths representing important
elements of culture and if not based on facts then often based on soft
facts. One such soft fact is alchemy. Its goal is the Philosophers’ Stone.
This book traces the chemistry and philosophy of the
Philosophers’ Stone from first dynasty Egypt and Mesopotamia through
the Commagene region of Turkey, to Israel, France and England. It
particularly focuses on mystery religions and philosophical schools that
co-existed over thousands of years.
The keys to understanding the Commagene region are metallurgy
and alchemy. There is a remarkably close connection between metals,
alchemy, perhaps the true Holy Grail and many esoteric traditions of the
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