ALCHEMY GUILD SYMBOLS

About Our Website Flash Intro (Play)

    The Macromedia Flash introduction on the home page of our website is meant to a 20-second summary of alchemical philosophy. The red, chaotic screenshot that appears for a split-second before the intro plays represents the beginning of the Great Work -- the First Matter from which all created things emerge. The seven turning pages represent the sequential operations of alchemy that must be undertaken to expose the essence or "light within" of the substance at hand. The ensuing "light show" shows the process of creation emerging from the primal chaos, as the Light fashions reality by transforming energy and matter. This original Light, which curls in upon itself like a serpent, is the true Source of our reality. On the microcosmic scale, this Light is the light of consciousness, which the alchemists saw as a force in nature. By purifying and focusing this inner light, the alchemists accomplished amazing transformations. In the concluding scenes, the focused light suddenly expands into the universe from the microcosmic center, which is the mind of the alchemist and the spiritual light carried by all sentient beings. At the very end of the movie, the visitor is returned to the chaos in a screenshot lasting only 1/10 of a second. It is left up to the visitor whether to enter the site or move on.  

 

Traditional Guild Seal

    The traditional seal of the Guild dates to its founding. The snake eating its own tail is the Ouroboros, symbol of the rhythm of transformation and inherent unity of the universe. Within the Ouroboros (emerging from the clouds of spirit and fire) are two hands grasping one another, which is symbolic of the Great Work and cooperation between members of the Guild. The Guild motto "Solve et Coagula" is a Latin phrase meaning "dissolve and coagulate." It is short for Solvite corpora et coagulate spiritus, which means "dissolve the body (or matter) and coagulate the spirit (or energetic essence). This principle is the foundation of the art of spagyrics and all alchemical transformation.

 

IAG Esoteric SealEsoteric Guild Insignia

     The esoteric guild insignia contains many secret meanings discernible by adept members. The acronym V.I.T.R.I.O.L. stands for the Latin expression "Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem," which means "Visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying (correcting or purifying) what you find there, you will discover the hidden stone. A similar phrase V.I.T.R.I.O.L.U.M. used in alchemical literature is formed by the Latin expression "Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem Veram Medicinam", which means "Visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying you will find the hidden stone, which is the true medicine."

Modern Guild Logo

    The modern insignia or logo of the Alchemy Guild is an abstract depiction of the three archetypal forces of creation coming together to form a new manifestation. The Tria Prima are the three primordial principles of creation and potential transformation that are inherent in all things. They are known to Taoists as the Three Supernals, in Celtic lore as the Triquerta, and in the pagan tradition as the Triskele. The alchemists called them Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt. To modern scientists, they are Energy, Light, and Matter. On the personal level, they are Spirit, Mind, and Body. These three primal forces are what make up the First Matter, and their separation, rectification, and reunion are what transforms the chaotic mass into the perfected Stone. This process of dissolution (Solve) and reconstitution (Coagula) "perfects" any substance or any situation, whether it be changing lead into gold or soul into spirit. 

 

The Alchemy Guild has commissioned an artisan to handcraft a unisex ring showing our symbolic logo. The custom-made GUILD SIGNET RING is solid metal and contains no enamel or glazing. The dark background is a result of deliberate oxidation of the silver. The fusion of silver and gold in this beautiful creation is an appropriate metaphor for the sacred marriage of lunar and solar energies. You may have the inside of the ring engraved with an inscription such as a date and initials (10-character maximum). You may also have the Alchemy Guild cipher (John Dee's Monad shown atMonad right below) engraved on the inside front of the ring. Determine your ring size from these Ring Sizing Charts. These are discounted prices for current Guild members only, and your membership status will be verified before the order is commissioned. Pricing depends on current market value of gold and silver. Email info@alchemyguild.org with your ring size for pricing and delivery. Available options are:

ORGANIZATION OF THE ALCHEMY GUILD

 The current organizational structure of the Alchemy Guild is based on the kabalistic Tree of Life (shown at left). Kether represents the Source, the Sun Behind the Sun, or Ultimate Light that is beyond the Guild yet is the ultimate source of consciousness for all its members. In hermetic teachings, the source of human consciousness is not in the physical body. This Source is beyond duality and is accessed in what are referred to as Light Meetings, which are outside time and space and take place in the purified light of the Adept’s True Imagination. During Light Meetings, Adepts connect with the unitary Source and with other members throughout the world, as well as past masters and ancient alchemists.

The organization of the Guild enters the duality (or energetic tension of opposites) of the manifested world at the level of Binah-Chokmah, which represent the elected leaders of the Guild. The Guild has two presidents who carry this archetypal duality. The Lunar (or Binah) President (currently Hans Schimmer) must be born in the sign of Cancer to be elected. He or she represents the conservative, contractive, traditional, legal, and protective aspects of the Guild. The Solar (or Chokmah) President (currently Dennis Hauck) must be born in the sign of Aries to be elected. He or she represents the liberal, expansive, adaptive, inventive, and experimental aspects of the Guild. The dual presidents of the Guild are required to divulge their names and contact information publicly and remain available at all times for Guild business.

Both presidents are equal members of the Board of Governors, which is composed four other members representing the functions of Geburah, Chesed, Hod, and Netzach. The Geburah person represents the strategic negative, complaining, or contractive opinions of the membership, while the Chesod person represent the strategic positive, praising, or expansive opinions of the membership. The Hod person is the Guild accountant and auditor and also head of marketing and recruitment. The Netzach person is the membership director and also manages employees and volunteers, who carry out the daily work and projects of the Guild.

In the organization of the Guild, the central pillar represents the expressions of First Matter as it manifests to form the Guild body. Kether is the mystical Source of Light that guides Guild intention and activities. Daath is the accumulated knowledge and archives of the Guild that is part of a hidden Underground River of wisdom that flows unbroken from ancient times. Tiphareth is the heart of the Guild, its diverse and dedicated membership. Yesod is the imagination, life force, and determination that members give the Guild to keep it alive and functioning in the Great Work. Malkuth is the fundamental requirement of membership dues, donations, sales, and physical buildings and meeting places to create the physical presence of the Guild in the created world.

 

THE GUILD SEAL AND MOTTO

 The motto of the Alchemy Guild is the basic spagyric formula of Solve et Coagula (Dissolve and Coagulate). It is a shortened form of the phrase Solvite Corpora et Coagulate Spiritus (Dissolve the Body and Coagulate the Spirit). This ancient formula is a succinct summary of the Great Work and how it is accomplished.

The seal of the International Alchemy Guild is based on an old Guild emblem. It depicts the mystical Ouroboros representing the universal hermetic principle that “All Is One.” At the center of the emblem are a pair of hands emerging from clouds and generating fire. It is symbolic of the coming-together of alchemists both in spirit and in physical reality to generate the Fire of transformation. Fire is the agent of transformation, and alchemists spent so much time discussing it, they were known as “Philosophers of Fire.” In the seal, it represents both the fire of the furnace and the fire of directed consciousness.

 

THE GUILD’S FLOWER: THE ROSE 

The rose is the official flower of the Guild and fresh roses are present at all Guild meetings. The placement, color, and state of bloom of the roses carry subtle messages for Guild members on the nature of the meeting and how to conduct themselves. There are no posted announcements of the subject matter of meetings or printed rules of behavior. Only the silent message of the rose guides members on a heart-to-heart basis.

Historically, roses represent the presence of our founder and patron, Wilhelm von Rosenberg, whose family name means literally “mountain of roses.” The rose carried deep personal meaning for him. The five-petaled red rose figures prominently in his personal coat of arms (shown at left), and the rose symbol is present in many other forms at all of his family estates.

To understand the archetypal signature of the rose, it is necessary to suspend one’s intellectual and cultural connections to it and simply be open to the “presence” of the rose. This popular flower has a complicated symbology with paradoxical meanings. It is at once a symbol of both purity and passion, both heavenly perfection and earthly desire; both virginity and fertility; both death and life. The rose is the flower of the goddesses Isis and Venus but also the blood of Osiris, Adonis, and Christ.

Originally a symbol of joy, the rose later indicated secrecy and silence but is now usually associated in the common mind with romantic love. But the rose is much more meaningful, much older and more deeply embedded in the human unconscious than most people believe. Rose fossils 35 million year old have been found in Europe, and petrified rose wreaths have been unearthed from the oldest Egyptian tombs. At Guild meetings, the symbology of the rose is associated with the color (or combinations of colors) of its petals:

The numerological elements of the rose are also present in Guild documents and meetings. In general, the rose represents the number five. This is because the wild rose has five petals, and the total petals on roses are in multiples of five. Geometrically, the rose corresponds with the pentagram and pentagon. Five represents the Fifth Element, the life force, the heart or essence of something. In an absolute sense, the rose has represented the expanding awareness of life through the development of the senses. Six-petaled varieties indicate balance and love; seven-petaled varieties indicate transformative passion; and rare eight-petaled roses indicate regeneration, a new cycle, or a higher level of space and time.

The rose is one of the fundamental symbols of alchemy and became the philosophical basis of  Rosicrucian alchemy. It was so important to alchemists that there are many texts called “Rosarium” (Rosary), and all these texts deal with the relationship between the archetypal King and Queen. We have noted the Rosarium of Jaros Griemiller, an original member of the Guild. Another important Rosarium was prepared by alchemist Arnold de Villanova, who also interacted with Guild members.

In alchemy, the rose is primarily a symbol of the operation of Conjunction, the Mystical Marriage of opposites. It represents the regeneration of separated essences and their resurrection on a new level. In the Practice of Psychotherapy, Carl Jung discussed the archetypal underpinnings of love between people in terms of the rose: “The wholeness which is a combination of ‘I and you’ is part of a transcendent unity whose nature can only be grasped in symbols like the rose or the coniunctio (Conjunction).”

In alchemy the red rose is regarded as a masculine, active, expansive principle of solar spirit (Sulfur), where the white rose represents the feminine, receptive, contractive principle of lunar soul (Salt). The combination of white and red roses (spirit and soul) symbolizes the birth of the Philosopher’s Child (Mercury). During the operation of Conjunction, the relationship of the masculine red rose to the feminine white rose is the same relationship depicted in alchemical images of the Red King and the White Queen or the Red Sun and White Moon. White roses were linked to the White Phase of the Work (albedo) and the White Stone of Multiplication, while the red rose was associated with the Red Phase and the Red Stone of Projection.

The single golden (or gilded) rose is a symbol completion of the Great Work or of some consummate achievement in personal or laboratory alchemy. The Popes used to bless a Golden Rose on the fourth Sunday in Lent, as a symbol of their spiritual power and the certainty of resurrection and immortality. In alchemical terms, the golden rose means a successful marriage of opposites to produce the Golden Child, the perfected essence of both King and Queen.

Because Mary is the Christian model of union with God, the rose and the rosary became symbols of the union between god and mankind. Scenes of Mary in a rose garden or under a rose arbor or before a tapestry of roses reinforces this idea. Mary holds a rose and not a scepter in the art of the Middle Ages, which means her power comes from divine love. The rose garden in alchemical drawings is a symbol of sacred space. It could mean a meditation chamber or tabernacle, an altar, a sacred place in nature, or paradise itself. In all these instances, the rose garden is the mystical bridal chamber, the place of the mystic marriage.

The rose has obvious connections with sexual energy in alchemy. The “rose colored blood of the alchemical redeemer” or the “warm red tincture” were references to healing effects of purified (alchemically distilled or sublimated) sexual energy. For instance, the Renaissance alchemist Gerhardt Dorn calls rose-colored blood a vegetabile naturae whereas ordinary blood was a vegetabile materiae. In other words, rose-colored blood carries the natural essence or soul, while ordinary blood simply functions on the physical level to supply oxygen to cells, etc. That is the meaning of the alchemical phrase, “The soul of the Stone is in its blood,” or as Carl Jung put it: “The rose red color is related to the aqua permanens and the soul, which are extracted from the prima materia.” The sword and knife, symbols of the Separation operation, carry such power in alchemy partly because of their ability to draw blood.

In spiritual alchemy, the single red rose represents the mystic center of a person, his or her heart of hearts – one’s true nature. It also represents the process of purification to reveal one’s essence or the inner “pearl beyond price.” Sufi spiritual alchemist Rumi described this idea when he wrote: "In the driest whitest stretch of pain's infinite desert, I lost my sanity and found this rose." As a symbol of the Mystical Marriage on a personal level, the red rose represents a special kind of love in which one “melts away” into the beauty of another, and the old identity is surrendered for that of the beloved or a higher identity within oneself. In this sense, the rose is a symbol of complete surrender and permanent transmutation.

Alchemist Daniel Maier discusses the symbolism of the rose in his Septimana Philosophica: “The rose is the first, most beautiful and perfect of flowers. It is guarded because it is a virgin, and the guard is thorns. The Gardens of Philosophy are planted with many roses, both red and white, which colors are in correspondence with gold and silver. The center of the rose is green and is emblematical of the Green Lion [First Matter]. Even as a natural rose is a pleasure to the senses and life of man, on account of its sweetness and salubrity, so is the Philosophical Rose exhilarating to the heart and a giver of strength to the brain. Just as the natural rose turns to the sun and is refreshed by rain, so is the Philosophical Matter prepared in blood, grown in light, and in and by these made perfect."

Because of its association with the workings of the heart, the rose in alchemy has come to symbolize secrets of the heart or things that cannot be spoken or an oath of silence in general. In the folded structure of the rose, the flower seems to be concealing a secret inner core. “Mystery glows in the rose bed and the secret is hidden in the rose,” wrote the twelfth-century Persian alchemist Farid ud-din Attar.

During Alchemy Guild meetings, a red rose hung from the ceiling indicates the material to be discussed is confidential for members only and is to be kept secret. On the Guild’s websites and in its printed matter, a red rose icon (shown at right with the cipher for Fire) or the Latin phrase “sub rosa” (“under the rose”) indicates the material is secret. Clicking on this icon on websites will take the visitor to password-protected areas intended for members only. This concept originates in the hermetic tradition of hanging red roses from the ceiling of meetings to indicate that discretion was called for and none of the information discussed should leave the room. The symbol was used in a number of hermetic organizations in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance and was well known to alchemists. For instance, in Sebastian Brant's fifteenth-century alchemical treatise “Narrenschiff” (“Ship of Fools”), the author warns: “What here we do say, shall under roses stay.”

THE GUILD’S PHILOSOPHY

The basic philosophy of the Alchemy Guild is based on three hermetic principles. The first is that The Universe Is Striving towards Perfection. According to this viewpoint, the whole universe is becoming aware. The levels of awareness comprise a gradient of reality from lower frequency to higher, from lead to gold, from utter darkness to whitest light, from dead matter to purest light of mind. This evolution of matter is driven by primal forces from two opposing sides of reality that ultimately come from just One Thing and just One Mind, which are themselves aspects of the one Source.  The inherent duality of creation originates from the universal dichotomies of Above and Below, Spirit and Soul, Heaven and Hell, Conscious and Unconscious, Mind and Matter, Aggressive and Yielding, Positive and Negative, Male and Female, Yang and Yin, etc. The idea that the universe is striving and has an inherent passion or intention, is an expression of an archetypal alchemical substance called Sulfur.

The second principle of Guild philosophy is that Consciousness Is a Force in Nature. Consciousness (mind and imagination) is a primordial force, and if one can purify and concentrate one’s own consciousness, one can project that power into the world around us – just as the One Mind fashioned the cosmos from the chaos of the One Thing. This primordial pattern is embedded in the universe on all levels of reality and is the basis for the alchemical Doctrine of Correspondences (“As Above, so Below”). Furthermore, when mind acts on matter, it imposes its essence or truest nature on it, and thus everything everywhere carries the archetypal signature of its original creator. By learning to read the signature of a person, substance, event, or situation, one is able to relate to its true nature or essence. Consciousness and imagination are expressions of the universal alchemical substance known as Mercury.

The third principle of Guild philosophy is that All Is One. The levels of creation in the universe are determined by the interplay of the One Mind and the One Thing (or the combined forces of Mind and Matter, Spirit and Soul). Although this pattern manifests on a myriad of different levels, ultimately the One Thing and the One Mind are One. This is the message of such alchemical symbols as the Ouroboros (the serpent eating its own tail) or the eternally flowing Fountain of Fountains. The deepest truth is that All is One, and we experience that oneness as the purest consciousness and highest love. The idea that all manifested things are crystallizations or expressions of this higher light is associated with the mystical alchemical substance of Salt.

ALCHEMY GUILD CHAPTERS

 Members may form local chapters with other members in their area at their discretion. The only requirement is that all persons present at chapter meetings be current members of the International Alchemy Guild (IAG). Public lectures and workshops may be given by chapter members, however no guild business may be conducted in public. Chapter names and contact information will be listed in official guild documents and local chapters will be recommended to new members. Alchemy Guild Chapters will also be assigned a free pop-email account in the form of “chapter-name" at AlchemyGuild.org. Free forms, information on how to conduct meetings, posters, and other documents will be provided to all chapters. Chapters also have free access to Guild lecturers and presentations. Large chapters (over 25 members) receive monthly financial stipends from the Guild to support their activities. Chapters should be organized in the official Tree of Life way described previously. When a chapter reaches enough membership to form a Board of Governors (6 members), it will receive an extra vote at meetings of the central Alchemy Guild Board of Governors. This vote is in addition to the votes cast by individual members and represents the majority of their votes. For every seventh member thereafter, the local chapter will receive one extra vote. Local chapter votes are placed on the table and counted during elections and referendums of the central Board of Governors by the Guild Membership Director (Netzach person).

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