Star Winds

Through a magnifying glass he could detect no blemish on the perfectly spherical surface, or beneath it. Laying down the lens, he proceeded to the specified tests. He imagined the sphere to be a cube, and projected the thought. Instantly it was a cube, the sides perfect planes, the edges straight and square-set. Likewise he transformed it, by thought, into a double-ended cone, a tetrahedron, a torus, a statuette of the goddess Demeter.

He nodded, letting it revert back to a sphere. The test of amorphism was satisfied. The stone had no intrinsic shape. Next he took up a sharp saw-bladed knife and set himself to carve off a portion of it. Although of gemlike hardness in the hand, the stone offered little resistance to the blade, and he sliced off a piece of about an inch in thickness.

The severed portion hit the tabletop, but no longer as the jade-like substance of the stone. It had instantly decomposed into a scintillant red powder.

Amschel well understood this. Divorced from the fundamental unity of the stone, the fragment could not maintain itself and had begun to decay into merely normal states of matter. Already it was compound, partly elemental.

With this powder marvels could be performed. Compounded further, introduced into other substances, it would create a whole new range of efficacious agents.

More important, however, was that when pared the stone had immediately reconstituted itself. It was as if the knife had done no more than slice through water.

The test of wholeness and indivisibility was satisfied.

Amschel lifted the pale green ball and stared straight into its heart. This, then, was the Stone. This was the Tincture, the Most Excellent Medicine, the secret substance of the universe, wrenched out of the hylic realm by a blast of manmade lightning. Gazing upon this wonder, Amschel experienced a supreme joy and exultation. Now he knew that the Hermetic art was real, that the vision of Zosimos was true, that nature applied to nature transforms nature!

This much proved, it remained but to verify one more property of the stone—a little-known property conveyed cryptically, elliptically, in the alchemical code word V.I.T.R.I.O.L.: Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem—“Visit the Interior of the Earth, Through Purification Thou Wilt Find the Hidden Stone.”

Few indeed knew that this formula indicated how the adept may be transformed into a Magus of Power. The earth symbolized the adept’s own body, the place where the Stone could be hidden away from the sight of ordinary man. Amschel moved the Stone. He pressed it to his forehead, between his eyes—and pushed. The Stone moved—inward, passing through skin and bone.

Into Amschel’s brain.

In the Philosopher’s Stone was no differentiation of parts. The Stone was Ultimate Oneness. Immersed in the Stone, the tissues of Amschel’s brain experienced transcendental unity, total access—to one another, and, eventually, to the macrocosm itself.

Amschel’s consciousness was whipped away from the narrow laboratory where he sat. It expanded and expanded, until he seemed to be moving through an endless dark, a dark that was paradoxically filled with light.

The Black Light of the adepts, by which one saw without seeing. Vastness, vastness. And now Amschel perceived the macrocosm.

It was not a place, or region. It was the infinite world system seen from the point of view of totality, endless movement without destination, coming without arriving, going without departing. Man’s reason, evolved in the microcosm, could not grasp the essence of the macrocosm. Even when super-conscious as Amschel’s was, the mind could see it only in terms of entities, signs and symbols, the ancient eternal symbols of alchemy. The mighty Worm Ouroborous, appearing as a vast ring galaxy larger than milliards of galaxies put together, spinning at colossal speed, endlessly devouring and reevolving itself—thus was the macrocosm maintained! The alchemical marriage of King and Queen, conjunction of opposites by which the eternal mystery of merging and separating was brought to pass.

These and other visions of macrocosmic processes blasted into Amschel’s consciousness with such a sense of super-reality that the myriads of worlds flowing away from them seemed mere shadows. Then the direction of his gaze became more specific. He witnessed, as if it lay below him in some multidimensional region so that he saw it from countless vantage points at once—from north, south, east, west, nadir and zenith, externally and internally—the staggering spiral blaze of his own galaxy. He saw, slumbering coiled like a quiescent serpent within the spiraling star arms, the power known as the Sleeping Sulphur, and he saw that this power could, if one knew how, be prodded and disturbed, even, momentarily, awakened.