Distillation in Alchemy

Hey dear community, first of all I would like to welcome you all to my new post and hope you had a day full of great experiences! Today I would like to talk a little about alchemy and hope you can expand your knowledge a little.

Here you can see pictures of minerals and fittingly I would like to go into alchemy and explain exactly what distillation is. From practical, it is one of the most important steps for transformation and separation of substances and this process was often an elaborate process that was divided into different phases and by using different tools such as glass bulbs and other vessels it is to separate the coarse parts from the fine. This procedure became particularly popular towards the end of the Middle Ages, but the traces are already much older and it is assumed that the Egyptians already had advanced methods for distillation and numerous traces of this important process can also be found in other cultures. The advantage of this is that, unlike other processes, no solvents have to be added and at the beginning the substance is brought to a boil with fire and the steam resulting from it is then intercepted again and then cooled back into a liquid and there are some important things to consider and the temperature must always be kept at the right level because otherwise the result will suffer.

The cooled steam is then collected in another vessel and is now ready for further processing and in addition to fire, other heat sources were also used for vaporizing and especially often the sun or other sources were used and there are also other methods for distillation and differently as with the first methods it is also possible to use the force of earth attraction and extract the substance downwards and the more steps were used for distillation the more purer the end result became in the end. Now I would also like to go into the meaning in spiritual alchemy where it can be compared to dissolving the spirit of the substance or in this case to purify the mental level in a separate state, refining it and then adding it back to the physical body and this reunification was also often associated with the well-known sentence solve et coagula, which means to dissolve and coagulate. It can also be regarded as a process of reunification as well as the separation of the spirit and rebirth and this step is also associated with the two elements fire or water and can also be associated with fertility as well as destruction from a symbolic point of view. In practical application, distillation was also of enormous importance for spagyric, which can also be described as a special separation procedure where it was about activating the self-healing powers of the body and plants had an important significance for this.

Thanks a lot for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about alchemy! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.