"If a person were to want to work with some old alchemical text or group of hieroglyphic emblems and the image of a Red Lion occurred, then the alchemist would know that this image was a reference to Sulfur combined with Mercury to control the force of nature. Even descriptions written without an image of the red lion could be rather descriptive:

Afterwards take the lion in the pelican which also is found [at] first, when you see its tincture, that is to say, the element of fire which stands above the water, the air, and the earth."

  • lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    6 days ago

    Super interesting. I was watching someone react to some conspiracy channel on youtube, and the conspiracy channel uses bunch of old political cartoons and drawings and shit to flash at the audience to make the audience more suggestible to their insane batshit conspiracy stuff.

    Some of those I now know were alchemy images, and now I can see how the symbolism in the drawings make some sort of formula or recipe of an alchemic process.

    Seems like you could also make some modern version of this method using symbolism to make a formula for a modern thing. I guess we do it to some extent with patents. But none of those use mythical creatures.

    Thank you for sharing this cool fact/blog post :)