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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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alchemical marriage

19 Nov 2022 - 12 Aug 2023
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    • A magic term and I really have no fucking clue what it means, other than the combination of opposites. Well, not the abstract sort of pairing you would find in math, there is a sexual overtone. And a metaphysical one! Marriage of the Red King and White Queen in Alchemy
    • Descriptions of alchemical processes often describe the reactions of sulfur and mercury. The Red King is sulfur -- the active, volatile and fiery principle -- while the White Queen is mercury -- the material, passive, fixed principle. Mercury has substance, but it has no definitive form on its own. It needs an active principle to shape it.
    • The science guy in me wants to scream. We know what the universe is made of, and it isn't these binary abstractions. This occult stuff is no better (and no worse) than bog-standard philosophical materialism or idealism – just bad ideas that need to be discarded.
      • Hm, not exactly. Philosophy is relatively stupid, it wants to choose one of the members of the pair and declare it the winner, more ultimate, more ruling than the other. This stuff is better, closer to nondualism in a way, it somehow acknowledges that the distinction is largely a fiction, and this is one of the ways of representing the fiction.
    • OK, learned just now that the outcome of alchemy, its goal, is called Rebis: the Result of the Great Work in Alchemy Had not heard that term before.
      • the divine hermaphrodite—a reconciliation of spirit and matter, a being of both male and female qualities as indicated by the two heads within a single body.