(no subject)

[malsperanza]

The alchemy listserv to which I subscribe has been discussing Isaac Newton's alchemical experiments. A historian of science at Indiana University is recreating them from descriptions in Newton's notebooks. A passing remark led me to google "Antimony" and sure enough, Regulus turned up:

"For many alchemists, especially Isaac Newton, the metal Antimony became a more potent form of Mercury with which to work transformation. They were fascinated by a property of Antimony to form a cyrstalline star (the Star Regulus) under certain conditions. For alchemists, of course, that symbolized the quintessence of matter. [...]

The term 'starred' was here employed by Newton in its most literal sense. For if the antimony has been properly purified as in this instance, it forms long and slender crystals. During cooling the crystals in turn form triangular branches around a central point, taking on the aspect of a silver star.

Masters of the symbolic, the alchemists named this heart of antimony ore after Regulus, the bright double star near the heart of the constellation Leo. When the star regulus of antimony was achieved with the aid of a metallic reducing agent in the above experiment, Newton had produced the star regulus of Mars." (http://www.vanderkrogt.net/elements/elem/sb.html)

Double star: Regulus and Sirius.
Mars, god of war (and also the planet ruling the alchemical metal Iron; the red planet)

The other alchemist who was particularly interested in the Star Regulus of Antimony was, of course, Nicolas Flamel.

I'm just sayin, is all.

Comments

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Hello to you! I had a long reply to this written, and then I selfishly decided to do it as a post in my own journal instead. Because 1. this is use-my-own-journal week, just for the hell of it, and 2. I am not sold on alchemy as a framework for interpreting JKR, and this is also my stop-contradicting-other-people-in-their-own-journals-and-try-to-be-more-f'in-polite week. All part of the occasional, forlorn urge for self-improvement. Not that if I had had anything actually useful to say about Granger's reading, it would have counted as mere contradiction. That would have been debate, a wholly good thing. :)

I find the alchemy imagery amazingly suggestive, but I suspect JKR's use of it suffers from typical JKR-itis in that it is a system that is not treated systematically, or is treated just systematically enough to be crucially misleading about how far we can rely on it as evidence. Which is something she has done in other areas as well. For all that I love her, she is fickle! So I ended up using it as a springboard for saying that.

Still, some of those teasing correspondences, standing out from our heap of broken images, can be oddly moving. I love the image of Sirius and Regulus as a double star, circling each other, despite their limited self-knowledge. Even if they are only taunting us with the illusion that it means something. :)

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Disagreement from Black Dog is never spam, and never less than courteous.

However, in this instance you're out of luck because I agree with you. (Though I will probably visit your LJ shortly in order to, er, hound you with wanton refutation for the sheer pleasure of it.)

JKR is a magpie inventor: she has a sponge memory that soaks up words and images and remixes them--it's why she is so good at puns and names with double meanings. She is not, however, properly systematic, and uses or discards bits of the stuff she likes, as they serve her purpose or simply amuse her.

The alchemists themselves were sloppy when it came to their system, which is itself a hodgepodge of contradictory steps, processes, elements, and sekrit incantations. Every alchemist had a different version of exactly what he or she was doing, how, and why. The only consistent element in alchemy is that the process is meant to transform the soul of the practitioner from a base human condition to one of divine enlightenment (and power), through a series of stages that are both a trial and an education and that go in roughly this order: disintegration and "death" of the old self, purification of the fledgling new self, transmutation of the self into a new, more perfect form.

All of which is expressed through the allegory (and literal practice) of the transmutation of metals. And attached to both are an elaborate series of symbols--tarot, astrology, astronomy, color theory, weird animal mythology, and whatever else was going cheap at the supermarket of ideas in the Renaissance.

This far, though, I think the alchemical system is secure in HP: each of these stages ends in the death of the black, white, and red characters. To me, this explains something that had puzzled me mightily in OOP. I had no objection, conceptually, to the death of Sirius--it fits in the general scheme of Harry's story, and the destruction of the man marked as the Romantic Hero (Scaramouche) is important to the tale. But it seemed to me to happen way too soon. Emotionally, it should have been nearer the climax, the great confrontation, and after Sirius and Harry had had more time together.

But now I see that it had to be at the end of book 5 because that was the Black stage of the alchemical process--disintegration (the social system of the wizarding world is falling apart), putrefaction (Something is Rotten in the state), and death--the descent into the Underworld, a la Odysseus and most other epic heroes. When Harry comes out of the basement of the ministry, the transformation of the first stage is complete. To me, this is a persuasive point.

And as in classic alchemy, Harry is both the apprentice alchemist who will carry out the operations that turn base metal (copper, iron, mercury, tin) into pure metal (gold--the Philosopher's Stone) *and* he is himself the object of the operation, the Stone itself (horcrux). The Philosopher is both object and subject of the story. If all goes well, at the end of Book 7, Harry may well be on his way to becoming the headmaster of Hogwarts, replacing Dumbledore.

[larryhammer]

"properly systematic"? Syncretists need a system?

---L.