Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Some of the ancients placed Fire as a fourth Element, in the highest region of the Air, because they regarded it as the lightest and most subtle. But the Fire of Nature does not differ from the Celestial Fire; this is why Moses makes no mention of it in Genesis, because he had said that Light was created on the first day. The fire which we use ordinarily is partly natural and partly artificial. The Creator has placed in the sun an igneous spirit, the principle of movement and of gentle heat, such as is necessary to Nature for her operations. It communicates it to all bodies, and by exciting and developing the Fire which is innate in them, it preserves the principle of generation and of life. Each individual partakes of it more or less. He who seeks in Nature another element of Fire, is ignorant of what the sun and light are. It is placed in the Moist Radical as its proper seat. With animals it seems to have established its chief domicile in the heart, which communicates it to all parts, as the sun does to all the Universe. The Fire of Nature is her first agent. It reduces the germs from potentiality to actuality. As soon as it no longer acts, all apparent movement and all vital action ceases. The principle of movement is light, and movement is the cause of heat. This is why the absence of the sun and of light has such a great effect upon bodies. Heat penetrates to the interior of the most opaque and hardest substances, and animates the hidden and torpid nature. Light penetrates only transparent bodies, and its property is to manifest the perceptible accidents of the composites. Thus the sun is the first natural and universal agent. In departing from the sun light strikes the dense bodies, the celestial as well as the terrestrial; it places their facultiesin moveme...

AN ALCHEMICAL TREATISE ON THE GREAT ART deals with a system of physics according to the Hermetic Philosophy, and the Theory and Practice of the "Magisterium". Unlike other authors, Pernety presents the complete system of the "Magnum Opus" in a short and concise manner.

Part treatise, part critique, part call to action, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is a journey into the uncanny realities revealed to us in the great works of art of the past and present. Received opinion holds that art is culturally-determined and relative. We are told that whether a picture, a movement, a text, or sound qualifies as a "work of art" largely depends on social attitudes and convention. Drawing on examples ranging from Paleolithic cave paintings to modern pop music and building on the ideas of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Gilles Deleuze, Carl Jung, and others, J.F. Martel argues that art is an inborn human phenomenon that precedes the formation of culture and even society. Art is free of politics and ideology. Paradoxically, that is what makes it a force of liberation wherever it breaks through the trance of humdrum existence. Like the act of dreaming, artistic creation is fundamentally mysterious. It is a gift from beyond the field of the human, and it connects us with realities that, though normally unseen, are crucial components of a living world. While holding this to be true of authentic art, the author acknowledges the presence—overwhelming in our media-saturated age—of a false art that seeks not to liberate but to manipulate and control. Against this anti-artistic aesthetic force, which finds some of its most virulent manifestations in modern advertising, propaganda, and pornography, true art represents an effective line of defense. Martel argues that preserving artistic expression in the face of our contemporary hyper-aestheticism is essential to our own survival. Art is more than mere ornament or entertainment; it is a way, one leading to what is most profound in us. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice places art alongside languages and the biosphere as a thing endangered by the onslaught of predatory capitalism, spectacle culture, and myopic technological progress. The book is essential reading for visual artists, musicians, writers, actors, dancers, filmmakers, and poets. It will also interest anyone who has ever been deeply moved by a work of art, and for all who seek a way out of the web of deception and vampiric diversion that the current world order has woven around us.

A System Of Physics According To Hermetic Philosophy And Theory And Practice Of The Magisterium. Of the three thousand volumes composing the bibliography of Alchemy, those of Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety are the only ones in which the theories of the Artificers are exposed with method: he is the first and only writer who has endeavored to present a short, concise and complete system of the Magnum Opus.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1898 Edition.