LABORATORY SPAGYRICAL ALCHEMIC

First of all, you install your alchemy and spagyrics laboratory. You will need, to start, an appropriate quiet place well ventilated and lighted for your work. In general, in an apartment, it is not nearly as easy to get things done.

It is important that all the matters and utensils are out of children's reach, not only from the danger that can come when breaking accidentally a glass vase, but also the dangerous handling of some toxic substances. Always label the flasks of chemical products so you know its content and there will be no mistakes.

You will need a table or bench. The preference is wood with a cover of formica and you will need some shelves to arrange the materials in. Place, also, an electrical current plug near the table.

The first thing that you will have to obtain is one or more sources of heat. Without fire there is no matter transformation. The fire is the spirit transformer of alchemy.

Formerly, the masters used almost exclusively coal as a source of thermal energy. There didn't exist, as today, other forms of energy more proper and easier to regulate. Imagine the inconvenience there would be if you had in your house a stove of coal permanently burning.

Eirenaeus Philalethes, in his book The Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King, he describes with great detail the construction of an oven or Athanor fed with coal.

As it is neither practical nor proper to work with coal, many artists opted for gas, it is a natural element extracted from the earth. It is more practical, cleaner and easier to regulate.

Another source of heat also actively used, is electrical energy. There is a great controversy with relationship to the use of electricity in alchemic operations. Some affirm that it is an artificial energy and that the results can be altered by it.

We are not of the same opinion. It’s true that an electrical energy applied to a metallic resistance provokes an electromagnetic field that, probably, will have influence in chemical reactions, but there is no certainty of that harming or altering the end product.

On the other hand, it is known that the electric energy although produced artificially, is coming from natural phenomena. The current of the exciter produces the electromagnetic field of a generator, this current is generated by the mechanical rotation and for the remaining and natural magnetism of the stator poles.

Therefore, in our opinion, the electric energy has its origin in natural phenomena and it won't be harmful, because an incandescent metal produces the heat.

Electricity has a great advantage over other sources of energy. The temperature can be regulated with excellent precision and the ovens are generally relatively small and lighter than the gas stoves and ovens.

Besides, electricity can be connected permanently without there being the concern of running out of gas, or the mouth of the stove to fade for any reason. The gas being burned could give place to an explosion with fateful consequences as well. For certain operations, however, a small "camping", stove with gas with a porringer and a sand bath is good.

And the "camping" stove, it can also be used as a small portable stove of one or two mouths, fed by a butane or propane gas container. However, in distillation's, digestions and circulation's, we recommended an electric oven, it being easier to install, cleaner and, above all, it can be connected for a long time.

There are digestions and circulation's that take up to one week or more to do and the oven will have to be connected that whole time. Of course you can have an energy break and the operation will be interrupted.

That would be serious, being particularly serious in the Third Work of the alchemic way, because the work would be hopelessly lost. However, in most of the cases, it doesn't have much importance, because the interrupted operation can continued as soon as the energy is restored. Besides, the energy breaks are not very frequent.

Further ahead, we will explain to you the building of different electrical ovens, starting from simple materials easy to find. It is evident that there are cases where you will have to use exclusively, ovens with butane/propane gas. It is so in the case of the dry way. In this case, the temperature of the oven will have to reach about a thousand degrees to operate and the oven will have to be installed outside in an appropriate place.

Rubellus Petrinus