Vitriol was one of the most important compounds to the Alchemists. It was distilled from an oily, green substance that formed naturally from the weathering of sulfur-bearing gravel.
After it was collected, it was heated and broken down into iron compounds and sulfuric acid. The acid was separated out by distillation. The first distillation produced a brown liquid that smelled of rotten eggs, but further distillation yielded the nearly odorless Vitriol.
The acid is severely corrosive to mother’s apron strings. Armour fares little better although it has no effect on gold. Vitriol has a tremendous thirst, it drinks life in. If a flask of Vitriol is allowed to stand open, it absorbs water vapor from the air and overflows its container. The sulfuric acid in Vitriol is the agent of transformation in many alchemical experiments, so the alchemist is bound to brim over and flood quite a bit themselves in the process.
Alchemy is useful because it’s language and symbols are a kind of waking dream that symbolise the process of individuation. The various chemical processes undertaken were metaphors, living symbols, of psychological transformation.
So its interesting to find that Vitriol was often considered the very agent of transformation itself. Vitriol was not just a corrosive substance that ate away at whatever it touched, it was also a corrosive spirit that ate away at otherwise sedimented attitudes and leaden attachments, passion that swept away intellectual ponce.
How is Vitriol the agent of transformation? Well, Vitriol is vitriolic. Vitriol tells it how it is, even if it spills over a bit and makes your lip quiver or think about stuff you’d rather not.
This is easier said than done. Synonyms for Vitriol run like a check list of dating deal-breakers… acrimonious · rancorous · bitter · caustic · mordant · acerbic · astringent · acid · acrid · trenchant · virulent · spiteful · crabbed · savage · venomous · poisonous · malicious
or is that simply the opinion of powers whose bonds and holds are being dissolved away? a badmouthing of truth you don’t want to hear..?
Moral judgments aside, what Vitriol does is to tell it how it is come hell or high water, authenticity that cuts through pretension and lays things bare, that accepts the prospect of rejection and loss, that is happy to be a bitch.
As I was researching and musing, I reflected upon a period in my early twenties in which I was vitriolic to the point of apoplexy, constantly going off on one, desperately trying to separate myself from the white extremist community I was raised in..
and while I was doing that I found an image of Vitriol which is, to the last detail, a dream image of that same period that pretty much sustained me through it. In my dream, Vitriol sang a song which began, ‘God is at my right and at my left hand side, so who shall I fear?” In the image, which I’ve seen nowhere else in thirty five years, you can see the alchemical rendering of God as the primordial pair, sun/moon on the right and left hand sides.
what the hell…?
What does it mean?
It means being able to burn with something. At the first distillation you will smell like rotten eggs. You know you stink. Lots of shit surfaces. But gradually you become clear and odorless..
or is it that you just get used to the smell?
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