Alchemical furnace

I thought about Jung s statement that the alchemists projected their unconscious contents into matter. I realized that this is only partially right. I saw that they consciously, purposively, projected chosen archetypal images into matter, including the matter of their own physical body. The alchemical artist, through an act of imaginal perception, structures archetypal symbols, such as the alchemical furnace, or retort, into matter. 

Athanor, an alchemical furnace, used especially for heating the sealed Vessel of Hermes. 

Alchemical scene showing two putti holding philosopher s stone containing image of Hermes, below which are a man and a woman kneeling before furnace where... 

In the earlier sections, we have developed the theoretical framework for the FEP approach. In this section, we outline some specific methodologies built upon this framework to calculate the free energy differences associated with the transformation of a chemical species into a different one. This computational process is often called alchemical transformation because, in a sense, this is a realization of the inaccessible dream of the proverbial alchemist - to transmute matter. Yet, unlike lead, which was supposed to turn into gold in the alchemist s furnace, the potential energy function is sufficiently malleable in the hands of the computational chemist that it can be gently altered to transform one chemical system into another, slightly modified one. 

Moreover, the novel describes a real period of surplus of thread before the arrival of weaving machines. So Marner, like other hand-weavers of his era, can actually overproduce to productive ends. Yet this kind of unbridled production will not be possible a few decades later, suggesting that one should read the novel in a precise realist manner, intimately tied to the land. For instance, the fact that Marner lives next to stone pits is both symbolic and realistic. The dwarf lives in a furnace (volcano, like Vulcan), or hollow stone. But the very doorway to this abode is also the opening to the furnace. Since the furnace is built over the ore pit, the metal, and therefore the dwarf, is often said to live under a stone (Dieterle 5). There is a primary relation between stones and metals that goes back very far in time, prior to industrialization. This antiquity is evoked in alchemical thought. 

And since the form of putrefaction was the form in which the metal united with the materia prima, as maternal, for the purpose of rebirth, the putrefied form was equated with semen the entrance of the semen into the alchemical retort or furnace was equated with the divine marriage the retort or furnace itself was equated with the maternal womb and the cooking of the metal in the retort or furnace was equated with gestation. ... 

There were many types of furnaces and of distillation apparatus, but every piece of apparatus shown in this sixteenth-century illustration could have been found in earlier medieval laboratories or in laboratories as late as the eighteenth century. Alchemical, chemical, and metallurgical laboratories were relatively unchanged for hundreds of years. 

Note that the apparatus in their mideighteenth-century laboratory would not be out of place in an alchemical laboratory of the Middle Ages the same range of crucibles, furnaces, and distillation apparatus (the last on the long shelf above the laboratory bench) could be found in each. 

And yet by the late sixteenth century certain features had emerged to define alchemical laboratories as distinct spaces in the landscape of late Renaissance work and learning. Some of these features were architectural. Although it is easy to lose sight of them, certain practical considerations had to be taken into account in establishing an alchemical laboratory. Any workspace had to have a hearth or ventilation for multiple furnaces. The need to feed these fires made access to fuel a neces-... 

---