The Key to Life and Death is everywhere to be found, but if you do not find it in your own house, you will find it nowhere. Yet, it is before everyone’s eyes. No one can live without it. Everyone has used it. The poor usually possess it more than the rich. Children play with it in the streets. The meek and uneducated esteem it highly, but the privileged and learned often throw it away. It is the only thing from which the Philosopher’s Stone can be prepared, and without it, no noble metal can be created.
People who blindly follow socially accepted values, beliefs and behavior are no longer connected to the Mystery of this thing and therefore “throw it away.”
Medieval Alchemists frequently referred to this thing as “the corner stone the builders forgot.” In other words, it is something important that is not an integrated part of our current civilization.
Sometimes these intimations are only obvious at quiet times, or when we focus our undivided attention on the present moment, or enter deep meditation seeking to learn the true nature of reality.
To Alchemists, Consciousness is a force of Nature that can be harnessed and purified through prayer and meditation and then added to the experiment just like a chemical ingredient. Magic has the power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For Magic is a Great Secret Wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly.
Within every living thing there exists a Hidden Star that is that thing’s Quintessence. One of the symbols for the Quintessence is the Star.
In general terms the “Star” is the truest part of anything, the Divine Thought that gives things their form and being.
Too much reliance on intellect instead of intuition will surely spell disaster for the world.
We have assimilated the Sun’s Masculine Spirit on Earth, and it has led to great technological advances, but out Lunar, Feminine Soul has been pushed away in the process. The Key to Transformation is the union of Solar and Lunar forces: the Sacred Marriage of the Sun and the Moon. Instead there exists an estrangement between them, and correspondingly, between our own Spirits and Souls.
Our intuition lies in our innocence. Your head must bow to your Heart.