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T'ao-t'ieh, a motif of Chinese funerary art as the iconographic counterpart of Cinnabar, an alchemical drug.

The agency conferring resurrection is soul or its emblem. The earliest conception of soul is blood. Its Redness penetrates subsoil and is taken up by serpent, from whence arises snake-soul, later snake-god. Blood vapours is the other fraction arising upwards. It becomes wraith bird, later soul bird, and finally bird god. Blood as whole gave snake-god plus bird-god. A winged-cobra became snake-god and bird-god or together, one-as-all. Red Cock was its equivalent. As substance came cinnabar, red like blood and sublimable like soul. Dragon was idealized snake-god. Then Dragon-god plus Bird-god became the equal of blood soul, the magical power. T'ao-t'ieh is Dragon-plus-Bird, snake-god plus bird-god, the equivalent of Cosmic soul. Then cinnabar as the equal of blood soul and T'ao-t'ieh, the emblem of Cosmic soul, each were capable of conferring resurrection and have been interred in Chinese graves.

Alchemy↗

Paracelsus: the Hippocrates of the Renaissance.

Paracelsus lived during the Renaissance. His sober spirit of scientific observation and critical reason were accompanied by emotional turbulence and a volcanic temperament. He remains both a mystery and an object of nostalgia. Paracelsus is today celebrated as the first modern medical scientist. Paracelsus' early life, achievements and latter years are described.

Alchemy↗

"Summus atque felicissimus salium": the medical relevance of the liquor alkahest.

This paper analyzes the development of the concept of alkahest from its origins in the Paracelsian corpus to its mature form in the works of Joan Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644) and his successors. Historians of science have usually focused on the chemical aspects of the alkahest, taking into account especially the claims that it was a substance capable of dissolving all kinds of matter. This paper shows the medical implications of the alkahest: it was not only a "solvent," but an important means of revealing nature's secrets and of producing medicines. The properties ascribed to the alkahest fit perfectly within Helmontian theories about matter, disease, and cure.

Alchemy↗