The Transmutation Of Silver Into Mercury

The fifth transmutation of the Anabasis is from silver to mercury. This involves the mysterious process of quickening. Silver is quickened to become mercury and, in doing so, develops a divine spark. Thus, the transmutation of silver to mercury involves beginning (but not completing) the process of apotheosis.

In quickening, silver becomes liquid. This liquidity is the essence of the realm of mercury. The character of mercury displays the opposite of the rigid thinking found in the realm of iron. They are the quickest of thinkers, always a step ahead of everyone else. For this reason they evoke a wide range of reactions from other characters. Mercury is therefore unpredictable to the lower elements, hence the term mercurial.

The rigidity of silver means that it cannot flow into certain spaces. Mercury can. Hence characters of mercury can be explorers of the mind and soul as well as of physical or cultural space. A transmutation from silver to mercury might be motivated by a character who has achieved everything possible in their career or business, and started to wonder what else there is to life. For such people, the occult often beckons.

Psychologically, the character of mercury is beyond any character of the previous levels. They are intellectually superior to an extent that is awesome. But they don’t merely intellectualise. The character of mercury is capable of intuiting knowledge in a way that seems psychic to others. They seem to know things that could not possibly be known, as if they had access to another world.

It is said of the brilliant that they can hit targets no-one else can hit, but of the genius it is said that they can hit targets no-one else can see. The transition from silver to mercury is like this transition from brilliance to genius. A character who achieves it will not merely impress others – they will instill awe. Other characters will generally not understand how the transition has been made.

Aldous Huxley once said (maybe) that “an intellectual is someone who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” The character of mercury is entirely capable of having sex and enjoying it – but they are also capable of sublimating their sexual energy into incredible cultural, artistic, scientific or spiritual achievements. If they choose to attempt such a thing, and if they come to value this higher than sex, they will be seen as very strange by most others. Thus, the transition to mercury can only be attempted by those with superior will.

Socially, the transmutation from silver to mercury could see a character go from leading their clan to leading an empire. In some ancient cultures, the king was also the chief judge. If the judges of a nation are those who the villages nominate to resolve conflicts, the king would be the one who resolves conflicts among the judges themselves. A transition to mercury could be made by becoming a king of kings, or an emperor.

The character of mercury, then, is of the highest terrestrial rank. This might not necessarily be evident, especially at the beginning of the story. A transmutation from silver to mercury might occur very early in the life of a character, such that those around them don’t readily recognise the change. They might simply be too young for higher honours yet, despite being spiritually worthy.

Physically, a character of mercury could look like anything. If characters of lead are scrawny, those of tin fat, those of iron muscular, those of copper muscular and fat and those of silver slender, characters of mercury could look like any such phenotype plus others. For a character of mercury, who is beginning to apotheosise, the physical form is almost irrelevant. They may even start to move beyond physical form as they move away from silver.

The transmutation of silver to mercury is a challenge unlike any of the previous four stages, because it’s primarily a spiritual process, whereas the previous four stages deal with physical and mental processes. For the fifth transmutation of the Anabasis to begin, the spiritual realm has to be accessed. This makes the nature of the transmutation much more subtle than any of the previous four.

This can make a character of mercury a highly complex one. They are capable of anything that the lower levels are capable of. The difference is that the lower five elements are somewhat bound to their realm of frequency, whereas mercury can flow readily to any frequency. Thus the character of mercury can party as if tin, fight as if lead, make love as if copper and socialise as if silver. They are not specialised in any one aspect of life but are rather masters of life in a general sense. As such, the transition to mercury requires a certain depth of life experience.

Glory can transmute mere silver to mercury. A character who rises to become a general or warlord might discover, in the throes of victory, a glory that raises them to a place not previously possible. In the wake of a military triumph, a commander might attain realms of consciousness that had otherwise been inaccessible.

A near death experience can also do it. As mentioned above, the process of transmutation to mercury is, at one level, divine. In almost dying, a person sometimes realises that they are more than just their body and mind. When the physical senses are shut off, the soul can make itself present. Many a person has passed over to the other side only to then return and, imbued with occult knowledge from those shadow realms, risen to a position of social prominence.

A psychedelic experience might be another, similar way to achieve this. A character who undergoes a sufficiently powerful spiritual experience though use of a psychedelic might seem, to other characters, to have acquired superpowers. They may also seem to have gone insane: the transmutation to mercury implies that a character no longer cares as much about material concerns such as wealth or social status. This might not be understood or appreciated by characters of the lower levels.

Yet another way might be getting chosen by a secret society for a special role, such as the harbinger of a new age of humanity. A character of silver who is chosen as a special representative by a secret society could begin the transmutation to mercury by way of ritual. Ancient rites intended to drive out weaknesses from lower frequencies could effect the transmutation to mercury.

The ultimate action that transmutes silver to mercury is application of will. It’s ultimately will that overcomes the rigidness of silver and transmutes into something quasi-divine. The rigidity of silver is testament to the extent to which it is programmed by circumstance. The application of will causes a character to rise above circumstance and to define themselves according to their own values. Even the stronghest, the smartest, the richest and the most handsome of men are subordinate to the most willing.

An example of the transmutation of silver to mercury in popular fiction is the film Braveheart. William Wallace starts as a well-respected villager, the son of a well-respected villager, and seemed destined for the realm of silver. But on account of being taught to use his brain properly, he was able to reshape the course of history.

This is an excerpt from Viktor Hellman’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

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The Transmutation Of Copper Into Silver

The fifth stage of ascent up the Mithraic Ladder is silver. Alchemically speaking, copper brightens as it transmutes into silver. The colourful, ruddy copper becomes the white-grey silver as a person transcends a focus on materialist concerns such as nuclear family for (slightly) more abstract concerns.

This brightening reflects a broadening, and a raising, of horizons. The characters of lead, tin, iron and copper all look downward in a sense, because they’re most worried about dangers that arise from the Earth. But the character of silver looks over them all, to the distant horizons, and the rising and setting Sun.

A person of copper works to transmute themselves into silver when they start to take an interest in the welfare of those outside their immediate family. Once a person with a small family is asked to speak or act on behalf of a larger group, such as a village or clan, they start to raise their frequency of consciousness beyond that which is found in a state of Nature. They start to become actually civilised – not merely passive, but an active bearer of the light of civilisation.

A second method of transmutation is the accumulation of knowledge. The character of silver is traditionally the one that has taken an interest in history, geography and culture. They are able to look beyond their immediate environment and understand the context into which their family has been thrust by circumstance. As such, they are able to understand individuals much better than those who cannot take such a broad view.

They can also transmute by means of a third way: voluntary celibacy. Upon reaching the apex of the realm of copper, a person might find that they no longer feel they have much left to experience sexually. Perhaps they have lived out every fantasy they ever had by this time. They might then, rather than expending sexual energy in the pursuit of more offspring, sublimate it into something higher.

The decision to sublimate sexual energy into spiritual energy is one of the most powerful decisions a person can ever make. It is the key to attaining the level of silver (and above). The sexual energy is fundamental to physical life, and therefore fundamental to fighting and violence and the non-consensual assertion of will. By sublimating that energy into something higher, a person moves beyond the beast and towards the god.

Chronologically, when a person is in the copper stage, they tend to have children who are in the lead stage, i.e. just learning to survive. Of people who die, a high proportion of them die in the first twelve years of life, owing to all the survival challenges that have to be met and overcome for the first time.

When their children pass into the realm of tin, there’s no longer such a worry that they might immediately die. When it does, a person of copper might cast their mind to wider things than just their nuclear family – such as their extended family. In doing so, their horizons broaden from the home to the community, and a change can begin, from copper to silver. Deep knowledge can be attained by those who throw themselves into the task once they no longer need to worry about their children.

The character of silver is mostly concerned with the clan. They are the sort of person who would become a clan chieftain. Thus they must engage in politics to some extent. They will inevitably find themselves called to settle disputes between other family members.

Occupationally, silver is associated with jobs where a degree of brilliance is required, such as doctor or judge. If copper if the boss of the front-facing roles such as Army captain, silver is the major, a back-facing role in an important office. The transition to silver, then, is a kind of retirement, from the physical realm and its conflicts.

Silver is a precious metal. This reflects the fact that characters of silver play a precious role in maintaining civilisation. They are concerned with “the wider collective”. As such, a large number of the people involved in government bureaucracy tend to be characters of silver (even if their leaders tend to be characters of mercury).

A character of copper might discover that, thanks to the reputation they have developed from raising their children well, they are offered a position as an official in a government somewhere. Such a promotion might occupationally reflect an inner change from copper to silver.

Socially, the person of silver is much less preoccupied with sex. The person of copper is specifically trying to create a family, and so is obsessed with sex. The person of silver, by contrast, no longer feels an imperative to have children. Hence, the prime virtue that transmutes copper to silver is chastity.

Physically, the transition from copper to silver is marked by silver (or grey) hair. It can also be marked by becoming more slender. Characters of silver are most likely to have the long, willowy bodies typical of the upper classes. If the muscle man of the realm of iron first relaxes into the teddy bear of the realm of copper, upon then entering the realm of silver he might become neither muscular nor fat, but lean and slender.

It’s necessary to note here that merely getting old doesn’t guarantee a transition to silver. The nature of the alchemy here is spiritual and not material. A person can therefore have silver hair but still be stuck at an earlier level of spiritual development. For example, if a 55-year old is still mostly concerned with looking tough, they are stuck at the level of iron. If they are still mostly concerned with partying, they are stuck at the level of tin.

Neither is it necessary to be old to develop a frequency of silver. It’s generally true that, the higher the frequency of the consciousness, the later in life it comes to full fruition. However, a character of an unusually high frequency of consciousness can manifest aspects of silver at an early age. This is often seen intellectually through an interest in art.

An archetypal moment that is emblematic of the transition from copper to silver is when a parent starts caring more about paying for their child’s college tuition than they do about keeping them alive. Guiding the child towards life, rather than away from death, becomes the focus. In a way, then, they transition from the guardian of their offspring to an advisor of them.

Another such moment is when a person starts wondering if there’s more to life than just sex and children. Once a person doesn’t want any more children, they have to start asking some deep, existential questions that are typically postponed by the imperative to win territory and breeding partners. A character stops following instincts like a lower animal, and starts asking themselves questions about the meaning of life.

The essence of the transition from copper to silver is a brightening that hints at the presence of solar energy. The character of silver plays a minor role in upholding civilisation itself. As such, their lives are heroic in a subtler way than those of copper and iron. In the transition to mercury, the character of silver becomes less subtle.

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The Insanity At The Heart Of Western Culture In 2024

Mainstream media has made clear to every one of us that our current rates of material consumption are destroying the planet. If we don’t stop raping the limited resources of Planet Earth, we will induce a biosphere collapse that will probably kill us all. But there are very powerful forces preventing us from not pillaging the world.

Earth Overshoot Day is the day by when humans have used up all the resources that the planet can regenerate in a year. In 2024, that day was May 27. New Zealanders consume at such at rate that, if everyone consumed like us, we’d use up a year’s worth of resources by April 11.

The fact that an overshoot day even exists is proof that the world is insane. It means that we’re living in an unsustainable manner, much like a crackhead living on a giant ball of crack. We have to change course or we’re all going to die. But there are structural reasons why our global society can’t stop consuming the planet.

It’s not just a matter of resource depletion either. This March was the tenth straight month of record temperatures. The mainstream scientific consensus is that human activity has heated up the planet by almost 1.7 degrees Celcius since the late 1800s. If we don’t rein that activity in by reducing overconsumption, we will eventually cook the planet (and us with it).

The problem is that most of this consumption is motivated by the necessities of going to work and maintaining a state of work-readiness. A person must maintain a private vehicle, professional clothing and footwear, professional standards of grooming and body care, potentially all manner of tools and equipment, as well as pay for entertainment to destress from the demands of working. All of this costs resources – resources that are only used because of the obsession with working.

Realistically what we need is for a large number of people to go on something like a UBI, so that instead of driving to work every day and flying to meetings every week, and then spending the income they make from a forty-hour workweek on all kinds of consumer crap they don’t need, they can cut down both their work rate and their consumption rate.

The problem is that it’s simply not allowed to not work.

Our entire culture appears to be based on the logic that people not employed for wages are “not pulling their weight”, as if widespread starvation was imminent. There are dozens of words that can be employed to humiliate someone into working harder: bum, bludger, leech, moocher, parasite, lazy, shirker, grifter etc. To not be working for a wage is considered a great shame.

It could even be said that we live in a “workiarchy” where whoever works the most has the highest status. People brag about waking up extremely early in the morning to work, as if it was central to their moral value. This mentality has given us absurd humour like the “100 hours a week” meme, wherein it’s assumed that if you work less than 100 hours a week you’re taking it easy.

Mass abandonment of work is also not socially possible. The identities of most people are so closely bound with their work that they would suffer a catastrophic loss of personality structure if they were asked to give it up. In the same way that many people die shortly after they retire, because they no longer see a purpose to life, many people would lose the will to live if they were asked to stop working for the environment’s sake.

We’re killing the planet by consuming as much as we are. Yet it’s impossible to just simply not work. This irreconcilable conflict is causing immense levels of undiagnosed schizophrenia among Westerners, and especially younger ones, who are facing the existential dilemma of climate change head-on.

It is apparent from the widespread despair and malaise in Western society today that people want a change of direction. But who can change that direction, when most people are too busy working to pay rents to organise protest, and the people receiving the rents don’t want to change anything?

For the insanity at the heart of Western culture to be cured, we need to collectively come to the realisation that time spent in unpaid work can be just as valuable as time spent in paid work. We don’t need capitalists ordering us around for our lives to have value or meaning. We need to completely revalue the importance of work and industriousness in the light of the total ecological impact of humanity.

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The Transmutation Of Iron Into Copper

The third upward transmutation is that of iron into copper. To move into the fourth stage of the Mithraic Ladder is to move to the central stage: there are three stages both above and below. Befitting this central position is that copper represents the coming together of men and women in bonds of mutual love. This doesn’t mean that the transmutation into copper occurs without drama.

In a state of Nature, men fight for reasons, and the primary reason is women. The hardening to iron of any of the male expressions of life is usually in order to win fights for territory and status, the two prerequisites of attracting women. This is why the man of iron is typically what has been selected for in all low-sophistication cultures throughout time. But as cultures progress towards glorious civilisations, people of higher frequencies than iron start to appear.

In transmuting to copper, a man of iron begins to colourise. Lead, tin and iron are all a shade of grey. Copper, by contrast, has colour, reflecting the fact that it is a semi-precious metal, unlike lead, tin and iron. The reddish hues of copper symbolise the fire of the soul that is now beginning to rise.

This stage of transmutation is just as applicable to women as to men. It might not be as stereotypical for a female character to become a person of iron, in comparison to a male one, but it can still happen – and perhaps would make for a less cliched story. Women might not be as good as men when it comes to fistfighting, but they are just as capable of becoming hard-bitten. Thus, a woman is just as capable as a man of being put in a situation where she must transmute iron into copper.

Copper is a stage in the mental realm, reflecting the fact that intelligence – not of much use in transmuting lead into tin or tin into iron – is of great use in transmuting iron into copper. It’s primarily intelligence that causes a person to see the value in being something more than hard. (this is a foreshadowing of the future transmutation to mercury).

In the same way that the character of lead must let go of fear of death to become a character of tin, the character of iron must let go of fear of weakness to become a character of copper. Iron is the will to physically dominate at all costs. As such, its transmutation into copper begins when a character comes to realise that there are more important things than physical domination.

Once a fighter decides to become a lover instead, they begin the transmutation of iron into copper.

A character can become motivated to make such a change when they realise that other people don’t really respect people of iron. They might fear people of iron, but not respect them. The people of iron don’t get invited to the highest positions, or the best parties, or offered the best jobs, because they tend to scare others too much.

The person of copper is oriented primarily towards their family. At the level of iron or below, a person is primarily concerned with looking tough, cool or terrible in front of their friends or comrades. Such interests fade away when a person is tasked with raising and protecting a family.

Physically, the transmutation of iron to copper is encapsulated in the “Dad bod”. The entire concept of a dad bod reflects the observation that, for many men, once they have children and no longer feel the pressure to be tough and to fight over women, the incentive to maintain fitness and leanness is gone. A female character can also, of course, become fat once they advance past the imperative to attract a romantic partner.

It’s also reflected in general appearance. The character transmuting from iron to copper stops wearing black and starts wearing colours. They stop wearing skulls as adornments and start wearing love hearts. Their entire vibe switches from trying to intimidate to trying to win love.

Copper is, of course, better for making weapons than the other metals than aren’t iron. This is reflected in the fact that characters of copper are still highly effective at fighting, they’re just past the physical fighting prime that was achieved in the frequency of iron.

A character of copper is also signficantly more social than a character of iron. When the character of iron starts to realise that, through polishing their social qualities, they can obtain pleasures that cannot be obtained through violence, they start to transmute to copper. Because copper is a semi-precious metal, a character of copper can seem like a kind of nobility to characters of lower tiers. The ensuing admiration can be what drives such characters to rise to the level of copper.

Reflecting this increased sociability, a character of copper can play with children in a way that a character of iron cannot. In fact, the reaction of children can demonstrate that a transmutation from iron to copper has taken place. A character of iron might not care if they lose a game to a child, because they’re indifferent. A character of copper doesn’t care about the loss, because, unlike the character of iron, they care about the child and its socialisation.

Psychosexually, the transmutation from iron to copper is analagous to going from having sex to making love. The character of iron doesn’t feel the need to make love – they doesn’t care too much about how the other person feels. The character of copper makes love, reflecting their superior capacity for empathy in comparison to the lower three levels.

A typical psychosexual transformation at this stage might be a woman who learns to control men of iron through her sex appeal. Copper learns to dominate iron, not through hardness and violence as iron dominates tin and lead, but through subtler means. Copper is that in civilisation which tames the beast. This is why copper can also represent small-scale trading and business.

Spiritually, the colourisation characteristic of copper represents the first real flowering of divinity. The lower three metals are all dull, the higher four are all colourful. Copper is the first of the colourful, representing a character’s first inkling of some higher order of divinity in the world.

Copper can be realised just as easily through masculine as feminine energies. However, in transforming from iron to copper there tends to be less fiery energy and more watery energy. This quenching of rage is perhaps the essential emotional and spiritual transformation. A character must learn to sublimate anger into something higher in order to pass beyond the frequency of iron.

Perhaps the best-known transmutation of iron into copper is that of Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings. Indeed, completing a great journey and winning your dream girl is an archetypal hero’s journey. Spiritual purification need not end there, however: a minority of characters go further, to the realm of silver.

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