Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies > Magic, alchemy & hermetic thought
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Alchemical Mercury - A Theory of Ambivalence (Hardcover)
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Alchemical Mercury - A Theory of Ambivalence (Hardcover)
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How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We
think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually
lead) into gold, but "alchemy" is a word in wide circulation in
everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as
the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and
time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not
at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not
as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a
theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the
world. What emerges as the least common denominator or "intensive
property" of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical
coexistence of two incompatible elements. "Alchemical Mercury"
moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the
Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels,
stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the
Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging,
this is the first study to consider alchemy in relation to literary
and visual theory in a comprehensive way.
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