Thank you Village Books for a successful event—and to all friends, colleagues, and readers in attendance! Special thanks to Steve Jensen, Hilde Meadow, Terri Kempton, and the Norwegian Choir (Damekor) who performed Renaissance madrigals. The Next Chapter’s Café provided tantalizing sweet and savory, bursting with flavor.
As always, paying tribute to key writings
I’ve participated in over a dozen book events/podcasts so far, but the talk and signing at Village Books held a special place for me, being in my home town!
One critical question of great interest to many in the audience was, “What is alchemy?” And then, was Bianca’s alchemy different than Francesco’s alchemy?
In general, alchemy through the ages has had several common themes: Transmutation (transformation, purification) of substances (often, metals, such as lead into gold) and longevity of life (via elixers, a Philosopher’s Stone, etc.). It’s a combination of chemistry/other sciences and mysticism with roots in classical Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Islamic texts. As such, it thrived in the classics-obsessed Renaissance as seen in the art and science of the Medici—producing a Medici paste-porcelain, as here, one of a handful of such pieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
This was Francesco’s alchemy (“Francesco’s alchemy required exactness“); Bianca’s, a more observation-focused study,
Bianca watched the boil writhing in the cauldron, the tang of cooked herbs shutting out everything else. She wasn’t torturing the water; she was coaxing out its elements. A slow churning boil, bubbles building in perfect circles on the bottom, increasing quickly in width, breaking explosively at the surface. The earthy bite of artemisia drifted up, as it should…
Bianca’s work, focused on plants, taught her, too, “the forms of their leaves as they grew, reading in each unfurling frond or leaf what that plant would become…”
As I speak about at Village Books, on Artemisia annua and work at the Goetheanum.
See my blog for related posts!