by callmekato

Question by wastical: Why is “the Alchemist” represented with a skull?
I have seen a few rings or pictures where a skull is described as “the alchemist” does this have something to do with the play or with the plague? Or what?

Best answer:

Answer by Luna Lovegood
Countless artworks of wizard, alchemists, sorcerers and so forth feature the quintessential, archetypical skull, usually resting on a book with a single candle burning atop it. Some media even have the skull speaking.

Wondering why such a peculiar icon becomes so often repeated, as if there were a sense of rightness about it through an intuition of truth, several actual, older examples such as in Rosell Hope Robbin’s “Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology” may also be noted to have details which are clues about the creation and operation of such devices, the components of whose modern definitions might include dynanmic magnetic data storage, holographic-optical computer, countermagnetic amplifier and so on.
Certain Native American references of oracular, guiding “ancestor spirits” inhabiting buffalo skulls and the like may also be correctly classified here…

Although it may be a possibility that if the magnetic features were not the result of consecrations (besides the hoard of older occultists who attributed magick to magnetics, ceremonial magicians with magnet-tipped wands and so forth, the consecration of an object at two of the cardinal points of the compass, N & S, most often neatly remembles the method of making magnets), that directional casting or magnetization could have been initiated by a spirit, much as hauntings leave tell-tale signatures, i.e. “hot spots”, that register on magnetic instruments like the often used magnetometer. Still, the consecratory herbs are likely of some significance as well.
Mexican codices and conquistador accounts of the New World describe racks of human skulls adorning the pyramids, but the great probability is that the reality is what we see at the right, that they are only facsimiles. It’s hard explaining, whatever rationale is given, why, if there was any purpose in genuine human skulls, that facsimiles could suffice in any instance. The same must be asked about their crystal skulls; the Mesoamerican occurance of, and preoccupation with skulls may very well arise from their feats of of oracular magick. We find exactly the same situation amongst the ancient Celts. If custom demands the genuine skulls at left, then why are columns of heads such as at right acceptable?

The answer again may be found in the concept of oracular magnetic feild cores. The authenticity or even the recognizable head shape is largely irrelevant, but the symbol serves as a label that the object has been imbued with artifical intelligence.

The column at right may have had other purposes that acting as an oracle, but it may have been extremely important that those who encountered it at random were aware that artifical intelligence was present. Such collections of vigilant skulls have also been associated with the fabulous divination with magick mirrors known as catoptromancy that occured in ancient Greece; it has been said that some were buried in a circle nearby to account for this amazing medical divination.

Along with several crystal skulls, standard works on the subject identify this crystal rabbit as genuine, although there can be found a hoarde of dispute of the authenticity of the crystal skulls.
The fact that this form is a rabbit, however, may touch on hypersymbolism that may help be able to validate the origin of the peices, since the rabbit has a wealth of meanings, largely scientific, in Mesoamerican literature, as the “Star Way” page at this site attests to.

We may also have the fortune that both the rabbit and the skull as astrological symbols can tell us a great deal more about Mesoamerican efforts in this area, through acknowledging the correspondences of ancient and modern magick.
National Geographic’s article on the Mound-builders (Dec. 1972, pg. 783) features these Northern Amerindian skulls (pp. 796-797), “from Canada’s Rainy River mound sites- radio-carbon dated at A.D. 1200… Eye-sockets contain shell-bead irises set in clay”. Reminds one a bit of the eye-socket inserts of the Easter Island heads and others of their kind in the Pacific, which may very also belong to the category we are discussing.

I am asserting that skulls should be able to have been expected to have been generically treated like crystal balls, annointed with mugwort or dusted with iron-based minerals; Nat. Geo.’s caption advises us that “People of the Blackduck culture often sprinkled iron oxide over grave areas”. Does prediction work often enough here therefore to consider this line of inquiry a science?
Here is a classic, used on the cover of Valliant’s “Aztecs of Mexico”.

If we expand on the premise already supported here, the two bands of turquoise may fufill the same criteria in a different way: the fact that they are fragmented may yeild a Prigogyne resonator, after the fashion of Tom Bearden’s detailing of the physics of mysterious lights whose possible origins lie in faults within the earth, a premise that may extend to virtually any impurities that are found in other skulls, including the crystal ones.

These two bands may also form a scalar device, possibly resonating with several scalar vortex rings of energy.

This may put them even more recognizably within the framework of inventor Nikola Tesla’s wireless science, a science he himself said went at least as far back as the Spanish Inquistion, and the obvious impliction is that it formed the framework of “occult” feats and science.

Two scenes from the Codex Nutall. There are even more convincing scenes from ancient Mesoamerican works than these, but these are adequate to not only effectively suggest several methods of consecration or charging, or magnetization and programming of the probable magnetic artificial intelligence system that is implied.

The cardinal points of the four directions, or points of the compass and their magnetic axis, do indeed seem to be apparent in the markers around the skull, suggesting that the skull is being magnetized. Many other scenes from the Codex Nutall show precisely the same thing while expanding on various details.

The first one may feature an acorn, a possible source of magnetizing muons, as well as the appropriate magnetic bird icon next to it. The shape below the skull in both images has analogues in the Codex Nutall that look more like walnuts. The general impression that is created is that the ancient Mesoamericans recognized the shape of members of the Composite family of plants as having a morphology that, almost as much as certain nuts, signified the brain and pertained to it according to their Doctrine of Signatures.

Both neurotransmitter precursors or analogs, and salts that this family of plants is often known for, resembling key players in the nervous system and related to both magickal “graveyard dusts” and to the salts of modern glasses with memory properties may be utilized in some methods of establishing the artificial intelligence.

An accurate count of the notches or petals may give the atomic numbers of the relevant elements and may also make some reference to the creation of the crystal skulls themselves, as may the “moon in rabbit” scene shown on the “Star Way” page of this site.

The suffocation of the bird in the first scene may well be a ideographic way of suggesting the role of the element oxygen (which the bird is denied), possibly that the functions referred to occur in an anaerobic state, that oxygen is antagonistic to the magnetic feild at some critical stage or conversely beneficial to the magnetization, or that oxygen is given off within the chemistry of the process.

That the role of wands may prescribe the use of ectoplasm, generated by magicians as opposed to an actuation by disembodied intelligences, however, may favor the anaerobic type of theory.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!