The time has come to speak of stars, or the web of influences that binds everything together.
Your statement is at once true and so generic that it borders on the unreal. For an alchemist, stellar influences are complex and varied. For instance, to begin with, the stars also serve as the alchemist’s clock.
The stellar calendar, the ancient agricultural calendar…
We will discuss this later. I mentioned a “clock” earlier, and clocks are typically a system for scheduling the hours of the solar day.
The solar hours were marked by sundials.
But not the nighttime hours.
Water clocks and sand clocks. Or, for those who knew how, observing the moon and the stars: the moon revolves around the Earth, and the Earth revolves around the Pole Star, so the night sky is never the same.
The night sky is never the same. But an alchemist must also be guided in what he does not know how to choose.
Perhaps you mean that there are stellar cycles…
Fair enough regarding stellar cycles, but that is a whole other topic. So… Alchemical work must be performed at night. Always. In any season. We also take it for granted, under the influence of certain peculiar stars. But there is another decisive detail. It is a matter of choosing the right moment of the night to begin or conclude certain operations. For the qualities of the night not only differ greatly from one another, but also change as the seasons progress.
Take sunrise, for example, which changes with practically every new solar day.
Dawn is too late; I need something scheduled that happens earlier. I need the Milky Way.
The Milky Way? Yet we are part of the Milky Way—situated in one of its rather outlying arms. And what we see is not foreign to us, but rather a part so vast that it seems detached from the Earth, like any ordinary star.
The Milky Way apparently rotates in the night sky; only the North Star remains fixed. Due to the Earth’s rotation, the exact time the Milky Way rises in the east changes drastically throughout the year. The fundamental rule is that it gains about an hour each month (rising an hour earlier than in the previous month).
Furthermore, an important distinction must be made: the faint band of the Milky Way (visible all year round) is one thing, while the Galactic Core (the brightest, densest, and most spectacular part)—visible only during specific months—is another.
Wait a moment—didn’t you say that alchemical work should begin during the so-called “witching hour”—roughly between 11:30 PM and 1:00 AM?
Unfortunately, the “witching hour” is not fixed for every night of the year. Therefore, we need to take into account the approximate times when the Milky Way begins to rise in the east/southeast at various times of the year.
Aside from the difficulty of seeing the Milky Way with the naked eye in many parts of the world due to light pollution, there is also the challenge of catching the exact moment it rises in the east/southeast. Aside from all that, there are times of the year when it is impossible to use the Milky Way as a night-time clock. Want an example? Let’s look at the Italian sky—where we are now: in March, it appears low and parallel to the horizon before dawn (roughly 4 a.m.); in April, it is visible for a couple of hours before morning twilight (roughly 3 a.m.); May, it rises to form a striking arc across the night sky (roughly between 1 and 2 a.m.); June—its peak visibility—it rises as soon as darkness falls and remains visible for most of the night (roughly between 11 p.m. and midnight); In July and August, it is already high in the sky as soon as darkness falls, so its rising is not visible; in September and October, at sunset, the core is already visible high in the south/southwest and sets within a few hours; from November to January, it is invisible. The galactic center is positioned behind the Sun from our perspective, meaning it transits the sky during the day and cannot be seen. How reliable is this night clock?
First, if an alchemist required a night clock that marked the hours by extending the duration of solar hours, they would have been better off using water clocks or sandglasses. Second, the night hours suitable for specific alchemical operations do not, in fact, follow the duration of solar hours; instead, they vary from day to day, month to month, and season to season. In short: the most important alchemical operations are carried out only on specific days within specific months and seasons of the year. The remaining time is devoted to the solar-lunar magnetization of midsummer and to other operations that verge on theurgy between November and January. Alchemy is not chemistry; you cannot perform in exactly the same way all year round.
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Main Index: 9. Stellar Alchemy