We are what we create, and currently this is increasingly communicated through clay --a soulful,
alchemistic medium as old as time itself.
Each of these forms has functions beyond utility, including the
alchemistic secrets (particularly glaze) and the production processes that master craftsmen maintain and inherit.
and as an "
alchemistic" (1996b, 725) process that Heidegger
Contrariwise, Abrams (1971a: 35, 36, 38, 39, 40) was of the opinion that Coleridge had "opium hallucinations" even while reading the very books from which he was to extract his ideas and images later to be used in the The rime of the Ancient Mariner, so much so that opium cannot be excluded as a source of inspiration in the birth of this poem, besides the other sources like the "literature of Elizabethan travellers and
alchemistic handbooks." Coleridge's "opium hallucinations" and "opium dream of [spectral] persecution" were present before and at inception, as well as through the whole process of its composition.
In this passage, which ends with the same
alchemistic trope that Hawthorne would use years later to describe Delia Bacon's interpretations of Shakespeare, the narrator complicates his earlier description of the problems created by the Custom-House, in fact finding that they are created not by the materialistic environment of the Custom-House at all but merely by his own attitude toward it.
However, Kepler, a gifted mathematician who worked at the
alchemistic Prague court of the emperor Rudolf II casting horoscopes, mixed a good dose of magic and astrology into his sci-fi dream.
You should, however, take it more as a reflection of my naturalistic education and enthusiasm for nature (in a wider context, from botany to physics) than as a wilful fixation on the inexhaustible source of a sort of, inconceivable for other people,
alchemistic inspiration.
alchemistic - of or relating to alchemists