The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt
 
by
  Jack  Lindsay

To
Marie Delcourt-Curvers




This solid flesh a circling smoke

in winds of bellying Time

haunts crevices of Space and seems

anchored here or there :

Men have thought the prospect strange

demonic scaring as they woke

from a ravishing crystalline dream

of abstract Eternities

to touch the edge of Change

where all Numbers twist and break :



yet Pattern lurks in the vanishing lair

of ragged particles. Alchemists

first kept the double vision and reckoned

as aspects of a single Stream

the Vortices of spinning mist

and the Structure of the unseizable second

when Life leaps upwards through the range

of fiery unstable Symmetries,

intricate dangerous Time.


Time

      is the moving

                image of  Eternity

Plato remarked among the Stars.

Eternity

      is the sudden

                wholeness of Time

Apollo answers amid the Flowers.

J.L.


PDF Version
The First and Concluding Chapters [PDF]
Ebenezer Baylis and Son, Trinity Press, London 1970

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