The Red Lion

The Confection of the Philosophers Stone

By Joe Lello & David VanDerryt

Updated 10.24.2010
Changes and additions are marked by bold, italicized-red font. Notes and
observances are also described to better help those who are performing
this process. Please email Joe or myself (dvd) if you have any suggestions
or have personally experienced any other significant occurrences.

WARNING: This is NOT an operation for beginners or even amateurs with

minimal experience. If you have never melted a pot of boiling lead, or cast
pot-metal, do not attempt this procedure. All of the materials are highly
toxic and the distillation procedures are deadly dangerous to perform.
Many highly skilled people have died attempting to complete this Work
over the past five or six centuries.

This document is an addendum to Robert Coxs ground shaking new

book, The Elixir of Immortality: A Modern-Day Alchemists Discovery
of the Philosophers Stone. The text may be purchased at
Amazon.com at this URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Elixir-Immortality-Modern-Day-Alchemists-
Philosophers/dp/1594773033/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254257270&sr=1-1

This is without a doubt the very best book on alchemy I have found in
over 10 years of reading and research. If you aspire to confect The
Stone and have not read it, please stop now and do so. If you have
already read it, then you know it presents much important information
but lacks a few critically important details, which I intend to provide
here as well as giving you a hands-on guide to actually performing
this Work, step-by-step. For this operation, you will need four main
ingredients:

3 pounds of triple-distilled Mercury (Hg)

o The amount of Hg called for is the minimum

required. I suggest you obtain 5 lbs. or more.

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*A further caution regarding the handling of Hg: Always keep
Hg or any amalgams containing Hg covered with a thin layer of
water to prevent Hg vapor from gassing off into the air, which
occurs quite readily at room temperatures.

3 pounds of Bismuth pellets (Bi)

o Again, the amount of Bi required depends on the

amount of Hg employed. Since the Lunar Phase work
is relatively easy to perform and Philosophical
Mercury is also needed in the Multiplication process,
I would suggest obtaining 4 to 5 pounds of Bi, since it
is very affordable.

3 pounds of Antimony shot (Sb)

ounce 99.9999% pure Gold metal
o The more Gold the better.

A good source for Mercury with a minimum of hassle is

http://www.sciencelab.com . The current price is about $135 lb.

A better source is http://www.virginmercury.com cost is $25

lb. plus a $60 penalty for orders less than 60 lb. It is
therefore advisable to make a group purchase and divide
the penalty, thus permitting prices in the range of $30 lb.

A good source for Bismuth chunks and Antimony pellets is

http://www.consolidated-chemical.com/ at $10 and $12 lb.,
respectively.
The Queen (Lunar Phase)

Begin by breaking up the bismuth pellets into fine granules. This

should be done by placing a handful inside an old dishrag, setting it
on a hard surface like concrete and whacking the daylights out of it
with a hammer. Bi (Bismuth) is a very brittle metal and shatters
easily; much like ceramic pottery. You can also crush it with a heavy
pair of pliers like vise-grips. Poster-board paper works well. Just
fold over the edges to prevent flying. You can also place your
dishrag inside the folded poster-board to prevent loss.

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Crush them to a powder fine enough to pass through a coarse
strainer with mesh slightly larger than window screening.

Pour about 1 lb. of Hg (mercury) into your mortar and pestle and
sprinkle in about a spoonful or two of the powdered Bi. Let it steep
for 15 minutes or so. The Hg will act upon the Bi and soften it up,
making the grinding much easier. Place the mortar under a
constantly trickling stream of water. An outdoor sink is good for this.
Let the mortar fill to the brim and gently overflow. As you begin to
grind the two materials together, a grayish-black filth or feces
evolves that will be washed away by the water. Keep grinding and
rinsing until no more filth comes out then add another spoonful of Bi
powder and repeat as before. Grinding does not have to be done
under running water, so long as some water is present in the
mortar. Always have a solid surface where you can grind
comfortably. Rinse as needed to remove the grayish-black filth
or feces.

Continue adding, grinding and washing until you have a sparkling

clean, silvery amalgam the consistency of cookie dough. To
determine when enough Bi has been added, scrape all the
material to one side of the mortar, then gently incline the mortar
away from the amalgam. If a bead or droplets of Hg ooze out of
the leading edge of the amalgam, you need to add more Bi. Place
the finished amalgam into a tightly sealed glass jar and let the
materials commingle and digest together undisturbed for about 2
weeks. You can use this time to locate and order or assemble a
retort or distilling flask that you will need in the next step which is a
distillation.

You can use a retort made of either cast iron or high-temperature

quartz glass to distill the Hg out of the amalgam. Ordinary glass,
even borosilicate glass will not serve here because they melt at lower
temperatures than we will be working with. Fig. 1 illustrates a retort
of the preferred configuration although it is not made of quartz glass.

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Figure 1

Figure 2

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 Figure 3

If you cannot locate or afford a retort made of quartz, plain black iron
pipe fittings are also usable - (See Fig. 2 above) - however, quartz is
highly superior since it does not rust , nor does it have the many
threaded joints of the iron device that are prone to leakage of toxic
hot Hg vapor. Another plus for quartz is that you can also see whats
going on inside as the distillation proceeds.

I (DVD)have found that rust in the retort did not seem to effect
the Lunar Phase. I did use acid to clean as much rust out as
possible before I did my distill. I also heated my retort up and
then removed it and tightened it again to make sure all
connections were as tight as possible. You have to have these
threaded connections very tight.

If you opt for the iron retort, make sure all of your fittings are plain,
un-plated black iron pipe and not are zinc galvanized. The smaller
adapter bushings can be made of stainless steel, but try to get
everything in black iron. Seal all threaded joints with PTFE Teflon
thread tape. Do not use any other adhesives or sealants. Before
assembling your retort, thoroughly degrease and clean all parts with a

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brief bath in diluted 20% HCl, about 50 ml of acid to two gallons of
water. Neutralize the solution with baking soda afterwards and rinse
parts thoroughly in hot water. If you can obtain some phosphoric
acid, it will be better yet, since it will serve as a rust-remover and
inhibitor as well as a good cleaning agent.

Put all of your amalgam cookie dough into the retort and heat to
approximately 750F over a large propane burner (Hg boils at 636F).
The condenser tube must terminate at least 6 inches under water. I
recommend placing a small 250 300 ml beaker inside a larger (8L
10L) glass vessel, positioned directly beneath the condenser tube
(See Fig. 3 above) to catch the droplets of Hg as they fly over.

To more easily determine when all of your Hg has distilled over,

pour a pound of Hg into your beaker and mark it (assuming you
have started with a pound of Hg). During the distillation, the Hg
sometimes comes over in sessions. When you have collected
enough Hg to reach or almost reach the pre-determined mark,
you will know you can stop distilling.

Use cold distilled water, and be sure you can quickly and easily
remove the tubing from the water as soon as you stop the heating, so
that no water is sucked back up into the hot retort, or there is a risk of
causing a steam-pressure explosion. After you distill the Hg out of the
Bi amalgam, you can discard the Bi. With the quartz retort, you will
have to re-melt it and pour it out of the retort.

Distill the Hg two or three times to get it nice and clean, (This is not
really necessary. Experiment has shown that one distillation is
sufficient.) then pour it into a large (2L) flask that has a broad neck
so there is plenty of surface area, and seal the flask with a tapered
glass plug and safety-wire it shut. Place it into an oven at 300 deg
Fahrenheit. until you see a green, moss-like growth form on the
surface of the Hg. This is the Tree of Hermes or the Green Lion
which none but the eyes of a true philosopher hath seen. If these
flowers begin to turn yellowish or even orange, reduce the heat so
that you do not burn them.

Do not go any higher than 330F or you will burn the flowers. I
have seen the Green Lion begin to appear in as little as 6 hours.

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If you are doing the suggested small batches (a pound of Hg
plus Bi) the growth will appear quickly.

Once the greenish growth occurs it must be harvested. Remove the

flask from the oven, handling it very carefully so as not to damage the
flowers or trees. Let the Hg cool to room temperature whereupon
the green color of the growth will fade to gray. Very carefully remove
the growths as best you can using a small nylon sieve, or a piece of
plastic screening - whatever you can procure, so long as it is non-
metallic. This formerly green growth must be ground up in a mortar
& pestle and the sap at its center collected.

I (DVD) found that after the Hg has cooled completely you can
pour the Hg off ,being careful not to pour out the growth. You
can use a piece of nylon or plastic mesh screen to retain the
growth in your flask but do not dump the material out onto the
screen or it may shatter and you will lose precious Philisophical
Mercury (PM). After you have removed the Hg you will have a
clump of grayish matter left behind. Put your stopper back on
and shake your flask side to side. The PM will separate from the
powder. Pour this into a container. The PM may be strained
through a leather chamois if desired to get it absolutely clean.

This material, the blood of the Green Lion, is the true, animated
Philosophical Mercury of the Sages (hereinafter referred to as PM).
When you have collected as much as you can get, place it into a
tightly capped bottle or sealed flask and store it in a cool, humid
place. This concludes the Lunar Phase of The Work.

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 The King (Solar Phase)

Place about 4 ounces of Sb shot into a covered porcelain crucible

large enough so that it is filled only halfway. Place the crucible into
your oven and heat to 750F. This must be done OUTDOORS in a
well-ventilated area. Remove the cover from the crucible briefly
and add a half-ounce of pure 24K Au metal. It will immediately
melt like butter into the hot liquefied Sb.

Replace the cover and continue heating at 750F for at least 48 hrs.
then turn off the heat and allow the crucible to cool down slowly.
The Au will have been broken down into micro-clusters, some of
which are in groups of less than nine atoms. Many of these micro-
clusters will actually disaggregate and dissociate into ORME
Cooper pairs, a.k.a. M-state, or Bose-Einstein Condensate.

When cooled to room temperature, you will find a brittle cake in the
crucible that must be removed and pulverized into a powder just
as you did with the Bi pellets in the first section. Place another
pound of Hg into your mortar & pestle [Note: use fresh, triple-
distilled Hg, NOT the PM you just made]. Add a tbsp. or so of the
ground-up Sb powder and let it steep for about 15 minutes.

Although the Sb (known as The Wolf by the ancients) will devour

and finely divide the Au metal, it will not amalgamate with it. The
two metals simply remain a physical mixture, easily separated.
When we add Hg to the mix, the finely divided Au homogenously
amalgamates with the Hg, but does not adhere to the Sb at all.
This means that the Sb may be easily separated out by simply
grinding and washing.

Place the mortar into the sink and again let a small stream of water
fill and overflow the mortar and begin grinding the powder into the
Hg as before. Once again, a filth or blackness will evolve from the
mixture that must be washed away, only this time the blackness is
the Sb being separated and removed from the physical mixture,
leaving behind only the finely divided Au amalgamated together
with the Hg.

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When you have ground and washed away all of the powder and no
more blackness evolves, place the Au / Hg amalgam into your
retort and distill off the Hg as before. Keep this Hg completely
separate from the first batch of PM that you made. Most of the
finely divided Au will remain behind in the bottom of the retort as a
dry brittle cake, but the super-fine Au micro-clusters in ORME
configuration will fly over with the Hg and seed it with the body or
the sulfur of Au.

This operation was called by the ancients Flying an Eagle, and it

must be repeated at least 9 times. Each time you Fly an Eagle,
you place the now slightly smaller leftover cake of Au into a fresh
quantity of Sb, but when you add in the Hg use the same Hg that
you distilled over from the first Eagle. In this manner, each time
you distill it, a little more seed of Au will fly over and be imbued
into the Hg, until it becomes saturated with Au ORME.

When you have completed 9 or 10 Eagles, place the Au seeded

Hg into a large flask, seal it well and place it into the oven at 330C
(635F) as before. Once again, this temperature was misstated.
Do not go above 330F. Start the process at 300F and observe
it Observe periodically, and after a few days either a red or a
white powder should begin to emerge and float atop the pool of
Hg. Agitate it occasionally and continue heating until no more
powder evolves.

This powder must be collected by allowing the Hg to cool to room

temperature and then pouring it into a crystallizing dish. The red
or white powder that is floating on the surface of the Hg may then
be carefully scraped off with a feather quill and placed into a small
glass vial. This powder is pure ORME Au, and was referred to as
Philosophical Gold or Our Gold by the ancients. We have now
concluded the Solar Phase of The Great Work.

The Alchemical Wedding

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You are now ready to perform the final phase of The Great Work, the
marriage of the Sun & Moon, or the mixture of the Philosophical Gold
with the Philosophical Mercury. This mixture, when combined, is
known as The Rebis, a word that literally means a mixture of two
dissimilar things. They are very difficult to combine, and once they
are combined, they have a tendency to separate again very quickly.
It is therefore important to have everything prepared in advance and
ready to go so that you can immediately place the Rebis into the
Egg and place the Egg into the oven.

The Egg should be a tightly sealed very thick-walled quartz flask that
is either round-bottomed or slightly elongated (egg-shaped) with a
long neck so that a circulation process may proceed within it this
will be further explained a bit later. The ratio of PG to PM for the
Rebis should be somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1, (Au:Hg). The two
materials can be persuaded to combine by either grinding them
together in a mortar & pestle, or shaking them together vigorously in
a long, slender covered jar. Either process will be lengthy and
arduous, but eventually they will grudgingly form a marginal sort of
colloidal suspension.

Combining the two parts should be the very last thing you do, so that
you may immediately place the Rebis into the oven. A sand bath
placed inside a gas-fired ceramics kiln makes a good set-up. Once
you begin heating the Rebis, the heat must not be interrupted for the
duration of the procedure, not even for 5 minutes or the process will
fail and all will be lost. For this reason, gas heat is infinitely
preferable to an electric oven, since there would be little chance of
the heat being interrupted for example, by a temporary power outage.
A sand bath holds heat well and cools very slowly, thereby providing
a reliable safety buffer should it be necessary to change out an empty
gas canister.

Incubation

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Maintain the temperature at right around 330C (636F), and other than
periodic observation it should not be necessary to lay hands upon the
egg again until the entire process in completed. Carefully regulate
the heat so that a steady, even circulation occurs within the Egg.
Think of it as a process similar to the circulation by which rain occurs
in nature. The hot vapor of the animated PM should evaporate up
into the neck of the egg where it will condense back into a liquid upon
the cooler surfaces, and then rain down to seep back into the
seeded earth below. Too much heat will tend to dry out the earth
in the bottom of the flask and create excessive moisture clinging to
the walls inside the neck. Too little heat and the earth will appear
flooded, with very little condensation visible in the neck.

Now begins a series of color changes known thoughout alchemical

history as the Peacocks Tail. At first not much will appear to be
going on inside the egg, but toward the end of about 40 days the
material will gradually begin to dry up, turn a bluish-black and putrefy,
and a dark vapor known as the Dragons Breath will proceed
forth and fill the Egg. This first sign that things are proceeding as
they should is known as the Ravens Head.

At somewhere around five months you will next observe a white

crescent that appears around the inside perimeter of the Egg along
the surface of the earth. Eventually the entire mass will all turn to a
pure snow-white powder. At this point, it is no longer toxic and has
become the White Stone or Medicine of the First Order. Later on,
it will gradually begin to liquefy again and turn a light translucent
greenish hue, the color of new plant seedlings. After seven and a half
months, it will turn to a citrine color, then yellow, then amber. Finally,
at somewhere between nine and ten months, the amber color gives
way to a purplish-violet and then quickly proceeds to a deep
vermillion red, the color of coagulated blood. This sign marks the end
of the first incubation but we are not quite done yet.

Multiplication

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We must perform at least one more operation to obtain the fully
matured Philosophers Stone, and that is called a multiplication.
Multiplication not only increases the amount of the Stone you
possess, but it also increases the potency of the material by a factor
of ten. Each time you multiply the Stone, its power to heal the body
and the quantity of base metal it can perfect (transmute) is increased
ten times over. However the Stone may only be multiplied a
maximum of nine times any further multiplication would result in a
material so potent and so subtle that it can no longer be contained
and it will escape right through the walls of the Egg and be lost.

Remove the material from the Egg, and separate the bright red
powder from the dross. Using only the red powder and a fresh
quantity of PM, make up another Rebis, place it within the Egg, and
incubate it. The operation will proceed as before, only the time
between phases of the Peacocks Tail will be greatly lessened and
the entire process should only take about 28 days. The Stone is now
complete and fixed in the fire meaning that if heated in a spoon it
should not scorch or burn, merely flow like wax and then re-harden.

NOTE: The once or twicemultiplied mature Red Stone is a

dangerously potent restorative medicine. It must never be ingested
full strength.

To dilute the Stone to a safe level for consumption, take up the tiniest
grain of the material with a needle point and drop it into a pint of white
wine. The wine will be dyed a deep red color. Take an eyedropper
and place a drop of this reddened wine into another pint of white wine
and it will turn a lighter shade of red. Continue in this manner until
the wine turns a golden hue; this is the true Potable Gold and is now
sufficiently diluted to the point where 1 or 2 DROPS of it may be
consumed. No person should ever take more than 7 drops of this
material at once. An average dose is 1 or 2 drops twice per year.

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