Friday's Top 10 Alchemy Picks of the Week
Friday's Top 10 Alchemy Picks of the Week
Curated Rituals, Recipes, and Adventures for the Alchemical Soul Hungry for More Life Learning
Welcome to this week’s Top 10 Alchemy Picks—your curated guide to rituals, stories, and tools that spark transformation and creativity!
Each week, I gather ideas, resources, and inspirations to help you weave the mystical and the practical into your daily life. From embodying ancient archetypes to exploring rare manuscripts, these picks are designed to fuel your alchemical journey of self-discovery and soul nourishment. Whether you're seeking new ways to deepen your spiritual practice or simply looking to savor life's magic, there's something here to ignite your creative spark.
Dive in and explore this week's alchemical treasures!
Embody Archetypes: Over the summer, I completed a 16-week Advanced Training Certificate in Applied Astrological Archetypes from Pacifica Graduate Institute. I imagine you’re curious about your archetypes, so click here to take the mini-assessment. Then, click here for a valuable tool to learn how to embody ten archetypes—thirty-second lessons by Richard Olivier (son of actor Laurence Olivier). I’m doing the “strategist” gestures every morning, and it’s made a significant difference in my productivity.
COVID is Still Here: Several members of our Alchemist Community either have COVID or are recovering from it. Here’s an Indigenous ritual to soothe the soul. ‘Every Step You Take is a Prayer’ features the music and dance led by Umpaowastowin — or Pat Northrup, as she's known in English. Enjoy these healing vibes from Minnesota Public Radio.
Herbs & Verbs: Magic, in part, is “A decontextualizing of the language and actions from everyday life and resituating them within a special and powerful—and abstracted (often mythic)—context,” according to writer Hillary Waterman for JSTOR Daily. This is a fascinating article exploring how magical language can be. Cast a few spells, too, if you would like.
For Content Creators: the Smithsonian allows you to download and use over 40,000 works of Asian and American Art through Open Culture. Plus, much more. This is a fantastic resource for storytellers.
Siena Awards Festival: Technology empowers artists. Echos of the Arctic by Florian Ledoux is my pick for the 2024 Drone Video Awards (four minutes each). Each nominee is extraordinary. The winners will be announced on September 28th.
Why Is Everything Made by People Static? We are designed to be interacting with each other and the world. Lonneke Gordijn explains how to change people’s behavior through light artistry in this illuminating TedTalk.
Cleopatra’s Sweet Tooth: Ancient Recipes with Sohla —you do not want to miss this. She recreates ancient dessert recipes from Cleopatra’s abundant table. This is no small feat, given how ingredients have changed over the centuries. Solving these problems makes her show interesting, and the recipes are creative and inspiring.
Turning Pages and Interpreting the Heavens: The National Library of Medicine offers interactive access to a range of rare books, manuscripts, and documents from its historical collections. The many colorful charts in the manuscript for The Manual of Astrology and Divination were based on astrological texts imported to Mongolia from Tibet in the late 1700s. This is another reminder of how different one’s world perspective can be when viewed holistically and not divided by artificial separations.
11 Mantras for Taking Better Care of Yourself: This pairs nicely with the resource on archetypes. Every day is a new beginning. You can make it brighter with validation by operating from a place of strength.
The World’s Oldest Cookbook: Cleopatra’s desserts are fantastic, but we can go back even further! Four thousand-year-old ancient Babylonian recipe tablets are now being studied. Recipes are poetry. We can’t live without either of them.
From the Coincidence, Serendipity, Synchronicity Files
Earlier this week, and for the first time, I made Black-eyed Pea Soup with Rainbow Swiss Chard. This soup sparkles with a dash of Pomegranate syrup and a dollop of Greek yogurt. Yum!
And what’s the news story in yesterday’s AI Business? The band Black Eyed Peas to Debut AI-Powered Member at Las Vegas Residency 2025. Had I not made the soup, I would not have noticed the story. Coincidence, Serendipity, Synchronicity? You decide. Maybe the band is named after the soup. Why not?
Last Call
As a childless cat lady, I cannot resist sharing Ancient Egypt to Taylor Swift: The Historical Roots of the ‘Cat Lady’ by Akanksha Singh, BBC News.
Choose a Portal and Enjoy Your Weekend!
