A powerfully expressive symbolism which is so unalterable in its forms that a person uninitiated may at once recognise a work of signification without knowing its meaning. 

Dissolution, Maceration, Sublimation, Division and Composition are the essential operations of the Work.

The Stone, our Great King. The thing that is the venerable Stone is hidden in the caverns of the metals. Visit the inner parts of the earth; by rectification you shall find the Stone. (Process not Object) 

"Reducing material chaos to its basic components explains by a sort of grandiose mathematica how Nature directs the birth of forms she draws from chaos." (Antonin Artaud, 'Les Tarahumaras', PP. 44). 

Settling among themselves that "Dissolution, Maceration, Sublimation, Division, and Composition", are the essential operations of the Work, while above them appear the Sun and Moon, the Dragon biting his own tail. 

There are Sorcerers who command the demons and impose obedience upon them. They summon them at their will and force them to appear to do their work, and if they should delay or fault, hold them prisoner in their dwelling, (and HOLD THEM WITHIN THE WORKS, PRISONER, WHEN THE WORK IS NOT ACHIEVED). 

ARCANA MAGORUM DETESTANDA. VENI, DIABOLE, DISCALCEA ME. 

The execrated secrets of the magicians. Come devil, take off my shoes. 

The card is not TIME or TEMPERANCE, but art, caught between the DEVIL and the TOWER. 

He who knows how to sublimate the Stone philosophically justly merits the name of Philosopher, since he knows the Fire of the Sages, which is the sole instrument which can effect this sublimation; no philosopher has ever openly revealed this secret fire; he who does not understand it must halt here and prey to God that He may enlighten him. 

A true conception of the essential meaning of spirit and nature in man shows life and art as a perpetual sacrifice of inward to outward and outward to inward; a conception which enables us to recognise this process as exclusively in favour of the inward and seiving to broaden man's individual inwardness (spirit) towards universal inwardness .... Thus understood, the opposition of spirit and nature in man is seen as constantly forming a new unity — which constantly reflects more purely the original unity of which the opposites, spirit and nature, manifest themselves — in time as a duality. (Piet Mondrian. "De Stijl", June 1918)

The Progression followed in the formation of the world is the same as that of animal gestation. Metallic generation can only be the same. The creations of works by the artist to a Work can only be the same. 

The Eternal Renewal of things in the Midst of Decay and the Symbolic Synthesis of the Great Work. 

Give me Philtres, Cazotte's Camel closes in. 

Demons Ashtoreth, Baal, Asmodeus, Belphegor, Eurynome,