Alchemy II

My Quest For Immortality
Art Kunkin

After more than thirty years of study and research, I now believe that it might be possible to achieve a tremendous increase in the healthy human life span to hundreds of years through applying the principles of the ancient science of Alchemy.  The average human life span today is fewer than 100 years.  A few rare individuals have been known to achieve ten or twenty years of life beyond that point before the inevitable-seeming physical death occurs.  However, could there be any truth to the legends that a few alchemists have achieved life spans of one thousand years or greater after having mastered the secrets of alchemy?

in the 1960’s and early 1970’s I was the publisher and editor of the widely known weekly newspaper, The Los Angeles Free Press.  In that era at the FREEP I interviewed and published the work of a multitude of the Los Angeles “gurus” of the day.  When suspicious elements forced the FREEP to cease operations, I turned my attention to Meditation, a practice I was led to by several of those gurus.  It was while I was practicing my meditations, that I experienced a Spiritual connection to an understanding that the information that I was given in those meditations was coming from a higher source, a collective consciousness, that was beyond the scope of my own intelligence.  Inspired by that realization, I began sharing my understandings by teaching meditation

I had been teaching a meditation class in Los Angeles on the Tibetan and Egyptian Books Of The Dead for some time when, in 1979 a young man, James Woolsey, joined my class.  James was also a student of “laboratory alchemy” at the Paracelsus College in Salt Lake City.  When he told me about his alchemical studies, I enrolled in my first class in February of 1980.

The College was owned and operated by the Paracelsus Research Society (PRS), an international organization.  PRS produced a quarterly magazine, Essentia, and previously had published a series of 41 “Alchemical Laboratory Bulletins” (1960 to 1969), each issue limited to 500 copies.  Since the early 1960’s, Frater Albertus, its founder, had offered many successful alchemical seminars in Europe, Australia and throughout the United States.

The College “campus” consisted of six houses that had been converted into laboratories and dormitories with one house being the residence of alchemist and teacher Albert Riedel (aka: Frater Albertus) and his wife, known to the students as Emmie.  One amazing thing about Paracelsus was that, if you were accepted as a student and made the effort to travel to Salt Lake City, you would not be charged for tuition or room and board.  Like most students, however, I volunteered to pay the small amount of $120 per week for the room, board and tuition.

PRS had also published a number of books, including The Alchemist’s Handbook and The Seven Rays Of The Q.B.L.  The “Handbook” informed the student how to set up a scientific laboratory, collect plants and produce medicinal tinctures from herbs and minerals, while the “Seven Rays” discussed astrology and the “Quabalistic Tree of Life” as introductions to alchemical philosophy.

Paracelsus offered a program in Alchemy that consisted of two weeks of residential study that would take place, once a year, for seven years.  There were fourteen students in my first class at Paracelsus.  They had come from Michigan, Texas, California, Kansas, Massachusetts, Colorado, New York, Utah and Missouri.  There were also students from Germany, Scotland and Australia.

That first two weeks of classes were devoted largely to making herbal medicines, the way the ancient alchemists had, and resulted in my filling two large, three-ring notebooks.  Page after page was filled with handwritten notes on the distillation of herbs to make tinctures for medicines.  After two weeks, students were instructed to return to their homes, construct a scientific laboratory and conduct a series of guided experiments in herbal and mineral alchemy before coming back the following year with their results, and for another two weeks of residential study.

When I returned home to Los Angeles after that first year, I made a series of visits to the surplus stores at UCLA and USC, purchasing all the used university laboratory equipment I could, at pennies on the dollar.  My haul included boxes of distillation glassware, microscopes, sterilization chambers, furnaces, torches, and petri dishes, etc.  Eventually, I had five rooms of laboratory equipment, filling up a large basement that I had rented in an old hotel near the corners of Hollywood and Vine.

While concocting the required herbal remedies, I would make frequent sunrise visits to Griffith Park and Topanga Canyon collecting herbs while the plant oil in them was at the required maximum potency for the day.  I then turned my attention to the book The Quabalistic Tree of Life by the French scientist Louis Kervran.  Eventually I learned to make medicines out of minerals such as antimony and poisonous mercury as well as various other herbs.

Alchemy became so fascinating to me that by the end of 1980 I had permanently moved to Salt Lake City and, banking on my experience at the Free press, become editor of the Essentia.  I supported myself by teaching meditation classes to about 100 students each week, including many members of the Freemasons organization in Salt Lake.

In the years since 1984 I have performed hundreds of alchemical experiments in my laboratories and acquired a library of approximately a thousand books on the subject. (While living in Salt Lake City, I photocopied the four hundred books in the Paracelsus College Library to start this collection).  I have determined that the Philosopher’s Stone, sought by the traditional alchemists to achieve immortality, is actually a radioactive mineral.  I made this discovery in 2006 while already living in Joshua Tree, California, having become by then an alternate member of the National Board of Mentalphysics located there.

I have been eating a radioactive apple each week since 2006 to deliberately add a very small amount of radioactive energy to my body.  I have concluded that humans get life from radioactivity, living as we do in an atmospheric sea of radioactivity much as fish live in water.  I am very careful with the radioactive substances I handle and have purchased a Geiger Counter so I can measure and limit the amount of radioactivity in my environment.

Have I achieved an exceptionally long life or immortality by eating my radioactive apples?  I really don’t know but I have had an interesting life and am now a fairly healthy and active 86 year old, having just gotten married last month.  You will be able to read about my success in your daily newspaper, if and when I reach 200 years of age.

In recent years I have become interested in the subject of past lives.  I have learned, through hypnotic past life regressions, that I have been an alchemist in three previous lifetimes as well as this lifetime.  I now “believe” that after a certain point of development, a person who studies these issues is able not only to live an extended lifetime, but would also be able to continue their life purpose from lifetime to lifetime, just as a person normally chooses each day how to live his (or her) tomorrows.  So my “purpose” in being an alchemist during the past four lives has been to discover, use and teach about the Philosopher’s Stone, the radioactive substance at the heart of alchemy.

In conclusion, I simply don’t know how long I will now live.  I do know, however, that my life purpose is to educate as many alchemists as possible and thus continue this rich tradition.