Benjamin Balderson | Esoteric Alchemy, Emasculated Society & The Salts of Salvation
Heathen wizard (and practical modern Alchemist) Benjamin Balderson joins InnerVerse to chat about salt and oil, sun and moon, and other aspects of the life-fractal that we can explore to help us achieve our own great work, transmute our toxins into treasures, and bring balance to our biorhythms.
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In this episode
Core themes
Off-Grid Living as a Training Ground
Benjamin Balderson describes a farm life lived completely off grid, with spring water caught and gravity fed to his house, his own chickens and milk cows, and almost no bills. He argues that people spend countless hours at jobs so they can pay others to do what they could do themselves, and he says he fixed his own truck for sixty dollars in parts. Chance Garton adds that the age of information makes ignorance a choice, and that the things we own end up owning us.
Cold Extraction and the Three Levels of Oil
Ben says every carbon-based life form breaks into three levels, salt, oil and carbon, and that the oil itself divides into three. Using cannabis as his example, he walks through terpenes, CBD and THC as layers separated by volatility. His own lab work runs at negative forty degrees on flash-frozen plant picked before dawn, ideally near the full moon, because he holds that heat damages oil for good. He frames oil as the feminine side and salt as the masculine, a polarity he returns to all episode.
Cymatics, Salt, and the Memory of Water
Ben plans to build a library of cymatic patterns in the spirit of Masaru Emoto, so that shapes can be read as messages. He argues that water itself does not hold memory, salt does, which is why Emoto's distilled water, stripped of salts, could be written on. His proposed experiment sends a message in dried salt to Chance, who would dissolve it, flash freeze it and read the pattern. Chance wonders whether symbols carry an inherent meaning that cymatics could finally reveal, and Ben pushes further, claiming sound and thought precede light.
Crystals, Missing Elements, and the Great Work
Ben rejects the familiar four elements as truncated, arguing that fire, water and air are only the feminine half, and that a crystalline, structured side is always left out. He maps seven levels of elements, joins the most chaotic with the most dense in an Ouroboros, and says demonizing the salt side is what disempowers people. Chance shares his selenite experiments with light. For Ben, the great work means descending to the deepest salt as well as ascending, then bringing both back to the middle.
A Cosmic Battery and the Cycle of Seasons
Ben presents a world model in which the sun is a gold cathode and the moon a silver anode, with planets as metal plates in one vast galvanic cell, so that silver becomes gold. He then maps spring, summer, fall and winter onto a cycle of masculine and feminine, reading spring as the reforging of the sword and the return of the king. Prompted by Chance's question about an emasculated society, Ben says we sit at the end of a cycle, in a high feminine winter.
Quotes
“People don't realize how many hours of their life they're putting into a job so they can pay somebody else to do something they should be doing in their own home.”
“We do live in a world where the age of information means that ignorance on anything is pretty much a choice.”
“I don't really like the four elements in any way, shape, or form. I think it's truncated just like everything else.”
“The things that you own they end up owning you, that could not be more true.”
“Thought transitions into sound, transitions into light. And then it all just becomes denser and denser until we actually have a medium that we can touch and feel.”
“This whole idea that we're just going to ascend, and there's some heaven where everything never changes and stays the same and it's just wonderful forever. Well, how is that even feasible?”
“When you start demonizing that salt side or that crystal side. Well, that side is where your power comes from.”
“Until somebody does something, puts hands on it, makes it real, it doesn't have any meaning.”
Benjamin Balderson is a practicing alchemist who has taught laboratory (practical) alchemy on InnerVerse, covering distillation, alcohol-free tinctures, and the alchemical patterns found in nature; he shares his work under the banner "Odin's Alchemy."
See all Benjamin episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
