Benjamin Balderson | Alchemical Labors: The Process of Nature's Memory Preservation
Odin's favorite wizard, Benjamin Balderson, returns to InnerVerse to give us the 101 course on the process of laboratory alchemy. In this episode you'll learn the steps of alchemy from distillation to chemical wedding, the logic of alcohol-free tinctures, the alchemical fractal in nature, and how this study may impact the course of our after-life journey.
In the Plus+ Extension we dive deep into how nature alchemizes on all scales, performing the great work on ourselves, the meaning behind quickening synchronicity, how alchemy relates to astrotheology, alchenomics of currency, ancestors, and the two I AMs.
Plus+InnerVerse Plus+
InnerVerse Plus+Hear every full episode
Every extended episode, the complete Plus+ archive, premium video and a private podcast feed for your app.
Cancel any time.
Get tuned with Chance
Tuning forks find where energy is stuck in the field around your body and bring it back into flow. Sessions over Zoom, recorded for you to keep.
30 Minute Consultations
Have something to look at, or looking for guidance? We can consult oracular tools, read your chart, or just talk through whatever you choose.
In this episode
Core themes
Spagyrics anyone can do at home
Benjamin Balderson opens by insisting that lab alchemy starts cheap and simple, not with rare equipment. He points to his friend Homie Romy, who runs the whole process with a thrift store copper teapot, a hardware store coil and a little pump, the same basic still a moonshiner in Appalachia would recognize. The only real requirement is an enclosed system that can vaporize a liquid and then cool that vapor back into fluid. Chance Garton frames the episode around this practical entry point, wanting listeners who love the philosophy of nature to finally get their feet off the ground.
Separating oil, salt and body
The core walkthrough is a separation. Balderson soaks plant material in high proof alcohol, ideally Everclear or an alcohol fermented from the same plant, because the higher the percentage the more solvent it is. That pulls the oil out. The leftover mush goes into a cast iron pot over extreme flame for calcination, turning black, then gray, then finally a white powder like baby powder. Distilled water dissolves the mineral salts out of that ash, gets filtered through coffee filters until clear, and then evaporates away, leaving a small pile of the plant's own cell salts.
Why he refuses to add the alcohol back
Here Balderson breaks with most alchemists, and says he rarely talks about it. Many treat the fermented alcohol as the spirit of the plant and mix it back in as a tincture. He does not. For him alcohol is the negative side of mercury, the side that takes and strips and spikes the cell open. He asks Chance Garton to apply as above so below, pointing out that in metal work the solvent is hydrochloric and sulfuric acid, and nobody would leave acid in something you eat. So why leave the solvent in the plant medicine.
Mercury as the messenger between two halves
Mercury, in this telling, is simply whatever acts as solvent at a given level, and its identity keeps changing step by step. Water, alcohol, acid and finally the oil itself all take that role. Balderson describes an electron and an ion as one particle split in two with a field between them, and says only through the mercurial fluid can those halves rejoin. Chance Garton connects that to Dionysus and Jesus as lords of wine, while Balderson brings in Castor and Pollux and calls mercury the messenger that carries money, messages and whatever else from one point to another.
The salt is where memory is kept
The alchemical marriage is what makes the episode philosophical. Balderson puts the salt back into the oil with no solvent, warms it gently, and waits for the graininess to clear the way sugar dissolves into butter. The yellow sulfur life inside the oil then enlivens the salt, and the two coagulate into the stone. Because the salt now evaporates with the oil, the marriage holds. From that he argues that when a person dies and separates from their salt they lose memory, since salt is the stable side, the wisdom side. Chance wonders whether that loss of memory is what causes reincarnation.
Quotes
“I think that there's many, many out there listening that have a more than passing interest in the principles we talk about here and exalting the attributes of nature and learning how to do these things that allow us to actually make the medicine stronger from nature”
“The lab work is where the philosophy comes from. And it's understanding how things work in the lab that make so many other things you understand, putting them in place and understanding them.”
“And that's why if you're standing in your garden in, when the morning sun hits your garden, all of a sudden the smells are like, wow. You know, just overwhelming and so fresh and beautiful. Um, that's your terpene level of oil actually burning off and entering your nose.”
“And that's why mercury is the messenger. Why it's always the exchange. It's the monetary system. Anytime something needs to go from point A to point B, whether it's a message, whether it's money, whether it's whatever it has to happen through the mercury, which is where the alchemical marriage comes in.”
“So the other thing is the oil would lose this life force quickly without being put into the salt. So, you know, it makes you wonder about so many things. Like, is that why our, is that why our life force gets planted down here? So it lasts longer.”
“And when you go in and you go to, you think that, Oh, look, that, that it's just all white and you go stir the pile, all of a sudden it's black again, you're like, how is that even possible?”
“And why did you lose your memory? Why? Because you separated from your salt. The salt is where the memory is. That's the stable side where things are remembered. That's wisdom. So wisdom's your lower salt side.”
“That is the real benefit of philosophy is like natural law. It isn't natural law because somebody in some higher dimension or some creator being was like, these are the rules and you got to follow my rules.”
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.
