Rafito el Varado at 57: Because of His Youthfulness, Some Thought Him a Vampire

More about Rafito el Varado at 57: Because of His Youthfulness, Some Thought Him a Vampire

To explain Rafito el Varado’s agelessness, I first have to speak about alchemy—and step out of the alchemical closet long enough to say what it is not. It is not spiritual alchemy, nor the diluted tantra-mantra-mysticism sold in the New Age West.

Globally, there have always been two primary schools of alchemy.

The first uses the poisonous substance mercury. From this stream come the Taoist Immortals and the South Indian Siddhas, whose final techniques are nearly identical. After ingesting a series of potent herbs—some designed to purge the kidneys of mercury—the elixir is taken. The alchemist’s skin turns black and begins to slough off like a snake shedding its old self. At this point, to keep the nervous system from collapsing, one must sit perfectly still, almost in a yogic asana. If successful, the inner clock of aging resets.

The second school gives us the very word alchemy: Al-Khem, “the black soil.” It refers to a long, compost-based process that could take three to five years. Through slow refinement, it yields the Philosopher’s Stone—golden, yet clear as glass. The 16th-century alchemist Thomas Vaughan accelerated this reaction to three weeks by mixing “thundering gold” into the compost, a catalyst so volatile it behaved like the detonator in a plastic explosive. Vaughan understood this process well enough to blow up his own laboratory and convincingly fake his death. After attaining the Stone—and relative immortality—he and his wife disappeared from society, freed from economic bondage.

Why say all this?
To explain why our hero looks thirty when he is fifty-seven—and still looks thirty when he is ninety.

His transformation did not begin in a laboratory, but on a beach. Drunk, he passed out near the high-tide line, where a group of gypsy children found him, buried him in the sand for fun, and then wandered off. He remained entombed there for three days, alone with his thoughts. Near midnight, he felt the tide creeping toward him, the damp grit tightening, the air hole closing. He began to choke.

Then something happened.

The sand dissolved as the waves tore at it, freeing him from his accidental grave. When he stood, he saw the sea foaming under a rising full moon—and from that foam emerged a towering Venus. She looked at him with pure, unguarded love. She bent low, impossibly low, and kissed the poor floundering man.

In that kiss his life restarted. A vitality beyond all understanding flooded him. Youth fastened itself to him like a soul-deep tattoo.

And that is why Rafito el Varado never ages.