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Inspired byA single unified psychedelic alchemical vision in the style of R. Crumb and 1970s underground comix. A bald, bespectacled Renaissance alchemist with recognizable facial features, exaggerated expressions, and intricate crosshatched wrinkles drips glowing crimson elixir onto a wide-eyed magical dog’s head. The ecstatic dog explodes into a radiant cosmic Dog Star, surrounded by orbiting planets, miniature galaxies, golden flames, and spiraling celestial energy. An astonished elderly wizard watches while a beautiful green-haired mermaid emerges from a bubbling bain-marie. The chaotic laboratory overflows with ancient grimoires, philosopher’s eggs, glass flasks, molten gold, mystical symbols, skulls, crystals, and fantastical machinery. Dense pen-and-ink crosshatching, heavy black outlines, grotesque caricature, earthy psychedelic colors, surreal humor, obsessive detail, and flowing composition. Authentic 1970s underground comic-book illustration, not photorealistic. One continuous image, absolutely no panels. 4:3 landscape format. Solid black 40-pixel blank header across the top. Absolutely no text. In the magic potion shop, a wizened old apothecary drips some yellow glowing liquid onto a funny looking dog's head, and it bursts into flames. The dog's eyes get large and surprised and weirdly rainbow coloured, and its tongue gets long and its ears jump into a stretched position as it stares up at the apothecary. The apothecary bites his bottom lip as if he is thinking "Oops". Hilarious but realistic scene.
I first heard about the star Regulus from my friend Mark Fuson, a man who could tell a lie so magnificent that the truth would stand beside it, hat in hand, looking like a poor relation.
I suspected Mark was trying to con my alchemy guru, Irwin Grant. But Mark had one remarkable qualification as a storyteller: half his stories had actually happened. The difficulty was determining which half.
He told my friend the Doc that his family in Texas had been extracting gold in their backyard using antimony. Somehow they manufactured something called star antimony, and somehow gold came out of the arrangement.
Now, this was not traditional alchemy. In the old books, antimony was more commonly associated with medicine. Paracelsus supposedly fed it to pigs, poisoning the poor creatures until the survivors grew wonderfully fat. The miracle was probably nothing more than the antimony killing their intestinal worms. But an alchemist would sooner surrender his trousers than admit that a miracle had an ordinary explanation.
Mark claimed his uncle passed an antimony solution through sieves, whereupon gold precipitated out as politely as a gentleman arriving for Sunday dinner.
I had no particular interest in extracting gold. In my opinion, discovering gold is one of the worst misfortunes that can befall a civilization. It ruins lives, poisons rivers, destroys landscapes, and has furnished respectable excuses for stealing Indigenous lands throughout the world.
But the star antimony interested me.
I found an article in an alchemical journal called Alembic. There was Isaac Newton, that celebrated gentleman of gravity, deeply occupied with star antimony. The substance formed a curious star-shaped crystalline pattern with a center. Some speculated that this center helped inspire Newton's thinking about gravity.
Whether that was true hardly mattered to my imagination.
For I had begun considering a question that would have troubled the angels sitting on the head of a pin.
What if consciousness had weight?
What if the subtle body, ordinarily lighter than a politician's promise, encountered a gravitational field so immense that it condensed into matter?
A man might lie in bed a thousand miles from his laboratory, project his astral body across the continent, and arrive with enough substance to knock over the furniture.
That would certainly give the spiritualists something to discuss.
And I had just the experiment in mind.
