Tuesday 25 October 2016

Digna Love - Reviving the Art of Alchemy

Digna Love is a holistic healer and mother of three who lives in Florida. Born and raised in St. Lucia in the Caribbean, she came to the United States in 2001, in part, she says, because she wanted to see more of the world.


She attended Palm Beach State College and Everglades University, where she studied alternative medicine and healing. She has had an interest in alternative practices for many years. “I have been practicing channeling and meditation for decades now, and I’m proud of the progress I’ve made,” she says. “I plan to revive the art of alchemy – not turning rocks into gold, as people believe alchemy is, but transforming entities and energies to a better state.”

Alchemy, as she knows, is widely viewed as a forerunner to modern chemistry. Classical alchemy is shrouded in mystery and secrecy; it was rooted in the idea that everything around us has a universal and unifying spirit. It is believed that early practitioners based their work on a mythical substance known as the philosopher’s stone, which they believed had many valuable attributes. Those included the power to heal, the power to prolong life, and the power to transform base metals into precious metals like gold. But they did not necessarily do that to enrich themselves. Historian Nevill Drury wrote that “Gold symbolized the highest development in nature and came to personify human renewal and regeneration. A ‘golden’ human being was resplendent with spiritual beauty and had triumphed over the lurking power of evil. The basest metal, lead, represented the sinful and unrepentant individual who was readily overcome by the forces of darkness.”

Most practitioners of alchemy in the twenty-first century say that defining it is not very easy, because by their very nature definitions tend to categorize and put things into boxes. Alchemy can’t be reduced to lab work, or meditative work, or defined merely as a spiritual pursuit. The modern view is that alchemy is a philosophy of the cosmos and of our place in the grand scheme of things.

No matter how you define it, many people agree that alchemy is really an important part of cultural history that can be examined in a very scholarly way. The central idea of alchemy is that matter and spirit are really one whole, inseparable unit, and that one works with the other. An early alchemist said that wisdom is a light of divine energy; it moves everything, and when it leaves its earthly manifestations it goes directly to the grace of God, or the Holy Spirit.

Digna Love makes her home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.