The first clear evidence of distillation comes from Greek alchemists working in Alexandria in the first century AD.[2] Distilled water has been known since at least ca. 200 AD, when Alexander of Aphrodisias described the process.[3] Arabs learned the process from the Egyptians and used it extensively in their chemical experiments[citation needed].
Clear evidence of the distillation of alcohol comes from the School of Salerno in the 12th century.[4][5] Fractional distillation was developed by Tadeo Alderotti in the 13th century.[6]
In 1500, German alchemist Hieronymus Braunschweig published Liber de arte destillandi (The Book of the Art of Distillation)[7] the first book solely dedicated to the subject of distillation, followed in 1512 by a much expanded version. In 1651, John French published The Art of Distillation the first major English compendium of practice, though it has been claimed[8] that much of it derives from Braunschweig's work. This includes diagrams with people in them showing the industrial rather than bench scale of the operation.
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ReplyDeletehere is the link again....
ReplyDeletehttp://soundcloud.com/elisa-faires/distillations
ok another explanation of this....The Alchemy in Spiritual Progress
ReplyDeletePart 7: Distillation
by Nanci Shanderá, Ph.D.
“Your feelings and thoughts are the feelings and thoughts of the Whole Universe,” (from The Emerald Tablet by Dennis William Hauck). This statement describes the process of Distillation, where we become far more interested in the greater good than merely in our own. It is the transformational stage where we are spiritually and emotionally mature enough to merge with the collective conscious and unconscious without becoming devastated by what we find there. The reason we can keep our balance after having arrived at the Distillation stage is that the ego no longer controls us and we can therefore appreciate the mysteries of the collective - and personal - shadow material without the ego’s intrusion. (The shadow is that part of our own consciousness, as well as society’s, that holds the darker, rejected, denied, and powerful aspects. It not only holds difficult material that sometimes feels demonic in nature, but is also is the repository for our gifts, talents, and Soul’s voice until such time as we are ready to fully take them on.)
Distillation brings the creative out of us. It encourages all that we are to manifest in balanced and serenely powerful ways. It heralds the entry of the influence of the higher forces and the balancing of those forces with the lower ones, which provide our "groundedness," so crucial to wholeness. Someone once said that to be spiritually high all the time made us no earthly good. I see so much of the so-called “New Age” philosophies, as well as many religious ones, promoting the idea that our spiritual task is to transcend the body and earthly pleasures and problems, and move into an idealistic realm populated by angels and eternal joviality. These philosophies are based upon ages-old misconceptions about spiritual experience. These ideas imply that we are not capable of dealing with the reasons our Souls brought us down to earth in the first place. These philosophies would have us either become dependent upon intermediaries between us and our gods or look at life through very smudged rose-colored glasses. The truth about life is that it is exactly what it is in every moment. It is childish to believe that there was some kind of cosmic mistake that gave us the parents we have, put us on a toxic planet, and dropped us off without a user’s manual. Our infantile needs for remaining blind and rebelliously unresponsive to all the problems that our Souls chose life on Earth to experience keep us unconscious and unevolved.
Distillation takes us into higher realms of awareness, but because we have been through all of the purifications and difficult challenges in the previous stages, we have a finer appreciation of the purpose of those difficulties. A distilled person is able to walk in both worlds at once, without rejecting either. And - this is very important - a distilled person is mature. She/he does not expect life to meet egoistic expectations, nor does she/he view it as a devastating disappointment just because it doesn’t meet
those expectations. A distilled person would tend to perceive Earth as a “workshop planet,” where we have the blessed (yes, I said blessed) opportunity to really grow. A Soul who chooses Earth as its experience has great courage.
A distilled person would know that the Soul, rather than the ego, was now guiding her/his life. A distilled person surrenders to the higher forces while celebrating and honoring the existence of the lower ones. A mystical symbol of this state of consciousness which appears in many spiritual and religious logos is the image of two triangles, one with its point coming down to either touch or merge into a second triangle whose point rises up to meet or merge with the other.