Ron Wyman is an artist and writer who has brought the internal alchemical transformation process into a contemporary experience through his own undergoing of the Magnum Opus. He has set this into a methodical format for occult practitioners, or for anyone interested in the transcendental effects of internal alchemy. This is presented in a trilogy: The Black Toad, The Peacock’s Egg, and a further book to be published, The Dragon.
Alchemy, in this sense, can be groundwork for any type of spiritual or occult practice. This is so because the levels achieved through the opus magnum, experienced through three lengthy cycles here, coincide with the levels and abilities inherent in the psyche and spiritual body. These cycles of experience are also for the fairly serious practitioner, who is able to accomplish controlled dreaming, and work toward the attainment of the philosopher’s stone, which can involve some years of practice. This spiritual alchemy then adheres to extraordinary beliefs found within ancient systems, recorded in Egyptian and Chinese alchemy, and extending through Western Hermeticism.
The philosophical basis of this trilogy and its cyclical opus are set within the real and the psychical experiences of light and colour, and of shadow, and cosmos, of constellation, sun, moon, and classical planets. Visionary experience is emphasised as the practitioner undergoes the full alchemical dream process—and arouses the dragon, then attaining the vision of the coloured peacock’s egg, and purifies the alchemical vessel. Ultimately this leads to the latent dragon’s egg and the dragon’s planetary forces and metals.
The author also comes from a Continental Philosophy background, and writes about this transitional movement and re-centring of the psyche in relation to similar experience described by Jung, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others; and the infinite space and time involved there. And he has his own fine art practice that attends to the metaphysical milieu of the modern art movement.

Author on Alchemy

This work is an abstract art associated with pittura metafisica, or metaphysical painting. It may be understood as an aesthetic structuralism that conveys a structural infinity. In this way it is archetypal and involves the Jungian archetype. It involves a philosophical perspectivism, and a ‘low’ or abyssal dionysian abstraction, which I bring into interiors, still life, landscape, and portraiture. I convey a sculptural figuration and also utilise the theme of the mannequin, as the psychic apparatus. Its figuration then involves a kind of realism, in an existential sense of realism. In general these originated from an interest in bringing the dionysian into graphic, perspectival, and figurative work, and from Heideggerian kind of experience of space, that contains a structurality. It is related to abstract surrealism and metarealism, but emphasises an essence or immanence, which I understand through the tragic, and the shadow, and an afternoon withdrawal.