Ramsey Duke mentioned the phrase “whisky keeps better than beer” in SSOTMBE Revised (2002) and it struck me as powerful metaphor. People once described whisky as aqua vitae in Latin, though as a Scotch lover I like the Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha; both terms translate to “water of life.” How does one turn fermenting grain into this water of life? By distilling it.
In a purely material sense, distillation separates the pure from the impure. In this case the whisky from the mash. As an aside, do you know how to make Holy Water? Boil the Hell out of it.
Distillation also refers to one of the seven transformational stages of Alchemy.
Alchemically, distillation purifies the self in preparation for the next stage. One can see this ditstillation as freeing the Self from the “impurities” of an inflated ego. It can even boil away one’s personal identity.
From a bodily perspective, distillation purifies the life force, bringing it up from the cauldron of the body (the belly) to the crown. From a Western view point, this culminates in the brow, around the pineal gland. Those of a more Eastern perspective will know this as the 6th chakra or the upper dan tien.
But this notion of purification, of extracting the essence, applies to our magick in other ways too. Those old grimoires come to mind. Obfuscated by the fashionable grammar of the time or the need for secrecy, we need to distill them down their essence to fully understand them.
In magick, this distillation takes experience. My words can describe my experience, but they cannot bestow upon the reader a similar experience. So to understand what another magician experienced, we must endeavor to experience it ourselves to fully distill their words into the essence of the experience.
As better magicians than I have said: “Experience is truth.”