[UPDATE May 2019: The link to Matthew Graybosch’s commentary on the first three Chapters of The Alchemists’ Council is currently unavailable. Nonetheless, I’ve opted to retain my responses to his commentary in my “Reading The Alchemists’ Council” posts.]

In Part 1 of my response to the Chapter 3 segment of The Rebel Branch Initiate’s Guide to The Alchemists’ Council, I focused on a few key elements made by both Graybosch and Higby. Part 2 will focus primarily on one particular aspect: Dragons!

Matthew’s exploration of dragon symbolism and its potential association with the Rebel Branch is interesting and diverse. I particularly appreciated learning of the Dragon Rouge, of which I was previously unaware. This and other connections Matthew has drawn between the Rebel Branch and the Left-Hand Path throughout the Chapter 3 analysis are much appreciated given their remarkable similarity to my concept of the rebels of The Alchemists’ Council.

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For those of you interested in further exploring the connections between alchemy and dragons, you can find extensive information on this page at Circle of the Dragon. For those of you interested in a quick overview in relation to its presence in alchemical literature, see the entry for “dragon” in Lyndy Abraham’s A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery.

My concept of Dracaen, the Dragonblood Stone, and Dragon’s Blood tonic come primarily from the Dragon’s Blood (or Dragon Blood) tree. As I mentioned in an earlier post regarding the origins and pronunciation of names, most of the characters in The Alchemists’ Council are named for trees or tree-like plants. Here is the excerpt about Dracaen from that post:

DRACAEN is named for the Dragon’s Blood Tree or Dracaena cinnabari. As the narrator of this video states, the tree is “so named because of the drops of red sap which ooze out when it’s cut.” (What other name would I give the High Azoth of the dimension in which the Dragonblood Stone resides?) An array of photos of the tree and its landscape (taken by Michael Melford for National Geographic) can be found here. The pronunciation of the word dracaena can be heard here. In contrast to that pronunciation, I prefer to say the name as DRA-KANE.

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This particular tree was first introduced to me by Jessica Legacy, who was a student research assistant of mine at Vancouver Island University back in 2010. (Indeed, she is one of the VIU research assistants to whom Book One is dedicated.) Jessica brought me information about Dracaena cinnabari, suggesting I consider using it as one of the tree names. As noted at Princeton Tree Care, the Dragon’s Blood tree is “named for its dark red resin, known as dragon’s blood, a substance which has been highly prized since ancient times.” The entry at Archive.org provides extensive information about the tree, stating among other details that “[t]he dragon’s blood resin of this tree exudes naturally from fissures and wounds in the bark, and is commonly harvested by widening these fissures with a knife.” References such as this to the tree’s bleeding fissures fit perfectly with my concept of the Flaw in the Stone. Thus were the names for the Rebel High Azoth (Dracaen) and the Flaw (Dragonblood Stone) born.

And one final point for today… In addition to his detailed work on dragon lore, Matthew created a Matrix/Morpheus meme that I adore–I can only hope it hits the Twitter feeds shortly! Be sure to check it out under “Dracaen’s Pitch” in the Chapter 3 segment of The Rebel Branch Initiate’s Guide to The Alchemists’ Council.

Farewell for this week, or as the rebels might say, “Long live the Dragonblood Stone!”

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