Show Notes
Garin Horner is a spiritual practitioner, photographer, professor, author, and Tarot designer. He joins us to discuss his amazing book, A Feather on the Breath of RA: Conversations with an Alchemist on Photography, Light, & Magic. Garin's book is one of the most unexpected and brilliant books about alchemy and Western esotericism that I've ever read. I highly recommend it.
https://a.co/d/0a6DFpBE https://www.garinhorner.net/
https://occultofpersonality.net/ https://patreon.com/occultofpersonality https://gregkaminsky.net/ Alchemy is a word that has suffered enormously from overuse. I say this as someone who has devoted considerable years to studying the tradition seriously — and who has watched the word get attached to everything from finance to microbrews. Garin Horner's A Feather on the Breath of RA does something virtuous: it takes the word back.
The book documents Horner's extended conversations with George Kingswood, a fourth-generation practitioner of a Western alchemical lineage rooted in Egyptian solar mysticism and convincingly interwoven with the history and practice of photography. I've spent over two decades hosting a podcast devoted to the Western esoteric traditions, and I have to say that the Kingswood family — their hand-written manuscripts, their Hermetic Order of the Silver Sun, their four unbroken generations of the Great Work — represents something I genuinely haven't encountered anywhere else. That's not praise I offer lightly.
What makes the historical argument so compelling is that Horner doesn't merely assert a connection between alchemy and photography — he traces it. The line from ancient Egypt's solar priests through Hellenistic alchemy, through the alchemical chemistry that anticipated every component of photography before anyone recognized it, to Wedgwood and Daguerre finally connecting the dots, is laid out with genuine scholarly care. This isn't alchemy deployed as metaphor. It's alchemy understood as a living tradition that recognized photography at its birth as the continuation of something it had been pursuing for centuries.
And then there's light. GK's argument — that the camera's act of capturing sunlight in silver is both a metaphysical and an initiatory act — will resonate for anyone who has thought seriously about luminosity as more than physics. I found myself thinking of Corbin on the mundus imaginalis and of the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of luminosity not as metaphor for mind but as its actual nature. GK arrives at adjacent territory through a completely different path, and that convergence matters.
The book is beautifully produced as well — the photographs, historical illustrations, and alchemical emblems thoughtfully integrated throughout. It is a genuine pleasure to hold in your hands.
Horner earns enormous credit for bringing this tradition to light with the care and scholarship it requires and deserves. A Feather on the Breath of RA is, in my opinion, an instant classic of alchemical literature — and something genuinely revolutionary in how it expands our understanding of what alchemy is and where it has been working quietly in the world. The Western esoteric community would do well to take notice.
More from Occult of Personality podcast
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