Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (2:10)

Yes, it has been a few years. This has really been long in the making. I started on this in 2018 actually, and this was when I still had my ERC funded project IYOG and I had a bit of money left over and changed my plans a little bit. The Ayur Yoga project was about the entanglement between yoga, Ayurveda and alchemy. And at the time looking at the alchemical sources and what kinds of medical information they had, I really realized how little is out there of alchemical literature for people to access. And so I decided that for the end of the project it would be really useful to make a kind of Alchemy Reader and just get some of those texts out there to show people what Indian alchemy was actually about. And so in 2018, I brought together a group. I had a new postdoc. Patricia Sautoff joined me in my project at that time, specifically for working on the Alchemy Reader. And then Keith Cantu also joined, not as a sort of official project member, but for this book. And also an Ayurvedic practitioner, Priyanka Soman. So she also joined us, and we had weekly reading groups online and in person to sort of look at a selection of texts. And then I also asked David Gordon White to contribute a chapter. I was also going to reuse one of his former publications. He had a translation of chapter one of the Rasara Nava, and I was going to reuse it, but in the end he did a new translation of this part as well. And then finally, also my husband, Dominic Vuyasti, added a chapter. And so Keith's, Patricia's, Priyanka's, and my articles were sort of finished by 2020 at the end of the IYO project, but the others took a bit longer. David was finished soon as well. But then we decided to add another chapter. So that took a while. And Dom's chapter took a longer while. And I had then also asked Jim Mallinson to contribute a chapter which was not really from an alchemical work, but from a on Yoga with reference to alchemy. So that was added to the mix. And then I don't know, years passed, we submitted the whole thing to oup, peer review, changes to the book and so on. And then somehow it took a whole year to get it out there. But now, finally it is with us, at least a digital form since the middle of August. And just today I got an email that the print publication will be out on the 24th of October.

Dr. Raj Balkar (4:56)

Well, that is perhaps some fortuitous serendipity or perhaps even auspicious, to use quite an indica concept that you're receiving notice as we're speaking today. And of course, in the timeless time of podcast land, just click on the link below and it'll be available to you. So tell us, how would you. So could you say a little bit more about either alchemy in general or Indian alchemy? What do they mean by this? What sorts of things are we talking about here?

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (5:23)

So I actually feel a little bit guilty about the title, calling it Indian Alchemy. And really we're just looking at Sanskrit sources. And you might also look at Tamil Sources, which we don't have in the volume, unfortunately, and Persian sources. Again, it's not in the volume, so really it should have been called something like the Indian Alchemy according to the Sanskrit sources. But for a pithy kind of title, we went with Indian Alchemy. So it's an alchemical tradition as it developed on the Indian subcontinent, which is, of course, different to the nation of India today. Probably some of the texts might have been composed in areas that are Pakistan today, also maybe parts in Nepal, maybe parts in Bangladesh and so on. We don't actually know a lot about the locations where these texts were written. For some of them we do, but for most we don't. This is a literature that starts around the 10th century, maybe a little bit earlier. There's a lot of discussion about that. Some want to see it sort of 8th century forward, but usually the oldest of the texts that we deal with, the Rasahridaya Tantra, the Heart of Mercury, is usually dated to around the 10th century. And then it goes forward. There's quite a lot of literature, this sort of alchemical literature, which becomes medicalized up to and including the 20th century. There's a sort of gap in between where there's not a lot of literary production, where probably we find more in Persian and other Indian vernaculars. But. Yeah. So it's quite a big body of literature. Yeah. And sort of. I don't know. Would you like me to talk more a bit about the content or. Yeah. What would be.

Dr. Raj Balkar (7:16)

Yeah, well, just, you know, since there's a bit of an interruption on my part here. I think Indian Alchemy is a great title, but then again, I've been forced to learn how to. How to name things that resonate with people who aren't. And I really. I was approached by a press to write a book on fleshing out the narratives from the Puranas and the epics that are the namesakes of most of the yoga asanas. Right. Like, who is Matyandra? Who is like, who are these ages? You know? Right. So. And I. I really was intent on calling it Mythology in Motion, and that was quashed thoroughly by the press, who's like, no, we're calling it the Stories behind the Poses so people know it's the Stories behind the Hoses. Okay, fine. So I always have to hammer myself into thinking less like an academic when I'm trying to reach a broader public with titles and names of courses. So I think Indian Alchemy is a great title. It sort of has that poetic allure of what does this mean? And also Indian. Same with Indian religions here or the Indian Muslim school. I mean Indic. Indic civilizations. We're not talking about the modern nation state like Persian versus Iranian, like Egypt or Egyptian culture. So I think folks quite understand the implication there.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (8:36)

Yeah, I think indig doesn't mean much to most people, aside from. So I think if you're going to reach a larger public or an audience, you'd probably want to go with Indian rather than indic.

Dr. Raj Balkar (8:48)

Yes, you're absolutely right because I think of it as indic to myself. Indic civilizations, all the nation states that are South Asian. South Asia. Even the public doesn't always understand what South Asia is sometimes.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (9:02)

Oh, I can't tell you, I mean how often people mix South Asia up with Southeast Asia or just Asia altogether. They think China actually often when you say South Asia.

Dr. Raj Balkar (9:14)

Yeah. So Indian's a great word and we have the respect and wherewithal to disambiguate. We don't mean just the modern nation state that's not even a century old. We mean a multi millennia civilizational vortex of many strands, uncertain otherwise. So it's the index subcontinent. So yes, you could say more about what's in the book itself, but also in passing, you mentioned the heart of Mercury Tantra, alchemy. Many of the audience may not even be quite clear on what alchemy is. Could you say a bit more about what alchemy is?

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (9:51)

Yeah, you know, this is something that I think about so often because of dealing with the histories of alchemy in other geographical regions. You know, the term alchemy comes from an Arabic term, alchemia, which itself is probably derived from a Greek term, kumea, which means smelting metals. And you have this continuity of traditions in the. Well for me Western world, but it's also the Middle east where one tradition informs the next the following one, and so on. And then the Arabic tradition goes to Europe and so on. And so it really makes sense to speak of this tradition as alchemy with this sort of continuity of the word. But when we come to India, Tibet, China and so on, then we have traditions that we're calling alchemy but that are not part of this evolution of the term as we have for the Western traditions. So I mean, I usually, when I'm not talking to an audience that is thinking about wider alchemy, I usually just use the Sanskrit terms for the Indian tradition, which there are various terms. Rasa shastra, the science or the discipline of mercury. Rasa Vidya, the knowledge of mercury, Rasavadas, again, the discipline of mercury, to talk about this tradition. But then I do think that we can apply the idea of alchemy to this tradition and to adjacent traditions, simply because there is a sort of connecting factor, which is the idea of transmutation, that a material can change from being one thing to being another thing. And that's a sort of strand that goes through all the alchemies, as it were, and then a lot of the sort of things that alchemists do, the ways in which they manipulate substances and so on, and the apparatuses that they use and what kind kind of substances they use and so on. There's a lot of overlap there between the Asian traditions and the Western ones, Middle Eastern ones, and so on. So I think that this is part of a larger whole with sort of variations on a theme. When we come to the Asian traditions, there's a much more focus on changing the human being, changing the human body, and also on spiritual insight than the Western traditions, which are much more focused on the making of gold. We have making of gold also in the Asian traditions, but it's sort of like it's not exactly a minor part, but it's not the main focus of the tradition. So we do have a sort of east, west divide, as it were, but there's also a lot of commonality.

Dr. Raj Balkar (12:44)

Yeah, I love the juxtaposition you just indicated. And FYI, generalizations are not only acceptable, but welcome on podcast. You know, high level, you know, is like this, and the west is like that. We understand, obviously, that we'll nuance it for certain, but these overarching themes of, for whatever reason, processes known as alchemy elsewhere, alchemical work is not so much geared towards the outer at times as towards the inner. I mean, that's fascinating. That's a fascinating fact about the evolution and sort of the Indianization of these practices. Could you say a little bit more about that for our audience?

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (13:32)

Yeah, you say Indianization, but I would say we have earlier Chinese traditions that also have this factor of changing the human being and sort of the idea of being able to become immortal or to be able to fly and so on. So you have that earliest in Chinese sources. And there's a possibility that this is influenced through Buddhist, Tantric ideas and so on. We don't know. That's a sort of whole area where it'd be wonderful to find out more, but at this time, we can see some connections, but we don't quite know. But when it comes to India, we Have really this sort of introduction of alchemy starts with stories and narratives. And so we get miracle stories, and we get them in Buddhist and in Jain and also in Hindu sort of tantric context. We get them in plays. And these are sort of stories of some practitioner, some alchemist. And these alchemists are often called something like dhatu vadin, so somebody who adheres to the vada, the discipline of dhatu. And dhatu is usually metals and minerals, something like that. So mercury is not quite there yet in some of the stories. We also have mercury, but this is a different sort of name. But these could also be minors. That would be the same word used. But the stories are sort of miracle stories where Nagarjuna makes a mountain into gold or so there's also also some idea of sort of longevity in connection with these practices, but they're not very well described. And then you have something about doing something with metals and making gold again comes up very often. But then there's this change around, as I said before, maybe the 10th century, where suddenly we get the whole story from the perspective of the actual practitioner. So before it's from the outside, and often it's actually sort of satirical stories of this crazy practitioner who. Poisoning himself with his elixirs or so. And now we get this sort of book where the whole thing is represented as a shastra, as an authoritative body of knowledge, sort of certified practitioners, like people who learn according to a lineage and who have teachers, and there's a formal setup of the thing and then this sort of initiation and all of that. So now it becomes like a profession. And this literature looks quite different to these stories that we heard about before. And then we get the sort of very technical descriptions of how to make a mercurial elixir, and then also long descriptions of how to take that elixir and what happens when you take it.

Dr. Raj Balkar (16:17)

Yeah, I typically would ask this a little later, but I want to ask it now just to sort of place this scholarship for listeners. Who is this book for, who might benefit from looking at it, you know, along those lines. Audience type of question.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (16:31)

Yeah, so, I mean, anyone interested in Indian alchemy? So I was sort of hoping for a wide readership and just sort of people who do history of science, people who do history of alchemy. I really wanted to put something out there that, you know, the Indian side of the story could be accessed by a public who usually is just very focused on Europe and maybe on the Middle East a little bit. So just to sort of add India to the story for China. We have the books of science and civilization in China where we get a lot of information. So I just really wanted to add India to the mix. I'm always also thinking of other Indologists. I really feel that there's such big alchemists literature and this should be part of South Asian studies that people are aware of it and also are able to get some access to it for if they're teaching this as part of Indian culture and also to some part Indian religion. So the tantric aspects of some of the works are of interest there. So that's the sort of general audience that I'm looking at. I mean anyone also who is interested in Indian medicine, there's a lot of medical content in these works. So again that is something that people should know about. And because also Rasa Shastra is still alive today, we have living traditions that are medicalized. The Ayurvedic pharmacology of today, which is institutionalized and so on. They are still using principles first written in these alchemical treatises. So I think anybody who's sort of interested in any of these areas would be my my audience.

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Dr. Raj Balkar (19:17)

Yeah, that's really interesting stuff. And some of the papers are chapters are mind blowing. But I don't know if I don't want to necessarily put you on the spot and say tell us about all 10 of these papers if you want to make mention of all of them or some of them. But certainly maybe you could tell us a bit about your own contributions.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (19:34)

Yeah, as editor, of course, I've read every chapter very carefully and many times so I'm very aware. And because we had these common readings as well, I think there's some. There's a sort of divide between parts that are very technical. So one of my chapters describes the steps it takes to make the mercurial elixir. And it's basically recipes and sort of to do lists for making a mercurial elixir. Or one of Patricia Salthoff's chapters is about the apparatuses used. And that chapter from that work that she's looking at is basically saying, and there's a pot and it has this sort of height and this sort of length, and it's made out of these materials and so on. It's like. I think Patricia got a little bit bored when she was translating it. It's very technical. But we felt. Or when I was sort of conceiving of the volume, what I wanted to do is to really give people the flavor of these works. You know, we have, you know, David Gordon White wrote the wonderful. The Alchemical Body, and that was, you know, published in 1995 or 1996. And it's a fantastic book, gives a wonderful introduction to Indian alchemy. But David really focused on all these sort of fun and sexy bits of the alchemical works, you know, which is sort of the stories, the narratives, you know, all that stuff And. Well, actually, actually alchemical works are really technical and 90% of them are sort of technical things. And then you get some stories and you get some sort of. The more sort of narrative things. So I wanted to have both of these elements in the book. Right. So we have then a chapter by Keith, for example, where it's sort of alchemical pilgrimage, this sort of like wandering around in Sri Silam and you're meeting this nymphs and you're digging for treasure, and there's a pool and a tree with special leaves that become fish. And then you're making gold this way and so on. So it's a very different feeling to it than that chapter from the one work on what the pot is supposed to look like and what kind of charcoal you're using. So you have that sort of divide within the alchemical works between these sort of fun stories, spiritual aims, and then this sort of very. Let's get down to the ground and grind herbs for 10 hours or so.

Dr. Raj Balkar (21:55)

Yeah. Between left and right brains, basically.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (21:58)

Very much so. And not every work has all elements. You know, some are really very sober, like the Heart of Mercury. That 10th century work, the Rasahiraya Tantra, is very technical and has hardly any story elements to adjust. In the first chapter, we learned a little bit about what mercury is, and it's sort of the conjunction of Shiva and the goddess and so on, but just very, very little. The Rasarnava has lots and has sort of the initia rituals and how to make the laboratory and to make a temple space within the laboratory and so on, all these kinds of things. So there's more in there. And then others go into much more of a medical direction. So you get lots of recipes against diseases and so on. Like the Rasaratna Samuchaya, the chapter that Priyanka and I translated. And there, by the way, it was so fun to work with Priyanka because she's a practicing Ayurvedic practitioner with Ayurveda.

Dr. Raj Balkar (22:55)

Yeah.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (22:55)

Focus on Rasa shastra. So she is actually in this sort of alchemical pharmacology. That's her training. And it was really fun to see her perspective on the text, and it was so helpful. Also, she helped us a lot with plant identification. At least you could tell us what things were identified as today. Sometimes you have to be very careful with that because sometimes there can be a gap. But it was really interesting working with her as well.

Dr. Raj Balkar (23:26)

Yeah, that's fascinating. So tell us a bit about your work, about your contribution.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (23:31)

Yeah. So I contributed the introduction, which is a sort of quick history of alchemy in India. So it's sort of just an overview chapter. I think this is sort of quite useful to sort of just get a general sense of the literature and how it's developed. And then I did a chapter on the final chapter of the Rasar Tantra, so the heart of Mercury, and that final chapter describes elixir regimen. So you've spent all the other 18 chapters making the elixir, and then finally somebody gets to take it. And there's a lot of preparations on how to do that. And these are very parallel to prescriptions on rasayana in Indian medical literature. Rasayana is this sort of vitalization, rejuvenation, therapies. And they always demand that the person who is taking the tonic in medical terms, or the elixir in alchemical terms, that that person's body is cleansed, that they maybe are in a special dedicated space for taking the elixir, that they have a diet during the intake. This takes quite a long time, may go over several months and so on. And then after the whole cleansing and preparation phase, then you take actual tonic or elixir. And so this chapter in the Rasarhidya Tantra describes this taking of the tonic and then sort of what happens. And in this case, it's the sort of making of special progeny, but it's also becoming like Shiva or like Vishnu. So it sort of has various outcomes that are possible, including being poisoned. So there's a little section on what to do if you're having negative effects, effects from the intake and so on. So it's a quite interesting chapter. And I guess this was in chapter one, because it's the oldest of the works, but really, probably I should have started with a chapter that sort of described the making of the elixir. The Rasahir de Al Tantra does that. But I chose a different chapter, a different work for that. But, yeah, I think it's a sort of interesting chapter from that work. And then I did another chapter on much later work from the 16th century, the Rasatrakasha Siddharkhara.

Dr. Raj Balkar (25:53)

So.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (25:56)

The mind light on mercury. And this work is a late work, so the bulk of it is sort of medical. But it also has an interesting chapter on making gems, which I used for some of the alchemical reconstruction videos that I made together with Andrew Mason. But the chapter that I translated there was its summary of mercurial operations. So on how to make the mercury elixir, which is strongly based on, but not exactly the same as the earlier works. So that was another chapter that I looked at. And then the one that I did together with Priyanka was a chapter on abdominal diseases in the Rasaratna Samuchaya, the jewel heap of mercury, also probably 16th century. Priyanka actually told us that. That she learned that it dated to the 13th century. So there's a little bit of a sort of gap between what Indologists have thought and what practitioners think. The Indology dating to the 16th century is sort of based on the fact that there's a particular formulation that is mercury chloride and that it mentions firangaroga syphilis. So that usually dates things to the 16th century. But other than that, there's no reason not to think it might be a bit older. But half of the work is sort of pure alchemy, making a mercury elixir. And then the second half is medical. Well, when I say half, actually the second part is longer than the first part and has all the Ayurvedic disease categories. And then you get sort of like, what's the disease? Very briefly, and then the medicines that you would use against it according to different factors that will influence it. And the difference to Ayurvedic literature is that a lot of the medicines are based on mercury, also on sulfur and so on. So you have a lot of Mercurials which are not part of the sort of classical Ayurvedic medicine. But by that time, if it's the 16th century, then certainly Indian medicine has already sort of taken in the whole mercurial processing ideas and has added it to their repertoire. But in the alchemical works that have medicine, there's just more of it, more mercury medicines than in the Ayurvedic ones. So, yeah, that's the chapters that I worked on.

Dr. Raj Balkar (28:24)

That's really interesting. Is it difficult to integrate or reconcile the texts that function more as manuals, perhaps more in the what we would think of as perhaps more of a formulaic, scientific, physical processes side. And the texts that are narrative or perhaps whether you think of them as fantastical or mystical or take you on this sort of magical realist journey, do we have a sense of, you know, who is using which or whether both were used, or do we have a sense of how they come together?

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (28:58)

I mean, to me, often they feel like add ons. So, I mean, I was thinking about this with the. How you have all these. You have stories and so on, but if you just cut that chapter, nothing would change. You still have even the ones that are very technical and so on. You still have the idea that this elixir is there for transmutation. So that's really at the core of everything. But in a way, it doesn't really matter whether mercury is the semen of Shiva or sort of like these kinds of stories in a way don't really influence one, what the person really does with it. The mercury is always cleansed and then calcined and mixed with other things and so on. So in some sense it feels like there was something there before and then somebody put it into a certain context. And in the case of this pilgrimage story, for example, again, it seems a bit added on. And it might have been added on at a later place, but at this point, the work that it belongs to, that's the Rasaratnakara, the jewel mine of Mercury. And this is a work that is an assemblage and it has five books, and those were probably written between the 13th and 15th centuries, so probably not one author. The author is supposed to be Nithyanatha, but it's sort of like an assemblage of different parts. And one part, like the Rasakanda and the Vadakanda are sort of quite similar in theme. The Rasendrakanda is about. So these are the different books of the work. It's about medicine. And then you have the Rasayana Kanda, which is partly about the elixir intake. And that's also where that pilgrimage story is happening. And it's sort of one of the final chapters of the work. So kind of like easy to add on. You don't get a sense of this. It sort of fits in. In that we're still sort of in the same cosmology. You know, this is India, you know, you know, whether it's, you know, you could also have something like that in Jain context, you could have it in Buddhist context, You know, like it still fits you still, you have, you know, tree deities or, you know, sort of like you have yakshas, you have, you know, these kind of beings. You know, they're part of the sort of pan indic world of thought and so on. So there's no reason to say this doesn't belong or this doesn't fit. But certainly, you know, there's a bit of a mismatch between the sort of technicality of the other works where there's a person just grinding stuff and burning stuff and so on, to somebody going into the woods and meeting special beings and that there's these special waters and so on, you know, so it feels. It feels really different, I would say. But clearly, as an assemblage, this was meaningful to a group of people who were using this work and they saw it. 1.

Dr. Raj Balkar (31:54)

Yeah, I find that utterly fascinating, particularly being quite fond of narrative, whether as an object of study or a pedagogical tool or I've been known to perhaps enjoy a story or two myself here and there. But this, you know, I think there's. There's a real profundity with the juxtaposition of this very left brain, formulaic, scientific, you know, this is how you perform medical procedure. This is how this. And then what is, you know, I use it with mythology. And when I use mythology for when I teach, whether it's about Moses parting the Red Sea or Kurukshetra, I'm bracketing out the historical question, saying, hey, we can have a historical conversation, certainly, but there's. There's utter meaning making power in the narrative and the narrative. The function of mythological stories is that they're spiritually true or culturally true or morally true in a way that transcends history. And I think it's almost like looking out of one eye at a time where the narratives, the narratives orient the practitioner. I'm inferring what do I know surrounding the meaning of this, what is this significant for? You know, the sort of the sanctity of it, the efficacy of it. You know, what it does is it really bridges the gap between sort of a physicalistic formulaic materialism and then the world beyond. Like, it's really interesting.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (33:24)

I mean, I think also, you know, this sense of who is the practitioner and what community do they belong to. Like in the Rasayanava, the practitioner is defined as a kaula. And so it's a shaiva context, but more specifically kaula. But they're also kind of attacking other kinds of kola practices and so on and say no, this is the right one. And so you're having sort of like a statement on identity in a way of the practitioner, but maybe also of potential consumers. So you have that. And then the other thing I was also thinking about is that the usage of mercury is a bit of a mystery because there isn't a lot of mercury on the Indian subcontinent. You have some in what is today Afghanistan, you have some in Tibet, you have have in Burma and so on. But it had to be imported. And so now we have a discipline in which mercury is completely central. And so then to say this is connected with the most inner self of shiv, this is this kind of also this is the Indianization of the material and the making sense of and making it ours. Sort of like something that we're. Why are we suddenly using mercury? This was not something that was an important material beforehand. And in fact also the same might go for sulfur, which was also not widely used, not in medicine, for example. So it's only like after the 10th century that it is. And so having stories surrounding these materials, where do they come from and what is their power, brings something into the community and make sense of it.

Dr. Raj Balkar (35:05)

Yeah, that's, it's really interesting.

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Dr. Raj Balkar (36:22)

Was there, I imagine there's much but was there any of the really surprised you or sort of struck you about this process? Any particular paper or finding or do you want to comment about what anything unexpected did you kind of. Yeah, I don't want to leave the.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (36:38)

Question too much, but I mean I got into this literature by thinking first about changes in Indian medicine and there I found this sort of introduction of mercury and then a cell that probably had come from, from alchemy and so on. So this sort of different use and different ways of thinking about materials was sort of the main insight that I had. You know, this idea that a material has to be manipulated in order to be able to be used and so on. But I keep on thinking about how were these texts used and that's why during the project, when I was still in Iyo milk and had funds for doing these things, we did these reconstructions of some of the recipes specifically from the Rasa y Tantra, which I was sort of reading a lot at that time. And I had the help of Andrew Mason, who learned about Rasa shastra in Britain. Actually he did a sort of ayurvedic training in Britain and then went to Sri Lanka and sort of specialized a bit on rasa shastra there. And very difficult circumstances. Actually that was just the time of the tsunami when he was there. So a lot of the structures had broken down, but it meant that he was sort of left to be in a lot of sort of the informal places of rasa shastra practice. So he learned a lot. And so Andrew and I worked together and I would do a translation of a recipe and then he would put it into practice, sort of using his knowledge of how things work, but also staying as close to the text as possible. And that included making apparatuses as described in the text and so on. So he had a Potter friend who made an apparatus for us and so on. And then we kind of tried to redo these recipes. And, you know, I said that Rasar Shastra is still living and you still have this pharmacology. But texts like the rasarhidya tantra, this 10th century texts, are not actually used anymore. It's the later texts that sort of form the basis of the more modern pharmacology. And so redoing the. These recipes was really a recreation. And we consulted with some people we knew who were Rasa Shastra practitioners in India and had very different sort of opinions on some of the ingredients and so on. And then, of course, Andrew was in England, so it was sometimes a little bit difficult to get the right materials and so on. But in trying to recreate these recipes, kind of the gaps became very clear. And I mean, you could just, just think it through. You know, you could look at a recipe and sort of imagine doing it and then you would see kind of the information that is missing. But when you're doing it, it becomes very, very obvious. And one of the things that, you know, the text, you don't see it, but how much time passes, how long it takes to do a thing, you know, you're doing days of grinding, 12 hours or so of roasting, all sort of the passing of time and then this sort of uncertainties about materials or what exactly you do. And so this really led me to understand the Rasadaya Tantra not as a manual sort of like how to, but really as a sort of statement about what is alchemy, what is this discipline of Rasavada, of rasavidya. So it's not really a prescription of activities. It's really of just a sort of a statement about this is what we do. At least that was my sort of conclusion after doing these recreations.

Dr. Raj Balkar (40:16)

I think that strikes me as quite insightful and also quite sympathetical with why we have so much of the narrative why of how we do what we do. Right. So it's really fascinating. Are you still working on this? Something to do with Indian alchemy. What are you working on these days?

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (40:39)

Yeah, so I'm on sabbatical right now, which is lovely, but time is passing so quickly. And I'm actually writing a book based on sort of the last 10 years of thinking about alchemy. And what I'm writing about specifically is the development of chemical medicine, so Yatro chemistry. And I'm looking at where these sort of alchemical ideas enter Ayurvedic literature. So the Sanskrit Literature, but also where medical ideas become more important or under the alchemical work. So that's the sort of book project that I'm working on right now. I'm sort of four chapters in, but the sabbatical ends in December. And, yeah, I don't think I'll get it quite done this year, but that's the thing that I'm working on. And then I am actually also working on a bigger project for an application, and that's sort of whether that will happen or not. I mean, the application is happening, but whether we'll get that project. Project. And that will be a wider alchemy project where finally we try to integrate Sanskrit sources, Tamil sources, Persian sources and Tibetan sources. A little bit of Chinese in there, not very much. In an ideal world, we'd have Chinese sources as well, but you can do what you can budget for, as it were. Yeah. And so that's sort of in the works. And if we're successful with that, that would start in a year's time or so.

Dr. Raj Balkar (42:06)

Oh, that sounds so exciting for so many reasons. I mean, certainly there are those who'll be more invested in that niche, that sort of area of specialization in terms of scholarship. But what really excites me above and beyond just what we do as scholars is the cultural work, the collaboration work, the translation work. I mean, that's such an exciting project. And I also have given myself a deadline between now and the end of the year to have something in. So maybe we'll be up. Maybe we'll be opening up procrastination buddies, but we'll be sort of, you know, we'll spot each other, we'll. We'll message each other, say, so how much more have you got? I am. I turned out a translation, a new translation of the students had been requesting it for years. And I kept saying, well, you know, Cockburn is pretty rigorous, a little bit strange at times. And there's David at Akali. There's, you know, there's other sources. But, you know, I translated. I used a couple of. I translated a couple of hymns for a course I did a couple of years ago, and students were on me. They wouldn't let off. They're like, you've got, You've got, you've got to do a new transition on the day of your humming. Fine. So I turned it out. But that has been sitting at my desk for two years because it's not like there's other things to do.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (43:16)

But is that what I saw? You saw on Facebook, you posted a little poem the translate.

Dr. Raj Balkar (43:22)

You know what? Yeah. So I've decided that my quote unquote sadhana for Navaratri is actually getting into the salt mines of central grammar and. And, you know, going through all. I translated it very. Not liberally in the sense of everything that wasn't in the. I was reading the verse as I was translating it. It wasn't sort of like ad hoc or rendition. But I also just. I prioritized the flow of it really and truly of what really felt right to me to flow. And now I'm going to go back and make sure that every little thing in the Sanskrit must be in English somewhere. And if I make any exceptions, I should. You know, the detail oriented work of that. But really what the students really valued in their perspective was the extent to which it flowed in English, and that's what they were looking for. And to have a transition that's faithful and flows, that's difficult. That's a tall order. I hope that it succeeds, but either way, I've given myself the deadline of getting it off my proverbial desk by the end of this year as well. So good luck with your deadline. And this idea of you said at the beginning, I feel guilty. It's just Sanskrit sources. Oh, nonsense. The best books are beginnings. The best books are beginnings. You're beginning something, you're developing it. Listen, my work isn't perfect. If someone wants to add Twitter corrected, by all means. Hopefully it's not nothing. It's not, you know, let's. It's okay. We'll. We'll build on it. You clearly, you've got exciting things happening there. And I received a really warm and to my mind, exciting email from you a couple months ago. If it was time has really worked for me, talking about what you're doing and what I'm doing and what other people are doing. Do you want to. Do you want to sort of tell our listeners what you have in the works for us?

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (45:07)

Oh, oh. And just. Are we talking about Ricard or. Yeah, you know, I was just thinking about this sort of translation element of, you know, in the Indian Alchemy Sources and Context book, we all have quite different translation styles. And, you know, I would say my own style. I have worked very hard not to be too Germanic, which is, you know, basically translating very accurately with a million brackets and sub clauses and so on. It makes it very unreadable. So I've been really trying to adhere to the more Anglophone smoothness of translation, but I would say that my language is certainly not poetic. But Somebody like David Gordon White, for example. I love his use of language, which is witty very often. I love his translation, for example, of Bunny, the woman who helps with the binding of Mercury. Right. And calls them fixatrics and things like that. And I just love it. He's got such a knack. And I also think my husband has a very beautiful way of dealing with language and I appreciate it very much if I'm not completely able to do it myself. But we were talking about poetry and I was reminded of a German Indologist who was famous for doing translations of poetry and that he would read them in front of an Indian audience. So his translations were into German, but he was able to express the emotion of the poetry in a way that really reached his audience. So they really felt it somehow about the rhythmic use of language or something. But he had this special knack of language, which is so unusual.

Dr. Raj Balkar (46:58)

That's staggering. Yeah. For the audience listening, that was just an email exchange that we had because I had emailed the dogma, what I'm currently working on, which is this Devi Mahmoud translation, and she asked me what I was working on because. Why don't you tell them why you asked that?

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (47:15)

No, no, please, you go ahead. Done.

Dr. Raj Balkar (47:18)

So she has emailed a bunch of us in this place called Canada, this little nation called Canada, and many of we scholars, South Asian geologists in Canada. She has invited to a conference of sort of showcasing the Indology happening in Canada that's to take place in, I believe, believe May, early ish, May 2026. It's the first of its kind. And my spidey sense says it will not be the last of its kind. It's like this is one of those things, you know, when like they had their first world sounds for conference or their first Dubrovnik International conference of the epics and flanas. I really get the sense that this may well grow. I know that the invitation was well received by so many of our colleagues. I was grateful to receive the invite because it's not as if I have a standard professorship at a university. I have many teaching appointments, but. But I was very grateful to receive the invite. But I was even more grateful that you were making the initiative to bring us together to showcase Indology. But. Oh, yeah, let's hear some more about you from you about your vision for this.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (48:26)

Yeah, so the Indology conference, or South Asian Studies conference. This was an idea that I long had, actually speaking with Elisa Fresky, who is in Toronto, and I had organized the conference for the retirement of my husband and we had, you know, South Asian studies people come and give talks and so on. And I was just thinking how lovely that was. But over the years also, you know, Canada being such a large country, US Canadian indologists don't actually get to see each other very much. And I was just thinking it'd be so nice to, you know, to just get to see people and to hear what everybody is doing. You know, we're all so far apart and everybody's also very busy with their day to day work of teaching and doing their things and so on. So I just thought it'd be very nice to bring people together and do it a little bit on a shoestring. Everybody's just paying for themselves and coming. And I'm very inspired by the so called coffee break conferences that happen in Europe. Elisa is one of the conveners of these coffee break conferences where the focus is really on conversation between each other. So I hope we will have a lot of opportunity to just talk with each other, get to know each other and just really get a sense of what everybody is up to. Because now that people have sent me their titles and abstracts, we have such a wide range of things that people are working on that they're interested in. So this will be quite an informal conference. It will be, of course people will give a talk and there will be PowerPoints and so on. But at the same time it's really about a sort of larger conversation about what is our field and who's doing what. And so you're saying you're honored to be invited? Of course you're invited. You're working in this field, you're contributing. So I'm delighted. And I'm also delighted that we will have some graduate students. There's a number of people who are independent researchers. With the academic field being so limited in terms of, of what jobs there are, there's a lot of people who have done such interesting work who don't have an affiliation and they're all part of a larger community of people who are fascinated by this topic. So I'm happy for everyone to come. I sort of narrowed it down to Canada rather than North America. I know that our North American colleagues that would be very nice to have them and I'm hoping very much that they will all come out as audience. In this case is just sort of like to make it manageable for me to organize a thing. I didn't want to like a mini world Sanskrit conference because I wanted to keep it a little bit simple for budget Purposes and so on. But I'm hoping that lots of people will just come and join in and be our friends and sort of also get a sense of what we're doing. So it's sort of showcasing indology. And here at the University of Alberta, we have a new Singar chair, Yigal Bronner, who will be joining us in January. And so I thought it would also be a wonderful opportunity to sort of celebrate the new singer chair and to welcome Yigal and to sort of just, you know, show well that we're here, you know. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Dr. Raj Balkar (51:40)

Yeah, that sounds incredible. I mean, I mean, even if I were not involved or to be involved, that sounds as I do when I cover. When I cover events on this podcast. I mean, I always showcase spaces where work is showcased or people are brought together. And it just feels like, you know, the minute I got that invite, I just had this sense of, you know, what, wow, what a great idea this is. Sort of there's a need, you know, you're fulfilling a need. And I think just for us to understand and be cognizant of the work that's being done within Canada. And of course, you know, many of us do meet our American colleagues at Madison, Wisconsin, every year and at the American Academy of Religion and of course, you know, World Satzer Conference, et cetera, et cetera. The Dubrovnik Conference, I think, is happening next year, et cetera. But this will be great because I think it'll really help us to understand what else is happening in ways in which we may be able to support and collaborate in the future. And so I'm totally on board to present. More than happy we can have you back as a guest when you have a clearer sense of registration and what the program looks like, so we can share some of what's happening and what's fully presented on. And also you feel most free to reach out. I mean, I'm not a stranger to organization, and I used to have an event sort of background in events. That's how I put myself through my first two degrees, actually. So if you'd like any help on that ground, I'm more than happy to. But, yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun, actually. So thank you very much for inviting us.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (53:15)

Yeah, thank you. I'm hoping that the sort of fun aspect is strong with this conference, and I think that's why I want to keep it quite informal. I mean, we'll have all the things like a room and a projector and all of that, and we'll have meals and so on. But the main idea is that it's get together. So. Yeah, that's my emphasis.

Dr. Raj Balkar (53:40)

Yeah. It feels like the best conferences are equal parts intellectual engagement and community connection. Those are the best conferences and actually the latter facilitates the former because you have these great conversations that are totally low stakes. Everyone's relaxed and then you have a brilliant idea and you share a half baked idea with a colleague and before you know it, maybe it's not so half baked and. And you know, it's. Some of my greatest ideas have come. Some have come actually hearing papers and many have come in between the papers. Right. Just chatting with people because you're in a different space. So that's fantastic. Is there anything else about your work, the publication, the conference, anything at all that you wanted to mention before we close for today?

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (54:25)

Well, I mean the conference, please everybody come. It will be May 4th to 6th. I'm still working on the schedule. I have about 20 speakers. Speakers. Some haven't sent me their abstracts yet, very late, but most have. So we've got about 20 speakers and it's going to be like half an hour each. So I'm still deliberating whether it's going to be two days or three days. I want to make it sort of financeable for people to come. And of course the third day people will need to stay another night and so on. So I'm still deliberating on that, how to schedule that. But It'll start on the 4th of May definitely. So put that into your calendars. The 4th and the 5th are definitely happening. Maybe the 6th will be included in the schedule.

Dr. Raj Balkar (55:10)

Fantastic. And it's not, to be honest, once you're hopping on a plane and going there, I imagine Edmonton isn't quite like Vancouver or Toronto and a couple of nights is not unreasonable at all for a conference. And also to have gone that far might be more value for people to stay an extra night, night, have a couple more papers and maybe some more time to do something local. Right.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (55:32)

Yeah. I mean I was even thinking could we then have a day where we all just go into the mountains or so. But the mountains are not that close here. It's a four hour drive to Jasper. And then I also realized that in May it's also still really cold in the mountains. So I may not do that. It might just be Edmonton's River Valley where we go for a walk together or something to see. See what Edmonton is like. But yeah, I'll try to get some schedule like thing happening within the next two weeks to send out to people as a sort of preliminary thing. And then once I finalize that, we'll advertise it more widely for people to come so that I also know what kind of room we need for this and so on. I'm hoping that also people just come from the community, of course, of the U of A and and the Edmonton community and from far and wide as well. So, yeah, I think it's going to be a great opportunity to talk together.

Dr. Raj Balkar (56:29)

Yeah, no question. And we'll do what we can to make this inaugural event a success. Well, thank you very much for appearing on the podcast today.

Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik (56:36)

Oh, thank you so much, Raj. Pleasure to be here.

Dr. Raj Balkar (56:38)

For those listening, we've been speaking with Dr. Dagmar Wuyastik on Indian alcohol alchemy sources and context, brand new OUP publication. The link is in the podcast notes. Until next time, keep listening, keep safe reading and keep contemplating this little thing called alchemy. Bye for now.

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