THE CRAFT OF FIRE

 Last weekend, we did another session of aluminum casting, with the goal being to get at least one more decent salamander made. And it worked! We had too many molds to fit into the kiln, so we prioritized the salamanders. Way back when in Paracelsus' time, salamanders were said (among other things) to live in fire, so we thought we'd try to make them happy and put them in all together. (Salamander in flames from, "The Story of Alchemy", the Book of Lambspring in the  Musaeum Hermeticum .) First up was the wax burnout for about 2-3 hours, moving through those clear stages of: 1) sweet-smelling melting wax, 2) awful-smelling burning wax, and 3) neutral-smelling 'just a little more because the molds are almost entirely ready to go'.   And that's one mold that actually wasn't ready to go - still flaming... Then we melted up the aluminum, still using the same canned tomatoes crucible which is holding up well. Getting to temperature didn't take very long...

We're closing in now. I believe the end of the Age of Aluminum is in sight. The goal this time was to make a good salamander. And I finally went full-in and made properly vented molds.  We started using this cool, albeit perhaps unnecessary, wax-dripper tool that people (like my sister-in-law ) use for decorating Easter Eggs. It helped to glue the sprues and vents to the legs.         Here are all the patterns ready for molding. There was a yoni-lingam, a pinecone and Mrs. Willendorf in there, too. One of the molds had some cardboard fuzz on it from the box I used, reminding me a little of the great footnote about Gilgamesh/Enkidu in Silo's, Universal Root Myths :  "T he fact that Enkidu is born covered with hair (“the hero was born with his body covered with hair as thick as the barley of the fields”) could refer to the visible presence of materials added to reduce plasticity (cereal cuttings, straw, and so on), which were added to the clay to prevent it f...