Inspired by Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”

Ge Hong’s immortality recipe reconstruction

“and centuries before and at a great distance from these places the Chinese philosopher Ge Hong spent the last years of his long life making pills of immortality…”

“Take three pounds of pure cinnabar, he wrote, and one pound of white honey. Mix them. Dry the mixture in the sun. Then hold over the fire until pills can be formed from this mixture. Take ten hemp seed sized pills every morning. Within a year, gray hair will darken, teeth will be replaced by new ones and the body will become smooth and glossy. If the old man takes this pills for a long time, he will turn into a young man. One who takes it constantly will enjoy eternal life and will never die”