Eliza Swann

Eliza Swann, who also goes by Emerald, is an artist, writer and teacher whose subject is alchemy and the Western esoteric traditions. They studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and took a master's at Central Saint Martins in London, and their visual work has been shown in galleries and universities. Swann teaches alchemy at Pratt Institute in New York, gave a 2023 residency of talks on alchemy at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, and has been artist in residence at gardens, convents and studios in the US and Peru.

In 2014 they set up Golden Dome, a nonprofit school where art and mystical practice meet, and since 2024 have taught through its Emerald School of Alchemical Arts. Their approach treats alchemy less as a historical curiosity and more as a working method for creative and inner change, mixing close reading of old texts and images with herbalism, divination, meditation, writing and art-making, from a queer, ecological and feminist angle. Their longest course is a year of monthly online sessions working through George Ripley's twelve stages of the Philosopher's Stone. Their books include Auras: The Anatomy of the Aura and The Alchemical Imagination, and they are now building a planetary herb garden at the Philosophical Research Society.