Temperance carried into the sessions as "the Alchemist" — a name Ra called less than completely correct, since what the fourteenth archetype names is not an infinity of time but a mirror.

The concept

Working through the body cycle's later cards, the questioner proposed the Alchemist as the name of the fourteenth archetype, reasoning that the body has an infinity of time across its various forms to learn the lessons evolution requires. Ra corrects the reasoning rather than settling for it: the Great Way of the Body, like every archetype of the body, must be seen as a mirror image of the thrust of the mind's activity (81.14). What the body does, on this reading, it does at the mind's direction — form given to what mind and spirit have already produced, the working vessel rather than the worker (81.14).

That correction folds Archetype Fourteen into a rule Ra states for the Great Way generally, across all three cycles. Asked again in later sessions whether a cycle's seventh card marks the end of that cycle's work, Ra gives the same answer for mind, body, and spirit alike: the Great Way is not the culmination of a cycle's seven activities but the environment within which that cycle's stations are already operating (92.17, 100.11). Applied here, the Great Way of the Body is not a distant reward the body's other six archetypes work toward; it is the space they already occupy — the cycle whose Matrix Ra names Balanced Working and whose Potentiator, Wisdom (78.11).

The body cycle runs cards eight through fourteen, the second of the tarot's three sevens, built on the mind cycle's foundation and headed, with the spirit cycle after it, toward the Choice (77.12). In the same exchange that named the Alchemist, Ra had just confirmed the Catalyst of the Body as offering both positive and negative outside experience (81.11) and the Transformation of the Body as a death and rebirth available every day, not only at incarnation's end (81.13) — the immediate company Archetype Fourteen keeps.

Working with the archetype

Ra's standing instruction for the whole system still applies: study each concept complex first on its own, then paired, attending to the polarity each carries, before attempting to work from within it (89.19). The Alchemist misnomer is worth keeping in mind precisely because it invites the opposite approach — treating the body as the agent of its own transformation, when Ra's correction places that agency in the mind and leaves the body to carry it out.

In Ra's words

The correction: not an infinity of time, but the body as a mirror of the mind's thrust:

This is less than completely correct as the Great Way of the Body must be seen, as are all the archetypes of the body, to be a mirror image of the thrust of the activity of the mind.

81.14.2

The Great Way stated generally, for mind, body, or spirit alike — environment, not culmination:

Firstly, we ask that the student consider the Great Way not as the culmination of a series of seven activities or functions but as a far more clearly delineated image of the environment within which the mind, body, or spirit shall function.

100.11.2

The same architecture named directly for the Great Way of the Body:

The Great Way of the Mind, the Body, or the Spirit draws the environment which has been the new architecture caused by the veiling process and, thusly, dipped in the great, limitless current of time/space.

103.11.6