The Reenchantment of the World (13 page)

 

 

Unfortunately, Jung's interpretation does not tell us anything about
what the alchemist actually did with his pots and alembics. Instead,
it extracts from his activity the portion that we find comprehensible,
and discards the rest. Such an interpretation is, in short, the product
of a modern scientific consciousness, assuming as it does that matter was
forever the same, and that only mind (concepts of matter) changed. But the
alchemical world view simply did not construct reality in our terms. The
subject/object distinction was already blurry in the first place, and
thus such an interpretation of reality makes no sense, for "projection"
assumes a sharp dichotomy that the alchemist did not make. Obviously
the alchemist was doing
something
; but the projection argument,
although an improvement over the standard textbook version, still takes
him less than seriously. The goal of magical practice was to become a
skillful practitioner, not a self-realized being. The quotes from Dorn
and other alchemists cited above are not typical, and they date from
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the scientific Revolution
was relentlessly driving a wedge between matter and consciousness. For
most of its history, alchemy had been perceived as an exact science,
not a spiritual metaphor. If we succumb to Jung's formulation, we do
so because of our inability to enter into a consciousness in which the
technical and the divine were one, a consciousness in which finding a
science of matter was equivalent to participating in God; Thus, Jung's
formulation begs the question, for it is that very consciousness that we
seek to penetrate. The very modernity of the projection concept precludes
this possibility. The problem can only be solved (if at all) by trying
to recreate the actual procedures of the discipline, and learning what
the alchemist was doing in material terms.

 

 

Alchemy was first and foremost a craft, a "mystery" in medieval
terminology, and all crafts, from the most ancient of times, were
regarded as sacred activities. As Genesis tells us, the creation or
modification of matter, the crux of all craftsmanship, is God's very first
function. Metallurgy was intentionally compared to obstetrics: ores were
seen to grow in the womb of the earth like embryos. The role of the miner
or metalworker was to help nature accelerate its infinitely slow tempo by
changing the modality of matter. But to do so was to meddle, to enter into
sacred territory, and thus, down to the fifteenth century, the sinking
of a new mine was accompanied by religious ceremonies, in which miners
fasted, prayed, and observed a particular series of rites. In a similar
fashion, the alchemical laboratory was seen as an artifidal uterus in
which the ore could complete its gestation in a relatively short time
(compared to the action of the earth). Alchemy and mining shared the
notion, then, that man could intervene in the cosmic rhythm, and the
artisan, writes Mircea Eliade, was seen as "a connoisseur of secrets,
a magician. . . . " For this reason, all crafts involved "some kind of
initiation and [were] handed down by an occult tradition. He who 'makes'
real things is he who
knows
the secrets of making them."27

 

 

From these ancient sources came the central notion of alchemy: that
all metals are in the process of becoming gold, that they are gold in
potentia, and that men can devise a set of procedures to accelerate their
evolution. The practice of alchemy is thus not really playing God --
though the notion is certainly latent in the Hermetic tradition -- but
is, to continue the obstetrical metaphor, a type of midwifery. The set
of procedures came to be called the "spagyric art," the separating of
the gross from the subtle in order to assist the evolution and obtain
the gold that lay buried deep within the lead. "Copper is restless
until it becomes gold," wrote the thirteenth-century mystic Meister
Eckhart;28 and although Eckhart may have had something more Jungian
than metallurgical in mind, the alchemist, as we have stated repeatedly,
made no such distinctions, but (in our terms) concentrated on his reagents
and let nature (both human and inorganic) take its course.

 

 

What, then, were the procedures? Reading alchemical texts, the first thing
one discovers is that there is very little unity of opinion on the subject.
Transmutation consisted in the following set of operations: purification,
solution, putrefaction, distillation, sublimation, calcination, and
coagulation. However, the order and content of them is unclear, and not
all alchemists employed all the techniques. Circumstances, especially
the nature of the ores, always seemed to alter the methods. Hence what is
agreed upon in terms of procedure is very general, consisting only of the
basic outlines. Mercury is the dissolver, the active principle of things,
and in fact had been used from the earliest times as a wash in gilding,
to extract gold from other minerals. Sulfur (also called the green lion)
is a coagulant, the creator of a new form. One must first perform the
dissolution of the metal to the 'materia prima' and then recrystallize,
or coagulate, this formless substance. If done correctly, gold will be the
result. 'Solve et coagula' meant reduction to chaos -- a watery solution,
a primal state -- followed by fixation into a new pattern.

 

 

In fact, the process was rarely this straightforward. The very delicacy
of the procedure meant that it could be thrown off by the slightest
mistake. Furthermore, it was central to the tradition that each student
must learn this complex procedure by himself. There was no standardized
recipe that could be handed on, but rather an elaborate practice that
required a profound commitment. The variable factors were thus legion;
failure rather than success was the rule. A number of intermediate steps,
such as putrefaction, distillation, sublimation and calcination, normally
had to be employed; and clearly, the terse formula 'solve et coagula'
expressed only an ideal

 

 

Sometimes, the metal first had to be made to decay, or putrefy. The stink
of this process came from hydrogen sulfide (the odor of rotten eggs),
which was prepared and then passed through metallic solutions to obtain
various colors (in the Middle Ages, colors and odors were substantial
entities, not secondary qualities). Or, an evaporable substance would
have to be extracted from its mixture so as to obtain it in a pure
state. Sulfur, in particular, was obtained in this way. Hence, the
long and exacting process of sublimation that in turn necessitated
the complementary process of distillation, or filtering. Finally, if
a metal would not dissolve, calcination was employed to convert it to
a soluble oxide so that the processes of solution and separation could
be performed.29

 

 

That there are various psychoanalytic and religious correlates to
these procedures is perhaps obvious. In a spiritual interpretation,
all personalities (metals, ores) are potentially divine (golden), and
are trying to reach their true nature, trying to transcend the weight
of their past (lead). An old reality decays for me, I stink and feel
rotten, but this change in matter is ultimately good, for it is a change
in what matters. Old realities die, new things become my reality. The
rigidity of my personality is dissolved, a new pattern is slowly allowed
to coalesce. The ferocious desire for pattern itself is tamed, and I
begin to look at my former pattern as just one possibility among many. I
become less rigid, more tolerant. I see that all that really exists is
fusability and creativity, which mercury represents. Mercury, or Hermes,
the messenger of the gods, acts as "trickster" here, even though he is
called "psychopomp," guide of the soul. As Freud realized, we have to
be tricked into consciousness, see our true nature almost by accident,
for example, through jokes or slips of the tongue. Mercury was also
associated with glass, the vessel that enables one to see into it. The
container of my problems is transparent: I come to see that my problems
not only hold the solution, they
are
the solution. Thus R.D. Laing:
"The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it."

 

 

The alchemist is thus like a miner, probing deeper and deeper veins
of ore. One vein leads to another, there is no right answer. Life, and
human personality, are inherently crazy, multifaceted; neurosis is the
inability to tolerate this fact. The traditional model of the healthy soul
demands that we impose an order or identity on all of these facets, but
the alchemical tradition sees the result as an aborted metal that sulfur
fixed too quickly. 'Solve et coagula,' says the alchemist; abandon this
prematurely congealed persona that forces you into predictable behavior
and a programmed life of institutionalized insanity. If you would have
real control over your life, says the tradition, abandon your artificial
control, your "identity," the brittle ego that you desperately feel
you must have for your survival, Real survival, the gold, consists in
living according to the dictates of your own nature, and that cannot be
achieved until the risk of psychic death is confronted directly. This,
in the alchemical view, is the meaning of the Passion. When Christ said
"I am the Way," he meant, "you yourself must go through my ordeal." No
one else can confront your demons for you; no one else can give you your
real Self.30

 

 

The conclusion seems unavoidable, then, that alchemy corresponds' to a
primal substrate of the unconscious, and both R.D. Laing and Jungian
analyst John Perry have noted the identical imagery thrown up by the
tortured psyche during the psychotic experience -- imagery that is clearly
alchemical in nature.31 Still, the alchemist did not regard himserf
as a shaman or yogi, but as an expert on the nature of matter. Given
the above description of laboratory procedures, what have we learned
about the material aspect of the work? Essentially, nothing. That the
alchemist was serious about his work, and the manufacture of gold,
is beyond doubt. But what was he actually
doing
in his laboratory?

 

 

With this question we reach a total impasse. The literature of alchemy
records that gold was in fact produced, and the testimony is not so
easily dismissed. In one case, a transmutation was witnessed by Helvetius
(Johann Friedrich Schweitzer), physician to the Prince of Orange, in 1666,
and verified by a number of witnesses, including a Dutch assay master
and a well-known silversmith. Spinoza himself got involved in the case,
and reported the testimony without questioning it.32 In the end, the
answer to our question may depend only on whether or not one believes
such a metallurgical transmutation is possible.

 

 

Nevertheless, I believe we can take this problem one step farther. Since
the worlds constructed by participating and nonparticipating consciousness
are not mutually translatable, the question, "What was the alchemist
actually doing?" turns out to be something of a red herring when we
examine what we mean by the word "actually." What we really mean is
what we would be doing, or what a modern chemist would be doing, if
we or he could be transported back in time and space to an alchemists
laboratory. But what was "actually" going on was what the
alchemist
was doing, not what we moderns, with our nonparticipating consciousness,
would do if we could be transported back to the fourteenth century. Had we
belonged to that era we would have possessed a participating consciousness
and necessarily would have been doing what the alchemist was doing. Thus
the question "What was the alchemist actually doing?" can have no
meaningful answer in modern terms.

 

 

Let me put this another way. The world in which alchemy was practiced
recognized no sharp distinctions between mental and material events. In
such a context, there was no such thing as "symbolism" because everything
(in our terms) was symbolic, that is, all material events and processes
had psychic equivalents and representations. Thus alchemy was -- from our
viewpoint -- a composite of different activities, It was the science of
matter, the attempt to unravel nature's secrets; a set of procedures
which were employed in mining, dyeing, glass manufacture, and the
preparation of medicines; and simultaneously a type of yoga, a science
of psychic transformation.33 Because matter possessed consciousness,
skill in transforming the former automatically meant that one was
skilled in working with the latter -- a tradition retained today only
in fields such as art, poetry, or handicrafts, in which we tend (rightly
or wrongly) to regard the ability to create things of great beauty as a
reflection of the creators personality. We say then, that the talent of
the alchemist in his laboratory was dependent on his relationship with
his own unconscious, but in putting it that way we indicate the limits of
our understanding. "Unconscious," whether used by Jung or anyone else,
is the language of the modern disembodied intellect. It was all one to
the alchemist: there
was
no "unconscious." The modern mind cannot help
but regard the occult sciences as a vast welter of confusion about the
nature of the material world, since for the most part the modern mind
does not entertain the notion that the consciousness with which the
alchemist confronted matter was so different from its own, If the state
of mind can at all be imagined, however, we can say that the alchemist
did not
confront
matter; he
permeated
it.

 

 

It is thus doubtful that the alchemist could have described what he was
doing to us, or to a modern chemist, transported back to the fourteenth
century, even if he had wanted to. His was (again, from our point of
view) partly a psychic discipline that no nonpsychic method (save neutron
bombardment in a nuclear reactor) can possibly accomplish. The manufacture
of gold was not a matter of replicating a material formula. Indeed, its
manufacture was part of a much larger work, and our attempt to extract the
material essence from a holistic process reveals how contracted our own
knowledge of the world has become. We cannot know the alchemical process
of making gold until we know the "personality" of gold. We, here and now,
have no real sympathetic identity with the process of becoming golden;
we cannot fathom the relationship between becoming golden and making
gold. The medieval alchemist, on the other hand, was completed by the
process; the synthesis of the gold was his synthesis as well.