The Reenchantment of the World (14 page)

 

 

The only conclusion I can come to, then, is one that will probably strike
most readers as radical in the extreme. The above analysis forces me to
conclude that it is not merely the case that men conceived of matter as
possessing mind in those days, but rather that in those days, matter
did
possess mind, "actually" did so. When the obvious objection is raised
that the mechanical world view must be true, because we are in fact
able to send a man to the moon or invent technologies that demonstrably
work, I can only reply that the animistic world view, which lasted for
millennia, was also fully efficacious to its believers. In other words,
our ancestors constructed reality in a way that typically produced
verifiable results, and this is why Jung's theory of projection is off
the mark. If another break in consciousness of the same magnitude as
that represented by the Scientific Revolution were to occur, those on
the other side of that watershed might conclude that our epistemology
somehow "projected" mechanism onto nature. But modern science, with
the significant exception of quantum mechanics, does not regard the
gestalt of matter/motion/experiment/quantification as a
metaphor
for reality; it regards it as the
touchstone
of reality. And if the
criterion is going to be efficacy, we can only note that our own world
view has pragmatic anomalies that are as extensive as those of either
the magical or the Aristotelian world view. We are not, for example,
able to explain psychokinesis, ESP, psychic healing, or a host of other
"paranormal" phenomena by means of the current paradigm. There is no way,
on a pragmatic basis, to make a judgment in terms of any epistemological
superiority, and in fact, in terms of providing for a comprehensible
world, original participation might even win out. Participation
constitutes an insuperable historical barrier unless we consent to
regenerate a dead evolutionary pattern -- an act that would return us to a
world view in which it would be meaningless to ask: Which epistemology is
superior? Regenerating this pattern, we would, in some important sense,
have fallen back through the rabbit hole whence we originally came. In
such a world, the material transformation of lead to gold may well occur,
but we cannot know that now, nor can we know it for the Middle Ages.

 

 

The delusion of modern thinking on alternative realities is rarely
exposed. Most historical and anthropological studies of witchcraft, for
example, never speculate that the massive number of witchcraft trials
during the sixteenth century might have been caused by something more than
mass hysteria. (Will our descendants, we wonder, regard our involvement
with science and technology as mass hysteria, or more correctly realize
that it was a way of life?) The number of works that depict participating
consciousness from the inside, such as Chinua Achebe's description of
Nigerian village life in "Things Fall Apart," is very small indeed; and
I know of only one writer who has managed both to enter that world and
to articulate its epistemology in modern terms -- Carlos Castaneda.34 I
shall be discussing alternative realities in greater detail later on in
this book. For now, the reader should be aware of how stark the choice
really is. Either such realities were mass hallucinations that went on
for centuries, or they were indeed realities, although not commensurable
with our own. In his critique of Castaneda's work, anthropologist Paul
Riesman confronts the issue directly, though the reader should note that
Riesman hardly represents mainstream thinking on the subject:

 

 

Our social sciences [he writes] generally treat the culture and
knowledge of other peoples as forms and structures necessary for
human life that those people have developed and imposed upon a reality
which we know -- or at least our scientists know -- better than they
do. We can therefore study those forms in relation to "reality" and
measure how well or ill they are adapted to it. In their studies
of the cultures of other people, even those anthropologists who
sincerely love the people they study almost never think that they
are learning something about the way the world really is. Rather,
they conceive of themselves as finding out what other people's
conceptions
of the world are.35

 

 

In the case of the history of alchemy as well, or of premodern thought in
general, we have made precisely this mistake. We seek to describe what
the alchemist
thought
he was up to; we never grasp that what he was
"actually" doing was real. Moreover, we rarely apply this methodology to
our own methodology; we never manage to see
our
culture and knowledge as
"forms and structures necessary for human life" as it exists in Western
industrial societies.

 

 

The truth is that we can always find previous world views lacking if we
judge them in our terms. The price paid, however, is that what we
actually learn about them is severely limited before the inquiry even
begins. Nonparticipating consciousness cannot "see" participating
consciousness any more than Cartesian analysis can "see" artistic
beauty. Perhaps Heraclitus put it best in the sixth century B.C. when
he wrote, "What is divine escapes men's notice because of their
incredulity."36

 

 

This brings us, finally, to the question of values, a question that
is especially relevant because of the role of values in shaping our
perceptions. Our purpose with respect to gold is not very different
from that of King Midas. We seek to know how the alchemist "did
it". because we see gold as a vehicle for obtaining other things. To
the true alchemist, gold was the end, not the means. The manufacture of
gold was the culmination of his own long spiritual evolution, and this
was the reason for his silence. "The material aim of the alchemists,"
writes the historian Sherwood Taylor,

 

 

the transmutation of metals, has now been realized by science,
and the alchemical vessel is the uranium pile. Its success has had
precisely the result that the alchemists feared and guarded against,
the placing of gigantic power in the hands of those who have not been
fitted by spiritual training to receive it. If science, philosophy,
and religion had remained associated as they were in alchemy, we
might not today be confronted with this fearful problem.37

 

 

By 1700, alchemy had been significantly discredited by the mechanical
world view, or driven underground to become part of the ideology of
so-called obscurantist groups: Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and others. In
terms of making a claim on the dominant culture, its last great stand
occurred during the English Civil War and Commonwealth period (1642-60),
and its last great practitioner was Isaac Newton, though he wisely kept it
a private matter.38 Yet because alchemy (and all of the occult sciences)
represents a map of the unconscious, because it apparently corresponds
to a psychic substrate that is trans-historical, alchemy is still with
us, both privately and publicly, and it is doubtful that dialectical
reason can ever be completely extirpated. Privately it survives, as we
have seen, in dreams, and also in psychosis.39 Publicly it has but one
surviving domain -- the world of surrealist art. The express purpose
of the Surrealist Movement in the first half of the twentieth century
was to free men and women by liberating the images of the unconscious,
by deliberately making such images conscious. There is, as a result, a
peculiar visual link between alchemical plates, dreams, and surrealist
art which seems to go deeper than appearances. All three use allegory
and the incongruous juxtaposition of objects, and all three violate
the principles of scientific causality and noncontradiction. Yet they
do create a message by somehow managing to reflect, or evoke, certain
familiar states of mind. These messages are intuitive, even numinous,
rather than cognitive-rational, but we somehow "know" what they are
saying. Their rules are those of premodern logic, of participating
consciousness, of resemblance and "a secret affinity between certain
images." "One cannot speak about mystery," wrote René Magritte; "one
must be seized by it.40 Hence the highly alchemical nature of a painting
like 'The Explanation' (Plate 7), in which a carrot anda bottle are both
reasonably seen as distinct, and no less reasonably fused into a single
object. Salvador Dali's 'The Persistence of Memory' (Plate 8) has the
same dreamlike quality, in which linear, mechanical time has started
to wilt and run down in the arid desert of the twentieth century. Both
of these paintings employ the same sort of logic and imagery that we
observed in Plates 2 - 6.

 

 

We shall have to examine more closely what the public revival of alchemy
in the twentieth century could possibly mean later on in this work. Our
task now, however, is to try to solve the puzzle of why it was ever
lost in the first place. Although we may have succeeded in immersing
ourselves in that world view, we have not yet addressed the question of
how modern science managed to refute it. The holistic framework of the
occult sciences lasted for millennia, but it took Western Europe a mere
two hundred years -- roughly between 1500 and 1700 -- to break it apart,
revealing that the Hermetic tradition was, despite its long tenure,
rather fragile.

 

 

The problem lay in the tradition's (from our viewpoint) inherently
dualistic nature. Magic was at once spiritual and manipulative, or,
in D.P. Walkers terminology, subjective and transitive.41 Each of the
occult sciences, including alchemy, astrology, and the cabala, aimed
at both the acquisition of practical, mundane objectives, and union
with the Divinity. There was always a tension between these two goals
(which is not the same thing as an antagonism) because they constituted
a rather delicate ecological framework. If, for example, I am acting as
a "midwife" to nature, accelerating its tempo in altering the nature of
matter, it is clear that I am interfering in its natural rhythm. Any type
of human action upon the environment can be seen in these terms. But the
point is that the interference was always consciously acknowledged. It
was sanctified through ritual, lest the earth strike back against man
for this incursion into its womb. This interference was performed in
the context of a mentality, and an economy (steady-state), that sought
harmony with nature, and in which the notion of mastery of nature
would have been regarded as a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless,
the distinction ultimately involved a difference of degree rather than
kind, for at what point in our acceleration of nature's tempo can we be
said to have crossed the line from midwifery to induced birth, or even
abortion? What degree of interference tips the balance from harmony to
attempted mastery? In a feudal context of subsistence economy and only
moderately diffused technology, in a religious context that regarded
nature as alive and our relationship to it as one of participation, it
was very difficult for such a question to arise, and in this sense the
alchemical tradition was not all that fragile. But with the social and
economic changes wrought in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the sacred and the manipulative were split down the middle. The
latter could easily survive in a context of profit, expanding technology,
and secular salvation; indeed, that was what the manipulative aspect was
all about, severed from its religious basis. Thus Eliade rightly calls
modern science the secular version of the alchemists dream, for latent
within the dream is "the pathetic programme of the industrial societies
whose aim is the total transmutation of Nature, its transformation into
'energy.'"42 The sacred aspect of the art became, for the dominant
culture, ineffective and ultimately meaningless. In other words, the
domination of nature always lurked as a possibility within the Hermetic
tradition, but was not seen as separable from its esoteric framework
until the Renaissance. in that eventual separation lay the world view
of modernity: the technological, or the 'zweckrational,' as a logos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plate 7. René Magritte, "The Explanation" (1952). Copyright ©
by A.D.A.G.P., Paris, 1981.

 

 

 

 

Plate 8. Salvador Dali, "The Persistence of Memory (1931), oil on canvas,
9-1/2" x 13". Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

 

 

 

What is perhaps remarkable, from the modern point of view, is that magic
could actually have served as a matrix for the Scientific Revolution. As
explained in Chapter 2, technology had no theoretical or ideological
basis, at least not until Francis Bacon. Even down to the time of Leonardo
da Vinci, machines tended to be seen as toys, whereas the concept
of force was linked to the Hermetic theme of universal animation.43
Technology, in short, could not be a rival to Aristotelianism because
it was not a