taste of what alchemical thinking was about. Mercury takes the form of its container. If I pour mercury into acup, it takes the shape of the cup, if I pour it into a test tube, it takes the shape of the test tube. Thistaking the shape of its container is a quality of mind and yet here it is present in a flowing, silvery metal.The other thing is, mercury is a reflecting surface. You never see mercury, what you see is the world whichsurrounds it, which is perfectly reflected in its surface like a moving mirror, you see. And then if you've ever,as a child, I mean I have no idea how toxic this process is, but I spent a lot of time as a child hounding mygrandfather for his hearing aid batteries which I would then smash with a hammer and get the mercury out andcollect it in little bottles and carry it around with me. Well, the wonderful thing about mercury is when youpour it out on a surface and it beads up, then each bead of mercury becomes a little microcosm of the world. Andyet the mercury flows back together into a unity. Well, as a child I had not yet imbibed the assumptions and theontology of science. I was functioning as an alchemist. For me, mercury was this fascinating magical substanceonto which I could project the contents of my mind. And a child playing with mercury is an alchemist hard at work,no doubt about it.Well, so then, this is a phenomenon in the physical world and then mind is a phenomenon in the Cartesiandistinction, which is between the Res Extensa and the Res Verins. This is the great splitting of the world intotwo parts. I remember Al Wong once said to me, we were talking about the yin yang symbol, and he said you knowthe interesting thing is not the yin or the yang, the interesting thing is the s shaped surface that runs betweenthem. And that s shaped surface is a river of alchemical mercury. Now, where the alchemists saw this river ofalchemical mercury is in the boundary between waking and sleeping. There is a place, not quite sleeping, notquite waking, and there there flows this river of alchemical mercury where you can project the contents of theunconscious and you can read it back to yourself. This kind of thinking is confounding to scientific thoughtwhere the effort is always to fix everything to a given identity and a given set of behaviors.Now, the other hermetic perception that is well illustrated by just thinking for a moment about mercury is thenotion, and this is central to all hermetic thinking, of the microcosm and the macrocosm. That somehow the greatworld, the whole of the cosmos is reflected in the mystery of man, meaning men and women, it's reflected in themystery of the human mind/body interface. So, for an alchemist, it makes perfect sense to extrapolate from thisinternal, what we call internal psychological processes, to external processes in the world. That distinctiondoesn't exist for the alchemist, and let me tell you, the longer I live the more I am convinced that this isabsolutely the truth.The myth of our society is the existential myth that we are cast into matter, that we are lost in a universe thathas no meaning for us, that we must make our meaning. This is what Sartre, Kierkegaard, all those people aresaying, that we must make our meaning. It reaches its most absurd expression in Sartre's statement that nature ismute. I mean, this is as far from alchemical thinking as you can possibly get because for the alchemist naturewas a great book, an open book to be read by putting nature through processes that revealed not only its innermechanics, but the inner mechanics of the artifex (person performing experiment)-the person working upon thematerial, in other words, the alchemist.Well, in other contexts I've talked about the importance of language and how our world is made of language andpart of the problem in understanding alchemy is that the language is slipping out of our reach. We are socompletely imbued with the Cartesian categories of the Res Verins, the world of thought, and the Res Extensia,the world of three dimensional space, and causality, and the conservation of matter and energy, and so forth thatin order to do more than carry out a kind of scholarship of alchemy we have to create an alchemical language, ora field in which alchemical language can take place. Some of you may have been with me a couple of weeks ago in3
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