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The Secret Art of Alchemy: A Brief History
The Secret Art of Alchemy: A Brief History
4 Conversations
To medieval alchemists1, the world was animated. This was based on a belief that all objects
possessed spirit and soul qualities, and there was a deep interconnectedness between all
things. The material imagination contained in celestial bodies and substances, like
the Moon and water, was a basis for fully participating with nature, of having an intimate
relationship with its phenomenal presence, its movements and rhythms. To the medieval
Christian, it was man who needed to be redeemed by God. But to the alchemist, who believed
that spirit was contained in the material world and not outside it, it was quite the reverse. The
alchemists' primary matter, therefore, was not in heaven but in the affairs of the ordinary,
mundane world. This prima materia has, as the alchemist's say, a 'thousand names' and is
ubiquitous, indicating that anything was suitable matter to be worked on and transformed.
Today, however, the matter is in our projected material, in all the everyday occurrences of life.
It is in everything we are unable to 'see through,' everything we take unquestionably,
uncritically for 'real'.
A Brief History
Alchemy, as an esoteric art, is almost as old as civilisation itself. But it wasn't until the 12th or
13th Century, in the aftermath of the Crusades and the Arabic influence, that it filtered into
western Europe via Sicily and Spain. Alchemy derived its origins from ancient Egypt, where it
was associated with the worship of Thoth, who became Hermes in ancient Greece and
Mercury in Rome2.
In antiquity it was believed that the world originated from a single substance, or First Matter3,
which separated out into four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and then recombined in
various proportions to make up the physical objects in the world. Aristotle refined this idea,
teaching that primary matter existed first as pure potentiality, which then acquired form through
four primary qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry) arranging themselves into paired opposites; each
identified with the four individual elements (eg, fire = hot + dry). By manipulating these
qualities, Aristotle thought it was possible to change the elemental combinations of materials.
The alchemists adapted these ideas, reasoning that in order to transmute a base metal or
substance into gold, it must first be returned to its original, undifferentiated state. Since all
substances are composed of the same four elements, it was thought theoretically possible to
change one substance into another (eg, lead into gold) by reducing the substance to its original
elements, re-arranging their relative proportions, and then bringing the new substance into
being. The challenge lay in establishing the stages through which the chemical operations
must pass and in discovering a miraculous agent (a modern day 'catalyst') capable of enabling
the necessary transformation to occur.
The alchemist's quest was one of self-development, attempting to integrate the many facets of
personality to attain psychic wholeness. Alchemy, as the depth psychology of an earlier age4,
thus required infinite patience, subtlety in appreciation and dedication to the Art, often at great
personal sacrifice.
The work or opus of alchemy was an inner repetition of the cosmology outside - except, on the
psychological level, the alchemical process was a complete reversal of our contemporary
notion of biological evolution - as an expanding, outer process on the physical plane. Its final
'goal' was inorganic matter, either a metal (notably, gold), a mineral, a crystal or a stone.
This is dissimilar to the seven-day creation story in Genesis, for instance, where man is the
crown of creation, the top of the evolutionary ladder. In other words, alchemy's operations
deliberately broke down the natural order of things in order to renew creation. It was a work
against nature, an opus contra naturam, in order to free the psyche from its material and
natural view of itself and the world.
This return to find original essence, the gold in the heart of matter, may be explained by man's
relation to the material world of nature. Mircea Eliade5 traces the relationship of alchemy and
metallurgy of primitive man to mineral substances. Minerals, he asserts, shared in the
sacredness attached to Mother Earth. As the source of life and fertility, ores 'grew' and
'ripened' in the belly of the earth like embryos. Galleries of mines and caves were her vagina.
The miners and the metalworkers in extracting these ores from the earth were like obstetricians
co-operating in the work of nature. Through metallurgy, man felt that he was ultimately able to
assist in the processes of growth taking place in the bowels of the earth.
The alchemist, like the metallurgist, in their labour and with the assistance of fire, pursue the
transformation of matter, its perfection and transmutation. The whole operation of mining, its
rites and mysteries, played upon the alchemist's imagination as a metaphor for the generative
and degenerative powers of nature; its ability to constantly renew and refashion itself. For
example, the mythical belief that to ensure the 'marriage of metals' in the smelting process, a
living being must be sacrificed in order to 'animate' the operation.
One alchemical motto - 'perform no operation till all be made water' - refers to the state of
dissolution as the foundation of the work. In these primal, 'mercurial' waters, 'imperfect', gross
matter is broken down and cleansed. Entering these 'waters' was a kind of death, it being
necessary to let go where one has been stuck in order to regenerate soul and give to matters a
new psychic sense. This operation was often symbolised as a regression to a pre-natal state,
to the amniotic fluid of the mother's womb. Alchemical imagery shows a divine 'child' growing in
the womb of the vessel through a 'psychic pregnancy', there to await a kind of regeneration
through death. This image underlines the paradoxical nature of alchemy and the rhythms of
nature, where birth and death, womb and tomb, are intimately bound. Without a 'falling apart,'
or death of the soul through water, there can be no new insights or renewal of consciousness.
The alchemist's attempt to produce a miraculous new substance - often symbolised by an act
of sexual intercourse between a king and queen in a water bath, resulting in the production of a
child or a hermaphrodite - can be understood as a male embryogenetic fantasy. That is, the
alchemist was indulging in a form of compensation for his inability to emulate the female's
capacity to create life.
Pathologized images were of major importance to the alchemist who believed that the Gods
force themselves symptomatically into awareness, and that pathologizing was a divine process
working in the human soul. By reverting the pathology to the God, they recognised the divinity
of pathology. Pathologizing is a way of seeing, of gaining 'psychological insight,' which may
explain why alchemists, like many great artists and writers, often suffered for their art8.
The initial nigredo or 'blackening' stage of alchemy tells us that it starts with a 'mess', theprima
materia being the symptom that may drive one to seek therapeutic help. It is the crisis, issue,
wound and failure that forces one to begin to question one's nature, examine life, and explore
deeper meanings. 'Washing out' the immersed matter is therefore a metaphor for breaking
down old habits, attitudes and beliefs that obscure psychic insight, or have lost psychic
significance. Withdrawal of psychologically naive projections and the loosening of resistances
is also the decay (putrefaction) of idealisations that have moulded our reality. By dissolving
rigid ego boundaries, we can begin to challenge the ideas we carry about ourselves and the
world, questioning the 'truths' we unequivocally take to be reality.
Alchemy insists that the way to create soul is through 'the mess' - psyche's garbage becoming
the raw material which is cooked, reflected upon, in order to see the fantasies operating in our
'messy' lives. Turning base metal into gold is therefore to see the value in our symptoms, our
'faecal matter' as yielding great riches. It is not about transforming or closing-off symptoms,
which, from an alchemical perspective, is the mistake of spiritual, growth-based psychologies.
Alchemy attempts to 'see through' what lies hidden in the matters of life; in our repressed
unconscious mind where contamination takes place.
The 'waters' were sometimes described as 'stinking', alluding to the shadow side of personality.
Within these 'stinking waters', slumbering in the soul, lie our repressed contents, those inferior,
unacceptable aspects of one's nature that we try to hide and disown. The stink may emanate
from the rotting matters of our worldly affairs, the pollution and corruption that pervades the
world. This becomes a matter for soul, of Hecate, the compost-maker of the underworld,
whose temples are the rubbish-tip and household dustbin, who elicits our psychopathy, sees
the value and brings to life the morbid perspective of soul - this being at the very heart of
alchemy.
Washing away all the dung from the unconscious is to lose the gold with the dross. As an
heroic labour, it reminds of Hercules' task in the underworld of cleaning the Augean stables
and shifting the s**t by diverting two rivers. By comparison, alchemy's operations were much
more subtle. The alchemist was aware that an egocentric style of consciousness is apt to
literalise the fantasies that shape our reality into 'hard' problems that need to be solved. Only
by 'seeing through' the illusion of problems into the reality of fantasies can we to shift from the
heroic to the imaginal ego.
The mystery of alchemy was about a reconciliation of the opposites; by connecting, for
example, the macrocosm with microcosm, personal with impersonal, masculine with feminine -
and bringing them together into a paradoxical relationship, as exemplified by the alchemical
motto 'As Above, So Below'. To achieve this union of opposites, alchemy attempted to move in
two directions simultaneously: keeping things both apart and together. A motto for this
was: Solve et Coagula ('dissolve and congeal'). Treading a middle path stemmed from a
concern to keep soul separate from body and spirit (mind), to rescue soul from manic flights
into spirit (from psychological inflation and transcendence), and to draw soul out of the confines
of materialism. When soul is lost in either of these extremes, gone too are the benefits it brings
to experience. For instance, without soul, relationship and connectedness to people suffers.
Though physically present, we may walk through busy, crowded areas of daily life like a
stranger who sees it all as if it were happening behind a glass panel.
Alchemy emphasised that soul begins in the moist, solid earth, the realm of ordinary
experience. Without this embodied world there could be no soul. We need the tangles and
problems, our hurt feelings, pains and depressions, just as much as we need our exhilarations,
joys and pleasures, of everyday life.
1
The great names among medieval alchemists were those of Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), Roger
Bacon (1214-1292), Arnold of Villanova (1235-1311), and Raymond Lully (1232-1315), all of them
prominent figures within the Catholic Church. Established as an elaborate subculture, they arrived at a
broader view of nature by combining alchemical experiments with ancient natural philosophy and
2
Christian theology. Hermes, or the spirit Mercurius, was recognised as the archetypal presence guiding
3
the work of alchemy. The Arabic root -kimia comes from the Coptic word khem that alluded to the black,
fertile soil of the Nile delta. The word 'alchemy', esoterically and heiroglyphically, refers to the dark
4
mystery of the primordial or First Matter (the khem). Though arguably laying the foundations for modern
chemistry, the practice of alchemy has more in common with, and was more a presage of,
5
psychoanalysis or analytical psychotherapy. Mircea Eliade (1978) The Forge and the Crucible: The
6
Origins and Structures of Alchemy (2nd edition), The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. The relative
absence of any differentiation between subject and environment is comparable to what Lévy-Bruhl
7
called participation mystique. James Hillman, founder of Archetypal Psychology, defined the
term pathologizing as 'the psyche's autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality,
and suffering in any aspect of its behaviour, and to experience and imagine life through this deformed
8
and afflicted perspective'. André Gide said that illness opens doors to a reality which remains closed to
9
the healthy point of view. Though the 'royal art' of alchemy was officially outlawed and derided, it
continued (together with astrology and the occult) to be practised as an underground counter-movement
10
among members of the orthodox Christian clergy. CG Jung (1967) Alchemical Studies, (Collected