Tending the Green Fire:
Alchemy and an Animate Earth
It was not for nothing that the medieval alchemists referred to their labors as the Great Work, the opus magnum. While the tendency in modern times is to regard alchemy dismissively (if at all) as a quixotic and naïvely misguided attempt to turn lead into gold or as a primitive precursor to modern chemistry, the millennia-old alchemical tradition was, for many of its self-selecting adherents, a deeply spiritual discipline expressed in material form through their efforts to transform and transfigure metals. C.G. Jung, who dedicated nearly half of his long life to the study of alchemy and its relation to the inner workings of the psyche, wrote that the ultimate goal of the opus magnum was nothing short than “the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of the cosmos.” (1987, p. 228) The laboratory of the alchemist was, in a sense, a microcosm, a space in which he could seek to understand and engage with the deepest mysteries of life. The alchemists were, in short, apprentices to change and transfiguration: that is to say, they were apprentices to life itself.
In midlife, a well-established and respected Jung turned his attention to the then maligned and discarded tradition of alchemy. In the colorful, enigmatic, often obscure writings of the alchemists, Jung found language and imagery describing processes of change and transformation remarkably similar to that of the dreams and fantasies of his analytical patients. He surmised that the alchemists were projecting their unconscious psychological material into their elaborate experimentations with matter. The illustrations and written records of the typically solitary alchemists, overflowing with perplexing yet strangely resonant instructions and symbolic references, presented Jung with an unequaled treasure trove of imagery direct, as it were, from the unconscious, largely unmediated by the influences and prescribed expectations of the collective. The work of the alchemists presented Jung with something akin to a source code, data that illumined the underlying workings of the human psyche before the shaping influences of culture and consciousness worked the raw material into something more familiar and within the realm of collective acceptability. The alchemists were delving into the unknown, and therefore, “there exists in alchemy an astonishing amount of material from the unconscious, produced in a situation where the conscious mind did not follow a program, but only searched.” (von Franz, 1959/1980, p. 22)
While the great work of the post-Copernican era has been to understand nature objectively so as to control, master, and manipulate it for human ends, this paradigm has ever more clearly demonstrated its shadow and its limitations. In the light of ecological collapse and spiritual malaise, the great work of the alchemists, “the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of the cosmos,” has begun to seem less foolhardy and more prescient.
The medieval alchemists, through their labors, hoped to “redeem matter.” Influenced by their Gnostic forebears, the alchemists sought to liberate the Sophia, the feminine aspect of the divine, who after the creation fell into matter and became imprisoned within it. (Wikman, 2004, p. 266). One way of understanding the efforts of the Gnostics and the alchemists is to recognize that they were living in a cosmos that was becoming ever more de-animated, a cosmos in which “soul”, “anima” (Greek: psyche) no longer resided in or applied to the other-than-human world. Whether they were consciously aware of it or not, the alchemists intuited that this waxing paradigm lacked balance, lacked symbolic depth, lacked soul. From a Jungian standpoint, the opus of the alchemists was a compensatory effort to liberate themselves and the world from a deadening cosmology. The philosopher and cultural historian Richard Tarnas articulates the dangerous implications of the worldview the alchemists were laboring to transfigure:
"The disenchanted cosmos impoverishes the collective psyche in the most global way, vitiating its spiritual and moral imagination – “vitiate” not only in the sense of diminish and impair but also in the sense of deform and debase. In such a context, everything can be appropriated. Nothing is immune. Majestic vistas of nature, great works of art, revered music, eloquent language, the beauty of the human body, distant lands and cultures, extraordinary moments of history, the arousal of deep human emotion: all become advertising tools to manipulate consumer response. For quite literally, in a disenchanted cosmos, nothing is sacred." (2007, p. 32)
Jung recognized that while the alchemists failed on a literal level in their quest to transmute base metals into gold, they collectively left an invaluable legacy that evocatively and symbolically shed light upon the mysterious dynamics of the human psyche. Most importantly, Jung saw that the alchemists firmly believed that their work had a purposefulness or telos, and that for all of its difficulty and disappointments it led towards the Philosopher’s Stone, towards a reconciliation of seemingly irreconcilable opposites, towards greater wholeness and integration. This challenging yet hopeful orientation towards life mirrored Jung’s own life experiences and the psychological insights he drew from them.
Through his alchemical works, Jung made available a rich wellspring of imagery and metaphor that serve to orient and encourage those who wish to consciously explore the complex terrain of the psychological landscape. Yet the alchemists were not primarily or even consciously setting out to deepen or refine their own consciousness: their emphasis was on the physical work itself. Adopting an alchemical lens, therefore, can be particularly useful and enriching when directed towards one’s relationship with vocation, with one’s own work in the world. As a means of putting flesh on the alchemical bones, let us turn to my own creative and vocational projects to elucidate some of phases and phenomena.
The alchemists were by nature and necessity mostly solitary in their efforts, and there were as many different approaches to the opus as there were alchemists. The principal activities and phases of the work, however, were generally agreed upon. The medieval European alchemists, in whom Jung was particularly interested, employed Latin in their various dictums and treatises, and Jung imported these Latin terms into his psychological alchemy. It is well beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the complex and byzantine alchemical process as a whole, so we will confine ourselves to three of the key phases of the opus: separatio, solutio, and coagulatio.
The alchemical process begins with the prima materia, the first mass or first matter. “The prima materia was thought of as a composite, a confused mixture of undifferentiated and contrary components requiring a process of separation.” (Edinger, 1978/1984, p. 183) In psychological terms, the prima materia is unconscious material that has yet to be brought into the ordering and discerning light of consciousness. There is therefore no opportunity, no space for conscious decision making and action; we act without awareness, bound in what Jung, borrowing from Levi-Bruhl, called participation mystique. The process of separatio disentangles opposing strands within the psyche. Edinger illustrates this process through the Egyptian creation myth of the World Parents, Geb (earth) and Nut (sky) separated by Shu (atmosphere) in order to create an empty space between the two in which creation could occur. (pp. 185-186) In a more contemporary example, in the film The Matrix, Neo takes the red pill and experiences an intense separatio: he suddenly discerns the difference between the world as it is and the world of the matrix, a perceived reality in which he had lived his entire life unquestioningly like a fish in water.
In 2009, I wrote a series of essays and travel writings entitled Cracks in the Pavement. The overarching theme of the book was a differentiation between what I would have called at the time a holistic worldview and a mechanistic, reductionistic worldview. I worked on and off for the book for the better part of a year, and it represents the most ambitious creative project I have undertaken. Viewed in alchemical terms, Cracks in the Pavement was a process of separatio, my own efforts to discern and articulate what seemed at the time to be two opposing and irreconcilable worldviews. Psychologically, the instrument of separatio is Logos, and it is thus fitting that my creative tools in Cracks in the Pavement were words and logic. Edinger explains that “Every newly encountered area of the unconscious requires a cosmogenic act of separation. Each new increment of prima materia calls forth a sharp-edged action by Philo’s “Logos-Cutter.” (p. 191). Even the title of the book speaks to separatio, the image of cracked pavement creating a space of emptiness in which new seeds of possibility may take root.
To divide the world, to bring into consciousness and separate the opposites, is in itself insufficient. Separatio is the favored instrument in the toolkit of the Western mind, yet without countervailing processes of cohesion, separatio leads to greater and greater fragmentation, an atomized desert of psychic meaning. Separatio fortifies ego-consciousness, offers the illusion that naming and discerning equates to understanding and therefor opens the door to hubris. “The moment one forms an idea of a thing and successfully catches one of its aspects, one invariably succumbs to the illusion of having caught the whole” (Jung, 1960/1969, p. 168). Logos brings clarity but also leads to a tendency to take sides, to value the light over the dark, the masculine over the feminine, consciousness over the unconscious.
After publishing Cracks in the Pavement, I entered a long creative dry spell. Some six years after the book, I began to have a series of powerful dreams and remarkable synchronistic experiences that fundamentally challenged the rationalistic paradigm that I still largely clung to in spite of my work as an organic farmer and my championing of a more holistic worldview. I had no way to explain, for example, how or why I dreamed of a friend, who I had not seen or heard from in over a decade, only to be contacted the following day by the same friend who wanted to share that she had dreamed of me on that same night. The unconscious had begun to make itself known not just in my dream life, but in waking life as well. This corresponds to the alchemical stage of solutio, the dissolving of hitherto solid material into liquid. While separatio brings material to the surface in solid, discernible form, solutio works to dissolve psychic material that has become inflexible and overly literalized by ego consciousness. The solutio dreams and synchronicities I experienced over the course of the next two years were disorienting, yet I could also intuit that they were helping me become “unstuck” and potentially paving the way for a creative and psychological deepening. The solutio coincided with a period of tectonic change in my life. During this same period, I married, left my career in sustainable agriculture, moved from the United States to Canada, and became a father. I struggled with how to engage with and make sense of the flood of unconscious material in the midst of so much change, and the intuitive need for a container is what ultimately led me to pursue graduate work in depth psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute.
The alchemists used all manner of instruments, glasses, and retorts to conduct their work. The alchemical vessel had to be strong enough to withstand heat and highly reactive or corrosive materials. Jung saw the relationship between analyst and the analysand as an alchemical vessel that created a space both open and secure enough to withstand the sometimes volatile processes involved in psychological transfiguration. It is clear to me that the structure and camaraderie of my experiences at Pacifica have provided an alchemical vessel that I needed at this stage in my life to contain and embrace the solutio.
One cannot stay dissolved forever, and the complementary alchemical process to solutio is coagulatio, to become earth. “For psychic content to become earth means that it has been concretized in a particular localized form; that is, it has become attached to ego. Coagulatio is often equated with creation.” (Edinger, p. 83) Over the past two years, I have worked with, played with, experimented with the dream images and synchronicities that arose from the unconscious during the intense period of solutio. I have sought to express, to bring form to the archetypal images and feelings through painting, music, writing, storytelling, and filmmaking, often playfully combining unlikely elements with the curiosity of an alchemist wondering how two metals will react in his retort.
These experiments in coagulatio sometimes lead to what Jung referred to as a minor coniunctio, a temporary combining and reconciling of opposites that may pave the way for the ultimate coniunctio that resulted in the Philosopher’s Stone, the individuation of the psyche. In practical vocational terms, these minor coniunctios have provided intimations as to how I can combine my varied interests (in ecology, creative practice, depth psychology) and also combine the various means of expression I have experimented with over the years (writing, music, visual arts). The most recent and promising coagulatios are the Into the Woods podcast and the website I have developed to house my creative work, thegreenfire.net. The process of creating these projects has helped distill and clarify my unique offerings to the world. The alchemists believed that the Philosopher’s Stone had the power to magnify itself, to grow the materials in its vicinity and hasten them on their transformational journey from lower to higher metals. This multiplicatio is the ripple effect of positive impact of the opus magnum. Approached alchemically, our work, however obscure, contains within it this latent capacity to enliven those around us and create the preconditions for humans to recognize once again that we live upon and within an animate earth.
References
Edinger, E. (1978/1994), Anatomy of the psyche: alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy. Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing.
Jung, C.G. (1987), Jung speaking: interviews and encounters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tarnas, R. (2007), Cosmos and psyche: intimations of a new world view. New York, NY: Plume.
von Franz, M.L. (1980), Alchemy: an introduction to the symbolism and the psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Wikman, M. (2004), Pregnant darkness: alchemy and the rebirth of consciousness. Berwick, ME: Nicolas-Hays, Inc.