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.
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 durin
g 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 wha
t 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,
The Reenchantment of the World Page 10