Chapter 2 The Alchemical Imagination

In this chapter, through a series of illustrative examples, we see how ancient alchemy “works” for the contemporary world. It offers potent embodied metaphors that provide a medium through which ordinary life can be enhanced. This opportunity has been taken up in the extraordinary work of psychodynamic psychotherapy that affords a new kind of alchemical imagination, powered by a poetic imagination as well as by the conventions of narrative. The reader here is purposefully plunged straight in to the world of alchemical imagining through visual illustration as well as text, while subsequent chapters will meticulously pick apart some of the complexity encountered here. But the reader is shown how to decipher outwardly abstruse alchemy. Let us begin with a story.

I Only Came to Use the Phone

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1978 short story “I Only Came to Use the Phone”, en route to Barcelona and during a rainstorm, a woman’s car breaks down. A bus driver picks her up. The bus is full of inmates bound for a psychiatric institution. The woman, only 26 years old, asks if she can use the phone to call her husband. However, she is mistaken for a patient and, despite her protestations, is taken into the hospital’s bowels where she is assigned to a bed and then will be incarcerated for life. The more she protests, the more this is seen as a symptom of mental illness – all the more reason she should be detained and treated. She becomes subject to “total institutionalisation”, to draw on Erving Goffman’s (1956) term for organised separation from the public sphere. The institution becomes her home. She settles into its routines.

Anyone who enters the world of medieval and Renaissance alchemy – with its twisted and gnomic texts and often grotesque Escher-like illustrations, false leads and dead ends, multiple ambiguities and exasperating contradictions – may feel that they too have entered a house for the deranged, a hall of mirrors, a world inverted. But this world soon casts a spell, a strange fascination and uncanny familiarity, as a fold or quirk in history that to the modern mind can seem odd but utterly compelling. It is a dream world made concrete. In other words, a world of the poetic imagination, replete with inventive metaphorical possibility. A newcomer to this world, with no guidebook, will be perplexed, may indeed go un poco loco. But they won’t want to leave; fascination will prevail. They will be mistaken for alchemical adepts, somewhat mad. The lure is sure to work its magic.

Putting earthly matter on the same plane as humanity would have been sacrilege to the late medieval and Renaissance High Church and so alchemy existed as a parallel “gnostic” and partly underground strand to religious orthodoxies. Indeed, alchemy was considered illegal in many European countries from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the early modern period. It was an underground activity, becoming heavily coded. Such rulings were partly motivated by a fear on the part of the authorities that alchemy might actually make gold from base metals and would devalue gold-based currency. Fearing actual prosecution and religious persecution, the alchemists then went to extreme lengths to conceal their secrets through gnomic written texts and a wealth of abstruse illustrations. But some of these texts are easy enough to decipher. One must approach them with a poetic imagination rather than simply as a proto-science (a common historical approach to alchemy).

Here, the Father devours the Son

For example, what do we moderns make of the short excerpt below – “Here, the Father devours the Son” – from a 1625 alchemical text “The Book of Lambspring”? (The illustration that also heads the previous chapter 1). This is attributed to a German philosopher Lambsprinck, rendered from German verse into Latin by Nicolaus Barnaud of Dauphiné, described as “physician”. An original of the poetic text without the illustrations had previously been published at Leiden in 1599. It is an allegory about continuity of life (described in purely patrilineal fashion as the succession of an ageing and sickening Father King by a virile Son). To the late medieval and Renaissance mind, alchemy was surely about bringing natural matter to its full display, or realising its qualities or value, as a kind of midwifery and tending. It was above all an aesthetic adventure, as a revelation of qualities; and, moreover, a moral duty. This applies also to realising the qualities and value of human character; it is a moral duty to care for another such that it raises the quality of life. It matters that we elevate the matter of others, and this too is the purpose of the arts – both “high” and “popular”.

Not only the arts, but psychotherapy too promises such elevation. Psychotherapy is not just about addressing symptoms – neuroses such as phobias, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia and so forth – but also an education into deepening the quality of life, to give intensity and complexity to experience. This can be thought of as a widening of what is valued from the base instrumental or functional to the ethical, aesthetic, political and spiritual. This too may lift a person out of everyday anomie and a pedestrian world into one of creativity. But this education, importantly, is not one of high-flown idealism. It is bitterly realist, accepting that life is pathologised. There is personal and worldly suffering and terror to be faced, and named. There is identity with a complex world that seeks to address its intrinsic crooked timber – not to straighten it (false idealism) but to better understand its meanings.

The King undergoes many transformations in the Lambspring text, but the inevitability of his son succeeding him is finally realised (contra the myth of Chronos who devours his offspring lest they usurp his authority) because this is a gain in value, a notch up in quality. The virile and ambitious replaces the tired and staid. In resisting this inevitability and hanging on to his status despite his waning powers, one of the emblems shows the King devouring his son as a way to block the latter’s rise in status. This illustration follows the Chronos/Saturn myth discussed below (figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2: “Here the Father devours the Son”

The text shows the King’s trickery:

My Son, I was dead without thee

And lived in great danger of my life.

I revive at thy return,

And it fills my breast with joy.

But when the Son entered the Father’s house,

The Father took him to his heart,

And swallowed him out of excessive joy,

And that with his own mouth.

The great exertion makes the father sweat.

“Excessive joy” may be read as “self-protection”. In the next illustration in the series, the father becomes fevered and must take to his bed with sweats as he faces his fears born from eating his son. His symptoms of guilt rise to the surface. He is hot and bothered (figure 2.3). His symptoms of sweating are what Freud referred to as “the return of the repressed” – as Saturn refuses to see that swallowing his children only produces harm in the form of increasing melancholia, because he is blocking progress, so his condition worsens. The king is sweating out his melancholia amidst a fevered recognition of his stubbornness. There is a thundercloud outside, seen through the window, another signifier for an overcast or melancholic state. The clouds sweat rain.

Figure 2.3: The King sweats in his bed

The modern, rational, scientific mind says: “so, let’s forget all this arcane nonsense about sweating kings”. Alchemy was obviously a house for the insane and ill-fitted. But wait a moment. Surely, as noted, this is simply a recapping of the Greek myth of Chronos (Roman Saturn) devouring his offspring lest they challenge and replace his authority? When Rhea gave birth to Zeus, to prevent Chronos devouring him, she wrapped a stone in cloth pretending this was her new-born son, and Chronos swallowed this instead unaware that Zeus was being hidden from sight and would grow up to usurp him. In the subsequent overthrow of the Titans, Zeus leads the gods of the new order who defeat the old order. This is where we get the metaphor “titanic struggle”. Chronos (time: chronometer, chronic) represents stability, tradition and solid grounding. He is also the emblem of saturnine melancholia or depression, an inability to gather energy for change: days on end when getting out of bed is hard work, the head droops, limbs are leaden and feet shuffle. Mood sinks and stinks. Leaden melancholia, says Freud (1918), is understandable as an act of mourning, but under other circumstances might it be repressed desire, unfulfilled impulse? The king sweats, the frustrated pent-up impulse slowly releasing in symptoms...