SubscribeNovember 28th, 2010
doing nothing
Early this morning I read a few pages of Hitchcock’s book on alchemy and alchemists. The section was dedicated to showing that alchemy is in fact an elite form of Christianity (I kind of think of Christianity as a plebeian form of alchemy, but there you are). Remember the book was published in 1857 so that was probably a good thing to do since his audience would have been largely (at least nominally) Christian. What was wondrous about the section was the logical framework he sets up to make it happen. It says so much about him and about the mindset of the time that it is a bit like being present as reality was folded and jiggled to allow for his passion, his belief.
I put the book down to think about it and went out for coffee. I spent much of the rest of the day out. After coffee, I walked with the dog in the park and watched the ducks croon to each other, packed as they were in the little bit of open water. I watched a puppy splash excitedly after them, stirring them to deeper quacks and ruffling wings. I did nothing but that kind of thing for the rest of the day.
Hitchcock’s argument retreated to just below the surface but it did start me thinking about what it is I like in the rather disparate kinds of books I read. My conclusion is that they aren’t really disparate. ASL poetics and Spinoza are really not so different. They are both ways of making the world fall into meaningful order. That’s what interests me in all of the books I read. It is utterly fascinating for me to watch minds organize reality and make of it something human and meaningful. It doesn’t matter to me whether I agree with the found meaning. It’s the process that blows me away. It is so fundamentally beautiful.
Of course the author’s created conceptual framework can be problematic. Payne Knight’s for example and the inbuilt need for women to be passive receptacles for god’s/man’s seed. Blooey to you Mr Payne Knight. I reject such a categorization.
And of course that’s the thing that makes conceptual patterning so beautiful – it is a group art project. We do it together. We compare, we contrast, we argue, we agree. There are harmonies and conflicts but we all invest our lives in the process. We name reality childhood on to death.
Adam named. Payne Knight named. Qunqun names. I name.
Do you know the greeting namaste? The fundamentally respectful address recognizing the otherness of another is how I think of this salutation and of our naming. I name and Qunqun names. There are as many names as there are namers. The multitude circle in our shared mental space and even though we often individually miss the reality of another’s names, they are all there, circling. Namaste: one name to another.
My mind drifts on the tide of this kind of thing: this is what happens when I do nothing. Dangerous.
November 20th, 2010
tarot, alchemy, the soul and the concept of impermance
As a tarot reader and reader of alchemy I have a long interest in the idea of human transformation and the assumed relationship between the material world and that which seems to speak of the incorporeal. Yet, for consistency’s sake, for logic, and human compassion and just plain common sense, I cannot underwrite a belief in the immortal, in any kind of living permanence – no soul as we in the West have come to think of it.
Still, there are seeds of deep worth and beauty in the Western esoteric traditions. The valiant belief in Man is above all things a crucible that bubbles shimmering hope, golden stories shared amongst friends, a purple rapt history of a shared ideal.
Look at Hitchcock’s Remarks Upon Alchemy for example. He conceives of alchemy as a religious pursuit, one that is for the true purpose of the realizing in oneself “the union of the divine and human nature, expressed in man by an enlightened submission to God’s will.” Given the times in which he wrote (published in 1857) his preface alone is remarkable for its enlightened view of religious and intellectual freedom. It is also a book designed to be an exemplar of the civilized man: kindness, civility, dedication, commitment to truth and tolerance. Nevertheless, for this “union” to be a true goal for humanity certain assumptions made by the statement must also be true. That there be a God, for example, that there be some sense by which mortal man can be in union with (e.g. the same as) the divine. This seed of God within us is commonly called the soul, and while it can apparently develop or learn, it is, nevertheless also eternal – barring God’s wrath. It’s a beautiful idea, but like the unicorn and the virgin, it is also a cultural myth and empirically nonsensical.
Can the beauty of sulfur and salt as a symbolic system withstand the disinterment of the concept of a soul?
I asked this before in an earlier post on tarot (the Death card), and while I still have a long way to go, I’d like to begin exploring the question. Some attempts have been made of course. Jung’s book on alchemy, for example, uses alchemy as a metaphor for the psychological process of individuation and by doing so moves away from Hitchcock’s religious framework. The idea that all humans have an inbuilt (did he imagine this as cerebral?) predisposition to certain kinds of image orderings (archetypes) goes a long way to providing a material framework to support the pursuit of esotericism without having to fall under the spell of our tendency to anthropomorphise our longings and fears. If we can see these archetypes as materially based we do not have to imagine that “mother” exists somewhere in the universe apart from in the working of the human mind/brain and body as it moves through life.
So some inroads have been made, yet Jung still has a teleological core, the idea of individuation as a maturation goal for human beings, for example. One of the besetting problems with a history of the absolute at the heart of the Western mind is the need for a goal, for “evolution” to have a purpose and an end point, for the narrative arc to have a denouement with all story lines tied up. I think that this need for an end-of-times will have to be unburied along with the concept of the soul in order for us to be able to revitalize Western esotericism in any way other than as a soporific to escape the mental and emotional consequences of a less than noble present and past.
The question is what would human development look like without the “development” part? That is, can we see human psychological change as a kind of evolution? Let me be clear: the human mind, emotional body, psyche changing to better suit the environment we actually live in with no sense that this represents anything more profound than a better fit. We are not becoming enlightened. We are not purifying our spirits or souls. We are simply changing what was developed as a tool for a hunting-gathering primate to gauge success (using happiness as a measuring scale?) to a tool for an urbanized, visually and informationally inundated primate. I think something like this would be far more in accord with the concept of impermanence than anything I’ve read heretofore with regard to the Western traditions. However, there must be other possibilities.
Anyway, my headache is back so that’s all for now.
October 12th, 2010
Burckhardt’s Alchemy
I have a copy of Titus Burckhardt’s Alchemy Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul. I’ve been thinking about “sense” and “nonsense” and how to think about the limits of intelligibility. Then, this morning, I saw Titus’ book and had a sudden compulsion to read it.
It’s fascinating. In the introduction Titus deals with his nay-sayers.
Thus alchemy is neither a hybrid nor a haphazard product of human history, but on the contrary represents a profound possibility of the spirit and the soul.
In the previous paragraphs he has chastised “people” for coming to the “conclusion that an insatiable desire to make gold” was the root of alchemy. I can’t imagine why “people” would do that.
I understand the impulse to spiritualize the alchemical tradition. Ethan Allen Hitchcock did that back in with his 1857 book Remarks upon Alchemy and Alchemists. The point of the book was to show that alchemy was, in fact, about purifying the spirit/soul and not about purifying matter. But realistically, this was a relatively late shift in emphasis within the tradition, one that that took place (in part) because the traditional soul-purifiers (religion and its elite) lost power.
In the same lead-up to the quote above there is this: “…intellectual faculty of man – his power to distinguish real from unreal – were itself subject to some sort of biological evolution.” And here it is, the crux—the unexamined belief that underlies the starting quote, that the spirit exists independently of the body and its ways. Because of course man’s ability to distinguish real from unreal is a function of our biological evolution. Unless of course you go with Leibniz’s monad theory where the incorporeal “soul” is what does the perceiving and not the eyes, ears and noses.
But there’s a more grievous error. When dismissing Jung’s “collective unconscious” as a way of explaining the tenacity of the alchemical tradition Titus resorts to the hierarchical assumption to prove the hierarchy. I hate that.
He says that Jung got it wrong because this stuff isn’t “below,” it’s “above” in the spirit, “above the level of his conscious mental processes.” I mean, jeez, how many way’s can you use the word without realizing you are really talking about different things. Unless he really thinks that our “conscious mental processes” mix it up in the tree tops as opposed to (where?) the deep caverns at the center of the earth? Our groins? Our soles/souls?
Then there’s this move:
The hypothesis of the psychologists evaporates as soon as one realizes that the true alchemists were never ensnared in any wish-fulfilling dream of making gold, and that they did not pursue their goal like sleepwalkers or by means of passive ‘projections’ of the unconscious contents of their souls! On the contrary, they followed a deliberate method, of which the metallurgical expression – the art of transmuting base metals into silver or gold – has admittedly misled many uninititiated enquirers, although in itself it is logical and, what is more, truly profound.
So basically, if you don’t believe in Titus’ kind of alchemy it’s because you aren’t a true alchemist. Evidence be damned. Boy, am I familiar with that type of reasoning. To be fair, this kind of insider secrecy stuff is built into all mystery traditions. That’s why their called “mystery” traditions. It’s a good way of maintaining adherence when the logic and effectiveness of its methods couldn’t stand the light of group narrative probing.
Ok, so I’m done being mean. At least for now. The book isn’t a logic treatise. It’s a alchemical history and general introduction, and it does that with some thoroughness. As long as you can agree to come at the subject from a practitioner’s perspective, it’ll be a useful text. For example, there’s a chapter on Nicolas and Perrenelle, that should please Potter and alchemy fans alike. The whole mystery thing has a long history. Titus quotes Flamel:
Concerning the primus agens the philosophers have always spoken only in parables and symbols, so that their science might not be accessible to fools; for if that were to happen, all would be lost. It should be available only to patient soul and refined spirits, who have withdrawn themselves from the corruption of the world and have purified themselves from the slimy filth of avarice…
The chapter acts as a summary of the “work.” It gives good insight into the symbolic nature of alchemy, its reliance on number as both a sign and a sacred symbol of transcendent meaning. For example, in the rather extensive quote of Flamel’s book he talks of the “trice-seven pages” which includes images that refer to the three principle stages of “the work – blackening, whitening, and reddening – and the seven planets or metals.”
This is the kind of detail you will find in Burchhardt’s Alchemy. If it is your passion, I strongly suggest you read it, but please don’t forget that overall, the argument sucks. Don’t mistake this as a science. Alchemy is an art form, specifically a kind of performance art. Science is glamorous in today’s world, smacking of the elite and of mystery as it does, but science is a methodology that brooks no mystery of the sort Flamel and Burchkardt see as integral to alchemy.
Rather than holding on to the idea that alchemy is a science, we need, instead, to rehabilitate the image of the artist into something other than the narcissistic, beret wearing quoter of Carrollian gibberish. Art can be practical, useful and personally redemptive and sometimes, the products of science can be slithy toves. Better to start from where you actually are, I think. That way you have a chance of getting somewhere apart from your starting place.
So what does this have to do with intelligibility? I’m not sure yet. Need more thinking time.
August 3rd, 2009
Alchemy and American Letters
Project Gutenburg has a copy of Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Dr. Herbert Silberer. This famous rendition pictured here of the goal of alchemical practice has always been one of my favourite emblems of human desire and the western European narrative that tries to make sense of the experience of wanting. The whole project of alchemy as it pertains to the human psyche is fascinating.
Silberer lived between 1882 and 1923. He was four years old when Emily Dickinson died. Dickinson had been influenced in her thinking by many things but one of them was Transcendentalism, or at least Emerson’s writings about it. Emerson was influenced by the various magical traditions of the west largely through Swedenborg (1688-1772) just as Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1798-1870) was. Although Hitchcock and Emerson focused on different things, one thing stayed the same, they were both obsessed by the notion of the transcendence of the individual human being, as was Dickinson in her own fashion.
Hitchcock was fascinated by alchemy. In fact, it seems as if the finest literary collection of early alchemical works in the United States was his. Hitchcock knew Emerson, and certainly Emily Dickenson had access to Emerson’s essays in her daily papers. Emerson and Dickinson: arguably two of the most influential writers in American history. And of course there are the Great Awakenings, the first occuring between the (approximate years) 1730 and 1775 and the second between 1790 and 1840. The third rolled around only 10 years after that, between 1850 and 1900. I don’t think it can be underestimated how woven a magical world view is in American society and Letters.
