The Soul'S Retort: Psychotherapy Based In Alchemy

The Soul's Retort: Psychotherapy Based in Alchemy

Alchemy survived, and thrived, into the late 18th century as the underbelly to Christianity. These two seemingly contradictory belief systems stood as the heretic and the orthodox in the western psyche; they breathe in relationship to each other. Together they represent an example of the dualistic way in which we, as human beings, perceive archetypal forces. We have a tendency to oversimplify and judge one energetic flow from an archetypal source as good, and the other complementary and balancing force as bad. This tendency exists in much psychological thinking, again reminding us of the humble abilities of the human mind to take in the magnificent grace of the intelligence of the forces that surround us. We can do better.

We would not have the hidden wisdom of alchemy if it were not for the Protestant and Roman Catholic religions. Alchemy existed before the birth of Jesus, but this is not contradictory, because the story of the dying eternal god, with which the Christian doctrine is occupied, is but the baton in the relay race through time for this archetype. Unlike in, for instance, the myths of the dying yet eternal god Dionysus or Osiris, in Christianity the practitioner is divorced from a direct relationship with the god/archetype. The worshipper is instructed to go through the mediating hierophant of a minister or a preacher. And alchemy was needed for compensation, its emphasis on interior "knowing" flourished during Christianity's watch. The soul will find a way.

C.G. Jung understood this, and realized that to understand the modern western psyche as it grows up and out of the Christian paradigm, it became necessary to fathom the arcane, confusing, often annoying writings and drawings of the alchemists. He spent thirty years studying, researching, and writing about alchemy. No less than three complete volumes of his collected works, and considerable other essays, such as "The Psychology of the Transference", which is a study of psychological transference using the alchemical Rosarium Philosophorum drawings, are devoted to analyzing the symbolic nature of the alchemists quest and to deciphering a psychological understanding of their language (Jung, 1953/1968; Jung, 1954/1966; Jung, 1963/1970; Jung, 1967).

Before diving into the amazing world of alchemy, I want to pause and question the value of such efforts when there is so much to learn of life and we all have so little time. Life as we know it, the earth, is in dire straits, to a great extent because western civilization has developed in a decidedly one sided direction, favoring humans above animals and plant life, left brain above right, consuming above creativity, power above love. If, as therapists, we are to be of service we must hold the global concern in our hearts as compassionately as the concerns of our clients. The one is but a part of the whole, each person who develops a more self reflective consciousness helps to tip the balance away from the teetering edge we are currently galloping toward.

Western civilization really cannot be understood without accepting the colossal imprint that the Christian religions have pressed upon us. Not just in religious ceremonies, they are but the glint on the tip of a North Atlantic iceberg, but the culture itself is embedded in Christian thinking. Consider one example, the emphasis on hard work as a road to heavenly reward. Now that many do not believe in heaven, the Christian mythos is unconsciously played out through rapidly increasing numbers of work hours per family, with the addictive pace of consumerism as a "heavenly" reward.

Christianity was needed by psyche to develop, now that phase in the great historical advance of consciousness is on the wane, and to see where we are going we must see where we are now. The alchemists played the counterpoint to Christianity, their work was actually complementary to the orthodox thinking and they, in obscurity, intuitively knew that they needed to keep the one sided orthodoxy from tipping over. They hung on, in fact, they were sincere practitioners

of a form of early depth psychology.

Initially, alchemy is utterly confusing. The alchemists, or philosophers as they called themselves, worked in isolation, their notes and pictorial emblems contain little concrete information, their experiments are unrepeatable, their secret language, from the earliest times give instructions that are figurative, symbolic, metaphorical, and paradoxical. What are we supposed to make of a thing like this?

As Jung detected alchemy has everything to do with a psychology that considers the unconscious. The alchemists studied in order to discover the reason that life exists, the secret of life. They deduced that they could learn this by examining nature. Essentially, they theorized that everything is made of four elements: water, fire, earth, and air, and that these four were all variations of the one essential building block of the universe, ether. The alchemists were confident that how this all worked was once known, embedded in a secret way in the Bible, or passed down by the Egyptian philosopher/alchemist Hermes Trismigestus in his writings. They believed it was possible to transmute metals and baser, impure materials back to the one essence and, of course, then they would be able to transmute anything into anything else, including gold. To do this the philosopher's stone was needed and so acquiring this was the elusive quest of the ages. For the philosopher/ alchemist it was this search that held them and not a disreputable greed for gold.

But what Jung soon recognized in his research, and which then held him with fascination that equals that of the alchemists themselves, was that the alchemists were, while exploring the outer world, projecting their own inner world into their experiments. They experienced their projections as properties of the matter they were trying to understand.

The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery--his own unknown psychic background--into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! [the obscure through the obscure, the unknown through the unknown] This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence. (Jung, 1953/1968, pp. 244-245)

Most importantly, the generations of alchemists created a huge legacy of images of what they projected. These images are archetypal; they are pictures of the collective level of the unconscious from which we can learn a great deal about the nature