dr mary ann ghaffurian. alchemical ways

8/14/2019 Dr Mary Ann Ghaffurian. Alchemical Ways

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PLATE 1

An Alchemical Journey: contrara natura

PART ONE: THE BASIS OF THE WORK

Prima Materia: An Opening Sequence

Introduction

The 22 manuscript illuminations of 1582, theSplendor Solis

represent the stages of individ-

ual transformation by alchemy. Salomon Trismosin [the creator] clearly identify the

alchemical quest as both a spiritual and physical process (Wasserman, 1993:94). The first

four plates represent the first four stages of the beginning of the interior alchemic Work.

The next seven plates show the story of the Alchemical Allegory. Seven further stages


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depict the Transformation within the Retort, or Vessel, and the last four plates signify the

End of the Work and its final culmination. 1

These stages are reinterpreted from a metapsychological position. New psychological, cul-tural, consciousness, and historical information now allow the separation of magic, myth,

the mental, and cultural bases of components of psyche of components that have been

extremely difficult to extract and heal. Even Carl Jung had trouble with the same and other

series of alchemical images, trying to relate them back to archetypal psychology in order to

discern the path of individuation through life. Now I take this opportunity to meld history,

psychology, anthropology, society and cultural life to bring a whole new interpretation to

bear on the struggles of the soul to realize interior life, even as it operates in the world and

falls under the spell of the prevailing myths. The umbrella-term of this marriage of branches

of knowledge is metapsychology. Its interest is to grasp the limiting factors and the whole.

The purpose of such a new excavation is because whole mind, body, spirit and conscious-

ness demand it, from the core of the innermost being. It is one of the deepest earth incarna-

tion desires, to get to the truth of existence by following the trail of existing myths,

archetypes and structures of mind, in order to allow consciousness to know and soar free of

culturally conditioned factors and mental frames, as it must, where nothing holds back

emergence of the complete ascent.

The Alchemic Images and What They Tell

Alchemical images are symbolically rich, generally carefully conceived and executed, not

only for their allegorical narrative about an internal journey, a psyche-ic adventure, but

because part of their function was educational. They tell the story of a dramatic process of

inner transformation and their meaning can be read on many levels of interpretation. As

such, interpretation may range between psychology, the historical, the biology of the

1. PART ONE: THE BASIS OF THE WORK The Vessel, Container in 7 parts

Plate One: An Alchemical Journey: contrara natura - The Initiate Approaches the Temple Nigredo

/

Physis

in 7 parts

Plate Two: The Alchemist

- The Vessel, Container

Plate Three: The Crusader-knight, and the Stance of the Return - The Ego Sets OutPlate Four: Intercourse of Solar King and Lunar Queen - Conjunction of Opposites

Plate Five: Exploration of the Foundations of Nature - Digging into Matter

Plate Six: Autumn - Eyeing a Rejuvenating Bath - A Vision of Renewal

Plate Seven: Drowning King in the Waters & Young King on the Bank, Rejuvenated - Dying to be Reborn

PART TWO: CONJUNCTION; TWO AS ONE; DISMEMBERMENT, then CLEANSING in 4 parts

Plate Eight: The Ethiopian, Out of the Mud, & the White Queen

Plate Nine: The Whitened Ethiopian as Hermaphrodite

Plate Ten: Dismemberment of the Body of Salt, Element Earth

Plate Eleven: Cleansing by Heat & Fire in the Alchemical Bath

PART THREE: THE METAPHOR OF THE RETORT: History as Nightmare, The Allegory of Change Without and

Within in 7 parts and images.

PART FOUR: THE END OF THE WORK: Transformation Inside and Out in 4 parts and images.


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unconscious and prehistorical antecedents, particularly in reference to the Goddess or

Mother of All.

Within alchemical work 'the theory of correspondence is taken to the ultimate degree(Wasserman, ibid., p.26) and the entire basis of its work was predicated on the belief that

matter and psyche are malleable substances that can be worked upon to bring about desired

results or end-products. The intensely subjective work of alchemy had an objective face and

the mind was clearly worked upon to change it, even its substance.

The sixteenth century was already towards the end of the alchemical era per s in terms of

its major preoccupation, which was the negotiation between a medieval mind, still steeped

in traditions of pre-history, engaged in religious and philosophical contact with powerful

foreigners, and forging a bridge between the fallen Roman empire, Christianity, the Neo-

lithic past, and a modern mind, and New World, ahead.

So the sixteenth centurySplendor Solis

, which is the main study of this work, sits between

the dynamic processes of an alchemistry of mind in process, and the End of the Work of

the alchemic change on mind, body and spirit. It is recapitulates centuries of work in mind,

and a historical archive of the psyche under transformation as well as an allegory or story at

a more superficial level. The End of the Work resulting in eliciting what I term (2003) the

Western mind-space container, represented and metaphored by the alchemical vessel,

with its distillation and extraction of content contained within the metaphored retort. The

process of alchemical transformation is both archetypal and metaphorical, while its major

domain of activity occurs in the psyche-somatic or numinous or deep within.

Images give a unique insight into processes within that were steeped in the archetypal and

numinous matter of inwardness which resulted in the end-product, a fully distilled solar orb

of sovereignty, as it turns out, which was in fact, the sun-king extracted from nature and

matter, (see Plate Twenty-Two). Crafted in the hermetically sealed alchemic and laboratory

vessel, or retort, the work of alchemic mens metaphoric imaginations as well as external

chemical procedures in a laboratory formed a union of intent.

The end-result reveals no mere play of fumbling premoderns, but a process of self-actualiz-

ing men set to liberate the mind from the most ancient Mother, and also from nature and

all vital referents, that is energetic ones. The goal was to instate a return to the sky-god of


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Genesis in which men become the new gods of creation, having shaken the carbon of earth

from gravityless feet.

Campbell (1989) suggested there is a nightmare of history from which it is time for con-sciousness to wake up, particularly in the West. My question is why is it so difficult to wake

up? Perhaps the answer is strongly hinted at in the processes of Occidental alchemy which

progressively move in a direction of inner dualism which becomes instated deep in the

Western psyche. The Splendor Solis series and other images highlighted in these chapters

are examples of the transformation, it is difficult to come to grips with, even now.

Peeling apart the romance of characters like Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn, or the

Knights of the Rosy Cross, when scholars like Yates take on the historical analysis of the end

of the Renaissance and its alchemic undertows, there is a barely hidden tremulous vibrato, a

quavering. Alchemists were fast becoming scientists, because the Inquisition had gone

within. Body and soul were separated, the Western alchemy of the esoteric-to exoteric kind

was done. Isaac Newton and Robert Fludd could mingle alchemic nature ideas and aggres-

sive dominance stance over nature (and the Orient with it). So by the time nineteen to twen-

tieth century neophytes wished to go down that winding path of transformation, including

Waite and Jung, for instance, looking back to the sign posting already littering the way,

most of the way had already been closed and darkened.

What this suggests is that it is difficult to awaken within because at the most esoteric levels of

our dominant alchemy which for Jung was the deepest expression of the workings of con-

sciousness within psyche (1953), there is this split between mind and matter, spirit and

nature remaining, and which is not resolved into a whole and integral being, but into a

holism. The Enlightenment One was achieved through the sacrifice of the body and vital

being, nature and world-body, Mother and her children. Yet the reconnection of psyche

and soma within is seen today as necessary in moves towards whole being and that is a

strong part of what the New Age and human development movements are most intrinsi-

cally about.

Awakening means awakening from imprisonment in our cultural consciousness andaspects of its over-arching closed psyche as much as contacting spirit guides or beginning

the process of following ones intuition. Consciousness can only awaken from the nightmare

of its own history of split-being within by the elucidation of the procedures of the history of

broken being. Alchemic processes involve deepest archetypal associations, that is why they

have been chosen to throw light on the subject of awakening from nightmare or sleep. But

whether we want it or not, it is not just our individual mind and consciousness that is awak-

ening to a more spiritual life, but it is about the whole universe awaking up in us. It is a col-

lective deal. So wed better be prepared for it. For this, the job we face, which many of us


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feel keenly I believe, even if we dont know exactly what it all means yet, means we had bet-

ter take to heart the old adage and take it well: Know Thyself. Opening up is painful, but

being closed is not a function of survival in a new world of higher vibrations and the pleni-

tude of new knowledge with deepening and widening interior experience to match.

PPPPllllaaaatttteeee OOOOnnnneeee:::: IIIIttttBBBBeeeeggggiiiinnnnssss

Two men in debate approach a large and stately temple with

high arches. A river flows within its precincts, in which a

rich, red carpet is unrolled down an inner wall, and on which

sun and moon shields rest, and between which is an iron hel-

met from a suit of armour surmounted by a starry cloak, tri-

ple crescent moons and a golden crown. Steps lead upwardand inward to the interior of the temple, while the shields are

hidden from the view of the two approaching men. It is

assessed that by entering the temple they will be leaving the

outer world in the process of discovering or finding some-

thing which is as yet only hinted at. A border rich in nature

symbols, flora and fauna surrounds the scene and suggests

that the blessings or beneficence of nature abounding, sur-

rounds the task at hand. The words over the entrance to the

sanctuary reads Arma Artes, the coat of arms of the art.)

The solar orb in the shield above the helmet is serenely in the

highest position, shining out. The men will come through

the arch to the left. In terms of the biology of the uncon-

scious, they are entering by the left hemisphere, the side of

reasoning, which fits in with the two men in discussion, using

language and thinking to work out the aspects of the under-

world. The side on the East, right is hidden from view as the

temple precincts go deeper within. The steps also enter from

the West, left hemispheric thinking, and right side of the

body action and the direction of seeking the prima materia

or primal material is East, or right hemispheric side, door to

the underworld, memory, the past and the left side of the

silence within. (Note: orientation of the figure in the dia-

gram, right below. The images, being created for the viewer,

or as introspective devices of the artist, are like mirrors in

which the initiate sees his own psyche: it is my premiss the

image is so constructed, and are interpreted facing this way.

Above: The left-right orientation of the

body shows the switch of brain to

body is a fundamental polarity that is

commonly metaphored and symboli-

cally appears in projected images,regardless of individual anatomical

understanding. This aspect is kept in

mind when relating to the alchemical

opus in which the alchemist is dynami-

cally involved with the inner polarities

in psyche and attempting to reconcile

them into a new relation of oneness.

Both the structure and the function ofthese two 'half-brains' in some partunderlie the two modes of conscious-ness which simultaneously coexistwithin each one of us. ... The lefthemisphere ... is predominantlyinvolved with analytic, logical think-ing, especially in verbal and mathe-matical functions. Its mode [is]linear... sequential. [and] depend ant on linear time ...

the right hemisphere languageability is quite limited. This hemi-sphere is primarily responsible for ourorientation in space ... body image ...arts, crafts ... processing informationmore diffusely... holistic and rela-tional... integrating many inputs atonce. (Ornstein, 1977:67-8.)


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The sun and moon symbols on the red wall are in a North-South axis and indicate the sun

has the supreme role, of light. Beneath the knights helmet and on the shield is the moon,

but it is transfixed, and has grotesque faces in its eyes, and its poking tongue is another

face; this is a play on the anciently destroyed Medusa/Gorgon, often depicted on the shield

of Greek gods, and stiffly represents the head of snakes, and a cast down lunar power.

The blue starry cloak, like hair, or fronds, billowing out from the black helmet are remem-

brance of the Queen of the Night, and the starry skies of the Sumerian and Babylonian

Inanna-Ishtar and her girdle:

The Sumerians [c.2000BC] and Babylonians were fascinated by the stars. ... Nightly from

the roof terraces of their houses they must have watched the great constellations wheeling

around them, as they came to identify the most brilliant stars and gave the zodiacal belt the

names and images that have endured to this day. Both Inanna and Ishtar were worshipped

as Queen of Heaven. Their principle images were the moon and Venus, the morning and

evening star, which may have given rise to the image of the eight-pointed ...'Radiant Star'...Ishtar in ... seals is often shown with a circle of stars around her, as she personified the

zodiac ... the zodiac was called Ishtar's Girdle. (Baring & Cashford, 1993:200).

In the alchemical image it seems like the starry cloak decorates the iron helmet as if might

be a trophy from some battle; nonetheless, both stellar girdle and moon are below the sun

above.A set of three nested crescent moons sit on top of a golden crown. These is remem-

brance of Diana, fertility cults, bovine worship, essentially the world of feminine divinities

and figures often grouped as three. Prior to the symbol of the bull being associated with

masculine symbolism, in the Neolithic era, it represented the horned uterus of ancient cos-

mic womb worship (Gimbutas, 1989). Cow horns, bullflowers and bull-horns found in Neo-

lithic birthing rooms were not coincidentally found there. The crescent moon was

associated with lunar cycles in both planting and menses, while it also resembled the female

anatomy of womb and fallopian tubes: the most ancient bulls horns are both menses lunar

symbol and a reference to the womb that gives birth to all. (See below, Birth-giving God-

dess Shrine, c.5800BC.) It was a feminine symbol of generation or creation power.)

In theSplendor Solis

image the three crescents of old adorn the head of the helmet, within

Human physiology shothe systems of the body. Ation is drawn to the reprotive system for its bull-hand horns form.

(Image: Sherwood, 1993)Left: 'The Birth-giving Goddess; c.5800BC,

Anatolia. The shrine is dedicated to birth ... the

goddess is outstretched in the stylized birthing

position and 'seems to have given birth to the

three bulls' heads placed beneath her'. In thisculture the act of birthing is prolific in imagery.

(Baring & Cashford, 1993:56).

The act of birthing, female anatomy, and the

intensification aspect of several bulls horns,

symbols of the fallopian tubes/female repro-

ductive organs; might have been to intensify

the sacred nature of birthing in association to

the Goddess who gives birth to all (Gimbutas,

1989:252-256).


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the golden crown; but the symbolic nature of these objects represents a symbolically stated

balance of power and sovereignty, as well as the future ahead for the neophyte who walks

and discusses or argues with his colleague the way by which he may attain the alchemical

gold and the solar condition.The entire scene is surrounded by the richness of nature, the

man and his restless walking is still in the background, and so the primal scene is set as they

come closer into frame and towards the river flowing onward into the temple. The alchem-

ical journey is hence, a moving away from the nature outside to an inner mysterious world,

basically a womb within. They are entering the ancient world of the Goddess in pursuit of

psychic change.

TTTToooo EEEEnnnntttteeeerrrr tttthhhheeee SSSSaaaannnnccccttttuuuuaaaarrrryyyy OOOOrrrr NNNNooootttt

Grassy knolls flank the rivulet leading down to the underworld; its path is only suggested in

the s-shape of its serpentine flow. In the alchemical quest, the rivers season of spring is a

season of sacrifice, its river of life a stream of blood (Fabricius, 1976:17).

A river that is a stream of blood indicates that it is the body that is being spoken about, the


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soma, and its own underworld; it is the abode of the goddess, for it is she that gives life, sus-

tains life and supports its essence through procreation and generation. At the same time, the

wall-hanging, edged with gold that is a support for the arms of the art is blood-red. The

symbolic motifs are forged on a background of blood, which may mean warfare, violence or

child-bearing and menses.

The border of abundant foliage suggests the alchemist is entering the temple in the spring in

the bloom of youth which is reminiscent of the ancient son-lover Dumuzi or Tammuz of

the Sumerian Goddess Inanna or Ishtar (Baring & Cashford, 1991); the son by virgin birth

of the goddess-mother Ninhursag, Astarte, Artemis, Demeter, Aphrodite, Venus - the cos-

mological goddess-mother. Tammuz and Dumuzi mean Faithful Son, and their title was

the Green One (Baring & Cashford, 1993:207. The Goddess was the vine, the son the fruit

(grapes); or the Mother was the Tree of Life, and her son the fruit (dates); the sons of thegoddess were the fruits of the year and were organic, vegetative. They came out of the

Great Mother, the primordial waters of space (ibid., p.208).

When the grape vines were cut and pruned, the renewal of vegetation was associated with

the renewal of the soul, which was intimately associated with the birth and resurrection of

the year god - the male god that was born and died every year, going down into the under-

world at winter, being reborn in spring and the new growth season (see Campbell, 1973,

[1949]),

The horned moon and the milk-bearing cow is a cosmological symbol of life, seeding the

earth, fertilization, poetically illustrated through the metaphor of the cow the bull, and

their calf, liturgically represented within the precincts of the early temple compounds -

which were symbolic of the womb of the cosmic goddess Cow herself (Campbell, 1986

[1962]:41). Inanna, Astarte, Ishtar, Isis, and Hathor all wore horned head-dresses suggest-

ing goddesses of fertility, the womb and everything that governed the generation of life

(Baring & Cashford, 1993:460). They appeared in Sumerian (c.2500BC), Mesopotamian,

Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Canaanite and Near-Eastern goddess worship.

Horned cows, bisons, bulls were all part of the principle of the feminine generation within

the abundance and deep immersion of humans into nature and natural processes like birth

'The bull was connected with the moon from

the earliest times ... Upper Paleolithic cave

painting and engraving[s]. Spain and Las-

caux, France c.15,000-10,000 BC. (Gimb-

utas, 1989: 280).


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which were imbued with numinosity, magic, mana, and a sacral character. The bulls horns

were also associated with the male principle, the god - the goddesss son, as well as the power

of regeneration and birth at Catal Huyk, 5800BC (Baring & Cashford, 1993:84), adorning

walls of dwellings and shrines; the son, brother or husband of the Mother was also the Bull of

Heaven and in these contexts is always in relationship to the Mother as compatriot, associate

and life-giver.

In the primal Sumerian mother-son union, the son had to descend into the underworld so

that the earth may renew in the yearly cycles: for he was the fruit. This myth had several var-

iants: in the Babylonian, Ishtar goes to the underworld to rescue Tammuz from his sleep (of

Winter); in the Sumerian, Inanna sacrifices Dumuzi to go the underworld instead of herself,

and in a third, the god (as Enki) is asleep in the underworld and his mother Nammu has to

awaken him (Baring & Cashford, 1993:219). There was, accompanying, significant ritual andassociative participation of humans with the cyclical seasons, and lament at the end of sum-

mer, From Sumeria and Babylonia, to the Near East and then Mediterranean, the height of

summer harvests was replaced by the end of fruits. grains and corn on the bough, plenty was

at an end, harvesting complete (June-July) and Dumuzi was lamented.

Everywhere the same myth of the virgin goddess whose son-lover dies a sacrificial death and

is reborn after she goes in search of him in the underworld was ritually celebrated. ... When

he was lost to life much later in Syria and Greece, a wooden effigy of the god was laid in a

boat or raft and set afloat on the waters. As it sank Dumuzi-Tammuz descended into the

underworld. ... The difficulty of awakening the god from sleep and bringing him back to life

was part of he ritual drama of the myth of the goddess. ... The imagery of the archaic myth is[later] transposed to the context of the human soul (Baring & Cashford, 1993:221-3).

In the alchemical journey, the son takes a similar journey into the underworld, back into pri-

mary associations and primordial connections, which through the passage of the millennia

have undergone many modifications. For instance, as mythology and human consciousness

moved further away from nature, the content of the underworld became more frightening for

subjective consciousness as it moved farther and farther away from a sense of the wholeness

and sacrality of life. ... The more the known and the unknown, light and dark phases of life

are split apart and associated with good and evil, the more terrifying the dimension beyond

Left: Ninhursag, Sumeria, GreatMother of all life wears the bulls-horns; full of fertility-power. Onher lap is her son, who will beking. He stretches out his righthand to drink the elixir, but turnsto his mother as if looking forpermission; she holds him for-ward to take it. Behind them is

the Tree of Life. 3 tall vessels actas sacred containers of life-force,strength and power (see Bar-ing& Cashford, 1993:191).


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death becomes. ... The ultimate legacy of this fear is reached in the Hebrew Lilith and the

Christian image of hell and the devil (ibid., p.224). For this, though ancient or archaic sym-

bols are employed in the sixteenth century alchemical opus they have already gone through

some radical transformations, yet the journey is significantly about relationships of age-old

opposites, oppositions, and of masculine-feminine relations of balance and power in a psy-

che-ic inner world.

Outside the temple in the plate, in the distance is seen water and craggy mountainous

regions without foliage or growth. This suggests two things, both the season of winter and

that the temple which is being approached is set on a very high place. The perspective from

inside the temple suggests it is set at the highest point in the landscape, which precipitously

leads away to valleys and regions far below. The ambience of the castle setting is where the

ancients built the temples to the goddess. They were set in high places. Throughout theNeolithic world a mound or mountain was symbolic of the goddess ... and in the Bronze

Age ... the focus of the temple was the sanctuary at the summit, where the sacred marriage

rite was enacted (Baring & Cashford, 1993:185). The opposites engaged in a conjunction

and culmination, a fusion within a sacred rite, and earth was restored to harmony and bal-

ance.

Seen in this light, the image of the two alchemists is the less ancient image of the age-old

saga of the male approaching the temple of the goddess. The enframed image is within a

deep perspective; the temple precinct takes up the foreground and its entrance is suggested

is what is foremost in mind. Considering the three bovine ancient symbols of father and

mother bull, plus calf, as emblems of the most ancient goddess, they appear in this first

image of the opus atop the golden crown of a starry wig or hair-frond that is emblematic of

Ishtar, the Queen of the Night herself. The male initiates, in order to be transformed need

to enter the womb of the primordial goddess; they are fearful if they will die or live. Is this

one of mans most ancient traumas, or is it only the rather lately won egoic consciousness

that is fearful of death or defeat in being immersed in the unconscious?

RRRReeeettttuuuurrrrnnnn ttttoooo tttthhhheeee UUUUnnnnddddeeeerrrrwwwwoooorrrrlllldddd

The putrefaction stage of the opus is the compost stage, when the green of nature ferments

and returns into the earth. It is associated with Tammuz and Dumuzi returning to the

underworld in order to come back budding and renewed the following season. Rebirth is

only possible if nature is renewed, after an initial dying away, following the natural cycles.

Fabricius (1976:16) quotes Hali the Philosopher who wrote the green is reduced to its

former nature ... things sprout and come forth in ordained time ... putrefied and decocted in

the way of our secret art. Traditional Chinese medicine, pharmaceutically complex and

aware of subtle energies, for at least 2000 years, relies on the processes of collecting herbs,


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drying, extracting essences by cooking until decoctions are ready to treat various mala-

dies. The process is firmly embedded in nature and natural processes as applied to signs

and symptoms of the body which is part of nature, whose laws can be read in the body sys-

tems; there is a natural order that tends towards balance and order, as well as cyclic decay

and regeneration, microscopic and macroscopic (Tao) (Jingfeng, Jian, et al, 1995). Who was

Hali ? Kalid ibn Yazid, Omayyad prince (660-704) claims Fabricius, 1976:216. Was his

knowledge from a Greek or Babylonian background?

In general, alchemistry which follows a natural way, by following natural cycles is East-

ern. The Western heritage, philosophy is most noticeably that which begins to bring a ten-

sion into the relationship between man and nature. Fundamentally, the Eastern (except for

certain ascetic yogis) retain the natural world and does not attempt to jettison it, but instead

seek ways of balancing closer within its natural order. (Traditional Chinese medicine andFeng Shui are examples.)

Regeneration alchemically also depended on a reduction to a primal material, so metals, for

example, were reduced to a formless state, thereafter they could be moulded into any form

the alchemist may choose (Fabricius, 1976:17). With this simple admission, similar to the

Jungian (1953) description of the yogic alchemic process, some factor or active agent out-

side the process is actually working upon the reformulation of the extracted material into

any shape. When the alchemical process is associated with the chemistry of gold, one could

expect modelling of jewellery or ornaments, for example, but when the process is associated

with psychology/psyche it is saying that the adept can act upon any material within to trans-

form it into any other shape, psychological or physical. This suggests that all material, inner

and outer is malleable and subject to the controlling factor of the master alchemists will or

mind.

Out of the swirling chaos of the prima materia

, form arose in the shape of the four ele-

ments fire, air, water and earth. By blending these simple bodies in certain proportions,

God finally succeeded in creating out of the prime matter the limitless varieties of life. ...

Transmutation is an obvious consequence of this theory: any element may be transformed

into another through the quality which they have in common. Thus, fire can become air

through the medium of heat, just air can become water through the medium of fluidity. ...

From this belief it follows that any kind of substance can be transformed into any other by

simply changing its elemental proportions through the processes of burning, calcination,

solution, evaporation, distillation, sublimation, and crystallization. If iron and gold are met-

als consisting of fire, air, water and earth in differing proportions, why not attempt to

change the elemental proportions of iron by adjusting them to the proportions of the ele-

ments of gold? Here we have the germ of all alchemical theories ... based on this theoretical

background that the alchemists sweated over their furnaces (Fabricius, 1976:8).

This metallurgy was projected upon by inward unconscious psychic factors (Jung, 1953)

which made of it a psychological process; or taking it much further, once the process of

alchemy was envisioned as applying to the substance of humans themselves, at any level, it


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could be imagined as a science of great psyche-ic and even physical transformational possi-

bilities. Perhaps in the Occidental alchemy this possibility was entertained early because

alchemists as clerics, and womanless men (Noble, 1992), had an ecclesiastical bias againstwomen, the flesh, and the devil, which in the medieval mind all occupied something of the

same rungs of manifestation due to Biblical exegesis, and the myth of the Fall of Man due to

Woman and her relationship to a serpent (Pagels, 1979).

One of the greatest achievements within the opus is the creation of the homunculus (the

baby in the vessel) and its creation in vitro, outside the womb of a woman. The great

achievements of recent medical science are testimonies to this possibility envisioned in an

earlier alchemy, but as well by the potential for men to give birth to creation, and wrest

finally the last great power away from the ancient Goddess cultures, the primary function of

birth, as individual and cosmic Mother, and the primacy of nature to create. From the Yah-

weh of the Judeo-Christian Bible, a masculine deity, without partner, or equal, brings forth

the whole creation by his hand and eye. This Iron Age demi-God myth which was raised to

ultimate potency becomes the residual desire in the alchemy of the West, to be like Him.

The Western alchemistry, while it may owe a great deal to the Eastern subtle alchemies of

inner transformation of the spirit, owe nothing to them of the direction it veered off on; its

trajectory was away from nature, absolutely away from the Goddess , particularly as equal,

to a sole transcendental control and rulership, not immanence and not a return to unity or

at-oneness with Her.

The dualistic universe is the battleground of opposing forces resolved by the putrefying

movement of death and rebirth; by returning to the prima materia; by the circulatorium

or circulatory movement backward, and to return to the source of all creation, or God

(Fabricius, 1976:17).

Text accompanying plate one of the alchemic series Splendor Solis contain the phrase:

opus contra naturam (Fabricius, 1976:16), which infers the alchemical opus is going

against the flow of nature. Lull writes you should know, dear son, that the course of nature

is turned about (from Compendium artis alchemiae, in Fabricius, p.10); the body is dis-solved in a movement back into a primal substance. The distilling apparatus that the alche-

mists will use is a bulb-shaped vessel with a neck, an object for free association

psychologically. Fabricius claims the pear-shaped vessels are female matrix and that the

Hermetic vessel was called a uterus which the philosophers son will be born out of. Hence

the entire process of this alchemy is charged with a specific tension, the goal is not unifica-

tion with the feminine principle in order to instantiate a golden, stellar or cosmic world of

psyche-ic oneness with Her or with nature as implicate order, but entrance on a meditative

and psychological path of extraction.


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This delineates the opus: the extraction of mind-space out of the terrestrial and cosmic

which includes a new womb that will be created in the process by a cabal.The meditative

aspect of the opus reveals the alchemists understanding of their work as a psychic process

of transformation also, unfolding ... with the chemical process of transformation. In such a

manner the alchemical laboratories took on the function of psychological laboratories as

well. The effect was the symbolized chemistry of alchemy which, is in the last analysis, rep-

resents an alchemy of the mind (Fabricius, 1976:11).

The process might have been happening in mind but it

bore a particular relationship and stance towards the

body as well, and that attitude was one of mounting

estrangement which possibly made the sensed process

even more precarious as mind withdrew from somaticengagement. There were inherent dangers for the start-

ing-out alchemist; the unconscious was the great

unknown and it was implicated with the somatic world -

physis

, with all its dangerous associations, lingering in a

psychic, clerical atmosphere where nature was feared for

its power to induce oneness with it, instating panic for a

feared loss of the egoic consciousness struggling to eman-

cipate itself from dependency on Mother Nature herself

in all her guises, terrestrial, unconscious, pagan and cos-mic. All this movement was predicated on desire

emboldened as well as chastened by religion, to rule, as

Genesis informed.

1

Entry into the temple of initiation is essentially entrance

into the underworld of Her domain, as well as a descent

into cavern or grotto, which will lead potentially to encountering the Shadow. The Shadow

may bear an archetypal likeness to the beloved bull of old, from Crete, the same one which

becomes the Minotaur in Greek myth. Just as other horned beasts, like rams or goats, com-panions of shepherd Tammuz (Dumuzi) connected to Baal, son of the Old Testament God-

dess (Asherah), become the horned devils in an emerging dualistic universe. There,

connection back to nature and the ancient Great Goddess become subverted and shadowy

and the dark images of the Gothic imagination, European Romanticism and the existential

1.

.

On the other side of the brightly lit exterior world of consciousness, what is within is considered ambivalent and

potentially threatening. The controlling ego-personality and what that consists of and contains manoeuvres and

rebalances to contain that which is in the underworld, or out of sight; to enter physis is to go down into that darkness

to confront ones own interior shadowy side

Minotaur, painting by G. F. Watts, 1877.

The illustration above from a text on Mary

Shelleys Frankenstein intimates the monster(Source: Tropp, 1976.) The sacred bull of

the Goddess (with feminized face) had

become a figure of revile, associated with

the labyrinth - physis, womb, and the coil of

life, symbolic of the dark ostracized outsider

or other who can never return to be in

ones conscious living of life.

Mary Shelleys Franken

stein, [1818]. Illustration

Moser 1994 .


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arts to follow, all bear witness to the trail of the divine sunk in the murky well of interior

being.

Yet, behind all projections of inner woe, remain both an image of the ostracized Motherand womb of all, as well as one of a child lost in the wilderness. The nurturing womb-space

is historically and psychically purged, and gradually emptied of content and of vital matter.

As it is, the streams flowing back to an ancient and ever-flowing source are almost extin-

guished and the soul lapses to despair and decay. At the same time, the procedure of Occi-

dental alchemistry was just that removal of the mind of men from the body and

remembrance of the Mother of matter and from the profusion of nature in a psyche-ically

connected sense. Not only that, a gradual instatement of a new mind and consciousness will

take her place and assign attributes of her to a new containment vessel (a wombless one),

one where the child knows no such mother, unless she is borne of the laboratory will.

To follow this story of a change in collective psyche is

to witness in hindsight the loss of the vital world, pri-

mordial origins and connection back to the garden of

paradise, with the terrestrial garden within. It is also to

understand something of the nature of the problem of

dualism which brings about the nightmare of history.

This is regarded on two levels as a process of history

out in the world and of a process of the history of the

transformation of psyche, within, the very history and

nightmare the intensest current

inner work must even-

tually come to grips with and face.

That is, one deals with the problem on both sides, indi-

vidual and collective, of mini-society within, and

macro-society without. It is wonderful to wake up to

the inner truth and beauty of the fact one is every-

thing, the cosmos is I and we are the universe, each

and everyone of us. That is like the first incredible

break-out from the chains of being small and limited

egos, of minds of social conditioning just beginning to slough off.

But there is barely any vocabulary for dealing with the reality and history of the Western

transformation of civilization on the psyche as it moved out of the slumber of consciousness

in the Dark Ages and earlier. But there is a thread running from the almost Paleolithic Ages

to the present time of the fastness of all souls to a different kind of energetic alchemic bond.

The agriculturalist eras are painted as dull and bovine in comparison to the growing scien-


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tific eras to follow. But as the West followed an alchemy of extraction, not integration, its most inner

paths are psychic trails sand-blasted into the subconscious and unconscious by the forefathers of

Western civilization. Ultimately, when we speak about transformation and the New Age, and the

coming culmination foretold in the Aztec calendar, we must clear, as part of the cleansing process,

deeply embedded cultural consciousness, individual and collective, where it does not serve the mean-

ing of the whole. So how are we going to do this? There is a short answer and a long one; here I will

begin with the first

dr mary ann ghaffurian. alchemical ways

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