On Spiritual Alchemy

Alchemy may be taken, in any of its pre-modern forms, as an attempt to understand and control matter within the framework of a world of gods and God. It has, in this respect (both in relation to material science and healthcare), largely been displaced by scientific method and medicine. It should be of largely antiquarian interest. However, the residue of this world view has re-emerged in the modern world as 'spiritual alchemy': the attempt to read back into the past an analogical element that applies, to the self, soul and mind, the method and findings of material alchemy.

The idea that lead (the material self) can be transmuted into gold (spiritual perfection) through mercury (the quickening process of thought) is self-evidently a model of human development and we will return to this when we reach Jung below. The later idea that the Philosopher’s Stone might be used to summon or communicate with angels may be a ‘real belief’ (which it certainly was) or an ‘analogical belief’ by which we mean that the Stone represents the catalyst for a type of thinking that can command and understand a Heraclitean flux of thoughts and emotion. This is a belief system that says that analogical thinking within a particular framework can aid personal transformation and. like all belief systems that do not argue against the findings of science, it cannot be argued against with any certainty once it has abandoned the physical alchemical laboratory.

The Historicity of Alchemy

This is much more like the modern mechanistic read-back of scientific analysis into our ideas of mind than we may think. It is simply one out of our time and place. The modern scientific model of mind is clearly flawed but that is no reason, in itself, to allow an even more flawed older model of 'science' to become the basis for a retrospective and a largely poorly evidenced attempt to build up a hermetic positive psychology. Are we prepared to accept knowingly that what we are engaged in is a mythic re-construction? As poetic or artistic analogy, on the other hand, alchemical language has its own strange beauty, a beauty perhaps first presented by the German mystic Jacob Boehme but also by other alchemists of the early modern period such as Heinrich Khunrath.

There are analogous systems of thought in China and India and there is no doubt that it is not a modern invention in the West. There is a clear history going back to the Hermetica of Thrice-Great Hermes and probably beyond. But we also have to remember that few 'scientific' writings have survived from the Ancient World. Diocletian ordered the burning of alchemical texts after a revolt in Alexandria (292) which, in itself, suggests some important political aspect to such material in what was the central port for the supply of essential grains to the over-populated urban centre of the Empire. But whatever was taken from Hellenism to Europe via such significant Arab figures as Khalid Ibn Yazid, it was not 'political'.

Something very dangerous to the existing order of empire had been suppressed and turned into something mystical and private, much as modern science has often been shifted into New Age models by people desperate to invoke a meaning for the void and yet functionally powerless. Perhaps what Diocletian was doing was little different from the imperial policies of Germany and Russia against the Polish intellectual elite in 1940 - the determined destruction of a particular culture so that it could never stand against them. The fact of the Roman Empire holding its sway for many more years than the monster-empires of Twentieth Century Europe may well have shifted the progressive community of thinkers towards their salvation as individuals within more extensive state-backed cosmopolitan faith traditions.

The Use of Alchemy

Using the operations of the material world to describe the 'spiritual' nature of man is a common human trope in times of alienation from the ability to think freely – the imperial systems (eventually Christian, Buddhist, Confucian, Muslim) have offered ready-made approved models into which archetypal thinking can be forced to fit. We may think equally of the machine model of eighteenth century ‘philosophes’ under the Ancien Regime right through to modern philosophers' attempt to describe our minds in terms of hardware and software. Prevailing orthodoxy always has gaps for creative analogy. To describe our intrinsic, inexplicable being in terms of the retort and of alchemical transmutation was simply another case of trying to explain and live out our complex nature in terms that seemed analogically appropriate at that time.

The 'discovery' of spiritual alchemy in the late nineteenth century occult revival should be seen not so much as a seeking after truth as of an attempt to avoid the brutal implications of the new positivistic world emerging before the eyes of an insecure Western urban middle class. Because it could not find analogies for actual experience from contemporary analytical knowledge, it looked backwards, for lack of alternatives, to older scientific models – the exact opposite of the process of near trans-humanism in Russia which was explored by Andrew Vee. This reactionary approach to the world implicit in occult spiritual alchemy is rarely commented upon but this is not to find it wanting.

The 're-constructionist' approach to alchemy served a purpose as a mythic, analogical, artistic and creative response to the fact that descriptions of the world that were undoubtedly true in regard to the material world were far from the experience of men actually living in the world. New myths were required. Until the rise of phenomenology and existentialism (and the reactions to the latter), a mechanistic view of the human condition was the only alternative to an organised religion that failed to take account either of the new science or of personal experience. Until men and women had found their own myths from philosophies that could escape the clutches of Plato and Aristotle (which could not happen until very recently indeed), the source of such myths had to lie either in the past as reconstructionism or in the future as science fiction.

There is the path of occultism or Russian Cosmism, of Crowley or Wells, of rosicrucianism or scientology. Nineteenth century and twentieth century 'occult' or New Age ideas will often include highly pragmatic attempts to link the language of alchemy to personal development. Obscure symbolism and secret societies have become the chosen tools for persons dealing with a world they do not comprehend on the terms explained by the priests (the scientists) of our day. For them, it may have worked functionally and materially but engaging with the new priesthood is highly demanding of time and energy and intrinsically unsatisfying. Like all belief systems, even science requires an initial act of faith that can have no rational base so why not find another irrational base and see where it leads - so long as you do not try to build an aircraft with it. If the core framework of such attempts depends too often on misreadings and re-readings of texts (such as those of Hermes Trismegistus) outside their original context, one thinker, Jung, was attempting an analogical approach that updated alchemy to the world of analytical psychology.

The Insights of Jung

The interesting and more modern attempt by Jung to demonstrate that alchemy's hermetic language has a 'spiritual' context, an exposure of the Self's access to the collective unconscious, suggests something that might be treated both rationally and artistically. We have here an attempt to synthesise scientific reason (as a mode of thinking) with an exploration of the common psychic heritage of humanity whose drivers are the non-scientific worlds of spirit, magic and art. This is still an analogical use, a doubtful framework, yet Jung is probably correct that alchemy is a useful tool (amongst others) in trying to understand what the grounding for human psychology may be when hard science has reached its limits.

His master work in this respect is 'Psychology and Alchemy' which first appeared in German in 1944 but he wrote on the subject throughout his life from the 1920s until his death. Nevertheless, the introduction to the master work somewhat pre-supposes the 'spiritual' as a really existing concept instead of the less comfortable but more likely thesis that what he is exploring is merely undiscovered and probably undiscoverable science. In short, even here, spiritual alchemy is either a retro-manufactured tool for personal self and social development (whether it uses Western, Tantric or Taoist forms) or it is an exploratory tool for deep psychology into territories where scientific analysis cannot currently and may never go.

Jung, in this respect, takes a wrong turn but a wholly decent one. But, although no one can judge in these matters, the wrong turn is not the analogical use of alchemy as a symbolic path and theory for ‘spiritual’ development. Instead, faced with the failure of scientific method at the limits of human experience, he falls back on the 'spiritual' instead of moving forward (as he had once done in his own 'Red Book') into the territory of art and magic, the occlusive methods for reaching the Self.

What Alchemy Is Today

Alchemy, when it is not early scientific exploration within particular cultural frameworks, is not a matter of the spiritual or of science but of art and creativity, a more disciplined hand-maiden to the repressed sexuality of symbolism and the wild dream world of surrealism. To engage in spiritual alchemy is to add to the armoury of techniques that question the Self (in Jung's more rounded sense of Self) and it provides a framework for psychological self-management, using symbolism that can refer to the otherwise unspeakable.

It is, if you like, a practical and useful psychology of introspection but it cannot be redemptive because there is no redemption, simply different states of being that are more or less resonant or in tune with one’s self. What comparisons of Self and alchemical analogy and between Western and Eastern traditions can do is create an insight into the functioning of mind that no formally analytical mode of research can possibly match.

Analogies between alchemical thought and the process of individuation are never certain or absolute but they hit the ‘spot’ of so many people so often that we are talking of mythic operations that appear somehow biologically grounded. Analytical investigation cannot cope with the scale of humanity and its operations in time and in relation to itself so the theory of archetypes and their repetition in many varied contexts shows us templates, creatively re-imagined under local conditions, which are at the heart of our myths.

The infinite variation of these forms means that there can be no analytical law of archetypes or their operation but there are patterns. Coming to terms as a Self with these patterns, re-imagining them for our circumstances, is also at the heart of our own self-creation. Thus, we come around slowly to a ‘modernisation’ of spiritual alchemy, a process by which we engage with the archetypes, including such process variations as lead-mercury-gold or man-as-machine or software-driving-hardware, and, in critiquing them, we discover ourselves.

Jung’s driver was the search for ‘individuation’ – a concept far more useful than anything using the word ‘spiritual’ which gives excessive ‘reality’ to externalities and their hold over us. If Jung was right that alchemy was a form of proto-psychology (and there is evidence that this may be both true and an over-simplification), then its insights remain useful although the ‘myth of Gnostic survival’ should perhaps be taken less uncritically.

Above all, the simple idea that mercury (that is, the process of communication and flux) will transform our inherited leaden nature into something more individuated is not only intuitively right but interesting to consider in the light of the alchemical power on us of social networking. Social networks are not alchemically irrelevant because if we are conscious of their mercurial effects and make deliberate use of them in that light, we are more likely to become individuated over and against ‘real’ but inherited and enforced social bonds.

This is potentially liberatory, but both anarchic and troubling to traditionalists who may feel more relaxed when they consider that most of the users of facebook will not be seeking gnosis but merely the reinforcement of existing social bonds and attitudes and entertainment. We are probably engaged now in the biggest alchemical experiment in human history with the internet representing the application of mercury to the lead of humanity. The question is open whether this will create social gold or not.

Riots and the Crisis of Late Capitalism

The English Riots in 2011 caught a lot of people by surprise. It might be worth revisiting them as dire warnings emerge of similar violence because of 'austerity' on the one hand and negative assets affecting middle class savers on the other. We have our doubts on both scores. There is evidence that the rioting owed a great deal to social deprivation and social exclusion but also to a longstanding dynamic of opposition between street-based cultures and law enforcement that predated the 2008 crash and the world of 'cuts'. Similarly, historical evidence suggests that the middle classes do not riot or even demonstrate but turn to populist parties who promise them relief from harsh reality and the burden of history.

At the time, the marketing industry which had played up aspirational rebellion until that date was thoroughly caught out by events. It has since taken an even stronger turn towards the classically conservative strategy of corporate social responsibility, directed more at placating authority and legislators than speaking for their poorer customers. Young males can respond to messages of defiance and individualism but it was clear that they were not supposed to act out the fantasy that had been presented to them on a plate by clothes and shoe manufacturers. 

Fantasy became reality when Levi's notion of a young male squaring up to riot police actually did square up to riot police. This led to one of many 'moral panics' where analysis of the long term structural causes of a social phenomenon could be ignored in favour of a wave of emotion, resulting in the type of gut reactions that would only store up problems for the future. No one was thinking. No one is thinking.  The response of the marketing community came down to an attempt to answer the question at the heart of the political crisis of our time: to sell a good or service, does one appeal to the emotional instinct of the customer base or respond to the emotional reaction of a herd-like media and political culture in a state of confusion, ignorance and fear? Normally, the marketing man goes for the customer and ignores society but, in a crisis, he will swing violently back towards what he believes to be society but is, in fact, merely his terror that the media will persuade the national executive to order the legislature to 'do something' on the basis that 'something must be done' and that that something will restrict the business' ability to make a profit.

We had an answer to the question very quickly in 2011: business joined in the panic and suddenly became 'socially responsible', meaning, in fact, conservative in the worst sense, part of the problem of suppressing discontent rather than stating firmly that it is merely responding to the mood of the time as sound business and expecting Government to do what Government is supposed to do, govern. If people are discontented, it is not because of moral laxity (an abstract without meaning except from the stand point of the comfortable moraliser) but because they have reasons for discontent - local policing, lack of opportunity, overcrowding, underemployment, generational lack of respect (from the old to the young), the hypocrisy of the rich and the lack of representation by a serious Left (the real crisis for the under class and the young).

A video now removed from YouTube at the time showed an articulate employed black telling it like it was to the Mayor of London. This man was bright, talented and on the right side of the law but he was not happy. He did not have to look far to see a world where others no better than he was were still raking in bonuses despite (in the eyes of the many) bringing the country to its economic knees. In fact, it was incompetent Government that failed to create a framework for hyper-capitalism that had brought things to the edge, a fact probably to be carefully forgotten by many centre-left voters in May. On the other side, and equally legitimately, a video spread at the time showed a tough black lady taking on the rioters. This encapsulated the tragedy of those riots. Small traders and property owners with little capital were being ruined and threatened by people with no capital who had nothing left but unthinking ill-educated carnival politics with which to express themselves

Both sides in the same community were shoved into the position of the soldiery of the competing powers in 1914. Neither side asked then why they should even be in this position and neither side is asking that question today. One reason is that there is no reliable political force ready to intermediate within communities against elites unless we think the intellectually ramshackle UKIP plays that role faute de mieux. Just as in the 2014 'celebrations' (because that is what they often seemed to be) of the 1914 fiasco, no one is interested in the absurdity of the fact that two sets of masses should have more in common with each other than either should with the preening political class that purports to rule them. And yet they set about destroying each other on equal terms (the magistracy speaking here for the small trader) - and with enthusiasm. The draconian and eighteenth century conveyor belt that doled out 'justice' after 2011 was the true signal of what we were dealing with - the liberal facade of society was dropped by the magistracy in order to remind us where ultimate power lay, a power that can clearly cover up systematic child abuse with impunity and no doubt herd us into camps or conscription if it ever blunders into another war.

Here is where one has to put in the mantra that all this does not justify the riots. The riots, of course, were not political as we generally understand them but closer to 'carnival' - anarchic, criminal if strangely authentic. People suffered but not the people who should have done. And, ironically, the most admirable reaction to the whole business was that of The (Tory) Lord Harris. He did not pontificate or moralise. He did not even try to analyse (the job of others). He dealt like a practical man with a fact and offered material assistance to the victims and called on the Government to provide jobs. Yup! A Tory. How inconvenient for the Official Left. The mantra of moralistic blame from 'commentators' of the communitarian school missed the point. The riots were a fact on the ground. They happened because they were ready to happen. It is like expecting to humiliate Germany in 1919 and not expect another war. You can moralise all you like about why Germans should have accepted liberal democracy and bleat and whine after the event - but the dead of the 1930s and 1940s are on the tab of the vengeful non-German liberal democrats who did not think.

Business is now stuck in the middle of all this because something bad is going to happen if we do not get economic growth going elsewhere in the world and if our own falters (as it probably will when we choose the weak centre-left over a cynically half-competent centre-right). For two decades or so, business, for example, has tried to ride the tiger of incipient populism and weakening states by trying to collaborate with elites in developing a manipulative liberalism that changes nothing but gives us a fine rhetoric based on charitable works and not getting caught, all managed through the art of the lobbyist. Stage by stage, the Left has degenerated into a transcendental bourgeois idealism and business and the State into cringing manipulators who think they have the whip hand when they do not. The final stage of this game is being reached today in Europe where human rights idealists undercut the very economic base of modern welfare societies by insulting the people who buy their exports (as we have seen in Sweden and Germany) while continuing to do nothing to invest in the national infrastructures that will permit new wealth to meet future needs. Weak states prepared to be thugs in a crisis, a cowering evasive business community and bullying activists and single issue NGOs conspire to create the conditions for right-wing populism and short bursts of alienating street violence.

The selling process, whether political or commercial, is, of course. an emotional process, a manipulative process, of entering into the consciousness of its targets and tweaking it into an action in the interest of the sellers. It is not much different from the classical view of magicians of their craft. Politicians are also not much different from salesman except that they are 'channellers', responding to the emotions of voters and seeking to manipulate them for their own ends, raising intermediary demons (the media) who, like all raised demons, are untrustworthy tricksters. In the end, the only authentic behaviour seems to be that of the people themselves at the hard edge of the crisis, something clearly tapped into by Syriza in Greece - the rioters rioting in a context of their own, the police trying to do their job under difficult conditions, the victims of rioting and those attempting to clean up afterwards. Four sets of flotsam and jetsam pushed hither and thither by their masters.

In the 2011 case, the magistrates panicked, the politicians panicked, the media panicked and the marketeers panicked - the only people not panicking were the population at large. Listen to conversations around you at the time and the question was always: why did this happen now? Yet this was a question studiously avoided by the panic-stricken Establishment because it was an inconvenient question, partly because nobody knew the answer although everyone had an opinion, an opinion usually cast in terms of morality and 'oughts' rather than what was actually happening on the ground. The Establishment does not really want to answer that question or any other significant question (such as why the British care system turned into a recruiting machine for organised crime and pederasts) because each question raises still more serious questions about what the politicians and the media have been doing for the last three or four decades, perhaps since the Edwardian era. We, on the other hand, can certainly raises our own questions about whether the political and economic system is more broken that we had all thought.

The 2011 Riots and the Saville case are not the first times that the Establishment had failed to predict an event of great importance - we might start with the fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of Islamic terror - but failure to predict economic collapse and urban mayhem are the less forgivable because there is no excuse about lack of data. The 2011 Riots are history but the fact that no serious questions were raised then is matched by the continued inability to ask the fundamental questions arising out of the multitude of child abuse events happening now. But before jumping into bed with authoritarian moralists who wished to re-introduce the strap, conscription, hanging and all forms of social terror to a free young population, most of whom did not riot, or apply them to paedophiles today, we should ask this: how is it that the persons we hired to govern us failed to structure a society where everyone feels they have opportunity, where perhaps one in five of the population is now on the economic edge and in which policy can be made rationally before a crisis instead of irrationally after one? We could learn a great deal from Lord Harris' humane, practical approach to the business of recovery. It strikes me as no surprise that an experienced Tory businessman of the old school should have put the rest of the panicking and hysterical political elite to shame then. We need similar practical men from all schools of practical experience to do so now.

The Tantra Series - Rethinking Tantra

For those looking for my Tantra series on Position Reserved, this has been moved as a whole to another site as a 'blog book' - http://rethinkingtantra.blogspot.co.uk - where it has been re-ordered so it can be read in sequence. The posts there will not be added to so you should consider it a blog of record and for reference only. Any further commentary will be found on Position Reserved. The original text has been removed from Position Reserved.