What intrigues me enough to send out a post is something that makes us examine the water in which we swim. (As the student fish said to the philosopher fish, “Water, what water?”) So I thought it fitting to begin the year with a back story that might help us perceive what's going o­n in our bowl.

I found a piece about alchemy, authored by Zaphod II (that's all I know), when I stumbled across this person's unusually objective, perceptive report o­n the crop circle phenomenon.

The piece 

The Secret Art of Alchemy

To medieval alchemists, the world was animated. This was based o­n a belief that all objects possessed spirit and soul qualities, and there was a deep interconnectedness between all things.

This fits nicely with the HISTORY OF THE QUADRIVIUM, which you can find in Science and Spirit Smarts

…each of the Quadrivium sciences was accompanied by its complementary metaphysical art. Each dealt not o­nly with the outer structures, but also with the inner meanings of its discipline. Thus, Arithmetic included Arithmology, the understanding that numbers were not merely quantities, but also qualities (that “two”, for instance, is also “duality, polarity”); Geometry included what is nowadays called Geomancy, the understanding (in, for example, the design of temples or cathedrals, or in the graphic arts) that the spirit and the emotions can be affected in particular ways by particular forms; Astronomy included Astrology, the divination of the meanings of cycles of time; and Music included not o­nly the study of “practical theory”, of nomenclature and technique (e.g. “this is a minor third”, “this is the Mixolydian mode”), but also the study of “speculative theory”, of the meanings and influences of tones and intervals and scales.

…in the 1600s…It was as if a heavy iron gate had abruptly slammed shut between the outer and the inner, between the left brain and the right, between the physical sciences and the metaphysical arts.

In the alchemy piece, which ends this way, I especially like the light the Jungian perspective sheds o­n what's wrong with us as perversions that were introduced when we split the material aspect of ourselves from our natural, sacred state.

The Final Curtain

In classical alchemy, empirical science and mystical philosophy worked in tandem, being more or less undifferentiated. However, the dawning age of Enlightenment in the 17th Century, followed by the advent of modern scientific pragmatism and its unyielding adherence to facts, sounded the death toll for all things considered mystical, magical and irrational. These two new intellectual forces meant the chemist and the hermetic philosopher finally parted company.

Earlier, in Western civilisation, Christianity brought with it a morality that eventually destroyed pagan practices, including nature worship and folk crafts. The alchemists fell foul of the Church because they felt it was in the power of man himself to achieve the divine condition, and therefore rejected the Christian dogma of original sin and the fallen nature of man. Alchemy, viewed as witchcraft and heresy by the patriarchal Church, threatened the vision of Christian universal harmony, and was officially denounced as a heathen, superstitious pursuit.

With classical imagination stultified, 'animism' – the attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects and natural phenomena – gave way to 'anthropomorphism' – the attribution of human form or character, or, the ascription of a human attribute of personality to anything impersonal or irrational – and humanism as the dominant worldview. As the many spirits inhabiting nature began to fade, everything became a reflection of, and message for, human affairs. The most crushing consequence of Christianity's ordering, control and defeat of nature was the loss of soul.

In a largely de-spiritualised, de-animated world, these nature spirits are said to now reside in the dark shadows of human rational consciousness. Psychologically, as Jung observed, the gods, deities and spirits have become our modern day dis-eases. Repressed, they exist in our personal lives as moods, odd fascinations, delusions, erotic fantasies and whatever else lurks in the depths of the unconscious. They are the 'chaotic' urges of nature, the irrational elements that entangle us in life. It seems as though we are trapped in the materiality of our being, with nature reduced to the human experience of it.

Alchemy, as a psychological discipline, may have ended long ago, but the alchemical processes within the psyche continue as before. If the gods have become our dis-eases, and the formal cause of our afflictions are mythical persons, then rather than having lost the alchemical model, we can see many of its processes alive today in the form of psychopathology.