The Alchemical Crucible W. Zeitler [ORGAN]
(a new piece)
Praise, My Soul, the God of Heaven
Chivalrous Virtues: Hope and the Knight’s Dagger W. Zeitler
Alchemy is described as a medieval forerunner of chemistry, trying to transmute lead into gold, and more generally how to transform something common into something special. Which is a fair description, but not the whole story. Medieval alchemists were responsible for laying some of the basic foundations of chemistry, figuring out how to make now standard chemicals like sulfuric acid and nitric acid. But within the alchemical literature there is a corpus which is clearly not ‘chemical recipes’ of any sort — they read more like highly mythologized and baffling esoteric stories.
Indeed, it would appear that a portion of the alchemical literature consists of symbolic discussions of the Spiritual Path. After all, in an era when deviating from the official Church dogma could be very bad for your health, it might be a good idea to discuss such ideas in veiled symbolism, and hide it in plain sight in a body of literature that was already incomprehensible to most people. This literature is known as ‘Spiritual Alchemy’ — concerned with converting the base lead of the human heart into the gold of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘union with God’. Carl Jung (1875–1961) pioneered a considerable amount of groundbreaking research on this literature.
In his book Psychology and Alchemy, Jung argues that the symbolism of Alchemy is intimately related to the psychoanalytical process. Using a cycle of dreams of one of his patients, Jung shows how the symbols used by the alchemists occur in our psyches as part of an ocean of mythological images. Jung called this ocean our Collective Unconscious, and says we all draw images from this ocean in our dreaming. Jung draws analogies between the Great Work of the Alchemists and the process of growth of the psyche in our psyches today.
In drawing these parallels, Jung emphasizes the universal nature of his archetypes — symbolic images in the Collective Unconscious — and argues for the importance of spirituality in the psychic health of us all. By the way — the client whose dreams Jung analyzed with alchemical symbolism was Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) — Einstein nominated him for a Nobel Prize and the Nobel committee agreed. Jung and Pauli corresponded for 26 years until Pauli’s death, discussing the relationship of Jungian psychology and quantum physics at length.
A common idea amongst medieval alchemists was that the success of experiments depended in part on the experimenter’s personal integrity — their ‘purity of heart’. That if the experimenter had a heart tainted by greed or sin of any kind, the experiment was doomed to fail. That the experimenter’s moral stature would affect the outcome of their experiments. That strikes us moderns as being a little silly — but is it?
The Scientific Method is one of humanity’s greatest inventions. The relentless application of the Scientific Method has utterly transformed humanity. But Science also has its spectacular failures: the FDA labeling OxyContin as non-addictive, for example. Or recently it was revealed that about two billion dollars worth of research on Alzheimer’s was based on a fraudulent paper. In general, when a new scientific paper is announced that addresses some expensive problem we face (like Climate Change), my first question anymore is “who paid for this study” because anymore it seems that if you know who paid for it, you know their conclusions without even reading it.
To do good science requires more than being a ‘dispassionate observer’, it requires its own integrity, ‘purity of heart’ to get it right. Perhaps the medieval alchemists weren’t far from the mark after all.
P.S. Regarding the title of the prelude: A crucible is an essential piece of equipment in labs (both medieval and modern), in which things are subjected to high temperatures and melted. Hmm, I’ve experienced plenty of crucibles in my own life! You too, I’m guessing…