Alchemical Transformation: 3. Citrinitas (Surprise) W. Zeitler [PIANO]
Advent Meditation
The last two weeks we’ve discussed the transformation of lead into gold in Medieval Alchemy, including the metaphorical transformation of the human heart from its default ‘leaden’ state into the ‘gold’ of Enlightenment or Oneness with God. Commonly this was described as taking place in four steps. The first step is ‘Nigredo’ — darkness. One thing about seasons of darkness, especially our personal trips to the ‘underworld’ in times of loss and grief, is that they sharply clarify to us what’s important and what’s not so much. Then we saw that the second phase, ‘Albedo’, is about letting go of the ‘dross’, the ‘chaff’ we identified in the first phase so we can focus on the ‘wheat’ that we want to keep.
In those seasons of darkness and winnowing, we are dealing entirely with the Known — wheat and chaff familiar to us. We know what we’re keeping, we know what we’re letting go. But with Citrinitas we’re surprised by something new, something unexpected — that could only come into being because we did the work of Darkness and Winnowing.
Consider Joseph. He learns that his fiancé is pregnant, and he knows the child is not his. In those days, ‘betrothal’ was legally binding — Joseph and Mary were for all intents and purposes legally married, awaiting only the ‘technicality’ of the wedding ceremony and consummation. It’s something like a marriage had to go through escrow to ensure ‘clear title’, etc. Typically it was about 9 months between betrothal and marriage, which served two purposes: 1) it ensured that the bride wasn’t already with child, and 2) it gave the husband time to build a house or make other arrangements for his new family. (It’s not like starter homes were plentiful in first century Palestine subsistence agricultural towns. The estimated population for first century Nazareth was about 500, and 300 for Bethlehem.)
And it also doesn’t hurt to think about the differing attitudes towards children in agricultural vs. urban cultures generally. Broadly speaking, on a farm, children are relatively free labor, and a large family is insurance against injury and old age. (And until modern times, infant mortality could easily take half your children.) So, broadly speaking, it was a matter of survival to get busy having as many kids as you could. In urban cultures like ours, however, children are an expensive luxury.
Meanwhile, under the circumstances, Joseph would have been within his rights to have Mary stoned to death. In his dark circumstance, Joseph does his own ‘winnowing’ — he decides he can’t be married to Mary, but he doesn’t want harm to come to her either. So he decides to end the marriage quietly. (If couples consummated things with each other while betrothed but before the wedding, nobody really cared.) Joseph tries to be ‘righteous’ in the fat middle of a dark situation — bad for him, worse for Mary. And then he has The Dream: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit…”
Alchemical transformation is like that: we do the work of the Darkness, and then the Winnowing, and then the unexpected boon, the unforeseen benefit appears. Opportunities open up, the unimagined becomes a present reality. We’re surprised by possibilities we couldn’t possibly have foreseen.