Alchemical Process Research Articles

The Cauda Pavonis and Byatt's Female Visionary in the Tetralogy

ABSTRACT British writer A. S. Byatt employs alchemical imagery substantially in her Tetralogy. She redefines god as an androgynous being in the four occult narratives, and the four gods represent virginity, life, death, and rebirth, the four stages of an alchemical process, which also symbolize the life stages of the main character, Frederica Potter. The alchemical structure serves at least a double purpose for Byatt. First, she successfully brings her heroine's sex versus intellect conflict into a metaphorical scheme already constructed by Jung. Second, she successfully creates a whole repertoire of female visionaries whose prototypes are crosses between fertility goddesses and alchemical divinities, and by so doing, she underlines the importance of intellectual pursuit for her female artists.

Cross and Crucible: Alchemy in the Theology of Paracelsus

Paracelsus was not only a reformer of medicine with a preference for medical alchemy, but also emerged as a radical church reformer. However, he only rarely used the imagery of alchemy as a parable for theological salvation. Fire as the driving force for every alchemical process was also suitable as an image for the purification of souls. A central idea of alchemy, to transfer a substance from its still impure original state into the purified final state, was very much in line with Paracelsus’s doctrine of the Last Supper, according to which the mortal human who had descended from Adam is to be brought to a new birth through baptism with the Holy Spirit. As an alchemist, Paracelsus was keenly interested in the transfiguration of Christ, which he first explained alchemically, but later magically, probably according to the model of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSES AS A FACTOR OF FORMATION OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

The article is devoted to the problem of the formation of personality in the modern information society and the influence of the unconscious person on the surrounding world. The author analyzes the psychoanalytic approach to the consideration of the personality by Z. Freud. The author also considers the conflict between the principle of pleasure and the principle of rationality and its influence on the interaction of personality and society. The author characterizes the psychoanalytic approach of J. Frankl. The problem of the mutual influence of personality and society, namely the processes of interiorization and exteriorization, is revealed. The theory of E. Neumann about the influence of the unconscious on the functioning of consciousness is described in the article.E. Edinger’s scientific work is also analyzed by the author. Parallels between the alchemical processes of the unconscious person and their reflection in the behavior and activities of the individual were made. The author analyzes also the modern view on the problem of person and reality in quantum mechanics. In this context, A. Puzikov’s approach is considered. The problem of objective and subjective realities has been raised. The concept of proto-reality is revealed in the article. The influence of the choice of personality from the endless options on the formation of actual reality is explained in the article.

Creating the Freedom to Move: Reply to Goldberg and Grusky

In current times, more and more of us are seeing patients who are afraid and unable to make genuine contact with another human being. Their self is more undeveloped than false—more unrealized than broken—and the psychoanalytic, alchemical process of turning reality, truth, and lived experience into meaning often fails, as they wither in psychic encapsulation or retreat. Peter Goldberg and I address the project of how to develop the capacity to play—to help patients come into being and develop a self. Goldberg (this issue) highlights that the analyst’s animating presence and psycho-sensory engagement has alway been present in psychoanalytic processes but usually resides in the background of a treatment, but this crucial inductive dimension of the analytic method comes more to the foreground with the treatment of unintegrated patients. Zoe Grusky (this issue) discusses the medium of play therapy as a means to create transitional space. In my reply, I underscore that a critical component of the project of reclamation, or “inductive dimension” of the treatment with some melancholic patients, is for the analyst to help the patient separate from self-states of non-being that are also anti-life, by meeting the patient where she lives and survive being destroyed; this sort of object-usage is critical to building subjectivity and restoring faith in Life.

Ramón García, Featured Poet: Brother Bluebeard and Other Poems

In this commentary on the “Brother Bluebeard” sequence by featured poet Ramón García, I consider the profound and terrible revelations this mythic poem gives about our own dreaded times, as well as the wisdom it brings us, patterned on the archetype of initiation—descent into an underworld. In his gender-fluid retelling of the Bluebeard legend, the narrator of the poem is a man who sleeps with men, but who over the course of the poem identifies with the women whom Bluebeard has slaughtered. This is at once a highly political sequence of poems, in which we can recognize the Bluebeard in our current national story, a Jungian series of poems that illuminates the alchemical process of mortificatio and rebirth, and a story of trauma and spiritual recovery.

Aqua vitae, aqua permanens: dreaming, drowning, swimming and surfing in analysis.

In response to the question 'Who is My Jung?', this paper describes the profound personal impact of Jung's creative / artistic approach to the unconscious, beginning with my discovery of The Red Book at the age of twelve. Echoing the flow of my own dream-life, I trace the course of two analyses through the alchemical process of solutio, which began with numinous dreams of tidal waves and plunged us into inter- and intra-psychic analytic relationships that evoked vestigial memories of our first aquatic world in utero.

Alchemical Transformation

On multiple levels, in various degrees of scale or metaphor, the work of Sally Weber illuminates alchemical processes. Each singular artwork in a particular exhibit of hers might embody its own microcosm of emergent ideas, somehow inseparable from the macrocosm of the whole show.

The Alchemy of Play

Jung devoted his late career to alchemy, convinced that it revealed the psyche's deep structure. This structure is not static, but dynamic. Jung saw that the alchemists described, through naïve projection, a process by which the psyche realizes its highest potential, called by the alchemists the philosopher's stone or the elixir of life. From a psychological perspective, we realize our highest psychic potential in an ongoing creative engagement with life and the world. Using theoretical and illustrative clinical material, the author examines alchemy through the lenses of Jung's and Winnicott's perspectives and shows how the alchemist's prima materia suggests a form of consciousness that Jung refers to as participation mystique and that Winnicott refers to as transitional states. Winnicott describes a process for moving from subjective fantasy to a creative relationship with the world. This process aligns with the alchemical process of moving from the prima materia to the elixir of life. Winnicott's psychology also shows aggression's necessary role in this process. This understanding of the role of aggression in the mind's self-construction accounts for the necessity of the dark nigredo phase in the alchemical process. Alchemy's goal, the elixir of life, is the correlate to Winnicott's notion of play: not so much an activity as a way of being and living creatively. Clinical material from play therapy, seen through Winnicott's views on play, are used in conjunction with Jung's seminal insights into alchemy to yield new perspectives on both psychology and alchemy.

“True Religion”: Individuation, Alchemy, and Poetry

The most vital urge in every being, the urge to self-realize, is the motivating force behind the individuation process. With the internal compass of our very nature set toward self-realization, the thrust to become who and what we are derives its power from the instincts. On taking up the study of alchemy, Jung realized his long-held desire to find a body of work expressive of the psychological processes involved in the overarching process of individuation. Here, Jung saw the individual's opus in the individuation process mirrored in the opus of the alchemical procedure.Like alchemical images, poetry can also shed light on individuation. Poetry's languages of symbol, imagery, and feeling are able to bring the concept of individuation vibrantly to life, adding nuance and conveying the numinous energy associated with an individuating experience. In this presentation, I entrust to poetry—one poem by D. H. Lawrence and several of my own—the task of bringing individuation and its underlying alchemical processes to life.

Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages by Zachary A. Matus

Reviewed by: Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages by Zachary A. Matus Claire Fanger KEY WORDS Franciscans, Medieval Europe, 13th century, 14th century, alchemy, elixir of life, Roger Bacon, Vitalis of Furno, John of Rupescissa, Christianity, apocalypticism, Joachim of Fiore zachary a. matus. Franciscans and the Elixir of Life: Religion and Science in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 216. This book is focused on three late thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century Franciscans concerned with alchemy, and in particular interested in the alchemical notion of the elixir of life. The elixir was a material substance with spiritual properties; its formula was occult (though tended to involve distillation). It was understood as a medicine of wide application that could extend lives and that conferred spiritual gifts, enhancing intellect and other virtues and powers of the soul. The authors primarily under scrutiny are Roger Bacon (˚c. 1292), Vitalis of Furno (˚1327) and John of Rupescissa (˚after 1365). Matus does not suggest there is anything like a Franciscan “school of alchemy” or even a single way of thinking about the elixir itself; rather he is interested in the nexus between the alchemy and the Franciscanism of each author, and uses his analysis of this relation as a way of fingering broader connections between religion and science in the period. In a general way it is not news that that premodern alchemy in all of its cultural milieus has religious ramifications. In Christian culture, alchemical processes, for the writers that countenance them, are likely to be treated as sacral, and to be associated with allied Christian processes or substances linking the material and spiritual, such as the Eucharist, or resurrected bodies. Yet I know of no other book that sets out to examine Christian thinking about alchemy using such a specific set of focal points within a specific tradition of Christian religiosity. This is a valuable book from many angles; it is [End Page 489] readable, curates its data points well, and conveys fascinating information in a useful package. The book comprises four chapters and a brief conclusion. Chapter 1, “Franciscans and the Sacral Cosmos,” examines historical contexts for the Franciscan interests in the natural world that ground the alchemical discourse, starting with Francis’s Canticle of Brother Sun, and drawing interestingly on Peter John Olivi and his views on Genesis. Chapter 2, “Three Elixirs,” concerns the traditions surrounding the elixir of life that informed the theological and cosmological models of each of his Franciscan subjects: Roger Bacon connects the elixir to the resurrected body; John of Rupescissa reads it, as the quintessence, a literal distillation of heaven. The treatment in Vitalis’s largely compilatory work, Pro conservanda sanitate (On Preserving Health), examined as a kind of bridge between the two views, is important largely because it draws on widely available encyclopedic texts. Vitalis understands the elixir as distilled wine or brandy, though with numerous applications for it that move this mundane substance into esoteric realms. Chapter 3, “The Apocalyptic Imperative,” looks at apocalyptic speculations and how these connected to alchemy. This chapter is a kind of keystone for the book, not only because all the authors under scrutiny had an urgent sense of impending apocalypse which they tended to view (with greater or lesser degrees of openness) through a Joachite lens, but because their thinking touches on crucial events in the history of the Franciscan order in the controversies over the Spiritual Franciscans who were suspected of heresy and periodically repressed after 1295—a point when, as Matus notes (101), the condemnation of alchemy and other esoteric sciences also becomes more acute. The chapter draws in a useful treatment of Joachim of Fiore and his Trinitarian understanding of sacred history and shows how concerns with esoteric science and the natural world come to seem vital under pressure of imminent apocalypse. Chapter 4, “A Subjunctive Science,” discusses how Franciscan ritual life opens up a way of adumbrating the human relationship to God and the cosmos. The term “subjunctive science” refers to the way knowledge was understood to concern that which must happen as importantly as that which actually happens—“the world...

Stoicism and Alchemy in Late Antiquity: Zosimus and the Concept of Pneuma

At the beginning of the twentieth century, historians associated the alchemy of the third-century alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis with Platonism and Aristotelianism, explicating his theory of alchemical transmutation under the intellectual umbrella of these philosophical traditions. More recently, scholars of alchemy such as Christina Viano and William Newman have suggested a connection between Zosimean alchemy and Stoicism. Through a close reading of texts in Zosimus’s corpus, this paper posits a Stoic interpretation of several aspects of Zosimean alchemy, focusing on the concepts of pneuma and tension. For Zosimus, I argue, pneuma played a vital role in colouring metals, while tension conferred stability and cohesion upon metallic compounds. This interpretation suggests that Zosimus applied Stoic concepts to describe the alchemical process of tincturing metals.

The Royal Typographer and the Alchemist: John Dee, Willem Silvius, and the Diagrammatic Alchemy of the Monas Hieroglyphica

John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (1564) was a work which involved a close collaboration between its author and his “singular friend” the Antwerp printer Willem Silvius, in whose house Dee was living whilst he composed the work and saw it through the press. This article considers the reasons why Dee chose to collaborate with Silvius, and the importance of the intellectual culture – and the print trade – of the Low Countries to the development of Dee’s outlook. Dee’s Monas was probably the first alchemical work which focused exclusively on the diagrammatic representation of the alchemical process, combining diagrams, cosmological schemes, and various forms of tabular grid. It is argued that in the Monas the boundaries between typography and alchemy are blurred as the diagrams “anatomising” his hieroglyphic sign (the “Monad”) are seen as revealing truths about alchemical substances and processes.

Duality To Unity: A Heuristic Exploration Of The Experience Of Being The Other

Centred in the afro-centric spiritual belief that relationship to the other is a path to wholeness my research asserts that we all have an experience of being other. Combining heuristic research methods with creative techniques common to Transpersonal psychotherapy, my belief is that by working with one’s unconscious experience as the outsider metaphorically and symbolically it is possible to access spiritual wholeness. Following Moustakas’ heuristic stages, this researcher therefore undertook a six-month study into his own experience as other. As well as the recording of dreams and creative exercises designed to access the deeper symbolic experience as other, this researcher also undertook 4 ‘self-interviews’ designed to challenge his own resistance to entering the shadow. During the interviews visualisations, bodywork and drawing were used to understand the internalised experience as other, whilst sand tray work, common to play therapy, utilised symbolism and metaphor to express the unconscious experience as other via projection. By observing the products of the interviews and the creative exercises through the lens of an alchemical process, it was found that working heuristically with one’s experience as other is a route towards better relationship with self and others. KEYWORDS Transpersonal, difference, diversity, creativity, individuation

Rose Cross, Saturn’s Menagerie and the Coal Mines of Silesia

This article analyzes the artistic visions of Teofil Ociepka, an overground mine worker known as one of the Polish Naïve Art painters. The artist, who was strongly influenced by aspects of Western Esotericism, was the initiator and most prominent member of a Silesian occultist circle of painters called the Janowska Group. He believed that his artistic talent was given to him as an esoteric gift to use as a practice for self-development. Very colorful and uncommon visions of this and other worlds brought his artistic works popularity. His insight into the miners’ subterranean work, which can be understood as a kind of alchemical process, in combination with his extraterrestrial and celestial images produced a unique and inspiring collection of paintings. The article traces the esoteric inspirations in Ociepka’s painting in various periods of his career.

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Professional Alchemy, or How to Make Bread from Air and Literature from Science

This article examines writings by Carlo Emilio Gadda dedicated to industrial technologies used to produce fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen. Although these essays, along with other writings of the 1930s explaining scientific concepts to a popular audience, have been essential to recent reconsiderations of Gadda’s affective and intellectual relationship to fascism, scholars have neglected the fundamental importance in Gadda’s thought of the technologies themselves. These industrial processes — and the call for their invention — focalize a critical intellectual current of the nineteenth century: a new awareness of scarcity and related anxieties about population growth. Engaging with work by Michel Foucault and Mitchell Dean, I note the emphasis on labour that follows from this concern with scarcity and ‘overpopulation’. What results is a cruel riddle of governmentality: labour is the antidote to the scarcity engendered by overpopulation; but the reproduction of labouring bodies results in further overpopulation, and thus further scarcity. The solution to this riddle — vital to the development of fascism — is the promise offered by synthetic fertilizers: that of nourishing labourers with thin air. This article proposes that Gadda uses these technologies as a philosopher’s stone, catalysing another alchemical process: that of his own professional transformation from engineer to writer.

Orthogonal sampling in free-energy calculations of residue mutations in a tripeptide: TI versus λ-LEUS.

In a recent article (Bieler et al., J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2014, 10, 3006), we introduced a combination of λ-dynamics and local-elevation umbrella-sampling termed λ-LEUS to calculate free-energy changes associated with alchemical processes using molecular dynamics simulations. This method was suggested to be more efficient than thermodynamic integration (TI), because the dynamical variation of the alchemical variable λ opens up pathways to circumvent barriers in the orthogonal space (defined by the N - 1 degrees of freedom that are not subjected to the sampling enhancement), a feature λ-LEUS shares with Hamiltonian replica-exchange (HR) approaches. However, the mutation considered, hydroquinone to benzene in water, was no real challenge in terms of orthogonal-space properties, which were restricted to solvent-relaxation processes. In the present article, we revisit the comparison between TI and λ-LEUS considering non-trivial mutations of the central residue X of a KXK tripeptide in water (with X = G, E, K, S, F, or Y). Side-chain interactions that may include salt bridges, hydrogen bonds or steric clashes lead to slow relaxation in the orthogonal space, mainly in the two-dimensional subspace spanned by the central φ and ψ dihedral angles of the peptide. The efficiency enhancement afforded by λ-LEUS is confirmed in this more complex test system and can be attributed explicitly to the improved sampling of the orthogonal space. The sensitivity of the results to the nontrivial choices of a mass parameter and of a thermostat coupling time for the alchemical variable is also investigated, resulting in recommended ranges of 50 to 100 u nm(2) and 0.2 to 0.5 ps, respectively.

Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras and the Alchemical Process of Individuation

The Yoga Sūtras , a Sanskrit text authored by the Indian philosopher Patañjali (ca 100 b.c.e . to 200 c.e. ), are interpreted using Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s (1865–1961) model of Western alchemy. The alchemical process gave Jung a language with which to understand the psyche’s transformation from unconscious to increasingly conscious states. This process, which Jung termed individuation or Self-becoming, serves as the interpretive lens to view the Yoga Sūtras . Alchemical stages are compared to Patañjali’s definition of yoga ( citta-vṛtti nirodhaḥ ), the obstacle to achieving yoga (saṁyoga) , and the goal or end of yoga (kaivalya) . Through utilizing an alchemical hermeneutic the aim of the Yoga Sūtras reads not as a final separation of matter and spirit as traditionally interpreted, but as depicting a process of reunification and differentiated wholeness.

On the History of Refining Mercury in Tibetan Medicine

In this brief study, the origin and spread of the alchemical process of refining mercury in Tibetan medicine will be explored. Beginning with early sources from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, it will be argued that Orgyenpa Rinchenpel (O rgyan pa Rin chen dpal) caused a turning-point in the processing of mercury in Tibet by introducing a complex alchemical process previously unknown. This knowledge, including the manufacturing of new pills containing mercury, soon spread through Tibet and was incorporated into the medical expertise of local schools such as the Drangti school (Brang ti). Later it was most prominently practised by Nyamnyi Dorjé (Mnyam nyid rdo rje) in southern Tibet. This particular tradition was upheld by Chökyi Drakpa (Chos kyi grags pa) of the Drigung school, who taught it to his gifted student Könchok Dropen Wangpo (Dkon mchog ’gro phan dbang po). During the seventeenth century, two main transmission lines for refining mercury emerged, one associated with the Gelukpa school (Dge lugs pa) in Central Tibet and one with the Kagyüpa school (Bka’ brgyud pa) and the Rimé movement (Ris med) in eastern Tibet. Both will be discussed in detail, highlighting important proponents and major events in their development. Finally, the situation in the twentieth century will be briefly explained.

Look Here Upon This Picture, and On This

Roberto Chavez: Paintings and Drawings (January 23–February 23, 2013) at Notre Dame de Namur University's Wiegand Gallery in Belmont presented a varied collection of multicultural influences and styles. Chavez's work is impressively universal and compelling and, as such, exhibits many of the ways that the images of the collective unconscious are experienced through personal perception and projection. His subject matter ranges from the delightfully attractive to the horrifically explicit. His styles range from Realism to Surrealism, combining Asian with European with Chicano motifs. The archetypes of the persona, the shadow, and their synthesis in the alchemical process is discussed in terms of Jung's own writings about the philosophical “egg,” a powerful symbol of the wholeness reached through the “detached consciousness” of the individuation process.

‘To Paint the Portrait of a Bird’: analytic work from the perspective of a ‘developmental’ Jungian

Jungians who are trained in the so-called 'Developmental School' straddle the two worlds of psychoanalysis and classical Jungian thinking. This is not always an easy position in which to be, but if the tensions can be held it is potentially a rich and creative way of working. In this paper I attempt to explore this position using the poem, 'To Paint the Portrait of a Bird' by Jacques Prévert as a metaphor for the analytic endeavour. From this perspective I hope to illustrate the importance of being able on the one hand to hold and maintain a clear frame for the careful and detailed exploration of the transference within which the more malign aspects of the psyche might be expressed, and, on the other, to allow the alchemical process of mutual transformation that lies outside the conscious understanding of the analytic couple.