Alchemy; making Gold, making Soul
My 20-year journey with the art of transformation
There are certain teachings, systems, places and people that we meet time and again on our spiral human journey…until eventually we know -they are not just an integral part of our myth, they make up its very backbone.
Alchemy has been a major part of mine.
alchemy {al·chy·mia}
/ˈælkəmi/ • noun
from the Arabic al (“the”) and the Greek χυμείᾱ and/or the Egyptian khem
(khēmeía, “art of alloying metals / chemistry” and/or “the Black Land”, referring to Egypt)
• a series of operations for transmuting base metals into gold
• the process of inner transformation culminating in the union between the conscious & unconscious parts of the psyche; the journey to wholeness
2001 -the seed
My very first encounter with Alchemy was through the wildly popular book “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho, when I was 17. It had been given to me by my then-boyfriend, whom I had hugely idealised with my very romantic, adolescent mind -only to have my heart hugely broken also, soon after.
A year later, I am sat on my hotel balcony, on the island of Samos, on my very first solo vacation, with “The Philosopher’s Stone and the Tree of Life” by Israel Regardie open in my lap.
A gentle evening breeze is touching my skin, the scent of oregano fills the air, the near full-moon is shedding its light, and shivers are moving up and down my spine as I drink in the cryptic words of Hermes Trismegistus that I don’t quite understand, but feel so magnetically pulled toward.
The memory is vivid. An early spark of recognition.
Years later, I would make the association; Samos is the birthplace of one of the most influential Greek alchemists, Pythagoras.
Back then, spirituality was my coping mechanism and my escape from all the human, emotional “messiness” I had no idea what to do with. On that solo trip, I was trying to work through that painful break-up in the only way I knew -by rising up and out of my body and into the ethereal.
If I had to imagine myself as a building, I would have been a skyscraper extending all the way up into the clouds, while floating in the air, high above the ground, rootless.
Looking back now with my current understanding, I see -I was reaching to the archetypal, without a strong ego foundation or any life experience to ground it into. It felt intoxicating. Exhilarating. And quite inflating indeed…
“Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego’s rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche.”
-C.G. Jung
2012 - Spiritualising Matter
Nine years later, more than halfway through my Jungian psychotherapy training, I need to pick a topic for my MA dissertation. At the same time, I am a devoted yoga practitioner, in the final stages of my teacher training. Spirituality still plays a major part in my life and worldview, and by now, it has become strongly rooted in yogic philosophy. It is Eastern; solar, transcendental and oriented toward Enlightenment.
I have been in therapy since the beginning of my training, but haven’t really experienced it yet. There is a lot of theory, but not enough practice so as to integrate it. The bricks that would create my ground floors are starting to get stacked, but are in no way solid structures.
Alchemy shows up for me again. This time, through the lens of psychotherapy; Carl Jung recognised in this Medieval system a reflection of the process of analysis and of individuation. In what was considered till then a pseudo-science that had been pushed aside in favour of “real” ones, Jung saw a map for the journey of the Soul toward wholeness -and initiated a revival of Alchemy that continues to rise in popularity to this day.
Always attracted to the symbolic and the esoteric, I started noticing similarities between the symbolism of the chakras, the energy centres of the body in the tradition of Kundalini/Tantra Yoga I was very familiar with2, and the alchemical imagery we studied in the programme. My research focus gets shaped; I am going to compare and contrast the Chakra System with the stages of the Alchemical Opus, as Parallel Paths to individuation.
Writing the dissertation over one summer was a powerful experience, and an intense one too. I fully embodied the “mad scientist in the lab” archetype, spending my days immersed in complicated theory and rich imagery, discovering connections that blew my mind. I truly believe that half of that dissertation came from my books and my mind, and half of it from my dreams and my body.
The actual title I used was: “Turning base metals into gold, spiritualising the human body”. Right now, I wish I could pick a different second half! Because there is no part in me that sees “spiritualising” as a goal anymore. But that was part of that chapter for me. And, beyond the title, it still is my most meaningful writing.
My lens in composing that piece was the liberation current3; I followed the rising of Shakti from the root to the crown, where she meets Shiva and awakens the thousand-petalled lotus, representing complete identification and union with the Divine. The movement was from the physical to the spiritual, from the gross to the subtle; spiritualising matter. The path of ascension.
“Soul, to me, means “embodied essence,” when we experience ourselves and others in our full humanity – part animal, part divine. Healing comes through embodiment of the soul. The soul in matter is what I think the feminine side of God is all about… The feminine soul is what grounds us; it loves and accepts us in our totality.”
-Marion Woodman
After I graduated, the time had come to move from the theory to the praxis of psychotherapy. I embarked on a decade-long practice, directly working with people through the nigredo (blackening) phase of their journey, the dark night of the soul -one of the many we face in this life.
Here, it was all about those lower floors. My hands (our hands, together with my clients) were in the dirt, in the soil, in the mud. Intimately engaging with the messy emotions, with the suppressed shadows, with building a strong ego that could hold it all, from the ground up.
Throughout that decade, my spirituality took on a completely new, more Western turn as well; I progressively moved further and further away from yoga, and stepped into the world of Priestessing and the sacred feminine, which was starting to make its great return.
This new path was embodiment and humanity-oriented. It was lunar. Rather than working with abstract energy, our ‘material’ was our immediate, specific life experiences. It wasn’t about transcendence anymore, but about bringing the archetypal down and into the body. The path of immanence and descent.
2022 -Making Soul
Fast forward to late summer of 2022…I am processing an experience of great loss, when my dissertation calls to me again, after a very long time. As I revisit it one August evening, sat in my sanctuary-home in Glastonbury, with the setting sun warming my face, I start to see things…differently. I read it differently.
I close my eyes and feel an activation in my body. The same shivers I had felt on that balcony 20+ years ago. Within a few minutes, connections get made, things that have been floating around in my mind for ages fall into place, my inner and outer journeys get woven together…and a new chapter officially opens its doors.
I had been feeling the need for integration for quite some time, sensing the two worlds I’d been immersed into over the past two decades longing to come closer together, but it was a process I couldn’t force.
What follows is a reimagining of the entire Opus, the Work of Alchemy, through the lens of wholeness and the body, the lens of Soul. This time it is all about bridging; the personal and the transpersonal, East and West, sun and moon, the emotional and the spiritual, the heights and the depths…Both/and.
The destination: embodying a home-Self with both foundation and apex, Psyche and Spirit -and finding gold in the in-between, in Soul. Growing whole, and wholly.
That August evening, I receive the bones of a new practice -what turned into Ekstatic Alchemy; The Dance of Human and Holy.
And with it, a new phase in my work is born, in which Alchemy takes centre stage.
This new era saw the completion of my therapy work, a strong return to my Jungian/Depth and Dance/Movement roots, and a focus on the practice of Soul-Making over healing and “therapising” -more on that in my next post...
“The alchemical art and its allegories are the drama of our own souls —playing out the individuation process on the wheel of life”
-Jeffrey Raff
Jung believed that Alchemy, as a psychospiritual process, took place through the mechanism of projection; the alchemists “saw” and experienced the contents of their psyche in their material, as properties of the metals they were experimenting with. Transformation happened through imagination. It was deeply personal and yet collective.
I believe the same is true for those of us who are called to study and practice Alchemy -or any similar system- to this day. We experience it anew, every time we circle back to it. We see it with new eyes, are drawn to different elements and are offered what we need to move in the direction our Soul is headed.
We project onto the system the dynamics playing out in our psyche and receive our ever-wholing Self reflected back to us. It becomes the container, the mirror, the ground...literally, the crucible for our transformation.
The alchemy is in the dance, in the dialogue, in the relationship.
And the journey continues...
I would love to hear...
Do you have a relationship with a system that deepens and evolves throughout your life, revealing more of itself to you as you do the same with it?
What might be the backbone of your soul journey?
To our Wholeness…
Image: Emblem 2 from Philosophia Reformata – Johann Daniel Mylius
It feels important to say here that that was my understanding of yogic philosophy and practice, my projection onto and experience of it, as a white person, having been taught yoga in both traditional, Eastern and Western environments -more on that to follow in future posts.
https://anodeajudith.com/currents-of-energy/