Intimations of Alchemy

It seems fairly simple, really—as the mythical and symbolic presentation for the psychology of transformation, alchemy essentially draws a processional map that shows us how to stop remaining as brute beasts and start becoming awakened, compassionate, divine beings who are inherently wise and good. This transformation from beast to priest or priestess is the entire reason for human existence. To forego its achievement in the pursuit of power, wealth, fame, or other shallow frivolities is to forego one’s birthright which is a blissful, ecstatic, peaceful, and vibrant consciousness simultaneously unique, i.e., “thus come,” and in perfect oneness with the indivisible divine.

Alchemy is an allegory of the emergence of human freedom, which, according to Rollo May (1975), “involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our fate. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness” (p. 100). In other words, this transformation requires a high degree of personal responsibility (self-awareness) which manifests as anticipation, desire, effort, and focus. Each tussle with recurring anxiety, each unsettling dream, each uprising of emotional armies arrayed against us, each series of irrational impulses or obsessions, and each and every moment of unconscious projection functions as a day, a month, a year, a decade at work on creative divine emergence. It is precisely from within these psychological precincts of soul-pathology (nigredo) that a polished, refined, and purified product (lapis philosophorum) emerges, for our truest work is undertaken in myth and fantasy, in prayer, and in the realm of a mystically inclined molecular structure where elemental dances unfold like dragon-painted fans in the deft hands of a young maiko.

To achieve this transformation, ninth-century Zen master Yunmen advises to: “Make your whole body a mass of inquiry, and with your three hundred and sixty bones and joints and your eighty-four thousand hair follicles concentrate” (Aitken, 1991, p. 7) on your work of emergence, for the divine cannot live in impure (beastly) matter, the matter at hand must be altered. Or, as Rilke put it, “You must change your life.” Paracelsus and Dorn explain that “the denser, concretistic, daytime mind . . . reaches its limits; for . . . the ‘men of crasser temperament,’ . . . there is no way into the ‘untrodden, the untreadable regions’” (Jung, 1942/1967, p. 171, [CW 13] para. 210). Accordingly, for the ultimate mystery to materialize, material reality itself must become something else—less body, more soul and spirit. The former must be vanquished but without falling into the trap of concretistic literalism. Sri Aurobindo (1993) explains what happens when the process is complete, how delusions simply evaporate:

When the psychic being comes in front, there is an automatic perception of the true and the untrue, the divine and the undivine, the spiritual right and wrong of things, and the false vital and mental movements and attacks are immediately exposed and fall away and can do nothing; gradually the vital and physical as well as the mind get full of this psychic light and truth and sound feeling and purity . . . . (pp. 206-207)

A total revolution then, in body, mind, and spirit which transforms the very essence of the organism. It reminds me of Portia’s impassioned speech in The Merchant of Venice when she insists that “earthly power doth then show likest God’s, when mercy seasons justice” (4. 1. 194-195). We season ourselves with mercy, love, and truth so we become tender(ized) and calm. This is, I believe, what is meant by alchemical transformation.

Aitken, R. (1991). The gateless barrier: the Wu-men Kuan. New York, NY: North Point Press.
Aurobindo, S. (1993). The integral yoga. Sri Aurobindo’s teaching and method of practice. Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Light Publications.
Jung, C. G. (1967). Paracelsus as a spiritual phenomenon (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 13, pp. 109-189). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1942)
May, R. (1975). The courage to create. New York, NY: Northam.

Rainer Maria Rilke and the Psychology of Religion

In the Upanishads, we are told a story about how, in the beginning, and in his natural state, God the creator (Self) was utterly transparent to himself and entirely known, so much so that in a short while he became bored and invented a game of hide and seek which he began to play with himself. The image is thus of an original, unitary, and divine Self distilled into many beings who are relocated to a mundane, tellurian world where a (theatre) play was devised to keep the illusion (from ludere, to play) alive and make it all very convincing (Maya). But the game was so good, the illusion so real, that the creator Self eventually forgot himself there and became lost. There are countless other stories from mythology that also attest to the original—but lost, missing, or absent—divine nature of the human soul. Accordingly, undoing the inherent agony of being lost in a world where the divinity of one’s own nature remains out of reach is the spiritual work of re-membering to which every human life is yoked by necessity and by design. C. G. Jung called this indispensable spiritual work the teleological nature of the human psyche. James Hillman called it soul-making. The alchemists named it the magnum opus. 

Rilke lived it in/through poetry. 

When the original Self is transmuted into material physicality, a forgetting occurs. In Plato’s myth of Er, for example, reincarnating souls pass through the river of Lethe (forgetting) so that all knowledge of previous affairs of the soul and of the integrating purpose of the forthcoming life are lost. But apparently, we are not alone on this journey of remembering: an emissary/daimon—the holder of our soul memory/pattern—accompanies us in this rebirth journey. Ira Progoff, in his lecture series “Waking Dream and Living Myth (2010),” offers the image of a newly born soul, calling it an “organic soul” and comparing its nature and process of development to the seed of a plant, much in the same way that Hillman speaks of the acorn theory. The idea is that each individual life contains a specific life pattern within its seed/soul, a pattern which gestates, then, slowly, evolves into a mature specimen of its species. If we think of the original divine Self as a unitary whole, then we can imagine the soul pattern of each individual life as one thread in the giant tapestry of a unitary divinity. In this way, by living out our life pattern (growing from acorn to oak), we each become creative weavers of a jointly held divine destiny. Or, as James Hollis (2010) puts it, “We are asked to become the individual in order that our small portion of the unfolding of the divine may be achieved. To flag or fail in that task is to injure God” (p. 44). In other words, failing to realize our soul pattern impoverishes not just our own, but the transpersonal anima mundi or world soul. 

Fusing body with soul and giving it voice through the imaginal language of poetry was the pattern contained in the soul of Rainer Maria Rilke. But the crucial characteristic of this fusion—namely, the part of it which requires work—is beautifully depicted in the tao of Rilke’s inseparable human and soul life. Rilke’s life itself unfolded as a process of religious magnitude precisely because his work involved making god real through art, for, ultimately, it is through art, through the creative act as work, that god (the creator) is born into the world. As Lou Andreas-Salomé explained, this is the very meaning of religion. She explained that each individual contains a piece of god—a unique and personal image of god contained in the seed/soul/psyche—and that by living out this specific, individual life/image we are, in turn, both creating god and being (re)created as god. Our images—human and divine—are thus forever entwined in a double helix of ongoing creative work, of mutual co-creation. As the poetry of soul-making, Rilke’s work is therefore deeply religious for it fuses art, religion, and psychology (the holy trinity) into one unified and inseparable whole. Andreas-Salomé thus identified a condition she named the “religious affect” which calls for both humility and pride since our lives are simultaneously alchemical vessels (bain marie) for the creation of the divine and mere (sinful?) mundanity continually devoid of a divinity who is always absent (playing hide-and-seek), continuously sought, found, and lost again. Archetypal psychology, too, is ultimately “a religious project since its primary concern is for the soul and its relationship with the Gods” (Khoie, 2019, n.p.). 

Studying the life and work of Rilke has given me a deeper comprehension of the real meaning of soul-making, a level of understanding which eluded me before. Since my vocation involves becoming a scholar of archetypal psychology I would venture to say that this more in-depth knowledge is of incalculable value not just to my vocational aspirations, but to the ultimate purpose of my life which is to realize essential truth for myself. 

Hollis, J. (2010). The archetypal imagination. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press. 

Khoie, G. (2019). The religious psyche. [Personal blog]. Retrieved from http://www.gelarehkhoie.com/jungian-studies/2019/9/11/the-religious-psyche

Progoff, I. (2010). Waking dream and living myth. [Audio lecture]. Retrieved from amazon.com