Psychology and Alchemy: Ancient Roots & Modern Problems
“Wholeness is in fact a charisma which one can manufacture neither by art, nor by cunning. One can only grow into it and endure whatever its advent may bring”
How can alchemy support the soul in the face of ongoing cataclysm?
This is a question I am asking myself day in and day out in my private practice, working with incredibly intelligent folks coming to therapy seeking a compassionate witness as they wrestle with the enormity of challenges they are facing in their daily lives. The human instinct is to recoil from pressure, pain, and the ricochet of our own inner distress. However one of the grandfathers of psychodynamic theory, Carl Jung, intuited that moving into and integrating the shadow and facing the thing which frightens us can actually yield a much more powerful result. Jung continued the work of great philosophers, scientists, theurgists, astrologers and alchemists who came before him in his quest to map the human soul, and how to heal its most un-healable wounds. His work in this field has formed the basis for the approach I use in my clinic, which combines modern psychological approaches and alchemy. Alchemy can be simply explained as the process of taking two elements and combining them in a crucible where heat is applied, and allowing the natural process of their transmutation and reconfiguration into a third, different substance. Alchemy is a natural process unfolding all around us all the time, and gives us powerful clues into how we can live into our creative potential whilst allowing the pain, distress and pressures of life to function as a crucible to transmute darkness into light. Alchemy is, in my opinion, the way Divine and creation work in harmony with humanity to generate rich new possibilities for consciousness to evolve into deeper connection with itself, others, and the Universal Soul (or what religious folks might call ‘God’). We can see alchemy at work all around us:
Seed and soil into a lemon tree.
Sperm and egg into a human.
Grit and talent into a business strategy.
The truth is, humanity has been living in rolling waves of revolution since always. The upheaval we are experiencing now is not a new phenomena. What is new is that we now live in a tech era where we can all know about all.the.things all.the.time and so we now live with collective overwhelm, as our primal nervous systems struggle to integrate a cacophony of stimulation. This overwhelm makes it increasingly difficult to find or remember out deepest tethers to reality. Most of us have been taught to avoid pain at all costs. The combination of these two unconscious drivers in the human soul - the overwhelm and distraction, and the insistence we have about avoiding of pain, leave many of us reeling in a constant state of anxiety, depression and nervous system disregulation.
The last thing to go, when we’ve been living like this for a while, is hope.
Hope that things might feel better one day. Hope that someone will be waiting for us when we get home. Hope that the pressure will ease, the illness will recede, the gamble will pay off. Hope is a potent motivator, and keeps us tethered to the possibility of goodness as a ground of Beingness in which we can drop anchor. If I am sitting opposite a person who can connect to hope, the work to steady the soul in the face of pressure or pain is very straightforward and simple.
However, human lives are often not straightforward or simple, and there are many moments where what we actually need is someone who will provide the necessary container for us to turn and stare into the yawning abyss, and as Nietzsche said, let it stare back at us.
There are times when speaking of hope becomes violent, those sparse times where the bald facts must be examined and their heft measured and weighed. There are moments for despair, for being silenced by heartbreak so devastating that death feels like release, like a break, like an appealing option. These are the moments the archetype of the Mage or the Hermit appears for us, asking us if we would like to retreat within, and apprentice at his alchemical workshop.
When we lose sight of hope, what is actually happening is that alchemical transformation is being wrought on us, sometimes against our will, and we have a range of choices about even that. I call the hope-less place the tomb, or the womb of god, or the belly of the whale, or the void of de-creation. They all mean the same thing. These are places of profound alchemical transmutation, and they do not let us go until they have had their way with us.
In this place, the meeting of the abyss, we are commanded to leave all that we have known, and surrender to the not-knowing of a metaphoric death. The death of hope is the last death the abyss extracts from the soul, and we return to the centre of our own Fibonacci sequence and realise we have arrived at what is both the end and a new beginning. From here, anything becomes possible.
Our human free will as powerful co-creators of reality invites us at this zero point of creation to call out from the ether what we are ready for next. Many of us decide (unconsciously, usually) that we are not ready for anything new, and so we co-create similar timelines of victim consciousness, arrogance, separation, ego-posturing and powerlessness that we have experienced before. We learn nothing from this, except to avoid pain at all costs. When we decide to make the unconscious conscious (which is the work I walk people through), we can choose mastery over previous themes which may have dominated our life story, and make new choices. We can choose connection, pleasure, rest, abundance, and fertility. First we choose these things in really small ways. We make our bed, we drink more water. We get more sunshine, we scroll less, numb less, distract less. Then we begin choosing these things in bigger ways. We say no when we need to, we stop overcommitting, we renegotiate soul contracts, we ditch habits that keep us looping in addiction. Once we have nailed down these personal habits, we notice that our small choices have lead to larger consequences. We notice we don’t seem to have any fake people left in our lives. That our relationships are reciprocal and nurturing. That there always seems to be enough. Time, money, love, food, energy - to go around.
These are the moments we see the magic of alchemy unfolding in graceful ways through our lives.
Once we have become proficient at mastering personal alchemy, we are ready to use it as a tool to support us when cataclysm comes. We can use it to support others. We lose our primal fear of exclusion from the tribe, from the fire, from the face of the divine.
We begin to wake from our deep sleep and remember that we are divine, that we are the fire, that we are our own tribe.
As above, so below. As within, so without. As the universe, so the soul.