ALCHEMICAL GREEN FIRE: ANNOTATING THE BOOK OF NATURE

If alchemy is understood to involve the transformation of Nature by Art, can it still be considered a reading of the book of nature?

Craig Chalquist

Chalquist.com
 2021

According to Jungians, the primary colors of alchemy are black, white, and red, in that order, with yellow sometimes coming before black. Their habit of systematizing alchemy descends from analyst Jolanda Jacobi, former student of Jung and a strident advocate of linear categories. But the alchemists thought and practiced more widely than these narrow categories suggest; for many of them, the color wheel spun as it would, and green was primary, with the Emerald Tablet far from the only example.

For instance, the Splendor Solis (1598), attributed to alchemist Salomon Trismosin, tells us: 

Hali the Philosopher, says there of: “This Stone rises in greening, growing things.” Wherefore when the Green is reduced to its former nature, whereby things sprout and come forth in ordained time, it must be decoded and putrefied in the way of our secret art.[1] 

In this work to fashion the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, we follow nature’s lead. We begin our encounter with the materia prima, the initial state of chaos, by founding the work in its natural origins. The entire opus depends on understanding how it springs ultimately from the operations of the world of nature. The resulting materia ultima virtue depends upon alignment with these organic, elemental, and mineral forces of growth, decay, death, and renewal.

Jane Caputi amplifies Leopold Aldo’s image of the “green fire” seen in a dying wolf’s eyes: linking it to archetypal female divinity, Isis, Demeter, and Persephone, she traces the image to alchemy too, where it emanates from the womb of the earth and signals a regeneration of the kind Leopold undertook on a tract of sick land in Wisconsin when he died.[2]

For some alchemists, reading the book of nature is akin to making annotations to it via transformative experiments. In alchemical theory, the primal green god-stuff or soul-stuff makes everything grow, even minerals buried in the earth. These minerals ripen very slowly as they evolve from “base” metals like lead into “noble” ones like gold. In fact, the truest kind of gold was said to be of a greenish color like that of a plant. This “non-ordinary” gold represents a particularly pure distillation of the greening force of the primary substance. The adept’s job is to assist the evolution of the metals into purer, “greener,” and livelier states.

This is where Paracelsus comes in. In Opus Paramirum he writes, “When the physician [and by implication the alchemist] finds Nature open and unconcealed before him, then will the origin of health and sickness be unobscured...Hence, the physician must be called to the profession. Medicine grows out of the earth for him”.[3] Paracelsus takes his place in a long line of alchemists who believe their efforts to be healing and regenerative, with the wisdom and language of nature the medicinal source of their craft.

These and other alchemists proceed, at least in their imaginings and writings, from primal patterns inscribed in the natural world. They work in creative collaboration with what they read there.

However, the alchemical tradition is filled with references to “puffers” and “blowers” who aim for transmutation to get rich and establish prestigious reputations. (Interestingly, dry-pan seekers in the California Gold Rush were also referred to as puffers because of how they blew dust from collected gold.) These anti-alchemists read the book of nature only to warp it to their own advantage, and not only for the sake of greed.

One might argue that the shadow of technological might now cast over the entire world originates in unconscious alchemy. Mary Shelley warned us about this; while her husband-to-be worked the bright side of the figure of Prometheus, Shelley wrote Frankenstein from what might be called a premonitory technological nightmare. It bears reflection that the doctor in that book considered himself a kind of alchemist, one dedicated to the hubristic goal of extinguishing death itself. Today, his ideological descendants assail the genome, promote “transhumanism,” seek to upload consciousness into digital ephemerality. Their unconsciousness of the myths they reenact is dangerous. When nuclear bomb researchers experimented with atomic fission at Cal in Berkeley before transferring their efforts to the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead) in New Mexico, a rumor circulated that they had been attempting to make gold from lead.

“For healthful I can be,” warned Mercurius, the mage-god of alchemy, “and poisonous.”

Jung argued that the alchemists projected the unconscious, whether personal or collective, into their bubbling retorts. That is why they felt matter to be alive and responsive. But in terrapsychological terms, the wisdom-seeking alchemists aimed at giving more interactive consciousness to the World Soul whose sparks of aliveness invest everything with animation. We do not project so much as find ourselves projected into by the presence of things, materials, elements. A meadow is pounded into a golf course, and nearby residents get depressed. The meadow is “depressed” too. The alchemical vas offers an appropriate symbol for the psychological field in which things of the world demonstrate to us their qualities of corporeal mindfulness and are in turn acknowledged in human consciousness. Projection is actually the absence of what really occurs alchemically: a mutually transformative interaction.

Reasons for reading the book of nature alchemically during the 12th-16th centuries, which Jung considered a golden age for alchemy, are not very different from why we read today, however much the act of reading has changed down the centuries. Some of us read to get rich, to exert power over nature, to acquire the upper hand; to exploit, extract, dominate, and control. Such ambitious people “read” the book of nature only to turn the text against itself in acts of ecological and psychological sacrilege.

But some of us read because we like the material, feel enlivened by it, and hope to grow a little wiser through our hermeneutic efforts. We read with humility, eager to be taught. We can even hope that once we get a feel for underlying patterns without as well as within us, we might contribute to the book a little, or at least help others understand it better. For we too are nature, if only a single species among many.

References

Caputi, Jane. 2011. “Feeding Green Fire.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 5(4), 410-436.

Trismosin, Solomon. 2011. Splendor Solis: Alchemical Wanderings. Theophania Publishing.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. 1999. Paracelsus: Essential Readings. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.