Alchemy in the Anthropocene

Medieval and Renaissance European alchemy, peaking at the time of Shakespeare, is a heavily coded symbolic system. There are two historical streams to alchemy. First, as a misguided literal attempt to convert base metals into gold that acted as a precursor to modern chemistry. Second, as an abstract symbol system whose development and study aimed at gaining higher consciousness.

Carl Jung single-handedly recovered this alchemical tradition for modern times by treating alchemy as a coded symbol system of psychological growth and enlightenment, tapping into archetypes. This book offers a third way between matter and symbol – alchemy as embodied metaphor, transcending the literal and engaging the poetic. This approach differs from that of Jung, who turned a materialist alchemy into an abstract psychological code. In the approach taken in this book, alchemy offers an education into an imagination of matter offering a framework for contemporary living, where a language of substances replaces abstract terms describing psychological life.

But alchemy has other meanings and purposes – for example, as a once outlawed activity promising jail sentences for practitioners, alchemy is essentially political. It restores power not just to citizens to resist orthodoxies, but also to material life otherwise seen as inanimate. Giving meaning to the natural (material) world echoes indigenous traditions that see this world as animated and populated by unseen but felt energies. Such energies are the lifeblood of imagination and creativity as the poetic impulse in humanity.

The Anthropocene is an emergent age of ecological anxiety. We need languages and symbol and sign systems to effectively navigate and make meaning of this unfolding age.