A child of metallurgy and the
traditional crafts, alchemy cannot be easily separated from the concrete
aspect of existence any more than it can be separated from the
transcendent. Indeed, both become interfusible, interdependent and
interchangeable. If alchemy appears elusive, it is precisely because it
cuts across categories ordinarily seen as mutually exclusive. For this
reason, alchemy may be better approached not so much as a fixed domain
of activity, but as a nondualprocess. Indeed, its sphere of operation is better comprehended as existing betweendomains, or better yet, as the medium in
which more ‘fixed’ domains proceed. Like the fusible nature of metals,
this medium may be regarded as the ‘substance’ from which fixed forms
‘solidify’, and into which they ‘dissolve’. As such, it is the conditio sine qua non for
transmutation and dissolution, for converting one form into another,
and for dissolving and abrogating the familiar boundaries or borders
between apparently fixed states.
One
explicit example of this is the fact that the key object of the western
alchemical quest itself—the philosopher’s stone or ‘universal medicine’
(the perfecting agent par excellence)— is also, literally, a universal poison. In the Greek alchemical manuscripts, the expression is given as katholikon pharmakon. The word katholikonmeans ‘universal, whole’, while pharmakon,
a very ambiguous word, means not only ‘medicine’, but also ‘poison’,
and ‘magical philtre’. According to the mercurial Jacques Derrida (who
perhaps understood ambivalence better than anyone):
this
‘medicine’, this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already
introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its
ambivalence. This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of
fascination, can be—alternately or simultaneously—beneficent or
maleficent’.
‘If the pharmakon is
ambivalent’ continues Derrida, ‘it is because it constitutes the medium
in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links
them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into
the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness,
speech/writing, etc.)’ Thus, in conjunction with its ability for transformation, the (universal) pharmakon is also a medium for cosmic enantiodromia.
This
capacity for fluid interweaving between different states of existence
is perhaps most eloquently expressed within alchemical tradition proper
by the seventeenth century Sufi, Muhzin Fayz Kāshānī, who described a
process in which ‘spirits are corporealised and bodies spiritualised’, a
process that, according to Henry Corbin, takes place in an
ontologically real, yet liminal, zone—the mundus imaginalis—which Corbin defined precisely as a juncture between the eternal and the transient, the intelligible and the sensible: the intermonde or intermediary realm par excellence. Importantly,
Corbin’s phraseology is not only drawn from Persian and Arabic mystical
texts (which deeply tinctured the alchemy of the time), it is also
consonant with other, earlier Islamicate alchemical sources, such as
the Kitab Sirr al-Asrar(Latin: Secretum Secretorum), whose Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald
Tablet) famously states: ‘that which is above is like that which is
below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to perform
the miracles of the one thing’. This formula, which is further ascribed to [pseudo] Apollonius of Tyana’s Book of the Secret of Creation, orBook of Causes (Kitāb Sirr al-ḫalīqa, or Kitāb al-῾ilal), bears a still deeper identity to the hieratic art as practiced by the Neoplatonic theurgists. According to Proclus,
the
theurguists established their sacred knowledge after observing that all
things were in all things from the sympathy that exists between all
phenomena and between them and their invisible causes, and being amazed
by that they saw the lowest things in the highest and the highest in the
lowest.
In
the alchemical purview, the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ aspects of existence
are ultimately reciprocal and interdependent expressions of a deeper,
more inclusive reality. Thus, to separate alchemy into a purely material
and a purely spiritual aspect in a mutually exclusive fashion, without
recognising their fundamental complementarity, is to miss the greater
flux between the volatile and the fixed with which alchemy is almost
invariably concerned. As a hieratic art, the alchemical vision of
reality encompasses all levels of existence within the holarchical monad, and as such engages the
world—including the world of duality, which is subsumed in the greater
whole—as a nondual reality: a simultaneously abstract and concrete
integrum.
In speaking of
alchemy as a nondual process it is important to understand just what is
meant when the term ‘nondual’ is used. The word itself is a formal
translation of the Sanskrit word advaita (a- + dvaita, ‘not dual’), and
is used to indicate an epistemology in which both ‘seer’ and ‘seen’ are
experienced not as separate entities but as a unity, a single act of
being in which both the subject and object of experience become agent
and patient of one divine act. While nondualism forms the basis of three
of the broadest currents in eastern metaphysics (Buddhism, Taoism and
Vedānta), it is also expressed explicitly or implicitly in the western
philosophical canon by figures such as Plotinus, Eckhart, Böhme, Blake,
Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead and Bohm, to
name but a few. Despite this, the idea of nondualism has not been
readily understood or accepted in the west, and this is because western
constructions of reality, especially after Decartes and Kant, are based
precisely upon a strict affirmation of mind-matter or subject-object
dualism. At the root of the matter lie two fundamentally different ways
of experiencing the world. One is the ‘everyday’ experience available to
everyone; the other proceeds from a metaphysical experience
theoretically available to, but not necessarily attained by, everyone.
Although dualism and nondualism describe two different experiences of
the world, it is not simply a recapitulation of the materialist-idealist
divide (which is simply another dualism). As David Loy remarks:
none
of these three [Buddhism, Taoism, Vedānta] denies the dualistic
‘relative’ world that we are familiar with and presuppose as ‘common
sense’: the world as a collection of discrete objects, interacting
causally in space and time. Their claim is rather than there is another,
nondual way of experiencing the world, and that this other mode of
experience is actually more veridical and superior to the dualistic mode
we usually take for granted. The difference between such nondualistic
approaches and the contemporary Western one (which, given its global
influence, can hardly be labelled Western any more) is that the latter
has constructed its metaphysics on the basis of dualistic experience
only, whereas the former acknowledges the deep significance of nondual
experience by constructing its metaphysical categories according to what
it reveals.
What
is proposed, therefore, is to begin to understand certain forms of
alchemy as an expression of a nondual experience of (and engagement
with) the world, not only with regard to the dualities of spirit and
matter, but also their corollaries: subjective experience and objective
experiment. As Prussian poet and Kulturphilosoph Jean Gebser
observes with regard to the structures of consciousness that underpin
entire modalities of civilisation, nondualistic or aperspectival
epistemologies do not exclude but integrate more perspectivally-bound epistemologies within a diaphanous whole. [ What
this means is that apparent dualities are not ultimate; rather, they
are relative expressions of a deeper reality that is ultimately free
from the limitations of dualism and opposition. It means that one can
see all things in the ‘ultimate’ reality, and reciprocally, the
‘ultimate’ reality in all things. It is to see, with Blake, ‘a World in a
Grain of Sand’ and ‘Eternity in an hour’. According
to this view, one eventually fails to distinguish between the ultimate
and the relative in a rigidly dualistic way, abandoning the attribution
of any inherent ontological primacy to one or the other. Because there
is no longer any essential contradiction or opposition
perceived to exist between them, so-called ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’
realities become co-present, interdependent expressions of a deeper,
‘existentiating’ field of being. What
is more, according to the ancient epistemology ‘like knows like’, the
nondual, aperspectival or integral nature of reality, in both its
relative and ultimate expressions, can only be known by the nondual,
aperspectival or integralconsciousness. It is in this sense that alchemy, in its more profound sense, necessitates a metaphysics of perception.
Occult Aspects 