Material Mysticism

Jung, in his groundbreaking studies of alchemy, opposes alchemy and Christian orthodoxy seeing the former as a humanistic revolt that, in an esoteric and symbolically displaced form, elevated the human to equality with God. Of course, the Neo-Platonists masters of magic, of whom we might take Iamblichus as chief, warn against exactly this kind of conclusion. The seeds of magical operation are graciously implanted in the natural realm (by way of correspondence) and are effective only by the grace of the higher gods. In this Iamblichus almost approaches the Christian concept of a miracle though such divine action is not exceptional or ad hoc like a miracle but part of the total cosmic operation. Nonetheless I think Jung was on to something. Reading a late hermetic thinker like Atwood (mentioned above) brings to light a profound tension in European culture between Christian and other, potentially subversive, elements. Atwood is an excellent case study in this as she was the wife of an Anglican clergyman and spent the majority of her days as a parson’s wife in rural Yorkshire. She was also intensely Christian in thought and expression. Why then would she seek the ‘philosopher’s stone? The Christian sacraments, one would assume, were all the ‘medicine of immortality’ she would need. I suspect there IS a revolt going on though not exactly the one Jung thought.

The revolt concerns matter. One reason I find alchemists difficult to read and alchemy almost impossible to grasp is that on the surface it seems to make a basic philosophic error. It takes the ancient notion of prime matter (a kind of pure potential) and claims that the matter that underlies all qualitative or substantial alteration can be refined and distilled into a substance that can be used to purify and elevate all other elemental matter into a state of perfection. What is more this is a distillation of immense healing power being charged with an energy perhaps divine in itself. This makes no sense at all if, like Aquinas say, you argue that prime matter is only ever ‘con-created’ with form and can have no existence of its own. It is a view of matter as heretical to ancient and medieval tradition as it is to modern Newtonian conceptions. It is divinisable, perhaps divine matter. As the purified soul is a perfect mirror to god so by correspondence is pure matter. Indeed, Atwood emphasizes, as do many of the texts Jung cites, that alchemy is simultaneously a psychic AND physical process. The transformed soul transforms the matter along with it and as the light dawns on the intellect from above so is the matter purified and elevated in what we might call a theurgical or even sacramental way. Matter has an infinite divine potential beyond its function as ‘pure potential’ or ‘nearly nothing’. It is active not passive and the operator liberates this power through a process of psychic, physical and ritual elevation. This, of course, also involves the heresy that mind can profoundly alter the structure of matter. The divinized flesh of Christ, received in the sacrament, is only a foretaste of a further revelation: the divine nature of the material realm itself in its intrinsic nature. In this sense we might see that Atwood was, after all, an anachronism. Her divine matter had passed on into the infinite standing reserve of modern techne even before she was born. We might then think of her revolt against a residual dualism in the Christian conception of a sacrament (which is only ‘divine’ by a miracle) as something that transpired in Yorkshire long after it had played out its fuller logic everywhere else. However, as modern techne has clearly reached its historical terminus we might want to consider whether the modern religion of matter should be reconsidered from her quirky angle if not abandoned altogether.