I recently came across a post relaying the alchemical symbolism in J.P. Rowlins' Harry Potter series of books and thought some of the passages referring to Alchemy were well done.

Excerpts by John Granger

What Alchemy Is

What modern people know of alchemy in my experience is almost inevitably wrong, so wrong that the use of alchemical imagery in English literature must seem absurd. One of the first things you learn in chemistry classes is that chemistry grew out of a kind of medieval voodoo called alchemy, a pseu-doscience whose goal was to try to isolate a philosopher’s stone that could turn lead (meaning base metals) into gold and bestow immortality on the alchemist.

This is still the predominant idea of alchemy in the popular mind: “Alchemy is stupid chemistry.” The second misconception about alchemy is that it was a fraud or quackery; the third is that it is a kind of witchcraft; and the fourth, coming to us from the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is that it presents the archetypes in the collective consciousness of humanity and the dreams of individuals.

If alchemy wasn’t “chemistry for idiots,” a con game, witchcraft, or a path into the unconscious mind, what was it? In its best and most representative form, it was a spiritual path to return fallen man to his Edenic perfection. (The history of alchemy is a complicated one, with its share of quacks, frauds, and lunatics, but I am referring to the sort of alchemy the English Greats used in their writings. Alchemies were also to be found in Jewish and Islamic areas as well as Christian ones.)

To understand how a science of metallurgy and physical bodies could advance the purification and perfection of the alchemist, body and soul, requires turning the modern worldview upside down. The alchemist, like all traditional or non-modern people, understood man to be essentially spirit (as man is created by the Spirit), then soul, then physical body, rather than the reverse. He believed the obvious, i.e., that the lesser thing comes from the greater thing, never the greater from the lesser.

His personhood or humanity he knew to be a joining of soul and body without seam—and his tragedy was that he was fallen, i.e., that he had lost his spiritual capacity or intellectus, by means of which Adam walked and talked with God in the garden. Alchemy was the means, in conjunction with the mysteries of the Church, by which he could regain this lost capacity. The substance changing from lead to gold was his soul, and the riches he would glean were spiritual riches—holiness and immortality. (Gold was considered the most perfect of metals, not just for its beauty but also because it did not rust or tarnish.)

The alchemist was helped in doing this by effecting a similar change in metals. Because the traditional worldview does not hold that there is a chasm between subject and object, that is, that objects do not have independent existence from their observers and vice versa, an alchemist understood the substances with which he worked as being related to him. This relationship amounted to a correspondence; as he purified himself in obedience to the work, the work would advance and his soul or bodily consciousness would go through corresponding changes.

This was not magic or work independent of nature, but an accelerating of the natural work by observance of supernatural, even contra-natural principles. Titus Burckhardt, who with Mircea Eliade is the authority on the history and meaning of alchemy, called alchemy

the art of the transmutations of the soul. In saying this I am not seeking to deny that alchemists also knew and practiced metallurgical procedures such as the purification and alloying of metals; their real work, however, for which all these procedures were merely the outward supports or “operational” symbols, was the transmutation of the soul. The testimony of the alchemists on this point is unanimous.

The Great Work

Alchemy is summed up in the adage, “To make of the body a spirit and of the spirit a body,” as Burckhardt noted elsewhere:

Gold itself, which outwardly represents the fruit of the work, appears as an opaque body become luminous, or as a light become solid. Transposed into the human and spiritual order, gold is bodily consciousness transmuted into spirit or spirit fixed in the body. . . . This transmutation of spirit into body and of body into spirit is to be found in a more or less direct and obvious manner in every method of spiritual realization; alchemy, however, has made of it its principal theme, in conformity with the metallurgical symbolism that is based on the possibility of changing the state of aggregation of a body.

As metals changed from rough ores and solid states to more and more pure conditions by change of states (from solid to liquid and gas and back again to solid, a process repeated several times) and by combination with catalysts and purifying agents, the alchemist affected changes in himself by corresponding changes in his bodily consciousness while attempting the work.

The Western alchemist by attempting to “kill” the ingredients, to reduce them to the materia prima, provokes a sympatheia between the “pathetic situations” of the substance and his innermost being. In other words, he realizes, as it were, some initiatory experiences which, as the course of the opus proceeds, forge for him a new personality, comparable to the one which is achieved after successfully undergoing the ordeals of initiation.

In other words, alchemy had a soteriological role for the alchemist. It is essentially a super-conscious or spiritual work that happens through correspondence with archetypes that are above, not below, individual consciousness.

So what was alchemy? It was a traditional or sacred science, supporting the work of the revealed tradition and its means of grace, for the purification and perfection of the alchemist’s soul in correspondence with the metallurgical perfection of a base metal into gold. It requires a view of man and of creation or cosmology that is opposite and contradictory to that of the physical scientist and chemist of today, for whom alchemists had only disdain; they thought of men who were interested in matter only for its manipulation as “charcoal burners” and anything but wise. To an alchemist, the chemist neglects the greater thing in the lesser thing—and in himself.

This science went into precipitous decline and corruption at the end of the Renaissance and especially at the Enlightenment, when it was eclipsed by the materialist view and priorities of modern chemistry. But it was kept alive by writers who found in its imagery and symbolism a powerful way of communicating Christian truth.

Literary Alchemy

If English Literature from its beginning to Rowling is front-loaded with alchemical devices and images, why is this so? What is the connection between alchemy and literature that makes these images such useful tools for writers?

I think the connection is probably most clear in drama. Eliade even suggested that alchemical work grew out of the initiatory dramas of the Greek Mystery religions. Shakespeare doesn’t just make asides to alchemy in his plays; many if not most of them are written on alchemical skeletons and themes. The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labours Lost, and The Merchant of Venice come to mind. Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory argued persuasively that Shakespeare built the Globe Theatre on alchemical principles for the proper staging of his alchemical dramas. Why?

If you recall your Aristotle on what happens in a proper tragedy, the audience identifies with the hero in his agony and shares in his passion. This identification and shared passion is effectively the same as the experience of the event; the audience experiences katharsis or “purification” in correspondence with the actors. Shakespeare and Jonson, among others, used alchemical imagery and themes because they understood that the work of the theater in human transformation was parallel if not identical to the work of alchemy in that same transformation. The alchemical work was claimed to be greater than an imaginative experience in the theater, but the idea of purification by identification or correspondence with an object and its transformations was the same in both.

Alchemical language and themes are a shorthand. The success of an artist following this tradition is measured by the edification of his audience. By means of traditional methods and symbols, the alchemical artist offers our souls delight and dramatic release through archetypal and purifying experiences.

That may be harder for some of us than the idea of alchemy as a sacred science. If you are like me, you grew up with the idea that reading was entertainment and diversion, and anything but life-changing. This idea, really only in currency for the last seventy or eighty years, is a gross misconception. Anthropologists, historians of religion, and professors of literature will tell you that the rule in traditional cultures, and even in profane cultures such as ours, is that Story, in whatever form, instructs and initiates.

In his The Sacred and The Profane, Eliade argued that entertainments serve a religious function, especially in a profane culture. They remove us from our ego-bound consciousness for an experience or immersion in another world. C. S. Lewis, in his Preface to Paradise Lost, asserted that this is the traditional understanding of the best writers, namely, that their role in culture is “to instruct while delighting.”

Alchemy and literature are a match because they both endeavor (in their undegenerate or orthodox state) to transform the human person.