The Philosophers' Secret Fire, Mercurius and Daimonic Reality

Excerpt from Patrick Harpur’s The Philosopher’s Secret Fire

“Students of alchemy are often bewildered by the mass of contradictions in the recipes. We read that our sulphur is a fixed body and, in the next breath, a volatile spirit; or that our mercury is at one moment water, at the next, fire. At every 'circulation', the pairs of elements rearrange themselves such that the analogy which applies to the stage of Calcination, say, is reversed at Separation. A mythology, we recall, goes on permutating its elements and generating variants of its constituent myths until it is imaginatively exhausted whereupon it springs up again in a different guise. The alchemical myth seems largely to have exhausted itself in Europe by the end of the 17thCE, but it reappeared as C G Jung realized, as the psychology of the unconscious. He also noted that the overall aim of mythology, though never quite realized, is similar to alchemy in its seeking to reunite the opposites. Its symbol of reunion is the Stone in which all the pairs of elements are ravelled up in a grand marriage. No matter how unattainable the goal, the Work absolutely has a purpose in the way that all deep imaginative activity has not so much a fixed goal as a volatile Way. Alchemy is always going on whether we know it or not. It is the movement of the mythopoeic imagination itself. The alchemist merely collaborates with, and accelerates, the movement just as an artist does. In his struggle to transform the world he is also transforming himself, making his own soul.Authentic art always entails initiation, both for the artist and his client. It can only be made by the Self's imagining and never by what sometimes looks like this—the self-serving fantasies of the ego. Artists understand alchemy as it aligns with the long struggle with intransigent materials, the fusing of subject—object in the fire of imagination, the synchronous mirroring of inner—outer worlds. We are all prey to leaden archetypal despair; mercurial mood swings, sulphurous rage, blocked fixities and manic volatilizations, the blackness of depression, and to dreams of lacerating beasts, revelatory light ladies and a wise golden child—the fillius philosophorum...“

“But if Depth Psychology is one place where alchemy went—even the language of amplification, mortification, sublimation, projection, etc. is the same. Just as tribal myths are linked to initiation they are often like prescriptions for it, so alchemy can be read as an initiatory process. More particularly, it is a kind of cooking of raw materials into a new kind of material, the 'Stone'. As we have seen, tribal initiation rites (at birth or puberty for instance) often consist of a symbolic cooking of the initiates, which works by analogy with the literal cooking of food. The 'natural' biological person is transformed into an individual. The Work does not transform Nature into an individual, but the individual back into its (super)-Nature. To perform this task, the Philosopher cannot use the ordinary fire which transforms raw Nature; he needs a 'secret fire', an unnatural fire which will transmute inedible metals into an edible meta-Nature, the Elixir that will make him as immortal as the Stone and able to withstand any fire because he is himself composed of fire. The initiation of the Philosopher is like that of a shaman, who is likewise an acculturated individual returned to a super-Nature. The body of 'our matter', personified as Rex (King) or Sol (Sun) undergoes the equivalent of the shaman's dismemberment. The king is violently divided, maimed, mutilated, torn apart—before being conjoined with Regina (Queen) or Luna (Moon). The re-forging of the shaman's body with 'iron bones' is analogous to the immortal 'diamond body' of Chinese alchemy. However, many of the alchemical texts describe in different stages the birth of Sol; his mutilation in a way that is analogous to puberty rites; his marriage to Luna; his death followed by roasting (cremation) or putrefaction (burial); 'and his sub' sequent resurrection.”