Spirit Alchemy

The Alchemy of the Image:

Bringing it All Together

Chapter 7 Of the Master's Thesis:
The Elements as Archetype of Transformation

By Seth Miller
02.28.08

The Image in Alchemy

More so than any other tradition, religion, philosophy, or discipline, that of alchemy deals with images in a way that is fundamental.  Certainly alchemy does not have a monopoly when it comes to images – either in their formation or meaning.  But the alchemical tradition exemplifies the use of images not just as pictures of various elements, but rather as instantiations of processes which simultaneously call for transformation in the imaging subject while providing the key for that very transformation.  Thus alchemy is rife with images, symbols, mandalas, and other visual content which aim at being much more than static carriers of facts.  From the beginning, alchemists understood the nature of the logos through the help of images, and they expressed themselves in images.  We must not narrowly restrict our understanding of “image” to the realm of “pictures” or other physiologically visual phenomena.  Rather, image, alchemically understood, is a strange sort of djinni existing on many levels at once, moving freely between the above and below, the inner and outer, serving as an actual link between these seemingly disparate worlds.  At first we see simply an old lamp or bottle (we may say: a flask). But this flask contains a heavenly being in embryo, waiting to be called forth through a particular process – a process that inevitably leads towards transformation.  Like Aladdin, our task is to uncover the process behind that which at first appears as the simple word: “image”.  We must open this flask, the image, and examine it carefully, for like everything else, it is in a process of continual evolution.  In so doing, we will discover a variety of masks worn by the image, and if we pursue these transformations actively we ourselves will be transformed.

 

Image and Fact - Earth

Every image contains a basic structure, its shape and color as manifested to our visual sense.  This is the first level of the image, its overt form.  Additionally, this level includes the existence of the image as a specific representative of a fact, a bit of information.  Here the image simply stands in for a definite piece of content and is more or less unambiguous.  For example, an image of a cigarette underneath a circle with a line through it represents a singular fact: no smoking.  Thus we can speak of images at this level as signs – signifiers which are visual placeholders for some specific content, and in this sense they are designed to mitigate attempts at variegated interpretation.  When an image is primarily a sign, great attention is paid to the details of the form in order to make it different enough from other signs so as to make its associated ‘fact’ unambiguously clear.  This provides for great efficiency in communication.  Because images are inherently gestalts, they present themselves to us all at once in a non-linear fashion, and our visual brains can grasp the underlying fact without having to rely on the sequential nature of written or verbal language.  This level is the foundation and beginning of all further working with images, and is the bedrock upon which a deeper understanding can be achieved. 

Thus alchemists, in working with images, always begin with an understanding of this most overt aspect of images as signs, and have found it useful to actually form a sign which expresses this fact.  This sign is one of many for the element Earth.  Stated another way, when working from the first level of the image, we can recognize that this sign simply codes for the ‘fact’ that the basic level of the image constitutes its facts: its form, color, structure, and signification.

Image and Process - Water

If all images could be reduced solely to signs, then our visual experience and its associated capacity for imagination would be reduced to particles of dust – a collection of separate identities linking images and facts.  Such identities are essentially static, with surfaces that actually constitute the thing itself.  One can see the tendency for literalism and absolutism in people who tend towards this level of Earth, alchemically understood.  Yet beyond the capacity of images to act as signals, they also contain something at a deeper level.

At the second level of the image, we can come to understand that the manifest sign does not simply exist as a singular, independent entity, but rather is embedded in a flowing context of meaning.  For example, in the symbol for Earth, we see a triangle.  But this triangle is pointing downwards, as if to say, “things come to a point, right… here.”  The sense of gravity is evident, and we can imagine the triangle tipping easily to either side; reliance upon facts qua Earth is a precarious position, where the slightest imbalance tends to force a collapse to one side or the other (for example, in literalism and fundamentalism of all sorts).  In order to avoid this fate, we must consciously connect the overt fact with other facts, to create a stream of meaning in which an individual fact is upheld by surrounding facts.  In this discovery we recognize that any individual sign bears the weight of its meaning by virtue of the surrounding system of signs in which it is embedded.

Exoterically speaking, we can call this level of the image the cipher.  As a cipher, an image is a sort of cryptographic encoding of meaning – but the meaning isn’t only in the manifest form.  Rather, it exists by virtue of the fact that a particular process of encoding has occurred that allows the sign to take a particular form.  The form cannot exist without a preceding process.  In this sense, the Earth level of the sign is actually a residue or solidification of a series of related processes, which taken out of context looks like an individual, separate, and simple particular.  When seen as an Earth, a coded cipher looks like gibberish: “ifmmp.”  This is simply a series of seemingly separate, individual facts – letters – which bear no apparent relationship to one another.  The Water task is to identify the process by which the letters got there in the first place, the rule that connects the apparent individualities in a meaningful way to another set of facts.  In this case, the rule is “every letter is replaced by the next in the alphabet.”  Discovering this pattern allows the gibberish to take on meaning: “hello.”  The key to understanding images from a Water perspective is to identify the relationships between the various forms, until coherent movements or patterns of meaning start to become apparent.

 

Image and Reversal - Air

Going still further, we come to another level beyond that of the flow of meaning between signs.  This level of the image can be the most subtle and difficult to understand at first.  The primary quality at this level can be experienced as a reversal, often occurring in a moment of insight.  While swimming through the river of facts, a moment will come where concepts get stretched so far that suddenly something snaps and the direction of the energy flow shifts and reverses.  A wonderful word used by Jung, enantiodromia, expresses precisely this aspect, where something is taken so far to one extreme that it suddenly flips, in a kind of singularity, into its opposite.  An example of this principle of Air in action will help.

If we examine the alchemical symbol for Water, we see a downward pointing equilateral triangle with a bisecting horizontal line.  This is just the sign for Earth with the added horizontal component; therefore we can see how the element of Water still bears some of the qualities of Earth, but in a slightly transformed way.  Something has arisen from within the Earth, and is now permeating the lower half of the sign.  The Water forms a kind of lake in the lower half of the triangle, within and bounded by the Earth below, which acts as its container.  But rather than fill the entire sign, the Water reaches a self-made boundary (the horizontal line).  This is an analog to the physical property of water: it takes on the shape of its vessel, and spontaneously forms a coherent, flowing barrier when no vessel wall presents itself.  This horizontal surface acts to connect the whole periphery of the shoreline, allowing waves in any one part of the surface to reach all other parts of the surface.  A moving balancing lacking in Earth is now present, as if the horizontal bar is that of a tightrope walker. 

This type of Water-thinking, a linking of related facts, now leads us to an Air moment, when we realize that this new horizontal line, a boundary, is not simply a connector of facts, but must be a boundary between the water and something that is not actually represented in the sign: the air.  It is just at this place, where the Water has become liberated from the Earth, that it meets not just itself, but something beyond itself, the Air – a new context in which it finds itself embedded, exactly opposite in quality to its previous environment.  These considerations lead us naturally to the sign for the element of Air: an inverted sign for Water.

The triangle now points upward, but this shift is not simply a geometric, it is also symbolic.  The dividing line of the Water sign is maintained, but symbolizes now the Air experience of polarity in general, of the formation of opposites, complements, reciprocals, and enantiodromias.  Whereas in the water sign the horizontal bar symbolizes the lateral connection made between various points on a surface, in Air it represents a vertical division of one volume from another; completely polar domains are established which dominate the activity of Air thinking.

This example points more generally to the Air level of the image, which we can call the symbol.  What at first appeared to be a sign for some bit of knowledge ‘out there’, which was then linked to other external facts to embed it in a stream of meaning, now is recognized to be something even more subtle.  Rather than simply being a string of related facts, a moment occurs where the external image takes on a whole inner dimension.  Our consciousness may suddenly shift into a strange type of experience, which may be called a dual polarity. 

In such an experience, we have two complementary polarities arising essentially simultaneously.  The first polarity is an awakening in consciousness to the differential recognition of two things: the fact that the sign is experienced as a fact outside oneself, and the necessary complement to this recognition – that in order to have such an experience, one must also have a whole inner realm in which the fact is placed in order to be experienced.  The first polarity, which we can call recognition of the outer sign, simply sets up in consciousness a complementarity between the inner and the outer.  The reader should be able to see how this first polarity is expressive of the Earth element.

The second polarity is expressive of Water.  In the second polarity, simultaneous to the first polarity, we can experience that the pattern of flow between external bits of information in the sign out there sets up complementary patterns of meaning within.  Thus we can speak of an inner sign as well as an outer one.  In the second polarity we recognize that in addition to the ‘fact’ out there, a correlate, a mirror image of the sign, exists inside of us as well, and that its flowing relationships are analogs to our own inner states.

Thus a symbol is precisely that which connects our inner world to the outer world.  Looking at the image at the level of the symbol literally puts us into a polarity: we are taken simultaneously out of ourselves into the wider context in which the flowing patterns of meaning in the facts find themselves while having a direct experience of our own inner relationship to those same patterns.  The symbol takes us beyond ourselves by taking us into ourselves.

Thus, the modern alchemical scholar Stanislas Klossowski de Rola can point out that the alchemist’s pictorial language,

in which not a single detail is ever meaningless, exerts a deep fascination on the sensitive beholder.  This fascination does not even necessarily depend upon understanding.  If the reader will contemplate these images, that is to say go beyond their surface, he will often perceive that they correspond to another timeless dimension which we all may find deep within ourselves.  These profoundly haunting pictures have a polyvalent symbolism, and lend themselves therefore to various interpretations.1 (Klossowski de Rola, 1973)

This forming of connections beyond oneself is an essential element of alchemy.  Rudolf Steiner, who could be seen as a modern Rosicrucian alchemist, states that “true alchemy makes itself independent of sense-perception in order to behold the spiritual nature of the world that is external to man, but is concealed by sense-perception.” (Allen & Pietzner, 1981)  This ‘independence’ from sense-perception is a capacity that is trained by rhythmically going into the Air element – a capacity that is most easily exercised though alchemical work with lawful images.  By working with an image from Earth, through Water, into Air, one builds a capacity in which, despite the polyvalence noted by de Rosa, one’s thinking capacity becomes strong enough (Earth) to not dissipate (Air) in the face of multiplicities and paradoxes while simultaneously remaining flexible enough (Water) to keep from fixing a multiplicity into a single, dead answer.  This helps to maximize the potential for a greater meaning (Fire) to present itself.

One sees from the preceding type of discussion that the Air element is complicated, having to do with polarities, reversals, complements, opposites, reciprocals, and multiple simultaneous levels.  One simply has to look to the movements of warm and cool masses of air in the atmosphere to notice that it is precisely these qualities that permeate and rule climate and weather.  Yet the whole system of weather is driven by a principle beyond the atmosphere itself: the sun.

 

Image and Meaning - Fire

We have discussed the image as sign, cipher, and symbol.  What exists beyond the level of the symbol, an analog to the sun?  The pattern from gross to subtle continues with this new stage, the stage that is expressed alchemically through the element of Fire.  An understanding of the Fire element requires looking again at the previous three elements in a new way.  Just as the movement of Water led us naturally into Air, so a natural progression through the element Air leads one to ask of the image: “but what does it all mean?” 

A minimal amount of meaning exists in the identity of a sign with its labeled content in Earth, but this meaning is like a single bit of data.  In Water, the cipher encodes a whole stream of meaning through a process that connects each bit to its neighbor, but this meaning is essentially an outer meaning.  The Air level opens up the image from its inside – but in doing so we discover that the image ‘out there’ was really a mirror in which we were gazing at the opening of our own insides; the meaning at this level exists on an inner plane.  Now in the Fire element, something remarkable happens to the constellation of meanings being toyed with in Air.  Rather than multiply into infinity, the Fire element burns away all the insubstantialities and leaves only the most subtle shell of meaning – a meaning that links all the various interpretations through an underlying archetype.  Thus we can speak of a universal meaning, in addition to the inner and outer, and factual.

At this level, the image takes on the quality of an actual being.  All of the data, flow, and insight of the previous levels becomes a manifestation of a primal, objective, and peripheral but real coherence that although inexpressible, is directly knowable by higher human faculties, particularly the transformed heart’s capacity for intuition.  Here, the image itself is experienced as if it were actually speaking.  In Air, the image itself becomes silent, which, in true Air polarity-style, creates the space which the viewer fills in with a variety of interpretations.  This is why the transition from Air to Fire involves the capacity we could call listening to the image.  The last reversal required in passing beyond the Air level is a shift in the location of the silence from outside to inside.  By shutting down the factory that produces one’s inner dialogue, the image is then allowed to present itself to the inner silent space created willfully in the viewer.  This is where it speaks its truth – and it is a truth that is inclusive of all the previous aspects of the image.  In fact, the experience at this level involves a perception of why all of the previous levels take the forms that they do.  They seem to all fit perfectly and necessarily into a coherent whole as logical manifestations of the archetype through successive layers.

Using our example of the elemental signs, we first see that the sign for Fire is an inverted sign for Earth: an upward pointing equilateral triangle.  What used to be pointing downwards to a singular manifest fact, has, in a progression through the elements, been inverted.  Now it points upwards towards a singular unmanifest archetype, which doesn’t exist itself on the earth as a particular form, but rather is the underlying principle of the particular’s ongoing formation.  Just as the signs for Water and Air share a boundary, so too the signs for Earth and Fire share an inner space.  But while the inner space of the Earth sign is filled with a mass of dense facts, the space in the Fire sign is filled with the potential for meaning.  The main quality of Fire is that of transformation, and the Fire is in effect a transformed Earth, where all that was subject to gravity is rendered into something new via the forces of levity.  But at the same time, the Earth is also a transformed Fire.  How can this be?  It is only now, having worked through Earth, Water, Air, and Fire separately, that we can see something of the Fire, the archetype, lying behind the elemental signs as a whole, which will help to answer this question.

 

The Elemental Mandala

The reader should recognize that the approach to the elements taken so far is primarily indicative of the Earth element.  To a minor extent some relations between the elements have been brought to light (Water), but a comprehensive picture is missing.  This should bring to awareness a whole new level of thinking with respect to the elements: perhaps in the form of the following question: “What if the system of the elements were to be applied to itself?”  This presents an interesting test of the system at the Fire level.  If the system claims that there is a Fire level, which is somehow the reaching towards an archetype or driving, unifying principle, then what would this Fire level be for the system of the elements as a whole?

Here words and concepts begin to fail us, in the sense that no individual sentence or phrase can embody the principle entirely.  Not even the linking of sentences can do it.  Rather, we must shift our thinking itself – we must make our thinking elemental.  This requires a certain capacity for intuition and a willingness to surrender what one already knows in order to let the process itself lead one forward.  We could say that a proper examination of the Fire element will lead one into an understanding of the whole of the four elements: as facts, processes, polarities, and as wholes, which themselves all form a single, more encompassing whole – the archetype of the elemental process itself.

Now we can make explicit, in an image, something of the nature of this process, using the signs discussed above.  Working to understand the Fire level of the image leads to a larger picture of how everything fits together to make a single, coherent process.  Each individual element exists as a manifestation of the Fire element itself.  Although speaking of the elements in this way may seem elliptical, it is meant to be both explicit and exact – because at the Fire level, it is not only the specific nature of Fire that must be addressed, but the whole itself, including all the previous elements.

Thus we come to recognize the larger nature of the Fire element, both in its inexpressibility and its all-encompassing nature.  We can see that as a cycle, the Fire element leads to a new Earth.  We can show this relation through a sequence of images, pictured below.

We begin with the symbol for Fire at stage A.  This Fire does not arise arbitrarily but is a direct consequence of the ongoing evolution and transformation of the facts of the Earth level.  No individual fact, nor all of the individual facts together can make the Fire.  Rather, the arrival at the Fire level is simultaneously accomplished along with the transformation of each individual fact into its own Fire state.  It is precisely the coherent, interconnected, simultaneous transformation of each individual fact in the context of the whole that allows the whole to arise for us – they are one and the same process.  This is represented in stage B, where three individual Earths have been simultaneously transformed to the Fire level in a lawfully connected way, forming the larger Fire triangle.  The arrow points both ways to indicate that stages A and B are actually interchangable and identical.

The coming together of all the transformed Earths has led to something new, embedded within the original Fire element, and it looks suspiciously like a symbol we have already encountered!  It is a New Earth.  The experience at the Fire level is generally not one to be sustained: the activity of the Fire quite quickly expands beyond the capacity of the individual system to contain it.  This is represented at stage C, where we picture the individual Fire elements flying away in all directions, toward the infinite periphery.  We could say that the contents of the original Earth facts combust themselves in their transformative Fire process, but while they leave their old natures behind, they do not simply disappear.  Rather, all of the bits of Earth form out of their combined burning/transformation something which falls out of the process and is ‘left behind’, pictured above at stage D.  What we are left with is an insight – not the activity that produced the insight, which has now disappeared from our view.  This insight becomes a new ‘fact’, which can itself evolve through the process again towards its own Fire state, signified by the looped arrow to stage A; the loop can actually represent another complete cycle through the elemental mandala, but one that works at a higher level, as if moving along a spiral.  The actual Fire sign itself is thus revealed to be an alchemical crucible for the transformation of its own constituent Earths.  This is an exact analogy for the spiritual alchemical work undertaken by an adept.

With respect to the discussion of images, our Fiery insight yields up a new sign: the elemental mandala pictured below.  Thus, by undertaking the alchemical cycle with the signs for the alchemical cycle, we are led to a new sign – one which embodies, integrates, and completes in a coherent package all of the previous stages.  Alchemists would call the production of this new Earth an ash.  This new sign, the mandala, makes explicit the overall meaning and interrelationship of the individual signs in a singular representation, so that the feeling of the whole takes on a quality of rightness that is lacking in any of the individual elements taken out of this context.  The development of this quality of exact imagination is ultimately one of the major reasons for the use of images by the alchemists themselves.  It was implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) recognized that the alchemical language of the image could act as both a carrier of the content of the practice of alchemy, while also serving as a key that unlocks the alchemical process itself in the developing alchemist.  In other words, the alchemist, in order to glean the meaning of the content of the alchemical image, had to work with the alchemical cycle – but the image itself actually served as a guide and teacher to the alchemist, training him or her in the very faculty required to read the image.  Thus, alchemical images are meant to be not simply bearers of content, but transformative agents.

The archetype of alchemical images is to act as a direct teaching of the alchemical process itself – not as a specific content but as a living process.  In this way the image can act as a transformative process in the viewer.  Marie Louise von Franz, a pupil of Jung, points out this power inherent in the symbol:

Jung called the symbol-making function of the unconscious ‘transcendent,’ for not only does it transcend our conscious grasp, but it is the one thing which, through symbol-formation, enables man to pass from one state to another. We would be forever stuck in an acquired habit of consciousness if this transcendent function of the psyche did not help us over into new attitudes, by creating the symbol, which shares in both worlds. The symbol is associated with both present and future psychic states, and therefore helps us over.2

Although here interpreted psychologically, with our modified understanding of the elemental cycle we can see how it is the archetype itself which helps us with this transformation from one state to another.  The image is then experienced to be a coagulation of the archetype – in other words, the Fire level of the image is the archetype.  The primary difference between alchemical images and other images has to do with the fact that the alchemist, in creating the image in the first place, has already worked through multiple cycles of the elemental process, so that the new Earth of the image embodies all the stages that have come before.  We could say that the image is ‘warmed’, having already been through a process of ‘digestion’. 

This consideration leads us to a further understanding, which has been implicit in all of the above discussion both in its form and content, viz. the fractal nature of the alchemical process.  It becomes clear that each element is not fundamentally ‘pure’ in the atomic sense of the word.  Rather, each element is actually a particular expression of the whole process itself.  That is, the alchemical process can be said to consist of nothing but itself – its own archetype – its being.  We can formulate a new image expressive of this fact, although with the recognition that at these levels such a thing cannot be actually embodied, in words or images, but can only be hinted at.  Thus, the process is infinite and fractal – self-similar at all scales.  This is a new way of getting at the idea which alchemists called the ‘prima materia’ – which is both heavenly and earthly, one and many at the same time.

The signs for the elements are therefore somewhat unique in their character, as the images are pictures of themselves – of their own archetypal processes.  Although the alchemical process can be used to examine any image, when used to examine the elemental symbols, the process becomes doubly self-reflexive.  This transforms the signs themselves into keys for their own unlocking.  Here we see a real example of the highest alchemical principle in action: as above, so below, as below, so above.  And we can see that this must be the case – that the alchemical cycle of the elements, all the way from its archetype to its physical manifestation in signs, must holographically carry the meaning of the whole.

Let us now return to our starting point and see if we have made any progress.  What is useful about the alchemical approach to images?  What does it teach us about the image that may be missing otherwise?  Let us use our new-found tool, the alchemical mandala, to very briefly address this question.  At the Earth level, we can see that images are not simply facts, but are multilayered manifestations of hidden (but not secret) realities; they are signs.  In Water, we notice that these manifestations arise through a specific process and are expressive of relations; they are cyphers.  In Air, we notice that images additionally have the capacity to bridge the inner and outer worlds, and thus can act as potent tools for communication (or manipulation!); they are symbols.  The Fire tells us that images even have the capacity to transform us in profound ways, because ultimately everything is an image of the fire; they are archetypes.

An alchemical approach to images, in true alchemy-style, leads beyond a strict consideration of images into the field of transformation itself.  It should by now be obvious that the archetypal nature of the elemental process truly is archetypal, working as an active patterning principle by virtue of which manifestation occurs, both in images and elsewhere.  Thus, the elemental mandala, as an archetype, is expressive of transformation itself, and can therefore be fruitfully applied in any arena in which transformation occurs.  And, as the Rosicrucian saying “This too, shall pass” subtly implies, means essentially every process.  The elemental mandala is powerful tool that can be used for efficiency and directness in understanding any situation involving transformation.

In other words, it shouldn’t bear pointing out that the discussions taken up in this paper can be approached from the perspective of any single element.  Yet it is by actually working through the cycle experientially from Earth to Fire that you, the reader, will be able to discover the extent to which there is more to these words than simple dust.

Bibliography

Endnotes:

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