I was reading Marie-Louise von Franz’s Alchemical Active Imagination, & I’m only thinking how everyone wants to be who they imagine themselves to be—who they want to be?
Achemy, via Dorn & the Jungians seems very much to be focused on male ejaculation: matter as feminine, embryonic, and form as male seed cast into form. Before “God” hovered over the Waters, She was there, too, uncreated—“the female matrix being, the chaotic matter.” They represented matter as unspiritual—& feminine, but this representation seems to be merely Dorn being confused by what his semen does.[1] And there is a perverse rape fantasy in Dorn & similar alchemical models where the feminine has to be “purified” & made “receptive.” And so much one::two (other) shaming—the numerical symbolism of 2 is inherently oppressive, misogynistic, & racist—the Other is always represented as the cause of conflict through its différance—for oneness is the representative of Order, and anything made into Two to the One becomes, is forced to serve as, the One’s actualization by giving the One something to stand against—difference.
The problem is that the One views the Other in terms of différance[2]—not in terms of interconnection—2 is always a result of blindness on 1’s part.
And I can see, via von Franz, how the YHWH principle—the second H as the daughter of God, via the GD and Thelemic symbolism—as Babalon via Crowley & company—comes in in Dorn & alchemy, as form in matter, yielding its union (One & Other producing something new, for the Son is always, it seems, the Father in miniature, the image of the Father). In a sense, it’s a kind of enchantment. Men, of course, see this process only in terms of jizzing into reality, of fucking things. God & Zeus fuck the Earth because, fuck, what else is he going to do? Von Franz sees Bruno & others stealing “God’s” creative power when the process is actually realizing one’s creative power. Gold, meanwhile, is the alchemists’s Shá, the shining light they seek to embrace & understand. Gold as metaphor.
And, yeah, gold is light, is perfection, is Otherworldly power, & gold purifies/perfects the imperfect matter. Although I can see Dorn’s use of gold here as pointing to the perfection of his own body, to have the kind of body he wants, and I can see him as merely an old white dude looking at what age has cost him, wanting to purify it into something “perfect.” And Dorn frames the perfecting power of gold as a function of simplicity (ease)—
The Jungians want a “constant realization of the Self.” And yet, they are so caught up in the maintenance of the quotidian, in sustaining the reality of the everyday. They accept consensus/normativity for all the talk about synchronicity & etc.
There is this sense that synchronicity is a magical thing even as the Jungians desperately run from it half the time, desperately representing it in more sciencey terms.
Von Franz & Dorn point to the idea of “repetition” or “Frequentia,” which makes me think of one’s practice, especially with the gardening metaphors. Dorn, of course, comes at this from a pseudo-Xian perspective. The divine spark of divinity within—what the Jungians term “Self.”
She talks of how people will have archetypes “constellated” in the “unconscious” that people respond strongly to—& synchronicity occurs as if the inner constellation resonates out into the consensus physical world: so, from one perspective, we filter the world in terms of Talker’s current worldview, noticing patterns aligned to our own particular mythical focus, or we create resonant effects, projecting these constellations out into the world. Jung connected this to Macrocosm:microcosm paradigm, with Paracelsus noting we have an inner sky (Talker I’d say) with its own reflection of the constellations.
Ah, synchronicity is just Jungian for “magic shit happens”—our expectations & Talker affect the world—von Franz points to CERN scientists buying synchronicity (magic) until pressed on it, then the psychic censor & professional self-preservation kick in.
Von Franz notes how our language retains several alchemical metaphors (solution, resolution) associate cognitive & emotional analogues to chemical processes. (cf. temperaments & humoral discourse).
Jung seems to premise psychic problems (complexes) as arising form lack of alignment & fighting, ego fighting Deep Mind (Talker fights God-Self).
Dorn’s tiered stages & dialogues likely reflect his understanding of how our faculties (the three bodies) relate to each other during each stage of the alchemical version of the Great Work. Von Franz sees Dorn as never getting past Xian responses to the question of evil.
Image: Old tree branch on sandy beach – Ao Railay West Beach Krabi Province Thailand by René Ehrhardt
[1] Semen was seen in the pre-modern period as containing the idea of the father which developed in the raw material of the mother’s womb into the result of the child. See Thomas Lacquer’s Making Sex.
[2] I’m coming out of Derrida here. Très prétentieux.[3]
[3] Non, je ne parle pas français. S’il vous plaît ne me demandez pas fait de parler français.