Here for your reflection and easy reference are  overdue and oft requested definitions of three topics and ideas that are easily confused:

Alchemy and Literature: As a baseline, I think we need to recognize the obvious fact and conventional understanding as normative. Metallurgical and esoteric alchemy are subjects studied by historians of science, Jungian psychologists, and comparative anthropologists and historians (it is an art or sacred science known in the Levant, China, India, and the West over a period of centuries). Literature, in contrast, while the subject of psychological reflection since Freud put Oedipus and Hamlet on the couch, is principally the domain of language wonks, e.g., English Literature studied by ‘English Departments,’ of occasional historians, and of the beloved amateur book lover and serious reader. As a rule with an increasing number of exceptions, the person knowledgeable in one area is not very well read in the other.

Alchemy of Literature: This is the Aristotelian cum Coleridgean phenomenon in which the reader of a poem or novel or audience member at a play so enters into the story, successfully “suspending disbelief” in “poetic faith,” becoming operatively the heart rather than the persona, that s/he elides with the principal(s) into the story action and experiences katharsis or purification (or trauma!) imaginatively as the principals do. This imaginative experience is heightened insomuch as the eye of the heart entering the story recognizes its reflection which makes the elision and identification and consequent cathartic experience that much more profound, even transformational. This is alchemical insomuch as the alchemical work was just such a simultaneous and corresponding illumination of subject and object through logos elision.

Literary Alchemy: Stanton Linden in Darke Hieroglyphicks, his survey of the use of alchemical symbols and themes in English literature from Chaucer to the Restoration, defines positive, as opposed to satirical, literary alchemy as “specialized vocabulary and individual images in the allegorization of transmutation subjects in light of Christian doctrine.” In the vernacular, that means the use of terms, images, symbols, stages, and colors from historical metallurgy and esoteric alchemy to foster the reaction between reader and text, audience and drama, that is the essence of ‘the alchemy of literature.’

To sum that up, ‘Literature’ and ‘Alchemy’ are distinct subjects of study, ‘the Alchemy of Literature’ is a description of what happens when we read or watch a play (not screened images, alas), and ‘Literary Alchemy’ is the use of alchemical tropes to foster our transformation while reading.

With that in mind, here is an exchange I had a year ago with that friend in Texas I mentioned yesterday, whose weblog you need to visit:

[Read more…]