Alchemy

But first a little bit of personal context. Over the past few years I’ve found the field of alchemy and pre-Enlightenment occult thought to be quite fascinating and it has played an increasingly prominent role in my music. Moon Phases for QME was the first instrumental composition I wrote where this paradigm was central to the creation of the work.

My interest stems from a paper I presented at a conference on alchemy and aesthetics held at Aberystwyth University, entitled The Spectral Music of Horatiu Radulescu: An Alchemical Perspective. Attending the conference confirmed what I had suspected from my own research into alchemical thought: that alchemy (here I’m speaking mostly about European alchemy which flourished between the 15th and 17th centuries), far from representing a rudimentary and slightly embarrassing intellectual fumbling towards modern scientific rationalism, represented instead a rich (although admittedly very ambiguous) field of thought which, in many ways, came from somewhere quite independent to our own post-Enlightenment paradigm. I say in many ways because it is true that one strand of alchemy developed into chemistry proper. But, for a relatively short time another strand of alchemy developed alongside this which took a more philosophical approach. Here, the physical processes in the laboratory were taken as catalysts for heady metaphysical speculation. This resulted in something that was a strange concatenation of religious belief, depth psychology, poetry, affective imagery, visionary hysteria, proto-phenomenology, aesthetics as well as scientific exploration.

It would be inaccurate to see the alchemists as merely taking faltering baby-steps toward the light-switch of modern thought. Rather many of them were engaged in weirder explorations, and were pointed away from the forensic illumination of the modern laboratory, where objects have clear contours that don’t waver and don’t enchant. The clearly delineated outlines of the scientific object make it all the better to measure. Whereas the alchemists’ transmutation was from metals into gold, and from the profane to the holy,  Enlightenment thinkers transmuted the world into the fixity of number and calculation.

It’s easy to deride the alchemists’ quest to turn base metal into gold, if we assess it based on current epistemological value systems. The attraction for me is in attempting the almost impossible task of understanding pre-Enlightenment thinking on its own terms and to try and enter into a serious rapport with fields as strange as Renaissance magic, Cabala, sigil forming, Hermeticism, divination and the aforementioned alchemy. Alchemy retained a numinous quality in its exploration of reality, and accepted the necessity of including the self as an integral participant in that  reality. Furthermore it brought mood and an element of Dionysian enthusiasmos into the otherwise clinical setting of the laboratory. These qualities are characteristic of occult thought in general. We could even speculate that alchemy and occultism represent a more ideal state where aesthetics, religion, depth-psychology and scientific enquiry are integrated as a more sophisticated means of understanding the world.