July 11, 2025
It simply popped into my head: buried treasure. This week I am to talk about buried treasure. Honestly, this newsletter is as unpredictable to me as it is to you. What kind of a theme is that? The first thing that comes to mind, of course, is pirates—pirates and a map. Pirates always have a map. The archetypal buried treasure story is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), a tale of adventure for the young. It is good to become young again, to return to the time when life was an adventure, but is there something to this search that is deeper than that?
The search for buried treasure is a variant of the quest myth, a quest for something that may be accidentally lost or deliberately hidden, and yet always with a map for finding it again. A map is a text that has to be interpreted, and treasure maps are always cryptic. It takes a cunning interpreter to find the treasure. In other words, reading is one form of the search for buried treasure, one that I have been embarked upon all my life. Haven’t got rich yet, unfortunately, but have had a lot of adventures, though not of the kind that pirates usually care about. I have grown old searching, yet what continues to drive me is the faith that I might yet come upon that treasure. Occasionally, as this morning, I come upon notes that I made in the margins of a book a long time ago, and think ruefully that I knew more once than I do now. Wisdom slips from the mind as fitfully as it appears, like the memory of last night’s dream. Nor is this really old age, as I have always been this way. If you have a touch of inattentive ADHD, as I have, you will understand. Yet it may be that we are all haunted by this feeling. What is it that you have lost? What is it that you have buried and need to find? And where is the map that will be your guide?
The best-known versions of the search for buried treasure are negative, and we would do well to ponder why, for such versions are always cautionary tales in disguise. I mean, pirates, after all. Pirates are outlaws, usually for reasons more serious than burying things on public property in defiance of local ordinances. It’s more complicated than that, however. Pirates are Trickster figures, and therefore not so much evil as morally ambiguous. Successful quests often depend upon Tricksters, because any quest worth venturing upon must go beyond the safe confines of social rules, including moral ones, which is why respectable people very much disapprove of adventures. They are not always just foolish to do so, because stepping outside the limits of the known and safe leaves us vulnerable. Christ went out alone to the desert to get away from the crowds and meditate, and was immediately set upon by Satan and with his arsenal of temptations.
Another form of the search for buried treasure is the gold rush, in the United States most notoriously the California Gold Rush of 1849, which lasted at least as a rumor through the time Mark Twain spent time as a miner between 1861 and 1867, recounted in his book Roughing It in 1872. Twain and his partner actually did find gold, but failed to stake their claim successfully. In his dedication, Twain referred to the time they were “Millionaires for Ten Days.” Twain dedicated Roughing It to his partner, Calvin Higbee, as an “Honest Man,” which is quite a compliment given that gold miners were as notorious as pirates for double crossing their partners out of greed.
The most famous such tale is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927) by B. Traven, the name adopted by a writer who managed to outdo even Thomas Pynchon in remaining mysterious. In fact, Traven wrote a whole series of novels about temptation not by the devil but by capitalism, especially of the colonialist variety with its characteristically brutal exploitation of the natives in places like Mexico. I just saw Jurassic World: Rebirth, and this has not changed: the villain is a venture capitalist who leads an expedition to capture samples of dinosaur blood so that he can use it to manufacture heart medicine for which he intends to charge exorbitant prices, Martin Shkreli style, and who is willing to allow a young girl to die rather than lose his chance at a fortune. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was also a film, a classic by John Huston in 1948. Both novel and film tell a story of greed, temptation, betrayal, and murder. In the film’s famous final scene, the gold is scattered to the winds, because it is thought to be sand.
John Huston seems to have been drawn to stories of dark, ironic treasure hunts. His directorial debut, in 1941, was The Maltese Falcon, considered a masterpiece of film noir, based on the 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett about hard-boiled detective Sam Spade. The Maltese Falcon was actually a real treasure, as a text explains after the film’s opening credits: "In 1539 the Knight Templars [sic] of Malta, paid tribute to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels—but pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day." Nothing like the lure of treasure to bring out the seamy side of human nature, the common preoccupation of both the hard-boiled detective and film noir genres. There are murders and the usual betrayals, with Sam Spade turning the girl he kind of loves over to the law at the end. The twist is that the biggest double cross is that of the Falcoln itself—it is a fake, and it is unclear whether there was every a genuine one, a deft metaphor for the entire world in which Sam Spade must make his way.
No darkness, however, but what the spirit of comedy can alchemize into laughter. My kindred spirit Mary Lynn, informed of my search for the buried treasure of examples of the search for buried treasure, offered a British comedy series, The Detectorists, which began airing in 2014. Enthusiasts in a club compete with metal detectors to find treasures such as Saxon royal ship burials in farmers’ fields, only to make royal fools of themselves in their competition. It has been a very popular show, the audience clearly understanding that the absurd premise is a vehicle for truths about human nature having to do with the temptation that comes with the search for buried treasure.
Traditional treasure is precious metals or else jewels. The impulse to acquire such treasure is complex, because two possible motives may interplay. Naturally, such riches may be sought for what they can buy. In other words, one motive is conspicuous consumption, the accumulation of what the Homeric warriors deemed “war prizes.” Jeff Bezos, having already acquired a 500-foot yacht, just rented the city of Venice as a wedding site. This is of course all about status. Royalty and aristocracy have always worn their treasures, from the crowns of monarchs to the jewels and rich fabrics with which the elite have weighed themselves down in many cultures, even in popular culture with the Cadillacs and flamboyant clothes of blues and rock superstars. People complained about the fortune spent for King Charles’ coronation when the rest of England suffered from financial austerity.
But this rational, if often vulgar, use of treasure has an irrational counterpart, seen in the opposite compulsion not to spend but to hoard. The mythically undisplaced example is of course dragons. In Beowulf, a dragon sleeps for an untold age in possession of his vast hoard, only to awaken and embark on a mad, destructive rampage in response to the theft of a single cup. Dragons don’t even drink from cups. The ending of Beowulf is endlessly disputed, as scholars argue over whether Beowulf is implicitly criticized by the poet for asking to have the treasure piled before him so that he can gaze upon it as he dies. Shouldn’t he have his mind on higher things? Yet he is a lord, and lords were gift-givers. The lord who was stingy and hoarded his wealth like a dragon was held in contempt, and Beowulf is gift-giver to the last. Other people are not as resistant to the temptation. The dragon Smaug sits on his hoard in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but acquisitiveness deepens to genuine madness in the heart of the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield, leading to tragedy.
What drives this compulsion to hoard treasure? Strange to say, it is the hypertrophy of an impulse so deeply rooted that it seems quasi-instinctual. Animals hoard: our hamsters used to hoard enormous piles of food, bigger than they were. When we involuntarily acquired field mice as live-in pets, they would bring in food from outside, acorns and deer corn, and stash it everywhere—in shoes, behind books in bookcases, in my guitars. Squirrels bury their nuts, and I have wondered all my life whether they can actually find them again, or if it is just pure compulsion. And I could not take the moral high ground, because the books behind which the corn was hid and the guitars which became the mice’s safety-deposit boxes were themselves a hoard, or, to use the polite euphemism, a collection. Do I need so many books and musical instruments? “Oh, reason not the need!” cries King Lear about his need for a hundred knights.
There is a fear that drives one kind of hoarding. I acquired some of it by growing up among adults who learned to hoard during the Depression. My first father-in-law told me that he had to resist the temptation to straighten out a bent nail rather than just throw it away. During the Depression, you threw away nothing. To this day, I keep on hand three, four, half a dozen items of food and toiletries, just as my mother did. You never know. But the eccentricity can deepen into a compulsion. Every so often, some old lady dies and bequeaths a fortune to some charity, a fortune amassed by sheer accumulation, by not ever spending anything. This has always been true of misers, from Mammon in Spenser’s Faerie Queene to George Eliot’s miser Silas Marner. My mom’s family history speaks of a relative who shopped at thrift stores despite being affluent.
Occasionally there can be a kind of innocence, beyond the fear of poverty or the flaunting of social status, in the amassing of material wealth. When Peter Jackson’s film version of The Hobbit showed the dragon bedded down amidst vast piles of gold coins, cups, and other items, I immediately thought of my favorite childhood comic book, Uncle Scrooge, not by Disney himself but by the great comics creator Carl Barks. Scrooge McDuck (of course he’s a frugal Scot, with feathers) is the millionaire uncle of Donald Duck, and he keeps his wealth in a “money bin” piled high with coins. I seem to recall a diving board so that Uncle Scrooge could dive into his piles like a child into autumn leaves. I had no idea of wealth, but I caught the love of exuberant abundance, a cornucopia of money. Scrooge didn’t sit glowering and anxious on his treasure: he actually luxuriated in it and enjoyed it.
But the compulsion to hoard may expand from personal neurosis to social menace when the irrational impulse to accumulate more and every more is at the expense of everyone else. Within this week, we have arrived at what may become a catastrophe in this country. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill has just delivered enormous tax cuts to an elite who are already wealthy beyond what they could possibly spend even if they wanted to, at the cost of cutting social services and necessary government functions. Why? There is no rational motive that can account for this. It is clear that no amount will ever be enough: they will always attempt to take more, more, more. Thus the elite are increasingly as out of control as some of those mad Roman emperors they taught us about in school.
Someone who did poke around at psychological motivations in relation to capitalism and its discontents was Norman O. Brown, author of Life Against Death (1959), one of the great visionary books of the 60’s although a few years ahead of its time, one of whose sections bears the quaint title “Studies in Anality.” Freud’s idea that children go through an anal stage, connected with toilet training, sounds like one of those weird theories that intellectuals come up with. But you do not have to be a Freudian to know that toilet training is about a lot more than hygiene. Control of one’s bodily habits is more than a key to getting parental love and social approval: it is a personal issue, having to do with power, and the first power is power over oneself and one’s own body. When we say that someone is “anal,” we mean they are a control freak with power issues. To retain is thus an act of power. As usual, what seem bizarre Freudian assertions accord with a certain amount of folk wisdom. Freud merely provided convenient lingo like “anal retentive” for facts that the popular imagination has always known. In an essay called “Character and Anal Eroticism” (1908), Freud says exactly that:
In reality, wherever archaic modes of thought predominate or have persisted—in ancient civilizations, in myth, fairy-tale and superstition, in unconscious thoughts and dreams, and in the neuroses—money comes into the closest relation with excrement. We know how the money the devil gives his paramours turns to excrement after his departure, and the devil is most certainly nothing more than a personification of the unconscious instinctual forces The superstition, too, which associates the finding of treasure with defaecation is well known, and everyone is familiar with the figure of the “excretor of ducats” (49).
We speak of “dirty money” (and money “laundering”), of “filthy lucre.” The devil’s money turning out to be an con-job illusion fits Trump, who never pays his bills. He shits on people. This is utterly paradoxical, but there it is, right down to the devil’s sulfur-and-brimstone smell. So what should we make of the fact that during the initial panic of the pandemic lockdown, people chose to hoard....toilet paper?
The paradox is that excrement is devalued matter, worthless matter, disgusting matter. Treasure is the exact opposite: precious matter, beautiful matter, desirable matter. This is not a mere illogical contradiction: it represents a powerful ambivalence. What was alchemy trying to do? Turn “base metals” into gold. The material world, after hundreds of years of Christian dualism that rejected the material and bodily in favor of the spirit, often had an excremental attitude to the physical world. Therefore, alchemy tried to redeem matter by spiritualizing it. The quest for the so-called Philosopher’s Stone was a treasure hunt that took place within a sealed container in a laboratory—although it simultaneously took place within the imagination of the alchemist. The lapis, as it was termed, was the ultimate treasure, and it was at least once identified with the goal of the Christian treasure hunt, the Grail. In the profoundest version of the Grail quest, the poem Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Grail is not the cup used by Christ in the Last Supper but a stone, clearly the lapis.
We have traveled by this point a good deal beyond Long John Silver. These quests, although their goal is an object, are really about the achievement of the real treasure, an expanded vision. This expanded vision is the kingdom itself, which is the “pearl of great price” for which the merchant in Jesus’ parable (Matthew 13:45-46) sold all that he had in order to buy it. When this expanded vision is achieved, we realize that we have been looking for the treasure even as we have been standing on it, as Odysseus in the Odyssey does not recognize his homeland for which he has been searching for 19 years because Athena has put a mist over it. The object sought for has been hiding in plain sight, as in Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter.” In the spiritual vision, as Mary Lynn, my soror mystica, put it in the same letter, “Everything we touch is treasure.”
But the positive treasure hunts of alchemy and the Grail quest are polarized against their more ubiquitous demonic parodies, as Northrop Frye would call them. We have looked at greed, the acquisitive compulsion, but there is a second type of negative quest, the quest for power, which, like greed, is a desire that cannot be satisfied. No amount of power is ever enough: there is always a need for more, ever more. Jewels and precious metals glitter and shine, which gives them a numinous quality. They seem to be charged with energy, with power. Alberich in Das Rheingold, the first in Wagner’s cycle of four operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen, steals the gold of the Rhine Maidens with which to forge a magic ring that will enable him to rule the world. In order to do so, he has to renounce love. This desire for power ends by destroying the entire cosmos, even the gods. The Germanic and Wagnerian ring is the inspiration for Tolkien’s rings of power, forged by the elves. While The Hobbit focused on greed and hoarding, the focus of The Lord of the Rings is on the lust for power. Tolkien may seem to rip off Wagner, who had in turn ripped off the traditional German Nibelungenleid, but it does not seem to be fully appreciated that he does so for the same purpose that Virgil rips off Homer: he deliberately mimics his original in order to be revisionist. Both the original Germanic story and Wagner end in total destruction: they are apocalyptic, a pagan counterpart to the Book of Revelation in the Bible. At the end of the Ring Cycle, as at the end of the Book of Revelation, there is a “new heaven, new earth.” The circle is closed, the image for which is the Ouroboros serpent, the dragon or snake with its tail in its mouth, a cycle with no beginning and no end. We are no doubt supposed to look upon such an outcome with what Yeats called “tragic joy.”
But Tolkien had fought in World War I and knew that war was not heroic or tragically joyful but a combination of stupidity and nihilism. I think that, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien is trying to revise the old, tragic, heroic epic according to the spirit of a very different tradition, the spirit of the fairy tale and its longer form, the romance. In a famous essay, Tolkien said that the fairy tale ends with a eucatastrophe, his term for a happy or desirable ending. The happy endings of comedy are a more extraverted and social version of the same pattern. The happy endings of fairy tale, romance, and comedy depend upon a kind of Trickster spirit—often embodied in an actual Trickster character—that plays fast and loose with the “reality principle” and the tragic sense of fatality. The Lord of the Rings does not end in total destruction. There is, instead, a eucatastrophe, although one that is much more complex, one that resembles the endings of Shakespeare’s final romances, sometimes called “tragicomedies.” It may just be that annihilation will be averted because one fat, furry, peace-loving creature unselfishly not only puts his life at risk but resists the lure to wear the ring of power and thus become corrupted. Frodo throws the treasure into the fiery abyss. He resists the temptation of the wrong kind of treasure. We could do with thinking about all this, because we are presently facing a collusion of both kinds of negative treasure-seeking: the blind acquisitiveness of the oligarchs and the power-crazed nihilism of Trump and his administrative Orcs.
Oddly popular recently has been the odd device of a kind of scavenger hunt search for treasure that has been widely scattered. This seems to be a displacement of the kind of myth in which a cosmic being falls and shatters or is killed and torn apart. When the Egyptian Osiris is killed and dismembered by his evil brother Set, Isis, the wife of Osiris, searches for the widely-scattered pieces of her husband and reassembles them. The Marvel Universe equivalent of this is the six Infinity Stones, each of which embodies and therefore has power over one aspect of experience: Space, Time, Reality, Power, Mind, and Soul. The ironic twist is that it is the cosmic villain Thanos who tries to collect them across the multiple films of the Infinity Saga, culminating in Avengers: Endgame (2019). His reason for collecting them is not rebirth but its opposite, death, as his name suggests. He wants to embed the Stones into a gauntlet that he will use to eliminate half the life of the universe literally with one snap of his fingers, a rather Elon-Musk style solution to what he views as an overpopulation problem.
The title of Avengers: Endgame shows that what Marvel had in mind was an insanely complicated game of chess. The Stones play a role in the plot of multiple films, the ins and outs being so complicated that I wonder whether the most dedicated fanboy could really keep track of it all. There is no way a more casual viewer could follow it, especially with a gap of a year or two between films. So what is the point? Are the Stones just McGuffins employed to keep the plot moving? Avengers: Endgame is designed as a final apocalypse in Tolkien fashion. The good guys triumph over Thanos, in other words over death—at the cost of a number of deaths and many lives and careers forever altered. I could have done with less chess playing and fewer complications, giving time to concentrate more on character and emotion. Needlessly complicated plots seem to be a main temptation of superhero movies.
A similar complication, however, pervades the Harry Potter books, in which there are not one but two treasure hunts of a sort. The first is the search for the seven Horcruxes. Voldemort, the villain, has acted as a kind of do-it-yourself Osiris, disassembling himself and lodging a piece of his soul in seven different objects, making him very difficult to kill, as Voldemort lusts for immortality. The Horcruxes are various: a diary, a cup, a ring, a locket, a diadem, but also Voldemort’s giant snake Nagini and, by accident, Harry Potter himself. Then there are the three Deadly Hallows. One who possesses all of them will become the master of death. This search-and-destroy pattern seems to have come to J.K. Rowling late: the Horcrux quest is introduced only in the sixth volume, the Deathly Hallows in the seventh and last. They are anchored, nonetheless, in the series’ overriding thematic contrast between the selfishness of a quest for immortality at any price and the self-sacrifice out of love that is exemplified most of all by Harry himself. The treasures all belong to the negative side of the moral ledger. But, although late-introduced, they round the series back to its beginning, to the original treasure hunt in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, known as the Sorcerer’s Stone in the U.S. version.
We too come round again, back to the subject of alchemy. Why alchemy? The standard view of alchemy was that it was a crackpot method of trying to make gold that accidentally gave birth to the actual science of chemistry. There are partial truths here. There was a kind of alchemist who was really a con artist that duped rich patrons into giving them real gold to subsidize their phony researches. Ben Jonson’s comedy The Alchemist achieves its happy ending by the unraveling of such a scam. But there were some great figures who not only took alchemy seriously but actually conducted alchemical experiments, including Isaac Newton in the 17th century and Goethe in the late 18th. It was Goethe’s Faust, informed by alchemical imagery from beginning to end, that drew C. G. Jung into alchemical studies which transformed our understanding of it.
We have said that alchemy on its objective, material side was an attempt to spiritualize matter, redeeming it from its fallen state. The redemption of space would thus include a redemption of time, returning the world to the original, unfallen Age of Gold. But that would be a prelude to a fully apocalyptic expansion of vision into eternity. The New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation is a 12-gated city made of precious stones. These are spiritualized matter, like the lapis, and spiritualized matter is alive, not dead like fallen matter. I Peter 2:5 calls its readers “living stones built up as a spiritual house.” Matthew 6: 19-21 counsels us to lay up our treasures in heaven, for “where your treasure is, your heart will be also.” Alchemy understood itself as a hunt for “the treasure hard to attain”—“The Hidden Treasure” is the title of one section of Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (340-44). But it was an inward quest, undertaken in the solitude of a laboratory that was also a study or place of meditation. As such, it contrasted with the extraverted treasure hunts not just of pirates but of the early explorers of the New World. Not that people like Pizarro, looting the gold of the Incas, were much different from pirates. Ponce de Leon explored what would ironically become the retirement home of senior citizens, searching for the fountain of youth.
The alchemists explored an inward sea. While pirates bury their treasure on land, another kind of treasure search is conducted by diving for the treasures sunken undersea, in shipwrecks. The fascination with exploring the wreck of the Titanic derives from the fact that it has become mythical—it is indeed a drowned Titan, a fallen godlike figure. Water, Jung says, is the commonest image of the unconscious, and diving into deep waters is to dive into the deeper levels of the self. The ability to do this was limited before the invention of diving equipment, so, instead, one form of the hero’s quest was the “night sea journey,” a journey upon an underground sea. We may compare the haunting image of the boat traveling the sewers of Paris in the silent film version of The Phantom of the Opera. Jesus puzzled Nicodemus by saying that we have to be born again of water and the spirit, and Nicodemus wondered how we were to return to our mother’s womb. But the plunge into the depths of the unconscious is a descent into a watery tomb that is metaphorically also a womb of rebirth. It is good to keep a sense of humor about these things: John Barth has a story called “Night Sea Journey” narrated by what is apparently a sperm cell searching for the treasure of the egg.
The alchemists could be impossibly obscure, but such imagery is not the wild associations of cranks. People either give up on Christian imagery or try to reduce it to historical fact because we have forgotten how to read metaphor. Metaphor is like water. It is fluid, it flows, constantly changing shape. Metaphors are constantly changing into one another, and this is much more true in the alchemical writings than for conventional literature that has been fixed, structured, and developed. The alchemists were writing right out of their unconscious, and even Jung, who studied them more comprehensively than anyone else, says that at times he has no idea what they are talking about, and that sometimes the alchemists themselves didn’t know. Still, it is possible to learn to think in the protean language of metaphorical symbolism as in a native language, because, after all, it is the native language of all of us.
Jung shows this without preaching it by a very simple means. In Psychology and Alchemy, he shows two tripartite panels from the Biblia Pauperum or “Bible of the Poor,” which was touched on in a recent newsletter. As its name implies, the Biblia Pauperum, this version of which is dated 1471, was intended to teach the stories of the Bible to the poor and uneducated, either with or without the help of a priest to explicate. The first panel depicts not one but three images: Joseph thrown in the well or cistern by his brothers and abandoned; Christ in the sepulchre; and Jonah swallowed by the whale. But the panel is teaching something further by showing, not telling. These are the same story—that is why they appear together. They are three manifestations of the same event, at least on the highest level of understanding, what medieval theories of Biblical interpretation called the anagogic level. They are three forms of the same revelation as the three persons of the Trinity are three forms of one God. A half dozen pages later is reproduced a second tripartite panel, whose images are the Resurrection of Christ; Samson bursting out of imprisonment by the Philistines, carrying the gates of Gaza along with him; and Jonah spewed forth by the whale. The two panels are the two phases of a single story, and that story is an epitome of the entire Bible. The total story of the Bible is one of Fall and redemption; descent and return; death and resurrection. It is a story that happens everywhere, at all times, in many guises.
The skeptical response is, “Oh, but you’re ignoring the differences between the stories, just reducing them to a formula. That’s what myth critics always do.” First of all, the Biblia Pauperum is not the intellectualized and idealizing construct of a myth critic. It is how people used to read the Bible, because it is how the Bible reads itself across multiple authors and multiple times. Second, any fool can see the differences. Fools cling to the differences because that is what they can see, so they make a virtue out of it. To think in metaphor is to see the resemblances, indeed the identity, within the differences. The moment that happens is the moment the treasure is found. What Jung found in alchemy was one of the most important precursors to the Romantic theory of the imagination. He states explicitly in a section of Psychology and Alchemy titled “Meditation and Imagination”: “The concept of imaginatio is perhaps the most important key to the understanding of the opus” (279). Quoting the alchemist Ruland’s definition of meditatio, he says, “Ruland’s definition proves beyond all doubt that when the alchemists speak of meditari they do not mean mere cogitation, but explicitly an inner dialogue and hence a living relationship to the answering voice of the ‘other’ in ourselves, i.e., of the unconscious” (274).
But what does this have to do with performing operations with chemicals in a laboratory? Jung goes on to explain the strange borderline state into which the alchemists entered in their meditation. In such a liminal experience, the boundaries between subject and object, mind and matter, break down, and strange things happen. Jung’s description clarifies about as much as such a paradoxical experience can be clarified:
Ruland says, “Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.” This astounding definition throws a quite special light on the fantasy processes connected with the opus. We have to conceive of these processes not as the immaterial phantoms we readily take fantasy-pictures to be, but as something corporeal, a “subtle body,” semi-spiritual in nature. In an age when there was as yet no empirical psychology such a concretization was bound to be made, because everything unconscious, once it was activated, was projected into matter—that is to say, it approached people from the outside. It was a hybrid phenomenon, as it were, half spiritual, half physical... (278)
So are we going to feel superior to the alchemists because the things they thought they saw happening in the alchemical sealed vessel were “nothing but” projections? Projection can be utterly dangerous. It can cause people to burn other people as witches or heretics, cause them to worship a malicious weasel like Trump as a demigod. But the older I get, the more I feel that projection is an indispensable function of the imagination. To project something is to allow it to become truly other, outside oneself, to allow it to exist in its own right. We have to be able to believe in our projections, to grant them their own kind of reality, as a matter of respect. Paul says that love believes all things. Maybe he meant it. After all, he was converted by a projection, a voice that spoke to him. What the alchemists were doing has its counterpart in the Last Supper, when Jesus took bread and wine and transubstantiated them—changed their substance to that of his body and blood. Then he asked his disciples, and asked all of us, for every time the priest consecrates the host it happens again, to eat his body and drink his blood. Alchemy has nothing weirder to offer than that. A rational Protestant or atheist can understand “Do this in remembrance of me,” but “This is my body” simply has to be ignored. Yet what theology calls “transubstantiation” is the spiritualization of matter. Christ is the bread, yet Christ is also the transforming agent. Christ the alchemist.
Alchemy was a meditational practice yet at the same time a kind of ritual, as the Mass is a ritual yet at the same time an invitation to meditation. But theatre is a ritual, and nothing will ever replace live theatre because a fictional story nevertheless takes place right in front of us, and that draws us out of ourselves into an intense involvement with the story. We know that the story is not “real,” but we willingly suspend disbelief, just as children do in play, for most of children’s play is theatre and ritual. Why do we do this? Even when a story is read, we find ourselves inside the story, as inside a hermetic vessel, identified with the characters and living vicariously through them, suffering vicariously through them. What about music? Surely music has been taken to the purest art, the one other arts aspire to the condition of, because it is free of vulgar, material projections. But music may involve the most daring projection of them all. When we listen with total involvement to music, we are transported, perhaps more so than with any other art. What is projected is, or is like unto, a spiritual body, invisible as spirit is invisible, free and invisible as air. When we are rapt within its spell, we go out of ourselves, which is the root meaning of the word “ecstasy,” and we become the music while the music lasts, as T.S. Eliot says in Four Quartets.
When we fall romantically in love, of course it is a matter of projections: in Jungian terminology, in a heterosexual relationship the man projects his anima or unconscious feminine self upon the woman, and the woman projects her animus or unconscious masculine self upon the man. Love is not a binary but a quaternity.
I think love works through projections. The beloved has a numinous quality, and magic will only be dispelled if the love dies, and what is left is disillusionment. Indeed, the central image in all of alchemy is that of the coniunctio, the “chemical wedding,” in which a union of chemical substances takes place that is also a union of all the opposites in the world, symbolized by the erotic union of a red king and a white queen, the colors of both Eros and of the spirit—of body and blood.
In religion, art, and love, the trick is not to confuse two kinds of reality and two kinds of belief. To take the images of the imagination as facts in the ordinary world is to be delusional. Then you are mistaking windmills for giants. But the images of the imagination are real at the same time, in what Frye calls a double vision. However, the world of the imagination, although it can be a refuge, is not a mere Neverneverland to run away to. It confronts the ordinary world and alchemizes it, decreates it until we can see it for the illusion that it really is, then recreates it in its own image. It is, in short, redemptive. The alchemists saw themselves as active participants in the process of the redemption of this fallen, suffering world. Is this heretical? A certain interpretation of the Christian vision—one that is often called “orthodoxy”—would say it is not only heresy but dangerous pride. We cannot save ourselves, let alone the cosmos. Since the Fall, we are powerless, utterly passive, and are saved by faith alone—and by obedience to the Church. Doctrines such as predestination and original sin stress the guilt and powerlessness of humanity.
But that conservative, more or less authoritarian point of view has always been in countered by a more humanistic Christianity, one exemplified by Milton, Blake, Frye, Jung—and the alchemists. In this view, human beings have two selves, what Paul calls the natural self and the spiritual self The natural self can indeed do nothing, but the spiritual self is a power that can change the world. Insofar as it is a human power, we can call it the imagination. But it is at the same time God as an Inner Light, an inward presence. In the words of Wallace Stevens, “We say that God and the imagination are one.” In the words of Paul, “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.”
The real buried treasure is this inward creative power. It is not some special gift reserved for an elite class of artists and visionaries. The motto of this newsletter is, “The imagination as the home of human life.” We have buried our treasures in memory, and sometimes we have lost them. Therapy is often a hunt for buried treasure. And the treasure of memory has its maps—old letters, memorabilia, tales told by our elders, genealogies and family histories.
Sometimes we may feel we have lost something deeper than memory, another life altogether. The protagonist of one of the greatest literary fantasies, John Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy, began to feel as a child that he was an orphan who had lost his true home, which he called Aegypt—not Egypt, which is just a foreign country, but another reality altogether. We are the buried treasure. We are entombed, trapped. The term “Aegypt” comes from the Hermetic and Gnostic traditions that Jung felt provided the intellectual basis for alchemy. In one Gnostic text, the “Hymn of the Soul” in the Acts of Thomas, which I have mentioned in another newsletter, a child is sent to Egypt (the false Egypt, Biblical image of the fallen world) to find a pearl in the sea guarded by a dragon. The child instead falls asleep, and forgets not only his mission but his very identity. But the parents send a letter that cures the child of his amnesia, and he gathers the pearl and returns. Citing this parable in his book The Secular Scripture, Frye notes the role of the letter. The success of the quest depends on a text that awakens, the metaphorical equivalent of the map. In one of the great poems of the 20th century, Adrienne Rich speaks of “Diving into the Wreck,” a deep sea dive into the wreckage of the self. She says,
I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.
At the bottom of the dive, she, a “merman” who is a male alter ego, and the wreck itself become one, and the reader is included as the form of the fourth in a remarkably alchemical coniunctio:
We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene
Rimbaud spoke of “the alchemy of words.” For some of us, words are our treasure—the Old English poet spoke of his “word hoard” which he would unlock and give as gifts. The word “thesaurus” means “treasure” or “treasury.” We send them as letters, hoping to wake people up and give them purposes and maps. But the first person on the mailing list is of course ourselves.
Note
Special thanks to my friend Tom Willard, who probably knows as much about alchemy as anyone alive. Tom is the author of Thomas Vaughan and the Rosicrucian Revival in Britain: 1648-1666. He responded generously to my series of email queries about alchemy and the esoteric traditions, and was patient with my confusion and occasional exasperation with alchemical obscurity. He is not responsible for the interpretation of alchemy offered here, nor for any of its errors.
References
Freud, Sigmund. “Character and Anal Eroticism.” In Collected Papers, Volume 2. Authorized translation under the supervision of Joan Riviere. Basic Books, 1959. 45-50. Originally published 1908.
Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. Second edition, completely revised. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 12 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton, 1968.