Burn in Water, Wash in Fire

 Burn in water; wash in fire.- Rosarium Philosophorum, 1550.

I have a couple of students who are avidly interested in alchemy, and I've supplied them with a lot of supplementary material, outside of our regular chemistry curriculum. There are a few areas of human endeavor that historically attracted the weirdest of the weird, and made them go basically mad, and alchemy is one of those arenas, at least in Europe. It may well have been due to mercury and lead poisoning, as well as the general consciousness twisting weirdness of the ironically named "philosopher's art." Anyway, the phrase quoted above of course has all sorts of metaphorical implications, but it is also literally true regarding, for example, alkali earth metals of group 1, which burn in water, and are "purified" by being burned. 

Like everything in all of the European literature of alchemy, actual chemical reactions are described in the most arcane and metaphorical language, a fact that Jung made much of, but that is not all that remarkable from an inductive, experiential perspective on working with matter. In fact, a great many propositions of quantum physics and cosmology seem like metaphors as well, a fact that many somewhat specious hybrid New Age/science writers make much of, at which, cosmic eyeroll. The simple fact is that matter is quite bizarre, and lends itself to all kinds of metaphorical conceptualization. 

A woodcut illustration of the "illuminatio," from Rosarium Philosophorum, 1550

Love burns in water and washes in fire. We have a bewildering experience of an alchemical encounter with a beloved, by which we are both burned and washed, but we don't understand exactly how we have changed in the chemical reaction, exactly what has been gained or lost, and we need some kind of framework or place to stand, to try to make sense of it. The heretical sin of the alchemists was in looking for God in matter, and the hierophantic moral rectitude of the Enlightenment was in either completely divorcing God from matter or (at least slyly) eradicating God altogether. The heretical sin of lovers throughout time is in choosing each other as the Divine, either against religious or social order, or both, and the punishment is metaphorically swift, and delivered by sword. 

Via The Marigold Tarot by Amrit Brar

After time, the baffling transformation and even more baffling evanescence is embedded simultaneously more deeply as a permanent wound one learns to live with, and all those hopes of "healing" or "transcendence" (let alone the more ridiculously superficial and idiotic "letting go and moving on") are just products of twitterpated infantile abnegating "functional" denial and bad faith "strength" or, even worse, "health." 

This is the way of the resigned alchemist, who was, for a brief time, tangled in mysteries, but has decided to "grow up," "do the responsible thing," and "get real." In this way, we betray ourselves to a deeper and more fatal degree than anyone else could ever betray us, and do ourselves the worst harm. Out of the flames of our most profound transformations we forge...tin. Ash. Regret. Simultaneously, we get the highest praise for our resignation. We have done the right thing. We are welcomed to the great, grey, bland General Nation of Anomic Acedia. Joni Mitchell was of course correct, all Romantics meet the same fate someday, cynical, drunk or sober, boring someone in some dark cafe, or on some boring blog. 

Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind cannot bear very much reality. (Burnt Norton, TS Eliot)