The Image in Alchemy

More so than any other tradition, alchemy deals with images in a fundamental way.  Certainly alchemy doesn’t have a monopoly on images – either in their formation or meaning.  But alchemists use images not just as pictures of various elements, but as examples of processes which simultaneously call for transformation in the imaging subject while providing the key for that very transformation.  Thus alchemy is rife with images, symbols, and other visual content which aim at being more than static carriers of facts.  Image, alchemically understood, is a strange sort of djinn existing on many levels at once, moving freely between the above and below, acting as the link between these worlds.  At first we see simply an old lamp or flask. But this flask contains a heavenly being in embryo, waiting to be called forth through a particular process that leads towards self-transformation.  Like Aladdin, our task is to uncover the process behind that which at first appears as the simple word: “image”.  We must open this flask, the image, and see it link above to below, and below to above.

Image and Fact - Earth

Every image contains a basic structure, its shape and color.  This is the first level of the image.  At this level the image is also a representative of a fact, a bit of information.  Here the image stands in for a definite piece of content and is more or less unambiguous.  For example, an image of a cigarette underneath a circle with a line through it represents a singular fact: no smoking.  We call images at this level signs – signifiers which are visual placeholders for content.  When an image is primarily a sign, great attention is paid to the details of the form in order to make it different enough from other signs so as to make its associated ‘fact’ clear.  Because images are inherently gestalts, they present themselves all at once in a non-linear fashion, and our visual brains can grasp the underlying fact without relying on the sequential nature of written or verbal language.  This level is the bedrock upon which a deeper understanding can be achieved. 
Alchemists always begin with an understanding of this most overt aspect of images as signs.  This sign is one of many for the element Earth.

 Image and Process - Water

If all images could be reduced solely to signs, our visual experience and its associated capacity for imagination would be reduced to particles of dust – a collection of separate identities between images and facts.  Such identities are static, with surfaces that constitute the thing itself.   Yet beyond the capacity of images to act as signals, they also contain something at a deeper level.At the second level of the image, the manifest sign does not simply exist as a singular entity, but is embedded in a flowing context of meaning.  For example, the symbol for Earth is a triangle.  But it’s pointing downwards, as if to say, “Things come to a point, right… here.”  The sense of gravity is evident, and we can imagine the triangle tipping easily to either side; reliance upon facts qua Earth is a precarious position, where the slightest connection to something beyond can force a collapse.  To avoid this, we must consciously connect the overt fact with other facts, to create a stream of meaning.  Any individual sign bears the weight of its meaning by virtue of the surrounding system of signs in which it is embedded.At this level, the image is a cipher, or a cryptographic encoding of meaning – but the meaning isn’t only in the manifest form.  It exists by virtue of the fact that a particular process of encoding has occurred that allows the sign to take a particular form.  The form cannot exist without a preceding process.  In this sense, the Earth level of the sign is a solidification of a series of related processes, which taken out of context looks like an individual, separate particular.  When seen as an Earth, a cipher looks like gibberish: “ifmmp.”  This is a series of seemingly separate facts – letters – which bear no apparent relationship to one another.  The Water task is to identify the process, the rule that connects the individualities in a meaningful way to another set of facts.  In this case, the rule is “every letter is replaced by the next in the alphabet.”  Discovering this pattern gives the gibberish meaning: “hello.”  The key to understanding images from a Water perspective is to identify the relationships between the various forms, until coherent movements or patterns of meaning become apparent.

Image and Reversal - Air   

The primary quality at this level can be experienced as a reversal, often occurring in a moment of insight.  While swimming through the river of facts, a moment will come where concepts get stretched so far that something snaps and the energy flow reverses. Jung called it enantiadromia: something is taken so far to one extreme that it suddenly flips into its opposite. 
The alchemical symbol for Water is a downward pointing equilateral triangle with a bisecting horizontal line.  This is the sign for Earth with the added horizontal component; the element of Water still bears some qualities of Earth, but in a transformed way.  Something has arisen from within the Earth, and is permeating the lower half of the sign.  The Water forms a lake, within and bounded by the Earth below, its container.  Rather than fill the entire sign, the Water reaches a self-made boundary (the horizontal line).  This is an analog to the physical property of water: it takes on the shape of its vessel, and spontaneously forms a coherent, flowing barrier when no vessel wall presents itself.  This type of Water-thinking, a linking of related facts, now leads us to an Air moment, when we realize that this new horizontal line, a boundary, must be a boundary between the water and something that is not actually represented in the sign: the air.  It is just at this place, where the water has become liberated from the earth, that it meets not just itself, but something beyond itself, the air – a new context in which it finds itself embedded, exactly opposite in quality to its previous environment.  This leads us to the sign for the element of Air: an inverted sign for Water.
This example points more generally to the Air level of the image, which we can call the symbol.  What at first appeared to be a sign for some bit of knowledge ‘out there’, which was then linked to other external facts to embed it in a stream of meaning, now is recognized to be something even more subtle.  Rather than simply being a string of related facts, the external image takes on an inner dimension.  Our consciousness shifts into an experience called a dual polarity. 
In such an experience, we have two complementary polarities arising simultaneously.  The first polarity is an awakening in consciousness to the differential recognition of two things: the fact that the sign is experienced as a fact outside oneself, and the necessary complement to this recognition – that in order to have such an experience, one must also have an inner realm in which the fact is placed in order to be experienced.  The first polarity, recognition of the outer sign, simply sets up in consciousness a complementarity between the inner and the outer.  This first polarity is expressive of Earth.
The second polarity is expressive of Water.  The pattern of flow between external bits of information in the sign out there sets up complementary patterns of meaning within.  In addition to the ‘fact’ out there, a correlate, a mirror image of the sign, exists inside of us as well, and its flowing relationships are analogs to our own inner states.
Thus a symbol connects our inner world to the outer world.  Looking at the image at the level of the symbol puts us into a polarity: we are taken simultaneously out of ourselves into the wider context in which the flowing patterns of meaning in the facts find themselves, while having a direct experience of our own inner relationship to those same patterns.  The symbol takes us beyond ourselves by taking us into ourselves.
The modern alchemical scholar Stanislas de Rola can point out that the alchemist’s pictorial language,
in which not a single detail is ever meaningless, exerts a deep fascination on the sensitive beholder.  This fascination does not even necessarily depend upon understanding.  If the reader will contemplate these images, that is to say go beyond their surface, he will often perceive that they correspond to another timeless dimension which we all may find deep within ourselves.  These profoundly haunting pictures have a polyvalent symbolism, and lend themselves therefore to various interpretations.

Forming of connections beyond oneself is an essential element of alchemy.  Rudolf Steiner states that “true alchemy makes itself independent of sense-perception in order to behold the spiritual nature of the world that is external to man, but is concealed by sense-perception.”  ‘Independence’ from sense-perception is a capacity that is trained by rhythmically going into the Air element via alchemical work with lawful images.  By working with an image from Earth, through Water, into Air, one builds a capacity in which, despite the polyvalence, one’s thinking capacity is strong enough (Earth) to not dissolve (Air) in the face of multiplicities and paradoxes while simultaneously remaining flexible enough (Water) to keep from fixing a multiplicity into a single, dead answer.
The Air element is complicated, with its reversals, polar complements, and many simultaneous levels.  Observing movements of warm and cool masses of air in the atmosphere will show that it is precisely these qualities that rule climate and weather.  Yet the whole system of weather is driven by a principle beyond the atmosphere itself: the sun.

Image and Meaning - Fire

We have discussed the image as sign, cipher, and symbol.  What exists beyond the level of the symbol?  The pattern from gross to subtle continues with the element of Fire.  Just as the movement of Water led us into Air, so a natural progression through the element Air leads one to ask of the image: “but what does it all mean?” 
A minimal amount of meaning exists in the identity of a sign with its labeled content in Earth, but this meaning is like a single bit of data.  In Water, the cipher encodes a whole stream of meaning through a process that connects each bit to its neighbor, but this meaning is essentially an outer meaning.  The Air level opens up the image from its inside – but in doing so we discover that the image ‘out there’ was really a mirror in which we were gazing at the opening of our own insides; meaning exists on an inner plane.  Now in the Fire element, something remarkable happens to the constellation of meanings being toyed with in Air.  Fire burns away all the insubstantialities, leaving only a subtle shell of meaning – a meaning that links all the various interpretations through an underlying archetype.  There is a universal meaning, in addition to the inner and outer, and factual.
At this level, the image takes on the quality of a being.  Everything from previous levels are understood to be a manifestation of a primal, objective, and peripheral but real coherence that although inexpressible, is directly knowable by higher human faculties.  Here, the image itself is experienced as if it were speaking.  In Air, the image becomes silent, which creates the space which the viewer fills in with interpretations.  This is why the transition from Air to Fire involves listening to the image.  The last reversal required in passing beyond the Air level is a shift in the location of the silence from outside to inside.  By silencing one’s inner dialogue, the image can present itself to the inner space created willfully in the viewer.  This is where it speaks its truth – a truth that is inclusive of all the previous aspects of the image.  In fact, the experience at this level involves a perception of why all of the previous levels take the forms they do.  They seem to all fit perfectly and necessarily into a coherent whole as logical manifestations of the archetype through successive layers.
The sign for fire is an inverted sign for Earth.  Now it points upwards towards a singular unmanifest archetype, which doesn’t exist itself on the earth as a particular form, but is the underlying principle of the particular’s ongoing formation.  Just as the signs for Water and Air share a boundary, so too the signs for Earth and Fire share an inner space.  But while the inner space of the Earth sign is filled with a mass of dense facts, the space in the Fire sign is filled with the potential for meaning.  The main quality of Fire is transformation, and the Fire is in effect a transformed Earth, where all that was subject to gravity is rendered into levity.