Final...yeah

Lead, Gold and the Immortal Soul
We all know that alchemy is the ‘science’ of transmuting lead into gold, yeah? Ern! Wrong, or at least not completely right, there is that little bit of economical gain to it but it is not the entirety of it. Alchemy is a purification. But it is not just a transformation of earthly elements but ethereal ones as well. By ethereal I mean spiritual, the soul. Yes it is a transformation and purification of the human soul; immortal it may be, unchanging it is not.
While the Philosopher’s Stone may produce the Elixir of Life and turn lead into gold with a touch, soul alchemy is not so simple. Though making the Stone probably took a while. Anyway there is a five step program, sort of, for the alchemical purification of the soul. It is represented by five birds: Black Crow, White Swan, Peacock, Pelican and Phoenix. The Crow represents the first step which is to free oneself from dependence on the physical world and senses. The Swan, step two, is the realization of the ethereal form, meaning soul. The Peacock, step three, means stretching the soul or becoming conscious of it, a little different from step two as that is more like looking in the mirror and seeing a fuzzy impression, where step three is more along the lines of realizing you have black hair or blue eyes. Step four, the Pelican, is stretching out the spiritual muscles. And finally, step five, the Phoenix, legendary firebird of death and rebirth, which is a purificaiton in itself, the soul is freed from the physical body.
But it is not death. It’s more like astral projection… kind of… maybe… huh…
Maybe not. Maybe the Phoenix step is death, maybe that is the least step for the purification. Being “consumed by either fire or fire” (Eliot 57). Fire is a purifier, Eliot thinks so. Beckett empties the soul, Joyce fills it up, Shakespeare drowns it… hmmm.
The soul, the soul, the soul is the most expensive thing a human being can trade, sell, but you cannot really sell a soul, only give it away. A soul can be exchanged for something of equal value, but it is priceless. Hmmm. Quite the conundrum I have created for myself.
Anyway the crow is a symbol of trickery and death, of the darker side of human emotions and actions. Here it seems to mean a sacrifice of the physical world and desires. To step back and dismiss the ego and selfishness of human nature, to sacrifice and remove the soul from the physical human. The five physical senses are dismissed in favor of exploring the sixth ethereal sense.
The white swan, usually pictured in flight, one experiences the form of the soul, be it tinier than the head of a pin, or wider than the vastness of the universe. Can a soul be measured thus? Does it have a ‘physical’ form that can be measured? If a soul has no cost then how can it be measured? The swan is a lighter symbol, often with romantic connotations and divine partnership, soul mates maybe. This is the start of the transformation from pure physicality and tainted humanity into the absolute divine purity of the human soul. The ‘yuck’ of humanity is starting to be wiped away.
The peacock is a symbol of resurrection and immortality, here humanity becomes enamored of the beauty of the soul as they are enamored with the beauty of a peacock. This is the transformation in progress. One immerses oneself in the soul, which lacks human frailties and emotions stepping into the level of the angelic, I suppose. They are also a symbol of omnipotence, the all seeing eyes of their tail feathers. They see all and know all that ever was, is, or will be… Muahahaha!
Hmhmn. Sorry. Right, pelican. Usually shown carving its own heart out of its chest, the soul begins stretching its wings, and being all… soul-ly. It is another resurrection symbol. Hmm. Anyway, the carving thing is the bird spilling its own blood to feed its chicks. This is sacrifice, now the human begins to sacrifice not just the superficial but the deeper parts of the self that taint, or maybe restrict. As the pelican sacrifices the blood the human sacrifices the important things to themselves. Family friends, treasured people and bonds are given up in order to prepare the self for the final step of the transformation.
Phoenix. A largely light symbol and the representation of the cycle of death and rebirth, the fire, the purifier. The Resurrection, the Immortality, being reborn from the ashes of it’s own collective ‘yuck’ it rises once again pure and untainted. The fire bird is a world wide symbol from ancient Egypt to Japan to the Aztec. Usually associated with the sun, whose alchemical symbol also represents gold, one burns away the flesh and remains, or perhaps returns to the pure soul form free of the physical world and the boundaries therein.
You know I’m starting to get a little suspicious, three of these symbols have to do with resurrection. Maybe this whole soul purification thing isn’t purification but resurrection. What if we are trying to revive our own souls that got so caught up in humanity and being human that they slowly stagnated and died, or worse drowned. No. That’s not right either. We killed our own souls by doing very human things, being distracted and impure. We have not stretched our wings and they are too weak to help us fly. Like a starling with broken wings, we can either throw ourselves off the limb and attempt to fly or let go and fall to our terrible and wasted deaths.
What a terrible fate we have laid our for ourselves.
As I said earlier Joyce tried to put all of humanity’s nonsense into one book which turned into a never ending cycle with a pause between two words. Beckett went the opposite and tried to stop talking, he poured out his words until there were no more left to use. He stripped each sense and talked and talked about it until he could say no more. Sucking stones; it really makes me want to giggle.
Hmm, but really can a soul actually be tainted? I do not think so. You can probably bury it under so much muck (human stuff and distractions) but I do not think it can be tainted. Souls are pure… whatever the hell they are, energy, ectoplasmic matter/antimatter, whatever. They are not a physical thing. So they cannot be buried either nor weighed down but the best idea I can come up with is buried. A soul can be buried under all the human distractions and human frailties and faults, it can be turned away from and shoved into the farthest darkest corner of the self. But can it be tainted?
No, you know what this is? This is a resurrection.
Resurrection quite literally means ‘to rise’ or ‘rise again.’ This processess is not about reviving or purifying the soul, it is about unburying it and allowing it to rise once more, to reach again for the sun. The phoenix rises from its ashes, it is not reborn from them, not really, because a phoenix is immortal and does not die. So rather its physical form is purified in a burst of flame, the ashes settle, covering, and the fire bird rises once more through them. Rebirth implies death, resurrection implies that there is merely a burial. And that what was buried may and will be unearthed.
So the soul will be resurrected after being buried by the human who was “distracted from distraction by distraction” (Eliot 17). Sacrificing those distractions and bonds resurrects the soul.
Prospero drowns his books. I am uncertain if this is a Crow or a Phoenix but am leaning toward the latter. Why? He asks the audience to release him “from [his bands]/ with the help of [our] good hands” (Shakespeare 163). What I find interesting is that he asks the audience to release him as if he cannot do it himself? Too tired, perhaps? Or maybe no human can pull off that final release alone. Perhaps it is not possible to Phoenix oneself. Perhaps a guiding hand is necessary. No person in any of the books we have read has taken any of these five steps alone. Prospero released Ariel, the Audience releases Prospero, Hamlet and Horatio, Molloy and Malone (not really together but working off one another), Santiago and the various people (the alchemist amongst them) who helped him along).
So if one cannot resurrect alone, then how can one resurrect at all? The process requires that a person give up all things earthly so that the soul can take flight. Is this process, perhaps, impossible? Or perhaps, like Arjuna, one must become objective to it all, not merely give it up. Krishna commanded that Arjuna fight because that was his duty, that those bonds were less important than that. I think he might have been right.
In order to resurrect the soul, which is a heavy but necessary duty, one must become objective even as one remains bound. The bonds are important, but action and duty come first, even at the cost of such things. It is a sacrifice that a person must make. But just because those earthly senses are given up does not mean that they do not still exist. Humans are, after all, terribly social creatures. We cannot give up on one another. Even hermits come down from the mountain once in a while and sages get visited by whoever makes it up to them. Apparently one cannot give up all earthly bonds. I think it might be part of the free will thing.
At any rate this process, workable or not, is something people choose to undergo, it is something that must be taken up freely otherwise it will definitely never work. Besides this makes something more pure, more sacred, if one chooses to sacrifice instead of simply being sacrificed. Jesus chose to hang from his cross, Vietnam soldiers choose to save their buddies as opposed to themselves, Prospero choose to drown his books, Hamlet choose to die.
Damn. This is starting to sound like my Capstone final. What a drag.
Though I suppose they are the same thing, the alchemical purification is very similar to the human sacrifice. Each is wiping out one thing in order to reveal another, each is giving up something of less value for something of priceless/near priceless value.
Humans burned witches at the stake to purify them, they burned their dead, and still do to purify the flesh and return it to the earth. Fire is one of the most well known purifiers in the world. Every historical reference states fire destroys and purifies, and most, if not all, cultures have a phoenix reference. I cannot say if this is a coincidence or if someone somewhere is playing with us. I am not sure which I prefer, crazy deity/thing, or humans sharing brains. Well, there is something about humans knowing all memories of everyone, everywhere and every when, cultural memory or maybe it was genetic memory. Hmm. No, it’s not cultural it’s the genetic one. Passed down through the DNA that all humans and animals share, though I doubt that animals understand exactly what is going on due to the lack of a higher conscious. But genetic memory… Hmm.
Back to alchemy. The rose, Eliot is very fond of his rose. Once the symbol of passion and purity with the additional paradoxical nature of being the symbol of divine perfection and earthly desires, life and death, fertility and virginity. Quite the complexity, no? Roses are secrets. The secrets of the world are all held within the rose and that is why the “the fire and the rose are one” (Eliot 59). The fire reveals the rose, the world’s secrets. Or perhaps it reveals the anima mundi. With the purity of the fire and the secret of the rose all things are revealed, all souls revealed, and all things become divine. Rather they return to the divine. Eliot knew this, knew that the secrets of the world would be held in a sing blooming rose and the fire.
The Rosicrucian, crossed rose, is the purification, the phoenix where in all dissolves the world is revealed anew. It is the finality, the renewal, and the beginning.
So, it is not a matter of purification, for souls cannot be tainted, it is a matter of resurrection and revelation. “And all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well” because while it is something of a duty it is also something one cannot not do, and once started it is unstoppable. Simplicity, do this, merely live and fare forward.
“I learned that the world has a soul, and that whoever understands that soul can also understand the language of things. I learned that many alchemists realized their destinies, and wound up discovering the Soul of the World, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Elixir of Life. But above all, I learned that these things are all so simple they could be written on the surface of an emerald.” The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho