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Alchemy

10 de out.
9 min de leitura

Atualizado: há 2 horas

Graphic design in pop culture has been following the aesthetics of mythology for a while. Eusexua by FKA Twigs, Lux by Rosalía, Chromatica by Gaga—it is already common to find enigmatic symbols, sigils, runes. Sometimes in 3D carved in stone, wax, or metal, simulating handcraft or the protection of a message too strong to be said directly. Part of this is due to the boom in spirituality among young people, who use belief to imagine reality when it offers no hope. But part of it is also due to a dissolution in language caused by AI, which, in the absence of logic, has been conducted by a mythological language. Everywhere content is fake or automated; it is meant to make information arrive faster, but it also makes it leave faster—there is no time to create memory. And the old, secret symbol offers this: the idea of time and trust. If information dissolves all the time, it is easy to question whether it ever existed.


But talking about crossing the chaos of change through the use of symbols means talking about something that appears all the time in pop culture, but which, because of scientific racism, we know little about historically: alchemy. Do you associate alchemy with religion or science? And what if it is both? Alchemists were natural scientists: they studied how nature works in order to imitate what it does. Knowing the chemical reactions of plants, they made medicines. With fungal fermentation, they made breads and drinks. But their most striking function was in metallurgy, because, knowing how to manipulate minerals and metals, they were the most valuable employees in the mints of kings, pharaohs, and caliphates. In Europe, for instance, a great alchemist was Isaac Newton, who worked for the English crown identifying coin counterfeiters. But Newton’s alchemical side is always erased from his story to protect the image of the scientific genius, and his alchemical writings are considered the “black mark” on his trajectory, his degenerate side, that of a genius who lost his sanity.


The path to the stereotype comes from the origin. Alchemy was in fact the precursor of science; it had structure, testing, and analysis. But because it was a large umbrella of practices and because it was born in a context where science and religion did not have a rigid separation, it also encompassed less practical and more spiritual objectives, generally the purification of the soul and the search for eternal life. The first records of alchemy are about metallurgy, describing a practice called Chrysopoeia, which is to purify and transform any worthless metal into silver or gold. In practice, it means transforming a material that rusts into one that does not rust; but, spiritually, it means transforming something mortal into something immortal.


The central symbol of alchemy is one of the best known in pop culture: the Philosopher’s Stone, which in Harry Potter is described as “a stone capable of transforming any metal into gold and giving eternal life to whoever possesses it.” But in alchemy, it is not a literal stone; it is a text, a method. Philosophy is the capacity to alter consciousness, and the stone is physical matter. Therefore, the Philosopher’s Stone is the capacity to alter physical things. Not only to make a metal “live forever” by becoming gold, but to make a person live longer by curing them of a disease. To fertilize a plant so it grows faster. It is about purifying a thing simply by placing its composition in balance. Another central point of alchemy is the Emerald Tablet, honored by Jorge Ben Jor. It is considered the material that originates and guides alchemy. Like the Bible, it tells the story and explains the path to salvation. In practice, it is a summary of how alchemy works: it speaks of how things are separated and purified, but also mixed and connected. The authorship of the tablet is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who is not a physical man, but a celestial figure, representing simultaneously the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. He represents the connection between Egypt and Greece, between East and West.


The best example of an alchemical process is the name itself. Kemet is the original name of Egypt, given by its own inhabitants, and it means “Black Land,” which refers to the people there and to the soil of the Nile River, which was dark because it was rich in minerals. The first stage in the alchemical transformation process is called Nigredo, because it used this black earth. Later, in Greece, following Egyptian culture, the Greeks practiced Khēmia, which is simply “the art of the men of Kemet.” After the fall of Ancient Greece, the materials went to the Arabs, who continued to call it Khemia, but in the Arabic language AL is an article placed at the beginning of words, and “A khemia” became “Al-kīmiyā.” Medieval Europeans adopted the material created by the Arabs, and Al-kīmiyā finally became Alchemy.


But with the Scientific Revolution, the more technical side of alchemists was used, but the mystical side needed to be separated and destroyed. It was then that, from alchemy, chemistry emerged, the “update without mysticism,” which was marked by the publication of the book The Sceptical Chymist, by the Irish scientist Robert Boyle. This is where the symbol and iconographic language become a watershed. In the transition from alchemy to chemistry, not only spiritual content was discarded, but all material that was too coded and difficult to simplify and reproduce. And this was common in alchemy books. In the same content, alchemists mixed: a narrative, a mathematical formula, an emblem, a symbol, a poem, a song. This puzzle was seen as childish and primitive. But the content was not coded only for mystical reasons.


First: coded language protects the narrative value of cultures that manage to prevent their stories from being told in a simplified way. Egyptian mythology is more fragmented than Greek mythology, where it is possible to group gods into a family tree. Tarot, which appears first in Egypt, illustrates this idea well: they are groups of symbols that connect in the narrative of the deck as a whole, but that also speak independently.


Second: it was also literally valuable material, because it kept recipes and methods for manipulating metals. Codification prevented any charlatan from starting to make gold around and breaking the coin value of empires. Some kings ordered their alchemy libraries burned so as not to “leak the coin recipe.” That is, many of the symbols that make alchemists be read as charlatans were, in fact, an anti-charlatan system.


But the third and most important: the symbol allows something that the word does not allow—malleability. A dictionary meaning is much more rigid than the interpretation of a symbol, and if alchemy speaks about the process of transformation, it needs to allow the content itself to have a reserved space to always be transformed. Rigidity provides structure, but it also causes delay, and delay prevents the survival of the structure.


Everything narrated so far is a description of alchemy from the right to complexity. It is a text produced (and alchemized) as a summary, and only a summary, since obviously alchemy, being a millenary and multicultural knowledge, is much more complex than this simple text. But the summary is not a problem; rather, it is its objective. Some summaries are made to open doors to the world; others are made to close doors. Generally, this is done by deforming a culture to make it fit into a place of “historical insignificance.” And the deformation of alchemy is told from the deformation in the history of Egypt.


The “discovery” of Egypt’s history began with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion in 1789. The objective was to conquer the trade route to India, but it was also to “civilize” Egypt. The campaign was a military disaster, but a scientific success. The soldiers were surrendered, but the researchers managed to collect (loot) a lot of archaeological material, with which it was possible to construct Egyptology, a scientific field that exists to this day, full of polemics and contradictions, but which became the basis for looking at the history of Egypt and, consequently, of alchemy.


The focus of European Egyptologists was not to tell the history of Africa, but to increase the history of the West, through a justification for the colonization plan. In this context, various scientific aberrations emerged, the best known being the theory of the “Master Race Dynasty,” which, in order to argue that the pharaohs were white, suggested that a so-called superior white race had invaded Africa and founded Egyptian civilization. In the 1950s/60s, the Senegalese researcher Cheikh Anta Diop tried to prove, through rigorous scientific methods, that Egypt was a Black civilization and that it was the basis of Greek science, an idea that is accepted today, but which at that time was repeatedly rejected by the Sorbonne academy, in France.


Egyptology exploded in international culture after the publication of Description of Egypt, a collection of exotically monumental books, some volumes more than a meter tall and with 837 engravings showing temples, tombs, clothes, animals, and plants. All of this awakened in Europe the commercial and cultural fever of “Egyptomania,” which ranged from the commercial popularization of jewelry and wigs in the style of Cleopatra and Nefertiti to sicker traditions, such as private parties where mummies were unwrapped live in front of ecstatic guests, on the threshold between curiosity and necrophilia.


The presence of alchemy in science also passes through the emblematic figure of Carl Jung, who came to describe alchemy as the “origin of psychology,” insofar as it spoke of the capacity for internal transformation through symbols. Freud was Jung’s research partner, but they separated due to incompatibilities, one of them about symbolic thought. For Freud, the symbol is a channel of transformation, yes, but a regressive one, which transforms the new into the old, the social into the instinctive. He sees the symbol as a path of infantilization, of the return of civilization to internal barbarism; and for this reason analysis is necessary to decipher the meaning of the sign in order to dissolve the power it has. Psychiatrist Frantz Fanon speaks about the incapacity of the Freudian method to analyze the colonized mind. Freud uses the logic of the Oedipus Complex a lot (which looks from the family structure), but the mental dilemmas of colonized peoples come from public spheres, external to the family. They are traumas of culture and slavery, not of the relationship with father and mother. That is, social traumas, which gives name to Fanon’s theory: sociogenesis. Fanon says that, in order to legitimize the domination of the colonized, it was necessary to invent their figure as a primitive, infantile, and emotional being, someone who had not yet reached the apex of reason and abstract, logical, and scientific thought.


Researcher Boaventura de Sousa Santos speaks of the idea of epistemicide, the destruction of knowledge by colonization. If Western thought is described as pure, neutral, and universal, it does not need to dialogue with Egyptian or Indigenous cosmology; it can simply tear the symbol from its context and transform it into an exotic, folkloric, or spiritual object of study. Thinker Aimé Césaire says that colonialism “thingified” colonized peoples, transforming them into mere objects and symbols, “things” to be administered, studied, and discarded. That is, at the same time that it transformed colonized peoples into symbols, it denied them the right to be creators of symbols and meanings. To be symbolized, but never to symbolize.


Language is an inevitably alchemical field, from languages to dialects; each place and each generation participates in the continuous creation of language. But AI has taken this to another level, very alarmist and mythified, and still little understood. The current idea of a “universal generative algorithm” places people in the position of active creators, at the same time that it removes agency from knowledge, because it is not conducted by scientific institutions open to the community, but by companies with closed codes and personal objectives. We can think of public and scientific AIs for the future, but we can also think: why, even with all the talk of “embracing the transformation of reality,” is there still so much erasure of cultures that speak of transformation as a way to make life last longer, while defending cultures that say things must remain the same so that they last forever?





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