The Poison is the Cure

“The Poison is the cure”

Let me say it again: the result is not merely the objectification of subjective "me-ness," but the objectification of its material basis. This has been dissolved, calcined, tortured, putrefied, and distilled to a clarity that can be completely seen through, as if it were not there at all, not a speck of literalism remains, not even spiritual literalism. The libidinal compulsion, the organic towardness of hope and desire that would always go further for a faraway grail, turns around on itself and dissolves
itself. The snake eats its own tail-another goal image of deconstructive subversion. The snake of healing, transformation, and rebirth, the goals most dearly desired, and the artifex's obedient service, all dry to dust, mineralized. The uroboric motion poisons (iosis) the very idea of cure. Or, poison is the cure.

What is actually accomplished by the alchemical work? According to my psychological fantasies, it is the objectification of the libido-our lives are not our lives. The alchemical goal is the realization in its complete sense of Freud's "object libido," The libido as a cosmic erotic dynamic that permeates the world because it loves the world of matter, even though it has been caught in the personal delusions of subjectivity, so that we believe we love the world, or can be improved or instructed to love the world. Whereas it is the object libido that loves the world
through us, despite us. The anima in chains in the matter of "me, " and we place it there each time as we ask psychologically, what is the matter
with me? Alchemy answers, saying: you, I, everyone, the world is matter, elemental material, and we indulge in the materials, as the artifex in the laboratory, all along believing that you are working on you, your life, your relations, your processes until the day dawns,  aurora.  You awaken within the idea of the goal, the goal not somewhere else out there calling for attainment, but you are within the idea. But because the mind is still trapped in me-ness, we shamelessly assert that the idea is in me when your mind is in the idea. You awaken to the recognition that you are already in that stone, mineralized, stoned out of your mind.

If my reading is on track and the telos or "that for the sake of which" is the de-subjectification of the object libido, then we are obliged to imagine resurrection from this vantage point, which hardly conforms with a
Christian reading of either alchemy or resurrection. For now resurrection would indicate not the confirmation throughout eternity of the personal subject and its body saved from the world and the devil of its flesh but rather the resurrection of the body of the world with an idea to its eternity. Not the lifting, the Aufhebung, of material worldliness but the
full realization of desire for a world that pulsates in the materials of the elemental psyche, those substances that compose the stone and give it its
enduring life, a realization that the world itself speaks through the desire in the materials; that desire is the language of the world, that the libido of each individual human is indeed a cosmic force, an eros or object libido which yearns toward and enjoys this world. And we who labor in the garden as if it were a stony ground would find our individual resurrection
in attachment to our materials, which are the world's body, this body becoming a jardin des délices, the objectification of pleasure.

Object libido finds its pleasure in the other, the object, the world as a body. This dry term "object libido" calls for a moistened language. Terms
such as cosmogonic eros, desire, jouissance, or unus mundus cannot do justice to what is implied. Libido brings with it the aura of pleasure and the Aphroditic world of the senses. Did not Plotinus attribute to Plato the idea that the soul is always an Aphrodite, which suggests that we cannot adequately speak of the libidinal soul without shifting immediately to an
Aphroditic language?  Then we would imagine that this libidinal drive throughout the whole opus of soul-making and its increasing love has as its goal a resurrection in beauty and pleasure, and we would realize that even such terms as opus and operatio are work-words which distort the libido's nature. The Christianization of alchemy nonetheless retains
the Aphroditic vision in the images it presents. She is the Golden One, the pearl is her jewel; the rose, her flower; the bath and the copulations in the bath of the Rosarium, her liquid territory. The translation of sensate images into spiritual value, as if a lifting improvement to the higher realm of Aphrodite Urania, succeeds only in losing the very sensate attraction
of the goal as a pleasurable pull toward beauty. Hence Ficino, Valla, and other Renaissance Platonists insisted that Voluptas is nearer to the life of the spirit than the middle region or mediocrity of ataraxic rationality. Voluptas, according to Apuleius, lies curled in the womb of Psyche and comes to birth only after all psychological effort is passed.

~James Hillman