Alchemist Archetype

October 29, 2012 — #Caroline Myss #Archetype# wholeness, alchemy, ancestry

fermentation at home

In my study of the archetypes I have procrastinated badly around the character of the alchemist. I have homework that involves writing to the archetypes and tracking them in my own life. When I arrived at the second house of my own chart and found this character I stalled. Maybe I stalled, or maybe I needed a few months to consider what the alchemist does. Doing the journal project I found a few people in my past who represent this aspect of life, some of whom had not come to mind for decades before I asked myself to find them.  I readily accept that this is part of me, but the definition of what it is and how I use it became a blank and a mystery.  This requires great discipline.  I must handle it with great respect or drop the entire curriculum.  The distillation of time and space is the realm of the alchemist.  I have been involved in it all my life.  I  still have a big interest in all the mystery schools and twirling Sufis in all of history.

If we look at all the ways magic and nature have been combined the most common use is to cure.  Medicine has included alchemy, which was derived from basic observation of nature.  If you go into an 800 year old pharmacy in Europe you will see the astrological signs on the wall, and the snake delivering the water used to take your pills. The unbroken tradition of magic linked to medicine thrives in places where the folk medicine still uses native plants and elements to cure.  Indigenous peoples around the world do this without referring to alchemy in the European sense.

Since I am also interested in the DNA, the contribution made by the ancestors to my composite, I notice the few doctors or pharmacists who appear in my tree.  On my mother’s side before 1400 a couple of generations of nice Jewish doctors lived and worked in northern Spain during the time when Jews, Christians, and Arabs all thrived in a multi cultural party of intellectual delight.  Joshua ben Ibn Vives al Lorca was my 15th great grandfather.