Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Alchemy
1973
Oil, acrylic, ink, lettering on canvas
73 1/2 x 73 1/2 in.

Subject: The Alchemical Process

Symbol Evocation: Traditional Western Magic

Comments: During the Middle Ages the magical practices of ancient, Egypt, Greece, and Rome became codifies as alchemy (the power and techniques of universal transformation) with the study of the Qabalah as its energy source. This is a perfect analogy of the way Christianity became the creative extension of Judaism. However, alchemy, then at its mature power was considered just another Gnostic heresy, and the personal practice of it as an example of blasphemy. The distinction between magic and religion that was accepted by the Medieval world was neatly summed up in 1920 by the synoptic chronicler of the occult, Lewis Spense, when he wrote: "It has been that religion consists of an appeal to the gods, whereas magic is the attempt to force their compliance." This is why alchemy is often called the confused precursor of the modern sciences of chemistry and physics-- which it is not. Science appeals to the myth of invariance in nature (the "laws" of nature) in order to euphemize out of existence the gradual hubris as a result of attempting a complete control of nature (never the intent of alchemy). In a certain sense both chemistry and physics could be viewed as failed forms of alchemy.

When Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519) separated alchemy into what we now call art and science, he not only began the Italian Renaissance and the modern world, but he also discovered a way to keep the enterprise of magic alive right under the nose of the church. The price that was paid by the rest of humanity was: 1) traditional magic had to go underground into secret organizations that became the world of the occult-- the hidden, and 2) over the next 500 years there occurred a very unhealthy separation between the intellect and the passions at the societal level. The operating nomenclature of alchemy as it applies to the major substances of transformation are: A) the Body, B) the Soul, and C) the Spirit, which were rendered as mass, consciousness and energy during the International Gothic Period and into the Renaissance. The Church considered the Body, the Soul, and the Spirit to be its exclusive property; and its obvious attempt at the theological neutering of these sacred concepts into the secular forms, simultaneously accomplished two tasks: 1) it gave science, a new and fast rising bureaucracy of learning and authority something of its own to chew on besides the Church's authority, and 2) allowed the Church the leverage to quietly push alchemy off the stage of knowledge and into oblivion-- or at lest that is what it though that it did.

The final paroxysm of tension between thinking and feeling, which spiked at the end of the 19th Century, was eloquently recorded by the philosopher/historian Sigried Giedion, in Space, Time, and Architecture: Growth of a New Tradition (1941-1967). Ostensibly a polemic for modernism in architecture, it became for me, one of the major influences in the current revival of alchemy, because it documents the transforming power of a willful and impassioned vision for a present and future world.