THE ALCHEMY OF ILLNESS

In 1993 I read a brilliant article in Parabola Magazine. It was by Kat Duff and was an excerpt from her then forthcoming book, “The Alchemy of Illness.” I highly recommend this book and will give a little taste below.

It begins with this phenomenal sentence from Virginia Woolf:
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s armchair and confuse his “Rise the mouth - rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not take its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

In the chapter itself entitled, “The Alchemy of Illness” Kat Duff recognizes the vital contributions of ancient alchemists who were as much metaphysicians as chemists - as well as Carl Jung who nearly single-handedly resurrected ideas of alchemy as being relevant to everyone’s psyche.

Alchemists started with the “prima materia” and identified four qualities to find it: 1) it is ordinary and found everywhere; 2) people are often revolted by it; 3) it has many names and faces but only one essence; 4) it is boundless, consuming and overwhelming.

They put this material in a closed container and cooked it, part of the alchemical process being to reduce the prime material to being a “massa confusa,,” to its original state. We can all relate to illness breaking us down to our most basic living selves.

Kat Duff speaks profoundly and at length to the further explorations of the alchemical process. Please access the book and read this important chapter. She relates and explores the meaning of four stages within the process, intriguingly and most commonly described as:
calcinatio (burning by fire), solutio (dissolving in water), sublimatio (rising in air), and coagulatio (falling to earth). These of course can relate to fever, the lethargy of self-dissolution, the feeling of becoming immaterial, and a reconstitution of embodied self as we heal.

All of these are stages we encounter in the soul as well as body in illness, and often in any transformative process in our lives.

As Oliver Sacks wrote about a journey initiated through a severe injury:
”This limbo - which lasted for twelve timeless days - started as torment, but turned into patience, started as hell, but became a purgatorial dark night, humbled me, horribly, took away hope, but then sweetly-gently, returned it to me thousandfold, transformed.”