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Apart from the fact that I have not yet exhausted the anagogic contents of our material and so must add a number of things in the following sections, I am confronted with the task of elucidating the position of the nature myth portion. That will necessarily be done briefly. The alchemistic chemistry was not, to be sure, scientific in the strict modern sense. Myth. u.
Every “master” who enjoyed the highest honor among his fellows in the hermetic art has a certain lofty manner that keeps aloof from the detailed description of chemical laboratory work, although they do not depart from the alchemistic technical language.
In this I follow in general the train of thought of Hitchcock, without adhering closely to his exposition. The alchemistic process is, as the hermetics themselves say, a cyclical work, and the end resides to a certain degree in the beginning. Here lies one of the greatest mysteries of the whole of alchemy, although the meaning of the language is to be understood more or less as follows.
The alchemistic interpretation of our parable is a development of what its author tried to teach by it. We do not need to show that he pursues an hermetic aim, for he says so himself, and so do the circumstances, i.e., the book, in which the parable is found. In this respect we shall fare better in the alchemistic exposition than in the psychoanalytic, where we were aiming at the unconscious.
There is generally a certain relationship between the astronomical and the alchemistic meanings.
The third meaning of this work of imagination lies in different relations half way between the psychoanalytic and the anagogic, and can, as alchemistic literature shows, be conceived as the bearer of the anagogic. The problem of multiple interpretation is quite universal, in the sense namely that one encounters it everywhere where the imagination is creatively active.
Enough that there is a book by some writer who describes the work and describes it in such a way that naïve scholarship could have thought it quite consistent. The idea as such has appeared conceivable to us. Its form in the book mentioned appears clearly determined by alchemistic ideas. The reader will immediately perceive it himself as I give here some passages from the book.
In one respect we are therefore better off, but in another we are much worse off. From this point of view the conscious is more difficult of access than the unconscious. And now we have to face a system so very far removed from our way of thinking as the alchemistic.
The psychoanalytic interpretation brings to view elements of a purposeless and irrational life of impulse, which works out its fury in the phantasies of the parable; and now the analysis of hermetic writings shows us that the parable, like all deep alchemistic books, is an introduction to a mystic religious life,—according to the degree of clearness with which the ideas hovered before the author.
Appointments cannot be made for them any more than for the thunder-storms which sweep the sky. They die when they cease to be wild. Literary life, at its best, is a desperate play, but it is with guineas, and not with coppers, to all who truly play it. Its elements would not be finer, were they the golden and potent stars of alchemistic and astrological dreams.
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