Reverse Alchemy

[This article is also available as a video.]

People who experience near death often report back that they’re told, on the other side, that our purpose here on Earth is to love, or failing that, to learn to love, and that one method for learning to love is to realize that we’re all connected, that we’re all one. In addition, most say that, on the other side of the veil, there is a profound sense and experience of pure, complete love.

And this prompts the question, why would souls need to visit Earth to learn how to do something that everyone has mastered on the other side?

But if it’s true that we’re here to learn how to love and to recognize all other souls as collectively “one,” it might be a good idea to explore love and oneness from a greater understanding than simply feeling good about everyone.

When many individuals seek to enter into the connectedness of being “one,” that’s essentially the collective process of incorporation. The task of learning to connect all as one may have more to do with learning integration, but not the integration of one human being with another. Instead, Carl Jung saw integration as occurring in one individual as the process of integrating his or her conscious mind with the subconscious, the ego with the shadow.

Jung called this process of integration individuation. “By [individuation] I mean the psychological process that makes of a human being an “individual”—a unique, indivisible unit or ‘whole man’.”

I say something similar in The Next Octave:

But this belief that “we are all one” is the most beautiful and spiritual of all boundary violations, and a belief that leads people into mass psychosis.

the Cluster Bs

If I were going to psychoanalyze the world’s controllers, I see primarily Cluster B personality disorders being expressed and acted out. The Cluster Bs are: antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic. Common traits and behaviors include deception, gaslighting, manipulation, and drama.

More specifically, I see our world as being run by metaphorical parents: narcissistic/borderline parents attempting to enmesh, manipulate, and enslave the world’s population as their perceived children/orphans/wards.

Otto Kernberg saw narcissism and borderline personality disorders as indistinguishable, so I don’t mind using them together in my layman’s diagnosis. Cluster B disorders include antisocial traits, which is where I think a lot of the criminality comes from, and histrionic traits, which are obvious among the elite celebrities, as histrionic means overly theatrical, melodramatic, or attention seeking.

One of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder, or BPD, is the failure to respect the boundaries of other people. We see boundary violation everywhere today on the macrocosom, but it’s actually much more of an intense violation on the microcosm, and in our society, it’s a fairly common feature between parents and children.

“I shouldn’t really have to say this,” Richard Grannon nevertheless said in a 2023 video on distinguishing narcissism, “but I can see the way in which culture is going and this, narcissistic personality disorder, is undoubtedly a culture bound syndrome. So moral relativism has taken place, the idea that breaking all boundaries is going to lead to the most wonderful utopia. It never has. It never will. Boundaries… are good.”

And boundary violation isn’t just present in the obvious forms like sexual abuse. There’s a deeper, more vestigial psychosis involved in not seeing or acknowledging where, for example, a parent ends and the child begins. The blurring of the boundary between people produces something called enmeshment, where the child is seen by the parent as simply an extension of the parent.

When children of borderline parents attempt to individuate as their own individual selves, which is a normal part of psychological growth, the child will be prevented, usually through some type of programming, love bombing, or guilt, and to see merging with the parent as the child’s safest option. This merger then becomes the child’s choice, the child’s tacit consent to what psychologists refer to as a trauma bond, and, of course, people are much easier to manipulate and control when they give their tacit consent to bondage.

As the children of Cluster B parents grow up, they tend to exhibit some of the same symptoms and because of this, our entire culture seems to be teetering on the edge of mass psychosis.

This same dynamic can be seen in the macrocosmic relationship between the state and the citizen. The defense of government controls and taxes by the very citizens victimized by them shows that the Cluster B manipulations of state propaganda have largely succeeded. Whether it’s a mother trying to control her child or a tyrant trying to control the population, job one for any controller is to destroy individuality. And the best way to do that is to foster, through both gaslighting and propaganda, various types of subsuming mergers, centralized incorporations, and metaphorical weddings.

Reverse Alchemy

When a child has been enmeshed, they’ve been incorporated into the parent. A common verb in culinary recipes instructs the cook to incorporate various ingredients, and as the Seasoned Advice website explains, incorporation means mixing two things “so that they are one thing now.” The ingredient is now just a fragment of the whole. For an enmeshed child, she becomes a fragment of the totality of the parent/child incorporation. For a teaspoon of salt, it becomes just a fraction, a fragment of the whole loaf of bread.

All food recipes are instructions on how to create some form of a chymical wedding, and there’s nothing very hermetic or magical about it. The “chymical wedding” starts out as simply a combination of various chemical compounds that are much more flavorful mixed together than any single ingredient would be alone, expressing the holistic idea that a whole loaf of bread is greater than the sum of its parts.

Christian Rosenkreutz’s Hermetick Romance begins with a focus on this same lower level of the incorporation found within food. The story starts on the evening before Easter when he’s meditating and communing with God, after which Christian prepares to eat a customary passover dish: an “unleavened, undefiled cake.”

In certain religions, unleavened bread reflects a lack of incorporation: in this case, between the flour and the yeast, and there’s meaning in this lack of incorporation. Exodus 12 in the Old Testament states that, “for whosoever eateth that which is leavened, even that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel…” The congregation is the corporate body, and this passage can be interpreted as, “for whosoever eateth that which is incorporated, even that individual shall be cut off from the corporate body of Israel…”

The leavened or incorporated cake is “defiled,” a word deriving from the French meaning befouled or “impure.” And that makes sense because flour that is incorporated or joined with yeast is no longer pure flour.

In the witches’ kitchen of Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles instructs Faust to eat in the same “pure” way to preserve his youth: “Good! the method is revealed / Without or gold or magic or physician. / Betake thyself to yonder field, / There hoe and dig, as thy condition; / Restrain thyself, thy sense and will / Within a narrow sphere to flourish; / With unmixed food thy body nourish…” Yet who is it always incorporating stews and potions in their cauldrons? The witches. The spell is incorporation, but freedom from their spell is achieved in dis-incorporation. And this is why alchemy is about the opposing “magic” of separation, of reducing down to each individual constituent.

That alchemy is the art of disincorporation is obvious in the title of Christian Rosenkreutz’s story. It’s not called the “Al-chymical Wedding,” which would be an oxymoron. Instead, the act of alchemy is a chymical divorce. I’ve confused the two, myself, using imprecise wording to describe the wedding of Ferdinand and Miranda as “an alchemical one.” My bad: it was nothing if not a chymical wedding, or reverse alchemy.

The act of incorporation that starts in the kitchen with a recipe can extend on into higher realms like the incorporation of alloys in metallurgy, the legal incorporation of guilds and commercial groups, and the incorporation of the soul into the spiritual body or corpus of the church. The purpose of these combinations or conglomerations or mergers has always been to solve the perceived inherent weakness of the individual metals, smaller firms, or single souls, and this reliance on groups is based on the adage of “strength in numbers.”

But creating alloys and churches and corporations is not the realm of alchemy; all of these processes are binding. Alchemy, in contrast, is about separation, divorce, and disincorporation. Imagine a sticky bread dough all stirred up and incorporated in a mixing bowl, and then trying to separate an ingredient back out of the dough. That’s the reversal of a chymical wedding, and that is the hermetic magic of alchemy.

The best example of reverse alchemy or a chymical divorce in literature is the allegory of the sword in the stone, describing the process of separating metallic tellurides, tellurium being a bladed element with the appearance of a sword that forms sylvanite and krennerite when bonded with gold and silver, and calaverite and montbrayite when bonded only with gold.

A few people might be put off if you get chocolate in their peanut butter, but nobody wants tellurium in their gold, and this binding of gold with other metals is usually seen by man as a problem to be fixed through alchemy: through the separation of the pure gold from binding tellurides or alloys.

In fact, the bladed nature of tellurium acts in a way similar to the metaphor of Cupid’s arrow piercing the heart and causing a “romance.” And it’s not a coincidence that Cupid shows up in The Chymical Wedding to pierce Christian’s hand with his arrow.

But before Christian can even get to this wedding, there’s a bit more prep work for him to do.

Choosing Lunacy

After eating his undefiled cake, Christian Rosenkreutz is meditating in prayer when a storm suddenly develops outside: “All on a sudden ariseth so horrible a Tempest, that I imagined no other but that through its mighty force, the Hill whereon my little House was founded, would flye in pieces.”

Rather than panicing or setting about to secure his house, Christian does something strange: he resumes his meditation with “courage,” as if God would be expecting him to ignore the frightening reality taking place around him. As the storm rages and Christian stubbornly meditates, an angel then taps him on the shoulder, striking in him a level of fear that he purposely hides: “whereupon I was so hugely terrified, that I durst hardly look about me; yet I shewed my self as cheerful as humane frailty would permit.”

This line is probably meant to elicit admiration for Christian’s strong faith, but it describes a psychologically unhealthy break from reality, which feeds into the clinical definition of borderline: a personality existing on the borderline between reality and psychosis.

His inappropriate cheerfulness is false, illustrating a feature of BPD: the false self. Christian later reports that his own false self almost manifests in the King’s Treasury or sepulcher of Lady Venus: “Herewith I espied a rich Bed ready made, hung about with curious Curtains, one of which he drew, where I saw the Lady Venus stark naked (for he heaved up the Coverlets too) lying there in such Beauty, and a fashion so surprising, that I was almost besides myself…”

Jung uses this same phrase in The Integration of the Personality to indicate a mental imbalance: “…the lunatic is an individual completely overcome by the unconscious. The same condition may exist to a less degree in the case of a person whom we cannot characterize as lunatic. We then have to deal with a man who is only partially overcome by his unconscious. He is not entirely ‘beside himself,’ but only partially or metaphorically.”

And at the end of Jung’s first chapter here, he anticipates the way forward in integrating the conscious and subconscious: “I am now satisfied that alchemy is the requisite medieval exemplar of this concept of individuation.” The two biggest symbols in alchemy are the sun and the moon, and as I’m sure you know, the word “lunatic” is associated with one of them.

In Chapter 5 of The Integration of the Personality, the chapter called “The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy,” Carl Jung writes that, “…we observe here a tendency to locate the mystery of psychic transformation in matter, and to use it at the same time as a theoretical guide for effecting chemical transformations.”

Jung seems to be saying that medieval alchemists were projecting their own unconscious processes onto their work in the laboratory, as if their unconscious minds were attempting to make sense of the material through the innate workings of the psyche.

While this may be true, I think Jung was ignoring the key understanding of alchemy: that it means separation. And he ignores it, even though the evidence is right under his own nose. Because, in this same chapter, Jung quotes from The Rosarium Philosophicum, where it says, “Who therefore knows salt and its solution, he knows the hidden secret of the wise men of old. Therefore turn thy mind upon the salt, for in it alone is concealed all science and the noblest and most hidden secret of all the ancient philosophers.”

This quote is lifted directly from Jung’s work and differs slightly from the translation I generated with Google, but the gist of these Latin lines is that the alchemist, when considering or cogitating on the salt and the solution, must keep his mind on the salt alone and remove the solution from his thinking. It seems clear to me that this instruction is made because the remedy is reverse alchemy. It’s the salt that’s the end goal for the alchemist: de-incorporating the solution to reclaim the salt as an individual constituent.

This is not about the alchemist projecting his unconscious onto material processes. This is about the alchemist de-incorporating the solution to reclaim a single ingredient.

Sir Francis Bacon begins with the very same example in the first experiment of Sylva Sylvarum on removing the salt from sea water, in this case, to reclaim and purify the water. In the margin, Bacon notes that the process is called “Percolation, ” and this straining or filtering of the fluid to separate its dissolved constituents is one of the simplest forms of alchemy, of separating that which has been incorporated or dissolved.

And I think Jung was right, even if it was simply his unconscious speaking, when he sensed that alchemy was the remedy for psychological individuation: the process of separating out an abnormal merger taking place within the mind. Jung spoke to this type of dissolving merger here: “It is as if the voice of the inner demon moved further and further off and spoke more rarely and indistinctly. The smaller the personality is, so much the more unclear and unconscious it becomes, till it finally merges into one with society, surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving instead into the wholeness of the group.”

It’s almost as if the two basic symbols of alchemy—the sun and moon—spoke directly to Jung subconsciously regarding their roles in the process of alchemy and analytical psychology.

The term for the sun in Latin is sol. In the Latin excerpt from Rosarium Philosophicum, the line “Nam in ipsa sola,” referring to the salt, means “for in it alone…” with sola meaning alone. The root of sol or sola has evolved in English to mean solo, single, the one, the individual.

The opposing symbol and term in Latin is luna or moon, and we see the sun and moon opposed in The Chymical Wedding: “On it hung a weighty Medal of Gold, whereon were figured the Sun and Moon in opposition.” Most assume their opposition is that one lights the day while the other lights the night. But that’s not what the etymologies tell us.

Lune is the root for lunatic, but lune also means fractionated or fragmented, and so it’s interesting that Carl Jung describes a “lunatic” as someone “beside himself.” In the 1854 Webster’s Dictionary, “lune” is defined as, “Any thing in the shape of a half moon.” Oddly, “lune” doesn’t mean anything in the shape of a full moon. A complete moon. Instead, it’s a partial moon.

The word “lune” is also listed here as a feature in geometry, though Wikipedia’s definition is easier to follow: “In plane geometry, the crescent shape formed by two intersecting circles is called a lune.” It turns out, the geometrical lune can be any of the crescents or fragmentary phases of the moon. In fact, lune means anything BUT the moon in its full or complete state, which certainly lends deeper meaning to the concept of lunatic.

So the sun symbolizes the single, discrete individual, while the moon symbolizes the fragmentary nature of an individual when consumed by the collective. And it’s the fragmented state that pertains to lunacy, while the sun, in its totality, is equated with gold.

the False Self

Governments are in the habit of creating legal fictions according to the common law doctrine of corporate personhood. And a legally fictitious person seems to fit the definition of a false self pretty well in many ways. But might a legal fiction also embrace the concept of the corporate living person, the lunatic fragment consumed by the collective?

Just as the law has determined that a monster can’t inherit land, it also has defined the legal rights of a lunatic. Anderson’s Law Dictionary states that, “By the common law, a lunatic must make compensation to persons injured by his acts, although, being incapable of criminal intent, he cannot be indicted and punished.” And either a committee or another person is allowed to take charge of a lunatic’s estate.

Carl Jung’s conception of the false self is something he called the persona, an “excerpt” of the collective unconscious that a person wears as a mask to portray the ideal image that the person wishes to be.

In the second of his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Jung writes that, “Only by virtue of the fact that the persona is a more or less accidental or arbitrary slice of the collective psyche, we can easily make the mistake of accepting it in toto as something ‘individual.’ Whereas it is, as its name tells us, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that is a substitute for individuality, intending to make others as well as oneself believe one is individual. In reality it is only a role that is played; it is, as it were, the collective psyche speaking. When we analyze the persona we take off the mask; and then we discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective… fundamentally the persona is not real.”

This is also a fairly accurate description of corporate personhood in law: a legal fiction that’s both collective and not real. And it’s not real precisely because it’s a collective entity masquerading as an individual.

Jung continues, “…whoever identifies himself with the collective psyche, or, in mythical terms, whoever lets himself be swallowed by the monster—hence more or less consumed by it—is certainly near the treasure that is guarded by the dragon, yet he is in the highest degree unfree…”

But just as a corporate person is a fiction, Jung wrote that the development of the persona results in “divesting the self of its reality, in favor of an outer role, or in favour of an imaginary meaning.” The persona, then, is an imaginary or false self, just as corporate personhood creates a fictional self. It’s interesting that both involve the individual being “swallowed by the monster” or consumed by the collective universality.

In order to engage with reality, the person must move from the lunacy of the moon to the wholeness of the sun.

But this useful process of disincorporation is why alchemy has been ridiculed as foolish by science, while labeled an evil pursuit by the church. Alchemy is mocked because the Cluster B elites do not want the enmeshed population of the world to get any bright ideas about separating and individuating. And this is especially true in law and government, where we see a constant nudging of its citizens to enter into a state of incorporation and bondage.

Take, for example, the term “resolution,” which is a remedy arrived at by a judge or legislative body. The concept of a “resolution as remedy” illustrates the fact that the law sees a remedy in re-establishing the solution—the incorporation. In fact, the word, “solution” has, itself, evolved to mean a remedy or the correct answer to a problem. Pour in the ingredients, mix them until incorporated, and maintain the state of that congealed “solution” by re-incorporating, if necessary.

problem - reaction - SOLUTION

Decades ago, David Icke noticed a method of mind manipulation used by the controlling elites that I recognize as a clever utilization of Cluster B gaslighting. Icke named the method “problem, reaction, solution” and he explained it this way:

“The mind-manipulation technique that I called in my books “problem—reaction—solution” works like this: if you want to introduce something, say, centralization of power… first of all, you create [a] problem but you get someone else to be blamed for it. You then report that problem through the media in the way you want it reported, because the media’s owned by the same people that own the banks, etc. You get the public to react to your problem by saying, ‘Something must be done. This can’t go on. What are they gonna do about it?’ And at that point, they (who have covertly created the problem and blamed someone else) who’ve gleaned that reaction of ‘do something,’ then offer the solution to the problems they have created.” The method of control used by the Cluster B controllers is that of centralization, a merging of varied pieces into a centralized incorporation that ends the state of decentralized dispersion and diversity that threatens their homogenous control.

But the “solution” piece of “problem-reaction-solution” is the literal dissolving of the nation’s individuals into the greater “solution” of the collective. Jung acknowledged that this “solution” predominates in our culture: “Self-divestiture in favour of the collective corresponds to a social ideal; it even passes for social duty and virtue, although it can be misused for egoistical purposes.” I would add that it is misused for the purpose of controlling the masses.

Centralization means bringing variables together as one, as singular, because one thing is much easier to control than many things.

We can see this dynamic of singularity at work in an incorporated business. Here, the act of incorporation doesn’t bind shareholders to one another. Incorporation binds separate shareholders to a single business entity; this is why you can incorporate even as a sole shareholder. Then, this single corporate entity shields the individuals in the company from loss and accountability.

Even in recipes, the word incorporation isn’t used to signify stirring or mixing; it’s used to signify many ingredients being dissolved in solution. The answer (the solution) is to dissolve the individual ingredients… the individuals.

Using many things to create one thing is the act of embodying, just as the Catholic church views the church as one body, one corpus, one corpse, one corporation. In law, the resulting embodiment of incorporation is a “legal person.” And this legal fiction of “personhood” is strikingly similar to the “false self” of the borderline person-ality.

the Psychotic Nature of Incorporation

Near death experiences consistently describe a loving connectedness that exists on the other side of the veil; so why would we come here as separate beings to learn something we’ll immediately experience the minute we go back?

I think retaining our separateness on Earth has a purpose. As I mentioned earlier, in The Next Octave I devote an entire chapter to individuality and the indivisible nature of the individual. But we’re taught by Cluster B elitist controllers like Karl Marx that the individual is only a fragment of society, a fragment that must be subsumed or absorbed by society, the great oneness. Marx actually wrote this in 1884: “Every individual capital forms… an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life… of the aggregate social capital…” The concept of an individualised fraction goes beyond mere oxymoronic doublespeak… it’s a logical impossibility if the word “individual” really does mean indivisible.

There is a phase of human life in which an individual should enmesh with another: it’s when the infant sees himsef and his mother as one. That’s a healthy and necessary bond that ensures the infant’s survival. But according to psychology professor Sam Vaknin, individuation is the end goal of every healthy toddler. When there’s a failure to separate from the external world, something we start doing around the age of two, this represents an abnormal continuation of psychosis and Vaknin has stated on his channel that, “Psychosis is the natural state in childhood… psychoticism is the state that all of us are in when we are children.”

Professor Vaknin defines psychosis as a difficulty in recognizing your self as separate from the world. Another way to say this might be, a difficulty in recognizing your self as separate from the corporate, from the collective. Vaknin goes on to say that, “The child gradually transitions from a merger and fusion with mommy (mommy is the world); the healthy child gradually transitions from the psychotic state to separation individuation.”

“Psychosis,” says Vaknin, “is when it’s very difficult to tell apart yourself from the world, when they are merged, infused, intermeshed… and you don’t have boundaries. You don’t know where you stop and the world starts. You expand outwards and consume the world and assimilate it. And so you become one with the world. This oceanic feeling that many gurus and mystics keep alluding to is, I am sorry to say, clinically a psychotic state.”

This makes the function of therapy for the children of borderline parents an alchemical attempt to separate the enmeshed child from the borderline mother. But our modern society is, instead, trying to keep everyone in a childlike, dependent, even enmeshed state to keep them from growing up, maturing, evolving, and breaking free.

Carl Jung described the process of individuation this way: “By [individuation] I mean the psychological process that makes of a human being an ‘individual’—a unique, indivisible unit or ‘whole man’.”

Jung differentiated between a “personal” unconscious and a deeper, inborn “collective” unconscious. “This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term ‘collective’ because this part of the unconscious is not individual, but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. The collective unconscious, so far as we know, is self-identical in all Western men and thus constitutes a psychic foundation, superpersonal in its nature, that is present in every one of us.” This is not to say, however, that we have the collective, the Borg, inside of us. It means that the forms or archetypes in our subconscious are identical to everyone else’s.

And while Vaknin defines psychosis as the inability to see your self as separate from the collective, Jung—who sees us already tapping the collective in our unconscious—defined psychosis as “a largely involuntary yielding before an irruption from the unconscious that has attained a higher potential than consciousness.”

Vaknin believes that Jung was a psychopath, saying that, “He is not by far my favorite psychologist or example of a rational person. I think he's a throwback to the Middle Ages in many respects. He is an anti-prophet. He acts against enlightenment and he's a very irrational person in many of his writings, which I find rank nonsense.

“But there are diamonds in there. Here's one of the diamonds.

“[Jung] says the self is not only the center, but also the whole circumference, which embraces both conscious and unconscious. It is the center of this totality, just as the ego is the center of consciousness.”

The self, then, subsumes the ego and the shadow. The self is everything and the totality of self is the end result of Jung’s process of individuation, the integration of the ego/shadow duality.

As such, the self subsumes the corporate collective. And if the self fails to function in this way, if he fails to integrate the collective into his ego, that collective unconscious can overpower his individual ego and produce psychopathy. This understanding fundamentally contradicts the edict that “we are all one” and illuminates corporate behaviors (which, in the legal and business realms, simply attempts to avoid accountability) as psychotic.