From Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
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Dear Brave Souls: In Alchemy, which I will be teaching in the helping professionals Mysterium Training in Archetypal and Cross-Cultural Psychology, very soon… alchemy in popular imagination is often only known as the transmutation of lead into gold.
But it is far more: Psychically, this has correspondence with the ways the psyche develops through three assigned and coded color stages of varying duration … whenever we begin and proceed in a leap in consciousness: The first is often the nigredo… the darkening, wherin one wonders “Is this all there is?” And “where the heck am I?” And, “things have lost their meaning.”
The nigredo or darkening of the psyche can come when a beautiful run is over, when a relationship comes to a close, when the curtain falls, when there is a death of any kind, there is yet no more map seeming writ, when one is plunged into being ‘a stranger in a strange land.’
IT is a time of wandering about, but also a time of finding cracks of light under unfamiliar doors.
Alchemy is a set of beautiful and ace-accurate metaphors that comes straight up out of the ground in terms of suggesting the leaden, with being bathed, salted, sung over, married, dissolved, reddened, will finally come to sunrise— one never before seen or known… one that bestows wisdom to those who will take the alchemical road, also called the black, red and white road.
There are many names to this alchemy, called differently by many tribal groups throughout the world, some who have only remnants of the process still known to them, others a more whole set of rituals and understandings for this journey… oddly the alchemical texts and drawings of the nigredo (the darkening), rubedo (the reddening/ the blood loss) and the albedo, the rising disk of white silver sun of gold (of new never before seen amalgamated consciousness) —
are in terms of hierographics and hierglyphs, one of the most complete sets of literal ritual that even were all others lost, these would remain— for they were duplicated thousands of times in hundreds of the ancient libraries in literally dozens and dozens of nations far flung, and were not able to be subverted, ruined, hacked away, burnt, destroyed by conquests of only one targeted nation.
The usefulness of knowing the ‘alchemical process’, in part, is to be able to anticipate an ancient beyond ancient process that comes over all of us, several times in life… and that such dark and blood-loss journey is not without meaning and substance… and ultimately a knowing that can be passed hand to hand, heart to heart about the way through, for often people with even best intentions become caught in the nigredo or the rubedo, and flounder instead of finding the way through to a scarred up flourishing.
This comes with love, to each her own, to each his own.
Dr.E
