Social Alchemy:
Creative & Participatory Dialogue Process
by Johann L Botha and Jackie Elliot
[This article was written for the Heretic Magazine, the full piece can be accessed here - on The Heretic website]
Social Alchemy is the art of hosting transformational space together. An amalgamation of narrative-dialogical and creative-contemplative practices and attending to the change, transition, and transformation in our lives.
This approach views life as change, and movement in various stages of metamorphosis, transformation, and transition, which we can participate in by the quality of the attention we bring to a situation.
The aim is to attend in a creative and dialogical way, to the natural renewal and decay of life, to bring us back into harmony with our natural environment. We draw inspiration from alchemy as an experimental and observational process that reconnects the material body to the vitality of spirit to renew our related ways of being in the world.
A TASTE OF ALCHEMY
We may acknowledge Alchemy as a hermetic philosophy, a craft of metallurgy, or a rudimentary science of experimentation and observation as the pre-cursor to our modern-day chemistry, while at the same time not neglecting to become aware of the hidden inner life, psychology, emotions, and spirit of the alchemist.
The Western alchemical operations generally follow a three-part structure with Beginning, Middle and End.
Let’s start with the end in mind, in service of the telos that is the purpose and aspiration of the work. The end and purpose are often confused with the literal turning of lesser metals to gold or brewing magical cure-all elixirs, which we treat as the fantasy of the work.
There is very little, dare one say no reliable, evidence which suggests that anyone literally transformed lead into gold. Carl Jung understood that one should not take the end goal or “gold” of the alchemical work literally but as a psychological projection of the state of our psyche into a material form.
For Jung (2014), in alchemy and psychology, it is the middle of the work (Opus), in his case the individuation process, we need to attend to. To become an individuated person may be beyond us.
Sharp (1991) references Jung in saying that “The goal is important only as an idea, the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime”.
James Hillman (2015), an archetypal psychologist in the Jungian Psychoanalytic tradition, goes even further to say that we should not even see these goals as symbolic representations of psychological accomplishments. In a way, Hillman recognises the gold goal for what it is, a fantasy. Here in Social Alchemy, the goal is that which keeps us attending to our daily practice, mastering transformation not as a power over but as the ability to accompany the change and flux of life as it is, which in our view requires the exercise of our creative perception and imagination.
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