Alchemy, Addiction, and Initiation

By Bob Bongiovanni, MA

Happiness
 
Happiness, to some, elation;
Is, to others, mere stagnation.
Days of passive somnolence,
At its wildest, indolence.
Hours of empty quietness,
No delight, and no distress.
Happiness to me is wine,
Effervescent, superfine.
Full of tang and fiery pleasure,
Far too hot to leave me leisure
For a single thought beyond it.
Drunk! Forgetful! This the bond: it
Means to give one's soul to gain
Life's quintessence. Even pain
Pricks to livelier living, then
Wakes the nerves to laugh again,
Rapture's self is three parts sorrow.
Although we must die to-morrow,
Losing every thought but this;
Torn, triumphant, drowned in bliss.
Happiness: We rarely feel it.
I would buy it, beg it, steal it,
Pay in coins of dripping blood

For this one transcendent good.

--Amy Lowell

Last week, we began our exploration of the topic of initiation, explaining it as the process by which a current situation demands transcendence, and the process of transcendence involves an initiatory death and rebirth. This week, we will discuss how the use of drugs – particularly so-called recreation drugs – is frequently involved in modern initiations – paralleling the processes of psychological and spiritual transformation known as alchemy. In other words, for modern people, their bodies are like the vessels of the alchemists, where exotic elements are combined, producing mystical, transformational processes. If done unconsciously, the effect can be unpredictable, even deadly.

First, let’s discuss drug use, particularly drug use that passes into dependence and addiction. Analyst Luigi Zoja tells us that drug addiction involves three elements: physical, psychological, and parareligious. First, there is the physiological effect of the drug. Initially, a relatively small quantity of the drug produces a relatively large effect on consciousness and on the body’s chemistry. Over time, it takes more and more of the drug to produce the same effect, and the body’s chemistry changes. Indeed, a certain amount of the drug is necessary even to feel normal or well. That is the physical part of addiction. In addition, there is a psychological dimension to addiction. The drug can come to dominate many dimensions of a person’s psychological functioning. It becomes the way of coping with disappointment, relaxing, overcoming anxiety, being energetic, unleashing creativity, achieving ecstasy, and so on. If your peers and friends also use drugs, it can also define ways of relating and communicating. Third, there is the parareligious aspect, which could also be called its sacred aspect. Through drug use, a person strives toward transcendence, toward a sacred dimension of life. Zoja argues that any true, lasting treatment for drug addiction must completely address all three dimensions. In fact, there is a great deal of research that substantiates that one must deal with both physiological and psychological addiction. For instance, so-called detoxification programs, that merely assist one to rid the body of the effects of the drug, are only very rarely effective by themselves in preventing future use. Zoja’s further assertion – that the sacred aspect must also be dealt with – does also ring true, perhaps not so much in the professional research, but certainly anecdotally. To quote Zoja:

We occasionally find a drug addict who has managed to free himself of the first two elements (roughly speaking, physical intoxication and obsessive pathology) by apparently having found in himself those new values he had previously sought externally. He seems to alter his own world view, but when this view is not sufficiently altered, we begin to see the former addict falling in a new dependence, either on a new substance or on another pathological behavior – fanatic adherence to a religious sect, compulsive eating, and so on. Even membership in Alcoholics Anonymous, certainly one of the most effective programs against alcoholism, influences the individual by promoting the acritical, unconditioned participation characteristic of sacred rites.

. . .

This leads us to hypothesize that the tendency to use drugs is not closely linked to environmental influences, but rather emanates from that area of the unconscious out of which autonomous realities can emerge independently of consciousness, personal history, or cultural milieu.

Even with that third aspect added – the sacred aspect – it’s tempting to equate addiction with disease. That is the prevailing modern attitude, namely, that addiction is a disease to which some of us are more susceptible than others, calling for treatment that follows the medical model. Indeed, the holy grail of drug treatment is to find an antidote for all addictive drugs that can be easily taken to produce a long-lasting cure.

From a Jungian point of view, such a disease and medical model is doomed to failure because it fails to acknowledge the meaning of the phenomena for the affected person and our culture. We are awash in chemical addictions, with no end in sight. What could this mean for us?

Consider the following clue. The rise in addiction has roughly paralleled the loss of other forms of initiation in Western societies. Could it be that people are seeking, through drug use, the type of initiation that was formerly available through rites of passage for adolescents and other tests of will and spirit? I believe this hypothesis is even more plausible in light of how Jung describes our modern era in Volume 9 of the collected works, known as Aeon. As we’ve discussed previously in this group, Jung discerned four parts to the Piscean aeon, roughly 500 years each, beginning with 1^st year A.D., and ending in the year 2000. The first 500 years was dominated by spirituality, the second 500 years was dominated the church and carnality, the third 500 years was marked by the flowering of alchemy, and the final 500 years, up to the present day, has been dominated by scientific materialism and the deification of matter. Perhaps initiation has similarly evolved and changed through these eras, as well. Consider just the last 1000 years, from the age of alchemy through today. It seems clear that alchemy was a powerful means of initiation, particularly suited to its time. Those were less materialistic times, when people were inclined to look for evidence of the divine everywhere. By observing the changes in the physical elements in the sealed container, the alchemist came to appreciate and experience subtle psychological and spiritual transformations. Now, the modern mentality does not lend itself easily to such observations. We certainly understand and appreciate the nature of materiality, down to the subatomic level of detail, but most scientists are not looking for the divine there, merely the inalterable and universal laws of nature. We live, most certainly, in a material age. Therefore, one might expect that a more modern initiation would be more materialistic and more literal than alchemy. In that sense, initiation through drug use makes perfect sense. It is typical of our modern times to expect something physical and observable to satisfy all of our longings, including our needs for transcendence and initiation.

Although alchemy does not provide the initiation potential as it did in the past, the psychological and spiritual transformations associated with it are still very much a part of human longing and experience. The question is: what are the present-day equivalents of alchemical practices? I would argue that drug use is among the most common and most powerful. And, as in the days of alchemy, there are those who dabble in such practices with ego-driven motives, thereby inflicting great harm to themselves and the community. For the alchemists, the ego-driven goal was gold; for the drug user, the ego-driven goal is entertainment. That said, the experiences of drug use parallel the experiences of alchemy in very interesting ways. For instance, the alchemical stage known as “solutio” is strikingly similar to intoxication with alcohol and other drugs that break down ego boundaries and produce, at least initially, a feeling of expansiveness and well-being, like the opiates. Listen to this description by Edward Edinger, concerning the experience of solutio:

It is a dissolver of limits and boundaries, bringing life without measure. In its extreme, it is wild, irrational, mad, ecstatic, boundless. It is the enemy of all conventional laws, rules, and established forms. It is in the service, not of safety, but of life and rejuvenation. The weak and immature may be destroyed by its onslaughts . . . Many clinical syndromes are due to a concretistic identification with [solutio]. Alcoholism and drug addiction are obvious.

Solutio is not the only process unleashed by drug use. There are many recreational drugs in use today, and each has a different effect. Edinger cites the following passage by a woman recounting her experiences using LSD as an example of a sublimatio experience:

I knew I was on my way when a releasing and delicious sense of floating in the atmosphere took over and engulfed my entire being. My sense of being contained by body dissolved. I laughed with delight and said out loud, "Now I remember what it's like to be without a body." I was in contact with some level of being, fully conscious but without embodiment. An awareness took form in my mind that I had resisted being born into the world in my present incarnation. I understood why. Air is my true element, the matrix of my being. The ecstasy of being free of body, the aging process, backaches, headaches, creaky joints lasted an eternity. I was no longer confined by the space-time dimensions of earth. How amazing to be "me," fully aware and conscious, and yet without any physical vehicle.

People who use stimulants, such as methamphetamine or cocaine, describe experiences more commonly attributed to the alchemical process known as coagulatio, having to do with compulsion to satisfy desires, or to calcinatio, the fiery purification that comes from desires unfulfilled. These substances produce energy, fan the flames of libido, and can result in orgies of experience, leaving ordinary life feeling flat and unfulfilling.

If drug use is a modern alchemy, what is the problem? Shall we legalize and normalize drug use, even encourage its use, for the psychological and spiritual transformations that might come from it? Some would argue that we should. However, the damaging effects of drug use are also around us – lives brought to ruin, cut short, untold suffering. What goes wrong? As I briefly mentioned before, much of it has to do with the motives for taking the drug and the context for drug-taking. If motives are for entertainment, or for escape, or for proving oneself to others, this will affect the after-effects of the experience. In addition, in our typical individualistic and precocious way, we tend to take drugs alone or with people who only dimly understand the shadow side of the drugs – in alchemical terms, there are initiates trying to initiate other initiates, with no adept present to safeguard the container and contain the process. Zoja points out a further danger of drug-taking as initiation in the following passage:

In analytic terms, we can thus say that in the moments following the taking of a drug one experiences a more or less ego-death, and a distancing of that consciousness, rationality, and lucidity to which we are hound by the inevitable imperative of European culture. This observation can help us understand certain facts. The use of drugs is considered a crime, especially in the West, because it above all is an attack against the specificity of Western psychology. The fact that drug addiction explodes with particular violence in societies involved in overly hasty modernization can also be seen as an unconscious and desperate attempt on the part of many people to offset the psychic onesidedness which this process causes. It becomes easier for us to understand how in the West drugs are often linked, perhaps unconsciously, with other forms of rejecting the dominant culture.

It is highly improbable that the brief and relative experience of "ego-death" consequent to the taking a drug (a feeling of "ego-lightness") corresponds to the necessity of death in the initiatory archetype, or that it can satisfy this need. This death is not consciously accepted, nor is it experienced as death, but rather as a loosening of excessive tension. When the ego is de-activated, the unconscious is simultaneously activated, overtly when the drug is a hallucinogen, and less overtly when other substances are used.

In general, it seems that in the first minutes following the taking of a drug, the psyche as a whole does not experience a feeling of death, but of alteration. The moment in which the death-experience manifests itself most violently generally occurs afterwards, as the effects of the drug wear off. If we consider drug addiction as an unconscious attempt at self-initiation, then what strikes us the most is that it is an initiation which has been inverted—rebirth as the initial experience, death as the final one.

This, of course, is a much more fundamental difficultly with using drugs for initiation. Impure motives and precocious initiates were difficulties that the alchemists dealt with, even in their time. But an inverted initiation is part-and-parcel of the drug experience itself and, it would seem, much of the reason that literal death and modern drug-taking are so linked.

We end with a poem by Emily Dickinson:

Exhilaration -- is within --
There can no Outer Wine
So royally intoxicate
As that diviner Brand
 
The Soul achieves -- Herself --
To drink -- or set away
For Visitor -- Or Sacrament --
'Tis not of Holiday
 
To stimulate a Man
Who hath the Ample Rhine
Within his Closet -- Best you can

Exhale in offering.