Alchemy – The Art of Transformation: An Interview with Cherry Gilchrist

Alchemy – The Art of Transformation: An Interview with Cherry Gilchrist

January 21, 2018
By RICHARD SMOLEY

Cherry Gilchrist’s book on the history and interpretation of alchemy has remained a classic since its first publication in 1984. Alchemy, the Great Work: A History and Evaluation of the Western Hermetic Tradition will be published in a new edition by Weiser Books, with an introduction by Mark Booth, in June 2015.

Her book on alchemy as a system of self-development, drawing on the Twelve Gates of George Ripley and alchemical imagery, is Everyday Alchemy, published by Rider in 2002.

She has appeared on radio and TV on various occasions to discuss alchemy, most notably on ‘Stephen Hawking’s World’, in an episode filmed in Owlpen Manor in Gloucestershire, UK, home and haunt of an eighteenth-century alchemist.

Cherry also draws on her knowledge of the Tree of Life, astrology, and divination in her writings on alchemy. She has studied these subjects since her student days at Cambridge, from which she graduated with a degree in English literature and anthropology. Following the line of oral traditions and wisdom, she has also written about Russian folk traditions, ancestry, personal life stories, and myths and legends from different cultures. Cherry is at present writing a book on the traditional Tarot trumps for Quest Books. For details of her work, see www.cherrygilchrist.co.uk.

Other interests include singing early music, and travel. Places visited such as Easter Island, Siberia, and the Silk Road have given her inspiration for her books, and insight into ancient cultures.

Cherry’s own philosophy is that the Hermetic work can be passed down through a genuine line of teaching, and that it needs to find different forms in new generations. She was a founder member of Saros, the Foundation for the Perpetuation of Knowledge, an organisation headquartered in the UK which took on those aims.

Cherry lives in Exeter, UK, with her husband, artist Robert Lee-Wade.

Richard Smoley (RS): Maybe we could start by a brief definition of what you think alchemy is.

Cherry Gilchrist (CG): Alchemy is about transformation. In its most basic definition, it’s the transformation of base material or metal into gold. However, that is too simplistic, according to the ways in which the tradition of alchemy has been practised and understood over hundreds, even thousands, of years. In a way, alchemy is about the process of creation itself: how does one thing become another? How do things change state? How can we change our state of being? And can we, as so-called conscious human beings, learn how to make those changes? So another way to put it is that alchemy is a way of using the life force to effect transformation, whether that’s on the physical, external level, or in a spiritual way. I hesitate to say that the alchemical process can work either on the material or on the spiritual level, because in one sense, in alchemy, they are completely integrated!

RS: Most people would say that alchemy is just an old and outmoded form of chemistry. Why should we interest ourselves in it today?

CG: I think this old chestnut comes up because of the way historians have dealt with alchemy in the last hundred years or so. That has formed the belief we’re fed. I use the word ‘belief’ because I really do think our perception of what is true and false, what is reliably scientific and what is non-scientific and therefore superstitious – in some people’s eyes – is moulded by the way history has been interpreted. Anyone who reads my book will, I hope, have that view changed. The evidence from the history of alchemy alone, when explored more fully, shows just how seriously it was taken, and how it can’t be just cast on the scrapheap as a well-meaning but deluded forerunner to enlightened science. Isaac Newton himself was an alchemist, and funnily enough, scholars have recently begun to pay a lot more attention to that fact.

I myself make no claims that alchemy is effective when judged by the standards of modern chemistry. I am not a scientist, and clearly we’re not going to go backwards in time and revert to what now seem very primitive methods for working with chemical elements. I think the point is more that alchemy has had many applications over its history, and that the way it led into chemistry as we know it was just one feature of the whole spectrum of alchemy. Maybe it still has more to teach us about how to work with physical materials, though – and with the whole area of interaction of mind and materials opening up in science, it could offer views and approaches which breathe new life into scientific development. But whatever the case, alchemy still has much to impart in terms of psychology, spiritual development, and our relationship with the natural world. In one form or another, it’s still a path to knowledge.

RS: Could you say a little bit about the origins of alchemy?

CG: Well, again here we are somewhat constrained by the degree of research and scholarship available to us. This suggests, to put it briefly, that the metal workers of ancient Egypt may have kicked off the interest in the transformation of one material or metal into another. And that this came to early fruition in the Hellenistic, Alexandrian period, which began about three hundred years before the Christian era. But I suspect that if a few scholars really dig into the roots of alchemy, they will find a much wider realm of alchemical endeavour, particularly if they broaden the definition of alchemy. In the Far East, alchemy also had ancient origins, but the focus there was more on how the human body worked. Just as shamanism has extended its definition in recent years – it was once considered to be exclusively Siberian, and now is traced almost worldwide – so alchemy may have a broader historical lineage than we at present suspect. Perhaps this is beginning to happen. It has been suggested for instance that the discovery of charcoal burning is linked to a historical peasant tradition of alchemy as practiced by the Basques, one of the most ancient peoples of Europe.

RS: Some writers describe alchemy as a physical process – actual working with minerals and plants and so on. Others see it as a psychological process. How do you see these different roles? Are they both valid?

CG: I used to hold firmly to the view that true alchemy must be applied across the levels, having both a physical and a mental component. Its magic, if I can call it that, is that it is neither purely material or purely spiritual. However, I’ve come to see this in a different light, and I think now that alchemy has an incredible spectrum of application, and can be applied at different levels of creation. The most extreme examples of selective application are perhaps the old-fangled ‘puffers’ who spent all their time trying to work out how to concoct gold and get rich. And also the purely spiritual alchemists among whom we can count Jacob Boehme. I consider now that both of these are valid in their way; they are both participating in an alchemical process. However, if the get-rich-quick alchemists ignored the bigger scale of the creative process and limited their goals to financial reward, they were likely to end up dirty, disappointed, and broke! Alchemical laboratories weren’t pretty, fragrant places to work in.

The other way round, I suppose, can have more significant results – I mean alchemy as a metaphor for spiritual development does work. But perhaps it will peter out as a way forward, or be very particular to one person, because it is treated then as a set of symbols which could be replaced by another set at will. If you sever the connection between material process and our sense of creation as a whole, or between spiritual and material understanding, then that approach to alchemy can’t flourish for long. There’s much to ponder on here, and I doubt that my own views will ever reach a complete and final conclusion!

Continue to read:
[link to twitter.com (secure)]