Alchemy and the Enneagram
How Can I Take it Easy on My Type?
I have this bad habit as a Four of combing through the past 40 years of my life and dredging up the times when my type got in my way. The volleyball team I was too scared and lazy to join, the DJ gigs I didn’t feel ready for, the broken people I believed must know way more about life than I did. I could go on. In this ruminative mode, the temptation is to curse my type and to believe the life I should be living is the one I can imagine where I never got triggered or sold myself short because I didn’t have this type constantly crossing my wires.
It’s an absurd fantasy and a waste of the calories my brain consumes to spin it. I know this intellectually, but it’s been the study of alchemy that’s helping me to develop a better attitude towards my type and a more embodied sense of the dignity that comes from working through my shit.
Alchemy is an ancient philosophical and pre-scientific tradition concerned with… well, it’s hard to narrow down. The association most people are familiar with is of men dressed like wizards with lots of potions, flasks, and burners trying to turn lead into gold. Other alchemists sought to create the Philosopher’s Stone or the Elixir of Life, substances with many miraculous properties including the healing of all diseases and the transmutation of lead to gold.
On its face, alchemy is only useful if you’re interested in the pop-culture fantasy archetypes it inspired or in the history of what would eventually become chemistry. And yet, Carl Jung wrote more about alchemy than any other subject in his lifetime.
Jung believed that, in their attempts to explore the nature of matter, the alchemists ended up projecting a lot of of their unconscious processes on to the materials they studied. While we’re better off using the lenses of physics and chemistry to learn about the physical properties of matter, alchemy can tell us a surprising amount about unconscious processes of the psyche. Since a principle concern of alchemy was the transformation of different materials, it (perhaps inadvertantly) reveals to us quite a bit about how the unconscious relates to personal transformation1.
Very generally speaking, transformations in alchemy tend to begin with something foul, forgotten, ignored, or scorned. It could be trash or filth, something discarded. Sometimes lead was seen in this light. When this filthy, forgotten thing scorned by society is found by the alchemist, the attitude should be celebratory as now all of the alchemical operations can be conducted in order to turn it into gold, the Philosopher’s Stone, or the panacea that will cure all. In this model, it is almost as though there can be no gold if you can’t find any lead to start with.
The specific alchemical operations are fascinating in their own right, but this is enough alchemy for now to make a point about the Enneagram. It can feel awful to have some childish aspect of our type take control for long enough for us to embarrass ourselves or create some mess we’ll have to clean up later. But these childish or ill-adapted aspects are the trash that, if related to and processed, will eventually line our psychological or spiritual pockets with gold.
My attitude is certainly not yet celebratory when I notice some previously unrealized facet of how my type can take over. I have, however, stopped believing that it shouldn’t be this way. Without a steady supply of raw personality junk (alchemists often called it the prima materia) the work cannot continue.
Symbolizing the process of maturing as taking precious lead or filth and pouring all kinds of care and expertise into refining it has helped me grow out of the wish that my life and my type were set to easy mode. Being hijacked by my type will probably never be a cause for celebration, but it points me to where the work is. I’m coming to appreciate the clarity and direction.
For a more in-depth argument for the value of studying alchemy for contemporary psychology from a Jungian perspective, I recommend the Introduction to Edward Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche.