Yesterday, while at a friend´s who
helped us fix the exhaust pipe of our old Mitsubishi
4 x 4, my attention was seized by an
old Citroen resting on top of a ramp, dismanteled to its core. The
sight of this sceleton reminded me of the central formula of alchemy
solve et coagula, signifying
something along the lines of take it apart, clean it to the
bones and put the cleansed parts together again into a new whole.
My
associative chain led me further into therapeutic landscapes. The
process seems to operate after the same principles: first you need to
dismantle the whole of the human being´s old
ego &
identifications - all the way down to the bones of the particular
parts, spesific content. You need to clean the old wounds -that
often had hidden under layers of articifical plasters, scrape them
clean from the old debris and rust, desinfect them. This may burn,
hurt on the short run– but definitely helps and heals on the long
run. And finally one needs put the parts together again, integrate
the insights, discovered potentials, new consciousness until a new
human being is born.
Sounds
a bit like creating a Frankenstein of some sort. But- also the
Frankenstein monster is a symbol of an attempt to transform shadows
that have been locked away over a long time.
Astrologically
this corresponds to the Scorpio principle (alchemy, the dismanteling,
the transformation, metamophosis). In the magical syklus of the
zodiac, Sagitarius follows after Scorpio, meaning, related to this
context: in order to arrive at a New Vision of Self -that must be the
ultimate goal of any therapeutic process - the alchemical
transformation first needs to have taken place in the laboratory of
the Inner Alchemist. That´s why the working chronology in the Zodiac
is (astro-)logical: first Scorpio, than Sagitarius.