The Alchemical Net

***************** Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 15:16:38 -0500 To: fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu From: declan@hotwired.com (Declan McCullagh) Subject: FC: The Alchemical Net Sender: owner-fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu X-URL: http://www.eff.org/~declan/fight-censorship/ X-JusticeOnCampusURL: http://joc.mit.edu/ This is an essay that talks about about the psychology of Net-censorship. The writer draws parallels between the architecture of the Net and the architecture of depth psychology, with particular emphasis on alchemical symbols. Repressing the Net represses ourselves. McCullagh studies at the Jung Institute in Philadelphia. An excerpt from the essay: "The Net and Web symbols and icons, the mythological names, the weird links and mirrors, the uncensored slop, the stench of digital sulfur, the secrecy, the fuss about encryption, the inside language, the personal signatures, the home pages and so on, are the stuff of alchemy. The world governments efforts to control this secretive language is no different than the Church trying to censor medieval alchemists or religious mystics. The powers always take such actions in the name of god-fearing decency and the protection of innocents. The government wants to regulate Net behavior because it doesnt understand it. They can certainly fake it, as Dole tried to do in the first debate with Clinton. T.S. Eliot wrote about the twentieth century citizen as having the experience but missing the meaning. That is a description of the 800-pound gorilla government presence in the Net-terrain. They dont get it. But, in a way, they do. Even unreflective government ministers realize this Netthing is bubbling up from somewhere and like Hermes/Mercury, is forever changing its shape, spots, color, and demeanor. Suppress a web site in Burma and an alchemical mirror captures the message in Timbuktu." -Declan **************** The Alchemical Net By Chuck McCullagh <76543.1777@CompuServe.COM> October 10, 1996 I got interested in the Net about the same time I developed an interest in alchemy. Since that time Ive been musing about what these two protocols, one distinctly medieval, one post-modern, might have in common. Both, to borrow the words of writer Flannery OConnor, draw large and starting figures. Both are agents and expressions of cultural, psychological, and perhaps even spiritual transformations. Both protocols are ostensibly about technology and process; but ultimately the two protocols are about changes in technology that can change the inner man. The protocols can be easily misunderstood. And they can readily serve the charlatan seeking the quick buck. Alchemy was originally the effort to change base metals into gold. This arcane science predated chemistry and metallurgy and medieval literature shows how serious practitioners were about this activity. For them, alchemy was a sacred art. To truly transform base metals into gold, an internal transformation must also take place, though the process might be unconscious. The genuine alchemical artists would understand the poet Auden's phrase:new styles of architecture, a change of heart. There had to be the right chemistry between the metallurgical process and the alchemist. Alchemy went the way of the dung heap, sent there in part by all the charlatans who promised get rich schemes. Today they would be stock brokers. Chemistry replaced this earthy science. Three hundred years later C.G. Jung, the Swiss psychologist, stumbled onto alchemy. After hearing thousands of his patients' dreams Jung was struck by the similarity of symbolism in the various dreams. He found arelatedness among the dream imagery and eventually found similar imagery in alchemy. He considered dream symbolism a kind of empirical evidence that man possesses a collective unconscious which houses archetypes common to mankind. Jung also discovered that alchemists were interested in personal, as well as metallurgical, transformation. Though there were technicians and charlatans in the business, the real alchemists were philosophers who were using the witches brew of sulfur, metals, and whatnot, as a mediation axis for their internal transformation. They were actually in search of soul. But why the charade? Why engage in ironwork when the true interest is in soul work? The psychological answer is that the Catholic Church, in the driver's seat for centuries, has successfully managed to suppressive the personal and collective unconscious and emphasize spirit rather than soul. The Church essentially denied the interior man and his/her proclivity for symbol-making. Augustine, Aquinas and the other Church fathers denied the dark side of life. Satan, once the brother of Christ, was now dethroned. Evil was merely the absence of good. Neat as this might be from a theological perspective, it absolutely devastated psychological man. Jung writes that when the unconscious is suppressed, it erupts as fate. Our inability to believe that an evil as great as Hitler could be real, led to the slaughter of millions. That the Catholic Church and the Reformers, who promised much more attention to psychology but failed, denied modern man his or her psychology, sent the activity underground. The philosopher/alchemists, made wary by Church Inquisitions and witch burning, went underground and developed a delicious pre-industrial protocol to disguise a psychological activity. As Jung has noted, the changing of base metals into gold is really a metaphor for the individuation process, during which a person becomes fully integrated and whole. The alchemists were an industrial offshoot of the mystical tradition, perhaps best represented by Meister Eckhart of Germany, that believed, as the Greeks did, he who knows himself, knows God. Such a position was anathema to the Church which held the keys to the kingdom. No wonder alchemists went underground. Alchemy was finally done in by the powerful worlds of rationalism and empiricism that denied the unconscious. If you couldnt measure something, it wasnt real. Our world today is a product of these movements. Most of our cultural ailments, whether consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fundamentalism, or extremism of any kind, have their origins in the psychology of rational and empirical Americans. The spiritual despair so many people feel today is due to the denial of the soul and the failure of the old religious symbols to speak to us at the end of the 20th century. As the rap song goes,  Denial, Anns just a river in Egypt. It is a principle of depth psychology that what a culture represses, comes back as fate. Our collective inability to accept the very real presence of evil in the world (and in ourselves and in our icon gods) has given us a brutal century which will likely close the way it began--in bloodshed. The pathetic, simple-minded political discourse in this country only underscores our lack of reflection. American and world institutions are scared shuttles of the NET, not because they cant control it but because, from a psychological point-of-view, it is the animals emerging out of the collective unconscious. In terms of digital exchange, the NET was probably inevitable. Im less interested in the Net as a overlay of technical protocols than the Net as a projection of depth psychology replete with its own cultural icons and alchemical processes. The alchemical language was archaic, symbolic, suggestive, designed that way so the authorities could not easily decipher. It was a game of sulfur handshakes and smoky mirrors. The factory floor was smelled of Yeats foul rag and bone shop of the heart. The alchemists knew the stench of excrement. They were that too. The Net and Web symbols and icons, the mythological names, the weird links and mirrors, the uncensored slop, the stench of digital sulfur, the secrecy, the fuss about encryption, the inside language, the personal signatures, the home pages and so on, are the stuff of alchemy. The world governments efforts to control this secretive language is no different than the Church trying to censor medieval alchemists or religious mystics. The powers always take such actions in the name of god-fearing decency and the protection of innocents. The government wants to regulate Net behavior because it doesnt understand it. They can certainly fake it, as Dole tried to do in the first debate with Clinton. T.S. Eliot wrote about the twentieth century citizen as having the experience but missing the meaning. That is a description of the 800-pound gorilla government presence in the Net-terrain. They dont get it. But, in a way, they do. Even unreflective government ministers realize this Netthing is bubbling up from somewhere and like Hermes/Mercury, is forever changing its shape, spots, color, and demeanor. Suppress a web site in Burma and an alchemical mirror captures the message in Timbuktu. Whatever the Net is technologically, it also represents a psychological space where transactions of the soul and spirit take place. Yes, its messy, god knows its messy. But so were the alchemists attempts to turn base metals into gold. So is the psychological process of individuation which is a life journey for us all. Psychologist James Hillman, updating Jung writes, In my symptoms is my soul. Life is a mess and that is reflected on the Net. Neither religion nor the state encourages psychological development. Instead both encourage wars to fight for anthropomorphic god we have projected into the heavens. The symbols that are passed on to us by tradition (Christ, Virgin Mary, the saints) are made clean by tradition and are rid of the shadows of the unconscious. Our presidents, saints, and cultural icons are elevated and become etherized on the table of history. The conscious mind wants order. impeccable grammar, and Jefferson without his black mistress. The unconscious mind serves up dreams in alchemical dress that scare the hell out of us. That is, if we are awake. That this is a manifestation of depth psychology with its lions, tigers, and dream corridors worries the guardians of the conscious state. So they propose their own protocols, wrapped in the white flag of decency. The authorities want to repress the Net because it is a projection of their own unconscious. They dont want to enter that terrain. They will certainly stand tall against pedophiles but will refuse to see the Net as a journey they must to take. Alchemists had rigorous protocols of mixing elements to get the right elixir. But their work was not programmatic, for that approach would satisfy the conscious mind. Rather alchemists relied more on intuition and magical clues, finding hints and links during the soul journey. The objective was always transformation; taking the unprocessed substances and combining them in such a way as to bring about the desired end which, in psychological terms, was the development of the Self, the whole person. A basic principle of alchemy was that the basic materials had to be combined and processed the same way Jungians believe raw dream material has to be subjected to a critical analysis. A technical need gave birth to the Net. However, the Net also answered a psychological need. Again, what the conscious mind represses, returns as fate or culture. Modern man is both liberated and enslaved. The institutions that purport to serve him has denied him access to the unconscious, the royal road to the soul. Alchemists knew intuitively what analytical psychologists know empirically; that is, the unconscious is more responsive to the spontaneous attitudes associated with the young. This is what has perplexed and scared so many in authorities. The young are vigorously responding to this invitation from the unconscious to develop the mysterious tools and protocols that will, as the fantasy goes, transform the world and perhaps themselves. For some the Net is really about ontology, the nature of being itself. It is a mirror that invites a very different view of man. He or she is no only digital, world at the fingertip; this emerging tech-head renders obsolete most institutions associated with paternalism. Free speech is really free. A literate, enfranchised, ennobled citizen can be a reality. More profoundly, the collective psychology is changing. The boundaries that define and confine are less important. On the Net nationalism takes on a very petty glow. Netizens have the potential of living their lives symbolically in that they are always linked to the other. Of course, the Net is also a junk yard filled with tons of stuff that must be subjected to the right touch of alchemy. The process is about process and realizing one must interact with the untutored material. The Net is certainly a solipsistic zone of personal chatter. But this chatter has an alchemical role in that it allows the base material to show forth to be transformed. The impulse to censor the Net argues against the Nets psychological benefits. Alchemy described a technological process that was also about personal transformation. The psychological aim was wholeness and integration of the Self. The Net is a technical protocol that permits the transfer of unlimited amounts of digital date. But the Net architecture is also a manifestation of depth psychology that has the potential of ordering the world in a much more soulful way. ### ------------------------------------------------------------------------- fight-censorship is at http://www.eff.org/~declan/fight-censorship/