The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t see the connection. You’ll have to say more.”

  She drew in her breath, glanced across at the old man who frowned down at the table, dubious of Laura’s intervention, dubious of me. “Edward,” she said, “I think you’d better explain.”

  The thing about riddles is that the answer is always more mysterious than the puzzle. Sure, once you have it, the pieces click into place. It fits. But what are you holding? Like that ancient riddle to which the answer is “the wind” or, better still, like the Sphinx’s riddle to which the answer is “man”. Fine; you get the point; all very clever. But what is the wind? What is man?

  This was much the same. I had the answer and it answered nothing, and Edward clearly was none too happy about explaining. I thought I saw why. I mean – alchemy! ALCHIMIA! It had to be an elaborate piece of chicanery. I arranged my face accordingly, but when I looked across at him I had the impression of an old dragon coiled about its hoard, and fuming jealously.

  Under question it quickly emerged that I knew precious little about alchemy – no more than the fragments I’d picked up from literature: Chaucer’s mockery of it, Jonson’s satirical play, the conceits of the Metaphysical poets. I saw it as an eccentric quirk of history, a dodo hunt in which credulous men had tried to transmute base metal to gold. It was the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, wasn’t it? Or the Elixir of Life? I’d never been quite sure which, and did it matter? I knew – but did not say – that the whole thing smelled of fraud.

  Edward girded up the weary swags beneath his eyes and – I hadn’t been prepared for this – agreed. “Yes, the men whom Chaucer and Jonson despised were quacks, con-artists, knaves. Lacking the patience to woo the Lady Alchimia, they tried to rape her. They failed, of course, and their failure made the enterprise appear contemptible. But that is not the whole story. Regrettably the darker powers at work inside us know exactly how to muddy the waters so that a spiritual child goes down the drain with them unseen. Then meaning goes with it, and with meaning value… and we are left darkling.”

  He observed my frown at the reference to dark powers, and said, “They are there, I assure you. You are not exempt.” He brooded over the words, and the words brooded over me. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

  “True alchemy,” he declared, “is one among the sacred arts… For we Europeans perhaps the most vital.”

  Now, in my world only one art was sacred, and it wasn’t alchemy. I retreated into flippancy, said that this all sounded a bit mystical to me.

  “But do you know the meaning of that word?” Edward returned. “At root it has to do with closing, with sealing… the closing of the eyelids, the sealing of the lips, the closing of a wound. It has to do with making whole or holy… with healing. Alchemy is the effort to heal the split in consciousness. And, yes, in that strict sense of the word, I agree, it is mystical. But it is an art which is also a science… one which acts on the understanding that all true science is also a matter of poetics.”

  I saw his eyes shift at Laura’s impatient signals, but his frown silenced her. “We’ll get nowhere,” he said, looking back at me, “unless you start to think as you dream – symbolically. Alchemy sees the world as a great dance of symbols. A delicate web of correspondences in which nothing is finally separable from everything else. It starts from the premise – from the experience – that the germ of life plays everywhere. It has long known what the physicists ‘discovered’ yesterday – that the observer and the observed are members of a single interactive field. But it knows also what we have yet to learn – that the field is far from neutral. What we do to it is done also to ourselves. We are implicate. We create only in our own image, like God, and therefore self-knowledge is of critical importance. Without it the consequences are diabolic.” He paused to let the full force of the word strike home, then added, “Hence the disaster of materialism. It’s like the polystyrene muck it makes – rot that won’t rot. There’s nothing regenerative in its relationship to the world. How could there be? For rebirth is a science of the spirit.”

  “A science?” His first use of the word had bothered me; this second was unacceptable.

  “A science. A way of knowledge.”

  “But hardly scientific?”

  “Rigorously so – though not the scientific method of the materialists – a method which is, I may point out, increasingly aware of its limitations.”

  “But at least materialism…”

  I was about to suggest that it offered a solid purchase on the world, insisted at least on verifiable fact, but Edward winced, extravagantly. “Spare me,” he groaned. “Isn’t it enough that it proliferates around us daily, atomizing as it goes, making a junkyard of our world? Don’t bring it in here. Not in my house.”

  “Edward.” Laura’s reproof was again forestalled.

  “All right. I’m sorry. But look where it’s got us. At obscene expense and considerable inconvenience to those with humbler need of the money, the physicists smash their way into the mirror of matter, and what do they find? That it breaks. That matter is fissive, right? Remarkable! Except that alchemy has always known this. It also understands that the more we are entranced by the dance of matter, the more we fall victim to its fissive nature. It’s not only the atom that splits.We are in the mirror. Consciousness splits too. It shatters like china. And then – howlback. Heat death. The big chill. Cut.”

  He left a silence in which I might reflect on this brisk potted history of nuclear physics. I said, “So you’d rather we went back to counting angels on pinheads?”

  Edward sighed. “It might be saner than counting quarks – charmed or otherwise. Or counting universes for that matter. I suppose you know what the physicists are up to now? I presume you’re familiar with the Many Universes Theory?” Gratified by a further confession of ignorance, he explained. “It’s a fancy little number cooked up by the fissive mind in its efforts to account for the schizophrenic behaviour of smashed particles. We are now asked to bend our imaginations round the thought that at every instant of choice the universe forks. In this world only one thing may appear to happen, but in countless unreachable others all the alternative possibilities spin off happily doing their thing. Matter splits, you see, and thus, with fine paradoxical flair, nothing really matters any more. If a few million Jews are murdered in this world, never mind – there are others in which they find Jerusalem. If Africa starves here and now, elsewhere it waxes fat. If the missiles eventually incinerate this madhouse reality, worry not – in a more sensible dimension we beat them into ploughshares. Nothing matters. We have an elegant, theoretically sound explanation of a fissive world. Which I, for one, don’t buy. Do you?”

  He gave me no time to collect my thoughts. “Don’t you get it yet? Materialism leaves us trapped in a world that won’t hold together. It’s centrifugal. It splits at every turn into the Ten Thousand Things each neatly labelled with a PhD thesis. In the meantime we become more and more obsessed with what we mistake for our real needs, hopes, fears… and more and more estranged from our birthright membership of a coherent universe. Hence this century’s endless harping on the theme of exile – typically misconceived in merely political terms, or as the dreary job description of being human. If we were less arrogant, we might see ourselves for what we are – children sent on an errand, who first forget our instructions and then realize we have forgotten the way home. How to find our way back? How to realize a whole vision of life? Not some self-sealing intellectual construct; no shabby, patchwork compromise, but a regenerative, transcendent change. One that reconciles matter with spirit, heart with mind, the female in us and the male, the darkness and the light. That was the problem which engaged the spiritual intellect of the true alchemist. That was the Elixir, the Stone, the Gold… aurum non vulgi – no common gold. They are all symbols for what cannot be said – only experienced. As is,” he added pointedly, “the chymical wedding – the promise of which you saw celebrated in your dreams.”


  He took in the impact of this last remark, and left a further silence which, this time, I did not break. The strange phrase chimed through my mind. For an instant I was possessed by an image of the mind as a glass bell – an intangible but lucid elision of bell jars and wedding bells, the sound and the shape – temple bells even, ringing like glass across the valleys of the brain. Momentarily, I was hooked. And he saw it.

  “You were given a glimpse of the thalamus,” Edward said quietly, “that chamber of the mid-brain which is also the bridal chamber. It is where the mysteries are consummated while the world makes its rough music outside, wanting it to happen, yet excluded from the secret. The Agnews were the guardians of that secret. If you have understood anything, you will see it is a secret we desperately need to know.”

  Slowly the dragon uncoiled from his hoard, and he did it by telling a story. It began back in the seventeenth century in the time of the first baronet of Easterness, Sir Humphrey Agnew, an ardent royalist who had founded the family’s fortunes at the Restoration. A gallant, somewhat mysterious figure, he had also been a profoundly learned man – a friend and correspondent of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton and, more particularly, of Thomas Vaughan, author of the Magia Adamica and the Lumen de Lumine, and twin brother of the poet Henry Vaughan. All four of them, it seemed, had been explorers of the Hermetic arts, though Boyle and Newton’s enquiries in this area had largely been forgotten.

  Humphrey Agnew was himself an adept who had conducted his own important researches in collaboration with a remarkable woman called Janet Dyball. Edward explained that many alchemists had worked with a female assistant –a soror mystica – for the Art required that both aspects of human nature, the male and the female, the solar and the lunar, be reconciled in harmonious unison if the chymical wedding was to be celebrated.

  It was a moment before I made the connection with the names of the swans – Humphrey and Janet – and began to perceive what Edward might have meant when he called them their familiars. At the same moment his need of Laura was thrown into a context quite different from any I had guessed. I wanted to press him further on the relationship between alchemist and mystic sister, but already Edward had moved on.

  Regrettably he couldn’t prove it, but he had a strong suspicion that Sir Humphrey was the adept who had written under the pseudonym Irenaeus Philalethes, the greatest master of the golden age of English alchemy, whose identity had never been established. Agnew had been born in 1622 and would therefore have been twenty-three in 1645, the age and the year in which Irenaeus attained to the Stone of the Philosophers. Whether or not this theory was right, Agnew had certainly been an important link in the Aurea Catena – the golden chain by which knowledge of the alchemical mysteries was transmitted orally from adept to adept. The library in the Hall was still packed with the Hermetic texts he had collected. It was one of the finest private collections in the world. Furthermore, some of Sir Humphrey’s alchemical instruments were now in the Kensington Science Museum. “There is a particularly fine example of a Pelican such as you saw in your dream,” Edward said. “It’s a retort designed to facilitate the circulation of the vapours during the sublimation of volatile substances.”

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what this meant but, without pausing to explain, he went on to insist that, though there was never again to be a Hermeticist of such distinction in the family, he believed that the tradition had been kept alive from generation to generation – oral transmission of the inner secret while the rest of the world plunged headlong into blind materialism.

  “And you think that Ralph still has it?” I remained unclear what the secret might be, but when I recalled that portly gentleman with his bland high-Tory manner, he seemed an unlikely carrier. My voice conveyed as much.

  “If only it were that simple.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re trying to find out,” Laura said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “The chain was broken,” Edward added. “I am trying – God help me – to mend it again.”

  The break had happened in the time of the eighth baronet – Ralph’s great-grandfather, Sir Henry Agnew. In revulsion from his father’s rakehell excesses, Henry Agnew had chosen the contemplative life. Having distinguished himself as a philologist at Oxford, he retired to Easterness where his studious disposition could devote itself entirely to metaphysical enquiry. His wife had died at a relatively early age and, after her death, he became ever more reclusive. He had one son who made a successful career at the Foreign Office, but his real pride was his daughter, Louisa Anne, who lived with him at the Hall.

  “She was an extraordinary woman,” Edward said, “intellectually brilliant, entirely devoted to her father. You have to understand that she was much more than a daughter to him. She was his intellectual comrade. His collaborator.”

  “His mystic sister?” I put in, thinking that this was a very strange way for a man to regard his daughter.

  “Precisely. After Henry died in 1850, Louisa was the last link in the chain. You saw her portrait at the Hall the other night, remember?” To refresh my memory Edward showed me a photograph of an old lady – in her seventies, I judged – sitting in a basketwork garden chair, wearing a long gown of black, buttoned taffeta with lace at her neck and a shawl round her shoulders. The slender, almost flimsy hands rested on an ebony cane. At first glance she appeared a typical, late-Victorian matriarch – one could imagine her smelling of camphor and the family Bible. On closer inspection the aged, delicately chiselled features seemed to peer out at the camera with alert, benevolent interest. The eyes were steeply angled and must have been quite devastating in her younger days. Even here in the old sepia photograph they were bright with intellectual mettle, and her lips seemed mildly amused that she had survived long enough to witness this moment so distant from her youth. I sensed a quality of innocence reconciled to experience such as only the very old, or the very holy, seem to have.

  “This was taken on her ninetieth birthday,” Edward said. “A formidable figure, don’t you think?”

  “And well-preserved. She must have been a beauty once.”

  “Laura can tell you,” Edward answered. “She has seen her.”

  I stared up from the photograph. Laura looked down at her hands. “It was in the Hall,” she murmured. “A few weeks ago. She was wearing a long dress of grey silk and holding a Michaelmas daisy in her hand. She was gazing out of a window as though waiting for someone. And, yes, she was very beautiful.” Laura lifted her eyes and held me a moment in a quietly defiant gaze.

  But my critical faculties were bristling again. Edward saw it and smiled. “Laura has unusual gifts, which is only one of the reasons why I have such great need of her. Have you ever heard of psychometry? It’s the ability to divine from an object the qualities of the person who has been most strongly in contact with it. A rare ability, but real. At the time Laura was holding something that had been very precious to Louisa – her deck of Tarot cards. The very deck you held yourself the other night.”

  Once again, as when I’d puzzled over the riddle, I felt that for obscure purposes of their own the pair of them were out to make a fool of me. I half-expected it of Edward, but that Laura should be in collusion with him bothered and heated me. I didn’t really want to look at her. Nor did I want her to think they could get away with this. So I ignored Edward, mentally cancelled him out, and studied her obvious embarrassment before saying, “And that was enough to cause an apparition of her?”

  “It wasn’t really an apparition,” she answered quietly.

  “Laura doesn’t care to talk about this,” Edward put in. “But as she has already decided that we be open with you…”

  Laura drew in her breath. “It’s a way of tuning in to time,” she said. “I can’t explain it… No one saw her but me.” It was clear from her voice and face that she was sincere. Clear too that she would welcome no further question.

  As though both in confirmation and
reparation, Edward added, “Laura estimated that she was about twenty-four at the time – a year or two before the crisis.”

  He hesitated. I was aware of the uneasiness between them, and momentarily my sympathies were with Edward. After all, Laura had insisted on these disclosures. She could hardly draw the line at her own peculiar involvement. There were moments when she resembled Jess a little too closely in her desire to have things on her own irrational terms.

  “How do you do it?” I demanded.

  “I don’t. It happens. It’s a matter of relationship, of receptivity. Like dowsing. Anyway, it’s not the main point. You don’t have to believe.”

  “On the contrary,” Edward insisted, “it’s very much to the point, but as our friend is obviously unhappy with it, let’s try and keep things simple. I have explained that Henry and Louisa had been working together for some years. By the late ’40s they had conceived the idea of publishing their findings. Already they foresaw the consequences of the accelerating drift into materialism. They felt that something must be done to stem the tide – something more radical than the Evangelical revival which had already hardened into Pharisaical conformity and mawkish sentiment. Something more truly Catholic than the odour of papist sanctity in which the Oxford Movement had foundered. They knew that in their knowledge of the Hermetic tradition they held a key to spiritual regeneration which would challenge materialism at its very root… which would redeem the century’s debased and debasing perception of the nature of matter. More than a century ago they saw the crying need to resacralize experience through the reconciliation of opposing forces. This was around 1848, remember. The old order was breaking up. Industrialism had seized the minds of men. Europe was in the throes of revolutionary unrest. As Blake and Wordsworth had foreseen, the split in human consciousness was growing ever wider. Think about it – that very year, not much more than a hundred miles away, Marx was in the British Museum writing the Communist Manifesto – developing in the name of the brotherhood of man his tragically misguided dialectical materialism. Lyell’s principles of geological dating had knocked the bottom out of a literal interpretation of Genesis. Even Paley’s elegant argument from design would soon be called into question by Darwin. In a few years, Sigmund Freud would be born to darken counsel by dragging the sexual skeleton from the closet as though it explained everything. These were no mere pigeons coming home to roost but vengeful eagles. The church had no answer to challenges of that order.”