Golden Sunday

We are each our own medicine men and women, with the ability to activate the powers of healing. This practice is our birthright not just the privilege of the shaman and alchemist. We’ve forgotten our ancient ways; we need to reconnect with intelligence to nature through a magical and animist lens.

There’s abundance all around us on the planet. We should celebrate Dionysian spirit and Pan-like mischief, get drunk on dreams and our mythic promise. This world is vast and green, and we are but children playing. We have not realised our own possibility.

Our raw human potential yearns to be fulfilled, self-realised and discovered through our psyche. Through light and darkness, suffering and joy we chase, as Joseph Campbell says, “the feeling of the rapture of being alive”. If we Know Thyself, truly, and can balance the Logos and the Eros, we can dance through time, snaking like DNA through the universe of life itself.

The signature of God (of the forces of the Universe) is in all things, all matter. It is the Soul of the World, the One Thing and One Mind, the Anima Mundi. This is our power for transformation; through it we can do the work. If we find its life source, its living spirit. Even inanimate matter like metals, can be enlivened just so – be reconnecting that spirit of the substance to be in contact with Source. What we need is what PaulCowlan* calls “the seed of regeneration”. This is our mercury. With which to bring back the dead, the unliving things, the deaden inside us and re awaken our essences anew. Ideas we’ve buried, dreams long forgotten, and passions denied. We resurrect our dead imaginings and goals, restore life to them with ambrosia. Purify what no longer serves, and retain the jewels.

Like a hermetic psychopomp in our own underworld of unconscious, we can traffic with our own dead nature. We rediscover secret, magical, wizard things we’d long since left entombed below. We re-ignite that fire. Like Hephaestus in his forge. But it is not metal in the crucible, not tin, iron or steel in the flames. It is a future self we are molding in the furnace. We’re making it reborn, like a phoenix rising from ash. We birth in the alchemic mix, in the fusion, a hybrid, the spirit of our new adventure. Our psyche transmutes once more from leaden to gold.

The daimon acorn seed within us at the core, our soul, is rich to the seams with new treasure as new ideas and possibilities are sparked in the heat of the flame. Volatile elements are fixed, and unified, multiple parts of our selves reconciled and metamorphosizing. The full legion is purged, purified, and vibrated into a new harmonic resonance. We are ourselves a paradox, a hybrid of all things, a coming together of opposites and dualities, to make a new integrated whole.

As humans we constantly subject ourselves on purpose because (like quicksilver) we too have an exceptionally low stability under the stress when the heat is too much. Without that stressor – the suffering – we cannot burn, we cannot transmute anew. We need those compressors (often of our own making) and triggers from the world around us, so we can explode into brand new energetic forms, we evolve. We become electric, atomic, nuclear. We power up inside ourselves massive radical instant change. In the cauldron burns the potential birth of the archetypal Self. We are each the change we’ve been looking for.  

There is the turning point in alchemy, when the matter undergoes spiritisation. This is known as the Green Phase, it is symbolized by the Green Lion. The lion eats the sun, the soul. And the green represents vitriol. Only once this acid purification has happened are we left with the gold at the end of the process of transformation.

By visiting the centre of reality in the macrocosm, and the centre of our own being in the microcosm, one finds the Philosopher's Stone in both cosmos, above and below. We’re our own Philosopher’s Stone. 

You are golden. And the sun will rise again and blaze. How fitting that it's a Sunday.

And to get there, we need to re-green ourselves, find our green nature within, offer perhaps an ecological, sustainable and pagan response. Embrace the magic of the green pigment of chlorophyll and the green leaves of plants (formed out of the energy of sunlight). Follow the Green Man, he'll lead us on the wild path to the phoenix ahead. And its road is laid with yellow bricks of gleaming gold.

You are the gold. Shine, shine, shine - like the treasure you are, clean and new, reborn. Whole. Integrated self, mind and soul. This is forest medicine.

(*Paul Cowlan's awesome books on Alchemy, Spiritual Psychology and Yoga are available at Treadwells)