Alchemical Stages of Transformation

As mentioned, the key to alchemy is summarized in the Latin expression solve et coagula. ‘Solve’ here means to break down and separate elements and ‘coagula’ refers to their coming back together (coagulating) in a new, higher form. The alchemical idea of transmuting base metals into gold is also a metaphor for the inner Work. We must ‘break down’ aspects of our character that are in the way of the realization of our deeper, higher nature. This deeper, higher nature is the Philosopher’s Stone, and our ‘higher calling’ in life is represented by the symbol of gold. Thus, solve et coagulameans to see clearly our limiting characteristics, take steps to wear them down by dispersal, and then to reconstitute in a higher, more pure form—which then allows for the possibility of accomplishing our maximum potentials in life.

There are, in some schools of thought, seven general stages in the alchemical process, which correspond to seven stages of individual transformation. Needless to say, as in all matters pertaining to alchemy, there is no overall consensus among alchemists or esoteric scholars as to the details of these stages. What follows is a simplified and psychologized overview of the seven stages, based on a scheme that is a good representation of the overall alchemical view of inner development.

1. Calcination: This is the first stage of alchemy. Chemically, calcination is the term given for the heating and pulverizing of raw matter to bring about its thermal decomposition, that is, its breaking up (or down) into more than one substance, or into a phase shift (from, say, water to gas at boiling point).

In spiritual symbolism, this stage is sometimes humorously referred to as ‘cooking’ or ‘baking’ (and in fact the prime symbol of this stage is fire). It occurs naturally in life as a process whereby our egos get gradually worn down by the inevitable challenges of life. In alchemical symbolism this stage is sometimes represented by bringing down a tyrannical king. The idea there is that we have two essential elements to us: our essence, and our ego-personality. The ego serves us in our early years, aiding in protection and survival, but becomes a problem as we seek to grow and mature into spiritually awake adults. The more we try to hold on to this limiting part of us, the more life will gradually hammer us—‘cooking’ us until we become sufficiently humbled to admit that we are going in a wrong direction. A hallmark of this stage is a growing willingness to be wrong about core issues, a willingness to let go of positions that we cling to. The expression from the book A Course In Miracles, ‘Would you rather be right or happy?’ speaks, in a simplified fashion, to this. The ego-self cares primarily about being right—right that we know, or right that we are not good enough, or right that we are too good, or right that we are a powerless victim, or right that we cannot trust life or love owing to previous experiences, and so on. Calcination is the process of beginning to get that part of our stubbornness, pride, and arrogance worn down. (This stubbornness, pride, or arrogance need not only express as an outwardly puffed up nature; indeed, more commonly it tends to disguise itself in shyness, self-doubt, or self-sabotage).

The sooner we understand the point that in most cases we are the architect of our own frustrations and failures, the better, because we can avoid years of unnecessary suffering. Ideally the spiritual path is about hastening the process of calcination, rather than it being drawn out over the course of a whole life, only to realize in old age just how intransigent and controlling we have always been. The reason why this process is so essential is because the personality we cling to, the sense of personal identity, the ‘me’ that we invest so much energy in maintaining, is ultimately illusory, based as it is on identification (with body, form, history, borrowed knowledge, and so on). Aging, and eventually death, will wear down and destroy this false self in time. Learning to let go of constructed mental positions, pride, excessive stubbornness, reactive blame of others, playing small owing to crippling self-doubt, and fear of confronting our falsehoods, will hasten the process and potentially give us more time to experience our deeper nature while still alive.

2. Dissolution: Chemically, ‘dissolution’, or ‘solvation’ as it is also called, refers to a process whereby a solute (like salt) dissolves in a solvent (like water).

Psycho-spiritually, the element that symbolizes dissolution is water, and this stage represents a deep encounter with our subconscious mind. After our ego has been sufficiently cooked (humbled) from calcination, what remains of our personality has to be further processed, and this is brought about by its dissolution in a solvent like water.

Dissolution, or deep deconstruction of the ego, is a challenging phase, especially for those with strongly developed personalities and egos. The common expression that someone ‘has a lot of personality’ is conventionally taken as a compliment, but from the point of view of psycho-spiritual alchemy it is problematic, because usually it just means that the person has a stronger ego-system and greater defences built up over time. Whether this ego is unpleasant or charming is secondary. Either way, it has to be dissolved in order for the true self to be liberated.

Ego-dissolution is directly related to our beginning to take responsibility for our projections—in short, to our beginning to truly grow up. We begin to move beyond victim-consciousness, the tendency to blame the world for our struggles, and the tendency to see in others what we most dislike about ourselves.

This stage is often characterized by experiencing the emotion of grief, and allowing ourselves to truly grieve painful incidents from our past that we may have long buried. Repressed or with-held pain keeps us dry and contracted. These psychic knots of pain need to be dissolved via permitting ourselves to truly experience the pain with awareness, as opposed to avoiding it with endless distractions, narcotizations (mind-altering substances like drugs or alcohol, including excessive T.V. watching), or endless other forms of avoidance. In many cases the stage of dissolution is forced on a person by unexpected accidents or illnesses. If a right attitude is brought to bear on such apparent misfortunes, overall maturing and growth can result.

A key to the stage of Dissolution is the awakening of passion, and the harnessing of the energy of emotional pain toward an object of creativity. We do not just passively witness the reality of our inner pain; we redirect its energy, wedding it to our authentic personal desires and constructive aims. In so doing we are participating and aiding in the dissolving of our false self. We are using the energy freed up by letting go of old, stale ego-positions, in the service of re-aligning our life in the direction of our higher purpose.

3. Separation: Chemically, separation, or ‘separation process’, refers to the appropriate extraction of one substance from another—for example, the extraction of gasoline from crude oil. In spiritual alchemy, separation refers to the need to make our thoughts and emotions more distinct by isolating them from other thoughts and emotions. For example, the process of forgiving someone is usually only authentic if we have first honestly recognized our negative thoughts and feelings toward that person, such as anger. We must first experience the anger prior to moving into an authentic forgiveness. When attempting to come to terms with our ‘shadow’-side, we need to identify and isolate particular elements of our character in order to honestly see and assess them. This is very much like a scientific process of extracting something from something else, in order to gain knowledge and insight about it. Developmentally it relates to the importance of a young adult differentiating from their parents (or other influential relatives) in order to clarify their own identify. On a socio-political level, it lies behind the idea of the separation of church and state.

This stage represents the need to focus on what has been revealed in us after the first two purification stages, so we can get clear on what precisely needs to be given attention. Navigated successfully, the separation stage aids us in taking a clearer stock of our life, honestly admitting our errors in judgment. A common symbol for this stage is the black crow, which in its color denotes the dying away of the false that has occurred in the first two stages, as well as the positive possibilities for the future symbolized by the crow’s capacity to fly.

The Separation stage is of crucial importance on the path of awakening, if only because it is most commonly both feared and overlooked. Many ‘feel-good’ approaches to personal transformation, or diluted new age teachings, in their rushed desire to reach an idealized state of unity with existence, gloss over the need to face and assume responsibility for one’s inner shadow element, or darker nature. The Separation stage is entirely concerned with the need to both see and take responsibility for the shadow within. If we fail to do this, the shadow elements will be projected onto the world, usually showing up in the form of others who appear to subject us to unjust treatment.

In this stage we begin to see what is of value in our life, and what is not. To illustrate the point with a simple example: back in the 1990s the former NY Times reporter Tony Schwartz quit his stressful job and decided to travel the country seeking out many prominent cutting edge psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual teachers and interviewing them. He wrote a book about his journey and what he’d learned from these teachers, titling it What Really Matters. When we’ve been humbled enough by life that we begin to recognize what really matters, then we’ve begun the alchemical process of separation. We are literally separating the wheat from the chaff both from within us and from our outer lives as well. However this is only possible when we are truly ready to be deeply honest with ourselves, by taking ownership of our frustrations and self-imposed limitations, and the entire range of thoughts and feelings within, from the positive to the negative—in short, of our entire self-image. Such a step makes it possible to achieve a radical breakthrough in our lives, something that may take the form of a thorough change in attitudes and inner positions, if not also in outer circumstances.

4. Conjunction: The fourth stage in the alchemical process is conjunction. Psycho-spiritually, this refers to the proper combining of the remaining elements of our being, after the purification and clarification of the first three stages. It speaks to an inner unification that is made possible by the hardships, purifications, and inner divisions that happened in the first three stages.

The essence of psycho-spiritual conjunction is to provide an inner space in which to mediate between two apparently distinct opposites. For example, we all know what it is to experience conflicted feelings toward another person, especially someone we are close to, the typical ‘love-hate’ scenario. In the previous stage, separation, we need to distinguish these two states clearly if we are to be authentic. We need to be fully honest with ourselves about all of our inner states—put another way, we need to bring all of our unconscious thoughts and feelings about this person, and who/what they represent to us, to the light of consciousness. In conjunction, we worry less about totally unifying these thoughts and feelings than we do about developing the inner spaciousness in which to allow them to be there without condemning any as ‘wrong’. In this sense, ‘conjunction’ is not a forced joining of distinct and opposite states of mind, but rather a natural connecting process that happens as we honestly recognize the reality of both within us.

Additionally, esoteric alchemy proposes that what is left if the first three stages of calcination, dissolution, and separation have been properly undergone is a state wherein we can more clearly mediate between our ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’. In this sense ‘soul’ refers to our embodied spirit, the part of our essential nature that is fully on Earth, and ‘spirit’ refers to our most rarefied connection with the divine, transcendental Source. These two are sometimes categorized as the divine feminine (soul) and the divine masculine (spirit). The combining of the two is the essence of inner tantra, a sacred marriage of spiritual opposites, or what the depth psychologist C.G. Jung called the mysterium coniunctionis. Alchemical symbolism sometimes refers to this as the marriage of the Sun (spirit) and the Moon (soul).

All this speaks to the important of balance on our path of awakening, and in particular, direct and honest awareness of those parts of us that remain out of balance. In achieving a conscious balance of our spirit-soul/masculine-feminine energies, we become capable of deeper spiritual realizations and more effective manifestations in our life. Put in practical terms, we maintain a balance between our maximum context transcendent awareness (meditation) and our embodied, integrated immanence (which is essentially relationship, in all its forms—relationship with others, with our practical affairs, our immediate surroundings, and so on).

The conjunction phase is sometimes compared to the spiritual Heart (or ‘heart chakra’), which as metaphor speaks to the ability to ‘hold a space’ in which conflicting elements can work out their differences and become resolved to a higher potential. It is here where we realize a definite maturity, understanding that differences, especially those of polar opposite qualities, do not get resolved via force, but rather by holding space, i.e., cultivating the patience to allow integration and change to occur organically.

However this stage is not the end of our process of transformation, as elements of ego remain, and must in turn be processed.

5. Fermentation: In biochemistry, ‘fermentation’ refers to the process of oxidizing organic compounds (changing their oxidation state). Examples of products of fermentation are beers and wines. In spiritual alchemy, fermentation has to do with a new stage in the process of transformation in which so-called higher energies begin to be tapped in to. The first four stages all dealt with the energies of the personality (and its remnants), but with fermentation we are beginning to access the energies of the higher dimensions (or subtle inner planes, depending on how we view it).

Fermentation occurs in two parts, the first being Putrefaction. In biology, putrefaction refers to the breakdown or decomposition of organic material by certain bacteria. Spiritually, this refers to a kind of inner death process in which old, discarded elements of the personality are allowed to rot and decompose. It is sometimes referred to as the dark night of the soul, and can involve difficult mental states such as depression. In the Tarot, this phase is represented by the Death card, which denotes the death of an aspect of our lower self that no longer is needed.

Putrefaction is followed by a stage called Spiritization. Here, we undergo a type of rebirth resulting from the deep willingness to let-go of all elements of us that no longer serve our spiritual evolution. This marks the true beginning of inner initiation, of entry into a ‘higher’ life in which our best destiny has a chance to unfold.

6. Distillation: Chemically, distillation refers to a separation process of substances. It has a long history, being used for the production of such things as alcohol and gasoline. Psychologically, distillation represents a further purification process, being about an ongoing process of integrating our spiritual realizations with our daily lives—dealing with seeming mundane things with integrity, being as impeccable in our lives as we can be, and not using the inner work as a means by which to escape the world. At this stage remaining impurities, hidden as ‘shadow’ elements in the mind, are flushed out and released, crucial if they are not to surface later on (a phenomena that can be seen to occur when a reputed saint, sage, or wise person, operating from a relatively advanced level of self-realization, appears to have a fall from grace). Repeatedly practicing this leads to a strong and profound inner transformation that is rooted in integrity. Most standard definitions of ‘enlightenment’, in the Eastern sense of that word, correspond to this stage. A common alchemical symbol for this stage is the Green Lion eating the sun. It suggests a robust triumph and an embracing of a limitless source of energy.

7. Coagulation: This stage brings to a completion the seven phases of the Solve et Coagula process of alchemy. Biologically, ‘coagulate’ refers to the blood’s ability to form clots and so stem bleeding, thus being a crucial life-saving function. In spiritual alchemy it symbolizes the final balancing of opposites, symbolized in the Tarot by the meeting of Magician and Devil, or higher self and the raw material of form, the ultimate marriage of Heaven and Hell. The end result is the Philosopher’s Stone, also sometimes called the Androgyne, and is often symbolized by the Phoenix, the bird that has arisen from the ashes. This is closely connected to the idea of the Resurrection Body of mystical Christianity, or the Rainbow Body of Tibetan Buddhism, which includes the esoteric idea of the ability to navigate all possible levels (dimensions) of reality, without loss of consciousness. It is the form of the illumined and fully transformed human, in which matter has been spiritualized, or the spiritual has fully entered the material. Heaven and Earth as seen as one, or as the Buddhists say, nirvana (the absolute, or formless) is samsara (the world of form). At this end stage, whatever we set eyes on we see the divine, as we have come to realize our own full divinity. We have arisen from the ashes of limited individuality, and been reborn as our true Self.