Transmute, Transform, Translate

Most weeks in therapy, I get homework. I’m ok with this. I never anticipated an hour a week of navel gazing to be enough in and of itself. Sometimes navels must be gazed at constantly in order for stuff to change. I am ready for stuff to change, hence gazing so long and hard that I actually broke my eyes and am picking up new glasses on Monday.

This week, my homework has been to think about the alchemical process of calcination, take it apart and rebuild it.

Alchemy is what you get when you put a wizard in charge of a chemistry set. It is said to be the study of transmutation, i.e. how to turn one thing into another thing. Primarily the things it wants to transmute are base metals into gold. It has not proved to be entirely successful, physically speaking. As Terry Pratchett says in Moving Pictures: ‘By and large, the only skills the alchemists of Ankh Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.’

Alchemists however, are nothing if not quantum. Their motto is ‘As above, so below.’ Transmutation can happen both within and without. There is an inherent, holistic duality to it. You may think you’re only dealing with one face of transformation but that is impossible. It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting from the outside in or the inside out. It matters that you start.

Calcination is one of the first alchemical principles. Chemically speaking, it takes the material that you wish to transmute and plunges it into an intensely hot fire. What is left in the ashes is called a salt. This is the fundamental building block of whatever it was you started with. All the dross has been burned away and what is left is the pure essence of what you need to create your gold. There are several steps between the ashes and the treasure. Alchemists refer to this as a ladder. Of course they bloody do. I expect they have fancy costumes to do all this ladder climbing in as well. Ones with flame proof buttons.

From a therapeutic viewpoint, the process of calcination is that ‘darkest before the dawn’ space. It’s what alcoholics call ‘rock bottom’. It’s pulling the Tower card in tarot. It’s the transition phase of giving birth, that rocking on the lip thinking you’ve got nothing left to give, just before you knock it out of the park and push a new life into the world. It’s that time when everything seems so unspeakably awful that there seems to be no way forward, but you keep moving anyway, even when you think you can’t. Your world is on fire and you cannot imagine surviving, but you do.

Calcination is the discovery that you have something within you that is more powerful and enduring than any earthly fire. It is the white hot flame in your core that burns hotter and brighter than anything outside of it. It’s that moment of clarity, as sharp as a blade. That cold, burning certainty that allows you to do the hardest things. Whatever survives this destruction becomes a foundation on which you can build. That flame within you never goes out, never dulls, never dwindles. The things we thought would save us, turn to dust around us, but this stays true forever.

What is it though?

That, I think, very much depends on you, or in my case, me.

The mistake is in thinking that it’s the same for everyone. Or that it’s the same every time. I’ve been through a few personal calcinations in my time. The first one was the worst, because I was convinced I would die. After that I managed to retain enough memories of the first time to remind myself that I had done this before, so it became marginally less scary. It’s never fantastic though. I can honestly say that I never, ever look forward to that realisation that this thing that I thought was good and firm and helpful has turned out to be as flammable as the last thing. ‘Oh goody. I’m about to learn a particularly transformative life lesson. Whoopee.’ Is something I never say. I know I will be a better person afterwards, but I cannot help wishing I could find a less painful way to teach myself this stuff. Could it not just jump out of a cake at a party?

I have no idea what the thing I am going to get from this process is. I know it will be valuable. I know that I need it. I have no idea how long I will be scrabbling around in the ashes looking for it. I know enough to trust that I will find it. I also know that it’s just the start. Just because I have the thing for picking stones out of horses’ hooves with, doesn’t mean I am equipped to use it or know where my horse is.

My therapist knows I am not enamoured of patriarchy and its bag of tricks. She asked me to think about how I would go about explaining calcination in a more female way. I’m not sure that I can.

It’s not that the alchemists have come up with the best way of describing transmutation and transformation. That’s the usual boys own club nonsense as far as I’m concerned. A bunch of men who should know better, attempting to make up for the fact that they don’t know how to create life and they’re too ashamed to either ask or leave it to the experts. They distract themselves by twatting about in a shed with a bunch of stinking chemicals and some fancy, Latin words for burning shit. A lot of rituals that are quite literally smoke and mirrors. There is something ironic about how many of them get burned, literally and metaphorically by playing with fire. As above, so below indeed.

I’m not sure magic needs a special language, unless you want one. I think it’s very much up to you. Maybe your magic is binary, or cookery or reaching previously untravelled dimensions through the power of a really good orgasm. Magic happens all the time, whether you’re aware of it or not. It’s not dependent on you. Calcination is a moment in your life when the trappings of the world fall away and show you the magic whirring away underneath. It’s a time of noticing. It’s a time of choosing. That’s why it’s scary. It shows what is possible and asks you if you really want it.

Of course, that’s a story, just like alchemy is a story and science and religion are other stories. We feel safe with stories. Stories are the oldest magic. They’re the way children learn things, and children are powerful little beings, dripping with all the raw elements that make the universe tick, unaware of quite how scary they are to people who have learned to hide all that stuff under a cloth and pretend it isn’t there. They’re insatiable for stories. It feeds them and they need it, because they are solely in the transformation business. So are we. We just forget, either by accident or on purpose. Sometimes, when it’s being kind, the universe likes to remind us and asks us if we want to start again. There’s a story for that. There’s a story for everything. Let’s leave the last word to Terry and a Hat Full of Sky.

“There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”