Chaos of Samhain Transforms the Celtic Soul
By C. Austin
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
-- Nietzsche
With November come the shadows. From October's eroding edge we
have descended into the season of Samhain, the realm of chaos, the
darkness at the beginning.
Before darkness was consigned to hell, it was fertile. In many
creation myths and in the worldview of the Celts, darkness is the
original form. It is rich, unbounded chaos that gives birth to order.
Recognizing that darkness begets light, the Celts began their day at
twilight and their year in November with winter preceding summer.
In our era, light trumps darkness. We pour such light into the
dark that the stars fade and creatures of the night lose their
bearings. We have no season or festival that recognizes darkness,
only winter, when nature goes to "sleep." Chaos is for those without
goals, money, the proper citizenship, or enough sense. But chaos,
like nature, does not simply go to sleep, it goes underground.
The underground is an interesting place, although virtually no one
willingly goes there. It is the place where things rot, putrefy and,
of course, crap flows downhill, so you have that as well. We are
clean people. We have white teeth and pure souls, so our soiled
thoughts and checkered secrets have to crumble their way down too.
Few of us deal with the large secrets of our lives during daylight.
The large secrets are the things you couldn't help, they just
happened. History created a wound so deep that your life, almost
imperceptibly, orbits slowly around it year after year.
Perhaps you weren't heard, or weren't held, and thus life became a
sifting for words, for pieces of soul and a safe place to put them.
Perhaps you were never seen, which caused you to grow big and
colourful to hide your invisibility. Or the damage was so hot and
loud that you still seek its embrace later in life. Decorated
loneliness, carrying water in a sieve - it is your essence, for better
or worse. It is authentic and it is dark.
The alchemists called this essence the "prima materia," the
original material. Alchemy is a system for observing substances and
their differences as well as their relationships with each
other. Aristotle called the prima materia, "something that isn't
there," because it is unrefined and because its potential lies within
itself, to emerge rather than be imposed. The shadowy prima materia
is also known as the radix ipsius or the "root of itself" for the same
reason - its form lies within and requires a growth process to develop
it.
Though arcane, alchemy yielded invaluable insights into scientific
and psychological processes. Alchemists such as Sir Isaac Newton had
an enormous influence on science and the arts. Of all alchemical
ideas though, none is more famous than that of the "lapis
philosophorum" or the Philosopher's Stone.
Enigmatic and known by many names, the Philosopher's Stone can
"dispel all corruption, heal all disease and bestow youth and wisdom."
It is a "stone that is not a stone," and it can be as treacherous as
it is miraculous. The Philosopher's Stone is brilliant, exalted and
divine and it can only be fashioned from that very dark stuff, the
prima materia.
Like the Celts, alchemists believe in darkness at the beginning.
They call it "nigredo," the black chaos in which the "old, outmoded
state of being is killed and dissolved into the original substance of
creation, the prima materia." Nature can only restore itself after
first dying away and we are no different.
Depression, alcoholism, job loss, illness, divorce - these are all
disturbingly common harbingers of nigredo. Like the winds of
November, tossing off what leaves remain, chaos supplies the disorder
needed to break down our defenses. And that is what is needed - a
dissolution of order - of the old rules and deceptions that keep us,
again and again, from seeing our original wound. Psychologist Carl
Jung noted "All error in the art arises because men do not begin with
the proper substance."
Nigredo carries with it the opportunity to understand that disarray
and our own vulnerability are at least as valuable as order. But in
its role as the universal solvent, chaos also brings seemingly
unending pain, fear and bitterest disappointment. It is the "nox
profunda," the profound night, and from it, the prima materia begins
to take form.
To the alchemists, the prima materia is both a physical and
psychological substance. It is the matter from which everything is
created. The first forms to rise from the prima materia are the four
elements, water, fire, air and earth. Each of these carries an
alchemical property of another element within it. For example, both
air and fire can share heat.
Like factions of the human mind, the four elements are eternally
warring with each other, overcoming, taking priority and then
receding. But it is the fifth element, the prima materia, that flows
through them all. That part of ourselves we seek to conceal, to
forget and that we cast into darkness - the piece that we must
navigate chaos to recover - is the very part that can turn our grey,
leaden lives into gold.
In the heat and pressure of the alchemical process, the elements,
like our most cherished misconceptions, begin to lose their identity.
Upon release from their rigid form, they sense the similarities among
themselves and rotate to take on the attributes of those elements to
which they were formerly most opposed. That which is reviled is
loved, that which is trapped is finally released.
In Alchemic, Buddhist, Celtic and other belief systems, the point
where four territories unite is the area of divine chaos. It is a
churning wheel where original material is ceaselessly being reborn,
burned away and born again. It is the Tao, the course of things and
perpetual change. It is universality - the lowly prima materia
transformed into the Philosopher's Stone, a vast nothing that is
everything, "a stone that is not a stone."
On a hill called Uisneach in County Westmeath, Ireland, lays
another stone. It is a limestone boulder called Aill na Mireann, the
"Stone of Divisions," named so because it marks the mythological
centre where the four divided provinces of Ireland unite.
From our world into the next Aill na Mireann stands at the door.
Where some find chaos, others find grace. The darkness of November
reestablishes order. To the Celts, who so richly understood the joys
and sorrows of life and the value of that renewing darkness, it is the
end and the beginning.
I now know that in the beginning, chaos was ignited by an immense burst of laughter.
-- Rene Daumal
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