Usos clínicos o terapéuticos

symbolic materials having redemptive ends that often remain those of alchemy. We cannot here reconstitute the universe proper to each of these creators, but we can try to display some of the constants as well as the most obvious limits of romanticist alchemy.

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and in this respect closer to the Illuminists than to the Enlightened, romanticism proceeded toward an inversion of the values of day and night and tended to make of the night the domain in which all revelations arose. From this point of view, it must be observed that all romantic

thought, even that which consciously seeks to be "synthetic," is marked by what Gilbert Durand calls the "mystical nocturnal" order of the imaginary 22 _{--by its uterine involution, its propensity}

to dream, indeed, by its derealization. It remains therefore to ask whether this involution can be assimilated either to the process of complete transmutation, which would give it value for the Great Work, or to the stage called Nigredo (the Work of the Black), which is indeed a passage through the night, but only prefigures a return of dawn by way of the terrors of decomposition, a dawn that alone truly transmutes. Such was romantic ambiguity, at least with regard to

alchemical thought, whatever additional superb images might have generated such an

involution--Friedrich Hölderlin's, for example: "The night illuminated by stars has become my element. When silence made its abode in the night, as even in the depths of the earth where the mysterious growth of gold occurs, the most beautiful time of my love began. Then the heart once again found its poetic rights." 23

Beyond the philosophical and literary movement that bears this name, we would be inclined to consider "romantic" every "mystical nocturnal" which, making entrance into and residence within the night a substitute for the Great Work, tends to confuse the means and the ends of the alchemical transmutation and therefore puts it in jeopardy. It is this which bursts forth in Novalis Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the night, 1800), but also in Wagner Tristan, in certain pages of Georg Trakl, and even in Andre' Breton. It is no less true that, disappointed by their times, the romantics sometimes considered their passage through the night to be the promise of a civilizing dawn yet to come. If there is alchemy among them, it is in this eschatological vision of history. Be that as it may, the great romantic obsession remains the refusal of inertia, material as well as spiritual, and most romantics proclaim their fascination with all forms of vital fluidity, side by side with their desire to belong to the great All, the En to Pan of the hermeticists. The romantics hope to find confirmation for what their poetic aspirations instinctively suggest to them in certain scientific theories of the time. Is this not the epoch in which Mesmer ( 1734-1815) makes his magnetic experiments and Ritter ( 1776-1810) his discoveries concerning electricity, in which Friedrich Schelling ( 1775-1854) believes he has found the equivalent of the anima mundi in oxygen, in which people are enthralled by Galvanism and the phenomena of clairvoyance (such as those reported by Justinus Kerner in

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Die Seherin von Prevost [The seeress of Prevorst, 1829]), in which dreams come to be studied ( Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert published Symbolik des Traums [Symbolism of the dream] in 1814) as an opening into a "natural" world lost to the waking state? Finally, the work of the mineralogist A. G. Werner ( 1750-1817) was to familiarize the entire romantic generation with the alchemical and "geo-gnostic" art of the mine, as is attested by Novalis Heinrich von

Ofterdingen as well as E. T. A. Hoffmann Die Bergwerke zu Falun (The mines of Falun, 1818). Thus there emerges in its turn the romantic conception of "science," which Antoine Faivre rightly defines as "an art of life understood as vital force and an aesthetic of knowledge

understood as gnosis." 24 _{A science eminently poetic and "magical," since far from searching for}

emergence of eternal Nature only through the quintessence of the instant, which it calls "Pollen," fragment, or "Witz" (witticism). It is the romantic Philosopher's Stone, a crystallized time in which antagonisms are resolved, contradictions are dissolved.

But it is reasonable to wonder whether the romantics, having emphasized the rapid conduction of an influx which the internal sense, the imagination, taps like a fluid, and which places it in analogical and sympathetic relation with Nature, may have underestimated the importance of the slow maturation of the Work. It would seem that romantic haste did not always allow the

accomplishment that was admirably, and alchemically, formulated by Novalis ( 1772-1801): "We are here on earth with a mission: it is our vocation to educate the earth." 25

Finally, one cannot underestimate the influence of alchemy on a theosopher such as Franz von Baader ( 1765-1841), on a Naturphilosoph such as Schelling, indeed on Hegel, because the triad of which the Hegelian dialectic was to become the demonstration and the official mouthpiece is in fact inherited from alchemical thought, through the intermediary of Boehme's theosophy. However, while Baader keeps alive the confrontation of alchemy and Christianity and elaborates a remarkable philosophy of the incarnation which owes as much to one as to the other, Schelling, divided between Naturphilosophie and theosophy, hesitates between the vision of a self-

sufficient Nature, polarized by extremes, and its subordination to a God still to come, with Hermes its harbinger ( Die Weltalter--The Ages of the world, 1815). For his part, Hegel

definitively chooses the side of history; and whatever the "natural" metaphors that punctuate the odyssey of consciousness in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of spirit, 1807), Nature is no longer considered in the Encyclopedia as anything but a dead crystal in which Spirit may contemplate a necessary but limited phase of its own advancement toward totality.

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