Magic versus Alchemy: Showdown 2016.

On the bedside table this week: August 12, 2016

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe; 2009; Hyperion New York

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho; 1993; Harper San Francisco

Many moons ago, in another lifetime, I had a lengthy and perhaps too-detailed conversation with a (now former) lover about magic and alchemy. I had just read The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and could not shut up about the battle between the protagonist and antagonist of that book.

The plot revolves around a young woman, Connie, who is writing her dissertation on the history of witchcraft in America. She moves into her grandmother’s isolated, mysterious cottage near Salem, Massachusetts in order to give herself a quiet summer to focus and work, but soon strange things begin to unfold. Not least of these unusual doings is the preternatural interest her dissertation advisor takes in her research- he’s an old school Boston professor who has dedicated his academic life to the study of alchemy. He seems fixated on finding, through Connie’s work, a certain source text: the eponymous physick book. It turns out this book isn’t a historic record at all; it’s a compendium of magic spells. Pretty soon it becomes obvious that the good professor isn’t interested in the physick book for academic reasons, and Connie begins to fear for her safety.

There are plenty of doses of supernatural elements, and a tight pacing of action, mixed in with a quite believable backstory focusing on Deliverance Dane, a fictional addition to the very real Salem Witch Trials. All in all, a great book. One of those I’ve read more than once, because I just do that.

What always caught me up in this book’s storyworld was the conflict between alchemy and witchcraft/magic. The alchemical professor is embodied as a very stereotypical stuffy, not-so-slightly sexist academic who thinks that Connie is going to do his bidding as he dangles her professional career as a carrot. Witch-Researcher Connie is at first a bit of a shrinking violet, but as she learns more about Deliverance Dane and their connection, she unshrinks pretty damn quick.

I took it as a very clear analogy between the masculine world of alchemy- the need to make the unexplainable logical and therefore controllable, the ego involved in the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone- and the feminine world of witchcraft- magic for magic’s sake and always with the goal of healing.

Connie’s professor thinks he can solve the Philosopher’s Stone by eliminating magic, the unknowable, by controlling it.

They come from the same place, you know, alchemy and magic, and they are essentially means to the same end goal: harnessing the forces we don’t fully understand and using them to accomplish things. There isn’t a reason in the world why we can’t use both for maximum profit to everyone; one does not serve a grander purpose than the other. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane happens to set up this conflictual dichotomy quite effectively for dramatic purposes, but another alchemist helps me to see beyond it.

This is, of course, Paulo Coelho, who wrote The Alchemist after taking a deeply spiritual journey along the way to Santiago de Compostela in the late 1970s. To me, his book perfectly wraps the magic of the quest together with the logical search for the answer to the Philosopher’s Stone; the one is wholly dependent on the other. There is no point to the story if mysterious magic and logical alchemy can’t coexist. They are the twin forces driving the shepherd along his seemingly impossible path.

I feel that this deep necessary longing for both can find a modern day parallel in the current “debate” between science and faith. NPR contributor has been writing a fabulous series for Cosmos and Culture, adapted from his book The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. His most recent article is titled “The Porous Boundary Between Science and the Mysterious.” In it, he opines:

“Why should we want to know everything? Imagine how sad it would be if, one day, we arrived at the end of knowledge. With no more questions to ask, our creativity would be stifled, our fire within extinguished. That, to me, would be incomparably worse than embracing doubt as the unavoidable partner of a curious mind.

Every system of knowledge is fallible. It needs to be in order to evolve. Failure compels change, Besides, we don’t want reason to invade ever corner of our existence. Some mysteries can be solved by reason, and others just can’t.”