1.22.24
Alchemy, synchronicity, and . . .
Welcome everyone—and especially new readers! You can count on EP email every 11th and 22nd of the month, along with a sprinkling of other dates—as information emerges and/or inspiration strikes. In most posts, I’ll share real-time discoveries and experiences related to Tarot, then revisit a relevant story from EP’s almost-three-year history.
Today’s introductory anecdote is about synchronicity. I wrote about that topic last year—but just as a reminder: in “serendipity,” one thing leads to another (often with unexpected results), while with “synchronicity,” related things turn up around the same time in some relationship that can’t be explained by a direct or causal connection.
Here’s where we start: I woke up this morning thinking about the week ahead. I remembered that I’d received a Starbucks gift card, and had decided to take some breaks to work away from my home office. Before COVID I had done that regularly, but since the pandemic subsided, I’ve just never resumed.
But as I was musing along about Starbucks, I thought about the once-popular concept of “third space”—not home, not work, just an accessible, welcoming place. I wondered to myself whether that idea is still “a thing.”
About half an hour later, I opened my Inbox and saw this email from Wall Street Journal’s regular column on marketing:
This kind of co-incidence happens to me fairly often—and every time, my brain riffles through several possible explanations:
I’m especially attuned to the zeitgeist.
I look for things that can be connected, so I find them.
The universe is trying to tell me something.
Sometimes I track these “co-incidences” and sometimes I just note them and move on. If the universe wants me to go to Starbucks—no problem! Wish will soon be granted.
Or maybe the universe wants me to share this incident, so I’m checking that option off right now. Write about “third spaces”? I’ve added that topic to my list. Give more thought to the zeitgeist? Will do.
But in the meantime—I’m using this anecdote to set the stage for what I’d already been planning for today’s post: four appearances of “alchemy” in four unconnected places in the space of four days.
My rule for identifying a synchronicity event is that (a) there have to be at least three instances, and they must have nothing obvious in common; plus (b) they have to occur with a short period of time—a day preferably, but no longer than a week; plus (c) they have to be obvious or explicit, not subtle or interpretive; plus (d) they can’t be typical or recurring.
That’s a lot of parameters, but today’s example meets them all. Here’s the big picture:
That’s a snapshot of my Inbox, with four subject lines that include the words “alchemy” or “alchemical,” three of which arrived in the span of five days (January 13-18, 2024). The fourth came along a few days later, but it’s from a source—Morbid Anatomy—where alchemy is frequently mentioned, so we’ll leave it out.
Here are the other three, in order:
London Review of Books, a literary publication that sends me weekly newsletters. This is the first one (of many dozens) with “alchemical” in the headline. And here’s the review they were referencing:
Excerpt . . . .
In her history of English alchemy, Jennifer Rampling pays relatively little attention to Newton, perhaps because he’s an over-ploughed furrow, but does quote a startling passage from folio 13 of MS Keynes 22, an early Elizabethan manuscript annotated by Newton more than a century later. Here he describes how King Solomon employed the ‘vegetable stone’ - a base ingredient for alchemy, combining the four elements (earth, fire, water and air) - to make ‘trees & hearbs to flourish at all times of the yeare’ and ‘bring the birds down to him out of the air to sing and chirp & sit by him but also dwell with him’. Did Newton believe this to be possible?
Ness Labs, a “mindful productivity” blog written by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
Excerpt from her post “The Alchemy of Good Questions.”
In short, asking good questions is a bit like being an alchemist. They have a power that allows you to transform any conversation into a source of actionable information and creative insights.
The Creative Mystic, a Substack written by Lenaleah McCullough.
Excerpt from her post “The Year of Synergy—Discovering the Alchemy of Living”:
Let this be my declaration: through the discomfort of forging new neural pathways for living an authentic life, I will discover the Alchemy of Living.
These three instances have absolutely nothing in common. The first concerns a particular period in the history of alchemical practice. The other two aren’t about alchemy at all. One just uses a familiar persona—the alchemist—to brighten up a single sentence, and one just adopts “alchemy” as an evocative shorthand-word.
But until these five days, the words “alchemy” and “alchemist” had not turned up at all in any of the subject lines that filled up my Inbox over the past three years. (Except for a few older posts from Morbid Anatomy about one of their courses.)
So why those three, that week?
If there is an underlying reason, it hasn’t revealed itself yet. So I’ll just share some downstream discoveries that were prompted by my focus on the word “alchemy”:
At the end of Lenaleah McCullough’s post (a thoughtful personal essay), I found this:
What a lovely idea . . .
Further back in my email search I found a notification I’d received from Academia.com in 2021, around the time I started EP. It was about this paper:
Marshall’s paper is a concise and accessible introduction to its topic—worth a read! Extra significance: “Hermetic Research” was the amazing Adam McLean’s publishing imprint. I always meant to write an EP post about his remarkable work, but haven’t gotten to it. However, two of his many achievements are mentioned in previous posts—one on the artist Ithell Colquin’s abstract Tarot (which he had originally published), the other on Louise Cooper’s Tarot-inspired fantasy The Book of Paradox.
And as for the Morbid Anatomy course, here’s their pitch:
My takeaway from the Alchemy/Inbox excursion?
Like all “meaningful co-incidences,” this one is both an invitation and a mystery. It opened a door, I went through, I found some things. But I don’t know whether that was the whole point, or a preparation for something still to come. Or perhaps my role is to surface these items for other people to read about. Or . . .
In any case—I’m thinking “alchemy” should be the keyword for choosing today’s flashback post. So here’s one of my favorites:
Briefly: The Beat movement flourished during the 1950s, beginning in New York and spreading to California, where it converged with what’s now known as the San Francisco Renaissance. There was a great deal of diversity among Beat writers, but to the extent that common themes can be identified, they would be the rejection of social norms and the search for spiritual experience.
Although Spicer was part of the “Beat era,” he did not consider himself part of the “Beat movement.” A complicated distinction, but here’s a very good explanation:
Unlike his Beat peers, Spicer did not believe that poetry should be the expression of an inspired and uncorked self. Instead, the poet’s work is reduced to an almost mechanical act of listening to and receiving what Spicer called the Outside — a field of forces that invade rather than inspire, and before which the poet is little more than a secretary taking dictation. (Erik Davis, “Voices Carry”)
Although Spicer was influential in the San Francisco scene, his complex ideas were not widely appreciated during his lifetime (1925–1965). Lucky for us, though, his work steadily gained attention — and in 1977, friends Robin Blaser and John Granger published Spicer’s “Plan for a Book on Tarot” (in the journal boundary 2, Vol. 6, №1).
The plan was found with some notes written around 1958. So the document is interesting from one perspective as a sort of time capsule, describing attitudes toward Tarot that were prevalent among the public at mid-century. But it also contains some insightful observations about Tarot.
The complete text is shared below. But here are some passages that stand out. (I added the emphases.)
Fortune-telling is an unexplored parascience. Its relation to the science of prediction (or statistics, to take it in its narrower form) is quite the same as the parasciences of telepathy and telekinesis had to the science of psychology before Dr. Rhine started his experiments. A parascience is not a science — it is a mixture of rules of thumb, half-truths, and fanciful lies painfully yoked to each other by centuries of experience; but a parascience can become a science; alchemy can become chemistry; astrology can become astronomy; fortune-telling, after a century of patient scientific observation, could become a new means of understanding time and necessity in the universe.
[I would be] stressing strongly the fact that the individual card has no meaning solely in itself but only in relation to the cards around it and its position in the layout — exact analogy to words in a poem.
The Poetry of Chance: Some possible explanations to account for the fact that Tarot cards can, under proper circumstances, predict parts of the future and clarify parts of the past.
As a contextual reminder — those ideas came from a poet and literary theorist, in a year when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the United States, and The Beatles were still The Quarrymen. More than a decade would pass before the “Tarot revolution” really began to take shape.
The post continued with Spicer’s introduction and outline for the planned book—it’s fascinating.
Thanks for reading—and I’ll be back in your email this week with a surprise. C
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