When greening terminates, it turns from seminal force to dead husk. Its constant process of growth stops, and like a maple leaf in autumn it rusts and turns to compost. During the ®nal days of summer, the crust of primal matter, its frozen husk, rules this greening animation with ossi®ed rigidity. When set conditions have too long been ruled by ®xed structures, dissolution is of the essence. Alchemists imagine this as the death of the old king, the old ruler of a superannuated state. In order for the root moisture to be freed from this bone-dry condition, the old king has to drown in primordial waters. Remember, ``. . . `our water' is the sperm of all metals and all metals dissolve in it.'' We're standing at the portal of seasonal death, when green drowns back into the primordial sea of sperm, which generated it to begin with. In alchemical woodcuts a pathetic old crowned man is seen with just his ¯owing white beard above water, crying for help, obviously in great anxiety. You know he is about to pass out and drown. An old rule disintegrates and sinks back into the animating matrix of being, in order to disintegrate down to its smallest constituting elements. The old state is atomized. This frees the forces of the wild, racing out in all directions. What had been central is no longer, the center cannot hold. This is a centrifugal time of high anxiety, not knowing what is up, a time during which the interiors are in great turmoil. It is a time of churning gut, messy excrement and the odors of decay. Alchemists portray an era of war, a battle of opposing forces, killing off one another; a snake devouring itself, dogs ®ghting, a torn age of struggle and wishing it weren't so. What had been known and obvious glides down a harrowing slide of unknowing, until all certainty evaporates. Eventually the greening force turns into sludge, blacker than black, at the bottom of the retort in the alchemist's lab, exhausted after dying, surrendering to death.
— Robert Bosnak
Bosnak is tracking a process the soul resists almost more than any other: the moment when what organized life stops organizing it. The greening — that forward, generating, seminal press of vitality — has been doing genuine work. It was not an illusion. But it has a season, and when the season ends, the worst possible response is to pretend otherwise, to keep pushing the dried husk as if force of will could restore the sap.
What the alchemists understood, and what the image of the drowning king makes viscerally plain, is that the dissolution is not a mistake to be corrected. The crowned figure going under with his white beard above water, crying, obviously terrified — that figure *is* the legitimate order. His terror is appropriate. He is losing everything he was. The alchemical tradition does not sentimentalize this: the old king drowns, the center cannot hold, the gut churns, and the sludge at the bottom of the retort is blacker than black. There is no shortcut across this terrain, no spiritual leverage that lifts you above the mess.
The thing worth sitting with is that the animating matrix — the primordial water into which the old rule dissolves — is the same matrix that generated the greening in the first place. Not comfort exactly, but orientation: the dissolution is generative in structure, even as it is harrowing in experience.
Robert Bosnak·Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel·2007