ABSTRACT

Alchemy appears as an exalted or sublimated need to search for a way out of the determining shame elicited by faeces, from humiliation and distrust, to find the mysterious and symbolic secret of transmutation, to change faeces into gold. It seems quite paradoxical that not only is human intimacy attached to and determined by anal influences, but creativity, the capacity to obtain everything from nothing, is also directly conditioned by the sublimation of faeces. Perhaps alchemists were not capable of solving the mysterious, hermetic secret of changing faeces into gold, but they were capable of accomplishing the sublimation of that infantile desire by producing the foundation for contemporary science: they found not metallic gold but the symbolic gold of science and creativity. Although alchemy was a pseudo-science concerned with changing base metals such as lead or copper into silver or gold, it was also linked with the roots of chemistry itself.