The Goldsmith and the Arts of Fire
For Paul Valéry, the innocence of longing and the author’s uncertainty regarding the outcome of his action determine that the more the nature of the matter he torments—and the agents used to force it—leaves the artist unsure of his efforts, the purer his desire and the more evident his virtue. Among all the arts, the most adventurous and noble are those that invoke fire. In them, negligence is not permitted; there is no room for abandonment, nor for fluctuations in thought, courage, or mood. Their drama lies in the struggle between man and form. Its essential agent, fire, is also its greatest enemy—a fearsome precision whose operations in nature are limited and defined by a few constants that are difficult to observe. Any deviation of an instant, whether the fire grows or slumbers, will lead to disaster and the piece is ruined; in a single moment, the long-meditated time, the materials, the care, and the love are lost. If the metal piece, molded by an order engendered by fire, suddenly crumbles and melts. Thus, while the fire works, the man consumes himself; an anxious vigil, resembling a soul in prayer. His hand, which provoked the fire and fed it, stalks the moment to withdraw that incandescent form it has just produced—a form it could destroy in the very next instant, just as the blind power of life does with its creatures. Even with all the experience in the science of fusion and heat, the noble uncertainty remains immense. It is an art dominated and sanctified by risk.
Just as the ancients, trembling, submitted their doubts and projects to seers and omens, the goldsmith presents the problem of form to the fire; and the fire gives its oracle—sometimes joyful, sometimes terrible or enigmatic, sometimes a breathtaking wonder. Sometimes fire creates forms unknown in nature, like a foreign body that remained for centuries as a crystalline and eternal organism. An object that emerges from the trials of fire represents the capital history of man; having barely subdued the fire, he is already distracted from its utility and contemplates it. This first distracted man felt the birth of the idea of modeling something different, with no other purpose than to deposit it as an offering to the God, where the mystical enclosure welcomes the captive lightning—omnipotent and unison of energy.
These objects that emerge from the trials of fire are, after all, nothing more than cooled bodies in which the conditions of life, numerous and complex, have been gathered; uncertain and hardly achieved works, objects useful to a design they serve or lead without knowing it. The work of the goldsmith would be the transcendent imitation of a Demiurge.
In the unwritten doctrines of Plato, the Demiurge would work by modeling the sensible world of experience following the ideal model—not as a creator, but as an orderer of the cosmos. This mediation between the sensible world and intelligible paradigms would be the work of a supreme intelligence, the image of an artificer who shapes the material principle according to the model of ideas, making each thing resemble and imitate, as perfectly as possible, its ideal paradigm, using mathematical entities such as geometric figures and numbers as mediators.
The Goldsmith and Alchemy
To recover submerged traditions in a dialectical journey in search of a complex work—in a labyrinth, in a metaphorical initiatory journey toward the center following the same infinitely repeated line. One enters the mystery only by walking toward the encounter of a work, of the Nigredo, Albedo, or Rubedo, in order to later re-emerge into life reborn: the dissolution of the enigma, the illusoriness of the enigma translates into its opposite.
ARCHETYPES, Arche / types, where things and forms are simple copies; for Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, it would be a direct emanation of the divine primordial foundation, the NOUS, which is the archetype of all archetypes. Jung transferred this archetypal representation to primordial archaic types—universal images present since ancient times, symbolic figures of the primitive vision of the world. Phenomenologically, archetypes are a priori forms that organize experience and determine representations; they are models of innate behavior—organizing factors that exist a priori, constituting human nature as a whole, where the meaning of this innateness and apriorism is immediately specified as an example. Understood as a formative factor or structural element, and not as an inherited image or content, the apriorism of the archetype does not contradict the fact that the content of each person’s experience is obtained a posteriori within their own environment.
In a mythological sense, when archetypes as a priori forms organize human experience, they become instincts formed from specific energies. For this reason, in their presence, it is necessary to have a wise fear, a daimonion—a divine sign that never loses its meaning. On the mythological plane, archetypes are created from the primordial material of revelation and represent the everlasting experience of divinity, which is always half-open to man as a presentiment, while simultaneously protecting him from direct contact with it. It follows that when the stars have fallen from the sky and our highest symbols have faded, they dominate our unconscious as a secret life, where archetypes are not imaginary dangers but effective risks upon which a destiny can depend. Thus, the main danger is succumbing to the fascinating influence of archetypes—dangerous and especially concrete if we do not transform the archetypal images within ourselves into conscious ones.
Archetypes become original models where all experiences of the realm of the soul, all events, and behaviors have a resemblance, a correspondence, an analogy with an archetypal model. Our lives follow mythical figures; we act, think, and feel only as allowed by the primary models established in the imaginal world. Our lives are mimetic of myths; our experiences can lead us to a primordial terrain with which they resonate and to which they belong. The challenge is to discover the archetypal model of forms—the hypothesis that every thing, every form, has a mythical substrate and belongs to myth or has its dwelling within it, and is itself a means to be influenced by myth or to enter into it.
Archetype and Art
The work is a production that goes beyond the individual; its origins should not be sought in the personal unconscious of the author, but in the sphere of unconscious mythology, whose primordial images are those common properties of humanity that the collective unconscious preserves and activates as a possibility of representation. Therefore, the work of art offers us a perfect image revealed in its value as a symbol of archetypal possibilities of primordial images. Thus, there are no innate representations, but innate possibilities of representations. These appear in formed matter as regulating principles of its formation, which means that we cannot reconstruct the primitive model of the primordial image except through conclusions obtained from the finished work.
The primordial image or archetype is a figure, daimon, man, or process that repeats itself in the course of history; it is a mythological figure and, in a way, results from innumerable experiences of past generations. It represents millions of individual experiences or an image subdivided and projected onto the multiple forms of the mythological pandemonium (Milton’s Paradise Lost). When creation is exercised, these primordial images are unleashed, in which the voice of humanity resonates; the artist who uses them speaks with a thousand voices, elevating what is precarious to the eternal. Every relationship with the Archetype is moving in the sense that it acts by releasing in us a voice that, mediated by the artist, works on the education of the spirit.