Our worldview comes largely from the Christian worldview that developed after the collapse of the Roman Empire. This is a worldview in which God's perfection exists apart from man and apart from nature; it tells us that we are fallen creatures who have sinned against god and so are doomed to toil in guilt as we strive to find our way back to God, who is somewhere out there. We are all familiar with this basic attitude- it views divinity as unreachable in this life and, most importantly, it views our inner landspace as a dark, corrupt place, not to be trusted. In the dark recesses of the imagination are devils and demons. This is the attitude which leads to witch hunts, inquisitions and the like. We are all familiar with this attitude in western society but, for the most part, we claim to have gotten over it since we have rejected Christianity in favor of scientific materialism, to which it is diamerically opposed... right?
In terms of the story of who we are and how we got here, science is a total departure from the Christian universe. But the fundamental metaphysical attitudes of Christianity are thoroughly bred into the scientific tradition, simply because science grew up hand in hand with the church. Up until the 19th century, most major scientists were religious (for real, not just as a formality), and it was perfectly acceptable to be an accomplished scientific academic moving through the most respected salons of Europe espousing that the God of Abraham created the universe at 3:15 on April 3, 5272 B.C. Most people envisioned science as developing alongside the church and glorifying it by coming to know the mind of God- an external God. This attitude never really changed, and science has always been in search of external truth and an objective vantage point by which it can be measured, while distrusting the mind and internal life of the observer, which is the same attitude the church had towards the fallen sinner. In the 19th century, it became necessary for science to pull away from the dogmatic inertia of the church and so the modern conception of scientific materialism was born. But the basic way in which the white man conceived of the external world as primary to the inner world didn't really change.
Early in the 20th century, this position revealed its weaknesses. Scientists wanted to establish and objective vantage point by which to measure external reality, but Einstein came along to show us that there are no privileged vantage points, no eye-of-god from which to measure all things objectively. Worse was the advent of quantum mechanics, which show that there is no such thing as objectivity at all, that all concrete existence is dependent on an observer- suddenly the subject is of great importance again. Strangely, this insight has been around for going on a century but it has not made a dent in the way we view the world. We are far gone indeed, lost in an illusion that the internal world of the subject is of no importance, that all it can do is taint the 'real' picture of 'reality'. This is a futile dream; just like supressing the reality of a failed relationship, there must always come a point of reckoning, and the longer you put it off, the uglier it gets.
The alchemical tradition is basically a tradition of spiritual exercises. It's whole point is to face the psyche and dredge it, drain away all the muck of repression and denial and seek the opposite of Christianity- not god out there but god in here. Alchemy is the Hermetic tradition expressed in the metaphors of the 15th century laboratory, but these are only metaphors- alchemy has nothing to do with beakers and test tubes and turning lead into gold. First, we must turn inward and face the psyche. We must dive into the muck and dross and callousness that develops from everyday experience and a lifetime of disappointments and losses caused by denying internal divinity, which is indeed an alien concept to us.
Up until the 17th century, there wasn't a clear distinciton between science and alchemy. The grand alchemical reform of society was a dream of the renaissance, and it would have meant a complete 180 degree turn from the worldview of medieval christianity, as it would have turned inward into the dark waters of the mind. Instead, the dream failed and Descartes came along and the rest is history, a history in which we are still seeing through the eyes of dangerously unstable, neurotic white Europeans who devalue subjectivity over an illusory objectivity, who seek dominion over nature at all costs. Back then it was an external god and a right to dominion given by scripture, now it is an external natural universe and a quest to dominate nature through measurement and number. Nothing has changed, and we remain lodged in the samsara of history, never willing to give in and admit that until our central preoccupation is facing the internal landscape, we are looking in all the wrong places.
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