The Transmutation Of Copper Into Iron

When consciousness descends below the Elemental Horizon, it begins to enter the realm of iron. In transmuting to iron, copper becomes discoloured. This discolouring represents the loss of a kind of basic humanity, the empathy that distinguishes the social from the antisocial. In so discolouring, a character’s consciousness descends to the border between the human and the animal realms.

The general thematic trend of this transmutation is from contentment to anger.

A typical example of a descent from copper to iron is that of the family man who loses everything. In a state of copper, he may have been relatively contented. But something happens to destroy that state of contentment, and in suffering the change the character drops down the Mithraic Ladder. A merchant or a sportsman who loses everything are other common examples.

The breakup of a romantic relationship is a typical way to descend from copper to iron, but this need not mean the death of a partner. It can mean a messy divorce, especially one stressful enough to cause anger to arise. It can also mean a falling out with a family member, old friend or workmate. It could be reflected in a loss of money.

An archetypal way for a family to fall out with each other is when an elder dies and everyone fights over the inheritance. Long-simmering resentments can boil over into drama if one character feels that another is acting selfishly. If one of the brothers or sisters felt that another one had been treated as the favourite, they might get really angry if the elder’s will wasn’t to their liking.

Another character’s successful Anabasis could serve as the trigger for the envy that caused another character to drop from copper to iron. Although envy is usually the preserve of the realm of silver, the lower levels are more than capable of feeling it too. A character of copper who become sufficiently envious could find themselves getting nasty.

If a merchant is your protagonist, that merchant might get robbed, and then have to decide whether to let the money go or to take it back by force. They might not like force – it might be extremely unnatural to them – but Fate compels them to fight in order to maintain their position. This could also be the story of someone forced to steal to support their family.

Socially speaking, the character transmuting from copper to iron tends to lose their sense of humour. This reflects the impatience that can be characteristic of the realm of iron. The phrase ‘hard-bitten’ can become appropriate. This can lead to a falling out with other characters if offence is taken.

Emotionally, a character descending to iron will become more wrathful. This can occur on account of frustrated lusts, which can become resentments. A deeply humiliating experience, or one in which a character is made to feel vulnerable or helpless, could tip a character from the realm of copper into the realm of iron. Revenge, especially physical revenge, is the sort of action a character descending into the realm of iron is liable to take.

Physically, the transmutation to iron brings with it a hardness and a greyness. Grey is usually associated with silver, and the transition to high social status, but it can also represent a fading of spiritual energy. This can be reflected in a sullen, low-energy appearance.

The character making this transmutation might start to dress less to impress women and more to intimidate men. They might start wearing black, shave their head, or even get a tattoo. Their body language might also reflect the change, becoming more tense, more challenging and aggressive. A female character might start smoking cigarettes.

A typical incident that might be emblematic of this transformation is that of a middle-aged man getting into a fistfight on account of some insult that a character on the Anabasis would have ignored. This is perhaps the archetypal fictional example of someone falling out of the realm of copper.

Intellectually, a character undergoing this transmutation will lose some of the wider social vision that had been achieved by reaching the level of copper. Instead of thinking of their family and long-term needs, the character will start to think more about themselves and short-term needs. As with the other steps of the Katabasis, they become more egotistical.

Some of the hobbies or luxury pastimes that a character may have engaged in will be forgotten in the transmutation of copper to iron. Such things might come to seem as frivolities to someone whose focus is tightening and hardening.

This is similar to how a character transmuting from tin to iron loses interest in frivolities, only in a tragic way. The character transmuting upwards from tin loses interest in childish games; the character transmuting downwards from copper loses interest in social obligations. It can thus be said that characters during the Katabasis mistakenly lose interest in their own lives, and this is reflective of the discolouration process.

In falling into the realm of iron from a higher frequency, a character can easily forget some of the moral lessons or realisations from earlier in life. In particular, they can forget the long-term value of behaving compassionately. This might have bad consequences for the character, but it can make for some great drama!

This transmutation need not have negative connotations, or at least not extremely so.

A character could, in so transmuting, become highly physically fit, as per the nature of characters of iron. It could be that, in the initial transmutation from iron to copper during the Anabasis, a character became physically soft and didn’t like it. Perhaps they longed to feel physically strong again when they got fat as a wealthy merchant. Viewed through the lens of iron, which prizes physical power above other forms, a fall to iron from copper might actually be a win.

It could also be that, in getting cast down from the level of copper to the level of iron, a character learns the rage that allows them to achieve things they previously couldn’t. This lack of rage may have prevented them from overcoming certain social barriers – and now they can break through them.

At this point it’s worthwhile to restate that the Hero’s Journey, in alchemical terms, need not be linear. The Katabasis refers to a general tendency: downward. But an interesting story will have a multi-dimensional character arc. The lover may be forced to become a fighter, but the fighter can redeem himself.

It’s also worthwhile to restate here that iron, despite being a low level compared to gold, mercury, silver and copper, is not the lowest, and a character of iron still has a lot of honour in comparison to those of lead.

Perhaps the most famous depiction of this transmutation in popular culture is Russell Crowe’s character in Gladiator. A greatly respected leader of men as a Roman general, Maximus Decimus Meridius is betrayed and cast down to the level of a mere gladiator, forced to fight hand-to-hand.

This is an excerpt from Vince McLeod’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

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Mentally Ill? You May Actually Be Physiologically Ill

Some of the recent psychological literature has described a seachange in conceptions of mental illness. The old-fashioned model of understanding mental illness in terms of chemical imbalances has been abandoned by experts in the field. In its place is what’s being called the traumagenic developmental model. This reflects the modern understanding that most mental illness is caused by trauma in early childhood.

Throughout much of history, mental illness has been seen as a moral defect. The mentally ill were seen as weak or lazy. A person unable to sleep lacked discipline. Anyone who cried lacked emotional stability. If a person threw up, it wasn’t from stress, but from a refusal to exercise the willpower to prevent it. Social failings were all moral failings.

A mental illness was thereby different to a physical illness, as it had worse implications. A person can have a physical illness without blame. A mental illness is different. People are blamed for being mentally ill in the same way they’re blamed for being criminals. The logic is that they ought to have exerted the necessary willpower or foresight to prevent it, so if they didn’t, it was their fault.

Even the chemical imbalance theory confers some degree of blame. A commonly-heard story is that a person “blew their brains” on drugs, thanks to an irresponsible will, and as a result they’re now mentally defective. Either that or they worked too hard.

The traumagenic developmental theory, by contrast, does not blame mentally ill people for their own conditions.

This relatively new theory holds that the vast majority of behavioural problems are caused by traumatic early childhood experiences, particularly childhood abuse and neglect. Developmental psychology has long stated this, but awareness has taken a long time to reach popular consciousness.

According to traumagenic developmental theory, adverse early childhood experiences can alter the structure of the brain, leading to cognitive difficulties, impulse control problems and an overactive stress response.

The body’s stress response is mostly under control of the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal gland) axis. If this axis is chronically overstimulated, emotional regulation becomes very difficult. Growing up with a chronically overstimulated HPA axis can lead to significant alterations in brain function, and thereby behaviour.

The amygdala is a part of the brain that plays a major role in threat detection. In people who have grown up with a constantly active HPA axis, the amygdala develops to see threats all over the place. It’s common for such people to see threats and dangers that aren’t really there. This has an immense negative impact on social function. Such people have a much harder time trusting others, which makes forming relationships difficult.

People who grow up with an overstimulated HPA axis also tend to suffer impaired pre-frontal cortex development. This part of the brain is crucial for emotional regulation. An impaired pre-frontal cortex makes it much harder for a person to rationally and calmly consider their reactions to things. The tendency is to react strongly and often without justification.

Emotionally dysregulated people who see threats everywhere are typical of those who end up getting a mental illness diagnosis, whether it’s depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, Borderline Personality Disorder, C-PTSD or something else. But many of them are not actually mentally ill according to the traditional conception. The damage is in the body – as Bessel van der Kolk says, the body keeps the score. They don’t have psychiatric conditions because the psyche is not damaged. The body is.

Many people out there, suffering from a label of mental illness, ought to ask themselves: am I mentally ill, or just physiologically ill? Because if it’s actually the latter, you might feel better about yourself.

In actuality, many schizophrenia diagnoses might truly be C-PTSD. This is because schizophrenia and C-PTSD are known to overlap heavily in terms of both etiology and symptomology. Both conditions are commonly caused by early childhood abuse and neglect, and both commonly exhibit emotional dysregulation and relationship difficulties.

How many people labour under a schizophrenia diagnosis, believing themselves to be irreparably insane, when they actually have a physiological condition that causes similar symptoms to schizophrenia, but which can be treated much more easily with the right knowledge and approach?

It has been noted that Borderline Personality Disorder and C-PTSD overlap heavily as well, so much so that some are asking if BPD is even a different disorder. As above, how many people labour under a BPD diagnosis, thinking themselves weak or unreasonable, when they actually have a physiological condition that can be treated by avoiding stress?

Hypervigilance is a classic symptom of physiological damage. Many people who have it are not, in truth, “sensitive” or “uptight” but damaged. Such people would be better off being informed about how to downregulate their nervous system in times of need, and not being left to think they had a personality defect or a weakness of will.

Anyone feeling the pain of what Pete Walker calls the inner critic might benefit from asking themselves if the supposed illness of their psyche is not, in fact, an illness of the body.

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The Transmutation Of Silver Into Copper

The third stage in the katabasis is the dullening, which occurs when silver dullens into copper. Having already deteriorated below the level of spirituality in the previous stage, here a character loses some (but not all) of that pro-sociality which demarcates humans from beasts. Herein the vision narrows further, to the level of simpler pleasures.

This descent occurs within the intellectual or mental realm. If silver is high intellectualism, copper is a lower form. As with the other steps of the katabasis, this transmutation implies a narrowing of focus, in this case from social to sexual. This narrowing of focus comes with an increase in animalistic impulses and sentiments.

For the most part, the descent from silver to copper leads to an obsession with sex. Copper is still a fairly high level of the Mithraic Ladder, so the sexual degeneracy here does not imply crimes. A character descending to copper does not become a rapist or child molester. But it does imply the capacity to be brought low by sexual desire.

One of the most common ways for this to happen is for an intelligent person to develop an obsession with their own sexual value. If they start thinking too much about whether they can attract sexual partners, and too little about their social obligations, they can decline from silver to copper.

Developing habits of constant preening and strutting are typical behaviours for a character undergoing this transmutation. Vanity is therefore a common emotion for characters at this stage. The pro-social engagement of the stage of silver becomes slightly more selfish as it becomes copper. As such, a character transmuting to copper can come to neglect social obligations in favour of opportunities to impress the opposite sex.

As alluded to above, a character who degrades from silver to copper won’t undertake antisocial actions for sex – but they will take plenty of asocial ones. The kind of person who goes to university, and then gives up on taking their study seriously to get laid and to watch pornography, is archetypal of this transmutation.

A pornography obsession is emblematic of this descent, which is why a character making it may come to resemble Coomer from Clown World Chronicles. A strained, dope addict-like stupor, constant enervation and sensory dullness, coupled with an inability to appreciate actual women, are the signs of a porn addict.

Sex obsessions in general are emblematic of this level. A relatively high-frequency character who finds themselves engaging in pestering their wife or husband for sex could be making the descent to copper. This can happen to a character at just about any age. As such, it’s not necessary for a character to be old before it becomes possible for them to make the transmutation from silver to copper.

Characters at this level don’t just become dull spiritually, they become dull to talk to. The obsession with sex leads to the stereotypical “One-track mind”. This is especially true if it takes the place of what would otherwise have been meaningful cultural or scientific considerations. So the socialite of the level of silver, in degrading to copper, becomes boring when they used to be charming.

A character making this descent can reveal their degeneracy through an obsession with sexual innuendo and gossip. Where they once focused their minds on intellectual concerns, this discipline appears to falter leading into this stage. In faltering, it becomes degenerate and bestial, but only to a minor extent.

This transmutation can be motivated by a loss of faith in the intellectual world. A character who learns how corrupt academia is might lose their ambitions for intellectual achievement, and might sink that energy into getting laid instead. Another motivation can be a character’s realisation that they will never attain the heights of mercury. A character who understands that they will peak at silver might become resentful, and, in their resentment, allow themselves to slide down the Mithraic Ladder (at least as far as the level of copper).

Insecurity is a feature of all of the levels lower than mercury, and at the level of copper this insecurity typically expresses itself as jealousy. At this level, insecurity is managable but still reasonably powerful. A character of silver who begins to suffer insecurities related to their sexual market value can degrade into copper.

Although silver is generally associated with middle-aged people, this transmutation can easily occur in younger characters. It’s said of many young people that their lives were looking promising until they discovered girls/boys, at which point their academic aspirations were left to decay. This is a typical form of this transmutation.

For middle-aged characters, this transmutation can occur as part of a mid-life crisis. Male menopause can make a character insecure, and that insecurity can find expression in a desire to date younger women. The stereotypical middle-aged man buying a sportscar and trying to attract women in their 20s is probably undergoing this transmutation.

Taking a mistress is a typical example of behaviour at this stage, as is a woman who becomes a cougar and takes on a toyboy. This is doubly true if the relationship with the younger person leads to a loss of social status for the older one.

Another example of behaviour typical for characters making the descent from silver to copper is infidelity. Giving in to one’s lower urges to reproduce, at the expense of one’s marriage and social standing, pulls a character out of the realms of the precious metals and back into the prosaic. In degrading to copper, a character proves that there’s little truly special about them.

Fighting over women is also a feature of this stage, although the fighting tends to be social and not physical. Where the character of iron throws fists, the character of copper tends to throw words. If the transmutations to tin and lead involve major sexual degeneracies, the transmutation from silver to copper is about a large number of more moderate errors.

Herein it must be emphasised that the descent to copper does not imply that a character become a rapist or any kind of sexual abuser. That kind of behaviour is the speciality of the character of lead.

Neither is it even necessary for this stage to involve sexual relations or romance. The transmutation from silver to copper could be made by a character becoming cheap, stingy or miserly for some reason. Alchemical copper generally refers to the affairs of Aphrodite, but the term also covers the crude merchantry of trade.

A character who failed as a scholar and was forced to become a relatively lowly sales clerk could be a story of this level. So could an inventor who sells a fraudulent product, knowing that it isn’t as good as claimed. A lot of story arcs that involve a decent person selling low-quality products, because they need the money desperately, could fit under this transmutation.

One well-known depiction of this descent in popular culture is the character of Glenn Quagmire in The Family Guy. Quagmire is charming, intelligent and usually pro-social, but also perverted. This perversion prevents him from achieving the social status that his intellect might have suggested he reach.

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The Rise Of Leftist Nationalism In The 21st Century

For all the furore about right-wing nationalists gaining power in recent European elections, some other phenomena have been less noticed. One of those was the fact that women are now turning nationalist in places like France. Another is the rise of left-wing nationalism, something believed by many to be a contradiction in terms.

Because of World War II, right-wing nationalism is the biggest bogeyman in the West today. It’s such a bogeyman that it has soured people’s attitudes to nationalism itself. Right-wing nationalism, we are told, is the greatest evil imaginable, and all social problems have their roots in it somehow.

Right-wing nationalism is very masculine, and can easily be masculine in such a way that it turns many people off (especially women). Heinrich Himmler warned against a particularly aggressive and boorish type of masculine nationalism that drove decent people away. The emphasis on exclusion of outsiders can also turn away sophisticated people. Thus, there are several fair reasons not to like it.

Right-wing politics also tends to have theocratic sympathies, and so tends to want religious-based restrictions on things. The idea of banning abortion, and thereby forcing raped women to carry to term, seems appalling to most, but it’s a common theme in right-wing politics. Cannabis prohibition, likewise, seems like a relic of a bygone age to most people, but not to the religious right, who are happy to keep destroying the lives of cannabis users. The suggestion often made by Kanye West and Nick Fuentes – that non-Christians should be barred from public office – turns a lot of people away.

Leftist nationalism offers most of the same benefits as right-wing nationalism without the paranoia, aggression and control freakery.

Sooner or later, someone in every country is going to realise that a lot of people want nationalism but don’t want authoritarian restrictions on civil liberties or more Jesus rammed down everyone’s throats. These someones will find themselves being the only ones in a very large niche – that of leftist nationalism.

Sahra Wagenknecht’s recently-founded leftist nationalist movement in Germany is an example of what is now becoming possible. Wagenknecht has recognised that working-class Westerners no longer feel represented by the discourse of the left. This has caused them to turn to protest movements.

Because the left is so cosy with the political establishment all over the West, protest movements tend to be right-wing. This has meant that a large number of protest voters in the West have found themselves tied up with unsavoury religious authoritarians and other loonies of the extreme right. The mainstream left has mostly sneered at these people and called them deplorables and racists. Moreover, the political establishment has exhausted its anti-nationalist ammunition by firing it all at the right-wing nationalists. All of this has created great opportunities.

Wagenknecht’s movement is the first of what will be many: 21st Century leftist nationalist movements. Already it is recording 8-9% in some national polls, and almost twice that in some state polls.

Many other Western countries will soon discover that nationalism does not necessarily imply support for right-wing stupidities such as reducing investment in young people, rolling the social development clock back 1,000 years or banning everything.

Neither does it imply support for militarism – Wagenknecht is among Germany’s biggest critics of escalating the war in Ukraine. Leftist nationalism has the same concern for children and vulnerable people as ordinary leftism – it just doesn’t have the globalist concerns for e.g. defeating Russia on the battlefield or for building a worldwide dictatorship of the working class.

In fact, left-wing nationalism can offer many of the same advantages that the leftist establishment can (or used to). Left-wing nationalists understand as well as anyone else that money invested into the first 24 months of any child’s development will pay great dividends to the nation later on, and that such considerations are more important than the endless bleating about tax cuts that characterise right-wing discourse.

The major consequence of the rise of left-wing nationalism will likely be a further normalisation of nationalism. If the presence of left-wing nationalism proves that nationalism doesn’t need to be xenophobic, paranoid, aggressive, nasty etc., then many people will no longer object to it. If it can avoid all of those things and also provide an alternative to globalist economic desolation, then great!

One of the eventual consequences of this rise will be the associated rise of centrist nationalism. Inevitably, as the right-wing nationalists provide an alternative to the right-wing establishment, and the left-wing nationalists likewise, a centrist nationalism will rise in an effort to pull together the other nationalist blocs against the establishment itself.

What the continued rise of left-wing nationalism will mean is a broad challenge to the globalist status quo over the next 20 years.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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