Alchemical LOST?

Geek question of the week…

Is LOST working within an alchemical framework?

I know I’ve been sitting at the feet of John Granger for a few years now, so you could say I have alchemical imagery on the brain. But as I’ve pondered the first couple of shows this final season, I find myself wondering if the show’s writers are somehow tapping into, if not a full alchemical framework, at least some serious alchemical imagery.

What makes it difficult to ascertain, beyond the fact that this isn’t literature on the page, is that we really don’t have just one central character. We have a whole group (or groups) of them, all of them seeming to struggle toward redemption and purification. But whether or not you look at the alchemical journey in terms of the community story arc, or just one central character, like Jack Shephard, some of the imagery seems to leap off the screen.

I’ve been particularly pondering it at the beginning of this sixth and final season because our characters have certainly been through plenty of nigredo moments. Think about Jack in L.A., but really think about any of them and the kinds of things they’ve gone through in recent months, on and off the island.

Although I think it’s possible that you’ve got frameworks within frameworks (individual characters at different places in the journey toward purification; individual seasons with discrete alchemical frameworks from start to finish, working like a book in a series) I think it’s possible we’re also seeing the show as a whole working within the three symbolic stages. And if that’s the case, I think season 6 is beginning with the albedo stage and working steadily toward the rubedo.

Here are some of the clues I’ve noticed. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that when the screen went to white, instead of its traditional black, at the end of season 5, that was our signal that we were beginning the transition from the nigredo to the albedo stage. Think about it: our survivors, when they detonated the bomb (in their attempted time reboot) have seemingly been “reborn” (their old, outmoded selves “dead”) into a new state of being. Or maybe two states of being, given our island timeframe and the sideways timeframe, where we’ve actually met with former characters who have died (Locke, Boone, Charlie…)

If you miss the symbolism of dying to their old selves, the show gave us an exploded hatch that literally functioned as a grave for Juliet ~ and yes, tragic Juliet shares a name with one of the most famous couples in alchemical literary history. Sawyer descends beneath the earth to try to retrieve Juliet, who dies in his arms. He carries her back above ground, and not long after receives a message from her (via Miles, who can listen to the dead) that seems to indicate the explosion “worked.” Worked how? To give them back their lives? The survivors, of course, were always mixed in their hopes and fears of what it might accomplish, but there has always been some doubt that a reboot would restore them to their pre-crash selves. What if a reboot somehow restores them instead to new-forged, purified selves? Or at least to an ongoing process of purification toward that end?

At the moment, of course, they seem to be existing in two alternative time frames, but it seems as though the time-frames may somehow be connected, and that washing/purification (the work of the albedo stage, which readies the material/person being purified for new life/resurrection) is possibly going on in both, or is reflected in one while going on in the other. Isn’t it fascinating to note the places where things keep happening in 2004 sideways world that seem to mirror, or echo things that have happened on the island? Jack saving Charlie’s life, Kate connecting with pregnant Claire (is Kate destined to be at Aaron’s birth, whenever/wherever it may occur?).

The water/washing symbolism seems especially potent right now. We’ve plunged beneath the ocean from the skies. We’ve seen Sayid, literally, physically dead, put into a healing pool. What that might or might not have affected, we don’t know, and there are troubling indications that dark is on the rise in some of our survivors, including Sayid and Claire, but still. We’ve seen Sawyer, of all people, dissolved in tears. Actually, the possibility that the water of the healing pool and the water of Sawyer’s tears could be functioning on some alchemical symbolic level gives me the best hope I have at the moment that we’re not going to lose either man totally to the powers of smoky darkness.

Beyond the things I’ve already mentioned as alchemical possibilities, I have to mention this one: doppelgangers. As John Granger writes (in his book Unlocking Harry Potter) “This staple of 19th century Gothic and romantic fiction is of a creature or pair of creatures that have complementary figures or shadows, which shadows reveal aspects of their character otherwise invisible.” In the HP stories, all sorts of things functioned as doppelgangers: twins, brothers, half-breeds, liminal characters, etc. In LOST, it seems to me we have a storyline currently run amok with doppelgangers, from the re-animated bodies (“claimed”? by Jacob’s nemesis Smoky, and/or potentially by Jacob?) to the timeline doubles of our castaways themselves. However else the double-timeline story plays itself out, I don’t think we can get away from the symbolic power of the fact that our survivors, perhaps brought to the island in part to “work out their salvation” in some sense, currently have “shadow selves.”

And I won’t even begin to speculate on the fact that of our two married couples on the island, the women are named Rose and Sun….

Or that the island has been rife with “quarreling couples” of all sorts (with Jacob and his nemesis perhaps the biggest quarrelers of all…)

I’m not arguing that the alchemical framework/imagery is the only or even most important element of the story-telling. I’ve not even convinced myself that it’s completely conscious…so much of the LOST narrative depends on references to other stories and story-telling traditions, some of them are bound to be alchemical literature. But I’d love to hear your thoughts. So my fellow geeks, have at it. Is there alchemical imagery at work in LOST?

P.S. Re: potential spoilers in the comments, please know that I am running a few days behind in my LOST watching. I generally see the current week’s show over the weekend (thank you, Erin!) so I’m only up through “What Kate Does” for now.