Intro to the 7 Deadly Metals & all their Deadly Kin with selected aphorisms on cultural ideals
(Enter Toxic Metal or Chemical Here)!
Be thy name a challenge not only for now
but for the future generations of industrial nations
which make toxic to others that which they cultivate.
Cultural Survival
It is our good wisdom which informs us of the ideal:
That which you cultivate shall be a bane to your enemies and a paradise to your friends.
This phrase has a simple ring of truth to it. You might call this ideal the first step in the Cultural Jungle, though it may seem like all there is at times.
The Slippery Toxicity of the Cultural Ideal
Perhaps human culture will never again be the freewheeling, rocking and rolling, raving and roller-coastering time which it came to be in the 20th Century. Will this past century be known in the future as the age of the love affair between Disaster & Capital under the banner of Abundance — where age old human dreams finally came to be weighed at the scales of Mendacity, to borrow a word from a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
Where fun in the sun, partying and the romance of cities full of lights in the night sky ruled the thoughts of our world… where the challenge was to open the soul to the vulnerabilities of human love, and the dreams of upward economic mobility and human equality trumped our awareness of the impact our cultural evolution has had in trashing the world for individual opportunity and the wealth of a few, which is not to speak at all of the effects of patriotism and tribal dominance. We have chosen the American Dream over the truly difficult prospect of opening one’s heart to other species of life on this planet when it is culturally inconvenient to do so. We live on lands which we have thoroughly destroyed for our own Homely Comforts from the ravages of nature to forge our own castles in the wastes of time.
We often forget the first principles of life in our technologically enhanced cultural world: life does not and can not grow in a vacuum, and thus you are never alone. Nor does life grow from computer parts or hexavalent chromium. Life needs life in order to survive and grow. Therefore in some respects our dreams which involve our own rise to power, wealth, abundance or stardom can fall grotesquely short of the inclusions inherent in the greater dream of the Mother Earth Dragon whose magic we bathe and breath in as we live out our lives on the skin of the Great One.
It is common cultural coin to insist on the dirtiness of Nature, even where city life has without question been synonymous with deadly and dangerous chemical exposure, disease and nightmares of sanitation at least since the Industrial Revolution, even though 1850 is a very round figure for the high toxicity of human industry. For in the desperation of our attempts to stay afloat as a civilization crawling through the muck of pandemics, war, endless greed and tribal strife we have grasped at extreme chemical solutions to problems of cultural production. How to go about sanitation in a chemical jungle?…
More to the point: What are the many ills of metallurgy? So many solutions we have grasped at: gold, mercury, copper, silver, iron, tin, lead, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum. The list is perhaps too large to commit to a page when you include the various chemicals we have used to process metal and the various left over toxic sludges that have resulted from the history of metal processing. All of the alchemical classical metals are toxic in anything but trace amount — even to a human. Hexavalent chromium is but one of the extremely toxic chemicals we employ in our largest industries, namely stainless steel.
Today the production of chlorine, iron and steel factor in not only the most sizable industrial consumptions of electricity but they also contribute to the spread of chemicals that are known to be toxic to life.(1) It shatters my heart to think of the way humans ask for help from the gods when we produce our own evils for the world at large to share in at breakneck speed in the form of hazardous waste.
Is it perhaps true that our sadness and grief are born of a world finally hooked to the point of perceiving it in this great teeming wilderness that we are all somehow alone? It is easy to see how folks might surmise that none but some unnameable god or goddess is watching out for us, as we isolate in a world where it is often taken for truth that every man or woman for only his or herself. Maybe a culture of community and intercultural harmony is one in which loneliness is non-existent. For as soon as we preach the wonders of individual love and triumph do we then become a culture of the lone individual, who both triumphs over the masses and the monsters alike. Even more disgusting in our cultural baggage is the trope of hunting monsters which disturb our cultural comfort: be it the insect or the sea monster, the foreign devil or the wild animal. For it seems to me that our inspirations and adventures have fallen far short of the true difficulties of deeper forms of victory. Who are the fallen, in our celebrations of victory over a great evil? Naught but straw devils. A far more difficult thing is to curb our own effect on the natural balances of ecology and non-human cultural life. At this stage in human history perhaps that would be a great cultural triumph, and a deeper form of victory than any of Hercules’ beast-slaying adventures: spare the world the demons of your personal convictions.
We often dress up our evils as a fairly agreeable enemy: the devil, satan, lucifer, the bogey man, the tentacle monster, aliens, savages. Maybe it is so difficult to find an enemy we can all agree on, that we make our Enemies into such repulsive and threatening things. Thus it becomes a little clearer how powerful mass media is in creating the particularly heinous problems of art — which is particularly good at muddying the waters of clear thinking and sound judgement where cheap thrills are the rule. It is so bad at this stage of our cultural development, that even our vehicles geared to public service play the ploys of horror films simply to get a reaction. We spent a century creating a public which could sit quietly at the couch as the television blares its expertly curated show, now we are all scratching our heads wondering how we got to the point of such apathetic and unthoughtful citizens. Perhaps they are starting to believe the world is all taken care of by the folks that make the shows on tv.
So now at the bottom of that cultural well we wonder at how to change not the world — that is not the real meaning behind our ideas of world-wide salvation — but how we can change our cultural world into a more conscientious and active one such that our dreams don’t mean ruin for all the rest of the world.
Ooooooh. Conscientious….. Perhaps, you, dear reader, have shuddered already…
It’s so very much more attractive to simply watch a superhero flick or a romance and believe that dreams full of excitement, mass destruction and ecstasy are right around the corner. Plato was not ignorant of these problems when he spoke of the dangers of art, and proposed that Art be outlawed in the Republic of the future, which is ruled by philosophical wisdom and not material power.
Yet Art and Beauty both are so very much more versatile in their natures than such facile alignments of beauty versus boring. Where are the Divas lurking the boardwalks with a satchel for garbage and a look built to devastate the apathetic masses from their slumber? All that is required in our civilized invention is the addition of works which actually matter not just to life in our fictional cultural vacuum, but to the wider world which buttresses all life at the edges and extremes of our cultural dominance.
Alchemy, Wisdom and the Dance of Deadly Metals
Is it perhaps true that Alchemy, born of the long historical confluence of humanity, industry and paradise has existed at the crosshairs of chemical warfare and humanity’s immunity to its own evils? We have over millenia come to consume and take into our bodies metals which figure in our cultural power as well as our immunity and harmony with those very forces which wreck the paradise we live in. All of the 7 alchemical metals, not one but all of them are poisonous to life if taken in anything but trace amounts. We have found it well to state that these trace amounts are healthy and natural. Yet would we have it that our expansive industrial efforts in all these metals and more would somehow contribute to a healthier natural world? Fluoride and hexavalent chromium in the drinking water: must be good for you or not really a problem. What insane apocalyptic jester would suppose that metal processing would naturally produce something quite edible and beneficial to life if they were even a little honest about the history of metallurgy?
