Rikki Ducornet
An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire
Entering Fire
Fire for the alchemist causes calcination, reducing substances within the athanor furnace to ashes. Fire is also the heat that fuses elements, a process often represented in alchemical illustrations as sexual intercourse between the sun and the moon, symbols of the masculine sulphur and the feminine mercury. The second novel, Entering Fire, is a story of both love and hate, inspired also by a visit to a greenhouse outside Paris where orchids were being cloned. [34] The fiery theme in this novel is portrayed as both regenerative and destructive, alternating between the forces of good and evil. It chronicles the loves of a father, Lamprias de Bergerac, for women, nature and the forest, and the hatred of his son, Septimus, a bigot possessed by anti-Semitism and other Eurocentric prejudices. Lamprias is an amateur botanist and a descendant of the famous Cyrano of Rostand’s play. Ducornet admired the play and was delighted to find during her research that the original Cyrano was also an alchemist. She narrates the story almost exclusively through her male characters, as the male voice has fascinated her since the days of her father’s storytelling. [35]
Lamprias meets Virginie, Septimus’ mother, at a lavish tea, charmed by the way her lips encircle a creamcake. The marriage sours during the honeymoon, and worsens when Lamprias rescues Dust, a Chinese concubine with bound feet, and brings her to the family home. Both women have sons, Septimus and True Man, a hybrid but also, to the warped Septimus’s dismay, a perfect specimen of masculinity. Somewhat like the alchemical salamander, a symbol of fire, and his namesake, Chên-Yen, True Man can “enter water without getting wet and fire without getting burned” (34). The fire of Septimus’s hatred is fanned by his bigoted mother, sparking him to burn the books of his father’s library. They cremate the despised Dust after she dies of influenza and then throw her ashes into the Loire. Later when Septimus grows up to embrace Facism, he takes great delight in the Gestapo’s concentration camp ovens, especially when directing the arrest and annihilation of two of his father’s former lovers.
But fire here also represents love and human passion. Lamprias believes that “The Eternal Feminine throbs at the heart of Mystery” (21). The cities of South America that he visits and the Amazon forest where he collects his orchids are overheated by the tropical sun. The Indians dream, colored with caesalpinia dye the color of red coals (24). The talented prostitute Evangelista, “a volcanic fusion of Ivory Coast and Xvante” (26), takes her first steps as a child over hot coals. The land is an igneous fusion rich in mineral deposits including copper, iron and lead sulphide. Lamprias draws the analogy “As in an alchemical drawing, the sun radiates from within a crown of clouds” (29). [36]
On his second trip to the Amazon the meets his life’s passion, Cûcla, an innocent and seductive child. Lamprias catches glimpses of her in the forest and then one day he “caught the smell of her fire, and saw—illuminated by the living embers, a roasted iguana held smoking before her lips—Cûcla. Breathing on the meat to cool it, she made sparks” (59). Cûcla is a bit of an alchemist and a philosopher herself. Newly discovered iguanas often hung from the ceilings of seventeenth century European alchemical laboratories to symbolize the mythic dragon. She has a bain-marie (48), the vessel designed by the first woman alchemist who gave it her name—Maria the Jew. Cûcla reveals to Lamprias the truth: “that the straight path leads to a door of lead; it is the tortuous path that leads to the garden. And this: only foolish men worship a god who banishes his children from Paradise. It is the fertile serpent who has the green thumb” (33). Their love ignites in the forest, but returning to her village, the yano, they find a hell on earth. Senhor Rosada, a murderous rubber tycoon, has brutally murdered all of its inhabitants—men, women and children. In respect, they set fire to their remains and reduce the village to ashes, never to speak of the terror again so that the Indians’ souls can rest.
Central to this novel are the alchemical writings and experiments of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (43-45). Leaving home, Lamprias take the alchemical manuscript written by his ancestor and hidden in a black armoire, as “the alchemists believed that black contains all colours.” He shares it with a chemist, Angelo Mariani, inventor of a miraculous wine and elixir, a coca-flavored eau de vivre. The text contains a quote from the Emerald Tablet (Table Smaragdine), the oldest and most succinct summary of alchemical lore: “separate earth and fire, the subtle and the dense, gentle and with great care.” In his quest to create the homunculus and to pierce the mysteries of creation, Cyrano, or “Sire-in-O” the adept in the circle, experiments with the cells of the radish, frog, lion and even his own sperm. “He died before he found the answer, but he knew that the answer was there” (84-85).
Lamprias marvels over another truism in the book, CESTE PIERRE EST VEGETALE (43), and is amazed to discover that the alchemical work can be conducted in the plant realm. He and the chemist decipher Cyrano’s cryptic language, typical of so many alchemical texts, that or refers not only to gold but to (or)chids as well. Here Ducornet incorporates the same kind of linguistic analysis of alchemical texts often used by Fulcanelli. The two friends realize that the alchemy works at the cellular level and this inspires Lamprias to inaugurate his life-long experimentation with orchid cloning.
