In order to understand the alchemical imagery inherent in the television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, one must first understand alchemy itself and the way that it expresses itself in works of art, specifically in literature and film. The goal of alchemy is to achieve the production of the Philosopher’s Stone: an artifact that produced the Elixir of Life and also could transmute base metals (such as lead) into pure gold. In alchemy, the path to the production of the Stone was a sequence of metallurgical/symbolic/spiritual stages known as the Magnum Opus (English: the Great Work). The Work is separated into three convenient stages – nigredo (the blackening), albedo (the whitening), and rubedo (the reddening). In the rubedo, the Stone is produced.
Rudolph’s Nigredo
The nigredo in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is not one single event, but actually the whole first section of the film, from Rudolph’s birth to when he and Hermey meet. In his work The Deathly Hallows Lectures, John Granger quotes Lyndy Abraham’s A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery concerning nigredo: it is “the body of the impure metal, the matter for the Stone, or the old, outmoded state is being killed, putrefied, and dissolved into the original substance of creation, the prima materia, in order that it may be renovated and reborn in a new form” (Granger, Lectures, page 59). In the nigredo, a base metal (Abraham’s “impure metal”) has to be dissolved or broken down into its pure state – its prima materia – to burn away all of the impurities.
In the Rudolph story, we can see symbolic representations, or markers, that tell us viewers that Rudolph is in the nigredo stage. The first indicator is during the scene where infant Rudolph’s mother and father discover his congenital nose condition. Donner, his father, attempts to hide his glowing nose under a clump of mud from the cave floor. Rudolph removes it at the end of the scene, allowing the light of his nose to shine, but as we see in the following scenes, such as the Reindeer Games, he has been forced to wear the mud over his nose for most of his life.
The nigredo is characterized by division and the stripping of all identifying markers. As stated above, Donner’s suppression of his son’s nose with the base mud strips Rudolph of his most unique characteristic. At the Reindeer Games, he is stripped of his father’s legacy and his own birthright: as the son of one of Santa’s eight chosen reindeer, Rudolph should have a place before the sleigh handed to him on a silver platter. As it is, however, he is thrown out of the Games and becomes the pariah of the community. Distraught, Rudolph resolves to run away from his home despite continued support from his beau, Clarice. This is the nigredo’s division at its most apparent.
After successfully separating himself from the North Pole milieu and severing all ties to his old community, Rudolph sheds everything that made him “imperfect” by the standards of his old life. In the wild, he is reduced to his innocent, original state – almost born again, as it were. The nigredo, however, is not a moment of rebirth, but of death. Rudolph has “died” in the sense that the person he was up until this point is gone forever.
Quicksilver and Sulfur
In the alchemical process, once the materia prima is obtained from a base metal, it must be matured in a bath containing the two alchemical reagents of quicksilver (mercury) and sulfur. In literary alchemy, these reagents do not appear as elements but are represented in story-transparencies that coincide symbolically with the alchemical characteristics of the two reagents. Mercury – or quicksilver, as it was known – represented the feminine pole of being and was known to be “volatile.” Sulfur was quicksilver’s polar opposite: it represented the masculine pole and was fiery and active. As story-transparencies, human characters take on personalities attuned to these elemental traits. The mercury representative is usually female (or at least possesses a degree of sexual ambiguity), operates from a cranial place rather than from an emotional or cardiac one, and is associated with the colors of white or silver. The sulfur representative is usually male, operates from an emotional place where he is ruled b y the passions, and is associated in some way with activity, and the color red.
In RRNR, Hermey represents mercury and Yukon Cornelius is sulfur.
Hermey is obviously not a female, but it is interesting that he alone amongst the male elves has that swooping coif of bright blonde hair. All of the female elves have the same blonde hair, but none of the other males. He is the most academically inclined of any character in the film. He has no silver in his outfit, nor is he associated in any way with the color white – but, it is interesting to note that Hermey’s interests lie in dentistry: a profession that utilizes large amounts of mercury. Hermey’s name even implies the connection to mercury: “Hermey” is the diminutive for “Hermes,” the Greek name for the Roman god, Mercury. Mythologically, Hermes was the progenitor of the Hermetic sciences, particularly alchemy, and is used frequently in alchemical art to represent his namesake element.
Yukon Cornelius, as I have already discussed in other posts on this blog, is quite clearly the active, passion-based embodiment of sulfur. Not only is he significantly larger than any of the other characters, but his most recognizable feature in his great, bushy, red beard and mustache. Yukon operates almost entirely out of a sensory mindset. When he is mining for “gold and silver,” he does so not by consulting geological charts or utilizing any mineralogical knowledge, but he throws his pick ax into the ground and judges whether or not the precious metals were there by tasting the blade. At the end of the film, when he locates a peppermint mine, he finds it by smell.
NEXT POST: Buffy Turns 30
No comments:
Post a Comment