Monarch Meds #1: Psycho & the Coniunctio
Monarch meds (meditations) is a series where I instinctively select two books and then, in a stroke of serendipity, open each to a random page. Similar to Tarot, I would consider this a kind of “designed chance” experience. The experience of pulling out the deck with the intension of doing a reading is designed, and then the subsequent chance event occurs. The passages chosen by chance are taken delightfully out of context, with the purpose of bridging them (conceptually or otherwise) to hopefully generate something new. Today, we discuss the relationship between the alchemical process of the conjunctio in relation to the film Psycho.
Subscribe to read the texts
I had never seen the 1960s Psycho before, and even though the shower scene is so ubiquitous in pop culture, I naturally had to take the opportunity to watch the entire film. The obvious connection of these two passages, or even works of art in general, is death: the killing of the dragon and the killing of Marion.
The first passage from Alchemy & Mysticism is a reference to the Alchemical concept of the Coniunctio (or conjunction). The death of the Mercurial dragon can only be acheived through the coniunctio, or the unification of opposites: “killed by his brother and sister at once”. That is, in order to kill the Mercurial dragon one must remove their sulphur and lunar moisture at the same time. The passage of J.F already mentions the most interesting aspect of this: that the coniunctio could also be understood more primitively as sex and thus, life. The shower scene where Marion ultimately dies by the kitchen knife was shocking to viewers of the 1960s. The whole shower scene is 45 seconds long where we see the creeping of the shadow of Norman holding the knife, the curtain rip open, and the subsequent scenes that flash before our eyes which outline a clear rhythm of sex and death; naval and knife.
As J.F mentions, the knife, while a mundane object in the narrative, transforms into a symbol of deeper realities, encompassing themes of sex, violence, life, and death. It transmutes itself into a symbolic object which one could argue is itself a representation of the coniunctio in that moment. Though, if one were to claim the knife is entirely representative of the singular concept of the conjunction step in alchemy, it is through the integration, or unification, of sex and death that happens in the minds of the viewer. As Hitchcock points out himself, there are no