The Archetype of the Alchemical Witch: Professor Rodney Needham

 Professor Rodney Needham's obit from 2006 - a little after I discovered him (youtube interview at link):

Examples are the same three colours of black, white and red, which also tend to have similar associations; sacred numbers, almost always below 10; the association of the right hand with men, the sun, odd numbers, and hardness, and the left hand with female, the moon, even numbers, and softness; the use of percussive sounds to mark a transition between two states, such as a new moon or a wedding; a distinction between sacred and secular authority, and so on.

These symbolic elements occur in a limited number of relations, in particular: opposition, exchange, alternation, reversal, inversion, and transition across a boundary. So archetypal figures such as the witch, and the half-man (with one eye, one arm, and one leg, all on the same side), are complexes made up of these primary factors, which are also the basic building blocks of a great deal of myth and ritual, and of important aspects of social organisation.

In Needham's view, these are not "beliefs" that have been consciously formulated, nor are they the expressions of any discernible inner states, but are direct expressions of the working of the human brain, which is why they are independent of language and culture.

UK Telegraph Obit of Rodney Needham

If you look at those categories it appears Needham truly understood alchemy!!

This lecture is a reprint of Needham, Rodney, 1978. “Synthetic images.” In Primordial characters, 23–50. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press:

So we turn to a reprint of his article

 I suggest only that the dichotomy among the primary factors, and their synthesis into the archetype, are consistent with current opinion about the lateral functions of the brain; and that this ultimate locus is consistent with the unconscious generation of the archetypes and with the likelihood that these complex images are the products of genetically inherited predispositions.

What may lie at a deeper level of probing into the imaginative operations of the brain, in the form of neuroelectrical events, is a tantalizing sequel among further questions that propose themselves, if hardly one that a comparativist can have an opinion about.

 His view is very similar to Stan Gooch's book Total Man.

 Needham was devoted to All Souls, to which over the years he donated some 40 silver items, such as pepper pots, mustard pots and finger bowls (some inscribed in Malay). He became a Buddhist in the 1980s.

Alan Macfarlane on witchcraft - youtube professor

 One famous thesis is that gardening, which is technical activity, is peripherally surrounded by magic (in Trobriands), because of Malinowski’s uncertainty principle (pace Heisenberg – same time – linked?). But Gell does not think it is as simple as that. ‘The idea of magic as an accompaniment to uncertainty does not mean that it is opposed to knowledge, that is, that where there is knowledge there is no uncertainty, and hence no magic’. (p.179) - there is basically never enough knowledge about the future….

Furthermore, because magic allows short cuts (avoidance of work as well as risk), ‘magic is the negative contour of work’ (p.181) – as with helping Trobriand ships go more smoothly through water, or fishermen be more efficient.

 Thoughts for part of lecture based on Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, ch.5 of Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology, Essays and Diagrams (1999)