The Road - A Post-Apocalyptic Alchemical Crash Course

Published as a Pulitzer Prize winning novel in 2006 by Cormac McCarthy, The Road was adapted by Joe Penhall for the silver screen and released in 2009. Director John Hillcoat masterfully relays much of the novel’s bleak existentialism. An exposition of the book would be too great a task, given the author’s ability to pack gobs of despair and hope into each densely meaningful sentence. The following is a relatively brief extrapolation of my perception of a thinly veiled alchemical commentary sown into the story’s plot, (or rather a thin plot sown into an alchemical apocalypse).

The movie opens with a scene from a memory; lush gardens replete with buds bursting under sunbeams, and at their center, a pregnant woman. The laughter of lovers, of children dapple the soundscape. This is all starkly contrasted with the grey world to which The Father awakens. However, we find his dream's material correlative in the waterfall roaring behind his head. There is still something left of paradise in this hard moment.

The Father tells us: “The clocks stopped at one seventeen one morning. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. I think it's October but I can't be sure. I haven't kept a calender for five years. Each day is more gray than the one before. Each night is darker - beyond darkness. The world gets colder week by week as the world slowly dies. No animals have survived. All the crops are long gone. Someday all the trees in the world will have fallen. The roads are peopled by refugees towing carts and road gangs looking for fuel and food. There has been cannibalism. Cannibalism is the great fear. Mostly I worry about food. Always food. Food and our shoes. Sometimes I tell the boy old stories of courage and justice - difficult as they are to remember. All I know is the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.”

Compare the beginning of this monologue with Genesis 1:2. “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Compare its end with John 1:1-4. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

Our situation is simple and dire. We have a wrecked world whimpering as it drags itself toward oblivion. We have a father and son struggling through the planet's spasmodic death throws toward an enigmatic ocean, where they hope to find an end to their suffering – the Father in death; the Son in life.

There are three components ever present within the film’s imagery – The Road, Fire, and Water. These veins represent the three columns on the Qabalistic model of the Tree of Life (the central glyph of any legitimate alchemical transmission). These three columns are respectively the Pillar of Mildness, running long and arduous up the center of the glyph; the Pillar of Severity, running on the feminine left; and the Pillar of Mercy, running on the masculine right. These are also respectively mercury, salt, and sulfur; or in Vedic terms, sattva, tamas, and rajas.

The scenery along The Road is always desolate, invoking the melancholy disillusionment that predicates the mission of alchemical transmutation. This central column, The Road, is continually tempered by severe fires and merciful rains, as The Father and Son make their way toward the ocean, the symbolic source of all their thoughts and memories. The two hobble through the ashes of a world barren of plants and animals pushing a shopping cart (symbolic of the human body) containing their belongings.

Civilization is mostly abandoned. In an old barn they find bodies hanging from the rafters. The Father explains that they killed themselves. He finds two bullets for his gun and teaches the boy how to commit suicide to avoid rape and torture by the bands of roaming cannibals. This disturbing sequence is actually a subtle treatise on cosmic absorption (hanging) and meditation (suicide). While stark, the point is made. This is the beginning of the transmission of wisdom from Father to Son.

Another memory pours into The Father’s steely mind. It is the memory of The Son’s birth. Father and Mother are eating dinner together, when her water breaks. Mother is resistant to labor. It is intense, and she is loath to bring new life into this crumbling world. Nevertheless through her primal screams she births The Son. Jesus said, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Here The Son is born of water, his destiny then, is to be born of fire.

So it begins. Father and Son awaken to the sound of trucks and voices on The Road. They quickly retreat into the forest, where they encounter one of its men. He has reduced himself to eating human flesh for survival. According to The Father, this is the demarcation between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. The cannibalism is essentially a Saturnine (aka Satanic) trait. Saturn (Greek – Kronos) devours his own children. The cannibals are an expression of the element of time, which gives rise to forms and in turn tears them down.

The Father shoots the cannibal as he grabs the boy. “I will kill anyone who touches you. Because that's my job,” he promises as he washes the boy’s hair after a harrowing escape through the forest. “C’mon, we’ve got to go find our cart.” Our destiny preserves us so that we may fulfill it.

Again memory comes flooding in, and always with memory comes The Mother. The Mother is simply, The Son’s Soul. She is his past and his root. She is the water falling from the boding sky and running alongside The Road. She ever seeks to pull the boy into her great sea of entropy. She herself has fled naked into the darkness of the eminently disintegrating world. Memory tells us that she pleaded with The Father to use their remaining bullets to end both her and the boy's life, in an act of severe mercy. “They’ll come for us,” She implores Him. "They", of course, are the cannibalistic agents of Time. Before she abandons them to become their Memory she urges The Father, “Keep him warm and go South.” South is the direction of the Sun. This is the collective intelligence in which The Son will find his everlasting life.

The Father is The Son’s Spirit. He is his future and his destiny. He is the fire that burns in the dead forest, and at their campsites; on their torches, and in their hearts. “You’ve got to watch out for the bad guys,” he tells the boy. “Keep carrying the fire inside you.” Here is the refusal to go not gentle into that good night. The Father says, “When you dream about bad things happening, it means you're still fighting and you're still alive. It's when you start to dream about good things that you should start to worry.”

The dichotomy between Soul and Spirit and their eventual merging is the very purpose of the alchemical labor. The Book of Lambspring articulates, “Be warned and understand truly that two fishes are swimming in our sea”; “Hear without terror that in the forest are hidden a deer and an unicorn”; and finally, “Here you behold a great marvel – two lions are joined into one”.

This unification of Soul and Spirit is the fruit of trial and error; of probation and experimentation. This is typically represented as a rainbow, and enunciated when The Father and The Son swim under the waterfall. The mist makes a prism and the seven colors flair in the setting sun. It is also a promise of the completion of the Great Work.

Further down The Road, they encounter a sprawling estate, which they explore in search of food, clothing, and shoes. As they pass between the barn and the mansion, the boy eyes the large cauldrons placed in ritual arrangement around the courtyard, along with a tall tripod with a hook dangling menacingly from it. A gray mist is rolling in. They know what it was, but not until they tear the lock off the cellar door and find a cache of human livestock wasting in the darkness beneath, do they comprehend what it is. The tribe that runs the estate returns, and during a desperate moment in hiding, The Father presses the barrel of his pistol to the boys forehead, ready to quickly end his life rather than let him be tortured and eaten. Fortunately, they escape into the woods, where they listen to the slaughter inside the house.

The Son asks, “We’ll never eat anybody will we?”

The Father answers, “No, we’re the good guys.”

The Son concurs, “We’re carrying the Fire…”

It is perhaps this refusal to conform to the madness of the world that is the essence of spiritual life and even morality.

Their journey leads them to The Father’s childhood home. The man is swept away by a nostalgia that gives him a deeper empathy for the boy and his lot. The boy is uncomfortable with his father’s reverie and sits on the porch coloring a sheet of paper with the chaotic scribbles that seep into an irradiated mind. He sees a child across the street and runs after him. The child flees like a mirage. The boy is chasing ghosts. The Father intervenes and The Son becomes aware that there is no “other”.

This “other” is comforting though it is only an echo. Maturity (The Father) demands that we stop seeing the world through this delusion. However, it is an easy trap for the mind to seek solace in. As The Father muses, “When I have nothing, I try to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings.” We populate our worlds with dreams to keep us from the hard truth that we are, each one of us, truly alone…

Running water, the downward spiral, prompts the boy to ask, “Are we gonna die?”

To which The Father assures him, “We are not gonna quit. We are gonna survive this.”

The fire is still burning, though they haven’t eaten in days. They uncover a child’s skeleton under dusty blankets. “Nothing you haven’t seen before,” growls The Father. Still the boy stares, and contemplates his mortality. Fasting makes philosophers.

Famine always precedes feast, however, and outside they find an iron door on the ground. Upon prying it open, they discover a bomb shelter laden with canned food, whiskey, and even cigarettes. In this little kiva they renew themselves. They bathe, sleep in peace, laugh, and for a time find a needed softness. The Father enjoys the whisky and tobacco, but when the boy asks to try some, The Father refuses, “You won’t like it.” He acknowledges, “You think I come from another world don’t you?” Our destinies appear so alien to us. When we get a glimpse of what we will become, we are confused. And so our futures must remain hidden, that we may go to meet them quite beside ourselves, without the burden of self-consciousness.

Two important foreshadows draw here. The first is an arrowhead The Father finds amongst The Son’s treasured belongings. The second is a dog barking overhead as they eat in the shelter. They abandon the shelter and walk The Road again in spite of the boy’s objections. “I don’t want to go! You always think bad things are going to happen, but we found this place!” Destiny compels us. It will allow us to rest as long as necessary before whipping us into motion again.

They meet an old man on The Road with a staff. He hobbles ahead of them and calls back, “I don’t have anything for you.” “We’re not robbers,” The Father replies. The boy is naïve and compassionate. He insists the hermit join them for dinner. “How old are you?” asks The Father. “90,” says the old man who introduces himself as Eli. They sit around the fire and share food. Eli claims that he is blind, but The Father doesn’t believe him. “Can you see that?” he asks as he places his pistol in front of him. Eli is undaunted, “When I saw that boy I thought I’d died and met an angel.” The Father answers, “He is an angel.”

The conversation continues subtle, cryptic, and pregnant with meaning beyond the obvious, but I will let my readers deduct these implications.

“What happened to you,” The Son asks the Hermit.

“I can’t talk of it,” says the blind man. “I knew this was coming. For a while I thought I was the last man.”

Father scoffs, “How would you know that, that you were the last man alive?”

The hermit replies, “Well, I don't guess you'd know it. You'd just be it.”

Father says, “God would know.”

“God wouldn't know what... God wouldn't know what he knows. If there is a God up there, he would have turned his back on us by now. And whoever made humanity will find no humanity here. No, sir. No, sir. So beware. Beware,” the old man babbles.

Father asks him, “Do you ever wish you would die?”

“No. It's foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.”

In the morning they send off the old man. They are a hundred miles from the coast “as the crow flies”. The boy quips, “Crows are only in books.”

They find blood on the ground. All shed blood is human now, and they run into the forest and watch a pack of men chase down a woman and a small child. Father and Son escape into the forest, while gunshots and screams sound behind them. An earthquake fells huge trees around them and they dodge and hide until the shaking stops. Saturn eats her children…

A fire rages in the falling forest. Father and Son sleep in an old stone church. The morning sun shines in through a cross-shaped window, and The Father coughs and spits up blood. He is dying, and he knows this. He is sacrificing himself to take the boy south, to take the boy to the sea. Our destiny dies for our sins; dies that we might have life everlasting. That death is slow, painfully arduous, and full of doubt.

Father and Son look at a map together, and boy runs his finger along the coastline. “What’s all that?” he asks his Father. “The sea,” replies the man. “Is the sea blue?” he asks. “Dunno,” replies the man. “Used to be.”

But the ocean is not blue when they reach it. It is gray like the sky above them. They huddle together looking out over the litter-strewn beach and the vast gray mantle rolling under the pouring rain. “What’s on the other side?” says the boy. The man says, “Maybe a father and boy on a beach.” The water is a mirror and both are prepared to step through the looking glass. They have followed The Road to the 13th Path, that long last leg of any journey, in which the ego (The Son) is forced to acknowledge its solitude in the vastness of space and the eternal stretch of time.

“Forever young… I want to be forever young… Do you really want to live forever… forever….” There are realizations along the way to immortality that shatter the desire for eternal life. This mirror, this gray churning sea, this camel’s path is the destiny of each one of us.

The boy becomes ill, and lightning flashes.

Son: “What would you do if I died?”

Father: “I’d die too.”

Son: “So I could be with you.”

Father: “So I could be with you.”

“My Son, I was dead without thee,

And lived in great danger of my life.

I revive at thy return,

And it fills my breast with joy.”

~ The Book of Lambspring (Figure XIII)

There is a large boat wrecked about a hundred yards from shore. The Father leaves the boy under a makeshift shelter on the beach. He strips naked and swims to the vessel to search for supplies. While he is away a thief steals all their belongings and carts them away. The Father returns with a few minor items (including a flare gun) to find all their belongings gone. Luckily the boy is alive, but Father is furious. He hunts down the thief and makes him strip at gunpoint. They take back their things, and leave the man stranded and naked.

Throughout all this the boy is gaining a voice, and voicing his compassion for the naked thief. “Just help him,” he pleads. “He’s hungry. He was just scarred.” Father shouts, “You’re not the one who has to worry about things!”

And here the journey reaches its crescendo. Destiny is almost spent, and the boy cries out, “I AM! I AM THE ONE!” The boy leaves the food and clothing for the thief, though he is nowhere to be found.

The Road runs along the ocean, and Father and Son cautiously enter a town. It is raining again and the musical accompaniment is the piano Mother used to play. A small miracle occurs when the boy finds a living beetle (Egyptian symbol for immortality). He reveals his find to Father, and as he does an arrow pierces the man’s Achilles heel. Pushing the boy out of the way he shoots his newly found flare gun into the window and kills the archer. A woman screams from inside the building. Father runs into the building and discovers the burning body of a man. “Why did you shoot him,” his wife rocks and weeps. “Why were you following us?” Father answers. “Why were you following us?” the woman echoes. The mirror is cracking.

Gritting his teeth, Father removes the arrow from his calf. Coughing, limping, and pulling the cart he finally collapses. He rests for a while before struggling to his feet and taking a few more steps. The boy reaches for the cart. “Leave it,” says the man, “I can’t do it anymore.”

That night by the fire a final memory washes in on the tide. It is a memory of love-making between Father and Mother. “If I were God, I would have made the world just so and no different… and so I have you. I am you.” We are all poetic or pathetic at death’s door.

Father stares up at a rare clear night sky strewn with incalculable stars.

Father: “Keep going South.”

Son: “I want to be with you. Take me with you. What should I do? You said you wouldn’t leave me…”

Father: “I’m sorry. You have my whole heart – you always did.”

Here the transmission is completed. Boy knows now that it was always only him. Both Father and Mother are within the Son.

In the morning Father’s body is cold. The Son weeps and sits by the body all day and into the night, keeping the fire burning. The next day he takes binoculars and the gun, respectively Aries and Gemini, and walks down to the water’s edge. A body approaches him with deliberation, and he is afraid. He draws the pistol and waits for the stranger.

“Where is that man?” the stranger asks.

The boy is silent and stands away with his pistol on the stranger.

“You’ve got two choices,” the stranger says. “You can come with me, or you can stay here. If you stay here, you must keep off the road.” “I have a little boy and a little girl,” the stranger continues.

“Do you eat people?” the boy asks.

“We don’t eat people.”

“Are you carrying the fire?”

The stranger cocks his head, then nods, “Yes.”

A woman and two children appear. “We’ve been following you,” she says softly. “We were so worried about you, but now we don’t have to worry anymore. Is that ok?”

“Ok,” says the boy. A dog barks nearby.

The sleeping Father is here changed

Entirely into limpid water,

And by virtue of this water alone

The good work is accomplished.

There is now a glorified and beautiful Father,

And he brings forth a new Son.

The Son ever remains in the Father,

And the Father in the Son.

Thus in divers things

They produce untold, precious fruit.

They perish never more,

And laugh at death.

By the grace of God they abide for ever,

The Father and the Son, triumphing gloriously

In the splendour of their new Kingdom.

Upon one throne they sit,

And the face of the Ancient Master

Is straightway seen between them:

He is arrayed in a crimson robe.

~ The Book of Lambspring (Figure XV)

Alchemy is mastery of heaven and earth, of fire and water, of father and mother, of day and night, of mercy and severity, of destiny and memory. By merging them within our hearts, we may continue as their child and creator. Now we are free to make eternal life, unconditional love, and a thousand other miracles.

~ Joshua Caleb Sedam

6/18/10