DNC Growth Alchemy: Putrefaction

For those that are familiar with my work on Marianne Williamson’s 2020 presidential campaign where we went viral many times and influenced the overall discourse of the election (Biden even adopted the title of one of her books as his campaign slogan, “Healing the Soul of America”), you probably caught my feature in The New York Times that described the psychological alchemy behind the viral campaign.

While the astrologers are pretty much in unison about predicting a Harris loss and a Trump win based on the astrology of our current time, as well as the natal charts of the United States, Biden, Harris, Trump, and other world leaders (mundane astrology), I wanted to offer the more archetypal narrative perspective of spiritual alchemy – basically just astrology, but without the math.

I find this schema to be more reliable at times, and much more easily accessible being less subject to strict timelines or details of interpretation. When developing a viral campaign I wouldn’t pay attention to astrology, for example – but I would thoroughly investigate the relevant alchemical narratives.

The key to the spiritual alchemist perspective on historical events is the order of operations. Our narratives progress in a standard format with a beginning, middle, and end. This format can be expanded into 5 steps – exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. These can be further enriched/expanded by the 7-point story structure, which perfectly map to the 7 stages of spiritual alchemy. You can often identify what is likely to happen next in a narrative by identifying which of the 7 stages of story or alchemy the operation is in, and how far progressed through the stage it is. A movie plot takes place over an hour or two, but spiritual alchemy takes place over years and lifetimes.

As a general outline, here are the 7 stages:

1. Calcination: Breaking down the ego and worldly attachments.
2. Dissolution: Releasing repressed emotions.
3. Separation: Distinguishing between true self and acquired persona.
4. Conjunction: Integrating purified elements.
5. Putrefaction/Fermentation: Decay of the old self and rebirth.
6. Distillation: Removing impurities for spiritual purity.
7. Coagulation: Achieving a unified, whole self.

To read more on the 7 Stages of Spiritual Alchemy, I recommend this article.

Applying this template to the DNC is rather straightforward. The reason I choose the narrative of the DNC rather than US politics at large, or the Democratic party at large, is because there is a lot to be gained with precision when using archetypal methodology. If we examined the narrative of the Democratic party at large, we’d be dealing with all of the downticket races, the DCCC, the local elections across all geographic contexts, etc etc. While the narrative of the DNC is likely parallel to all of those narratives, there is too much variability that would bog us down in this blog post, and the root of the question we want to examine is specifically the result of the presidential ticket anyways.

So let’s anchor the DNC in alchemical terms. While much of the last 20 or so years seems like general chaos, there is a clear point of conjunction – when the DNC achieved an amalgamation of key elements and experienced an ascendant and stable victory. The Obama campaign. The Democratic party, with Obama at the head of the ticket, exemplified it’s ideal of championing the black vote, the educated vote, and was also able to live out its ideals across many areas of policy. Many threads of separation, prominently racial separation, came to an integrated point in the DNC narrative. The Obama campaign also left the DNC with NGP-VAN, an advanced data operation that came to define the party from an infrastructure and technological perspective.

To frame the Democratic National Committee (DNC) arc in alchemical terms:

1. Calcination: Pre-Obama era, breaking down outdated practices and beliefs within the party.
2. Dissolution: Addressing internal conflicts and repressed issues, such as racial and economic disparities.
3. Separation: Distinguishing between progressive and traditional factions, taking up healthcare reform as a unifying issue.
4. Conjunction: Obama era, integrating diverse elements and achieving a cohesive identity, Obamacare reform. NGP-VAN.
5. Putrefaction: Clinton/Biden/Harris era, experiencing decay and transformation as old structures are challenged (Bernie/Progressive factions representing the challenge to the corporatist structures)
6. Distillation: Efforts to purify and refine the party’s vision.
7. Coagulation: Future goal of achieving a unified and enlightened political stance.

It is possible that the DNC is on the back-end of Putrefaction in the narrative, and may soon move into Distillation. I suspect that even with a Harris loss though, the elements of the Clinton/Biden/Harris era will still retain a tight hold on the DNC operation and narrative, and it will likely be some time before the DNC progresses into a distillation through which new leaders and structure emerge.

What solidifies my alchemical prediction though, is juxtaposing the DNC alchemical status with that of the RNC.

The RNC has already completed the Distillation phase with Trump having all of his previous sins tried in open court, culminating in a near-death experience from which the party emerged totally unified, and with a positive, more centrist vision for the future. After watching the RNC, there is no doubt they are in the Coagulation stage of spiritual alchemy.

So if we put a Putrefaction against a Coagulation, the Coagulation is in an ascendancy that will likely not be uprooted. The Putrefaction still has some ways to go before achieving a narrative status of ascendancy, and in fact likely has some more severe losses or scandal ahead.

In Putrefaction, I often think of Numbers 32:23 which says, “Be sure your sin will find you out”. In context, this is the stage where the DNC will have to go through the odious process of realizing their strategic errors and internalizing them in order to facilitate the changes that will lead to Distillation and then Coagulation. Whereas, the RNC ticket has not only reckoned with their challenger Tea Party faction, but has also already undergone a thorough scrutinizing of their faults and errors – and has even reckoned with the formal forces of justice to emerge unified and with clearer vision.

This is not to say that there are not some elements within the Democratic party at large that are in other alchemical stages. If you consider these types of narratives as having fractal properties, one can look at a particular individual in the DNC, or at specific downticket races, and observe them in different stages of the alchemical narrative. One can even look at broader scopes such as global foreign policy issues like de-dollarization, and also observe alternate narrative pacing. Each thread can be pulled apart and analyzed from an alchemical narrative perspective. So, any analysis through this lens will want to be as precise as possible about which specific narrative we analyze in order to answer a question.

In terms of predicting future events, this type of analysis is amusing. When constructing an organic viral narrative or charting the growth of a company within an industry or niche, this type of analysis is extremely powerful.

I hope these thoughts were at least interesting, and if you’ve read this far – I welcome your comment! Please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or privately if you have my direct contact.