What is Shadow Tech Alchemy?

Shadow Tech Alchemy is a platform founded by Colin E. Davis and Melissa Mari to support our ongoing investigation into the shadow of the psyche and to develop 21st century shadow work theory and practices. This article summarizes our work and describes the shadow of the psyche, while the Work with Colin page describes how we might work together in the alchemical arts.

Before we go further I want to say that my efforts to demystify the shadow and to make clear maps of this psychic phenomenon are only one way of experiencing this subject. The shadow is a metaphysical principle in the cosmos before it shows up in the human psyche. It operates in ways that cannot be fully explained with words or cognitive maps. It has non-local properties and manifests in ways that are better seen through myth and known by way of lived experience. It is important to remember that the map is not the territory.

Melissa and I began our journey together in 2013, although its roots go back many years prior into our personal inner healing work. For reasons I cannot yet fully fathom, Melissa left our planet in January 2025. That was a huge hit to my psyche which has caused me to use to the fullest extent, the very practices that we developed in our time together.

Now I, Colin, continue on with our mission to demystify the shadow and to share the maps, practices, art and inner gnosis that came to us during our years together. From there I continue to mature this Work into the future.

The way that Melissa and I worked with our subject matter was first experiential, followed by scholarly research. We first engaged in deep conversations and self analysis. Then we compared what we were finding in ourselves with what we already knew about the shadow side of culture and society, biology and other domains. Then we looked for links between the outer and the inner, as above so below. From there, we looked to the work of others and to existing research to see if what we were finding was already known and we adjusted our thinking. We knew that all models of the psyche are just models and that they will be continuously reimagined. The primary basis for our ideas was the laboratory of our own personal psyches and our relationship.

With this said, I always want this work to be well grounded. Besides being an artist, working from an intuitive place, I also have some background in law, so I want my understandings to be rooted in first principles and logically coherent when possible.

My public mission was also Melissa’s mission. First it is to assist and inspire other serious alchemists on the path of inner development. From there it is to explain the Great Work of alchemical transmutation to anyone, anywhere, so that they have a map of the territory that they can use when they experience the natural cycles of life, death and rebirth in their own lives.

Then there is the domain of the “alchemical relationship”, where I encourage and teach couples to engage in highly conscious transformative partnerships, often using conflict as the catalyst to integrate chronic complexes, to inwardly mature and to experience deep psycho-spiritual intimacy and trust.

Finally, my task is to help other inner alchemists find each other and form community. You can find me discussing these ideas Thursday and Saturday nights at the Singularity Thought House in Austin Texas and on my Tuesday night YouTube podcasts.

Here are some more links that you may be interested in:

Our alchemical progressive rock band The 01Experience that played between 2018 and 2023.

The Solutio Inner Alchemy Center is described on the Work with Colin page.

The Papers page of this website featuring my recent white papers on inner alchemy.

The Books page, where you can find our 2015 book Shadow Tech and my 2024 book Transforming Darkness.

And below you can read a full explaination of the shadow of the psyche.

Thanks for tuning in,

Colin E. Davis
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What is the shadow?

The shadow is a psychological term and a theory developed by Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychologist. The basic idea of the shadow is that the conscious mind (the ego), naturally suppresses, denies or “bypasses”, our darker socially unacceptable drives, thoughts and emotions, which we all carry within us. Shadow energies are commonly thought of as things like aggression and rage, sexual impulses, drives for control and social status, envy, jealousy, revenge as well as personal insecurities, fears, shame, guilt and grief.

Jung showed that the most forcefully denied psychic contents were those that were strictly prohibited by our families, communities and wider culture. Traits or tendencies which are not acceptable to our social world are rejected from our persona and have to be repressed into the unconscious - into the shadow. There is also the “golden shadow” which constitutes positive traits that we repress similarly, but we will leave that for another time.

What follows shadow repression is what is called psychological projection. In order to rid ourselves of these darker, socially unacceptable energies, our psyches have developed a simple mechanism to offload, or scapegoat our shadow contents onto others. We inevitably find other people or groups to carry our shadows for us. Then we can claim that it is they who are the aggressive ones, the sleazy ones, the demonic ones while we are the clean ones, the righteous ones or God’s chosen ones. This “dichotomous splitting” creates an “us and them” field of conflict as well as the rationales that we need to destroy them, repress them or stamp out their ideology with enactments of physical behavior. And this is how our shadows get mentally and physically displaced from our own mind-bodies out into the world around us. And when an entire society is doing this process, unconsciously, you see a continual, habitual state of chronic conflict that can go on for thousands of years.

At the same time, while much of our shadow energy gets displaced outwards, that which cannot be projected out is turned inwards where it manifests as physical and mental disease, symptoms and syndromes of countless types. It can also be said, quite accurately, that what we commonly refer to as evil is in fact the projection and displacement of the shadow of the human psyche into the world.

While the energy of the shadow can be reduced to a great degree by shadow awareness and shadow work practices, as well as “sublimated” into healthy outlets, which must be done, the ongoing problem of the shadow is a direct result of our basic psychic construction. In order to have organized and polite societies or what we call civilization, our animalistic tendencies have to be limited. In order to be civilized people, we cannot be continually flooded with shadow emotions that overwhelm us or cause us to act out. Something else has to be done with these energies. So there are functional reasons why the psyche has evolved these mechanisms to repress, project and displace our shadow energies.

But if we zoom out to the higher level of human evolution, recent social developments such as globalization and the existence of weapons of mass destruction now require human consciousness to be upgraded in order to facilitate continued symbiosis of the species. Carl Jung’s theory of the shadow of the psyche is an evolutionary response to a more interconnected and dangerous world that when followed through to its logical conclusion, points to a new way of symbiotic living.

That new way of being was actually described in detail by one of Jung’s greatest students and colleagues, Erich Neumann. After the atrocities of WWII, Neumann released the book “Depth Psychology and a New Ethic”, which Jung wrote the forward to. In this book he made clear that the Christian ethics of “love your neighbor as yourself”, “turn the other cheek” and related Christian dictates were completely ignored. The Western world devolved down to the level of a wild animal as our shadow energies possessed us en masse. He stated that because humans are now in possession of nuclear weapons, if we did not get a handle on our shadows and begin the necessary shadow work, we may destroy the human race.

Neumann’s warning was completely ignored, even by the majority of Jung’s followers, the Jungians. Due to the internet, we have recently become far more aware of the movement of the shadow, as we can all now witness every form of human destructiveness worldwide on video, although we take no more responsibility for our shadows as we did in 1949. The good news is that last 80 years has given us enough time to either confirm or deny Jung and Neumann’s theory and recommendation. Even though few scholars have worked on the problem of the shadow in earnest, those who have, have concluded that the theory is completely correct and that we may not be able to evolve as a species until the shadow of the psyche as a domain of understanding is taken into account and worked with personally and collectively. We are now in standby mode, waiting for more individuals to commit to this absolutely necessary work.

Melissa and I always considered those who dedicate themselves to the project of shadow work to be “alchemists”. There are many modes of psycho-spiritual practice but those who commit to the alchemical process of transmuting the lower material of the psyche (shadow or prima materia) so as to refine, heal and evolve the human being from the inside out are true alchemists. What Jung called Individuation is this same Great Work of inner alchemy.

What I have described above is very deep and wide, but this all comes down to the ground level when one finds themselves suffering from chronic conflict in relationship, symptoms in the body, resistance to progress and emotional suffering in life. And this is where the shadow work becomes a true necessity for an individual. Whatever is held back, swept under the rug and allowed to grow unattended will become more powerful and autonomous. That which lives in our shadows must be worked with and integrated or else it will tear us apart. When an entire society denies its shadow en masse, that society slowly dies.

In a way, our current era is similar to the time when microscopic disease agents known as germs, and later viruses, were finally seen with a microscope. That realization of the invisible world of biological pathogens resulted in efforts that greatly increased the human lifespan. We are now at the cusp of fathoming the personal and collective shadow. When shadow awareness and shadow work practice become normal functions in life, we may see exponential evolution of the human species.