JUNG'S ALCHEMY
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alchemy
collective
unconscious alchemy
illuminate us
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Alchemy: the absurd belief that lead can be transformed into gold. It emerged, no-one made gold, and it disappeared again, somewhat embarressed. While this remains the popular view of alchemy, it misses the point completely. In his introduction to Jung on Alchemy, Nathan Schwartz-Salant writes,
This modern attitude of distorting and maligning ‘the sacred art’ of alchemy seems almost adolescent, especially when seen against the fact that alchemy occupied some of the best minds for thousands of years. Indeed, alchemy’s impressive beginnings reach back into prehistory, with its conceptual foundation in Greek and Stoic thought in the centuries pripr to our present era. (1)
Certainly, alchemy dealt with chemicals, but as much on a symbolic as a literal level: every element was thought to have its ‘philisophical’ counterpart, and characteristics such as those astrology attributes to the planets. Thus mercury could be allegorised as the alchemical King, and sulphur the alchemical Queen. Alchemical symbolism, however, resisted the simple equation of one symbol with one concept, using images "not just to represent an idea but to extend it and reveal its wider implications" (The Alchemical Website). Although certain alchemical symbols invite certain ideas, "their significance must be read from the symbolic context in which they appear" (ibid) as part of a complex process, and meanings were often mutable. The alchemical adept worked alone or with a soror mystica, his female counterpart, on the alchemical texts and in the laboratory, seeking spiritual understanding through intellectual knowledge, intuition, and practical work. In this way, alchemy was closer to a religion than to chemistry. Its principle concern was with processes of transformation:
In general, alchemy attempted to deal with the complexities of change, the transformation from one state or form to another... The alchemical art attempted to imitate such processes in a laboratory. But this outer or mundane work with materials was intimately linked to an inner or arcane work on the human personality. (ibid, 2)
This balance of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ work varied from alchemist to alchemist, from the ‘puffers’ who wanted to make gold quickly, to the adepts who saw it as a spiritual pursuit:
...there were always a few for whom laboratory work was primarily a matter of symbols and their psychic effect. As their texts show, they were quite conscious of this, to the point of condemning the nanve goldmakers as liars, frauds, and dupes. Their own standpoint they proclaimed with propositions like "Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi." " (Jung, 1998: 284)
It is this religious or mythic content that drew Jung to alchemy, as a means to illuminate the collective unconscious.
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