Jung on Alchemy

Introduction

ALCHEMY, SCIENCE AND ILLUMINATION

My first encounter with alchemy was a passing one as a student some thirty years ago in a course dealing with the scientific work of Sir Isaac Newton. When the professor, who had an interest in the history of science, discussed Newton he made a side reference to Newton’s interests in alchemy, and he seemed both amused and embarrassed by how this legendary figure could be enchanted by such nonsense. And all of us followed suit, ‘implanted’ by the professor’s attitude, as no doubt he had been by his teachers before him. The subject was soon dropped, cast aside as an obvious aberrant behavior of the times that could affect even the great Newton, but certainly not his ‘real’ work as we knew it. While his alchemical studies are now more well known and available, the alchemical aspect of Newton’s work at that time were like books on the ‘Index’ of the Catholic Church; they were difficult to find, and one wondered if they really existed. None of us, most likely the professor included, had any inkling that over four decades of Newton’s life were, in significant measure, spent in serious alchemical pursuits (Taylor, 1956; Geoghegan, 1957; McGuire, 1967; Dobbs, 1975, 1992), including a quest for the ‘true philosophical mercury’ (Dobbs, 1992, p. 195). But even now one can encounter an aversion among scholars to accepting the role of alchemy in Newton’s life (Hall, 1992).

Today, a very great majority of educated people still regard alchemy with disdain. 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 prior to our present era. Why has this distortion occurred, and why is this remarkable body of thought still dismissed as an embarrassment that was only ‘corrected’ by the emergence of science? The historian of religion Mircea Eliade suggests:

Having for so long (and so heroically!) followed the path which we believed to be the best and only one worthy of the intelligent, self respecting individual, and in the process having sacrificed the best part of our soul in order to satisfy the colossal intellectual demands of scientific and industrial progress, we have grown suspicious of the greatness of primitive cultures.

(Eliade, 1962, p. 12)

Certainly, this attitude of suspiciousness, if not superiority, was what I and most people were once taught concerning alchemy. But, as Eliade also tells us, ‘Alchemy is one of those creations of the pre-scientific era and the historiographer who would attempt to present it as a rudimentary phase of chemistry or, indeed, as a secular science, would be treading on very shaky ground’ (ibid., p. 13). ‘From the alchemist’s point of view, chemistry represented a Fall because it meant the secularization of a sacred science’ (ibid., p. 11).

C. G. Jung, perhaps more than any other modern researcher of alchemy, is responsible for resurrecting this body of thought as a respectable field of study. In alchemy, as we shall see, Jung found a mine of symbolism that he recognized to parallel the way a human being, with a correct use of will and imagination, and the assent of fate, can enter a process whose goal is the creation of an internal structure he called the self. The self, created through what Jung termed the individuation process, yields an inner stability and sense of direction for the ego even amidst stormy, emotional and environmental conflict. But the self is filled with paradox, and it too can create chaotic states of mind that can endanger a person’s sense of identity. Usually, this has a greater goal of enriching and widening the scope and values of the personality. But it also has its dangers. ‘Many have perished in the work’ is an alchemical saying that Jung quotes to offer a balance to any overly optimistic attitude. Jung found that alchemy mirrored the complexities of the process of the creation of the self in ways far superior to any other body of thought. I shall discuss such issues in greater detail in this introduction to Jung on Alchemy, after which I shall present excerpts from his writings on alchemical symbolism. But to begin with let us try to give some answers to the question: what is alchemy?

The alchemists worked with materials that they tried to change from base to more elevated forms, or they attempted to tincture substances to change their appearance, an endeavor that owed much to the Egyptian craft of dyeing fabrics. In general, alchemy attempted to deal with the complexities of change, the transformation from one state or form to another, from a seed to an embryo, or from an ore of little value to silver or gold, transformed, they believed, in the bowels of the earth under intense pressures and heat. 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. For example, the alchemical fire, which is often called the secret of the opus, is clearly a physical fire, controlled within an actual vessel, but it is also the heat-producing quality of meditation and imagination. Some alchemical texts will often deal with an outer or inner form of fire, and others will combine them so that it is difficult to know which form is meant. This makes one wonder if this situation is a result of the confusion of a mind not yet capable of dealing with linear, discursive thinking and causality. But the situation is more interesting, and more complex.

Given the acute awareness of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ that we find among certain practitioners of magic in the Renaissance, and the fact that alchemy attracted great scientists such as Newton, Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, it is possible that the linking between ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ dimensions – which is anathema to our sense of science and its foremost need for objectivity – was also recognized and valued by some alchemists, without their necessarily losing sight of its dangers of confusing subject and object. Like the so-called ‘primitive’ logic of traditional cultures, alchemy may have been employing a different rather than a lesser form of thought (Levi-Strauss, 1966, p. 15). Still, there was a tendency to obscure ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in ways that did, at times, lead to considerable confusion. In some texts it is clear that an inner development is a conscious goal of the alchemist, while in others it is clear that the psychological or spiritual component is minimal; and one wonders if the alchemist is not lost in a maze of operations that are being mystified, rather than informed by mystery. As with science over the last three hundred years and today, one finds exceptional alchemists, mediocre ones and frauds. While we should remain cognizant of the fact that the alchemical mind was a product of its time and its historical past, and that it did tend to blur the distinction between inner and outer in ways that are different from our present consciousness, this should not lead us to a hypothesis of inferiority for that mind. In fact, alchemists were probably more aware of the use of conscious projection (Jung, 1988, pp. 1495-6) than we are today. In this regard one should also take note of Henry Corbin’s work on the ‘autonomous Imagination’ and the Sufi notion of himma (1969, pp. 220-1), an idea that is akin to the alchemical projectio.

The alchemist’s understanding of and transformation of matter were surely far inferior to what has been accomplished by modern science. His lack of interest in quantitative measurements contributed to this, as did his conceiving material processes in terms of their purpose or final cause. Historically speaking, the alchemical endeavor has been far more useful for reflecting upon psychological changes than for understanding physical processes. But as science expands the problems it addresses and attempts to tackle – for example, the complexities of how form develops – alchemical thinking may appear in a more interesting light, even to scientific thought. Newton’s interest was far from an aberration. And, generally, it is a common misunderstanding that alchemy was a pseudo-science that gave way to the enlightened discoveries of chemistry. It is true enough that much of chemistry as it initially developed was an extension of alchemical ideas, but the tale of alchemy’s fate is far more complex. It is indissolubly linked with the control and limitation of the imagination at the instigation of the Reformation (Couliano, 1987, p. 193) and, of course, with the development of science. The demise of alchemy was probably ordained by two factors. On the one hand, it chose to address problems that are so difficult – issues of the qualitative transformations through which substance takes on new forms – that modern science has yet to truly explore them, let alone master them. On the other, the early fourteenth- and fifteenth-century practitioners of alchemy lived in a world that was entirely animated, one in which matter was not dead or chaotic but had a living soul. This kind of consciousness sees relationships between all levels of existence, animate and inanimate, spiritual and profane, but it does not deal with distinctness and separable entities within a causal process. It was an approach to the world that gave priority to a background sense of oneness. But this kept it from ever successfully separating from, and adequately evaluating, its most potent tool, the imagination. In a strong sense, alchemy, like the Renaissance, had to retreat to allow the individual ego to develop, an ego that could believe it was separate from other people and the world and from God, and an ego that could believe in the usefulness of understanding nature as a process in historical time.

During the time of the emergence of alchemy in the Renaissance, when it began to flourish once again after its birth in the second or third century BC and its communication to the West by the great Arab copyists and alchemists, ego-consciousness had barely developed. But, without the careful discrimination of the ego, a sense of what is inner and outer union states between people readily regresses into a hopeless muddle of fusion that blurs any subject-object differentiation. The mind in the Renaissance, and before, was characterized by an immersion in images, a lack of critical reflection on fantasy, and the use of fantasy to prove anything in an idiosyncratic way (Huizinga, 1954, p. 225 et passim). Scientific objectivity in any experimental sense did not exist. Relationships and disputes were subject to being resolved through appeal to mythical and philosophical precedence. Everything was based upon prior models, not on discerning the significance of events in the historical moment. The latter development came about later, with Descartes’s separation of mind and body as two qualitatively different entities, and the exclusion of God and finality in theorizing about nature. This was a radical split, but a necessary one.

This great achievement in consciousness – an objectivity about nature and the development of self-awareness – which began to consolidate in the seventeenth century (Whyte, 1960, pp. 42-3), made possible the modern scientific approach. With it came as well the attitude, which became habitual, of separating processes into distinct parts, and focussing attention on the parts even to smaller and smaller units. Eventually, wholeness and a unitary background to existence, a mainstay of alchemical thinking, was lost sight of altogether, even to a degree that brought fragmentation into the life of modernday people. Today, alchemical thinking holds out a way of return to wholeness without abandoning separation and distinctness of process. In a way alchemy’s time has come. Perhaps we can now return to those mysterious realms or Third areas’ that are neither physical nor psychic, domains whose existence must be recognized if we are to re-connect orders of reality such as mind and body. It was such ‘third areas’ that were a major concern of alchemy. Like the notion of the ether, they were left behind by scientific thinking, but it is possible that even in science they may have to be re-introduced (Bohm, 1980). And if we are to gain a true sense of what relationship is, especially under the eye of psychotherapy, then such ‘third areas’ must, I believe, definitely be re-introduced (Schwartz-Salant, 1989, 1995).

The alchemists knew, from their own and from the accumulated experience of centuries of traditional cultures, that their personalities could be transformed. Through initiation rites they felt different, behaved differently, and grew in new ways. No longer bound to the compulsion of adolescent states of mind, or to the flights into promiscuity that wasted their sexual energies, people in traditional cultures learned that they could ‘die’ and be ‘reborn.’ And in their reborn form they actually did see the world differently. They could, in fact, see in ways they never could before. Their imagination could become a guide to truth instead of being a capricious trickster. And some alchemists could feel a guiding center that formed in their innermost being and which was strangely linked in feeling to experiences of their most ecstatic journeys. Alchemy developed within this respect for a human concern for the sacred. As a consequence, its very methods were intrinsically bound to the power of illumination and the imagination, and it especially applied the ideas of death and rebirth, so central to initiation rites and mystical experience, to material and psychological change. To understand the alchemical quest we must recognize the intimate relationship that existed between its methods and the transformation of the human personality, or else we shall miss its essential mystery.

I use the term ‘mystery’ with care. It is not possible to understand alchemy in the same way as one can understand scientific theories. There, one’s limitations, whatever they may be, will largely be found in one’s capacity for abstraction and in one’s knowledge of certain mathematical methods. This is not to say that modern science does not deal with problems that are mysterious, for example, with black holes, chaos and the basic constituents of matter. But the nature of this mystery is that the more we know, the less mystery one finds, and then new problems, new mysterious frontiers open up, once again to be eventually better understood and lose their sense of being enigmatic. Science becomes familiar with problems in ways that seem to be able to take for granted as well known or understood issues that, at a prior time, were filled with mystery. In science, notions such as mass or energy become parts of equations, and cease to hold a sense of awe. This can be recovered when some scientists ask questions like ‘What is energy?’, and then we again recognize that we are, in fact, not dealing with simple issues at all. But in general the mystery of scientific concepts is hidden away in the equations that govern them, and one can do science without pausing very much to wonder about just what basic entities such as mass, energy or entropy actually are.

This quality of becoming abstract or distant from the concepts one works with is the strength of scientific approaches. One learns to operate with abstractions, and in the process one can solve real problems. Complicated technological advances that could never be accomplished with the magical or so-called primitive logic and attitudes of alchemy are a testimony to this triumph. Alchemy is very different. Here is a body of thought that requires that one be open to an Other dimension of existence in order both to understand the basic concepts, and to operate with them in an attempt to transform material life and the human personality as well. This Other dimension, which is often referred to as God in alchemical thinking, is that domain of human experience that, in early cultures, was mediated by the shaman, or priest, and was eventually codified into dogma in later religions. This codification was always balanced or opposed by a counter-movement of mystics who were determined not to lose a more immediate link with the sacred. Many alchemists were such people, informed by their visions and by being ‘killed and reborn’ through their experiences of the numinosum.

It is this mystery of death and rebirth that never gives way to more profane understanding, as is the case with scientific ideas that were once filled with awe. Whoever has known the numinosum in a deep enough way for his or her life to have been unalterably changed by it – changed in such a way that they now see differently and now experience the center of personality as existing outside the ego – such a person never understands this process. It for ever remains a mystery, one that he or she has been graced to participate in, and survive. And those who have been so changed can then become part of a process of change, for such experiences of death and rebirth are the beginning of the individual opus, not the end.

Alchemy depended upon such states of mind, and the art attempted to change not only the human personality but matter as well. Certainly there were many alchemists who had little immediate sense of the true mystery of their art. They were the ‘puffers’ that tried to transform matter or find the Elixir of Life, without recognizing that the endeavor was hopeless unless they themselves were transformed. But even in the most illuminated of alchemists, such outer goals were probably hopeless of achievement. For the nature of the experience of human transformation takes place, so to speak, in a state of mind and a sense of space that are peculiarly different from the external world in which we can grasp things as being outside of us, or inside of us. This is a critical point, and my own belief is that in a significant measure, aside from their ignorance of atomic structure and quantitative methods, alchemists’ heroic effort to deal with matter failed because it was not possible to construct actual, chemical vessels that were analogous to the vessel or vas hermeticum in which human personality transforms (Rosen, 1995). I mention this in passing to highlight the fact of the difficult nature of the alchemical quest, rather than to see alchemy as some dumb pursuit of ‘pre-scientific’ people. Alchemy receded because the problems it set were too hard: problems such as the way the internal structure and outer form of an object change. Science could advance because the problems it addressed were relatively simple. Science only has an embryonic mathematical understanding of how things take on a particular or changing form.

In good science there is always an interplay between experiment and theory, each enhancing and checking the other. Alchemy, as it was developed by many groups and individuals from Egypt, Arabia, Iran, Greece, India, China, England, Germany and France, was a kind of applied mysticophilosophical system. But instead of equations that ordered Nature, the background of alchemical thinking was a set of principles derived from reflections upon human nature and society, and, as I have stressed, the knowledge gained through mystical visions. We frequently read in alchemical texts that one who has not been illuminated, who has not known God through the unio mystica, cannot but be led into error and despair by trying to follow the texts; he will inevitably go astray.

Now this alone would seem to qualify alchemy for the dungheap of ideas. After all, how can we possibly consider with any respect a so-called science that relies upon illumination? There are several ways to discuss this criticism. On the one hand, it can be argued that the greatest failing of our world today, probably encouraged by the abstracting nature of science and technology, is the alienation from the numinosum. But, on the other hand, one can also look to the limitations of the alchemical world-view. Perhaps its greatest failing is that it encourages the inflation, which can become megalomania, of knowing about God by those who have never ‘died.’ The latter person is always humble, at least as long as his ‘death and rebirth’ is a living experience. But in a culture in which the numinous has a very high value, indeed is necessary for activities such as attempting the alchemical art, the tendency to behave as if one were illuminated, or to pull on strands of partial illumination as gained from dreams and minor visions, is very strong. This leads to inflations, fraudulence and unsubstantiated claims. The experimental thrust of modern science is also a major corrective and nourishing source that stands against the often, far too often inflated approaches, of a visionary science.

But alchemy was far too subtle to easily fall victim to this pitfall. While only a few were truly illuminated, this did not mean that an alchemical art could not be developed on a sound and humble footing, and still require illumination in some way. On the one hand, faith played a great role. To this was added an awareness of the vices of arrogance and pride. On the other hand, the alchemists recognized that the central illumination of mystical life, the union with God, had a corollary in Nature and, in our terms, in the human psyche. For through a particular quality of the imagination, one could experience a guiding light that was akin to the Light of greater illuminations. These levels of illumination are different from each other in extremely significant ways, and it is the mistaken road of inflation to totally identify the two. But there are also similarities, and because of this the alchemists could speak of ‘true’ versus ‘false’ imagination. Always, the central, life-and death-dealing vision of God was held as the highest value, but it was also believed that other, ‘lesser’ but ‘true’, visions could also be a guide. Knowing the pitfalls of such a procedure the alchemists are forever stressing that one must study the masters, and that ‘one book opens another.’ It was a hazardous journey, filled with failure, but so worthy a one that it lasted for thousands of years.

ALCHEMY, UNION STATES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF FORM

It is precisely in the issue of vision and relation to the numinosum that we find one of alchemy’s remarkable achievements and services to modern-day people. For it was a body of thought that carried with it much of what was abused and rejected by the collective religions of the last two thousand years. Central to this is a peculiar form of illumination that focusses not only upon a person and a transcendent deity, but one which is encountered between two people. The experience I am referring to is known as the hieros gamos in the history of religion, and translates as the ‘sacred wedding’. It is this image of relationship and union, which reflects an experience of the sacred that was cast aside by the patriarchal religions, that is central to alchemical thinking. They conceived of change in terms of the union of different substances. This union process, the alchemical coniunctio, was a marriage that, at its highest level of completion, the so-called stage of the rubedo, was filled with desire.

To see how the issue of union was applied to work with outer substances, we can turn to a fundamental alchemical principle frequently found among alchemical writers, the ‘Axiom of Ostanes’: A nature is delighted by another nature, a nature conquers another nature, a nature dominates another nature. This triadic formula underpins much alchemical thinking, from its earliest forms in Bolos-Demokrites (200 BC), who lived in Egypt and is often called the founder of alchemy, up through the next seventeen hundred years (Lindsay, 1970, p. 103).

The historian Jack Lindsay’s reflections upon this formula offer us an invaluable perspective on alchemical thinking about the topic of transformation.

The change in quality (of an object) was also change in inner organization, (and) was linked or identified with colour changes. Lead, a primary common metal, had to be broken up, changed, driven up the scale, towards silver or gold; it had to change its colour. So fire was invoked; and under its action the lead was reduced to a fluid state. The fluidity thus brought about was what constituted the primary level, in which new potentialities were actively present. . . . Also the liquefaction of lead involved its blackening. So the blackness of the liquid condition above all expressed the attainment of a primary level, a state of chaos. Having produced chaos, the alchemist was in a position to act the role of demiurge and drive matter up its hierarchical ladder, with gold as the highest step. To bring about this upward-movement the principle of sympathy or attraction was invoked. Somehow the Primary Black had to be transformed into White or Yellow, which expressed the nobler metals. This could be done, it was believed, if one could find a metal which had certain affinities with both the lower and higher substances, which sympathized with both of them and which exerted its attractive power in both directions (downwards and upwards).

By using the right kind of metal, in the right kind of proportions, one could swing the balance towards the upper levels and thus transform the material into the higher. The principle of this operation was expressed in the famous triadic formula of Ostanes which Bolos-Demokritos discovered. The two materials, that of primary matter or liquid blackness and that of the alloying and transforming addition, must have something in common, some element of harmony. That is, they delighted in one another. But if that were all, a state of equilibrium was created and nothing happened; the first level was not transcended. So one nature must conquer the other. The conquering act was the moment of transformation, when the equilibrium was broken and a new relationship established.

The new fused substance existed at a higher level and involved the creation of a new quality, which revealed itself in the colour-change. But that was not enough. The new state must be stabilized, so that it might provide the basis for yet another upward-movement. Hence, the third section of the formula: one nature must dominate another. The three stages of the alchemic act might then be defined: mixture on the original level, introduction of a dynamic factor which changes the original relations and creates a new qualitative level, then stabilization of this level. In an Arab text the process [is] described as three marriages, the two substances acting on one another being called male and female.

(ibid., pp. 116-17)

The ‘axiom’ can be seen most clearly as an image of processes between two people in psychotherapy. To see this we may first note Lindsay’s remark that transformation depends upon finding a metal which has certain affinities with both the lower and higher substances, which sympathizes with both of them and which exerts its attractive power in both directions (downwards and upwards). This ‘metal’ is the alchemical lapis, or what Jung denoted as the self. The logic follows the alchemical notion that it takes gold to make gold. Thus an analyst, for example, must have a sufficiently stable self, one that can allow the processing of internal experiences in which affects and ideas ‘move upwards and downwards’, from a spiritual-mental perspective towards an emotional-instinctual one, and vice versa. This internal act of ‘sublimation’ is what in turn helps the patient to process his or her own disordered material. Both analyst and patient have aspects of the same issues to process, but the analyst, ostensibly, will either have or discover a stable transformative agent within their interaction. He or she has a form of the ‘gold’ to begin with – or, what is more to the point, the capability to discover it within their interaction. This is what generally differentiates analyst and patient in the analytical process, although there is also room, at times, for these roles to be reversed. It is also interesting to note that the patient may have far more of a link to the numinosum than the analyst; but generally it is scattered, unable to exist in a stable manner under the impact of an emotional experience or outer stress. It is the analyst’s ‘gold’ in the form of the capacity to process confusing issues of projection, and especially to survive emotional attacks from the patient in an intact manner, that matters, not his or her exalted awareness. It is likely that the awareness of processes imaged by the Axiom of Ostanes – a required consciousness for anyone practicing magic, which was so central to ‘primitive’ thought and to the Renaissance – was then projected into work with matter. As I have noted, there is reason to wonder if, at least among some alchemists, this was not an intentional act, while for others it was largely an unconscious process of fusion between matter and psyche.

The issue of illumination through union is pressing up from the depths of the human unconscious, having been cast out by nearly two thousand years of patriarchal forms of insight and vision. Perhaps this form of vision found a home in the interests of the alchemists. As an endeavor, alchemy developed largely as a result of its interest in the union experience. Consequently, it provides us with a mine of information on this issue which is fundamental to human relationships in life and in psychotherapy. Nowadays, the ‘sacred marriage’ has been lost from scientific pursuit, but finds itself in the analyst’s consulting-room in the form of the unconscious union of psyches of analyst and analysand, the so-called transference and counter-transference.

ALCHEMY, HISTORY AND JUNG’S MODEL OF THE PSYCHE

It should be noted that historians of religion have recognized Jung’s approach to alchemy as one very worthy of further study and application. Mircea Eliade (1962, pp. 221ff.) is one of these scholars. Historians of science as well, notably the Newton scholar Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, have recognized the value of Jung’s approach. Professor Dobbs writes:

There has always been something of an historical problem in the very existence of alchemy. Its evident appeal to generation after generation of adepts does little to elucidate the grounds of the fascination it once exerted, even though its relation to innumerable scientific, technical, religious, and philosophical currents has been carefully explored. In recent years, however, the insights of twentieth-century analytical psychology as applied to alchemy by C. G. Jung have come to provide a really promising approach to the problem, allowing as they do for an understanding of the many factors in alchemy which are not only obscure but patently irrational. Jung was not only very historically minded . . . but his views offer a comprehensive and comprehensible model of alchemy as a field of human endeavor.

(Dobbs, 1975, p. 26)

Dobbs also calls attention to the fact that the value of Jung’s approach to alchemy was Tong ago recognized by that eminent exponent of non-scientific motives in the history of science, Walter Pagel, and also by the historian of alchemy, Gerard Heym’ (ibid., p. 27).

There are many ways of viewing the writings of the alchemists. On the one end of a spectrum of approaches there are those who see in alchemy nothing more than a projection of an inner developmental process that can be understood in Freudian, Kleinian or other developmental terms. Johannes Fabricius’ work Alchemy (1976) is an example of this approach, as was Herbert Silberer’s before him. On the other end of the spectrum are those who see alchemy as a divine science in which great mysteries are intentionally hidden from the uninitiated; they are encoded in chemical operations. Far from viewing alchemy as a a fledgling science dealing with matter and confused with projections, this approach sees it as a conscious system engaged in by centuries of adepts who passed their knowledge on to one another. From this point of view any