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Alchemy

The Work of Alchemy

In the popular imagination, the alchemist is a seeker of gold, driven by personal profit and greed to extract that precious substance from base metals. From a modern-day perspective, attached as we are to material wealth, this reading of the alchemist's exploits are understandable. But while there were those 'puffers' who did indeed mint coins and sought riches and fame, some were at least after an 'inner' gold. This was variously known as the Philosopher's Stone, Golden Flower, Elixir of Life, and universal medicine, depending on a particular tradition, but all symbolising the search for the supreme and ultimate value.

The alchemist's quest was one of self-development, attempting to integrate the many facets of personality to attain psychic wholeness. Alchemy, as the depth psychology of an earlier age⁴, thus required infinite patience, subtlety in appreciation and dedication to the Art, often at great personal sacrifice.

The work or opus of alchemy was an inner repetition of the cosmology outside - except, on the psychological level, the alchemical process was a complete reversal of our contemporary notion of biological evolution - as an expanding, outer process on the physical plane. Its final 'goal' was inorganic matter, either a metal (notably, gold), a mineral, a crystal or a stone. more

Jung and Alchemy

The Swiss psychologist, Dr Carl Jung, who began studying alchemy when aged 53, realised that the alchemist was really working symbolically on the transformation of his own psyche. He found in alchemy's bizarre fantasies and afflicted imagery a metaphor for individuation and an ideal portrait of soul-work.(Jung's Individuation is a process of self-development in which an individual integrates the many facets of the psyche to become his or her Self, and thus attain psychic wholeness.) Its symbolisms and operations were a projection onto matter of archetypes and psychological processes that occur in the collective unconscious.

Believing that an individual's psychological state can be assessed alchemically, he took the four basic substances found in alchemy (sulphur, salt, lead, and mercury) as metaphors for the way the personality operates in life. The work of individuation, as the differentiation of self, is then to enact lengthy operations on these substances, as if doing alchemy on ourselves. This resulted in Jung's (often neglected) alchemical model of personality, being a development of his better known psychological typology theory. Jung was also able to elucidate the stages of alchemy and relate them to his own insights into the individuation process. more

Jung and Active Imagination
The Alchemy website
general links to alchemy referenced material
Artworks influenced by Alchemy