I first got the idea of writing it from C. Kerenyi’s essay on the Aegean Festival in Goethe’s Faust.
FOREWORD
This book—my last—was begun more than ten years ago.
I first got the idea of writing it from C. Kerenyi’s essay on the Aegean Festival in Goethe’s Faust.1
The literary prototype of this festival is The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, itself
a product of the traditional hierosgamos symbolism of alchemy.
I felt tempted, at the time, to comment on Kerenyi’s essay from the standpoint of alchemy and psychology, but soon discovered that the theme was far too extensive to be dealt with in a couple of pages.
Although the work was soon under way, more than ten years were to pass before I was able to collect and arrange all the material relevant to this central problem.
As may be known, I showed in my book Psychology and Alchemy, first published in 1944,
2 how certain archetypal motifs that are common in alchemy appear in the dreams of modern individuals who have no knowledge of alchemical literature.
In that book the wealth of ideas and symbols that lie hidden in the neglected treatises of this much misunderstood ”art” was hinted at rather than described in the detail it deserved; for my primary aim was to demonstrate that the world of alchemical symbols
definitely does not belong to the rubbish heap of the past, but stands in a very real and living relationship to our most recent
discoveries concerning the psychology of the unconscious.
Not only does this modern psychological discipline give us the key to the secrets of alchemy, but, conversely, alchemy provides the
psychology of the unconscious with a meaningful historical basis.
This was hardly a popular subject, and for that reason it remained largely misunderstood. Not only was alchemy almost
entirely unknown as a branch of natural philosophy and as a religious movement, but most people were unfamiliar with the modern discovery of the archetypes, or had at least misunderstood them.
Indeed, there were not a few who regarded them as sheer fantasy, although the well-known example of whole numbers, which also were discovered and not invented, might have taught them better, not to mention the “patterns of behaviour”
in biology. Just as numbers and instinctual forms do exist, so there are many other natural configurations or types which are exemplified by Levy-Bruhl’s representations collectives.
They are not “metaphysical” speculations but, as we would expect, symptoms of the uniformity of Homo sapiens.
Today there is such a large and varied literature describing psychotherapeutic experiences and the psychology of the unconscious that everyone has had an opportunity to familiarize himself with the empirical findings and the prevailing theories about them.
This is not true of alchemy, most accounts of which are vitiated by the erroneous assumption that it was merely the precursor of chemistry.
Herbert Silberer 3 was the first to try to penetrate its much more important psychological aspect so far as his somewhat limited equipment allowed him to do so.
Owing to the paucity of modern expositions and the comparative inaccessibility of the sources, it is difficult to form an adequate conception of the problems of philosophical alchemy.
It is the aim of the present work to fill this gap.
As is indicated by the very name which he chose for it—the “spagyric” 4 art—or by the oft-repeated saying “solve et coagula”
(dissolve and coagulate), the alchemist saw the essence of his art in separation and analysis on the one hand and synthesis and consolidation on the other.
For him there was first of all an initial state in which opposite tendencies or forces were in conflict; secondly there was the great question of a procedure which would be capable of bringing the hostile elements and qualities,
once they were separated, back to unity again.
The initial state, named the chaos, was not given from the start but had to be sought for as the prima materia.
And just as the beginning of the work was not self-evident, so to an even greater degree was its end.
There are countless speculations on the nature of the endstate, all of them reflected in its designations.
The commonest are the ideas of its permanence (prolongation of life, immortality, incorruptibility), its androgyny, its spirituality and corporeality,
its human qualities and resemblance to man (homunculus), and its divinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Foreward, Page xiii-xiv
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