Alchemy with its wealth of symbols
Alchemy, with its wealth of symbols, gives us an insight into an endeavour of the human mind which could be compared with a
religious rite, an opus divinum [divine task].
The difference between them is that the alchemical opus was not a collective activity rigorously defined as to its form and
content, but rather, despite the similarity of their fundamental principles, an individual undertaking on which the adept
staked his whole soul for the transcendental purpose of producing a unity.
It was a work of reconciliation between apparently incompatible opposites, which, characteristically, were understood not
merely as the natural hostility of the physical elements but at the same time as a moral conflict.
Since the object of this endeavour was seen outside as well as inside, as both physical and psychic, the work extended as it were through the whole of nature, and its goal consisted in a symbol which had an empirical and at the same time a transcendental aspect. Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 700.
The Influence of Alchemy on the Work of C.G. Jung
Jung’s method of research was pre-eminently historical.
It consisted essentially in comparing his ideas and intuitions, and the insights he
had gained from the empirical material provided by his patients, with historical evidence.
This method also enabled him to view his own psychic experiences objectively and to establish their general validity.
For Jung, the obscure, confused, and often grotesque statements of alchemy played the most important, indeed the decisive, role in this respect.
It was largely the correspondence between the alchemical texts and his discoveries concerning the unconscious that made it possible for him to hammer his psychology into an objective science.
During the period of friendship and collaboration with Freud, Jung had a number of significant dreams which could not be satisfactorily interpreted on the basis of Freud’s conception of the unconscious as a reservoir of repressed psychic contents.
It was then that the idea of a much more comprehensive unconscious-a collective
unconscious which was the source of impersonal, autonomous contents-came to him for the first time.
After the separation from Freud, Jung followed up this trail and began to experiment with the unconscious himself.
He immersed himself in it, using for this purpose a method of “active imagination” which he himself had developed.
In the course of these “imaginations” or phantasies a whole world of strange images, often of a religious or a mythological character, rose up, and he himself became the protagonist in a series of enigmatic but intensely exciting psychic dramas.
For the time being, however, the meaning of the images and of what was happening remained for him a complete mystery.
This experimental phase began at the end of 1912 and lasted till about 1919.
It was a period of pioneer work in the jungle of the unconscious, which not unnaturally isolated Jung from the scientific world of his time .
He nevertheless called those years the most important in his life, for in them there burst forth-if only as an inchoate torrent of emotionally charged phantasies and images-everything that was later formulated conceptually in his scientific writings. “It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work.”
The scientific processing of this “fiery magma” was indeed a long-drawnout affair, and it was only after some twenty years that Jung was able to understand, in some measure, the products of his active imagination.
“First I had to find evidence for the historical prefiguration of my inner experiences,” he writes in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, when discussing this critical phase of his life. “That is to say, I had to aS’k myself, ‘Where have my particular premises already occurred in history?’
If I had not succeeded in finding such evidence, I would never have been able to substantiate my ideas.
Therefore, my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked.”
All the same, a good while had still to pass before Jung became eriously interested in alchemy.
Before a lucky chance brought him face to face with an alchemical text, he had made a thorough study of the Gnostics during the years 1916-1926.
What attracted him to them was the fact that they had been faced with “the primal world of the unconscious,” just as he and the alchemists had been.
The study of Gnostic traditions, nevertheless, left Jung unsatisfied.
For one thing, they were not less than seventeen or eighteen hundred years old, and too remote historically for him to establish a living link with them.
For another, the tradition that might have connected the Gnostics with the present seemed to him to have been broken.
Later, Jung realized that alchemy should in fact be considered the connecting link between Gnosticism and the modern psychology of the unconscious.
This crucial discovery revealed the unbroken historical continuity of a cultural current that for much of its course flowed underground.
There was a continuous chain of people, known in alchemy as the Golden or Homeric Chain, who from antiquity had undertaken the “unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous” venture of “a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world,” that is to say, who sought to explore the mystery of the psychic hinterland and
to bridge the gulf between the conscious and the unconscious.
1928 was the fateful year when Jung began to study alchemy.
Concurrently with the major works he had written in the meantime, the work on his own unconscious had quietly been going ahead.
His most important discovery during these years of experimentation was the fact that a process of development was going on in the unconscious which had as its goal the wholeness of the personality.
This process (Jung later called it the individuation process) frequently depicts itself in the form of images representing the circumambulation of a center.
The circle as a static figure, or mandala, can be interpreted as a symbol of the totality embracing both conscious and unconscious, namely the self.
For many years, Jung kept quiet about the insights he had gained from his dreams, as well as from the material presented by patients, concerning the meaning of the
mandala.
For all their significance, the results of his investigations seemed to him questionable in more than one respect.
“My results, based on £if teen years of effort, seemed inconclusive, because no possibility of comparison offered itself.
I knew of no realm of human experience with which I might have backed up my findings with some degree of assurance.”
Then came the turning point.
The sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him the manuscript of a Chinese alchemical treatise, of Taoist origin, called “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” with the request
that he write a commentary on the text.
“I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-of
confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center. That was the first event which broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with something and someone. ”
For Jung it was a rare satisfaction to find in this old Chinese alchemical text symbols for psychic contents and psychic states that were well-known to him from personal experience as well as from his patients.
In the first place, a most unexpected analogy presented itself between the above-mentioned “circumambulation of the center” and the Chinese concept of the “circulation of the light.”
Here too the circular movement was intended to set in motion a kind of individuation process.
It is a true mandala symbol, as is also the golden flower or flower of light that blossoms forth in the center of this movement in a circle.
A further analogy is to be found in the concepts of hun and p’ o ( the masculine and the feminine soul), which Jung took as equivalents of the archetypal figures of animus and anima.
Finally, the Chinese symbolism was concerned with the shifting of the psychic center from the ego to a transpersonal content9 which could be compared with the self as the goal of the individuation process.
The similarity of the contents of the unconscious among Europeans and Chinese offered unsuspected confirmation of the concept of the collective unconscious, which would explain the analogy and even identity of myth-motifs and symbols among all races, and also the possibility of human communication in general.
Jung’s interest in alchemy was now thoroughly aroused.
Soon afterward he acquired the first alchemical work for his library from a bookseller in Munich.
It was the two volumes of Artis auriferae, a compilation of some thirty Latin treatises, published in Basel, 1593.
This did not remain his only acquisition, for Jung soon turned into a collector, and in the course of the years his alchemical books and manuscripts came to constitute a substantial part of his library.
After his death, over two hundred items were catalogued. ~Aniela Jaffe, Spring 1967, Page 7-10
#AnalyticalPsychology #DepthPsychology #CarlJung #TheUnconscious #JungianPsychology #Psyche #JungianConcepts #PsychologicalType #Archetypes #Individuation