An Anthropos-image is central to the work of almost all alchemists, a divine or greater man who
must be freed from his imprisonment in matter and in darkness; through this work the human
liberator at the same time achieved immortality. On the one hand the ideas contained in the
Egyptian liturgy of embalming played a conspicuous role in this work, because in this ritual the
corpse is transformed by concrete material operations into the god Osiris and thereby identified
with him; on the other hand certain gnostic myths were also important, myths which taught that
the "divine great man" or "light man," either because he had been seduced by some evil power or
other or because he had been drawn down by his own reflection in the depths, had fallen into the
darkness of the material world, whence he was calling for help and from which it was the adept's
task to free him. (Pages 199-200)
2 In the Old Greek text 'The Prophetess Isis to her Son'1 dating from Hellenistic times, Isis tells her son Horus how she obtained the alchemical secret from an amorous angel, who as a 'messenger of the gods' is the (ithyphallic) Hermes, synonymous with the Latin Mercurius:
Oh, my son, when you desired to go away to fight the treacherous Typhon [ie Seth] over your
father's kingdom [the kingdom of Osiris], I went to Hormanouthi, ie Hermaupolis, the town of
Hermes, the town of the holy technique of Egypt, and stayed there some time. After a certain
passing of the kairoi [astrologically significant moments] and the necessary movement of the
heavenly sphere, it happened that one of the angels who dwelt in the first firmament saw me from
above and came towards me desiring to unite with me sexually. He was in a great hurry for this
to happen, but I did not submit to him. I resisted, for I wished to ask him about the preparation
of gold and silver.
3 Alchemy; an Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, M-L von Franz
The search for immortality was actually the search for an incorruptible essence in man which
would survive death, an essential part of the human being which could be preserved. Thus the
search for immortality, for the eternal in man, is to be found at the very beginning of alchemy. We
can say that the emotional drive and interest in the phenomenon of matter was not a modern
scientific interest, in the sense of curiosity as to what matter looked like, but that what gave the
impulse and libido for the search to understand the mystery of matter was a real emotional drive
and desire to find the immortal part of man. (pages 93-94)
4 Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12
332 Everything unknown and empty is filled with psychological projection; it is as if the investigator's own psychic ground were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter, or thinks he sees, is chiefly the data of his own unconscious which he is projecting into it. In other words, he encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is completely unconscious. This is particularly true of classical alchemy, when empirical science and mystical philosophy were more or less undifferentiated.
345 The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own unknown psychic ground - into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.
346 Strictly speaking, projection is never made; it happens, it is simply there. In the darkness of anything external to me I find, without recognizing it as such, an interior or psychic life that is my own. It would therefore be a mistake in my opionion to explain the formula tam ethice quam physice [ethically as well as physically] by the theory of correspondence, and to say that this is its 'cause'. On the contrary, this theory is more likely to be a rationalization of the experience of projection. The alchemist did not practice his art because he believed on theoretical grounds in correspondence; the point is that he had a theory of correspondence because he experienced the presence of pre-existing ideas in physical matter. I am therefore inclined to assume that the real root of alchemy is to be sought less in philosophical doctrines than in the projections of individual investigators. I mean by this that while working on his chemical experiments the operator had certain psychic experiences which appeared to him as the particular behaviour of the chemical process. Since it was a question of projection, he was naturally unconscious of the fact experience had nothing to do with matter itself (that is, with matter as we know it today). He experienced his projection as a property of matter; but what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious. In this way he recapitulated the whole history of man's knowldege of nature. As we all know, science began with the stars, and mankind descovered in them the dominants of the unconscious, the "gods," as well as the curious psychological qualities of the zodiac: a complete projected theory of human character. Astrology is a primordial experience similar to alchemy. Such projections repeat themselves whenever man tries to explore an empty darkness and involuntarily fills it with living form.
C G Jung: His Myth in Our Time, M-L von Franz
Inasmuch as the early chemists knew almost nothing about matter as we today understand it and
were groping their way in the dark, it is understandable that they filled this darkness with fantasies
and with hypthetical models which - as has been the history of every branch of science - later
proved to be inadequate or mistaken. Since - right up to Jung's day - alchemy was looked upon
merely as a precursor of chemistry, these fantasies were accordingly dismissed as "confused
superstitions" or "unscientific fantasies." It is one of Jung's greatest achievements, the significance
of which has not yet been adequately recognized, that he rediscovered the projected religious
myth of alchemy and showed unmistakably where it originated and where it is still at work today:
not in matter but in the objective unconscious psyche of Western man. (pages 200-01)
5 Psychology and Religion: West and East; C G Jung, Collected Works 11
389 Everything which belongs to me bears the stamp of "mineness," that is, it has a subtle identity with my ego. The affinity which all the things bearing the stamp of "mineness" have with my personality is aptly characterized by Lévy-Bruhl2 as participation mystique. It is an irrational, unconscious identity, arising from the fact that anything which comes into contact with me is not only itself, but also a symbol. This symbolization comes about firstly because every human being has unconscious contents, and secondly because every object has an unknown side...Where two unknowns come together, it is impossible to distinguish between them. The unknown in man and the unknown in the thing fall together in one. Thus there arises an unconscious identity which sometimes boarders on the grotesque...So long as they are unconscious our unconscious contents are always projected, and the projection fixes upon everything "ours," inanimate objects as well as animals and people. And to the extent that "our" possessions are projection carriers, they are more than what they are in themselves, and function as such. They have acquired several layers of meaning and are therefore symbolical, though this fact seldom or never reaches consciousness. In reality, our psyche spreads far beyond the confines of the conscious mind, as was apparently known long ago to the old alchemist who said that the soul was for the greater part outside the body.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade
For the "primitives" in general, there is no clear difference between "natural" and "supernatural," between empirical object and symbol. An object becomes "itself" (that is, the carrier of a value) in so far as it participates in a "symbol"; an act acquires meaning in so far as it repeats an archetype. Pg 263 [There is no indication that Eliade is referring specifically to Jung's concept of the archetype in this context.]
6 Alchemical Studies, CW 13
482 Alchemy lost its vital substance when some of the alchemists abandoned the laboratorium for
the oratorium, there to befuddle themselves with an ever more nebulous mysticism, while others
converted the oratorium into a laboratorium and discovered chemistry. We feel sorry for the
former and admire the latter, but no one asks about the fate of the psyche, which thereafter
vanished from sight for several hundred years.
7 Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, para 515
8 Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12
562 In a sense, the old alchemists were nearer to the central truth of the psyche than Faust when they strove to deliver the fiery spirit from the chemical elements, and treated the mystery as though it lay in the dark and silent womb of nature. It was still outside them. The upward thrust of evolving consciousness was bound sooner or later to put an end to the projection, and to restore to the psyche that which had been psychic from the beginning. Yet, ever since the Age of Enlightenment and in the era of scientific rationalism, what indeed was the psyche? It had become synonymous with consciousness. The psyche was "what I know." There was no psyche outside the ego. Inevitably, then, the ego identified with the contents accruing from the withdrawal of projections. Gone were the days when the psyche was still for the most part "outside the body" and imagined "those greater things" which the body could not grasp. The contents that were formerly projected were now bound to appear as personal possessions, as chimerical phantasms of ego-consciousness. The fire chilled to air, and the air became the great wind of Zarathustra and caused and inflation of consciousness which, it seems, can be damped down only by the most terrible catastrophe to civilization, another deluge let loose by the gods upon inhospitable humanity.
564 What we may learn from the models of the past is above all this: that the psyche harbours
contents, or is exposed to influences, the assimilation of which is attended by the greatest dangers.
If the old alchemists ascribed their secret to matter, and if neither Faust nor Zarathustra is a very
encouraging example of what happens when we embody this secret in ourselves, then the only
course left to us is to repudiate the arrogant claim of the conscious mind to be the whole of the
psyche, and to admit that the psyche is a reality which we cannot grasp with our present means of
understanding. I do not call the man who admits his ignorance an obscurantist; I think it is much
rather the man whose consciousness is not sufficiently developed for him to be aware of his
ignorance.
9 Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12
516 Although there is, materialistically speaking, no prima materia at the root of everything that
exists, yet nothing that exists could be discerned were there no discerning psyche. Only by virtue
of psychic existence do we have any "being" at all. Consciousness grasps only a fraction of its
own nature, because it is the product of a preconscious psychic life which made the development
of consciousness possible in the first place. Consciousness always succumbs to the delusion that it
developed out of itself, but scientific knowledge is well aware that all consciousness rests on
unconscious premises, in other words on a sort of unknown prima materia; and of this the
alchemist said everything that we could possibly say about the unconscious.
10 Alchemical Studies, CW 13
11 In order to make this strange fact more intelligible to the reader, it must be pointed out that
just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too,
the human psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and
consciousness. I have called this substratum the collective unconscious.
11 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i
7 Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need - or rather, his unconscious psyche has an irresistible urge - to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events. It is not enough for the primitive to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must at the same time be a psychic happening: the sun in its course must represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells nowhere except in the soul of man. All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy season, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection - that is, mirrored in the events of nature. The projection is so fundamental that it has taken several thousand years of civilization to detach it in some measure from its outer object. In the case of astrology, for instance, this age-old "scientia intuitiva" came to be branded as rank heresy because man had not yet succeeded in making the psychological description of character independent of the stars.
Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11
140 Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawl, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i
50 Only an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as
psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious...Since the stars have fallen from heaven
and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we
have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite
superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols. Symbols are spirits from above, and
under those conditions the spirit is above too. Therefore it would be a foolish and senseless
undertaking for such people to wish to experience or investigate an unconscious that contains
nothing but the silent, undisturbed sway of nature. Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides
living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed.
12 Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11
246 The quaternity is an archetype of almost universal occurrence. It forms the logical basis for a
whole judgment. If one wishes to pass such a judgment, it must have this fourfold aspect. For
instance, if you want to describe the horizon as a whole, you name the four quarters of heaven.
Three is not a natural coefficient of order, but an artifical one. There are four elements, four prime
qualities, four colours, four castes, four ways of spiritual development in Buddhism, etc. so, too,
there are four aspects of psychological orientation, beyond which nothing fundamental remains to
be said. In order to orient ourselves, we must have a function which ascertains that something is
there (sensation); a second function which establishes what it is (thinking); a third function which
states whether it suits us or not, whether we wish to accept it or not (feeling); and a fourth
function which indicates where it came from and where it is going (intuition). When this has been
done, there is nothing more to say. Schopenhauer proves that the "Principle of Sufficient Reason"
has a fourfold root. This is so because the fourfold aspect is the minimum requirement for a
complete judgment. The ideal of completeness is the circle or sphere, but its natural minimal
division is a quaternity.
13 Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11
124 It was, indeed, a great problem to the Middle Ages, this problem of the Trinity and the
exclusion, or the very qualified recognition, of the feminine element, of the earth, the body, and
matter in general, which were yet, in the form of Mary's womb, the sacred abode of the Deity and
the indispensable instrument for the divine work of redemption...It was the first intimation of a
possible solution of the devastating conflict between matter and spirit, between the desires of the
flesh and the love of God.
14 The ancestry of this spirit may go back to the universal figure of the therianthrophic Shamanic spirit guide, a half-animal, half-human being whose recorded genealogy has been traced to Palaeolithic cave paintings tens of thousands of years old. Cf. The Strong Eye of Shamanism, Robert Ryan page 55, showing the 'Sorcerer' of Les Trois Frères Cave in southern France.
15 Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14
791 The cheap, unseemly substance, which, rejected by all, [is today found] rather in the
distressing darkness of the human psyche, which [has] become accessible to clinical observation.
There alone [can] be found all those contradictions, those grotesque phantasms and scurrilous
symbols which had fascinated the mind of the alchemists and confused them as much as
illuminated them. And the same problem presents itself to the psychologist that had kept the
alchemists in suspense for seventeen hundred years: what was he to do with these antagonistic
forces? Could he throw them out and get rid of them? Or had he to admit their existence, and is it
our task to bring them into harmony and, out of the multitude of contradictions, produce a unity,
which naturally will not come of itself, though it may - Deo Concedente - with human effort?
16 The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16
383 Once an unconscious content is constellated, it tends to [create], through projection, an
atmosphere of illusion...The situation is enveloped in a kind of fog, and this fully accords with the
nature of the unconscious content: It is a "black blacker than black" (nigrum, nigrius nigro), as
the alchemists rightly say, and in addition is charged with dangerous polar tensions, with the
inimicitia elementorum. One finds oneself in an impenetrable chaos, which is indeed one of the
synonyms for the mysterious prima materia. The latter corresponds to the nature of the
unconscious content in every respect, with one exception: this time it does not appear in the
alchemical substance but in man himself...Hunted for centuries and never found, the prima
materia or lapis philosophorum is, as a few alchemists rightly suspected, to be discovered in man
himself. But it seems that this content can never by found and integrated directly, but only by the
circuitous route of projection. For as a rule the unconscious first appears in projected form.
17 Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, para. 43
18 Alchemical Studies, CW 13
157 The alchemical operation consisted essentially in separating the prima materia, the so-called chaos, into the active principle, the soul, and the passive principle, the body, which were then reunited in personified form in the coniunctio or "chymical marriage." In other words, the coniunctio was allegorized as the hieros gamos, the ritual cohabitation of Sol et Luna. From this union sprang the filius sapientiae or filius philosophorum, the transformed Mercurius, who was thought of as hermaphroditic in token of his rounded perfection.
Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11
748 It is psychologically significant for our day that in the year 1950 the heavenly bride was
united with the bride-groom...The nupital union in the thalamus (bridal-chamber) signifies the
hieros gamos, and this in turn is the first step towards incarnation, towards the birth of the saviour
who, since antiquity, was thought of as the filius solis et lunae, the filius sapientiae, and the
equivalent of Christ. When, therefore, a longing for the exaltation of the Mother of God passes
through the people, this tendency, if thought to its logical conclusion, means the desire for the
birth of a saviour, a peacemaker...Although he is already born in the pluroma, his birth in time can
only be accomplished when it is perceived, recognized, and declared by man.
19 Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11
755 The dogmatization of the Assumptio Mariae points to the hieros gamos in the pleroma, and this in turn implies, as we have said, the future birth of the divine child, who, in accordance with the divine trend towards incarnation, will choose as his birthplace the empirical man. The metaphysical process is known to the psychology of the unconscious as the individuation process. In so far as this process, as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf the cow, and the child an adult. But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind. The central symbols of this process describe the self, which is man's totality, consisting on the one hand of that which is conscious to him, and on the other hand of the contents of the unconscious. The self is the whole man, whose symbols are the divine child and its synonyms. This is only a very summary sketch of the process, but it can be observed at any time in modern man, or one can read about it in the documents of Hermetic philosophy from the Middle Ages. The parallelism between the symbols is astonishing to anyone who knows both the psychology of the unconscious and alchemy.
756 The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae is the symbol of the union of opposites as well as the catalyst of their union. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. "It has a thousand names," say the alchemists, meaning that the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal towards which it aims is nameless, ineffable.
The Practice of Psychotherapy, CW 16
474 The union of the conscious mind or ego-personality with the unconscious...produces a new
personality compounded of both. Not that the new personality is a third thing midway between
conscious and unconscious, it is both together. Since it transcends consciousness it can no longer
be called "ego" but must be given the name of "self"...The self is both ego and non-ego, subjective
and objective, individual and collective. It is the "uniting symbol" which epitomizes the total union
of opposites. As such and in accordance with its paradoxical nature, it can only be expressed by
means of symbols.
20 Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11
221 If we perseveringly and consistently follow the way of natural development, we arrive at the experience of the self, and at the state of being simply what one is. This is expressed as an ethical demand by the motto of Paracelsus..."Alterius non sit, qui suus esse potest" (That man no other man shall own, / Who to himself belongs alone) - a motto both characteristically Swiss and characteristically alchemical. But the way to this goal is toilsome and not for all to travel. "Est longissima via," say the alchemists. We are still only at the beginning of a development whose oringins lie in late antiquity, and which throughout the Middle Ages led little more than a hole-and-corner existence, vegetating in obscurity and represented by solitary eccentrics who were called, not without reason, tenebriones. Nevertheless men like Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Paracelsus were among the fathers of modern science, and their spirit did much to shake the authority of the "total" church. Our modern psychology grew out of the spirit of natural science and, without realizing it, is carrying on the work begun by the alchemists. These men were convinced that the donum artis was given only to the few electis, and today our experience shows us only to plainly how arduous is the work...and how few can attain the necessary knowledge and experience.
233 The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization, or individuation.
But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and
indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization - to put it in religious or metaphysical terms -
amounts to God's incarnation. That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of
God...The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it
conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable
except in the form of symbols. The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic
images the events in the conscious life - as well as in the life that transcends consciousness - of a
man who has been transformed by his higher destiny.
21 The Practice of Psychotherapy: CW 16, para. 467
References:
1. In the Codex Marcianus, 11th cent. Venice. Quoted from M-L von Franz: Alchemy, an
Introduction to the Symbolism and Psychology (page 44)
2. Lévy-Bruhl: How Natives Think. London, 1926