We must admit the fact, however difficult it is for us to understand, that something which previous ages have discarded should suddenly come to our attention.
C. G. Jung
Frontispiece Amphitheatrum sapientiae
DESPITE its apparent lack of success the 'sacred art' of alchemy persisted for more than seventeen hundred years. The essential duality which characterised alchemy
from the very beginning, by which the work was divided into the practica and the theoria, reflects the confluence in Hellenistic times of a new spirit with a very old tradition. Alchemy combined the Gnostic spirit of Greek natural philosophy with the highly developed magico-techne of old Egypt, particularly in relation to metallurgy, the dyeing of materials, and the embalming process associated with the regeneration mysteries of Osiris. This ancient god of resurrection provided a
close analogy with the Gnostic doctrine of the Anthropos, the androgynous original man caught in
the embrace of Physis and in need of redemption.1 Right up until its high water mark in the seventeenth century it was this myth, above all else, that motivated, consciously or otherwise, the practica of alchemical operations; thereafter declining as the practical and experimental approach to matter
began to discover empirical science and discard the old theories.
With the first existent writings dating from around the first century AD, the 'holy technique of
Egypt'2 continued to flourish in the West through Greek, Arabic and from the twelfth century
onwards European countries up until the end of the seventeenth century. A parallel form of
alchemy also developed in the East, in which the liberation of the 'true man' from within was
sought in forms of Indian yoga and Chinese Taoism. In contrast to the East however, the less introvert
nature of Western alchemy always persevered with the material aspect of the work, and
despite the fact that no genuine alchemist could claim to have produced the famed lapis, the
philosophers' immortal stone,3 innumerable treatise were written on the mysterious processes by which it was to be produced.
According to C. G. Jung, this unfailing fascination with the obscurities of matter persisted in and
through the psychological fact that the darkness of ignorance does not remain empty but is
immediately filled and animated by unconscious projections of our own psyche. Projections are
never made, they occur involuntarily and unconsciously create a situation in which the inner is
experienced via the outer.4 Jung traced the root of projection back to an undifferentiated state or 'archaic identity' between man and his natural environment, first described by the anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl as a participation mystique, a condition in which, ultimately, both subject and object converge into One nature.5
The naive alchemist, witnessing seemingly 'miraculous' changes within the retort might, therefore,
be forgiven for having seen in the opus alchemicum no more than the false yet shimmering
possibility of transforming base metals into noble ones, a possibility which did not appear
implausible so long as the secret of the art remained projected into unknown matter. Although
many alchemists, even from earliest times, were clearly aware of a secret correspondence or
meaningful connection of the opus to man, and rightly shunned crude or vulgar understanding of
its materials and procedures, it was only towards the end of the long tradition that the basis or
prima materia of the opus finally split into its composite parts, man on the one hand and matter
on the other, thus breaking the original projection.
Surprisingly perhaps this separation of psyche and matter only hastened the demise of alchemy. For as science freed itself of religion in an Age of Enlightenment and work in the laboratory finally shed its arcane symbolisms to become modern chemistry, so the philosophical side of the work forfeit the creative medium - the living soul - of its projections,6 only to become the inanimate preserve of secret societies such as the Rosicrucians, "the whole raison d'être of which," according to Jung, "is to guard a secret that has lost its vitality and can only be kept alive as an outward form." 7 Much more than this, however, was the consequence of appropriating the mythos of the Anthropos to consciousness, a consequence which found literary expression in the inflated figures of Goethe's Faust and Nietzsche's superman, Zarathustra, whose famous cry 'God is dead!' brought home the fact that the old form of God had indeed been lost. Only in the vicissitudes of the twentieth century would the 'world-destroying and world-creating' source of alchemy's dynamic and symbolic projections be rediscovered no longer in matter but in the unconscious psyche. 8
§
The 'subjective factor' of the psyche is as a rule completely overlooked, though it conditions all
our perception and comprehension.9 Only when it is disturbed do we notice anything at all. Alchemy developed from a universal disturbance that was common to different people of different
ages; what they perceived in the behaviour of matter was something collective and suprapersonal,
rooted not in the personal but in the collective unconscious.
10 While projections originating from the personal sphere of the unconscious can with insight become conscious, collective projections
from the deeper and more universal layer of the unconscious on the other hand persist through the
'archaic identity' of participation mystique and are largely time-conditioned.
11 More precisely, the term projection only really applies where the possibility of its withdrawl has already arisen, that is when some doubt occurs which begins to push it toward consciousness and thus dissolve the projection. This is where the opus really begins, for, according to the philosophers, 'doubt is the first stage of knowledge.'
The archaic picture mankind originally had of the world was wholly derived from unconscious premises. Staring into the darkness of the night sky, it was not a random distribution of stars that the early astrologer and alchemist saw, but rather the unified vision of the twelve cosmic configurations of the zodiac, by which the great revolution of the year was divided into four seasons of three parts each. Similarly there were four directions, four elements, four qualities (hot, dry, moist and cold) and character was dependent upon the four humours or temperaments. These things appeared to be just-so or self-evident to the archaic mind because of the pre-existence of a uniform or universally occurring principle behind it, namely the archetype of fourfold order, by which in alchemical terms the circle is squared and thereby reduced to order.12
The number four represents a totality, encompassing both man and all creation. Fourfold symbols
enjoy universal significance as the natural schema for unified images of heaven, paradise and
the godhead. But four also shows a tendency to dissociate into three and one, as for example in
the ancient representation of the four sons of Horus, where three have animals' heads and only
one a human head. As human consciousness progressed over the centuries this relation of one and
three became reversed, so that by the Middle Ages the nature of the 'fourth' had become a
complex religious problem. It was in this context that Jung saw the Catholic Church's Declaratio
Assumptionis Mariae as a reunion of the three with the 'missing' fourth element, which in
contrast to the spiritual and paternal Trinity is physical and feminine.
13
Jung showed that the problem of the fourth and of the body in general developed in Western
alchemy as a compensatory undercurrent to the Christian conflict between the opposites,
particularly the moral opposites of good and evil, which ever since the first day of Creation had
been rent apart into upper and lower worlds. While the divine Trinity illuminated three quarters of
human consciousness, divided darkness covered the lower realm. Alchemy represented the search
for the divine spark of God's reflection in the darkness of the lower world, under the motto
ascribed in antiquity to Hermes Trismegistus; 'as Above, so Below', a search motivated by the
light that shone in Nature, the lumen naturae. As this search lead ultimately to the dawn of
science and technology rather than the unconscious source of its motivating projections, it opened
up the heretical split between faith and knowledge and engendered the sickness of spiritual
alienation and inflated consciousness so characteristic of our age, which afflicts both individual
and nation alike with pseudoreligious factional 'isms' and the evil of blind possession. As the
power of faith upheld by the Church waned, it was left to psychology to uncover the source of
this sickness in modern man, a sickness and distress which Jung argued can only be cured through
greater knowledge and individual experience of the hidden numen in our own nature, the numen
that, as the uniting medicant, 'heals and makes whole'.
It is significant that many of the most gifted alchemists, like Paraselsus for example, were also prominent physicians of their day, who could not ignore the problem of the fourth and sought to bring about health and longlivety through an all-embracing wholeness of mind and body. This approach was fundamentally at odds with the Christian treatment of the body, which attempted to make a perfect thing of one to the damnation of the other. The alchemists by contrast sought to salvage the body and make peace with it. But the body with which the alchemist worked included far more than what we today understand by the term. As the prima materia, it contained a dual-natured spirit, which could be made volatile by fire and which was no less the spirit Mercurius, the messenger of the gods.14 Jung interpreted this spirit as the autonomous and ambivalent power of the unconscious psyche, 'caught' as it were in matter and freed from it through an act of conscious intervention. Mercurius imparted to the adept the secret of a uniting medicant produced from two opposing principles, Sol (fire) and Luna (water), first separated from the prima materia and then re-combined in the wonder-working lapis, famously called 'the stone that is no stone'. This stone, rejected as worthless by most, was said to be found in the dungheap, which is precisely where Freud, Jung and other pioneering investigators uncovered the discarded and disreputable psyche at the turn of the twentieth century. 15
§
The opus of alchemy was essentially concerned with the union of
opposites of the most extreme kinds, which in the deadly prima
materia were perceived to be caught in a black (ie unconscious)
state of corruption. This coincided with the dark and confused mental
state of the alchemist in the initial stage of the negredo.
16 The
general procedure of the opus involved the separation and sublimation of the
warring elements contained in the prima materia or massa
confusa, typically described in the sixteenth century Gloria Mundi
as "familiar to all men...yet despised by all," so that they could be
"melted into a unity purified of all opposition and therefore
incorruptible,"17 which was itself the gold, or the transformative
Elixir or Medicine capable of producing it from imperfect bodies.
The stone, the lumen novum, arising from the coniunctio of the reconciled opposites Sol et Luna
was personified as the rounded, bisexual Anthropos and proclaimed as the filius macrocosmi, the
saviour of the macrocosm and counterpart to Christ.18
For the alchemists the paradoxical nature of the filius or lapis mirrored the complexio oppositorum of the godhead itself, and thus elevated the opus into the sphere of divine transformation and revelation of God in and through the prima materia which was both in matter and in man. From the modern point of view of Jungian psychology the opus represents a perception in matter of the process of individuation; the maturation of the whole personality and the synthesis of that unified totality, symbolised by the mandala, which Jung termed the Self.19 Because the experience of wholeness re-connects the individual with the universal life of the collective unconscious, Jung called the mandala 'a window on eternity', a moment of 'redemption' transcending the ego-personality as the whole transcends the part. Thus we may conclude that in the darkness of unknown matter was played out the strange drama of the soul in search of transformation, and the immortal stone the alchemists sought to realize was in fact the unconscious image of wholeness, the imago Dei in man. 20
Melt and remould
Mixed metal
Into Gold