At the beginning of the twentieth century alchemy seemed destined to remain a closed chapter in the history of science, a curiosity for antiquarians. If its symbols have come back to speak to a wide public today, much is owed to a Swiss physician who devoted decades of study to them: Carl Gustav Jung. His reading opened important doors, but it also shaped quite precisely the way many people approach alchemy. It is worth knowing, with its merits and its limits.
The encounter with alchemy
Jung relates that for years alchemical texts had seemed incomprehensible to him. The turning point came at the end of the 1920s, when the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him the translation of a Taoist text of inner alchemy, The Secret of the Golden Flower, asking him for a psychological commentary. The book came out in 1929. Working on it, Jung noticed that the images of that Chinese text bore a striking resemblance to those emerging in his patients' dreams and to those of European alchemy.
From then on he began to collect and study Latin and German alchemical treatises, building up a vast library. The work continued until the end of his life.
The main works
Jung's journey through alchemy is concentrated in a few fundamental works.
| Work | Essential content |
|---|---|
| Psychology and Alchemy (1944) | the parallel between alchemical symbols and modern dreams |
| The Psychology of the Transference (1946) | a reading of the woodcuts of the Rosarium Philosophorum |
| Essays on the spirit Mercurius and the philosophical tree | studies of individual symbols |
| Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-1956) | the union of opposites as the heart of the Work |
In Psychology and Alchemy Jung analyses a long series of dreams of a young man and shows how images found in alchemical treatises appear in them spontaneously: the circle, the square, the vessel, transformation, the union of opposites.
The central idea: projection
Jung's thesis can be summed up like this: alchemists, working in the darkness of their laboratories on substances they knew little about, projected the contents of their own psyche into matter. What they saw happening in the vessel was partly a reflection of what was happening within them. That is why their texts, unreadable as chemistry, become readable as the description of an inner process.
Jung called this process individuation: the path by which a person becomes more and more themselves, integrating parts of the self that had remained in shadow. The alchemical stages, from black to red, became stages of this path.
The main correspondences
- Nigredo: the encounter with the shadow, what one does not want to see in oneself.
- Albedo: a new awareness, the relationship with the images of the soul.
- Rubedo: integration, the Self as the centre of the personality.
- Coniunctio: the union of inner opposites.
- Philosophers' stone: a symbol of psychic wholeness.
The merits of the Jungian reading
Jung's work had important consequences.
- It restored dignity to an enormous literature that had been considered merely a mistake of history.
- It showed that alchemical symbols have a value that goes beyond the laboratory.
- It popularised images such as those of the Rosarium and the Splendor Solis.
- It stimulated later historical studies, even by those who did not share his theses.
The limits to keep in mind
Many historians of alchemy have, however, pointed out some problems.
- The practical dimension: many alchemists were genuine experimenters, interested in metals, dyes and drugs. Reducing everything to the psyche risks erasing this historical reality.
- The variety of texts: alchemy includes very different traditions, and not all of them lend themselves to a psychological reading.
- The risk of anachronism: reading a sixteenth-century author with twentieth-century categories can make texts say what they did not say.
A balanced position recognises that alchemy was at once, in proportions varying from author to author, laboratory practice, philosophy of nature and spiritual path. Jung's reading illuminates the third aspect very well, the other two less so.
How to use Jung in study
For anyone approaching alchemy as a symbolic tradition, Jung is a valuable interlocutor, provided he does not become the only one. A fruitful approach is to read an alchemical text first on its own, then in its historical context, and only finally with the help of the Jungian reading. In this way the three dimensions enrich one another instead of overlapping.
In short
- Jung approached alchemy after commenting on The Secret of the Golden Flower, published in 1929.
- In his works he read alchemical symbols as projections of psychic processes.
- The stages of the Work became for him stages on the path of individuation.
- His reading is valuable but should be integrated with the historical and practical dimension of alchemy.
