This is another book by Jung detailing how the work of alchemists was a precursor of psychology. He begins, “In medieval alchemy we have the long-sought connecting link between Gnosis and the processes of the collective unconscious that can be observed in modern man.” He opposes this to modernity’s constant striving for greater consciousness, “Such a symbolic unity cannot be attained by the conscious will because consciousness is always partisan. Its opponent is the collective unconscious, which does not understand the language of the conscious mind…. The unconscious can be reached and expressed only by symbols, and for this reason the process of individuation can never do without the symbol. The symbol is the primitive exponent of the unconscious, but at the same time an idea that corresponds to the highest intuitions of the conscious mind.”
For Jung, the alchemists’ project involved projecting outwards towards the material world what was deep within their inner psyche. “In the abstruse symbolism of alchemy we hear a distant echo of this kind of thinking…. But we also find in it a groping towards the future, a premonition of the time when the projection would be taken back into man…. How obstinately it was projected back into matter. Psychological knowledge through withdrawal of projections seems to have been an extremely difficult affair from the very beginning…. It sounds very strange to modern ears that the inner man and his spiritual growth should be symbolized by metals…. After Zarathustra had received the drink of omniscience from Ahuramazda, he beheld in a dream a tree with four branches of gold, silver, steel, and mixed iron. This tree corresponds to the metallic tree of alchemy, the arbor philosophica, which, if it has any meaning at all, symbolizes spiritual growth and the highest illumination.” Pagan myths also contain a certain type of truth. “Even though mythology may not be “true” in the sense that a mathematical law or a physical experiment is true, it is still a serious subject for research and contains quite as many truths as natural science; only, they lie on a different plane.” As far as projected contents, “whatever their reality may be, functionally at all events they behave just like realities.” Jung, later, continues, “The alchemical projections represent collective contents that stand in painful contrast—or rather, in compensatory relation—to our highest rational convictions and values. They give the strange answers of the natural psyche to the ultimate questions which reason has left untouched. Contrary to all progress and belief in a future that will deliver us from the sorrowful present, they point back to something primeval.”
The medieval alchemists considered themselves Christians in good standing. “We can safely call the light the central mystery of philosophical alchemy. Almost always it is personified as the filius…. The filius remains in the adept’s power…. This filius was equated with Christ.” The Rosarium, a medieval alchemical text, states, “From the stone you shall know in natural wise Christ, and from Christ the stone.” Jung elaborates, “And yet that light or filius philosophorum was openly named the greatest and most victorious of all lights, and set alongside Christ as the Saviour and Preserver of the world! Whereas Christ God himself became man, the filius philosophorum was extracted from matter by human art and, by means of the opus, made into a new light-bringer. In the former case the miracle of man’s salvation is accomplished by God; in the latter, the salvation or transfiguration of the universe is brought about by the mind of man—“Deo concedente,” as the authors never fail to add. In the one case man confesses “I under God,” in the other he asserts “God under me.” Man takes the place of the Creator. Medieval alchemy prepared the way for the greatest intervention in the divine world order that man has ever attempted: alchemy was the dawn of the scientific age, when the daemon of the scientific spirit compelled the forces of nature to serve man to an extent that had never been known before.”
Although alchemy seemed to be the precursor of chemistry, it was also the precursor of psychology. “The purpose of distillation in alchemy was to extract the volatile substance, or spirit, from the impure body…. This was not an ordinary chemical operation, it was essentially a psychological procedure…. The accentuation of the centre is again a fundamental idea in alchemy…. Its physical counterpart is gold, which is therefore a symbol of eternity. In Christianos the centre is compared to paradise and its four rivers. These symbolize the philosophical fluids, which are emanations from the centre…. Nothing is more like God than the centre, for it occupies no space, and cannot be grasped, seen, or measured. Such, too, is the nature of God and the spirits. Therefore the centre is “an infinite abyss of mysteries.” The fire that originates in the centre carries everything upward, but when it cools everything fall back again to the centre.”
The mind cannot escape the unconscious. “It is a process of coming to terms with the unconscious, which always sets in when a man is confronted with its darkness…. Here the human mind is confronted with its origins, the archetypes; the finite consciousness with its archaic foundations; the mortal ego with the immortal self, Anthropos, purusha, atman, or whatever else be the names that human speculation has given to that collective preconscious state from which the individual ego arose. Kinsman and stranger at once, it recognizes and yet does not recognize that unknown brother who steps towards it, intangible yet real.” When consciousness tries to assert itself, it is always held back in check. “And whenever the conscious mind clings hard and fast to concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations—as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness—nature pops up with her inescapable demands. Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit…. The lumen naturae is the natural spirit, whose strange and significant workings we can observe in the manifestations of the unconscious…. The unconscious is not just a “subconscious” appendage or the dustbin of consciousness, but is a largely autonomous psychic system for compensating the biases and aberrations of the conscious attitude…. The unconscious is not limited only to the instinctual and reflex processes of the cortical centres; it also extends beyond consciousness and, with its symbols, anticipates future conscious processes. It is therefore quite as much a “supra-consciousness.””
Jung next gets into the idea of the faulty dualism involved in the subject/object distinction. “In East and West alike, alchemy contains as it core the Gnostic doctrine of the Anthropos and by its very nature has the character of a peculiar doctrine of redemption…. It is almost impossible for our scientifically trained minds to feel their way back into that primitive state of participation mystique in which subject and object are identical…. Any prolonged preoccupation with an unknown object acts as an almost irresistible bait for the unconscious to project itself into the unknown nature of the object and to accept the resultant perception, and the interpretation deduced from it, as objective.” For Jung, the alchemists were doing the best to make sense of the unconscious with the tools available to their epoch. “Willy-nilly they had to submit to the overwhelming power of the numinous ideas that crowded into the empty darkness of their minds. From these depths a light gradually dawned upon them as to the nature of the process and its goal. Because they were ignorant of the laws of matter, its behaviour did not do anything to contradict their archetypal conception of it. Occasionally they made chemical discoveries in passing, as was only to be expected; but what they really discovered, and what was an endless source of fascination to them, was the symbolism of the individuation process…. The alchemists had unexpectedly blundered into the unconscious.”
Jung concludes with a word on how the psyche relates to both its conscious and unconscious parts. “The psyche needs to know the meaning of its existence—not just any meaning, but the meaning of those images and ideas which reflect its nature and which originate in the unconscious. The unconscious supplies as it were the archetypal form, which in itself is empty and irrepresentable. Consciousness immediately fills it with related or similar representational material so that it can be perceived. For this reason archetypal ideas are locally, temporally, and individually conditioned…. The great psychic systems of healing, the religions, likewise consist of universal myth motifs whose origin and content are collective and not personal…. The conscious psyche is certainly of a personal nature, but it is by no means the whole of the psyche. The foundation of consciousness, the psyche per se, is unconscious, and its structure, like that of the body, is common to all, its individual features being only insignificant variants.”
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