Alchemy

Alchemy is the medieval and early-modern European tradition — itself inheriting from Alexandrian, Arabic, and Chinese antecedents — of a symbolic art whose operations on matter are simultaneously operations on the soul. The alchemists worked at the forge and the athanor on what they called the prima materia, seeking through a disciplined sequence — nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo — to produce the lapis philosophorum, the philosophers’ stone in which the four elements are reconciled and the king and queen wedded in the coniunctio.

Jung’s recovery of alchemy — across CW 12, CW 13, CW 14, and Psychology and Alchemy — demonstrated that the alchemical corpus is a symbolic record of the individuation process projected into matter. The alchemists were not failed chemists; they were contemplatives whose laboratory work was a meditative practice in which the soul’s transformation was enacted on its material double. See alchemy-as-projection for the epistemological reading and alchemical-operations for the sequence.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• coniunctio
• alchemy-as-individuation
• alchemical-operations