Prima Materia

The prima materia is the starting substance of the opus-alchymicum — the base from which the work begins. Its defining feature, in the texts, is that it has no single name: it is called lead, dew, mercury, chaos, massa confusa, dragon, black earth, the orphan, the dragon’s tail, the cosmic egg. The multiplicity of names is not a failure of the tradition’s nomenclature; it is the tradition’s faithful report that the unconscious, at its starting point, is radically unnamable. The alchemist does not know what he is working with. Jung’s psychological reading is precise on this point: “What he sees in matter, or thinks he can see, is chiefly the data of his own unconscious which he is projecting into it” (Psychology and Alchemy).

The prima materia is paradoxically identical with the goal. Jung quotes the tradition approvingly: “The prima materia sometimes coincides with the idea of the initial stage of the process, the nigredo-albedo-rubedo” (Psychology and Alchemy), and further, the prima materia is frequently called lapis — the stone one is seeking is the stone one is already standing on. Psychologically: the unconscious contains both the problem and the solution; the self is present as potential in the very shadow the ego most resists.

The pre-Socratic background is continuous. The prima materia as “round” and as the “most serene God” descends through Anaxagoras’ nous giving rise to a whirlpool in chaos and Empedocles’ sphairos springing from the union of dissimilars (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy). The alchemical starting point is the pre-Socratic arche.

Relationships

• opus-alchymicum
• nigredo-albedo-rubedo
• mercurius
• lapis-philosophorum
• shadow
• self

Primary sources

• jung-psychology-and-alchemy (Jung 1944)
• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955)
• abraham-dictionary-alchemical-imagery (Abraham 1998)