Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Gas’ emerges not as a mere physical substance but as a psycho-historical threshold concept — the moment when the ancient pneuma, the spiritus silvestris of Paracelsus, was stripped of its animating soul and recast as controllable, measurable matter. Hillman’s Alchemical Psychology provides the richest treatment, tracing the word’s genealogy from van Helmont’s spiritus silvestris through the chemical revolution of Black, Priestley, Cavendish, and Lavoisier. For Hillman, the naming of ‘gas’ marks a crucial desouling of air: what had been spirit, breath, and elemental life became a substance subject to Boyle’s law, to compression and release at will. The psychologically charged resonance appears in the fairy-tale motif of the sealed bottle — ‘Let me out, let me out’ — where gas-as-spirit desires liberation from the alchemical vessel. Humphry Davy’s experiments with laughing gas further dramatize the ambivalence: the gaseous can transport consciousness into ecstasy or become instrument of political devastation, as in the artillery powder charges entangling both Priestley and Lavoisier with revolution. Frankl’s solitary use of the term marks its darkest register — the gas chamber as absolute negation of the pneumatic tradition. Across these voices, gas stands at the crossing of spirit and matter, poetry and technology, liberation and imprisonment.
The term spiritus silvestris, the wild spirit that now became gas, had already been used by Paracelsus.
Hillman identifies ‘gas’ as the modern materialization of Paracelsus’s wild spirit, making explicit the etymology that connects pneumatic soul to chemically defined substance.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
An invisible spring of air, a combustible phlogiston, a wild gas still imbues each thing, making possible the animation of the actual world of things among which, or whom, we live.
Hillman argues that gas, phlogiston, and the spring of air retain a residual animating function within the material world, preserving something of the original anima mundi even after scientific reduction.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
Oh, Tom! Such gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide! Oh, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.
Through Southey’s ecstatic letter about nitrous oxide, Hillman illustrates how gas-as-spirit momentarily broke through scientific materialism to restore a visionary, pneumatic experience of air.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
every ‘Moslem’ goes to the gas chambers. Therefore, remember: shave, stand and walk smartly; then you need not be afraid of gas.
Frankl’s invocation of the gas chamber situates the term at its most catastrophic historical extreme, where industrialized gas becomes the absolute antithesis of the life-giving pneuma.
, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946thesis
Lavoisier’s work ran parallel with and culminated the differentiation of air that, let us say, began with Robert Boyle’s New Experiments, Physico-mechanicall, touching the Spring of the Air.
Hillman locates the chemical revolution — the differentiation of air into distinct gases — as the historical process that progressively desouled the elemental atmosphere.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
Boyle’s law placed the air in servitude, reduced in size, and then released at one’s pleasure. Air’s elasticity was wholly passive, suffering compression.
Hillman reads Boyle’s law as the foundational psychic gesture reducing once-active, ensouled air to passive, quantifiable gas subject to human control.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air… the spirit in the bottle in a six-pack, and now in the United States consumed m
Hillman traces the commodification of ‘fixed air’ (carbon dioxide) through carbonated water, demonstrating how the alchemical spirit-in-a-vessel became a mass-market consumer product.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
The barometric language used by economics for its basic directions — inflation and depression — seems to belong to what I am calling the Cavendish phenomenon, that is, reduction to a mode
Hillman argues that the quantification of gas and air by Cavendish migrated conceptually into economic language, grounding modern fiscal thinking in pneumatic metaphors now stripped of psychological depth.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
His father says that, on two occasions immediately prior to Michael’s night awakenings, a car had run out of gas and in the child’s presence there had been much discussion of how the motor had ‘died’.
Yalom records a child’s unconscious equation of running out of gas with dying, illustrating how the term carries latent death-anxiety even in everyday domestic usage.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside
when raw sulfur heated with lime results in calcium sulfide, which, when added to water, results in the g
A passing chemical reference in Hillman’s discussion of sulfur and yellowing in alchemical process, tangentially evoking the transformation of substances into gaseous or dissolved states.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside