Prima materia occupies a foundational position in the depth-psychological reading of alchemy, functioning simultaneously as cosmological substrate, psychological metaphor, and therapeutic concept. Jung establishes the term's central paradox: it is 'cheap as dirt and can be had everywhere, only nobody knows it,' possessing a 'thousand names' that mark its essential elusiveness — chaos, hyle, massa confusa, Saturn, Adam, the sea, quicksilver. For Jung, the prima materia projects the contents of the unconscious into matter; the alchemist's search for first substance is therefore a search within. Edward Edinger extends this insight clinically, reading the prima materia as the undifferentiated psychological state — pure potentiality from which new form emerges — and identifying it with the infant, the child, the dreamer returned to origins. Abraham's lexicographic work establishes the iconographic range: Adam, Mercurius, the hermaphrodite, the sea, argent vive, and earth all serve as synonyms within the alchemical tradition. Von Franz situates the prima materia within the micro-macrocosmic framework, where the opus on first matter mirrors God's creation of the universe. The Platonic substrate, most visible in the Timaeus, supplies the philosophical grammar: a formless receptacle that must be without character in order to receive all forms. Tensions persist between those who emphasize the prima materia's universal accessibility and those who stress the arduous labour required to produce or identify it.
In the library
19 passages
the prima materia is, as one can so aptly say in English, 'tantalizing': it is cheap as dirt and can be had everywhere, only nobody knows it; it is as vague and evasive as the lapis that is to be produced from it; it has a 'thousand names.'
Jung articulates the defining paradox of the prima materia — ubiquitous yet unrecognized, named endlessly yet essentially elusive — and links its difficulties to the psychic obstacles of the alchemical work.
Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
Mylius describes the prima materia as the elementum primordiale. It is the 'pure subject and the unity of forms,' and in it any form whatsoever may be assumed.
Jung synthesizes alchemical authorities to define the prima materia as the primordial element containing all potential forms, equivalent to a metaphysical first substance.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
The 'stone' is the prima materia, called hyle or chaos or massa confusa... 'a certain species which cannot be beheld and is formless and sustains all things'... 'the primeval chaotic earth, Hyle, Chaos, the abyss, the mother of things.'
Jung documents the Greek alchemical and Neoplatonic lineage of the prima materia, equating it with Platonic hyle, chaos, and the formless substrate underlying all creation.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
In the context of the opus alchymicum Adam is a synonym for the prima materia, the substance from which it was believed the universe and all the things in it were created... 'Mercurius' is the name given to the secret transforming substance which transmutes itself from the prima materia into the ultimate goal of the opus, the philosopher's stone.
Abraham establishes Adam and Mercurius as key synonyms for the prima materia within the alchemical tradition, tracing the hermaphroditic and cosmogonic dimensions of this first substance.
Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
The prima materia is the original stuff of creation from which it was thought all things in the universe were made. The sea is used as an image for the prima materia because it is the 'mother' (mater, matter) from which all things come.
Abraham explains the sea as an iconographic equivalent of the prima materia, emphasizing its formless, maternal, and generative character as the substrate of all creation.
Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
The child is the prima materia of the adult... the form that actualizes the present personality is being dissolved and returned to the first matter, the formless state of pure potentiality, in order for a new form or actuality to emerge.
Edinger interprets the prima materia clinically as the state of pure psychological potentiality to which the personality must return before transformation, exemplified in dream imagery of children and infants.
Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
For some alchemists the prima materia is something that can be found everywhere, for others it has first to be produced out of the 'imperfect body' or substance... all chemical substances contain, in greater or lesser degree, the moisture, the water of the beginning that was brooded over by the spirit of God. This water was the prima materia.
Jung resolves the apparent contradiction between the universal accessibility and the laborious production of the prima materia through the doctrine of the humidum radicale, the primordial moisture latent in all substances.
Jung, C.G., Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976thesis
Roger Bacon advised the alchemist to construct his furnace in imitation of the mountains where metals were thought to be engendered from the prima materia... going up into the mountains means to rise in awareness in order to come to know the prima materia, the pure, original substance/consciousness from which all things are created.
Abraham demonstrates the metaphysical dimension of the prima materia in alchemical practice, showing how the search for first matter was simultaneously a spiritual and cognitive ascent.
Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
if the matter were like any of the supervening forms, then whenever any opposite or entirely different nature was stamped upon its surface, it would take the impression badly... that which is to receive all forms should have no form.
Plato's Timaeus provides the classical philosophical template for the prima materia as formless receptacle — the mother principle that must be characterless in order to receive every possible form.
As prima materia, the hermaphroditic Mercurius contains the male and female seeds of metals, the hot, dry, active male principle known as philosophical 'sulphur, and the cold, moist, receptive female principle, philosophical 'argent vive.
Abraham establishes Mercurius as the hermaphroditic embodiment of the prima materia, containing within itself the opposed sulphur and argent vive principles that must be separated and rejoined in the opus.
Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
As the definitions and names of the prima materia make abundantly plain, matter in alchemy is material and spiritual, and spirit spiritual and material.
Jung articulates the fundamental alchemical axiom that the prima materia is simultaneously material and spiritual, collapsing the modern dichotomy between matter and psyche.
Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
In alchemy all forms were believed to be created from the same formless substance, the *prima materia or original first matter.
Abraham frames the prima materia as the cosmogonic unity underlying the multiplicity of forms, providing the philosophical grounding for the alchemical coniunctio of apparent opposites.
Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
The prima materia as Saturn devouring his children... Earth as prima materia, suckling the son of the philosophers.
Jung's iconographic catalogue identifies Saturn and the nursing Earth as two major pictorial embodiments of the prima materia, marking its devouring and generative poles.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944supporting
This highly refined embodiment, called subtle body, is a pure manifestation of primal matter. Subtle bodies are embodiments existing between physicality and abstraction, in a realm of quasi-physicality.
Bosnak recasts the prima materia in terms of embodied imagination, arguing that the subtle body — the realm between physics and abstraction — constitutes its purest manifestation.
Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting
The *prima materia, the pure, first matter which contains the male and female *seeds of metals, is sometimes called 'quicksilver'. 'The Golden Rotation' states that the matter of the Stone must be 'reduced into his first beginning, which is quicksilver the first matter of metals.'
Abraham documents quicksilver as a common alchemical synonym for the prima materia, emphasizing its role as the bisexual first substance containing the seeds of metallic transformation.
Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
God, the Universe, Man, and the Stone... God created the universe and man after His own image and that man creates the Lapis after the same pattern, the God-image.
Von Franz situates the work on the prima materia within a fourfold analogical structure — God, cosmos, man, stone — in which the transformation of first matter recapitulates divine creation.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter... the liberation of God from the darkness of matter.
Jung frames the alchemical work on prima materia as a project of divine redemption — the liberation of the immanent god-image latent within chaotic first substance.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944supporting
only in the region of danger (watery abyss, cavern, forest, island, castle, etc.) can one find the 'treasure hard to attain' (jewel, virgin, life-potion, victory over death).
Jung links the descent into the prima materia's chaotic aqueous domain to the universal mythic pattern of the hero's night-sea journey in search of the treasure hard to attain.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944aside
'Earth is the mother of the elements; from earth they come and to earth they return.'
Von Franz's citation of Morienus and Hermes grounds the prima materia in the patristic and Hermetic equation of first matter with the maternal earth, the universal generative principle.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966aside