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Lyndy Abraham
Lyndy Abraham
Lyndy Abraham is a scholar of Renaissance alchemical literature whose A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (1998) is the standard philological reference for alchemical symbolism in English. She is not a Jungian; her work is grounded in Renaissance literary scholarship and close reading of the primary alchemical texts. This distance from the Jungian reading is what makes her indispensable: she stabilizes the vocabulary on its own terms. Where Jung, Edinger, and Hillman read the alchemical corpus psychologically, Abraham catalogues what the texts themselves say about each image — nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo, lapis, Mercurius, the metals, the animals, the celestial bodies — with philological precision.
The work serves the Jungian tradition as the Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique of Pernety once did: a lexicon that lets the depth reader verify that the images being interpreted are the images the alchemists actually wrote about. Its articles document the rubedo phase in terms the alchemists themselves would recognize: “With the fixation, crystallization or embodiment of the eternal spirit, form is bestowed upon the pure, but as yet formless, matter of the Stone. At this [final stage], the supreme chemical wedding, the body is resurrected into eternal life. As the heat of the fire is increased, the divine red tincture flushes the white stone with its rich red colour” (Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery).
The dictionary stands with von Franz’s Alchemy and Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis as one of the three reference works the serious reader of depth alchemy must have at hand.