---
slug: hillman-alchemy-9ca45e4e
title: "Hillman on Alchemy"
author: "James Hillman"
work: "Alchemical Psychology"
section: ""
year: "2010"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - alchemy
fragment: |
  He considered sulfur to be the active principle in the opus and thus of human life. He equated sulfur with what psychology calls the motive factor: on the one hand, the conscious will; on the other, unconscious compulsion. The extreme language to which alchemy resorts to describe sulfur indicates to Jung that sulfur has affinities with the Devil - as corrupter and compeller - and with Christ, giver of warmth and life. In either direction, Devil or Christ, sulfur is usually imagined as male, hot, of an obdurate earthly body, fat and oily, desirous as a dragon or lion. Though it is the urgent agent of change, sulfur at the same time resists not only sublimation, but is that very component of the psyche, as Jung said, "responsible for our resistance to psychology in general."
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Sulfur is what drives you to read a passage like this and simultaneously what makes you want to put the book down. That double bind is not a metaphor — it is the thing itself. The alchemists were precise about this: sulfur is not an obstacle to the work, it is the work's own fuel turning against its refinement. Compulsion and will are not opposites seated in different rooms; they share a body, and that body is fat, oily, hot, obdurate — nothing weightless or aerial about it.
  
  What Jung identified as the motive factor cuts against every fantasy of clean transformation. The soul does not want to be known. It wants, it burns, it resists sublimation not through weakness but through the same energy that makes sublimation appealing in the first place. This is why the alchemists could hold Devil and Christ in a single substance without collapsing the tension — both are forces of compulsion, one driving down, one driving up, and sulfur is indifferent to the direction. The impulse that carries you toward understanding and the impulse that makes you throw the book across the room are chemically identical. Psychology's peculiar difficulty is that its subject is also its adversary, and sulfur is the reason.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The final turn is the one worth sitting with: sulfur, the very agent that drives change, is also what makes us resist understanding ourselves. Jung means this structurally, not as paradox for its own sake — the same heat that compels transformation is the same heat that recoils from being named, analyzed, brought into psychological light. Edinger would recognize this as the ego's complicity in its own opacity. But Hillman presses further: the Devil-and-Christ polarity isn't a problem to resolve but a tension to inhabit, because sulfur at either extreme remains sulfur — corrosive, oily, obdurate, alive. The image of the dragon is precise here: not a monster to slay but a form of desire so dense and earthen it cannot quite rise into reflection. Whatever in you most wants to change may also be what most refuses to know why it does.
parent_id: Hillman_2010_Alchemical_Psychology__par0117
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Hillman writes:

> He considered sulfur to be the active principle in the opus and thus of human life. He equated sulfur with what psychology calls the motive factor: on the one hand, the conscious will; on the other, unconscious compulsion. The extreme language to which alchemy resorts to describe sulfur indicates to Jung that sulfur has affinities with the Devil - as corrupter and compeller - and with Christ, giver of warmth and life. In either direction, Devil or Christ, sulfur is usually imagined as male, hot, of an obdurate earthly body, fat and oily, desirous as a dragon or lion. Though it is the urgent agent of change, sulfur at the same time resists not only sublimation, but is that very component of the psyche, as Jung said, "responsible for our resistance to psychology in general."

— James Hillman

Sulfur is what drives you to read a passage like this and simultaneously what makes you want to put the book down. That double bind is not a metaphor — it is the thing itself. The alchemists were precise about this: sulfur is not an obstacle to the work, it is the work's own fuel turning against its refinement. Compulsion and will are not opposites seated in different rooms; they share a body, and that body is fat, oily, hot, obdurate — nothing weightless or aerial about it.

What Jung identified as the motive factor cuts against every fantasy of clean transformation. The soul does not want to be known. It wants, it burns, it resists sublimation not through weakness but through the same energy that makes sublimation appealing in the first place. This is why the alchemists could hold Devil and Christ in a single substance without collapsing the tension — both are forces of compulsion, one driving down, one driving up, and sulfur is indifferent to the direction. The impulse that carries you toward understanding and the impulse that makes you throw the book across the room are chemically identical. Psychology's peculiar difficulty is that its subject is also its adversary, and sulfur is the reason.

---

James Hillman · *Alchemical Psychology* · 2010