Jung is quoting a passage from the Timaeus tradition — Plato's *chora*, the formless receptacle that precedes form, neither element nor compound, the "nurse of all becoming" — and placing it at the center of alchemical thinking about prima materia. The move is deliberate: alchemy does not invent this concept but recovers something the philosophical tradition had already tried to think and then, characteristically, filed away under cosmology rather than psychology.

What the passage resists is any attempt to locate the beginning in something nameable. Every time you say "it is this substance," you have already missed it. The prima materia is defined by its refusal to be held by definition — formless, invisible, sustaining. The alchemists understood this as an instruction: you cannot begin the work by having the right ingredient. You begin by having nothing you can grip.

Spirituality routinely inverts this. It promises a beginning-substance — the higher self, the divine spark, the inner light — something prior and luminous that the work simply uncovers. What the alchemical tradition noticed is that the true starting material looks more like chaos than gold, more like what you have been trying not to look at than what you went looking for. The receptacle is not a vessel you fill. It is the formlessness that precedes the filling, and it will not be hurried past.