The alchemists were not confused. They were describing something that cannot be described from outside it — the material each person carries that is simultaneously the most ordinary thing in the world and the thing they cannot stop circling. Quicksilver for one, shadow for another, mother, sea, dragon, chaos: the list keeps growing because projection is individual, and what carries the weight of the unknown psychic content differs with the person doing the carrying.

Jung's point here is subtler than it first appears. The alchemists did not fail to name the prima materia; they named it compulsively, in fifty registers and more, because naming it was the work itself — not a preparation for the work. Each synonym is a place where someone's unconscious content landed long enough to leave a mark. The substance is whatever will not stay ordinary: the thing that lights up, that attracts obsession, that seems to promise transformation by proximity. Notice how the list includes both the celestial (sky, dew, moon) and the abject (poison, shadow, dragon) with equal authority. The prima materia has no fixed dignity. It is wherever the soul has deposited what it cannot yet hold directly, and the alchemist's task — and ours — is to recognize it in whatever form it has agreed to appear.