Alchemical symbols of the self

Jung's encounter with alchemy was, by his own account, the moment his psychology found its historical ground. At the conclusion of Mysterium Coniunctionis he wrote that alchemy "has performed for me the great and invaluable service of providing material in which my experience could find sufficient room, and has thereby made it possible for me to describe the individuation process at least in its essential aspects." The alchemical symbols of the Self are not decorative parallels to psychological concepts — they are the phenomenology of the Self as it appeared before anyone knew to call it that.

The Lapis Philosophorum

The primary symbol is the lapis philosophorum, the philosophers' stone — the declared telos of the alchemical opus. Edinger states the identification plainly: "The goal of the individuation process is to achieve a conscious relation to the Self. The goal of the alchemical procedure was most frequently represented by the Philosophers' Stone. Thus the Philosophers' Stone is a symbol for the Self" (Edinger, 1972). The stone carries a paradoxical grammar that mirrors the Self's own: it is simultaneously the humblest and most exalted thing, found everywhere and nowhere, described in the alchemical literature as vili figura — offered in lowly form — yet capable of a "cosmically healing effect" once the opus is complete. Jung notes that the stone "is below thee, as to obedience; above thee, as to dominion; therefore from thee, as to knowledge; about thee, as to equals" — a formulation that maps precisely onto the ego's relationship to the Self: subordinate yet ruling, intimate yet transcendent.

The Rebis and the Hermaphroditic Anthropos

The lapis is also figured as the rebis — the "double thing," the hermaphroditic Anthropos born from the coniunctio of Sol and Luna, King and Queen. Jung describes it in The Symbolic Life as having "a trichotomus form (habat corpus, animam et spiritum) and is also compared to the Trinity (trinus et unus)." The symbolism of wholeness requiring the union of opposites — masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious, spirit and matter — is the structural signature of the Self. The rebis names the completed product as living being; the lapis names it as enduring substance. Both are the same psychological reality seen from different angles.

The Filius Philosophorum

The filius philosophorum — the "son of the philosophers" — figures the same reality under the image of offspring. From the coniunctio of the royal pair springs a child, the transformed Mercurius, who is "hermaphroditic in token of his rounded perfection" (Jung, Alchemical Studies, 1967). The qualifier philosophorum distinguishes this child from any literal product: it is the fruit of the philosophical work, the result of sustained attention to the unconscious. As von Franz observes in C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, "just at the deepest point of suffering, the content of the next stage appears, the 'birth of the inner man,' that is, the Self, or the stone of the wise" — the filius and the lapis converging at the moment of greatest darkness.

Mercurius

Mercurius is the most elusive of the Self's alchemical figures precisely because he is not the goal but the governing archetype of the entire process. He symbolizes "both the lowest prima materia and the highest lapis philosophorum, as well as the chthonic god of revelation and transformation" (Jung, Letters, 1942). He is Mercurius duplex — simultaneously the raw material and the completed work, the poison and the medicine, the trickster and the redeemer. Jung wrote to a correspondent in 1942 that working on the Mercury material "caught hold of me, played the transformation of Mercury on my own human system and gave me incidentally a remarkably miserable fortnight" — a reminder that these symbols are not inert. Mercurius represents the autonomous life of the unconscious, the principium individuationis itself, which the alchemists intuited but could not yet recognize as psychic fact.

The Lapis-Christi Parallel

Jung's most audacious move was to identify the lapis structurally with Christ — not reductively, but as two independent symbolic traditions converging on a single archetype. In Aion he states: "In as much or in as little as the fish is Christ does the self mean God." The Ichthys, the fish symbol of early Christianity, mediates between the two poles: Edinger reads the dream of extracting the blood of a golden fish as the extraction of "life and meaning from the whole Christian dispensation" — a precious psychic essence being separated from the form that had contained it (Edinger, 1972). The lapis completes what the Christ-symbol left unfinished: where Christianity saved the human soul but not nature, the alchemical stone reconciles spirit and matter, the divine and the chthonic, in a single image.

The coniunctio produces the lapis philosophorum, the central symbol of alchemy. This lapis has innumerable synonyms. On the one hand, its symbols are quaternary or circular figures and, on the other, the rebis or the hermaphroditic Anthropos who is compared to Christ. He has a trichotomus form and is also compared to the Trinity. The symbolism of the lapis corresponds to the mandala symbols in dreams, etc., which represent wholeness and order and therefore express the personality that has been altered by the integration of the unconscious.

The Stages as Symbols

The colored stages of the opus — nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo — are themselves symbolic of the Self's emergence. Jung described the sequence in a 1952 interview: matter suffers through the blackness of the nigredo until the dawn of the albedo appears, but the albedo "is a sort of abstract, ideal state" — it must have "blood," the rubedo, before the opus is finished and "the human soul is completely integrated" (Jung, quoted in Edinger, 1985). Hillman sharpens this: the nigredo is not merely a beginning but "an accomplished stage" — black is an achievement, the result of something having been worked upon. The stages do not promise salvation; they describe what the soul actually undergoes when the logics of avoidance fail and the work begins in earnest.

What unites all these symbols — stone, child, hermaphrodite, fish, Mercurius, the colored sequence — is their refusal of the pneumatic preference. The lapis is not spirit ascending from matter; it is spirit and matter reconciled. The alchemists, as Jung observed, were projecting into the retort what they could not yet recognize as their own psychic process. The symbols survived because they were accurate.

  • lapis philosophorum — the philosophers' stone as symbol of the Self and goal of the alchemical opus
  • opus alchymicum — the Great Work as individuation projected into matter
  • Edward Edinger — portrait of the Jungian analyst who mapped alchemical operations onto the psyche
  • James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist whose Alchemical Psychology reads the stages through soul rather than spirit

Sources Cited

  • Edinger, Edward F., 1972, Ego and Archetype
  • Edinger, Edward F., 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche
  • Jung, C.G., 1944, Psychology and Alchemy
  • Jung, C.G., 1967, Alchemical Studies
  • Jung, C.G., 1975, Letters Volume 2, 1951–1961
  • Jung, C.G., 1976, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1975, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time
  • Hillman, James, 2010, Alchemical Psychology