Rosarium Philosophorum

The Rosarium philosophorum, secunda pars alchemiae de lapide philosophico (Frankfort, 1550) is a sixteenth-century alchemical compilation illustrated by a sequence of ten full-page woodcuts depicting the coniunctio of King and Queen, the death and putrefaction of the resulting hermaphrodite, and the birth of the Rebis — the lapis-philosophorum. The work is “for the greater part ascribed to Arnaldus de Villanova” (Jung, Alchemical Studies), though the compilation also gathers material from earlier authors.

The work survives in the depth tradition not as a chemical procedure but as an iconographic grammar. Jung reproduced the ten woodcuts in full in The Psychology of the Transference (CW 16, 1946) and read them as a pictorial account of the analytic relationship — the mutual dissolution and recomposition of analyst and analysand. The Rosarium thus becomes the pivot on which the alchemical tradition enters analytical psychology: its images furnish the vocabulary through which Jung articulates transference, coniunctio, the alchemical color-stages, and individuation.

Jung himself notes that the title “Rosarium” — rose-garden — carries the medieval mystique of the rose into alchemical literature; the book’s symbolic system participates in the lapis-Christ parallel through which Christian imagery and Hermetic speculation interpenetrate (Alchemical Studies, Jung 1967).

Concepts introduced or developed

• coniunctio
• nigredo-albedo-rubedo
• lapis-philosophorum
• mercurial-fountain
• immersion-in-the-bath
• hierosgamos

Cited by

• carl-jung
• marie-louise-von-franz
• james-hillman