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Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology

Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology

Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology is the book the Jungian tradition produced to make its own alchemical corpus legible to the non-specialist. Delivered by marie-louise-von-franz as nine lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1959 and published in 1980 as volume 5 of the Studies in Jungian Psychology series, the work walks the reader through Greek, Greek-Arabic, Arabic, and medieval Latin alchemy — from Isis and Cleopatra through Olympiodorus, Zosimos, and the Letter from the Sun to the Waxing Moon of Muḥammad ibn Umail, to the Aurora Consurgens attributed to the dying Thomas Aquinas.

The thesis is carl-jung‘s own, inherited and extended: that the alchemist was not a proto-chemist but a psychic practitioner, and that the substances in the retort were projections of unconscious psychic contents. The opus is read as a symbolic phenomenology of the individuation process; the prima-materia and [[massa-confusa-as-chaotic-ground|massa confusa]] are “a state of conscious confusion typical of the beginning of both the alchemical work and the process of individuation” (von Franz 1980, caption to illustration 61). The book reads the three stages of the opus as phases of psychological transformation, and the coniunctio as the opus’s goal — the marriage of sol and luna, the red and the white, the fixed and the volatile.

Its pedagogical gift is that von Franz does not let symbol remain only symbol. The planets fallen into the metals are the instincts fallen into matter; the alchemist’s washing and distilling are the analyst’s long labor with projection: “The psychological analogy is obviously to the first hard part of an analysis where Venus, the love problem, must be washed, as well as Mars, the problem of aggression” (von Franz 1980, p. 220). The volume is cited across the Jungian literature — edward-edinger refers to it throughout [[edinger-mysterium-lectures|The Mysterium Lectures]], and for English-language readers it is the book that opened carl-jung‘s alchemical writings to a generation that could not read Latin.

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