Two alchemies

The teaching

As the alchemical tradition read with Carl Jung teaches it.

One matter, many forms

The laboratory art rests on a teaching about matter. All bodies are made of the four elements, fire, air, water and earth, and each element is a pair of qualities: fire is hot and dry, air hot and moist, water cold and moist, earth cold and dry. Change one quality and one element passes into another, as water heated rises as vapour. Beneath the elements lies a first matter with no form of its own, able to take any form. If that is so, no metal is fixed for ever: bring a base metal back toward its first matter, give it a nobler form, and it becomes another metal.

The metals, besides, are held to grow in the earth from a sulphur and a mercury, ripening slowly as fruit does, so that lead is gold that has not finished. Nature tends toward perfection, and the art only helps her: in the vessel the alchemist does quickly what nature does slowly underground.

Dissolve and bind

The whole method is often put in two words, dissolve and coagulate. The matter is broken down, by fire, by water, by rotting, until its old form is gone, and then it is joined and fixed in a new one. Around those two moves the books name many operations: calcination, which reduces a body to ash by fire; dissolution in a liquid; separation of the fine from the coarse; conjunction, the joining of opposites; putrefaction, a slow rotting in gentle heat; distillation and sublimation, in which a vapour rises and is caught; and fixation, which makes what flies stay put. A rule goes with them: make the fixed volatile and the volatile fixed.

The vessel and the fire

The work is done in sealed glass, the vessel the books call the philosophers' egg, set in the athanor, a furnace built to hold an even heat for weeks. Heat is given by degrees, the first of them likened to the warmth of a hen sitting on her eggs, and the books warn again and again that haste and a fierce fire ruin everything. The pelican, a vessel whose arms curve back into its own body, lets the vapour rise and fall back without end, and gives the art its picture of a work that feeds on itself.

The house says it plainly: none of this is to be tried. The old work used mercury, lead, antimony and acids, and here it is taught only as the books picture it.

Pray, read, work

The alchemist works in two rooms. Heinrich Khunrath's engraving of the art shows a man kneeling in prayer on one side and the furnaces of a laboratory on the other, and the books insist that the work needs a pure heart as much as a steady hand: the worker is to be patient, humble, sober and honest, and greed spoils the work as surely as a fierce fire. The Mutus Liber, a book told almost wholly in pictures, gives the rule in Latin on one of its last plates: pray, read, read, read, read again, work, and you will find.

Our gold is not common gold

The books warn their readers not to take their words at face value. Our gold, says the Rosarium philosophorum, is not common gold. In the same way the books set the mercury of the wise apart from the quicksilver sold in shops, and give the first matter a thousand names. The art writes in a code of kings and queens, lions and dragons, crows, doves and peacocks, so that each step can be pictured, and so that only those who have done the work can read it.

The inner reading

The second alchemy begins from that code. Carl Jung read it as a record of what the alchemists saw in their flasks without knowing it was their own. Watching the dark matter in the glass for days on end, they projected the contents of their own unconscious into it, so that the stages of the work describe a change in the worker. The king who dies, the bath, the marriage of Sun and Moon, the black that turns white and then red, are pictures of the psyche loosening its old order and coming to a new wholeness, which Jung called individuation.

The old books themselves give him a foothold. In Martin Ruland's dictionary of the art, meditation is defined as an inner dialogue with someone unseen: with God, with oneself or with one's good angel. Gerhard Dorn, a follower of Paracelsus, urged his readers to change themselves from dead stones into living philosophical stones.

The vessel is the person

In the inner reading nothing is heated but attention. The first matter is what one would rather not look at: a grief, a fault, a fear, a part of life written off. The vessel is a steady, closed attention in which it can be held without leaking away into distraction or being poured out on others. The fire is the feeling it stirs, kept at a heat that can be borne; too fierce, and the vessel cracks. The stages are the slow changes that follow, and the stone is the self made whole, which Jung called the Self.

The two alchemies share one rule: the work cannot be hurried. What the furnace books say of the fire, the inner reading says of a life: the gentle heat kept up for a long time does what no sudden blaze can.

Working with an image

Jung's own method was to take an image, from a dream or from an old emblem, and let it move and speak in the imagination while one watches and answers it, then to write or paint what came; he called this active imagination. Beside it he set the old pictures, to widen what a dream image might mean by showing where it had appeared before, and this he called amplification. A reader can begin more simply, with one emblem, a dated page of notes and a second look a month later.

Jung also warned that active imagination is not for everyone at every time. For a person in a fragile state the images can overwhelm instead of inform, and such work then belongs with a trained guide, or not at all.