Jung Alchemy Quotes

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.

Carl Jung never said: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” What Dr. Jung said in two separate and unrelated statements was: Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193 People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.

If a blind man can gradually be helped to see it is not to be expected that he will at once discern new truths with an eagle eye. One must be glad if he sees anything at all, and if he begins to understand what he sees.

For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina catholica, just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or "sick" metals, etc. His attention is not directed to his own salvation through God's grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen or diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their souls. … It is rewarding to watch patiently the silent happenings in the soul, and the most and the best happens when it is not regulated from outside and from above. I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference.” 

The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae (the son of the Sun and Moon) is the possible result as well as the symbol of this union of opposites. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. "It has a thousand names," say the alchemists, meaning that the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal toward which it aims is nameless, ineffable.

The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence” and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.

The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is “secret,” i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.

the outcome, if successful, in both alchemy and individuation is a union of opposites—the coniunctionis or transcendent function—leading to alchemical gold, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, or, in Jungian terms, the Self.

The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands.

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life; it is real only when it is known.

When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictoral symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend ‘the One, the All’. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all the opposites.

The purpose of Alchemy is to liberate the whole individual which is hidden in the darkness, threatened by the rational and correct conduct of life, consequently experiencing themselves as hindered and on the wrong path.

The archetypal image of the redeemer serpent is certainly placed here in opposition to the serpents of evil that battle with it. But why do they both have the same form if there is only oppositIOn between them? What does it mean that they both dwell in the same place, the depth of the great abyss? Are they not possibly two aspects of the same thing? We know this image of the redeemer serpent not only from Gnosis and from the Sabbataian myth, but we know of the same serpent rising from below, redeeming and to be redeemed, as the Kundalini serpent in India, and finally from alchemy as the serpens Mercurii, the ambiguous serpent whose significance was first made clear to us by Jung's researches. Since Jung's work on alchemy we know two things. The first is that in its "magnum opus" alchemy dealt with a redemption of matter itself. The second is that pari passu with this redemption of matter, a redemption of the individual psyche was not only unconsciously carried out but was also consciously intended. As we know, the serpent is a primeval symbol of the Spirit, as primeval and ambiguous as the Spirit itself. The emergence of the Earth archetype of the Great Mother brings with it the emergence of her companion, the Great Serpent. And, strangely enough, it seems as though modern man is confronted with a curious task, a task which is essentially connected with what mankind, rightly or wrongly, has feared most, namely the Devil.

Perhaps because alchemy combines the ancient, Gnostic focus on the immaterial and transcendent soul, or spark, with the modern, scientific-like focus on the transformation of worldly matter, it serves to connect the two. Despite his professed closer kinship to alchemy,

After his break with Freud, Jung pursued the connection between the unconscious and the occult and found example after example of ancient mystical and occult symbols in the dreams of people who had never encountered those symbols in waking life. He came to believe that below the repressed memories of individual life, there exists a collective unconscious full of archaic images that appear in myths, legends, and the traditions of occultism. By bringing those images into consciousness, it is possible to achieve individuation: a state of psychological balance and wholeness as far above ordinary sanity as neurotic conditions are below it.

Throughout their lives W.B. Yeats and C.G. Jung sought out precedents for, and affinities with, their visionary — their daimonic — standpoints. Between them they uncovered and studied just about every major proponent of our tradition. This is not surprising, because it is a feature of the tradition that it threads together all who discover it, to form a series of historical links. The alchemists called it the Aurea Catena, the Golden Chain; and to grasp one link is to be connected to all the others.

Whatever service the works of C. G. Jung may have rendered to make alchemy better known, they are inadequate in that they limit alchemy to a psychology that is devoid of a transcendent and spiritual origin for the symbols that appear to the human psyche.

The child had a premonition of the instinctual hell into which she will enter. In alchemy, this state of instinctual hell is represented as a snake with three heads, the so-called serpens mercurii. It leads the soul into the afterworld, and is identical with the Gnostic Nous.

The water and tree symbolism, which we found as further attributes of the symbol of the city, likewise refer to the libido that is unconsciously attached to the mother-imago. In certain passages of the Apocalypse we catch a clear glimpse of this longing for the mother.32 Also, the author’s eschatological expectations end with the mother: “And there shall be no more curse.” There shall be no more sin, no more repression, no more disharmony with oneself, no guilt, no fear of death and no pain of separation, because through the marriage of the Lamb the son is united with the mother-bride and the ultimate bliss is attained. This symbol recurs in the nuptiae chymicae, the coniunctio of alchemy.

Muselo to tak být, protože alchymisté vůbec nevěděli, o čem vlastně píší. Zda to víme dnes my, nezdá se mi zcela jisté. Buď jak buď, už nevěříme, že tajemství spočívá v chemické látce, ale spíše v jistém temném pozadí psýché, o němž ovšem nevíme, z čeho se vlastně skládá. Bude asi muset opět uběhnout několik staletí, než novou temnotu odkryjeme; vychází z ní to, co nechápeme, a přece to pociťujeme s nejkrajnější jistotou jako něco působivého.

Opinions differ on the details, but most serious students today recognize that alchemy was, and is, a spiritual pursuit, and that whether or not an actual outer physical transformation takes place during its operations, if these are carried out correctly, an inner spiritual one does. “Aurum nostrum es non vulgi” (“Our gold is not the vulgar gold”), Gerhard Dorn, one of Jung’s favorite alchemists, said. The “gold” the true alchemists sought was inner transformation.

Not only the gods, but the goddesses, too, are libido-symbols, when regarded from the point of view of their dynamism. The libido expresses itself in images of sun, light, fire, sex, fertility, and growth. In this way the goddesses, as we have seen, come to possess phallic symbols, even though the latter are essentially masculine. One of the main reasons for this is that, just as the female lies hidden in the male (pl. XXIX), so the male lies hidden in the female.28 The feminine quality of the tree that represents the goddess (cf. pl. XXXI) is contaminated with phallic symbolism, as is evident from the genealogical tree that grows out of Adam’s body. In my Psychology and Alchemy I have reproduced, from a manuscript in Florence, a picture of Adam showing the membrum υirile as a tree.29 Thus the tree has a bisexual character, as is also suggested by the fact that in Latin the names of trees have masculine endings and the feminine gender.30

With the dawn of the second millennium the accent shifted more and more towards the dark side. The demiurge became the devil who had created the world, and, a little later, alchemy began to develop its conception of Mercurius as the partly material, partly immaterial spirit that penetrates and sustains all things, from stones and metals to the highest living organisms. In the form of a snake he dwells inside the earth, has a body, soul, and spirit, was believed to have a human shape as the homunculus or homo altus, and was regarded as the chthonic God.26 From this we can see clearly that the serpent was either a forerunner of man or a distant copy of the Anthropos, and how justified is the equation Naas = Nous = Logos = Christ = Higher Adam. The medieval extension of this equation towards the dark side had, as I have said, already been prepared by Gnostic phallicism. This appears as early as the fifteenth century in the alchemical Codex Ashburnham 1166,27 and in the sixteenth century Mercurius was identified with Hermes Kyllenios.

From the lapis, i.e., from alchemy, the line leads direct to the quaternio of alchemical states of aggregation, which, as we have seen, is ultimately based on the space-time quaternio. The latter comes into the category of archetypal quaternities and proves, like these, to be an indispensable principle for organizing the sense-impressions which the psyche receives from bodies in motion. Space and time form a psychological a priori, an aspect of the archetypal quaternity which is altogether indispensable for acquiring knowledge of physical processes.

Jung found that evidence in two sources: alchemy and Gnosticism. Interpreted psychologically, both served as hoary counterparts to his brand of psychology and therefore as evidence of its objectivity: The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology.24

Man kann dem Christentum eine rückständige Entwicklung vorwerfen, wenn man das eigene Ungenügen entschuldigen will. Ich will nicht in den Fehler verfallen, dasjenige der Sache zuzuschreiben, wofür die Ungeschicktheit des Menschen in erster Linie verantwortlich ist. [...] Die Forderung der "imitatio" Christi, nämlich dem Vorbild nachzufolgen und diesem ähnlich zu werden, sollte die Entwicklung und Erhöhung des eigenen inneren Menschen bezwecken, wird aber von oberflächlichen und zur mechanischen Formelhaftigkeit neigenden Gläubigen zu einem außenstehenden Kultobjekt gemacht, welches gerade durch die Verehrung daran verhindert wird, in die Tiefe der Seele einzugreifen und letztere zu jener dem Vorbild entsprechenden Ganzheit umzuschaffen.

But the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism—or neo-Platonism—to the contemporary world. But when I began to understand alchemy I realized that it represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity therefore existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.27

The focus of history and philosophy of science scholar Arthur Miller’s (2010) "137: Jung and Pauli and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession" is Jung and Pauli’s mutual effort to discover the cosmic number or fine structure constant, which is a fundamental physical constant dealing with electromagnetism, or, from a different perspective, could be considered the philosopher’s stone of the mathematical universe. This was indeed one of Pauli and Jung’s collaborative passions, but it was not the only concentration of their relationship. Quantum physics could be seen as the natural progression from ancient alchemy, through chemistry, culminating in the abstract world of subatomic particles, wave functions, and mathematics. [Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy]

Co se od našich vzorů můžeme naučit, je především ta skutečnost, že duše skrývá obsahy nebo je vystavena vlivům, jejichž asimilace se pojí s největšími nebezpečími. Když tedy staří alchymisté své tajemství připisovali hmotě a Faust ani Zarathuštra nás nikterak nepovzbuzují k tomu, abychom je k sobě přičlenili, nezbývá asi nic jiného, než ten arogantní nárok vědomí, aby bylo samo duší, odmítnout a přiznat duši skutečnost, již našimi současnými rozumovými prostředky nejsme schopni pochopit. Nepovažuji za tmáře toho, kdo přizná svou nevědomost, nýbrž toho, jehož vědomí není ještě ani tak vyvinuto, že o své nevědomosti nic neví. Jsem toho názoru, že alchymistické očekávání, že z hmoty lze zhotovit filosofické zlato nebo všelék nebo zázračný Kámen, je sice na jedné straně iluzí (jejíž příčinou je projekce), ale na straně druhé odpovídá psychickým skutečnostem, jimž v psychologii nevědomí připadá velký význam. Alchymista totiž, jak dokazují texty a jejich symbolika, projikoval proces individuace do chemických procesů proměny.

spite of the suppression of the Gnostic heresy, it [the heresy] continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages under the guise of alchemy.”30 For Jung, the alchemical process of extracting gold from base metals is a continuation of the Gnostic process of liberating fallen sparks from matter. Both processes are seemingly outward, physical or metaphysical ones which in fact are inner, psychological ones. Both represent a progression from sheer ego consciousness to the ego’s rediscovery of the unconscious and reintegration with it to forge the self. In alchemy the progression is from base metals to the distillation of vapor out of them and the return of that vapor to the metals to form gold. In Gnosticism the progression is from the Gnostic’s sheer bodily existence to the release of the immaterial spark within the Gnostic’s body and the reunion of that spark with the godhead. In both cases the state truly sought lies within human beings—between the ego and the unconscious—rather than outside them—between the vapor and the metals or between the spark and the godhead. The human state is simply projected onto the external world.31

It is significant that Gnostic philosophy found its continuation in alchemy.29 “Mater Alchimia” is one of the mothers of modern science, and modern science has given us an unparalleled knowledge of the “dark” side of matter. It has also penetrated into the secrets of physiology and evolution, and made the very roots of life itself an object of investigation. In this way the human mind has sunk deep into the sublunary world of matter, thus repeating the Gnostic myth of the Nous, who, beholding his reflection in the depths below, plunged down and was swallowed in the embrace of Physis. The climax of this development was marked in the eighteenth century by the French Revolution, in the nineteenth century by scientific materialism, and in the twentieth century by political and social “realism,” which has turned the wheel of history back a full two thousand years and seen the recrudescence of the despotism, the lack of individual rights, the cruelty, indignity, and slavery of the pre-Christian world, whose “labour problem” was solved by the “ergastulum” (convict-camp). The “transvaluation of all values” is being enacted before our eyes.

However, it looks somewhat different when viewed not from the personalistic standpoint, i.e., from the personal situation of Miss Miller, but from the standpoint of the archetype’s own life. As we have already explained, the phenomena of the unconscious can be regarded as more or less spontaneous manifestations of autonomous archetypes, and though this hypothesis may seem very strange to the layman, it is amply supported by the fact the archetype has a numinous character: it exerts a fascination, it enters into active opposition to the conscious mind, and may be said in the long run to mould the destinies of individuals by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, even if this influence is not recognized until long afterwards. The primordial image is itself a “pattern of behaviour”4 which will assert itself with or without the co-operation of the conscious personality. Although the Miller case gives us some idea of the manner in which an archetype gradually draws nearer to consciousness and finally takes possession of it, the material is too scanty to serve as a complete illustration of the process. I must therefore refer my reader to the dream-series discussed in Psychology and Alchemy, where he will be able to follow the gradual emergence of a definite archetype with all the specific marks of its autonomy and authority.

For this reason the ancients often compared the symbol to water, a case in point being tao, where yang and yin are united. Tao is the “valley spirit,” the winding course of a river. The symbolum of the Church is the aqua doctrinae, corresponding to the wonder-working “divine” water of alchemy, whose double aspect is represented by Mercurius. The healing and renewing properties of this symbolical water—whether it be tao, the baptismal water, or the elixir—point to the therapeutic character of the mythological background from which this idea comes. Physicians who were versed in alchemy had long recognized that their arcanum healed, or was supposed to heal, not only the diseases of the body but also those of the mind. Similarly, modern psychotherapy knows that, though there are many interim solutions, there is, at the bottom of every neurosis, a moral problem of opposites that cannot be solved rationally, and can be answered only by a supraordinate third, by a symbol which expresses both sides. This was the “veritas” (Dorn) or “theoria” (Paracelsus) for which the old physicians and alchemists strove, and they could do so only by incorporating the Christian revelation into their world of ideas. They continued the work of the Gnostics (who were, most of them, not so much heretics as theologians) and the Church Fathers in a new era, instinctively recognizing that new wine should not be put into old bottles, and that, like a snake changing its skin, the old myth needs to be clothed anew in every renewed age if it is not to lose its therapeutic effect.

Interest in alchemy seems to be nowadays on the rise. Whereas the educated public at large remains no doubt skeptical and indeed disdainful of the ancient discipline, there is today a deepening awareness among the better informed that what stands behind many an “exploded superstition” may be in fact a long-forgotten wisdom. Although Carl Jung was obviously exaggerating when ! he suggested that four centuries after being expelled from our universities,- alchemy stands “knocking at the door,” a number of factors have conspired; to render the prospect of re-admission less remote, at least, than it had been ; during the heyday of materialism. In any case, no truly solid grounds for rejecting the ancient doctrine have yet been proposed. Take the case of the so-called four elements: earth, water, air and fire. One can be reasonably certain that these terms were not employed alchemically in their ordinary sense, but were used to designate elements, precisely, out of which substances, as we know them, are constituted. Somewhat like the quarks of modern physics, these elements are not found empirically in isolation, but occur in their multiple combinations, that is to say, as the perceptible substances that constitute what I term the corporeal domain. Now, as I have argued at length in The Quantum Enigma (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden, 1995), corporeal objects are not in fact mere aggregates of quantum particles; and this clearly suggests that there may indeed be elements of the aforesaid kind. It turns out that our habitual opposition to alchemy is based mainly upon scientistic prejudice: upon a reductionist dogma, namely, for which there is in reality no scientific support at all.

Chinese alchemy parallels European alchemy in postulating the change from watery lead (nigredo) to fiery heart (rubedo) and then to pure white (albedo) or gold (also known as the Philosopher’s Stone).22 Understandably, in ancient Greece, a “similar archetypal concept of a perfect being is that of Platonic man, round on all sides and uniting within himself the two sexes.”23

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I am, I suppose, a mystic. I have never been at home in organized religion, but have had to find my own path and decipher my own truths. Without either Jung or alchemy, though, my efforts would have failed.

To Bruno and the hermeticists, of course, the four X were metaphysical as well as psychological. The cosmology of earth-air-fire-water has such a long history in alchemical-hermetic literature that it hardly needs to be insisted on; Jung has tried to find modern translations for this somewhat archaic system in his Psychology and Alchemy. The traditional system meanwhile lives on and is used by many occult groups still surviving; the reader will find it expounded in most of the works of Aleister Crowley, especially The Book of Thoth.

In alchemy, Jung realized, he had found a precursor of his own Psychology. ‘The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious’ (MDR 196). Hitherto, alchemy had been dismissed as no more than a crude anticipation of chemistry, but Jung believed that, in their efforts to turn base metals into gold, the alchemists were symbolically engaged in a process of psychic transformation. In other words, alchemy was a metaphor for individuation.

Healing and protection are long-standing themes for the serpent: the wand of Asclepius, Greek god of medicine, wrapped by a single serpent, inspires the symbols of the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization. Hermes’ winged staff, entwined by a pair of snakes, forms the caduceus, a symbol of alchemy and commerce, and a second symbol of medicine. Jung considered ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, to be the one archetypal symbol that explained absolutely everything.

The first way has been excellently presented by David Holt in his lecture on “Jung and Marx.” [1] There Holt shows that Jung imagined his work to be theoretically and historically substantiated by alchemy, and that Jung spent a

Nothing is possible without love, not even the processes of alchemy, for love puts one in the mood to risk everything and not to withhold important elements. ~Carl Jung, Jung and Hesse: A Diary of Two Friendships, Page 75