Page 14 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

term, or at the least there was the possibility of metaphoric expansion.
This association of metals with planets, could lead to exploration of
complex interior astronomies, and correspondences between the small
world of the human (the microcosm) and the great world of the cosmos
(the macrocosm) - which should not be confused with a distinction
between inner and outer as they contain each other. The distinction
between the Human and the Natural was not quite as firm as it was to
become.

Alchemy has usually been said to have been lost to the Western
world (though perhaps it never technically entered the Western world
from Alexandria) until the 12th Century when translation academies
were set up in Spain to translate Arabic texts into Latin3. These
translations were difficult as Latin was not replete with the required
technical terms, and translators sometimes transliterated, sometimes
guessed and sometimes incorporated their own explanations into the
texts. The texts were then dictated to even more ignorant copyists.
Confusion was bound to arise, and some of the problems in Western
theory may arise because of this.

Perhaps the earliest significant Western contribution to Alchemy
was the discovery of the distillation of wine and the manufacture of
spirits. These spirits, as the word suggests, were identified with the
essence, or spirit, of the substance. The supposed Testament of
Raymond Lull proposed that spirit congealed into matter (that there was
no hard and fast division between spirit and matter), and that the spirits
of wine were not only an example of the substance of the heavens (the
fifth element or quintessence), but helped extract this spirit with its
heavenly potencies from other substances.

Although some alchemists argued that metals were alive and grew in
the earth very slowly and that as they matured they changed into other
metals - eventually reaching gold (as gold has the perfect Form),
Western alchemy also tended, like the rest of medieval philosophy, to
grade substances, so metals where arranged into grades of perfection and

Pisces, Luna has her liquidity and her white brightness” and so on (CW 14:
176).
3. It is possible that this supposed loss is primarily a loss of records, or of
alchemy being a craft which did not write down its secrets, but there is little
evidence for this - I only know of one 9th Century Italian text, the Mappae
Clavicula which speaks of increasing gold (Singer 1948: 45).

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