Page 20 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

melting pots and devoted themselves entirely to Hermetic
philosophy. It was then that the chemist and the Hermetic
philosopher parted company... [the latter] lost the empirical
ground from under its feet and aspired to bombastic allegories
and inane speculations (CW 12: 227).

Which again shows that Jung was not particularly interested in
spiritual alchemy.

General features of Alchemy

With alchemy we are faced with great and sometimes deliberate
obscurity of language and image. The alchemists frequently admit they
write in an obscure or misleading manner, or say that they have hidden
what is essential to their art. Thus it is possible to read many things into
alchemical texts. Esoteric interpreters tend to disregard the often clear
and decodable chemical instructions which we can understand, as
obfuscation, and to see the remarks about spiritual transformation, which
we largely don’t understand, as being more important. Other people are
more likely to refer only to the laboratory work they can decode, and
ignore the rest as potentially decodable. Jung himself, though
recognising the existence and importance of laboratory work, largely
ignores the chemistry as irrelevant (as for example in the Zosimos paper
CW 13: 74).

Western alchemy is filled with recurrent symbols, Sun and Moon
headed humans, Kings, Queens, copulation, hermaphrodites, winged
Mercuries, wolves, lions, birds and dragons, and recurrent uses of
colours in particular green, black, white and red. When arranged as
graphic emblems these symbols can become quite complex with many
different elements in different patterns. It is not clear that these images
and terms always refer to the same things between different texts or
even within the same text. The alchemical commentator Petrus Bonus
wrote c.1330 “There must be a profound natural faculty for interpreting
the significance of those symbols and analogies of the philosophers,
which in one place have one meaning and in another a different” (1894:
134-5). Similarly Elias Ashmole wrote in 1652 of the alchemists that:
“Their chiefest study was to wrap up their Secrets in Fables, and spin
out their Fancies in Vailes and Shadows, whose Radii seems to extend
every way, yet so, that they all meete in a Common Centre, and point
onely at One thing” (Ashmole 1652: 440).

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