Page 30 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

unconscious premises, in other words on a sort of unknown prima
materia, and of this the alchemists said everything that we could
possibly say about the unconscious” (CW 12: 437). In other words:
where there is a mystery, there will be projection.

In favour of Jung’s general position we could also argue that the
highly abstract theoretical or ‘philosophic’ theories of alchemy, many of
which had no empirical grounding or outer world referents, and many of
which were primarily religious in orientation (such as the idea of a
divine spirit being trapped in matter), could lead the work of some
alchemists to be more than usually subject to psycholo gical
determination. The properties of metals could have been blended with
the symbolic properties of their associated planets and gods. Mercury
does not seem to have the same range of associations, or properties, as
the chemist’s mercury (Hg). The fact that Sulphur was both a conceptual
substance (‘philosophic sulphur’, or ‘non vulgar sulphur’) and a real
substance might well affect some alchemists views of the real substance.
It is also possible that the union of substances was not quite as concrete
and specific for all alchemists as it is for the modern chemist, and
fantasies about other conjunctions might have played a part in their
views and expectations of what would and did happen. Even if
everything is decodable into ‘ordinary chemicals’, we might still wish to
know how the Philosophers’ Stone, when attained, gets its reality. We
might also wonder if the ambiguity and sheer lack of clarity of many
texts, with the obscure defined in terms of the more obscure, lead to the
alchemist using fantasy, or association, to identify materials? It is
certainly possible that some alchemical texts are introspectively
‘magical texts’, more driven by the associations and metaphors of
language, coupled with hope and imagination, than they are by
following a transparent (if coded) reference to non-human reality.

The problem is that Jung does not demonstrate that many of the
symbolic descriptions he refers to are not straightforward and
conventional allegories. For example when someone says “I love you
with all my heart”, they may not necessarily believe they are feeling
with their organic heart. Likewise when we talk of the essence of a
debate, we are not implying that there is a spiritual substance we can
extract from an argument. Sometimes words can become fictional things
as when governments talk of the virtue of private enterprise, as if the
abstraction of ‘private enterprise’ could be a person with morals. As this
conventionality does not disprove the possibility of the psychic
motivation of the symbols used, this might be considered a weak

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