Page 37 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

thief from outside will be cast out with the workers of wickedness”.
Jung explains that something has stopped your fantasy, namely the
sulphur of greedy desire. You no longer wish to be fruitful for any sake
but your own, and are thus barren. And so on. There is not even the
vaguest attempt to see how the author uses terms like “dry earth”,
“moisture”, “pores of the earth”, “thief” or so on, in the rest of his fairly
considerable body of texts. There is even no attempt to try and
investigate how other alchemists of the same time period (middle 17th
Century) might use them. The text is made to be an allegory of some
kind of psycho-spiritual teaching. Although this commentary clarifies
some of Jung’s theories about how individuation might proceed, it is
hardly analogous to amplifying a person’s dreams through their personal
history or problems. Jung finishes by answering the question of whether
Philalethes had anything like Jung’s interpretation in mind when he
wrote, by writing “I regard this as out of the question, and yet I believe
that these authors invariably said the best, most appropriate, and clearest
thing they could about the matter in hand”, and that in time his own
interpretation would likewise be felt to be metaphorical (ibid: 172-3).
Unfortunately, this could be a license to read almost anything into the
texts as there is no check. Although this may be fruitful, it may not tell
us much, if anything, about alchemy.

Jung’s longest late analysis of a text is of Ripley’s Cantilena, and
although he makes comparisons outside the text, he does not make
comparison with other Ripley texts so that he could explore the
dynamics of an alchemist at a particular time and place.

In the Ripley analysis, Jung is primarily concern with the symbol of
the King. The King represents an exalted personality and carries myth:
“it is a psychic figure which reaches far back into prehistory” (CW 14:
258). However the king is not a fixed figure but one which undergoes
transformation from an imperfect into a more perfect state (ibid: 265-6).
Jung argues that the King represents a hypertrophy of the ego, it
represents violence of the will, selfishness and greed without bounds.
This calls for compensation, and the king is dissolved, and separated out
from the unconscious, whereupon he revives in a better state (ibid: 272-
3). In the Ripley poem the King starts off barren, despite his high state.
He is compared with the Ancient of Days (i.e. God), but he needs to be
reborn (ibid: 275-80). He is to be dissolved by his mother’s breast, and
unites with the mother, who becomes sick with poison and seals up her
chamber to feast on peacock’s flesh, Green Lion’s blood, and Mercury’s
mead [?] (ibid: 282-5). There then follows a discussion of the

33