Page 48 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

data. For example the observer invents a category which they call
alchemy and looks for confirmatory examples ignoring everything that
might be present which does not fit with their definition. This is
particularly likely to be the case when the analyst chooses fragments out
of texts from widely differing periods. This is not something to which
Jung alone is subject to, many other people also dismiss large amounts
of alchemical writings as not really alchemical, in order to further their
own interpretation as constituting the only ‘real’ alchemy. Jung, for
example, dismisses some writers for being concerned with gold making
or mysticism (CW 12: 316).

3) This method also deletes the sense of possible change and of its
consequences - and alchemy does change over time as implied in the
brief history given above. If alchemy is related to psychology and
unconscious compensation, then these changes are important to the
kinds of compensation alchemy offers. Jung himself seems to think the
psyche may change with social organisation or ideology, but deletes this
from his alchemical studies. Yet if Western alchemy is a compensation
for problems within Christianity, then it may well be expected to change
as Christianity changes, and we might also expect Jung to investigate
what this says about non-Christian alchemies - what are they
compensations for?

4) A further, particularly Jungian problem, is that many of his
examples are not examples of the same type of symbol within a similar
context, but ‘amplifications’ which follow symbols or motifs into other
kinds of contexts and into other symbols - that is they often do not
appear to clear up ‘the problem’, but proceed by association to widen the
problem. Thus in the essay on Zosimos Jung writes, in the following
order, about: sacrifice, dismemberment, flaying, stuffing, scalping,
taking the soul, torture, hell, testing metals on the touchstone, heads,
obtaining the arcane substance, gold from the sun, rays, the hermetic
krater, death and rebirth, Isis, Horus, water and the Nile, Osiris, spirit as
water as paradox, pairs of opposites, violations, states that chemical
recipes are of no interest, and discusses Mercurius, and roundness. He
covers all this within six pages (CW 13: 70-76). Some of these
associations may seem to have little to do with alchemy, or even of the
Greece of the period of Zosimos. Sometimes a reader may be hard
pressed to see the relevance of a whole chain of associations. This may
be completely legitimate and even valuable in dealing with someone’s
dream, but it does mean that the books read largely as a web of free

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