Page 7 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

else, alchemical secrecy and obscurity did not arise through repression.
Even if this did so eventuate in the West, this does not explain the
similar obscurity of Eastern writings.
2) People will frequently inform you that real alchemists were only
teaching the perfection of the Soul, or the making of ‘spiritual gold’.
This is likewise not the case. Any study of the lives of the alchemists,
including those alchemists who were known as adepts, shows they were
almost always interested in laboratory work, whether on metals or
medicines. They were also frequently involved in technological
innovation and discovery. This kind of ‘spiritual’ interpretation must be
distinguished from the interpretation of Jung, as he assumed that most of
the early alchemists did work with substances - although he was not
much interested in this aspect of the work. The spiritual alchemy
argument often relies on the assumption that a distinction between soul
and matter is obvious and universal. Likewise there is a tendency for
followers of this position to argue that as alchemists frequently deny
they are engaged in a search for riches, alchemy must be about the
search for spiritual perfection. It is conceivable that others might argue
that because alchemy often concerned itself with what we might call
practical things, it had no truck with what we might call esoteric things.
Either position is mistaken, and it could be more accurately suggested
that this categorical distinction was not one followed throughout most of
the history of alchemy, even though there may have been alchemists
more interested in transmutation of the soul than in metals and vice
versa.

History of Alchemy

As far as we know, and it is fairly unclear, Western alchemy began
in Alexandria some time in about the 2nd or 3rd Century AD in a
collision between both Greek philosophy and mystery religions, with
Egyptian metal work and possibly Egyptian philosophy. These
illustrations, although they come from Byzantine manuscripts of the
Greek texts, clearly show distillation equipment which appears to be non
allegorical and thus implies some kind of familiarity with chemical
process.

The recipes which survive from Egypt, in the so called Leyden and
Stockholm papyri dated to about the end of the third century AD (far
earlier than our surviving Greek alchemical manuscripts) (Caley 1926,
1927), concern such matters as the making of gold alloys, changing the

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