Alchemy In everyday usage the word alchemy describes a psychological interplay among people.
Its etymology points to the actual practice of alchemy–derived via Arabic from the Greek chemeia.
Historically, alchemy involved the heating and mixing of chemicals and mineral substances with a view toward artificially transforming base metals into gold.
The ancient Greeks in Alexandria around 300 BCE practiced the art, as did the Arabs and Chinese.
During the Middle Ages numerous shams posing as alchemists arose in England.
Few realize that Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) wrote on alchemy. His writings remained unpublished in his lifetime.
The theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) also wrote on alchemy.
In the sixteenth-century the Swiss physician Paracelsus wrote extensively on alchemy.
Poet John Donne claimed “some can finde out Alchimy” in the Bible.
C. G. Jung says alchemists not only transformed substances but also practiced a psycho-spiritual technique. Jung claims that, because of the alchemists’ intimate relation to their work, the transmutation of substances paralleled their psychological development.
Raw sulfur (prima materia) was transformed into gold (the philosopher’s stone) through various boiling and chemical treatments. Thus baser aspects of the psyche were likewise transmuted to a higher state.
This involved stages, culminating in a ‘mystical union’ of the man’s anima and woman’s animus archetypes within the self, which Jung suggests are universal.
In medieval Europe twelve alchemical stages were associated with the twelve astrological houses of the zodiac.
Discounting the many historical frauds who knowingly faked the creation of gold in order to profit from aristocrats, for Jungians the alchemical quest is a personal search for immortality necessitating a sequence of a psychological deaths and rebirths.
For Jung these are not merely symbolic because positive and negative psychological states accompy each stage in the process.
Depth psychologists and some mythographers tend to see the mythic theme of dismemberment and restoration (exemplified by the Egyptian Osiris) as a parallel to the alchemical process.
The Romanian scholar of religion Mircea Eliade maintains that the alchemists quickened the natural pace of geological change–that is, they were altering time.
Eliade is not so much referring to the subjective experience of time but rather to cheating the laws of nature. Transforming raw elements into refined forms (such as carbon to diamond) requires precise geological conditions and a definite duration. By quickening the process, Eliade says the alchemists overcame a natural process and thus mastered time, itself.
Eliade’s view here seems confusing and perhaps underdeveloped. A similar type of argument could be presented in the context of buying a fast food burger instead of farming, slaughtering cows and cooking the meat for oneself. One might say that Eliade is merely playing word games as the nature of time is not truly altered in either instance.
While the alchemical process perhaps accelerates the geological rate, the Jungian Marie-Louise Von-Franz claims that the numerous stages in alchemy follow their own temporal logic, representing general phases in a process of psychological transformation.
Although often painful, Von-Franz says the alchemical stages cannot be quickened. The mythic and yet subtly visceral ‘boilings’ and ‘dismemberments’ of the psyche undergoing these transitions must be patiently endured, with the ultimate hope that maturity and wisdom – what the alchemists call the elixir of life – will eventually rise from the fire.
Jung also extends the metaphor of alchemy by likening the dynamic of human relationship to chemical interactions. Accordingly he wrote a piece called “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship” (1925). » Bhagavad Gita, Magnetizers, Ramakrishna (Sri)
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true alchemy is about spiritual transformation; not the matieral, although that can definitely be a consequential effect.
blessings