A Jungian & Archetypal Perspective on Alchemy
Taken symbolically, alchemy is about turning the lower, primitive aspects of the self into a purified state; to illuminate the darkness with a sense of value or meaning, making conscious what is unconscious. This becoming whole is the process Jung called individuation, which is what we’re doing with dreamwork and belonging.
Toko-pa Turner • Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home
Many interpreters of alchemical texts say that the processes they describe are metaphors for psycho-spiritual transformation not physical transformation. This was Carl Jung’s view.
Steve March • The Four Styles of Transformation Part 2: On Transmutation — Aletheia
For Jung, alchemy had a dual face. He saw it as both a quest to literally transform matter in the laboratory as well as a spiritual quest aimed at the transformation of the soul and thus as a religious philosophy.
Stanton Marlan • Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy: Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea (ISSN)
alchemy has placed the death experience at the heart of the alchemical process. Without entering into the nigredo and undergoing the mortificatio experience, no transformation is possible.