Inner Gold - Alchemy and Psychology

Alchemy itself has been seen as gold making, Self-making, and God making, and there are also the divides between phenomena and noumena, limit and transcendence, mechanism and vitalism, thought and being, image and idea, spirit and nature, soul and spirit, ontology and history, absolutism and relativism.

In that process, ego identity dies or is symbolically killed along with one's former perspectives of oneself andof life. Still, for Rosen, what Jung calls the Self is not destroyed. What is killed or analyzed to death is the negative (destructive) ego or false (inauthentic) Self. The primary Self as an archetypal image of the Supreme Being remains

Between 1916 and 1928, Jung published a number of works in which he attempted to translate some of the themes of Liber Novus into contemporary psychological language. In 1928, the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of the Taoist alchemical treatise The Secret of the Golden Flower, inviting him to write a commentary. Struck by the parallelis

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.

Such images reflect an archetypal moment when we stand on the threshold of our individuation and wonder whether going forward is going to lead to our demise.