Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy: Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea (ISSN)

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.

Considered from the wider perspective of the history of the human spirit, alchemy and its goal appeared not only as physical processes leading to chemistry, but also as a religious discipline whose goal was the transformation of earthly man into an illuminated philosopher.

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.