[from Jung: A Biography, by Gerhard Wehr, transl. David M. Weeks. Boston, Shambhala Press 1987, pp. 245–46.]
One of the most remarkable elements of C. G. Jung’s activity is undoubtedly the numerous works that he devoted to alchemy and its significance for psychology. This line of research continued for decades, extending from his middle life to the end of his productive period, and fascinated him as virtually no other area of work and knowledge. Entering Jung’s study and library at his home in Küsnacht today, one finds along one wall, protected from the direct light, an impressive collection of rare and valuable alchemical texts. As an “eminently historically minded researcher,” in the words of Aniela Jaffé, it was not simply a hobby that made him assemble all these manuscripts and even produce extensive hand-copied excerpts from these alchemical editions, in order to surround himself with curiosities for their own sake. Rather, he was guided by his need to document, by means of “historical prefigurations,” what he had experienced for himself and explored psychologically, to place the productions of the unconscious of modern people in a larger historical context. Looking back upon this critical stage in his own life, he asked himself what examples of these inner experiences there might be in history, and where. In the Memories he put it this way:
If I had not succeeded in finding such evidence, I would never have been able to substantiate my ideas. Therefore, my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked.
In approaching Jung’s work, therefore, we cannot avoid regarding alchemy as more than just the “prescientific” expression of the scientific techniques of chemistry. It does not mean the art of turning lead into gold, which became decadent and disrespectable in past centuries, and in which error—not to mention (self-)deception—and truth were so oddly combined. Those who sought in earnest the lapis philosophorum or “philosophers’ stone,” striving to express it in chemical form, referred to a practice that presented in the imagery of material “transmutation” what was primarily a path to spiritual and physical knowledge, a way of self-transformation. One of the few in our century who have sought to connect the meditative and the operative aspects of alchemical practice, the writer and pharmacist Alexander von Bernus, explains:
The background of alchemy is initiation, an indoctrination into the mysteries that dates back millennia. Originating in the Egyptian-Chaldean Hellenistic universal consciousness in the pre-Christian era, and later flowing into the West via the Arabic cultural orbit, it became tinged with the substance of Christianity. . . . To be sure, the idea of transmutation stands at the center of alchemical initiation; not, however, that of the transformation of metals but rather the mystical process of inner transmutation, of which the outward chemical and physical transformation of metals is but the external manifestation, realized and made visible in the material world.