39: Carl Jung & Alchemy • Part I: Dreams, Art, & Synchronicity

“A huge task lay before me—I saw its enormous size—and its value and meaning escaped me. I entered into the dark and I groped along my path. That path led inward and downward.”

This is a note that Dr. Carl Gustave Jung writes in his Black Books, a note which appears before the first entry in his journals, which document a journey to find his soul. This deeply personal quest will result in the creation of the now notorious Red Book, or as Jung called it: Liber Novus—a visionary literary work that embodies not only Jung’s search for meaning but man’s capacity to wrestle with the Gods.

We’ve covered The Red Book in great detail in episodes 11 and 12, and even further in episodes 27 through 29. Now it’s time to follow Jung through the next chapter of his life and work.

Welcome to Creative Codex, I am your host, MJDorian. This is the first episode of an in depth series which explores the creative genius of Dr. Carl Jung and his work with alchemy.

But before we begin, we have to establish the context within which this story takes place. This will be helpful for those who are less familiar with Jung’s work and those of us who may be a little rusty on the details.

In October 1913, the psychologist, Dr. Carl Jung, has a startling vision while traveling on a train through the Swiss Alps, in it he sees a torrential flood, carrying the lifeless remains of countless thousands. Due to its apocalyptic nature, this will become known as his River of Blood vision. It comes on the heels of a mental breakdown resulting from his contentious and public split from his mentor, Sigmund Freud.

Because of this split, Jung loses his friends and colleagues, and risks his entire professional reputation as he attempts to establish a new school of thought in psychology, which he calls: analytical psychology.

During this tumultuous time, Jung continues his clinical work as a psychoanalyst with a steady practice and his academic work—writing research papers based on his experiences as a clinician—but he also embarks on an intensely personal visionary journey, spurred on by these visions he has which begin in October 1913. He later calls this period his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.

Every night, he sits in meditation and practices a method of engaging and interacting with his unconscious. A method he will later call ‘active imagination’. He writes everything down in his journals, every snippet of dialogue and imagery, to refer to or expand upon later; these journals will later come to be known as his Black Books.

In the months and years that follow, Jung will transcribe these visionary experiences into a book he calls Liber Novus, known today simply as The Red Book—due to its large red leather cover.

This book is a work of creative genius, which invites the reader to bear witness to a private journey through divine madness & spiritual transformation. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you listen to episodes 11 and 12 of this podcast, where we take a journey through Jung’s Red Book.

But there’s something which always bothered me about the book, it’s a mystery which we never addressed before on this show.

Paradoxically, after Jung spends years on this project and produces a truly inspired literary work—he abandons it. After 16 years, he sets the Red Book aside…and never picks it up again.

Why?

It turns out Jung gives us the answer on the final page of The Red Book. There he writes a note which is dated 1959—some 30 years after he stopped the project, he comes back to a blank page at the end of the book and writes:

“I worked on this book for 16 years. My acquaintance with alchemy in 1930 took me away from it. The beginning of the end came in 1928, when Wilhelm sent me the text of the ‘Golden Flower,’ an alchemical treatise.

There the contents of this book found their way into actuality and I could no longer continue working on it. To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness. It would also have developed into one, had I not been able to absorb the overpowering force of the original experiences.

With the help of alchemy, I could finally arrange them into a whole.”

There’s our answer. After 16 years of working on The Red Book, Dr. Carl Jung stumbles onto something which puts everything he had experienced into perspective: Alchemy. An ancient tradition, which leaves such a profound impression on him, that he spends the rest of his life studying it and writing about it.

Even his last great written work, Mysterium Conionctionis, is all about alchemy and psychology.

And that’s what this episode is about…Jung & Alchemy.

[cue music – Mysterium intro]

But I must warn you, this is not going to be a walk in the park—no transformative journey ever is. And that is what we will aim for in this series—nothing less than a transformation. Or in the terminology of alchemy: a transmutation.

We are not only going to sift through Jung’s writings on the subject, but also alchemical treatises themselves. For in wrestling with the paradoxes of alchemy, in an honest and open minded way, we too will be convinced of its underlying power. Or at the very least, the power which Jung saw in it.

We have our work cut out for us.

Jung is easily the most esoteric psychologist of the 20th century and alchemy is one of the most esoteric traditions of human history. Both truly embody the spirit of Mercury, as we’ll come to know. But again, we will have to wrestle with unknowns and paradoxes along the way. All the while remembering that the true gold of our expedition won’t be found on the surface layers, but deep in the dirt and bramble.

Welcome once again to Creative Codex, I am your host, MJDorian.

At the start of our journey, our path is beset by two problems…

Problem One:

What is alchemy? Where does it come from? When did it begin? What is it trying to achieve? At its core, what is its purpose? In other words, what does alchemy want?

Problem Two:

What does Jung find in alchemy? What does it represent to him that is so important, so profound, that it causes him to abandon his inspired work of the Red Book?

It’s time to find out.

This is Codex 39: Carl Jung & Alchemy • Part I: Dreams, Art, & Synchronicity

Let’s begin…

[cue Mysterium Opening Theme music]

 

Chapter One: Alchemical Dreams

In analytical psychology, there’s a notable respect and dignity given to the dream life of every individual. Dreams aren’t seen as meaningless neural misfirings of a confused brain. Instead, they are seen as products of the unconscious, and as such, they have the potential to alert us to problems outside of our conscious view, suggest solutions, and even bring our full attention to important chapters in our life which can compel our growth.

The point being that in Jung’s view, dreams are rarely meaningless, instead, we should see them as invitations for self reflection. This view curiously overlaps with all the world’s mystical and occult traditions—including alchemy. And this is no coincidence. In ancient times, dreams were often the point of origin of visions, and many spiritual traditions believe Gods speak to us through dreams.

Jung theorized that dreams can alert us to pivotal changes in our lives, and in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he shares multiple personal dreams to illustrate this fact.

Now, why should this matter to us? It turns out that Jung’s dreams led him to alchemy. Yes, wild, right?

In his autobiography, he writes about one such dream which came to him while he was still working with Freud. He writes:

“I had dreams which presaged the forthcoming break with Freud. One of the most significant had its scene in a mountainous region on the Swiss-Austrian border. It was toward evening, and I saw an elderly man in the uniform of an Imperial Austrian customs official. He walked past, somewhat stooped, without paying any attention to me.

His expression was peevish, rather melancholic and vexed. There were other persons present, and someone informed me that the old man was not really there, but was the ghost of a customs official who had died years ago. They said ‘he is one of those who still couldn’t die properly.’

That was the first part of the dream…after a hiatus came a second and far more remarkable part.

I was in an Italian city, and it was around noon, between twelve and one o’clock. A fierce sun was beating down upon the narrow streets. The city was built on hills and reminded me of a particular part of Basel, the Kohlenberg. The little streets which lead down into the valley, (the Birsigtal,) that runs through the city, are partly flights of steps.

In the dream, one such stairway descended to Barfüsserplatz. The city was Basel, and yet it was also an Italian city, something like Bergamo. It was summertime; the blazing sun stood at the zenith and everything was bathed in an intense light. A crowd came streaming toward me, and I knew that the shops were closing and people were on their way home to dinner.

In the midst of this stream of people walked a knight in full armor. He mounted the steps toward me. He wore a helmet of the kind that is called a basinet, with eye slits, and chain armor. Over this was a white tunic into which was woven, front and back, a large red cross.

One can easily imagine how I felt: suddenly to see in a modern city, during the noonday rush hour, a crusader coming toward me. What struck me as particularly odd was that none of the many persons walking about seemed to notice him. No one turned his head or gazed after him. It was as though he were completely invisible to everyone but me.

I asked myself what this apparition meant, and then it was as if someone answered me—but there was no one there to speak: ‘Yes, this is a regular apparition. The knight always passes by here between twelve and one o’clock, and has been doing so for a very long time,’ for centuries, I gathered, ‘and everyone knows about it.’ “

Jung writes that he went about analyzing this double dream immediately, as it felt significant. If you’re interested in possibly exploring dream analysis, then you will love this next part. Jung proceeds to elaborate on his thought process for analyzing this dream. As you listen, take note of how Jung treats the scenes and characters in the dream, first through establishing his personal associations and then exploring the scenes and characters as metaphors.

He starts with the first half of the dream, the part about the customs official who was a ghost, he writes:

“I set about analyzing this dream. In connection with ‘customs’ I at once thought of the word ‘censorship.’ In connection with ‘border’ I thought of the border between consciousness and the unconscious on the one hand, and between Freud’s views and mine on the other. The extremely rigorous customs examination at the border seemed to me an allusion to analysis.

At a border, suitcases are opened and examined for contraband. In the course of this examination, unconscious assumptions are discovered. As for the old customs official, his work had obviously brought him so little that was pleasurable and satisfactory that he took a sour view of the world. I could not refuse to see the analogy with Freud.

The knight and the customs official were contrasting figures. The customs official was shadowy, someone who ‘still couldn’t die properly’—a fading apparition. The knight, on the other hand, was full of life and completely real.

The second part of the dream was numinous in the extreme, whereas the scene on the border had been prosaic and in itself not impressive; I had been struck only by my reflections upon it.

In the period following these dreams I did a great deal of thinking about the mysterious figure of the knight. But it was only much later, after I had been meditating on the dream for a long time, that I was able to get some idea of its meaning.

Even in the dream, I knew the knight belonged to the twelfth century. That was the period when alchemy was beginning and also the quest for the Holy Grail. The stories of the Grail had been of the greatest importance to me ever since I read them, at the age of fifteen, for the first time.

I had an inkling that a great secret still lay hidden behind those stories. Therefore it seemed quite natural to me that the dream should conjure up the world of the Knights of the Grail and their quest—for that was, in the deepest sense, my own world, which had scarcely anything to do with Freud’s.

My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.”

This double dream that Jung experiences, seems to prefigure two things: 1) there was something off about his relationship with Freud, something which he was not yet conscious of at the time and 2) that there was something in the distant past which was waiting to be discovered.

It’s useful at this point to get a better understanding for how Jung and his colleagues viewed dreams and their context within the overall inner life of the individual. For this, let’s take a look at a passage in the book, Man & His Symbols, a wonderful introductory text to Jung’s theories. Marie Louise von Franz, arguably one of Jung’s closest students and colleagues, provides a chapter in the book about individuation, on the subject of dreams, she writes:

“Through dreams one becomes acquainted with aspects of one’s own personality that for various reasons one has preferred not to look at too closely. This is what Jung called ‘realization of the shadow.’ (He used the term ‘shadow’ for this unconscious part of the personality because it actually often appears in dreams in a personified form.)

The shadow is not the whole of the unconscious personality. It represents unknown or little-known attributes and qualities of the ego—aspects that mostly belong to the personal sphere and that could just as well be conscious. In some aspects, the shadow can also consist of collective factors that stem from a source outside the individual’s personal life.”

It’s clear that the first half of Jung’s dream, about the customs officer, concerned shadow content related to his relationship with Freud. But the second half is harder to pin down, as it seems to have been for Jung as well, when he admits it took him a long time to understand. We’ll come back to Jung’s dreams later, for now we have other work to do.

In order to better understand how Jung found alchemy and why it meant so much to him, we need to trace a timeline from his split with Freud to the moment he reads his first alchemical text. By keeping this timeline in mind we’ll be able to fully appreciate the incredible journey Jung embarks on in both his professional and personal life.

Autumn of 1913 is the beginning of what Jung will later refer to as his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. As we’ve covered in episodes 11 & 12, this experience compels him to document his dreams and meditation visions in his black book journals. During this time he also begins to feel a compulsion to transcribe these same visions more formally, in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, written in multiple languages and complimented by original artworks. He calls this work: Liber Novus. People today simply call it The Red Book.

This becomes a personal project that Jung pursues for years, usually during periods of nighttime solitude in his study. The experiences and visions that fill the Red Book prove so meaningful to Jung that he begins to feel there must be some historical parallels to this work; there must be evidence at some point in human history of other people engaging in this type of deep personal and spiritual exploration.

After several years of working on The Red Book, Jung finds this historical parallel in Gnosticism. Specifically in ancient writings about various Gnostic Christian sects of the Hellenistic period, dating back 1,800 years.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes:

“Between 1918 and 1926 I had seriously studied the Gnostic writers, for they too had been confronted with the primal world of the unconscious and had dealt with its contents, with images that were obviously contaminated with the world of instinct.”

In studying these Gnostic texts, Jung is inspired to write his own Gnostic scripture, in 1916, which he credits to Basilides, a famed scholar, teacher, and founder of a school of Gnosticism in Alexandria. Jung titles his scripture: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos. Or Seven Sermons to the Dead.

This work continues to be thought of as one of the most esoteric works by Jung. It’s dense, paradoxical, philosophical, and religious in nature. It’s an inspired work of creative genius, and some modern Gnostics go so far as to claim it cements Carl Jung as a prophet of Gnosticism. We cover the Seven Sermons to the Dead in full detail on episodes 27, 28 and 29 of this podcast. If you’re interested in that deeply esoteric work, check those out.

But as much as Jung felt a kindred connection with the tradition of Gnosticism, he faced a serious problem: the early Catholic church effectively wiped them out of the history books, they persecuted any Gnostics as heretics, and Catholic authorities destroyed every Gnostic text they could get their hands on. Jung saw Gnosticism as a distant precursor to analytical psychology, but as far as he knew, these various Gnostic sects lasted only a few hundred years.

And so, his work—in this regard—was at a standstill.

If only Gnosticism could have survived over a thousand years more, then he would be able to trace the roots of analytical psychology more convincingly to something ancient.

But you may be wondering: why was this task seemingly so important to Jung? Why does it seem like he felt he needed to validate his theories by connecting them to an ancient thread?

I haven’t seen anyone argue this next point, so this is my personal opinion. After having studied Jung’s work for over half a decade, I get the sense that he placed tremendous weight in the idea that the human psyche itself is an ancient structure. Humans have been on Earth for roughly 200,000 years. As such, the mind carries residual echoes and tendencies of the distant past, the same way that DNA does, but these largely remain unconscious.

For example, there are certain tendencies of the mind that appear spontaneously, irrespective of time or culture. Like the tendency to meditate. Why does every ancient culture in the world have some form of meditation? Irrespective of their contact with one another. And add to that, why do modern humans feel the compulsion to meditate? Or how about music? Or religion? …or magic?

There is a passage in The Red Book, in which Jung is speaking to his spiritual teacher, Philemon. And he is asking him about the nature of magic. The wise Philemon replies elusively, arguing that it would be better if everything he knew about magic were buried with him.

And then he states: “It can always be rediscovered later. It will never be lost to humanity, since magic is reborn with each and every one of us.”

It’s a compelling thought, that even if you erased all the information about magic practices throughout human history, burned every single last book and artifact…then the next generation, having never heard of magic, would discover it again—from a mixture of necessity and intuition.

Technology and culture changes, but the structure of the human psyche remains the same. In this regard, what we do now, works for us now because it has always worked for us—for 200,000 years. If you stumble onto an activity that feels particularly pleasurable or interesting, you usually don’t have to look very far back in history to see that people were engaged in that same activity, though in a different form.

Take something specific like NASCAR—you know, the sport of racing cars around an oval. Right. Trace that back a hundred years and you see the sport of bicycle racing. Trace that back two thousand years and you have the sport of chariot racing with horses. You can imagine the NASCAR crowd would feel right at home in the stands of a chariot race. If you trace that far enough eventually you just get back to foot racing. Snap back to the present and you realize ‘oh yeah, children do that all the time.’

The form may be different, but the spirit of it is the same—the spirit of racing. And this goes the same for countless other things. The forms change but the spirit or the distilled core stays the same.

And so, understanding human nature in this way, I imagine Jung felt that analytical psychology must have several antecedents. The problem is finding the surviving evidence of them.

In The Red Book, Jung writes a passing phrase that has always stuck with me, and in this context, it really puts things into perspective. He writes: “The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.” I believe this was Jung’s task, and he was very conscious of that fact.

All of culture is in this state of constant rebirth, where things don’t disappear they just change form. Which, of course, is a very alchemical idea in itself, that the alchemists would call transmutation—the transformation of a substance from one form to another: solid to liquid, liquid to gas, and so on.

But back to Jung’s determined search. He writes this in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

“…the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism—or neo-Platonism—to the contemporary world.”

Jung sets this problem aside. Then in the early 1920’s he begins to have recurring dreams of an extension being added to his house. Every time he wakes up confused, as that portion of the house does not exist. He writes about these recurring dreams, saying:

“Beside my house stood another, that is to say, another wing or annex, which was strange to me. Each time I would wonder in my dream why I did not know this house, although it had apparently always been there.

Finally came a dream in which I reached the other wing. I discovered there a wonderful library, dating largely from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Large, fat folio volumes, bound in pigskin, stood along the walls. Among them were a number of books embellished with copper engravings of a strange character, and illustrations containing curious symbols such as I had never seen before.

At the time I did not know to what they referred; only much later did I recognize them as alchemical symbols. In the dream I was conscious only of the fascination exerted by them and by the entire library. It was a collection of medieval incunabula and sixteenth-century prints.

The unknown wing of the house was a part of my personality, an aspect of myself; it represented something that belonged to me but of which I was not yet conscious. It, and especially the library, referred to alchemy, of which I was ignorant, but which I was soon to study.”

Jung is implying that over the course of years, his unconscious was signaling to him this need to search for something in the medieval texts. We mentioned the dream of the knight walking through the crowded town, which only he could see, and which reminded him of his childhood interests in the tales of the Holy Grail. Now there is this recurring dream of a vast library of medieval texts, added as an extension to his house. One interesting thing Jung mentions in his analysis is the idea that a house is a metaphor for the psyche itself.

If you dream, as I have, of finding secret doors in your house or revisiting certain rooms in your childhood home, you are very likely dealing with a dream about your personality or mental structures, that something is ready to change or is in the process of shifting or growing. Endlessly fascinating stuff.

There is a passage in Man And His Symbols, in the chapter written by Marie Louise Von Franz, which helps to put Jung’s recurring dreams into perspective.

She writes:

“Jung discovered not only that all dreams are relevant in varying degrees to the life of the dreamer, but that they are all parts of one great web of psychological factors. He also found that, on the whole, they seem to follow an arrangement or pattern. This pattern Jung called ‘the process of individuation.’

Since dreams produce different scenes and images every night, people who are not careful observers will probably be unaware of any pattern. But if one watches one’s own dreams over a period of years and studies the entire sequence, one will see that certain contents emerge, disappear, and then turn up again.

Many people even dream repeatedly of the same figures, landscapes, or situations; and if one follows these through a whole series, one will see that they change slowly but perceptibly. These changes can be accelerated if the dreamer’s conscious attitude is influenced by appropriate interpretation of the dreams and their symbolic contents.

Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth—the process of individuation.”

Taking all these insights into account, one can’t help but pause for a moment, and look back on one’s own dream life. Jungian dream analysis provides a compelling reason for the phenomenon of recurring dreams, which all of us have experienced at some point in our lives. As Von Franz states, not only are dreams parts of one great web of psychological factors, but over time, meandering patterns emerge, where recurring dreams are strands of the same underlying mental structure.

This brings us to the final dream which Jung sees as prefiguring his lifelong obsession with alchemy.

He writes:

“The crucial dream anticipating my encounter with alchemy came around 1926.

I was in South Tyrol. It was wartime. I was on the Italian front and driving back from the front line with a little man, a peasant, in his horse-drawn wagon. All around us shells were exploding, and I knew that we had to push on as quickly as possible, for it was very dangerous.

We had to cross a bridge and then go through a tunnel whose vaulting had been partially destroyed by the shells. Arriving at the end of the tunnel, we saw before us a sunny landscape, and I recognized it as the region around Verona. Below me lay the city, radiant in full sunlight.

I felt relieved, and we drove on out into the green, thriving Lombard plain. The road led through lovely springtime countryside; we saw the rice fields, the olive trees, and the vineyards. Then, diagonally across the road, I caught sight of a large building, a manor house of grand proportions, rather like the palace of a North Italian duke.

It was a typical manor house with many annexes and outbuildings. Just as at the Louvre, the road led through a large courtyard and past the palace. The little coachman and myself drove in through a gate, and from here we could see, through a second gate at the far end, the sunlit landscape again.

I looked around: to my right was the facade of the manor house, to my left the servant’s quarters and the stables, barns, and other outbuildings, which stretched on for a long way.

Just as we reached the middle of the courtyard, in front of the main entrance, something unexpected happened: with a dull clang, both gates flew shut. The peasant leapt down from his seat and exclaimed, “Now we are caught in the seventeenth century.’ Resignedly I thought, ‘Well, that’s that! But what is there to do about it? Now we shall be caught for years.’

Then the consoling thought came to me: ‘Someday, years from now, I shall get out again.’

After this dream I plowed through ponderous tomes on the history of the world, of religion, and of philosophy, without finding anything that could help me explain the dream. Not until much later did I realize that it referred to alchemy, for that science reached its height in the seventeenth century.”

This final dream occurs to Jung in 1926. Two years later, a friend, Richard Wilhelm, sends him a newly translated ancient text which will change him forever and set him off on his journey into alchemy. That text was The Secret of the Golden Flower. This is a Chinese meditation treatise which fits into a Taoist tradition known as inner alchemy.

Jung devours this work, he reads it and rereads it, something in it penetrates him to his core. He even writes an introduction to it for his friend, Richard Wilhelm’s translation.

Jung admits:

“I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center.”

Perhaps it is also the enigmatic nature of the text, or the poetic descriptions of meditation, there is also no doubt Jung was intrigued by the primary method of the meditation, which encourages the reader to observe one’s thoughts and emotions without judgement, and let them pass through like a cloud.

On reading the treatise you start to see why Jung may have been so excited by it. Here is an excerpt from The Secret of the Golden Flower, for our purposes I’m using the Thomas Cleary translation. The passage reads:

“Whenever you sit, you should quiet your mind and unify your energy.

How is the mind quieted? The mechanism is in the breathing, but the mind alone knows you are breathing out and will not let the ears hear. When you don’t hear it, the breathing is fine; and when the breathing is fine, the mind is clear.

If you can hear it, the breathing is rough, which means the mind is cloudy. Cloudiness means oblivion, so it is natural to feel sleepy. Even so, the mind should be kept on the breathing.

It is also essential to understand that this device is not mechanical or forced. Just maintain a subtle looking and listening.

What is ‘looking’? It is the light of the eyes spontaneously shining, the eyes only looking inward and not outward. Not looking outward yet being alert is inward looking[…]

What is ‘listening’? It is the light of the ears spontaneously listening, the ears only listening inward and not outward. Not listening outward yet being alert is inward listening[…]

Listening means listening to the soundless; looking means looking at the formless.

When the eyes do not look outside and the ears do not listen outside, they are closed in and have a tendency to race around inside. Only by inward looking and listening can you prevent this inner racing as well as oblivion in between. This is the meaning of the sun and moon combining their vitalities and lights.”

Make note of the mention of the sun and moon at the end of the passage. These two symbols will become incredibly meaningful to us as we venture deeper into alchemy. Modern scholars date this text to the 1600’s, which is again the seventeenth century time period as foretold by Jung’s third alchemy dream. Throughout this Chinese treatise, there is also the mention of water and fire, it is said that their intercourse is a key to this work—again, very alchemical concepts.

There’s yet another connection he establishes with this text which doesn’t have its origin in dreams, but in art. Throughout his life, Jung also made artworks as a way of further exploring and crystallizing certain dreams, meditations, or intuitions.

“In 1927 I obtained confirmation of my ideas about the center and the self by way of a dream. I represented its essence in a mandala which I called “Window on Eternity”.

A year later I painted a second picture, likewise a mandala, with a golden castle in the center. When it was finished, I asked myself, “Why is this so Chinese?” I was impressed by the form and choice of colors, which seemed to me Chinese, although there was nothing outwardly Chinese about it. Yet that was how it affected me.

It was a strange coincidence that shortly afterward I received a letter from Richard Wilhelm enclosing the manuscript of a Taoist-alchemical treatise entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower, with a request that I write a commentary on it.

I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed of
confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the center. That was the first event which broke through my isolation. I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with something and someone.

In remembrance of this coincidence, this “synchronicity,” I wrote underneath the picture which had made so Chinese an impression upon me: ‘In 1928, when I was painting this picture, showing the golden, well-fortified castle, Richard Wilhelm in Frankfurt sent me the thousand-year-old Chinese text on the yellow castle, the germ of the immortal body.’ “

 

So you see… we now have our answer.

How did Jung arrive at the doorstep of alchemy?

It was through dreams, art, and synchronicity.

 

INTERMISSION

And now it’s time for a brief intermission.

I hope you’re enjoying this journey into Jung & Alchemy. If you’re interested in reading a transcript of this episode, which includes all the quotations I’ve mentioned, you can find that on my site at mjdorian.com/transcripts

There you’ll also find transcripts for plenty of other episodes including the Red Book series and my Vincent Van Gogh series, and many more, again that’s mjdorian.com/transcripts

If you like what we do here on Creative Codex and would like to become a supporter of the show, and gain access to tons of exclusive content, head on over to my Patreon page, that’s patreon.com/mjdorian

There you’ll find exclusive Creativity Tip minisodes, episode exclusives about some of the topics we’ve covered, and the Limited Release series—which includes three full length episodes all about Kurt Cobain, a series which totals four hours that is not available in the main podcast feed.

Again, you can find all that on my Patreon at patreon.com/mjdorian The link for that is in the episode description.

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Without further ado, back to Codex 39: Carl Jung & Alchemy • Part 1: Dreams, Art, & Synchronicity.

 

After Jung is introduced to the Secret of the Golden Flower, he feels a compulsion to explore other alchemical texts. The question is: will other texts resonate in the same meaningful way with his personal experiences?

But he encounters an immediate problem: in the early 1900’s, getting a hold of any alchemical texts is nearly impossible. It’s just not something people are researching. So he commissions a Munich bookseller to notify him if he comes across any alchemical treatises. Shortly afterward, he acquires the first, a book titled Artis Auriferae Volumina Duo, or the Artists of Gold Dual Volume, published in 1593, which is a collection of Latin treatises he has never read before, though he will need to translate them himself to decipher their meaning.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes about this particular collection:

“I let this book lie almost untouched for nearly two years. Occasionally I would look at the pictures, and each time I would think, ‘Good Lord, what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to understand.’ But it persistently intrigued me, and I made up my mind to go into it more thoroughly.

The next winter I began, and soon found it provocative and exciting. To be sure, the texts still seemed to me blatant nonsense, but here and there would be passages that seemed significant to me, and occasionally I even found a few sentences which I thought I could understand.

Finally, I realized that the alchemists were talking in symbols—those old acquaintances of mine. ‘Why, this is fantastic,’ I thought. ‘I simply must learn to decipher all this.’

By now I was completely fascinated, and buried myself in the texts as often as I had the time. One night, while I was studying them, I suddenly recalled the dream that I was caught in the seventeenth century. At last I grasped its meaning. ‘So that’s it! Now I am condemned to study alchemy from the very beginning.’

I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious.

The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. When I pored over these old texts everything fell into place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it.

I now began to understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in historical perspective.”

Stumbling onto alchemy was a revelation for Jung. And it’s important to appreciate the strangeness of this discovery. In the early 1900’s, no one was interested in alchemy, especially not in academic circles. Historians and intellectuals of the time did not even waste a thought on it, alchemy was relegated to the trash heap of history. It was seen as a foolish pursuit by greedy medieval people.

Although it served as a precursor to chemistry, its apparent fixation on transforming base metals to gold and a penchant for bizarre imagery made it a thing no one took seriously. Add to that, there were no readily available translations of the ancient alchemical treatises, they all existed only in their original Latin, Greek, or Arabic forms.

As important as this new work was to Jung, it was far from easy. It was around this exact time that he came to know a young woman who would prove invaluable in his alchemical studies: Marie Louise von Franz.

Von Franz was a college student at this time at the University of Zurich, studying classical philology, Latin, Greek, and classical literature. She first met Dr. Jung in 1933, when she was 18 and he was 58.

They first met when Jung invited the nephew of his assistant to Bollingen Tower, near Zurich. This was a tower which Jung had built and designed himself. Jung told the young student he could bring a few of his friends too, he asked “how about a girl?” And Jung said “of course!”

And so, among the group of students who visited Jung on this trip to Bollingen Tower was Marie Louise Von Franz. She recounted the event to her sister later that night as one of the most ‘decisive encounters’ of her life.

In an interview later in her years she mentions a certain conversation she had with Jung. Here is an interview with Von Franz from 1977 speaking about that time:

That meeting with Jung left such a strong impression on her that in the months that followed, Von Franz decided she wanted to enter into analysis with him.

But one major problem, she professed to him that she did not have any money to pay him in return. So he proposed a barter arrangement: he would take her on for analysis and she would help him translate the alchemical treatises he was beginning to acquire in large volumes. They shook hands on this arrangement.

Many years later, Marie Louise von Franz would be considered the heir apparent to Jung. She worked so closely with him throughout the years that there came to be virtually no distinction between his work and her work. Von Franz became a Jungian analyst, a renowned author of over 20 books in the field of psychology, and one of his closest students and colleagues.

In light of this, in this series on alchemy, we will occasionally be consulting with the writings of Marie Louise Von Franz to supplement our understanding of Jung’s writings.

From an interview in 1977, Von Franz provides one more valuable insight, this one about Jung’s initial hesitation about pursuing these alchemical studies.

“His hesitation was that these texts were very very difficult…

…but he knew he had to do it, all his dreams pushed him in that direction.”

Translation issues aside, what is so fascinating about alchemy is that all of the material, from the treatises to the artworks are thoroughly esoteric. Nothing is every plainly spoken. Everything has a double or triple meaning, veiled in practical and spiritual symbolism.

By attempting to engage with this work, you are stepping into a terrain of such depth and mystery that you are forced to wrestle with paradoxes. Rarely will you find solid ground on which to stand. And I think this is one of the characteristics of alchemy which attracted Jung.

For an unparalleled intellect such as Jung’s, alchemy provided a worthy challenge—a paradox that his psyche could chew on for a lifetime.

We’ll end this episode with a reading from one of the most famous alchemical texts in history: The Emerald Tablet. A work seen with special reverence in occult circles, as it is the origin of the notorious phrase: as above so below.

Reflecting on The Emerald Tablet will give us a taste of what is to come. By the next episode of this series, we will be diving headfirst into the history and symbolism of alchemy. For this reading, we’ll be using the English translation of the Emerald Tablet, as written by Isaac Newton. Yes, one of history’s greatest scientists was also an alchemist.

It reads:

“Tis true without lying, certain and most true.
That which is below is like that which is above
and that which is above is like that which is below
to do the miracle of one only thing.

And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one:
so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.

The Sun is its father, the moon its mother,
the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse.

The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.

Its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth.

Separate thou the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross
sweetly with great industry.

It ascends from the earth to the heaven and again it descends to the earth
and receives the force of things superior and inferior.

By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.

Its force is above all force, for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing.

So was the world created.

From this are and do come admirable adaptations whereof the means is here in this.

Hence I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.

That which I have said of the operation of the Sun is accomplished and ended.”

On the next Creative Codex…

We will finally answer: what is alchemy? Where does it come from? What is its purpose? How did Jung understand the esoteric symbolism of alchemy through the lens of analytical psychology?

And I will share with you a special discovery: in The Red Book, I have located a passage which proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jung seemingly tapped into the spirit of alchemy through his imagination years before he started studying it. Believe me, you don’t wanna miss it. All this and more on Part II of Carl Jung & Alchemy.

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