Chapter 1: Origins of Alchemy: Extraverted and Introverted Traditions

Jung sometimes defined the introverted psychological tradition in alchemy as the art of active imagination with material. We generally think of active imagination as talking to our own personified complexes, and trying in our imagination and fantasies to personify certain of our complexes and then have it out with them, allowing the ego complexes or the ego to talk to these inner factors. As you know, you can also do active imagination through musical improvisation or through painting, producing your unconscious material in the form of a painted fantasy; or by sculpting or dancing. You can lend very different means of self-expression to the unconscious. With your body you can dance a fantasy, or with a brush you can paint a weird image. So why couldn't you project your unconscious onto a chemical material and produce your fantasy with that? Why, instead of putting a mosaic together with a fantasy image to express your unconscious situation, could you not take different materials which seem to express something in yourself and mix them together? So that was an introverted aspect of alchemy, and naturally, while meditating on these factors, you can talk to them.

I remember when I was ten years old, growing up in the country, I frequently used to play alone in a little garden house attached to the henhouse. Once I read in a paper for young people, which gave some information on natural science, that amber was really resin that came from old trees and had been washed about in the sea. That somehow triggered my fantasy, and I thought that now I wanted to make a yellow amber pearl. That was true alchemical thinking, though I had not the foggiest idea of alchemy. So then I thought, "Well, nature makes amber by rolling about resin in the sea, so we must speed up the process of nature." (You read that in every alchemical text: "We are speeding up the natural processes.") I had not the faintest idea what to do but went about it completely naively. I thought that seawater consisted of water with salt and iodine, so I just took salt from the kitchen and iodine from my parents' medicine cabinet and mixed them without caring about the quantities. Then I collected resin from the neighboring trees, which naturally was full of dirt, bits of bark and so on. So I thought (and this again was alchemy, without my knowing it) that before you mix the substances, you must purify them separately. The seawater was clean, but now the resin had to be melted and then put through a sieve. While I was melting it in a stolen pan, I was filled with pity for it and wondered if it was suffering pain. I thought that if you cooked a human he would be in agony, and wondered if matter really was dead or if the resin suffered when I heated it. So I talked to it. I said, "Look here, you may suffer great tortures, but you will become such a beautiful yellow amber pearl that it is worth going through the torture."

Well, there came a sad end to the experiment, as often happened to alchemists. The whole thing caught fire and 1 burnt my eyebrows, and thus my parents found out what I was doing and unfortunately put a stop to my alchemy. Only later, when I was nineteen or twenty and had met Jung and he told me to look up certain alchemical texts for him, did I discover that I had done an archetypal thing which was right there in the whole history of alchemy. It was one of those instances where you see the spontaneous reappearance of an archetypal situation, for in my parents' library at that time there was not one book with a single allusion to alchemy in it. I could not even have heard about it by cryptomnesia. And in my Swiss village school, in the lower elementary classes, one would not hear about pearl-making or alchemy either. You could call it a piece of active, or rather, at the time, passive imagination, but an imagination making a fantasy-play with the material—not by painting a golden pearl but by making one. That was what happened to those alchemists, they were seized on an inner and outer level by the archetype of transformation—for alchemists gave themselves totally to the Great Art.

Now, you see, if you think of an archetypal motif and of an archetypal background, such as appears very often in myths and fairy tales, people get caught in a trap. They enter a castle and the door shuts behind them, and that always means that now they are in the Self. Now they have reached that point in their psyche where they can no longer run away from themselves. Now they are in for it, and the ego, which always flirts with the idea of getting away from what it ought to do, knows that it is caught in the mousetrap and hitherto has to fulfill the requirements of the Self and will not be released before that is accomplished.

In all fairy tales and mythological patterns one is always released again, in spite of everything, but only after one has done the heroic deed. Trying to run away is no good, for you cannot escape. There is, for instance, a Persian story where the hero gets into a magic bath in which the water rises inexorably. The hero swims until he is exhausted, until finally the water lifts him up to the level of the cupola over the bath. At that point he touches the round stone and escapes. Everything disappears, and he suddenly finds himself walking freely in the desert, towards a new, unknown trial. In 1926 Jung had the dream which he relates in Memories, Dreams, Reflections : He was in a light cart led by a little peasant taking him to a castle of the seventeenth century. The gates closed on him. He knew then that he would be a prisoner in this castle for many years. It was when studying alchemical texts later that he realized what his dream had meant—that he was condemned to study and develop this discarded tradition "from the very beginning." It was in the seventeenth century that alchemy began to perish. The introverted approach in alchemy shows that it is just as much an investigation of the collective unconscious as of matter. In this purely psychological trend in alchemical symbolism, we can recognize what we are doing when we experiment with the unknown objective, basic layer of our own makeup. Many alchemists practiced spontaneously what Jung discovered before knowing alchemy and what he called "active imagination."