It was the psychologist Carl Jung who first emphasized this aspect of alchemy, and since then everyone who has studied alchemy has either followed the outline of his interpretation, or rebelled against him. I am not a follower of Jung, and I do not agree with his singleminded pursuit of spiritual allegories, or with his theories of the psyche. But to me what is wrong with Jung is not the basic idea that some alchemists saw their souls in their crucibles, but the fact that he made alchemy virtually independent of the laboratory. There is much more to the experimental side of alchemy than Jung thought; alchemical procedures vary from routine formulas for soap to ecstatic visions of God. Even today there are recipies using straightforward ingredients that are so intricate they cannot be reliably duplicated by chemists. What mattered to all but a very few purely spriritual alchemists was the laboratory itself, and the manipulation of actual substances. The laboratory made their ideas real, and had a grip on the imagination that no speculative philosophy could hope for. Jungs readings slights the everyday alchemists who imagined they were making medicines or becoming rich: they were just as enthralled, and took just as much of the meaning of their lives from their crucibles, as the spiritual alchemists who wrote so beautifully about darkness and redemption. What Painting Is -James Elkins jameselkins/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=227%3Awhat-painting-is&catid=2%3Atrade-books&Itemid=9
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 08:50:34 +0000
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