Stanton Marlan - Jung's Alchemical Philosophy

‘It is all too easy to regard the Philosophers’ Stone as an idle metaphor or as the
product of a misguided and vain alchemical obsession. But Jung’s Alchemical

Philosophy demonstrates on the contrary that the Stone is something to take
seriously with deep implications for our self-understanding and our connection
to the cosmos. In this ambitious and comprehensive book, detailed discussions
are given of Jung’s extensive research into the relationship between the search for
the Stone and the greater Self, and of subsequent contributions by James Hillman
with an emphasis on the soul work symbolized in alchemical transformation
and on imagination as an inherent ingredient in that same transformation. The
larger philosophical significance of the Stone is pursued in a nuanced treatment
of Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit, drawing on the depth-psychological
interpretations of Wolfgang Giegerich. Contemporary authors such as Derrida
and Zizek are also woven skillfully into the larger tale. The book generates a
complex tapestry of philosophical and psychological insights, demonstrating their
dialectical co-valence. Written with a rare combination of precision and passion,
this book expands the horizons of the always enigmatic relationships between
matter and meaning, self and other, life and death. By the end, the reader comes
to realize that the Philosophers’ Stone is not something merely chimerical but a
psychical reality and an inroad into soul and spirit alike’.
Edward S. Casey, Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook, USA.
Author: The World on Edge: Studies in Continental Thought
‘This edifying book has a double impact. The author is a philosopher and a
psychoanalyst, and his book is at once a philosophical psychology and a psychological
philosophy. In the first instance it reveals to its reader valuable and varied insights into
the history and imagery of alchemy, demonstrating why the philosophy of alchemy
has been crucial to the development of the theory and practice of psychoanalytic
therapy. But this is not all. Philosophers think about thinking, and philosophy, as the
book reminds the reader, is thought in the act of thinking about itself. So, in the second
instance, this book shows its reader how to think about psychology psychologically,
as opposed to thinking about psychology personalistically as medicine, science,
spirituality, or problem-solving for ego and its difficulties. The book’s doubleness
rewards the reader with provocative perspectives’.
David L. Miller, Watson Ledden Professor Emeritus, Syracuse
University, USA. Author: Gods and Games: Toward a Theology of Play
‘Stanton Marlan’s Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy provides a wide-ranging and

profound analysis of the transformative psychological understanding of alchemy
initiated by Jung. In the process Marlan brings to light the alchemists’ efforts
to come to terms with such binary oppositions as nature and spirit, absolutism
and relativism, thought and being, and most pointedly, image and idea. Marlan
provides a perspective through which these oppositions can be reconciled and he
opens a new philosophical vista on alchemy which expands upon and complements
Jung’s depth psychological perspective on the alchemical opus’.
Sanford Drob, Core Faculty of Fielding Graduate University in
Santa Barbara, California, USA. Author: Archetype of the Absolute:
The Unity of Opposites in Mysticism Philosophy and Psychology
Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy
Traditionally, alchemy has been understood as a precursor to the science

of chemistry but from the vantage point of the human spirit, it is also a
discipline that illuminates the human soul. This book explores the goal
of alchemy from Jungian, psychological, and philosophical perspectives.
Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy: Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image
and Idea is a reflection on Jung’s alchemical work and the importance
of philosophy as a way of understanding alchemy and its contributions
to Jung’s psychology. By engaging these disciplines, Marlan opens new
vistas on alchemy and the circular and ouroboric play of images and ideas,
shedding light on the alchemical opus and the transformative processes
of Jungian psychology. Divides in the history of alchemy and in the
alchemical imagination are addressed as Marlan deepens the process by
turning to a number of interpretations that illuminate both the enigma of
the Philosophers’ Stone and the ferment in the Jungian tradition.
This book will be of interest to Jungian analysts and those who wish
to explore the intersection of philosophy and psychology as it relates to
alchemy.
Stanton Marlan, PhD, ABPP, FABP is a Jungian analyst, President of

the Pittsburgh Society of Jungian Analysts, and an Adjunct Professor in
Clinical Psychology at Duquesne University, with long-time interests in
alchemy and the psychology of dreams. He is also the author of other
books on psychology and alchemy, including C.G. Jung and the Alchemical
Imagination: Passages into the Mysteries of Psyche and Soul.
Philosophy & Psychoanalysis Book Series
Jon Mills
Series Editor
Philosophy & Psychoanalysis is dedicated to current developments and

cutting-edge research in the philosophical sciences, phenomenology,
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cism, and the humanities that engage and enrich psychoanalytic thought
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comes a new era of theoretical research that revisits past paradigms while
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Titles in this series:
Metaphysical Dualism, Subjective Idealism,

and Existential Loneliness
Matter and Mind
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Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea
Stanton Marlan
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Philo
sophy & Psychoanalysis Book Series
Psyche and the Mercurial Play

of Image and Idea
Stanton Marlan
Cover image: Jimlop collection/Alamy Stock Photo
First published 2022
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905
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For my children and grandchildren:
Dawn, Tori and Brandon
Malachi, Sasha, Zia and Naomi
Contents
List of figuresxiv
List of tablesxvi
Acknowledgmentsxvii
Prefacexviii
Introduction 1
1 Philosophical tensions in the historiography of

alchemy: the history of science and the history of the
human spirit 8
Jung and the study of alchemy 12
Criticisms of Jung and Eliade (Principe and Newman) 13
Limitations of Principe’s and Newman’s Criticisms (Tilton,
Caliăn, Hanegraaff, Cheak) 15
2 The eye of the winged serpent: Mercurius and

overcoming the split in the alchemical imagination 32
Mercurius duplex 35
The pre-alchemy Jung: initiation and the descent into the
unconscious 40
The Rosarium philosophorum 46
3 Benign and monstrous conjunctions 62

The hermaphrodite 64
Abraxas 66
Mercurius 69
Mysterium Coniunctionis 77
xii Contents
4 Classical development of Jung’s ideas of alchemy and

the Philosophers’ Stone in Von Franz and Edinger 84
Marie-Louise von Franz 84
Edward F. Edinger 86
5 Innovations, criticisms, and developments: James

Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich: James Hillman and
archetypal psychology: imagination is the cornerstone 94
Hillman’s alchemical psychology 98
Wolfgang Giegerich and the soul’s logical life 106
Giegerich’s alchemy 111
6 James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich: unification

and divergence in their psychological and
philosophical perspectives 116
7 Exposition and criticism of Giegerich’s philosophical

view of psychology proper and the human-all-too-human 125
8 The problem of the remainder: the unassimilable

remnant – what is at stake? 136
Facing the darkness: imbibing philosophical vinegar 140
9 The alchemical stove: continuing reflections on

Hillman’s and Giegerich’s views of alchemy and the
Philosophers’ Stone 145
Resistance of the remainder 151
Sparks of reiteration 156
Mystical death 157
Turning to stone 159
Must we turn to stone? The stone that is not a stone 162
10 The philosophical basis of the remnant in Kant’s

thing-in-itself and in Hegel’s move to surpass it 169
Phenomenon and noumenon: the unresolved tension of limit and
transcendence in the thought of Kant and Jung 173
Hegel’s introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit: from
clouds of error to the heaven of truth 184
Hegel’s alchemy: splendid isolation or fullness of soul 190
Contents xiii
11 A reflection on the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 205

Self and no self 206
Depth psychology and the negated self: the strategy
of “sous rature” 210
The entrance problem 213
The absolute 217
12 Spirit and soul 233

Tarrying with the negative 234
13 The self, the absolute, the stone 247

Self and absolute knowing 251
The Philosophers’ Stone as chaosmos and the dilemma
of diversity 255
Mercurius the mediator 257
Conclusion 262
Epilogue 265
Bibliography267
Index276
Figures
Cover: Hermes
Frontispiece: Tree of Life vii
2.1 The dual face of alchemy. 33
2.2 Sun and Moon, Rebis. 34
2.3 Mercurius as a uniting symbol. 36
2.4 Ouroboros, the tail-eater. 36
2.5 Mercurius turning the wheel which symbolizes the
alchemical process. 37
2.6 Mercurius as caduceus unifying the opposites. 38
2.7 Male/female coniunctio.46
2.8 The death-like state of the soul standing on the black
sun, a condition lacking differentiation. 47
2.9 Sol niger. The dark phase of the alchemical work. 48
2.10 King and Queen’s return to the prima materia.49
2.11 Energizing moisture. 50
2.12 Return to the prima materia.51
2.13 Energizing moisture. 52
2.14 Grain growing from the grave. 53
2.15 Grain growing from the corpse of Osiris. 54
2.16 A growing sense of vitality in the midst of darkness. 55
2.17 The monstrous hermaphrodite. 56
3.1 Extraction of the monster Mercurius and the raising of
the feminine image of Mary into the hierarchy. 65
3.2 These images of Abraxas show its strange composite and
monstrous form. 68
3.3 An image of the Mercurial monster. 70
3.4 Union of opposites as monstrosity. 71
Figures xv
3.5 An alchemical image of two birds illustrating the spirit

of antagonistic opposition. 72
3.6 Two traditional images of the conflict between winged
and unwinged lions – spirit and body. 73
3.7 The alchemist and the lumen naturae.75
3.8 The squaring of the circle as image of the
Philosophers’ Stone. 76
3.9 Four alchemical images depicting the linking of above
and below. 77
3.10 Two images of the benign conjunction, in which we see
the unification of opposites in terms of the marriage of
Sol and Luna. 78
3.11 Two images of the complexity of alchemical stages. 79
3.12 Grand image of the alchemical process 80
3.13 Cosmological vision of the achievement of the
Philosophers’ Stone. 81
4.1 Mortificatio/Putrefactio.91
4.2 Coniunctio.92
10.1 Ancient philosopher and eagle chained to a ground animal. 175
10.2 From the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck: Two of Wands. 176
10.3 Image of the alchemical separatio.194
10.4 Multiple views of psychic reality. 198
10.5 Variation of the peacock tail. 200
11.1 Image of the skull as representing the mortificatio
process in this use of Eve. 215
Tables
6.1 Fundamental differences between James Hillman

and Wolfgang Giegerich. 123
Acknowledgments
With great appreciation and respect, I would like to acknowledge a num-

ber of professors, philosophers, psychologists, Jungian analysts, artists,
colleagues, friends and family, all of whom have contributed to my work.
I am grateful to James Hillman, Edward Edinger, Murray Stein, Ed Casey,
David Miller, Sanford Drob, Tom Rockmore, Wolfgang Zucker, William
Wurzer, James Swindal, John Sallis, Robert Romanyshyn, Terry Pulver,
Roger Brooke, John White, Maury Krasnow, David Perry, Jeff Librett,
Keith Knecht, Leticia Capriotti, Lynne Cannoy, and Virginia Moore.
I would like to thank Alexis O’Brien, Editor, and Jana Craddock, Edi-
torial Assistant, at Routledge for their professionalism and timely ongo-
ing support. Special thanks to Jon Mills Series Editor of Philosophy &
Psychoanalysis publications for his friendship, continuing interest in my
work and encouragement to publish my book in his series. Also special
thanks to my friend and colleague Claudette Kulkarni without whose help,
dedication, editorial skill and hard work organizing and preparing this
manuscript it would not have arrived in a timely manner for publication.
I am most grateful to my wife Jan Marlan for her love and untiring sup-
port and to my children and grandchildren, who continue to delight and
inspire me and to whom this book is dedicated.
Preface
In this book, I will consider the enigmatic and mysterious goal of the
alchemical process, the Philosophers’ Stone. The Stone has for the most
part been dismissed as a serious object of academic and scholarly stud-
ies and has been thought of as an illusory fantasy of the old alchemists
in their impossible quest to turn lead into gold. At best, the results of the
alchemists’ quest for the transformation of substances have been seen from
the perspective of the history of science as a naturalistic process and as
a precursor to the science of chemistry. From this perspective, many of
the religious and symbolic aspects of alchemical literature were passed
over or reduced to code names for material processes. For many historians
of alchemy, this approach left out or ignored important aspects of what
alchemy was about. 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.
The complex history of alchemy is a current and burgeoning field filled
with tensions and controversy that may reflect the historical divides within
alchemy itself and mirror what I will call a split in the alchemical imagina-
tion. For Jung, alchemy had a dual face. He saw it as both a quest to liter-
ally transform matter in the laboratory as well as a spiritual quest aimed at
the transformation of the soul and thus as a religious philosophy. Studying
alchemy from this perspective led Jung to see it not only as a precursor to
chemistry, but also as a historical counterpart to his developing psychol-
ogy of the unconscious. Jung’s psychological perspective on the symbolic
dimensions of alchemy opened a way of understanding the alchemical
process that revolutionized our understanding of alchemy. While Jung’s
perspective on alchemy continues to influence the field to this day, his
Preface xix
view has been challenged both from within and from outside the Jungian
tradition. I will claim that current challenges to Jung’s position take place
in the context of differing philosophical convictions. Therefore, I propose
that, along with natural scientific, religious, and psychological perspec-
tives, the alchemical philosophers should be considered as philosophers
working out a philosophical perspective. The goal of their work was the
Philosophers’ Stone – a philosophical substance. Placing the Philosophers’
Stone in this context opens up many philosophical issues and tensions
with regard to the study of the goal of alchemy, including the problem of
binary oppositions, splits and gaps that are seemingly impossible to close,
among them: chemistry and alchemy, scientific positivism and religious
esotericism, psychology and philosophy. 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. I will consider
these binaries in several contexts and among different thinkers and arrive
at the conclusion that none of these divides can easily, if at all, be resolved
into a simple unity or oneness.
Coming to terms with the idea of binaries and their resolution appears to
be both an ancient and contemporary philosophical struggle. The work of
many philosophers is relevant to this issue and lends itself to the concerns
of this book. The Philosophers’ Stone as the idea of the goal has been
understood as a unification of oppositions into a oneness that was not a
oneness mirroring the enigmatic dictum that the Philosophers’ Stone is
a “stone that is no stone.” The attempt to penetrate further into an under-
standing of the unity of the Stone requires that it be understood not as a
simple unity, but as a complex one. A philosophical way into this conun-
drum is an important focus of this book. In it I came to see what I consider
a modern philosophical rendering that can shed additional light on notions
such as the Self and the Philosophers’ Stone.
Introduction
The Philosophers’ Stone is considered the end product of the opus philoso-
phorum. It has been described in numerous ancient manuscripts with con-
siderable disagreement about its nature and appearance and about how it
was to be discovered or made. It was identified with the transformation of
matter and turning lead into gold, as well as philosophically identified with
the transformation of “the earthly man into an illuminated philosopher.”1
This miraculous Stone has a strange sort of complexity that once led
Jung to confess that he “regarded alchemy as something off the beaten
track and rather silly.”2 After an initial study of the images of the classical
Latin alchemical text Artis aurifera, volumina duo (1593), Jung declared,
“Good Lord, what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to understand.”3 Ech-
oing this sentiment, Jung wrote elsewhere, “What the old philosophers
meant by the lapis has never become quite clear.”4 And, in a similar spirit,
alchemical scholar Lyndy Abraham called the Stone the “arcanum of all
arcana.”5
While the Stone was often identified with the unus mundus, the prin-
ciple of one world, it has also been known by a variety of names, many
of which were collected by Gratacolle in his “The Names of the Philoso-
phers” (1652). Among the many names of the Stone, we find it referred to
as “Chaos, a Dragon, a Serpent, a Toad, the green Lion, the quintessence,
our stone Lunare, Camelion, . . . blacker than black, Virgins milke, radicall
humidity, unctuous moysture, . . . urine, poyson, water of wise men, . . .
Gold . . .”6 And the list goes on, disseminating itself into a continuing
complexity of images. The complexity reaches nearly absurd proportions
in Dom Pernety’s Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique, which lists about six
hundred synonyms for the Stone or related materials.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-1
2 Introduction
Perhaps the description that most embodied the Stone’s paradoxical

nature is lithos ou lithos, the “stone that is no stone.”7 In this saying, the
enigmatic quality of the Stone shines forth. How are we to understand this
goal of the opus, which presents itself in so many images, contradictions,
and enigmatic expressions and both presents itself and negates itself in a
single gesture, as a multiplicity and yet also as a single substance or unity?
Abraham has noted that:
Despite the many names of the Stone, the alchemists stressed that it
personified unity and consisted in one thing and one thing only. Morie-
nus wrote: “For it is one Stone, one med’cin, in which consists the
whole magistery” – and the Scala philosophorum stated: “The Stone
is one: Yet this one is not one in Number, but in kind.”8
The play between unity and multiplicity, the one and the many, identity
and difference, manifests itself in many ways throughout the alchemical
literature.
The making of the Philosophers’ Stone was said to require an understand-
ing “of the laws of nature so that [the alchemist] can reproduce God’s mac-
rocosmic creation in the microcosm of the alembic.”9 To achieve this union,
one had to begin with the prima materia or “principal substance of the
Stone”10 which was known as philosophical mercury or, more accurately,
Mercurius, a substance philosophically different from the physical materi-
alism of chemical mercury. Within natural substances, the alchemists dis-
covered “living . . . seeds” “necessary for the generation of the Stone in the
dialectic of creation.”11 Just what is meant by these “living seeds”? “Jung
has written that by the fourteenth century it had begun to dawn on the alche-
mists that the Stone was something more than an alchemical compound.”12
Jung here was alluding to the psychic and spiritual components of material
reality discovered by the alchemical imagination. Abraham notes that
the spiritual component of Alexandrine and Islamic alchemy entered

Europe as an integral part of that science. Zosimos of Panopolis . . .
had written that the alchemist must seek his origin in order to “obtain
the proper, authentic, and natural tinctures” and that this was accom-
plished by “plunging into meditation.”13
Jung finds innumerable alchemical references to support the idea that

images of the Stone were to be discovered within oneself and that the
Introduction 3
imagination was a major component for the achievement of the alchemical

goal.14 In short, for Jung, alchemy and its goal, the Philosophers’ Stone,
came to be seen as a religious philosophy and as a precursor to his psy-
chology of the unconscious. For Jung, the “living seeds” of alchemy were
to be formed through philosophical and psychological awareness, though
looking into the essence of the human soul through meditation, imagina-
tion, and dialectics. For Jung, advancing our knowledge of alchemy and
the Philosophers’ Stone required that we understand the alchemical philos-
ophers as philosophers, as adepts dealing not simply with literal and mate-
rial realities, but with philosophical substances and philosophical issues
that had been of concern from time immemorial and throughout history.15
The importance of philosophy for understanding alchemy and the Phi-
losophers’ Stone is underlined by Jung who refers to the alchemist Ray-
mond Lully as saying that “owing to their ignorance men are not able to
accomplish the work until they have studied universal philosophy, which
will show them things that are unknown and hidden from others.”16 And
quoting Richardus Anglicus: “There is no way by which this art can truly
be found . . . except by completing their studies and understanding the
words of the philosophers.”17
Jung’s approach to alchemy has had an enormous effect on the histo-
riography of alchemy. Some historians support Jung’s spiritual and psy-
chological understanding of alchemy, but others do not. Some current
historiographers who are critical of Jung believe that the spiritual/psy-
chological interpretation of alchemy is a bogus one, as is his universalist
interpretation of it. What appears as a split in the alchemical imagination
continues to pervade the literature of historians, psychologists, and phi-
losophers alike.
Perhaps it is not surprising then that one of the most persistent philo-
sophical themes that runs through my study of alchemy is the problem of
opposites and the attempt to resolve them. Jung’s notion of the Self and
the Philosophers’ Stone represent the end product and goal of the effort
to resolve such opposites. For Jung, the Self was a modern psychological
equivalent of the Philosophers’ Stone, but both notions remain enigmatic
and each has undergone continuing reformulations over time.
Jung’s idea of the Self has also been challenged by a growing ferment
within the Jungian tradition. James Hillman criticized the notion of the
Self and in its place he developed what for him was a less “metaphysical”
notion: the soul. He considered this a better phenomenological description
4 Introduction
of both what Jung was after and as a way of moving beyond the limits of
Jung’s perspective. Likewise, Wolfgang Giegerich via Hegel went further
along this path by centralizing the notion of spirit and developing the idea
of the soul’s logical life. Each of these formulations has analytic and philo-
sophical implications and offers different views of the subject/self and of
human “nature” and “purpose.” As such, these are not only psychological
concerns but philosophical ones as well. These differing views, based on
self, soul, and/or spirit, have implications for how alchemy and the Philos-
ophers’ Stone are understood as well. Following these threads and tracking
the Philosophers’ Stone into its various historiographic and psychological
variations sets the stage for continuing philosophical reflection.
One of the major orienting concerns of Jungian psychology and of
alchemy has been the unification of opposites and the attempt to come
to terms with binaries. The notion of the Philosophers’ Stone and the
Self represent the goals of the alchemical and psychoanalytic processes
respectively. Such goals have been understood and symbolized in many
ways and refer generally to ideas of “wholeness.” Jungian psychology as
a modern discipline has contributed to our understanding of the process
and goal of alchemy. While doing so, it has also gained a great deal from
alchemy and has advanced our understanding of the psychology of the
unconscious as well as opening up interesting philosophical issues. As
noted above, Jung understood alchemy to be a philosophical endeavor and
though I consider the Jungian approach to be a “philosophically” oriented
psychology, I believe that further research into the philosophical meaning
of the goal of alchemy would continue to enhance our understanding of it.
Both Hillman and Giegerich challenged the philosophical parameters of
Jung’s approach and for both of them, though in very different ways, phil-
osophical understanding was implicitly and explicitly important in their
reflections. While many philosophical orientations influenced Jung, Hill-
man, and Giegerich, Jung’s notion of the Self was significantly influenced
by Asian philosophy, whereas Hillman’s idea of soul drew on neo-Platonic
influences, and Giegerich’s notion of the spirit was largely influenced by
Hegel.18
When read in a certain way, Hegel’s dialectic and his notions of “Abso-
lute Knowing” and “Absolute Spirit” can be useful ideas, helpful to con-
sider in connection with the idea of the Philosophers’ Stone, as a unity
that is complex and differentiated. While finding Hegel’s philosophy to be
relevant to my interest in the goal of alchemy, I have been suspicious of
Introduction 5
Giegerich’s “Hegelian” understanding of spirit as promoting a final sub-

lation, as raising spirit above image and imagination, and of his seeing
syntax and form as “true psychology” beyond the semantics of the ego,
content, and “picture thinking” (images). For Giegerich, it is clear that
spirit surpasses soul, as soul is seen by Jung and Hillman.
In my work, I have struggled with Hegel and with the way Giegerich
adapts Hegel’s ideas for his own philosophical position. Giegerich’s inter-
pretation appears to have precedent in Hegel’s hierarchical placement of
philosophy above art and religion, and thus also above imagination, image,
and soul in Jung and Hillman’s sense. I have argued against an interpre-
tation of Hegel that promotes the elevation of idea and spirit in such a
manner. As I have continued to read Hegel, I have also found a number
of interpretations of his philosophy and ways of reading him that have
prompted me to rethink and reinterpret his point of view and its relevance
for understanding Jung, alchemy, and the Philosophers’ Stone.
In my final chapters, I consider the work of Donald Verene, Karin De
Boer, Kathleen Dow Magnus, William Desmond, Slavoj Žižek, Tom
Rockmore, and Edward S. Casey; all of whom in different ways open up
perspectives that are imaginative and challenging and that, along with
and contrary to Giegerich’s point of view, have allowed me to deepen my
reflections.19 Desmond has noted that in philosophy we must avoid quick
and easy solutions and while I would say that philosophy helps to clarify
issues, it also “does not dispel our perplexity but deepens it.”20
I find such a perplexity in Rockmore’s reading of Hegel’s notion of the
Absolute. For Rockmore, the Absolute cannot be seen as a completely
ontological statement and, even though Absolute, it is also relative in its
dependence on the historical moment and thus also always relative to time
and place. For Rockmore as for Hegel, philosophy is ultimately tied to the
history of ideas. For Desmond, “philosophy must acknowledge its own
plurivocity;” it does not speak with only a voice “of a dominating univocal
logicism.”21
For me, the multiple voices are both within philosophy and between phi-
losophy and its others – in my case, particularly between philosophy and
psychology, spirit, and soul. My reflections in this book are drawn from
my history and thus from both “fields.” In writing a book on philosophy,
I could not part completely with psychology, but I cannot write psycho-
logically without also writing and thinking philosophically. In this ten-
sion between “fields,” I find Casey’s reflections resonate with my struggle.
6 Introduction
Casey writes: “Philosophy and Psychology – how will this strange twain
meet? Or have they not always already met – but in a way unknown to
each other?”22 For Casey, these fields appear alien and have strict bounda-
ries, but for him this aggravates the problem. Putting it otherwise, he asks
“how are we to join – or rejoin, or to see as already conjoined – spirit and
soul?”23 With this question, Casey addresses my own concern about phi-
losophy and psychology, as well as about the tension between image and
idea, spirit and soul. In Casey’s work, he finds a “place” where “spirit and
soul not only will meet but . . . already [have] met” and are held together
in meaning, imagination, and image, and in a linking between philosophy
and psychology.24
In the following chapters, I intend to think through the problems and
complexity of a number of divides in the history of alchemy and in the
alchemical imagination. In this book, I intend to deepen the process of
resolving these divides by turning to philosophy in ways that shed light on
the Philosophers’ Stone and Jung’s notion of the Self.
Hegel is one figure whose ideas can be seen to penetrate into the
dynamics of the Philosophers’ Stone and to a complex unification of
opposites that is resolved in his idea of Absolute Knowing and Abso-
lute Spirit. Hegel’s view of the Absolute is not best read as an ontologi-
cal conviction or abstract theory privileging idea over image, form over
content, syntax over semantics, and I will argue that while there is evi-
dence in Hegel’s work for privileging the first term of the above binaries,
there are many readings of his work that demonstrate the profound and
inseparable connection between image and idea, form and content, syn-
tax and semantics, and the timelessness of the Absolute and its relative
history in time and place. I believe it is this latter reading that deepens
our understanding of what has been called the Philosophers’ Stone and
it is this kind of Absolute Knowing that has continued to inspire inquiry
into the alchemists and into contemporary psychology and philosophy.
The concept of the Philosophers’ Stone is an ancient way of expressing
what Jung considered to be the Self. Both the Stone and the Self can be
given philosophical expression in terms of the notion of Absolute Know-
ing, but this knowing has been variously understood by numerous depth
psychologists and philosophers in alternate ways. Part of my work in
this book is to suggest that their alternative understandings can throw
new light on the Philosophers’ Stone, the goal of alchemy, and of Jung’s
psychology of the Self.
Introduction 7
Notes
1 Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 145.
2 Jung, Memories, 204.
3 Ibid.
4 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), §555.
6 Gratacolle, “The Names of the Philosophers’ Stone,” 67.
7 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14), §643.
9 Ibid., 146.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.; emphasis mine.
12 Ibid., 147.
13 Ibid.
14
“Calid had stated that ‘This Stone is to be found at all times, in everie place, and
about every man.” This tradition was inherited by the medieval alchemists and the
alchemists of Renaissance Europe. Many were aware of the fact that the Stone or
the matter for making the Stone was to be found in man himself. Ripley wrote:
“Every-ech Man yt hath, and ys in every place/ In thee, in me, in every tyme and
space, and Philalethes wrote that Morienus informed his pupil, the king, that he
must 'descend/ I Into himself the matter for to finde/Of this our stone.” Gerhard
Dorn likewise indicated that panacea was the truth to be found in man. Colson’s
Philosophia maturata states that the Stone “is generated between Male and Female
and lieth hide [sic] in Thee, in Me, and in such like things.” In the production of
the Stone, the alchemist was advised to employ his imagination as the major tool.
Arnoldus is cited in Zoroaster’s Cave: “Follow it with the Instance of Labour, but
first exercise thyself in a diuturnity of Intense Imagination: for so thou mayst find
the compleat Elixir; but without that never at all.” (Ibid.)
15 See Panisnick, “The Philosophical Significance.”
17 Ibid., §362.
18 It is interesting and perhaps not surprising since the goals of alchemy and analysis
are concerned with the unity of binary oppositions that Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit
and his Logic have been important to a number of contemporary scholars who bring
his work to bear on both the Freudian and Jungian traditions. In terms of the Freudian
tradition, see the work of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Jon Mills. For the Jungian
tradition, see Sean Kelly, Sanford Drob, and Wolfgang Giegerich.
19 Giegerich’s appreciation and interpretation of Hegel is important for today’s psychol-
ogy, however, he is only one of several thinkers who have come to similar conclusions.
Giegerich has brought Hegelian reflections to the work of Jungian psychology in The
Soul’s Logical Life and in Dreaming the Myth Onwards. Also see Mills, The Uncon-
scious Abyss; Žižek, Less Than Nothing.
20 Desmond, Beyond Hegel, xi.
21 Ibid.
22 Casey, Spirit and Soul, xi.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., xviii.
Chapter 1
Philosophical tensions in the

historiography of alchemy
The history of science and the
history of the human spirit
Alchemy is a vast subject and the Philosophers’ Stone is one of its most
enigmatic ideas. The Stone was considered the ultimate achievement of
the “Great Work” of alchemy and the elusive goal of alchemical trans-
formation. The Philosophers’ Stone has been described in numerous
ancient manuscripts and in many recipes for its production, and with
considerable disagreement about its nature and appearance as well as
about how it was to be discovered and/or made. These disagreements
have followed the Stone throughout its history and alchemists have
argued with one another about the materials, procedures, and the reality
of the Stone. In spite of overlapping claims, many alchemical treatises
proclaim their own recipes as the correct one for the achievement of
alchemy’s sought-after goal. It was not unusual at the beginning of an
alchemical treatise for the writer to begin by mercilessly denouncing
other adepts, calling them charlatans, “puffers,” and fools. In the midst
of such controversy and confusion, the Philosophers’ Stone remained
shrouded in mystery.
Richard Grossinger has noted that “[a]lchemy is primeval. Those who
would give its origin must also realize: there are no origins.”1
Alchemy is a form that comes to us from the most ancient times. Its
survival bespeaks numerous redefinitions and rebirths, many of them
known to us from texts (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Christian, Euro-
pean, Islamic, Hindu, Taoist);2 but [he speculates] an equally large
number no doubt occurring in preliterate times and among unknown
people whose writings never reached us.3
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-2
Philosophical tensions in historiography 9
Philosopher George David Panisnick (1975) likewise states that the reason
why the Stone’s origin is so problematic is due to the supposition “that
it seems to have evolved out of a pre-alchemical consciousness which
was concerned with . . . lithic myths.”4 Mircea Eliade, the well-known
historian of religion, identifies a number of these myths, some of which
play an important role as background for the alchemical idea of the Phi-
losophers’ Stone. Two provocative mythologems include the idea that the
Stone generates and ripens in the bowels of the earth and that men are born
from stones.5 Alan Cardew amplifies these myths noting the living quali-
ties of what we now consider inorganic materials. In them he finds what
“were like veins of blood in animal life. . . [and] were akin to stars.”6 The
implications of such ideas point to a way of thinking in which man and
nature were intrinsically co-implicated and what Cardew calls a “dark her-
metic equivalence,”7 a way of imagining that is implicit in the well-known
alchemical idea “as above so below.” For Cardew, “[d]escending into the
black labyrinths of the earth and exploring caverns was a journey back to
the archaic, which was still at work with a daemonic magical force.”8 In
such a descent into our history one could learn to discover and read the
“primal plant . . . primal animal . . . and the primal stone (or Urstein)”
which, according to E.T.A. Hoffmann, mirror the “secrets which are hid-
den above the clouds.”9
It is hard for our modern consciousness to enter into such archaic and
mythical thinking, but for Eliade it is necessary to do so to gain some
sense of the worldview that lies behind many alchemical ideas, including
the Philosophers’ Stone. For Eliade, entering into the archaic and mythic
imagination gives us a glimpse of how early societies related to what we
now call “matter.” He writes that the purpose of his study was
to gain an understanding of the behavior of primitive societies in rela-

tion to Matter and to follow the spiritual adventures in which they
became involved when they found themselves aware of their power to
change the mode of being of substances.10
Eliade points out that the idea of the modification and transformation of
substances is a key element of the alchemists’ “raison d’être.” In the world
of the alchemists, “nature” was animated by a natural telos and entelechy
that moved it toward its destiny and completion. The role of the ancient
10 Philosophical tensions in historiography
metallurgists and smiths, like that of the alchemists, was to cooperate

with nature and to assist in the acceleration of the birth process helping
it to bring to fruition its implicit goal. For many alchemists, this goal was
the Philosophers’ Stone. In this view, nature was alive, animated, and the
engagement with “matter” was a sacred work, intertwined with initiation
rites and mysteries.
While Eliade does not claim an unbroken connection between the early
miners and smiths and the alchemists, he does posit a common “magico-
religious”11 worldview in which subject and object, psyche and matter,
philosophically overlap and are intrinsically interrelated. From Eliade’s
perspective, contrary to some historians of science, alchemy was not simply
a rudimentary chemistry, but was a sacred discipline first. It only became
rudimentary chemistry when, “for the majority of its practitioners, its men-
tal world had lost its validity and its raison d’être.”12 So, for Eliade, “chem-
istry was born . . . from the disintegration of the ideology of alchemy.”13
But, we will see, this is a point of view denied by many contemporary his-
torians of science. Historians of science typically distinguish a fundamental
discontinuity between alchemy and chemistry. Eliade maintains the valid-
ity of his research into the origins of science and technology, but also states
that “the perspective of the historian of chemistry is perfectly defensible” in
the sense that alchemy and chemistry each “work on the same mineral sub-
stances, uses the same apparatus, and generally speaking applies itself to
the same experiments.”14 In this sense, alchemy and chemistry share these
functional similarities. However, if we view the relationship between these
similar but different endeavors “from the standpoint of the history of the
human spirit we see the matter quite differently.”15 Alchemy continued to
be a sacred science and “chemistry came into its own when substances had
shed their sacred attributes”16 and the alchemists their ritual practices.
This divide in the way of understanding the relationship of alchemy
and chemistry continues to this day, and the history of science and the
history of religion constitute very different historiographic positions; there
remains a split in our contemporary imagination reflecting different philo-
sophical perspectives. While it is clear that both alchemists and chemists
carried out physical experiments in their laboratories, how these opera-
tions were understood and experienced were considerably different. Eliade
notes that the chemist
carries out his exact observations of physico-chemical phenomena and

performs systematic experiments in order to penetrate to the structure
of matter. The alchemist on the other hand, is concerned with the “pas-
sion,” “the death,” the “marriage” of substances in so far as they will
tend to transmute matter and human life. His goals were the Philoso-
phers’ Stone and the Elixir Vitae.17
Eliade’s main concern in and through his analysis of the “historico-cul-

tural context . . . has been to pierce through to the mental world which
lies behind them.”18 For Eliade, “[o]nly by looking at things from the
standpoint of the alchemist will we succeed in gaining insight into his
mental world and thereby appraise the extent of its originality.”19 It was
this intention that opened Eliade to Jung’s perspective, which was both a
psychological and philosophical shift in worldview with implications for
religious studies as well. He notes that “Jung’s observations are of interest
not only to depth psychology; they also indirectly confirm the soteriologi-
cal [the study of religious doctrine of salvation] function which is one of
the main constituents of alchemy.”20
For Eliade, as for Jung, “soteriological” applies to the alchemists and
to the perspective that alchemy was a philosophy of religion. For Eliade,
“Without a shadow of doubt, the Alexandrian alchemists were from the
beginning aware that in pursuing the perfection of metals they were pur-
suing their own perfection.”21 Eliade confirms the above position histori-
cally by noting the Liber Platonis quartorum (which in its original Arabic
cannot be later than the tenth century), which “gives great importance to
the parallelism between the opus alchymicum and the inner experience of
the adept.”22 The alchemist’s work to achieve the state of an illuminated
philosopher is also stated by Gerhard Dorn – a sixteenth century physi-
cian, philosopher, and alchemist – in the form of a challenge: “Transform
yourself from dead stones into living philosophic stones.”23 Here Dorn
addresses man as a Stone with a potential for transformation.24 Another
example is taken from Morienus addressing himself to King Kallid:
“For this substance [that is, the one which conceals the divine secret] is
extracted from you and you are its ore.”25 In short, for Eliade and Jung,
“the Western alchemist, in his laboratory . . . worked upon himself – upon
his psycho-physiological and philosophical life as well as on his moral and
spiritual experience.”26 The alchemist must be totally engaged in the opus.
Eliade describes the ethical values attributed to alchemical works not-
ing that the alchemist “must be healthy, humble, patient, chaste; his mind
must be free and in harmony with his work; he must be intelligent and
scholarly, he must work, meditate, pray. . . ”27 While these ethical virtues
guide the way for the alchemists’ work, in themselves they cannot produce
the goal the alchemists sought. Eliade is quick to point out that in addition
to such virtues an initiatory process is necessary to produce philosophical
illumination and the attainment of the Philosophers’ Stone or elixir of life.
Jung and the study of alchemy

There are many renditions of the alchemical process both in original
alchemical sources as well as in secondary descriptions and interpretations
of it. The general alchemical literature is considerable; several thousand
books were published between the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.
A somewhat smaller number are known to focus on the process of cre-
ating the Philosophers’ Stone. The books focusing on the discovery and
development of the Philosophers’ Stone run through the literature. A few
important ones include: The Secret of the Golden Flower (8th century), the
Artis auriferae, volumina duo (1593), Rosarium philosophorum (1550),
and the Aurora consurgens (15th century). In addition, other manuscripts
of value include Splendor Solis (1532–35), the Twelve Keys of Basil Val-
entine (1599/1602), the Crowning of Nature (16th century), Philosophia
reformata of J.D. Mylius (1622), the Ripley Scroll of Sir George Ripley
(15th century), and finally the Mutus liber, or the wordless or mute book
(1677). All of these texts are replete with alchemical illustrations depict-
ing the transformative process mostly aiming at the presentation of the
Philosophers’ Stone.
Many of alchemy’s original manuscripts were studied and interpreted
by Jung.28 The careful study of his work on alchemy is a demanding task
and the study of the Philosophers’ Stone, even “simply” in the context of
the above work, is also demanding. In the index noted above, reference
to the lapis/Lapis Philosophorum (Philosophers’ Stone)29 spans twelve of
Jung’s twenty volumes, including Collected Works 4, 5, 8, 9i, 9ii, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 16, and 18, to say nothing of the yet unpublished work on
alchemy in process with the Philemon Foundation. In addition, a proper
study of the Philosophers’ Stone requires cross-references to other related
topics including Jung’s notion of the individuation process and the Self. In
short, to have a comprehensive understanding of the Philosophers’ Stone
in Jung’s work requires nearly an overall grasp of his complete corpus
and a book-length study in its own right. Nevertheless, it is possible to get
a general grasp of his understanding of the stone and its meaning in the
context of his psychology of the unconscious which can serve as a ground

for this study.
In addition, Jung’s understanding of alchemy made a major if now con-
troversial impact on the historiography of alchemy, both in the history
of science and chemistry as well as in the history of esotericism. Jung’s
approach to alchemy is now part of these historiographical perspectives and
might be said to exist at the crossroads between them. Historian of chemis-
try “Gerhard Heym wrote that no modern authority prior to Jung had been
able to decipher the ‘abstruse and obscure’ vocabulary . . . of Paracelsus.”30
Likewise, eminent scholar Walter Pagel noted that Jung’s interpretation
of alchemical symbolism “will be fundamental for all future studies on the
subject.”31 He sums up Jung’s contribution noting that:
[Jung] succeeds: (1) in placing alchemy into an entirely new perspec-

tive in the history of science, medicine, theology and general human
culture, (2) in explaining alchemical symbolism, hitherto a complete
puzzle, by utilizing modern psychological analysis for the elucidation
of an historical problem and – vice versa – making use of the latter
for the advancement of modern psychology; and all this is a scholarly,
well documented and scientifically unimpeachable exposition. If not
the whole story of alchemy, he has tackled its “mystery,” its “Nacht-
seite,” i.e., the problem most urgent and vexing to the historian.32
Criticisms of Jung and Eliade (Principe

and Newman)
Not all historians of alchemy have a positive judgment about Jung or of a
spiritual or psychological understanding of alchemy in general. Two such
contemporary researchers who have had a significant impact on the field are
Lawrence Principe and William R. Newman. Principe points to a wealth of
recent historical studies that have changed our understanding of alchemy
radically during the last forty years. These studies point to the fact that
mistakes in the historiography of alchemy have been repeated over and
over again and that a fundamental step in coming to understand alchemy is
to clear away many taken-for-granted errors. Principe and Newman argue
that a fundamental difficulty in the study of alchemy has been the lack of
reliable, trustworthy, contextual scholarship into its history. They note that
a common failing of many interpretations of alchemy is the tendency to
see it “as a uniform and constant monolith”33 that overlooks the differen-
tiations among the many different alchemies. They criticize Jung’s arche-
typal perspective largely on this basis and state that the aim of continuing
research is to “elucidate the spectrum of notions, attitudes, and pursuits
generally grouped under the wide umbrella of ‘alchemy’ and to portray it
as a vastly more dynamic field than has hitherto been presumed.”34
In a more recent publication, Principe makes the distinction between
alchemy and “alchemies” to underline his point that “the diversity and
dynamism within historical alchemy is sufficiently extensive that histori-
ans have now begun to group individual authors and practitioners within
‘schools’ and to see the differences among their practices and goals.”35
Principe’s work on the historiography of alchemy has been valuable and
has made an important impact on other researchers in alchemy, particularly
historians of science and chemistry. While Principe champions the impor-
tance of careful differentiations in the field, he does not seem to be aware
that his own point of view has a strong philosophical bias that is not uni-
versally accepted by other credible academic historians. Important aspects
of his perspective have been challenged by Hereward Tilton (2003), Florin
George Caliăn (2010), Wouter Hanegraaff (2012), Aaron Cheak, and oth-
ers. These researchers, while appreciating and accepting a number of
Principe’s and Newman’s contributions, also note their bias toward reduc-
ing alchemy to their own monolithic orientation of a “natural philosophy”
and an exclusively “natural scientific” perspective, to the exclusion of the
vital history of esotericism and other philosophical orientations.
I would consider this a brand of historical and scientific positivism,
though Principe and Newman are uncomfortable with this designation,
“because of the diffuseness of [the term’s] common use.”36 They differen-
tiate their position from the kind of “positivism” that imposes its current
scientific notions on the field of alchemy without sufficient interest “in
the historical and cultural context of those ideas.”37 They label the above
variety of positivism as “ ‘presentist’ or ‘Whig’ historiography,” meaning
projecting current views anachronistically back on the historical context of
alchemy, “which assigns relative importance to historical ideas based upon
their level of connection with or similarity to current scientific notions.”38
For them, such a position shows “insufficient interest in the historical and
cultural context of those ideas.”39
It is interesting, however, that Principe and Newman, while seemingly
open to the historical and cultural context of alchemical ideas beyond a “pre-
sentist” scientific perspective, seem singularly hostile and closed-minded
about spiritual and psychological interpretations of alchemy. Further, they

appear to hold an unscholarly, undifferentiated, and monolithic view with
regard to these aspects of alchemical historiography. In their criticisms,
they cite Eliade and Jung, but also historian Hélène Metzger who, in her
emphasis on vitalism, ended up supporting the symbolic vision of alchemy
elaborated by Jung and Eliade. In addition, they discount Eliade and Jung
for their tendency to view alchemy as a “chronological constant” and, in
so doing, they also indict a host of earlier and current historiographers of
alchemy who have adopted a spiritual and psychological dimension of
alchemy “without being aware of . . . their ‘unsuitability.’ ”40 The aspects
of alchemy that Eliade and Jung have seen as symbolic, psychological,
and religious are described by Principe and Newman as alien, strange,
“bizarre,”41 and “outlandish.”42 Not surprisingly, these aspects do not fit
into their natural scientific worldview as being credible expressions of
the alchemical mind. For Principe and Newman, these “ostensibly bizarre
texts”43 and their symbols are in essence code-names (Decknamen) for the
language of the laboratory and of natural philosophy and, therefore, there
is no need to interpret them into spiritual, psychological terms. For them,
such prosaic translations serve to show that there is no need to divide
chemia from alchemia in early modern texts and they go as far as to rec-
ommend that in early modern texts we can eliminate the term alchemy
altogether. In essence, with the elimination of alchemia they simply dis-
miss what for Eliade and Jung were fundamental aspects of alchemy,
namely its status as a religious philosophy with its importance as an ini-
tiatory practice. In the reduction of alchemia to chemia, there is nothing
for Principe and Newman to worry about outside their field of expertise
as chemists and positive historians. The philosophical underpinnings of
their worldview remain taken for granted. As noted above, there are still
credible historians of science who do not agree with such reductions of the
alchemical worldview, even if they accept some of the research and insight
provided by some of the less prejudicial views of Principe and Newman.
Limitations of Principe’s and Newman’s

Criticisms (Tilton, Caliăn, Hanegraaff, Cheak)
Hereward Tilton
Tilton’s work on the historiography of alchemy is a far more balanced
study, which includes more informed and scholarly accounts of Eliade,
Jung, and the history of esotericism. While appreciating the contributions

of Principe and Newman, he is also critical of them. In the Introduction
to his book The Quest for the Phoenix (2003), he affirms the importance
of seeing alchemy as part of the history of esotericism as well as within
the history of science, and in his study he enters into both of these arenas
of discourse. He notes that the arguments of Principe and Newman are
concerned “not only with questions of historiography and nomenclature,”
but also with “the very nature of laboratory alchemy in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and its relation to the esoteric traditions.”44 Tilton’s
study of alchemist Michael Maier links Maier’s religious ideas to his lab-
oratory work and points out that Maier’s role in the history of Western
esotericism in itself presents difficulties for the assertions of Principe and
Newman.
For Tilton, as well as for Eliade and Jung, if the study of esotericism
is taken seriously, then the term “alchemy” is indispensable. Within this
context, Tilton reconsiders “the reception of Jung and his psychoanalytic
approach amongst historians of alchemy,”45 recalling Jung’s idea “that
alchemical symbolism expresses psychological processes of an essen-
tially religious nature [which had] wide currency in the academic study
of alchemy.”46 While it is often pointed out that Jung reduced alchemy to
psychology, Tilton is aware that for Jung both chemistry and psychology
have emerged from it. Tilton quotes Jung: “I had long been aware that
alchemy is not only the mother of chemistry, but is also the forerunner of
our modern psychology of the unconscious.”47
Nevertheless, those critical of Jung’s approach claim that he overly
minimizes the scientific content of alchemy. This position was expressed
even by those who otherwise valued Jung’s contributions. This was true
even for Pagel who was an opponent of positivism in the history of science
and who had also felt that “Jung had revolutionized the academic study of
alchemy.”48 Pagel felt that “Jung’s theories were an antidote to the positiv-
ist view of science.”49 Following in the spirit of Pagel, John Read com-
mented “that it had required ‘the discernment of a master’ to elucidate the
intimate relationship of alchemy to psychology.”50 Tilton points to both the
support and criticism of other historians including Eduard Farber, Maurice
Crosland, and Betty Dobbs. Dobbs, though critical of
Jung’s ahistorical approach, . . . followed Jung’s historiography . . .

describing an “older” ancient and medieval alchemy in which
psychological processes remained largely unconscious to the adept,

and a “newer” alchemy arising with the advent of the Reformation,
in which divisions began to appear between a conscious alchemical
mysticism and an experientially-based alchemy.51
Tilton points out, however, that though Dobbs followed Jung’s “distinc-
tion between a ‘scientific’ and a ‘spiritual’ alchemy . . . she did not believe
Jung’s work supported the notion of a radical discontinuity in the evolu-
tion of chemistry.”52
More critical of Jung’s historiography was Barbara Obrist, a French
historian of alchemy, who “lamented” that Jung’s perspective had taken
on “the status of a self-evident truth and was no longer questioned by
historians of alchemy.”53 For her, Jung’s mistakes were later reinforced by
Eliade. The two major views of Jung and Eliade that she criticizes were
the fundamental religiosity of the alchemists and their animistic vitalist
worldviews. Her work, which preceded Principe’s and Newman’s, argues
the same point: that there was no good evidence to presume that “labora-
tory workers of this time were engaged in a spiritual quest for selfhood.”54
For her, Jung “projected the Protestant myth of the solitary, interior search
into the Middle Ages.”55 She also claims that both Eliade and Jung simply
copied Hélène Metzger, who sought to distinguish alchemy from mecha-
nistic chemistry and instead saw it as having a vitalistic and organic view
of the cosmos.
Newman follows and develops this criticism citing both Obrist and
Robert Halleux as “serious” historians of alchemy who reject Jung. Tilton
takes issue with a number of methodological and factual errors of both
Principe and Newman. For one, he notes that Halleux holds no overt anti-
Jungian position. In fact, he points out that Halleux praises Jung for his
“scrupulous adherence to the fruits of erudition concerning the dating and
authorship of texts, and speaks of Jung’s ‘brilliant’ exegeses of certain
particularly ‘mystical’ texts such as the Hellenistic Egyptian Visions of
Zosimos.”56 Tilton shows that Halleux – contrary to Principe and Newman,
who use him to criticize Jung – is in fact more critical of Obrist.
Another problem with Principe’s and Newman’s characterization of
Jung is that they slant their language in a way to defame both him and the
esoteric tradition they dislike and apparently know little about. Demon-
strating this point, Tilton quotes Newman’s caricature of the Jungian inter-
pretation of the work of Philalethes. Newman, apparently in the service of
mocking Jung’s position, states that Philalethes’ work is not “ ‘the product
of a disordered mind’ [i.e., projection of the unconscious] or the work of
‘an irrational mystic unable to express himself in clear English.’ ”57 New-
man misunderstands Jung’s notion of projection, contrasting it to his ide-
alized version of clear and distinct ideas, a Cartesian bias. Tilton notes,
“It matters little [to Newman] that ‘irrational mystics’ have given rise to
some of the finest literature in the English language.”58 For Tilton, what
is at stake here is the devaluation of the mystical and religious aspects of
alchemy. Tilton sums up:
if we follow Principe and Newman in counterposing a positively val-

ued “correct chemical analysis” carried out by “serious historians of
alchemy” with a negatively valued “analysis of unreason,” we not
only run the risk of committing a violence against the texts at hand,
but we also perform a disservice to contemporary scholarship on the
subject of alchemy by excluding certain voices (principally those of
psychoanalysts) from the realms of valid discourse.59
Another charge against Jung is the common one that he completely

dismissed laboratory alchemy. While clearly Jung’s breakthrough and
expertise were in psychology, he in no way indicated that the alche-
mists were not engaged with the “material” reality in their alembics.
Tilton points to the way Principe and Newman misrepresent comments
about this issue by replacing what Jung said about the alchemists as
dealing “not only with chemical experiments” with their rendition which
states “not with chemical experiments as such.”60 With such empha-
sis, Principe and Newman more easily accuse Jung of concluding that
the alchemists discounted alchemical substances and simply projected
psychological reality on them. What is not pointed out and perhaps not
understood is that projection for Jung is an unconscious process that
goes on all the time. For Jung, the majority of alchemists were not in any
way aware that there was a psychological dimension to what they were
seeing and experiencing. They were indeed focused on the literal “real-
ity” of their substances without realizing that through projection there
was an “admixture of unconscious psychic material”61 that was part of
the alchemist’s experience whether he/she was conscious of it or not.
Extracting these projections yielded an understanding of the psychology
of the alchemical experience that until Jung’s insight was simply seen as
irrational. Even for those alchemists whom Jung considered conscious of

the psychological dimensions of the work, there was no indication that
he “wrote laboratory experimentation out of the picture” when consider-
ing such individuals. Thus Jung describes Paracelsus as “both the father
of modern pharmacology and ‘a pioneer of empirical psychology and
psychotherapy.’ ”62
Tilton acknowledges that Jung’s notion of alchemy as “a great timeless
unit”63 is problematic, but Principe and Newman criticize Jung for saying
that any alchemical texts that could be decoded into modern chemical lan-
guage is inferior alchemy. Tilton points out that there is no evidence for this,
noting only that Jung’s comments about good and bad alchemical authors
referred merely to the fact that there were many charlatans in the field who
mystified their work to delude others.64 Jung was not unaware that some of
the strangeness of alchemical images and symbols were utilized by alche-
mists as code names for chemical substances. But, as Tilton points out, this
fact should not be used to suggest that this proves that the primary reality
of natural philosophy or “chemistry” was the only truly “real” level of
legitimate understanding. Tilton points out that the flaw in the explanation
is Principe and Newman’s “either-or logic – either the symbols of alchemy
are products of the unconscious psyche, or they are secret code-names for
chemical substances.”65 For psychoanalysts, as in alchemical thinking, “a
symbol may possess more than one significance.”66 Tilton describes Julius
Ruska, whom Jung cites, as stating that “certain symbols in the history of
alchemy have borne explicit religious and mystical significance alongside
their narrowly chemical meaning.”67
As for those symbols that emerge spontaneously throughout the
alchemical work, Principe and Newman simply state “that the physical
appearance of chemicals in the vessel is sometimes ‘evocative.’ ”68 Tilton
rightly notes this “ ‘explanation’ is not explanation at all.”69 Then he goes
on to say:
When Theobald de Hoghelande describes “the wonderful variety of

figures that appear in the course of the [alchemical] work . . . just as
we sometimes imagine in the clouds or in the fire strange shapes of
animals, reptiles or trees,” there can be no doubt that the “arbitrary”
[spontaneous] symbols of alchemy are evoked from the psyche of the
individual alchemist as much as from the physical processes in the
vessel.70
Tilton recognizes that the so-called arbitrary symbolism is for the psycho-
analyst anything but arbitrary. Rather, there is an underlying imaginative
psycho-logical process at work in and through the chemical logic of the
material.
While Tilton remains open and balanced about Jung’s views, he still
maintains with other historians (Pagel, Dobbs, Halleux, Obrist, Princ-
ipe and Newman) a criticism of Jung’s treatment of “its symbolism as a
mythology of timeless origin in the collective psyche.”71 In holding this
position, he states that “Jung failed to give an adequate account of the
cultural matrix from which his own ideas emerged, and consequently
failed to recognize the bewildering diversity of endeavors that – for bet-
ter or worse – have been gathered together under the rubric of the term
‘alchemy.’ ”72
The status and development of Jung’s views of archetypes and the col-
lective unconscious is another matter about which there is much to say,
but this aside, Tilton makes an interesting connection between Jung and
modern esotericism. He cites Antoine Faivre’s “four fundamental charac-
teristics of modern esotericism” and links them to the characteristics of
Jung’s psychology: the “doctrine of correspondences and sympathies; a
belief in a living and revelatory Nature; an emphasis on imagination as
the means of revelation; and the practical objective of personal ‘transfor-
mation’ through such revelation.”73 Recognizing these characteristics sug-
gests to Tilton “we are no longer dealing with a doctrine that stands in the
realms of [natural] science as it is known today.”74 Jung was aware that his
ideas and work had a connection with the Freemasonic and Rosicrucian
traditions, but, if so, it also stood in relationship to the science of his day.
Jung stood at a crossroads.
However, Jung’s openness to the esoteric tradition led Principe and
Newman to follow the writing of Richard Noll, a figure who certainly has
been given little credence in Jungian psychology because of his extremist
biases.75 Tilton is aware of the poor historiography of Noll, an “ex-Jun-
gian,” in his attempt “to expose his former mentor as a dangerous right-
wing cultist and charlatan.”76 It is interesting that though Principe and
Newman emphasize a careful scholarly historiography of alchemy, when
it comes to Jung, they choose an “authority” who has a “well-established
predilection for sensationalism.”77 Tilton is also aware of the not-so-well-
known fact that Noll “published a number of articles in which he garnered
experiential evidence to support Jung’s conceptions of the archetype,
psychological projection, and a transpersonal and atemporal ‘collective

unconscious.’ ”78 In his introduction to the Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia
and Psychotic Disorders, Noll wrote of Jung with “adulation” as a “giant”
on whose shoulders he had stood and he thanked “the deceased psycho-
analyst, ‘for the tremendous impact his life and work had on my life, both
personally and professionally.’ ”79
Now, I don’t think it reasonable to discount someone’s judgments
because he/she may have had a change of view. However, Noll’s antag-
onism to Jung and Jungians seems to suggest an agenda. He writes in
a hostile tone and with questionable scholarship, as already mentioned
previously. It is surprising that sober researchers in the historiography of
alchemy would rely so strongly on such a controversial figure whose attack
on Jung has been addressed by an eminent scholar of Jungian history, Sonu
Shamdasani, in his book Cult Fictions: C.G. Jung and the Founding of
Analytical Psychology. As Tilton has noted, “Whatever genuinely reli-
gious foundations analytical psychology may possess, a comparison of
Jungian psychotherapy to the millennialist cults in question was simply
inaccurate and misleading from the perspective of the academic study of
religion.”80
Principe’s and Newman’s persistent efforts to discredit spiritual alchemy
appear more like a campaign than an objective evaluation. Their unschol-
arly claim that the alchemy of the early modern period “worked on ‘mate-
rial substances toward material goals,’ ” for Tilton,
merely begs the question as to the [philosophical] nature of matter

itself in the early modern world view, and displays precisely the pre-
sentism and positivism Principe and Newman claim to disown, by
which contemporary notions of matter are unconsciously elevated to
the realm of the definitive.81
For Tilton, what is important then is to reflect on the nature of “matter”

and “spirit” and not simply to counterpose “a narrowly ‘chemical’ herme-
neutic with a psychological model such as that proposed by Jung.”82 In
short, for Tilton a philosophical understanding of the meaning of “matter,”
“spirit,” and “psyche” should not be taken for granted. Ultimately for Til-
ton, there remained a continuing importance and ideological congruence
in the history of esotericism with regard to matters of alchemy and the Phi-
losophers’ Stone in the nineteenth century. This congruence “formed the
basis for the alchemical hermeneutic proposed first by Silberer and then by
Jung.”83 Tilton follows Jung’s argument for a coherent “tradition,” rooting
and differentiating the historical contexts at their source, which was not
new with Jung. Historiographic matters continue to evolve in the history
of the alchemical tradition, but, as Tilton notes with regard to Jung, he
placed his own work in the context of a lineage of symbolic import

rather than a Tradition per se, as he argued that psychological or “spir-
itual” elements in alchemical practice prior to the sixteenth century
“fission” of physica and mystica remained largely unconscious to the
“adepts.”84
Tilton sums up his criticism of Principe and Newman with the following
statement:
On this matter we might follow the good advice of the historian of

alchemy E.J. Holmyard, who stated that “it must be left to the psy-
chologists” to pronounce judgment on the “profound psychological
study” put forward by Jung, rather than intruding into fields which
are not our rightful domain. We should also keep in mind Holmyard’s
accurate depiction of Jung’s view of medieval alchemy as a “chemi-
cal research worked into which there entered, by way of projection,
an admixture of unconscious psychic material;” as we have shown,
when Principe and Newman speak of “Jung’s assertion that alchemy
ceases to be alchemy when it becomes clear enough to be understood
in chemical terms,” they betray their fundamental misunderstanding
of the psychology of the unconscious.85
While I agree with this assessment, it is also important to recognize

the lack of philosophical clarification of the presupposed ideas that run
through these debates.
Florin George Caliăn

Caliăn takes up and reviews a number of the controversies on the histori-
ography of alchemy, noting what has become, as we have seen, a funda-
mental divide in the perspectives from which alchemy is understood. The
general way of describing this divide is between the approach of the history
of science, which sees alchemy as a proto-science and accentuates laboratory

work, and what has been seen under the auspices of the history of religion
and/or esotericism in which alchemy is seen as part of religious behavior and
under the rubric of what has generally been called “spiritual alchemy.” Caliăn
further differentiates religious spiritual alchemy (Mircea Eliade), Western
esotericism (Antoine Faivre), the hermetic tradition (Julian Evola and Titus
Burckhardt), and also includes under this designation the hermeneutic prac-
tice of Umberto Eco as well as the psychological perspective of C.G. Jung.
Caliăn takes up the positions of Jung and Eliade as representing the
spiritual tradition and critiques them on the basis of historians of science
Principe and Newman. I will not reiterate these arguments since we have
already referred to them previously. He rehearses this critique as a ground
for his own evaluation, which arrives at the conclusion, like Tilton’s, that
studying “alchemy as only protoscience sets too narrow limitations.”86
Caliăn describes Principe and Newman’s thesis “as an attempt to intro-
duce a kind of exclusivist position . . . into the field of scholarly research
on alchemy.”87 A striking claim among others given the approaches
named above is that “there is almost no connection between early modern
alchemy and the Western esoteric tradition.”88 Noting as well Principe and
Newman’s criticism of Jung, he concludes that their critique of Jung “does
not fully undermine Jungian research, taking into account that his purpose
was almost totally different from that of a historian.”89
Caliăn continues to articulate the limitations of the protoscience thesis
and the unjustified aspects of Principe and Newman. He notes the dramati-
cally inflexible rejection of “spiritual alchemy,”
which is difficult to sustain in the case of many alchemical texts, as

for example Aurora consurgens, The Ripley Scroll, or authors such
as Michael Maier [studied by Tilton] or Jakob Böhme, to name only
some works and authors that cannot fit into the thesis of those two
historians of science.90
Caliăn also rightly criticizes Principe and Newman, as noted above, for
asserting that “Jung was a kind of ‘victim’ of the occultism of the nine-
teenth century.”91 They appear to arrive at such a judgment by depend-
ing on “a bizarre book as their authority, that of Richard Noll, The Jung
Cult, which rather comes from tabloid literature than from the academic
world.”92 While Principe and Newman link Jung and Eliade to the esoteric
school, they do not mention that Evola and Burckhardt respected Jung’s
psychological thesis which for them “somehow left alchemy without its
metaphysical components and placed it in the psyche, as a product of it.
Therefore, it is not esoteric knowledge that has its root in a transcend-
ent reality.”93 Caliăn notes that “[f]or religious and esoteric temperaments
Jung is too positivistic in approaching religion, and for the scientist he
is too spiritual in approaching the history of science.”94 As noted earlier,
Jung’s “psychology” seems to stand at the crossroads between disciplines.
Crossroads have traditionally been both dangerous and sacred places.
Caliăn notes that the efforts of Principe and Newman, the distinction
between “spiritual” and “physical” alchemy is still prevalent in serious
works on alchemy. He quotes historian of chemistry Bruce T. Moran whose
thesis is much like Eliade’s: through a change in its methods alchemy
“gradually lost its spiritual or religious aspect and became chemistry at the
time of the so-called scientific revolution.”95 What was lost in the trans-
formation to the material science of chemistry was precisely alchemy’s
spiritual dimension, that is, that “[t]he successful alchemist gained control
of life’s forces and uncovered secret wisdom – the essence of all truths and
religions.”96 While an exaggerated ideal, it is part of the fantasy of the Phi-
losophers’ Stone, an image that continues to haunt the religious esoteric as
well as the psychological idea of alchemy’s historical goal.
Caliăn also points to the fact that the divide between spiritual and labo-
ratory alchemy can be found in medieval alchemy and not only in the
nineteenth century as Principe and Newman suggested. Caliăn marshals
evidence for his thesis, which “supports the idea that alchemy had a dou-
ble character – it was a science (the mundane facet), but also a donum Dei
(a supernatural facet). In this context,” he notes, “Petrus connected lapis
with Christ, which means a lapis divinus.”97 The divide advances in the
Renaissance as the abundance of speculative alchemical works begins to
lose connections with laboratory alchemy. However, to reduce the whole
of speculative alchemy to only chemical research is patently wrong. There
are, as Caliăn shows, many spiritual alchemists who are seekers of a unio
mystica, including Villanova, Ripley, Fludd, Maier, and others; and, as Til-
ton has concluded, “there exists an ideological congruence in the history
of esotericism pertaining to matters of alchemy.”98
An important point made by Caliăn is that “there are differences in the
perception of the spirituality of alchemy.”99 He points out that “for Maier
alchemy is the ultimate speculative and spiritual discipline, for Böhme it
is a tool to create analogies with his mystic theology, while Newton saw
in alchemy the possibility of understanding the divine plan.”100 While spir-
itual alchemy does not present a single vision, “it is sure that, in the light of
[the above differentiations] a pure empirical approach was insufficient.”101
Caliăn concludes his article by criticizing Principe and Newman’s labe-
ling of alchemy as a primarily scientific and positivistic inquiry, and states
that their criticism of Jung’s and Eliade’s spiritual views of alchemy relies
on unscholarly sources and assumptions. While Principe and Newman
totally reject spiritual alchemy and claim that Jung dismisses the scientific
perspective, in fact, Jung affirms both the spiritual and scientific views of
alchemy in their complexity. Rather, it is Principe and Newman’s thesis
which is one-sided and reductionistic.
The rejection of esotericism in the study of alchemy is untenable, and
the “dual face” of alchemy remains a viable and necessary component of
alchemical studies in the complexity of the field. While esoteric studies
have been seen in a negative light by many academics, the field is in the
process of academic revision.
Wouter Hanegraaff
The work of many recent scholars such as Wouter Hanegraaff has brought
esoteric studies to a high scholarly standard. Hanegraaff’s perspective on
esoteric studies is succinctly described as follows:
Academics tend to look on “esoteric,” “occult,” or “magical” beliefs

with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philo-
sophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to
intellectual history. Wouter J. Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of
how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms
with a cluster of “pagan” ideas from late antiquity that challenged the
foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from
the academy . . . these traditions have come to be perceived as the
Other by which academics define their identity to the present day.
Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary
and secondary sources . . . from the fifteenth century to the present
day, and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion
has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy, and
science.102
Hanegraaff, like Tilton and Caliăn, takes issue with the positions and
scholarship of Principe and Newman and, with regard to Jung, makes clar-
ifying differentiations about laboratory and spiritual alchemy. He notes
that in the heat of debate between critics and defenders of Jung, “both
sides tend to underestimate the differences between Jung’s original state-
ments and what we find in translations and interpretations by later follow-
ers.”103 Hanegraaff calls critical attention to Principe and Newman as well
as to Tilton. He notes that Principe’s arguments against Jung are based on
quotes from a 1940 English translation of Jung’s work by Stanley Hall
of an article that was originally published in the Eranos Yearbooks. On
the basis of this translation, one can assume Jung’s adherence to “spir-
itual alchemy.” Hanegraaff notes Tilton’s criticism of this interpretation by
pointing to a more accurate passage from Psychology and Alchemy (1940),
which reads: “In the alchemical work, we are dealing for the greatest part
not only with chemical experiments, but also with something resembling
psychic processes expressed in pseudo-chemical language.”104 Hanegraaff
points out that “neither Tilton nor Principe/Newman seem to have looked
at the original Eranos lecture, which undermines both their positions.”105
The Eranos lecture “begins with a statement that is remarkably negative
about a purely ‘spiritual’ understanding of alchemical symbolism.”106
Hanegraaff quotes Jung as saying:
Gradually during the course of the eighteenth century, alchemy fell

victim to its own obscurity. . . . The inner decay of alchemy began
more than a century earlier, already in the time of Jacob Böhme, when
many alchemists left their retorts and crucibles and devoted them-
selves exclusively to the hermetic philosophy. At that time, the chem-
ist separated himself from the hermeticist. Chemistry became natural
science, but hermeticism lost the empirical ground under its feet and
lost its way in allegories and speculations that were as bombastic as
they were empty of content, and merely lived off the memories of
a better time. This better time, however, was when the spirit of the
alchemist still truly struggled with the problems of matter, when the
investigating mind was facing the realm of the unknown and believed
to perceive forms and laws in it.107
Such statements serve to show that Jung in no way affirmed a position of the
spiritual alchemist over and against what the “chemist” was engaged with
in the struggle with “matter.” “In other words,” for Hanegraaff “Jung calls
purely ‘spiritual’ alchemy a degenerate phenomenon!”108 For Hanegraaff,
“the absurd idea . . . that for Jung alchemy as a historical phenomenon was
essentially unconcerned with laboratory” practices was due to “defective”
English translations of his work, which was then taken up by his English
readers who were also unconcerned with the history of science.109 “It would
seem then that Principe’s and Newman’s criticism is applicable to the drift
of popular Jungian (mis)interpretations of alchemy . . . rather than to Jung’s
own work.”110 Hanegraaff links the “spiritual alchemy” that was dismissed
by Jung with the “spiritual alchemy” highlighted by Tilton, which for Jung
was “bombastic” and “empty of content.”111 I remain uncertain and reserve
judgment with regard to whether the spiritual alchemy Jung dismisses is
in fact equivalent to what Tilton highlights. However, if Jung was critical
of a disembodied spiritualization of alchemy, he was also critical of the
reduction of the “substances” of the alchemists to a preconceived literalist
understanding of the “material world.” Jung’s criticism raised the question
of just what the natures of “spirit” and “matter” are, and challenged the
presuppositions that are historically projected onto them. In any case, the
divide in the alchemical imagination and in its historiography continues to
struggle with this two-fold subject-object divide.
Aaron Cheak
Cheak attempts to avoid the divide, but notes that the tensions among dif-
fering orientations to alchemy was never easily resolved and that restric-
tive and reductive definitions and approaches to alchemy were, as we have
seen, characteristic of its historiography, in their attempt to define alchemy
as either/or material or spiritual in its authentic and primary nature. Cheak
notes that alchemy has “always been two-fold: chrysopoeia and apotheosis
(gold-making and god-making) – the perfection of metals and mortals.”112
Cheak emphasizes that the earliest works of alchemy were not mate-
rial and protoscientific, but ritualistic, and that alchemical practices were
considered to have been given to humanity by the gods. Alchemy was thus
“a divine art [and] a hieratikē technē.”113 Alluding to the earlier develop-
ment of alchemical practices in China, Cheak cites the two basic traditions
of internal neidan and external waidan. While these two traditions differ
in approach, one emphasizing oratory and the other the laboratory, they
were seen to be complementary and as ultimately having the same goal:
“the attainment of perfection through liberation from conditional exist-

ence.”114 Nevertheless, the differing orientations to alchemy were never
resolved either in China or in the West. Cheak notes “that the effort to
define alchemy to everyone’s satisfaction may well be impossible.”115
Likewise, the contemporary historian of alchemy Lawrence Principe has
noted that “Arriving at solid, satisfactory conclusions about alchemy can
seem as difficult as finding the Philosophers’ Stone itself.”116
Cheak struggles with differing approaches and issues, the opposing ten-
sions between universal and particular, synchronic and diachronic, try-
ing to find a “golden mean” between them, recognizing that finding the
elusive center of such opposing forces “is something of an alchemical act
in and of itself.”117 Cheak seeks to get a glimpse of this elusive center by
circumambulating what he calls an “alchemical mysterium.”118 From this
perspective, alchemy can be seen in terms of “ ‘nodal points of qualitative
change’ . . . or in instances of ‘qualitative exaltation’ . . .” a transforma-
tive point “where ‘art’ becomes science and ‘science’ art.”119 In this way,
Cheak hopes to avoid the “fixed parameters of disciplinal specificity” and
allow for a wider and richer perspective that he links to the German philo-
sophical tradition of “actual understanding (Verstehen) rather than mere
explanation (Erklären).”120 In this Cheak is influenced by Dilthey, Hus-
serl, and Heidegger.121 At the same time, Cheak recognizes that there is
an inherent tension to this balance. This tension requires one to embrace a
Heraclitean “harmony of contrasts” between deeply opposed methodolo-
gies. In circumambulating a center, whether “essentialist” or “relativist,”
the ultimate nature of the center, indeed the substantial existence of the
center itself, must remain an open question.
Having begun with the recognition of alchemy and the Philosophers’
Stone as enigmas, I have described what appears as a fundamental split
in the alchemical imagination and in our approaches to understanding it.
I have examined a range of ways of seeing alchemy primarily in the con-
texts of a natural or spiritual science, the historiographic tradition of the
history of science, and the history of religion. In addition, I have briefly
examined the new discipline of esoteric studies as well as the approach of
Jung’s psychoanalytic point of view, which made a major contribution to
the historiography of alchemy. His psychological interpretation penetrated
to the symbolic level of alchemical thought rendering aspects of it under-
standable, which up until then had remained enigmatic. Jung’s psycho-
analytic point of view which I have described as sitting at the crossroads
of these perspectives draws fire from both sides of the divide, the center
of which Cheak calls an “alchemical mysterium.”122 I believe that Jung,
like Cheak, seeks to bridge the divide and is not content to understand the
enigmatic quality of alchemy or the Philosophers’ Stone by reduction of
them to either subject or object, inner or outer, material and real versus
spiritual and esoteric.
Notes
1 Grossinger, Alchemy, 195.
2 His description does not include Jewish alchemy, which has a significant history. For
more on that, see Patai, The Jewish Alchemists.
3 Grossinger, Alchemy, 177.
4 Panisnick, “The Philosophical Significance,” 100.
5 Eliade, Forge and Crucible, 43.
6 Cardew, “The Archaic and the Sublimity of Origins,” 111.
7 Ibid., 112.
8 Ibid., 111–112.
9 Ibid.
10 Eliade, Forge and Crucible, 7.
11 Ibid., 8.
12 Ibid., 9.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 11.
18 Ibid., 8.
19 Ibid., 11.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 158.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Dorn was a symbolically-oriented alchemist and was therefore important to Jung’s
interpretation of alchemy.
25 Eliade, Forge and Crucible, 159; brackets included in original.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 The story of how Jung’s interest in alchemy developed is described below in Chapter 2
and more fully elaborated in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
29 Thanks to Kevin Padawer at the Kristine Mann Library in New York City for the mas-
sive task of copying relevant passages from Jung’s Collected Works.
30 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 3; includes a phrase from Heym, “Review of Para-
celsica, Zwei Vorlesungen über den Arzt und Philosophen Theophrastus,” 64–67.
31 Pagel, “Jung’s Views on Alchemy,” 48; quoted by Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 4.
32 Pagel, “Jung’s Views on Alchemy,” 48; Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 5.
33 Principe and Newman, “Some Problems,” 419.
34 Ibid., 420.
35 Principe, “Alchemy I,” 13.
36 Principe and Newman, “Some Problems,” 415.
37 Ibid., 415–416.
38 Ibid., 415.
39 Ibid., 415–416.
40 Ibid., 417.
41 Ibid., 418.
42 Ibid., 417.
43 Ibid., 417–418.
44 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 2.
45 Ibid., 2.
46 Ibid., 2–3.
47 Ibid., 3.
48 Ibid., 5.
49 Ibid., 6.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 7.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 8.
54 Ibid., 9.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 10.
57 Newman, “Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language?,” 165, 188; quoted by Tilton,
The Quest for the Phoenix, 11.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 12.
61 Holmyard, Alchemy, 160; quoted by Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 255.
63 Ibid., 13.
64 See Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 13, footnote 55.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 14; includes a word quoted from Principe and New-
man, “Some Problems,” 407.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 16.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., 17.
74 Ibid., 17–18.
75 Richard Noll has written two controversial books about Jung, The Jung Cult and The
Aryan Christ, both of which vilify Jung and have been strongly rejected by other schol-
ars, including Sonu Shamdasani who in his book Cult Fictions points to Noll’s lack of
critical scholarship.
77 Ibid., 20.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., 21, footnote 87.
80 Ibid., 20.
81 Ibid., 34.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 254.
84 Ibid., 255.
85 Ibid.
86 Caliăn, Alkimia Operativa, 170.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid., 171.
89 Ibid., 173.
90 Ibid., 174–175.
91 Ibid., 175.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid., 175–176. See Caliăn’s excellent summary of these issues, 176–177.
94 Ibid., 176.
95 Ibid., 177.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., 178.
98 Ibid., 253.
99 Ibid., 187.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, book jacket.
103 Ibid., 290.
104 Ibid. Italics added by Hanegraaff.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid., 291.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid.
112 Cheak, “Introduction,” 18.
113 Ibid., 19.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, 2.
117 Cheak, “Introduction,” 19.
118 Ibid., 20.
119 Ibid., 19.
120 Ibid., 20.
121 Ibid., footnote 5.
122 Ibid.
Chapter 2
The eye of the winged serpent

Mercurius and overcoming the
split in the alchemical imagination 1
For Jung, alchemical images and graphics were of great value in attempt-
ing to overcome our modern divide between the alchemical binaries and
to approach a center point. In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung published an
alchemical image taken from the frontispiece of Michael Maier’s Tripus
aureus.2 It is an image of what Jung called the “double face of alchemy.”3
The image is divided into two parts. On the right is a representation of
an alchemical laboratory with many alembics and laboratory instruments
hanging on the wall. Just below we can see a distilling apparatus, a table, a
shelf, and in the foreground a man partially clad in a short wrap, kneeling
on one knee. He appears to be tending the fire inside a circular athanor or
furnace. In his right hand is a hammer or ax-like instrument. There appears
to be chopped wood, perhaps kindling, and leaning against the furnace
is a pair of tongs and a bellows on its base, as well as instruments of the
laboratory.
On the left is what appears to be a library with walls lined with books.
In the foreground are three figures. Jung, following Maier, identified the
men as the abbot John Cremer, the monk Basilius Valentinus (a legendary
figure, possibly fictitious), and a layman, Thomas Norton. One of the men
appears to be pointing to the laboratory and possibly to what is going on in
the long-necked flask on a tripod sitting on top of the round furnace that is
central to the image. Inside the flask is the winged serpent or dragon that is
the inspiration for this reflection and whose perspective we will consider
shortly.
For the moment, let us notice a divide that has entered the contemporary
alchemical imagination. As some of us look at this illustration we tend
to identify with one side of the divide or the other. Some of us retreat to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-3
The eye of the winged serpent 33
Figure 2.1 The dual face of alchemy. From Michael Maier, Tripus aureus, frontis-
piece, 1618.
Source: Public domain.
our libraries, studies, or consulting rooms and others to our labs and spy-
geric and chemical experiments. We come like the two serpents, perhaps
instinctively emerging from one side or another, ontologizing spirit or
matter, from library or laboratory, sometimes hissing at one another about
who is the real alchemist and what constitutes real alchemy.
From the point of view of what is now called “spiritual alchemy,”
those who work on the practical level are often seen as retro-chemists or
proto-pharmacists, hopelessly trying to practice the art, often without a
clue about its subtle nature and without spiritual insight, while from the
point of view of the practical laboratory alchemist, spiritual alchemists are
merely abstract thinkers who reduce the real engagement with nature to
facile ideas. They are seen as disembodied spirits projecting psychological
principles back onto the real work of engaging and transforming matter. It
is nothing new for alchemists to both berate and undermine one another.
Jung cites the examples of Bernard of Treviso, a famous alchemist, as call-
ing the great Gerber (Jabir) “an obscurantist and a Proteus who promises
kernels and gives husks.”4
34 The eye of the winged serpent
From a Jungian point of view, one might imagine both the spiritual and
laboratory alchemists as projecting the shadow onto each other. For the
spiritual alchemist, who is not deeply grounded in the substance of the
work, he or she disparages and/or secretly idealizes the practical alche-
mist, who appears to literally be engaged with what is absent in his or her
own work. On the other hand, the practical alchemist may be defended
against spiritual transformation, avoiding it by focusing on literal matter to
the exclusion of its deep mystery. He or she disparages and/or idealizes the
spiritual alchemist who appears to have a real inner knowledge of transfor-
mation. In both cases, a lack precedes the shadow projection. There is no
sense of Mercurius duplex – and the hermetic complexity s/he embodies.
Figure 2.2 S un and Moon, Rebis. From Heinrich Nollius, Theoria Philosophiae
Hermeticae, 1617.
The dual face of alchemy is literalized and split into spiritual versus mate-
rial, and there is no insight into the one body of alchemy, which appears
with two heads.
Returning to our image of the dual face of alchemy, let’s notice how
the athanor or furnace stands between the two rooms, library and labora-
tory, as if to link them. As the flask is heated up, an odd creature appears,
a winged serpent or dragon within it. I imagine this creature as what
the alchemists called a monstrum, a premature conjunction on the way
toward a coniunctio of spirit and matter. The wings indicate the spiritual
aspect that raises up the instinctual, material dimension illustrated by
the serpent; the material, instinctual serpent grounds the winged ener-
gies. This circular and ouroboric play is a hint that we are approaching
the subtle body of Mercurius duplex. It signals a more primary unified
field. The image of Mercurius sits on a tripod and is as well a third pos-
sibility sitting in the flask between the split world, cooking and awaiting
realization.
Mercurius duplex
Abraham describes Mercurius as “the central symbol in alchemy,” who is
also known by the equivalent Greek name Hermes, symbolizing the

universal agent of transmutation. . . . Mercurius is a symbol for the
alchemists’ magical Arcanum, the transformative substance without
which the opus cannot be performed. . . . Mercurius . . . is also the
name of the divine spirit hidden in the depths of matter, the light of
nature, anima mundi, the very spirit of life which must be released in
order to make the philosophers’ stone.5
For Jung, the dragon combines “the chthonic principle of the serpent and
the aeriel principle of the bird.”6 The dragon is “a variant of Mercurius” as
“the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter.”7
In metallic terms, Mercury or “ ‘living silver,’ quicksilver . . . perfectly
expressed” is the dual reality of Mercurius, outwardly metal, inwardly “the
world-creating spirit.”8 Jung notes that “[t]he dragon is probably the oldest
pictorial symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It
appears as the [Ouroboros], the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which
dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend.”9
Figure 2.3 M ercurius as a uniting symbol. From Valentinus, “Duodecim clavis,”

16th century.
Figure 2.4
O uroboros, the tail-eater. From the “The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra,”
preserved in Codex Marcianus, 10th-11th century.
“Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the
one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting
its own tail.”10
In a footnote, Jung quotes the Rosarium from the Artis auriferae:
Therefore you must be single-minded in the work of nature. . . . For

however much its names may differ, yet it is ever one thing alone, and
from the same thing. . . . One is the stone, one the medicine, one the
vessel, one the method and one the disposition.11
And again: “This magistery proceeds first from one root, which [root] then
expands into more things, and then reverts to the one.”12 “For this reason,” Jung
states, “the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel).”13
Here we see Mercurius turning the wheel symbolizing the alchemical
process. Mercurius “is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery,
poison yet healing draught,”14 a pharmakon, as Plato and French philoso-
pher Jacques Derrida would contend.
Figure 2.5 M ercurius turning the wheel which symbolizes the alchemical pro-
cess. “Speculum veritatis,” 17th century.
In the earlier image entitled the “dual face of alchemy,” two serpents
representing forces from opposite sides of the alchemical divide were seen
as crawling toward one another and in the flask above them was an image
of the Mercurial dragon representing an early and/or premature stage of
integration, what the alchemists call a monstrum. In the following image,
the serpents can now be seen to be interlocking, linking Sun and Moon,
King and Queen, representing a further integration of paired opposites, a
moving toward the greater coniunctio, a deeper level of integration. In this
circular process, what were the hissing serpents unite in a healing image
symbolized by Mercurius and the caduceus, uniting pairs of opposites.
If, for Cheak, the center between opposites is an alchemical mysterium
and must remain open, Jung attempts to give us a graphic and symbolic
Figure 2.6
M ercurius as caduceus unifying the opposites. From “Figurarum
Aegyptiorum secretarum,” 18th century.
view of this open center, looking into it to see what goes on between the
so-called opposites of the dual face of alchemy. The conjunction of oppo-
sites, as a mysterium coniunctionis, has been expressed through alchemi-
cal images of Mercurius duplex, the ouroboros, the rota or ever-moving
wheel of the alchemical process. These images of the conjunction of oppo-
sites as an ever-revealing process give us a glimpse of what has been called
the Philosophers’ Stone. In the alchemical text, the Aurora consurgens, the
Philosophers’ Stone speaks:
I am the mediatrix of the elements, making one to agree with another;

that which is warm I make cold, and the reverse; that which is dry
I make moist, and the reverse; that which is hard I soften, and the
reverse. I am the end and my beloved is the beginning. I am the whole
work and all science is hidden in me.15
In this odd statement, the Philosophers’ Stone speaks, leaving the reader
with the ambiguity of whether the Stone reflects some human reality or
describes a vision of a natural cosmic process. This ambiguity captures
what we have been describing as the tension in the alchemical imagination.
The question itself reflects a taken-for-granted conviction, mainly a divide
between the human and natural world. It is precisely this supposition which
is challenged by the idea of a Philosophers’ Stone. As we have seen for the
alchemists, the “Philosophers’ Stone” is itself seen as a union of opposites.
“Philosophy, love of wisdom, is” identified as a deeply human and sentient
activity, while “a stone is a crude, hard, material reality.”16 Somehow, the
Philosophers’ Stone attempts to bring these two realms of reality together
as the goal of the alchemical process. For Jung, the Philosophers’ Stone
was a forerunner of the modern discovery of what he called the reality of
the psyche and the Self, which also cannot be reduced to a preconceived
model based on a complete separation of psyche from world.
For Jung, the literal reality of matter through “projection” created an
“admixture” of psyche and substance recognized by the alchemists as a
living symbolic reality such that for them it is not so strange to imagine the
Philosophers’ Stone as speaking and having a voice. For Jung,
[w]hat the alchemists called “matter” was in reality the [unconscious]

self. The “soul of the world,” the anima mundi, which was identified
with the spiritus mercurius, was imprisoned in matter. It is for this
reason that alchemists believed in the truth of “matter,” because “mat-

ter” was actually their own psychic life. But it was a question of free-
ing this “matter,” of saving it – in a word, of finding the philosophers’
stone, the corpus glorificationis.17
Jung goes on to say that “The alchemical operations were real, only this
reality was not physical but psychological. Alchemy represents the projec-
tion of a drama both cosmic and spiritual in laboratory terms. The opus
magnum had two aims: the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of
the cosmos.”18 The move brought alchemy into the realm of Jung’s psy-
chology, but it remains to be clarified just what “a psychology of alchemy”
implies. On the one hand, Jung states,
I am and remain a psychologist. I am not interested in anything that tran-

scends the psychological content of human experience. I do not even
ask myself whether such transcendence is possible, because in any case
the trans-psychological is no longer the concern of the psychologist.19
In such statements, Jung appears to retreat to a “psychological reality”

separated from the world. However, just what he meant by “psychologi-
cal” never quite fit the category of an ego subject against an object world.
When he was at times accused of being a reductionist for translating his
experience into psychology, he would often counter that his critics act as if
they knew what the “psyche” and “matter” really are. If Jung was right that
the alchemists did indeed project “psyche” into matter, I think it is impor-
tant to see that for Jung “psyche” was not simply subjective, not simply
in us, and is ultimately for him an unknown, a mystery, as is the “matter”
upon which so-called psyche is projected. “Matter” for Jung was not sim-
ply out there, totally independent of psyche. Projection, then, was move-
ment from a mystery (psyche) to a mystery (matter), and this mystery is
one “thing” and yet differentiated into a multiplicity at the same time.
The pre-alchemy Jung: initiation and the

descent into the unconscious
If the work of alchemy and the production of the Philosophers’ Stone
required a coniunctio oppositorum that attempted to overcome the dualis-
tic divides between spirit and matter, psyche and substance, self and world,
alchemy and chemistry, it also required alchemical transformation to bring

this about. From the point of view of Eliade and Jung, alchemy required an
initiatory process or descent into the depth of death, renewal, leading to a
change in the adept’s mode of seeing and being. These initiatory rites are
preserved in the descriptions of the transformation of “matter” as living
substances from which Jung extracted his descriptions of what he was to
call the individuation process. Jung ultimately saw this process as a pre-
cursor to his psychology of the unconscious.
Jung developed his way of understanding alchemy in and through such
a process of personal initiation. The process was described in his autobiog-
raphy Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In a chapter entitled “Confrontation
with the Unconscious,” Jung describes a powerful series of visions that
brought him to the brink of psychosis.
From the beginning I had conceived my voluntary confrontation with

the unconscious as a scientific experiment which I myself was con-
ducting and in whose outcome I was vitally interested. . . .
. . . I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears.
Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground liter-
ally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths.
I could not fend off a feeling of panic. But then, abruptly, at not too
great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass. I felt great
relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a while
my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like a deep
twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave, in which stood
a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were mummified. I squeezed
past him through the narrow entrance and waded knee deep through
icy water to the other end the cave where, on a projecting rock, I saw
a glowing red crystal. I grasped the stone, lifted it, and discovered a
hollow underneath. At first I could make out nothing, but then I saw at
there was running water. In it a corpse floated by, a youth with blond
hair and a wound in the head. He was followed by a gigantic black
scarab and then by a red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of
the water. Dazzled by the light, I wanted to replace the stone upon
the opening, but then a fluid welled out. It was blood. A thick jet of it
leaped up, and I felt nauseated. It seemed to me that the blood contin-
ued to spurt for an unendurably long time. At last it ceased, and the
vision came to an end.
I was stunned by this vision. I realized, of course, that it was a hero

and solar myth, a drama of death and renewal, the rebirth symbol-
ized by the Egyptian scarab. At the end, the dawn of the new day
should have followed, but instead came that intolerable outpouring of
blood – an altogether abnormal phenomenon, so seemed to me. But
then I recalled the vision of blood that I had had in the autumn of that
same year, and I abandoned all further attempt to understand.20
Jung writes of his loneliness. He felt he could not speak to anyone about
these experiences for fear they would be misunderstood. He notes: “I felt
the gulf between the external world and the interior world of images in its
most painful form. I could not yet see that interaction of both worlds which
I now understand. I saw only an irreconcilable contradiction between
‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ ”21
It was a long time before Jung felt he began to emerge from the darkness.
One of the things that had helped him come to terms with his nearly over-
whelming experiences was that he began to draw small circular drawings in
a notebook every morning. He recognized such drawings as mandalas, which
seemed to correspond to his inner situation at the time. Jung notes: “With the
help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day
to day.”22 Only gradually did Jung feel that he began to understand what these
mandalas were. For Jung, these circular drawings came to be understood as
representing “the self, the wholeness of the personality.”23 Jung writes:
My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of self which

were presented to me anew each day. In them I saw the self – that is,
my whole being – actively at work. To be sure at first I could only
dimly understand them; but they seemed to me highly significant, and
I guarded them like precious pearls. I had the distinct feeling that they
were something central, and in time I acquired through them a living
conception of the self. The self, I thought, was like the monad which
I am, and which is my world. The mandala represents this monad, and
corresponds to the microcosmic nature of the psyche.24
In his autobiography, Jung was aware that he was producing a great many
such drawings and at one point he asks himself “What is this process lead-
ing to? Where is its goal?”25 Jung realized he could not choose a goal
which gave the ego too much control. He felt he had to let himself “be
carried along by the current, without a notion of where it would lead

[him].”26 When he was drawing the mandalas, he could determine all the
paths he had been following and they seemed to lead “back to a single
point – namely, to the mid-point.”27 It became clear to Jung that the man-
dala “is the path to the center, to individuation.”28 He writes that during
the “years between 1918 and 1920, I began to understand that the goal of
psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only
a circumambulation of the self.”29 For Jung:
Uniform development exists, at most, only at the beginning; later, eve-

rything points toward the center. This insight gave me stability, and
gradually my inner peace returned. I knew that in finding the mandala
as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ulti-
mate. Perhaps someone else knows more, but not I.30
This process described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a late-life auto-

biography, was originally documented in his “Black Books,” the private
journals in which he recorded his fantasies and his “Confrontation with the
Unconscious.”31 He then added these revised reflections and drawings to
them, and transcribed them into what was known as The Red Book. This
book was kept under wraps so to speak and only recently translated and
published with an Introduction and scholarly notes by Sonu Shamdasani.
In his Introduction, Shamdasani in a section entitled “The Way to the Self”
refers to Jung as saying that “all of us stood between two worlds: the world
of external perception and the world of perception of the unconscious.”32
The distinction depicted his world at the time of his writing a paper enti-
tled “On the unconscious” in 1918. For Jung, “[t]he union of rational and
irrational truth is to be found . . . in the symbol. . . [which contains] both
the rational and irrational.”33 In and through his experiences documented in
The Red Book, Jung continually worked on the issue of “how the problem
of the opposites could be resolved through the production of the uniting or
reconciling symbol.”34 In his work Psychological Types, Jung continued to
struggle with how the opposites could be resolved studying this in “Hindu-
ism, Taoism, Meister Eckhart, and . . . in the work of Carl Spitteler.”35 Out
of these studies, the idea of the “self” emerged as a psychological concept.
But inasmuch as the ego is only the center of my field of conscious-

ness, it is not identical with the totality of my psyche, being merely one
complex among other complexes. I therefore distinguish between the

ego and the self, since the ego is only the subject of my consciousness,
while the self is the subject of my total psyche, which also includes
the unconscious. In this sense the self would be an ideal entity which
embraces the ego. In unconscious fantasies the self often appears as
supraordinate or ideal personality, having somewhat the relationship
of Faust to Goethe or Zarathustra to Nietzsche.36
Jung also linked the Self with the Hindu notion of Brahman/Atman. In
this view, it is relevant to note that the Atman reflects the microcosmic
self while Brahman its macrocosmic counterpart. From the perspective
of the macrocosmic level of understanding in Hinduism, the Brahman
is seen to have two aspects: Brahman with qualities (saguna) as “he”
appears in the time and space and Brahman without qualities (nirguna)
as “he” appears from the perspective of eternity. Ultimately from the
Hindu perspective, there is a “oneness” between these two aspects – a
linking of nirguna and saguna Brahman. This linking is described as
having the qualities of sat chit ananda (truth, consciousness, bliss) and
to represent the ultimate perspective of the ontological reading of the
Self, a term also widely used in the Upanishads. The Hindu model is use-
ful for recognizing that in Jung’s understanding of the Self both personal
and archetypal universal perspective make up a fuller understanding of
the “self.” In another place, Jung writes that the Self is also the goal of
life because it is the most expressive “of that fateful combination we
call individuality.” With the experiencing of the Self as something irra-
tional, “as an indefinable” being “to which the ego is neither opposed nor
subjected,” but is nevertheless in a relation of dependence, and around
which it rotates, much like the earth orbits the sun – then the goal of
individuation has been reached.37
In spite of what appears like confident statements about the Self, Jung
remained somewhat uncertain about his discovery. It was very personal
and emerged out of a deep struggle with his nearly overwhelming con-
frontation with the unconscious. The notion of the Self helped Jung feel
stabilized, through the experience of this superordinate center. Jung
came to feel that his notion of the Self was a “compensation for the con-
flict between inside and outside”38 and that the circular mandalas he was
drawing were symbolic expressions of the dynamic quality of the Self.
Jung wrote some years later, around 1927, that he “obtained confirmation
of [his] ideas about the center and the self by way of a dream,” and
he referenced its essence in a mandala which he called “Window on
Eternity.”39
A year later, he painted another mandala “with a golden castle in the
center.”40 Jung believed the image to be Chinese in character, although it
is not apparent why he thought this. Strangely, not long after Jung painted
this image, he received a letter from Sineologist Richard Wilhelm along
with a Taoist alchemical manuscript called The Secret of the Golden
Flower, “with a request that [he] write a commentary on it.”41 This was
an important turning point for Jung. He notes that this book gave him an
“undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the cir-
cumambulation of the center.”42 This sense of a parallel between Jung’s
understanding of the Self and the mandala with Chinese alchemy gave him
a sense of affinity with others who had experienced something similar and
broke through his feeling of isolation. At this point, Jung was “stirred by
the desire to become more closely acquainted with the alchemical texts.”43
He soon acquired a copy of the Rosarium Philosophorum, a sixteenth
century alchemical text, but it was a long time before he “found [his] way
about in the labyrinth of alchemical thought processes.”44 It was in this
text that he noticed a number of strange phrases, including the lapis (the
Philosophers’ Stone), and he gradually felt that it was as if he “were try-
ing to solve the riddle of an unknown language. . . [that] gradually yielded
up its meaning.”45 Jung recognized that his psychology “coincided in a
most curious way with alchemy” and that he “had stumbled upon the his-
torical counterpart of [his] psychology of the unconscious.”46 Once Jung
discovered the symbolic meaning of alchemy he understood his confron-
tation with the unconscious in a new context and no longer needed The
Red Book as a “container” for his discoveries. Instead, alchemy provided
a new field of study that remained his passion for the rest of his life. With
the help of alchemy, Jung felt he could finally absorb and arrange “the
overpowering force of [his] original experiences.”47 Sanford Drob (2012)
elaborates on this:
As alchemy treated the symbols of chaos, the soul, evil, and the merg-
ing of opposites, Jung found a ready container for his Red Book expe-
rience and ideas. The alchemist’s efforts to bring about a union of
opposites in the laboratory and to perform what they spoke of as a
“chymical wedding” were understood by Jung as antecedents to his
own “innovation” of merging the opposites and his attempt to distin-

guish, but at the same time forge a unity, e.g., between the masculine
and feminine, and the good and evil aspects of the psyche. We might
say that for Jung this “unity in difference” was The Red Book’s major
theoretical and personal achievement.48
The Rosarium philosophorum

This theme is carried further in the Rosarium philosophorum, which con-
tains a series of iconic images central to both alchemy and Jungian psy-
chology, beginning with the initiatory death and separation, and ending
Figure 2.7 Male/female coniunctio. From the Rosarium philosophorum, Figure 5,

16th century.
with the coniunctio, the goal of the work. This process requires a defeat of
the ego, a going under, a death and descent into hell, and ultimately a spir-
itual renewal, all of which Jung and Eliade see as essential to the alchemi-
cal process. This is illustrated by twenty images from the Rosarium, only
ten of which Jung refers to in his study of this text in “The Psychology of
the Transference.” The Rosarium portrays this process as progressive as
well as circular. An example of the unification or coniunctio of masculine
and feminine is graphically represented in the following image by a couple
in connubial union.
Jung wrote about this image that “The sea has closed over the king and
queen, and they have gone back to the chaotic beginnings, the massa con-
fusa.”49 The union early on in the process takes place in an unconscious
identity which he describes as a primitive initial state of chaos “where het-
erogeneous factors merge in an unconscious relationship.”50 As such, it is a
Figure 2.8 The death-like state of the soul standing on the black sun, a condition
lacking differentiation. From J.D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata, 1622.
premature union, a state of unconsciousness. Such an undifferentiated Abso-

lute union was described by Hegel in his implicit critique of Schelling “as
the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black.”51 In alchemical
texts, this undifferentiated condition is illustrated graphically as a stage in
the development of consciousness where “[t]he stone of solar and lunar con-
junction [is] turned into the black sun of death.”52 The following two images
illustrate alchemical variations of the undifferentiated state of the nigredo:
The second image likewise illustrates the dark phase of the alchemical
work. In this image, the landscape has suffered a drought or been burned,
dried up, and is flat or empty. Henderson and Sherwood note that the
image depicts a “state of incubation . . . a need for change” in a pivotal yet
temporal moment.53
Figure 2.9 Sol niger. The dark phase of the alchemical work. From Splendor solis,
16th century.
Hegel’s idea of the Absolute surpasses these undifferentiated conditions

and, like the notion of the Philosophers’ Stone, requires a more differenti-
ated view. Jung, like Hegel, indicates the importance of going beyond the
stage of a simple undifferentiated conjunction. He suggests, however, that
even in the stage of undifferentiated darkness something is going on that
sets the stage for further development. For Jung, the Rosarium illustrates
a differentiating process in its images. One can discern such a movement
throughout the ten figures Jung discusses. For example, in Figure 6 the
“[k]ing and queen are dead and have melted into a single being with two
heads,”54 an undifferentiated state of the prima materia, an alchemical ver-
sion of Hegel’s “all cows are black.”
Figure 2.10 K ing and Queen’s return to the prima materia. From the Rosarium
philosophorum, Figure 6, 16th century.
Source: Photo courtesy of the author.
Jung writes that when opposites unite at this stage “all energy
ceases. . . [or] So at least it appears, looked at from the outside. . . .”55
“Nuptial joy” gives way to a “stagnant pool . . . No new life can arise, says
the alchemists [sic], without the death of the old.”56 This death, the black-
ness of the nigredo, is also implicitly the ground of a genesis – putrefac-
tion, corruption are also fertility. Jung points out that the corpse left over
from the connubial union is already in a new body. Half of the body is
male and the other half female. For Jung, this hermaphrodite prefigures the
long-sought goal of the lapis or Philosophers’ Stone, symbolizing a “mys-
terious being yet to be begotten, for whose sake the opus is undertaken.
But the opus has not yet reached its goal, because the lapis has not come
alive.”57 Its differentiated quality is not yet conscious.
Figure 2.11
E nergizing moisture. From the Rosarium philosophorum, Figure 8,
16th century.
Source: Photo courtesy of the author.
In Figure 8 of the Rosarium, there is a provocative, perhaps parallel,

image entitled “Purification,” in which an energizing moisture emerges
from a cloud and activates psychic potential, setting in motion the catalyz-
ing energy for a more differentiated state of existence. Jung asserts that
“[t]he falling dew is a portent of the divine birth now at hand.”58 He notes
that “(Gideon’s dew) is a synonym for the aqua permanens, hence for
Mercurius.”59
An interesting variation on these Rosarium images was presented by an
analysand in these two drawings.
Just as in alchemy, so in the analytic process, the activation of the soul
can be seen in images. The first mirrors a variation on image 6 of the
Figure 2.12 Return to the prima materia. Artwork by analysand.

Source: Used by permission.
Figure 2.13 Energizing moisture. Artwork by analysand.

Rosarium. In it, one can see two heads attached to a single skeletal body
whose garments have been shredded, again an image of the prima materia
or of the undifferentiated state. However, the animal energies surround-
ing the figure anticipate the vitalizing moisture that does not emerge until
image 8 of the Rosarium. This moisture becomes explicit in her second
image in which a death-like skeletal figure sits in darkness, but the poten-
tiality of further development can also be seen in the images of a doorway
and a key.
This moisture, like the divine dew of alchemy, serves to energize the life
force that Jung relates to the spirit of Mercurius which “descends . . . to
purify the blackness.”60 For Jung, the “divine” dew is a gift of “illumina-
tion and wisdom”61 and is linked to the anticipation of the Philosophers’
Stone. About the Stone, Jung states “the acquisition of the stone is better
than the fruits of purest gold and silver.”62
For Jung, the stage of movement beyond the darkness of non-differ-
entiation requires something more than abstract intellectual realization.
It requires the recognition of the importance of feeling. Jung states that
feelings open up a whole new perspective, even a whole new world. The
moisture signifies a freshness and animation of the deadness. “The black
or unconscious state that resulted from the union of opposites reaches the
nadir and a change sets in. The falling [moisture] signals resuscitation and
new light.”63 Alchemy is filled with such images that link death and new
life. The following image from the alchemical text The Hermetic Museum
illustrates this process, showing how grain grows from the grave symbol-
izing resurrection and new birth:
Figure 2.14 G rain growing from the grave. From D. Stolcius de Stolcenberg,
Viridarium chymicum, 1624.
Figure 2.15 Grain growing from the corpse of Osiris. E. A Wallis Budge, Egyptian
Ideas of the Future Life, 1900.
A similar image is found in the Egyptian mysteries showing grain grow-

ing from the corpse of Osiris:
The experience of new life emerging from an experience of death is
not uncommon in analytic work. The following image was presented by a
woman analysand upon coming out of a death-like depression:
The image of a tree and the movement of birds reflected a growing sense
of vitality in the midst of darkness.
For Jung, the emergence of new life from death-like states suggests that
the deepening descent into the unconscious does not mean that the soul
was lost or destroyed, but rather that in that other world, it was form-
ing a “living counterpole to the state of death in this world.”64 The dew
in Figure 8 of the Rosarium indicates this counterpole in the form of the
activation of feeling and new life. But, for Jung, this is not the final stage.
The emergence of the vitality points the way to another kind of experience
Figure 2.16 A growing sense of vitality in the midst of darkness. Artwork by

analysand.
Figure 2.17 T he monstrous hermaphrodite. From the Rosarium philosophorum,

Figure 10, 16th century.
that anticipates the lapis as an “imaginative activity . . . intuition, with-

out which no realization is complete.”65 For Jung, the imaginative activity
opens a new range of psychological possibilities for insight and the way
we see the world. Imagination “revels in the garden of magical possibili-
ties as if they were real”66 and nothing is more charged with such possi-
bilities for the alchemist than the intuition of the lapis philosophorum, the
Philosophers’ Stone, which “rounds off the work into an experience of the
totality of the individual.”67
It is not possible here to go through every stage depicted by the Rosar-
ium philosophorum, but I would like to skip ahead to the last image
Jung describes in this process entitled “The New Birth.” This is the last
picture, number 10, of the series Jung discusses, and is a first image of
the goal of the process.
It is a complex image described in many ways: as the alchemical filius
philosophorum, as the Rebis, as a Christ figure, and as a hermaphrodite (a
bisexual first man/woman, the Anthropos), and as the lapis or Philosophers’
Stone. The image represents “the culminating point of the work beyond
which it is impossible to go except by means of the multiplicatio.”68 It is a
figure that Jung identifies as “a higher state of unity,” a unity that is not a
unity but a complex unity hard to understand and describe.69 The lapis as the
“cosmogonic First Man” is called radix ipsius (root of itself) and according
to the Rosarium “everything has grown from this One and through this One.
It is the Ouroboros, the serpent that fertilizes and gives birth to itself, by
definition an increatum . . . .”70 For Jung, the creation increatum is an impen-
etrable paradox. In his view, anything unknowable can best be described in
terms of opposites, what Nicholas of Cusa regarded as antinomial thought.71
Jung states that it is not surprising that the alchemical opus ends with the
idea of a highly paradoxical being that defies rational analysis. The work
could hardly end in any other way since the complexio oppositorum can-
not possibly lead to anything but a baffling paradox. Psychologically, this
means that human wholeness can only be described in antimonies, which
is always the case when dealing with a transcendental idea.72 Jung, how-
ever, states that this paradoxical image of the goal holds out
the possibility of an intuitive and emotional experience, because the

unity of the self, unknowable and incomprehensible, irradiates even
the sphere of our discriminating, and hence divided, consciousness,
and, like all unconscious contents, does so with very powerful effects.
This inner unity, or experience of unity, is expressed most forcibly
by the mystics in the idea of the unio mystica, and above all in the
philosophies and religions of India, in Chinese Taoism, and in the Zen
Buddhism of Japan.73
From Jung’s psychological point of view, language does not seem to be

intrinsically related to the reality of what is being described: “A rose by
any other name would smell as sweet.” For him, “the names we give to the
self are quite irrelevant.”74 So, whatever we call the Self or the “goal” or
the Philosophers’ Stone remains a psychological reality independent of the
metaphysical “truth” of the “thing-in-itself.”
With the idea of the “psychic reality” in mind, Jung returns to the com-
plex image of the goal of the Rosarium process in all its symbolic details.
This image is filled with contrasting and complex imagery that, Jung notes,
requires a study in its own regard. Jung suggests that the image of the her-
maphrodite shows an apotheosis of the Rebis, an elevation of the image to
a divine level. The image contains opposites such as male and female, the
sun and moon, in the vessel that the alchemists called the vas hermeticum.
The wings on the image suggest to Jung the qualities of both vitality and
spirituality, and the serpents and the raven point to the problem of evil
and its containment. The Mercurial and numerical play between three and
four is seen in terms of number symbolism both in its religious Trinitar-
ian aspects of the three serpents in one vessel and a fourth in another.
The additional serpent stands outside the Trinity and yet must be included
to complete the goal of the opus. The whole process is then reflected in
what Jung calls the philosophical tree, or arbor philosophica, with sun and
moon images depicting the coming to consciousness of the unconscious
process represented in the work of the unification of opposites. What Jung
finds most remarkable about the image is that “the fervently desired goal
of the alchemist’s endeavors should be conceived under so monstrous and
horrific an image.”75
In this chapter, I have attempted to show that alchemical and psycho-
logical work endeavor to overcome opposites and splits in the alchemical
imagination. It has become clear that efforts to move beyond the dual face
of alchemy cannot rest in a simple unification, that is, a unification with-
out differentiation. Such a unity is not a simple unity, but a complex one
bringing together contraries that appear from an ordinary everyday view as
impossible to join together: life and death, male and female, good and evil.
As such, this unification was called by Jung a mysterium coniunctionis,
a designation expressed in the image of the Philosophers’ Stone. For the
alchemists, such a goal was not simply a rational process, but required the
adept to see through the eye of the winged serpent Mercurius who unified
unity and differences in a single vision. Murray Stein has noted:
It is the genius of Mercurius that the many do not disappear into a sin-
gularity but rather retain their unique aspects and facets, diamondlike,
while joining the wholeness structure of the mandala. Thus, room for
diversity is preserved while unity is attained.
This is the answer to the dilemma of “the One or the Many.” It has
often been discussed among Jungian authors: Is the personality multi-
ple and many, or is it one? Polytheism or monotheism? The answer is:
“both” – diversity in unity; unity in diversity. This is the only realis-
tic and sustainable goal for individuation given the complexity of the
human personality. And this is the net implication of the [Mysterium]
Coniunctionis in the title of the text: it is “unity” but it does not deny
or eliminate diversity and differentiation.76
From an ordinary point of view, such a complexity can appear monstrous.

Philosophically, Hegel’s idea of the Absolute as a unity linking unity and
difference approaches such complexity and may well be a parallel to the
alchemical Mercurius. It offers a philosophical description of such a com-
plexity and is useful in trying to understand what the alchemists had in
mind by the goal of their opus.
Notes
1 This chapter is a modified version of a talk entitled “Archetypal Alchemy,” which was
originally given at the International Alchemy Conference, Las Vegas, NV, October 6,
2007.
2 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), 278.
3 Ibid., §404.
4 Ibid., §402.
5 Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 124–125.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., footnote 12(a).
12 Ibid., footnote 12(b); brackets included in original.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, 143.
16 Edinger, Anatomy, 216.
17 Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, 228.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 229.
20 Jung, Memories, 178–179.
21 Ibid., 194.
22 Ibid., 195.
23 Ibid., 196.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 197.
31 Ibid., 170–199.
32 Shamdasani, Introduction to The Red Book, 210.
33 Jung, Civilization in Transition (CW10), §24; quoted by Shamdasani, Introduction to
The Red Book, 210.
35 Ibid., 211.
36 Jung, Psychological Types (CW6), §706.
37 Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW7), §405.
38 Ibid., §404.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 204.
44 Ibid., 205.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Jung, The Red Book, 360.
48 Drob, Reading the Red Book, 257. The issue of “the unity of unity and difference” in
the work of Hegel is a related theme to be addressed in a later chapter and, like Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, Jung’s Red Book was called an “impossible book.” (Gieg-
erich, “Liber Novus,” 362).
49 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16), §457.
50 Ibid., §462.
51 Hegel, Phenomenology, 9, §16. “Hegel is only making a claim about Schelling’s cog-
nitive claim in his view of the so-called indifference point, but not about the origins of
nature, alchemy and so on.” (Rockmore, personal communication).
52 Fabricius, Alchemy, 103.
53 Henderson and Sherwood, Transformation of the Psyche, 162.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., §468.
58 Ibid., §483.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., §484.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., §493.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., §492.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., §526.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., §527.
71 Ibid., footnote 9.
72 Here Jung reveals the influencer of Kant’s idea of the antimonies. For a full account of
Jung’s relationship to Kant, see Brent, “Jung’s Debt to Kant.”
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., §533.
76 Stein, “Mysterium Coniunctionis.”
Chapter 3
Benign and monstrous

conjunctions 1
In alchemy, as in analysis, there are simple and complex, rational and

mystical, benign and monstrous conjunctions representative of the Self’s
expression. Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious” was at the source
of his struggle to bring the alien aspects of his psychic life into an inte-
grated whole that he was to call the Self, and he saw this as a modern-
day experience of the Philosophers’ Stone. Jung’s engagement with the
depths of his psychic life was recorded in The Red Book, a book that has
been compared to many of the major classics of Western literature, includ-
ing Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine
Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, and Blake’s illuminated manuscripts.
The Red Book has been called an “impossible book,” a “book that is not
a book,” because of both its highly personal nature and its internal contra-
dictions.2 On the other hand, there are others who have positively imagined
that these so-called contradictions are not necessarily opposed. Hillman,
for instance, has described the book as a poetic text that embraces psyche
and life in our age of scientific rationalism,3 an important example of the
vision that Jung has said is yet to come.
A difficulty for readers of The Red Book is its challenge to our modern
intellect and imagination. What the nascently alchemical Jung called the
“melting together of sense and non-sense”4 is nearly impossible to under-
stand from within our taken-for-granted categories. These early struggles
with the otherness of the unconscious were at the root of Jung’s idea of the
transcendent function that sought some kind of accommodation between
opposites. However, even Jung’s own continuing attempt to describe his
experience of the seemingly contradictory aspects of the psyche, using
phrases such as complexio oppositorum and mysterium coniunctionis, can
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-4
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 63
become too easily assimilated and intellectualized, thus becoming benign

clichés for the darkness, complexity, and profundity of the numinous
unknown that Jung called the unconscious. What is important in reading
The Red Book is to have an appreciation of its radical vision, a vision that
points beyond any conventional sense of meaning. In The Red Book, Jung
tries to convey this radicality by using the neologism Übersinn, which
can be translated as “supreme meaning.” The difficulty of understanding
Jung’s intent is noted by Wolfgang Giegerich who points out that Über-
sinn implies a meaning that is “over,” “beyond,” in “excess of meaning,”
even “counter-meaning.”5 He states that what Jung has in mind in The
Red Book is “outrageous.”6 For James Hillman, Jung’s vision jars even the
most knowledgeable readers. It shocks and pushes us to the very limits and
moves psyche and life beyond our understanding.7
In a review of The Red Book entitled “Carl Jung’s Red Book,” John Tar-
rant compares Jung’s book to “the late Buddhist sutras,” in which we are
confronted “with thousand-armed deities and paradoxes and impossible
statements that nonetheless make you feel changed after connecting with
them.”8 It is not an uncommon experience to feel somehow changed after
reading The Red Book. We might imagine such a change as the result of
an encounter with the numinous, a quality of fear and awe in the face of
a tremendum hard to define or understand and that challenges the funda-
mental beliefs and ideas of those who read it. In such a case, understanding
is not only standing above or “overmeaning,” but also a standing “under”
which requires a descent and a decentering, a “going under” that results in
a defeat for and relativization of the ego. The idea that a defeat for the ego
is a victory for the Self, for the larger personality, is one of Jung’s ways of
speaking about the meaning of the Self. In essence, such a going under is
an initiatory experience and a movement toward the goal of the alchemical
and psychological process.
Such an encounter and experience with the unconscious brought Jung to
the edge of his sanity, but his psychic strength and integrity allowed him to
use his experience to forward a new vision of psychology. During Jung’s
time, he was not the only one to react to the perception that something
had been left out of our notion of the psyche and soul. For him, beneath
the surface of our historical, cultural, and philosophical attitude, was a
seething irrationalism. Many creative artists, writers, philosophers, poets,
and painters were, like Jung, experimenting with ways to access this unac-
knowledged depth. Tarrant noted, “Jung (in common with other prominent
64 Benign and monstrous conjunctions
figures like Kandinsky) had terrible dreams of destruction overwhelm-

ing the land. We know now that Europe was heading toward a century of
war.”9 In response, creative thinkers were turning away from traditional
ways of understanding and seeking a deeper meaning of life.
Rilke was writing sonnets – which he received more or less as dicta-

tion – to Orpheus, Yeats was studying automatic writing, and Eliot was
trying to educate his unconscious creative processes by immersing
himself in great literature. Picasso was experimenting with Cubism.
The Dada movement was for a while closely linked to the Jungians.
The idea that something had to come from the depths was important.10
The Red Book was ultimately Jung’s reaction to the creative urgings of his
imagination in response to personal and collective crises. He noted in The
Red Book:
I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still
another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of every-
thing contemporary. The spirit of this time would like to hear of use
and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this
way. But that other spirit forces me to speak beyond justification, use,
and meaning. . . . The spirit of the depths took my understanding and
all my knowledge and placed them in the service of the inexplicable
and the paradoxical.11
The “inexplicable and paradoxical” that Jung speaks of here remained

with him throughout his life and in his works, from The Red Book to the
Mysterium Coniunctionis. From its nascent beginnings to its mature form,
Jung’s work forges a vision of the unity of opposites, of wholeness, and the
Self that is almost unbearable for the ego to tolerate.
The hermaphrodite
British Jungian analyst Neil Micklem has noted that there is still a tendency
in reading Jung to pass over the shock and radicality of his vision.12 Mick-
lem emphasizes the importance of paradox rather than unity and notes that
paradox usually gets glossed over as our attention moves toward the more
attractive idea of the vision of the unity of the opposites. Micklem points
Figure 3.1 Extraction of the monster Mercurius and the raising of the feminine
image of Mary into the hierarchy. “Speculum Trinitatis,” from Hiero-
nymus Reusner, Pandora, Emblem 14, 16th century.
to the image of the hermaphrodite discussed in the previous chapter (see

Figure 2.7) and notes that most people see it as a symbol representing an
integrated wholeness without letting themselves experience its grotesque
and monstrous character. Edinger gives another example of the monstrous
in the image of the “Extraction of Mercurius and the coronation of the
Virgin” from Reusner’s Pandora (1582).
In this image, Edinger discusses the issue of monstrosity and the Chris-
tian psyche. Like Jung, he considers what issues might have been left out
of Christian symbolism as it developed over the past two thousand years.
He believes Reusner’s picture of Pandora contains the essence of alchemy,
and was for Jung the carrier of those psychological elements elided by
Christianity, serving as a counterbalance to it. In this figure, we see the
assumption of Mary into heaven and her coronation. In the lower part of
the picture one can see what Edinger calls the birth of a monster. What is
so shocking for Edinger is the juxtaposition of the spiritual image of the
assumption with “the image of the birth of the monster out of the lump of
matter.”13 The whole image reflects the struggle to integrate both the femi-
nine and the principle of materiality into the Christian vision.
The image is monstrous to the Christian eye and for Edinger the lower
image of birth from matter is humorously portrayed in the context of the
Christian Weltanschauung as analogous to “a cuckoo’s egg that’s been laid
in somebody else’s nest” and from which “something unexpected is going
to hatch.” French philosopher Jacques Derrida has likewise linked the mon-
strous with the future. For Derrida, “The future is necessarily monstrous:
The figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprisingly, that for
which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by a species of monsters.”14
Abraxas
Perhaps one of the most potent of such monsters appears in Jung’s Seven
Sermons of the Dead (1916). These Sermons have been considered to be
an expression of “what Jung went through in the years [of confronting
the unconscious] 1913–1917” and reflect “what he was trying to bring to
birth.”15 The Sermons contain “hints or anticipations of ideas that were
to figure later in his scientific writings, more particularly concerning the
polaristic nature of the psyche, of life in general, and of all psychological
statements.”16
In Sermon I, Jung sets up the Gnostic distinction between the non-
distinctive pleroma and the essence of man as distinctiveness. Jung says:
“When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from
the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinc-
tiveness. But still we have said nothing concerning the pleroma.”17 The
distinctions we must make are about us; Jung calls this the “principium
individuationis.”18 All we can do is attribute our polar categories to the
larger “reality.” Jung mentions:
The Effective and the Ineffective.

Fullness and Emptiness.
Living and Dead.

Difference and Sameness.
Light and Darkness.
The Hot and the Cold.
Force and Matter.
Time and Space.
Good and Evil.
Beauty and Ugliness.
The One and the Many, etc.19
While Jung clearly notes that man, due to his nature, distinguishes qualities
of the pleroma that are his own, he also speaks of these qualities as belong-
ing to the pleroma which, paradoxically, in reality, has no qualities. But
since he is also part of the pleroma and distinguishes qualities, one could
also say that the pleroma expresses these qualities as well. In this arcane
way, Jung links the finite with the infinite and the human with the divine.
In essence, he writes, “we have said nothing concerning the pleroma. . . .
However, it is needful to speak”20 and we must be true to this need. If we
do not make such distinctions, Jung says, we “get beyond our own nature”
and “fall into indistinctiveness” and give ourselves over to dissolution into
nothingness.21 This is death to our human essence and so we fight against
this “perilous sameness.”22 While Jung goes to some lengths to distinguish
man from the pleroma, he also links them, noting “As we are the pleroma
itself, we also have all these qualities in us.”23 Jung distinguishes how
these qualities are different as they exist in us and in the pleroma, noting
that in us these qualities “are not balanced and void, but effective. Thus
are we the victims of the pairs of opposites. The pleroma is rent in us.”24
In the pleroma, the opposites are balanced and void, but in us they are
not. What this means for man is that as we attempt to attain the good and
the beautiful, the evil and ugly are likewise implicitly a part of our human
experience. One side cannot be completely separated from the other. While
the pleroma in itself has no qualities, we create these opposites necessarily
by our thinking. Two fundamental opposites are God and the devil, what
Jung calls first manifestations of nothingness. In man, God and the devil
do not extinguish themselves, but stand against one another as effective
opposites. “God and the devil are distinguished by the qualities of full-
ness and emptiness, generation and destruction,” and effectiveness (the
generative principle of the opposites) stands above both, in essence, “is a
god above god, since in its effect it uniteth fullness and emptiness.”25 For
Jung, the radical and primeval living of the opposites as a demonic force
is a monstrous and divine reality he calls by the Gnostic name Abraxas.
Jung reasons if Abraxas is effectiveness, nothing stands opposed to it,
but the ineffective, so its effective nature freely unfolds itself. The inef-
fective is not. Therefore, it does not resist it, so one might imagine it as
a primal theory of action. Jung continues, calling Abraxas an “improb-
able probability, unreal reality”26 noting that if the pleroma had “a being,
Abraxas would be its manifestation. It is the effective itself, not any par-
ticular effect, but effect in general.”27 Abraxas is thus force and duration,
“the sun and at the same time the eternally sucking gorge of the void, the
belittling and dismembering devil. . . . What the god-sun speaketh is life.
What the devil speaketh is death. But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and
accursed word which is life and death at the same time.”28 This strange
confluence and interpenetration of what we think of as opposites renders
Abraxas “terrible” and a “monster.”29 Jung writes that Abraxas is “a mon-
ster of the underworld, a thousand-armed polyp, coiled knot of winged
serpents, frenzy.”30 It is like the hermaphrodite we have seen above and

Figure 3.2 These images of Abraxas show its strange composite and monstrous
form. (1) Magical amulet, green jasper, KM 2.6054. (Courtesy of the
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.)
(2) From Bernard de Montfaucon, L’antiquité expliquée et représentée
en figures, 1722.
“of the earliest beginning. It is the lord of the toads and frogs, which live
in the water and go up on the land, whose chorus ascendeth at noon and
at midnight. It is abundance that seeketh union with emptiness. It is holy
begetting.”31
It is hard to come to terms with the implications of such a deity with what
Shamdasani describes as “the uniting of the Christian God with Satan.”32
“Abraxas himself is LIFE.”33 Such a characterization for Drob “invokes
comparison not only with the unconscious, but with the broad conception
of the . . . unforeseeable future.”34 Drob notes “Abraxas can be understood
as the awesome future that can neither be anticipated nor circumscribed
by words: ‘Before him there is no question and no reply.’ ”35 “Abraxas is
the ‘chaos,’ the ‘utterly boundless,’ ‘eternally incomprehensible . . . cruel
contradictoriness of nature.’ ”36 “ ‘Abraxas,’ we are told, ‘is the world, its
becoming and its passing.’ ”37
Mercurius
In the frontispiece to Jung’s Alchemical Studies, the spirit of Mercurius is
likewise represented as a monster.
For Jung, this image is one of the primal unconscious whose three extra
heads represent Luna, Sol, and a coniunctio of Sol and Luna on the far
right. The unity of the three is symbolized by Hermes, who represents the
quaternity “in which the fourth is at the same time the unity of the three.”
This image captures the quality of paradox and monstrosity stressed by
Jung, Micklem, and Edinger. It is a symbolic unification, but one not easily
assimilable by the ego. This image may well be considered an example of
a transformation going on in the God image of the Western psyche by vir-
tue of the alchemical process that has been inserted into it, a process that
gives birth to new possibilities. The new God image heralds the impor-
tance not only of incorporating the feminine and matter into our vision
of spirit, but also of “the discovery of the unconscious and the process of
individuation.”38
On a personal level, it also signifies all of the struggles of incarnated
existence, “[e]very hard disagreeable fact” of ordinary life.39 Edinger uses
the eloquence of Shakespeare to describe the painful facts:
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, . . .

. . . the whips and scorns of time,
Figure 3.3 An image of the Mercurial monster. From G.B. Nazari, Della tramuta-
tione metallica sogni tre, 16th century.
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, . . .
To grunt and sweat under a weary life. . . .40
If one is honest, these insults of life cannot simply be passed over in any
idealized transcendence. Such experiences hurt, sting, enrage, and some-
times depress and kill us, and yet they must be acknowledged, negotiated,
and made conscious if any real awareness of the Self is to take place.
Edinger notes, as Jung and Micklem have, that “[t]he living experience of
the Self is a monstrosity. It’s a coming together of opposites that appalls

the ego and exposes it to anguish, demoralization and violation of all rea-
sonable considerations.”41 It is a violation of everything we have come
to expect as natural, reasonable, and normal. Edinger gives us a feeling
for this in the following images of the unity of opposites. In alchemy, the
monstrous aspect of the conjunction is particularly emphasized when the
opposites that are brought together are not at first well differentiated. This
situation is referred to as a monstrum, or premature unity, that is, any unity
which does not differentiate itself into distinct realities.42 The image of
premature unity is sometimes expressed by images of incest and prema-
ture conjunction as in this image.
Figure 3.4
U nion of opposites as monstrosity. From Hexastichon Sebastiani
Brant, 1502.
Figure 3.5 An alchemical image of two birds illustrating the spirit of antagonistic
opposition. From Theosophie alchimie, 1678.
Such an incestuous unification of opposites must be first broken apart

so that the opposite can be more clearly differentiated. In such a process,
considerable aggression and enmity is a result, as illustrated in the conflict
between animals.
The confrontation of beastly forces anticipates a “higher” transforma-
tion of conflicting energies indicated by both the crowns and the wings
of the lion figures. Jung speculates in The Psychology of the Transfer-
ence that
Had the alchemists understood the psychological aspects of their

work, they would have been in a position to free their “unity symbol”
Figure 3.6 Two traditional images of the conflict between winged and unwinged
lions – spirit and body. (1) From Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens,
Emblem 16, 1617. (Public domain.) (2) From J.D. Mylius, Philosophia
reformata, 1622.
from the grip of instructive sexuality [and aggression] where, for bet-
ter or worse, mere nature, unsupported by the critical intellect, was
bound to leave it. Nature could say no more than that the contribution
of supreme opposites was a hybrid thing.43
Jung speculates that the thing-like nature of the alchemists “unity sym-
bol” was due to the fact that the alchemists were not yet in a position to
see the implicit nature of consciousness in the midst of their images. The
question remained: “how is the profound cleavage in man and world to be
understood, how are we to respond to it and, if possible, abolish it?”44 Jung
notes that in the long course of the dialectical process the unconscious has
continued to produce images of the goal of the work.
In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung describes this process as it existed in
the work with a long series of dreams. These images were “mostly con-
cerned with ideas of the mandala type, that is, the circle and the quater-
nity”45 which represented images of the goal of the unity of opposites.
The cross, circle, and sphere, as well as the less frequent images of “the
luminous character of the center” or the image of a “superior type of per-
sonality,”46 the enlightened or illuminate adept, represented the idea of
unity and wholeness, the overcoming of warring opposites.
The linking of the opposites by the alchemist was imagined both as a chem-
ical procedure as well as a mental and geometric one. One classic example
of the benign conjunction is the image of the alchemist as a divine geometer.
In the example above, this task is depicted in an image of the alchemist as a
divine geometer who brings opposites together into a grand design represent-
ing the Philosophers’ Stone. The motto beneath the image states: “Make a cir-
cle out of a man and a woman, out of this a square, out of this a triangle. Make
a circle and you will have the Philosopher’s Stone.”47 The Stone is created by
harmonizing and containing masculine and feminine energies representing a
wide range of binary pairings, e.g., light and dark, spirit and matter, sulfur and
mercury. These “opposites,” expressed by the male and female images, are
contained in the diagram’s inner circle, which “represents the Hermetic vessel,
the cosmic egg in which the Stone is prepared.”48 The square surrounded by
the inner circle stands for the four elements and suggests the ancient enigmatic
idea of squaring the circle: an impossible task in terms of modern mathemat-
ics, but an essential condition for the preparation of the Stone. This “impossi-
ble” conjunction is then imagined to be contained in a triangle representing the
dynamic force of “the third,” the mystery of generative possibilities. Finally,
Figure 3.7
The alchemist and the lumen naturae. Frontispiece from C.F.
Sabor, Practica naturae vera, 1721.
the entire process is enclosed within a larger macrocosmic circle. The impor-
tance of man’s contribution to the process is illustrated by the alchemist hold-
ing a giant compass with one point touching the inner circle and the other
resting on the outer sphere, thus linking the microcosmic unity of inner life
with the outer wholeness of the macrocosmic world and exemplifying the
famous adage, “as above so below.” The work of linking above and below
was a classic alchemical theme represented in numerous forms in alchemical
literature and in the images which illustrated it.
The variety of images of the conjunction and the Philosophers’ Stone
range from the very simple and benign to the very complex and monstrous.
Figure 3.8 The squaring of the circle as image of the Philosophers’ Stone. From
Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem 21, 1687.
Some images portray a simple process or moment in the work while others
give us an image of the overall alchemical process.
For Jung, such grand images are attempts to express the complexity of
the Self and the individuation process. They aim to represent psyche’s
attempt to achieve order and wholeness and, like the “self,” to contain
and organize the wholeness of psychic reality. As such, they attempt to
grapple with what Edinger has called “a wild and luxuriant, tangled mass
of overlapping images that is maddening to the order-seeking conscious
mind.”49 In short, they maintain a sense of the monstrous which, for Jung,
in principle is “always just beyond our reach.”50
Figure 3.9
Four alchemical images depicting the linking of above and below.
(1) From J.D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata, 1622. (Public domain.)
(2) Maria the Jewess, famous alchemist of the 1st-2nd century A.D.
From Michael Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, 1617. (Public domain.)
(3) Hermes Trismegistos. From D. Stolcius de Stolcenberg, Viridarium
chymicum (1624). (Public domain.) (4) Engraving by Nicolas Bonnart.
From Nicolas de Locques, Les Rudiments de la Philosophie Naturelle,
frontispiece, 1665. (Public domain.)
Mysterium Coniunctionis
Jung continued to reflect on the problem of opposites throughout his life and
work. The fullest treatment of this issue was taken up in his final work enti-
tled Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthe-
sis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. In this work, he followed his original
Figure 3.10 Two images of the benign conjunction, in which we see the unifica-
tion of opposites in terms of the marriage of Sol and Luna. (1) From
Johann Conrad Barchusen, Elementa chemiae, Plate 503, Figure 9,
1718. (Public domain.) (2) From J.D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata,
Engraving 19, 1622. (Public domain.)
intention of representing the whole range of alchemy as a kind of “psychol-

ogy of alchemy,” and “as an alchemical basis for depth psychology.”51
In C. G. Jung Speaking, Jung offered a synopsis of the alchemical
process:
This work is difficult and strewn with obstacles; the alchemical opus is
dangerous. Right at the beginning you meet the “dragon,” the chthonic
Figure 3.11 Two images of the complexity of alchemical stages. (1) Stephan

Michelspacher, Cabala, Engraving 3, 1615. (Public domain.) (2) Woodcut from
Andreas Libavius, Commentariorum alchymiae, 1606. (Public domain.)
Figure 3.12 Grand image of the alchemical process. Engraving by J.T. de Bry, from
Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, 1618.
spirit, the “devil” or, as the alchemists called it, the “blackness,” the
nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering. “Matter” suffers right
up to the final disappearance of the blackness; in psychological terms,
the soul finds itself in the throes of melancholy, locked in a struggle
with the “shadow.” The mystery of the coniunctio, the central mys-
tery of alchemy, aims precisely at the synthesis of the opposites, the
assimilation of the blackness, the integration of the devil. . . .
Figure 3.13 Cosmological vision of the achievement of the Philosophers’ Stone.

“Macrocosm and microcosm.” From J.D. Mylius, Opus Medico-
Chymicum, 1618.
In the language of the alchemists, matter suffers until the nigredo

disappears, when the “dawn” (aurora) will be announced by the “pea-
cock’s tail” (cauda pavonis) and a new day will break, the leukosis or
albedo. But in this state of “whiteness” one does not live in the true
sense of the word, it is a sort of abstract, ideal state. In order to make it
come alive it must have “blood,” it must have what the alchemists call
the rubedo, the “redness” of life. Only the total experience of being
can transform this ideal state of the albedo into a fully human mode of
existence. Blood alone can reanimate a glorious state of consciousness
in which the last trace of blackness is dissolved, in which the devil no
longer has an autonomous existence but rejoins the profound unity
of the psyche. Then the opus magnum is finished: the human soul is
completed [sic] integrated.52
At the conclusion of his work, Jung’s imagination was captured by the

ideas and metaphors of alchemy, with its dragons, suffering matter, pea-
cock’s tail, alembics and athanors; its red and green lions, kings and
queens, fishes’ eyes and inverted philosophical trees, salamanders and her-
maphrodites; its black suns and white earth, and its metals – lead, silver
and gold; its colors – black, white, yellow and red; and its distillations and
coagulations, and rich array of Latin terms. All of these became the best
possible expressions of a psychic mystery as yet unknown, and enunciated
and amplified his maturing vision of the parallels between alchemy and
his own psychology of the unconscious. All this and far more, Jung saw
as projected by the alchemists into matter. Their effort was to bring about
unity from the disparate parts of the psyche, creating a chymical wedding.
Jung saw this as the moral task of alchemy: to unify the disparate ele-
ments of the soul, both personal and ultimately cosmic, and thus to create
the goal, the lapis or Philosophers’ Stone. Likewise, Jung’s psychology
works with the conflicts and dissociations of psychic life and attempts to
bring about the mysterious “unification” and a sense of wholeness. We
have seen such images in the benign form of the geometric conjunction
and in the monstrous forms of the hermaphrodite, Mercurius, and Abraxas.
All of these are images of supreme meaning (Übersinn) and thus images
that move toward what Jung saw as the notions of the Self and the Phi-
losophers’ Stone. With his Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung noted that his
psychology was at last “given its place in reality and established upon its
historical foundations.”53
Notes
1 Portions of this chapter were previously published as the “Foreword,” in Reading the
Red Book, ix–xv (Reused with the kind permission of Spring Journal, Inc).
2 Giegerich, “Liber Novus,” 362.
3 Hillman, at “Carl Gustav Jung & the Red Book.”
4 Giegerich, “Liber Novus,” 384.
5 Ibid., 383–384.
6 Ibid., 383.
7 Hillman, at “Carl Gustav Jung & the Red Book.”
8 Tarrant, “Carl Jung’s Red Book.” (Used by kind permission of the author).
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Jung, The Red Book, 229.
12 Micklem, “I Am Not Myself.”
13 Edinger, Mysterium Lectures, 134.
14 Derrida, “Passages,” 386–387. For more about Derrida and his idea of the monstrous,
see, for example, Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” 123; see also Derrida,
“Passages – from Traumatism to Promise”; Drob, Reading the Red Book, 289–290,
footnote 19.
15 Aniela Jaffé. Introductory comments to Appendix V of C.G. Jung, Memories, 378.
16 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 380–381.
20 Ibid., 380.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 381; emphasis mine.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 383.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 384.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
33 Drob, Reading the Red Book, 236.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. Includes quote from Jung, The Red Book, 350b.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Although Edinger does quote this passage from Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1,
please note that this particular translation was retrieved from Project Gutenberg.
42 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 193.
44 Ibid., §534.
45 Ibid., §535.
46 Ibid.
47 Coudert, Alchemy, 58.
48 Ibid.
52 Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, 228–229.
Chapter 4
Classical development of
Jung’s ideas of alchemy and
the Philosophers’ Stone in
Von Franz and Edinger 1
Jung’s studies of alchemy strongly influenced his close followers, Marie-

Louise von Franz (1915–1988) in Europe and Edward Edinger (1922–
1998) in the United States. Both von Franz and Edinger held Jung’s work
to be fundamental and viewed themselves primarily as elaborators of his
ideas, and as commentators who gave students easier access to the work
of the master. These rather humble self-assessments do not adequately
represent the extent to which their own contributions have extended and
contributed to the field of analytical psychology and especially to our
understanding of alchemy.
Marie-Louise von Franz

Von Franz has been considered the primary developer of Jung’s alchemi-
cal legacy. She “became world renowned among followers of Jung and
after his death was an eloquent spokesperson for his ideas.”2 Von Franz
met Jung when she was 18 years old in 1933, just around the time Jung’s
interest in alchemy was catalyzing. He analyzed her in exchange for her
work on translations of texts from Greek and Latin. She continued as a
close collaborator and eventually published what was in essence the third
part of the Mysterium Coniunctionis called the Aurora consurgens (1966).
The Aurora is an account of and commentary on an alchemical text that
dated roughly from the thirteenth century. The text has been ascribed to
Thomas Aquinas, though its authorship is disputed. Jung chose this text
as exemplary of medieval Christianity’s attempt to come to terms with
alchemical philosophy and as an instance of the alchemical problem of the
opposites. Von Franz’s (1966) commentary shows how Jung’s analytical
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-5
Marie-Louise von Franz and Edward Edinger 85
psychology may be used as a key to unlock the meaning of this difficult

and very psychological text, and how the traditional practice of alchemy is
best understood as a symbolic process.
Von Franz extended her work on alchemy through lectures to students at
the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1959. These lectures were transcribed by Una
Thomas, a member of the seminar, and published in 1980 under the title
Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. The book
was designed to be an introduction to Jung’s more difficult study and is a
“practical account of what the alchemists were really looking for – emo-
tional balance and wholeness.”3 The text contains lectures on old Greek
and Arabic alchemy as well as on later European alchemy and the Aurora
consurgens. In giving her course and publishing this book von Franz hoped
to enable students to read Jung with more comprehension. She recognized
how dark and difficult his alchemical writings were and that even many of
his closest students could not follow his work in this area. Nevertheless,
she stressed the importance of this work. Her lectures continued in Zurich
in January and February of 1969, and her book Alchemical Active Imagi-
nation was published in 1979. In addition to a short history of alchemy,
von Franz concentrated on Gerhard Dorn, an alchemist and physician who
lived probably in the sixteenth century. Following his work as a whole,
and staying close to the original, she showed the similarity between the
alchemist’s practice and Jung’s technique of active imagination, both of
which promote a dialogue with the unconscious.
Von Franz’s last direct work on alchemy, a “Psychological Commen-
tary” on the Kitāb Ḥall ar-Rumūz (or Clearing of Enigmas) is a historical
introduction to this Arabic alchemical text. The author, Muhammad Ibn
Umail (“Senior”), lived in the tenth century AD. This text among others
represents the missing link within the mystical branch of alchemy, con-
necting Gnostic-Hermetic Greek alchemy to the mystical Latin alchemy
of Europe.
Until her death, Von Franz acted as a collaborator, translator, and crea-
tive developer of Jung’s alchemical work. She contributed to the history
of alchemy, the dialogue of alchemy with Christianity, and the importance
of a symbolic and psychological approach. She also furthered our thinking
about the alchemical problem of the opposites and our understanding of
the unus mundus, the unified field upon which the opposites rely. These
themes are further elaborated in her book Psyche and Matter (1992). In
it, she brings together reflections on number, time, synchronicity, and the
86 Marie-Louise von Franz and Edward Edinger
relationship between depth psychology, contemporary physics, and quan-

tum theory. She has also contributed to Jung’s view of Christianity and an
understanding of the importance of alchemy as a religious contribution to
the Christian myth. In an interview, when asked what the main value was
of Jung’s and her own work on alchemy, she stated that:
civilization needs a myth to live . . . And I think that the Christian

myth, on which we have lived, has degenerated and become one-sided
and insufficient. I think alchemy is the complete myth. If our Western
civilization has a possibility of survival, it would be by accepting the
alchemical myth, which is a richer completion and continuation of
the Christian myth . . . The Christian myth is deficient in not includ-
ing enough of the feminine. (Catholicism has the Virgin Mary, but
it’s only the purified feminine; it does not include the dark feminine).
Christianity treats matter as dead and does not face the problem of the
opposites – of evil. Alchemy faces the problem of the opposites, faces
the problem of matter, and faces the problem of the feminine.4
Edward F. Edinger
If von Franz can be considered the pre-eminent follower of Jung’s in
Europe, few would argue against the same status for Edward Edinger in
the United States. For more than forty years, “in lectures, books, tapes and
videos, he masterfully presented and distilled the essence of Jung’s work,
illuminating its relevance for both collective and individual psychology.”5
Though Edinger wrote on a wide range of topics, including Moby Dick,
Faust, Greek philosophy, the Bible, the Apocalypse, and the God image,
like von Franz he had a special passion for alchemy. In the first issue of
Quadrant (spring 1968), the New York Institute announced its final spring
series of lectures by Edinger entitled “Psychotherapy and Alchemy,” and
the following issue contained a précis of Edinger’s lectures, “Alchemy as a
Psychological Process.” These lectures, given in New York and Los Ange-
les in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were serially published in Quadrant:
Journal of the CG. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology and later
collected for his book Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in
Psychotherapy (1985).
In these lectures and in his book, Edinger focused on seven selected
images, which he used to organize the typical stages of the alchemical
process: calcinatio, solutio, coagulatio, sublimatio, mortficatio, separatio,

and coniunctio. By focusing on these images/operations, Edinger attempts
to bring order to “the chaos of alchemy.”6 Each of these operations is found
to be the center of an elaborate symbol system. “These central symbols of
transformation . . . provide basic categories by which to understand the life
of the psyche, and they illustrate almost the full range of experiences that
constitute individuation.”7
In his work, Edinger views Jung’s discovery of the “reality of the
psyche” as a new approach to understanding alchemy and other pre- or
pseudo-sciences such as astrology. For Edinger, these systems of thought
are expressions of a phenomenology that can serve to illustrate patterns
and regularities of the objective psyche. As such they serve as archetypal
images of transformation. What Edinger considers himself and Jung as
presenting are psychic facts rather than “a theoretical construct [or] a phil-
osophical speculation.”8
Edinger was also concerned with the practical problems of psychother-
apy. His goal was to become familiar enough with archetypal images and
to have sufficient enough knowledge drawn from personal analysis that
one can discover an anatomy of the psyche, as “objective as the anatomy
of the body.”9 He contended that psychological theories are often too nar-
row and inadequate, and that when analysis goes deep, things are set in
motion which are mysterious and profound. It is easy for both therapist
and patient to lose their way. According to Edinger:
What makes alchemy so valuable for psychotherapy is that its images

concretize the experiences of transformation that one undergoes in
psychotherapy. Taken as a whole, alchemy provides a kind of anatomy
of individuation. Its images will be most meaningful . . . to those who
have had a personal experience of the unconscious.10
For him, as for Jung, the work of alchemy can be equated with the individ-
uation process, but the alchemical corpus exceeds any individual’s process
in richness and scope. In the end, for Edinger, alchemy was considered to
be a sacred work, one that required a religious attitude; and like von Franz,
he saw Jung’s work in alchemy as a development of the Christian myth.
Edinger’s examination of Jung’s work on alchemy continued with a num-
ber of texts carefully devoted to explicating it. While Anatomy of the Psy-
che (1985) is an overall look at alchemical processes and the symbolism of
the individuation process, Edinger’s further reflections focus on particular

works of Jung in order to give his readers access to and help in understand-
ing them. In 1994, he published The Mystery of Coniunctio: Alchemical
Image of Individuation. It contains both an introduction to Jung’s Myste-
rium Coniunctionis and an essay on the psychological interpretation of
the Rosarium pictures. These essays were first presented as lectures at the
C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco during 19–20 October 1984. In this
work, Edinger takes a somewhat different stance from Jung, suggesting
other ways to look at the pictures of the Rosarium. He does not oppose
Jung’s interpretations but suggests that the images have multiple facets,
meanings, and contexts in which they can be seen.
In 1995, Edinger published The Mysterium Lectures based on a course
he gave to members of the Jung Society of Los Angeles during 1986–1987.
In this text he leads his readers through Jung’s most difficult work. He fol-
lows his fundamental metaphor of the anatomy of the psyche, suggesting
that this is a book of facts described in “images.” He selects the major
images throughout the Mysterium and elaborates them with amplificatory
material and commentary. Edinger had the capacity to take difficult sym-
bolic material and to translate it into clear, contemporary psychological
statements, making it possible to integrate the material into our current
psychological worldview.
In his work The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion,
Edinger elaborates a reading of Jung that emphasizes psychic reality
as empirical facts described in images. Edinger’s reading has a basis in
Jung’s thought. For instance, in The Psychology of the Transference, Jung
writes “My business is merely the natural science of the psyche, and my
main concern is to establish the facts. How these facts are named and what
further interpretation is then placed upon them is of secondary impor-
tance. Natural science is not a science of words and ideas, but facts.” Jung
continues:
I am no terminological rigorist – call the existing symbols “whole-

ness,” “self,” “consciousness,” “higher ego,” or what you will, it
makes little difference. I for my part only try not to give any false
or misleading names. All these terms are simply names for the facts
that alone carry weight. The names I give do not imply a philosophy,
although I cannot prevent people from barking at these terminologi-
cal phantoms as if they were metaphysical postulates. The facts are
sufficient in themselves, and it is well to know about them. But their

interpretation should be left to the individual’s discretion.11
On the basis of such statements, one can read Jung as holding a position in
which language and interpretation are separate from facts and, with such a
conviction, one can see Jung as coming from a fundamentally natural sci-
entific position. However, to emphasize such a position does not do justice
to the complexity of his position. Jung’s stance as a natural scientist was
often expressed when he was concerned about justifying his research to a
scientific community.
What Jung and Edinger called “facts” are both more and less than the
term is commonly understood to mean in a natural scientific perspec-
tive. This ambiguity continues throughout the development of the Jun-
gian tradition and in Edinger’s work. The strange ambiguity in Edinger’s
description is that every time he used the words “fact” and “objective,” he
italicizes the words as if to set them apart from our common understanding
of fact and objectivity. I believe he does this because, beyond the com-
mon and natural scientific use of these words, he recognizes as Jung did
that approaching psychic reality is not well understood within the simple
Cartesian binaries of subject and object. At the same time, however, he
holds onto the pre-phenomenological scientific and medical framework
in which he was trained as a physician and psychiatrist because he is still
struggling with a methodology which can do justice to the complexity that
psychic reality demands. In the spirit of science and the medical model,
Edinger writes about “facts” which he claims “go to make up an anatomy
of the psyche, which is at the same time an embryology, since we are deal-
ing with a process of development and transformation.”12 For Edinger, as
noted earlier, this anatomy of the psyche “is as objective as the anatomy
of the body.”
Edinger’s medical analogies link psyche to a natural scientific view of
reality, but he sees psychic reality as symbolic and expresses this side by
side with his medical frame of reference. He speaks as well of a “phenom-
enology of the objective psyche” by which he seems to mean “to bring into
visibility certain experiential modes or categories of the individuation pro-
cess. . . [which] serve to illustrate patterns and regularities of the objective
psyche.”13 He saw these phenomenological patterns and categories both
as facts that can be put into an ordered and objective frame of scientific
objectivities and, alternatively, as “facts” that can be put into a structured
and ordered phenomenology of psyche itself. To amplify this idea, Edinger

quotes an old alchemical saying, “Dissolve the matter in its own water.”14
Alchemy provided a rich and complex network of images that Edinger
considered phenomenological and it was these “presentational” images
that he considered psyche’s own waters. In The Aion Lectures, Edinger
states that
Jung writes about the psyche in what I call a presentational way, by

which I mean he presents us with psychic facts rather than with theo-
ries about the facts. We are so used to living out of a conceptual con-
text that we spare ourselves the encounter with the raw facts. And
because we are not familiar with the psychic facts Jung presents, they
seem alien and disconnected. Our task is to become familiar with the
facts Jung gives us. As we gradually gain that familiarity, their inner
connections and the whole presentational method become visible.
This leads into a mode of thinking different from the usual.15
From Edinger’s perspective, we are used to linear thinking whereas what

he is proposing is an ordering and presentation of psychic facts following
Jung’s method of active imagination and amplification. I believe in this
process. Edinger is aiming at something that goes beyond seeing psyche
as a simple “object” of consciousness. Based on Jung’s ideas of active
imagination and amplification, Edinger develops what he calls a method
of “cluster thinking,” something that is more like a structural phenomenol-
ogy of images that gives one a variegated, dynamic, and mosaic view of
psyche. He describes “cluster thinking” as beginning with a “central image
and. . . [finding] a cluster of related images connected to it.”16
In Anatomy of the Psyche, Edinger gives examples of cluster thinking
based on the operations of alchemy. As noted above, he organizes the
alchemical process on the basis of seven operations: calcinatio, solutio,
coagulatio, sublimatio, mortficatio, separatio, and coniunctio. He dedi-
cates a chapter of his book to each operation, placing each of them at
the center of its own elaborate symbol system, which then provides “the
basic categories by which to understand the life of the psyche.”17 At the
beginning of each chapter, Edinger depicts this complex symbol system
imagistically, creating a map of psychic reality as it presents itself in the
alchemical process. I include below two of the seven basic operations fun-
damental to the alchemical transformation process illustrated by Edinger:
mortificatio/putrefactio and coniunctio:
Figure 4.1
M ortificatio/Putrefactio. From Edward Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche:
Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 146.
Source: Courtesy Open Court Books.
In these diagrams, Edinger surrounds each operational image with a web

of related images, tracing the phenomenological and structural relations
between them by connecting lines of relatedness. As the central image is
changed, the connecting lines likewise change, resulting in a different con-
stellation of psychic reality. On the basis of the diagrams themselves, it is not
easy or even possible to adequately understand all of the relational aspects
of the mosaic. However, when one reads the details of each of the opera-
tions and then looks at the chart, one gets a structurally rich and variegated
overview of the psychic reality Edinger is pointing to. I believe Edinger
intends these maps of “psychic reality” to be seen as dynamic and changing
processes, a moving and transformational view of the psyche rather than a
static or fixed representation of it. In addition, if we imagine that all seven
Figure 4.2
C oniunctio. From Edward Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical
Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 210.
Source: Courtesy Open Court Books.
diagrams are interrelated and that the constellations around the seven pro-
cesses change along with the central image, the process view of psyche is
richly enhanced. It is as if the psyche can be viewed in each moment through
the eye of the central image or from any point in the dynamic process. Ear-
lier we spoke of the eye of Mercurius in the clash between two serpents and
here we might imagine the possibility of multiple and changing viewpoints,
multiple eyes through which we might view psychic reality.
Each chapter of Edinger’s book then might be seen not simply as a linear
process that ends with the coniunctio and the Philosophers’ Stone, but also
as a circular, ongoing process with changing matrices showing an image
of the psyche at each moment from a central but changing standpoint,
with no Archimedean transcendental point outside psyche itself. Perhaps
this dynamic view of psychic reality is itself a way of imaging the Phi-
losophers’ Stone and the Self. While Edinger does not elaborate this view,
I believe it is implicit in his exegesis and that it sits side-by-side with his
translation of alchemical images into a “scientific,” medical, anatomical
frame of reference and into the language of classical Jungian psychologi-
cal categories. While this latter perspective seems to make alchemy more
understandable to modern consciousness, it also runs the risk of over-
simplification and static reification. When this occurs, the complexities
of alchemy, the Philosophers’ Stone, and “psychic reality” are translated
into a “psychology of alchemy” and the unknown monstrosities of ideas
like the Philosophers’ Stone are translated into the Jungian notion of “the
Self.” Put in this way, and in spite of my positive regard for both Von Franz
and Edinger, they at times too easily translate alchemy into a conceptual,
taken-for-granted framework of Jung’s psychology. Such a reductive read-
ing invites alternative readings and thus sets the stage for the revisionist
theories of James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich.
Notes
1 Sections of this chapter are a modified version of my entry Marlan, “Alchemy,”
263–295.
2 Kirsch, The Jungians, 11.
3 Von Franz, Alchemy, 273.
4 Von Franz, in Wagner, “A Conversation,” 15–16.
5 Sharp, “Tribute for E. Edinger,” 18.
7 Ibid., 15.
8 Ibid., Preface.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 2.
12 Edinger, Anatomy, Preface.
14 Ibid., 1.
15 Edinger, The Aion Lectures, 11.
16 Ibid.
Chapter 5
Innovations, criticisms, and

developments: James Hillman
and Wolfgang Giegerich
James Hillman and archetypal psychology:
imagination is the cornerstone 1
If von Franz and Edinger were major classical disciples of Jung’s work,
James Hillman is an important revisionist of Jungian theory. From one
perspective, Hillman fundamentally revised Jung’s – and by extension Von
Franz’s and Edinger’s – thought, but from another he returns to its radical
essence, carrying its implications to a new level.
Hillman accuses traditional psychology of being blindly rooted in the
scientific paradigm and devoid of ideas, and complains that modern psy-
chology has “replaced ideas with nominalistic allegorical and disembodied
words. We count heads and make classifications, exchange information as
if we were thinking.”2 Such bold and iconoclastic statements “turn upside
down many ideas that people hold dear and unreflected.”3 Hillman’s style
is provocative and this can lead some to dismiss him, but as Moore notes
“he seeks to engage and enjoy polemics, persuasion and controversy”4 not
for their own sake but for the sake of reactivating imagination.
The imagination is fundamental to Hillman’s thought and “metapsy-
chology itself is one of the ways of the imagination proper to psychol-
ogy.”5 In Hillman’s hands, psychoanalytic concepts and ideas have to be
“deliteralized” and can be heard as expressions of the imagination. But his
notion of the imagination is not the one we imagine. Hillman re-visions/re-
envisions the imagination in a way that challenges the history of our West-
ern traditions and renders it secondary to conceptual thinking. He reverses
this pattern and reopens the question of the relationship of concept and
metaphor. His methodological reversal reminds psychology that “it too
is an activity of the soul”6 and that it is unpsychological to proceed with
concepts that have become hardened and unreflected. This hardening can
too easily become the bedrock dogmas of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-6
Innovations, criticisms, and developments 95
Part of the work of archetypal psychology aims at “seeing through” to

the originary images in our conceptual formulations. To see through our
literal concepts in both psychology and psychoanalysis leads us to “envi-
sion the basic nature and structure of the soul in an imaginary way and to
approach the basic questions of psychology first of all by means of imagi-
nation.”7 To take an archetypal perspective then means
to envision archetypal structures as the deepest patterns of psychic

functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have
of ourselves and our world. They are . . . the images to which psychic
life and our theories about it ever return. All ways of speaking about
archetypes are translations from one metaphor to another. Even sober
operational definitions in the language of science and logic are no less
metaphorical.8
Hillman uses the designation “archetypal” to refer to a perspective, “to

a move one makes rather than a thing or a substance.”9 It is a move that
places whatever is seen in a mythic perspective. For Hillman, psychoana-
lysts are “myth makers” and “myth preservers.”10 “What holds us to Freud,
provoking countless retellings and commentaries, is not the science in the
theory but the myth in the science.”11 Hillman quotes Freud’s communica-
tion to Einstein in 1922:
It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythol-
ogy and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not
every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this? Cannot
the same be said today of your own physics?
The question for Hillman is not a question simply of myth versus science,
but of the reification of single myths as opposed to a broad mythic aware-
ness. For Hillman, when a living myth hardens and becomes literalized,
we imagine it as fundamental and central, and we fall into a philosophi-
cally and psychologically monomythic mode.12 For Hillman, the Oedipal
tale has become such a central myth in psychoanalysis. As analysts,
. . . we go on ritualizing the Oedipal Tale, go on affirming the cosmic

power of the parents and child for discovering identity. By divining
the parental world, each patient discovers a budding Oedipus in the
96 Innovations, criticisms, and developments
soul. We believe we are what we are because of our childhoods in

family but this is only because the actual family is “really” Oedipal,
that is, mythical. Even as actual sociological, statistical family life dis-
solves psychoanalysis retains the myth.13
He continues:
We emerge into life as creatures in a drama, . . . as budding Oedi-

pus; . . . we immediately transpose the stock figures of mom and dad,
or their stand-ins, into Jocasta and Laius enabling desire, early family
scenes, early abandonments, abuses, and mutilations, little boy and
little girl wishes, and endowing these small, preinitiatory events with
salient inevitable determinacy.14
And, as Moore notes, “for Hillman, none of this is literally absolute, all
these emotions and configurations are ways in which we are remytholo-
gized, and that is why they carry such importance.”15 Hillman states “they
are doors to Sophocles and Sophocles, himself a door, their importance
rising not from historical events but mythical happenings that as Sallustius
said never happened but always are fictions.”16 Thus for Hillman “depth
psychology believes in myth, practices myth, teaches myth”17 and, I would
add, that it is no different for an archetypal psychology, except insofar as
being self-reflexive about its mythic practice it opens the door to a poly-
mythic sensibility, to a broad range of archetypal perspectives.
Instead of making a norm of singleness of soul, Hillman portrays the
psyche as “inherently multiple.”18 Hillman states that “we need a psychol-
ogy that gives place to multiplicity, not demanding integration and other
forms of unity, and at the same time offering a language adequate to a
psyche that has many faces.”19 The psyche is not only multiple, “it is a
communication of many persons each with specific needs, fears, longings,
styles and language.”20 The many persons echo the many perspectives and
mythic modes which archetypal psychology investigates.
A focus upon the many and different styles of thought provides arche-
typal psychology with a variety of ways of looking at the psyche. Mythi-
cal paradigms as well as analytic perspectives may suggest metaphoric
insight. A Jungian might now find himself in a Freudian or Adlerian meta-
phor to differentiate a psychic phenomenon. Hillman used the metaphor
of the bricoleur to describe this ready-to-hand activity and uses such an
approach to tease out several perspectives on “pathologizing.” He gives an

example of depression, which may be understood,
on the model of Christ and his suffering and resurrection; it may

through Saturn gain the depth of melancholy and inspiration, or
through Apollo serve to release the black bird of prophetic insight.
From the perspective of Demeter depression may yield awareness
of the mother-daughter mystery, or through Dionysus, we may find
depression a refuge from the excessive demands of the ruling will.21
In Hillman’s hands, this approach is far from a simple eclecticism or moral

relativism, perspectives which he differentiates from his own. His “claim
and contention” is that sensitivity to the variety of perspectives discovered
in myth will prove to be more psychological, that is “to produce more
insights into emotions, images and relationships and reflect more accu-
rately the illusions and entanglements of the soul.”22
Hillman’s aim is “to restore psychology to the widest, richest, deepest
volume so that it would resonate with the soul in its descriptions as unfath-
omable, multiple, prior, generative and necessary.”23 For Hillman, it is not
necessary to “get it all together,” to integrate it all, or to find “some ulti-
mate blending of the many impulses and directions.”24 It is rather essential
to find “vitality in tension, learn from paradox, getting wisdom by strad-
dling ambivalence and gain confidence in trusting the confusion that natu-
rally arises with multiplicity.”25
Hillman’s work ultimately leads out of the consulting room into the
world. He attacks vigorously what has become the shadow narcissism
of psychological and philosophical reductionism. In so doing, he broad-
ens the scope of psychology. For example, in A Blue Fire he traces many
themes: education, work, money, transportation, sex, war, terrorism, eros,
and love; in short, the psychological aspects of everyday life or, perhaps
better, everyday life insofar as it also transcends psychological subjectivity.
As the parameters, range, and implications of Hillman’s thought have
continued to emerge, his work has grown in influence, impacting a wide
range of thinkers, cultural historians, philosophers, novelists, and a great
number of poets and analysts. The quality and originality of Hillman’s
carefully crafted prose has led poet Robert Bly to consider Hillman “one
of the most lively and original psychologists and thinkers we’ve had in
America since William James.”26 Whether or not one agrees with such
accolades, it is clear that Hillman’s work is to be grappled with by any seri-

ous, intellectually-minded psychologist, psychoanalyst, or philosopher.
Hillman’s work drives one to question and reexamine the fundamental
beliefs of Jung and his followers as well as thinkers in the academic dis-
ciplines of psychology and philosophy. He is a gadfly and an iconoclast
who challenges whatever has become hackneyed and complacent. He has
pressed himself and others hard to become thinkers, to be more “literate
and less literal, stuck in the case without a vision of soul.”27 His own vision
is richly articulated, but true to his own critiques of unreflective ontolo-
gizing he is careful to include a statement in a deconstructive postmodern
spirit titled a “professional exit.”28
Though this has been a groundwork of irreplaceable insights, they are

to be taken neither as foundations for a systematic theory nor even
a prolegomenon for any future archetypal psychology. Soul-making
needs adequate ideational vessels, and it equally needs to let go of
them. In this sense all that is written in the foregoing pages is con-
fessed to with passionate conviction, to be defended as articles of faith,
and at the same time disavowed, broken, and left behind. By holding
to nothing, nothing holds back the movement of soul-making from
its ongoing process, which now like a long Renaissance processional
slips away from us into memory, off-stage and out of sight. They are
leaving – even the Bricoleur and the Rogue Errant who put together
the work and charted its course; . . . when the last image vanishes, all
icons gone, the soul begins again to populate the stilled realms with
figures and fantasies born of the imaginative heart.29
Hillman as an important revisionist of Jungian theory has nevertheless

philosophically followed Jung closely with regard to the fundamental
importance of images at the basis of psychic life. This is nowhere more
evident than in his alchemical psychology.
Hillman’s alchemical psychology 30

His first organized attempts to present his alchemical reflections were in
lectures given at the Zurich Institute in 1966. He stated that he had been
drawn by alchemy’s “obscure poetic language and strange images, and
by its amazing insights especially in Jung’s introduction to The Secret of
the Golden Flower and [in Jung’s essay on] ‘The Philosophical Tree.’ ”31
Later, in 1968, while at the University of Chicago, Hillman continued his
lectures and “expanded [his] library research and collection of dreams
with alchemical motifs.”32 These lectures were given in an old wooden
chemistry hall and were entitled “Analytic work – Alchemical Opus.”33
His approach in these lectures was “to exhibit a background to analytical
work that is metaphorical, even preposterous, and so, less encumbered
by clinical literalism.”34 This theme runs through Hillman’s alchemical
papers beginning with his 1970 publication “On Senex Consciousness.”
In 1978 Hillman published “The Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Lan-
guage” which set the stage for his continuing reflections.
Unlike Edinger, Hillman’s approach to reading alchemy resists translat-
ing its images and language into the structures of any reductive rationalism
that leaves the image behind. He gives these examples:
White Queen and Red King have become [for Jung, Von Franz, and
Edinger] feminine and masculine principles; their incestuous sexual
intercourse has become the union of opposites; the freakish her-
maphrodite and uniped, the golden head . . . have all become para-
doxical representations of the goal, examples of androgyny, symbols
of the Self.35
For him, these are a move from “precision to generality.”36 Hillman chal-
lenges us to imagine the process of reading alchemy differently. For him,
sticking to the image recovers the point of Plutarch’s ancient maxim “save
the phenomena,”37 and allows us to speak imaginatively and to dream
the dream onward. Hillman is not simply suggesting that we replace our
concepts with “the archaic neologisms of alchemy” or take alchemical
language literally as substitutions for our own concepts. It is not the lit-
eral return to alchemy that he proposes, but rather a “restoration of the
alchemical mode of imagining.” For Hillman, this means the move from a
psychology of alchemy to an alchemical psychology rooted in the funda-
mental principle of the imagination and not in reified, fixed structures of
theoretical abstractions.
One might imagine Hillman here as making a revolutionary psycho-
logical and philosophical move beyond Jung and the classical Jungians,
or perhaps just emphasizing the fundamental importance of the primacy
of images and imagination, and resisting the further movement into what
he calls “conceptual rationalism.”38 In either case, Hillman’s emphasis has

evolved into what has now been called archetypal psychology, a discipline
of thought in which images speak more directly when their metaphysical
covering “can be peeled away, so that the material may speak more phe-
nomenally. Then pagan images stand out: metals, planets, minerals, stars,
plants, charms, animals, vessels, fires, and specific locales.”39
For Hillman these alchemical images have been obscured by both Jung’s
psychology and its association with Christian metaphysics. He explained
this awareness to the International Congress of the International Associa-
tion of Analytical Psychologists in Rome in 1977, noting that “[w]hile
Jung reclaimed alchemy for the psyche, he also claimed it for his psychol-
ogy” and that its “liberation of alchemy from the former traps (mysticism,
charlatanism, and pre- or pseudo-science) entangled it in his system of
opposites and Christian symbols and thought.”40 Jung’s metapsychology
and his reliance on Christian imagery led Hillman to make the distinction
not only between a psychology of alchemy and an alchemical psychol-
ogy, but also between “an alchemy of spirit and an alchemy of soul.”41 He
further noted that the transformation of the psyche can be distinguished
from the Christian idea of redemption. He stated that when we make this
distinction, then
the subtle changes in color, heat, bodily forms, and other qualities
refer to the psyche’s processes, useful to the practice of therapy for
reflecting the changes going on in the psyche without linking these
changes to a progressive program or redemptive vision.42
In short, alchemy’s curious images and sayings are valuable not so much
because alchemy is a grand narrative of the stages of individuation and
its conjunction of opposites, nor for its reflection on the Christian pro-
cess of redemption, “but rather because of alchemy’s myriad, cryptic,
arcane, paradoxical, and mainly conflicting texts [which] reveal the psy-
che phenomenally.”43
For Hillman, alchemy needs to be encountered with “the least possi-
ble intrusion of metaphysics.”44 He saw Jung, von Franz, and Edinger as
informed consciously or unconsciously by a metaphysical attitude, and
thus attempting to examine alchemy in a scholarly manner in order to
find objective meaning. He, on the other hand, saw himself as emphasiz-
ing the “matters” of alchemy as metaphorical substances and archetypal
principles. He sought to activate alchemical language and images in order

to find those qualities of human life which act on the very substance of
personality.
The work of soul-making requires corrosive acids, heavy earth,

ascending birds; there are sweating kings, dogs, and bitches, stenches,
urine, and blood . . . I know that I am not composed of sulfur and
salt, buried in horse dung, putrefying or congealing, turning white or
green or yellow, encircled by a tail-biting serpent, rising on wings.
And yet I am! I cannot take any of this literally, even if it is all accu-
rate, descriptively true.45
In contrast to Jung and Edinger, for Hillman, language is fundamental and

his thinking about language both resists reducing alchemical metaphors to
generalized abstractions while also wanting to re-materialize our concepts,
“giving them body, sense, and weight.”46 It is not absolutely clear to what
extent Hillman’s references to body, sticking to images, and saving the
phenomena parallel Edinger’s idea of “presentational” images. What is
clear is that Hillman rejects any medicalized, factualized, or objective, lit-
eralized notion of the body as a model. For him, conceptual rationalization
of any sort obscures the richness and complexity of images and imagistic
language.
While Edinger used alchemical operations to organize his exposition
of the alchemical process, Hillman aesthetically organized the majority
of his study of alchemical psychology around a rainbow of colors: black,
blue, silver/white, yellow, and red, all intrinsic to the azure vault, which
is an image of the “final” realization of the alchemical opus. For Hillman,
color imagery indicates both the stages of alchemical work as well as inde-
pendent states of soul. His analysis leans away from developmental and
progressivist interpretations of individuation and toward a co-presence of
aesthetic fields. In the traditional view of alchemical stages, blackness is
often thought of as an early phase of the work. In blackness, the soul of
the alchemist finds itself in a dark place. In Hillman’s reflection on “The
Seduction of Black” (Chapter 4 in Alchemical Psychology), however,
there is far more to be appreciated about blackness. For the alchemist,
blackness is also an accomplishment. In it, Hillman finds an intentionality,
a deepening of the soul, a suffering that teaches endurance, and a halting of
the exaggerated passions that Hillman called the “fervor of salt.”47 Perhaps
most importantly, the experience of blackness serves to deconstruct posi-

tivities and paradigms, and to overcome the fundamentalisms of “hope-
fully-colored illusions.”48 The blacker-than-black aspect of this condition
brings with it the dread of nonbeing, but it also is the “unbounded ground
of possibility.”49 As black despair moves toward reflection, black turns to
blue and imagination penetrates the darkness. Psyche ponders and consid-
ers as it moves toward the albedo, a silvery white condition of the soul
characterized by lunafication and lustration, a gleaming white condition,
the white earth as the archetypal basis of psychic life and what Hillman
calls the poetic basis of mind. In this silvery white light, Hillman aims to
reframe and reform our language. He calls for a poetic speech that “speaks
to clinical conditions in their own tongue.”50 This whiteness of the albedo
was the first goal of the alchemists, but, as Hillman notes, Jung said: “in
this state of ‘whiteness’ one does not live.”51 “The sure optimism of solar
clarity is the blind spot itself” – something more is required, and “Sol dis-
solves in the darkness of its own light.”52 The purity of whiteness has to
spoil and this leads to what the alchemists called the yellowing of the work
necessary to a later reddening into a fuller life.
In “The Yellowing of the Work” (Chapter 7 in Alchemical Psychol-
ogy), Hillman describes this important transitional process of putrefaction,
decay, and rot. Yellowing saves us from the whiteness and abstractions of
psychological insight, what Hillman saw as the continuing translation of
experience into bloodless concepts. For the work to approach the high-
est level, it must reach the world, deconstruct and spoil itself, develop a
“jaundiced eye”53 to the whiteness of psychology. Yellowing moves us
toward these potentialities and brings both the decay and illumination that
are found together. Movement from white to yellow brings the goal of
alchemy into further relief and anticipates the reddening that brings life
to the abstractions of whiteness and living fullness to the intellectual soul.
The reddening signifies the animation of the vital reality of psyche, the
goal of the alchemists, the Philosophers’ Stone, the gold of the alchemists.
Hillman then takes up the issue of the goal of the alchemical process
in his reflection “Concerning the Stone: Alchemical Images of the Goal”
(Chapter 8 in Alchemical Psychology). In this reflection, Hillman notes
that the grand images of alchemy – the gold, the elixir, the Philosophers’
Stone, and others – are not meant to be understood as literal achievements
at the end of a process, but rather as ideas intended to impel the adept
into the long work of the opus of life. As such, the goal is the work itself
with no static fixed end. Psychologically, this alters the heroic desire for
ever-continuing improvement – rather, the soul circles around itself in an
ongoing process, a ouroboric rotatio where beginning and end meet. Put
another way, Hillman states that
[t]he goal images correlate precisely with this motion of circularity,

since the iteratio (repetition, or as the maxim goes, “one operation
does not make an artist”), circulatio, and rotatio are often considered
among the last operations of the opus.
The rotatio, like a turning wheel, announces that no position can
remain fixed, no statement finally true, no end place achieved. Devel-
opment makes little sense when no place is better or worse, higher or
lower. As the wheel rotates what was up is now down, what was infe-
rior, now superior and will become again inferior. What rises, falls,
repeatedly: “Only the fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn
the wheel on which he turns.” Linear motion as a line of development
from any point of the rotation only goes off at a tangent. Developmen-
tal process actually moves away from the soul’s goal which is turning
in circles. As Figulus says: “What we seek is here or nowhere.”54
He goes on to say:
The rotatio also returns telos itself to its root meaning. Telos does
not simply mean end, goal, purpose, finis. “Instead,” says Onians,
“I would suggest that with this root notion of ‘turning around’ [telos]
meant ‘circling’ or ‘circle.’ ” The goal itself circles, because it is a
psychic goal; or, the goal is psyche itself obeying the laws of its own
motion, a motion that is not going somewhere else; no journey, no pro-
cess, no improvement. And so the images of the goal put to final rest
the subjective urge that has impelled the entire work from the start. We
awaken to the fact that the goal of the work is nothing else than the
objectification of the very urge that propels it.55
A dream experience illustrates a concrete example of such a moment. The

dreamer was obsessed with the idea of entering a Tibetan monastery, but
he was in conflict because his life demands made it nearly impossible to
do so – the sacrifices were too great – yet he was on the brink of making
such a sacrifice. While walking down the street, he suddenly remembered
hearing a voice from an earlier dream that said directly to him: “You are
already in a Tibetan monastery.” Remembering this dream had a dramatic
effect on his thought process. The idea that the dreamer was already where
he wanted to be was more than a rationalization. It, in effect, opened him
to the recognition that what he valued in his study of the Tibetan Bud-
dhist tradition was the idea of the fullness of the present moment. The idea
was well known to him, but not deeply experienced. With the recollection
of this dream, the conflict began to subside since what was psychologi-
cally intrinsic about going to the monastery was the desire to live more
fully in the moment. In such a dream, the fantasy of the future returns to
the present and the dreamer experienced a feeling of greater completion.
In a sense, the telos of going forward returned to itself. The goal of his
intention was not simply out there in some “actuality” to be realized in
the future, but rather in the existential structure of the “moment.” In such
transformative moments, the psyche’s conception of temporality changes
from linear extension to a circular deepening – one might say, from an
“ego psychology” of a being-in-time to a “self psychology” whose being-
in-time is grounded in a larger sense of temporality. Put another way: “By
imagining the goal as feelings already familiar, we are . . . deliteralising
the goal by removing it from a temporal presence and activating it as an
idea already present in the human condition and intermittently available to
our feelings, spurring the desire for supreme values.”56 Hillman refers to
philosopher Edward Casey, noting that Casey has set forth “the idea that
imagination is so closely related to time, both psychologically and onto-
logically, that actual image-work not only takes time into soul or makes
temporal events soul events but also makes time in soul.”57
What is important for Hillman is that alchemical goals must be de-liter-
alized and that “alchemy’s images of [the goals], the hermaphrodite, the
gold, or the red stone” are not to be taken “as actualized events” in time or
even symbolic representations.58 It is this idea that motivates psyche into
the long process of the alchemical work. For Hillman, the motivation for
both work and life requires attractive goals that promise healing, redemp-
tion, fantasies, possibilities, and even beauty. In short, “An inflated vision
of supreme beauty is a necessary fiction for the soul-making opus we call
our lifetime.”59
For Hillman, “[t]he purpose of the work is purposiveness itself, not this
or that formulated purpose, which quickly degenerates into an ideology
and just as quickly loses effectiveness as motive power.”60 It is not what
can be attained that moves us toward our ends, but what is unattainable.
Hillman elaborates the difference between what he earlier called a spir-
itual approach and the soul approach noting that the spirit approach takes
alchemical fictions “as metaphysical realities, and measures progress
toward them in literal stages. The soul approach maintains the images as
supreme values but takes them always as fictions.”61
To hold fictions as a supreme value is a strange idea. In modern times,
there seems to be a tendency to devalue fiction, opposing it to truth, and to
value “reality” over what is called “fantasy” or “imagination.” However,
for Hillman, imagination is raised to the highest value. Hillman notes:
We must start, as [the alchemist] Benedictus Figulus says, in the cae-

lum, the sky-blue firmament over our heads, the mind already in the
blue of heaven, imagination opened. The blue caelum of imagination
gives to the opus a rock-hard standpoint from above downward, just
as firm and solid as literal physical reality. A sapphire stone already at
the beginning. The sophic activity of the mind. . . .62
For Hillman, archetypal psychology is fundamentally an imaginal psy-

chology. It “axiomatically assumes imagistic universals” which Hillman
compares “to the universali fantastici of Vico.”63 For him this means that
imaginal realities are at the core of human thought and constitute a poetic
basis of human consciousness. He notes: “By means of the archetypal
image, natural phenomena present faces that speak to the imagining soul
rather than only conceal hidden laws and probabilities and manifest their
objectification.”64 For Hillman, it is important to remain open to imagina-
tion and its ongoing imagery, to the “openings of the heart and mind and
senses.”65 It is a method rich in “texture, images, language, emotion, and
sudden mysterious arrivals.”66
Hillman links his style to a rhetorical device peitho, which the Greeks
sometimes called Aphrodite. It is sophistical in the sense that its intent
is “to invite, seduce, charm, enhance, and convince by rhetorical, even
poetic, means.”67 It is a method that was earlier rejected in the history of
philosophy, which sought absolute truths, perhaps most notable in Plato
and Aristotle, but one that returns as a contemporary style in rhetoric and
in some postmodern philosophy. It is a method that includes anima sensi-
bilities at its core, to a greater extent than does the rational logos of Greek
philosophical thought. It was also an approach that Jung rejected when an
anima voice told him that his work was art.68 Hillman has noted that had
Jung entertained this anima voice more openly, the direction of his psy-
chology may have been very different. One way to imagine this difference
is to recognize that Hillman’s work has not only taken up this call to the
aesthetic and art, but also made it central to his own psychology, which he
so forcefully demonstrates in his alchemical psychology.
Jung’s and Hillman’s ideas are in turn criticized by another important
revisionist, Wolfgang Giegerich, whose philosophical orientation, strongly
influenced by the work of Hegel, challenges the fundamental place of
image in psychic life.
Wolfgang Giegerich and the soul’s logical life

If James Hillman has been the champion of the imagination and of Jung’s
idea that images are at the non-reductive basis of psychic life, Wolfgang
Giegerich raises the most challenging criticism of this point of view from
within the Jungian tradition. Giegerich, originally a close collaborator
of Hillman’s, was part of a small archetypally oriented group helping to
develop an archetypal perspective. Since the publication of his ground-
breaking book The Soul’s Logical Life (1998), he has been the foremost
critic of both Jung and Hillman from within the Jungian tradition, includ-
ing their views of alchemy and the Philosophers’ Stone. In all, Giegerich
has about 200 publications in several languages and his scholarship has
inspired the development of the International Society for Psychology as
the Discipline of Interiority.
Giegerich has been seen as extending both Jung’s and Hillman’s work
and has been thought of as representing a third wave in Jungian scholar-
ship. Both praise and criticism are woven together in his work. In the pref-
ace to The Soul’s Logical Life, Giegerich praises and criticizes both Jung
and Hillman noting “why it has to be, more or less exclusively, JUNG
from among the many important psychologists of this century and all the
various psychological schools that must be the base and starting point for
our search for a rigorous notion of psychology.”69 He then offers
a critical assessment of first JUNG’s, then conventional Jungianism’s

and finally archetypal psychology’s relevance for a strict notion of
psychology. . . . [T]he state-of-affairs of conventional Jungianism
seems to be a regression far behind the achievement of JUNG, while
archetypal psychology is again a great advance, but is nonetheless

in need of a radical criticism (with respect to its imaginal bias). To
arrive at a rigorous concept of psychology we have to go beyond the
imaginal.70
Giegerich is one of the most philosophically oriented Jungian analysts and

he has been heavily influenced by Hegel and Heidegger. His criticism of
the imaginal basis of Jung’s and Hillman’s psychologies is largely based
on his reading of Hegel’s phenomenological and logical works. Gieg-
erich acknowledges his Hegelian influence though he claims not to be a
Hegelian:
I find that often people try to make me a Hegelian, simply because

I refer to Hegel and have learned a few things from him. But nei-
ther do I propagate Hegel’s philosophy, nor do I claim that what I say
is such that Hegel would have been of one mind with me. I do not
even claim to understand Hegel properly. My work is in psychology
and about our modern situation, and is not an attempt to propound
Hegel’s philosophy. Our purpose in our time cannot be to inscribe our
modern psychological interests and needs into the ready-made form
of Hegel’s system and to rely on him as an authority that validates our
own work. We have to think from within our own historical situation
and on our own responsibility. However, I think that in trying to do
so there is no way around Hegel. It is the most advanced, comprehen-
sive, and differentiated thinking and supersedes everything that came
afterwards. . . .71
In short, Giegerich applies many of Hegel’s fundamental concepts to his

critical work, including sublation, dialectics, absolute knowing, abso-
lute negativity, and spirit as the fundamental philosophical idea that goes
beyond the limits of the Kantian-based epistemology which he attributes
to Jung.72 Following Hegel’s lead, Giegerich’s perspective sets the stage
for moving from imagination to “thought.”
In The Soul’s Logical Life, Giegerich makes the case for the importance
of thought as fundamental to an understanding of psychological life, and
he contends that “[t]he time of . . . logical innocence, where truth could
still really happen in the form of symbols, images or rituals, have long
been passé.”73 Giegerich remarks on the complexity of modern life and
notes that we must move “beyond natural pictorial thinking and move on
to the abstract level of thought proper.”74 Contrasting imaginal imagina-
tion with thought proper, Giegerich states:
Image is a form in which what is actually (that is, “in itself,” but not
“for itself”) a thought or Notion initially appears in consciousness. As
long as it appears in the form of a symbol or image, the thought cannot
yet be consciously thought (past participle); it can only be “beheld” or
“contemplated,” as if it were an object or a scene and not a thought.
Because it is a thought “in visible [anschaulicher] form,” the form
of a pictorial representation, its thought character remains “invisible”
[unanschaulich] or unconscious, implicit.75
For Giegerich, the movement beyond picture thinking which is
immersed in the medium of an emotional of an envisioned image has

to be transposed into the form of explicit (or consciously thought)
thought . . . in JUNG’s case in the form of a psychological theory.
One might say with FREUD, what at first had the status of “It” would
be transposed into the status of “I-ness.” Expressed in HEGEL’s lan-
guage, what at first was grasped and expressed only as Substance [a
perceived or envisioned imaginal content, which, as perceived or envi-
sioned, was so-to-speak vis-à-vis the perceiving person] would also be
grasped and expressed as Subject, namely as one’s own thinking, one’s
own actual and living thought. As such it could turn into what HEGEL
terms the Notion (der Begriff).76
By using an example from Jung, Giegerich helps us to see what he means

by the movement from emotion to thought, from image to the soul’s logi-
cal life. He recalls Jung’s later-life statement that he no longer needed
to dialogue with his autonomous images of his soul (anima). He quotes
Jung as saying, “To-day I am directly conscious of the anima’s ideas,”
and then goes on, “that is, they now are his own thoughts that he is con-
sciously thinking.”77 Giegerich, using Hegel’s philosophical insights, sug-
gests a way of understanding the relationship between emotion/image and
thought/notion.
A psychosomatic symptom is “in itself” or, as it were, unbeknownst to

itself, emotion (or, it is implicit, latent emotion); it is not “for itself”
emotion, not explicitly or manifestly so (it is ansichseiend, not fürsi-

chseiend, emotion). And emotion is ansichseiend (or latent) image;
image is ansichseiend (or latent) Notion. Conversely, Notion is sub-
lated (aufgehoben) image; image is sublated emotion; emotion is sub-
lated (interiorized, psychologized) behavior or physical condition.78
Giegerich points out that in Jung’s autobiography he speaks about how

important it was for him “to translate the emotions into images – that is to
say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions.”79 For Gieg-
erich, another move is essential – the move from image to thought – which
he feels is underrepresented in Jung’s thought, and it is this move which
he feels is necessary to go beyond and complete Jung’s and Hillman’s
psychologies and move them toward a more rigorous philosophical psy-
chology. Giegerich states that this move is an “even more far-reaching con-
sequence to be drawn from the cited idea of JUNG’s that the practical work
of psychology has to make the initially latent thought ‘complete’ . . . .”80
In the last analysis, soul is Notion, is logical life. This corresponds

to the gold or philosopher’s stone of the alchemists. Logically,
even though not temporally, it is not primarily emotion, affect, feel-
ing, drive, desire, not even image or fantasy (which all correspond
to impure forms of the prime matter in alchemy, the massa confusa,
etc.). To be sure, soul is also emotion and desire and especially, as
JUNG often insisted, image. Indeed, it is even physical behavior and
psychosomatic, even somatic, symptom. But it is symptom, emotion
and desire only because, as again JUNG taught us to realize, each of
those phenomena contains an image or idea hidden within itself or is
one guise in which an image or idea may first appear when it is deeply
immersed in (psychological or alchemical) matter. And the image is
one guise in which a thought or notion presents itself under the con-
ditions, or in the medium, of a consciousness that is in the spell of
sensory intuition (Anschauung), imagination, pictorial representation
(Vorstellung).81
Importantly, Giegerich develops his idea of sublation and the Notion by

pointing out that
Being sublated psychosomatic symptom, emotion, and image, the

Notion is not their simple (undialectical) opposite. It is not the abstract,
“nothing but” type of notion, merely intellectual, cut off from living
experience. Rather, it is the concrete Notion which, due to its genesis
from emotion and image, is still satiated with them, but now with them
in their form as sublated moments within thought. The sensual, emo-
tional and imaginal qualities have not been lost altogether. They have
been alchemically distilled and brought home from their alienation in
the initial crude, literal state in which they first were manifested.82
In this important paragraph, Giegerich clearly makes explicit that the

Notion is not something abstractly separate from image and emotion. In
fact, the Notion or Idea is “satiated” with the sensate imagination; at least
these sensual “qualities have not been lost altogether.”83 Yet, in spite of
this recognition, it is also clear that for Giegerich the idea of “sublation,”
the movement to thought proper, is seen as a higher level psychological
and philosophical position from which image and emotion can be seen as
distilled, brought home from their crude, alienated state.84 The image is
thus assimilated into a higher-level process and is relieved of its monstrous
alterity. Ultimately Giegerich (via Hegel) will claim to have surpassed,
gone beyond, and completed what was underdeveloped in the work of
Jung and Hillman.
Giegerich, following his move to the soul’s logical life, states:
This holding on to the visible, spatial and ontological as a firm ground

is really inexcusable for a field that wants to be true psychology beyond
the ego-stance. It just will not do to subjectively free psychology from
the standpoint of the ego while receiving one’s object of study, the life
of the soul, from the hands of the ego with its positivizing modes of
relating to phenomena (perception, sensory intuition, pictorial think-
ing) and in the form of “people’s psychologies.”
More than a re-visioning: a real sublation of psychology is needed:
a fundamental self-negation, self-putrefaction of an imagination-based
psychology in favor of a logic of the soul. I stated before that psy-
chology is sublated science, sublated religion, sublated medicine, and
further that psychology proper exists only to the extent that it is also
sublated immediate psychology. With this self-sublation, psychology
does not collapse and give way to some Other, as was the case with
alchemy. Its self-sublation is psychology’s beginning, the process of
its foundation.85
Giegerich’s alchemy 86
Just as Jung and Hillman found alchemy important for their psychology,
Giegerich likewise takes up alchemy as an important touchstone. His
major reflections on alchemy are found in his The Soul’s Logical Life,
particularly in the section entitled “Excursus: Alchemy’s Opus Contra
Imagination.” In addition, there are two papers dedicated to alchemy, one
entitled “Closure and Setting Free or the Bottled Spirit of Alchemy and
Psychology” and another entitled “Once More ‘the Stone which is Not a
Stone.’ Further Reflections on the ‘Not.’ ” In addition, Giegerich has also
made a number of comments about alchemy by personal communication
to this author and I have included some of these in my chapter entitled
“Alchemy” in The Handbook of Jungian Psychology.
In Giegerich’s personal comments to the author, he notes that alchemy
entered Jung’s psychology only as a topic or content. Giegerich objects
that Jung’s scientific/modernist metapsychology seems to remain the
same, maintaining a subject/object split, while at the same time making an
object of alchemical ideas that do not fit into these categories. Giegerich
believes that Jung reduces alchemical processes to events “in” the uncon-
scious or the interior of the personality. He notes that: “the individual, the
personality, the inner, and ‘the unconscious’ are our names for the ‘bottle’
in which the mercurial ‘substance’ had to stay firmly enclosed for Jung.”87
Giegerich continues his reflection by noting that “because Mercurius
remained enclosed in the above way ‘it’ had to stay a substance, an object,
and entity” and could not be true to its own nature as a spirit (something
intangible and unrepresentable). This interpretation sets the stage for the
fundamental thrust of Giegerich’s emphasis in The Soul’s Logical Life.
According to Giegerich, when Jung, and Hillman for that matter, stick
to “images” as fundamental, they are in fact objectifying the spirit of
alchemy. The image itself becomes objectified, while the true spirit of
alchemy aims at realizing the logical life of the soul, which is conceptual,
subtle, non-positive, intangible. Throughout Giegerich’s critique, he juxta-
poses images and a “pictorial form of thinking” which valorizes perception
and imagination against what he considers to be the true aim of alchemy,
which is to achieve the level of dialectical thought and logical expression
that he describes in The Soul’s Logical Life. For Giegerich, when Jung
opts to hold the image as fundamental, he steps over the goal of alchemy
to release the spirit from its container and ignores the “self-sublation” or
death that the alchemical process requires. In doing so he skips “over the
successive psychological development of several centuries.”88
Jung pronounced his psychology of the unconscious to be the immedi-

ate successor and redemptor of alchemy. In this way he could declare
the previous image-oriented (pictorial) mode of thinking, long over-
come by the history of the soul, to still be “the” psychological mode
and decry the later development into which alchemy had dissolved as
a mere rationalism, intellectualization, i.e., mere “ego.” Jung excluded
from his psychological reception of alchemy the fact that the telos of
alchemy had been the overcoming of itself. He froze it, and psychol-
ogy along with it, in an earlier phase.89
For Giegerich, the task of alchemy was to deconstruct itself, or at least, in

his terms, to surpass itself as a movement of the historical expression of
the soul. Here a Hegelian dialectical understanding of history influences
Giegerich. For him, Jung and the classical analysts did not give enough
emphasis to the active dimensions of consciousness as constituting the
reality of the psyche. That is, alchemy was an active human project, which
meant that the observer of the alchemical process was not passive. He
notes that even in the activity of “registering, recording, maybe painting,
the dream or fantasy images received and in thinking about them as a text,”
there was still the tendency to relate to this text as a finished “product.”90
“But consciousness had to refrain from entering the process of the produc-
tion of images themselves.”91 Giegerich qualifies this statement to note
the “exception” of active imagination, though even in this instance “what
is to become active and enter the production process is not the reflecting
mind, but the empirical ego.”92 In short, the mythos of Jungian work, both
psychological and alchemical, is that the “natural process of the produc-
tion of images was not to be interfered with.”93 For Giegerich, this was
the vestige of fundamental naturalism left in Jung’s psychology, which in
the end “was contrary to the spirit of alchemy.”94 He notes that in Jung:
“we have the curious spectacle . . . of a singular dedication to and propa-
gation of alchemy ‘and’ its simultaneous repression. His advancement of
alchemy as a psychological paradigm was ‘in itself’ the substance of what
it was intrinsically about.”95
Hillman’s and Giegerich’s ideas on psychology, alchemy, and the
Philosophers’ Stone express both a mutual appreciation and important
differences in perspective. I have identified these approaches as being

grounded respectively in the notions of soul (Hillman) and spirit (Gieg-
erich). In the next chapter, the similarities and differences between these
revisionist thinkers will be explored.
Notes
1 The following section was previously published as Marlan, “A Blue Fire.”
2 Hillman, quoted by Marlan in “A Blue Fire,” 5.
3 Ibid.
4 Moore, quoted by Marlan in “A Blue Fire: The Work of James Hillman,” 5.
5 Hillman, quoted by Marlan in “A Blue Fire: The Work of James Hillman,” 5.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 6.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 7.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Hillman, Revisioning, 229.
30 Portions of this section were previously published in my entry Marlan, “Alchemy,”
263–295.
31 Hillman, “A Note for Stanton Marlan,” 101.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 102.
34 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Plutarch, On the Face in the Orb of the Moon, line 923A.
38 Ibid., 18.
39 Hillman, “A Note for Stanton Marlan,” 102.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 103.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Hillman, “The Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Language,” 37, 39.
46 Ibid.
47 Hillman, “Salt,” 173.
49 Ibid., 94; quoted in Marlan, “Colors of the Soul,” 73.
50 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 203; quoted in Marlan, “Colors of the Soul,” 74.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 238.
57 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.
58 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 232. It would be interesting to explore Heidegger’s
notion of temporalizing and his “not yet” view of the future as amplifying Hillman’s
notion of telos returning to itself, but I cannot develop this theme here.
59 Ibid., 233.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 238.
62 Ibid., 239.
63 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 23 (From Giambattista Vico. Scienza Nuova. Napoli,
1744 [in translation: The New Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968]).
64 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 329.
67 Ibid.
68 See Jung, Memories, 185–187, for the full story. In brief: at one point during his con-
frontation with the unconscious, as Jung was writing down some of his fantasies, he
heard a voice telling him that his work was “art.” (185) At first, he dismissed this
as an interference from “a woman . . . within,” “the ‘soul,’ in the primitive sense.”
(186) Eventually, he came to believe that it was essential to interact with this inner
figure in order “to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personify-
ing them, and at the same time to bring them into relationship with consciousness. That
is the technique for stripping them of their power.” (187) However, he also was con-
vinced that, in general, the anima was “full of a deep cunning” and if he had trusted her
and accepted that his work was “art,” he would have been “seduced . . . into believing
that [he] was a misunderstood artist” and that this could have destroyed him. (187) For
Jung, what was important was the question of philosophical objectivity and scientific
validity. He wanted to be seen as a serious thinker and to make a contribution to the
science of psychology.
69 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 11.
70 Ibid.
71 Giegerich, “Conflict/Resolution,” 8–9.
72 In light of this congruence with Hegelian thought, it would be interesting to ask in what
ways Giegerich’s ideas actually differ from Hegel’s in any significant way, but I will
not pursue this theme here.
73 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 23–24.
74 Ibid., 29.
75 Ibid., 47.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., 48.
78 Ibid.
79 Jung, Memories, 177; quoted by Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 48.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.; emphasis mine. The importance of the intrinsic connection between Notion and
Idea, image and emotion, needs further elaboration, but is beyond the scope of this
work.
85 Ibid., 191–192.
86 Portions of this section were previously published in my chapter Marlan, “Alchemy.”
87 Giegerich, personal communication, 2000.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid. Yasuhiro Tanaka, a Japanese analyst, picks up on Giegerich's critique of “images”
and the limitations of an “imaginal psychology.” For him, if we remain one-sidedly
dependent on such a perspective “then we fall into the trap of remaining on the horizon
of surface-psychology rather than depth psychology” (Tanaka, personal communica-
tion, 2000). For Tanaka, as for Giegerich, “we psychologists living after Jung, have
to address the alchemical logic in analytical psychology.” His assessment of Jung is
that while Jung on a personal level perceived the logical, paradoxical, and dialectic
dimension of alchemy, he could not “interiorize it enough” or adequately apply it to his
psychology as a theory. Thus, for Tanaka, our work now is “not to fashion the bridge
between alchemy and our clinical practice” but to examine the theoretical limitations
of Jung's psychology: “Alchemy was not only [Jung’s] historical background but also
his logical background in the sense that for Jung it was none other than the theoria
for sublating his own experience into his psychology.” This then means it was Jung’s
theory that could dispel the massa confusa and it is to this that we must now give our
attention.
Chapter 6
James Hillman and Wolfgang

Giegerich
Unification and divergence in their
psychological and philosophical
perspectives
The tension between recognizing that there is something about the mon-
strous complexity of alchemical images that remains essential (Hillman)
and holding that thought rather than images are essential (Giegerich) has
been seen as an important divide between Jung’s and Hillman’s versions
of an image-based psychology and Giegerich’s logical life of the soul. The
struggle of coming to terms with the unconscious often has been under-
stood as making the unconscious conscious, the unknown known, the alien
familiar, the darkness light, and so on. It is a process familiar to nearly
all forms of psychoanalysis and it has been seen as fundamental to the
healing process. In making this move toward “consciousness,” whether
in Freud or Giegerich, albeit recognizing their considerable philosophical
differences, both of these thinkers emphasize the translation from image
to thought. Hillman, on the other hand, radically reverses this tide, claim-
ing the resistance of the image to translation into what he calls conceptual
rationalism. Using dream life as an example, Hillman notes that Freud
called the dream
the via regia to the unconscious. But because this via regia in most
psychotherapy since his time, has become a straight one-way street of
all morning traffic, moving out of the unconscious toward the ego’s
city, I have chosen to face the other way. Hence my title [The Dream
and the Underworld], which is a directional signpost for a different
one-way movement, let us say vesperal, into the dark.1
This is a “move backwards from logos to mythos, [a] move against the
historical stream of our culture.”2 For Hillman, this move – similar to the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-7
James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich 117
one he makes with regard to alchemy – is a criticism of translation from

the phenomena of dreams or alchemical symbols into any conscious struc-
ture that leaves the image behind. Rather than seeking the light, interpret-
ing dreams or alchemy, Hillman proposes, as Jung did, that we dream the
dream onward, sticking with its images in a mythopoetic way, and resist-
ing any translation into the categories of the soul’s logical life.
The difference between the mythopoetic and the logical life of the
soul is seen in the contrast between Giegerich’s and Hillman’s attitudes
toward “the unconscious” (a notion Giegerich ultimately rejects) and
their approach to the alchemical text Aurora consurgens. For Giegerich,
alchemy works toward the aurora, bringing about a new sunrise, the new
sun of a “new ‘day,’ ”3 whereas for Hillman, the work is not toward the
“day world” but toward the underworld of night.
Dreams are children of the Night, and we have to look at their brightest
dayworld image also through our selfsame smoky glasses. So we work
into the dream without forethoughts of Aurora consurgens, for Eos
(Dawn) prefers heroes and takes them up. [sublates them?] Instead:
the resurrection of Death. Instead of turning to the dream for a new
start and for foresight . . . there will always be going downward, first
with feelings of hopelessness, then, and the mind’s eye dilates in the
dark, with increasing surprise and joy.4
Here Hillman finds something in the dark that for Giegerich is an impris-
onment in matter. For Giegerich, this is an old attitude while for Hillman
this darkening of consciousness is on the verge of the monstrously new,
“so utterly foreign and incomprehensible.”5 For Hillman, this turn toward
the dark leaves Promethean consciousness behind, making consciousness
less visual and more auditory, far removed from therapies that aim to bring
things to light. The move toward the darkness is also a move toward sensing,
from eye to ear and then through the senses of touch, taste, and scent
so that we begin to perceive more and more in particulars, less and less
overviews. We become more and more aware of an animal discrimina-
tion going on below our reflections and guiding them.6
For Hillman, “Sensual imagination restores to the image [and imagina-

tion] its primacy as psychic basis of sensation.”7 It is important here to
118 James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich
note that for Hillman the “image” is not simply based on what we think of
as natural sensations. Hillman writes:
To take our senses only on the level of natural sensations is a natural-

istic fallacy. It’s like believing that we have to see an image to imagine
or hear music to listen musically. The image makes possible the sens-
ing of it.
This turns upside down what psychology has been teaching ever
since Aristotle: images result from sensations and soul is built of the
bricks of sense experience (dayworld residues). Once we deliteralize
sensation and take our senses too as metaphorical modes of perceiv-
ing, we are finally across the bridge and can look back on the all-too-
solid brick structure where we live our lives as manmade defenses
against the soul, as an “anthropomorphism called reality.”8
In this turn to the underworld, Hillman intentionally polarizes the day-

world and the underworld, as is his tendency when he wants to reveal
important contrasts. He works “The Dream Bridge” in a one-way direc-
tion with a “singleness of intent.”9 The underworld becomes a paradox of
extremity, a realm of radicality, of coldness, of the unconscious, and he
differentiates the hero’s night sea-journey from the nekyia, a descent “to a
zone of utter coldness.”10 Further, there is a return from the journey, leav-
ing the explorer “in better shape for the tasks of life,” but from the nekyia
there is no return.11 It is a journey he likens to Dante’s descent to the Ninth
Circle of the Inferno, a “frozen topos,” “deep, deep down,” that is all ice.12
Here we are numb, chilled. All our reactions are in cold storage. This
is a psychic place of dread and of a terror so deep that it comes in
uncanny experiences, such as voodoo death and the totstell reflex.
A killer lives in the ice.13
For Hillman, the “glacial cold” of the underworld is likened to psychopa-

thy, to figures such as Cain, Judas, and Lucifer, to the unredeemable; and
yet such a place and such figures “serve a function in the soul” that cannot
be reached by any religious or psychological humanism.14 For Hillman,
the icy coldness of the underworld is “beyond human warmth” and must
be met homeopathically in kind. In the clinical realm, the warm-hearted
desire to show sensitive feelings to a paranoid or borderline patient is like
showing blood to a vampire or a shark; one will quickly be eaten alive. For
Hillman, the urge to warm the cold and melt the ice “reflects a therapeutic
effort that has not been able to meet the ice at its own level. The curative
urge conceals the fear of the Ninth Circle, of going all the way down” into
the cold.15 Hillman notes that there is a part of our soul “that would live
forever cast out from both human and heavenly company,”16 and contact
with this place is essential for any therapist who would truly work as a
depth psychologist.
If we take Hillman’s idea of the difference between the night sea-jour-
ney and the nekyia seriously – that it is only the hero who returns from
the journey in better shape for the tasks of life – what conclusion can we
draw within ourselves from those who have had the capacity to face such
cold-blooded experiences? Are we not better off for doing so as therapists
and human beings? Are we not able to engage life in a fuller way by con-
necting to our own psychopathic depths?
I would claim that we are, and I take Hillman’s division between the
night sea-journey and the nekyia to be a polemical strategy to reveal
something about the profound depths of psychic life that ordinarily remain
invisible or unconscious. His strategy is a one-way exploration, with “sin-
gleness of intent,” “a vesperal, into the dark,”17 as he calls it. It is a strategy
he used in The Dream and the Underworld and, in addition, in his essay
“Peaks and Vales.” In that essay, he again draws apart the polarities of psy-
chic life to reveal, by stark contrast in this case, the differences between
spirit and soul, puer and psyche, heights and depths. For Hillman this is
an act of violence, “urging strife, or eris, or polemos,” an imaginal act of
separatio (separation).18 Hillman hopes to clarify both spirit and soul as
separate ways of imagining. We recognize these ways of seeing by vir-
tue of their imaginary styles and language. He describes spirit as abstract,
unified, and concentrated, while soul is concrete, multiple, and imminent.
I believe that their separation is in part artificial and that ultimately there
is a need for accommodation between differences. In “Peaks and Vales,”
Hillman ultimately makes a move toward this accommodation in what he
calls the puer-psyche marriage.
The accommodation between the high-driving spirit on the one hand

and the nymph, the valley, or the soul on the other can be imagined
as the puer-psyche marriage. It has been recounted in many ways –
for instance, in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis as an alchemical
conjunction of personified substances, or in Apuleius’s tale of Eros

and Psyche. In the same manner as these models, let us imagine in
a personified style. Then we can feel the different needs within us as
volitions of distinct persons, where puer is the Who in our spirit flight,
and anima (or psyche) is the Who in our soul.19
The idea here is that the “opposites” of spirit and soul are in intimate
embrace. For Hillman, the soul or anima – the archetype of life – reflects
the endless mess of everyday life and its endless problems. Hillman spec-
ulates that perhaps “these very endless labyrinthine ‘problems’ are its
depth. The anima [soul] embroils and twists and screws us to the breaking
point.”20 For Hillman, bringing our spirit to the soul is a relationship of
perplexity and it is perplexity that “consciousness needs to marry.” Puer
and psyche, spirit and soul, need each other. The fruits of this marriage
transform the soul such that it
can regard its own needs in a new way. Then these needs are no
longer attempts to adapt to Hera’s civilizational requirements, or to
Venus’s insistence that love is God, or to Apollo’s medical cures, or
even Psyche’s work of soul-making. Not for the sake of learning love
only, or for community, or for better marriages and better families,
or for independence does the psyche present its symptoms and neu-
rotic claims. Rather these demands are asking also for inspiration, for
long-distance vision, for ascending eros, for vivification and intensi-
fication (not relaxation), for radicality, transcendence, and meaning –
in short, the psyche has spiritual needs, which the puer part of us can
fulfill. Soul asks that its preoccupations be not dismissed as trivia but
seen through in terms of higher and deeper perspectives, the verticali-
ties of the spirit. When we realize that our psychic malaise points to a
spiritual hunger beyond what psychology offers and that our spiritual
dryness points to a need for psychic waters beyond what spiritual
discipline offers, then we are beginning to move both therapy and
discipline.21
For Hillman, the engagement between spirit and soul constructs a
walled space, the thalamus or bridal chamber, neither peak nor vale,
but rather a place where both can be looked at through glass windows
or be closed off with doors. This increased interiority means that each
new puer inspiration, each hot idea, at whatever time of life in whom-
ever, be given psychization. It will first be drawn through the labyrin-
thine ways of the soul, which wind it and slow it and nourish it from
many sides (the “many” nurses and “many” maenads), developing the
spirit from a one-way mania for “ups” to polytropos, the many-sided-
ness of the Hermetic old hero, Ulysses. The soul performs the service
of indirection to the puer arrow, bringing to the sulphuric compulsions
of the spirit the lasting salt of soul.22
Clearly then, Hillman points to the benefits of a coniunctio between spirit

and soul, and aims to bring them together within his psychological vision.
However, it is interesting to consider how or whether such a marriage is
possible between the work of Hillman and that of Giegerich. While both
Hillman’s and Giegerich’s works, within themselves, attempt an integra-
tion between spirit and soul, I think it is fair to say that each also leans in
one direction more than the other. Hillman has clearly emphasized the soul
or anima psychology, while Giegerich the spiritual or animus psychol-
ogy. Contemporary Jungian theory continues to struggle with both of these
directions.
In general, Hillman and Giegerich have much in common and have
expressed an appreciation of each other’s work in spite of their differences.
Both use Jung’s later work as a starting point and both criticize Jung. Nei-
ther is simply an imitator or disciple. Both criticize orthodoxy, literalizing,
substantializing, personalizing, and ontologizing as well as the limits of
ego psychology. Both want to go beyond literal notions of ego and uncon-
scious and agree that psychology needs to be re-envisioned. While neither
says the consulting room and long-term analysis are not valuable, both
criticize the introverted style, which does not pay adequate attention to the
importance of the larger psychological world beyond the clinic, and both
emphasize the importance of going beyond the limits of the consulting
room. Both value thinking and have a view of thinking that is not limited
to Jung’s conception of it in his typological works. Both emphasize the
importance of the soul, though they have differing views of it. Both value
history, but again have different conceptions of it. And, finally, both Hill-
man and Giegerich propose a rethinking of our notions of the ego, the Self,
wholeness, balance, growth, individuation, dream interpretation, Christian
metaphysics, and so on.
Giegerich sees archetypal psychology as a major step forward and as

a real advance in psychological theory – not as a school beside other
schools, but as an advancement that supersedes classical and devel-
opmental approaches; a new level of reflection that future develop-
ments must pass through, as opposed to avoiding or going around. It
is state of the art. Archetypal psychology thus has the merit of having
re-visioned psychology. It has accepted the root metaphor of the soul, a
theoretical feat not found elsewhere. It has approached phenomena like
psychopathology from internal reflection, from “within psyche’s own
waters” (as noted previously by Edinger) – a deepening from within
that follows and advances Jung’s thought. Giegerich feels there is
something radical and free about Hillman’s approach, and likes his way
of responding to psychological phenomena, seeing it as characterized
by what Jung called a subtler intelligence. For Giegerich, archetypal
psychology has a logical fluidity by virtue of being in touch with a fiery
liquid center of the psyche. It has a concern for the magnum opus of
the soul, the great riddle of the human mind, and for our place in the
real historically-formed world. For Giegerich, archetypal psychology
does justice to the soul under the conditions of modernity and, as such,
is more aware of the predicament of the Western soul than traditional
approaches.
For these reasons, Giegerich believes that archetypal psychology
deserves to be taken very seriously, and thus also deserves careful review
and criticism. The re-visioning of psychology in Hillman’s hands is not the
creation of a total system; rather, it is a series of forays into and critiques of
the issues of psychic life. It does not leave us with an intellectually-closed
system or doctrine, but instead opens many doors through which we can
perceive an enormous number of new possibilities.23
As we have seen, there are many points of agreement between Hill-
man and Giegerich. However, there are also many points of disagreement.
Giegerich believes that just as Hillman has surpassed Jung, he himself has
surpassed Hillman in that he has thought things through to the end and gone
beyond image into thought proper. For Giegerich, archetypal psychology
is stuck in the image, which is fixed and tender-minded. The problem with
images and metaphors is that they lend themselves to a naturalistic reduc-
tion despite the effort to not read them literally. What is required is a real
cut through the image to its logical basis, which rethinks the subjective,
personalized, ontologized reality of “ego” and “the unconscious.” Much
of Giegerich’s criticism of Hillman has to do with his perception that
Table 6.1
Fundamental differences between James Hillman and Wolfgang
Giegerich.
JAMES HILLMAN WOLFGANG GIEGERICH
1 Imaginal VS Logical
2 Images VS Dialectical thought/notion/concept
3 Semantics VS Syntax or logical form
4 Hesitancy VS Going all the way
5 Not making the cut VS Making the cut
Paying the price
Leave ego at the door
Cross the threshold into the abyss
No middle ground
6 Picture thinking. VS Logical thinking. Notion.
Even though image is not Images are not reducible to sense
something set before the impressions, but images are still
eyes or even before the reductive. Image has anima-like
mind, it is something into innocence.
which I enter and by which
I am embraced. Images hold
image sense.
7 Silvery image. VS Negativity of the image
Yellowing the image.
8 Metaphorical holding of VS Vaporizing images.
images. The liquification of images.
9 Image as imaginal psychic VS Image must be worked through to
reality, metaphor, play, the level of logical thought.
humor, aesthetic.
10 Sticking with the image VS Labor of concept
11 OK to hold different VS Not OK to simply stop with
philosophical convictions different convictions—positions
must be worked through. (At
other points, Giegerich appears
to agree that differences
are based on irreducible
philosophical convictions.)
12 Imaginal ego VS Logical subject
13 Thought opens to image VS Image gives rise to thought
14 Return to the gods and myth VS Ancient modes of myth and the
gods have been surpassed.
15 Historicality VS Historicity
The archetypal structure of History seen as developmental,
man’s existential condition, progressive, diachronic, Being-
man’s being as time. in-time.
Circularity Linearity
Hillman’s psychology retains vestiges of the literal and natural implicit

in the image and the imagination. As ordinarily read, this leads to a num-
ber of complex binaries and juxtapositions, which I have schematized in
the following chart. The chart briefly highlights the fundamental concepts,
in a shorthand language, illustrating the fundamental differences in ideas

between the two thinkers.
If we read the above differences as binaries, we might say that Gieg-
erich, inspired by Hegel, pushes off from Jung and Hillman. He develops
an alternative perspective based on a movement of the soul’s attempting to
go beyond its embeddedness in the imaginal life and the ego.
Notes
1 Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 1.
2 Ibid., 3.
5 Ibid., 192.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 192–193.
9 Ibid., 1.
10 Ibid., 168.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 169.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 170.
16 Ibid., 169.
17 Ibid., 1.
18 Hillman, Blue Fire, 114.
19 Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” 66.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 68.
22 Ibid.
23 In personal communications to this author, Hillman many times told me that, in gen-
eral, he did not respond to critics of his work because he felt that this would be a dis-
traction from the work he still wanted to complete. Although he always tried to digest
criticisms, he preferred “to avoid the challenges of combat” in favor of accepting the
fact that he had a point of view that diverged from that of others, including his friend
Giegerich (Hillman, “Divergences” 6).
Chapter 7
Exposition and criticism of

Giegerich’s philosophical view
of psychology proper and the
human-all-too-human 1
We might imagine Giegerich’s view of psychology proper as a philo-

sophical paradigm shift that redefines psychology as syntactic rather than
semantic, logical rather than ontological, thoughtful rather than imaginal,
and so on.2 What appears as a fundamental, ontological divide creates a
new paradigm in which the human person is no longer presupposed as “the
foundation or container of the life of the soul.”3
Insofar as psychology has moved beyond the human person into the
logical life of the soul and has fully separated itself from all vestiges of
the ego, perhaps we can say that a radical cut has been made, the Rubicon
has been crossed, and we have traveled to a place where no return is pos-
sible. We have entered an underworld of the soul’s logical life, described
by Giegerich as “cold, abstract, formal, irrepresentable” and “ghostly,”4
totally removed from life, at least from its biological understanding. This
radical cut is difficult because it injures our narcissism, wounds the “vir-
ginal innocence as ‘natural’ consciousness,” and dissolves the unio men-
talis.5 For Giegerich, the work of alchemy is precisely aimed at such a
dissolution, “[p]utrefaction, fermenting corruption, pulverization, dissolu-
tion, etc., are all aimed at violently decomposing the imaginal shape of the
matter worked with.”6 For Giegerich, a psychology informed by alchemy
has as its goal the task of totally liquefying and freeing the spirit of Mer-
curius – the thought that is imprisoned in matter, in nature, in the image, in
emotion, and in the body.
On first reflection, it would appear that for Giegerich, philosophically,
there is an unbridgeable divide between thought proper and the everyday
life of the human person and, moreover, to do psychology seems to require
keeping them apart. Real psychology, in Giegerich’s sense, is not an ego
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-8
126 Giegerich and the human-all-too-human
psychology and not even a psychology of the person or of people at all. If

this characterization is correct, I find myself wondering to what extent or in
what way such a psychology is really possible. To what extent is it possible
to pass over to a strictly logical psychology in Giegerich’s sense? Can one
go over to the other side and not return? Philosophically, is there any such
thing as a complete sublation, a complete cut or break that takes us beyond
the human ego – beyond life, to a total liquification, even vaporization of
alchemical Mercurius as the goal of the Philosophers’ Stone? And does
such a philosophical vision of psychology absolutize the cut in such a way
that the cut becomes cutting – the violence of the kill literalized – and, in
so doing, engage in semantic violence? “No admission for the unqualified.
Only true scholars and seekers enter here. Pay the price. Leave your gar-
ments and your ego at the door. Cross the threshold and dive into the abyss
you passive, stay-at-home, unscathed pop psychologist!”7
Now, perhaps, this is all just hyperbole and the vitriol of semantic one-
sidedness in the passion to escape from ego psychology. Both Giegerich
and Hillman exhibit such a passion and even a violence, urging separa-
tion and strife, eris or polemos, “which Heraclitus, the first [philosophical]
ancestor of psychology, has said is the father of all.”8 One might ask: can
such creative urges at times become insensitive to the virtues of passivity,
to home, and to the important aspects of the feminine? Does it demean the
mother-daughter archetype, nature, the sensitivities of the innocent soul?
Does it cut right through them in a literal gesture of rape – Hades-like?
Does the rage and grief of Demeter go unnoticed or ignored? Would she
or Persephone be satisfied if Zeus were to tell them their concerns were
only semantic? This would indeed be a cold, abstract, formal, and ghostly
response more typical of Hades than of his brother Zeus with whom a bar-
gain can be struck. But perhaps it is the case that Demeter’s perspective,
like ours, is too identified with the mother and Persephone, with innocent
nature, that they and we see things too much through the eyes of Eros,
human life, and love. We panic in the face of crisis, of going under, and we
are repelled by the marriage of the innocent soul to Hades – to her becom-
ing his wife. If this is the case, perhaps Giegerich’s psychology sets the
stage for such a wedding.
Perhaps the cool eye of Hecate’s perspective, familiar with the under-
world, knows more. Trained in both archetypal psychology and the logical
life of the soul, she can see beyond the mother complex, beyond life and
love, and has a calm wisdom that exceeds what Hillman derisively calls
Giegerich and the human-all-too-human 127
the “flap of Persephone.”9 Is it the case that both Hillman and Giegerich, in
their appreciation of Hecate and the underworld, see psychology as a one-
way trip to the shades or to dissolution? Hillman, like Giegerich, reacts
against the limitations of ego psychology and to its one-way traffic out of
the unconscious toward ego assimilation.10 As we have discussed, Hillman
proposes a reversal, another one-way movement into the underworld, “a
vesperal into the dark,”11 as he calls it, and Giegerich’s alchemy articulates
the cut that gets us there.
In this comparison, one can begin to see the limitations of strict opposi-
tions. If it is fair to characterize (though it is too simple) Hillman’s contri-
bution as an anima psychology and Giegerich’s as an animus one, can or
should the two of them be joined in an alchemical marriage, a circulatio,
with each moment leading in and out of one another? Logical psychology
would go beyond all the literal residues of the imaginal, and imaginal psy-
chology would continue to give flesh to the unseen and unseemly – solve
et coagula, say the alchemists, a dynamic and fundamental syzygy. For
me, the telos of Mercurius is not simply aimed at liquification or evapora-
tion. Mercurius is an odd and creative duplex, living on the edge of a trem-
bling ground of poetic undecidables, the site of a monstrous and unstable
coniunctio, and, as Jung noted, he/she is “sometimes . . . a substance. . .,
sometimes . . . a philosophy”12 or thought. Panisnick, following Ficino,
has commented, “Eros impels the spirit out of the corporeal and sensi-
ble world, but Eros also projects the spirit into that realm and it thereby
becomes a dynamic connective between the two worlds.”13
Giegerich appears to favor one dimension of Mercurius, and one aim of
alchemy, namely, the work of dissolution. When he cites the alchemical
operations, he omits coagulatio and he follows a linear view of history,
pointing out that alchemy properly undergoes dissolution. It remains a
question if alchemy and history are so progressive. Alchemy also remains
active and continues to die and be reborn in an eternal recurrence while
still emerging in the present in differing historical forms. All of its opera-
tions are archetypal, in an eternal play between solve et coagula.14 The
dialectic is more circular and requires an ongoing interplay between anima
and animus, the positivity of the soul and its ongoing dissolution, a syzygy
between anima and animus psychologies. However, to imagine a syzygy
between archetypal psychology and the logical life of the soul in this way
is also to do both an injustice. Each is more complex than I have as yet
indicated. Interior to both theories is an intrinsic relationship between
anima and animus, soul and spirit – though overall one might characterize
each as leaning in one direction or another and as exhibiting an overarch-
ing archetypal pattern.
Giegerich further differentiates and characterizes these fundamentally
different patterns, namely, the standpoints of the anima, animus, and
syzygy. He observes that both the anima and animus points of view rely
on mythical figures or concepts of forces imagined as brought into union
by the syzygy above them. But, for Giegerich, psychology can and must
rise to the level of the syzygy itself. For him, bringing anima and animus
together is a Jungian fantasy based on mythological thinking, in which
the anima imagines the syzygical relation in the naturalistic imagery of
marriage. Anima and animus are seen from an outside view as images
or forces, entities needing to be combined or reconciled. For him, such
a relationship needs to be sublated to reveal the subtle structure of the
syzygy itself, no longer seen as above or encompassing the anima and
animus. As separate figures, they disappear and show themselves as sub-
lated moments, the syzygy. They no longer need to be imagined as yoked
together, no need for a yoga to connect them. They are already connected
dialectically in the movement of thought as a unity of unity and difference,
a notion we will return to in a later discussion of Hegel’s philosophy.
In this analysis, Giegerich not only moves beyond an ego and anima
psychology, but he pushes off from an animus psychology as well. In
so doing, he appears to follow the phenomenology of spirit beyond the
level of force and understanding to an even subtler level. From the logical
standpoint of the form of the syzygy itself, there is no longer a concern
with the intuition of contents. The work of sublation continues to cut away
at the coagulations and remaining positivities of the soul, freeing the spirit
for what appears to be a never-ending story, an endless march to Dionysian
freedom – but to what extent is such freedom possible? To what extent and
how should it be the goal of psychology?
If a true psychology in Giegerich’s sense is to be identified with the radi-
cal philosophical discipline of interiority and with an ongoing sublation,
is something left behind, unaccounted for – a residue surpassed, a shadow
that lingers and requires our attention if psychology is to be adequate to
its calling? Here I look into the margins of Giegerich’s own reflections
and into the development of his own concept of the soul. For Giegerich,
the goal of his true psychology is virtually identical with his understand-
ing of the alchemical philosopher’s achievement of pure gold, which he
interprets as the total liquification of Mercurius. But if this is the aim of

both alchemical philosophy and his psychology, what should we make of
his statement that he has actually never reached true gold in his work?15
If the master of the discipline of interiority has himself not been able to
achieve the radical cut leading to the syzygy itself, to pure thought or true
gold, we might ask to what extent is such a goal possible? I suspect put-
ting this issue this way is not quite fair because it assumes that the goal
or gold is some kind of positivity that could be possessed in a moment of
literal time and that the radical cut necessary for a true psychology is also
a literal event done by the psychologist as a human being. I think such a
conception misses the point.
Let’s recall that, for Jung and Hillman, the goal is important only as an
idea, and that this de-literalizes the idea of the goal right at the beginning.
Goals are not actualized events or psychological accomplishments. They
are necessary fictions of the soul-making opus. I think no one understands
this better or has worked more diligently than Giegerich to think through
and develop the idea implicit in this view. But it is perplexing that he seems
to write about achieving true gold as if it were a literal possibility, rather
than clarifying in that moment the misconception of the kind of achieve-
ment he indicates he has not attained. Is it the case that in such moments –
and there are only a few of them – Giegerich, the human being, falls short
of his radical view of psychology and steps into a semantic concern, a
moment in which he shows himself to be a “civil man” and a private indi-
vidual? Is there a moment of confusion between the practical man and the
psychologist? Or, is what we are calling a confusion, an inevitable divide,
a shadow that suggests the return of the repressed, of something that fell
into a crack in the work of sublation? Does psychology have to remain an
activity that leaves the human being behind and separates man from soul?
Near the end of Giegerich’s book What Is Soul?, he addresses and
complicates his position, noting that in clinical work with actual patients,
something more may be required than “true psychology.” He notes:
As practicing therapists, we are not totally identical with the psychol-

ogist in ourselves. We must have one leg in psychology and one leg
in practical reality, the sphere of the human, all-too-human. We must
be able to display a true, unadulterated access to soul as well as a
practical knowledge of the world (which includes a realistic insight
into human nature) and understand the needs of the patient as human
being. And, this is most important, we have to know when it is a ques-

tion of one or the other.16
This seems to me to be a significant departure from the true psychology

Giegerich has been advocating to this point. He continues: “So while I do
not wish to water down in any way the severe requirements presented
above for doing psychology, a psychology with soul, I also do not want to
absolutize psychology, as if in the consulting room nothing but psychol-
ogy was permitted.”17
At first glance, it does appear that Giegerich is precisely caught between
absolutizing and watering down psychology, as opposed to liquefying it.
All of his emphasis on the importance of the radical cut, of crossing the
Rubicon to the point of no return, seems contradicted by the return of
the man in the consulting room. Did the stay-at-home psychologist stay,
or return home, unscathed? Is it a return of the repressed, of the practi-
cal person, the human being who was banished or degraded in the heroic
march to a real psychology? Is this the psychology that until now Gieg-
erich claimed is precisely not a psychology of the human person, but a
psychology of the soul proper?
Is such a divide a regression, concession, and compensation, a semantic
falling back into a side-by-side and undialectical view of the psychologist
and psychology? Does a true psychology of the soul need the contribution
of the common man to be complete or comprehensive, a magnum opus?
Should we now view the psychologist as philosophically divided against
him or herself, against the liberation of thought from its entanglements in
the illusions of its ontic identity, or does this divide require a further labor
of the concept and sublation to a more integrated view of psychology?
As I noted above, Giegerich is aware that this dual, side-by-side view
considerably complicates his theory, and he makes an effort to see the
divide conceptually in terms of the soul’s dual intentionalities, namely,
the soul’s need for initiation as well as emancipation: on the one hand,
the need for grounding, embeddedness in imagination, myth and meta-
physics, and, on the other hand, for emancipation from all the above.
For Giegerich, this contradiction needs to be understood in terms of the
soul’s inner dialectic and self-regulation. The purpose of emancipation
from the soul (initiation) is itself a soul purpose, an opus contra natu-
ram, a work by and in the spirit of the nature of the soul itself. Even
more strongly, Giegerich states: “Emancipation from soul does not mean
absolute defection from soul, because this emancipation from soul con-
versely occurs only within soul.”18
From here, this apparent contradiction/conflict continues to gain com-
plexity. Giegerich goes on to speak both about the individual soul and the
condition of soul in modernity, the condition in which we find ourselves
already thrown (perhaps in a Heideggerian sense) into the logical condi-
tion of psychologically-born man. For Giegerich, this is a condition in
which myth, metaphysics, gods, and God have become impossible – since
Modern Man is born out of the soul as an autonomous individual, a civil
man, an ego. It would appear that the emancipatory intentionality of the
soul has been successful in departing from its initiatory needs in the par-
ticipation mystique and anima identification. In fact, the initiatory needs of
the soul in modernity are now moving in harmony and support of its eman-
cipatory desires, to be born out of itself and into the world as subjectivity,
subjective mind, consciousness, and logical form.
The movement of initiation toward emancipation leads Giegerich to a
recognition of the soul’s need for historical development. Thus, for Gieg-
erich, modern man’s initiation now means the absolute negative interiori-
zation of the phenomenon, deepening into itself and thus releasing itself
into spirit and truth. It is in casting off his mythological garments that
modern man finds his human dignity. And, so, for Giegerich freedom from
soul today is irrevocable and total.
It would appear that the logical life of the soul has been a successful
march to freedom and human dignity – but then comes a major caveat and
exception – neurosis! For Giegerich, neurosis is the soul’s stubborn insist-
ence on somehow remaining linked to a mythic or metaphysical identity at
a time when the soul knows that such an identity has been historically sur-
passed. Giegerich submits then that the soul itself “invented neurosis for
itself both as an incentive and as a kind of springboard to push off from.”19
But such an emancipation does not come easily or naturally. It requires
a struggle against the fascinating pull exerted by myth and metaphysics.
Giegerich puts it this way: The soul
has to actively, systematically, in detail and in full awareness work off

its own fascination and infatuation with the metaphysical, the mythic,
the numinous and suggestive power of the imaginal – through pulling
itself out of its neurosis, really stepping out of it and leaving it behind
as the nothing that it is.20
Only then has the full price been paid for the departure from a previous
stage of consciousness, while it is the soul itself that “emancipates itself
from itself” and then becomes “explicitly and for itself a born soul.” It
“is born as human consciousness and its infinite interiority.”21 This is all
the work of the soul, but at the same time, Giegerich notes, it is only the
human person who can push off from his or her neurosis and truly be freed
of it, and one does go through the utilization of “strictly analytic, concep-
tual thought. . . [by] uncompromisingly seeing through and critiquing the
neuroticness of the soul’s pervers[ity] . . . in all its practical details.”22
I’m not sure what to say about what the soul in itself is capable of, but
it is hard for me to imagine any human person who has achieved, or could
achieve, total freedom from neurosis, from all mythic and metaphysical
fascinations, as if there is in fact some other hard core “truth” that can
be known and that would set one totally free. Giegerich’s definition of
this freedom from neurosis is the achievement of infinite interiority, again
paying the full price, crossing the Rubicon to the point of no return. But
here I am reminded of Giegerich’s comment about “true gold,” and that
he had not achieved it with his work! I wonder if he would claim anything
different for the achievement of a total freedom from neurosis? It is for
him to answer, but I imagine it would be reasonable for him to tell us that
this is a semantic concern and as a “psychologist” he can think it all the
way through. Here there is a problematic distinction between the ordinary
human-all-too-human being and the psychologist. At the end of Chapter
Three of his book What Is Soul?, Giegerich tells us that as a private indi-
vidual, as a civil man, he does not confuse himself with the psychologist
he “hopes” he is.23 But what an odd divide this is from the point of view
of his psychology. Why hope? Is this the concern of the psychologist who
has not made the radical cut, worked this dialectic all the way through?
This hope cannot be the hope of the psychologist proper, but only the
hope of the human-all-too-human being, and the idea of hoping signifies
the divide between them. For Hillman, hope is a fantasy that distracts us
from the present and, in this case, from our human reality, and for that
reason he also sees it as the one last evil left in Pandora’s box before the
lid closes.24
So, does this mean that, as a private individual like the rest of us, Gieg-
erich remains neurotic – attached to myth and metaphysics, and hoping
to overcome them? Again, has he fallen back into semantics – or never
left it? Either way, there appears to be a continuing and unresolved binary
between the private individual and the psychologist – and it is this private
man who is now invited into the consulting room so that by instinct and the
feeling function he can help the psychologist discern the actual needs of
the soul in each moment, while to the psychologist proper is left only the
“caustic analytic work . . . necessary” to cauterize the patient.25
I personally would like to think of the psychologist as capable of the
full range of clinical responsiveness, using his or her capabilities to dis-
cern whatever it is that the soul needs in the eachness of the moment.
I would imagine such a therapist as an analyst who is not totally identi-
fied with being a psychologist or with any method, and remembers his or
her humanity while offering what is possible in the clinical and human
encounter. With regard to this encounter, Giegerich has given the analyst a
refined understanding of dialectical and syntactic awareness. The shadow
of this contribution is that when it is absolutized and removed from the
human all-too-human, the never-ending quest for liberation, and the con-
tinuing need to push off from every initiatory connection that is not the
dialectic itself, it can be as neurotic as the attachment it tries to cure.
In Buddhism, the caustic work of sunyata, of the Vajra or diamond cutter,
reduces all attachment to nothingness, but nothingness itself needs to logi-
cally void itself, which returns the soul to the world in an ever-recurring
circle of life. Thus, liberation is not beyond or transcendent to the world of
samsara image and illusion. It is one with it or, as the Buddhists say, there
is not a hair’s-breadth difference between them (i.e., between samsara and
nirvana). Seen alchemically, this is a hermetic circle embodying the dual
aspect of Mercurius, which to my mind is not only the liquefying solvent,
but the coagulatory agent as well. The liquification of Mercurius is also
not a liquification in any literal sense, and the caustic work of analysis
need not be literally caustic. As it turns out, the psychologist is also not
a psychologist. Another turn of the dialectic reveals the psychologist as
human, all-too-human. Perhaps this is the case for Giegerich as well, as he
hopes to be a good psychologist, and, in so doing, reveals himself as a psy-
chologist who is not a psychologist and as a human being, human-all-too-
human. Is this the failure of the dialectic, its success, or both? In his work
on soul, Giegerich discovers what for me has been a missing remainder in
his work, the human being and his feeling function, and it is this that for
me exceeds, goes beyond, and complicates his work. In so doing, it returns
the debt to human feeling, the enigma of the unconscious, and the mystery
that is not vanquished by the spirit.
In my criticism of Giegerich, I have pointed to what appears to be a

philosophical contradiction or, at least, a tendency to divide a “true psy-
chology” from the human-all-too-human ego psychology which remains
embedded in emotion and images. Yet, for Giegerich, the human person
returns into the consulting room as a return of the repressed (that is, as the
human-all-too-human) and as a necessary aspect of clinical work. Hence
Giegerich’s “true psychology” must include what he has earlier defined
as not psychological at all. Thus, the humanistic subject comes back into
play side-by-side with the psychologist, as an Other to all that Giegerich
has developed. I have called this “human subject” an unassimilable rem-
nant left out of Giegerich’s dialectic proper. But if this is so, it is only one
instance of what resists assimilation to the logical life of the soul. It is an
instance in which there appears to remain a polarity or, at least, a polar ten-
dency to catapult “idea” beyond “image,” in which case something does
not fully get taken up into his dialectical process, remaining outside as a
remainder. I discuss this aspect more fully in the next chapter.
Notes
1 This chapter is modified from a paper entitled “The Psychologist Who’s Not a Psychol-
ogist: A Deconstructive Reading of Wolfgang Giegerich’s Idea of Psychology Proper,”
presented at the International Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority
Conference, Berlin, Germany, July 24, 2012, and later published in “The Psychologist
Who’s Not a Psychologist,” 223–238.
2 Giegerich, “Psychology,” 251.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 254.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 254–255.
7 Based on language from Giegerich’s discussion of this in Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical
Life, 9–38.
8 Hillman, Blue Fire, 114.
10 Ibid., 1.
11 Ibid.
12 Jung, Aion (CW9ii), §240.
13 Panisnick, “The Philosophical Significance,” 201.
14 In all fairness to Giegerich, he responded to this criticism by noting:
It is true that I did not talk much about coagulation, although it is certainly part
of alchemy. But I think it is part of alchemy in a different sense from sublimation,
distillation, etc. I make a difference between the particular instantaneous operations
and the overall direction of the work. Coagulation is not essential as far as the over-
all purpose of the work is concerned. Beware of the physical in the matter, the stone
that is NOT a stone, vinum ardens, the freeing of Mercurius from the imprisonment
and Mercurius itself as QUICKsilver. These are a few indications of the goal of
alchemy. The end-product is not supposed to be coagulated. By contrast, in the

day-to-day work coagulation may be necessary, for example if the prime matter, as
in hysteria, begins so to speak with a prime matter in the status of ‘diarrhea.’ So my
point is this distinction between two levels.
(Personal communication, October 3, 2012)
15 Giegerich, “The Unassimilable Remnant,” 199.
16 Giegerich, What Is Soul?, 315–316.
17 Ibid., 316.
18 Ibid., 322–323.
19 Ibid., 332.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 316.
24 In all fairness, I would like to include here a response that Giegerich made to my
criticism:
[Y]ou contrasted [James Hillman] and me with respect to the topic of hope. I think,
however, that there is no difference between his and my view about this. The sen-
tence you used as basis for your comment was one in which “hope” was used in
the trivial everyday sense. But Hillman probably also hoped that when he said
something it was sound and not erroneous Concerning the deeper psychol. sense of
hope, I voiced my criticism of it repeatedly and consistently, e.g., my Coll. Engl.
Papers vol. III, p. 12 (or 9–12).
(Personal communication, October 3, 2012)
25 Ibid., 334.
Chapter 8
The problem of the remainder

The unassimilable remnant – what
is at stake? 1
In the last chapter, I discussed my own view of the psychologist and

the experience of the human-all-too-human in the consulting room. My
own experience of this was described in my work on The Black Sun: The
Alchemy and Art of Darkness. In that book, I addressed what I consid-
ered to be an unassimilable darkness through experiences that resisted
conscious assimilation, in particular with an image of the black sun that
would not yield to or be incorporated into consciousness. It would not dis-
solve, go away, or be lifted up, and it challenged my own theoretical and
psychological narcissism to the core. Since the image of the black sun did
not allow itself to be fully integrated into consciousness, it remained an
unassimilable remnant, which left me with the question of whether or not
this darkness could ever be sublated.
My idea of the unassimilable remnant was catalyzed while treating a
woman who reported that she felt something ominous in her chest. She
described it as a dark ball that had long strands reaching throughout her
body. Her inclination was to reach down and pull it up. Between sessions,
in and through her active imagination, she drew the image that she felt
was lodged in her chest. It was a brilliant sun with a dense black center
and long fibrous tentacles. After drawing it, she felt the image was not
menacing enough and felt a need to draw it again. Shortly afterwards, she
reported a dream in which she felt a nuclear war was inevitable.
No psychological interpretation seemed to do justice to the monstrosity
of the image. The long black fibers remained and there were many circular
black shapes that my patient described with horror as an expression of dead
skeletal embryos. In spite of this retrieval and the process it stimulated,
the image, like a devouring demon, did not subside and no conceptual
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-9
The problem of the remainder 137
translation seemed adequate. While grappling with these images, she suf-
fered an aneurism of the anterior region of her brain and came close to
dying. She lost sight in one eye but survived.
The power of these clinical images left me with an experience of their
unassimilable monstrosity and an incapacity to dialectically move through
or beyond them. I began to research the image of the black sun and, sur-
prisingly, discovered many other instances of such images intimately
linked to the most literal and destructive experiences of narcissistic morti-
fication, humiliation, delusion, despair, depression, physiological and psy-
chological decay, cancer, psychosis, suicide, murder, and death. I found
these images were resistant to any kind of meaningful explanation or any
kind of process that would attempt to sublate them. Rather, the images
paradoxically seemed to be the archetype of negation itself, and I found
it impossible to bypass their dark aspects. In the face of such a monstrous
image of destruction, darkness, and negation, the question of how to come
to terms with the unconscious is problematized.
For Jung, this meant opening oneself to the depths of the unknown and
yet not abandoning the precious gift of the intellectual differentiation of
consciousness. Jung states in Psychology and Alchemy:
It is rather a question of the man taking the place of the intellect – not
the man whom the dreamer imagines himself to be, but someone far
more rounded and complete. This would mean assimilating all sorts of
things into the sphere of his personality which the dreamer still rejects
as disagreeable or even impossible.2
For Jung, this was no easy task and required facing the perils, threats, and
promises that often show themselves in the context of deep analytic work.
Part of this process Jung called “facing the shadow.” Facing the shadow
is one of the more important goals of Jungian analysis, a key aspect of the
overall work. “Coming to terms with the unconscious [shadow] means
calling into question the illusions one clings to most dearly about oneself,
which have been used to shore up self-esteem and to maintain a sense of
personal identity.”3 Confronting the shadow and confronting one’s illu-
sions are understandably painful and, at times, dangerous moments in
analysis. One danger is that the daimonic can become demonic. Stanley
Diamond differentiated the daimonic from the demonic by noting that the
demonic remains one-sided, frozen, locked into irrevocable ontological
138 The problem of the remainder
convictions – personal, professional, political, religious, unconsciously

self-certain.4 We worship ourselves or others, Plato or Aristotle, Freud or
Jung, Hillman or Lacan, Democrats or Republicans, God or the Devil,
Good or Evil – our biases are inner or outer, yin or yang. Rodrick Main
has noted that “[w]here ambiguity and intensity are found together, as in
the numinous . . . there is indeed a high risk” of splitting and projection.5
The daimonic, unlike the demonic, contains the seeds of its own redemp-
tion, while fixed ontological convictions lead to fundamentalisms of every
sort that silently invade and possess us. They press us toward premature
clarity and philosophical closure. Our inspirations and ideas become
“gods” in whose thrall we labor to work out our ends and in whose service
we become warriors for their “truth.” We become purveyors of absolute
points of view. These “truths” may be rooted in biology or physics, psy-
chology, poetry, philosophy – or even the deconstruction of all points of
view. Perhaps we cannot escape the gods. We think them necessary not
only in our inner but also in our outer world, in our personal and profes-
sional lives, in our organizations, university classes, consulting rooms, and
private studies. In short, our demons inflate us, become our shadows, and
our shadows often have roots in our deepest wounds.
In the most general sense, one might define the shadow as referring
to the darkness of the unconscious, to what is rejected by consciousness,
but also implicit in what we hold dear, as well as that which has not yet
or perhaps will never become conscious. Turning toward this darkness
means facing the unacceptable, undesirable, and underdeveloped parts of
ourselves, the crippled, blind, cruel, ugly, inferior, inflated, and sometimes
vile, as well as discovering the potentials for further development of which
we are unaware. For Jung, our attempt to fit in with our historical, cultural,
and religious values results in the personality’s developing what he called
a persona, a mask through which adaptation is facilitated.
In order to adapt, parts of our soul are rejected, aspects of ourselves are
deemed unacceptable, denied or too highly valued, frozen, repressed, and
split off from the developing personality. As a result, they can become
tortured, wounded, maimed, and can recede into the dark where ultimately
they may be killed and buried. In spite of banishment to a nether world,
the shadow continues to play a dynamic role in our psychological life. We
are plagued by neuroses.
Jung explored the way in which the shadow emerges into aware-
ness, often through irrational eruptions that impede consciousness. The
shadow’s trickster-like behavior acts as if it had a mind of its own, sending

conscious life into a retrograde movement, where something other than
the conscious person seems to hold sway. The shadow appears as well in
dreams, projections, transferences, and counter-transferences. On the one
hand, it resists consciousness, seeking confrontation, threatening, often
leaving us terrified and retreating from contact; while on the other hand, it
pursues consciousness, challenging us to engage it.
Angst about the shadow is not surprising. Some current dream images of
patients reveal the shadow emerging in the form of primitive, disembodied
voices and spirits, wounded animals, impervious cold-blooded prehistoric
and mythical beasts, stalkers, murderers, and sexual perverts. In addition,
patients’ dreams have presented images of disgusting beer-drinking alco-
holics, down-and-out gamblers, heavily made-up unattractive women,
men with outrageously bad taste, dull-witted jerks, and paralyzed figures
locked into frozen rages. Deep emotion has often accompanied images
such as those of severe and at times incurable illnesses, as well as scarred,
disfigured, and sometimes dead infants and children haunting graves and
burial grounds.
Parts of the Self are experienced as poisoned, tortured, killed, decom-
posed, rotting, and moving toward death. Hillman has warned that the
nigredo speaks with the voice of the raven, foretelling “dire happenings,”
echoing and amplifying Dante’s classical admonition: “Abandon hope all
ye who enter here.” In short, following darkness into its most destructive
aspects is to enter the dark night of the soul, the heart of darkness, into the
world of Hades and Ereshkigal, to Kali’s cremation ground and Dante’s
world of ice, where idealistic and youthful visions of light, eternity, truth,
and bliss give way to Saturnine time, the perils of night, and the death of
God. Here rational order breaks down and traumatogenic defenses come
into play to prevent the unthinkable. At times, one must ask oneself, as a
human being and as an analyst, how is it possible to engage such mon-
strous realities?
Unfortunately, these experiences cannot be simply written off as patho-
logical states, but rather are often the very passageways to individuation,
perhaps one aspect of fate or of an individual destiny. One might ask: Why
do terrible things happen to good people? I believe it is an illusion to think
that such experiences can simply be avoided, rejecting them while imagin-
ing that life can or should always be fair or rational. The alchemists called
such fantasies “virgin’s milk,” naïve fantasies of purity and perfection that
everything will eventually come out ok. Typical virgin’s milk fantasies are
often maintained emotionally in intellectually sophisticated and otherwise
developed people who unconsciously hold onto ideas that might include
sentiments like: God will protect and care for me like a good parent. Bad
things won’t happen to me because I have lived according to this or that
principle. I have been good or faithful, eat healthy foods, meditate and
exercise, regularly interpret my dreams, study hard.
When life does not conform to such ideas, the innocent or immature
ego is wounded and often overcome with feelings of hurt, self-pity, anger,
oppression, and feeling victimized. The injured ego can carry this wound-
ing in many ways. The darkening process can lead to a kind of blindness
and dangerous stasis of the soul that then becomes locked in a wound,
in hurt or rage, frozen in stone or ice, or fixed in fire. From an alchemi-
cal point of view, these innocent attitudes resist undergoing a mortificatio
process – and as the inevitable experiences of life cause wounding, the
soul enters the darkening process. Jacques Lacan likens facing such hor-
rific images to facing cancer, not necessarily manifested physically, but
psychologically, proliferating and often leading to humiliation, despair, or
depression. What is often not seen is what is happening under the surface –
the ripening of innocence that opens the dark eye of the soul.
Facing the darkness: imbibing philosophical

vinegar
The suffering in the depths of this descent has been known from ancient
times and in various cultures. Traditional approaches to taking in and
engaging these realities have been recorded in wisdom traditions, in rit-
ual art, poetry, and spiritual practices. These traditions have also inspired
modern poets and artists.
May Sarton, in her poem “The Invocation of Kali,”6 describes this
Tantric goddess as a destructive savage who makes it difficult to become
ourselves. She is maddening and reflects our primordial fears, which are
so difficult to confront. Swami Vivekananda7 describes the impact of fac-
ing this goddess as not unlike facing the horrors of blackness and death.
It is hard to imagine facing a shadow figure as potent as the goddess and
inviting her in. It is difficult to translate this into analytic principles, but
clearly the hard work of facing the shadow and of analysis is in part learn-
ing to turn toward the painful, unpleasant and at times horrifying figures
of the psyche, and thus toward the unacceptable aspects of the Self and
of life. Moreover, the deepest recesses of the archetypal shadow may be
unredeemable, and we may need to relativize salvationist hopes or we will
be driven to do so. These images remind us that life at times can be tragic
and that the unconscious is not invariably benevolent.
Recalling my patient’s dream of the black sun, in its aftermath one real-
izes that there appear to be limits to what our efforts – religious, spiritual,
analytic – can accomplish, and this is sobering to our overzealous expec-
tations. In such instances, the analyst may be called upon to sit with the
analysand in and through loss, grief, despair, and the tragic experiences of
life, and be company on the ship of death and in silence be witness to the
limits of analysis and to the hopes and dreams of the human soul. And yet,
there will be moments when the “death” we face may turn out to be a sym-
bolic one, heralding an alchemical process of mortficatio and putrefactio,
which can lead to renewal and the opening to a deepened symbolic life.
Stein has noted that “[p]ersons in analysis are asked explicitly or implic-
itly to stay receptive to the unconscious – to the less rational, more ambig-
uous, and often mysterious side of the personality.”8 It is important that
the analyst as well be prepared to venture into the darkest recesses of the
shadow as a participant and guide with the capacity to sit still, stay pre-
sent, accompany and facilitate facing the darkest aspects of psychic life,
in so doing, the shadow figures may show themselves to compensate or
complement a one-sided conscious position, and facing them can lead to a
more integrated personality. Still, the question remains: how to face such
figures? And to what extent can we do so?
How can we take in what Hillman speaks of as broken, ruined, weak,
sick, inferior, and socially unacceptable parts of ourselves? For him, cur-
ing these shadow images requires love. He asks: “How far can our love
extend to the broken and ruined parts of ourselves, the disgusting and per-
verse? How much charity and compassion have we for our own weakness
and sickness? How far can we. . . [allow] a place for everyone?”9 Because
the shadow can be socially unacceptable and even evil, it is important that
it is carried by us, which means that we do not project our unacceptable
parts on to others and or act them out. This is an ethical responsibility.
The importance of refraining from creating scapegoats loaded down
with our own evils is particularly urgent in today’s world situation. For
Hillman, a moral stance toward the shadow is essential and cannot be
abandoned, but this is not enough: “At one moment something else must
break through.”10 Facing the shadow and its cure requires a conjunction of
seeming opposites, a confrontation, and a paradoxical union of two incom-
mensurables: “the moral recognition that these parts of me are burden-
some and intolerable and must change, and the loving laughing acceptance
which takes them just as they are. . . . [o]ne both . . . judges harshly and
joins gladly.”11 Each position “holds only one side of the truth.”12 Hillman
gives an example from the Jewish mystical tradition of the Chassidim,
where “deep moral piety [is] coupled with astounding delight in life.”13 To
achieve such an attitude requires considerable psychological development,
but it still seems almost impossible to imagine taking delight in the deeply
heinous and virulent aspects of the shadow. How can we participate in the
implications of perversity, with Nazi images of the Holocaust, and with
the terrorist shadow? Did Job join gladly with the dark side of God, which
according to Jung required a moral transformation?
There hopefully is a moment where moral outrage turns to moral con-
viction and the moment where one challenges the gods – inner or outer –
and speaks out. One deep shadow of psychoanalysis is the danger of an
introverted bias, thus bypassing the atrocities of everyday life. But psy-
choanalysis has also taught us about the shadow of premature acting out in
the naïve name of the good, the “truth,” that righteously brings even more
darkness into the world.
We spoke above of the kind of love necessary to embrace the shadow. It
is difficult indeed to make real the cliché to love ourselves when our selves
contain not only the noblest but also the vilest aspects of our human con-
dition. It is too easy to fall into the clichés of love and self-acceptance –
residues of virgin milk may still be operative in the fantasies of wholeness
unification and oneness.
Jung early on spoke of this oneness as “a melting together of sense and
nonsense” – a complexio oppositorum or mysterium coniunctionis – but
such ideas can too easily become assimilated and intellectualized, thus
becoming clichés for a dark chaosmos that pushes the soul toward the
unthinkable and to the limits of mind and language bringing with it the
danger of being used by the powers we pretend to understand.
It is clear to me that Jung’s idea of the mysterium and Hillman’s idea
of love are no simple clichés. What both Jung and Hillman call for in the
name of love is an ability to endure and embrace the darkest and most
offensive and unacceptable parts of ourselves and to resist projecting
them on others. This requires a breadth and depth of soul and an ability to
tolerate the tension of moral paradox. In “Silver and White Earth,” (Chap-
ter 6 in Alchemical Psychology) Hillman considers such a paradox as a
kind of “illuminated lunacy”14 and, in addition, he sees the work of psyche
as a return of the soul to the world, a reality that goes beyond insular sub-
jectivity and moral passivity.
The inexpressible mysteries of life remained with Jung throughout his
life and in his works from The Red Book to his final works on alchemy.
Jung’s vision of the unity of opposites was never a simple or benign cli-
ché, but, as noted above, there has been a tendency to pass over the shock
and radicality that Neil Micklem has called grotesque and monstrous. The
teleological future that Jung intends in his idea of the transcendent func-
tion that “unifies” opposites is indeed monstrous! Jacques Derrida like-
wise has noted that the future is necessarily monstrous – surprising – that
for which we are unprepared. And Casey, at the end of his book Spirit and
Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology has noted that “we must allow
ourselves to be surprised at every turn. We must, in Heraclitus’ trench-
ant fragment, ‘expect the unexpected.’ ”15 Like innocent Persephone, we
are sometimes drawn downward kicking and screaming into the depths, a
descent into darkness and to an underworld marriage with Hades. Whether
in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and Persephone, Ishtar and
Demuzi, all symbolize the potential for loss and the redemptive power of
darkness, and perhaps even more that at an archetypal level these poten-
tials are somehow linked together.
I believe this is the “mystery” of the black sun, an image that carries
both darkness and illumination. If, as noted earlier, we do not avoid the
monstrous paradox of the black sun and simply attempt to reach beyond it
to the light, we may notice that the archetype of negation itself is indeed
a sublated image – a darkness that negates itself not through an external
light that dispels darkness, but rather through what the alchemists called
the lumen naturae, an intimate intertwining that is called “the light of
darkness itself.” It is clear that, if indeed there is anything like a sublation,
the human-all-too-human element remains an ongoing presence never
simply transcended by any intellectual abstraction. The mess of our eve-
ryday existence is a never-ending remainder that is part of our experience
of otherness and of life itself and that shows itself in our neuroses and
in history. If we can tolerate or even learn to appreciate this differenti-
ated oneness, perhaps we can begin to free ourselves from virgin’s milk
and turn vinegar into wine, which may allow one to live on in the face of
insult and loss, or as Shakespeare has put it, with “the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune.” Perhaps it is a recognition of such duplex images
that can catalyze a linking of soul and spirit and that can be instrumental
in the development of a more intimate relationship between psychology
and philosophy. It is this integration that leads us toward an understanding
of the Philosophers’ Stone as an initiatory experience involving both spirit
and soul and the fullness of life, which the philosophers have sought since
the earliest expressions of the alchemical imagination.
Notes
1 This chapter is a modified version of Marlan, “Facing the Shadow,” a chapter in Jun-
gian Psychoanalysis, 5–13.
3 Stein, “The Aims and Goal of Jungian Analysis,” 40.
4 See Diamond, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, Chapter 3: The Psychology of Evil:
Devils, Demons, and the Daimonic.
5 Main, “Numinosity and Terror,” 163.
6 Sarton, “The Invocation of Kali.”
7 Vivekananda, In Search of God, 25.
8 Stein, “The Aims and Goal of Jungian Analysis,” 39.
9 Hillman, “The Cure of the Shadow,” 242.
10 Ibid., 243.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
15 Casey, Spirit and Soul, 348.
Chapter 9
The alchemical stove

Continuing reflections on Hillman’s
and Giegerich’s views of alchemy
and the Philosophers’ Stone 1
In this chapter, I first return to alchemy, the Philosophers’ Stone, Jung,

Hillman, and Giegerich, and then move on to Hegel and other philoso-
phers, in order to rethink the question of soul and spirit in the light of
analysis and philosophy. One way to imagine the psychological work on
the Stone is to follow in the steps of the old alchemists and claim that each
thinker advances over those who came before, each representing a version
of the best or truest vision of the goal. While such a perspective ultimately
may prove to be true, I must confess that I am not yet ready to make such
a move. Rather, I am still at work trying to understand Jung’s alchemical
vision alongside those of Hillman, Giegerich, and others. While there are
many scholars who have presented a number of valuable contributions to
the alchemical work, I will continue to focus here on Hillman and Gieg-
erich, both of whom offer astonishing insights into the psychic reality of
the Stone. Each of their perspectives can be read independently or as con-
tributing to a larger and subtler vision still being articulated.
For me, reading Jung side-by-side with Hillman and Giegerich evokes
an image of the alchemical stove: Jung in one alembic cooking on a back
burner over a steady low heat, Hillman and Giegerich in differently shaped
vessels boiling up front, while I attempt to prepare my own concoction
utilizing the vapors produced by them and others, and seeking to further
distill the essences and elixirs necessary for the difficult production of the
Stone.2
For the moment I will leave Jung’s vessel closed and on the back burner,
and return again for another look into Hillman’s alembic which reveals a
phenomenology of the soul’s colors: an imaginal rainbow of black, blue,
white/silver, yellow, and red. For Hillman, the Stone is first an “idea” of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-10
146 The alchemical stove
the goal, since the goal must be deliteralized from the beginning.3 While
the Stone has facticity and objectivity, duration and substantiality, it is too
complex to be described simply in senex metaphors. The Stone is also sen-
sual, soft, waxy, and wounded. It is tender and flexible, oily, rich, and fat.
It is vital and combustible and, though emotional, it has a kind of stability
and timelessness. It moves in a circular way, turning like a wheel, return-
ing telos to itself – “to the subjective urge that has impelled the entire work
from the start . . . the snake eats its own tail”4 – and the rotatio announcing
“that no position can remain fixed, no statement can be finally true.”5 It is
ultimately the objectification of our subjectivity, yet it oozes with libido.
It is Freudian, pagan, neo-Platonic, Greek, and Italian – a pleasurable pull
towards Beauty, toward Voluptas, rather than the “mediocrity of ataraxic
rationality.”6 Hillman’s patron saints, Corbin, Ficino, and Valla, among
others, stimulate a reddened psychology dripping with an Aphroditic lan-
guage, exalting, revivifying, and crowning matter. The goal is not growth,
health, development, or transformation “but seeking and searching of the
awakened mind . . . like a burning jewel in the stone.”7
As we noted earlier, a look inside the Giegerich vessel suggests the
need to refine the Stone further. Its inner essence emphasizes the logical
rather than the imaginal. The work of the adept, for Giegerich, would be
to liberate the Stone from the confines of “sensate intuition” and “picture
thinking.” With the dissolution of the imaginal and of sensate intuition,
one might be left imagining the Stone as colorless rather than colorful. If
Hillman’s tincture leans toward “coagula,” Giegerich’s move is toward
“solve” – toward the freeing of Mercurius through sublation, through the
dialectics of the Negative, the “NOT” or “ou” (from the alchemical saying
“lίthos ou lίthos,” that is, “the not-stone stone”).8 For Giegerich, the high-
est mystery of the whole work is the physical dissolution into mercury, a
movement out of the imaginal into the logical. Here I imagine Kundalini
shedding her skin and Thales remarking that all is water (liquidity). Gieg-
erich also notes that aqua permanens is “a solid ground that in itself is not
solid, not ‘ground’ at all, but rather liquidity, pure movement, that. . . is
nevertheless solid ground.”9
So, if Hillman emphasizes wax (the body of the image), Giegerich
thinks water (the solutio of its body). If Hillman finds soul in the valley,
Giegerich points to the peaks. If Hillman critiques sublation,10 Giegerich
considers it to be the elixir vital. If Hillman draws inspiration from the
Italians, Giegerich finds his in Hegel.
The alchemical stove 147
However, if one has read Hillman and Giegerich carefully, one soon
begins to see that all of the above caricatures are at best misreadings.
As we have seen in the last chapters, both thinkers are far more com-
plex than such sketches suggest and, while there are crucial differences
between them, there are also considerable overlapping themes that call for
further study. Placing the above ideas into a double pelican and reheating
the entire mixture will allow us to see their similar essences circulating
and rising up. Both thinkers emphasize the importance of “ideas,” and
both see that it is essential to go beyond the physical and the literal. Both
emphasize the intrinsic link between idea and image, peak and vale, solve
and coagula, and both officiate at the puer/psyche marriage, although the
way each tinctures his syzygy differs. And, most importantly for me, both
emphasize some version of the “death of the ego.” While both might be
seen as privileging one side of the syzygy over the other, neither can be
accused of disregarding the importance of that which is not given priority.
In order to understand their respective positions, it may be useful also
to compare some of their mutual misunderstandings. For example, when
Hillman critiques Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung, what he seems to have
in mind is the spirit detached from psyche, the puer drawn apart from
psyche, or anima separated from animus – a procedure that he uses as a
heuristic device in his essay “Peaks and Vales.” However, to read Hegel’s
or Giegerich’s notion of sublation in this way does not do justice to the
complexity of their ideas. Nor does it recognize that for both of them
sublation should never be understood as an either/or. Giegerich clarifies
his position on this by noting: “What I offer instead [of an either/or inter-
pretation] is a psychology of interiority. There are not two, but only one,
and this ‘one’ contains its own ‘other’ within itself.”11 In other words,
for Giegerich, thought is not an external other to the image, but the very
soul of the image itself. Put in this way, Hillman’s critique of sublation,
if it is understood as a “climb into the thin air of mountain peaks,”12 does
not hold. Giegerich’s notion of sublation already assumes a puer-psyche,
anima-animus syzygy. If his thought can be said to lean towards the ani-
mus, it is because Giegerich feels that “thought” has been underdevel-
oped under the weight of the image in imaginal psychology. Giegerich
makes it clear that his “pleading for ‘thought’ [an appeal Hillman makes
as well] is not a call to turn our backs on ‘image’ and on what archetypal
theorizing ha[s] accomplished, ‘but rather to continue it radically in an
attempt to complete it. . . .’ ”13
However, in spite of his desire to develop Hillman’s thought, Giegerich

actually misconstrues the way Hillman defines image. He believes that
Hillman’s understanding of image is based on “sensory intuition” and
that it is a form of “picture-thinking” in contra-distinction to “thought”
or thinking proper.14 But here, just as Hillman’s critique falls short of
Giegerich’s idea of “thought,” so Giegerich’s critique of Hillman seems
to miss Hillman’s more radical understanding of “image.” After all, in
“Image-Sense,” Hillman writes: “. . . images are not the same as optical
pictures even if they are like pictures. . . . We do not literally see images.”15
He adds, giving credit to Casey, that “An image is not what you see but
the way you see.”16 That is, we do not see images but see through them.
In fact, Giegerich knows that his critique is different from what archetypal
psychology actually proposes and that its notion of image has a deeper
and more fundamental meaning than he has attributed to it. Seeing images
as pictures might be considered to be a remnant of a sensationist psychol-
ogy that understands images and even the imagination as epiphenomenal
to actual things. Although he claims that he does “not want to reduce”17
archetypal psychology’s understanding of image to this limited represen-
tationalist notion, his critique is primarily aimed at image and the imagina-
tion in the narrow sense just described.
David Miller also alludes to this issue of “the nonperceptual and non-
sensate ‘image.’ ”18 While Miller’s view of image is closer to Hillman’s
and different from Giegerich’s, this difference for Miller is very small
and does not diminish his deep appreciation for Giegerich’s contribution.
Likewise, Greg Mogenson is aware that Hillman’s understanding of image
is non-representational and that it functions, in some ways, not unlike the
work of negative interiorization as described by Giegerich. This is clear
from Mogenson’s choice of quotes from Hillman: “The soul’s life is not
upheld as correct by virtue of exteriority”19 and “What is reflection then
when there is no subject reflected, neither emotion nor external object?”20
For Hillman, the image is most clearly “a metaphor without a referent.”21
While in many ways I share Miller’s sense that in a larger perspective such
issues are trivial, and perhaps heuristic on Giegerich’s part, they nonethe-
less point to matters that require further distillation and a “labor of the
concept,”22 as Giegerich might describe it. This is particularly true in the
face of the provocative question raised by Mogenson at the end of his
chapter “Different Moments in Dialectical Movement.” He acknowledges
that Hillman, like Giegerich, conveys “the negativity of the image”23 – but
he then calls attention to an even more radical interiorization. Pointing

beyond Hillman toward Giegerich’s notion of logical form, he asks: “But
what of the gold that is to follow?”24 Here he alludes to Giegerich’s view
that “the ‘gold’ of true psychology is the further negation of the image’s
silvery negativity into the absolute negativity of a consciousness that can
think the various moments of each image all at once.”25
But just what does absolute negativity mean when it comes to Gieg-
erich’s “gold,” which, like the “stone that is not a stone,” is a subtler “gold
that is not gold” – a gold that is spirit? How is this subtle gold to be dif-
ferentiated from Hillman’s idea? Hillman, too, speaks of gold, not only of
silver’s imagination of it. What is the difference when we “think” gold in
the context of absolute negativity versus when we see it from Hillman’s
standpoint – particularly when we no longer define the imaginal as simply
representing the real? Once we have Giegerich’s subtle view of “gold” as
totally liquefied Mercurius, can we still distinguish it from lead, silver,
or mercury? Are all sublated concepts dissolved in the grand solution of
the dialectic? Is “the gold that is not gold” the spirit of gold, the ghost of
gold, a tincture of gold, the idea of gold, or no gold at all? I suspect that
these questions mistake what Giegerich means and that we can distinguish
gold’s particularity once we have a deeper understanding of the dialectic
he proposes. However, just how his gold can be “thought” in comparison
to Hillman’s “seeing,” its sensuous particularity requires further elabora-
tion. When Hillman sees through gold, pushes off from it, he does not go
“all the way” according to Giegerich – and for which he faults him. While
Hillman’s gold is also clearly not the “vulgar gold”26 but rather the “fan-
tastical gold” of alchemy, his way of speaking about it retains the “golden
touch,”27 the sensate “heart of gold,” the “winners gold,” images of gold as
“permanently glowing and untarnished,” visions of “a consciousness ever
shining like dawn, like the sun, without fits of darkening,” ever “able to be
beaten and beaten yet never crack under the hammer, to be bent, thin as a
leaf and so cover mundane things with the shine of glory.”28 Images such
as these are ideas of gold released from simple physicality, but they retain
a pigment recognizable to the metaphoric ear. While Hillman’s move takes
him beyond the physical, he stays with the material, the concrete, what
I have called here the pigment, a certain impurity that for him saves gold
from the “poisonous state of splendid solar isolation.”29
Therefore, the question about the gold that is to follow (Mogenson’s
question) is also a question that ultimately applies to the Philosophers’
Stone and to the goal of the work. In considering the vision of the Stone
in Hillman and Giegerich, it is important to place Hillman’s most radical
view of image and of the Stone alongside Giegerich’s ideas of “absolute-
negative interiority, spirit, thought.”30 For Giegerich, the goal of both
alchemy and a “true psychology” is to go beyond a psychology rooted
in images and the imagination to a psychology rooted in the logical life
of the soul. Such a move, for Giegerich, is a true working through of
the hierarchical possibilities present in the dialectic and is superior to
a psychology that remains rooted in the flesh of images. Since Gieg-
erich does not propose that we eliminate images, the question remains
how to understand the similarities and differences between Hillman and
Giegerich in a way that moves beyond a side-by-side view of simple
difference.31
This brings us full circle to my image of the alchemical stove and to my
own side-by-side placement of differing views of the Stone. Is it adequate
simply to allow different views, perspectives, archetypal stances – or does
the “labor of the concept” demand that all views be subject to a dialectic
in which “Reason” will produce one position more developed than oth-
ers? Following Hegel, Giegerich notes that “items that are ‘simply differ-
ent’ (verschienden) are indifferent to the difference between them.”32 Here
I take Giegerich to be calling for an engagement of ideas versus simply
settling for alternative perspectives; for instance, holding that the fun-
damental basis of psyche is imagistic versus logical rather than working
through the two positions to a conclusion. He has done much to argue for
his well-worked-through positions, and his critiques of imaginal psychol-
ogy merit careful reading and consideration. Miller and Mogenson have
done a masterful job of giving us strong readings of Giegerich’s work and
of helping us toward a careful consideration of his ideas. What follows is
my beginning attempt to work through an interface between Hillman and
Giegerich and to raise a number of concerns about any move that relegates
images to a status secondary to thought. In opening up the problematic
of moving from image to thought, it is unclear whether, or in what way,
thought is more fundamental than image, particularly when the image is
understood in its most radical way. In addition, a number of philosophers
have resisted this move and raised critical questions that must be explored
before we can consider abandoning the primary place of image in the work
of Jung and Hillman.
Resistance of the remainder

My own hesitation and resistance about a move to spirit/thought is rooted
in my belief that Jung and Hillman each brought about an advance in con-
sciousness by re-envisioning image and imagination, both of which had
been in the shadow of Western thought and metaphysics since Plato. Jung’s
resuscitation of images was a return to the soul and began a reversal of the
dominant historical process that had de-potentiated images and reduced
soul to rational intellectual spirit. Hillman’s archetypal psychology contin-
ued and radicalized Jung’s reversal. Hillman has taken note of the hatred
for image. The battle between spirit and soul, thought and image, is an old
one and even now continues to be fought. The fear of the power of image
and of the imagination is very deep in our culture. Giegerich himself has
acknowledged that the work of Jung and Hillman was a major step from
which “there is no way back.”33
Given that Giegerich’s return to the “rational” and to “thought” is so
powerful, I am concerned that his perspective may be too easily assimi-
lated into the cultural undermining of image, especially since image is still
in a fragile revival of its importance, if not its primacy. We must give Gieg-
erich full credit for the complexity of his ideas and for his recognition of
the rational. However, although his work does suggest that the rational and
the soul are integrated notions, the idea of the rational is so emotionally
and psychologically laden with profound cultural implications that Gieg-
erich’s perspective, in spite of its sophistication, may serve to continue the
repression of the imagination and to turn readers away from the radical
innovations of Jung and Hillman. While this, in itself, is not an argument
against Giegerich’s position as such, it is an expression of my concern
about how his work may be heard and taken up by others.
A move to spirit is an earmark of Hegelian and post-Hegelian Ideal-
ism and neo-rationalist philosophies. An example of this, perhaps another
misreading, can be seen in the work of Paul Ricoeur, who – in spite of his
creative valuing of the symbolic – nevertheless ends up ultimately in a
neo-rationalist position in which thought/philosophy transcends mytho-
poesis. This can be seen in his formulation “the symbol gives rise to
thought,”34 which privileges thinking and tilts the balance away from the
primacy of the metaphoric toward the superiority of the rational and the
philosophical. My concern here is with the dangers of logocentrism, with
what happens when an interpreter, philosophical or psychoanalytic, gives

primacy to thought over image, to the rational side of a metaphoric copula,
to a formulation in which image and metaphor could be reduced to being
simply instrumental, as literary critic Dominick LaCapra has noted.35
LaCapra’s analysis echoes both archetypalist and deconstructivist cri-
tiques of the traditional position, which has its roots in the whole history
of thought that gives priority to logos over mythos. It is a position resisted
as well by a number of philosophers who take a critical stance toward the
Hegelian dialectic and post-Hegelian neo-rationalist thinking and toward
Hegel’s attempt to sublate the image into the rational. Martin Heidegger,
for instance, has commented that the “not” or “negative,” referred to as a
moment in Hegel’s dialectic, cannot be simply overcome or assimilated
by reason. The “not” is more than a dialectical alienation on the way to
a sublation. In fact, it resists assimilation into the movements of thought.
The negation of a negation does not culminate in an unconditional “yes”
(i.e., a full assimilation of the “not”). For Heidegger, Hegel’s interpre-
tation of negativity is an inauthentic modification of an insurmountable
“not” – a “not” that can serve as an access point that transitions from a
logical understanding of the soul to a poetic one. For Heidegger, the more
important category is not rationality but Being.
Similarly, Edgar Morin “faults Hegel for considering contradiction
a transitory ‘moment’ of the Aufhebung, a moment which is ultimately
annulled.”36 Like Heidegger, Morin is arguing, in effect, that the “not”
cannot be sublated by any movement of thought and that it represents an
unassimilable difference that resists any form of engulfment.
In a spirit similar to Heidegger’s and Morin’s, Jacques Derrida also rec-
ognizes the problem of the unassimilable “not.” For him, trying to undo
Hegel is like trying to decapitate the hydra. He argues that Hegel’s dia-
lectic incorporates all contradiction, and that every attempt to refuse such
“engulfment” is seen as an error to be overcome by the continuing dia-
lectic. He asks: how then to interrupt the operation of Aufhebung, how
to handle a negative that is more than just a moment in an all-embracing
process? How do we escape the perpetual reversal entailed in any oppo-
sitional system of thought? What would bring the death knell (glas), or
laughter (Nietzsche) to bear on Hegel’s attempt to achieve absolute spirit
without remainder?
For Derrida, Hegel’s insistence on absolute spirit implies a drift towards
rationalism and idealism and requires the creation of a metaphysical edifice,
which for Derrida is rooted in a trembling ground of double entendre. He

describes this trembling ground as a “fabulous scene” which any meta-
physics of certainty effaces and yet this scene remains, stirring beneath
it.37 For Derrida this scene provokes “an endless confrontation with Hege-
lian concepts, and the move from a restricted, ‘speculative’ philosophical
economy – in which there is nothing that cannot be made to make sense,
in which there is nothing other than meaning – to a ‘general’ economy –
which affirms that which exceeds meaning, the excess of meaning from
which there can be no speculative profit – involves a reinterpretation of
the central Hegelian concept: the Aufhebung.”38 In order to engage Gieg-
erich’s particular vision of the Philosophers’ Stone, and while realizing
that Giegerich’s thought is to be distinguished from Hegel’s, I find myself
struggling with the above critiques naming the unassimilable “not” as a
remainder rather than as a momentary hiatus in the dialectic. In my own
work, an expression of the negative that is unassimilable showed itself as
the image of sol niger, a darkness that refuses conscious assimilation.
This unassimilable darkness was a theme of my book The Black Sun:
The Alchemy and Art of Darkness. The alchemy and art of this darkness
require a further exploration of the light of darkness as an expression of
both sol niger and the Philosophers’ Stone. As I’ve stated, my work began
with the recognition of that which resists conscious assimilation, with a
black sun that would not yield or be incorporated by an ego stance. It
would not dissolve, go away, or be lifted up, and it challenged my own
psychological narcissism to the core. While sol niger did not allow itself to
be possessed by ego and the ego at times felt more in danger of being pos-
sessed by it, a perceptual awareness occurred. The wounded and by now
somewhat emaciated ego noticed that what it called darkness had a shine
that Jung called the shine of darkness itself, the lumen naturae. My book
was the beginning of an exploration of this darkness and of its odd lumi-
nosity. This strange lumen was my impetus to explore the Philosophers’
Stone as I imagined it, present in a darkness that is no darkness. Could the
lumen of the Philosophers’ Stone be an image in Hillman’s sense – some-
thing that is not simply an object of consciousness but something we can
see through? Could this darkness be called sublated?
My ongoing work on the Stone owes a continuing debt to Jung, Hill-
man, Giegerich, and others – and, as I have noted, is a work in progress.
It began in The Black Sun with the blackness of sol niger, with the morti-
ficatio of brokenness, incision, and wound, castration, cut, negation, with
an ultimate “No” to the ego, with what felt unassimilable. But now my
attention is turning from the black sun per se to the Philosophers’ Stone.
To bring the Stone into focus is not to leave the black sun behind, nor to
simply move to an albedo psychology. Rather, it is to pursue my suspicion
that the Philosophers’ Stone has been there all along in the shine of dark-
ness itself and that darkness will be there at the end as well, perhaps as
an indispensable caput mortuum, the dross or residue that remains in the
retort after distillation. In some philosophical and alchemical views, this
residue is ultimately eliminated, but my wager and anticipation is that the
Stone – whether in the language of revivification and Aphroditic pleasure
or in the sublation to pure mercurial liquidity – is always accompanied by
a remainder. This remainder, while not best understood as a Kantian thing-
in-itself, is nonetheless that which resists a consciousness that does not
account for its differentiation. At times, to accommodate this difference,
one can see the Stone described as “the unity of the unity and difference.”
Such a description attempts to address the monstrous complexity of the
Stone, but even the idea of “the unity of the unity and difference” privi-
leges unity, although at a higher “logical level.” The “unity of the unity
and difference” is still a tincture of the syzygy that emphasizes unity as
the major trope. The syzygy can also be tinctured to emphasize difference.
This would call out for the complementary idea of “the difference of the
unity and difference,” a difference that resists being lit up by conscious-
ness and which protects the remainder that emits a mysterious light of its
own as opposed to a light that consciousness would shine on it. This com-
plementary idea is itself similar to one of the stages of the logical dialectic
discussed by the Buddhist sage Nargarjuna. His formulation resists any
transcendent unification and reinstates a darkness, a void (sunyata) that
can also be said to shine.
My exploration here of the shine of darkness begins with two images of
sol niger. In the first, a skeleton stands on a blazing black sun; the image
reads “Putrefactio.”39 In the second, a black sun burns down on a primarily
desolate landscape in the alchemical text Splendor Solis (1582). These are
images of a place an adept must enter if anything is to be learned about the
light of nature and the Philosophers’ Stone. Jung writes about this light,
the lumen naturae, in his Alchemical Studies, where he calls it “the light of
darkness itself.”40 It is a light “which illuminates its own darkness. . . [and]
turns blackness into brightness.” It is a kind of light that the “darkness
comprehends.” This light is not the light of our day-world sun, but rather
the lumen naturae that shines in sol niger. It can be seen in the rising of
the black Ethiopian (also referred to as caput mortuum, nigredo, “matter
to be calcined,” “dragon,” “black faeces,” and “shadow stuff”41), whose
rebirth takes on a new name “which the philosophers call the natural sul-
fur and their son, this being the stone of the philosophers.”42 Likewise
this transformation is seen in the reconstituted Kali, and is cultivated in
Taoist alchemy. It shines in The Secret of the Golden Flower, and in the
filius philosophorum, imagined by Paracelsus as a luminous vehicle and
referred to by Jung as “the central mystery of philosophical alchemy.”43 It
is to this mystery, to this “luminous vehicle,” that we turn as we imagine
a move from sol niger to the Philosophers’ Stone. Just as this light is not
separate from darkness, so the Philosophers’ Stone is not separate from sol
niger but is intrinsic to it.
How can darkness shine? In my work on the black sun, it is the shining
that seems most enigmatic. Is it a question then of presence and absence,
or of a present absence, or of absence itself? The negation and presence of
light is at the heart of the archetypal image/idea of the black sun. The Sun
King is mortally wounded by darkness and in the negation of negation,
sol niger shines; a strange reversal takes place or perhaps is “logically”
present from the beginning.
One could say that sol niger, the black sun, is already a sublated sun,
a philosophical/psychological sun, a sun that is not a sun (as the alche-
mists say of their Stone). It is black and yet, at the same “logical” time, it
shines. What is the nature of such a shining, such a consciousness? Is it an
image, an idea, or both? Is consciousness too dull a word to express this
complexity? Philosophers and psychologists have often found difficulty
with words like consciousness, image, and idea, and have struggled to give
expression to their meanings in a way not encumbered by the metaphysi-
cal and metaphoric prejudices of their times – a seemingly impossible task
that on occasion has silenced the best of philosophers. How then to let be
manifest what is gathered into the shining?
In our postmodern world, our efforts have often left us with a virtual
apophatic orgy of dissemination, of a negation of master tropes (and, in
their place, sliding signifiers), and of neologisms that require another lan-
guage to follow the discourse. Yet our simple common language will not
do either. Our best efforts are marked by traces of darkness, perhaps pen-
etrating to the core of language itself, into a darkness that matters – and
still there is the shine. How then to speak of it, of what Roger Brooke has
called the “fertile and hospitable emptiness within which the things of the
world could shine forth?”44 To speak of the shining is not only to speak
in the context of the metaphor of light, but also to speak of the shining in
a way that aims at expressing an insight that goes beyond the traditional
divide between light and dark, and in a way that approaches a more pri-
mordial awareness closer to Jung’s more mature vision of the psyche, a
vision influenced by the alchemical tradition.
Sparks of reiteration
In The Black Sun I began a consideration of this shining and wrote of it as an
image of light at the core of ancient alchemical ideas. The aim of alchemy,
according to Paracelsus, was to discover this light hidden in nature. It is
a light very different from notions of light as simply separate from dark-
ness and by extension different from any conception of a consciousness
separate from its dark background. My strategy in The Black Sun was to
hesitate before this darkness, to pause and then to enter its realm of corpses
and coffins, of monsters and monstrous complexity, and to engage its most
literal and destructive demons. Such kinds of experiences can traumatize
and kill. They can also drive the soul toward the unthinkable, a condition
which archetypal defenses seek to avoid. To experience the above means
to be in the grip of the mortificatio, a condition the alchemists knew was
essential to reaching the depths of the transformation process. Through
illness and/or a shamanic-like initiation, the mortificatio drives the psyche
to an ontological pivot point, to a desubstantiation of the ego, and to what
Theodor Adorno might call an emaciated subject,45 leading to a gateway
that is both a dying and a new life.
The black sun is a complexity. Its “blacker than black” dimension shines
with a dark luminescence. It can open the way to some of the most numi-
nous aspects of psychic life and can give us a glimpse of the miracle of
perception at the heart of what Jung called the mysterium coniunctionis
and of the Philosophers’ Stone. I spoke above of such a vision in the
Tantric rites of Kali who was worshiped at the cremation grounds where
she copulates with her consort Shiva on the body of a corpse burning on a
funeral pyre. Kali worshipers enact ceremonials associated symbolically
and ritually with the annihilation of the ego. These rituals often depict the
death of the ego, out of which, it is said, the “human being arises shin-
ing.”46 How is it possible to embrace such a negative image? For Hegel,
“only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it,” is it pos-
sible that the negative can be “the magical power that converts death [and
darkness] into being.”47
For the Tantrics, if one’s worship is successful, if one is able to stay the
course open-eyed, to dance Kali’s dance, to welcome her, then her black-
ness is said to shine. This shining can be linked to the alchemical ideas of
whitening and silvering, with the proviso that we see this shining albedo
as part of the complexity of darkness itself and not simply as a literal phase
following blackness. From one perspective, the theme of renewal follows
from symbolic death, but from another, archetypally and logically, death
and renewal are at the core of sol niger, and this is expressed in the simul-
taneity of blackness and luminescence.
Mystical death
How can we further our understanding of this mystical death? How to
speak of it? The idea of ego death is a difficult one in the light of the
acknowledged importance of the role of the ego in relation to the uncon-
scious in our classical way of thinking. When we think of ego loss, our
thoughts immediately go to the problematics of a weak, impaired, or non-
functioning ego, to a concern with annihilation anxiety and the defenses of
the Self against it, as well as to psychosis. Ego psychology has a dominant
hold on our everyday psychological culture. Yet, the notion of ego death
is and has been in the margins of our tradition: in Jung’s idea that “the
experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego,”48 in Hillman’s “psy-
chotherapeutic cure of me,”49 in Rosen’s “egocide,”50 in Miller’s views
about the “no self,”51 in Giegerich’s “death of the ego,”52 and so on. Each
has contributed to our understanding of a psychology that relativizes and/
or dismembers the ego, and each has a stake in the transformation of our
psychological theory.
Giegerich, for example, states that “the Self is real only to the extent that
the ego has been negated, overcome . . . one might even say, it exists only
as a reality ‘over the ego’s dead body’53 . . . as one who has long died as
ego personality.”54 “The art of psychological discourse,” he continues, “is
to speak as someone who is already deceased.”55 Here Giegerich extends
the notion of ego death into the core of psychological discourse itself. For
him, this is a necessary step toward the achievement of a “true psychol-
ogy” and essential in understanding the goal of both alchemy and of a
psychological life. For Giegerich, as noted, ego death also signifies the
death of all positivity and serves as the gateway to a liquification of the
subject and thus allows entrance into the logical life of the soul. There is
a resonance between Giegerich’s reading of Hegel and poststructuralist
thought, both of which proceed toward if not a liquification of the ego, at
least a displacement of the subject from the center of philosophical, lin-
guistic, and theoretical activity.
Several postmodern philosophers have made this connection between
ego death and philosophical activity. For example, philosopher Geoffrey
Bennington has remarked that: “Taking something philosophically, then,
always involves this more or less hidden relationship with death. Or, by
a slightly violent contraction, whatever I take philosophically is death.”56
Surprisingly, Bennington ends his statement with an enigmatic image, but
one which captures his point: “The philosophers’ stone is an inscribed
head stone.” For Marla Morris, another postmodern thinker, what is true of
the Philosophers’ Stone is also true for the “psychoanalyst’s stone.”57 She
notes that for Bennington, at the end of the day, it is death that deconstruc-
tion is all about.
The philosopher Simon Critchley argues in a similar spirit, noting that
“ancient Ciceronian wisdom says that to philosophize [and, in light of
Morris’ comment, to practice psychoanalysis] is to learn how to die.”58
Critchley’s exploration echoes the theme of Sol niger in that it seeks to
“de-create narratives of redemption” and to “strip away the resources
and comforts of story, fable and narrative.”59 Here Critchley sounds like
Giegerich and, following the work of Samuel Becket, he seeks to under-
stand “the meaning of . . . meaninglessness,” what he calls “a redemption
from redemption.”60 He notes how Becket’s work “frustrates our desire
to ascend from the flatlands of language and ordinary experience into the
stratosphere of meaning”61 and comments:
As is all too easily seen in both contemporary New Age sophism,

crude scientism, and the return to increasingly reactionary forms of
religious fundamentalism, there is an almost irresistible desire to stuff
the world full of meaning and sign up to one or more salvific narra-
tives of redemption.62
Critchley, like Becket and in the spirit of Giegerich’s “Birth of Man,”63

leads us away from the temptation to redemption and toward a Zen-like
perception of the ordinary, the “sheer mereness of things.”64 He turns to

a number of poets – Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ralph Waldo
Emerson – to give voice to this perception of the ordinary, a perception not
unlike Hillman’s whose reading of alchemy seeks to move our understand-
ing and our language outside of redemptive, metaphysical systems and
salvationist programs. Like Stevens’ expression of particulars, “pond,”
“leaf,” “tree,” – and, I would add, stones.
So, what kind of “thing” is a Stone? For Critchley, like Hillman, percep-
tion yields a simplicity of awareness in which the subject/object, person/
world dichotomy is altered. In such an awareness, we are like a “thing
among things,” displaying a shining world of sheer “isness,” or, as the
Buddhists would say, of “suchness.” In such a world, a “stone is not a
stone,” because stones are part of the alchemical white earth and of matter
illuminated from within itself. Ordinarily we think of matter as illuminated
by virtue of an external consciousness separate from its object, but matter,
in truth, is better understood as part of the complexity of the materialized
soul. Such a soul can alchemically be said to be a Stone “cleared of mois-
tures”65 and objective in the “psycho-alchemical” sense as Giegerich has
described.66
Hillman has noted that depth psychology, including Jung’s, has had
difficulty in finding a way to express the complex/simplicity of psyche’s
need to substantiate67 or likewise of substance’s need to speak. For Hill-
man, the problematic is in part rooted in the way conceptual language
splits apart a fundamental unity, “abstracting matter from image.”68
When this occurs, there is a powerful psychic demand to heal the split,
to substantiate psyche and to bring it back in touch with something solid.
The problem of “languaging” the soul was present for Jung throughout
his life and work. The need to substantiate, to go beyond words and
paper, played a role in his desire to personify and in his urge to turn to
stone.
Turning to stone
Ultimately for Jung “words and paper . . . did not seem real enough. . .;
something more was needed.”69 He had “to achieve a kind of representa-
tion in stone of [his] innermost thoughts and of the knowledge [he] had
acquired.” Or, to put it another way, he “had to make a confession of faith
in stone.” Jung’s need to substantiate was responsible for the building of
his tower at Bollingen where he felt he was “reborn in stone” and through
which he was able to express a concretization of his ideas.70
Jung carved his way to self-expression through architecture, sculpture,
and his focus on alchemical language and poetry, but even more one might
say that he opened himself to the call of stone – to its message and to the
way the world came to him. Jung reports the story of the cornerstone he
had ordered for his garden when he was building his tower at Bollingen.
When the stone arrived it was the wrong shape and measurements, and
the stonemason, furious, wanted to return it. However, when Jung saw the
stone, he claimed it as his stone. He felt he “must have it!”71 even though,
at the moment, he was not sure what he wanted to do with it.
In short, Jung welcomed whatever arrived unwanted and unexpected,
unlike Faust who murdered Baucis and Philemon. In other words, Jung
opened himself up to experiences the ego would often reject, seemingly
in good sense. As Jung contemplated the stone, a verse from the alchemist
Arnoldus de Villanova came to him and he chiseled it into the stone:
Here stands the mean, uncomely stone,

‘Tis very cheap in price!
The more it is despised by fools,
The more loved by the wise.72
Jung was aware that this verse referred to the Philosophers’ Stone and,
as he contemplated it further, he saw in its “natural structure” a sort of
eye73 that looked back at him, a living other, who appeared to Jung as
“the Telesphoros of Asklepios,” the healing figure of a child who was
seen as roaming through the dark regions of the cosmos and glowing like
a star out of the depths, a shining “pointer of the way.”74 In this image
and in the stone, Jung captured something in the heart of darkness itself,
something that he found in the depths of inorganic matter, something
that looked back at him and made a stone a living stone, a Philosophers’
Stone that shines. For Jung, stones speak a shining truth and such a truth
touches the core of what we have come to call, inadequately, psyche and
matter.
Jung’s attempt to repair this split in his life and work led not only to stone,
but also to innovative formulations in the language of his psychology by
which he attempted to embrace both sides of a linguistic divide – subject
and object, spirit and matter – using terms such as “psychoid,” “synchro-
nicity,” and “unus mundus.”75 Such terms expressed Jung’s urge to go
beyond the subjectivity of words and paper in order to express psyche’s
need to substantiate and the need of substances to speak.
For Hillman, however, such words not only fall short of Jung’s goal,
but also actually “reinforce the splitting effect inherent” in the neurosis
of one-sided abstract language.76 If this was a problem for Jung, it is also
one which is deeply rooted in our collective, historical, cultural, and
linguistic consciousness. It is an issue that penetrates into the problem-
atics of perception and language, and into the archetypal psyche itself.
How then to express psyche’s need to substantiate and substances need
to speak?
In his book entitled simply Stone, philosopher John Sallis speaks of his
desire to substantiate, to find a way to articulate, philosophical ideas ade-
quate to the powerful stone monuments he is drawn to investigate, and in
and through which he finds a “shining truth.”77 In his book, he explores the
power of stone in “the various guises and settings in which stone appears”78 –
in monuments, the complexity of Gothic cathedrals, Greek temples, and
the tombstones of a Jewish cemetery in Prague; in fossils, stone houses,
and the power and beauty of wild nature in the mountains of Haute Savoie,
France. In his search, he attempts to give voice to the power he discovers
in these profound expressions of stone. Sallis writes:
I would have liked this discourse to be inscribed by a very skillful

stonemason, by one who knew just the right slant at which to hold the
chisel so as to cut obliquely into the stone and produce well-formed,
clearly legible letters, chipping away the stone so as to leave the
inscription both in place of stone and yet still in stone, practicing thus
a kind of lithography. I would have liked the well-measured strokes of
his hammer to be audible, as he practiced his venerable craft of mak-
ing stone, in its silence, nonetheless speak.79
One might imagine Jung, Hillman, Giegerich, and Sallis as such stonema-
sons, adepts who inscribe the materia of rock and word such that stone has
words and words matter. In these thinkers, we find stones that speak, liv-
ing objective stones that shine, modern day expressions of the alchemists’
quest for life in the heart of matter.
Must we turn to stone? The stone that is not

a stone
The well-known alchemical saying “Beware of the physical in the mate-
rial” provides us with a warning not to confuse what the alchemist is
after with literal materiality – but it is also important to recognize that
a simple psychological or spiritual abstraction misses the mark as well.
“The precious goals of alchemy are neither physical achievements . . .
nor metaphysical truths. . . . We are not in the realm of metaphysics or
physics,”80 says Hillman. Sallis makes a similar point, noting that when
trying to give expression to what we mean by “stone” it is important
to do it in a way that does not split off our subjectivity from the voice
of stone itself, nor turn this voice into a projection onto stones.81 To
fall into either one position or another fixes thought into a false subject/
object dichotomy. Either the stone that we seek is literally over there in a
mind-independent world, or it is simply part of our subjective inner life
projected outward. Jung’s psychology of alchemy is usually understood
in the latter way and, thus, the Philosophers’ Stone is seen as a projection
of the Self.
I submit that this is one plausible reading of Jung, but it remains unclear
exactly what the nature of such a projection entails and just what it is
that is projected. Ultimately, the Arcane Substance that Jung often spoke
about remained as mysterious as his understanding of the unconscious
and to assume that this projected substance is simply inside our subjec-
tivity misses Jung’s deeper understanding of “psychic reality,” even if
it was not adequately developed. In addition, the problem of projection
itself requires a number of philosophical and metapsychological presup-
positions that are taken for granted in classical analysis. Going beyond
these assumptions requires a fundamental shift in metapsychology if not
ontology.82 Schwartz-Salant deconstructs the notion of “projection” and
concludes that using this idea as a framework for understanding what the
alchemists are talking about is inadequate. Alchemical “experiences do
not always, or even primarily, fit into an inside-outside structure.”83 In
its place, Schwartz-Salant constructs a field theory, an intermediate realm
between subject and object, mind and matter. While he applies his field
theory primarily to the analytic interaction, it is a move that also has con-
sequences for how we understand both Jung’s work with stone and the
nature of the Philosophers’ Stone.
Although Jung actually worked with literal stone, his more enduring
corpus was what he produced through his imagination and with words and
paper, that is, his ideas. And, likewise, it is with ideas and the imagination
that Hillman finds a “rock-hard standpoint from above downward, just
as firm and solid as literal physical reality.”84 From this perspective, the
Philosophers’ Stone that is not a stone seems indestructible. It is solid, has
objectivity, thing-likeness, facticity, and duration. It is an example of phil-
osophical permanence. Yet, while its hardness wounds, it is also wounded,
easily affected. The Stone is complex and resists one-sided descriptions
and simple dichotomies. As David Miller has shown, “the course of wis-
dom consists in deferring one-sided judgment concerning meaning.”85 The
imaginatio is as much a part of what is imaged as the world is itself the
substance of imagination. Robert Romanyshyn makes a similar point:
Imagining is not something which a subject adds to a merely perceiv-

able world. On the contrary, we imagine and the world is imagine-
able. To say one is to say the other. Each is the obverse of the other. In
other words, imagining belongs as much to things as it belongs to us.
Perception is always less certain than we naively believe it to be, and
things are more shadowy than we often dare admit.86
In this passage, and throughout his analysis, Romanyshyn cautions us not

to collapse the difference between perceiving and imagining. He under-
lines how the perceivable and the real exhibit a stubborn intractabil-
ity which marks them as different from the imagination even if we have
destabilized their absolute difference. Romanyshyn holds this distinction
in place as he continues to subtly refine our understanding of the imagi-
nary and the real. He demonstrates, following Merleau-Ponty and reminis-
cent of Schwartz-Salant, how perception and imagination are like mirrors
“facing each other,”87 forming “a couple more real than either of them”88
would be independent of each other. For Romanyshyn, “the imagine-abil-
ity of things is their very depth: that is the image of a thing, seen through
other things, describes the depth of the real.”89 Romanyshyn’s analysis
gives amplification to Critchley’s insight that things merely are and that
we are things too. He sees into the complex materiality of the soul and
into a substance’s need to speak. For Romanyshyn, the “voice of things” is
best served by the language of metaphor and imagination which “inhabits
neither the brilliance of the day [spirit] nor the darkness of night [soul], but
speaks simultaneously in light and shadow.”90
If the imagination can be seen to be the voice of things, then one might
also understand how “imaginal realities” exhibit a stubborn intractability.
The Philosophers’ Stone, as we have noted, exhibits facticity and thing-
ness. It refuses to be altered by the manipulating ego subject, and yet sub-
jectivity is part of its intrinsic reality, a subjectivity that appears as the ego
subject dies or is negated and relativized. It is a subjectivity that has been
touched by ego death and therefore is no longer subjective. It is a subjec-
tivity that is not subjectivity, a subjectivity in which the me-ness has been
“cooked out” and redeemed from essentialist narratives of meaning.
As Hillman, making reference to Miller, points out, the stone “does not
allow itself to be held in meaning”91 and generality. “It does not yield
to understanding.” For Hillman, the alchemical process of ceration is
“designed to obliterate a psychological episteme of . . . anything that would
rigidify the idea of the goal into categories of knowledge.”92 And yet, as
Sallis has noted, the stone exhibits a “shining truth,”93 a truth discovered
in a “suspension of the difference that otherwise separates the eidetic from
the singular, a peculiar suspension in that its very force requires that the
difference remain, in the moment of suspension, also intact.”94 If I under-
stand Sallis correctly, such singular yet eidetic moments of “shining truth”
recall the sheer “isness of things” discussed above, the metals, planets,
minerals, diamonds, pearls, stars and stones, the shining particularities that
are also oddly universal but which can “never simply be assimilated to the
purely eidetic.”95 Such singular moments of perception/imagination are
neither inside nor out and must show themselves, be exhibited like pearls
so as not to lose their luster, again to use Hillman’s metaphor.
The bringing forth of such particulars allows them to shine, and this
shine is for Hillman the revelation of Beauty, a term Plato used as well
for that “shining truth” which he considered “the most radiant, that which
most shines forth amidst the visible, in the singular things that come to
be and pass away.”96 Is the Philosophers’ Stone such a radiant truth, a
truth that must as well remain in touch with negativity, death and dark-
ness? It is “not enough,” Hillman reminds us, “to shine in the dark.”97 The
Philosophers’ Stone is linked intrinsically with sol niger, “no matter how
exalted the stage of any process in life, that stage lives within the context
of whatever despair and failure accompanied its creation.”98 Thus, it is not
surprising that Schwartz-Salant observes, in relation to the last image of
the Splendor Solis, that there are “two states – a created self and its puri-
fied consciousness . . . joined not only with life and body but also with a
history of despair and failure.”99
Likewise, as Hillman notes, in alchemical psychology “sorrow, solitude
and misery can break even the most indomitable spirit.”100 The Philos-
ophers’ Stone requires a relationship with the ongoing negativity of the
deconstructive principle of the black sun. Perhaps this recognition of sol
niger is related to why, for Giegerich, the imaginal requires continuing
negative interiorization. But if this is so, just as Giegerich deconstructs
the literal residues of the imaginal, so imaginal psychology continues to
give flesh to the unseen. Solve et coagula, say the alchemists. In Hillman
and Giegerich we have two moments of the Stone that not only can live
together but also belong together in the same living mosaic – or do they?
Jung has noted: “sometimes Mercurius is a substance like quicksilver
[image], sometimes it is a philosophy [thought].”101 To put it yet another
way, if Paul Ricoeur is correct that the symbol gives rise to thought, then
perhaps it is also the case that thought gives rise to symbol. What has pri-
ority may well be, as Giegerich has noted, a matter of personal and philo-
sophical conviction “of the psychology [and philosophy] that one has,”
“that one is,” “that one lives.”102 Perhaps in the end, thought and image
may best be spoken of in a variety of ways: as an alchemical circulatio, or
in a monstrous coniunctio, or as a trembling ground of poetic undecidables
(Derrida), or a unity of unity and difference (Hegel/Giegerich), or as the
difference of unity and difference (Marlan). Perhaps all of the above might
be thought/imagined as metaphors that attempt to speak the unspeakable,
an idea perhaps captured in the title of Paul Kugler’s latest book, Raids on
the Unthinkable. To struggle with these seemingly irreconcilable moments
is well articulated by Alain Badiou who gave expression to the importance
of attempting to speak the unspeakable when he stated:
Let us struggle then, partitioned, split, unreconciled. Let us struggle

for the flash of conflict, we philosophers, always torn between the
mathematical norm of literal transparency, and the poetic norm of sin-
gularity and presence. Let us struggle then, but having recognized the
common task, which is to think what was unthinkable, to say what
it was impossible to say. Or, to adopt Mallarmé’s imperative, which
I believe is common to philosophy and poetry: “There, wherever it
may be, deny the unsayable – it lies.”103
In our attempt to express psyche’s need to substantiate, we have come to

see that the Stone to which we have turned is a “stone that is not a stone.”
It is rather a Philosophers’ Stone. It is a Stone linked to the lumen naturae
of sol niger, a luminous vehicle, a central mystery of alchemy. It is an
alchemical achievement involving the death of the ego out of which some-
thing emerges shining and yet the shining was already there at the core
of darkness. It is a part of the complexity of darkness itself, reflecting the
death and shine of a positivity that is perhaps no positivity at all, but rather
an image/idea requiring a liquification and/or displacement of the subject.
The Stone requires learning how to die, how to de-create narratives of
redemption, and thus allowing one to see, with Zen-like astonishment, the
perception of the ordinary, the sheer mereness of things. As the poet Theo-
dore Roethke once indicated, when we encounter the power of death, even
stones express themselves.104
Notes
1 This chapter is a modified version of my previously published paper entitled Marlan,
“From the Black Sun,” 1–30.
2 A more comprehensive outcome of these distillations, however, must await a longer
work still in progress. Here I can offer only a glimpse at the work emerging from the
alembics of my colleagues, each with his own ideas and his own compelling images of
the Philosophers’ Stone.
3 The description which follows is a condensation of Hillman’s ideas drawn from his
essay “Concerning the Stone” (Chapter 8 in Alchemical Psychology, 231–263).
5 Ibid., 259.
6 Ibid., 262.
7 Ibid., 253.
9 Ibid., 148.
10 For example, Hillman argues that the goal is “not the lifting, the Aufhebung, of mate-
rial worldliness, but the full realization of desire for the world that pulsates in the
materials of the elemental psyche, those substances that compose the stone and give its
enduring life . . .” (Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 261).
11 Giegerich, “Afterword,” 109.
12 Ibid.,
13 Ibid., 108.
15 Hillman, “Image-Sense,” 130.
16 Ibid., 134.
18 Miller, “The End of Ending,” 85.
19 Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth (Part Two),” 49; quoted by Greg Mogenson in
“Different Moments,” 106.
20 Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth (Part Two),” 49; quoted by Greg Mogenson in
“Different Moments,” 105.
21 Ibid.
22 This is a phrase used by Hegel and borrowed by Giegerich, and here refers simply to
the process of working through.
23 Mogenson, “Different Moments in Dialectical Movement,” 106.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 240.
28 Ibid., 241.
29 Ibid., 240.
30 Mogenson, “Different Moments,” 106.
31 Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,” 115.
32 Ibid.
34 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 38.
35 LaCapra, “Who Rules Metaphor?,” 15–28.
36 Kelly, “Atman, Anatta, and Transpersonal Psychology.”
37 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 213.
38 Alan Bass (translator) in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 19–20, footnote 23.
39 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), 85.
40 Jung, Alchemical Studies (CW13), §197.
42 Melchior, quoted in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), §484.
43 Ibid., §162.
44 Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology, 99.
45 Kuspit, “Negatively Sublime Identity.”
46 Sinha, Tantra, 52.
47 Hegel, Phenomenology, 19, §32.
50 Rosen, Transforming Depression, xxi.
51 Miller, “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles!,” 15.
52 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 18–24.
53 Ibid., 18.
54 Ibid., 24.
55 Ibid.
56 Bennington, quoted in Marla Morris, “Archiving Derrida,” 44.
57 Ibid.
58 Critchley, Very Little, xvii.
59 Ibid., xxiii.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., xxiv.
63 Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man.”
64 Critchley, Very Little, xxiv.
66 Giegerich, “The Ego-Psychological Fallacy,” 55.
67 Hillman, “Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Language,” 40.
68 Ibid., 41.
70 Ibid., 225.
71 Ibid., 226.
72 Ibid., 227. This carved stone became a monument for what his tower meant to him.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Hillman, “Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Language,” 41.
76 Ibid.
77 Sallis, Stone, 2.
78 Ibid., book jacket.
79 Ibid., 1.
81 Sallis, Stone, Chapter 1.
82 Nathan Schwartz-Salant, personal communication, 2000.
83 Ibid.
85 Miller, “The ‘Stone’ Which Is Not a Stone,” 116.
86 Romanyshyn, “Psychological Language,” 79–80.
87 Ibid., 73.
88 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139; quoted by Romanyshyn, “Psycho-
logical Language,” 73.
89 Romanyshyn, “Psychological Language,” 73.
90 Ibid., 79.
92 Ibid., 255.
93 Sallis, Stone, 2.
94 Ibid., 4.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid., 2–3.
98 Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 216.
99 Ibid.
101 Jung, Aion (CW9ii), §240.
102 Giegerich, “Afterword,” 108.
103 Badiou, Theoretical Writings, 241.
104 Roethke, “Fourth Meditation.”
Chapter 10
The philosophical basis of the

remnant in Kant’s thing-in-
itself and in Hegel’s move to
surpass it
In 2008, Wolfgang Giegerich published a response to the ideas in the last

chapter, which had been previously published as an article entitled “From
the Black Sun to the Philosophers’ Stone.” Giegerich’s response to my
analysis was called “The Unassimilable Remnant – What is at Stake?
A Dispute with Stanton Marlan.” In a later essay entitled “Jung’s Betrayal
of His Truth: The Adoption of a Kantian-Based Empiricism and the Rejec-
tion of Hegel’s Speculative Thought,” he reiterated some of these points
and made additional comments about my interpretation of his position. His
criticisms of my article motivated me to reconsider my understanding of
Kant and my criticisms of Hegel and their importance in the ongoing fer-
ment about soul and spirit within the Jungian tradition. These re-readings
are reflected in the remainder of this study beginning with this chapter.
Giegerich’s thoughtful response to my interpretation of his work was a
welcome furthering of the issues at stake in our exchange. In his articles,
he addresses a number of issues, including: (a) differing views on the
Philosophers’ Stone, (b) the relationship between image and dialectical
thought, (c) my complement to his Hegelian view of the “union of the
unity and difference,” with an additional formulation of “the difference
of unity and difference,” (d) my insistence on what I referred to as an
unassimilable remnant, and (e) my historical assessment of Jung’s and
Hillman’s emphasis on the primacy of the image as a reversal of a domi-
nant trend in the historical process that has repressed images. In addition,
Giegerich clarifies a number of points. My criticism of Giegerich was
that his interpretation of Hillman’s view of image was limited because
he only understood “image” in the traditional sense, as being based on
a sensationist psychology, as representational and epiphenomenal with
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-11
170 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
respect to literal objects, and seen in the Hegelian sense as “picture

thinking.” He argues, however, that his criticism was not based on see-
ing “images as contents of consciousness or as ‘copies’ in the mind at
all. Rather than the image in the narrower sense, [he was] critiquing
the imaginal style of thought as picture thinking.”1 He takes for granted
that the image was understood by Hillman as “a metaphor without a
referent.” Still, his point is that with “the charge of picture thinking,
it does not make any difference whether an image is ‘what you see’ or
whether it is – ‘understood in its most radical way’ – ‘the way you see,’ ”
that is, whether you see the image as content of consciousness or as a
perspective with which you see. “In either case, the sphere of sensory
intuition (sinnliche Anschauung)” has not been exceeded. “To be sure,”
he continues, “the image has now [with Hillman], through this quasi-
transcendental-philosophical move been deliteralized; it may no longer
be visual in the empirical sense, but it stays logically visual” which does
not for Giegerich “advance to sublated seeing as thought or conceptual
comprehension: ‘insight,’ ‘intellegere.’ ”2
The point here is that it does not make any difference whether there
is a literal external referent or whether the “referent” has been totally
internalized into the structure of image or imaginal seeing itself so
that the image is now its own referent: the structure or form of rep-
resentation has not been overcome merely by overcoming the exter-
nally existent referent. The form of representation would be overcome
only with a transcendence of the form of image as such, that is, with
thought. Thought does not see or imagine; it thinks. Here one sees
how important it is to become aware of the dimension of logical form
or “syntax.” A merely semantic approach is naturally already satis-
fied with the difference between “image without external referent” and
“epiphenomenal representation of an external referent.”3
Giegerich then proceeds to address my concern about how his idea of

total sublation or “liquification” of Mercurius, absolute-negative interior-
ity, spirit or thought, if pushed to the limit, cuts all the way through, thus
losing its phenomenality, what I have called the “pigment,”4 while giving
gold its metaphoric potency and particularity. In my questioning of this
reaction, I felt it important to place Hillman’s most radical view of image
and of the Philosophers’ Stone alongside Giegerich’s idea of sublation to
Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself 171
determine the validity of Hillman’s and my shared concern that there may
be an important loss if one goes too far beyond imaginal awareness. For
Hillman, that would lead to what he called a “poisonous state of splen-
did solar isolation.”5 Giegerich argues that for Hillman it is, in fact, the
impurity that gives his gold its qualitative reality, its phenomenality, and
saves it from that abstract isolation. Here Giegerich turns his concern back
toward Hillman’s point of view, noting that his own
critique of imaginal psychology had precisely always been that it

cocoons itself in the unreality of a kind of “Platonism,” as I once
termed it. I had challenged psychology with the thesis that a real cut
into the naturalism of the imaginal and metaphoric is indispensable
to reach actuality. And I believe that it is precisely by trying to save
his “gold” by means of those so-called impurities (that is, through the
logically unbroken tie to naturalistic apperception) that this cocooning
in unreality takes place.6
For Giegerich, it is the fear of the poisonous isolation that he thinks is the
problem.
This is what makes consciousness shrink from going all the way for-
ward and instead makes it turn back again to what it was itself, after
all, intent upon leaving through its very move away from the physi-
cal in the material. It makes this move, but halfway there (namely
after having moved from the literal to the metaphorical), it stops. Of
course, the danger of splendid solar isolation exists. But the point is
that it must be met, not avoided. . . . If you avoid the danger, you have
psychologically succumbed to it unawares. You truly avoid it only by
facing it.7
While Giegerich attempts to turn the table on Hillman’s halfway meta-

phorical move and again proclaims the necessity of “a real cut into the
naturalism of the imaginal” viewpoint, he does not demonstrate how his
view of gold or of the Philosophers’ Stone and all of their metaphoric reso-
nances are not lost, bypassed into the isolation of which Hillman accused
him. Giegerich’s emphasis on the actual place of action and his assertion
of logical form rather than semantic content begins to split syntax from
semantics, form from content. Giegerich rightly attempts to see these two
levels as always belonging together; however, he speaks in such a way

as to emphasize one side of the binary and uses that to drive forward his
perspective. For him, syntax is emphasized as somehow more important
than semantics. Such emphasis then takes on a rhetoric of division and a
polemical style of aggressive challenge. A similar martial style was also
present in Hillman’s writing and he reiterated many times that his creative
work was motivated by his anger.
I should add as an aside here that with regard to my personal dialogue
with Giegerich, he has always been most cordial, if still polemical. Perhaps
it is also the case with both Hillman and Giegerich that the polemical style
is an effective way to awaken one from the status quo, but I also believe
that it lends itself to exaggeration and worse at times, a one-sidedness and
the entrenchment of binary thinking. To point to this tendency does not,
however, “resolve” the issue of what is at stake in the differing positions.
That continues to remain for me an open and ongoing question. Implicit in
these questions are some important philosophical issues.
One important tension has been the difference in perspectives between
the imaginal psychology of James Hillman and the dialectical approach
of Wolfgang Giegerich. The philosophical tension between Hillman and
Giegerich has its roots in the history of philosophy. Philosophy like
alchemy and psychoanalysis is not a benign art. The questions I posed
to Giegerich pushed him to clarify his position, and his responses to
me were an occasion of considerable struggle with my own point of
view, which is still developing. Image versus thought, soul versus spirit,
semantics versus syntax, phenomenon versus noumenon, unassimilable
remnant versus sublation, sticking with images versus the freeing of
and liquefying of the mercurial spirit are not simply perspectives in my
dialogue with Giegerich, but also tensions in my inner dialogue with
myself.
As I have noted, in Jung, Hillman, Giegerich, and in my own thoughts
these differences are not simple binaries, but interrelated complexities so
to speak which get drawn apart. In addition, even to the extent that a body
of thought integrates rather than splits these differences apart, the overall
character of the thought that links them seems to emphasize and be marked
more by one side of the dyad than the other. Just how these contrasts play a
role in the philosophical orientation of any given thinker gives a particular
character to their philosophy.
The above issues have played an important role is the philosophies of

Kant and Hegel. Rockmore has noted the importance of Kant:
Kant is not only a great philosopher, one of the very small handful
of truly great thinkers in the Western tradition; he is also a singularly
influential figure, whose position continues to impact on the later
debate, often in decisive ways. Like post-Kantian German Idealism
and German neo-Kantianism, central philosophical tendencies in the
nineteenth century, in different ways the main philosophical move-
ments in twentieth century philosophy are all responding to Kant.8
Kant’s philosophy has been important to both Jung and Giegerich, and like
Hegel both have pushed off from him, though, as Rockmore has noted,
“[w]e are still in the process of finding out Kant’s position [and] [t]here is
continuing controversy about how to best interpret it.”9
If, as has been suggested, Jung’s psychology can be interpreted in a
Kantian way, it likewise can be seen as moving beyond Kant. If Jung is
read as a Kantian, it is not surprising that his critics would evaluate him
from a post-Kantian position. I believe that both Hillman and Giegerich
have read Jung as Kantian and this reading is one basis of their criticisms.
Kant’s work, like Jung’s, is complicated and in the next section we will
explore this issue.
Phenomenon and noumenon: the unresolved

tension of limit and transcendence in the
thought of Kant and Jung
In her introduction to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Patricia
Kitcher notes that Kant “is usually regarded as the most important figure
in the history of Modern Western Philosophy,”10 and that his first Critique
(1781–1787) “is his magnum opus.”11 She also comments on how difficult
a book it is to read and notes that H.J. Paton has compared its “ ‘windings
and twistings’ . . . to crossing the great Arabian Desert.”12 For many, the
metaphor of a desert is an apt one and they find the work dry as dust. Kant
himself made similar judgments and called his book “dry, obscure,” and
“long winded.” He lamented that readers would skim through it and that
seriously thinking it through was a “disagreeable task.”13
Goethe is reported to have “read no more than twenty pages or so of

Kant’s Critique, leafed through the rest and then put it aside exclaiming
‘Good heavens no!’ ”14 Mendelssohn, on whom Kant counted to help dem-
onstrate his ideas, called the Critique of Pure Reason “dieses Nervensaft-
verzehrendes Werk – this nerve-juice consuming book,”15 and Carl Jung
admitted that he found the book “difficult and it had caused him much
Kopfzerbrechen [‘brain racking’].”16
But if Jung found Kant dry and difficult, he also found him important
if not fundamental in the development of his psychology. In Kant’s “dry”
critique of “watery” metaphysics, Jung found a spectrum of differentia-
tions that became essential to his psychology, the most prominent of which
was that between phenomena and noumena. One might imagine Jung’s
attitude as echoing the maxim of Paracelsus, which stated “colors result
from dryness acting on moisture,”17 and Hillman notes: “there is more
color in the alchemical desert than in the flood, in less emotion than in
more. Drying releases the soul from personal subjectivism.”18 For Hill-
man, as for Jung and Kant, simple subjectivism was not an adequate basis
for knowledge. “Dry souls are best, said Heraclitus, which Philo turned to
mean, ‘Where the earth is dry, the soul is wisest,’ ”19 and, for Jung, Kant’s
critique of speculative metaphysics was a stroke of genius.
Undisciplined metaphysical speculation was prone to “schwärmen” – a
kind of madness, fanatic and raving. Such speculation leads nowhere and
worse, to “shipwreck,” “entanglements,” delusion, and “empty hopes.” In
his preface to Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant writes: “The land of shadows
is the paradise of dreamers. Here they find an unlimited country where they
may build their houses ad libitum. Hypochondriac vapours, nursery tales,
and monastic miracles, provide them with ample building material.”20
Kant’s first Critique and his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
might well be imagined as a lifeboat on the sea of philosophy, a laying
down of some ground rules necessary to set things in order before ventur-
ing forth into any beyond. In this sense Kant like Jung might be imagined
as a healer of madness, treating generations of raving philosophers, help-
ing to check the impulse of pure reason from exceeding reason’s reason-
able boundaries. For Kant as for Jung, the fantasy of transcendence must
first be firmly anchored to the experience of our senses if we are to have
knowledge and not empty ideas that fly away into the unknown. In a ges-
ture not unlike that of Kant and Jung, the figure below shows an ancient
philosopher pointing to the necessary chain that grounds high-flying ideas.
Figure 10.1 A ncient philosopher and eagle chained to a ground animal. From
Michael Maier, Symbola aureae mensae, 1617.
While Kant’s critique of metaphysics was for the most part written in a
controlled if not burdensome way, his critique at moments waxes poetic, as if
to take a respite after surveying the ground that he has covered. He begins his
“Analytic of Principles” in a way that echoes Heraclitus’ earlier point about
strife and imagines Metaphysics as, “a vast and stormy ocean, where illusion
properly resides and many fog banks and much fast-melting ice feign new-
found lands.”21 “This sea,” he says, “incessantly deludes the sea fairer with
empty hopes as he roves through his discoveries, and thus entangles him in
adventures that he can never relinquish, not ever bring to an end.”22
Kant draws us back from this sea and points to dry land where every-
thing has its proper place, to a “land of truth,”23 and he appeals to his read-
ers, as if hesitating on the shoreline:
before we venture upon this sea, to search its latitudes for certainty
as to whether there is in them anything to be hoped, it will be useful
Figure 10.2 From the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck: Two of Wands.

to begin by casting another glance on the map of the land that we are
about to leave, and to ask . . . whether we might not perhaps be con-
tent with what this land contains, or even must be content with it from
necessity if there is no other territory at all on which we could settle.24
Against the madness and entanglements of wild speculation and the

ephemeral fog of dogmatic metaphysics Kant in Cartesian fashion sought
certainty, carried out by the sharp sword of epistemological limits. One of
Kant’s basic messages in the Critique – perhaps his most basic – is that
“philosophy errs when it tries to draw metaphysical conclusions about the
way the world is part from our knowledge on the basis of epistemological
arguments about how we do or must acquire knowledge of the world.”25
Deirdre Bair, in a much-applauded recent biography of Jung, notes his

appreciation for Kant’s “painstaking work of distinguishing what belongs
to me, what is within my reach, and what lies beyond, and where we can-
not reach.”26 For Kant, it was important to draw apart those cognitive
structures that gave shape to our experiences and to that which appears but
which itself is unknown and perhaps unknowable.
Jung based his distinction on Kant, who attempts to deal with what is
beyond the plane of perception, and he refers to this beyond (which affects
us) as an unknown x or thing-in-itself.
Just as, in the Transcendental Analytic, Kant drew a distinction between

the object as phenomenon (representation for us) and as noumenon (in
itself), so Jung attempted a distinction between “archetypische Vor-
stellungen” [“archetypal representations”] and “der Archetypus an
sich” [“the archetype in-itself”].27
The way both Kant and Jung deal with this unknowable x is filled with
seeming inconsistencies, complexity, and, perhaps most importantly,
ambiguity; but for Jung, Kant’s epistemic limits were essential in his own
theory of cognition. Jung cites Kant as the real basis of his philosophi-
cal education “insisting that whoever did not understand Kant’s theory
of cognition ‘cannot understand my psychology.’ He despaired that peo-
ple confused his psychology with metaphysics”28 and he continued to
claim that his thought never exceeded the limits imposed on our possible
knowledge by Kant. Kant’s considerable influence on Jung’s psychology
has been traced by Germanist Paul Bishop who notes that “Jung referred
to Kant nearly twenty times – more than any other philosopher” in his
published correspondence and “repeatedly [tried] to assimilate the fun-
damental notions of analytical psychology to the key concepts of critical
philosophy of Kant.”29
Bishop further states that in Jung’s letters he “frequently aligned himself
with Kant to defend the epistemological stance of analytical psychology.”
In a letter of 8 April 1932 to the aesthetician and philosopher August Vet-
ter, Jung wrote: “In a certain sense I could say of the collective Uncon-
scious exactly what Kant said of the Ding an Sich – that it is merely a
negative borderline concept.”30 In a letter dated 8 February 1941 to Josef
Goldbrunner, a Catholic theologian, “Jung declared himself to be episte-
mologically speaking a Kantian.”31
It is abundantly clear that Kant’s epistemic limits were a bulwark for

Jung and he used them again and again in defense of claims that he was a
metaphysician, and that his thoughts were filled with transcendent judg-
ments. Jung, however, did admit that “in spite of Kant and epistemol-
ogy [such judgments] crop up again and again and can evidently not be
suppressed.”32
For Bishop “such ‘transcendental judgments’ could be least of all sup-
pressed in Jung’s own work,”33 and he goes on to enumerate a number
of ways in which Jung exceeds the epistemic limits set down by Kant.
For example, in Jung’s “ ‘Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype’
(1938/1954), Jung went so far as to suggest that the critical philosophy
of Kant had prepared the way for his own analytical psychology which
now, so he implied, had superseded the first Critique.”34 In this assessment
I believe Bishop is correct. Despite Jung’s protestations that he is not a
metaphysician, his “psychology” is always on the edge of transgressing
the limits declared by Kant, at least in respect to the limits set by the first
Critique.
While Jung thought himself to be a Kantian, others have shown the ways
in which he was (or is) “a most un-Kantian Kantian.”35 While I believe this
is not a totally unfair assessment of Jung, I think it is also important to
consider that in some ways Kant himself was a most un-Kantian Kantian;
and perhaps so by philosophical necessity. By this I mean that Kant him-
self was not always consistent. Rockmore has noted that the thing-in-itself
is subject to multiple interpretations which find textual support in Kant’s
writings, ranging from representationism to constructivism.36
While seemingly conflicting points of view run throughout Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, his notion of the Ding an Sich and the tension
between Phenomenon and Noumenon is a high point. While Jung accepted
the limits of Kant’s epistemology, I do not believe he adequately under-
stood the complex philosophical problematic implicit in it, or that he was
aware of the numerous inconsistencies in Kant’s position. Nor do I think
Kant himself ever adequately resolved the differing strands of thought in
his critical epistemology.
In pointing to Kant’s inconsistencies, it is not with the intent to empha-
size his errors but rather to read him in a Derridian manner and as Rock-
more has, seeking in the margins of his text the anomalies which enliven
the continuing philosophical tensions implicit in Kant’s philosophy. Rock-
more, referring to the constructivist moment in Kant’s epistemological
position “has the enormous merit of solving the problem of knowledge in

another, very different, potentially more promising and exciting way.”37
I believe that Jung consciously or unconsciously was immersed in this ten-
sion between epistemic possibilities as is all post-Kantian thinking. From
an analytic point of view, unresolved philosophical problems like psychic
complexes repeat themselves in continuing generations of philosophy and
psychology.
Post-Kantian philosophers have struggled with the problem of the thing-
in-itself in many creative ways. I would like to consider a number of issues
that I believe are opened up by looking at some of the problematic con-
tained in Kant’s distinction of phenomenon and noumenon, and in his idea
of a thing-in-itself.
A major point in Kant’s critique is that when we try to apply pure reason
beyond its phenomenal limit to things-in-themselves, we come up against
an absolute limit. We have no way to know if our mental apparatus can go
beyond itself to “real” or noumenal objects as they exist in themselves in
some trans-empirical world. We are restricted to what can be experienced
in time and space, and there is no legitimate way to get beyond our epis-
temological limit. Taking Kant’s Critique in this strict way seems to lead
to a profound skepticism except in so far as we are satisfied to restrict our
knowledge to “phenomena,” or, in Jung’s case, to a “psychological” one.
For Jung, if we are unable to know the real world, what we can know is our
psychological experience of something that is unknowable. In this sense,
Kant and Jung are in agreement.
In his Alchemical Studies, Jung states that the thing-in-itself is merely a
“negative borderline concept.”
Every statement about the transcendental is to be avoided because it is

only a laughable presumption on the part of the human mind uncon-
scious of its limitations. Therefore, when God or the Tao is named an
impulse of the soul, or psychic state, something has been said about
the knowable only, but nothing about the unknowable, about which
nothing can be determined.38
Here for Kant – as well as for Jung – a seemingly unbridgeable gap is opened
up between knowable phenomena and the unknowable thing-in-itself.39
This reading of Kant’s thing-in-itself stimulates metaphysical desire and
leaves the concept open to multiple fantasies or, in psychoanalytic terms,
multiple projections. The thing-in-itself can be imagined as “absolute oth-

erness” or “alien” or as the mystery of the “unconscious,” which Jung
simply defined as the unknown and ultimate unknowable. Such designa-
tions recall the medieval speculations about the mysterious inability to
name God and the traditions of negative theology as well as the alchemical
procedure of searching for the arcane substance by defining the unknown
by the greater unknown. Such mystical ideas, fruitful as they are from one
point of view, give us no knowledge in Kant’s sense.
In contrast, as we have seen, Kant sought to limit such speculations
in his Critique; but if his idea of the thing-in-itself set limits to dog-
matic metaphysics and perhaps to our narcissism, it also kept open the
door to metaphysical desire by its mysterious draw beyond the world
of phenomenon. Ultimately, neither Kant nor Jung was fully content to
simply stay within such absolute epistemic limits and both continued to
struggle in their own ways with human limits, transcendence, and the
tension between them.
Kant insisted “that in his theory he intends to navigate between dog-
matic affirmation and skeptical doubt,”40 between materialism and ideal-
ism, and Jung, like Kant,
suggests that while we may never know more than what the psyche
presents to us, we must assume a transcendental reality – a thing-in-
itself – which lies in back of and causes the phenomena which we
experience. “One must assume that the . . . ideas . . . rest on something
actual.”41
Kant also held that there was something “actual” or “real” behind phenom-
ena; the ontological question remained a continuing tension throughout his
work.
While Kant continued to maintain that we cannot know things-in-them-
selves, since knowledge is limited to possible experience, he also held that
a thing-in-itself can be thought, “provided that it satisfies the condition of
a possible thought which is not to be self-contradictory.”42 In the Prole-
gomena to Any Future Metaphysics, “Kant uses things-in-themselves syn-
onymously with noumena, namely in the application of pure concepts of
the understanding ‘beyond objects of experience’ to ‘things-in-themselves
(noumena),’ ”43 and in the Critique of Pure Reason he likewise speaks
of things-in-themselves “as potential ideas of reason, and speaks of ‘the
unconditioned which reason, by necessity and by right, demands in things

in themselves.’ ”44 Caygill notes that “[w]hat distinguishes the things-in-
themselves from the other forms of noumena are their property of being
the ‘true correlate of sensibility.’ ”45 Here Kant assumes in a way similar
to Jung that there “must be a correlate which can be thought, even if not
known.”46
Caygill also notes that on critical principles Kant can only say that
the “thing in itself may be a correlate of sensibility. That he does not do
so arises from his resistance to the ‘absurd conclusion that there can be
appearance without anything that appears.’ ”47 Barker notes “that a world
constructed merely of ideas could not by itself possess the power to be,”48
and A.C. Ewing in addition states that for Kant: “if there were nothing but
phenomena, then the intellectual ideals in question and the ethical ideals
which led Kant to belief in God could not be fulfilled, therefore the ideas
of reason at least suggest a reality beyond.”49
In all, there are many passages in Kant’s work that indicate commitment
to a reality beyond appearances. Still to his critics this position remains
vague, problematic, unclear, and indeterminate. Ewing notes a number of
such inconsistencies. He states that:
we cannot (even) say that things-in-themselves exist unless we mean

something by the term thing-in-itself. But if we mean anything by
the term, we are asserting something however vague and slight, about
their nature when we assert them to exist, and therefore it is inconsist-
ent to (even) describe them as unknowable, as Kant does.50
Ewing points to the paradox of claiming to know that there is in fact a real-
ity behind appearances or “that it was of such a nature that we could know
nothing about it without already inconsistently presupposing knowledge
of its nature.”51
Such inconsistencies multiply when what seems to be a common and
natural attitude comes up against critical philosophical distinctions. In
simply speaking of the “reality” or “existence” of a thing-in-itself, we
must apply Kant’s categories of the understanding beyond the phenom-
enal realm in which they are said to apply. Kant also inconsistently goes
beyond the idea of the mere existence of the thing-in-itself to imagining
it as the cause of appearances. Again in such moments Kant is “guilty of
extending the category of causality beyond the realm of appearances,” a
procedure which, on the one hand, “he had explicitly repudiated,”52 but on
the other, there is “textual support”53 for this in his writing.
The problem of causality continues to be debated in philosophical cir-
cles. For some scholars to apply causality to the thing-in-itself remains an
impossibility in Kant’s terms, while for others, such as Warren, it is essen-
tial to do so, and in his book, according to Watkins, he argues that
insofar as the category of reality can be applied to the sensible qual-

ities of objects, it can be distinguished from the pure, unschema-
tized category (i.e., represented through the understanding alone) if
and only if the sensible qualities or realities it represents are causal
powers.54
Kant’s text is filled with such tensions, and while for some modern
Kant scholars such contradictions are reduced by the fact that things-in-
themselves are not intuited but only thought,55 for others such distinctions
are still problematic. Perhaps it is the case that through such inconsisten-
cies and complexity Kant walks a thin line between sensibility and under-
standing, knowledge and faith, skeptical doubt and dogmatic affirmation,
between phenomenon and noumenon, limit and transcendence.
As noted earlier, Kant situated his work on the shoreline between dry
land and the raging sea, between sanity and madness. For the most part
Kant’s work is dry and obsessional, while at other less frequent moments it
takes flight as if on Plato’s “wings of ideas” and ventures forth beyond the
experienced world into that “empty space of pure understanding.”56 Still,
if Kant’s work is anything, it is the work of a philosophical genius which
for the most part keeps its balance by staying in the tension between the
opposites and hesitating to fly off in the traditional directions of “dogmatic
affirmation and skeptical doubt.”57 At one point in the Critique Kant hints
at bridging the gaps between “sensibility” and “understanding” by sug-
gesting the possibility that “[h]uman cognition has two stems . . . which
perhaps spring from a common root, though one is unknown to us.”58 By
hesitating before the unknown, Kant maintains his dualism, but holds out
a hint, for those after him, who might take up the perilous journey into
metaphysics.
Heidegger, though also claiming to avoid traditional metaphysics, finds
this common root (of sensibility and understanding) in the transcendental
imagination,59 and Jung, like Heidegger (whom he disliked), also leans
away from dualism, likewise seeing the “opposites” as rooted in one

world, the unus mundus. But, like Kant, for Jung this unifying principle
remained unknown if not in principle unknowable.
In a passage that I believe links Kant to Jung, Kant states in regard to
the thing-itself “we are completely ignorant as to whether it is to be found
in us – or for that matter, outside us.”60 Likewise Jung’s notion of the
unconscious was paradoxical and although it is common to imagine that
the unconscious refers to something inside the subject, Jung often spoke
as if we are inside the unconscious. It was this fundamental paradox that
characterized Jung’s idea of the unconscious and what he meant by the
“objective psyche.” For Jung:
The psyche is the starting-point of all human experience, and all the
knowledge we have gained eventually leads back to it. The psyche is
the beginning and end of all cognition. It is not only the object of its
science, but the subject also . . . on the one hand there is a constant
doubt as to the possibility of its being a science at all, while on the
other hand psychology acquires the right to state a theoretical problem
the solution of which will be one of the most difficult tasks for a future
philosophy.61
Like Kant, Jung lived in an unresolved tension of opposites, though his

work was aimed at overcoming them. Also, like Kant, while Jung was
always in danger of contradiction and of overstepping the epistemic
boundaries he espoused, I believe he more fundamentally lived in an
ongoing tension, and thus he resisted metaphysical solutions and followed
a critical path of interminable analysis.
Kant and Jung lived in an unresolved tension between limit and tran-
scendence; both felt the power and importance of a noumenal reality
beyond appearances, and approached it in their respective ways, all the
while trying to avoid the pitfalls of dogmatic metaphysics. Possessed by
what might be called a metaphysical desire, both Kant and Jung were con-
tinually drawn to the edge and beyond their self-imposed limits and, as a
result, their voluminous works were filled with inconsistencies. It might
be possible to imagine that if they each had more carefully followed the
discipline they espoused, their works would be more consistent, but, if
so, it remains a question if in so doing they would have, as Kant believed,
brought “human reason to complete satisfaction in . . . its desire to know.”62
This desire to know was a continuing impetus in post-Kantian philoso-

phy as well as in post-Jungian psychology. Rockmore points out that in
Kant’s wake
most able thinkers believed his position was incomplete and needed
to be carried beyond Kant in order to complete the Copernican revo-
lution in philosophy. If this is his standard, then arguably the most
important later innovation, the biggest step in developing and com-
pleting Kant’s contribution, lies in the post-Kantian transformation of
the Kantian approach to knowledge from an ahistorical to a historical
conception.63
As Rockmore notes,
[t]he introduction of a historical dimension into the problem of knowl-

edge totally transforms it. At least normatively, Kant’s transcendental
study of the general conditions of knowledge points to an a priori con-
ception of knowledge unrelated to time and place, hence ahistorical.
This changes immediately in Kant’s wake. The post-Kantian idealist
line of development up to Hegel leads to a thoroughly historical con-
ception of knowledge claims indexed to time and place, hence to the
historical moment. One way to put the point is that in building on Fichte
and Schelling, Hegel rejects Kantian representationalism in favor of
Kantian constructivism, which he understands not as an a priori but as
an a posteriori construction by finite human beings in historical space.64
Movement from Kant to Hegel resonates with the aspects of Jung that
exceed Kant’s limitations with regard to the limits of knowledge. In the
next section I will examine Hegel’s struggle with what he considers the
mistake of stopping at the notion of the thing-in-itself which Hegel consid-
ers to be an error. Hegel’s philosophy is thus useful in understanding the
way that Jung also exceeds these limits and is also a post-Kantian.
Hegel’s introduction to the Phenomenology of

Spirit: from clouds of error to the heaven of
truth
This historical philosophical move is well illustrated in the Introduction
to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a
difficult text that has been read in many different ways and there are end-
less commentaries about it. It was Hegel’s first great work and his Intro-
duction to this work is instructive with regard to Hegel’s departure from
the limitations of Kant’s epistemology and gives us a view of the direction
of post-Kantian thought.
One way of reading Hegel’s Introduction might be imagined in a Hege-
lian fashion; that is, that Hegel leaps into the midst of a philosophical issue
beginning with the thesis at the heart of Kant’s epistemology, then entering
into a dialectical engagement with it through a process of intense negation,
and finally by offering articulation that both preserves something of Kant’s
original project and goes beyond it to envision a new scientific project for
philosophy.
Hegel begins his Introduction by elaborating what he calls a “natural
assumption” in philosophy: that before we deal with cognition of what
is, an ontological concern, we must first understand cognition, the episte-
mological instrument or medium through which we can discover the goal
of philosophy as an object of knowledge. With Kant in mind and while
acknowledging the naturalness of the above procedure, Hegel also con-
fesses an uneasiness with Kant’s procedure and ultimately concludes that
it is unscientific. Hegel does not leap ahead to this conclusion, but, follow-
ing Kant, he acknowledges that cognition is a particular “faculty of . . .
kind and scope” and that “without a more precise definition of its nature
and limits, we might grasp clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth.”65
Hegel’s project is aimed at this “heaven of truth.”
Next, Hegel articulates the concerns of Kant in his Critique of Pure
Reason, noting that, without understanding the limits of Reason, one falls
prey to the Metaphysical fantasy that one has arrived at the knowledge
of a mind-independent reality, a “thing-in-itself.” For a time, it is diffi-
cult to discern exactly where Hegel is in agreement with Kant and where
he differs, but as the Introduction continues Hegel’s seemingly ambiva-
lent response turns to a scathing if thinly veiled critique of the outcome
of Kant’s philosophical position, noting that it is ultimately absurd to
assume an absolute boundary between cognition and the so-called mind-
independent object. For Hegel, what is absurd is that we “make use of a
means at all” ultimately putting into question the idea of cognition as a
medium.66 For Hegel, focusing on cognition as a medium is born of mis-
trust and, turning mistrust on itself, he asks “whether this fear of error is
not just the error itself?”67 What Hegel seems to have in mind is that, in
the grip of fear, our reflection focuses on a self-conscious concern with
cognition, overemphasizing and splitting off our consciousness from its

object. Thus, we presuppose that cognition stands outside the truth that it
seeks. Ultimately for Hegel, this so-called fear of error is actually a “fear
of the truth.”68 In short, Hegel destabilizes and challenges our notions of
cognition, of subject and object, and of the Absolute. For him, these mean-
ings remain “hazy” and to use them is deceptive and empty in the face of
the recognition that science has not yet unfolded a true understanding of
their meaning.69
For Hegel, a scientific philosophy must liberate itself from thinking in
terms which only serve to maintain a separation of cognition from the
true Absolute and creates an incapacity for a science to go forward with
the hard work of what Hegel was to later call the labor of the concept.
Instead of refuting these ideas of a prolegomena to metaphysics, Hegel
simply rejects them “out of hand as adventitious and arbitrary.”70 In so
doing, he turns his project away from Kant’s natural attitude, noting that
Science must now liberate itself and reflect on “how knowledge makes its
appearance.”71
Hegel considers his new focus a science “free and self-moving” in its
own particular shape, as opposed to Kant’s focus on phenomenal knowl-
edge of its object.72 While Hegel remains critical of Kant’s position, he is
also able to preserve it as a historical standpoint on a path of natural con-
sciousness and as a station on the way of the soul which journeys through
its own configurations. For Hegel, the journey is a process of purification
and a preparation for the life of the spirit. Through such a process, the
spirit can finally achieve a completed experience of itself, the awareness
of what it already is in itself. On the one hand, we can interpret this move
as an abandonment of Kant’s project, but from another perspective Kant’s
philosophy is a dead end and can lead no further.
Hegel continues to juxtapose Kant’s natural one-sided and incomplete
pattern of consciousness (which for him can only end in skepticism) with
his own critique targeting Kant’s phenomenalism and the structure of
Kant’s epistemology. For Hegel, this move liberates the spirit for the first
time to examine what truth really is. This truth emerges from challeng-
ing Kant’s thesis, a thesis which must suffer the negation of true despair.
For Hegel, Kantian consciousness is negated and shown to be a bare
abstraction, a nothingness that leads only to an abyss. Moving beyond this
abstract nothingness, consciousness, like a phoenix arising from the fire of
negation, finds a new and determinate form, which continues “unhalting”
in its historical progression toward the goal.73 Knowledge no longer needs

to go beyond itself when Notion corresponds to its object, and the object
to the Notion. Short of such a situation, there is “no satisfaction . . . to be
found at any of the stations on the way.”74 For Hegel, consciousness is rest-
lessly driven beyond itself by something else. It is a process in which our
positions are always uprooted and surpassed. Formal positions must suffer
a violence which kills, but it is a death necessary for the advancement of
consciousness. It is due to this violent threat that consciousness retreats
from truth and clings to its former position in unthinking inertia, but the
unrest drives consciousness forward as well.
Hegel then takes another critical swipe at Kant who, at the end of his
Critique, speaks of the importance of a burning zeal for truth. For Hegel,
this zeal seems only to hide from itself and others a clinging to its position
which is only vanity. In essence, one might say, Hegel considers Kant a
philosophical narcissist who in his “conceit . . . gloat[s]s over [his] own
[barren] understanding” – Kant flees from the Universal and is stuck in
maintaining the structure of an in-itself.75 For Hegel, what is needed is
an “examination of the reality of cognition,” but as yet no one has devel-
oped a standard by which science can be compared to phenomenal knowl-
edge.76 It is Hegel’s own analysis that sets the stage for understanding this
relationship.
Hegel approaches this relationship by examining an interesting paradox
or contradiction: that consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself
from something and at the same time relates itself to it. Hegel notes that
this something can be said to exist for consciousness, and that the determi-
nate aspect of this relating or of the being of something for consciousness
is knowing. But a contradiction seems to exist in that we distinguish this
being-for-another from being-in-itself. Whatever is related to knowledge
or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside
of this relationship. It is this “posited. . . being-in-itself [that] is called
truth.”77
Hegel now makes an interesting observation that “if we inquire into the
truth of knowledge, it seems that we are asking what knowledge is in itself.
Yet in this inquiry knowledge is our object, something that exists for us.”78
A certain shift in focus seems to take place that hinges on Hegel’s recog-
nition that the so-called thing-in-itself is posited by consciousness. This
move begins the restructuring of the true relationship of consciousness
to its object. The nature of the object seems to undergo change such that
consciousness, as it relates to its object, is now an object that “falls within

it;” that is, any “comparison of consciousness” with its object is also a
comparison “with itself.”79 In short, “the dissociation, or this semblance
of dissociation” between consciousness and its object “is overcome by
[recognizing] the nature of the object we are investigating.”80 This theme
is refined and repeated throughout the Introduction and Hegel can be seen
attempting to both acknowledge and leave behind the thing-in-itself as
Kant understood it. For Hegel, within consciousness “one thing exists for
another,” yet, “at the same time, this other is to consciousness not merely
for it;” this other “is also outside of this relationship, or exists in itself.”81
Here I find myself asking how can it be the case that something that con-
sciousness determines can also be outside of this relationship? For Hegel,
this is possible by virtue of the difference in consciousness between some-
thing that appears to consciousness as other (in-itself) and not merely for
it, but is also at the same time for it at another moment of truth. This dif-
ference allows the otherness of being-in-itself to be a standard which con-
sciousness sets up for itself and by which it measures what it knows. Hegel
puts it this way: “If we designate knowledge as the Notion, but the essence
or the True as what exists, or the object, then the examination consists in
seeing whether the Notion corresponds to the object.”82 In short, Hegel
posits a kind of correspondence theory of truth, not between consciousness
and some mind-independent object, but a coherence that exists within a
revised Notion of consciousness itself. Thus, for Hegel, the object we are
investigating is knowledge-consciousness, a consciousness that can posit
an essence or thing-in-itself.
Ultimately, what consciousness examines is its own Self, a re-envisioned
Self no longer simply understood in the traditional sense of the “subject”
examining an “object.” What Hegel seems to have in mind is an intrinsic
relationship of two moments of consciousness in which one moment is
to perceive something in itself and in another the recognition that the in-
itself is for consciousness. In Hegel’s description to this point, it is hard
to overcome the Kantian idea that the thing-in-itself cannot be something
for consciousness, though for Kant it is something that can be thought.
But Hegel seems to have something different in mind than the thought of
the thing-in-itself. He notes that it does not seem possible to “get behind
the object as it exists for consciousness so as to examine what the object
is in itself.”83 If we cannot do this, we have no standard by which to test
our knowledge and say that we know something. But Hegel again makes
the point that the distinction we have been concerned about – between the
in-itself and knowledge of it – is already inherent “in the very fact that
consciousness knows an object at all. Something is for it the in-itself; and
knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness,” characterizes
the very essence of consciousness as a free-flowing movement between
moments of its truth.84 It is on the basis of these moments as the move-
ment between them that the examination rests. If the comparison between
these two moments reveals that they do not correspond with one another,
it would seem that “consciousness must alter its knowledge to make it
conform to the object.”85
So, it would seem to be the case that even though both moments of con-
sciousness, knowledge, and object-in-itself are within consciousness, they
may well be out of tune with each other. Consciousness can mistake itself
for what it is not or can recognize itself accurately. For Hegel, it is also the
case that as knowledge is altered the object itself is altered as well: “as the
knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to
this knowledge.”86 In short, Hegel suggests that knowledge and object are
co-relative.
This recognition radically changes what was initially (by Kant) taken to
be an in-itself. What was previously taken to be an in-itself proves to be
not an in-itself, but rather an in-itself that is for consciousness. This change
of object is part of what Hegel considers the “dialectical movement” of
consciousness – “which affects both its knowledge and its object” in an
unfolding and developmental process “called experience.”87 Hegel rec-
ognizes that this movement shows the object to be ambiguous. The first
object, seen as in-itself, is altered, as a developing knowledge now recog-
nizes this object as an “in-itself only for consciousness.”88 This new object
is for Hegel the “True” object or “essence” and it contains the limiting
structure or “nothingness of the first.”89 It is now “what experience has
made of it.”90
This way of looking at what we know suggests that “something [is] con-
tributed by us, by means of which the succession of experiences through
which consciousness passes is raised into a scientific progression.”91 In
every case for Hegel the result of a former state or mode of knowing must
be seen as the ground out of which the new progression emerges. The
essence of the emergent object is now something different from what
appeared at the preceding stage. For Hegel, it is this fact that guides the
phenomenology of patterns of consciousness in a necessary historical
sequence. This process seems to go on unconsciously or, as Hegel puts

it, “behind the back of consciousness.”92 What consciousness is aware of
is both the “content . . . of what presents itself to us” as well as a “move-
ment and a process of becoming.”93 Hegel notes that “[b]ecause of this
necessity,” the necessity of the unfolding phenomenology of conscious-
ness, “the way to Science is itself already Science, and hence, in virtue of
its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness.”94
For Hegel, self-reflective experience, the experiential unfolding which
consciousness goes through, is an “entire system” of the unfolding truth.95
The Phenomenology of Spirit is not a series of “abstract moments,” but
determinate patterns of a consciousness which presses “forward to its
true existence.”96 Finally, consciousness can and “will arrive at a point at
which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened [as Kant was] with
something alien.”97 At a certain point “appearance becomes identical with
essence. . . . [W]hen consciousness itself grasps this its own essence, it will
signify the nature of absolute knowledge itself.”98
Hegel’s alchemy: splendid isolation

or fullness of soul
The work of complex thinkers lends itself to multiple interpretations. This
seems obviously the case for both Jung and Hegel, as well as for Hill-
man and Giegerich – so much so that it has not been uncommon to hear
the queries: “Which Jung?” or “Which Hegel?”, “Which Hillman?” or
“Which Giegerich?” Cyril O’Regan, in the introduction to his book The
Heterodox Hegel, refers to Wilhelm Raimund Beyer’s “parade of pictures
of Hegel, from revolutionary Hegel to fascist Hegel, from a catholic Hegel
to an [sic] Protestant evangelical Hegel.”99 Likewise, Jung’s work has been
subject to multiple interpretations. From critics and debunkers Stern and
Noll to classical analysts Edinger and Von Franz, Jung has been seen as
devil and saint, Eurocentric racist, and compassionate wise man. It is not
surprising that for many readers Jung and Hegel are difficult to under-
stand. Wolfgang Zucker has remarked that in the English-speaking world,
Hegel’s books “have the reputation of being as abstruse as medieval texts
on alchemy or astrology.”100
While Zucker refers to alchemy/astrology simply in passing as a way
of emphasizing the difficulty of reading Hegel, it is ironic that both Hegel
and Jung had more than a passing involvement with alchemy and other
esoteric subjects. One might even conceive that certain of their texts are
really not unlike alchemical treatises in that they are difficult and obscure,
and aim at the transformation of a simple substance into a more differenti-
ated and complex one. In this regard, it is interesting that Glenn Alexander
Magee, a Hegelian scholar and controversial interpreter of Hegel’s work,
refers to Eric Voegelin as describing “the Phenomenology of Spirit as a
grimoire . . . as an alchemical manual, an Emerald Tablet for the modern
age.”101 In a similar spirit, Magee provocatively states that:
Hegel is not a philosopher. He is no lover or seeker of wisdom – he

believes he has found it. Hegel writes in the preface to the Phenom-
enology of Spirit, “To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Sci-
ence, to the goal where it can lay aside the title of ‘love of knowing’
and be actual knowledge – that is what I have set before me.” By the
end of the Phenomenology, Hegel claims to have arrived at Absolute
Knowledge, which he identifies with wisdom.102
For Magee:
Hegel’s claim to have attained wisdom is completely contrary to the

original Greek conception of philosophy as the love of wisdom, that
is, the ongoing pursuit rather than the final possession of wisdom.103
For Magee, Hegel’s claim to wisdom is “fully consistent with the ambi-
tions of the Hermetic tradition.”104 He finds many parallels between
Hegel’s thoughts and alchemy noting that “[a] systematic parallel can be
drawn between each aspect of the [alchemical] opus and Hegel’s philo-
sophical project.”105 The goal of working through Hegel’s philosophy is
for Magee what is necessary for the achievement of Absolute Knowing,
which like the Philosophers’ Stone “will constitute a perfected form of liv-
ing in the world; in the words of H.S. Harris [a Hegel scholar], ‘an actual
experience of living in the light of the eternal day.’ ”106 The achievement,
Magee notes, draws the adepts to the opus.
All philosophy, including Hegel’s, presupposes that at least some men

yearn to know themselves and the world fully. Just as the magicians
of old – men such as Agrippa and Bruno – believed that knowledge
of the right incantations could give one tremendous power, so Hegel
believes that knowledge of the “magic words” that evoke the Abso-
lute can empower the individual by reconciling him with the world.
Kojève defines the Hegelian wise man as the man of both perfect
self-consciousness and perfect self-satisfaction. Wisdom and self-sat-
isfaction do not consist, however, in ego-aggrandizement, but in the
transcendence of ego and identification with Spirit as such. Kojeve
writes: “For Self-consciousness to exist, for philosophy to exist, there
must be transcendence of self with respect to self as given.” H.S. Har-
ris notes that “In [Hegel’s] view we have to annihilate our own self-
hood in order to enter the sphere where Philosophy herself speaks.”107
Magee does not want to suggest a simple or magical attainment of wisdom.

On the contrary, he sees Hegel’s philosophy “as a real experience, stretch-
ing all the capacities of those who embark upon it: ‘for it is an extremely
tortuous way, to abandon what one is used to and possesses now, and to
retrace one’s steps toward the old primordial things.”108 Magee emphasizes
how working through both Hegel and alchemy is like an initiation that
“can stretch all of one’s capacities and be . . . a highway of despair.”109
In Hegel’s philosophy, as in alchemy, the adepts must purify themselves
by passing through the fire of negation. Magee makes an analogy to the
phenomenological crucible, where “Spirit is separated from its impurities
and, literally, perfected.”110 In each phase, there is impurity and imperfec-
tion, a flawed seed that is the prima materia necessary for the work to lead
to Absolute Spirit. For Hegel, the purification process is, in part, catalyzed
by the mystical process, but, in addition, there is for Hegel a
secret ingredient necessary to synthesize Absolute Spirit. . . . [H]e has

placed the historical forms of Spirit into his alembic and, through the
fire of dialectic, has caused them to reorganize into a form that reveals
the necessity within their apparent contingency. The Phenomenology
is the nigredo, the stage in which the material (man) has its imperfec-
tions burned off. In Hegel the albedo, the pure white stone from which
the Philosopher’s Stone can be made, is Absolute Knowing, the pure
aetherial consciousness from which the entire system develops.111
If I read this passage correctly, Magee appears to be saying that the

achievement of purity in and through the forms of the Phenomenology
and in which all imperfections are “burned off” is a prima materia for
the development of both the Philosophers’ Stone and Absolute Knowing,

which he defines as a “pure aetherial consciousness,” which is similar to
Giegerich’s understanding of the spirit of Mercurius. It would appear that
there are two levels of purity described in this passage: (1) the albedo/
white stone and a furthering of the process leading to (2) the Philosophers’
Stone and pure aetherial consciousness. In both cases, the results appear to
privilege purity. It will be important to differentiate these levels between
the white stone and the Philosophers’ Stone in order to further evaluate
Hegel’s notion of Absolute Knowing.
For Jung, as for many alchemists, the stage of purity of thought lacks
differentiation and is called a unio mentalis, a united mental condition
that remains pure and rises above difference. Perhaps it is a condition in
which “living in the light of the eternal day” (Harris) is living in a light
where all cows are white and where all darkness has been purged from
consciousness.
For Hillman, too, such states of purity might be conceived to take place
in the unio mentalis. Such a whitened consciousness leads to the convic-
tion of the “mental” world as separate and pure. He writes: “In this tepid
and shadowless lunar light, everything seems to fit. . . . Having absorbed
and unified all hues into the one white, the mirror of silvered subjectivity
expands to reflect all things at the expense of differentiation of itself.”112
Hillman notes that the albedo should not be confused with the inno-
cent whiteness of the prima materia or of virgin’s milk, “the candida of
unmarked and unremarking innocence” since the “albedo whiteness [is]
achieved after the soul’s long exile in [the darkness of the] nigredo. . . . In
alchemy, albedo refers to both a complete separation and a complete con-
junction: the separation between sulfur (concrete urgency) and mercury
(psychic fusibility and intellectual volatility),” but still “[t]he conjunction
occurs in mind, in the unio mentalis of soul and spirit.”113
The condition of mind, the unio mentalis, appears in alchemy as a neces-
sary but insufficient stage of the opus. According to Dorn, the unio men-
talis is significant in overcoming the instinctual pull of internal bodily
desires and the influence they have on the mind.114 According to Jung,
the aim of this separation [then] was to free the mind of the influence
of “the bodily appetites and the heart’s affections,” and to establish a
spiritual position which is supraordinate to the turbulent sphere of the
body.115
Edinger, quoting Jung, notes: “This leads at first to a dissociation of the

personality and a violation of the merely natural man.”116 He points out that
this separation is only a “preliminary step, in itself a clear blend of Stoic
and Christian psychology. . . [and it] is indispensable for the differentiation
of consciousness.”117 Thus, for Edinger, “the unio mentalis corresponds
precisely to the philosophers who make dying their profession.”118 It is the
accomplishment of this necessity that Jung captures in his statement, “the
experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.”119 The importance of
this process of separation is taken up by Edinger in Chapter 7 of Anatomy
of the Psyche entitled “Separatio.”120
At the end of Edinger’s chapter, he notes that the “separatio is not a final
process.”121 It is rather an “intermediate operation that is a prerequisite for
the greater coniunctio.”122
Figure 10.3
I mage of the alchemical separatio. From Michael Maier, Atalanta
Fugiens, Emblem 8, 1617.
The move to separate and purify soul and body has a long history. I will
follow Edinger here in quoting a long passage from Plato’s Phaedo:
“But does not purification consist in this, as was said in a former part
of our discourse, in separating as much as possible the soul from the
body, and in accustoming it to gather and collect itself by itself on all
sides apart from the body, and to dwell, so far as it can, both now and
hereafter, alone by itself, delivered, as it were, from the shackles of
the body?”
“Certainly,” he replied.
“Is this, then, called death, this deliverance and separation of the
soul from the body?”
“Assuredly,” he answered.
“But, as we affirmed, those who pursue philosophy rightly are espe-
cially and alone desirous to deliver it; and this is the very study of
philosophers, the deliverance and separation of the soul from the body,
is it not?”
“It appears so.”
“Then, as I said at first, would it not be ridiculous for a man who
has endeavored throughout his life to live as near as possible to death,
then, when death arrives, to grieve? Would not this be ridiculous?”
“How should it not?”
“In reality, then, Simmias,” he continued, “those who pursue philos-
ophy rightly, study to die; and to them, of all men, death is least formi-
dable. Judge from this. Since they altogether hate the body and desire
to keep the soul by itself, would it not be irrational if, when this comes
to pass, they should be afraid and grieve, and not be glad to go to that
place where, on their arrival, they may hope to obtain that which they
longed for throughout life? But they longed for wisdom, and to be
freed from association with that which they hated. . . . and shall one
who really loves wisdom, and firmly cherishes this very hope, that he
shall nowhere else attain it in a manner worthy of the name, except in
Hades, be grieved at dying, and not gladly go there? We must think
that he would gladly go, my friend, if he be in truth a philosopher;
for he will be firmly persuaded of this, that he will nowhere else than
there attain wisdom in its purity; and if this be so, would it not be very
irrational, as I just now said, if such a man were to be afraid of death?”
“Very much so, by Jupiter!” he replied.123
For Hillman as for Jung, in the condition of the albedo, in which purity is
attained by separation and rising above worldly matters, something is still
missing. Jung had noted that in the “state of ‘whiteness’ one does not live
in the true sense of the word.”124 The unio mentalis is an “abstract, ideal
state.”125
In order to make it come alive it must have “blood,” it must have what
the alchemists call the rubedo, the “redness” of life. Only the total
experience of being can transform this ideal state of the albedo into a
fully human mode of existence. Blood alone can reanimate a glorious
state of consciousness in which the last trace of blackness is dissolved,
in which the devil no longer has an autonomous existence but rejoins
the profound unity of the psyche. Then the opus magnum is finished:
the human soul is completely integrated.126
Edinger likewise refers to the Philosophers’ Stone as associated with red-

ness and as such “was not only the prima materia, but also the goal of the
opus.”127
For Hillman what is notably absent from the whiteness of the albedo “is
the solar power of sophic sulfur, which gives body to the clarified mind
and is necessary for the rubedo.”128 For Hillman, the whiteness of the
albedo resists change. Once an intellectual paradigm is established and all
things fit together, a rigidity sets in against external impurities; and yet,
for Hillman, such “impurities” are a necessary part of “purity,” so that a
system does not become dogmatic and lifeless. Hillman’s way of speak-
ing about it is that the “whiteness” needs to be spoiled, needs to yellow,
to rot and putrify, and in so doing to take on “body, flavor, fatness.”129
“White resists this physical substantiation, for it feels like a regression to
the vulgar drivenness of earlier moments in the work” which reflection has
“finally sophisticated and pacified.”130 For the alchemist Figulus, says Hill-
man, “whiteness remains imperfect unless it be brought by heat to highest
redness and, in fact, remains ‘dead’ until that occurs.”131 Reddening brings
into existence an imperfect perfection, a perfection that is not perfect. For
Hillman then, as well as for other alchemical authors, “yellowing is more
than a spoiling of the white. It is also its brighter, more vivifying illumina-
tion, a richer, more expansive clarity.”132 The yellowing for Hillman is not
a simple return to the unilluminated bodily emotion, but a “transmutation
of the mind, a change in the intellect,” a change that “cannot be captured
by whitened reflection.”133 The change in the intellect brought about by

yellowing is described by Hillman as:
not the usual intellect, dried with concepts, abstracted, pulled away;
this is the fat intellect, physical, concrete, emotional, fermenting with
instinctual interiority, an unctuous passion. Having first been whit-
ened, its desire is not simple and driven, but desire aware of itself
through intellectual fervor – an intellectus agens – dawnings of the
winged mind, sure as gold. No longer that separation between mer-
cury and sulfur, between fantasy flights and dense emotional body.
In the carcass of the lion a new sweetness, thick and yellow and
sticking to all things, like honey, like oil, flowing like wax and gild-
ing as it touches. One’s nature goes through a temperamental turn,
a change in humors from choleric to sanguine, which the dictionary
defines as confident, optimistic, cheerful. So does citrinitas become
the reddening.134
As Hillman’s reflections approach the rubedo, his descriptions appear to

overlap with our understanding of the Philosophers’ Stone. He notes that
reddening, like the Stone, has
many names and equations, it indicates the inseparability of visible

and invisible, psyche and cosmos, a unus mundus. It requires the most
intense heat: “The spirit is heat.” The operations coincident to the red-
dening are exaltation, multiplication, and projection, according to the
fifteenth century English alchemist George Ripley. These expansions
together perform the tincturing, staining all things. . . .135
Like yellowing, “[t]he rubedo as purple-red is also called in Greek terms

iosis [poisoning]. It would seem that the rubedo” is deconstructive and
signifies a final dissolution of sunlit consciousness and all distinc-

tions – all the stages, phases, operations, and colors. It is a moment
of the rotatio, a turning and turning like the cosmos itself, requiring
endless numbers of eyes to see with.136
For Hillman, before healing can take place, one must be able to see
through multiple eyes and from many perspectives. From one point of
Figure 10.4 Multiple views of psychic reality. Artist unknown.

Source: From author’s personal collection.
view, the emergence of the white earth leaves the blackness behind, but as
we have seen in numerous ways, the terra alba and the darkness against
which it defines itself form an intimate and indissoluble relationship so
that the white earth “is not sheer white in the 1iteral sense but a field of
flowers . . . a peacock’s tail, a coat of many colors.”137
The idea of multiple eyes and colors is also imaged in alchemy as the
cauda pavonis, the peacock’s tail, an image associated with the Philoso-
phers’ Stone.
Hillman explains that the multiple eyes of the peacock’s tail reflect their
full flowering of imagination [that] shows itself as the qualitative

spread of colors so that imagining is a coloring process, and if not
in literal colors, then as the qualitative differentiation of intensities
and hues which is essential to the unio mentalis”138 and “to the act of
imagination.”139
Ultimately, for Hillman, these colors are not the same as in the subjectiv-
ist philosophies of Newton and Locke or of Berkeley and Hume, where
colors are considered as only secondary qualities brought about by the
mind and senses of the observer. Rather, for Hillman, colors are something
more fundamental – a phainoumenon on display at the heart of the mat-
ter itself prior to all abstractions. For Hillman, with the emergence of the
rotatio and a Ouroboric consciousness,
The work is over; we no longer work at consciousness, develop our-

selves, or possess a distinct grid by means of which we recognize
where we are, how we are, maybe even who we are. “The dissolution
of Sol should be effected by Nature, not by handiwork,” concludes
Figulus. Psyche is life; life, psyche.
Psyche is also death, an equation investigated in my writings on
the Underworld. The “death” in this moment of the alchemical work
is the “dissolution of Sol,” which occurs “by Nature,” as if a homeo-
static self-correction of solar optimism. This process is similar to the
insidious dark strength of Yin afflicting bright Yang from within. The
sure optimism of solar clarity is the blind spot itself. Sol dissolves in
the darkness of its own light. Or, to put it another way: yellow at this
moment is nothing other than the visible presence of the black in its
depth.140
In these statements, I believe Hillman attempts to deconstruct any ves-

tiges of metaphysical realism, though he has been accused by Giegerich of
not going far enough, while Hillman, as we have seen, accuses Giegerich
of going too far into the “poisonous state of splendid isolation,” a state
that for Giegerich needs to be faced and understood. The philosophical
and alchemical question remains: to what extent does such a pure state of
thought fall short of including the depth of alchemical darkness described
by Jung and Hillman. I will attempt to show, in a later chapter, how a read-
ing of Hegel in spite of the movement of idea beyond image includes the
full body of historical richness and embeddedness in the depths of soul
that Jung and Hillman speak of. If such an interpretation is successful, it
challenges the divide between Hillman and Giegerich.
Figure 10.5 Variation of the peacock tail. Artwork by analysand.

Notes
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 199.
4 Marlan, “From the Black Sun,” 7.
8 Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake, 19.
9 Ibid., 168.
10 Kitcher, “Introduction,” xxv.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Kant, Prolegomena, 9.
14 De Voogd, “C.G. Jung: Psychologist of the Future,” 179.
15 Mendelsohn, quoted in Zweig, “Kant: Philosophical Correspondence,” 15.
16 Bishop, Syncronicity and Intellectual Intuition, 77; brackets in original.
17 Hillman, A Blue Fire, 155.
18 Ibid.
20 Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, 37.
21 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 303.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 303–304.
25 Kitcher, “Introduction,” xxviii.
26 Bair, Jung: A Biography, 35.
27 Bishop, Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition, 179.
28 Bair, Jung: A Biography, 508.
29 Bishop, Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition, 4.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 5.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 5–6.
35 De Voogd, “C.G. Jung: Psychologist of the Future,” 176.
36 Rockmore, Before and After Hegel, 20. See also Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake, 39–40.
39 Rockmore, Cognition, 3. Rockmore notes that, “[i]n reaction to Kant, Hegel maintains
that a coherent account of the relation of an appearance to an independent external
object is impossible.”
40 Rockmore, Before and After Hegel, 21.
41 Nagy, Philosophical Issues, 149.
42 Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, 393.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 393. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 28, footnote 103 and Rockmore,
Before and After Hegel, 35.
48 Barker, “Appearing and Appearances in Kant,” 286.
49 Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 195.

50 Ibid., 187.
51 Ibid.
52 Schrader, “The Thing in Itself in Kantian Philosophy,” 172.
54 Watkins, “Review of Daniel Warren.”
55 Nagy, Philosophical Issues, 62.
59 Wood, “Reiterating the Temporal Toward a Rethinking of Heidegger on Time,” 142.
61 Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW8), §261.
64 Ibid., 168–169.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 47, §74.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., 48, §75.
70 Ibid., 48, §76.
71 Ibid., 49, §76; emphasis mine.
72 Ibid., 49, §77.
73 Ibid., 51, §80.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., 52, §80.
76 Ibid., 52, §81.
77 Ibid., 52, §82.
78 Ibid., 53, §83.
79 Ibid., 53, §84.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 54, §85.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 55, §86.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 55, §87.
92 Ibid., 56, §87.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid., 56, §88.
95 Ibid., 56, §89.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid., 57, §89.
99 O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, 2.
100 Zucker, “Historicism and Relativism,” 2.

101 Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, 187.
102 Ibid., 1.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid. Magee goes on to define the Hermetic tradition as:
a current of thought that derives its name from the so-called Hermetica (or Cor-
pus Hermeticum), a collection of Greek and Latin treatises and dialogues written
in the first or second centuries A.D. and probably containing ideas that are far
older. The legendary author of these works is Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-
Greatest Hermes”). “Hermeticism” denotes a broad tradition of thought that
grew out of the “writings of Hermes” and was expanded and developed through
the infusion of various other traditions. Thus, alchemy, Kabbalism, Lullism, and
the mysticism of Eckhart and Cusa – to name just a few examples – became
intertwined with the Hermetic doctrines. (Indeed, Hermeticism is used by some
authors simply to mean alchemy.) Hermeticism is also sometimes called the-
osophy, or esotericism; less precisely, it is often characterized as mysticism, or
occultism.
(Ibid.)
105 Ibid., 211.
106 Ibid., 129.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid., 211.
111 Ibid.
113 Ibid., 211; emphasis of “occurs in the mind” is mine.
114 Edinger, Anatomy, 171–172.
115 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14), §670ff.; quoted by Edinger, Anatomy, 171.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
120 An alchemical illustration of this process can be found in Michael Maier’s Atalanta
fugiens (1618). The image is called “Cutting the Philosophical Egg.”
122 Ibid., 207–209.
123 Although Edinger does quote this passage from Plato’s Phaedo, please note that this
particular translation was retrieved from Project Gutenberg.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid.
129 Ibid., 213.
130 Ibid.
131 Ibid.
132 Ibid.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid., 216.
135 Ibid.
136 Ibid., 217. A criticism of Hillman’s view of yellowing is taken up by Giegerich in The
Soul’s Logical Life, 194–201.
138 Ibid., 112.
139 Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” 41.
Chapter 11
A reflection on the black sun

and Jung’s notion of self 1
In my own earlier work The Black Sun, I refer to the visible presence of the
black in its depth as the light of darkness itself or the lumen naturae, the
light of nature. I do not believe that what the alchemists called the “light of
nature” is easily reducible to any metaphysical realism or notion of nature
as a mind independent reality, nor to a self-referential subjectivity. It is
both visible and invisible, present and absent. It is in its complexity both
the prima materia and the Philosophers’ Stone, another expression of an
ouroboric circle and so both at the beginning and end of the work. In this
way, the Black Sun/Philosophers’ Stone is another way of imagining what
we have earlier called one of the most enigmatic statements of the goal of
alchemy – the idea of the Philosophers’ Stone – as “a stone that is not a
stone.” If, for Jung, the Philosophers’ Stone is an expression of the Self,
then it is important to view the Self in an equally complex way, a self that
is not a Self. Such ideas are the height of paradox, linking and transcend-
ing what we think of as opposites in such a way that ordinary conscious-
ness is radically challenged and subverted.
In “Silver and White Earth,” (Chapter 6 in Alchemical Psychology)
Hillman speaks of such madness alchemically as a process in which solar
brilliance and moon madness are marvelously conjoined. The mysterium
coniunctionis then is an “illuminated lunacy.”2 In “Concerning the Stone:
Alchemical Images of the Goal” (Chapter 8 in Alchemical Psychology),
Hillman discusses the complexity of images and refuses to break them
into hard and fast binaries or opposites. The “grit and the pearl, the lead
and the diamond, the hammer and the gold are inseparable.”3 For Hillman,
“[t]he pain is not prior to the goal, like crucifixion before resurrection;”
rather, “pain and gold are coterminous, codependent, corelative. The pearl
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-12
206 On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self
is also always grit, an irritation as well as a luster, the gilding also a poi-
soning.”4 It is hard to keep these opposite dimensions of experience in
consciousness, but, for Hillman, such a description fits with life, “for we
are strangely disconsolate even in a moment of radiance.”5 Our golden
experience “again and again will press for testing in the fire, ever new
blackness appearing, dark crows with the yellow sun.”6
It was on such a basis that I proposed that the “light of darkness itself”
is such a complex image and that the idea of regeneration was better seen
in a deeper consciousness of this paradox than in a moving through and
beyond it. The paradox holds the “opposites” of light/dark, visible/invis-
ible, and self and no-self (or, as Fichte says, not-self) together, and in so
doing there is a “light,” an effulgence, or a “shine” that is hard to define or
capture in any metaphysical language or traditional binaries. In this sense,
if, with Hillman, we have ended in being out of our minds with lunacy, it is
only fair to say that it is a higher kind of lunacy. That harkens back to what
has been called Jung’s madness and his strange visionary experiences that
led him to write Seven Sermons of the Dead, an outcome of his confronta-
tions with the unconscious described earlier.
Self and no self

In these experiences, Jung heard the following words, which he transcribed:
Harken: I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness.

In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and
full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance,
white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or is it. . . . This nothingness or
fullness we name the PLEROMA.7
This pleroma was a Gnostic name given to Jung’s experiential prefigura-

tion of what later became his hypothesis of the Self. This concept was elab-
orated throughout many of the Collected Works, but most fully expressed
in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. According to
Jung, the Self was a concept difficult to define, and, in spite of all of his
warnings, it is often taken as a substantialized entity. Perhaps it would be
of use to remind ourselves that Jung’s Self is not a metaphysical entity.
Psychologist and scholar Roger Brooke makes a useful contribution by
asserting that to think of the Self as a “something” is less accurate than to
On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 207
understand it as a “no-thing,” “a fertile and hospitable emptiness within

which the things of the world could shine forth.”8
In an article that has received too little attention, “Nothing Almost
Sees Miracles!: Self and No-Self in Psychology and Religion,” scholar
of religion and Jungian psychology David Miller writes what amounts to
a deconstructive reading of Jung’s idea of the Self. He claims that even
though Jung ultimately rejects the idea of a No-Self doctrine, in essence
what he means by the idea of the “Self” “has the same ontological status
as the desubstantialized and deconstructed notion of the ‘no-self’ in the
apophatic religious traditions. ‘Self’ is no-self.”9 Turning to the margins of
Jung’s ideas, beyond the formulations of his ideas as an empirical scientist,
Miller recalls Jung’s comment:
If you will contemplate [your nothingness,] your lack of fantasy, [lack]

of inspiration, and [lack] of inner aliveness, which you feel as sheer
stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest
born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in
you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as great a fullness, if you
allow it to penetrate into you.10
An emptiness that is also a fullness resonates with figures such as Pseudo-

Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Lao Tzu, and other masters of Asian or West-
ern philosophies and religions that hold the concept of Nothingness at the
core of psychological and religious life. In essence, this is true for Jung,
too. For, beyond the scientific Jung is the alchemical Jung, for whom the
so-called Self is “in principle unknown and unknowable” to the ego.11 This
Jung follows the alchemical dictum ignotium per ignotius (the unknown
[is explained] by the more unknown). In short, for Jung the Self “is tanta-
mount to religion’s no-self.”12
The paradoxical tension between Self and No-Self that Miller describes
is a point of philosophical debate and doctrinal complexity that reaches
a high point in Asian philosophy and religion – in the dialogue between
Hindu and Buddhist perspectives. The debate is relevant for understanding
Jung’s idea of the Self since this idea was modeled in part on the ancient
Hindu notion of Atman/Brahman.
The Upanishadic perspective holds that beneath and/or above the flux
of the empirical world is an unchanging and eternal Self at the core of
the universe. Buddhist philosophy, on the other hand, rejects such an idea
of an unchanging Self and considers any idea of the Self to be an imper-

manent construction that must be seen through. In the place of the Self/
Atman, the Buddhists see Anatman (or No-Self) and Sunyata (Nothing-
ness or Voidness) as a mark of the “real.”
The theme of this debate has been taken up by transpersonal psychol-
ogist Sean Kelly.13 He contributes to this debate, positing what he calls
“complex holism,” a view in part influenced by Hegel’s, Jung’s, and Mor-
in’s idea of a dialectic that is a “symbiotic combination of two [or more]
logics in a manner that is at once complementary and antagonistic.” What
is important in Kelly’s position is not just the idea of bringing the two per-
spectives together in unity, but also giving importance to their differences.
This gives his vision nuance and complexity. In other words, the doctrine
that holds the Self (the Hindu Atman/Brahman) as the supreme principle
and the doctrine that holds the No-Self (the Buddhist Annata) as a supreme
principle are complementary while at the same time remaining antagonis-
tic. Kelly relativizes each fundamental idea by noting that both principles
“must negate the truth of the other in order to point out its onesidedness
and its missing complement.”14
It appears that Kelly’s idea is parallel to Jung’s. Jung’s psychology was
originally called complex psychology, and later, as it developed, an impor-
tant component of it was the idea that the unconscious compensates for the
one-sided attitudes of the conscious mind with the intent of achieving bal-
ance and wholeness. For Jung, the “Self” was also a complex (w)holism,
a self-regulating and balancing principle, but what is interesting in Kelly’s
argument is that he applies the idea of complementarity to the idea of the
Self itself.15 He observes that the concept of the Self as Atman is prone
to the kind of sterile hypostatization that impedes rather than facilitates
psychic life. On the other hand, without the stability of the atmanic Self,
the No-Self Annata doctrine is also prone to a sterile nihilism that leaves
psychic life adrift.
It is worth noting here that for each perspective, Hindu or Buddhist, the
idea of a complementarity principle can be accounted for from within. The
Atman/Brahman perspective has its own way of understanding the flux of
the No-Self, just as the No-Self perspective of the Buddhists has its own
way of understanding stability. Those who are committed to one perspec-
tive or another are likely to feel that the antagonistic other does not really
understand its perspective, which from within its own point of view the
ideas of its critics have already addressed. Those who hold to their own
perspectives alone are traditionally considered orthodox, whereas those

who seek to break with tradition may be seen as iconoclastic or even heret-
ical, like Jung himself. The history of ideas and cultures seems to move by
virtue of such a dialectic, though ultimately this may be a too-limited way
to imagine the complexity of history.
Kelly’s perspective of complex holism embraces both perspectives, Self
and No-Self. To this dialogical complementarity he adds the either/or of
dialogic antagonism, which gives the debate a dynamic thrust that both
affirms and relativizes at the same time. If we then imagine Jung’s idea
of the Self as being subject to a similar critique, the Self would call for
the complementarity principle of No-Self to keep it from stagnating into a
hypostasized and fixed idea of order, as Hillman has observed.
For Jung as well as Hillman, the Self as the archetype of meaning
requires the anima or archetype of life to keep it from stagnation. Hillman,
however, prefers not to speak of the Self at all because of its tendency as
a transcendental concept to lose connection with the body. For him, the
problem with Jung’s idea of the Self is that it moves toward transcendence,
both mathematical and geometric. Its analogies tend to be drawn from
the realm of spirit, abstract philosophy, and mystical theology. Its princi-
ples tend to be expressed in terms such as self-actualization, entelechy, the
principle of individuation, the monad, the totality, Atman, Brahman, and
the Tao.16
For Hillman, all of this points to a vision of Self that is removed from
life, and so it enters psychology “through the back door, disguised as
synchronicity, magic, oracles, science fiction, self-symbolism, mandalas,
tarot, astrology and other indiscriminations, equally prophetic, ahistori-
cal and humorless.”17 Here Hillman brings together a variety of ideas and
images sacred to the orthodox Jungians, which, while not well differenti-
ated, serves the purpose of painting a vision of the Self as an unconscious,
abstract structure that has lost touch with the dynamics of the soul. This is
a view of the Self that is not acceptable to the orthodox Jungian, for whom
the Self is structural, dynamic, and deeply connected to life.
It is not surprising to find that fundamental concepts such as the Self
are open to multiple interpretations. As noted, there are those who regard
Jung’s Self as anything but static and others for whom it too easily loses
itself in a hypostasized, outmoded, out-of-touch, and abstract conception
that calls out for revision. As I interpret Kelly’s perspective of “complex
holism,” the importance of the tension is to reveal how every fundamental
concept has a shadow even when the concept is as wide-ranging as the

Self. In this sense, the complementary/antagonistic idea of the No-Self
reveals the Self’s shadow as an esoteric and invisible other that is neces-
sary to the animation of psychic life. Traditionally the shadow is consid-
ered to be the counterpart of consciousness, but the Self is said to embrace
both the conscious and the unconscious dimensions of psychic life.
However, if one follows Jung in the most radical sense while simultane-
ously giving credence to the perspectives of Miller and Kelly and to the
importance of the idea of the No-Self as being both complementary and
antagonistic to Jung’s idea of the Self, then it is reasonable to imagine the
Self as having a shadow, a dynamic and invisible Otherness, that is essen-
tial to it. The whole is both Self and Not Self.
Often for alchemy, Sol is the most precious thing, while Sol niger as
its shadow is like Lacan’s “petit a.”18 This petit a is “more worthless than
seaweed.”19 Yet without Sol niger there is no ring to consciousness, no
dynamic Other that taints and tinctures the brilliance of the Sun. Following
the alchemical tradition, Jung writes that
Consciousness requires as its necessary counterpart a dark, latent,

non-manifest side. . . . So much did the alchemists sense the duality
of his unconscious assumptions that, in the face of all astronomical
evidence, he equipped the sun with a shadow [and stated]: “The sun
and its shadow bring the work to perfection.”20
Ultimately, I believe the notion of a shadow of the Self is supported by the

paradoxical play of opposites in alchemy.
Depth psychology and the negated self: the

strategy of “sous rature”
We have been grappling with the idea of antinomies, with the paradoxical
play of light and dark, life and death, spirit and matter. The coincidentia
oppositorum and mysterium coniunctionis are expressions of paradox and
monstrosity, maddening negations and attempts at understanding the unity
of identity and difference.
As we have seen, the problem is how can we speak about whatever it is
that is referred to in the preceding? How can we address that invisible or
absent presence that we call the Self or no-Self? It has been challenging
for the ancient philosophers, religious mystics, and alchemists, as well as
for modern and contemporary post-structuralist philosophers and psycho-
analysts to grapple with expressing what is often felt to be inexpressible.
For poststructuralist sensibilities, one difficulty that is often expressed is
that in every attempt to name that absent presence, there remains a vestige
of metaphysical speculation, a transcendental signified (for our purposes
read as Self) that is not deconstructed.
Applying Heidegger’s idea of “sous rature” to the notion of the Self in
Jung’s psychology opens a way of imagining the Self as under erasure.
Imagining such a Self psychologically is an attempt to think about some-
thing that can never be simply identified with any one side of a binary
pair – light or dark, black or white, spirit or matter, masculine or feminine,
imaginary or real, conscious or unconscious – or with any hypothesized,
transcendental notion that attempts to supersede or lift itself up above
these oppositions as if language referred in some nominalist or substan-
tialist way to some literal “thing” or entity.
As we have seen, terms such as Self, Being, and God cannot be privi-
leged or given status outside the language system from which they have
been drawn. For Derrida, following twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure, these terms derive their meaning in a diacritical way, each
making sense only in relation to other signs in a synchronic system of
signifiers and having meaning only in relationship to other signs among
which none is privileged. Nevertheless, philosophy, psychology, and reli-
gion all have a long history of master tropes or metaphors that appear and
are understood to refer to something beyond the ordinary images of famil-
iar words, such as Being, God, and Self. These “words” are like arche-
traces that refer more to mystical than to literal reality and, like Hermes,
stand at the crossroads of “différance,” a neologism that Derrida coined
from the French word for “difference” and which carries the meaning of
both difference and deferral.21 What is continually deferred is the idea that
a word arrives at a literal destination, indicating a one-to-one correspond-
ence and representation of reality.
So, for example, the idea of the Self can never be separated from its
invisible counterpart, the No-Self, against which it derives its meaning.
Since an insight is marked by placing it under erasure, the line drawn
through the word Self indicates its negation, its shadow. This ensures that
an idea will not be taken literally and reminds us that ideas will continue
to disseminate throughout time and culture. No concept, master trope, or
metaphor can ever finally complete the play or totality of psyche, which,
like Mercurius, always escapes our grasp. The Self under erasure is always
in a process of continual deconstruction, and, like the Philosophers’ Stone
of alchemy, it slips away from our ability to grasp it. Hillman’s reading
of alchemy imagines the Philosophers’ Stone as soft and oily, countering
both those images that point to its strength, solidity, and unity and also our
tendency to crystallize the goal in terms of fixed positions and doctrinal
truth. For him, the Philosophers’ Stone is waxy and can “receive endless
literalizations without being permanently impressed.”22 Perhaps it is use-
ful to imagine the Self under erasure as a kind of contemporary Philoso-
phers’ Stone marking a mystery that has long been sought and continues
to remain elusive.
Contemporary poststructuralist thought has proceeded toward “if not a
liquidation [or solutio], then at least a displacement of the subject from the
center of philosophical or theoretical activity.”23 Lacan and philosopher
Paul Ricoeur speak of decentering the subject and Foucault of the erasure
of man “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”24 The removal
of the subject from the center of psychic life also resonates with Jung’s
displacement and relativization of the ego. For Jung, the structures of the
Self likewise transcend the individual, and its essence “lies beyond the
subjective realm.”25
Just as for Derrida the subject is an effect of language, so for Jung
the ego is the product of an all-embracing totality. In short, the “Self is
paradoxically not oneself.”26 However, insofar as Jung’s Self as a totality
rises above and beyond the subjective realm and is seen as constituted by
impersonal, collective forces, it is consistent with the poststructuralist con-
tention that the subject is likewise primarily an effect of larger collective
forces: historic, economic, or linguistic. The poststructuralist view of such
forces is quite different from the more mysterious idea about archetypes
and the collective unconscious, but for some philosophers (e.g., Levi-
nas) and some post-Jungian psychoanalysts (e.g., Hillman), the distanc-
ing from subjectivity has become problematic. The question remains as
to what extent such a subject is dissolved in structure and function, with
a loss of body and sensibility. In both Levinas and Hillman, the problem
of the body and sensibility remains an important theme in the constitution
of the Self/soul and resists abstraction27 while, at the same time, paradoxi-
cally, it must move beyond the idea of a reified subject and/or an abstract
transcendence.
The entrance problem

To this point, I have considered the paradox of the Self that is not a Self as
a circular relation within which one finds the beginning and the end of the
work. The paradoxical relation of Self to Self or Self to No Self reiterates
the play of opposites reminiscent of the Philosophers’ Stone; the Stone as
Sol niger or black sun in its mercurial doubleness was said to shine, as a
lumen naturae, a light of nature that is a light different from all other lights
because it is not simply visible to a naturalist look, not an appearance of
some metaphysical object, but rather an imaginal lumination that is also
not reducible to simple subjective fantasy either. I have imagined such a
light as an imaginal effulgence of the Philosophers’ Stone as the experi-
ence of the Self under erasure.
Still, the question of the Self under erasure calls for further clarifica-
tion, perhaps continuing clarification. To place an X or line through any
master trope to assure that it is not simply read in the spirit of metaphysi-
cal realism is an interesting heuristic. However, I still find myself asking
what such a cut implies at a lived level. Wolfgang Giegerich has in his
own way addressed what has been called the entrance problem.28 Enter-
ing into something like the complexity of the Self requires the recognition
of a dividing line that runs through every individual. For him, to really
recognize the Self in this way requires a radical break with one’s old iden-
tity, “[a] rupture [to] one’s identity is the only entrance requirement.”29
For Giegerich, “[T]he Self is real only to the extent that the ego has been
negated, [crossed out], overcome; stretching the point, one might even say
it exists only as a reality ‘over the ego’s dead body.’ ”30 Here one might
imagine that the “sous rature” of Heidegger and the dividing line that runs
through the Self requires a hurtful cut, a narcissistic offense that introduces
the not-Self into the Self. In this way, for Giegerich, “sous rature” becomes
an existential violence; a discontinuity has entered into identity.31 This vio-
lence implicit in the Self is life’s existential price for a larger personality,
what the alchemists have called the opus contra naturam, the work against
nature that is also the dissolution of the unio naturalis.32
It is interesting that for the alchemists both the establishment and the
overcoming of the unio mentalis have been gruesomely symbolized by the
act of beheading. Jung writes:
Beheading is significant symbolically as the separation of the “under-

standing” from the “great suffering and grief” which nature inflicts on
the soul. It is an emancipation of the “cogitation” which is situated in
the head, a freeing of the soul from the “trammels of nature.” Its pur-
pose is to bring about, as in Dorn, a unio mentalis in the overcoming
of the body.33
In addition, and evidently as a later operation, beheading also sym-

bolizes the complete man and a movement beyond the unio mentalis.
Edinger notes that “beheading extracts the rotundum, the round, com-
plete man, from the empirical man. The head or skull becomes the round
vessel of transformation.”34 Edinger refers to such a transformation: “In
one text it was the head of the black Osiris or Ethiopian that, when boiled,
turned into gold.”35 Here the golden head anticipates the “completeness,”
or, perhaps more accurately, the complexity of the Philosophers’ Stone.
For Giegerich following Hegel, such a move of negation of the ego “is
not to be confused with a simple, undialectical subversion, which is some-
thing that modern man delights in.”36 Giegerich writes,
Being on the edge of a sword or having settled on the very threshold

implies to also be on the other side of the threshold. What I am talking
about is the accomplished negation . . . the negation of the natural self
already having taken place, and secondly it refers to the perfection or
completion of the negation, i.e., to a negation that goes all the way and
therefore does not even stop at negating itself (in the sense of ‘nega-
tion of the negation’ [Hegel]).37
This negation of negation requires “a fundamental shift of the center of

gravity . . . from the habitual personality to a non-ego, a real Other in us.”38
Giegerich sees this existential shift in the sense of Self as requiring a break
in our ordinary comfortable “logic” and a move to a greater complexity
of thinking. What is required is “a much more complex dialectical logic,
such as developed by HEGEL in his Science of Logic, which might serve
as a model for the kind of abstract thought required to do justice to the
Figure 11.1 Image of the skull as representing the mortificatio process in this use
of Eve. From the “Miscellanea d’alchimia,” 14th century manuscript.
complexities of the plight of the modern soul.”39 For Giegerich, psychology

needs the “labor of the concept” to do justice to alchemy and psychology.
Magee amplifies the importance of Hegel’s contribution by noting
that he was “the World-Historical Alchemist” as the producer of “the
Philosopher’s Stone, the lapis aethereus or, as it was known to the Ger-
mans, der Stein der Weisen.”40 He notes that “[t]he place of transforma-
tion is represented in the Phenomenology as Golgotha, the Place of the
Skull (die Schädelstätte).”41 Magee further states that “the alchemical
retort was sometimes a skull, and the caput mortuum was symbolized by
the skull.”42
Hegel uses the term caput mortuum several times in both the Encyclo-
pedia Logic and the Philosophy of Nature. Edinger notes that the caput
mortuum “was used to refer to the residue left after the distillation or sub-
limation of a substance.”43 O’Regan notes that it refers to the “precipitate
that remains after spirit has been extracted.”44 This extract appears to cor-
respond with the unio mentalis. Hegel also uses the term caput mortuum
to describe what he calls Essence (unio mentalis?), but also points out that
Essence (like the unio mentalis) is still
a stepping-stone on the way to Concept and Absolute Idea. Essence

itself is indeed a caput mortuum insofar as it is a negated provisional
definition for the Absolute Idea. It “dies” or falls away, yet it is at the
same time “material” used in the process of dialectic that presses on
to Absolute Idea. Hegel’s use of caput mortuum to describe Essence
taken abstractly (i.e., taken on its own, in isolation from the other
categories) indicates that he recognized the parallel between dialec-
tic and alchemical transmutation: determinate negation is the nigredo
that precedes the synthesis of rubedo, the philosopher’s stone, or the
Absolute.45
As such, the Absolute becomes a “goal” of the process like the Philoso-
phers’ Stone. Hegel describes his idea of the goal in the Phenomenology
of Spirit:
The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has
for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and
as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation,
regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form
of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philo-
sophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing
in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History,
form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the
actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be

lifeless and alone. Only
from the chalice of this realm of spirits

foams forth for Him his own infinitude.46
The absolute
In a complex and difficult passage leading to “Absolute Knowing.” Hegel
writes:
In this knowing, then, Spirit has concluded the movement in which

it has shaped itself, in so far as this shaping was burdened with the
difference of consciousness [i.e., of the latter from its object] a differ-
ence now overcome. Spirit has won the pure element of its existence,
the Notion. The content, in accordance with the freedom of its being,
is the self-alienating Self, or the immediate unity of self-knowledge.
The pure movement of this alienation, considered in connection with
the content, constitutes the necessity of the content. The distinct con-
tent as determinate, is in relation, is not “in itself,” it is its own rest-
less process of superseding itself, or negativity; therefore, negativity
or diversity, like free being, is also the Self; and in this self-like form
in which existence is immediately thought, the content is the Notion.
Spirit, therefore, having won the Notion, displays its existence and
movement in this ether of its life and is Science.47
If I understand these passages as he intended, it is interesting to compare

the ideas of “sous rature,” the rature, the beheading, the self-negation, the
self that is not the Self, with Hegel’s idea of the “self-alienating self” and
knowledge of the Notion. The Notion is not a static moment, but rather
what he calls a pure moment of an “alienation” and restlessness that is
also a vitality, a sublation that is also a continuing dialectical moment. The
achievement of Absolute Knowing can also know itself as Spirit and as a
mimesis of spirits that in memory can be recollected and organized.
It appears that for Hegel this mimetic organization can be preserved
and as such can both appear contingently as a historical process, but also
philosophically as “Absolute Knowing,” as a “Science” of appearances.
For Hegel at the end of the Phenomenology, it appears that these “two”
perspectives of historical Science can be brought together and understood

as “Absolute Spirit.” Hegel uses the word Absolute in many different con-
texts with different meanings. Often he uses it adjectively, “for example
in ‘Absolute Idea,’ ‘Absolute Knowing,’ ‘Absolute Religion,’ ‘Absolute
Spirit,’ ”and so on.48 “He utilizes the substantive, ‘the Absolute’ less fre-
quently.”49 The adjectival and substantive uses of the Absolute have impor-
tant philosophical implications. Magee points out:
The term “absolute” has a long history in German philosophy. Nicho-

las of Cusa in his Of Learned Ignorance (De Docta Ignorantia, 1440)
used the term absolutum to mean God, understood as a being that
transcends all finite determinations: the coincidentia oppositorum
(coincidence of opposites). Schelling’s use of “Absolute” is remark-
ably similar to Cusa’s. For Schelling, the Absolute is the “indifference
point” beyond the distinction of subject and object, or any other dis-
tinction. In the famous Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel
rejects this conception of the Absolute [as noted above], referring to
it derisively as “the night in which all cows are black.” Hegel means
that when the Absolute is conceived simply as the transcendent unity
of all things (or as the cancellation of all difference) it really amounts
to an idea devoid of all content. It is terribly easy to say “in this world
definite distinctions abide – but in the Absolute all is one.” But what
does this really mean?50
Rockmore points out that in spite of the many ways Hegel uses the term
“Absolute,” that his position
convey[s] a single, central insight: philosophy culminates in the com-

prehension of experience as a structured whole, or totality, whose inter-
relations are known with necessity. As early as the Differenzschrift,
he defends a normative view of philosophy intended to “overcome”
difference through speculative unity. This same basic approach runs
throughout his later thought, in the treatments of absolute knowing in
the Phenomenology of Spirit, of the absolute idea in the Encyclopedia
Logic, and of absolute spirit in the Philosophy of Spirit.
He depicts the absolute differently in these different texts as a func-
tion of what he is doing in each of them. In his account of the science
of the experience of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, he
describes the stages leading from sense certainty to absolute know-

ing, from the poorest, most abstract, unmediated or immediate experi-
ence to the richest, most concrete, fully mediated experience. In the
Encyclopedia Logic, he characterizes the abstract form of science. In
the Philosophy of Spirit, at the end of the Encyclopedia, he portrays
the concrete result of the process whose moments traverse logic, then
nature, before ending in spirit that knows and knows that it knows,
a process which culminates in philosophy as the highest, final, and
unsurpassable form of absolute spirit.51
Rockmore goes on to point out some presuppositions of Hegel’s position,

notably that “the subject is free, and reason is universal.” It presupposes as
well that the subject-object identity specifically includes subjective, objec-
tive, and absolute perspectives.52 On this basis, Rockmore like Magee
asks: “How are we to interpret Hegel’s understanding of the absolute?”53
Rockmore sets the stage for understanding the complexity of the Abso-
lute by placing Hegel’s philosophy in relation to Kant. He cites Hegel’s
“own reluctance to separate philosophy from the history of philosophy”54
and goes on to compare Kant’s idea of the thing-in-itself to Hegel’s abso-
lute idealism. He notes that absolute idealism, like Kant’s thing-in-itself,
“combines epistemological and ontological dimensions.”55
Kant, however, maintains that we do not know things as they are, as
merely objects of thought, but only as they appear. For Kant, “the thing-
in-itself functions in two ways: epistemologically as a limit to knowledge,
and ontologically as a causal principle that can without contradiction be
understood as giving rise to the phenomena of experience.”56 Kant claims
“that although we cannot know these objects as things-in-themselves, we
must yet be in a position at least to think them as things-in-themselves;
otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be
appearance without anything that appears.”57 Rockmore then goes on to
make a most important distinction in ways of interpreting Hegel’s view of
Absolute Knowing that the idea of the absolute can be interpreted in two
ways: “either ontologically or epistemologically.”58
For Rockmore, “[a]n ontological reading of Hegel makes the absolute
into an ultimate ontological principle” comparable “to the late Heidegger’s
reading of being.”59 For Hegel as for Heidegger, history is intelligible only
because it is literally constituted by the unfolding of an absolute.60 Read-
ing Hegel ontologically, the Absolute might be understood “as the ultimate
ground or source of all being.”61 For Magee, it was this approach that was
present in the search for the archē. This search for absolute ground existed
“right from the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition in the
Pre-Socratic philosopher Thales who declared that ‘water’ is the source of
all that is.”62
For Rockmore, reading Hegel ontologically is “erroneous” and he rejects
it citing three reasons, the first of which is that the ontological reading is
“out of date.”63 Second, that an ontological reading of Hegel interpreting
“the absolute as a hidden cause of history implies that Hegel intended to
describe the world as it really is, what James calls the really real and Put-
nam calls the furniture of the universe.”64 For Rockmore, in our time we
can “no longer defend any reading of Hegel’s theory resembling a claim to
tell us about the world in independence of us.”65 Thirdly, Rockmore claims
that any ontological reading of Hegel
is inconsistent with Hegelian theory itself. If absolute idealism, like

philosophy itself, can make no presuppositions, if it cannot admit
merely postulated entities, Hegel cannot consistently assert that the
absolute is the final cause of history. Now it may be that this is the
case, that history in fact records the unfolding of the absolute which
is known as its result. Yet were that the case, that fact about history
could not be known. For we cannot know this on a priori grounds, and
no experience is sufficient to teach us that the absolute is at the basis
of experience.66
Ontologically implying the basis of our experience outside experience

remains for Rockmore unintelligible. In another place, Rockmore makes
the point even more poignantly. For Rockmore, “[u]nlike [Kant’s] criti-
cal philosophy, and unlike its rationalist and empiricist predecessors,
philosophical reflection, in which speculation takes itself as its object,
has nothing to do with making indefeasible cognitive claims,” such as the
absolute’s existing in some transcendental way outside of time and place.67
For Rockmore, then, any ontological interpretation must address the
relationship between thought and being. With regard to this issue, Rock-
more has noted that in the above regard, Hegel’s thought is incomplete in
a significant sense; manifestly “unable to demonstrate the required unity
of thought and being in terms of circularity.”68 If philosophical knowledge
is “presuppositionless, it cannot yield knowledge in the full sense.”69 For
Rockmore, “if knowledge is apodictic, it cannot result from presupposi-

tionless theory.”70
The assumption of the inquiry into knowledge has always been

that thought knows being, although as Hegel knew, this assump-
tion never has been demonstrated. Hegel’s own attempt to provide
this demonstration fails, since as we have seen, it is in tension with
his view that philosophy is necessarily presuppositionless, therefore
circular, and accordingly unable to escape from the circle of thought
and being.
It is perhaps paradoxical, but unquestionably the case, that a striking
consequence of Hegel’s endeavor to demonstrate that reason can be
self-subsistent, that thought is identical with being, is to show that this
result cannot be established through reason. Hegel, the archrational-
ist, unwittingly but definitively puts an end to the rationalist form of
the epistemological enterprise as concerns the full emancipation of
reason. For he shows the necessity of assuming the indemonstrable
validity of the claim of thought to know being as an unavoidable pre-
supposition of all epistemology.71
The inability to complete the circle between thought and being is also
held by noted Hegelian scholar Donald Phillip Verene. Verene notes that
“Once the world of the Idea is entered, there is no exit back to what is there
before and outside the Idea.” Nature will always lose its independence
and “remain a function of the Idea, no matter how cleverly the dialectics
of its reality are explained.”72 Verene focuses on one sentence of Hegel’s
corpus that for him remains suspect. “It is a sentence that has bothered me
since I first read it thirty-four years ago.”73 It is Hegel’s claim in the last
moments of the Science of Logic that
The passing over [of the Idea into nature] is thus to be grasped here in
this way, that the Idea freely releases itself in its absolute confidence
and calm.
Das Übergehen ist also hier vielmehr so zu fassen, daß die Idee sich
selbst frei entläßt, ihrer absolut sicher und in sich ruhend.
Or, as he puts it in the Encyclopedia Logic, the Idea resolves freely
to release out of itself . . . the immediate Idea as its reflection, or itself
as nature.
Die unmittelbare Idee als ihren Widerschein, sich als Natur frei aus
sich zu entlassen.74
For Verene, “[i]f light can be thrown on how the Idea becomes nature, the
whole of the system will be illuminated.”75 He thinks these sentences are
too often passed over by commentators and no commentary has solved
it to his satisfaction. He calls attention to two statements: namely, that
“Hegel says that something is for consciousness – namely, the in-itself –
and the knowing (Wissen), or the being (Sein) of the object for conscious-
ness, is itself for consciousness another moment.”76 For Verene, there are
simply two “objects” of consciousness and “there is no specifiable rela-
tionship or principle that can be used to describe the passage from one
moment to the other.”77 Verene struggles with this “twoness,” wanting to
speak of them together as a whole, but realizing that to do so does not
constitute a “unity.”78 He notes: “The object for consciousness, the object
with being-for-itself, is just as ambiguous because its being is immediately
transposed into a new in-itself.” A third thing, a moment that would truly
hold all together, is always just out of reach.79 For Verene, consciousness
lives in this kind of ambiguity which is in continuous motion. We live in
the fantasy that this ambiguity can be resolved. But such hopes, as we
learn from Hegel’s Phenomenology are in a continuing play between hope
and despair and we live with the illusion of wholeness. Then, for Verene,
comes the wisdom of absolute knowing.
For Verene, “[t]he achievement of absolute knowing is the realization
that all the stages up to it have refused to accept the ambiguity of experi-
ence.”80 Absolute Knowing then for Verene is the acceptance of ambiguity
that the conjunction of opposites, “the two-in-the-one, and the one” are an
equally necessary “andness.”81 For Verene, Absolute Knowing is thus an
“ironic and melancholic wisdom.”82
Verene then considers Hegel’s movement from the Phenomenology to
the Logic, a move “in which consciousness freely goes forth as thought.”83
The Logic attempts to be a pure science that overcomes the “and” and the
“two” “through the power of the Idea.”84 Verene asks: “Can the ‘and,’
if not overcome on the level of phenomena, be grasped in thought such
that the doubleness, the ambiguity that is present in experience, is sur-
mounted?”85 While the Logic seems to be an asylum for the philosopher
from experience, “there is still nature to worry about.”86 Verene notes
“that the movement from Idea to nature . . . is not ‘a process of becoming’
(ein Gewordensein), nor is it properly a ‘transition’ (Übergang) such as

exists within the dialectic of the Logic, e.g., as when ‘the subjective end
becomes life.’ ”87 For Hegel, the movement “to nature is an absolute lib-
eration. . ., a freedom . . . that the [Idea] . . . commands.”88 For Verene,
however, the question remains just how the idea “goes forth freely as
nature?” He notes
[j]ust when the forms of spirit seem to be getting on so well, nature

reminds us of its own free existence in its primal scene of space and
time. Within the human animal itself is always the day of the locust,
the “labor of the negative” come to dinner, always an unwelcome
guest.89
Following Rockmore, and with Verene’s recognition of the limits of the

dialectic to complete the circle of thought and being, we return to what we
have called the yellowing of the work, the spoiling of the unio mentalis,
the cut, wound, the line, and the always dark aspects of life itself – the gap,
abyss, unconscious from which there is no complete shadowless freedom.
For Verene it is “[t]he reality of nature” which “has been there from the
beginning, as the double of spirit – the ever-present Ansich to spirit’s real-
ity ‘for us.’ ”90
Finally for Verene, the failure to resolve the twoness, if it is claimed
to be “resolved” at all, seems to depend on an ancient attitude not unlike
the one held by the Plato of the Timaeus – “the ancient techne of a ‘likely
story,’ ”91
that old humanist faculty of ingenium [ingenuity] – the ability to per-

ceive a resemblance between two things, which in science results in
the formation of hypotheses, in the arts results in the formation of the
metaphor, and in philosophy results in the formation of dialectic.92
For Verene, without this attitude which he sees as essential for wit, humor,
and irony, we could not understand Hegel.93
Without the sense of the incongruous, Hegel has no science. His dialec-
tic depends upon the presence of humor in the reader’s own existence.
Ingenium makes the incongruous congruous, without eliminating its
ambiguity. What I have called “doubling” is no mystery to anyone
who has developed the capacity of ingenium. But it is not a feature of

literal-mindedness.94
For Verene,
Ingenium connotes at once the power both to form imagistically and

to form through an intellectual principle. It contains both a sense
of imagistic and conceptual forming. Through ingenuity a new and
needed object is produced through a reshaping of what is already at
hand. In other words ingenuity is a way of doing something that gets
its method immediately from the content before it. Each time it makes
up its method immediately. It is always doing something for which
there is no method. Yet each time such a thing is done it is grasped as a
result of ingenuity. Hegel’s method of the double Ansich is like this.95
For Jung, like for Hegel and Verene, the attempt to make the incongruous
congruous without losing ambiguity and real difference is found in his
notion of Mercurius duplex. Jung describes his view of Mercurius in the
following passage:
He is duplex and his main characteristic is duplicity. It is said of him

that he “runs round the earth and enjoys the company of the good and
the wicked.” He is “two dragons,” the “twin,” made of “two natures”
or “two substances.” He is the “giant of twofold substances.” . . . The
two substances of Mercurius are thought of as dissimilar, sometimes
opposed; as the dragon he is “winged and wingless.”96
Because of his united double nature Mercurius is described as her-
maphroditic. Sometimes his body is said to be masculine and his soul
feminine, sometimes the reverse. The Rosarium philosophorum, for
example, has both versions. As vulgaris he is the dead masculine body,
but as “our” Mercurius he is feminine, spiritual, alive, and life giving.97
Just as for Hegel, the lifeless universality perishes into self-consciousness;

so self-consciousness exhibits a life-giving spirit. The relationship of
Jung’s “imagistic” version of Mercurius to Hegel’s complex notion of self-
consciousness needs further elaboration, but I believe the parallel is com-
pelling. Is it possible that Hegel’s notion of self-consciousness could be
seen as a concept of what Jung calls Mercurius duplex, and that Mercurius
duplex is an image of what Hegel calls self-consciousness? Both are dia-

lectical and circular notions, and the circle was an important archetypal
structure for both Hegel and Jung. I believe the complex circularity of
“image” and “idea” requires further reflection. One might say that Jung’s
version of a dialectic process is described in his notion of the transcendent
function. Sanford Drob, a Jungian scholar, writes:
Hegel’s dialectic and Jung’s transcendent function each endeavor to

unify opposites that remain unreconciled within everyday thought and
in what Hegel refers to as the “understanding.” The simple distinc-
tion between these thinkers is that while for Hegel the reconciliation
occurs in thought, for Jung it occurs and can only occur unconsciously
via the imagination.98
It would appear that the “dialectical” approach of both Jung and Hegel
each emphasized one side of the ingenium. However, for Drob, the con-
trast between Hegel and Jung is more complex. Drob turns to Hegel’s
Introduction to his “Lectures on Aesthetics,” where Hegel adopts a view
of the artistic image that comes quite close to Jung’s understanding of the
role of symbols and the imagination in the transcendent function. Drob
writes:
In the Lectures [on Aesthetics], Hegel holds that art expresses ideas in
sensuous, material form. Indeed, he holds that art expresses the Abso-
lute Idea of Geist (mind/spirit) alienating itself in nature (matter and
sensuous form) and then returning to itself self-consciously as spirit.
For Hegel, in art, as in religion and philosophy, mind comes to recog-
nize itself. However, while art expresses the Idea in sensuous form,
art cannot result from a conscious, “thinking” process. Hegel writes:
it would be possible in poetical creation to try and proceed by first

apprehending the theme to be treated as a prosaic thought, and then
by putting it into pictorial ideas, and into rhyme, and so forth; so
that the pictorial element would simply be hung upon the abstract
reflections as an ornament or decoration. Such a process could only
produce bad poetry, for in it there would be operative as two sepa-
rate activities that which in artistic production has its right place
only as undivided unity.
For Hegel, in “artistic imagination . . . the rational element . . .

extrudes itself into consciousness, but yet does not array before it what
it bears within itself till it does so in sensuous form.”99
Hegel puts it this way, according to Drob:
the productive imagination of the artist is the imagination of a great

mind and heart, the apprehension and creation of ideas and of shapes,
and, indeed, the exhibition of the profoundest and most universal
interests in the definite sensuous mode of pictorial representation.100
For Hegel, however, thought and reflection have moved us only beyond
art and a religious, mythological view of the world. “Hegel considers and
rejects the notion, later endorsed by Jung, that the life of the mind is ‘dis-
figured and slain’ by thought. . . ‘as the means of grasping what has life,
man rather cut himself off from . . . his purpose.’ ”101
For Hegel, “thought – to think – is precisely that in which the mind has
its innermost and essential nature. In gaining this thinking conscious-
ness concerning itself and its products, the mind is behaving according
to its essential nature. . . .
Drob concludes:
While Jung clearly held that the “transcendent function” is a religious/

psychological as opposed to an artistic function, I believe that the issue
between Hegel and Jung . . . rests on the role of the “image” (artistic,
symbolic, mythological) in the contemporary (post-Hegelian) devel-
opment of Geist. Jung was wrong to accuse Hegel of failing to grasp
the role of the imagination in psychic development – Hegel grasped it,
I think, but held that the imagination, which expressed nascent thought
in the form of art and religion, had been largely superseded by phi-
losophy, by thought in its “purest” form.102
This is Hegel’s position, but for Drob it is insufficiently dialectical. I am

not exactly sure what Drob means here, but for me, as noted above, the
dialectic continues – beyond art and religion is thought, but then from
thought back into the images of art and religion and symbolic thinking.
The idea of a circular rather than a linear dialectic is closer to what for me
remains a non-reducible function of the imaginal life. At the end of her
book Hegel’s Theory of Imagination, Jennifer Bates writes:
If imagination is central to the movement of Aufhebung – if it is,

indeed, the inception of it – then we never get beyond it. What the
imagination holds, and what it is today, is the key to understanding the
depth of our time. And if we have learned anything from Hegel, we
must think it through carefully.103
If I have interpreted Bates correctly, and I’m not sure I have or that she
would agree with me, her position would be close or parallel to Kathleen
Magnus.
Magnus states that “Hegel conceives of a wholly self-determining spirit
that is at once open to the difference of the ‘other,’ ”104 but “does not leave
its sensuous dimension behind as a mere preliminary stage to its fulfill-
ment; spirit actually incorporates the sensuous into its absolute dimension
through its various acts of symbolization.”105 In addition, the “symbolic
element remains in tension with the clarity of philosophical thought.”106
Paul Ricoeur had already noted that “Hegel fights against any concep-
tion of the Absolute which would ‘lack the seriousness, the suffering, the
patience, and the labour of the negative.’ ”107 For him as for Magnus, a
close reading of Hegel suggests the need for “mediation which entails
the dialectic between determinate shapes, the identifiable patterns, and
the flux which shatters all fixed forms. We have both to dwell in deter-
minate shapes and also accompany their dissolution into further differ-
ent shapes.”108 Ricoeur raises the question of whether it is “possible for a
human mind to ‘cease to think in pictures’ and to keep for philosophy the
inner thrust which projects figurative thinking toward speculative thought?
Such is the quandary that the philosophy of religion of the Phenomenol-
ogy left unsolved and that” Hegel took up in the Berlin Lectures “by fol-
lowing a less antagonistic stance as regards picture-thinking.”109 Ricoeur
understands
the last pages of the 1831 Berlin Lectures in this sense: becoming more
and more aware of the mutual relevance of religion and philosophy,
Hegel had to overcome his own distrust for picture-thinking in order
to secure the future of philosophy itself. Finally, absolute knowledge
affords no supplement of thought, but is no less and no more than the

conceptual light within which each cultural context, and finally each
religious representation, thinks itself.110
Ricoeur notes that absolute thought “is less a final stage than” it is “the
process thanks to which all shapes and all stages remain thoughtful. Abso-
lute knowledge, consequently, is the thoughtfulness of picture thinking.”111
Is this what imagistically we earlier called the “light of darkness itself”?
At the end of my essay in Spring,112 I noted that, perhaps in the end, idea
and image may best be spoken about in a couple of ways: as an alchem-
ical circulatio or a monstrous coniunctio. Both might be thought of as
metaphors that attempt to speak the unspeakable. The need to attempt this
speech is a continuing historical process, a process undertaken by Hegel.
Absolute Knowledge, therefore, is not a supplement of knowledge, but the
thoughtfulness of all modes that generate it. “As a result, we have the pos-
sibility of reinterpreting the hermeneutics of religious thinking as an end-
less process thanks to which representative and speculative thought keep
generating one another.”113 This leads to a focus on “the inner dynamism
which keeps directing figurative thought towards speculative thought,
without ever abolishing the narrative and symbolic features of the figu-
rative mode.”114 For the sake of completing the circle, I would add that
speculative thought also always discovers metaphor in its midst.
It is this tension that continues to animate Hegel’s notion of Absolute
Knowing. For Ricoeur, as it was for Magnus, spirit never literally “reaches
the point of ‘simply being’ absolute.”115 Rather “[i]ts absoluteness lies
within its self-creating, self-determining act. Spirit becomes absolute,” but
the emphasis is on the dynamic of becoming.116 “It is never absolute ‘once
and for all.’ ”117 That is, it can never “sustain its absoluteness on the level
of immediacy, but must continually create and recreate, present and rep-
resent, itself. In other words, in order to preserve its self-identity, spirit
must remain in self-differentiating motion.”118 If one takes seriously that
Absolute Knowing is never literally absolute “once and for all” and always
remains in “self-differentiated motion,” then one must also conclude with
Rockmore that Absolute Knowing “points toward the historical nature
of the process of knowledge.”119 For Rockmore, Hegel’s understanding
and knowing is “a thoroughly historical conception of knowledge claims
indexed to time and place, hence to the historical moment.”120 “Claims to
know are always dependent on theories which are relative to the historical
moment.”121 And again, for Hegel, “we cannot understand knowledge

other than from the perspective of human being. . . . [and] if we understand
the subject as a real human being, hence as historical, then we must under-
stand knowledge as a historical process”122 in which image and thought
are intimately interrelated, co-dependent, and necessary for the generative
movement of the historical soul.123
It seems to me that if, on the one hand, the circularity of self-conscious-
ness and of image and idea are archetypal structures, they are also always
historical. “The realized concept of spirit is precisely this paradox”124 and
Absolute Knowing, while it is absolute, is always also historical. Rock-
more’s emphasis on history is echoed by James Hillman who states:
“I shall ride this horse of history until it drops, for I submit that history has
become the Great Repressed.”125
Notes
1 Portions of this chapter are modified from sections of my book, Marlan, The Black Sun.
2 Ibid., 125.
3 Ibid., 239–240.
4 Ibid., 240.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
8 Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology, 99.
10 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14), §190; quoted by Miller, “Nothing Almost
Sees Miracles!,” 14.
12 Ibid., 15.
13 Kelly, “Atman, Anatta, and Transpersonal Psychology,” 188–199.
14 Ibid., 198.
15 Jung also uses the word “complementarity,” which for him was a bit too mechanical
and functional and for which compensation is “a psychological refinement.” (Jung,
The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche [CW8], §545, footnote 3).
16 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 207–208.
18 Lacan’s petit a is a profoundly polyvalent concept and the subject of literally thousands
of pages of exegesis in Lacan’s work. That said, Bruce Fink discusses it in terms of
the residue of symbolization – the real that remains, insists, and ex-
sists after or despite symbolization – as the traumatic cause, and as
that which interrupts the smooth functioning of law and the automatic
unfolding of the signifying chain. (Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 83)
20 Ibid.
21 Sim, Derrida and the End of History, 33.
23 Critchley, “Prolegomena to Any Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity,” 25.
24 Foucault, Order of Things, 387.
25 Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul, 152.
26 Ibid.
27 Levinas, for instance, criticizes Heidegger’s transsubjective concept of Dasein by not-
ing that “Dasein is never hungry” (Critchley, “Prolegomena,” 30), and Hillman chooses
to rely on the word “soul” as opposed to Self because it retains a connection with the
body, with physical and emotional concerns above love and loss, life and death. “It is
experienced as a living force having a physical location” and is more easily expressed
in psychological, metaphoric, and poetic descriptions (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis,
207). Both Levinas and Hillman share a number of overlapping concerns. Both are
critical of the primacy of a theoretical model of consciousness in which the subject
maintains an objectifying relation to the world mediated through representation. Both
support a movement toward a re-envisioned subject as an embodied being of flesh and
blood, a subject who is fully sentient and in touch with sensation and who is “vulner-
able” and “open to wounding” (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence,
15), filled with “jouissance and joie de vivre” (Critchley, “Prolegomena,” 29). In addi-
tion, both Levinas and Hillman share a unique, ethical sensibility. For Levinas, ethics
is fundamental, and the entire thrust of his Otherwise than Being is to "found ethical
subjectivity in sensibility and to describe sensibility as a proximity to the other"(Ibid.,
30). What this means for Levinas is very different from our usual understanding of eth-
ics. For him, “Ethics is not an obligation toward the other mediated through” formal
principles or good conscience: Moral consciousness is not an experience of values but
an access to exterior being – to what he calls the Other. From a psychological point
of view, this begins to sound like the capacity to see beyond our narcissistic self-
enclosure and to actually have contact with something outside of our own egos. The
subject is subject to something that exceeds us (Ibid., 26). The “deep structure of sub-
jective experience” – the responsibility or responsivity to the other – is what Levinas
calls Psyche (Ibid., 31). Likewise, the thrust of Hillman’s archetypal psychology is a
movement beyond the narcissistic enclosure in which the aim is a “psychotherapeutic
cure of ‘me,’ ” in which all the me-ness has been cooked out of our emotions (Hillman,
Alchemical Psychology, 255). This comparison of Levinas with Hillman is not meant
in any way to equate their thought. A real comparison of their work would require an
independent study of what each thinker means by terms they use in common.
28 See Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 13–38.
29 Ibid., 17.
30 Ibid., 18.
31 Ibid., 18–19.
32 Ibid., 20.
35 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 26; emphasis of “in us” is mine.
39 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 212.
42 Ibid.

45 Ibid.
46 Hegel, Phenomenology, 493, §808; brackets in original.
47 Ibid., 490–491, §805; brackets in original.
48 Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, 19.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Rockmore, On Hegel’s Epistemology, 62.
52 Ibid., 62–63.
53 Ibid., 63.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xxvi–xxvii, 27; quoted by Rockmore, On Hegel’s
Epistemology, 63; emphasis of “thing” is mine.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, 19.
62 Ibid.
64 Ibid., 64.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Rockmore, Kant and Idealism, 78.
68 Rockmore, Hegel’s Circular Epistemology, 178.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 180–181.
72 Verene, “Hegel’s Nature,” 212.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.; brackets in Verene’s text.
75 Ibid., 213.
76 Ibid., 215.
77 Ibid., 216.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 218.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., 219.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 220.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid., 221.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 215.
92 Ibid., 223.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid. For Verene as for others before him, humor remains a quality valuable for coming
to terms with Hegel. I cannot engage this issue in this context, but a fuller reflection
on this theme can be found in Flay, Hegel and His Critic. See particularly the essay
“Hegel, Derrida and Bataille’s Laughter,” by Joseph C. Flay with a Commentary by
Judith Butler, 163–178.
95 Verene, “Hegel’s Recollection,” 20; emphasis mine.
97 Ibid., §268.
98 Drob, personal communication, May 12, 2014.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination, 153.
104 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 25; emphasis mine.
105 Ibid., 241.
106 Ibid., 242.
107 Ricoeur, “The Status of Vorstellung,” 81.
109 Ibid., 84.
110 Ibid., 86.
111 Ibid.
112 Marlan, “From the Black Sun.”
113 Ricoeur, “The Status of Vorstellung,” 86.
114 Ibid.
115 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 245.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid.
120 Ibid., 168.
122 Rockmore, Cognition, 216. Emphasis mine.
123 For a further discussion, see Rockmore, Cognition, 210.
124 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 245.
Chapter 12
Spirit and soul
Image and idea, spirit and soul, have been imagined in different ways and
in differing constellations. What has become clear to me is that they are
not clear-cut opposites. In the Introduction to Karin de Boer’s study of
Hegel, she notes that Hegel denounced
the tendency of modernity to treat contrary determinations and

clear-cut oppositions. Whereas modern thought, in his view, unduly
assumed the relative independence of contraries such as necessity and
freedom, the inner and the outer, essence and appearance, he believed
that “the sole intent of philosophy consists in resolving such rigidified
oppositions.” Only thus might it achieve insight into the dynamic unity
constitutive of thought, nature, and history.1
De Boer’s thesis sheds additional light on a number of my own concerns

raised above, namely, the circular process of Spirit and Soul, image and
thought, and the optimism of Hegel’s march to the absolute as a linear
view of history, as necessary progress. For me, progress remains a highly
ambivalent notion and is always in need of a disclosure of values and
context.
In my study of the black sun, I challenged the optimistic idea that oppo-
sitions can always be overcome, surpassed, or sublated. The tragic dimen-
sion of Sol niger showed, at least in individual lives if not in culture, that
the tragic dimensions of life resisted, if not refused, to be uplifted. I also
noted above that my interpretation of Hegel was that he was not naïvely
optimistic in bypassing tragedy, that he did existentially suffer the impact
of the negative. As Desmond has noted, for Hegel, “[t]he human spirit is
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-13
234 Spirit and soul
an agony before evil”2 and yet, for Hegel, and Desmond as well as for De
Boer, the “sway of the negative” demands further, if not continuing, reflec-
tion with regard to the tragic sides of life.3 De Boer writes:
Hegel’s speculative science as a whole testifies to a deep tension

between two different strands, namely, a tragic and a dialectical strand.
Whereas, as I hope to show, the dialectical strand allowed Hegel to
develop a comprehensive philosophical system, this book deploys its
tragic strand to develop a contemporary criticism of Hegel’s philoso-
phy, and modernity alike.4
For De Boer,
Hegel could only resolve the conceptual oppositions constitutive of

modern thought by recoiling, as it were, from the implications of his
early conception of tragic conflicts.5
While I don’t think recoiling is a fair word, I think De Boer is referring to

the optimism of Hegel’s dialectic which for her is in tension with another
aspect of Hegel’s awareness which she believes is not given enough recog-
nition as playing an equal role in the dialectic itself. This aspect is Hegel’s
recognition of the “tragic,” which for De Boer cannot be fully sublated, but
remains “entangled” with the “advance” of spirit and constitutes an equal
principle, a “logic of entanglement” on par with Hegel’s notion of “abso-
lute negativity.” De Boer’s view of “tragic negativity”6 fits with my origi-
nal concerns about the tragic aspects of the black sun, while Hegel’s more
optimistic view of logical negativity, which drives the dialectic, expresses
the shine of Sol niger and its illumination in spirit, which inspired me to
continue my reflection beyond the black sun to the shine of darkness itself
and to the Philosophers’ Stone.
Tarrying with the negative

Perhaps De Boer’s contribution in my terms would be to recognize that
as the Philosophers’ Stone moves toward a shining whiteness, it bears its
darkness; brings its darkness with it as an essential aspect of its differen-
tiated wholeness. In this sense, the Stone truly tarries with the negative
and continues to “hesitate before the magical power that turns death into
Spirit and soul 235
being.”7 Tarrying here has less the meaning of a temporal hiatus and more
of an archetypal principle of hesitancy of “being of two minds” which
should not be identified with stasis as such or with any fixed principle.
Without trying to elaborate the philosophical structure of tarrying or hesi-
tation, I would simply like to suggest that an attitude of hesitation enriches
the dialectical process and theoretical speculation. It also deepens interior-
ity and psychological space – which for James Hillman increases through
slowness. In accord with the alchemists, Hillman refers to “patience as
a first quality of soul.”8 Now this psychological recognition does not yet
address the fundamental place of tarrying or hesitation with the problemat-
ics of the dialectic raised by De Boer and others, but it is important to note
that “[w]e live in a time of rush.”9
“[C]ontemporary societies have little or no time for metaphysical pon-
dering. . . . even the privileged, academic philosopher is often caught in
the hurry, too harried by professional obligations to have enough time or
inclination to think.”10 Even philosophers have been infected by what Carl
Honoré has called the “cult of speed.”11 Honoré quotes British psycholo-
gist Guy Claxton who states: “We have developed an inner psychology
of speed, of saving time and maximizing efficiency. . . ”12 In his book, In
Praise of Slowness, Honoré describes his own life as having “turned into
an exercise in hurry” and notes that American physician Larry Dossey
“coined the term ‘time-sickness’ to describe the obsessive belief that ‘time
is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must peddle
faster and faster to keep up.’ ”13
Desmond notes that in our time philosophers
risk the seduction of what I will call “thought-bites:” positions ready

prepared for speed reading, prepackaged for mental digestion. Our
quick attention to ideas, more or less familiar, offers a satisfaction but
this is short-lived. Little nourished, we seek the stimulus of more quick
“thought-bites” to keep the hunger of spirit at bay. A philosopher has
to be prepared to stand aside in the rush – and to let that hunger of
spirit speak. The willingness to think long, with a discerning taste for
what sustains thought – these are necessary for philosophy. To have the
freedom to think one must have the time to savor thought. There is no
quick or easy solution to philosophical perplexity that would give to
the mind an undemanding rush of conceptual ecstasy. Philosophy can
be urgent but need not be hurried. Philosophy requires the patience of
236 Spirit and soul
thinking. Patience of thought is especially required when, as we often

find, philosophy does not dispel our perplexity but deepens it.14
For Desmond, philosophy must acknowledge its own plurivocity. “It does
not just have one voice, say, that of a dominating univocal logicism.”15
Here Desmond is referring to his multiple reflections on Hegel and dia-
lectics in his book, but this plurivocity as well can be seen to refer to
the dialectical tensions implicit in both philosophical and psychological
dialectics – personal, cultural, and historical voices that, in their dialogue
with the philosopher or psychologist, slow the pace to reach ontological
convictions.
Following Jung and Hillman, plurivocity can be imagined as a daimonic
process, an engagement with what they have called the “little people” who
want their say and have a story to tell. Engagement with them is a complex
dialectic that drives one to the limits of one’s understanding and relativizes
one’s point of view, and in so doing continues to open new horizons and
broadens one’s vision. Such a dialogue challenges stale ideas and helps to
give meaning to what initially appears as nonsense. It opens a fertile abyss
and connects the subject to a larger world. Such dialogue provokes hesita-
tion and such tarrying can help us to reserve judgment and to resist quick
one-sided formulations. It may allow us to stand firm against the pressure
for clear and distinct ideas that devitalize our reflections and foreclose
an openness and ambiguity on the threshold of meaning that enriches us.
When this open space collapses, our theories can become stultified, and we
lose something essentially human.
For Desmond, there is no quick and easy solution to the conundrums of
philosophy. Philosophy requires patience and a resistance to any easy “uni-
vocal logicism.”16 While Desmond is very sympathetic to Hegel, he resists
seeing philosophy as standing over other modes of discourse in a hier-
archical fashion. Philosophy for Desmond has limits in the face of other
forms of discourse to which it must open itself beyond its own familiar
categories not reducing otherness “to its own categorial self-mediation.”17
For Desmond, Hegel is a master philosopher who takes the time to think
things through to the end, but as noted above there are many ways to read
Hegel. Desmond struggles with a reading of Hegel not unlike the ones Rock-
more criticizes, basically a reading that literalizes the Absolute and reduces
it to an ontology of spirit. For Desmond, this happens when spirit encom-
passes all other modes of thought and subordinates them to its own purpose.
Spirit and soul 237
At the end of the Phenomenology, Desmond finds an example of this in

the way the dialectic subordinates both art and religion. Pointing to this
moment in the dialectic has not been an uncommon criticism and Hegel
has been fairly or unfairly accused of “a hubris of reason, a disrespect for
what is other to thought, and a will to subordinate all being to philosophi-
cal speculation.”18 However, Desmond suggests that if systematic philoso-
phy is to take account of art and religion as “other” to philosophy, in the
sense of “their proximity to ultimacy, then what we mean by philosophi-
cal science is itself made problematic.”19 For Desmond, there is no easy
solution to this problem. Unlike many other critics, he does not simply
dismiss Hegel’s handling of this issue. He does, however, underline what
he considers paradox, “thought provoking ambiguities,” and “fundamental
tensions inherent in the philosophical enterprise itself.”20
For Desmond, these ambiguities call for a different way of reading Hegel
“to think otherwise than Hegel did.”21 Here it appears that Desmond is not
simply reading Hegel differently, but actually proposing a different way
of engagement of philosophy with other disciplines. Desmond cites his
contribution as reinterpretation, a “ ‘metaxological understanding’ of the
interplay of philosophy and its others.”22 Giving credit to Hegel, he notes
that in Hegel’s thought we also find both “the coexistence of an inexorable
will to systematic reason and philosophical respect for modes of mind that
normally are taken as recalcitrant to rational systematization.”23 In short,
Hegel “wants to think the dialectical togetherness of philosophical reason
and its recalcitrant others.”24
The paradox Desmond points to centers around the question: What
is other to philosophy? Desmond again returns to the seeming divide
between the task of systematic philosophy and subordinating all other-
ness to the self-mediation of philosophical thought and yet maintaining
a genuine openness to other modes of mind – a seeming contradiction,
an either/or. In Desmond’s view, “Hegel rejects this either/or. . . . [in] his
desire to respond to both these requirements.”25 Ultimately, Desmond
claims that Hegel reduces “this double requirement to a singular, all-
embracing process of dialectical self-mediation.”26 For Desmond, it is
undeniable that Hegel “gives philosophical priority to thought thinking
itself.”27 This paradoxical way of thinking challenges us to “rethink what
it is to think philosophically. It forces us to rethink the others of phi-
losophy, not only in their continuity with philosophy, but also in their
discontinuity.”28
238 Spirit and soul
In this moment, Desmond is critical of Hegel, but he is relentless in his

attempt to give Hegel as fair a reading as he can. Following his first line of
criticism, he notes that self-mediation leads to a continuity between phi-
losophy and its others, which is valorized by Hegel’s admirers, while the
gap between philosophy and its other, the discontinuity, remains important
to those who see Hegel’s thought as reductive. Desmond finds it important
to reflect on both ways of reading Hegel, a balanced reading. In this double
reading, Desmond both praises and criticizes Hegel in an attempt to hear
Hegel’s complex voice, noting that he himself has been criticized by some
as being “too Hegelian,” by others as being “not Hegelian enough,” and by
still others as getting “the balance right.”29
In Desmond’s ongoing reflections, he leans toward continuity, but also
allows for more discontinuity than is often the case with Hegelians. This
approach is fitting to Desmond’s “concern with what is other to system
at the limits of philosophical reason.”30 Desmond considers himself to be
a generous reader of Hegel, but his reading does not lay fully to rest his
“pervasive unease” and “suspicion.”31 While “Hegel occupies a certain
intermediate position between continuity and discontinuity,”32 the mediat-
ing between these two moments is itself dialectical for Hegel while for
Desmond it is “metaxological,” and he argues that this “takes us beyond
Hegel and dialectic.”33
What and how then does Desmond’s approach differ from Hegel’s? Like
Hegel, Desmond realizes that “the relation of thought and what is other to
thought” requires a “complex balance of unity and plurality, identity and
difference, sameness and distinction.”34 For Desmond, the middle between
these divergences is not adequately “interpreted either by totalizing
holisms” (as some attribute to Hegel) or by “the discontinuous plurality”
of deconstructionism and the pluralism of Wittgenstein and others.35 While
Desmond’s perspective acknowledges the contemporary appreciation of
the importance of “dissents from any sterile obsession with discontinuity,”
he also notes that “[O]therness itself asks us to think through the meaning
of the community of being. A community of being that sustains otherness
distances us from merely asserted difference, as well as from any equally
unfruitful sense of totalizing unity.”36
At first, it is hard to distinguish Desmond’s dialectics from Hegelian
dialectics. Toward the end, however, Desmond finally notes that for him
the limitation he finds with Hegel’s dialectics is the “tendency to interpret
all mediation primarily in terms of self-mediation . . . . The thought of
Spirit and soul 239
everything other to thought risks getting finally reduced to a moment of

thought thinking itself.”37 Desmond attempts to remedy this with his idea
of a metaxological approach. This approach, he claims, “is not so much
hostile to dialectic as it is to any such reduction of otherness, and to the
reduction of a pluralized intermediation to a singular self-mediation.”38
The metaxological approach seems to complement dialectics in so far as
“[i]t wants to articulate the togetherness with a different accent on other-
ness,” a way of seeing that is
open to a double mediation . . . that is no dualistic opposition. The

middle is plurally mediated: it can be mediated from the side of the
dialectical self; but also it can be mediated from the side of an other-
ness that is not reduced to a moment of self-mediation.39
Again, Desmond points out the singularity that can be found with a careful
reading of Hegel who “also believes that the other mediates the middle,”
but for Desmond there are many places
that this mediation from the side of the other invariably turns out to be
a penultimate, hence subordinate moment of a more ultimate process
of dialectical self-mediation . . . a mediation of the self in the form of
its own otherness, and hence not the mediation of an irreducible other
at all.40
A metaxological approach intends even more than Hegel to grant “oth-

erness its irreducible otherness.”41 It is hard to understand how, if “other-
ness” is to be “mediated,” it remains “irreducible.” Desmond states that
otherness “must” indeed be mediated, but it has to do so “in terms other
than dialectical self-mediation.”42 The metaxological approach
is itself plural. . . [in] an affirmative sense of the double that cannot

be spoken of simply as a dualistic opposition. Nor is the other simply
the self in the form of its own otherness. . . . The mediation of the
metaxological between cannot be exhausted either by the mediation of
the self or the mediation of the other. Neither side can claim entirely to
mediate the complex between. The “whole” is not a whole in the sense
of a conceptual monologue with itself; it is a plurivocal community of
voices in interplay just in their genuine otherness.43
240 Spirit and soul
In elaborating the metaxological sensibility, Desmond hopes to counter

the dangers of “spiritual” and “mental” reductionism and to reinforce that
“[t]he deepest openness of the speculative mind is the impossibility of the
ultimate closure of thought by itself and in itself.”44
Speculative thought in Desmond’s sense both self-mediates and inter-
mediates “between thought and what is other than thought.”45 Therefore,
the metaxological way of thinking may discover that “honest speculative
reflection may find its self-mediations broken or ruptured on forms of
otherness that its categories cannot entirely master.”46 Put another way, a
metaxological approach opens itself beyond monologue, goes to the edge
of logos and beyond to hear the voices of otherness on their own terms.
The relationship between self and other is still “held together” as “a sense
of ‘wholeness’ that is not closed.”47 Examples of such open wholeness can
be found for Desmond in works of art. In his recognition of such whole-
ness, the metaxological is seen as closer to Hegel than to deconstruction-
ist thinkers who, Desmond feels, “disdain any suggestion of wholeness,”
which they identify “with a closed totality.”48 Rather than leave Hegel
and dialectics behind, Desmond proposes that Hegel can be “fruitfully
reinterpreted as trying to stand dialectically in the middle.”49 In this con-
text, Hegel’s “dynamic interplay of the self and other, unity and differ-
ence, sameness and otherness” exhibits the “power of dialectical thinking”
which is not surpassed in either Heidegger or Derrida.50 “Its power is not
completed or exhausted, but still stands before us a promise.”51 To philoso-
phize in Desmond’s sense requires a patient dwelling with and mediating
attitude toward what is “other” than philosophy.
An example of such mediation can be found in the work of Casey who
engages one of philosophy’s “others” – psychology. The otherness of phi-
losophy and psychology have been thought of as two different, exclusive
enterprises, but for Casey they may actually be more closely related then
typically imagined. For Casey, they may in fact show themselves not sim-
ply needing to be brought into relationship, but as already co-joined. In
order to take up the relationship between philosophy and psychology, he
first draws them apart, pointing to the way these “fields” have been char-
acterized and marked respectively in terms of spirit (philosophy) and soul
(psychology).
Casey characterizes philosophy as emphasizing spirit, pure reason, sepa-
ration, division, diakrises, analysis, form, logos. Psychology is, in contrast,
characterized by soul, as synthetic, syncretic, fusing, and lively spirit, with
Spirit and soul 241
body and world, in concrete places. While philosophy, according to Casey,

classically divides, psychology refuses dichotomies. Psychology empha-
sizes feeling rather than thought and argues that feeling links opposites
and sits at the border between them. For Casey, psychology’s syncretic
style extends to the divides between philosophy and psychology, spirit and
soul, though he recognizes how difficult this divide is for the modern mind
characterized as it is by Cartesian dualism.
Casey continues to refine his reflections on the interplay between phi-
losophy and psychology by noting the tension between reason and percep-
tion. Reason attempts to unify from above, while psychology, more rooted
in perception, attempts to unify from below. For Casey, neither reason nor
perception can close the gap between the two perspectives or between
thought and feeling, spirit and soul. For Casey, moving further toward
the integration of these divides is facilitated by his focus on imagination
and memory. At a subtle level, it appears as if imagination and memory
mirror the contrast between philosophy and psychology in that imagina-
tion appears to move upward toward spirit, while memory seems to move
down toward feeling.
Casey describes the power of imagination as moving up from body
to soul, “an essential step to corporeal action,” and “Up from Soul to
Spirit.”52 This process is a moving from inarticulate feeling toward expres-
sion in “categories, concepts, and words,” but he also notes the subtler and
progressive move in the direction of “ ‘verbalization’ . . . that has not yet
found words adequate to its level of insight.”53 What Casey has in mind
here appears to be a progressive active imagination, including “pondering”
and “meditating” that takes place “without yet crystalizing our thought in
language – not even in inner speech.”54 Casey gives the example of the
sequential processes in both Hegel’s Phenomenology and the Logic, pro-
cesses that he says (much like Bates) “would not be possible without the
intervention of an imagination that inspired the soul to think abstractly.”55
For Casey, philosophy itself would not be possible without the imagi-
nation. Like emotion, imagination is “a spontaneously unifying factor in
human experience, first linking body with soul . . . and then connecting
soul with spirit.”56 For Casey, like for Hegel and Giegerich, this linking
is not an external process that starts with two different objective entities:
body and soul, “but of an indefinite plurality of modes of existing between
which imagination moves in its Mercurial manner.”57 If, for Casey, imagi-
nation is an upward linking already in process, a binding adhesive that is
242 Spirit and soul
active at a subtle level, it is also not the only process at work as a synthe-
sizing force. Imagination’s upward movement is matched by memory’s
downward movement from spirit to soul. “Memory brings spirit down to
feeling. . . [and] to its . . . troubled body that is re-membered in mind.”58
For Casey, “soul seeks its own substance.”59 The two operations of
imagination and memory, the upward and downward movement are not
the same. They are complimentary and both work as connecting princi-
ples and are necessary to each other. “[W]ithout the continual and conjoint
operations of imagination and memory human existence would indeed fall
apart into warring factions, divided against itself.”60
An interesting and important aspect of Casey’s description of imagina-
tion and memory is that they do not simply operate on an inward level. He
notes that in imagining and remembering we move out of simple interior-
ity extending beyond ourselves and “out of our skin and into places of the
world.”61 The notion of “place” is one of Casey’s creative contradictions
to both philosophy and psychology which I cannot further explore in this
context. However, with the idea of “place,” there is a movement beyond
the expression of either idea and image, spirit or soul – in separation. “The
twain between spirit and soul not only will meet but has already met in
the continual collusions of imagery and remembering, which, tied to each
other, tie soul and spirit together.”62
For Casey, this “co-constitution” and coherence “of spirit and psyche”63
are “held together in a bodily mode . . . above all, by the images which
imagining and remembering share.”64 Here “image” must be understood
not simply as a representation in mind of some outer physical reality, but
rather as “essential features of phenomena” or “structures of presenta-
tion.”65 For Casey, both imagining and remembering share images and
operate as “ ‘intentional threads’ by which a life comes to composition and
compresence with itself.”66 Casey notes:
Language is no more a matter of an individual speech act (la parole)

than primordial images are affairs of the isolated ego. Each proceeds
from a level of the psyche that is profoundly impersonal: “collective”
in Jung’s preferred term, “institutionalized” in Saussure’s answering
notion. In this way, image and word come together in the end after
all – despite Jung’s sometimes heroic efforts to hold them apart. But
they come together at a level of human being that has been given full
recognition only in postmodernist thought. Jung and Saussure are not
Spirit and soul 243
alone in their insistence on the collective basis of image and word that
earlier modernists failed to acknowledge. They are joined by think-
ers as diverse as Lévy-Bruhl and Chomsky, both of whom also assert
the transpersonal foundation of imagination and language, whether in
the guise of collective representations or universally shared rules of
generative grammar. What matters, however, is not the history of the
trend, or who in particular belongs to it. What matters is the vision it
embodies. This is a vision that gives back to images, as it gives back to
words, a grounding in the spontaneous action of the psyche, which is
image as it is word, and, in being both at once, transcends the ecologi-
cal confines – in sign and copy – of the modernist conception of the
human self, a conception that renders the self incapable of the sym-
bolic activity of the psyche in its cosmic and collective dimensions.67
For Casey, “[i]mages also serve to specify. They occupy places in psy-
che. . . . It is with images, then, that the ultimate rapprochement is to be
made between” philosophy and psychology.68 More particularly the kind
of philosophizing and psychology that Casey has in mind and has been
concerned with is phenomenological philosophy and archetypal psychol-
ogy. He draws both “fields” together by virtue of their mutual concern
with “manifestation,” where what matters to both “is the manifest image
and the world in which it is set.”69 In both fields, the world as anima
mundi is a notion of world that goes out beyond “the entrapment of per-
sonalized consciousness.”70 Both fields “step into the light of place . . .
a diffusely lighted, amorphously luminous place whose proper name is
‘landscape.’ ”71 With this notion, Casey offers a philosophical setting “for
archetypes as well as for structures of presentation.”72 Casey imagines
the linking of phenomenological philosophy with archetypal psychology
as a three-sided discipline which he calls “arche-pheno-topology” and
which he sees as “a region within which philosophy and psychology
can commingle more fully and freely than they have allowed themselves
to do thus far in the modern and post-modern era.”73 In such a place,
Casey imagines images can play back and forth between imaging and
remembering.
they are the free play of their enactments. They also furnish the Spiel-
raum, the very play-space, for a psychology conceived archetypally
and a philosophy considered as phenomenology. Images allow these
244 Spirit and soul
two “fields” to take place together, to find a common ground – a

shared placescape – and even on occasion to take each other’s place.74
The work of bringing philosophy and psychology together is also taken

up by David Morris who, inspired by Casey’s idea to “get back with
things into place,” argues that this is an unending process.75 It is unend-
ing because, as Morris suggests, “place” in Casey’s sense “is never fully
here”76 and requires what he calls a “vagabond,” “subliminal,” or “periph-
eral approach to things.”77 The method by which one may approach such
a place or landscape is to “turn from determinate objects to indeterminate
horizons, from the more to the less, [which] is at work within experience
itself, prior to reflection.”78
To “capture,” or perhaps better, to enter, into such awareness requires
differentiating between gazing and glancing. “Glancing opens [us] onto the
non-givenness of place” to indeterminate horizons “let[ting] things catch
our glance before we have objectified [them] with our gaze.”79 This lets us
see what Casey calls periphenomenon “that can reveal, within the phenom-
ena themselves, tell tales of a non-appearing, non-givenness that nonethe-
less appears and is given in each and every phenomenon.”80 For Morris,
Casey’s phenomenology is subliminal in its topic, since what it reveals

is that the condition of appearance of delimited things is place as not
itself susceptible of full delimitation, since such delimitation always,
inherently, and endogenously proceeds into further moves of delimita-
tion. Casey shows us how there is no bottom to place, as there is no
end to time. Place is both beneath and beyond delimitation.81
Casey’s distinction between the gaze and the glance and his refusal to sep-
arate spirit from soul, psychology from philosophy, renders his thought
resonant with a number of contemporary interpreters of Hegel and sets
the stage for a non-traditional understanding of Hegel’s notion of Spirit.
For these interpreters of Hegel, Spirit itself must be intimately connected
with soul and the psychological ground important in an understanding of
the idea of the Absolute that is grounded in history, in time and place, and
is a complex unity. As such, it can serve as an important way to deepen
our understanding of the alchemical project of creating a unified vision
of the Philosophers’ Stone not split into the binaries discussed throughout
this work.
Spirit and soul 245
Notes
1 De Boer, On Hegel, 1–2; emphasis mine.
2 Desmond, Beyond Hegel, 230.
3 I cannot here adequately discuss the important challenges Desmond raises for spec-
ulative thought. See his chapter entitled “Dialectic and Evil,” 189–250, for a fuller
discussion.
4 De Boer, On Hegel, 2.
5 Ibid., 7.
6 Ibid., 4.
7 Hegel Phenomenology of the Spirit, 19.
8 Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, 94.
10 Ibid.
11 Honoré, In Praise of Slowness, 11.
12 Ibid., 4.
13 Ibid., 3.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 1.
18 Ibid., 2.
19 Ibid., 3.
20 Ibid., 4.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 5.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 6. Whether Desmond succeeds in going beyond Hegel or rather offers an alterna-
tive reading of Hegel’s dialectic requires further discussion.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 7.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 7–8.
41 Ibid., 8.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 9.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 10.
48 Ibid.
246 Spirit and soul
49 Ibid., 11.
50 Ibid., 12.
51 Ibid.
52 Casey, Spirit and Soul, xv.
53 Ibid., xvi.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., xvii.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., xviii.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Here Casey alters his conjunction between “spirit and soul” to “spirit and psyche.”
I am unsure if he is using the term “psyche” as congruent with “soul” in this context.
64 Casey, Spirit and Soul, xix.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Casey, “Jung and the Postmodern Condition,” 323.
68 Casey, Spirit and Soul, xx.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., xxi.
75 Morris, “Casey’s Subliminal Phenomenology,” 54.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., 56.
78 Ibid., 57.
79 Ibid., 61.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
Chapter 13
The self, the absolute,

the stone
Throughout this work, I have pointed to the importance of Hegel for an

understanding of the Philosophers’ Stone and the Self. Previously I have
touched upon the idea of the Absolute, which is perhaps the most complex
and difficult of Hegel’s ideas. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel’s
idea of Absolute Knowing is described in the last and perhaps most enig-
matic chapter of his work. Rockmore comments that this is Hegel’s “most
cryptic chapter” and though it “still retains a large portion of mystery after
almost two centuries,” it is “not impenetrable.”1 If Derrida is correct, and
I believe that he is, “we will never be finished with a reading or rereading
of Hegel”2 – and this, I would add, is also the case for Jung.
As noted, Jung’s works are likewise difficult, particularly his notion of
the “Self” as it developed over time out of his alchemical studies and as
it was discussed in his work Aion and ultimately in his last major work,
Mysterium Coniunctionis. The classical analyst Edward Edinger, in his
The Mysterium Lectures, calls reading Jung’s Mysterium “a very sizable
enterprise. . . . It is likely that you will all fall into confusion. . . . This
is absolutely inevitable because Mysterium is like the psyche itself. It’s
oceanic and to take it seriously means to run the risk of drowning.”3 He
states that “What makes Mysterium so exasperating is that every para-
graph, every sentence, confronts us with material with which we are unfa-
miliar, and that’s very hard on one’s vanity.” Similar to Rockmore’s and
Derrida’s comments on Hegel, Edinger maintains that the Mysterium “will
be a major object of study for centuries.”
If Jung and Hegel are difficult and complex, it seems even more prob-
lematic to attempt any comparison between their thought, but Sean Kelly,
an academic researcher in the fields of philosophy and religion, attempts
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-14
248 The self, the absolute, the stone
such a dialectical encounter between them. Kelly’s book Individuation

and the Absolute attempts to synthesize the core ideas of Jung and Hegel
and to explore the dialectical tensions between their concepts of Self and
other, ego and unconscious, and the individual and the Absolute. Here,
I will focus particularly on Hegel’s notion of the “Absolute” and Jung’s
idea of the “Self” and the way these notions have been interpreted.
Kelly has noted that a comparison of Hegel and Jung at first glance
seems an unlikely encounter in that Hegel is known as a speculative phi-
losopher while Jung, on the other hand, is a depth psychologist who has
again and again proclaimed that he is an “empiricist,” “with eyes trained
on those aspects of human experience which manifest a hypothetical pre-
rational and unconscious ground.”4 On closer inspection, however, Kelly
finds a number of grounds which make a comparison not only viable, but
also fruitful. Most particularly, Kelly notes that “Jung’s understanding of
Self-actualization as the quest for meaning and wholeness” resonates with
Hegel’s “dialectically self-articulating totality.”5 That is, Kelly makes an
effort to set the stage for a deeper exploration of both Jung’s notion of the
Self (the outcome and goal of Jung’s process of individuation) and the
culmination of Hegel’s system in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Even though Jung himself has stated that he had not “been influenced
by Hegel, nor to have studied him properly,” he admitted that there was
“a remarkable coincidence between certain tenets of Hegelian philoso-
phy”6 and his own findings. Jung himself goes on to see a parallel between
Hegel’s conclusions and his own conception of a collective unconscious.
The collective unconscious is said to be composed of archetypal struc-
tures and the Self as an archetype is central among them. For our purposes
here, let me begin by noting that both the “Self” and “Absolute Knowing”
can be said to be outcomes of Jung’s and Hegel’s respective systems of
thought.
Both notions emerge from the achievement of having passed through a
profound transformation process of historical and psychological develop-
ment. Jung called this the process of individuation, by which he meant, in
the simplest terms, a person’s self-actualization or becoming whole. This
simple statement is a thread that runs through Jung’s Collected Works. It
is a notion that is often misunderstood merely as the development of the
individual ego. Jung makes it clear that it has more to do with the working
through of various archetypal patterns of the “psyche” to the point where
the constellation of the “Self” is a defeat for the ego. This is a point in
The self, the absolute, the stone 249
development where the ego is relativized and the central meaning-making

function of the “soul” becomes visible. The typical outlines of this process
have been characterized as a movement of differentiation through a series
of archetypal patterns or forms of the Spirit.
The unfolding individuation process has been described in terms of the
ego’s encounter with what Jung has called the shadow, the anima or ani-
mus, the animal trickster, the wise old man or woman, and the Self, but
there is no precise order of archetypal unfolding, and some consider the
process to be more circular. The shadow, usually encountered early in the
individuation process but not always, can be described “as the negative
side of the personality, the sum of all the unpleasant qualities one wants to
hide, the inferior, worthless and primitive side of man’s nature, the ‘other
person’ in one, one’s own dark side.”7
To recognize the shadow side of one’s “self” is to acknowledge a com-
plexity, split, or tension in one’s own identity. We discover that we are more
than we thought and/or would like to be. We carry in ourselves a sense of
otherness with which we are often in conflict. We are divided in ourselves in
a way reminiscent of what Hegel called the “unhappy consciousness.” For
Jung, because the shadow makes the ego uncomfortable, he hypothesized
that this inner otherness is projected out and not seen as part of the Self,
but rather is seen in others. Part of the task of individuation is to reclaim
this otherness, internalizing what has been projected outward until it can
be seen and felt to be one’s own. This move Jung calls the withdrawing of
projections and it seems to roughly correspond to what Hegel sees as hap-
pening in the move from Stoicism to Scepticism. For Hegel, the negative is
experienced as out in the world, and the subject reacts to it. The Stoic subject
keeps the poles of this its self-contradiction apart and adopts the same
attitude to it as it does in its purely negative activity in general. . . . Its
talk is in fact like the squabbling of self-willed children, one of whom
says A if the other says B, and in turn says B if the other says A.8
A move out of Stoicism to what Hegel calls “Scepticism” is similar to

what happens in Jungian analysis when a person experiences the shadow
as their own internal reality.
In Scepticism, consciousness truly experiences itself as internally con-

tradictory. From this experience emerges a new form of consciousness
which brings together the two thoughts which Scepticism holds apart.
Scepticism’s lack of thought about itself must vanish, because it is in
fact one consciousness which contains within itself these two modes.
The new form is, therefore, one which knows that it is the dual con-
sciousness of itself, as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identi-
cal, and as self-bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness
of this self-contradictory nature of itself.9
In short, it becomes a more complex subject. Hegel called this the

“Unhappy Consciousness,” which “is the consciousness of self as a dual-
natured, merely contradictory being.”10 This description could also easily
be applied to Jung’s idea of discovering the shadow.
A literary example of the dual nature of the unhappy consciousness
might be drawn from Goethe. When Faust speaks to his assistant Wagner
he says:
One impulse art thou conscious of, at best;

O, never seek to know the other!
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces.11
Then Faust proclaims, as if to call out for Hegel’s sublation or Jung’s

transcendent function:
If there be airy spirits near,

‘Twixt Heaven and Earth on potent errands fleeing,
Let them drop down the golden atmosphere,
And bear me forth to new and varied being!12
It is to this “new and brighter life” that we now turn to consider the further
unfolding of the individuation process and the development of Hegel’s
dialectic. The integration of the shadow and the move from stoicism to
skepticism with its unhappy consciousness sets the stage for the further
unfolding respectively described by Jung and Hegel. The journey of
consciousness toward its goal in the respective systems of Jung and Hegel
is long and arduous and, while the paths to their goals have many reso-
nances, they cannot be discussed here. However, we can consider some
possible parallels between the outcome of both systems, in terms of Jung’s
notion of the Self and Hegel’s Absolute Knowing.
Self and absolute knowing

It is said of the Philosophers’ Stone that it is a great “reconciler of oppo-
sites.” This is relevant to both the Self and Absolute Knowing, which
becomes more and more complex as the “soul” moves toward self-con-
sciousness in its ultimate shape. At the level of the Shadow, consciousness
begins a recognition of its dual complexity and, in the development of the
dialectics in Jung and Hegel, the principle of overcoming one-sidedness
and movement toward wholeness is an ongoing theme. Rockmore put
it this way: “Philosophy’s task consists in reconciling, or uniting, such
aspects as being and non-being, infinity and finitude, necessity and contin-
gency within a structured whole.”13
As we have seen, for Jung “the self has a paradoxical, antinomial char-
acter . . . a true ‘complexio oppositorum.’ ”14 As such, the Self is the fullest
expression of the actuality of the archetype. It “has somewhat the charac-
ter of a result, of a goal attained, something that has come to pass gradually
and with much travail. So too the self is our life’s goal, for it is the com-
pletest expression of the fateful combination we call individuality . . .”15
For Jung, the seed of this individuality is present at the beginning as well
as at the end.
Similarly, for Hegel, the Self “is the process of its own becoming, the
circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its begin-
ning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual.”16 And again:
“. . . the self is like that immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because
it is the result, that which has returned into itself, the latter being similarly
just the self. And the self is the sameness and simplicity that relates itself
to itself.”17 For both Jung (mandala) and Hegel (circle), the circle is a pow-
erful indicator of the Self and, in speaking about goal images and the Phi-
losophers’ Stone, Jungian analyst James Hillman writes: “The goal images
correlate precisely with this motion of circularity, since the iteratio . . .,
circulatio, and rotatio are often considered among the last operations of
the opus.”18
So, what does it mean to come to an end in light of the notion of a cir-
cle? The Self and Absolute Knowing have been interpreted in static and
essentialist ways, but where is the end of a circle? Or, as Rockmore put
it, “[t]here is the problem of the absolute character of so-called absolute
knowledge.”19
An example of the problem is present in Magee’s book entitled Hegel
and the Hermetic Tradition. As we’ve discussed, Magee states that “Hegel
is not a philosopher. He is no lover or seeker of wisdom – he believes he
has found it.”20 To support his view, he quotes Hegel from the Preface of
the Phenomenology of Spirit: “to help bring philosophy closer to the form
of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title of love of knowing
and be actual knowledge – that is what I set before me.”21
For Magee, this aim is interpreted in the context of the Hermetic tradi-
tion in which Absolute Knowledge appears in gnostic, if not ontological,
fashion. He states: “If Hegel departs from the metaphysical tradition in
anything, it is in dispensing with its false modesty. Hegel does not claim
to be merely searching for truth. He claims that he has found it.”22 While
Hegel does say the things Magee emphasizes, interpretation of just what
Hegel has found remains at issue.
As noted earlier, Jung, like Hegel, has also been interpreted in gnostic
and ontological fashion on the basis of comments that might understand-
ably be interpreted in such a manner. As noted earlier, in an interview Jung
once stated when asked if he believed in God:
All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakable con-
viction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And
that eliminates believing. Therefore, I do not take His existence on
belief – I know that He exists.23
One can see how, on the basis of such statements, one might conclude
Jung was also a gnostic thinker and came to be interpreted metaphysically,
but this single statement is overshadowed by many others in which Jung
again and again demonstrates a far greater reserve. For example, in a typi-
cal self-assessment, Jung states: “I am and remain a psychologist. I am not
interested in anything that transcends the psychological content of human
experience.”24 He goes on to say:
Speaking always as a psychologist, I affirm that the presence of God is

manifest, in the profound experience of the psyche, as a coincidentia
oppositorum, and the whole history of religion, all the theologies, bear
witness to the fact that the coincidentia oppositorum is one of the com-
monest and most archaic formulas for expressing the reality of God.25
Further, Jung states “[t]he designation of my ‘system’ as ‘Gnostic’ is an

invention of my theological critics.”26
It seems to me that Jung’s statements taken in context might best be
understood in light of Rockmore’s differentiation of the interpretation of
the idea of the absolute as “the absolute for human being,” as opposed to
“claiming [ontological] knowledge in some absolute sense beyond time
and place.”27 This interpretation also fits well for Jung who notes: “[t]
he goal is important only as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which
leads to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime.”28 Post-Jungian Hillman
notes that “[t]he rotatio, like a turning wheel, announces that no position
can remain fixed . . . no end place achieved.”29 Rockmore’s interpretation
is also supported by Jon Mills who notes that:
Hegel shows that spirit comes to know itself as spirit by coming to

understand its historical progression of encountering contingencies
and this constitutes an absolute position insofar as spirit understands
its process, but nowhere does he say that spirit ends, only perhaps
that spirit has reached the zenith of the pure form of its understanding
which is always open to the introduction of new experiences and nov-
elties. Hegel even ends his Phenomenology with an adapted reference
to Schiller underscoring the significance of “infinitude.” Spirit lives
on; it must continue in the lives of individual minds.30
Previously, we alluded to the complexity of Absolute Knowing as a his-

torical and ongoing process while nevertheless remaining absolute. This
seeming paradox is more fully discussed by Rockmore in his book on
Hegel’s epistemology. He asks: “What can be said for absolute ideal-
ism today?”31 In reflecting on this question, he suggests two possible
approaches: the traditional approach claims that Absolute Knowledge can
be seen “as truth beyond time” or, in a non-traditional sense, as a claim for
knowledge and “truth as relative to a particular theoretical framework.”32
For Rockmore, the first claim asserts a version of foundationalism which
has been forcefully reflected in modern times. The more interesting and
promising approach for him is interpreting absolute knowledge in terms
of an “historically-linked, contextualized analysis of claims to know.”33
Rockmore finds hints in Hegel’s Phenomenology and in his Philosophy

of Right to support the non-traditional view and evidence for a perspectival
position and “various models of knowledge.”34 Such a position recognizes
Absolute Knowing and spirit as “impure.”35 In part this position recog-
nizes both knowledge and reason as historical and notes that each philoso-
pher is a child of a particular time and place. As such, Absolute Knowing
cannot claim to be “a perspective without perspective, surpassing other
perspectives.”36 And yet, for Rockmore, there is a way that the Absolute is
absolute in that, as a perspective, it “depicts the proper attitude of thought
to objectivity.”37 He states that if Hegel is right about this, then “[f]rom the
metatheoretical vantage point, absolute knowing, which is itself part of the
knowing process, is itself absolute as the form for fully mediated claims
to know.”38
I think, to make this more explicit, consciousness comes to realize that
the nature of any knowledge (of what we mean by knowledge) must be
mediated. This truth is absolute; it is what the meaning of knowledge
must be. However, such a recognition appears as a paradox in which what
is absolute is also mediated and historically contingent. In this sense, as
Rockmore then notes, “absolute idealism is not only absolute but relative
as well, or absolutely relative.”39 Rockmore then asks whether or not hold-
ing both the Absolute and the relative as properly characterizing Absolute
Knowing constitutes an inconsistency. He states that it is not, and resolves
the issue by pointing out that both of these aspects refer to differing aspects
of Hegel’s theory.
[A]bsolute knowledge is absolute when it functions as the metatheo-

retical criteria of what it means to know, as a relative a priori that
conditions any analysis of experience. Yet it is also relative in its
dependence on the historical movement. In fact, all such criteria
depend for their acceptance on the historical moment and all are sub-
ject to revocation at some future time.40
Rockmore ironically underlines this “impure” statement by further noting

that “the truth of absolute idealism . . . is that knowledge is never absolute
and always relative to time and place.”41
An interesting gloss on this point is made by Slavoj Žižek with regard
to post-Kantian German Idealism. Like Rockmore in In the Wake of Kant,
Žižek argues that the implication of the subject in any quest for knowing is
fundamental and as fundamental (Absolute?). This linking or co-relation

is an “unsurpassable horizon, the mark of the finitude of the human condi-
tion.”42 For Žižek, the “gap (between For-us and In-itself) must be part of
the Absolute itself, so that the very feature that seemed forever to keep us
away from the Absolute is the only feature which directly unites us with
the Absolute.”43
From a Lacanian point of view, the gap that separates us as human
beings from the “In-itself” is “correlative to Lacan’s move from desire to
drive.”44 For Lacan, the lack of access to the in-itself is a void, a lost pri-
mordial object or thing. The desire for this thing Žižek considers Kantian,
while the drive enacted in its absence is Hegelian. Absence is related to the
absence of the impossible object as thing-in-itself. Lacan posits the object
a, which overlaps with the loss of the Kantian object. This “new” object
a emerges at the very same moment of its loss – and the movement from
desire to drive opens up a transcendental space in which “fantasy” fills
the void of the lost primordial object. In short, the drive in Lacan’s sense
shows itself “in fantasmatic incarnations, from breast to voice and gaze,”
as “metonymic figurations of the void, of nothing. . . . [I]n the shift from
desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object,” to
the concreteness of the void.45 Thus the work of drive and fantasy is not
aimed simply at “the ‘impossible’ quest for the lost [Kantian] object [an
abstract thing in itself]; it is [rather] a push to directly enact the ‘loss’ – the
gap, cut distance – itself.”46 Such an enactment is itself a move away from
the abstract to the concreteness of a new object.
The living quality of this parallax gap is indispensable to productive
thinking. For Žižek, such thinking is itself such a gap that approaches
the ultimate Hegelian paradox: “the Spirit is a bone.”47 “The great binary
oppositions – subject v. object, [spirit and matter], materialism v. idealism, . . .
are all ways of naming this fundamental parallax gap: their tensions and
incommensurabilities are indispensable to productive thinking.”48 In
regard to these reflections we might also say that spirit is a stone.
The Philosophers’ Stone as chaosmos and

the dilemma of diversity 49
The Philosophers’ Stone is a strange complexity, difficult to understand
and filled with psychological and philosophical contradictions. Perhaps
the most paradoxical and enigmatic description of the Stone was lilthos ou
lithos, the “stone that is not a stone,” and as an expression not expressible –
manifest yet not manifest. Such paradoxes haunted the alchemists and the
Philosophers’ Stone was shrouded in darkness, but also continued to pro-
voke an ongoing dissemination of ideas and conundrums.
One such idea was Sol niger, the black sun, expressing itself in a single
gesture, both darkness and light. For the alchemist, the Stone as prima
materia was both at the beginning and end of the work. The realization
of the Philosophers’ Stone was not simply a move from darkness to light,
but a deepening into an illuminated darkness, the light of darkness itself.
As such, the work “begins” in chaos and disorder, and yet it ends in order,
illumination, and cosmos, but these two moments (order and disorder) are
not simply separate. Rather they represent a complex and integral order
that is named the Philosophers’ Stone. As we have noted, Jung tried to
account for such paradoxes with the idea of a complexio oppositorum,50 as
an attempt to describe for his psychology what appeared to be incompat-
ible dimensions of the Stone.
Jung writes: “In order to attain this union, [the alchemists] tried not
only to visualize the opposites together but to express them in the same
breath.”51 Hierosgamos, sacred marriage, chemical wedding, filius philoso-
phorum, Mercurius duplex, mysterium conuinctionis, Anthropos, Abraxas,
Adam Kadmon, coniunctio, lapis philosophorum, and so on, were Jung’s
attempts to render complexity and multiplicity in a single gesture.
In his Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung gives his late-life account of
grappling with these complexities. The subtitle of his book, “An Inquiry
into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy,” pre-
figures the focus of this work. Jung opens this book with: “[t]he factors
which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either
confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love.”52 It
has been traditional to treat Jung as privileging love over enmity, synthesis
over separation, convergence over divergence, and to see him as unifying
diversity into oneness, chaos into cosmos, and suffering into healing and
wholeness. As Jung states: “the desperately evasive and universal Mercurius –
that Proteus twinkling in a myriad shapes and colours – is none other than
the ‘unus mundus,’ the original, non-differentiated unity of the world or of
Being”53 or its “equivalent,” the Philosophers’ Stone.54
Jung spent a good part of his later life trying to describe this goal of psy-
chic life, but, despite all of his efforts, the coniunctio remains anything but
a simple unity. The entire Mysterium Coniunctio testifies to the complexity
of Jung’s vision, and what remains clear is that the unification of oppo-
sites requires continuing investigation. Despite all of Jung’s attempts to
see beyond the opposites and the plurality of psychic life, he recognized
that the idea of unity and the unus mundus remain a “metaphysical specu-
lation.”55 Elsewhere, he observed that, while the tensions between psychic
pairs of opposites “ease off” over time, “the united personality will never
quite lose the painful sense of innate discord. Complete redemption from
the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion.”56
The forces at work, according to the Mysterium, are enmity and love,
and it is important to realize that these “energies” are more than personal.
They are archetypal phenomena that do not simply give up their force.
Love and hate continue to be generators of psychic process, and they spur
continuing tensions and remain active in some form, even when relaxed
and refined in the production of the lapis. The lapis can then be seen to be
as much a multiplicity as a unity.
The symbols that attempt to capture what Edinger called “a transcend-
ent, miraculous substance”57 are multiple, wide-ranging, and diverse, and
as much harmonious as dissonant.
Jung’s struggle with unity and multiplicity had an historical and arche-
typal background. From the Presocratics to the postmoderns, in the philos-
ophies of the East and West, the perennial problems of unity and diversity,
the one and the many of monism and pluralism, continue to challenge us
to this day.
Mercurius the mediator

Jung proposed a solution to the perennial problem of unity and multiplicity
in the figure of Mercurius, who lies between opposites and is the means
of bringing them together. As the mercurial body that bridges the divide,
he was called a “mediator.”58 Mercurius links heaven and earth and, as
such, is both “prima materia” and “ultima materia,”59 and therefore called
“lapis”60 and “the stone,”61 as the great principle of unification. But Jung
was also aware that this unity was subject to a deconstruction and a divi-
sion. He notes that Mercurius “is named a unity in spite of the fact that
his innumerable inner contradictions can dramatically fly apart into equal
numbers of disparate and apparently independent figures.”62
If the linking of heaven and earth can be said to transcend the opposites,
it is not in any kind of transcendental purity beyond the world but rather
in the midst of things – in a oneness that is not a oneness, in a multiplicity

that is not simply multiple. In his essay on James Joyce, Jung imagines a
view of the Self as
a being who is not a mere colourless conglomerate soul composed of

an indefinite number of ill-assorted and antagonistic individual souls,
but consists also of houses, street-processions, churches, . . . several
brothels, and a crumpled note on its way to the sea – and yet possesses
a perceiving and registering consciousness!63
In short, what seems to express the transcendence of opposites is a world

just as it is, conscious of itself in nuance and complexity as a living being
in a way that reminds one of Hillman’s call to return soul to the world.
Like Jung, Hillman finds it particularly strange how personal life reflects
the objective psyche. It is a “me-ness that is simply thatness”64 a deeply
subjective expression that is also an objectivity.
Hillman likewise describes the Stone in a spirit not unlike James Joyce’s
and Jung’s: “All that other people are and the world is, from rivers and
elephants to teacups and toasters is essentially what I call ‘me’ as part of
an ensouled anima mundi and yet utterly depersonalized.”65 And yet what
a strange vision of Self! In these, at times, infernal and sacrilegious chants
of psychology, literature, and life, we find a variegated multiple world,
rich beyond any organizing principle of the ego, a Self who is a dark father
and demiurge, a hundred-eyed Argus, and so, for Jung, “a monstrosity
[that] drives one to speculation.”66
For Jung, and perhaps more so for Hillman, alchemy is an art of mul-
tiple, careful distillations and tinctures, and the continuing refinement of
the play between unifications and differentiations, all of which yield subtle
non-essentialist essences and soft rather than hard lines of demarcation,
like the Philosophers’ Stone itself.
As an alchemical book, Ulysses is different from the hard-edged book
that Derrida claims is at an end. By being flexible, like wax or soft gold,
Ulysses as an image of the Philosophers’ Stone defeats logocentrism. If the
distillation of this new consciousness can be said to reflect the Self and the
Stone, or if the Stone and the Self reflect this new consciousness, perhaps
we can also imagine that, when it does so mythically and religiously, it
parallels images such as Christ, Buddha, Atman-Brahman, and the multi-
eyed Argus. But when this new consciousness is seen through the scintilla
of these multiple eyes, the demiurgic creativity is expressed in the mul-

tiplicity and free play of life as it is in its everydayness. However, when
this play is frozen into one or the other of the opposites, it produces a one-
sided vision requiring yet another tincture. Unity becomes a Cyclops, and
multiplicity, a hundred-eyed Argus. The Cyclops sacrifices heterogeneity,
and the hundred-eyed Argus lacks integral unity. Both are monsters. But
when unity and multiplicity are both legitimate aspects of the Self, when
they are imagined as simple undialectical opposites, the complexity of the
Self is lost.
One might imagine this everydayness, this flow of life, like a Heraclitian
river, or moving like the Tao of Lao Tse, playful like the Lila of the Hindu
sages. It also might be seen as “a paradoxical co-incidence of order and
disorder, cosmos and chaos,”67 a “quantum weirdness”68 or chaosmos of
the natural world – anything but the static frozenness of categories and
fixed meaning.
Perhaps then we can add the notion of chaosmos to the effort to express
what Jung was after when speaking of the complexio oppositorum. Its fur-
ther exploration can add contemporary nuance to our mercurial under-
standing of just what we mean by the unity of opposites, which is never
a simple unity or stable presence, but rather a dynamic hybridity, a unity
that does not require that differences subordinate themselves to a unifying
principle. Such a unity “affirms the very heterogeneity that would appear
to dissolve it.”69 As such, it is a unity in continuing self-deconstruction and
so an errant fugitive that maddeningly continues to escape our grasp while
teasing us into conjunctions,70 usually expressing itself in the spiritualiza-
tion of language. When these conjunctions fall apart, the Self becomes
fixed and rigid, controlled by the senex or abandoned to Dionysus, a split
between the stable and dynamic aspects of the soul that affect both theo-
retical understanding and personal life. I believe it is in the mutual engage-
ment of these archetypal energies that one can find the dynamic hybridity
that links chaos and cosmos, an integration that Jung intended but did not
always achieve. This linkage between chaos and cosmos is what I have
here called chaosmos – another name for the Philosophers’ Stone and
another perspective through which we can reconsider and reread Jung’s
idea of the Self.
It is my contention that the most productive way to understand the out-
come of Jungian analysis and Hegelian philosophy is in the spirit of the
many scholars, philosophers, and analysts who have been referred to in
this book and is best understood as an ongoing movement of continuing

reconciliation, and that both the Self and Absolute Knowing are always
absolute for a concrete, temporal human being in a historical and ongo-
ing process. Clearly, at the end of the arduous journey, in both traditions
the human subject has become more complex, refined, and has achieved a
structural, self-conscious wholeness. It is this wholeness I believe Hegel
indicated in his image of a “chalice” that “foams forth;”71 it is the creative
fullness of Spirit overflowing its containers that constitutes the continuing
work of both psychology and philosophy.
Notes
1 Rockmore, Cognition, 179.
2 Derrida, Positions, 77.
3 Edinger, The Mysterium Lectures, 17.
4 Kelly, Individuation and the Absolute, 3.
5 Ibid., 4.
6 Ibid.
7 Samuels et al., A Critical Dictionary, 138.
8 Hegel, Phenomenology, 125–126, §205.
9 Ibid., 126, §206.
10 Ibid.
11 Goethe, Faust, Retrieved from Project Gutenberg.
12 Ibid.
13 Rockmore, Cognition, 183.
14 Jung, Aion (CW9i), §355.
15 Jung, Two Essays (CW7), §404; quoted by Kelly, Individuation and the Absolute, 27.
17 Ibid., 12, §22.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 16.
25 Ibid., 229–230.
26 Jung, The Symbolic Life (CW18), §1642.
30 Mills, The Unconscious Abyss, 218.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 65.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 66.

39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 67.
41 Ibid., 68.
42 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 626.
43 Ibid., 635.
44 Ibid., 638.
45 Ibid., 639.
46 Ibid.
47 Hegel, Phenomenology, 208, §343; quoted by Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 205.
48 Jameson, “First Impressions.”
49 This section and the following one utilize parts of a paper by the author entitled “The
Philosophers’ Stone as Chaosmos.”
50 Jung, Aion (CW9i), §555.
52 Ibid., §1.
53 Ibid., §660.
54 Ibid., §661.
55 Ibid., §660.
59 Ibid., §282.
60 Ibid., §283.
61 Ibid., §282.
62 Ibid., §284.
63 Jung, The Spirit in Man (CW15), §198.
65 Ibid.
66 Jung, The Spirit in Man (CW15), §198.
67 Kuberski, Chaosmos, 3.
68 Ibid., 2.
69 Evans, The Multivoiced Body, 4.
70 Ibid., 28.
Conclusion
In this exploration of Jung’s Alchemical Psychology and the Philosophers’

Stone, we have encountered the problem of many binary oppositions,
splits and gaps that are seemingly impossible to close, among them: chem-
istry and alchemy, scientific positivism and religious esotericism, psychol-
ogy and philosophy, phenomena and noumena, limit and transcendence,
mechanism and vitalism, thought and being, spirit and nature, soul and
spirit, ontology and history, absolutism and relativism.
In this reflection, I have considered these binaries in several contexts and
among different thinkers, arriving at the conclusion, as noted in the Pref-
ace, that none of these divides can easily, if at all, be resolved into a simple
unity or oneness. Rather, a complex oneness or irreducible dynamic twon-
ess showed itself in multiple images and thoughts: the “and,” the “two,”
the “gap,” “being of two minds,” consciousness and unconsciousness,”
“primordial paradox,” “the dual-face of alchemy,” “Mercurius duplex,”
and so on. Throughout history, those struggling with these “divides” and
“gaps” have generated many attempts to go beyond them, leading to
notions such as the ouroboric circle, the mandala, the wheel or rota, “telos
returning to itself,” a circular movement around an “alchemical myste-
rium,” a mediatrix of elements, of the “fusing of sense and nonsense,”
as übersinn, supreme or excess of meaning, the syzygy, coniunctio, com-
plexio oppositorum, the mysterium coniunctionis, and the Self.
For the alchemists, these conjunctions happened in stages and in and
through complex and, at moments, monstrous imagery such as the her-
maphrodite, Abraxas, and Mercurius, conjunctions which have been
referred to as an “illuminated lunacy.”1 More palatable rational images of
wholeness were also described in geometric terms such as the square of
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Conclusion 263
the circle and in more aesthetically pleasing images such as the “golden
flower,” “golden castle,” and “golden head,” reflecting the illuminated
philosopher. All of these images attempt to bring the opposites together
in some kind of harmonious integration and unity. An early expression of
this unity is found in the alchemical idea of the unio mentalis – yet, for
many alchemists, psychologists, and philosophers, none of these images
captures the dynamic and complex conjunction philosophically necessary
to do justice to the dynamics of the idea of the Philosophers’ Stone.
In alchemy, the unio mentalis was known as the white stone and, for
many alchemists, it represented a “lesser coniunctio” and awaited a more
differentiated goal called the “greater coniunctio.” To reach the “greater
coniunctio” meant achieving a fuller connection with the “redness” of
lived life. As Dorn has challenged his colleagues, “Transform yourself
from dead stones into living philosophic stones.” Along with Jung’s, Hill-
man’s, and Giegerich’s ideas of self, soul, and spirit, which unify oppo-
sites, Hegel’s idea of the “unity of unity and difference” approaches a more
complex and dialectical understanding of the struggle with opposites –
leading toward “Absolute Knowing.” The power of Hegel’s formulations
of the goal of Absolute Knowing added much to my attempt to understand
the goal of alchemy beyond the simpler formulation of the unio mentalis.
Taking up Hegel’s view of complex unity, I considered to what extent
it answers Dorn’s challenge and brings dead stones to philosophical life.
Here I have turned to Giegerich’s work, following Hegel’s notion of spirit,
which takes us beyond life, self, and soul, into what he called the “logical
life of the soul” or spirit. I found that to some extent his formulation leans
toward a formalism or ontologizing of syntax over semantics, thought
and idea over image, and at a subtle level interprets Hegel in a way that
leaves itself open to the charge of philosophical abstraction and to a fur-
ther refinement of the unio mentalis as an outcome of absolute negativity.
Common interpretations of Hegel consider his thought highly abstract and
intellectual, and read his view of Absolute Knowing as expressing an ontologi-
cal if not Gnostic view of knowledge. In my own early reading of Hegel and in
response to Giegerich’s binary leanings elevating pure spirit above and beyond
life, I, too, quickly resonated with postmodern criticisms of Hegel’s view of
spirit and Absolute Knowing. However, in re-reading Hegel and reconsidering
his thought as an expression of a complex rather than simple unity, I began to
see what I consider to be a modern philosophical rendering that can shed addi-
tional light on notions such as the Self and the Philosophers’ Stone. For me, this
264 Conclusion
required reading Hegel in some respects contra-Giegerich and in light of other

readers of Hegel, including Verene, who noted that in the attempt to make the
incongruous congruous, we must not lose an irresolvable “ambiguity” – what has
also been called an “impure entanglement” and “tragic negativity” (De Boer) –
that resists and slows down the optimism of absolute negativity (Hegel). De
Boer’s idea of entanglement resonates with Magnus’ recognition of the impor-
tance of spirit’s connection with the symbolic as a necessary mediating and
irreducible factor in the expression of spirit. Thus, entanglement, tragic nega-
tivity (De Boer), and symbolic mediation (Magnus) fit well with Desmond’s
metaxological twoness and Žižek’s “parallax gap,” all of which emphasize the
importance of keeping spirit and the dialectic away from any fantasy of pure
and perfect completion.
In this sense, Hegel’s dialectic can be seen as a “complex holism”
(Kelly), a bringing together of two or more logics in a moment that is at
once complementary and antagonistic. As such, the dialectic can be read
as a dynamic hybridity in which the otherness of the other, which threatens
the wholeness of spirit, is itself embraced but not reduced to the oneness
of mind or spirit as a simple unity, nor left as a thing-in-itself. Rather, the
dialectic can be read as a dynamic two-in-oneness and one-in-twoness, in
a dual mediation of a bifocal logic. In this way, I re-imagine Hegel’s dia-
lectic of spirit and of “Absolute Knowing” as a goal that helps us further
differentiate what he means by unity. Hegel describes unity as a Unity (of
unity and difference) and to this I would add the Difference (between unity
and difference) as mutual yet different ways of seeing the dynamics of the
Philosophers’ Stone and Jung’s concept of the Self. To me, such a reading
re-envisions the gaze of the philosopher and rather finds its place in the
glance (Casey), in a philosophical psychology and a psychological phi-
losophy, that loosens the pull of ontologizing and releases the Mercurial
play between idea and image, spirit and soul, philosophy and psychology.
My way of reading this play resists seeing philosophy as rising above life,
but rather as intrinsic to it, present in both image and idea, in history and in the
circular play of image and thought. Such a ouroboric vision of soul and spirit
gives rise to imagination and imagination shapes the lives that we live, our
psychologies and philosophies, and as such is a touchstone to my vision of a
contemporary Philosophers’ Stone. To my mind, a unity like the Stone is also
a multiplicity, a unity and difference. It both aims at a universal and eternal
oneness but is also a paradox that yields a startling philosophical illumination.
Note
Epilogue
This book has been a reflection on Jung’s alchemical work and on the
importance of philosophy as a way of understanding it. Alchemy has been
viewed in the context of the history of natural science as a precursor to and
primitive form of chemistry. Jung’s research has shown that this view was
far too limited and that a scientific approach to alchemy sheds little light on
its mythic, esoteric, and symbolic meanings, which are intrinsic to many
alchemical traditions and at the heart of the alchemical imagination. From
the broader perspective of the history of the human spirit, these neglected
aspects of alchemy can be seen as vital dimensions of the soul and impor-
tant for our understanding of alchemy and the Philosophers’ Stone. Jung’s
idea of the work was not simply the creation of a literal goal, but rather
the transformation of the adept into an illuminated philosopher and the
discovery of a new vision of the cosmos. Seeing alchemy in this way led
Jung to recognize it as a forerunner of his psychology of the unconscious
and as a symbolic process of individuation. Jung’s vision revitalized our
understanding of alchemy and opened the door to continuing study both
within and outside the Jungian tradition.
I have considered a number of classical followers of Jung as well as
revisionists, particularly James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich. They
each set in motion interesting and challenging philosophical and psycho-
logical juxtapositions between images and ideas, imagination and thought,
and they each consider one or the other term as primary. Hillman sticks to
the image and Giegerich absolutizes thought in the spirit of Hegel. These
leanings lead them to considerably different viewpoints.
In my own work, I have tended to emphasize the importance of images
and imagination. In the end, I have discovered a way of understanding
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-16
266 Epilogue
Hegel that is more compatible with my own orientation in which the imag-
ination is not surpassed by thought or spirit. Ultimately, I have come to
link image and idea together, prioritizing the ouroboric and mercurial play
between them. Images then give rise to thought and thought gives rise to
images – a circulatio and chasmos – at times a monstrous coniunctio and a
poetic undecidable, yielding not an absolute spirit rising above, but rather
a philosophical illumination essential to life and to the depths of the soul,
and resonant with the Philosophers’ Stone.
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Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table
on the corresponding page. Page numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate a note.
above–below linking, alchemical 16, 23 – 27; ethical values 11 – 12;

images 77 grand images of 102; Grossinger on
Abraham, Lyndy 1, 2, 7n14, 35 8; historiography of 15 – 22; initiatory
Abraxas 66 – 69, 68, 82 process 41 – 42; literature on 12 – 13;
Absolute idealism 5, 6, 49, 59; Absolute moral task of 82; Principe and
Knowing 4, 191, 193, 222, 251 – 255, Newman’s study 13 – 15; psychology of
263; Absolute Knowledge 228; absolute 40, 93; ritualistic 27; self-deconstruction
negativity 264; Absolute Spirit 4, 112; spiritual alchemy 23; symbols
152 – 153, 192; absolute thought 228; of 19 – 20; see also alchemical
absolute union 48 imagination
Adorno, Theodor 156 Anatomy of the Psyche (Edinger) 194
Aion Lectures, The: Exploring the Self in ancient philosopher and eagle chained to a
C.G. Jung’s Aion (Edinger) 88, 90 ground animal 175
Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology Anglicus, Richardus 3
of the Self 206, 247 anima, and animus 105 – 106, 114n68, 120,
albedo 81, 157, 193, 196; and psyche 102; 127 – 128, 147, 249
whiteness of 102, 196 animus 105 – 106, 114n68, 120, 121,
alchemical imagination 2, 3, 6, 32, 90, 127 – 128, 147, 249
264; dark phase of 48, 48 – 49; divide in Annata 208; see also no-self
27, 28, 32, 58; tension in 39; see also antagonistic opposition, spirit of 72
image and imagination antimonies 57
Alchemical Studies (Jung) 154, 179 archetypal psychology 95, 100, 122,
alchemist: as a divine geometer 74; and the 151, 230n27; as imaginal psychology
lumen naturae 75 105, 148; and the logical life of the
alchemy: aim of 156; alchemical soul, syzygy between 127 – 128; and
mysterium 28, 29, 38, 262; alchemical phenomenological philosophy 243; and
process, grand image of 80; alchemical psyche 96
psychology 98 – 106, 165; alchemical art 106, 122, 225, 226, 237, 240
stages, complexity of 79; and Artis auriferae, volumina duo 1, 12, 37
“alchemies,” difference between 14; Atman/Brahman 44, 207 – 208, 209;
blackness in 101 – 102; and chemistry see also Self
10 – 11, 24; double face of 32 – 33, 33, Aurora consurgens: 15th century text 12,
35, 38; Eliade on 10; and esotericism 39, 117; von Franz 84, 85
Index 277
Badiou, Alain 165 circulatio, alchemical 103, 127, 165, 228,

Bair, Deirdre 177 251, 266
Barker, S.F. 181 Claxton, Guy 235
Bates, Jennifer 227 cluster thinking 90
Becket, Samuel 158 coagulatio 87, 90, 127, 128
beheading 214, 217 coincidentia oppositorum 210
Being 152, 211 Collected Works (Jung) 206, 248
being-for-another 187 colors 82, 101, 196, 199; and dryness
being-in-itself 187, 188 174; and Philosophers’ Stone 146; of
benign and monstrous conjunctions 62, soul 145; see also blackness; redness;
78; Abraxas 66 – 69; hermaphrodite whiteness; yellowing
64 – 66; Mercurius 69 – 77; mysterium complex holism 208, 209 – 210
coniunctionis 77 – 82 complexio oppositorum 57, 62, 142, 256, 259
Bennington, Geoffrey 158 conceptual rationalism 100, 116
Bernard of Treviso 33 coniunctio 38, 87, 90, 92, 194, 256 – 257;
Beyer, Wilhelm Raimund 190 of male and female 46; of masculine and
binaries, alchemical 4, 6, 32, 124, feminine 47; monstrous coniunctio 165,
172, 262 228, 256 – 257; of Sol and Luna 69; of
Bishop, Paul 177 spirit and matter 42; of spirit and soul
blackness 80, 81; experience of 101 – 102; 121; see also opposites
and Raimundo luminescence 157; of coniunctio oppositorum 40
nigredo 50; of solniger 153 consciousness 112, 116, 132, 186,
black sun 82, 153, 156, 165, 205, 213, 233; 187 – 188, 230n27, 258; and blood 81;
death-like state of the soul standing on darkening of 117; development of 48;
47; image of 136 – 137, 154; mystery of dialectical movement of 189; in-itself
143; shining of 155 that is for consciousness 189; journey
Black Sun, The: The Alchemy and Art towards its goal 250 – 251; modern
of Darkness (Marlan) 136, 153, 156, consciousness 9, 93; objects of 222;
205 phenomenology of patterns of 189 – 190;
Bly, Robert 97 and psyche 90, 112; and Sol niger 210;
body 101; and psyche 87, 89; purification and thing-in-itself 188
of 195; and sensibility 212 – 213; and cosmological vision, of Philosophers’
soul 241; and spirit 73, 74 Stone’s achievement 81
Brahman see Atman/Brahman cosmos and chaos 142, 259, 266
bricoleur metaphor 96 – 97 creativity 64, 259
Brooke, Roger 155 – 156, 206 Critchley, Simon 158 – 159
Buddhism 133, 207 – 208 Critique of Pure Reason (Ewing)
Burckhardt, Titus 24 180 – 181
Crosland, Maurice 16
Caliăn, Florin George 14, 22 – 25 Crowning of Nature 12
Cardew, Alan 9
Casey, Edward S. 5 – 6, 104, 143, 148, daimonic and demonic 137 – 138
240 – 244 Dante Alighieri 118, 139
causality 181 – 182 darkness 42, 136, 138, 139, 153, 166,
Caygill, Howard 181 200; facing 140 – 144; growing sense
chaosmos 142, 259, 266 of vitality in the midst of 54, 55; lumen
Chassidim 142 naturae 153; and Philosopher’s Stone
Cheak, Aaron 14, 27 – 29 234 – 235; redemptive power of 143;
chemistry, and alchemy 10 – 11, 24 and sensing 117; shine of 154 – 155;
Christianity: metaphysics 100; symbolism unassimilable 153; undifferentiated 49,
65 – 66 53; see also shadow
circles, and alchemy 225, 251 – 252 day-world 118
278 Index
death 141; death-like state of the soul experience 11, 40, 54, 67, 189
standing on the black sun 47; of ego “Extraction of Mercurius and the
156, 157 – 158; mystical death 157 – 159; coronation of the Virgin” 65 – 66, 65
and new life, link between 53, 53 – 54;
power of 166 facing the shadow 137, 138, 140 – 142
de Boer, Karin 5, 233, 234, 264 “facts” 89
demons 68, 137 – 138, 156 Faivre, Antoine 20
Derrida, Jacques 37, 66, 143, 152 – 153, Farber, Eduard 16
211 – 212, 247, 258 fate 139
Desmond, William 5, 233 – 234, 235 – 240, 264 Figulus, Benedictus 196
Diamond, Stanley 137 – 138 filius philosophorum 57, 155
Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique Fink, Bruce 229n18
(Pernety) 1 Flay, Joseph C. 231 – 232n94
différance 211 Foucault, Michel 212
differentiated oneness 143 Freud, Sigmund 95
dissolution 127
Dobbs, Betty 16 – 17 gazing and glancing, differentiating
Dorn, Gerhard 11, 85, 193, 263 between 244
Dossey, Larry 235 Giegerich, Wolfgang 4 – 5, 7n19, 63, 116,
dream 103 – 104, 116 134 – 135n14, 135n24, 265; on alchemy
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Kant) 174 111 – 113, 117, 127, 150; on anima and
Drob, Sanford 45, 69, 225 animus 128; archetypal psychology
122; and consciousness 117; criticism of
Eco, Umberto 23 Hillman 171; on death 157; dialectical
Edinger, Edward 65 – 66, 69 – 71, 76 – 77, approach of 172; on ego death 157 – 158;
84, 86 – 93, 257; alchemical operations on emancipation from soul 130 – 131;
101; alchemical process, study on on entrance problem 213; on fear of the
86 – 87, 88, 90; on beheading 214; poisonous isolation 171; on gold 149;
on caput mortuum 216; on cluster Hegelian influence 107; and Hillman,
thinking 90; coniunctio operation, on compared 121 – 124, 123, 146 – 150, 172,
92, 93; examination of Jung’s work 200; idea of sublation 170 – 171; idea of
on alchemy 87 – 88; on “facts” 89; on sublation and the Notion 109 – 110; on
Jung’s Mysterium 247; mortificatio/ imagination/image 108 – 109, 169 – 170;
putrefactio operation, on 90 – 92, 91; on modern life 107 – 108; on negation
phenomenology of objective psyche of ego 214; on neurosis 131 – 132; on
89 – 90; Philosophers’ Stone 196; on Philosophers’ Stone 146, 150, 153;
practical problem of psychotherapy 87; praise and criticism of Jung 106 – 107;
on Rosarium 88; on unio mentalis 194; on psychology 215; on psychology
view on Jung’s “reality of the psyche” informed by alchemy 125; on real
87, 88 – 89, 91 psychology 125 – 126; on Self 213,
ego 63, 122, 131, 153, 248 – 249; death of 214; on soul 133, 159; on soul’s dual
156, 157 – 158; injured 140; liquification intentionalities 130; on soul’s logical
of 158 life 106 – 110, 125, 263; on soul’s need
ego psychology 104, 121, 126, 127, for historical development 131; and
134, 157 sublation 147; on syntax and semantics
Eliade, Mircea 9 – 12, 15, 17 171 – 172; on thought 107 – 109, 148;
energizing moisture 50, 51, 52 – 53, 52 and true psychology 128 – 130, 134, 150;
entanglement 234, 264 on work of alchemy 125
entrance problem 213 – 217 goals 129, 216 – 217
esotericism 16, 20, 23 – 27 gods/God 138, 142, 211
ethics 230n27 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 174, 250
Evola, Julian 24 gold 1, 27, 53, 128, 149 – 150,
Ewing, A.C. 181 170 – 171
Index 279
Goldbrunner, Josef 177 consciousness 117; on depth psychology

grain growing: from the corpse of Osiris 159; on ego psychology 127; example
54; from the grave 53 of depression 97; and Giegerich,
Gratacolle, William 1 compared 121 – 124, 123, 146 – 150,
greater coniunctio 38, 194, 263 172, 200; on goal of the alchemical
Grossinger, Richard 8 process 102 – 103, 104; on goals 129;
on gold 149; on healing 197, 199; on
Halleux, Newman 17 history 229; on hope 132; idea of love
Hanegraaff, Wouter 14, 25 – 27 142; on image 148, 163, 205 – 206;
Hecate 126 – 127 on images and natural sensations
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4 – 5, 118; imaginal psychology of 172; on
48 – 49, 107, 152, 156 – 157, 173, imagination 105; impact on his works
223 – 224; Absolute concepts 59, 186, 97 – 98; on language 101; on motivation
216, 218, 219 – 220, 227, 247, 248; for both work and life 104 – 105; on
Absolute Knowing 6, 217, 219, 228, multiple eyes of the peacock’s tail 199;
229, 247, 263; absolute negativity on mysterium coniunctionis 205; on
234; Absolute Spirit 6, 152 – 153, 218; myth 95 – 96; night sea-journey and the
alchemy of 190 – 200; and art 225 – 226; nekyia, division between 119; notion
and caput mortuum 216; on cognition of imagination 94; and peitho 105;
185 – 186; on complex unity 263; on phenomenology of the soul’s colors
consciousness 187 – 188, 189 – 190; on 145; on Philosophers’ Stone 145 – 146,
essence 216; on fear of truth 186; on 150, 212, 258; professional exit 98; on
goals 216 – 217; and Jung, compared psyche 96; on psychoanalysts 95; on
225 – 226, 248; and Kant 185, 186; psychology 97; puer-psyche marriage
on Kantian consciousness 186; on 119 – 120; on rotatio 103, 253; on
knowledge 187, 188 – 189; on negative Self 209; on shadow 141 – 142; on
activity 249; ontological reading of soul 230n27, 258; soul approach 105;
220; philosophy of 192; purification on spirit and soul 119 – 121; spiritual
process 192; on Scepticism 249 – 250; approach 105; and sublation 147; on
on scientific philosophy 186; on Self traditional versus modern psychology
251; on self-consciousness 224 – 225; 94; on underworld 118 – 119; on
self-reflective experience 190; on spirit whiteness of albedo 102, 196; on
244; sublation of 250; on tragic 234; on yellowing 197
unhappy consciousness 249, 250; on Hinduism 44, 207
unity and difference 264; on wisdom Hoffmann, E.T.A. 9
191 – 192; on zeal for truth 187 Honoré, Carl 235
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition hope 132
(Magee) 252 human-all-too-human being and
Heidegger, Martin 152, 182 psychologist, distinction
Henderson, Joseph L. 48 between 132
hermaphrodite 50, 56, 58, 64 – 66, 82
Hermetic Museum, The 53 idea 228, 229
Hermetic tradition 203n104 illuminated lunacy 143, 205, 262
Heym, Gerhard 13 image and imagination 56, 122, 151,
Hillman, James 3 – 4, 62 – 63, 94, 112 – 117, 225, 228, 229, 262 – 263, 265 – 266;
166n10, 199 – 200, 251, 265; on albedo archetypal psychology’s understanding
193, 196; and alchemical images of 148; and deep emotion 139; Hillman
99 – 100; alchemical psychology on 148; and idea 266; imagining
98 – 106, 165; on alchemy 117, as essential feature of phenomena
258; on archetypal 95; archetypal 242; objectification of 111; and
psychology 151, 230n27; color philosophy 241 – 242; progressive
imagery 101 – 102; on colors 174, 199; active imagination 241; and psyche
conceptual rationalism concept 100; and 243; psychology based on 116; and
280 Index
remembering 243 – 244; of sol niger transcendent function of 250; on

153; as voice of things 163 – 164 unconscious 183; undifferentiated
imaginal psychology 105, 115n95, 122, conditions 49; on unity of opposites 50,
147, 150, 165, 172 143, 182 – 183, 257
imaginatio 163
imagination see image and imagination Kali (Hindu goddess) 155, 156
imperfections 92, 192 – 193 Kant, Immanuel 173 – 174, 176, 179;
impure entanglement 264 approach to knowledge 183 – 184;
individual destiny 139 on cognitive structure 177; critique
Individuation and the Absolute of metaphysics 175 – 176; Critique
(Kelly) 248 of Pure Reason 178; dogmatic
individuation process 87 – 88, 139, 250, 265 affirmation and skeptical doubt 182;
ingenium 224, 225 and epistemology 178; on fantasy
in-itself 189, 255; see also being-in-itself; and senses 174; and Hegel 185; and
thing-in-itself metaphysics 183; phenomenon and
“Invocation of Kali, The” (Sarton) 140 noumenon, distinction of 179 – 180; on
reality beyond appearances 181; thing-
Joyce, James 258 in-itself 180 – 181; on thing-in-itself
Jung, Carl Gustav: on Abraxas 68; 219; works Critique; Critique of Pure
on alchemical images and graphics Reason 185
32; on alchemical process 78 – 82; Kelly, Sean 208 – 209, 247 – 248
on alchemists 18; on alchemy 1, Kitcher, Patricia 173
3, 12 – 13, 16, 41 – 42, 82, 258; on knowledge 183 – 184; knowledge-
Arcane Substance 162; on beheading consciousness 188; and object 189;
214; on body and mind 193; circular truth of 187
drawings 42, 74, 225, 251; on complex Kugler, Paul 165
image of the goal of the Rosarium
process 58; complex psychology 208; laboratory alchemy 17, 34
on consciousness 210; on creation Lacan, Jacques 140, 212; on in-itself 255;
increatum 57; criticisms of 13 – 15; on petit a 229n18
death and new life 54; facing the shadow LaCapra, Dominick 152
process 137; on goals 129; on God language, Hillman on 101
252; and Hegel, compared 225 – 226, lapis 56, 57
248; idea of the mysterium 142; on lesser coniunctio 263
imaginative activity 56; on intellect Levinas, 230n27
137; and Kant 177 – 178, 183; on light: of darkness itself 206; of nature
Kant’s Critique 174; mandalas 42 – 43, 154 – 155
45, 74, 251; on Mercurius 52 – 53, 69, Logic 222 – 223; logical life of the soul
224 – 225, 257; and metaphysics 183; 116, 117, 131, 158; logical negativity
and modern esotericism 20; mysterium 234; logical psychology 127
coniunctionis 58; nondistinctive pleroma logocentrism 151 – 152, 258
and essence of man as distinctiveness, love, and shadow 141, 142 – 143
distinction between 66 – 67; on Lully, Raymond 3
opposites 43 – 44, 77 – 82; on persona lumen naturae (light of nature) 143,
138; on Philosophers’ Stone 2 – 3, 12, 154 – 155, 205, 213
39, 53, 159 – 160, 256; on psychic
reality 88 – 89; on reality of matter Magee, Glenn Alexander 191 – 193,
39 – 40; resuscitation of images 151; on 203n104, 215 – 216, 218, 220; on Hegel
Rosarium 47, 49; on Self 3, 43 – 45, 62, as philosopher 252
63, 206 – 207, 208, 209, 248, 251, 258, Magnus, Kathleen Dow 5, 227, 264
264; self-assessment as a psychologist Maier, Michael 16, 32
252 – 253; on shadow 138 – 139, 249; Main, Rodrick 138
stance as a natural scientist 89; study male/female coniunctio 46, 47
on Artis aurifera, volumina duo 1; mandalas 42 – 43, 45, 74
Index 281
matter 9 – 10, 21, 39 – 40, 100 – 101, 159; no-self 157, 206 – 211, 213
and nigredo 81 “not” 146, 152
memory 242 nothingness 67, 133, 186 – 187,
Mendelssohn, 174 206, 207
Mercurius 35, 58 – 59, 69 – 77, 92; as Notion 109 – 110, 187, 188, 217
caduceus unifying the opposites 38; noumena 174, 180
duplex 35 – 40, 224 – 225; liquification
of 133; as mediator 257 – 260; Mercurial objective psyche 87, 89, 183
monster 70; spirit of 52 – 53, 69; Obrist, Barbara 17
telos of 127; turning the wheel which oneness 44, 142, 256, 258, 262, 264
symbolizes the alchemical process 37, opposites 3, 119 – 120, 205, 206; divine
37; as a uniting symbol 36 geometry 74; of the dual face of alchemy
metaphysics 131, 175 – 176, 183 39; God and devil 67; incestuous
metaxological approach 239 – 240, 264 unification of 71 – 72; Jung on 43 – 44,
Metzger, Hélène 15, 17 50, 77 – 82, 143, 182 – 183, 257;
Micklem, Neil 64 – 65, 143 Mercurius as caduceus unifying the 38;
Miller, David 148, 150, 163, 207 and Philosophers’ Stone 39; and pleroma
Mills, Jon 253 67; unification of 4, 38, 39, 50, 71, 78,
mind-independent reality 185 143, 182 – 183, 257; see also coniunctio
Mogenson, Greg 148 – 149, 150 opus 58, 59, 193
monstrous coniunctio 266 opus contra naturam 130, 213
monstrous conjunctions see benign and O’Regan, Cyril 190, 216
monstrous conjunctions ouroboros 35, 36, 37, 39
monstrous hermaphrodite 55
monstrum 35, 38, 71 Pagel, Walter 13, 16
Moore 96 Panisnick, George David 9, 127
moral consciousness 230n27 Paracelsus, Philippus Aureolus 155, 156
Moran, Bruce T. 24 parallax gap 255, 264
Morienus 11 patience, and philosophy 235 – 236
Morin, Edgar 152 Paton, H.J. 173
Morris, David 244 peacock’s tail 81 – 82, 199, 200
Morris, Marla 158 perceiving and imagining, difference
mortificatio 141, 156; process 215; between 163
mortificatio/putrefactio operation, of periphenomenon 244
alchemy 90 – 92, 91 Pernety, Dom 1
multiple eyes 199, 258 personality 101
Mutus liber 12 Phaedo (Plato) 195
Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung) 58, 62, phenomena 174, 179 – 180, 186
77 – 82, 142, 156, 210, 247, 256 – 257 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel)
mystical death 157 – 159 184 – 185, 190, 216 – 217, 247, 252
myths 131 Philalethes 17
Philosophers’ Stone 1, 4, 6, 8, 145,
Nargarjuna 154 153 – 154, 264; achievement,
nature 9 – 10, 223 cosmological vision of 81; and black
negativity 152; absolute 234, 264; logical sun 165; characteristics of 162 – 163; and
234; tragic 234, 264 darkness 154, 234 – 235; divine geometry
neurosis 131 – 132, 138, 161 74 – 76, 76; and goal images 251; Hillman
“New Birth, The” 56 – 57 on 145 – 146; imagined as speaking 39; as
Newman, William R. 13 – 15, 17, 19, 21; an initiatory experience 144; linked to the
see also Principe and Newman’s thesis lumen naturae of sol niger 166; lithos ou
Nicholas of Cusa 57 lithos 2; lumen of 153; and peacock’s tail
nigredo 139; and matter 81; 199, 200; as prima materia 256;
undifferentiated state of 48, 50 prima materia Mercurius 2; problematic
Noll, Richard 20 – 21, 30n75, 190 origin 9; rotatio 146; and Self 6, 162,
282 Index
212, 258; and sol niger 155, 164 – 165, 157; imaginal psychology 105, 115n95,
213; squaring of the circle as image of 122, 147, 150, 165, 172; informed by
74 – 76, 76; as “a stone that is not a stone” alchemy 125; logical psychology 127;
205, 255 – 256; synonyms of 1; tarrying and philosophy 240 – 241; psychological
with the negative 234 – 244; thing, the reality 18, 40, 57; real psychology
159; as union of opposites 39; and white 125 – 126; re-visioning of 122; self-
stone 193 assessment as a psychologist 252 – 253;
Philosophia reformata of J.D. Mylius 12 spiritual psychology 121; traditional
philosophical tree (arbor philosophica) 58 versus modern 94; true psychology
philosophy 5; and imagination 241 – 242; 128 – 130, 134, 149, 150, 157 – 158; see
natural assumption of 185; and also archetypal psychology
psychology 240 – 241 Psychology and Alchemy (Jung) 137
picture thinking 170 psychotherapy 87
pigment 170 puer-psyche marriage 119 – 120
place 242, 244 pure aetherial consciousness 193
Plato 37, 195 purity 192 – 193
pleroma 66 – 67, 206 putrefactio 50, 90, 141, 154
plurivocity 236
positivism 14 radix ipsius (root of itself) 57
pre-alchemy Jung 40 – 46 Read, John 16
premature unity 71 reality: beyond appearances 181, 183; of
presentational images 90, 101 matter 39 – 40; mind-independent reality
prima materia: King and Queen’s return to 185; of psyche 87, 88 – 89, 91; psychic
49, 49; return to 51 reality 88 – 89; psychological reality 18,
Principe, Lawrence 13 – 15, 19, 21, 28 40, 57; see also psychic reality
Principe and Newman’s thesis: Caliăn on Red Book, The (Jung) 43, 45, 62 – 63, 64
23 – 24; Hanegraaff on 26; Tilton on reddening 196, 197
15 – 22 redness (rubedo) 196, 197
private individual, and the psychologist 133 religion 5, 11, 24, 207, 226, 237
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics remainder 134, 143, 151, 153, 154
(Kant) 174, 180 Ricoeur, Paul 151, 165, 212, 227 – 228
protoscience thesis 23 Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, Two of Wands 176
psyche 21, 40, 62, 87 – 91, 96, 248; and Ripley Scroll, of Sir George Ripley 12
albedo 102; and archetypal psychology Rockmore, Tom 5, 184, 201n39, 228 – 229,
96; and body 87, 89; Christian idea of 247, 251; on absolute knowledge 252,
redemption, distinguishing between 100; 253 – 254; on Hegel’s epistemology
and colors 102; and consciousness 90, 253 – 254; on Hegel’s ontological reading
112; and image 243; objective psyche 218 – 221; on importance of Kant 173; on
87, 89, 183; and puer 119 – 120; and Kant’s epistemology 178 – 179
spirit 242 Roethke, Theodore 166
psychic reality 58, 87, 91, 92, 93, 162; and Romanyshyn, Robert 163 – 164
image 88 – 89; multiple views of 198; Rosarium 37, 47, 49 – 52, 57
wholeness of 76 Rosarium Philosophorum 12, 45, 46 – 59
psychoanalysis, deep shadow of 142 rota 37, 39, 262
psychologist: and human-all-too-human rotatio 103, 146, 199
being, distinction between 132; and Ruska, Julius 19
private individual 133
psychology 5, 97, 116; alchemical Sallis, John 161, 162
psychology 98 – 106, 165; of alchemy samsara and nirvana, difference between
40, 93; archetypal psychology 96, 122, 133
148, 151, 230n27; complex psychology Sarton, May 140
208; depth psychology 159; ego sat chit ananda (truth, consciousness,
psychology 104, 121, 126, 127, 134, bliss) 44
Index 283
Saussure, Ferdinand de 211 spiritual alchemists 34

Scepticism 249 – 250 spiritual alchemy 21, 23, 24 – 25, 26 – 27,
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 48 33; versus laboratory alchemy 24;
schwärmen 174 versus material alchemy 35
Schwartz-Salant, Nathan 162, 164 spiritual psychology 121
Science of Logic (Hegel) 221 – 222 Splendor Solis 12, 154, 165
scientific philosophy 186 Stein, Murray 58 – 59, 141
Secret of the Golden Flower, The 12, 45, 155 Stoicism 249
Self 3 – 4, 43 – 45, 62, 139, 205; and sublation 109 – 110, 128, 147, 152
Absolute Knowing 251 – 255; as Atman sufferings 140
208; and ego 248; entrance problem Sun and Moon, Rebis 34
213 – 217; under erasure 213; imaging sunyata 133, 154, 208
as under erasure 211 – 212; and no self symbols, of alchemy 19 – 20, 225
206 – 210, 211; as no-thing 206 – 207; syzygy 127 – 128, 129, 147, 154
and Philosophers’ Stone 6, 258; shadow
of 210, 211, 249; and sous rature 211 Tanaka, Yasuhiro 115n95
self-consciousness 192, 224 – 225, 229, 251 Tantric rites 156 – 157
self-mediation 236, 237, 238 – 239 Taoism 45, 155
self-reflective experience 190 Tarrant, John 63 – 64
separatio 87, 90, 194, 194 telos 104
Seven Sermons of the Dead (Jung) 66 – 67, 206 Thales 220
shadow 138 – 139, 141 – 142, 249; facing thing-in-itself 177 – 183, 185, 187, 188,
137, 138, 140 – 142; and love 141, 219, 255
142 – 143; of Self 210, 211, 249; see also Thomas, Una 85
blackness; darkness thought 148, 151; and being 221, 223;
Shakespeare, William 69, 144 Giegerich on 107 – 108
Shamdasani, Sonu 21, 43, 69 Tilton, Hereward 14, 15 – 22
Sherwood, Dyane N. 48 tragedy 233 – 234
shining truth 160, 161, 164 tragic negativity 234, 264
Shiva (Hindu god) 156 transcendental imagination 182
Silberer, Herbert 22 Trinity 58
sol niger 48, 158, 210, 213; images of Tripus aureus 32 – 33, 33
154 – 155; shine of 234; tragic dimension true psychology 128 – 130, 134, 149, 150,
of 233 157 – 158
solve et coagula 165 truth 138, 142; fear of 186; shining truth
soul 5, 249; and body, separation of 160, 161, 164; zeal for 187
194 – 195, 241; dual intentionalities Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine 12
130; emancipation from 130 – 131; twoness 222, 223, 262
logical life of 110, 125; need
for historical development 131; Übersinn 63, 82
phenomenology of the colors of 145; ultimate unknowable 180
and Philosophers’ Stone 159; problem Ulysses (Derrida) 121, 258
of “languaging” 159; purification of unassimilable “not” 152 – 153
195; and spirit 151, 264 unassimilable remnant 134, 136
sous rature 211, 213 unconscious 116, 117, 122, 183, 265
speed 235 underworld 118 – 119, 126 – 127
spirit 4 – 5, 21, 186, 244, 264; absoluteness undisciplined metaphysical speculation
228; and psyche 242; and soul 119 – 121, 174
128, 151, 233, 264; see also winged unhappy consciousness 249, 250
and unwinged lions (spirit and body), unio mentalis 193, 196, 213, 216,
conflict between 223, 263
Spirit and Soul: Essays in Philosophical unio naturalis 213
Psychology (Casey) 143 union of opposites as monstrosity 71
284 Index
unity of the unity and difference 154 What Is Soul? (Giegerich) 129 – 130, 132
unknowable 180 white earth 82, 102, 159, 199
unknown 180 whiteness 102, 196
Upanishads 44, 207 wholeness 4, 57, 74, 222, 234, 240, 251,
260 – 263
Verene, Donald Phillip 5, 221 – 224, Wilhelm, Richard 45
231 – 232n94 winged and unwinged lions (spirit and
Vetter, August 177 body), conflict between 72 – 74, 73
Villanova, Arnoldus de 160 wisdom 191 – 192
virgin’s milk fantasies 139 – 140,
143, 193 yellowing 102, 196 – 197, 223
Vivekananda, Swami 140
Voegelin, Eric 191 Žižek, Slavoj 5, 254 – 255, 264
von Franz, Marie-Louise 84 – 86 Zucker, Wolfgang 190 – 191

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‘It is all too easy to regard the Philosophers’ Stone as an idle metaphor or as the

product of a misguided and vain alchemical obsession. But Jung’s Alchemical

‘Stanton Marlan’s Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy provides a wide-ranging and

Traditionally, alchemy has been understood as a precursor to the science

Stanton Marlan, PhD, ABPP, FABP is a Jungian analyst, President of

Philosophy & Psychoanalysis is dedicated to current developments and

Titles in this series:

Metaphysical Dualism, Subjective Idealism,

Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy

Psyche and the Mercurial Play

1 Philosophical tensions in the historiography of

2 The eye of the winged serpent: Mercurius and

3 Benign and monstrous conjunctions 62

4 Classical development of Jung’s ideas of alchemy and

5 Innovations, criticisms, and developments: James

6 James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich: unification

7 Exposition and criticism of Giegerich’s philosophical

8 The problem of the remainder: the unassimilable

9 The alchemical stove: continuing reflections on

10 The philosophical basis of the remnant in Kant’s

11 A reflection on the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 205

12 Spirit and soul 233

13 The self, the absolute, the stone 247

3.5 An alchemical image of two birds illustrating the spirit

6.1 Fundamental differences between James Hillman

With great appreciation and respect, I would like to acknowledge a num-

Perhaps the description that most embodied the Stone’s paradoxical

the spiritual component of Alexandrine and Islamic alchemy entered

Jung finds innumerable alchemical references to support the idea that

imagination was a major component for the achievement of the alchemical

Giegerich’s “Hegelian” understanding of spirit as promoting a final sub-

Philosophical tensions in the

to gain an understanding of the behavior of primitive societies in rela-

metallurgists and smiths, like that of the alchemists, was to cooperate

carries out his exact observations of physico-chemical phenomena and

Eliade’s main concern in and through his analysis of the “historico-cul-

Jung and the study of alchemy

context of his psychology of the unconscious which can serve as a ground

[Jung] succeeds: (1) in placing alchemy into an entirely new perspec-

Criticisms of Jung and Eliade (Principe

about spiritual and psychological interpretations of alchemy. Further, they

Limitations of Principe’s and Newman’s

Jung, and the history of esotericism. While appreciating the contributions

Jung’s ahistorical approach, . . . followed Jung’s historiography . . .

psychological processes remained largely unconscious to the adept,

if we follow Principe and Newman in counterposing a positively val-

Another charge against Jung is the common one that he completely

irrational. Even for those alchemists whom Jung considered conscious of

When Theobald de Hoghelande describes “the wonderful variety of

psychological projection, and a transpersonal and atemporal ‘collective

merely begs the question as to the [philosophical] nature of matter

For Tilton, what is important then is to reflect on the nature of “matter”

placed his own work in the context of a lineage of symbolic import

On this matter we might follow the good advice of the historian of

While I agree with this assessment, it is also important to recognize

Florin George Caliăn

of science, which sees alchemy as a proto-science and accentuates laboratory

which is difficult to sustain in the case of many alchemical texts, as

Academics tend to look on “esoteric,” “occult,” or “magical” beliefs

Gradually during the course of the eighteenth century, alchemy fell

“the attainment of perfection through liberation from conditional exist-

The eye of the winged serpent

also known by the equivalent Greek name Hermes, symbolizing the

Figure 2.3 M ercurius as a uniting symbol. From Valentinus, “Duodecim clavis,”

Stanton Marlan - Jung's Alchemical Philosophy

Stanton Marlan - Jung's Alchemical Philosophy

3 Benign and monstrous conjunctions 62

11 A reflection on the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 205

12 Spirit and soul 233

13 The self, the absolute, the stone 247

Figure 2.3 M ercurius as a uniting symbol. From Valentinus, “Duodecim clavis,”

Figure 2.7 Male/female coniunctio. From the Rosarium philosophorum, Figure 5,

Figure 2.12 Return to the prima materia. Artwork by analysand.

Figure 2.13 Energizing moisture. Artwork by analysand.

Figure 2.16 A growing sense of vitality in the midst of darkness. Artwork by

Figure 2.17 T he monstrous hermaphrodite. From the Rosarium philosophorum,

Figure 3.11 Two images of the complexity of alchemical stages. (1) Stephan

Figure 3.13 Cosmological vision of the achievement of the Philosophers’ Stone.