Jung and the Alchemical Imagination

Jung and the Alchemical Imagination

Jeffrey Raff — 1 recording in the archive.

The book: Jung and the Alchemical Imagination by Jeffrey Raff.

Well, today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite topics, so I'm excited to be here. Alchemy is what got me interested in Jung at one time. And the first books by Jung that I read were his alchemical works; I think I was about 23 years old, if you've read Jung. So, it was ambitious, to say the least. But over the years, this interest in alchemy continued along with the development of my interest in Jung, until about 15 years ago I wrote my first book, "Jung and the Alchemical Imagination," where I tried to rethink alchemy a bit, an interpretation of alchemy based on Jung's work, but , trying to move it forward. also at least a little. Most people today have heard of alchemy and usually know that it was associated with attempts to create gold and turn lead into gold. And the word " alchemy" has become quite common in our culture, usually meaning some kind of magical change or transformation, or the alchemy of cooking, or something like that. Most scholars before Jung's time, and many still today, believed that alchemy was so-called protochemistry, that it was actually a form of chemistry that was underdeveloped and reflected the ignorance of the time. And only with the advent of the scientific method did alchemy move from protochemistry to true chemistry. Very few people, especially before Jung, spoke of alchemy as a spiritual tradition. But today many, not many, but people who study so-called spiritual alchemy clearly refer to alchemy as a so-called esoteric spiritual tradition. This includes most spiritual traditions that are neither orthodox nor mainstream. These include Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, and some aspects of Sufism, and of course alchemy. Jung was very concerned with placing himself in a particular historical context. The term " esoteric spirituality" was not yet used during Jung's lifetime. But I think if he existed, he would place Jungian psychology, especially its spiritual aspects, squarely within that tradition. He believed that alchemy was a precursor to Jungian psychology, and this was especially true . Fortunately for us , there was very little literature on Gnosticism for Jung to study . So he chose alchemy, for which I am grateful. All of these schools— Kabbalah, the Hermetic school, Gnosticism— had a particularly great influence on alchemy, and alchemy had a great influence on them. All traditions of esoteric spirituality…