This lecture explores the influence of alchemical ideas on medieval thinkers and the persistence of alchemical attraction in human nature. It argues that alchemy offers a unique perspective on the human soul and the unconscious, and that its symbols and doctrines continue to resonate with modern psychological thought. The lecture examines the conventional image of the alchemist and the alchemical laboratory, and discusses the relevance of alchemical ideas to Jungian psychoanalysis.
Gaston Bachelard — 2 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: La Poétique de la rêverie by Gaston Bachelard.
Related reading: La Formation de l’esprit scientifique by Gaston Bachelard.
A few months ago, while following the history of scientific ideas in the Middle Ages, I tried to assess the influence of alchemical ideas on the thinkers of that period. I noted that alchemy formed a particularly unified and stable body of doctrine, and that this explained its enduring hold upon people's minds. Alchemy appeared to me as a true power of tradition. The alchemist often seems to be searching for a lost secret. He wants to rediscover what the great masters found long ago, in the depths of time. He meditates on texts before working upon substances. There are many engravings in which we see the alchemist absorbed in reading a parchment before his furnaces. He must always discover the mysterious meaning of a formula in which an ancient master has, in some way, deliberately concealed his thought: a thought whose true light must be revealed only to initiates. There are also many cases in which alchemists complain of the obscurity of texts left by the ancient sages. In short, alchemy has always fulfilled a kind of function of mystery. That is why it retains its appeal for so many minds throughout the ages. We would not do full justice to alchemical doctrines if we confined ourselves to judging them materially, by listing their actual discoveries that belong to positive chemistry. In fact, medieval alchemy belongs to a kind of meditation in which images and thoughts mingle, in which experience is directed more toward the universe than toward things. It is no accident that so many works combine astrology and alchemy. Ultimately, the whole soul, the very destiny of the soul, was engaged in alchemical meditation. Consequently, although scientifically speaking alchemy belongs to a bygone age, and the work of an alchemical laboratory could have no effect on today's scientific culture, alchemy nevertheless remains an almost inexhaustible mine of psychological documents. The substantial book that the psychologist Jung wrote in 1944, entitled Psychology and Alchemy, a book whose French translation we are awaiting, shows that, for a psychologist of our time, the alchemy of the Middle Ages is still relevant. It is this persistence, I think, that I should like to study in a few talks. Today, let us try to characterize the attraction that still binds us to alchemical doctrines. In short, medieval alchemy has bequeathed us a picture to which we respond readily. We need only evoke…