Quick Answer
The way into Jung's alchemy for anyone who has opened Psychology and Alchemy and closed it again. Nine lectures, transcribed from speech, in which a classical philologist who translated the texts for Jung reads a handful of them slowly, explains what the furnaces and kings and dissolving bodies are doing, and pairs them with dreams from the consulting room. Von Franz is funnier and blunter than her teacher, and the book assumes nothing. Its limit is the limit of the whole Jungian reading: it treats the alchemists as psychologists who did not know it, and passes over the chemistry they were also doing. Within that limit it has no rival.
Key Takeaways
- Projection: the alchemists saw their own psyche in matter, and wrote it down.
- Three traditions: Greek, Arabic, European, one or two texts each.
- Nigredo, albedo, rubedo as stages of individuation.
- Dreams beside texts: modern parallels as the evidence.
- Aurora Consurgens: the ecstatic text she gave her life to.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology is the transcript of nine lectures von Franz gave at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in the winter of 1959, first circulated as mimeographed notes, and published as a book by Inner City Books in 1980 in their Studies in Jungian Psychology series. It is around two hundred and eighty pages.
The lectures are in three parts. Greek alchemy, through the text of Komarios to Cleopatra and the visions of Zosimos of Panopolis. Arabic alchemy, through a treatise attributed to a certain Habib and the Book of the Silvery Water and Starry Earth of Muhammad ibn Umail, known to the Latins as Senior. And European alchemy, principally through the Aurora Consurgens, a medieval text attributed to Thomas Aquinas that von Franz had edited and translated for the third volume of Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis.
The method throughout is close reading: a passage is quoted, its images are explained, a modern dream is set beside it, and the psychological meaning is drawn. Questions from the audience and von Franz's answers are kept. The book is talk, and reads like it.
The title's promise. Introduction is the right word. Von Franz gives only a sketch of the history of alchemy and treats perhaps six texts. She is teaching people who will go on to read Jung how to look at an alchemical image and see what it is doing. The book succeeds at that completely and attempts nothing else.
Who Marie-Louise von Franz Was
Marie-Louise von Franz was born in Munich in 1915 to an Austrian family, grew up in Switzerland, and at eighteen met Jung, who was looking for a student of classics to translate the Latin and Greek texts he had begun to collect. She took her doctorate in classical philology at Zurich in 1940 and worked with Jung for the rest of his life, translating the sources for Psychology and Alchemy, Alchemical Studies and Mysterium Coniunctionis, and producing the edition of the Aurora Consurgens that appeared as the latter's third part.
She became an analyst, lectured at the Jung Institute from its founding in 1948, and wrote the books on fairy tales, on number and time, on the puer aeternus, on projection and on dreams that made her the most read of Jung's students. In 1974 she and others founded the Research and Training Centre in Depth Psychology after a dispute with the Institute. She died in 1998.
Of all Jung's collaborators she knew the alchemical texts best, since she had read them in the original for twenty years before these lectures, and the book has the authority of that reading.
The Theory of Projection
The idea the whole book rests on, set out in the first lecture.
The alchemists were working with matter at a time when nobody knew what matter was. Into that unknown, von Franz argues, they projected the contents of their own unconscious: the drama they observed in the vessel, the blackening, the dissolution, the marriage of substances, the death and resurrection of the king, was the drama of their own psychic transformation, seen outside because it could not yet be seen inside. The texts are therefore records of the unconscious, all the more valuable because their authors did not know they were writing psychology and so did not edit it.
She is careful to say that projection is not delusion. The alchemists were observing something real, and their images have the objectivity of things that were not made up. What they were observing was, in her reading, the process Jung called individuation, and its stages correspond to the stages of the work.
Why Jung Turned to Alchemy
A lecture on the background, useful for readers who wonder why a psychiatrist spent thirty years on this.
Jung, von Franz explains, had found in his patients' dreams a symbolism that Christian and classical tradition did not account for: a process of transformation with its own stages and images, which appeared spontaneously and which the patients could not have learned. In the 1920s Richard Wilhelm sent him a Chinese alchemical text, The Secret of the Golden Flower, and he recognised the symbolism. He then ordered the Latin alchemists and found it again, and realised that alchemy was the historical bridge between Gnosticism and modern depth psychology: the underground tradition in which the psyche's own process had been recorded for fifteen centuries, in the West, by people who thought they were making gold.
Von Franz tells this as someone who was there for the second half of it, and the chapter gives the reader Jung's motive before his method.
Greek Alchemy: Komarios and Zosimos
The first part, and the earliest texts.
Greek alchemy arose in Egypt in the first centuries CE, among Greek-speaking craftsmen and philosophers who combined metallurgical recipes with Stoic, Gnostic and Egyptian religious ideas. Von Franz reads first the treatise of Komarios to Cleopatra, a text of the first or second century in which the philosopher instructs a queen in the mystery of the elements and the resurrection of the body from the tomb of Hades. She explains the four elements and their union, the death and rebirth of the substance, and the drink of immortality, as images of a psychic transformation, and sets beside them the dream of a modern man in which the same sequence appeared.
The chapter also introduces the alchemists' habit of speaking in the voice of the substance, the stone that says I am the one who is sought, and von Franz's suggestion that the voice is the unconscious speaking as itself.
The Visions of Zosimos
The most striking text in the book and the one von Franz reads most closely.
Zosimos of Panopolis, around 300 CE, recorded a series of dreams in which he climbs an altar shaped like a bowl, meets a priest who is being dismembered and boiled and who says he is the sacrificer and the sacrificed, sees men transformed into spirits by fire, and encounters a brazen man, a leaden man and a man of silver in succession. The visions are among the earliest documents of what Jung called active imagination, and von Franz reads them as the unconscious presenting the work in its own images: the vessel as the place of transformation, the dismemberment as the dissolution of the ego, the priest who is both agent and victim as the self.
Jung had written on Zosimos in Alchemical Studies. Von Franz's reading is simpler and more vivid, and she adds the observation that the violence in the visions measures the seriousness of the process rather than any sickness in Zosimos. Readers who know active imagination from Jung will find here its oldest ancestor.
Arabic Alchemy: Ibn Umail
The second part, and the tradition through which alchemy reached Europe.
Von Franz gives a short account of the Arabic period, from the eighth century, in which Greek alchemy was translated, systematised and joined to Islamic and Persian thought, and then reads Muhammad ibn Umail, a tenth-century Egyptian whose Silvery Water became one of the most cited texts in Latin alchemy under the name Senior. The text describes a visit to a temple in which a sage holds a tablet of images, and expounds them: the sun and moon, the bird that eats its own feathers, the two who become one.
She reads the Arabic material as carrying the Greek symbolism into a more explicitly religious register, in which the work is a form of worship and the substance is the divine presence in matter, and she connects the images to the mystical tradition of Islam in which the alchemy of the soul was already a term. The chapter is short, since the Arabic texts were less available to her than the Greek and Latin, and it is the part of the book most in need of supplementing.
European Alchemy
The third part, and the largest.
Latin alchemy began with translations from Arabic in the twelfth century and flourished until the seventeenth, when chemistry separated from it. Von Franz sketches the period and its figures, Albertus Magnus, Arnold of Villanova, the pseudo-Lull, and explains the distinctive European development: the assimilation of alchemy to Christian symbolism, so that the stone becomes a parallel to Christ, the work a parallel to the redemption, and the alchemist a kind of priest of matter. This is the alchemy Jung analysed most fully in Psychology and Alchemy, and von Franz explains why it mattered to him: it showed the Christian symbolism being completed from below, by the redemption of matter and the feminine that the official doctrine had left out.
The chapter's readings of the Rosarium pictures and of the king's death and rebirth are clear and prepare the reader for the culmination in the Aurora.
The Aurora Consurgens
The text von Franz edited for Jung and the climax of the book.
The Aurora Consurgens, the rising dawn, is a thirteenth-century Latin text attributed by its manuscripts to Thomas Aquinas. It is unlike other alchemical writings: ecstatic, built almost entirely from scriptural quotations, especially the Song of Songs and the Wisdom books, and addressed by a speaker in a state of rapture to a feminine figure who is at once Wisdom, the Church, the soul and the alchemical substance. Von Franz argued, in her edition, that it records a real experience and that the attribution may be right: Aquinas, near the end of his life, had a vision that made him stop writing, and the Aurora could be what came out of him then.
The attribution is disputed and most scholars reject it. But her reading of the text stands apart from the question. She shows the alchemical images, the black earth, the union of sun and moon, the resurrection body, appearing here as the language of a religious experience rather than as recipes, one in which matter and the feminine are redeemed together, and she reads it as the fullest expression of what the whole tradition was reaching for. The chapter is the book's most moving and the reason to read it to the end.
The Stages of the Work
The framework the reader comes for.
Von Franz explains the classical sequence: nigredo, the blackening, in which the substance is dissolved, putrefied, killed, and the vessel goes dark; albedo, the whitening, in which the washed substance rises purified and the moon appears; and rubedo, the reddening, in which the sun rises, the opposites are joined and the stone is made. Some texts add citrinitas, yellowing, between the last two.
Psychologically, in her reading: the nigredo is the confrontation with the shadow and the collapse of the ego's self-image, the depression that begins real analysis; the albedo is the withdrawal of projections and the emergence of a detached, reflective attitude, which she warns can become a lunar coldness; and the rubedo is the return to life with the opposites united, the self as the centre rather than the ego. She insists that the stages are a description rather than a programme, that they recur, and that the alchemists themselves gave different orders. The chapter is the most quoted in the book.
The Prima Materia
The substance the work begins from, and the concept von Franz handles best.
The alchemists said the prima materia was everywhere, cheap, despised, thrown out on the road, and that nobody recognised it. It was lead, or dung, or the stone the builders rejected. Von Franz reads this as the unconscious content that the ego has rejected as worthless, the symptom, the shameful thing, the part of oneself one would rather not have, and she argues that analysis begins where the alchemists said the work begins: with the thing on the road that nobody wants. The chapter is the book's most practical, and its examples from her consulting room are exact.
The Coniunctio
The union of opposites, the goal of the work and of Jung's late thought.
The coniunctio, the alchemical marriage of sun and moon, king and queen, sulphur and mercury, is the central image of the tradition and the subject of Jung's last great book. Von Franz explains it as the union of conscious and unconscious, of masculine and feminine principles in the psyche, of spirit and matter, and she is careful to say that the difference survives the union: both are held in relation, and neither dissolves into the other. She follows the texts through the union's stages, the first marriage that produces a death, the second that produces the child, and the third that produces the stone, and she connects them to the stages of a relationship to the inner other that analysis makes conscious.
The chapter is where the book comes closest to Jung's own late thought and where von Franz's plainness does the most work, since she says in a page what Mysterium Coniunctionis takes fifty to say.
The method's power shows in the pairing of dream and text. A modern woman, with no knowledge of alchemy, dreams of a black bird that must be boiled in a vessel until it turns white and then red. Zosimos, seventeen centuries earlier, describes a man being boiled in a bowl until he becomes spirit. Von Franz sets them side by side and does not need to argue: the reader sees that the same process, in the same images, is present in a fourth-century Egyptian and a twentieth-century European, and that neither invented it. Whether one calls it the collective unconscious or something else, the book's evidence is that pairing, repeated fifty times, and it is hard to read the pairs and think nothing is there.
The Dreams Beside the Texts
The case material, which is the book's spine.
Nearly every alchemical image is matched with a dream: from von Franz's practice, from Jung's, from the series in Psychology and Alchemy. The dreams are told briefly and their dreamers' situations sketched, and the parallel is drawn without labouring. The effect is to show that the alchemical symbolism is a living language, still spoken by the unconscious of people who have never heard of it, and to give the reader a way of recognising it when it appears in their own material.
The clinical asides are also where von Franz's tone is most characteristic: dry, direct, occasionally severe about analysts who interpret too fast and patients who want the rubedo without the nigredo.
The Feminine and the Anima
A thread through the book that repays attention.
Alchemy, von Franz argues, was the tradition in which the Christian West kept the feminine and matter, both of which the official theology had subordinated. The queen, the moon, Sophia, the white woman, the earth that must be redeemed: these are the images through which the missing half of the Christian symbol was carried underground. She reads them as the anima in the male alchemists' psychology, and, more broadly, as the compensation the unconscious produced for a culture that had split spirit from body. The Aurora, with its speaker addressing Wisdom as bride, is her chief evidence, and the reading connects the book to Jung's Answer to Job and to his interest in the Assumption of Mary.
The Voice
Since it is the book's distinction.
The lectures were transcribed and lightly edited, and they keep the sound of someone talking to students she knows. Von Franz interrupts herself, tells jokes, answers questions sharply, says when she does not know, and dismisses nonsense in a sentence. She is unpretentious about the texts and unsentimental about the psyche. Readers who have found the Jungian literature solemn will be surprised, and the surprise is part of why the book has lasted.
What the Historians Say
The reading's limit, and it should be stated.
Since the 1990s, historians of science led by Lawrence Principe and William Newman have shown that the alchemists were doing experimental chemistry, that their obscure language often encodes real procedures which can be reproduced, and that the Jungian assumption of pure projection, in which the alchemist observed nothing chemical and everything psychic, is false. The alchemists were chemists and something else, and the something else does not require that the chemistry be denied.
Von Franz's book does not engage this, since it did not yet exist, and readers should hold her reading as one layer of a tradition that had others. Her defence would be that the psychological layer is real whatever else was happening in the vessel, and that is true. But the book presents projection as the whole explanation, and it was not.
Reading It With Jung
Where it fits, for readers planning the sequence.
Start here. Then Psychology and Alchemy, whose dream series and picture commentary will make sense with von Franz's images in mind. Then Alchemical Studies, for Zosimos and Paracelsus and the tree. Then Mysterium Coniunctionis, which is the summit and which few reach without the earlier three. Von Franz's own later books, on projection and on the puer, extend the reading; Edward Edinger's Anatomy of the Psyche arranges the alchemical operations as a clinical map and is the best companion.
The Objections
Three.
It ignores the chemistry. The alchemists were doing something in the vessel, and the projection theory erases it.
Projection explains too much. If every image is the unconscious, nothing in the texts could count against the reading.
The framework is assumed. A reader who does not already accept individuation and the self will find them presupposed rather than argued.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to read Jung on alchemy and need a door, since this is the door.
Read it if your dreams have begun producing fires, vessels, dismemberments and marriages, and you want to know what tradition they belong to.
Read it if you are drawn to the alchemical images in art and literature and want a trained classicist to explain what they meant to those who made them.
Read the Aurora chapter if you read nothing else. It is the text she gave her life to and the one in which the tradition speaks most directly.
The book's teaching, underneath the scholarship, is about where to look. The alchemists said the beginning of the work was on the road, in the thing everyone walks past: the lead, the dung, the rejected stone. Von Franz reads this as an instruction to begin with what one has refused in oneself, the symptom, the shame, the failure, and to treat it as the material of the work rather than an obstacle to it. Everything else in alchemy, the stages, the marriage, the stone, follows from taking that first thing seriously. It is a hard instruction and the tradition wrapped it in a thousand images so that it could be found by those who were ready. Von Franz unwraps it, and the book's plainness is a kind of mercy.
The Jungian reading of alchemy from the classicist who translated the texts, in lectures that assume nothing and explain everything.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the historians' objection to the projection theory is given above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Alchemy: An Introduction about?
Nine lectures given by Marie-Louise von Franz at the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1959, reading alchemical texts from Greek Egypt, the Arabic world and medieval Europe as records of the unconscious projected into matter, and showing what the images mean for the psychology of individuation.
Who was Marie-Louise von Franz?
A Swiss analyst and classical philologist, 1915 to 1998, who met Jung at eighteen, translated the Latin and Greek alchemical texts for his late works, and became the leading interpreter of fairy tales, dreams and alchemy in the Jungian school. She founded the Research and Training Centre in Depth Psychology in 1974.
How does it relate to Jung's alchemy books?
Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, Alchemical Studies and Mysterium Coniunctionis are dense and assume the reader knows the texts. Von Franz's lectures were designed as the way in: she reads a few texts slowly, explains the images, and connects them to clinical material. Most readers should start here.
Which texts does it cover?
Greek alchemy through Komarios and Zosimos, Arabic alchemy through the Kitab al-Habib and Muhammad ibn Umail, and European alchemy through the Aurora Consurgens attributed to Thomas Aquinas. Each part reads one or two texts closely rather than surveying many.
What does she mean by projection?
That the alchemists, not knowing what matter was, saw in it the contents of their own unconscious: the stages of the work, the unions and deaths and resurrections, are descriptions of psychic transformation experienced as chemistry. The texts are therefore documents of the psyche, readable now as such.
Is it a history of alchemy?
No. It is a psychological reading of selected texts. Historians of alchemy have shown since that the alchemists were also doing real chemistry and that the Jungian reading passes over this. Von Franz is a guide to the symbolism, not to the laboratory.
What are the stages of the work?
Nigredo, the blackening or dissolution; albedo, the whitening or purification; and rubedo, the reddening or completion, with citrinitas sometimes between. Von Franz reads them as the confrontation with the shadow, the withdrawal of projections, and the union of opposites in the self.
What is the Aurora Consurgens?
A medieval alchemical text of ecstatic character, attributed to Thomas Aquinas, which von Franz edited as the third volume of Mysterium Coniunctionis. She argues it records a real experience of visions, possibly Aquinas's at the end of his life, and her chapter on it is the book's climax.
Does it include case material?
Yes, throughout. Von Franz pairs the alchemical images with dreams from her practice and Jung's, showing the same motifs appearing spontaneously in modern people who knew nothing of alchemy. The parallels are the evidence for the psychological reading.
Is it easy to read?
Yes. The lectures were transcribed from speech and keep its directness, its humour and its asides. Von Franz is funny, blunt about analysts and patients alike, and never pretentious. It is the most approachable book in the Jungian alchemical literature by a wide margin.
What are the objections?
That the psychological reading ignores the chemistry, that projection explains everything and therefore nothing, and that the Jungian framework is assumed rather than argued. All three are fair and none removes the book's value as an introduction to the images.
Who should read it?
Anyone who wants to read Jung on alchemy and has bounced off him, students of symbolism who want a trained classicist's reading of the primary texts, and anyone in analysis or self-work whose dreams have started producing furnaces, kings and strange unions.
Find the stone on the road
Von Franz's practical instruction is the alchemists' own: the prima materia is the thing you have thrown out. Before reading further in the tradition, name one thing about yourself you have set aside as worthless, a recurring failure, a feeling you are ashamed of, a symptom you manage rather than meet, and consider, as an experiment, that it is where the work begins rather than what the work will remove. The alchemists said nobody recognised the first matter because it was too common and too despised. The book's wager is that the same is true in every psyche, and that the whole elaborate art was built to get one person to pick the thing up.
Sources & References
- von Franz, Marie-Louise. Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, Inner City Books, 1980.
- von Franz, Marie-Louise, ed. Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966.
- Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works vol. 12.
- Jung, C. G. Mysterium Coniunctionis, Collected Works vol. 14.
- Principe, Lawrence. The Secrets of Alchemy, 2013, for the historians' view.
- Edinger, Edward. Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985.