FIRST ENGLISH EDITION, C.G. Jung The Collected Works, Volume Twelve. Psychology and Alchemy, 1953, Routledge & Kegan Paul, hardcover, 270 illustrations, 565 pages, index, orginal bookseller label " ID Cape Town", some small loss and wear to dust jacket, otherwise condition: excellent.
Please note this book is billed as the twelfth volume in "The Collected Works" but it was actually the first one published (in English).
Carl Jung puts forward a thesis, which I am going to oversimplify: Alchemy, rather than being a scientific process, was, at least in part, an artistic process by which alchemists were attempting to resolve unconscious material within the psyche by using narratives involving physical matter such as chemicals, precious metals, and stones. The transformation alchemists sought is similar to that of the symbol of the figure of Christ and many of his parallels.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is secret, i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.
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