But can scientific sense be made of the labour of the alchemists, most of which was symbolism and definitely not chemical experiment? The ancients knew what chemical processes were, and therefore could not overlook that most of what they did was not chemistry. Their “experiments” were admittedly bound up with a symbolic meaning. If, on the other hand, as the alchemists persistently maintained, their descriptions represented chemical processes, these were at least made unrecognizable by the elaborate symbolic language in which they were couched.In Jung’s opinion, these apparent contradictions can be removed, and the true nature of alchemy discovered, in certain processes of “projection” which take place in the “psyche” of the individual alchemist. These psychical processes appear to the adept as a peculiar behaviour of chemical substances. “Er erlebte seine Projektion als Eigenschaft des Stoffes.” What he witnessed in reality, however, was his own unconscious self. Hence the admonition to look into oneself, i.e., the internal light which God has kindled, in order to “invent” (“Quaeris multum et non invenies. Fortasse invenies cum non quaeris.”) Hence the emphasis laid on the purity of the mind (“mens” in contrast to reason) and the congruity of the latter with the “work.”
“Meditation” (i.e., an internal dialogue with one’s own unconscious self) and “imagination” (i.e., the action of the “celestial” in man, his “astrum”) will, in the alchemist’s opinion, set free the forces which enable him to alter matter. The process of liberation of the soul from its bodily cage (including the unconscious self) that takes place in dreams, visions and phantasies appears to be the “Philosopher’s Stone”; for the alchemist believes that this process, while progressing in his own unconscious self, engenders a similar process of liberation of the “spiritual” in matter. The process has become an “autonomous complex.” It may acquire independent existence whereby it is “objectivated” or “projected” on base material ennobling it by “coloration.” (Walter Pagel)
