When early alchemists looked to explain the mysteries of the structure of the universe they looked within. They believed that answer to the mystery lay within their own bodies and in that part of the body we call the unconscious. The alchemist believed that he could ask matter to tell him what he consists of. Instead of treating matter as a dead object to be thrown into a vessel and then cooked in order to see what would come out, one could just as well take a block of iron, for instance, and ask it what it was, what kind of life was, what it was doing, how it felt when melted. Since all these materials are within you, you can contact them directly. In that way alchemists contacted what we now call the collective unconscious. They consulted this power directly, by talking to the iron or quicksilver. Naturally the unconscious fills the gap with a personification
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