Carl Jung's Alchemical Secret: the Process to Reach Mystical Experiences (2024d) (original) (raw)
Related papers
At the Roots of Jung's Alchemy Part I: The Red Book's Alchemical Quaternion
Jung Journal, 2022
It is a well-known fact that Jung decided to devote himself to a systematic study of the European alchemical tradition at the beginning of the 1930s. What readied him to do so remains, to this day, uncertain. Shedding light on Jung’s long-standing interest in rituals and processes of death and rebirth, which culminated in his 1932 Ravenna vision, this article traces Jung’s earliest understanding of alchemy back to the pages of The Red Book. A close reading of a sequence of four illuminations, which Jung painted in the fall of 1919, allows us to see how profound his understanding of alchemy as an experience of inner rebirth already was, and how powerfully those early images kept reverberating through Jung’s later alchemical writings.
Jung, Alchemy and History. Glasgow: Hermetic Research
It is well known that Jung's encounter with alchemy was important for the development of his psychology, and that his writings on the subject have a reputation for difficulty. This book gives a brief history of alchemy, a short account of Jung's position arranged by subject, a small amount on James Hillman's use of alchemy, and some brief criticism. The aim is to provide people with enough background for them to read Jung's writings on alchemy themselves. The overall theme is that Jung's writings, while interesting, important and influential, do not exhaust the complexities of alchemy. Jung gets much from the alchemists, they deepen tendencies within his own works, but it is extremely doubtful that he clears up the mysteries of the texts themselves. It might be possible to suggest that if the alchemist projected the secrets of their psyche onto the Work, Jung projected the secrets of his Analytic Psychology onto Alchemy.
Turn of an Age: The Spiritual Roots of Jungian Psychology in Hermeticism, Gnosticism and Alchemy, by Alfred Ribi. Edited with a Foreword by Lance S. Owens, 2019
In this book Alfred Ribi reaches back across two millennia, gathering and engaging an extraordinary collection of writings. With authority and fluency, Ribi draws together the antique texts of Hellenism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Alchemy, and illustrates how these nurture the visionary work of C. G. Jung. Into this tapestry Alfred Ribi weaves personal insights gained over half a century of experience as an analytical psychologist. He illuminates how the dreams and visions of modern individuals intertwine with the tradition that Jung indicated to be a spiritual antecedent of his psychology. This is the second volume of a two-volume work. The first volume, "The Search for Roots: C. G. Jung and the Tradition of Gnosis" was published in an English translation in 2013. That volume served as a general introduction to the more detailed and multifaceted exposition presented in this second volume. This book is addressed to serious students of Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and the works of C. G. Jung. It will richly reward those who give it their diligent attention. Authored by Alfred Ribi. Foreword by Lance S. Owens. Translated by Mark Kyburz Gnosis Archive Books ISBN 978-0578565507
Carl Jung's Transcendent Function: his Insight into Mystical Experiences (2024f)
2024
Carl Jung wrote the essay The Transcendent Function in 1916, but it was not published until 1958 when students at the C. G. Jung Institute of Zurich discovered it. The psychological phenomenon explained by Jung in his essay comes before the most important concepts of his psychology such as archetypes, shadow, anima/animus and Self. As a result, it is of the utmost importance to understand Jung's individuation process. Nevertheless, the transcendent function is probably the most misunderstood notion in the field of Analytical psychology. Jungians generally explain it as a mere product of the integration of unconscious contents in consciousness, but they miss the essence of its description by Jung as the autonomous compensation from the archetype of the Self and the voice of God. In this article, we show that the transcendent function is exactly what Jung implied in the title of his essay: the psychological process to produce a mystical or transcendent experience. To Jung, that phenomenon is an extremely numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites entering consciousness for a short moment. Jung's 1916 essay was his first attempt to explain psychologically his mystical experience of December 1913. The goal of this article is to give back its place to the transcendent function in the Jungian corpus.
Of Gods and Stones: Alchemy, Jung, and The Dark Night of St. John of the Cross
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 47(1). John of the Cross’ mystical text The Dark Night (DN) presents a candid portrayal of the ego’s encounter with the numinous or transpersonal dimensions of the psyche. When viewed through a Jungian alchemical lens, the encounter becomes significantly amplified to reveal novel insights into this psychospiritual ordeal. The article first unpacks and explores the DN through Jung’s Collected Works and Letters, and subsequently offers an in-depth interpretation of the dark night experience through the lens of the alchemical nigredo, including depth psychological and transpersonal perspectives. Finally, the article re-visions the DN in light of the nigredo, albedo, and rubedo stages of Western alchemy, drawing parallels between these and the purgation, illumination, and union stages of the Western Christian mystical tradition. In both instances, a coniunctio or mystical union results, where new self- and god-images arise from the illuminating darkness of night and into conscious integration. Key words: John of the Cross, dark night, C.G. Jung, alchemy, nigredo, god image
C. G. Jung Collected Works Volume 12 Psychology and Alchemy
The two lectures were previously translated by Stanley Dell and published in The Integration of the Personality (New York, 1939; London, 1940) under the titles "Dream Symbols of the Process of Individuation" and "The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy." Professor Jung then considerably expanded them and added an introduction, in which he set out his whole position particularly in relation to religion. These three parts together with a short epilogue make up the Swiss volume. The translation now presented to the public has been awaited with impatience in many quarters, for it is one of Professor Jung's major works, to be compared in importance with Psychology of the Unconscious and Psychological Types. It may be said that round the material contained in this volume the major portion of his later work revolves. On this account Psychology and Alchemy is being published first, though it is not Volume 1 of the Collected Works. EDITORIAL NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION For this second edition of Volume 12, technical considerations made it necessary to reset the text, and this in turn made various improvements possible. The translation has been thoroughly revised, and additions and revisions have been made in accordance with the second Swiss edition, 1952. The bibliography and the footnote references have been corrected and brought up to date, particularly in respect of the author's subsequent publications in English. The paragraph numeration has been preserved, but the pagination has unavoidably changed. An entirely new index has been prepared. The late Mr. A. S. B. Glover was responsible for numerous improvements in the translations from the Latin and in the bibliographical references. The illustrations are printed almost entirely from new photographs; consequently the sources have sometimes had to be altered. For valuable assistance in obtaining new photographs the Editors are indebted to Mrs. Aniela Jaffé, Dr. Jolande Jacobi, and Dr. Rudolf Michel; for general editorial help, to Mrs. B. L. Honum Hull. After the author's death in 1961, the unpublished draft of a "prefatory note to the English edition," written in English, was found among his papers, and this has been added to the present edition. For permission to publish it, the Editors are indebted to the late Mrs. Marianne Niehus-Jung, then acting on behalf of the heirs of C. G. Jung. A variant of the text of Part II presenting the essay in its Eranos-Jahrbuch 1935 form appeared as "Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process" in Spiritual Disciplines (Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 4; New York and London, 1959).
Depth Psychology and Mysticism, 2018
The art and alchemy of transformation is a large and complex subject. There are many approaches to understanding the opus alchemicum and its goals of solification and the Philosophers' Stone. My approach to this work is from the perspective of a Jungian analyst, which means privileging a certain orientation and point of view. It is a point of view that continues to develop within, around, and on the edges of the Jungian tradition, and, for me, it remains an open inquiry that continues to intrigue and surprise me. Like Jung, the alchemists were interested in fundamental and elemental change, classically imagined as the transformation of lead into gold, a base substance into a noble one. Jung's (1968) revolutionary insight was that the alchemists were not simply concerned with the "material
C.G. Jung and I, Summary of Chapter 6, The Night-Sea Jouney, 2024
Preliminary Note: During the revision of Chapter 6 of my manuscript “C.G. Jung and I”, I became increasingly aware of the serious problem that the depth psychologist has left us. It concerns the discrepancy between the neo-Platonic background of science and that of Hermetic magic. As I show in this manuscript, he always meandered back and forth between these two irreconcilable worldviews. While his depth-psychological theory is neo-Platonic – the good spirit is to be liberated from the ultimately evil matter – his deepest life experiences are hermetic, that is, bound to a magical worldview. This discrepancy, which became visible in all its depth in his “night-sea journey” of 1913, he was never able to overcome, so that his successors are faced with the task of solving this discrepancy. With my postulation of the empirically experiential internal quantum leap, in which an acausal event interrupts causal development, which then leads to a new causal but completely unpredictable continuation, I believe I have found the solution to this problem of contradiction. The alchemical model for this solution was the symbolic statement of the “coniunctio”, the sexual union of the male-divine with the female-divine principle. It led to the birth of the “infans solaris”, the lapis, the alchemical gold. Equivalent to this was the production of the “medicina catholica”, the Alexipharmakum (the antidote) for the healing of physical and psychological illnesses, which had already been postulated by Paracelsus. Another symbolic paraphrase of this solution is the “rotatio” of the “rotundum”, the Ouroboros, a problem with which the dreams of the transfer of the oscillation into the rotation of Wolfgang Pauli were concerned.