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The Rose Garden of the Philosophers: Text and Context
Practically since its first printing, the Rosarium philosophorum has been the object of constant veneration. Alchemists of the late Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians of the Enlightenment, and finally Jungian analytical psychologists of our modern era, have all claimed it as a central text. And yet, in respect of its genre, the Rosarium is rather unremarkable. Joachim Telle, the late historian of German alchemy and author of an authoritative historical commentary on the Rosarium, quipped that “as expected, the Rosarium philosophorum loses all the glory of a literary solitary when surveyed amidst the dense thicket of alchemical technical writings.”[1]
The meaning of rosarium is “rose garden,” referring to a text which collects important excerpts, picking them out like flowers for a garden. This genre was popular in medieval Europe, and was called in that context a florilegium (Latin flos, “flower,” + lego, “pick out”); the etymology survives in our modern term “anthology” (Greek ανθος, “flower,” + λεγω, “pick out”). The rose being the queen of flowers, one would expect to find in a rosarium not only the flowers but the best of flowers carefully selected from the field. It seems that the rose garden was a flourishing genre among alchemical technical authors around the time our text of interest was published. Numerous roughly contemporary florilegia of alchemical authorities bore the title Rosarium or Rosarium philosophorum. To give just one example, a certain Rosarium philosophorum, attributed to the 17th century English alchemist John Dastin, states that “we call this compendium ‘Rosarium,’ because we have plucked it for you from the philosophers’ books like roses from thorns. In it we shall hand down all that we have found necessary in their books for the completion of this work, succinctly, in plain speech and correct sequence, and word for word, together with all the necessary cases.”[2]
Our Rosarium philosophorum was printed in 1550 by Cyriacus Jacobus in Frankfurt. Its full title is “The rose garden of the philosophers: The second part of the Alchemy, concerning the true preparation of the philosophers’ stone, with an exact development of that science. With figures showing the perfection of the matter.”[3] The first part of the subtitle refers to the Rosarium’s place as the second volume of a two-volume text, De alchimia opuscula complura veterum philosophorum (“Several little works of the old philosophers concerning alchemy”). Also notable is the designation cum figuris, “with figures.” The cycle of twenty-one woodcuts incorporated into the text of the 1550 Rosarium is a key feature which distinguished it from the other rose gardens of the era. Indeed, later alchemical authors, when they needed to refer to this Rosarium in particular, sometimes referred to it as the Rosarium cum figuris, the rose garden with figures.[4]
Until recently, the 1550 print of the Rosarium cum figuris was presumed to be the earliest extant version of the text. However, recent archival work by Rudolf Gamper and Thomas Hofmeier has shown that there exists a manuscript, with illustrations in coloured pen, which can be dated to the 1530s.[5] Apart from giving a name to one of its early owners—Bartlome Schobinger, a wealthy Swiss merchant who collected a number of important alchemical texts—the discovery of this earlier witness answers few questions about the text of the Rosarium. About the editor date of the original composition, we know nothing with certainty other than that the editor was probably active in the 14th century.[6]
The Rosarium cum figuris includes twenty-one woodcuts, including the frontispiece. The twenty woodcuts internal to the text serve to order it into a sequence emblematic of the alchemical transformation. Most figures are accompanied by verses written, unlike the rest of the Latin text, in Middle High German. The figures and the German poem appear originally to have been a single composition named Sol und Luna, an example of the picta-poesis tradition current in contemporary medieval publication. Each individual picture-poem of the cycle is composed of an emblematic figure, together with a verse couplet illuminating its content. Little more is known textually about this picture-poem cycle, except that it must have been in circulation by 1400.[7] The version of Sol und Luna printed in the 1550 Rosarium contains several distortions and omissions compared to the forms attested in the 1530s manuscript as well as in other textual witnesses. Footnotes to this translation supply the omitted material and show textual variants from the 1530s manuscript. Moreover, Sol und Luna is interrupted at one point, in the subscript to the text’s tenth figure, by a second and unrelated Middle High German poem, called Das Nackte Weib (“The Naked Woman”).
Telle argues that not only the poetry but also the pictures of the cycle were distorted in their redaction into the Rosarium. Apparently, the cycle in its standard form concludes with three picture-poems representing the albedo or white tincture, the rubification phase, and finally the rubedo or red tincture.[8] These three images are replaced in the Rosarium (both our 1550 print and also the 1530s manuscript) with a single Rebis figure (a hermaphroditic king-queen emblematic of the magnum opus), plus three extraneous picture-poem representations: a green lion devouring the sun, the Coronation of Mary, and the Resurrection of Christ.
Given its nature as a collection of excerpts, the Latin text has many strata, most of which are still in need of substantial textual and archival work before their origins can be known. Two points, however, are certain. First is that the “philosophers” of the Rosarium—a general term referring to any alchemical authority—are by and large drawn from Latin translations of the Arabic alchemical tradition, or from Latin sources pseudepigraphally attributed to Arabic authorities. By the time of Jacobus’s print of the Rosarium in 1550, European alchemy had begun to detach itself from its Arabic origins, under the influence of figures like Paracelsus (c. 1493–1541), who provided an alternative to the Aristotelian-Galenic orthodoxy inherited from Arabic alchemical and medical texts. Curiously, Jacobus’s publication had a part to play on both sides of this burgeoning controversy. The 1550 edition of De alchimia, of which the Rosarium is the second volume, was dedicated to Otto Henry, Elector Palatine (1502–1559), a count who was himself apparently an alchemist and a partisan of the young Paracelsan school.[9] On the other hand, precisely this patronage permitted texts like the Rosarium, bearing the heavy Arabic influence of a 14th-century composition, to revive interest in the old alchemical authorities at a time when such treatises were becoming relatively rare.[10]
The second point of certainty is that we know of one textual source which was incorporated into the Rosarium, sometime between its initial composition and the redaction which served as Jacobus’s source: the Pretiosissimum donum Dei (“Most precious gift of God”).[11] This very influential text, also a florilegium which features a picture-poem cycle, circulated widely in the 15th century. Large portions of it, particularly a section labelled the Tabula scientiae maioris (“Tablet of the greater science”), are shared with the Rosarium. In turn, certain versions of the Donum Dei incorporate text that belonged originally to the Rosarium.[12] Several early editions of the Donum Dei are titled Rosarium philosophorum sive Donum Dei.
We may summarize what is known of the Rosarium’s textual strata and their dates as follows: (1) the Latin-language alchemical corpuses which formed the original composition of the Rosarium (before 14th c.); (2) material from the Donum Dei (before 15th c.) which was added to the Rosarium sometime after its original composition; (3) the picture-poem Sol und Luna, including the cycle of figures and accompanying Middle High German verse couplets (before 15th c.); (4) Das Nackte Weib, another poem in Middle High German; and (5) the four final figures and verses in the Rosarium, representing the Rebis, the green lion, the Coronation of Mary, and the Resurrection of Christ, which were not originally integral to the Sol und Luna material, and may have been added in either at the time of the Rosarium’s original compilation or as part of a later redaction but prior to the 1530s manuscript.
Jung’s Interpretation of the Rosarium
Into the early modern and Enlightenment periods, the Rosarium continued to exert an overt influence on alchemically minded thinkers. Thus, for instance, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger—the Lutheran Pietist theologian and theosopher who held sway at Tübinger Stift in Württemberg in the generation before Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling[13]—called the Rosarium the “most understandable book for a seeker.”[14] Readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Nature who were familiar with alchemy would have recognized in these texts an open discussion of the dialectical tension between the four classical elements and the three Paracelsan primes (sulphur, salt, and mercury). This is the same tension between the orthodox Aristotelian-Galenic conception and the competing Paracelsan doctrine which manifests in the content and publication context of the Rosarium.
But the modern history of the Rosarium really begins with Carl Gustav Jung, particularly with his “Psychology of the Transference,”[15] a long essay in he interprets a subset of the images of the Rosarium along the lines of his analytical psychology. Thanks to the widespread popularity of Jung’s ideas, the Rosarium philosophorum and its images have come today to enjoy a notoriety far beyond any kind of fame the text may have had among learned alchemists and scholars in the preceding centuries. The academic literature on the Rosarium is now dominated by Jungian and post-Jungian discussion of the original text, of Jung’s interpretation of it, and of its contemporary use in illuminating various psychoanalytic problems, especially the transference. It is not too much to say that the Rosarium is now in its second life, one whose meaning is inseparable from the figure who revived it.
Jung’s turn toward alchemy began late in his career. His first major work on the topic, Psychology and Alchemy,[16] was published just shy of his seventieth birthday, and he spent the rest of his life engaged in the massive undertaking of recovering the obscure and apparently useless alchemical corpus for use by psychologists. In the foreword to his last major work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung states the rationale of his two decades’ work on alchemy: “Not only does this modern psychological discipline give us the key to the secrets of alchemy, but, conversely, alchemy provides the psychology of the unconscious with a meaningful historical basis.”[17]
We might infer from this that, for Jung, the alchemical corpus served not so much to provide new information as to confirm the historical substance of his existing theories. Jung, for his part, often made statements to this effect:
I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology.[18]
This rather romanticized account from Jung’s autobiography belies the fact his own work was brought into “coincidence” with alchemy only after a substantial, conscious effort to re-theorize his older concepts, and to bring wholly new ones into existence. Analytical psychology did not derive merely a historical data point from alchemy. In the encounter it was, so to speak, transmuted, given a wholly new appearance and language, and purified of much of the dross of the theories of Jung’s early and middle periods.
We may briefly summarize the major points of Jung’s theoretical development, leading up to his encounter with the Rosarium, as follows. Following his break in 1913 with Sigmund Freud and several years of intense mystical and quasi-psychotic experiences,[19] Jung emerged for the first time as an independent thinker in 1918 with the publication of “Instinct and the Unconscious,”[20] in which he began his development of the concept of archetype. Psychological Types,[21] published in 1921, established Jung as a psychological thinker concerned, not with sex and infancy, but with aesthetics, religion, and mythology. The 1920s, a prolific period, saw Jung preoccupied with applying his “analytical psychology” (as opposed to Freud’s “psychoanalysis”) to the most varied fields of human experience. The work from this period leaves a rather ambivalent impression. It is marked by the genius of Jung’s theoretical leaps of the late 1910s and early 1920s, but suffers from Jung’s lack of capacity at this point to theorize his insights rigorously. “Archetype,” for example, remains a thoroughly heterogeneous concept throughout Jung’s early work, sometimes approximating to the Kantian category, sometimes approaching Lévi-Strauss’s elementary structure, sometimes referring plainly to the stock characters of myths and fairy tales. The result of this confusion is a kind of monotonous expansion of archetypal psychology’s breadth without any corresponding increase of its depth.
A turn is marked in 1928 by the publication of “On Psychical Energy,”[22] in which Jung responds to challenges against the vague and implicit nature of his theory of libido. While the argument is clumsily developed, it nevertheless represents a crucial step from the monotonous application of an incompletely developed theory towards an examination of the logic of analytical psychology itself—what Freud called “metapsychology.” Jung’s libido turns out to be something like potential energy, a quantity that becomes visible as work when psychic elements move from high tension to low tension, just as gravitational potential energy becomes visible when water, flowing downward, spins a turbine. This mechanical framework is the logical scaffold for nearly all of Jung’s important analytic concepts: from repression (envisioned as a “damming up” of a “flow” of psychic energy) to neurosis (a paralysis of psychic work resulting from a dammed-up flow) to the cure of neurosis via the transcendent function (the establishment of a new psychic flow, and thus the capacity for work, mediated by the unusually and unpleasantly high potential caused by neurosis).
Into the 1930s, Jung’s fame and institutional power were mounting. In 1933, he began to deliver annual seminars at the Eranos Conference, which would eventually be worked into the material of Psychology and Alchemy. Jung had begun serious study of alchemical material at this time, and references to it begin to become more frequent through the 1930s. Of particular importance is a lecture, titled “Psychology and Religion,”[23] originally delivered in English at Yale University in 1937. A great deal of alchemical material, including the Rosarium philosophorum, is directly referenced and interpreted in the lecture. Incidentally, Jung begins here to make the error, as he will continue to do in later works, of conflating the various texts called Rosarium into one.[24]
The material of this period, during which Jung had begun his alchemical studies but had not yet begun publishing his major works on alchemy, is often characterized by a kind of incoherence. Jung seems to make little use of his decisive step toward a rigorous formalization of his own concepts, other than to point out more explicitly than before the logical inconsistency reigning within his own explanations. In retrospect, however, we observe within the works of this middle period the emergence of three archetypes from out of the confused mass, which were destined to become the fulcrum of later Jungian theory: the shadow, the anima, and the Self.[25] Arguably the essence of this theoretical evolution is the determination of the concept of archetype as a form of relation between the ego and unconscious. More specifically it is a binary and dialectical form of relation, which defines a positive relation between two objects through their opposition. The ego relates to its shadow insofar as I reject what I refuse from my image. The ego relates to the anima insofar as I, through my desire, am disjoined from the object of my desire. The ego relates to the Self insofar as I, a mortal creature, find myself confronted by the ground of my existence, which is therefore also the question of my annihilation.
The structural nature of this new concept of archetype is clear in that the shadow, anima, and Self are immediately associated with the alchemical phases, broad stages of the work which transcend any particular substance or operation in order to describe their underlying conceptual unity. The confrontation with the shadow is associated with the nigredo, the “black” phase of the work, which entails the dissolution and putrefaction of the existing forms of matters, returning them into a chaotic but fertile mass. The anima-work is associated with the albedo, the “white,” which is the separation, sublimation, and purification of the desirable elements of the prima materia from the undesirable. The nigredo and the albedo are summed up in the alchemical dictum, solve et coagula, “dissolve and coagulate,” which appears on the frontispiece of the Rosarium. The unity of the dissolving and coagulating phases is the rubedo, the “red,” which designates the coniunctio oppositorum (“union of opposites”), the attainment of the philosophers’ stone, the panacea, the elixir, etc. This last phase is identified with the Jungian Self.[26]
The emergence of the Jungian archetype as a kind of dialectical structural relation, under the influence of the alchemical treatment of the union of opposites, forms the context in which Jung approaches the Rosarium. “Psychology of the Transference” was first published in 1946, shortly following the publication of Psychology and Alchemy (1944), and preceding that of Aion (1951), in which shadow, anima, and Self emerge once and for all as the structural trinity of the Jungian archetype.
Given the centrality of the concept of transference to all other major branches of psychoanalysis, it is remarkable that “Psychology of the Transference” is Jung’s only lengthy treatment of the topic. Even so, it is hard to avoid the impression that Jung’s interest in this text does not lie solely, or even primarily, with the clinical transferential relationship. As is typical of him, Jung ranges across topics in anthropology, religion, and mythology in his exposition of the images of the Rosarium. Why, then, highlight the transference at all? One plausible conclusion would be that Jung was recruiting the problem of the clinical transference—much as he was recruiting the Rosarium itself—to lend substance to the evolution of his concept of archetype into a strictly dyadic and logical form. The shadow, anima, and Self each confront the ego as an other defined by a determinate kind of otherness, the phase of the work being defined by the task of grasping and uniting with this particular sort of other. This puts Jung’s work into close relation with other structurally inclined psychoanalytic theorists, notably Jacques Lacan, who also insisted on a binary relationship between the ego and the Other: “There is no Other of the Other.”[27] For both Jung and Lacan, although one encounters many particular others in everyday life, there is nevertheless only one Other at a given time, namely the fundamental form of otherness which underlies and governs one’s relation to particular others. An ego in a phase of shadow work does not relate to others in the same way as an ego in a phase of anima work; its Other in one case is the shadow, in the other the anima. The goal of the work is to integrate not one’s particular others, but the fundamental, archetypal otherness which governs these particular relations. It is in this context that Jung summons the metaphor of the transferential relationship, in which the analyst serves as a surface for the projection of the archetype, thereby enabling the analysand to enter into relation with it.
Jung’s interpretation spans only the first half of the Rosarium and is centered largely on the woodcuts rather than the text.[28] Eleven of the Rosarium’s twenty-one woodcuts appear in “Psychology of the Transference”; they are the first eleven woodcuts, excluding the frontispiece. In effect, however, Jung only considers ten woodcuts, from “The Mercurial Fountain” to the “The New Birth.” (These are Jung’s labels; the Rosarium sometimes provides different figure headings, which I will note below.) The eleventh woodcut, which appears in the Rosarium under the title “Fermentation,” is displaced in Jung’s text, being inserted after the fifth woodcut (labelled in Jung’s text “The Conjunction,” and “Conception, or Putrefaction” in the Rosarium). Jung treats it simply as a visual variant of the fifth woodcut, allotting it no independent analysis.
Jung interprets the first woodcut, “The Mercurial Fountain,” as a general representation of the materials and numerology of the alchemical work. The second woodcut, “King and Queen,” stands for the “supreme union of hostile opposites, [which] was not shown in our first picture ...”.[29] Through a lengthy analysis of the stances of the King and Queen (each touching the other’s left hand, and holding a flower in the right), Jung brings them into relation with his understanding of the structural nature of incest and of the relation between a man and his anima (soror mystica, “mystical sister”): “Marriage with the anima is the psychological equivalent of absolute identity between conscious and unconscious,”[30] a complete regression into non-differentiation. Thus, in order to attain this marriage without such a disastrous regression, the “adept” (analysand) must project his anima onto a substitutive or transferential object. This, for Jung, is the primordial form of the more general substitution of exogamous marriage partners for incestuous partners.
In the third woodcut, “The Naked Truth,” the King and Queen have shed their vestments. Jung interprets this as emblematic of the beginning of the nigredo, or shadow work:
Psychologically we can say that the situation has thrown off the conventional husk and developed into a stark encounter with reality, with no false veils or adornments of any kind. Man stands forth as he really is and shows what was hidden under the mask of conventional adaptation: the shadow. This is now raised to consciousness and integrated with the ego, which means a move in the direction of wholeness.[31]
The fourth woodcut, “Immersion in the Bath,” is identified with the operation of solution, that is, dissolution and return to basic materials, which follows upon the confrontation of the nigredo.
The fifth woodcut, “The Conjunction” (together with the eleventh woodcut used as a visual variant only), depicts the King and Queen in nude coital embrace. For Jung, naturally, the “main emphasis falls on the unio mystica, as is shown quite clearly by the presence of the uniting symbol in the earlier pictures. ... For at this juncture the meaning of the symbol is fulfilled: the partners have themselves become symbolic.”[32]
The sixth woodcut, “Death” (labelled “Conception, or Putrefaction” in the Rosarium) depicts a hermaphroditic figure lying dead:
The situation described in our picture is a kind of Ash Wednesday. The reckoning is presented, and a dark abyss yawns. Death means the total extinction of consciousness and the complete stagnation of psychic life, so far as this is capable of consciousness. ... Thus the encounter with anima and animus means conflict and brings us up against the hard dilemma in which nature herself has placed us. Whichever course one takes, nature will be mortified and must suffer, even to the death; for the merely natural man must die in part during his own lifetime.[33]
The seventh woodcut, “The Ascent of the Soul” (labelled “Extraction of the soul, or impregnation” in the Rosarium) depicts a homunculus-like figure rising from the dead hermaphrodite in a cloud. This is the extreme of the nigredo: “This picture corresponds psychologically to a dark state of disorientation. The decomposition of the elements indicates dissociation and the collapse of the existing ego-consciousness. It is closely analogous to the schizophrenic state, ... i.e., when the patient becomes aware of the collective unconscious and the psychic non-ego.”[34]
The eighth woodcut, “Purification” (in the Rosarium, “Ablution, or cleansing”) depicts rain falling from the cloud onto the hermaphrodite body, and signals the arrival of the albedo:
The mundificatio (purification) means, as we have seen, the removal of the superfluities that always cling to merely natural products, and especially to the symbolic unconscious contents which the alchemist found projected onto matter. This is what the laboratory worker [in the Rosarium] called the extractio animae [extraction of the soul], and what in the psychological field we would call the working through of the idea contained in the dream.[35]
The ninth woodcut, “The Return of the Soul” (in the Rosarium, “Jubilation, or birth, or sublimation of the soul”) depicts the homunculus figure descending from the cloud back into the body, representing the final phase of the albedo phase, in which the body’s purification is tested:
The process of differentiating the ego from the unconscious, then, has its equivalent in the mundificatio, and, just as this is the necessary condition for the return of the soul to the body, so the body is necessary if the unconscious is not to have destructive effects on the ego-consciousness, for it is the body that gives bounds to the personality. The unconscious can be integrated only if the ego holds its ground.”[36]
Finally, the tenth woodcut, “The New Birth” (unlabeled in the Rosarium), in which the hermaphrodite King-Queen arises adorned with various emblems, is taken to be symbolic of the accomplishment of the magnum opus, the coniunctio oppositorum (union of opposites), the creation of the philosophers’ stone, etc. Psychologically, Jung takes it as equivalent with his concept of individuation, which is likewise the product of the integration of the psychic opposites by mediation of the archetypes.
Reading the Rosarium: Beyond Jung
Post-Jungians have generally remained within Jung’s interpretive framework, reducing the symbols of the Rosarium and its woodcuts to concepts of analytical psychology. One notable exception is James Hillman, who has opposed not only Jung’s particular interpretations but his engagement in conceptual interpretation of alchemical material per se:
Ever since Jung opened the door to alchemy for psychologists, we have tended to go through it in only one direction: We have directed thinking to its fantasy thinking, translating its images into our concepts. White Queen and Red King have become feminine and masculine principles; their incestuous sexual intercourse has become the union of opposites, .... You see what happens: sensate image disappears into concept, precision into generality. Even the peculiar images of the Rosarium Philosophorum ... which call for perplexed contemplation are asked instead to serve as a handbook for a general psychology of transference.[37]
One must wonder whether Hillman’s call to replace the “handbook” mentality of orthodox Jungians with a commitment to “perplexed contemplation” of images really resolves the issue of reductive reading. Is it any better to limit our understanding of the Rosarium philosophorum, a text with a rich internal structure and complex relation to its society and its tradition, to its visual resemblances alone, than it is to reduce it to a rigid conceptual framework? Wolfgang Giegerich, among others, has argued against this point of hypocrisy in Hillman’s approach:
With systematic determination imaginal psychology [i.e., Hillman] shuns taking a philosophical (ontological, metaphysical) stand to back up its use of the ancient idea of “likeness.” Its “resemblances” are not grounded in any ontological continuity between different realms of being. But this does not stop imaginal psychology from making use of this theory. It enjoys the benefits this theory provides, namely the metaphysical (archetypal) aura and the feeling-tone of dignity and provenness adhering to this old philosophical concept, without subscribing to the metaphysics which alone was once able to authorize it. Thus one might say that imaginal psychology’s use of this theory is playful, noncommittal, “post-modern,” a “language game,” whose grounding is wanting.[38]
Curiously, although Giegerich hews to an ascetic logicism over against Hillman’s imaginal thinking, he too arrives at the identical conclusion that the alchemists, rather than being interpreted in a way that could yield any positive lessons for us, must be left to perplex:
The alchemists used a via negativa to describe the otherness of the reality they were talking about ... e.g., by saying, “not the ordinary gold, not the ordinary wine, the not-stone stone ..., etc. The phrase about the philosophers’ stone is particularly revealing. It flatly denies that it is a stone ... and yet retains the positive expression stone .... The alchemists’ insight that it is not a stone does not lead to a replacement of the word “stone” (the “medium”) by some other expression. They were not able to state positively what “the message” actually is. All they knew was that it was something different from what the “medium” implied.[39]
Stanton Marlan has quipped that one might view “Hillman’s contribution as an anima psychology and Giegerich’s as an animus one”[40]—in need, therefore, of an alchemical wedding. Neither the abstractly positive explanation nor the abstractly negative, nor both side by side, contain any concrete interpretation of the alchemical corpus. Instead, they amount to refusals to engage the challenge. Might one not hold fast to the positive content of the alchemical texts, as Hillman does, yet without sacrificing a dialectical awareness of the alchemists’ use of paradox to transcend their own immediate meanings, as Giegerich urges?
Let us attempt, for the remainder of this introduction, to do just such a reading. If we succeed, then we will necessarily cover the positive content of the Rosarium, yet while remaining constantly attentive to the paradoxes inherent in the positive content, which negates the latter and drives us onward.
We are met, at the very beginning of the Rosarium, with a contradiction, probably its fundamental contradiction: invitation on the one hand, and exclusion on the other. The philosophers’ stone belongs to the rich as much as the poor—and yet it belongs only to the rich, and is even harmful to the poor. It is a treasure that all should aspire to—but, in fact, only the wise should seek it, and the ignorant should be left empty-handed. The art is revealed to us plainly and openly—but only fools take it at its plain sense. The way into the art, it is said, is universal—but at the same time it is particular.[41]
Let us involve another paradox in order to help explain the first; for, as is said in the Rosarium, like comes only from like. The stone is said to be the end of the work, and yet it is also the beginning, for there is nothing in it that was not in it from the beginning. Thus, the motion of its transmutation is in fact a sort of stasis, in which the stone always becomes the stone. And yet the stone cannot be left alone simply to be the stone. Always and again it must become the stone, which in some way it already is, through the manifold operations of calcination, sublimation, pulverization, and so on.
The alchemists, it seems, had grasped the category of becoming as the unity of being and non-being. We must distinguish this from the merely negative, abstract contradiction of a riddle like, “this is a stone but not a stone.” What they say is rather, “This stone becomes,” for what becomes is just what is altered (and so is not what it was) yet while remaining itself (and so is what it was). Grasped in this way, the paradox ceases to be much of a paradox, and what might have seemed like a miraculous quality of the stone to move while standing still turns out to be quite ordinary. For this is the activity of everything that becomes. A blade of grass growing taller, or a ball flying through the air, is at every moment made into what it was not, yet while remaining what it was—only we do not ordinarily describe this process so precisely.
We are tempted at many points in the Rosarium by the statement that the philosophical stone (tincture, water, elixir, etc.) belongs to the few while the common one belongs to the many. This might be taken to mean that the wisdom, needed to number among the few, is knowledge of the operations which turn the common into the philosophical. Here we are in the realm of mystery religion. But we must not forget the other, negating statement woven through the first: The philosophical has nothing in it except the common, natural substance of its origin. It is a like begotten from like, and all its operations are of the genus of reproduction. If we are too strongly attached to our first, mystic impulse, we may become “like desperate men,” everywhere looking and nowhere finding the key that will transform us and set us apart yet while altering us in no way. In fact, however, what we have just learned is that there is no infinity of contradiction between altering and remaining the same; they are not mutually annihilating opposites, but moments of the motion of becoming. We made this motion just now for ourselves, when we realized that what seemed to be an utterly particular description of a miraculous stone turned out to be quite ordinary and universal. And by doing so, we did in fact discover something that sets us apart from others, for we have grasped something fundamental about nature itself, yet while remaining free from the endless sojourn of a vulgar mysticism.
As for the first paradox, it has turned out that the universal invitation and the particular exclusion could indeed hold true at once, although not in the senses we originally had in mind. What appeared to be the particularity of the miraculous stone turned out to be universal, because there is nothing that does not become, that is not made into itself by the operation of nature. Meanwhile, it is our recognition of this universal which turns out to be particular, for it goes beyond the plain contradiction of the paradox that is accessible to everyone and discovers, as a secret, its inner unity as positive knowledge. And this is the resolution of another one of the paradoxes, for it is true both that the point is plain and can be seen by anyone who looks at a blade of grass, and also that one must fail to recognize it as plain unless one sees past its plainness. Finally, we can note that the text itself has undergone the sort of becoming which it enacted for us. It has been altered so that it contains a new concept, and yet, of course, it contains nothing more than it ever did.
Now, what does it matter if it is true that everything becomes, in the sense of being and not being? If we stopped here, we would be hard pressed to say why this idea should interest us, or of what use it will be in the world. But we would be able to stop here only if we ignored what still remains unresolved in the concept of becoming itself. Namely—let us return to the example of the ball flying through the air—it may be that the ball is what it was and is not what it was, but it is continuous in a different sense than it is discontinuous. The ball is not what it was in the sense that its location has changed; it is no longer “that ball there.” The ball is what it was in that it is the same ball; it is “the ball in the air.” In other words, just as becoming was more than a mere negative contradiction, it is also more than a merely abstract positive unity. It is also the shedding of immediacy, through which we perceive the continuous, persisting substance that survives its transformations.
It turns out that the text of the Rosarium follows this logical movement in its own development. I am referring now to its treatment of the substances (res) and material (materia) of the work. Note, first, that the building blocks of alchemy, the transformations of which are called operations, are always organized into genera of species which imply each other. If there is fire, it will not be long before we encounter the other elements: earth, air, water, and sometimes quintessence, the fifth element. Paracelsus calls sulphur, mercury, and salt the “three primes,” and these are also clearly related to each other, just as are the metaphysical elements of spirit, soul, and body. Many of these also belong to more than one genus. Water, for example, is an element, but it is also a liquid that is related and contrasted to other liquids, like oil and mercury. Salt is both a species of the genus of primes and a genus in its own right; several types of salt are distinguished in the Rosarium, including sea salt, ammonium salt, rock salt, alum, and soap.
Now we enter into the next set of paradoxes. Let us take salt as an example. Salt, we are told at many points in the Rosarium, is the stone itself, and the stone is salt. Simple enough, but immediately we face statements that seem to contradict and confound what we were just told. We are already prepared to deal with one of these paradoxes, namely the assertion that the salt which is identified with the stone is not common salt but philosophical salt. Salt is salt, and insofar as salt is at the same time not salt, it is because the two moments of salt are linked by the relation of becoming. But what, we may now ask more precisely, is the immediate part of salt that is altered and destroyed in becoming, and what is the part of it that endures as the medium of transmutation? Here the Rosarium has an answer for us: what endures is the nature (natura) or substance (substantia) of salt—that is, its saltiness. As we learn, saltiness, the nature of salt, means something more than the taste of sodium chloride, for that is a property only of one particular species of the genus of salts, and it would not apply to soap, for example. Rather, we learn that the nature of salt is defined generally by two physical properties: salts dissolve easily in water, and they require a much stronger fire to melt than most other substances. (A modern student of physical chemistry would still recognize these properties as marks of a salt, i.e., of an ionic compound). Thus, it is said at one point, the stone is called salt because it melts and dissolves—because it has acquired the nature of salt, has become salty. And so the stone, which is salt, may, like salt, be of many appearances, while it yet retains the underlying nature of salt. Through the assays of water and fire, a transformation is effected through which the immediate appearance of the salt is destroyed, while its saltiness remains the same and can be grasped as such.
All we have just now said is more or less consonant with the empirical method that is familiar to us from modern chemistry. We could, if we wished to, stop here, and congratulate the alchemists for having anticipated in their age the discovery of the ionic bond and its properties, and having recognized the latter as the defining essence of salts. But if we continue with the Rosarium, then we are met with further contradictions in our notions. For we are told that salt is not salt, but rather gold, which certainly is not soluble in water. Or salt is yeast, which of course cannot melt, or it is quicksilver or copper, or water or fire, or indeed salt is a dragon or a king. And these are truly contradictions. It is never said in the Rosarium that the stone is the sum of these different substances, like a whole is a sum of parts, so that each contributes a distinct quality without contradicting the others. Rather, it is said that the stone is salt, and the stone is gold—but salt is not of the nature of gold, nor gold of the nature of salt. The inference must be that the stone is not of its own nature.
We find ourselves in a similar place as we began with in the first paradox. The stone is said to be universal, now in the sense that it is identified with the whole world of substances. And yet it is particular, for it is identified with each substance to the exclusion of the others, just as salt, if it has the nature of salt, excludes the nature of gold. Again a mystic path spreads itself temptingly before us, which would consist of the endless and fruitless search for some miraculous, hardly comprehensible substance which has both every nature and also only its own nature.
Now, we had been characterizing the nature or substance of salt thus far in terms of a set of empirical marks, namely solubility in water and high melting point. Thus, the genus “salt” means nothing more than the set of all things which are soluble in water and have a high melting point, and the stone is salt in the sense that it is a salt, a member of the set of salts. We were clearly on the right track with this formulation, which led us to another of the Rosarium’s central theses, but the resulting contradictory inference signals that the formulation still needs to be reframed. The stone, which is identified with every genus, means that each genus must also be identified with all the others, for two things that are equal to a third are also equal to each other. Thus, salt, by virtue of being salt, is not gold; but, at the same time, salt must be gold, for both salt and gold are the stone. The stone, then, if it is to survive this logical development, must be a medium in which all the particular substances are mediated into one universal—the stone—while at the same time their particular identities are preserved as mutually distinct.
Reframed in this way, it is possible to see that such a medium is not as miraculous as it seemed before, and that in fact, like becoming, it is even mundane. This kind of medium is called “force” (vis) by the physicists as well as the alchemists of the Rosarium, although the latter more often refer to it as operation (operatio). What do we mean when we speak of a force of nature? Why, for example, do we posit the existence of a force of gravity, although gravity is not something that can be seen or touched? We do so because we observe that all objects seem to move toward each other, as if impelled to do so. This is a different sort of property than, say, the saltiness of salts, precisely because it seems to apply universally to massive objects regardless of their other properties. We have no need for a force of saltiness; it is enough to say that all salts dissolve, and so what is saltlike is what dissolves. But salts are subject to gravity just as much as gold, or quicksilver, or a king are subject to gravity. Gravity is not the nature of salt alone, or of gold alone. Neither is it the sum of the natures of salt, gold, and all the other substances. Nor do these relate to gravity as parts to a whole. Rather, it is the nature of nature itself, whose expression in nature is called a law of nature. Salt, then, is indeed equivalent to gold, insofar as it is a natural object that is subject to the law of nature. As an expression of the force of gravity, its motion will be predictable according to exactly the same law as gold. Yet, for all that, salt is not gold, for salt is salty and not of the nature of gold. In force, these two moments are united as a positive unity. The natural objects retain their individual and mutually excluding substances, their natures. Yet, insofar as they are natures, they are subject to the unity of the law of nature, and they are one nature even in the multiplicity of their natures. And the medium of this unity is the force, and is the stone.
Much like we saw with becoming, this new unity is in fact observed everywhere by everybody. It is not at all remarkable for us to see that a drop of water falls just like a pebble does, and they are no less watery and pebbly for it—although we must not forget that the discovery of this fact was indeed a spectacular demonstration not too long before the time of the Rosarium, in Galileo’s day. After all, it could not have been obvious, to those who did not have the benefit of being educated with its proofs, that there should be any reason for two substances of different natures to be constrained by an identical law of nature. To demand such a law would have been precisely to demand the paradoxical stone of which we just spoke, in which natures are identical at the same time as they are distinct. And yet they are, and such a stone does exist.
In fact, many such stones exist. Gravity is not the only law of nature. We may identify the gravitational law in particular as a quantitative one: Massive objects, of whatever substance they may be, are unified according to the law of universal gravitation, in which objects participate insofar as they are of a given quantity of mass and at given distances from each other. Here again, as in the case of becoming, there turns out to be an unresolved discrepancy. We may quite richly describe how salt and gold differ in their qualitative natures, but our account of their unity in nature is rather threadbare, occurring on only one quantitative axis. We must therefore include in our consideration the multiplicity of the forces of nature and the laws of their expressions. Thus we arrive at our first account of the meaning of the many operations described in the Rosarium. Sublimation, for example, is only one operation, in which substances are sifted and moved according to the order of their subtlety and are thus made into one nature, while at the same time they retain their individual natures. To this we must add calcination, in which the one nature is the nature of combustibility; solution, which is the force of solubility; putrefaction, the force of decay, and so on. Subject two substances to any one of these operations, and they will be the same insofar as they becomes subject to the same natural law of transformation.
Yet—and this is the next paradox—we are told that each of these operations is itself the same as the others. Everywhere we read that sublimation is also mortification, calcination also solution, fermentation also fixation, tincturing also extraction, and so on. If we take these all to be true, then every operation must be every other operation, and the stone must be every operation. How can this be, since each expresses a distinct and unique identity of the different substances?
Our deduction of the multiplicity of the natural forces must lead us to confront another complication that has thus far crept along silently: Each of these particular forces does not cover the whole of nature. Just as gravity serves as a medium only for massive objects, so does solution unify in solubility only what is soluble, and so on. Thus, each operation is irreducibly distinct to the others, and their particularity cannot be given up, or else we would miss some part of the world of substances, and the alchemical art would be incomplete, the stone unfinished. And yet we are told that the operations are all one.
The insight is given to us, as ever, in one of the favorite and most frequently repeated themes of the Rosarium: the preparation. The alchemists caution that the materials cannot be dissolved—unified in their particularity through the force of solubility, for example—unless they be prepared for the solution, unless they are made soluble. Here, there seems to be a sort of tautology. The force of solution requires that the material of its expression, that upon which it acts, be already soluble. But what is soluble is in its nature already acted upon by the force of solution, just as everything that is massive is already acted upon by gravity, for that is just what “massive” means. The same applies to every other operation. At this point, it is no longer very important which operation we are talking about. For suppose that we were partisans of the operation of calcination rather than of solution, and we wished to make calcination the universal force. Then every substance that is not already combustible would need to be prepared, to be endowed with the nature of combustibility, that is, already subject to the force of calcination through which it is unified with the whole universe. Thus, the problem is exactly equivalent no matter which operation we talk about. Its domain of expression lacks that which is not of its nature, and the latter must be prepared to receive its nature, and its preparation is the very receiving of its nature. In this sense, the operations are one.
Or rather they are two. For just as the multiplicity of operations has collapsed into the one operation, the one operation has revealed itself to have two parts. Unlike the quantities with which we were previously working, like mass and distance in the law of universal gravitation, these two parts are mutually related in their very nature; they cannot even be expressed or conceived without reference to the other. The first is the force that acts upon matter to make it amenable to its nature, and yet its action is senseless and null unless the matter is already of its own nature. And the second is the matter which is acted upon in its nature, and its nature is revealed and made actual in that the force that is of its nature is already acting upon it. The language of desire, of the lover and the beloved, is almost unavoidable here. We hear in the Rosarium of countless instantiations of it. The moist longs for the dry, the dry for the moist; the solution for the calcination, the calcination for the solution; the king for the queen, the queen for the king. All of these are one operation, the operation of eros, through which all things are prepared to receive the one nature, and their preparation is their having received it. The operation of conjunction, coupling, or coitus well deserves the special place it is given in the Rosarium. It is the operation above all operations, and it is all operations.
It is thus exactly the same thing to develop the operation into a more sublime, capacious form, and to develop the material so that it is receptive to greater operations. In each of these, the longing of the one for the other is identical with the longing of the other for the one, and it is the longing of nature for its totality, for the universe of one nature, in which there is only one operation that is the operation of nature itself, through which all of nature is unified in its difference. And the whole development of nature through the elements and substances and operations is to the point of this longing, and the longing is their nature. Aleister Crowley has summarized this same stationary motion in Magick in Theory and Practice:
The series of transformations has not affected his identity; but it has explained him to himself. Similarly, Copper is still Copper after Cu + O = CuO: + H2SO4 = CuS4O(H2O): + K2S = CuS(K2SO4): + blowpipe and reducing agent = Cu(S).
It is the same copper, but we have learnt some of its properties. We observe especially that it is indestructible, inviolably itself throughout all its adventures, and in all its disguises. We see moreover that it can only make use of its powers, fulfill the possibilities of its nature, and satisfy its equations, by thus combining with its counterparts. Its existence as a separate substance is evidence of its subjection to stress; and this is felt as the ache of an incomprehensible yearning until it realises that every experience is a relief, an expression of itself; and that it cannot be injured by aught that may befall it.[42]
Yet nothing comes to us out of nature itself to resolve this question, this longing. All of nature has been unified in the stone, the self-identity of nature with nature, but it is a stone of desire, a stone of lack, whose one nature is the nature of eros, which is a nature that does not exist without a partner. And so, after the long development of the stone in the operations of nature, it must turn to seek a partner outside of nature: the art.
In fact, the art has been present all along in our discussion. Thus far, we have been acting like Socrates in the Meno, showing through our ordered inquiry that the alchemists, like Meno’s slave, knew more than they said they knew, that they knew more than they knew they knew. It is in fact true that the Rosarium contains everything that is needed to derive everything we have derived, just as a slave untrained in geometry can be guided to produce a geometrical proof without imposing new facts upon him. And yet it is impossible that Meno’s slave could have produced the proof of his own accord, just as it is hardly imaginable that the alchemists of the Rosarium could have traced out the logic of their own thinking without the benefit of much later philosophical developments.
How is it that we have come to knowledge about the absolute unity of nature, its absolute closure, its fulfillment of its own lack? Every action in nature is already a realization of purpose in the non-purposive, a proof of the unity of subject and object. The alchemists, therefore, rightly did not concern themselves supplying a proof of the unity as such. Instead, they began with what is much more difficult, supplying us with a remarkable account of the actual, concrete forms this unity may take: the unity of universality, the unity of becoming, the unity of the operation, the unity of desire, the unity of nature, and, finally, the unity of the art.
This latter they did not fully accomplish, precisely because their account remained fragmented and thus inadequate to the unity of nature. It was only 250 years later that Hegel, through the study of Jakob Böhme, Schelling, and other such alchemically influenced thinkers, developed the logical tools necessary to actualize what had been implicit in the sources.
Note on the Translation
This translation is based on Joachim Telle’s facsimile[43] of the 1550 print of Rosarium philosophorum. Superscripted page numbers refer to the pagination of Telle’s edition. There are marginal notes present in the print edition, which serve as subheadings or brief summaries of the textual content; they are not reproduced in this web edition.
Alterations to sentence and paragraph structure were necessary in order to render the text legible. These were largely superficial in the first half of the text, but much more extensive in the second half, where it seems that a second printer took over the task from the first. This second printer is identifiable by a distinct use of abbreviations, and also, unfortunately, a constant tendency to punctuate the text in a syntactically impossible way, or not to punctuate it at all. (One wonders whether Jung’s lack of penetration into the second half of the Rosarium’s picture series was due as much to this linguistic difficulty as any theoretical failing.)
For consistency, I have always rendered the names of planets, including Mercury, with capital letters, while I have rendered all other names of alchemical substances in lowercase.
“Substance” translates res and “material” translates materia unless otherwise indicated in square brackets. “Quicksilver” translates argentum vivum, while “Mercury” translates mercurius.
[1] “... erwartungsgemäß verliert das «Rosarium philosophorum» bei einer Umschau im ungelichteten Dickicht alchemischer Fachschriften allen Glanz eines litarischen Solitärs.” Joachim Telle, ed., Rosarium Philosophorum: Ein Alchemisches Florilegium Des Spätmittelalters, vol. 2, trans. Lutz Claren and Joachim Huber (VCH Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1992), 172.
[2] “... hanc quidem summam vocitamus Rosarium, eo quod ex philosophorum libris tanquam rosas à spinis evulsimus tibi ipsum, in quo quidem claro sermone rectoque ordine, ac de verbo ad verbum, cum omnibus suis causis sufficientis succinctum trademus, quicquid ex illorum libris reperimus ad operis hujus complementum.” John Dastin, “Rosarium Philosophorum,” in Theatrum Chemicum, vol. 3 (Strasbourg, 1659), cited in Telle, 1992, 172.
[3] “Rosarium philosophorum: Secunda pars alchimiae de lapide philosophico vero modo praeparando, continens exactam eius scientiae progressae. Cum figuris rei perfectionem ostendentibus.”
[4] Telle, Rosarium Philosophorum: Ein Alchemisches Florilegium Des Spätmittelalters, 2:180.
[5] Rudolf Gamper and Thomas Hofmeier, Alchemische Vereinigung: Das Rosarium Philosophorum und sein Besitzer Bartlome Schobinger (Chronos Verlag, 2014).
[6] Telle, Rosarium Philosophorum: Ein Alchemisches Florilegium Des Spätmittelalters, 2:170.
[7] Telle, Rosarium Philosophorum: Ein Alchemisches Florilegium Des Spätmittelalters, 2:180ff.
[8] Telle, Rosarium Philosophorum: Ein Alchemisches Florilegium Des Spätmittelalters, 2:183.
[9] Telle, Rosarium Philosophorum: Ein Alchemisches Florilegium Des Spätmittelalters, 2:167ff.
[10] Lynn Thorndike, “Alchemy During the First Half of the Sixteenth Century,” Ambix 2, no. 1 (1938): 26–38, https://doi.org/10.1179/amb.1938.2.1.26.
[11] Various manuscripts are extant. See, e.g., Leiden University Library, “Rosarium Philosophorum Sive Donum Dei,” in Vossianus Chymicus Q. 17, vol. 20 (1588).
[12] Telle, Rosarium Philosophorum: Ein Alchemisches Florilegium Des Spätmittelalters, 2:245–46.
[13] Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornell University Press, 2001), 64–69.
[14] “... das verständlichste Buch für einen Sucher.” Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, “Anhang Zu Der Theoria Electricitatis, von Dem Einfluß Derselben in Die Chemie Und Alchemie,” in Procopius Divisch: Theorie von Der Meterologischen Electricité (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1768), 128, cited in Telle, 200.
[15] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference.”
[16] Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12.
[17] C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Mysterium Coniunctionis, 2nd ed., ed. William McGuire, vol. 14, ed. Herbert Read et al., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton University Press, 1966), xxii.
[18] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, revised edition, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (Vintage Books, 1989), 205.
[19] C. G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, trans. John Peck (WW Norton, 2012).
[20] C. G. Jung, “Instinct and the Unconscious,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd ed., ed. William McGuire, vol. 8, ed. Herbert Read et al., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton University Press, 1981).
[21] C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Psychological Types, 2nd ed., ed. William McGuire, vol. 6, ed. Herbert Read et al., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton University Press, 1976).
[22] C. G. Jung, “On Psychical Energy,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd ed., ed. William McGuire, vol. 8, ed. Herbert Read et al., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton University Press, 1981).
[23] C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Religion,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2nd ed., ed. William McGuire, vol. 11, ed. Herbert Read et al., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton University Press, 1958).
[24] Jung, “Psychology and Religion,” 31n.
[25] Cf. C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 2nd ed., ed. William McGuire, vol. 9ii, ed. Herbert Read et al., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton University Press, 1958), 8–35.
[26] Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Mysterium Coniunctionis, vol. 14, passim. A fourth alchemical phase, the citrinitas or citrinatio (“yellow”), has been pointed out by several post-Jungian authors, notably James Hillman, to have been mostly omitted by Jung.
[27] Jacques Lacan, Desire and Its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Polity, 2019), seminar of April 8, 1959.
[28] Moreover, the woodcuts in “Psychology of the Transference” are taken from the 1550 print of the Rosarium, while the text belongs to version printed as the second volume of the Artis auriferae in 1593. The textual variance between these two editions is minor and will not concern us here.
[29] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 211.
[30] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 220.
[31] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 239.
[32] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 252.
[33] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 260, 262.
[34] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 267.
[35] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 279–80.
[36] Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 294.
[37] James Hillman, “The Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Language: A Heated Introduction,” in Alchemical Psychology, 3rd ed., Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman, ed. Klaus Ottman, vol. 5 (Spring Publications, 2021), 17.
[38] Wolfgang Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology (Peter Lang GmbH, 2020), 186.
[39] Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology, 111.
[40] Stanton Marlan, C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination: Passages into the Mysteries of Psyche and Soul (Routledge, 2021), 185.
[41] Jung notes dryly at one point that the alchemists “were [either] so hopelessly muddled that they did not notice these flat contradictions, or ... their paradoxes were sublimely deliberate.” Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” 287.
[42] Aleister Crowley, Magick in theory and practice (Lecram Press, 1929), 37.
[43] Joachim Telle, ed., Rosarium Philosophorum: Ein Alchemisches Florilegium Des Spätmittelalters, vol. 1, trans. Lutz Claren and Joachim Huber (VCH Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1992).