On Alchemy

This book really wasn’t for me. It’s best approached by readers already grounded in Jung, because it is far more about Jung than about alchemy — the alchemical symbolism is a jumping-off point for a deeper dive into his analytical psychology.

I came to it through Liz Greene’s lecture on alchemy in Dynamics of the Unconscious, where she connects alchemy with astrology and Jung’s thought. That coverage wasn’t as comprehensive as I’d hoped, but she speaks highly of Marie-Louise von Franz’s book, so I thought I’d try it. I’d also read Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy, which takes alchemy quite differently — as people experimenting with metallurgy and trying to make sense of the world. On his reading the alchemists used esoteric symbolism but were really talking about metals, and he’s sharply critical of anyone who frames alchemy as a way of understanding the soul. I think Principe is misguided: Hermetic thought genuinely demands a spiritual component — “as above, so below,” and we are the below.

So I expected to be sympathetic to von Franz. Unfortunately I found it hard. I try to trust experts on subjects I know little about, like alchemy, but she gets basic facts of Islamic history wrong. She frames Shiʿism, for instance, as the mystical “sect” of Islam. That isn’t true. Shiʿites are certainly receptive to mysticism, perhaps at times more than Sunnis, but the characterization is wrong — and there’s little mention of Sufism as the esoteric tradition, with all the attention landing on Shiʿism instead. I am sympathetic to the impulse, I really am, but that simply isn’t what Shiʿism is. Her discussion of the imam compounds it: she says somewhere that each generation has an imam to guide the spiritual community. That may have been so at one point, but it no longer is — under Twelver Shiʿism the twelfth imam went into “occultation,” still in the world and guiding believers, but the same person he was a thousand years ago.

All of this is a digression; it isn’t actually important to the text. But it sounded an alarm for me that von Franz may not know what she’s talking about. She has a solid command of Jungian theory and practice, but it’s being projected — is that word too on the nose? — onto historical traditions she has little empirical grasp of.

Even so, I learned something. I was especially taken with her discussion of Thomas Aquinas in the final third, who she argues was flooded by the unconscious and underwent mystical experiences. That’s my reading, at least. It doesn’t seem he went “crazy” in any sense; it seems he tapped into something real, and that’s fascinating.