The Philosophers Stone (Spiritual Approach)
by Craig Chalquist
Legend had it that this Stone could transmute ordinary metals like lead and brass into gold; that it obliterated sickness and restored health; that it bestowed on the artifex ("artificer": the alchemical adept) long life and physical regeneration; that it provided a self-replenishing well of secret knowledge. Men and women dedicated their lives and sometimes lost them in their mystico-scientific endeavor to unearth Mercurius, the alchemical Spirit in the Stone, and thereby tap what Marie-Louise von Franz has called divine power in matter.
There are wannabes and charlatans in every field. Some alchemists sought gold in order to be wealthy. But others had an amusing term for these money-chasers: "puffers," so named to caricature them as greedy kneelers blowing hard on the futile fires heating their simmering retorts.
The true alchemists believed in something else. They believed that all things evolve. And not only things classified as living. The alchemist recognized three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable, and animal. Corresponding to the sacred compounds Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury, each kingdom slowly metamorphosed into the next, base metals like iron growing eventually into gold, all minerals gradually becoming plants, plants animals.
To accelerate this evolution: this the alchemist saw as his most holy, scientific responsibility. Although these researcher-contemplatives never found literal gold or immortality (the usual disappointment at rainbow's end for those who live out what should be lived in), they located something more precious than metallic wealth: an unintended glimpse, coded into their elaborate formulas, of the psyche's deepest patterns.
Nevertheless, for millennia the written works of the alchemists gathered dust in old libraries, the elaborate treatises scattered, discredited, and forgotten. Alchemy looked to the hyperrational eye of science like ersatz chemistry, a superstitious dabbling in physical impossibilities, just as mythology seemed a collection of dead explanations for natural processes.
To the jealous eye of religious orthodoxy, alchemy was heresy pure and simple, a kind of do-it-yourself Gnosticism. So the potent imagery dreamed by artifex and soror mystica ("mystical sister": female alchemist) in their laboratory-shrines shuffled sadly from history's spotlight, leaving behind a handful of obscure terms like opus, reflux, and hermetic seal. Until C. G. Jung.
You can't read much of alchemy, or of Jung, without learning that he saw in alchemy's rich, magical, medicated symbolism the outlines of individuation, the lifelong enrichment of consciousness and its actualities by contact with the unconscious and its potentialities. Jung found in alchemy the bridge between Gnosticism and psychology and the historical counterpart to his concept of the collective unconscious.
He discovered that the artifex, the alchemical researcher who preceded both chemist and psychologist, projected into matter's dark mystery the search for the Self (from the Hindu atman or spark of God), archetypal center and organizer of personality, symbolized by the trapped spirit Mercurius (or his windy forerunner Hermes, derived in turn from the Egyptian Thoth) and the Lapis Philosophorum, the Philosopher's Stone that could extend life, heal all sicknesses, and transform base metals into gold. And, for the true philosophers, not the base gold of the "puffers," but the essence of metals: "Our gold is not the ordinary gold." Nor was their wisdom the ordinary wisdom.
So over steaming retorts the meditative alchemist dreamed deep visions and wrote them down as chemical transformations. Although every artifex used his own methods in his own way, the opus alchymicum, the work to cook the Lapis, divides roughly into four basic procedures or regiminia: the nigredo (blackening), the albedo (whitening), the citrinitas (yellowing), and the rubedo (reddening).
Each stage begins with decay and ends with rebirth and coniunctio, the chemical synthesis of two substances that alters both - and a counterpart to the Jungian view of transference (therapist + client = something new) and to the psyche's transcendent function which unites the psychological opposites.
To apply this scheme: nigredo = shadow work, albedo = anima/animus work, citrinitas = Wise Old Man/Wise Woman work, rubedo = Self work. The Self archetype, symbolized by the Lapis, is the core.
During individuation each of these archetypes surrenders part of its energy to the probing ego and part to activating the next, deeper archetype. See M. Ester Harding's book Psychic Energy and while you're at it, Edward Edinger's The Anatomy of the Psyche and, if you really want a challenge, Jung's Psychology and Alchemy; all three were very helpful.
The Prima Materia
The reverent artifex began with the prima materia, the "first matter," the "orphan," the chaotic source substance, "found in filth," out of which all creation supposedly formed. And this material was what? No one knows. Probably not even the alchemists knew. But their descriptions of it match those of an unconscious content ready to enter awareness--a "point at issue," as M. Ester Harding put it. They intuited in fantasy what they couldn't locate chemically.
Because four elements - earth, air, fire, and water - composed the prima materia, purifying any metal amounted to changing the relative proportions of those elements until they matched those of silver, a noble substance, or gold, the noblest (and, in psychological symbolism, the most conscious or transformed). According to the sulphur-mercury theory, built on that of the four elements, purified sulphur mixed with purified mercury made gold, the perfect metal. But the "true imagination" of the reflective alchemist provided the key ingredient - and welded the psyche's activities to the sparks and gasses of the work in the laboratory. Metal and alchemist suffered purification together.
Into an egg-shaped retort, the unum vas, vas bene clausum ("well-sealed vessel"), or vas Hermeticum (also called the "uterus"), went the prima materia, there to cook on a low flame. This corresponds to holding the rising unconscious experience or set of experiences firmly in awareness and "heating" or "cooking" it with meditation (meditatio) and fantasy (or with Jung's active imagination). Containment also includes grasping the process with the help of concepts (theoria). Meditatio senses the material, theoria grasps it.
According to the legendary Maria Prophetissa, a Neoplatonist alchemist of the third century, the whole secret is in knowing the vessel. It must be thick so its boiling contents won't get away (projection, symptoms, psychosis). It must focus its heat on its center, aided by reflux condensers and the retort called the pelican, in which the distillate runs back into the belly.
Put psychologically: in the sturdy vessel of an ego purged of personal issues, the contained nonego self can undergo transformation. Properly heated, the prima materia split into its four constituting elements (divisio elementorum). As the Axiom of Maria tells us, "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." Concentrating on a surfacing experience separates the mutual contamination of its components into the categories imposed by consciousness: here/there, up/down, left/right, light/dark. The four elements also recall Jung's four orienting functions of the ego: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.
But fire and meditation soon bring about the first coniunctio oppositorum, or the reunification of prima materia split into its opposites: Sol (consciousness) with Luna (the unconscious, as personified by the anima), ego with id (body), male with female, sulphur and salt, spirit and nature, heaven and earth, Logos and Eros, son and mother. The increasing heat of awareness fuses the unconscious content, divided and differentiated by a conceptualizing consciousness, into a new, partly conscious substance. King and queen join incestuously (which can symbolize self-union) and thereby give birth to something new.
The Blackening
Now falls the nigredo (or tenebrositas--"darkness"; mortificacio; etc.) and death of the hermaphroditic son, the filius solis et lunae. The vessel becomes a tomb. The artifex's brain, like the alchemical sun, turns black. The inflated king who drank too much water dies; the king is dismembered; the lion's paws are cut off; the birds wings are clipped; the unconscious overshadows the presumptuous, controlling ego. Meanwhile the spirit and soul of the deceased homunculus speeds to heaven. Fleeing, Mercurius resists integration with consciousness and must be subdued with a special quality of the sturdy vessel: interpretive understanding.
Although the nigredo represents an encounter with the shadow, the dark side, containing all we won't acknowledge in ourselves, encountering the nonpersonal, ancestral layer common to us all, brings on its own nigredo, the alchemical "shadow of the sun"; and if the ego identifies with and therefore imprisons the experiences, insights, and powers surfacing from unconsciousness, its inflation triggers a deflating nigredo more punishing than any normal shadow encounter.
It's one thing to mess with the personal shadow but quite another to piss off the collective unconscious behind it, which responds with an ego-crushing invasion of archetypal symptoms and impulses. But even the gentlest ego suffers a kind of spiritual decimation, a bum's rush out of the oedipal Eden of unconsciousness, by the inward forces unleashed in this stage of the opus. It may not be accidental that the alchemist began the opus in the Fall.
The Whitening
In the albedo, the dead metallic body is incinerated and cooked and washed by falling "dew," or tears, and pulverized, again and again, through many layers, into a pure silver or white ash, a color that blends all colors (reconciles the various feeling-values). The albedo recalls silver, moon, bride, leaving a pure body yet soulless but refined of all remaining inflation and other personal issues and unneeded conceptualizations. This shining, spiritualized, incorruptible ego has now been separated from its unconscious, fleshly remnants, ready to receive the soul/spirit previously extracted by cooking and the albedo's circular distillations (circulatio).
The spiritualized/psychized homunculus returns to the body that draws it down. Mercurius descends in his heavenly form as the fire of the Holy Ghost and reanimates the body. Though made possible by the purified ego, this reanimation quickens outside consciousness. This is the second, "white" coniunctio, symbolized by a reborn rebis, or winged hermaphrodite, hatched from a lunar egg, just as contact with the anima/animus "hatches" a new personality. And the rebis takes flight.
The Yellowing
The Little Work ends when the artifex completes the two previous stages of the prima materia's transformation. Here, in the citrinitas, as the winged, silver hermaphrodite, fermenting, flies toward the sun (toward consciousness), opens the Great Work. The stone ferments by cleavage as its silver, prized by the artifex but sacrificed to the opus, changes to gold, pierced by sun and lightning. A silvery, purified "I" no longer identified with the Wise Old Man/Wise Woman looks back at the sparkling womb of the unconscious and knows there's no returning. In the third coniunctio, the hermaphrodite's body is again resurrected by its spirit and soul, but this time on the sun.
The Reddening
The multicolored iridescence of the cauda pavonis ("peacock's tail") signals the fourth stage, the dawnlike rubedo ("reddening"). Spring arrives, consciousness participates more in the stirring contents of the unconscious - and the green lion (symbol of Mercurius) eats the hermaphrodite, who divides into sun and moon in the lion's stomach and dies. This heralds the ultimate test and final loss: can the conscious self, having come so far and sacrificed so much, now give the completion of the opus entirely into the hands of its dark sister, the unconscious? Can "I" be a perfect vessel, passive but supremely alert, vulnerable, open, innocent, without preconceptions?
If so, the unwavering fire of this fourth and highest degree of heat hatches the divine child, the filius philosophorum: the reconciling Self-symbol, culmination of alchemy and of the Jungian goal of individuation. Per the Axiom of Maria, the prima materia's four elements evolve into Mercurius's three manifestations in the organic, inorganic, and spiritual words, then into Sol and Luna, then into the One, the Lapis, all the numbers adding up to ten (cf. the Jewish Tree of Life), the number of completion.
What's left of the artifex's ego now assists in - but does not control - two final operations: the multiplicatio and the proiectio, in which the Self-stone projects and multiplies itself by changing inner experiences into gold (= making them conscious). I suspect that only now does the artifex attain perfect inward stillness, his superior function quiescent, convinced beyond doubt of how the Self projects the limited conscious personality.
Beyond consciousness but reflected within it: the last coniunctio. The Stone transfigures itself into a clear, incorruptible, eternally living crystal shining with a ruby hue: the quinta essentia, the fifth derived from the four elements cooked in the vessel of consciousness, a vessel which, overwhelmed, regains contact with the four-sided Heavenly City, the higher Eden, a dialog Neumann calls the "ego-Self axis."
From the Stone flows its tincture (oil; aqua permanens; aqua nostra; etc.), its liquid form, which corresponds with the Jungian libido, or psychological energy, which explains why it also provides the solvent, fire, and passion that make the Stone. This energy also symbolizes the truth and wisdom, knowledge and spirit extracted from matter.
Other synonyms include mare nostrum (our sea) and vinum ardens (fiery wine). In fact, the Stone and Mercurius constitute the fire and the transforming substance and even the vessel. She/he is prima materia, Lapis, and everything in between. Behind all we do works the Self and its transforming, synthesizing spirit.
Symbolizing the Self, Mercurius is symbolized by the lion, metallic man, rejuvenated king, dragon, raven, black eagle, hermaphrodite, and self-fertilizing oroborous. She/he compensates the all-good and therefore incomplete Self symbol of Christ. Combining all conceivable opposites, Mercurius is trickster, transformer, and God's reflection in nature.
So out of the final refusion and the ego-passivity/listening accompanying it arises Mercurius, the Lapis Philosophorum, the living Philosopher's Stone, the medicina catholica and everlasting cibus (food), a piece of Self chiseled out of unconscious instinctuality, expressed through the inferior function and worked by psychization into a crystalline image of wholeness. An awareness purged of inflation and repression has freed spiritual Mercurius from imprisonment in raw, instinctual unconsciousness.
Multiplication and Projection
Here we have, then, a refined piece of the psyche. According to legend, this Lapis can project into ordinary metals, transforming them into gold. How should we interpret this psychologically?
We know the Self, a conscious-unconscious entity, can integrate - enfold in awareness - raw products of the psyche. When the shadow, for instance, enters awareness, its savagery evolves into passion. The ego changes the products of the unconscious and is in turn changed by them. Gold symbolizes these changed products. As said above, the alchemical idea of the Stone's proiectio (projection) points to the Stone's power to convert base metals (unconscious contents) into gold (conscious contents)...or into more Stones.
I dreamed once of a hero who arose from a coffin borne by four men, an alchemical image unknown to me at that time. Water (the aqua permanens; amniotic fluid) poured out as he rose to his feet. He and his followers asked me to find some prehistoric tools buried in the side of a hill, and when I did, he used the tools to cook some flesh (a synonym for the prima materia). I looked at it and thought, "That's the Philosopher's Stone." Then they ate it, the "everlasting food," grew to an enormous height, and looked about with luminous golden eyes. For helping him achieve immortality, the heroic being suggested that I sample the divine food.
This dream and my associations to its symbols suggest to me an odd piece of speculation: that the Self, far too vast to fit into awareness, uses the Lapis facet of itself to psychize the collective unconscious, a realm forever beyond the reach of the limited ego's culinary endeavors. Through the refined Stone the psycho-spiritual force of the archetypes of the collective unconscious is made real, concrete, clothed in symbolic imagery, fed by libido.
This means, I believe, that the transpersonal Self grinds out from the prima materia, in the vessel of ego consciousness, a chunk of itSelf, a psychological lens through which it transforms the latent, psychoid realm beyond the ego's reach and behind all possible symbols. Lapis-making (multiplicatio and proiectio) rather than gold-making. The ego's job is to assist with this, then step aside.