Cognitive Aesthetics

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2013, 58, 4–33
Cognitive aesthetics of alchemical imagery
Angela M. Connolly, Rome
Abstract: Jung’s contribution to the understanding of the relevance of psychology to

alchemy has become increasingly invalidated by the ahistorical nature of his approach,
just as his tendency to ignore the importance of cognitive aesthetics for an improved
comprehension of the functions of alchemical images has prevented Jungians from
further extending Jung’s insight of the importance of alchemy for psychology.
This paper explores the history of the development of alchemical illustrations in
Western Europe from the 14th to the 16th century, tracing the emergent processes over
time. It is only when we take into consideration the historical dimension and the aesthetics
of alchemical imagery that it becomes possible to demonstrate how the increasing use of
certain aesthetic techniques such as the disjunction and recombination of separate
metaphorical elements of previous illustrations, the use of compressive combinations
and the use of framing devices worked to gradually increase the cognitive function and
the symbolical power of the images.
If alchemy is still relevant to psychotherapy it is exactly because it helps us to under-
stand the importance of cognitive aesthetics in our approach to the images, metaphors
and narratives of our patients.
Key words: cognitive aesthetics and emergent development of alchemical images,

critique of Jung’s approach to alchemy, the historical dimension, psychological
function of alchemical images
The cognitive work of images as actively constructed and constructing ‘real’

concepts must once again take center stage in the now denuded cave of the
mind.
(Stafford 2007, p. 216)
Introduction
Part of the revolutionary nature of Jung’s thought lies in the importance he
attributes to imagination and in his insistence on the creative function of images
and on the power of images to change minds. If for Freud, as Paul Kugler notes,
psychic images are merely reproductive, ‘representations of either drives,
wishes, or historical events. . .. Jung took a different approach, opting instead
0021-8774/2013/5801/4 © 2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5922.2013.02015.x
Cognitive aesthetics of alchemical imagery 5
to view imaging as an autonomous activity of the psyche, capable of both

production and reproduction’ (2005, p. 14). As Kugler explains, ‘In the history
of Western thought, the psychic tendency to construct images has been por-
trayed primarily in two different forms: a) as a reproductive process portraying
some more primary reality and b) as a productive process which creates original
entities, images’ (ibid., p. 3). Even more important however is the emphasis
Jung placed on the visual image for as George Hogenson notes, ‘Even the casual
reader of Jung will be struck by his fascination with figural representations, the
work of art, the pictorial. . .for Jung the visual image is as important as language
is to Freud’ (2009, p. 333).
It was above all in alchemy that Jung found a historical foundation for his
theories about the role of the imagination and of the significance of visual
images for the psyche. Although Jung’s first contact with the univers imaginaire
of alchemy through his reading of Herbert Silberer’s 1917 Problems of
Mysticism and its Symbolism seems to have made little impression on him,
from 1928 onwards when Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of the Golden
Flower, Jung remained fascinated by alchemical images, dedicating a large part
of his subsequent studies and writings to this subject. Indeed many of his key
concepts such as the individuation process and the transcendent function along
with his methodological tools such as amplification and active imagination
were modified by his encounter with alchemy and with the way alchemists
worked with images.
As Colman says, Jung saw in alchemy ‘a symbolical imaginal world whose
aim was to promote psychological and spiritual development through the
contemplation, exploration and development of its very rich and elaborate
imagery’ (2007, p. 568).
Nevertheless, although Jung’s knowledge of alchemical texts was vast and
encyclopedic, there were serious problems in his approach to alchemical images
that have to some extent vitiated his theorizing around the significance of
images for the psyche. Historians of alchemy, such as Obrist (1982) and Robert
Halleux (1979), have put forward important critiques of Jung’s anti-historical
bias and his tendency, despite the enormous variations in alchemical imagery,
to see alchemy as something essentially static and unchanging, divorced from
the different cultural and historical contexts. The other objection to Jung’s
theorizing on alchemy is his tendency to ignore alchemy as a precursor to
chemistry and to interpret it only in terms of psychology and spiritual transfor-
mation. Newman and Principe (2002) have attacked Jung’s psychological
reductionism, suggesting that his theories about alchemy are ‘strikingly weak,
as they are based ultimately on Victorian occultist views with very little
reference to the historical reality of the subject’ (ibid., p. 37).
These criticisms can be linked essentially to two problems. The first is that
Jung, in his attempts to use alchemy to ground his theory of the archetypes
and the collective unconscious, always insisted that what changes is only the
content of the image; the form, he argued, can in the final analysis be reduced
6 Angela M. Connolly
to a limited number of uniform and eternal patterns, the archetypes. The second
problem which derives from the first is Jung’s tendency to ignore the role of
logical rational thought and of the sensuous, aesthetic element in the formation
of alchemical images. Although, as John Beebe says, Jung postulated ‘that these
processes exist in a compensatory relationship, regulating and supplementing
each other to form the transcendent function’ (Beebe 2010, p. 165), Jung
always tends to oppose ‘aesthetic formulation’ to ‘understanding’, insisting
that, ‘aesthetic formulation, when it predominates, leaves it at that and gives
up any idea of discovering a meaning’ (Jung 1916/1953, p. 87). The result is
that he fails to consider the role of aesthetics in the creation of alchemical
images and as Paul Bishop says with reference to alchemical symbols: ‘Placing
emphasis on the importance of intuition (Anschauung) Jung recognized the
aesthetic appeal of such symbols, although he was reluctant to go one step
further and regard this appeal in itself as central to their psychological function’
(2009, p. 87).
This critique can be equally applied to the work of classical Jungians such as
von Franz and Edinger. Although they have written important works which
have deepened our understanding of the psychological significance of the sym-
bolism of alchemical texts, nevertheless we are, yet again, left with the feeling
that everything is reduced to psychology. Alchemical images have however, as
Klossowski de Rola writes, a ‘polyvalent symbolism, and lend themselves there-
fore to various interpretations. . .alchemy cannot be bound to a single system of
thought, any more than it can be reduced to a single symbolical interpretation’
(1973, p. 9).
Post-Jungians of the archetypal school such as James Hillman and Stan
Marlan are highly critical of Jung’s psychological reductionism, insisting
instead on the need for an aesthetic psychology that ‘sticks to the image’,
eschewing the temptation to translate the images directly into the conceptual
language of psychology. Their writings do much to show us how alchemy can
help us understand the therapeutic value of non-literal metaphorical perception
and language; as Hillman writes, ‘Alchemy gives us a language of substance
which cannot be taken substantively, concrete expressions which are not literal.
This is its therapeutic effect’ (2010, p. 5). Nevertheless even this more aesthetic
approach pays little attention to the historical dimension of alchemical imagery
or to the cognitive function of metaphorical images.
Both in the field of scientific epistemology and in that of the history of
art, there has been a recent upsurge of interest in alchemical artworks and
in certain aesthetic and cognitive characteristics of alchemical images,
studies that offer Jungians the possibility of arriving at new insights into how
alchemy can deepen our understanding of the role of images in psychotherapy
and in culture.
Until now there has been very little work done on the rather particular
aesthetics of alchemical artworks but in a 2003 edition of the scientific journal
Hyle, dedicated to visualization in science, Elkins explores the particular
characteristics of alchemical art that render it still relevant to post-modern

painting and notes that,
From the fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, alchemical illustrations achieved
a richer vocabulary, a greater expressivity and a more articulate economy of ‘verbal’
and ‘visual’ elements than other kinds of pictures before the twentieth century . . ...al-
chemical emblems tended to increase the pictorial content, and delimit or obscure the
inscriptio and subscriptio, turning them into ciphers. Those strategies meant that
viewers were sent back to the images in their quest to understand the emblems.
(2003, pp. 105–18)
It is precisely this capacity of alchemical art to insist on the image as a means of

conveying, as Elkins says, not a clear or logical meaning but rather a feeling of
meaning that renders it interesting for research into scientific creativity.
In the same edition of Hyle, scientist Robert Root-Bernstein suggests that
scientific discovery is linked not just to rational logic but to a different kind of
knowing that he calls aesthetic cognition. As he states, ‘Over many years, I have
come to the conclusion that aesthetic considerations are, in and of themselves,
ways of thinking about scientific ideas and that sensual experience is the basis
of the intuition we bring to our work’ (2003, pp. 33–50).
As I hope to show, a more complete approach to alchemical images must of
necessity be capable of bringing into play not just their psychological but
equally their aesthetic and cognitive dimensions; therefore, what I propose in
this paper is first to look briefly at the history of images in Western culture; to
attempt a critical overview of Jung’s theories of the image and of the imagina-
tion; to look at how cognitive linguistics, the neurosciences and art history
can offer new insight into the cognitive and aesthetic functions of images; to
discuss the problems and limitations of Jung’s approach to the alchemical
image; and finally to look at how these considerations can open the way to
new insights into how the alchemists themselves thought about and worked
with images. If there is a purpose in studying alchemy apart from its interest
to historians, it is exactly because it still can teach us much about how emergent
processes develop within symbolic systems and the way in which certain
symbolically dense images act on the psyche and on conceptual systems.
The history of the image

When the first homo sapiens began to sculpt out the geometric shapes of
cupules, dots, lines and zigzags into rocks and when the Paleolithic hunters
began to decorate the walls of caves with the beautiful paintings that still speak
to us today, we can hypothesize that for them, these images were at one and the
same time reproductive, productive and operative, that is to say, capable of
changing reality. As Eliade says, ‘we may regard the Paleolithic representations
as a code that signifies the symbolic (hence magico-religious) value of the
images and at the same time their function in the ceremonies connected with
various “stories”’ (1978, p. 23).
The idea that images are merely reproductive was first introduced by Plato
when he suggested that poetic and artistic images are imitations of natural
objects which in turn are inferior imitations of the forms of transcendent reality.
This Platonic distrust of images became profoundly rooted in Western culture
and, over the centuries, erupted into moments of profound iconoclasm.
Nevertheless, running parallel to official culture, there remained a subterranean
belief in the productive and performative power of images incarnated in
movements such as Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, the Jewish
Kabbala and alchemy, all movements which came together in the Renaissance
to produce an explosion of iconophilia. What all these thought systems have
in common is the belief in the efficacy of images and their capacity to transform
reality, both inner and outer, typified in the writings of figures such as Marsilio
Ficino and Giordano Bruno. With the iconoclasm of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation, the whole imaginal culture of the Renaissance came to
an end and the effects of this on the role of images have lasted up to, and indeed
have intensified, in our present culture, despite the essentially ineffective
attempts on the part of Romanticism to re-establish the creative role of
imagination.
The final blow against the power of images took place in the 18th century
when aesthetic experience and perceptual apprehension were declassified as
subjective and therefore inferior categories of knowledge. The result is that to-
day we live in a world where we are bombarded by images but they are deprived
of any representative, productive or operative power, pure simulacra to use
Baudrillard’s term (1994). Modern science has tended to enforce this idea of
the irrelevance of images with devastating effects on how we have come to view
human subjectivity, leaving us only with a de-personalized and de-imaged
brain-mind. It is to Jung’s credit that he was one of the first to diagnose and seek
to rectify this ‘disease of the imagination’ typical of modern culture, but his
efforts have been all too often vitiated by the problems in his theorizations on
the image.
Jung and the image

Throughout his writings Jung never ceased to stress the importance for the
psyche of imagination or fantasy as he sometimes called it. As he says:
Fantasy therefore seems to me the clearest expression of the specific activity of the
psyche. It is pre-eminently the creative activity from which the answers to all answer-
able questions come; it is the mother of all possibilities, where like all psychological
opposites, the inner and outer worlds are joined together in living union.
(1921/1971, para. 78)
Jung is well aware that imagination has a ‘bad reputation’ among psychoana-
lysts and he attributes this to the tendency to interpret fantasies semantically,
insisting instead that fantasies are symbolical in the sense that ‘they represent
an attempt to elucidate, by means of analogy, something that still belongs

entirely to the domain of the unknown or something that is still to be’ (1916/1953,
paras. 493–95).
A problem arises however in Jung’s thinking on images when he stresses that
images depend essentially on ‘unconscious fantasy activity’ which is only
indirectly related to the perception of an external event (1921/1971, para. 743).
In this way, Jung’s suspicion of the senses, to which Paul Bishop refers (2009,
p. 45), leads him to ignore the aesthetic and sensuous dimension of image
formation, a tendency that is accentuated with the introduction in 1912, of the
idea of ‘primordial images’ (Urbild), later substituted by the term archetype. The
primordial image is conceived of as ‘a mnemic deposit, an imprint or engram
(Semon) which has arisen from countless processes of a similar kind. . ...a typical
basic form’ (1921/1971, para. 748).
Certainly, Jung was aware of the dangers inherent in the idea of eternal innate
images and it was for this reason that he distinguishes between the archetypal
image and the ‘archetype-as-such’ which is conceived of as an ‘empty formal
element which is nothing other than a ‘facultas praeformandi’, a possibility of
representation which is given a priori’ (1954, para. 155). By his insistence on
universal and unchanging forms, Jung introduces constraints into the creativity
of the imagination and, as the Italian philosopher and Jungian analyst Mario
Trevi writes, ‘Jung’s mistake was to hypothesize a repetitive and, in any case
improvable, fixity in that rich world of forms where eventual similarities are
based not on improbable a priori structures but on the all too human relative
constancy of man’s needs’ (1993, p. 62).
The insistence on the irrelevance of sensation for image creation led Jung into
serious errors in his approach to aesthetics. As Philipson says, ‘Jung. . . has not
taken sufficient interest in the sensuous nature of the aesthetic creation, of the
actual formative process or the formal elements of the art-work’, thus leading
to ‘. . .underestimations and oversimplifications of both the formal and the
historical elements in works of art’ (1994, p. 131).
A further complication in Jung’s theorization on the image is his tendency
to ignore the role of conscious thought in meaning creation and in image
formation. As Giegerich notes:
At a time when de Saussure had demonstrated that in the system of language the
function of signs is not determined by substrates of meaning but by differences Jung
resurrected, with his concept of archetypes, the idea of subsisting units of meaning:
meaning as natural fact, not product of the activity of the mind (and thus not the mind’s
own property); meaning ontologized and hypostatized, timeless contents. The mind is
conversely imagined to be the product of and passively informed by, the archetypes.
(2004, p. 53)
Jung’s suspicion of abstract thought and his concept of the archetype needs to
be seen against the background of the anti-reflexivist reaction of right-wing
Vitalists such as Klages, against what Ernest Nolte termed theoretical
transcendence, the idea that the world can be understood only in terms of
abstract, intellectual categories (Nolte 1965 quoted in Jay 1998, pp. 97–98).
For Klages the emergence of human consciousness was believed to have brought
about an alienation of man from his natural roots and not by chance. Klages’
concept of the archaic image shows parallels with Jung’s primitive or primal
image and both authors’ privileged Erlebnis (spontaneous feeling experiences)
over intellectual abstraction.
The result was that, as Giegerich says, Jung ‘radically eliminated the level of
form from his psychology. . .the internal logical form of the contents themselves
was precisely not touched’ (2004, p. 48). This meant that in any discussion of
images what was privileged was the content of the image not the conscious work
of production nor the relationship between form and content, between sensation
and thought on the one hand, and intuition and feeling on the other.
All this has led to the charge of mysticism that has so often been levelled
against Jung. There are, however, contradictions in Jung’s ideas on the image that
open the way to a re-consideration of the importance of cognition and aesthetics
and of the interrelationship between form and content in image formation. As
Bishop suggests, ‘What Jung termed an ‘archetypal experience’ might be better
understood, relieved of misleading mystical connotations, and understood along
Goethean lines, under the category of the aesthetic’ (2009, p. 75).
These considerations suggest that there are dangers in ignoring the role
of sensation and of the thoughtful shaping of the formal elements in image
production. Even more importantly, they imply the necessity of an evaluation
of the relationship between form and content of images. If all that matters is
the content then one image is, in the last analysis, equal to another and we
are authorized to conflate them. As Joy Schaverien has shown, however, even
in the images of the dreams and fantasies of our patients and in our own
countertransference images there are important aesthetic differences that we
need to take into account (2007, pp. 413–33).
It is only when analysts are capable of taking into account the aesthetic form
of the image that we can begin to construct a theory capable of critiquing
images and of investigating the pathology of imagination. Steps in this direction
have already been taken by Jungians such as Warren Colman who emphasizes
the need to distinguish between what he refers to as the imaginary and the real
imagination (2006, p. 22).
Recent advances in cognitive linguistics and in neuro-aesthetics have, however,
begun to point the way towards the possibility of re-integrating thought and
sensation with feeling and imagination in any consideration of the image.
Cognitive linguistics
If Jung tended to oppose rational thought and sensation to feeling and intuition,
nevertheless it is becoming increasingly clear that both abstract thought and
metaphor depend on bodily experience. Gallese and Lakoff have proposed that
conceptualization uses the same sensorimotor processes that are activated in
actual perceptual and motor experiences (2005, p. 459).
Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have demonstrated the central
role of metaphor in both abstract thought and in creativity. The essence of
metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of
another, and metaphors are learned when two experiences occur together,
producing neuronal activity simultaneously in separate areas of the brain
leading to the recruitment of neural connections between those areas (Lakoff
& Johnson 2003, pp. 256–58).
Metaphors can be primary or complex. Primary metaphors are ‘directly
grounded in the everyday experience that links our sensory-motor experience
to the domain of our subjective judgments’ (ibid., p. 255) and are based on
image schemas, ‘simple embodied spatial gestalts that capture the patterns of
our physical experience of the world around us and the processes by which
objects and bodies relate to each other’ (Knox 2009, p. 314).
Complex metaphors are built up from the combination of primary metaphors
although they structure the ordinary conceptual system of our culture reflected in
our everyday language. In other words, metaphors are not just literary devices, they
also play a fundamental role in our conceptual thinking. When metaphors are
used to communicate concepts, they can be consistent, that is to say they refer
to a single image, but more frequently they are inconsistent where various
metaphors are used to convey a single concept. As Lakoff and Johnson say:
There is a good reason why our conceptual systems have inconsistent metaphors for a
single concept. The reason is that no one metaphor will do that. Each one gives a
certain comprehension of one aspect of the concept and hides others. To operate only
in terms of a consistent set of metaphors is to hide many aspects of reality.
(2003, p. 221)
Metaphors do not however merely reflect reality, they have the power to create
new realities and much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new
metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones. New metaphors ‘consist not
in the totally new creations of metaphoric thought but in the marshalling of
already existing forms of metaphoric thought to form new extensions and
combinations of old metaphorical mappings’ (ibid., p. 267). This point is im-
portant as it is exactly in this way, as we shall see, that the alchemists worked
with images.
Metaphor is not just a matter of language or of conceptual systems as it
involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including our sense
experiences. What I now want to take into consideration is visual metaphor
and the role of art and how it works in structuring the way we think and expe-
rience ourselves and the world around us. Art, as the anthropologist Alfred Gell
states, is not merely a way ‘of encoding symbolic propositions about the world,
it is a system of action intended to change it’ (1998, p. 6).
Neuroaesthetics
Neuroaesthetics is a relatively new science and while it tends to make somewhat
sweeping claims not always backed up by hard evidence, it nevertheless shows
the power of visual metaphor to change brain function. Ramachandran in the
2003 BBC Reith Lectures suggests that synesthesia, visual metaphor and hyper-
connectivity may have played an important part in the emergence of abstract
thought and even language itself.
Much of the work being carried out in neuroaesthetics by researchers such as
Ramachandran and Semir Zeki focus on what Zeki calls ‘the modularity of
visual aesthetics’, the way in which the ‘human brain through a combination
of innate predispositions and habits of learning through trial and error, extracts
regular features from the environment and organizes them into basic conceptual
categories’ as the visual primitives or image structures (Zeki 1999, p. 26).
Studies into the neurophysiological substrate of aesthetics such as those of
Zeki and Ramachandran put forward a model of art that emphasizes the
perceptual and cognitive constants that constrain vision, a model that reduces
aesthetic pleasure, at least in part, to the recognition of constants that reflect the
neurological function of our visual system and the basic compositional organiza-
tion of nature. Such constants are discernible in elementary geometrical shapes,
diagrammatic verticals and horizontals, and colour primaries and together
make up a ‘body-based semiotic system connecting cognition with environment’
(Stafford 2007, p. 199). If in a certain sense these studies partially confirm Jung’s
intuition of the existence of innate forms which are linked to brain structure,
nevertheless they also stress that these primitive forms are equally dependent on
the visual perception of our environment. This suggests the importance of
attention and consciousness in the creation and the appreciation of the form of
images, in art-making and aesthetics. Increasingly however, the mind-brain model
that is emerging is one in which intentionality and conscious interaction with
images have become almost irrelevant.
Stafford strongly opposes such ideas arguing instead that images play an
important cognitive function:
Rather than seeing images as the mere illustration of some modular function, the range
and variety of the cognitive work they perform needs to be better understood.
Avoiding both Plato’s claim that they are necessarily the sensible copies of paradigmatic
ideas and more recent phenomenological claims that they are entirely generated from
the brain’s intrinsic activity, I treat them as boundary events. . ..the medium or
interface where world and subject get co-constructed, that is echoically presented to
one another’s view.
(2007, p. 212)
It is becoming increasingly clear that meaning-making is not, as Jung would

have it, a purely internal function but rather, as Jean Knox and Hogenson point
out, the ability to create meaning is dependent not only on the infant’s capacity
to make sense of the environment ‘. . .through the self-organizing properties of
the human mind’ (Knox 2004, p. 6) but also on the immersion in the world
of social and cultural meanings through the mother’s capacity to attribute
intentionality and significance to the child’s behaviour, to ‘bootstrap’ her into
the symbolic world ( Hogenson 2004, p. 73). As Jean Knox says, referring to
the work of Terence Deacon (1997) on linguistic symbols, ‘the meaning of
symbols derives from the fact that they are embedded in and cross-refer to a
network of other symbols’ (2009, p. 316).
Language is not however the only symbolical system in which we are
immersed for, as Hogenson suggests, there is increasing evidence that cultural
artefacts such as myths, symbols, and I would include works of art, can undergo
some form of evolutionary development along Baldwinian lines, through their
interaction with preceding symbolic systems (2004, pp. 74–75; 2009, p. 333).
As he says, ‘there is only process in the world of the symbolic’ (2004, p. 78).
This suggests that the symbolic world is a world characterized by the emergence
of meaning through analogy and metaphor; the recognition of similar patterns
in different experiences facilitates this process. In any complex symbolical
system such as alchemy one could expect a certain evolution in both the content
and in the form of the symbolical images but it is exactly this that Jung tended
to ignore in his search for universals.
Jung and alchemical images

Jung’s approach to alchemy was essentially based on the use of amplification, a
method grounded all too often on an incorrect use of analogy. Analogy, accord-
ing to Stafford, is ‘. . .a vision of ordered relationships, articulated as similarity in
difference. This order is neither facilely affirmative nor purchased at the expense
of variety’ (2001, p. 9). The difficulty in analogy therefore is finding enough
similarity to warrant giving a common name to disparate items while acknow-
ledging their significant variations, and analogy should not be confused with
establishing identity or isomorphism. In his writings on alchemy, however, this
is exactly what Jung tended to do. He moves from Paracelsus to Stephanos of
Alexandria and Zosimos, from Geber and Senior to the Chinese alchemists,
from George Ripley to Dorn, amplifying symbols, metaphors and allegories
from one text with texts drawn indifferently from totally diverse cultural
contexts and historical periods. In his search for timeless universals Jung makes
a rather selective use of texts and illustrations in his effort to stress similarities
and to downplay differences. He shows little interest either in studying the
interrelationship between illustrations within the same work or in the inter-
dependence of later series of illustrations with earlier ones. Relevant in this
context is the fact that in all his works on alchemy, only in one, ‘The psychology
of the transference’ does he actually discuss the way in which the images
develop within the context of a single series and even here he uses only 11 plates
out of the original 20 of the Rosarium Philosophorum and he ignores the
important difference between plate 5 (coniunctio sive) and plate 11 (fermentatio)

as Fabricius points out (1971). Equally he ignores the significance of the difference
between the two images of the Hermaphrodite in plates 10 and 17 and their
relationship to the hermaphrodites depicted in the much earlier Book of the
Holy Trinity, despite the fact that he was aware that they were taken from it, as
he states in a footnote to illustration B3 in Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon
(1942/1967). Again, it is interesting, in this respect, to compare the 1550 version
used by Jung to the various versions of the Presiossimum Donum Dei illustrations
such as the 1579 version in Spruch der Philosophen by Petrus Wintzig contained
in MS.6 of the Ferguson collection (not shown) which is much more faithful to
the earliest versions of the Rosarium such as the 1475 version attributed to
George Aurach (Adam McLean, http://www.levity.com/alchemy/). These illus-
trations give a rather different picture of the development of the coniunctio
symbol and it shows the dangers of basing interpretations only on one text.
Jung’s hermeneutic naïveté resulted in fundamental misinterpretations in the
significance and function of alchemical texts and images through the failure
to appreciate the historical dimension of alchemy and the way in which alchemical
imagery evolved and changed over time, a view echoed by Paul Bishop when he
remarks on Jung’s, ‘certain insensitivity precisely to the cultural context and the
historical perspective he avowedly espoused’ (2009, p. 151).
One result was that he constantly downplayed the role of alchemy as a
precursor of chemistry and the relevance of the alchemist’s sensuous and
aesthetic experiences as he worked in the laboratory, an approach that has led
to the increasing irrelevance of Jung to modern studies on alchemy.
William Newman in a 1996 article has attacked Jung’s diachronic and trans-
cultural vision of alchemy which tends to ignore the chemical dimension of the
work in the laboratory, suggesting that alchemical metaphors such as the green
lion, the red man or the doves of Diana are simply Decknamen, secret names for
mineral substances or chemical processes. For Newman ‘to the skilled in the
tradition of alchemical hermeneutics, the correct chemical analysis of the texts
was indeed attainable’ (1996, p. 188) and he has been able to replicate in the
laboratory, the golden trees, nets and the star-regulus of antimony, described
by the alchemists. Is alchemy then only proto-chemistry and has psychology
no role in the explanation of the fascination alchemical images exerted over
the minds of scientists such as Newton and Boyle or of artists and poets such
as Bosch, Shakespeare and Donne, a fascination that continues even today if
we think of the work of artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Leonora Carrington?
Art historian Jacob Wamberg in Art and Alchemy (2006) sees alchemy not
only as the science of the transmutation and refining of minerals but rather
suggests that it can also be ‘understood more broadly as a field of knowledge
reflecting on any kind of transformation or refinement’ (2006, p. 43), and that
therefore alchemical insights can provide a key into other fields of knowledge.
In What Painting Is (2000), James Elkins focuses on the materiality of painting
rather than on its contents and is highly critical of Jung’s tendency to see
alchemy purely in terms of psychology and spirituality and to pay insufficient

attention to the experience of working in the laboratory. As he says, ‘there
is much more to the experimental side of alchemy than Jung thought’ (ibid.,
p. 4). For Elkins, alchemy and painting are not thinking about but thinking in
substances and processes, that is to say, thinking that springs from the feelings
and the aesthetic experiences of the alchemist as he gazed on the chemical
reactions taking place in the alchemical vas. As David Parker states:
Clearly Jung does discuss substances such as salt, sulphur and mercury etc. as having
symbolic meaning in alchemy. However, my point is that his desire to elucidate
psychological meaning when discussing such substances results in a tendency to
neglect or overlook how these substances actually promote aesthetic/transformative
responses in the alchemist directly within their physical and visual transformations –
without recourse to re-presentation.
(2008, p. 54)
It is exactly when we move our attention away from the content of alchemical
images to concentrate on the aesthetic and cognitive experiences of the alchemists
and the way in which the alchemists and artists gave shape to these experiences
that we can begin to trace the way in which the symbolic images changed and
developed over time. This is essential if we are to arrive at a new understanding
of the importance of alchemical images for the psyche.
The history of alchemical images

It is now becoming increasingly clear that there are important historical and
cultural variations in alchemical texts and illustrations. Sami K. Hamarneh, in
an 1986 article published in Ambix, has suggested that it is possible to discern
different intertwined stages in the millennium long history of Islamic alchemy: a
period of a primitive approach supported by observations and laboratory
experiments, whose aim was the transformation of base metals into gold
through the philosopher’s stone; a period of mystical alchemy in which the
laboratory work was accompanied by symbolical writings which relied heavily
on poetical metaphors; a period of iatrochemistry characterized by the idea that
the aim of alchemy was the preservation of good health. Something similar can
be discerned in the history of Greek alchemy but it is in European alchemy that
historical variations are most evident and it is here that a fundamental change
took place through the use of complex visual metaphors organized into series of
illustrations to explain, communicate and develop the symbols of the substances
and processes of the alchemical opus.
As Gerald Heym notes, with respect to European symbolical pictures and
illustrations, ‘only in a few North Indian and Tibetan manuscripts where refer-
ences to Alchemy are made, is a similar use of elaborate and detailed symbolism
discovered’ (1937, p. 70). Islamic alchemy as Titley remarks failed to elaborate
a system of visual symbolism (1937, p. 67), while in Greek alchemy illustrations

tended to be limited to notational signs for metals and planets and drawings of
apparatuses. Symbolical pictures designed to express ideas that are of difficult if
not impossible expression are rare and, as Gerald Heym notes, ‘these are crude
and usually follow one scheme, based on the ancient astral interpretation of
the forces of nature’ (ibid., p. 70). The only exception is the single page of
symbolical drawings in the Chrysopoeia of Kleopatra, which include the image
of the serpent Ouroboros eating its tail and at the centre the following words
can be found: ‘One is all’, and on the same page, an image of two concentric
circles, enclosing the signs for gold, silver and mercury, with the words, ‘One
is the serpent which has its poison according to two compositions’ (Sherwood
Taylor 1937, p. 43).
Visual images in European alchemy

Alchemy was first introduced into the West in1144 when Robert of Ketton
completed his translation from the Arabic of the Liber de Compositione Alchimie
and was conceived of as both scientia (a contemplative discipline whose aim was
to construct theories through reasoning) and as ars (an operative practice aimed at
producing transformations in the realm of corporeal substances). If initially
interest was mainly concentrated around translation of Islamic texts, by the 13th
century there was already a body of original texts mainly from the two great
monastic orders. In the texts of Dominicans such as Vincent of Beauvais, Albert
the Great and Thomas Aquinas alchemy was seen less as a science according to
the Aristotelian scholastic model of science and more as an art or techne and as
such it was seen as inferior and capable only of imitating nature.
In contrast, the anti-scholastic alchemists of the 14th century such as Arnold
of Villanova, Raymon Lull and John Rupecissa tended to attribute scientific
dignity to alchemy and considered their alchemical research as being justified
by divine illumination and capable of completing or even substituting nature.
Profoundly influenced by the millennium prophecies of Joachim of Fiore on
the coming end of the world and the teachings of the Franciscans and Spirituals,
Villanova and Rupecissa saw in alchemy a way towards the corporal and
spiritual renovation of the community of the faithful. Through alchemy they
aimed at, as Chiara Crisciani writes in the introduction to the Preziosa Margarita
Novella, ‘bringing together in a unity, capable of overcoming the borders between
peoples and the divisions of faiths, auctores and the adepts of the Art, Greeks and
Jews, Muslims and Christians, all equally pure and holy, members of a community
of the elect of God’ (1976, p. xv).
Thus the Franciscan movement led to an increasingly political use of alchemy
as a way of producing social and religious reform and we could hypothesize that
it was exactly the need to communicate with temporal rulers and with ordinary
people who did not speak Latin, through a symbolical language capable of
conveying the message of alchemy, that was one of the driving forces behind the
introduction of visual symbols and the way in which the symbolic power of the
images increased over time.
According to art historian Barbara Obrist, the use of illustrations in medieval
alchemy was a relatively late phenomenon (2003, p. 131). Documents dating
from the introduction of alchemy into the Latin West around 1140 up to the
mid-thirteenth century are almost devoid of pictorial elements. Possibly the first
text to make extensive use of visual metaphors for the substances and processes
of the opus was the Introduction to Alchemy of a certain Gratheus purportedly
written in Paris in the 12th century and translated into middle Dutch around the
second half of the 14th century according to Helmut Birkhan (1989). By the
early fifteenth century illustrations of alchemical texts had become organized
into whole series and until the 17th century, illustrations continued to proliferate
and to become ever more important, to the point that texts often were reduced
to mere picture labels as in the late 15th century Ripley Scrowle and the 17th
century Atlanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, or disappeared altogether as in the
17th century Liber Mutus.
From Gratheus onwards, what all these works had in common was the way
in which the artists used visual metaphors didactically to facilitate the commu-
nication and clarification of the basic stages of the process and the substances
through the use of conventional chemical metaphors and symbolically to
convey the mysteries of alchemy with the aim of changing both the predominant
scholastic conceptual system and the cognitive capacities of the viewer.
Gratheus’ Introduction to Alchemy is a wildly imaginative text with interspaced
illustrations which, as Obrist says, (2003, p. 148) ‘transform the old analogical
relations drawn between animal generation and the formation of metals into a
series of highly original plates colored in black, white and red which depict a series
of amorous and violent dramas taking place within glass vases’.
The principle metaphorical motifs, taken mainly from Islamic texts such as
those of Ibn Umail, are the union between male and female principles in the
form of a king and queen, Ylarius and Virgo through the actions of an
intermediary, Multiplos, a strange figure bearing a cudgel whose mercurial
nature is underlined not by the visual image but merely by the name (Plate 1).
The subsequent depiction of the sexual union actually seems to be depicting a
double coniunctio between king and queen and between queen and dragon
(Plate 2) as we can see from the subsequent results of this union, a child first
(Plate 3) and then a dragon (Plate 4).
The early 15th century saw the gradual increase of alchemical illustration in
works such as the Aurora Consurgens and the Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit
(The Book of the Holy Trinity), both of which combine written texts with
increasingly complex and original pictorial representations. According to
Obrist (2003, p. 150) these illustrations also mark another evolution in late
medieval alchemical image making, that of the synthetic representations of the
philosophical principles that governed alchemy: the unity of the cosmos and
Plate 1. Vien, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensi,

Cod. 2372 52a–87a

Cod. 2372 52a–87a
the interconnection between microcosm and macrocosm; the idea that only
nature can vanquish nature; the ideas of two becoming one.
What I propose to attempt in this work is to focus attention on the way in which
the alchemists created their images and the way in which the aesthetics of
alchemical images changed over time in order to understand why the alchemists
turned to images and what function they served. As I have already stated, one

Cod. 2372 52a–87a

Cod. 2372 52a–87a
of the significances of alchemy for psychology is that it still can teach us much
about how emergent processes develop within symbolic systems and the aesthetic
characteristics that render images meaningful.
The cognitive and aesthetic function of the alchemical image

As I have already noted, Jung showed no interest in tracing the historical
development of alchemical images. If we begin to look at the aesthetics of medi-
eval alchemical illustrations, there is however a clearly emergent development in
the symbolic power of the images through the increasing use of three particular
aesthetic techniques: firstly, the use of the ancient analogical art and science of
combinations that Leibniz called the Ars Combinatoriatio; secondly, the use
of compressive compositions, that is to say, the condensation within single
images of multiple metaphors; and, thirdly, the use of framing or encapsulating
devices.
For Stafford, an expert in Baroque emblems which are imagistic heirs to the
medieval alchemical illustrations, these emblems or illustrations are constructed
by ‘detaching constituent parts from more diffuse wholes and then integrating
them into a new crystal-like arrangement’ (2007, p. 45). In such art works the
artist, rather than imposing a unitary shape on a mass of disjunctive material,
allows the material structure to self-organize associatively through sympathetic
correspondences (2007, p. 47). This is a true bottom-up process, typical of
emergent phenomena.
In general, alchemical art, from the 15th century onwards, is characterized by
the very particular way in which the artists use the images, metaphors and
symbols of previous works. Even if it is still difficult to establish the exact
chronology of the illustrations that still exist, nevertheless, there is a relation-
ship between earlier illustrations and later ones for, as Obrist states, ‘alchemical
texts and their illustrations became mosaics of already existing documents
which were elaborated in more or less original manner’ (2003, p. 151). The
originality of the artists resides, therefore, not so much in the metaphors and
symbols they used, which did not really change much, but in the way in
which they extracted individual metaphorical elements from earlier illustrations
recombining them through analogical associations and correspondences to cre-
ate original, strange and unfamiliar images which are both attention-grabbing and
thought-provoking and thus capable of stimulating the cognitive and affective
responses of the viewer. According to Stafford, these images which inlay rather
than blend diverse sensory inputs, ‘. . .allow us to witness how the brain-mind
cobbles together conflicting bits of information. Gapped or mosaic-like composi-
tions make the labor of thinking inseparable from the perception of the object’
(2007, p. 43).
If we look at the 16th century Rosarium illustrations used by Jung for
example, the two Hermaphroditic images in Plate 10 (1946, p. 307) and
Plate 17 (1944/1968, p. 113) are combinations of the earliest images of the

Hermaphrodite taken from the Aurora Consurgens (see Adam McLean’s
Alchemy Website http://www.levity.com/alchemy/) and the Book of the Holy
Trinity (Plates 5 and 6), but there are important differences between these
illustrations that help us to understand the significance of this combination.
The illustrations in the Book of the Holy Trinity written in vernacular
German around 1419 and dedicated to Frederic, Margrave of Brandenburg,
have a decidedly religious and Christian character and would seem to represent
a more spiritual vision of the opus. The 25 beautifully executed miniatures
illustrate once again the union between male and female principles to bring
about the transformation of the two into the one, but here however the motifs
of Gratheus are elaborated, expanded and combined with other metaphors
which depict first the torture of a leprous man and woman, a metaphor both
for the crude initial state of the substances and of the fall of Adam and Eve and
subsequently the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Christ as a metaphor both
of the processes that lead to the salvation of sinful mankind and of the birth of the
Stone which will redeem the metals. The identification between alchemy and
Christianity is emphasized even more, however, through the different stages of
Plate 5. Special Collections, The Ferguson Collection, MS 4 f96v

Plate 6. Special Collections, The Ferguson Collection, MS 4 f115v
union between the Virgin Mary and Christ represented by the two figures of the
Hermaphrodite (see Figs. 5 and 6) as Duveen points out (1946, p. 30).
In the Aurora Consurgens on the other hand, the illustrations are much
more corporeal and material with graphic depictions of the torture and dismember-
ment of human figures, of struggles between animals and birds and of parturition;
here the Hermaphrodite is naked, although the genitals have been scratched out at
a later date, and it has a much more sinister character which is conveyed by the hare
and the bat it holds in its hand, the mass of dead birds on which it is standing and
the black eagle that imprisons it within its claws. Thus they represent a darker,
more material and a decidedly less Christian vision of alchemy.
The two images of the Hermaphrodite in the Rosarium, however, are
constructed by selecting out and combining elements from both the Book of
the Holy Trinity and the Aurora. In the Rosarium the first hermaphrodite is
naked and has a more sexualized character to it but it has bird wings, it holds
in its hands a coiled serpent and a chalice with three serpents (although reversed
with respect to the original) and there is a moon tree, all elements extracted
from the first image of the Hermaphrodite in the Book of the Holy Trinity. As
Stafford says, ‘this dual process of first prying apart and then patching together
into a novel unit yields ill-sorted and fantastic objects demanding to be noticed
and thought about. Because the extrapolated items appear so unnatural as to be

shocking. . . they stimulate our imaginative powers of inference. More than that,
they change the strength of our synaptic connections since their puzzling
appearance counters habituation and augments sensation’ (2007, p. 45). If the
paradoxical monstrosity of the hermaphrodite image is shocking in itself,
the Hermaphrodite of the Rosarium which brings together and unites not just
male and female, but corporality and spirituality, paganism and Christianity,
transcendence and immanence is positively unsettling and, if taken seriously
as Jung did, it becomes of necessity an object of reflection.
In the same way, the combination of textual and visual information found in
the Rosarium, characteristic of so many alchemical illustrations, again stimulates
synchronic brain mechanisms for as Stafford says, ‘juxtapositive design
encourages the fluctuation of viewer attention between the different kinds of
inhibitory and excitatory sensory signals. We should think of this format as a
‘small-world’ network, a densely connected assembly with resonating visual and
verbal features’ (2007, p. 72).
Equally, from Gratheus onward, medieval and Renaissance alchemical images
are characterized by the very striking compressive nature of the images which
condense within themselves enormous amounts of disjunctive sensory inputs
and heterogeneous information. For Stafford ‘certain dense and interstructural
kinds of artworks permit us to see. . .the synchronizing cerebral processes involved
in vision, actively constructed by the cerebral cortex after having discarded
extraneous information’ (2007, p. 45). She goes further, however, suggesting
that emblems, ‘those enigmatic complexes compressing enormous amounts of
information that populated early modern European collections of prints’, are
actually operative, performing a cognitive function. As she says, ‘to be concen-
trated is to be symbolically powerful’ (ibid.).
This compressive character of alchemical images is already clearly demon-
strable in the 37 powerful and original beautifully coloured illustrations of
the Aurora Consurgens. There are several copies of this work of which the most
artistically valid one is undoubtedly that of the Zentralbibliothek of Zurich. The
one which I will be using from the Ferguson collection in Glasgow University is
a much later work done by an inferior artist but the illustrations are, with few
exceptions, faithful copies of the Zurich work, although the images are in a very
different order. These plates show a marked development in the use the artist
makes of visual metaphors.
In the puzzling and enigmatic plates of Aurora Consurgens the artist combines
the metaphors of Gratheus with other metaphors and allegories drawn from
Arab, Greek and biblical texts to produce extremely dense metaphorical combina-
tions and chains of metaphors. The use of colour symbolism to code both astro-
logical references and the different stages of the work also serve to increase the
metaphoric complexity of the images and at the same time the intensity of the
colours increases their affective charge. Unfortunately it is impossible here to pro-
duce these plates in colour but seven of them are available on the Alchemy
Website of Adam McLean, the Glasgow-based alchemical scholar and artist

(http://www.levity.com/alchemy/).
Here, it is important to remember how metaphors work, highlighting certain
aspects of the target domain and downplaying others. The more metaphors are
brought into play, whether in combinations within a single image or organized
into chains of metaphors, the more the images are capable of reflecting the
different aspects of the object to which they allude, no matter how obscurely,
and the more they work to increase the feeling of meaning.
If we compare Gratheus’ image of a flask containing Ylarius, Virgo and
Multiplos with Plate 19 (Plate 7 here) of the Aurora Consurgens, for example,
we can see how the artist has amplified the more simple visual metaphors with
a series of more complex, inconsistent but still coherent metaphors. Multiplos is
substituted by a strange blue figure with a long tail, brown animal legs and
white wings holding a white sword in its right hand and a grey arrow in its left.
While this blue figure is clearly a conventional metaphor for the spirit of
mercury which through its dual intermediate nature is capable of acting as a
catalyst in order to bring about the union between the two to produce the
one, it is also a highly original metaphor in which the combination of animal,
human and spiritual elements accentuates the unnatural and paradoxical nature
of the visual image and increases its symbolic power. The sword is a metaphor
for the destruction of the bodies of the crude substances in order to extract the
soul of the metals while the arrow is a metaphor for the fixation of the soul in
order to return it to the purified bodies, processes that occur throughout the
work and are summed up in the famous alchemical aphorism, ‘solve et coagula’.
The image is then further complicated by the use of colour as a metaphor both
for the substances and stages of the work and for the planetary gods governing
Plate 7. Glasgow University Library Special Collections, The Ferguson Collection,

MS 6 f230
the stages of the opus. The brown codes the element of earth and Saturn as the
mythological figure governing the Nigredo, blue codes water and Jupiter while
white codes air and the moon as the governing principle of the Albedo.
The coniunctio image of Gratheus between the king, queen and dragon as a
metaphor for the alchemical transformation of the two into the one, is
multiplied in order to better represent the different types of coniunctio which
occur at different stages of the work. In plate 7, the union of the king and queen
is substituted by a fight between the red wingless bird and the white winged
bird, an image that emphasizes the destructive nature of the union between
crude sulphur and mercury and at the same time represents the role of the spirit
(the winged bird) in spiritualizing the body and of the body (the red wingless
bird) in rendering corporeal the soul.
In plate 22 (Plate 8 here), the three protagonists are already at a more purified
or spiritual stage: the red and white birds representing sulphur and mercury have
been transformed into the red male and the white female while the coniunctio is
represented by the mixing of the blood which pours from the neck of the two
decapitated figures. The spirit of Mercury is now represented by a strange blue
Melusine figure, half human, half serpent, with its head surrounded by a blue
nimbus, carrying an axe in the left hand and a pipe in the right hand which is being
carried towards the mouth, a metaphor for fermentation or the sublimation of the
bodies through the addition of the element of air.
In the Aurora Consurgens, in the Book of the Holy Trinity and in the
Rosarium, the complex images work as conventional chemical metaphors to
convey knowledge and to transmit theoretical principles and as rhetorical
devices aimed at increasing the persuasiveness of the text. At the same time
however they are also original metaphors that, because of their strange and
Plate 8. Glasgow University Library Special Collections, The Ferguson Collection,

MS 6 f233
paradoxical nature and their combinatory and compressive character, are capable
of stimulating affectivity and cognition in order to effect changes in brain mechan-
isms. In these plates as Heym notes, ‘every line and figure has meaning’ (1937,
p. 70) and as we gaze on them, the images capture us and we find our attention
fluctuating between the complex and intricate symbolism of different pictorial
elements of the plate. The feeling of meaning that they convey forcefully makes
it impossible not to think about them. As Stafford says,
Isolating individual components from their customary background or dissociating

them from some overall context serves to exclude other data. This focusing process
highlights images that would otherwise slip by our attention or be absorbed unthink-
ingly. When plucked from a narrative flow, they become salient objects for reflection.
(2007, p. 45)
What is at stake in these kinds of pictures is not the content of the single
pictorial elements which can be reductively translated either in terms of
chemical substances and processes, or in terms of religious, philosophical or
mythological themes, as we can see from works such as the 18th century
Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique of Dom Pernety (1787/1972). What matters
here, and what makes them relevant to psychology and to analytical practice,
is the way in which the symbolic complexity and the startling originality of
the metaphors, created through the marshalling of already existing forms of
metaphoric thought to form new extensions and combinations of old metaphor-
ical mapping, intensify the feeling of meaning that these pictures convey.
Alchemical art works, however, make use of yet another aesthetic device to
increase the symbolic power of the images, images that are symbolical in as
much as they are capable of stimulating all four functions of the psyche, think-
ing, feeling, intuition and sensation.
The use of framing or encapsulating devices which begins with Gratheus
and his glass vessels serve as Stafford suggests, ‘to provoke the performative
impulse to piece different stimuli together’ (2007, p. 43). As she says, ‘fretwork
and intarsia compositions demonstrate the cognitive work performed by encap-
sulating images: the craft-like ways in which they solicit attention, stimulating
the beholder to re-enact the gathering, compounding and synthesizing of
information into a compact idea-thing’ (2007, p. 206).
One of the finest examples of this way of working can be found in the very
beautiful and intricate 22 illustrations of the 16th century Splendor Solis of
Solomon Trismosin, the pseudonym of Ulrich Poysel according to Joachim Telle
(2006). There are various copies of this work of which the earliest is the one
dating from 1531/2 in the Prussian State Museum in Berlin. According to Adam
McLean, the illustrations were probably the work of Albrecht Glockendon, a
miniaturist and engraver working in Nuremberg, although they have also been
attributed to Jorg Breu the Elder and to Simon Bening.
The 22 plates are re-elaborations of elements extracted from earlier works
such as Pretiosissimum Donum Dei of the Strasburg 15th century alchemist
George Aurach, the Book of the Holy Trinity and the Aurora Consurgens, as
the artist makes clear in Plate I which is an almost exact copy of the Arms
Artis taken from Aurora. Plates XII to XVIII re-elaborate images taken from
the various versions of the Donum Dei series in which, like the illustrations
of Gratheus, the transformations of the metals and the creation of the white
and red stones are depicted as taking place within glass vessels. These flasks
are then encapsulated within architectural niches which in turn are enclosed
within images extracted from the planetary series of the 16th century engraver,
Hans Sebald Beham, where above can be found the planetary gods governing
the various stages of the work and below are scenes depicting the life in the
country and towns of late medieval Germany with the different activities
governed by each of the planets. It is interesting that the sequence governing
the opus in this work is not the common one derived from Greek alchemy
which moves from Kronos, Zeus, Aphrodite, Ares, Hermes, Moon and Sun
(Partington 1937, pp. 61–62) but the more unusual one of the Aurora which
goes from Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon. This
repeated use of encapsulation is seen in plate XVII (Plate 9 here) which shows
the birth of the white queen or the white stone within a crowned flask that is
then enclosed within an architectural niche with a flower decorated frieze,
which in turn is surrounded again by the images of the planetary gods drawn
from Hans Sebald Beham.
This technique of encapsulating images within multiple frames serves the
function both of capturing and focusing the attention on the different elements
of the whole plate while at the same time it stimulates the viewer to understand
the connections between them.
The Splendor Solis plates represent one of the most significant and highly
developed examples of how the alchemical illustrators constructed their images.
They are remarkable for the symbolism, complexity and richness of the contents
of the images which have been explored in depth by Henderson and Sherwood
(2003) in their evocative work, Transformations of the Psyche. Equally how-
ever they represent one of the finest examples of how the artists of alchemical
illustrations combined, compressed and framed the various elements to create
image formats that stimulate aesthetic cognition through the creation, not of
clear logical meanings but of a ‘feeling of meaning’ that stimulates both
cognition and intuition, feeling and sensation. The study of alchemical images
offers us a new vision of the psychodynamics of images for if an image is to be
effective it must of necessity be capable of bringing together body and psyche,
individual and world.
As Stafford says referring to this kind of compressed art form,
Simultaneously corporeal and metaphysical, these tight formed amalgams are catalysts,
violently yoking different orders of experience. As message bearing vehicles, they hook
up the material with the immaterial, the worldly with the otherworldly
(2007, p. 71)
Plate 9. Splendor Solis, Plate XVII – The Fourth Treatise, Sixthly. Taken from Splendor
Solis: Alchemical Treatises of Solomon Trismosin. J.K. (Julius Kohn), (1920) London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd reproduced from the Original Paintings dated
1582 in the British Museum
Conclusion
The relationship of Jungian thought, alchemical studies and alchemy is complex
and fluctuating. Initially Jung’s psychological approach to alchemy offered
new insights into the minds of the alchemists and into the meaning of their
symbolism but the ahistorical nature of his studies and his reductive vision of
alchemy has rendered his ideas increasingly more irrelevant. In the same way,
if Jungians are unable to go beyond Jung, remaining blocked within an approach
that focuses only on the content of the alchemical images, ignoring the way in
which the images work both aesthetically and cognitively, then we are failing to
make use of one of the richest sources available to us in our search to understand
how imagination functions and how to cure its pathologies. We can only do this if
we are ready to take onboard new insights coming from those like Elkins and
Stafford who seek, like Jung, to restore to the image its old power. In the words of
Stafford: ‘Images not only possess a cognitive quotient but they can refine our
imaginative, emotional and spiritual lives, making us intelligent in the body and
sympathetic in the mind’ (1996, p. 17).
Alchemy teaches us that when we confront the images our patients produce
either in their dreams or in their active imaginations, it is not enough to under-
stand the content of the images. We also have to learn to look at the form or the
aesthetic quality of the images, metaphors and narratives and the way in which
they develop through series of dreams or of active imaginations. In the same
way, when we interpret or amplify such images, it is not the correctness of
our responses that count but their metaphorical power, their capacity to facilitate
emergent processes in the development of the images.
As Mario Trevi says,
It is precisely that same historical dimension of images that Jung ingenuously

attempted to circumvent in part of his theorization that allows us today to envisage
analytical psychology as a psychology of the imaginal and of its inexhaustible source
that is the creative imagination.
(1993, p. 60)
TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT
La contribution de Jung à la compréhension de l’intérêt de la psychologie pour l’alchimie

a été progressivement invalidée par la nature historique de son approche, précisément
parce que sa tendance à ignorer l’importance de l’esthétique cognitive pour une compré-
hension approfondie de la fonction des images alchimiques a empêché les jungiens
d’élargir les idées de Jung sur l’importance de l’alchimie pour la psychologie. Cet article
explore l’histoire du développement des illustrations alchimiques en Europe Occidentale
du 14ème au 16ème siècle afin de suivre l’émergence des processus au fil du temps. C’est
seulement lorsque nous considérons la dimension historique et l’esthétique de l’imagerie
alchimique qu’il devient possible de démontrer combien l’usage croissant de certaines
techniques esthétiques comme la disjonction et la recombinaison d’éléments métaphoriques
différents provenant d’illustrations antérieures, l’utilisation d’associations condensées ainsi
que l’utilisation de procédés de cadrage ont fonctionné pour augmenter progressivement la
fonction cognitive et le pouvoir symbolique des images. Si l’alchimie est encore intéressante
pour la psychologie c’est exactement parce qu’elle aide à comprendre l’importance de
l’esthétique cognitive dans notre approche des images, des métaphores et des récits de
nos patients.
Jungs Beitrag zum Verständnis der Relevanz der Psychologie für die Alchimie wurde
durch die historische Natur seines Ansatzes zunehmend entkräftet. Dies, ebenso wie
seine Neigung, die Wichtigkeit einer kognitiven Ästhetik für ein vertieftes Begreifen der
Funktionen alchimistischer Bilder zu ignorieren, hat Jungianer daran gehindert, Jungs
Einblick in die Wichtigkeit der Alchimie für die Psychologie weiter auszubauen. Der
vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Geschichte der Entwicklung alchimistischer Illustrationen
in Westeuropa vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert mit der Absicht, den Entwicklungsprozeß
aufzuzeigen. Nur wenn wir die geschichtliche Dimension sowie die Ästhetik alchimistischer
Darstellungen in Betracht ziehen wird es möglich sein zu zeigen, wie der zunehmende
Gebrauch bestimmter ästhetischer Techniken, wie etwa die der Disjunktion und der
Rekombination von getrennten metaphorischen Elementen ursprünglich zusammenhängender
Illustrationen, der Gebrauch von verdichteten Kombinationen und die Benutzung
von Rahmungen zusammenwirkten zur gradweisen Steigerung der kognitiven Funktion
und zur Erhöhung der Symbolkraft der Bilder. Wenn Alchimie noch immer eine Bedeutung
für Psychotherapie hat, dann eben deshalb, weil sie uns hilft, die Wichtigkeit zu verstehen,
die der kognitiven Ästhetik zukommt in unseren Annäherungen an die Bilder, Metaphern
und Erzählungen unserer Patienten.
Il contributo junghiano alla comprensione del rapporto tra alchimia e psicologia è stato
sempre più invalidato dalla natura storica del suo approccio, proprio come la sua
tendenza a ignorare l’importanza dell’estetica cognitiva per una crescente comprensione
delle funzioni di immagini alchemiche ha impedito agli junghiani di estendere ulteriormente
l’intuizione junghiana dell’importanza dell’alchimia per la psicologia. In questo scritto si
esplora la storia dello sviluppo delle illustrazioni alchemiche dal 14 al 16 secolo nell’Europa
Occidentale, così da descrivere i processi emergenti che avvennero durante quel tempo. E’
solo quando prendiamo in considerazione la dimensione storica e l’estetica delle immagini
alchemiche che diviene possibile dimostrare in che modo l’uso crescente di certe tecniche
estetiche quali la disgiunzione e la ricombinazione di elementi metaforici di precedenti illustra-
zioni separati, l’uso di combinazioni compressive e l’uso di dispositivi strutturanti abbia fatto
in modo da incrementare gradualmente la funzione cognitiva e il potere simbolico delle
immagini. Se l’alchimia è ancora importante per la psicoterapia è precisamente perché ci aiuta
a comprendere l’importanza dell’estetica cognitiva nel nostro approccio alle immagini, alle
metafore e alle narrazioni dei nostri pazienti.
Вклад Юнга в понимание тесной связи психологии и алхимии все больше и

больше сводился на нет его историческим подходом, равно как и его тен-
денция не придавать значения когнитивной эстетике, позволяющей улучшать
понимание функционирования алхимических образов, не дала юнгианцам
дальше развивать творческие озарения Юнга о важности алхимии для
психологии. Настоящая статья исследует историю развития алхимических
иллюстраций в Западной Европе от 14 до 16 века, задаваясь целью просле-
дить за процессами, возникающими с течением времени. Только тогда, когда
мы включаем в рассмотрение и историческое измерение, и эстетику
алхимической образности, становится возможным показать, как все возрас-
тающее использование определенных эстетических техник, такое, как, напри-
мер, разъединение и перекомбинирование различных метафорических эле-
ментов предыдущих иллюстраций, использование сжатия, сочетаний и
рамок работали на постепенное увеличение когнитивной функции и симво-
лической мощи образов. Если алхимия до сих пор важна для психотерапии,
то именно потому, что она помогает нам понять значимость когнитивной эсте-
тики в нашем подходе к образам, метафорам и рассказам наших пациентов.
La contribución de Jung de la relevancia de la psicología en la alquimia ha sido constan-

temente invalidada por lo histórico de su aproximación, tanto como por su tendencia a
ignorar la importancia de la estética cognitiva para una comprensión más completa de
las funciones de las imágenes alquímicas han dificultado un mejor conocimiento de la
importancia de la alquimia para la psicología. Este trabajo analiza la historia del desar-
rollo de las ilustraciones alquímicas en la Europa Occidental desde el siglo XIV al XVI
para seguir los procesos emergentes que tuvieron lugar durante ese tiempo. Es solo
cuando tomamos en cuenta la dimensión histórica y la estética de la imaginería alquímica
que es posible demostrar como el uso continuado de ciertas técnicas estéticas tales como
la separación y recombinación de elementos metafóricos separados de ilustraciones
previas, el uso de combinaciones compresivas y el uso de elementos que enmarquen
pueden trabajar para gradualmente incrementar la función cognitiva y el poder simbólico
de las imágenes. Si la alquimia sigue siendo relevante para la psicoterapia es exactamente
por que nos ayuda a entender la importancia de la estética cognitiva en nuestra aproxima-
ción a las imágenes, metáforas y narrativa de nuestros pacientes.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and to the Glasgow

University Library Special Collections for their permission to reproduce the
plates from the Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensi Cod. 2372 and from MS 4
and 6 of The Ferguson Collection with my special thanks to the staff of
Glasgow University Library for all their help and patience.
[MS first received February 2011; final version September 2012]

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Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2013, 58, 4–33

Cognitive aesthetics of alchemical imagery

Angela M. Connolly, Rome

Abstract: Jung’s contribution to the understanding of the relevance of psychology to

Key words: cognitive aesthetics and emergent development of alchemical images,

The cognitive work of images as actively constructed and constructing ‘real’

0021-8774/2013/5801/4 © 2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology

to view imaging as an autonomous activity of the psyche, capable of both

characteristics of alchemical art that render it still relevant to post-modern

It is precisely this capacity of alchemical art to insist on the image as a means of

The history of the image

Jung and the image

an attempt to elucidate, by means of analogy, something that still belongs

It is becoming increasingly clear that meaning-making is not, as Jung would

Jung and alchemical images

important difference between plate 5 (coniunctio sive) and plate 11 (fermentatio)

alchemy purely in terms of psychology and spirituality and to pay insufﬁcient

The history of alchemical images

a system of visual symbolism (1937, p. 67), while in Greek alchemy illustrations

Visual images in European alchemy

Plate 1. Vien, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensi,

Plate 2. Vien, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensi,

Plate 3. Vien, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensi,

Plate 4. Vien, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensi,

The cognitive and aesthetic function of the alchemical image

Plate 17 (1944/1968, p. 113) are combinations of the earliest images of the

Plate 5. Special Collections, The Ferguson Collection, MS 4 f96v

Plate 6. Special Collections, The Ferguson Collection, MS 4 f115v

and thought about. Because the extrapolated items appear so unnatural as to be

Website of Adam McLean, the Glasgow-based alchemical scholar and artist

Plate 7. Glasgow University Library Special Collections, The Ferguson Collection,

Plate 8. Glasgow University Library Special Collections, The Ferguson Collection,

Isolating individual components from their customary background or dissociating

It is precisely that same historical dimension of images that Jung ingenuously

La contribution de Jung à la compréhension de l’intérêt de la psychologie pour l’alchimie

Вклад Юнга в понимание тесной связи психологии и алхимии все больше и

La contribución de Jung de la relevancia de la psicología en la alquimia ha sido constan-

Hamarneh, S. K. (1982). ‘Arabic-Islamic alchemy: three intertwined stages’. Ambix, 29,

Schaverien, J. (2007). ‘Countertransference as active imagination: imaginative experiences

My thanks to the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and to the Glasgow

[MS ﬁrst received February 2011; ﬁnal version September 2012]

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