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Alchemical Active Imagination: Revised Edition (C. G. Jung Foundation Books) (1979)

by Marie-Louise von Franz

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Although alchemy is popularly regarded as the science that sought to transmute base physical matter, many of the medieval alchemists were more interested in developing a discipline that would lead to the psychological and spiritual transformation of the individual. C. G. Jung discovered in his study of alchemical texts a symbolic and imaginal language that expressed many of his own insights into psychological processes. In this book, Marie-Louise von Franz examines a text by the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician Gerhard Dorn in order to show the relationship of alchemy to the concepts and techniques of analytical psychology. In particular, she shows that the alchemists practiced a kind of meditation similar to Jung's technique of active imagination, which enables one to dialogue with the unconscious archetypal elements in the psyche. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, the book opens therapeutic insights into the relations among spirit, soul, and body in the practice of active imagination.… (more)
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As scientists today “enrich” or process uranium to transform it into a more “pure” metal for industrial/bomb-making purposes, so the 16th century alchemist believed that any metal, sufficiently “enriched” or processed, would transform into a metal’s purest form: gold.
Von Franz explains the theories of alchemist Gerhard Dorn:
“... gold, now really understood as a metal, is the perfect state of every metal. Iron, copper, and alloy, and so forth, are just not - yet - completed metals, hampered by stuff which is inimical to them. Therefore, if you make this higher separatio and remove what hampers the inner development of that metal, it will naturally become gold.” pg. 99

Football as the American religion:
“...when you to further back in the history of religion, you can no longer distinguish between play or games and rituals. The history of games such as still exist in primitive societies - like dice, ring-toss (putting a stick in the ground and then throwing a ring over it), and all the group and ball games - shows that these are played both as rituals and, at the same time, as games.... In other words, when a man is not occupied in hunting, eating, making love, or sleeping, if he has any further energy left, then - let us use the zoological expression - he moves about and does things which to him express the meaning of his existence, and such things are generally ritual-games or game-rituals. And according to the material I have seen, at least ninety percent if not all of them always cluster around what we now would call the symbolism of the Self.
“There is generally a mandala structure involved somewhere: rings have to be put over a center, or you have a round bowl into which you have to throw little stones, and you hit or miss the goal. The patterns of all those ritualistic games are bigger or smaller mandala patterns, and even the implements used, like dice, are generally of a mandala structure, and it is the same all over the world, whether in North America, India, China, Australia, and so on. These ritual games and performances are therefore the oldest features of religious life that which we can trace historically.” pg. 91
  Mary_Overton | Dec 22, 2013 |
this book, Marie-Louise von Franz examines a text by the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician Gerhard Dorn in order to show the relationship of alchemy to the concepts and techniques of analytical psychology. In particular, she shows that the alchemists practiced a kind of meditation similar to Jung's technique of active imagination, which enables one to dialogue with the unconscious archetypal elements in the psyche. ( )
  LTW | Sep 6, 2006 |
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Although alchemy is popularly regarded as the science that sought to transmute base physical matter, many of the medieval alchemists were more interested in developing a discipline that would lead to the psychological and spiritual transformation of the individual. C. G. Jung discovered in his study of alchemical texts a symbolic and imaginal language that expressed many of his own insights into psychological processes. In this book, Marie-Louise von Franz examines a text by the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician Gerhard Dorn in order to show the relationship of alchemy to the concepts and techniques of analytical psychology. In particular, she shows that the alchemists practiced a kind of meditation similar to Jung's technique of active imagination, which enables one to dialogue with the unconscious archetypal elements in the psyche. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, the book opens therapeutic insights into the relations among spirit, soul, and body in the practice of active imagination.

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Although alchemy is popularly regarded as the science that sought to transmute base physical matter, many of the medieval alchemists were more interested in developing a discipline that would lead to the psychological and spiritual transformation of the individual. C. G. Jung discovered in his study of alchemical texts a symbolic and imaginal language that expressed many of his own insights into psychological processes. In this book, Marie-Louise von Franz examines a text by the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician Gerhard Dorn in order to show the relationship of alchemy to the concepts and techniques of analytical psychology. In particular, she shows that the alchemists practiced a kind of meditation similar to Jung's technique of active imagination, which enables one to dialogue with the unconscious archetypal elements in the psyche. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, the book opens therapeutic insights into the relations among spirit, soul, and body in the practice of active imagination.
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