Reading & Selected Quotes:

We continue with chapter one of the book of James Hillman on Alchemical Psychology.

Patricia Berry selected sentences:

P. 13. (para 2)

A smith had to know how to manage fire and regulate heat;  a pharmacist must make mixtures in the right proportion, else a remedy could kill rather than cure.  (The very word pharmakon means both poison and remedy.)

P. 13, (para 4)

a)  Alchemy presents an array of different qualities of vessel, different fragilities, visibilities, and forms: condensing coils, multiheaded alembics, pelicans, cucurbits, flat open pans.  b) One uses copper or glass or clay to hold one's stuff and cook it.

P. 14. (last para.)

a)  Alchemy took Jung away from the systematic rationalism of the types...  No term means only one thing.  b) Every alchemical phenomenon is both material and psychological at the same time, else alchemy could not claim to be salvific of both the human soul and material nature.

P. 16, (end of para. 2)

Even while the words are concrete, material, physical, it is a patent mistake to take them literally.  Alchemy gives us a language of substance which cannot be taken substantively, concrete expressions which are not literal.

P. 17. (para 2) 

"Conceptual language...is not self-evidently metaphor. It is too contemporary to be transparent; we are living right in its midst. Its myth is going on all about us, so it does not have a metaphorical sense built in it.  I do not know, cannot see, that I am really ... not composed of an ego and self, a feeling function and a power drive, castration anxiety and depressive positions."

Robert Bosnak selected sentences:

p.12 #3          Not only ... the psychic fact that it denotes.

p.12 #5/13#1           Enter alchemy - thing words ...nourishing edibles.

p.15 #2          perplexed contemplation

p.18 # 4         Our concepts ... "drawing away" their matter.

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