Dream meaning of alchemy

The real beginnings of alchemy date back to the first centuries A.D., when it was practised mainly by Greeks and Arabs. Elements from various traditions, including Christian mysticism, were later incorporated. It was essentially a symbolic process involving the endeavour to make gold, regarded as the symbol of illumination and salvation.

The four stages of the process were signified by different colours, as follows: black (guilt, origin, latent forces) for ‘prime matter’ (a symbol of the soul in its original condition); white (minor work, first transmutation, quicksilver); red (sulphur, passion); and, finally, gold. Piobb analyses the symbolic meaning of the various operations.

The first, known as calcination, stood for the ‘death of the profane’, i.e. the extinction of all interest in life and in the manifest world; the second, putrefaction, was a consequence of the first, consisting of the separation of the destroyed remains; solution, the third, denoted the purification of matter; distillation, the fourth, was the ‘rain’ of purified matter, i.e. of the elements of salvation isolated by the preceding operations; fifthly, conjunction symbolized the joining of opposites (the coincidentia oppositorum, identified by Jung with the close union, in Man, of the male principle of consciousness with the female principle of the unconscious); sublimation, the sixth stage, symbolized the suffering resulting from the mystic detachment from the world and the dedication to spiritual striving.

In emblematic designs, this stage is depicted by a wingless creature borne away by a winged being, or sometimes it is represented by the Prometheus myth.

The final stage is philosophic congelation, i.e. the binding together inseparably of the fixed and the volatile principles (the male/invariable with the female/’saved’ variable).