ALCHEMY
One day a north west wind was lashing the Rhine into foaming waves. My way to school led along the river. Suddenly I saw approaching frosm the north a ship with a great mainsail running up the Rhine before a storm. Here was something completely new in my experience- a sailing vessel on the Rhine! My imagination took wings. If, instead of the swiftly flowing river, all of Alsace was a lake, we would have sailing boats and great steamers. Then Basel would be a port; it would almost be as good as living by the sea. Then everything would be different and we would live in another time and another world. There would be no Gymnasium, no long walk to school, and I would be grown up and able to arrange my life as I wished. There would be a hill or a rock rising out of the lake, connected by a narrow isthmus to the mainland, cut through by a broad canal with a wooden bridge over it, leading to a gate flanked by towers and opening into a little medieval city built on the surrounding slopes. On the rock stood a well fortified castle with a tall keep, a watch tower. This was my house. In it there were no fine halls or any signs of magnificence. The rooms were simple, paneled and rather small. There was an uncommonly attractive library where they was everything worth knowing. There was also a collection of weapons, and the bastions were mounted with heavy cannons. Besides that, there was a garrison of fifty men-at-arms in the castle. The little town had several hundred garrisons and was governed by a mayor and a town council of old men. I myself was justice of the peace, arbitrator and adviser. Who appeared only now and then to hold court. On the landward side the town had a port in which lay my two masted schooner, armed with several small cannon.
The nerve centre and raison t’etre of this whole arrangement was the secret of the keep, which I alone knew. The thought had come to me like a shock. For, inside the tower, extending from the battlements to the vaulted cellar, was a copper column or heavy wire cable as thick as a man’e arm, which ramified at the top into the finest branches, like the crown of a tree- or better still- like a taproot with all its tiny rootlets turned upside down and reaching into the air. From the air they drew a certain inconceivable something which was conducted down the copper column into the cellar. Here I had an equally inconceivable apparatus, a kind of laboratory in which I made gold out of the mysterious substance which the copper roots drew from the air. This was really an arcanum of whose nature I neither had nor wished to form any conception. Nor did my imagination concern itself with the transformation process. Tactfully and with a certain nervousness it skirted around what actually went on in this laboratory. There was a kind of inner prohibition: one was not supposed to look into it too closely, nor ask what kind of substance was extracted from the air. As Goethe says of the Mothers, “Even to speak of them dismays the bold”.
“Spirit” of course meant for me something ineffable, but at bottom I did not reagard it as essentiall different from very rareified air. What the roots absorbed and transmitted to the copper trunk was a kind of spiritual essence which became isible down in the cellar as finished gold coins. This was certainly no conjuring trick, but a venerable and vitally important secret of nature which had come to me I know not how and which I had to conceal not only from the council of elders but, in a sense, also from myself. .. ....
In his 80's, Jung remembers boyhood, boredom and a fantasy he often escaped to..Jung talks of being influenced by literature from the 12th century, the time when alchemy and the quest for the holy grail were both- big? (write this bettah!)
