Alchemy Research Group | University of Essex

Introduction

Alchemy is a major strand of Western Esotericism whose symbolic language of transformation was reanimated by C.G. Jung as a Western form of yoga, offering a framework for understanding the transformation of consciousness through individuation.

Alchemical imagery and processes became central to Jung’s later work and to the development of Analytical Psychology, providing a language through which psychic and spiritual transformation, the relationship between psyche and matter, and the integration of opposites could be explored.

Yet alchemy remains underutilised as a mythic language for understanding transformation in contemporary culture. Its terminology is often poorly understood, appropriated without sufficient attention to its historical and esoteric contexts, or recast through concepts drawn from other traditions.

There is therefore a need for an interdisciplinary space in which alchemy can be examined both historically and as a living symbolic language, including through comparative engagement with alchemical and transformative traditions across cultures.

Aims

The aim of this research group is to investigate the meanings, manifestations and contemporary significance of alchemical transformation including Jung’s development of alchemical symbolism within Analytical Psychology and its subsequent post-Jungian interpretations, across psychology, mythology, religion, philosophy and diverse cultural traditions. Alongside academic and theoretical inquiry, the group will consider the application, experience and phenomenology of transformation through an alchemical lens, while maintaining critical attention to the relationship between historical traditions and contemporary interpretations.

The group will bring together scholars and practitioners from diverse fields to foster dialogue, comparative conceptual analysis and new perspectives on alchemy as a significant and still underexplored language of transformation.

Taking part

Participation is by invitation or application. If you would like to participate, or propose someone to be invited, please send your name, academic situation and email address to Karen (kk25320@essex.ac.uk) or Silvy (sr24358@essex.ac.uk).

Header image: Matthäus (Matthias) Merian the Elder’s In Praefationem Tertiam: Basilicae Philosophicae, the famous alchemical Microcosm and Macrocosm engraving, originally made for Johann Daniel Mylius’s Opus medico-chymicum (1618) and subsequently reproduced in the Musaeum Hermeticum (1678).

Meetings

Autumn term 2026

Wednesday 28 October

5:00pm - 6:30pm (GMT)

PhD researcher Cassie Fielding will speak on "Blue Shadows and Golden Geese: Surrealist Poetry Practice and the Alchemical Opus".

In her PhD research on surrealist practice and the alchemical opus, Cassie Fielding maps a phenomenological account of surrealist poetry writing onto the Axiom of Maria Prophetissa, which Jung wrote in Psychology and Alchemy runs “like a leitmotiv throughout almost the whole of the lifetime of alchemy”: One becomes Two, Two becomes Three and out of the third comes the One as the fourth.

Layering the four alchemical stages of nigredo, albedo, citrintas and rubedo over this framework – an original application as far as she is aware – Cassie teases out the heart of surrealist practice as an enactment of Paracelsus’ tria prima: sulphur, mercury and salt, understood as soul, spirit and body. Three co-constitutive principles whose distinction and interaction surrealist practice makes visible.

The implications of the research challenge the standard view of the alchemical process, thus the conventional understanding of Jung’s individuation process, as a progressive move towards unattainable wholeness. It asks whether the Self, or the alchemical counterpart of the lapis, is not elusive because it is hidden – a buried treasure waiting to be excavated from the depths – but ungraspable because it is always in the process of being made.

Wednesday 11 November

5:00pm - 6:30pm (GMT)

Dr. Rohan Naidoo will speak on an aspect of his thesis: Alchemical flames: Individuation through the sacred and sexual in tummo meditation and Jung’s late thought.

Wednesday 9 December

5:00pm - 6:30pm (GMT)

Dr. Steve Myers will speak on Alchemy in Psychological Types and everyday life.

This session will argue that Jung’s later use of alchemy gives symbolic language to a process of psychological transformation that is already present in Psychological Types, and which Jung had wanted to be of value to a lay audience. In particular, it will focus on the axiom of Maria – “one becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth” – which Marie-Louise von Franz related to typology, citing a private conversation with Jung.

The presentation will then introduce a case study from organisational consultancy, predating my formal training in analytical psychology, including the use of a film clip. Participants will be invited to consider what alchemical principles may have been involved, and where the intervention might sit within the axiom of Maria. The concluding discussion will focus on how alchemical principles can be applied more widely, without necessarily using explicitly alchemical language.