11-25-2024, 05:11 PM
Blurb: "The Reenchantment of the World is a perceptive study of our scientific consciousness and a cogent and forceful challenge to its supremacy. Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its controlling position in the consciousness of the West."
Quotation 1: "Jung's specific contribution, both to the history of alchemy and to depth psychology, was the discovery that patients with no previous knowledge of alchemy were having dreams that reproduced the imagery of alchemical texts with a bewildering similarity. In his famous essay "Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy," Jung recorded a series of one such patient's dreams and produced for nearly every dream a separate alchemical plate that duplicated the dream symbols in an unmistakable way. Inasmuch as Jung claimed that others had produced a similar set of dream images while undergoing the individuation process, Jung was forced to conclude that this process was indeed inherent in the psyche and that the alchemists, without really knowing exactly what they were doing, had recorded the transformations of their own unconscious which they then projected onto the material world."
Quotation 2: "By the sixteenth century, the church had drawn up a document establishing correspondences between the various alchemical processes and church sacraments. Hence putrefaction was extreme unction; distillation, ordination; calcination, repentance; coagulation, marriage; solution, baptism; sublimation, confirmation; and of course, transmutation, the Mass. We might infer from these correspondences that the collapse of church magic under the pressure of heretical sects, and later, the Protestant Reformation, led to an overemphasis on the religious dimension of alchemy. This, in addition to the attack being mounted by the growing technological literature, ultimately served to split it off from the exoteric tradition."
An interesting book, with many alchemical references:
https://www.amazon.com/Reenchantment-Wor...0801492254
Quotation 1: "Jung's specific contribution, both to the history of alchemy and to depth psychology, was the discovery that patients with no previous knowledge of alchemy were having dreams that reproduced the imagery of alchemical texts with a bewildering similarity. In his famous essay "Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy," Jung recorded a series of one such patient's dreams and produced for nearly every dream a separate alchemical plate that duplicated the dream symbols in an unmistakable way. Inasmuch as Jung claimed that others had produced a similar set of dream images while undergoing the individuation process, Jung was forced to conclude that this process was indeed inherent in the psyche and that the alchemists, without really knowing exactly what they were doing, had recorded the transformations of their own unconscious which they then projected onto the material world."
Quotation 2: "By the sixteenth century, the church had drawn up a document establishing correspondences between the various alchemical processes and church sacraments. Hence putrefaction was extreme unction; distillation, ordination; calcination, repentance; coagulation, marriage; solution, baptism; sublimation, confirmation; and of course, transmutation, the Mass. We might infer from these correspondences that the collapse of church magic under the pressure of heretical sects, and later, the Protestant Reformation, led to an overemphasis on the religious dimension of alchemy. This, in addition to the attack being mounted by the growing technological literature, ultimately served to split it off from the exoteric tradition."
An interesting book, with many alchemical references:
https://www.amazon.com/Reenchantment-Wor...0801492254