Basile: Chemica Sonora Symbolica – Benedetto Basile

Alchemy, an arcane and obscure practice, frequently reduced by today’s rationalistic thought to a pseudo-chemical stuttering, found, in the past century, and thanks to the intuitions and research by Carl Gustav Jung, a new meaning and significance in a symbolic and psychoanalytical key. The lapis, the stone capable of transmuting vile metals into gold, as well as the elixir of life, became as many expressions of a psychological and spiritual realization, symbols for a transformation which, willy-nilly, regards all human beings.
In this view, the alchemist’s gold should not be mistaken for the aurum vulgi, the material gold craved for by the people (thus many alchemists’ works affirm); rather, it is the realization of that coniunctio oppositorum which is nothing else than the overcoming of dualism, i.e. of the source of every contrast and suffering. This duality is realized, in the psychological domain, by the contrast between conscious and unconscious, rationality and instinct, expressions of the Self and social rules.
Christian (and sometimes heretical) mysticism, similar to the Eastern one, is full of references to the non-dual nature of the true being: to the point that it identifies the single human being with God intended as the One. Jung gave a new name and a new definition to this compulsion which is found in every individual of every culture and every time, by naming it individuation. He thus revealed the presence of thousand-years-old psychical motifs in the symbols and proceedings of alchemy. In this perspective, alchemy revealed itself to be a “project of redemption of nature, aiming at bringing to light the divine side which is asleep in the darkness of things, of the body, of the instincts” (from the back cover of Psicologia e alchimia, Turin: Boringhieri, 1981).