At the Roots of Jung’s Alchemy

ABSTRACT It is a well-known fact that Jung decided to devote himself to a systematic study of the European alchemical tradition at the beginning of the 1930s. What readied him to do so remains, to this day, uncertain. Shedding light on Jung’s long-standing interest in rituals and processes of death and rebirth, which culminated in his 1932 Ravenna vision, this article traces Jung’s earliest understanding of alchemy back to the pages of The Red Book. A close reading of a sequence of four illuminations, which Jung painted in the fall of 1919, allows us to see how profound his understanding of alchemy as an experience of inner rebirth already was, and how powerfully those early images kept reverberating through Jung’s later alchemical writings.