In his book Sorcerer'stone, a beginner's guide ot alchemy, Dennis William Hauck quote a 17th century riddle about alchemy that says
“The key to life and death is everywhere to be found, but if you do not find it in your own house, you will find it nowhere. Yet, it is before everyone's eyes; no one can live without it; everyone has used it. The poor usually possess more of it than the rich; children play with it in the streets. The meek and uneducated esteem it highly, but the privileged and learned often throw it away. It is the only thing from which the Philosopher's Stone can be prepared, and without it, no noble metal can ever be created."
Hauck even writes that "if you really understand the answer, there is no need for you to read the rest of this book, for you are already an alchemist who has drunk from the Holy Grail of alchemy. Go out into the world now and accumulate as much of this substance as you can find, for it is the key to all transformations."
The secret to that riddle is no so difficult to find. Some will answer love, light, thought time or God but when you take each one of these answers they do not quite fit with the riddle.
Jungians would probably say that it is the unconscious or the soul but this is not quite exact either. The answer to that riddle is CONSCIOUSNESS which is the prima materia or the prime matter to prepare the philosopher's stone.
We know from Jung's research on psychological types and from the MBTI that humans generally develop only two cognitive functions and the other two are left undifferentiated. We sometimes see the emergence of the tertiary function in old people but it never is as developed as the auxiliary cognitive funcion. The tertiary and the inferior functions are the complete opposites of the cognitive personality and are normally rejected as undesirable. The state of half consciousness is, therefore, nowadays lived as normal.
It should be stressed that Jung did not invent the cognitive functions, he used the four temperaments of the Ancient Greeks, the four elements of astrology, the four cherubs of the Bible and rename them. Those are all the same complexio oppositorum or combination of two pairs of opposites. What Jung has added to them are the two directions of psychic energy: introversion and extraversion.
In his 1925 Seminar on Analytical psychology, Jung defines the psychological state that leads to transcendent experiences or the transcendent function as the following: when one lower drastically the use of his auxiliary function for a sufficient period of time, the development of the tertiary function is automatically engaged. For example, if the use of the Feeling cognitive function is rejected, the opposite Thinking function will emerge to fill the gap in the rational or judgment capacity.
When that third cognitive function reaches the level of automatic functioning, the mind produces a symbol of the conjunction of opposites. That is exacty what happened to Jung in 1913.
From 1911, when he was writing Symbols of Transformation, Jung was preoccupied with the opposition Thinking-Feeling. After his break with Freud, he felt in a depressive state, and he did an extensive auto-analysis to get out of this condition. When those Thinking type techniques did not produce results, he abandoned them and started working on his Feeling function. He then played with pebbles, constructing little houses and started doing active imagination. That provoked the lowering of his auxiliary Thinking function and the development of his tertiary Feeling cognitive function. This process ultimately produced a transcendent experience. This is what Jung called the sacrifice:
"A sacrifice must be done in order to cut the hero away from the power of the unconscious and give him his individual autonomy. He has to pay himself off and contrive to fill the vacuum left in the unconscious." (Introduction to Jungian Psychology P. 31)
The sacrifice was in Jung’s case his Thinking cognitive function. In the Seminar, he recalled this dream that is a clear indicator of what is happening:
"Six days later (December 18, 1913), I had the following dream. I was with an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage, I in a lonely, rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn; the eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried's horn sounding over the mountains, and I knew that we had to kill him. We were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over the rocks. Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain, in the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead. Filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great and beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the murder might be discovered. But a tremendous downfall of rain began, and I knew that it would wipe out all traces of the dead. I had escaped the danger of discovery; life could go on, but an unbearable feeling of guilt remained."
In his Seminar, Jung said that
"It was a case of destroying the hero ideal of my efficiency. This has to be sacrificed in order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected with the sacrifice of the superior function in order to get at the libido necessary to activate the inferior functions. (P. 53)
But it was not the superior cognitive function that Jung killed but his Thinking auxiliary one and it activated the development of his Feeling tertiary function. Jung was an INTJ and as such he had Intuition as his dominant function and Thinking as the auxiliary one. Without knowing exactly what to do to exit his sickness, he triggered the right buttons to reach his transcendent function.
Conciousness is the answer to the riddle and the key to understand alchemy.
