Spellbound by Daniel Z. Lieberman MD

Author:Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637741337
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2022-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Take the ravenous grey wolf that on account of his name is subjected to bellicose Mars, but by birth is a child of old Saturn, and that lives in the valleys and mountains of the world and is possessed of great hunger. Throw the king’s body before him that he may have his nourishment from it. And when he has devoured the king, then make a great fire and throw the wolf into it so that he burns up entirely; thus will the king be redeemed.

Lawrence Principe, a professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, interprets this passage as a method of purifying gold.3 Gold is the metaphorical king of metals. The wolf is stibnite, a gray mineral made from sulfur and antimony that Principe suggests is “ravenous” because, when it’s melted, it dissolves other metals “with breathtaking speed.” When impure gold is added to molten stibnite, the impurities combine with the sulfur and float to the surface. The gold forms a brilliant white alloy with the antimony, and when this alloy is heated over a fire, the antimony is driven off, leaving behind pure gold, the “redeemed king” in Valentine’s description.

Principe believes the personification of chemical reactants was simply a way of hiding the alchemical secrets from those who didn’t have the background necessary to decode the riddles. Jung, however, interpreted alchemical writings as expressions of archetypal themes. In just the brief quoted passage, we find the archetypes of royalty, the predatory animal, death, and redemption by fire.

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