ABSTRACT
Western education teaches us to think in terms of cause and effect and to proceed logically through any argument or discussion. Where alchemy is concerned this presents an immediate difficulty, if not an impossibility. The alchemists carried out a series of procedures by which they believed they could extract gold from base metal. However, one very important fact needs to be remembered: it was much more than a series of tasks to be performed in their laboratories. Alchemists believed in a process by which gold could be produced from base metals; Gnostics believed immaterial sparks of spirit could be released from the body to enable them to reunite with the g-dhead. Psychologically, that which is sought after is not in the outer world but in the inner world of the psyche; an inner human process was simply projected onto the outside world, the process Carl Jung called the individuation process, which is why alchemy became the core of Jung's work.
