Mysterium Coniunctionis


Mysterium Coniunctionis, subtitled An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, is Volume 14 in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, published in 1970 by Princeton University Press in the United States and by Routledge and Kegan Paul in the United Kingdom. Completed in his 81st year, it is Carl Jung's last major work on the synthesis of opposites in alchemy and psychology.
The book gives a final account of Jung's lengthy researches in alchemy. He empirically discovered that certain key problems of modern man were prefigured in what the alchemists called their "art" or "process". Edward F. Edinger poses an important question in the introduction to his book "The Mystery of The Conjunctio": "One might ask, why alchemy?... The alchemists were fired with the beginnings of the modern spirit of inquiry, but yet, as investigators of the nature of matter they were still half asleep. So, in their zeal to investigate those newly opened vistas, they projected their fantasies and dream images into matter. in effect, they dreamed a vast collective dream using chemical operations and materials as imagery and subject matter for that dream. Alchemy is that great collective dream, and what makes it so important for us is that it's the dream of our ancestors. The alchemist were rooted in the Western psyche which we've inherited, so their imagery, their fantasy, their dream, is our fantasy and our dream.
That's what Jung demonstrates so magnificently in his major works on alchemy."
Jung maintained that:
The Journal of Analytical Psychology said of this book:
The work includes ten plates, a bibliography, an index, and an appendix of original Latin and Greek texts quoted.

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