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Chiron new release looks at the role of alchemy in Goethe’s Faust Chiron Publications is pleased to announce the release of A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust by Dr. Stephen Wilkerson.
Readers today are especially thrilled by the prospect of good news. Drought and global warming, civil war and famine, poverty and economic inequity—yes, bad news abounds. A Most Mysterious Union: The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust, on the other hand, is about hope and optimism for the future. The recorded history of our world is largely one of a sometimes worthy patriarchal striving. It has, however, all too often been tarnished, marred, and horribly disfigured by the hatreds, intolerance, and destruction that have accompanied it. And the good news? There is another way, poignantly and persuasively outlined nearly two hundred years ago by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, involving the Divine Feminine.
Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust, involves an immensely intelligent but profoundly narcissistic man, who cruelly and selfishly exploits and ultimately ruins the life of an innocent maiden. In the legend on which Goethe’s great work is based, Faust understandably winds up in Hell, just as he does in virtually every version of this well-known wager with the Devil. But in Goethe’s interpretation, the deeply flawed protagonist is received into Heaven by the Mother of God Herself.
How and why can this be? Mankind’s long history of heroic accomplishment has never been sufficiently tempered by a sense of global community and cooperation that mitigate the horror and devastation that ever seem to march along beside a single-minded struggle to achieve and prevail. And how may this missing unity be brought about? Alchemy as understood in this book has nothing to do with an early and misguided chemistry and everything to do with the sort of individual transformation necessary for a better, more gracious, more inclusive world.
The millennial patterns of blind violence and repression can only be ameliorated by a thoughtful and genuine embrace of open-minded reception of difference and heart-felt valuation of a larger, borderless world in which all grow together rather than further apart. Such is the promise of the final words in Goethe’s Faust: “The Divine Feminine leads us forward.”
“Dr. Stephen Wilkerson has created a masterful piece of scholarly work in his book concerning the role of alchemy in Goethe’s classic poem, Faust. Essentially, Wilkerson maps Jung’s process of individuation, through Faust’s narrative, as the alchemist projected this psychic dynamic on to the alchemical process. The flow of this seminal work by Dr. Wilkerson is toward one of ultimate, ‘coniunctio,’ or union with the Whole. Folded within this novel approach is a complete, yet concise biography of Goethe and Jung and history of alchemy. One closes this book with a greater knowledge of analytical psychology and a clearer sense of what is needed in the 21st century is the union of opposites in the inner and outer world.”
-J. Pittman McGehee, D.D., Diplomate Jungian Analyst
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The son of medical missionaries to China, Stephen Wilkerson was born in Shanghai in 1949, although he later moved to and grew up through high school in central Taiwan. Like Faust, pulled in two directions, he received an M.D. and also a Ph.D. in history from Duke University and has been vacillating between science and the humanities ever since. Most of his professional career has been in the field of medicine, first in the U.S. Navy, then in the U.S. Army, and finally in private practice in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. His time as a physician, especially in the military, provided many opportunities for teaching, which he has done in some capacity or other ever since working as a tutor and English language instructor in high school.
After retiring first from the Army and later from civilian practice, he entered a program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, from which he most recently received a Ph.D. in mythological studies. He has for ten years co-chaired the area on mythology of the national Popular Culture Association, and continues his interest in teaching now primarily for Road Scholar and other adult continuing education programs.
He has published a number of papers, particularly in medicine, but this is his first book. He is now living in Black Mountain, North Carolina. His wife works there as a Jungian psychotherapist. His son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter live in West Asheville; a daughter recently began work in Charleston, South Carolina; and another daughter is invitingly not too far removed in St. Petersburg, Florida.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
CHAPTER 1
The Mystery of the Unification 9
CHAPTER 2
The Life of Goethe 23
Introduction 23
Childhood and Youth 24
The First Weimar Period 37
The Second Weimar Period 49
The “Procession of Beloved Women” 65
Death—Of Goethe and Friends 79
CHAPTER 3
Goethe the Alchemist 91
Introduction 91
Brief Survey of the History of Alchemy 96
Goethe the Alchemist 114
CHAPTER 4
Jung, Alchemy, and the Coniunctio 135
Introduction/The Life of Jung 135
Jung and Alchemy 148
Raff: Jung and the Alchemical Imagination 168
CHAPTER 5
The Mystery of the Coniunctio:
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust 177
PART ONE: PATIENCE AND PATHWAY
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust—Introduction 177
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust—Patience 187
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust—The Pathway 189
CHAPTER 6
The Mystery of the Coniunctio:
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust 209
PART TWO: COLOR AND CONJUGATION
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust—Alchemical Color Change 209
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust—The Coniunctio 229
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust—Alchemical Clues 250
The Role of Alchemy in Goethe’s Faust—Conclusion 257
CHAPTER 7
The Coniunctio and the Unity of Faust 261
Introduction 261
Part One—The Earth Spirit 265
Part One—Alchemy and the Plague/Walpurgis Night 270
Part Two 278
Part Two—Homunculus 285
Part Two—Baucis and Philemon 289
Part Two—The Mothers 292
CHAPTER 8
Faust, Ascent, and Alchemy 299
Introduction 299
Faust and The Divine Comedy 302
The Pilgrim’s Progress 307
Marlowe—Doctor Faustus 313
Gounod’s Faust 318
Mann—Doctor Faustus 324
Conclusion 331
CHAPTER 9
Faust and the Eternal Feminine 335
Bibliography 355
Index 367
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