Archetypes: The Prima Materia
The prima materia is featured in several of Jungs works, particularly those on alchemy.[i] However, the term predates Jung and the alchemists by hundreds of years. The first known usage is in Aristotle, who considered the “first mater” to be a substrate of substances. As a tree, for example, was transformed into ash, it moved from one substance to the next. Yet something remained. That something must have been common to both the tree and the ash. Aristotle called this substrate the prima materia.
Later, the alchemists would attempt to change matter. Famously, they wanted to transform lead into gold. To change one substance into the next, they hypothesized that the first substance needed to be dissolved (solutio) into the prima materia and later reformed (coniunctio) into gold.
Jung initially saw alchemy as nonsense. After a couple of years of an alchemical tract collecting dust on his shelf, he returned to it and realized that alchemists communicated in symbols – much like the dream symbols he had analyzed in his patients. If the alchemists were proto-chemists, experimenting with matter long before any scientific methodology or theory could constrain their fantasies, then much of their work was imaginal. In other words, what wasn’t scientific was psychological. This is the symbolic content that Jung was attempting to analyze.
In this context, the prima materia is the psychological material that one must be reduced to during the process of transformation. In other words, the individual must be dissolved into his psychological substrate: the prima materia. This phase, wherein one’s higher order concepts and categories, possibly his ego, have been broken down into pure consciousness akin to that of a child’s, is the nigredo or blackness. Jung states,
For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me… it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am object and every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. ‘Lost in oneself’ is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are.
The unconscious no sooner touches us than we are it – we become unconscious of ourselves. That is the age-old danger, instinctively known and feared by primitive man, who himself stands so very close to this pleroma. His [self-]consciousness is still uncertain, wobbling on its feet. It is still childish, having just emerged from the primal waters. A wave of the unconscious may easily roll over it, and then he forgets who he was and does things that are strange to him. Hence primitives are afraid of uncontrolled emotions, because [self-]consciousness breaks down under them and gives way to possession. All man’s strivings have therefore been directed towards the consolidation of consciousness. This was the purpose of rite and dogma; they are dams and walls to keep back the dangers of the unconscious, the “perils of the soul.” Primate rites consist accordingly in the exorcizing of spirits, the lifting of spells, the adverting of the evil omen, propitiation, purification, and the production by sympathetic magic of helpful occurrences (C.W. vol. 9, pt. 1, p. 21-22).
From there, one had to reform themselves, having burned off the misconceptions accumulated across one’s lifetime. This is the albedo or whiteness. According to Jeffery Raff, a second dissolution and coagulation can occur, forming the philosophers stone (a symbol of the Self).[ii] This phase is the rubedo or redness.
In conclusion, in the Jungian tradition, the prima materia is undifferentiated, unformed, state of consciousness which, through the process of individuation, is differentiated and unified into the Self.
The prima materia is closely related to the Ouroboros. Learn more about the Ouroboros here.
Often, the solutio is represented as a sacrifice of the ego. Akin to a bull. Learn more about the Bull here.
Forms ‘draw out’ substances from the prima materia. Those forms reside in Heaven. Read about Heaven here.
You can read Joseph Jackowski’s personal Substack here.