Alchemical Musings

Ralph Metzner first wrote about alchemy when he was in his early 30s. He included a chapter on alchemy in his book Maps of Consciousness, which was published in 1971. As a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, he taught a course titled "Alchemy and Depth Psychology," as part of the East-West Psychology Program. The study of alchemy was also a part of a course he taught on esoteric systems of thought. I was a student in his alchemy class in the summer of 1983, as well as of the esoteric systems course during the academic year. In the 1990s he wrote about a process he called Alchemical Divination, and developed that into a training program which he taught for more than a decade in the early 2000s. In the latter few years of his life he recorded his thoughts on some 36 alchemical terms. Over an arc of some 50 years, Ralph worked on the practice of using alchemical processes for inner transformation. This volume of alchemical musings combines his earliest writing on alchemy with his last writings on alchemical terms.