In this short historical film, you can see Carl Jung reading in English the Latin text he had carved on a stone for his seventy-fifth birthday in 1950 and installed at his home in Bollingen, Switzerland.

The philosophers’ stone, or lapis philosophorum, is a stone in alchemy through which metals are said to be transformed into gold; it has also been called the essence of life.

There is something within us that is not limited by time and place. For Jung, this solitary and silent observer is the Self, or the lapis philosophorum within us.

If we find it, it works alchemy within our soul, yet it is itself the end of the alchemical process. Below I have provided an approximate translation of Jung’s words:

“I am an orphan ... in solitude! Yet I am found everywhere. I am one, but in conflict with myself. At once I am old and young! I have known neither father nor mother, for I must be drawn up out of death like a fish, or else I have fallen from the sky like that white stone. I wander through mountains and forests, while at the same time I am hidden in the innermost core of human beings. For everyone I am mortal, and yet the cycle of time will not touch me!”

Aydin Areta