The Philosopher’s Stone (Full Text)

In this short historical film, we see Carl Jung, the renowned Swiss psychologist and one of the founders of analytical psychology and depth psychology, reciting a Latin text carved onto a stone. Jung completed the carving of this stone on his seventy-fifth birthday in 1950 and installed it at his home at Bollingen Tower.

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

When you pick up a stone from the bed of a river and hold it in your hand, what do you sense in it?
A stone can have any shape, yet despite all its fractures and asymmetrical angles it conveys an impression of completeness and unity. This is why, in archetypal psychology, the stone is regarded as a symbol of the human Self.

The inscription Jung carved on this stone is drawn from an ancient alchemical text and refers to the Self that sits at the centre of the mandala of every human being.

Think of yourself. At five years old... ten years old... adolescence... and today... Which one is you?

The “I” of this present moment is only a spatiotemporal form of the Self within you, a Self that is not altered by the cycle of time: that singular presence within us which sits, alone and silent, observing life.

There is something within us that is not limited by time and place, and for Jung this solitary silent observer is the Self, or the lapis philosophorum—the philosopher’s stone within us.

If we find it, it performs alchemy in our soul, yet it is itself the end of alchemy. Below I have offered an approximate translation of Jung’s words:

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

Aydin Areta