Prima Materia: The First Matter

Prima materia (Latin for “first matter”) is the raw material of the alchemical Great Work: the formless starting substance that is broken down in the nigredo and, at the end of the work, becomes the philosopher’s stone. Carl Jung read it as the unconscious material a person begins with, especially the parts of experience the ego would rather throw away.

Where the Idea Comes From

The term reaches alchemy from Greek philosophy. Aristotle and his commentators spoke of a first matter, prote hyle, a substrate with no qualities of its own that can take on any form. The alchemists borrowed the idea and made it practical: if every substance shares the same underlying matter, then a base metal could in principle be reduced to it and brought back up as something nobler.

That is why the work begins with dissolution. Before anything can be transformed, it has to be returned to a formless state. The first operations, calcination, solution and putrefaction, were all ways of taking a substance back towards its first matter.

A Thousand Names

The alchemists refused to say plainly what the first matter was. Instead they gave it name after name. Martin Ruland’s Lexicon Alchemiae of 1612 lists dozens of them, and Jung reproduced long lists in Psychology and Alchemy: water, the sea, the dragon, the green lion, the toad, the virgin’s milk, the orphan, lead, salt, the shadow of the sun.

The texts agree on a few of its qualities, and they are strange ones. It is cheap and found everywhere. It is trodden underfoot and thrown on the dungheap. The ignorant despise it. And it is, in the end, the same substance as the stone: the thing the whole work was trying to make was present in the material from the start, waiting to be freed.

How Jung Read It

Jung noticed that the alchemists described their raw material in exactly the terms his patients used for what they least wanted to look at in themselves: worthless, chaotic, shameful, something to be got rid of. He concluded that the alchemists, working with matter they did not fully understand, had projected the unconscious onto it.

Read this way, the prima materia is the starting point of inner work: not an ideal, but the actual and often unwelcome material of a life. The mood that keeps returning, the pattern you are embarrassed by, the part of the past you have tried to leave behind. The tradition’s claim is that this is not an obstacle to the work but its substance. The philosopher’s stone is made from it, not in spite of it.

What It Is Not

• A secret ingredient. The tradition insists it is ordinary and everywhere. Its rarity lies in being recognised, not in being found.
• Something to be fixed first. The work does not begin after the difficult material has been cleaned up. It begins with that material.
• A diagnosis. Reading painful experience as raw material is a way of relating to it, not a reason to avoid professional care when it is needed.

Where It Leads

The first matter enters the vessel and the four stages begin: the nigredo, the blackening; the albedo, the whitening; the citrinitas, the yellowing; and the rubedo, the reddening. The twelve operations are the steps by which it is worked, from calcination to projection.

Questions

What is the prima materia?

The prima materia, or first matter, is the raw material of the alchemical Great Work: the formless starting substance from which the philosopher’s stone was to be made. The alchemists described it as common, cheap and overlooked, and gave it hundreds of names.

What does prima materia mean in Jungian psychology?

Jung read the prima materia as the unconscious material a person starts from: the rejected, chaotic or shameful parts of experience that the ego would rather throw away, and that the work of individuation has to begin with.

Is the prima materia the same as the philosopher’s stone?

Many alchemical texts say that it is: the stone is made from the first matter and, in a sense, already hidden in it. The work does not add something new so much as free what was present from the start.

Sources: C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12); Martin Ruland, Lexicon Alchemiae (Frankfurt, 1612); Edward F. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche (1985).