Alchemy Course: Yellowing and the Stone

Course Description

James Hillman was a past master of alchemical psychology. This field uses metaphors derived from ancient alchemy to elucidate deep structures in the creative imagination. We tend to forget that creative processes are not random. Imagination embodies along lines that become apparent when we ponder the frequently incomprehensible images of alchemy.

The book, Alchemical Psychology, covers a lifetime of studies and is quite difficult to read by someone who is not deeply steeped in alchemy, the work of C.G. Jung or James Hillman. Robert Bosnak and Patricia Berry have studied these thinkers for well over 40 years.

James Hillman was the primary training analyst of Robert Bosnak, who developed the field of embodied imagination: the way in which images can be felt in the body and shape our embodied condition.

This course goes through Alchemical Psychology and engages with the chapters Yellow and The Stone page by page – and frequently line by line – sometimes dropping even between the lines into the great mystery itself. For those who have tasted these mysteries, there is no way back. One is haunted by them for life. It was so with Jung, Hillman, and with Bosnak as well. It will happen to you if you’re open to it.

This course is ideal if

• You want to learn more about and understand how - in the creative process - yellowing is a crucial phase to bring about change, art, and creation into the world.
• You are interested in learning how to take on an alchemical perspective about the goal of life.

Course Overview

In this remarkable fourth course of the Alchemical Psychology series, Robert Bosnak guides us through James Hillman’s final two chapters: The Yellowing of the Work and Concerning the Stone. These chapters are Hillman at his most daring, and Bosnak meets him there with fire, imagination, and a touch of humor.

We explore citrinitas, the often-overlooked yellowing stage of alchemy. Yellow is unstable, uncomfortable, wild. It stinks. It ferments. It bridges the cool lunar reflections of silver and the embodied, red radiance of rubedo. Bosnak shows how yellowing is a crisis of knowing, a rupture of purity, and the messy turn from inner insight to worldly engagement.

Then we turn to The Stone, where the work culminates. The stone is the goal, and the goal is both a vision as the journey. The Stone is that which endures, the thisness of reality. It asks us to stop, feel, respond. It is wisdom hardened by time, yet porous to the world. Bosnak draws on dreams, stories, and his own lifelong practice to illuminate how the goal is not personal growth, but an embodied, living participation in psyche and cosmos. This course is a profound encounter—with the world, with the work, and with what matters.

Further courses on the subsequent chapters of Alchemical Psychology are also available on Jung Platform:

• Alchemy course: Embodying James Hillman Alchemical Psychology
• Alchemy course: Salt, Black and Blue
• Alchemy course: The imagination of Air and the Azure Vault
• Alchemy course : Silver and the White Earth

By the end of this course, you will

• Have tools to approach your creativity more practically.
• Have tools to reflect on the importance of the goal of life.