What would you say the main value of the research and the writing that you and Jung have done on alchemy is?
I would say that a civilization needs a myth to live. We know that if we missionaries destroy the myth of the primitive people, they destroy them also physically, they begin to drink, they do degenerate, they are lost and no civilization can live only from welfare, it needs a myth to live.
All great civilizations when they were flourishing had a living myth and I think that the Christian myth on which we have lived has degenerated and has become one-sided and insufficient and I think that alchemy is the complete myth. And therefore if our Western civilization has a possibility of survival, it would be by accepting the alchemical myth, which is a completion and continuation and enriched completion of the christian myth - that's a myth we could live and live again with encompass to the Christian myth, which doesn't satisfy a great amount of people anymore.
And the Christian myth is deficient on not including enough the feminine or in Catholicism they have the Virgin Mary, but it's only the purified feminine, it's not the dark feminine and in excluding matter and pleading matter as dead and the realm of the devil and in not facing the problem of the opposites of evil.
But alchemy faces the problem of the opposite, faces the problem of matter and faces the problem of the feminine - the three things which are lacking in Christianity and therefore it complements the Christian myth and could revive it to that way.
