The Great Work
The central aim of alchemy and later ceremonial magic: a transformation of matter, and in many writers, of the self.
Also: magnum opus, opus magnum, the Work
Magnum opus is Latin for great work, and in alchemy it names the process of turning base matter into a perfected state, often described in stages such as blackening, whitening and reddening. Some alchemists worked with metals in laboratories, others read the process as spiritual. Carl Jung, in the twentieth century, read alchemical imagery as a map of psychological change. In ceremonial magic of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, the Great Work was the realisation of the true will or union with the divine. Historians stress that the meaning varied sharply by author and period, and that metaphor and practice were often hard to separate.