The Vessel, the Hidden Room, and the Gold Within
Copyright © 2026 by Lois E. Wilkins, PhD, APRN
All rights reserved.
My interest in alchemy has accompanied much of my work with fairy tales, finding particular expression in my three-volume series, The Alchemy of Fairy Tales. A friend who knows of this interest recently traveled to Prague with her husband, where they visited Speculum Alchemiae, an alchemical museum housed in an old building above a subterranean workshop and laboratory. While exploring the museum shop, she encountered a small pendant that reminded her of my work and chose to bring it home to me. It is named the Amulet of Happiness.
The pendant hangs from a red thread. At its center is a small vessel held by a gold serpentine figure and inside the vessel rests several pieces of gold. I knew almost nothing about Speculum Alchemiae when she gave it to me, certainly not enough to understand why this little object would remain in my thoughts. Perhaps that is as it should be, for some images seem to arrive before we have language for them. A dream does this, as does a fairy tale, and sometimes an object does it as well. Something enters our lives without explanation and waits until we are ready to enter into relationship with it. Over the years I have learned not to hurry that opening, because too quick an interpretation can sometimes close precisely what the image has come to open.
Speculum Alchemiae means the Mirror of Alchemy. The museum occupies one of Prague’s old houses, where an alchemical workshop was discovered during reconstruction. The rooms are associated with the remarkable alchemical world of Rudolfine Prague, when Emperor Rudolf II made the city an important center for artists, astronomers, natural philosophers, and others pursuing forms of knowledge that did not yet fit neatly within the boundaries we draw today. Rudolf himself was a patron of alchemy. Yet what interests me most is not establishing the historical certainty of every story attached to the underground rooms, but the image of the place itself, a house whose ordinary rooms exist above another world.
Beneath those familiar rooms are chambers where vessels, furnaces, herbs, metals, books, and fire belonged to a different kind of work. Someone could have entered the house, remained entirely within its visible rooms, and never known what was taking place underneath. I have been thinking about hidden rooms for a long time because they appear so often in dreams and fairy tales, where a door is discovered that no one had noticed, a staircase leads somewhere unexpected, or a room waits behind a wall that had seemed solid. The discovery changes the house because it changes what we thought the house contained, and increasingly I wonder whether a life may be something like this.
For years we move through its familiar rooms. We establish relationships, build careers, raise families, lose people we love, make things, abandon things, and begin again. We gather books and objects and memories. Certain dreams remain with us while others disappear, and certain images refuse to leave. Experiences that once seemed unrelated accumulate quietly beside one another, although we may not recognize that they have anything to say to each other. We believe we know the house because we have lived in it for so long, until sometimes quite late we discover another room and realize that what we had taken to be the whole house was only the part we had learned to inhabit.
Increasingly, I wonder whether this is one of the gifts of elderhood. Perhaps we spend much of life believing that wisdom will come through knowing more, only to discover that another kind of knowing becomes possible when we have lived long enough to recognize relationships that could not have been visible earlier. The life itself had not yet become large enough to reveal them, and some things can only be recognized after enough years, images, losses, loves, and experiences have accumulated for their relationship to one another to begin to show itself.
Within my website, I have created a space I call my Virtual Library. Initially, I imagined it as a place where the work of many years could be gathered:essays, fairy tales, dreams, reflections, recordings, images, and conversations. Lately the image of the library has been changing for me, and I have begun to wonder whether every true library eventually reveals another library beneath it. The library we know contains what we have gathered, while the library beneath it may contain what has been gathering us.
There are books we deliberately choose, but there are also books to which we return twenty years later and discover that they have become different books because we have become different readers. There are dreams we record without understanding them and images that return years afterward. There are fairy tales that accompany one period of a life and unexpectedly speak again from somewhere else in another, just as there are objects someone places in our hands without knowing that they have entered a conversation already taking place within us. These, too, may belong to the library beneath the library, where relationship is often recognizable only after it has been unfolding for some time.
Alchemy offers an especially powerful image for this because the alchemist required a vessel, something capable of containing matter while it underwent transformation. The substances within it might be heated, dissolved, separated, joined, darkened, clarified, or changed in ways the alchemist could not accomplish simply by willing them to become something else. The vessel did not exist to prevent the process but to allow the process to occur without losing what was being transformed.
Nature offers this lesson continually, although we may cease to notice it because we have lived within its rhythms all our lives. Spring does not remain spring in order to preserve what has blossomed, nor does autumn represent the failure of summer. What has grown must ripen, fall away, disappear for a time, and enter forms we cannot always see before another season becomes possible. The continuity lies not in remaining unchanged but in belonging to the whole movement.
I have witnessed another expression of this in my work with couples, where perhaps the hardest task any two human beings undertake is to grow and change together over a lifetime while remaining in committed relationship. The work is not to prevent the heat that change inevitably brings, but to create enough containment for the relationship itself to undergo transformation without requiring either person to remain who they once were.
The psyche asks something similar of us. Dreams, images, and fairy tales rarely surrender themselves because we demand an explanation from them. They change in relationship to us as we change in relationship to them, sometimes revealing something years later that could not have been known when we first encountered them. What appears at one moment to be darkness may belong to a process whose shape has not yet become visible.
Perhaps elderhood offers the widest vessel of all, because by then enough seasons have passed, enough relationships have changed us, and enough images have accompanied us that we may begin to recognize a pattern among things that once seemed separate. The transformation is not into a perfected life. It may instead be into a life capable of recognizing its own wholeness, including what was lost, what remained unfinished, what changed beyond recognition, and what somehow became gold.
Centuries after the alchemical laboratories flourished, C. G. Jung recognized in alchemy images that spoke to the psychic process of individuation. The laboratory could therefore be encountered not only as a physical place but also as an image of psychological transformation. What occurred within the vessel could speak to what was occurring within the person attending it. Yet I find myself increasingly reluctant to make the vessel only a psychological symbol, because a vessel is also a vessel. Its first task is to hold something, and there may be more wisdom in that simple fact than we initially recognize.
This brings me back to the gift and to the name it was given, the Amulet of Happiness. The image it offers for happiness is not abundance spilling everywhere. There is no overflowing cup and no promise that everything will turn out as we wished. Instead, there is a small vessel with a little pieces of gold held inside it, an image that becomes more compelling when happiness is understood through the imagination of alchemy rather than through our contemporary expectation that happiness should mean feeling good or having life arrange itself according to our wishes.
The red thread has also begun to interest me. I do not know whether whoever made the amulet intended it to carry a specifically alchemical meaning, and I would rather leave that question open than assign the object a symbolism it may never have been intended to bear. Yet red itself has an important place within the alchemical imagination. The rubedo, or reddening, came to represent a culminating phase of the alchemical work, following processes of darkness, dissolution, separation, and purification. Speculum Alchemiae itself describes red as an important alchemical color associated with life, blood, and the Sun.
What interests me almost as much as the color, however, is that it is a thread. The gold does not simply sit inside its vessel as an object to be looked at. The vessel is suspended from something that allows it to be worn against the body, connecting what the vessel contains to the person who carries it. Perhaps that is another reason the image has stayed with me. Whatever gold a life produces does not exist apart from the life that has carried it. It remains attached to blood and body, relationship and experience, and to everything through which the life itself has passed.
Seen this way, the amulet begins to hold its own small alchemical sequence: the red thread of life, the gold surrounding serpentine form, the vessel capable of containment, and the small piece of gold within. I do not need to decide that this is what the maker intended. It is enough to notice that these images have arrived together and to remain curious about the conversation taking place among them.
The alchemical work itself assumes disturbance. Matter is heated, dissolved, separated, darkened, recombined, and transformed, and nothing about the process suggests that value comes from remaining untouched. The vessel does not protect what it contains from transformation. It protects the possibility of transformation by holding what must undergo it. From within that imagination, happiness cannot simply be the opposite of suffering, nor can suffering be taken as evidence that happiness has failed. Happiness might instead name something that becomes possible when love and loss, desire and disappointment, beauty and grief, accomplishment and failure have remained within the vessel of a life long enough for another relationship among them to emerge.
Gold mattered profoundly within the alchemical imagination, not simply because of its material value but because it could represent perfection and the hoped-for culmination of transformation. Jung found in alchemy a rich symbolic parallel to the psyche’s movement toward wholeness, although wholeness is very different from perfection as we ordinarily use that word. It does not mean eliminating everything unwanted from a life. It asks whether what belongs to the whole can be allowed to belong, and from that perspective happiness begins to look less like a feeling we achieve and more like a relationship to the life we have actually lived.
There are places Mike and I once imagined visiting together, journeys we hoped would become part of our shared life but that we have not yet taken. I cannot say there is no regret in that recognition, for there is. Yet I have also come to appreciate how the journeys of those we love can enter our lives in unexpected ways. My friends and their adventures have brought distant places, histories, and discoveries into my own world, not as substitutes for journeys untaken, but as gifts freely shared. Perhaps this, too, is one of the mysteries of relationship: that we may receive something of a world we have never entered ourselves and find that it has nevertheless become part of our lives.
The amulet came to me in just this way. I did not descend into the rooms beneath that old house in Prague, stand in the alchemist’s laboratory, or encounter the Amulet of Happiness among the objects in its shop. My friend did, and something she encountered there entered her imagination in relationship to me, allowing this little vessel to travel where I had not. There is a kind of happiness in this that I might once have overlooked, not the happiness of having everything I wanted and certainly not one that requires denying the unlived life, but a happiness capable of recognizing what came toward me because other people traveled roads I did not travel and were willing to bring something of those journeys home.
Perhaps this, too, belongs to an alchemical understanding of happiness. We do not begin the work by insisting that the substance within the vessel should have been some other substance. We begin with what is actually there, and at seventy-six I find myself less interested in measuring my life against the lives I might have lived and more interested in discovering what this particular life has made possible. I wonder what has arrived because of its limitations as well as its freedoms, what others have carried into it, what I have been able to carry for them, and what pieces of gold might have appeared precisely because none of us lives entirely alone.
The gold within the pendant does not fill the vessel, and perhaps it does not need to. Its value is not diminished by the space surrounding it. Indeed, the space may be necessary, for the gold is not everything the vessel contains or has contained. It is what has emerged among everything, and this seems particularly meaningful to me in elderhood, when the body changes, people disappear from rooms we expected them to continue inhabiting, roles that once organized a life loosen, and time itself begins to feel different. Alongside these changes there can also be a strange clarification, an ability to recognize pieces of gold that might once have seemed too small to notice.
They may be found in a conversation that changed something, a friendship that endured, a dream remembered for decades, a sentence that continues to open each time we encounter it, an animal who shared our life and remained entirely itself while doing so, a garden, a book, an image, or a small object brought home from Prague by someone who thought of us while standing in a place we had never seen. None of this requires us to call the difficult things good, because that would be sentimentality rather than transformation. The darkness remains darkness, loss remains loss, and the life that was not lived does not have to be declared unwanted simply because another life was lived instead.
Alchemy asks something more demanding: that what has entered the vessel be allowed to participate in the work. Darkness, fire, breaking apart, waiting, and recombining all belong to the process, just as somehow the gold belongs. Perhaps this is one of our misunderstandings of happiness. We have made it an emotional destination, something we expect to possess once enough difficulty has been removed, while alchemy suggests almost the opposite. Transformation occurs because the substance does not remain what it was, so happiness may not mean that the vessel escaped the fire. It may mean that the vessel was capable of holding what the fire transformed.
The more I think about the pendant, the more I recognize another image that has accompanied me for years, the spiral staircase leading upward toward a library. I had understood that staircase as an ascent, while this hidden laboratory beneath a house in Prague offers its counterpart, a movement downward rather than upward. One image rises toward the library while the other descends toward the laboratory, and perhaps there is no reason to choose between them because psyche seems to move in both directions.
There are times when we are asked to climb toward a wider view, toward language, reflection, and the gathering of what has been learned, while at other times we are asked to descend beneath what we think we know into the place where transformation occurs before it can be explained. Perhaps wisdom requires both movements, for the library without the laboratory can become a place where knowledge is merely stored, while the laboratory without the library risks transformation without reflection. Between these movements is the vessel, holding what has been gathered long enough for relationships that were previously invisible to begin to appear.
I have spent much of my life gathering books, stories, dreams, clinical encounters, fairy tales, images, scholarship, relationships, and questions. I might once have imagined that the task was eventually to bring them into a coherent system and understand what they meant, but I am no longer certain that is the task. Perhaps the work is to become a vessel spacious enough for them to remain in relationship, which is increasingly what I mean when I say that relationship precedes mastery. A dream is not exhausted by its interpretation, a fairy tale does not become ours because we can explain its symbols, an animal does not exist simply to carry a psychological meaning for us, and an image retains something beyond our understanding, something Other that asks to be encountered rather than possessed.
The old alchemists dreamed of transformation, but the image that has reached me across centuries and geography is surprisingly modest. I am not standing before a furnace attempting to manufacture gold. I am holding a small vessel in which small pieces of gold have already been placed, an Amulet of Happiness that crossed an ocean I did not cross and has now come into my keeping. It does not ask me to believe that happiness means receiving everything I once imagined a life might contain. Instead, it asks me to look again at what has actually been held within this life and at what has emerged from the holding.
Perhaps elderhood does not ask us to turn everything into gold but to recognize the gold that has already appeared without denying the darkness from which some of it came. A library can become a vessel for such things, and so can a life. Increasingly, I am interested in the gold that could only have come from the life that was actually lived.
The little vessel crossed an ocean I did not cross. It rests now in my hands, while somewhere beneath an old house in Prague, the hidden rooms remain.
Continue with the companion essay: The Library Beneath the Library