Pouring Old Wine into a New Bottle

This article focuses on the relationship between alchemy’s ancient hermetic vessel and a topological structure found in modern mathematics: the Klein bottle. The paradoxical properties of the hermetic vessel are described in detail, primarily as brought out by Jung. I then turn to the Klein bottle and my “alchemical” interpretation of it. In laying these two structures beside each other, I believe it becomes clear that their correspondence is more than adventitious, that the coincidence goes beyond a mere superficial resemblance of entities that are essentially different. The paper concludes with a brief postscript on the archetypal significance of pouring “old wine” into a “new bottle.”