object:2.03 - THE ENIGMA OF BOLOGNA
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
[51] These paradoxes culminate in an allegedly ancient monument, an epitaph said to have been found in Bologna, known as the Aelia-Laelia-Crispis Inscription. It was appropriated by the alchemists, who claimed, in the words of Michael Maier, that it was set up by an artificer of old to the honour of God and in praise of the chymic art.122 I will first give the text of this highly remarkable inscription:
D. M.
D. M.
Aelia Laelia Crispis, nec mulier, nec androgyna, nec puella, nec iuvenis, nec anus, nec casta, nec meretrix, nec pudica, sed omnia.
Aelia Laelia Crispis, neither man nor woman, nor mongrel, nor maid, nor boy, nor crone, nor chaste, nor whore, nor virtuous, but all.
Sublata neque fame, nec ferro, nec veneno, sed omnibus.Nec coelo, nec aquis, nec terris, sed ubique iacet.
Carried away neither by hunger, nor by sword, nor by poison, but by all.Neither in heaven, nor in earth, nor in water, but everywhere is her resting place.
Lucius Agatho Priscius, nec maritus, nec amator, nec necessarius, neque moerens, neque gaudens, neque flens, hanc neque molem, nec pyramidem, nec sepulchrum, sed omnia.
Lucius Agatho Priscius, neither husband, nor lover, nor kinsman, neither mourning, nor rejoicing, nor weeping, (raised up) neither mound, nor pyramid, nor tomb, but all.
Scit et nescit, (quid) cui posuerit.
He knows and knows not (what)123 he raised up to whom.
(Hoc est sepulchrum, intus cadaver non habens.
(This is a tomb that has no body in it.
Hoc est cadaver, sepulchrum extra non habens.
This is a body that has no tomb round it.
Sed cadaver idem est et sepulchrum sibi.)
But body and tomb are the same.)
[52] Let it be said at once: this epitaph is sheer nonsense, a joke,124 but one that for centuries brilliantly fulfilled its function as a flypaper for every conceivable projection that buzzed in the human mind. It gave rise to a cause clbre, a regular psychological affair that lasted for the greater part of two centuries and produced a spate of commentaries, finally coming to an inglorious end as one of the spurious texts of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and thereafter passing into oblivion. The reason why I am digging up this curiosity again in the twentieth century is that it serves as a paradigm for that peculiar attitude of mind which made it possible for the men of the Middle Ages to write hundreds of treatises about something that did not exist and was therefore completely unknowable. The interesting thing is not this futile stalking-horse but the projections it aroused. There is revealed in them an extraordinary propensity to come out with the wildest fantasies and speculationsa psychic condition which is met with today, in a correspondingly erudite milieu, only as an isolated pathological phenomenon. In such cases one always finds that the unconscious is under some kind of pressure and is charged with highly affective contents. Sometimes a differential diagnosis as between tomfoolery and creativity is difficult to make, and it happens again and again that the two are confused.
[53] Such phenomena, whether historical or individual, cannot be explained by causality alone, but must also be considered from the point of view of what happened afterwards. Everything psychic is pregnant with the future. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of transition from a world founded on metaphysics to an era of immanentist explanatory principles, the motto no longer being omne animal a Deo but omne vivum ex ovo. What was then brewing in the unconscious came to fruition in the tremendous development of the natural sciences, whose youngest sister is empirical psychology. Everything that was naively presumed to be a knowledge of transcendental and divine things, which human beings can never know with certainty, and everything that seemed to be irretrievably lost with the decline of the Middle Ages, rose up again with the discovery of the psyche. This premonition of future discoveries in the psychic sphere expressed itself in the phantasmagoric speculations of philosophers who, until then, had appeared to be the arch-pedlars of sterile verbiage.
[54] However nonsensical and insipid the Aelia-Laelia epitaph may look, it becomes significant when we regard it as a question which no less than two centuries have asked themselves: What is it that you do not understand and can only be expressed in unfathomable paradoxes?
[55] Naturally I do not lay this question at the door of that unknown humorist who perpetrated this practical joke. It existed long before him in alchemy. Nor would he ever have dreamt that his joke would become a cause clbre, or that it would lead his contemporaries and successors to question the nature of the psychic backgrounda question which, in the distant future, was to replace the certainties of revealed truth. He was only a causa instrumentalis, and his victims, as nave and innocent as himself, made their first, involuntary steps as psychologists.
[56] It seems that the first report of the Aelia-Laelia inscription appeared in the treatise of a certain Marius L. Michael Angelus, of Venice, in the year 1548, and as early as 1683125 Caesar Malvasius126 had collected no less than forty-five127 attempts at interpretation. In alchemical literature, the treatise of the physician Nicholas Barnaud, of Crest (Dauphin), who lived in the second half of the sixteenth century, has been preserved. He gave an alchemical interpretation of the inscription in, it appears, 1597.128 To begin with, I shall keep to his interpretation and that of the learned Michael Maier.
[57] Maier maintains that Aelia and Laelia represent two persons who are united in a single subject, named Crispis. Barnaud calls Aelia solar, presumably a derivation from
, sun. Laelia he interprets as lunar. Crispis (curly-haired), thinks Maier, comes from the curly hairs which are converted into a very fine powder.129 Maier obviously has in mind the tincture, the arcane substance. Barnaud on the other hand says that our materia is obvoluta, intricata, therefore curly. These two persons, says Maier, are neither man nor woman, but they once were; similarly, the subject was in the beginning an hermaphrodite but no longer is so, because though the arcane substance is composed of sponsus and sponsa, and is thus as it were bisexual, as a third thing it is new and unique. Neither is the subject a maid or virgin, because she would be intact. In the opus, however, the virgin is called a mother although she has remained a virgin. Nor is the subject a boy, because the consummation of the coniunctio contradicts this, nor a crone,130 because it still retains its full strength, nor a whore,131 because it has nothing to do with money, nor is it virtuous, because the virgin has cohabited with a man. The subject, he says, is a man and a woman, because they have completed the conjugal act, and an hermaphrodite because two bodies are united in one. It is a girl because it is not yet old, and a youth because it is in full possession of its powers. It is an old woman because it outlasts all time (i.e., is incorruptible). It is a whore because Beya132 prostituted herself to Gabritius before marriage. It is virtuous because the subsequent marriage gave absolution.133
[58] But all is the real explanation of the enigma: all these designations refer to qualities of the one thing, and these were thought of as existing, but they are not entities in themselves. The same is true of the Carried away passage. The substance (uroboros) devours itself and thus suffers no hunger; it does not die by the sword but slays itself with its own dart, like the scorpion, which is another synonym for the arcane substance.134 It is not killed by poison because, as Barnaud says, it is a good poison, a panacea with which it brings itself to life again.135 At the same time it is killed by all three: by hunger for itself, by the sword of Mercurius,136 and by its own poison as snake or scorpion. By all again points to the arcane substance, as Barnaud says: This is everything, it has within itself everything needful for its completion, everything can be predicated of it, and it of everything.137 For the One is the whole, as the greatest Chymist saith: because [of the One] everything is, and if the whole had not the whole [in itself], the whole would not be.138
[59] That the arcanum is neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor in water is explained by Maier as a reference to the lapis, which is found everywhere. It is found in all the elements and not only in one of them. Here Barnaud is rather more subtle, for he equates heaven with the soul, earth with the body, and water with the spirit,139 and thus arrives at the idea of the wholeness of a living organism. Our material, he says, is simultaneously in heaven, on earth, and in the water, as if wholly in the whole and wholly in each part; so that those parts, though otherwise divisible, can no longer be separated from one another after they are made one: the whole Law and Prophets of alchemy seem to depend upon this.140
[60] Barnaud explains the name of him who raised the tomb, Lucius Agatho Priscius, as follows: Lucius is lucid, endowed with the most lucid intellect;141 Agatho is good-natured (Gk.
, good), upright; Priscius is priscus (pristine), senior (of ancient time), reckoned among those upright Philosophers of old. Maier maintains that these names signified the chief requisite necessary for the fulfilment of the art.
[61] Neither husb and nor lover etc. means that Aelia Laelia drew him to herself as the magnet the iron and changed him into her nebulous and black nature. In the coniunctio he became her husband, and was necessary142 to the work. But Maier does not tell us to what extent he was not the husb and etc. Barnaud says: These are the chief causes, namely marriage, love, and consanguinity, which move a man to raise a column to the dead in the temple of memory, and none of these can here be considered. Lucius had another purpose in mind: he wished the art, which teaches everything, which is of all things the most precious and is concealed under this enigma, to appear upon the scene, so that the investigators might apply themselves to the art and true science, which surpasses all else in worth. True, he makes an exception of that holiest investigation [agnitionem] of God and Christ, whereon our salvation depends,143 a proviso we often meet in the texts.
[62] Maier ignores the negative in neither mourning etc. just as he did in neither husband. In truth, he says, all this can as well be said positively of Lucius and not negatively. On the other hand Barnaud remarks that it draws a picture of an intrepid philosopher, smooth and rounded.144 Neither mound etc. is again explained positively by Maier: Aelia is herself the mound, which endures as something firm and immovable. This is a reference to the incorruptibility which the opus sought to achieve. He says the pyramid signifies a flame to eternal remembrance, and this was Aelia herself. She was buried because Lucius did everything he had to do in her name. He takes her place, as it were, just as the filius philosophorum takes the place of the maternal prima materia, which till then had been the only effective arcane substance. Barnaud declares that though Lucius is a building, it does not fulfil its purpose (since it is a symbol). But all he refers to the Tabula smaragdina, because the epitaph as a whole points to the medicina summa et catholica.
[63] By He knows and knows not Maier thinks that Lucius knew it at first but no longer knew it afterwards, because he himself was ungratefully forgotten. It is not clear to me what this is intended to mean. Barnaud takes the monument as an allegory of the lapis, of which Lucius knew. He explains the quid as quantum, for Lucius probably did not know how much the stone weighed. Neither, of course, did he know for what future discoverer he had made the inscription. Barnauds explanation of quid is decidedly feeble. It would be more to the point to remember that the lapis is a fabulous entity of cosmic dimensions which surpasses human understanding. Consideration for the prestige of the alchemist may have prevented him from indulging this suggestive thought, for as an alchemist he could not very well admit that the artifex himself did not know what he was producing with his art. Had he been a modern psychologist he might have realized, with a little effort, that mans totality, the self, is by definition145 beyond the bounds of knowledge.
[64] With This is a tomb etc. we reach the first positive statement (barring the names) of the inscription. Maiers opinion is that this has nothing to do with the tomb, which was no tomb, but that Aelia herself is meant. For she herself is the container, converting into herself the contained; and thus she is a tomb or receptacle that has no body or content in it, as was said of Lots wife, who was her own tomb without a body, and a body without a tomb.146 He is evidently alluding to the second version of the Arisleus Vision, which says: With so much love did Beya embrace Gabricus that she absorbed him wholly into her own nature and dissolved him into indivisible particles.147 Ripley says that at the death of the king all his limbs were torn into atoms.148 This is the motif of dismemberment which is well known in alchemy.149 The atoms are or become white sparks shining in the terra foetida.150 They are also called the fishes eyes.151
[65] The explanation of Aelia herself as the tomb would naturally appeal to an alchemist, as this motif plays a considerable role in the literature. He called his vessel a tomb,152 or, as in the Rosarium, a red tumulus of rock. The Turba says that a tomb must be dug for the dragon and the woman.153 Interment is identical with the nigredo.154 A Greek treatise describes the alchemical process as the eight graves.155 Alexander found the tomb of Hermes when he discovered the secret of the art.156 The king is buried in Saturn,157 an analogy of the buried Osiris.158 While the nigredo of the burial endures, the woman rules,159 referring to the eclipse of the sun or the conjunction with the new moon.
[66] Thus, concludes Maier, tomb and body are the same. Barnaud says:
Bury, they say, each thing in the grave of the other. For when Sulphur, Sal and Aqua, or Sol, Luna and Mercurius, are in our material, they must be extracted, conjoined, buried and mortified, and turned into ashes. Thus it comes to pass that the nest of the birds becomes their grave, and conversely, the birds absorb the nest and unite themselves firmly with it. This comes to pass, I say, that soul, spirit and body, man and woman, active and passive, in one and the same subject, when placed in the vessel, heated with their own fire and sustained by the outward magistery of the art, may in due time escape [to freedom].160
In these words the whole secret of the union of opposites is revealed, the summa medicina, which heals not only the body but the spirit. The word escape presupposes a state of imprisonment which is brought to an end by the union of opposites. The Hindus described this as nirdvandva, free from the opposites, a conception that, in this form at least, is alien to the Christian West because it relativizes the opposites and is intended to mitigate, or even heal, the irreconcilable conflict in the militant Christian attitude.161
[67] The interpretation here given of this enigmatic inscription should be taken for what it is: a testament to the alchemical way of thinking, which in this instance reveals more about itself than the epitaph would seem to warrant. But here we must tread carefully, for a good many other explanations are possible and have, in fact, been given.162 Above all, we have to consider the genuineness of the monument and its origin. None of the three authors so far mentioned actually saw the inscription. At the time of Malvasius, in 1683, there were apparently only two original transcripts of it, one in Bologna, the other in Milan. The one in Bologna ends with the words cui posuerit. The other, in Milan, adds Hoc est sepulcrum etc., and also a quid to the Scit et nescit of the Bologna version. Further, at the head of the Milan version there is an unelucidated A.M.P.P.D. in place of the D.M. (Diis Manibus) at the head of the other. Malvasius states that the monument was destroyed,163 but he cites eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the inscription and copied it, in particular Joannes Turrius of Bruges, who in January 1567 wrote a letter to Richardus Vitus (Richard White of Basingstoke) saying that he had read the epitaph with his own eyes in the villa of Marcus Antonius de la Volta, at the first milestone outside the Porta Mascharella, Bologna. It was, as the eyewitness and commentator Joannes Casparius Gevartius reports, let into the wall joining the villa to the church. A few of the chiselled letters were worn with time and corroded by a kind of rust, which, he says, testified to its antiquity.164 Malvasius endeavoured to prove its genuineness with the help of numerous other Roman epitaphs,165 and advanced the following theory:
The inscription speaks of a daughter who is to be born to Laelius and who is destined for Agatho as a bride; but she is neither daughter nor bride, because, though conceived, she is not born, and not born, because she miscarried. Therefore Agatho, long chosen as the husband, disappointed in such great hope and betrayed by fate, rightly mocks himself, or pretends to mock himself, with this enigmatic inscription.166
[68] Malvasius goes out of his way to be fair to the author of the epitaph. He calls Agatho very skilled in this science and that;167 indeed he compares him, as being a pre-eminent worshipper of the exceedingly auspicious number Three,168 to Hermes Trismegistus, and calls him Thrice-Greatest, an allusion to the concluding sentence of the Tabula smaragdina.169 He does this because the inscription is divided into three parts,170 to which he devotes a long dissertation. Here he gets into difficulties with the four elements and the four qualities, and, like all the alchemists, flounders about in his attempts to interpret the axiom of Maria.171 His idea of a miscarriage likewise comes within the sphere of alchemy (not to mention Gnosticism),172 for we read in the Tractatus Aristotelis: 173This serpent is impetuous, seeking the issue [death] before birth, wishing to lose the foetus and desiring a miscarriage.174 This refers, of course, to the Mercurial serpent or prima materia, which, the treatise maintains,175 strives to pass quickly through the transformation process and to force the light-seeds of the anima mundi hidden within it into flower.
[69] Of the numerous interpretations made by the commentators I would like to mention one which seems to me worth rescuing from oblivion. This is the view expressed by the two friends of Malvasius (see n. 127), namely that Lucius Agatho was a real person, but that Aelia was a fictitious woman, or perhaps an evil genius in female form or an ungodly spirit, who in the opinion of one of them flies about in the air, and according to the other dwells in the earth and was enclosed and affixed in a Junonian oak; a sylvan sprite, nymph, or hamadryad who, when the oak was cut down and burnt, was obliged to seek another dwelling-place and so was found, as if dead, in this sarcophagus. Thus it was that she was praised, described, and commemorated by the loved and loving Agatho.176
[70] According to this interpretation, Aelia is Agathos anima, projected into a Junonian oak. The oak is the tree of Jupiter, but it is also sacred to Juno.177 In a metaphorical sense, as the feminine carrier of the anima projection, it is Jupiters spouse and Agathos beloved. Mythologically, nymphs, dryads, etc. are nature- and tree-numina, but psychologically they are anima projections,178 so far as masculine statements are concerned.
[71] This interpretation can be found in the Dendrologia of one of the above-mentioned friends, Ulysses Aldrovandus:
I maintain that Aelia Laelia Crispis was one of the Hamadryads . . . who was tied to an oak in the neighbourhood of the city of Bologna, or shut up inside it. She appeared to him both in the tenderest and in the harshest form, and while for some two thousand years she had made a show of inconstant looks like a Proteus, she bedevilled the love of Lucius Agatho Priscius, then a citizen of Bologna, with anxious cares and sorrows, which assuredly were conjured up from chaos, or from what Plato calls Agathonian confusion.179
One can hardly imagine a better description of the feminine archetype that typifies a mans unconscious than the figure of this most hazardous beloved (incertissima amasia), who pursues him like a teasing sprite amid the stillness of the groves and springs. It is clear from the text of the inscription that it gives no ground for interpreting Aelia as a wood nymph. Aldrovandus tells us, however, that the Porta Mascharella in Bologna, near which the inscription was alleged to have been found, was called Junonia in Roman times, from which he concludes that Juno was obviously the spiritus loci. In support of his hypothesis that Aelia was a dryad, the learned humanist cites a Roman epitaph that was found in this region:
CLODIA PLAVTILLA
SIBI ET
QVERCONIO AGATHONI
MARITO OPTIMO
This epitaph does in fact occur in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum,180 but there the operative words are:
Q. VERCONIO AGATHONI
So Quintus Verconius must suffer his name to be changed to Querconius to suit the author.
[72] Aldrovandus explains the puzzling hoc est sepulcrum by saying that the oak supplied the necessary building material for the tomb! In substantiation of this he adds that there was in that locality a village with the name of Casaralta,181 which he analyses into casa (house), ara (altar), alta (high).
[73] As a further contri bution he quotes an Italian poem about a great oak, representing, he says, the world of the elements, planted as it were in a heavenly garden, where Sun and Moon are spread out like two flowers.182 This allusion to the world-oak of Pherecydes leads us straight to the sun-and-moon tree of alchemy, to the red and white lily,183 the red slave and the white woman (or white dove),184 and the four-hued blossoms of the Tree in the Western Land.185 Reusners Pandora portrays the tree as a torch-bearing woman, its top sprouting out of her crowned head.186 Here the tree is personified by its feminine numen.
[74] Aldrovanduss interpretation is essentially alchemical, as we can see from the treatise of Bernardus Trevisanus (Count of the March and Trevis, 140690).187 He tells the parable188 of an adept who finds a clear spring set about with the finest stone and secured to the trunk of an oak-tree, the whole surrounded by a wall. This is the Kings bath in which he seeks renewal. An old man, Hermes the mystagogue, explains how the King had this bath built: he placed in it an old oak, cloven in the midst.189 The fountain was surrounded by a thick wall, and first it was enclosed in hard, bright stone, then in a hollow oak.190
[75] The point of the parable, evidently, is to bring the oak into connection with the bath. Usually this is the nuptial bath of the royal pair. But here the Queen is missing, for it is only the King who is renewed. This unusual version191 of the motif suggest that the oak, as the feminine numen, has taken the place of the Queen. If this assumption is correct, it is particularly significant that the oak is first said to be cloven and later to be hollow. Now it seems to be the upright trunk or stock of the fountain,192 now a living tree casting a shadow, now the trough of the fountain. This ambiguity refers to the different aspects of the tree: as the stock, the oak is the source of the fountain, so to speak; as the trough it is the vessel, and as the protecting tree it is the mother.193 From ancient times the tree was mans birthplace;194 it is therefore a source of life. The alchemists called both the vessel and the bath the womb.195 The cloven or hollow trunk bears out this interpretation.196 The Kings bath is itself a matrix, the tree serving as an attri bute of the latter. Often, as in the Ripley Scrowle,197 the tree stands in the nuptial bath, either as a pillar or directly as a tree in whose branches the numen appears in the shape of a mermaid (= anima) with a snakes tail.198 The analogy with the Tree of Knowledge is obvious.199 The Dodonian oak was the abode of an oracle, the anima here playing the role of prophetess.200 The snake-like Mercurius appears as a tree numen in Grimms fairytale of The Spirit in the Bottle.201
[76] The tree has a remarkable relation to the old man in the Turba:
Take that white tree and build around it a round dark house covered with dew, and place in it202 a man of great age, a hundred years old, and close the house upon them and make it fast, so that no wind or dust can get in. Then leave them for one hundred and eighty days in their house. I say that that old man ceases not to eat of the fruits of that tree until the completion of that number [180], and that old man becomes a youth. O what wondrous natures, which have changed the soul of that old man into a youthful body, and the father is become the son.203
[77] In this context we may perhaps cite a rather obscure text from Senior:204
Likewise Marchos205 said, It is time for this child to be born, and he related the following parable: We shall build him a house, which is called the grave of Sihoka. He [or Mariyah]206 said, There is an earth207 near us, which is called tormos,208 where there are serpents [or witches]209 that eat the darkness210 out of the burning stones, and on these stones they drink the blood of black goats.211 While they remain in the darkness, they conceive in the baths212 and give birth213 in the air, and they stride on the sea,214 and they inhabit vaults and sepulchres, and the serpent fights with the male, and the male continues forty nights in the grave, and forty nights in the little house.215
[78] The Latin translation serpent for witch is connected with the widespread primitive idea that the spirits of the dead are snakes. This fits in with the offering of goats blood, since the sacrifice of black animals to the chthonic numina was quite customary. In the Arabic text the witches refer to the female demons of the desert, the jinn. The grave-haunting numen is likewise a widespread idea that has lingered on into Christian legend. I have even met it in the dream of a twenty-two-year-old theological student, and I give this dream again so that those of my readers who are familiar with the language of dreams will be able to see the full scope of the problem we are discussing.216
[79] The dreamer was standing in the presence of a handsome old man dressed entirely in black. He knew it was the white magician. This personage had just addressed him at considerable length, but the dreamer could no longer remember what it was about. He recalled only the closing words: And for this we need the help of the black magician. At that moment the door opened and in came another old man exactly like the first, except that he was dressed in white. He said to the white magician, I need your advice, but threw a sidelong, questioning glance at the dreamer, whereupon the white magician answered: You can speak freely, he is an innocent. The white-clad black magician then related his story. He had come from a distant land where something extraordinary had happened. The country was ruled by an old king who felt his death near and had therefore sought out a worthy tomb for himself. There were in that land a great number of tombs from ancient times, and the king had chosen the finest for himself. According to legend, it was the tomb of a virgin who had died long ago. The king caused it to be opened, in order to get it ready for use. But when the bones were exposed to the light of day they suddenly took on life and changed into a black horse, which galloped away into the desert. The black magician had heard this story and immediately set forth in pursuit of the horse. After a journey of many days through the desert he reached the grasslands on the other side. There he met the horse grazing, and there also he came upon the find on account of which he now needed the advice of the white magician. For he had found the lost keys of paradise, and he did not know what to do with them. Here the dream ended.
[80] The tomb was obviously haunted by the spirit of the virgin, who played the part of the kings anima. Like the nymph in Malvasius, she was forced to leave her old dwelling-place. Her chthonic and sombre nature is shown by her transformation into a black horse, a kind of demon of the desert. We have here the widespread conception of the anima as horsewoman and nightmare, a real ungodly spirit, and at the same time the well-known fairytale motif of the aging king whose vitality is at an end. As a sous-entendu a magical, life-renewing marriage with the nymph seems to be planned (somewhat in the manner of the immortal Merlins marriage with his fairy), for in paradise, the garden of love with the apple-tree, all opposites are united. As Isaiah says:
He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord [51 : 3].
There the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrices den [11 : 6f.].
There white and black come together in kingly marriage, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels (61 : 10). The two antithetical magicians are obviously making ready the work of union, and what this must mean for a young theologian can be conceived only as that colossal problem whose solution was considered by the more speculative alchemists to be their chief task. Therefore the Senior text continues:
He [the male] will be roused,217 like the white doves,218 and his step shall rejoice, and he shall cast his seed upon the marble219 into the image [or spirit that dwells in the marble], and the ravens will come flying, and will fall upon it and gather it up. Then they will fly to the tops of the mountains, whither none can climb, and they will become white,220 and multiply. . . . Likewise no man hath known this, unless he himself hath conceived it in his head.
[81] This text describes the resurrection after death, and if we are not deceived, it takes the form of a coniunctio, a coming together of the white (dove) and the black (raven), the latter being the spirit that dwells in the tombstone (see n. 219). Since, as often happens, theriomorphic symbols (snakes and doves) are used for the male and female elements, this points to the union of unconscious factors.221 The ravens that gather up the seed (or the product of the union?) and then fly with it to the tops of the mountains222 represent the helpful spirits or familiars who complete the work when the skill of the artifex has failed him. They are not, as in Faust, beautiful angels but dark messengers of heaven, who at this point themselves become white.223 Even in Faust the angels are not entirely innocent of the arts of seduction,224 and the angels inability to sin is, as we know, to be taken so relatively that women have to keep their heads covered in church on account of the moral frailty of these winged messengers, which has more than once proved disastrous in ancient times (e.g., Genesis 6 : 2).
[82] Similar motifs occur in modern dreams, and can be found in persons who have never been remotely concerned with alchemy. For instance, a patient had the following dream: A large pile of wood was burning at the foot of a high wall of rock; the flames shot up with clouds of smoke. It was a lonely and romantic spot. High in the air, a flock of great black birds circled round the fire. From time to time one of the birds plunged straight into the blaze and was joyfully burnt to death, turning white in the process.225 As the dreamer himself remarked, the dream had a numinous quality, and this is quite understandable in view of its meaning: it repeats the miracle of the phoenix, of transformation and rebirth (the transformation of the nigredo into the albedo, of unconsciousness into illumination) as described in the verses from the Rosarium philosophorum:
Two eagles fly up with feathers aflame,
Naked they fall to earth again.
Yet in full feather they rise up soon . . .226
[83] After this digression on transformation and resurrection, let us turn back to the motif of the oak-tree, whose discussion was started by the commentators on the Enigma.
[84] We come across the oak in yet another alchemical treatise, the Introitus apertus of Philaletha.227 There he says: Learn, then, who are the companions of Cadmus; who is the serpent that devoured them; and what the hollow oak to which Cadmus spitted the serpent.
[85] In order to clarify this passage, I must go back to the myth of Cadmus, a kinsman of the Pelasgian Hermes Ithyphallikos.228 The hero set out to find his lost sister Europa, whom Zeus had carried away with him after turning himself into a bull. Cadmus, however, received the divine comm and to give up the search, and instead to follow a cow, with moon markings on both her sides, until she lay down, and there to found the city of Thebes. At the same time he was promised Harmonia, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite as a wife. When the cow had lain down, he wanted to sacrifice her, and he sent his companions to fetch water. They found it in a grove sacred to Ares, which was guarded by a dragon, the son of Ares. The dragon killed most of the companions, and Cadmus, enraged, slew it and sowed the dragons teeth. Immediately armed men sprang up, who fell to fighting among themselves until only five remained. Cadmus was then given Harmonia to wife. The spitting of the snake (dragon) to the oak seems to be an addition of Philalethas. It represents the banishment of the dangerous daemon into the oak,229 a point made not only by the commentary on the Aelia inscription in Malvasius but by the fairytale of The Spirit in the Bottle.
[86] The psychological meaning of the myth is clear: Cadmus has lost his sister-anima because she has flown with the supreme deity into the realm of the suprahuman and the subhuman, the unconscious. At the divine comm and he is not to regress to the incest situation, and for this reason he is promised a wife. His sister-anima, acting as a psychopomp in the shape of a cow (to correspond with the bull of Zeus), leads him to his destiny as a dragon-slayer, for the transition from the brother-sister relationship to an exogamous one is not so simple. But when he succeeds in this, he wins Harmonia, who is the dragons sister. The dragon is obviously disharmony, as the armed men sprung from its teeth prove. These kill one another off as though exemplifying the maxim of Pseudo-Democritus, nature subdues nature, which is nothing less than the uroboros conceptually formulated. Cadmus holds fast to Harmonia while the opposites in projected form slaughter one another. This image is a representation of the way in which a split-off conflict behaves: it is its own battle-ground. By and large this is also true of yang and yin in classical Chinese philosophy. Hand in hand with this selfcontained conflict there goes an unconsciousness of the moral problem of opposites. Only with Christianity did the metaphysical opposites begin to percolate into mans consciousness, and then in the form of an almost dualistic opposition that reached its zenith in Manichaeism. This heresy forced the Church to take an important step: the formulation of the doctrine of the privatio boni, by means of which she established the identity of good and being. Evil as a
(something that does not exist) was laid at mans dooromne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine.230 This idea together with that of original sin formed the foundation of a moral consciousness which was a novel development in human history: one half of the polarity, till then essentially metaphysical, was reduced to a psychic factor, which meant that the devil had lost the game if he could not pick on some moral weakness in man. Good, however, remained a metaphysical substance that originated with God and not with man. Original sin had corrupted a creature originally good. As interpreted by dogma, therefore, good is still wholly projected but evil only partly so, since the passions of men are its main source. Alchemical speculation continued this process of integrating metaphysical projections in so far as it began to dawn on the adept that both opposites were of a psychic nature. They expressed themselves first of all in the duplicity of Mercurius, which, however, was cancelled out in the unity of the stone. The lapis wasDeo concedentemade by the adept and was recognized as an equivalent of the homo totus. This development was extremely important, because it was an attempt to integrate opposites that were previously projected.
[87] Cadmus is interpreted alchemically as Mercurius in his masculine form (Sol). He seeks his feminine counterpart, the quicksilver, which is his sister (Luna), but she meets him in the shape of the Mercurial serpent, which he must first kill because it contains the furious conflict of warring elements (the chaos). From this arises the harmony of the elements, and the coniunctio can now take place. The spoils of the struggle, in this case the dragons skin, are, according to ancient custom, offered to the hollow oak, the mother, who is the representative of the sacred grove and the fount. In other words, it is offered up to the unconscious as the source of life, which produces harmony out of disharmony.231 Out of the hostility of the elements there arises the bond of friendship between them, sealed in the stone, and this bond guarantees the indissolubility and incorruptibility of the lapis. This piece of alchemical logic is borne out by the fact that, according to the myth, Cadmus and Harmonia turned to stone (evidently because of an embarras de richesse: perfect harmony is a dead end). In another version, they turn into snakes, and even into a basilisk, Dom Pernety232 remarks, for the end-product of the work, incorporated with its like, acquires the power ascribed to the basilisk, so the philosophers say. For this fanciful author Harmonia is naturally the prima materia, and the marriage of Cadmus,233 which took place with all the gods assisting, is the coniunctio of Sol and Luna, followed by the production of the tincture or lapis. Pernetys interpretation of Harmonia would be correct only if she were still allied with the dragon. But since she lost the reptile, she had logically to change herself and her husb and into snakes.
[88] Thus Malvasius, as well as the more interesting of the commentators, remain within the magic circle of alchemical mythologems. This is not surprising, since Hermetic philosophy, in the form it then took, was the only intellectual instrument that could help fill the dark gaps in the continuity of understanding. The Enigma of Bologna and its commentaries are, in fact, a perfect paradigm of the method of alchemy in general. It had exactly the same effect as the unintelligibility of chemical processes: the philosopher stared at the paradoxes of the Aelia inscription, just as he stared at the retort, until the archetypal structures of the collective unconscious began to illuminate the darkness.234 And, unless we are completely deluded, the inscription itself seems to be a fantasy sprung from that same paradoxical massa confusa of the collective unconscious. The contradictoriness of the unconscious is resolved by the archetype of the nuptial coniunctio, by which the chaos becomes ordered. Any attempt to determine the nature of the unconscious state runs up against the same difficulties as atomic physics: the very act of observation alters the object observed. Consequently, there is at present no way of objectively determining the real nature of the unconscious.
[89] If we are not, as Malvasius was, convinced of the antiquity of the Aelia inscription, we must look round in the medieval literature for possible sources or at least analogies. Here the motif of the triple prediction, or triple cause, of death might put us on the right trail.235 This motif occurs in the Vita Merlini in the old French romance Merlin, as well as in its later imitations in the Spanish and English literature of the fifteenth century. But the most important item, it seems to me, is the so-called Epigram of the Hermaphrodite, attri buted to Mathieu de Vendme (ca. 1150):
When my pregnant mother bore me in her womb,
they said she asked the gods what she would bear.
A boy, said Phoebus, a girl, said Mars, neither, said Juno.
And when I was born, I was a hermaphrodite.
Asked how I was to meet my end, the goddess replied: By arms;
Mars: On the cross; Phoebus: By water. All were right.
A tree overshadowed the waters, I climbed it;
the sword I had with me slipped, and I with it.
My foot caught in the branches, my head hung down in the stream;
And Imale, female, and neithersuffered by water, weapon, and cross.236
[90] Another parallel, but dating from late antiquity, is mentioned by Maier. It is one of the Platonic Riddles and runs: A man that was not a man, seeing yet not seeing, in a tree that was not a tree, smote but did not smite with a stone that was not a stone a bird that was not a bird, sitting yet not sitting.237 The solution is: A one-eyed eunuch grazed with a pumice-stone a bat hanging from a bush.238 This joke was, of course, too obvious to lend itself to alchemical evaluation. Similarly, the Epigram of the Hermaphrodite was not, so far as I know, taken up by the alchemists, though it might have been a more suitable subject for exegesis. This kind of jest probably underlies the Aelia inscription. The seriousness with which the alchemists took it, however, is justified not only because there is something serious in every joke, but because paradox is the natural medium for expressing transconscious facts. Hindu philosophy, which likewise struggled to formulate transcendental concepts, often comes very near to the paradoxes so beloved of the alchemists, as the following example shows: I am not a man, neither am I a god, a goblin, a Brahmin, a warrior, a merchant, a shudra, nor disciple of a Brahmin, nor householder, nor hermit of the forest, nor yet mendicant pilgrim: Awakener to Myself is my name.239
[91] Another source that needs seriously considering is mentioned by Richard White of Basingstoke.240 He maintains that Aelia Laelia is Niobe transformed, and he supports this interpretation by referring to an epigram attri buted to Agathias Scholasticus, a Byzantine historian:241
This tomb has no body in it.
This body has no tomb round it.
But it is itself body and tomb.242
White, convinced that the monument was genuine, thinks that Agathias wrote his epigram in imitation of it, whereas in fact the epigram must be its predecessor or at least have derived from the same source on which the unknown author of the Aelia inscription drew.
[92] Niobe seems to have an anima-character for Richard White, for, continuing his interpretation, he takes Aelia (or Haelia, as he calls her) to be the soul, saying with Virgil: Fiery is her strength, and heavenly her origin. From this Haelia takes her name.243 She was called Laelia, he says, on account of Luna, who exerts a hidden influence on the souls of men. The human soul is androgynous, because a girl has a masculine and a man a feminine soul.244 To this remarkable psychological insight he adds another: the soul is also called an old woman, because the spirit of young people is weak. This aptly expresses the psychological fact that, in people with an all too youthful attitude of consciousness, the anima is often represented in dreams as an old woman.
[93] It is clear that Richard White points even more plainly to the anima in the psychological sense than Aldrovandus. But whereas the latter stressed her mythological aspect, White stresses her philosophical aspect. In his letter of February 1567 to Johannes Turrius, he writes that the soul is an idea of such great power that she creates the forms and things themselves, also she has within herself the selfness of all mankind.245 She transcends all individual differences. Thus, if the soul would know herself, she must contemplate herself, and gaze into that place where the power of the soul, Wisdom, dwells.246 This is just what happened to the interpreters of the Bolognese inscription: in the darkness of the enigma, the psyche gazed at herself and perceived the wisdom immanent in her structure-the wisdom that is her strength. And, he adds, man is nothing other than his soul.247 It should be noted that he describes this soul quite differently from the way it would be described by a biological or personalistic psychology today: it is devoid of all individual differences, it contains the selfness of all mankind, it even creates the objective world by the power of its wisdom. This description is far better suited, one would think, to the anima mundi than to the anima vagula of the personal man, unless he means that enigmatic background of everything psychic, the collective unconscious. White comes to the conclusion that the inscription means nothing less than the soul, the form imprinted on and bound to matter.248 This, again, is what happened to the interpreters: they formulated the baffling inscription in accordance with the imprint set upon it by the psyche.
[94] Whites interpretation is not only original but profoundly psychological. His deserts are certainly not diminished by his having, so it would seem, arrived at his deeper view only after he received Turriuss letter of January 1567. Turrius was of the opinion that Aelia and Laelia stood for form and matter. He interprets neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor in water as follows: Since the prima materia is nothing, but is conceived solely by the imagination, it cannot be contained in any of these places.249 It is not an object of the senses, but is conceived solely by the intellect, therefore we cannot know how this material is constituted. It is evident that Turriuss interpretation likewise describes the projection of the psyche and its contents, with the result that his secondary explanations are a petitio principii.
[95] As is clear from the title of his book, Allegoria peripatetica de generatione, amicitia, et privatione in Aristotelicum Aenigma Elia Lelia Crispis,250 Fortunius Licetus reads the whole philosophy of Aristotle into the monument. He mentions the report that it was sculptured in stone, formerly set in a high position on the walls of St. Peters, but he does not say that he saw it with his own eyes, for in his day it was no longer in existence, if ever it existed at all. He thinks the inscription contains the summation of a serious philosophical theory about the origin of mundane things, a theory that was scientifico-moralis or ethico-physica. It is the authors intention to combine in a way to be marvelled at the attri butes of generation, friendship, and privation.251 That is why, he says, the monument is a true treasure-house.
[96] After reviewing a number of earlier authors who had devoted themselves to the same theme, Licetus mentions the work of Joannes Casparius Gevartius,252 who propounded the theory that the inscription described the nature of Love. This author cites the comic poet Alexis in Athenaeus:
I think that the painters, or, to put it more concisely, all who make images of this god, are unacquainted with Eros. For he is neither female nor male; again, neither god nor man, neither stupid nor yet wise, but rather composed of elements from everywhere, and bearing many qualities under a single form. For his audacity is that of a man, his timidity a womans; his folly argues madness, his reasoning good sense; his impetuosity is that of an animal, his persistence that of adamant, his love of honour that of a god.253
[97] Unfortunately I was unable to get hold of the original treatise of Gevartius. But there is a later author, Caietanus Felix Veranius, who takes up the Eros theory apparently as his own discovery in his book, Pantheon argenteae Elocutionis.254 He mentions a number of earlier commentators, amongst whom Gevartius is conspicuously absent. As Gevartius is named in the earlier lists, it is scarcely likely that Veranius was unacquainted with him. The suspicion of plagiarism is almost unescapable. Veranius defends his thesis with a good deal of skill, though considering the undeniable paradoxicality of Eros the task he sets himself is not too difficult. I will mention only one of his arguments, concerning the end of the inscription. The inscription ends, he says, with scit et nescit quid cui posuerit, because though the author of this enigmatic inscription knows that he has dedicated it to Love, he does not know what Love really is, since it is expressed by so many contradictions and riddles. Therefore he knows and does not know know to whom he dedicated it.
[98] I mention the interpretation of Veranius mainly because it is the forerunner of a theory which was very popular at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, namely Freuds sexual theory of the unconscious. Veranius even goes so far as to conjecture that Aelia Laelia had a special talent for eroticism (therein anticipating Aldrovandus). He says: Laelia was a whore; Crispis comes from curly-haired, because curly-haired people are frailer than others and more prone to the allurements of Love. Here he quotes Martial: Whos that curly-headed fellow whos always running round with your wife, Marianus? Who is that curly-headed fellow?255
[99] Now it is, as a matter of fact, true that apart from the personal striving for power, or superbia, love, in the sense of concupiscentia, is the dynamism that most infallibly brings the unconscious to light. And if our author was of the type whose besetting sin is concupiscence, he would never dream that there is any other power in heaven or earth that could be the source of his conflicts and confusions. Accordingly, he will cling to his prejudice as if it were a universal theory, and the more wrong he is the more fanatically he will be convinced of its truth. But what can love mean to a man with a hunger for power! That is why we always find two main causes of psychic catastrophes: on the one hand a disappointment in love and on the other hand a thwarting of the striving for power.
[100] The last interpretation I shall mention is one of the most recent. It dates from 1727, and though its argument is the stupidest its content is the most significant. How it can be both is explained by the fact that the discovery of significance is not always coupled with intelligence. The spirit bloweth where it listeth. . . . Despite the inadequacy of his equipment, the author, C. Schwartz,256 managed to get hold of a brilliant idea whose import, however, entirely escaped him. His view was that Lucius Agatho Priscius meant his monument to be understood as the Church. Schwartz therefore regards the inscription as being not of classical but of Christian origin, and in this, as compared with the others, he is undoubtedly right. His arguments, however, are threadbareto take but one example, he tries to twist D.M. into Deo Magno. Although his interpretation is not in the least convincing, it nevertheless remains a significant fact that the symbol of the Church in part expresses and in part substitutes for all the secrets of the soul which the humanistic philosophers projected into the Aelia inscription. In order not to repeat myself, I must refer the reader to what I said about the protective function of the Church in Psychology and Religion.257
[101] The interpretive projections we have been examining are, with the exception of the last, identical with the psychic contents that dropped out of their dogmatic framework at the time of the Renaissance and the Great Schism, and since then have continued in a state of secularization where they were at the mercy of the immanentist principle of explanation, that is, a naturalistic and personalistic interpretation. The discovery of the collective unconscious did something to alter this situation, for, within the limits of psychic experience, the collective unconscious takes the place of the Platonic realm of eternal ideas. Instead of these models giving form to created things, the collective unconscious, through its archetypes, provides the a priori condition for the assignment of meaning.
[102] In conclusion, I would like to mention one more document that seems relevant to our context, and that is the anecdote about Meister Eckharts daughter:
A daughter came to the Dominican convent asking for Meister Eckhart. The porter said, Who shall I tell him? She answered, I do not know. Why do you not know? he inquired. Because, she said, I am neither virgin nor spouse, nor man nor wife nor widow nor lady nor lord nor wench nor thrall. The porter went off to Meister Eckhart. Do come out, he said, to the strangest wight that ever I heard, and let me come too and put your head out and say, Who is asking for me? He did so. She said to him what she had said to the porter. Quoth he, My child, thou hast a shrewd and ready tongue, I prithee now thy meaning? An I were a virgin, she replied, I were in my first innocence; spouse, I were bearing the eternal word within my soul unceasingly; were I a man I should grapple with my faults; wife, should be faithful to my husband. Were I a widow I should be ever yearning for my one and only love; as lady I should render fearful homage; as wench I should be living in meek servitude to God and to all creatures; and as thrall I should be working hard, doing my best tamely to serve my master. Of all these things I am no single one, and am the one thing and the other running thither. The Master went away and told his pupils, I have been listening to the most perfect person I ween I ever met.258
[103] This story is more than two hundred years older than the earliest reference to the Aelia inscription, and therefore, if there is any literary influence at all, it could at most be derived from Mathieu de Vendme, which seems to me just as unlikely as that Meister Eckharts vision of the naked boy was derived from the classical puer aeternus. In both cases we are confronted with a significant archetype, in the first that of the divine maiden (anima), in the second that of the divine child (the self).259 As we know, these primordial images can rise up anywhere at any time quite spontaneously, without the least evidence of any external tradition. This story could just as well have been a visionary rumour as a fantasy of Meister Eckhart or of one of his pupils. It is, however, rather too peculiar to have been a real happening. But occasionally reality is quite as archetypal as human fantasy, and sometimes the soul seems to imagine things outside the body,260 where they fall to playing, as they do in our dreams.
questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers
change font "color":
change "background-color":
change "font-family":
change "padding":
change "table font size":
last updated: 2022-02-04 18:37:29
234558 site hits