object:3.02 - SOL
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
2. SOL
[110] In alchemy, the sun signifies first of all gold, whose sign it shares. But just as the philosophical gold is not the common gold,5 so the sun is neither just the metallic gold6 nor the heavenly orb.7 Sometimes the sun is an active substance hidden in the gold and is extracted as the tinctura rubea (red tincture). Sometimes, as the heavenly body, it is the possessor of magically effective and transformative rays. As gold and a heavenly body8 it contains an active sulphur of a red colour, hot and dry.9 Because of this red sulphur the alchemical sun, like the corresponding gold, is red.10 As every alchemist knew, gold owes its red colour to the admixture of Cu (copper), which he interpreted as Kypris (the Cyprian, Venus), mentioned in Greek alchemy as the transformative substance.11 Redness, heat, and dryness are the classical qualities of the Egyptian Set (Gk. Typhon), the evil principle which, like the alchemical sulphur, is closely connected with the devil. And just as Typhon has his kingdom in the forbidden sea, so the sun, as sol centralis, has its sea, its crude perceptible water, and as sol coelestis its subtle imperceptible water. This sea water (aqua pontica) is extracted from sun and moon. Unlike the Typhonian sea, the life-giving power of this water is praised, though this does not mean that it is invariably good.12 It is the equivalent of the two-faced Mercurius, whose poisonous nature is often mentioned. The Typhonian aspect of the active sun-substance, of the red sulphur, of the water that does not make the hands wet,13 and of the sea water should not be left out of account. The author of the Novum lumen chemicum cannot suppress a reference to the latters paradoxical nature: Do not be disturbed because you sometimes find contradictions in my treatises, after the custom of the philosophers; these are necessary, if you understand that no rose is found without thorns.14
[111] The active sun-substance also has favourable effects. As the so-called balsam it drips from the sun and produces lemons, oranges, wine, and, in the mineral kingdom, gold.15 In man the balsam forms the radical moisture, from the sphere of the supracelestial waters; it is the shining or lucent body which from mans birth enkindles the inner warmth, and from which come all the motions of the will and the principle of all appetition. It is a vital spirit, and it has its seat in the brain and its governance in the heart.16
[112] In the Liber Platonis Quartorum, a Sabaean treatise, the spiritus animalis or solar sulphur is still a
, a ministering spirit or familiar who can be conjured up by magical invocations to help with the work.17
[113] From what has been said about the active sun-substance it should be clear that Sol in alchemy is much less a definite chemical substance than a virtus, a mysterious power18 believed to have a generative19 and transformative effect. Just as the physical sun lightens and warms the universe, so, in the human body, there is in the heart a sunlike arcanum from which life and warmth stream forth.20 Therefore Sol, says Dorn, is rightly named the first after God, and the father and begetter of all,21 because in him the seminal and formal virtue of all things whatsoever lies hid.22 This power is called sulphur.23 It is a hot, daemonic principle of life, having the closest affinities with the sun in the earth, the central fire or ignis gehennalis (fire of hell). Hence there is also a Sol niger, a black sun, which coincides with the nigredo and putrefactio, the state of death.24 Like Mercurius, Sol in alchemy is ambivalent.
[114] The miraculous power of the sun, says Dorn, is due to the fact that all the simple elements are contained in it, as they are in heaven and in the other heavenly bodies. We say that the sun is a single element, he continues, tacitly identifying it with the quintessence. This view is explained by a remarkable passage from the Consilium coniugii: The Philosophers maintained that the father of the gold and silver is the animating principle [animal] of earth and water, or man or part of a man, such as hair, blood, menstruum, etc.25 The idea at the back of this is that primitive conception of a universal power of growth, healing, magic, and prestige,26 which is to be found as much in the sun as in men and plants, so that not only the sun but man too, and especially the enlightened man, the adept, can generate the gold by virtue of this universal power. It was clear to Dorn (and to other alchemists as well) that the gold was not made by the usual chemical procedures,27 for which reason he called gold-making (chrysopoeia) a miracle. The miracle was performed by a natura abscondita (hidden nature), a metaphysical entity perceived not with the outward eyes, but solely by the mind.28 It was infused from heaven,29 provided that the adept had approached as closely as possible to things divine and at the same time had extracted from the substances the subtlest powers fit for the miraculous act. There is in the human body a certain aethereal substance, which preserves its other elemental parts and causes them to continue,30 he says. This substance or virtue is hindered in its operations by the corruption of the body; but the Philosophers, through a kind of divine inspiration, knew that this virtue and heavenly vigour can be freed from its fetters, not by its contrary . . . but by its like.31 Dorn calls it veritas. It is the supreme power, an unconquerable fortress, which hath but very few friends, and is besieged by innumerable enemies. It is defended by the immaculate Lamb, and signifies the heavenly Jerusalem in the inner man. In this fortress is the true and indubitable treasure, which is not eaten into by moths, nor dug out by thieves, but remaineth for ever, and is taken hence after death.32
[115] For Dorn, then, the spark of divine fire implanted in man becomes what Goe the in his original version of Faust called Fausts entelechy, which was carried away by the angels. This supreme treasure the animal man understandeth not. . . . We are made like stones, having eyes and seeing not.33
[116] After all this, we can say that the alchemical Sol, as a certain luminosity (quaedam luminositas), is in many respects equal to the lumen naturae. This was the real source of illumination in alchemy, and from alchemy Paracelsus borrowed this same source in order to illuminate the art of medicine. Thus the concept of Sol has not a little to do with the growth of modern consciousness, which in the last two centuries has relied more and more on the observation and experience of natural objects. Sol therefore seems to denote an important psychological fact. Consequently, it is well worth while delineating its peculiarities in greater detail on the basis of the very extensive literature.
[117] Generally Sol is regarded as the masculine and active half of Mercurius, a supraordinate concept whose psychology I have discussed in a separate study.34 Since, in his alchemical form, Mercurius does not exist in reality, he must be an unconscious projection, and because he is an absolutely fundamental concept in alchemy he must signify the unconscious itself. He is by his very nature the unconscious, where nothing can be differentiated; but, as a spiritus vegetativus (living spirit), he is an active principle and so must always appear in reality in differentiated form. He is therefore fittingly called duplex, both active and passive. The ascending, active part of him is called Sol, and it is only through this that the passive part can be perceived. The passive part therefore bears the name of Luna, because she borrows her light from the sun.35 Mercurius demonstrably corresponds to the cosmic Nous of the classical philosophers. The human mind is a derivative of this and so, likewise, is the diurnal life of the psyche, which we call consciousness.36 Consciousness requires as its necessary counterpart a dark, latent, non-manifest side, the unconscious, whose presence can be known only by the light of consciousness.37 Just as the day-star rises out of the nocturnal sea, so, ontogenetically and phylogenetically, consciousness is born of unconsciousness and sinks back every night to this primal condition. This duality of our psychic life is the prototype and archetype of the Sol-Luna symbolism. So much did the alchemist sense the duality of his unconscious assumptions that, in the face of all astronomical evidence, he equipped the sun with a shadow: The sun and its shadow bring the work to perfection.38 Michael Maier, from whom this saying is taken, avoids the onus of explanation by substituting the shadow of the earth for the shadow of the sun in the forty-fifth discourse of his Scrutinium. Evidently he could not wholly shut his eyes to astronomical reality. But then he cites the classical saying of Hermes: Son, extract from the ray its shadow,39 thus giving us clearly to understand that the shadow is contained in the suns rays and hence could be extracted from them (whatever that might mean). Closely related to this saying is the alchemical idea of a black sun, often mentioned in the literature.40 This notion is supported by the self-evident fact that without light there is no shadow, so that, in a sense, the shadow too is emitted by the sun. For this physics requires a dark object interposed between the sun and the observer, a condition that does not apply to the alchemical Sol, since occasionally it appears as black itself. It contains both light and darkness. For what, in the end, asks Maier, is this sun without a shadow? The same as a bell without a clapper. While Sol is the most precious thing, its shadow is res vilissima or quid vilius alga (more worthless than seaweed). The antinomian thinking of alchemy counters every position with a negation and vice versa. Outwardly they are bodily things, but inwardly they are spiritual, says Senior.41 This view is true of all alchemical qualities, and each thing bears in itself its opposite.42
[118] To the alchemical way of thinking the shadow is no mere privatio lucis; just as the bell and its clapper are of a tangible substantiality, so too are light and shadow. Only thus can the saying of Hermes be understood. In its entirety it runs: Son, extract from the ray its shadow, and the corruption that arises from the mists which gather about it, befoul it and veil its light; for it is consumed by necessity and by its redness.43 Here the shadow is thought of quite concretely; it is a mist that is capable not only of obscuring the sun but of befouling it (coinquinarea strong expression). The redness (rubedo) of the suns light is a reference to the red sulphur in it, the active burning principle, destructive in its effects. In man the natural sulphur, Dorn says, is identical with an elemental fire which is the cause of corruption, and this fire is enkindled by an invisible sun unknown to many, that is, the sun of the Philosophers. The natural sulphur tends to revert to its first nature, so that the body becomes sulphurous and fitted to receive the fire that corrupts man back to his first essence.44 The sun is evidently an instrument in the physiological and psychological drama of return to the prima materia, the death that must be undergone if man is to get back to the original condition of the simple elements and attain the incorrupt nature of the pre-worldly paradise. For Dorn this process was spiritual and moral as well as physical.
[119] Sol appears here in a dubious, indeed a sulphurous light: it corrupts, obviously because of the sulphur it contains.45
[120] Accordingly, Sol is the transformative substance, the prima materia as well as the gold tincture. The anonymous treatise De arte chymica distinguishes two parts or stages of the lapis. The first part is called the sol terrenus (earthly sun). Without the earthly sun, the work is not perfected.46 In the second part of the work Sol is joined with Mercurius.
On earth these stones are dead, and they do nothing unless the activity of man is applied to them. [Consider]47 the profound analogy of the gold: the aethereal heaven was locked to all men, so that all men had to descend into the underworld, where they were imprisoned for ever. But Christ Jesus unlocked the gate of the heavenly Olympus and threw open the realm of Pluto, that the souls might be freed, when the Virgin Mary, with the cooperation of the Holy Ghost in an unutterable mystery and deepest sacrament, conceived in her virgin womb that which was most excellent in heaven and upon earth, and finally bore for us the Redeemer of the whole world, who by his overflowing goodness shall save all who are given up to sin, if only the sinner shall turn to him. But the Virgin remained incorrupt and inviolate: therefore not without good reason is Mercurius made equal [aequiparatur] to the most glorious and worshipful Virgin Mary.48
It is evident from this that the coniunctio of Sol and Mercurius is a hierosgamos, with Mercurius playing the role of bride. If one does not find this analogy too offensive, one may ask oneself with equanimity whether the arcanum of the opus alchymicum, as understood by the old masters, may not indeed be considered an equivalent of the dogmatic mystery. For the psychologist the decisive thing here is the subjective attitude of the alchemist. As I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, such a profession of faith is by no means unique.49
[121] The metaphorical designation of Christ as Sol50 in the language of the Church Fathers was taken quite literally by the alchemists and applied to their sol terrenus. When we remember that the alchemical Sol corresponds psychologically to consciousness, the diurnal side of the psyche, we must add the Christ analogy to this symbolism. Christ appears essentially as the son the son of his mother-bride. The role of the son does in fact devolve upon ego-consciousness since it is the offspring of the maternal unconscious. Now according to the arch authority, the Tabula smaragdina, Sol is the father of Mercurius, who in the above quotation appears as feminine and as the mother-bride. In that capacity Mercurius is identical with Luna, andvia the Luna-Mary-Ecclesia symbolismis equated with the Virgin. Thus the treatise Exercitationes in Turbam says: As blood is the origin of flesh, so is Mercurius the origin of Sol . . . and thus Mercurius is Sol and Sol is Mercurius.51 Sol is therefore father and son at once, and his feminine counterpart is mother and daughter in one person; furthermore, Sol and Luna are merely aspects of the same substance that is simultaneously the cause and the product of both, namely Mercurius duplex, of whom the philosophers say that he contains everything that is sought by the wise. This train of thought is based on a quaternity:
[122] Although the Sol symbolism is reminiscent of the dogmatic models, its basic schema is very different; for the dogmatic schema is a Trinity embracing only the Deity but not the universe.52 The alchemical schema appears to embrace only the material world, yet, on account of its quaternary character, it comes near to being a representation of totality as exemplified in the symbol of the cross erected between heaven and earth. The cross is by implication the Christian totality symbol: as an instrument of torture it expresses the sufferings on earth of the incarnate God, and as a quaternity it expresses the universe, which also includes the material world. If we now add to this cruciform schema the four protagonists of the divine world-drama the Father as auctor rerum, the Son, his counterpart the Devil (to fight whom he became man), and the Holy Ghost, we get the following quaternity:
[123] I will not discuss the various aspects of this quaternity more closely here, as I have already done so in a separate study.53 I mention it only for comparison with the alchemical one. Quaternities such as these are logical characteristics of Gnostic thinking, which Koepgen has aptly called circular.54 We have already met similar figures in our account of the opposites, which were often arranged in quaternities. The rhythm of both schemas is divided into three steps:
[124] The alchemical drama leads from below upwards, from the darkness of the earth to the winged, spiritual filius macrocosmi and to the lux moderna; the Christian drama, on the other hand, represents the descent of the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. One has the impression of a mirror-world, as if the God-man coming down from aboveas in the Gnostic legendwere reflected in the dark waters of Physis. The relation of the unconscious to the conscious mind is to a certain extent complementary, as elementary psychogenic symptoms and dreams caused by simple somatic stimuli prove.55 (Hence the strange idea, taught for instance by Rudolf Steiner, that the Hereafter possesses qualities complementary to those of this world.) Careful observation and analysis show, however, that not all dreams can be regarded mechanically as mere complementary devices but must be interpreted rather as attempts at compensation, though this does not prevent very many dreams from having, on a superficial view, a distinct complementary character. Similarly, we could regard the alchemical movement as a reflection of the Christian one.56 Koepgen makes a significant distinction between two aspects of Christ: the descending, incarnate God, and the ascending, Gnostic Christ who returns to the Father. We cannot regard the latter as the same as the alchemical filius regius, although Koepgens schema offers an exact parallel to the alchemical situation.57 The redeemer figure of alchemy is not commensurable with Christ. Whereas Christ is God and is begotten by the Father, the filius regius is the soul of nature, born of the world-creating Logos, of the Sapientia Dei sunk in matter. The filius regius is also a son of God, though of more distant descent and not begotten in the womb of the Virgin Mary but in the womb of Mother Nature: he is a third sonship in the Basilidian sense.58 No traditional influences should be invoked in considering the conceptual structure of this filius; he is more an autochthonous product deriving from an unconscious, logical development of trends which had already reached the field of consciousness in the early Christian era, impelled by the same unconscious necessity as produced the later development of ideas. For, as our modern experience has shown, the collective unconscious is a living process that follows its own inner laws and gushes up like a spring at the appointed time. That it did so in alchemy in such an obscure and complicated way was due essentially to the great psychological difficulties of antinomian thinking, which continually came up against the demand for the logical consistency of the metaphysical figures, and for their emotional absoluteness. The bonum superexcedens of God allows no integration of evil. Although Nicholas Cusanus ventured the bold thought of the coincidentia oppositorum, its logical consequence the relativity of the God-conceptproved disastrous for Angelus Silesius, and only the withered laurels of the poet lie on his grave. He had drunk with Jacob Boehme at the fount of Mater Alchimia. The alchemists, too, became choked in their own confusions.
[125] Once again, therefore, it is the medical investigators of nature who, equipped with new means of knowledge, have rescued these tangled problems from projection by making them the proper subject of psychology. This could never have happened before, for the simple reason that there was no psychology of the unconscious. But the medical investigator, thanks to his knowledge of archetypal processes, is in the fortunate position of being able to recognize in the abstruse and grotesque-looking symbolisms of alchemy the nearest relatives of those serial fantasies which underlie the delusions of paranoid schizophrenia as well as the healing processes at work in the psychogenic neuroses. The overweening contempt which other departments of science have for the apparently negligible psychic processes of pathological individuals should not deter the doctor in his task of helping and healing the sick. But he can help the sick psyche only when he meets it as the unique psyche of that particular individual, and when he knows its earthly and unearthly darknesses. He should also consider it just as important a task to defend the standpoint of consciousness, clarity, reason, and an acknowledged and proven good against the raging torrent that flows for all eternity in the darkness of the psychea
that leaves nothing unaltered and ceaselessly creates a past that can never be retrieved. He knows that there is nothing purely good in the realm of human experience, but also that for many people it is better to be convinced of an absolute good and to listen to the voice of those who espouse the superiority of consciousness and unambiguous thinking. He may solace himself with the thought that one who can join the shadow to the light is the possessor of the greater riches. But he will not fall into the temptation of playing the law-giver, nor will he pretend to be a prophet of the truth: for he knows that the sick, suffering, or helpless patient standing before him is not the public but is Mr or Mrs X, and that the doctor has to put something tangible and helpful on the table or he is no doctor. His duty is always to the individual, and he is persuaded that nothing has happened if this individual has not been helped. He is answerable to the individual in the first place and to society only in the second. If he therefore prefers individual treatment to collective ameliorations, this accords with the experience that social and collective influences usually produce only a mass intoxication, and that only mans action upon man can bring about a real transformation.59
[126] It cannot have escaped the alchemists that their Sol had something to do with man. Thus Dorn says: From the beginning man was sulphur. Sulphur is a destructive fire enkindled by the invisible sun, and this sun is the Sol Philosophorum,60 which is the much sought-after and highly praised philosophic gold, indeed the goal of the whole work.61 In spite of the fact that Dorn regards the sun and its sulphur as a kind of physiological component of the human body, it is clear that we are dealing with a piece of physiological mythology, i.e., a projection.
[127] In the course of our inquiry we have often seen that, despite the complete absence of any psychology, the alchemical projections sketch a picture of certain fundamental psychological facts and, as it were, reflect them in matter. One of these fundamental facts is the primary pair of opposites, consciousness and unconsciousness, whose symbols are Sol and Luna.
[128] We know well enough that the unconscious appears personified: mostly it is the anima62 who in singular or plural form represents the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is personified by the shadow.63 More rarely, the collective unconscious is personified as a Wise Old Man.64 (I am speaking here only of masculine psychology, which alone can be compared with that of the alchemists.) It is still rarer for Luna to represent the nocturnal side of the psyche in dreams. But in the products of active imagination the symbol of the moon appears much more often, as also does the sun, which represents the luminous realm of the psyche and our diurnal consciousness. The modern unconscious has little use for sun and moon as dream-symbols.65 Illumination (a light dawns, it is becoming clear, etc.) can be expressed just as well or even better in modern dreams by switching on the electric light.
[129] It is therefore not surprising if the unconscious appears in projected and symbolized form, as there is no other way by which it might be perceived. But this is apparently not the case with consciousness. Consciousness, as the essence of all conscious contents, seems to lack the basic requirements for a projection. Properly understood, projection is not a voluntary happening; it is something that approaches the conscious mind from outside, a kind of sheen on the object, while all the time the subject remains unaware that he himself is the source of light which causes the cats eye of the projection to shine. Luna is therefore conceivable as a projection; but Sol as a projection, since it symbolizes consciousness, seems at first glance a contradiction in terms, yet Sol is no less a projection than Luna. For just as we perceive nothing of the real sun but light and heat and, apart from that, can know its physical constitution only by inference, so our consciousness issues from a dark body, the ego, which is the indispensable condition for all consciousness, the latter being nothing but the association of an object or a content with the ego. The ego, ostensibly the thing we know most about, is in fact a highly complex affair full of unfathomable obscurities. Indeed, one could even define it as a relatively constant personification of the unconscious itself, or as the Schopenhauerian mirror in which the unconscious becomes aware of its own face.66 All the worlds that have ever existed before man were physically there. But they were a nameless happening, not a definite actuality, for there did not yet exist that minimal concentration of the psychic factor, which was also present, to speak the word that outweighed the whole of Creation: That is the world, and this is I! That was the first morning of the world, the first sunrise after the primal darkness, when that inchoately conscious complex, the ego, the son of the darkness, knowingly sundered subject and object, and thus precipitated the world and itself into definite existence,67 giving it and itself a voice and a name. The refulgent body of the sun is the ego and its field of consciousness Sol et eius umbra: light without and darkness within. In the source of light there is darkness enough for any amount of projections, for the ego grows out of the darkness of the psyche.
[130] In view of the supreme importance of the ego in bringing reality to light, we can understand why this infinitesimal speck in the universe was personified as the sun, with all the attri butes that this image implies. As the medieval mind was incomparably more alive than ours to the divine quality of the sun, we may assume that the totality character of the sun-image was implicit in all its allegorical or symbolic applications. Among the significations of the sun as totality the most important was its frequent use as a God-image, not only in pagan times but in the sphere of Christianity as well.
[131] Although the alchemists came very close to realizing that the ego was the mysteriously elusive arcane substance and the longed-for lapis, they were not aware that with their sun symbol they were establishing an intimate connection between God and the ego. As already remarked, projection is not a voluntary act; it is a natural phenomenon beyond the interference of the conscious mind and peculiar to the nature of the human psyche. If, therefore, it is this nature that produces the sun symbol, nature herself is expressing an identity of God and ego. In that case only unconscious nature can be accused of blasphemy, but not the man who is its victim. It is the rooted conviction of the West that God and the ego are worlds apart. In India, on the other hand, their identity was taken as self-evident. It was the nature of the Indian mind to become aware of the world-creating significance of the consciousness68 manifested in man.69 The West, on the contrary, has always emphasized the littleness, weakness, and sinfulness of the ego, despite the fact that it elevated one man to the status of divinity. The alchemists at least suspected mans hidden godlikeness, and the intuition of Angelus Silesius finally expressed it without disguise.
[132] The East resolves these confusing and contradictory aspects by merging the ego, the personal atman, with the universal atman and thus explaining the ego as the veil of Maya. The Western alchemist was not consciously aware of these problems. But when his unspoken assumptions and his symbols reached the plane of conscious gnosis, as was the case with Angelus Silesius, it was precisely the littleness and lowliness of the ego70 that impelled him to recognize its identity with its extreme opposite.71 It was not the arbitrary opinions of deranged minds that gave rise to such insights, but rather the nature of the psyche itself, which, in East and West alike, expresses these truths either directly or clothed in transparent metaphors. This is understandable when we realize that a world-creating quality attaches to human consciousness as such. In saying this we violate no religious convictions, for the religious believer is at liberty to regard mans consciousness (through which, as it were, a second world-creation was enacted) as a divine instrument.
[133] I must point out to the reader that these remarks on the significance of the ego might easily prompt him to charge me with grossly contradicting myself. He will perhaps remember that he has come across a very similar argument in my other writings. Only there it was not a question of ego but of the self, or rather, of the personal atman in contradistinction and in relation to the suprapersonal atman. I have defined the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious psyche, and the ego as the central reference-point of consciousness. It is an essential part of the self, and can be used pars pro toto when the significance of consciousness is borne in mind. But when we want to lay emphasis on the psychic totality it is better to use the term self. There is no question of a contradictory definition, but merely of a difference of standpoint.
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