[134] Because of the singular role it plays in alchemy, sulphur deserves to be examined rather more closely. The first point of interest, which we have already touched on, is its relation to Sol: it was called the prima materia of Sol, Sol being naturally understood as the gold. As a matter of fact, sulphur was sometimes identified with gold.73 Sol therefore derives from sulphur. The close connection between them explains the view that sulphur was the companion of Luna.74 When the gold (Sol) and his bride (Luna) are united, the coagulating sulphur, which in the corporal gold was turned outwards [extroversion], is turned inwards (i.e., introverted).75 This remark indicates the psychic double nature of sulphur (sulphur duplex); there is a red and a white sulphur, the white being the active substance of the moon, the red that of the sun.76 The specific virtue of sulphur is said to be greater in the red variety.77 But its duplicity also has another meaning: on the one hand it is the prima materia, and in this form it is burning and corrosive (adurens), and hostile to the matter of the stone; on the other hand, when cleansed of all impurities, it is the matter of our stone.78 Altogether, sulphur is one of the innumerable synonyms for the prima materia79 in its dual aspect, i.e., as both the initial material and the end-product. At the beginning it is crude or common sulphur, at the end it is a sublimation product of the process.80 Its fiery nature is unanimously stressed,81 though this fieriness does not consist merely in its combustibility but in its occult fiery nature. As always, an allusion to occult qualities means that the material in question was the focus of projections which lent it a numinous significance.
[135] In keeping with its dual nature sulphur is on the one hand corporal and earthly,82 and on the other an occult, spiritual principle. As an earthly substance it comes from the fatness of the earth,83 by which was meant the radical moisture as prima materia. Occasionally it is called cinis extractus a cinere (ash extracted from ash).84 Ash is an inclusive term for the scoriae left over from burning, the substance that remains belowa strong reminder of the chthonic nature of sulphur. The red variety is thought of as masculine,85 and under this aspect it represents the gold or Sol.86 As a chthonic being it has close affinities with the dragon, which is called our secret sulphur.87 In that form it is also the aqua divina, symbolized by the uroboros.88 These analogies often make it difficult to distinguish between sulphur and Mercurius, since the same thing is said of both. This is our natural, most sure fire, our Mercurius, our sulphur, says the Tractatus aureus de lapide.89 In the Turba quicksilver is a fiery body that behaves in exactly the same way as sulphur.90 For Paracelsus sulphur, together with Sal (salt), is the begetter of Mercurius, who is born of the sun and moon.91 Or it is found in the depths of the nature of Mercurius,92 or it is of the nature of Mercurius,93 or sulphur and Mercurius are brother and sister.94 Sulphur is credited with Mercurius power to dissolve, kill, and bring metals to life.95
[136] This intimate connection with Mercurius makes it evident that sulphur is a spiritual or psychic substance of universal import, of which nearly everything may be said that is said of Mercurius. Thus sulphur is the soul not only of metals but of all living things; in the Tractatus aureus it is equated with nostra anima (our soul).96 The Turba says: The sulphurs are souls that were hidden in the four bodies.97 Paracelsus likewise calls sulphur the soul.98 In Mylius sulphur produces the ferment or soul which gives life to the imperfect body.99 The Tractatus Micreris says: . . . until the green son appears, who is its100 soul, which the Philosophers have called the green bird and bronze and sulphur.101 The soul is also described as the hidden part [occultum] of the sulphur.102
[137] In the sphere of Christian psychology, green has a spermatic, procreative quality, and for this reason it is the colour attri buted to the Holy Ghost as the creative principle.103 Accordingly Dorn says: The male and universal seed, the first and most potent, is the solar sulphur, the first part and most potent cause of all generation.104 It is the life-spirit itself. In his De tenebris contra naturam Dorn says: We have said before that the life of the world is the light of nature and the celestial sulphur, whose substrate [subiectum] is the aetheric moisture and the heat of the firmament, namely Sol and Luna.105 Sulphur has here attained cosmic significance and is equated with the light of nature, the supreme source of knowledge for the natural philosophers. But this light does not shine unhindered, says Dorn. It is obscured by the darkness of the elements in the human body. For him, therefore, sulphur is a shining, heavenly being. Though this sulphur is a son who comes from imperfect bodies, he is ready to put on the white and purple garments.106 In Ripley he is a spirit of generative power, who works in the moisture.107 In the treatise De sulphure he is the virtue of all things and the source of illumination and of all knowledge.108 He knows, in fact, everything.109
[138] In view of the significance of sulphur it is worth our while to take a look at its effects as described by the alchemists. Above all, it burns and consumes: The little power of this sulphur is sufficient to consume a strong body.110 The strong body is the sun, as is clear from the saying: Sulphur blackens the sun and consumes it. Then, it causes or signifies the putrefactio, which in our day was never seen, says the Rosarium.111 A third capacity is that of coagulating,112 and a fourth and fifth those of tincturing (tingere, colorare) and maturing (maturare).113 Its putrefying effect is also understood as its ability to corrupt. Sulphur is the cause of imperfection in all metals, the corrupter of perfection, causing the blackness in every operation; too much sulphurousness is the cause of corruption, it is bad and not well mixed, of an evil, stinking odour and of feeble strength. Its substance is dense and tough, and its corruptive action is due on the one hand to its combustibility and on the other to its earthy feculence. It hinders perfection in all its works.114
[139] These unfavourable accounts evidently impressed one of the adepts so much that, in a marginal note, he added diabolus to the causae corruptionis.115 This remark is illuminating: it forms the counterpoint to the luminous role of sulphur, for sulphur is a Lucifer or Phosphorus (light-bringer), from the most beautiful star in the chymic firmament down to the candelulae,little bits of sulphurous tow such as old women sell for lighting fires.116 In addition to so many other qualities, sulphur shares this extreme paradox with Mercurius, besides having like him a connection with Venus, though here the allusion is veiled and more discreet: Our Venus is not the common sulphur, which burns and is consumed with the combustion of the fire and of the corruption; but the whiteness of the Venus of the Sages is consumed with the combustion of the white and the red [albedinis et rubedinis], and this combustion is the entire whitening [dealbatio] of the whole work. Therefore two sulphurs are mentioned and two quicksilvers,117 and these the Philosophers have named one and one,118 and they rejoice in one another,119 and the one contains the other.120
[140] Another allusion to Venus occurs in one of the parables in De sulphure,121 about an alchemist who is seeking the sulphur. His quest leads him to the grove of Venus, and there he learns through a voice, which later turns out to be Saturns, that Sulphur is held a prisoner at the comm and of his own mother. He is praised as the artificer of a thousand things, as the heart of all things, as that which endows living things with understanding, as the begetter of every flower and blossom on herb and tree, and finally as the painter of all colours.122 This might well be a description of Eros. In addition we learn that he was imprisoned because in the view of the alchemists he had shown himself too obliging towards his mother. Although we are not told who his mother was, we may conjecture that it was Venus herself who shut up her naughty Cupid.123 This interpretation is corroborated by the fact, firstly, that Sulphur, unknown to the alchemist, was in the grove of Venus124 (woods, like trees, have a maternal significance); secondly, that Saturn introduced himself as the governor of the prison, and all alchemists with knowledge of astrology would have been familiar with the secret nature of Saturn;125 thirdly, that after the disappearance of the voice the alchemist, falling asleep, saw in the same grove a fountain and near it the personified Sulphur; and, finally, that the vision ends with the chymical embrace in the bath. Here Venus is undoubtedly the amor sapientiae who puts a check on Sulphurs roving charms. The latter may well derive from the fact that his seat in the Uroboros is in the tail of the dragon.126 Sulphur is the masculine element par excellence, the sperma homogeneum;127 and since the dragon is said to impregnate himself, his tail is the masculine and his mouth the feminine organ. Like Beya,128 who engulfed her brother in her own body and dissolved him into atoms, the dragon devours himself from the tail upwards until his whole body has been swallowed into his head.129 Being the inner fire of Mercurius,130 Sulphur obviously partakes of his most dangerous and most evil nature, his violence being personified in the dragon and the lion, and his concupiscence in Hermes Kyllenios.131 The dragon whose nature sulphur shares is often spoken of as the dragon of Babel or, more accurately, the dragons head (caput draconis), which is a most pernicious poison, a poisonous vapour breathed out by the flying dragon. The dragons head comes with great swiftness from Babylon. However, the winged dragon that stands for quicksilver becomes a poison-breathing monster only after its union with the wingless dragon, which corresponds to sulphur.132 Sulphur here plays an evil role that accords well with the sinful Babel. Furthermore, this dragon is equated with the human-headed serpent of paradise, which had the imago et similitudo Dei in its head, this being the deeper reason why the dragon devours its hated body. His head lives in eternity, and therefore it is called glorious life, and the angels serve him.133 This is a reference to Matthew 4: 11: Then the devil leaveth him, and behold, angels came and ministered unto him.
[141] Hence we get the parallel of the dragons head with Christ, corresponding to the Gnostic view that the son of the highest divinity took on the form of the serpent in paradise in order to teach our first parents the faculty of discrimination, so that they should see that the work of the demiurge was imperfect. As the son of the seven planets the dragon is clearly the filius macrocosmi and, as such, a parallel figure to Christ and at the same time his rival.134 The dragons head contains the precious stone, which means that consciousness contains the symbolic image of the self, and just as the lapis unites the opposites so the self assimilates contents of consciousness and the unconscious. This interpretation fully accords with the traditional significance of the dragons head as a favourable omen.
[142] From what has been said it should be evident that sulphur is the essence of an active substance. It is the spirit of the metals,135 forming with quicksilver, the other spirit of nature, the two principles and the matter of the metals, since these two principles are themselves metals in potentia.136 Together with Mercurius it also forms the lapis.137 In fact, it is the heart of all things138 and the virtue of all things.139 Enumerating, along with water and moisture, the synonyms for the lapis as the whole secret and life of all things whatsoever, the Consilium coniugii says: The oil that takes up the colour, that is, the radiance of the sun, is itself sulphur.140 Mylius compares it to the rainbow: The sulphur shines like the rainbow above the waters . . . the bow of Isis stands half on the pure, liquid, and flowing water and half on the earth . . . hence the whole property of sulphur and its natural likeness are expressed by the rainbow. Thus sulphur, so far as it is symbolized by the rainbow, is a divine and wonderful experience. A few lines further on, after mentioning sulphur as one of the components of the water, Mylius writes that Mercurius (i.e., the water) must be cleansed by distillation from all foulness of the earth, and then Lucifer, the impurity and the accursed earth, will fall from the golden heaven.141 Lucifer, the most beautiful of the angels, becomes the devil, and sulphur is of the earths foulness. Here, as in the case of the dragons head, the highest and the lowest are close together. Although a personification of evil, sulphur shines above earth and water with the splendour of the rainbow, a natural vessel142 of divine transformation.
[143] From all this it is apparent that for the alchemists sulphur was one of the many synonyms for the mysterious transformative substance.143 This is expressed most plainly in the Turba:144 Therefore roast it for seven days, until it becomes shining like marble, because, when it does, it is a very great secret [arcanum], since sulphur has been mixed with sulphur; and thereby is the greatest work accomplished, by mutual affinity, because natures meeting their nature mutually rejoice.145 It is a characteristic of the arcane substance to have everything it needs; it is a fully autonomous being, like the dragon that begets, reproduces, slays, and devours itself. It is questionable whether the alchemists, who were anything but consistent thinkers, ever became fully conscious of what they were saying when they used such images. If we take their words literally, they would refer to an Increatum, a being without beginning or end, and in need of no second. Such a thing can by definition only be God himself, but a God, we must add, seen in the mirror of physical nature and distorted past recognition. The One for which the alchemists strove corresponds to the res simplex, which the Liber quartorum defines as God.146 This reference, however, is unique, and in view of the corrupt state of the text I would not like to labour its significance, although Dorns speculations about the One and the unarius are closely analogous. The Turba continues: And yet they are not different natures, nor several, but a single one, which unites their powers in itself, through which it prevails over the other things. See you not that the Master has begun with the One and ended with the One? For he has named those unities the water of the sulphur, which conquers the whole of nature.147 The peculiarity of sulphur is also expressed in the paradox that it is incremabile (incombustible), ash extracted from ash.148 Its effects as aqua sulfurea are infinite.149 The Consilium coniugii says: Our sulphur is not the common sulphur,150 which is usually said of the philosophical gold. Paracelsus, in his Liber Azoth, describes sulphur as lignum (wood), the linea vitae (line of life), and fourfold (to correspond with the four elements); the spirit of life is renewed from it.151 Of the philosophical sulphur Mylius says that such a thing is not to be found on earth except in Sol and Luna, and it is known to no man unless revealed to him by God.152 Dorn calls it the son begotten of the imperfect bodies, who, when sublimated, changes into the highly esteemed salt of four colours. In the Tractatus Micreris it is even called the treasure of God.153
[144] These references to sulphur as the arcane and transformative substance must suffice. I would only like to stress Paracelsus remark about its fourfold nature, and that of his pupil Dorn about the four colours as symbols of totality. The psychic factor which appears in projection in all similarly characterized arcane substances is the unconscious self. It is on this account that the well-known Christ-lapis154 parallel reappears again and again, as for instance in the above-mentioned parable of the adepts adventure in the grove of Venus. As we saw, he fell asleep after having a long and instructive conversation with the voice of Saturn. In his dream he beholds the figures of two men by the fountain in the grove, one of them Sulphur, the other Sal. A quarrel arises, and Sal gives Sulphur an incurable wound. Blood pours from it in the form of whitest milk. As the adept sinks deeper into sleep, it changes into a river. Diana emerges from the grove and bathes in the miraculous water. A prince (Sol), passing by, espies her, they are inflamed for love of one another, and she falls down in a swoon and sinks beneath the surface. The princes retinue refuse to rescue her for fear of the perilous water,155 whereupon the prince plunges in and is dragged down by her to the depths. Immediately their souls appear above the water and explain to the adept that they will not go back into bodies so polluted, and are glad to be quit of them. They would remain afloat until the fogs and clouds have disappeared. At this point the adept returns to his former dream, and with many other alchemists he finds the corpse of Sulphur by the fountain. Each of them takes a piece and operates with it, but without success.156 We learn, further, that Sulphur is not only the medicina but also the medicus the wounded physician.157 Sulphur suffers the same fate as the body that is pierced by the lance of Mercurius. In Reusners Pandora158 the body is symbolized as Christ, the second Adam, pierced by the lance of a mermaid, or a Lilith or Edem.159
[145] This analogy shows that sulphur as the arcane substance was set on a par with Christ, so that for the alchemists it must have meant something very similar. We would turn away in disgust from such an absurdity were it not obvious that this analogy, sometimes in clear and sometimes in veiled form, was thrust upon them by the unconscious. Certainly there could be no greater disparity than that between the holiest conception known to mans consciousness and sulphur with its evil-smelling compounds. The analogy therefore is in no sense evidential but can only have arisen through intense and passionate preoccupation with the chemical substance, which gradually formed a tertium comparationis in the alchemists mind and forced it upon him with the utmost insistence. The common denominator of these two utterly incommensurable conceptions is the self, the image of the whole man, which reached its finest and most significant development in the Ecce Homo, and on the other hand appears as the meanest, most contemptible, and most insignificant thing, and manifests itself to consciousness precisely in that guise. As it is a concept of human totality, the self is by definition greater than the ego-conscious personality, embracing besides this the personal shadow and the collective unconscious. Conversely, the entire phenomenon of the unconscious appears so unimportant to ego-consciousness that we would rather explain it as a privatio lucis160 than allow it an autonomous existence. In addition, the conscious mind is critical and mistrustful of everything hailing from the unconscious, convinced that it is suspect and somehow dirty. Hence the psychic phenomenology of the self is as full of paradoxes as the Hindu conception of the atman, which on the one hand embraces the universe and on the other dwells no bigger than a thumb in the heart. The Eastern idea of atman-purusha corresponds psychologically to the Western figure of Christ, who is the second Person of the Trinity and God himself, but, so far as his human existence is concerned, conforms exactly to the suffering servant of God in Isaiah161from his birth in a stable among the animals to his shameful death on the cross between two thieves.
[146] The contrast is even sharper in the Naassene picture of the Redeemer, as reported by Hippolytus:162 Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.163 This is the wonder of wonders. For who, saith he [the Naassene], is this King of glory? A worm and no man, a reproach of men, and despised of the people;164 this same is the King, and mighty in battle. But the battle, say the Naassenes, refers to the warring elements in the body. This association of the passage from the Psalms with the idea of conflict is no accident, for psychological experience shows that the symbols of the self appear in dreams and in active imagination at moments of violent collision between two opposite points of view, as compensatory attempts to mitigate the conflict and make enemies friends. Therefore the lapis, which is born of the dragon, is extolled as a saviour and mediator since it represents the equivalent of a redeemer sprung from the unconscious. The Christ-lapis parallel vacillates between mere analogy and far-reaching identity, but in general it is not thought out to its logical conclusion, so that the dual focus remains. This is not surprising since even today most of us have not got round to understanding Christ as the psychic reality of an archetype, regardless of his historicity. I do not doubt the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth, but the figure of the Son of Man and of Christ the Redeemer has archetypal antecedents. It is these that form the basis of the alchemical analogies.
[147] As investigators of nature the alchemists showed their Christian attitude by their pistis in the object of their science, and it was not their fault if in many cases the psyche proved stronger than the chemical substance and its well-guarded secrets by distorting the results. It was only the acuter powers of observation in modern man which showed that weighing and measuring provided the key to the locked doors of chemical combination, after the intuition of the alchemists had stressed for centuries the importance of measure, number, and weight.165 The prime and most immediate experience of matter was that it is animated, which for medieval man was self-evident; indeed every Mass, every rite of the Church, and the miraculous effect of relics all demonstrated for him this natural and obvious fact. The French Enlightenment and the shattering of the metaphysical view of the world were needed before a scientist like Lavoisier had the courage finally to reach out for the scales. To begin with, however, the alchemists were fascinated by the soul of matter, which, unknown to them, it had received from the human psyche by way of projection. For all their intensive preoccupation with matter as a concrete fact they followed this psychic trail, which was to lead them into a region that, to our way of thinking, had not the remotest connection with chemistry. Their mental labours consisted in a predominantly intuitive apprehension of psychic facts, the intellect playing only the modest role of a famulus. The results of this curious method of research proved, however, to be beyond the grasp of any psychology for several centuries. If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. The misfortune of the alchemists was that they themselves did not know what they were talking about. Nevertheless, we possess witnesses enough to the high esteem in which they held their science and to the wonderment which the mystery of matter instilled into them. For they discoveredto keep to sulphur as our examplein this substance, which was one of the customary attri butes of hell and the devil, as well as in the poisonous, crafty, and treacherous Mercurius, an analogy with the most sacrosanct figure of their religion. They therefore imbued this arcanum with symbols intended to characterize its malicious, dangerous, and uncanny nature, choosing precisely those which in the positive sense were used for Christ in the patristic literature. These were the snake, the lion, the eagle, fire, cloud, shadow, fish, stone, the unicorn and the rhinoceros, the dragon, the night-raven, the man encompassed by a woman, the hen, water, and many others. This strange usage is explained by the fact that the majority of the patristic allegories have in addition to their positive meaning a negative one. Thus in St. Eucherius166 the rapacious wolf in its good part signifies the apostle Paul, but in its bad part the devil.
[148] From this we would have to conclude that the alchemists had discovered the psychological existence of a shadow which opposes and compensates the conscious, positive figure. For them the shadow was in no sense a privatio lucis; it was so real that they even thought they could discern its material density, and this concretism led them to attri bute to it the dignity of being the matrix of an incorruptible and eternal substance. In the religious sphere this psychological discovery is reflected in the historical fact that only with the rise of Christianity did the devil, the eternal counterpart of Christ, assume his true form, and that the figure of Antichrist appears on the scene already in the New Testament. It would have been natural for the alchemists to suppose that they had lured the devil out of the darkness of matter. There were indeed indications of this, as we have seen, but they are exceptions. Far more prevalent and truly characteristic of alchemy was the optimistic notion that this creature of darkness was destined to be the medicina, as is proved by the use of the term medicina et medicus for the untrustworthy sulphur. The very same appellation appears as an allegory of Christ in St. Ambrose.167 The Greek word
(poison and antidote) is indicative of this ambivalence. In our parable of the sulphur the river of most dangerous water, which caused so many deaths, is analogous to the water from the side of Christ and the streams that flowed from his belly. What in one place is a river of grace is a deadly poison in anotherharbouring within it, however, the potentialities of healing.
[149] This is not mere euphemism or propitiatory optimism, but rather an intuitive perception of the compensating effect of the counter-position in the unconscious, which should not be understood dualistically as an absolute opposite but as a helpful though nonetheless dangerous complement to the conscious position. Medical experience shows that the unconscious is indeed actuated by a compensatory tendency, at any rate in normal individuals. In the domain of pathology I believe I have observed cases where the tendency of the unconscious would have to be regarded, by all human standards, as essentially destructive. But it may not be out of place to reflect that the self-destruction of what is hopelessly inefficient or evil can be understood in a higher sense as another attempt at compensation. There are murderers who feel that their execution is condign punishment, and suicides who go to their death in triumph.
[150] So, although the alchemists failed to discover the hidden structure of matter, they did discover that of the psyche, even if they were scarcely conscious of what this discovery meant. Their naive Christ-lapis parallel is at once a symbolization of the chemical arcanum and of the figure of Christ. The identification or paralleling of Christ with a chemical factor, which was in essence a pure projection from the unconscious, has a reactive effect on the interpretation of the Redeemer. For if A (Christ) = B (lapis), and B = C (an unconscious content), then A = C. Such conclusions need not be drawn consciously in order to be made effective. Given the initial impulse, as provided for instance by the Christ-lapis parallel, the conclusion will draw itself even though it does not reach consciousness, and it will remain the unspoken, spiritual property of the school of thought that first hit upon the equation. Not only that, it will be handed down to the heirs of that school as an integral part of their mental equipment, in this case the natural scientists. The equation had the effect of channelling the religious numen into physical nature and ultimately into matter itself, which in its turn had the chance to become a self-subsistent metaphysical principle. In following up their basic thoughts the alchemists, as I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, logically opposed to the son of the spirit a son of the earth and of the stars (or metals), and to the Son of Man or filius microcosmi a filius macrocosmi, thus unwittingly revealing that in alchemy there was an autonomous principle which, while it did not replace the spirit, nevertheless existed in its own right. Although the alchemists were more or less aware that their insights and truths were of divine origin, they knew they were not sacred revelations but were vouchsafed by individual inspiration or by the lumen naturae, the sapientia Dei hidden in nature. The autonomy of their insights showed itself in the emancipation of science from the domination of faith. Human intolerance and shortsightedness are to blame for the open conflict that ultimately broke out between faith and knowledge. Conflict or comparison between incommensurables is impossible. The only possible attitude is one of mutual toleration, for neither can deprive the other of its validity. Existing religious beliefs have, besides their supernatural foundation, a basis in psychological facts whose existence is as valid as those of the empirical sciences. If this is not understood on one side or the other it makes no difference to the facts, for these exist whether man understands them or not, and whoever does not have the facts on his side will sooner or later have to pay the price.
[151] With this I would like to conclude my remarks on sulphur. This arcane substance has provided occasion for some general reflections, which are not altogether fortuitous in that sulphur represents the active substance of the sun or, in psychological language, the motive factor in consciousness: on the one hand the will, which can best be regarded as a dynamism subordinated to consciousness, and on the other hand compulsion, an involuntary motivation or impulse ranging from mere interest to possession proper. The unconscious dynamism would correspond to sulphur, for compulsion is the great mystery of human life. It is the thwarting of our conscious will and of our reason by an inflammable element within us, appearing now as a consuming fire and now as life-giving warmth.
[152] The causa efficiens et finalis of this lack of freedom lies in the unconscious and forms that part of the personality which still has to be added to the conscious man in order to make him whole. At first sight it is but an insignificant fragmenta lapis exilis, in via eiectus, and often inconvenient and repellent because it stands for something that demonstrates quite plainly our secret inferiority. This aspect is responsible for our resistance to psychology in general and to the unconscious in particular. But together with this fragment, which could round out our consciousness into a whole, there is in the unconscious an already existing wholeness, the homo totus of the Western and the Chn-yn (true man) of Chinese alchemy, the round primordial being who represents the greater man within, the Anthropos, who is akin to God. This inner man is of necessity partly unconscious, because consciousness is only part of a man and cannot comprehend the whole. But the whole man is always present, for the fragmentation of the phenomenon Man is nothing but an effect of consciousness, which consists only of supraliminal ideas. No psychic content can become conscious unless it possesses a certain energy-charge. If this falls, the content sinks below the threshold and becomes unconscious. The possible contents of consciousness are then sorted out, as the energy-charge separates those capable of becoming conscious from those that are not. This separation gives rise on the one hand to consciousness, whose symbol is the sun, and on the other hand to the shadow, corresponding to the umbra solis.
[153] Compulsion, therefore, has two sources: the shadow and the Anthropos. This is sufficient to explain the paradoxical nature of sulphur: as the corrupter it has affinities with the devil, while on the other hand it appears as a parallel of Christ.
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