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object:3.04 - Immersion in the Bath
book class:The Practice of Psycho therapy
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
class:chapter


4
IMMERSION IN THE BATH
[453]
A new motif appears in this picture: the bath. In a sense this takes us
back to the first picture of the Mercurial Fountain, which represents the
upwelling. The liquid is Mercurius, not only of the three but of the
thousand names. He stands for the mysterious psychic substance which
nowadays we would call the unconscious psyche. The rising fountain of
the unconscious has reached the king and queen, or rather they have
descended into it as into a bath. This is a theme with many variations in
alchemy. Here are a few of them: the king is in danger of drowning in the
sea; he is a prisoner under the sea; the sun drowns in the mercurial
fountain; the king sweats in the glass-house; the green lion swallows the
sun; Gabricus disappears into the body of his sister Beya, where he is
dissolved into atoms; and so forth. Interpreted on the one hand as a
harmless bath and on the other hand as the perilous encroachment of the
sea, the earth-spirit Mercurius in his watery form now begins to attack
the royal pair from below, just as he had previously descended from above
in the shape of the dove. The contact of left hands in Figure 2 has
evidently roused the spirit of the deep and called up a rush of water.
[454]
The immersion in the sea signifies the solutio dissolution in the
physical sense of the word and at the same time, according to Dorn, the
solution of a problem. It is a return to the dark initial state, to the amniotic
fluid of the gravid uterus. The alchemists frequently point out that their
stone grows like a child in its mothers womb; they call the vas
hermeticum the uterus and its contents the foetus. What is said of the lapis
is also said of the water: This stinking water contains everything it
needs. It is sufficient unto itself, like the Uroboros, the tail-eater, which is
said to beget, kill, and devour itself. Aqua est, quae occidit et vivificat
the water is that which kills and vivifies. It is the aqua benedicta, the
lustral water, wherein the birth of the new being is prepared. As the text to
our picture explains: Our stone is to be extracted from the nature of the
two bodies. It also likens the water to the ventus of the Tabula
smaragdina, where we read: Portavit eum ventus in ventre suo (The
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4wind hath carried it in his belly). The Rosarium adds: It is clear that wind
is air, and air is life, and life is soul, that is, oil and water. The curious
idea that the soul (i.e., the breath-soul) is oil and water derives from the
dual nature of Mercurius. The aqua permanens is one of his many
synonyms, and the terms oleum, oleaginitas, unctuosum, unctuositas, all
refer to the arcane substance which is likewise Mercurius. The idea is a
graphic reminder of the ecclesiastical use of various unguents and of the
consecrated water. The two bodies mentioned above are represented by the
king and queen, a possible reference to the commixtio of the two
substances in the chalice of the Mass. A similar coniunctio is shown in the
Grandes heures du duc de Berry, where a naked little man and woman
are being anointed by two saintly servitors in the baptismal bath of the
chalice. There can be no doubt of the connections between the alchemical
opus and the Mass, as the treatise of Melchior Cibinensis proves. Our text
says: Anima est Sol et Luna. The alchemist thought in strictly medieval
trichotomous terms: anything alive and his lapis is undoubtedly alive
consists of corpus, anima, and spiritus. The Rosarium remarks (p. 239) that
the body is Venus and feminine, the spirit is Mercurius and masculine;
hence the anima, as the vinculum, the link between body and spirit,
would be hermaphroditic, i.e., a coniunctio Solis et Lunae. Mercurius is
the hermaphrodite par excellence. From all this it may be gathered that the
queen stands for the body and the king for the spirit, but that both are
unrelated without the soul, since this is the vinculum which holds them
together. If no bond of love exists, they have no soul. In our pictures the
bond is effected by the dove from above and by the water from below.
These constitute the linkin other words, they are the soul. Thus the
underlying idea of the psyche proves it to be a half bodily, half spiritual
substance, an anima media natura, as the alchemists call it, an
hermaphroditic being capable of uniting the opposites, but who is never
complete in the individual unless related to another individual. The
unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only
through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is
always found in a You. Wholeness is a combination of I and You, and
these show themselves to be parts of a transcendent unity whose nature
can only be grasped symbolically, as in the symbols of the rotundum, the
rose, the wheel, or the coniunctio Solis et Lunae. The alchemists even go
so far as to say that the corpus, anima, and Spiritus of the arcane substance
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17are one, because they are all from the One, and of the One, and with the
One, which is the root of itself (Quia ipsa omnia sunt ex uno et de uno et
cum uno, quod est radix ipsius). A thing which is the cause and origin of
itself can only be God, unless we adopt the implied dualism of the
Paracelsists, who were of the opinion that the prima materia is an
increatum. Similarly, the pre-Paracelsist Rosarium maintains that the
quintessence is a self-subsistent body, differing from all the elements and
from everything composed thereof.
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Figure 4
[455]
Coming now to the psychology of the picture, it is clearly a descent
into the unconscious. The immersion in the bath is another night sea
journey, as the Visio Arislei proves. There the philosophers are shut
21up with the brother-sister pair in a triple glass-house at the bottom of the
sea by the Rex Marinus. Just as, in the primitive myths, it is so stiflingly
hot in the belly of the whale that the hero loses his hair, so the
philosophers suffer very much from the intense heat during their
confinement. The hero-myths deal with rebirth and apocatastasis, and the
Visio likewise tells of the resuscitation of the dead Thabritius (Gabricus)
or, in another version, of his rebirth. The night sea journey is a kind of
descensus ad in-feros a descent into Hades and a journey to the land of
ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an
immersion in the unconscious. In our picture the immersion is effected by
the rising up of the fiery, chthonic Mercurius, presumably the sexual libido
which engulfs the pair and is the obvious counterpart to the heavenly
dove. The latter has always been regarded as a love-bird, but it also has a
purely spiritual significance in the Christian tradition accepted by the
alchemists. Thus the pair are united above by the symbol of the Holy
Ghost, and it looks as if the immersion in the bath were also uniting them
below, i.e., in the water which is the counterpart of spirit (It is death for
souls to become water, says Heraclitus). Opposition and identity at once
a philosophical problem only when taken as a psychological one!
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[456]
This development recapitulates the story of how the Original Man
(Nous) bent down from heaven to earth and was wrapped in the embrace
of Physisa primordial image that runs through the whole of alchemy.
The modern equivalent of this stage is the conscious realization of sexual
fantasies which colour the transference accordingly. It is significant that
even in this quite unmistakable situation the pair are still holding on with
both hands to the starry symbol brought by the Holy Ghost, which
signalizes the meaning of their relationship: mans longing for
transcendent wholeness.




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