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object:3.04 - LUNA
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter



4. LUNA
a. The Significance of the Moon
[154] Luna, as we have seen, is the counterpart of Sol, cold,168 moist, feebly shining or dark, feminine, corporeal, passive. Accordingly her most significant role is that of a partner in the coniunctio. As a feminine deity her radiance is mild; she is the lover. Pliny calls her a womanly and gentle star. She is the sister and bride, mother and spouse of the sun.169 To illustrate the sun-moon relationship the alchemists often made use of the Song of Songs (Canticles),170 as in the confabulation of the lover with the beloved in Aurora Consurgens.171 In Athens the day of the new moon was considered favourable for celebrating marriages, and it still is an Arabian custom to marry on this day; sun and moon are marriage partners who embrace on the twenty-eighth day of the month.172 According to these ancient ideas the moon is a vessel of the sun: she is a universal receptacle, of the sun in particular173; and she was called infundibulum terrae (the funnel of the earth), because she receives and pours out174 the powers of heaven. Again, it is said that the moisture of the moon (lunaris humor) takes up the sunlight,175 or that Luna draws near to the sun in order to extract from him, as from a fountain, universal form and natural life; 176 she also brings about the conception of the universal seed of the sun in the quintessence, in the belly and womb of nature.177 In this respect there is a certain analogy between the moon and the earth, as stated in Plutarch and Macrobius.178 Aurora Consurgens says that the earth made the moon,178a and here we should remember that Luna also signifies silver. But the statements of the alchemists about Luna are so complex that one could just as well say that silver is yet another synonym or symbol for the arcanum Luna. Even so, a remark like the one just quoted may have been a reference to the way in which ore was supposed to have been formed in the earth: the earth receives the powers of the stars, and in it the sun generates the gold, etc. The Aurora consurgens therefore equates the earth with the bride: I am that land of the holy promise,179 or at any rate it is in the earth that the hierosgamos takes place.180 Earth and moon coincide in the albedo, for on the one hand the sublimated or calcined earth appears as terra alba foliata, the sought-for good, like whitest snow,181 and on the other hand Luna, as mistress of the albedo,182 is the femina alba of the coniunctio183 and the mediatrix of the whitening.184 The lunar sulphur is white, as already mentioned. The plenilunium (full moon) appears to be especially important: When the moon shines in her fulness the rabid dog, the danger that threatens the divine child,185 is chased away. In Senior the full moon is the arcane substance.
[155] In ancient tradition Luna is the giver of moisture and ruler of the water-sign Cancer (

). Maier says that the umbra solis cannot be destroyed unless the sun enters the sign of Cancer, but that Cancer is the house of Luna, and Luna is the ruler of the moistures186 (juice, sap, etc.). According to Aurora consurgens II, she is herself the water,187 the bountiful nurse of the dew.188 Rahner, in his Mysterium Lunae, shows the extensive use which the Church Fathers made of the allegory of the moon-dew in explaining the effects of grace in the ecclesiastical sacraments. Here again the patristic symbolism exerted a very strong influence on the alchemical allegories. Luna secretes the dew or sap of life. This Luna is the sap of the water of life, which is hidden in Mercurius.189 Even the Greek alchemists supposed there was a principle in the moon (

), which Christianos190 calls the ichor of the philosopher (

).191 The relation of the moon to the soul, much stressed in antiquity,192 also occurs in alchemy though with a different nuance. Usually it is said that from the moon comes the dew, but the moon is also the aqua mirifica193 that extracts the souls from the bodies or gives the bodies life and soul. Together with Mercurius, Luna sprinkles the dismembered dragon with her moisture and brings him to life again, makes him live, walk, and run about, and change his colour to the nature of blood.194 As the water of ablution, the dew falls from heaven, purifies the body, and makes it ready to receive the soul;195 in other words, it brings about the albedo, the white state of innocence, which like the moon and a bride awaits the bridegroom.
[156] As the alchemists were often physicians, Galens views must surely have influenced their ideas about the moon and its effects. Galen calls Luna the princeps who rightly governs this earthly realm, surpassing the other planets not in potency, but in proximity. He also makes the moon responsible for all physical changes in sickness and health, and regards its aspects as decisive for prognosis.
[157] The age-old belief that the moon promotes the growth of plants led in alchemy not only to similar statements but also to the curious idea that the moon is itself a plant. Thus the Rosarium says that Sol is called a great animal whereas Luna is a plant.196 In the alchemical pictures there are numerous sun-and-moon trees.197 In the Super arborem Aristotelis, the circle of the moon perches in the form of a stork on a wonderworking tree by the grave of Hermes.198 Galen199 explains the arbor philosophica as follows: There is a certain herb or plant, named Lunatica or Berissa,200 whose roots are metallic earth, whose stem is red, veined with black, and whose flowers are like those of the marjoram; there are thirty of them, corresponding to the age of the moon in its waxing and waning. Their colour is yellow.201 Another name for Lunatica is Lunaria, whose flowers Dorn mentions, attri buting to them miraculous powers.202 Khunrath says: From this little salty fountain grows also the tree of the sun and moon, the red and white coral-tree of our sea, which is that same Lunaria and whose salt is called Luna Philosophorum et dulcedo sapientum (sweetness of the sages).203 The Allegoriae super librum Turbae describe the moon-plant thus: In the lunar sea204 there is a sponge planted, having blood and sentience [sensum],205 in the manner of a tree that is rooted in the sea and moveth not from its place. If thou wouldst handle the plant, take a sickle to cut it with, but have good care that the blood floweth not out, for it is the poison of the Philosophers.206
[158] From all this it would seem that the moon-plant is a kind of mandrake and has nothing to do with the botanical Lunaria (honesty). In the herbal of Tabernaemontanus, in which all the magico-medicinal properties of plants are carefully listed, there is no mention of the alchemical Lunatica or Lunaria. On the other hand it is evident that the Lunatica is closely connected with the tree of the sea in Arabian alchemy207 and hence with the arbor philosophica,208 which in turn has parallels with the Cabalistic tree of the Sefiroth209 and with the tree of Christian mysticism210 and Hindu philosophy.211
[159] Rulands remark that the sponge has understanding (see n. 205) and Khunraths that the essence of the Lunaria is the sweetness of the sages point to the general idea that the moon has some secret connection with the human mind.212 The alchemists have a great deal to say about this, and this is the more interesting as we know that the moon is a favourite symbol for certain aspects of the unconsciousthough only, of course, in a man. In a woman the moon corresponds to consciousness and the sun to the unconscious. This is due to the contrasexual archetype in the unconscious: anima in a man, animus in a woman.
[160] In the gnosis of Simon Magus, Helen (Selene) is

,213 sapientia,214 and

.215 The last designation also occurs in Hippolytus: For Epinoia herself dwelt in Helen at that time.216 In his

(Great Explanation), Simon says:
There are two offshoots from all the Aeons, having neither beginning nor end, from one root, and this root is a certain Power [

], an invisible and incomprehensible Silence [

]. One of them appears on high and is a great power, the mind of the whole [

], who rules all things and is a male; the other below is a great Thought [

], a female giving birth to all things. Standing opposite one another, they pair together and cause to arise in the space between them an incomprehensible Air, without beginning or end; but in it is a Father who upholds all things and nourishes that which has beginning and end. This is he who stood, stands, and shall stand, a masculo-feminine Power after the likeness of the pre-existing boundless Power which has neither beginning nor end, abiding in solitude [

].217
[161] This passage is remarkable for several reasons. It describes a coniunctio Solis et Lunae which Simon, it seems, concretized in his own life with Helen, the harlot of Tyre, in her role as Ishtar. As a result of the pairing with the soror or filia mystica, there was begotten a masculo-feminine pneuma, curiously designated Air. Since pneuma, like spirit, originally meant air in motion, this designation sounds archaic or else deliberately physicistic. It is evident, however, that air is used here in the spiritual sense of pneuma since its progenitors bear names

which have a noetic character and thus pertain to the spiritual sphere. Of these three names Nous is the most general concept, and in Simons day it was used indiscriminately with pneuma. Ennoia and Epinoia mean nothing that could not be rendered just as well by Nous; they differ from the latter only in their special character, emphasizing the more specific contents of the inclusive term Nous. Further, they are both of the feminine gender required in this context, whereas Nous is masculine. All three indicate the essential similarity of the components of the syzygy and their spiritual nature.
[162] Anyone familiar with alchemy will be struck by the resemblance between Simons views and the passage in the Tabula smaragdina:
And as all things proceed from the One, through the meditation of the One, so all things proceed from this one thing, by adaptation.218
Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon; the wind hath carried it in his belly.219
[163] Since all things proceed from the meditation of the One, this is true also of Sol and Luna, who are thus endowed with an originally pneumatic character. They stand for the primordial images of the spirit, and their mating produces the filius macrocosmi. Sol and Luna in later alchemy are undoubtedly arcane substances and volatilia, i.e., spirits.220
[164] We will now see what the texts have to say about Lunas noetic aspect. The yield is astonishingly small; nevertheless there is the following passage in the Rosarium:
Unless ye slay me, your understanding will not be perfect, and in my sister the moon the degree of your wisdom increases, and not with another of my servants, even if ye know my secret.221
Mylius copies out this sentence uncritically in his Philosophia reformata.222 Both he and the Rosarium give the source as the Metaphora Belini de sole.223 The Dicta Belini are included in the Allegoriae sapientum, but there the passage runs:
I announce therefore to all you sages, that unless ye slay me, ye cannot be called sages. But if ye slay me, your understanding will be perfect, and it increases in my sister the moon according to the degree of our wisdom, and not with another of my servants, even if ye know my secret.224
Belinus, as Ruska is probably right in conjecturing, is the same as Apollonius of Tyana,225 to whom some of the sermons in the Turba are attri buted. In Sermo 32, Bonellus discusses the problem of death and transformation, likewise touched on in our text. The other sermons of Bonellus have nothing to do with our text, however, nor does the motif of resurrection, on account of its ubiquity, signify much, so that the Dicta in all probability have no connection with the Turba. A more likely source for the Dicta would be the (Harranite?) treatise of Artefius, Clavis maioris sapientiae:226 Our master, the philosopher Belenius, said, Set your light in a vessel of clear glass, and observe that all the wisdom of this world revolves round the following three . . .227 And again: But one day my master, the philosopher Bolemus, called me and said, Eh! my son, I hope that thou art a man of spiritual understanding and canst attain to the highest degree of wisdom.228 Then follows an explanation about how two contrary natures, active and passive, arose from the first simple substance. In the beginning God said without uttering a word, Let there be such a creature, and thereupon the simple (simplex) was there. Then God created nature or the prima materia, the first passive or receptive [principle], in which everything was present in principle and in potency. In order to end this state of suspension God created the causa agens, like to the circle of heaven, which he resolved to call Light. But this Light received a certain sphere, the first creature, within its hollowness. The properties of this sphere were heat and motion. It was evidently the sun, whereas the cold and passive principle would correspond to the moon.229
[165] It seems to me not unlikely that the Dicta Belini are connected with this passage from Artefius rather than with the Turba, since they have nothing to do with the sermons of Apollonius. They may therefore represent a tradition independent of the Turba, and this is the more likely since Artefius seems to have been a very ancient author of Arabic provenance.230 He shares the doctrine of the simplex with the Liber quartorum,231 which too is probably of Harranite origin. I mention his theory of the creation here despite the fact that it has no parallels in the Dicta. It seemed to me worth noting because of its inner connection with the Apophasis megale of Simon Magus. The Dicta are not concerned with the original separation of the natures but rather with the synthesis which bears much the same relation to the sublimation of the human mind (exaltatio intellectus) as the procedures of the Liber quartorum.232
[166] Besides the connection between Luna and intellect we must also consider their relation to Mercurius, for in astrology and mythology Mercurius is the divine factor that has most to do with Epinoia. The connections between them in alchemy have classical antecedents. Leaving aside the relation of Hermes to the Nous, I will only mention that in Plutarch Hermes sits in the moon and goes round with it (just as Heracles does in the sun).233 In the magic papyri, Hermes is invoked as follows: O Hermes, ruler of the world, thou who dwellest in the heart, circle of the moon, round and square.234
[167] In alchemy Mercurius is the rotundum par excellence. Luna is formed of his cold and moist nature, and Sol of the hot and dry;235 alternatively she is called the proper substance of Mercurius.236 From Luna comes the aqua Mercurialis or aqua permanens;237 with her moisture, like Mercurius, she brings the slain dragon to life.238 As we have seen, the circle of the moon is mentioned in the Super arborem Aristotelis, where a stork, as it were calling itself the circle of the moon, sits on a tree that is green within instead of without.239 Here it is worth pointing out that the soul, whose connection with the moon has already been discussed, was also believed to be round. Thus Caesarius of Heisterbach says that the soul has a spherical nature, after the likeness of the globe of the moon.240
[168] Let us now turn back to the question raised by the quotation in the Rosarium from the Dicta Belini. It is one of those approximate quotations which are typical of the Rosarium.241 In considering the quotation as a whole it should be noted that it is not clear who the speaker is. The Rosarium supposes that it is Sol. But it can easily be shown from the context of the Dicta that the speaker could just as well be the filius Philosophorum, since the woman is sometimes called soror, sometimes mater, and sometimes uxor. This strange relationship is explained by the primitive fact that the son stands for the reborn father, a motif familiar to us from the Christian tradition. The speaker is therefore the father-son, whose mother is the sons sister-wife. According to the degree of our wisdom is contrasted with your understanding; it therefore refers to the wisdom of the Sol redivivus, and presumably also to his sister the moon, hence our and not my wisdom. The degree is not only plausible but is a concept peculiar to the opus, since Sol passes through various stages of transformation from the dragon, lion, and eagle242 to the hermaphrodite. Each of these stages stands for a new degree of insight, wisdom, and initiation, just as the Mithraic eagles, lions, and sun-messengers signify grades of initiation. Unless ye slay me usually refers to the slaying of the dragon, the mortificatio of the first, dangerous, poisonous stage of the anima (= Mercurius), freed from her imprisonment in the prima materia.243 This anima is also identified with Sol.244 Sol is frequently called Rex, and there is a picture showing him being killed by ten men.245 He thus suffers the same mortificatio as the dragon, with the difference that it is never a suicide. For Sol, in so far as the dragon is a preliminary form of the filius Solis, is in a sense the father of the dragon, although the latter is expressly said to beget itself and is thus an increatum.246 At the same time Sol, being his own son, is also the dragon. Accordingly there is a coniugium of the dragon and the woman, who can only be Luna or the lunar (feminine) half of Mercurius.247 As much as Sol, therefore, Luna (as the mother) must be contained in the dragon. To my knowledge there is never any question of her mortificatio in the sense of a slaying. Nevertheless she is included with Sol in the death of the dragon, as the Rosarium hints: The dragon dieth not, except with his brother and his sister.248
[169] The idea that the dragon or Sol must die is an essential part of the mystery of transformation. The mortificatio, this time only in the form of a mutilation, is also performed on the lion, whose paws are cut off,249 and on the bird, whose wings are clipped.250 It signifies the overcoming of the old and obsolete as well as of the dangerous preliminary stages which are characterized by animal-symbols.
[170] In interpreting the words your understanding increases in my sister, etc., it is well to remember that a philosophical interpretation of myths had already grown up among the Stoics, which today we should not hesitate to describe as psychological. This work of interpretation was not interrupted by the development of Christianity but continued to be assiduously practised in a rather different form, namely in the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers, which was to have a decided influence on alchemical symbolism. The Johannine interpretation of Christ as the pre-worldly Logos is an early attempt of this kind to put into other words the meaning of Christs essence. The later medievalists, and in particular the natural philosophers, made the Sapientia Dei the nucleus of their interpretation of nature and thus created a new nature-myth. In this they were very much influenced by the writings of the Arabs and of the Harranites, the last exponents of Greek philosophy and gnosis, whose chief representative was Tabit ibn Qurra in the tenth century. One of these writings, the Liber Platonis quartorum, is a dialogue in which Thebed (Tabit) speaks in person. In this treatise the intellect as a tool of natural philosophy plays a role that we do not meet again until the sixteenth century, in Gerhard Dorn. Pico della Mirandola appeals to the psychological interpretation of the ancients and mentions that the Greek Platonists described Sol as

251 and Luna as

,252 terms that are reminiscent of Simons Nous and Epinoia.253 Pico himself defines the difference as that between scientia and opinio.254 He thinks that the mind (animus), turning towards the spirit (spiritus) of God, shines and is therefore called Sol. The spirit of God corresponds to the aquae superiores, the waters above the firmament (Gen. 1 : 7). But in so far as the human mind turns towards the waters under the firmament (aquae inferiores), it concerns itself with the sensuales potentiae, whence it contracts the stain of infection and is called Luna.255 In both cases it is clearly the human spirit or psyche, both of which have, however, a double aspect, one facing upwards to the light, the other downwards to the darkness ruled by the moon (The sun to rule the day, the moon also to govern the night). And while, says Pico, we wander far from our fatherl and and abide in this night and darkness of our present life, we make most use of that which turns us aside to the senses, for which reason we think many things rather than know them,256a pessimistic but no doubt accurate view that fully accords with the spiritual benightedness and sinful darkness of this sublunary world, which is so black that the moon herself is tarnished by it.
[171] The moon appears to be in a disadvantageous position compared with the sun. The sun is a concentrated luminary: The day is lit by a single sun. The moon, on the other handas if less powerfulneeds the help of the stars when it comes to the task of composition and separation, rational reflection, definition, etc.257 The appetites, as potentiae sensuales, pertain to the sphere of the moon; they are anger (ira) and desire (libido) or, in a word, concupiscentia. The passions are designated by animals because we have these things in common with them, and, what is more unfortunate, they often drive us into leading a bestial life.258 According to Pico, Luna has an affinity with Venus, as is particularly to be seen from the fact that she is sublimated in Taurus, the House of Venus, so much that she nowhere else appears more auspicious and more beneficent.259 Taurus is the house of the hierogamy of Sol and Luna.260 Indeed, Pico declares that the moon is the lowest earth and the most ignoble of all the stars,261 an opinion which recalls Aristotles comparison of the moon with the earth. The moon, says Pico, is inferior to all the other planets.262 The novilunium is especially unfavourable, as it robs growing bodies of their nourishment and in this way injures them.263
[172] Psychologically, this means that the union of consciousness (Sol) with its feminine counterpart the unconscious (Luna) has undesirable results to begin with: it produces poisonous animals such as the dragon, serpent, scorpion, basilisk, and toad;264 then the lion, bear, wolf, dog,265 and finally the eagle266 and the raven. The first to appear are the cold-blooded animals, then warm-blooded predators, and lastly birds of prey or ill-omened scavengers. The first progeny of the matrimonium luminarium are all, therefore, rather unpleasant. But that is only because there is an evil darkness in both parents which comes to light in the children, as indeed often happens in real life. I remember, for instance, the case of a twenty-year-old bank clerk who embezzled several hundred francs. His old father, the chief cashier at the same bank, was much pitied, because for forty years he had discharged his highly responsible duties with exemplary loyalty. Two days after the arrest of his son he decamped to South America with a million. So there must have been something in the family. We have seen in the case of Sol that he either possesses a shadow or is even a Sol niger. As to the position of Luna, we have already been told what this is when we discussed the new moon. In the Epistola Solis ad Lunam crescentem267 Sol cautiously says: If you do me no hurt, O moon.268 Luna has promised him complete dissolution while she herself coagulates, i.e., becomes firm, and is clothed with his blackness (induta fuero nigredine tua).269 She assumes in the friendliest manner that her blackness comes from him. The matrimonial wrangle has already begun. Luna is the shadow of the sun, and with corruptible bodies she is consumed, and through her corruption . . . is the Lion eclipsed.270
[173] According to the ancient view, the moon stands on the border-line between the eternal, aethereal things and the ephemeral phenomena of the earthly, sublunar realm.271 Macrobius says: The realm of the perishable begins with the moon and goes downwards. Souls coming into this region begin to be subject to the numbering of days and to time. . . . There is no doubt that the moon is the author and contriver of mortal bodies.272 Because of her moist nature, the moon is also the cause of decay.273 The loveliness of the new moon, hymned by the poets and Church Fathers, veils her dark side, which however could not remain hidden from the fact-finding eye of the empiricist.274 The moon, as the star nearest to the earth, partakes of the earth and its sufferings, and her analogy with the Church and the Virgin Mary as mediators has the same meaning.275 She partakes not only of the earths sufferings but of its daemonic darkness as well.276
b. The Dog
[174] This dark side of the moon is hinted at in the ancient invocation to Selene as the dog or bitch (

), in the Magic Papyri.277 There it is also said that in the second hour Helios appears as a dog.278 This statement is of interest in so far as the symbolizatio279 by the dog280 entered Western alchemy through Kalids Liber secretorum, originally, perhaps, an Arabic treatise. All similar passages that I could find go back, directly or indirectly, to Kalid.281 The original passage runs:
Hermes282 said, My son, take a Corascene dog and an Armenian bitch, join them together, and they will beget a dog of celestial hue, and if ever he is thirsty, give him sea water to drink: for he will guard your friend, and he will guard you from your enemy, and he will help you wherever you may be, always being with you, in this world and in the next. And by dog and bitch, Hermes meant things which preserve bodies from burning and from the heat of the fire.283
Some of the quotations are taken from the original text, others from the variant in the Rosarium, which runs:
Hali, philosopher and king of Arabia, says in his Secret: Take a Coetanean284 dog and an Armenian bitch, join them together, and they two will beget for you a puppy [filius canis] of celestial hue: and that puppy will guard you in your house from the beginning, in this world and in the next.285
As explanatory parallels, the Rosarium mentions the union of the white and red, and cites Senior: The red slave has wedded the white woman. It is clear that the mating must refer to the royal marriage of Sol and Luna.
[175] The theriomorphic form of Sol as a lion and dog and of Luna as a bitch shows that there is an aspect of both luminaries which justifies the need for a symbolizatio in animal form. That is to say the two luminaries are, in a sense, animals or appetites, although, as we have seen, the potentiae sensuales are ascribed only to Luna. There is, however, also a Sol niger, who, significantly enough, is contrasted with the day-time sun and clearly distinguished from it. This advantage is not shared by Luna, because she is obviously sometimes bright and sometimes dark. Psychologically, this means that consciousness by its very nature distinguishes itself from its shadow, whereas the unconscious is not only contaminated with its own negative side but is burdened with the shadow cast off by the conscious mind. Although the solar animals, the lion and the eagle, are nobler than the bitch, they are nevertheless animals and beasts of prey at that, which means that even our sun-like consciousness has its dangerous animals. Or, if Sol is the spirit and Luna the body, the spirit too may be corrupted by pride or concupiscence, a fact which we are inclined to overlook in our one-sided admiration of the spirit.
[176] Kalids son of the dog is the same as the much extolled son of the philosophers. The ambiguity of this figure is thus stressed: it is at once bright as day and dark as night, a perfect coincidentia oppositorum expressing the divine nature of the self. This thought, which seems an impossible one for our Christian feelings, is nevertheless so logical and so irresistible that, by however strange and devious a route, it forced its way into alchemy. And because it is a natural truth it is not at all surprising that it became articulate very much earlier. We are told in the Elenchos of Hippolytus that, according to Aratus,
Cynosura286 is the [little] Bear, the Second Creation, the small, narrow way,287 and not the great Bear [

]. For it leads not backward, but guides those who follow it forward to the straight way, being the tail of the Dog. For the Logos is a dog [

] who guards and protects the sheep against the wiles of the wolves, and chases the wild beasts from Creation and slays them, and begets all things. For Cyon [

], they say, means the Begetter.288
Aratus associates the Dog with the growth of plants, and continues:
But with the rising of the Dog-star, the living are distinguished by the Dog from the dead, for in truth everything withers that has not taken root. This Dog, they say, being a certain divine Logos, has been established judge of the quick and the dead, and as the Dog is seen to be the star of the plants, so is the Logos, they say, in respect of the heavenly plants, which are men. For this reason the Second Creation Cynosura stands in heaven as an image of the rational creature [

]. But between the two Creations stretches the Dragon, hindering anything of the Great Creation from entering the lesser, and watching over everything that exists [

] in the Great Creation, like the Kneeler,289 observing how and in what manner each thing exists [

] in the Lesser Creation.
[177] Kalids filius canis290 is of celestial hue, an indication of its heavenly origin from the great luminaries. The blue colour or likeness to a dog291 is also attri buted to the woman who in Hippolytus is described as

,292 and who is pursued by a grey-haired, winged, ithyphallic old man (

). He is named

, Flowing Light, and she is

, which means Dark Water (

).293 Behind these figures may be discerned a coniunctio Solis et Lunae, both the sun and the new moon appearing in their unfavourable aspect. Here too there arises between them the harmony of an intermediary spirit (

), roughly corresponding to the position of the filius philosophorum.293a Kalids filius plays the role of a guiding spirit or familiar whose invocation by magic is so typical of the Harranite texts. A parallel to the dog-spirit is the poodle in Faust, out of whom Mephistopheles emerges as the familiar of Faust the alchemist.
[178] In this connection I would like to mention the incest dream of a woman patient: Two dogs were copulating. The male went head first into the female and disappeared in her belly.294 Theriomorphic symbolism is always an indication of a psychic process occurring on an animal level, i.e., in the instinctual sphere. The dream depicts a reversed birth as the goal of a sexual act. This archetypal situation underlies the incest motif in general and was present in modern man long before any consciousness of it. The archetype of incest is also at the back of the primitive notion that the father is reborn in the son, and of the heirosgamos of mother and son in its pagan and Christian form;295 it signifies the highest and the lowest, the brightest and the darkest, the best and the most detestable. It represents the pattern of renewal and rebirth, the endless creation and disappearance of symbolic figures.
[179] The motif of the dog is a necessary counterbalance to the excessively praised light-nature of the stone. Apart from the saying of Kalid there is still another aspect of the dog, of which, however, we find only sporadic hints in the literature. One such passage occurs in the De ratione conficiendi lapidis philosophici of Laurentius Ventura:296
Therefore pull down the house, destroy the walls, extract therefrom the purest juice297 with the blood, and cook that thou mayest eat. Wherefore Arnaldus saith in the Book of Secrets:298 Purify the stone, grind the door to powder, tear the bitch to pieces, choose the tender flesh, and thou wilt have the best thing. In the one thing are hidden all parts, in it all metals shine. Of these [parts], two are the artificers, two the vessels, two the times, two the fruits, two the ends, and one the salvation.299
[180] This text abounds in obscurities. In the preceding section Ventura discusses the unity of the lapis and the medicina, mentioning the axioms Introduce nothing alien and Nothing from outside300 with quotations from Geber, the Turba, and the Thesaurus thesaurorum of Arnaldus.301 Then he turns to the superfluities to be removed.302 The lapis, he says, is by nature most pure. It is therefore sufficiently purified when it is led out of its proper house and enclosed in an alien house. The text continues:
In the proper house the flying bird is begotten, and in the alien house303 the tincturing stone. The two flying birds304 hop on to the tables and heads of the kings,305 because both, the feathered bird and the plucked,306 have given [us] this visible art307 and cannot relinquish the society of men.308 The father309 of [the art] urges the indolent to work, its mother310 nourishes the sons who are exhausted by their labours, and quickens and adorns their weary limbs.
Then follows the passage Therefore pull down the house, etc. If the reader has perused the foregoing passage with the footnotes he will see that these instructions are the typical alchemical procedure for extracting the spirit or soul, and thus for bringing unconscious contents to consciousness. During the solutio, separatio, and extractio the succus lunariae (juice of the moon-plant), blood, or aqua permanens is either applied or extracted. This liquid comes from the unconscious but is not always an au thentic content of it; often it is more an effect of the unconscious on the conscious mind. The psychiatrist knows it as the indirect effect of constellated unconscious contents which attracts or diverts attention to the unconscious and causes it to be assimilated. This process can be observed not only in the gradual formation of hypochondriac obsessions, phobias, and delusions, but also in dreams, fantasies, and creative activities when an unconscious content enforces the application of attention. This is the succus vitae,311 the blood, the vital participation which the patient unconsciously forces on the analyst too, and without which no real therapeutic effect can be achieved. The attention given to the unconscious has the effect of incubation, a brooding312 over the slow fire needed in the initial stages of the work;313 hence the frequent use of the terms decoctio, digestio, putrefactio, solutio. It is really as if attention warmed the unconscious and activated it, thereby breaking down the barriers that separate it from consciousness.
[181] In order to set free the contents hidden in the house314 of the unconscious (anima in compedibus!) the matrix must be opened. This matrix is the canicula, the moon-bitch, who carries in her belly that part of the personality which is felt to be essential, just as Beya did Gabricus. She is the vessel which must be broken asunder in order to extract the precious content, the tender flesh,315 for this is the one thing on which the whole work turns. In this one thing all parts of the work are contained.316 Of these parts two are the artificers, who in the symbolical realm are Sol and Luna, in the human the adept and his soror mystica,317 and in the psychological realm the masculine consciousness and the feminine unconscious (anima). The two vessels are again Sol and Luna,318 the two times are probably the two main divisions of the work, the opus ad album et ad rubeum.319 The former is the opus Lunae, the latter the opus Solis.320 Psychologically they correspond to the constellation of unconscious contents in the first part of the analytical process and to the integration of these contents in actual life. The two fruits321 are the fruit of the sun-and-moon tree,322 gold and silver, or the reborn and sublimated Sol and Luna. The psychological parallel is the transformation of both the unconscious and the conscious, a fact known to everyone who methodically has it out with his unconscious. The two ends or goals are these transformations. But the salvation is one, just as the thing is one: it is the same thing at the beginning as at the end, it was always there and yet it appears only at the end. This thing is the self, the indescribable totality, which though it is inconceivable and irrepresentable is none the less necessary as an intuitive concept. Empirically we can establish no more than that the ego is surrounded on all sides by an unconscious factor. Proof of this is afforded by the association experiment, which gives a graphic demonstration of the frequent failure of the ego and its will. The psyche is an equation that cannot be solved without the factor of the unconscious; it is a totality which includes both the empirical ego and its transconscious foundation.
[182] There is still another function of the dog in alchemy which has to be considered. In the Introitus apertus of Philaletha we find the following passage:
This Chamaeleon is the infant hermaphrodite, who is infected from his very cradle by the bite of the rabid Corascene dog, whereby he is maddened and rages with perpetual hydrophobia; nay, though of all natural things water is the closest to him, yet he is terrified of it and flees from it. O fate! Yet in the grove of Diana there is a pair of doves, which assuage his raving madness. Then will the impatient, swarthy, rabid dog, that he may suffer no return of his hydrophobia and perish drowned in the waters, come to the surface half suffocated; but do thou chase him off with pails of water and blows, and keep him at a distance, and the darkness will disappear. When the moon is at the full, give him wings and he will fly away as an eagle, leaving Dianas birds dead behind him.323
[183] Here the connection with the moon tells us that the dark, dangerous, rabid dog changes into an eagle at the time of the plenilunium. His darkness disappears and he becomes a solar animal. We may therefore assume that his sickness was at its worst at the novilunium. It is clear that this refers to a psychic disturbance324 which at one stage also infected the infant hermaphrodite. Probably that too occurred at the novilunium,325 i.e., the stage of nigredo. Just how the mad dog with its terror of water got into the water at all is not clear, unless perhaps it was in the aquae inferiores from the beginning. The text is preceded by the remark: Whence will come the Chamaeleon or our Chaos, in which all secrets are hid in their potential state. The chaos as prima materia is identical with the waters of the beginning. According to Olympiodorus lead (also the prima materia) contains a demon that drives the adept mad.326 Curiously enough, Wei Po-yang, a Chinese alchemist of the second century, compares lead to a madman clothed in rags.327 Elsewhere Olympiodorus speaks of the one cursed by God who dwells in the black earth. This is the mole, which, as Olympiodorus relates from a Hermetic book, had once been a man who divulged the mysteries of the sun and was therefore cursed by God and made blind. He knew the shape of the sun, as it was.328
[184] It is not difficult to discern in these allusions the dangers, real or imaginary, which are connected with the unconscious. In this respect the unconscious has a bad reputation, not so much because it is dangerous in itself as because there are cases of latent psychosis which need only a slight stimulus to break out in all their catastrophic manifestations. An anamnesis or the touching of a complex may be sufficient for this. But the unconscious is also feared by those whose conscious attitude is at odds with their true nature. Naturally their dreams will then assume an unpleasant and threatening form, for if nature is violated she takes her revenge. In itself the unconscious is neutral, and its normal function is to compensate the conscious position. In it the opposites slumber side by side; they are wrenched apart only by the activity of the conscious mind, and the more one-sided and cramped the conscious standpoint is, the more painful or dangerous will be the unconscious reaction. There is no danger from this sphere if conscious life has a solid foundation. But if consciousness is cramped and obstinately one-sided, and there is also a weakness of judgment, then the approach or invasion of the unconscious can cause confusion and panic or a dangerous inflation, for one of the most obvious dangers is that of identifying with the figures in the unconscious. For anyone with an unstable disposition this may amount to a psychosis.
[185] The raving madness of the infected infant is assuaged (we should really say with caresses, for that is the meaning of mulcere) by the doves of Diana. These doves form a paira love pair, for doves are the birds of Astarte.329 In alchemy they represent, like all winged creatures, spirits or souls, or, in technical terms, the aqua, the extracted transformative substance.330 The appearance of a pair of doves points to the imminent marriage of the filius regius and to the dissolution of the opposites as a result of the union. The filius is merely infected by the evil, but the evil itself, the mad dog, is sublimated and changed into an eagle at the plenilunium. In the treatise of Abraham Eleazar, the lapis in its dark, feminine form appears instead of the dog and is compared to the Shulamite in the Song of Songs. The lapis says: But I must be like a dove.331
[186] There is another passage in the Introitus apertus which is relevant in this context:
If thou knowest how to moisten this dry earth with its own water, thou wilt loosen the pores of the earth, and this thief from outside will be cast out with the workers of wickedness, and the water, by an admixture of the true Sulphur, will be cleansed from the leprous filth and from the superfluous dropsical fluid, and thou wilt have in thy power the fount of the Knight of Treviso, whose waters are rightfully dedicated to the maiden Diana. Worthless is this thief, armed with the malignity of arsenic, from whom the winged youth fleeth, shuddering. And though the central water is his bride, yet dare he not display his most ardent love towards her, because of the snares of the thief, whose machinations are in truth unavoidable. Here may Diana be propitious to thee, who knoweth how to tame wild beasts, and whose twin doves will temper the malignity of the air with their wings, so that the youth easily entereth in through the pores, and instantly shaketh the foundations of the earth,332 and raises up a dark cloud. But thou wilt lead the waters up even to the brightness of the moon, and the darkness that was upon the face of the deep shall be scattered by the spirit moving over the waters. Thus by Gods comm and shall the Light appear.333
[187] It is evident that this passage is a variation on the theme of the preceding text. Instead of the infant hermaphrodite we have the winged youth, whose bride is the fountain of Diana (Luna as a nymph). The parallel to the mad dog is the thief or neer-do-well who is armed with the malignity of arsenic. His malignity is assuaged by the wings of the doves, just as the dogs rabies was. The youths wings are a token of his aerial nature; he is a pneuma that penetrates through the pores of the earth and activates itwhich means nothing less than the connubium of the living spirit with the dry, virgin earth, or of the wind with the waters dedicated to the maiden Diana. The winged youth is described as the spirit moving over the waters, and this may be a reference not only to Genesis but to the angel that troubled the pool of Bethesda.334 His enemy, the thief who lies in wait for him, is, we are told earlier, the outward burning vaporous sulphur, in other words sulphur vulgi, who is armed with the evil spirit, the devil, or is held captive by him in hell,335 and is thus the equivalent of the dog choked in the water. That the dog and the thief are identical is clear from the remark that Diana knows how to tame wild beasts. The two doves do in fact turn out to be the pair of lovers who appear in the love-story of Diana and the shepherd Endymion. This legend originally referred to Selene.
[188] The appearance of Diana necessarily brings with it her hunting animal the dog, who represents her dark side. Her darkness shows itself in the fact that she is also a goddess of destruction and death, whose arrows never miss. She changed the hunter Actaeon, when he secretly watched her bathing, into a stag, and his own hounds, not recognizing him, thereupon tore him to pieces. This myth may have given rise first to the designation of the lapis as the cervus fugitivus (fugitive stag),336 and then to the rabid dog, who is none other than the vindictive and treacherous aspect of Diana as the new moon. The parable we discussed in the chapter on sulphur likewise contains the motif of the surprise in the bath. But there it is Helios himself who espies her, and the relationship is a brother-sister incest that ends with their both being drowned. This catastrophe is inherent in the incest, for through incest the royal pair is produced after animals have been killed or have killed one another.337 The animals (dragon, lion, snake, etc.) stand for evil passions that finally take the form of incest. They are destroyed by their own ravenous nature, just as are Sol and Luna, whose supreme desire culminates apparently in incest. But since all that passes is but a parable, incest, as we have said before, is nothing but a preliminary form of the unio oppositorum.338 Out of chaos, darkness, and wickedness there rises up a new light once death has atoned for the unavoidable machinations of the Evil One.
c. An Alchemical Allegory
[189] The newcomer to the psychology of the unconscious will probably find the two texts about the mad dog and the thief very weird and abstruse. Actually they are no more so than the dreams which are the daily fare of the psycho therapist; and, like dreams, they can be translated into rational speech. In order to interpret dreams we need some knowledge of the dreamers personal situation, and to understand alchemical parables we must know something about the symbolic assumptions of the alchemists. We amplify dreams by the personal history of the patient, and the parables by the statements found in the text. Armed with this knowledge, it is not too difficult in either case to discern a meaning that seems sufficient for our needs. An interpretation can hardly ever be convincingly proved. Generally it shows itself to be correct only when it has proved its value as a heuristic hypothesis. I would therefore like to take the second of Philalethas texts, which is rather clearer than the first, and try to interpret it as if it were a dream.
Tu si aridam hanc Terram, aqua sui generis rigare sciveris, poros Terrae laxabis,
If thou knowest how to moisten this dry earth with its own water, thou wilt loosen the pores of the earth,
[190] If you will contemplate your lack of fantasy, of inspiration and inner aliveness, which you feel as sheer stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as great a fulness if only you will allow it to penetrate into you. If you prove receptive to this call of the wild, the longing for fulfilment will quicken the sterile wilderness of your soul as rain quickens the dry earth. (Thus the Soul to the Laborant, staring glumly at his stove and scratching himself behind the ear because he has no more ideas.)
et externus hic fur cum Operatoribus nequitiae foras projicietur,
and this thief from outside will be cast out with the workers of wickedness,
[191] You are so sterile because, without your knowledge, something like an evil spirit has stopped up the source of your fantasy, the fountain of your soul. The enemy is your own crude sulphur, which burns you with the hellish fire of desirousness, or concupiscentia. You would like to make gold because poverty is the greatest plague, wealth the highest good.339 You wish to have results that flatter your pride, you expect something useful, but there can be no question of that as you have realized with a shock. Because of this you no longer even want to be fruitful, as it would only be for Gods sake but unfortunately not for your own.
purgabitur aqua per additamentum Sulphuris veri a sorde leprosa, et ab humore hydropico superfluo
and the water, by an admixture of the true Sulphur, will be cleansed from the leprous filth and from the superfluous dropsical fluid,
[192] Therefore away with your crude and vulgar desirousness, which childishly and shortsightedly sees only goals within its own narrow horizon. Admittedly sulphur is a vital spirit, a Yetser Ha-ra,340 an evil spirit of passion, though like this an active element; useful as it is at times, it is an obstacle between you and your goal. The water of your interest is not pure, it is poisoned by the leprosy of desirousness which is the common ill. You too are infected with this collective sickness. Therefore bethink you for once, extrahe cogitationem, and consider: What is behind all this desirousness? A thirsting for the eternal, which as you see can never be satisfied with the best because it is Hades in whose honour the desirous go mad and rave.341 The more you cling to that which all the world desires, the more you are Everyman, who has not yet discovered himself and stumbles through the world like a blind man leading the blind with somnambulistic certainty into the ditch. Everyman is always a multitude. Cleanse your interest of that collective sulphur which clings to all like a leprosy. For desire only burns in order to burn itself out, and in and from this fire arises the true living spirit which generates life according to its own laws, and is not blinded by the shortsightedness of our intentions or the crude presumption of our superstitious belief in the will. Goe the says . . .
That livingness I praise
Which longs for flaming death.342
This means burning in your own fire and not being like a comet or a flashing beacon, showing others the right way but not knowing it yourself. The unconscious demands your interest for its own sake and wants to be accepted for what it is. Once the existence of this opposite is accepted, the ego can and should come to terms with its demands. Unless the content given you by the unconscious is acknowledged, its compensatory effect is not only nullified343 but actually changes into its opposite, as it then tries to realize itself literally and concretely.
habebisque in posse Comitis a Trevis Fontinam, cujus Aquae sunt proprie Dianae Virgini dicatae.
and thou wilt have in thy power the Fount of the Knight of Treviso, whose waters are rightfully dedicated to the maiden Diana.
[193] The fountain of Bernardus Trevisanus is the bath of renewal that was mentioned earlier. The ever-flowing fountain expresses a continual flow of interest toward the unconscious, a kind of constant attention or religio, which might also be called devotion. The crossing of unconscious contents into consciousness is thus made considerably easier, and this is bound to benefit the psychic balance in the long run. Diana as the numen and nymph of this spring is an excellent formulation of the figure we know as the anima. If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our psychic life are separated.
Hic fur est nequam arsenicali malignitate armatus, quem juvenis alatus horret et fugit.
Worthless is this thief, armed with the malignity of arsenic, from whom the winged youth fleeth, shuddering.
[194] It is evidently a difficult thing, this cleansing from leprous filth; indeed, dEspagnet calls it a labour of Hercules. That is why the text turns back to the thief at this point. The thief, as we saw, personifies a kind of self-robbery. He is not easily shaken off, as it comes from a habit of thinking supported by tradition and milieu alike: anything that cannot be exploited in some way is uninterestinghence the devaluation of the psyche. A further reason is the habitual depreciation of everything one cannot touch with the hands or does not understand. In this respect our conventional system of educationnecessary as it wasis not entirely free from the blame of having helped to give the empirical psyche a bad name. In recent times this traditional error has been made even worse by an allegedly biological point of view which sees man as being no further advanced than a herd-animal and fails to understand any of his motivations outside the categories of hunger, power, and sex. We think in terms of thousands and millions of units, and then naturally there are no questions more important than whom the herd belongs to, where it pastures, whether enough calves are born and sufficient quantities of milk and meat are produced. In the face of huge numbers every thought of individuality pales, for statistics obliterate everything unique. Contemplating such overwhelming might and misery the individual is embarrassed to exist at all. Yet the real carrier of life is the individual. He alone feels happiness, he alone has virtue and responsibility and any ethics whatever. The masses and the state have nothing of the kind. Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself. He is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State. Our time contains and produces more than enough of that crude sulphur which with arsenical malignity prevents man from discovering his true self.
[195] I was tempted to translate arsenicalis as poisonous. But this translation would be too modern. Not everything that the alchemists called arsenic was really the chemical element As. Arsenic originally meant masculine, manly, strong (

) and was essentially an arcanum, as Rulands Lexicon shows. There arsenic is defined as an hermaphrodite, the means whereby Sulphur and Mercury are united. It has communion with both natures and is therefore called Sun and Moon.344 Or arsenic is Luna, our Venus, Sulphurs companion and the soul. Here arsenic is no longer the masculine aspect of the arcane substance but is hermaphroditic and even feminine. This brings it dangerously close to the moon and the crude sulphur, so that arsenic loses its solar affinity. As Sulphurs companion it is poisonous and corrosive. Because the arcane substance always points to the principal unconscious content, its peculiar nature shows in what relation that content stands to consciousness. If the conscious mind has accepted it, it has a positive form, if not, a negative one. If on the other hand the arcane substance is split into two figures, this means that the content has been partly accepted and partly rejected; it is seen under two different, incompatible aspects and is therefore taken to be two different things.
[196] This is what has happened in our text: the thief is contrasted with the winged youth, who represents the other aspect, or personifies the true sulphur, the spirit of inner truth which measures man not by his relation to the mass but by his relation to the mystery of the psyche. This winged youth (the spiritual Mercurius) is obviously aware of his own weakness and flees shuddering from the crude sulphur. The standpoint of the inner man is the more threatened the more overpowering that of the outer man is. Sometimes only his invisibility saves him. He is so small that no one would miss him if he were not the sine qua non of inner peace and happiness.345 In the last resort it is neither the eighty-million-strong nation nor the State that feels peace and happiness, but the individual. Nobody can ever get round the simple computation that a million noughts in a row do not add up to 1, just as the loudest talk can never abolish the simple psychological fact that the larger the mass the more nugatory is the individual.
[197] The shy and delicate youth stands for everything that is winged in the psyche or that would like to sprout wings. But it dies from the poison of organizational thinking and mass statistics; the individual succumbs to the madness that sooner or later overtakes every mass the death-instinct of the lemmings. In the political sphere the name for this is war.
Et licet Aqua centralis sit hujus Sponsa, tamen Amorem suum erga illam ardentissimum non audet exerere, ob latronis insidias, cujus technae sunt vere inevitabiles.
And though the central Water is his bride, yet dare he not display his most ardent love towards her, because of the snares of the thief, whose machinations are in truth unavoidable.
[198] The goal of the winged youth is a higher one than the fulfilment of collective ideals, which are all nothing but makeshifts and conditions for bare existence. Since this is the absolute foundation, nobody will deny their importance, but collective ideals are not by a long way the breath of life which a man needs in order to live. If his soul does not live nothing can save him from stultification. His life is the soil in which his soul can and must develop. He has only the mystery of his living soul to set against the overwhelming might and brutality of collective convictions.
[199] It is the age-old drama of opposites, no matter what they are called, which is fought out in every human life. In our text it is obviously the struggle between the good and the evil spirit, expressed in alchemical language just as today we express it in conflicting ideologies. The text comes close to the mystical language of the Baroque the language of Jacob Boehme (15751624), Abraham of Franckenberg (15931652), and Angelus Silesius (16241677).
[200] We learn that the winged youth is espoused to the central Water. This is the fountain of the soul or the fount of wisdom,346 from which the inner life wells up. The nymph of the spring is in the last analysis Luna, the mother-beloved, from which it follows that the winged youth is Sol, the filius solis, lapis, aurum philosophicum, lumen luminum, medicina catholica, una salus, etc. He is the best, the highest, the most precious in potentia. But he will become real only if he can unite with Luna, the mother of mortal bodies. If not, he is threatened with the fate of the puer aeternus in Faust, who goes up in smoke three times.347 The adept must therefore always take care to keep the Hermetic vessel well sealed, in order to prevent what is in it from flying away. The content becomes fixed through the mystery of the coniunctio, in which the extreme opposites unite, night is wedded with day, and the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female.348 This apocryphal saying of Jesus from the beginning of the second century is indeed a paradigm for the alchemical union of opposites. Obviously this problem is an eschatological one, but, aside from the somewhat tortuous language of the times, it cannot be called abstruse since it has universal validity, from the tao of Lao-tzu to the coincidentia oppositorum of Cusanus. The same idea penetrated into Christianity in the form of the apocalyptic marriage of the Lamb (Rev. 22 : 9ff.), and we seldom find a high point of religious feeling where this eternal image of the royal marriage does not appear.
[201] I can do no more than demonstrate the existence of this image and its phenomenology. What the union of opposites really means transcends human imagination. Therefore the worldly-wise can dismiss such a fantasy without further ado, for it is perfectly clear: tertium non datur. But that doesnt help us much, for we are dealing with an eternal image, an archetype, from which man can turn away his mind for a time but never permanently.349 Whenever this image is obscured his life loses its proper meaning and consequently its balance. So long as he knows that he is the carrier of life and that it is therefore important for him to live, then the mystery of his soul lives alsono matter whether he is conscious of it or not. But if he no longer sees the meaning of his life in its fulfilment, and no longer believes in mans eternal right to this fulfilment, then he has betrayed and lost his soul, substituting for it a madness which leads to destruction, as our time demonstrates all too clearly.
[202] The machinations of the thief, our text says, are unavoidable. They are an integral part of the fateful drama of opposites, just as the shadow belongs to the light. Reason, however, cannot turn this into a convenient recipe, for inevitability does not diminish the guilt of what is evil any more than the merit of what is good. Minus remains minus, and guilt, as ever, has to be avenged. Evil follows after wrong, says the Capuchin friar in Wallensteins campa banal truth that is too readily forgotten, and because of this the winged youth cannot lead his bride home as quickly as he would wish. Evil cannot be eradicated once and for all; it is an inevitable component of life and is not to be had without paying for it. The thief whom the police do not catch has, nonetheless, robbed himself, and the murderer is his own executioner.
[203] The thief in our text is armed with all evil, but in reality it is merely the ego with its shadow where the abysmal depths of human nature begin to appear. Increasing psychological insight hinders the projection of the shadow, and this gain in knowledge logically leads to the problem of the union of opposites. One realizes, first of all, that one cannot project ones shadow on to others, and next that there is no advantage in insisting on their guilt, as it is so much more important to know and possess ones own, because it is part of ones own self and a necessary factor without which nothing in this sublunary world can be realized. Though it is not said that Luna personifies the dark side, there is as we have seen something very suspicious about the new moon. Nevertheless the winged youth loves his moon-bride and hence the darkness to which she belongs, for the opposites not only flee one another but also attract one another. We all know that evil, especially if it is not scrutinized too closely, can be very attractive, and most of all when it appears in idealistic garb. Ostensibly it is the wicked thief that hinders the youth in his love for the chaste Diana, but in reality the evil is already lurking in the ideal youth and in the darkness of the new moon, and his chief fear is that he might discover himself in the role of the common sulphur. This role is so shocking that the noble-minded youth cannot see himself in it and puts the blame on the wiles of the enemy. It is as if he dared not know himself because he is not adult enough to accept the fact that one must be thankful if one comes across an apple without a worm in it and a plate of soup without a hair.
Esto hic tibi Diana propitia, quae feras domare novit,
Here may Diana be propitious to thee, who knoweth how to tame wild beasts,
[204] The darkness which is opposed to the light is the unbridled instinctuality of nature that asserts itself despite all consciousness. Anyone who seeks to unite the opposites certainly needs Diana to be propitious to him, for she is being considered as a bride and it has yet to be seen what she has to present in the way of wild animals. Possibly the thief will appear quite insignificant by comparison.
cujus binae columbae pennis suis aeris malignitatem temperabunt,
and whose twin doves will temper the malignity of the air with their wings,
[205] The tender pair of doves is an obviously harmless aspect of the same instinctuality, though in itself the theriomorphic symbol would be capable of an interpretation from above downwards. Nonetheless, it should not be interpreted in this sense because the aspect of untamed animality and evil is represented in the previous quotation by the mad dog and in this one by the thief. In contrast to this, the doves are emblems of innocence and of marital love as well as of the Holy Ghost and Sapientia, of Christ and his Virgin Mother.350 From this context we can see what the dove is intended to represent: it is the exact counterpart to the malignity of the thief. Together they represent the attack, first from one side and then from the other, of a dualistic being on the more restricted consciousness of man. The purpose or result of this assault is the widening of consciousness, which has always, it seems, followed the pattern laid down in Genesis 3 : 4f.: Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
[206] It is obviously a moment of supreme possibilities both for good and for evil. Usually, however, it is first one and then the other: the good man succumbs to evil, the sinner is converted to good, and that, to an uncritical eye, is the end of the matter. But those endowed with a finer moral sense or deeper insight cannot deny that this seeming one-after-another is in reality a happening of events side-by-side, and perhaps no one has realized this more clearly than St. Paul, who knew that he bore a thorn in the flesh and that the messenger of Satan smote him in the face lest he be exalted above measure.351 The one-after-another is a bearable prelude to the deeper knowledge of the side-by-side, for this is an incomparably more difficult problem. Again, the view that good and evil are spiritual forces outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them, is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. Even a life dedicated to God is still lived by an ego, which speaks of an ego and asserts an ego in Gods despite, which does not instantly merge itself with God but reserves for itself a freedom and a will which it sets up outside God and against him. How can it do this against the overwhelming might of God? Only through self-assertion, which is as sure of its free will as Lucifer. All distinction from God is separation, estrangement, a falling away. The Fall was inevitable even in paradise. Therefore Christ is without the stain of sin, because he stands for the whole of the Godhead and is not distinct from it by reason of his manhood.352 Man, however, is branded by the stain of separation from God. This state of things would be insupportable if there were nothing to set against evil but the law and the Decalogue, as in pre-Christian Judaismuntil the reformer and rabbi Jesus tried to introduce the more advanced and psychologically more correct view that not fidelity to the law but love and kindness are the antithesis of evil. The wings of the dove temper the malignity of the air, the wickedness of the aerial spirit (the prince of the power of the airEphesians 2 : 2), and they alone have this effect.
quod per poros facile ingreditur adolescens, concutit statim (terrae sedes), nubemque tetricam suscitat.
so that the youth easily entereth in through the pores, and instantly shaketh the foundations of the earth,353 and raiseth up a dark cloud.
[207] Once the malignity is tempered, sinfulness and its evil consequences are mitigated too, and that which has wings can embrace the earth. For now we come to the consummation of the hierosgamos, the earthing of the spirit and the spiritualizing of the earth, the union of opposites and reconciliation of the divided (Ephesians 2 : 14),354 in a word the longed-for act of redemption whereby the sinfulness of existence, the original dissociation, will be annulled in God. The earthquake is on the one hand an allusion to Christs descent into hell and his resurrection, and on the other hand a shaking of the humdrum earthly existence of man, into whose life and soul meaning has at last penetrated, and by which he is at once threatened and uplifted.
[208] This is always an intuitive experience that is felt as a concrete reality. It is the prefiguration and anticipation of a future condition, a glimmering of an unspoken, half-conscious union of ego and non-ego. Rightly called a unio mystica, it is the fundamental experience of all religions that have any life in them and have not yet degenerated into confessionalism; that have safeguarded the mystery of which the others know only the rites it producedempty bags from which the gold has long since vanished.
[209] The earthquake sends up a dark cloud: consciousness, because of the revolution of its former standpoint, is shrouded in darkness, just as the earth was at Christs death, which was followed by a resurrection. This image tells us that the widening of consciousness is at first upheaval and darkness, then a broadening out of man to the whole man. This Man, being indescribable, is an intuitive or mystical experience, and the name Anthropos is therefore very apt because it demonstrates the continuity of this idea over the millennia.
tu undas superinduces ad Lunae usque candorem,
But thou wilt lead the waters up even to the brightness of the moon,
[210] As we have seen, water here has the meaning of fructifying interest, and its leading upwards means that it now turns towards the plenilunium, the gracious and serene complement of the sinister new moon and its perils.
atque ita Tenebrae, quae supra abyssi faciem erant, per spiritum se in aquis moventem discutientur. Sic jubente Deo Lux apparebit.
and the darkness that was upon the face of the deep shall be scattered by the spirit moving over the waters. Thus by Gods comm and shall the Light appear.
[211] The eye that hitherto saw only the darkness and danger of evil turns towards the circle of the moon, where the ethereal realm of the immortals begins, and the gloomy deep can be left to its own devices, for the spirit now moves it from within, convulses and transforms it. When consciousness draws near to the unconscious not only does it receive a devastating shock but something of its light penetrates into the darkness of the unconscious. The result is that the unconscious is no longer so remote and strange and terrifying, and this paves the way for an eventual union. Naturally the illumination of the unconscious does not mean that from now on the unconscious is less unconscious. Far from it. What happens is that its contents cross over into consciousness more easily than before. The light that shines at the end is the lux moderna of the alchemists, the new widening of consciousness, a further step in the realization of the Anthropos, and every one of these steps signifies a rebirth of the deity.
[212] Herewith we end our contemplation of the text. The question now arises: Did the alchemists really have such thoughts and conceal them in their ornate metaphors? In other words, did Philaletha, the pseudonymous author of our text, have anything like the thoughts and ideas which I have put forward by way of interpretation? I regard this as out of the question, and yet I believe that these authors invariably said the best, most apposite, and clearest thing they could about the matter in hand. For our taste and our intellectual requirements this performance is, however, so unsatisfactory that we ourselves feel compelled to make a renewed attempt to say the same thing in still clearer words. It seems obvious to us that what we think about it was never thought by the alchemists, for if it had been it would doubtless have come out long ago. The philosophers took the greatest pains to unearth and reveal the secret of the stone, accusing the ancients of having written too copiously and too obscurely. If they, on their own admission, wrote typice, symbolice, metaphorice, this was the best they could do, and it is thanks to their labours that we are today in a position to say anything at all about the secrets of alchemy.
[213] All understanding that is not directly of a mathematical nature (which, incidentally, understands nothing but merely formulates) is conditioned by its time. Fundamental to alchemy is a true and genuine mystery which since the seventeenth century has been understood unequivocally as psychic. Nor can we moderns conceive it to be anything except a psychic product whose meaning may be elicited by the methods and empirical experience of our twentieth century medical psychology. But I do not imagine for a moment that the psychological interpretation of a mystery must necessarily be the last word. If it is a mystery it must have still other aspects. Certainly I believe that psychology can unravel the secrets of alchemy, but it will not lay bare the secret of these secrets. We may therefore expect that at some time in the future our attempt at explanation will be felt to be just as metaphorical and symbolical as we have found the alchemical one to be, and that the mystery of the stone, or of the self, will then develop an aspect which, though still unconscious to us today, is nevertheless foreshadowed in our formulations, though in so veiled a form that the investigator of the future will ask himself, just as we do, whether we knew what we meant.
d. The Moon-Nature
[214] We have treated at some length of the sinister and dangerous aspect of the new moon. In this phase the climax of the moons waning, which in folklore is not always considered auspicious, is reached. The new moon is dangerous at childbirth and weddings. If a father dies at the waning moon, this brings the children bad luck. One also has to bow to the sickle moon or it will bring bad luck. Even the light of the moon is dangerous as it causes the moon-sickness, which comes from the moon-wolf. The marriage bed, pregnant women, and small children should be protected from the moonlight. Whoever sews by moonlight sews the winding-sheet, and so on.355
[215] The passage on the moon in Paracelsus De pestilitate (III, 95) catches very aptly the atmosphere which hangs round the pale moonlight:
Now mark this: Wherever there is a disheartened and timid man in whom imagination has created the great fear and impressed it on him, the moon in heaven aided by her stars is the corpus to bring this about. When such a disheartened timid man looks at the moon under the full sway of his imagination, he looks into the speculum venenosum magnum naturae [great poisonous mirror of nature], and the sidereal spirit and magnes hominis [magnet of man] will thus be poisoned by the stars and the moon. But we shall expound this more clearly to you as follows. Through his imagination the timid man has made his eyes basilisk-like, and he infects the mirror, the moon, and the stars, through himself at the start, and later on so that the moon is infected by the imagining man; this will happen soon and easily, by dint of the magnetic power which the sidereal body and spirit exerts upon the celestial bodies [viz.] the moon and the stars in great Nature [viz., the Macrocosm]. Thus man in turn will be poisoned by this mirror of the moon and the stars which he has looked at; and this because (for, as you can see, it happens quite naturally) a pregnant woman at the time of menstruation similarly stains and damages the mirror by looking into it. For at such a time she is poisonous and has basilisks eyes ex causa menstrui et venenosi sanguinis [because of the menstrual and poisonous blood] which lies hidden in her body and nowhere more strongly than in her eyes. For there the sidereal spirit of the stained body lies open and naked to the sidereal magnet. Quia ex menstruo et venenoso sanguine mulieris causatur et nascitur basiliscus, ita luna in coelo est oculus basilisci coeli [Because as the basilisk is caused and born from the menstrual and poisonous blood of a woman, thus the moon in the sky is the eye of the basilisk of heaven]. And as the mirror is defiled by the woman, thus conversely the eyes, the sidereal spirit, and the body of man are being defiled by the moon, for the reason that at such time the eyes of the timid imagining man are weak and dull, and the sidereal spirit and body draw poison out of the mirror of the moon into which you have looked. But not so that only one human being has the power thus to poison the moon with his sight, no; hence I say that, mostly, menstruating women do poison the moon and the stars much more readily and also more intensely than any man, easily so. Because as you see that they poison and stain the mirror made of metallic material and what is even more, the glass mirrormuch more and sooner they defile the moon and the stars at such a time. And even if at such time the moon only shines on water and the woman looks at the water, the moon will be poisoned, and by still many more means, but it would not do to reveal all this clearly. And such poisoning of the moon happens for this reason: it is the naked eye of the spirit and of the sidereal body and it often grows new and young as you can see. Just as a young child who looks into a mirror which was looked at by a menstruating woman will become long-sighted and cross-eyed and his eyes will be poisoned, stained, and ruined, as the mirror was stained by the menstruating woman; and so also the moon, and also the human being, is poisoned. And as the moon, when it grows new and young, is of a poisonous kind, this you shall notice in two ways, namely in the element of water and also in wood, loam, etc.: as this, when it is gathered at the wrong time will not burn well, but be worm-eaten, poisonous, bad, and putrid, so is also the moon, and that is why it can be poisoned so easily by merely looking at it and the moon with its light is the humidum ignis [moisture of fire], of a cold nature, for which reason it is capable of receiving the poison easily.356
[216] In the Table of Correspondences in Penotus357 the following are said to pertain to the moon: the snake, the tiger, the Manes, the Lemurs, and the dei infernales. These correlations show clearly how Penotus was struck by the underworld nature of the moon.358 His heretical empiricism led him beyond the patristic allegories to a recognition of the moons dark side, an aspect no longer suited to serve as an allegory of the beauteous bride of Christ. And just as the bitch was forgotten in the lunar allegory of the Church, so too our masculine judgment is apt to forget it when dealing with an over-valued woman. We should not deceive ourselves about the sinister tail of the undoubtedly desirable head: the baying of Hecate is always there, whether it sound from near or from far. This is true of everything feminine and not least of a mans anima. The mythology of the moon is an object lesson in female psychology.359
[217] The moon with her antithetical nature is, in a sense, a prototype of individuation, a prefiguration of the self: she is the mother and spouse of the sun, who carries in the wind and the air the spagyric embryo conceived by the sun in her womb and belly.360 This image corresponds to the psychologem of the pregnant anima, whose child is the self, or is marked by the attri butes of the hero. Just as the anima represents and personifies the collective unconscious, so Luna represents the six planets or spirits of the metals. Dorn says:
From Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and Venus nothing and no other metal can arise except Luna [i.e., silver]. . . . For Luna consists of the six spiritual metals and their powers, of which each has two. . . . From the planet Mercury, from Aquarius and Gemini, or from Aquarius and Pisces, Luna has her liquidity [liquatio] and her white brightness . . ., from Jupiter, Sagittarius, and Taurus her white colour and her great stability in the fire . . ., from Mars, Cancer, and Aries her hardness and fine resonance . . ., from Venus, Gemini, and Libra her degree of solidity [coagulationis] and malleability . . ., from Sol, Leo, and Virgo her true purity and great endurance against the strength of the fire . . ., from Saturn, Virgo, and Scorpio, or from Capricorn, her homogeneous body, her pure cleanness [puram munditiem], and steadfastness against the force of the fire.361
[218] Luna is thus the sum and essence of the metals natures, which are all taken up in her shimmering whiteness. She is multi-natured, whereas Sol has an exceptional nature as the seventh from the six spiritual metals. He is in himself nothing other than pure fire.362 This role of Luna devolves upon the anima, as she personifies the plurality of archetypes, and also upon the Church and the Blessed Virgin, who, both of lunar nature, gather the many under their protection and plead for them before the Sol iustitiae. Luna is the universal receptacle of all things, the first gateway of heaven,363 and William Mennens364 says that she gathers the powers of all the stars in herself as in a womb, so as then to bestow them on sublunary creatures.365 This quality seems to explain her alleged effect in the opus ad Lunam, when she gives the tincture the character and powers of all the stars. The Fragment from the Persian Philosophers says: With this tincture all the dead are revived, so that they live for ever, and this tincture is the first-created ferment,366 namely that to the moon,367 and it is the light of all lights and the flower and fruit of all lights,368 which lighteth all things.369
[219] This almost hymn-like paean to the materia lapidis or the tincture refers in the first instance to Luna, for it is during her work of whitening that the illumination takes place. She is the mother in this art. In her water Sol is hidden like a fire370a parallel to the conception of Selene as the

in Plutarch. On the first day of the month of Phamenoth, Osiris enters into Selene, and this is evidently equivalent to the synodos in the spring. Thus they make the power of Osiris to be fixed in the moon.371 Selene, Plutarch says, is male-female and is impregnated by Helios. I mention these statements because they show that the moon has a double light, outside a feminine one but inside a masculine one which is hidden in it as a fire. Luna is really the mother of the sun, which means, psychologically, that the unconscious is pregnant with consciousness and gives birth to it. It is the night, which is older than the day:
Part of the darkness which gave birth to light,
That proud light which is struggling to usurp
The ancient rank and realm of Mother Night.372
[220] From the darkness of the unconscious comes the light of illumination, the albedo. The opposites are contained in it in potentia, hence the hermaphroditism of the unconscious, its capacity for spontaneous and autochthonous reproduction. This idea is reflected in the Father-Mother of the Gnostics,373 as well as in the nave vision of Brother Klaus374 and the modern vision of Maitland.375 the biographer of Anna Kingsford.
[221] Finally, I would like to say a few words about the psychology of the moon, which is none too simple. The alchemical texts were written exclusively by men, and their statements about the moon are therefore the product of masculine psychology. Nevertheless women did play a role in alchemy, as I have mentioned before, and this makes it possible that the symbolization will show occasional traces of their influence. Generally the proximity as well as the absence of women has a specifically constellating effect on the unconscious of a man. When a woman is absent or unattainable the unconscious produces in him a certain femininity which expresses itself in a variety of ways and gives rise to numerous conflicts. The more one-sided his conscious, masculine, spiritual attitude the more inferior, banal, vulgar, and biological will be the compensating femininity of the unconscious. He will, perhaps, not be conscious at all of its dark manifestations, because they have been so overlaid with saccharine sentimentality that he not only believes the humbug himself but enjoys putting it over on other people. An avowedly biological or coarse-minded attitude to women produces an excessively lofty valuation of femininity in the unconscious, where it is pleased to take the form of Sophia or of the Virgin. Frequently, however, it gets distorted by everything that misogyny can possibly devise to protect the masculine consciousness from the influence of women, so that the man succumbs instead to unpredictable moods and insensate resentments.
[222] Statements by men on the subject of female psychology suffer principally from the fact that the projection of unconscious femininity is always strongest where critical judgment is most needed, that is, where a man is involved emotionally. In the metaphorical descriptions of the alchemists, Luna is primarily a reflection of a mans unconscious femininity, but she is also the principle of the feminine psyche, in the sense that Sol is the principle of a mans. This is particularly obvious in the astrological interpretation of sun and moon, not to mention the age-old assumptions of mythology. Alchemy is inconceivable without the influence of her elder sister astrology, and the statements of these three disciplines must be taken into account in any psychological evaluation of the luminaries. If, then, Luna characterizes the feminine psyche and Sol the masculine, consciousness would be an exclusively masculine affair, which is obviously not the case since woman possesses consciousness too. But as we have previously identified Sol with consciousness and Luna with the unconscious, we would now be driven to the conclusion that a woman cannot possess a consciousness.
[223] The error in our formulation lies in the fact, firstly, that we equated the moon with the unconscious as such, whereas the equation is true chiefly of the unconscious of a man; and secondly, that we overlooked the fact that the moon is not only dark but is also a giver of light and can therefore represent consciousness. This is indeed so in the case of woman: her consciousness has a lunar rather than a solar character. Its light is the mild light of the moon, which merges things together rather than separates them. It does not show up objects in all their pitiless discreteness and separateness, like the harsh, glaring light of day, but blends in a deceptive shimmer the near and the far, magically transforming little things into big things, high into low, softening all colour into a bluish haze, and blending the nocturnal landscape into an unsuspected unity.
[224] For purely psychological reasons I have, in other of my writings, tried to equate the masculine consciousness with the concept of Logos and the feminine with that of Eros. By Logos I meant discrimination, judgment, insight, and by Eros I meant the capacity to relate. I regarded both concepts as intuitive ideas which cannot be defined accurately or exhaustively. From the scientific point of view this is regrettable, but from a practical one it has its value, since the two concepts mark out a field of experience which it is equally difficult to define.
[225] As we can hardly ever make a psychological proposition without immediately having to reverse it, instances to the contrary leap to the eye at once: men who care nothing for discrimination, judgment, and insight, and women who display an almost excessively masculine proficiency in this respect. I would like to describe such cases as the regular exceptions. They demonstrate, to my mind, the common occurrence of a psychically predominant contrasexuality. Wherever this exists we find a forcible intrusion of the unconscious, a corresponding exclusion of the consciousness specific to either sex, predominance of the shadow and of contrasexuality, and to a certain extent even the presence of symptoms of possession (such as compulsions, phobias, obsessions, automatisms, exaggerated affects, etc.). This inversion of roles is probably the chief psychological source for the alchemical concept of the hermaphrodite. In a man it is the lunar anima, in a woman the solar animus, that influences consciousness in the highest degree. Even if a man is often unaware of his own anima-possession, he has, understandably enough, all the more vivid an impression of the animus-possession of his wife, and vice versa.
[226] Logos and Eros are intellectually formulated intuitive equivalents of the archetypal images of Sol and Luna. In my view the two luminaries are so descriptive and so superlatively graphic in their implications that I would prefer them to the more pedestrian terms Logos and Eros, although the latter do pin down certain psychological peculiarities more aptly than the rather indefinite Sol and Luna. The use of these images requires at any rate an alert and lively fantasy, and this is not an attri bute of those who are inclined by temperament to purely intellectual concepts. These offer us something finished and complete, whereas an archetypal image has nothing but its naked fullness, which seems inapprehensible by the intellect. Concepts are coined and negotiable values; images are life.
[227] If our formula regarding the lunar nature of feminine consciousness is correctand in view of the consensus omnium in this matter it is difficult to see how it should not bewe must conclude that this consciousness is of a darker, more nocturnal quality, and because of its lower luminosity can easily overlook differences which to a mans consciousness are self-evident stumbling-blocks. It needs a very moon-like consciousness indeed to hold a large family together regardless of all the differences, and to talk and act in such a way that the harmonious relation of the parts to the whole is not only not disturbed but is actually enhanced. And where the ditch is too deep, a ray of moonlight smoothes it over. A classic example of this is the conciliatory proposal of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Anatole Frances Penguin Island. The heavenly council had come to a deadlock over the question of baptism, since although the penguins were animals they had been baptized by St. Mal. Therefore she says: That is why, Lord, I entreat you to give old Mals penguins a human head and breast so that they can praise you worthily. And grant them also an immortal soul but only a little one!376
[228] This lunatic logic can drive the rational mind to the white heat of frenzy. Fortunately it operates mostly in the dark or cloaks itself in the shimmer of innocence. The moon-nature is its own best camouflage, as at once becomes apparent when a womans unconscious masculinity breaks through into her consciousness and thrusts her Eros aside. Then it is all up with her charm and the mitigating half-darkness; she takes a stand on some point or other and captiously defends it, although each barbed remark tears her own flesh, and with brutal short-sightedness she jeopardizes everything that is the dearest goal of womanhood. And then, for unfathomable reasonsor perhaps simply because it is time the picture changes completely: the new moon has once more been vanquished.
[229] The Sol who personifies the feminine unconscious is not the sun of the day but corresponds rather to the Sol niger. It is not the real Sol niger of masculine psychology, the alter ego, the Brother Medardus of E. T. A. Hoffmanns story The Devils Elixir, or the crass identity of opposites which we meet with in Jekyll and Hyde. The unconscious Sol of woman may be dark, but it is not coal black (

), as was said of the moon; it is more like a chronic eclipse of the sun, which in any case is seldom total. Normally a womans consciousness emits as much darkness as light, so that, if her consciousness cannot be entirely light, her unconscious cannot be entirely dark either. At any rate, when the lunar phases are repressed on account of too powerful solar influences, her consciousness takes on an overbright solar character, while on the other hand her unconscious becomes darker and darkernigrum nigrius nigro and both are unendurable for both in the long run.
[230] Her Sol niger is as void of light and charm as the gentling moonlight is all heavenly peace and magic. It protests too much that it is a light, because it is no light, and a great truth, because it invariably misses the mark, and a high authority, which nevertheless is always wrong, or is only as right as the blind tom-cat who tried to catch imaginary bats in broad daylight, but one day caught a real one by mistake and thereafter became completely unteachable. I do not want to be unfair, but that is what the feminine Sol is like when it obtrudes too much. (And it has to obtrude a bit if the man is to understand it!)
[231] As a man normally gets to know his anima only in projected form, so too a woman in the case of her dark sun. When her Eros is functioning properly her sun will not be too dark, and the carrier of the projection may even produce some useful compensation. But if things are not right with her Eros (in which case she is being unfaithful to Love itself), the darkness of her sun will transfer itself to a man who is anima-possessed and who dispenses inferior spirit, which as we know is as intoxicating as the strongest alcohol.
[232] The dark sun of feminine psychology is connected with the father-imago, since the father is the first carrier of the animus-image. He endows this virtual image with substance and form, for on account of his Logos he is the source of spirit for the daughter. Unfortunately this source is often sullied just where we would expect clean water. For the spirit that benefits a woman is not mere intellect, it is far more: it is an attitude, the spirit by which a man lives.377 Even a so-called ideal spirit is not always the best if it does not understand how to deal adequately with nature, that is, with the animal man. This really would be ideal. Hence every father is given the opportunity to corrupt, in one way or another, his daughters nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father378 can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations. But in judging these things one should not be too certain either of good or of evil. The two are about equally balanced. It should, however, have begun to dawn on our cultural optimists that the forces of good are not sufficient to produce either a rational world-order or the faultless ethical behaviour of the individual, whereas the forces of evil are so strong that they imperil any order at all and can imprison the individual in a devilish system that commits the most fearful crimes, so that even if he is ethical-minded he must finally forget his moral responsibility in order to go on living. The malignity of collective man has shown itself in more terrifying form today than ever before in history, and it is by this objective standard that the greater and the lesser sins should be measured. We need more casuistic subtlety, because it is no longer a question of extirpating evil but of the difficult art of putting a lesser evil in place of a greater one. The time for the sweeping statements so dear to the evangelizing moralist, which lighten his task in the most agreeable way, is long past. Nor can the conflict be escaped by a denial of moral values. The very idea of this is foreign to our instincts and contrary to nature. Every human group that is not actually sitting in prison will follow its accustomed paths according to the measure of its freedom. Whatever the intellectual definition and evaluation of good and evil may be, the conflict between them can never be eradicated, for no one can ever forget it. Even the Christian who feels himself delivered from evil will, when the first rapture is over, remember the thorn in the flesh, which even St. Paul could not pluck out.
[233] These hints may suffice to make clear what kind of spirit it is that the daughter needs. They are the truths which speak to the soul, which are not too loud and do not insist too much, but reach the individual in stillness the individual who constitutes the meaning of the world. It is this knowledge that the daughter needs, in order to pass it on to her son.




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