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object:3.08 - Purification
book class:The Practice of Psycho therapy
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
class:chapter


8
PURIFICATION
Here falls the heavenly dew, to lave/
The soiled black body in the grave.
[Figure 8]
[483]
The falling dew is a portent of the divine birth now at hand. Ros
Gedeonis (Gideons dew) is a synonym for the aqua permanens, hence for
Mercurius. A quotation from Senior at this point in the Rosarium text
says: Maria says again: But the water I have spoken of is a king
descending from heaven, and the earths humidity absorbs it, and the water
of heaven is retained with the water of the earth, and the water of the earth
honours that water with its lowliness and its sand, and water consorts with
water and water will hold fast to water and Albira is whitened with
Astuna.
1
2
3
[484]
The whitening (albedo or dealbatio) is likened to the ortus solis, the
sunrise; it is the light, the illumination, that follows the darkness. Hermes
says: Azoth et ignis latonem abluunt et nigredinem ab eo auferunt
(Azoth and fire cleanse the lato and remove the blackness). The spirit
Mercurius descends in his heavenly form as sapientia and as the fire of the
Holy Ghost, to purify the blackness. Our text continues: Dealbate latonem
et libros rumpite, ne corda vestra rumpantur. Haec est enim compositio
omnium Sapientum et etiam tertia pars totius operis. Jungite ergo, ut
dicitur in Turba, siccum humido: id est terram nigram cum aqua sua et
coquite donee dealbatur. Sic habes aquam et terram per se et terram cum
aqua dealbatam: ilia albedo dicitur aer. (Whiten the lato and rend the
books lest your hearts be rent asunder. For this is the synthesis of the wise
and the third part of the whole opus Join therefore, as is said in the Turba,
the dry to the moist, the black earth with its water, and cook till it whitens.
In this manner you will have the essence of water and earth, having
whitened the earth with water: but that whiteness is called air.) So that the
reader may know that the water is the aqua sapientiae, and the dew
falling from heaven the divine gift of illumination and wisdom, there
follows a long disquisition on Wisdom, entitled Septimum Sapientiae
4
5
6
5
6
7Salomonis:
She it is that Solomon chose to have instead of light, and above all
beauty and health; in comparison of her he compared not unto her the
virtue of any precious stone. For all gold in her sight shall be esteemed
as a little sand, and silver shall be counted as clay; and this is not
without cause, for to gain her is better than the merchandise of silver and
the most pure gold. And her fruit is more precious than all the riches of
this world, and all the things that are desired are not to be compared with
her. Length of days and health are in her right hand, and in her left hand
glory and infinite riches. Her ways are beautiful operations and
praiseworthy, not unsightly norill-favoured, and her paths are measured
and not hasty, but are bound up with stubborn and day-long toil. She is
a tree of life to them that lay hold on her, and an unfailing light. Blessed
shall they be who retain her, for the science of God shall never perish, as
Alphidius beareth witness, for he saith: He who hath found this science,
it shall be his rightful food for ever.
8
9Figure 8
[485]
In this connection I would like to point out that water as a symbol of
wisdom and spirit can be traced back to the parable which Christ told to
the Samaritan woman at the well. The uses to which this parable was put
can be seen in one of the sermons of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, a
contemporary of our alchemists: There is in Jacobs well a water which
human ingenuity has sought and found. Philosophy is its name, and it is
found through laborious investigation of the world of the senses. But in the
Word of God, which dwells in the depths of the living well of Christs
humanity, there is a fountain for the refreshment of the spirit. Here, then,
we have Jacobs well of the senses, the well of reason and the well of
wisdom. From the first well, which is of animal nature and deep, the father
10drinks, together with his children and cattle; from the second, which is yet
deeper and on the very margin of nature, there drink only the children of
men, namely those whose reason has awakened and whom we call
philosophers; from the third, the deepest of all, drink the sons of the All-
Highest, whom we call gods and true theologians. Christ in his humanity
may be called the deepest well.... In this deepest well is the source of
wisdom, which brings bliss and immortality.... The living well bears the
source of its own life, it calls the thirsty to the waters of salvation that they
may be refreshed with the water of saving wisdom. Another passage in
the same sermon says: Whosoever drinks the spirit, drinks of a bubbling
spring. Finally, Cusanus says: Mark well, our reason is given to us with
the power of an intellectual seed; wherefore it contains a welling principle
through which it generates in itself the water of understanding. And this
well can yield naught but water of a like nature, namely, the water of
human understanding; just as the understanding of the principle every
thing either is or is not yields the metaphysical water from which the other
streams of science flow without cease.
11
12
13
[486]
After all this there can be no more doubt that the black darkness is
washed away by the aqua sapientiae of our science, namely the God-
given gift of the royal art and the knowledge it bestows. The mundificatio
(purification) means, as we have seen, the removal of the superfluities that
always cling to merely natural products, and especially to the symbolic
unconscious contents which the alchemist found projected into matter. He
therefore acted on Cardans rule that the object of the work of
interpretation is to reduce the dream material to its most general
principles. This is what the laboratory worker called the extractio animae,
and what in the psychological field we would call the working through of
the idea contained in the dream. We know that this requires a necessary
premise or hypothesis, a certain intellectual structure by means of which
apperceptions can be made. In the case of the alchemist, such a premise
was ready to hand in the aqua (doctrinae), or the God-inspired sapientia
which he could also acquire through a diligent study of the books, the
alchemical classics. Hence the reference to the books, which at this stage
of the work must be avoided or destroyed lest your hearts be rent
asunder. This singular exhortation, altogether inexplicable from the
chemical point of view, has a profound significance here. The atolvent
water or aqua sapientiae had been established in the teachings and sayings
14of the masters as the donum Spiritus Sancti which enables the philosopher
to understand the miracula operis. Therefore he might easily be tempted to
assume that philosophical knowledge is the highest good, as the Cusanus
quotation shows. The psychological equivalent of this situation is when
people imagine that they have reached the goal of the work once the
unconscious contents have been made conscious and theoretically
evaluated. In both cases this would be arbitrarily to define spirit as a
mere matter of thinking and intuition. Both disciplines, it is true, are
aiming at a spiritual goal: the alchemist undertakes to produce a new,
volatile (hence aerial or spiritual) entity endowed with corpus, anima, et
spiritus, where corpus is naturally understood as a subtle body or
breath body; the analyst tries to bring about a certain attitude or frame of
mind, a certain spirit therefore. But because the body, even when
conceived as the corpus glorificationis, is grosser than anima and spiritus,
a remnant of earth necessarily clings to it, albeit a very subtle one.
Hence an attitude that seeks to do justice to the unconscious as well as to
ones fellow human beings cannot possibly rest on knowledge alone, in so
far as this consists merely of thinking and intuition. It would lack the
function that perceives values, i.e., feeling, as well as the fonction du rel,
i.e., sensation, the sensible perception of reality.
15
16
[487]
Thus if books and the knowledge they impart are given exclusive
value, mans emotional and affective life is bound to suffer. That is why
the purely intellectual attitude must be abandoned. Gideons dew is a
sign of divine intervention, it is the moisture that heralds the return of the
soul.
[488]
The alchemists seem to have perceived the danger that the work and
its realization may get stuck in one of the conscious functions.
Consequently they stress the importance of the theoria, i.e., intellectual
understanding as opposed to the practica, which consisted merely of
chemical experiments. We might say that the practica corresponds to pure
perception, and that this must be supplemented by apperception. But this
second stage still does not bring complete realization. What is still lacking
is heart or feeling, which imparts an abiding value to anything we have
understood. The books must therefore be destroyed lest thinking impair
feeling and thus hinder the return of the soul.
[489]
These difficulties are familiar ground to the psycho therapist. It oftenhappens that the patient is quite satisfied with merely registering a dream
or fantasy, especially if he has pretensions to aestheticism. He will then
fight against even intellectual understanding because it seems an affront to
the reality of his psychic life. Others try to understand with their brains
only, and want to skip the purely practical stage. And when they have
understood, they think they have done their full share of realization. That
they should also have a feeling-relationship to the contents of the
unconscious seems strange to them or even ridiculous. Intellectual
understanding and aestheticism both produce the deceptive, treacherous
sense of liberation and superiority which is liable to collapse if feeling
intervenes. Feeling always binds one to the reality and meaning of
symbolic contents, and these in turn impose binding standards of ethical
behaviour from which aestheticism and intellectualism are only too ready
to emancipate themselves.
[490]
Owing to the almost complete lack of psychological differentiation in
the age of alchemy, it is hardly surprising that such considerations as these
are only hinted at in the treatises. But hints do exist, as we have seen.
Since then the differentiation of the functions has increased apace, with the
result that they have become more and more segregated from one another.
Consequently it is very easy for the modern mind to get stuck in one or
other of the functions and to achieve only an incomplete realization. It is
hardly necessary to add that in time this leads to a neurotic dissociation. To
this we owe the further differentiation of the individual functions as well
as the discovery of the unconscious, but at the price of psychological
disturbance. Incomplete realization explains much that is puzzling both in
the individual and in the contemporary scene. It is a crucial matter for the
psycho therapist, particularly for those who still believe that intellectual
insight and routine understanding, or even mere recollection, are enough to
effect a cure. The alchemists thought that the opus demanded not only
laboratory work, the reading of books, meditation, and patience, but also
love.
[491]
Nowadays we would speak of feeling-values and of realization
through feeling. One is often reminded of Fausts shattering experience
when he was shaken out of the deadly dull rut of his laboratory and
philosophical work by the revelation that feeling is all. In this we can
already see the modern man who has got to the stage of building his worldon a single function and is not a little proud of his achievement. The
medieval philosophers would certainly never have succumbed to the idea
that the demands of feeling had opened up a new world. The pernicious
and pathological slogan lart pour lart would have struck them as absurd,
for when they contemplated the mysteries of nature, sensation, creation,
thinking, cognition and feeling were all one to them. Their state of mind
was not yet split up into so many different functions that each stage of the
realization process would have needed a new chapter of life. The story of
Faust shows how unnatural our condition is: it required the intervention of
the devilin anticipation of Steinach to transform the ageing alchemist
into a young gallant and make him forget himself for the sake of the all-
too-youthful feelings he had just discovered! That is precisely the risk
modern man runs: he may wake up one day to find that he has missed half
his life.
17
[492]
Nor is realization through feeling the final stage. Although it does not
really belong to this chapter, yet it might not be out of place to mention the
fourth stage after the three already discussed, particularly since it has such
a very pronounced symbolism in alchemy. This fourth stage is the
anticipation of the lapis. The imaginative activity of the fourth function
intuition, without which no realization is completeis plainly evident in
this anticipation of a possibility whose fulfilment could never be the object
of empirical experience at all: already in Greek alchemy it was called
the stone that is no stone. Intuition gives outlook and insight;
it revels in the garden of magical possibilities as if they were real. Nothing
is more charged with intuitions than the lapis philosophorum. This
keystone rounds off the work into an experience of the totality of the
individual. Such an experience is completely foreign to our age, although
no previous age has ever needed wholeness so much. It is abundantly clear
that this is the prime problem confronting the art of psychic healing in our
day, as a consequence of which we are now trying to loosen up our rigid
psychologie compartiments by putting in a few communicating doors.
[493]
After the ascent of the soul, with the body left behind in the darkness
of death, there now comes an enantiodromia: the nigredo gives way to the
albedo. The black or unconscious state that resulted from the union of
opposites reaches the nadir and a change sets in. The falling dew signals
resuscitation and a new light: the ever deeper descent into the unconscioussuddenly becomes illumination from above. For, when the soul vanished at
death, it was not lost; in that other world it formed the living counterpole
to the state of death in this world. Its reappearance from above is already
indicated by the dewy moisture. This dewiness partakes of the nature of
the psyche, for
is cognate with
(cold) and
(to freshen and
animate), while on the other hand dew is synonymous with the aqua
permanens, the aqua sapientiae, which in turn signifies illumination
through the realization of meaning. The preceding union of opposites has
brought light, as always, out of the darkness of night, and by this light it
will be possible to see what the real meaning of that union was.




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