object:4.04 - THE REGENERATION OF THE KING
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
4. THE REGENERATION OF THE KING
(Ripleys Cantilena)
[368] It should not be overlooked that no reason was given why the king was in need of renewal. On a primitive level the need for renewal was self-evident, since the magic power of the king decreased with age. This is not so in later parables, where the original imperfection of the king itself becomes a problem.
[369] Thus the author of the following parable, Sir George Ripley (141590), Canon of Bridlington, was already revolving in his mind the problem of the sick king. I must leave to one side the question of how far this idea was influenced by the Grail Legend. It is conceivable that Ripley, as an Englishman, would have been acquainted with this tradition. Apart from the rather doubtful evidence of the lapis exillis (lapsit exiliis in Wolfram von Eschenbach), I have not been able to find any more likely traces of the Grail cycle in alchemical symbolism, unless one thinks of the mystic vessel of transformation, the tertium comparationis for which would be the chalice in the Mass.
The first five verses of the Cantilena67 are as follows:
Behold! And in this Cantilena see
The hidden Secrets of Philosophy:
What Joy arises from the Merry Veines
Of Minds elated by such dulcid Straines!
Through Roman Countreys as I once did passe,
Where Mercuries Nuptiall celebrated was,
And feeding Stoutly (on the Bride-Groomes score)
I learnd these Novelties unknown before.
There was a certaine Barren King by birth,
Composd of the Purest, Noblest Earth,
By nature Sanguine and Devoute, yet hee
Sadly bewaild his Authoritie.
Wherefore am I a King, and Head of all
Those Men and Things that be Corporeall?
I have no Issue, yet Ile not deny
Tis Mee both Heaven and Earth are Ruld by.
Yet there is either a Cause Naturall
Or some Defect in the Originall,
Though I was borne without Corruption
And nourished neath the Pinions of the Sunne.68
[371] The clerics language betrays him: original defect is a paraphrase of original sin, and the pinions of the sun are the wings of the sun of justice (Malachi 4 : 2: The sun of justice shall arise with healing in his wings). Possibly there is a connection here between the Cantilena and the remark of Senior that the male without wings is under the winged female.69 The Cantilena condenses the winged female on the one hand with the winged sun-disk of Malachi and on the other with the idea of the nourishing mothera kind of dreamlike contamination.
[372] Verses 6 and 7
Each Vegetative which from the Earth proceeds
Arises up with its own proper Seeds;
And Animalls, at Seasons, speciously
Abound with Fruit and strangly Multiply.
Alas, my Nature is Restricted so
No Tincture from my Body yet can flow.
It therefore is Infoecund: neither can
It ought availe, in Generating Man.70
Here again the ecclesiastical language is noticeable: the tincture is identical with the aqua permanens, the wonderful water of transformation which corresponds to the Churchs water of grace. The water that should flow from the body may be analogous to the rivers from the belly of Christ, an idea that plays a great role not only in ecclesiastical metaphor but also in alchemy.71 With regard to the ecclesiastical language I would call attention to Hugo Rahners most instructive essay, Flumina de ventre Christi. Origen speaks of the river our saviour (salvator noster fluvius).72 The analogy of the pierced Redeemer with the rock from which Moses struck water was used in alchemy to denote the extraction of the aqua permanens or of the soul from the lapis; or again, the king was pierced by Mercurius.73 For Origen water meant the water of doctrine and the fount of science. It was also a fountain of water springing up in the believer. St. Ambrose speaks of the fountains of wisdom and knowledge.74 According to him paradise, with its fourfold river of the Logos, is the ground of the soul;75 he also calls this river the innermost soul, since it is the principle, the
(venter), and the
.76 These few examples from the many collected by Rahner may suffice to put the significance of the aqua permanens, the arcane substance par excellence, in the right perspective. For the alchemists it was wisdom and knowledge, truth and spirit, and its source was in the inner man, though its symbol was common water or sea-water. What they evidently had in mind was a ubiquitous and all-pervading essence, an anima mundi and the greatest treasure, the innermost and most secret numinosum of man. There is probably no more suitable psychological concept for this than the collective unconscious, whose nucleus and ordering principle is the self (the monad of the alchemists and Gnostics).
[373] Verses 8 and 9
My Bodies Masse is of a Lasting-Stuffe,
Exceeding delicate, yet hard enough;
And when the Fire Assays to try my Sprite,
I am not found to Weigh a Graine too light.
My Mother in a Sphaere gave birth to mee,
That I might contemplate Rotunditie;
And be more Pure of kind than other things,
By Right of Dignity the Peer of Kings.77
The house of the sphere is the vas rotundum, whose roundness represents the cosmos and, at the same time, the world-soul, which in Plato surrounds the physical universe from outside. The secret content of the Hermetic vessel is the original chaos from which the world was created. As the filius Macrocosmi and the first man the king is destined for rotundity, i.e., wholeness, but is prevented from achieving it by his original defect.
[374] Verse 10
Yet to my Griefe I know, unlesse I feed
On the Specifics I so sorely need
I cannot Generate: to my Amaze
The End draws near for me, Ancient of Daies.78
This verse confirms the decrepit condition of the king, who apart from his original defect, or because of it, is also suffering from senile debility. It was a bold stroke for a canon to identify the king with the Ancient of Days from Daniel 7 : 9: I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of Days did sit, whose garments were white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. There can be no doubt that Ripley the alchemist was here speculating over the head of Ripley the cleric to hit upon an idea that in the Middle Ages must have seemed like blasphemy: the identification of the transformative substance with God. To our way of thinking this kind of allegory or symbolization is the height of absurdity and unintelligibility. It was even hard for the Middle Ages to swallow.79 But where it met with acceptance, as in philosophical alchemy, it does much to explain the hymnlike or at any rate highly emotional language of some of the treatises. We have here, in fact, a new religious declaration: God is not only in the unspotted body of Christ and continually present in the consecrated Host butand this is the novel and significant thinghe is also hidden in the cheap, despised, common-or-garden substance, even in the uncleanness of this world, in filth.80 He is to be found only through the art, indeed he is its true object and is capable of progressive transformationDeo adjuvante. This strange theologem did not, of course, mean that for the alchemists God was nothing but a substance that could be obtained by chemical transformationfar from it. Such an aberration was reserved rather for those moderns who put matter or energy in the place of God. The alchemists, so far as they were still pagans, had a more mystical conception of God dating from late antiquity, which, as in the case of Zosimos, could be described as Gnostic; or if they were Christians, their Christianity had a noticeable admixture of hea thenish magical ideas about demons and divine powers and an anima mundi inherent or imprisoned in physical nature. The anima mundi was conceived as that part of God which formed the quintessence and real substance of Physis, and which was to Godto use an apt expression of Isidore81as the accrescent soul (
, grown-on) was to the divine soul of man. This accrescent soul was a second soul that grew through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms up to man, pervading the whole of nature, and to it the natural forms were attached like appendages (
). This strange idea of Isidores is so much in keeping with the phenomenology of the collective unconscious that one is justified in calling it a projection of this empirically demonstrable fact in the form of a metaphysical hypostasis.
[375] It will not have escaped the reader how primitive the idea of Gods ageing and need of renewal is. It does in fact derive from ancient Egypt, though one is at a loss to imagine from what sources, other than the Bible, a Canon of Bridlington in the fifteenth century could have borrowed such a theology. His writings at any rate allow no conjectures in this respect. There is something of a clue, however, in the alchemical tradition itself, in the idea of a corrupt arcane substance whose corruption is due to original sin. A similar idea appears in the Grail tradition of the sick king, which has close connections with the transformation mystery of the Mass. The king is the forbear of Parsifal, whom one could describe as a redeemer figure, just as in alchemy the old king has a redeemer son or becomes a redeemer himself (the lapis is the same at the beginning and at the end). Further, we must consider certain medieval speculations concerning Gods need of improvement and the transformation of the wrathful God of the Old Testament into the God of Love in the New: for, like the unicorn, he was softened by love in the lap of a virgin. Ideas of this kind are found as early as Bonaventure, the Franciscan saint, who died in 1274.82 We should also remember that, in the figurative language of the Church, God the Father was represented as an old man and his birth as a rejuvenation in the Son. In a hymn to the Church as an analogy of the Mother of God Paulinus of Nola says:
Sister and wife at once; for without the use of the body
Mentally she unites, for the Spouse is God, not a man.
Out of this mother is born the Ancient as well as the infant 83
[376] Although the candidate for baptism (reborn into a new infancy) is meant here, the point of the analogy is that God the Father, a bearded old man, is worshipped in God the Son as a newborn child.
[377] The contrast between senex and puer touches at more than one point on the archetype of Gods renewal in Egyptian theology, especially when the underlying homoousia comes out as clearly as in the verses of Ephraem Syrus: The Ancient of Days, in his sublimity, dwelt as a babe in the womb.84 Thy Babe, O Virgin, is an old man; he is the Ancient of Days and precedes all time.85
[378] Nowhere in this material, however, do we find the very specific motif of Gods senescence, and the source Ripley could have used remains obscure. Even so, there is always the possibility of an autochthonous revival of the mythologem from the collective unconscious. Nelken has published a case of this kind. His patient was a primary-school teacher who suffered from paranoia. He developed a theory about a Father-God with immense procreative powers. Originally he had 550 membra virilia, but in the course of time they were reduced to three. He also possessed two scrota with three testicles each. His colossal sperm production weakened him in the end, and finally he shrank to a five-ton lump and was found chained up in a ravine. This psychologem contains the motif of ageing and loss of procreative power. The patient was the rejuvenated Father-God or his avatar.86 The embellishment of the archetypal theme is in this case completely original, so that we can safely take it as an autochthonous product.
[379] In Ripleys case there is the more immediate possibility that he modified for his own purpose the conception of the Ancient of Days and his youthful son the Logos, who in the visions of Valentinus the Gnostic and of Meister Eckhart was a small boy. These concepts are closely related to those of Dionysus, youngest of the gods, and of the Horus-child, Harpocrates, Aion, etc. All naturally imply the renewal of the ageing god. The step from the world of Christian ideas back into paganism is not a long one,87 and the naturalistic conclusion that the father dwindles when the son appears, or that he is rejuvenated in the son, is implicit in all these age-old conceptions, whose effect is all the stronger the more they are consciously denied. Such a combination of ideas is almost to be expected in a cleric like Ripley, even though, like all alchemists, he may not have been conscious of their full import.
[380] Verses 1112
Utterly perishd is the Flower of Youth,
Through all my Veines there courses naught but Death.
Marvelling I heard Christs voice,88 that from above
Ile be Reborne, I know not by what Love.
Else I Gods Kingdom cannot enter in:
And therefore, that I may be Borne agen,
Ile Humbled be into my Mothers Breast,
Dissolve to my First Matter, and there rest.89
[381] In order to enter into Gods Kingdom the king must transform himself into the prima materia in the body of his mother, and return to the dark initial state which the alchemists called the chaos. In this massa confusa the elements are in conflict and repel one another; all connections are dissolved. Dissolution is the prerequisite for redemption. The celebrant of the mysteries had to suffer a figurative death in order to attain transformation. Thus, in the Arisleus vision, Gabricus is dissolved into atoms in the body of his sister-wife. We have seen from the analogy with the Ancient of Days what the alchemists goal was: both artifex and substance were to attain a perfect state, comparable to the Kingdom of God. I will not discuss, for the moment, the justification for this seemingly presumptuous comparison, but would remind the reader that in the opinion of the alchemists themselves the transformation was a miracle that could take place only with Gods help.
[382] Verse 13
Hereto the Mother Animates the King,
Hasts his Conception, and does forthwith bring
Him closely hidden underneath her Traine,
Till, from herselfe, shed made him Flesh againe.90
[383] Here the chymical wedding takes the form of the ancient rite of adoption, when the child to be adopted was hidden under the skirts of the adoptive mother and then drawn forth again.91
In this way Ripley circumvented the scandal of the customary incest.
[384] The adoption was represented in ancient times either by a figurative act of birth or by the suckling of the adoptive child. In this manner Heracles was adopted by Hera. In a hymn to Nebo92 the god says to Asurbanipal:
Small wert thou, Asurbanipal, when I left thee with the divine Queen of Nineveh,
Feeble wert thou, Asurbanipal, when thou didst sit in the lap of the divine Queen of Nineveh,
Of the four udders that were placed in thy mouth thou didst suck from two,
And in two thou didst bury thy face 93
[385] Concealment under the skirt is a widely disseminated rite, and until quite recently was still practised by the Bosnian Turks. The motif of the tutelary Madonna in a mantle has a similar meaning, namely, the adoption of the believer.
[386] Ripleys adoption scene may derive from the lion-hunt of Marchos,94 where mention is made of a fire which comes out over the coals, even as the pious mother steps over the body of her son. And again: He likened the subtlety of the fires heat to the stepping of the pious mother over the body of her son.95 These sentences form part of a dialogue between King Marchos and his mother. In contrast to the Cantilena, however, it is not the king who is to be transformed but the lion (see pars. 409f.).
[387] Verses 1417
Twas wonderfull to see with what a Grace
This Naturall Union made at one Imbrace
Did looke; and by a Bond both Sexes knitt,
Like to a Hille and Aire surrounding it.
The Mother unto her Chast Chamber 96 goes,
Where in a Bed of Honour she bestowes
Her wearyd selfe, twixt Sheets as white as Snow
And there makes Signes of her approaching Woe.
Ranke Poison issuing from the Dying Man
Made her pure Orient face look foule and wan:
Hence she commands all Strangers to be gone,
Seals upp her Chamber doore, and lyes Alone.
Meanwhile she of the Peacocks Flesh did Eate
And Dranke the Greene-Lyons Blood with that fine Meate,
Which Mercurie, bearing the Dart of Passion,
Brought in a Golden Cupp of Babilon.97
[388] The pregnancy diet described here is the equivalent of the cibatio, the feeding of the transformative substance. The underlying idea is that the material to be transformed had to be impregnated and saturated, either by imbibing the tincture, the aqua propria (its own water, the soul), or by eating its feathers or wings (volatile spirit), or its own tail (uroboros), or the fruit of the philosophical tree. Here it is peacocks flesh. The peacock is an allusion to the cauda pavonis (peacocks tail). Immediately before the albedo or rubedo98 all colours appear, as if the peacock were spreading his shimmering fan. The basis for this phenomenon may be the iridescent skin that often forms on the surface of molten metal (e.g., lead).99 The omnes colores are frequently mentioned in the texts as indicating something like totality. They all unite in the albedo, which for many alchemists was the climax of the work. The first part was completed when the various components separated out from the chaos of the massa confusa were brought back to unity in the albedo and all become one. Morally this means that the original state of psychic disunity, the inner chaos of conflicting part-souls which Origen likens to herds of animals,100 becomes the vir unus, the unified man. Eating the peacocks flesh is therefore equivalent to integrating the many colours (or, psychologically, the contradictory feeling-values) into a single colour, white. Nortons Ordinall of Alchimy says:
For everie Colour whiche maie be thought,
Shall heere appeare before that White be wrought.101
[389] The lapis contains or produces all colours.102 Hoghelande says that the Hermaphroditic monster contains all colours.103 Poetic comparisons are also used, such as Iris, the rainbow,104 or the iris of the eye.105 The eye and its colours are mentioned by Hippolytus. He calls attention to the Naassene analogy between the four rivers of paradise and the senses. The river Pison, which waters Havilah, the land of gold, corresponds to the eye: This, they say, is the eye, which by its bearing and its colours bears witness to what is said. 106 Abul-Qasim speaks of the tree with multicoloured blossoms.107 Mylius says: Our stone is the star-strewn Sol, from whom every colour proceeds by transformation, as flowers come forth in the spring. 108 The Tractatus Aris-totelis gives a more elaborate description: Everything that is contained beneath the circle of the moon . . . is made into one at the quadrangular ending,109 as if it were a meadow decked with colours and sweet-smelling flowers of divers kinds, which were conceived in the earth by the dew of heaven.110
[390] The stages of the work are marked by seven colours which are associated with the planets.111 This accounts for the relation of the colours to astrology, and also to psychology, since the planets correspond to individual character components. The Aurora Consurgens relates the colours to the soul.112 Lagneus associates the four principal colours with the four temperaments.113 The psychological significance of the colours comes out quite clearly in Dorn: Truly the form which is the intellect of man is the beginning, middle, and end of the preparations, and this form is indicated by the yellow colour, which shows that man is the greater and principal form in the spagyric work, and one mightier than heaven.114 Since the gold colour signifies intellect, the principal informator (formative agent) in the alchemical process, we may assume that the other three colours also denote psychological functions, just as the seven colours denote the seven astrological components of character. Consequently the synthesis of the four or seven colours would mean nothing less than the integration of the personality, the union of the four basic functions, which are customarily represented by the colour quaternio blue-red-yellow-green.115
[391] The cauda pavonis was a favourite theme for artistic representation in the old prints and manuscripts. It was not the tail alone that was depicted, but the whole bird. Since the peacock stands for all colours (i.e., the integration of all qualities), an illustration in Khunraths Amphitheatrum sapientiae logically shows it standing on the two heads of the Rebis, whose unity it obviously represents. The inscription calls it the bird of Hermes and the blessed greenness, both of which symbolize the Holy Ghost or the Ruach Elohim, which plays a great role in Khunrath.116 The cauda pavonis is also called the soul of the world, nature, the quintessence, which causes all things to bring forth.117 Here the peacock occupies the highest place as a symbol of the Holy Ghost, in whom the male-female polarity of the hermaphrodite and the Rebis is integrated.
[392] Elsewhere Khunrath says that at the hour of conjunction the blackness and the ravens head and all the colours in the world will appear, even Iris, the messenger of God, and the peacocks tail. He adds: Mark the secrets of the rainbow in the Old and New Testament.118 This is a reference to the sign of Gods covenant with Noah after the flood (Gen. 10 : 12f.) and to the one in the midst of the four and twenty elders, who was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine-stone, and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald (Rev. 4 : 3f.),119 and to the vision of the angel with a rainbow on his head (Rev. 10 : 1).120 Iris as the messenger of God is of special importance for an understanding of the opus, since the integration of all colours points, as it were, to a coming of God, or even to his presence.
[393] The colour green, stressed by Khunrath, is associated with Venus. The Introitus apertus says: But in the gentle heat the mixture will liquefy and begin to swell up, and at Gods comm and will be endowed with spirit, which will soar upward carrying the stone with it, and will produce new colours, first of all the green of Venus, which will endure for a long time.121 Towards the end of this procedure, which was known as the regimen of Venus, the colour changes into a livid purple, whereupon the philosophical tree will blossom. Then follows the regimen of Mars, which displays the ephemeral colours of the rainbow and the peacock at their most glorious. In these days the hyacinthine colour122 appears, i.e., blue.
[394] The livid purple that appears towards the end of the regimen of Venus has something deathly about it. This is in accord with the ecclesiastical view of purple, which expresses the mystery of the Lords passion.123 Hence the regimen of Venus leads by implication to passion and death, a point I would emphasize in view of the reference to the dart of passion in the Cantilena. A passage from the Aquarium sapientum shows that colours are a means of expressing moral qualities and situations: While the digestion124 and coction of the dead spiritual body goes forward in man, there may be seen, as in the earthly opus, many variegated colours and signs, i.e., all manner of sufferings, afflictions, and tribulations, the chiefest of which . . . are the ceaseless assaults of the world, the flesh, and the devil.125
[395] These statements concerning the regimen of Venus are confirmed in Penotuss Table of Symbols, where the peacock is correlated with the mysterium coniugii and with Venus, as is also the green lizard. Green is the colour of the Holy Ghost, of life, procreation and resurrection. I mention this because Penotus correlates the coniugium with the dii mortui (dead gods), presumably because they need resurrecting. The peacock is an ancient Christian symbol of resurrection, like the phoenix. According to a late alchemical text,126 the bronze tablets in the labyrinth at Mero showed Osiris, after his regeneration by Isis, mounting a chariot drawn by peacocks, in which he drives along triumphing in his resurrection, like the sun.
[396] In Dorn the dead spiritual body is the bird without wings. It changes into the ravens head and finally into the peacocks tail, after which it attains to the whitest plumage of the swan and, last of all, to the highest redness, the sign of its fiery nature.127 This plainly alludes to the phoenix, which, like the peacock, plays a considerable role in alchemy as a symbol of renewal and resurrection,128 and more especially as a synonym for the lapis.
[397] The cauda pavonis announces the end of the work, just as Iris, its synonym, is the messenger of God. The exquisite display of colours in the peacocks fan heralds the imminent synthesis of all qualities and elements, which are united in the rotundity of the philosophical stone. For seventeen hundred years, as I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, the lapis was brought into more or less clear connection with the ancient idea of the Anthropos. In later centuries this relationship extended to Christ, who from time immemorial was this same Anthropos or Son of Man, appearing in the gospel of St. John as the cosmogonie Logos that existed before the world was: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. According to the teachings of the Basilidians, the God who is not cast down a certain seed which, like a grain of mustard-seed, contained the whole plant, or, like a peacocks egg, had in itself a varied multitude of colours.129 In this seed was a threefold sonship, consubstantial with the God who is not. In alchemy, the end of the work announced by the cauda pavonis was the birth of the filius regius. The display of colours in the Basilidian doctrine therefore occurred at the right place. Again one must ask: traditionor spontaneous generation?
[398] The peacock is an attri bute of Juno, and one of the cognomens of Iris is Junonia. Just as the Queen Mother or the mother of the gods grants renewal, so the peacock annually renews his plumage, and therefore has a relation to all the changes in nature. De Gubernatis says:
The serene and starry sky and the shining sun are peacocks. The deep-blue firmament shining with a thousand brilliant eyes, and the sun rich with the colours of the rainbow, present the appearance of a peacock in all the splendour of its eye-bespangled feathers. When the sky or the thousand-rayed sun (sahasrnu) is hidden by clouds, or veiled by autumnal mists, it again resembles the peacock, which, in the dark part of the year, like a great number of vividly coloured birds, sheds its beautiful plumage, and becomes drab and unadorned; the crow which had put on the peacocks feathers then caws with the other crows in funereal concert. In winter the peacock-crow has nothing left to it except its shrill disagreeable cry, which is not dissimilar to that of the crow. It is commonly said of the peacock that it has an angels feathers, a devils voice, and a thiefs walk.130
This would explain Dorns connecting the peacock with the ravens head (caput corvi).
[399] Certain subsidiary meanings of the peacock in medieval literature are worth mentioning. Picinellus says that the peacock, contrasted with the sun, signifies the righteous man, who, although adorned with the colours of a thousand virtues, yet has a share in the greater glory of the divine presence; it also signifies the man who, spotted by repeated sins, rises again to integrity of spirit. The peacock expresses the inner beauty and perfection of the soul.131 Merula mentions that the peacock will empty and destroy a vessel containing poison,132 yet another peculiarity which may account for the peacocks position in alchemy, since it brings about and betokens the transformation of the poisonous dragon into the healing medicine. Merula also asserts that the peahen does not introduce her young to their father until they are fully grown, from which Picinellus drew an analogy with the Blessed Virgin, who likewise presents her charges to God only in the perfect state. Here again the motif of renewal through the mother is struck.133
[400] If, therefore, the Queen Mother eats peacock flesh during her pregnancy, she is assimilating an aspect of herself, namely, her capacity to grant rebirth, whose emblem the peacock is. According to Augustine, peacock flesh has the peculiarity of not turning rotten.134 It is, as the alchemists would say, a cibus immortalis, like the fruits of the philosophical tree with which Arisleus and his companions were fed in the house of rebirth at the bottom of the sea. Peacock flesh was just the right food for the mother in her attempt to rejuvenate the old king and to give him immortality.
[401] While peacock flesh135 was the queens diet, her drink was the blood of the green lion. Blood136 is one of the best-known synonyms for the aqua permanens, and its use in alchemy is often based on the blood symbolism and allegories of the Church.137 In the Cantilena the imbibitio (saturation)138 of the dead 139 arcane substance is performed not on the king, as in the Allegoria Merlini, but on the queen. The displacement and overlapping of images are as great in alchemy as in mythology and folklore. As these archetypal images are produced directly by the unconscious, it is not surprising that they exhibit its contamination of content 140 to a very high degree. This is what makes it so difficult for us to understand alchemy. Here the dominant factor is not logic but the play of archetypal motifs, and although this is illogical in the formal sense, it nevertheless obeys natural laws which we are far from having explained. In this respect the Chinese are much in advance of us, as a thorough study of the I Ching will show. Called by short-sighted Westerners a collection of ancient magic spells, an opinion echoed by the modernized Chinese themselves, the I Ching is a formidable psychological system that endeavours to organize the play of archetypes, the wondrous operations of nature, into a certain pattern, so that a reading becomes possible. It was ever a sign of stupidity to depreciate something one does not understand.
[402] Displacement and overlapping of images would be quite impossible if there did not exist between them an essential similarity of substance, a homoousia. Father, mother, and son are of the same substance, and what is said of one is largely true of the other. This accounts for the variants of incestbetween mother and son, brother and sister, father and daughter, etc. The uroboros is one even though in the twilight of the unconscious its head and tail appear as separate figures and are regarded as such. The alchemists, however, were sufficiently aware of the homoousia of their basic substances not only to call the two protagonists of the coniunctio drama the one Mercurius, but to assert that the prima materia and the vessel were identical. Just as the aqua permanens, the moist soul-substance, comes from the body it is intended to dissolve, so the mother who dissolves her son in herself is none other than the feminine aspect of the father-son. This view current among the alchemists cannot be based on anything except the essential similarity of the substances, which were not chemical but psychic; and, as such, appurtenances not of consciousness, where they would be differentiated concepts, but of the unconscious, in whose increasing obscurity they merge together in larger and larger contaminations.
[403] If, then, we are told that the queen drank blood, this image corresponds in every respect to the king drinking water,141 to the kings bath in the trough of the oak, to the king drowning in the sea, to the act of baptism, to the passage through the Red Sea, and to the suckling of the child by the mother of the gods. The water and the containing vessel always signify the mother, the feminine principle best characterized by yin, just as in Chinese alchemy the king is characterized by yang.142
[404] In alchemy the lion, the royal beast, is a synonym for Mercurius,143 or, to be more accurate, for a stage in his transformation. He is the warm-blooded form of the devouring, predatory monster who first appears as the dragon. Usually the lion-form succeeds the dragons death and eventual dismemberment. This in turn is followed by the eagle. The transformations described in Rosencreutzs Chymical Wedding give one a good idea of the transformations and symbols of Mercurius. Like him, the lion appears in dual form as lion and lioness,144 or he is said to be Mercurius duplex.145 The two lions are sometimes identified with the red and white sulphur.146 The illustrations show a furious battle between the wingless lion (red sulphur) and the winged lioness (white sulphur). The two lions are prefigurations of the royal pair, hence they wear crowns. Evidently at this stage there is still a good deal of bickering between them, and this is precisely what the fiery lion is intended to express the passionate emotionality that precedes the recognition of unconscious contents.147 The quarrelling couple also represent the uroboros.148 The lion thus signifies the arcane substance, described as terra,149 the body or unclean body.150 Further synonyms are the desert place,151 poison, because it [this earth] is deadly, tree, because it bears fruit, or hidden matter [hyle], because it is the foundation of all nature and the substance [subiectum] of all elements.152 In apparent contradiction to this Maier cites from Ripleys Tractatus duodecim portarum the remark that the green lion is a means of conjoining the tinctures between sun and moon.153 It is, however, psychologically correct to say that emotion unites as much as it divides. Basilius Valentinus takes the lion as the arcane substance, calling it the trinity composed of Mercurius, Sal, and Sulphur, and the equivalent of draco, aquila, rex, spiritus, and corpus.154 The Gloria Mundi calls the green lion the mineral stone that consumes a great quantity of its own spirit,155 meaning self-impregnation by ones own soul (imbibitio, cibatio, nutritio, penetratio, etc.).156
[405] Besides the green lion there was also, in the later Middle Ages, a red lion.157 Both were Mercurius.158 The fact that Artefius mentions a magic use of the lion (and of the snake) throws considerable light on our symbol: he is good for battle,159 and here we may recall the fighting lions and the fact that the king in the Allegoria Merlini began drinking the water just when he was venturing forth to war. We shall probably not be wrong if we assume that the king of beasts, known even in Hellenistic times as a transformation stage of Helios,160 represents the old king, the Antiquus dierum of the Cantilena, at a certain stage of renewal, and that perhaps in this way he acquired the singular title of Leo antiquus.161 At the same time he represents the king in his theriomorphic form, that is, as he appears in his unconscious state. The animal form emphasizes that the king is overpowered or overlaid by his animal side and consequently expresses himself only in animal reactions, which are nothing but emotions. Emotionality in the sense of uncontrollable affects is essentially bestial, for which reason people in this state can be approached only with the circumspection proper to the jungle,162 or else with the methods of the animal-trainer.
[406] According to the statements of the alchemists the king changes into his animal attri bute, that is to say he returns to his animal nature, the psychic source of renewal. Wieland made use of this psychologem in his fairytale Der Stein der Weisen,163 in which the dissipated King Mark is changed into an ass, though of course the conscious model for this was the transformation of Lucius into a golden ass in Apuleius.164
[407] Hoghelande ranks the lion with the dog.165 The lion has indeed something of the nature of the rabid dog we met with earlier, and this brings him into proximity with sulphur, the fiery dynamism of Sol. In the same way the lion is the potency of King Sol.166
[408] The aggressive strength of the lion has, like sulphur, an evil aspect. In Honorius of Autun the lion is an allegory of Antichrist and the devil,167 in accordance with I Peter 5 : 8: your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. But in so far as the lion and lioness are forerunners of the (incestuous) coniunctio, they come into the category of those theriomorphic pairs who spend their time fighting and copulating, e.g., cock and hen, the two serpents of the caduceus, the two dragons, etc. The lion has among other things an unmistakable erotic aspect. Thus the Introitus apertus says: Learn what the doves of Diana are,168 who conquer the lion with caresses; the green lion, I say, who in truth is the Babylonish dragon, who kills all with his venom. Learn, lastly, what the caduceus of Mercury is, wherewith he works miracles, and what are those nymphs whom he holds enchanted, if thou wouldst fulfil thy wish (i.e., the completion of the work).169 The reference to the Babylonish dragon is not altogether accidental, since in ecclesiastical language Babylon is thoroughly ambiguous.170 Nicholas Flamel likewise alludes to Babylon when he says that the stink and poisonous breath of burning mercury are nothing other than the dragons head which goes forth with great haste from Babylon, which is surrounded by two or three milestones.171
[409] In the lion hunt of Marchos172 the lion, as we have seen, takes the place of the king. Marchos prepares a trap and the lion, attracted by the sweet smell of a stone that is obviously an eye-charm,173 falls into it and is swallowed by the magic stone. And this stone, which the lion loves, is a woman.174 The trap was covered by a glass roof, and the interior, called by Senior the cucurbita, is here called the thalamus (bridal chamber). The lion therefore falls like a bridegroom into the bridal chamber, where the magic stone that is good for the eyes and is a woman, lies on a bed of coals. This stone swallows (transglutit) the lion so that nothing more of him was to be seen. This is a parallel of the Arisleus vision, where Beya causes Gabricus to disappear into her body.
[410] In the lion hunt the incest, though veiled, is clear enough. The love-affair is projected on the lion, the animal nature or accrescent soul of the king; in other words it is enacted in his unconscious or in a dream. Because of his ambiguous character the lion is well suited to take over the role of this indecorous lover. As the king is represented by his animal and his mother by the magic stone, the royal incest can take place as though it were happening somewhere outside, in quite another sphere than the personal world of the king and his mother. Indeed the marriage not only seems to be unnatural but is actually intended to be so. The tabooed incest is imposed as a task and, as the wealth of allegories shows, it is always in some symbolical form and never concrete. One has the impression that this sacral act, of whose incestuous nature the alchemists were by no means unconscious, was not so much banished by them into the cucurbita or glass-house but was taking place in it all the time. Whoever wished to commit this act in its true sense would therefore have to get outside himself as if into an external glasshouse, a round cucurbita which represented the microcosmic space of the psyche. A little reason would teach us that we do not need to get outside ourselves but merely a little deeper into ourselves to experience the reality of incest and much else besides, since in each of us slumbers the beastlike primitive who may be roused by the doves of Diana (n. 168). This would account for the widespread suspicion that nothing good can come out of the psyche. Undoubtedly the hierosgamos of the substances is a projection of unconscious contents. These connstents, it is usually concluded, therefore belong to the psyche and, like the psyche itself, are inside man, Q.E.D. As against this the fact remains that only a very few people are or ever were conscious of having any incestuous fantasies worth mentioning. If such fantasies are present at all they are not yet conscious, like the collective unconscious in general. An analysis of dreams and other products of the unconscious is needed to make these fantasies visible. To that end considerable resistances have to be overcome, as though one were entering a strange territory, a region of the psyche to which one feels no longer related, let alone identical with it; and whoever has strayed into that territory, either out of negligence or by mistake, feels outside himself and a stranger in his own house. I think one should take cognizance of these facts and not attri bute to our personal psyche everything that appears as a psychic content. After all, we would not do this with a bird that happened to fly through our field of vision. It may well be a prejudice to restrict the psyche to being inside the body. In so far as the psyche has a non-spatial aspect, there may be a psychic outside-the-body, a region so utterly different from my psychic space that one has to get outside oneself or make use of some auxiliary technique in order to get there. If this view is at all correct, the alchemical consummation of the royal marriage in the cucurbita could be understood as a synthetic process in the psyche outside the ego.175
[411] As I have said, the fact that one can get into this territory somehow or other does not mean that it belongs to me personally. The ego is Here and Now, but the outside-of-the-ego is an alien There, both earlier and later, before and after.176 So it is not surprising that the primitive mind senses the psyche outside the ego as an alien country, inhabited by the spirits of the dead. On a rather higher level it takes on the character of a shadowy semi-reality, and on the level of the ancient cultures the shadows of that land beyond have turned into ideas. In Gnostic-Christian circles these were developed into a dogmatic, hierarchically arranged cosmogonic and chiliastic system which appears to us moderns as an involuntary, symbolic statement of the psyche concerning the structure of the psychic non-ego.177
[412] This region, if still seen as a spectral land beyond, appears to be a whole world in itself, a macrocosm. If, on the other hand, it is felt as psychic and inside, it seems like a microcosm of the smallest proportions, on a par with the race of dwarfs in the casket, described in Goethes poem The New Melusine, or like the interior of the cucurbita in which the alchemists beheld the creation of the world, the marriage of the royal pair, and the homunculus.178 Just as in alchemical philosophy the Anthroparion or homunculus corresponds, as the lapis, to the Anthropos, so the chymical weddings have their dogmatic parallels in the marriage of the Lamb, the union of sponsus and sponsa, and the hierosgamos of the mother of the gods and the son.
[413] This apparent digression from our theme seemed to me necessary in order to give the reader some insight into the intricate and delicate nature of the lion-symbol, whose further implications we must now proceed to discuss.
[414] The blood of the green lion drunk by the queen is handed to her in a golden cup of Babylon. This refers to the great whore in Rev. 17 : 1ff., that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication . . . having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication
[415] The whore (meretrix) is a well-known figure in alchemy. She characterizes the arcane substance in its initial, chaotic, maternal state. The Introitus apertus says that the chaos is like a mother of the metals. It is also called our Luna before the royal diadem is extracted from the menstruum of our whore,179 i.e., before the king is reborn from the moon-mother. The Tractatus aureus de lapide says of the arcane substance: That noble whore Venus180 is clothed and enveloped in abounding colour. This colour has a reddish appearance.181 The nobility of this Venus derives from the fact that she is also the queen, the chaste bride of the king.182 In his Practica de lapide Basilius Valentinus says: This tincture is the rose183 of our Masters, of Tyrian hue, called also the red blood of the dragon, described by many, and the purple cloak184 . . . with which the queen is covered.185 A variant says: That precious substance is the Venus of the ancients, the hermaphrodite, who has two sexes.186 Maier writes: In our chemistry there is Venus and Cupid. For Psyche is the female, Cupid the male, who is held to be the dragon.187 The opus ad rubeum (reddening) takes place in the second house of Venus (Libra).188 Accordingly the Turba remarks that Venus precedes the sun.189 Flamel takes Venus as an important component of the arcane substance; in an apostrophe to the Magnesia he says: Thou bearest within thee the many-formed image of Venus, the cupbearer and fire-spitting servant,190 the latter referring to the sulphurous aspect of Mercurius. Mercurius also plays the role of cup-bearer in the Cantilena. In Flamel the lapis is born of the conjunction of Venus pugnax (fighting Venus)191 and Mercuriusevidently a reference to the quarrelling that precedes their union (cf. the fighting lions). In Valentinuss poem on the prima materia lapidis Venus is identified with the fountain, the mother and bride of the king, in which her fixed father is drowned:
A stone there is, and yet no stone,
In it doth Nature work alone.
From it there welleth forth a fount
In which her Sire, the Fixed, is drownd:
His body and life absorbed therein
Until the souls restored agen.192
[416] In other texts Venus represents the queen at the wedding, as in the Introitus apertus: See to it that you prepare the couch of Venus carefully, then lay her on the marriage bed, etc.193 In general, Venus appears as the feminine aspect of the king, or as we should say, his anima. Thus Valentinus says of Adam and Venus in the bath:
So saith the Wise Man: Nought they be
Except the Double Mercurie!
The King in the bath and the connubium with Venus194 or with the mother are the same thing: the man encompassed by the woman. Sometimes he and sometimes she is hermaphroditic,195 because at bottom they are nothing other than Mercurius duplex. Venus or the whore corresponds to the erotic aspect of the lion, who in turn is an attri bute of the king. As in the Apocalypse the seven-headed dragon is the riding-animal of the Great Whore, so in Valentinus the lion is the mount of Mercurius duplex (portrayed in his feminine aspect).196 Khunrath equates Venus with the green lion.197 Since Sulphur is to Sol as Leo is to Rex, we can see why Khunrath regards Venus as the anima vegetativa of sulphur.198 The most subtle substance must, when mixed with Sol, be preserved in a bottle whose stopper is marked with the sign of the cross,199 just as an evil spirit is banished by a crucifix.200 The relation of the stone to Venus occurs as early as the Greek texts, which speak of the Cytherean stone and the pearl of Cythera.201 In the Arabic Book of Krates202 Venus is endowed with tincturing power; she is therefore called scribe. Since she holds the vessel from which quicksilver continually flows, the word crivain very probably refers to Thoth-Mercurius. In the vision of Krates Venus appears surrounded by a number of Indians who shoot arrows at him. This image occurs again in Seniors vision of Hermes Trismegistus, at whom nine eagles shot their arrows. Mercurius is the archer who, chemically, dissolves the gold, and, morally, pierces the soul with the dart of passion. As Kyllenios he is identical with Cupid, who likewise shoots arrows in Rosencreutzs Chymical Wedding.203
[417] The corrupt nature of Venus is stressed in Rosinus ad Sarratantam:
And mark that Nature in the beginning of her origin intends to make the Sun or the Moon, but cannot, because of Venus, [who is] a corrupt [and] mixed quicksilver, or because of the foetid earth. Wherefore, as a child in its mothers womb accidentally contracts a weakness and a corruption by reason of the place, although the sperm was clean, [and] the child is nevertheless leprous and unclean because of the corrupt womb, so it is with all imperfect metals, which are corrupted by Venus and the foetid earth.204
[418] Lastly, I would mention the kings daughter in the play in the Chymical Wedding, who was chosen as the bride but because of her coquetry was made captive by the King of the Moors. She agrees to be his concubine, and thus proves herself a regular meretrix. Rosencreutzs visit to the sleeping Venus shows that this two-faced goddess is somehow secretly connected with the opus.205
[419] Evidently on account of its close connection with Venus the green lion has, surprisingly enough, rose-coloured blood, as mentioned by Dorn206 and by his contemporary, Khunrath.207 The latter ascribes rose-coloured blood to the filius macrocosmi as well.208 This peculiarity of the green lions blood establishes its connection not only with the filius, a well-known Christ parallel, but above all with the rose, whose symbolism produced not only the popular title Rosarium (rose-garden) but also the Rosen-creuz (Rosie Cross). The white and the red rose 209 are synonyms for the albedo 210 and rubedo. The tincture is of a rosy colour and corresponds to the blood of Christ, who is compared and united with the stone.211 He is the heavenly foundation-stone and corner-stone. 212 The rose-garden is a garden enclosed and, like the rose, a soubriquet of Mary, the parallel of the locked prima materia.213
[420] The relation of the love-goddess to red dates back to ancient times.214 Scarlet215 is the colour of the Great Whore of Babylon and her beast. Red is the colour of sin.216 The rose is also an attri bute of Dionysus. Red and rose-red are the colour of blood, a synonym for the aqua permanens and the soul, which are extracted from the prima materia and bring dead bodies to life.217 The prima materia is called meretrix and is equated with Great Babylon, just as are the dragon and the lion with the dragon of Babel. The stone, the filius regius, is the son of this whore. In ecclesiastical tradition the son of the whore is Antichrist, begotten by the devil, as we read in the Elucidarium of Honorius of Autun.218
[421] Certain of the ecclesiastical symbols prove to be acutely dualistic, and this is also true of the rose. Above all it is an allegory of Mary and of various virtues. Its perfume is the odour of sanctity, as in the case of St. Elizabeth and St. Teresa. At the same time it symbolizes human beauty (venustas), indeed the lust of the world (voluptas mundi).219
[422] Like the rose, the figure of the mother-beloved shines in all the hues of heavenly and earthly love. She is the chaste bride and whore who symbolizes the prima materia, which nature left imperfected. It is clear from the material we have cited that this refers to the anima. She is that piece of chaos which is everywhere and yet hidden, she is that vessel of contradictions and many coloursa totality in the form of a massa confusa, yet a substance endowed with every quality in which the splendour of the hidden deity can be revealed.
[423] The food of the Queen Motherpeacocks flesh and lions bloodconsists of the goddesss own attri butes, that is to say she eats and drinks herself. The Consilium coniugii formulates this as follows: And so at length it sinks down into one content through saturation with the one ferment, water, for water is the ferment of water.220 It is always the same idea, which is best expressed by the uroboros. Unexpectedly but not surprisingly we come across a similar formulation in ecclesiastical literature, in the remark of St. John Chrysostom that Christ was the first to eat his own flesh and drink his own blood (at the institution of the Last Supper).221 Tertullian says: In the same way the Lord applied to himself two Greek letters, the first and the last, as figures of the beginning and end which are united in himself. For just as Alpha continues on until it reaches Omega, and Omega completes the cycle back again to Alpha, so he meant to show that in him is found the course of all things from the beginning to the end and from the end back to the beginning, so that every divine dispensation should end in him through whom it began.222 This thought corresponds exactly to what the alchemists sought to express by the uroboros, the
. The uroboros is a very ancient pagan symbol, and we have no reason to suppose that the idea of a self-generating and self-devouring being was borrowed from Christianity, e.g., from Tertullian, although the analogy with Christ, who as the one God begets himself and voluntarily offers himself for sacrifice, and then in the rite of the Eucharist, through the words of the consecration, performs his own immolation, is very striking. The concept of the uroboros must be much older, and may ultimately go back to ancient Egyptian theology, to the doctrine of the homoousia of the Father-God with the divine son, Pharaoh.
[424] In the Cantilena, the mythologem of the uroboros is unexpectedly, and most unusually, translated into feminine form: it is not the father and son who merge into one another, but the mother who merges with her own substance, eating her own tail or impregnating herself, as the king in the Allegoria Merlini drank his own water.223 The queen is in a condition of psychic pregnancy: the anima has become activated and sends her contents into consciousness. These correspond to the peacocks flesh and the lions blood. If the products of the anima (dreams, fantasies, visions, symptoms, chance ideas, etc.) are assimilated, digested, and integrated, this has a beneficial effect on the growth and development (nourishment) of the psyche. At the same time the cibatio and imbibitio of the anima-mother indicate the integration and completion of the entire personality. The anima becomes creative when the old king renews himself in her. Psychologically the king stands first of all for Sol, whom we have interpreted as consciousness. But over and above that he represents a dominant of consciousness, such as a generally accepted principle or a collective conviction or a traditional view. These systems and ruling ideas age and thereby forcibly bring about a metamorphosis of the gods as described in Spittelers Olympian Spring. It seldom occurs as a definite collective phenomenon. Mostly it is a change in the individual which may, under certain conditions, affect society when the time is fulfilled. In the individual it only means that the ruling idea is in need of renewal and alteration if it is to deal adequately with the changed outer or inner conditions.
[425] The fact that the king played a large role in medieval alchemy for several hundred years proves that, from about the thirteenth century onwards, the traces of the kings renewal surviving from Egyptian and Hellenistic times began to gain in importance because they had acquired a new meaning. For as the West started to investigate nature, till then completely unknown, the doctrine of the lumen naturae began to germinate too. Ecclesiastical doctrine and scholastic philosophy had both proved incapable of shedding any light on the nature of the physical world. The conjecture thereupon arose that just as the mind revealed its nature in the light of divine revelation, so nature herself must possess a certain luminosity which could become a source of enlightenment. It is therefore understandable that for those individuals whose particular interest lay in the investigation of natural things the dogmatic view of the world should lose its force as the lumen naturae gained in attraction, even though the dogma itself was not directly doubted. The more serious alchemists, if we are to believe their statements, were religious people who had no thought of criticizing revealed truth. There is in the literature of alchemy, so far as I can judge, no attack on dogma. The only thing of this kind is a depreciation of the Aristotelian philosophy sponsored by the Church in favour of Hermetic Neoplatonism.224 Not only were the old Masters not critical of ecclesiastical doctrine, they were, on the contrary, convinced that their discoveries, real or imaginary, would enrich the doctrine of the correspondence of heavenly and earthly things, since they endeavoured to prove that the mystery of faith was reflected in the world of nature.225 They could not guess that their passion for investigating nature would detract as much as it did from revealed truth, and that their scientific interests could be aroused only as the fascination of dogma began to pall. And so, as in dreams, there grew up in their unconscious the compensating image of the kings renewal.
[426] These considerations make it the more comprehensible that it was a cleric who wrote the Cantilena. It is indeed something of a descent to the underworld when he makes Mercurius, bearing the dart of passion, the emblem of Cupid,226 hand the queen the blood-potion in a golden cup of Babylon. This, as we have seen, is the golden cup full of the abomination and filthiness of fornication, and it is quite obvious that she is being ruthlessly regaled with her own psychic substances. These are animal substances she has to integrate, the accrescent soul-peacock and lion with their positive and negative qualities; and the draught is given to her in the cup of fornication, which emphasizes still more the erotic nature of the lion, his lust and greed. Such an integration amounts to a widening of consciousness through profound insight.
[427] But why should such an unpalatable diet be prescribed for the queen? Obviously because the old king lacked something, on which account he grew senile: the dark, chthonic aspect of nature. And not only this but the sense that all creation was in the image of God, the antique feeling for nature, which in the Middle Ages was considered a false track and an aberration. Dark and unfathomable as the earth is, its theriomorphic symbols do not have only a reductive meaning, but one that is prospective and spiritual. They are paradoxical, pointing upwards and downwards at the same time. If contents like these are integrated in the queen, it means that her consciousness is widened in both directions. This diet will naturally benefit the regeneration of the king by supplying what was lacking before. Contrary to appearances, this is not only the darkness of the animal sphere, but rather a spiritual nature or a natural spirit which even has its analogies with the mystery of faith, as the alchemists were never tired of emphasizing.
[428] During her pregnancy, therefore, the queen undergoes something akin to a psycho therapeutic treatment, whereby her consciousness is enriched by a knowledge of the collective unconscious and, we may assume, by her inner participation in the conflict between her spiritual and chthonic nature. Often the law governing the progressive widening of consciousness makes the evaluation of the heights and depths into a moral task transcending the limits of convention. Failure to know what one is doing acts like guilt and must be paid for as deariy. The conflict may even turn out to be an advantage since, without it, there could be no reconciliation and no birth of a supraordinate third thing. The king could then be neither renewed nor reborn. The conflict is manifested in the long sickness of the queen.
[429] Verse 18
Thus great with Child, nine months she languishd
And Bathd her with the Teares which she had shed
For his sweete sake, who from her should be Pluckt
Full-gorgd with Milke which now the Greene-Lyon suckt.227
The uroboric relationship between queen and lion is quite evident here: she drinks his blood while he sucks her milk. This singular notion is explained by what we would consider an offensive identification of the queen with the mother of God, who, personifying humanity, takes God into her lap and suckles him at her breast. The lion, as an allegory of Christ, returns the gift by giving humanity his blood. This interpretation is confirmed in the later verses. Angelus Silesius makes use of a similar image in his epigram on the humanized God:
God drank the Virgins milk, left us his wine;
How human things have humanized divine!228
[430] Verse 19
Her Skin in divers Colours did appeare,
Now Black, then Greene, annon twas Red and Cleare.
Oft-times she would sit upright in her Bed,
And then again repose her Troubled Head.229
This display of colours is an indication of the queens Venus and peacock nature (cauda pavonis). Psychologically it means that during the assimilation of the unconscious the personality passes through many transformations, which show it in different lights and are followed by ever-changing moods. These changes presage the coming birth.
[431] Verse 20
Thrice Fifty Nights she lay in grievous Plight,
As many Daies in Mourning sate upright.
The King Revivd was in Thirty more,
His Birth was Fragrant as the Prim-Rose Flower.230
[432] There are, in alchemy, two main kinds of smell, the stench of graves and the perfume of flowers, the latter being a symbol of resurgent life. In ecclesiastical allegory and in the lives of the saints a sweet smell is one of the manifestations of the Holy Ghost, as also in Gnosticism. In alchemy the Holy Ghost and Sapientia are more or less identical; hence the smell of flowers attests that the rebirth of the king is a gift of the Holy Ghost or of Sapientia, thanks to whom the regeneration process could take place.
[433] Verses 2124
Her Wombe which well proportiond was at first
Is now Enlargd a Thousand fold at least,
That it bear Witnesse to his Genesis:
The End by Fires the best Approved is.
Her Chamber without Corners smoothly stands,
With Walls erected like her outstretched hands;
Or else the Fruit of her ripe Womb should spoil,
And a sicke Son reward her labouring Toil.
A burning Stove was placd beneath her Bed,
And on the same another Flourished:
Trimmd up with Art, and very Temperate,
Lest her fine Limbes should freeze for lack of Heate.
Her Chamber doore was Lockd and Bolted fast,
Admitting none to Vex her, first or last;
The Furnace-mouth was likewise Fastend so
That thence no Vaporous Matter forth could go.231
This is the image of the homunculus in the Hermetic vessel!
[434] Verse 25
And when the Childs Limbs there had putrefyd,
The Foulness of the Flesh was laid aside,
Making her232 fair as Luna, when anon
She coils towards233 the Splendour of the Sun.234
This is an attempt to describe the transformation in the sealed chamber. It is not clear whether the mother has already given birth to the child, and whether there (ibi) refers to the chamber or to the gravid uterus. The latter seems to me more probable in view of the next verse. Altogether verse 25 is obscure and clumsy in the extreme. The only thing to emerge with any clarity is the death and decomposition of the foetus in the uterus or in the chamber, and then the sudden appearance of Luna in the place of the mother after the foulness of the flesh had fallen away. Anyhow there is a tangle of thoughts here such as is frequently found in the texts. We must suppose that the poet meant something sensible with his apparent jumble of words, and that only his limited capacity for poetic expression prevented him from making himself intelligible. He was in fact trying to express a very difficult thought, namely the nature of the critical transformation. Chemically speaking, the mother overflowing with milk and tears is the solution, the mother liquid or matrix. She is the water in which the old king, as in the Arisleus vision, is dissolved into atoms. Here he is described as a foetus in utero. The dissolution signifies his death, and the uterus or cucurbita becomes his grave, that is, he disappears in the solution. At this moment something in the nature of a miracle occurs: the material solution loses its earthy heaviness, and solvent and solute together pass into a higher state immediately following the cauda pavonis, namely the albedo. This denotes the first stage of completion and is identified with Luna. Luna in herself is spirit, and she at once joins her husb and Sol, thus initiating the second and usually final stage, the rubedo. With that the work is completed, and the lapis, a living being endowed with soul and spirit and an incorruptible body, has taken shape.
[435] We know that what hovered before the mind of the alchemist during this transformation was the almost daily miracle of transubstantiation at the Mass. This would very definitely have been the case with Canon Ripley. We have already seen from a number of examples how much religious conceptions were mixed up with his alchemical interests. The queen in the Cantilena is neither a wife nor mother in the first place but a tutelary madonna who adopts the king as her sonan indication that she stands in the same relationship to the king as Mater Ecclesia to the believer. He dies and is buried as if in the Church or in consecrated ground, where he awaits resurrection in a glorified body.
[436] The elevation of the matrix, the chemical solution, from the state of materiality to Luna is the classic allegory of the Church, as Ripley doubtless knew. The goddess who suddenly intervenes in the opus is depicted in the Mutus liber, where she appears equally suddenly during the procedure, as a naked female figure crowned with the sign of the moon and bearing a child in her arms. The miracle is there described as an intervention of the gods,235 who, like god-parents, take the place of the earthly parents and arrange for the spiritual procreation of the foetus spagyricus. It is inevitable that Luna should stand for the Virgin and/or the Church in the Cantilena because the senex-puer is described by Ripley himself as the Ancient of Days. Since the mother at this moment has brought about the histolysis of the old king, so that only a single homogeneous solution remains, we must assume that Luna, appearing in the place of the mother, has become identical with the solution and now carries the king in her body as her adopted son. This gives the king immortality in a divine and incorruptible body. In the Mutus liber there then follows an adoption by Sol and after that a coniunctio Solis et Lunae, and the adoptive child, now consubstantial with Sol and Luna, is included in the ceremony.
[437] Something of this sort seems to occur in the Cantilena: Luna and her adoptive son are at first identical in one and the Same solution. When Luna takes over this condition she is presumably in her novilunium and hastens to her union with Sol. The new moon is associated with uncanniness and snakiness, as we saw earlier.236 I therefore interpret spirificans in splendorem Solis as winding like a snake into the radiance of the sun. Woman is morally suspect in alchemy and seems closely akin to the serpent of paradise, and for this and other reasons Canon Ripley might easily think of the new moons approach to the sun as a spiram facere.237 It should not be forgotten that a learned alchemist of the fifteenth century would have a knowledge of symbols at least as great as our own in the present exposition (if you discount the psychology), and in some cases perhaps greater. (There are still numerous unpublished MSS. in existence to which I have had no access.)
[438] Verses 2627
Her time being come, the Child Conceivd before
Issues re-borne out of her Wombe once more;
And thereupon resumes a Kingly State,
Possessing fully Heavens Propitious Fate.
The Mothers Bed which erstwhile was a Square
Is shortly after made Orbicular;
And everywhere the Cover, likewise Round
With Lunas Lustre brightly did abound.238
[439] The second strophe confirms that the entire solution has changed into Luna, and not only is it transformed, but the vessel containing the matrix. The bed, which before was a square, now becomes round like the full moon. The cooperculum (cover) points more to a vessel than a bed, and this cover shines like the moon. As the cover is obviously the top part of the vessel it indicates the place where the moon rises, that is, where the content of the vessel is sublimated. The squaring of the circle, a favourite synonym for the magistery, has been accomplished. Anything angular is imperfect and has to be superseded by the perfect, here represented by the circle.239 The mother is both content (mother liquid) and container, the two being often identified; for instance, the vessel is equated with the aqua permanens.240 The production of the round and perfect means that the son issuing from the mother has attained perfection, i.e., the king has attained eternal youth and his body has become incorruptible. As the square represents the quaternio of mutually hostile elements, the circle indicates their reduction to unity. The One born of the Four is the Quinta Essentia. I need not go into the psychology of this process here as I have done so already in Psychology and Alchemy.
[440] Verse 28
Thus from a Square, the Bed a Globe is made,
And Purest Whiteness from the Blackest Shade;
While from the Bed the Ruddy Son doth spring
To grasp the Joyful Sceptre of a King.241
[441] Vessel and content and the mother herself, who contains the father, have become the son, who has risen up from blackest shade to the pure whiteness of Luna and attained his redness (rubedo) through the solificatio. In him all opposites are fused together.
[442] Verse 29
Hence God unlockd the Gates of Paradise,
Raisd him like Luna to th Imperiall Place,
Sublimd him to the Heavens, and that being done,
Crownd him in Glory, aequall with the Sun.242
[443] Here Ripley describes the renewal of the king and the birth of the son as the manifestation of a new redeemerwhich sounds very queer indeed in the mouth of a medieval ecclesiastic. The sublimation of Luna (uti Luna) to the imperial place is an unmistakable paraphrase on the one hand of the Assumption of the Virgin and on the other of the marriage of the bride, the Church. The unlocking of paradise means nothing less than the advent of Gods Kingdom on earth. The attri butes of sun and moon make the filius regius into the rearisen Primordial Man, who is the cosmos. It would be wrong to minimize the importance of this jubilee or to declare it is nonsense. One cannot dismiss all the alchemists as insane. It seems to me more advisable to examine the motives that led a cleric, of all people, to postulate a divine revelation outside his credo. If the lapis were nothing but gold the alchemists would have been wealthy folk; if it were the panacea they would have had a remedy for all sickness; if it were the elixir they could have lived a thousand years or more. But all this would not oblige them to make religious statements about it. If nevertheless it is praised as the second coming of the Messiah one must assume that the alchemists really did mean something of the kind. Although they regarded the art as a charisma, a gift of the Holy Ghost or of the Sapientia Dei,243 it was still mans work, and, even though a divine miracle was the decisive factor, the mysterious filius was still concocted artificially in a retort.
[444] In the face of all this one is driven to the conjecture that medieval alchemy, which evolved out of the Arabic tradition sometime in the thirteenth century, and whose most eloquent witness is the Aurora consurgens, was in the last resort a continuation of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost, which never came to very much in the Church.244 The Paraclete descends upon the single individual, who is thereby drawn into the Trinitarian process.245 And if the spirit of procreation and life indwells in man, then God can be born in hima thought that has not perished since the time of Meister Eckhart.246 The verses of Angelus Silesius are in this respect quite unequivocal:
If by Gods Holy Ghost thou art beguiled,
There will be born in thee the Eternal Child.
If its like Mary, virginal and pure,
Then God will impregnate your soul for sure.
God make me pregnant, and his Spirit shadow me,
That God may rise up in my soul and shatter me.
What good does Gabriels Ave, Mary do
Unless he give me that same greeting too?247
[445] Here Angelus expresses as a religious and psychological experience what the alchemists experienced in and through matter, and what Ripley is describing in his tortuous allegory. The nature of this experience is sufficient to explain the rapt language of certain verses in the Cantilena. He was speaking of something greater than the effects of grace in the sacraments: God himself, through the Holy Ghost, enters the work of man, in the form of inspiration as well as by direct intervention in the miraculous transformation. In view of the fact that such a miracle never did occur in the retort, despite repeated assertions that someone had actually succeeded in making gold, and that neither a panacea nor an elixir has demonstrably prolonged a human life beyond its due, and that no homunculus has ever flown out of the furnacein view of this totally negative result we must ask on what the enthusiasm and infatuation of the adepts could possibly have been based.
[446] In order to answer this difficult question one must bear in mind that the alchemists, guided by their keenness for research, were in fact on a hopeful path since the fruit that alchemy bore after centuries of endeavour was chemistry and its staggering discoveries. The emotional dynamism of alchemy is largely explained by a premonition of these then-unheard-of possibilities. However barren of useful or even enlightening results its labours were, these efforts, notwithstanding their chronic failure, seem to have had a psychic effect of a positive nature, something akin to satisfaction or even a perceptible increase in wisdom. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the alchemists did not turn away in disgust from their almost invariably futile projects. Not that such disillusionments never came to them; indeed the futility of alchemy brought it into increasing disrepute. There remain, nevertheless, a number of witnesses who make it quite clear that their hopeless fumbling, inept as it was from the chemical standpoint, presents a very different appearance when seen from a psychological angle. As I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, there occurred during the chemical procedure psychic projections which brought unconscious contents to light, often in the form of vivid visions. The medical psychologist knows today that such projections may be of the greatest therapeutic value. It was not for nothing that the old Masters identified their nigredo with melancholia and extolled the opus as the sovereign remedy for all afflictions of the soul; for they had discovered, as was only to be expected, that though their purses shrank their soul gained in statureprovided of course that they survived certain by no means inconsiderable psychic dangers. The projections of the alchemists were nothing other than unconscious contents appearing in matter, the same contents that modern psycho therapy makes conscious by the method of active imagination before they unconsciously change into projections. Making them conscious and giving form to what is unformed has a specific effect in cases where the conscious attitude offers an overcrowded unconscious no possible means of expressing itself. In these circumstances the unconscious has, as it were, no alternative but to generate projections and neurotic symptoms. The conscious milieu of the Middle Ages provided no adequate outlet for these things. The immense world of natural science lay folded in the bud, as also did that questing religious spirit which we meet in many of the alchemical treatises and which, we may well conjecture, was closely akin to the empiricism of scientific research.
[447] Perhaps the most eloquent witness to this spirit was Meister Eckhart, with his idea of the birth of the son in human individuals and the resultant affiliation of man to God.248 Part of this spirit was realized in Protestantism, another part was intuited by the mystics who succeeded Boehme, in particular by Angelus Silesius, who quite literally perished in the work. He advanced even beyond Protestantism to an attitude of mind that would have needed the support of Indian or Chinese philosophy and would therefore not have been possible until the end of the nineteenth century at the earliest. In his own age Angelus could only wither away unrecognized, and this was the tragedy that befell him. A third part took shape in the empirical sciences that developed independently of all authority, and a fourth appropriated to itself the religious philosophies of the East and transplanted them with varying degrees of skill and taste in the West.
[448] No thinking person will wish to claim that the present state of affairs represents a durable end-state. On the contrary, everyone is convinced that the tempo of change and transition has speeded up immeasurably. Everything has become fragmented and dissolved, and it is impossible to see how a higher synthesis could take place in any of the spiritual organizations that still survive without their having to be modified to an almost intolerable degree. One of the greatest obstacles to such a synthesis is sectarianism, which is always right and displays no tolerance, picking and fomenting quarrels for the holiest of reasons in order to set itself up in the place of religion and brand anyone who thinks differently as a lost sheep, if nothing worse. But have any human beings the right to totalitarian claims? This claim, certainly, is so morally dangerous that we would do better to leave its fulfilment to Almighty God rather than presume to be little gods ourselves at the expense of our fellow-men.
[449] Verse 30
Four Elements, Brave Armes, and Polishd well
God gave him, in the midst whereof did dwell
The Crownd Maid, ordaind for to be
In the Fifth Circle of the Mysterie.249
[450] To the regenerated king, now endowed with the qualities of the cosmic Anthropos, God gives the four elements as the weapons with which he shall conquer the world. It is a figure that reminds us of the Manichaean First Man, who, armed with the five elements, came down to fight against the darkness.250 The elements are evidently conceived as circles, for the Quinta Essentia, the Maid, appears in the fifth. The circular representation of the elements was well known in medieval alchemy.251 The Maid is crowned (redimita), and in her we recognize the crowned Virgin, the Queen of Heaven, who recalls the old pictures of the anima media natura or anima mundi. She is the divine life indwelling in the world, or the pneuma that moved over the waters, implanted its seed in them, and so was held captive in the body of Creation. The anima mundi is the feminine half of Mercurius.252
[451] In the Cantilena the Maid is the rejuvenated Queen Mother who now appears as the bride. Her redemption is achieved through the long sufferings of the mother, i.e., through the pains of the opus, which are compared to the Passion.253
[452] The establishment of the Maid in the fifth circle is an indication that the quintessence, portraying the disharmonious elements as a unity, is equivalent to aether, the finest and most subtle substance. She therefore participates in the world of the spirit and at the same time represents the material, sublunary world. Her position corresponds on the one hand to that of Luna and on the other to that of the Blessed Virgin.
[453] Verses 3135
With all delicious Unguent flowd she
When Purgd from Bloody Menstruosity:
On every side her Countnance Brightly shone,
She being Adornd with every Precious Stone.
A Lyon Greene did in her Lapp reside
(The which an Eagle254 fed), and from his side
The Blood gushd out: The Virgin drunck it upp,
While Mercuries Hand did thOffice of a Cupp.
The wondrous Milk she hastend from her Breast,
Bestowd it frankly on the Hungry Beast,
And with a Sponge his Furry Face she dryd
Which her own Milk had often Madefyd.
Upon her Head a Diadem she did weare,
With fiery Feet shAdvanced into the Aire;
And glittering Bravely in her Golden Robes
She took her Place amidst the Starry Globes.
The Dark Clouds being Dispersd, so sate she there,
And woven to a Network in her Haire
Were Planets, Times, and Signes, the while the King
With his Glad Eyes was her Beleagering.255
[454] Here the apotheosis of the Queen is described in a way that instantly reminds us of its prototype, the coronation of the Virgin Mary. The picture is complicated by the images of the Piet on the one hand and the mother, giving the child her breast, on the other. As is normally the case only in dreams, several images of the Mother of God have contaminated one another, as have also the allegories of Christ as child and lion, the latter representing the body of the Crucified with the blood flowing from his side. As in dreams, the symbolism with its grotesque condensations and overlappings of contradictory contents shows no regard for our aesthetic and religious feelings; it is as though trinkets made of different metals were being melted in a crucible and their contours flowed into one another. The images have lost their pristine force, their clarity and meaning. In dreams it often happensto our horror that our most cherished convictions and values are subjected to just this iconoclastic mutilation. It also happens in the psychoses, when the patients sometimes come out with the most appalling blasphemies and hideous distortions of religious ideas. We find the same thing in belles lettres I need only mention Joyces Ulysses, a book which E. R. Curtius has not unjustly described as a work of Antichrist.256 But such products spring more from the spirit of the age than from the perverse inventive gifts of the author. In our time we must expect prophets like James Joyce. A similar spirit prevailed at the time of the Renaissance, one of its most striking manifestations being the Hexastichon of Sebastian Brant.257 The illustrations in this little book are freakish beyond belief. The main figure in each is an evangelical symbol, for instance the eagle of St. John, and round it and on it are allegories and emblems of the principal events, miracles, parables, etc., in the gospel in question. These creations may be compared with the fantasies of George Ripley, for neither author had any inkling of the dubious nature of what he was doing. Yet in spite of their dreamlike quality these products seem to have been constructed with deliberate intent. Brant even numbered the main components of his pictures according to the chapters of the Gospel, and again in Ripleys paraphrase of the sacred legend each item can easily be enucleated from its context. Brant thought of his pictures as mnemotechnical exercises that would help the reader to recall the contents of the gospels, whereas in fact their diabolical freakishness stamps itself on the mind far more than the recollection, say, that John 2 coincides with the marriage at Cana. The image of the Virgin with the wounded lion in her lap has the same kind of unholy fascination, precisely because it deviates so strangely from the official image to which we are accustomed.
[455] I have compared the tendency to fantastic distortion to a melting down of images, but this gives the impression that it is an essentially destructive process. In reality and this is especially so in alchemyit is a process of assimilation between revealed truth and knowledge of nature. I will not attempt to investigate what the unconscious motives were that animated Sebastian Brant, and I need say nothing more about James Joyce here, as I have discussed this question in my essay Ulysses: A Monologue. These melting processes all express a relativization of the dominants of consciousness prevailing in a given age. For those who identify with the dominants or are absolutely dependent on them the melting process appears as a hostile, destructive attack which should be resisted with all ones powers. Others, for whom the dominants no longer mean what they purport to be, see the melting as a longed-for regeneration and enrichment of a system of ideas that has lost its vitality and freshness and is already obsolete. The melting process is therefore either something very bad or something highly desirable, according to the standpoint of the observer.258
[456] In the latter category we must distinguish two kinds of alchemists: those who believed that the revealed truth represented by the Church could derive nothing but gain if it were combined with a knowledge of the God in nature; and those for whom the projection of the Christian mystery of faith into the physical world invested nature with a mystical significance, whose mysterious light outshone the splendid incomprehensibilities of Church ceremonial. The first group hoped for a rebirth of dogma, the second for a new incarnation of it and its transformation into a natural revelation.
[457] I lay particular stress on the phenomena of assimilation in alchemy because they are, in a sense, a prelude to the modern approximation between empirical psychology and Christian dogmaan approximation which Nietzsche clearly foresaw. Psychology, as a science, observes religious ideas from the standpoint of their psychic phenomenology without intruding on their theological content. It puts the dogmatic images into the category of psychic contents, because this constitutes its field of research. It is compelled to do so by the nature of the psyche itself; it does not, like alchemy, try to explain psychic processes in theological terms, but rather to illuminate the darkness of religious images by relating them to similar images in the psyche. The result is a kind of amalgamation of ideas ofso it would seem the most varied provenience, and this sometimes leads to parallels and comparisons which to an uncritical mind unacquainted with the epistemological method may seem like a devaluation or a false interpretation. If this were to be construed as an objection to psychology one could easily say the same thing about the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers, which are often very risky indeed, or about the dubious nature of textual criticism. The psychologist has to investigate religious symbols because his empirical material, of which the theologian usually knows nothing, compels him to do so. Presumably no one would wish to hand over the chemistry of albuminous bodies to some other department of science on the ground that they are organic and that the investigation of life is a matter for the biologist. A rapprochement between empirical science and religious experience would in my opinion be fruitful for both. Harm can result only if one side or the other remains unconscious of the limitations of its claim to validity. Alchemy, certainly, cannot be defended against the charge of unconsciousness. It is and remains a puzzle whether Ripley ever reflected on his theological enormities and what he thought about them. From a scientific point of view, his mentality resembles that of a dream-state.
[458] The coronation of the Virgin and the heavenly marriage bring us to the final strophes of the Cantilena.
[459] Verses 363
Thus He of all Triumphant Kings is Chiefe,
Of Bodies sicke the only Grand Reliefe:
Such a Reformist of Defects, that hee
Is worshippd both by King and Commonalty.
To Princes, Priests he yields an Ornament,
The Sicke and Needy Sort he doth content:
What man is there this Potion will not bless,
As banishes all thought of Neediness?259
[460] This is the apotheosis of the filius regius, as we find it in numerous treatises. Thus the Tractatus aureus260 says: The king comes forth from the fire and rejoices in the marriage. The son is become a warrior of the fire and surpasses the tinctures, for he himself is the treasure and himself is attired in the philosophic matter. Come hither, ye sons of wisdom, let us be glad and rejoice, for the dominion of death is over, and the son reigns; he is clothed with the red garment, and the purple is put on. The reborn king is the wonder of the world, an exceeding pure spirit;261 he is, the Aquarium sapientum assures us, the most elect, the most subtile, the purest, and noblest of all the heavenly spirits, to whom all the Test yield obedience as to their King, who bestows on men all health and prosperity, heals all sickness, gives to the God-fearing temporal honour and long life, but to the wicked who abused him, eternal punishment. . . . In sum, they have designated him the chief of all things under heaven, and the marvellous end and epilogue of all philosophic works. Hence some devout philosophers of old have affirmed that he was divinely revealed to Adam, the first man, and thereafter was awaited with peculiar longing by all the holy Patriarchs.262 The Almighty, remarks the Introitus, has made him known by a most notable sign, whose birth263 is declared throughout the East on the horizon of his hemisphere. The wise Magi saw it at the beginning of the era, and were astonished, and straightway they knew that the most serene King was born in the world. Do you, when you see his star, follow it to the cradle, and there you shall behold the fair infant. Cast aside your defilements, honour the royal child, open your treasure, offer a gift of gold; and after death he will give you flesh and blood, the supreme Medicine in the three monarchies of the earth.264 The clothing of the elixir with the kingly garment is also found in the Turba.265 The Consilium coniugii describes the king as descending from heaven.266 Mylius says of King Sol that Phoebus with shining hair of gold sits in the midst, like a king and emperor of the world, grasping the sceptre and the helm. In him are all the powers of heaven.267 In another place he cites the following quotation: And at last the king will go forth crowned with his diadem, radiant as the sun, bright as the carbuncle. 268 Khunrath speaks of the wondrous natural triune Son of the Great World, whom the sages name their Son and crowned King, artificially hatched from the egg of the world.269 Elsewhere he says of the filius Mundi Maioris:
The Son of the great World [Macrocosm] who is Theocosmos, i.e., a divine power and world (but whom even today, unfortunately, many who teach nature in a pagan spirit and many builders of medical science reject in the high university schools), is the exemplar of the stone which is Theanthropos, i.e., God and man (whom, as Scripture tells us, the builders of the Church have also rejected); and from the same, in and from the Great World Book of Nature, [there issues] a continuous and everlasting doctrine for the wise and their children: indeed, it is a splendid living likeness of our Saviour Jesus Christ, in and from the Great World which by nature is very similar to him (as to miraculous conception, birth, inexpressible powers, virtues, and effects); so God our Lord, besides his Sons Biblical histories, has also created a specific image and natural representation for us in the Book of Nature.270
[461] These few examples, together with those already quoted in Psychology and Alchemy, may give the reader some idea of the way in which the alchemists conceived the triumphant king.
[462] Verse 38
Wherefore, O God, graunt us a Peece of This,271
That through the Encrease 272 of its own Species
The Art may be Renewd, and Mortal Men
Enjoy for aye its Thrice-Sweet Fruits. AMEN.273
[463] Here ends the Cantilena, one of the most perfect parables of the renewal of the king. It does not, of course, compare with the much more elaborate development of the myth in Christian Rosencreutz. (His Chymical Wedding is so rich in content that I could touch on it only lightly here.) The latter part of Faust II likewise contains the same motif of the transformation of the old man into a boy, together with all the necessary indicia of the heavenly marriage. This theme, too, as in alchemy, runs through the whole of Faust and repeats itself on three different levels (Gretchen, Helen, Queen of Heaven), just as the kings renewal takes a form that was destined to fail three times before Fausts death (the Boy Charioteer, the Homunculus, and Euphorion).
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