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object:4.06 - THE KING AS ANTHROPOS
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter



6. THE KING AS ANTHROPOS
[484] I have drawn attention earlier333 to the passage in Hippolytus where the Gnostic interpretation of Psalm 24 : 710 is discussed. The rhetorical question of the psalm, Who is this king of glory? is answered in Hippolytus thus: A worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people.334 He is the king of glory, mighty in battle. This passage, says Hippolytus, refers to Adam and his ascension and rebirth, that he may be born spiritual, not fleshly.335 The worm therefore signifies the second Adam, Christ. Epiphanius also mentions the worm as an allegory of Christ,336 though without substantiating it further.
[485] This train of thought is consciously or unconsciously continued in alchemy. The Aquarium sapientum says:337
And firstly it is here to be noted, that the Sages have called this decomposed product, on account of its blackness (Cant. 1), the ravens head. In the same way Christ (Isa. 53) had no form nor comeliness, was the vilest of all men, full of griefs and sicknesses, and so despised that men even hid their faces from him, and he was esteemed as nothing. Yea, in the 22nd Psalm [Vulgate] he complains of this, that he is a worm and no man, the laughing-stock and contempt of the people; indeed, it is not unfitly compared with Christ when the putrefied body of the Sun lies dead, inactive, like ashes, in the bottom of the phial, until, as a result of greater heat, its soul by degrees and little by little descends to it again, and once more infuses, moistens, and saturates the decaying and all but dead body, and preserves it from total destruction. So also did it happen to Christ himself, when at the Mount of Olives, and on the cross, he was roasted338 by the fire of the divine wrath339 (Matt. 26, 27), and complained that he was utterly deserted by his heavenly Father, yet none the less was always (as is wont to happen also to an earthly body through assiduous care and nourishing) comforted and streng thened (Matt. 4, Luke 22) and, so to speak, imbued, nourished, and supported with divine nectar; yea, when at last, in his most sacred passion, and at the hour of death, his strength and his very spirit were completely withdrawn from him, and he went down to the lowest and deepest parts below the earth (Acts 1, Eph. 1, I Peter 3), yet even there he was preserved, refreshed, and by the power of the eternal Godhead raised up again, quickened, and glorified (Rom. 14), when finally his spirit, with its body dead in the sepulchre, obtained a perfect and indissoluble union, through his most joyful resurrection and victorious ascension into heaven, as Lord and Christ (Matt. 28) and was exalted (Mark 16) to the right hand of his Father; with whom through the power and virtue of the Holy Spirit as true God and man he reigns and rules over all things in equal power and glory (Ps. 8), and by his most powerful word preserveth and upholdeth all things (Hebr. 1) and maketh all things one (Acts 17). And this wondrous Union and divine Exaltation angels and men, in heaven and on earth and under the earth (Philipp. 2, 1 Peter 1) can scarce comprehend, far less meditate upon, without fear and terror; and his virtue, power, and roseate Tincture340 is able even now to change, and tint, and yet more, perfectly to cure and heal us sinful men in body and soul: of which things we shall have more to say below . . . Thus, then, we have briefly and simply considered the unique heavenly foundation and corner-stone Jesus Christ, that is to say, how he is compared and united with the earthly philosophical stone of the Sages, whose material and preparation, as we have heard, is an outstanding type and lifelike image of the incarnation of Christ.
[486] The various fatalities which the old king has to sufferimmersion in the bath or in the sea, dissolution and decomposition, extinction of his light in the darkness, incineration in the fire, and renewal out of the chaosare derived by the alchemists from the dissolution of the matter in acids, from the roasting of ores, the expulsion of sulphur or mercury, the reduction of metallic oxides, and so forth, as if these chemical procedures yielded a picture which, with a little straining of the imagination, could be compared with Christs sufferings and his final triumph. The fact that they projected the Passion as an unconscious premise into the chemical transformations was not at all clear to the alchemists.341 Naturally, under these circumstances, they were able to prove with complete success that their alleged observations coincided with the Passion. Only, it was not a question of their making observations on matter, but of introspection. Since, however, genuine projections are never voluntarily made but always appear as preconscious factors, there must have been something in the unconscious of the alchemists which lent itself to projection (i.e., had a tendency to become conscious because of its energy charge), and on the other hand found in the alchemical operations a hook that attracted it, so that it could express itself in some way. Projection is always an indirect process of becoming consciousindirect because of the check exercised by the conscious mind, by the pressure of traditional or conventional ideas which take the place of real experience and prevent it from happening. One feels that one possesses a valid truth concerning the unknown, and this makes any real knowledge of it impossible. The unconscious factor must necessarily have been something that was incompatible with the conscious attitude. What it was in reality we learn from the statements of the alchemists: a myth that had much in common not only with many mythologems of pagan origin but above all with Christian dogma. If it were identical with the dogma and appeared in projection it would show that the alchemists had a thoroughly anti-Christian attitude (which was not the case). Lacking such an attitude a projection of this kind would be psychologically impossible. But if the unconscious complex represented a figure that deviated from the dogma in certain essential features, then its projection becomes possible, for it would then be in opposition to the dogma approved by consciousness and would have arisen by way of compensation.
[487] In this and my other writings I have constantly stressed the peculiar nature of the alchemists statements and need not recapitulate what I have said. I should only like to point out that the central idea of the filius philosophorum is based on a conception of the Anthropos in which the Man or the Son of Man does not coincide with the Christian, historical redeemer figure. The alchemical Anthropos comes closer to the Basilidian conception of him as reported by Hippolytus: For he [the Redeemer] . . . is in their view the inner spiritual man in the psychic . . . which is the Sonship that left the soul here not to die but to remain according to its nature, just as the first Sonship left behind on high the Holy Ghost, who is conterminous with him, in the appropriate place, clothing himself in his own soul. 342
[488] The inner spiritual man bears a resemblance to Christ that is the unconscious premise for the statements about the filius regius.343 This idea contradicts the dogmatic view and therefore has every reason to be repressed and projected. At the same time it is the logical consequence of a spiritual situation in which the historical figure had long since disappeared from consciousness, while his spiritual presence was stressed all the more strongly in the form of the inner Christ or God who is born in the soul of man. The outward fact of the dogmatic Christ was answered from within by that inner primordial image which had produced a Purusha or a Gayomart long before the Christian era and made the assimilation of the Christian revelation possible. The ultimate fate of every dogma is that it gradually becomes soulless. Life wants to create new forms, and therefore, when a dogma loses its vitality, it must perforce activate the archetype that has always helped man to express the mystery of the soul. Note that I do not go so far as to say that the archetype actually produces the divine figure. If the psychologist were to assert that, he would have to possess a sure knowledge of the motives that underlie all historical development and be in a position to demonstrate this knowledge. But there is no question of that. I maintain only that the psychic archetype makes it possible for the divine figure to take form and become accessible to understanding. But the supremely important motive power which is needed for this, and which sets the archetypal possibilities in motion at a given historical moment, cannot be explained in terms of the archetype itself. Only experience can establish which archetype has become operative, but one can never predict that it must enter into manifestation. Who, for instance, could logically have foretold that the Jewish prophet Jesus would give the decisive answer to the spiritual situation in the age of Hellenistic syncretism, or that the slumbering image of the Anthropos would waken to world dominion?
[489] The limitations of human knowledge which leave so many incomprehensible and wonderful things unexplained do not, however, exempt us from the task of trying to understand the revelations of the spirit that are embodied in dogma, otherwise there is a danger that the treasures of supreme knowledge which lie hidden in it will evaporate into nothing and become a bloodless phantom, an easy prey for all shallow rationalists. It would be a great step forward, in my opinion, if at least it were recognized how far the truth of dogma is rooted in the human psyche, which is not the work of human hands.
[490] The inner spiritual man of the Gnostics is the Anthropos, the man created in the image of the Nous, the

(true man).344 He corresponds to the chn-yn (true man) of Chinese alchemy. The chn-yn is the product of the opus. On the one hand he is the adept who is transformed by the work,345 on the other he is the homunculus or filius of Western alchemy, who also derives from the true man.346 The treatise of Wei Po-yang says:
The ear, the eye, and the mouth constitute the three precious things. They should be closed, to stop communication. The True Man living in a deep abyss, floats about the centre of the round vessel . . . The mind is relegated to the realm of Nonexistence so as to acquire an enduring state of thoughtlessness. When the mind is integral, it will not go astray. In its sleep, it will be in Gods embrace, but during its waking hours it is anxious about the continuation or termination of its existence.347
This true man is Dorns vir unus and at the same time the lapis Philosophorum.348
[491] The true man expresses the Anthropos in the individual human being. Compared with the revelation of the Son of Man in Christ this seems like a retrograde step, for the historical uniqueness of the Incarnation was the great advance which gathered the scattered sheep about one shepherd. The Man in the individual would mean, it is feared, a scattering of the flock. This would indeed be a retrograde step, but it cannot be blamed on the true man; its cause is rather all those bad human qualities which have always threatened and hindered the work of civilization. (Often, indeed, the sheep and the shepherd are just about equally inept.) The true man has nothing to do with this. Above all he will destroy no valuable cultural form since he himself is the highest form of culture. Neither in the East nor in the West does he play the game of shepherd and sheep, because he has enough to do to be a shepherd to himself.
[492] If the adept experiences his own self, the true man, in his work, then, as the passage from the Aquarium sapientum shows, he encounters the analogy of the true manChristin new and direct form, and he recognizes in the transformation in which he himself is involved a similarity to the Passion. It is not an imitation of Christ but its exact opposite: an assimilation of the Christ-image to his own self, which is the true man.349 It is no longer an effort, an intentional straining after imitation, but rather an involuntary experience of the reality represented by the sacred legend. This reality comes upon him in his work, just as the stigmata come to the saints without being consciously sought. They appear spontaneously. The Passion happens to the adept, not in its classic formotherwise he would be consciously performing spiritual exercises but in the form expressed by the alchemical myth. It is the arcane substance that suffers those physical and moral tortures; it is the king who dies or is killed, is dead and buried and on the third day rises again. And it is not the adept who suffers all this, rather it suffers in him, it is tortured, it passes through death and rises again. All this happens not to the alchemist himself but to the true man, who he feels is near him and in him and at the same time in the retort. The passion that vibrates in our text and in the Aurora is genuine, but would be totally incomprehensible if the lapis were nothing but a chemical substance. Nor does it originate in contemplation of Christs Passion; it is the real experience of a man who has got involved in the compensatory contents of the unconscious by investigating the unknown, seriously and to the point of self-sacrifice. He could not but see the likeness of his projected contents to the dogmatic images, and he might have been tempted to assume that his ideas were nothing else than the familiar religious conceptions, which he was using in order to explain the chemical procedure. But the texts show clearly that, on the contrary, a real experience of the opus had an increasing tendency to assimilate the dogma or to amplify itself with it. That is why the text says that Christ was compared and united with the stone. The alchemical Anthropos showed itself to be independent of any dogma.350
[493] The alchemist experienced the Anthropos in a form that was imbued with new vitality, freshness and immediacy, and this is reflected in the enthusiastic tone of the texts. It is therefore understandable that every single detail of the primordial drama would be realized in quite a new sense. The nigredo not only brought decay, suffering, death, and the torments of hell visibly before the eyes of the alchemist, it also cast the shadow of its melancholy over his own solitary soul.351 In the blackness of a despair which was not his own, and of which he was merely the witness, he experienced how it turned into the worm and the poisonous dragon.352 From inner necessity the dragon destroyed itself (natura naturam vincit) and changed into the lion,353 and the adept, drawn involuntarily into the drama, then felt the need to cut off its paws354 (unless there were two lions who devoured one another). The dragon ate its own wings as the eagle did its feathers.355 These grotesque images reflect the conflict of opposites into which the researchers curiosity had led him. His work began with a katabasis, a journey to the underworld as Dante also experienced it,356 with the difference that the adepts soul was not only impressed by it but radically altered. Faust I is an example of this: the transformation of an earnest scholar, through his pact with the devil, into a worldly cavalier and crooked careerist. In the case of the fanciful Christian Rosencreutz the descent to Venus led only to his being slightly wounded in the hand by Cupids arrow. The texts, however, hint at more serious dangers. Olympiodorus says:357 Without great pains this work is not perfected; there will be struggles, violence, and war. And all the while the demon Ophiuchos358 instils negligence (

), impeding our intentions; everywhere he creeps about, both within and without, causing oversights, anxiety, and unexpected accidents, or else keeping us from the work by harassments (

) and injuries. The philosopher Petasios (Petesis), quoted by Olympiodorus, expresses himself even more strongly: So bedevilled (

) and shameless (

) is the lead359 that all who wish to investigate it fall into madness through ignorance. That this is not just empty talk is shown by other texts, which often emphasize how much the psyche of the laborant was involved in the work. Thus Dorn, commenting on the quotation from Hermes, All obscurity shall yield before thee, says:
For he saith, All obscurity shall yield before thee; he saith not, before the metals. By obscurity is to be understood naught else but the darkness of diseases and sickness of body and mind . . . The authors intention is, in sum, to teach them that are adepts in spagyric medicine how with a very small dose, such as is suggested by a grain of mustard seed,360 however it be taken, to cure all diseases indifferently, by reason of the simplicity of union361 effective in the medicine, so that no variety of the multitude of maladies may resist it. But manifold as are the obscurities of the weaknesses of the mind, as insanity [vesania], mania, frenzy [furia], stupidity [stoliditas], and others like, by which the spirit [animus] is darkened and impaired, yet by this single spagyric medicine they are perfectly cured. And it not only restores health to the spirit [animo], but also sharpens the ingenuity and mind of men, that all things may be miraculously easy362 for them in understanding [intellectu] and perception [perceptu], and nothing be hid from them which is in the upper or lower world.363
The sentence from the Tabula smaragdina, He will conquer every subtle thing, Dorn interprets as follows: the subtle thing is Mercurius, or the spiritual obscurities that occupy the mind; in other words it is spirit. Hence the darkness is a demon that possesses the spirit (as in Olympiodorus) and can be cast out by the work (it expels every subtle thing).364 Sickness is an imprinting of evil (impressio mali) and is healed through the repression of evil by the action of the true and universal centre upon the body. This centre is the unarius or the One, in which the unitary man (unicus homo) is rooted. If, therefore, he is to recover from his bodily and spiritual sicknesses, let him study to know and to understand exactly the centre, and apply himself wholly thereto, and the centre will be freed from all imperfections and diseases,365 that it may be restored to its state of original monarchy.366
[494] These passages from Dorn refer less to the dangers of the work than to the healing through the outcome of the work. But the means of healing come from Mercurius, that spirit367 of whom the philosophers said: Take the old black spirit, and destroy therewith the bodies until they are changed.367a The destruction of the bodies is depicted as a battle, as in Sermo 42 of the Turba: Excite war between the copper and the quicksilver, since they strive to perish and first become corrupt. Excite the battle between them and destroy the body of the copper, till it becomes powder.368 This battle is the separatio, divisio, putrefactio, mortificatio, and solntio, which all represent the original chaotic state of conflict between the four hostile elements. Dorn describes this vicious, warlike quaternity allegorically as the four-horned serpent, which the devil, after his fall from heaven, sought to infix in the mind of man.369 Dorn puts the motif of war on a moral plane370 and thereby approximates it to the modern concept of psychic dissociation, which, as we know, lies at the root of the psychogenic psychoses and neuroses. In the furnace of the cross and in the fire, says the Aquarium sapientum, man, like the earthly gold, attains to the true black Ravens Head; that is, he is utterly disfigured and is held in derision by the world,371 and this not only for forty days and nights, or years,372 but often for the whole duration of his life; so much so that he experiences more heartache in his life than comfort and joy, and more sadness than pleasure . . . Through this spiritual death his soul is entirely freed.373 Evidently the nigredo brought about a deformation and a psychic suffering which the author compared to the plight of the unfortunate Job. Jobs unmerited misfortune, visited on him by God, is the suffering of Gods servant and a prefiguration of Christs Passion. One can see from this how the figure of the Son of Man gradually lodged itself in the ordinary man who had taken the work upon his own shoulders.
[495] In the second century of our era Wei Po-yang, quite uninfluenced by Western alchemy and unhampered by the preconceptions of our Christian psychology, gave a drastic account of the sufferings caused by a technical blunder during the opus:
Disaster will come to the black mass: gases from food consumed will make noises inside the intestines and stomach. The right essence will be exhaled and the evil one inhaled. Days and nights will be passed without sleep, moon after moon. The body will then be tired out, giving rise to an appearance of insanity. The hundred pulses will stir and boil so violently as to drive away peace of mind and body . . . Ghostly things will make their appearance, at which he will marvel even in his sleep. He is then led to rejoice, thinking that he is assured of longevity. But all of a sudden he is seized by an untimely death.374
So we can understand why Khunrath writes:
But chiefly pray to God . . . for the good gift of discretion, the good spirit of discriminating good from evil, who may lead thee into true knowledge and understanding of the Light of Nature, into her Great Book. So wilt thou extricate thyself from the labyrinth of very very many deceitful Papers, and even books of Parchment, and arrive right well at the ground of truth.375
[496] The depressions of the adept are also described in the Tractatus aureus:
My son, this is the hidden stone of many colours, which is born in one colour; know this and conceal it. By this, the Almighty favouring, the greatest diseases are escaped, and every sorrow,376 distress, evil, and hurtful thing is made to depart. It leads from darkness to light, from this desert wilderness to a secure habitation, and from poverty and straits into freedom.377
[497] These testimonies suffice to show that the adept was not only included in his work but also knew it.



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