4.07 - THE RELATION OF THE KING-SYMBOL TO CONSCIOUSNESS

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object:4.07 - THE RELATION OF THE KING-SYMBOL TO CONSCIOUSNESS
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter

7. THE RELATION OF THE KING-SYMBOL TO CONSCIOUSNESS
[498] The apotheosis of the king, the renewed rising of the sun, means, on our hypothesis, that a new dominant of consciousness has been produced and that the psychic potential is reversed. Consciousness is no longer under the dominion of the unconscious, in which state the dominant is hidden in the darkness, but has now glimpsed and recognized a supreme goal. The apotheosis of the king depicts this change, and the resultant feeling of renewal is expressed nowhere more plainly than in some of our loveliest chorals. Ripleys Cantilena includes mother Luna, the maternal aspect of night, in this transfiguration, which reminds us of the apotheosis at the end of Faust II. It is as though the moon had risen in the night with as much splendour as the sun. And just as the Queen flows with all delicious unguent so, in the Acts of Thomas,378 a sweet smell pours from the heavenly goddess. She is not only the mother but the Kore, daughter of the light. She is the Gnostic Sophia,379 who corresponds to the alchemical mother. If our interpretation of King Sol is correct,380 then the apotheosis must also have made mother Luna visible, that is to say made the unconscious conscious. What at first sight seems a contradiction in terms resolves itself, on closer examination, as the coming into consciousness of an essential content of the unconscious. It is primarily the feminine element in man, the anima,381 that becomes visible; secondly the moonlight, which enables us to see in the dark, and represents an illumination of the unconscious, or its permeability to light; and thirdly, the moon stands for the rotundum, about which I have written in Psychology and Alchemy.382 In the sublunary world her roundness (plenilunium, circulus lunaris)383 corresponds, as the mirror-image of the sun, to the Anthropos, the psychological self, or psychic totality.
[499] The moon is the connecting-link between the concept of the Virgin Mother and that of the child, who is round, whole, and perfect. The new birth from the moon can therefore be expressed as much by the Christians joy at Eastertide as by the mystic dawn, the aurora consurgens; for the risen king is the soul, which is infused into the dead stone.384 The idea of roundness is also found in the crown, symbol of kingship. Corona regis is cited as synonymous with ashes, body, sea, salt, mother and Blessed Virgin,385 and is thus identified with the feminine element.
[500] This peculiar relationship between rotundity and the mother is explained by the fact that the mother, the unconscious, is the place where the symbol of wholeness appears. The fact that the rotundum is, as it were, contained in the anima and is prefigured by her lends her that extraordinary fascination which characterizes the Eternal Feminine in the good as well as the bad sense. At a certain level, therefore, woman appears as the true carrier of the longed-for wholeness and redemption.
[501] The starting-point of our explanation is that the king is essentially synonymous with the sun and that the sun represents the daylight of the psyche, consciousness, which as the faithful companion of the suns journey rises daily from the ocean of sleep and dream, and sinks into it again at evening. Just as in the round-dance of the planets, and in the star-strewn spaces of the sky, the sun journeys along as a solitary figure, like any other one of the planetary archons, so consciousness, which refers everything to its own ego as the centre of the universe, is only one among the archetypes of the unconscious, comparable to the King Helios of post-classical syncretism, whom we meet in Julian the Apostate, for instance. This is what the complex of consciousness would look like if it could be viewed from one of the other planets, as we view the sun from the earth. The subjective ego-personality, i.e., consciousness and its contents, is indeed seen in its various aspects by an unconscious observer, or rather by an observer placed in the outer space of the unconscious. That this is so is proved by dreams, in which the conscious personality, the ego of the dreamer, is seen from a standpoint that is toto coelo different from that of the conscious mind. Such a phenomenon could not occur at all unless there were in the unconscious other standpoints opposing or competing with ego-consciousness. These relationships are aptly expressed by the planet simile. The king represents ego-consciousness, the subject of all subjects, as an object. His fate in mythology portrays the rising and setting of this most glorious and most divine of all the phenomena of creation, without which the world would not exist as an object. For everything that is only is because it is directly or indirectly known, and moreover this known-ness is sometimes represented in a way which the subject himself does not know, just as if he were being observed from another planet, now with benevolent and now with sardonic gaze.
[502] This far from simple situation derives partly from the fact that the ego has the paradoxical quality of being both the subject and the object of its own knowledge, and partly from the fact that the psyche is not a unity but a constellation consisting of other luminaries besides the sun. The ego-complex is not the only complex in the psyche.386 The possibility that unconscious complexes possess a certain luminosity, a kind of consciousness, cannot be dismissed out of hand, for they can easily give rise to something in the nature of secondary personalities, as psychopathological experience shows. But if this is possible, then an observation of the ego-complex from another standpoint somewhere in the same psyche is equally possible. As I have said, the critical portrayal of the ego-complex in dreams and in abnormal psychic states seems to be due to this.
[503] The conscious mind often knows little or nothing about its own transformation, and does not want to know anything. The more autocratic it is and the more convinced of the eternal validity of its truths, the more it identifies with them. Thus the kingship of Sol, which is a natural phenomenon, passes to the human king who personifies the prevailing dominant idea and must therefore share its fate. In the phenomenal world the Heraclitan law of everlasting change,

, prevails; and it seems that all the true things must change and that only that which changes remains true.
[504] Pitilessly it is seen from another planet that the king is growing old, even before he sees it himself: ruling ideas, the dominants, change, and the change, undetected by consciousness, is mirrored only in dreams. King Sol, as the archetype of consciousness, voyages through the world of the unconscious, one of its multitudinous figures which may one day be capable of consciousness too. These lesser lights are, on the old view, identical with the planetary correspondences in the psyche which were postulated by astrology. When, therefore, an alchemist conjured up the spirit of Saturn as his familiar, this was an attempt to bring to consciousness a standpoint outside the ego, involving a relativization of the ego and its contents. The intervention of the planetary spirit was besought as an aid. When the king grows old and needs renewing, a kind of planetary bath is instituteda bath into which all the planets pour their influences.387 This expresses the idea that the dominant, grown feeble with age, needs the support and influence of those subsidiary lights to fortify and renew it. It is, as it were, dissolved in the substance of the other planetary archetypes and then put together again. Through this process of melting and recasting there is formed a new amalgam of a more comprehensive nature, which has taken into itself the influences of the other planets or metals.388
[505] In this alchemical picture we can easily recognize the projection of the transformation process: the aging of a psychic dominant is apparent from the fact that it expresses the psychic totality in ever-diminishing degree. One can also say that the psyche no longer feels wholly contained in the dominant, whereupon the dominant loses its fascination and no longer grips the psyche so completely as before. On the other hand its content and meaning are no longer properly understood, or what is understood fails to touch the heart. A sentiment dincompltude of this kind produces a compensatory reaction which attracts other regions of the psyche and their contents, so as to fill up the gap. As a rule this is an unconscious process that always sets in when the attitude and orientation of the conscious mind have proved inadequate. I stress this point because the conscious mind is a bad judge of its own situation and often persists in the illusion that its attitude is just the right one and is only prevented from working because of some external annoyance. If the dreams were observed it would soon become clear why the conscious assumptions have become unworkable. And if, finally, neurotic symptoms appear, then the attitude of consciousness, its ruling idea, is contradicted, and in the unconscious there is a stirring up of those archetypes that were the most suppressed by the conscious attitude. The therapist then has no other course than to confront the ego with its adversary and thus initiate the melting and recasting process. The confrontation is expressed, in the alchemical myth of the king, as the collision of the masculine, spiritual father-world ruled over by King Sol with the feminine, chthonic mother-world symbolized by the aqua permanens or by the chaos.
[506] The illegitimate aspect of this relationship appears as incest, veiled, in the Cantilena, by adoptionwhich nevertheless results in the pregnancy of the mother. As I have explained elsewhere, incest expresses the union of elements that are akin or of the same nature; that is to say the adversary of Sol is his own feminine chthonic aspect which he has forgotten. Sols reflected light is the feminine Luna, who dissolves the king in her moistness. It is as though Sol had to descend into the watery deep of the sublunary world in order to unite the powers of Above and Below (as in Fausts journey to the Mothers). The unworkable conscious dominant disappears in menacing fashion among the contents rising up from the unconscious, thus bringing about a darkening of the light. The warring elements of primeval chaos are unleashed, as though they had never been subjugated. The battle is fought out between the dominant and the contents of the unconscious so violently that reason would like to clamp down on unreason. But these attempts fail, and go on failing until the ego acknowledges its impotence and lets the furious battle of psychic powers go its own way. If the ego does not interfere with its irritating rationality, the opposites, just because they are in conflict, will gradually draw together, and what looked like death and destruction will settle down into a latent state of concord, suitably expressed by the symbol of pregnancy.389 In consequence the king, the previous dominant of consciousness, is transformed into a real and workable whole, whereas before he had only pretended to wholeness.
[507] The Cantilena shows us what that dominant was which is subjected to transformation not only in Ripley but in many other alchemists: it was the Christian view of the world in the Middle Ages. This problem is of such dimensions that one cannot expect a medieval man to have been even remotely conscious of it. It was bound to work itself out in projection, unconsciously. For this reason, too, it can hardly be grasped even todaywhich is why the psychological interpretation of the One, the filius regius, meets with the greatest difficulties. From the hymnlike manner in which the alchemists praised their son it is quite evident that they meant by this symbol either Christ himself or something that corresponded to him. Naturally they were not concerned with the historical personality of Jesus, which at that time was completely covered up by the dogmatic figure of the second Person of the Trinity. The latter symbol had slowly crystallized out in the course of the centuries, though it was clearly prefigured in the Logos of St. John. Nor was the conception of God as senex and puer peculiar to the alchemists, for many clerics who were not alchemists took it as a transformation of the wrathful and vindictive Yahweh of the Old Testament into the God of Love of the New. Thus the archetype of the kings renewal manifested itself not only among the philosophers but also in ecclesiastical circles.390
[508] There can be a psychological explanation of the filius regius only when this image has sloughed off its projected form and become a purely psychic experience. The Christ-lapis parallel shows clearly enough that the filius regius was more a psychic event than a physical one, since as a physical event it can demonstrably never occur and as a religious experience it is beyond question. There are many passages in the texts that can be interpretedstrange as this may soundas an experience of Christ in matter. Others, again, lay so much emphasis on the lapis that one cannot but see in it a renewal and completion of the dogmatic image. An unequivocal substitution of the filius regius for Christ does not, to my knowledge, occur in the literature, for which reason one must call alchemy Christian even though heretical. The Christ-lapis remains an ambiguous figure.
[509] This is of considerable importance as regards a psychological interpretation of the filius regius. In any such view the place of matter, with its magical fascination, is taken by the unconscious, which was projected into it. For our modern consciousness the dogmatic image of Christ changed, under the influence of evangelical Protestantism, into the personal Jesus, who in liberal rationalism, which abhorred all mysticism, gradually faded into a mere ethical prototype. The disappearance of the feminine element, namely the cult of the Mother of God, in Protestantism was all that was needed for the spirituality of the dogmatic image to detach itself from the earthly man and gradually sink into the unconscious. When such great and significant images fall into oblivion they do not disappear from the human sphere, nor do they lose their psychic power. Anyone in the Middle Ages who was familiar with the mysticism of alchemy remained in contact with the living dogma, even if he was a Protestant. This is probably the reason why alchemy reached its heyday at the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth century: for the Protestant it was the only way of still being Catholic. In the opus alchymicum he still had a completely valid transformation rite and a concrete mystery. But alchemy did not flourish only in Protestant countries; in Catholic France it was still widely practised during the eighteenth century, as numerous manuscripts and published works testify, such as those of Dom Pernety (17161800?), Lenglet du Fresnoy (16741752?), and the great compilation of Manget, published 1702. This is not surprising, as in France at that time the modern anti-Christian schism was brewing which was to culminate in the Revolution that relatively harmless prelude to the horrors of today. The decline of alchemy during the Enlightenment meant for many Europeans a descent of all dogmatic imageswhich till then had been directly present in the ostensible secrets of chemical matterto the underworld.
[510] Just as the decay of the conscious dominant is followed by an irruption of chaos in the individual,391 so also in the case of the masses (Peasant Wars, Anabaptists, French Revolution, etc.), and the furious conflict of elements in the individual psyche is reflected in the unleashing of primeval blood-thirstiness and lust for murder on a collective scale. This is the sickness so vividly described in the Cantilena. The loss of the eternal images is in truth no light matter for the man of discernment. But since there are infinitely many more men of no discernment, nobody, apparently, notices that the truth expressed by the dogma has vanished in a cloud of fog, and nobody seems to miss anything. The discerning person knows and feels that his psyche is disquieted by the loss of something that was the life-blood of his ancestors. The undiscerning

miss nothing, and only discover afterwards in the papers (much too late) the alarming symptoms that have now become real in the outside world because they were not perceived before inside, in oneself, just as the presence of the eternal images was not noticed. If they had been, a threnody for the lost god would have arisen, as once before in antiquity at the death of Great Pan.392 Instead, all well-meaning people assure us that one has only to believe he is still therewhich merely adds stupidity to unconsciousness. Once the symptoms are really outside in some form of sociopolitical insanity, it is impossible to convince anybody that the conflict is in the psyche of every individual, since he is now quite sure where his enemy is. Then, the conflict which remains an intrapsychic phenomenon in the mind of the discerning person, takes place on the plane of projection in the form of political tension and murderous violence. To produce such consequences the individual must have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the insignificance and worthlessness of his psyche and of psychology in general. One must preach at him from all the pulpits of authority that salvation always comes from outside and that the meaning of his existence lies in the community. He can then be led docilely to the place where of his own natural accord he would rather go anyway: to the land of childhood, where one makes claims exclusively on others, and where, if wrong is done, it is always somebody else who has done it. When he no longer knows by what his soul is sustained, the potential of the unconscious is increased and takes the lead. Desirousness overpowers him, and illusory goals set up in the place of the eternal images excite his greed. The beast of prey seizes hold of him and soon makes him forget that he is a human being. His animal affects hamper any reflection that might stand in the way of his infantile wish-fulfilments, filling him instead with a feeling of a new-won right to existence and intoxicating him with the lust for booty and blood.
[511] Only the living presence of the eternal images can lend the human psyche a dignity which makes it morally possible for a man to stand by his own soul, and be convinced that it is worth his while to persevere with it. Only then will he realize that the conflict is in him, that the discord and tribulation are his riches, which should not be squandered by attacking others; and that, if fate should exact a debt from him in the form of guilt, it is a debt to himself. Then he will recognize the worth of his psyche, for nobody can owe a debt to a mere nothing. But when he loses his own values he becomes a hungry robber, the wolf, lion, and other ravening beasts which for the alchemists symbolized the appetites that break loose when the black waters of chaosi.e., the unconsciousness of projectionhave swallowed up the king.393
[512] It is a subtle feature of the Cantilena that the pregnancy cravings of the mother are stilled with peacocks flesh and lions blood, i.e., with her own flesh and blood.394 If the projected conflict is to be healed, it must return into the psyche of the individual, where it had its unconscious beginnings. He must celebrate a Last Supper with himself, and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood; which means that he must recognize and accept the other in himself. But if he persists in his one-sidedness, the two lions will tear each other to pieces. Is this perhaps the meaning of Christs teaching, that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to rend others also?
[513] Such reflections are justified by the alchemical symbolism, as one can easily see if one examines the so-called allegories a little more closely and does not dismiss them at the start as worthless rubbish. The miraculous feeding with ones own substanceso strangely reflecting its prototype, Christmeans nothing less than the integration of those parts of the personality which are still outside ego-consciousness. Lion and peacock, emblems of concupiscence and pride, signify the overweening pretensions of the human shadow, which we so gladly project on our fellow man in order to visit our own sins upon him with apparent justification. In the age-old image of the uroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself.395 The uroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e., of the shadow. This feed-back process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the uroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which, as a projection, unquestionably stems from mans unconscious. Accordingly, there must be some psychic datum in it which gives rise to such assertions, and these assertions must somehow characterize that datum even if they are not to be taken literally. What the ultimate reason is for these assertions or manifestations must remain a mystery, but a mystery whose inner kinship with the mystery of faith was sensed by the adepts, so that for them the two were identical.

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