5.01 - ADAM AS THE ARCANE SUBSTANCE

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object:5.01 - ADAM AS THE ARCANE SUBSTANCE
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter

V - ADAM AND EVE
1. ADAM AS THE ARCANE SUBSTANCE
[544] Like the King and Queen, our first parents are among those figures through whom the alchemists expressed the symbolism of opposites. Adam is mentioned far more frequently than Eve, and for this reason we shall have to concern ourselves first and principally with him. He will give us plenty to get on with, as he figures in a great variety of significations which enter the world of alchemical ideas from the most heterogeneous sources.
[545] Ruland defines Adam as a synonym for the aqua permanens, in contradistinction to Eve, who signifies earth. Water is the prime arcane substance, and is therefore the agent of transformation as well as the substance to be transformed. As water is synonymous with Mercurius, we can understand the remark of John Dee that that other Mercurius who appears in the course of the work is the Mercurius of the Philosophers, that most renowned Microcosm and Adam.1 Adam is mentioned as the arcane substance in Rosinus. His correlates are lead and Azoch, 2 both, like Adam,3 of hermaphroditic nature. Similarly, Dorn says that the lapis was called Adam, who bore his invisible Eve hidden in his body. 4 This archaic idea occasionally turns up in the products of the insane today.5 The dual nature of Adam is suggested in the Gloria mundi: When Almighty God had created Adam and set him in paradise, he showed him two things in the future, saying, Behold, Adam, here are two things: one fixed and constant, the other fugitive.6
[546] As the transformative substance, therefore, Adam is also the king7 who is renewed in the bath. Basilius Valentinus says in his poem: Adam sat in the bath which the old Dragon had prepared, and in which Venus found her companion.8
[547] It was a bold stroke, even for a Baroque imagination, to bring together Adam and Venus. In the poem Venus is the fountain that flows from the stone and submerges her father, absorbing his body and life into herself. She is thus a parallel figure to Beya, who dissolved Gabricus into atoms in her body. In the same section in which Ruland mentions Adam as a synonym for water he states that he was also called the tall man.9 Ruland was a Paracelsist, so this expression may well coincide with the great man of Paracelsus, the Adech,10 whom Ruland defines as our inner and invisible man.11
[548] Accordingly the arcane substance would appear to be the inner man or Primordial Man, known as Adam Kadmon in the Cabala. In the poem of Valentinus, this inner man is swamped by the goddess of lovean unmistakable psychologem for a definite and typical psychic state, which is also symbolized very aptly by the Gnostic love-affair between Nous and Physis. In both cases the higher spiritual man is the more comprehensive, supra-ordinate totality which we know as the self. The bath, submersion, baptism, and drowning are synonymous, and all are alchemical symbols for the unconscious state of the self, its embodiments, as it wereor, more precisely, for the unconscious process by which the self is reborn and enters into a state in which it can be experienced. This state is then described as the filius regius. The old dragon who prepared the bath, a primeval creature dwelling in the caverns of the earth, is, psychologically, a personification of the instinctual psyche, generally symbolized by reptiles. It is as though the alchemists were trying to express the fact that the unconscious itself initiates the process of renewal.
[549] Adams bath is also mentioned in a Latin manuscript in my possession, where an unspecified being or creature addresses Adam thus: Hear, Adam, I will speak with you. You must go with me into the bath; you know in what manner we are influenced the one by the other, and how you must pass through me. Thus I step up to you with my sharpened arrows, aiming them at your heart 12
[550] Here again Adam is the transformative substance, the old Adam who is to renew himself. The arrows recall the telum passionis of Mercurius and the shafts of Luna, which the alchemists, via the mysticism of Hugh of St. Victor13 and others, referred to that well-known passage in the Song of Songs: Thou hast wounded my heart, as we have seen earlier.14 The speaker in the manuscript must be feminine, as immediately before there is a reference to the cohabitation of man and woman.
[551] Both texts point to a hierosgamos which presupposes a kind of consanguineous relationship between sponsus and sponsa. The relationship between Adam and Eve is as close as it is difficult to define. According to an old tradition Adam was androgynous before the creation of Eve.15 Eve therefore was more himself than if she had been his sister. Adams highly unbiblical marriage is emphasized as a hierosgamos by the fact that God himself was present at the ceremony as best man (paranymphus).16 Traces of cabalistic tradition are frequently noticeable in the alchemical treatises from the sixteenth century on. Both our texts are fairly late and so fall well within this tradition.
[552] We must now turn to the question of why it was that Adam should have been selected as a symbol for the prima materia or transformative substance. This was probably due, in the first place, to the fact that he was made out of clay, the ubiquitous materia vilis that was axiomatically regarded as the prima materia and for that very reason was so tantalizingly difficult to find, although it was before all eyes. It was a piece of the original chaos, of the massa confusa, not yet differentiated but capable of differentiation; something, therefore, like shapeless, embryonic tissue. Everything could be made out of it.17 For us the essential feature of the prima materia is that it was defined as the massa confusa and chaos, referring to the original state of hostility between the elements, the disorder which the artifex gradually reduced to order by his operations. Corresponding to the four elements there were four stages of the process (tetrameria), marked by four colours, by means of which the originally chaotic arcane substance finally attained to unity, to the One, the lapis, which at the same time was an homunculus.18 In this way the Philosopher repeated Gods work of creation described in Genesis 1. No wonder, therefore, that he called his prima materia Adam and asserted that it, like him, consisted or was made out of the four elements. For out of the four elements were created our Father Adam and his children, says the Turba.19 And Gabir ibn Hayyan (Jabir)20 says in his Book of Balances:
The Pentateuch says, regarding the creation of the first being, that his body was composed of four things, which thereafter were transmitted by heredity: the warm, the cold, the moist, and the dry. He was in fact composed of earth and water, a body and a soul. Dryness came to him from the earth, moisture from the water, heat from the spirit, and cold from the soul.21
The later literature often mentions Adam as a compositio elementorum.22 Because he was composed out of the four cosmic principles he was called the Microcosm.23 The Tractatus Micreris says:24
Even so is man called the lesser world [mundus minor], because in him is the figure of the heavens, of the earth, of the sun and moon, a visible figure upon earth and [at the same time] invisible, wherefore he is named the lesser world. Therefore the old Philosophers said of him, When the water fell upon the earth, Adam was created, who is the lesser world.25
Similar views of Adam are found elsewhere; thus the Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer says that God collected the dust from which Adam was made from the four corners of the earth.26 Rabbi Meir (2nd cent.) states that Adam was made from dust from all over the world. In Mohammedan tradition Tabari, Masudi, and others say that when the earth refused to provide the material for Adams creation the angel of death came along with three kinds of earth: black, white, and red.27 The Syrian Book of the Cave of Treasures relates:
And they saw God take a grain of dust from the whole earth, and a drop of water from the whole sea, and a breath of wind from the upper air, and a little warmth from the nature of fire. And the angels saw how these four weak elements, the dry, the moist, the cold, and the warm, were laid in the hollow of his hand. And then God made Adam.28
The poet Jalal-ud-din Rumi says that the earth from which Adam was made had seven colours.29 A collection of English riddles from the fifteenth century asks the following questions concerning Adams creation:
Questions bitwene the Maister of Oxinford and his scoler: Whereof was Adam made? Of VIII thingis: the first of earthe, the second of fire, the IIId of wynde, the IIIIth of clowdys, the Vth of aire where thorough he speketh and thinketh, the Vlth of dewe whereby hi sweteth, the Vllth of flowres wherof Adam hath his ien, the VIIIth is salte wherof Adam hath salt teres.30
[553] This material clearly shows the tetradic and ogdoadic nature of Adam, and there is also that characteristic uncertainty as to three and seven: four elements, four colours, four qualities, four humours,31 and three and seven colours.32
[554] Dorn calls the ternarius (the number three) peculiar to Adam (Adamo proprius). And because the ternarius was the offspring of the unarius (the number one), the devil, whose nature is binary, could do nothing against him, but had to make his attack upon Eve,33 who was divided from her husb and as a natural binarius from the unity of his ternarius.34 Vigenerus, commenting on I Cor. 15 : 47,35 writes:
For the elements are circular [in their arrangement], as Hermes makes clear, each being surrounded by two others with which it agrees in one of those qualities peculiar to itself, as [for instance] earth is between fire and water, partaking in the dryness of fire and the coldness of water. And so with the rest. . . . 36 Man, therefore, who is an image of the great world, and is called the microcosm or little world (as the little world, made after the similitude of its archetype, and compounded of the four elements, is called the great man), has also his heaven and his earth. For the soul and the understanding are his heaven; his body and senses his earth. Therefore, to know the heaven and earth of man, is the same as to have a full and complete knowledge of the whole world and of the things of nature.37
[555] The circular arrangement of the elements in the world and in man is symbolized by the mandala and its quaternary structure. Adam would then be a quaternarius, as he was composed of red, black, white, and green dust from the four corners of the earth, and his stature reached from one end of the world to the other.38 According to one Targum, God took the dust not only from the four quarters but also from the sacred spot, the centre of the world.39 The four quarters reappear in the (Greek) letters of Adams name: anatole (sunrise, East), dysis (sunset, West), arktos (Great Bear, North), mesembria (noon, South).40 The Book of the Cave of Treasures states that Adam stood on the spot where the cross was later erected, and that this spot was the centre of the earth. Adam, too, was buried at the centre of the earthon Golgotha. He died on a Friday, at the same hour as the Redeemer.41 Eve bore two pairs of twinsCain and Lebhdh, Abel and Kelmathwho later married each other (marriage quaternio). Adams grave is the cave of treasures. All his descendants must pay their respects to his body and not depart from it. When the Flood was approaching, Noah took Adams body with him into the ark. The ark flew over the flood on the wings of the wind from east to west and from north to south, thus describing a cross upon the waters.
[556] At the midpoint where Adam was buried, the four corners come together; for when God created the earth his power ran along in front of it, and the earth ran after his power from four sides like winds and gentle breezes, and there his power stopped and came to rest. And there will be accomplished the redemption for Adam and all his children. Over the grave where the cross would stand there grew a tree, and there too was the altar of Melchizedek. When Shem laid the body on the ground,
the four sides moved away from one another, the earth opened in the form of a cross, and Shem and Melchizedek laid the body inside. And as soon as they had done this, the four sides moved together again and covered the body of our Father Adam, and the doors of the earth were closed. And the same spot was named the Place of the Skull, because the head of all men was laid there, and Golgotha, because it was round . . . and Gabbatha, because all the nations were gathered in it.42
There the power of God will appear, for the four corners of the world have there become one, say the Ethiopic Clementines.43 God said to Adam: I shall make thee God, but not now; only after the passing of a great number of years.44 The apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve says that the east and north of paradise were given to Adam, but the west and south to Eve.45 The Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer relates that Adam was buried in the double cave Machpelah, and that Eve, Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah were buried there too. Therefore the cave was named Kiriath Arba, the City of Four, because four husbands and wives were buried there.46
[557] I do not want to pile up proofs of Adams quaternary nature, but only to give it due emphasis. Psychologically the four are the four orienting functions of consciousness, two of them perceptive (irrational), and two discriminative (rational). We could say that all mythological figures who are marked by a quaternity have ultimately to do with the structure of consciousness. We can therefore understand why Isaac Luria attri buted every psychic quality to Adam: he is the psyche par excellence.47
[558] The material I have presented is so suggestive that no detailed commentary is needed. Adam stands not only for the psyche but for its totality; he is a symbol of the self, and hence a visualization of the irrepresentable Godhead. Even if all the texts here cited were not available to the alchemists, a knowledge of the Zosimos treatises or of certain Cabalistic traditions would have been sufficient to make quite clear to them what was meant when the arcane substance was called Adam. I need hardly point out how important these historical statements are from the psychological point of view: they give us valuable indications of the way in which the corresponding dream-symbols should be evaluated. We do not devalue statements that originally were intended to be metaphysical when we demonstrate their psychic nature; on the contrary, we confirm their factual character. But, by treating them as psychic phenomena, we remove them from the inaccessible realm of metaphysics, about which nothing verifiable can be said, and this disposes of the impossible question as to whether they are true or not. We take our stand simply and solely on the facts, recognizing that the archetypal structure of the unconscious will produce, over and over again and irrespective of tradition, those figures which reappear in the history of all epochs and all peoples, and will endow them with the same significance and numinosity that have been theirs from the beginning.

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