object:5.03 - ADAM AS THE FIRST ADEPT
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
3. ADAM AS THE FIRST ADEPT
[570] Not always in alchemy is Adam created out of the four elements. The Introitus apertus, for instance, says that the soul of the gold is united with Mercurius in lead, that they may bring forth Adam and his wife Eve.86 Here Adam and Eve take the place of King and Queen. But in general Adam, being composed of the four elements, either is the prima materia and the arcane substance itself,87 or he brought it with him from paradise, at the beginning of the world, as the first adept. Maier mentions that Adam brought antimony (then regarded as an arcane substance)88 from paradise.89 The long line of Philosophers begins with him. The Aquarium sapientum asserts that the secret of the stone was revealed to Adam from above and was subsequently sought after with singular longing by all the Holy Patriarchs.90 The Gloria mundi says: The Lord endowed Adam with great wisdom, and such marvellous insight that he immediately, without the help of any teachersimply by virtue of his original righteousnesshad a perfect knowledge of the seven liberal arts, and of all animals, plants, stones, metals, and minerals. Nay, what is more, he had a perfect understanding of the Holy Trinity, and of the coming of Christ in the flesh.91 This curious opinion is traditional and comes mainly from Rabbinic sources.92 Aquinas, too, thought that Adam, because of his perfection, must have had a knowledge of all natural things.93 In Arabian tradition Shth (Seth) learnt medicine from him.94 Adam also built the Kaba, for which purpose the angel Gabriel gave him the ground-plan and a precious stone. Later the stone turned black because of the sins of men.95
[571] The Jewish sources are even more explicit. Adam understood all the arts,96 he invented writing, and from the angels he learnt husbandry and all the professions including the art of the smith.97 A treatise from the eleventh century lists thirty kinds of fruit which he brought with him from paradise.98 Maimonides states that Adam wrote a book on trees and plants.99 Rabbi Eliezer credits Adam with the invention of the leap-year.100 According to him, the tables on which God later inscribed the law came from Adam.101 From Eliezer, probably, derives the statement of Bernardus Trevisanus that Hermes Trismegistus found seven stone tables in the vale of Hebron, left over from antediluvian times. On them was a description of the seven liberal arts. Adam had put these tables there after his expulsion from paradise.102 According to Dorn, Adam was the first practitioner and inventor of the arts. He had a knowledge of all things before and after the Fall, and he also prophesied the renewal and chastening of the world by the flood.103 His descendants set up two stone tables on which they recorded all the natural arts in hieroglyphic script. Noah found one of these tables at the foot of Mount Ararat, bearing a record of astronomy.104
[572] This legend probably goes back to Jewish tradition, to stories like the one mentioned in the Zohar:
When Adam was in paradise, God sent the holy angel Raziel,105 the keeper of the higher secrets, to him with a book, in which the higher holy wisdom was set forth. In this book two and seventy kinds of wisdom were described in six hundred and seventy sections. By means of this book there were given to him fifteen hundred keys to wisdom, which were known to none of the higher holy men, and all remained secret until this book came to Adam. . . . Henceforth he kept this book hid and secret, daily using this treasure of the Lord, which discovered to him the higher secrets of which even the foremost angels knew nothing, until he was driven out of paradise. But when he sinned and transgressed the comm and of the Lord, this book fled from him. . . . He bequea thed it to his son Seth. And from Seth it came to Enoch, and from him . . . to Abraham.106
[573] In the Clementine Homilies (2nd cent.) Adam is the first of a series of eight incarnations of the true prophet. The last is Jesus.107 This idea of a pre-existent seer may spring from Jewish or Judaeo-Christian tradition, but in China it is vividly realized in the figure of Pan Ku.108 He is represented as a dwarf clad in a bear-skin or in leaves; on his head he has two horns.109 He proceeded from yang and yin, fashioned the chaos, and created heaven and earth. He was helped by four symbolic animals the unicorn, the phoenix, the tortoise, and the dragon.110 He is also represented with the sun in one hand and the moon in the other. In another version he has a dragons head and a snakes body. He changed himself into the earth with all its creatures and thus proved to be a real homo maximus and Anthropos. Pan Ku is of Taoist origin and nothing seems to be known of him before the fourth century A.D.111 He reincarnated himself in Yan-shih Tien-tsun, the First Cause and the highest in heaven.112 As the fount of truth he announces the secret teaching, which promises immortality, to every new age. After completing the work of creation he gave up his bodily form and found himself aimlessly floating in empty space. He therefore desired rebirth in visible form. At length he found a holy virgin, forty years old, who lived alone on a mountain, where she nourished herself on air and clouds. She was hermaphroditic, the embodiment of both yang and yin. Every day she collected the quintessence of sun and moon. Pan Ku was attracted by her virgin purity, and once, when she breathed in, he entered into her in the form of a ray of light, so that she became pregnant. The pregnancy lasted for twelve years, and the birth took place from the spinal column. From then on she was called Tai-yan Sheng-mu, the Holy Mother of the First Cause.113 The relatively late date of the legend leaves the possibility of Christian influence open. All the same, its analogy with Christian and Persian ideas does not prove its dependence on these sources.
[574] The series of eight incarnations of the true prophet is distinguished by the special position of the eighth, namely Christ. The eighth prophet is not merely the last in the series; he corresponds to the first and is at the same time the fulfilment of the seven, and signifies the entry into a new order. I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy (pars. 200ff.), with the help of a modern dream, that whereas the seven form an uninterrupted series, the step to the eighth involves hesitation or uncertainty and is a repetition of the same phenomenon that occurs with three and four (the Axiom of Maria). It is very remarkable that we meet it again in the Taoist series of eight immortals (hsien-yn): the seven are great sages or saints who dwell in heaven or on the earth, but the eighth is a girl who sweeps up the fallen flowers at the southern gate of heaven.114 The parallel to this is Grimms tale of the seven ravens: there the seven brothers have one sister.115 One is reminded in this connection of Sophia, of whom Irenaeus says: This mother they also call the Ogdoad, Sophia, Terra, Jerusalem, Holy Spirit, and, with a masculine reference, Lord.116 She is below and outside the Pleroma. The same thought occurs in connection with the seven planets in Celsuss description of the diagram of the Ophites, attacked by Origen.117 This diagram is what I would call a mandalaan ordering pattern or pattern of order which is either consciously devised or appears spontaneously as a product of unconscious processes.118 The description Origen gives of the diagram is unfortunately not particularly clear, but at least we can make out that it consisted of ten circles, presumably concentric, since he speaks of a circumference and a centre.119 The outermost circle was labelled Leviathan and the innermost Behemoth, the two apparently coinciding, for Leviathan was the name for the centre as well as the circumference.120 At the same time, the impious diagram said that the Leviathan . . . is the soul that has permeated the universe.121
[575] Origen had got hold of a diagram like the one used by Celsus and discovered in it the names of the seven angels Celsus alludes to. The prince of these angels was called the accursed God, and they themselves were called sometimes gods of light and sometimes archons. The accursed God refers to the Judaeo-Christian world-creator, as Origen duly notes. Yahweh appears here obviously as the prince and father of the seven archons.122 The first of them had a lions form and was named Michael; the second was a bull and was named Suriel, the bull-formed; the third, Raphael, had the form of a snake; the fourth, named Gabriel, the form of an eagle; the fifth, Thauthabaoth, the form of a bear; the sixth, Erataoth, the form of a dog; and the seventh had the form of an ass and was called Onol or Taphabaoth or Thar thataoth.123
[576] It is to be presumed that these names were distributed among the eight inner circles. The seven archons correspond to the seven planets and represent so many spheres with doors which the celebrant has to pass through on his ascent. Here, says Origen, is the origin of the Ogdoad, which, clearly, must consist of the seven and their father Yahweh. At this point Origen mentions, as the first and seventh, Ialdabaoth, of whom we have not heard before. This supreme archon, as we know from other sources too, is lion-headed or lion-like.124 He would therefore correspond to Michael in the Ophitic diagram, the first in the list of archons. Ialdabaoth means child of chaos; thus he is the first-born of a new order that supersedes the original state of chaos. As the first son, he is the last of the series,125 a feature he shares with Adam and also with Leviathan, who, as we have seen, is both circumference and centre. These analogies suggest that the diagram showed a series of concentric circles.126 The old world-picture, with the earth as the centre of the universe, consisted of various heavensspherical layers or spheresarranged concentrically round the centre and named after the planets. The outermost planetary sphere or archon was Saturn. Outside this would be the sphere of the fixed stars (corresponding to Leviathan as the tenth circle in the diagram), unless we postulated some place for the demiurge or for the father or mother of the archons. It is evident from the text that an Ogdoad is meant,127 as in the system of Ptolemy reported by Irenaeus.128 There the eighth sphere was called Achamoth (Sophia, Sapientia),129 and was of feminine nature, just as in Damascius the hebdomad was attri buted to Kronos and the ogdoad to Rhea.130 In our text the virgin Prunicus is connected with the mandala of seven circles:131 They have further added on top of one another sayings of the prophets, circles included in circles . . . and a power flowing from a certain Prunicus, a virgin, a living soul.132
[577] The circles included in circles point decisively to a concentric arrangement, as we find it, significantly enough, in Herodotuss description133 of the seven circular walls of Ecbatana.134 The ramparts of these walls were all painted in different colours; of the two innermost and highest walls one was silvered and the other gilded. The walls obviously represented the concentric circles of the planets, each characterized by a special colour.
[578] In the introduction to his diagram Celsus reports on the idea, found among the Persians and in the Mithraic mysteries, of a stairway with seven doors and an eighth door at the top. The first door was Saturn and was correlated with lead, and so on. The seventh door was gold and signified the sun. The colours are also mentioned.135 The stairway represents the passage of the soul (animae transitus). The eighth door corresponds to the sphere of the fixed stars.
[579] The archetype of the seven appears again in the division of the week and the naming of its days, and in the musical octave, where the last note is always the beginning of a new cycle. This may be a cogent reason why the eighth is feminine: it is the mother of a new series. In Clements line of prophets the eighth is Christ. As the first and second Adam he rounds off the series of seven, just as, according to Gregory the Great, he, coming in the flesh, joined the Pleiades, for he had within himself, at once and for ever, the works of the sevenfold Holy Spirit.136 These references should suffice to show the special nature of the eighth and its tendency to be feminine in Christian gnosis.
[580] Adams dual nature reappears in Christ: he is male-female. Boehme expresses this by saying that Christ was a virgin in mind.137 She is an image of the holy number Three,138 eternally uncreated and ungenerated.139 Where the Word is, there is the virgin, for the Word is in her.140 She is the womans seed,141 which shall bruise the head of the serpent (Gen. 3 : 15).142 He who shall tread on its head is Christ, who thus appears identical with the seed of the woman or with the virgin. In Boehme the virgin has the character of an anima, for she is given to be a companion to thee in thy soul,143 and at the same time, as divine power and wisdom, she is in heaven and in paradise.144 God took her to him to be his spouse.145 She expresses all the profundity and infinity of the Godhead,146 thus corresponding to the Indian Shakti.147 The androgynous unity of Shiva and Shakti is depicted in Tantric iconography as permanent cohabitation.148
[581] Boehmes ideas had a strong influence on Franz von Baader, who asserted that God gave Adam a helpmeet (adjutor) through whom Adam was to have brought forth without an external woman, as Mary did without a man. But Adam fell for149 the bestial act of copulation and was in danger of himself sinking to the level of a beast. God, recognizing this possibility, thereupon created Eve as a salutary counter-institution [rettende Gegenanstalt], to prevent an otherwise unavoidable and deeper descent of man . . . into animal nature.150 When Adam threatened to sink into it nevertheless, his divine androgyny departed from him, but was preserved in Eve as the womans seed, with the help of which man would free himself from the seed of the serpent. For he who was born in the Virgin Mary is the same who had to depart from Adam on account of his fall.151
[582] The presence of a divine pair or androgyne in the human soul is touched upon by Origen: They say that as the sun and moon stand as the two great lights in the firmament of heaven, so in us Christ and the Church.152 And thus, too, Adam and Eve are in each of us, as Gregory the Great says; Adam standing for the spirit, Eve for the flesh.153
[583] Origen, like Clement of Rome, credits Adam with the gift of prophecy, for he prophesied a great mystery in Christ and the Church, saying, Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.154 (Gen. 2 : 24; cf. Matt. 19 : 5 and Mark 10 : 7.)
[584] I shall end this account of the excellent equipment of the first man with an Arabian legend, which is not without a deeper meaning. When Adam left Paradise, God sent the angel Gabriel to him with an offer of three gifts of which he should choose one: modesty, intelligence, and religion. Without hesitation Adam chose intelligence. Thereupon Gabriel commanded modesty and religion to return at once to heaven. But they refused, invoking Gods own comm and never to part from intelligence, wherever it might be found. For the Prophet had said: Never submit to one who has no trace of intelligence.155
questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers
change font "color":
change "background-color":
change "font-family":
change "padding":
change "table font size":
last updated: 2022-02-04 18:45:02
221867 site hits