object:5.04 - THE POLARITY OF ADAM
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
4. THE POLARITY OF ADAM
[585] There has always existed a widely felt need to think of the first man as having a light nature; hence the frequent comparison with the sun. The alchemists did not insist on this aspect, so I need say only a few words about it here. Usually, however, in the non-alchemical literature Adam is a light figure whose splendour even outshines that of the sun. He lost his radiance owing to the Fall.156 Here we have a hint of his dual nature: on the one hand shining and perfect, on the other dark and earthy. Haggadic interpretation derives his name from adamah, earth.157
[586] His dual nature is confirmed by Origen: one Adam was made out of earth, the other after the image and likeness of God. He is our inner man, invisible, incorporeal, unspotted, and immortal.158 Similar views are expressed by Philo.159 It is worth noting that in Colossians 1:15 Christ is this image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature.
[587] Adams dual nature is reflected in his hermaphroditism. Thus Dorn says that the fiery and perfect Mercurius is the true hermaphroditic Adam.160 This idea occurs among the Naassenes. These men, says Hippolytus, worship as the beginning of all things, according to their own statement, a Man and a Son of Man. But this Man is masculo-feminine [
] and is called by them Adamas; and hymns to him are many and various. He quotes as an example: From thee the father, through thee the mother, the two immortal names, parents of the Aeons, O citizen of heaven, O Man of the Great Name!161 Adam is masculo-feminine also in Jewish tradition. In Midrash Rabbah VIII, 1162 he is an androgyne, or a man and woman grown into one body with two faces. God sawed the body in two and made each half a back.163 Through his androgyny Adam has affinities with Platos sphere-shaped Original Being as well as with the Persian Gayomart. This idea has left a few traces in alchemy. For instance, Glauber attri butes the sign of the circle to Adam and the square to Eve.164 The circle is usually the sign for gold and sun. It is found in the latter sense in the Book of the Cave of Treasures: Then God made Adam. . . . And when the angels saw his glorious appearance, they were moved by the beauty of the sight; for they saw the form of his countenance, while it was enkindled, in shining splendour like to the ball of the sun, and the light of his eyes like to the sun, and the form of his body like to the light of a crystal.165 An Arabic Hermes-text on the creation of Adam relates that, when the virgin (Eve) came to power, the angel Harus (Horus) arose from the unanimous will of the planets. This Harus took sixty spirits from the planets, eighty-three from the zodiac, ninety from the highest heaven, one hundred and twenty-seven from the earth, three hundred and sixty spirits in all, mixed them together and created out of them Adamanus, the first man, after the form of the highest heaven.166 The number 360 and the form of heaven both indicate his circular shape.
[588] Aside, however, from his androgyny there is a fundamental polarity in Adam which is based on the contradiction between his physical and spiritual nature. This was felt very early, and is expressed in the view of Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eleazar that Adam must have had two faces, in accordance with his interpretation of Psalm 139 : 5: Thou hast beset me behind and before;167 and in the Islamic view that Adams soul was created thousands of years before his body and then refused to enter the figure made of clay, so that God had to put it in by force.168
[589] According to a Rabbinic view Adam even had a tail.169 His condition at first was altogether most inauspicious. As he lay, still inanimate, on the ground, he was of a greenish hue, with thousands of impure spirits fluttering round who all wanted to get into him. But God shooed them away till only one remained, Lilith, the mistress of spirits, who succeeded in so attaching herself to Adams body that she became pregnant by him. Only when Eve appeared did she fly away again.170 The daemonic Lilith seems to be a certain aspect of Adam, for the legend says that she was created with him from the same earth.171 It throws a bad light on Adams nature when we are told that countless demons and spooks arose from his nocturnal emissions (ex nocturno seminis fluxu). This happened during the one hundred and thirty years which he had to spend apart from Eve, banished from the heavenly court under the anathema of excommunication.172 In Gnosticism the original man Adamas, who is nothing but a paraphrase of Adam,173 was equated with the ithyphallic Hermes and with Korybas, the pederastic seducer of Dionysus,174 as well as with the ithyphallic Cabiri.175 In the Pistis Sophia we meet a Sabaoth Adamas, the ruler (
) of the Aeons, who fights against the light of Pistis Sophia176 and is thus wholly on the side of evil. According to the teachings of the Bogomils, Adam was created by Satanal, Gods first son and the fallen angel, out of mud. But Satanael was unable to bring him to life, so God did it for him.177 Adams inner connection with Satan is likewise suggested in Rabbinic tradition, where Adam will one day sit on Satans throne.178
[590] As the first man, Adam is the homo maximus, the Anthropos, from whom the macrocosm arose, or who is the macrocosm. He is not only the prima materia but a universal soul which is also the soul of all men.179 According to the Mandaeans he is the mystery of the worlds.180 The conception of the Anthropos first penetrated into alchemy through Zosimos, for whom Adam was a dual figure the fleshly man and the man of light.181 I have discussed the significance of the Anthropos idea at such length in Psychology and Alchemy that no further documentation is needed here. I shall therefore confine myself to material that is of historical interest in following the thought-processes of the alchemists.
[591] Already in Zosimos182 three sources can be distinguished: Jewish, Christian, and pagan. In later alchemy the pagan-syncretistic element naturally fades into the background to leave room for the predominance of the Christian element. In the sixteenth century, the Jewish element becomes noticeable again, under the influence of the Cabala, which had been made accessible to a wider public by Johann Reuchlin183 and Pico della Mirandola.184 Somewhat later the humanists then made their contri bution from the Hebrew and Aramaic sources, and especially from the Zohar. In the eighteenth century an allegedly Jewish treatise appeared, Abraham Eleazars Uraltes Chymisches Werck,185 making copious use of Hebraic terminology and claiming to be the mysterious Rindenbuch of Abraham the Jew, which, it was said, had revealed the art of gold-making to Nicholas Flamel (13301417).186 In this treatise there is the following passage:
For Noah must wash me in the deepest sea, with pain and toil, that my blackness may depart; I must lie here in the deserts among many serpents, and there is none to pity me; I must be fixed to this black cross, and must be cleansed therefrom with wretchedness and vinegar187 and made white, that the inwards of my head may be like the sun or Marez,188 and my heart may shine like a carbuncle, and the old Adam come forth again from me. O! Adam Kadmon, how beautiful art thou! And adorned with the rikmah189 of the King of the World! Like Kedar190 I am black henceforth; ah! how long! O come, my Mesech,191 and disrobe me, that mine inner beauty may be revealed. . . . O that the serpent roused up Eve! To which I must testify with my black colour that clings to me, and that is become mine by the curse of this persuasion, and therefore am I unworthy of all my brothers. O Sulamith afflicted within and without, the watchmen of the great city will find thee and wound thee, strip thee of thy garments and smite thee, and take away thy veil. . . . Yet shall I be blest again when I am delivered from the poison brought upon me by the curse, and mine inmost seed and first birth comes forth. For its father is the sun, and its mother the moon. Yea, I know else of no other bridegroom who should love me, because I am so black. Ah! do thou tear down the heavens and melt my mountains! For thou didst crumble the mighty kingdoms of Canaan like dust, and crush them with the brazen serpent of Joshua and offer them up to Algir
[fire], that she who is encompassed by many mountains may be freed.192
[592] It is evident that the speaker is the feminine personification of the prima materia in the nigredo state. Psychologically this dark figure is the unconscious anima. In this condition she corresponds to the nefesh of the Cabalists.193 She is desire; for as Knorr von Rosenroth trenchantly remarks: The mother is nothing but the inclination of the father for the lower.193a The blackness comes from Eves sin. Sulamith (the Shulamite)194 and Eve (Hawa, earth) are contaminated into a single figure, who contains in herself the first Adam, like the mother her child, and at the same time awaits the second Adam, i.e., Adam before the Fall, the perfect Original Man, as her lover and bridegroom. She hopes to be freed by him from her blackness. Here again we encounter the mysticism of the Song of Songs as in the Aurora consurgens I. Jewish gnosis (Cabala) combines with Christian mysticism: sponsus and sponsa are called on the one hand Tifereth and Malchuth and on the other Christ and the Church.195 The mysticism of the Song of Songs196 appeared in Jewish-Gnostic circles during the third and fourth centuries, as is proved by the fragments of a treatise called Shiur Koma (The Measure of the Body). It concerns a mysticism only superficially Judaicized by references to the description of the Beloved in the Song of Songs.197 The figure of Tifereth belongs to the Sefiroth system, which is conceived to be a tree. Tifereth occupies the middle position. Adam Kadmon is either the whole tree or is thought of as the mediator between the supreme authority, En Soph, and the Sefiroth.198 The black Shulamite in our text corresponds to Malchuth as a widow, who awaits union with Tifereth and hence the restoration of the original wholeness. Accordingly, Adam Kadmon here takes the place of Tifereth. He is mentioned in Philo and in the midrashic tradition. From the latter source comes the distinction between the heavenly and earthly Adam in I Cor. 15 : 47: The first man was of the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven, heavenly (DV), and verse 45: The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit (DV). Thus the original hylicpsychic man is contrasted with the later pneumatic man.
[593] The Tractatus de Revolutionibus Animarum, of Knorr von Rosenroth, Part I, ch. 1, 10, contains a passage which is of importance for the psychological interpretation of Adam:
Ezekiel 34 : 31 says, Ye are Adam.199 This means, you are rightly called by the name of Adam. The meaning is: If the text were to be understood literally, it could rightly be objected that all the peoples of the world or the Gentiles are men after the same manner as the Israelites, that is, of upright stature. Wherefore it would have to be said: Ye are men. But in truth (the meaning is this: out of your souls was composed the microcosm of Adam). . . . 200 11. Ye are Adam. (He says, as it were, that all the souls of the Israelites were in truth nothing but the first-created Adam.) And you were his sparks and his limbs.201
Here Adam appears on the one hand as the body of the people of Israel 202 and on the other as its general soul. This conception can be taken as a projection of the interior Adam: the homo maximus appears as a totality, as the self of the people. As the inner man, however, he is the totality of the individual, the synthesis of all parts of the psyche, and therefore of the conscious and the unconscious. 20 says: And therefore our masters have said: The son of David shall not come until all the souls that were in the body (of the first-created) have fully gone out.203 The going out of the souls from the Primordial Man can be understood as the projection of a psychic integration process: the saving wholeness of the inner mani.e., the Messiahcannot come about until all parts of the psyche have been made conscious. This may be sufficient to explain why it takes so long for the second Adam to appear.
[594] The same treatise says: From En Soph, from the most general One, was produced the universe, which is Adam Kadmon, who is One and Many, and of whom and in whom are all things. The differences of genera are denoted by concentric circles which proceed from him or are contained in him. He is thus something like a schema of the psychic structure, in which the specific differences [those characterizing species] are denoted by a straight line204 (i.e., in a concentric system, by the radius). Thus in Adam Kadmon are represented all the orders of things, both genera and species and individuals.205
[595] Among the pagan sources we must distinguish an Egyptian one, concerned with the very ancient tradition of the God-man Osiris and the theology of kingship; a Persian one, derived from Gayomart; and an Indian one, derived from Purusha.206 The Christian source for alchemical ideas is the aforementioned Pauline doctrine of the first and second Adam.
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