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object:5.05 - THE OLD ADAM
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter



5. THE OLD ADAM
[596] After these preliminary remarks we can turn back to Eleazars text, beginning with the significant passage in the middle where Adam appears. The reader is immediately struck by the expression the old Adam, who is evidently equated with Adam Kadmon. Rather than the old Adam we would expect the second or the original Adam, chiefly because the old Adam means above all the old, sinful, unredeemed man, in accordance with Romans 6 : 6: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. That this passage must have been at the back of the authors mind is shown by the sentence: I must be fixed to this black cross, and must be cleansed therefrom with wretchedness and vinegar.
[597] The author purports to be a Jew, but was clumsy enough not only to perpetrate anachronisms but to reveal his own unquestionably Christian psychology. He had a good knowledge of the Bible and was familiar with Biblical language. The language of his book is the stylistically and grammatically fluid German of the eighteenth century. He has a liking for edifying rhetoric (could he have been a theologian?) One thing is clear, at any rate, and that is that the expression the old Adam on the lips of such a person can have only one meaning, namely, the old man whom we are to put off (Eph. 4 : 22) in accordance with the comm and in Colossians 3 : 9: Put off the old man with his deeds. These passages must have been known to the author, and he could easily have avoided the resultant contradiction or ambiguity by putting, instead of old, original, or something of that kind.
[598] I must beg the readers indulgence for apparently splitting hairs and harping somewhat pedantically on this little defect in the style of a none too careful author. But it is more than a question of a mere slip of the pen: a text that is riddled with ambiguities, that sets up the most unexpected relationships (Adam and the Shulamite!) and blends together the most heterogeneous situations, has unquestionable affinities with the structure of a dream and consequently necessitates a careful examination of its figures. A clich like the old Adam, which can have no other meaning, does not occur in a dream-text without a very good reason, even though the author might have excused it as a mere slip. Even ifas seems to be the case herehe understood the old Adam as the Ur- or original Adam, he was compelled by some obscure intention to pick on the old Adam, which in this context is thoroughly ambiguous. Had it occurred in a real dream it would be a technical blunder for the interpreter to overlook this ostensible slip. As we know, these quid pro quos invariably happen at the critical places, where two contrary tendencies cross.
[599] Our suspicions have been aroused, and in what follows we shall pursue them on the assumption that the old Adam is not a mere accident but is one of those irritating ambiguities of which there is no lack in the alchemical texts. They are irritating because seldom if ever can it be ascertained with any certainty whether they arose from a conscious intention to deceive or from an unconscious conflict.
[600] The old Adam, evidently, can come forth again from the Shulamite, the black mother, only because he had once got into her in some way. But that can only have been the old, sinful Adam, for the blackness of the Shulamite is an expression for sin, the original sin, as the text shows. Behind this idea lies the archetype of the Anthropos who had fallen under the power of Physis, but it seems doubtful whether our author had any conscious knowledge of this myth. Had he really been familiar with Cabalistic thought he would have known that Adam Kadmon, the spiritual First Man, was an Idea in the Platonic sense, which could never be confused with the sinful man. By his equation old Adam = Adam Kadmon the author has contaminated two opposites. The interpretation of this passage must therefore be: from the black Shulamite comes forth the antithesis old Adam: Adam Kadmon. Her obvious connection with the earth as the mother of all living things makes it clear that her son was the sinful Adam, but not Adam Kadmon, who, as we have seen, is an emanation of En Soph. Nevertheless, by contaminating the two, the text makes both of them issue from the Shulamite. The old Adam and the Primordial Man appear to be identical, and the author could excuse himself by saying that by old he meant the first or original Adama point which it is not easy to deny.
[601] As high as the Primordial Man stands on the one side, so low on the other is the sinful, empirical man. The phenomenon of contamination, which we meet so frequently in the psychology of dreams and of primitives, is no mere accident but is based on a common denominator; at some point the opposites prove to be identical, and this implies the possibility of their contamination. One of the commonest instances of this is the identity of the god and his animal attri bute. Such paradoxes derive from the non-human quality of the gods and the animals psychology. The divine psyche is as far above the human as the animal psyche reaches down into subhuman depths.
[602] The old Adam corresponds to the primitive man, the shadow of our present-day consciousness, and the primitive man has his roots in the animal man (the tailed Adam),207 who has long since vanished from our consciousness. Even the primitive man has become a stranger to us, so that we have to rediscover his psychology. It was therefore something of a surprise when analytical psychology discovered in the products of the unconscious of modern man so much archaic material, and not only that but the sinister darkness of the animal world of instinct. Though instincts or drives can be formulated in physiological and biological terms they cannot be pinned down in that way, for they are also psychic entities which manifest themselves in a world of fantasy peculiarly their own. They are not just physiological or consistently biological phenomena, but are at the same time, even in their content, meaningful fantasy structures with a symbolic character. An instinct does not apprehend its object blindly and at random, but brings to it a certain psychic viewpoint or interpretation; for every instinct is linked a priori with a corresponding image of the situation, as can be proved indirectly in cases of the symbiosis of plant and animal. In man we have direct insight into that remarkable world of magical ideas which cluster round the instincts and not only express their form and mode of manifestation but trigger them off.208 The world of instinct, simple as it seems to the rationalist, reveals itself on the primitive level as a complicated interplay of physiological facts, taboos, rites, class-systems, and tribal lore, which impose a restrictive form on the instinct from the beginning, preconsciously, and make it serve a higher purpose. Under natural conditions a spiritual limitation is set upon the unlimited drive of the instinct to fulfil itself, which differentiates it and makes it available for different applications. Rites on a primitive level are uninterpreted gestures; on a higher level they become mythologized.
[603] The primary connection between image and instinct explains the interdependence of instinct and religion in the most general sense. These two spheres are in mutually compensatory relationship, and by instinct we must understand not merely Eros but everything that goes by the name of instinct.209 Religion on the primitive level means the psychic regulatory system that is coordinated with the dynamism of instinct. On a higher level this primary interdependence is sometimes lost, and then religion can easily become an antidote to instinct, whereupon the originally compensatory relationship degenerates into conflict, religion petrifies into formalism, and instinct is vitiated. A split of this kind is not due to a mere accident, nor is it a meaningless catastrophe. It lies rather in the nature of the evolutionary process itself, in the increasing extension and differentiation of consciousness. For just as there is no energy without the tension of opposites, so there can be no consciousness without the perception of differences. But any stronger emphasis of differences leads to polarity and finally to a conflict which maintains the necessary tension of opposites. This tension is needed on the one hand for increased energy production and on the other for the further differentiation of differences, both of which are indispensable requisites for the development of consciousness. But although this conflict is unquestionably useful it also has very evident disadvantages, which sometimes prove injurious. Then a counter-movement sets in, in the attempt to reconcile the conflicting parties. As this process has repeated itself countless times in the course of the many thousand years of conscious development, corresponding customs and rites have grown up for the purpose of bringing the opposites together. These reconciling procedures are rites performed by man, but their content is an act of help or reconciliation emanating from the divine sphere, whether in the present or in the past. Generally the rites are linked up with the original state of man and with events that took place in the age of the heroes or ancestors. This is as a rule a defective state, or a situation of distress, which is helped by divine intervention, and the intervention is repeated in the rite. To take a simple example: When the rice will not grow, a member of the rice-totem clan builds himself a hut in the rice-field and tells the rice how it originally grew from the rice-ancestor. The rice then remembers its origin and starts growing again. The ritual anamnesis of the ancestor has the same effect as his intervention.
[604] The prime situation of distress consists either in a withdrawal of the favourable gods and the emergence of harmful ones, or in the alienation of the gods by mans negligence, folly, or sacrilege, or else (as in the Taoist view) in the separation210 of heaven and earth for unfathomable reasons, so that they can now come together again only if the wise man re-establishes Tao in himself by ritual meditation. In this way he brings his own heaven and earth into harmony.211
[605] Just as the rice spoils in the defective state, so too man degenerates, whether from the malignity of the gods or from his own stupidity or sin, and comes into conflict with his original nature. He forgets his origination from the human ancestor, and a ritual anamnesis is therefore required. Thus the archetype of Man, the Anthropos, is constellated and forms the essential core of the great religions. In the idea of the homo maximus the Above and Below of creation are reunited.



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