object:5.06 - THE TRANSFORMATION
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
6. THE TRANSFORMATION
[606] The appearance of Adam Kadmon has characteristic consequences for the Shulamite: it brings about a solificatio, an illumination of the inwards of the head. This is a veiled but, for the psychology of alchemy, typical allusion to the transfiguration(glorificatio) of the adept or of his inner man. For Adam is interior homo noster, the Primordial Man in us.
[607] Seen in the light of the above remarks, Eleazars text assumes a by no means uninteresting aspect and, since its train of thought is characteristic of the basic ideas of alchemy, a meaning with many facets. It depicts a situation of distress corresponding to the alchemical nigredo: the blackness of guilt has covered the bridal earth as with black paint. The Shulamite comes into the same category as those black goddesses (Isis, Artemis, Parvati, Mary) whose names mean earth. Eve, like Adam, ate of the tree of knowledge and thereby broke into the realm of divine privilegesye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. In other words she inadvertently discovered the possibility of moral consciousness, which until then had been outside mans range. As a result, a polarity was torn open with momentous consequences. There was a sundering of earth from heaven, the original paradise was shut down, the glory of the First Man was extinguished, Malchuth became a widow, the fiery yang went back aloft, and the damp yin enveloped humanity with darkness, degenerated through ever-increasing wantonness, and finally swelled into the black waters of the Deluge, which threatened to drown every living thing but on the other hand could be understood more hopefully as an ablution of the blackness. Noah, too, appears in a different light: he is no longer seen as someone runing away from the catastrophe but as Lord of the Waters, the minister of the ablution. This operation does not seem to be enough, however, for the Shulamite promptly gets herself into the opposite kind of pickleinto the dry desert, where, like the children of Israel, she is menaced by evil in the form of poisonous serpents.212 This is an allusion to the tribulations of the Exodus, which in a sense was a repetition of the expulsion from paradise, since bidding farewell to the fleshpots of Egypt was quite as painful a prospect as the stony ground from which our first parents had to wrest a living in the sweat of their brows. But even with this last extremity the goal is not reached, for the Shulamite has still to be fixed to a black cross. The idea of the cross points beyond the simple antithesis to a double antithesis, i.e., to a quaternio. To the mind of the alchemist this meant primarily the intercrossing elements:
or the four qualities:
We know that this fastening to a cross denotes a painful state of suspension, or a tearing asunder in the four directions.213 The alchemists therefore set themselves the task of reconciling the warring elements and reducing them to unity. In our text this state is abolished when the distressing blackness is washed off with wretchedness and vinegar. This is an obvious allusion to the hyssop and gall which Christ was given to drink. In the oft-quoted text of Maier, wretchedness and vinegar stand for the melancholia of the nigredo, as contrasted with the joy and gladness of the redeemed state. The washing with wretchedness and vinegar finally brings about the whitening as well as a solificatio of the inwards of the head, presumably the brain or even the soul. We can only interpret this as meaning that the Shulamite experienced a transformation similar to Parvatis, who, saddened by her blackness, was given a golden skin by the gods. Here we must emphasize that it is the lapis or hermaphrodite which, as the god who is quartered or torn asunder or crucified on the Four, represents and suffers the discord of the elements, and at the same time brings about the union of the Four and besides that is identical with the product of the union. The alchemists could not help identifying their Primordial Man with Christ, for whom our author substitutes Adam Kadmon.
[608] Since sun and gold are equivalent concepts in alchemy, the solificatio means that the inwards of the headwhatever we are to understand by thatare transformed into light, or Marez, the precious white earth. The Shulamites heart, too, will shine like a carbuncle. From the time of the Middle Ages the carbuncle was regarded as a synonym for the lapis.214 Here the allegory is transparent: as the head is illuminated, so the heart burns in love.
[609] The difference between Parvati and the Shulamite is, therefore, that whereas Parvati is transformed outwardly the Shulamite is transformed inwardly. Outwardly she remains as black as ever. Unlike the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, whose skin is swarthy, our Shulamite declares that her blackness clings to her as if painted on, and that one has only to disrobe her to bring her inner beauty to light. By the sin of Eve she is plunged, as it were, in ink, in the tincture, and blackened, just as in Islamic legend the precious stone that Allah gave Adam was blackened by his sin. If the poison of the curse is taken from her -which will obviously happen when the Beloved appears then her innermost seed, her first birth, will come forth. According to the text this birth can refer only to the appearance of Adam Kadmon. He is the only one who loves her despite her blackness. But this blackness seems to be rather more than a veneer, for it will not come off; it is merely compensated by her inner illumination and by the beauty of the bridegroom. As the Shulamite symbolizes the earth in which Adam lay buried, she also has the significance of a maternal progenitrix. In this capacity the black Isis put together again the limbs of her dismembered brother-spouse, Osiris. Thus Adam Kadmon appears here in the classic form of the son-lover, who, in the hierosgamos of sun and moon, reproduces himself in the mother-beloved. Consequently the Shulamite takes over the ancient role of the hierodule of Ishtar. She is the sacred harlot (meretrix), which is one of the names the alchemist gave his arcane substance.
[610] The Shulamites reversion to type is not a stroke of genius on the part of our author, but merely the traditional alchemical view that our infant, the son of the Philosophers, is the child of sun and moon. But in so far as he represents the hermaphroditic Primordial Man himself, the son is at the same time the father of his parents. Alchemy was so saturated with the idea of the mother-son incest that it automatically reduced the Shulamite of the Song of Songs to her historical prototype.215
[611] We have paid due attention to the recalcitrant nature of the Shulamites blackness. Now it is significant that the old Adam is mentioned at the very moment when the perfect, prelapsarian Adam, the shining Primordial Man, is obviously meant. Just as the black Shulamite misses the final apotheosis, the total albedo, so we lack the necessary confirmation that the first Adam is changed into the second, who at the same time is the father of the first. We cannot suppress the suspicion that, just as the blackness will not disappear, so the old Adam will not finally change. This may be the deeper reason why the expression the old Adam did not worry the author but, on the contrary, seemed just right. It is, unfortunately, far truer to say that a change for the better does not bring a total conversion of darkness into light and of evil into good, but, at most, is a compromise in which the better slightly exceeds the worse. The complication introduced by the old Adam, therefore, does not seem to be merely fortuitous, since it forms a factor in an archetypal quaternio composed as follows:
or
[612] This structure corresponds to the marriage quaternio discussed in the Psychology of the Transference,216 which is based on certain psychic facts and has the following structure:
or
[613] Although this quaternio plays a considerable role in alchemy, it is not a product of alchemical speculation but an archetype which can be traced back to the primitive marriage-class system (four-kin system). As a quaternity it represents a whole judgment and formulates the psychic structure of mans totality. This expresses on the one hand the structure of the individual, i.e., a male or female ego in conjunction with the contrasexual unconscious, and on the other hand the egos relation to the other sex, without which the psychological individual remains incomplete. (By this I mean primarily a psychic relationship.) But in this schema the idea of transformation, so characteristic of alchemy, is missing. As a scientific discipline, empirical psychology is not in a position to establish whether the conscious ego ranks higher or lower than the anima, which, like the ego, has a positive and a negative aspect. Science does not make value-judgments, and though psychology has a concept of value it is nothing but a concept of intensity: one complex of ideas has a higher value when its power of assimilation proves stronger than that of another.217 The alchemical idea of transformation is rooted in a spiritual concept of value which takes the transformed as being more valuable, better, higher, more spiritual, etc., and the empirical psychologist has nothing to set against this. But since evaluating and estimating are functions of feeling and nevertheless do play a role in psychology, value must somehow be taken into account. This happens when an assertion or value-judgment is accepted as an intrinsic part of the description of an object.
[614] The moral as well as the energic value of the conscious and the unconscious personality is subject to the greatest individual variations. Generally the conscious side predominates, though it suffers from numerous limitations. The schema of the psychological structure, if it is to be compared with the alchemical schema, must therefore be modified by the addition of the idea of transformation. This operation is conceivable in principle, as the process of making the anima and animus conscious does in fact bring about a transformation of personality. Hence it is the psycho therapist who is principally concerned with this problem. The foremost of his therapeutic principles is that conscious realization is an important agent for transforming the personality. The favourable aspect of any such transformation is evaluated as improvementprimarily on the basis of the patients own statements. The improvement refers in the first place to his psychic health, but there can also be a moral improvement. These statements become increasingly difficult or impossible to verify when the evaluation imperceptibly encroaches upon territory hedged about with philosophical or theoretical prejudices. The whole question of improvement is so delicate that it is far easier to settle it by arbitrary decision than by careful deliberation and comparison, which are an affront to all those terrible simplifiers who habitually cultivate this particular garden.
[615] Although the fact of transformation and improvement cannot be doubted, it is nevertheless very difficult to find a suitable term for it which is not open to misunderstanding and can be fitted into our schema. Medieval man, like our own simplifiers, was naive enough always to know what was better. We are not so sure, and besides this we feel to some extent answerable to those who hold a different opinion. We cannot cherish the joyful belief that everybody else is in the wrong. For this reason we shall probably have to give up the idea of expressing in the terminology of our schema the kind of transformation which is bound up with conscious realization and the wholeness (individuation) it brings in its train.
[616] For a naive-minded person the imperfect, corrupt old Adam is simply contrasted with the perfect Primordial Man, and the dark Eve with an illuminated and altogether nobler being. The modern viewpoint is much more realistic, as it withdraws the archetypal schema, which referred originally to a mythological situation, back from projection, and peoples the stage not with mythical lay-figures but with real human beings and their psyches. The man, or the masculine ego-consciousness, is then contrasted with an animus, the masculine figure in a womans unconscious, who compels her either to overvalue him or to protest against him. The corresponding figure that contrasts with the woman and her feminine ego-consciousness is the anima, the source of all the illusions, over- and under-valuations of which a man makes himself guilty in regard to a woman. There is nothing to indicate in this schema that the man is better than the animus or vice versa, or that the anima is a higher being than the woman. Nor does it indicate in which direction the line of development is moving. Only one thing is clear, that when, as a result of a long, technical and moral procedure the patient obtains a knowledge of this structure, based on experience, and accepts the responsibility entailed by this knowledge, there follows an integration or completeness of the individual, who in this way approaches wholeness but not perfection, which is the ideal of certain world philosophies. In the Middle Ages philosophy prevailed over fact to such an extent that the base metal lead was credited with the power to turn into gold under certain conditions, and the dark, psychic man with the capacity to turn himself into the higher pneumatic man. But just as lead, which theoretically could become gold, never did so in practice, so the sober-minded man of our own day looks round in vain for the possibility of final perfection. Therefore, on an objective view of the facts, which alone is worthy of the name of science, he sees himself obliged to lower his pretensions a little, and instead of striving after the ideal of perfection to content himself with the more accessible goal of approximate completeness. The progress thereby made possible does not lead to an exalted state of spiritualization, but rather to a wise self-limitation and modesty, thus balancing the disadvantages of the lesser good with the advantage of the lesser evil.
[617] What prevents us from setting up a psychological schema fully corresponding to the alchemical one is ultimately, therefore, the difference between the old and the modern view of the world, between medieval romanticism and scientific objectivity.
[618] The more critical view which I have outlined here on the objective basis of scientific psychology is, however, implied in the alchemical schema. For even as the old Adam comes forth again and is present in the schema just as much as Adam Kadmon, so the blackness does not depart from the Shulamite, an indication that the transformation process is not complete but is still going on. That being so, the old Adam is not yet put off and the Shulamite has not yet become white.
[619] In the Cabalistic view Adam Kadmon is not merely the universal soul or, psychologically, the self, but is himself the process of transformation, its division into three or four parts (trimeria or tetrameria). The alchemical formula for this is the Axiom of Maria: One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the Third comes the One as the Fourth.218 The treatise of Rabbi Abraham Cohen Irira (Hacohen Herrera) says: Adam Kadmon proceeded from the Simple and the One, and to that extent he is Unity; but he also descended and fell into his own nature, and to that extent he is Two. And again he will return to the One, which he has in him, and to the Highest; and to that extent he is Three and Four.219 This speculation refers to the essential Name, the Tetragrammaton, which is the four letters of Gods name, three different, and the fourth a repetition of the second.220 In the Hebrew word YHVH (written without vowels), he is feminine and is assigned as a wife to yod221 and to vau. As a result yod222 and vau223 are masculine, and the feminine he, though doubled, is identical and therefore a single unit. To that extent the essential Name is a triad. But since he is doubled, the Name is also a tetrad or quaternity224a perplexity which coincides most strangely with the Axiom of Maria. On the other hand the Tetragrammaton consists of a double marriage and thus agrees in an equally remarkable manner with our Adam diagrams. The doubling of the feminine he is archetypal,225 since the marriage quaternio presupposes both the difference and the identity of the feminine figures. This is true also of the two masculine figures, as we have seen, though here their difference usually predominatesnot surprisingly, as these things are mostly products of the masculine imagination. Consequently the masculine figure coincides with mans consciousness, where differences are practically absolute. Though the feminine figure is doubled it is so little differentiated that it appears identical. This double yet identical figure corresponds exactly to the anima, who, owing to her usually unconscious state, bears all the marks of non-differentiation.
[620] If we apply these considerations to the alchemical schema, we shall be able to modify it in a way that was not possible with the psychological one. We thus arrive at a formula which reduces both to the same denominator:
[621] The critical point, namely the fact that the transformation is not complete, comes out in the text itself; the desired perfection is relegated to the future, that she who is encompassed by many mountains shall be freed. For this a divine miracle is needed, the crushing and burning of Canaan, the tearing down of heaven, and the melting of mountains. One can see from these tours de force the magnitude of the difficulties that have to be overcome before perfection is reached.
[622] The reference to the mountains which encompass the Shulamite has a strange parallel in Parvati, whose name means mountain dweller and who was deemed the daughter of Himavat (Himalaya).226 Grieving over her blackness, for which her husb and Shiva reproached her, she left him and withdrew to the solitude of the forest. And in her loneliness and seclusion the Shulamite exclaims:
What shall I say? I am alone among the hidden; nevertheless I rejoice in my heart, because I can live privily, and refresh myself in myself. But under my blackness I have hidden the fairest green.227
[623] The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed228 sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests. It is the alchemical benedicta viriditas, the blessed greenness, signifying on the one hand the leprosy of the metals (verdigris), but on the other the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things. O blessed greenness, which generatest all things! cries the author of the Rosarium.229 Did not the spirit of the Lord, writes Mylius, which is a fiery love, give to the waters when it was borne over them a certain fiery vigour, since nothing can be generated without heat? God breathed into created things . . . a certain germination or greenness, by which all things should multiply . . . They called all things green, for to be green means to grow . . . Therefore this virtue of generation and the preservation of things might be called the Soul of the World.230
[624] Green signifies hope and the future, and herein lies the reason for the Shulamites hidden joy, which otherwise would be difficult to justify. But in alchemy green also means perfection. Thus Arnaldus de Villanova says: Therefore Aristotle says in his book, Our gold, not the common gold, because the green which is in this substance signifies its total perfection, since by our magistery that green is quickly turned into truest gold.231 Hence the Shulamite continues:
But I must be like a dove with wings, and I shall come and be free at vespertime, when the waters of impurity are abated, with a green olive leaf; then is my head of the fairest Asophol,232 and my hair curly-gleaming as the
. And Job says (27 : 5),233 that out of my
234 shall come forth blood. For it is all as
,235 shining red Adamah,236 mingled with a glowing
. Though I am poisonous, black, and hateful without, yet when I am cleansed I shall be the food of heroes; as out of the lion which Samson slew there afterward came forth honey. Therefore says Job 28 : 7: Semitam non cognovit ille avis, neque aspicit earn oculus vulturis.237 For this stone belongeth only to the proven and elect of God.238
[625] It is the hope of the dark Shulamite that one day, at vespertime, probably in the evening of life, she will become like Noahs dove, which, with the olive leaf in its beak, announced the end of the flood and appeared as the sign of Gods reconciliation with the children of men.239 The Song of Songs (2 : 14) says: 0 my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice . . . In our text her head will be of gold, like the sun, and her hair like the moon. She thus declares herself to be a conjunction of the sun and moon. Indeed, a golden head and bushy hair are attri butes of the Beloved.240 She is, in fact, mingled with the Beloved, from which it is evident that the perfect state melts sponsus and sponsa into one figure, the sun-and-moon child.241 The black Shulamite, well matched by her bushy locks, black as a raven, becomes the moon, which in this way acquires its curly-gleaming hair.242
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 18:46:24
300720 site hits