object:6.02 - STAGES OF THE CONJUNCTION
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
2. STAGES OF THE CONJUNCTION
[669] The coniunctio affords another example of the gradual development of an idea in the course of the millennia. Its history flows in two main streams which are largely independent of one another: theology and alchemy. While alchemy has, except for a few traces, been extinct for some two hundred years, theology has put forth a new blossom in the dogma of the Assumption, from which it is evident that the stream of development has by no means come to a standstill. But the differentiation of the two streams has not yet passed beyond the framework of the archetypal hierosgamos, for the coniunctio is still represented as a union of mother and son or of a brother-sister pair. Already in the sixteenth century, however, Gerard Dorn had recognized the psychological aspect of the chymical marriage and clearly understood it as what we today would call the individuation process. This is a step beyond the bounds which were set to the coniunctio, both in ecclesiastical doctrine and in alchemy, by its archetypal symbolism. It seems to me that Dorns view represents a logical understanding of it in two respects: first because the discrepancy between the chemical operation and the psychic events associated with it could not remain permanently hidden from an attentive and critical observer, and secondly because the marriage symbolism obviously never quite satisfied the alchemical thinkers themselves, since they constantly felt obliged to make use of other uniting symbols, besides the numerous variants of the hierosgamos, to express the all but incomprehensible nature of the mystery. Thus the coniunctio is represented by the dragon embracing the woman in the grave,57 or by two animals fighting,58 or by the king dissolving in water,59 and so on. Similarly, in Chinese philosophy the meaning of yang is far from exhausted with its masculine connotation. It also means dry, bright, and the south side of the mountain, just as the feminine yin means damp, dark, and the north side of the mountain.
[670] Although the esoteric symbolism of the coniunctio occupies a prominent position, it does not cover all aspects of the mysterium. In addition we have to consider the symbolism of death and the grave, and the motif of conflict. Obviously, very different if not contradictory symbolisms were needed to give an adequate description of the paradoxical nature of the conjunction. In such a situation one can conclude with certainty that none of the symbols employed suffices to express the whole. One therefore feels compelled to seek a formula in which the various aspects can be brought together without contradiction. Dorn attempted to do this with the means that were then at his disposal. He could do so the more easily as the current idea of correspondentia came to his aid. For a man of those times there was no intellectual difficulty in postulating a truth which was the same in God, in man, and in matter. With the help of this idea he could see at once that the reconciliation of hostile elements and the union of alchemical opposites formed a correspondence to the unio mentalis which took place simultaneously in the mind of man, and not only in man but in God (that He may be one in All). Dorn correctly recognized that the entity in which the union took place is the psychological authority which I have called the self. The unio mentalis, the interior oneness which today we call individuation, he conceived as a psychic equilibration of opposites in the overcoming of the body, a state of equanimity transcending the bodys affectivity and instinctuality.60 The spirit (animus), which is to unite with the soul, he called a spiracle [spiraculum] of eternal life, a sort of window into eternity (Leibniz), whereas the soul is an organ of the spirit and the body an instrument of the soul. The soul stands between good and evil and has the option of both. It animates the body by a natural union, just as, by a supernatural union, it is endowed with life by the spirit.61
[671] But, in order to bring about their subsequent reunion, the mind (mens) must be separated from the bodywhich is equivalent to voluntary death62for only separated things can unite. By this separation (distractio) Dorn obviously meant a discrimination and dissolution of the composite, the composite state being one in which the affectivity of the body has a disturbing-influence on the rationality of the mind. The aim of this separation was to free the mind from the influence of the bodily appetites and the hearts affections, and to establish a spiritual position which is supraordinate to the turbulent sphere of the body. This leads at first to a dissociation of the personality and a violation of the merely natural man.
[672] This preliminary step, in itself a clear blend of Stoic philosophy and Christian psychology, is indispensable for the differentiation of consciousness.63 Modern psycho therapy makes use of the same procedure when it objectifies the affects and instincts and confronts consciousness with them. But the separation of the spiritual and the vital spheres, and the subordination of the latter to the rational standpoint, is not satisfactory inasmuch as reason alone cannot do complete or even adequate justice to the irrational facts of the unconscious. In the long run it does not pay to cripple life by insisting on the primacy of the spirit, for which reason the pious man cannot prevent himself from sinning again and again and the rationalist must constantly trip up over his own irrationalities. Only the man who hides the other side in artificial unconsciousness can escape this intolerable conflict. Accordingly, the chronic duel between body and spirit seems a better though by no means ideal solution. The advantage, however, is that both sides remain conscious. Anything conscious can be corrected, but anything that slips away into the unconscious is beyond the reach of correction and, its rank growth undisturbed, is subject to increasing degeneration. Happily, nature sees to it that the unconscious contents will irrupt into consciousness sooner or later and create the necessary confusion. A permanent and uncomplicated state of spiritualization is therefore such a rarity that its possessors are canonized by the Church.
[673] Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in the chains of Physis, and she desires beyond physical necessity. She must be called back by the counsel of the spirit from her lostness in matter and the world. This is a relief to the body too, for it not only enjoys the advantage of being animated by the soul but suffers under the disadvantage of having to serve as the instrument of the souls appetites and desires. Her wish-fantasies impel it to deeds to which it would not rouse itself without this incentive, for the inertia of matter is inborn in it and probably forms its only interest except for the satisfaction of physiological instincts. Hence the separation means withdrawing the soul and her projections from the bodily sphere and from all environmental conditions relating to the body. In modern terms it would be a turning away from sensuous reality, a withdrawal of the fantasy-projections that give the ten thousand things their attractive and deceptive glamour. In other words, it means introversion, introspection, meditation, and the careful investigation of desires and their motives. Since, as Dorn says, the soul stands between good and evil, the disciple will have every opportunity to discover the dark side of his personality, his inferior wishes and motives, childish fantasies and resentments, etc.; in short, all those traits he habitually hides from himself. He will be confronted with his shadow, but more rarely with the good qualities, of which he is accustomed to make a show anyway. He will learn to know his soul, that is, his anima and Shakti who conjures up a delusory world for him. He attains this knowledge, Dorn supposes, with the help of the spirit, by which are meant all the higher mental faculties such as reason, insight, and moral discrimination. But, in so far as the spirit is also a window into eternity and, as the anima rationalis immortal, it conveys to the soul a certain divine influx and the knowledge of higher things, wherein consists precisely its supposed animation of the soul. This higher world has an impersonal character and consists on the one hand of all those traditional, intellectual, and moral values which educate and cultivate the individual, and, on the other, of the products of the unconscious, which present themselves to consciousness as archetypal ideas. Usually the former predominate. But when, weakened by age or by criticism, they lose their power of conviction, the archetypal ideas rush in to fill the gap. Freud, correctly recognizing this situation, called the traditional values the super-ego, but the archetypal ideas remained unknown to him, as the belief in reason and the positivism of the nineteenth century never relaxed their hold. A materialistic view of the world ill accords with the reality and autonomy of the psyche.
[674] The arcanum of alchemy is one of these archetypal ideas that fills a gap in the Christian view of the world, namely, the un-bridged gulf between the opposites, in particular between good and evil. Only logic knows a tertium non datur; nature consists entirely of such thirds, since she is represented by effects which resolve an oppositionjust as a waterfall mediates between above and below. The alchemists sought for that effect which would heal not only the disharmonies of the physical world but the inner psychic conflict as well, the affliction of the soul; and they called this effect the lapis Philosophorum. In order to obtain it, they had to loosen the age-old attachment of the soul to the body and thus make conscious the conflict between the purely natural and the spiritual man. In so doing they rediscovered the old truth that every operation of this kind is a figurative death 64which explains the violent aversion everybody feels when he has to see through his projections and recognize the nature of his anima. It requires indeed an unusual degree of self-abnegation to question the fictitious picture of ones own personality. This, nevertheless, is the requirement of any psycho therapy that goes at all deep, and one realizes how oversimplified its procedures are only when the analyst has to try out his own medicine on himself. One can, as experience has often shown, relieve oneself of the difficult act of self-knowledge by shutting out the moral criterion with so-called scientific objectivity or unvarnished cynicism. But this simply means buying a certain amount of insight at the cost of artificially repressing an ethical value. The result of this deception is that the insight is robbed of its efficacy, since the moral reaction is missing. Thus the foundations for a neurotic dissociation are laid, and this in no way corresponds to the psycho therapists intention. The goal of the procedure is the unio mentalis, the attainment of full knowledge of the heights and depths of ones own character.
[675] If the demand for self-knowledge is willed by fate and is refused, this negative attitude may end in real death. The demand would not have come to this person had he still been able to strike out on some promising by-path. But he is caught in a blind alley from which only self-knowledge can extricate him. If he refuses this then no other way is open to him. Usually he is not conscious of his situation, either, and the more unconscious he is the more he is at the mercy of unforeseen dangers: he cannot get out of the way of a car quickly enough, in climbing a mountain he misses his foothold somewhere, out skiing he thinks he can just negotiate a tricky slope, and in an illness he suddenly loses the courage to live. The unconscious has a thousand ways of snuffing out a meaningless existence with surprising swiftness. The connection of the unio mentalis with the death-motif is therefore obvious, even when death consists only in the cessation of spiritual progress.
[676] The alchemists rightly regarded mental union in the overcoming of the body as only the first stage of conjunction or individuation, in the same way that Khunrath understood Christ as the Saviour of the Microcosm but not of the Macrocosm, whose saviour was the lapis.65 In general, the alchemists strove for a total union of opposites in symbolic form, and this they regarded as the indispensable condition for the healing of all ills. Hence they sought to find ways and means to produce that substance in which all opposites were united. It had to be material as well as spiritual, living as well as inert, masculine as well as feminine, old as well as young, andpresumablymorally neutral. It had to be created by man, and at the same time, since it was an increatum, by God himself, the Deus terrestris.
[677] The second step on the way to the production of this substance was the reunion of the spirit with the body. For this procedure there were many symbols. One of the most important was the chymical marriage, which took place in the retort. The older alchemists were still so unconscious of the psychological implications of the opus that they understood their own symbols as mere allegories orsemioticallyas secret names for chemical combinations, thus stripping mythology, of which they made such copious use, of its true meaning and using only its terminology. Later this was to change, and already in the fourteenth century it began to dawn on them that the lapis was more than a chemical compound. This realization expressed itself mainly in the Christ-parallel.66 Dorn was probably the first to recognize the psychological implications for what they were, so far as this was intellectually possible for a man of that age. Proof of this is his demand that the pupil must have a good physical and, more particularly, a good moral constitution.67 A religious attitude was essential.68 For in the individual was hidden that substance of celestial nature known to very few, the incorrupt medicament which can be freed from its fetters, not by its contrary but by its like. The spagyric medicine whereby it is freed must be conformable to this substance. The medicine prepares the body so that the separation can be undertaken. For, when the body is prepared, it can be separated more easily from the other parts.
[678] Like all alchemists, Dorn naturally did not reveal what the spagyric medicine was. One can only suppose that it was thought of as physical, more or less. At the same time he says that a certain asceticism is desirable, and this may be a reference to the moral nature of the mysterious panacea. At any rate he hastens to add that the assiduous reader will thenceforth advance from the meditative philosophy to the spagyric and thence to the true and perfect wisdom. It sounds as if the assiduous reader had been engaged at the outset in reading and meditating, and as if the medicine and the preparation of the body consisted precisely in that.69 Just as for Paracelsus the right theoria was part of the panacea, so for the alchemists was the symbol, which expresses the unconscious projections. Indeed, it is these that make the substance magically effective, and for this reason they cannot be separated from the alchemical procedure whose integral components they are.
[679] The second stage of conjunction, the re-uniting of the unio mentalis with the body, is particularly important, as only from here can the complete conjunction be attainedunion with the unus mundus. The reuniting of the spiritual position with the body obviously means that the insights gained should be made real. An insight might just as well remain in abeyance if it is simply not used. The second stage of conjunction therefore consists in making a reality of the man who has acquired some knowledge of his paradoxical wholeness.
[680] The great difficulty here, however, is that no one knows how the paradoxical wholeness of man can ever be realized. That is the crux of individuation, though it becomes a problem only when the loophole of scientific or other kinds of cynicism is not used. Because the realization of the wholeness that has been made conscious is an apparently insoluble task and faces the psychologist with questions which he can answer only with hesitation and uncertainty, it is of the greatest interest to see how the more unencumbered symbolical thinking of a medieval philosopher tackled this problem. The texts that have come down to us do not encourage the supposition that Dorn was conscious of the full range of his undertaking. Although in general he had a clear grasp of the role the adept played in the alchemical process, the problem did not present itself to him in all its acuteness, because only a part of it was enacted in the moral and psychological sphere, while for the rest it was hypostatized in the form of certain magical properties of the living body, or as a magical substance hidden within it. This projection spread over the problem a kind of mist which obscured its sharp edges. The alchemists still believed that metaphysical assertions could be proved (even today we have still not entirely freed ourselves from this somewhat childish assumption), and they could therefore entrench themselves behind seemingly secure positions in the Beyond, which they were confident would not be shaken by any doubts. In this way they were able to procure for themselves considerable alleviations. One has only to think what it means if in the misery and incertitude of a moral or philosophical dilemma one has a quinta essentia, a lapis or a panacea so to say in ones pocket! We can understand this deus ex machina the more easily when we remember with what passion people today believe that psychological complications can be made magically to disappear by means of hormones, narcotics, insulin shocks, and convulsion therapy. The alchemists were as little able to perceive the symbolical nature of their ideas of the arcanum as we to recognize that the belief in hormones and shocks is a symbol. We would indignantly dismiss such an interpretation as a nonsensical suggestion.
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