6.07 - THE MONOCOLUS

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object:6.07 - THE MONOCOLUS
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter

7. THE MONOCOLUS
[720] Evidently in order to emphasize the unity of Mercurius, Albertus makes use of the expression monocolus (as is probably the right reading), or uniped. It seems to me that this must be an alchemical

,147 for I have found it nowhere else in the literature. The alchemists use of a rare or strange word generally served to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the object expressed by it. (As we know, with this trick one can also make banalities appear unusual.) Even though the word monocolus appears to be unique, the image is not, for the uniped occurs in several illustrated alchemical manuscripts, for instance in the aforementioned Paris codex (Fr. 14765) entitled Abraham le Juif.148 As the title shows, this presumably purported to be, or was intended to replace, the zealously sought Rindenbuch of the same author, of which Nicholas Flamel gives an account in his autobiography and whose loss the alchemists so deeply deplored. Though this mythical work was never found, it was reinvented in Germany;149 but this forgery has nothing to do with our manuscript. On page 324 of the manuscript we find the first in a series of pictures of unipeds (cf. PI. 4). On the left there is a crowned man in a yellow robe, and on the right a priest in a white robe with a mitre. Each of them has only one foot. The inscription under the picture begins with the sign for Mercurius (

) and runs: There they make but one. This refers to the preceding text, For there is but one single thing, one medicine, and in it all our magistery consists; there are but two coadjutors who are made perfect here.150 The subject is obviously Mercurius duplex. In my chapter on Sulphur I have pointed out that it, especially in its red form, is identical with gold, the latter being generally regarded as rex. The red sceptre of the king might be an allusion to this. There is, as I have shown, a red and a white sulphur, so it too is duplex and identical with Mercurius. Red sulphur stands for the masculine, active principle of the sun, the white for that of the moon. As sulphur is generally masculine by nature and forms the counterpart of the feminine salt, the two figures probably signify the spirits of the arcane substance, which is often called rex, as in Bernardus Trevisanus.
[721] This curious separation or union of the figures occurs several times in the manuscript. In the next picture (Pl. 5), on page 331, the king on the left has a blue robe and a black foot, and the one on the right a black robe and a blue foot. Both the sceptres are red. The inscription runs: Thus is it done, that what was hid may be revealed.151 This refers, as the preceding text makes clear, to the nigredo which is about to ensue. The nigredo signifies the mortificatio, putrefactio, solutio, separatio, divisio, etc., a state of dissolution and decomposition that precedes the synthesis. This picture is followed by one showing the two figures separated, each with two feet. The figure on the left wears the spiritual crown and the one on the right the temporal, corresponding to the occult-spiritual and earthly-corporeal nature of sulphur. The figure on the left wears a robe whose right half is blue and the left black, the one on the right the reverse. They thus complement one another. The text explains: The colours of the 9th year and this month of January 1772 are represented by these two figures. Likewise by the mortification of our natural

and of the dead water reduced to another form. The inscription under the picture runs: A very long time, and by putrefaction, calcination, incineration, fixation, and coagulation the materials become solid, but this comes to pass naturally after a very long time.
[722] This probably refers to the completion of the nigredo after a period of pregnancy, i.e., to the complete separation of Mercurius or the two sulphurs, or of their bodily and spiritual natures, corresponding to Dorns extraction of the soul from the body and the production of the unio mentalis. According to the picture, the one figure, as regards its colours, is the mirror-image of the other. This indicates a relationship of complementarity between physis and spirit, so that the one reflects the other.152 That, too, is probably the meaning of the manifestation of the hidden: through the unio mentalis that which is hidden in physis by projection is made conscious. In the nigredo, the dark night of the soul, the psychic contents free themselves from their attachment to the body, and the nature and meaning of this connection are recognized.
[723] In the next picture (p. 335) the two figures are united again (Pl. 6). Their colours and other attri butes are the same. Each figure has only one blue foot. The inscription runs: Wherefore saith the Philosopher: He obtaineth the Art who can manifest that which is hidden, and conceal that which is manifest. And underneath: Hic artem digne est consecutus (Here is the art worthily followed, or: This man worthily followed the art), and: The blue colour after the yellow which will lead to the complete blackness or putrefaction after a very long time.
[724] On page 337 the (spiritual) king from the previous picture is joined to a similarly crowned queen (Pl. 7). He wears a black upper garment and a blue under garment. His crown has a black rim, but the mitre-like part is gold, as in the previous picture. He has one blue foot tipped with black, as if he had dipped it in black paint. The green-clad queen has her hand in his left sleeve, presumably indicating that she takes the place of the leftworldly or bodilyhalf of the king and appears as his better half, so to speak. Her feet are black. The text runs: There comes about an inconstant fixation, then after a little the soft hardens. The watery becomes earthy and dry; thus a change of nature is made from one to the other; and a single colour in the form of a black Raven, and the

[sulphur] of the male

and of the female, have become of the same nature. The inscription says: Take therefore in Gods almighty name this black earth, reduce it very subtly and it will become like the head of a Raven. As if explaining the caput corvi the text remarks that the Silne endormy is bound by the shepherds with garlands of flowers in all colours of the rainbow and, after quaffing his wine, says: I laugh at my bond. So say the philosophers that when the blackness appears one must rejoice.153 The text adds that Troy was reduced to ashes after ten years of siege.
[725] This picture represents the union of the monocolus with the earth (the body). As the sulphur of the male Mercurius he is a very active power,154 for he is the red sulphur of the gold or the active principle of the sun. The king in the saffron-yellow robe was originally gold and the sun but has now become totally black the sol niger and even his blue robe, signifying heaven, is covered with a black one.155 Only the top of his crown displays the solar gold. Dame Earth wears the same crown (only it is all gold) and thus reveals that her nature is equivalent to his: both are sulphur. One could call the sulphur of the king the spirit, which, hiding its light in the darkness, unites with the queen.
[726] This earth is of a watery nature, corresponding to Genesis 1 : 2 and 6: And the earth was without form, and void. . . . And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. . . . And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters In this way heaven can embrace the sea instead of the earth. We may recall the myth of Isis and Osiris: Isis copulated with the spirit of the dead Osiris, and from this union sprang the god of the mysteries, Harpocrates. Osiris plays a certain role in the ancient alchemical texts: the brother/sister or mother/son pair are sometimes called Isis and Osiris.156 In Olympiodorus157 Osiris is lead, as arcane substance, and the principle of moisture;158 in Firmicus Maternus he is the life-principle.159 The alchemical interpretation of him as Mercurius has its parallel in the Naassene comparison of Osiris to Hermes.160 Like the latter, he was represented ithyphallically, and this is significant in regard to the monocolus.161 He is the dying and resurgent God-man and hence a parallel to Christ. He is of a blackish colour (

)162 and was therefore called Aithiops,163 in Christian usage the devil,164 and in alchemical language the prima materia.165 This antithesis is characteristic of Mercurius duplex. Wine as the blood of Osiris occurs in the ancient magical texts.166 In the Egyptian texts Osiris had a sun-and-moon nature, and was therefore hermaphroditic like Mercurius.167
[727] Corvus (crow or raven) or caput corvi (ravens head) is the traditional name for the nigredo (nox, melancholia, etc.). It can also, as pars pro toto, mean a capital thing or principle, as for instance the caput mortuum, which originally meant the head of the black Osiris,168 but later Mercurius philosophorum, who, like him, undergoes death and resurrection and transformation into an incorruptible state. Thus the anonymous author of the Novum lumen chemicum exclaims: O our heaven! O our water and our Mercurius! O dead head or dregs of our sea! . . . And these are the epithets of the bird of Hermes,169 which never rests.170 This bird of Hermes is the raven, of which it is said: And know that the head of the art is the raven, who flies without wings in the blackness of the night and the brightness of the day.171 He is a restless, unsleeping spirit, our aerial and volatile stone, a being of contradictory nature.172 He is the heaven and at the same time the scum of the sea. Since he is also called water, one thinks of rain-water, which comes from the sea and falls from heaven. As a matter of fact the idea of clouds, rain, and dew is often found in the texts and is extremely ancient.173 A papyrus text says: I am the mother of the gods, named heaven; I am Osiris, named water; I am Isis, named dew; . . . I am Eidolos, likened to the true spirits. Thus speaks a magician who wishes to conjure up his familiar: he himself is a spirit and thus akin to the bird of the night. In Christian tradition the raven is an allegory of the devil.174
[728] Here we encounter the primitive archetypal form of spirit, which, as I have shown,175 is ambivalent. This ambivalence or antagonism also appears in the ancient Egyptian pair of brothers, Osiris and Set, and in the Ebionite opposition of Christ and Satan. The night raven (nycticorax) is an allegory of Christ.176
[729] Nowadays the caput mortuum, or colcothar, denotes the brownish-red peroxide of iron which remains in the retort after the distillation of sulphuric acid from iron sulphate,177 whereas the caput Osiridis was black and was therefore called caput corvi. The Aquarium sapientum compares it with Christ, whose visage was so marred more than any man (Isaiah 52 : 14).178 The blackening usually took forty days, corresponding to the forty days between Easter and Ascension, or Christs forty days fast in the wilderness, or the forty-year wanderings of the Jews in the desert.179 In the heat of the nigredo the anima media natura holds dominion. The old philosophers called this blackness the Ravens Head or black sun.180 The anima media natura corresponds to the Platonic world-soul and the Wisdom of the Old Testament.181 In this state the sun is surrounded by the anima media natura and is therefore black. It is a state of incubation or pregnancy. Great importance was attached to the blackness as the starting point of the work.182 Generally it was called the Raven.183 In our context the interpretation of the nigredo as terra (earth)184 is significant. Like the anima media natura or Wisdom, earth is in principle feminine. It is the earth which, in Genesis, appeared out of the waters,185 but it is also the terra damnata.186
[730] The caput mortuum or caput corvi is the head of the black Osiris or Ethiopian, and also of the Moor in the Chymical Wedding.187 The head was boiled in a pot and the broth poured into a golden ball. This gives us the connection with the golden head of the Greek alchemy, discussed earlier. The Moor in the Chymical Wedding is probably identical with the black executioner mentioned there, who decapitates the royal personages. In the end his own head is struck off.188 In the further course of events a black bird is beheaded.189 Beheading is significant symbolically as the separation of the understanding from the great suffering and grief which nature inflicts on the soul. It is an emancipation of the cogitatio which is situated in the head, a freeing of the soul from the trammels of nature.190 Its purpose is to bring about, as in Dorn, a unio mentalis in the overcoming of the body.
[731] The Moor or Ethiopian is the black, sinful man, whom St. Hilary (d. 367) compared to the raven. (The raven made in the form of the sinner.191) In the Chymical Wedding there is a black king, and in Schema XXIV Mylius represents the relation of king and queen under the symbol of two ravens fighting.192 Just as the raven symbolizes mans black soul, so the caput corvi represents the head or skull (testa capitis), which in Sabaean alchemy served as the vessel of transformation.193 The Sabaeans were suspected of magical practices that presupposed the killing of a man. The brain-pan or head of the element Man therefore has a somewhat sinister aspect: they needed a human skull because it contained the brain and this was the seat of the understanding. And the understanding exists in that organ, because it rules the soul and assists her liberation. 194 The corpus rotundum built the skull about itself as a stronghold, girt itself with this armour, and opened windows in it, i.e., the five senses. But the corpus rotundum, the living being, the form of forms and the genus of genera, is man.195 The rotundum196 obviously refers not to the empirical but to the round or whole man, the

. Afterwards he drew the soul to the higher world, that he might give her freedom. The higher world has always an effect in man, which consists in the perfect inspiration of man at his death; nor shall he fail to reach the firmament, until that which proceeded from the higher world returns to its place.197 The higher world is the world of worlds, obviously the mundus potentialis of Dorn, who was inspired by this text as his use of the ideas of the stronghold (castrum sapientiae)198 and of the window (spiraculum vitae aeternae) shows.
[732] The round vessel or stronghold is the skull. The divine organ, says the Liber quartorum, is the head, for it is the abode of the divine part, namely the soul. That is why the philosopher must surround this organ with greater care than other organs. Because of its roundness, it attracts the firmament and is by it attracted; and it is attracted in similar manner by the attracter, until the attraction reaches its end in the understanding. Man is worthier than the beasts and closer to the simple, and this on account of his understanding. The simple (simplex or res simplex) is the One,199 the natura caelestis of Dorn, the round and perfect, the firmament or heaven in man.200 Plato is of the opinion that the man whose righteousness is the greatest attains to the bountiful [largam] upper substance when he is assimilated by his work to the highest place.201 This shows us how the production of the caelum attracts the starry firmament and the influences (or spirits) of the planets into the Microcosm, just as by the same operation man is likened to the upper substance, the anima mundi or res simplex or the One.
[733] In the nigredo the brain turns black. Thus a Hermes recipe cited in the Rosarium says: Take the brain . . . grind it up with very strong vinegar, or with boys urine,202 until it turns black.203 The darkening or benightedness is at the same time a psychic state which, as we have seen, was called melancholia. In the Aurelia occulta there is a passage where the transformative substance in the nigredo state says of itself (cf. Pl. 10):
I am an infirm and weak old man, surnamed the dragon; therefore am I shut up in a cave, that I may be ransomed by the kingly crown. . . . A fiery sword inflicts great torments upon me; death makes weak my flesh and bones. . . . My soul and my spirit depart; a terrible poison, I am likened to the black raven, for that is the wages of sin; in dust and earth I lie, that out of Three may come One. O soul and spirit, leave me not, that I may see again the light of day, and the hero of peace whom the whole world shall behold may arise from me.204
* * *
[734] What our Abraham le Juif text says about the royal persons sounds like a mythologem: the sun, the king of the blue sky, descends to earth and it becomes night; he then unites with his wife, the earth or sea. The primordial image of Uranos and Gaia may well be the background of this picture. Similarly, in connection with the raven205 as the name for this situation, we must consider the creative night mentioned in an Orphic hymn, which calls it a bird with black wings that was fertilized by the wind (pneuma). The product of this union was the silver egg, which in the Orphic view contained heaven above and earth below, and was therefore a cosmos in itself, i.e., the Microcosm. In alchemy it is the philosophical egg. The French alchemists of the eighteenth century were familiar with the king, the hot, red sulphur of the gold, and called it Osiris; the moist (aquosum) they called Isis. Osiris was the fire hidden in nature, the igneous principle . . . which animates all things;206 Isis was the passive and material principle of all things. The dismemberment of Osiris corresponded to the solutio, putrejactio, etc. Of this Dom Pernety,207 the source for these statements, says: The solution of the body is the coagulation of the spirit. The blackness pertains to Isis. (Apuleius says she was clad in a shining robe of the deepest black.) If heaven or the sun incline to her they are covered in her blackness.
[735] The relation of alchemical fantasies to the primordial images of Greek mythology is too well known for me to document it. The cosmogonic brother-sister incest,208 like the Creation itself, had been from ancient times the prototype of the alchemists great work. Yet we seek the Graeco-Roman tradition in vain for traces of the wonder-working monocolus. We find him, perhaps, in Vedic mythology, and in a form that is highly significant for our context, namely, as an attri bute of the sun-god Rohita209 (red sun), who was called the one-footed goat210 (ag kapada). In Hymn XIII, i of the Atharva-veda he is praised together with his wife Rohini. Of her it says: Rise up, O steed, that art within the waters, and The steed that is within the waters is risen up.211 The hymn begins with this invocation to Rohini, who is thereby united with Rohita after he has climbed to his highest place in heaven. The parallel with our French text is so striking that one would have to infer its literary dependence if there were any way of proving that the author was acquainted with the Atharva-veda. This proof is next to impossible, as Indian literature was not known in the West at all until the turn of the eighteenth century, and then only in the form of the Oupnekhat of Anquetil du Perron,212 a collection of Upanishads in Persian which he translated into Latin.213 The Atharva-veda was translated only in the second half of the nineteenth century.214 If we wish to explain the parallel at all we have to infer an archetypal connection.
[736] From all this it appears that our picture represents the union of the spirit with material reality. It is not the common gold that enters into combination but the spirit of the gold, only the right half of the king, so to speak. The queen is a sulphur, like him an extract or spirit of earth or water, and therefore a chthonic spirit. The male spirit corresponds to Dorns substantia coelestis, that is, to knowledge of the inner light the self or imago Dei which is here united with its chthonic counterpart, the feminine spirit of the unconscious. Empirically this is personified in the psychological anima figure, who is not to be confused with the anima of our mediaeval philosophers, which was merely a philosophical anima vegetativa, the ligament of body and spirit. It is, rather, the alchemical queen who corresponds to the psychological anima.215 Accordingly, the coniunctio appears here as the union of a consciousness (spirit), differentiated by self-knowledge, with a spirit abstracted from previously unconscious contents. One could also regard the latter as a quintessence of fantasy-images that enter consciousness either spontaneously or through active imagination and, in their totality, represent a moral or intellectual viewpoint contrasting with, or compensating, that of consciousness. To begin with, however, these images are anything but moral or intellectual; they are more or less concrete visualizations that first have to be interpreted. The alchemist used them more as technical terms for expressing the mysterious properties which he attri buted to his chemical substances. The psychologist, on the contrary, regards them not as allegories but as genuine symbols pointing to psychic contents that are not known but are merely suspected in the background, to the impulses and ides forces of the unconscious. He starts from the fact that connections which are not based on sense-experience derive from fantasy creations which in turn have psychic causes. These causes cannot be perceived directly but are discovered only by deduction. In this work the psychologist has the support of modern fantasy material. It is produced in abundance in psychoses, dreams, and in active imagination during treatment, and it makes accurate investigation possible because the author of the fantasies can always be questioned. In this way the psychic causes can be established. The images often show such a striking resemblance to mythological motifs that one cannot help regarding the causes of the individual fantasies as identical with those that determined the collective and mythological images. In other words, there is no ground for the assumption that human beings in other epochs produced fantasies for quite different reasons, or that their fantasy images sprang from quite different ides forces, from ours. It can be ascertained with reasonable certainty from the literary records of the past that at least the universal human facts were felt and thought about in very much the same way at all times. Were this not so, all intelligent historiography and all understanding of historical texts would be impossible. Naturally there are differences, which make caution necessary in all cases, but these differences are mostly on the surface only and lose their significance the more deeply one penetrates into the meaning of the fundamental motifs.
[737] Thus, the language of the alchemists is at first sight very different from our psychological terminology and way of thinking. But if we treat their symbols in the same way as we treat modern fantasies, they yield a meaning such as we have already deduced from the problematical modern material. The obvious objection that the meaning conveyed by the modern fantasy-material has been uncritically transferred to the historical material, which the alchemists interpreted quite differently, is disproved by the fact that even in the Middle Ages confessed alchemists interpreted their symbols in a moral and philosophical sense. Their philosophy was, indeed, nothing but projected psychology. For as we have said, their ignorance of the real nature of chemical matter favoured the tendency to projection. Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.

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