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object:6.09 - THE THIRD STAGE - THE UNUS MUNDUS
book class:Mysterium Coniunctionis
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


9. THE THIRD STAGE: THE UNUS MUNDUS
[759] The production of the lapis was the goal of alchemy in general. Dorn was a significant exception, because for him this denoted only the completion of the second stage of conjunction. In this he agrees with psychological experience. For us the representation of the idea of the self in actual and visible form is a mere rite dentre, as it were a propaedeutic action and mere anticipation of its realization. The existence of a sense of inner security by no means proves that the product will be stable enough to withstand the disturbing or hostile influences of the environment. The adept had to experience again and again how unfavourable circumstances or a technical blunder oras it seemed to himsome devilish accident hindered the completion of his work, so that he was forced to start all over again from the very beginning. Anyone who submits his sense of inner security to analogous psychic tests will have similar experiences. More than once everything he has built will fall to pieces under the impact of reality, and he must not let this discourage him from examining, again and again, where it is that his attitude is still defective, and what are the blind spots in his psychic field of vision. Just as a lapis Philosophorum, with its miraculous powers, was never produced, so psychic wholeness will never be attained empirically, as consciousness is too narrow and too one-sided to comprehend the full inventory of the psyche. Always we shall have to begin again from the beginning. From ancient times the adept knew that he was concerned with the res simplex, and the modern man too will find by experience that the work does not prosper without the greatest simplicity. But simple things are always the most difficult.
[760] The One and Simple is what Dorn called the unus mundus, This one world was the res simplex.228 For him the third and highest degree of conjunction was the union of the whole man with the unus mundus. By this he meant, as we have seen, the potential world of the first day of creation, when nothing was yet in actu, i.e., divided into two and many, but was still one.229 The creation of unity by a magical procedure meant the possibility of effecting a union with the worldnot with the world of multiplicity as we see it but with a potential world, the eternal Ground of all empirical being, just as the self is the ground and origin of the individual personality past, present, and future. On the basis of a self known by meditation and produced by alchemical means, Dorn hoped and expected to be united with the unus mundus.
[761] This potential world is the mundus archetypus of the Schoolmen. I conjecture that the immediate model for Dorns idea is to be found in Philo Judaeus, who, in his treatise De mundi opificio230 says that the Creator made in the intelligible world an incorporeal heaven, an invisible earth, and the idea of the air and the void. Last of all he created man, a little heaven that bears in itself the reflections of many natures similar to the stars. Here Philo points clearly to the idea of the Microcosm and hence to the unity of the psychic man with the cosmos. According to Philo, the relation of the Creator to the mundus intelligibilis is the imago or archetypus of the relation of the mind to the body. Whether Dorn also knew Plotinus is questionable. In his fourth Ennead (9, iff.) Plotinus discusses the problem of whether all individuals are merely one soul, and he believes he has good grounds for affirming this question. I mention Plotinus because he is an earlier witness to the idea of the unus mundus. The unity of the soul rests empirically on the basic psychic structure common to all souls, which, though not visible and tangible like the anatomical structure, is just as evident as it.
[762] The thought Dorn expresses by the third degree of conjunction is universal: it is the relation or identity of the personal with the suprapersonal atman, and of the individual tao with the universal tao. To the Westerner this view appears not at all realistic and all too mystic; above all he cannot see why a self should become a reality when it enters into relationship with the world of the first day of creation. He has no knowledge of any world other than the empirical one. Strictly speaking, his puzzlement does not begin here; it began already with the production of the caelum, the inner unity. Such thoughts are unpopular and distressingly nebulous. He does not know where they belong or on what they could be based. They might be true or again they might notin short, his experience stops here and with it as a rule his understanding, and, unfortunately, only too often his willingness to learn more. I would therefore counsel the critical reader to put aside his prejudices and for once try to experience on himself the effects of the process I have described, or else to suspend judgment and admit that he understands nothing. For thirty years I have studied these psychic processes under all possible conditions and have assured myself that the alchemists as well as the great philosophies of the East are referring to just such experiences, and that it is chiefly our ignorance of the psyche if these experiences appear mystic.
[763] We should at all events be able to understand that the visualization of the self is a window into eternity, which gave the medieval man, like the Oriental, an opportunity to escape from the stifling grip of a one-sided view of the world or to hold out against it. Though the goal of the opus alchymicum was indubitably the production of the lapis or caelum, there can be no doubt about its tendency to spiritualize the body. This is expressed by the symbol of the air-coloured liquid that floats to the surface. It represents nothing less than a corpus glorificationis, the resurrected body whose relation to eternity is self-evident.
[764] Now just as it seems self-evident to the naive-minded person that an apple falls from the tree to the earth, but absurd to say that the earth rises up to meet the apple, so he can believe without difficulty that the mind is able to spiritualize the body without being affected by its inertia and grossness. But all effects are mutual, and nothing changes anything else without itself being changed. Although the alchemist thought he knew better than anyone else that, at the Creation, at least a little bit of the divinity, the anima mundi, entered into material things and was caught there, he nevertheless believed in the possibility of a one-sided spiritualization, without considering that the precondition for this is a materialization of the spirit in the form of the blue quintessence. In reality his labours elevated the body into proximity with the spirit while at the same time drawing the spirit down into matter. By sublimating matter he concretized spirit.
[765] This self-evident truth was still strange to medieval man and it has been only partially digested even by the man of today. But if a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new, just as for the alchemists the cosmic strife of the elements was composed by the

(stone that is no stone), by a transcendental entity that could be described only in paradoxes.231 Dorns caelum, which corresponded to the stone, was on the one hand a liquid that could be poured out of a bottle and on the other the Microcosm itself. For the psychologist it is the selfman as he is, and the indescribable and super-empirical totality of that same man. This totality is a mere postulate, but a necessary one, because no one can assert that he has complete knowledge of man as he is. Not only in the psychic man is there something unknown, but also in the physical. We should be able to include this unknown quantity in a total picture of man, but we cannot. Man himself is partly empirical, partly transcendental; he too is a

. Also, we do not know whether what we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic. Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience, though this certainly does not justify the arbitrary hypothesis of either materialism or spiritualism.
[766] With this conjecture of the identity of the psychic and the physical we approach the alchemical view of the unus mundus, the potential world of the first day of creation, when there was as yet no second. Before the time of Paracelsus the alchemists believed in creatio ex nihilo. For them, therefore, God himself was the principle of matter. But Paracelsus and his school assumed that matter was an increatum, and hence coexistent and coeternal with God. Whether they considered this view monistic or dualistic I am unable to discover. The only certain thing is that for all the alchemists matter had a divine aspect, whether on the ground that God was imprisoned in it in the form of the anima mundi or anima media natura, or that matter represented Gods reality. In no case was matter de-deified, and certainly not the potential matter of the first day of creation. It seems that only the Paracelsists were influenced by the dualistic words of Genesis.232
[767] If Dorn, then, saw the consummation of the mysterium coniunctionis in the union of the alchemically produced caelum with the unus mundus, he expressly meant not a fusion of the individual with his environment, or even his adaptation to it, but a unio mystica with the potential world. Such a view indeed seems to us mystical, if we misuse this word in its pejorative modern sense. It is not, however, a question of thoughtlessly used words but of a view which can be translated from medieval language into modern concepts. Undoubtedly the idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, and that not two or more fundamentally different worlds exist side by side or are mingled with one another. Rather, everything divided and different belongs to one and the same world, which is not the world of sense but a postulate whose probability is vouched for by the fact that until now no one has been able to discover a world in which the known laws of nature are invalid. That even the psychic world, which is so extraordinarily different from the physical world, does not have its roots outside the one cosmos is evident from the undeniable fact that causal connections exist between the psyche and the body which point to their underlying unitary nature.
[768] All that is is not encompassed by our knowledge, so that we are not in a position to make any statements about its total nature. Microphysics is feeling its way into the unknown side of matter, just as complex psychology is pushing forward into the unknown side of the psyche. Both lines of investigation have yielded findings which can be conceived only by means of antinomies, and both have developed concepts which display remarkable analogies. If this trend should become more pronounced in the future, the hypothesis of the unity of their subject-matters would gain in probability. Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. But this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental backgrounda fact which, as Sir James Jeans has shown, can be expressed by Platos parable of the cave. The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental.
[769] The background of our empirical world thus appears to be in fact a unus mundus. This is at least a probable hypothesis which satisfies the fundamental tenet of scientific theory: Explanatory principles are not to be multiplied beyond the necessary. The transcendental psychophysical background corresponds to a potential world in so far as all those conditions which determine the form of empirical phenomena are inherent in it. This obviously holds good as much for physics as for psychology, or, to be more precise, for macrophysics as much as for the psychology of consciousness.
[770] So if Dorn sees the third and highest degree of conjunction in a union or relationship of the adept, who has produced the caelum, with the unus mundus, this would consist, psychologically, in a synthesis of the conscious with the unconscious. The result of this conjunction or equation is theoretically inconceivable, since a known quantity is combined with an unknown one; but in practice as many far-reaching changes of consciousness result from it as atomic physics has produced in classical physics. The nature of the changes which Dorn expects from the third stage of the coniunctio can be established only indirectly from the symbolism used by the adepts. What he called caelum is, as we have seen, a symbolic prefiguration of the self. We can conclude from this that the desired realization of the whole man was conceived as a healing of organic and psychic ills, since the caelum was described as a universal medicine (the panacea, alexipharmic, medicina catholica, etc.). It was regarded also as the balsam and elixir of life, as a life-prolonging, streng thening, and rejuvenating magical potion. It was a living stone, a

(baetylus), a stone that hath a spirit,233 and the living stone mentioned in the New Testament,234 which in the Shepherd of Hermas is the living man who adds himself as a brick to the tower of the Church. Above all, its incorruptibility is stressed: it lasts a long time, or for all eternity; though alive, it is unmoved; it radiates magic power and transforms the perishable into the imperishable and the impure into the pure; it multiplies itself indefinitely; it is simple and therefore universal, the union of all opposites; it is the parallel of Christ and is called the Saviour of the Macrocosm. But the caelum also signifies mans likeness to God (imago Dei), the anima mundi in matter, and the truth itself. It has a thousand names. It is also the Microcosm, the whole man (

), chn-yn, a homunculus and a hermaphrodite. These designations and significations are but a small selection from the plethora of names mentioned in the literature.
[771] Not unnaturally, we are at a loss to see how a psychic experience of this kind for such it evidently wascan be formulated as a rational concept. Undoubtedly it was meant as the essence of perfection and universality, and, as such, it characterized an experience of similar proportions. We could compare this only with the ineffable mystery of the unio mystica, or tao, or the content of samadhi, or the experience of satori in Zen, which would bring us to the realm of the ineffable and of extreme subjectivity where all the criteria of reason fail. Remarkably enough this experience is an empirical one in so far as there are unanimous testimonies from the East and West alike, both from the present and from the distant past, which confirm its unsurpassable subjective significance. Our knowledge of physical nature gives us no point dappui that would enable us to put the experience on any generally valid basis. It is and remains a secret of the world of psychic experience and can be understood only as a numinous event, whose actuality, nevertheless, cannot be doubted any more than the fact that light of a certain wave-length is perceived as reda fact which remains incomprehensible only to a man suffering from red-green blindness.
[772] What, then, do the statements of the alchemists concerning their arcanum mean, looked at psychologically? In order to answer this question we must remember the working hypothesis we have used for the interpretation of dreams: the images in dreams and spontaneous fantasies are symbols, that is, the best possible formulation for still unknown or unconscious facts, which generally compensate the content of consciousness or the conscious attitude. If we apply this basic rule to the alchemical arcanum, we come to the conclusion that its most conspicuous quality, namely, its unity and uniquenessone is the stone, one the medicine, one the vessel, one the procedure, and one the disposition235presupposes a dissociated consciousness. For no one who is one himself needs oneness as a medicinenor, we might add, does anyone who is unconscious of his dissociation, for a conscious situation of distress is needed in order to activate the archetype of unity. From this we may conclude that the more philosophically minded alchemists were people who did not feel satisfied with the then prevailing view of the world, that is, with the Christian faith, although they were convinced of its truth. In this latter respect we find in the classical Latin and Greek literature of alchemy no evidences to the contrary, but rather, so far as Christian treatises are concerned, abundant testimony to the firmness of their Christian convictions. Since Christianity is expressly a system of salvation, founded moreover on Gods plan of redemption, and God is unity par excellence, one must ask oneself why the alchemists still felt a disunity in themselves, or not at one with themselves, when their faith, so it would appear, gave them every opportunity for unity and unison. (This question has lost nothing of its topicality today, on the contrary!) The question answers itself when we examine more closely the other attri butes that are predicated of the arcanum.
[773] The next quality, therefore, which we have to consider is its physical nature. Although the alchemists attached the greatest importance to this, and the stone was the whole raison dtre of their art, yet it cannot be regarded as merely physical since it is stressed that the stone was alive and possessed a soul and spirit, or even that it was a man or some creature like a man. And although it was also said of God that the world is his physical manifestation, this pantheistic view was rejected by the Church, for God is Spirit and the very reverse of matter. In that case the Christian standpoint would correspond to the unio mentalis in the overcoming of the body. So far as the alchemist professed the Christian faith, he knew that according to his own lights he was still at the second stage of conjunction, and that the Christian truth was not yet realized. The soul was drawn up by the spirit to the lofty regions of abstraction; but the body was de-souled, and since it also had claims to live the unsatisfactoriness of the situation could not remain hidden from him. He was unable to feel himself a whole, and whatever the spiritualization of his existence may have meant to him he could not get beyond the Here and Now of his bodily life in the physical world. The spirit precluded his orientation to physis and vice versa. Despite all assurances to the contrary Christ is not a unifying factor but a dividing sword which sunders the spiritual man from the physical. The alchemists, who, unlike certain moderns, were clever enough to see the necessity and fitness of a further development of consciousness, held fast to their Christian convictions and did not slip back to a more unconscious level. They could not and would not deny the truth of Christianity, and for this reason it would be wrong to accuse them of heresy. On the contrary, they wanted to realize the unity foreshadowed in the idea of God by struggling to unite the unio mentalis with the body.
[774] The mainspring of this endeavour was the conviction that this world was in a morbid condition and that everything was corrupted by original sin. They saw that the soul could be redeemed only if it was freed by the spirit from its natural attachment to the body, though this neither altered nor in any way improved the status of physical life. The Microcosm, i.e., the inner man, was capable of redemption but not the corrupt body. This insight was reason enough for a dissociation of consciousness into a spiritual and a physical personality. They could all declare with St. Paul: O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?236 They therefore strove to find the medicine that would heal all the sufferings of the body and the disunion of the soul, the

which frees the body of its corruptibility, and the elixir vitae which grants the long life of the Biblical aforetime, or even immortality. Since most of them were physicians, they had plenty of opportunities to form an overwhelming impression of the transitoriness of human existence, and to develop that kind of impatience which refuses to wait till Kingdom come for more endurable conditions better in accord with the message of salvation. It is precisely the claims of the physical man and the unendurability of his dissociation that are expressed in this gnawing discontent. The alchemists, consequently, saw themselves faced with the extremely difficult task of uniting the wayward physical man with his spiritual truth. As they were neither unbelievers nor heretics, they could not and would not alter this truth in order to make it more favourably disposed to the body. Besides, the body was in the wrong anyway since it had succumbed to original sin by its moral weakness. It was therefore the body with its darkness that had to be prepared. This, as we have seen, was done by extracting a quintessence which was the physical equivalent of heaven, of the potential world, and on that account was named caelum. It was the very essence of the body, an incorruptible and therefore pure and eternal substance, a corpus glorificatum, capable and worthy of being united with the unio mentalis. What was left over from the body was a terra damnata, a dross that had to be abandoned to its fate. The quintessence, the caelum, on the other hand, corresponded to the pure, incorrupt, original stuff of the world, Gods adequate and perfectly obedient instrument, whose production, therefore, permitted the alchemist to hope and expect the conjunction with the unus mundus.
[775] This solution was a compromise to the disadvantage of physis, but it was nevertheless a noteworthy attempt to bridge the dissociation between spirit and matter. It was not a solution of principle, for the very reason that the procedure did not take place in the real object at all but was a fruitless projection, since the caelum could never be fabricated in reality. It was a hope that was extinguished with alchemy and then, it seems, was struck off the agenda for ever. But the dissociation remained, and, in quite the contrary sense, brought about a far better knowledge of nature and a sounder medicine, while on the other hand it deposed the spirit in a manner that would paralyse Dorn with horror could he see it today. The elixir vitae of modern science has already increased the expectation of life very considerably and hopes for still better results in the future. The unio mentalis, on the other hand, has become a pale phantom, and the veritas Christiana feels itself on the defensive. As for a truth that is hidden in the human body, there is no longer any talk of that. History has remorselessly made good what the alchemical compromise left unfinished: the physical man has been unexpectedly thrust into the foreground and has conquered nature in an undreamt-of way. At the same time he has become conscious of his empirical psyche, which has loosened itself from the embrace of the spirit and begun to take on so concrete a form that its individual features are now the object of clinical observation. It has long ceased to be a life-principle or some kind of philosophical abstraction; on the contrary, it is suspected of being a mere epiphenomenon of the chemistry of the brain. Nor does the spirit any longer give it life; rather is it conjectured that the spirit owes its existence to psychic activity. Today psychology can call itself a science, and this is a big concession on the part of the spirit. What demands psychology will make on the other natural sciences, and on physics in particular, only the future can tell.




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