53 Psychology
43 Occultism
9 Poetry
8 Integral Yoga
4 Fiction
1 Philosophy
1 Alchemy
55 Carl Jung
7 Sri Aurobindo
5 Jorge Luis Borges
4 Nolini Kanta Gupta
3 Jordan Peterson
3 H P Lovecraft
3 Franz Bardon
2 The Mother
2 Satprem
2 Saint John of the Cross
2 Aleister Crowley
33 Mysterium Coniunctionis
12 The Practice of Psycho therapy
5 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
5 Aion
4 The Secret Doctrine
3 Savitri
3 Maps of Meaning
3 Lovecraft - Poems
3 Initiation Into Hermetics
2 Liber ABA
2 Labyrinths
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
2 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
01.04 - The Poetry in the Making, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Like the modern scientist the artist or craftsman too of today has become a philosopher, even a mystic philosopher. The subtler and higher ranges of consciousness are now the object of inquiry and investigation and expression and revelation for the scientist as well as for the artist. The external sense-objects, the phenomenal movements are symbols and signposts, graphs and pointer-readings of facts and realities that lie hidden, behind or beyond. The artist and the scientist are occult alchemists. What to make of this, for example:
Beyond the shapes of empire, the capes of Carbonek, over
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0 1960-04-13, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
My friend here gave me the book Templier et Alchimiste [Templar and alchemist] to read; its published by the group he is going to join in France. They too speak of the transmutation of matter and proclaim the end of homo sapiens and the birth of the superman.
I long to be with you and work on the book on Sri Aurobindo I want to put all my soul into it and, with your grace, create something inflaming.
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02.06 - The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Life, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
He watched in the alchemist radiance of her suns
The crimson outburst of one secular flower
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03.02 - The Adoration of the Divine Mother, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The spirit's alchemist energy is hers;
She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.
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03.04 - The Vision and the Boon, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This alchemist's miracle from plasm and gas,
And he who shared the animal's run and crawl
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1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
fire of the alchemists, or phlogiston, or the heat-force inherent
in matter, like the "primal warmth" of the Stoics, or the Hera-
--
reason he was called by the alchemists the "first son of the
mother." The black magician and the black horse correspond to
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ciple paradoxical, just as for the alchemists the spirit was
conceived as "senex et iuvenis simul" an old man and a youth
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1.01 - Historical Survey, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
theological and philosophical thinkers, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among those devoted to the study of its theorems were Raymond Lully, the scholastic metaphysician and alchemist ; John Reuchlin, who revived Oriental Philosophy in Europe ; John Baptist von Helmont, the physician and chemist who discovered hydrogen ; Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated " God- intoxicated " Jewish philosopher ; and Dr. Henry More, the famous Cambridge Platonist. These men, to name but a few among many who have been attracted to the
Qabalistic ideology, after restlessly searching for a world- view which should disclose to them the true explanations of life, and show the real inner bond uniting all things, found the cravings of their minds at least partially satisfied by its psychological and philosophical system.
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1.01 - MAPS OF EXPERIENCE - OBJECT AND MEANING, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
sayest the truth; if heavenly, thou liest not; if earthly, thou hast well spoken. The alchemist could not
separate his subjective ideas about the nature of things that is, his hypotheses from the things
--
The alchemists, whose conceptualizations intermingled affect with sense, dealt with affect as a matter of
course (although they did not know it not explicitly). We have removed the affect from the thing, and
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1.01 - THE OPPOSITES, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[2] The opposites and their symbols are so common in the texts that it is superfluous to cite evidence from the sources. On the other hand, in view of the ambiguity of the alchemists language, which is tam ethice quam physice (as much ethical as physical), it is worth while to go rather more closely into the manner in which the texts treat of the opposites. Very often the masculine-feminine opposition is personified as King and Queen (in the Rosarium philosophorum also as Emperor and Empress), or as servus (slave) or vir rubeus (red man) and mulier candida (white woman);5 in the Visio Arislei they appear as Gabricus (or Thabritius) and Beya, the Kings son and daughter.6 Theriomorphic symbols are equally common and are often found in the illustrations.7 I would mention the eagle and toad (the eagle flying through the air and the toad crawling on the ground), which are the emblem of Avicenna in Michael Maier,8 the eagle representing Luna or Juno, Venus, Beya, who is fugitive and winged like the eagle, which flies up to the clouds and receives the rays of the sun in his eyes. The toad is the opposite of air, it is a contrary element, namely earth, whereon alone it moves by slow steps, and does not trust itself to another element. Its head is very heavy and gazes at the earth. For this reason it denotes the philosophic earth, which cannot fly [i.e., cannot be sublimated], as it is firm and solid. Upon it as a foundation the golden house9 is to be built. Were it not for the earth in our work the air would fly away, neither would the fire have its nourishment, nor the water its vessel.10
[3] Another favourite theriomorphic image is that of the two birds or two dragons, one of them winged, the other wingless. This allegory comes from an ancient text, De Chemia Senioris antiquissimi philosophi libellus.11 The wingless bird or dragon prevents the other from flying. They stand for Sol and Luna, brother and sister, who are united by means of the art.12 In Lambspringks Symbols13 they appear as the astrological Fishes which, swimming in opposite directions, symbolize the spirit / soul polarity. The water they swim in is mare nostrum (our sea) and is interpreted as the body.14 The fishes are without bones and cortex.15 From them is produced a mare immensum, which is the aqua permanens (permanent water). Another symbol is the stag and unicorn meeting in the forest.16 The stag signifies the soul, the unicorn spirit, and the forest the body. The next two pictures in Lambspringks Symbols show the lion and lioness,17 or the wolf and dog, the latter two fighting; they too symbolize soul and spirit. In Figure VII the opposites are symbolized by two birds in a wood, one fledged, the other unfledged. Whereas in the earlier pictures the conflict seems to be between spirit and soul, the two birds signify the conflict between spirit and body, and in Figure VIII the two birds fighting do in fact represent that conflict, as the caption shows. The opposition between spirit and soul is due to the latter having a very fine substance. It is more akin to the hylical body and is densior et crassior (denser and grosser) than the spirit.
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10.28 - Love and Love, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Of course, there was always in the ancient days also, in some disciplines or others, an aspiration, an urge to immortalise the body, but the means they adopted, the instruments they chose for the operation were indirect and secondary. It was either through the force of a luminous mind influencing the body or through the pressure of concentrated vital force making the body an obedient and docile instrument. The former was the process followed by the Vaishnavas who envisaged a luminous body, the second was the aim of the Tantriks who sought to rejuvenate the body, possess it youthful and vigorous indefinitely. The Hatha yogis also in their turn through physico-vital exercises attempted to acquire a new body changing the modalities of the old. The ancient alchemists tried more material means, the use of alchemic substances for cleansing the body making it free from disease and, if possible, death. But the secret power lies in the body itself, that is, in the very self of the body, not anywhere else. The hidden consciousness lodged in the cell, the material cell, that is the key to the problem, that secret consciousness and its energy asleep in the cell, has to be awakened and brought into play. When the physical cell itself awakes and declares its purpose, the thing is done.
This secret consciousness-energy appearing as a material form is also intrinsically the delight of existence. Its other name is Divine Grace and Love.
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1.02 - THE QUATERNIO AND THE MEDIATING ROLE OF MERCURIUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[12] In addition, we learn from the scholia that the circle and the Hermetic vessel are one and the same, with the result that the mandala, which we find so often in the drawings of our patients, corresponds to the vessel of transformation. Consequently, the usual quaternary structure of the mandala57 would coincide with the alchemists quaternio of opposites. Lastly, there is the interesting statement that an Ecclesia spiritualis above all creeds and owing allegiance solely to Christ, the Anthropos, is the real aim of the alchemists endeavours. Whereas the treatise of Hermes is, comparatively speaking, very old, and in place of the Christian Anthropos mystery58 contains a peculiar paraphrase of it, or rather, its antique parallel,59 the scholia cannot be dated earlier than the beginning of the seventeenth century.60 The author seems to have been a Paracelsist physician. Mercurius corresponds to the Holy Ghost as well as to the Anthropos; he is, as Gerhard Dorn says, the true hermaphroditic Adam and Microcosm:
Our Mercurius is therefore that same [Microcosm], who contains within him the perfections, virtues, and powers of Sol [in the dual sense of sun and gold], and who goes through the streets [vicos] and houses of all the planets, and in his regeneration has obtained the power of Above and Below, wherefore he is to be likened to their marriage, as is evident from the white and the red that are conjoined in him. The sages have affirmed in their wisdom that all creatures are to be brought to one united substance.61
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1.03 - THE ORPHAN, THE WIDOW, AND THE MOON, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[21] All the more ruthlessly, therefore, does alchemy insist on the dangerousness of the new moon. Luna is on the one hand the brilliant whiteness of the full moon, on the other hand she is the blackness of the new moon, and especially the blackness of the eclipse, when the sun is darkened. Indeed, what she does to the sun comes from her own dark nature. The Consilium coniugii143 tells us very clearly what the alchemists thought about Luna:
The lion, the lower sun,144 grows corrupt through the flesh. [His flesh is weak because he suffers from quartan fever.145] Thus is the lion146 corrupted in his nature through his flesh, which follows the times of the moon,147 and is eclipsed. For the moon is the shadow of the sun, and with corruptible bodies she is consumed, and through her corruption is the lion eclipsed with the help of the moisture of Mercurius,148 yet his eclipse is changed to usefulness and to a better nature, and one more perfect than the first.
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[23] The alchemists also represented the eclipse as the descent of the sun into the (feminine) Mercurial Fountain,160 or as the disappearance of Gabricus in the body of Beya. Again, the sun in the embrace of the new moon is treacherously slain by the snake-bite (conatu viperino) of the mother-beloved, or pierced by the telum passionis, Cupids arrow.161 These ideas explain the strange picture in Reusners Pandora,162 showing Christ being pierced with a lance by a crowned virgin whose body ends in a serpents tail.163 The oldest reference to the mermaid in alchemy is a quotation from Hermes in Olympiodorus: The virginal earth is found in the tail of the virgin.164 On the analogy of the wounded Christ, Adam is shown in the Codex Ashburnham pierced in the side by an arrow.165
[24] This motif of wounding is taken up by Honorius of Autun in his commentary on the Song of Songs.166 Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast wounded my heart with one of thy eyes, and with one hair of thy neck (DV).167 The sponsa says (1 : 4): I am black, but comely, and (1 : 5) Look not upon me because I am black, because the sun hath scorched me. This allusion to the nigredo was not missed by the alchemists.168 But there is another and more dangerous reference to the bride in 6 : 4f.: Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners. Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me . . . 10: Who is this that looketh forth as the rising dawn [quasi aurora consurgens],169 fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?170 The bride is not only lovely and innocent, but witch-like and terrible, like the side of Selene that is related to Hecate. Like her, Luna is all-seeing, an all-knowing eye.171 Like Hecate she sends madness, epilepsy, and other sicknesses. Her special field is love magic, and magic in general, in which the new moon, the full moon, and the moons darkness play a great part. The animals assigned to herstag, lion, and cock 172are also symbols of her male partner in alchemy. As the chthonic Persephone her animals, according to Pythagoras, are dogs,173 i.e., the planets. In alchemy Luna herself appears as the Armenian bitch.174 The sinister side of the moon plays a considerable role in classical tradition.
[25] The sponsa is the dark new moonin Christian interpretation the Church in the nuptial embrace 175and this union is at the same time a wounding of the sponsus, Sol or Christ. Honorius comments on Thou hast wounded my heart as follows:
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[27] The motif of wounding in alchemy goes back to Zosimos (3rd cent.) and his visions of a sacrificial drama.180 The motif does not occur in such complete form again. One next meets it in the Turba: The dew is joined to him who is wounded and given over to death.181 The dew comes from the moon, and he who is wounded is the sun.182 In the treatise of Philaletha, Introitus apertus ad occlusum Regis palatium,183 the wounding is caused by the bite of the rabid Corascene dog,184 in consequence of which the hermaphrodite child suffered from hydrophobia.185 Dorn, in his De tenebris contra naturam, associates the motif of wounding and the poisonous snake-bite with Genesis 3: For the sickness introduced into nature by the serpent, and the deadly wound she inflicted, a remedy is to be sought.186 Accordingly it is the task of alchemy to root out the original sin, and this is accomplished with the aid of the balsamum vitae (balsam of life), which is a true mixture of the natural heat with its radical moisture. The life of the world is the light of nature and the celestial sulphur,187 whose substance is the aetheric moisture and heat of the firmament, like to the sun and moon.188 The conjunction of the moist (= moon) and the hot (= sun) thus produces the balsam, which is the original and incorrupt life of the world. Genesis 3 : 15, he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel (RSV), was generally taken as a prefiguration of the Redeemer. But since Christ was free from the stain of sin the wiles of the serpent could not touch him, though of course mankind was poisoned. Whereas the Christian belief is that man is freed from sin by the redemptory act of Christ, the alchemist was evidently of the opinion that the restitution to the likeness of original and incorrupt nature had still to be accomplished by the art, and this can only mean that Christs work of redemption was regarded as incomplete. In view of the wickednesses which the Prince of this world,189 undeterred, goes on perpetrating as liberally as before, one cannot withhold all sympathy from such an opinion. For an alchemist who professed allegiance to the Ecclesia spiritualis it was naturally of supreme importance to make himself an unspotted vessel of the Paraclete and thus to realize the idea Christ on a plane far transcending a mere imitation of him. It is tragic to see how this tremendous thought got bogged down again and again in the welter of human folly. A shattering example of this is afforded not only by the history of the Church, but above all by alchemy itself, which richly merited its own condemnationin ironical fulfilment of the dictum In sterquiliniis invenitur (it is found in cesspools). Agrippa von Nettesheim was not far wrong when he opined that Chymists are of all men the most perverse.190
[28] In his Mysterium Lunae, an extremely valuable study for the history of alchemical symbolism, Rahner191 mentions that the waxing and waning of the bride (Luna, Ecclesia) is based on the kenosis192 of the bridegroom, in accordance with the words of St. Ambrose:193
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[30] St. Ambroses reference to the kenosis makes the changing of the moon causally dependent on the transformation of the bridegroom. The darkening of Luna then depends on the sponsus, Sol, and here the alchemists could refer to the darkening of the beloveds countenance in Song of Songs 1 : 45. The sun, too, is equipped with darts and arrows. Indeed, the secret poisoning that otherwise emanates from the coldness and moisture of the moon is occasionally attributed to the cold dragon, who contains a volatile fiery spirit and spits flames. Thus in Emblem L of the Scrutinium198 he is given a masculine role: he wraps the woman in the grave in a deadly embrace. The same thought occurs again in Emblem V, where a toad is laid on the breast of the woman so that she, suckling it, may die as it grows.199 The toad is a cold and damp animal like the dragon. It empties the woman as though the moon were pouring herself into the sun.200
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1.03 - The Tale of the Alchemist Who Sold His Soul, #The Castle of Crossed Destinies, #Italo Calvino, #Fiction
object:1.03 - The Tale of the alchemist Who Sold His Soul
class:chapter
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The Tale of the alchemist Who Sold His Soul
The emotion aroused by this story had not yet died away when another of our companions indicated that he wanted to tell his own. One episode, especially, in the knight's tale seemed to have attracted his attention, or, rather, it was one of the random pairings of cards in the second row: the Ace of Cups, placed beside The Popess. To suggest how he felt personally involved in that juxtaposition, he pushed up to the right of those two cards the figure of the King of Cups (which could have passed for a very youthful and-to tell the truth-exaggeratedly flattering portrait of him) and, on the left, continuing in a horizontal line, an Eight of Clubs.
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The most probable hypothesis that occurred to me was that the card stood for the Fountain of Life, the supreme goal of the alchemist's search, and that our companion was, in fact, one of those scholars who scrutinize alembics and crucibles (like the complicated vessel that his royally clad figure held in its hand), trying to wrest from Nature her secrets, and especially that of the transformation of metals.
We could believe that, from his earliest youth (this was the meaning of the portrait with adolescent features, which could at the same time allude also to the elixir of long life) he had had no other passion (the fountain remained nevertheless an amorous symbol) save the manipulation of the elements, and for years he had waited to see the yellow king of the mineral world precipitate in the depths of his cauldron. And in this quest he had finally sought the counsel and aid of those women sometimes encountered in forests, experts in philters and magic potions, devoted to the arts of witchcraft and foretelling the future (like the woman he indicated, with superstitious reverence, as The Popess).
--
It would hardly have been surprising if our alchemist had got a swelled head, expecting any day an extraordinary change in the course of his life. This event must have been indicated in the following card, which was the enigmatic First Arcanum, sometimes known as The Juggler, in which some see a charlatan or magician performing his tricks.
So, then, our hero, raising his eyes from his desk, had seen a magician seated before him, as he handled his alembics and his retorts.
--
So Mephistopheles had then answered, "Your soul!": an idea that can be represented only with the figure of Psyche, the young girl who illuminates the shadows with her light, as she is contemplated in The Star. The Five of Cups which was then shown us could be read as the alchemistic secret the Devil revealed to Faust, or as a toast to seal their bargain, or as the bells which, with their strokes, put the infernal visitor to flight. But we could also interpret the card as a discourse upon the soul and upon the body as the soul's vessel. (One of the five cups was painted horizontally, as if it were empty.)
"My soul?" our Faust may have answered. "And what if I had no soul?"
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Now there was still The Wheel of Fortune to interpret, one of the most complicated images in the whole tarot game. It could mean simply that fortune had turned in Faust's direction, but this explanation seemed too obvious for the alchemist's narrative style, always elliptical and allusive. On the other hand, it was legitimate to suppose that our doctor, having got possession of the diabolical secret, conceived a monstrous plan: to change into gold all that was changeable. The wheel of the Tenth Arcanum would then literally mean the toiling gears of the Great Gold Mill, the gigantic mechanism which would raise up the Metropolis of Precious Metal; and the human forms of various ages seen pushing the wheel or rotating with it were there to indicate the crowds of men who eagerly lent a hand to the project and dedicated the years of their lives to turning those wheels day and night. This interpretation failed to take into account all the details of the miniature (for example, the animalesque ears and tails that adorned some of the revolving human figures), but it was a basis for interpreting the following cards of cups and coins as the Kingdom of Abundance in which the City of Gold's inhabitants wallowed. (The rows of yellow circles perhaps evoked the gleaming domes of golden skyscrapers that flanked the streets of the Metropolis.)
But when would the established price be collected by the Cloven Contracting Party? The story's two final cards were already on the table, placed there by the first narrator: the Two of Swords and Temperance. At the gates of the City of Gold armed guards blocked the way to anyone who wished to enter, to prevent access to the Cloven-hooved Collector, no matter in what guise he might turn up. And even if a simple maiden, like the one in the last card, were to approach, the guards made her halt.
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1.04 - ALCHEMY AND MANICHAEISM, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[34] The inflammation by desire has its analogy in the alchemists gradual warming of the substances that contain the arcanum. Here the symbol of the sweat-bath plays an important role, as the illustrations show.227 Just as for the Manichaeans the sweat of the archons signified rain,228 so for the alchemists sweat meant dew.229 In this connection we should also mention the strange legend reported in the Acta Archelai, concerning the apparatus which the son of the living Father invented to save human souls. He constructed a great wheel with twelve buckets which, as they revolved, scooped up the souls from the deep and deposited them on the moon-ship.230 In alchemy the rota is the symbol of the opus circulatorium. Like the alchemists, the Manichaeans had a virago, the male virgin Joel,231 who gave Eve a certain amount of the light-substance.232 The role she plays in regard to the princes of darkness corresponds to that of Mercurius duplex, who like her sets free the secret hidden in matter, the light above all lights, the filius philosophorum. I would not venture to decide how much in these parallels is to be ascribed directly to Manichaean tradition, how much to indirect influence, and how much to spontaneous revival.
[35] Our starting-point for these remarks was the designation of the lapis as orphan, which Dorn mentions apparently out of the blue when discussing the union of opposites. The material we have adduced shows what an archetypal drama of death and rebirth lies hidden in the coniunctio, and what immemorial human emotions clash together in this problem. It is the moral task of alchemy to bring the feminine, maternal background of the masculine psyche, seething with passions, into harmony with the principle of the spirittruly a labour of Hercules! In Dorns words:
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1.04 - Descent into Future Hell, #The Red Book Liber Novus, #unset, #Zen
Panapolis, a natural philosopher and alchemist of the third century. Jung noted: "What I sacrifice is my egotistical claim, and by doing this I give up myself Every sacrifice is therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, a self-sacrifice" (CW II, 397). Cf also the Katha Upanishad, ch. 2, verse
19. Jung cited the next two verses of the Katha Upanishad on the nature of the self in 1921 (CW
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1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
Christ, the second fruit of the tree of knowledge). The medieval alchemists tended to adopt a gnostic
interpretation of the Edenic story, for this reason, as Jung states:
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1.04 - The Paths, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
Its magical formula is Regeneration through Putrefac- tion. The alchemists of old used this formula mainly. The first common matter of their operations was base, and had to pass through several stages of corruptions or putrefac- tion (or chemical change, as it would be styled to-day), when it was called the black dragon - but from this putrid stage, the pure gold was derived.
Another application of the same formula applies to that psychological state of which all mystics speak, viz. : the
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1.04 - What Arjuna Saw - the Dark Side of the Force, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
n the spiritual alchemist experimenting in his labora-
tory to realize his own transformation;
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1.05 - Christ, A Symbol of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
fish symbol, so it seemed to the alchemists that their parallel
with the stone served to illuminate and deepen the meaning of
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one that faced the alchemists: Is the self a symbol of Christ, or
is Christ a symbol of the self?
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Christ. As I have said, there is among certain of the alchemists,
too, a tendency to give the lapis priority over Christ. Since I
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1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
modern science logically enough, as the ancient alchemists practiced in the absence of the presumptions
and tools of modern science. It was a substance more like Tao to that which produced or constituted the
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The late-stage alchemists posited that a personality that had completely assimilated the spirit of the
unknown was equivalent to Christ. Jung translated their image-laden mythological language into
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The western alchemists followed the scenario, known already in the Hellenistic period, of the four
phases of the process of transmutation: that is, of the procurement of the Philosophers Stone. The first
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the alchemists, they both are to be found everywhere, and under all forms; and they are designated by
hundreds of terms. To cite only a text of 1526, the Stone is familiar to all men, both young and old; it is
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the Arabic alchemists who imparted therapeutic virtues to the Stone, and it is through the intermediary
of Arabic alchemy that the concept of the Elixir vitae arrived in the West.578 Roger Bacon speaks of a
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his play The alchemist (Act 2, Scene 2). The alchemist affirms that lead and other metals . . . would be
312
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christological significance. The alchemists now affirmed that just as Christ had redeemed humanity by
his death and resurrection, so the opus alchymicum could assure the redemption of Nature. Heinrich
--
Carl Jung devoted a tremendous amount of attention to the writings of the alchemists, in the latter part of
his life. These efforts merely added fuel to the fire of those who had branded him eccentric, because of his
--
psychology without entering into the categorical system of the alchemist. The stuff with which the
alchemist worked, although bearing the same name, was only vaguely akin to our modern matter. There are
many ways to cut the world up, and they are not necessarily commensurate. Much of what the alchemist
considered thing we would not think of as characteristic of the objective world; furthermore, what he
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the end towards which activity is currently devoted. The ends pursued by the alchemist were by no means
identical to those considered worthwhile today. In large part, they were much more comprehensive (the
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examining the matter of the alchemist, and by comparing it to what we think of as matter.
Alchemical matter was the stuff of which experience was made and more: the stuff of which the
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The alchemists regarded the transcendent capacity of the object that is, the capacity of the familiar
and explored in one context to become the unfamiliar and unexplored in another as a spirit, embedded
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the activities of the alchemist. Mercurius was the spirit that made the matter investigated by the adept
interesting, compelling and interest is a spirit that moves from place to place, as knowledge changes
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teasing goblin who drove the alchemists to despair and had many of his attri butes in common with the
devil. For instance he is dragon, lion, eagle, raven to mention only the most important of them. In the
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philosophorum. The spiritus mercurialis is the alchemists guide (Hermes Psychopompos), and their
tempter: he is their good luck and their ruin.599
The alchemists conflated what we would think of as matter with what we might regard as the
unknown. This is hardly surprising, since matter was the unknown to the pre-scientific mind (and is
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accurately presented what is an iron block not, for man? The pre-experimental mind of the alchemist,
pondering the nature of the prima materia the fundamental constituent element of experience easily
--
characteristic presumptions of the alchemist Michael Maier:
The sun, by its many millions of revolutions, spins the gold into the earth. Little by little the sun has
--
exterior obstacles to the execution of her designs, wrote a Western alchemist, Nature would always
complete what she wished to produce.... That is why we have to look upon the births of imperfect metals
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The alchemist viewed himself as midwife to Nature as bringing to fruition what Nature endeavoured
slowly to produce and therefore as aid to a transformation aimed at producing something ideal. Gold is
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of the part assumed by the alchemist as the brotherly savior of Nature. He assists Nature to fulfil her
final goal, to attain her ideal, which is the perfection of its progeny be it mineral, animal or human
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The alchemists lived in a world that had theoretically been redeemed, by the sacrifice of Christ at
least from the Christian perspective. But they did not feel redeemed were not satisfied with the present
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extract from the unknown new and useful tools). The alchemists assumed, implicitly, that further
exploration might bring redemptive knowledge. This search was driven by their admission of the
unbearable present by their identification with a still-fallen world. The alchemists believed that the
desirable transmutation of matter could be brought about by the release of Mercurius from matter. This
--
In participating in this process, the alchemists identified with the exploratory hero, and turned
themselves unconsciously (that is, in procedure, if not always in representation) into that which
redeems. This identification was complicated by the fact that the alchemist also considered himself as
partaking of the state of matter as belonging in the state necessitating redemption. This basically meant
that the alchemist viewed himself, at least in part, as in the same category as matter (as well as being that
which could become gold, and which could aid in that transformation). For the pre-experimental mind,
--
the alchemist and the relation of the alchemical procedure to his own being was further streng thened by
323
--
that this came as anything but a surprise to the alchemists themselves. We are in for a shock at least as
great.
--
fallen material world the alchemist himself had to become great. Thus the alchemical literature might be
regarded, in part, as one long meditation, on the nature of the ideal man.
--
Europe). The alchemists were the first to risk this attri bution, or something similar to it; but they still
studied matter in the absence of explicit empirical methodology. Jung states:
--
between esse in re and esse in intellectu solo. The way out lay in metaphysics. The alchemist was
therefore compelled to formulate his quasichemical facts metaphysically too.606
--
[The alchemists]... believed that they were studying the unknown phenomenon of matter... and they
just observed what came up and interpreted that, somehow, but without any specific plan. There would
--
Imagine an old alchemists situation. A man in a certain village would build an isolated hut and cook
things which caused explosions. Quite naturally, everyone calls him a witch doctor! One day someone
comes and says he has found a queer piece of metal and would the alchemist be interested in buying it?
The alchemist does not know the value of the metal, but gives the man some money at a guess. He then
puts what has been brought him in his stove and mixes it with sulphur, or something similar, to see what
--
liquids. The alchemists therefore wrote about it in the naive form which I am now describing and did not
notice that that was not natural science but contained a lot of projection, if looked at from a modern
--
Observing what he did not understand, the alchemist had recourse only to speculation, which he used to
interpret that unknown. These speculations look like fantasies to the modern mind like the fantasies of the
--
forth equally mysterious new substances. In this profound darkness the alchemists fantasy had free play
and could playfully combine the most inconceivable things. It could act without restraint and, in so
--
The alchemist thought in a medieval fashion or pre-medieval using archaic preconceptions and
ideas. Analysis of that thought, projected upon matter (just as we interpret matter in the light of our
--
saying solve et coagula [dissolve and reconstitute], the alchemist saw the essence of his art in
separation and analysis on the one hand and synthesis and consolidation on the other. For him there was
--
The alchemists began their work, their opus, by determining to face the unknown, locked away in the
material world, in the pursuit of an ideal. Their ideal was symbolized by the lapis philosophorum, which
--
the fact that no alchemist every reached his goal. Jung states:
In view of the fact that... a miracle never did occur in the retort, despite repeated assertions that
--
In order to answer this difficult question one must bear in mind that the alchemists, guided by their
keenness for research, were in fact on a hopeful path since the fruit that alchemy bore after centuries of
--
wisdom. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the alchemists did not turn away in disgust
from their almost invariably futile projects.610
--
The alchemist was an unredeemed, suffering man, in search of an inexpressible ideal. He formulated
that ideal, and its process of generation, using terms that referred to the physical world, at least from the
modern perspective. However, the alchemist made no clear distinction between psychological and
objective. His search for the ideal was therefore as much psychological as chemical (more, actually, since
he worked in the absence even of the basic tools of modern science). The alchemist posited that the answer
lay outside the Church, in the unknown. Exploration of the unknown and forbidden meant generation of
--
perfection. So broadly speaking the alchemist wanted to transform every subordinate element in the
category matter (the unknown, fallen, corrupt world, including man as material being) into the category
--
The alchemist courageously posited that the work of redemption held up as absolute by the Church was
not yet complete or at least acted as if there was still work to be done. So he hoped to turn what was
--
The alchemists soon came to realize that movement towards the ideal did not mean an unbroken journey
uphill; soon came to realized that a large leap forward was necessarily preceded by a radical descent.
--
Once the alchemist had decided to look into the unknown for salvation, rather than to the Chuch (or at
least in addition to the Church), he placed himself outside the protective confines of his previous system of
--
information that comes to constitute the determinate experiencing subject. The alchemists therefore
granted the prima materia a half chemical, half mythological definition: For one alchemist, it was
quicksilver, for others it was ore, iron, gold, lead, salt, sulphur, vinegar, water, air, fire, earth, blood, water
--
The alchemists understood the prima materia to be as of yet unredeemed, however, and base. The
notion of corrupted matter was a moral notion, and the imperfection of matter therefore a moral
imperfection. The alchemists reflections on the nature of this imperfect matter inevitably took the form of
reflections upon the moral problem of imperfection and material corruption, as such. Since the alchemist
thought analogically and symbolically, in the absence of the empirical method, he fantasized or imagined
--
smiths, miners and alchemists were serving therefore serving the role of midwife, striving to help the
Earth bring forth the perfect substances it evidently desired to produce. Eliade states, with regards to the
--
not, of couse, claim that there is an unbroken continuity between the mental world of the alchemist and
that of the miner, metal-worker and smith (although, indeed, the initiation rites and mysteries of the
--
But what the smelter, smith and alchemist have in common is that all three lay claim to a particular
magico-religious experience in their relations with matter; this experience is their monopoly, and its
--
In the unredeemed prima materia the alchemist understood matter to be trapped in an imperfect state;
just as man himself was trapped, in a corrupt and perishable state, by his sinful, demonic physical material
--
signified a moral transformation, which could be brought about through moral means. The alchemists were
searching for a method to redeem corruption. They applied their fantastical reasoning to redemption of
--
although the alchemists conflated the psyche and objective reality, their conflation was meaningful.
The alchemist did redeem himself, by studying the redemptive transformations of matter most
simply, because exploration releases information that can be used to construct personality; more
--
stable or rigid substance. The archetypal first stage in any moral transformation (which the alchemist
was striving to produce) constitutes tragic disruption of the previous state of being. The disintegration of
the prima materia was analogically equivalent to the degeneration of the alchemists previous sociallydetermined intrapsychic state, consequential to his decision to pursue the unknown:
The chemical putrefaction is compared to the study of the philosophers, because as the philosophers are
--
The nature of the previous state of the alchemist, its symbolic equivalent in the prima materia, and the
consequences of its disintegration, can be placed in context by examination of the medieval world-view.
--
that the alchemist placed himself outside the protection of his cultural canon, in the psychological sense,
and at the mercy of the ecclesiastical authorities in the practical world. Investigation of matter and its
--
The alchemist, in beginning his pursuit, placed himself outside the protective enclave of conformity, and
risked the investigation of an aspect of experience which, according to the world-view of his time, was
--
itself, in the pursuit of value. The alchemist who pursued this investigation already believed he was in need
of redemption, that he was incomplete, or he would have never dared step outside the boundaries drawn by
--
imaginative fantasy. The alchemist worked alone, concentrating on his procedure for months and years at a
time, and in this solitary pursuit, his fantasy had free reign. Once he had the courage to admit to his own
--
itself in symbolic form. The alchemist was searching for comprehension of the nature of material
corruption, and for a method whereby it could be perfected. Christian dogma stated that the world had been
finally redeemed by the Passion of Christ; but it appeared evident to the alchemist that material substances,
including himself, remained morally corrupt and incomplete. Admission of imperfection was therefore
--
body of his mother, and return to the dark initial state which the alchemists called the chaos. In this
massa confusa the elements are in conflict and repel one another; all connections are dissolved.
--
humanity war without subjection to a higher-order power. The alchemists described this stage of their
opus as the nigredo, or blackness a condition we would associate with depression, psychological chaos,
--
fundamental constituent structures of the alchemists psyche to become actively personified in fantasy.
Elements of individual, patriarchal, and matriarchal systems vie in competition, lacking uniting principle,
--
The alchemists believed that perfection was characterized by a state of unity, in which all competing
opposites were united. The final stage of the alchemical procedure the conjunction was therefore
--
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
--
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
--
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
--
a state usually engenders sufficient discomfort to bring further moral development to a halt. The alchemist,
however, implicitly adopted a heroic role, when he voluntarily determined to pursue the unknown, in
--
robber, the wolf, lion, and other ravening beasts which for the alchemists symbolized the appetites that
break loose when the black waters of chaos i.e., the unconsciousness of projection have swallowed
--
immersion in life is the mystical peregrination of the medieval alchemist, in search of the philosophers
stone is the journey of Buddha through the complete sensory, erotic, and philosophical realms, prior to
--
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
--
Arisleus (a Byzantine alchemist of the 8th or 9th century) tells of his adventures with the Rex Marinus,
in whose kingdom nothing prospers and nothing is begotten. Moreover, there are no philosophers there.
--
realized in behavior. And this was not necessarily yet even the final stage. The alchemist Dorn states:
We conclude that meditative philosophy consists in the overcoming of the body by mental union (unio
--
the mind of the alchemist. This sequence followed the pattern of the way, upon which all religions have
developed. Formal Christianity adopted the position that the sacrifice of Christ brought history to a close,
--
what remained unknown. In that (heroic) pursuit the alchemist found himself transformed:
Whereas the Christian belief is that man is freed from sin by the redemptory act of Christ, the alchemist
was evidently of the opinion that the restitution to the likeness of original and incorrupt nature had
--
It was in pursuit of the unknown that the alchemist experienced this psychological transformation, just
as it was originally in contact with the unknown that the (monotheistic) patriarchal system developed, in the
--
improve life. The alchemist experienced what the individual always experiences, when he determines to
face every aspect of his existence (individual and collective), without denial or recourse to sterile
--
This final value, the goal of the pursuit of the alchemists, is discovery and embodiment of the meaning of
life itself: integrated subjective being actively expressing its nature through manipulation of the
--
The alchemists (re)discovered the error of this presumption, and came to realize that identification with the
redeemer was in fact necessary, not his worship came to realize that that myths of redemption had true
--
Thus an old alchemist and he a cleric! prays... Purge the horrible darknesses of our minds, light a
light for our senses! The author of this sentence must have been undergoing the experience of the
--
cited in [Eliade, M. (1978a). p. 158]. One will find the same doctrine among the Chinese alchemists [see Eliade, M.
(1982). pp. 37-43]. [Eliade, M. (1985). p. 256, footnote 90].
--
themselves, however, whether alchemy could assist nature in this process, and above all whether those alchemists who
claimed to have done so already were honest men, fools, or impostors [see Dobbs, B.J.T. (1975). p. 44). Herman
|
1.06 - The Sign of the Fishes, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
preoccupied the alchemists for many centuries.
59 "The Spirit Mercurius," pars. 284ft:., and "A Psychological Approach to the
--
a metaphor used by the alchemists.
69 De errore projanarum religionum, 20, 1.
|
1.07 - Akasa or the Ethereal Principle, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
It is the quintessence of the alchemists; it is all in all.
|
1.08 - Psycho therapy Today, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
century alchemist even gave the name of filius macrocosmi. Modern
findings agree in principle with these formulations.
--
via, say the alchemists. We are still only at the beginning of a
development whose origins lie in late antiquity, and which throughout the
--
realizing it, is carrying on the work begun by the alchemists. These men
were convinced that the donum artis was given only to the few electis, and
|
1.09 - Man - About the Body, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
In their active and passive polarity the electric and the magnetic fluids have the task of forming acid combinations in all the organic and inorganic bodies, from the chemical point of view, eventually from the alchemistic standpoint too. In the active sense they are constructive, and in the negative sense they are destructive, dissolving and disintegrating. All this explains the biological functions in the body. The final result is the circulation of life, which is brought into existence, thrives, ripens and fades away. This is the sense of evolution of all things created. a.
Diet ~
--
With the help of this occult anatomy and the key of the tetrapolar magnet, the adept may compile further analogies if wanted. The alchemist will recognize that the human body represents a genuine Athanor in which the most perfect alchemistic process, the
Great Work or the preparation of the Philosophers Stone is visibly performed.
|
1.10 - The Roughly Material Plane or the Material World, #Initiation Into Hermetics, #Franz Bardon, #Occultism
According to the specific properties of a body, which depend on the composition of the elements, each object, with respect to the electric fluid, owns certain emanations, the so-called electronic vibrations that are attracted by the general magnetic fluid of the entire material world. This attraction is called the weight. Consequently, weight is an appearance of the attractive power of the earth. The well known attractive power of iron and nickel is a little example respecting an imitation of that which is happening, in a big measure, on our whole earth. What we understand, on our earth, a magnetism and electricity, is nothing else but an appearance of the four-pole magnet. For, as we know already, by an arbitrary pole-changing, electricity can be obtained from magnetism and, in a mechanical way, we get magnetism through electricity. The transmutation of one power into another, properly speaking, is already an alchemistic or magic process, which, however, in the course of time, has been generalized so much that it is no longer regarded as alchemy or magic, but is simply ascribed to physics. For this reason, it is obvious that the four-pole magnet can be used here also.
According to the law concerning the problems of magnetism and electricity not only in the body as mentioned in the foregoing chapter but also in the grossly materialistic world, each hermeticist exactly knows that what is above is also that which is below. Each adept who knows how to employ the powers of the element or the great secret of the Tetragrammaton on all planes is also capable to achieve great things in our material world, things which the outsider would regard as miracles. The adept, however, sees no miracles in them for, backed by the knowledge of the laws; he will be able to explain even the most rema rkable curiosity.
|
1.13 - Gnostic Symbols of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the
nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, ex-
--
The alchemists likewise speak of an Adam who always carries
his Eve around with him. Their coniunctio is an incestuous act,
--
light." Just as the alchemists took the well-known allegory of
Christ, the lapis angularis or cornerstone, for their lapis philoso-
--
from Adamas the arch-man on high." 86 The alchemists said
their stone was "cut from the mountain without hands," 87 and
--
He is the "soul in fetters" or "in the prison of the body," as the alchemists say.
Le the corresponds to the modern concept of the unconscious.
--
108 The alchemists say very aptly: "Perfectum non perficitur" (that which is per-
fect is not perfected).
|
1.14 - The Secret, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
At the same time, Sri Aurobindo was retrieving the lost Secret, that of the Veda and of all the more or less distorted traditions from Persia to Central America and the Rhine Valley, from Eleusis to the Cathars and from the Round Table to the alchemists the ancient Secret of all the seekers of perfection. This is the quest for the Treasure in the depths of the cave; the battle against the subconscious forces (ogres, dwarves, or serpents); the legend of Apollo and the Python, Indra and the Serpent Vritta, Thor and the giants, Sigurd and Fafner; the solar myth of the Mayas, the Descent of Orpheus, the Transmutation. It is the serpent biting it own tail. And above all, it is the secret of the Vedic rishis, who were probably the first to discover what they called "the great passage," mahas pathah, (II.24.6) the world of "the unbroken Light," Swar, within the rock of the Inconscient: "Our fathers by their words broke the strong and stubborn places, the Angiras seers252 shattered the mountain rock with their cry; they made in us a path to the Great Heaven, they discovered the Day and the sunworld," (Rig Veda I.71.2) they discovered "the Sun dwelling in the darkness." (III.39.5) They found "the treasure of heaven hidden in the secret cavern like the young of the Bird, within the infinite rock." (I.130.3)
Shadow and Light, Good and Evil have all prepared a divine birth in Matter: "Day and Night both suckle the divine Child." 253 Nothing is accursed, nothing is in vain. Night and Day are "two sisters, immortal, with a common Lover (the Sun) . . . common they, though different their forms." (I.113.2.3) At the end of the "pilgrimage" of ascent and descent, the seeker is "a son of the two Mothers (III.55.7): the son of Aditi, the white Mother254 of the superconscious infinite, and the son of Diti, the earthly Mother of "the dark infinite." He possesses "the two births," human and divine, "eternal and in one nest . . . as the Enjoyer of his two wives" (I.62.7): "The contents of the pregnant hill255 (came forth) for the supreme birth . . . a god opened the human doors." (V.45) "Then indeed, they awoke and saw all behind and wide around them, then, indeed, they held the ecstasy that is enjoyed in heaven. In all gated houses256 were all the gods." (Rig Veda IV.1.18)
|
1.14 - The Structure and Dynamics of the Self, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
images. Since the opus was understood by the alchemists as a
recapitulation or imitation of the creation of the world, the
--
For the alchemists Paradise was a favourite symbol of the
albedo* the regained state of innocence, and the source of its
--
forth. 43 We find the same symbol in the alchemist and mystic
John Pordage: divine Wisdom is a "New Earth, the heavenly
--
by the alchemists. The symbolism here described can be repre-
sented diagrammatically as another quaternio or double pyra-
--
which is an intellectual model. The alchemists describe the
45 The lapis is made of the four elements, like Adam. The centre of the squared
--
those "thousand names" which the alchemists devised for their
central symbol, but nothing different or more fitting would have
--
The phlogiston theory adumbrated by the alchemists did
not get as far as that, but it points unmistakably in that direc-
--
conceptions of the alchemists, if we disregard its moral aspects.
Thus we have the "hostile brothers," Christ and the devil, who
--
of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed
through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula
--
of our formula. The alchemists were fond of picturing their
opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the
|
1.15 - Conclusion, #Aion, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
gaged the speculations of the alchemists in the form of the
"Chymical Wedding," and those of the cabalists in the form of
--
experience. They are therefore, like the alchemists, a veritable
mine of information concerning all those natural symbols aris-
|
12.09 - The Story of Dr. Faustus Retold, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Dr. Faust, as you know, you must have seen him on our school stage, was a very learned man. His ambition was to acquire all knowledge, knowledge of all subjects, of all arts and sciences. But he wanted not only to be a doctor of theories but of practice also, not only a learned man but a man of power in additionnot only to know but to control. Universal nature was his field and he sought not only to measure and survey the outside but to probe into her deeper secret mysteries. In those days there was a line of inquiry pursued by savants that was called occultism. The occultist sought to discover the secret and subtle forces of nature through which one could influence and control outer and material things and happenings. In this field there were the alchemists whose attempt was to transform lead into gold, that is to say, manipulate forces and elements in nature in such a way that mere lead would be turned into pure gold. So, our Dr. Faust, in tune with these magicians as they were commonly known, ventured into this region to possess the power over the forces of nature. This control over nature could go to the extent of producing what we know as miracles, for example, you ask for a thing, anything whatsoever, and it is there before you; you want to go some place, you will the thing and you are there like a flash of lightning. You can even make people do what you want to be done.
One day when Dr. Faust was deeply engaged in this interesting occupation, suddenly he saw standing in front of him a figurea strange figure, black, robed in black, huge in staturehe was taken by surprise. Half in curiosity, half in fear he asked who he was. The figure answered: he was what Dr. Faust wanted, that is to say, he could give Faust whatever he wanted, he was that Power. Dr. Faust questioned him and he was answered that the person was indeed what he was claiming to be. Faust was to ask only to have the thing he wanted. Faust could have more and more knowledge, more and more power. Not only that, but something infinitely greater and more precious. Dr. Faust wanted to know what that was. "Infinite pleasure, infinite delight. You will never be sad or sorrowful, never suffer, I will give you perfect enjoyment." This ambitious greedy man swallowed the bait. Faust asked whether it was all truewhat he was professing. The person answered: "More than what I have promised, I will give you. But it is give and take, you can take only when you give." "Give! What can I give? What have I got?" Oh! it is nothing, it is just a trifle. You won't ever know that you are giving. Ready?" "Ready? Yes, quite. But just tell me what it is?" "Oh! it is indeed nothingyour soul!" "Soul?" Faust did not know what the soul was. He nodded assent, strange to say, somewhat hesitatinglyalthough so eager and ardent till now. Take it then, he said.
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1.29 - Geri del Bello. The Tenth Bolgia Alchemists. Griffolino d' Arezzo and Capocchino. The many people and the divers wounds, #The Divine Comedy, #Dante Alighieri, #Christianity
object:1.29 - Geri del Bello. The Tenth Bolgia alchemists. Griffolino d' Arezzo and Capocchino. The many people and the divers wounds
These eyes of mine had so inebriated,
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1.ami - Selfhood can demolish the magic of this world (from Baal-i-Jibreel), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Naeem Siddiqui Original Language Urdu Selfhood can demolish the magic of this world; But our belief in The One is not comprehended by all. Have a seer's eye, and light will dawn on thee; As a river and its waves cannot remain apart. The light of God and knowledge are not in rivalry, But so the pulpit believes, afraid of Hallaj's rope. Contentment is the shield for the pure and the noble A shield in slavery, and a shield in power. In the East the soul looks in vain for light; In the West the light is a faded cloud of dust. The fakirs who could shatter the power and pelf of kings No longer tread this earth, in climes far or near. The spirit of this age is brimful with negations, And drained to the last drop is the power of faith. Muted is Europe's lament on its crumbling pageant, Muted by the delirious beats, the clangour of its music. A sleepy ripple awaits, to swell into a wave A wave that will swallow up monsters of the sea. What is slavery but a loss of the sense of beauty? What the free call beautiful, is beautiful indeed. The present belongs to him who explores, in their depths, The fathomless seas of time, to find the future's pearl. The alchemist of the West has turned stone into glass But my alchemy has transmuted glass into flint Pharaohs of today have stalked me in vain; But I fear not; I am blessed with Moses' wand. The flame that can set afire a dark, sunless wood, Will not be throttled by a straw afloat in the wind. Love is self-awareness; love is self-knowledge; Love cares not for the palaces and the power of kings. I will not wonder if I reach even the moon and the stars, For I have hitched my wagon to the star of all stars. First among the wise, last of the Prophets, Who gave a speck of dust the brightness of the Mount. He is the first and last in the eyes of love; He is the Word of God. He is the Word of God. <
|
1f.lovecraft - The Alchemist, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
object:1f.lovecraft - The alchemist
author class:H P Lovecraft
--
associates turned away from the lowly abode of the alchemists, the form
of Charles Le Sorcier appeared through the trees. The excited chatter
--
descendants of the alchemist, I would fall back to occult studies, and
once more endeavour to find a spell that would release my house from
--
of the old alchemists and daemonologists. The apparition spoke of the
curse which had hovered over my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt
--
much like an alchemists laboratory. In one corner was an immense pile
of a shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the
--
Return to The alchemist
|
1f.lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
alchemistwould not be long in finding the Philosophers Stone. The
nearest neighbours to this farmthe Fenners, a quarter of a mile
|
1f.lovecraft - The Tree on the Hill, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
by Rudolf Yergler, a German mystic and alchemist who borrowed some of
his lore from Hermes Trismegistus, the ancient Egyptian sorcerer. There
|
1.gmh - The Alchemist In The City, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
object:1.gmh - The alchemist In The City
author class:Gerard Manley Hopkins
|
1.jlb - Browning Decides To Be A Poet, #Borges - Poems, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher's stone
|
1.jr - Not Here, #Rumi - Poems, #Jalaluddin Rumi, #Poetry
We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change.
|
1.okym - 43 - The Grape that can with Logic absolute, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Edward FitzGerald Original Language Persian/Farsi The Grape that can with Logic absolute The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute: The subtle alchemist that in a Trice Life's leaden Metal into Gold transmute. [bk1sm.gif] -- from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by Omar Khayyam / Translated by Edward FitzGerald <
|
1.pbs - Alastor - or, the Spirit of Solitude, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
Like an inspired and desperate alchemist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
|
1.rmr - The Alchemist, #Rilke - Poems, #Rainer Maria Rilke, #Poetry
object:1.rmr - The alchemist
author class:Rainer Maria Rilke
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1.sjc - Not for All the Beauty, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Antonio T. de Nicolas Original Language Spanish (Poem with a Divine Intention) Not for all the beauty will I ever be lost, but for I-know-not-what that by fortune I may reach. The taste of what is finite, Goes only as far As to weary the appetite And destroy the taste; Thus not for sweetness Will I ever be lost, But for I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. The generous heart Never cares to stop Where it is easy to cross, But tries where it is hard; Nothing satisfies him, And with faith he climbs so high, That he tastes I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. He who is pierced by love, Or touched by the divine, Has his taste so changed That to all taste he is dead; As someone may leave The food he sees when he is sick, And craves for I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. Do not be surprised That taste be thus changed, For the cause of this evil Is alien to all the rest; Thus every creature Sees itself estranged, And tastes I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. For as soon as the will is touched from above, It cannot be satisfied But with the divine; Its beauty being such That only faith may show it, For it tastes of I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. Tell me if for such a lover, You will feel any pain, For he finds no pleasure Among created things; Alone, with no figure or shape, Without company or even memory, Except the taste of I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. Do not think that the soul, That is worth much more, Finds joy and happiness In what on earth gives taste; It is beyond beauty, In what is, was or will be, That it tastes I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. Whoever wants to advance Would better use care In what is left to gain Than in what he has already won; And thus aiming for the heights, I will always try For that I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. What comes through the senses And may here be understood And whatever may be learned, Even though very high, Not for all that beauty Will I ever be lost, But for that I-know-not-what That by fortune I may reach. -- Finis. [bk1sm.gif] -- from St. John of the Cross: alchemist of the Soul: His Life, His Poetry (Bilingual), His Prose, by Antonio T. de Nicolas <
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1.sjc - Song of the Soul That Delights in Knowing God by Faith, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
English version by Antonio T. de Nicolas Original Language Spanish Well I know the fountain that runs and flows, though it is night! This eternal fountain is hidden deep. Well I know where it has its spring, Though it is night! In this life's dark night, Faith has taught where this cold fountain lies, Though it is night! Its origin I cannot know, it has none, And I know all origins come from it, Though it is night! And I know there can be nothing more fair, The heavens and earth drink there, Though it is night! And I know it has no bed, And I know no one can cross its depths, Though it is night! Its clarity is never clouded, And I know all light shines from it, Though it is night! I know her streams swell so abundantly, They water people, heaven and even hell, Though it is night! The current born of this fountain I know to be wide and mighty, Though it is night! And from these two another stream flows, And I know neither comes before, Though it is night! I know Three in only one water live, And each the other feeds, Though it is night! This eternal fountain is hiding from sight Within this living bread to give us life, Though it is night! He calls all creatures to this light, And of this water they drink, though in the dark, Though it is night! This living fountain I desire, I see it here within this living bread, Though it is night! [bk1sm.gif] -- from St. John of the Cross: alchemist of the Soul: His Life, His Poetry (Bilingual), His Prose, by Antonio T. de Nicolas <
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2.01 - THE ARCANE SUBSTANCE AND THE POINT, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[36] The tremendous role which the opposites and their union play in alchemy helps us to understand why the alchemists were so fond of paradoxes. In order to attain this union, they tried not only to visualize the opposites together but to express them in the same breath.1 Characteristically, the paradoxes cluster most thickly round the arcane substance, which was believed to contain the opposites in uncombined form as the prima materia, and to amalgamate them as the lapis Philosophorum. Thus the lapis2 is called on the one hand base, cheap, immature, volatile, and on the other hand precious, perfect, and solid; or the prima materia is base and noble,3 or precious and parvi momenti (of little moment). The materia is visible to all eyes, the whole world sees it, touches it, loves it, and yet no one knows it.4 This stone therefore is no stone,5 says the Turba, that thing is cheap and costly, dark, hidden, and known to everyone, having one name and many names.6 The stone is thousand-named like the gods of the mystery religions, the arcane substance is One and All (
). In the treatise of Komarios, where the philosopher Komarios teaches the Philosophy to Cleopatra, it is said: He showed with his hand the unity of the whole.7 Pelagios asks: Why speak ye of the manifold matter? The substance of natural things is one, and of one nature that which conquers all.8
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[39] The alchemists seem to have visualized their lapis or prima materia in a similar manner. At any rate they were able to cap the paradoxes of Monomos. Thus they said of Mercurius: This spirit is generated from the substances of the sea26 and calls himself moist, dry, and fiery,27 in close agreement with the invocation to Hermes in the magic papyrus entitled The Secret Inscription, where Hermes is addressed as a damp-fiery-cold spirit (
).28
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2.02 - THE SCINTILLA, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[45] The scintillae often appear as golden and silver, and are found in multiple form in the earth.73 They are then called oculi piscium (fishes eyes).74 The fishes eyes are frequently mentioned by the authors, probably first by Morienus Romanus75 and in the Tractatus Aristotelis,76 and then by many later ones.77 In Manget there is a symbol, ascribed to the philosopher Malus,78 which shows eyes in the stars, in the clouds, in the water and in the earth. The caption says: This stone is under you, and near you, and above you, and around you.79 The eyes indicate that the lapis is in the process of evolution and grows from these ubiquitous eyes.80 Ripley remarks that at the desiccation of the sea a substance is left over that shines like a fishs eye.81 According to Dorn, this shining eye is the sun,82 which plunges the centre of its eye into the heart of man, as if it were the secret of warmth and illumination. The fishs eye is always open, like the eye of God.83 Something of the sort must have been in the mind of the alchemists, as is evidenced by the fact that Eirenaeus Orandus84 used as a motto for his edition of Nicolas Flamel85 the words of Zechariah 4 : 10: And they shall rejoice and see the plummet [lapidem stanneum] in the hand of Zorobabel. These are the seven eyes of the Lord that run to and fro through the whole earth. 3 : 9 is also relevant: Upon one stone there are seven eyes (DV). Firmicus Maternus may be referring to the latter passage when he says:86 The sign of one profane sacrament is
. . . [god from the rock].87 The other is the stone which God promised to send to streng then the foundations of the promised Jerusalem.88 Christ is signified to us by the venerable stone.89 Just as the one stone meant, for the alchemists, the lapis,90 so the fishes eyes meant the seven eyes or the one eye of God, which is the sun.
[46] The Egyptians held that the eye is the seat of the soul; for example, Osiris is hidden in the eye of Horus.91 In alchemy the eye is the coelum (heaven): It is like an eye and a seeing of the soul, whereby the state of the soul and her intentions are ofttimes made known to us, and through the rays and the glance [of heaven] all things take form.92 In Steebs view, which agrees with that of Marsilius Ficinus,93 the coelum is a virtus, indeed a certain perfect, living being.94 Hence the alchemists called their quinta essentia coelum. The idea of a virtus is borne out by the description of the Holy Ghost as an eye,95 a parallel to the invocation to Hermes: Hermes . . . the eye of heaven.96 The eye of God emits power and light,97 likewise the fishes eyes are tiny soul-sparks from which the shining figure of the filius is put together. They correspond to the particles of light imprisoned in the dark Physis, whose reconstitution was one of the chief aims of Gnosticism and Manichaeism. There is a similar nexus of ideas in the siddhaila of Jainism: The loka [world] is held in the middle of the aloka [void], in the form of the trunk of a man, with siddhaila at the top, the place where the head should be. This siddhaila is the abode of the omniscient souls, and may be called the spiritual eye of the universe.98
[47] The eye, like the sun, is a symbol as well as an allegory of consciousness.99 In alchemy the scintillulae are put together to form the gold (Sol), in the Gnostic systems the atoms of light are reintegrated. Psychologically, this doctrine testifies to the personality- or ego-character of psychic complexes: just as the distinguishing mark of the ego-complex is consciousness, so it is possible that other, unconscious complexes may possess, as splinter psyches, a certain luminosity of their own.100 From these atoms is produced the Monad (and the lapis in its various significations), in agreement with the teachings of Epicurus, who held that the concourse of atoms even produced God.101
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[49] In Dorns view there is in man an invisible sun, which he identifies with the Archeus.107 This sun is identical with the sun in the earth (in agreement with the passage from Novum lumen, supra, par. 43). The invisible sun enkindles an elemental fire which consumes mans substance108 and reduces his body to the prima materia. It is also compared with salt or natural balsam, which has in itself corruption and protection against corruption. This paradoxical aspect is borne out by a curious saying: Man is the bait, wherein the sparks struck by the flint, i.e., Mercurius, and by the steel,109 i.e., heaven, seize upon the tinder and show their power.110 Mercurius as the flint is evidently thought of here in his feminine, chthonic form, and heaven stands for his masculine, spiritual quintessence. From the (nuptial) impact between the two the spark is struck, the Archeus, which is a corrupter of the body, just as the chemist is a corrupter of metals. This negative aspect of the scintilla is remarkable, but it agrees very well with the alchemists less optimistic, medico-scientific view of the world.111 For them the dark side of the world and of life had not been conquered, and this was the task they set themselves in their work. In their eyes the fire-point, the divine centre in man, was something dangerous, a powerful poison which required very careful handling if it was to be changed into the panacea. The process of individuation, likewise, has its own specific dangers. Dorn expresses the standpoint of the alchemists in his fine saying: There is nothing in nature that does not contain as much evil as good.112
[50] In Khunrath113 the scintilla is the same as the elixir: Now the elixir is well and truly called a shining splendour, or perfect scintilla of him who alone is the Mighty and Strong. . . . It is the true Aqua Permanens, eternally living.114 The radical moisture is animated . . . by a fiery spark of the World-Soul, for the spirit of the Lord filleth the whole world.115 He also speaks of a plurality of sparks: There are . . . fiery sparks of the World-Soul, that is of the light of nature, dispersed or scattered at Gods comm and in and through the fabric of the great world into all fruits of the elements everywhere.116 The scintilla is associated with the doctrine of the Anthropos: The Son of the Great World . . . is filled, animated and impregnated . . . with a fiery spark of Ruach Elohim, the spirit, breath, wind or blowing of the triune God, from . . . the Body, Spirit, and Soul of the World, or . . . Sulphur and Salt, Mercury and the universal fiery spark of the light of nature.117 The fiery sparks of the World-Soul were already in the chaos, the prima materia, at the beginning of the world.118 Khunrath rises to Gnostic heights when he exclaims: And our Catholick Mercury, by virtue of his universal fiery spark of the light of nature, is beyond doubt Proteus, the sea god of the ancient pagan sages, who hath the key to the sea and . . . power over all things: son of Oceanos and Tethys.119 Many centuries lie between Monomos and Khunrath. The teachings of Monomos were completely unknown in the Middle Ages,120 and yet Khunrath hit upon very similar thoughts which can hardly be ascribed to tradition.
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2.03 - THE ENIGMA OF BOLOGNA, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[51] These paradoxes culminate in an allegedly ancient monument, an epitaph said to have been found in Bologna, known as the Aelia-Laelia-Crispis Inscription. It was appropriated by the alchemists, who claimed, in the words of Michael Maier, that it was set up by an artificer of old to the honour of God and in praise of the chymic art.122 I will first give the text of this highly remarkable inscription:
D. M.
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[63] By He knows and knows not Maier thinks that Lucius knew it at first but no longer knew it afterwards, because he himself was ungratefully forgotten. It is not clear to me what this is intended to mean. Barnaud takes the monument as an allegory of the lapis, of which Lucius knew. He explains the quid as quantum, for Lucius probably did not know how much the stone weighed. Neither, of course, did he know for what future discoverer he had made the inscription. Barnauds explanation of quid is decidedly feeble. It would be more to the point to remember that the lapis is a fabulous entity of cosmic dimensions which surpasses human understanding. Consideration for the prestige of the alchemist may have prevented him from indulging this suggestive thought, for as an alchemist he could not very well admit that the artifex himself did not know what he was producing with his art. Had he been a modern psychologist he might have realized, with a little effort, that mans totality, the self, is by definition145 beyond the bounds of knowledge.
[64] With This is a tomb etc. we reach the first positive statement (barring the names) of the inscription. Maiers opinion is that this has nothing to do with the tomb, which was no tomb, but that Aelia herself is meant. For she herself is the container, converting into herself the contained; and thus she is a tomb or receptacle that has no body or content in it, as was said of Lots wife, who was her own tomb without a body, and a body without a tomb.146 He is evidently alluding to the second version of the Arisleus Vision, which says: With so much love did Beya embrace Gabricus that she absorbed him wholly into her own nature and dissolved him into indivisible particles.147 Ripley says that at the death of the king all his limbs were torn into atoms.148 This is the motif of dismemberment which is well known in alchemy.149 The atoms are or become white sparks shining in the terra foetida.150 They are also called the fishes eyes.151
[65] The explanation of Aelia herself as the tomb would naturally appeal to an alchemist, as this motif plays a considerable role in the literature. He called his vessel a tomb,152 or, as in the Rosarium, a red tumulus of rock. The Turba says that a tomb must be dug for the dragon and the woman.153 Interment is identical with the nigredo.154 A Greek treatise describes the alchemical process as the eight graves.155 Alexander found the tomb of Hermes when he discovered the secret of the art.156 The king is buried in Saturn,157 an analogy of the buried Osiris.158 While the nigredo of the burial endures, the woman rules,159 referring to the eclipse of the sun or the conjunction with the new moon.
[66] Thus, concludes Maier, tomb and body are the same. Barnaud says:
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[68] Malvasius goes out of his way to be fair to the author of the epitaph. He calls Agatho very skilled in this science and that;167 indeed he compares him, as being a pre-eminent worshipper of the exceedingly auspicious number Three,168 to Hermes Trismegistus, and calls him Thrice-Greatest, an allusion to the concluding sentence of the Tabula smaragdina.169 He does this because the inscription is divided into three parts,170 to which he devotes a long dissertation. Here he gets into difficulties with the four elements and the four qualities, and, like all the alchemists, flounders about in his attempts to interpret the axiom of Maria.171 His idea of a miscarriage likewise comes within the sphere of alchemy (not to mention Gnosticism),172 for we read in the Tractatus Aristotelis: 173This serpent is impetuous, seeking the issue [death] before birth, wishing to lose the foetus and desiring a miscarriage.174 This refers, of course, to the Mercurial serpent or prima materia, which, the treatise maintains,175 strives to pass quickly through the transformation process and to force the light-seeds of the anima mundi hidden within it into flower.
[69] Of the numerous interpretations made by the commentators I would like to mention one which seems to me worth rescuing from oblivion. This is the view expressed by the two friends of Malvasius (see n. 127), namely that Lucius Agatho was a real person, but that Aelia was a fictitious woman, or perhaps an evil genius in female form or an ungodly spirit, who in the opinion of one of them flies about in the air, and according to the other dwells in the earth and was enclosed and affixed in a Junonian oak; a sylvan sprite, nymph, or hamadryad who, when the oak was cut down and burnt, was obliged to seek another dwelling-place and so was found, as if dead, in this sarcophagus. Thus it was that she was praised, described, and commemorated by the loved and loving Agatho.176
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[75] The point of the parable, evidently, is to bring the oak into connection with the bath. Usually this is the nuptial bath of the royal pair. But here the Queen is missing, for it is only the King who is renewed. This unusual version191 of the motif suggest that the oak, as the feminine numen, has taken the place of the Queen. If this assumption is correct, it is particularly significant that the oak is first said to be cloven and later to be hollow. Now it seems to be the upright trunk or stock of the fountain,192 now a living tree casting a shadow, now the trough of the fountain. This ambiguity refers to the different aspects of the tree: as the stock, the oak is the source of the fountain, so to speak; as the trough it is the vessel, and as the protecting tree it is the mother.193 From ancient times the tree was mans birthplace;194 it is therefore a source of life. The alchemists called both the vessel and the bath the womb.195 The cloven or hollow trunk bears out this interpretation.196 The Kings bath is itself a matrix, the tree serving as an attribute of the latter. Often, as in the Ripley Scrowle,197 the tree stands in the nuptial bath, either as a pillar or directly as a tree in whose branches the numen appears in the shape of a mermaid (= anima) with a snakes tail.198 The analogy with the Tree of Knowledge is obvious.199 The Dodonian oak was the abode of an oracle, the anima here playing the role of prophetess.200 The snake-like Mercurius appears as a tree numen in Grimms fairytale of The Spirit in the Bottle.201
[76] The tree has a remarkable relation to the old man in the Turba:
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There white and black come together in kingly marriage, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels (61 : 10). The two antithetical magicians are obviously making ready the work of union, and what this must mean for a young theologian can be conceived only as that colossal problem whose solution was considered by the more speculative alchemists to be their chief task. Therefore the Senior text continues:
He [the male] will be roused,217 like the white doves,218 and his step shall rejoice, and he shall cast his seed upon the marble219 into the image [or spirit that dwells in the marble], and the ravens will come flying, and will fall upon it and gather it up. Then they will fly to the tops of the mountains, whither none can climb, and they will become white,220 and multiply. . . . Likewise no man hath known this, unless he himself hath conceived it in his head.
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[90] Another parallel, but dating from late antiquity, is mentioned by Maier. It is one of the Platonic Riddles and runs: A man that was not a man, seeing yet not seeing, in a tree that was not a tree, smote but did not smite with a stone that was not a stone a bird that was not a bird, sitting yet not sitting.237 The solution is: A one-eyed eunuch grazed with a pumice-stone a bat hanging from a bush.238 This joke was, of course, too obvious to lend itself to alchemical evaluation. Similarly, the Epigram of the Hermaphrodite was not, so far as I know, taken up by the alchemists, though it might have been a more suitable subject for exegesis. This kind of jest probably underlies the Aelia inscription. The seriousness with which the alchemists took it, however, is justified not only because there is something serious in every joke, but because paradox is the natural medium for expressing transconscious facts. Hindu philosophy, which likewise struggled to formulate transcendental concepts, often comes very near to the paradoxes so beloved of the alchemists, as the following example shows: I am not a man, neither am I a god, a goblin, a Brahmin, a warrior, a merchant, a shudra, nor disciple of a Brahmin, nor householder, nor hermit of the forest, nor yet mendicant pilgrim: Awakener to Myself is my name.239
[91] Another source that needs seriously considering is mentioned by Richard White of Basingstoke.240 He maintains that Aelia Laelia is Niobe transformed, and he supports this interpretation by referring to an epigram attri buted to Agathias Scholasticus, a Byzantine historian:241
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2.04 - Positive Aspects of the Mother-Complex, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
*9 8 The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol
of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the uncon-
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2.06 - Two Tales of Seeking and Losing, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
There is an elderly man, for example, who maintains his meditative calm in the midst of the turmoil, and each time, before putting down a card, he studies it as if absorbed in an operation whose successful outcome is not certain, a combination of trivial elements from which, however, a surprising result may emerge. The trim professorial white beard, the grave gaze in which there is a hint of uneasiness, are some of the features he shares with the picture of the King of Coins. This portrait of himself, along with the cards of Cups and gold Coins seen around him, could define him as an alchemist, who has spent his life investigating the combinations of the elements and their metamorphoses. In the alembics and phials he is being handed by the Page of Cups, his famulus or assistant, he examines the bubbling of liquids thick as urine, colored by reagents in clouds of indigo or cinnabar, from which the molecules of the king of metals are to be detached. But the expectation is vain; what remains in the bottom of the vessels is only lead.
It is known to all, or at least it should be, that if the alchemist seeks the secret of gold out of desire for riches his experiments fail: he must instead free himself of all egoism, all personal limitations, become one with the powers that move in the heart of things, and the first real transformation, which is of himself, will be duly followed by others. Having devoted his best years to this Great Work, our elderly neighbor, now that he finds a deck of tarots in his hand, wants to compose again an equivalent of the Great Work, arranging the cards in a square in which, from top to bottom, from left to right, and vice versa, all stories can be read, his own included. But when he seems to have succeeded in deploying the stories of the others, he realizes his own story has been lost.
He is not the only one who seeks in the succession of the cards the path of a change within himself that can be transmitted externally. There is also another, who, with the beautiful heedlessness of youth, feels he recognizes himself in the boldest warrior figure of the whole deck, the Knight of Swords, and he confronts the most cutting of Swords cards and the sharpest of Clubs to reach his goal. But he has to take a roundabout route (as the serpentine sign of the Two of Coins indicates), defying (Two of Swords) the infernal powers (The Devil) called up by Merlin the Magician (The Juggler) in the forest of Broceliande (Seven of Clubs), if he wants finally to be allowed to sit at the Round Table (Ten of Cups) of King Arthur (King of Swords) in the place no knight so far has been worthy of occupying.
If you look carefully, the destination for both the alchemist and the knight-errant should be the Ace of Cups which, for the one, contains phlogiston or the philosopher's stone or the elixir of long life, and for the other the talisman guarded by the Fisher King, the mysterious vessel whose first poet lacked time-or else was unwilling-to explain it to us; and thus, since then, rivers of ink have flown in conjectures about the Grail, still contended between the Roman religion and the Celtic. (Perhaps the Champagne troubadour wanted precisely this: to keep alive the battle between The Pope and the Druid-Hermit. There is no better place to keep a secret than in an unfinished novel.)
So then the problem that these two companions of ours wanted to solve, arranging the cards around the Ace of Cups, was at once the Great Work of Alchemy and the Quest for the Grail. In the same cards, one after the other, both can recognize the stages of their Art or Adventure: in The Sun, the star of gold or the innocence of the warrior youth; in The Wheel, perpetual motion or the spell of the forest; in Judgment, death and resurrection (of metals and of the soul) or the heavenly call.
As things stand, the two stories constantly risk stumbling over each other, if the mechanism is not made quite clear. The alchemist is the man who, to achieve transformations of matter, tries to make his soul become as unchangeable and pure as gold; but there is the instance of a Doctor Faust, who inverts the alchemist's rules, makes the soul an object of exchange, and thus hopes nature will become incorruptible and it will no longer be necessary to seek gold because all elements will be equally precious: the world is gold, and gold is the world. In the same way a knight-errant is one who submits his actions to an absolute and severe moral law, so that natural law can maintain abundance on earth with absolute freedom; but let us try to imagine a Perceval-Parzival-Parsifal who inverts the rule of the Round Table, knightly virtues in him will be involuntary, they will come forth as a gift of nature, like the colors of butterflies' wings, and while performing his exploits with dazed nonchalance, he will perhaps succeed in subduing nature to his will, in possessing the knowledge of the world like an object, in becoming magician and thaumaturge, in healing the wound of the Fisher King, and in restoring green sap to the wasteland.
The mosaic of cards that we are watching, fixed here, is therefore the Work of the Quest that one would like to conclude without work or search. Doctor Faust has wearied of having the instantaneous metamorphoses of metals depend on the slow transformations that take place within himself, he doubts the wisdom accumulated in the solitary life of a Hermit, he is disappointed in the powers of his art as he is in this dawdling over the tarot combinations. At that moment a thunderbolt illuminates his little cell at the top of The Tower. A personage appears before him with a broad-brimmed hat, such as the students wear at Wittenberg, a wandering clerk perhaps, or a charlatan Juggler, a mountebank at a fair, who has laid out on a stand a laboratory of ill-assorted jars.
"Do you believe you can counterfeit my art?" So the true alchemist must have addressed the impostor. "What messes are you stirring in your pots?"
"The broth that was at the origin of The World," the stranger may have replied, "whence crystals and plants took their form, and the species of animals and the race of Homo Sapiens!" And what he names then appears in the transparent material boiling in an incandescent crucible, just as we now observe it in Arcanum XXI. In this card, which has the highest number of all the tarots and is the one that counts most in players' scoring, a naked goddess framed in myrtle is flying, Venus perhaps; the four figures around her can be recognized as more modern devout emblems, but perhaps they are only a prudent disguise of other apparitions less incompatible with the triumph of the goddess in the middle, perhaps centaurs, sirens, harpies, gorgons, who supported the world before the authority of Olympus had subdued it, or perhaps dinosaurs, mastodons, pterodactyls, mammoths, the attempts nature made before resigning herself-we do not know for how much longer-to human dominion. And there are also those who, in the central figure, see not Venus but the Hermaphrodite, symbol of the souls that reach the center of the world, the culminating point of the itinerary the alchemist must follow.
"And can you then make gold?" the doctor must have asked, to which the other must have replied, "Look!" giving him a brief vision of strongboxes brimming with homemade ingots.
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3.00.2 - Introduction, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
that had preoccupied the minds of the alchemists for seventeen centuries. It
was precisely this image that had always lured the mind of the investigator
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love) of the elements, which the alchemists likened to the primeval chaos.
The activated unconscious appears as a flurry of unleashed opposites and
--
nigro), as the alchemists rightly say, and in addition is charged with
dangerous polar tensions, with the inimicitia elementorum. One finds
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sometimes really diabolical. The alchemists aptly personified it as the wily
god of revelation, Hermes or Mercurius; and though they lament over the
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the exact opposite, and I can well understand why the alchemists endowed
their Mercurius with the highest spiritual qualities, although these stand in
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prompted the alchemists to insert a heartfelt Deo concedente in their
recipes, or to allow that only if God wrought a miracle could their
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described by the alchemists as the separatio or divisio elementorum, the
solutio, calcinatio, incineratio, or as dismemberment of the body,
--
dual nature). The alchemist tries to get round this paradox or antinomy
with his various procedures and formulae, and to make one out of two.
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both parties; often the doctor is in much the same position as the alchemist
who no longer knew whether he was melting the mysterious amalgam in
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psychological state of the alchemist than the division of his work-room
into a laboratory, where he bustles about with crucibles and alembics,
--
old alchemists were often doctors as well, and thus had ample opportunity
for such experiences if, like Paracelsus, they worried about the
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3.01 - INTRODUCTION, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[104] The alchemists endeavours to unite the opposites culminate in the chymical marriage, the supreme act of union in which the work reaches its consummation. After the hostility of the four elements has been overcome, there still remains the last and most formidable opposition, which the alchemist expressed very aptly as the relationship between male and female. We are inclined to think of this primarily as the power of love, of passion, which drives the two opposite poles together, forgetting that such a vehement attraction is needed only when an equally strong resistance keeps them apart. Although enmity was put only between the serpent and the woman (Genesis 3 : 15), this curse nevertheless fell upon the relationship of the sexes in general. Eve was told: Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And Adam was told: Cursed is the ground for thy sake . . . because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife (3 : 16f.). Primal guilt lies between them, an interrupted state of enmity, and this appears unreasonable only to our rational mind but not to our psychic nature. Our reason is often influenced far too much by purely physical considerations, so that the union of the sexes seems to it the only sensible thing and the urge for union the most sensible instinct of all. But if we conceive of nature in the higher sense as the totality of all phenomena, then the physical is only one of her aspects, the other is pneumatic or spiritual. The first has always been regarded as feminine, the second as masculine. The goal of the one is union, the goal of the other is discrimination. Because it overvalues the physical, our contemporary reason lacks spiritual orientation, that is, pneuma. The alchemists seem to have had an inkling of this, for how otherwise could they have come upon that strange myth of the country of the King of the Sea, where only like pairs with like and the land is unfruitful?1 It was obviously a realm of innocent friendship, a kind of paradise or golden age, to which the Philosophers, the representatives of the physical, felt obliged to put an end with their good advice. But what happened was not by any means a natural union of the sexes; on the contrary it was a royal incest, a sinful deed that immediately led to imprisonment and death and only afterwards restored the fertility of the country. As a parable the myth is certainly ambiguous; like alchemy in general, it can be understood spiritually as well as physically, tam moralis quam chymica.2 The physical goal of alchemy was gold, the panacea, the elixir of life; the spiritual one was the rebirth of the (spiritual) light from the darkness of Physis: healing self-knowledge and the deliverance of the pneumatic body from the corruption of the flesh.
[105] A subtle feature of the Visio Arislei is that the very one who is meditating a pairing of the sexes is king of the land of innocence. Thus the rex marinus says: Truly I have a son and a daughter, and therefore I am king over my subjects, because they possess nothing of these things. Yet I have borne a son and a daughter in my brain.3 Hence the king is a potential traitor to the paradisal state of innocence because he can generate in his head, and he is king precisely because he is capable of this sin against the previous state of innocence. Since he can be different from them he is more than any of his subjects and therefore rightly their king, although, from the physical standpoint, he is counted a bad ruler.4
[106] Here again we see the contrast between alchemy and the prevailing Christian ideal of attempting to restore the original state of innocence by monasticism and, later, by the celibacy of the priesthood. The conflict between worldliness and spirituality, latent in the love-myth of Mother and Son, was elevated by Christianity to the mystic marriage of sponsus (Christ) and sponsa (Church), whereas the alchemists transposed it to the physical plane as the coniunctio of Sol and Luna. The Christian solution of the conflict is purely pneumatic, the physical relations of the sexes being turned into an allegory orquite illegitimatelyinto a sin that perpetuates and even intensifies the original one in the Garden. Alchemy, on the other hand, exalted the most heinous transgression of the law, namely incest, into a symbol of the union of opposites, hoping in this way to bring back the golden age. For both trends the solution lay in extrapolating the union of sexes into another medium: the one projected it into the spirit, the other into matter. But neither of them located the problem in the place where it arose the soul of man.
[107] No doubt it would be tempting to assume that it was more convenient to shift such a supremely difficult question on to another plane and then represent it as having been solved. But this explanation is too facile, and is psychologically false because it supposes that the problem was asked consciously, found to be painful, and consequently moved on to another plane. This stratagem accords with our modern way of thinking but not with the spirit of the past, and there are no historical proofs of any such neurotic operation. Rather does all the evidence suggest that the problem has always seemed to lie outside the psyche as known to us. Incest was the hierosgamos of the gods, the mystic prerogative of kings, a priestly rite, etc. In all these cases we are dealing with an archetype of the collective unconscious which, as consciousness increased, exerted an ever greater influence on conscious life. It certainly seems today as if the ecclesiastical allegories of the bridegroom and bride, not to mention the now completely obsolete alchemical coniunctio, had become so faded that one meets with incest only in criminology and the psychopathology of sex. Freuds discovery of the Oedipus complex, a special instance of the incest problem in general, and its universal incidence have, however, reactivated this ancient problem, though mostly only for doctors interested in psychology. Even though laymen know very little about certain medical anomalies or have a wrong idea of them, this does not alter the facts any more than does the laymans ignorance of the actual percentage of cases of tuberculosis or psychosis.
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3.01 - The Mercurial Fountain, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
conscious speculation among the alchemists, but this is no hindrance
whatever to unconscious projection, for wherever the mind of the
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describing the experience of the alchemist who discovers that what he has
projected into the retort is his own darkness, his unredeemed state, his
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3.02 - King and Queen, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
which we would have to conclude that the alchemists were unshakably
orthodox in their beliefs. I do not think that this can be doubted as a rule.
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venerable nature evidently enabled the alchemist to provide the Holy
Ghost with a most unorthodox and distinctly earth-bound partner, or rather
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to think that the alchemists were keeping up a secret tradition, although the
evidence for this (the hints contained in the writings of Zosimos of
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god of revelation. This dilemma throws a new light on the secret of the art:the very serious danger of heresy. Consequently the alchemists found
themselves between Scylla and Charybdis: on the one hand they ran the
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shows, the alchemist would rather risk being suspected of gold-making
than of heresy. It is still an open question, which perhaps can never be
answered, how far the alchemist was conscious of the true nature of his art.
Even texts as revealing as the Rosarium and Aurora consurgens do not
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descent of the projection into matter had led some of the old alchemists,
for example Morienus Romanus, to the clear realization that this matter
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matter of the alchemists could be recognized as the psyche.
[441]
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3.02 - SOL, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[110] In alchemy, the sun signifies first of all gold, whose sign it shares. But just as the philosophical gold is not the common gold,5 so the sun is neither just the metallic gold6 nor the heavenly orb.7 Sometimes the sun is an active substance hidden in the gold and is extracted as the tinctura rubea (red tincture). Sometimes, as the heavenly body, it is the possessor of magically effective and transformative rays. As gold and a heavenly body8 it contains an active sulphur of a red colour, hot and dry.9 Because of this red sulphur the alchemical sun, like the corresponding gold, is red.10 As every alchemist knew, gold owes its red colour to the admixture of Cu (copper), which he interpreted as Kypris (the Cyprian, Venus), mentioned in Greek alchemy as the transformative substance.11 Redness, heat, and dryness are the classical qualities of the Egyptian Set (Gk. Typhon), the evil principle which, like the alchemical sulphur, is closely connected with the devil. And just as Typhon has his kingdom in the forbidden sea, so the sun, as sol centralis, has its sea, its crude perceptible water, and as sol coelestis its subtle imperceptible water. This sea water (aqua pontica) is extracted from sun and moon. Unlike the Typhonian sea, the life-giving power of this water is praised, though this does not mean that it is invariably good.12 It is the equivalent of the two-faced Mercurius, whose poisonous nature is often mentioned. The Typhonian aspect of the active sun-substance, of the red sulphur, of the water that does not make the hands wet,13 and of the sea water should not be left out of account. The author of the Novum lumen chemicum cannot suppress a reference to the latters paradoxical nature: Do not be disturbed because you sometimes find contradictions in my treatises, after the custom of the philosophers; these are necessary, if you understand that no rose is found without thorns.14
[111] The active sun-substance also has favourable effects. As the so-called balsam it drips from the sun and produces lemons, oranges, wine, and, in the mineral kingdom, gold.15 In man the balsam forms the radical moisture, from the sphere of the supracelestial waters; it is the shining or lucent body which from mans birth enkindles the inner warmth, and from which come all the motions of the will and the principle of all appetition. It is a vital spirit, and it has its seat in the brain and its governance in the heart.16
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[114] The miraculous power of the sun, says Dorn, is due to the fact that all the simple elements are contained in it, as they are in heaven and in the other heavenly bodies. We say that the sun is a single element, he continues, tacitly identifying it with the quintessence. This view is explained by a remarkable passage from the Consilium coniugii: The Philosophers maintained that the father of the gold and silver is the animating principle [animal] of earth and water, or man or part of a man, such as hair, blood, menstruum, etc.25 The idea at the back of this is that primitive conception of a universal power of growth, healing, magic, and prestige,26 which is to be found as much in the sun as in men and plants, so that not only the sun but man too, and especially the enlightened man, the adept, can generate the gold by virtue of this universal power. It was clear to Dorn (and to other alchemists as well) that the gold was not made by the usual chemical procedures,27 for which reason he called gold-making (chrysopoeia) a miracle. The miracle was performed by a natura abscondita (hidden nature), a metaphysical entity perceived not with the outward eyes, but solely by the mind.28 It was infused from heaven,29 provided that the adept had approached as closely as possible to things divine and at the same time had extracted from the substances the subtlest powers fit for the miraculous act. There is in the human body a certain aethereal substance, which preserves its other elemental parts and causes them to continue,30 he says. This substance or virtue is hindered in its operations by the corruption of the body; but the Philosophers, through a kind of divine inspiration, knew that this virtue and heavenly vigour can be freed from its fetters, not by its contrary . . . but by its like.31 Dorn calls it veritas. It is the supreme power, an unconquerable fortress, which hath but very few friends, and is besieged by innumerable enemies. It is defended by the immaculate Lamb, and signifies the heavenly Jerusalem in the inner man. In this fortress is the true and indubitable treasure, which is not eaten into by moths, nor dug out by thieves, but remaineth for ever, and is taken hence after death.32
[115] For Dorn, then, the spark of divine fire implanted in man becomes what Goe the in his original version of Faust called Fausts entelechy, which was carried away by the angels. This supreme treasure the animal man understandeth not. . . . We are made like stones, having eyes and seeing not.33
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[117] Generally Sol is regarded as the masculine and active half of Mercurius, a supraordinate concept whose psychology I have discussed in a separate study.34 Since, in his alchemical form, Mercurius does not exist in reality, he must be an unconscious projection, and because he is an absolutely fundamental concept in alchemy he must signify the unconscious itself. He is by his very nature the unconscious, where nothing can be differentiated; but, as a spiritus vegetativus (living spirit), he is an active principle and so must always appear in reality in differentiated form. He is therefore fittingly called duplex, both active and passive. The ascending, active part of him is called Sol, and it is only through this that the passive part can be perceived. The passive part therefore bears the name of Luna, because she borrows her light from the sun.35 Mercurius demonstrably corresponds to the cosmic Nous of the classical philosophers. The human mind is a derivative of this and so, likewise, is the diurnal life of the psyche, which we call consciousness.36 Consciousness requires as its necessary counterpart a dark, latent, non-manifest side, the unconscious, whose presence can be known only by the light of consciousness.37 Just as the day-star rises out of the nocturnal sea, so, ontogenetically and phylogenetically, consciousness is born of unconsciousness and sinks back every night to this primal condition. This duality of our psychic life is the prototype and archetype of the Sol-Luna symbolism. So much did the alchemist sense the duality of his unconscious assumptions that, in the face of all astronomical evidence, he equipped the sun with a shadow: The sun and its shadow bring the work to perfection.38 Michael Maier, from whom this saying is taken, avoids the onus of explanation by substituting the shadow of the earth for the shadow of the sun in the forty-fifth discourse of his Scrutinium. Evidently he could not wholly shut his eyes to astronomical reality. But then he cites the classical saying of Hermes: Son, extract from the ray its shadow,39 thus giving us clearly to understand that the shadow is contained in the suns rays and hence could be extracted from them (whatever that might mean). Closely related to this saying is the alchemical idea of a black sun, often mentioned in the literature.40 This notion is supported by the self-evident fact that without light there is no shadow, so that, in a sense, the shadow too is emitted by the sun. For this physics requires a dark object interposed between the sun and the observer, a condition that does not apply to the alchemical Sol, since occasionally it appears as black itself. It contains both light and darkness. For what, in the end, asks Maier, is this sun without a shadow? The same as a bell without a clapper. While Sol is the most precious thing, its shadow is res vilissima or quid vilius alga (more worthless than seaweed). The antinomian thinking of alchemy counters every position with a negation and vice versa. Outwardly they are bodily things, but inwardly they are spiritual, says Senior.41 This view is true of all alchemical qualities, and each thing bears in itself its opposite.42
[118] To the alchemical way of thinking the shadow is no mere privatio lucis; just as the bell and its clapper are of a tangible substantiality, so too are light and shadow. Only thus can the saying of Hermes be understood. In its entirety it runs: Son, extract from the ray its shadow, and the corruption that arises from the mists which gather about it, befoul it and veil its light; for it is consumed by necessity and by its redness.43 Here the shadow is thought of quite concretely; it is a mist that is capable not only of obscuring the sun but of befouling it (coinquinarea strong expression). The redness (rubedo) of the suns light is a reference to the red sulphur in it, the active burning principle, destructive in its effects. In man the natural sulphur, Dorn says, is identical with an elemental fire which is the cause of corruption, and this fire is enkindled by an invisible sun unknown to many, that is, the sun of the Philosophers. The natural sulphur tends to revert to its first nature, so that the body becomes sulphurous and fitted to receive the fire that corrupts man back to his first essence.44 The sun is evidently an instrument in the physiological and psychological drama of return to the prima materia, the death that must be undergone if man is to get back to the original condition of the simple elements and attain the incorrupt nature of the pre-worldly paradise. For Dorn this process was spiritual and moral as well as physical.
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It is evident from this that the coniunctio of Sol and Mercurius is a hierosgamos, with Mercurius playing the role of bride. If one does not find this analogy too offensive, one may ask oneself with equanimity whether the arcanum of the opus alchymicum, as understood by the old masters, may not indeed be considered an equivalent of the dogmatic mystery. For the psychologist the decisive thing here is the subjective attitude of the alchemist. As I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, such a profession of faith is by no means unique.49
[121] The metaphorical designation of Christ as Sol50 in the language of the Church Fathers was taken quite literally by the alchemists and applied to their sol terrenus. When we remember that the alchemical Sol corresponds psychologically to consciousness, the diurnal side of the psyche, we must add the Christ analogy to this symbolism. Christ appears essentially as the son the son of his mother-bride. The role of the son does in fact devolve upon ego-consciousness since it is the offspring of the maternal unconscious. Now according to the arch authority, the Tabula smaragdina, Sol is the father of Mercurius, who in the above quotation appears as feminine and as the mother-bride. In that capacity Mercurius is identical with Luna, andvia the Luna-Mary-Ecclesia symbolismis equated with the Virgin. Thus the treatise Exercitationes in Turbam says: As blood is the origin of flesh, so is Mercurius the origin of Sol . . . and thus Mercurius is Sol and Sol is Mercurius.51 Sol is therefore father and son at once, and his feminine counterpart is mother and daughter in one person; furthermore, Sol and Luna are merely aspects of the same substance that is simultaneously the cause and the product of both, namely Mercurius duplex, of whom the philosophers say that he contains everything that is sought by the wise. This train of thought is based on a quaternity:
[122] Although the Sol symbolism is reminiscent of the dogmatic models, its basic schema is very different; for the dogmatic schema is a Trinity embracing only the Deity but not the universe.52 The alchemical schema appears to embrace only the material world, yet, on account of its quaternary character, it comes near to being a representation of totality as exemplified in the symbol of the cross erected between heaven and earth. The cross is by implication the Christian totality symbol: as an instrument of torture it expresses the sufferings on earth of the incarnate God, and as a quaternity it expresses the universe, which also includes the material world. If we now add to this cruciform schema the four protagonists of the divine world-drama the Father as auctor rerum, the Son, his counterpart the Devil (to fight whom he became man), and the Holy Ghost, we get the following quaternity:
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[124] The alchemical drama leads from below upwards, from the darkness of the earth to the winged, spiritual filius macrocosmi and to the lux moderna; the Christian drama, on the other hand, represents the descent of the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. One has the impression of a mirror-world, as if the God-man coming down from aboveas in the Gnostic legendwere reflected in the dark waters of Physis. The relation of the unconscious to the conscious mind is to a certain extent complementary, as elementary psychogenic symptoms and dreams caused by simple somatic stimuli prove.55 (Hence the strange idea, taught for instance by Rudolf Steiner, that the Hereafter possesses qualities complementary to those of this world.) Careful observation and analysis show, however, that not all dreams can be regarded mechanically as mere complementary devices but must be interpreted rather as attempts at compensation, though this does not prevent very many dreams from having, on a superficial view, a distinct complementary character. Similarly, we could regard the alchemical movement as a reflection of the Christian one.56 Koepgen makes a significant distinction between two aspects of Christ: the descending, incarnate God, and the ascending, Gnostic Christ who returns to the Father. We cannot regard the latter as the same as the alchemical filius regius, although Koepgens schema offers an exact parallel to the alchemical situation.57 The redeemer figure of alchemy is not commensurable with Christ. Whereas Christ is God and is begotten by the Father, the filius regius is the soul of nature, born of the world-creating Logos, of the Sapientia Dei sunk in matter. The filius regius is also a son of God, though of more distant descent and not begotten in the womb of the Virgin Mary but in the womb of Mother Nature: he is a third sonship in the Basilidian sense.58 No traditional influences should be invoked in considering the conceptual structure of this filius; he is more an autochthonous product deriving from an unconscious, logical development of trends which had already reached the field of consciousness in the early Christian era, impelled by the same unconscious necessity as produced the later development of ideas. For, as our modern experience has shown, the collective unconscious is a living process that follows its own inner laws and gushes up like a spring at the appointed time. That it did so in alchemy in such an obscure and complicated way was due essentially to the great psychological difficulties of antinomian thinking, which continually came up against the demand for the logical consistency of the metaphysical figures, and for their emotional absoluteness. The bonum superexcedens of God allows no integration of evil. Although Nicholas Cusanus ventured the bold thought of the coincidentia oppositorum, its logical consequence the relativity of the God-conceptproved disastrous for Angelus Silesius, and only the withered laurels of the poet lie on his grave. He had drunk with Jacob Boehme at the fount of Mater Alchimia. The alchemists, too, became choked in their own confusions.
[125] Once again, therefore, it is the medical investigators of nature who, equipped with new means of knowledge, have rescued these tangled problems from projection by making them the proper subject of psychology. This could never have happened before, for the simple reason that there was no psychology of the unconscious. But the medical investigator, thanks to his knowledge of archetypal processes, is in the fortunate position of being able to recognize in the abstruse and grotesque-looking symbolisms of alchemy the nearest relatives of those serial fantasies which underlie the delusions of paranoid schizophrenia as well as the healing processes at work in the psychogenic neuroses. The overweening contempt which other departments of science have for the apparently negligible psychic processes of pathological individuals should not deter the doctor in his task of helping and healing the sick. But he can help the sick psyche only when he meets it as the unique psyche of that particular individual, and when he knows its earthly and unearthly darknesses. He should also consider it just as important a task to defend the standpoint of consciousness, clarity, reason, and an acknowledged and proven good against the raging torrent that flows for all eternity in the darkness of the psychea
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[126] It cannot have escaped the alchemists that their Sol had something to do with man. Thus Dorn says: From the beginning man was sulphur. Sulphur is a destructive fire enkindled by the invisible sun, and this sun is the Sol Philosophorum,60 which is the much sought-after and highly praised philosophic gold, indeed the goal of the whole work.61 In spite of the fact that Dorn regards the sun and its sulphur as a kind of physiological component of the human body, it is clear that we are dealing with a piece of physiological mythology, i.e., a projection.
[127] In the course of our inquiry we have often seen that, despite the complete absence of any psychology, the alchemical projections sketch a picture of certain fundamental psychological facts and, as it were, reflect them in matter. One of these fundamental facts is the primary pair of opposites, consciousness and unconsciousness, whose symbols are Sol and Luna.
[128] We know well enough that the unconscious appears personified: mostly it is the anima62 who in singular or plural form represents the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is personified by the shadow.63 More rarely, the collective unconscious is personified as a Wise Old Man.64 (I am speaking here only of masculine psychology, which alone can be compared with that of the alchemists.) It is still rarer for Luna to represent the nocturnal side of the psyche in dreams. But in the products of active imagination the symbol of the moon appears much more often, as also does the sun, which represents the luminous realm of the psyche and our diurnal consciousness. The modern unconscious has little use for sun and moon as dream-symbols.65 Illumination (a light dawns, it is becoming clear, etc.) can be expressed just as well or even better in modern dreams by switching on the electric light.
[129] It is therefore not surprising if the unconscious appears in projected and symbolized form, as there is no other way by which it might be perceived. But this is apparently not the case with consciousness. Consciousness, as the essence of all conscious contents, seems to lack the basic requirements for a projection. Properly understood, projection is not a voluntary happening; it is something that approaches the conscious mind from outside, a kind of sheen on the object, while all the time the subject remains unaware that he himself is the source of light which causes the cats eye of the projection to shine. Luna is therefore conceivable as a projection; but Sol as a projection, since it symbolizes consciousness, seems at first glance a contradiction in terms, yet Sol is no less a projection than Luna. For just as we perceive nothing of the real sun but light and heat and, apart from that, can know its physical constitution only by inference, so our consciousness issues from a dark body, the ego, which is the indispensable condition for all consciousness, the latter being nothing but the association of an object or a content with the ego. The ego, ostensibly the thing we know most about, is in fact a highly complex affair full of unfathomable obscurities. Indeed, one could even define it as a relatively constant personification of the unconscious itself, or as the Schopenhauerian mirror in which the unconscious becomes aware of its own face.66 All the worlds that have ever existed before man were physically there. But they were a nameless happening, not a definite actuality, for there did not yet exist that minimal concentration of the psychic factor, which was also present, to speak the word that outweighed the whole of Creation: That is the world, and this is I! That was the first morning of the world, the first sunrise after the primal darkness, when that inchoately conscious complex, the ego, the son of the darkness, knowingly sundered subject and object, and thus precipitated the world and itself into definite existence,67 giving it and itself a voice and a name. The refulgent body of the sun is the ego and its field of consciousness Sol et eius umbra: light without and darkness within. In the source of light there is darkness enough for any amount of projections, for the ego grows out of the darkness of the psyche.
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[131] Although the alchemists came very close to realizing that the ego was the mysteriously elusive arcane substance and the longed-for lapis, they were not aware that with their sun symbol they were establishing an intimate connection between God and the ego. As already remarked, projection is not a voluntary act; it is a natural phenomenon beyond the interference of the conscious mind and peculiar to the nature of the human psyche. If, therefore, it is this nature that produces the sun symbol, nature herself is expressing an identity of God and ego. In that case only unconscious nature can be accused of blasphemy, but not the man who is its victim. It is the rooted conviction of the West that God and the ego are worlds apart. In India, on the other hand, their identity was taken as self-evident. It was the nature of the Indian mind to become aware of the world-creating significance of the consciousness68 manifested in man.69 The West, on the contrary, has always emphasized the littleness, weakness, and sinfulness of the ego, despite the fact that it elevated one man to the status of divinity. The alchemists at least suspected mans hidden godlikeness, and the intuition of Angelus Silesius finally expressed it without disguise.
[132] The East resolves these confusing and contradictory aspects by merging the ego, the personal atman, with the universal atman and thus explaining the ego as the veil of Maya. The Western alchemist was not consciously aware of these problems. But when his unspoken assumptions and his symbols reached the plane of conscious gnosis, as was the case with Angelus Silesius, it was precisely the littleness and lowliness of the ego70 that impelled him to recognize its identity with its extreme opposite.71 It was not the arbitrary opinions of deranged minds that gave rise to such insights, but rather the nature of the psyche itself, which, in East and West alike, expresses these truths either directly or clothed in transparent metaphors. This is understandable when we realize that a world-creating quality attaches to human consciousness as such. In saying this we violate no religious convictions, for the religious believer is at liberty to regard mans consciousness (through which, as it were, a second world-creation was enacted) as a divine instrument.
[133] I must point out to the reader that these remarks on the significance of the ego might easily prompt him to charge me with grossly contradicting myself. He will perhaps remember that he has come across a very similar argument in my other writings. Only there it was not a question of ego but of the self, or rather, of the personal atman in contradistinction and in relation to the suprapersonal atman. I have defined the self as the totality of the conscious and the unconscious psyche, and the ego as the central reference-point of consciousness. It is an essential part of the self, and can be used pars pro toto when the significance of consciousness is borne in mind. But when we want to lay emphasis on the psychic totality it is better to use the term self. There is no question of a contradictory definition, but merely of a difference of standpoint.
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3.02 - The Great Secret, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
I started my work inspired by this ideal of pure knowledge. I chose the science of Physics and more particularly the study of the atom, of radioactivity, the field in which Becquerel and the Curies had mapped out a royal road. It was the period when natural radioactivity was being superseded by artificial radioactivity, when the dreams of the alchemists were coming true. I worked with the great physicists who discovered uranium fission and I saw the birth of the atom bomb: years of hard, dogged and one-pointed labour. It was at this time that I conceived the idea which was to lead me to my first discovery, the one which enables us today to obtain electric power directly from intra-atomic or nuclear energy. As you all know, this discovery resulted in a radical change in the economic condition of the whole world, because it brought energy at a low cost within the reach of all. If this discovery was so sensational, it was because it freed man from the curse of toil, from the need to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.
So I realised the dream of my youth - a great discovery and at the same time I saw its importance for humanity - to which, without especially intending to do so, I had brought this great boon.
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3.02 - The Psychology of Rebirth, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
rebirth. As the alchemist Democritus says: "Nature rejoices in
nature, nature subdues nature, nature rules over nature." There
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of the alchemists, their friend and counsellor, who leads them
to the goal of their work. He is "like a teacher mediating be-
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other, i.e., as an outward event. The alchemists saw it in the
transformation of the chemical substance. So if one of them
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mortality. The former is the case with many alchemists, notably
Paracelsus (in his treatise De vita longa 5 ), and the latter is exem-
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2 46 The alchemists, too, speak of a strange fish in the sea, the
"round fish lacking bones and skin," n which symbolizes the
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by the alchemists in a cave under the earth (Mylius, Philosophia reformata, 1622,
p. 167). They are the "sleepers enchained in Hades" (Berthelot, Collection des
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3.03 - SULPHUR, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[138] In view of the significance of sulphur it is worth our while to take a look at its effects as described by the alchemists. Above all, it burns and consumes: The little power of this sulphur is sufficient to consume a strong body.110 The strong body is the sun, as is clear from the saying: Sulphur blackens the sun and consumes it. Then, it causes or signifies the putrefactio, which in our day was never seen, says the Rosarium.111 A third capacity is that of coagulating,112 and a fourth and fifth those of tincturing (tingere, colorare) and maturing (maturare).113 Its putrefying effect is also understood as its ability to corrupt. Sulphur is the cause of imperfection in all metals, the corrupter of perfection, causing the blackness in every operation; too much sulphurousness is the cause of corruption, it is bad and not well mixed, of an evil, stinking odour and of feeble strength. Its substance is dense and tough, and its corruptive action is due on the one hand to its combustibility and on the other to its earthy feculence. It hinders perfection in all its works.114
[139] These unfavourable accounts evidently impressed one of the adepts so much that, in a marginal note, he added diabolus to the causae corruptionis.115 This remark is illuminating: it forms the counterpoint to the luminous role of sulphur, for sulphur is a Lucifer or Phosphorus (light-bringer), from the most beautiful star in the chymic firmament down to the candelulae,little bits of sulphurous tow such as old women sell for lighting fires.116 In addition to so many other qualities, sulphur shares this extreme paradox with Mercurius, besides having like him a connection with Venus, though here the allusion is veiled and more discreet: Our Venus is not the common sulphur, which burns and is consumed with the combustion of the fire and of the corruption; but the whiteness of the Venus of the Sages is consumed with the combustion of the white and the red [albedinis et rubedinis], and this combustion is the entire whitening [dealbatio] of the whole work. Therefore two sulphurs are mentioned and two quicksilvers,117 and these the Philosophers have named one and one,118 and they rejoice in one another,119 and the one contains the other.120
[140] Another allusion to Venus occurs in one of the parables in De sulphure,121 about an alchemist who is seeking the sulphur. His quest leads him to the grove of Venus, and there he learns through a voice, which later turns out to be Saturns, that Sulphur is held a prisoner at the comm and of his own mother. He is praised as the artificer of a thousand things, as the heart of all things, as that which endows living things with understanding, as the begetter of every flower and blossom on herb and tree, and finally as the painter of all colours.122 This might well be a description of Eros. In addition we learn that he was imprisoned because in the view of the alchemists he had shown himself too obliging towards his mother. Although we are not told who his mother was, we may conjecture that it was Venus herself who shut up her naughty Cupid.123 This interpretation is corroborated by the fact, firstly, that Sulphur, unknown to the alchemist, was in the grove of Venus124 (woods, like trees, have a maternal significance); secondly, that Saturn introduced himself as the governor of the prison, and all alchemists with knowledge of astrology would have been familiar with the secret nature of Saturn;125 thirdly, that after the disappearance of the voice the alchemist, falling asleep, saw in the same grove a fountain and near it the personified Sulphur; and, finally, that the vision ends with the chymical embrace in the bath. Here Venus is undoubtedly the amor sapientiae who puts a check on Sulphurs roving charms. The latter may well derive from the fact that his seat in the Uroboros is in the tail of the dragon.126 Sulphur is the masculine element par excellence, the sperma homogeneum;127 and since the dragon is said to impregnate himself, his tail is the masculine and his mouth the feminine organ. Like Beya,128 who engulfed her brother in her own body and dissolved him into atoms, the dragon devours himself from the tail upwards until his whole body has been swallowed into his head.129 Being the inner fire of Mercurius,130 Sulphur obviously partakes of his most dangerous and most evil nature, his violence being personified in the dragon and the lion, and his concupiscence in Hermes Kyllenios.131 The dragon whose nature sulphur shares is often spoken of as the dragon of Babel or, more accurately, the dragons head (caput draconis), which is a most pernicious poison, a poisonous vapour breathed out by the flying dragon. The dragons head comes with great swiftness from Babylon. However, the winged dragon that stands for quicksilver becomes a poison-breathing monster only after its union with the wingless dragon, which corresponds to sulphur.132 Sulphur here plays an evil role that accords well with the sinful Babel. Furthermore, this dragon is equated with the human-headed serpent of paradise, which had the imago et similitudo Dei in its head, this being the deeper reason why the dragon devours its hated body. His head lives in eternity, and therefore it is called glorious life, and the angels serve him.133 This is a reference to Matthew 4: 11: Then the devil leaveth him, and behold, angels came and ministered unto him.
[141] Hence we get the parallel of the dragons head with Christ, corresponding to the Gnostic view that the son of the highest divinity took on the form of the serpent in paradise in order to teach our first parents the faculty of discrimination, so that they should see that the work of the demiurge was imperfect. As the son of the seven planets the dragon is clearly the filius macrocosmi and, as such, a parallel figure to Christ and at the same time his rival.134 The dragons head contains the precious stone, which means that consciousness contains the symbolic image of the self, and just as the lapis unites the opposites so the self assimilates contents of consciousness and the unconscious. This interpretation fully accords with the traditional significance of the dragons head as a favourable omen.
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[143] From all this it is apparent that for the alchemists sulphur was one of the many synonyms for the mysterious transformative substance.143 This is expressed most plainly in the Turba:144 Therefore roast it for seven days, until it becomes shining like marble, because, when it does, it is a very great secret [arcanum], since sulphur has been mixed with sulphur; and thereby is the greatest work accomplished, by mutual affinity, because natures meeting their nature mutually rejoice.145 It is a characteristic of the arcane substance to have everything it needs; it is a fully autonomous being, like the dragon that begets, reproduces, slays, and devours itself. It is questionable whether the alchemists, who were anything but consistent thinkers, ever became fully conscious of what they were saying when they used such images. If we take their words literally, they would refer to an Increatum, a being without beginning or end, and in need of no second. Such a thing can by definition only be God himself, but a God, we must add, seen in the mirror of physical nature and distorted past recognition. The One for which the alchemists strove corresponds to the res simplex, which the Liber quartorum defines as God.146 This reference, however, is unique, and in view of the corrupt state of the text I would not like to labour its significance, although Dorns speculations about the One and the unarius are closely analogous. The Turba continues: And yet they are not different natures, nor several, but a single one, which unites their powers in itself, through which it prevails over the other things. See you not that the Master has begun with the One and ended with the One? For he has named those unities the water of the sulphur, which conquers the whole of nature.147 The peculiarity of sulphur is also expressed in the paradox that it is incremabile (incombustible), ash extracted from ash.148 Its effects as aqua sulfurea are infinite.149 The Consilium coniugii says: Our sulphur is not the common sulphur,150 which is usually said of the philosophical gold. Paracelsus, in his Liber Azoth, describes sulphur as lignum (wood), the linea vitae (line of life), and fourfold (to correspond with the four elements); the spirit of life is renewed from it.151 Of the philosophical sulphur Mylius says that such a thing is not to be found on earth except in Sol and Luna, and it is known to no man unless revealed to him by God.152 Dorn calls it the son begotten of the imperfect bodies, who, when sublimated, changes into the highly esteemed salt of four colours. In the Tractatus Micreris it is even called the treasure of God.153
[144] These references to sulphur as the arcane and transformative substance must suffice. I would only like to stress Paracelsus remark about its fourfold nature, and that of his pupil Dorn about the four colours as symbols of totality. The psychic factor which appears in projection in all similarly characterized arcane substances is the unconscious self. It is on this account that the well-known Christ-lapis154 parallel reappears again and again, as for instance in the above-mentioned parable of the adepts adventure in the grove of Venus. As we saw, he fell asleep after having a long and instructive conversation with the voice of Saturn. In his dream he beholds the figures of two men by the fountain in the grove, one of them Sulphur, the other Sal. A quarrel arises, and Sal gives Sulphur an incurable wound. Blood pours from it in the form of whitest milk. As the adept sinks deeper into sleep, it changes into a river. Diana emerges from the grove and bathes in the miraculous water. A prince (Sol), passing by, espies her, they are inflamed for love of one another, and she falls down in a swoon and sinks beneath the surface. The princes retinue refuse to rescue her for fear of the perilous water,155 whereupon the prince plunges in and is dragged down by her to the depths. Immediately their souls appear above the water and explain to the adept that they will not go back into bodies so polluted, and are glad to be quit of them. They would remain afloat until the fogs and clouds have disappeared. At this point the adept returns to his former dream, and with many other alchemists he finds the corpse of Sulphur by the fountain. Each of them takes a piece and operates with it, but without success.156 We learn, further, that Sulphur is not only the medicina but also the medicus the wounded physician.157 Sulphur suffers the same fate as the body that is pierced by the lance of Mercurius. In Reusners Pandora158 the body is symbolized as Christ, the second Adam, pierced by the lance of a mermaid, or a Lilith or Edem.159
[145] This analogy shows that sulphur as the arcane substance was set on a par with Christ, so that for the alchemists it must have meant something very similar. We would turn away in disgust from such an absurdity were it not obvious that this analogy, sometimes in clear and sometimes in veiled form, was thrust upon them by the unconscious. Certainly there could be no greater disparity than that between the holiest conception known to mans consciousness and sulphur with its evil-smelling compounds. The analogy therefore is in no sense evidential but can only have arisen through intense and passionate preoccupation with the chemical substance, which gradually formed a tertium comparationis in the alchemists mind and forced it upon him with the utmost insistence. The common denominator of these two utterly incommensurable conceptions is the self, the image of the whole man, which reached its finest and most significant development in the Ecce Homo, and on the other hand appears as the meanest, most contemptible, and most insignificant thing, and manifests itself to consciousness precisely in that guise. As it is a concept of human totality, the self is by definition greater than the ego-conscious personality, embracing besides this the personal shadow and the collective unconscious. Conversely, the entire phenomenon of the unconscious appears so unimportant to ego-consciousness that we would rather explain it as a privatio lucis160 than allow it an autonomous existence. In addition, the conscious mind is critical and mistrustful of everything hailing from the unconscious, convinced that it is suspect and somehow dirty. Hence the psychic phenomenology of the self is as full of paradoxes as the Hindu conception of the atman, which on the one hand embraces the universe and on the other dwells no bigger than a thumb in the heart. The Eastern idea of atman-purusha corresponds psychologically to the Western figure of Christ, who is the second Person of the Trinity and God himself, but, so far as his human existence is concerned, conforms exactly to the suffering servant of God in Isaiah161from his birth in a stable among the animals to his shameful death on the cross between two thieves.
[146] The contrast is even sharper in the Naassene picture of the Redeemer, as reported by Hippolytus:162 Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.163 This is the wonder of wonders. For who, saith he [the Naassene], is this King of glory? A worm and no man, a reproach of men, and despised of the people;164 this same is the King, and mighty in battle. But the battle, say the Naassenes, refers to the warring elements in the body. This association of the passage from the Psalms with the idea of conflict is no accident, for psychological experience shows that the symbols of the self appear in dreams and in active imagination at moments of violent collision between two opposite points of view, as compensatory attempts to mitigate the conflict and make enemies friends. Therefore the lapis, which is born of the dragon, is extolled as a saviour and mediator since it represents the equivalent of a redeemer sprung from the unconscious. The Christ-lapis parallel vacillates between mere analogy and far-reaching identity, but in general it is not thought out to its logical conclusion, so that the dual focus remains. This is not surprising since even today most of us have not got round to understanding Christ as the psychic reality of an archetype, regardless of his historicity. I do not doubt the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth, but the figure of the Son of Man and of Christ the Redeemer has archetypal antecedents. It is these that form the basis of the alchemical analogies.
[147] As investigators of nature the alchemists showed their Christian attitude by their pistis in the object of their science, and it was not their fault if in many cases the psyche proved stronger than the chemical substance and its well-guarded secrets by distorting the results. It was only the acuter powers of observation in modern man which showed that weighing and measuring provided the key to the locked doors of chemical combination, after the intuition of the alchemists had stressed for centuries the importance of measure, number, and weight.165 The prime and most immediate experience of matter was that it is animated, which for medieval man was self-evident; indeed every Mass, every rite of the Church, and the miraculous effect of relics all demonstrated for him this natural and obvious fact. The French Enlightenment and the shattering of the metaphysical view of the world were needed before a scientist like Lavoisier had the courage finally to reach out for the scales. To begin with, however, the alchemists were fascinated by the soul of matter, which, unknown to them, it had received from the human psyche by way of projection. For all their intensive preoccupation with matter as a concrete fact they followed this psychic trail, which was to lead them into a region that, to our way of thinking, had not the remotest connection with chemistry. Their mental labours consisted in a predominantly intuitive apprehension of psychic facts, the intellect playing only the modest role of a famulus. The results of this curious method of research proved, however, to be beyond the grasp of any psychology for several centuries. If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. The misfortune of the alchemists was that they themselves did not know what they were talking about. Nevertheless, we possess witnesses enough to the high esteem in which they held their science and to the wonderment which the mystery of matter instilled into them. For they discoveredto keep to sulphur as our examplein this substance, which was one of the customary attri butes of hell and the devil, as well as in the poisonous, crafty, and treacherous Mercurius, an analogy with the most sacrosanct figure of their religion. They therefore imbued this arcanum with symbols intended to characterize its malicious, dangerous, and uncanny nature, choosing precisely those which in the positive sense were used for Christ in the patristic literature. These were the snake, the lion, the eagle, fire, cloud, shadow, fish, stone, the unicorn and the rhinoceros, the dragon, the night-raven, the man encompassed by a woman, the hen, water, and many others. This strange usage is explained by the fact that the majority of the patristic allegories have in addition to their positive meaning a negative one. Thus in St. Eucherius166 the rapacious wolf in its good part signifies the apostle Paul, but in its bad part the devil.
[148] From this we would have to conclude that the alchemists had discovered the psychological existence of a shadow which opposes and compensates the conscious, positive figure. For them the shadow was in no sense a privatio lucis; it was so real that they even thought they could discern its material density, and this concretism led them to attri bute to it the dignity of being the matrix of an incorruptible and eternal substance. In the religious sphere this psychological discovery is reflected in the historical fact that only with the rise of Christianity did the devil, the eternal counterpart of Christ, assume his true form, and that the figure of Antichrist appears on the scene already in the New Testament. It would have been natural for the alchemists to suppose that they had lured the devil out of the darkness of matter. There were indeed indications of this, as we have seen, but they are exceptions. Far more prevalent and truly characteristic of alchemy was the optimistic notion that this creature of darkness was destined to be the medicina, as is proved by the use of the term medicina et medicus for the untrustworthy sulphur. The very same appellation appears as an allegory of Christ in St. Ambrose.167 The Greek word
(poison and antidote) is indicative of this ambivalence. In our parable of the sulphur the river of most dangerous water, which caused so many deaths, is analogous to the water from the side of Christ and the streams that flowed from his belly. What in one place is a river of grace is a deadly poison in anotherharbouring within it, however, the potentialities of healing.
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[150] So, although the alchemists failed to discover the hidden structure of matter, they did discover that of the psyche, even if they were scarcely conscious of what this discovery meant. Their naive Christ-lapis parallel is at once a symbolization of the chemical arcanum and of the figure of Christ. The identification or paralleling of Christ with a chemical factor, which was in essence a pure projection from the unconscious, has a reactive effect on the interpretation of the Redeemer. For if A (Christ) = B (lapis), and B = C (an unconscious content), then A = C. Such conclusions need not be drawn consciously in order to be made effective. Given the initial impulse, as provided for instance by the Christ-lapis parallel, the conclusion will draw itself even though it does not reach consciousness, and it will remain the unspoken, spiritual property of the school of thought that first hit upon the equation. Not only that, it will be handed down to the heirs of that school as an integral part of their mental equipment, in this case the natural scientists. The equation had the effect of channelling the religious numen into physical nature and ultimately into matter itself, which in its turn had the chance to become a self-subsistent metaphysical principle. In following up their basic thoughts the alchemists, as I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, logically opposed to the son of the spirit a son of the earth and of the stars (or metals), and to the Son of Man or filius microcosmi a filius macrocosmi, thus unwittingly revealing that in alchemy there was an autonomous principle which, while it did not replace the spirit, nevertheless existed in its own right. Although the alchemists were more or less aware that their insights and truths were of divine origin, they knew they were not sacred revelations but were vouchsafed by individual inspiration or by the lumen naturae, the sapientia Dei hidden in nature. The autonomy of their insights showed itself in the emancipation of science from the domination of faith. Human intolerance and shortsightedness are to blame for the open conflict that ultimately broke out between faith and knowledge. Conflict or comparison between incommensurables is impossible. The only possible attitude is one of mutual toleration, for neither can deprive the other of its validity. Existing religious beliefs have, besides their supernatural foundation, a basis in psychological facts whose existence is as valid as those of the empirical sciences. If this is not understood on one side or the other it makes no difference to the facts, for these exist whether man understands them or not, and whoever does not have the facts on his side will sooner or later have to pay the price.
[151] With this I would like to conclude my remarks on sulphur. This arcane substance has provided occasion for some general reflections, which are not altogether fortuitous in that sulphur represents the active substance of the sun or, in psychological language, the motive factor in consciousness: on the one hand the will, which can best be regarded as a dynamism subordinated to consciousness, and on the other hand compulsion, an involuntary motivation or impulse ranging from mere interest to possession proper. The unconscious dynamism would correspond to sulphur, for compulsion is the great mystery of human life. It is the thwarting of our conscious will and of our reason by an inflammable element within us, appearing now as a consuming fire and now as life-giving warmth.
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3.04 - Immersion in the Bath, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
fluid of the gravid uterus. The alchemists frequently point out that their
stone grows like a child in its mothers womb; they call the vas
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says: Anima est Sol et Luna. The alchemist thought in strictly medieval
trichotomous terms: anything alive and his lapis is undoubtedly alive
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substance, an anima media natura, as the alchemists call it, an
hermaphroditic being capable of uniting the opposites, but who is never
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rose, the wheel, or the coniunctio Solis et Lunae. The alchemists even go
so far as to say that the corpus, anima, and Spiritus of the arcane substance
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3.04 - LUNA, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[154] Luna, as we have seen, is the counterpart of Sol, cold,168 moist, feebly shining or dark, feminine, corporeal, passive. Accordingly her most significant role is that of a partner in the coniunctio. As a feminine deity her radiance is mild; she is the lover. Pliny calls her a womanly and gentle star. She is the sister and bride, mother and spouse of the sun.169 To illustrate the sun-moon relationship the alchemists often made use of the Song of Songs (Canticles),170 as in the confabulation of the lover with the beloved in Aurora Consurgens.171 In Athens the day of the new moon was considered favourable for celebrating marriages, and it still is an Arabian custom to marry on this day; sun and moon are marriage partners who embrace on the twenty-eighth day of the month.172 According to these ancient ideas the moon is a vessel of the sun: she is a universal receptacle, of the sun in particular173; and she was called infundibulum terrae (the funnel of the earth), because she receives and pours out174 the powers of heaven. Again, it is said that the moisture of the moon (lunaris humor) takes up the sunlight,175 or that Luna draws near to the sun in order to extract from him, as from a fountain, universal form and natural life; 176 she also brings about the conception of the universal seed of the sun in the quintessence, in the belly and womb of nature.177 In this respect there is a certain analogy between the moon and the earth, as stated in Plutarch and Macrobius.178 Aurora Consurgens says that the earth made the moon,178a and here we should remember that Luna also signifies silver. But the statements of the alchemists about Luna are so complex that one could just as well say that silver is yet another synonym or symbol for the arcanum Luna. Even so, a remark like the one just quoted may have been a reference to the way in which ore was supposed to have been formed in the earth: the earth receives the powers of the stars, and in it the sun generates the gold, etc. The Aurora consurgens therefore equates the earth with the bride: I am that land of the holy promise,179 or at any rate it is in the earth that the hierosgamos takes place.180 Earth and moon coincide in the albedo, for on the one hand the sublimated or calcined earth appears as terra alba foliata, the sought-for good, like whitest snow,181 and on the other hand Luna, as mistress of the albedo,182 is the femina alba of the coniunctio183 and the mediatrix of the whitening.184 The lunar sulphur is white, as already mentioned. The plenilunium (full moon) appears to be especially important: When the moon shines in her fulness the rabid dog, the danger that threatens the divine child,185 is chased away. In Senior the full moon is the arcane substance.
[155] In ancient tradition Luna is the giver of moisture and ruler of the water-sign Cancer (
). Maier says that the umbra solis cannot be destroyed unless the sun enters the sign of Cancer, but that Cancer is the house of Luna, and Luna is the ruler of the moistures186 (juice, sap, etc.). According to Aurora consurgens II, she is herself the water,187 the bountiful nurse of the dew.188 Rahner, in his Mysterium Lunae, shows the extensive use which the Church Fathers made of the allegory of the moon-dew in explaining the effects of grace in the ecclesiastical sacraments. Here again the patristic symbolism exerted a very strong influence on the alchemical allegories. Luna secretes the dew or sap of life. This Luna is the sap of the water of life, which is hidden in Mercurius.189 Even the Greek alchemists supposed there was a principle in the moon (
), which Christianos190 calls the ichor of the philosopher (
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[156] As the alchemists were often physicians, Galens views must surely have influenced their ideas about the moon and its effects. Galen calls Luna the princeps who rightly governs this earthly realm, surpassing the other planets not in potency, but in proximity. He also makes the moon responsible for all physical changes in sickness and health, and regards its aspects as decisive for prognosis.
[157] The age-old belief that the moon promotes the growth of plants led in alchemy not only to similar statements but also to the curious idea that the moon is itself a plant. Thus the Rosarium says that Sol is called a great animal whereas Luna is a plant.196 In the alchemical pictures there are numerous sun-and-moon trees.197 In the Super arborem Aristotelis, the circle of the moon perches in the form of a stork on a wonderworking tree by the grave of Hermes.198 Galen199 explains the arbor philosophica as follows: There is a certain herb or plant, named Lunatica or Berissa,200 whose roots are metallic earth, whose stem is red, veined with black, and whose flowers are like those of the marjoram; there are thirty of them, corresponding to the age of the moon in its waxing and waning. Their colour is yellow.201 Another name for Lunatica is Lunaria, whose flowers Dorn mentions, attri buting to them miraculous powers.202 Khunrath says: From this little salty fountain grows also the tree of the sun and moon, the red and white coral-tree of our sea, which is that same Lunaria and whose salt is called Luna Philosophorum et dulcedo sapientum (sweetness of the sages).203 The Allegoriae super librum Turbae describe the moon-plant thus: In the lunar sea204 there is a sponge planted, having blood and sentience [sensum],205 in the manner of a tree that is rooted in the sea and moveth not from its place. If thou wouldst handle the plant, take a sickle to cut it with, but have good care that the blood floweth not out, for it is the poison of the Philosophers.206
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[159] Rulands remark that the sponge has understanding (see n. 205) and Khunraths that the essence of the Lunaria is the sweetness of the sages point to the general idea that the moon has some secret connection with the human mind.212 The alchemists have a great deal to say about this, and this is the more interesting as we know that the moon is a favourite symbol for certain aspects of the unconsciousthough only, of course, in a man. In a woman the moon corresponds to consciousness and the sun to the unconscious. This is due to the contrasexual archetype in the unconscious: anima in a man, animus in a woman.
[160] In the gnosis of Simon Magus, Helen (Selene) is
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), roughly corresponding to the position of the filius philosophorum.293a Kalids filius plays the role of a guiding spirit or familiar whose invocation by magic is so typical of the Harranite texts. A parallel to the dog-spirit is the poodle in Faust, out of whom Mephistopheles emerges as the familiar of Faust the alchemist.
[178] In this connection I would like to mention the incest dream of a woman patient: Two dogs were copulating. The male went head first into the female and disappeared in her belly.294 Theriomorphic symbolism is always an indication of a psychic process occurring on an animal level, i.e., in the instinctual sphere. The dream depicts a reversed birth as the goal of a sexual act. This archetypal situation underlies the incest motif in general and was present in modern man long before any consciousness of it. The archetype of incest is also at the back of the primitive notion that the father is reborn in the son, and of the heirosgamos of mother and son in its pagan and Christian form;295 it signifies the highest and the lowest, the brightest and the darkest, the best and the most detestable. It represents the pattern of renewal and rebirth, the endless creation and disappearance of symbolic figures.
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[183] Here the connection with the moon tells us that the dark, dangerous, rabid dog changes into an eagle at the time of the plenilunium. His darkness disappears and he becomes a solar animal. We may therefore assume that his sickness was at its worst at the novilunium. It is clear that this refers to a psychic disturbance324 which at one stage also infected the infant hermaphrodite. Probably that too occurred at the novilunium,325 i.e., the stage of nigredo. Just how the mad dog with its terror of water got into the water at all is not clear, unless perhaps it was in the aquae inferiores from the beginning. The text is preceded by the remark: Whence will come the Chamaeleon or our Chaos, in which all secrets are hid in their potential state. The chaos as prima materia is identical with the waters of the beginning. According to Olympiodorus lead (also the prima materia) contains a demon that drives the adept mad.326 Curiously enough, Wei Po-yang, a Chinese alchemist of the second century, compares lead to a madman clothed in rags.327 Elsewhere Olympiodorus speaks of the one cursed by God who dwells in the black earth. This is the mole, which, as Olympiodorus relates from a Hermetic book, had once been a man who divulged the mysteries of the sun and was therefore cursed by God and made blind. He knew the shape of the sun, as it was.328
[184] It is not difficult to discern in these allusions the dangers, real or imaginary, which are connected with the unconscious. In this respect the unconscious has a bad reputation, not so much because it is dangerous in itself as because there are cases of latent psychosis which need only a slight stimulus to break out in all their catastrophic manifestations. An anamnesis or the touching of a complex may be sufficient for this. But the unconscious is also feared by those whose conscious attitude is at odds with their true nature. Naturally their dreams will then assume an unpleasant and threatening form, for if nature is violated she takes her revenge. In itself the unconscious is neutral, and its normal function is to compensate the conscious position. In it the opposites slumber side by side; they are wrenched apart only by the activity of the conscious mind, and the more one-sided and cramped the conscious standpoint is, the more painful or dangerous will be the unconscious reaction. There is no danger from this sphere if conscious life has a solid foundation. But if consciousness is cramped and obstinately one-sided, and there is also a weakness of judgment, then the approach or invasion of the unconscious can cause confusion and panic or a dangerous inflation, for one of the most obvious dangers is that of identifying with the figures in the unconscious. For anyone with an unstable disposition this may amount to a psychosis.
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[189] The newcomer to the psychology of the unconscious will probably find the two texts about the mad dog and the thief very weird and abstruse. Actually they are no more so than the dreams which are the daily fare of the psycho therapist; and, like dreams, they can be translated into rational speech. In order to interpret dreams we need some knowledge of the dreamers personal situation, and to understand alchemical parables we must know something about the symbolic assumptions of the alchemists. We amplify dreams by the personal history of the patient, and the parables by the statements found in the text. Armed with this knowledge, it is not too difficult in either case to discern a meaning that seems sufficient for our needs. An interpretation can hardly ever be convincingly proved. Generally it shows itself to be correct only when it has proved its value as a heuristic hypothesis. I would therefore like to take the second of Philalethas texts, which is rather clearer than the first, and try to interpret it as if it were a dream.
Tu si aridam hanc Terram, aqua sui generis rigare sciveris, poros Terrae laxabis,
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[195] I was tempted to translate arsenicalis as poisonous. But this translation would be too modern. Not everything that the alchemists called arsenic was really the chemical element As. Arsenic originally meant masculine, manly, strong (
) and was essentially an arcanum, as Rulands Lexicon shows. There arsenic is defined as an hermaphrodite, the means whereby Sulphur and Mercury are united. It has communion with both natures and is therefore called Sun and Moon.344 Or arsenic is Luna, our Venus, Sulphurs companion and the soul. Here arsenic is no longer the masculine aspect of the arcane substance but is hermaphroditic and even feminine. This brings it dangerously close to the moon and the crude sulphur, so that arsenic loses its solar affinity. As Sulphurs companion it is poisonous and corrosive. Because the arcane substance always points to the principal unconscious content, its peculiar nature shows in what relation that content stands to consciousness. If the conscious mind has accepted it, it has a positive form, if not, a negative one. If on the other hand the arcane substance is split into two figures, this means that the content has been partly accepted and partly rejected; it is seen under two different, incompatible aspects and is therefore taken to be two different things.
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[211] The eye that hitherto saw only the darkness and danger of evil turns towards the circle of the moon, where the ethereal realm of the immortals begins, and the gloomy deep can be left to its own devices, for the spirit now moves it from within, convulses and transforms it. When consciousness draws near to the unconscious not only does it receive a devastating shock but something of its light penetrates into the darkness of the unconscious. The result is that the unconscious is no longer so remote and strange and terrifying, and this paves the way for an eventual union. Naturally the illumination of the unconscious does not mean that from now on the unconscious is less unconscious. Far from it. What happens is that its contents cross over into consciousness more easily than before. The light that shines at the end is the lux moderna of the alchemists, the new widening of consciousness, a further step in the realization of the Anthropos, and every one of these steps signifies a rebirth of the deity.
[212] Herewith we end our contemplation of the text. The question now arises: Did the alchemists really have such thoughts and conceal them in their ornate metaphors? In other words, did Philaletha, the pseudonymous author of our text, have anything like the thoughts and ideas which I have put forward by way of interpretation? I regard this as out of the question, and yet I believe that these authors invariably said the best, most apposite, and clearest thing they could about the matter in hand. For our taste and our intellectual requirements this performance is, however, so unsatisfactory that we ourselves feel compelled to make a renewed attempt to say the same thing in still clearer words. It seems obvious to us that what we think about it was never thought by the alchemists, for if it had been it would doubtless have come out long ago. The philosophers took the greatest pains to unearth and reveal the secret of the stone, accusing the ancients of having written too copiously and too obscurely. If they, on their own admission, wrote typice, symbolice, metaphorice, this was the best they could do, and it is thanks to their labours that we are today in a position to say anything at all about the secrets of alchemy.
[213] All understanding that is not directly of a mathematical nature (which, incidentally, understands nothing but merely formulates) is conditioned by its time. Fundamental to alchemy is a true and genuine mystery which since the seventeenth century has been understood unequivocally as psychic. Nor can we moderns conceive it to be anything except a psychic product whose meaning may be elicited by the methods and empirical experience of our twentieth century medical psychology. But I do not imagine for a moment that the psychological interpretation of a mystery must necessarily be the last word. If it is a mystery it must have still other aspects. Certainly I believe that psychology can unravel the secrets of alchemy, but it will not lay bare the secret of these secrets. We may therefore expect that at some time in the future our attempt at explanation will be felt to be just as metaphorical and symbolical as we have found the alchemical one to be, and that the mystery of the stone, or of the self, will then develop an aspect which, though still unconscious to us today, is nevertheless foreshadowed in our formulations, though in so veiled a form that the investigator of the future will ask himself, just as we do, whether we knew what we meant.
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[222] Statements by men on the subject of female psychology suffer principally from the fact that the projection of unconscious femininity is always strongest where critical judgment is most needed, that is, where a man is involved emotionally. In the metaphorical descriptions of the alchemists, Luna is primarily a reflection of a mans unconscious femininity, but she is also the principle of the feminine psyche, in the sense that Sol is the principle of a mans. This is particularly obvious in the astrological interpretation of sun and moon, not to mention the age-old assumptions of mythology. Alchemy is inconceivable without the influence of her elder sister astrology, and the statements of these three disciplines must be taken into account in any psychological evaluation of the luminaries. If, then, Luna characterizes the feminine psyche and Sol the masculine, consciousness would be an exclusively masculine affair, which is obviously not the case since woman possesses consciousness too. But as we have previously identified Sol with consciousness and Luna with the unconscious, we would now be driven to the conclusion that a woman cannot possess a consciousness.
[223] The error in our formulation lies in the fact, firstly, that we equated the moon with the unconscious as such, whereas the equation is true chiefly of the unconscious of a man; and secondly, that we overlooked the fact that the moon is not only dark but is also a giver of light and can therefore represent consciousness. This is indeed so in the case of woman: her consciousness has a lunar rather than a solar character. Its light is the mild light of the moon, which merges things together rather than separates them. It does not show up objects in all their pitiless discreteness and separateness, like the harsh, glaring light of day, but blends in a deceptive shimmer the near and the far, magically transforming little things into big things, high into low, softening all colour into a bluish haze, and blending the nocturnal landscape into an unsuspected unity.
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3.05 - SAL, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[238] The taking up of the body had long been emphasized as an historical and material event, and the alchemists could therefore make use of the representations of the Assumption in describing the glorification of matter in the opus. The illustration of this process in Reusners Pandora388 shows, underneath the coronation scene, a kind of shield between the emblems of Matthew and Luke, on which is depicted the extraction of Mercurius from the prima materia. The extracted spirit appears in monstrous form: the head is surrounded by a halo, and reminds us of the traditional head of Christ, but the arms are snakes and the lower half of the body resembles a stylized fishs tail.389 This is without doubt the anima mundi who has been freed from the shackles of matter, the filius macrocosmi or Mercurius-Anthropos, who, because of his double nature, is not only spiritual and physical but unites in himself the morally highest and lowest.390 The illustration in Pandora points to the great secret which the alchemists dimly felt was implicit in the Assumption. The proverbial darkness of sublunary matter has always been associated with the prince of this world, the devil. He is the metaphysical figure who is excluded from the Trinity but who, as the counterpart of Christ, is the sine qua non of the drama of redemption.391 His equivalent in alchemy is the dark side of Mercurius duplex and, as we saw, the active sulphur. He also conceals himself in the poisonous dragon, the preliminary, chthonic form of the lapis aethereus. To the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages, and to Dorn in particular, it was perfectly clear that the triad must be complemented by a fourth, as the lapis had always been regarded as a quaternity of elements. It did not disturb them that this would necessarily involve the evil spirit. On the contrary, the dismemberment and self-devouring of the dragon probably seemed to them a commendable operation. Dorn, however, saw in the quaternity the absolute opposite of the Trinity, namely the female principle, which seemed to him of the devil, for which reason he called the devil the four-horned serpent. This insight must have given him a glimpse into the core of the problem.392 In his refutation he identified woman with the devil because of the number two, which is characteristic of both. The devil, he thought, was the binarius itself, since it was created on the second day of Creation, on Monday, the day of the moon, on which God failed to express his pleasure, this being the day of doubt and separation.393 Dorn puts into words what is merely hinted at in the Pandora illustration.
[239] If we compare this train of thought with the Christian quaternity which the new dogma has virtually produced (but has not defined as such), it will immediately be apparent that we have here an upper quaternio which is supraordinate to mans wholeness and is psychologically comparable to the Moses quaternio of the Gnostics.394 Man and the dark abyss of the world, the deus absconditus, have not yet been taken up into it. Alchemy, however, is the herald of a still-unconscious drive for maximal integration which seems to be reserved for a distant future, even though it originated with Origens doubt concerning the ultimate fate of the devil.395
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[245] Inseparable from salt and sea is the quality of amaritudo, bitterness. The etymology of Isidore of Seville was accepted all through the Middle Ages: Mare ab amaro.431 Among the alchemists the bitterness became a kind of technical term. Thus, in the treatise Rosinus ad Euthiciam,432 there is the following dialogue between Zosimos and Theosebeia: This is the stone that hath in it glory and colour. And she: Whence cometh its colour? He replied: From its exceeding strong bitterness. And she: Whence cometh its bitterness and intensity? He answered: From the impurity of its metal. The treatise Rosinus ad Sarratantam episcopum433 says: Take the stone that is black, white, red, and yellow, and is a wonderful bird that flies without wings in the blackness of the night and the brightness of the day: in the bitterness that is in its throat the colouring will be found. Each thing in its first matter is corrupt and bitter, says Ripley. The bitterness is a tincturing poison.434 And Mylius: Our stone is endowed with the strongest spirit, bitter and brazen (aeneus);435 and the Rosarium mentions that salt is bitter because it comes from the mineral of the sea.436 The Liber Alze437 says: O nature of this wondrous thing, which transforms the body into spirit! . . . When it is found alone it conquers all things, and is an excellent, harsh, and bitter acid, which transmutes gold into pure spirit.438
[246] These quotations clearly allude to the sharp taste of salt and sea-water. The reason why the taste is described as bitter and not simply as salt may lie first of all in the inexactness of the language, since amarus also means sharp, biting, harsh, and is used metaphorically for acrimonious speech or a wounding joke. Besides this, the language of the Vulgate had an important influence as it was one of the main sources for medieval Latin. The moral use which the Vulgate consistently makes of amarus and amaritudo gives them, in alchemy as well, a nuance that cannot be passed over. This comes out clearly in Ripleys remark that each thing in its first matter is corrupt and bitter. The juxtaposition of these two attri butes indicates the inner connection between them: corruption and bitterness are on the same footing, they denote the state of imperfect bodies, the initial state of the prima materia. Among the best known synonyms for the latter are the chaos and the sea, in the classical, mythological sense denoting the beginning of the world, the sea in particular being conceived as the
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), and as the domain of Typhon (Set); they called salt the spume of Typhon.440 In his Philosophia reformata, Mylius mentions sea-spume together with the purged or purified sea, rock-salt, the bird, and Luna as equivalent synonyms for the lapis occultus.441 Here the impurity of the sea is indirectly indicated by the epithets purged or purified. The sea-spume is on a par with the salt andof particular interestwith the bird, naturally the bird of Hermes, and this throws a sudden light on the above passage from Rosinus, about the bird with bitterness in its throat. The bird is a parallel of salt because salt is a spirit,442 a volatile substance, which the alchemists were wont to conceive as a bird.
[247] As the expulsion of the spirit was effected by various kinds of burning (combustio, adustio, calcinatio, assatio, sublimatio, incineratio, etc.), it was natural to call the end-product ashagain in a double sense as scoria, faex, etc., and as the spirit or bird of Hermes. Thus the Rosarium says: Sublime with fire, until the spirit which thou wilt find in it [the substance] goeth forth from it, and it is named the bird or the ash of Hermes. Therefore saith Morienus: Despise not the ashes, for they are the diadem of thy heart, and the ash of things that endure.443 In other words, the ash is the spirit that dwells in the glorified body.
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[253] The alchemists understood the return to chaos as an essential part of the opus. It was the stage of the nigredo and mortificatio, which was then followed by the purgatorial fire and the albedo. The spirit of chaos is indispensable to the work, and it cannot be distinguished from the gift of the Holy Ghost any more than the Satan of the Old Testament can be distinguished from Yahweh. The unconscious is both good and evil and yet neither, the matrix of all potentialities.
[254] After these remarkswhich seemed to me necessaryon the salt-spirit, as Khunrath calls it, let us turn back to the amaritudo. As the bitter salt comes from the impure sea, it is understandable that the Gloria mundi should call it mostly black and evil-smelling in the beginning.450 The blackness and bad smell, described by the alchemists as the stench of the graves, pertain to the underworld and to the sphere of moral darkness. This impure quality is common also to the corruptio, which, as we saw, Ripley equates with bitterness. Vigenerus describes salt as corruptible, in the sense that the body is subject to corruption and decay and does not have the fiery and incorruptible nature of the spirit.451
[255] The moral use of qualities that were originally physical is clearly dependent, particularly in the case of a cleric like Ripley, on ecclesiastical language. About this I can be brief, as I can rely on Rahners valuable Antenna Crucis II: Das Meer der Welt. Here Rahner brings together all the patristic allegories that are needed to understand the alchemical symbolism. The patristic use of mare is defined by St. Augustine: Mare saeculum est (the sea is the world).452 It is the essence of the world, as the element . . . subject to the devil. St. Hilary says: By the depths of the sea is meant the seat of hell.453 The sea is the gloomy abyss, the remains of the original pit,454 and hence of the chaos that covered the earth. For St. Augustine this abyss is the realm of power allotted to the devil and demons after their fall.455 It is on the one hand a deep that cannot be reached or comprehended456 and on the other the depths of sin.457 For Gregory the Great the sea is the depths of eternal death.458 Since ancient times it was the abode of water-demons.459 There dwells Leviathan (Job 3 : 8),460 who in the language of the Fathers signifies the devil. Rahner documents the patristic equations: diabolus = draco = Leviathan = cetus magnus = aspis (adder, asp) = draco.461 St. Jerome says: The devil surrounds the seas and the ocean on all sides.462 The bitterness of salt-water is relevant in this connection, as it is one of the peculiarities of hell and damnation which must be fully tasted by the meditant in Loyolas Exercises. Point 4 of Exercise V says he must, in imagination, taste with the taste bitter things, as tears, sadness, and the worm of conscience.463 This is expressed even more colourfully in the Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuit Sebastian Izquierdo (1686): Fourthly, the taste will be tormented with a rabid hunger and thirst, with no hope of alleviation; and its food will be bitter wormwood, and its drink water of gall.464
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[259] I have gone into this Hippolytus text at some length because the Red Sea was of special significance to the alchemists. Sermo LXII of the Turba mentions the Tyrian dye, which is extracted from our most pure Red Sea. It is the parallel of the tinctura philosophorum, which is described as black and is extracted from the sea.474 The old treatise Rosinus ad Euthiciam says: And know that our Red Sea is more tincturing than all seas, and that the poison,475 when it is cooked and becomes foul and discoloured, penetrates all bodies.476 The tincture is the dip and the baptismal water of the alchemists, here asserted to come from the Red Sea. This idea is understandable in view of the patristic and Gnostic interpretation of the Red Sea as the blood of Christ in which we are baptized; hence the paralleling of the tincture, salt, and aqua pontica with blood.477
[260] The Red Sea appears in a very peculiar manner in the Tractatus Aristotelis ad Alexandrum Magnum, where a recipe says:
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[270] These hints may throw a little light on the strange idea of the serpent-chariot. It is a symbol of the arcane substance and the quintessence, of the aether that contains all four elements, and at the same time a God-image or, to be more accurate, an image of the anima mundi. This is indicated by the Mercurial serpent, which in its turn was interpreted by the alchemists as the spirit of life that was in the wheels (DV).498 We should also mention that according to Ezekiel 1 : 18 the inter-revolving wheels were full of eyes round about. The old illustrators therefore produced something like an astrolabe in their attempts to depict the vision. The notion of wheels is naturally connected with movement in all directions, for the eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the whole earth (Zech. 4 : 10). It is said of the horses, too, that they walk to and fro through the earth (Zech. 6 : 7). Eyes are round and in common speech are likened to cart-wheels. They also seem to be a typical symbol for what I have called the multiple luminosities of the unconscious. By this I mean the seeming possibility that complexes possess a kind of consciousness, a luminosity of their own, which, I conjecture, expresses itself in the symbol of the soul-spark, multiple eyes (polyophthalmia), and the starry heaven.499
[271] By reason of its solar nature the eye is a symbol of consciousness, and accordingly multiple eyes would indicate a multiplicity of conscious centres which are co-ordinated into a unity like the many-faceted eye of an insect. As Ezekiels vision can be interpreted psychologically as a symbol of the self, we may also mention in this connection the Hindu definition of the selfhere hiranyagarbhaas the collective aggregate of all individual souls.500
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[273] The quaternity of the self appears in Ezekiels vision as the true psychological foundation of the God-concept. God uses it as his vehicle. It is possible for the psychologist to verify the structure of this foundation, but beyond that the theologian has the last word. In order to clear up any misunderstandings, especially from the theological side, I would like to emphasize yet again that it is not the business of science to draw conclusions which go beyond the bounds of our empirical knowledge. I do not feel the slightest need to put the self in place of God, as short-sighted critics have often accused me of doing. If Indian philosophers equate the atman with the concept of God and many Westerners copy them, this is simply their subjective opinion and not science. A consensus generalis on this point would in itself be yet another fact which, for the empirical psychologist, is as well worth considering as the remarkable view of many theologians that religious statements have nothing to do with the psyche. Similarly, it is characteristic of the mystical philosophy of the alchemists that the Mercurial serpent is enthroned on the chariot. He is a living spirit who uses as his chariot the body that consists of the four elements. In this sense the chariot is the symbol of earthly life. A Georgian fairytale closes with the verses:
I have dragged a cart up the mountain,
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[275] For this, unfortunately, there are no recipes or general rules. I have tried to present the main outlines of what the psycho therapist can observe of this wearisome and all too familiar process in my study The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious. For the layman these experiences are a terra incognita which is not made any more accessible by broad generalizations. Even the imagination of the alchemists, otherwise so fertile, fails us completely here. Only a thorough investigation of the texts could shed a little light on this question. The same task challenges our endeavours in the field of psycho therapy. Here too are thousands of images, symbols, dreams, fantasies, and visions that still await comparative research. The only thing that can be said with some certainty at present is that there is a gradual process of approximation whereby the two positions, the conscious and the unconscious, are both modified. Differences in individual cases, however, are just as great as they were among the alchemists.
d. The Fourth of the Three
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[277] The fourth function has its seat in the unconscious. In mythology the unconscious is portrayed as a great animal, for instance Leviathan, or as a whale, wolf, or dragon. We know from the myth of the sun-hero that it is so hot in the belly of the whale that his hair falls out.506 Arisleus and his companions likewise suffer from the great heat of their prison under the sea.507 The alchemists were fond of comparing their fire to the fire of hell or the flames of purgatory. Maier gives a description of Africa which is very like a description of hell: uncultivated, torrid, parched,508 sterile and empty.509 He says there are so few springs that animals of the most varied species assemble at the drinking-places and mingle with one another, whence new births and animals of a novel appearance are born, which explained the saying Always something new out of Africa. Pans dwelt there, and satyrs, dog-headed baboons, and half-men, besides innumerable species of wild animals. According to certain modern views, this could hardly be bettered as a description of the unconscious. Maier further reports that in the region of the Red Sea an animal is found with the name of Ortus (rising, origin). It had a red head with streaks of gold reaching to its neck, black eyes, a white face, white forepaws, and black hindpaws. He derived the idea of this animal from the remark of Avicenna: That thing whose head is red, its eyes black and its feet white, is the magistery.510 He was convinced that the legend of this creature referred to the phoenix, which was likewise found in that region. While he was making inquiries about the phoenix he heard a rumour that not far off a prophetess, known as the Erythraean Sibyl, dwelt in a cave. This was the sibyl who was alleged to have foretold the coming of Christ. Maier is probably referring here not to the eighth book of the Sibylline Oracles, verse 217, at which point thirty-four verses begin with the following letters: IHOY XPEITO EOY YIO THP TAYPO,511 but to the report of St. Augustine in Decivitate dei,512 which was well known in the Middle Ages. He also cites the passage about the sibyl in the Constantini Oratio of Eusebius and emphasizes that the sibylline prophecy referred to the coming of Christ in the flesh.512a
[278] We have seen earlier that the Erythraean Sea is a mysterious place, but here we meet with some noteworthy details. To begin with, our author reaches this sea just when he has completed the journey through the three continents and is about to enter the critical fourth region. We know from the Axiom of Maria and from Faust the crucial importance of that seemingly innocent question at the beginning of the Timaeus:
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[285] Maiers Erythraean quadruped, the Ortus, corresponds to the four-wheeled chariot of Pseudo-Aristotle. The tetramorph, too, is a product of early medieval iconography,528 combining the four winged creatures of Ezekiels vision into a four-footed monster. The interpretation of the Ortus as the phoenix connects it with Christ, whose coming was prophesied by the Sibyl; for the phoenix is a well-known allegory of the resurrection of Christ and of the dead in general.529 It is the symbol of transformation par excellence. In view of this well-known interpretation of the phoenix and of the Erythraean oracle, it is amazing that any author at the beginning of the seventeenth century should dare to ask the sibyl, not to show him the way to Christ, but to tell him where he could find Mercurius! This passage offers another striking proof of the parallelism between Mercurius and Christ. Nor does the phoenix appear here as a Christ allegory but as the bearer and birthplace of the universal medicine, the remedy against wrath and pain. As the sibyl once foretold the coming of the Lord, so now she is to point the way to Mercurius. Christ is the Anthropos, the Primordial Man; Mercurius has the same meaning, and the Primordial Man stands for the round, original wholeness, long ago made captive by the powers of this world. In Christs case the victory and liberation of the Primordial Man were said to be complete, so that the labours of the alchemists would seem to be superfluous. We can only assume that the alchemists were of a different opinion, and that they sought their remedy against wrath and pain in order to complete what they considered to be Christs unfinished work of redemption.
[286] It is characteristic of Maiers views that the idea of most importance is not Mercurius, who elsewhere appears strongly personified, but a substance brought by the phoenix, the bird of the spirit. It is this inorganic substance, and not a living being, which is used as a symbol of wholeness, or as a means towards wholeness, a desideratum apparently not fulfilled by the Christ-symbol.530 Involuntarily one asks oneself whether the intense personalization of the divine figures, as is customary in Christianity and quite particularly in Protestantism,531 is not in the end compensated, and to some extent mitigated, by a more objective point of view emanating from the unconscious.
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[294] As if in contradiction to the Tabula smaragdina, whose authority he follows here, Dorn writes in his Philosophia speculativa: No one ascends into the heaven which ye seek, unless he who descends from the heaven which ye do not seek, enlighten him.553 Dorn was perhaps the first alchemist to find certain statements of his art problematical,554 and it was for this reason that he provided his foetus spagyricus, who behaves in an all too Basilidian manner, with a Christian alibi. At the same time he was conscious that the artifex was indissolubly one with the opus.555 His speculations are not to be taken lightly as they are occasionally of the greatest psychological interest, e.g.: The descent to the four and the ascent to the monad are simultaneous.556 The four are the four elements and the monad is the original unity which reappears in the denarius (the number 10), the goal of the opus; it is the unity of the personality projected into the unity of the stone. The descent is analytic, a separation into the four components of wholeness; the ascent synthetic, a putting together of the denarius. This speculation accords with the psychological fact that the confrontation of conscious and unconscious produces a dissolution of the personality and at the same time regroups it into a whole. This can be seen very clearly in moments of psychic crisis, for it is just in these moments that the symbol of unity, for instance the mandala, occurs in a dream. Where danger is, there / Arises salvation also, says Hlderlin.
[295] While the older authors keep strictly to the Tabula smaragdina,557 the more modern ones, under the leadership of Dorn, tend to present the process the other way round. For instance, Mylius says that the earth cannot ascend unless heaven comes down first. And even then the earth can be sublimated to heaven only if it is dissolved in its own spirit558 and becomes one substance therewith.559 The Paracelsist Penotus is even more emphatic. Speaking of Mercurius, he says:
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[297] Returning now to Michael Maiers journey to the seven mouths of the Nile, which signify the seven planets, we bring to this theme a deepened understanding of what the alchemists meant by ascent and descent. It was the freeing of the soul from the shackles of darkness, or unconsciousness; its ascent to heaven, the widening of consciousness; and finally its return to earth, to hard reality, in the form of the tincture or healing drink, endowed with the powers of the Above. What this means psychologically could be seen very clearly from the Hypnerotomachia565 were its meaning not overlaid by a mass of ornate detail. It should therefore be pointed out that the whole first part of the book is a description of the dreamers ascent to a world of gods and heroes, of his initiation into a Venus mystery, followed by the illumination and semi-apotheosis of Poliphilo and his Polia. In the second, smaller part this leads to disenchantment and the cooling off of the lovers, culminating in the knowledge that it was all only a dream. It is a descent to earth, to the reality of daily life, and it is not altogether clear whether the hero managed to preserve in secret the nature of the heavenly centre which he acquired by the ascent.566 One rather doubts it. Nevertheless, his exciting adventure has left us a psychological document which is a perfect example of the course and the symbolism of the individuation process. The spirit, if not the language, of alchemy breathes through it and sheds light even on the darkest enigmas and riddles of the Masters.567
[298] Maiers journey through the planetary houses begins with Saturn, who is the coldest, heaviest, and most distant of the planets, the maleficus and abode of evil, the mysterious and sinister Senex (Old Man), and from there he ascends to the region of the sun, to look for the Boy Mercurius, the longed-for and long-sought goal of the adept. It is an ascent ever nearer to the sun, from darkness and cold to light and warmth, from old age to youth, from death to rebirth. But he has to go back along the way he came, for Mercurius is not to be found in the region of the sun but at the point from which he originally started. This sounds very psychological, and in fact life never goes forward except at the place where it has come to a standstill.568 The sought-for Mercurius is the spiritus vegetativus, a living spirit, whose nature it is to run through all the houses of the planets, i.e., the entire Zodiac. We could just as well say through the entire horoscope, or, since the horoscope is the chronometric equivalent of individual character, through all the characterological components of the personality. Individual character is, on the old view, the curse or blessing which the gods bestowed on the child at its birth in the form of favourable or unfavourable astrological aspects. The horoscope is like the chirographum, the handwriting of the ordinances against us . . . which Christ blotted out; and he took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. And after having disarmed the principalities and powers he made a show of them openly, and triumphed over them.569
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[305] Just as Maier on his return met Mercurius, so Hermas in his next vision met the Poimen, the shepherd, a white fleece round his shoulders, a knapsack on his back, and a staff in his hand. Hermas recognized that it was he to whom I was handed over,583 namely the shepherd of the lamb, which was himself. In iconography the good shepherd has the closest connections with Hermes Kriophoros (the lamb-bearer); thus even in antiquity these two saviour figures coalesced. Whereas Hermas is handed over to his shepherd, Hermes hands over his art and wisdom to his pupil Maier and thus equips him to do something himself and to work with the aid of the magic caduceus. This, for a physician who was an alchemist, took the place of the staff of Asklepios, which had only one snake. The sacred snake of the Asklepieion signified: The god heals; but the caduceus, or Mercurius in the form of the coniunctio in the retort, means: In the hands of the physician lie the magic remedies granted by God.584
[306] The numerous analogies between two texts so far apart in time enable us to take a psychological view of the transformations they describe. The sequence of colours coincides by and large with the sequence of the planets. Grey and black correspond to Saturn585 and the evil world; they symbolize the beginning in darkness, in the melancholy, fear, wickedness, and wretchedness of ordinary human life. It is Maier from whom the saying comes about the noble substance which moves from lord to lord, in the beginning whereof is wretchedness with vinegar.586 By lord he means the archon and ruler of the planetary house. He adds: And so it will fare with me. The darkness and blackness can be interpreted psychologically as mans confusion and lostness; that state which nowadays results in an anamnesis, a thorough examination of all those contents which are the cause of the problematical situation, or at any rate its expression. This examination, as we know, includes the irrational contents that originate in the unconscious and express themselves in fantasies and dreams. The analysis and interpretation of dreams confront the conscious standpoint with the statements of the unconscious, thus widening its narrow horizon. This loosening up of cramped and rigid attitudes corresponds to the solution and separation of the elements by the aqua permanens, which was already present in the body and is lured out by the art. The water is a soul or spirit, that is, a psychic substance, which now in its turn is applied to the initial material. This corresponds to using the dreams meaning to clarify existing problems. Solutio is defined in this sense by Dorn.587
[307] The situation is now gradually illuminated as is a dark night by the rising moon. The illumination comes to a certain extent from the unconscious, since it is mainly dreams that put us on the track of enlightenment. This dawning light corresponds to the albedo, the moonlight which in the opinion of some alchemists heralds the rising sun. The growing redness (rubedo) which now follows denotes an increase of warmth and light coming from the sun, consciousness. This corresponds to the increasing participation of consciousness, which now begins to react emotionally to the contents produced by the unconscious. At first the process of integration is a fiery conflict, but gradually it leads over to the melting or synthesis of the opposites. The alchemists termed this the rubedo, in which the marriage of the red man and the white woman, Sol and Luna, is consummated. Although the opposites flee from one another they nevertheless strive for balance, since a state of conflict is too inimical to life to be endured indefinitely. They do this by wearing each other out: the one eats the other, like the two dragons or the other ravenous beasts of alchemical symbolism.
[308] Astrologically, as we have said, this process corresponds to an ascent through the planets from the dark, cold, distant Saturn to the sun. To the alchemists the connection between individual temperament and the positions of the planets was self-evident, for these elementary astrological considerations were the common property of any educated person in the Middle Ages as well as in antiquity. The ascent through the planetary spheres therefore meant something like a shedding of the characterological qualities indicated by the horoscope, a retrogressive liberation from the character imprinted by the archons. The conscious or unconscious model for such an ascent was the Gnostic redeemer, who either deceives the archons by guile or breaks their power by force. A similar motif is the release from the bill of debt to fate. The men of late antiquity in particular felt their psychic situation to be fatally dependent on the compulsion of the stars, Heimarmene, a feeling which may be compared with that inspired by the modern theory of heredity, or rather by the pessimistic use of it. A similar demoralization sets in in many neuroses when the patient takes the psychic factors producing the symptoms as though they were unalterable facts which it is useless to resist. The journey through the planetary houses, like the crossing of the great halls in the Egyptian underworld, therefore signifies the overcoming of a psychic obstacle, or of an autonomous complex, suitably represented by a planetary god or demon. Anyone who has passed through all the spheres is free from compulsion; he has won the crown of victory and become like a god.
[309] In our psychological language today we express ourselves more modestly: the journey through the planetary houses boils down to becoming conscious of the good and the bad qualities in our character, and the apotheosis means no more than maximum consciousness, which amounts to maximal freedom of the will. This goal cannot be better represented than by the alchemical symbol of the
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[313] Maiers silence is eloquent, as we soon find when we try to see the psychological equivalent of the descent and of the discovery of Mercurius. The maximal degree of consciousness confronts the ego with its shadow, and individual psychic life with a collective psyche. These psychological terms sound light enough but they weigh heavy, for they denote an almost unendurable conflict, a psychic strait whose terrors only he knows who has passed through it. What one then discovers about oneself and about man and the world is of such a nature that one would rather not speak of it; and besides, it is so difficult to put into words that ones courage fails at the bare attempt. So it need not be at all a frivolous evasion if Maier merely hints at his conversations with Mercurius. In the encounter with life and the world there are experiences that are capable of moving us to long and thorough reflection, from which, in time, insights and convictions grow upa process depicted by the alchemists as the philosophical tree. The unfolding of these experiences is regulated, as it were, by two archetypes: the anima, who expresses life, and the Wise Old Man, who personifies meaning.591 Our author was led in the first place by the anima-sibyl to undertake the journey through the planetary houses as the precondition of all that was to follow. It is therefore only logical that, towards the end of the descent, he should meet Thrice-Greatest Hermes, the fount of all wisdom. This aptly describes the character of that spirit or thinking which you do not, like an intellectual operation, perform yourself, as the little god of this world, but which happens to you as though it came from another, and greater, perhaps the great spirit of the world, not inappositely named Trismegistus. The long reflection, the immensa meditatio of the alchemists is defined as an internal colloquy with another, who is invisible.592
[314] Possibly Maier would have revealed to us something more if Mercurius had not been in such a hurry to take upon himself the role of arbiter between the owl and the birds who were fighting it.593 This is an allusion to a work of Maiers entitled Jocus severus (Frankfurt a. M., 1617), where he defends the wisdom of alchemy against its detractors, a theme that also plays an important part in his Symbola aureae mensae in the form of argument and counterargument. One is therefore justified in assuming that Maier got into increasing conflict with himself and his environment the more he buried himself in the secret speculations of Hermetic philosophy. Indeed nothing else could have been expected, for the world of Hermetic images gravitates round the unconscious, and the unconscious compensation is always aimed at the conscious positions which are the most strongly defended because they are the most questionable, though its apparently hostile aspect merely reflects the surly face which the ego turns towards it. In reality the unconscious compensation is not intended as a hostile act but as a necessary and helpful attempt to restore the balance. For Maier it meant an inner and outer conflict which was not abolished, but only embittered, by the firmness of his convictions. For every one-sided conviction is accompanied by the voice of doubt, and certainties that are mere beliefs turn into uncertainties which may correspond better with the truth. The truth of the sic et non (yes and no), almost, but not quite, recognized by Abelard, is a difficult thing for the intellect to bear; so it is no wonder that Maier got stuck in the conflict and had to postpone his discovery of the phoenix until doomsday. Fortunately he was honest enough not to assert that he had ever made the lapis or the philosophical gold, and for this reason he never spread a veil of deception over his work. Thanks to his scrupulousness his late successors are at least able to guess how far he had progressed in the art, and where his labours came to a standstill. He never succeeded, as we can now see, in reaching the point where conflict and argument become logically superfluous, where yes and no are two aspects of the same thing. Thou wilt never make the One which thou seekest, says the master, except first there be made one thing of thyself.594
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[316] The aqua pontica (or aqua permanens) behaves very much like the baptismal water of the Church. Its chief function is ablution, the cleansing of the sinner, and in alchemy this is the lato, the impure body;595 hence the oft-repeated saying attri buted to Elbo Interfector:596 Whiten the lato597 and rend the books, lest your hearts be rent asunder.598 In the Rosarium the ablution599 of the lato occurs in variant form: it is cleansed not by water but by Azoth and fire,600 that is, by a kind of baptism in fire, which is often used as a synonym for water.601 The equivalent of this in the Catholic rite is the plunging of a burning candle into the font, in accordance with Matthew 3 : 11: He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.602 The alchemists did not hesitate to call the transformative process a baptism. Thus the Consilium coniugii says: And if we are baptized in the fountain of gold and silver, and the spirit of our body ascends into heaven with the father and the son, and descends again, then our souls shall revive and my animal body will remain white, that is, [the body] of the moon.603 The subject of this sentence is Sol and Luna. The Aurora consurgens I distinguishes three kinds of baptism, in water, in blood, and in fire,604 the Christian ideas being here transferred directly to the chemical procedure. The same is true of the idea that baptism is a submersion in death, following Colossians 2 : 12: (Ye are) buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him. In his Table of Symbols, Penotus605 correlates the moon, the spirits and ghosts of the dead [Manes et Lemures], and gods of the underworld with the mystery of baptism, and the corresponding stage in the opus is the solutio, which signifies the total dissolution of the imperfect body in the aqua divina, its submersion, mortification,606 and burial. The putrefaction takes place in the grave, and the foul smell that accompanies it is the stench of the graves.607 The motif of imprisonment in the underworld is found in Greek alchemy, in the treatise of Komarios: Lock them [the substances] in Hades.608 The rebirth from the floods (
) of Hades and from the grave recurs in Cyril of Jerusalem: That saving flood is both your sepulchre and your mother,609 and in St. Augustine: The water leads him down, as if dying, into the grave; the Holy Spirit brings him up, as if rising again, into heaven.610
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[319] As the alchemists strove to produce an incorruptible glorified body, they would, if they were successful, attain that state in the albedo, where the body became spotless and no longer subject to decay. The white substance of the ash618 was therefore described as the diadem of the heart, and its synonym, the white foliated earth (terra alba foliata), as the crown of victory.619 The ash is identical with the pure water which is cleansed from the darkness of the soul, and of the black matter, for the wickedness (malitia) of base earthiness has been separated from it.620 This terrestreitas mala is the terra damnata (accursed earth) mentioned by other authors; it is what Goe the calls the trace of earth painful to bear, the moral turpitude that cannot be washed off. In Senior the ash is synonymous with vitrum (glass), which, on account of its incorruptibility and transparency, seemed to resemble the glorified body. Glass in its turn was associated with salt, for salt was praised as that virgin and pure earth, and the finest crystalline glass is composed mainly of sal Sodae (soda salts), with sand added as a binding agent. Thus the raw material of glass-making (technically known as the batch) is formed from two incorruptible substances.621 Furthermore, glass is made in the fire, the pure element. In the sharp or burning taste of salt the alchemists detected the fire dwelling within it, whose preservative property it in fact shares. Alexander of Macedon is cited as saying: Know that the salt is fire and dryness.622 Or, the salts are of fiery nature.623 Salt has an affinity with sulphur, whose nature is essentially fiery.624 Glauber maintains that fire and salt are in their essential nature one thing and are therefore held in high esteem by all sensible Christians, but the ignorant know no more of these things than a cow, a pig, or a brute, which live without understanding. He also says the Abyssinians baptized with water and fire. Without fire and salt the hea then would not have been able to offer sacrifice, and the evangelist Mark had said that every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt.625
h. The Interpretation and Meaning of Salt
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[321] Some light is thrown on the numerous overlapping significations of salt, and the obscurity begins to clear up, when we are informed, further, that one of its principal meanings is soul. As the white substance it is the white woman, and the salt of our magnesia629 is a spark of the anima mundi.630 For Glauber the salt is feminine and corresponds to Eve.631 The Gloria mundi says: The salt of the earth is the soul.632 This pregnant sentence contains within it the whole ambiguity of alchemy. On the one hand the soul is the aqua permanens, which dissolves and coagulates, the arcane substance which is at once the transformer and the transformed, the nature which conquers nature. On the other hand it is the human soul imprisoned in the body as the anima mundi is in matter, and this soul undergoes the same transformations by death and purification, and finally by glorification, as the lapis. It is the tincture which coagulates all substances, indeed it even fixes (figit) itself; it comes from the centre of the earth and is the destroyed earth, nor is there anything on the earth like to the tincture.633 The soul is therefore not an earthly but a transcendental thing, regardless of the fact that the alchemists expected it to appear in a retort. This contradiction presented no difficulties to the medieval mind. There was a good reason for this: the philosophers were so fascinated by their own psychisms that, in their navet, they faithfully reproduced the inner psychic situation externally. Although the unconscious, personified by the anima, is in itself transcendental, it can appear in the sphere of consciousness, that is, in this world, in the form of an influence on conscious processes.
[322] Just as the world-soul pervades all things, so does salt. It is ubiquitous and thus fulfils the main requirement of an arcane substance, that it can be found everywhere. No doubt the reader will be as conscious as I am of how uncommonly difficult it is to give an account of salt and its ubiquitous connections. It represents the feminine principle of Eros, which brings everything into relationship, in an almost perfect way. In this respect it is surpassed only by Mercurius, and the notion that salt comes from Mercurius is therefore quite understandable. For salt, as the soul or spark of the anima mundi, is in very truth the daughter of the spiritus vegetativus of creation. Salt is far more indefinite and more universal than sulphur, whose essence is fairly well defined by its fiery nature.
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[328] This strangely beautiful passage contains pretty well everything that the alchemists endeavoured to say about salt: it is the spirit, the turning of the body into light (albedo), the spark of the anima mundi, imprisoned in the dark depths of the sea and begotten there by the light from above and the reproductive power of the feminine. It should be noted that the alchemists could have known nothing of Hippolytus, as his Philosophumena, long believed lost, was rediscovered only in the middle of the nineteenth century in a monastery on Mount Athos. Anyone familiar with the spirit of alchemy and the views of the Gnostics in Hippolytus will be struck again and again by their inner affinity.
[329] The clue to this passage from the Elenchos, and to other similar ones, is to be found in the phenomenology of the self.650 Salt is not a very common dream-symbol, but it does appear in the cubic form of a crystal,651 which in many patients drawings represents the centre and hence the self; similarly, the quaternary structure of most mandalas reminds one of the sign for salt
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[335] This interpretation of salt and its qualities prompts us to ask, as in all cases where alchemical statements are involved, whether the alchemists themselves had such thoughts. We know from the literature that they were thoroughly aware of the moral meaning of the amaritudo, and by sapientia they did not mean anything essentially different from what we understand by this word. But how the wisdom comes from the bitterness, and how the bitterness can be the source of the colours, on these points they leave us in the dark. Nor have we any reason to believe that these connections were so self-evident to them that they regarded any explanation as superfluous. If that were so, someone would have been sure to blurt it out. It is much more probable that they simply said these things without any conscious act of cognition. Moreover, the sum of all these statements is seldom or never found consistently formulated in any one author; rather one author mentions one thing and another another, and it is only by viewing them all together, as we have tried to do here, that we get the whole picture.661 The alchemists themselves suggest this method, and I must admit that it was their advice which first put me on the track of a psychological interpretation. The Rosarium says one should read from page to page, and other sayings are He should possess many books and One book opens another. Yet the complete lack, until the nineteenth century, of any psychological viewpoint (which even today meets with the grossest misunderstandings) makes it very unlikely that anything resembling a psychological interpretation penetrated into the consciousness of the alchemists. Their moral concepts moved entirely on the plane of synonym and analogy, in a word, of correspondence. Most of their statements spring not from a conscious but from an unconscious act of thinking, as do dreams, sudden ideas, and fantasies, where again we only find out the meaning afterwards by careful comparison and analysis.
[336] But the greatest of all riddles, of course, is the ever-recurring question of what the alchemists really meant by their substances. What, for instance, is the meaning of a sal spirituale? The only possible answer seems to be this: chemical matter was so completely unknown to them that it instantly became a carrier for projections. Its darkness was so loaded with unconscious contents that a state of participation mystique,662 or unconscious identity, arose between them and the chemical substance, which caused this substance to behave, at any rate in part, like an unconscious content. Of this relationship the alchemists had a dim presentimentenough, anyway, to enable them to make statements which can only be understood as psychological.
[337] Khunrath says: And the Light was made Salt, a body of salt, the salt of wisdom.663 The same author remarks that the point in the midst of the salt corresponds to the Tartarus of the greater world, which is hell.664 This coincides with the conception of the fire hidden in the salt. Salt must have the paradoxical double nature of the arcane substance. Thus the Gloria mundi says that in the salt are two salts, namely sulphur and the radical moisture, the two most potent opposites imaginable, for which reason it was also called the Rebis.665 Vigenerus asserts that salt consists of two substances, since all salts partake of sulphur and quicksilver.666 These correspond to Khunraths king and queen, the two waters, red and white.667 During the work the salt assumes the appearance of blood.668 It is certain, says Dorn, that a salt, the natural balsam of the body, is begotten from human blood. It has within it both corruption and preservation against corruption, for in the natural order there is nothing that does not contain as much evil as good.669 Dorn was a physician, and his remark is characteristic of the empirical standpoint of the alchemists.
[338] The dark nature of salt accounts for its blackness and foetid smell.670 At the dissolution of living bodies it is the last residue of corruption, but it is the prime agent in generation.671 Mylius expressly identifies salt with the uroboros-dragon.672 We have already mentioned its identification with the sea of Typhon; hence one could easily identify it with the sea-monster Leviathan.673 At all events there is an amusing relationship between salt and the Leviathan in Abraham Eleazar, who says with reference to Job 40 : 15:674 For Behemoth is a wild ox, whom the Most High has salted up with Leviathan and preserved for the world to come,675 evidently as food for the inhabitants of paradise,676 or whatever the world to come may mean.
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[344] The good tidings announced by alchemy are that, as once a fountain sprang up in Judaea, so now there is a secret Judaea the way to which is not easily found, and a hidden spring whose waters seem so worthless685 and so bitter that they are deemed of no use at all. We know from numerous hints686 that mans inner life is the secret place where the aqua solvens et coagulans, the medicina catholica or panacea, the spark of the light of nature,687 are to be found. Our text shows us how much the alchemists put their art on the level of divine revelation and regarded it as at least an essential complement to the work of redemption. True, only a few of them were the elect who formed the golden chain linking earth to heaven, but still they were the fathers of natural science today. They were the unwitting instigators of the schism between faith and knowledge, and it was they who made the world conscious that the revelation was neither complete nor final. Since these things are so, says an ecclesiastic of the seventeenth century, it will suffice, after the light of faith, for human ingenuity to recognize, as it were, the refracted rays of the Divine majesty in the world and in created things.688 The refracted rays correspond to the certain luminosity which the alchemists said was inherent in the natural world.
[345] Revelation conveys general truths which often do not illuminate the individuals actual situation in the slightest, nor was it traditional revelation that gave us the microscope and the machine. And since human life is not enacted exclusively, or even to a noticeable degree, on the plane of the higher verities, the source of knowledge unlocked by the old alchemists and physicians has done humanity a great and welcome serviceso great that for many people the light of revelation has been extinguished altogether. Within the confines of civilization mans wilful rationality apparently suffices. Outside of this shines, or should shine, the light of faith. But where the darkness comprehendeth it not (this being the prerogative of darkness!) those labouring in the darkness must try to accomplish an opus that will cause the fishes eyes to shine in the depths of the sea, or to catch the refracted rays of the divine majesty even though this produces a light which the darkness, as usual, does not comprehend. But when there is a light in the darkness which comprehends the darkness, darkness no longer prevails. The longing of the darkness for light is fulfilled only when the light can no longer be rationally explained by the darkness. For the darkness has its own peculiar intellect and its own logic, which should be taken very seriously. Only the light which the darkness comprehendeth not can illuminate the darkness. Everything that the darkness thinks, grasps, and comprehends by itself is dark; therefore it is illuminated only by what, to it, is unexpected, unwanted, and incomprehensible. The psycho therapeutic method of active imagination offers excellent examples of this; sometimes a numinous dream or some external event will have the same effect.
[346] Alchemy announced a source of knowledge, parallel if not equivalent to revelation, which yields a bitter water by no means acceptable to our human judgment. It is harsh and bitter or like vinegar,689 for it is a bitter thing to accept the darkness and blackness of the umbra solis and to pass through this valley of the shadow. It is bitter indeed to discover behind ones lofty ideals narrow, fanatical convictions, all the more cherished for that, and behind ones heroic pretensions nothing but crude egotism, infantile greed, and complacency. This painful corrective is an unavoidable stage in every psycho therapeutic process. As the alchemists said, it begins with the nigredo, or generates it as the indispensable prerequisite for synthesis, for unless the opposites are constellated and brought to consciousness they can never be united. Freud halted the process at the reduction to the inferior half of the personality and tended to overlook the daemonic dangerousness of the dark side, which by no means consists only of relatively harmless infantilisms. Man is neither so reasonable nor so good that he can cope eo ipso with evil. The darkness can quite well engulf him, especially when he finds himself with those of like mind. Mass-mindedness increases unconsciousness and then the evil swells like an avalanche, as contemporary events have shown. Even so, society can also work for good; it is even necessary because of the moral weakness of most human beings, who, to maintain themselves at all, must have some external good to cling on to. The great religions are psycho therapeutic systems that give a foothold to all those who cannot stand by themselves, and they are in the overwhelming majority.
[347] In spite of their undoubtedly heretical methods the alchemists showed by their positive attitude to the Church that they were cleverer than certain modern apostles of enlightenment. Alsovery much in contrast to the rationalistic tendencies of todaythey displayed, despite its tortuousness, a remarkable understanding of the imagery upon which the Christian cosmos is built. This world of images, in its historical form, is irretrievably lost to modern man; its loss has spiritually impoverished the masses and compelled them to find pitiful substitutes, as poisonous as they are worthless. No one can be held responsible for this development. It is due rather to the restless tempo of spiritual growth and change, whose motive forces go far beyond the horizon of the individual. He can only hope to keep pace with it and try to understand it so far that he is not blindly swallowed up by it. For that is the alarming thing about mass movements, even if they are good, that they demand and must demand blind faith. The Church can never explain the truth of her images because she acknowledges no point of view but her own. She moves solely within the framework of her images, and her arguments must always beg the question. The flock of harmless sheep was ever the symbolic prototype of the credulous crowd, though the Church is quick to recognize the wolves in sheeps clothing who lead the faith of the multitude astray in order to destroy them. The tragedy is that the blind trust which leads to perdition is practised just as much inside the Church and is praised as the highest virtue. Yet our Lord says: Be ye therefore wise as serpents,690 and the Bible itself stresses the cleverness and cunning of the serpent. But where are these necessary if not altogether praiseworthy qualities developed and given their due? The serpent has become a by-word for everything morally abhorrent, and yet anyone who is not as smart as a snake is liable to land himself in trouble through blind faith.
[348] The alchemists knew about the snake and the cold half of nature,691 and they said enough to make it clear to their successors that they endeavoured by their art to lead that serpentine Nous of the darkness, the serpens mercurialis, through the stages of transformation to the goal of perfection (telesmus).692 The more or less symbolical or projected integration of the unconscious that went hand in hand with this evidently had so many favourable effects that the alchemists felt encouraged to express a tempered optimism.
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3.05 - The Conjunction, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
In the fertile imagination of the alchemists, the hierosgamos of Sol
and Luna continues right down to the animal kingdom, as is shown by the
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cosmic idea, and this amply explains the alchemists use of superlatives.
[459]
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when the dream material comes to be analysed. Many alchemists compute
the duration of the opus to be that of a pregnancy, and they liken the entire
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3.05 - The Formula of I.A.O., #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The alchemists themselves taught this same truth. The first
matter of the work was base and primitive, though natural. After
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3.06 - Death, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
arise, say the alchemists, without the death of the old. They liken the art to
the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to
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be paid for, and however much the alchemist may extol venerabilis natura,
it is in either case an opus contra naturam. It goes against nature to
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confusing that the alchemist tries to depict the conflict, death, and rebirth
figuratively, on a higher plane, firstin his practica in the form ofchemical transformations and thenin his theoria in the form of
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goal unless man voluntarily places himself in its service. The alchemists
are of the opinion that the artifex is the servant of the work, and that not he
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The alchemists assert that death is at once the conception of the filius
philosophorum, a peculiar variation of the doctrine of the Anthropos.
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3.07 - The Ascent of the Soul, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
one alchemist says: Hoc est ergo magnum signum, in cuius investigatione
nonnulli perierunt (This is a great sign, in the investigation of which not a
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part of the alchemists procedure belong to this stage of the iterum mori
the reiterated death. They consist in membra secare, arctius sequestrare ac
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whom the sun drowns is an earth-spirit, a Deus terrenus, as the alchemists
say, or the Sapi entia Dei which took on body and substance in the creature
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3.08 - Purification, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
contemporary of our alchemists: There is in Jacobs well a water which
human ingenuity has sought and found. Philosophy is its name, and it is
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unconscious contents which the alchemist found projected into matter. He
therefore acted on Cardans rule that the object of the work of
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apperceptions can be made. In the case of the alchemist, such a premise
was ready to hand in the aqua (doctrinae), or the God-inspired sapientia
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aiming at a spiritual goal: the alchemist undertakes to produce a new,
volatile (hence aerial or spiritual) entity endowed with corpus, anima, et
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The alchemists seem to have perceived the danger that the work and
its realization may get stuck in one of the conscious functions.
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effect a cure. The alchemists thought that the opus demanded not only
laboratory work, the reading of books, meditation, and patience, but also
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the devilin anticipation of Steinach to transform the ageing alchemist
into a young gallant and make him forget himself for the sake of the all-
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3.08 - The Mystery of Love, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Divine whom we adore and our own lives there is no longer any division. So too in all happenings we have to come to see the dealings with us of the divine Lover and take such pleasure in them that even grief and suffering and physical pain become his gifts and turn to delight and disappear finally into delight, slain by the sense of the divine contact, because the touch of his hands is the alchemist of a miraculous transformation. Some reject life because it is tainted with grief and pain, but to the God-lover grief and pain become means of meeting with him, imprints of his pressure and finally cease as soon as our union with his nature becomes too complete for these masks of the universal delight at all to conceal it. They change into the Ananda.
The Mystery of Love
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3.09 - The Return of the Soul, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
fountain). Again and again we note that the alchemist proceeds like the
unconscious in the choice of his symbols: every idea finds both a positive
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was the diadem. It is difficult to tell whether the alchemists were so
hopelessly muddled that they did not notice these flat contradictions, or
--
14have been the alchemists weak spot, though a few of them tell us plainly
enough how we are to regard their peculiar language. The less respect
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truth. The alchemists were so steeped in their inner experiences that their
sole concern was to devise fitting images and expressions regardless of
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him. This was inevitable, as the alchemists did not really know what they
were writing about. Whether we know today seems to me not altogether
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The alchemist saw no contradiction in comparing the diadem with a
foul deposit and then, in the next breath, saying that it is of heavenly
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mental backwardness on the part of the alchemist; it is more the case that
16his main interest is focussed on the unconscious itself and not at all on the
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The alchemists failure to distinguish between corpus and spiritus is in
our case assisted by the assumption that, owing to the preceding
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art as any alchemist; the serious attempt he made to found the Rosicrucian
Order is proof of this, and it was largely for reasons of expediency, owing
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the alchemists experienced as immunditia, pollution. They saw it as the
defilement of something transcendent by the gross and opaque body which
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Consequently, the alchemists endeavour to unite the corpus mundum, the
purified body, with the soul is also the endeavour of the psychologist once
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patience of the alchemist, who must purify the body from all superfluities
in the fiercest heat of the furnace, and pursue Mercurius from one bride
--
depicted in the alchemists Rebis, the symbol of transcendental unity, as a
coincidence of opposites; but in conscious realityonce the conscious
--
these words the old alchemist put the quintessence of his experience. I can
add nothing to their incomparable simplicity and conciseness. They
--
for the wholeness and also for the passion which the alchemist saw in his
work. Hence the Rosarium ends, not unfittingly, with the picture of the
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3.10 - The New Birth, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
meaning of the denarius is the Son of God. Although the alchemists call it
the filius philosophorum, they use it as a Christ-symbol and at the same
--
that the alchemists were not being consciously and intentionally
paradoxical. It seems to me that theirs was a perfectly natural view:
--
of the psychological insight of the alchemists, since this has already been
done elsewhere.
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presumption on the part of the alchemist to imagine himself capable, even
with Gods help, of producing an everlasting substance. This claim gives
--
about the remarkable fact that the fervently desired goal of the alchemists
endeavours should be conceived under so monstrous and horrific an image.
--
express the immaturity of the alchemists mind, which was not sufficiently
developed to equip him for the difficulties of his task. He was
--
to fill the second. Had the alchemists understood the psychological aspects
of their work, they would have been in a position to free their uniting
--
the alchemists. The natural archetypes that underlie the mythologems of
incest, the hierosgamos, the divine child, etc., blossomed forthin the age
--
What the alchemist tried to express with his Rebis and his squaring of
the circle, and what the modern man also tries to express when he draws
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of that simplicity where contradictories are reconciled. The alchemists
are as it were the empiricists of the great problem of the union of
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3.11 - Epilogue, #The Practice of Psycho therapy, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
events. Experience shows, in fact, that not only were the alchemists
exceedingly vague as to the sequence of the various stages, but that in our
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32.06 - The Novel Alchemy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
In the vision of Sri Aurobindo, the process of creation is not merely an ascent and upward movement, it has a movement of descent too. There is not merely a crossing of levels upon levels, not merely a progressive purification, enlargement, deepening, intensification and sharpening of the consciousness and status; the aim is to transfigure all in the image of the divine being. This process involves a going upward and a, descent with a view to reshape the lower reaches anew in the mould of the heights, not a final extinction, nirvana,in the world of Brahmanby a rejection of all individuality and collectivity. No level of the created universe has to be bypassed or abolished, not even the lowest material plane. On the contrary, the aim is to take one's stand on this material plane itself and transmute it into a new matter, even as the secret aim of the old alchemists had been to transmute the base metal into gold.
And we know how, thanks to modern science, gross solid matter now appears before our eyes in its true form of electricity and light; but it remains matter all the same in spite of its possessing the properties of light and electricity. If we will probe a little deeper into its secrets, matter acquires the attributes of consciousness, but even then it may still remain matter. Materiality need not abolish itself in order to become consciousness. The spiritual world too need not transcend matter; the establishment of the spirit will not mean the extinction of the material world in a final dissolution.
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3.20 - Of the Eucharist, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
these objects formed the pre-occupation of the alchemists in varying
proportions. Hermes is alike the God of Wisdom, Thaumaturgy,
--
value. The alchemist is in all cases to take this substance, and subject
it to a series of operations. By so doing, he obtains his product.
--
being, not to an inanimate mass. In a word, the alchemist is to take
a dead thing, impure, valueless, and powerless, and transform it
--
research that the statements of alchemists cannot be explained way.
From the chemical standpoint it has seemed not priori impossible
--
seemed so absurd that he felt obliged to conclude that the alchemists
who claimed these properties for their Gold must, after all, have
--
the original aniline and use sugar instead. Thus the alchemists
said: To make gold you must take gold; their art was to bring
--
blacken and putrefy as the alchemist breaks up its coagulations of
impurity.
--
1. Some alchemists may object to this statement. I prefer to express no final
opinion on the matter.
--
the impression of the Will of the alchemist. This substance, properly
prepared, and properly charged, is able to perform all things soever
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4.04 - THE REGENERATION OF THE KING, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
.76 These few examples from the many collected by Rahner may suffice to put the significance of the aqua permanens, the arcane substance par excellence, in the right perspective. For the alchemists it was wisdom and knowledge, truth and spirit, and its source was in the inner man, though its symbol was common water or sea-water. What they evidently had in mind was a ubiquitous and all-pervading essence, an anima mundi and the greatest treasure, the innermost and most secret numinosum of man. There is probably no more suitable psychological concept for this than the collective unconscious, whose nucleus and ordering principle is the self (the monad of the alchemists and Gnostics).
[373] Verses 8 and 9
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This verse confirms the decrepit condition of the king, who apart from his original defect, or because of it, is also suffering from senile debility. It was a bold stroke for a canon to identify the king with the Ancient of Days from Daniel 7 : 9: I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of Days did sit, whose garments were white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. There can be no doubt that Ripley the alchemist was here speculating over the head of Ripley the cleric to hit upon an idea that in the Middle Ages must have seemed like blasphemy: the identification of the transformative substance with God. To our way of thinking this kind of allegory or symbolization is the height of absurdity and unintelligibility. It was even hard for the Middle Ages to swallow.79 But where it met with acceptance, as in philosophical alchemy, it does much to explain the hymnlike or at any rate highly emotional language of some of the treatises. We have here, in fact, a new religious declaration: God is not only in the unspotted body of Christ and continually present in the consecrated Host butand this is the novel and significant thinghe is also hidden in the cheap, despised, common-or-garden substance, even in the uncleanness of this world, in filth.80 He is to be found only through the art, indeed he is its true object and is capable of progressive transformationDeo adjuvante. This strange theologem did not, of course, mean that for the alchemists God was nothing but a substance that could be obtained by chemical transformationfar from it. Such an aberration was reserved rather for those moderns who put matter or energy in the place of God. The alchemists, so far as they were still pagans, had a more mystical conception of God dating from late antiquity, which, as in the case of Zosimos, could be described as Gnostic; or if they were Christians, their Christianity had a noticeable admixture of hea thenish magical ideas about demons and divine powers and an anima mundi inherent or imprisoned in physical nature. The anima mundi was conceived as that part of God which formed the quintessence and real substance of Physis, and which was to Godto use an apt expression of Isidore81as the accrescent soul (
, grown-on) was to the divine soul of man. This accrescent soul was a second soul that grew through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms up to man, pervading the whole of nature, and to it the natural forms were attached like appendages (
--
[379] In Ripleys case there is the more immediate possibility that he modified for his own purpose the conception of the Ancient of Days and his youthful son the Logos, who in the visions of Valentinus the Gnostic and of Meister Eckhart was a small boy. These concepts are closely related to those of Dionysus, youngest of the gods, and of the Horus-child, Harpocrates, Aion, etc. All naturally imply the renewal of the ageing god. The step from the world of Christian ideas back into paganism is not a long one,87 and the naturalistic conclusion that the father dwindles when the son appears, or that he is rejuvenated in the son, is implicit in all these age-old conceptions, whose effect is all the stronger the more they are consciously denied. Such a combination of ideas is almost to be expected in a cleric like Ripley, even though, like all alchemists, he may not have been conscious of their full import.
[380] Verses 1112
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[381] In order to enter into Gods Kingdom the king must transform himself into the prima materia in the body of his mother, and return to the dark initial state which the alchemists called the chaos. In this massa confusa the elements are in conflict and repel one another; all connections are dissolved. Dissolution is the prerequisite for redemption. The celebrant of the mysteries had to suffer a figurative death in order to attain transformation. Thus, in the Arisleus vision, Gabricus is dissolved into atoms in the body of his sister-wife. We have seen from the analogy with the Ancient of Days what the alchemists goal was: both artifex and substance were to attain a perfect state, comparable to the Kingdom of God. I will not discuss, for the moment, the justification for this seemingly presumptuous comparison, but would remind the reader that in the opinion of the alchemists themselves the transformation was a miracle that could take place only with Gods help.
[382] Verse 13
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[388] The pregnancy diet described here is the equivalent of the cibatio, the feeding of the transformative substance. The underlying idea is that the material to be transformed had to be impregnated and saturated, either by imbibing the tincture, the aqua propria (its own water, the soul), or by eating its feathers or wings (volatile spirit), or its own tail (uroboros), or the fruit of the philosophical tree. Here it is peacocks flesh. The peacock is an allusion to the cauda pavonis (peacocks tail). Immediately before the albedo or rubedo98 all colours appear, as if the peacock were spreading his shimmering fan. The basis for this phenomenon may be the iridescent skin that often forms on the surface of molten metal (e.g., lead).99 The omnes colores are frequently mentioned in the texts as indicating something like totality. They all unite in the albedo, which for many alchemists was the climax of the work. The first part was completed when the various components separated out from the chaos of the massa confusa were brought back to unity in the albedo and all become one. Morally this means that the original state of psychic disunity, the inner chaos of conflicting part-souls which Origen likens to herds of animals,100 becomes the vir unus, the unified man. Eating the peacocks flesh is therefore equivalent to integrating the many colours (or, psychologically, the contradictory feeling-values) into a single colour, white. Nortons Ordinall of Alchimy says:
For everie Colour whiche maie be thought,
--
[400] If, therefore, the Queen Mother eats peacock flesh during her pregnancy, she is assimilating an aspect of herself, namely, her capacity to grant rebirth, whose emblem the peacock is. According to Augustine, peacock flesh has the peculiarity of not turning rotten.134 It is, as the alchemists would say, a cibus immortalis, like the fruits of the philosophical tree with which Arisleus and his companions were fed in the house of rebirth at the bottom of the sea. Peacock flesh was just the right food for the mother in her attempt to rejuvenate the old king and to give him immortality.
[401] While peacock flesh135 was the queens diet, her drink was the blood of the green lion. Blood136 is one of the best-known synonyms for the aqua permanens, and its use in alchemy is often based on the blood symbolism and allegories of the Church.137 In the Cantilena the imbibitio (saturation)138 of the dead 139 arcane substance is performed not on the king, as in the Allegoria Merlini, but on the queen. The displacement and overlapping of images are as great in alchemy as in mythology and folklore. As these archetypal images are produced directly by the unconscious, it is not surprising that they exhibit its contamination of content 140 to a very high degree. This is what makes it so difficult for us to understand alchemy. Here the dominant factor is not logic but the play of archetypal motifs, and although this is illogical in the formal sense, it nevertheless obeys natural laws which we are far from having explained. In this respect the Chinese are much in advance of us, as a thorough study of the I Ching will show. Called by short-sighted Westerners a collection of ancient magic spells, an opinion echoed by the modernized Chinese themselves, the I Ching is a formidable psychological system that endeavours to organize the play of archetypes, the wondrous operations of nature, into a certain pattern, so that a reading becomes possible. It was ever a sign of stupidity to depreciate something one does not understand.
[402] Displacement and overlapping of images would be quite impossible if there did not exist between them an essential similarity of substance, a homoousia. Father, mother, and son are of the same substance, and what is said of one is largely true of the other. This accounts for the variants of incestbetween mother and son, brother and sister, father and daughter, etc. The uroboros is one even though in the twilight of the unconscious its head and tail appear as separate figures and are regarded as such. The alchemists, however, were sufficiently aware of the homoousia of their basic substances not only to call the two protagonists of the coniunctio drama the one Mercurius, but to assert that the prima materia and the vessel were identical. Just as the aqua permanens, the moist soul-substance, comes from the body it is intended to dissolve, so the mother who dissolves her son in herself is none other than the feminine aspect of the father-son. This view current among the alchemists cannot be based on anything except the essential similarity of the substances, which were not chemical but psychic; and, as such, appurtenances not of consciousness, where they would be differentiated concepts, but of the unconscious, in whose increasing obscurity they merge together in larger and larger contaminations.
[403] If, then, we are told that the queen drank blood, this image corresponds in every respect to the king drinking water,141 to the kings bath in the trough of the oak, to the king drowning in the sea, to the act of baptism, to the passage through the Red Sea, and to the suckling of the child by the mother of the gods. The water and the containing vessel always signify the mother, the feminine principle best characterized by yin, just as in Chinese alchemy the king is characterized by yang.142
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[406] According to the statements of the alchemists the king changes into his animal attri bute, that is to say he returns to his animal nature, the psychic source of renewal. Wieland made use of this psychologem in his fairytale Der Stein der Weisen,163 in which the dissipated King Mark is changed into an ass, though of course the conscious model for this was the transformation of Lucius into a golden ass in Apuleius.164
[407] Hoghelande ranks the lion with the dog.165 The lion has indeed something of the nature of the rabid dog we met with earlier, and this brings him into proximity with sulphur, the fiery dynamism of Sol. In the same way the lion is the potency of King Sol.166
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[410] In the lion hunt the incest, though veiled, is clear enough. The love-affair is projected on the lion, the animal nature or accrescent soul of the king; in other words it is enacted in his unconscious or in a dream. Because of his ambiguous character the lion is well suited to take over the role of this indecorous lover. As the king is represented by his animal and his mother by the magic stone, the royal incest can take place as though it were happening somewhere outside, in quite another sphere than the personal world of the king and his mother. Indeed the marriage not only seems to be unnatural but is actually intended to be so. The tabooed incest is imposed as a task and, as the wealth of allegories shows, it is always in some symbolical form and never concrete. One has the impression that this sacral act, of whose incestuous nature the alchemists were by no means unconscious, was not so much banished by them into the cucurbita or glass-house but was taking place in it all the time. Whoever wished to commit this act in its true sense would therefore have to get outside himself as if into an external glasshouse, a round cucurbita which represented the microcosmic space of the psyche. A little reason would teach us that we do not need to get outside ourselves but merely a little deeper into ourselves to experience the reality of incest and much else besides, since in each of us slumbers the beastlike primitive who may be roused by the doves of Diana (n. 168). This would account for the widespread suspicion that nothing good can come out of the psyche. Undoubtedly the hierosgamos of the substances is a projection of unconscious contents. These connstents, it is usually concluded, therefore belong to the psyche and, like the psyche itself, are inside man, Q.E.D. As against this the fact remains that only a very few people are or ever were conscious of having any incestuous fantasies worth mentioning. If such fantasies are present at all they are not yet conscious, like the collective unconscious in general. An analysis of dreams and other products of the unconscious is needed to make these fantasies visible. To that end considerable resistances have to be overcome, as though one were entering a strange territory, a region of the psyche to which one feels no longer related, let alone identical with it; and whoever has strayed into that territory, either out of negligence or by mistake, feels outside himself and a stranger in his own house. I think one should take cognizance of these facts and not attri bute to our personal psyche everything that appears as a psychic content. After all, we would not do this with a bird that happened to fly through our field of vision. It may well be a prejudice to restrict the psyche to being inside the body. In so far as the psyche has a non-spatial aspect, there may be a psychic outside-the-body, a region so utterly different from my psychic space that one has to get outside oneself or make use of some auxiliary technique in order to get there. If this view is at all correct, the alchemical consummation of the royal marriage in the cucurbita could be understood as a synthetic process in the psyche outside the ego.175
[411] As I have said, the fact that one can get into this territory somehow or other does not mean that it belongs to me personally. The ego is Here and Now, but the outside-of-the-ego is an alien There, both earlier and later, before and after.176 So it is not surprising that the primitive mind senses the psyche outside the ego as an alien country, inhabited by the spirits of the dead. On a rather higher level it takes on the character of a shadowy semi-reality, and on the level of the ancient cultures the shadows of that land beyond have turned into ideas. In Gnostic-Christian circles these were developed into a dogmatic, hierarchically arranged cosmogonic and chiliastic system which appears to us moderns as an involuntary, symbolic statement of the psyche concerning the structure of the psychic non-ego.177
[412] This region, if still seen as a spectral land beyond, appears to be a whole world in itself, a macrocosm. If, on the other hand, it is felt as psychic and inside, it seems like a microcosm of the smallest proportions, on a par with the race of dwarfs in the casket, described in Goethes poem The New Melusine, or like the interior of the cucurbita in which the alchemists beheld the creation of the world, the marriage of the royal pair, and the homunculus.178 Just as in alchemical philosophy the Anthroparion or homunculus corresponds, as the lapis, to the Anthropos, so the chymical weddings have their dogmatic parallels in the marriage of the Lamb, the union of sponsus and sponsa, and the hierosgamos of the mother of the gods and the son.
[413] This apparent digression from our theme seemed to me necessary in order to give the reader some insight into the intricate and delicate nature of the lion-symbol, whose further implications we must now proceed to discuss.
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[423] The food of the Queen Motherpeacocks flesh and lions bloodconsists of the goddesss own attri butes, that is to say she eats and drinks herself. The Consilium coniugii formulates this as follows: And so at length it sinks down into one content through saturation with the one ferment, water, for water is the ferment of water.220 It is always the same idea, which is best expressed by the uroboros. Unexpectedly but not surprisingly we come across a similar formulation in ecclesiastical literature, in the remark of St. John Chrysostom that Christ was the first to eat his own flesh and drink his own blood (at the institution of the Last Supper).221 Tertullian says: In the same way the Lord applied to himself two Greek letters, the first and the last, as figures of the beginning and end which are united in himself. For just as Alpha continues on until it reaches Omega, and Omega completes the cycle back again to Alpha, so he meant to show that in him is found the course of all things from the beginning to the end and from the end back to the beginning, so that every divine dispensation should end in him through whom it began.222 This thought corresponds exactly to what the alchemists sought to express by the uroboros, the
. The uroboros is a very ancient pagan symbol, and we have no reason to suppose that the idea of a self-generating and self-devouring being was borrowed from Christianity, e.g., from Tertullian, although the analogy with Christ, who as the one God begets himself and voluntarily offers himself for sacrifice, and then in the rite of the Eucharist, through the words of the consecration, performs his own immolation, is very striking. The concept of the uroboros must be much older, and may ultimately go back to ancient Egyptian theology, to the doctrine of the homoousia of the Father-God with the divine son, Pharaoh.
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[425] The fact that the king played a large role in medieval alchemy for several hundred years proves that, from about the thirteenth century onwards, the traces of the kings renewal surviving from Egyptian and Hellenistic times began to gain in importance because they had acquired a new meaning. For as the West started to investigate nature, till then completely unknown, the doctrine of the lumen naturae began to germinate too. Ecclesiastical doctrine and scholastic philosophy had both proved incapable of shedding any light on the nature of the physical world. The conjecture thereupon arose that just as the mind revealed its nature in the light of divine revelation, so nature herself must possess a certain luminosity which could become a source of enlightenment. It is therefore understandable that for those individuals whose particular interest lay in the investigation of natural things the dogmatic view of the world should lose its force as the lumen naturae gained in attraction, even though the dogma itself was not directly doubted. The more serious alchemists, if we are to believe their statements, were religious people who had no thought of criticizing revealed truth. There is in the literature of alchemy, so far as I can judge, no attack on dogma. The only thing of this kind is a depreciation of the Aristotelian philosophy sponsored by the Church in favour of Hermetic Neoplatonism.224 Not only were the old Masters not critical of ecclesiastical doctrine, they were, on the contrary, convinced that their discoveries, real or imaginary, would enrich the doctrine of the correspondence of heavenly and earthly things, since they endeavoured to prove that the mystery of faith was reflected in the world of nature.225 They could not guess that their passion for investigating nature would detract as much as it did from revealed truth, and that their scientific interests could be aroused only as the fascination of dogma began to pall. And so, as in dreams, there grew up in their unconscious the compensating image of the kings renewal.
[426] These considerations make it the more comprehensible that it was a cleric who wrote the Cantilena. It is indeed something of a descent to the underworld when he makes Mercurius, bearing the dart of passion, the emblem of Cupid,226 hand the queen the blood-potion in a golden cup of Babylon. This, as we have seen, is the golden cup full of the abomination and filthiness of fornication, and it is quite obvious that she is being ruthlessly regaled with her own psychic substances. These are animal substances she has to integrate, the accrescent soul-peacock and lion with their positive and negative qualities; and the draught is given to her in the cup of fornication, which emphasizes still more the erotic nature of the lion, his lust and greed. Such an integration amounts to a widening of consciousness through profound insight.
[427] But why should such an unpalatable diet be prescribed for the queen? Obviously because the old king lacked something, on which account he grew senile: the dark, chthonic aspect of nature. And not only this but the sense that all creation was in the image of God, the antique feeling for nature, which in the Middle Ages was considered a false track and an aberration. Dark and unfathomable as the earth is, its theriomorphic symbols do not have only a reductive meaning, but one that is prospective and spiritual. They are paradoxical, pointing upwards and downwards at the same time. If contents like these are integrated in the queen, it means that her consciousness is widened in both directions. This diet will naturally benefit the regeneration of the king by supplying what was lacking before. Contrary to appearances, this is not only the darkness of the animal sphere, but rather a spiritual nature or a natural spirit which even has its analogies with the mystery of faith, as the alchemists were never tired of emphasizing.
[428] During her pregnancy, therefore, the queen undergoes something akin to a psycho therapeutic treatment, whereby her consciousness is enriched by a knowledge of the collective unconscious and, we may assume, by her inner participation in the conflict between her spiritual and chthonic nature. Often the law governing the progressive widening of consciousness makes the evaluation of the heights and depths into a moral task transcending the limits of convention. Failure to know what one is doing acts like guilt and must be paid for as deariy. The conflict may even turn out to be an advantage since, without it, there could be no reconciliation and no birth of a supraordinate third thing. The king could then be neither renewed nor reborn. The conflict is manifested in the long sickness of the queen.
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[435] We know that what hovered before the mind of the alchemist during this transformation was the almost daily miracle of transubstantiation at the Mass. This would very definitely have been the case with Canon Ripley. We have already seen from a number of examples how much religious conceptions were mixed up with his alchemical interests. The queen in the Cantilena is neither a wife nor mother in the first place but a tutelary madonna who adopts the king as her sonan indication that she stands in the same relationship to the king as Mater Ecclesia to the believer. He dies and is buried as if in the Church or in consecrated ground, where he awaits resurrection in a glorified body.
[436] The elevation of the matrix, the chemical solution, from the state of materiality to Luna is the classic allegory of the Church, as Ripley doubtless knew. The goddess who suddenly intervenes in the opus is depicted in the Mutus liber, where she appears equally suddenly during the procedure, as a naked female figure crowned with the sign of the moon and bearing a child in her arms. The miracle is there described as an intervention of the gods,235 who, like god-parents, take the place of the earthly parents and arrange for the spiritual procreation of the foetus spagyricus. It is inevitable that Luna should stand for the Virgin and/or the Church in the Cantilena because the senex-puer is described by Ripley himself as the Ancient of Days. Since the mother at this moment has brought about the histolysis of the old king, so that only a single homogeneous solution remains, we must assume that Luna, appearing in the place of the mother, has become identical with the solution and now carries the king in her body as her adopted son. This gives the king immortality in a divine and incorruptible body. In the Mutus liber there then follows an adoption by Sol and after that a coniunctio Solis et Lunae, and the adoptive child, now consubstantial with Sol and Luna, is included in the ceremony.
[437] Something of this sort seems to occur in the Cantilena: Luna and her adoptive son are at first identical in one and the Same solution. When Luna takes over this condition she is presumably in her novilunium and hastens to her union with Sol. The new moon is associated with uncanniness and snakiness, as we saw earlier.236 I therefore interpret spirificans in splendorem Solis as winding like a snake into the radiance of the sun. Woman is morally suspect in alchemy and seems closely akin to the serpent of paradise, and for this and other reasons Canon Ripley might easily think of the new moons approach to the sun as a spiram facere.237 It should not be forgotten that a learned alchemist of the fifteenth century would have a knowledge of symbols at least as great as our own in the present exposition (if you discount the psychology), and in some cases perhaps greater. (There are still numerous unpublished MSS. in existence to which I have had no access.)
[438] Verses 2627
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[443] Here Ripley describes the renewal of the king and the birth of the son as the manifestation of a new redeemerwhich sounds very queer indeed in the mouth of a medieval ecclesiastic. The sublimation of Luna (uti Luna) to the imperial place is an unmistakable paraphrase on the one hand of the Assumption of the Virgin and on the other of the marriage of the bride, the Church. The unlocking of paradise means nothing less than the advent of Gods Kingdom on earth. The attri butes of sun and moon make the filius regius into the rearisen Primordial Man, who is the cosmos. It would be wrong to minimize the importance of this jubilee or to declare it is nonsense. One cannot dismiss all the alchemists as insane. It seems to me more advisable to examine the motives that led a cleric, of all people, to postulate a divine revelation outside his credo. If the lapis were nothing but gold the alchemists would have been wealthy folk; if it were the panacea they would have had a remedy for all sickness; if it were the elixir they could have lived a thousand years or more. But all this would not oblige them to make religious statements about it. If nevertheless it is praised as the second coming of the Messiah one must assume that the alchemists really did mean something of the kind. Although they regarded the art as a charisma, a gift of the Holy Ghost or of the Sapientia Dei,243 it was still mans work, and, even though a divine miracle was the decisive factor, the mysterious filius was still concocted artificially in a retort.
[444] In the face of all this one is driven to the conjecture that medieval alchemy, which evolved out of the Arabic tradition sometime in the thirteenth century, and whose most eloquent witness is the Aurora consurgens, was in the last resort a continuation of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost, which never came to very much in the Church.244 The Paraclete descends upon the single individual, who is thereby drawn into the Trinitarian process.245 And if the spirit of procreation and life indwells in man, then God can be born in hima thought that has not perished since the time of Meister Eckhart.246 The verses of Angelus Silesius are in this respect quite unequivocal:
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[445] Here Angelus expresses as a religious and psychological experience what the alchemists experienced in and through matter, and what Ripley is describing in his tortuous allegory. The nature of this experience is sufficient to explain the rapt language of certain verses in the Cantilena. He was speaking of something greater than the effects of grace in the sacraments: God himself, through the Holy Ghost, enters the work of man, in the form of inspiration as well as by direct intervention in the miraculous transformation. In view of the fact that such a miracle never did occur in the retort, despite repeated assertions that someone had actually succeeded in making gold, and that neither a panacea nor an elixir has demonstrably prolonged a human life beyond its due, and that no homunculus has ever flown out of the furnacein view of this totally negative result we must ask on what the enthusiasm and infatuation of the adepts could possibly have been based.
[446] In order to answer this difficult question one must bear in mind that the alchemists, guided by their keenness for research, were in fact on a hopeful path since the fruit that alchemy bore after centuries of endeavour was chemistry and its staggering discoveries. The emotional dynamism of alchemy is largely explained by a premonition of these then-unheard-of possibilities. However barren of useful or even enlightening results its labours were, these efforts, notwithstanding their chronic failure, seem to have had a psychic effect of a positive nature, something akin to satisfaction or even a perceptible increase in wisdom. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the alchemists did not turn away in disgust from their almost invariably futile projects. Not that such disillusionments never came to them; indeed the futility of alchemy brought it into increasing disrepute. There remain, nevertheless, a number of witnesses who make it quite clear that their hopeless fumbling, inept as it was from the chemical standpoint, presents a very different appearance when seen from a psychological angle. As I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, there occurred during the chemical procedure psychic projections which brought unconscious contents to light, often in the form of vivid visions. The medical psychologist knows today that such projections may be of the greatest therapeutic value. It was not for nothing that the old Masters identified their nigredo with melancholia and extolled the opus as the sovereign remedy for all afflictions of the soul; for they had discovered, as was only to be expected, that though their purses shrank their soul gained in statureprovided of course that they survived certain by no means inconsiderable psychic dangers. The projections of the alchemists were nothing other than unconscious contents appearing in matter, the same contents that modern psycho therapy makes conscious by the method of active imagination before they unconsciously change into projections. Making them conscious and giving form to what is unformed has a specific effect in cases where the conscious attitude offers an overcrowded unconscious no possible means of expressing itself. In these circumstances the unconscious has, as it were, no alternative but to generate projections and neurotic symptoms. The conscious milieu of the Middle Ages provided no adequate outlet for these things. The immense world of natural science lay folded in the bud, as also did that questing religious spirit which we meet in many of the alchemical treatises and which, we may well conjecture, was closely akin to the empiricism of scientific research.
[447] Perhaps the most eloquent witness to this spirit was Meister Eckhart, with his idea of the birth of the son in human individuals and the resultant affiliation of man to God.248 Part of this spirit was realized in Protestantism, another part was intuited by the mystics who succeeded Boehme, in particular by Angelus Silesius, who quite literally perished in the work. He advanced even beyond Protestantism to an attitude of mind that would have needed the support of Indian or Chinese philosophy and would therefore not have been possible until the end of the nineteenth century at the earliest. In his own age Angelus could only wither away unrecognized, and this was the tragedy that befell him. A third part took shape in the empirical sciences that developed independently of all authority, and a fourth appropriated to itself the religious philosophies of the East and transplanted them with varying degrees of skill and taste in the West.
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[456] In the latter category we must distinguish two kinds of alchemists: those who believed that the revealed truth represented by the Church could derive nothing but gain if it were combined with a knowledge of the God in nature; and those for whom the projection of the Christian mystery of faith into the physical world invested nature with a mystical significance, whose mysterious light outshone the splendid incomprehensibilities of Church ceremonial. The first group hoped for a rebirth of dogma, the second for a new incarnation of it and its transformation into a natural revelation.
[457] I lay particular stress on the phenomena of assimilation in alchemy because they are, in a sense, a prelude to the modern approximation between empirical psychology and Christian dogmaan approximation which Nietzsche clearly foresaw. Psychology, as a science, observes religious ideas from the standpoint of their psychic phenomenology without intruding on their theological content. It puts the dogmatic images into the category of psychic contents, because this constitutes its field of research. It is compelled to do so by the nature of the psyche itself; it does not, like alchemy, try to explain psychic processes in theological terms, but rather to illuminate the darkness of religious images by relating them to similar images in the psyche. The result is a kind of amalgamation of ideas ofso it would seem the most varied provenience, and this sometimes leads to parallels and comparisons which to an uncritical mind unacquainted with the epistemological method may seem like a devaluation or a false interpretation. If this were to be construed as an objection to psychology one could easily say the same thing about the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers, which are often very risky indeed, or about the dubious nature of textual criticism. The psychologist has to investigate religious symbols because his empirical material, of which the theologian usually knows nothing, compels him to do so. Presumably no one would wish to hand over the chemistry of albuminous bodies to some other department of science on the ground that they are organic and that the investigation of life is a matter for the biologist. A rapprochement between empirical science and religious experience would in my opinion be fruitful for both. Harm can result only if one side or the other remains unconscious of the limitations of its claim to validity. Alchemy, certainly, cannot be defended against the charge of unconsciousness. It is and remains a puzzle whether Ripley ever reflected on his theological enormities and what he thought about them. From a scientific point of view, his mentality resembles that of a dream-state.
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[461] These few examples, together with those already quoted in Psychology and Alchemy, may give the reader some idea of the way in which the alchemists conceived the triumphant king.
[462] Verse 38
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4.05 - THE DARK SIDE OF THE KING, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[467] The sunken king of alchemy went on living as the metal king, the regulus of metallurgy. This is the name for the lumps of metal formed beneath the slag in melting and reducing ores. The term Sulphur auratum antimonii, like gold-sulphur, indicates the strong predominance of sulphur in combination with antimony. Sulphur, as we have seen, is the active substance of Sol and is foul-smelling: sulphur dioxide and sulphuretted hydrogen give one a good idea of the stink of hell. Sulphur is an attribute of Sol as Leo is of Rex. Leo, too, is ambiguous: on the one hand he is an allegory of the devil and on the other is connected with Venus. The antimony compounds known to the alchemists (Sb2S5, Sb2S3) therefore contained a substance which clearly exemplified the nature of Rex and Leo, hence they spoke of the triumph of antimony.281
[468] As I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy,282 the sunken king forms a parallel to Parable VII of Aurora Consurgens:282a Be turned to me with all your heart and do not cast me aside because I am black and swarthy, because the sun hath changed my colour and the waters have covered my face and the land hath been polluted and defiled in my works; for there was darkness over it, because I stick fast in the mire of the deep and my substance is not disclosed. Wherefore out of the depths have I cried, and from the abyss of the earth with my voice to all you that pass by the way. Attend and see me, if any shall find one like unto me, I will give into his hand the morning star.
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[470] These contradictory interpretations of the depths (profunda) come much closer together in alchemy, often so close that they seem to be nothing more than two different aspects of the same thing. It is natural that in alchemy the depths should mean now one and now the other, to the despair of all lovers of consistency. But the eternal images are far from consistent in meaning. It is characteristic of the alchemists that they never lost sight of this polarity, thereby compensating the world of dogma, which, in order to avoid ambiguity, emphasizes the one pole to the exclusion of the other. The tendency to separate the opposites as much as possible and to strive for singleness of meaning is absolutely necessary for clarity of consciousness, since discrimination is of its essence. But when the separation is carried so far that the complementary opposite is lost sight of, and the blackness of the whiteness, the evil of the good, the depth of the heights, and so on, is no longer seen, the result is one-sidedness, which is then compensated from the unconscious without our help. The counterbalancing is even done against our will, which in consequence must become more and more fanatical until it brings about a catastrophic enantiodromia. Wisdom never forgets that all things have two sides, and it would also know how to avoid such calamities if ever it had any power. But power is never found in the seat of wisdom; it is always the focus of mass interests and is therefore inevitably associated with the illimitable folly of the mass man.
[471] With increasing one-sidedness the power of the king decays, for originally it had consisted just in his ability to unite the polarity of all existence in a symbol. The more distinctly an idea emerges and the more consciousness gains in clarity, the more monarchic becomes its content, to which everything contradictory has to submit. This extreme state has to be reached, despite the fact that the climax always presages the end. Mans own nature, the unconscious, immediately tries to compensate, and this is distasteful to the extreme state, which always considers itself ideal and is moreover in a position to prove its excellence with the most cogent arguments. We cannot but admit that it is ideal, but for all that it is imperfect because it expresses only one half of life. Life wants not only the clear but also the muddy, not only the bright but also the dark; it wants all days to be followed by nights, and wisdom herself to celebrate her carnival, of which indeed there are not a few traces in alchemy. For these reasons, too, the king constantly needs the renewal that begins with a descent into his own darkness, an immersion in his own depths, and with a reminder that he is related by blood to his adversary.
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(subterranean Hermes). Mercurius is a compound of opposites, and the alchemists were primarily concerned with his dark side, the serpent.
[481] It is an age-old mythological idea that the hero, when the light of life is extinguished, goes on living as a snake and is worshipped as a snake.317 Another widespread primitive idea is the snake-form of the spirits of the dead. This may well have given rise to the worm version of the phoenix myth.
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The comparison of the god to a snake reminds us of his chthonic form in the underworld, just as the rejuvenated phoenix (falcon) first takes the form of a worm.328 As Christianity borrowed a good deal from the Egyptian religion it is not surprising that the allegory of the snake found its way into the world of Christian ideas (John 3 : 14) and was readily seized on by the alchemists.329 The dragon is an allegory of Christ as well as of the Antichrist.330 A remarkable parallel occurs in the anonymous treatise, De promissionibus (5th cent.).331 It concerns a version of the legend of St. Sylvester, according to which this saint imprisoned a dragon in the Tarpeian Rock and so rendered him harmless. The other version of this story is related by a certain monk who discovered that the alleged dragon, to whom offerings of virgins were made, was nothing but a mechanical device. St. Sylvester locked the dragon up with a chain, as in Rev. 20 : 1; but in the parallel story the artificial dragon brandished a sword in its mouth, like the Son of Man in Rev. 1 : 16.332
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4.06 - THE KING AS ANTHROPOS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[486] The various fatalities which the old king has to sufferimmersion in the bath or in the sea, dissolution and decomposition, extinction of his light in the darkness, incineration in the fire, and renewal out of the chaosare derived by the alchemists from the dissolution of the matter in acids, from the roasting of ores, the expulsion of sulphur or mercury, the reduction of metallic oxides, and so forth, as if these chemical procedures yielded a picture which, with a little straining of the imagination, could be compared with Christs sufferings and his final triumph. The fact that they projected the Passion as an unconscious premise into the chemical transformations was not at all clear to the alchemists.341 Naturally, under these circumstances, they were able to prove with complete success that their alleged observations coincided with the Passion. Only, it was not a question of their making observations on matter, but of introspection. Since, however, genuine projections are never voluntarily made but always appear as preconscious factors, there must have been something in the unconscious of the alchemists which lent itself to projection (i.e., had a tendency to become conscious because of its energy charge), and on the other hand found in the alchemical operations a hook that attracted it, so that it could express itself in some way. Projection is always an indirect process of becoming consciousindirect because of the check exercised by the conscious mind, by the pressure of traditional or conventional ideas which take the place of real experience and prevent it from happening. One feels that one possesses a valid truth concerning the unknown, and this makes any real knowledge of it impossible. The unconscious factor must necessarily have been something that was incompatible with the conscious attitude. What it was in reality we learn from the statements of the alchemists: a myth that had much in common not only with many mythologems of pagan origin but above all with Christian dogma. If it were identical with the dogma and appeared in projection it would show that the alchemists had a thoroughly anti-Christian attitude (which was not the case). Lacking such an attitude a projection of this kind would be psychologically impossible. But if the unconscious complex represented a figure that deviated from the dogma in certain essential features, then its projection becomes possible, for it would then be in opposition to the dogma approved by consciousness and would have arisen by way of compensation.
[487] In this and my other writings I have constantly stressed the peculiar nature of the alchemists statements and need not recapitulate what I have said. I should only like to point out that the central idea of the filius philosophorum is based on a conception of the Anthropos in which the Man or the Son of Man does not coincide with the Christian, historical redeemer figure. The alchemical Anthropos comes closer to the Basilidian conception of him as reported by Hippolytus: For he [the Redeemer] . . . is in their view the inner spiritual man in the psychic . . . which is the Sonship that left the soul here not to die but to remain according to its nature, just as the first Sonship left behind on high the Holy Ghost, who is conterminous with him, in the appropriate place, clothing himself in his own soul. 342
[488] The inner spiritual man bears a resemblance to Christ that is the unconscious premise for the statements about the filius regius.343 This idea contradicts the dogmatic view and therefore has every reason to be repressed and projected. At the same time it is the logical consequence of a spiritual situation in which the historical figure had long since disappeared from consciousness, while his spiritual presence was stressed all the more strongly in the form of the inner Christ or God who is born in the soul of man. The outward fact of the dogmatic Christ was answered from within by that inner primordial image which had produced a Purusha or a Gayomart long before the Christian era and made the assimilation of the Christian revelation possible. The ultimate fate of every dogma is that it gradually becomes soulless. Life wants to create new forms, and therefore, when a dogma loses its vitality, it must perforce activate the archetype that has always helped man to express the mystery of the soul. Note that I do not go so far as to say that the archetype actually produces the divine figure. If the psychologist were to assert that, he would have to possess a sure knowledge of the motives that underlie all historical development and be in a position to demonstrate this knowledge. But there is no question of that. I maintain only that the psychic archetype makes it possible for the divine figure to take form and become accessible to understanding. But the supremely important motive power which is needed for this, and which sets the archetypal possibilities in motion at a given historical moment, cannot be explained in terms of the archetype itself. Only experience can establish which archetype has become operative, but one can never predict that it must enter into manifestation. Who, for instance, could logically have foretold that the Jewish prophet Jesus would give the decisive answer to the spiritual situation in the age of Hellenistic syncretism, or that the slumbering image of the Anthropos would waken to world dominion?
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[492] If the adept experiences his own self, the true man, in his work, then, as the passage from the Aquarium sapientum shows, he encounters the analogy of the true manChristin new and direct form, and he recognizes in the transformation in which he himself is involved a similarity to the Passion. It is not an imitation of Christ but its exact opposite: an assimilation of the Christ-image to his own self, which is the true man.349 It is no longer an effort, an intentional straining after imitation, but rather an involuntary experience of the reality represented by the sacred legend. This reality comes upon him in his work, just as the stigmata come to the saints without being consciously sought. They appear spontaneously. The Passion happens to the adept, not in its classic formotherwise he would be consciously performing spiritual exercises but in the form expressed by the alchemical myth. It is the arcane substance that suffers those physical and moral tortures; it is the king who dies or is killed, is dead and buried and on the third day rises again. And it is not the adept who suffers all this, rather it suffers in him, it is tortured, it passes through death and rises again. All this happens not to the alchemist himself but to the true man, who he feels is near him and in him and at the same time in the retort. The passion that vibrates in our text and in the Aurora is genuine, but would be totally incomprehensible if the lapis were nothing but a chemical substance. Nor does it originate in contemplation of Christs Passion; it is the real experience of a man who has got involved in the compensatory contents of the unconscious by investigating the unknown, seriously and to the point of self-sacrifice. He could not but see the likeness of his projected contents to the dogmatic images, and he might have been tempted to assume that his ideas were nothing else than the familiar religious conceptions, which he was using in order to explain the chemical procedure. But the texts show clearly that, on the contrary, a real experience of the opus had an increasing tendency to assimilate the dogma or to amplify itself with it. That is why the text says that Christ was compared and united with the stone. The alchemical Anthropos showed itself to be independent of any dogma.350
[493] The alchemist experienced the Anthropos in a form that was imbued with new vitality, freshness and immediacy, and this is reflected in the enthusiastic tone of the texts. It is therefore understandable that every single detail of the primordial drama would be realized in quite a new sense. The nigredo not only brought decay, suffering, death, and the torments of hell visibly before the eyes of the alchemist, it also cast the shadow of its melancholy over his own solitary soul.351 In the blackness of a despair which was not his own, and of which he was merely the witness, he experienced how it turned into the worm and the poisonous dragon.352 From inner necessity the dragon destroyed itself (natura naturam vincit) and changed into the lion,353 and the adept, drawn involuntarily into the drama, then felt the need to cut off its paws354 (unless there were two lions who devoured one another). The dragon ate its own wings as the eagle did its feathers.355 These grotesque images reflect the conflict of opposites into which the researchers curiosity had led him. His work began with a katabasis, a journey to the underworld as Dante also experienced it,356 with the difference that the adepts soul was not only impressed by it but radically altered. Faust I is an example of this: the transformation of an earnest scholar, through his pact with the devil, into a worldly cavalier and crooked careerist. In the case of the fanciful Christian Rosencreutz the descent to Venus led only to his being slightly wounded in the hand by Cupids arrow. The texts, however, hint at more serious dangers. Olympiodorus says:357 Without great pains this work is not perfected; there will be struggles, violence, and war. And all the while the demon Ophiuchos358 instils negligence (
), impeding our intentions; everywhere he creeps about, both within and without, causing oversights, anxiety, and unexpected accidents, or else keeping us from the work by harassments (
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4.07 - THE RELATION OF THE KING-SYMBOL TO CONSCIOUSNESS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[504] Pitilessly it is seen from another planet that the king is growing old, even before he sees it himself: ruling ideas, the dominants, change, and the change, undetected by consciousness, is mirrored only in dreams. King Sol, as the archetype of consciousness, voyages through the world of the unconscious, one of its multitudinous figures which may one day be capable of consciousness too. These lesser lights are, on the old view, identical with the planetary correspondences in the psyche which were postulated by astrology. When, therefore, an alchemist conjured up the spirit of Saturn as his familiar, this was an attempt to bring to consciousness a standpoint outside the ego, involving a relativization of the ego and its contents. The intervention of the planetary spirit was besought as an aid. When the king grows old and needs renewing, a kind of planetary bath is instituteda bath into which all the planets pour their influences.387 This expresses the idea that the dominant, grown feeble with age, needs the support and influence of those subsidiary lights to fortify and renew it. It is, as it were, dissolved in the substance of the other planetary archetypes and then put together again. Through this process of melting and recasting there is formed a new amalgam of a more comprehensive nature, which has taken into itself the influences of the other planets or metals.388
[505] In this alchemical picture we can easily recognize the projection of the transformation process: the aging of a psychic dominant is apparent from the fact that it expresses the psychic totality in ever-diminishing degree. One can also say that the psyche no longer feels wholly contained in the dominant, whereupon the dominant loses its fascination and no longer grips the psyche so completely as before. On the other hand its content and meaning are no longer properly understood, or what is understood fails to touch the heart. A sentiment dincompltude of this kind produces a compensatory reaction which attracts other regions of the psyche and their contents, so as to fill up the gap. As a rule this is an unconscious process that always sets in when the attitude and orientation of the conscious mind have proved inadequate. I stress this point because the conscious mind is a bad judge of its own situation and often persists in the illusion that its attitude is just the right one and is only prevented from working because of some external annoyance. If the dreams were observed it would soon become clear why the conscious assumptions have become unworkable. And if, finally, neurotic symptoms appear, then the attitude of consciousness, its ruling idea, is contradicted, and in the unconscious there is a stirring up of those archetypes that were the most suppressed by the conscious attitude. The therapist then has no other course than to confront the ego with its adversary and thus initiate the melting and recasting process. The confrontation is expressed, in the alchemical myth of the king, as the collision of the masculine, spiritual father-world ruled over by King Sol with the feminine, chthonic mother-world symbolized by the aqua permanens or by the chaos.
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[507] The Cantilena shows us what that dominant was which is subjected to transformation not only in Ripley but in many other alchemists: it was the Christian view of the world in the Middle Ages. This problem is of such dimensions that one cannot expect a medieval man to have been even remotely conscious of it. It was bound to work itself out in projection, unconsciously. For this reason, too, it can hardly be grasped even todaywhich is why the psychological interpretation of the One, the filius regius, meets with the greatest difficulties. From the hymnlike manner in which the alchemists praised their son it is quite evident that they meant by this symbol either Christ himself or something that corresponded to him. Naturally they were not concerned with the historical personality of Jesus, which at that time was completely covered up by the dogmatic figure of the second Person of the Trinity. The latter symbol had slowly crystallized out in the course of the centuries, though it was clearly prefigured in the Logos of St. John. Nor was the conception of God as senex and puer peculiar to the alchemists, for many clerics who were not alchemists took it as a transformation of the wrathful and vindictive Yahweh of the Old Testament into the God of Love of the New. Thus the archetype of the kings renewal manifested itself not only among the philosophers but also in ecclesiastical circles.390
[508] There can be a psychological explanation of the filius regius only when this image has sloughed off its projected form and become a purely psychic experience. The Christ-lapis parallel shows clearly enough that the filius regius was more a psychic event than a physical one, since as a physical event it can demonstrably never occur and as a religious experience it is beyond question. There are many passages in the texts that can be interpretedstrange as this may soundas an experience of Christ in matter. Others, again, lay so much emphasis on the lapis that one cannot but see in it a renewal and completion of the dogmatic image. An unequivocal substitution of the filius regius for Christ does not, to my knowledge, occur in the literature, for which reason one must call alchemy Christian even though heretical. The Christ-lapis remains an ambiguous figure.
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[511] Only the living presence of the eternal images can lend the human psyche a dignity which makes it morally possible for a man to stand by his own soul, and be convinced that it is worth his while to persevere with it. Only then will he realize that the conflict is in him, that the discord and tribulation are his riches, which should not be squandered by attacking others; and that, if fate should exact a debt from him in the form of guilt, it is a debt to himself. Then he will recognize the worth of his psyche, for nobody can owe a debt to a mere nothing. But when he loses his own values he becomes a hungry robber, the wolf, lion, and other ravening beasts which for the alchemists symbolized the appetites that break loose when the black waters of chaosi.e., the unconsciousness of projectionhave swallowed up the king.393
[512] It is a subtle feature of the Cantilena that the pregnancy cravings of the mother are stilled with peacocks flesh and lions blood, i.e., with her own flesh and blood.394 If the projected conflict is to be healed, it must return into the psyche of the individual, where it had its unconscious beginnings. He must celebrate a Last Supper with himself, and eat his own flesh and drink his own blood; which means that he must recognize and accept the other in himself. But if he persists in his one-sidedness, the two lions will tear each other to pieces. Is this perhaps the meaning of Christs teaching, that each must bear his own cross? For if you have to endure yourself, how will you be able to rend others also?
[513] Such reflections are justified by the alchemical symbolism, as one can easily see if one examines the so-called allegories a little more closely and does not dismiss them at the start as worthless rubbish. The miraculous feeding with ones own substanceso strangely reflecting its prototype, Christmeans nothing less than the integration of those parts of the personality which are still outside ego-consciousness. Lion and peacock, emblems of concupiscence and pride, signify the overweening pretensions of the human shadow, which we so gladly project on our fellow man in order to visit our own sins upon him with apparent justification. In the age-old image of the uroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself.395 The uroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e., of the shadow. This feed-back process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the uroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which, as a projection, unquestionably stems from mans unconscious. Accordingly, there must be some psychic datum in it which gives rise to such assertions, and these assertions must somehow characterize that datum even if they are not to be taken literally. What the ultimate reason is for these assertions or manifestations must remain a mystery, but a mystery whose inner kinship with the mystery of faith was sensed by the adepts, so that for them the two were identical.
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4.08 - THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM OF THE KINGS RENEWAL, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[516] If, now, the alchemists meant by their old king that he was God himself, this also applies to his son. They themselves must have shrunk from thinking out the logical consequences of their symbolism, otherwise they would have had to assert that God grows old and must be renewed through the art. Such a thought would have been possible at most in the Alexandrian epoch, when gods sprang up like mushrooms. But for medieval man it was barely conceivable.398 He was far more likely to consider that the art would change something in himself, for which reason he regarded its product as a kind of
. Had he had any idea of psychology, he would almost certainly have called his healing medicament psychic and would have regarded the kings renewal as a transformation of the conscious dominantwhich naturally has nothing to do with a magical intervention in the sphere of the gods.
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[520] Consciousness is renewed through its descent into the unconscious, whereby the two are joined. The renewed consciousness does not contain the unconscious but forms with it a totality symbolized by the son. But since father and son are of one being, and in alchemical language King Sol, representing the renewed consciousness, is the son, consciousness would be absolutely identical with the King as dominant. For the alchemists this difficulty did not exist, because the King was projected into a postulated substance and hence behaved merely as an object to the consciousness of the artifex. But if the projection is withdrawn by psychological criticism, we encounter the aforesaid difficulty that the renewed consciousness apparently coincides with the renewed king, or son. I have discussed the psychological aspect of this problem in the second of the Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, in the chapter on the mana personality. The difficulty cannot be resolved by purely logical argument but only by careful observation and analysis of the psychic state itself. Rather than launch out into a detailed discussion of case-histories I would prefer to recall the well-known words of Paul, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Gal. 2 : 20), which aptly describe the peculiar nature of this state. From this we can see that that other, earlier state, when the king aged and disappeared, is marked by a consciousness in which a critical ego knowingly took the place of the sick king, looking back to an earlier mythical time when this ego still felt absolutely dependent on a higher and mightier non-ego. The subsequent disappearance of the feeling of dependence and the simultaneous streng thening of criticism are felt as progress, enlightenment, liberation, indeed as redemption, although a one-sided and limited being has usurped the throne of a king. A personal ego seizes the reins of power to its own destruction; for mere egohood, despite possessing an anima rationalis, is not even sufficient for the guidance of personal life, let alone for the guidance of men. For this purpose it always needs a mythical dominant, yet such a thing cannot simply be invented and then believed in. Contemplating our own times we must say that though the need for an effective dominant was realized to a large extent, what was offered was nothing more than an arbitrary invention of the moment. The fact that it was also believed in goes to prove the gullibility and cluelessness of the public and at the same time the profoundly felt need for a spiritual authority transcending egohood. An authority of this kind is never the product of rational reflection or an invention of the moment, which always remains caught in the narrow circle of ego-bound consciousness; it springs from traditions whose roots go far deeper both historically and psychologically. Thus a real and essentially religious renewal can be based, for us, only on Christianity. The extremely radical reformation of Hinduism by the Buddha assimilated the traditional spirituality of India in its entirety and did not thrust a rootless novelty upon the world. It neither denied nor ignored the Hindu pantheon swarming with millions of gods, but boldly introduced Man, who before that had not been represented at all. Nor did Christ, regarded simply as a Jewish reformer, destroy the law, but made it, rather, into a matter of conviction. He likewise, as the regenerator of his age, set against the Greco-Roman pantheon and the speculations of the philosophers the figure of Man, not intending it as a contradiction but as the fulfilment of a mythologem that existed long before him the conception of the Anthropos with its complex Egyptian, Persian, and Hellenistic background.
[521] Any renewal not deeply rooted in the best spiritual tradition is ephemeral; but the dominant that grows from historical roots act like a living being within the ego-bound man. He does not possess it, it possesses him; therefore the alchemists said that the artifex is not the master but rather the minister of the stoneclearly showing that the stone is indeed a king towards whom the artifex behaves as a subject.
[522] Although the renewed king corresponds to a renewed consciousness, this consciousness is as different from its former state as the filius regius differs from the enfeebled old king. Just as the old king must forgo his power and make way for the little up start ego, so the ego, when the renewed king returns, must step into the background. It still remains the sine qua non of consciousness,400 but it no longer imagines that it can settle everything and do everything by the force of its will. It no longer asserts that where theres a will theres a way. When lucky ideas come to it, it does not take the credit for them, but begins to realize how dangerously close it had been to an inflation. The scope of its willing and doing becomes commensurate with reality again after an Ash Wednesday has descended upon its pre-sumptuousness.401
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[525] We have here a discrepancy between the alchemical and psychological symbolism and the Christian. It is indeed difficult to imagine what kind of coniunctio beyond the union of conscious (male) and unconscious (female) in the regenerated dominant could be meant, unless we assume, with the dogmatic tradition, that the regenerated dominant also brings the corpus mysticum of mankind (Ecclesia as Luna) into glorious reality. Among the alchemists, who were mostly solitaries by choice, the motif of the Apocalyptic marriage, characterized as the marriage of the Lamb (Rev. 19 : 7ff.), is missing, the accent here lying on the sacrificial appellation lamb. According to the oldest and most primitive tradition the king, despite his dignity and power, was a victim offered up for the prosperity of his country and his people, and in his godlike form he was even eaten. As we know, this archetype underwent an extremely complicated development in Christianity. From the standpoint of Christian symbolism the alchemists conception of the goal lacked, firstly, the motif of the heavenly marriage and, secondly, the almost more important motif of sacrifice and the totem meal. (The mourned gods of Asia MinorTammuz, Adonis, etc.were, in all probability, originally sacrifices for the fruitfulness of the year.) The lapis was decidedly an ideal for hermits, a goal for isolated individuals. Besides that, it was a food (cibus immortalis), could be multiplied indefinitely, was a living being with body, soul, and spirit, an androgyne with incorruptible body, etc. Though likened to King Sol and even named such, it was not a sponsus, not a victim, and belonged to no community; it was like the treasure hid in a field, the which when a man hath found, he hideth (Matt. 13 : 44), or like one pearl of great price, for which a man went and sold all that he had, and bought it (Matt. 13 : 46). It was the well-guarded, precious secret of the individual.403 And though the old Masters emphasized that they would not hide their secret jealously 404 and would reveal it to all seekers, it was perfectly clear that the stone remained the preoccupation of the individual.
[526] In this connection it should not be forgotten that in antiquity certain influences, evidently deriving from the Gnostic doctrine of the hermaphroditic Primordial Man,405 penetrated into Christianity and there gave rise to the view that Adam had been created an androgyne.406 And since Adam was the prototype of Christ, and Eve, sprung from his side, that of the Church, it is understandable that a picture of Christ should develop showing distinctly feminine features.407 In religious art the Christ-image has retained this character to the present day.408 Its veiled androgyny reflects the hermaphroditism of the lapis, which in this respect has more affinity with the views of the Gnostics.
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[529] Koepgen introduces his book with a dedication and a motto. The first is: Renatis praedestinatione (To those who are reborn out of predestination), and the second is from John 14 : 12: He that believeth on me, the works that I do he shall do also, and greater works than these shall he do. The dedication echoes the motif of election, which the author shares with the alchemists. For Morienus had said of alchemy:
God vouchsafes this divine and pure science to his faithful and his servants, that is, to those on whom nature made it proper to confer it from the beginning of things. For this thing can be naught else but the gift of God most high, who commits and shows it as he will, and to whom he will of his faithful servants. For the Lord selects of his servants those whom he wills and chooses, to seek after this divine science which is concealed from man, and having sought it to keep it with them.412
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[531] Koepgen thinks along the same lines, as his dedication and motto show. It is easy to see what happens when the logical conclusion is drawn from the fourteenth chapter of John: the opus Christi is transferred to the individual. He then becomes the bearer of the mystery, and this development was unconsciously prefigured and anticipated in alchemy, which showed clear signs of becoming a religion of the Holy Ghost and of the Sapientia Dei. Koepgens standpoint is that of creative mysticism, which has always been critical of the Church. Though this is not obviously so in Koepgen, his attitude betrays itself indirectly in the living content of his book, which consistently presses for a deepening and broadening of the dogmatic ideas. Because he remained fully conscious of his conclusions, he does not stray so very far outside the Church, whereas the alchemists, because of their unconsciousness and naive lack of reflection, and unhampered by intellectual responsibility, went very much further in their symbolism. But the point of departure for both is the procreative, revelatory working of the Holy Ghost, who is a wind that bloweth where it listeth, and who advances beyond his own workings to greater works than these. The creative mystic was ever a cross for the Church, but it is to him that we owe what is best in humanity.415
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4.09 - REGINA, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[543] The Queen of Sheba, Wisdom, the royal art, and the daughter of the philosophers are all so interfused that the underlying psychologem clearly emerges: the art is queen of the alchemists heart, she is at once his mother, his daughter, and his beloved, and in his art and its allegories the drama of his own soul, his individuation process, is played out.
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5.01 - ADAM AS THE ARCANE SUBSTANCE, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[544] Like the King and Queen, our first parents are among those figures through whom the alchemists expressed the symbolism of opposites. Adam is mentioned far more frequently than Eve, and for this reason we shall have to concern ourselves first and principally with him. He will give us plenty to get on with, as he figures in a great variety of significations which enter the world of alchemical ideas from the most heterogeneous sources.
[545] Ruland defines Adam as a synonym for the aqua permanens, in contradistinction to Eve, who signifies earth. Water is the prime arcane substance, and is therefore the agent of transformation as well as the substance to be transformed. As water is synonymous with Mercurius, we can understand the remark of John Dee that that other Mercurius who appears in the course of the work is the Mercurius of the Philosophers, that most renowned Microcosm and Adam.1 Adam is mentioned as the arcane substance in Rosinus. His correlates are lead and Azoch, 2 both, like Adam,3 of hermaphroditic nature. Similarly, Dorn says that the lapis was called Adam, who bore his invisible Eve hidden in his body. 4 This archaic idea occasionally turns up in the products of the insane today.5 The dual nature of Adam is suggested in the Gloria mundi: When Almighty God had created Adam and set him in paradise, he showed him two things in the future, saying, Behold, Adam, here are two things: one fixed and constant, the other fugitive.6
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[548] Accordingly the arcane substance would appear to be the inner man or Primordial Man, known as Adam Kadmon in the Cabala. In the poem of Valentinus, this inner man is swamped by the goddess of lovean unmistakable psychologem for a definite and typical psychic state, which is also symbolized very aptly by the Gnostic love-affair between Nous and Physis. In both cases the higher spiritual man is the more comprehensive, supra-ordinate totality which we know as the self. The bath, submersion, baptism, and drowning are synonymous, and all are alchemical symbols for the unconscious state of the self, its embodiments, as it wereor, more precisely, for the unconscious process by which the self is reborn and enters into a state in which it can be experienced. This state is then described as the filius regius. The old dragon who prepared the bath, a primeval creature dwelling in the caverns of the earth, is, psychologically, a personification of the instinctual psyche, generally symbolized by reptiles. It is as though the alchemists were trying to express the fact that the unconscious itself initiates the process of renewal.
[549] Adams bath is also mentioned in a Latin manuscript in my possession, where an unspecified being or creature addresses Adam thus: Hear, Adam, I will speak with you. You must go with me into the bath; you know in what manner we are influenced the one by the other, and how you must pass through me. Thus I step up to you with my sharpened arrows, aiming them at your heart 12
[550] Here again Adam is the transformative substance, the old Adam who is to renew himself. The arrows recall the telum passionis of Mercurius and the shafts of Luna, which the alchemists, via the mysticism of Hugh of St. Victor13 and others, referred to that well-known passage in the Song of Songs: Thou hast wounded my heart, as we have seen earlier.14 The speaker in the manuscript must be feminine, as immediately before there is a reference to the cohabitation of man and woman.
[551] Both texts point to a hierosgamos which presupposes a kind of consanguineous relationship between sponsus and sponsa. The relationship between Adam and Eve is as close as it is difficult to define. According to an old tradition Adam was androgynous before the creation of Eve.15 Eve therefore was more himself than if she had been his sister. Adams highly unbiblical marriage is emphasized as a hierosgamos by the fact that God himself was present at the ceremony as best man (paranymphus).16 Traces of cabalistic tradition are frequently noticeable in the alchemical treatises from the sixteenth century on. Both our texts are fairly late and so fall well within this tradition.
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[558] The material I have presented is so suggestive that no detailed commentary is needed. Adam stands not only for the psyche but for its totality; he is a symbol of the self, and hence a visualization of the irrepresentable Godhead. Even if all the texts here cited were not available to the alchemists, a knowledge of the Zosimos treatises or of certain Cabalistic traditions would have been sufficient to make quite clear to them what was meant when the arcane substance was called Adam. I need hardly point out how important these historical statements are from the psychological point of view: they give us valuable indications of the way in which the corresponding dream-symbols should be evaluated. We do not devalue statements that originally were intended to be metaphysical when we demonstrate their psychic nature; on the contrary, we confirm their factual character. But, by treating them as psychic phenomena, we remove them from the inaccessible realm of metaphysics, about which nothing verifiable can be said, and this disposes of the impossible question as to whether they are true or not. We take our stand simply and solely on the facts, recognizing that the archetypal structure of the unconscious will produce, over and over again and irrespective of tradition, those figures which reappear in the history of all epochs and all peoples, and will endow them with the same significance and numinosity that have been theirs from the beginning.
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5.02 - THE STATUE, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[560] The statue has a somewhat different significance in the treatise of Senior,50 who speaks of the water that is extracted from the hearts of statues. Senior is identical with the Arabian alchemist Ibn Umail al-Tamimi. He is reported to have opened tombs and sarcophagi in Egypt and to have removed the mummies.51 Mummies were supposed to possess medicinal virtues, and for this reason bits of corpses had long been mentioned in European pharmacy under the name of mumia.52 It is possible that mumia was also used for alchemical purposes. It is mentioned in Khunrath as synonymous with the prima materia.53 In Paracelsus, who may have been Khunraths source for this, Mumia balsamita has something to do with the elixir, and is even called the physical life-principle itself.54 Seniors statues may well have been Egyptian sarcophagi, which as we know were portrait-statues. In the same treatise there is a description of a statue (of Hermes Trismegistus) in an underground chapel. Senior says: I shall now make known to you what that wise man who made the statue has hidden in that house; in it he has described that whole science, as it were, in the figure, and taught his wisdom in the stone, and revealed it to the discerning. Michael Maier comments: That is the statue from whose heart the water is extracted. He also mentions that a stone statue which pronounced oracles was dedicated to Hermes in Achaia Pharis.
[561] In Raymond Lully (Ramon Llull) there is an oil that is extracted from the heart of statues, and moreover by the washing of water and the drying of fire.55 This is an extremely paradoxical operation in which the oil evidently serves as a mediating and uniting agent.
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[565] It must have appealed very much to the imagination of the alchemists that there were statues of Mercurius with the real god hidden inside. Mercurius was their favourite name for that being who changed himself, during the work, from the prima materia into the perfected lapis Philosophorum. The figure of Adam readily lent itself as a biblical synonym for the alchemical Mercurius, first because he too was androgynous, and second because of his dual aspect as the first and second Adam. The second Adam is Christ, whose mystical androgyny is established in ecclesiastical tradition.63 I shall come back to this aspect of Adam later.
[566] According to the tradition of the Mandaeans, Adam was created by the seven in the form of a lifeless bodily statue which could not stand erect. This characteristic expression bodily statue frequently recurs in their literature and recalls the Chaldaean myth handed down by the Naassenes, that mans body was created by the demons and was called a statue (
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[567] As Adam has always been associated with the idea of the second Adam in the minds of Christian writers,67 it is readily understandable that this idea should reappear among the alchemists. Thus Mylius says:
There now remains the second part of the philosophical practice, by far the more difficult, by much the more sublime. In this we read that all the sinews of talent, all the mental efforts of many philosophers have wearied themselves. For it is more difficult to make a man live again, than to slay him. Here is Gods work besought: for it is a great mystery to create souls, and to mould the lifeless body into a living statue.68
This living statue refers to the end-result of the work; and the work, as we have seen, was on the one hand a repetition of the creation of the world, and on the other a process of redemption, for which reason the lapis was paraphrased as the risen Christ. The texts sometimes strike a chiliastic note with their references to a golden age when men will live forever without poverty and sickness.69 Now it is remarkable that the statue is mentioned in connection with the eschatological ideas of the Manichaeans as reported by Hegemonius: the world will be consumed with fire and the souls of sinners chained for all eternity, and then shall these things be, when the statue shall come.70 I would not venture to say whether the Manichaeans influenced the alchemists or not, but it is worth noting that in both cases the statue is connected with the end-state. The tradition reported by Hegemonius has been confirmed by the recently discovered original work of Mani, the Kephalaia.71 This says:
At that time [the Father of Greatness] made the messenger and Jesus the radiant and the Virgin of Light and the Pillar of Glory and the gods. . . . 72 The fourth time, when they shall weep, is the time when the statue [
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by statua, unless perhaps he wished to avoid repeating the word imago from the end of the preceding sentence. But it may also be that the word cor recalled to his mind Seniors phrase from the hearts of statues, as might easily happen with so learned an alchemist. There is, however, another source to be considered: it is evident from this same treatise that Vigenerus was acquainted with the Zohar. There the Haye Sarah on Genesis 28:22 says that Malchuth is called the statue when she is united with Tifereth.80 Genesis 28 : 22 runs: And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be Gods house.81 The stone is evidently a reminder that here the upper (Tifereth) has united with the lower (Malchuth): Tifereth the son82 has come together with the Matrona83 in the hierosgamos. If our conjecture is correct, the statue could therefore be the Cabalistic equivalent of the lapis Philosophorum, which is likewise a union of male and female. In the same section of Vigeneruss treatise the sun does in fact appear as the bridegroom.84 As Augustine is quoted a few lines later, it is possible that Vigenerus was thinking of that passage where Augustine says:
Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a presage of his nuptials into the field of the world. He ran like a giant exulting on his way, and came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, by a loving exchange he gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride. He yielded up also the carbuncle, as the jewel of his blood, and he joined the woman to himself for ever. I have espoused you to one husband, says the apostle, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ [2 Cor. 11 : 2].85
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5.04 - THE POLARITY OF ADAM, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[585] There has always existed a widely felt need to think of the first man as having a light nature; hence the frequent comparison with the sun. The alchemists did not insist on this aspect, so I need say only a few words about it here. Usually, however, in the non-alchemical literature Adam is a light figure whose splendour even outshines that of the sun. He lost his radiance owing to the Fall.156 Here we have a hint of his dual nature: on the one hand shining and perfect, on the other dark and earthy. Haggadic interpretation derives his name from adamah, earth.157
[586] His dual nature is confirmed by Origen: one Adam was made out of earth, the other after the image and likeness of God. He is our inner man, invisible, incorporeal, unspotted, and immortal.158 Similar views are expressed by Philo.159 It is worth noting that in Colossians 1:15 Christ is this image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature.
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[590] As the first man, Adam is the homo maximus, the Anthropos, from whom the macrocosm arose, or who is the macrocosm. He is not only the prima materia but a universal soul which is also the soul of all men.179 According to the Mandaeans he is the mystery of the worlds.180 The conception of the Anthropos first penetrated into alchemy through Zosimos, for whom Adam was a dual figure the fleshly man and the man of light.181 I have discussed the significance of the Anthropos idea at such length in Psychology and Alchemy that no further documentation is needed here. I shall therefore confine myself to material that is of historical interest in following the thought-processes of the alchemists.
[591] Already in Zosimos182 three sources can be distinguished: Jewish, Christian, and pagan. In later alchemy the pagan-syncretistic element naturally fades into the background to leave room for the predominance of the Christian element. In the sixteenth century, the Jewish element becomes noticeable again, under the influence of the Cabala, which had been made accessible to a wider public by Johann Reuchlin183 and Pico della Mirandola.184 Somewhat later the humanists then made their contri bution from the Hebrew and Aramaic sources, and especially from the Zohar. In the eighteenth century an allegedly Jewish treatise appeared, Abraham Eleazars Uraltes Chymisches Werck,185 making copious use of Hebraic terminology and claiming to be the mysterious Rindenbuch of Abraham the Jew, which, it was said, had revealed the art of gold-making to Nicholas Flamel (13301417).186 In this treatise there is the following passage:
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5.06 - THE TRANSFORMATION, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[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
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5.07 - ROTUNDUM, HEAD, AND BRAIN, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
(marrow in the head). Besides this the brain is a synonym for the arcane substance, as is clear from a Hermes quotation in the Rosarium: Take his brain, powder it with very strong vinegar . . . until it turns dark.249 The brain was of interest to the alchemists because it was the seat of the spirit of the supracelestial waters,250 the waters that are above the firmament (Genesis 1 : 7). In the Visio Arislei the brain of the King of the Sea is the birthplace of the brother-sister pair.251 The Liber quartorum calls the brain the abode of the divine part.252 For the brain has a proximity to the rational soul, which in turn possesses simplicitas, a feature it shares with God.253 Because the brain seemed secretly to participate in the alchemical process,254 Wei Po-yang states that when the brain is properly tended for the required length of time, one will certainly attain the miracle.255 References to the brain are also found in Greek alchemy, an especially large role being played by the
(brain-stone), which was equated with the
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5.08 - ADAM AS TOTALITY, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[630] An alchemical recipe says: Sow the gold in foliated white earth.270 Thus the gold (sun) and the white earth, or moon271 are united. In Christianity, as in alchemy, earth and moon are closely related, conjoined by the figure of the divine mother. The sun-moon conjunction takes place in the head, an indication of the psychic nature of this event.272 As I said, the concept of the psychic, as we understand it today, did not exist in the Middle Ages, and even the educated modern man finds it difficult to understand what is meant by reality of the psyche. So it is not surprising that it was incomparably more difficult for medieval man to imagine something between esse in re and esse in intellectu solo.273 The way out lay in metaphysics.274 The alchemist was therefore compelled to formulate his quasichemical facts metaphysically too.275 Thus the white earth corresponds to the earth that signified mankind, is exalted above all the circles of the World, and placed in the intellectual heaven of the most holy Trinity.276 (Where, we may add, it is obviously added to the Trinity as the Fourth, thereby making it a totality.)277 This cheerful piece of heterodoxy remained unconscious and its consequences never appeared on the surface.
[631] The conclusion which Eleazar draws requires elucidation. It is in itself remarkable that he should paraphrase, in connection with the perfect state, i.e., the coniunctio Solis et Lunae, just that passage in Job (supra, par. 624) and say: Out of my earth shall come forth blood. This is feasible only if the coniunctio symbolizes the production of the hermaphroditic second Adam, namely Christ and the corpus mysticum of the Church. In the ecclesiastical rite the equivalent of the coniunctio is the mixing of substances, or the Communion in both kinds. The passage from Job must therefore be interpreted as though Christ were speaking: From my earth, my body, will come forth blood. In the Greek Orthodox rite the loaf of bread stands for Christs body. The priest pierces it with a small silver lance, to represent by analogy the wound in his side from which blood and grace flow, and perhaps also the slaying of the victim (mactatio Christi).
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Here again the head is compared to the sun, combined with the whiteness of the full moon. But the feet stand in the fire and glow like molten metal. We find the lower fire in Job 28 : 5: Terra igne subversa est (DV: the earth hath been overturned with fire). But out of it cometh breadan image of the union of supreme opposites! In the Apocalyptic image we would hardly recognize the Son of Man, who is the true incarnation of Gods love. But actually this image comes nearer to the paradoxes of the alchemists than does the Christ of the gospels, whose inner polarity was reduced to vanishing-point after the Get thee behind me, Satan incident. In the Apocalypse it becomes visible again, and even more so in the symbolism of alchemy.285
[634] Our conjecture that Eleazar had in mind the Apocalyptic figure of the Son of Man is confirmed to the extent that there is an illustration of the fils de lhomme
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[640] The lapis also figures in the Cabala: Sometimes Adonai, the name of the last Sefira, and Malchuth herself, the Kingdom, are so called; for the latter is the foundation of the whole fabric of the world.325 The stone is, indeed, of supreme importance, because it fulfils the function of Adam Kadmon as the capital-stone, from which all the upper and lower hosts in the work of creation are brought into being.326 It is called the sapphirestone, because it takes on divers colours from the highest powers, and works in created things now in one wise, now in the contrary, administering at times good, at others evil, now life, now death, now sickness, now healing, now poverty, now riches.327 The stone appears here as the power of fate; indeed, as the reference to Deuteronomy 32 : 39 shows, it is God himself.328 Knorr von Rosenroth was himself an alchemist, and his words here are written with deliberate intent.329 He emphasizes that the stone is the one which the builders rejected and is become the head of the corner.330 It occupies a middle position in the Sefiroth system since it unites in itself the powers of the upper world and distributes them to the lower.331 According to its position, therefore, it would correspond to Tifereth.332
[641] I have found no evidence in the alchemical literature that the sapphire was an arcanum before the time of Paracelsus. It seems as though this author introduced it into alchemy from the Cabala as a synonym for the arcane substance:
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[642] The Lapis Sapphireus or Sapphirinus is derived from Ezekiel 1 : 22 and 26, where the firmament above the living creature was like a terrible crystal and a sapphire stone (also 10 : 1), and from Exodus 24 : 10: And they saw the God of Israel: and under his feet as it were a work of sapphire stone, and as the heaven, when clear (DV). In alchemy our gold is crystalline;339 the treasure of the Philosophers is a certain glassy heaven, like crystal, and ductile like gold;340 the tincture of gold is transparent as crystal, fragile as glass.341 The Book of the Cave of Treasures says that Adams body shone like the light of a crystal.342 The crystal, which appears equally pure within and without, refers in ecclesiastical language to the unimpaired purity of the Virgin.343 The throne in Ezekiels vision, says Gregory the Great, is rightly likened to the sapphire, for this stone has the colour of air.344 He compares Christ to the crystal in a way that served as a model for the language and ideas of the alchemists.345
[643] The combination of water and crystal is found also in the Cabalistic Sifra de Zeniutha. 178 of Lurias commentary says: The second form is called crystalline dew, and this is formed of the Severity of the Kingdom346 of the first Adam, which entered into the Wisdom of Macroprosopus:347 hence in the crystal there appears a distinct red colour. And this [form] is the Wisdom whereof they said, that Judgments are rooted in it.348 Although alchemy was undoubtedly influenced by such comparisons, the stone cannot be traced back to Christ, despite all the analogies.349 It was the mystical property of alchemy, this stone that is no stone, or the stone that hath a spirit and is found in the streamings of the Nile.350 It is a symbol that cannot be explained away as yet another supererogatory attempt to obscure the Christian mystery. On the contrary, it appears as a new and singular product which in early times gradually crystallized out through the assimilation of Christian ideas into Gnostic material; later, clear attempts were made in turn to assimilate the alchemical ideas to the Christian, though, as Eleazars text shows, there was an unbridgeable difference between them. The reason for this is that the symbol of the stone, despite the analogy with Christ, contains an element that cannot be reconciled with the purely spiritual assumptions of Christianity. The very concept of the stone indicates the peculiar nature of this symbol. Stone is the essence of everything solid and earthly. It represents feminine matter, and this concept intrudes into the sphere of spirit and its symbolism. The Churchs hermeneutic allegories of the cornerstone and the stone cut out of a mountain without hands,351 which were interpreted as Christ, were not the source of the lapis symbol, but were used by the alchemists in order to justify it, for the
was not of Christian origin. The stone was more than an incarnation of God, it was a concretization, a materialization that reached down into the darkness of the inorganic realm or even arose from it, from that part of the Deity which put itself in opposition to the Creator because, as the Basilidians say, it remained latent in the panspermia (universal seed-bed) as the formative principle of crystals, metals, and living organisms. The inorganic realm included regions, like that of hell-fire, which were the dominion of the devil. The three-headed Mercurial serpent was, indeed, a triunity in matter352the lower triad353complementing the divine Trinity.
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5 - The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
ceived by the alchemists. 8 But he can also be negative, and then
he signifies the infantile shadow. 9 In both cases the boy means
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dactyls of antiquity, the homunculi of the alchemists, and the
gnomic throng of hobgoblins, brownies, gremlins, etc. How
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naive way that the English alchemist, Sir George Ripley, 33 de-
scribes the "old king" as "antiquus dierum" "the Ancient of
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the alchemists we can see clearly how the divine Trinity has its
counterpart in a lower, chthonic triad (similar to Dante's three-
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53 The alchemists stress the long duration of the work and speak of the "longissima
via," "diuturnitas immensae meditationis," etc. The number 12 may be connected
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66 The great tree corresponds to the arbor philosophica of the alchemists. The
meeting between an earthly human being and the anima, swimming down in the
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6.01 - THE ALCHEMICAL VIEW OF THE UNION OF OPPOSITES, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[654] Herbert Silberer rightly called the coniunctio the central idea of the alchemical procedure.1 This author correctly recognized that alchemy was, in the main, symbolical, whereas the historian of alchemy, Eduard von Lippmann, a chemist, did not mention the term coniunctio even in his index.2 Anyone who has but a slight acquaintance with the literature knows that the adepts were ultimately concerned with a union of the substancesby whatever names these may have been called. By means of this union they hoped to attain the goal of the work: the production of the gold or a symbolical equivalent of it. Although the coniunctio is unquestionably the primordial image of what we today would call chemical combination, it is hardly possible to prove beyond a doubt that the adept thought as concretely as the modern chemist. Even when he spoke of a union of the natures, or of an amalgam of iron and copper, or of a compound of sulphur and mercury, he meant it at the same time as a symbol: iron was Mars and copper was Venus, and their fusion was at the same time a love-affair. The union of the natures which embrace one another was not physical and concrete, for they were celestial natures which multiplied by the comm and of God.3 When red lead was roasted with gold it produced a spirit, that is, the compound became spiritual,4 and from the red spirit proceeded the principle of the world.5 The combination of sulphur and mercury was followed by the bath and death.6 By the combination of copper and the aqua permanens, which was usually quicksilver, we think only of an amalgam. But for the alchemists it meant a secret, philosophical sea, since for them the aqua permanens was primarily a symbol or a philosophical postulate which they hoped to discoveror believed they had discoveredin the various fluids. The substances they sought to combine in reality always hadon account of their unknown naturea numinous quality which tended towards phantasmal personification. They were substances which, like living organisms, fertilized one another and thereby produced the living being [
] sought by the Philosophers.7 The substances seemed to them hermaphroditic, and the conjunction they strove for was a philosophical operation, namely the union of form and matter.8 This inherent duality explains the duplications that so often occur, e.g., two sulphurs, two quicksilvers,9 Venus alba et rubea,10 aurum nostrum and aurum vulgi.
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of the Gnostics, the primordial unconsciousness.41 The Mercurius of the alchemists is a personification and concretization of what we today would call the collective unconscious. While the concept of the unus mundus is a metaphysical speculation, the unconscious can be indirectly experienced via its manifestations. Though in itself an hypothesis, it has at least as great a probability as the hypothesis of the atom. It is clear from the empirical material at our disposal today that the contents of the unconscious, unlike conscious contents, are mutually contaminated to such a degree that they cannot be distinguished from one another and can therefore easily take one anothers place, as can be seen most clearly in dreams. The indistinguish ableness of its contents gives one the impression that everything is connected with everything else and therefore, despite their multifarious modes of manifestation, that they are at bottom a unity. The only comparatively clear contents consist of motifs or types round which the individual associations congregate. As the history of the human mind shows, these archetypes are of great stability and so distinct that they allow themselves to be personified and named, even though their boundaries are blurred or cut across those of other archetypes, so that certain of their qualities can be interchanged. In particular, mandala symbolism shows a marked tendency to concentrate all the archetypes on a common centre, comparable to the relationship of all conscious contents to the ego. The analogy is so striking that a layman unfamiliar with this symbolism is easily misled into thinking that the mandala is an artificial product of the conscious mind. Naturally mandalas can be imitated, but this does not prove that all mandalas are imitations. They are produced spontaneously, without external influence, even by children and adults who have never come into contact with any such ideas.42 One might perhaps regard the mandala as a reflection of the egocentric nature of consciousness, though this view would be justified only if it could be proved that the unconscious is a secondary phenomenon. But the unconscious is undoubtedly older and more original than consciousness, and for this reason one could just as well call the egocentrism of consciousness a reflection or imitation of the self-centrism of the unconscious.
[661] The mandala symbolizes, by its central point, the ultimate unity of all archetypes as well as of the multiplicity of the phenomenal world, and is therefore the empirical equivalent of the metaphysical concept of a unus mundus. The alchemical equivalent is the lapis and its synonyms, in particular the Microcosm.43
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[664] It is significant for the whole of alchemy that in Dorns view a mental union was not the culminating point but merely the first stage of the procedure. The second stage is reached when the mental union, that is, the unity of spirit and soul, is conjoined with the body. But a consummation of the mysterium coniunctionis can be expected only when the unity of spirit, soul, and body is made one with the original unus mundus. This third stage of the coniunctio was depicted51 after the manner of an Assumption and Coronation of Mary, in which the Mother of God represents the body. The Assumption is really a wedding feast, the Christian version of the hierosgamos, whose originally incestuous nature played a great role in alchemy. The traditional incest always indicated that the supreme union of opposites expressed a combination of things which are related but of unlike nature.52 This may begin with a purely intra-psychic unio mentalis of intellect or reason with Eros, representing feeling. Such an interior operation means a great deal, since it brings a considerable increase of self-knowledge as well as of personal maturity, but its reality is merely potential and is validated only by a union with the physical world of the body. The alchemists therefore pictured the unio mentalis as Father and Son and their union as the dove (the spiration common to both), but the world of the body they represented by the feminine or passive principle, namely Mary. Thus, for more than a thousand years, they prepared the ground for the dogma of the Assumption. It is true that the far-reaching implications of a marriage of the fatherly spiritual principle with the principle of matter, or maternal corporeality, are not to be seen from the dogma at first glance. Nevertheless, it does bridge over a gulf that seems unfathomable: the apparently irremediable separation of spirit from nature and the body. Alchemy throws a bright light on the background of the dogma, for the new article of faith expresses in symbolical form exactly what the adepts recognized as being the secret of their coniunctio. The correspondence is indeed so great that the old Masters could legitimately have declared that the new dogma has written the Hermetic secret in the skies. As against this it will be said that the alchemists smuggled the mystic or theological marriage into their obscure procedures. This is contradicted by the fact that the alchymical marriage is not only older than the corresponding formulation in the liturgy and of the Church Fathers but is based on classical and pre-Christian tradition.53 The alchemical tradition cannot be brought into relationship with the Apocalyptic marriage of the Lamb. The highly differentiated symbolism of the latter (lamb and city) is itself an offshoot of the archetypal hierosgamos, just as this is the source for the alchemical idea of the coniunctio.
[665] The adepts strove to realize their speculative ideas in the form of a chemical substance which they thought was endowed with all kinds of magical powers. This is the literal meaning of their uniting the unio mentalis with the body. For us it is certainly not easy to include moral and philosophical reflections in this amalgamation, as the alchemists obviously did. For one thing we know too much about the real nature of chemical combination, and for another we have a much too abstract conception of the mind to be able to understand how a truth can be hidden in matter or what an effective balsam must be like. Owing to medieval ignorance both of chemistry and of psychology, and the lack of any epistemological criticism, the two concepts could easily mix, so that things that for us have no recognizable connection with one another could enter into mutual relationship.
[666] The dogma of the Assumption and the alchemical mysterium coniunctionis express the same fundamental thought even though in very different symbolism. Just as the Church insists on the literal taking up of the physical body into heaven, so the alchemists believed in the possibility, or even in the actual existence, of their stone or of the philosophical gold. In both cases belief was a substitute for the missing empirical reality. Even though alchemy was essentially more materialistic in its procedures than the dogma, both of them remain at the second, anticipatory stage of the coniunctio, the union of the unio mentalis with the body. Even Dorn did not venture to assert that he or any other adept had perfected the third stage in his lifetime. Naturally there were as many swindlers and dupes as ever who claimed to possess the lapis or golden tincture, or to be able to make it. But the more honest alchemists readily admitted that they had not yet plumbed the final secret.
[667] One should not be put off by the physical impossibilities of dogma or of the coniunctio, for they are symbols in regard to which the allurements of rationalism are entirely out of place and miss the mark. If symbols mean anything at all, they are tendencies which pursue a definite but not yet recognizable goal and consequently can express themselves only in analogies. In this uncertain situation one must be content to leave things as they are, and give up trying to know anything beyond the symbol. In the case of dogma such a renunciation is reinforced by the fear of possibly violating the sanctity of a religious idea, and in the case of alchemy it was until very recently considered not worth while to rack ones brains over medieval absurdities. Today, armed with psychological understanding, we are in a position to penetrate into the meaning of even the most abstruse alchemical symbols, and there is no justifiable reason why we should not apply the same method to dogma. Nobody, after all, can deny that it consists of ideas which are born of mans imagining and thinking. The question of how far this thinking may be inspired by the Holy Ghost is not affected at all, let alone decided, by psychological investigation, nor is the possibility of a metaphysical background denied. Psychology cannot advance any argument either for or against the objective validity of any metaphysical view. I have repeated this statement in various places in order to give the lie to the obstinate and grotesque notion that a psychological explanation must necessarily be either psychologism or its opposite, namely a metaphysical assertion. The psychic is a phenomenal world in itself, which can be reduced neither to the brain nor to metaphysics.
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6.02 - STAGES OF THE CONJUNCTION, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[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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6.04 - THE MEANING OF THE ALCHEMICAL PROCEDURE, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[686] Thus Dorn describes the secret of the second stage of conjunction. To the modern mind such contrivances of thought will seem like nebulous products of a dreaming fancy. So, in a sense, they are, and for this reason they lend themselves to decipherment by the method of complex psychology. In his attempt to make the obviously confused situation clearer, Dorn involved himself in a discussion of the ways and means for producing the quintessence, which was evidently needed for uniting the unio mentalis with the body. One naturally asks oneself how this alchemical procedure enters into it at all. The unio mentalis is so patently a spiritual and moral attitude that one cannot doubt its psychological nature. To our way of thinking, this immediately sets up a dividing wall between the psychic and the chemical process. For us the two things are incommensurable, but they were not so for the medieval mind. It knew nothing of the nature of chemical substances and their combination. It saw only enigmatic substances which, united with one another, inexplicably brought forth equally mysterious new substances. In this profound darkness the alchemists fantasy had free play and could playfully combine the most inconceivable things. It could act without restraint and, in so doing, portray itself without being aware of what was happening.
[687] The free-ranging psyche of the adept used chemical substances and processes as a painter uses colours to shape out the images of his fancy. If Dorn, in order to describe the union of the unio mentalis with the body, reaches out for his chemical substances and implements, this only means that he was illustrating his fantasies by chemical procedures. For this purpose he chose the most suitable substances, just as the painter chooses the right colours. Honey, for instance, had to go into the mixture because of its purifying quality. As a Paracelsist, Dorn knew from the writings of the Master what high praises he had heaped upon it, calling it the sweetness of the earths, the resin of the earth which permeates all growing things, the Indian spirit which is turned by the influence of summer into a corporeal spirit.94 Thereby the mixture acquired the property not only of eliminating impurities but of changing spirit into body, and in view of the proposed conjunction of the spirit and the body this seemed a particularly promising sign. To be sure, the sweetness of the earths was not without its dangers, for as we have seen (n. 81) the honey could change into a deadly poison. According to Paracelsus it contains Tartarum, which as its name implies has to do with Hades. Further, Tartarum is a calcined Saturn and consequently has affinities with this malefic planet. For another ingredient Dorn takes Chelidonia (Chelidonium maius, celandine), which cures eye diseases and is particularly good for night-blindness, and even heals the spiritual benightedness (affliction of the soul, melancholy-madness) so much feared by the adepts. It protects against thunderstorms, i.e., outbursts of affect. It is a precious ingredient, because its yellow flowers symbolize the philosophical gold, the highest treasure. What is more important here, it draws the humidity, the soul,95 out of Mercurius. It therefore assists the spiritualization of the body and makes visible the essence of Mercurius, the supreme chthonic spirit. But Mercurius is also the devil.96 Perhaps that is why the section in which Lagneus defines the nature of Mercurius is entitled Dominus vobiscum.97
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, divine water or sulphur water. The water was also called aqua pontica (sea-water) or simply sea. This was the great sea over which the alchemist sailed in his mystic peregrination, guided by the heart of Mercurius in the heavenly North Pole, to which nature herself points with the magnetic compass.99 It was also the bath of regeneration, the spring rain which brings forth the vegetation, and the aqua doctrinae.
[689] Another alexipharmic is the lily. But it is much more than that: its juice is mercurial and even incombustible, a sure sign of its incorruptible and eternal nature. This is confirmed by the fact that the lily was conceived to be Mercurius and the quintessence itself the noblest thing that human meditation can reach (see n. 85). The red lily stands for the male and the white for the female in the coniunctio, the divine pair that unite in the hierosgamos. The lily is therefore a true gamonymus in the Paracelsan sense.
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6.05 - THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE PROCEDURE, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[695] This singular identity, simply postulated and never taken as a problem, is an example of that participation mystique which Lvy-Bruhl very rightly stressed as being characteristic of the primitive mentality.106 The same is true of the unquestionably psychic unio mentalis, which is at the same time a substance-like truth hidden in the body, which in turn coincides with the quintessence sublimed from the phlegm. It never occurred to the mind of the alchemists to cast any doubt whatsoever on this intellectual monstrosity. We naturally think that such a thing could happen only in the dark Middle Ages. As against this I must emphasize that we too have not quite got out of the woods in this respect, for a philosopher once assured me in all seriousness that thought could not err, and a very famous professor, whose assertions I had ventured to criticize, came out with the magisterial dictum: It must be right because I have thought it.
[696] All projections are unconscious identifications with the object. Every projection is simply there as an uncriticized datum of experience, and is recognized for what it is only very much later, if ever. Everything that we today would call mind and insight was, in earlier centuries, projected into things, and even today individual idiosyncrasies are presupposed by many people to be generally valid. The original, half-animal state of unconsciousness was known to the adept as the nigredo, the chaos, the massa confusa, an inextricable interweaving of the soul with the body, which together formed a dark unity (the unio naturalis). From this enchainment he had to free the soul by means of the separatio, and establish a spiritual-psychic counter-positionconscious and rational insightwhich would prove immune to the influences of the body. But such insight, as we have seen, is possible only if the delusory projections that veil the reality of things can be withdrawn. The unconscious identity with the object then ceases and the soul is freed from its fetters in the things of sense. The psychologist is well acquainted with this process, for a very important part of his psycho therapeutic work consists in making conscious and dissolving the projections that falsify the patients view of the world and impede his self-knowledge. He does this in order to bring anomalous psychic states of an affective nature, i.e., neurotic symptoms, under the control of consciousness. The declared aim of the treatment is to set up a rational, spiritual-psychic position over against the turbulence of the emotions.
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[701] Let us now turn to another ingredient of the mixture, namely the rosemary flowers (flores rosis marini). In the old pharmacopeia, rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) was regarded as an antitoxin, presumably on symbolic grounds which may be connected with its curious name. Ros marinus (sea-dew) was for the alchemist a welcome analogy for the aqua permanens, which in its turn was Mercurius.117 But what lends rosemary its special significance is its sweet smell and taste. The sweet odour of the Holy Ghost occurs not only in Gnosticism but also in ecclesiastical language,118 and of course in alchemythough here there are more frequent references to the characteristic stench of the underworld, the odor sepulchrorum. Rosemary was often used in marriage customs and as a love philtre, and therefore had for the alchemista binding power, which was of course particularly favourable for the purpose of conjunction.119 Thus the Holy Ghost is the spiration binding Father and Son, just as, in alchemy, he occasionally appears as the ligament of body and soul. These different aspects of rosemary signify so many qualities which are imparted to the mixture.
[702] Mercurialis is a magic herb too, but unlike rosemary it is connected not with love but with sexuality, and is another binding power which, as we have mentioned, can even determine the sex of the child. The red lily, as the quintessence of sulphur (n. 85), represents the male partner in the alchemical marriage, the servus rubeus who unites with the foemina candida. With this figure the adept mixed himself into the potion, so to speak, and, to make the bond inviolable, he added human blood as a further ingredient. Being a special juice with which pacts with the devil are signed, it would magically consolidate the bond of marriage.
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[704] What are we to think of this most peculiar philtre? Did Dorn really mean that these magic herbs should be mixed together and that the air-coloured quintessence should be distilled from the Tartarus, or was he using these secret names and procedures to express a moral meaning? My conjecture is that he meant both, for it is clear that the alchemists did in fact operate with such substances and thought-processes, just as, in particular, the Paracelsist physicians used these remedies and reflections in their practical work. But if the adept really concocted such potions in his retort, he must surely have chosen his ingredients on account of their magical significance. He worked, accordingly, with ideas, with psychic processes and states, but referred to them under the name of the corresponding substances. With the honey the pleasure of the senses and the joy of life went into the mixture, as well as the secret fear of the poison, the deadly danger of worldly entanglements. With the Chelidonia the highest meaning and value, the self as the total personality, the healing and whole-making medicine which is recognized even by modern psycho therapy, was combined with spiritual and conjugal love, symbolized by rosemary; and, lest the lower, chthonic element be lacking, Mercurialis added sexuality, together with the red slave moved by passion,124 symbolized by the red lily, and the addition of blood threw in the whole soul. All this was united with the azure quintessence, the anima mundi extracted from inert matter, or the God-image imprinted on the worlda mandala produced by rotation;125 that is to say the whole of the conscious man is surrendered to the self, to the new centre of personality which replaces the former ego. Just as, for the mystic, Christ takes over the leadership of consciousness and puts an end to a merely ego-bound existence, so the filius macrocosmi, the son of the great luminaries and of the dark womb of the earth, enters the realm of the psyche and seizes the human personality, not only in the shining heights of consciousness but in the dark depths which have not yet comprehended the light that appeared in Christ. The alchemist was well aware of the great shadow which Christianity obviously had not assimilated, and he therefore felt impelled to create a saviour from the womb of the earth as an analogy and complement of Gods son who came down from above.
[705] The production of the caelum is a symbolic rite performed in the laboratory. Its purpose was to create, in the form of a substance, that truth, the celestial balsam or life principle, which is identical with the God-image. Psychologically, it was a representation of the individuation process by means of chemical substances and procedures, or what we today call active imagination. This is a method which is used spontaneously by nature herself or can be taught to the patient by the analyst. As a rule it occurs when the analysis has constellated the opposites so powerfully that a union or synthesis of the personality becomes an imperative necessity. Such a situation is bound to arise when the analysis of the psychic contents, of the patients attitude and particularly of his dreams, has brought the compensatory or complementary images from the unconscious so insistently before his mind that the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious personality becomes open and critical. When this confrontation is confined to partial aspects of the unconscious the conflict is limited and the solution simple: the patient, with insight and some resignation or a feeling of resentment, places himself on the side of reason and convention. Though the unconscious motifs are repressed again, as before, the unconscious is satisfied to a certain extent, because the patient must now make a conscious effort to live according to its principles and, in addition, is constantly reminded of the existence of the repressed by annoying resentments. But if his recognition of the shadow is as complete as he can make it, then conflict and disorientation ensue, an equally strong Yes and No which he can no longer keep apart by a rational decision. He cannot transform his clinical neurosis into the less conspicuous neurosis of cynicism; in other words, he can no longer hide the conflict behind a mask. It requires a real solution and necessitates a third thing in which the opposites can unite. Here the logic of the intellect usually fails, for in a logical antithesis there is no third. The solvent can only be of an irrational nature. In nature the resolution of opposites is always an energic process: she acts symbolically in the truest sense of the word,126 doing something that expresses both sides, just as a waterfall visibly mediates between above and below. The waterfall itself is then the incommensurable third. In an open and unresolved conflict dreams and fantasies occur which, like the waterfall, illustrate the tension and nature of the opposites, and thus prepare the synthesis.
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6.06 - SELF-KNOWLEDGE, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[707] Expressed in the language of Hermetic philosophy, the ego-personalitys coming to terms with its own background, the shadow, corresponds to the union of spirit and soul in the unio mentalis, which is the first stage of the coniunctio. What I call coming to terms with the unconscious the alchemists called meditation. Ruland says of this: Meditation: The name of an Internal Talk of one person with another who is invisible, as in the invocation of the Deity, or communion with ones self, or with ones good angel.128 This somewhat optimistic definition must immediately be qualified by a reference to the adepts relations with his spiritus familiaris, who we can only hope was a good one. In this respect Mercurius is a rather unreliable companion, as the testimony of the alchemists agrees. In order to understand the second stage, the union of the unio mentalis with the body, psychologically, we must bear in mind what the psychic state resulting from a fairly complete recognition of the shadow looks like. The shadow, as we know, usually presents a fundamental contrast to the conscious personality. This contrast is the prerequisite for the difference of potential from which psychic energy arises. Without it, the necessary tension would be lacking. Where considerable psychic energy is at work, we must expect a corresponding tension and inner opposition. The opposites are necessarily of a characterological nature: the existence of a positive virtue implies victory over its opposite, the corresponding vice. Without its counterpart virtue would be pale, ineffective, and unreal. The extreme opposition of the shadow to consciousness is mitigated by complementary and compensatory processes in the unconscious. Their impact on consciousness finally produces the uniting symbols.
[708] Confrontation with the shadow produces at first a dead balance, a standstill that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective or even impossible. Everything becomes doubtful, which is why the alchemists called this stage nigredo, tenebrositas, chaos, melancholia. It is right that the magnum opus should begin at this point, for it is indeed a well-nigh unanswerable question how one is to confront reality in this torn and divided state. Here I must remind the reader who is acquainted neither with alchemy nor with the psychology of the unconscious that nowadays one very seldom gets into such a situation. Nobody now has any sympathy with the perplexities of an investigator who busies himself with magical substances, and there are relatively few people who have experienced the effects of an analysis of the unconscious on themselves, and almost nobody hits on the idea of using the objective hints given by dreams as a theme for meditation. If the ancient art of meditation is practised at all today, it is practised only in religious or philosophical circles, where a theme is subjectively chosen by the meditant or prescribed by an instructor, as in the Ignatian Exercitia or in certain theosophical exercises that developed under Indian influence. These methods are of value only for increasing concentration and consolidating consciousness, but have no significance as regards effecting a synthesis of the personality. On the contrary, their purpose is to shield consciousness from the unconscious and to suppress it. They are therefore of therapeutic value only in cases where the conscious is liable to be overwhelmed by the unconscious and there is the danger of a psychotic interval.
[709] In general, meditation and contemplation have a bad reputation in the West. They are regarded as a particularly reprehensible form of idleness or as pathological narcissism. No one has time for self-knowledge or believes that it could serve any sensible purpose. Also, one knows in advance that it is not worth the trouble to know oneself, for any fool can know what he is. We believe exclusively in doing and do not ask about the doer, who is judged only by achievements that have collective value. The general public seems to have taken cognizance of the existence of the unconscious psyche more than the so-called experts, but still nobody has drawn any conclusions from the fact that Western man confronts himself as a stranger and that self-knowledge is one of the most difficult and exacting of the arts.
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[711] The unio mentalis, then, in psychological as well as in alchemical language, means knowledge of oneself. In contradistinction to the modern prejudice that self-knowledge is nothing but a knowledge of the ego, the alchemists regarded the self as a substance incommensurable with the ego, hidden in the body, and identical with the image of God.129 This view fully accords with the Indian idea of purusha-atman.130 The psychic preparation of the magisterium as described by Dorn is therefore an attempt, uninfluenced by the East, to bring about a union of opposites in accordance with the great Eastern philosophies, and to establish for this purpose a principle freed from the opposites and similar to the atman or tao. Dorn called this the substantia coelestis, which today we would describe as a transcendental principle. This unum is nirdvandva (free from the opposites), like the atman (self).
[712] Dorn did not invent this idea but merely gave clearer expression to what had long been secret knowledge in alchemy. Thus we read in the Liber octo capitulorum de lapide philosophorum of Albertus Magnus,131 with reference to quicksilver (Mercurius non vulgi, the philosophical mercury):
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6.07 - THE MONOCOLUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
,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.
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[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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6.08 - THE CONTENT AND MEANING OF THE FIRST TWO STAGES, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[740] I cannot describe the process of self-knowledge here in all its details. But if the reader wishes to form some idea of it, I would draw his attention to the wide variety of infantile assumptions and attachments which play a great role not only in psychopathology but in so-called normal life, and which cause endless complications in every sphere of human existence. Freuds lasting achievement in this field suffers only from the defect that, from the insights gained, a theory was prematurely abstracted which was then used as a criterion of self-knowledge: projections were recognized and corrected only so far as they were assumed to correspond to known infantile fantasies. That there are many other kinds of illusion is mentioned hardly at all in the literature, and for just that reason. As we have seen from Dorn, there are very many important things which are posited as self-evident and which do not exist, such as the alchemists assumption that certain substances have magical qualities which in fact are projections of fantasy. The progressive correction of these brings us, however, to a frontier which at first cannot be crossed. As a rule it is set up by the spirit of the age with its specific conception of truth, and by the state of scientific knowledge prevailing at the time.
[741] Self-knowledge is an adventure that carries us unexpectedly far and deep. Even a moderately comprehensive knowledge of the shadow can cause a good deal of confusion and mental darkness, since it gives rise to personality problems which one had never remotely imagined before. For this reason alone we can into its former bondage and everything would have been as before. The volatile essence so carefully shut up and preserved in the Hermetic vessel of the unio mentalis could not be left to itself for a moment, because this elusive Mercurius would then escape and return to its former nature, as, according to the testimony of the alchemists, not infrequently happened. The direct and natural way would have been to give the soul its head, since we are told that it always inclines to the body. Being more attached to this than to the spirit, it would separate itself from the latter and slip back into its former unconsciousness without taking with it anything of the light of the spirit into the darkness of the body. For this reason the reunion with the body was something of a problem. Psychologically, it would mean that the insight gained by the withdrawal of projections could not stand the clash with reality and, consequently, that its truth could not be realized in fact, at least not to the desired degree or in the desired way. You can, as you know, forcibly apply the ideals you regard as right with an effort of will, and can do so for a certain length of time and up to a certain point, that is, until signs of fatigue appear and the original enthusiasm wanes. Then free will becomes a cramp of the will, and the life that has been suppressed forces its way into the open through all the cracks. That, unfortunately, is the lot of all merely rational resolutions.
[742] Since earliest times, therefore, men have had recourse in such situations to artificial aids, ritual actions such as dances, sacrifices, identification with ancestral spirits, etc., in the obvious attempt to conjure up or reawaken those deeper layers of the psyche which the light of reason and the power of the will can never reach, and to bring them back to memory. For this purpose they used mythological or archetypal ideas which expressed the unconscious. So it has remained to the present time, when the day of the believer begins and ends with prayer, that is, with a rite dentre et de sortie. This exercise fulfils its purpose pretty well. If it did not, it would long since have fallen into disuse. If ever it lost its efficacy to any great extent, it was always in individuals or social groups for whom the archetypal ideas have become ineffective. Though such ideas or reprsentations collectives are always true in so far as they express the unconscious archetype, their verbal and pictorial form is greatly influenced by the spirit of the age. If this changes, whether by contact with understand why the alchemists called their nigredo melancholia, a black blacker than black, night, an affliction of the soul, confusion, etc., or, more pointedly, the black raven. For us the raven seems only a funny allegory, but for the medieval adept it was, as we have said, a well-known allegory of the devil.216 Correctly assessing the psychic danger in which he stood, it was therefore of the utmost importance for him to have a favourable familiar as a helper in his work, and at the same time to devote himself diligently to the spiritual exercise of prayer; all this in order to meet effectively the consequences of the collision between his consciousness and the darkness of the shadow. Even for modern psychology the confrontation with the shadow is not a harmless affair, and for this reason it is often circumvented with cunning and caution. Rather than face ones own darkness, one contents oneself with the illusion of ones civic rectitude. Certainly most of the alchemists handled their nigredo in the retort without knowing what it was they were dealing with. But it is equally certain that adepts like Morienus, Dorn, Michael Maier, and others knew in their way what they were doing. It was this knowledge, and not their greed for gold, that kept them labouring at the apparently hopeless opus, for which they sacrificed their money, their goods, and their life.
[743] Their spirit was their own belief in the lighta spirit which drew the soul to itself from its imprisonment in the body; but the soul brought with it the darkness of the chthonic spirit, the unconscious. The separation was so important because the dark deeds of the soul had to be checked. The unio mentalis signified, therefore, an extension of consciousness and the governance of the souls motions by the spirit of truth. But since the soul made the body to live and was the principle of all realization, the philosophers could not but see that after the separation the body and its world were dead.217 They therefore called this state the grave, corruption, mortification, and so on, and the problem then arose of reanimation, that is, of reuniting the soul with the inanimate body. Had they brought about this reanimation in a direct way, the soul would simply have snapped back a foreign and possibly more advanced civilization, or through an expansion of consciousness brought about by new discoveries and new knowledge, then the rite loses its meaning and degenerates into mere superstition. Examples of this on a grand scale are the extinction of the ancient Egyptian civilization and the dying out of the gods of Greece and Rome. A similar phenomenon can be observed in China today.
[744] The demand that arises under such conditions is for a new interpretation, in accord with the spirit of the age, of the archetypes that compensate the altered situation of consciousness. Christianity, for instance, was a new and more suitable formulation of the archetypal myth, which in its turn gave the rite its vitality. The archetype is a living idea that constantly produces new interpretations through which that idea unfolds. This was correctly recognized by Cardinal Newman in regard to Christianity.218 Christian doctrine is a new interpretation and development of its earlier stages, as we can see very clearly from the ancient tradition of the God-man. This tradition is continued in the unfolding of ecclesiastical dogma, and it is naturally not only the archetypes mentioned in the canonical writings of the New Testament that develop, but also their near relatives, of which we previously knew only the pagan forerunners. An example of this is the newest dogma concerning the Virgin; it refers unquestionably to the mother goddess who was constantly associated with the young dying son. She is not even purely pagan, since she was very distinctly prefigured in the Sophia of the Old Testament. For this reason the definition of the new dogma does not really go beyond the depositum fidei, for the mother goddess is naturally implied in the archetype of the divine son and accordingly underwent a consistent development in the course of the centuries.219 The depositum fidei corresponds in empirical reality to the treasure-house of the archetypes, the gazophylacium of the alchemists, and the collective unconscious of modern psychology.
[745] The objection raised by theologians that the final state of the dogma in any such development would be necessarily more complete or perfect than in the apostolic era is untenable. Obviously the later interpretation and formulation of the archetype will be much more differentiated than in the beginning. A glance at the history of dogma is sufficient to confirm this. One has only to think of the Trinity, for which there is no direct evidence in the canonical writings. But it does not follow from this that the primitive Christians had a less complete knowledge of the fundamental truths. Such an assumption borders on pernicious intellectualism, for what counts in religious experience is not how explicitly an archetype can be formulated but how much I am gripped by it. The least important thing is what I think about it.220
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[747] Christianity, to return to our previous argument, was a unio mentalis in the overcoming of the body. In just this respect the rite fulfilled its purpose, so far as that is possible for fallible human beings. Ancient mans sensuous delight in the body and in nature did not disappear in the process, but found free play in the long list of sins which has never at any time diminished in scope. His knowledge of nature, however, presents a special problem. Ever since antiquity it had flourished only in secret and among the few, but it handed down certain basic conceptions through the centuries and, in the later Middle Ages, fertilized mans reawakened interest in natural bodies. Had the alchemists not had at least a secret premonition that their Christian unio mentalis had not yet realized the union with the world of the body, their almost mystical thirst for knowledge would scarcely be explicable, let alone the symbolism, rivalling that of Christianity, which began to develop already at the end of the thirteenth century. The Christ-lapis parallel shows more clearly than anything else that the world of natural bodies laid claim to equality and hence to realization in the second stage of the coniunctio.
[748] This raised the question of the way in which the coniunctio could be effected. Dorn answered this by proposing, instead of an overcoming of the body, the typical alchemical process of the separatio, solutio, incineratio, sublimatio, etc. of the red or white wine, the purpose of this procedure being to produce a physical equivalent of the substantia coelestis, recognized by the spirit as the truth and as the image of God innate in man. Whatever names the alchemists gave to the mysterious substance they sought to produce, it was always a celestial substance, i.e., something transcendental, which, in contrast to the perishability of all known matter, was incorruptible, inert as a metal or a stone, and yet alive, like an organic being, and at the same time a universal medicament. Such a body was quite obviously not to be met with in experience. The tenacity with which the adepts pursued this goal for at least seventeen hundred years can be explained only by the numinosity of this idea. And we do indeed find, even in the ancient alchemy of Zosimos, clear indications of the archetype of the Anthropos,221 as I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy; an image that pervades the whole of alchemy down to the figure of the homunculus in Faust. The idea of the Anthropos springs from the notion of an original state of universal animation, for which reason the old Masters interpreted their Mercurius as the anima mundi; and just as the original animation could be found in all matter, so too could the anima mundi. It was imprinted on all bodies as their raison dtre, as an image of the demiurge who incarnated in his own creation and got caught in it. Nothing was easier than to identify this anima mundi with the Biblical imago Dei, which represented the truth revealed to the spirit. For the early thinkers the soul was by no means a merely intellectual concept; it was visualized sensuously as a breath-body or a volatile but physical substance which, it was readily supposed, could be chemically extracted and fixed by means of a suitable procedure. This intention was served by the preparation of the phlegma vini. As I pointed out earlier, this was not the spirit and water of the wine but its solid residue, the chthonic and corporeal part which would not ordinarily be regarded as the essential and valuable thing about the wine.
[749] What the alchemist sought, then, to help him out of his dilemma was a chemical operation which we today would describe as a symbol. The procedure he followed was obviously an allegory of his postulated substantia coelestis and its chemical equivalent. To that extent the operation was not symbolical for him but purposive and rational. For us, who know that no amount of incineration, sublimation, and centrifuging of the vinous residue can ever produce an air-coloured quintessence, the entire procedure is fantastic if taken literally. We can hardly suppose that Dorn, either, meant a real wine but, after the manner of the alchemists, vinum ardens, acetum, spiritualis sanguis, etc., in other words Mercurius non vulgi, who embodied the anima mundi. Just as the air encompasses the earth, so in the old view the soul is wrapped round the world. As I have shown, we can most easily equate the concept of Mercurius with that of the unconscious. If we add this term to the recipe, it would run: Take the unconscious in one of its handiest forms, say a spontaneous fantasy, a dream, an irrational mood, an affect, or something of the kind, and operate with it. Give it your special attention, concentrate on it, and observe its alterations objectively. Spare no effort to devote yourself to this task, follow the subsequent transformations of the spontaneous fantasy attentively and carefully. Above all, dont let anything from outside, that does not belong, get into it, for the fantasy-image has everything it needs.222 In this way one is certain of not interfering by conscious caprice and of giving the unconscious a free hand. In short, the alchemical operation seems to us the equivalent of the psychological process of active imagination.
[750] Ordinarily, the only thing people know about psycho therapy is that it consists in a certain technique which the analyst applies to his patient. Specialists know how far they can get with it. One can use it to cure the neuroses, and even the milder psychoses, so that nothing more remains of the illness except the general human problem of how much of yourself you want to forget, how much psychic discomfort you have to take on your shoulders, how much you may forbid or allow yourself, how much or how little you may expect of others, how far you should give up the meaning of your life or what sort of meaning you should give it. The analyst has a right to shut his door when a neurosis no longer produces any clinical symptoms and has debouched into the sphere of general human problems. The less he knows about these the greater his chances are of coming across comparatively reasonable patients who can be weaned from the transference that regularly sets in. But if the patient has even the remotest suspicion that the analyst thinks rather more about these problems than he says, then he will not give up the transference all that quickly but will cling to it in defiance of all reasonwhich is not so unreasonable after all, indeed quite understandable. Even adult persons often have no idea how to cope with the problem of living, and on top of that are so unconscious in this regard that they succumb in the most uncritical way to the slightest possibility of finding some kind of answer or certainty. Were this not so, the numerous sects and -isms would long since have died out. But, thanks to unconscious, infantile attachments, boundless uncertainty and lack of self-reliance, they all flourish like weeds.
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[752] Thus the modern man cannot even bring about the unio mentalis which would enable him to accomplish the second degree of conjunction. The analysts guidance in helping him to understand the statements of his unconscious in dreams, etc. may provide the necessary insight, but when it comes to the question of real experience the analyst can no longer help him: he himself must put his hand to the work. He is then in the position of an alchemists apprentice who is inducted into the teachings by the Master and learns all the tricks of the laboratory. But sometime he must set about the opus himself, for, as the alchemists emphasize, nobody else can do it for him. Like this apprentice, the modern man begins with an unseemly prima materia which presents itself in unexpected forma contemptible fantasy which, like the stone that the builders rejected, is flung into the street and is so cheap that people do not even look at it. He will observe it from day to day and note its alterations until his eyes are opened or, as the alchemists say, until the fishs eyes, or the sparks, shine in the dark solution. For the eyes of the fish are always open and therefore must always see, which is why the alchemists used them as a symbol of perpetual attention. (Pis. 8 and 9.)
[753] The light that gradually dawns on him consists in his understanding that his fantasy is a real psychic process which is happening to him personally. Although, to a certain extent, he looks on from outside, impartially, he is also an acting and suffering figure in the drama of the psyche. This recognition is absolutely necessary and marks an important advance. So long as he simply looks at the pictures he is like the foolish Parsifal, who forgot to ask the vital question because he was not aware of his own participation in the action. Then, if the flow of images ceases, next to nothing has happened even though the process is repeated a thousand times. But if you recognize your own involvement you yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions, just as if you were one of the fantasy figures, or rather, as if the drama being enacted before your eyes were real. It is a psychic fact that this fantasy is happening, and it is as real as youas a psychic entityare real. If this crucial operation is not carried out, all the changes are left to the flow of images, and you yourself remain unchanged. As Dorn says, you will never make the One unless you become one yourself. It is, however, possible that if you have a dramatic fantasy you will enter the interior world of images as a fictitious personality and thereby prevent any real participation; it may even endanger consciousness because you then become the victim of your own fantasy and succumb to the powers of the unconscious, whose dangers the analyst knows all too well. But if you place yourself in the drama as you really are, not only does it gain in actuality but you also create, by your criticism of the fantasy, an effective counterbalance to its tendency to get out of hand. For what is now happening is the decisive rapprochement with the unconscious. This is where insight, the unio mentalis, begins to become real. What you are now creating is the beginning of individuation, whose immediate goal is the experience and production of the symbol of totality.
--
[756] Naturally there is an enormous difference between an anticipated psychosis and a real one, but the difference is not always clearly perceived and this gives rise to uncertainty or even a fit of panic. Unlike a real psychosis, which comes on you and inundates you with uncontrollable fantasies irrupting from the unconscious, the judging attitude implies a voluntary involvement in those fantasy-processes which compensate the individual andin particular the collective situation of consciousness. The avowed purpose of this involvement is to integrate the statements of the unconscious, to assimilate their compensatory content, and thereby produce a whole meaning which alone makes life worth living and, for not a few people, possible at all. The reason why the involvement looks very like a psychosis is that the patient is integrating the same fantasy-material to which the insane person falls victim because he cannot integrate it but is swallowed up by it. In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon, not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if he once saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the treasure hard to attain. He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives him faith and trust, the pistis in the ability of the self to sustain him, for everything that menaced him from inside he has made his own. He has acquired the right to believe that he will be able to overcome all future threats by the same means. He has arrived at an inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance, and attained what the alchemists called the unio mentalis.
[757] As a rule this state is represented pictorially by a mandala. Often such drawings contain clear allusions to the sky and the stars and therefore refer to something like the inner heaven, the firmament or Olympus of Paracelsus, the Microcosm. This, too, is that circular product, the caelum,224 which Dorn wanted to produce by assiduous rotary movements. Because it is not very likely that he ever manufactured this quintessence as a chemical body, and he himself nowhere asserts that he did, one must ask whether he really meant this chemical operation or rather, perhaps, the opus alchymicum in general, that is, the transmutation of Mercurius duplex under the synonym of the red and white wine,225 thus alluding at the same time to the opus ad rubeum et ad album. This seems to me more probable. At any rate some kind of laboratory work was meant. In this way Dorn shaped out his intuition of a mysterious centre preexistent in man, which at the same time represented a cosmos, i.e., a totality, while he himself remained conscious that he was portraying the self in matter. He completed the image of wholeness by the admixture of honey, magic herbs, and human blood, or their meaningful equivalents, just as a modern man does when he associates numerous symbolic attributes with his drawing of a mandala. Also, following the old Sabaean and Alexandrian models, Dorn drew the influence of the planets (stellae inferiores)or Tartarus and the mythological aspect of the underworldinto his quintessence, just as the patient does today.226
[758] In this wise Dorn solved the problem of realizing the unio mentalis, of effecting its union with the body, thereby completing the second stage of the coniunctio. We would say that with this production of a physical equivalent the idea of the self had taken shape. But the alchemist associated his work with something more potent and more original than our pale abstraction. He felt it as a magically effective action which, like the substance itself, imparted magical qualities. The projection of magical qualities indicates the existence of corresponding effects on consciousness, that is to say the adept felt a numinous effect emanating from the lapis, or whatever he called the arcane substance. We, with our rationalistic minds, would scarcely attri bute any such thing to the pictures which the modern man makes of his intuitive vision of unconscious contents. But it depends on whether we are dealing with the conscious or with the unconscious. The unconscious does in fact seem to be influenced by these images. One comes to this conclusion when one examines more closely the psychic reactions of the patients to their own drawings: they do have in the end a quietening influence and create something like an inner foundation. While the adept had always looked for the effects of his stone outside, for instance as the panacea or golden tincture or life-prolonging elixir, and only during the sixteenth century pointed with unmistakable clarity to an inner effect, psychological experience emphasizes above all the subjective reaction to the formation of images, andwith a free and open mindstill reserves judgment in regard to possible objective effects.227
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6.09 - THE THIRD STAGE - THE UNUS MUNDUS, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[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
--
[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.
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[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 attributes 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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6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
the regina or femina alba in alchemy. The English alchemist
Eirenaeus Philale thes ("lover of truth"), writing about 1645,
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Paracelsus 5 and the alchemists for the same thing. Moses' rock-
splitting staff, which struck forth the living water and after-
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sign is J: cf. Liidy, alchemistische und Chemische Zeichen, and Gessmann, Die
Geheimsymbole der Alchymie, Arzneikunde und Astrologie des Mittelalters.
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vessel, which in the language of the alchemists means: in the
underworld, Tartarus. 44
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Anthropos at once, 52 whom the alchemists also symbolized as
their famed lapis philosophorum
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550 For the alchemists the process of individuation represented
by the opus was an analogy of the creation of the world, and
--
quently possesses his pneumatic nature. The alchemists ac-
cordingly represented their Mercurius duplex as the winged
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95 For the double nature of the spirit (Mercurius duplex of the alchemists) see
"The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales," supra.
--
ternity but of a physical nature. The alchemists, too, allude to
the Achurayim. Mennens, 120 for instance, says: "And although
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120 Gulielmus Mennens (1525-1608), a learned Flemish alchemist, wrote a book
entitled Aurei velleris, sive sacrae philosophiae, naturae et artis admirabilium
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philosophica of the alchemists, about which I have written in
Psychology and Alchemy. 131 We should also remember that,
--
homunculus of the alchemists. The mythologem of the "Divine
Child" is based on ideas of this sort. 31
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Ludy, F. alchemistische und Chemische Zeichen. Berlin, 1929.
McGlashan, Alan. "Daily Paper Pantheon," The Lancet (London),
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6.10 - THE SELF AND THE BOUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE, #Mysterium Coniunctionis, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
[776] As I have repeatedly pointed out, the alchemists statements about the lapis, considered psychologically, describe the archetype of the self. Its phenomenology is exemplified in mandala symbolism, which portrays the self as a concentric structure, often in the form of a squaring of the circle. Co-ordinated with this are all kinds of secondary symbols, most of them expressing the nature of the opposites to be united. The structure is invariably felt as the representation of a central state or of a centre of personality essentially different from the ego. It is of numinous nature, as is clearly indicated by the mandalas themselves and by the symbols used (sun, star, light, fire, flower, precious stone, etc.). All degrees of emotional evaluation are found, from abstract, colourless, indifferent drawings of circles to an extremely intense experience of illumination. These aspects all appear in alchemy, the only difference being that there they are projected into matter, whereas here they are understood as symbols. The arcanum chymicum has therefore changed into a psychic event without having lost any of its original numinosity.
[777] If we now recall to what a degree the soul has humanized and realized itself, we can judge how very much it today expresses the body also, with which it is coexistent. Here is a coniunctio of the second degree, such as the alchemists at most dreamed of but could not realize. Thus far the transformation into the psychological is a notable advance, but only if the centre experienced proves to be a spiritus rector of daily life. Obviously, it was clear even to the alchemists that one could have a lapis in ones pocket without ever making gold with it, or the aurum potabile in a bottle without ever having tasted that bittersweet drinkhypo thetically speaking, of course, for they never succumbed to the temptation to use their stone in reality because they never succeeded in making one. The psychological significance of this misfortune should not be overestimated, however. It takes second place in comparison with the fascination which emanated from the sensed and intuited archetype of wholeness. In this respect alchemy fared no worse than Christianity, which in its turn was not fatally disturbed by the continuing non-appearance of the Lord at the Second Coming. The intense emotion that is always associated with the vitality an archetypal idea conveyseven though only a minimum of rational understanding may be presenta premonitory experience of wholeness to which a subsequently differentiated understanding can add nothing essential, at least as regards the totality of the experience. A better developed understanding can, however, constantly renew the vitality of the original experience. In view of the inexhaustibility of the archetype the rational understanding derived from it means relatively little, and it would be an unjustifiable overestimation of reason to assume that, as a result of understanding, the illumination in the final state is a higher one than in the initial state of numinous experience. The same objection, as we have seen, was made to Cardinal Newmans view concerning the development of dogma, but it was overlooked that rational understanding or intellectual formulation adds nothing to the experience of wholeness, and at best only facilitates its repetition. The experience itself is the important thing, not its intellectual representation or clarification, which proves meaningful and helpful only when the road to original experience is blocked. The differentiation of dogma not only expresses its vitality but is needed in order to preserve its vitality. Similarly, the archetype at the basis of alchemy needs interpreting if we are to form any conception of its vitality and numinosity and thereby preserve it at least for our science. The alchemist likewise interpreted his experience as best he could, though without ever understanding it to the degree that psychological explanation makes possible today. But his inadequate understanding did not detract from the totality of his archetypal experience any more than our wider and more differentiated understanding adds anything to it.
[778] With the advance towards the psychological a great change sets in, for self-knowledge has certain ethical consequences which are not just impassively recognized but demand to be carried out in practice. This depends of course on ones moral endowment, on which as we know one should not place too much reliance. The self, in its efforts at self-realization, reaches out beyond the ego-personality on all sides; because of its all-encompassing nature it is brighter and darker than the ego, and accordingly confronts it with problems which it would like to avoid. Either ones moral courage fails, or ones insight, or both, until in the end fate decides. The ego never lacks moral and rational counterarguments, which one cannot and should not set aside so long as it is possible to hold on to them. For you only feel yourself on the right road when the conflicts of duty seem to have resolved themselves, and you have become the victim of a decision made over your head or in defiance of the heart. From this we can see the numinous power of the self, which can hardly be experienced in any other way. For this reason the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego. The extraordinary difficulty in this experience is that the self can be distinguished only conceptually from what has always been referred to as God, but not practically. Both concepts apparently rest on an identical numinous factor which is a condition of reality. The ego enters into the picture only so far as it can offer resistance, defend itself, and in the event of defeat still affirm its existence. The prototype of this situation is Jobs encounter with Yahweh. This hint is intended only to give some indication of the nature of the problems involved. From this general statement one should not draw the overhasty conclusion that in every case there is a hybris of ego-consciousness which fully deserves to be overpowered by the unconscious. That is not so at all, because it very often happens that ego-consciousness and the egos sense of responsibility are too weak and need, if anything, streng thening. But these are questions of practical psycho therapy, and I mention them here only because I have been accused of underestimating the importance of the ego and giving undue prominence to the unconscious. This strange insinuation emanates from a theological quarter. Obviously my critic has failed to realize that the mystical experiences of the saints are no different from other effects of the unconscious.
[779] In contrast to the ideal of alchemy, which consisted in the production of a mysterious substance, a man, an anima mundi or a deus terrenus who was expected to be a saviour from all human ills, the psychological interpretation (foreshadowed by the alchemists) points to the concept of human wholeness. This concept has primarily a therapeutic significance in that it attempts to portray the psychic state which results from bridging over a dissociation between conscious and unconscious. The alchemical compensation corresponds to the integration of the unconscious with consciousness, whereby both are altered. Above all, consciousness experiences a widening of its horizon. This certainly brings about a considerable improvement of the whole psychic situation, since the disturbance of consciousness by the counteraction of the unconscious is eliminated. But, because all good things must be paid for dearly, the previously unconscious conflict is brought to the surface instead and imposes on consciousness a heavy responsibility, as it is now expected to solve the conflict. But it seems as badly equipped and prepared for this as was the consciousness of the medieval alchemist. Like him, the modern man needs a special method for investigating and giving shape to the unconscious contents in order to get consciousness out of its fix. As I have shown elsewhere, an experience of the self may be expected as a result of these psycho therapeutic endeavours, and quite often these experiences are numinous. It is not worth the effort to try to describe their totality character. Anyone who has experienced anything of the sort will know what I mean, and anyone who has not had the experience will not be satisfied by any amount of descriptions. Moreover there are countless descriptions of it in world literature. But I know of no case in which the bare description conveyed the experience.
[780] It is not in the least astonishing that numinous experiences should occur in the course of psychological treatment and that they may even be expected with some regularity, for they also occur very frequently in exceptional psychic states that are not treated and may even cause them. They do not belong exclusively to the domain of psychopathology but can be observed in normal people as well. Naturally, modern ignorance of and prejudice against intimate psychic experiences dismiss them as psychic anomalies and put them in psychiatric pigeon-holes without making the least attempt to understand them. But that neither gets rid of the fact of their occurrence nor explains it.
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Averroes Search, #Labyrinths, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
there is a God; then, of the alchemists who sought the philosopher's stone;
then, of the vain trisectors of the angle and squarers of the circle. Later I
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BOOK II. -- PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
Marquis de St. Martin -- the Martinists -- astral light, by the mediaeval Kabalists and alchemists the
Sidereal Virgin and the Mysterium Magnum, and by the Eastern Occultists AEther, the reflection of
--
as apocalyptic as the writings of any of the alchemists?
"Lucifer, the Astral Light . . . . is an intermediate force existing in all creation, it serves
--
" 'Attach thyself,' say the alchemists, 'to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in the
following manner: The letters of the ineffable name are there, although thou mayest not
--
matter to toy with, the Eastern Occultists and their disciples, the great alchemists the world over, have
the whole septenate to study from.** As those Alche[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
--
smooth crystal plane." "All proceeds from Ether and from its seven natures" -- said the alchemists.
Science knows these only in their superficial effects.
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treated as seven properties of nature in the alchemistic and astrological phase of the mediaeval
mysteries;"* and adds -"The followers of Bohme look on such matter as divine revelation of his inspired
--
features of the ancient Seven Spirits beneath their modern metaphysical or alchemist
mask. A second connecting link between the Theosophy of Bohme and the physical
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BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
root," and prakriti, "nature"), or the unmanifested primordial matter -- called by Western alchemists
Adam's Earth -- is applied by the Vedantins to Parabrahmam. Matter is dual in religious metaphysics,
--
the alchemists, at its lowest; GOD and DEVIL, GOOD and EVIL. . . .
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
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** Not the Mediaeval alchemists, but the Magi and Fire-Worshippers, from whom the Rosicrucians or
the Philosophers per ignem, the successors of the theurgists borrowed all their ideas concerning Fire,
--
Watchers" of the Christian Kabalists and alchemists, and relate, symbolically as well as
cosmogonically, to the numerical system of the Universe. The numbers with which these celestial
--
the habitual groove of strictly "Exact Science," as the alchemists of old did, he might be repaid for his
audacity.
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BOOK I. -- PART III. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
their PRINCIPLES -- transcendental or spiritual Elements; from those of the great alchemists, who,
like Paracelsus, made a great difference between phenomenon and its cause, or the Noumenon; and
--
any of its known states. An alchemist would say it was a spiritual secretion -- and would be laughed
at. But yet, when the physicist said that Electricity, stored up, was a fluid, or that light fixed on paper
--
these only the fictions of the alchemists, or dreams of the Mystics, such men as Paracelsus,
Philale thes, Van Helmont, and so many others, would have to be regarded as worse than visionaries:
--
many times explained by the alchemists.
** The "substance" of the Occultist, however, is to the most refined substance of the physicist, what
--
The unity of matter, of that which is real cosmic matter to the alchemist, or "Adam's Earth" as the
Kabalists call it, can hardly be proved or disproved, by either the French savant Dumas, who suggests
--
lines of thought as the medieval alchemist did.
* "World-Life," Ibid.
--
of differentiation. Therefore, when the adept or alchemist adds that, though matter is eternal, for it is
PRADHANA, yet atoms are born at every new manvantara, or reconstruction of the universe, it is no
--
It may be remarked that, save a few small divergencies, no Adept nor alchemist could have explained
the above any better, in the light of modern Science, however much the latter may protest against the
--
the Rosicrucians and alchemists of the Middle Ages? Is it the Van Helmonts, the Khunraths, the
Paracelsuses and Agrippas, from Roger Bacon down to St. Germain, who were all blind enthusiasts,
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BOOK I. -- PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
Mercury, the planet, as of the Mercury of the Alchemical philosophers, "as," say the alchemists,
"Mercury has to be ever near Isis, as her minister, as without Mercury neither Isis nor Osiris can
--
two countries. The alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the sun in the
ship on the Ether of Space meant that the hermetic matter is the principle, or basis, of gold, or again
--
Christian alchemists and Rosicrucians, Jehovah was a convenient screen, unified by the folding of its
many flaps, and adopted as a substitute: one name of an individual Sephiroth being as good as another
--
Heaven, to the Celestial Virgin of the alchemists, and even to the "Waters of Grace" of the modern
Baptist.
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Book of Imaginary Beings (text), #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
sixteenth century, Etymologists attri bute it to the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in whose writings it appears for the first
time.
--
To the alchemists the Salamander was the spirit of the
element fire. In this symbol and in an argument of
--
divided all matter, a particular spirit was later made to correspond. Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist
and physician, gave them their names: the Gnomes of earth,
--
creature which became the symbol adopted by alchemists
in the Middle Ages. The curious may read further in Jungs
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Conversations with Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
That this change this transmutation may be effective, it is necessary, according to my own ideas, to attain the cosmic consciousness and to get possession thus of the `universal solvent' as the alchemists say. Then can't one transmute?
No, this does not suffice. When you come down again from your cosmic consciousness, the same tendencies are there which can always be restored to life. But beyond the immanent aspect of the absolute power, the aspect which you realise in the experience of the cosmic consciousness, there is what may be called the transcendent aspect, which is creative and without limitations. This is the solvent which destroys and creates. The vital Purusha who consented to a certain movement of nature, must surrender to the higher life and the transformation is possible.
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Liber 111 - The Book of Wisdom - LIBER ALEPH VEL CXI, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
make Gold thou must have Gold (it is the Word of the alchemists), so to
become the Sphinx thou must first be a Sphinx. For naught may grow save
--
DE ARTE alchemistICA. (On the Alchemical Art)
Wilt thou acquaint thyself now further at my Reproof concerning this
--
wisdom than in Ten Thousand Folios of the alchemists! Study therefore
to acquire Skill in this Method, and Experience; for this Gold is not
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Liber 46 - The Key of the Mysteries, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Mirville calls the devil, and which the ancient alchemists called
Azoth. It is the vital element which manifests itself by the phenomena
--
than the bearded devil of the alchemists. One knows that the members of
the highest grades in the old hermetic masonry attri buted to a bearded
--
of the Sepher Yetzirah, commented by the alchemist Abraham (Amsterdam,
1642): {216}
--
of the alchemist the sun signifies gold, the moon silver, and that the
other stars or planets refer to the other metals. One {217} should now
--
medicament uselessly sought by so many hermetists and alchemists.
An Initiate of the sixteenth century, the good and learned William
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Liber 71 - The Voice of the Silence - The Two Paths - The Seven Portals, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
This verse reminds one of the writings of alchemists; and it should be
interpreted as the best of them would have interpreted it.
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The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
Middle Ages the scientific pioneers the leading alchemists, anatomists,
and physicists were almost as frequendy suspected of owing dieir
--
In an old alchemist's Rosarium, whose author I have forgotten, I once
saw two pieces of advice for finding the Philosopher's Stone
--
Equally fertile was the alchemists' right intuition, supported by wrong
arguments, of the transmutability of chemical elements. On the other
--
stuff of the universe was water, air, or fire; the alchemists were hypno-
tized by the properties of sulphur, salt, and mercury; the invention of
--
to body-snatchers for their sinister purposes. The alchemists distilled
witches' brews; electric rays became a favourite delusion in persecu-
--
As Dubos said, 'the alchemist never entirely ceased to live and function
within the academician*. Not only Kepler's astronomy was derived
--
was this alchemist's dream which gave birth to the 'grand design*
which I have mentioned and which like a blue-print drawn in in-
--
to the germ theory of disease. Thus did the alchemist's pipe-dream
give birth to modern medicine as Kepler's chimerical quest for the
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The Aleph, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
"First a glass of pseudo-cognac," he ordered, "and then down you dive into the cellar. Let me warn you, you'll have to lie flat on your back. Total darkness, total immobility, and a certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary. From the floor, you must focus your eyes on the nineteenth step. Once I leave you, I'll lower the trapdoor and you'll be quite alone. You needn't fear the rodents very much -- though I know you will. In a minute or two, you'll see the Aleph -- the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!"
Once we were in the dining room, he added, "Of course, if you don't see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced. Now, down you go. In a short while you can babble with all of Beatriz' images."
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The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
not count in their midst some practicing alchemist, some hunter of the impossible.
Imagination was given free reign. The auri sacra fames (accursed hunger for gold) ruined the
--
finally, the most famous and the most popular philosopher of our country, the alchemist
Nicholas Flamel (1330-1417).
--
(3) Cf. Papal bull Spondet pariter , issued against alchemists by Pope John XXII in 1317, who nonetheless had
written a very singular ,4r,v Transmutatoria Metallorum.
--
The alchemist? A meditative elderly man, with a grave forehead, crowned with white hair,
a pale and wasted silhouette, an original character from a long gone humanity and a forgotten
--
Such is the legendary painting of the alchemist and his laboratory. Fantastic vision, lacking
truth, sprung from popular imagination and reproduced in the old almanacs, treasures of the
--
Ancient alchemists, who had, according to traditional sources, more knowledge than we are
willing to grant them, assured us that the sun is a cold star and that its rays are dark (3).
--
Vincent Raspail was a convinced alchemist and the works of the classical alchemist and the
works of the classical philosophers occupied a prominent place among his other books. Ernest
--
his venerated master, Chevreul, professed the greatest esteem for our old alchemists, and his
rich library contained almost all the important works of the hermetic philosophers (1()) . It even
--
the alchemists".
Henri Poincare "Science cannot, and must not say never! It is possible that one day we will
--
contempt for the old Adepts, venerated masters of present alchemists. For our author, who has
probably never opened a hermetic book, transmutation is synonymous with charlatanism. As
--
principle? Then are we entitled to conclude that the ancient alchemists, using very simple
processes, had nevertheless experimentally discovered the formal proof capable of imposing
--
(8) Was Pascal an alchemist? Nothing allows us to claim that he was. What is more certain is that he must have
realized the transmutation himself, unless he saw it accomplished before his eyes in the laboratory of an Adept.
--
It is to be expected that a good number of chemists and some alchemists as well will not
share our point of view. This will not stop us. Should we be regarded as the most resolute
--
the positive facts on which it is built to the patient labor of the ancient alchemists.
This hypothesis, to which we could only have given a relative and conventional value, being
--
presented some analogy with that of the alchemists, but the materials and the means which
they had at their disposal were uniquely chemical materials and means. To transmute metals
--
disdainful expression of the alchemists for these side activities unworthy of the philosopher.
Without scorning these useful researchers, let us recognize that very often the most fortunate
--
of Lully and of Basil Valentine, all these researchers, wrongly classified among alchemists,
were simple archemists or learned spagyrists. This is why a famous Adept, author of a
--
our scientists had understood the language of the ancient alchemists, the laws of the practice
of Hermes would be known to them, and the philosophers stone would long have ceased to
--
elements. These processes, which alchemists know well, although they dont have to use them
in the elaboration of the Great Work, aim at extracting one of the two metallic roots, sulphur
--
For the alchemists, the spirits are real influences, although they are physically almost
immaterial or imponderable. They act in a mysterious, inexplicable, unknowable but
--
In spite of the lack of credence which George Bois gives to alchemists and their science, he
nevertheless recognizes that one cannot suspect the sincerity of the narrator, or the reality of
--
the alchemist melted together as much gold as silver; here then is the alloy well-defined (18) .
This alloy is laminated. Then, the laminae are arranged in layers, separated by layers of a
--
support the opinion of alchemists about the reality of transmutation".
As for the operation itself, it partakes exclusively from archemy and is very close to that
--
microbiologist the agar-agar and the spore, similarly she gives the alchemist the proper
metallic terrain and the appropriate seed. If all the circumstances favorable to the regular
--
from genuine alchemists, also called Adepts ( Adeptus, who has acquired) or Chemical Philosophers.
(5) Nicholas Grosparmy, LAbrege de theorique et le Secret des Secrets (Summary of the Theory and the Secret of Secrets)
--
offers us, among so many other curiosities, a pretty and quite interesting alchemists dwelling.
A humble house, in truth, but which betrays its builders concern for humility, that the
--
tradition, the Salamander jealously guards its secret and that of the alchemist. Yet in 1834 the
house was the subject of an article , however merely a pure and simple description of the
--
analysis, that the builder of the Manor was a learned alchemist, having given the measure of
his talent, in other words, an Adept, possessor of the philosophers stone. We also certify that
--
Approximately a century before the Manor of Lisieux had been built, three alchemist
companions labored in Flers (Orne) and accomplished the Great Work there in the year 1420.
--
above-mentioned Remarks. The old alchemist, artisan of the wealth of the Le Vallois family
and Lords of Escoville, lived as a wise man, in accordance with the precepts of philosophical
--
1445 probably the date of completion which would lead us to believe that the alchemist,
contrary to the account of the author of the Remarques , died at a very advanced age. We can
--
So Nicolas Le Vallois, great-grandson of the alchemist of Flers, undertook the work on the
house of Escoville, which required approximately ten years, from 1530 to 1540 (12) . To this
--
(4) Cf. Charles Verel: Les Alchimistes de Flers (The alchemists of Flers)', Alencon, 1889, in the Bulletin de la
Societe Historique et Archeologique de IOrne (Bulletin of the Historical and Archaeological Society ofOrne).
--
(5) Alfred de Caix: Notice sur quelques alchimistes normands (Notice on Some Norman alchemists ); Caen, F.
LeBlanc-Hardel, 1868.
--
(16) One frequently encounters on the dwellings of alchemists, among many other hermetic symbols, musicians
or musical instruments. Among the disciples of Hermes, the alchemical science (and we will say why in the
--
to the alchemist (Plate V)
In order to make the students more responsive to the particular value of the emblems
--
seem, given the deliberate repetition of the symbol, that our alchemist had a marked
preference for this heraldic reptile. We do not want to insinuate here that he meant to give it
--
hand, the very choice of the salamander leads us to believe that our alchemist must have
searched for a long time and spent many years to discover the secret fire. The hieroglyph in
--
For, in his patient work, the alchemist must be the scrupulous imitator of nature, the monkey
of creation, according to the genuine expression of several masters. Guided by the analogy, he
--
believes to be the alchemist known under the name of Seton, and others under the name of
Michael Sendivogius, describes in this passage its translucent appearance, its crystalline form,
--
metal but nothing more. This is what alchemists have always done, because they did not know
the universality and the nature of the agent which they were looking for. But what we ask for,
--
possess the wealth it protects. A Chinese legend tells us about the learned alchemist
Hujumsin, numbered among the gods after his death, that this man, having killed a horrible
--
head, which we believe is that f the alchemist himself, whose glance is directed towards the
man riding the griffin; Number 2: a small angel, pressing against his breast a quartered shield,
--
matter of fact, Louis dEstissac, man of high birth, turns out to be a practicing alchemist and
one of the best instructed Adepts in hermetic secrets.
--
Such are, briefly described, the most interesting emblematic pieces for the alchemist, that we
shall analyze in great detail.
--
died of a stroke! (34) . Who then, after reading this, would find it strange that alchemists refuse
to reveal their secrets and dared to prefer to remain shrouded in mystery and silence?
--
Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, that very day when alchemists customarily begin their Great Work.
(26) Ammon-Ra, the great solar divinity of the Egyptians, was normally represented with a rams head, or, when
--
simple. Any layman who knows to feed a fire, will perform it as well as an expert alchemist.
It neither requires any special trick nor professional skill but only the knowledge of an
--
Uroboros of the Greek alchemists ([*230-1], oura, tail, and [*230-2], boros , devouring),
reduced to its simplest expression, thus takes on the circular form, symbolic drawing of the
--
philosophers stone could come from antimony. It is known that alchemists of the 14th
century called their universal medicine Kohl or Kohol, from the Arabic words al cohol,
--
ancient alchemists as a term of comparison to teach the secret preparation of their antimony. It
is the solar eye Egyptians called oudja, which also figure among the Masonic emblems,
--
relief of Thiers clearly indicates, is that it designates the dwelling of an unknown alchemist. It
officially stamps the ancient philosophers dwelling and reveals its mystery. Its indisputable
--
what the alchemist should be: a learned man of simple spirit, an attentive investigator of
nature, always attempting to imitate, just as the monkey imitates man (3) . The other function
--
Joker, the Magician or sometimes the alchemist (6) .
In addition, the Jesters bauble which is positively a rattle ([***-253-1] krotalon ) (7) ,
--
and you will have the graphic secret used by medieval alchemists to designate their mercurial
matter <8) . This diagram which rather faithfully reproduces both the jesters bauble and the
--
This pilgrimage, all alchemists must undertake. Figuratively at least, for it is a symbolic
journey and whoever wants to gain from it, cannot leave the laboratory if only for a moment.
--
sculptors and painters, the alchemist Flamel hid the middle class personality of Flamel the
writer, under that of St James the Great, hieroglyph of the secret mercury. These images no
--
The closed book, vivid symbol of the subject which alchemists use and take with them at the
beginning is the one which the second character of the man of the Woods is holding so
--
excerpt from the Hieroglyphic Figures which contri buted to spread among alchemists and
bibliophiles. The quasi-certainty of the reality of the book attri buted to Abraham the Jew.
--
(6) Some occultists place the Jester or the alchemist as the last of the 21 cards of the deck, that is to say, after the card The
World and it is given the highest value. Such an order would be without any great consequence the Jester having no
--
to reality. It tells us of the famous alchemist Hujumsin, ranked among the gods for having discovered the philosophers stone;
he had killed a horrible dragon which ravaged the country and he had attached the corpse of this monster on the top of a
pillar, "which can still be seen today", says the legend. After which the alchemist was raised to the sky.
(13) Les Douze Clefs de Philosophie, op. cit. II, p. 140.
--
(29) Flamel died on March 22, 1418, holiday for the traditional alchemists. On that day the spring equinox opens the time for
the Great Work.
--
the evolution of the Rebis and reveal outwardly to the alchemist the successive stages of the
inner work. These stages, diversely colored, bear the name of Regimens or Reigns.
--
simply the Great Work, because the alchemist must closely follow, for his microcosmic
realization, all the circumstances which accompanied the Great Work of the Creator.
--
"As for the malleability of glass", he says, "upon which alchemists base the possibility of their
Elixir, it seems to be corroborated, albeit not very firmly, by the following passage from
--
the alchemist to direct his efforts to the acquisition of this indispensable body.
However in order to succeed we advise him to act methodically and to study in a simple, and
--
majority of practicing alchemists, is elaborated from start to finish in one crucible made of
fireproof clay. It is the way that the great masters called womans work and childs play; it is
--
Medieval alchemists used the verb acuer (to sharpen) to express the operation that gives the
solvent its cutting properties. Now acuer comes from the Latin acuo, to sharpen, to whet, to
--
the slaughtered innocents, and the manner in which the alchemist operates the differentiation
of the two mercuries, he will have passed the obstacle and nothing, later on, except his
--
As for the old alchemist, so happy about this meeting, while he knew not up to now where to
find the mercury, now shows rather well how familiar this matter is to him, since his own
--
concerns the mutation of the prepared matter with the aid of the fire. The alchemist thus
retraces, in the opposite direction, though with prudence, slowness and perseverance, the
--
Every alchemist knows that the stone is formed of the four elements united by a perfect
cohesion, in a state of natural and perfect equilibrium. What is less known is the manner in
--
and alchemists on the principles of the old sciences, the universal solvent was the subject of
ardent controversies. J.H. Pott (4) , who applied himself to noting the many formulas of
--
Works operations. In truth, it is not the person of the alchemist who defies and fights the
hermetic dragon, but another beast, equally robust, in charge of representing him and that the
--
the two sulfurs charged with orienting the two magisteries, All alchemists know white sulphur
should be exclusively used for the silver Work and yellow sulphur for the solar Work,
--
fixed and this spectacle gives to the alchemist the assurance that, for Latona, the time for
labor has come. At that moment, mystery reassumes its right. A heavy, dark, blackish-blue
--
Noah, opening the vessels windows releases the crow, which is for the alchemists, and in his
own minute genesis, the replica of the Cimmerian darkness, of these sinister clouds that
--
must be found on a smaller scale in that of the alchemist. As a consequence, when the
Patriarch sets forth the crow from the Ark, we must understand that in our work it has to do
--
This motif is on the whole nothing but a translation of the sign used by the alchemists to
express the element water. Clouds and arms compose a triangle with its summit directed
--
fire, is note other than the Athanor, a word by which the alchemists signified the philosophical
furnace essential to the Works maturation. Two side doors have been installed, facing each
--
continues, that it would not be so absurd to question whether that which the alchemists called
long months, would not really be only days that is to say a very short period of time and
--
equipped with "seven horns filled with water" and the alchemist-errant plying the good-
natured sphinx with questions. Jacques Tesson (4) , has this mythical representative of the
--
In our bas-relief, the gladiator takes the place of the alchemist, represented elsewhere with the
features of Hercules, hero of the 12 symbolic labors or yet with the appearance of a
--
mercury and who gave it a nature to which nothing resists; for, without it, the alchemists
painstaking efforts would be in vain, all their labor would become useless".
--
that it discouraged many alchemists who were more greedy than industrious, more
enthusiastic than persevering.
--
her time and among them, perhaps, with contemporary alchemists? We lack information
about the subject although it seems difficult to explain why the great fireplace of the drawing
--
The Work begins and ends with the weights of the art; so the alchemists preparing the way
prompts nature to begin and to perfect this great labor. But, in between these extremities, the
--
the spirit of a demon, a devil, or Satan; for the philosopher and alchemist, it was always used
to represent their volatile and dissolving first matter, otherwise called common mercury.
--
spagyrists, who have a collection of various acids at their disposal, the alchemists only
possess a single agent which received many names, of which the latest is Alkahest. To note
--
Thistle with the famous alchemist by invoking the hermetic testimony of the Edinburgh
Sundial.
--
In their formulas, the Greek alchemists followed the custom of translating the hermetic
solvent by indicating its color. To create their symbol, they assembled two consonants of the
--
description of the work which the alchemist must perform in order to extract from the coarse
mineral, the living and luminous spirit, the secret fire it encloses as a translucent, green
--
of the famous alchemist of Bourges, the Chancellor of the Exchequer to King Charles VII.
We shall end here our visits to the old philosophers dwellings.
--
(2) See Louis Figuier, LAlchimie et les Alchimistes (Alchemy and the alchemists)', Paris, Hachette et Cie, 1856.
248
--
by the old alchemists, in order to express the metallic gold or mineral sun. On the spiritual
level, the Golden Age is personified by the evangelist St Luke. The Greek [*520-2] ( Luchas ),
--
The ignoramus will not so easily forgive alchemists their allegiance to the rigorous discipline
they have freely accepted. I know my master cannot shun this same criterion. Before all, he
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the Eternal Wisdom, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
52) Melt thy soul in the fire of love and thou wilt know that love is the alchemist of the soul. ~ Ahm-ed Halif
53) If thou lovest, God liveth in thee. ~ Tolstoi
|
The Zahir, #Labyrinths, #Jorge Luis Borges, #Poetry
In the figure of speech called oxymoron a word is modified by an epithet which seems to contradict it: thus, the Gnostics spoke of dark light, and the alchemists of a black sun. For me it was a kind of oxymoron to go straight from my last visit with Clementina Villar to buy a drink at a bar; I was intrigued by the coarseness of the act, by its ease. (The contrast was heightened by the circumstance that there was a card game in progress.) I asked for a brandy. They gave me the Zahir in my change. I stared at it for a moment and went out into the street, perhaps with the beginnings of a fever. I reflected that every coin in the world is a symbol of those famous coins which glitter in history and fable. I thought of Charon's obol; of the obol for which Belisarius begged; of Judas' thirty coins; of the drachmas of La's, the famous courtesan; of the ancient coin which one of the Seven Sleepers proffered; of the shining coins of the wizard in the 1001 Nights, that turned out to be bits of paper; of the inexhaustible penny of Isaac Laquedem; of the sixty thousand pieces of silver, one for each line of an epic, which Firdusi sent back to a king because they were not of
'The Zahir is the shadow of the Rose, and the Rending of the Veil.' "
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