THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C. G. JUNG 1.Kısım

Published 1957; 2nd edn., 1970.

† Published 1960.

Published 1961.

† Published 1956; 2nd edn., 1967. (65 plates, 43 text figures.)

Published 1953; 2nd edn., 1966.

† Published 1960; 2nd edn., 1969.

Published 1959; 2nd edn., 1968. (Part I: 79 plates, with 29 in colour.)
Published 1964; 2nd edn., 1970. (8 plates.)

† Published 1958; 2nd edn., 1969.

Published 1953; 2nd edn., completely revised, 1968. (270 illustrations.)

† Published 1968. (50 plates, 4 text figures.)

‡ Published 1963; 2nd edn., 1970. (10 plates.)

Published 1966.

† Published 1954; 2nd edn., revised and augmented, 1966. (13 illustrations.)

‡ Published 1954.

B O L L I N G E N S E R I E S X X

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

C. G. JUNG

VOLUME 14

EDITORS

SIR HERBERT READ MICHAEL FORDHAM, M.D., M.R.C.P.

GERHARD ADLER, PH.D.

WILLIAM MCGUIRE, executive editor

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS

AN INQUIRY INTO THE SEPARATION AND SYNTHESIS OF PSYCHIC OPPOSITES IN ALCHEMY

C. G. JUNG

SECOND EDITION

TRANSLATED BY R. F. C. HULL

B O L L I N G E N S E R I E S X X

Second printing, 1974

Third printing, 1976

First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback printing, 1977

THE HARDCOVER EDITION IS PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS AND IN ENGLAND BY ROUTLEDGE AND KEGAN PAUL, LTD. IN THE AMERICAN EDITION ALL THE VOLUMES COMPRISING THE COLLECTED WORKS CONSTITUTE NUMBER XX IN BOLLINGEN SERIES, SPONSORED BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION. THE PRESENT VOLUME IS NUMBER 14 OF THE COLLECTED WORKS AND WAS THE TWELFTH TO APPEAR.

Translated from Mysterium Coniunctionis: Untersuchung über die Trennung und Zusammensetzung der seelischen Gegensätze in der Alchemie, Parts I and II, published by Rascher Verlag, Zurich, 1955 and 1956 (Vols. X and XI of Psychologische Abhandlungen, edited by C. G. Jung)

ISBN 0-691-01816-2 (paperback edn.)

ISBN 0-691-09766-6 (hardcover edn.)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUE CARD NUMBER: 75–156 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

EDITORIAL NOTE*

Volume 14 of the Collected Works presents Jung’s last great work, on which he was engaged for more than a decade, from 1941 to 1954. He finished it in his eightieth year. As is to be expected from its culminating position in his writings and from its subject matter, the book gives a final account of his lengthy researches into alchemy.

Jung’s interest in the symbolical significance of alchemy for modern depth psychology first found expression, in 1929, in his commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower. The theme was taken up again in his Eranos lectures of 1935 and 1936, which formed the basis of Psychology and Alchemy, originally published in 1944. Further researches led to the publication of essays now included in Alchemical Studies, Volume 13 of the Collected Works A preliminary study of the special symbolism of the coniunctio in relation to psychotherapeutic problems appeared in The Psychology of the Transference (1946), while the connection between philosophical alchemy and Christianity was elaborated in Aion (1951). All these themes are brought together in Mysterium Coniunctionis, where Jung continues his work of interpretation by examining in detail a number of texts taken from the alchemical classics. The scope of the book is indicated in its subtitle: “An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy.” This process, summed up in the trenchant formula solve et coagula

—“dissolve and coagulate”—underlies the opus alchymicum and may be symbolically understood as the process of psychic integration.

The focus of the book is on the symbolism of the coniunctio and the preceding stages of dissociation. These are known in alchemy as the chaos or prima materia, and they lead via the intermediate stages to a resolution of the conflict of opposites in the production of the lapis philosophorum. Fresh evidence is brought to bear upon Jung’s thesis that the lapis is not only a parallel of the Christ figure, but a symbolical prefiguration of psychic totality, or the self.

Jung’s inquiry is of a highly advanced character and necessitates a wide

knowledge of the concepts of analytical psychology in general and Jung’s previous publications on alchemy in particular. The reader who follows Jung in his search for a deeper understanding of the opus alchymicum will not only discover in this book new and fascinating aspects of the history of the European mind but will also be rewarded by fresh insights into such basic psychological problems as the structure of the self and the ego and their relation to one another, the nature of transference and countertransference, and the process of active imagination. In many ways this book is the summing up of all Jung’s later work.

The English edition differs from the Swiss in the following particulars. It comprises Volumes I and II of that version. Volume III is an edition and study by Marie-Louise von Franz of Aurora Consurgens, a thirteenth-century treatise traditionally attributed to Thomas Aquinas and rediscovered by Jung, which has been issued in English as a companion volume to Mysterium Coniunctionis, but outside the Collected Works. The paragraph numbers of the present work do not correspond to those in the two Swiss volumes, which run in separate sequence. Further, many of the longer paragraphs have been broken up, and in certain instances the material has been rearranged within the chapters to facilitate the exposition. The most important of these changes were made with the author’s consent.

In order not to overload the footnotes, the Latin and Greek passages have been put into an appendix. An asterisk in a footnote indicates that the quotation translated there or in the main text will be found in the appendix under the corresponding footnote number of the chapter in question.

Two sections of this work were previously published: Chapter II, section 3, appeared as “Das Rätsel von Bologna” in Beitrag zur Festschrift Albert Oeri (Basel, 1945), pp. 265–79 (translated as “The Bologna Enigma,” Ambix, London, II, 1946, 182–91); Chapter III, section 3, appeared as “De Sulphure” in Nova Acta Paracelsica (Einsiedeln), V (1948), 27–40.

For the second edition, numerous corrections and revisions have been made in cross-references to other volumes of the Collected Works now available, and likewise in the Bibliography.

The Gesammelte Werke edition of the present work appeared in 1968 as, in effect, a reprint of the 1955/1956 Swiss edition, retaining its textual arrangement and paragraph numbering. In order to facilitate cross-reference

between the English and German text, a table has been added to this edition, correlating the paragraph numbers: see below, pp. 697ff.

One paragraph (183 in Vol. II, p. 124 of the Gesammelte Werke edition) was inadvertently omitted in the first edition of the present volume. It should follow paragraph 518 on page 368 and is translated here as paragraph 518a.

[518a] The reader must pardon my use of metaphors that are linguistically analogous to dogmatic expressions. If you have conceptions of things you can have no conceptions of, then the conception and the thing appear to coincide. Nor can two different things you know nothing of be kept apart. I must therefore expressly emphasize that I do not go in for either metaphysics or theology, but am concerned with psychological facts on the borderline of the knowable. So if I make use of certain expressions that are reminiscent of the language of theology, this is due solely to the poverty of language, and not because I am of the opinion that the subject-matter of theology is the same as that of psychology. Psychology is very definitely not a theology; it is a natural science that seeks to describe experienceable psychic phenomena. In doing so it takes account of the way in which theology conceives and names them, because this hangs together with the phenomenology of the contents under discussion. But as empirical science it has neither the capacity nor the competence to decide on questions of truth and value, this being the prerogative of theology.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Standard translations of Latin and Greek texts have been used where they conformed more or less to the author’s own versions, and they are referred to in the footnotes. Where such translations were unsuitable or nonexistent, as is particularly the case with the texts in the appendix, an English version has been supplied by Mr. A. S. B. Glover. To him I would like to express my deepest thanks for his tireless help in preparing this book. My thanks are also due to Miss Barbara Hannah and Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz, for reading through the typescript and making many valuable suggestions.

VOLUME 14 MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL NOTE TRANSLATOR’S NOTE LIST OF PLATES FOREWORD

I. The Components of the Coniunctio

The Paradoxa

The Personification of the Opposites

Rex and Regina

Adam and Eve

The Conjunction

Epilogue

APPENDIX: LATIN AND GREEK TEXTS BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

TABLE OF PARAGRAPH CORRELATIONS

LIST OF PLATES

The plates follow page 330

“Third Picture of John”

From the Hexastichon of Sebastian Brant (1502), fol. a.vr

“Second Picture of Luke”

From the Hexastichon of Sebastian Brant (1502), fol. c.iiir

“Jezoth Le Juste”

From an 18th cent. ms., “Abraham le Juif,” Bibliothèque Nationale, Fr. 14765. PI. 8

The Two Unipeds

From a Latin ms., “Figurarum aegyptiorum secretarum” (author’s collection). p. 20

The “Revelation of the Hidden”

From the author’s “Figurarum aegyptiorum secretarum,”. p. 27

The Worldly and the Spiritual Power

From the author’s “Figurarum aegyptiorum secretarum,”. p. 31

The Royal Pair

From the author’s “Figurarum aegyptiorum secretarum,”. p. 33

The Eye-Motif in a Modern Painting Author’s collection
The Eye-Motif in a Modern Painting Author’s collection
The Nigredo

From the Theatrum chemicum, Vol. IV (1613). p. 570

FOREWORD

This book—my last—was begun more than ten years ago. I first got the idea of writing it from C. Kerényi’s essay on the Aegean Festival in Goethe’s Faust.1 The literary prototype of this festival is The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, itself a product of the traditional hierosgamos symbolism of alchemy. I felt tempted, at the time, to comment on Kerényi’s essay from the standpoint of alchemy and psychology, but soon discovered that the theme was far too extensive to be dealt with in a couple of pages. Although the work was soon under way, more than ten years were to pass before I was able to collect and arrange all the material relevant to this central problem.

As may be known, I showed in my book Psychology and Alchemy, first published in 1944,2 how certain archetypal motifs that are common in alchemy appear in the dreams of modern individuals who have no knowledge of alchemical literature. In that book the wealth of ideas and symbols that lie hidden in the neglected treatises of this much misunderstood “art” was hinted at rather than described in the detail it deserved; for my primary aim was to demonstrate that the world of alchemical symbols definitely does not belong to the rubbish heap of the past, but stands in a very real and living relationship to our most recent discoveries concerning the psychology of the unconscious. Not only does this modern psychological discipline give us the key to the secrets of alchemy, but, conversely, alchemy provides the psychology of the unconscious with a meaningful historical basis. This was hardly a popular subject, and for that reason it remained largely misunderstood. Not only was alchemy almost entirely unknown as a branch of natural philosophy and as a religious movement, but most people were unfamiliar with the modern discovery of the archetypes, or had at least misunderstood them. Indeed, there were not a few who regarded them as sheer fantasy, although the well-known example of whole numbers, which also were discovered and not invented, might have taught them better, not to mention the “patterns of behaviour” in biology. Just as numbers and instinctual forms do exist, so there are many other natural configurations or

types which are exemplified by Lévy-Bruhl’s représentations collectives. They are not “metaphysical” speculations but, as we would expect, symptoms of the uniformity of Homo sapiens.

Today there is such a large and varied literature describing psychotherapeutic experiences and the psychology of the unconscious that everyone has had an opportunity to familiarize himself with the empirical findings and the prevailing theories about them. This is not true of alchemy, most accounts of which are vitiated by the erroneous assumption that it was merely the precursor of chemistry. Herbert Silberer3 was the first to try to penetrate its much more important psychological aspect so far as his somewhat limited equipment allowed him to do so. Owing to the paucity of modern expositions and the comparative inaccessibility of the sources, it is difficult to form an adequate conception of the problems of philosophical alchemy. It is the aim of the present work to fill this gap.

As is indicated by the very name which he chose for it—the “spagyric”4 art

—or by the oft-repeated saying “solve et coagula” (dissolve and coagulate), 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 first of all an initial state in which opposite tendencies or forces were in conflict; secondly there was the great question of a procedure which would be capable of bringing the hostile elements and qualities, once they were separated, back to unity again. The initial state, named the chaos, was not given from the start but had to be sought for as the prima materia. And just as the beginning of the work was not self-evident, so to an even greater degree was its end. There are countless speculations on the nature of the end-state, all of them reflected in its designations. The commonest are the ideas of its permanence (prolongation of life, immortality, incorruptibility), its androgyny, its spirituality and corporeality, its human qualities and resemblance to man (homunculus), and its divinity.

The obvious analogy, in the psychic sphere, to this problem of opposites is the dissociation of the personality brought about by the conflict of incompatible tendencies, resulting as a rule from an inharmonious disposition. The repression of one of the opposites leads only to a prolongation and extension of the conflict, in other words, to a neurosis. The therapist therefore confronts the opposites with one another and aims at uniting them permanently. The images of the goal which then appear in dreams often run parallel with the corresponding alchemical symbols. An

instance of this is familiar to every analyst: the phenomenon of the transference, which corresponds to the motif of the “chymical wedding.” To avoid overloading this book, I devoted a special study to the psychology of the transference,5 using the alchemical parallels as a guiding thread. Similarly, the hints or representations of wholeness, or the self, which appear in the dreams also occur in alchemy as the numerous synonyms for the lapis Philosophorum, which the alchemists equated with Christ. Because of its great importance, this last relationship gave rise to a special study, Aion. Further offshoots from the theme of this book are my treatises “The Philosophical Tree,” “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” and “Answer to Job.”

The first and second parts of this work 6 are devoted to the theme of the opposites and their union. The third part is an account of, and commentary on, an alchemical text, which, evidently written by a cleric, probably dates from the thirteenth century and discloses a highly peculiar state of mind in which Christianity and alchemy interpenetrate. The author tries, with the help of the mysticism of the Song of Songs, to fuse apparently heterogeneous ideas, partly Christian and partly derived from natural philosophy, in the form of a hymnlike incantation. This text is called Aurora consurgens (also Aurea hora), and traditionally it is ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas. It is hardly necessary to remark that Thomist historians have always reckoned it, or wanted to reckon it, among the spurious and false writings, no doubt because of the traditional depreciation of alchemy. This negative evaluation of alchemy was due, in the main, to ignorance. People did not know what it meant to its adepts because it was commonly regarded as mere gold-making. I hope I have shown in my book Psychology and Alchemy that, properly understood, it was nothing of the sort. Alchemy meant a very great deal to people like Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, and also to St. Thomas Aquinas. We have not only the early testimony of Zosimos of Panopolis from the third century, but that of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara from the beginning of the fourteenth century, which both point to the parallelism of the alchemical arcanum and the God-man. Aurora consurgens tries to amalgamate the Christian and alchemical view, and I have therefore chosen it as an example of how the spirit of medieval Christianity came to terms with alchemical philosophy, and as an illustration of the present account of the alchemical problem of opposites.7

Today, once again, we hear tendentious voices still contesting the

hypothesis of the unconscious, declaring that it is nothing more than the personal prejudice of those who make use of this hypothesis. Remarkably enough, no consideration is given to the proofs that have been put forward; they are dismissed on the ground that all psychology is nothing more than a preconceived subjective opinion. It must be admitted that probably in no other field of work is there so great a danger of the investigator’s falling a victim to his own subjective assumptions. He of all people must remain more than ever conscious of his “personal equation.” But, young as the psychology of unconscious processes may be, it has nevertheless succeeded in establishing certain facts which are gradually gaining general acceptance. One of these is the polaristic structure of the psyche, which it shares with all natural processes. Natural processes are phenomena of energy, constantly arising out of a “less probable state” of polar tension. This formula is of special significance for psychology, because the conscious mind is usually reluctant to see or admit the polarity of its own background, although it is precisely from there that it gets its energy.

The psychologist has only just begun to feel his way into this structure, and it now appears that the “alchemystical” philosophers made the opposites and their union one of the chief objects of their work. In their writings, certainly, they employed a symbolical terminology that frequently reminds us of the language of dreams, concerned as these often are with the problem of opposites. Since conscious thinking strives for clarity and demands unequivocal decisions, it has constantly to free itself from counterarguments and contrary tendencies, with the result that especially incompatible contents either remain totally unconscious or are habitually and assiduously overlooked. The more this is so, the more the unconscious will build up its counterposition. As the alchemists, with but few exceptions, did not know that they were bringing psychic structures to light but thought that they were explaining the transformations of matter, there were no psychological considerations to prevent them, for reasons of sensitiveness, from laying bare the background of the psyche, which a more conscious person would be nervous of doing. It is because of this that alchemy is of such absorbing interest to the psychologist. For this reason, too, it seemed necessary to my co-worker and myself to subject the alchemical conception of opposites, and their union or reconciliation, to a thoroughgoing investigation. However abstruse and strange the language and imagery of the alchemists may seem to the uninitiated, they become vivid and alive as soon as comparative research

reveals the relationship of the symbols to processes in the unconscious. These may be the material of dreams, spontaneous fantasies, and delusional ideas on the one hand, and on the other hand they can be observed in works of creative imagination and in the figurative language of religion. The heterogeneous material adduced for comparison may seem in the highest degree baffling to the academically educated reader who has met these items only in an impersonal context—historical, ethnic, or geographical—but who does not know their psychological affinities with analogous formations, themselves derived from the most varied sources. He will naturally be taken aback, at first, if certain symbols in ancient Egyptian texts are brought into intimate relationship with modern findings concerning the popular religion of India and at the same time with the dreams of an unsuspecting European. But what is difficult for the historian and philologist to swallow is no obstacle for the physician. His biological training has left him with far too strong an impression of the comparability of all human activities for him to make any particular to-do about the similarity, indeed the fundamental sameness, of human beings and their psychic manifestations. If he is a psychiatrist, he will not be astonished at the essential similarity of psychotic contents, whether they come from the Middle Ages or from the present, from Europe or from Australia, from India or from the Americas. The processes underlying them are instinctive, therefore universal and uncommonly conservative. The weaver-bird builds his nest in his own peculiar fashion no matter where he may be, and just as we have no grounds for assuming that he built his nest differently three thousand years ago, so it is very improbable that he will alter his style in the next three thousand. Although contemporary man believes that he can change himself without limit, or be changed through external influences, the astounding, or rather the terrifying, fact remains that despite civilization and Christian education, he is still, morally, as much in bondage to his instincts as an animal, and can therefore fall victim at any moment to the beast within. This is a more universal truth than ever before, guaranteed independent of education, culture, language, tradition, race, and locality.

Investigation of alchemical symbolism, like a preoccupation with mythology, does not lead one away from life any more than a study of comparative anatomy leads away from the anatomy of the living man. On the contrary, alchemy affords us a veritable treasure-house of symbols, knowledge of which is extremely helpful for an understanding of neurotic and psychotic processes. This, in turn, enables us to apply the psychology of

the unconscious to those regions in the history of the human mind which are concerned with symbolism. It is just here that questions arise whose urgency and vital intensity are even greater than the question of therapeutic application. Here there are many prejudices that still have to be overcome. Just as it is thought, for instance, that Mexican myths cannot possibly have anything to do with similar ideas found in Europe, so it is held to be a fantastic assumption that an uneducated modern man should dream of classical myth-motifs which are known only to a specialist. People still think that relationships like this are far-fetched and therefore improbable. But they forget that the structure and function of the bodily organs are everywhere more or less the same, including those of the brain. And as the psyche is to a large extent dependent on this organ, presumably it will—at least in principle

—everywhere produce the same forms. In order to see this, however, one has to abandon the widespread prejudice that the psyche is identical with consciousness.

C. G. JUNG

October 1954

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS

AN INQUIRY

INTO THE SEPARATION AND SYNTHESIS OF PSYCHIC OPPOSITES IN ALCHEMY

I

THE COMPONENTS OF THE CONIUNCTIO

THE OPPOSITES

The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love.1 To begin with they form a dualism; for instance the opposites are humidum (moist) / siccum (dry), frigidum (cold) / calidum (warm), superiora (upper, higher) / inferiora (lower), spiritus-anima (spirit-soul) / corpus (body), coelum (heaven) / terra (earth), ignis (fire)

/ aqua (water), bright / dark, agens (active) / patiens (passive), volatile (volatile, gaseous) / fixum (solid), pretiosum (precious, costly; also carum, dear) / vile (cheap, common), bonum (good) / malum (evil), manifestum (open) / occultum (occult; also celatum, hidden), oriens (East) / occidens (West), vivum (living) / mortuum (dead, inert), masculus (masculine) / foemina (feminine), Sol / Luna. Often the polarity is arranged as a quaternio (quaternity), with the two opposites crossing one another, as for instance the four elements or the four qualities (moist, dry, cold, warm), or the four directions and seasons,2 thus producing the cross as an emblem of the four elements and symbol of the sublunary physical world.3 This fourfold Physis, the cross, also appears in the signs for earth , Venus , Mercury , Saturn , and Jupiter

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 King’s 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

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 Lambspringk’s “Symbols”13 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 Lambspringk’s “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.

The elevation of the human figure to a king or a divinity, and on the other hand its representation in subhuman, theriomorphic form, are indications of the transconscious character of the pairs of opposites. They do not belong to the ego-personality but are supraordinate to it. The ego-personality occupies an intermediate position, like the “anima inter bona et mala sita” (soul placed between good and evil). The pairs of opposites constitute the phenomenology of the paradoxical self, man’s totality. That is why their symbolism makes use of cosmic expressions like coelum / terra.18 The intensity of the conflict is expressed in symbols like fire and water,19 height and depth,20 life and death.21

THE QUATERNIO AND THE MEDIATING ROLE OF MERCURIUS

The arrangement of the opposites in a quaternity is shown in an interesting illustration in Stolcenberg’s Viridarium chymicum (Fig. XLII), which can also be found in the Philosophia reformata of Mylius (1622, p. 117). The goddesses represent the four seasons of the sun in the circle of the Zodiac (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn) and at the same time the four degrees of heating,22 as well as the four elements “combined” around the circular table.23 The synthesis of the elements is effected by means of the circular movement in time (circulatio, rota) of the sun through the houses of the Zodiac. As I have shown elsewhere,24 the aim of the circulatio is the production (or rather, reproduction) of the Original Man, who was a sphere. Perhaps I may mention in this connection a remarkable quotation from Ostanes in Abu’l-Qasim, describing the intermediate position between two pairs of opposites constituting a quaternio:

Ostanes said, Save me, O my God, for I stand between two exalted brilliancies known for their wickedness, and between two dim lights; each of them has reached me and I know not how to save myself from them. And it was said to me, Go up to Agathodaimon the Great and ask aid of him, and know that there is in thee somewhat of his nature, which will never be corrupted. . . . And when I ascended into the air he said to

me, Take the child of the bird which is mixed with redness and spread for the gold its bed which comes forth from the glass, and place it in its vessel whence it has no power to come out except when thou desirest, and leave it until its moistness has departed.25

The quaternio in this case evidently consists of the two malefici, Mars and Saturn (Mars is the ruler of Aries, Saturn of Capricorn); the two “dim lights” would then be feminine ones, the moon (ruler of Cancer) and Venus (ruler of Libra). The opposites between which Ostanes stands are thus masculine / feminine on the one hand and good / evil on the other. The way he speaks of the four luminaries—he does not know how to save himself from them—suggests that he is subject to Heimarmene, the compulsion of the stars; that is, to a transconscious factor beyond the reach of the human will. Apart from this compulsion, the injurious effect of the four planets is due to the fact that each of them exerts its specific influence on man and makes him a diversity of persons, whereas he should be one.26 It is presumably Hermes who points out to Ostanes that something incorruptible is in his nature which he shares with the Agathodaimon,27 something divine, obviously the germ of unity. This germ is the gold, the aurum philosophorum,28 the bird of Hermes or the son of the bird, who is the same as the filius philosophorum.29 He must be enclosed in the vas Hermeticum and heated until the “moistness” that still clings to him has departed, i.e., the humidum radicale (radical moisture), the prima materia, which is the original chaos and the sea (the unconscious). Some kind of coming to consciousness seems indicated. We know that the synthesis of the four was one of the main preoccupations of alchemy, as was, though to a lesser degree, the synthesis of the seven (metals, for instance). Thus in the same text Hermes says to the Sun:

. . . I cause to come out to thee the spirits of thy brethren [the planets], O Sun, and I make them for thee a crown the like of which was never seen; and I cause thee and them to be within me, and I will make thy kingdom vigorous.30

This refers to the synthesis of the planets or metals with the sun, to form a crown which will be “within” Hermes. The crown signifies the kingly totality; it stands for unity and is not subject to Heimarmene. This reminds us of the seven- or twelve-rayed crown of light which the

Agathodaimon serpent wears on Gnostic gems,31 and also of the crown of Wisdom in the Aurora Consurgens.32

In the “Consilium coniugii” there is a similar quaternio with the four qualities arranged as “combinations of two contraries, cold and moist, which are not friendly to heat and dryness.”33 Other quaternions are: “The stone is first an old man, in the end a youth, because the albedo comes at the beginning and the rubedo at the end.”34 Similarly the elements are arranged as two “manifesta” (water and earth), and two “occulta” (air and fire).35 A further quaternio is suggested by the saying of Bernardus Trevisanus: “The upper has the nature of the lower, and the ascending has the nature of the descending.”36 The following combination is from the “Tractatus Micreris”: “In it [the Indian Ocean]37 are images of heaven and earth, of summer, autumn, winter, and spring, male and female. If thou callest this spiritual, what thou doest is probable; if corporeal, thou sayest the truth; if heavenly, thou liest not; if earthly, thou hast well spoken.”38 Here we are dealing with a double quaternio having the structure shown in the diagram on page 10.

The double quaternio or ogdoad stands for a totality, for something that is at once heavenly and earthly, spiritual or corporeal, and is found in the “Indian Ocean,” that is to say in the unconscious. It is without doubt the Microcosm, the mystical Adam and bisexual Original Man in his prenatal state, as it were, when he is identical with the unconscious. Hence in Gnosticism the “Father of All” is described not only as masculine and feminine (or neither), but as Bythos, the abyss. In the scholia to the “Tractatus aureus Hermetis”39 there is a quaternio consisting of superius / inferius, exterius / interius. They are united into one thing by means of the circular distillation, named the Pelican:40 “Let all be one in one circle or vessel.” “For this vessel is the true philosophical Pelican, nor is any other to be sought after in all the world.” The text gives the following diagram:

B C D E represent the outside, A is the inside, “as it were the origin and source from which the other letters flow, and likewise the final goal to which they flow back,”41 F G stands for Above and Below. “Together the letters A B C D E F G clearly signify the hidden magical Septenary.” The central point A, the origin and goal, the “Ocean or great sea,” is also called a circulus exiguus, very small circle, and a “mediator making peace between the enemies or elements, that they may love one another in a meet embrace.”42 This little inner circle corresponds to the Mercurial Fountain in the Rosarium, which I have described in my “Psychology of the Transference.” The text calls it “the more spiritual, perfect, and nobler Mercurius,”43 the true arcane substance, a “spirit,” and goes on:

For the spirit alone penetrates all things, even the most solid bodies.44 Thus the catholicity of religion, or of the true Church, consists not in a visible and bodily gathering together of men, but in the invisible, spiritual concord and harmony of those who believe devoutly and truly in the one Jesus Christ. Whoever attaches himself to a particular church outside this King of Kings, who alone is the shepherd of the true spiritual church, is a sectarian, a schismatic, and a heretic. For the Kingdom of God cometh not with observation, but is within us, as our Saviour himself says in the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke.45

That the Ecclesia spiritualis is meant is clear from the text: “But you will ask, where then are those true Christians, who are free from all sectarian contagion?” They are “neither in Samaria, nor in Jerusalem, nor in Rome, nor in Geneva, nor in Leipzig,” but are scattered everywhere through the world, “in Turkey, in Persia, Italy, Gaul, Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, England, America, and even in farthest India.” The author continues: “God is Spirit,46 and those who worship him must worship him in the spirit and in truth. After these examinations and avowals I leave it to each man to judge who is of the true Church, and who not.”47

From this remarkable excursus we learn, first of all, that the “centre” unites the four and the seven into one.48 The unifying agent is the spirit Mercurius, and this singular spirit then causes the author to confess himself a member of the Ecclesia spiritualis, for the spirit is God. This religious background is already apparent in the choice of the term “Pelican” for the circular process, since this bird is a well-known allegory of Christ.49 The idea of Mercurius as a peacemaker, the mediator between the warring elements and producer of unity, probably goes back to Ephesians 2 : 13ff.:

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of two, so making peace, and might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer

strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you are also built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. [RSV]50

In elucidating the alchemical parallel we should note that the author of the scholia to the “Tractatus aureus Hermetis” prefaces his account of the union of opposites with the following remark:

Finally, there will appear in the work that ardently desired blue or cerulean colour, which does not darken or dull the eyes of the beholder by the healing power of its brilliance, as when we see the splendour of the outward sun. Rather does it sharpen and strengthen them, nor does he [Mercurius] slay a man with his glance like the basilisk, but by the shedding of his own blood he calls back those who are near to death, and restores to them unimpaired their former life, like the pelican.51

Mercurius is conceived as “spiritual blood,”52 on the analogy of the blood of Christ. In Ephesians those who are separated “are brought near in the blood of Christ.” He makes the two one and has broken down the dividing wall “in his flesh.” Caro (flesh)53 is a synonym for the prima materia and hence for Mercurius. The “one” is a “new man.” He reconciles the two “in one body,”54 an idea which is figuratively represented in alchemy as the two-headed hermaphrodite. The two have one spirit, in alchemy they have one soul. Further, the lapis is frequently compared to Christ as the lapis angularis (cornerstone).55 As we know, the temple built upon the foundation of the saints inspired in the Shepherd of Hermas a vision of the great building into which human beings, streaming from the four quarters, inserted themselves as living stones, melting into it “without seam.”56 The Church is built upon the rock that gave Peter his name (Matthew 16 : 18).

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

Accordingly Mercurius, in the crude form of the prima materia, is in very truth the Original Man disseminated through the physical world, and in his sublimated form he is that reconstituted totality.62 Altogether, he is very like the redeemer of the Basilidians, who mounts upward through the planetary spheres, conquering them or robbing them of their power. The remark that he contains the powers of Sol reminds us of the above-mentioned passage in Abu’l-Qasim, where Hermes says that he unites the sun and the planets and causes them to be within him as a crown. This may be the origin of the designation of the lapis as the “crown of victory.”63 The “power of Above and Below” refers to that ancient authority the “Tabula smaragdina,” which is of Alexandrian origin.64 Besides this, our text contains allusions to the Song of Songs: “through the streets and houses of the planets” recalls Song of Songs 3 : 2: “I will . . . go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.”65 The “white and red” of Mercurius refers to 5 : 10: “My beloved is white and ruddy.” He is likened to the “matrimonium” or coniunctio; that is to say he is this marriage on account of his androgynous form.

THE ORPHAN, THE WIDOW, AND THE MOON

In the text cited at the end of the last section Dorn continues: “Hermes Trismegistus called the stone ‘orphan’.”66 “Orphan” as the name of a precious stone is found in Albertus Magnus. The stone was called “orphan” because of its uniqueness—“it was never seen elsewhere”—and it was said to be in the Emperor’s crown. It was “wine-coloured” and sometimes shone in the night, “but nowadays it does not shine [any more] in the darkness.”67 As Albertus Magnus was an authority on alchemy, he may have been the direct source both for Dorn and for Petrus Bonus (see n. 66). “Orphan” as the name of a gem may therefore mean something like the modern “solitaire”—a very apt name for the unique lapis Philosophorum. Apart from Dorn and Petrus Bonus, it seems that this name is found only in the Carmina Heliodori.68 There it refers to the (homeless orphan) who is slain at the beginning of the work for purposes of transformation.
The terms “son of the widow” and “children of the widow” appear to be of Manichaean origin. The Manichaeans themselves were called “children of the widow.”69 The “orphan” referred to by Hermes must therefore have for his counterpart a vidua (widow) as the prima materia. For this there are synonyms such as mater, matrix, Venus, regina, femina, virgo, puella praegnans, “virgin in the centre of the earth,”70 Luna,71 meretrix (whore), vetula (old woman), more specifically vetula extenuata (enfeebled, exhausted),72 Mater Alchimia, “who is dropsical in the lower limbs and paralysed from the knees down,”73 and finally virago. All these synonyms allude to the virginal or maternal quality of the prima materia, which exists without a man74 and yet is the “matter of all things.”75 Above all, the prima materia is the mother of the lapis, the filius philosophorum. Michael Maier76 mentions the treatise of an anonymous author Delphinas, which he dates to some time before 1447.77 He stresses that this author insisted particularly on the mother-son incest. Maier even constructs a genealogical tree showing the origin of the seven metals. At the top of the tree is the lapis. Its father is “Gabritius,” who in turn was born of Isis and Osiris. After the death of Osiris Isis married their son Gabritius;78 she is identified with Beya—“the widow marries her son.” The widow appears here as the classical figure of the mourning Isis. To this event Maier devotes a special “Epithalamium in Honour of the Nuptials of the Mother Beya and Her Son Gabritius.”79 “But this marriage, which was begun with

the expression of great joyfulness, ended in the bitterness of mourning,” says Maier, adding the verses:

Within the flower itself there grows the gnawing canker:

Where honey is, there gall, where swelling breast, the chancre.80

For, “when the son sleeps with the mother, she kills him with the stroke of a viper” (viperino conatu). This viciousness recalls the murderous role of Isis,81 who laid the “noble worm” in the path of the heavenly Father, Ra.82 Isis, however, is also the healer, for she not only cured Ra of the poisoning but put together the dismembered Osiris. As such she personifies that arcane substance, be it dew83 or the aqua permanens84 which unites the hostile elements into one. This synthesis is described in the myth of Isis, “who collected the scattered limbs of his body and bathed them with her tears and laid them in a secret grave beneath the bank of the Nile.”85 The cognomen of Isis was , the Black One.86 Apuleius stresses the blackness of her robe (palla nigerrima, ‘robe of deepest black’),87 and since ancient times she was reputed to possess the elixir of life88 as well as being adept in sundry magical arts.89 She was also called the Old One,90 and she was rated a pupil of Hermes,91 or even his daughter.92 She appears as a teacher of alchemy in the treatise “Isis the Prophetess to her Son Horus.”93 She is mentioned in the role of a whore in Epiphanius, where she is said to have prostituted herself in Tyre.94 She signifies earth, according to Firmicus Maternus,95 and was equated with Sophia.96 She is , ‘thousand-named’, the vessel and the matter () of good and evil.97 She is the moon.98 An inscription invokes her as “the One, who art All.”99 She is named , the redemptrix.100 In Athenagoras she is “the nature of the Aeon, whence all things grew and by which all things are.”101

All these statements apply just as well to the prima materia in its feminine aspect: it is the moon, the mother of all things, the vessel, it consists of opposites, has a thousand names, is an old woman and a whore, as Mater Alchimia it is wisdom and teaches wisdom, it contains the elixir of life in potentia and is the mother of the Saviour and of the filius Macrocosmi, it is the earth and the serpent hidden in the earth, the blackness and the dew and the miraculous water which brings together all that is divided. The water is therefore called “mother,” “my mother who is my enemy,” but who also “gathers together all my divided and scattered

limbs.”102 The Turba says (Sermo LIX):

Nevertheless the Philosophers have put to death the woman who slays her husbands, for the body of that woman is full of weapons and poison. Let a grave be dug for that dragon, and let that woman be buried with him, he being chained fast to that woman; and the more he winds and coils himself about her, the more will he be cut to pieces by the female weapons which are fashioned in the body of the woman. And when he sees that he is mingled with the limbs of the woman, he will be certain of death, and will be changed wholly into blood. But when the Philosophers see him changed into blood, they leave him a few days in the sun, until his softness is consumed, and the blood dries, and they find that poison. What then appears, is the hidden wind.103

The coniunctio can therefore take more gruesome forms than the relatively harmless one depicted in the Rosarium.104

It is clear from these parallels that Maier was fully justified in giving the name Isis to the prima materia or feminine transformative substance.105 As Kerényi has brilliantly shown, using the example of Medea,106 there is in that myth a typical combination of various motifs: love, trickery, cruelty, motherliness, murder of relatives and children, magic, rejuvenation, and— gold.107 This same combination appears in Isis and in the prima materia and forms the core of the drama instigated by the mother-world, without which no union seems possible.
In Christian tradition the widow signifies the Church; in St. Gregory108 the analogy is the story of the widow’s cruse of oil (II Kings 4). St. Augustine says: “The whole Church is one widow, desolate in this world.”109 She “lacketh a husband, lacketh a man,” for her bridegroom has not yet come. So too the soul is “destitute in the world.” “But,” Augustine continues, “thou art not an orphan, thou art not reckoned as a widow . . .

Thou hast a friend . . . Thou art God’s orphan, God’s widow.”110

Another tradition to be considered in regard to the widow is the Cabala. There the abandoned Malchuth is the widow, as Knorr von Rosenroth says: “[Almanah] Widow. This is Malchuth, when Tifereth is not with her.”111 Tifereth112 is the son113 and is interpreted by Reuchlin as the Microcosm. Malchuth114 is Domina, the Mistress.115 She is also called Shekinah,116 the “indwelling” (of God), and virago.117 The Sefira Tifereth is the King, and in

the usual arrangement of the Sefiroth he occupies the second place:

Kether Tifereth Yesod Malchuth.

Kether, the Crown, corresponds to the upward-growing root of the Tree of the Sefiroth.118 Yesod119 signifies the genital region of the Original Man, whose head is Kether. Malchuth, conforming to the archetypal pattern, is the underlying feminine principle.120 In this wicked world ruled by evil Tifereth is not united with Malchuth.121 But the coming Messiah will reunite the King with the Queen, and this mating will restore to God his original unity.122 The Cabala develops an elaborate hierosgamos fantasy which expatiates on the union of the soul with the Sefiroth of the worlds of light and darkness, “for the desire of the upper world for the God-fearing man is as the loving desire of a man for his wife, when he woos her.”123 Conversely, the Shekinah is present in the sexual act:

The absconditus sponsus enters into the body of the woman and is joined with the abscondita sponsa. This is true also on the reverse side of the process, so that two spirits are melted together and are interchanged constantly between body and body. . . . In the indistinguishable state which arises it may be said almost that the male is with the female, neither male nor female,124 at least they are both or either. So is man affirmed to be composed of the world above, which is male, and of the female world below. The same is true of woman.125

The Cabala also speaks of the thalamus (bride chamber) or nuptial canopy beneath which sponsus and sponsa are consecrated, Yesod acting as paranymphus (best man).126 Directly or indirectly the Cabala was assimilated into alchemy. Relationships must have existed between them at a very early date, though it is difficult to trace them in the sources. Late in the sixteenth century we come upon direct quotations from the Zohar, for instance in the treatise “De igne et sale” by Blasius Vigenerus.127 One passage in this treatise is of especial interest to us as it concerns the mythologem of the coniunctio:

[The Sefiroth] end in Malchuth or the moon, who is the last to descend and the first to ascend from the elemental world. For the moon is the way to heaven, so much so that the Pythagoreans named her the heavenly earth and the earthly heaven or star,128 because in the elemental world all inferior nature in respect to the heavenly, and the heavenly in respect to the intelligible world, is, as the Zohar says, feminine and passive, and is as the moon to the sun. In the same measure as [the moon] withdraws from the sun, until she is in opposition to him, so does her light increase in relation to us in this lower world, but diminishes on the side that looks upwards. Contrariwise, in her conjunction, when she is totally darkened for us, she is fully illuminated on that side which faces the sun. This should teach us that the more our intellect descends to the things of sense, the more it is turned away from intelligible things, and the reverse likewise.129

The identification of Malchuth with Luna forms a link with alchemy, and is another example of the process by which the patristic symbolism of sponsus and sponsa had been assimilated much earlier. At the same time, it is a repetition of the way the originally pagan hierosgamos was absorbed into the figurative language of the Church Fathers. But Vigenerus adds something that seems to be lacking in patristic allegory, namely the darkening of the other half of the moon during her opposition. When the moon turns upon us her fullest radiance, her other side is in complete darkness. This strict application of the Sol-Luna allegory might have been an embarrassment to the Church, although the idea of the “dying” Church does take account, to a certain extent, of the transience of all created things.130 I do not mention this fact in order to criticize the significance of the ecclesiastical Sol-Luna allegory. On the contrary I want to emphasize it, because the moon, standing on the borders of the sublunary world ruled by evil, has a share not only in the world of light but also in the daemonic world of darkness, as our author clearly hints. That is why her changefulness is so significant symbolically: she is duplex and mutable like Mercurius, and is like him a mediator; hence their identification in alchemy.131 Though Mercurius has a bright side concerning whose spirituality alchemy leaves us in no doubt, he also has a dark side, and its roots go deep.

The quotation from Vigenerus bears no little resemblance to a long

passage on the phases of the moon in Augustine.132 Speaking of the unfavourable aspect of the moon, which is her changeability, he paraphrases Ecclesiasticus 27 : 12 with the words: “The wise man remaineth stable as the sun, but a fool is changed as the moon,”133 and poses the question: “Who then is that fool who changeth as the moon, but Adam, in whom all have sinned?”134 For Augustine, therefore, the moon is manifestly an ally of corruptible creatures, reflecting their folly and inconstancy. Since, for the men of antiquity and the Middle Ages, comparison with the stars or planets tacitly presupposes astrological causality, the sun causes constancy and wisdom, while the moon is the cause of change and folly (including lunacy).135 Augustine attaches to his remarks about the moon a moral observation concerning the relationship of man to the spiritual sun,136 just as Vigenerus did, who was obviously acquainted with Augustine’s epistles. He also mentions (Epistola LV, 10) the Church as Luna, and he connects the moon with the wounding by an arrow: “Whence it is said: They have made ready their arrows in the quiver, to shoot in the darkness of the moon at the upright of heart.”137 It is clear that Augustine did not understand the wounding as the activity of the new moon herself but, in accordance with the principle “omne malum ab homine,” as the result of man’s wickedness. All the same, the addition “in obscura luna,” for which there is no warrant in the original text, shows how much the new moon is involved. This hint of the admitted dangerousness of the moon is confirmed when Augustine, a few sentences later on, cites Psalm 71 : 7: “In his days justice shall flourish, and abundance of peace, until the moon shall be destroyed.”138 Instead of the strong “interficiatur” the Vulgate has the milder “auferatur”—shall be taken away or fail.139 The violent way in which the moon is removed is explained by the interpretation that immediately follows: “That is, the abundance of peace shall grow until it consumes all changefulness of mortality.” From this it is evident that the moon’s nature expressly partakes of the “changefulness of mortality,” which is equivalent to death, and therefore the text continues: “For then the last enemy, death, shall be destroyed, and whatever resists us on account of the weakness of the flesh shall be utterly consumed.” Here the destruction of the moon is manifestly equivalent to the destruction of death.140 The moon and death significantly reveal their affinity. Death came into the world through original sin and the seductiveness of woman (= moon), and mutability led to corruptibility.141 To eliminate the moon from Creation is

therefore as desirable as the elimination of death. This negative assessment of the moon takes full account of her dark side. The “dying” of the Church is also connected with the mystery of the moon’s darkness.142 Augustine’s cautious and perhaps not altogether unconscious disguising of the sinister aspect of the moon would be sufficiently explained by his respect for the Ecclesia-Luna equation.

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 coniugii”143 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.

The changefulness of the moon and her ability to grow dark are interpreted as her corruptibility, and this negative quality can even darken the sun. The text continues:

During the increase, that is during the fullness of the blackness of the lead, which is our ore, my light149 is absent, and my splendour is put out.

Then comes a passage which may have inspired the picture of the death of the royal pair in the Rosarium, but which is also significant as regards the dark side of the conjunction of Sol and Luna:150

After this151 is completed, you will know that you have the substance which penetrates all substances, and the nature which contains nature, and the nature which rejoices in nature.152 It is named the Tyriac153 of the Philosophers, and it is also called the poisonous serpent, because, like this, it bites off the head of the male in the lustful heat of conception, and giving birth it dies and is divided through the midst. So also the

moisture of the moon,154 when she receives his light, slays the sun, and at the birth of the child of the Philosophers she dies likewise, and at death the two parents yield up their souls to the son, and die and pass away. And the parents are the food of the son . . .

In this psychologem all the implications of the Sol-Luna allegory are carried to their logical conclusion. The daemonic quality which is connected with the dark side of the moon, or with her position midway between heaven and the sublunary world,155 displays its full effect. Sun and moon reveal their antithetical nature, which in the Christian Sol-Luna relationship is so obscured as to be unrecognizable, and the two opposites cancel each other out, their impact resulting—in accordance with the laws of energetics—in the birth of a third and new thing, a son who resolves the antagonisms of the parents and is himself a “united double nature.” The unknown author of the “Consilium”156 was not conscious of the close connection of his psychologem with the process of transubstantiation, although the last sentence of the text contains clearly enough the motif of teoqualo, the “god-eating” of the Aztecs.157 This motif is also found in ancient Egypt. The Pyramid text of Unas (Vth dynasty) says: “Unas rising as a soul, like a god who liveth upon his fathers and feedeth upon his mothers.”158 It should be noted how alchemy put in the place of the Christian sponsus and sponsa an image of totality that on the one hand was material, and on the other was spiritual and corresponded to the Paraclete. In addition, there was a certain trend in the direction of an Ecclesia spiritualis. The alchemical equivalent of the God-Man and the Son of God was Mercurius, who as an hermaphrodite contained in himself both the feminine element, Sapientia and matter, and the masculine, the Holy Ghost and the devil. There are relations in alchemy with the Holy Ghost Movement which flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was chiefly connected with the name of Joachim of Flora (1145–1202), who expected the imminent coming of the “third kingdom,” namely that of the Holy Ghost.159
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, Cupid’s arrow.161 These

ideas explain the strange picture in Reusner’s Pandora,162 showing Christ being pierced with a lance by a crowned virgin whose body ends in a serpent’s 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

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 moon’s darkness play a great part. The animals assigned to her—stag, lion, and cock 172—are 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.

The sponsa is the dark new moon—in Christian interpretation the Church in the nuptial embrace 175—and 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:

By heart is signified love, which is said to be in the heart, and the container is put in the place of the contained; and this metaphor is taken from the lover who loves his beloved exceeding much, so that his heart is wounded with love. So was Christ upon the cross wounded for love of his Church:176 “Thou didst first wound my heart when I was scourged for

thy love, that I might make thee my sister. . . . Again thou didst wound my heart with one of thine eyes177 when, hanging upon the cross, I was wounded for love of thee, that I might make thee my bride to share my glory.”178

The moment of the eclipse and mystic marriage is death on the cross. In the Middle Ages the cross was therefore logically understood as the mother. Thus in the Middle English “Dispute between Mary and the Cross,” the cross is a “false tree” that destroyed Mary’s fruit with a deadly drink. She laments: “My sonys stepmodir I thee calle.” Sancta Crux replies:

Lady, to thee I owe honour . . .

Thi fruyt me florysschith in blood colour.179

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 Christ’s 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 condemnation—in 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

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

Luna is diminished that she may fill the elements. Therefore is this a great mystery. To her it was given by him who confers grace upon all things. He emptied her that he might fill her, as he also emptied himself that he might fill all things. He emptied himself that he might come down to us. He came down to us that he might rise again for all. . . .

Thus has Luna proclaimed the mystery of Christ.194

Thus the changefulness of the moon is paralleled by the transformation of the pre-existent Christ from a divine into a human figure through the “emptying,” that passage in Philippians (2 : 6) which has aroused so much comment: “. . . who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be clung to, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (RSV / DV).195 Even the most tortuous explanations of theology have never improved on the lapidary paradox of St. Hilary: “Deus homo, immortalis mortuus, aeternus sepultus” (God-man, immortaldead, eternal-buried).196 According to Ephraem Syrus, the kenosis had the reverse effect of unburdening Creation: “Because the creatures were weary of bearing the prefigurations of his glory, he disburdened them of those prefigurations, even as he had

disburdened the womb that bore him.”197

St. Ambrose’s 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 beloved’s countenance in Song of Songs 1 : 4–

5. 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

ALCHEMY AND MANICHAEISM

At the beginning of the last section I mentioned the term “orphan” for the lapis. Here the motif of the unknown or absent father seems to be of special importance. Mani is the best-known example of the “son of the widow.” His original name was said to be (Cubricus); later he changed it to Manes, a Babylonian word meaning “vessel.”201 As a four- year-old boy he was sold as a slave to a rich widow. She came to love him, and later adopted him and made him her heir. Together with her wealth he inherited the “serpent’s poison” of his doctrine—the four books of Scythianos, the original master of his adoptive father Terebinthos, named “Budda.”202 Of this Scythianos there is a legendary biography which equates him with Simon Magus;203 like him, he is said to have come to Jerusalem at the time of the apostles. He propounded a dualistic doctrine which, according to Epiphanius,204 was concerned with pairs of opposites: “white and black, yellow and green, moist and dry, heaven and earth, night and day, soul and body, good and evil, right and wrong.” From these books Mani concocted his pernicious heresy which poisoned the nations. “Cubricus” is very like the alchemical Kybrius,205 Gabricus,206 Kibrich,207 Kybrich, Kibric,208 Kybrig, Kebrick,209 Alkibric,210 Kibrit,211 Kibrith,212 Gabricius, Gabrius,213 Thabritius, Thabritis,214 and so on.215 The Arabic word

kibrit means sulphur.

In the Aurora consurgens “sulphur nigrum” stands side by side with “vetula,” the first being a synonym for spirit and the second for soul. Together they form a pair roughly comparable to the devil and his grandmother. This relationship also occurs in Rosencreutz’s Chymical Wedding,216 where a black king sits beside a veiled old woman. The “black sulphur” is a pejorative name for the active, masculine substance of Mercurius and points to its dark, saturnine nature, which is evil.217 This is the wicked Moorish king of the Chymical Wedding, who makes the king’s daughter his concubine (meretrix), the “Ethiopian” of other treatises,218 analogous to the “Egyptian” in the “Passio Perpetuae,”219 who from the Christian point of view is the devil. He is the activated darkness of matter, the umbra Solis (shadow of the sun), which represents the virginal-maternal prima materia. When the doctrine of the “Increatum”220 began to play a role in alchemy during the sixteenth century, it gave rise to a dualism which might be compared with the Manichaean teaching.221
In the Manichaean system matter (hyle) is personified by the dark, fluid, human body of the evil principle. As St. Augustine says, the substance of evil “had its own hideous and formless bulk, either gross which they called earth, or thin and tenuous like the air; for they imagine it to be some malignant mind creeping over the earth.”222 The Manichaean doctrine of the Anthropos shares the dual form of its Christ figure with alchemy, in so far as the latter also has a dualistic redeemer: Christ as saviour of man (Microcosm), and the lapis Philosophorum as saviour of the Macrocosm. The doctrine presupposes on the one hand a Christ incapable of suffering (impatibilis), who takes care of souls, and on the other hand a Christ capable of suffering (patibilis),223 whose role is something like that of a spiritus vegetativus, or of Mercurius.224 This spirit is imprisoned in the body of the princes of darkness and is freed as follows by angelic beings who dwell in the sun and moon: assuming alternately male and female form they excite the desires of the wicked and cause them to break out in a sweat of fear, which falls upon the earth and fertilizes the vegetation.225 In this manner the heavenly light-material is freed from the dark bodies and passes into plant form.226
The inflammation by desire has its analogy in the alchemist’s 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.

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 spirit—truly a labour of Hercules! In Dorn’s words:

Learn therefore, O Mind, to practise sympathetic love in regard to thine own body, by restraining its vain appetites, that it may be apt with thee in all things. To this end I shall labour, that it may drink with thee from the fountain of strength,233 and, when the two are made one, that ye find peace in their union. Draw nigh, O Body, to this fountain, that with thy Mind thou mayest drink to satiety and hereafter thirst no more after vanities. O wondrous efficacy of this fount, which maketh one of two, and peace between enemies! The fount of love can make mind out of spirit and soul, but this maketh one man of mind and body.234

II

THE PARADOXA

THE ARCANE SUBSTANCE AND THE POINT

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
Further paradoxes: “I am the black of the white and the red of the white and the yellow of the red”;9 or “The principle of the art is the raven, who flies without wings in the blackness of night and in the brightness of day.”10 The stone is “cold and moist in its manifest part, and in its hidden part is hot and dry.”11 “In lead is the dead life,”12 or “Burn in water and wash in fire.”13 The “Allegoriae sapientum” speak of two figures, one of which is “white and lacking a shadow, the other red and lacking the redness.”14 A

quotation from “Socrates” runs: “Seek the coldness of the moon and ye shall find the heat of the sun.”15 The opus is said to be “a running without running, moving without motion.”16 “Make mercury with mercury.”17 The philosophical tree has its roots in the air18 (this is probably a reference to the tree of the Sefiroth). That paradox and ambivalence are the keynotes of the whole work is shown by The Chymical Wedding: over the main portal of the castle two words are written: “Congratulor, Condoleo.”19

The paradoxical qualities of Mercurius have already been discussed in a separate study.20 As Mercurius is the principal name for the arcane substance, he deserves mention here as the paradox par excellence. What is said of him is obviously true of the lapis, which is merely another synonym for the “thousand-named” arcane substance. As the “Tractatus aureus de Lapide” says: “Our matter has as many names as there are things in the world.”21 The arcane substance is also synonymous with the Monad and the Son of Man mentioned in Hippolytus:

Monoïmos . . . thinks that there is some such Man of whom the poet speaks as Oceanus, when he says: Oceanus, origin of gods and origin of men.22 Putting this into other words, he says that the Man is all, the source of the universe, unbegotten, incorruptible, everlasting; and that there is a Son of the aforesaid Man, who is begotten and capable of suffering, and whose birth is outside time, neither willed nor predetermined. . . .23 This Man is a single Monad, uncompounded and indivisible, yet compounded and divisible; loving and at peace with all things yet warring with all things and at war with itself in all things; unlike and like itself, as it were a musical harmony containing all things;

. . . showing forth all things and giving birth to all things. It is its own mother, its own father, the two immortal names. The emblem of the whole man (), says Monoïmos, is the jot or tittle.24 This one tittle is the uncompounded, simple, unmixed Monad, having its composition from nothing whatsoever, yet composed of many forms, of many parts. That single, undivided jot is the many-faced, thousand-eyed, and thousand-named jot of the iota. This is the emblem of that perfect and invisible Man. . . . The Son of the Man is the one iota, the one jot flowing from on high, full and filling all things, containing in himself everything that is in the Man, the Father of the Son of the Man.25

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 Monoïmos. 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

The mystery of the smallest written sign, the point, is also known to alchemy. The point is the symbol of a mysterious creative centre in nature. The author of the “Novum lumen”29 admonishes his reader:

But you, dear reader, you will have above all to consider the point in nature . . . and you need nothing else, but take care lest you seek that point in the vulgar metals, where it is not. For these metals, the common gold more especially, are dead. But our metals are alive, they have a spirit, and they are the ones you must take. For know that fire is the life of the metals.

The point is identical with the prima materia of the metals, which is a “fatty water” (aqua pinguis), the latter being a product of the moist and the hot.

John Dee (1527–1607) speculates as follows: “It is not unreasonable to suppose, that by the four straight lines which run in opposite directions from a single, individual point, the mystery of the four elements is indicated.” According to him, the quaternity consists of four straight lines meeting in a right angle. “Things and beings have their first origin in the point and the monad.”30 The centre of nature is “the point originated by God,”31 the “sun-point” in the egg.32 This, a commentary on the Turba says, is the “germ of the egg in the yolk.”33 Out of this little point, says Dorn in his “Physica Genesis,” the wisdom of God made with the creative Word the “huge machine” of the world.34 The “Consilium coniugii” remarks that the point is the chick (pullus).35 Mylius adds that this is the bird of Hermes,36 or the spirit Mercurius. The same author places the soul in the “midpoint of the heart” together with the spirit, which he compares with the angel who was “infused with the soul at this point” (i.e., in the womb).37 Paracelsus says that the “anima iliastri” dwells in the fire in the heart. It is “incapable of suffering,” whereas the “anima cagastris” is capable of suffering and is located in the water of the pericardium.38 Just as earth corresponds to the

triangle and water to the line, so fire corresponds to the point.39 Democritus stresses that fire consists of “fiery globules.”40 Light, too, has this round form, hence the designation “sun-point.” This point is on the one hand the world’s centre, “the salt-point in the midst of the great fabric of the whole world,” as Khunrath calls it (salt = Sapientia). Yet it is “not only the bond but also the destroyer of all destructible things.” Hence this “world-egg is the ancient Saturn, the . . . most secret lead of the sages,” and the “ambisexual Philosophic Man of the Philosophers, the Catholick Androgyne of the Sophists,” the Rebis, etc.41 The most perfect form is round, because it is modelled on the point. The sun is round and so is fire, since it is composed of the “fiery globules” of Democritus. God fashioned the sphere of light round himself. “God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”42 The point symbolizes light and fire, also the Godhead in so far as light is an “image of God” or an “exemplar of the Deity.” This spherical light modelled on the point is also the “shining or illuminating body” that dwells in the heart of man. The light of nature is the “radical moisture” (humidum radicale) which, as “balsam,” works from the heart, like the sun in the macrocosm and, we must conclude, like God in the “supracelestial world.” Thus does Steeb describe the , the “second God” in man.43 The same author derives the gold from the dew or supracelestial balsam sinking into the earth. Here he is probably referring to the older formulations of Maier,44 where the sun generates the gold in the earth. Hence the gold, as Maier says, obtains a “simplicity” approaching that of the circle (symbol of eternity) and the indivisible point. The gold has a “circular form.”45 “This is the line which runs back upon itself, like the snake that with its head bites its own tail, wherein that supreme and eternal painter and potter, God, may rightly be discerned.”46 The gold is a “twice-bisected circle,” i.e., one divided into four quadrants and therefore a quaternity, a division made by nature “that contraries may be bound together by contraries.”47 It can therefore, he says, be compared to the “sacred city,” Jerusalem48 (cf.

Revelation 21 : 10ff.). It is “a golden castle engirt with a triple wall,”49 “a visible image of eternity.”50 “Though gold be mute so far as sound or voice is concerned, yet by virtue of its essence it proclaims and everywhere bears witness to God.” And just as God is “one in essence,” so the gold is “one homogeneous substance.”51 For Dorn the unity of God,52 the “unarius,” is the “centre of the ternarius,” the latter corresponding to the circle drawn round

the centre.53 The point as the centre of the quaternio of the elements is the place where Mercurius “digests and perfects.”54

2. THE SCINTILLA

The point is identical with the ,55 scintilla, the “little soul-spark” of Meister Eckhart.56 We find it already in the teachings of Saturninus.57 Similarly Heraclitus, “the physicist,” is said to have conceived the soul as a “spark of stellar essence.”58 Hippolytus says that in the doctrine of the Sethians the darkness “held the brightness and the spark of light in thrall,”59 and that this “smallest of sparks” was finely mingled in the dark waters60 below.61 Simon Magus62 likewise teaches that in semen and milk there is a very small spark which “increases and becomes a power63 boundless and immutable.”64
Alchemy, too, has its doctrine of the scintilla. In the first place it is the fiery centre of the earth, where the four elements “project their seed in ceaseless movement.” “For all things have their origin in this source, and nothing in the whole world is born save from this source.” In the centre dwells the Archaeus, “the servant of nature,” whom Paracelsus also calls Vulcan, identifying him with the Adech, the “great man.”65 The Archaeus, the creative centre of the earth, is hermaphroditic like the Protanthropos, as is clear from the epilogue to the “Novum lumen” of Sendivogius: “When a man is illuminated by the light of nature, the mist vanishes from his eyes, and without difficulty he may behold the point of our magnet, which corresponds to both centres of the rays, that is, those of the sun and the earth.” This cryptic sentence is elucidated by the following example: When you place a twelve-year-old boy side by side with a girl of the same age, and dressed the same, you cannot distinguish between them. But take their clothes off66 and the difference will become apparent.67 According to this, the centre consists in a conjunction of male and female. This is confirmed in a text by Abraham Eleazar,68 where the arcane substance laments being in the state of nigredo:

Through Cham,69 the Egyptian, I must pass. . . . Noah must wash me . . . in the deepest sea, that my blackness may depart. . . . I must be fixed to this black cross, and must be cleansed therefrom with wretchedness and vinegar, and made white, that . . . my heart may shine like a carbuncle,

and the old Adam come forth from me again. O! Adam Kadmon, how beautiful art thou! . . . Like Kedar I am black henceforth, ah! how long! O come, my Mesech,70 and disrobe me, that mine inner beauty may be revealed. . . . O Shulamite, afflicted within and without, the watchmen of the great city will find thee and wound thee, and rob thee of thy garments . . . and take away thy veil. Who then will lead me out from Edom, from thy stout wall? . . . Yet shall I be blissful again when I am delivered from the poison wherewith I am accursed, and my inmost seed and first birth comes forth. . . . For its father is the sun, and its mother the moon.71

It is clear from this text that the “hidden” thing, the invisible centre, is Adam Kadmon, the Original Man of Jewish gnosis. It is he who laments in the “prisons” of the darkness,72 and who is personified by the black Shulamite of the Song of Songs. He is the product of the conjunction of sun and moon.
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 fish’s 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 fish’s 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 strengthen 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.

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 Steeb’s 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 siddhaśila of Jainism: “The loka [world] is held in the middle of the aloka [void], in the form of the trunk of a man, with siddhaśila at the top, the place where the head should be. This siddhaśila is the abode of the omniscient souls, and may be called the spiritual eye of the universe.”98

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
In his chapter on knowledge,102 Dorn uses the concept of the scintillae in moral form: “Let every man consider diligently in his heart what has been said above, and thus little by little he will come to see with his mental

eyes a number of sparks shining day by day and more and more and growing into such a great light that thereafter all things needful to him will be made known.” This light is the “light of nature.” As Dorn says in his “Philosophia meditativa”:

What madness deludes you? For in you, and not proceeding from you, he wills all this to be found, which you seek outside you and not within yourselves. Such is the vice of the common man, to despise everything his own, and always to lust after the strange. . . . The life, the light of men, shineth in us, albeit dimly, and as though in darkness.103 It is not to be sought as proceeding from us, though it is in us and not of us,104 but of Him to Whom it belongeth, Who hath deigned to make us his dwelling place. . . . He hath implanted that light in us that we may see in its light the light of Him who dwelleth in light inaccessible, and that we may excel his other creatures. In this especially we are made like unto Him, that He hath given us a spark of His light. Thus the truth is to be sought not in ourselves, but in the image of God105 which is within us.106

In Dorn’s 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 man’s 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

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 God’s command 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 Monoïmos and Khunrath. The teachings of Monoïmos were completely unknown in the Middle Ages,120 and yet Khunrath hit upon very similar thoughts which can hardly be ascribed to tradition.

3. THE ENIGMA OF BOLOGNA121

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. D. M.

Aelia Laelia Crispis, nec mulier, nec androgyna, nec puella, nec iuvenis, nec anus, nec casta, nec meretrix, nec pudica, sed omnia.

Sublata neque fame, nec ferro, nec veneno, sed omnibus.—Nec coelo, nec aquis, nec terris, sed ubique iacet.

Lucius Agatho Priscius, nec maritus, nec amator, nec necessarius, neque moerens, neque gaudens, neque flens, hanc neque molem, nec pyramidem, nec sepulchrum, sed omnia.

Scit et nescit, (quid) cui posuerit.

(Hoc est sepulchrum, intus cadaver non habens.

Hoc est cadaver, sepulchrum extra non habens.

Sed cadaver idem est et sepulchrum sibi.)

Aelia Laelia Crispis, neither man nor woman, nor mongrel, nor maid, nor boy, nor crone, nor chaste, nor whore, nor virtuous, but all.

Carried away neither by hunger, nor by sword, nor by poison, but by all.—Neither in heaven, nor in earth, nor in water, but everywhere is her resting place.

Lucius Agatho Priscius, neither husband, nor lover, nor kinsman, neither mourning, nor rejoicing, nor weeping, (raised up) neither mound, nor pyramid, nor tomb, but all.

He knows and knows not (what)123 he raised up to whom.

(This is a tomb that has no body in it.

This is a body that has no tomb round it.

But body and tomb are the same.)

Let it be said at once: this epitaph is sheer nonsense, a joke,124 but one that for centuries brilliantly fulfilled its function as a flypaper for every conceivable projection that buzzed in the human mind. It gave rise to a “cause célèbre,” a regular psychological “affair” that lasted for the greater part of two centuries and produced a spate of commentaries, finally coming to an inglorious end as one of the spurious texts of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and thereafter passing into oblivion. The reason why I am digging up this curiosity again in the twentieth century is that it serves as a paradigm for that peculiar attitude of mind which made it

possible for the men of the Middle Ages to write hundreds of treatises about something that did not exist and was therefore completely unknowable. The interesting thing is not this futile stalking-horse but the projections it aroused. There is revealed in them an extraordinary propensity to come out with the wildest fantasies and speculations—a psychic condition which is met with today, in a correspondingly erudite milieu, only as an isolated pathological phenomenon. In such cases one always finds that the unconscious is under some kind of pressure and is charged with highly affective contents. Sometimes a differential diagnosis as between tomfoolery and creativity is difficult to make, and it happens again and again that the two are confused.

Such phenomena, whether historical or individual, cannot be explained by causality alone, but must also be considered from the point of view of what happened afterwards. Everything psychic is pregnant with the future. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of transition from a world founded on metaphysics to an era of immanentist explanatory principles, the motto no longer being “omne animal a Deo” but “omne vivum ex ovo.” What was then brewing in the unconscious came to fruition in the tremendous development of the natural sciences, whose youngest sister is empirical psychology. Everything that was naively presumed to be a knowledge of transcendental and divine things, which human beings can never know with certainty, and everything that seemed to be irretrievably lost with the decline of the Middle Ages, rose up again with the discovery of the psyche. This premonition of future discoveries in the psychic sphere expressed itself in the phantasmagoric speculations of philosophers who, until then, had appeared to be the arch-pedlars of sterile verbiage.
However nonsensical and insipid the Aelia-Laelia epitaph may look, it becomes significant when we regard it as a question which no less than two centuries have asked themselves: What is it that you do not understand and can only be expressed in unfathomable paradoxes?
Naturally I do not lay this question at the door of that unknown humorist who perpetrated this “practical joke.” It existed long before him in alchemy. Nor would he ever have dreamt that his joke would become a cause célèbre, or that it would lead his contemporaries and successors to question the nature of the psychic background—a question which, in the distant future, was to replace the certainties of revealed truth. He was only a

causa instrumentalis, and his victims, as naïve and innocent as himself, made their first, involuntary steps as psychologists.

It seems that the first report of the Aelia-Laelia inscription appeared in the treatise of a certain Marius L. Michael Angelus, of Venice, in the year 1548, and as early as 1683125 Caesar Malvasius126 had collected no less than forty-five127 attempts at interpretation. In alchemical literature, the treatise of the physician Nicholas Barnaud, of Crest (Dauphiné), who lived in the second half of the sixteenth century, has been preserved. He gave an alchemical interpretation of the inscription in, it appears, 1597.128 To begin with, I shall keep to his interpretation and that of the learned Michael Maier.
Maier maintains that Aelia and Laelia represent two persons who are united in a single subject, named Crispis. Barnaud calls Aelia “solar,” presumably a derivation from , ‘sun.’ Laelia he interprets as “lunar.” Crispis (curly-haired), thinks Maier, comes from the curly hairs which are converted into a “very fine powder.”129 Maier obviously has in mind the tincture, the arcane substance. Barnaud on the other hand says that “our materia” is “obvoluta, intricata,” therefore curly. These two persons, says Maier, are neither man nor woman, but they once were; similarly, the subject was in the beginning an hermaphrodite but no longer is so, because though the arcane substance is composed of sponsus and sponsa, and is thus as it were bisexual, as a third thing it is new and unique. Neither is the subject a maid or virgin, because she would be “intact.” In the opus, however, the virgin is called a mother although she has remained a virgin. Nor is the subject a boy, because the consummation of the coniunctio contradicts this, nor a crone,130 because it still retains its full strength, nor a whore,131 because it has nothing to do with money, nor is it virtuous, because the virgin has cohabited with a man. The subject, he says, is a man and a woman, because they have completed the conjugal act, and an hermaphrodite because two bodies are united in one. It is a girl because it is not yet old, and a youth because it is in full possession of its powers. It is an old woman because it outlasts all time (i.e., is incorruptible). It is a whore because Beya132 prostituted herself to Gabritius before marriage. It is virtuous because the subsequent marriage gave absolution.133
“But all” is the real explanation of the enigma: all these designations refer to qualities of the one thing, and these were thought of as existing, but

they are not entities in themselves. The same is true of the “Carried away” passage. The substance (uroboros) devours itself and thus suffers no hunger; it does not die by the sword but “slays itself with its own dart,” like the scorpion, which is another synonym for the arcane substance.134 It is not killed by poison because, as Barnaud says, it is a “good poison,” a panacea with which it brings itself to life again.135 At the same time it is killed by all three: by hunger for itself, by the sword of Mercurius,136 and by its own poison as snake or scorpion. “By all” again points to the arcane substance, as Barnaud says: “This is everything, it has within itself everything needful for its completion, everything can be predicated of it, and it of everything.”137 “For the One is the whole, as the greatest Chymist saith: because [of the One] everything is, and if the whole had not the whole [in itself], the whole would not be.”138

That the arcanum is neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor in water is explained by Maier as a reference to the lapis, which “is found everywhere.” It is found in all the elements and not only in one of them. Here Barnaud is rather more subtle, for he equates heaven with the soul, earth with the body, and water with the spirit,139 and thus arrives at the idea of the wholeness of a living organism. “Our material,” he says, “is simultaneously in heaven, on earth, and in the water, as if wholly in the whole and wholly in each part; so that those parts, though otherwise divisible, can no longer be separated from one another after they are made one: the whole Law and Prophets of alchemy seem to depend upon this.”140
Barnaud explains the name of him who raised the tomb, Lucius Agatho Priscius, as follows: Lucius is “lucid,” “endowed with the most lucid intellect”;141 Agatho is “good-natured” (Gk. , ‘good’), “upright”; Priscius is “priscus” (pristine), “senior” (of ancient time), “reckoned among those upright Philosophers of old.” Maier maintains that these names “signified the chief requisite necessary for the fulfilment of the art.”
“Neither husband nor lover” etc. means that Aelia Laelia drew him to herself “as the magnet the iron” and changed him into her “nebulous and black nature.” In the coniunctio he became her husband, and was “necessary”142 to the work. But Maier does not tell us to what extent he was not the husband etc. Barnaud says: “These are the chief causes, namely marriage, love, and consanguinity, which move a man to raise a column to the dead in the temple of memory, and none of these can here be

considered.” Lucius had another purpose in mind: he wished the art, “which teaches everything, which is of all things the most precious and is concealed under this enigma, to appear upon the scene,” so that the investigators might “apply themselves to the art and true science, which surpasses all else in worth.” True, he makes an exception of “that holiest investigation [agnitionem] of God and Christ, whereon our salvation depends,”143 a proviso we often meet in the texts.

Maier ignores the negative in “neither mourning” etc. just as he did in “neither husband.” “In truth,” he says, “all this can as well be said positively of Lucius and not negatively.” On the other hand Barnaud remarks that it draws a picture of an “intrepid philosopher, smooth and rounded.”144 “Neither mound” etc. is again explained positively by Maier: Aelia is herself the mound, which endures as something firm and immovable. This is a reference to the incorruptibility which the opus sought to achieve. He says the pyramid signifies a “flame to eternal remembrance,” and this was Aelia herself. She was buried because Lucius “did everything he had to do in her name.” He takes her place, as it were, just as the filius philosophorum takes the place of the maternal prima materia, which till then had been the only effective arcane substance. Barnaud declares that though Lucius is a building, it does not fulfil its purpose (since it is a symbol). “But all” he refers to the “Tabula smaragdina,” because the epitaph as a whole points to the “medicina summa et catholica.”
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. Barnaud’s 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 man’s totality, the self, is by definition145 beyond the bounds of knowledge.

With “This is a tomb” etc. we reach the first positive statement (barring the names) of the inscription. Maier’s 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 Lot’s 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
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.
Thus, concludes Maier, tomb and body are the same. Barnaud says:

Bury, they say, each thing in the grave of the other. For when Sulphur, Sal and Aqua, or Sol, Luna and Mercurius, are in our material, they must be extracted, conjoined, buried and mortified, and turned into ashes. Thus it comes to pass that the nest of the birds becomes their grave, and conversely, the birds absorb the nest and unite themselves firmly with it. This comes to pass, I say, that soul, spirit and body, man and woman, active and passive, in one and the same subject, when placed in the vessel, heated with their own fire and sustained by the outward magistery of the art, may in due time escape [to freedom].160

In these words the whole secret of the union of opposites is revealed, the summa medicina, which heals not only the body but the spirit. The word “escape” presupposes a state of imprisonment which is brought to an end by the union of opposites. The Hindus described this as nirdvandva, “free from the opposites,” a conception that, in this form at least, is alien to the Christian West because it relativizes the opposites and is intended to mitigate, or even heal, the irreconcilable conflict in the militant Christian attitude.161

The interpretation here given of this enigmatic inscription should be taken for what it is: a testament to the alchemical way of thinking, which in this instance reveals more about itself than the epitaph would seem to warrant. But here we must tread carefully, for a good many other explanations are possible and have, in fact, been given.162 Above all, we have to consider the genuineness of the monument and its origin. None of the three authors so far mentioned actually saw the inscription. At the time of Malvasius, in 1683, there were apparently only two original transcripts of it, one in Bologna, the other in Milan. The one in Bologna ends with the words “cui posuerit.” The other, in Milan, adds “Hoc est sepulcrum” etc., and also a “quid” to the “Scit et nescit” of the Bologna version. Further, at the head of the Milan version there is an unelucidated “A.M.P.P.D.” in place of the “D.M.” (Diis Manibus) at the head of the other. Malvasius states that the monument was destroyed,163 but he cites eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the inscription and copied it, in particular Joannes Turrius of Bruges, who in January 1567 wrote a letter to Richardus Vitus (Richard White of Basingstoke) saying that he had “read the epitaph with his own eyes” in the villa of Marcus Antonius de la Volta, “at the first milestone outside the Porta Mascharella,” Bologna. It was, as the eyewitness and commentator Joannes Casparius Gevartius reports, let into the wall joining the villa to the church. A few of the chiselled letters were “worn with time and corroded by a kind of rust,” which, he says, testified to its antiquity.164 Malvasius endeavoured to prove its genuineness with the help of numerous other Roman epitaphs,165 and advanced the following theory:

The inscription speaks of a daughter who is to be born to Laelius and who is destined for Agatho as a bride; but she is neither daughter nor bride, because, though conceived, she is not born, and not born, because

she miscarried. Therefore Agatho, long chosen as the husband, disappointed in such great hope and betrayed by fate, rightly mocks himself, or pretends to mock himself, with this enigmatic inscription.166

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”: 173“This 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.
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
According to this interpretation, Aelia is Agatho’s anima, projected into a “Junonian oak.” The oak is the tree of Jupiter, but it is also sacred to Juno.177 In a metaphorical sense, as the feminine carrier of the anima projection, it is Jupiter’s spouse and Agatho’s beloved. Mythologically, nymphs, dryads, etc. are nature- and tree-numina, but psychologically they are anima projections,178 so far as masculine statements are concerned.
This interpretation can be found in the Dendrologia of one of the above-mentioned friends, Ulysses Aldrovandus:

I maintain that Aelia Laelia Crispis was one of the Hamadryads . . . who was tied to an oak in the neighbourhood of the city of Bologna, or shut up inside it. She appeared to him both in the tenderest and in the harshest form, and while for some two thousand years she had made a show of inconstant looks like a Proteus, she bedevilled the love of Lucius Agatho Priscius, then a citizen of Bologna, with anxious cares and sorrows, which assuredly were conjured up from chaos, or from what Plato calls Agathonian confusion.179

One can hardly imagine a better description of the feminine archetype that typifies a man’s unconscious than the figure of this “most hazardous beloved” (incertissima amasia), who pursues him like a teasing sprite amid the stillness of the “groves and springs.” It is clear from the text of the inscription that it gives no ground for interpreting Aelia as a wood nymph. Aldrovandus tells us, however, that the Porta Mascharella in Bologna, near which the inscription was alleged to have been found, was called “Junonia” in Roman times, from which he concludes that Juno was obviously the spiritus loci. In support of his hypothesis that Aelia was a dryad, the learned humanist cites a Roman epitaph that was found in this region:

CLODIA PLAVTILLA SIBI ET

QVERCONIO AGATHONI MARITO OPTIMO

This epitaph does in fact occur in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum,180

but there the operative words are:

Q. VERCONIO AGATHONI

So Quintus Verconius must suffer his name to be changed to Querconius to suit the author.

Aldrovandus explains the puzzling “hoc est sepulcrum” by saying that the oak supplied the necessary building material for the tomb! In substantiation of this he adds that there was in that locality a village with the name of “Casaralta,”181 which he analyses into casa (house), ara (altar), alta (high).
As a further contribution he quotes an Italian poem about a great oak, “representing,” he says, “the world of the elements, planted as it were in a heavenly garden, where Sun and Moon are spread out like two flowers.”182 This allusion to the world-oak of Pherecydes leads us straight to the sun- and-moon tree of alchemy, to the red and white lily,183 the red slave and the white woman (or white dove),184 and the four-hued blossoms of the Tree in the Western Land.185 Reusner’s Pandora portrays the tree as a torch-bearing woman, its top sprouting out of her crowned head.186 Here the tree is personified by its feminine numen.
Aldrovandus’s interpretation is essentially alchemical, as we can see from the treatise of Bernardus Trevisanus (Count of the March and Trevis, 1406–90).187 He tells the parable188 of an adept who finds a clear spring set about with the finest stone and “secured to the trunk of an oak-tree,” the whole surrounded by a wall. This is the King’s bath in which he seeks renewal. An old man, Hermes the mystagogue, explains how the King had this bath built: he placed in it an old oak, “cloven in the midst.”189 The fountain was surrounded by a thick wall, and “first it was enclosed in hard, bright stone, then in a hollow oak.”190
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 man’s 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 King’s 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 snake’s 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 Grimm’s fairytale of “The Spirit in the Bottle.”201

The tree has a remarkable relation to the old man in the Turba:

Take that white tree and build around it a round dark house covered with dew, and place in it202 a man of great age, a hundred years old, and close the house upon them and make it fast, so that no wind or dust can get in. Then leave them for one hundred and eighty days in their house. I say that that old man ceases not to eat of the fruits of that tree until the completion of that number [180], and that old man becomes a youth. O what wondrous natures, which have changed the soul of that old man into a youthful body, and the father is become the son.203

In this context we may perhaps cite a rather obscure text from Senior:204

Likewise Marchos205 said, It is time for this child to be born, and he related the following parable: We shall build him a house, which is called the grave of Sihoka. He [or Mariyah]206 said, There is an earth207 near us, which is called ‘tormos,’208 where there are serpents [or witches]209 that eat the darkness210 out of the burning stones, and on these stones they drink the blood of black goats.211 While they remain in the darkness, they conceive in the baths212 and give birth213 in the air, and they stride on the sea,214 and they inhabit vaults and sepulchres, and the serpent fights with the male, and the male continues forty nights in the grave, and forty nights in the little house.215

The Latin translation “serpent” for “witch” is connected with the widespread primitive idea that the spirits of the dead are snakes. This fits in with the offering of goat’s blood, since the sacrifice of black animals to the chthonic numina was quite customary. In the Arabic text the “witches” refer to the female demons of the desert, the jinn. The grave-haunting numen is likewise a widespread idea that has lingered on into Christian legend. I have even met it in the dream of a twenty-two-year-old theological student, and I give this dream again so that those of my readers who are familiar with the language of dreams will be able to see the full scope of the problem we are discussing.216
The dreamer was standing in the presence of a handsome old man dressed entirely in black. He knew it was the white magician. This

personage had just addressed him at considerable length, but the dreamer could no longer remember what it was about. He recalled only the closing words: “And for this we need the help of the black magician.” At that moment the door opened and in came another old man exactly like the first, except that he was dressed in white. He said to the white magician, “I need your advice,” but threw a sidelong, questioning glance at the dreamer, whereupon the white magician answered: “You can speak freely, he is an innocent.” The white-clad black magician then related his story. He had come from a distant land where something extraordinary had happened.

The country was ruled by an old king who felt his death near and had therefore sought out a worthy tomb for himself. There were in that land a great number of tombs from ancient times, and the king had chosen the finest for himself. According to legend, it was the tomb of a virgin who had died long ago. The king caused it to be opened, in order to get it ready for use. But when the bones were exposed to the light of day they suddenly took on life and changed into a black horse, which galloped away into the desert. The black magician had heard this story and immediately set forth in pursuit of the horse. After a journey of many days through the desert he reached the grasslands on the other side. There he met the horse grazing, and there also he came upon the find on account of which he now needed the advice of the white magician. For he had found the lost keys of paradise, and he did not know what to do with them. Here the dream ended.

The tomb was obviously haunted by the spirit of the virgin, who played the part of the king’s anima. Like the nymph in Malvasius, she was forced to leave her old dwelling-place. Her chthonic and sombre nature is shown by her transformation into a black horse, a kind of demon of the desert. We have here the widespread conception of the anima as horsewoman and nightmare, a real “ungodly spirit,” and at the same time the well-known fairytale motif of the aging king whose vitality is at an end. As a sous- entendu a magical, life-renewing marriage with the nymph seems to be planned (somewhat in the manner of the immortal Merlin’s marriage with his fairy), for in paradise, the garden of love with the apple-tree, all opposites are united. As Isaiah says:

He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord [51 : 3].

There the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie

down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den [11 : 6f.].

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.

This text describes the resurrection after death, and if we are not deceived, it takes the form of a coniunctio, a coming together of the white (dove) and the black (raven), the latter being the spirit that dwells in the tombstone (see n. 219). Since, as often happens, theriomorphic symbols (snakes and doves) are used for the male and female elements, this points to the union of unconscious factors.221 The ravens that gather up the seed (or the product of the union?) and then fly with it to the tops of the mountains222 represent the helpful spirits or familiars who complete the work when the skill of the artifex has failed him. They are not, as in Faust, beautiful angels but dark messengers of heaven, who at this point themselves become white.223 Even in Faust the angels are not entirely innocent of the arts of seduction,224 and the angels’ inability to sin is, as we know, to be taken so relatively that women have to keep their heads covered in church on account of the moral frailty of these winged messengers, which has more than once proved disastrous in ancient times (e.g., Genesis 6 : 2).
Similar motifs occur in modern dreams, and can be found in persons who have never been remotely concerned with alchemy. For instance, a patient had the following dream: “A large pile of wood was burning at the foot of a high wall of rock; the flames shot up with clouds of smoke. It was a lonely and romantic spot. High in the air, a flock of great black birds circled round the fire. From time to time one of the birds plunged straight into the blaze and was joyfully burnt to death, turning white in the process.”225 As the dreamer himself remarked, the dream had a numinous quality, and this is quite understandable in view of its meaning: it repeats the miracle of the phoenix, of transformation and rebirth (the transformation of the nigredo into the albedo, of unconsciousness into “illumination”) as described in the verses from the Rosarium philosophorum:

Two eagles fly up with feathers aflame, Naked they fall to earth again.

Yet in full feather they rise up soon . . .226

After this digression on transformation and resurrection, let us turn back to the motif of the oak-tree, whose discussion was started by the commentators on the Enigma.
We come across the oak in yet another alchemical treatise, the “Introitus apertus” of Philaletha.227 There he says: “Learn, then, who are the companions of Cadmus; who is the serpent that devoured them; and what the hollow oak to which Cadmus spitted the serpent.”
In order to clarify this passage, I must go back to the myth of Cadmus, a kinsman of the Pelasgian Hermes Ithyphallikos.228 The hero set out to find his lost sister Europa, whom Zeus had carried away with him after turning himself into a bull. Cadmus, however, received the divine command to give up the search, and instead to follow a cow, with moon markings on both her sides, until she lay down, and there to found the city of Thebes. At the same time he was promised Harmonia, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite as a wife. When the cow had lain down, he wanted to sacrifice her, and he sent his companions to fetch water. They found it in a grove sacred to Ares, which was guarded by a dragon, the son of Ares. The dragon killed most of the companions, and Cadmus, enraged, slew it and sowed the dragon’s teeth. Immediately armed men sprang up, who fell to fighting among themselves until only five remained. Cadmus was then given Harmonia to

wife. The spitting of the snake (dragon) to the oak seems to be an addition of Philaletha’s. It represents the banishment of the dangerous daemon into the oak,229 a point made not only by the commentary on the Aelia inscription in Malvasius but by the fairytale of “The Spirit in the Bottle.”

The psychological meaning of the myth is clear: Cadmus has lost his sister-anima because she has flown with the supreme deity into the realm of the suprahuman and the subhuman, the unconscious. At the divine command he is not to regress to the incest situation, and for this reason he is promised a wife. His sister-anima, acting as a psychopomp in the shape of a cow (to correspond with the bull of Zeus), leads him to his destiny as a dragon-slayer, for the transition from the brother-sister relationship to an exogamous one is not so simple. But when he succeeds in this, he wins “Harmonia,” who is the dragon’s sister. The dragon is obviously “disharmony,” as the armed men sprung from its teeth prove. These kill one another off as though exemplifying the maxim of Pseudo-Democritus, “nature subdues nature,” which is nothing less than the uroboros conceptually formulated. Cadmus holds fast to Harmonia while the opposites in projected form slaughter one another. This image is a representation of the way in which a split-off conflict behaves: it is its own battle-ground. By and large this is also true of yang and yin in classical Chinese philosophy. Hand in hand with this selfcontained conflict there goes an unconsciousness of the moral problem of opposites. Only with Christianity did the “metaphysical” opposites begin to percolate into man’s consciousness, and then in the form of an almost dualistic opposition that reached its zenith in Manichaeism. This heresy forced the Church to take an important step: the formulation of the doctrine of the privatio boni, by means of which she established the identity of “good” and “being.” Evil as a (something that does not exist) was laid at man’s door—omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine.230 This idea together with that of original sin formed the foundation of a moral consciousness which was a novel development in human history: one half of the polarity, till then essentially metaphysical, was reduced to a psychic factor, which meant that the devil had lost the game if he could not pick on some moral weakness in man. Good, however, remained a metaphysical substance that originated with God and not with man. Original sin had corrupted a creature originally good. As interpreted by dogma, therefore, good is still wholly projected but evil only partly so, since the passions of men are its main source.

Alchemical speculation continued this process of integrating metaphysical projections in so far as it began to dawn on the adept that both opposites were of a psychic nature. They expressed themselves first of all in the duplicity of Mercurius, which, however, was cancelled out in the unity of the stone. The lapis was—Deo concedente—made by the adept and was recognized as an equivalent of the homo totus. This development was extremely important, because it was an attempt to integrate opposites that were previously projected.

Cadmus is interpreted alchemically as Mercurius in his masculine form (Sol). He seeks his feminine counterpart, the quicksilver, which is his sister (Luna), but she meets him in the shape of the Mercurial serpent, which he must first kill because it contains the furious conflict of warring elements (the chaos). From this arises the harmony of the elements, and the coniunctio can now take place. The spoils of the struggle, in this case the dragon’s skin, are, according to ancient custom, offered to the hollow oak, the mother, who is the representative of the sacred grove and the fount. In other words, it is offered up to the unconscious as the source of life, which produces harmony out of disharmony.231 Out of the hostility of the elements there arises the bond of friendship between them, sealed in the stone, and this bond guarantees the indissolubility and incorruptibility of the lapis. This piece of alchemical logic is borne out by the fact that, according to the myth, Cadmus and Harmonia turned to stone (evidently because of an embarras de richesse: perfect harmony is a dead end). In another version, they turn into snakes, “and even into a basilisk,” Dom Pernety232 remarks, “for the end-product of the work, incorporated with its like, acquires the power ascribed to the basilisk, so the philosophers say.” For this fanciful author Harmonia is naturally the prima materia, and the marriage of Cadmus,233 which took place with all the gods assisting, is the coniunctio of Sol and Luna, followed by the production of the tincture or lapis. Pernety’s interpretation of Harmonia would be correct only if she were still allied with the dragon. But since she lost the reptile, she had logically to change herself and her husband into snakes.
Thus Malvasius, as well as the more interesting of the commentators, remain within the magic circle of alchemical mythologems. This is not surprising, since Hermetic philosophy, in the form it then took, was the only intellectual instrument that could help fill the dark gaps in the

continuity of understanding. The Enigma of Bologna and its commentaries are, in fact, a perfect paradigm of the method of alchemy in general. It had exactly the same effect as the unintelligibility of chemical processes: the philosopher stared at the paradoxes of the Aelia inscription, just as he stared at the retort, until the archetypal structures of the collective unconscious began to illuminate the darkness.234 And, unless we are completely deluded, the inscription itself seems to be a fantasy sprung from that same paradoxical massa confusa of the collective unconscious. The contradictoriness of the unconscious is resolved by the archetype of the nuptial coniunctio, by which the chaos becomes ordered. Any attempt to determine the nature of the unconscious state runs up against the same difficulties as atomic physics: the very act of observation alters the object observed. Consequently, there is at present no way of objectively determining the real nature of the unconscious.

If we are not, as Malvasius was, convinced of the antiquity of the Aelia inscription, we must look round in the medieval literature for possible sources or at least analogies. Here the motif of the triple prediction, or triple cause, of death might put us on the right trail.235 This motif occurs in the “Vita Merlini” in the old French romance Merlin, as well as in its later imitations in the Spanish and English literature of the fifteenth century. But the most important item, it seems to me, is the so-called “Epigram of the Hermaphrodite,” attributed to Mathieu de Vendôme (ca. 1150):

When my pregnant mother bore me in her womb, they said she asked the gods what she would bear.

A boy, said Phoebus, a girl, said Mars, neither, said Juno. And when I was born, I was a hermaphrodite.

Asked how I was to meet my end, the goddess replied: By arms; Mars: On the cross; Phoebus: By water. All were right.

A tree overshadowed the waters, I climbed it;

the sword I had with me slipped, and I with it.

My foot caught in the branches, my head hung down in the stream;

And I—male, female, and neither—suffered by water, weapon, and cross.236

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

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 attributed to Agathias Scholasticus, a Byzantine historian:241

This tomb has no body in it. This body has no tomb round it. But it is itself body and tomb.242

White, convinced that the monument was genuine, thinks that Agathias wrote his epigram in imitation of it, whereas in fact the epigram must be its predecessor or at least have derived from the same source on which the unknown author of the Aelia inscription drew.

Niobe seems to have an anima-character for Richard White, for, continuing his interpretation, he takes Aelia (or Haelia, as he calls her) to be the soul, saying with Virgil: “Fiery is her strength, and heavenly her origin. From this Haelia takes her name.”243 She was called Laelia, he says, on account of Luna, who exerts a hidden influence on the souls of men. The human soul is “androgynous,” “because a girl has a masculine and a man a feminine soul.”244 To this remarkable psychological insight he adds another: the soul is also called an “old woman,” because the spirit of young people is weak. This aptly expresses the psychological fact that, in people with an all too youthful attitude of consciousness, the anima is often represented in dreams as an old woman.
It is clear that Richard White points even more plainly to the anima in the psychological sense than Aldrovandus. But whereas the latter stressed her mythological aspect, White stresses her philosophical aspect. In his letter of February 1567 to Johannes Turrius, he writes that the soul is an idea “of such great power that she creates the forms and things themselves,” also “she has within herself the ‘selfness’ of all mankind.”245 She transcends all individual differences. “Thus, if the soul would know herself, she must contemplate herself, and gaze into that place where the power of the soul, Wisdom, dwells.”246 This is just what happened to the interpreters of the Bolognese inscription: in the darkness of the enigma, the psyche gazed at herself and perceived the wisdom immanent in her structure-the wisdom that is her strength. And, he adds, “man is nothing other than his soul.”247 It should be noted that he describes this soul quite differently from the way it would be described by a biological or personalistic psychology today: it is devoid of all individual differences, it contains the “selfness of all mankind,” it even creates the objective world by the power of its wisdom. This description is far better suited, one would think, to the anima mundi than to the anima vagula of the personal man, unless he means that enigmatic background of everything psychic, the collective unconscious. White comes to the conclusion that the inscription means nothing less than the soul, the form imprinted on and bound to matter.248 This, again, is what happened to the interpreters: they formulated the baffling inscription in accordance with the imprint set upon it by the psyche.
White’s interpretation is not only original but profoundly psychological. His deserts are certainly not diminished by his having, so it would seem, arrived at his deeper view only after he received Turrius’s letter of January 1567. Turrius was of the opinion that “Aelia and Laelia” stood for “form and matter.” He interprets “neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor in water” as follows: “Since the prima materia is nothing, but is conceived solely by the imagination, it cannot be contained in any of these places.”249 It is not an object of the senses, but is “conceived solely by the intellect,” therefore we cannot know how this material is constituted. It is evident that Turrius’s interpretation likewise describes the projection of the psyche and its contents, with the result that his secondary explanations are a petitio principii.
As is clear from the title of his book, Allegoria peripatetica de generatione, amicitia, et privatione in Aristotelicum Aenigma Elia Lelia Crispis,250 Fortunius Licetus reads the whole philosophy of Aristotle into the monument. He mentions the report that it was “sculptured in stone, formerly set in a high position on the walls of St. Peter’s,” but he does not say that he saw it with his own eyes, for in his day it was no longer in existence, if ever it existed at all. He thinks the inscription contains the summation of a serious philosophical theory about the origin of mundane things, a theory that was “scientifico-moralis” or “ethico-physica.” “It is the author’s intention to combine in a way to be marvelled at the attributes of generation, friendship, and privation.”251 That is why, he says, the monument is a true treasure-house.
After reviewing a number of earlier authors who had devoted themselves to the same theme, Licetus mentions the work of Joannes Casparius Gevartius,252 who propounded the theory that the inscription described the nature of Love. This author cites the comic poet Alexis in Athenaeus:

I think that the painters, or, to put it more concisely, all who make images of this god, are unacquainted with Eros. For he is neither female nor male; again, neither god nor man, neither stupid nor yet wise, but rather composed of elements from everywhere, and bearing many qualities under a single form. For his audacity is that of a man, his timidity a woman’s; his folly argues madness, his reasoning good sense; his impetuosity is that of an animal, his persistence that of adamant, his love of honour that of a god.253

Unfortunately I was unable to get hold of the original treatise of Gevartius. But there is a later author, Caietanus Felix Veranius, who takes up the Eros theory apparently as his own discovery in his book, Pantheon argenteae Elocutionis.254 He mentions a number of earlier commentators, amongst whom Gevartius is conspicuously absent. As Gevartius is named in the earlier lists, it is scarcely likely that Veranius was unacquainted with him. The suspicion of plagiarism is almost unescapable. Veranius defends his thesis with a good deal of skill, though considering the undeniable paradoxicality of Eros the task he sets himself is not too difficult. I will mention only one of his arguments, concerning the end of the inscription. “The inscription ends,” he says, “with ‘scit et nescit quid cui posuerit,’

because though the author of this enigmatic inscription knows that he has dedicated it to Love, he does not know what Love really is, since it is expressed by so many contradictions and riddles. Therefore he knows and does not know know to whom he dedicated it.”

I mention the interpretation of Veranius mainly because it is the forerunner of a theory which was very popular at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, namely Freud’s sexual theory of the unconscious. Veranius even goes so far as to conjecture that Aelia Laelia had a special talent for eroticism (therein anticipating Aldrovandus). He says: “Laelia was a whore; Crispis comes from ‘curly-haired,’ because curly-haired people are frailer than others and more prone to the allurements of Love.” Here he quotes Martial: “Who’s that curly-headed fellow who’s always running round with your wife, Marianus? Who is that curly-headed fellow?”255
Now it is, as a matter of fact, true that apart from the personal striving for power, or superbia, love, in the sense of concupiscentia, is the dynamism that most infallibly brings the unconscious to light. And if our author was of the type whose besetting sin is concupiscence, he would never dream that there is any other power in heaven or earth that could be the source of his conflicts and confusions. Accordingly, he will cling to his prejudice as if it were a universal theory, and the more wrong he is the more fanatically he will be convinced of its truth. But what can love mean to a man with a hunger for power! That is why we always find two main causes of psychic catastrophes: on the one hand a disappointment in love and on the other hand a thwarting of the striving for power.
The last interpretation I shall mention is one of the most recent. It dates from 1727, and though its argument is the stupidest its content is the most significant. How it can be both is explained by the fact that the discovery of significance is not always coupled with intelligence. The spirit bloweth where it listeth. . . . Despite the inadequacy of his equipment, the author, C. Schwartz,256 managed to get hold of a brilliant idea whose import, however, entirely escaped him. His view was that Lucius Agatho Priscius meant his monument to be understood as the Church. Schwartz therefore regards the inscription as being not of classical but of Christian origin, and in this, as compared with the others, he is undoubtedly right. His arguments, however, are threadbare—to take but

one example, he tries to twist “D.M.” into “Deo Magno.” Although his interpretation is not in the least convincing, it nevertheless remains a significant fact that the symbol of the Church in part expresses and in part substitutes for all the secrets of the soul which the humanistic philosophers projected into the Aelia inscription. In order not to repeat myself, I must refer the reader to what I said about the protective function of the Church in “Psychology and Religion.”257

The interpretive projections we have been examining are, with the exception of the last, identical with the psychic contents that dropped out of their dogmatic framework at the time of the Renaissance and the Great Schism, and since then have continued in a state of secularization where they were at the mercy of the “immanentist” principle of explanation, that is, a naturalistic and personalistic interpretation. The discovery of the collective unconscious did something to alter this situation, for, within the limits of psychic experience, the collective unconscious takes the place of the Platonic realm of eternal ideas. Instead of these models giving form to created things, the collective unconscious, through its archetypes, provides the a priori condition for the assignment of meaning.
In conclusion, I would like to mention one more document that seems relevant to our context, and that is the anecdote about Meister Eckhart’s “daughter”:

A daughter came to the Dominican convent asking for Meister Eckhart. The porter said, Who shall I tell him? She answered, I do not know. Why do you not know? he inquired. Because, she said, I am neither virgin nor spouse, nor man nor wife nor widow nor lady nor lord nor wench nor thrall. The porter went off to Meister Eckhart. Do come out, he said, to the strangest wight that ever I heard, and let me come too and put your head out and say, Who is asking for me? He did so. She said to him what she had said to the porter. Quoth he, My child, thou hast a shrewd and ready tongue, I prithee now thy meaning? An I were a virgin, she replied, I were in my first innocence; spouse, I were bearing the eternal word within my soul unceasingly; were I a man I should grapple with my faults; wife, should be faithful to my husband. Were I a widow I should be ever yearning for my one and only love; as lady I should render fearful homage; as wench I should be living in meek servitude to God and to all creatures; and as thrall I should be working

hard, doing my best tamely to serve my master. Of all these things I am no single one, and am the one thing and the other running thither. The Master went away and told his pupils, I have been listening to the most perfect person I ween I ever met.258

This story is more than two hundred years older than the earliest reference to the Aelia inscription, and therefore, if there is any literary influence at all, it could at most be derived from Mathieu de Vendôme, which seems to me just as unlikely as that Meister Eckhart’s vision of the “naked boy” was derived from the classical puer aeternus. In both cases we are confronted with a significant archetype, in the first that of the divine maiden (anima), in the second that of the divine child (the self).259 As we know, these primordial images can rise up anywhere at any time quite spontaneously, without the least evidence of any external tradition. This story could just as well have been a visionary rumour as a fantasy of Meister Eckhart or of one of his pupils. It is, however, rather too peculiar to have been a real happening. But occasionally reality is quite as archetypal as human fantasy, and sometimes the soul seems to “imagine things outside the body,”260 where they fall to playing, as they do in our dreams.

III

THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES

INTRODUCTION

The alchemist’s 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.

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
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 or—quite illegitimately—into 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.

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. Freud’s 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 layman’s ignorance of the actual percentage of cases of tuberculosis or psychosis.
Today the medical man knows that the incest problem is practically universal and that it immediately comes to the surface when the customary illusions are cleared away from the foreground. But mostly he knows only its pathological side and leaves it steeped in the odium of its name, without learning the lesson of history that the painful secret of the consulting-room is merely the embryonic form of a perennial problem which, in the suprapersonal sphere of ecclesiastical allegory and in the early phases of natural science, created a symbolism of the utmost importance. Generally he sees only the “materia vilis et in via eiecta” from the pathological side and has no idea of its spiritual implications. If he saw this, he could also perceive how the spirit that has disappeared returns in each of us in

unseemly, indeed reprehensible guise, and in certain predisposed cases causes endless confusion and destruction in great things as in small. The psychopathological problem of incest is the aberrant, natural form of the union of opposites, a union which has either never been made conscious at all as a psychic task or, if it was conscious, has once more disappeared from view.

The persons who enact the drama of this problem are man and woman, in alchemy King and Queen, Sol and Luna. In what follows I shall give an account of the way in which alchemy describes the symbolic protagonists of the supreme opposition.

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 latter’s 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

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 man’s 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
In the “Liber Platonis Quartorum,” a Sabaean treatise, the spiritus animalis or solar sulphur is still a , a ministering spirit or familiar who can be conjured up by magical invocations to help with the work.17
From what has been said about the active sun-substance it should be clear that Sol in alchemy is much less a definite chemical substance than a “virtus,” a mysterious power18 believed to have a generative19 and transformative effect. Just as the physical sun lightens and warms the universe, so, in the human body, there is in the heart a sunlike arcanum from which life and warmth stream forth.20 “Therefore Sol,” says Dorn, “is rightly named the first after God, and the father and begetter of all,21 because in him the seminal and formal virtue of all things whatsoever lies hid.”22 This power is called “sulphur.”23 It is a hot, daemonic principle of life, having the closest affinities with the sun in the earth, the “central fire” or “ignis gehennalis” (fire of hell). Hence there is also a Sol niger, a black sun, which coincides with the nigredo and putrefactio, the state of death.24 Like Mercurius, Sol in alchemy is ambivalent.
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

For Dorn, then, the spark of divine fire implanted in man becomes what Goethe in his original version of Faust called Faust’s “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
After all this, we can say that the alchemical Sol, as a “certain luminosity” (quaedam luminositas), is in many respects equal to the lumen naturae. This was the real source of illumination in alchemy, and from alchemy Paracelsus borrowed this same source in order to illuminate the art of medicine. Thus the concept of Sol has not a little to do with the growth of modern consciousness, which in the last two centuries has relied

more and more on the observation and experience of natural objects. Sol therefore seems to denote an important psychological fact. Consequently, it is well worth while delineating its peculiarities in greater detail on the basis of the very extensive literature.

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 sun’s 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

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 (“coinquinare”—a strong expression). The redness (rubedo) of the sun’s 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.
Sol appears here in a dubious, indeed a “sulphurous” light: it corrupts, obviously because of the sulphur it contains.45
Accordingly, Sol is the transformative substance, the prima materia as well as the gold tincture. The anonymous treatise “De arte chymica” distinguishes two parts or stages of the lapis. The first part is called the sol

terrenus (earthly sun). “Without the earthly sun, the work is not perfected.”46 In the second part of the work Sol is joined with Mercurius.

On earth these stones are dead, and they do nothing unless the activity of man is applied to them. [Consider]47 the profound analogy of the gold: the aethereal heaven was locked to all men, so that all men had to descend into the underworld, where they were imprisoned for ever. But Christ Jesus unlocked the gate of the heavenly Olympus and threw open the realm of Pluto, that the souls might be freed, when the Virgin Mary, with the cooperation of the Holy Ghost in an unutterable mystery and deepest sacrament, conceived in her virgin womb that which was most excellent in heaven and upon earth, and finally bore for us the Redeemer of the whole world, who by his overflowing goodness shall save all who are given up to sin, if only the sinner shall turn to him. But the Virgin remained incorrupt and inviolate: therefore not without good reason is Mercurius made equal [aequiparatur] to the most glorious and worshipful Virgin Mary.48

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

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, and—via the Luna-Mary-Ecclesia symbolism—is 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:

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:

I will not discuss the various aspects of this quaternity more closely here, as I have already done so in a separate study.53 I mention it only for comparison with the alchemical one. Quaternities such as these are logical characteristics of Gnostic thinking, which Koepgen has aptly called “circular.”54 We have already met similar figures in our account of the opposites, which were often arranged in quaternities. The rhythm of both schemas is divided into three steps:

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 above—as in the Gnostic legend—were 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 Koepgen’s 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-concept—proved 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.

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 psyche—a that leaves nothing unaltered and ceaselessly creates a past that can never be retrieved. He knows that there is nothing purely good in the realm of human experience, but also that for many people it is better to be convinced of an absolute good and to listen to the voice of those who espouse the superiority of consciousness and unambiguous thinking. He may solace himself with the thought that one who can join the shadow to the light is the possessor of the greater riches. But he will not fall into the temptation of playing the law-giver, nor will he pretend to be a prophet of the truth: for he knows that the sick, suffering, or helpless patient standing before him is not the public but is Mr or Mrs X, and that the doctor has to put something tangible and helpful on the table or he is no doctor. His duty is always to the individual, and he is persuaded that nothing has happened if this individual has not been helped. He is answerable to the individual in the first place and to society only in the second. If he therefore prefers individual treatment to collective ameliorations, this accords with the experience that social and collective influences usually produce only a mass intoxication, and that only man’s action upon man can bring about a real transformation.59

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.

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.
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.
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 cat’s 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.

In view of the supreme importance of the ego in bringing reality to light, we can understand why this infinitesimal speck in the universe was personified as the sun, with all the attributes that this image implies. As the medieval mind was incomparably more alive than ours to the divine quality of the sun, we may assume that the totality character of the sun- image was implicit in all its allegorical or symbolic applications. Among the significations of the sun as totality the most important was its frequent use as a God-image, not only in pagan times but in the sphere of Christianity as well.
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 man’s hidden godlikeness, and the intuition of Angelus Silesius finally expressed it without disguise.

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 man’s consciousness (through which, as it were, a second world-creation was enacted) as a divine instrument.
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.

SULPHUR72

Because of the singular role it plays in alchemy, sulphur deserves to be examined rather more closely. The first point of interest, which we have already touched on, is its relation to Sol: it was called the prima materia of Sol, Sol being naturally understood as the gold. As a matter of fact, sulphur was sometimes identified with gold.73 Sol therefore derives from sulphur. The close connection between them explains the view that sulphur was the “companion of Luna.”74 When the gold (Sol) and his bride (Luna) are united, “the coagulating sulphur, which in the corporal gold was turned outwards [extroversion], is turned inwards” (i.e., introverted).75 This remark indicates the psychic double nature of sulphur (sulphur duplex); there is a red and a white sulphur, the white being the active substance of the moon, the red that of the sun.76 The specific “virtue” of sulphur is said to be greater in the red variety.77 But its duplicity also has another meaning: on the one hand it is the prima materia, and in this form it is burning and corrosive (adurens), and “hostile” to the matter of the stone; on the other hand, when “cleansed of all impurities, it is the matter of our stone.”78 Altogether, sulphur is one of the innumerable synonyms for the prima materia79 in its dual aspect, i.e., as both the initial material and the end- product. At the beginning it is “crude” or “common” sulphur, at the end it is a sublimation product of the process.80 Its fiery nature is unanimously stressed,81 though this fieriness does not consist merely in its combustibility but in its occult fiery nature. As always, an allusion to occult qualities means that the material in question was the focus of projections which lent it a numinous significance.
In keeping with its dual nature sulphur is on the one hand corporal and earthly,82 and on the other an occult, spiritual principle. As an earthly substance it comes from the “fatness of the earth,”83 by which was meant the radical moisture as prima materia. Occasionally it is called “cinis extractus a cinere” (ash extracted from ash).84 “Ash” is an inclusive term for the scoriae left over from burning, the substance that “remains below”—a strong reminder of the chthonic nature of sulphur. The red variety is thought of as masculine,85 and under this aspect it represents the gold or Sol.86 As a chthonic being it has close affinities with the dragon, which is called “our secret sulphur.”87 In that form it is also the aqua divina, symbolized by the uroboros.88 These analogies often make it

difficult to distinguish between sulphur and Mercurius, since the same thing is said of both. “This is our natural, most sure fire, our Mercurius, our sulphur,” says the “Tractatus aureus de lapide.”89 In the Turba quicksilver is a fiery body that behaves in exactly the same way as sulphur.90 For Paracelsus sulphur, together with Sal (salt), is the begetter of Mercurius, who is born of the sun and moon.91 Or it is found “in the depths of the nature of Mercurius,”92 or it is “of the nature of Mercurius,”93 or sulphur and Mercurius are “brother and sister.”94 Sulphur is credited with Mercurius’ “power to dissolve, kill, and bring metals to life.”95

This intimate connection with Mercurius makes it evident that sulphur is a spiritual or psychic substance of universal import, of which nearly everything may be said that is said of Mercurius. Thus sulphur is the soul not only of metals but of all living things; in the “Tractatus aureus” it is equated with “nostra anima” (our soul).96 The Turba says: “The sulphurs are souls that were hidden in the four bodies.”97 Paracelsus likewise calls sulphur the soul.98 In Mylius sulphur produces the “ferment” or “soul which gives life to the imperfect body.”99 The “Tractatus Micreris” says: “. . . until the green son appears, who is its100 soul, which the Philosophers have called the green bird and bronze and sulphur.”101 The soul is also described as the “hidden part [occultum] of the sulphur.”102
In the sphere of Christian psychology, green has a spermatic, procreative quality, and for this reason it is the colour attributed to the Holy Ghost as the creative principle.103 Accordingly Dorn says: “The male and universal seed, the first and most potent, is the solar sulphur, the first part and most potent cause of all generation.”104 It is the life-spirit itself. In his “De tenebris contra naturam” Dorn says: “We have said before that the life of the world is the light of nature and the celestial sulphur, whose substrate [subiectum] is the aetheric moisture and the heat of the firmament, namely Sol and Luna.”105 Sulphur has here attained cosmic significance and is equated with the light of nature, the supreme source of knowledge for the natural philosophers. But this light does not shine unhindered, says Dorn. It is obscured by the darkness of the elements in the human body. For him, therefore, sulphur is a shining, heavenly being. Though this sulphur is a “son who comes from imperfect bodies,” he is “ready to put on the white and purple garments.”106 In Ripley he is a “spirit of generative power, who works in the moisture.”107 In the treatise “De

sulphure” he is the “virtue of all things” and the source of illumination and of all knowledge.108 He knows, in fact, everything.109

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
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
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 Saturn’s, that Sulphur is held a prisoner at the command 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 Sulphur’s 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 “dragon’s head” (caput draconis), which is a “most pernicious poison,” a poisonous vapour breathed out by the flying dragon. The dragon’s 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.”

Hence we get the parallel of the dragon’s 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 dragon’s 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 dragon’s head as a favourable omen.
From what has been said it should be evident that sulphur is the essence of an active substance. It is the “spirit of the metals,”135 forming with quicksilver, the other “spirit of nature,” the two principles and the matter of the metals, since these two principles are themselves metals in potentia.136 Together with Mercurius it also forms the lapis.137 In fact, it is the “heart of all things”138 and the “virtue of all things.”139 Enumerating, along with water and moisture, the synonyms for the lapis as the “whole secret and life of all things whatsoever,” the “Consilium coniugii” says: “The oil that takes up the colour, that is, the radiance of the sun, is itself sulphur.”140 Mylius compares it to the rainbow: “The sulphur shines like the rainbow above the waters . . . the bow of Isis stands half on the pure, liquid, and flowing water and half on the earth . . . hence the whole property of sulphur and its natural likeness are expressed by the rainbow.” Thus sulphur, so far as it is symbolized by the rainbow, is a “divine and wonderful experience.” A few lines further on, after mentioning sulphur as one of the components of the water, Mylius writes that Mercurius (i.e., the water) must be cleansed by distillation “from all foulness of the earth, and then Lucifer, the impurity and the accursed earth, will fall from the golden heaven.”141 Lucifer, the most beautiful of the angels, becomes the devil, and sulphur is “of the earth’s foulness.” Here, as in the case of the dragon’s

head, the highest and the lowest are close together. Although a personification of evil, sulphur shines above earth and water with the splendour of the rainbow, a “natural vessel”142 of divine transformation.

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 Dorn’s 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

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 adept’s 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 prince’s 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 Reusner’s Pandora158 the body is symbolized as Christ, the second Adam, pierced by the lance of a mermaid, or a Lilith or Edem.159
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 man’s 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 alchemist’s 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 Isaiah161—from his birth in a stable among the animals to his shameful death on the cross between two thieves.

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.

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 discovered—to keep to sulphur as our example—in this substance, which was one of the customary attributes 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.

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 attribute 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 another—harbouring within it, however, the potentialities of healing.

This is not mere euphemism or propitiatory optimism, but rather an intuitive perception of the compensating effect of the counter-position in the unconscious, which should not be understood dualistically as an absolute opposite but as a helpful though nonetheless dangerous complement to the conscious position. Medical experience shows that the unconscious is indeed actuated by a compensatory tendency, at any rate in normal individuals. In the domain of pathology I believe I have observed cases where the tendency of the unconscious would have to be regarded, by all human standards, as essentially destructive. But it may not be out of place to reflect that the self-destruction of what is hopelessly inefficient or evil can be understood in a higher sense as another attempt at compensation. There are murderers who feel that their execution is condign punishment, and suicides who go to their death in triumph.
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.

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.
The causa efficiens et finalis of this lack of freedom lies in the unconscious and forms that part of the personality which still has to be added to the conscious man in order to make him whole. At first sight it is but an insignificant fragment—a lapis exilis, in via eiectus, and often inconvenient and repellent because it stands for something that demonstrates quite plainly our secret inferiority. This aspect is responsible for our resistance to psychology in general and to the unconscious in

particular. But together with this fragment, which could round out our consciousness into a whole, there is in the unconscious an already existing wholeness, the “homo totus” of the Western and the Chên-yên (true man) of Chinese alchemy, the round primordial being who represents the greater man within, the Anthropos, who is akin to God. This inner man is of necessity partly unconscious, because consciousness is only part of a man and cannot comprehend the whole. But the whole man is always present, for the fragmentation of the phenomenon “Man” is nothing but an effect of consciousness, which consists only of supraliminal ideas. No psychic content can become conscious unless it possesses a certain energy-charge. If this falls, the content sinks below the threshold and becomes unconscious. The possible contents of consciousness are then sorted out, as the energy-charge separates those capable of becoming conscious from those that are not. This separation gives rise on the one hand to consciousness, whose symbol is the sun, and on the other hand to the shadow, corresponding to the umbra solis.

Compulsion, therefore, has two sources: the shadow and the Anthropos. This is sufficient to explain the paradoxical nature of sulphur: as the “corrupter” it has affinities with the devil, while on the other hand it appears as a parallel of Christ.

LUNA

The Significance of the Moon

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 out”174 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.

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 moistures”186 (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” ().191 The relation of the moon to the soul, much stressed in antiquity,192 also occurs in alchemy though with a different nuance. Usually it is said that from the moon comes the dew, but the moon is also the aqua mirifica193 that extracts the souls from the bodies or gives the bodies life and soul. Together with Mercurius, Luna sprinkles the dismembered dragon with her moisture and brings him to life again, “makes him live, walk, and run about, and change his colour to the nature of blood.”194 As the water of ablution, the dew falls from heaven, purifies the body, and makes it ready to receive the soul;195 in other words, it brings about the albedo, the white state of innocence, which like the moon and a bride awaits the bridegroom.

As the alchemists were often physicians, Galen’s 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.
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, attributing 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

From all this it would seem that the moon-plant is a kind of mandrake and has nothing to do with the botanical Lunaria (honesty). In the herbal of Tabernaemontanus, in which all the magico-medicinal properties of plants are carefully listed, there is no mention of the alchemical Lunatica or Lunaria. On the other hand it is evident that the Lunatica is closely connected with the “tree of the sea” in Arabian alchemy207 and hence with the arbor philosophica,208 which in turn has parallels with the Cabalistic tree of the Sefiroth209 and with the tree of Christian mysticism210 and Hindu philosophy.211
Ruland’s remark that the sponge “has understanding” (see n. 205) and Khunrath’s 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 unconscious—though 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.
In the gnosis of Simon Magus, Helen (Selene) is ,213 sapientia,214 and .215 The last designation also occurs in Hippolytus: “For Epinoia herself dwelt in Helen at that time.”216 In his ‘ (“Great Explanation”), Simon says:

There are two offshoots from all the Aeons, having neither beginning nor end, from one root, and this root is a certain Power [], an invisible and incomprehensible Silence []. One of them appears on high and is a great power, the mind of the whole [], who rules all things and is a male; the other below is a great Thought [

], a female giving birth to all things. Standing opposite one another, they pair together and cause to arise in the space between them an incomprehensible Air, without beginning or end; but in it is a Father

who upholds all things and nourishes that which has beginning and end. This is he who stood, stands, and shall stand, a masculo-feminine Power after the likeness of the pre-existing boundless Power which has neither beginning nor end, abiding in solitude [].217

This passage is remarkable for several reasons. It describes a coniunctio Solis et Lunae which Simon, it seems, concretized in his own life with Helen, the harlot of Tyre, in her role as Ishtar. As a result of the pairing with the soror or filia mystica, there was begotten a masculo- feminine pneuma, curiously designated “Air.” Since pneuma, like spirit, originally meant air in motion, this designation sounds archaic or else deliberately physicistic. It is evident, however, that air is used here in the spiritual sense of pneuma since its progenitors bear names—

—which have a noetic character and thus pertain to the spiritual sphere. Of these three names Nous is the most general concept, and in Simon’s day it was used indiscriminately with pneuma. Ennoia and Epinoia mean nothing that could not be rendered just as well by Nous; they differ from the latter only in their special character, emphasizing the more specific contents of the inclusive term Nous. Further, they are both of the feminine gender required in this context, whereas Nous is masculine. All three indicate the essential similarity of the components of the syzygy and their “spiritual” nature.

Anyone familiar with alchemy will be struck by the resemblance between Simon’s views and the passage in the “Tabula smaragdina”:

And as all things proceed from the One, through the meditation of the One, so all things proceed from this one thing, by adaptation.218

Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon; the wind hath carried it in his belly.219

Since “all things” proceed from the meditation of the One, this is true also of Sol and Luna, who are thus endowed with an originally pneumatic character. They stand for the primordial images of the spirit, and their mating produces the filius macrocosmi. Sol and Luna in later alchemy are undoubtedly arcane substances and volatilia, i.e., spirits.220
We will now see what the texts have to say about Luna’s noetic aspect. The yield is astonishingly small; nevertheless there is the following passage in the Rosarium:

Unless ye slay me, your understanding will not be perfect, and in my sister the moon the degree of your wisdom increases, and not with another of my servants, even if ye know my secret.221

Mylius copies out this sentence uncritically in his Philosophia reformata.222 Both he and the Rosarium give the source as the “Metaphora Belini de sole.”223 The “Dicta Belini” are included in the “Allegoriae sapientum,” but there the passage runs:

I announce therefore to all you sages, that unless ye slay me, ye cannot be called sages. But if ye slay me, your understanding will be perfect, and it increases in my sister the moon according to the degree of our wisdom, and not with another of my servants, even if ye know my secret.224

Belinus, as Ruska is probably right in conjecturing, is the same as Apollonius of Tyana,225 to whom some of the sermons in the Turba are attributed. In Sermo 32, “Bonellus” discusses the problem of death and transformation, likewise touched on in our text. The other sermons of Bonellus have nothing to do with our text, however, nor does the motif of resurrection, on account of its ubiquity, signify much, so that the “Dicta” in all probability have no connection with the Turba. A more likely source for the “Dicta” would be the (Harranite?) treatise of Artefius, “Clavis maioris sapientiae”:226 “Our master, the philosopher Belenius, said, Set your light in a vessel of clear glass, and observe that all the wisdom of this world revolves round the following three . . .”227 And again: “But one day my master, the philosopher Bolemus, called me and said, Eh! my son, I hope that thou art a man of spiritual understanding and canst attain to the highest degree of wisdom.”228 Then follows an explanation about how two contrary natures, active and passive, arose from the first simple substance. In the beginning God said “without uttering a word,” “Let there be such a creature,” and thereupon the simple (simplex) was there. Then God created nature or the prima materia, “the first passive or receptive [principle], in which everything was present in principle and in potency.” In order to end this state of suspension God created the “causa agens, like to the circle of heaven, which he resolved to call Light. But this Light received a certain sphere, the first creature, within its hollowness.” The properties of this sphere were heat and motion. It was evidently the sun, whereas the cold and

passive principle would correspond to the moon.229

It seems to me not unlikely that the “Dicta Belini” are connected with this passage from Artefius rather than with the Turba, since they have nothing to do with the sermons of Apollonius. They may therefore represent a tradition independent of the Turba, and this is the more likely since Artefius seems to have been a very ancient author of Arabic provenance.230 He shares the doctrine of the “simplex” with the “Liber quartorum,”231 which too is probably of Harranite origin. I mention his theory of the creation here despite the fact that it has no parallels in the “Dicta.” It seemed to me worth noting because of its inner connection with the “Apophasis megale” of Simon Magus. The “Dicta” are not concerned with the original separation of the natures but rather with the synthesis which bears much the same relation to the sublimation of the human mind (exaltatio intellectus) as the procedures of the “Liber quartorum.”232
Besides the connection between Luna and intellect we must also consider their relation to Mercurius, for in astrology and mythology Mercurius is the divine factor that has most to do with Epinoia. The connections between them in alchemy have classical antecedents. Leaving aside the relation of Hermes to the Nous, I will only mention that in Plutarch Hermes sits in the moon and goes round with it (just as Heracles does in the sun).233 In the magic papyri, Hermes is invoked as follows: “O Hermes, ruler of the world, thou who dwellest in the heart, circle of the moon, round and square.”234
In alchemy Mercurius is the rotundum par excellence. Luna is formed of his cold and moist nature, and Sol of the hot and dry;235 alternatively she is called “the proper substance of Mercurius.”236 From Luna comes the aqua Mercurialis or aqua permanens;237 with her moisture, like Mercurius, she brings the slain dragon to life.238 As we have seen, the circle of the moon is mentioned in the “Super arborem Aristotelis,” where “a stork, as it were calling itself the circle of the moon,” sits on a tree that is green within instead of without.239 Here it is worth pointing out that the soul, whose connection with the moon has already been discussed, was also believed to be round. Thus Caesarius of Heisterbach says that the soul has a “spherical nature,” “after the likeness of the globe of the moon.”240
Let us now turn back to the question raised by the quotation in the

Rosarium from the “Dicta Belini.” It is one of those approximate quotations which are typical of the Rosarium.241 In considering the quotation as a whole it should be noted that it is not clear who the speaker is. The Rosarium supposes that it is Sol. But it can easily be shown from the context of the “Dicta” that the speaker could just as well be the filius Philosophorum, since the woman is sometimes called “soror,” sometimes “mater,” and sometimes “uxor.” This strange relationship is explained by the primitive fact that the son stands for the reborn father, a motif familiar to us from the Christian tradition. The speaker is therefore the father-son, whose mother is the son’s sister-wife. “According to the degree of our wisdom” is contrasted with “your understanding;” it therefore refers to the wisdom of the Sol redivivus, and presumably also to his sister the moon, hence “our” and not “my” wisdom. “The degree” is not only plausible but is a concept peculiar to the opus, since Sol passes through various stages of transformation from the dragon, lion, and eagle242 to the hermaphrodite. Each of these stages stands for a new degree of insight, wisdom, and initiation, just as the Mithraic eagles, lions, and sun-messengers signify grades of initiation. “Unless ye slay me” usually refers to the slaying of the dragon, the mortificatio of the first, dangerous, poisonous stage of the anima (= Mercurius), freed from her imprisonment in the prima materia.243 This anima is also identified with Sol.244 Sol is frequently called Rex, and there is a picture showing him being killed by ten men.245 He thus suffers the same mortificatio as the dragon, with the difference that it is never a suicide. For Sol, in so far as the dragon is a preliminary form of the filius Solis, is in a sense the father of the dragon, although the latter is expressly said to beget itself and is thus an increatum.246 At the same time Sol, being his own son, is also the dragon. Accordingly there is a coniugium of the dragon and the woman, who can only be Luna or the lunar (feminine) half of Mercurius.247 As much as Sol, therefore, Luna (as the mother) must be contained in the dragon. To my knowledge there is never any question of her mortificatio in the sense of a slaying. Nevertheless she is included with Sol in the death of the dragon, as the Rosarium hints: “The dragon dieth not, except with his brother and his sister.”248

The idea that the dragon or Sol must die is an essential part of the mystery of transformation. The mortificatio, this time only in the form of a mutilation, is also performed on the lion, whose paws are cut off,249 and on the bird, whose wings are clipped.250 It signifies the overcoming of the old

and obsolete as well as of the dangerous preliminary stages which are characterized by animal-symbols.

In interpreting the words “your understanding increases in my sister,” etc., it is well to remember that a philosophical interpretation of myths had already grown up among the Stoics, which today we should not hesitate to describe as psychological. This work of interpretation was not interrupted by the development of Christianity but continued to be assiduously practised in a rather different form, namely in the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers, which was to have a decided influence on alchemical symbolism. The Johannine interpretation of Christ as the pre-worldly Logos is an early attempt of this kind to put into other words the “meaning” of Christ’s essence. The later medievalists, and in particular the natural philosophers, made the Sapientia Dei the nucleus of their interpretation of nature and thus created a new nature-myth. In this they were very much influenced by the writings of the Arabs and of the Harranites, the last exponents of Greek philosophy and gnosis, whose chief representative was Tabit ibn Qurra in the tenth century. One of these writings, the “Liber Platonis quartorum,” is a dialogue in which Thebed (Tabit) speaks in person. In this treatise the intellect as a tool of natural philosophy plays a role that we do not meet again until the sixteenth century, in Gerhard Dorn. Pico della Mirandola appeals to the psychological interpretation of the ancients and mentions that the “Greek Platonists” described Sol as 251 and Luna as ,252 terms that are reminiscent of Simon’s Nous and Epinoia.253 Pico himself defines the difference as that between “scientia” and “opinio.”254 He thinks that the mind (animus), turning towards the spirit (spiritus) of God, shines and is therefore called Sol. The spirit of God corresponds to the aquae superiores, the “waters above the firmament” (Gen. 1 : 7). But in so far as the human mind turns towards the “waters under the firmament” (aquae inferiores), it concerns itself with the “sensuales potentiae,” “whence it contracts the stain of infection” and is called Luna.255 In both cases it is clearly the human spirit or psyche, both of which have, however, a double aspect, one facing upwards to the light, the other downwards to the darkness ruled by the moon (“The sun to rule the day, the moon also to govern the night”). “And while,” says Pico, “we wander far from our fatherland and abide in this night and darkness of our present life, we make most use of that which turns us aside to the senses, for which reason we

think many things rather than know them,”256—a pessimistic but no doubt accurate view that fully accords with the spiritual benightedness and sinful darkness of this sublunary world, which is so black that the moon herself is tarnished by it.

The moon appears to be in a disadvantageous position compared with the sun. The sun is a concentrated luminary: “The day is lit by a single sun.” The moon, on the other hand—”as if less powerful”—needs the help of the stars when it comes to the task of “composition and separation, rational reflection, definition,” etc.257 The appetites, as “potentiae sensuales,” pertain to the sphere of the moon; they are anger (ira) and desire (libido) or, in a word, concupiscentia. The passions are designated by animals because we have these things in common with them, and, “what is more unfortunate, they often drive us into leading a bestial life.”258 According to Pico, Luna “has an affinity with Venus, as is particularly to be seen from the fact that she is sublimated in Taurus, the House of Venus, so much that she nowhere else appears more auspicious and more beneficent.”259 Taurus is the house of the hierogamy of Sol and Luna.260 Indeed, Pico declares that the moon is “the lowest earth and the most ignoble of all the stars,”261 an opinion which recalls Aristotle’s comparison of the moon with the earth. The moon, says Pico, is inferior to all the other planets.262 The novilunium is especially unfavourable, as it robs growing bodies of their nourishment and in this way injures them.263
Psychologically, this means that the union of consciousness (Sol) with its feminine counterpart the unconscious (Luna) has undesirable results to begin with: it produces poisonous animals such as the dragon, serpent, scorpion, basilisk, and toad;264 then the lion, bear, wolf, dog,265 and finally the eagle266 and the raven. The first to appear are the cold-blooded animals, then warm-blooded predators, and lastly birds of prey or ill-omened scavengers. The first progeny of the matrimonium luminarium are all, therefore, rather unpleasant. But that is only because there is an evil darkness in both parents which comes to light in the children, as indeed often happens in real life. I remember, for instance, the case of a twenty- year-old bank clerk who embezzled several hundred francs. His old father, the chief cashier at the same bank, was much pitied, because for forty years he had discharged his highly responsible duties with exemplary loyalty. Two days after the arrest of his son he decamped to South

America with a million. So there must have been “something in the family.” We have seen in the case of Sol that he either possesses a shadow or is even a Sol niger. As to the position of Luna, we have already been told what this is when we discussed the new moon. In the “Epistola Solis ad Lunam crescentem”267 Sol cautiously says: “If you do me no hurt, O moon.”268 Luna has promised him complete dissolution while she herself “coagulates,” i.e., becomes firm, and is clothed with his blackness (induta fuero nigredine tua).269 She assumes in the friendliest manner that her blackness comes from him. The matrimonial wrangle has already begun. Luna is the “shadow of the sun, and with corruptible bodies she is consumed, and through her corruption . . . is the Lion eclipsed.”270

According to the ancient view, the moon stands on the border-line between the eternal, aethereal things and the ephemeral phenomena of the earthly, sublunar realm.271 Macrobius says: “The realm of the perishable begins with the moon and goes downwards. Souls coming into this region begin to be subject to the numbering of days and to time. . . . There is no doubt that the moon is the author and contriver of mortal bodies.”272 Because of her moist nature, the moon is also the cause of decay.273 The loveliness of the new moon, hymned by the poets and Church Fathers, veils her dark side, which however could not remain hidden from the fact- finding eye of the empiricist.274 The moon, as the star nearest to the earth, partakes of the earth and its sufferings, and her analogy with the Church and the Virgin Mary as mediators has the same meaning.275 She partakes not only of the earth’s sufferings but of its daemonic darkness as well.276

The Dog

This dark side of the moon is hinted at in the ancient invocation to Selene as the “dog” or “bitch” (), in the Magic Papyri.277 There it is also said that in the second hour Helios appears as a dog.278 This statement is of interest in so far as the “symbolizatio”279 by the dog280 entered Western alchemy through Kalid’s “Liber secretorum,” originally, perhaps, an Arabic treatise. All similar passages that I could find go back, directly or indirectly, to Kalid.281 The original passage runs:

Hermes282 said, My son, take a Corascene dog and an Armenian bitch, join them together, and they will beget a dog of celestial hue, and if ever he is thirsty, give him sea water to drink: for he will guard your friend,

and he will guard you from your enemy, and he will help you wherever you may be, always being with you, in this world and in the next. And by dog and bitch, Hermes meant things which preserve bodies from burning and from the heat of the fire.283

Some of the quotations are taken from the original text, others from the variant in the Rosarium, which runs:

Hali, philosopher and king of Arabia, says in his Secret: Take a Coetanean284 dog and an Armenian bitch, join them together, and they two will beget for you a puppy [filius canis] of celestial hue: and that puppy will guard you in your house from the beginning, in this world and in the next.285

As explanatory parallels, the Rosarium mentions the union of the white and red, and cites Senior: “The red slave has wedded the white woman.” It is clear that the mating must refer to the royal marriage of Sol and Luna.

The theriomorphic form of Sol as a lion and dog and of Luna as a bitch shows that there is an aspect of both luminaries which justifies the need for a “symbolizatio” in animal form. That is to say the two luminaries are, in a sense, animals or appetites, although, as we have seen, the “potentiae sensuales” are ascribed only to Luna. There is, however, also a Sol niger, who, significantly enough, is contrasted with the day-time sun and clearly distinguished from it. This advantage is not shared by Luna, because she is obviously sometimes bright and sometimes dark. Psychologically, this means that consciousness by its very nature distinguishes itself from its shadow, whereas the unconscious is not only contaminated with its own negative side but is burdened with the shadow cast off by the conscious mind. Although the solar animals, the lion and the eagle, are nobler than the bitch, they are nevertheless animals and beasts of prey at that, which means that even our sun-like consciousness has its dangerous animals. Or, if Sol is the spirit and Luna the body, the spirit too may be corrupted by pride or concupiscence, a fact which we are inclined to overlook in our one-sided admiration of the “spirit.”
Kalid’s “son of the dog” is the same as the much extolled “son of the philosophers.” The ambiguity of this figure is thus stressed: it is at once bright as day and dark as night, a perfect coincidentia oppositorum

expressing the divine nature of the self. This thought, which seems an impossible one for our Christian feelings, is nevertheless so logical and so irresistible that, by however strange and devious a route, it forced its way into alchemy. And because it is a natural truth it is not at all surprising that it became articulate very much earlier. We are told in the Elenchos of Hippolytus that, according to Aratus,

Cynosura286 is the [little] Bear, the Second Creation, the small, narrow way,287 and not the great Bear []. For it leads not backward, but guides those who follow it forward to the straight way, being the tail of the Dog. For the Logos is a dog [] who guards and protects the sheep against the wiles of the wolves, and chases the wild beasts from Creation and slays them, and begets all things. For Cyon [ ], they say, means the Begetter.288

Aratus associates the Dog with the growth of plants, and continues:

But with the rising of the Dog-star, the living are distinguished by the Dog from the dead, for in truth everything withers that has not taken root. This Dog, they say, being a certain divine Logos, has been established judge of the quick and the dead, and as the Dog is seen to be the star of the plants, so is the Logos, they say, in respect of the heavenly plants, which are men. For this reason the Second Creation Cynosura stands in heaven as an image of the rational creature [

]. But between the two Creations stretches the Dragon, hindering anything of the Great Creation from entering the lesser, and watching over everything that exists [] in the Great Creation, like the Kneeler,289 observing how and in what manner each thing exists [] in the Lesser Creation.

Kalid’s filius canis290 is “of celestial hue,” an indication of its heavenly origin from the great luminaries. The blue colour or likeness to a dog291 is also attributed to the woman who in Hippolytus is described as

,292 and who is pursued by a grey-haired, winged, ithyphallic old man (

). He is named , Flowing Light, and she is , “which means Dark Water” ().293 Behind these figures may be discerned a coniunctio Solis et Lunae, both the sun and the new moon appearing in their unfavourable aspect. Here too there arises between them the “harmony” of an intermediary spirit (), roughly corresponding

to the position of the filius philosophorum.293a Kalid’s 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.

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.
The motif of the dog is a necessary counterbalance to the excessively praised “light-nature” of the stone. Apart from the saying of Kalid there is still another aspect of the dog, of which, however, we find only sporadic hints in the literature. One such passage occurs in the “De ratione conficiendi lapidis philosophici” of Laurentius Ventura:296

Therefore pull down the house, destroy the walls, extract therefrom the purest juice297 with the blood, and cook that thou mayest eat. Wherefore Arnaldus saith in the Book of Secrets:298 Purify the stone, grind the door to powder, tear the bitch to pieces, choose the tender flesh, and thou wilt have the best thing. In the one thing are hidden all parts, in it all metals shine. Of these [parts], two are the artificers, two the vessels, two the times, two the fruits, two the ends, and one the salvation.299

This text abounds in obscurities. In the preceding section Ventura discusses the unity of the lapis and the medicina, mentioning the axioms “Introduce nothing alien” and “Nothing from outside”300 with quotations from Geber, the Turba, and the “Thesaurus thesaurorum” of Arnaldus.301 Then he turns to the “superfluities to be removed.”302 The lapis, he says, is “by nature most pure.” It is therefore sufficiently purified when it is “led

out of its proper house and enclosed in an alien house.” The text continues:

In the proper house the flying bird is begotten, and in the alien house303 the tincturing stone. The two flying birds304 hop on to the tables and heads of the kings,305 because both, the feathered bird and the plucked,306 have given [us] this visible art307 and cannot relinquish the society of men.308 The father309 of [the art] urges the indolent to work, its mother310 nourishes the sons who are exhausted by their labours, and quickens and adorns their weary limbs.

Then follows the passage “Therefore pull down the house,” etc. If the reader has perused the foregoing passage with the footnotes he will see that these instructions are the typical alchemical procedure for extracting the spirit or soul, and thus for bringing unconscious contents to consciousness. During the solutio, separatio, and extractio the succus lunariae (juice of the moon-plant), blood, or aqua permanens is either applied or extracted. This “liquid” comes from the unconscious but is not always an authentic content of it; often it is more an effect of the unconscious on the conscious mind. The psychiatrist knows it as the indirect effect of constellated unconscious contents which attracts or diverts attention to the unconscious and causes it to be assimilated. This process can be observed not only in the gradual formation of hypochondriac obsessions, phobias, and delusions, but also in dreams, fantasies, and creative activities when an unconscious content enforces the application of attention. This is the succus vitae,311 the blood, the vital participation which the patient unconsciously forces on the analyst too, and without which no real therapeutic effect can be achieved. The attention given to the unconscious has the effect of incubation, a brooding312 over the slow fire needed in the initial stages of the work;313 hence the frequent use of the terms decoctio, digestio, putrefactio, solutio. It is really as if attention warmed the unconscious and activated it, thereby breaking down the barriers that separate it from consciousness.

In order to set free the contents hidden in the “house”314 of the unconscious (anima in compedibus!) the “matrix” must be opened. This matrix is the “canicula,” the moon-bitch, who carries in her belly that part of the personality which is felt to be essential, just as Beya did Gabricus. She is the vessel which must be broken asunder in order to extract the

precious content, the “tender flesh,”315 for this is the “one thing” on which the whole work turns. In this one thing all parts of the work are contained.316 Of these parts two are the artificers, who in the symbolical realm are Sol and Luna, in the human the adept and his soror mystica,317 and in the psychological realm the masculine consciousness and the feminine unconscious (anima). The two vessels are again Sol and Luna,318 the two times are probably the two main divisions of the work, the opus ad album et ad rubeum.319 The former is the opus Lunae, the latter the opus Solis.320 Psychologically they correspond to the constellation of unconscious contents in the first part of the analytical process and to the integration of these contents in actual life. The two fruits321 are the fruit of the sun-and-moon tree,322 gold and silver, or the reborn and sublimated Sol and Luna. The psychological parallel is the transformation of both the unconscious and the conscious, a fact known to everyone who methodically “has it out” with his unconscious. The two ends or goals are these transformations. But the salvation is one, just as the thing is one: it is the same thing at the beginning as at the end, it was always there and yet it appears only at the end. This thing is the self, the indescribable totality, which though it is inconceivable and “irrepresentable” is none the less necessary as an intuitive concept. Empirically we can establish no more than that the ego is surrounded on all sides by an unconscious factor. Proof of this is afforded by the association experiment, which gives a graphic demonstration of the frequent failure of the ego and its will. The psyche is an equation that cannot be “solved” without the factor of the unconscious; it is a totality which includes both the empirical ego and its transconscious foundation.

There is still another function of the dog in alchemy which has to be considered. In the “Introitus apertus” of Philaletha we find the following passage:

This Chamaeleon is the infant hermaphrodite, who is infected from his very cradle by the bite of the rabid Corascene dog, whereby he is maddened and rages with perpetual hydrophobia; nay, though of all natural things water is the closest to him, yet he is terrified of it and flees from it. O fate! Yet in the grove of Diana there is a pair of doves, which assuage his raving madness. Then will the impatient, swarthy, rabid dog, that he may suffer no return of his hydrophobia and perish drowned in

the waters, come to the surface half suffocated; but do thou chase him off with pails of water and blows, and keep him at a distance, and the darkness will disappear. When the moon is at the full, give him wings and he will fly away as an eagle, leaving Diana’s birds dead behind him.323

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
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.

The raving madness of the infected “infant” is assuaged (we should really say “with caresses,” for that is the meaning of “mulcere”) by the doves of Diana. These doves form a pair—a love pair, for doves are the birds of Astarte.329 In alchemy they represent, like all winged creatures, spirits or souls, or, in technical terms, the aqua, the extracted transformative substance.330 The appearance of a pair of doves points to the imminent marriage of the filius regius and to the dissolution of the opposites as a result of the union. The filius is merely infected by the evil, but the evil itself, the mad dog, is sublimated and changed into an eagle at the plenilunium. In the treatise of Abraham Eleazar, the lapis in its dark, feminine form appears instead of the dog and is compared to the Shulamite in the Song of Songs. The lapis says: “But I must be like a dove.”331
There is another passage in the “Introitus apertus” which is relevant in this context:

If thou knowest how to moisten this dry earth with its own water, thou wilt loosen the pores of the earth, and this thief from outside will be cast out with the workers of wickedness, and the water, by an admixture of the true Sulphur, will be cleansed from the leprous filth and from the superfluous dropsical fluid, and thou wilt have in thy power the fount of the Knight of Treviso, whose waters are rightfully dedicated to the maiden Diana. Worthless is this thief, armed with the malignity of arsenic, from whom the winged youth fleeth, shuddering. And though the central water is his bride, yet dare he not display his most ardent love towards her, because of the snares of the thief, whose machinations are in truth unavoidable. Here may Diana be propitious to thee, who knoweth how to tame wild beasts, and whose twin doves will temper the malignity of the air with their wings, so that the youth easily entereth in

through the pores, and instantly shaketh the foundations of the earth,332 and raises up a dark cloud. But thou wilt lead the waters up even to the brightness of the moon, and the darkness that was upon the face of the deep shall be scattered by the spirit moving over the waters. Thus by God’s command shall the Light appear.333

It is evident that this passage is a variation on the theme of the preceding text. Instead of the infant hermaphrodite we have the winged youth, whose bride is the fountain of Diana (Luna as a nymph). The parallel to the mad dog is the thief or ne’er-do-well who is armed with the “malignity of arsenic.” His malignity is assuaged by the wings of the doves, just as the dog’s rabies was. The youth’s wings are a token of his aerial nature; he is a pneuma that penetrates through the pores of the earth and activates it—which means nothing less than the connubium of the living spirit with the “dry, virgin earth,” or of the wind with the waters dedicated to the maiden Diana. The winged youth is described as the “spirit moving over the waters,” and this may be a reference not only to Genesis but to the angel that troubled the pool of Bethesda.334 His enemy, the thief who lies in wait for him, is, we are told earlier, the “outward burning vaporous sulphur,” in other words sulphur vulgi, who is armed with the evil spirit, the devil, or is held captive by him in hell,335 and is thus the equivalent of the dog choked in the water. That the dog and the thief are identical is clear from the remark that Diana knows how to tame wild beasts. The two doves do in fact turn out to be the pair of lovers who appear in the love-story of Diana and the shepherd Endymion. This legend originally referred to Selene.
The appearance of Diana necessarily brings with it her hunting animal the dog, who represents her dark side. Her darkness shows itself in the fact that she is also a goddess of destruction and death, whose arrows never miss. She changed the hunter Actaeon, when he secretly watched her bathing, into a stag, and his own hounds, not recognizing him, thereupon tore him to pieces. This myth may have given rise first to the designation of the lapis as the cervus fugitivus (fugitive stag),336 and then to the rabid dog, who is none other than the vindictive and treacherous aspect of Diana as the new moon. The parable we discussed in the chapter on sulphur likewise contains the motif of the “surprise in the bath.” But there it is Helios himself who espies her, and the relationship is a brother-sister

incest that ends with their both being drowned. This catastrophe is inherent in the incest, for through incest the royal pair is produced after animals have been killed or have killed one another.337 The animals (dragon, lion, snake, etc.) stand for evil passions that finally take the form of incest. They are destroyed by their own ravenous nature, just as are Sol and Luna, whose supreme desire culminates apparently in incest. But since “all that passes is but a parable,” incest, as we have said before, is nothing but a preliminary form of the unio oppositorum.338 Out of chaos, darkness, and wickedness there rises up a new light once death has atoned for the “unavoidable machinations” of the Evil One.

An Alchemical Allegory

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 psychotherapist; and, like dreams, they can be translated into rational speech. In order to interpret dreams we need some knowledge of the dreamer’s 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 Philaletha’s 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,

If thou knowest how to moisten this dry earth with its own water, thou wilt loosen the pores of the earth,

If you will contemplate your lack of fantasy, of inspiration and inner aliveness, which you feel as sheer stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as

great a fulness if only you will allow it to penetrate into you. If you prove receptive to this “call of the wild,” the longing for fulfilment will quicken the sterile wilderness of your soul as rain quickens the dry earth. (Thus the Soul to the Laborant, staring glumly at his stove and scratching himself behind the ear because he has no more ideas.)

et externus hic fur cum Operatoribus nequitiae foras projicietur,

and this thief from outside will be cast out with the workers of wickedness,

You are so sterile because, without your knowledge, something like an evil spirit has stopped up the source of your fantasy, the fountain of your soul. The enemy is your own crude sulphur, which burns you with the hellish fire of desirousness, or concupiscentia. You would like to make gold because “poverty is the greatest plague, wealth the highest good.”339 You wish to have results that flatter your pride, you expect something useful, but there can be no question of that as you have realized with a shock. Because of this you no longer even want to be fruitful, as it would only be for God’s sake but unfortunately not for your own.

purgabitur aqua per additamentum Sulphuris veri a sorde leprosa, et ab humore hydropico superfluo

and the water, by an admixture of the true Sulphur, will be cleansed from the leprous filth and from the superfluous dropsical fluid,

Therefore away with your crude and vulgar desirousness, which childishly and shortsightedly sees only goals within its own narrow horizon. Admittedly sulphur is a vital spirit, a “Yetser Ha-ra,”340 an evil spirit of passion, though like this an active element; useful as it is at times, it is an obstacle between you and your goal. The water of your interest is not pure, it is poisoned by the leprosy of desirousness which is the common ill. You too are infected with this collective sickness. Therefore bethink you for once, “extrahe cogitationem,” and consider: What is behind all this desirousness? A thirsting for the eternal, which as you see can never be satisfied with the best because it is “Hades” in whose honour the desirous “go mad and rave.”341 The more you cling to that which all the world desires, the more you are Everyman, who has not yet discovered himself and stumbles through the world like a blind man leading the blind

with somnambulistic certainty into the ditch. Everyman is always a multitude. Cleanse your interest of that collective sulphur which clings to all like a leprosy. For desire only burns in order to burn itself out, and in and from this fire arises the true living spirit which generates life according to its own laws, and is not blinded by the shortsightedness of our intentions or the crude presumption of our superstitious belief in the will. Goethe says . . .

That livingness I praise

Which longs for flaming death.342

This means burning in your own fire and not being like a comet or a flashing beacon, showing others the right way but not knowing it yourself. The unconscious demands your interest for its own sake and wants to be accepted for what it is. Once the existence of this opposite is accepted, the ego can and should come to terms with its demands. Unless the content given you by the unconscious is acknowledged, its compensatory effect is not only nullified343 but actually changes into its opposite, as it then tries to realize itself literally and concretely.

habebisque in posse Comitis a Trevis Fontinam, cujus Aquae sunt proprie Dianae Virgini dicatae.

and thou wilt have in thy power the Fount of the Knight of Treviso, whose waters are rightfully dedicated to the maiden Diana.

The fountain of Bernardus Trevisanus is the bath of renewal that was mentioned earlier. The ever-flowing fountain expresses a continual flow of interest toward the unconscious, a kind of constant attention or “religio,” which might also be called devotion. The crossing of unconscious contents into consciousness is thus made considerably easier, and this is bound to benefit the psychic balance in the long run. Diana as the numen and nymph of this spring is an excellent formulation of the figure we know as the anima. If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our psychic life are separated.

Hic fur est nequam arsenicali malignitate armatus, quem juvenis alatus

Worthless is this thief, armed with the malignity of arsenic, from whom the winged youth fleeth, shuddering.

horret et fugit.

It is evidently a difficult thing, this “cleansing from leprous filth”; indeed, d’Espagnet calls it a labour of Hercules. That is why the text turns back to the “thief” at this point. The thief, as we saw, personifies a kind of self-robbery. He is not easily shaken off, as it comes from a habit of thinking supported by tradition and milieu alike: anything that cannot be exploited in some way is uninteresting—hence the devaluation of the psyche. A further reason is the habitual depreciation of everything one cannot touch with the hands or does not understand. In this respect our conventional system of education—necessary as it was—is not entirely free from the blame of having helped to give the empirical psyche a bad name. In recent times this traditional error has been made even worse by an allegedly biological point of view which sees man as being no further advanced than a herd-animal and fails to understand any of his motivations outside the categories of hunger, power, and sex. We think in terms of thousands and millions of units, and then naturally there are no questions more important than whom the herd belongs to, where it pastures, whether enough calves are born and sufficient quantities of milk and meat are produced. In the face of huge numbers every thought of individuality pales, for statistics obliterate everything unique. Contemplating such overwhelming might and misery the individual is embarrassed to exist at all. Yet the real carrier of life is the individual. He alone feels happiness, he alone has virtue and responsibility and any ethics whatever. The masses and the state have nothing of the kind. Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself. He is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State. Our time contains and produces more than enough of that “crude sulphur” which with “arsenical malignity” prevents man from discovering his true self.
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

Ruland’s 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, Sulphur’s 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 “Sulphur’s 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.

This is what has happened in our text: the thief is contrasted with the winged youth, who represents the other aspect, or personifies the “true sulphur,” the spirit of inner truth which measures man not by his relation to the mass but by his relation to the mystery of the psyche. This winged youth (the spiritual Mercurius) is obviously aware of his own weakness and flees “shuddering” from the crude sulphur. The standpoint of the inner man is the more threatened the more overpowering that of the outer man is. Sometimes only his invisibility saves him. He is so small that no one would miss him if he were not the sine qua non of inner peace and happiness.345 In the last resort it is neither the “eighty-million-strong nation” nor the State that feels peace and happiness, but the individual. Nobody can ever get round the simple computation that a million noughts in a row do not add up to 1, just as the loudest talk can never abolish the simple psychological fact that the larger the mass the more nugatory is the individual.
The shy and delicate youth stands for everything that is winged in the psyche or that would like to sprout wings. But it dies from the poison of organizational thinking and mass statistics; the individual succumbs to the madness that sooner or later overtakes every mass—the death-instinct of the lemmings. In the political sphere the name for this is war.

Et licet Aqua centralis sit hujus Sponsa, tamen Amorem suum erga illam ardentissimum non audet exerere, ob latronis insidias, cujus technae sunt vere inevitabiles.

And though the central Water is his bride, yet dare he not display his most ardent love towards her, because of the snares of the thief, whose machinations are in truth unavoidable.

The goal of the winged youth is a higher one than the fulfilment of collective ideals, which are all nothing but makeshifts and conditions for bare existence. Since this is the absolute foundation, nobody will deny their importance, but collective ideals are not by a long way the breath of life which a man needs in order to live. If his soul does not live nothing can save him from stultification. His life is the soil in which his soul can and must develop. He has only the mystery of his living soul to set against the overwhelming might and brutality of collective convictions.
It is the age-old drama of opposites, no matter what they are called, which is fought out in every human life. In our text it is obviously the struggle between the good and the evil spirit, expressed in alchemical language just as today we express it in conflicting ideologies. The text comes close to the mystical language of the Baroque—the language of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), Abraham of Franckenberg (1593–1652), and Angelus Silesius (1624–1677).
We learn that the winged youth is espoused to the “central Water.” This is the fountain of the soul or the fount of wisdom,346 from which the inner life wells up. The nymph of the spring is in the last analysis Luna, the mother-beloved, from which it follows that the winged youth is Sol, the filius solis, lapis, aurum philosophicum, lumen luminum, medicina catholica, una salus, etc. He is the best, the highest, the most precious in potentia. But he will become real only if he can unite with Luna, the “mother of mortal bodies.” If not, he is threatened with the fate of the puer aeternus in Faust, who goes up in smoke three times.347 The adept must therefore always take care to keep the Hermetic vessel well sealed, in order to prevent what is in it from flying away. The content becomes “fixed” through the mystery of the coniunctio, in which the extreme opposites unite, night is wedded with day, and “the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female.”348 This apocryphal saying of Jesus from the beginning of the second century is

indeed a paradigm for the alchemical union of opposites. Obviously this problem is an eschatological one, but, aside from the somewhat tortuous language of the times, it cannot be called abstruse since it has universal validity, from the tao of Lao-tzu to the coincidentia oppositorum of Cusanus. The same idea penetrated into Christianity in the form of the apocalyptic marriage of the Lamb (Rev. 22 : 9ff.), and we seldom find a high point of religious feeling where this eternal image of the royal marriage does not appear.

I can do no more than demonstrate the existence of this image and its phenomenology. What the union of opposites really “means” transcends human imagination. Therefore the worldly-wise can dismiss such a “fantasy” without further ado, for it is perfectly clear: tertium non datur. But that doesn’t help us much, for we are dealing with an eternal image, an archetype, from which man can turn away his mind for a time but never permanently.349 Whenever this image is obscured his life loses its proper meaning and consequently its balance. So long as he knows that he is the carrier of life and that it is therefore important for him to live, then the mystery of his soul lives also—no matter whether he is conscious of it or not. But if he no longer sees the meaning of his life in its fulfilment, and no longer believes in man’s eternal right to this fulfilment, then he has betrayed and lost his soul, substituting for it a madness which leads to destruction, as our time demonstrates all too clearly.
The “machinations of the thief,” our text says, are “unavoidable.” They are an integral part of the fateful drama of opposites, just as the shadow belongs to the light. Reason, however, cannot turn this into a convenient recipe, for inevitability does not diminish the guilt of what is evil any more than the merit of what is good. Minus remains minus, and guilt, as ever, has to be avenged. “Evil follows after wrong,” says the Capuchin friar in Wallenstein’s camp—a banal truth that is too readily forgotten, and because of this the winged youth cannot lead his bride home as quickly as he would wish. Evil cannot be eradicated once and for all; it is an inevitable component of life and is not to be had without paying for it. The thief whom the police do not catch has, nonetheless, robbed himself, and the murderer is his own executioner.
The thief in our text is armed with all evil, but in reality it is merely the ego with its shadow where the abysmal depths of human nature begin

to appear. Increasing psychological insight hinders the projection of the shadow, and this gain in knowledge logically leads to the problem of the union of opposites. One realizes, first of all, that one cannot project one’s shadow on to others, and next that there is no advantage in insisting on their guilt, as it is so much more important to know and possess one’s own, because it is part of one’s own self and a necessary factor without which nothing in this sublunary world can be realized. Though it is not said that Luna personifies the dark side, there is as we have seen something very suspicious about the new moon. Nevertheless the winged youth loves his moon-bride and hence the darkness to which she belongs, for the opposites not only flee one another but also attract one another. We all know that evil, especially if it is not scrutinized too closely, can be very attractive, and most of all when it appears in idealistic garb. Ostensibly it is the wicked thief that hinders the youth in his love for the chaste Diana, but in reality the evil is already lurking in the ideal youth and in the darkness of the new moon, and his chief fear is that he might discover himself in the role of the common sulphur. This role is so shocking that the noble-minded youth cannot see himself in it and puts the blame on the wiles of the enemy. It is as if he dared not know himself because he is not adult enough to accept the fact that one must be thankful if one comes across an apple without a worm in it and a plate of soup without a hair.

Esto hic tibi Diana propitia, quae feras domare novit,

Here may Diana be propitious to thee, who knoweth how to tame wild beasts,

The darkness which is opposed to the light is the unbridled instinctuality of nature that asserts itself despite all consciousness. Anyone who seeks to unite the opposites certainly needs Diana to be propitious to him, for she is being considered as a bride and it has yet to be seen what she has to present in the way of wild animals. Possibly the thief will appear quite insignificant by comparison.

cujus binae columbae pennis suis aeris malignitatem temperabunt,

and whose twin doves will temper the malignity of the air with their wings,

The tender pair of doves is an obviously harmless aspect of the same

instinctuality, though in itself the theriomorphic symbol would be capable of an “interpretation from above downwards.” Nonetheless, it should not be interpreted in this sense because the aspect of untamed animality and evil is represented in the previous quotation by the mad dog and in this one by the thief. In contrast to this, the doves are emblems of innocence and of marital love as well as of the Holy Ghost and Sapientia, of Christ and his Virgin Mother.350 From this context we can see what the dove is intended to represent: it is the exact counterpart to the malignity of the thief. Together they represent the attack, first from one side and then from the other, of a dualistic being on the more restricted consciousness of man. The purpose or result of this assault is the widening of consciousness, which has always, it seems, followed the pattern laid down in Genesis 3 : 4f.: “Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

It is obviously a moment of supreme possibilities both for good and for evil. Usually, however, it is first one and then the other: the good man succumbs to evil, the sinner is converted to good, and that, to an uncritical eye, is the end of the matter. But those endowed with a finer moral sense or deeper insight cannot deny that this seeming one-after-another is in reality a happening of events side-by-side, and perhaps no one has realized this more clearly than St. Paul, who knew that he bore a thorn in the flesh and that the messenger of Satan smote him in the face lest he be “exalted above measure.”351 The one-after-another is a bearable prelude to the deeper knowledge of the side-by-side, for this is an incomparably more difficult problem. Again, the view that good and evil are spiritual forces outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them, is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. Even a life dedicated to God is still lived by an ego, which speaks of an ego and asserts an ego in God’s despite, which does not instantly merge itself with God but reserves for itself a freedom and a will which it sets up outside God and against him. How can it do this against the overwhelming might of God? Only through self-assertion, which is as sure of its free will as Lucifer. All distinction from God is separation, estrangement, a falling away. The Fall was inevitable even in paradise. Therefore Christ is “without the stain of sin,” because he stands for the whole of the Godhead

and is not distinct from it by reason of his manhood.352 Man, however, is branded by the stain of separation from God. This state of things would be insupportable if there were nothing to set against evil but the law and the Decalogue, as in pre-Christian Judaism—until the reformer and rabbi Jesus tried to introduce the more advanced and psychologically more correct view that not fidelity to the law but love and kindness are the antithesis of evil. The wings of the dove temper the malignity of the air, the wickedness of the aerial spirit (“the prince of the power of the air”—Ephesians 2 : 2), and they alone have this effect.

quod per poros facile ingreditur adolescens, concutit statim (terrae sedes), nubemque tetricam suscitat.

so that the youth easily entereth in through the pores, and instantly shaketh the foundations of the earth,353 and raiseth up a dark cloud.

Once the malignity is tempered, sinfulness and its evil consequences are mitigated too, and that which has wings can embrace the earth. For now we come to the consummation of the hierosgamos, the “earthing” of the spirit and the spiritualizing of the earth, the union of opposites and reconciliation of the divided (Ephesians 2 : 14),354 in a word the longed-for act of redemption whereby the sinfulness of existence, the original dissociation, will be annulled in God. The earthquake is on the one hand an allusion to Christ’s descent into hell and his resurrection, and on the other hand a shaking of the humdrum earthly existence of man, into whose life and soul meaning has at last penetrated, and by which he is at once threatened and uplifted.
This is always an intuitive experience that is felt as a concrete reality. It is the prefiguration and anticipation of a future condition, a glimmering of an unspoken, half-conscious union of ego and non-ego. Rightly called a unio mystica, it is the fundamental experience of all religions that have any life in them and have not yet degenerated into confessionalism; that have safeguarded the mystery of which the others know only the rites it produced—empty bags from which the gold has long since vanished.
The earthquake sends up a dark cloud: consciousness, because of the revolution of its former standpoint, is shrouded in darkness, just as the

earth was at Christ’s death, which was followed by a resurrection. This image tells us that the widening of consciousness is at first upheaval and darkness, then a broadening out of man to the whole man. This “Man,” being indescribable, is an intuitive or “mystical” experience, and the name “Anthropos” is therefore very apt because it demonstrates the continuity of this idea over the millennia.

tu undas superinduces ad Lunae usque candorem,

But thou wilt lead the waters up even to the brightness of the moon,

As we have seen, water here has the meaning of “fructifying interest,” and its leading upwards means that it now turns towards the plenilunium, the gracious and serene complement of the sinister new moon and its perils.

atque ita Tenebrae, quae supra abyssi faciem erant, per spiritum se in aquis moventem discutientur. Sic jubente Deo Lux apparebit.

and the darkness that was upon the face of the deep shall be scattered by the spirit moving over the waters. Thus by God’s command shall the Light appear.

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.
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.

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.

The Moon-Nature

We have treated at some length of the sinister and dangerous aspect of

the new moon. In this phase the climax of the moon’s waning, which in folklore is not always considered auspicious, is reached. The new moon is dangerous at childbirth and weddings. If a father dies at the waning moon, this brings the children bad luck. One also has to bow to the sickle moon or it will bring bad luck. Even the light of the moon is dangerous as it causes the moon-sickness, which comes from the “moon-wolf.” The marriage bed, pregnant women, and small children should be protected from the moonlight. Whoever sews by moonlight sews the winding-sheet, and so on.355

The passage on the moon in Paracelsus’ “De pestilitate” (III, 95) catches very aptly the atmosphere which hangs round the pale moonlight:

Now mark this: Wherever there is a disheartened and timid man in whom imagination has created the great fear and impressed it on him, the moon in heaven aided by her stars is the corpus to bring this about. When such a disheartened timid man looks at the moon under the full sway of his imagination, he looks into the speculum venenosum magnum naturae [great poisonous mirror of nature], and the sidereal spirit and magnes hominis [magnet of man] will thus be poisoned by the stars and the moon. But we shall expound this more clearly to you as follows. Through his imagination the timid man has made his eyes basilisk-like, and he infects the mirror, the moon, and the stars, through himself at the start, and later on so that the moon is infected by the imagining man; this will happen soon and easily, by dint of the magnetic power which the sidereal body and spirit exerts upon the celestial bodies [viz.] the moon and the stars in great Nature [viz., the Macrocosm]. Thus man in turn will be poisoned by this mirror of the moon and the stars which he has looked at; and this because (for, as you can see, it happens quite naturally) a pregnant woman at the time of menstruation similarly stains and damages the mirror by looking into it. For at such a time she is poisonous and has basilisk’s eyes ex causa menstrui et venenosi sanguinis [because of the menstrual and poisonous blood] which lies hidden in her body and nowhere more strongly than in her eyes. For there the sidereal spirit of the stained body lies open and naked to the sidereal magnet. Quia ex menstruo et venenoso sanguine mulieris causatur et nascitur basiliscus, ita luna in coelo est oculus basilisci coeli [Because as the basilisk is caused and born from the menstrual and

poisonous blood of a woman, thus the moon in the sky is the eye of the basilisk of heaven]. And as the mirror is defiled by the woman, thus conversely the eyes, the sidereal spirit, and the body of man are being defiled by the moon, for the reason that at such time the eyes of the timid imagining man are weak and dull, and the sidereal spirit and body draw poison out of the mirror of the moon into which you have looked. But not so that only one human being has the power thus to poison the moon with his sight, no; hence I say that, mostly, menstruating women do poison the moon and the stars much more readily and also more intensely than any man, easily so. Because as you see that they poison and stain the mirror made of metallic material—and what is even more, the glass mirror—much more and sooner they defile the moon and the stars at such a time. And even if at such time the moon only shines on water and the woman looks at the water, the moon will be poisoned, and by still many more means, but it would not do to reveal all this clearly. And such poisoning of the moon happens for this reason: it is the naked eye of the spirit and of the sidereal body and it often grows new and young as you can see. Just as a young child who looks into a mirror which was looked at by a menstruating woman will become long- sighted and cross-eyed and his eyes will be poisoned, stained, and ruined, as the mirror was stained by the menstruating woman; and so also the moon, and also the human being, is poisoned. And as the moon, when it grows new and young, is of a poisonous kind, this you shall notice in two ways, namely in the element of water and also in wood, loam, etc.: as this, when it is gathered at the wrong time will not burn well, but be worm-eaten, poisonous, bad, and putrid, so is also the moon, and that is why it can be poisoned so easily by merely looking at it and the moon with its light is the humidum ignis [moisture of fire], of a cold nature, for which reason it is capable of receiving the poison easily.356

In the Table of Correspondences in Penotus357 the following are said to pertain to the moon: the snake, the tiger, the Manes, the Lemurs, and the dei infernales. These correlations show clearly how Penotus was struck by the underworld nature of the moon.358 His “heretical” empiricism led him beyond the patristic allegories to a recognition of the moon’s dark side, an aspect no longer suited to serve as an allegory of the beauteous bride of Christ. And just as the bitch was forgotten in the lunar allegory of the

Church, so too our masculine judgment is apt to forget it when dealing with an over-valued woman. We should not deceive ourselves about the sinister “tail” of the undoubtedly desirable “head”: the baying of Hecate is always there, whether it sound from near or from far. This is true of everything feminine and not least of a man’s anima. The mythology of the moon is an object lesson in female psychology.359

The moon with her antithetical nature is, in a sense, a prototype of individuation, a prefiguration of the self: she is the “mother and spouse of the sun, who carries in the wind and the air the spagyric embryo conceived by the sun in her womb and belly.”360 This image corresponds to the psychologem of the pregnant anima, whose child is the self, or is marked by the attributes of the hero. Just as the anima represents and personifies the collective unconscious, so Luna represents the six planets or spirits of the metals. Dorn says:

From Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and Venus nothing and no other metal can arise except Luna [i.e., silver] For Luna consists of the six

spiritual metals and their powers, of which each has two. . . . From the planet Mercury, from Aquarius and Gemini, or from Aquarius and Pisces, Luna has her liquidity [liquatio] and her white brightness ,

from Jupiter, Sagittarius, and Taurus her white colour and her great stability in the fire . . ., from Mars, Cancer, and Aries her hardness and fine resonance , from Venus, Gemini, and Libra her degree of solidity

[coagulationis] and malleability . . ., from Sol, Leo, and Virgo her true purity and great endurance against the strength of the fire . . ., from Saturn, Virgo, and Scorpio, or from Capricorn, her homogeneous body, her pure cleanness [puram munditiem], and steadfastness against the force of the fire.361

Luna is thus the sum and essence of the metals’ natures, which are all taken up in her shimmering whiteness. She is multi-natured, whereas Sol has an exceptional nature as the “seventh from the six spiritual metals.” He is “in himself nothing other than pure fire.”362 This role of Luna devolves upon the anima, as she personifies the plurality of archetypes, and also upon the Church and the Blessed Virgin, who, both of lunar nature, gather the many under their protection and plead for them before the Sol iustitiae. Luna is the “universal receptacle of all things,” the “first gateway of heaven,”363 and William Mennens364 says that she gathers the powers of all

the stars in herself as in a womb, so as then to bestow them on sublunary creatures.365 This quality seems to explain her alleged effect in the opus ad Lunam, when she gives the tincture the character and powers of all the stars. The “Fragment from the Persian Philosophers” says: “With this tincture all the dead are revived, so that they live for ever, and this tincture is the first-created ferment,366 namely that ‘to the moon,’367 and it is the light of all lights and the flower and fruit of all lights,368 which lighteth all things.”369

This almost hymn-like paean to the materia lapidis or the tincture refers in the first instance to Luna, for it is during her work of whitening that the illumination takes place. She is the “mother in this art.” In her water “Sol is hidden like a fire”370—a parallel to the conception of Selene as the in Plutarch. On the first day of the month of Phamenoth, Osiris enters into Selene, and this is evidently equivalent to the synodos in the spring. “Thus they make the power of Osiris to be fixed in the moon.”371 Selene, Plutarch says, is male-female and is impregnated by Helios. I mention these statements because they show that the moon has a double light, outside a feminine one but inside a masculine one which is hidden in it as a fire. Luna is really the mother of the sun, which means, psychologically, that the unconscious is pregnant with consciousness and gives birth to it. It is the night, which is older than the day:

Part of the darkness which gave birth to light, That proud light which is struggling to usurp The ancient rank and realm of Mother Night.372

From the darkness of the unconscious comes the light of illumination, the albedo. The opposites are contained in it in potentia, hence the hermaphroditism of the unconscious, its capacity for spontaneous and autochthonous reproduction. This idea is reflected in the “Father-Mother” of the Gnostics,373 as well as in the naïve vision of Brother Klaus374 and the modern vision of Maitland.375 the biographer of Anna Kingsford.
Finally, I would like to say a few words about the psychology of the moon, which is none too simple. The alchemical texts were written exclusively by men, and their statements about the moon are therefore the product of masculine psychology. Nevertheless women did play a role in alchemy, as I have mentioned before, and this makes it possible that the “symbolization” will show occasional traces of their influence. Generally

the proximity as well as the absence of women has a specifically constellating effect on the unconscious of a man. When a woman is absent or unattainable the unconscious produces in him a certain femininity which expresses itself in a variety of ways and gives rise to numerous conflicts. The more one-sided his conscious, masculine, spiritual attitude the more inferior, banal, vulgar, and biological will be the compensating femininity of the unconscious. He will, perhaps, not be conscious at all of its dark manifestations, because they have been so overlaid with saccharine sentimentality that he not only believes the humbug himself but enjoys putting it over on other people. An avowedly biological or coarse-minded attitude to women produces an excessively lofty valuation of femininity in the unconscious, where it is pleased to take the form of Sophia or of the Virgin. Frequently, however, it gets distorted by everything that misogyny can possibly devise to protect the masculine consciousness from the influence of women, so that the man succumbs instead to unpredictable moods and insensate resentments.

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 man’s unconscious femininity, but she is also the principle of the feminine psyche, in the sense that Sol is the principle of a man’s. 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.
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.

For purely psychological reasons I have, in other of my writings, tried to equate the masculine consciousness with the concept of Logos and the feminine with that of Eros. By Logos I meant discrimination, judgment, insight, and by Eros I meant the capacity to relate. I regarded both concepts as intuitive ideas which cannot be defined accurately or exhaustively. From the scientific point of view this is regrettable, but from a practical one it has its value, since the two concepts mark out a field of experience which it is equally difficult to define.
As we can hardly ever make a psychological proposition without immediately having to reverse it, instances to the contrary leap to the eye at once: men who care nothing for discrimination, judgment, and insight, and women who display an almost excessively masculine proficiency in this respect. I would like to describe such cases as the regular exceptions. They demonstrate, to my mind, the common occurrence of a psychically predominant contrasexuality. Wherever this exists we find a forcible intrusion of the unconscious, a corresponding exclusion of the consciousness specific to either sex, predominance of the shadow and of contrasexuality, and to a certain extent even the presence of symptoms of possession (such as compulsions, phobias, obsessions, automatisms, exaggerated affects, etc.). This inversion of roles is probably the chief psychological source for the alchemical concept of the hermaphrodite. In a man it is the lunar anima, in a woman the solar animus, that influences consciousness in the highest degree. Even if a man is often unaware of his own anima-possession, he has, understandably enough, all the more vivid an impression of the animus-possession of his wife, and vice versa.
Logos and Eros are intellectually formulated intuitive equivalents of the archetypal images of Sol and Luna. In my view the two luminaries are

so descriptive and so superlatively graphic in their implications that I would prefer them to the more pedestrian terms Logos and Eros, although the latter do pin down certain psychological peculiarities more aptly than the rather indefinite “Sol and Luna.” The use of these images requires at any rate an alert and lively fantasy, and this is not an attribute of those who are inclined by temperament to purely intellectual concepts. These offer us something finished and complete, whereas an archetypal image has nothing but its naked fullness, which seems inapprehensible by the intellect. Concepts are coined and negotiable values; images are life.

If our formula regarding the lunar nature of feminine consciousness is correct—and in view of the consensus omnium in this matter it is difficult to see how it should not be—we must conclude that this consciousness is of a darker, more nocturnal quality, and because of its lower luminosity can easily overlook differences which to a man’s consciousness are self- evident stumbling-blocks. It needs a very moon-like consciousness indeed to hold a large family together regardless of all the differences, and to talk and act in such a way that the harmonious relation of the parts to the whole is not only not disturbed but is actually enhanced. And where the ditch is too deep, a ray of moonlight smoothes it over. A classic example of this is the conciliatory proposal of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Anatole France’s Penguin Island. The heavenly council had come to a deadlock over the question of baptism, since although the penguins were animals they had been baptized by St. Maël. Therefore she says: “That is why, Lord, I entreat you to give old Maël’s penguins a human head and breast so that they can praise you worthily. And grant them also an immortal soul

—but only a little one!”376

This “lunatic” logic can drive the rational mind to the white heat of frenzy. Fortunately it operates mostly in the dark or cloaks itself in the shimmer of innocence. The moon-nature is its own best camouflage, as at once becomes apparent when a woman’s unconscious masculinity breaks through into her consciousness and thrusts her Eros aside. Then it is all up with her charm and the mitigating half-darkness; she takes a stand on some point or other and captiously defends it, although each barbed remark tears her own flesh, and with brutal short-sightedness she jeopardizes everything that is the dearest goal of womanhood. And then, for unfathomable reasons

—or perhaps simply because it is time—the picture changes completely:

the new moon has once more been vanquished.

The Sol who personifies the feminine unconscious is not the sun of the day but corresponds rather to the Sol niger. It is not the real Sol niger of masculine psychology, the alter ego, the Brother Medardus of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “The Devil’s Elixir,” or the crass identity of opposites which we meet with in Jekyll and Hyde. The unconscious Sol of woman may be dark, but it is not “coal black” (), as was said of the moon; it is more like a chronic eclipse of the sun, which in any case is seldom total. Normally a woman’s consciousness emits as much darkness as light, so that, if her consciousness cannot be entirely light, her unconscious cannot be entirely dark either. At any rate, when the lunar phases are repressed on account of too powerful solar influences, her consciousness takes on an overbright solar character, while on the other hand her unconscious becomes darker and darker—nigrum nigrius nigro— and both are unendurable for both in the long run.
Her Sol niger is as void of light and charm as the gentling moonlight is all heavenly peace and magic. It protests too much that it is a light, because it is no light, and a great truth, because it invariably misses the mark, and a high authority, which nevertheless is always wrong, or is only as right as the blind tom-cat who tried to catch imaginary bats in broad daylight, but one day caught a real one by mistake and thereafter became completely unteachable. I do not want to be unfair, but that is what the feminine Sol is like when it obtrudes too much. (And it has to obtrude a bit if the man is to understand it!)
As a man normally gets to know his anima only in projected form, so too a woman in the case of her dark sun. When her Eros is functioning properly her sun will not be too dark, and the carrier of the projection may even produce some useful compensation. But if things are not right with her Eros (in which case she is being unfaithful to Love itself), the darkness of her sun will transfer itself to a man who is anima-possessed and who dispenses inferior spirit, which as we know is as intoxicating as the strongest alcohol.
The dark sun of feminine psychology is connected with the father- imago, since the father is the first carrier of the animus-image. He endows this virtual image with substance and form, for on account of his Logos he

is the source of “spirit” for the daughter. Unfortunately this source is often sullied just where we would expect clean water. For the spirit that benefits a woman is not mere intellect, it is far more: it is an attitude, the spirit by which a man lives.377 Even a so-called “ideal” spirit is not always the best if it does not understand how to deal adequately with nature, that is, with the animal man. This really would be ideal. Hence every father is given the opportunity to corrupt, in one way or another, his daughter’s nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For “what has been spoiled by the father”378 can only be made good by a father, just as “what has been spoiled by the mother” can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations. But in judging these things one should not be too certain either of good or of evil. The two are about equally balanced. It should, however, have begun to dawn on our cultural optimists that the forces of good are not sufficient to produce either a rational world-order or the faultless ethical behaviour of the individual, whereas the forces of evil are so strong that they imperil any order at all and can imprison the individual in a devilish system that commits the most fearful crimes, so that even if he is ethical-minded he must finally forget his moral responsibility in order to go on living. The “malignity” of collective man has shown itself in more terrifying form today than ever before in history, and it is by this objective standard that the greater and the lesser sins should be measured. We need more casuistic subtlety, because it is no longer a question of extirpating evil but of the difficult art of putting a lesser evil in place of a greater one. The time for the “sweeping statements” so dear to the evangelizing moralist, which lighten his task in the most agreeable way, is long past. Nor can the conflict be escaped by a denial of moral values. The very idea of this is foreign to our instincts and contrary to nature. Every human group that is not actually sitting in prison will follow its accustomed paths according to the measure of its freedom. Whatever the intellectual definition and evaluation of good and evil may be, the conflict between them can never be eradicated, for no one can ever forget it. Even the Christian who feels himself delivered from evil will, when the first rapture is over, remember the thorn in the flesh, which even St. Paul could not pluck out.

These hints may suffice to make clear what kind of spirit it is that the

daughter needs. They are the truths which speak to the soul, which are not too loud and do not insist too much, but reach the individual in stillness— the individual who constitutes the meaning of the world. It is this knowledge that the daughter needs, in order to pass it on to her son.

Salt as the Arcane Substance

In this section I shall discuss not only salt but a number of symbolisms that are closely connected with it, such as the “bitterness” of the sea, sea- water and its baptismal quality, which in turn relates it to the “Red Sea.” I have included the latter in the scope of my observations but not the symbol of the sea as such. Since Luna symbolizes the unconscious, Sal, as one of its attributes, is a special instance of the lunar symbolism. This explains the length of the present entire chapter: extensive digressions are necessary in order to do justice to the various aspects of the unconscious that are expressed by salt, and at the same time to explain their psychological meaning.
Owing to the theory of “correspondentia,” regarded as axiomatic in the Middle Ages, the principles of each of the four worlds—the intelligible or divine, the heavenly, the earthly, and the infernal379—corresponded to each other. Usually, however, there was a division into three worlds to correspond with the Trinity: heaven, earth, hell.380 Triads were also known in alchemy. From the time of Paracelsus the most important triad was Sulphur-Mercurius-Sal, which was held to correspond with the Trinity. Georg von Welling, the plagiarist of Johann Rudolf Glauber, still thought in 1735 that his triad of fire, sun, and salt381 was “in its root entirely one thing.”382 The use of the Trinity formula in alchemy is so common that further documentation is unnecessary. A subtle feature of the Sulphur- Mercurius-Sal formula is that the central figure, Mercurius, is by nature androgynous and thus partakes both of the masculine red sulphur and of the lunar salt.383 His equivalent in the celestial realm is the planetary pair Sol and Luna, and in the “intelligible” realm Christ in his mystical androgyny, the “man encompassed by the woman,384 i.e., sponsus and sponsa (Ecclesia). Like the Trinity, the alchemical “triunity” is a quaternity in disguise owing to the duplicity of the central figure: Mercurius is not only split into a masculine and a feminine half, but is the poisonous dragon and at the same time the heavenly lapis. This makes it clear that the dragon is analogous to the devil and the lapis to Christ, in accordance with the ecclesiastical view of the devil as an autonomous counterpart of Christ.

Furthermore, not only the dragon but the negative aspect of sulphur, namely sulphur comburens, is identical with the devil, as Glauber says: “Verily, sulphur is the true black devil of hell, who can be conquered by no element save by salt alone.”385 Salt by contrast is a “light” substance, similar to the lapis, as we shall see.

From all this we get the following schema:

Here we have another of those well-known quaternities of opposites which are usually masked as a triad, just as the Christian Trinity is able to maintain itself as such only by eliminating the fourth protagonist of the divine drama. If he were included there would be, not a Trinity, but a Christian Quaternity. For a long time there had been a psychological need for this, as is evident from the medieval pictures of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin; it was also responsible for elevating her to the position of mediatrix, corresponding to Christ’s position as the mediator, with the difference that Mary only transmits grace but does not generate it. The recent promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption emphasizes the taking up not only of the soul but of the body of Mary into the Trinity, thus making a dogmatic reality of those medieval representations of the quaternity which are constructed on the following pattern:

Only in 1950, after the teaching authority in the Church had long deferred it, and almost a century after the declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, did the Pope, moved by a growing wave of popular petitions,386 feel compelled to declare the Assumption as a revealed truth. All the evidence shows that the dogmatization was motivated chiefly by the religious need of the Catholic masses. Behind this stands the archetypal numen of feminine deity,387 who, at the Council of Ephesus in 431, imperiously announced her claim to the title of “Theotokos” (God-bearer), as distinct from that of a mere “Anthropotokos” (man-bearer) accorded to her by the Nestorian rationalists.

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 Reusner’s 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 fish’s 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.

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 man’s 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 Origen’s doubt concerning the ultimate fate of the devil.395
In philosophical alchemy, salt is a cosmic principle. According to its

position in the quaternity, it is correlated with the feminine, lunar side and with the upper, light half. It is therefore not surprising that Sal is one of the many designations for the arcane substance. This connotation seems to have developed in the early Middle Ages under Arabic influence. The oldest traces of it can be found in the Turba, where salt-water and sea- water are synonyms for the aqua permanens,396 and in Senior, who says that Mercurius is made from salt.397 His treatise is one of the earliest authorities in Latin alchemy. Here “Sal Alkali” also plays the role of the arcane substance, and Senior mentions that the dealbatio was called “salsatura” (marination).398 In the almost equally old “Allegoriae sapientum” the lapis is described as “salsus” (salty).399 Arnaldus de Villanova (1235?—1313) says: “Whoever possesses the salt that can be melted, and the oil that cannot be burned, may praise God.”400 It is clear from this that salt is an arcane substance. The Rosarium, which leans very heavily on the old Latin sources, remarks that the “whole secret lies in the prepared common salt,”401 and that the “root of the art is the soap of the sages” (sapo sapientum), which is the “mineral” of all salts and is called the “bitter salt” (sal amarum).402 Whoever knows the salt knows the secret of the old sages.403 “Salts and alums are the helpers of the stone.”404 Isaac Hollandus calls salt the medium between the terra sulphurea and the water. “God poured a certain salt into them in order to unite them, and the sages named this salt the salt of the wise.”405

Among later writers, salt is even more clearly the arcane substance. For Mylius it is synonymous with the tincture;406 it is the earth-dragon who eats his own tail, and the “ash,” the “diadem of thy heart.”407 The “salt of the metals” is the lapis.408 Basilius Valentinus speaks of a “sal spirituale.”409 It is the seat of the virtue which makes the “art” possible,410 the “most noble treasury,”411 the “good and noble salt,” which “though it has not the form of salt from the beginning, is nevertheless called salt”; it “becomes impure and pure of itself, it dissolves and coagulates itself, or, as the sages say, locks and unlocks itself”;412 it is the “quintessence, above all things and in all creatures.”413 “The whole magistery lies in the salt and its solution.”414 The “permanent radical moisture” consists of salt.415 It is synonymous with the “incombustible oil,”416 and is altogether a mystery to be concealed.417
As the arcane substance, it is identified with various synonyms for the latter. Above all it is an “ens centrale.” For Khunrath salt is the “physical

centre of the earth.”418 For Vigenerus it is a component of “that virginal and pure earth which is contained in the centre of all composite elementals, or in the depths of the same.”419 Glauber calls salt the “concentrated centre of the elements.”420

Although the arcane substance is usually identified with Mercurius, the relation of salt to Mercurius is seldom mentioned. Senior, as we noted, says that “by divers operations” Mercurius is made from salt,421 and Khunrath identifies Mercurius with common salt.422 The rarity of the identification strikes us just because the “salt of the wise” really implies its relation to Mercurius. I can explain this only on the supposition that salt did not acquire its significance until later times and then at once appeared as an independent figure in the Sulphur-Mercurius-Sal triad.
Salt also has an obvious relation to the earth, not to the earth as such, but to “our earth,” by which is naturally meant the arcane substance.423 This is evident from the aforementioned identification of salt with the earth- dragon. The full text of Mylius runs:

What remains below in the retort is our salt, that is, our earth, and it is of a black colour, a dragon that eats his own tail. For the dragon is the matter that remains behind after the distillation of water from it, and this water is called the dragon’s tail, and the dragon is its blackness, and the dragon is saturated with his water and coagulated, and so he eats his tail.424

The rarely mentioned relation of salt to the nigredo425 is worth noting here, for because of its proverbial whiteness salt is constantly associated with the albedo. On the other hand we would expect the close connection between salt and water, which is in fact already implicit in the sea-water. The aqua pontica plays an important role as a synonym for the aqua permanens, as also does “mare” (sea). That salt, as well as Luna, is an essential component of this is clear from Vigenerus: “There is nothing wherein the moisture lasts longer, or is wetter, than salt, of which the sea for the most part consists. Neither is there anything wherein the moon displays her motion more clearly than the sea, as can be seen . . . from its ebb and flow.” Salt, he says, has an “inexterminable humidity,” and “that is the reason why the sea cannot be dried up.”426 Khunrath identifies the femina alba or candida with the “crystalline

salt,” and this with the white water.427 “Our water” cannot be made without salt,428 and without salt the opus will not succeed.429 According to Rupescissa (ca. 1350), salt is “water, which the dryness of the fire has coagulated.”430

The Bitterness

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 episcopum”433 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 Alze”437 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
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 Ripley’s remark that “each thing in its first matter is corrupt and bitter.” The juxtaposition of these two attributes

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

, ‘matrix of all creatures’.439 The prima materia is often called aqua pontica. The salt that “comes from the mineral of the sea” is by its very nature bitter, but the bitterness is due also to the impurity of the imperfect body. This apparent contradiction is explained by the report of Plutarch that the Egyptians regarded the sea as something impure and untrustworthy (), 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 and—of particular interest—with 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.

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 “ash”—again 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.
This bird or spirit is associated with various colours. At first the bird is black, then it grows white feathers, which finally become coloured.444 The Chinese cousin of the avis Hermetis, the “scarlet bird,” moults in a similar way.445 We are told in the treatise of Wei Po-yang: “The fluttering Chu-niao flies the five colours.”446 They are arranged as follows:

Earth occupies the central position as the fifth element, though it is not the quintessence and goal of the work but rather its basis, corresponding to terra as the arcane substance in Western alchemy.447
As regards the origin and meaning of the avis Hermetis, I would like to mention the report of Aelian that the ibis is “dear to Hermes, the father of words, since in its form it resembles the nature of the Logos; for its blackness and swift flight could be compared to the silent and introverted [

] Logos, but its whiteness to the Logos already uttered and heard, which is the servant and messenger of the inner word.”448

It is not easy for a modern mind to conceive salt, a cold-damp, lunar- terrestrial substance, as a bird and a spirit. Spirit, as the Chinese conceive it, is yang, the fiery and dry element, and this accords with the views of Heraclitus as well as with the Christian concept of the Holy Ghost as tongues of fire. Luna, we have seen, is unquestionably connected with mens, manas, mind, etc. But these connections are of a somewhat ambiguous nature. Although the earth can boast of an earth-spirit and other daemons, they are after all “spirits” and not “spirit.” The “cold” side of nature is not lacking in spirit, but it is a spirit of a special kind, which

Christianity regarded as demonic and which therefore found no acclaim except in the realm of the magical arts and sciences. This spirit is the snake-like Nous or Agathodaimon, which in Hellenistic syncretism merges together with Hermes. Christian allegory and iconography also took possession of it on the basis of John 3 : 14: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” The mercurial serpent or “spirit Mercurius” is the personification and living continuation of the spirit who, in the prayer entitled the “Secret Inscription” in the Great Magic Papyrus of Paris, is invoked as follows:

Greetings, entire edifice of the Spirit of the air, greetings, Spirit that penetratest from heaven to earth, and from earth, which abideth in the midst of the universe, to the uttermost bounds of the abyss, greetings, Spirit that penetratest into me, and shakest me. . . . Greetings, beginning and end of irremovable Nature, greetings, thou who revolvest the elements that untiringly render service, greetings, brightly shining sun, whose radiance ministereth to the world, greetings, moon shining by night with disc of fickle brilliance, greetings, all ye spirits of the demons of the air. . . . O great, greatest, incomprehensible fabric of the world, formed in a circle! . . . dwelling in the aether, having the form of water, of earth, of fire, of wind, of light, of darkness, star-glittering, damp- fiery-cold Spirit! [].449

Here is a magnificent description of a spirit that is apparently the exact opposite of the Christian pneuma. This antique spirit is also the spirit of alchemy, which today we can interpret as the unconscious projected into heavenly space and external objects. Although declared to be the devil by the early Christians, it should not be identified outright with evil; it merely has the uncomfortable quality of being beyond good and evil, and it gives this perilous quality to anyone who identifies with it, as we can see from the eloquent case of Nietzsche and the psychic epidemic that came after him. This spirit that is “beyond good and evil” is not the same as being “six thousand feet above good and evil,” but rather the same distance below it, or better, before it. It is the spirit of the chaotic waters of the beginning, before the second day of Creation, before the separation of the opposites and hence before the advent of consciousness. That is why it leads those whom it overcomes neither upwards nor beyond, but back into chaos. This spirit corresponds to that part of the psyche which has not been

assimilated to consciousness and whose transformation and integration are the outcome of a long and wearisome opus. The artifex was, in his way, conscious enough of the dangers of the work, and for this reason his operations consisted largely of precautions whose equivalents are the rites of the Church.

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.
After these remarks—which seemed to me necessary—on 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
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 Rahner’s 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 comprehended”456 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 Loyola’s 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

The Red Sea

It might almost be one of the alchemical paradoxes that the Red Sea, in contrast to the significance ordinarily attached to “mare,” is a term for the healing and transforming baptismal water,465 and is thus an equivalent of the alchemical aqua pontica. St. Augustine says, “The Red Sea signifies baptism”;466 and, according to Honorius of Autun, “the Red Sea is the baptism reddened by the blood of Christ, in which our enemies, namely our sins, are drowned.”467
We must also mention the Peratic interpretation of the Red Sea. The Red Sea drowned the Egyptians, but the Egyptians were all “non-knowers” (). The exodus from Egypt signifies the exodus from the body, which is Egypt in miniature, being the incarnation of sinfulness, and the crossing ()468 of the Red Sea is the crossing of the water of corruption, which is Kronos. The other side of the Red Sea is the other side of Creation. The arrival in the desert is a “genesis outside of generation” (

). There the “gods of destruction” and the “god of salvation” are all together.469 The Red Sea is a water of death for those that are “unconscious,” but for those that are “conscious” it is a baptismal water of rebirth and transcendence.470 By “unconscious” are meant those who have no gnosis, i.e., are not enlightened as to the nature and destiny of man in the cosmos. In modern language it would be those who have no knowledge of the contents of the personal and collective unconscious. The

personal unconscious is the shadow and the inferior function,471 in Gnostic terms the sinfulness and impurity that must be washed away by baptism. The collective unconscious expresses itself in the mythological teachings, characteristic of most mystery religions, which reveal the secret knowledge concerning the origin of all things and the way to salvation. “Unconscious” people who attempt to cross the sea without being purified and without the guidance of enlightenment are drowned; they get stuck in the unconscious and suffer a spiritual death in so far as they cannot get beyond their one-sidedness. To do this they would have to be more conscious of what is unconscious to them and their age, above all of the inner opposite, namely those contents to which the prevailing views are in any way opposed. This continual process of getting to know the counterposition in the unconscious I have called the “transcendent function,”472 because the confrontation of conscious (rational) data with those that are unconscious (irrational) necessarily results in a modification of standpoint. But an alteration is possible only if the existence of the “other” is admitted, at least to the point of taking conscious cognizance of it. A Christian of today, for instance, no longer ought to cling obstinately to a one-sided credo, but should face the fact that Christianity has been in a state of schism for four hundred years, with the result that every single Christian has a split in his psyche. Naturally this lesion cannot be treated or healed if everyone insists on his own standpoint. Behind those barriers he can rejoice in his absolute and consistent convictions and deem himself above the conflict, but outside them he keeps the conflict alive by his intransigence and continues to deplore the pig-headedness and stiff- neckedness of everybody else. It seems as if Christianity had been from the outset the religion of chronic squabblers, and even now it does everything in its power never to let the squabbles rest. Remarkably enough, it never stops preaching the gospel of neighbourly love.

We should get along a lot better if we realized that the majority views of “others” are condoned by a minority in ourselves. Armed with this psychological insight, which today no longer has the character of revelation since common sense can grasp it, we could set out on the road to the union of the opposites and would then, as in the Peratic doctrine, come to the place where the “gods of destruction and the god of salvation are together.” By this is obviously meant the destructive and constructive powers of the unconscious. This coincidentia oppositorum forms a parallel

to the Messianic state of fulfilment described in Isaiah 11 : 6ff. and 35 : 5ff., though with one important difference: the place of “genesis outside of generation”—presumably an opus contra naturam— is clearly not paradise but the desert and the wilderness. Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude, as our text remarks. But only there is it possible to meet the “god of salvation.” Light is manifest in the darkness, and out of danger the rescue comes. In his sermon on Luke 19: 12 Meister Eckhart says: “And who can be nobler than the man who is born half of the highest and best the world has to offer, and half of the innermost ground of God’s nature and God’s loneliness? Therefore the Lord speaks in the prophet Hosea: I will lead the noble souls into the wilderness, and speak into their hearts. One with the One, One from the One, and in the One itself the One, eternally!”473

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
The Red Sea appears in a very peculiar manner in the “Tractatus Aristotelis ad Alexandrum Magnum,” where a recipe says:

Take the serpent, and place it in the chariot with four wheels, and let it be turned about on the earth until it is immersed in the depths of the sea, and nothing more is visible but the blackest dead sea. And there let the chariot with the wheels remain, until so many fumes rise up from the serpent that the whole surface [planities] becomes dry, and by desiccation sandy and black. All that is the earth which is no earth, but a stone lacking all weight [And when the fumes are precipitated in the

form of rain,] you should bring the chariot from the water to dry land, and then you have placed the four wheels upon the chariot, and will obtain the result if you will advance further to the Red Sea, running without running, moving without motion [currens sine cursu, movens sine motu].478

This curious text requires a little elucidation. The serpent is the prima materia, the Serpens Hermetis, “which he [Hermes] sent to King Antiochus, that he might do battle with thee [Alexander] and thine army.”479 The serpent is placed “in the chariot of its vessel and is led hither and thither by the fourfold rotation of the natures, but it should be securely enclosed.” The wheels are the “wheels of the elements.” The vessel or vehicle is the “spherical tomb” of the serpent.480 The fourfold rotation of the natures corresponds to the ancient tetrameria of the opus (its division into four parts), i.e., transformation through the four elements, from earth to fire. This symbolism describes in abbreviated form the essentials of the opus: the serpent of Hermes or the Agathodaimon, the Nous that animates the cold part of nature—that is, the unconscious—is enclosed in the spherical vessel of diaphanous glass which, on the alchemical view, represents the world and the soul.481 The psychologist would see it rather as the psychic reflection of the world, namely, consciousness of the world and the psyche.482 The transformation corresponds to the psychic process of assimilation and integration by means of the transcendent function.483 This function unites the pairs of opposites, which, as alchemy shows, are arranged in a quaternio when they represent a totality. The totality appears in quaternary form only when it is not just an unconscious fact but a conscious and differentiated totality; for instance, when the horizon is thought of not simply as a circle that can be divided into any number of parts but as consisting of four clearly defined points. Accordingly, one’s given personality could be represented by a continuous circle, whereas the conscious personality would be a circle divided up in a definite way, and this generally turns out to be a quaternity. The quaternity of basic functions of consciousness meets this requirement. It is therefore only to be expected that the chariot should have four wheels,484 to correspond with the four elements or natures. The chariot as a spherical vessel and as consciousness rests on the four elements or basic functions,485 just as the floating island where Apollo was born, Delos, rested on the four supports which Poseidon made for it. The wheels, naturally, are on the outside of the chariot and are

its motor organs, just as the functions of consciousness facilitate the relation of the psyche to its environment. It must, however, be stressed that what we today call the schema of functions is archetypally prefigured by one of the oldest patterns of order known to man, namely the quaternity, which always represents a consciously reflected and differentiated totality. Quite apart from its almost universal incidence it also appears spontaneously in dreams as an expression of the total personality. The “chariot of Aristotle” can be understood in this sense as a symbol of the self.

The recipe goes on to say that this symbolic vehicle should be immersed in the sea of the unconscious for the purpose of heating and incubation,486 corresponding to the state of tapas,487 incubation by means of “self-heating.” By this is obviously meant a state of introversion in which the unconscious content is brooded over and digested. During this operation all relations with the outside world are broken off; the feelers of perception and intuition, discrimination and valuation are withdrawn. The four wheels are “placed upon the chariot”: outside everything is quiet and still, but deep inside the psyche the wheels go on turning, performing those cyclic evolutions which bring the mandala of the total personality,488 the ground-plan of the self, closer to consciousness. But so long as consciousness has not completed the process of integration it is covered by the “blackest dead sea,” darkened by unconsciousness and oppressed by heat, as was the hero in the belly of the whale during the night sea journey.489 Through the incubation the snake-like content is vapourized, literally “sublimated,” which amounts to saying that it is recognized and made an object of conscious discrimination.
The “evaporatio” is followed by the “desiccation of the surface,” which then appears “sandy and black.” Here the imagery changes: the allusion to the subsiding flood means psychologically that the black blanket of unconsciousness hiding the nascent symbol is drawn away. “Arena” (sand) is defined as the “pure substance of the stone,”490 and accordingly the text describes the regenerated earth as a “stone lacking all weight.” The text does not explain just why it is weightless, but it is evident that nothing material, which alone has weight, is left over, and all that remains is the psychic content of the projection.
The opus is far from having come to an end at this point, for the

nigredo (terra nigra) still prevails and the substance of the stone is still black. It is therefore necessary for the “fumes” (evaporationes) to precipitate and wash off the blackness, “whence the whole earth becomes white.” The rain now falls so copiously that the earth is almost turned into a sea. Hence the direction that the chariot should be brought to dry land. This is clearly another allusion to Noah’s Ark and the flood.491 With the coming of the flood the previous state of chaos would be restored, and the result of the opus would again be swamped by unconsciousness. This motif recurs in the form of the dragon that pursued Leto and the woman crowned with stars (Rev. 12 : 1f.).

If the chariot reaches dry land, this obviously means that the content has become visible and remains conscious, “and then,” says the text, “you have placed the wheels upon the chariot.”492 The four natures or elements are gathered together and are contained in the spherical vessel, i.e., the four aspects or functions are integrated with consciousness, so that the state of totality has almost been attained. Had it really been attained the opus would be consummated at this point, but the “result” (effectus) is obtained only by advancing further. The “result” therefore means something more than integration of the four natures. If we take the loading of the chariot as the conscious realization of the four functions, this does in fact denote only the possibility of remaining conscious of the whole previous material, that is, of the principal aspects of the psyche. The question then arises as to how all these divergent factors, previously kept apart by apparently insuperable incompatibilities, will behave, and what the ego is going to do about it.
The singular image of the Nous-serpent enthroned on a chariot reminds us of the chariot-driving, snake-shaped gods of southern India, for instance on the immense black temple at Puri, which is itself a chariot of stone. I certainly don’t want to suggest that there is any direct Indian influence in our text, for there is another model closer to hand, and that is Ezekiel’s vision of the four creatures, with the faces respectively of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. These four figures are associated with four wheels, “their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went.”493 Together they formed the moving throne of a figure having “the appearance of a man.” In the Cabala this chariot (Merkabah) plays an

important role as the vehicle on which the believers mount up to God and the human soul unites with the world-soul.

An interpretation of the four wheels as the quadriga and vehicle of divinity is found in a window medallion by Suger, the twelfth-century maker of stained glass for the Abbey of Saint-Denis.494 The chariot which is depicted bears the inscription “QUADRIGE AMINADAB,”referring to the Song of Songs 6: 11 (DV): “My soul troubled me for the chariots of Aminadab.”495 God the Father stands on a four-wheeled chariot holding the crucifix before him. In the corners of the medallion are the four emblems of the evangelists, the Christian continuation of Ezekiel’s winged creatures. The four gospels form, as it were, a quaternary podium on which the Redeemer stands.
Still another source might be Honorius of Autun. In his commentary on Song of Songs 6 : 11, he says that his “animalis vita” was troubled because the chariot signified the four evangelists. It was this chariot that the apostles and their followers had driven through the world. For Christ had said in the gospels: “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13: 3). And it was to him, Honorius, that the words were addressed: “Return, return, O Shulamite” (Song of Songs 6 : 13).496
Psychologically the vision of Ezekiel is a symbol of the self consisting of four individual creatures and wheels, i.e., of different functions. Three of the faces are theriomorphic and only one anthropomorphic, which presumably means that only one function has reached the human level, whereas the others are still in an unconscious or animal state. The problem of three and four (trinity and quaternity) plays a great role in alchemy as the “axiom of Maria”497 and, like the vision of Ezekiel, is concerned with the God-image. The symbols of the self are as a rule symbols of totality, but this is only occasionally true of God-images. In the former the circle and the quaternity predominate, in the latter the circle and the trinity—and this, moreover, only in the case of abstract representations, which are not the only ones to occur.
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

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 Ezekiel’s vision can be interpreted psychologically as a symbol of the self, we may also mention in this connection the Hindu definition of the self—here hiranyagarbha—as the “collective aggregate of all individual souls.”500
Ezekiel’s vision is of psychological importance because the quaternity embodied in it is the vehicle or throne of him who had the “appearance of a man.” Together with the “spirit of life” in the wheels it represents the empirical self, the totality of the four functions. These four are only partly conscious. The auxiliary functions are partly, and the “inferior” or subliminal function is wholly, autonomous; they cannot be put to conscious use and they reach consciousness only indirectly as a fait accompli, through their sometimes disturbing effects. Their specific energy adds itself to the normal energy of the unconscious and thereby gives it an impulse that enables it to irrupt spontaneously into consciousness. As we know, these invasions can be observed systematically in the association experiment.501
The quaternity of the self appears in Ezekiel’s 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, It has become like a mountain.

Summon me from this life Over to eternity.502

As I have said, the process of transformation does not come to an end with the production of the quaternity symbol. The continuation of the opus leads to the dangerous crossing of the Red Sea, signifying death and rebirth. It is very remarkable that our author, by his paradox “running without running, moving without motion,” introduces a coincidence of opposites just at this point, and that the Hippolytus text speaks, equally paradoxically, of the “gods of destruction and the god of salvation” being together. The quaternity, as we have seen, is a quaternio of opposites, a synthesis of the four originally divergent functions. Their synthesis is here achieved in an image, but in psychic reality becoming conscious of the whole psyche503 faces us with a highly problematical situation. We can indicate its scope in a single question: What am I to do with the unconscious?
For this, unfortunately, there are no recipes or general rules. I have tried to present the main outlines of what the psychotherapist 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 psychotherapy. 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.

The Fourth of the Three

In the course of his mystic peregrination504 Maier reached the Red (“Erythraean”) Sea, and in the following way: he journeyed to the four directions, to the north (Europe), to the west (America), to the east (Asia).505 Leaving Asia and turning south to Africa, he found a statue of Mercury, made of silver, and with a golden head. The statue pointed to Paradise, which he espied far off. Now because of its four rivers, and because it was the abode of the originally androgynous Primordial Man (Adam), the Garden of Eden was a favourite mandala in Christian iconography, and is therefore a symbol of totality and—from the psychological point of view—of the self. If we take the four directions and the four elements (see note 505) as a symbolical equivalent of the four basic functions of consciousness, we can say that Maier had become conscious of three of them by the time he reached Asia. This brings him to the fourth and last, the “inferior” function, which is the darkest and the most unconscious of all. “Africa” is not a bad image for this. But just as Maier was about to direct his steps thither, he had a vision of paradise as the primordial image of wholeness, which showed him that the goal of his journey lay in the attainment of this wholeness. By the time he reached Africa, he says, the sun was in its house, Leo, and the moon was in Cancer, “the moon having Cancer for the roof of its house”. The proximity of the two houses indicates a coniunctio Solis et Lunae, the union of supreme opposites, and this is the crowning of the opus and the goal of the peregrination. He adds: “And this gave me great hope of the best augury.”
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: IHΣOYΣ XPEIΣTOΣ ΘEOY YIOΣ ΣΩTHP ΣTAYPOΣ,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

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:

SOCRATES: One, two, three—but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of those guests of yesterday who were to entertain me today?

TIMAEUS: He suddenly felt unwell, Socrates; he would not have failed to join our company if he could have helped it.513

The transition from three to four is a problem514 on which the ambiguous formulation of Maria does not shed very much light.515 We come across the dilemma of three and four in any number of guises, and in Maier’s Symbola aureae mensae as well the step from three to four proves to be an important development presaged by the vision of paradise. The region of the Red Sea is proverbially hot, and Maier reached it at the end of July, “in the intense heat of summer.” He was, in fact, “getting hot,” uncommonly hot, as hot as hell, for he was approaching that region of the psyche which was not unjustly said to be inhabited by “Pans, Satyrs, dog- headed baboons, and half-men.” It is not difficult to see that this region is the animal soul in man. For just as a man has a body which is no different in principle from that of an animal, so also his psychology has a whole series of lower storeys in which the spectres from humanity’s past epochs still dwell, then the animal souls from the age of Pithecanthropus and the hominids, then the “psyche” of the cold-blooded saurians, and, deepest down of all, the transcendental mystery and paradox of the sympathetic and parasympathetic psychoid processes.
So it is not surprising that our world-voyager felt that he had landed in the hottest place—he was in Arabia Felix—in the sweltering heat of summer! He was painfully aware that he was risking his skin: “It’s your concern when your neighbour’s wall is on fire.”516 He was the banquet- giver and the guest, the eater and the eaten in one person.
“The innumerable species of animals” begin to show up already by the Red Sea, headed by the fabulous four-footed “Ortus,” which combines in itself the four alchemical colours, black, white, red, and yellow517 (the gold streaks on head and neck). Maier does not hesitate to identify the Ortus with the phoenix, the other legendary inhabitant of Arabia Felix,518 less perhaps on account of its appearance than on account of its name; for the phoenix, too, after consuming itself in the land of Egypt, each time rose renewed, like the reborn sun in Heliopolis.
The Ortus is the alchemical “animal” which represents the living quaternity in its first synthesis. In order to become the ever-living bird of the spirit it needs the transforming fire, which is found in “Africa,” that is, in the encounter with and investigation of the fourth function and the animal soul represented by the Ortus. By interpreting it as the phoenix, Maier gave it a far-reaching change of meaning, as we shall see. For besides his animal soul he also discovered in its vicinity a kind of feminine soul, a virgin, to whom he at first appeared like an importunate guest.519 This was the sibyl who foretold the coming of Christ. Thus, by the Red Sea, he met the animal soul in the form of a monstrous quaternity, symbolizing, so to speak, the prima materia of the self and, as the phoenix, rebirth. The mystery alluded to here is not only the encounter with the animal soul but, at the same time and in the same place, the meeting with the anima, a feminine psychopomp who showed him the way to Mercurius and also how to find the phoenix.520
It is worth noting that the animal is the symbolic carrier of the self. This hint in Maier is borne out by modern individuals who have no notion of alchemy.521 It expresses the fact that the structure of wholeness was always present but was buried in profound unconsciousness, where it can always be found again if one is willing to risk one’s skin to attain the greatest possible range of consciousness through the greatest possible self- knowledge—a “harsh and bitter drink” usually reserved for hell. The throne of God seems to be no unworthy reward for such trials. For self- knowledge—in the total meaning of the word—is not a one-sided intellectual pastime but a journey through the four continents, where one is exposed to all the dangers of land, sea, air, and fire. Any total act of recognition worthy of the name embraces the four—or 360!—aspects of existence. Nothing may be “disregarded.” When Ignatius Loyola recommended “imagination through the five senses”522 to the meditant, and told him to imitate Christ “by use of his senses,”523 what he had in mind was the fullest possible “realization” of the object of contemplation. Quite apart from the moral or other effects of this kind of meditation, its chief effect is the training of consciousness, of the capacity for concentration, and of attention and clarity of thought. The corresponding forms of Yoga have similar effects. But in contrast to these traditional modes of realization, where the meditant projects himself into some prescribed form, the self-knowledge alluded to by Maier is a projection into the empirical

self as it actually is. It is not the “self” we like to imagine ourselves to be after carefully removing all the blemishes, but the empirical ego just as it is, with everything that it does and everything that happens to it. Everybody would like to be quit of this odious adjunct, which is precisely why in the East the ego is explained as illusion and why in the West it is offered up in sacrifice to the Christ figure.

By contrast, the aim of the mystical peregrination is to understand all parts of the world, to achieve the greatest possible extension of consciousness, as though its guiding principle were the Carpocratic524 idea that one is delivered from no sin which one has not committed. Not a turning away from its empirical “so-ness,” but the fullest possible experience of the ego as reflected in the “ten thousand things”—that is the goal of the peregrination.525 This follows logically from the psychological recognition that God cannot be experienced at all unless this futile and ridiculous ego offers a modest vessel in which to catch the effluence of the Most High and name it with his name. The significance of the vas-symbol in alchemy shows how concerned the artifex was to have the right vessel for the right content: “One is the lapis, one the medicament, one the vessel, one the procedure, and one the disposition.” The aqua nostra, the transformative substance, is even its own vessel.526 From this it is but a step to the paradoxical statement of Angelus Silesius:

God is my centre when I close him in,

And my circumference when I melt in him.527

Maier’s 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 Ezekiel’s 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 Christ’s 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 Christ’s unfinished work of redemption.

It is characteristic of Maier’s 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.

Ascent and Descent

In his quest for wholeness so far, Michael Maier, besides crossing three continents and travelling in three directions, has discovered a statue of Mercurius pointing the way to paradise; he has glimpsed paradise from afar, he has found the animal soul and the sibylline anima, who now counsels him to journey to the seven mouths of the Nile (Ostia Nili), in order to seek for Mercurius. The continuation of his pilgrimage recalls the flight of the phoenix from Arabia, where it lives, to Egypt, where it dies and arises anew. We may therefore expect that something similar will befall the author. We are not told anything of his crossing of the Red Sea and of his recapitulation, in the reverse direction, of the miraculous wanderings of the children of Israel. We do, however, soon learn that something like a rebirth mystery is to take place, because Maier compares the seven mouths of the Nile to the seven planets. He first reaches the

Canopic Gate, the western mouth of the delta, where he finds Saturn domiciled. Of the remaining planets we can recognize only Mars with certainty, as the description of the cities where the others dwell is not very clear. Amid innumerable hazards he traverses the seven regions without meeting Mercurius. He does not find him even in his own city. Finally he has to turn back and retrace his steps until he reaches the Canopic Gate, where this time he finds Mercurius. Although he learns from him all sorts of secrets, he fails to find the phoenix. Later, he will return again in order to discover the panacea. In his “Epigramma ad Phoenicem” he begs the wonderful bird to give the wise man its feathers,532 and in his epigram to the “Medicina Phoeniciae” he rates it above “riches and gold, and he who does not think so is not a man but a beast.”533

The experience of the fourth quarter, the region of fire (i.e., the inferior function), is described by Maier as an ascent and descent through the seven planetary spheres. Even if the peregrination up to this point was not an allegory of the opus alchymicum, from now on it certainly is. The opus is a“transitus,” a in the Gnostic sense, a “transcension” and transformation whose subject and object is the elusive Mercurius. I will not discuss the nature of the transitus here in any great detail, as this would be the proper concern of an account of the opus itself. One aspect of the transitus, however, is the ascent and descent through the planetary spheres, and to this we must devote a few words. As the “Tabula smaragdina” shows, the purpose of the ascent and descent is to unite the powers of Above and Below. A feature worthy of special notice is that in the opus there is an ascent followed by a descent, whereas the probable Gnostic- Christian prototype depicts first the descent and then the ascent. There are numerous evidences of this in the literature and I do not need to cite them here. I will quote only the words of one of the great Greek Fathers, St. Basil, who says in his explanation of Psalm 17 : 10534 (“And he bowed the heavens and came down, and a black cloud was under his feet”): “David says here: God came down from heaven to help me and to chastise his enemies. But he clearly prophesies the incarnation [] of Christ when he says: He bowed the heavens and came down. For he did not break through the heavens and did not make the mystery manifest, but came down to earth secretly, like rain upon the fleece,535 because the incarnation was secret and unknown, and his coming into the world-order [

] was hidden.”536 Commenting on the next verse (“And he was borne upon the cherubim, and he flew”), Basil says: “For in ascending he rose above the Cherubim, whom David named also the wings of the wind, on account of their winged and stormy nature. By the wings of the wind is also meant the cloud which took him up.”537 Irenaeus sums up the mystery in the lapidary saying: “For it is He who descended and ascended for the salvation of men.”538

In contrast to this, in alchemy the ascent comes first and then the descent. I would mention the ascent and descent of the soul in the Rosarium illustrations539 and above all the exordium in the “Tabula smaragdina,” whose authority held sway throughout the Middle Ages:

IV. Its father is the sun, its mother the moon; the wind hath carried it in his belly; its nurse is the earth.

VI. Its power is complete when it is turned towards the earth.

VIII. It ascendeth from the earth to heaven, and descendeth again to the earth, and receiveth the power of the higher and lower things. So wilt thou have the glory of the whole world.540

These articles (whose subject is sometimes masculine and sometimes neuter) describe the “sun-moon child” who is laid in the cradle of the four elements, attains full power through them and the earth, rises to heaven and receives the power of the upper world, and then returns to earth, accomplishing, it seems, a triumph of wholeness (“gloria totius mundi”). The words “So wilt thou have” are evidently addressed to the Philosopher, for he is the artifex of the filius philosophorum. If he succeeds in transforming the arcane substance he will simultaneously accomplish his own wholeness, which will manifest itself as the glory of the whole world.
There can be no doubt that the arcane substance, whether in neuter or personified form, rises from the earth, unites the opposites, and then returns to earth, thereby achieving its own transformation into the elixir. “He riseth up and goeth down in the tree of the sun,” till he becomes the elixir, says the “Consilium coniugii.”541 The text continues:

Someone hath said,542 And when I rise naked to heaven, then shall I come clothed upon the earth, and shall perfect all minerals.543 And if we are baptized in the fountain of gold and silver, and the spirit of our body [i.e., the arcane substance] ascends into heaven with the father and the

son, and descends again, then shall our souls revive, and my animal body will remain white, that is, [the body] of the moon.544

Here the union of opposites consists in an ascent to heaven and a descent to earth in the bath of the tincture. The earthly effect is first a perfection of minerals, then a resuscitation of souls and a transfiguration of the animal body, which before was dark. A parallel passage in the “Consilium” runs:

His soul rises up from it545 and is exalted to the heavens, that is, to the spirit, and becomes the rising sun (that is, red), in the waxing moon, and of solar nature.546 And then the lantern with two lights,547 which is the water of life, will return to its origin, that is, to earth. And it becomes of low estate, is humbled and decays, and is joined to its beloved,548 the terrestrial sulphur.549

This text describes the ascent of the soul of the arcane substance, the incombustible sulphur. The soul as Luna attains its plenilunium, its sunlike brilliance, then wanes into the novilunium and sinks down into the embrace of the terrestrial sulphur, which here signifies death and corruption. We are reminded of the gruesome conjunction at the new moon in Maier’s Scrutinium chymicum, where the woman and the dragon embrace in the grave.550 The description Dorn gives in his “Physica Trismegisti” is also to the point: “In the end it will come to pass that this earthly, spagyric birth clothes itself with heavenly nature by its ascent, and then by its descent visibly puts on the nature of the centre of the earth, but nonetheless the nature of the heavenly centre which it acquired by the ascent is secretly preserved.”551 This “birth” (foetura) conquers the “subtile and spiritual sickness in the human mind and also all bodily defects, within as well as without.” The medicament is produced “in the same way as the world was created.” Elsewhere Dorn remarks that the “foetus spagyricus” is forced by the fire to rise up to heaven (caelum), by which he means from the bottom of the vessel to the top, and from there it descends again after attaining the necessary degree of ripeness, and returns to earth: “This spirit becomes corporeal again, after having become spirit from a body.”552
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 Hölderlin.

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:

As to how the son of man [filius hominis] is generated by the philosopher and the fruit of the virgin is produced, it is necessary that he be exalted from the earth and cleansed of all earthliness; then he rises as a whole into the air and is changed into spirit. Thus the word of the philosopher is fulfilled: He ascends from earth to heaven and puts on the power of Above and Below, and lays aside his earthly and uncleanly nature.”560

This complete identification of the lapis with the “son of man” must obviously end with its ascension. But that contradicts the original and widespread conception of the lapis as the tincture or medicine, which has meaning and value only if it applies itself to the base substances of

the lower world. The upper world is in need of no medicine, since it is incorruptible anyway. A redeemer who proceeds from matter and returns to matter gradually became unthinkable. Those who identified the lapis absolutely with Christ stopped working in the laboratory, and those who preferred laboratory work slowly gave up their mystic language.

Ascent and descent, above and below, up and down, represent an emotional realization of opposites, and this realization gradually leads, or should lead, to their equilibrium. This motif occurs very frequently in dreams, in the form of going up- and downhill, climbing stairs, going up or down in a lift, balloon, aeroplane, etc.561 It corresponds to the struggle between the winged and the wingless dragon, i.e., the uroboros. Dorn describes it also as the “circular distillation”562 and as the “spagyric vessel” which has to be constructed after the likeness of the natural vessel, i.e., in the form of a sphere. As Dorn interprets it, this vacillating between the opposites and being tossed back and forth means being contained in the opposites. They become a vessel in which what was previously now one thing and now another floats vibrating, so that the painful suspension between opposites gradually changes into the bilateral activity of the point in the centre.563 This is the “liberation from opposites,” the nirdvandva of Hindu philosophy, though it is not really a philosophical but rather a psychological development. The “Aurelia occulta” puts this thought in the words of the dragon: “Many from one and one from many, issue of a famous line, I rise from the lowest to the highest. The nethermost power of the whole earth is united with the highest. I therefore am the One and the Many within me.”564 In these words the dragon makes it clear that he is the chthonic forerunner of the self.

The Journey through the Planetary Houses

Returning now to Michael Maier’s 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 dreamer’s 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

Maier’s 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
This very ancient idea of what we might call an inborn bill of debt to fate is the Western version of a prenatal karma. It is the archons, the seven rulers of the planets, who imprint its fate upon the soul. Thus Priscillian (d. c. 385) says that the soul, on its descent to birth, passes through “certain circles” where it is made captive by evil powers, “and in accordance with the will of the victorious prince is forced into divers bodies, and his handwriting inscribed upon it.”570 Presumably this means that the soul is imprinted with the influences of the various planetary spheres. The descent of the soul through the planetary houses corresponds to its passage through the gates of the planets as described by Origen: the first gate is of lead and is correlated with Saturn,571 from which it is clear that Maier is following an old tradition.572 His peregrinatio chymica repeats the old “heavenly journey of the soul,” an idea which seems to have been developed more particularly in Persia.
I shall not go more closely here into the transitus through the planetary houses;573 it is sufficient to know that Michael Maier, like Mercurius, passes through them on his mystic journey.574 This journey is reminiscent of the voyage of the hero, one motif of which becomes evident in the archetypal meeting at the critical place (the “ford”) with the Ortus, its head showing the four colours. There are other motifs too. Where there is a monster a beautiful maiden is not far away, for they have, as we know, a secret understanding so that the one is seldom found without the other. The sibyl, the guide of souls, shows the hero the way to Mercurius, who in this case is Hermes Trismegistus, the supreme mystagogue.
In the Shepherd of Hermas it is related that the hero, while travelling along the Via Campana, met a monster resembling a dragon of the sea (

And the beast had on its head four colours, black, then the colour of flame and blood, then golden, then white. After I had passed the beast by and had gone about thirty feet further, lo! a maiden met me, ‘adorned as if coming forth from the bridal chamber,’ all in white and with white sandals, veiled to the forehead, and a turban for a head-dress, but her hair was white.575

The similarity between the two stories is so complete that one is tempted to assume that Maier had read the Shepherd of Hermas. This is

not very likely. Though he had a good education in the humanities I can see in his writings no evidence that he was familiar with the patristic literature, and in his references to the writings of Albertus and Thomas Aquinas576 he might easily have let slip a remark of this kind. But one finds nothing, and it does not seem very probable, either, that Maier had direct knowledge of the New Testament Apocrypha.

Hermas interprets the maiden as the Church, and Maier, fifteen hundred years later, as the Erythraean Sibyl, which only goes to show once more that the newer is the older. The “supreme mistress” led Hermas to the kingdom of the triune God, but Maier she leads to Hermes Trismegistus and Trisomatos, the triadic Mercurius, who would reveal to him the secret of the phoenix’s resurrection.577 He can find Mercurius only through the rite of the ascent and descent, the “circular distillation,” beginning with the black lead, with the darkness, coldness, and malignity of the malefic Saturn; then ascending through the other planets to the fiery Sol, where the gold is heated in the hottest fire and cleansed of all impurities; and finally returning to Saturn, where this time he meets Mercurius and receives some useful teachings from him. Saturn has here changed from a star of ill omen into a “domus barbae” (House of the Beard), where the “wisest of all,” Thrice-Greatest Hermes, imparts wisdom.578 Hermas too begins with the blackness; his mistress gives him the following explanation:

The black is this world in which you are living; the colour of fire and blood means that this world must be destroyed in blood and fire. The golden part is you, who have fled from this world, for even as gold is tried in the fire and becomes valuable, so also you who live among them are tried. . . . The white part is the world to come, in which the elect of God shall dwell; for those who have been chosen by God for eternal life will be without spot and pure.579

In alchemy the fire purifies, but it also melts the opposites into a unity. He who ascends unites the powers of Above and Below and shows his full power when he returns again to earth.580 By this is to be understood the production on the one hand of the panacea or Medicina Catholica, and on the other, of a living being with a human form, the filius philosophorum, who is often depicted as a youth or hermaphrodite or child. He is a parallel of the Gnostic Anthropos, but he also appears as an Anthroparion, a kind of goblin, a familiar who stands by the adept in his work and helps the

physician to heal.581 This being ascends and descends and unites Below with Above, gaining a new power which carries its effect over into everyday life. His mistress gives Hermas this advice: “Therefore do not cease to speak to the ears of the saints”582—in other words, work among your fellow men by spreading the news of the Risen.

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
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 man’s 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 dream’s meaning to clarify existing problems. “Solutio” is defined in this sense by Dorn.587

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.
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.

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 (position of the sun at noon) in Zosimos.588 But at the zenith the descent begins. The mystic traveller goes back to the Nile mouth from which he started. He repeats, as it were, the descent of the soul which had led in the first place to the imprinting of the “chirographum.” He retraces his steps through the planetary houses until he comes back to the dark Saturn. This means that the soul, which was imprinted with a horoscopic character at the time of its descent into birth, conscious now of its godlikeness, beards the archons in their lairs and carries the light undisguised down into the darkness of the world.
Here again psychology makes no special claims. What before was a burden unwillingly borne and blamed upon the entire family, is seen by the greatest possible insight (which can be very modest!) to be no more than the possession of one’s own personality, and one realizes—as though this were not self-evident!—that one cannot live from anything except what one is.
On returning to the house of Saturn our pilgrim finds the long-sought Mercurius.589 Maier passes remarkably quickly over this highly significant encounter and mentions merely their “numerous conversations” without,

however, disclosing their content. This is the more surprising in that Mercurius either personifies the great teacher or else has the character of the arcane substance, both of which would be a fruitful source for further revelations. For Mercurius is the light-bringing Nous, who knows the secret of transformation and of immortality.

Let us assume that Maier’s sudden silence is no mere accident but was intentional or even a necessity. This assumption is not entirely without justification since Maier was one of the founders of the international Rosicrucian Society,590 and would therefore have no doubt been in a position to expatiate at length upon the Hermetic arcana. What we know of the so-called Rosicrucian secrets does nothing to explain why they were hushed up. This, incidentally, is true of most “mysteries” of this kind. It is very significant that the “mysteries” of the early Church turned soon enough into “sacraments.” The word “mystery” became a misnomer, since everything lay open in the rite. Andreas Rosencreutz used as a motto for his Chymical Wedding:”Mysteries profaned and made public fade and lose their grace. Therefore, cast not pearls before swine, nor spread roses for the ass.” This attitude might have been a motive for silence. People had so often got to know of things that were kept secret in the mysteries under the most fearsome oaths and had wondered why on earth they should ever have been the object of secrecy. Self-importance or the prestige of the priesthood or of the initiates seemed the obvious deduction. And there can be no doubt that the mysteries often were abused in this way. But the real reason was the imperative need to participate in a or perhaps the secret without which life loses its supreme meaning. The secret is not really worth keeping, but the fact that it is still obstinately kept reveals an equally persistent psychic motive for keeping secrets, and that is the real secret, the real mystery. It is indeed remarkable and “mysterious” that this gesture of keeping something secret should be made at all. Why does man need to keep a secret, and for what purpose does he invent an artificial one which he even decks out as an ineffably holy rite? The thing hidden is always more or less irrelevant, for in itself it is no more than an image or sign pointing to a content that cannot be defined more closely. This content is certainly not a matter for indifference since it indicates the living presence of a numinous archetype. The essential thing is the hiding, an expressive gesture which symbolizes something unconscious and “not to be named” lying behind it; something, therefore, that is either not yet conscious or

cannot or will not become conscious. It points, in a word, to the presence of an unconscious content, which exacts from consciousness a tribute of constant regard and attention. With the application of interest the continual perception and assimilation of the effects of the “secret” become possible. This is beneficial to the conduct of life, because the contents of the unconscious can then exert their compensatory effect and, if taken note of and recognized, bring about a balance that promotes health. On a primitive level, therefore, the chief effect of the mysteries is to promote health, growth, and fertility. If there were nothing good in the rite it would presumably never have come into existence or would long since have perished. The tremendous psychic effect of the Eleusinian mysteries, for instance, is beyond question. Psychotherapeutic experience has made the meaning of secrets once more a topical question, not only from the religious or philosophical point of view but also in respect of the demands of conscience with which individuation confronts a man.

Maier’s 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 one’s 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 up

—a 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

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 Maier’s 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

The Regeneration in Sea-water

After these long digressions on the interrelated symbols that branch out from the sea and its various aspects, we will resume our discussion of salt and salt-water.
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 attributed 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

The treatise of Ostanes611 says that when preparing the , the vessel with the ingredients should be immersed in sea-water, and then the divine water will be perfected. It is, so to speak, gestated in the womb of the sea-water. The text says: “This [divine] water makes the dead living and the living dead, it lights the darkness and darkens the light, concentrates [] the sea-water and quenches fire.” As this miraculous water occurs even in the oldest texts, it must be of pagan rather than of Christian origin. The oldest Chinese treatise known to us (A.D. 142) likewise contains this idea of the divine water: it is the “flowing pearl” (quicksilver), and the divine ch’i, meaning ‘air, spirit, ethereal essence’. The various essences are likened to “spring showers in abundance,”612 and this recalls the “blessed water” in the treatise of Komarios, which brings the spring.613 The age-old use of water at sacrifices and the great role it played in Egypt, where Western alchemy originated, may well have foreshadowed the water symbolism of later times. Folk ideas and superstitions such as we find in the Magic Papyri may have made their contribution, too; the following words might just as well have been taken from an alchemical treatise: “I am the plant named Baïs, I am a spout of blood . . ., the outgrowth of the abyss.614 . . . I am the sacred bird Phoenix.615

. . . I am Helios. . . . I am Aphrodite. . . . I am Kronos, who has showed forth the light. . . . I am Osiris, named water, I am Isis, named dew, I am Esenephys, named spring.”616 The personified might well have spoken like that.

The effect of Christian baptism is the washing away of sin and the acceptance of the neophyte into the Church as the earthly kingdom of Christ, sanctification and rebirth through grace, and the bestowal of an “indelible character” on the baptized. The effect of the aqua permanens is equally miraculous. The “Gloria mundi” says: “The mystery of every thing is life, which is water; for water dissolves the body into spirit and summons a spirit from the dead.”617 Dissolution into spirit, the body’s volatilization or sublimation, corresponds chemically to evaporation, or any rate to the expulsion of evaporable ingredients like quicksilver, sulphur, etc. Psychologically it corresponds to the conscious realization

and integration of an unconscious content. Unconscious contents lurk somewhere in the body like so many demons of sickness, impossible to get hold of, especially when they give rise to physical symptoms the organic causes of which cannot be demonstrated. The “spirit” summoned from the dead is usually the spirit Mercurius, who, as the anima mundi, is inherent in all things in a latent state. It is clear from the passage immediately following that it is salt of which it is said: “And that is the thing which we seek: all our secrets are contained in it.” Salt, however, “takes its origin from Mercurius,” so salt is a synonym for the arcane substance. It also plays an important part in the Roman rite: after being blessed it is added to the consecrated water, and in the ceremony of baptism a few grains of the consecrated salt are placed in the neophyte’s mouth with the words: “Receive the salt of wisdom: may it be a propitiation for thee unto eternal life.”

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 Goethe 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 heathen 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

The Interpretation and Meaning of Salt

Salt as much as ash is a synonym for the albedo (or dealbatio), and is identical with “the white stone, the white sun, the full moon, the fruitful white earth, cleansed and calcined.”626 The connecting link between ash and salt is potash, and the burning and corrosive property of lye (caustic solution) is well known.627 Senior mentions that the dealbatio was known as “salsatura” (marination).628
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 magnesia”629 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 naïveté, 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.

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.
The relationship of salt to the anima mundi, which as we know is personified by the Primordial Man or Anthropos, brings us to the analogy with Christ. Glauber himself makes the equation Sal: Sol = A : Ω,634 so that salt becomes an analogue of God. According to Glauber, the sign for salt was originally ,635 a double totality symbol; the circle representing non- differentiated wholeness, and the square discriminated wholeness.636 As a matter of fact there is another sign for salt, in contradistinction to Venus, who certainly has less to do with understanding and wisdom than has salt. Salt, says Glauber, was the “first fiat” at the creation.637 Christ is the salt of wisdom which is given at baptism.638 These ideas are elaborated by Georg von Welling: Christ is the salt, the fiat is the Word that is begotten from eternity for our preservation. Christ is the “sweet, fixed salt of silent, gentle eternity.” The body, when salted by Christ, becomes tinctured and therefore incorruptible.639
The Christ parallel runs through the late alchemical speculations that set in after Boehme, and it was made possible by the sal: sapientia equation. Already in antiquity salt denoted wit, good sense, good taste, etc., as well as spirit. Cicero, for instance, remarks: “In wit [sale] and humour Caesar . . . surpassed them all.”640 But it was the Vulgate that had the most decisive influence on the formation of alchemical concepts. In the Old Testament, even the “salt of the covenant”641 has a moral meaning. In the New Testament, the famous words “Ye are the salt of the earth”

(Matthew 5 : 13) show that the disciples were regarded as personifications of higher insight and divine wisdom, just as, in their role of (proclaimers of the message), they functioned as “angels” (, ‘messengers’), so that God’s kingdom on earth might approximate as closely as possible to the structure of the heavenly hierarchy. The other well-known passage is at Mark 9 : 50, ending with the words: “Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.” The earliest reference to salt in the New Testament (Colossians 4 : 6) likewise has a classical flavour: “Let your speech be alway with grace, and seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.”

Here salt undoubtedly means insight, understanding, wisdom. In both Matthew and Mark the salt is liable to lose its savour. Evidently this salt must keep its tang, just as the wise virgins kept their lamps trimmed. For this purpose a flexibility of mind is needed, and the last thing to guarantee this is rigid insistence on the necessity of faith. Everyone will admit that it is the task of the Church to safeguard her store of wisdom, the aqua doctrinae, in its original purity, and yet, in response to the changing spirit of the times, she must go on altering it and differentiating it just as the Fathers did. For the cultured Greco-Roman world early Christianity was among other things a message in philosophical disguise, as we can see quite plainly from Hippolytus. It was a competing philosophical doctrine that reached a certain peak of perfection in St. Thomas. Until well into the sixteenth century the degree of philosophical truth of Christian doctrine corresponded to that of scientific truth today.
The physicians and natural philosophers of the Middle Ages nevertheless found themselves faced with problems for which the Church had no answer. Confronted with sickness and death, the physicians did not hesitate to seek counsel with the Arabs and so resuscitate that bit of the ancient world which the Church thought she had exterminated for ever, namely the Mandaean and Sabaean remnants of Hellenistic syncretism. From them they derived a sal sapientiae that seemed so unlike the doctrine of the Church that before long a process of mutual assimilation arose which put forth some very remarkable blossoms. The ecclesiastical allegories kept, so far as I can judge, to the classical usage of Sal. Only St. Hilary (d. 367) seems to have gone rather more deeply into the nature of salt when he remarks that “salt contains in itself the element of water and

fire, and by this is one out of two.”642 Picinellus observes: “Two elements which stir up an implacable enmity between themselves are found in wondrous alliance in salt. For salt is wholly fire and wholly water.”643 For the rest he advises a sparing use of salt: “Let the word be sprinkled with salt, not deluged with it,”644 and another, earlier allegorist, the Jesuit Nicholas Caussin,645 does not mention salt at all.

This is not altogether surprising, for how do wisdom and revelation square with one another? As certain books of the Old Testament canon show, there is, besides the wisdom of God which expresses itself in revelation, a human wisdom which cannot be had unless one works for it. Mark 9 : 50 therefore exhorts us to make sure that we always have enough salt in us, and he is certainly not referring to divine revelation, for this is something no man can produce on his own resources. But at least he can cultivate and increase his own human wisdom. That Mark should offer this warning, and that Paul should express himself in a very similar way, is in accord with the traditional Judeo-Hellenism of the Jewish communities at that time. An authoritarian Church, however, leaves very little room for the salt of human wisdom. Hence it is not surprising that the sal sapientiae plays an incomparably greater role outside the Church. Irenaeus, reporting the views of the Gnostics, says: “The spiritual, they say, [is] sent forth to this end, that, being united here below with the psychic, it may take form, and be instructed simultaneously by intercourse with it. And this they declare to be the salt and the light of the world.”646 The union of the spiritual, masculine principle with the feminine, psychic principle is far from being just a fantasy of the Gnostics: it has found an echo in the Assumption of the Virgin, in the union of Tifereth and Malchuth, and in Goethe’s “the Eternal Feminine leads us upward and on.” Hippolytus mentions this same view as that of the Sethians. He says:

But when this wave is raised from the water by the wind and made pregnant in its nature, and has received within itself the reproductive power of the feminine, it retains the light scattered from on high together with the fragrance of the spirit [],647 and that is Nous given shape in various forms. This [light] is a perfect God, who is brought down from the unbegotten light on high and from the spirit into man’s nature as into a temple, by the power of nature and the movement of the wind. It is engendered from the water and commingled and mixed with the

bodies as if it were the salt of all created things, and a light of the darkness struggling to be freed from the bodies, and not able to find a way out. For some very small spark of the light is mingled with the fragrance from above. . . . [Here follows a corrupt and controversial passage which I pass over.] . . . Therefore every thought and care of the light from above is how and in what way the Nous may be delivered from the death of the sinful and dark body, from the father below [

],648 who is the wind which raised up the waves in tumult and terror, and begot Nous his own perfect son, who is yet not his own son in substance. For he was a ray of light from on high, from that perfect light overpowered in the dark and terrible, bitter polluted water, and a shining spirit carried away over the water …649

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.
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 mentioned earlier. Just as the numerous synonyms and attributes of the lapis stress now one and now another of its aspects, so do the symbols of the self. Apart from its preservative quality salt has mainly the metaphorical meaning of sapientia. With regard to this aspect the “Tractatus aureus” states: “It is said in the mystic language of our sages, He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies He who works

without salt draws a bow without a string. For you must know that these sayings refer to a very different kind of salt from the common mineral. . . . Sometimes they call the medicine itself ‘Salt.’ “652 These words are

ambiguous: here salt means “wit” as well as wisdom. As to the importance of salt in the opus, Johannes Grasseus says of the arcane substance: “And this is the Lead of the Philosophers, which they also call the lead of the air. In it is found the shining white dove, named the salt of the metals, wherein is the whole magistery of the work. This [dove] is the pure, chaste, wise, and rich Queen of Sheba.”653 Here salt, arcane substance (the paradoxical “lead of the air”), the white dove (spiritus sapientiae), wisdom, and femininity appear in one figure. The saying from the “Gloria mundi” is quite clear: “No man can understand this Art who does not know the salt and its preparation.”654 For the “Aquarium sapientum” the sal sapientiae comes from the aqua benedicta or aqua pontica, which, itself an extract, is named “heart, soul, and spirit.” At first the aqua is contained in the prima materia and is “of a blood-red colour; but after its preparation it becomes of a bright, clear, transparent white, and is called by the sages the Salt of Wisdom.”655 Khunrath boldly summarizes these statements about the salt when he says: “Our water cannot be made without the salt of wisdom, for it is the salt of wisdom itself, say the philosophers; a fire, and a salt fire, the true Living Universal Menstruum.” “Without salt the work has no success.”656 Elsewhere he remarks: “Not without good reason has salt been adorned by the wise with the name of Wisdom.” Salt is the lapis, a “mystery to be hidden.”657 Vigenerus says that the Redeemer chose his disciples “that they might be the salt of men and proclaim to them the pure and incorruptible doctrine of the gospel.” He reports the “Cabalists” as saying that the “computatio”658 of the Hebrew word for salt (melach) gives the number 78. This number could be divided by any divisor and still give a word that referred to the divine Name. We will not pursue the inferences he draws from this but will only note that for all those reasons salt was used “for the service of God in all offerings and sacrifices.”659 Glauber calls Christ the sal sapientiae and says that his favourite disciple John was “salted with the salt of wisdom.”660

Apart from its lunar wetness and its terrestrial nature, the most outstanding properties of salt are bitterness and wisdom. As in the double quaternio of the elements and qualities, earth and water have coldness in common, so bitterness and wisdom would form a pair of opposites with a third thing between. (See diagram on facing page.) The factor common to both, however incommensurable the two ideas may seem, is, psychologically, the function of feeling. Tears, sorrow, and disappointment

are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness. Salt, as the carrier of this fateful alternative, is co-ordinated with the nature of woman. The masculine, solar nature in the right half of the quaternio knows neither coldness, nor a shadow, nor heaviness, melancholy, etc., because, so long as all goes well, it identifies as closely as possible with consciousness, and that as a rule is the idea which one has of oneself. In this idea the shadow is usually missing: first because nobody likes to admit to any inferiority, and second because logic forbids something white to be called black. A good man has good qualities, and only the bad man has bad qualities. For reasons of prestige we pass over the shadow in complete silence. A famous example of masculine prejudice is Nietzsche’s Superman, who scorns compassion and fights against the “Ugliest Man”— the ordinary man that everyone is. The shadow must not be seen, it must be denied, repressed, or twisted into something quite extraordinary. The sun is always shining and everything smiles back. There is no room for any prestige-diminishing weakness, so the sol niger is never seen. Only in solitary hours is its presence feared.

Things are different with Luna: every month she is darkened and extinguished; she cannot hide this from anybody, not even from herself. She knows that this same Luna is now bright and now dark—but who has ever heard of a dark sun? We call this quality of Luna “woman’s closeness to nature,” and the fiery brilliance and hot air that plays round the surface of things we like to call “the masculine mind.”
Despite all attempts at denial and obfuscation there is an unconscious factor, a black sun, which is responsible for the surprisingly common phenomenon of masculine split-mindedness, when the right hand mustn’t know what the left is doing. This split in the masculine psyche and the regular darkening of the moon in woman together explain the remarkable fact that the woman is accused of all the darkness in a man, while he himself basks in the thought that he is a veritable fount of vitality and illumination for all the females in his environment. Actually, he would be better advised to shroud the brilliance of his mind in the profoundest doubt. It is not difficult for this type of mind (which besides other things is a great trickster like Mercurius) to admit a host of sins in the most convincing way, and even to combine it with a spurious feeling of ethical superiority without in the least approximating to a genuine insight. This can never be achieved without the participation of feeling; but the intellect admits feeling only when it is convenient. The novilunium of woman is a source of countless disappointments for man which easily turn to bitterness, though they could equally well be a source of wisdom if they were understood. Naturally this is possible only if he is prepared to acknowledge his black sun, that is, his shadow.
Confirmation of our interpretation of salt as Eros (i.e., as a feeling relationship) is found in the fact that the bitterness is the origin of the colours (par. 245). We have only to look at the drawings and paintings of patients who supplement their analysis by active imagination to see that colours are feeling-values. Mostly, to begin with, only a pencil or pen is used to make rapid sketches of dreams, sudden ideas, and fantasies. But from a certain moment on the patients begin to make use of colour, and this is generally the moment when merely intellectual interest gives way to emotional participation. Occasionally the same phenomenon can be observed in dreams, which at such moments are dreamt in colour, or a particularly vivid colour is insisted upon.
Disappointment, always a shock to the feelings, is not only the mother of bitterness but the strongest incentive to a differentiation of feeling. The failure of a pet plan, the disappointing behaviour of someone one loves, can supply the impulse either for a more or less brutal outburst of affect or for a modification and adjustment of feeling, and hence for its higher development. This culminates in wisdom if feeling is supplemented by

reflection and rational insight. Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.

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.
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 presentiment—enough, anyway, to enable them to make statements which can only be understood as psychological.

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 Khunrath’s “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.
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.
Another direful aspect of salt is its relation to the malefic Saturn, as is implied by Grasseus in that passage about the white dove and the philosophical lead. Speaking of the identity of sea and salt, Vigenerus points out that the Pythagoreans called the sea the “tear of Kronos,” because of its “bitter saltness.”677 On account of its relation to Typhon salt

is also endowed with a murderous quality,678 as we saw in the chapter on Sulphur, where Sal inflicts on Sulphur an “incurable wound.” This offers a curious parallel to Kundry’s wounding of Amfortas in Parsifal. In the parable of Sulphur Sal plays the sinister new-moon role of Luna.

As a natural product, salt “contains as much evil as good.” As the sea it is the , ‘mother of all things’; as the tear of Kronos it is bitterness and sadness; as the “sea-spume” it is the scum of Typhon, and as the “clear water” it is Sapientia herself.
The “Gloria mundi” says that the aqua permanens is a “very limpid water, so bitter as to be quite undrinkable.”679 In a hymn-like invocation the text continues: “O water of bitter taste, that preservest the elements! O nature of propinquity, that dissolvest nature! O best of natures, which overcomest nature herself! . . . Thou art crowned with light and art born

. . . and the quintessence ariseth from thee.”680 This water is like none on earth, with the exception of that “fount in Judaea” which is named the “Fount of the Saviour or of Blessedness.” “With great efforts and by the grace of God the philosophers found that noble spring.” But the spring is in a place so secret that only a few know of its “gushing,” and they know not the way to Judaea where it might be found. Therefore the philosopher681 cries out: “O water of harsh and bitter taste! For it is hard and difficult for any man to find that spring.”682 This is an obvious allusion to the arcane nature and moral significance of the water, and it is also evident that it is not the water of grace or the water of the doctrine but that it springs from the lumen naturae. Otherwise the author would not have emphasized that Judaea was in a “secret place,” for if the Church’s teachings were meant no one would need to find them in a secret place, since they are accessible to everyone. Also, it would be quite incomprehensible why the philosopher should exclaim: “O water, held worthless by all! By reason of its worthlessness and tortuousness683 no one can attain perfection in the art, or perceive its mighty virtue; for all four elements are, as it were, contained in it.” There can be no doubt that this is the aqua permanens or aqua pontica, the primal water which contains the four elements.

The psychological equivalent of the chaotic water of the beginning684 is the unconscious, which the old writers could grasp only in projected form, just as today most people cannot see the beam in their own eye but are all too well aware of the mote in their brother’s. Political propaganda exploits

this primitivity and conquers the naive with their own defect. The only defence against this overwhelming danger is recognition of the shadow. The sight of its darkness is itself an illumination, a widening of consciousness through integration of the hitherto unconscious components of the personality. Freud’s efforts to bring the shadow to consciousness are the logical and salutary answer to the almost universal unconsciousness and projection-proneness of the general public. It is as though Freud, with sure instinct, had sought to avert the danger of nation-wide psychic epidemics that threatened Europe. What he did not see was that the confrontation with the shadow is not just a harmless affair that can be settled by “reason.” The shadow is the primitive who is still alive and active in civilized man, and our civilized reason means nothing to him. He needs to be ruled by a higher authority, such as is found in the great religions. Even when Reason triumphed at the beginning of the French Revolution it was quickly turned into a goddess and enthroned in Notre- Dame.

The shadow exerts a dangerous fascination which can be countered only by another fascinosum. It cannot be got at by reason, even in the most rational person, but only by illumination, of a degree and kind that are equal to the darkness but are the exact opposite of “enlightenment.” For what we call “rational” is everything that seems “fitting” to the man in the street, and the question then arises whether this “fitness” may not in the end prove to be “irrational” in the bad sense of the word. Sometimes, even with the best intentions this dilemma cannot be solved. This is the moment when the primitive trusts himself to a higher authority and to a decision beyond his comprehension. The civilized man in his closed-in environment functions in a fitting and appropriate manner, that is, rationally. But if, because of some apparently insoluble dilemma, he gets outside the confines of civilization, he becomes a primitive again; then he has irrational ideas and acts on hunches; then he no longer thinks but “it” thinks in him; then he needs “magical” practices in order to gain a feeling of security; then the latent autonomy of the unconscious becomes active and begins to manifest itself as it has always done in the past.
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 man’s 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.

Revelation conveys general truths which often do not illuminate the individual’s 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 service

—so great that for many people the light of revelation has been extinguished altogether. Within the confines of civilization man’s 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 psychotherapeutic method of active imagination offers excellent examples of this; sometimes a numinous dream or some external event will have the same effect.

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 one’s lofty ideals narrow, fanatical convictions, all the more cherished for that, and behind one’s heroic pretensions nothing but crude egotism, infantile greed, and complacency. This painful corrective is an unavoidable stage in every psychotherapeutic 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 psychotherapeutic systems that give a foothold to all those who cannot stand by themselves, and they are in the overwhelming majority.
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. Also—very much in contrast to the rationalistic tendencies of today—they 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 sheep’s 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.

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.

IV

REX AND REGINA

INTRODUCTION

We have already met the royal pair, and particularly the figure of the King, several times in the course of our inquiry, not to mention the material which was presented under this head in Psychology and Alchemy. Conforming to the prototype of Christ the King in the Christian world of ideas, the King plays a central role in alchemy and cannot, therefore, be dismissed as a mere metaphor. In the “Psychology of the Transference” I have discussed the deeper reasons for a more comprehensive treatment of this symbol. Because the king in general represents a superior personality exalted above the ordinary, he has become the carrier of a myth, that is to say, of the statements of the collective unconscious. The outward paraphernalia of kingship show this very clearly. The crown symbolizes his relation to the sun, sending forth its rays; his bejewelled mantle is the starry firmament; the orb is a replica of the world; the lofty throne exalts him above the crowd; the address “Majesty” approximates him to the gods. The further we go back in history the more evident does the king’s divinity become. The divine right of kings survived until quite recent times, and the Roman Emperors even usurped the title of a god and demanded a personal cult. In the Near East the whole essence of kingship was based far more on theological than on political assumptions. There the psyche of the whole nation was the true and ultimate basis of kingship: it was self-evident that the king was the magical source of welfare and prosperity for the entire organic community of man, animal, and plant; from him flowed the life and prosperity of his subjects, the increase of the herds, and the fertility of the land. This signification of kingship was not invented a posteriori; it is a psychic a priori which reaches far back into prehistory and comes very close to being a natural revelation of the psychic structure. The fact that we explain this phenomenon on rational grounds of expediency means

something only for us; it means nothing for primitive psychology, which to a far higher degree than our objectively oriented views is based on purely psychic and unconscious assumptions.

The theology of kingship best known to us, and probably the most richly developed, is that of ancient Egypt, and it is these conceptions which, handed down by the Greeks, have permeated the spiritual history of the West. Pharaoh was an incarnation of God1 and a son of God.2 In him dwelt the divine life-force and procreative power, the ka: God reproduced himself in a human mother of God and was born from her as a God-man.3 As such he guaranteed the growth and prosperity of the land and the people,4 also taking it upon himself to be killed when his time was fulfilled, that is to say when his procreative power was exhausted.5
Father and son were consubstantial,6 and after his death Pharaoh became the father-god again,7 because his ka was consubstantial with the father.8 The ka consisted, as it were, of Pharaoh’s ancestral souls, fourteen of which were regularly worshipped by him,9 corresponding to the fourteen kas of the creator-god.10 Just as Pharaoh corresponded on the human plane to the divine son, so his ka corresponded to the divine Procreator, the ka- mutef,11 the “bull of his mother,” and his mother corresponded to the mother of the gods (e.g., Isis).
This gives rise to a peculiar double trinity, consisting on the one hand of a divine series, father-god, divine son, the ka-mutef, and on the other hand a human series, father-god, human divine son (Pharaoh), and Pharaoh’s ka. In the first series the father changes into the son and the son into the father through the procreative power of the ka-mutef. All three figures are consubstantial. The second, divine-human series, which is likewise bound into a unity by consubstantiality, represents the manifestation of God in the earthly sphere.12 The divine mother is not included in either triunity; she stands outside it, a figure now wholly divine, now wholly human. We should mention in this connection a late Egyptian trinity amulet discussed by Spiegelberg: Horus and Hathor sit facing one another, and between them and over them hovers a winged serpent. The three deities all hold the ankh (symbol of life). The inscription says: “Bait is one, Hathor one, Akori one, one is their power. Greetings, Father of the World, greetings, three-formed God.”13 Baït is Horus. The amulet, which is three-cornered, may date from the first or second century

A.D. Spiegelberg writes: “For my feeling this epigram, despite its Greek form, breathes an Egyptian spirit of Hellenistic nature and contains nothing Christian. But it is born of a spirit that made its contribution to the development of the dogma of the Trinity in Christianity.”14 The illustrations of the coniunctio in the Rosarium, showing King, Queen, and the dove of the Holy Ghost, correspond to the figures on the amulet exactly.15

GOLD AND SPIRIT

The striking analogy between certain alchemical ideas and Christian dogma is not accidental but in accordance with tradition. A good part of the symbolism of the king derives from this source. Just as Christian dogma derives in part from Egypto-Hellenistic folklore, as well as from the Judaeo-Hellenistic philosophy of writers like Philo, so, too, does alchemy. Its origin is certainly not purely Christian, but is largely pagan or Gnostic. Its oldest treatises come from that sphere, among them the treatise of Komarios (1st cent.?) and the writings of Pseudo-Democritus (1st to 2nd cent.) and Zosimos (3rd cent.). The title of one of the latter’s treatises is “The True Book of Sophe16 the Egyptian and Divine Lord of the Hebrews, [and] of the Powers of Sabaoth.”17 Berthelot thinks that Zosimos really was the author, and this is quite possible. The treatise speaks of a knowledge or wisdom that comes from the Aeons:

Ungoverned () and autonomous is its origin; it is non- material () and it seeks none of the material and wholly corruptible18 bodies. For it acts without being acted upon () But, on their asking for a gift, the symbol of the chymic art comes forth from creation for those who rescue and purify the divine soul chained in the elements, that is, the divine Pneuma mingled with the flesh. For as the sun is the blossom of fire, and the heavenly sun is the right eye of the world, so also the copper, when purification makes it to blossom, is an earthly sun, a king upon earth, like the sun in heaven.19

It is clear from this and from the text that follows that the “symbol of the chymic art” (), the king, is none other than gold, the king of metals.20 But it is equally clear that the gold comes into being only through the liberation of the divine soul or pneuma from the chains of the “flesh.” No doubt it would have suited our rational expectations better

if the text had said not “flesh” but “ore” or “earth.” Although the elements are mentioned as the prison of the divine psyche, the whole of nature is meant, Physis in general; not just ore and earth but water, air, and fire, and besides these the “flesh,” an expression that already in the third century meant the “world” in a moral sense as opposed to the spirit, and not simply the human body. Consequently, there can be no doubt that the chrysopoeia (gold-making) was thought of as a psychic operation running parallel to the physical process and, as it were, independent of it. The moral and spiritual transformation was not only independent of the physical procedure but actually seemed to be its causa efficiens. This explains the high-flown language, which would be somewhat out of place in a merely chemical recipe. The psyche previously imprisoned in the elements and the divine spirit hidden in the flesh overcome their physical imperfection and clothe themselves in the noblest of all bodies, the royal gold. Thus the “philosophic” gold is an embodiment of psyche and pneuma, both of which signify “life-spirit.” It is in fact an “aurum non vulgi,” a living gold, so to speak, which corresponds in every respect to the lapis. It, too, is a living being with a body, soul, and spirit, and it is easily personified as a divine being or a superior person like a king, who in olden times was considered to be God incarnate.21 In this connection Zosimos availed himself of a primordial image in the form of the divine Anthropos, who at that time had attained a crucial significance in philosophy and religion, not only in Christianity but also in Mithraism. The Bible as well as the Mithraic monuments and the Gnostic writings bear witness to this. Zosimos has, moreover, left us a long testimony on this theme.22 The thoughts of this writer, directly or indirectly, were of decisive importance for the whole philosophical and Gnostic trend of alchemy in the centuries that followed. As I have dealt with this subject in considerable detail in Psychology and Alchemy I need not go into it here. I mention it only because the above passage from Zosimos is, to my knowledge, the earliest reference to the king in alchemy. As an Egyptian, Zosimos would have been familiar with the mystique of kingship, which at that time was enjoying a new efflorescence under the Caesars, and so it was easy for him to carry over the identity of the divine pneuma with the king into alchemical practice, itself both physical and pneumatic, after the older writings of Pseudo-Democritus had paved the way with their views on (divine nature).23

The definition of the king as pneuma carried considerably more weight than his interpretation as gold. Ruland’s Lexicon defines Rex as follows: “Rex—King, Soul, Spiritual Water which gives Moisture to the Female and is restored to the Fountain whence it was derived. The Spirit is Water.”24 Here Rex is still the divine soul, the moist Osiris,25 a life-giving, fertilizing pneuma and not primarily the physical gold. The mystique of the king comes out even more clearly in Khunrath: “When at last,” he says, “the ash-colour, the whitening, and the yellowing are over, you will see the Philosophical Stone, our King and Lord of Lords, come forth from the couch and throne of his glassy sepulchre26 onto the stage of this world, in his glorified body, regenerated and more than perfect, shining like a carbuncle, and crying out, Behold, I make all things new.”27 In his story of how the lapis is made, Khunrath describes the mystic birth of the king. Ruach Elohim (the spirit of God) penetrated to the lowest parts and to the centre (meditullium) of the virginal massa confusa, and scattered the sparks and rays of his fruitfulness. “Thus the form impressed itself [forma informavit], and the purest soul quickened and impregnated the tohu-bohu, which was without form and void.” This was a “mysterium typicum” (a “symbolical” mystery), the procreation of the “Preserver and Saviour of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. The Word is become flesh . . . and God has revealed himself in the flesh, the spirit of God has appeared in the body. This, the son of the Macrocosm . . . that, the son of God, the God- man . . . the one in the womb of the Macrocosm, the other in the womb of the Microcosm,” and both times the womb was virginal. “In the Book or Mirror of Nature, the Stone of the Wise, the Preserver of the Macrocosm, is the symbol of Christ Jesus Crucified, Saviour of the whole race of men, that is, of the Microcosm.”28 The “son of the Macrocosm” begotten by the divine pneuma (the Egyptian ka-mutef) is “of like kind and consubstantial with the Begetter.” His soul is a spark of the world-soul. “Our stone is three and one, which is to say triune, namely earthly, heavenly, and divine.” This reminds us of the Egyptian sequence: Pharaoh, ka, God. The triune stone consists of “three different and distinct substances: Sal- Mercurius-Sulphur.”29

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE KING

As the Egyptian mystique of kingship shows, the king, like every archetype, is not just a static image; he signifies a dynamic process whereby the human carrier of the mystery is included in the mysterious drama of God’s incarnation. This happened at the birth of Pharaoh, at his coronation,30 at the Heb-Sed festival, during his reign, and at his death. The texts and illustrations of the “birth-chamber” in the temple depict the divine procreation and birth of Pharaoh in the form of the mystic marriage of the Queen Mother and the Father-God. The Heb-Sed festival served to associate his ka with the cultivation of the soil and, presumeably, to preserve or strengthen his powers.31 The identity of his ha with the Father- God was finally confirmed at his death and sealed for all time. The transformation of the king from an imperfect state into a perfect, whole, and incorruptible essence is portrayed in a similar manner in alchemy. It describes either his procreation and birth, in the form of a hierosgamos, or else his imperfect initial state and his subsequent rebirth in perfect form. In what follows I shall give a few examples of this transformation.
Among the older medieval treatises there is the so-called “Allegoria Merlini.”32 So far as the name Merlinus is concerned, I must leave it an open question whether it refers to the magician Merlin33 or is a corruption of Merculinus.34 The allegory tells us of a certain king who made ready for battle. As he was about to mount his horse he wished for a drink of water. A servant asked him what water he would like, and the king answered: “I demand the water which is closest to my heart, and which likes me above all things.” When the servant brought it the king drank so much that “all his limbs Avere filled and all his veins inflated, and he himself became discoloured.” His soldiers urged him to mount his horse, but he said he could not: “I am heavy and my head hurts me, and it seems to me as though all my limbs were falling apart.” He demanded to be placed in a heated chamber where he could sweat the water out. But when, after a while, they opened the chamber he lay there as if dead. They summoned the Egyptian and the Alexandrian physicians, who at once accused one another of incompetence. Finally the Alexandrian physicians gave way to the Egyptian physicians, who tore the king into little pieces, ground them to powder, mixed them with their “moistening” medicines, and put the king back in his heated chamber as before. After some time they fetched him out again half-dead. When those present saw this, they broke out into lamentation, crying: “Alas, the king is dead.” The physicians said

soothingly that he was only sleeping. They then washed him with sweet water until the juice of the medicines departed from him, and mixed him with new substances. Then they put him back in the chamber as before. When they took him out this time he was really dead. But the physicians said: “We have killed him that he may become better and stronger in this world after his resurrection on the day of judgment.” The king’s relatives, however, considered them mountebanks, took their medicines away from them, and drove them out of the kingdom. They now wanted to bury the corpse, but the Alexandrian physicians, who had heard of these happenings, counselled them against it and said they would revive the king. Though the relatives were very mistrustful they let them have a try. The Alexandrian physicians took the body, ground it to powder a second time, washed it well until nothing of the previous medicines remained, and dried it. Then they took one part of sal ammoniac and two parts of Alexandrian nitre, mixed them with the pulverized corpse, made it into a paste with a little linseed oil, and placed it in a crucible-shaped chamber with holes bored in the bottom; beneath it they placed a clean crucible and let the corpse stand so for an hour. Then they heaped fire upon it and melted it, so that the liquid ran into the vessel below. Whereupon the king rose up from death and cried in a loud voice: “Where are my enemies? I shall kill them all if they do not submit to me!” All the kings and princes of other countries honoured and feared him. “And when they wished to see something of his wonders, they put an ounce of well-purified mercury in a crucible, and scattered over it as much as a millet-seed of finger-nails or hair or of their blood, blew up a light charcoal fire, let the mercury cool down with these, and found the stone, as I do know.”

This parable contains the primitive motif of the murder or sacrifice of the king for the purpose of renewing his kingly power and increasing the fertility of the land. Originally it took the form of killing the old and impotent king. In this tale the king was afflicted with a “dropsy” both real and metaphorical: he suffered from a general plethora and a total oedema because he drank too much of the special “water.” One would be inclined to think that the “water closest to his heart which liked him above all things” was eau de vie and that he suffered from cirrhosis of the liver, were it not that the extraction of the moist psyche from the elements was a preoccupation of alchemy long before the distillation of alcohol.35 The idea was to extract the pneuma or psyche or “virtue” from matter (e.g., from

gold) in the form of a volatile or liquid substance, and thereby to mortify the “body.” This aqua permanens36 was then used to revive or reanimate the “dead” body and, paradoxically, to extract the soul again.37 The old body had to die; it was either sacrificed or simply killed, just as the old king had either to die or to offer sacrifice to the gods (much as Pharaoh offered libations to his own statue). Something of this kind was celebrated at the Sed festival. Moret thinks the Sed ceremony was a kind of humanized regicide.38

Water has always played a role at sacrifices as the “animating” principle. A text from Edfu says: “I bring thee the vessels with the limbs of the gods [i.e., the Nile], that thou mayest drink of them; I refresh my heart that thou mayest rejoice.” The water of the Nile was the real “consolamentum” of Egypt. In the Egyptian fairytale, Anubis found that the heart of his dead brother Bata, which Bata had placed on a cedar- flower, had turned into a cedar-cone. He put it in a vessel of cold water, and the heart soaked it up and Bata began to live again.39 Here the water is life-giving. But of the aqua permanens it was said: “It kills and vivifies.”
The king has numerous connections with water. In the parable of Sulphur cited earlier, the king drowns in it with Diana.40 The hierosgamos was often celebrated in water. The motif of drowning also takes the form of an inward drowning, namely dropsy. Mater Alchimia is dropsical in the lower limbs.41 Or the king is dropsical and conceals himself in the “belly of the horse” in order to sweat out the water.42 The water appears also as a bath, as in the “Dicta Alani,” where the “old man” sits in the bath.43 Here I would recall the king’s bath in Bernardus Trevisanus, which I have discussed earlier.44 Water is used for baptism, immersion, and cleansing. The cleansing of Naaman (II Kings 5 : 10ff.) is often cited as an allegory of this.45
In our parable the wonderful water already has that decomposing and dissolving property which anticipates the king’s dismemberment.46 The dissolution of the initial material plays a great role in alchemy as an integral part of the process. Here I will mention only the unique interpretation of the solutio given by Dorn. In his “Speculativa philosophia” he discusses the seven stages of the work. The first stage begins with the “study of the philosophers,” which is the way to the investigation of truth.

But the truth is that from which nothing can be missing, to which nothing can be added, nay more, to which nothing can be opposed. . . . The truth therefore is a great strength and an impregnable fortress . . ., an unconquerable pledge to them that possess it. In this citadel is contained the true and undoubted stone and treasure of the philosophers, which is not eaten into by moths, nor dug out by thieves, but remaineth for ever when all things else are dissolved, and is appointed for the ruin of many, but for the salvation of others. This is a thing most worthless to the vulgar, spurned above all things and hated exceedingly, yet it is not hateful but lovable, and to philosophers precious above gems.47

In his “Recapitulation of the First Stage” Dorn says:

It is the study of the Chemists to liberate that unsensual truth48 from its fetters in things of sense, for through it the heavenly powers are pursued with subtle understanding. . . . 49 Knowledge is the sure and undoubted resolution [resolutio] by experiment of all opinions concerning the truth.

. . . Experiment is manifest demonstration of the truth, and resolution the putting away of doubt. We cannot be resolved of any doubt save by experiment, and there is no better way to make it than on ourselves. Let us therefore verify what we have said above concerning the truth, beginning with ourselves. We have said above that piety consists in knowledge of ourselves,50 and hence it is that we make philosophical knowledge begin from this also. But no man can know himself unless he know what and not who he is,51 on whom he depends and whose he is (for by the law of truth no one belongs to himself), and to what end he was made. With this knowledge piety begins, which is concerned with two things, namely, with the Creator and the creature that is made like unto him. For it is impossible for the creature to know himself of himself, unless he first know his Creator. . . . 52 No one can better know the Creator, than the workman is known by his work.53

Later Dorn says:

The chemical putrefaction is compared to the study of the philosophers, because as the philosophers are disposed to knowledge by study, so natural things are disposed by putrefaction to solution [ad solutionem]. To this is compared philosophical knowledge, for as by solution bodies are dissolved [solvuntur], so by knowledge are the doubts of the philosophers resolved [resolvuntur].54

He says in his “Physica Trithemii”:

The first step in the ascent to higher things is the study of faith, for by this is the heart of man disposed to solution in water [ad solutionem in aquam].55

Finally, in his “Philosophia chemica,” Dorn asserts:

Dissolution is knowledge, or the spagyric56 union of the male with the female, the latter receiving from him all that ought to be received. This is the beginning of the special generation whereby the effect of our spagyric marriage is sensually apprehended, namely, the union of the twofold seed to form the embryo.57

It is evident from these statements that Dorn understood the alchemical solutio primarily as a spiritual and moral phenomenon and only secondarily as a physical one. The first part of the work is a psychic “solution” of doubts and conflicts, achieved by self-knowledge, and this is not possible without knowledge of God. The spiritual and moral solutio is conceived as a “spagyric marriage,” an inner, psychic union which by analogy and magic correspondence unites the hostile elements into one stone. By inquiring into the “quid,” and by spiritual understanding, the selfish hardness of the heart—caused by original sin—is dissolved: the heart turns to water. The ascent to the higher stages can then begin. Egocentricity is a necessary attribute of consciousness and is also its specific sin.58 But consciousness is confronted by the objective fact of the unconscious, often enough an avenging deluge. Water in all its forms— sea, lake, river, spring—is one of the commonest typifications of the unconscious, as is also the lunar femininity that is closely associated with water. The dissolution of the heart in water would therefore correspond to the union of the male with the female, and this in turn to the union of conscious and unconscious, which is precisely the meaning of the “spagyric marriage.”59 Similarly, the citadel or fortress is a feminine symbol, containing within it the treasure of the “truth,” also personified as Wisdom.60 This wisdom corresponds to salt, which is co-ordinated with the moon. The spagyric union produces an embryo whose equivalents are the homunculus and the lapis. The lapis, of course, is a symbol of the self.61
If after this glimpse into the psychology of the solutio we turn back to the “Allegoria Merlini,” several things will become clear: the king personifies a hypertrophy of the ego which calls for compensation. He is

about to commit an act of violence—a sure sign of his morally defective state. His thirst is due to his boundless concupiscence and egotism. But when he drinks he is overwhelmed by the water, i.e., by the unconscious, and medical help becomes necessary. The two groups of doctors further assist his dissolution by dismemberment and pulverization.62 The original of this may be the dismemberment of Osiris and Dionysus.63 The king is subjected to various forms of dissolution: dismemberment, trituration, dissolution in water.64 His transfer to the heated chamber is the prototype of the “laconicum” (sweat-bath) of the king, often shown in later illustrations; it is a therapeutic method which we meet again in the American Indian “sweat-lodge.” The chamber also signifies the grave. The difference between the Egyptian and the Alexandrian physicians seems to be that the former moistened the corpse but the latter dried it (or embalmed or pickled it). The technical error of the Egyptians, therefore, was that they did not separate the conscious from the unconscious sufficiently, whereas the Alexandrians avoided this mistake.65 At any rate they succeeded in reviving the king and evidently brought about his rejuvenation.

If we examine this medical controversy from the standpoint of alchemical hermeneutics many of the allusions can be understood in a deeper sense. For instance the Alexandrians, though making just as thorough use of the Typhonian technique of dismemberment, avoided the (Typhonian) sea-water and dried the pulverized corpse, using instead the other constituent of the aqua pontica, namely salt in the form of sal ammoniac (mineral salt or rock-salt, also called sal de Arabia) and sal nitri (saltpetre).66 Primarily the preservative quality of both salts is meant, but secondarily, in the mind of the adepts, “marination” meant the “in- forming” penetration of sapientia (Dorn’s “veritas”) into the ignoble mass, whereby the corruptible form was changed into an incorruptible and immutable one.
Certainly there is little trace of this in our somewhat crude parable. Also, the transformation of the king seems to betoken only the primitive renewal of his life-force, for the king’s first remark after his resuscitation shows that his bellicosity is undiminished. In the later texts, however, the end-product is never just a strengthening, rejuvenation or renewal of the initial state but a transformation into a higher nature. So we are probably not wrong in attributing a fairly considerable age to this parable. One

ground for this assumption is the conflict between the Alexandrian and Egyptian physicians, which may hark back to pre-Islamic times when the old-fashioned, magical remedies of the Egyptians still led to skirmishes with the progressive, more scientific medicine of the Greeks. Evidence for this is the “technical” blunder of the Egyptian method—contamination of conscious and unconscious—which the more highly differentiated consciousness of the Greeks was able to avoid.

THE REGENERATION OF THE KING

(Ripley’s “Cantilena”)

It should not be overlooked that no reason was given why the king was in need of renewal. On a primitive level the need for renewal was self- evident, since the magic power of the king decreased with age. This is not so in later parables, where the original imperfection of the king itself becomes a problem.
Thus the author of the following parable, Sir George Ripley (1415– 90), Canon of Bridlington, was already revolving in his mind the problem of the “sick king.” I must leave to one side the question of how far this idea was influenced by the Grail Legend. It is conceivable that Ripley, as an Englishman, would have been acquainted with this tradition. Apart from the rather doubtful evidence of the “lapis exillis” (“lapsit exiliis” in Wolfram von Eschenbach), I have not been able to find any more likely traces of the Grail cycle in alchemical symbolism, unless one thinks of the mystic vessel of transformation, the tertium comparationis for which would be the chalice in the Mass.

The first five verses of the Cantilena67 are as follows:

Behold! And in this Cantilena see The hidden Secrets of Philosophy:

What Joy arises from the Merry Veines Of Minds elated by such dulcid Straines!

Through Roman Countreys as I once did passe, Where Mercuries Nuptiall celebrated was,

And feeding Stoutly (on the Bride-Groomes score) I learn’d these Novelties unknown before.

There was a certaine Barren King by birth,

Composèd of the Purest, Noblest Earth, By nature Sanguine and Devoute, yet hee Sadly bewailèd his Authoritie.

Wherefore am I a King, and Head of all Those Men and Things that be Corporeall?

I have no Issue, yet I’le not deny

’Tis Mee both Heaven and Earth are Rulèd by.

Yet there is either a Cause Naturall Or some Defect in the Originall,

Though I was borne without Corruption

And nourished ’neath the Pinions of the Sunne.68

The cleric’s language betrays him: “original defect” is a paraphrase of “original sin,” and the “pinions of the sun” are the “wings of the sun of justice” (Malachi 4 : 2: “The sun of justice shall arise with healing in his wings”). Possibly there is a connection here between the Cantilena and the remark of Senior that the male without wings is under the winged female.69 The Cantilena condenses the winged female on the one hand with the winged sun-disk of Malachi and on the other with the idea of the nourishing mother—a kind of dreamlike contamination.

Verses 6 and 7

Each Vegetative which from the Earth proceeds Arises up with its own proper Seeds;

And Animalls, at Seasons, speciously Abound with Fruit and strangly Multiply.

Alas, my Nature is Restricted so

No Tincture from my Body yet can flow. It therefore is Infoecund: neither can

It ought availe, in Generating Man.70

Here again the ecclesiastical language is noticeable: the tincture is identical with the aqua permanens, the wonderful water of transformation which corresponds to the Church’s “water of grace.” The water that should flow from the body may be analogous to the “rivers from the belly of Christ,” an idea that plays a great role not only in ecclesiastical metaphor but also in alchemy.71 With regard to the ecclesiastical language I would call attention to Hugo Rahner’s most instructive essay, “Flumina de ventre Christi.” Origen speaks of “the river our saviour” (salvator noster fluvius).72 The analogy of the pierced

Redeemer with the rock from which Moses struck water was used in alchemy to denote the extraction of the aqua permanens or of the soul from the lapis; or again, the king was pierced by Mercurius.73 For Origen water meant the “water of doctrine” and the “fount of science.” It was also a “fountain of water springing up in the believer.” St. Ambrose speaks of the “fountains of wisdom and knowledge.”74 According to him paradise, with its fourfold river of the Logos, is the ground of the soul;75 he also calls this river the innermost soul, since it is the “principle,” the

(venter), and the .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).

Verses 8 and 9

My Bodies Masse is of a Lasting-Stuffe, Exceeding delicate, yet hard enough;

And when the Fire Assays to try my Sprite, I am not found to Weigh a Graine too light.

My Mother in a Sphaere gave birth to mee, That I might contemplate Rotunditie;

And be more Pure of kind than other things, By Right of Dignity the Peer of Kings.77

The “house of the sphere” is the vas rotundum, whose roundness represents the cosmos and, at the same time, the world-soul, which in Plato surrounds the physical universe from outside. The secret content of the Hermetic vessel is the original chaos from which the world was created. As the filius Macrocosmi and the first man the king is destined for “rotundity,” i.e., wholeness, but is prevented from achieving it by his original defect.

Verse 10

Yet to my Griefe I know, unlesse I feed On the Specifics I so sorely need

I cannot Generate: to my Amaze

The End draws near for me, Ancient of Daies.78

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 but—and this is the novel and significant thing—he 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 transformation—“Deo 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 transformation—far 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 heathenish 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 God—to use an apt expression of Isidore81—as 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 (). This strange idea of Isidore’s is so much in keeping with the phenomenology of the collective unconscious that one is justified in calling it a projection of this empirically demonstrable fact in the form of a metaphysical hypostasis.

It will not have escaped the reader how primitive the idea of God’s ageing and need of renewal is. It does in fact derive from ancient Egypt, though one is at a loss to imagine from what sources, other than the Bible, a Canon of Bridlington in the fifteenth century could have borrowed such a theology. His writings at any rate allow no conjectures in this respect. There is something of a clue, however, in the alchemical tradition itself, in the idea of a corrupt arcane substance whose corruption is due to original sin. A similar idea appears in the Grail tradition of the sick king, which has close connections with the transformation mystery of the Mass. The king is the forbear of Parsifal, whom one could describe as a redeemer figure, just as in alchemy the old king has a redeemer son or becomes a redeemer himself (the lapis is the same at the beginning and at the end). Further, we must consider certain medieval speculations concerning God’s need of improvement and the transformation of the wrathful God of the Old Testament into the God of Love in the New: for, like the unicorn, he was softened by love in the lap of a virgin. Ideas of this kind are found as early as Bonaventure, the Franciscan saint, who died in 1274.82 We should also remember that, in the figurative language of the Church, God the Father was represented as an old man and his birth as a rejuvenation in the Son. In a hymn to the Church as an analogy of the Mother of God Paulinus of Nola says:

Sister and wife at once; for without the use of the body Mentally she unites, for the Spouse is God, not a man.

Out of this mother is born the Ancient as well as the infant …83

Although the candidate for baptism (“reborn into a new infancy”) is meant here, the point of the analogy is that God the Father, a bearded old man, is worshipped in God the Son as a newborn child.
The contrast between senex and puer touches at more than one point on the archetype of God’s renewal in Egyptian theology, especially when the underlying homoousia comes out as clearly as in the verses of Ephraem Syrus: “The Ancient of Days, in his sublimity, dwelt as a babe in the womb.”84 “Thy Babe, O Virgin, is an old man; he is the Ancient of Days and precedes all time.”85
Nowhere in this material, however, do we find the very specific motif of God’s senescence, and the source Ripley could have used remains obscure. Even so, there is always the possibility of an autochthonous revival of the mythologem from the collective unconscious. Nelken has published a case of this kind. His patient was a primary-school teacher who suffered from paranoia. He developed a theory about a Father-God with immense procreative powers. Originally he had 550 membra virilia, but in the course of time they were reduced to three. He also possessed two scrota with three testicles each. His colossal sperm production weakened him in the end, and finally he shrank to a five-ton lump and was found chained up in a ravine. This psychologem contains the motif of ageing and loss of procreative power. The patient was the rejuvenated Father-God or his avatar.86 The embellishment of the archetypal theme is in this case completely original, so that we can safely take it as an autochthonous product.
In Ripley’s 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.

Verses 11–12

Utterly perish’d is the Flower of Youth,

Through all my Veines there courses naught but Death. Marvelling I heard Christ’s voice,88 that from above I’le be Reborne, I know not by what Love.

Else I God’s Kingdom cannot enter in:

And therefore, that I may be Borne agen, I’le Humbled be into my Mother’s Breast,

Dissolve to my First Matter, and there rest.89

In order to enter into God’s 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 alchemist’s 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 God’s help.

Verse 13

Hereto the Mother Animates the King,

Hasts his Conception, and does forthwith bring Him closely hidden underneath her Traine,

Till, from herselfe, she’d made him Flesh againe.90

Here the “chymical wedding” takes the form of the ancient rite of adoption, when the child to be adopted was hidden under the skirts of the adoptive mother and then drawn forth again.91

In this way Ripley circumvented the scandal of the customary incest.

The adoption was represented in ancient times either by a figurative act of birth or by the suckling of the adoptive child. In this manner Heracles was “adopted” by Hera. In a hymn to Nebo92 the god says to Asurbanipal:

Small wert thou, Asurbanipal, when I left thee with the divine Queen of Nineveh,

Feeble wert thou, Asurbanipal, when thou didst sit in the lap of the divine Queen of Nineveh,

Of the four udders that were placed in thy mouth thou didst suck from two,

And in two thou didst bury thy face …93

Concealment under the skirt is a widely disseminated rite, and until quite recently was still practised by the Bosnian Turks. The motif of the “tutelary Madonna” in a mantle has a similar meaning, namely, the adoption of the believer.
Ripley’s adoption scene may derive from the “lion-hunt” of Marchos,94 where mention is made of a fire which “comes out over the coals, even as the pious mother steps over the body of her son.” And again: “He likened the subtlety of the fire’s heat to the stepping of the pious mother over the body of her son.”95 These sentences form part of a dialogue between King Marchos and his mother. In contrast to the Cantilena, however, it is not the king who is to be transformed but the lion (see pars. 409f.).

Verses 14–17

’Twas wonderfull to see with what a Grace This Naturall Union made at one Imbrace Did looke; and by a Bond both Sexes knitt, Like to a Hille and Aire surrounding it.

The Mother unto her Chast Chamber 96 goes, Where in a Bed of Honour she bestowes

Her weary’d selfe, ’twixt Sheets as white as Snow

And there makes Signes of her approaching Woe.

Ranke Poison issuing from the Dying Man Made her pure Orient face look foule and wan:

Hence she commands all Strangers to be gone,

Seals upp her Chamber doore, and lyes Alone.

Meanwhile she of the Peacocks Flesh did Eate

And Dranke the Greene-Lyons Blood with that fine Meate, Which Mercurie, bearing the Dart of Passion,

Brought in a Golden Cupp of Babilon.97

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 “peacock’s flesh.” The peacock is an allusion to the cauda pavonis (peacock’s 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 peacock’s flesh is therefore equivalent to integrating the many colours (or, psychologically, the contradictory feeling-values) into a single colour, white. Norton’s “Ordinall of Alchimy” says:

For everie Colour whiche maie be thought,

Shall heere appeare before that White be wrought.101

The lapis contains or produces all colours.102 Hoghelande says that the “Hermaphroditic monster” contains all colours.103 Poetic comparisons are also used, such as Iris, the rainbow,104 or the iris of the eye.105 The eye and its colours are mentioned by Hippolytus. He calls attention to the Naassene analogy between the four rivers of paradise and the senses. The river Pison, which waters Havilah, the land of gold, corresponds to the eye: “This, they say, is the eye, which by its bearing and its colours bears witness to what is said.” 106 Abu’l-Qasim speaks of the tree with multicoloured blossoms.107 Mylius says: “Our stone is the star-strewn Sol, from whom every colour proceeds by transformation, as flowers come forth in the spring.” 108 The “Tractatus Aris-totelis” gives a more elaborate description: “Everything that is contained beneath the circle of the moon

. . . is made into one at the quadrangular ending,109 as if it were a meadow decked with colours and sweet-smelling flowers of divers kinds, which were conceived in the earth by the dew of heaven.”110

The stages of the work are marked by seven colours which are associated with the planets.111 This accounts for the relation of the colours to astrology, and also to psychology, since the planets correspond to

individual character components. The Aurora Consurgens relates the colours to the soul.112 Lagneus associates the four principal colours with the four temperaments.113 The psychological significance of the colours comes out quite clearly in Dorn: “Truly the form which is the intellect of man is the beginning, middle, and end of the preparations, and this form is indicated by the yellow colour, which shows that man is the greater and principal form in the spagyric work, and one mightier than heaven.”114 Since the gold colour signifies intellect, the principal “informator” (formative agent) in the alchemical process, we may assume that the other three colours also denote psychological functions, just as the seven colours denote the seven astrological components of character. Consequently the synthesis of the four or seven colours would mean nothing less than the integration of the personality, the union of the four basic functions, which are customarily represented by the colour quaternio blue-red-yellow- green.115

The cauda pavonis was a favourite theme for artistic representation in the old prints and manuscripts. It was not the tail alone that was depicted, but the whole bird. Since the peacock stands for “all colours” (i.e., the integration of all qualities), an illustration in Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae logically shows it standing on the two heads of the Rebis, whose unity it obviously represents. The inscription calls it the “bird of Hermes” and the “blessed greenness,” both of which symbolize the Holy Ghost or the Ruach Elohim, which plays a great role in Khunrath.116 The cauda pavonis is also called the “soul of the world, nature, the quintessence, which causes all things to bring forth.”117 Here the peacock occupies the highest place as a symbol of the Holy Ghost, in whom the male-female polarity of the hermaphrodite and the Rebis is integrated.
Elsewhere Khunrath says that at the hour of conjunction the blackness and the raven’s head and all the colours in the world will appear, “even Iris, the messenger of God, and the peacock’s tail.” He adds: “Mark the secrets of the rainbow in the Old and New Testament.”118 This is a reference to the sign of God’s covenant with Noah after the flood (Gen. 10

: 12f.) and to the “one in the midst of the four and twenty elders,” who “was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine-stone, and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald” (Rev. 4 : 3f.),119 and to the vision of the angel with a rainbow on his head (Rev. 10 :

1).120 Iris as the “messenger of God” is of special importance for an understanding of the opus, since the integration of all colours points, as it were, to a coming of God, or even to his presence.

The colour green, stressed by Khunrath, is associated with Venus. The “Introitus apertus” says: “But in the gentle heat the mixture will liquefy and begin to swell up, and at God’s command will be endowed with spirit, which will soar upward carrying the stone with it, and will produce new colours, first of all the green of Venus, which will endure for a long time.”121 Towards the end of this procedure, which was known as the regimen of Venus, the colour changes into a livid purple, whereupon the philosophical tree will blossom. Then follows the regimen of Mars, “which displays the ephemeral colours of the rainbow and the peacock at their most glorious.” In “these days” the “hyacinthine colour”122 appears, i.e., blue.
The livid purple that appears towards the end of the regimen of Venus has something deathly about it. This is in accord with the ecclesiastical view of purple, which expresses the “mystery of the Lord’s passion.”123 Hence the regimen of Venus leads by implication to passion and death, a point I would emphasize in view of the reference to the “dart of passion” in the Cantilena. A passage from the “Aquarium sapientum” shows that colours are a means of expressing moral qualities and situations: “While the digestion124 and coction of the dead spiritual body goes forward in man, there may be seen, as in the earthly opus, many variegated colours and signs, i.e., all manner of sufferings, afflictions, and tribulations, the chiefest of which . . . are the ceaseless assaults of the world, the flesh, and the devil.”125
These statements concerning the regimen of Venus are confirmed in Penotus’s Table of Symbols, where the peacock is correlated with the “mysterium coniugii” and with Venus, as is also the green lizard. Green is the colour of the Holy Ghost, of life, procreation and resurrection. I mention this because Penotus correlates the coniugium with the “dii mortui” (dead gods), presumably because they need resurrecting. The peacock is an ancient Christian symbol of resurrection, like the phoenix. According to a late alchemical text,126 the bronze tablets in the labyrinth at Meroë showed Osiris, after his regeneration by Isis, mounting a chariot drawn by peacocks, in which he drives along triumphing in his

resurrection, like the sun.

In Dorn the “dead spiritual body” is the “bird without wings.” It “changes into the raven’s head and finally into the peacock’s tail, after which it attains to the whitest plumage of the swan and, last of all, to the highest redness, the sign of its fiery nature.”127 This plainly alludes to the phoenix, which, like the peacock, plays a considerable role in alchemy as a symbol of renewal and resurrection,128 and more especially as a synonym for the lapis.
The cauda pavonis announces the end of the work, just as Iris, its synonym, is the messenger of God. The exquisite display of colours in the peacock’s fan heralds the imminent synthesis of all qualities and elements, which are united in the “rotundity” of the philosophical stone. For seventeen hundred years, as I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy, the lapis was brought into more or less clear connection with the ancient idea of the Anthropos. In later centuries this relationship extended to Christ, who from time immemorial was this same Anthropos or Son of Man, appearing in the gospel of St. John as the cosmogonie Logos that existed before the world was: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” According to the teachings of the Basilidians, the “God who is not” cast down a certain seed which, like a grain of mustard-seed, contained the whole plant, or, “like a peacock’s egg, had in itself a varied multitude of colours.”129 In this seed was a “threefold sonship, consubstantial with the God who is not.” In alchemy, the end of the work announced by the cauda pavonis was the birth of the filius regius. The display of colours in the Basilidian doctrine therefore occurred at the right place. Again one must ask: tradition—or spontaneous generation?
The peacock is an attribute of Juno, and one of the cognomens of Iris is Junonia. Just as the Queen Mother or the mother of the gods grants renewal, so the peacock annually renews his plumage, and therefore has a relation to all the changes in nature. De Gubernatis says:

The serene and starry sky and the shining sun are peacocks. The deep- blue firmament shining with a thousand brilliant eyes, and the sun rich with the colours of the rainbow, present the appearance of a peacock in

all the splendour of its eye-bespangled feathers. When the sky or the thousand-rayed sun (sahasrânśu) is hidden by clouds, or veiled by autumnal mists, it again resembles the peacock, which, in the dark part of the year, like a great number of vividly coloured birds, sheds its beautiful plumage, and becomes drab and unadorned; the crow which had put on the peacock’s feathers then caws with the other crows in funereal concert. In winter the peacock-crow has nothing left to it except its shrill disagreeable cry, which is not dissimilar to that of the crow. It is commonly said of the peacock that it has an angel’s feathers, a devil’s voice, and a thief’s walk.130

This would explain Dorn’s connecting the peacock with the raven’s head (caput corvi).

Certain subsidiary meanings of the peacock in medieval literature are worth mentioning. Picinellus says that the peacock, contrasted with the sun, signifies the “righteous man, who, although adorned with the colours of a thousand virtues, yet has a share in the greater glory of the divine presence”; it also signifies the man who, “spotted by repeated sins, rises again to integrity of spirit.” The peacock expresses the “inner beauty and perfection of the soul.”131 Merula mentions that the peacock will empty and destroy a vessel containing poison,132 yet another peculiarity which may account for the peacock’s position in alchemy, since it brings about and betokens the transformation of the poisonous dragon into the healing medicine. Merula also asserts that the peahen does not introduce her young to their father until they are fully grown, from which Picinellus drew an analogy with the Blessed Virgin, who likewise presents her charges to God only in the perfect state. Here again the motif of renewal through the mother is struck.133
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.
While peacock flesh135 was the queen’s 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.
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 incest—between 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.

If, then, we are told that the queen drank blood, this image corresponds in every respect to the king drinking water,141 to the king’s 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
In alchemy the lion, the “royal” beast, is a synonym for Mercurius,143 or, to be more accurate, for a stage in his transformation. He is the warm- blooded form of the devouring, predatory monster who first appears as the dragon. Usually the lion-form succeeds the dragon’s death and eventual dismemberment. This in turn is followed by the eagle. The transformations described in Rosencreutz’s Chymical Wedding give one a good idea of the transformations and symbols of Mercurius. Like him, the lion appears in dual form as lion and lioness,144 or he is said to be Mercurius duplex.145 The two lions are sometimes identified with the red and white sulphur.146 The illustrations show a furious battle between the wingless lion (red sulphur) and the winged lioness (white sulphur). The two lions are prefigurations of the royal pair, hence they wear crowns. Evidently at this stage there is still a good deal of bickering between them, and this is precisely what the fiery lion is intended to express—the passionate emotionality that precedes the recognition of unconscious contents.147 The quarrelling couple also represent the uroboros.148 The lion thus signifies the arcane substance, described as terra,149 the body or unclean body.150 Further synonyms are the “desert place,”151 “poison, because it [this earth] is deadly,” “tree, because it bears fruit,” or “hidden matter [hyle], because it is the foundation of all nature and the substance [subiectum] of all elements.”152 In apparent contradiction to this Maier cites from Ripley’s “Tractatus duodecim portarum” the remark that the green lion is a “means of conjoining the tinctures between sun and moon.”153 It is, however, psychologically correct to say that emotion unites as much as it divides. Basilius Valentinus takes the lion as the arcane substance, calling it the trinity composed of Mercurius, Sal, and Sulphur, and the equivalent of draco, aquila, rex, spiritus, and corpus.154 The “Gloria Mundi” calls the green lion the mineral

stone that “consumes a great quantity of its own spirit,”155 meaning self- impregnation by one’s own soul (imbibitio, cibatio, nutritio, penetratio, etc.).156

Besides the green lion there was also, in the later Middle Ages, a red lion.157 Both were Mercurius.158 The fact that Artefius mentions a magic use of the lion (and of the snake) throws considerable light on our symbol: he is “good” for battle,159 and here we may recall the fighting lions and the fact that the king in the “Allegoria Merlini” began drinking the water just when he was venturing forth to war. We shall probably not be wrong if we assume that the “king of beasts,” known even in Hellenistic times as a transformation stage of Helios,160 represents the old king, the Antiquus dierum of the Cantilena, at a certain stage of renewal, and that perhaps in this way he acquired the singular title of “Leo antiquus.”161 At the same time he represents the king in his theriomorphic form, that is, as he appears in his unconscious state. The animal form emphasizes that the king is overpowered or overlaid by his animal side and consequently expresses himself only in animal reactions, which are nothing but emotions. Emotionality in the sense of uncontrollable affects is essentially bestial, for which reason people in this state can be approached only with the circumspection proper to the jungle,162 or else with the methods of the animal-trainer.
According to the statements of the alchemists the king changes into his animal attribute, 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
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
The aggressive strength of the lion has, like sulphur, an evil aspect. In Honorius of Autun the lion is an allegory of Antichrist and the devil,167 in accordance with I Peter 5 : 8: “… your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” But in so far as the

lion and lioness are forerunners of the (incestuous) coniunctio, they come into the category of those theriomorphic pairs who spend their time fighting and copulating, e.g., cock and hen, the two serpents of the caduceus, the two dragons, etc. The lion has among other things an unmistakable erotic aspect. Thus the “Introitus apertus” says: “Learn what the doves of Diana are,168 who conquer the lion with caresses; the green lion, I say, who in truth is the Babylonish dragon, who kills all with his venom. Learn, lastly, what the caduceus of Mercury is, wherewith he works miracles, and what are those nymphs whom he holds enchanted, if thou wouldst fulfil thy wish” (i.e., the completion of the work).169 The reference to the “Babylonish” dragon is not altogether accidental, since in ecclesiastical language “Babylon” is thoroughly ambiguous.170 Nicholas Flamel likewise alludes to Babylon when he says that the stink and poisonous breath of burning mercury are nothing other than the “dragon’s head which goes forth with great haste from Babylon, which is surrounded by two or three milestones.”171

In the “lion hunt” of Marchos172 the lion, as we have seen, takes the place of the king. Marchos prepares a trap and the lion, attracted by the sweet smell of a stone that is obviously an eye-charm,173 falls into it and is swallowed by the magic stone. “And this stone, which the lion loves, is a woman.”174 The trap was covered by a “glass roof,” and the interior, called by Senior the “cucurbita,” is here called the “thalamus” (bridal chamber). The lion therefore falls like a bridegroom into the bridal chamber, where the magic stone that is “good for the eyes” and is a woman, lies on a bed of coals. This stone swallows (transglutit) the lion “so that nothing more of him was to be seen.” This is a parallel of the Arisleus vision, where Beya causes Gabricus to disappear into her body.
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 attribute 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

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

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 Goethe’s 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.
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.
The blood of the green lion drunk by the queen is handed to her in a “golden cup of Babylon.” This refers to the “great whore” in Rev. 17 : 1ff., “that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication . . . having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication …”
The whore (meretrix) is a well-known figure in alchemy. She characterizes the arcane substance in its initial, “chaotic,” maternal state. The “Introitus apertus” says that the chaos is like a mother of the metals. It is also called “our Luna” before the royal diadem is extracted from the

“menstruum of our whore,”179 i.e., before the king is reborn from the moon- mother. The “Tractatus aureus de lapide” says of the arcane substance: “That noble whore Venus180 is clothed and enveloped in abounding colour.” This colour “has a reddish appearance.”181 The nobility of this Venus derives from the fact that she is also the queen, the “chaste bride” of the king.182 In his “Practica de lapide” Basilius Valentinus says: “This tincture is the rose183 of our Masters, of Tyrian hue, called also the red blood of the dragon, described by many, and the purple cloak184 . . . with which the queen is covered.”185 A variant says: “That precious substance is the Venus of the ancients, the hermaphrodite, who has two sexes.”186 Maier writes: “In our chemistry there is Venus and Cupid. For Psyche is the female, Cupid the male, who is held to be the dragon.”187 The “opus ad rubeum” (reddening) takes place in the second house of Venus (Libra).188 Accordingly the Turba remarks that Venus “precedes the sun.”189 Flamel takes Venus as an important component of the arcane substance; in an apostrophe to the Magnesia he says: “Thou bearest within thee the many- formed image of Venus, the cupbearer and fire-spitting servant,”190 the latter referring to the sulphurous aspect of Mercurius. Mercurius also plays the role of cup-bearer in the Cantilena. In Flamel the lapis is born of the conjunction of “Venus pugnax” (fighting Venus)191 and Mercurius— evidently a reference to the quarrelling that precedes their union (cf. the fighting lions). In Valentinus’s poem on the prima materia lapidis Venus is identified with the fountain, the mother and bride of the king, in which her “fixed” father is drowned:

A stone there is, and yet no stone, In it doth Nature work alone.

From it there welleth forth a fount

In which her Sire, the Fixed, is drown’d:

His body and life absorbed therein Until the soul’s restored agen.192

In other texts Venus represents the queen at the wedding, as in the “Introitus apertus”: “See to it that you prepare the couch of Venus carefully, then lay her on the marriage bed,” etc.193 In general, Venus appears as the feminine aspect of the king, or as we should say, his anima. Thus Valentinus says of Adam and Venus in the bath:

So saith the Wise Man: Nought they be Except the Double Mercurie!

The King in the bath and the connubium with Venus194 or with the mother are the same thing: the “man encompassed by the woman.” Sometimes he and sometimes she is hermaphroditic,195 because at bottom they are nothing other than Mercurius duplex. Venus or the whore corresponds to the erotic aspect of the lion, who in turn is an attribute of the king. As in the Apocalypse the seven-headed dragon is the riding- animal of the Great Whore, so in Valentinus the lion is the mount of Mercurius duplex (portrayed in his feminine aspect).196 Khunrath equates Venus with the green lion.197 Since Sulphur is to Sol as Leo is to Rex, we can see why Khunrath regards Venus as the anima vegetativa of sulphur.198 The most subtle substance must, when mixed with Sol, be preserved in a bottle whose stopper is marked with the sign of the cross,199 just as an evil spirit is banished by a crucifix.200 The relation of the stone to Venus occurs as early as the Greek texts, which speak of the “Cytherean stone” and the “pearl of Cythera.”201 In the Arabic “Book of Krates”202 Venus is endowed with tincturing power; she is therefore called “scribe.” Since she holds the vessel from which quicksilver continually flows, the word “écrivain” very probably refers to Thoth- Mercurius. In the vision of Krates Venus appears surrounded by a number of Indians who shoot arrows at him. This image occurs again in Senior’s vision of Hermes Trismegistus, at whom nine eagles shot their arrows. Mercurius is the archer who, chemically, dissolves the gold, and, morally, pierces the soul with the dart of passion. As Kyllenios he is identical with Cupid, who likewise shoots arrows in Rosencreutz’s Chymical Wedding.203

The corrupt nature of Venus is stressed in “Rosinus ad Sarratantam”:

And mark that Nature in the beginning of her origin intends to make the Sun or the Moon, but cannot, because of Venus, [who is] a corrupt [and] mixed quicksilver, or because of the foetid earth. Wherefore, as a child in its mother’s womb accidentally contracts a weakness and a corruption by reason of the place, although the sperm was clean, [and] the child is nevertheless leprous and unclean because of the corrupt womb, so it is with all imperfect metals, which are corrupted by Venus and the foetid earth.204

Lastly, I would mention the king’s daughter in the play in the

Chymical Wedding, who was chosen as the bride but because of her

coquetry was made captive by the King of the Moors. She agrees to be his concubine, and thus proves herself a regular meretrix. Rosencreutz’s visit to the sleeping Venus shows that this two-faced goddess is somehow secretly connected with the opus.205

Evidently on account of its close connection with Venus the green lion has, surprisingly enough, rose-coloured blood, as mentioned by Dorn206 and by his contemporary, Khunrath.207 The latter ascribes rose-coloured blood to the filius macrocosmi as well.208 This peculiarity of the green lion’s blood establishes its connection not only with the filius, a well-known Christ parallel, but above all with the rose, whose symbolism produced not only the popular title “Rosarium” (rose-garden) but also the “Rosen-creuz” (Rosie Cross). The white and the red rose 209 are synonyms for the albedo 210 and rubedo. The tincture is “of a rosy colour” and corresponds to the blood of Christ, who is “compared and united” with the stone.211 He is the “heavenly foundation-stone and corner-stone.” 212 The rose-garden is a “garden enclosed” and, like the rose, a soubriquet of Mary, the parallel of the “locked” prima materia.213
The relation of the love-goddess to red dates back to ancient times.214 Scarlet215 is the colour of the Great Whore of Babylon and her beast. Red is the colour of sin.216 The rose is also an attribute of Dionysus. Red and rose- red are the colour of blood, a synonym for the aqua permanens and the soul, which are extracted from the prima materia and bring “dead” bodies to life.217 The prima materia is called “meretrix” and is equated with “Great Babylon,” just as are the dragon and the lion with the dragon of “Babel.” The stone, the filius regius, is the son of this whore. In ecclesiastical tradition the son of the whore is Antichrist, begotten by the devil, as we read in the “Elucidarium” of Honorius of Autun.218
Certain of the ecclesiastical symbols prove to be acutely dualistic, and this is also true of the rose. Above all it is an allegory of Mary and of various virtues. Its perfume is the odour of sanctity, as in the case of St. Elizabeth and St. Teresa. At the same time it symbolizes human beauty (venustas), indeed the lust of the world (voluptas mundi).219
Like the rose, the figure of the mother-beloved shines in all the hues of heavenly and earthly love. She is the chaste bride and whore who symbolizes the prima materia, which “nature left imperfected.” It is clear

from the material we have cited that this refers to the anima. She is that piece of chaos which is everywhere and yet hidden, she is that vessel of contradictions and many colours—a totality in the form of a massa confusa, yet a substance endowed with every quality in which the splendour of the hidden deity can be revealed.

The food of the Queen Mother—peacock’s flesh and lion’s blood— consists of the goddess’s own attributes, 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.
In the Cantilena, the mythologem of the uroboros is unexpectedly, and most unusually, translated into feminine form: it is not the father and son who merge into one another, but the mother who merges with her own substance, “eating her own tail” or “impregnating herself,” as the king in the “Allegoria Merlini” drank his “own” water.223 The queen is in a

condition of psychic pregnancy: the anima has become activated and sends her contents into consciousness. These correspond to the peacock’s flesh and the lion’s blood. If the products of the anima (dreams, fantasies, visions, symptoms, chance ideas, etc.) are assimilated, digested, and integrated, this has a beneficial effect on the growth and development (“nourishment”) of the psyche. At the same time the cibatio and imbibitio of the anima-mother indicate the integration and completion of the entire personality. The anima becomes creative when the old king renews himself in her. Psychologically the king stands first of all for Sol, whom we have interpreted as consciousness. But over and above that he represents a dominant of consciousness, such as a generally accepted principle or a collective conviction or a traditional view. These systems and ruling ideas “age” and thereby forcibly bring about a “metamorphosis of the gods” as described in Spitteler’s Olympian Spring. It seldom occurs as a definite collective phenomenon. Mostly it is a change in the individual which may, under certain conditions, affect society “when the time is fulfilled.” In the individual it only means that the ruling idea is in need of renewal and alteration if it is to deal adequately with the changed outer or inner conditions.

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 king’s 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 king’s renewal.

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.
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.

During her pregnancy, therefore, the queen undergoes something akin to a psychotherapeutic 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.

Verse 18

Thus great with Child, nine months she languishèd And Bath’d her with the Teares which she had shed For his sweete sake, who from her should be Pluckt

Full-gorg’d with Milke which now the Greene-Lyon suckt.227

The uroboric relationship between queen and lion is quite evident here: she drinks his blood while he sucks her milk. This singular notion is explained by what we would consider an offensive identification of the queen with the mother of God, who, personifying humanity, takes God into her lap and suckles him at her breast. The lion, as an allegory of Christ, returns the gift by giving humanity his blood. This interpretation is confirmed in the later verses. Angelus Silesius makes use of a similar image in his epigram on the “humanized” God:

God drank the Virgin’s milk, left us his wine;

How human things have humanized divine!228

Verse 19

Her Skin in divers Colours did appeare,

Now Black, then Greene, annon ’twas Red and Cleare. Oft-times she would sit upright in her Bed,

And then again repose her Troubled Head.229

This display of colours is an indication of the queen’s Venus and

peacock nature (cauda pavonis). Psychologically it means that during the assimilation of the unconscious the personality passes through many transformations, which show it in different lights and are followed by ever-changing moods. These changes presage the coming birth.

Verse 20

Thrice Fifty Nights she lay in grievous Plight, As many Daies in Mourning sate upright.

The King Revivèd was in Thirty more,

His Birth was Fragrant as the Prim-Rose Flower.230

There are, in alchemy, two main kinds of smell, the “stench of graves” and the perfume of flowers, the latter being a symbol of resurgent life. In ecclesiastical allegory and in the lives of the saints a sweet smell is one of the manifestations of the Holy Ghost, as also in Gnosticism. In alchemy the Holy Ghost and Sapientia are more or less identical; hence the smell of flowers attests that the rebirth of the king is a gift of the Holy Ghost or of Sapientia, thanks to whom the regeneration process could take place.

Verses 21–24

Her Wombe which well proportion’d was at first Is now Enlarg’d a Thousand fold at least,

That it bear Witnesse to his Genesis:

The End by Fires the best Approved is.

Her Chamber without Corners smoothly stands, With Walls erected like her outstretched hands; Or else the Fruit of her ripe Womb should spoil, And a sicke Son reward her labouring Toil.

A burning Stove was plac’d beneath her Bed, And on the same another Flourished:

Trimm’d up with Art, and very Temperate,

Lest her fine Limbes should freeze for lack of Heate.

Her Chamber doore was Lock’d and Bolted fast, Admitting none to Vex her, first or last;

The Furnace-mouth was likewise Fasten’d so That thence no Vaporous Matter forth could go.231

This is the image of the homunculus in the Hermetic vessel!

Verse 25

And when the Child’s Limbs there had putrefy’d, The Foulness of the Flesh was laid aside, Making her232 fair as Luna, when anon

She coils towards233 the Splendour of the Sun.234

This is an attempt to describe the transformation in the sealed chamber. It is not clear whether the mother has already given birth to the child, and whether “there” (ibi) refers to the chamber or to the gravid uterus. The latter seems to me more probable in view of the next verse. Altogether verse 25 is obscure and clumsy in the extreme. The only thing to emerge with any clarity is the death and decomposition of the foetus in the uterus or in the chamber, and then the sudden appearance of Luna in the place of the mother after the “foulness of the flesh” had fallen away. Anyhow there is a tangle of thoughts here such as is frequently found in the texts. We must suppose that the poet meant something sensible with his apparent jumble of words, and that only his limited capacity for poetic expression prevented him from making himself intelligible. He was in fact trying to express a very difficult thought, namely the nature of the critical transformation. Chemically speaking, the “mother” overflowing with milk and tears is the solution, the “mother liquid” or matrix. She is the “water” in which the old king, as in the Arisleus vision, is dissolved into atoms. Here he is described as a foetus in utero. The dissolution signifies his death, and the uterus or cucurbita becomes his grave, that is, he disappears in the solution. At this moment something in the nature of a miracle occurs: the material solution loses its earthy heaviness, and solvent and solute together pass into a higher state immediately following the cauda pavonis, namely the albedo. This denotes the first stage of completion and is identified with Luna. Luna in herself is spirit, and she at once joins her husband Sol, thus initiating the second and usually final stage, the rubedo. With that the work is completed, and the lapis, a living being endowed with soul and spirit and an incorruptible body, has taken shape.

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 son—an 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.

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.
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 moon’s 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.)

Verses 26–27

Her time being come, the Child Conceiv’d before Issues re-borne out of her Wombe once more; And thereupon resumes a Kingly State, Possessing fully Heaven’s Propitious Fate.

The Mother’s Bed which erstwhile was a Square Is shortly after made Orbicular;

And everywhere the Cover, likewise Round

With Luna’s Lustre brightly did abound.238

The second strophe confirms that the entire solution has changed into Luna, and not only is it transformed, but the vessel containing the matrix. The “bed,” which before was a square, now becomes round like the full moon. The “cooperculum” (cover) points more to a vessel than a bed, and this cover shines like the moon. As the cover is obviously the top part of the vessel it indicates the place where the moon rises, that is, where the content of the vessel is sublimated. The squaring of the circle, a favourite synonym for the magistery, has been accomplished. Anything angular is imperfect and has to be superseded by the perfect, here represented by the circle.239 The mother is both content (mother liquid) and container, the two being often identified; for instance, the vessel is equated with the aqua permanens.240 The production of the round and perfect means that the son issuing from the mother has attained perfection, i.e., the king has attained eternal youth and his body has become incorruptible. As the square represents the quaternio of mutually hostile elements, the circle indicates their reduction to unity. The One born of the Four is the Quinta Essentia. I need not go into the psychology of this process here as I have done so already in Psychology and Alchemy.

Verse 28

Thus from a Square, the Bed a Globe is made, And Purest Whiteness from the Blackest Shade; While from the Bed the Ruddy Son doth spring To grasp the Joyful Sceptre of a King.241

Vessel and content and the mother herself, who contains the father, have become the son, who has risen up from “blackest shade” to the pure whiteness of Luna and attained his redness (rubedo) through the

solificatio. In him all opposites are fused together.

Verse 29

Hence God unlock’d the Gates of Paradise, Rais’d him like Luna to th’Imperiall Place,

Sublim’d him to the Heavens, and that being done,

Crown’d him in Glory, aequall with the Sun.242

Here Ripley describes the renewal of the king and the birth of the son as the manifestation of a new redeemer—which 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 God’s Kingdom on earth. The attributes 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 man’s work, and, even though a divine miracle was the decisive factor, the mysterious filius was still concocted artificially in a retort.
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 him—a thought that has not perished since the time of Meister Eckhart.246 The verses of Angelus Silesius are in this

respect quite unequivocal:

If by God’s Holy Ghost thou art beguiled, There will be born in thee the Eternal Child.

If it’s like Mary, virginal and pure,

Then God will impregnate your soul for sure.

God make me pregnant, and his Spirit shadow me, That God may rise up in my soul and shatter me.

What good does Gabriel’s ‘Ave, Mary’ do Unless he give me that same greeting too?247

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 furnace—in view of this totally negative result we must ask on what the enthusiasm and infatuation of the adepts could possibly have been based.
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 stature—provided 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 psychotherapy 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.

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.
No thinking person will wish to claim that the present state of affairs represents a durable end-state. On the contrary, everyone is convinced that the tempo of change and transition has speeded up immeasurably. Everything has become fragmented and dissolved, and it is impossible to see how a “higher” synthesis could take place in any of the spiritual organizations that still survive without their having to be modified to an almost intolerable degree. One of the greatest obstacles to such a synthesis is sectarianism, which is always right and displays no tolerance, picking and fomenting quarrels for the holiest of reasons in order to set itself up in the place of religion and brand anyone who thinks differently as a lost sheep, if nothing worse. But have any human beings the right to totalitarian claims? This claim, certainly, is so morally dangerous that we would do better to leave its fulfilment to Almighty God rather than presume to be little gods ourselves at the expense of our fellow-men.

Verse 30

Four Elements, Brave Armes, and Polish’d well God gave him, in the midst whereof did dwell The Crownèd Maid, ordainèd for to be

In the Fifth Circle of the Mysterie.249

To the regenerated king, now endowed with the qualities of the cosmic Anthropos, God gives the four elements as the weapons with which he shall conquer the world. It is a figure that reminds us of the Manichaean

“First Man,” who, armed with the five elements, came down to fight against the darkness.250 The elements are evidently conceived as circles, for the Quinta Essentia, the “Maid,” appears in the fifth. The circular representation of the elements was well known in medieval alchemy.251 The Maid is “crowned” (redimita), and in her we recognize the crowned Virgin, the Queen of Heaven, who recalls the old pictures of the anima media natura or anima mundi. She is the divine life indwelling in the world, or the pneuma that moved over the waters, implanted its seed in them, and so was held captive in the body of Creation. The anima mundi is the feminine half of Mercurius.252

In the Cantilena the Maid is the rejuvenated Queen Mother who now appears as the bride. Her redemption is achieved through the long sufferings of the mother, i.e., through the pains of the opus, which are compared to the Passion.253
The establishment of the Maid in the fifth circle is an indication that the quintessence, portraying the disharmonious elements as a unity, is equivalent to aether, the finest and most subtle substance. She therefore participates in the world of the spirit and at the same time represents the material, sublunary world. Her position corresponds on the one hand to that of Luna and on the other to that of the Blessed Virgin.

Verses 31–35

With all delicious Unguent flowèd she When Purg’d from Bloody Menstruosity:

On every side her Count’nance Brightly shone, She being Adorn’d with every Precious Stone.

A Lyon Greene did in her Lapp reside

(The which an Eagle254 fed), and from his side The Blood gush’d out: The Virgin drunck it upp, While Mercuries Hand did th’Office of a Cupp.

The wondrous Milk she hasten’d from her Breast, Bestow’d it frankly on the Hungry Beast,

And with a Sponge his Furry Face she dry’d Which her own Milk had often Madefy’d.

Upon her Head a Diadem she did weare, With fiery Feet sh’Advanced into the Aire; And glittering Bravely in her Golden Robes She took her Place amidst the Starry Globes.

The Dark Clouds being Dispers’d, so sate she there, And woven to a Network in her Haire

Were Planets, Times, and Signes, the while the King With his Glad Eyes was her Beleagering.255

Here the apotheosis of the Queen is described in a way that instantly reminds us of its prototype, the coronation of the Virgin Mary. The picture is complicated by the images of the Pietà on the one hand and the mother, giving the child her breast, on the other. As is normally the case only in dreams, several images of the Mother of God have contaminated one another, as have also the allegories of Christ as child and lion, the latter representing the body of the Crucified with the blood flowing from his side. As in dreams, the symbolism with its grotesque condensations and overlappings of contradictory contents shows no regard for our aesthetic and religious feelings; it is as though trinkets made of different metals were being melted in a crucible and their contours flowed into one another. The images have lost their pristine force, their clarity and meaning. In dreams it often happens—to our horror—that our most cherished convictions and values are subjected to just this iconoclastic mutilation. It also happens in the psychoses, when the patients sometimes come out with the most appalling blasphemies and hideous distortions of religious ideas. We find the same thing in “belles” lettres—I need only mention Joyce’s Ulysses, a book which E. R. Curtius has not unjustly described as a work of Antichrist.256 But such products spring more from the spirit of the age than from the perverse inventive gifts of the author. In our time we must expect “prophets” like James Joyce. A similar spirit prevailed at the time of the Renaissance, one of its most striking manifestations being the Hexastichon of Sebastian Brant.257 The illustrations in this little book are freakish beyond belief. The main figure in each is an evangelical symbol, for instance the eagle of St. John, and round it and on it are allegories and emblems of the principal events, miracles, parables, etc., in the gospel in question. These creations may be compared with the fantasies of George Ripley, for neither author had any inkling of the dubious nature of what he was doing. Yet in spite of their dreamlike quality these products seem to have been constructed with deliberate intent. Brant even numbered the main components of his pictures according to the chapters of the Gospel, and again in Ripley’s paraphrase of the sacred legend each item can easily be enucleated from its context. Brant thought of his pictures as

mnemotechnical exercises that would help the reader to recall the contents of the gospels, whereas in fact their diabolical freakishness stamps itself on the mind far more than the recollection, say, that John 2 coincides with the marriage at Cana. The image of the Virgin with the wounded lion in her lap has the same kind of unholy fascination, precisely because it deviates so strangely from the official image to which we are accustomed.

I have compared the tendency to fantastic distortion to a melting down of images, but this gives the impression that it is an essentially destructive process. In reality—and this is especially so in alchemy—it is a process of assimilation between revealed truth and knowledge of nature. I will not attempt to investigate what the unconscious motives were that animated Sebastian Brant, and I need say nothing more about James Joyce here, as I have discussed this question in my essay “Ulysses: A Monologue.” These melting processes all express a relativization of the dominants of consciousness prevailing in a given age. For those who identify with the dominants or are absolutely dependent on them the melting process appears as a hostile, destructive attack which should be resisted with all one’s powers. Others, for whom the dominants no longer mean what they purport to be, see the melting as a longed-for regeneration and enrichment of a system of ideas that has lost its vitality and freshness and is already obsolete. The melting process is therefore either something very bad or something highly desirable, according to the standpoint of the observer.258
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.
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 dogma—an 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 of—so 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.

The coronation of the Virgin and the heavenly marriage bring us to the final strophes of the Cantilena.

Verses 36–3

Thus He of all Triumphant Kings is Chiefe, Of Bodies sicke the only Grand Reliefe: Such a Reformist of Defects, that hee

Is worshipp’d both by King and Commonalty.

To Princes, Priests he yields an Ornament, The Sicke and Needy Sort he doth content: What man is there this Potion will not bless, As banishes all thought of Neediness?259

This is the apotheosis of the filius regius, as we find it in numerous treatises. Thus the “Tractatus aureus”260 says: “The king comes forth from the fire and rejoices in the marriage. The son is become a warrior of the fire and surpasses the tinctures, for he himself is the treasure and himself is attired in the philosophic matter. Come hither, ye sons of wisdom, let us be glad and rejoice, for the dominion of death is over, and the son reigns; he is clothed with the red garment, and the purple is put on.” The reborn king is the “wonder of the world,” “an exceeding pure spirit”;261 he is, the “Aquarium sapientum” assures us, “the most elect, the most subtile, the purest, and noblest of all the heavenly spirits, to whom all the Test yield obedience as to their King, who bestows on men all health and prosperity, heals all sickness, gives to the God-fearing temporal honour and long life, but to the wicked who abused him, eternal punishment. . . . In sum, they have designated him the chief of all things under heaven, and the marvellous end and epilogue of all philosophic works. Hence some devout philosophers of old have affirmed that he was divinely revealed to Adam, the first man, and thereafter was awaited with peculiar longing by all the holy Patriarchs.”262 “The Almighty,” remarks the “Introitus,” “has made him known by a most notable sign, whose birth263 is declared throughout the East on the horizon of his hemisphere. The wise Magi saw it at the beginning of the era, and were astonished, and straightway they knew that the most serene King was born in the world. Do you, when you see his star, follow it to the cradle, and there you shall behold the fair infant. Cast aside your defilements, honour the royal child, open your treasure, offer a gift of gold; and after death he will give you flesh and blood, the supreme Medicine in the three monarchies of the earth.”264 The clothing of the elixir with the “kingly garment” is also found in the Turba.265 The “Consilium coniugii” describes the king as “descending from heaven.”266 Mylius says of King Sol that “Phoebus with shining hair of gold sits in the midst, like a king and emperor of the world, grasping the sceptre and the helm.” In him are “all the powers of heaven.”267 In another place he cites the following quotation: “And at last the king will go forth crowned with his diadem, radiant as the sun, bright as the carbuncle.” 268 Khunrath speaks of the “wondrous natural triune Son of the Great World,” whom the sages name “their Son and crowned King, artificially hatched from the egg of the world.”269 Elsewhere he says of the filius Mundi Maioris:

The Son of the great World [Macrocosm] who is Theocosmos, i.e., a

divine power and world (but whom even today, unfortunately, many who teach nature in a pagan spirit and many builders of medical science reject in the high university schools), is the exemplar of the stone which is Theanthropos, i.e., God and man (whom, as Scripture tells us, the builders of the Church have also rejected); and from the same, in and from the Great World Book of Nature, [there issues] a continuous and everlasting doctrine for the wise and their children: indeed, it is a splendid living likeness of our Saviour Jesus Christ, in and from the Great World which by nature is very similar to him (as to miraculous conception, birth, inexpressible powers, virtues, and effects); so God our Lord, besides his Son’s Biblical histories, has also created a specific image and natural representation for us in the Book of Nature.270

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.

Verse 38

Wherefore, O God, graunt us a Peece of This,271 That through the Encrease 272 of its own Species The Art may be Renew’d, and Mortal Men Enjoy for aye its Thrice-Sweet Fruits. AMEN.273

Here ends the Cantilena, one of the most perfect parables of the renewal of the king. It does not, of course, compare with the much more elaborate development of the myth in Christian Rosencreutz. (His Chymical Wedding is so rich in content that I could touch on it only lightly here.) The latter part of Faust II likewise contains the same motif of the transformation of the old man into a boy, together with all the necessary indicia of the heavenly marriage. This theme, too, as in alchemy, runs through the whole of Faust and repeats itself on three different levels (Gretchen, Helen, Queen of Heaven), just as the king’s renewal takes a form that was destined to fail three times before Faust’s death (the Boy Charioteer, the Homunculus, and Euphorion).

THE DARK SIDE OF THE KING

Besides the Cantilena, there are various other descriptions274 of the

king’s renewal, enriched with numerous details, which I will not discuss here so as not to overburden this chapter. The material we have adduced may suffice to illustrate the essential features of the transformation process. Nevertheless, the myth of the king’s renewal has so many ramifications that our exposition so far does not cover the entire range of the symbol. In this section, therefore, I shall try to shed a little more light on the critical phase of the nigredo, the phase of decay and death.

“Third Picture of John”

From the Hexastichon of Sebastian Brant (1502), fol. a.vr

“Second Picture of Luke”

From the Hexastichon of Sebastian Brant (1502), fol. c.iiir

“Jezoth le Juste”

From an 18th cent ms., “Abraham le Juif.” Bibliotheque Nationale, Fr.

14765, Pl. 8

The Two Unipeds

From a Latin ins., “Figurarum aegyptiorum secretarum” (author’s collection), p. 20

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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF C. G. JUNG 1.Kısım

B O L L I N G E N S E R I E S X X

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

VOLUME 14

C. G. JUNG

EDITORIAL NOTE*

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

VOLUME 14 MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS

LIST OF PLATES

FOREWORD

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS

I

THE OPPOSITES

THE QUATERNIO AND THE MEDIATING ROLE OF MERCURIUS

THE ORPHAN, THE WIDOW, AND THE MOON

ALCHEMY AND MANICHAEISM

II

THE ARCANE SUBSTANCE AND THE POINT

2. THE SCINTILLA

3. THE ENIGMA OF BOLOGNA121

III

INTRODUCTION

SOL

LUNA

SAL

IV

INTRODUCTION

GOLD AND SPIRIT

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE KING

THE REGENERATION OF THE KING

(Ripley’s “Cantilena”)

THE DARK SIDE OF THE KING

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