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