, not only “Lord of the spirits,” but “Lord over the (evil) spirits,” which is one of the essential meanings of the Christian Kyrios.8[267] “Mater Alchimia” could serve as the name of a whole epoch. Beginning, roughly, with Christianity, it gave birth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the age of science, only to perish, unrecognized and misunderstood, and sink from sight in the stream of the centuries as an age that had been outlived. But, just as every mother was once a daughter, so too was alchemy. It owes its real beginnings to the Gnostic systems, which Hippolytus rightly regarded as philosophic, and which, with the help of Greek philosophy and the mythologies of the Near and Middle East, together with Christian dogmatics and Jewish cabalism, made extremely interesting attempts, from the modern point of view, to synthetize a unitary vision of the world in which the physical and the mystical aspects played equal parts. Had this attempt succeeded, we would not be witnessing today the curious spectacle of two parallel world-views neither of which knows, or wishes to know, anything about the other. Hippolytus was in the enviable position of being able to see Christian doctrine side by side with its pagan sisters, and similar comparisons had also been attempted by Justin Martyr. To the honour of Christian thinking it must be said that up till the time of Kepler there was no lack of praiseworthy attempts to interpret and understand Nature, in the broadest sense, on the basis of Christian dogma.
[268] These attempts, however, inevitably came to grief for lack of any adequate knowledge of natural processes. Thus, in the course of the eighteenth century, there arose that notorious rift between faith and knowledge. Faith lacked experience and science missed out the soul. Instead, science believed fervently in absolute objectivity and assiduously overlooked the fundamental difficulty that the real vehicle and begetter of all knowledge is the psyche, the very thing that scientists knew the least about for the longest time. It was regarded as a symptom of chemical reactions, an epiphenomenon of biological processes in the brain-cells—indeed, for some time it did not exist at all. Yet all the while scientists remained totally unaware of the fact that they were using for their observations a photographic apparatus of whose nature and structure they knew practically nothing, and whose very existence many of them were unwilling to admit. It is only quite recently that they have been obliged to take into their calculations the objective reality of this psychic factor. Significantly enough, it is microphysics that has come up against the psyche in the most tangible and unexpected way. Obviously, we must disregard the psychology of the unconscious in this connection, since its working hypothesis consists precisely in the reality of the psyche. What is significant here is the exact opposite, namely the psyche’s collision with physics.1
[269] Now for the Gnostics—and this is their real secret—the psyche existed as a source of knowledge just as much as it did for the alchemists. Aside from the psychology of the unconscious, contemporary science and philosophy know only of what is outside, while faith knows only of the inside, and then only in the Christian form imparted to it by the passage of the centuries, beginning with St. Paul and the gospel of St. John. Faith, quite as much as science with its traditional objectivity, is absolute, which is why faith and knowledge can no more agree than Christians can with one another.
[270] Our Christian doctrine is a highly differentiated symbol that expresses the transcendent psychic—the God-image and its properties, to speak with Dorn. The Creed is a “symbolum.” This comprises practically everything of importance that can be ascertained about the manifestations of the psyche in the field of inner experience, but it does not include Nature, at least not in any recognizable form. Consequently, at every period of Christianity there have been subsidiary currents or undercurrents that have sought to investigate the empirical aspect of Nature not only from the outside but also from the inside.
[271] Although dogma, like mythology in general, expresses the quintessence of inner experience and thus formulates the operative principles of the objective psyche, i.e., the collective unconscious, it does so by making use of a language and outlook that have become alien to our present way of thinking. The word “dogma” has even acquired a somewhat unpleasant sound and frequently serves merely to emphasize the rigidity of a prejudice. For most people living in the West, it has lost its meaning as a symbol for a virtually unknowable and yet “actual”—i.e., operative—fact. Even in theological circles any real discussion of dogma had as good as ceased until the recent papal declarations, a sign that the symbol has begun to fade, if it is not already withered. This is a dangerous development for our psychic health, as we know of no other symbol that better expresses the world of the unconscious. More and more people then begin looking round for exotic ideas in the hope of finding a substitute, for example in India. This hope is delusory, for though the Indian symbols formulate the unconscious just as well as the Christian ones do, they each exemplify their own spiritual past. The Indian teachings constitute the essence of several thousand years of experience of Indian life. Though we can learn a lot from Indian thought, it can never express the past that is stored up within us. The premise we start from is and remains Christianity, which covers anything from eleven to nineteen centuries of Western life. Before that, there was for most Western peoples a considerably longer period of polytheism and polydemonism. In certain parts of Europe Christianity goes back not much more than five hundred years—a mere sixteen generations. The last witch was burnt in Europe the year my grandfather was born, and barbarism with its degradation of human nature has broken out again in the twentieth century.
[272] I mention these facts in order to illustrate how thin is the wall that separates us from pagan times. Besides that, the Germanic peoples never developed organically out of primitive polydemonism to polytheism and its philosophical subtleties, but in many places accepted Christian monotheism and its doctrine of redemption only at the sword’s point of the Roman legions, as in Africa the machine-gun is the latent argument behind the Christian invasion.2 Doubtless the spread of Christianity among barbarian peoples not only favoured, but actually necessitated, a certain inflexibility of dogma. Much the same thing can be observed in the spread of Islam, which was likewise obliged to resort to fanaticism and rigidity. In India the symbol developed far more organically and pursued a less disturbed course. Even the great Hindu Reformation, Buddhism, is grounded, in true Indian fashion, on yoga, and, in India at least, it was almost completely reassimilated by Hinduism in less than a millennium, so that today the Buddha himself is enthroned in the Hindu pantheon as the avatar of Vishnu, along with Christ, Matsya (the fish), Kurma (the tortoise), Vamana (the dwarf), and a host of others.
[273] The historical development of our Western mentality cannot be compared in any way with the Indian. Anyone who believes that he can simply take over Eastern forms of thought is uprooting himself, for they do not express our Western past, but remain bloodless intellectual concepts that strike no chord in our inmost being. We are rooted in Christian soil. This foundation does not go very deep, certainly, and, as we have seen, it has proved alarmingly thin in places, so that the original paganism, in altered guise, was able to regain possession of a large part of Europe and impose on it its characteristic economic pattern of slavery.
[274] This modern development is in line with the pagan currents that were clearly present in alchemy and had remained alive beneath the Christian surface ever since the days of antiquity. Alchemy reached its greatest efflorescence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then to all appearances it began to die out. In reality it found its continuation in natural science, which led in the nineteenth century to materialism and in the twentieth century to so-called “realism,” whose end is not yet in sight. Despite well-meaning assurances to the contrary, Christianity is a helpless bystander. The Church still has a little power left, but she pastures her sheep on the ruins of Europe. Her message works, if one knows how to combine her language, ideas, and customs with an understanding of the present. But for many she no longer speaks, as Paul did in the market-place of Athens, the language of the present, but wraps her message in sacrosanct words hallowed by age. What success would Paul have had with his preaching if he had had to use the language and myths of the Minoan age in order to announce the gospel to the Athenians? We overlook the unfortunate fact that far greater demands are made on present-day man than were ever made on people living in the apostolic era: for them there was no difficulty at all in believing in the virgin birth of the hero and demigod, and Justin Martyr was still able to use this argument in his apology. Nor was the idea of a redeeming God-man anything unheard of, since practically all Asiatic potentates together with the Roman Emperor were of divine nature. But we have no further use even for the divine right of kings! The miraculous tales in the gospels, which easily convinced people in those days, would be a petra scandali in any modern biography and would evoke the very reverse of belief. The weird and wonderful nature of the gods was a self-evident fact in a hundred living myths and assumed a special significance in the no less credible philosophic refinements of those myths. “Hermes ter unus” (Hermes-Thrice-One) was not an intellectual absurdity but a philosophical truth. On these foundations the dogma of the Trinity could be built up convincingly. For modern man this dogma is either an impenetrable mystery or an historical curiosity, preferably the latter. For the man of antiquity the virtue of the consecrated water or the transmutation of substances was in no sense an enormity, because there were dozens of sacred springs whose workings were incomprehensible, and any amount of chemical changes whose nature appeared miraculous. Nowadays every schoolboy knows more, in principle, about the ways of Nature than all the volumes of Pliny’s Natural History put together.
[275] If Paul were alive today, and should undertake to reach the ear of intelligent Londoners in Hyde Park, he could no longer content himself with quotations from Greek literature and a smattering of Jewish history, but would have to accommodate his language to the intellectual faculties of the modern English public. If he failed to do this, he would have announced his message badly, for no one, except perhaps a classical philologist, would understand half of what he was saying. That, however, is the situation in which Christian kerygmatics3 finds itself today. Not that it uses a dead foreign language in the literal sense, but it speaks in images that on the one hand are hoary with age and look deceptively familiar, while on the other hand they are miles away from a modern man’s conscious understanding, addressing themselves, at most, to his unconscious, and then only if the speaker’s whole soul is in his work. The best that can happen, therefore, is that the effect remains stuck in the sphere of feeling, though in most cases it does not get even that far.
[276] The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down. Instead, dogma is “believed”;4 it is hypostatized, as the Protestants hypostatize the Bible, illegitimately making it the supreme authority, regardless of its contradictions and controversial interpretations. (As we know, anything can be authorized out of the Bible.) Dogma no longer formulates anything, no longer expresses anything; it has become a tenet to be accepted in and for itself, with no basis in any experience that would demonstrate its truth.5 Indeed, faith has itself become that experience. The faith of a man like Paul, who had never seen our Lord in the flesh, could still appeal to the overwhelming apparition on the road to Damascus and to the revelation of the gospel in a kind of ecstasy. Similarly, the faith of the man of antiquity and of the medieval Christian never ran counter to the consensus omnium but was on the contrary supported by it. All this has completely changed in the last three hundred years. But what comparable change has kept pace with this in theological circles?
[277] The danger exists—and of this there can be no doubt—that the new wine will burst the old bottles, and that what we no longer understand will be thrown into the lumber-room, as happened once before at the time of the Reformation. Protestantism then discarded (except for a few pallid remnants) the ritual that every religion needs, and now relies solely on the sola fides standpoint. The content of faith, of the symbolum, is continually crumbling away. What is still left of it? The person of Jesus Christ? Even the most benighted layman knows that the personality of Jesus is, for the biographer, the obscurest item of all in the reports of the New Testament, and that, from a human and psychological point of view, his personality must remain an unfathomable enigma. As a Catholic writer pithily remarked, the gospels record the history of a man and a god at the same time. Or is only God left? In that case, what about the Incarnation, the most vital part of the symbolum? In my view one would be well advised to apply the papal dictum: “Let it be as it is, or not be at all,”6 to the Creed and leave it at that, because nobody really understands what it is all about. How else can one explain the notorious drift away from dogma?
[278] It may strike my reader as strange that a physician and psychologist should be so insistent about dogma. But I must emphasize it, and for the same reasons that once moved the alchemist to attach special importance to his “theoria.” His doctrine was the quintessence of the symbolism of unconscious processes, just as the dogmas are a condensation or distillation of “sacred history,” of the myth of the divine being and his deeds. If we wish to understand what alchemical doctrine means, we must go back to the historical as well as the individual phenomenology of the symbols, and if we wish to gain a closer understanding of dogma, we must perforce consider first the myths of the Near and Middle East that underlie Christianity, and then the whole of mythology as the expression of a universal disposition in man. This disposition I have called the collective unconscious, the existence of which can be inferred only from individual phenomenology. In both cases the investigator comes back to the individual, for what he is all the time concerned with are certain complex thought-forms, the archetypes, which must be conjectured as the unconscious organizers of our ideas. The motive force that produces these configurations cannot be distinguished from the transconscious factor known as instinct. There is, therefore, no justification for visualizing the archetype as anything other than the image of instinct in man.7
[279] From this one should not jump to the conclusion that the world of religious ideas can be reduced to “nothing but” a biological basis, and it would be equally erroneous to suppose that, when approached in this way, the religious phenomenon is “psychologized” and dissolved in smoke. No reasonable person would conclude that the reduction of man’s morphology to a four-legged saurian amounts to a nullification of the human form, or, alternatively, that the latter somehow explains itself. For behind all this looms the vast and unsolved riddle of life itself and of evolution in general, and the question of overriding importance in the end is not the origin of evolution but its goal. Nevertheless, when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. When that happens, anamnesis of the origins is a matter of life and death.
[280] Myths and fairytales give expression to unconscious processes, and their retelling causes these processes to come alive again and be recollected, thereby re-establishing the connection between conscious and unconscious. What the separation of the two psychic halves means, the psychiatrist knows only too well. He knows it as dissociation of the personality, the root of all neuroses: the conscious goes to the right and the unconscious to the left. As opposites never unite at their own level (tertium non datur!), a supraordinate “third” is always required, in which the two parts can come together. And since the symbol derives as much from the conscious as from the unconscious, it is able to unite them both, reconciling their conceptual polarity through its form and their emotional polarity through its numinosity.
[281] For this reason the ancients often compared the symbol to water, a case in point being tao, where yang and yin are united. Tao is the “valley spirit,” the winding course of a river. The symbolum of the Church is the aqua doctrinae, corresponding to the wonder-working “divine” water of alchemy, whose double aspect is represented by Mercurius. The healing and renewing properties of this symbolical water—whether it be tao, the baptismal water, or the elixir—point to the therapeutic character of the mythological background from which this idea comes. Physicians who were versed in alchemy had long recognized that their arcanum healed, or was supposed to heal, not only the diseases of the body but also those of the mind. Similarly, modern psychotherapy knows that, though there are many interim solutions, there is, at the bottom of every neurosis, a moral problem of opposites that cannot be solved rationally, and can be answered only by a supraordinate third, by a symbol which expresses both sides. This was the “veritas” (Dorn) or “theoria” (Paracelsus) for which the old physicians and alchemists strove, and they could do so only by incorporating the Christian revelation into their world of ideas. They continued the work of the Gnostics (who were, most of them, not so much heretics as theologians) and the Church Fathers in a new era, instinctively recognizing that new wine should not be put into old bottles, and that, like a snake changing its skin, the old myth needs to be clothed anew in every renewed age if it is not to lose its therapeutic effect.
[282] The problems which the integration of the unconscious sets modern doctors and psychologists can only be solved along the lines traced out by history, and the upshot will be a new assimilation of the traditional myth. This, however, presupposes the continuity of historical development. Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism. Wherever the Marxist utopia prevails, this has already happened. But a predominantly scientific and technological education, such as is the usual thing nowadays, can also bring about a spiritual regression and a considerable increase of psychic dissociation. With hygiene and prosperity alone a man is still far from health, otherwise the most enlightened and most comfortably off among us would be the healthiest. But in regard to neuroses that is not the case at all, quite the contrary. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.
*
[283] I have tried, in the foregoing, to indicate the kind of psychic matrix into which the Christ-figure was assimilated in the course of the centuries. Had there not been an affinity—magnet!—between the figure of the Redeemer and certain contents of the unconscious, the human mind would never have been able to perceive the light shining in Christ and seize upon it so passionately. The connecting link here is the archetype of the Godman, which on the one hand became historical reality in Christ, and on the other, being eternally present, reigns over the soul in the form of a supraordinate totality, the self. The God-man, like the priest in the vision of Zosimos, is a , not only “Lord of the spirits,” but “Lord over the (evil) spirits,” which is one of the essential meanings of the Christian Kyrios.8
[284] The noncanonical fish symbol led us into this psychic matrix and thus into a realm of experience where the unknowable archetypes become living things, changing their name and guise in never-ending succession and, as it were, disclosing their hidden nucleus by perpetually circumambulating round it. The lapis that signifies God become man or man become God “has a thousand names.” It is not Christ; it is his parallel in the subjective realm, which dogma calls Christ. Alchemy gives us, in the lapis, a concrete idea of what Christ means in the realm of subjective experience, and under what delusive or illuminative disguises his actual presence may be experienced in its transcendent ineffability. One could demonstrate the same thing in the psychology of a modern individual, as I attempted to do in Part II of Psychology and Alchemy.9 Only, this would be a much more exacting task, running into great detail and requiring a mass of personal biographical data with which one could fill volumes. Such an undertaking would exceed my powers. I must therefore rest content with having laid some of the historical and conceptual foundations for this work of the future.
[285] In conclusion, I would like to emphasize once again that the fish symbol is a spontaneous assimilation of the Christ-figure of the gospels, and is thus a symptom which shows us in what manner and with what meaning the symbol was assimilated by the unconscious. In this respect the patristic allegory of the capture of Leviathan (with the Cross as the hook, and the Crucified as the bait) is highly characteristic: a content (fish) of the unconscious (sea) has been caught and has attached itself to the Christ-figure. Hence the expression used by St. Augustine: “de profundo levatus” (drawn from the deep). This is true enough of the fish; but of Christ? The image of the fish came out of the depths of the unconscious as an equivalent of the historical Christ figure, and if Christ was invoked as “Ichthys,” this name referred to what had come up out of the depths. The fish symbol is thus the bridge between the historical Christ and the psychic nature of man, where the archetype of the Redeemer dwells. In this way Christ became an inner experience, the “Christ within.”
[286] As I have shown, the alchemical fish symbolism leads direct to the lapis, the salvator, servator, and deus terrenus; that is, psychologically, to the self. We now have a new symbol in place of the fish: a psychological concept of human wholeness. In as much or in as little as the fish is Christ does the self mean God. It is something that corresponds, an inner experience, an assimilation of Christ into the psychic matrix, a new realization of the divine Son, no longer in theriomorphic form, but expressed in a conceptual or “philosophic” symbol. This, compared with the mute and unconscious fish, marks a distinct increase in conscious development.10