MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
riomorphic 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; 2UG 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. 
	179 	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: 2U6 
Therefore pull down the house, destroy the walls, extract therefrom the purest juice 2U7 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 
	ISo 	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 
295 The same archetype forms the background to the Nicodemus dialogue in 
	John 3. 	296 A Venetian physician of the 16th cent. 
297 The text has "succu." It could therefore mean 'extract the most pure with the juice and blood.' 
298 Schmieder (Geschichte del' Alchemie, p. 153) mentions a MS of Arnaldus de Villanova, "De secretis naturae," and so does Du Fresnoy, Histoire de la philosoPhie hermetique, Ill, p. 325. 
299 Theatr. chem., 11, pp. 292f.· 
300 "Noli alienum introducere" and "nihil extraneum," an oft-repeated saying. SOl Art. aurif., 11, pp. 385ff. 
15° 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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 house 303 the tincturing stone. The two flying birds 304 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 art 307 and cannot relinquish the society of men.30S The father 309 of [the art] urges the indolent to work, its mother 310 nourishes the sons who are ex- 
302 "Superflua removenda," an equally popular phrase. 
S03 The idea of the "house" may have derived originally from astrology. Here the house (as domus propria) means the matrix of the substance, but as domus aliena it means the chemical vessel (for instance the domus vitrea, 'house of glass'). The "flying bird" is a gas that issues from the matrix. The stone, on the other hand, signifies the substance, which does not leave its house like the gas, but must be transferred to another vessel. The gas (spirit) is invisible and feminine by nature, and therefore belongs to the unconscious sphere, whereas the substance is visible and tangible-"more real," as it were. It is masculine and belongs to the conscious sphere (in a man). Accordingly the domus aliena could be interpreted as consciousness, and the domus propr'ia as the unconscious. 
304 In the "separatio" one of the birds can fly, the other not. The "unio" produces the winged hermaphrodite. 
305 Perhaps the only parallel to this· is in Senior (De chemia, p. 78): "And the ravens will come flying and fall upon it." • The idea is. obviously, that the birds share the king's meal, a possible influence here being the marriage of the king's son (Matthew 22 : 2fI.) and the marriage of the Lamb (Revelation 19: 9ff.). Rex always signifies the sun, while the' king's table signifies the bright world of day, Le., consciousness, in and by which the contents of the unconscious (the birds) are recognized. These are the "fishes and birds" that bring the stone. (Cf. Aion, par. 224.) 306 Variants of the "bird flying and without wings" (Senior, De chemia, p. 37.) For the plucked bird see "AlIegoriae super turbam," Art. aurif., I, p. 140: "Take a cock crowned with a red comb and pluck it alive." • 
S07 The two birds are the two luminaries, Sol and Luna, or their spirits. One bird is male and without wings, the other female and winged. When bound together as "colligatae" they represent the cOlliunctio. They are the parents of the lapis, which is practically identical with "Ars nostra" since it is an "artificium" (artefact). S08 "Hominum consortia relinquere nescit." In other words, they remain with men, which reminds us of Kalid's "always being with you" (par. 174). The birds are personified contents of the unconscious which, once they are made conscious, cannot become unconscious again. As we know, an essential if not decisive part of any analytical treatment is based on the fact that conscious realization generally brings about a psychic change. 
809 Sol as the day-star. 
BIO Luna as the mother of the living and mistress of the night. 
151 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
hausted by their labours, and quickens and adorns their weary limbs. 
Then follows the passage "Therefore pull down the house," etc. H 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,an 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 brooding 312 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. 
	181 	In order to set free the contents hidden in the "house" 314 of 
811 The succus vitae is once more the aqua permanens, which remarkably enough is also designated "dog," as a passage in the "Opus praeclarum" of Valentinus (Theatr. chem., IV, p. 1069) shows: " ... of the water ... which is called Dog of the balsam, or virgin's milk, or our quicksilver, or soul, or wind, or the dragon's tai!." • 
312 The arcane substance is frequently likened to an egg. CL the treatise "Concerning the Egg" ('/rEp' 'Toii t:Jov. Berthelot, Alch. grecs, I, iii), where the equivalents are the brain-stone (01 lit XilJov E-yKfq,a"Aov), the stone that is no stone (''TEpOL "AilJov ot! XilJov), and the image ot the world (ErEpOL 'TO 'Toii KOU/loOV /loI/lo'I'J/loa), as in the Turba (ed. Ruska, p. 112) and numerous other places. 
813 Cf. the frequent direction "on a slow fire." 
314 As stated above, the term "domus" is often used. Domus thesauraria (treasurehouse) denotes the place where the arcanum is found, or else it is the chemical vessel (domus vitrea) or furnace. Cf. "Visio Arislei," Art. aurif., I, p. 148. 
152 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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 
315 Caro (flesh) is a name for the arcane substance, especially when it is "vivified." The "Consil. coniug." says (Ars chemica, p. 234): "That globe receives the flesh, Le., the coagulation, and the blood, i.e., the tincture." • Dorn reveals the reason for this in his "Spec. phi!." (Theatr. chem., I, p. 300): "Hence we can understand the philosophical transmutations: do we not know that the pure substance of bread and wine is transformed into flesh and blood?" • Trevisanus ("De chemico miraculo," Theatr. chem., I, p. 802) is equally clear when he says of the "king": 
"And now he gives his red and bleeding flesh to be eaten by us all." • In "Congeries Paracelsicae" (Theatr. chem., I, p. 599) Dorn says that the medicament "can be made more than perfect through its own flesh and blood," in agreement with the above quotation from the "Consilium." A quotation from Ma!chamech in Ras. phil. (Art. aurif., 11, p. 238) says of the lapis: "It grows from flesh and blood." Often we come across the "fat flesh," as in a quotation from Pseudo-Aristotle in Mylius (Phil. ref., p. 277): "Son, you must take of the fatter flesh," and (p. 70): 
"Eat a morsel of the fat flesh," a quotation from Arnaldus de Villanova ("Thesaurus thesaurorum," Art. aurif., 11, p. 406). "Caro" is an allusion to the "fleshly" nature of man, which is tinctured by the opus. The "Liber Platonis quartorum" (Theatr. chem., V, p. 144) emphasizes this, and also the importance of "having knowledge of the gross, disordered, fleshly body, which is the burden of nature and reaches to the simple sou!." • The "animam simplicem" comes close to Plato's "eternal Idea." 
316 Arnaldus de Villanova (p. 397) lays stress on the oneness of the stone: "For there is one stone, one medicine, to which nothing from outside is added. nor is it diminished, save that the superfluities are removed,"· Ros. phil. (Art. aurif., 11, p. 206) is even more emphatic: "One the stone. one the medicament. one the vessel, one the procedure. and one the disposition." • 
817 Classic pairs are Simon Magus and Helen, Zosimos and Theosebeia, Nicholas Flamel and Peronelle, Mr. South and his daughter (Mrs. Atwood, author of A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery). A good account of Flame!'s career can be found in Larguier, Le Faiseur d'or Nicolas Flamel. The Mutus liber of Altus, recently reprinted, represents the Mysterium Solis et Lunae as an alchemical operation between man and wife, in a series of pictures. That such an abstruse and, aesthetically speaking. far from commendable book should be reprinted in the 20th century is proof of the psyche's secret and quite irrational participation in its own mysterium. I have attempted to describe the psychology of these relationships in my "Psychology of the Transference." 
153 

1\IYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
consciousness and the feminine unconscious (anima). The two vessels are ag-ain Sol and Luna,318 the two times are probably the two main divisions of the work, the opus ad album et ad rubeum.3lO The former is the opus Lunae) the latter the opus Solis.3~0 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 fruits 3~1 are the fruit of the sun-and-moon tree,3~~ gold and silver, or the reborn and sublimated Sol and Luna. The psychological parallel is the transformation of both the unconscious 318 Cf. the illustrations in the Mutlls liber, where this motif is well represented. 319 The opus is to be performed at certain fixed. symbolical times. For example. the A rcanum hermeticae Philoso!Jhiae opus (p. 82) says: "For the first work towards the whiteness must be brou~ht to an end in the house of the Moon. and the second in the second honse of Mercury. The first work towards the redness [should end] in the second hOllse of Venus; the latter terminates in the second royal throne of Jove, wherefrom our most mighty King receives his crown adorned with precious stones." •• Resides this time co-ordination there are a number of others. The "Consilium 'coniugii" (Ars chemica, p. 6;;) says: "The white [stone] begins to appear at sunset on the face of the waters, hiding itself until midnight. and thereafter it inclines towards the deep. But the red works contrariwise, for it begins to rise above the waters at sunrise and thereafter descends into the deep." •• 320 Cr. Senior, De chemia, pp. 26ft His account is not altogether clear on this point-which. as he himself admits, is due to the obscurities of the whole procedure. On p. 28 he says: "And the second work is the albefaction and the rubefaction, and the sages have brought these two works together in one. For when they speak of the one, they speak of the other also, and hence their writings seem to the readers to be contradictory." •• 
321 The result of the opus is often called its "fruit," as in the Turba, Sermo LVIII (Ruska, p. 161): "Why hast thou ceased to speak of the tree, of the fruit whereof he that eateth shall never hunger?" •• (This passage is probably not without reference to John 6: 35: " ... he that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.") The Turba continues: "I say that old man ceases not to eat of the fruits of that tree _ .. until that old man becomes a YOllth ... and the father is become the son." •• It is questionalJle whether this is a Christian interpolation. 
322 There are many pictures of the arbor philosoPhica. In patristic language it is "the fruitful tree which is to be nourished in our hearts" (Gregory the Great, Super Cantica Cancicomm, 2 : 3; Migne, PL., vol. 79. col. 495). like the vine in the Eastern Church: "Thou, prophet of God, art seen as a mighty vine, filling the whole world with divine words as with fruits" •• (Theoctore the Studite, Hymnus de S. Ephrem, in Pitra, Analecta Sacra, I, p. 341). "[I am] the fruitful vine" (Aurora Consurgens, p. 139). Aurora 11 likewise refers to John 15 : 1 and 5: "Know ye not that all holy writing is in parables? For Christ followed the same practice and said: I am the true vine." •• (Art. aurif·, I, p. 186). Cf. also "The Philosophical Tree," par. 359. n. 5. par. 458 and n. 5. 
154 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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. 
	182 	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. 0 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 flyaway as an eagle, leaving Diana's birds dead behind him.323 
	185 	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 disturbance 324 which at one stage also i!1fected the "infant hermaphrodite." Probably that too occurred at the novilu- 
323 Mus. herm., pp. 658f. (Waite, n, p. 171). 
324 "The Spagyrics ... extract from the moon itself an oil against falling-sickness and all affections of the brain." •• Penotus, Theatr. chem., I, p. 714. 
155 

MYSTERlUM CONlUNCTIONIS 
nium,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 witl) the "waters" of the beginning. According to Olympiodorus lead (also the prima materia) contains a demon that drives the adept mad.326 Curiously enough, Wei Po-yang. a Chinese alchemist of the second century, compares lead to a madman clothed in rags.327 Elsewhere Olympiodorus speaks of the "one cursed by God" who dwells in the "black earth." This is the mole, which, as Olympiodorus relates from a Hermetic book, had once been a man who divulged the mysteries of the sun and was therefore cursed by God and made blind. He "knew the shape of the sun, as it was." 328 
	184 	It is not difficult to discern in these allusions the dangers, 
real or imaginary, which are connected with the unconscious. In this respect the unconscious has a bad reputation, not so much because it is dangerous in itself as because there are cases of latent psychosis which need only a slight stimulus to break out in all their catastrophic manifestations. An anamnesis or the touching of a complex may be sufficient for this. But the unconscious is also feared by those whose conscious attitude is at odds with their true nature. Naturally their dreams will then assume an unpleasant and threatening form, for if nature is violated she takes her revenge. In itself the unconscious is neutral, and its normal function is to compensate the conscious position. In it the opposites slumber side by side; they are wrenched apart only by the activity of the conscious mind, and the more one- 
325 Not only does Luna cause moon-sickness, she herself is sick or ailing. One sickness is the "combustible sulphur" which prevents her from staying in the mixture, the other is "excessive coldness and dampness." Hollandus, Theatr. chem., Ill, p. 365. 
326 "They fall into madness through ignorance."· Berthelot, Alch. grecs, 11, iv, 46. 327 Isis, XVIII, p. 237. On p. 23R Wei Po-yang describes the madness that attacks the adept. Cf. "The Philosophical Tree," pars. 432ff. 
328 Berthelot, 11, iv, 52. An alchemist would say that he knew the secret of goldmaking. Psychologically it would mean that he knew about the transformation of consciousness, but that it was abortive, so that instead of being illuminated he fell into deeper darkness. 
156 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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. 
	185 	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.33o 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, t.he 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 
	186 	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 329 "In the philosophical sublimation or first preparation of Mercury a Herculean task confronts the worker ... The threshold is guarded by horned beasts ... naught will assuage their ferocity save the tokens of Diana and the doves of Venus, if the fates call thee"· (D'Espagnet, "Arcanum hermeticae philos.," XLII, Bibliotheca chemica, 11, p. 653). The doves themselves were originally the "chicks of crows" (p. 655). The priestesses of Ishtar were called doves (Wittekindt, Das Hohe Lied, p. 12). just as the priestesses of the goddess of Asia Minor were called ••.• hwill.s, 'wild doves' (Eisler, Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, p. 158). The dove is also the attribute of the mother-goddess of the Hittites, who is depicted in an obscene position (Wittekindt, p. 50). 
:lSO Eleazar, Uraltes Chymisches Werck, I, p. 34. 831 Ibid., p. 52. See infra, par. 624. 
157 

!\TY~T£RIV:\[ CO;\1!U;,\CTIONIS 
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 fieeth, 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 
	187 	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'erdo-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 
332 The text is corrupt here: "concutit statim pero ledos." I read "terrae sedes." It refers to the resurrection of the lapis out of the earth, which it penetrated as the "aer sophorum" (air of the sa.ges), one of the many allusions to the coniunctio. The birth of the lapis has its parallel in Christ's resurrection, hence the reference to the earthquake. (Cf. Matthew 28: 2: "And behold, there was a great earthquake ... ") 
333 Philaletha, Mus. herm., p. 657 (Waite, n, p. 169)' 334 John 5 : 2ff. 
335 "He has the key to the infernal prison house where sulphur lies bound.""De sulphure," Mus. herm., p. 623 (Waite, n, p. 143). 
158 

Ill. THE PERSO~IFICATIO'" OF THE OPPOSITES 
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. 
	188 	The appearance of Diana necessarily brings with it her hunt- 
ing 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 336 "Servus fugitivus" (fugitive slave) is more common. "Cervus" occurs in Agrippa von Nettesheim (The V>anity ot Arts and Sciences, p. 315): " ... foolish Mysteries of this Art, and empty Riddles, of the Green Lion, the fugitive Hart." There is a picture of Diana and Actaeon on the title·page of Mus. herm., 1678 (reproduced in Rernoulli, "Spiritual Development as Reflected in Alchemy"). In the Table of Figures in Manget (Bibl. clum., n, Plate IX, Fig. 13) the stag appears as the emblem of "Mahomet Philosophus." It is a symbol of self·rejuvenation in Honorius of Autun, Senno in EPiphania Domini (Migne, PL., vol. 172, col. 8.n), where it is said that the stag, when he has swallowed a poisonous snake, drinks water "that he may eject the poison, and then cast his horns and his hair and so take new"; we likewise should "put aside the horns of pride and the hair of worldly superfluity." In the legend of the Grail it is related that Christ sometimes appeared to his disciples as a white stag with four lions (= the four evangelists). (Cf. "Nature of Dreams," par. 559, n. 9, and the frontispiece to Vol. 8 of these Coli. Works.) Here too it is stated that the stag can renew itself (Le Saint Graal, nI, pp. 219 and 224). Ruland (Lexicon, p. 96) mentions only that "Ceroiculae Spiritus is a bone of the heart of the stag." Dom Pernety (Dict. 1Ilytho·hermetique, p. 72) says of the "cerveau ou cceur de cerf"; "C'est la matiere des Philosophes." The Livre des Secrez de Nature says: "The stag is a well·known beast, which renews itself when it feels it is growing old and weak. It gees to an ant·hill and digs at the foot thereof and brings forth thence a serpent, on ,,,hich it tramples with its feet and afterwards cats; it then swells up, and so renews itself. 'Vherefore it lives for goo years, as we fllld in scripture .. ," (Delatte, Textes Latins et Vieux Franfais relatits aux Cyranides, p. 346.) 
159 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
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. 
189 
c. A n A lchemical 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, 
190 
If you will contemplate your lack of fantasy, of inspiration and inner aliveness, which you feel as sheer stagnation and a 337 Since a psychic transformation is involved, the obscure passage in the Naassene hymn (Hippolytus, Elenchos, V, 10, 2), describing the sufferings of the soul, might be relevant here: "The soul ... veiled in the form of a stag, wearies, overpowered by the pains of death." • But the text is so uncertain that it has little documentary 
	value. 	338 Cf. "Psychology of the Transference: pars. 419ff. 
160 
Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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 Opera· toribus nequitiae foras projicietur, 
and this thief from outside will be cast out with the workers of wickedness, 
191 
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. 
192 
and the water, by an ;rdmixture 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 
purgabitur aqua per additamenturn Sulphuris veri a sorde leprosa, et ab humore hydropico superfluo 
339 Goethe, "Der Schatzgraber." 
340 So in Rueckert's well-known poem. Hebrew Yetser ha-m means "instinct of evil." 
161 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
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 nullified 343 but actually changes into its opposite, as it then tries to realize itself literally and concretely. 
habebisque in posse Comitis a and thou wilt have in thy power Trevis Fontinam, cujus Aquae the Fount of the Knight of Tresunt proprie Dianae Virgini dic- viso, whose waters are rightfully atae. dedicated to the maiden Diana. 
	193 	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 341 Cf. Heraclitus, R. P. 49, in Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 141. 
342 West-ostlicher Diwan. 
343 Naturally, this is true only during the process of coming to terms with the unconscious. 
162 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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 'Worthless is this thief, armed malignitate armatus, quem juve- with the malignity of arsenic, nis alatus horret et fugit. from whom the winged youth 
fteeth, shuddering. 
	194 	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 
163 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 

345 "In outward forms thou'lt not find unity, Thine eye must ever introverted be. 
Canst thou forget thyself, to all forlorn, Thou'It feel God in thee, well and truly One." 
(Tersteegen, Geistliches Blumengiirtlein inniger Seelen, No. 102, p. 24.) "'When I seek him outside, God makes me bad: 
Only within is salvation to be had." 
(Angelus Silesius, Siimtliche Poetische Werke, ed. Held, I, p. 162.) 
165 
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. H is 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. 
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 I, just as the loudest talk can never abolish the simple psychological fact that the larger the mass the more nugatory is the individuaL 

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 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. 
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 suI· phur" which with "arsenical malignity" prevents man from discovering his true self. 
	195 	I was tempted to translate arsenicalis as 'poisonous'. But this 
translation would be too modern. Not everything that the alchemists called "arsenic" was really the chemical element As. "Arsenic" originally meant 'masculine, manly, strong' (apCTY)v) 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. 
196 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 £lees "shuddering" from the crude sulphur. The standpoint of the 
au P.49. 
164 

MYSTERlUM CONIUNCTlONIS 
	199 	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 (15751624), Abraham of Franckenberg (1593-1652), and Angelus Silesius (1624-1677). 
	200 	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 luminumJ 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 taG 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. 
346 Book of Enoch 48: 1: " ••. fountains of wisdom; and all the thirsty drank of them." (Charles, ApocrYPha and PseudePigraPha, 11, p. 216). 
347 Boy Charioteer, Homunculus, and Euphorion. 
348 Clement of Rome, Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 12 (The Apostolic Fathers, trans. Lake, I, p. 147). 
166 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
	201 	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. 
	202 	The "machinations of the thief," our text says, are "unavoid- 
able." 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. 
	203 	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 
349 This has been shown once again in our own day by the solemn promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption. A Catholic author aptly remarks: "There seems to be some strange rightness in the portrayal of this reunion in splendour of Son and Mother, Father and Daughter, Spirit and Matter." (Victor White, "The Scandal of the Assumption," Life of the Spirit, V, p. 199,) In this connection it is worth recalling the words of Pope Pius XII's Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Dew: "On this day the Virgin Mother was taken up to her heavenly bridal chamber" (English trans., p. 15). Cl. Antony of Padua, "Sermo in Assumptione S, Mariae Virginis," Sermones, Ill, p. 730. 
167 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 

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 and whose twin doves will temaeris malignitatem temperabunt, per the malignity of the air with 
their wings, 168 
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 ch~ste 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 nobleminded 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 o.ne must be thankful if one comes across an apple without a worm in it and a plate of soup without a hair. 

Esto hie tibi Diana propitia, quae feras domare novit, 

2°

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

]206 

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 
350 Also of gentleness, tameness, peacefulness (dove of Noah), simplicity ("simplices sicut columbae," Matthew 10: 16; DV: "guileless as doves"). Christ, too, is called a dove: "The Lord Jesus was a dove ... saying Peace be unto you .... Behold the dove, behold the green olive-branch in its mouth."· (Fernandius, cited in Picinellus, Mundus Symbolicus, p. 283.) Picinellus calls Mary the "most pure dove." The "Aureum vellus" (Mennens, Theatr. chcm., V, p. 311) interprets the dove as follows: "Wherefore the Prophet crieth: Who will give me wings like a dove, that is to say, spotless and simple thoughts and contemplations?" • 
35111 Corinthians 12: 7. 
169 

MysTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIs 
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 selfassertion, 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 n'ot 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 paras facile ingredi- so that the youth easily entereth tur adolescens, cancutit statim in through the pores, and in(terrae sedes), nubemque tetri- stantly shaketh the foundations cam suscitat. of the earth,353 and raisetll up a 
dark cloud. 
	207 	Once the malignity is tempered, sinfulness and its evil con- 
sequences 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 352 A paradox which, like the kenosis doctrine (Philippians 2 : 6f.), is a slap in the 
	face for reason. 	353 My conjecture. See supra, n. 332. 
354 An idea echoed in the dogma of the Assumption, which lays particular emphasis on the incorruptibility of the body, likening it, as the earthly vessel of divinity, to the ark of the covenant: "In the ark of the covenant, built of incorruptible wood and placed in the temple of God, they perceive an image of the 
17° 

208 
20g 
110 

111. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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 mystical it is the fundamental experience of all religions that have any life in them and have not yet degenerated into confessional ism; 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 But thou wilt lead the waters up usque candorem, 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 and the darkness that was upon abyssi faciem erant, per spiritum the face of the deep shall be scatse in aquis moventem discutien- tered by the spirit moving over tur. Sic jubente Deo Lux appare- the waters. Thus by God's cam- 
	~it. 	mand shall the Light appear. 
most pure body of the Virgin Mary, preserved free from all corruption of the tomb." (Munificentissimus Deus, English trans., p. 13.) The coexistence in heaven of the real earthly body with the soul is expressed unequivocally in the words of the definition: " ... was taken up ... body and soul ... " 
171 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 

	211 	The eye that hitherto saw only the darkness and danger of 

evil turns towards the circle of the moon, where the ethereal realm of the immortals begins, and the gloomy deep can be left to its own devices, for the spirit now moves it from within, convulses and transforms it. When consciousness draws near to the unconscious not only does it receive a devastating shock but something of its light penetrates into the darkness of the unconscious. The result is that the unconscious is no longer so remote and strange and terrifying, and this paves the way for an eventual union. Naturally the "illumination" of the unconscious does not mean that from now on the unconscious is less unconscious. Far from it. What happens is that its contents cross over into consciousness more easily than before. The "light" that shines at the end is the lux moderna of the alchemists, the new widening of consciousness, a further step in the realization of the Anthropos, and every one of these steps signifies a rebirth of the deity. 
	212 	Herewith we end our contemplation of the text. The ques- 

tion 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 

°ike the thoughts and idea~ ~whi1:li. 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 appo- 

site, 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 WTitten 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. 
	215 	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 172 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 

is a true and genuine mystery which since the seventeenth century has been understood unequivocally as psychic. Nor can we modems 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 secretSo"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. 

d. The Moon-Nature 
	214 	We have treated at some lel1gth~of the sinister and dangerouSJ 

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 
	215 	The passage on the moon in Paracelsus' "De pestilitate" 

(Ill, 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 

355 Baechtold and Staubli, Handworterbuch des deutschen Aberglauoens, VI, s.v. "Mond:' 

173 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
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 be- 
174 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
come 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 poi soned. And as the moon, ,,,hen it gl-OWS new and young, is of a poisonous kind, this you shall notice in two ways, namely in the ele· ment of water and also in wood, loam, ete.: as this, when it is gath· ered at the wrong time will not burn well, but be worm-eaten, poi· sonous, 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 it~ light is the humidum ignis [moisture of fire], of a cold nature, f01 which reason it is capable of receiving the poison easily.306 
	216 	In the Table of Correspondences in Penotus 357 the follow· 
ing are said to pertain to the moon: the snake, the tiger, the: 
Manes, the Lemurs, and the dei infernales. These correlation~ show clearly how Penotus was struck by the underworld nature: of the moon.30S 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 beauteow bride of Christ. And just as the bitch was forgotten in the luna! allegory of the Church, so too our masculine judgment is apt tc 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 every· thing feminine and nOt least of a man's anima. The mythology of the moon is an object lesson in female psychology.359 
	217 	The. moon with her antithetical nature is, in a sense, a pro 
to type 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 
356 Sudhoff, XIV, pp. 6Slff. 
357 Pseudonym Bernardus a Portu Aquitanus, Theatr. chem., n, p. 123. 
35S The moon also has a relation to Saturn, the astrological maleficus. In the "Dicta Belini" Saturn is, as it were, the "father-mother" of the moon: "I am thl light of all things that are mine and I cause the moon to appear openly from within my father Saturn, even from the regnant mother, who is at enmity witl me."· ("Allegoriae sapientum," Theatr. ch em., V, p. 97.) Saturn plays the role 01 Typhon: dismemberment. 
359 Medical psychologists would profit from Esther Harding's account of moon psychology in her book Woman's Mysteries. See especially ch. 12, "The Inne] Meaning of the Moon Cycle," 
175 

MYSTERlUM CONlUNCTIONIS 
belly." 860 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 [ltquatio] 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.861 
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." 862 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," 868 and William Mennens 864 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.865 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 860 Dorn. "Phys. Trismeg .... Theatr. chem., I. p. 424 .• An allusion to "Tabula Smaragdina." De Alchemia, p. 363: "The wind hath borne it in his belly," 
861 "Congeries Paracelsicae." Theatr. chem., I. pp. 641f. 
862 Ibid., p. 642. 
868 Penotus in "De medicament. chem.," Theatr. chem., I, p. 681. 864 "Aurei velleris Libri tres," Theatr. chem., V, p. 321. 
865 A parallel to the Maria Mediatrix of the Church, who dispenses grace. 
176 

119 
220 

III. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES Philosophers" says: "With this tincture all the dead are revived so that they live for ever, and this tincture is the first-createc ferment,866 namely that 'to the moon,' 867 and it is the light of all lights and the flower and fruit of alllights,868 which lighteth all things." 369 
This almost hymn-like paean to the materia laPidis or th~ tincture refers in the first instance to Luna. for it is during hel work of whitening that the illumination takes place. She is th~ "mother in this art." In her water "Sol is hidden like a fire" 87( ~a parallel to the conception of Selene as the p.~TrJP TOU K6ap.ou ill Plutarch. On the first day of the month of Phamenoth, Osiri! enters into Selene, and this is evidently equivalent to th~ synodos in the spring. "Thus they make the power of Osiris tc be fixed in the moon." 871 Selene, Plutarch says, is male-femal~ and is impregnated by Helios. I mention these statement! because they show that the moon has a double light, outside a feminine one but inside a masculine one which is hidden in il as a fire. Luna is really the mother of the sun, which means, psy. chologically, that the unconscious is pregnant with conscious. ness 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.872 
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,8n as 
866 Presumably aether as the quinta essentia. 
867 The "opus ad Lunam" is the whitening (albedo), which is compared with sunrise. 
868 That is, o£ all luminaries, i.e., stars. 369 Art. auri/., I, p. 398 .• 
370 "Gloria mundi," Mus. herm., p. 280 (Waite, I, p. 225) .• 
871 "Isis and Osiris," 43, l\1oralia (trans. by Babbitt, V, pp. 104£.). 372 Goethe, Faust (trans. by MacNeice), p. 48 (mod.). 
373 For instance in Marcus the Gnostic. Cf. Hippolytus, Elenchos, VI, 42, I (Legge, n, p. 44). 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
well as in the naIve vision of Brother Klaus 374 and the modern vision of Maitland,375 the biographer of Ann a Kingsford. 
	221 	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. 
	122 	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- 
374 Cf. "Brother Klaus," pars. 485f. 
375 Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary, and Work, I, p. 130. I have quoted this vision at some length in my "Commentary on The Secret of the Golden 
Flower," par. 40. 
178 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
old assumptions of mythology. Alchemy is inconceivable with out the influence of her elder sister astrology, and the statement of these three disciplines must be taken into account in any psy chological evaluation of the luminaries. If, then, Luna charac terizes the feminine psyche and Sol the masculine, consciousnes would be an exclusively masculine affair, which is obviously no the case since woman possesses consciousness too. But as we hav~ previously identified Sol with consciousness and Luna with the unconscious, we would now be driven to the conclusion that; woman cannot possess a consciousness. 
	223 	The error in our formulation lies in the fact, firstly, that WI 
equated the moon with the unconscious as such, whereas thl equation is true chiefly of the unconscious of a man; and sec ondly, that we overlooked the fact that the moon is not on I' dark but is also a giver of light and can therefore represent con sciousness. This is indeed so in the case of woman: her conscious ness has a lunar rather than a solar character. Its light is thl "mild" light of the moon, which merges things together rathe than separates them. It does not show up objects in all thei pitiless discreteness and separateness, like the harsh, glarinl light of day, but blends in a deceptive shimmer the near an< the far, magically transforming little things into big things, higl into low, softening all colour into a bluish haze, and blendin: the nocturnal landscape into an unsuspected unity. 
	224 	For purely psychological reasons I have, in other of my writ 
ings, tried to equate the masculine consciousness with the con cept of Logos and the feminine with that of Eros. By Logos meant discrimination, judgment, insight, and by Eros I mean the capacity to relate. I regarded both concepts as intuitive idea which cannot be defined accurately or exhaustively. From th scientific point of view this is regrettable, but from a practica one it has its value, since the two concepts mark out a field 0 experience which it is equally difficult to define. 
	225 	As we can hardly ever make a psychological proposition wit~ 
out immediately having to reverse it, instances to the contrar leap to the eye at once: men who care nothing for discriminc tion, judgment, and insight, and women who display an alm05 excessively masculine proficiency in this respect. I would like t describe such cases as the regular exceptions. They demonstrat< to my mind, the common occurrence of a psychically predom 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
nant 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 ani ma, 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 v~vid an impression of the animus-possession of his wife, and VIce versa. 
	llll6 	Logos and Eros are intellectually formulated intuitive equiv- 
alents 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. 
	llll7 	If our formula regarding the lunar nature of feminine con- 
sciousness 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 
180 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
deadlock over the question of baptism, since although the pen guins were animals they had been baptized by St. Macl. There fore she says: "That is why, Lord, I entreat you to give ole Macl's penguins a human head and breast so that they can praise you worthily. And grant them also an immortal soul-but onl~ a li ttle one I" 376 
	128 	This "lunatic" logic can drive the rational mind to the white 
heat of frenzy. Fortunately it operates mostly in the dark 01 cloaks itself in the shimmer of innocence. The moon-nature i: its own best camouflage, as at once becomes apparent when , woman's unconscious masculinity breaks through into her con sciousness and thrusts her Eros aside. Then it is all up will her charm and the mitigating half-darkness; she takes a stand or some point or other and captiously defends it, although ead barbed remark tears her own flesh, and with brutal short-sight edness she jeopardizes everything that is the dearest goal oj womanhood. And then, for unfathomable reasons-or perhapl simply because it is time-the picture changes completely: tlH new moon has once more been vanquished. 
	129 	The Sol who personifies the feminine unconscious is not the 
sun of the day but corresponds rather to the Sol niger. It is no! the real Sol niger of masculine psychology, the alter ego, the Brother Medardus of E. T. A. Hoffmann's story "The Devil'i Elixir," or the crass identity of opposites which we meet witt in Jekyll and Hyde. The unconscious Sol of woman may be dark, but it is not "coal black" (av(}paK';'S1J'), as was said of the moon; it is more like a chronic eclipse of the sun, which in an1 case is seldom total. Normally a woman's consciousness emits ai 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 01 too powerful solar influences, her consciousness takes on at overbright solar character, while on the other hand her uncon scious becomes darker and darker-nigrum nigrius nigro-anc both are un endurable for both in the long run. 
	23° 	Her Sol niger is as void of light and charm as the gentlin~ 
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 never· 876 Cf. Penguin Island (trans. by Evans), p. 30. 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTlONIS 
theless 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!) 
	2!J1 	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 Eras 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 Eras (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. 
	232 	The dark sun of feminine psychology is connected with the 
father-imago, ,since the father is the first carrier of the animusimage. 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 
377 "Spirit and Life," pars. 629ff. 
378 Cf. I Ching, or the Book of Changes (trans. Wilhelm and Baynes), I, p. 80, Hexagram 18: "Work on What Has Been Spoiled." 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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 fil1ally 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 th,is 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. 
	233 	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. 
5. SAL 
a. Salt as the Arcane Substance 
	234 	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 
183 

1115 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTlONIS 
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 infernal 379-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 J ohann Rudolf Glauber, still thought in 1735 that his triad of fire, sun, and salt 381 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 en- 

136 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES compassed 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 comburensJ 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: 
~ Mercurius lapis 
~ Sulphur-----,I-----Sal ~ 

879 Vigenerus ("De igne et sale," Theatr. chem., V, pp. 32f.) speaks of three worlds. The fire on earth corresponds to the sun in heaven, and this to the Spiritus Sanctus "in the intelligible world." But on p. 39 he suddenly remembers the fourth, forgotten world: "The fourth is infernal, opposed to the in'telligible, glowing and burning without any light."· He also distinguishes four kinds of fire. (Cf. Aion, pars; 203, 393, and n. 81.) 
380 Heaven, earth, hell (like sulphur, mercurius, sal) is a false triad: earth is dual, consisting of the light-world above and the shadow-world below. 
381 Fire = sulphur, Sol = Mercurius (as the mother and son of Sol). 382 Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum, p. 30. 
383 A quotation from Hermes in Rosarium phi!. (Art. aurif., 11, p. 244) mentions "Sal nostrae lunariae" (the salt of our moon-plant). "Our salt is found in a certain precious Salt, and in all things. On this account the ancient Philosophers called it the common moon" • (Mus. herm., p. 217; Waite, I, p. 177). The salt from the Polar Sea is "lunar" (feminine), and the salt from the Equatorial Sea is "solar" (masculine): Welling, p. 17. Glauber (De signatura salium, metal/orum et planetarum, p. 12) calls salt feminine and gives Eve as a parallel. 
184 

~ Mercurius Serpent 
	2117 	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 eliminat384 St. Gregory, In primum Regum expositiones, I, i, 1 (Migne, PL., vol. 79, col. 23)· This idea is developed in literal form, in both Tibetan and Bengali Tantrism, as Shiva in the embrace of Shakti, the maker of Maya. We find the same idea in alchemy. Mylius (Phil. ref., pp. 8f.) says: "[God has] love all round him. Others have declared him to be an intellectual and fiery spirit, having no form, but transforming himself into whatsoever he wills and making himself equal to all things. ... Whence, by a kind of similitude to the nature of the soul, we give to God, or the power of God which sustains all things, the name of Anima media natura or soul of the World."· The -concluding words are a quotation from "De arte chymica," Art. aurif., I, p. 608. 
385 De natura salium, pp. 41ff• 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
ing 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: 
Holy Ghost (Dove) 
Christ-----I------'God the Father 
Mary 
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 tile archetypal numen of feminine deity,387 who, at the Council of 
386 "In the course of time these requests and petitions, so far from decreasing, grew daily more numerous and more insistent." Munificentissimus Deus, p. 5. 
387 A Catholic writer says of the Assumption: "Nor, would it seem, is the underlying motif itself even peculiarly Christian; rather would it seem to be but one expression of a universal archetypal pattern, which somehow responds to some deep and widespread human need, and which finds other similar expressions in 
186 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
Ephesus in 43 I, 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. 
	238 	The taking up of the body had long been emphasized as an 
historical and material event, and the alchemists could therefore make use of the representations of the Assumption in describing the glorification of matter in the opus. The illustration of this process in Reusner's Pandora 388 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 MercuriusAnthropos, who, because of his double nature, is not only spiritual and physical but unites in himself the morally highest and lowest.39o 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 per- 
countless myths and rituals, poems and pictures, practices and even philosophies, all over the globe." Victor White, "The Scandal of the Assumption," Life of the Spirit, V, p. 200. 
388 (Basel, 1588), p. 253. Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, Fig. 232. 
389 Cf. the man with a fish's tail in the mosaic on the floor of the cathedral of Pesaro, 6th cent., with the inscription: "Est homo non totus medius sed piscis ab imo." (This man is not complete, but half fish from the deep.) Becker, Die Darstellung Jesu Christi unteT dem Bilde des Fisc/us, p. 127. 
390 Cf. "The Spirit Mercurius," pars. 267ff.; also the arcane teaching of Paracelsus in "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon," pars. 159ff. 
391 Cf. "Dogma of the Trinity," pars. 248f., 252ff. 
187 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
fectly 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. Darn, 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.m In his refutation he identified woman with the devil because of the number two, which is characteristic of both. The devil, he thought, was the binarius itself, since it was created on the second day of Creation, on Monday, the day of the moon, on which God failed to express his pleasure, this being the day of "doubt" and separation.393 Dorn puts into words what is merely hinted at in the Pandora illustration. 
	239 	If we compare this train of thought with the Christian 
quaternity which the new dogma has virtually produced (but has not defined as such), it will immediately be apparent that we have here an "upper" quaternio which is supraordinate to 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 absconditusJ have nc·t 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 devi1.395 
	24° 	In philosophical alchemy, salt is a cosmic principle. Accord- 
ing 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 
392 For a closer discussion see "Psychology and Religion," pars. 104ff. 
393 "De Tenebris contra Naturam," Theatr. chem., I, p. 527. Cf. "Psychology and Religion," pars. 104, n. 47, 120, n. 11, and "Dogma of the Trinity," par. 262. 394 For details see Aion, pars. 359ff. 
395 Ibid., par. 171, n. 29. 
188 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
in the early Middle Ages under Arabic influence. The oldl traces of it can be found in the TurbaJ where salt-water and se water are synonyms for the aqua permanensJ896 and in Senic who says that Mercurius is made from salt.397 His treatise is 0 of the earliest authorities in Latin alchemy. Here "Sal Alkal also plays the role of the arcane substance, and Senior mentio that the dealbatio was called "salsatura" (marination).398 In t almost equally old "Allegoriae sapientum" the lapis is describ as "salsus" (salty).399 Arnaldus de Villanova (123S?-1313) sa: 
"Whoever possesses the salt that can be melted, and the oil tt cannot be burned, may praise God." 400 It is clear from this tt salt is an arcane substance. The RosariumJ which leans ve heavily on the old Latin sources, remarks that the "whole sec] lies in the prepared common salt," 401 and that the "root of t art is the soap of the sages" (sapo sapientum), which is the "ffii eral" of all salts and is called the "bitter salt" (sal amarum). Whoever knows the salt knows the secret of the old sages. "Salts and alums are the helpers of the stone." 404 Isaac H landus calls salt the medium between the terra sulPhurea a: the water. "God poured a certain salt into them in order to un them, and the sages named this salt the salt of the wise." 405 
	241 	Among later writers, salt is even more clearly the arcane Sl 
stance. For Mylius it is synonymous with the tincture; 406 it the earth-dragon who eats his own tail, and the "ash," t 
896 P. 283. 
397 "First comes the a~ 1, then the salt, and from that salt by divers operations Mercury of the Philosophers." • Quoted in Ros. phil. (Art. aurif., Il, p. 210) and "Clangor buccinae" (Art. aurif., I, p. 488). 
398 "De chernia," Theatr. chem., V, p. 231. For "salsatura" see Aurora consurg Il, in Art. aUTif., I, p. 205. 
399 Theatr. chem., V, p. 77. 
400 Cited in Ros. phil., p. 244. 
401 Ibid. 
402 Ibid., p. 222. The same on p. 225, where the salt is also called the "key t closes and opens." In Parable VII of Aurora Consurgens (p. 141), the bride c herself the "key" (clavicula). 
403 Ros. phi!., p. 244. 
404 Ibid., p. 269. The text adds: "He who tastes not the savour of the salts, si never come to the desired ferment of the ferment." • 
405 "Opera mineralia," Theatr. chem., Ill, p. 411. 
406 Phil. ref., p. 189. 
189 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
"diadem of thy heart." 407 The "salt of the metals" is the lapis.408 Basilius Valentinus speaks of a "sal spirituale." 4C9 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 
	242 	As the arcane substance, it is identified with various syno- 
nyms 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 
	243 	Although the arcane substance is usually identified with 
Mercurius, the relation of salt to Mercurius is seldom men- 
407 Ibid., p. 195. 
408 Ibid., p. ~~2. Also in Ros. phil., p. 208; Khunrath, Amphitheatrum saPientiae, p. 194, and Mus. herm., p. 20 (Waite, I, p. 22). 
409 Cited in '"Tract. aureus," Mus. herm., p. 31 (Waite, I, p. 32). The writings of Basilius Valentinus do not date from the 15th cent. but are a 17th-cent. forgery. 410 "Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, in his Philosophy has the following words: ... Blessed he God in heaven who has created this art in the Salt."· "Gloria mundi," Mus. herm., p. 217 (Waite, I, p. 176). 
411 Ibid., p. 2 I 8 (Waite, I, p. 177). 
412 Ibid., p. 216. 
413 Ibid., p. 217. It is also described as the "balsam of nature" (Khunrath, Hyl. Chaos, p. 258) and as the "fifth element" (sea). Vigenerus, "De igne et sale," Theatr. chem., VI, p. 122. 
414 Hyl. Chaos, p. 256. 415 Ibid., p. 257. 
416 Ibid., p. 260. 
417 AmPhitheatrum, p. 194. 418 Hyl. Chaos, p. 257. 
419 "De igne et sale," p. 44. 
420 De natura salium, p. 44. Glauber adds the verse: "In the salt and fire / Lies the treasure so dear." 
19° 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
tioned. Senior, as we noted, says that "by divers operations' Mercurius is made from salt,421 and Khunrath identifies Me! curius with common salt.422 The rarity of the identificatiOl strikes us just because the "salt of the wise" really implies it relation to Mercurius. I can explain this only on the suppositiOl that salt did not acquire its significance until later times an( then at once appeared as an independent figure in the SulphUI Mercurius-Sal triad. 
	244 	Salt also has an obvious relation to the earth, not to the e;J.rtl 
as such, but to "our earth," by which is naturally meant th< arcane substance.423 This is evident from the aforementione( identification of salt with the earth-dragon. The full t'~xt 0 Mylius runs: 
What remains below in the retort is our salt, that is, our earth, anc it is of a black colour, a dragon that eats his own tail. For the dragOl is the matter that remains behind after the distillation of wate from it, and this water is called the dragon's tail, and the dragon i its blackness, and the dragon is saturated with his water and coagu lated, and so he eats his tai1.424 
The rarely mentioned relation of salt to the nigredo 425 is wortl noting here, for because of its proverbial whiteness salt is con stantly associated with the albedo. On the other hand we woul( expect the close connection between salt and water, which is il fact already implicit in the sea-water. The aqua pontica plays al important role as a synonym for the aqua permanens, as alsc does "mare" (sea). That salt, as well as Luna, is an essential com ponent of this is clear from Vigenerus: "There is nothin! wherein the moisture lasts longer, or is wetter, than salt, 0 which the sea for the most part consists. Neit-her is there an) thing wherein the moon displays her motion more clearly tha] 
421 Art. aur-if., I, p. 210. In the Tu,-ba salt-water and sea-water are synonyms fa Mercurius. 
422 Hyl. chaos, p. 257. 
423 "Our salt, that is to say, our earth." "Tract. aureus," Mus. herm., p. 20 ("Wait, I, p. 22). Cf. also "Clangor buccinae," Art. aurif., I, p. 488, and "Scala philo~ ophorum," Art. audf., Il, p. 107. 
424 Phil. ref·, p. 195. 
425 One place is in "Gloria mundi," Mus. henn., p. 216 (Waite, I, p. 176): "(In th beginning) it is mostly black and evil-smelling." • 
191 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
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 
b. The Bitterness 
	245 	Inseparable from salt and sea is the quality of amaritudo, 
'bitterness'. The etymology of Isidore of Seville was accepted all through the Middle Ages: "Mare ab amaro." 431 Among the alchemists the bitterness became a kind of technical term. Thus, in the treatise "Rosinus ad Euthiciam," 432 there is the following dialogue between Zosimos and Theosebeia: "This is the stone that hath in it glory and colour. And she: Whence cometh its colour? He replied: From its exceeding strong bitterness. And she: Whence cometh its bitterness and intensity? He answered: 
From the impurity of its meta1." 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 
426 "De igne et sale," Theatr. chem., VI, p. 98. 427 Hyl. Chaos, pp. 197f. 
428 Ibid., p. 229. 
429 Ibid., p. 254. 
430 "De confectione lapidis," Theatr. ch em., Ill, p. 199. 431 Liber etymologiarum, XIII, 14, fol.lxviiiv. 
432 A corrupt versiun of "Zosimos ad Theosebeiam," owing to Arabic-Latin transmission. Art. aurif., I, p. 264. 
433 Art. aurit., I, p. 316. Cf. also Ros. Phil., Art. aurit., II, p. 258; Mylius, Phil. ret·, p. 249; "Tract. aureus," Ars chemida, pp. 11f. 
484 Chymische SchrifJten, p. 100. 
19~ 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
and brazen (aeneus)"; 43~ and the Rosarium mentions that salt is bitter because it comes from the "mineral of the sea." 436 The "Liber Alze" 437 says: "0 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 
	146 	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 7rapp.~rYJp, '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 (P:'1o'€ avp.cf>vAoV avr~<;), 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 equiva- 
435 Phil. ref., p. 244. The same in Ros. phil., JlI. 248.. 
436 P. 222. 
437 Mus. herm., p. 328 (Waite. I. pp. 263n. 
438 A Turba quotation from Sermo xv of Flritis (or Fictes = Socrates). See Ruska, Turba philosoPhorum, pp. 124f. 
439 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 56f., 476. 
440 "Isis and Osiris," 32, Moralia (tr'lns. Babbitt) V, pp. 78f. 
193 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 

lent 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. 
	247 	As the expulsion of the spirit was effected by various kinds 
of burning (combustio) adustio) calcinatio) assatio) sublimatio) incineratio) etc.), it was natural to call the end-product "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. 
	248 	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: 

441 The text is a poem which Mylius cites from an older source. The most important passages are the following: 
"There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well 
Worthless and rejected, concealed in dung or filth ..• And this stone is a bird, and neither stone nor bird ••• ... now sea-spume or vinegar, 

Now again the gem of salt, Almisadir the common salt .•• 

Now the sea, cleansed and purged with sulphur." • 
Phil. ref., p. 305. At that time gemma simply meant "stone." Cf. Ruland, Lexicon, pp. 241f. 
442 C£. supra, par. 245: "Our stone is endowed with the strongest spirit." 443 Art. aurif., 11, pp. 282£. 
444 C£. Rosencreutz, Chymical Wedding (trans. by Foxcroft), p. 155. 
445 The phoenix, the Western equivalent of this wonder-bird, is described by Maier as very colourful: "His neck is surrounded with a golden brightness, and the rest of his body by feathers of purple hue." • Symb. aur. mens., p. 598. 
446 Isis, XVIII, pp. lu8, 258. 

1 (lA 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATIO;\/ OF THE OPPOSITES 

SOUTH 

NORTH 

	249 	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 
	25° 	As regards the origin and meaning of the avis H ermetis) 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 [f'vSov l7runp£cf>op.€V'f'] Logos, but its whiteness to the Logos already uttered and heard, which is the servant and messenger of the inner word." 448 
	251 	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, 

447 It is strange that the editors of Wei Po-yang are of the opinion that no fundamental analogy obtains between Chinese and Western alchemy. The similarity is, on the contrary, amazing. [C£. "Concerning Mandala Symbolism," pars. 630ft (figs. 1-3)·-EDS.] 
448 De natura animalium, X, 29 (ed. Hercher, I, p. 257). 10/,; 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
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 t.herefore 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 re· volvest 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 .... 0 great, greatest, incomprehensible fabric of the world, formed in a circle I ... 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! [iryP07TVpLYOifvXPOY '/I'YfV,ua]. 449 
	252 	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 .49 Preisendanz, Pap. Graec. Mag., I, pp. 11Of£. Pap. IV, 1115-66. 
196 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
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. 
	253 	The alchemists understood the return to chaos as an essential 
part of the opus. It was the stage of the nigredo and mortificatio, which was then followed by the "purgatorial fire" and the albedo. The spirit of chaos is indispensable to the work, and it cannot be distinguished from the "gift of the Holy Ghost" any more than the Satan of the Old Testament can be distinguished from Yahweh. The unconscious is both good and evil and yet neither, the matrix of all potentialities. 
	254 	After these 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.45l 
	255 	The moral use of qualities that were originally physical is 
clearly dependent, particularly in the case of a cleric like Ripley, on ecclesiastical language. About this I can be brief, as I can rely on Rahner's valuable "Antenna Crucis II: Das Meer der 
450 Mw. herm., p. 1116 (Waite, I, p. 176). 
451 "To the spiritual [body] is referred fire, to the corruptible [body], Salt,"· "De igne et sale," Theatr. chem., VI, p. 7. 
197 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
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 
452 Expositions of the Book of Psalms: Ps. 92: 7, IV, p. 340. 
453 Tractatus super Psalmos, 68, 28 (Migne, PL., vol. 9, col. 487).454 Rahner, "Antennae Crucis 11," p. 105. 
455 Expositions: Ps. 148 : 9, VI, p. 424 (Migne, P.L., vol. 36, col. 1943). 456 Ibid., 11, p. 193: "Profunditas aquarum impenetrabilis." 
457 Ibid., I, p. 412: "Profunditas peccatorum." 
458 Homiliae in Evangelia, 11, 4 (Mign~, PL., vol. 76, col. 1116): "Aeternae mortis 
	profunda," 	459 Abt, Die Apologie des Apuleius, p. 257 (183)' 
460 The Septuagint has !J.<'Yo. K;jros (great whale) for Leviathan. 461 "Antennae Crllcis, 11," p. 108. 
462 Epistula II ad Theodosium, p. 12, in Opera, Sectio I, Pars I, Epistolarum 
	Pars I.- 	463 Spiritual Exercises (trans. by Rickaby), p. 41.- 
464 Pratica di alcuni esercitij Spirituali di S. Ignatio, "Esercitio dell'lnferno," H. p. 6.- The concluding words are reminiscent of Jeremiah 23: 15: "Behold, I will feed them with wormwood [absynthio], and make them drink the water of galL" 
10R 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
c. The Red Sea 
	256 	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 
	257 	We must also mention the Peratic interpretation of the Red 
Sea. The Red Sea drowned the Egyptians, but the Egyptians were all "non-knowers" (01 ayvoovvn,). The exodus from Egypt signifies the exodus from the body, which is Egypt in miniature, being the incarnation of sinfulness, and the crossing (7r£paCTaL) 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" (E~W Y£Vf.CT£W' y£vf.CT8aL). 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.47o 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,47l in Gnostic terms the sinfulness and impurity that must be washed away by baptism. The collective unconscious expresses itself in the mythological teachings, character- 
465 Doelger, Antike und Christentum, 11, pp. 63ff. 
466 Tractates on the Gospel of St. John, XXV, 9 (trans. by Innes), 11, p. 80.467 SPeculum de mysteriis ecclesiae, Migne, PL., vol. 172, col. 921.- 
468 Whence the designation "Peratics," a Gnostic sect. (Cf. Aion, pp. 185f.) They were the" trans-scendentalists," 
469 Hippolytus, Elenchos, V. 16, 4f. 
470 There exists a level or threshold of consciousness which is characteristic of a definite time-period or stratum of society, and which might be compared to a water-level. The unconscious level rises whenever the conscious level falls, and vice versa. Anything that is not in the conscious field of vision remains invisible and forms a content of the unconscious. 
471 Cf. Psychological Types, def. 30. 
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