MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
istic of most mystery religions, which reveal the secret knowledge concerning the origin of all things and the way to salvation. "Unconscious" people who attempt to cross the sea without being purified and without the guidance of enlightenment are drowned; they get stuck in the unconscious and suffer a spiritual death in so far as they cannot get beyond their one-sidedness. To do this they would have to be more conscious of what is unconscious to them and their age, above all of the inner opposite, namely those contents to which the prevailing views are in any way opposed. This continual process of getting to know the counterposition in the unconscious I have called the "transcendent function," 472 because the confrontation of conscious (rational) data with those that are unconscious (irrational) necessarily results in a modification of standpoint. But an alteration is possible only if the existence of the "other" is admitted, at least to the point of taking conscious cognizance of it. A Christian of today, for instance, no longer ought to cling obstinately to a one-sided credo, but should face the fact that Christianity has been in a state of schism for four hundred years, with the result that every single Christian has a split in his psyche. Naturally this lesion cannot be treated or healed if everyone insists on his own standpoint. Behind those barriers he can rejoice in his absolute and consistent convictions and deem himself above the conflict, but outside them he keeps the conflict alive by his intransigence and continues to deplore the pig-headedness and stiff-neckedness of everybody else. It seems as if Christianity had been from the outset the religion of chronic squabblers; and even now it does everything in its power never to let the squabbles rest. Remarkably enough, it never stops preaching the gospel of neighbourly love. 
	258 	We should get along a lot better if we realized that the 
majority views of "others" are condoned by a minority in ourselves. Armed with this psychological insight, which today no longer has the character of revelation since common sense can grasp it, we could set out on the road to the union of the opposites and would then, as in the Peratic doctrine, come to the place where the "gods of destruction and the god of salvation are together." By this is obviously meant the destructive and 
472 Ibid., def. 51 (especially par. 828). See also my "The Transcendent Function." 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICA nON OF THE OPPOSITES 
constructive powers of the unconscious. This coincidentia oppositorum forms a parallel to the Messianic state of fulfilment described in Isaiah 11 : 6ff. and 35 : 5ff., though with one important difference: the place of "genesis outside of generation"presumably an opus contra naturam-is clearly not paradise but ~ fp'YJP.o<;, the desert and the wilderness. Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude, as our text remarks. But only there is it possible to meet the "god of salvation." Light is manifest in the darkness, and out of danger the rescue comes. In his sermon on Luke 19: 12 Meister Eckhart says: "And who can be nobler than the man who is born half of the highest and best the world has to offer, and half of the innermost ground of God's nature and God's loneliness? Therefore the Lord speaks in the prophet Hosea: I will lead the noble souls into the wilderness, and speak into their hearts. One with the One, One from the One, and in the One itself the One, eternallyl" 473 
	259 	I have gone into this Hippolytus text at some length because 
the Red Sea was of special significance to the alchemists. Sermo LXII of the Turba mentions the "Tyrian dye, which is extracted from our most pure Red Sea." It is the parallel of the tinctura philosoPhorum) which is described as black and is extracted "from the sea." 474 The old treatise "Rosinus ad Euthiciam" says: "And know that our Red Sea is more tincturing than all seas, and that the poison,475 when it is cooked and becomes foul and discoloured, penetrates all bodies." 476 The tincture is the "dip" and the baptismal water of the alchemists, here asserted to come from the Red Sea. This idea is understandable in view of the patristic and Gnostic interpretation of the Red Sea as the blood of Christ in which we are baptized; hence the paralleling of the tincture, salt, and aqua pontica with blood.477 
	260 	The Red Sea appears in a very peculiar manner in the 
"Tractatus Aristotelis ad Alexandrum Magnum," where a recipe says: 
473 Cf. Evans trans., 11, p. 86. This passage refers to Hosea 13 : 5: "I did know thee in the wilderness, and in the land of great drought." 
474 Turba, ed. Rllska, p. 164. 
475 Venenum or rp&.pP.a.KOV is a synonym for the tincture. 476 Art. aurif., I, p. 272• 477 "Gloria mundi." Mw. herm., p. 216: "In the work it becomes like unto blood." 
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Take the serpent, and place it in the chariot with four wheels, and let it be turned about on the earth until it is immersed in the depths of the sea, and nothing more is visible but the blackest dead sea. And there let the chariot with the wheels remain, until so many fumes rise up from the serpent that the whole surface [planities] becomes dry, and by desiccation sandy and black. All that is the earth which is no earth, but a stone lacking all weight. ... [And when the fumes are precipitated in the form of rain,] you should bring the chariot from the water to dry land, and then you have placed the four wheels upon the chariot, and will obtain the result if you will advance further to the Red Sea, running without running, moving without motion [currens sine cursu) movens sine motuJ.478 
	261 	This curious text requires a little elucidation. The serpent is 
the prima materia, the Serpens Hermetis, "which he [Hermes] sent to King Antiochus, that he might do battle with thee [Alexander] and .thine army." 479 The serpent is placed "in the chariot of its vessel and is led hither and thither by the fourfold rotation of the natures, but it should be securely enclosed." The wheels are the "wheels of the elements." The vessel or vehicle is the "spherical tomb" of the serpent.480 The fourfold rotation of the natures corresponds to the ancient tetrameria of the opus (its division into four parts), i.e., transformation through the four elements, from earth to fire. This symbolism describes in abbreviated form the essentials of the opus: the serpent of Hermes or the Agathodaimon, the Nous that animates the cold part of nature-that is, the unconscious-is enclosed in the spherical vessel of diaphanous glass which, on the alchemical view, represents the world and the sou1.481 The psychologist would see it rather as the psychic reflection of the world, namely, consciousness of the world and the psyche.482 The transformation cor- 
478 The rest of the title is: "oHm conscriptus et a quodam Christiano Philosopho coIlectus" (Written of old and gathered together by a certain Christian Philosopher). Theatr. chem., V, pp. 880ff. 
479 Here the author adds (p. 886): "It is better to take pleasure in the opus than in riches or in works of virtuosity (virtuoso labore)." • The rare "virtuosus" is equivalent to the Greek fv6.pfTOS. 
480 Ibid., p. 885. 
481 In his sermon on the "vessel of beaten gold" (Ecc1esiasticus 50: 9) Meister Eckhart says: "I have spoken a word which could be spoken of Saint Augustine or of any virtuous soul, such being likened to a golden vessel, massive and firm, adorned with every precious stone." Cl. Evans, I, p. 50. 
482 Not only the vessel must be round, but the "fimarium" it is heated in. The "fimarium" is made of fimus equinus (horse-dung). Theatr. chem., V, p. 887. 
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responds to the psychic process of assimilation and integration by means of the transcendent function.483 This function unites the pairs of opposites, which, as alchemy shows, are arranged in a quaternio when they represent a totality. The totality appears in quaternary form only when it is not just an unconscious fact but a conscious and differentiated totality; for instance, when the horizon is thought of not simply as a circle that can be divided into any number of parts but as consisting of four clearly defined points. Accordingly, one's given personality could be represented by a continuous circle, whereas the conscious personality would be a circle divided up in a definite way, and this generally turns out to be a quaternity. The quaternity of basic functions of consciousness meets this requirement. It is therefore only to be expected that the chariot should have four wheels,484 to correspond with the four elements or natures. The chariot as a spherical vessel and as consciousness rests on the four elements or basic functions,485 just as the floating island where Apollo was born, Delos, rested on the four supports which Poseidon made for it. The wheels, naturally, are on the outside of the chariot and are its motor organs, just as the functions of consciousness facilitate the relation of the psyche to its environment. It must, however, be stressed that what we today call the schema of functions is archetypally prefigured by one of the oldest patterns of order known to man, namely the quaternity. which always represents a consciously reflected and differentiated totality. Quite apart from its almost universal incidence it also appears spontaneously in dreams as an expression of the total personality. The "chariot of Aristotle" can be understood in this sense as a symbol of the self. 
	262 	The recipe goes on to say that this symbolic vehicle should 
be immersed in the sea of the unconscious for the purpose of heating and incubation,486 corresponding to the state of tapas)487 
483 Cf. Psychological Types, def. 29 and par. 828, and "The Transcendent Function." 
484 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 469. 
485 Cl. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, par. 367. 
486 Cf. the heating and incubation of the Philosophers in the triple glass-house at the bottom of the sea in the Arisleus Vision. (Ruska, "Die Vision des Arisleus," Historische Studien und Skizun zu Natur- und Heilwissenschaft, pp. 22lf.; cf. the "Psychology of the Transference," par. 455 and n. 22.) 
487 Tapas is a technical term, meaning 'self-incubation' ('brooding') in the dhyana state. 
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MYSTERlUM CONlUNCTlONIS 
incubation by means of "self-heating." By this is obviously meant a state of introversion in which the unconscious content is brooded over and digested. During this operation all relations with the outside world are broken off; the feelers of perception and intuition, discrimination and valuation are withdrawn. The four wheels are "placed upon the chariot": outside everything is quiet and still, but deep inside the psyche the wheels go on turning, performing those cyclic evolutions which bring the mandala of the total personality,488 the ground-plan of the self, closer to consciousness. But so long as consciousness has not completed the process of integration it is covered by the "blackest dead sea," darkened by unconsciousness and oppressed by heat, as was the hero in the belly of the whale during the night sea journey.489 Through the incubation the snake-like content is vapourized, literally "sublimated," which amounts to saying that it is recognized and made an object of conscious discrimination. 
	263 	The "evaporatio" is followed by the "desiccation of the sur- 
face," which then appears "sandy and black." Here the imagery changes: the allusion to the subsiding flood means psychologically that the black blanket of unconsciousness hiding the nascent symbol is drawn-away: "Arena" (sand) is defined as the "pure substance of the stone," 490 and accordingly the text describes the regenerated earth as a "stone lacking all weight." The text does not explain just why it is weightless, but it is evident that nothing material, which alone has weight, is left over, and all that remains is the psychic content of the projection. 
	264 	The opus is far from having come to an end at this point, for 
the nigredo (terra nigra) still prevails and the substance of the stone is still black. It is therefore necessary for the "fumes" (evaporationes) to precipitate and wash off the blackness, "whence the whole earth becomes white." The rain now falls so copiously that the earth is almost turned into a sea. Hence the direction that the chariot should be brought to dry land. This 
488 For the psychology of the mandala see my "Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower," pars. 31ff., Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 122ff., "A Study in the Process of lndividuation," and "Concerning Mandala Symbolism." 
489 Cf. Symbols of Transformation, pars. 30Bff., and the Arisleus vision, which seems to be the prototype of the motif of the king in the sweat-bath. 
490 Ruland, Lexicon, p. 37. 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
is clearly another allusion to Noah's Ark and the flood.49l With the coming of the flood the previous state of chaos would be restored, and the result of the opus would again be swamped by unconsciousness. This motif recurs in the form of the dragon that pursued Leto and the woman crowned with stars (Rev. 12 : If.). 
	265 	If the chariot reaches dry land, this obviously means that the 
content has become visible and remains conscious, "and then," says the text, "you have placed the wheels upon the chariot." 492 The four natures or elements are gathered together and are contained in the spherical vessel, i.e., the four aspects or functions are integrated with consciousness, so that the state of totality has almost been attained. Had it really been attained the opus would be consummated at this point, but the "result" (efjectus) is obtained only by advancing further. The "result" therefore means something more than integration of the four natures. If we take the loading of the chariot as the conscious realization of the four functions, this does in fact denote only the possibility of remaining conscious of the whole previous material, that is, of the, principal aspects of the .psyc.he. The question then arises as tdo how an these divergent factor,s, previously kept apart by apparently insuperable incompatibilities, will behave, and what the ego is going to do about it. 
	266 	The singular image of the Nous-serpent enthroned on a 
chariot reminds us of the chariot-driving, snake-shaped gods of southern India, for instance on the immense black temple at Puri, which is itself a chariot of stone. I certainly don't want to suggest that there is any direct Indian influence in our text, for there is another model closer to hand, and that is Ezekiel's vision of the four creatures, with the faces respectively of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. These four figures are associated with four wheels, "their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four direc- 
491 Remarkably enough, a 12th-cent. representation of the four-wheeled chariot (see below) bears the inscription: "Foederis ex arca Christi cruce sistitur ara" (Out of the ark of the covenant an altar is built by the cross of Christ). 
492 "Plaustrum" also denotes the "chariot" in the sky, Charles' Wain (Ursa Major or Big Dipper). This constellation marks the celestial Pole, which was of great significance in the history of symbols. It is a model of the structure of the self. 
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MYSTERlUM CONlUNCTIONIS 
tions without turning as they went," 493 Together they formed the moving throne of a figure having "the appearance of a man," In the Cabala this chariot (Merkabah) plays an important role as the vehicle on which the believers mount up to God and the human soul unites with the world-soul. 
	267 	An interpretation of the four wheels as the quadriga and 
vehicle of divinity is found in a window medallion by Suger, the twelfth-century maker of stained glass for the Abbey of SaintDenis.494 The chariot which is depicted bears the inscription "QUADRIGE AMINADAB," referring to the Song of Songs 6: 11 (DV): "My soul troubled me for the chariots of Aminadab," 495 God the Father stands on a four-wheeled chariot holding the crucifix before him. In the corners of the medallion are the four emblems of the evangelists, the Christian continuation of Ezekiel's winged creatures. The four gospels form, as it were, a quaternary podium on which the Redeemer stands. 
	268 	Still another source might be Honorius of Autun. In his com- 
mentary on Song of Songs 6 : 11, he says that his "animalis vita" was troubled because the chariot signified the four evangelists. It was this chariot that the apostles and their followers had driven through the world. For Christ had said in the gospels: 
"Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish" (Luke 13: 3). And it was to him, Honorius, that the words were addressed: 
"Return, return, 0 Shulamite" (Song of Songs 6 : 13).496 
	269 	Psychologically the vision of Ezekiel is a symbol of the self 
consisting of four individual creatures and wheels, i.e., of differ- 
493 Ezekiel 1 : 16f. There is a similar vision in Zechariah 6 : 1: " ... and behold, four chariots came out from between two mountains ... " The first chariot had red horses, the second black, the third white, and the fourth dappled grey (RSV. Vulgate: "varii et fortes"; DV: "grisled and strong.") The horses "went forth to the four winds of heaven." For a remarkable parallel vision see Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Ogalala Sioux, p. 23. In Black Elk's vision twelve black horses stand in the west, twelve white horses in the north, twelve bays in the east, and in the south twelve greys. 
494 Male, L'Art religieux du XlJeme sii:cle en France, p. 182. 
495 The passage is corrupt. The Hebrew original text has only: "My soul set me - chariots of Aminadab." There are many different interpretations and conjectures, of which I will mention only Riwkah Scharf's: Merkabah can also be the sun-chariot (2 Kings 23: 11); Aminadab is a king's name, from Ammon, 'Amm, 'Ammi, a Semitic god, here possibly transferred to the sun-chariot. 
496 For Honorius this naturally has the moral meaning of "turn again." See his Expositio in Cantica Cant., Migne, PL., vol. 172, col. 462. 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
ent functions. Three of the faces are theriomorphic and only one anthropomorphic, which presumably means that only one function has reached the human level, whereas the others are still in an unconscious or animal state. The problem of three and four (trinity and quaternity) plays a great role in alchemy as the "axiom of Maria" 497 and, like the vision of Ezekiel, is concerned with the God-image. The symbols of the self are as a rule symbols of totality, but this is only occasionally true of God-images. In the former the circle and the quaternity predominate, in the latter the circle and the trinity-and this, moreover, only in the case of abstract representations, which are not the only ones to occur. 
	270 	These hints may throw a little light on the strange idea of 
the serpent-chariot. It is a symbol of the arcane substance and the quintessence, of the aether that contains all four elements, and at the same time a God-image or, to be more accurate, an image of the anima mundi. This is indicated by the Mercurial serpent, which in its turn was interpreted by the alchemists as the "spirit of life that was in the wheels" (DV).498 We should also mention that according to Ezekiel I : 18 the inter-revolving wheels "were full of eyes round about." The old illustrators therefore produced something like an astrolabe in their attempts to depict the vision. The notion of wheels is naturally connected with movement in all directions, for the "eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the whole earth" (Zpch. 4 : 10). It is said of the horses, too, that they "walk to and fro through the earth" (Zech. 6 : 7). Eyes are round and in common speech are likened to "cart-wheels." They also seem to be a typical symbol for what I have called the "multiple luminosities of the unconscious." By this I mean the seeming possibility that complexes possess a kind of consciousness, a luminosity of their own, which, I conjecture, expresses itself in the symbol of the soul-spark, multiple eyes (PolyoPhthalmia), and the starry heaven.499 
	271 	By reason of its "solar" nature the eye is a symbol of con- 
sciousness, and accordingly multiple eyes would indicate a mul- 
497 In this connection the alchemists also mentioned the three men in the fiery furnace, Daniel 3 : 20ff. 
498 Vulgate: "Quia spiritus vitae erat in rotis" Ezekiel I : 20. Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 471. 
499 Cf. "On the Nature of the Psyche," pars. 395f. 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
tiplicity of conscious centres which are co-ordinated into a unity like the many-faceted eye of an insect. As Ezekiel's vision can be interpreted psychologically as a symbol of the self, we may also mention in this connection the Hindu definition of the selfhere hiranyagarbha-as the "collective aggregate of all individual souls." 500 
	~72 	Ezekiel's vision is of psychological importance because the 
quaternity embodied in it is the vehicle or throne of him who had the "appearance of a man." Together with the "spirit of life" in the wheels it represents the empirical self, the totality of the four functions. These four are only partly conscious. The auxiliary functions are partly, and the "inferior" or subliminal function is wholly, autonomous; they cannot be put to conscious use and they reach consciousness only indirectly as a fait accompli) through their sometimes disturbing effects. Their specific energy adds itself to the normal energy of the unconscious and thereby gives it an impulse that enables it to irrupt spontaneously into consciousness. As we know, these invasions can be observed systematically in the association experiment.50i 
	273 	The quaternity of the self appears in Ezekiel's vision as the 
true psychological foundation of the God-concept. God uses it as his vehicle. It is possible for the psychologist to verify the structure of this foundation, but beyond that the theologian has the last word. In order to clear up any misunderstandings, especially from the theological side, I would like to emphasize yet again that it is not the business of science to draw conclusions which go beyond the bounds of our empirical knowledge. I do not fed the slightest need to put the self in place of God, as short-sighted critics have often accused me of doing. If Indian philosophers equate the atman with the concept of God and many Westerners copy them, this is simply their subjective opinion and not science. A consensus generalis on this point would in itself be yet another fact which, for the empirical psychologist, is as well worth considering as the remarkable view of many theologians that religious statements have nothing to do with the psyche. Similarly, it is characteristic of the mystical philosophy of the alchemists that the Mercurial serpent is enthroned on the chariot. He is a living spirit who uses as his chariot the body 500 Ramanuja's commentary to the Vedanta-Sutras (SBE, XLVIII), p. 578. 
501 Cf. my "Analysis of the Associations of an E'pileptic." 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
that consists of the four elements. In this sense the chariot is the symbol of earthly life. A Georgian fairytale closes with the verses: 
I have dragged a cart up the mountain, It has become like a mountain. Summon me from this life 
Over to eternity.502 
	274 	As I have said, the process of transformation does not come 
to an end with the production of the quaternity symbol. The continuation of the opus leads to the dangerous crossing of the Red Sea, signifying death and rebirth. It is very remarkable that our author, by his paradox "running without running, moving without motion," introduces a coincidence of opposites just at this point, and that the Hippolytus text speaks, equally paradoxically, of the "gods of destruction and the god of salvation" being together. The quaternity, as we have seen, is a quaternio of opposites, a synthesis of the four originally divergent functions. Their synthesis is here achieved in an image, but in psychic reality becoming conscious of the whole psyche 503 faces us with a highly problematical situation. We can indicate its scope in a single question: What am I to do with the unconscious? 
	275 	For this, unfortunately, there are no recipes or general rules. 
I have tried to present the main outlines of what the psychotherapist can observe of this wearisome and all too familiar process in my study ~'The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious," For the layman these experiences are a terra incognita which is not made any more accessible by broad generalizations. Even the imagination of the alchemists, otherwise so fertile, fails us completely here. Only a thorough investigation of the texts could shed a little light on this question. The same task challenges our endeavours in the field of psychotherapy. Here too are thousands of images, symbols, dreams, fantasies, and visions that still await comparative research. The only thing that can be said with some certainty at present is that there is a gradual process of approximation whereby the two positions, 
502 "The Bald-headed Gooseherd." Cf. Din, Kaukasische Miirchen, pp. 47/1'. 
503 "Whole" is meant here only in a relative sense, implying merely the most important aspects of the individual psyche and of the collective unconscious. 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
the conscious and the unconscious, are both modified. Differences in individual cases, however, are just as great as they were among the alchemists. 
d. The Fourth of the Three 
	1I76 	In the course of his mystic peregrination 504 Maier reached 
the Red ("Erythraean") Sea, and in the following way: he journeyed to the four directions, to the north (Europe), to the west (America), to the east (Asia).505 Leaving Asia and turning south to Africa, he found a statue of Mercury, made of silver, and with a golden head. The statue pointed to Paradise, which he espied far off. Now because of its four rivers, and because it was the abode of the originally androgynous Primordial Man (Adam), the Garden of Eden was a favourite mandala in Christian iconography, and is therefore a symbol of totality and-from the psychological point of view-of the self. If we take the four directions and the four elements (see note 505) as a symbolical equivalent of the four basic functions of consciousness, we can say that Maier had become conscious of three of them by the time he reached Asia. This brings him to the fourth and last, the "inferior" function, which is the darkest and the most unconscious of all. "Africa" is not a bad image for this. But just as Maier was about to direct his steps thither, he had a vision of paradise as the primordial image of wholeness, which showed him that the goal of his journey lay in the attainment of this wholeness. By the time he reached Africa, he says, the sun was in its house, Leo, and the moon was in Cancer, "the moon having Cancer for the roof of its house". The proximity of the two 'houses indicates a coniunctio Solis et Lunae) the union of supreme opposites, and this is the crowning of the opus and the goal of the peregrination. He adds; "And this gave me great hope of the best augury." 
	277 	The fourth function has its seat in the unconscious. In 
mythology the unconscious is portrayed as a great animal, for instance Leviathan, or as a whale, wolf, or dragon. We know from the myth of the sun-hero that it is so hot in the belly of the 
504 Symb. aur. mensae, pp. 5681£. 
505 Maier makes the following equations: Europe = earth, America = water, Asia = air, Africa = fire. 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
whale that his hair falls out.506 Arisleus and his companions likewise suffer from the great heat of their prison under the sea.507 The alchemists were fond of comparing their fire to the "fire of hell" or the flames of purgatory. Main gives a description of Africa which is very like a description of hell: "uncultivated, torrid, parched,50s sterile and empty." 509 He says there are so few springs that animals of the most varied species assemble at the drinking-places and mingle with one another, "whence new births and animals of a novel appearance are born," which eXplained the saying "Always something new out of Africa." Pans dwelt there, and satyrs, dog-headed baboons, and half-men, "besides innumerable species of wild animals." According to certain modern views, this could hardly be bettered as a description of the unconscious. l\faier further reports that in the region of the Red Sea an animal is found with the name of "Ortus" (rising, origin). It had a red head with streaks of gold reaching to its neck, black eyes, a white face, white forepaws, and black hindpaws. He derived the idea of this animal from the remark of Avicenna: "That thing whose head is red, its eyes black and its feet white, is the magistery." 510 He was convinced that the legend of this creature referred to the phoenix, which was likewise found in that region. While he was making inquiries about the phoenix he "heard a rumour" that not far off a prophetess, known as the Erythraean Sibyl, dwelt in a cave. This was the sibyl who was alleged to have foretold the coming of Christ. Maier is probably referring here not to the eighth book of the Sibylline Oracles, verse 217, at which point thirty-four verses begin with the following letters; IH~OY~ XPEI~TO~ ®EOY YIO~ ~nTHP ~T A YPO~, 511 but to the report of St. Augustine in De 
506 Frobenills. Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, p. 82 and note. 
507 "In the intense heat of summer." Art. aurif., I, p. '48. 
50S "Sitibundlls" means one who is parched with thirst on the sea. "Sitibundi in medio Oceani gurgite" (thirsting in the mid flood of Ocean). 
509 Symb. aur. mensae, p. 594. Maier completes the picture of hell by citing the legend of the oryx: "There the Oryx, thirsting in the great heat of summer, is said to curse the heat of the sun with the shedding of tears and repeated groanings." - 
510 Ibid., p. 199.- From Avicenna's Liber de anima artis, to which unfortunately I have no access. The saying is cited as an "Aenigma" in cap. X of the "Rosarius" of Arnaldus de Villanova (Gratarolus, Ferae alchemiae, I, Part 2, p. 42). 
511 "The cross of Jesus Christ the Son of God, Saviour." 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
civitate dei,512 which was well known in the Middle Ages. He also cites the passage about the sibyl in the Canstantini Gratia of Eusebius and emphasizes that the sibylline prophecy referred to the "coming of Christ in the flesh." 512. 
	1'78 	We have seen earlier that the "Erythraean Sea" is a mys- 
terious place, but here we meet with some noteworthy details. To begin with, our author reaches this sea just when he has completed the journey through the three continents and is about to enter the critical fourth region. We know from the Axiom of Maria and from Faust the crucial importance of that seemingly innocent question at the beginning of the Timaeus: 
SOCRATES: One, two, three-but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of those guests of yesterday who were to entertain me today? 
TIMAEUS: He suddenly felt unwell, Socrates; he would not have failed to join our company if he could have helped it.513 
	179 	The transition from three to four is a problem 514 on which 
the ambiguous formulation of Maria does not shed very much light.515 We come across the dilemma of three and four in any number of guises, and in Maier's Symbala aureae mensae as well the step from three to four proves to be an important development presaged by the vision of paradise. The region of the Red Sea is proverbially hot, and Maier reached it at the end of July, "in the intense heat of summer." He was, in fact, "getting hot," uncommonly hot, as hot as hell, for he was approaching that region of the psyche which was not unjustly said to be inhabited by "Pans, Satyrs, dog-headed baboons, and half-men." It is not difficult to see that this region is the an.imal soul in man. For just as a man has a body which is no different in principle from that of an animal, so also his psychology has a whole series of lower storeys in which the spectres from humanity's past epochs 
51~ The City of God, n, p. 196. Cf. Geffcken, Die Oracula Sibyllina, pp. 153f. 
512. Migne, P.G., vo!. 20, co!. 1302. 513 Plato's Cosmology (trans. by Cornford), p. 9· 514 There are two Armenian legends concerning Alexander, of which the first runs as follows: "When Alexander came into the world, he at once ran about the room. But when he came to the fourth corner, an an~el struck him down and gave him to understand that he would conquer only three-quarters of the world." In the second legend Alexander does conquer three-quarters of the world, but not the fourth, which is called that of the "righteous pOOL" A sea surrounds it and cuts it off from other parts of the earth. Din, Kaukasische Miirchen, p. 259· 
515 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 209. Concerning the problem in the Timaeus see "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity," pars. 181ff. 
212 

280 
281 
282 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
still dwell, then the animal souls from the age of Pithecanthropus and the hominids, then the "psyche" of the cold-blooded saurians, and, deepest down of all, the transcendental mystery and p~radox of the sympathetic and parasympathetic psychoid processes. 
So it is not surprising that our world-voyager felt that he had landed in the hottest place-he was in Arabia Felix-in the sweltering heat of summer! He was painfully aware that he was risking his skin: "It's your concern when your neighbour's wall is on fire." 516 He was the banquet-giver and the guest, the eater and the eaten in one person. 
"The innumerable species of animals" begin to show up already by the Red Sea, headed by the fabulous four-footed "Ortus," which combines in itself the four alchemical colours, black, white, red, and yellow 517 (the gold streaks on head and neck). Maier does not hesitate to identify the Ortus with the phoenix, the other legendary inhabitant of Arabia Felix,518 less perhaps on account of its appearance than on account of its name; for the phoenix, too, after consuming itself in the land of Egypt, each time rose renewed, like the reborn sun in Heliopolis. 
The Ortus is the alchemical "animal" which represents the living quaternity in its first synthesis. In order to become the ever-living bird of the spirit it needs the transforming fire, which is found in "Africa," that is, in the encounter with and investigation of the fourth function and the animal soul represented by the Ortus. By interpreting it as the phoenix, Maier gave it a far-reaching change of meaning, as we shall see. For besides his animal soul he also discovered in its vicinity a kind of feminine soul, a virgin, to whom he at first appeared like an importunate guest.519 This was the sibyl who foretold the coming of Christ. Thus, by the Red Sea, he met the animal soul in the form of a monstrous quaternity, symbolizing, so to speak, the prima materia of the self and, as the phoenix, rebirth. The mys516 Horace, Epistolae, I, xviii, 84.- 
517 Corresponding to the xanthesis, citrinitas, or yellowing. 
518 Isidore of Seville, Liber etymologiarum (XII, ch. 7, fo!' IxvT): "The phoenix, a biru of Arabia, so called because it has a purple colour and is singular and unique in all the world." - 
519 "Whom, says she, seekest thou here, stranger? It is not lawful for a man to approach a virgin." - The Sibyl pardons him, however, because he is "very desirous of learning." 
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l\'lYSTERIUM CONIUNCTlONIS 
tery ;:Illuded to here is not only the encounter with the animal soul but, at the same time and in the same place, the meeting with the anima, a feminine psychopomp who showed him the way to Mercurius and also how to find the phoenix.520 
	283 	It is worth noting that the animal is the symbolic carrier of 
the self. This hint in Maier is borne out by modern individuals who have no notion of alchemy.521 It expresses the fact that the structure of wholeness was always present but was buried in profound unconsciousness, where it can always be found again if one is willing to risk one's skin to attain the greatest possible range of consciousness through the greatest possible selfknowledge-a "harsh and bitter drink" usually reserved for hell. The throne of God seems to be no unworthy reward for such trials. For self-knowledge-in the total meaning of the word-is not a one-sided intellectual pastime but a journey through the four continents, where one is exposed to all the dangers of land, sea, air, and fire. Any total act of recognition worthy of the name embraces the four-or 360!-aspects of existence. Nothing may be "disregarded." When Ignatius Loyola recommended "imagination through the five senses" 522 to the meditant, and told him to imitate Christ "by use of his senses," 523 what he had in mind was the fullest possible "realization" of the object of contemplation. Quite apart from the moral or other effects of this kind of meditation, its chief effect is the training of consciousness, of the capacity for concentration, and of attention and clarity of thought. The corresponding forms of Yoga have similar effects. But in contrast to these traditional modes of realization, where the meditant projects himself into some prescribed form, the self-knowledge alluded to by Maier is a projection into the empirical self as it actually is. It is not the "self" we like to imagine ourselves to be after carefully removing all the blemishes, but the empirical ego just as it is, with everything that it does and everything that happens to it. Everybody would like to be quit of this odious adjunct, which is precisely why in the East the ego is explained as illusion and why in the West it is offered up in sacrifice to the Christ figure. 
~20 For the anima in this role see Psychology and Alchemy, pars. nf. 
~21 Namely in the form of symbolic animals which appear in dreams as prefigurations of the self. 
	522 Spiritual Exercises (trans. by Rickaby), p. 41. 	523 Ibid., p. 215. 
214 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
	284 	By contrast, the aim of the mystical peregrination is to under- 
stand all parts of the world, to achieve the greatest possible extension of consciousness, as though its guiding principle were the Carpocratic 524 idea that one is delivered from no sin which one has not committed. Not a turning away from its empirical "so-ness," but the fullest possible experience of the ego as reflected in the "ten thousand things"-that is the goal of the peregrination.525 This follows logically from the psychological recognition that God cannot be experienced at all unless this futile and ridiculous ego offers a modest vessel in which to catch the effluence of the Most High and name it with his name. The significance of the vas-symbol in alchemy shows how concerned the artifex was to have the right vessel for the right content: 
"One is the lapis, one the medicament, one the vessel. one the procedure, and one the disposition." The aqua nostraJ the transformative substance, is even its own vessel.526 From this it is but a step to the paradoxical statement of Angelus Silesius: 
God is my centre when I close him in, 
And my circumference when I melt in him.527 
	285 	Maier's Erythraean quadruped, the Ortus, corresponds to the 
four-wheeled chariot of Pseudo-Aristotle. The tetramorph, too, is a product of early medieval iconography,528 combining the four winged creatures of Ezekiel's vision into a four-footed monster. The interpretation of the Ortus as the phoenix connects it with Christ, whose coming was prophesied by the Sibyl; for the phoenix is a well-known allegory of the resurrection of Christ and of the dead in general.529 It is the symbol of transformation par excellence. In view of this well-known interpre- 
524 Cf. "Psychology and Religion:' par. 133. 525 Angelus Silesius says, however: 
"Turn inward for your voyage! For all your arts 
You will not find the Stone in foreign parts." 
Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Ill, No. 118. All the same, no one has yet discov- 
	ered himself without the world. 	526 Mylius, Phil. ref., pp. 33 and 245. 
	527 Cher. Wand., Ill, No. 148. 	528 See Psychology and Alchemy, fig. 53. 
529 St. Ambrose says: "Let this bird teach us by his example to believe in the resurrection."· Epiphanius: "Why therefore did the wicked Jews not believe in the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ on the third day, when a bird brings himself to life again in the space of three days?" • Both cited in Picinellus. Mundus symbolicus, I. pp. 575. 576, 578. 
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MYSTERlUM CONlUNCTIONIS 
tation of the phoenix and of the Erythraean oracle, it is amazing that any author at the beginning of the seventeenth century should dare to ask the sibyl, not to show him the way to Christ, but to tell him where he could find Mercurius! This passage offers another striking proof of the parallelism between Mercurius and Christ. Nor does the phoenix appear here as a Christ allegory but as the bearer and birthplace of the universal medicine, the "remedy against wrath and pain." As the sibyl once foretold the coming of the Lord, so now she is to point the way to Mercurius. Christ is the Anthropos, the Primordial Man; Mercurius has the same meaning, and the Primordial Man stands for the round, original wholeness, long ago made captive by the powers of this world. In Christ's case the victory and liberation of the Primordial Man were said to be complete, so that the labours of the alchemists would seem to be superfluous. We can only assume that the alchemists were of a different opinion, and that they sought their remedy against wrath and pain in order to complete what they considered to be Christ's unfinished work of redemption. 
	286 	It is characteristic of Maier's views that the idea of most 
importance is not Mercurius, who elsewhere appears strongly personified, but a substance brought by the phoenix, the bird of the spirit. It is this inorganic substance, and not a living being, which is used as a symbol of wholeness, or as a means towards wholeness, a desideratum apparently not fulfilled by the Christsymbol.530 Involuntarily one asks oneself whether the intense personalization of the divine figures, as is customary in Christianity and quite particularly in Protestantism, 53! is not in the 
530 If the iconographic symbols spontaneously produced by modern people are examined in this respect, we seldom find a human being as the central figure (in a mandala, for instance), but, much more frequently, an impersonal abstract sign which is meant to express totality. Occasionally there is a face or head. but this only enhances the analogy with alchemy. (Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 530, and 'Transformation Symbolism in the Mass," pars. 363ff.) The most extreme expression of the abstract and impersonal in alchemy is the lapis. I have already drawn attention to the peculiar nature of tbese central figures in "Psychology and Religion," pars. 156ff. 
531 An exception to this is the third Person of the Trinity, tbe Holy Ghost, who is "breathed" by Father and Son (active and passive spiration: cf. my "Dogma of the Trinity," pars. 235ff. and n. 10). He is, as the usual representations show, the most "depersonalized" of the figures. I have already mentioned the alchemists' preference for a religion of the Holy Ghost. (See also Aion, pars. 141ff.) 
216 

1I87 
1I88 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
end compensated, and to some extent mitigated, by a more objective point of view emanating from the unconscious. 
e. Ascent and Descent 
In his quest for wholeness so far, Michael Maier, besides crossing three continents and travelling in three directions, has discovered a statue of Mercurius pointing the way to paradise; he has glimpsed paradise from afar, he has found the animal soul and the sibylline anima, who now counsels him to journey to the seven mouths of the Nile (Ostia Nili), in order to seek for Mercurius. The continuation of his pilgrimage recalls the flight of the phoenix from Arabia, where it lives, to Egypt, where it dies and arises anew. We may therefore expect that something similar will befall the author. We are not told anything of his crossing of the Red Sea and of his recapitulation, in the reverse direction, of the miraculous wanderings of the children of Israel. We do, however, soon learn that something like a rebirth mystery is to take place, because Maier compares the seven mouths of the Nile to the seven planets. He first reaches the Canopic Gate, the western mouth of the delta, where he finds Saturn domiciled. Of the remaining planets we can recognize only Mars with certainty, as the description of the cities where the others dwell is not very clear. Amid innumerable hazards he traverses the seven region; without meeting Mercurius. He does not find him even in his own city. Finally he has to turn back and retrace his steps until he reaches the Canopic Gate, where this time he finds Mercurius. Although he learns from him all sorts of secrets, he fails to find the phoenix. Later, he will return again in order to discover the panacea. In his "Epigramma ad Phoenicem" he begs the wonderful bird to give the wise man its feathers,532 and in his epigram to the "Medicina Phoeniciae" he rates it above "riches and gold, and he who does not think so is not a man but a beast." 533 
The experience of the fourth quarter, the region of fire (i.e., the inferior function), is described by Maier as an ascent and descent through the seven planetary spheres. Even if the peregrination up to this point was not an allegory of the opus 532 Symb. aUT. mens., p. 606.- 
533 Ibid., p. 607.- 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
alchymicum, from now on it certainly is. The opus is a"tran· situs," a 7r€pacft> in the Gnostic sense, a "transcensi0n" and transformation whose subject and object is the elusive Mercurius. I will not discuss the nature of the transitus here in any great detail, as this would be the proper concern of an account of the opus itself. One aspect of the transitus, however, is the ascent and descent through the planetary spheres, and to this we must devote a few words. As the "Tabula smaragdina" shows, the purpose of the ascent and descent is to unite the powers of Above and Below. A feature worthy of special notice is that in the opus there is an ascent followed by a descent, whereas the probable Gnostic-Christian prototype depicts first the descent and then the ascent. There are numerous evidences of this in the literature and I do not need to cite them here. I will quote only the words of one of the great Greek Fathers, St. Basil, who says in his explanation of Psalm 17 : la 534 ("And he bowed the heavens and came down, and a black cloud was under his feet"): "David says here: God came down from heaven to help me and to chastise his enemies. But he clearly prophesies the incarnation [fvavBpw7r~(m] of Christ when he says: He bowed the heavens and came down. For he did not break through the heavens and did not make the mystery manifest, but came down to earth secretly, like rain upon the fleece,535 because the incarnation was secret and unknown, and his coming into the world~order [iv TfI olKovop.[",] was hidden." 536 Commenting on the next verse ("And he was borne upon the cherubim, and he flew"), Basil says: "For in ascending he rose above the Cherubim, whom David named also the wings of the wind, on account of their winged and stormy nature. By the wings of the wind is also meant the cloud which took him up." 537 Irenaeus sums up the mystery in the lapidary saying: "For it is He who descended and ascended for the salvation of men." 538 
534 DV; AV, 18: g. 
535.".6KOS = 'wool, fleece' (L. vel/us). The passage refers to Psalm 71 : 6 (Vulgate): 
"Descendet sicut pluvia in vellus" (DV: "He shall come down like rains upon the fleece"), and Judges 6: 37: "Ponam hoc vellus lanae in aera" (DV: "I will put this fleece of wool on the floor"). 
536 Pitra, Analecta sacra, V, pp. 8Sf. 
537 Refers to Acts I : g: " ... and a cloud received him out of their sight," 538 Adv. haer., Ill, VI, 2 (The Writings of Irenaeus, I, p. 270). 
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IIl. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
	289 	In contrast to this, in alchemy the ascent comes first and then 
the descent. I would mention the ascent and descent of the soul in the Rosarium illustrations 539 and above all the exordium in the "Tabula smaragdina," whose authority held sway throughout the Middle Ages: 
IV. Its father is the sun, its mother the moon; the wind hath carried it in his belly; its nurse is the earth. 
VI. Its power is complete when it is turned towards the earth. VIII. It ascendeth from the earth to heaven, and descendeth again to the earth, and receiveth the power of the higher and lower things. So wilt thou have the glory of the whole world.540 
	2go 	These articles (whose subject is sometimes masculine and 
sometimes neuter) describe the "sun-moon child" who is laid in the cradle of the four elements, attains full power through them and the earth, rises to heaven and receives the power of the upper world, and then returns to earth, accomplishing, it seems, a triumph of wholeness ("gloria totius mundi"). The words "So wilt thou have" are evidently addressed to the Philosopher, for he is the artifex of the filius philosoPhorum. If he succeeds in transforming the arcane substance he will simultaneously accomplish his own wholeness, which will manifest itself as the glory of the whole world. 
	291 	There can be no doubt that the arcane substance, whether 
in neuter or personified form, rises from the earth, unites the opposites, and then returns to earth, thereby achieving its own transformation into the elixir. "He riseth up and goeth down in the tree of the sun," till he becomes the elixir, says the "Consilium coniugii." 541 The text continues: 
Someone hath said,542 And when I rise naked to heaven, then shall I come clothed upon the earth, and shall perfect all minerals.543 And if we are baptized in the fountain of gold and silver, and the spirit of our body [i.e., the arcane substance] ascends into heaven with the father and the son, and descends again, then shall our souls 539 Reproduced in my "Psychology of the Transference," figs. 7 and g. 
540 Cf. "Tabula smaragdina" (ed. Ruska), p. 2.- 
541 Ars chemica, p. 118. 
542 This "someone," as is clear from the later text (in Bibliotheca chemical, is the "beloved" in the Song of Songs, i.e., Luna. She speaks here to Sol. 
543 Possibly an allusion to the "Tabula smaragdina." 
219 

MYSTERlUM CONlUNCTIONIS 
revive, and my animal body will remain white, that is, [the body] of the moon.544 
	292 	Here the union of opposites consists in an ascent to heaven 
and a descent to earth in the bath of the tincture. The earthly effect is first a perfection of minerals. then a resuscitation of souls and a transfiguration of the animal body, which before was dark. A parallel passage in the "Consilium" runs: 
His soul rises up from it 545 and is exalted to the heavens, that is, to the spirit, and becomes the rising sun (that is, red), in the waxing moon. and of solar nature.546 And then the lantern with two lights,547 which is the water of life. will return to its origin, that is, to earth. And it becomes of low estate. is humbled and decays, and is joined to its beloved,548 the terrestrial sulphur.549 
	293 	This text describes the ascent of the soul of the arcane sub- 
stance, the incombustible sulphur. The soul as Luna attains its plenilunium, its sun like brilliance. then wanes into the novilunium and sinks down into the embrace of the terrestrial sulphur, which here signifies death and corruption. We are reminded of the gTuesome conjunction at the new moon in Maier's Scrutinium chymicumJ where the woman and the dragon embrace in the grave.550 The description Dorn gives in his "Physica Trismegisti" is also to the point: "In the end it will come to pass that this earthly, spagyric birth clothes itself with heavenly nature by its ascent, and then by its descent visibly puts on the nature of the centre of the earth, but nonetheless the nature of the heavenly centre which it acquired by the ascent is secretly preserved." 551 This "birth" (foetura) conquers the "subtile and spiritual sickness in the human mind and also all 
544 "Consil. coniug.," p. 128; or remain "in the golden tree," p. 211. There may be a reference here to John 3 : 13: "And no one has ascended into heaven except him who has descended from heaven" (DV). 
545 I.e., from the "sulphur nostrum" previously referred to. 
546 "In Luna crescente, in nalUram solarcm." This could also be translated: "waxing in Luna into the nature of the sun." 
547 The light of sun and moon. 
548 The 1566 edn. has "figitur amanti eum." I read "earn." 
549 Consil. coniug.," p. 165 (commentary in Senior, De chemia, p. 15). Cf. the "transposition of the lights" in the Cabala. 
550 Emblema L, p. 148: "The dragon slays the woman and she him, and together they are bespattered with blood." - 
551 Theatr. chem., I, p. 409. 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
bodily defects, within as well as without." The' medicament is produced "in the same way as the world was created." Elsewhere Dorn remarks that the "foetus spagyricus" is forced by the fire to rise up to heaven (caelum), by which he means from the bottom of the vessel to the top, and from there it descends again after attaining the necessary degree of ripeness, and returns to earth: "This spirit becomes corporeal again, after having become spirit from a body." 552 
	194 	As if in contradiction to the "Tahula smaragdina," whose 
authority he follows here, Dorn writes in his "Philosophia speculativa": "No one ascends into the heaven which ye seek, unless he who descends from the heaven which ye do not seek, enlighten him." 553 Dorn was perhaps the first alchemist to find certain statements of his "art" problematical.554 and it was for this reason that he provided his foetus spagyricusJ who behaves in an all too Basilidian manner, with a Christian alibi. At the same time he was conscious that the artifex was indissolubly one with the OpUS.555 His speculations are not to be taken lightly as they are occasionally of the greatest psychological interest, e.g.: 
"The descent to the four and the ascent to the monad are simultaneous." 556 The "four" are the four elements and the monad is the original unity which reappears in the "denarius" (the 
1152 Ibid., p. 431. Dorn adds: "It was hidden of old by the Philosophers in the riddle: Make the fixed, said they, volatile, and the volatile fixed, and you will have the whole magistery." • 
1153 "Spec. phil.," Theatr. chem., I. p. 276.- Here the allusion to John 3: 13 is even clearer. 
554 CL supra, n. 393. 
1155 He says, for instance: "Learn from within thyself to know all that is in heaven and on earth, that thou mayest be wise in all things. Knowest thou not that heaven and the elements were formerly one. and were separated from one another by divine artifice, that they might bring forth thee and all things? If thou knowest this, the rest cannot escape thee, or thou lackest all sense. Again, in every generation such a separation is necessary, as I have said above, and needs to be effected of thyself, before thou settest sail towards the true philosophy. Thou wilt never make from others the One which thou seekest, except first there be made one thing of thyself." - "Spec. phil. •.• p. 276. The stages of the ascent are: (I) devotion to the faith, (2) knowledge of God by faith, (3) love from the knowledge of God. ("Physica Trithemii," Theatr. chem., I, p. 449.) 
556 - A similar view is suggested in the "Congeries Paracelsicae chemicae," Theatr. chem., I, p. 589: "Therefore it must be boiled, roasted, and melted; it ascends and descends, and all these operations are one single operation performed by the fire alone:' - 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
number lO), the goal of the opus; it is the unity of the personality projected into the unity of the stone. The descent is analytic, a separation into the four components of wholeness; the ascent synthetic, a putting together of the denarius. This speculation accords with the psychological fact that the confrontation of conscious and unconscious produces a dissolution of the personality and at the same time regroups it into a whole. This can be seen very clearly in moments of psychic crisis, for it is just in these moments that the symbol of unity, for instance the mandala, occurs in a dream. "Where danger is, there / Arises salvation also," says H()lderlin. 
	295 	While the older authors keep strictly to the "Tabula smarag- 
dina," 557 the more modern ones, under the leadership of Dorn, tend to present the process the other way round. For instance, Mylius says that the earth cannot ascend unless heaven comes down first. And even then the earth can be sublimated to heaven only if it is "dissolved in its own spirit 558 and becomes one substance therewith." 559 The Paracelsist Penotus is even more emphatic. Speaking of Mercurius, he says: 
As to how the son of man [filius hominisJ is generated by the philosopher and the fruit of the virgin is produced, it is necessary that he be exalted from the earth and cleansed of all earthliness; then he rises as a whole into the air and is changed into spirit. Thus the word of the philosopher is fulfilled: He ascends from earth to heaven and puts on the power of Above and Below, and lays aside his earthly and uncleanly nature." 560 
557 The Rosarium phil. formulates the ascent and descent as follows: "Our stone passes into earth, earthi.nto water, water into air, air into fire, and there it stays, but on the other h<tnd it descends." • Art. aurif., Il, p. 250. 
558 The water in which the earth is dissolved is the earth's soul or spirit, of which Senior says: "This divine water is the king descending from heaven." Before that, the·"king" was in the earth. Cf. Ros. phil., p. 283. 
559 Phil. ref., p. 20. This idea derives from "De arte chymica" (Art. aurif., I, p. 612). Here the descent is identical with God's incarnation. Our passage is followed by the text: "I will content thee with this parable: The Son of God coming down into the Virgin and there clothed with flesh is born as a man, who .. after showing us the way of truth fo~ our salvation, suffering and dying for us, after his resurrection returned to heaven, where the earth, that is, mankind, is exalted above all the circles of the world and set in the intellectual heaven of the most holy Trinity." • 
560 "De vera praep. medicament. chem.," Theatr. chem., I, p. 681. 
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Ill. THE PERSO:-.iIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
This complete identification of the lapis with the "son of ma must obviously end with its ascension, But that contradicts t original and widespread conception of the lapis as the tinctL or medicine, which has meaning and value only if it appl itself to the base substances of the lower world. The uPF world is in need of no medicine, since it is incorruptible at way. A redeemer who proceeds from matter and returns matter gradually became unthinkable. Those who identified t lapis absolutely with Christ stopped working in the laborato and those who preferred laboratory work slowly gave up the mystic language. 
	296 	Ascent and descent, above and below, up and down, rep 
sent an emotional realization of opposites, and this realizati, gradually leads, or should lead, to their equilibrium. This mo occurs very frequently in dreams, in the form of going up- a downhill, climbing stairs, going up or down in a lift, balloc aeroplane, etc.561 It corresponds to the struggle between t winged and the wingless dragon, i.e., the uroboros. Dorn ( scribes it also as the "circular distillation" 562 and as t "spagyric vessel" which has to be constructed after the liken, of the natural vessel, i.e., in the form of a sphere. As Do interprets it, this vacillating between the opposites and bei tossed back and forth means being contained in the opposit They become a vessel in which what was previously now 0 thing and now another floats vibrating, so that the painful SI pension between opposites gradually changes into the bilatel activity of the point in the centre.563 This is the "liberation frc opposites," the nirdvandva of Hindu philosophy, though it not really a philosophical but rather a psychological develc ment. The "Aurelia occulta" puts this thought in the words the dragon: "Many from one and one from many, issue of famous line, I rise from the lowest to the highest. The neth, most power of the whole earth is united with the highest. I the: fore am the One and the Many within me." 564 In these WOI 561 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 64tf., 78£. 
562 "Phys. Trismeg.," Theatr. chem., I, p. 430. 
563 This motif is not uncommon in mandalas drawn by patients, the centre be represented either by a fluttering bird, or a pulsing cyst or heart. (In pathol, we speak of an "auricular flutter.") The same motif appears in the form of « centric rings (see" A Study in the Process of Individuation," Picture 8), or of wa 
	surrounding a centre (Picture 3)' 	564 Theatr. ch em., IV, p. 575. 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
the dragon makes it clear that he is the chthonic forerunner of the self. 
f. The Journey through the Planetary Houses 
	297 	Returning now to Michael Maier's journey to the seven 
mouths of the Nile, which signify the seven planets, we bring to this theme a deepened understanding of what the alchemists meant by ascent and descent. It was the freeing of the soul from the shackles of darkness, or unconsciousness; its ascent to heaven, the widening of consciousness; and finally its return to earth, to hard reality, in the form of the tincture or healing drink, endowed with the powers of the Above. What this means psychologically could be seen very clearly from the Hypnerotomachia 565 were its meaning not overlaid by a mass of ornate detail. It should therefore be pointed out that the whole first part of the book is a description of the dreamer's ascent to a world of gods and heroes, 6f his initiation into a Venus mystery, followed by the illumination and semi-apotheosis of Poliphilo and his Polia. In the second, smaller part this leads to disenchantment and the cooling off of the lovers, culminating in the knowledge that it was all only a dream. It is a descent to earth, to the reality of daily life, and it is not altogether clear whether the hero managed to "preserve in secret the nature of the heavenly centre which he acquired by the ascent," 566 One rather doubts it. Nevertheless, his exciting adventure has left us a psychological document which is a perfect example of the course and the 'symbolism of the individuation process. The spirit, if not the language, of alchemy breathes through it and sheds light even on the darkest enigmas and riddles of the Masters.567 
	298 	Maier's journey through the planetary houses begins with 
Saturn, who is the coldest, heaviest, and most distant of the planets, the malefic us and abode of evil, the mysterious and sinister Senex (Old Man), and from there he ascends to the region of the sun, to look for the Boy Mercurius, the longed-for and long-sought goal of the adept. It is an ascent ever nearer to the 
565 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). 
566 Dom, "Phys. Trismeg.," Theatr. chem., I, p. 409. 
567 For a thorough psychological analysis of the text see Fierz·David, The Dream of Poliphilo, pp. 57ff. 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
sun, from darkness and cold to light and warmth, from old age to youth, from death to rebirth. But he has to go back along the way he came, for Mercurius is not to be found in the region of the sun but at the point from which he originally started. This sounds very psychological, and in fact life never goes forward except at the place where it has come to a standstill. 568 The sought-for Mercurius is the sPiritus vegetativusJ a living spirit, whose nature it is to run through all the houses of the planets, Le., the entire Zodiac. We could just as well say through the entire horoscope, or, since the horoscope is the chronometric equivalent of individual character, through all the characterological components of the personality. Individual character is, on the old view, the curse or blessing which the gods bestowed on the child at its birth in the form of favourable or unfavourable astrological aspects. The horoscope is like the "chirographum," the "handwriting of the ordinances against us ... which Christ blotted out; and he took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. And after having disarmed the principalities and powers he made a show of them openly, and triumphed over them." 569 
	299 	This very ancient idea of what we might call an inborn bill of 
debt to fate is the Western version of a prenatal karma. It is the archons, the seven rulers of the planets, who imprint its fate upon the soul. Thus Priscillian (d. c. 385) says that the soul, on its descent to birth, passes through "certain circles" where it is made captive by evil powers, "and in accordance with the will of the victorious prince is forced into divers bodies, and his handwriting inscribed upon it." 570 Presumably this means that the soul is imprinted with the influences of the various planetary spheres. The descent of the soul through the planetary houses corresponds to its passage through the gates of the planets as described by Origen: the first gate is of lead and is correlated with Saturn,571 from which it is clear that Maier is following an old tradition.572 His peregrinatio chymica repeats the old 568 A psychological statement which, like all such, only becomes entirely true when 
	it can be reversed. 	569 Colossians 2 : 14f. (AV, mod.). 
570 Orosius, Ad Aurelium Augustinum commonitorium (CSEL., XVIII, p. 153).· 571 Contra Celsum, VI, 22 (trans. by Chadwick), p. 334. (Migne, P.C., vol. 9, col. 1324.) 
572 Usually the series seems to begin with Saturn. Cf. Bousset, "Die Himmelsreise der Seele." 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
"heavenly journey of the soul," an idea which seems to have been developed more particularly in Persia. 
	3°° 	I shall not go more closely here into the transitus through 
the planetary houses; 5i3 it is sufficient to know that Michael Maier, like Mercurius, passes through them on his mystic journey.574 This journey is reminiscent of the voyage of the hero, one motif of which becomes evident in the archetypal meeting at the critical place (the "ford") with the Ortus, its head showing the four colours. There are other motifs too. Where there is a monster a beautiful maiden is not far away, for they have, as we know, a secret understanding so that the one is seldom found without the other. The sibyl, the guide of souls, shows the hero the way to Mercurius, who in this case is Hermes Trismegistus, the supreme mystagogue. 
	3°1 	In the ShePherd of Hermas it is related that the hero, while 
travelling along the Via Campana, met a monster resembling a dragon of the sea (K~TO'): 
And the beast had on its head four colours, black, then the colour of flame and blood, then golden, then white. After I had passed the beast by and had gone about thirty feet further, la! a maiden met me, 'adorned as if coming forth from the bridal chamber,' all in white and with white sandals, veiled to the forehead, and a turban for a head-dress, but her hair was white.57S 
	3°2 	The similarity between the two stories is so complete that 
one is tempted to assume that Maier had read the ShePherd of H ermas. This is not very likely. Though he had a good education in the humanities I can see in his writings no evidence that he was familiar with the patristic literature, and in his references to the writings of Albertus and Thomas Aquinas 576 he might easily have let slip a remark of this kind. But one finds nothing, and it does not seem very probable, either, that Maier had direct knowledge of the New Testament Apocrypha. 
573 The interested reader is referred to Cumont, Textes et Monuments relatifs aux Mysteres de Mithra, I, pp. 361£.; Bousset, "Himmelsreise"; and Reitzenstein, "Himmelswanderung und Drachenkampf." 
574 Cf. the journey motif in Pyschology and Alchemy, pars. 304f., 457 and n. 75. Concerning Mercurius see the puer-senex motif in Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pp. g81£. 
575 ShePherd of Hermas, IV, 1, 10-2, 1 (trans. by Lake), p. 63. 576 In his Symbola aureae mensae. 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
	303 	Hermas interprets the maiden as the Church, and M 
fifteen hundred years later, as the Erythraean Sibyl, which goes to show once more that the newer is the older. The preme mistress" led Hermas to the kingdom of the triune I but Maier she leads to Hermes Trismegistus and Trisom the triadic Mercurius, who would reveal to him the secret 0 phoenix's resurrection.577 He can find Mercurius only tht< the rite of the ascent and descent, the "circular distillati beginning with the black lead, with the darkness, coldness, malignity of the malefic Saturn; then ascending through other planets to the fiery Sol, where the gold is heated in hottest fire and cleansed of all impurities; and finally retur to Saturn, where this time he meets Mercurius and receives ~ useful teachings from him. Saturn has here changed from a of ill omen into a "domus barbae" (House of the Beard), w the "wisest of all," Thrice-Greatest Hermes, imparts wisdoi Hermas too begins with the blackness; his mistress gives the following explanation: 
The black is this world in which you are living; the colour 0 and blood means that this world must be destroyed in blood fire. The golden part is you, who have fled from this world, for as gold is tried in the fire and becomes valuable, so also you live among them are tried .... The white part is the war] come, in which the elect of God shall dwell; for those who have chosen by God for eternal life will be without spot and pure.5 
	3°4 	In alchemy the fire purifies, but it also melts the OpP( 
into a unity. He who ascends unites the powers of Above Below and shows his full power when he returns agai earth.580 By this is to be understood the production on the hand of the panacea or Medicina Catholica, and on the otht 
577 I would also draw attention to the maiden and the dragon and the t symbolism in The Dream of Poliphilo (ed. by Fierz-David), especially the er ter with the triple-tongued dragon and the black prism in the realm of 4 Eleuterilida (pp. 73ff. and goff.). For the Erythraean Sibyl see Curtius, pp. 578 "Therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistos, as having three parts , Philosophy of the whole world."· "Tabula smaragdina," De alchemia cap. 12. "Domus barbae" comes from Arab al-birba, 'pyramid', where Herm said to be buried. 
579 Shepherd of Hermas, IV, 3, 2-3,5 (Lake, p. 67)· 
580 "Its power is complete when it is turned towards the earth."· "1 smaragdina," De alchemia (1541), cap. 6. 
22.7 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
a living being with a human form, the filius philosoPhorum) who is often depicted as a youth or hermaphrodite or child. He is a parallel of the Gnostic Anthropos, but he also appears as an Anthroparion, a kind of goblin, a familiar who stands by the adept in his work and helps the physician to heal.581 This being ascends and descends and unites Below with Above, gaining a new power which carries its effect over into everyday life. His mistress gives Hermas this advice: "Therefore do not cease to speak to the ears of the saints" 582_in other words, work among your fellow men by spreading the news of the Risen. 
	11°5 	Just as Maier on his return met Mercurius, so Hermas in his 
next vision met the Poimen, the shepherd, "a white fleece round his shoulders, a knapsack on his back, and a staff in his hand." Hermas recognized that "it was he to whom I was handed over," 583 namely the shepherd of the lamb, which was himself. In iconography the good shepherd has the closest connections with Hermes Kriophoros (the lamb-bearer); thus even in antiquity these two saviour figures coalesced. Whereas Hermas is "handed over" to his shepherd, Hermes hands over his art and wisdom to his pupil Maier and thus equips him to do something himself and to work with the aid of the magic caduceus. This, for a physician who was an alchemist, took the place of the staff of Asklepios, which had only one snake. The sacred snake of the Asklepieion signified: The god heals; but the caduceus, or Mercurius in the form of the coniunctio in the retort, means: In the hands of the physician lie the magic remedies granted by God.584 
1i81 As, for example, Asklepios and his cabir, Telesphoros. Cf. Kerenyi, AsklePios, pp. 58, 88, and CA. Meier, Antike Inkubation und moderne Psychothempie, pp. 47f. 
582 Shepherd of Hermas, IV, 3, 6 (Lake, p. 67). 583 Ibid., V, 1-4 (p. 69). 
584 For the interpretation of the caduceus see Servius, In Vergilii Carmina commentarii (ed. by Thilo and Hagen), I, p. 508: "For the serpents have heads which look inward, in order to signify that ambassadors ought to discuss and agree among themselves .... For which reason ... ambassadors of peace are called Caduceatores ... and to those Caducei are added two apples, one of the Sun and one of the Moon .... Mercury causes these two fierce animals to agree, so surely we also ought to agree with one another:' "Others say that the Latins call Mercury by that name as if he were Medicurrius, the mid-runner, because he is always passing between heaven and the lower regions ... and that the Caduceus is assigned to him because he brings enemies together in friendship by mediating confidence:' • (Ibid. 11, p. 220.) The medieval writer Pierius says of the caduceus: "He will very 
228 

Ill. THE PERSO;\;IFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
	306 	The numerous analogies between two texts so far apart in 
time enable us to take a psychological view of the transformations they describe. The sequence of colours coincides by and large with the sequence of the planets. Grey and black correspond to Saturn 585 and the evil world; they symbolize the beginning- in darkness, in the melancholy, fear, wickedness, and wretchedness of ordinary human life. It is Maier from whom the saying comes about the "noble substance which moves from lord to lord, in the beginning whereof is wretchedness with vinegar." 586 By "lord" he means the archon and ruler of the planetary house. He adds: "And so it will fare with me." The darkness and blackness can be interpreted psychologically as man's confusion and lostness; that state which nowadays results in an anamnesis, a thorough examination of all those contents which are the cause of the problematical situation, or at any rate its expression. This examination, as we know, includes the irrational contents that originate in the unconscious and express themselves in fantasies and dreams. The analysis and interpretation of dreams confront the conscious standpoint with the statements of the unconsciolls, thus widening its narrow horizon. This loosening up of cramped and rigid attitudes corresponds to the solution and separation of the elements by the aqua permanens) which was already present in the "body" and is lured out by the art. The water is a soul or spirit, that is, a psychic "substance," which now in its turn is applied to the initial material. This corresponds to using the dream's meaning to clarify existing problems. "Solutio" is defined in this sense by Dorn.581 
	307 	The situation is now gradually illuminated as is a dark night 
by the rising moon. The illumination comes to a certain extent from the unconscious, since it is mainly dreams that put us on the track of enlightenment. This dawning light corresponds to the albedo, the moonlight which in the opinion of some alchemists heralds the rising sun. The growing redness (rubedo) which now follows denotes an increase of warmth and light readily bring discordant minds into agreement, and will bind together the two serpents, that is, mutual hatreds, into one by the rod of his doctrine."· Cited in Picinellus, Afundus symbolicus, I, p. 152. 
;'85 "In the first place Saturn reigns in the nigredo." • Symb. aur. mensae, p. 156. 586 Ibid., P' 568. 
587 "Spec. phi!.," Theatr. chem., I, p. 303: "As bodies are dissolved by solution, so the doubts of the philosophers are resolved by knowledge:' • 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
coming from the sun, consciousness. This corresponds to the increasing participation of consciousness, which now begins to react emotionally to the contents produced by the unconscious. At first the process of integration is a "fiery" conflict, but gradually it leads over to the "melting" or synthesis of the opposites. The alchemists termed this the rubedo, in which the marriage. of the red man and the white woman, Sol and Luna, is consummated. Although the opposites flee from one another they nevertheless strive for balance, since a state of conflict is too inimical to life to be endured indefinitely. They do this by wearing each other out: the one eats the other, like the two dragons or the other ravenous beasts of alchemical symbolism. 
	!l08 	Astrologically, as we have said, this process corresponds to 
an ascent through the planets from the dark, cold, distant Saturn to the sun. To the alchemists the connection between individual temperament and the positions of the planets was self-evident, for these elementary astrological considerations were the common property of any educated person in the Middle Ages as well as in antiquity. The ascent through the planetary spheres therefore meant something like a shedding of the characterological qualities indicated by the horoscope, a retrogressive liberation from the character imprinted by the archons. The conscious or unconscious model for such an ascent was the Gnostic redeemer, who either deceives the archons by guile or breaks their power by force. A similar motif is the release from the "bill of debt to fate." The men of late antiquity in particular felt their psychic situation to be fatally dependent on the compulsion of the stars, Heimarmene, a feeling which may be compared with that inspired by the modern theory of heredity, or rather by the pessimistic use of it. A similar demoralization sets in in many neuroses when the patient takes the psychic factors producing the symptoms as though they were unalterable facts which it is useless to resist. The journey through the planetary houses, like the crossing of the great halls in the Egyptian underworld, therefore signifies the overcoming of a psychic obstacle, or of an autonomous complex, suitably represented by a planetary god or demon. Anyone who has passed through all the spheres is free from compulsion; he has won the crown of victory and become like a god. 
	!log 	In our psychological language today we express ourselves 
23° 

Ill. THE PERSO:'IJIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
more modestly: the journey through the planetary houses boils down to becoming conscious of the good and the bad qualities in our character, and the apotheosis means no more than maximum consciousness, which amounts to maximal freedom of the will. This goal cannot be better represented than by the alchemical symbol of the IWT01Jpd.VLCTp.a ~Aro1J (position of the sun at noon) in Zosimos.588 But at the zenith the descent begins. The mystic traveller goes back to the Nile mouth from which he started. He repeats, as it were, the descent of the soul which had led in the first place to the imprinting of the "chirographum." He retraces his steps through the planetary houses until he comes back to the dark Saturn. This means that the soul, which was imprinted with a horoscopic character at the time of its descent into birth, conscious now of its godlikeness, beards the archons in their lairs and carries the light undisguised down into the darkness of the world. 
	310 	Here again psychology makes no special claims. What before 
was a burden unwillingly borne and blamed upon the entire family, is seen by the greatest possible insight (which can be very modest!) to be no more than the possession of one's own personality, and one realizes-as though this were not self-evident!-that one cannot live from anything except what one is. 
	311 	On returning to the house of Saturn our pilgrim finds the 
long-sought Mercurius.589 Maier passes remarkably quickly over this highly significant encounter and mentions merely their "numerous conversations" without, however, disclosing their content. This is the more surprising in that Mercurius either personifies the great teacher or else has the character of the arcane substance, both of which would be a fruitful source for further revelations. For Mercurius is the light-bringing Nous, who knows the secret of transformation and of immortality. 
	!lll! 	Let us assume that Maier's sudden silence is no mere acci- 
dent but was intentional or even a necessity. This assumption is not entirely without justification since Maier was onc of the founders of the international Rosicrucian Society,590 and would therefore have no doubt been in a position to expatiate at length 
588 Berthelot, Alch. grecs, Ill, v bis (text vol., p. 118). 
589 More precisely, before he comes to the house of Saturn, "in one of the entrances," Symb. aur. mensae, p. 6o!l. 
500 Ibid., p. 477. Cf. Waite, The Real History of the Rosicrucians, pp. 1168ff. 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
upon the Hermetic arcana. What we know of the so-called Rosicrucian secrets does nothing to explain why they were hushed up. This, incidentally, is true of most "mysteries" of this kind. It is very significant that the "mysteries" of the early Church turned soon enough into "sacraments." The word "mystery" became a misnomer, since everything lay open in the rite. Andreas Rosencreutz used as a motto for his Chymical Wedding: 
"Mysteries profaned and made public fade and lose their grace. Therefore, cast not pearls before swine, nor spread roses for the ass." This attitude might have been a motive for silence. People had so often got to know of things that were kept secret in the mysteries under the most fearsome oaths and had wondered why on earth they should ever have been the object of secrecy. Selfimportance or the prestige of the priesthood or of the initiates seemed the obvious deduction. And there can be no doubt that the mysteries often were abused in this way. But the real reason was the imperative need to participate in a or perhaps the secret without which life loses its supreme meaning. The secret is not really worth keeping, but the fact that it is still obstinately kept reveals an equally persistent psychic motive for keeping secrets, and that is the real secret, the real mystery. It is indeed remarkable and "mysterious" that this gesture of keeping something secret should be made at all. Why does man need to keep a secret, and for what purpose does he invent an artificial one which he even decks out as an ineffably holy rite? The thing hidden is always more or less irrelevant, for in itself it is no more than an image or sign pointing to a content that cannot be defined more closely. This content is certainly not a matter for indifference since it indicates the living presence of a numinous archetype. The essential thing is the hiding, an expressive gesture which symbolizes something unconscious and "not to be named" lying behind it; something, therefore, that is either not 'yet conscious or cannot or will not become conscious. It points, in a word, to the presence of an unconscious content, which exacts from consciousness a tribute of constant regard and attention. With the application of interest the continual perception and assimilation of the effects of the "secret" become possible. This is beneficial to the conduct of life, because the contents of the unconscious can then exert their compensatory effect and, if taken note of and recognized, bring about a balance that pro- 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
motes health. On a primitive level, therefore, the chief effect of the mysteries is to promote health, growth, and fertility. If there were nothing good in the rite it would presumably never have come into existence or would long' since have perished. The tremendous psychic effect of the Eleusinian mysteries, for instance, is beyond question. Psychotherapeutic experience has made the meaning of secrets once more a topical question, not only from the religious or philosophical point of view but also in respect of the demands of conscience with which individuation confronts a man. 
	313 	Maier's silence is eloquent, as we soon find when we try to 
see the psychological equivalent of the descent and of the discovery of Mercurius. The maximal degree of consciousness confronts the ego with its shadow, and individual psychic life with a collective psyche. These psychological terms sound light enough but they weigh heavy, for they denote an almost unendurable conflict, a psychic strait whose terrors only he knows who has passed through it. What one then discovers about oneself and about man and the world is of such a nature that one would rather not speak of it; and besides, it is so difficult to put into words that one's courage fails at the bare attempt. So it need not be at all a frivolous evasion if Maier merely hints at his conversations with Mercurius. In the encounter with life and the world there are experiences that are capable of moving us to long and thorough reflection, from which, in time, insights and convictions grow up-a process depicted by the alchemists as the philosophical tree. The unfolding of these experiences is regulated, as it were, by two archetypes: the anima, who expresses life) and the "Wise Old Man," who personifies meaning.59! Our author was led in the first place by the anima-sibyl to undertake the journey through the planetary houses as the precondition of all that was to follow. It is therefore only logical that, towards the end of the descent, he should meet ThriceGreatest Hermes, the fount of all wisdom. This aptly describes the character of that spirit or thinking which you do not, like an intellectual operation, perform yourself, as the "little god of this world," but which happens to you as though it came from another, and greater, perhaps the great spirit of the world, not inappositely named Trismegistus. The long reflection, the "im59! For details see "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious," pars. 66, 79. 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
mensa meditatio" of the alchemists is defined as an "internal colloquy with another, who is invisible." 592 
	314 	Possibly Maier would have revealed to us something more 
if Mercurius had not been in such a hurry to take upon himself "the role of arbiter between the owl and the birds who were fighting it." 593 This is an allusion to a work of Maier's entitled Jocus severus (Frankfurt a. M., 1617), where he defends the wisdom of alchemy against its detractors, a theme that also plays an important part in his Symbola aureae mensae in the form of argument and counterargument. One is therefore justified in assuming that Maier got into increasing conflict with himself and his environment the more he buried himself in the secret speculations of Hermetic philosophy. Indeed nothing else could have been expected, for the world of Hermetic images gravitates round the unconscious, and the unconscious compensation is always aimed at the conscious positions which are the most strongly defended because they are the most questionable, though its apparently hostile aspect merely reflects the surly face which the ego turns towards it. In reality the unconscious compensation is not intended as a hostile act but as a necessary and helpful attempt to restore the balance. For Maier it meant an inner and outer conflict which was not abolished, but only embittered, by the firmness of his convictions. For everyone-sided conviction is accompanied by the voice of doubt, and certainties that are mere beliefs turn into uncertainties which may correspond better with the truth. The truth of the "sic et non" (yes and no), almost, but not quite, recognized by Abelard, is a difficult thing for the intellect to bear; so it is no wonder that Maier got stuck in the conflict and had to postpone his discovery of the phoenix until doomsday. Fortunately he was honest enough not to assert that he had ever made the lapis or the philosophical gold, and for this reason he never spread a veil of deception over :lis work. Thanks to his scrupulousness his late successors are at least able to guess how far he had progressed in the art, and where his labours came to a standstill. He never succeeded, as we can now see, in reaching the point where conflict and argument become logically superfluous, where "yes and no" are two aspects of the same thing. "Thou wilt never make the One which thou 
592 Ru]and, Lexicon, p. 226. 
593 Symb. aur. mensae, pp. 603f. 
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Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
seekest," says the master, "except first there be made one thing of thyself." 594 
g. The Regeneration in Sea-water 
	315 	After these long digressions on the interrelated symbols that 
branch out from the sea and its various aspects, we will resume our discussion of salt and salt-water. 
	316 	The aqua pontica (or aqua permanens) behaves very much 
like the baptismal water of the Church. Its chief function is ablution, the cleansing of the sinner, and in alchemy this is the "lato," the impure body; 595 hence the oft-repeated saying attributed to Elbo Interfector: 596 "Whiten the lato 597 and rend the books, lest your hearts be rent asunder." 598 In the Rosarium the ablution 599 of the lato occurs in variant form: it is cleansed not by water but by "Azoth and fire," 600 that is, by a kind of baptism in fire, which is often used as a synonym for water.601 The equivalent of this in the Catholic rite is the plunging of a burning candle into the font, in accordance with Matthew 3 : 11: "He 
594 Dorn, "Spec. phil.:' Theatr. chem., I, p. 276. 
595 "Rosinus ad Sarrat.," Art. auri!., I, p. 280: "But the ]ato is the unclean body." • 596 For instance in Maier, Symb. aur. mensae, p. 215. 
597 The whitened ]ato is identical with the "crystalline salt." (Khunrath, Hyl. Chaos, p. 197.) The lato, too, is an arcane substance, but it has a negative character. Mylius says: "The lato is an imperfect yellow body compounded of Sun and Moon: when you have whitened it and restored it to its pristine yellowness, you have the ]ato again ... Then you have passed through the door and have the beginning of the art." • It is the prima materia laPidis in the state of vilitas, 'baseness: from which the "pearl of great price" arises. (Phil. 1"e!., p. 199.) This passage seems to be taken from "Consil. coniug.," Ars chemica, p. 134. The ]ato is the "b]ack earth" (ibid., p. 80, also p. 39). According to Du Cange, "Iato" has something to do with "electrum." Cf. Lippmann, Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchemie, I, p. 481. 
598 "Dealbate Latonem et libros rumpite, ne corda vestra corrumpantur." Ros. phil. cites this saying from Geber, but in corrupt form: "reponite" instead of "rumpite." 
599 Ab]utio was understood by the alchemists as distillatio. Cf. Mylius, Phil. 1"ef., P·35· 
600 Quotation from Hermes: "Azoth and fire cleanse the lato, and remove the blackness from it" • (A rt. aurif., 11, p. 277). 
601 Mylius has: "Fire and water cleanse the ]ato and wipe off its blackness."· Phil. re!., p. 297. 
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MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire." 602 The alchemists did not hesitate to call the transformative process a "baptism." Thus the "Consilium coniugii" says: "And if we are baptized in the fountain of gold and silver, and the spirit of our body ascends into heaven with the father and the son, and descends again, then our souls shall revive and my animal body will remain white, that is, [the body] of the moon." 603 The subject of this sentence is Sol and Luna. The Aurora consurgens I distinguishes three kinds of baptism, "in water, in blood, and in fire," 604 the Christian ideas being here transferred directly to the chemical procedure. The same is true of the idea that baptism is a submersion in death, following Colossians 2: 12: "(Ye are) buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him." In his Table of Symbols, Penotus 605 correlates the "moon, the spirits and ghosts of the dead [Manes et Lemures], and gods of the underworld" with the "mystery of baptism," and the corresponding stage in the opus is the solutio} which signifies the total dissolution of the imperfect body in the aqua divina} its submersion, mortification,606 and burial. The putrefaction takes place in the grave, and the foul smell that accompanies it is the stench of the graves.607 The motif of imprisonment in the underworld is found in Greek alchemy, in the treatise of Komarios: "Lock them [the substances] in Hades." 608 The rebirth from the floods (KAul>wVf") of Hades and from the grave recurs in Cyril of Jerusalem: "That saving flood 602 The fire symbolism connected with baptism is expressed particularly clearly in the hymn of St. Romanus, "De theophania": "I behold him in the midst of the floods, him who once appeared as dew in the fire in the midst of the three youths [Daniel 3 : 24f.], now a fire shining in the Jordan." • Piu'a, Analecta saera, I, p. 21. 603 P. 128.· Cf. supra, par. 2g1. 
604 Parable 4, Another passage has: "But when he baptizes, he infuses the soul." • 
	Ibid. 	605 Theatr. ehem., 11, p. 123. 
606 The classic example of this is the dissolution of Gabricus in the body of Beya, into "atoms" (partes indivisibiles). Ros. phil., in Art. aurif., 11, p. 246. 
607 Morienus, "De transmut. metallica," Art. aurif., 11, p. 33. 
608 • The text is in a poor state here. The passage is apparently attributed to Stephanos, and occurs not only in the treatise of Komarios (Berthelot, Aleh. grees. IV, xx, 13, lines 17 and 20) but also in Zosimos (Ill, ii). Whether Stephanos (7th cent.) would have expressed himself in such an old· fashioned way is uncertain. The passage does in fact belong in the treatise of Komarios, where it also occurs in different words at 10, lines 22ff. This runs: "The waves injure them [the substances] ... in Hades and in the grave where they lie. But when the grave is opened, they will rise up from Hades like the newborn from the belly." • 
236 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
is both your sepulchre and your mother," 609 and in St. Augustine: "The water leads him down, as if dying, into the grave; the Holy Spirit brings him up, as if rising again, into heaven." 610 
	~P7 	The treatise of Ostanes 611 says that when preparing the 
ill>wp Bfiov, the vessel with the ingredients should be immersed in sea-water, and then the divine water will be perfected. It is, so to speak, gestated in the womb of the sea-water. The text says: 
"This [divine] water makes the dead living and the living dead, it lights the darkness and dark ens the light, concentrates [l>paaaf'TaL] the sea-water and quenches fire." As this miraculous water occurs even in the oldest texts, it must be of pagan rather than of Christian origin. The oldest Chinese treatise known to us (A.D. 142) likewise contains this idea of the divine water: it is the "flowing pearl" (quicksilver), and the divine ch'i} meaning 'air, spirit, ethereal essence'. The various essences are likened to "spring showers in abundance," 612 and this recalls the "blessed water" in the treatise of Komarios, which brings the spring.613 The age-old use of water at sacrifices and the great role it played in Egypt, where Western alchemy originated, may well have foreshadowed the water symbolism of later times. Folk ideas and superstitions such as we find in the Magic Papyri may have made their contribution, too; 'the foUowing words might just as well have been taken from an alchemical treatise: "I am the plant named Bai"s, I am a spout of blood ... , the outgrowth of the 
	abyss.614 	I am the sacred bird Phoenix.615 ... I am 
	Helios 	I am Aphrodite .... I am Kronos, who has 
showed forth the light. . , , I am Osiris, named water, I am Isis, named dew, I am Esenephys, named spring." 616 The personified ill>wp (hiov might well have spoken like that. 
	!l18 	The effect of Christian baptism is the washing away of sin 
and the acceptance of the neophyte into the Church as the earthly kingdom of Christ, sanctification and rebirth through 
609 Cateeheses mystagogieae, 11, 4 (Migne, P.G., vol. 33, col. 1080).· 
	610 Pitra, Analeeta saera, V, p. 150.· 	611 Berthelot, Aleh. grees, IV, ii, 2. 
	612 Isis, XVIII, pp. 238 and 251. 	613 Berthelot, A/ch. grecs, IV, xx, 8, g, 12. 
614 The lvaf3vcrcraLOv iJliwp (abyssal water) is mentioned in the treatise of Christianos, "The Making of the Mystical Water" (Berthelot, VI, v, 6, line 12). 
615 Probably the earliest reference to the phoenix is in Zosimos (Berthelot, Ill, vi, 5), where a quotation from Ostanes speaks of an "eagle of brass, who descends into the pure spring and bathes there every day, thus renewing himself," • 
616 Preisendanz, Pap. Graee. Mag., 11, p. 73, Pap. XII, lines 228-38 .• 
237 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTlONIS 
grace, and the bestowal of an "indelible character" on the baptized. The effect of the aqua permanens is equally miraculous. The "Gloria mundi" says: "The mystery of every thing is life, which is water; for water dissolves the body into spirit and summons a spirit from the dead." 617 Dissolution into spirit, the body's volatilization or sublimation, corresponds chemically to evaporation, or any rate to the expulsion of evaporable ingredients like quicksilver, sulphur, etc. Psychologically it corresponds to the conscious realization and integration of an unconscious content. Unconscious contents lurk somewhere in the body like so many demons of sickness, impossible to get hold of, especially when they give rise to physical symptoms the organic causes of which cannot be demonstrated. The "spirit" summoned from the dead is usually the spirit Mercurius, who, as the anima mundi) is inherent in all things in a latent state. It is clear from the passage immediately following that it is salt of which it is said: "And that is the thing which we seek: all our secrets are contained in it." Salt, however, "takes its origin from Mercurius," so salt is a synonym for the arcane substance. It also plays an important part in the Roman rite: after being blessed it is added to the consecrated water, and in the ceremony of baptism a few grains of the consecrated salt are placed in the neophyte's mouth with the words: "Receive the salt of wisdom: may it be a propitiation for thee unto eternal life." 
	lP9 	As the alchemists strove to produce an incorruptible "glori- 
fied body," they would, if they were successful, attain that state in the albedo) where the body became spotless and no longer subject to decay. The white substance of the ash 618 was therefore described as the "diadem of the heart," and its synonym, the white foliated earth (terra alba foliata), as the "crown of victory." 619 The ash is identical with the "pure water" which is 
617 Mus. herm., p. 262 (Waite, I, p. 211). This opinion is put into the mouth of "Socrates," and corresponds more or less to Sermo XVI of the Turba. 
618 Ash is the calcined and annealed substance, freed from all decomposition. 
619 Senior, De chemia, p. 41: "The white foliated earth is the crown of victory, which is ash extracted from ash, and their second body,"· The connection with 1 Thess. 2'=' 19. " ... our hope, or joy, or crown of glory" (DV), is doubtful. likewiae with Isaiah 28: 5, " ... the Lord of hosts shall be a crown of glory" (DV). On the other hand, Isaiah 61: 3, " ... to give them a crown for ashes," is of importance for the alchemical connection between ashes, diadem, and crown. Cf. Goodenough. "The Crown of Victory." 
~38 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
"cleansed from the darkness of the soul, and of the black matter, for the wickedness (malitia) of base earthiness has been separated from it." 620 This "terrestreitas mala" is the "terra damnata" (accursed earth) mentioned by other authors; it is what Goethe calls the "trace of earth painful to bear," the moral turpitude that cannot be washed off. In Senior the ash is synonymous with vitrum (glass), which, on account of its incorruptibility and transparency, seemed to resemble the glorified body. Glass in its turn was associated with salt, for salt was praised as "that virgin and pure earth," and the "finest crystalline glass" is composed mainly of sal Sodae (soda salts), with sand added as a binding agent. Thus the raw material of glass-making (technically known as the "batch") is "formed from two incorruptible substances." 621 Furthermore, glass is made in the fire, the "pure" element. In the sharp or burning taste of salt the alchemists detected the fire dwelling within it, whose preservative property it in fact shares. Alexander of Macedon is cited as saying: "Know that the salt is fire and dryness." 622 Or, "the salts are of fiery nature." 623 Salt has an affinity with sulphur, whose nature is essentially fiery.624 Glauber maintains that "fire and salt are in their essential nature one thing" and are therefore "held in high esteem by all sensible Christians, but the ignorant know no more of these things than a cow, a pig, or a brute, which live without understanding." He also says the "Abyssinians" baptized with water and fire. Without fire and salt the heathen would not have been able to offer sacrifice, and the evangelist Mark had said that "everyone shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt." 625 
h. The Interpretation and Meaning of Salt 
	320 	Salt as much as ash is a synonym for the albedo (or deal- 
batio), and is identical with "the white stone, the white sun, the full moon, the fruitful white earth, cleansed and calcined." 626 
	620 Ibid .• p. 40. 	621 Vigenerus, "De igne et sale," Theatr. chem., VI, pp. 44f. 
622 Mus. herm., p. 217 (Waite. I. p. 176). 623 Vigenerus, p. 57. 
624 Mus. herm., p. 217. 
625 De natura salium, pp. 16f. Glauber alludes here to Mark 9: 49. 626 Mylius. Phil. ref., p. 20.· 
~39 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 

ophers were so fascinated by their own psychisms that, in their naivete, they faithfully reproduced the inner psychic situation externally. Although the unconscious, personified by the anima, is in itself transcendental, it can appear in the sphere of consciousness, that is, in this world, in the form of an "influence" on conscIOUS processes. 
Just as the world-soul pervades all things, so does salt. It is ubiquitous and thus fulfils the main requirement of an arcane substance, that it can be found everywhere. No doubt the reader will be as conscious as I am of how uncommonly difficult it is to give an account of salt and its ubiquitous connections. It represents the feminine principle of Eros, which brings everything into relationship, in an almost perfect way. In this respect it is surpassed only by Mercurius, and the notion that salt comes from Mercurius is therefore quite understandable. For salt, as the soul or spark of the anima mundi, is in very truth the daughter of the spiritus vegetativus of creation. Salt is far more indefinite and more universal than sulphur, whose essence is fairly well defined by its fiery nature. 
The relationship of salt to the anima mundi, which as we know is personified by the Primordial Man or Anthropos, brings us to the analogy with Christ. Glauber himself makes the equation Sal: Sol = A : OMEGA 0,634 so that salt becomes an analogue of God. According to Glauber, the sign for salt e was originally 0,635 a double totality symbol; the circle representing non-differentiated wholeness, and the square discriminated wholeness.636 As a matter of fact there is another sign for salt, ~ in contradistinction to ~ Venus, who certainly has less to do with understanding and wisdom than has salt. Salt, says Glauber, was the "first fiat" at the creation.637 Christ is the salt of wisdom which is given at baptism.638 These ideas are elaborated by Georg von Welling: Christ is the salt, the fiat is the Word that is begotten from eternity for our preservation. Christ is the "sweet, fixed salt of silent, gentle eternity." The body, when salted by Christ, becomes tinctured and therefore incorruptible.639 
The Christ parallel runs through the late alchemical speculations that set in after Boehme, and it was made possible by the 

The connecting link between ash and salt is potash, and the burning and corrosive property of lye (caustic solution) is well known.627 Senior mentions that the dealbatio was known as "salsatura" (marination). 628 
	!l21 	Some light is thrown on the numerous overlapping signifi- 
cations of salt, and the obscurity begins to clear up, when we are informed, further, that one of its principal meanings is soul. As the white substance it is the "white woman," and the "salt of our magnesia" 629 is a "spark of the anima mundi." 630 For Glauber the salt is feminine and corresponds to Eve.631 The "Gloria mundi" says: "The salt of the earth is the sou1." 632 This pregnant sentence contains within it the whole ambiguity of alchemy. On the one hand the soul is the "aqua permanens, which dissolves and coagulates," the arcane substance which is at once the transformer and the transformed, the nature which conquers nature. On the other hand it is the human soul imprisoned in the body as the anima mundi is in matter, and this soul undergoes the same transformations by death and purification, and finally by glorification, as the lapis. It is the tincture which "coagulates" all substances, indeed it even "fixes" (figit) itself; it comes "from the centre of the earth and is the destroyed earth, nor is there anything on the earth like to the tincture." 633 The soul is therefore not an earthly but a transcendental thing, regardless of the fact that the alchemists expected it to appear in a retort. This contradiction presented no difficulties to the medieval mind. There was a good reason for this: the philos- 
627 Cf. the Liber de aluminibus et salibus, attributed to Rhasis or to Garlandus (Buch der Alaune und Salze, ed. Ruska, pp. SdI.). This purely chemical treatise of Arabic origin gives some idea of what the early medieval alchemists knew of 
	chemistry. 	628 De chemia, p. 42. 
629 For the alchemists magnesia was as a rule an arcane substance and not a specifically chemical one. Cf. Aion, pars. 241f., 244. 
630 Khunrath, Hyl. Chaos, p. 197. 
631 De Signatura salium, p. 12. For Eve as the feminine element contained in the man see "Psychology and Religion," par. 47, n. 22. 
632 Mus. herm., p. 217 (Waite, I, p. 176): ",Sal terrae est anima." 
633 P. 218. How very much the tincture is the "baptismal water" can be seen from the Greek (Berthelot, VI, xviii, 4, line 2): "Bemg bodies they become spirits, so that he will baptize in the tincture of the spirit." • There is a similar passage in Pelagios (Berthelot, IV, i, 9, lines 17ff.). We are reminded of the famous passage about the krater in Zosimos (Berthelot, Ill, li, line 8): "baptized in the krater;' referring to the baptism of Theosebeia into the Poimandres community. 
24° 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
sal: saPientia equation. Already in antiquity salt denoted wit, good sense, good taste, etc., as well as spirit. Cicero, for instance, remarks: "In wit [sale] and humour Caesar ... surpassed them alL" 640 But it was the Vulgate that had the most decisive influence on the formation of alchemical concepts. In the Old Testament, even the "salt of the covenant" 641 has a moral meaning. In the New Testament, the famous words "Ye are the salt of the earth" (Matthew 5 : 13) show that the disciples were regarded as personifications of higher insight and divine wisdom, just as, in their role of a7T6(TTOAOL (proclaimers of the message), they functioned as "angels" (aYY£Am, 'messengers'), so that God's kingdom on earth might approximate as closely as possible to the structure of the heavenly hierarchy. The other well-known passage is at Mark 9 : 50, ending with the words: "Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another." The earliest reference to salt in the New Testament (Colossians 4 : 6) likewise has a classical flavour: "Let your speech be alway with grace, and seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man." 
	325 	Here salt undoubtedly means insight, understanding, wis- 
dom. In both Matthew and Mark the salt is liable to lose its savour. Evidently this salt must keep its tang, just as the wise virgins kept their lamps trimmed. For this purpose a flexibility of mind is needed, and the last thing to guarantee this is rigid insistence on the necessity of faith. Everyone will admit that it is the task of the Church to safeguard her store of wisdom, the aqua doctrinae) in its original purity, and yet, in response to the changing spirit of the times, she must go on altering it and differentiating it just as the Fathers did. For the cultured GrecoRoman world early Christianity was among other things a message in philosophical disguise, as we can see quite plainly from Hippolytus. It was a competing philosophical doctrine that reached a certain peak of perfection in St. Thomas. Until well into the sixteenth century the degree of philosophical truth of Christian doctrine corresponded to that of scientific truth today. 
	326 	The physicians and natural philosophers of the Middle Ages 
nevertheless found themselves faced with problems for which the Church had no answer. Confronted with sickness and death, the physicians did not hesitate to seek counsel with the Arabs 640 De officiis I, §133 (trans. by Miller), pp. 136£ .• 
641 For instance, Leviticus 2 : 13. 
242 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
and so resuscitate that bit of the ancient world which the Church thought she had exterminated for ever, namely the Mandaean and Sabaean remnants of Hellenistic syncretism. From them they derived a sal saPientiae that seemed so unlike the doctrine of the Church that before long a process of mutual assimilation arose which put forth some very remarkable blossoms. The ecclesiastical allegories kept, so far as I can judge, to the classical usage of Sal. Only St. Hilary (d. 367) seems to have gone rather more deeply into the nature of salt when he remarks that "salt contains in itself the element of water and fire, and by this is one out of two." 642 Picinellus observes: "Two elements which stir up an implacable enmity between themselves are found in wondrous alliance in salt. For salt is wholly fire and wholly water." 643 For the rest he advises a sparing use of salt: 
"Let the word be sprinkled with salt, not deluged with it," 644 and another, earlier allegorist, the Jesuit Nicholas Caussin,645 does not mention salt at all. 
	327 	This is not altogether surprising, for how do wisdom and 
revelation square with one another? As certain books of the Old Testament canon show, there is, besides the wisdom of God which expresses itself in revelation, a human wisdom which cannot be had unless one works for it. Mark 9 : 50 therefore exhorts us to make sure that we always have enough salt in us, and he is certainly not referring to divine revelation, for this is something no man can produce on his own resources. But at least he can cultivate and increase his own human wisdom. That Mark should offer this warning, and that Paul should express himself in a very similar way, is in accord with the traditional Judeo-Hellenism of the Jewish communities at that time. An authoritarian Church, however, leaves very little room for the salt of human wisdom. Hence it is not surprising that the sal sapientiae plays an incomparably greater role outside the Church. Irenaeus, reporting the views of the Gnostics, says: "The spiritual, they say, [is] sent forth to this end, that, being united here below with the psychic, it may take form, and be instructed simultaneously by intercourse with it. And this they declare 
642 Commentarium in Matthaei Evangelium, IV, 10 (Migne, PL., vol. 9, col. 954).643 Mundus symbolicus, p. 711. 
644 "Aspergatur sermo sapientia, non obruatur." 645 Polyhistor symbolicus. 
243 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
to be the salt and the light of the world." 646 The union of the spiritual, masculine principle with the feminine, psychic principle is far from being just a fantasy of the Gnostics: it has found an echo in the Assumption of the Virgin, in the union of Tifereth and Malchuth, and in Goethe's "the Eternal Feminine leads us upward and on." Hippolytus mentions this same view as that of the Sethians. He says: 
But when this wave is raised from the water by the wind and made pregnant in its nature, and has received within itself the reproductive power of the feminine, it retains the light scattered from on high together with the fragrance of the spirit [7rJlftJ/laTo,],647 and that is Nous given shape in various forms. This [light] is a perfect God, who is brought down from the unbegotten light on high and from the spirit into man's nature as into a temple, by the power of nature and the movement of the wind. It is engendered from the water and commingled and mixed with the bodies as if it were the salt of all created things, and a light of the darkness struggling to be freed from the bodies, and not able to find a way out. For some very small spark of the light is mingled with the fragrance from above .... [Here follows a corrupt and controversial passage which I pass over.] ... Therefore every thought and care of the light from above is how and in what way the Nous may be delivered from the death of the sinful and dark body, from the father below [TOV KUTW(hJl],648 who is the wind which raised up the waves in tumult and terror, and begot Nous his own perfect son, who is yet not his own son in substance. For he was a ray of light from on high, from that perfect light over· powered in the dark and terrible, bitter polluted water, and a shining spirit carried away over the water ... 649 
	328 	This strangely beautiful passage contains pretty well every- 
thing that the alchemists endeavoured to say about salt: it is the spirit, the turning of the body into light (albedo), the spark of the anima mundi) imprisoned in the dark depths of the sea and begotten there by the light from above and the "reproductive power of the feminine." It should be noted that the alchemists could have known nothing of Hippolytus, as his Philosophu646 Adv. haer., I, vi, 1 (cf. trans. Roberts / Rambaut, I, p. 25). 
647 Here pneuma has the meaning of a holy spirit and not of wind. 
648 "Death" and the "father below" are both preceded by the same <:i".6 (from) and are therefore parallel if not identical, in so far as the begetter of life is also the begetter of death. This is an indication of the ineluctable polaris tic nature of the auctor rerum. 
649 Elenchos, V, 19, 14ff. Cf. Legge, PhilosoPhumena, I, pp. 163f. 
244 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
mena) long believed lost, was rediscovered only in the middle of the nineteenth century in a monastery on Mount Athos. Anyone familiar with the spirit of alchemy and the views of the Gnostics in Hippolytus will be struck again and again by their inner affinity. 
	329 	The clue to this passage from the Elenchos) and to other 
similar ones, is to be found in the phenomenology of the self.650 Salt is not a very common dream-symbol, but it does appear in the cubic form of a crystal,65! which in many patients' drawings represents the centre and hence the self; similarly, the quaternary structure of most mandalas reminds one of the sign for salt ell mentioned earlier. Just as the numerous synonyms and attributes of the lapis stress now one and now another of its aspects, so do the symbols of the self. Apart from its preservative quality salt has mainly the metaphorical meaning of sapientia. With regard to this aspect the "Tractatus aureus" states: "It is said in the mystic language of our sages, He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies .... He who works without salt draws a bow without a string. For you must know that these sayings refer to a very different kind of salt from the common mineral. ... Sometimes they call the medicine itself 'Salt.' " 652 These words are ambiguous: here salt means "wit" as well as wisdom. As to the importance of salt in the opus, J ohannes Grasseus says of the arcane substance: "And this is the Lead of the Philosophers, which they also call the lead of the air. In it is found the shining white dove, named the salt of the metals, wherein is the whole magistery of the work. This [dove] is the pure, chaste, wise, and rich Queen of Sheba." 653 Here salt, arcane substance (the paradoxical "lead of the air"), the white dove (sPiritus sapientiae), wisdom, and femininity appear in one figure. The saying from the "Gloria mundi" is quite clear: "No man can understand this Art who does not know the salt and its preparation." 654 For the "Aquarium sapientum" the sal saPientiae comes from the aqua benedicta or aqua pontica) which, itself an extract, is named "heart, soul, and spirit." At first the 
650 See Aion, ch. 13. 
65! Cubic salt crystals are mentioned i~ Welling, Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum, p. 41. 652 Mus. herm., p. 20 (Waite, I, p. 22). 
653 "Area arcani," Theatr. chem., VI, p. 314. 654 Mus. herm., p. 216 (Waite, I, p. 176). 
245 

Ill. THE PERSO;\lIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES 
is co-ordinated with the nature of woman. The masculine, solar nature in the right half of the quaternio knows neither coldness, nor a shadow, nor heaviness, melancholy, etc., because, so long as all goes well, it identifies as closely as possible with consciousness, and that as a rule is the idea which one has of oneself. In this idea the shadow is usually missing: first because nobody likes to admit to any inferiority, and second because logic forbids something white to be called black. A good man has good qualities, and only the bad man has bad qualities. For reasons of prestige we pass over the shadow in complete silence. A famous example of masculine prejudice is Nietzsche's Superman, who scorns compassion and fights against the "Ugliest Man"-the ordinary man that everyone is. The shadow must not be seen, it must be denied, repressed, or twisted into something quite extraordinary. The sun is always shining and everything smiles back. There is no room for any prestige-diminishing weakness, so the sol niger is never seen. Only in solitary hours is its presence feared. 
Things are different with Luna: every month she is darkened and extinguished; she cannot hide this from anybody, not even from herself. She knows that this same Luna is now bright and now dark-but who has ever heard of a dark sun? We call this quality of Luna "woman's closeness to nature," and the fiery brilliance and hot air that plays round the surface of things we like to call "the masculine mind." 
Despite all attempts at denial and obfuscation there is an 247 
MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 

Cold

Earth

Water

moist

Air

Warm

Fire

Dry

aqua is contained in the prima materia and is "of a blood-red colour; but after its preparation it becomes of a bright, clear, transparent white, and is called by the sages the Salt of Wisdom." 655 Khunrath boldly summarizes these statements about the salt when he says: "Our water cannot be made without the salt of wisdom, for it is the salt of wisdom itself, say the philosophers; a fire, and a salt fire, the true Living Universal Menstruum." "Without salt the work has no success." 656 Elsewhere he remarks: "Not without good reason has salt been adorned by the wise with the name of Wisdom." Salt is the lapis, a "mystery to be hidden." 657 Vigenerus says that the Redeemer chose his disciples "that they might be the salt of men and proclaim to them the pure and incorruptible doctrine of the gospel." He reports the "Cabalists" as saying that the "computatio" 658 of the Hebrew word for salt (melach) gives the number 78. This number could be divided by any divisor and still give a word that referred to the divine Name. We will not pursue the inferences he draws from this but will only note that for all those reasons salt was used "for the service of God in all offerings and sacrifices." 659 Glauber calls Christ the sal sapientiae and says that his favourite disciple John was "salted with the salt of wisdom." 660 
	330 	Apart from its lunar wetness and its terrestrial nature, the 
most outstanding properties of salt are bitterness and wisdom. As in the double quaternio of the elements and qualities, earth and water have coldness in common, so bitterness and wisdom would form a pair of opposites with a third thing between. (See diagram on facing page.) The factor common to both, however incommensurable the two ideas may seem, is, psychologically, the function of feeling. Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness. Salt, as the carrier of this fateful alternative, 
	655 Mus. herm., p. 88 (Waite, I, p. 80). 	656 Hyl. Chaos, pp. 229, 254. 
657 Amphitheatrum, p. 197. The lapis, however, corresponds to the self. 
658 By "computatio" is meant the "isopsephia," that is, the sum which results from the numerical values of the letters in a word, this word being then equated with another word having the same numerical value. 
659 "De igne et sale," Theatr. chem., VI, pp. 129f. 
660 De natura salium, pp. 25 and 51. Christ as sal sapientiae is another symbol of the self. 
246 

MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS 
unconscious factor, a black sun, which is responsible for the surprisingly common phenomenon of masculine split-mindedness, when the right hand mustn't know what the left is doing. This split in the masculine psyche and the regular darkening of the moon in woman toget er explain the remarkable fact that the woman is accused of all the darkness in a man, while he himself basks in the thought that he is a veritable fount of vitality and illumination for all the females in his environment. Actually, he would be better advised to shroud the brilliance of his mind in the profoundest doubt. It is not difficult for this type of mind (which besides other things is a great trickster like Mercurius) to admit a host of sins in the most convincing way, and even to combine it with a spurious feeling of ethical superiority without in the least approximating to a genuine insight. This can never be achieved without the participation of feeling; but the intellect admits feeling only when it is convenient. The novilunium of woman is a source of countless disappointments for man which easily turn to bitterness, though they could equally well be a source of wisdom if they were understood. Naturally this is possible only if he is prepared to acknowledge his black sun, that is, his shadow. 
	333 	Confirmation of our interpretation of salt as Eros (i.e., as a 
feeling relationship) is found in the fact that the bitterness is the origin of the colours (par. 245). We have only to look at the drawings and paintings of patients who supplement their analysis by active imagination to see that colours are feeling-values. Mostly, to begin with, only a pencil or pen is used to make rapid sketches of dreams, sudden ideas, and fantasies. But from a certain moment on the patients begin to make use of colour, and this is generally the moment when merely intellectual interest gives way to emotional participation. Occasionally the same phenomenon can be observed in dreams, which at such moments are dreamt in colour, or a particularly vivid colour is insisted upon. 
	334 	Disappointment, always a shock to the feelings, is not only 
the mother of bitterness but the strongest incentive to a differentiation of feeling. The failure of a pet plan, the disappointing behaviour of someone one loves, can supply the impulse either for a more or less brutal outburst of affect or for a modification and adjustment of feeling, and hence for its higher development. This culminates in wisdom if feeling is supplemented by 
248 

Ill. THE PERSONIFICATION OF THE OPPOSITES reflection and rational insight. Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. 
	335 	This interpretation of salt and its qualities prompts us to 
ask, as in all cases where alchemical statements are involved, whether the alchemists themselves had such thoughts. We know from the literature that they were thoroughly aware of the moral meaning of the amaritudo} and hy sapientia they did not mean anything essentially different from what we understand by this word. But how the wisdom comes from the bitterness, and how the bitterness can be the source of the colours, on these points they leave us in the dark. Nor have we any reason to believe that these connections were so self-evident to them that they regarded any explanation as superfluous. If that were so, someone would have been sure to blurt it out. It is much more probable that they simply said these things without any conscious act of cognition. Moreover, the sum of all these statements is seldom or never found consistently formulated in anyone author; rather one author mentions one thing and another another, and it is only by viewing them all together, as we have tried to do here, that we get the whole picture.661 The alchemists themselves suggest this method, and I must admit that it was their advice which first put me on the track of a psychological interpretation. The Rosarium says one should "read from page to page," and other sayings are "He should possess many books" and "One book opens another." Yet the complete lack, until the nineteenth century, of any psychological viewpoint (which even today meets with the grossest misunderstandings) makes it very unlikely that anything resembling a psychological interpretation penetrated into the consciousness of the alchemists. Their moral concepts moved entirely on the plane of synonym and analogy, in a word, of "correspondence." Most of their statements spring not from a conscious but from an unconscious act of thinking, as do dreams, sudden ideas, and fantasies, where again we only find out the meaning afterwards by careful comparison and analysis. 
	336 	But the greatest of all riddles, of course, is the ever-recurring 
question of what the alchemists really meant by their substances. What, for instance, is the meaning of a "sal spirituale"? The 
661 Olympiodorus (Berthclot, n, iv, 38) remarks: "Thus the key to the meaning of the circular art is the synopsis thereof." • And the Turba says: "The more I read the books, the more I am enlightened" • (ed. Ruska, Sermo XV, p. 125). 
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