Core of Jung's Alchemy: Introduction

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The Alchemical Core of C. G. Jung's Work (1916-1956)
Presentation 1 of 13

The Core of Jung's Alchemy: Introduction
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 2, 1987

Transcript:

The date is July 2nd 1987. This is the first lecture in this series of lectures by Roger Weir on the alchemical core of Jung's work. Tonight's lecture is given at the Whirling Rainbows School and the rest of lectures will be given at the Philosophical Research Society.

Its admitted this to the PRF and all of us forgot it. and so we had to leave one lecture out of the series. And it was the initial lecture. And that's why I'm having to hold this class here Thursday. This Thursday evening. the rest of the series will be at the Philosophic Research Society and will occur there on each succeeding Thursday. I think what do we have, I think we go all the way through. We have no holidays. and I've transposed the series I was going to do to the end of the year. The end of the year series is going to be on Mahayana Buddhism. Especially from the Greek Buddhist perspective. And I was unable to order all of the material in time. nobody's ever done a series on that particular perspective. And even though Mr. Hall and I between the two of us have almost all the material. It's a mountain of sifting. And I was unable to get it in time.

So we're going to do the alchemical core of Jung's work. And I hope to establish for you some basic sense of Jung's tremendous accomplishment and achievement. He truly is one of the great figures of our time. I have not lectured on him very much in the last eight years in deference to my friend Dr. Heller. Who frequently lectures on Jung. And generally I've deferred to him in this in the subject area. But the only time that we have not conferred in the last eight years, we're both offering alchemical lectures at the same time at PRS. A great synchronicity. But I hope to present a perspective that will be a little bit different from any that you might have seen. I'm going to take step by step the historical occurrence in Jung's life. Just how he uncovered and discovered for himself the importance of alchemy for his, his life's work.

To start off I would like to refer immediately to some of Jung's writings which are almost completely unknown. They're published in the Bollingen series as Part A of the collected works. And their title is The Zofingia Lectures. And they were published just a few years ago. They came out in 1983. And before 1975 they were completely unknown to anyone. That is to say they are, they were unknown to all but a few of the old classmates of Jung. For these Zofingia lectures were delivered in the late 1890's when Jung was a student. He was a student at the University of Basel.

And I would like to read a paragraph from the first lecture that Carl Jung ever gave. He was just 21 years old. Barely. The title of the lecture was The Border Zones of Exact Science. And here's the paragraph. This is 1896. "As we all know the principle of inertia is not confined to the field of physical phenomenan but also represents a fundamental law of human thought. As such it is an even more powerful factor in the development of world history than stupidity." And we're going to leave that and we'll come back to the Zofingia Lectures.

And I'm going to jump to a letter which Carl Jung wrote in late 1915, about 20 years later. This is to a fellow Swiss doctor and psychotherapist Han Schmitt. Here's the opening paragraph of that correspondence. "In the meantime and after long reflection, the problem of resistance to understanding has clarified itself for me. And it was Saint Brigid of Sweden," who was a 14th century mystic. "Who helped me to gain insight. In a vision Saint Brigid saw the devil speaking to God. And the Saint Brigid overheard what the devil said to God about himself." And Jung reading Saint Bridget's visionary reportage understood in 1915 this problem of inertia. this problem of resistance to understanding. Why it was so conspicuous in the human psyche. This is the can..this is the a bit of the conversation the devil has with God. The devil, "Their belly is so swollen because their greed was boundless. For they filled themselves and they were never sated. And so great was their greed that they had but been able to gain the whole world they would gladly have exerted themselves. And would moreover have desired to reign in heaven. Greed like mine could i but when all the souls in heaven and on earth and in purgatory I would gladly snatch them."

And Jung's comment on this in the letter, "So the devil is a devourer. Understanding, comprehending, in Latin is likewise a devouring. understanding swallows you up. But one should not let oneself be swallowed if one is not minded to play the hero's role. Unless it be that one really is a hero who can overpower the monster from within. And the understander in turn must be willing to play this hero's role and himself devour indigestible contents. It is therefore, in the popular understanding, better not to understand people who might be heroes. Because if you associate with them the same fate that befalls them may befall oneself. And it's better than not to be associated with people who really do understand. One can be destroyed by them. In wanting to understand, ethical and human as it sounds, there lurks paradoxically a devil's will." Which though not at first perceptible is or as Jung would put it it's not at first perceptible to oneself but it is perceptible to oneself in someone else.

"Understanding is a fearfully binding power." He means binding in the religious sense. When you understand that what you have understood becomes a part of you. Human beings who understand together become bound together. Understanding esoterically is a sacramental act. And so there's, there's a a built-in resistance to understanding in the ego. And there's a built-in inertia in the natural horizon of the psyche. Not to really want to know. To in fact be satisfied with speculations and fantasies. To be satisfied just to be able to continue to to live. And to do. And to make do. And to make life. But not to really understand.

So we have in a course like this to be conscious. Because we're really going to understand. We're going to look with that kind of calipered compositional vision at the very structure of the psyche. That is to say not a cross-section of the psyche as in a diagram but the whole flowchart. The whole of process ecology by which the psyche maintains itself. And in this, in this ecology of maintenance is a double-ended mystery. For the psyche in even its completeness does not know where it came from or where it is going. So that it's wholeness is a wholeness unto itself. But it's relational position in the universe is mysterious at both ends. You can think of birth or death but it's probably better to think of Genesis and transformation rather than birth or death.

One of the peculiar aspects will be that the genesis in Jung's understanding will be the unconscious. But even with the unconscious in Jung there's a peculiar hitch. There's the peculiar flavor. Which we have to attend to and put ourselves into a position to understand.

I won't burden you with reading the the whole letters and so forth. But Jung in his investigations discovered that in clinical terms someone from East or South Asia does not have an unconscious like a European individual has. And so we will have to pay attention to that somewhat tonight. And one of the ways in which we can address this for ourselves, in our intelligence, is to is to make a primal association which we can amend from time to time as we go along. That the unconscious in its deepest levels is coextensive with the natural universe. To put it into a an image term if one reached deep enough into one's unconscious one would find the physical universe on a cosmic scale. So that the psyche, the psyche emerges from nature in some mysterious way. And has a developmental pattern which when it is full, when it is complete, allows for the psyche to integrate itself so that it exists self-consciously floating upon this indeterminate ocean of nature. But having integrated itself to the point of being autonomous consciously, it discovers that just as there was a natural horizon beneath there is now a conscious horizon above. There is a transpersonal consciousness also extending mysteriously farther than anyone could hope to reach.

The classical early hermetic Christian understanding of this transpersonal realm was that this with heaven. This is heaven. And we'll see that some of the mysteries in alchemy hinge around the forgetting of that whole understanding. And the interposition of diagrams and speculations in the classical world. So that as alchemy developed it came down to us in a consciously skewed fashion. Purposely scrambled. so that would always be paradoxical. It would always be enigmatic. But that the deepest resonances of the true transpersonal consciousness of alchemy would be there in the what became the unconscious of Western man. It's like the classical pun about the...about Aristophanes and the nature of God. When the gods wanted to hide the secret of the universe they put it into the mind of Aristophanes because no one would have thought of looking for it there.

So this is by way of introduction. And to give you some some sense that there is a vast mystery which has actually occurred in history. which is actually alive in our psyches. And which from time to time was hinted at and partially recovered. And only with Carl Jung in the 20th century was the entire picture brought into the light of introspection. So I will now set this introduction aside and we'll take a look, a brief look at alchemy and then a brief look at the early life of Carl Jung up to his mental breakdown. His voluntary mental breakdown in the First World War period.

When you look for histories of alchemy. And I was going to show you a 1987 article from the encyclopedia of religions that was edited by Mircea Eliade. and the history of Western alchemy even in this 1987 encyclopedia of religions is just willfully inadequate. absolutely inadequate. There are three sources for you. Which two of which you could find and one which you would have to probably go to UCLA to find. There's a little Pelican paperback just simply entitled Alchemy by E.J. Holmyard and this is one of the best little presentations. An overview of alchemy.

The second one was a series of lectures delivered at Harvard University and printed both by the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong and Harvard. And it's entitled Science in Traditional China: A Comparative Perspective by Joseph Needham. This is Joseph Needham who has devoted his entire life to writing science and civilization in China. About 12 volumes have come out so far and there eight more to come. And he's one of the real Giants of the 20th century.

So this book by Needham and this little book buy a Holmyard. And a lecture delivered by Needham at Berbick College, the second J.D. Bernal lecture. Bernal was a mathematician in England. And it's called The Refiners Fire: The Enigma of Alchemy in East and West. And a friend of mine took this lecture in in 1971. And so I received a copy from England at that time. These three little publications, none of them very big, give you the best overview of what we know about alchemy. And what we know about alchemy by late by mid nineteen eighty seven is extraordinary. And we're beginning to appreciate that alchemy is in fact one of the few world phenomenons. That is to say it affects not only ancient Greece but also ancient China, ancient India, Islam, Europe. Almost everywhere that you go except the the new world. So that alchemy is one of the few psychological models which bridges East and West. And curious enough, curious enough Jung's confirmation about the structure of the unconscious using an alchemical model was confirmed by Chinese material.

And we'll see that it was a stroke of genius on his part to recognize that even though the Chinese do not have an unconscious like Western man, that the Chinese sense of nature as a symbolic medium is very much like the Western unconscious. And that by understanding Chinese Daoist yoga in its symbolic flow one could match it up to the unconscious psyche of Western man. Which he did in the late 1920s with his friend Richard Wilhelm. And the outcome of that of course was the first translation of the I Ching into German. And then Wilhelm and Jung wrote a book together, The Secret of The Golden Flower. Which was to be a psychological entrance into the I Ching. For they found that the structure of the I Ching was cosmopolitan to the Chinese mind and unconsciously primal to the Western mind. You might be interested to know that the I Ching in hardcover has sold almost two million copies in the West. And there's almost no no use of it no recognition of it in China.

In 1972 in Canada I helped entertain a group of about 50 Chinese engineers in Calgary Alberta. And I got a whole bunch of each I Chings and presented them. And none of these men they were the cream of the of the scientific world and China. None of them were interested in the I Ching at all. Knew nothing about it. Cared nothing about it. Had no appeal whatsoever.

The conscious understanding of the I Ching is in a paradoxical way the unconscious of the Asian mind. it's a very peculiar way. what we can understand by this is that somehow the psyche of East and West is interpenetrable on a strategic massive level. And it's not as if our consciousness is their unconsciousness. But it's that our unconscious is like a obverse of their consciousness. There's a very strange structure involved. And part of the difficulty of East and West understanding each other is this odd skew in the relationship.

It comes out when we are able via Holmyard and Needham to take an overview of the development of alchemy. Needham shows that without a doubt alchemy originally came from the West. That is metallurgical alchemy developed in ancient Sumeria long before it developed in China. That while there was bronze working in the Shang Dynasty, some thousand or 1500 years before that there was already much more sophisticated metallurgical working in the Sumerian and Akkadian civilization. In fact we know from archeology now that metalworking in the European area of human life goes back at least to 6500 B.C. So we've had almost 9,000 years of working with metals. mining and working with metals in the West. It's something that we are not used to thinking. We're not used to thinking of the West is ancient. We're used to thinking of Asia as ancient. Of Egypt is ancient. But in Northern Yugoslavia in those areas is true ancientness.

The first time that alchemy enters into the Chinese picture as a recognizable form is about the 4th century B.C. And there's a Chinese genius named Tsou Yen. T-s-o-u Y-e-n would be a good approximation.
Tsou Yen. and in Science and Civilization in China Needham has a whole large section on the genius of Tsou Yen.

By 144 B.C. in China there appear the first laws from the Emperor. 144 B.C. would it be about the time of Han Wudi. Han Dynasty, early Han Dynasty. Laws forbidding the dissemination of information about alchemy. That alchemy is in every respect a royal art, is limited by decree by law, punishable by death limited to the Emperor and his close court. The reason being is that in China by 144 B.C. alchemy is associated with longevity to the point of immortality. That the focus of Chinese alchemy in the BC centuries is not making gold but taking gold for longevity. In and in fact in hopes of finding the right dosage to have immortality. so that the Chinese alchemists are specifically interested in the application of a potable gold. So that the initial idea of an elixir in alchemy is Chinese. The term elixir is Arabic. All elixir. It means like a covering all ills. If you have immortality you've covered all the ills that that you're that you're seeking to cure. The Chinese alchemy, distinct from Western alchemy, is after longevity and immortality.

The Western alchemy which is contemporary with Han Dynasty Chinese alchemy is not after longevity or immortality at all. In fact the notion of an elixir apparently does not enter in to Western alchemy until the 1200's. Just before 1200, around the first Western translations from Arabic of the alchemical material from Arabic into Latin are around 1182. Robert of Chester and Gerard of Cremona are the first translators. in the 1180's, 1190's. And then the first Great Western Alchemist is Michael Scott. And Michael Scott gives the, the alchemists the, the Merlin the magician archetypal look. He is the first one to wear a conical hat with the moon and the stars on it and the long flowing robe. And he was Frederic Hohenstaufen's court magician. And Michael Scott is is really somebody. And later on this series well we'll talk a little bit more about him. He dies about 1230 A.D.

So Western alchemy does not have the idea of an elixir until that time.

The early Hellenistic alchemy is developed in Alexandria. Now this is interesting. Alexandria dominates Hellenistic Egypt as if it were the intellectual and cultural capital of the world. Its counterpart at that time in China was the city Chang'an. which was the capital of the Han Dynasty and later became the great capital of the Tong Dynasty again. Chang'an is in Western China just a couple hundred miles from the beginnings of the Silk Road that went across the Gobi Desert. So Chang'an is not in what we would recognize as China proper but it's way over in the West. it's over a large river and mountain system. And it's much closer to Tibet than it would be to Beijing.

So Chang'an and Alexandria are the two cities and the two polar types. And the alchemy in those two places, though contemporaneous, are totally different. The Hellenistic alchemy seeks to transform metals which are inferior to gold into gold. That is to say there is, as Needham calls it here, there is an aura faction process. and that closely related to the aura faction process is an aura fiction process. The aura faction is to make gold. the aura fiction is to project the appearance of gold onto other metals. so that the notion, the idea of projection is an alchemical term. An alchemical idea. But if one is projecting one is not making real gold. One is giving a gold like appearance to things which essentially are not gold. This will have great ramifications later on. Because when we come to understand I understand the psyche in its processes. And we understand projection in an unconscious projection like in transference, we understand why we have to understand these processes to the point of no longer being caught within their purview. I don't want to say transcending them. I don't want to say ending them. But understanding them so that we can deal with them. Because the process of projection, the process of transference create the illusion of self-consciousness. Create the illusion that one is integrated. Create the illusion that one is whole. That one is in individuated. When in fact all one is done is just project one's egotistical coating upon people and objects and events and so forth. So that the world looks like yours. and is not really. And of course an aurofictive(sp?) projection invariably tarnishes. and when it tarnishes the most deepest despair comes up. because one thought one had it made and it's not working. It's not holding. So that these early Hellenistic alchemical terms become very, very potent later on.

I must say that when Jung started his work no one knew any of this. this story was not really known. Not really understood.

The first writings on alchemy in the West are around 200 B.C. and the man is referred to in various ways. Sometime referred to as pseudo Democritus. Democritus being a Greek philosopher about atomic structure and so forth. Pseudo Democritus but more characteristically referred to as Bolas. B-o-l-u-s. Frequently Bolus of Menez. Mendez is a city in the Nile Delta not too far from Alexandria. but Bolus is not really of Mendez but Bolus lives in Alexandria. And his writing around 200 B.C. indicates that the reason that there is no writing about alchemy before him is that alchemy is also a royal art. It's a royal prerogative in the West also. And it belongs to the king. the art and all the writings about it, the wisdom about it belong to the King. Belong to the Ptolemies. And no one else is to have this information. So alchemy east and west share the characteristic that it is a royal art.

And here we have to we have to stress this. The king is by nature divine. But through alchemical transformation the King is also divine by art. So that there is a by Hellenistic times there is a profound understanding that the King who is simply a king by nature is incomplete. That he must not only be a king by divine right by nature but he must consummate his kingship by the practice of art. And in this you can see that art and nature are brought into a synchronization. And for those of you who are coming to the Saturday lectures that I give here you recognize this as as the archetypal pattern of education. East/West for all time. Because in between nature and art is the psyche. And that whole development of the psyche takes place in between nature and art. Because when one has mastered the art one can go directly back to nature. And one can buy that kind of strategic cupping of the entirety of the psyche, one becomes a king of oneself. One understands the entire psyche. So that we'll always see alchemy referred to as the art. And alchemists will always talk about the art and nature.

And as a substratum between art and nature, as a substratum, there will be increasingly the recognition. The idea and then the recognition that art, this royal art. This royal art of divine person making must have the same substrate that nature has in the Divine Right of Kings. That there must be a prima materia underneath all of this process. It's there before nature begins. It's there all the time the psyche is forming. It's there in the art. The basis of the workability of the art. So that the the recognition that there is a prima materia underlying everything, a single common substrata to the entire process of reality. and that that can be tapped either naturally through the kingliness of oneself. Or can be tapped consciously through the sageliness of oneself. And thus you get the famous Chinese proverb sageliness within kingliness without. It's a Taoist proverb. It's been said hundreds at least 3000 years in China. And it has that pithiness of understanding to it.

Hellenistic alchemy really begins its association with personal transformation around the time of Jesus. And the first time that there's any indication of this is in the book The Wisdom of Solomon. And the passage is in the third chapter. Right in the, in the beginning by line 6. Wisdom of Solomon, third chapter, line six. Here's the phrase. "They will be received with great blessings because God has tested them and found them worthy to be his. Like gold in a crucible he has put them to the proof and found them acceptable like an offering burnt whole upon the altar." It's the first time anywhere that there is not just the association but the direct ascription that the alchemical process is a process of coming with one's secret self before God Almighty. And in being tested is found to have attained ones spiritual maturity. That all of the worldly dross is burnt up in this testing, in this crucible, on that altar. But that one golden spiritual self remains.

And so in The wisdom of Solomon, written about 10 B.C. around in that time in Alexandria, is the first time that there's any indication now that instead of just a metallurgical Royal prerogative of aura faction and or a fiction there is no understanding that this is in fact the process that happens in spiritual development. We would say today we would use the term in conscious individuation. Only in the wisdom of Solomon. Only at this high level in Alexandria at this time do we find this insight. In fact everywhere else in the world at this time there is a different association with alchemy that is not there in Alexandria.

Let's turn to Rome and let's turn to Pliny. Pliny who lived in the first century A.D. and he dedicated his Natural History to the Roman Emperor Titus. And he wrote this in the 70's A.D. So I would think the, so the section I'm going to read you is a little bit of the 30th book. There were 36 books in his Natural History. He finished it in 77 A.D. So this is around 75 ad in Rome. Here alchemy is associated with magic. And the whole issue of magic is associated with Persia. I'm using Elizabethan translation of it because I do not have the Lobe Classical Library volume from Pliny's Natural History that then has it in contemporary English. So I'm using Philemon Holland's Elizabethan translation which fortunately I had.

Here's how Pliny writes about 75 A.D. "The folly and vanity of art magic." That is the term now. Juxtaposed art magic. "I have oftentimes already taxed and confuted sufficiently in my former books. When and where so ever jost occasion and fit opportunity was offered. And still my purpose and intention is to discover and lay open the abuse thereof in some few points behind. And yet I must need say the argument is such as deserves a large and ample discourse if they were but only this to induce me. That notwithstanding it be of all arts fullest of fraud, deceit and kushnidge(?). Yet never was there any throughout the whole world either with light credit professed or so long time upheld and maintained."

Please turn your cassette now and it will commence playing again on the other side without without a break in the continuity.

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...said there are two elements intertwined here in Pliny's mind. One is that magic is the is the chiefest of all the arts of mankind. And it is full of deceit. Not only deceit for someone in his own time but that it deceives all men for, for a very long time. According to Pliny for thousands of years. So that there's a relationship here. It is the chiefest magical art and it is the most deceiving. In terms not of a single person or a single generation or a single country but generally in terms of human nature.

Maybe a cup of tea. Yeah. Donald get me some tea.

Pliny traces magic back to Persia. And he says in fact that the beginnings of magic go back to Zoroaster. And he places the date of Zoroaster some 6,000 years...

Thank you very much

...before the death of Plato. Plato died around 350 B.C. There's a note here by Philemon Holland that this is not so much 6,000 years but 6,000 lunar cycles. Which would put Zoroaster around 850 B.C. Which in fact is very close to his actual date. His actual date is about 900 B.C. 1000 to about 900 of B.C. So that Pliny's calculation is not very far off.

Why is it that magic deceives so and yet is so appealing to human nature. He writes, "For it," this is 75 A.D., "For it to begin with no man doubts but that magic took root first and proceeded from physics under the pretense of maintaining health, curing and preventing diseases. Things plausible to the world crept and insinuated farther into the heart of man. And with a deep conceit of some high and divine matter therein, more than ordinary and in comparison thereof, all physics was but basically accounted." In other words he's saying that magic is some secret essence of what is physical. Just what we've been talking about. Pliny says that this is a false appeal. And writes then further, "And having thus made way in entrance the better to fortify itself and to give itself a goodly color and luster to those fair and flattering promises of things." What are the fair and promising things? You're going to have health. You're going to be cured. It's going to prevent disease. And so to fortify it magic also then goes on and adopts the habit and cloak of religion. It fortifies itself as if it is a religious process. And those who administrate our religious people. They're spiritual.

Notice how we have to keep ourselves conscious here. And we're using something 2,000 years ago to remind ourselves. To tie a string around our figure...fingers. That while we are understanding something very profound which we need to understand. We need not to let ourselves be swallowed up by that understanding. It is absolutely imperative for consciousness not to simply accept the picture. But to be able to know that it is seeing a picture. That the understanding that it has. And let's see if I can use the old alchemical phrase. the understanding that we have is not so much that we are seeing the shadow of reality but that we are seeing the mirror of reality. It is different. Because there is an inversion in a mirror image which is not there an object shadow relationship. And this inversion is the key to individuation. The inversion that after one goes so far in one direction, one reverses and goes the other direction.

One of the earliest alchemical dictums in Alexandria. Around the 300 A.D. Zosimos of Panopolis ascribed it to Mary the Jewess. Who was one of the great Alexandrian alchemists of the 2nd century A.D. She said it those who wish to understand must learn how to reverse nature. It is an esoteric key. it is not apparent. And especially if one is working on associative levels. On allegorical or anagogical models. one falls prey to seeing in series and in parallels and doesn't pay attention to the fact that one has to obverse. One has to reverse. One has to see not in the mirror. But one has to understand that this is only a mirror. The whole idea of a magical mirror here. Or the whole idea of a mind as a mirror is just fraught with all kinds of difficulties because of this.

Then when Jung delving into the action of the ego within consciousness says that the first archetype that one comes into contact with is the shadow. The shadow? What is the the shadow? The shadow of the ego. But what is really at play is not the resistance of the shadow of the ego but is the mirror opposite of oneself. An anima for a man. An animus for a woman. That it's the inner soul complement which is what one should be watching and not the actions of the shadow. That by trying to steer clear of the negativities in oneself is the fastest way to spin your wheels and never mature. It's the acceptance of the relationship between ego and shadow because one knows that there is a larger strategy. A strategy, strategy of maturation which is brought in by one soul. The term anima means soul. Animus means a masculine soul. And so it becomes very important to understand that in Jung's alchemical understanding he's extremely sophisticated. He is in fact classically sophisticated. he knows that you're not dealing so much with reconciliation of opposites. Even though one talks that way one's dealing with reconciliations of obverse relationships. Then it's not so much polarities but complementarities that give the dynamic to maturation of consciousness.

What swells with energy with the polarities is the psyche. But what comes into unity with complementarities is the pneumatic spirit. Which is different. Quite different. One is a projection. Subtle as anyone could ever want it to be. Because it's oneself. You have no way to tell yourself whether you're projecting or not. Whether you're transferring or not. It's like seeing your own eye as you see through your eye. you can't do it. So that in a very practical way one needs someone else to be extremely honest with oneself and say wait a minute, you're doing this. You're going too far. This is not a sign of maturation. this is a sign of your trying to take over. This is an inflation on your part.

So that there's a very real quality of excellence to the honesty between human beings. In particular and especially the honesty between two people who are trying to establish their individuation. Trying to mature and bring out their spiritual selves. Because if there's any dissimulation between them, even just a little crack that's all you need. And the projective and transference resistances and everything go to work. And just like streams of ants undermine the whole process. The whole structure.

So we'll see that in Jung's work by tracing the alchemical core we'll find what great excellence the had. And why his insistence upon a complete of veracity between people.

I won't go into Pliny anymore. We'll set this aside. We'll set The Wisdom of Solomon aside. And we'll bring in just the basic argument from this book. This book was published by the University of California Press in 1939. It's entitled Rome in China. a very famous book. It's the only one ever done about this. Frederick Taggert. it's subtitle is A Study of Correlations in Historical Events. and Taggart in this book, by putting the chronologies of the Roman Empire and the Chinese dynasties together, year for year, as best they could. Decade for decade. Century for century. And filling in all the information that he could. following the cycles in the Roman Empire and following the cycles and the Chinese dynastic certainties(?) discovers that there is always a ripple effect which moves from China through Central Asia to Europe. That there is a one-way ripple effect. And that counterbalancing this there's like a trickling end of many little sources back to China from the West. But that Asia influences the West, China influences the Roman Empire in great surging waves. And that it's almost like a physical expression of the incursions of Attila the Hun, the incursions of Genghis Khan. These are almost like physical large archetypal expressions of these influential waves that come from China across Central Asia. Not only into the Roman Empire but into European history. That the West periodically after many hundreds of years received like an archetypal wave of influence from the Far East, from Asia. And it was a very curious pattern. No one ever noticed it before a Taggart in his book. And no one has ever disproved it. in fact the investigations have shown that oddly enough, and we we were not sure what to do with this, oddly enough this seems to be a pattern throughout history for many thousands of years.

In Alexandria the most powerful development around the beginning of the 1st century A.D. was the appearance of Jesus. That is to say his personality was so peculiar in its energy that it changed the formal structure of the way in which consciousness integrated itself. But one needn't be a Christian. One needn't even be a Westerner in order to discover this change in pattern. The, one of the basic changes in this pattern is that the in the B.C. centuries the way a human personality in the West organized itself was always in a referential mode. And in the immediate first two or three centuries A.D. the way in which a human being integrated himself was in a relational mode. But because this was so very difficult to maintain the referential mode was reinstated. Was brought back into play in the fourth century A.D. And when the referential mode was brought back into play, the civilization that had been founded on the referential consciousness had already long since been gone. And by forcing underground the relational consciousness which was there in place and working. By forcing the civilization, the nascent civilization of the West that was based upon relational personalities underground. And reinstituting the old referential personalities. Bringing the Roman Empire back in the guise of the church in the 4th century A.D. That whole civilization collapsed because it had no psychological basis upon which to to stay. To build. It's like building on sand. and the quote ensuing Dark Ages our Glacial testimony to the catastrophic ignorance of the 4th century A.D. absolute horror story in terms of human history and world civilization. But that living viable consciousness did not disappear. It simply went underground. it literally went unconscious.

And we'll see that when Jung is dealing with Western mans unconscious he will find that it has an alchemical structure. Not only that but the images that come up peculiarly come up in two great gulps, I almost want to say. That the imagery clusters itself around the late medieval times and the late Hellenistic Roman Empire times. That the imagery clusters around those areas. It's not always there but when you take a statistical overview the unconscious imagery of modern Western man, men and women who are alive now, their unconscious imagery constilates itself in those two places. And of course those two places are the last time in the classical world when that alchemical process was conscious for thousands if not millions of men and women. And the first time that it's surfaced from the long dark age is the long medieval night. Not so much in the Renaissance of the fifteenth century but in the Renaissance of the 12th century. The true renaissance was in the 12th century.

Got one case in point. At the very same time that you have Robert of Chester translating from Arabic the alchemical materials into Latin. At the very same time in the very same place you have Geoffrey of Monmouth writing his great Arthurian history. That never was anything except scattered legends. All of a sudden King Arthur and Merlin and and the whole archetypal symbolic image base comes back into play all at once complete intact.

And the next generation that's educated from that is a generation of genius. not only Michael Scott, Roger Bacon but there is just. Albert the great. Thomas Aquinas. Just a whole rash of genius which then enters into a struggle because there's tried to be reinstated again the controls. And we find that the last six hundred years of Western history a great struggle. Psychological struggle for this unconscious wholeness to come back out and to be. To be in human beings. To live in this world. To live in this life. So that they may be real in terms of their deepest capacity. Not in terms of the capacities given to them by authority. Ascribed to them by diagram. But those capacities which they themselves are.

And so we'll see as we go along with investigating the alchemical core of Jung's work that he literally grabs the dragon by the tail. And the way in which he grabs it will see in the first world war is that he at the age of forty recognizes that this is not just an exercise for him. But is in fact what he must do personally in his own life. And Jung with incredible courage. Not many people can do this. Purposely puts himself into a position where all of the unknown contents are going to come up like a volcano. And Jung let's go of all of the ego identity which he has by that time. He's a professional doctor. The Burgholzli Asylum in Switzerland. He's been dealing with mental patients for a long time. He's been sensitive to occult phenomena for a long time. He knows vaguely what's in store. But he knows that he has to do this. The old hippocratic dictum physician heal thyself. And Jung unconsciously around 1916 let's go of his old whole ego security and plunges into a malstrum, a psychic malstrum. It took him about five years to climb out of that one. and all the time while he was in this condition Jung kept a notebook. and when he couldn't write legibly he would draw pictures. And when he couldn't draw pictures he would try and make diagrams. And when he couldn't do that he would just sit and stare at it. But slowly having confidence that in the middle of the disease is the cure. waiting for, while the disease went rampant, waiting for the cure to mature. So that he could understand personally how this works. And he found that the old alchemical model is exactly honest and truthful to the enth degree about the way in which transformation takes place. One must enter into the darkness first of all. And slowly that golden star of the true self forms out of the darkness, out of the mystery.

And we'll take a look at that for the next couple of months. And I hope to be able to present it to you with a a little less verve and a little more scholarly than tonight. Thank you.

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