Psychology and Alchemy (1944)
Presented on: Thursday, August 20, 1987
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Alchemical Core of C. G. Jung's Work (1916-1956)
Presentation 8 of 13
Psychology and Alchemy (1944)
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 20, 1987
Transcript:
The date is August 20 1987. This is the eighth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir at the Philosophical Research society on the alchemical core of Jung's work. Tonight's lecture is entitled psychology and alchemy, 1944.
I take it you're ready.
*comment from the room* Quite ready.
From here on we start to go into deeper water. And we'll be glad to have had the lessons in the lagoon. Courage of the heart has always been the most valuable virtue in human life. And the more that one approaches individuality the greater the contrast with the infinite possibilities. so that there's always a double-action. And as one becomes more and more focused the context becomes wider and wider. Thus it is that a polarity arises. That is an idea but in the very process itself of becoming individual. That the reality of the infinite becomes more and more certain. And this gulf between what you are tending to be and what at the very same time in a compensational way you realize that you will not be. There needs to be a bridge between these two polarities.
And the classic image of the bridge was the ceremonial initiation mixing bowl. And we talked last week about the bowl and its Greek form, the kylix. With the two handles that if you put the handles together it's like an infinity sign. And we read a little bit from the Hermetic treatise number four, which is called The Crater. Or The Basin. And saw how powerful the image was around 100 A.D. Of the new idea that the mixing bowl, that initiation, ceremonial vessel between the stark individuality and the stark infinity. That mixing bowl was becoming the mind. But around 100 A.D. it began to be very clear to human beings like ourselves that the mind is that bowl. One even finds the indelible trace of it in the monastic tradition. Both East and West incidentally. The indelible trace is that very often in certain strict, ascetic extravagances the monk would use as his drinking vessel and his as his eating bowl they cut out cranium from a skull. And in just this very graphic way the image comes to one. But this is indeed what one is doing.
The very first indications of the use of the bowl as a symbol of the crater is a symbol which will then become the crucible in alchemy. Is around 5 or 600 B.C. and it appears in a triune context. And these fragments of writings which we have. These partial illustrations, which we have, are now categorized and designated archaeologically under the title of Orphic-Pythagorean. One of the areas in which archeology has dug up some of this material, outside of modern-day Thessalonica in Greece. Northern Greece, Macedonia. About 8 or so miles outside of town. About 20 years ago in a tomb was found a scroll from about 350 B.C. About the time when Alexander the Great was just being born. And in this scroll is an interpretation of the Orphic rhapsodies. And that was a series, a sequence, an initiatory sequence of 24 rhapsodic trances. Which one was led through. And that person who led you through was the hierophant. that is to say when you were naively being led through he was the hierophant. but when you understood that it was you who was going through these stages, then it was not so much the hierophant but he became known as the psychopomp. A Hierophant gives to you the initiatory hierarchies but a psychopomp is from you your own souls journey.
The early Hierophant was Orpheus. And in the transition the psychopomp became Hermes. As the same process was happening but there was a shift in recognition. The recognition shifted from he who was giving this to me to myself who is going through this.
Another archaeological site of the last 20 years was, is on the island of Sardinia. The very northern Cove of Sardinia. Has an age old port there called Ostia. Which was settled by the Phoenicians around the ninth, eighth or ninth of century B.C. Taken over by the Greeks, taken over by the Romans, taken over by the Carthaginians etc etc. Little squares of bone were found and some of them had little religious insightful inscriptions on them. One of them reproduced here in this volume, The Orphic Poems by M.L. West. Published by Oxford 1983. Has run together along the top a series of Greek words run together. And then a Greek word underneath it. And then a couple of little indications and underneath another Greek word. The top Greek words read, life death life. As if it were in that sequence. And underneath them is the Greek word alitheia which means truth. Alitheia is a peculiar kind of truth. It is the kind of truth that one finally arrives at after you've thought something through to the last stage. It's the conclusion of what you have come to understand. Come to learn. That's alitheia. It's truth like with the final veracity that this is certain. Because by the way that you have gone there to get there you know that this is true. It isn't true for anyone else. In other words alitheia is the truth which someone who has gone through the stages which a psychopomp has led them knows to be the truth. And the phrase life death life, truth. And underneath it is just the letter A and a little lightning like squiggle. And then the name Dio Oreca, Dionysius Orpheus. Dionysius and Orpheus have both something to do with the underworld and coming up.
But the Orphic theology put the mixing bowl interestingly with two other figures. the figure of the net and the figure of the robe. So that the crater, the net and the rob are the Trinity in the archaic Western symbolic understanding. The Orphic net was the image eternal of how all life is knotted together. So that life as a whole is like a net that covers the world. And every living creature is a part of the same net. The robe is something which is woven. It is like a net but it's much finer. And it comes to a person. It comes to an individual. You wear the robe but you are a part of the net of life. And the annealing of the consecration of those two realms together is through the action of the crater. Which is the primordial crucible in alchemy.
The first time that intellectual amplification of this is given is by Plato. Late in his life in The Timaeus. And there are two areas in The Timaeus. Area number 35 and area number 41. Plato, "God did not of course contrive the soul later than the body. As it has appeared in the narrative we are giving. For when he put them together he would never have allowed the older to be controlled by the younger. But God created the soul before the body. And gave it precedents both in time and value. And made it the dominant controlling partner. He composed it in the following way to the following constituents. From the indivisible eternally unchanging existence. And the divisible changing existence of the physical world. He mixed a third kind of existence intermediate between them." And he talks about this in in length.
Then later on he writes, "Anything bonded together can of course be dissolved. Only through only an evil will would anyone consent to dissolve anything whose composition and state were good. Therefore since you have been created you are not entirely immortal and indisolvable but you will never be dissolved nor taste death. As you will find my will a stronger and more sovereign bond than those with which you were bound at your birth." The phrase incidentally you will never taste death appears in the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas.
In a natural way human beings are subject to dissolution. But there is a transformed procedure process which secures them against dissolvability. And so in The Timaeus, in Plato, we find a step up in consciousness from the old Orphic theology. Still in keeping with it.
It's difficult by tracing in terms of a hundred years or 200 years or 300 years, to notice these differences one almost has to leap in terms of 500 years. And especially if you leap a thousand years you suddenly see that the language has shifted its focus. Talking about the same process, the same thing, only there is an increased consciousness of what is happening. If we shift a thousand years in the future from Plato we come to Dionysius the Areopagite. Sometimes called pseudo-dionysius. Who lived about 500 A.D. He too talks about the crater. But this time it's in a Christian setting. But he also talks about it in this way. He talks about symbolic theology. "I've explained to our friend in detail all those scriptural passages concerning God which to the man in the street appear quite extraordinary. Among uninstructed souls the fathers of unspeakable wisdom gave an impression of outstanding absurdity. When with secret and daring riddles they made known that truth, alitheia, which is divine mysterious. And so far as the profane are concerned inaccessible. That is why so many continue to be unbelieving in the presence of the explanations of the divine mysteries. For we contemplate them solely by way of the perceptible symbols attached to them. What is necessary is to uncover them to see in their naked purity. Their quintessence. By contemplating them in this manner we can revere that source of life flowing into itself. We see it remaining within itself a unique and simple power. Source of its own movement and activity. Which is never failing. and which is the knowledge of all knowledge. by virtue of its own perpetual self-contemplation"
So have a vision of consciousness around 500 A.D. of being sophisticated enough to understand that the delicate mechanics, if we can use that term advisedly, the delicate mechanics of the mind. is that it isn't the mind in general which is the crater. But it's that symbolic capacity of the mind which is the crater.
Now we jump almost 1500 years to Carl Jung. And consciousness now is extraordinarily sophisticated. But like the time of Dionysius the Areopagite. Or like the time of Plato. Or like the time of the hermetic corpus. Or the time of the Orphic hymns. Always when there's writing like this. Always when man is is driven to understand these esoteric truths, external situations are squeezing him. Bringing him out. because this kind of consciousness is always hard won. Almost no one voluntarily, as a lark, as entertainment, goes for this material. Because it's perilous. It is dangerous. And only when the situations become dyer do human beings stretch themselves out to try and understand.
We've seen how Jung's psychological career up to 1930 was an extraordinary self education. And we've seen how around 1930 there seemed to be a watershed in Jung's work because he discovered for the first time that deep mysterious elements in his own personality. In his own development. Which he recognized in the deeper more advanced expressive states of other person's, patients and colleagues, dreams and visions. That in the more extended amplified esoteric levels similar symbols came up in them as in himself. Similar processes were seen to occur. And then in 1930 Jung finally understood through contact with his friend Richard Wilhelm that these processes also occur in the Chinese psyche. That there are some differences in the image base but that the symbolic activity is exactly the same. And it gave Jung what he called an empirical confirmation. because there is no way that he could have known beforehand anything about the Chinese psyche of a thousand years before his time. And he found that the Tong Dynasty book The Secret of the Golden Flower, had the same process of individuation as its synthesizing core that he was using in his own work in Zurich Switzerland. That he had discovered in his own life process.
Even at this stage though Jung was not ready to commit himself to investigating the more arcane landscapes in the deeper levels of the psyche. Yes it was his work to go into the psyche but not that deep. Not that profound. Then in 1933 devastating thing happened. The National Socialists took over Germany. Hitler came to power. And Jung found himself thrust into the midst of this entire turmoil. He
found himself lecturing in Berlin in July of 1933. and what he got to Berlin he was horrified at the state of the German psyche. The people who attended his lecture in Berlin in July of 1933, were extremely sophisticated people. They were psychotherapists themselves. They were theologians. They were professors. They were sophisticated people. Jung found that all of them were suffering from the kind of projections and anxieties which an imminent psychosis would have indicated. And Jung paying attention to this, asking himself a very difficult question. Can a whole nation go crazy? Go crazy in the sense be swallowed up by some archetypal power. Some archetypal energy.
And then a friend of his who had not taken the train to Berlin but who had driven a car all across Germany. Barbra Hanna, arrived in Berlin and she said that everywhere that she was going there were people hitchhiking all over Germany. But you couldn't drive a car 50 yards on any highway without finding somebody hitchhiking. And the image of a restless Germany on its feet clicked in Jung's mythological background. And he realized that an archetype indeed had been loosed upon the German mind. The archetype of wartime. Odin.
It was at this time when Jung came back from Zurich. back from Berlin to Zurich, that he began to seriously consider that modern man had gotten himself into a psychological impasse. And that the only way to extricate himself was for individual human beings to achieve the consciousness necessary to put out this epidemic fire. That there was a psychic fire sweeping Germany. And who knew where else it would sweep. And that the only way to deal with this was through the individual. Through individuals becoming conscious of the situation. Digesting the material. Because feeding into large organizations just fanned the flames. Because the archetype dealt particularly effective with man's **inaudible word or two** level.
Jung from the autumn of 1933 on began to consider what tact must he take to develop himself. And in 1933 he delivered the first lecture in Es, Es Cana. Just outside Es Cana at the Aronus(sp?) lecture hall. He delivered his first lecture there and it was called The Meaning of Individuation. What does it mean to become an individual? And this was a summation of all that he had learned up to that point. In 1933 Jung was 58 years old. He then became sensitized to the fact that he had not understood the young people. By young he meant adolescent, late adolescence seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old people. That he had not understood what these, this level of people, who were German language speaking people what they were living like. And so he began to invite a small group of older adolescents to come out to Bollingen, to his home. and in that first group there were seven young men and one young woman. The young woman was the eighteen-year-old Marie Louise von France. And in dealing with these young people Jung begin to listen to their dreams. And Miss von France brought him a dream early in 1934 which was filled with arcane imagery. She was studying classics. She was studying Greek. And something in her opened up. One of these affinities opened up.
And from that time on Jung began to interest himself in collecting books on alchemy. He didn't read them yet at that time. But he began to have this feeling for searching them out and having them. And he notified booksellers. And the first volumes that arrived with two great big old fat volumes of Aris Arafaraqui(?) from a Basel book seller. Big old tomes. And for a couple of years Jung just looked at the pictures. He didn't try to read the arcane **inaudible word**. And just looking at the pictures. Just familiarizing himself. And slowly Jung began to find an orientation. And Marie Louise von France became what is known as a Soror Mystica, a mystical sister. She began to be the research assistant for him on this particular project. Because it became a project.
In 1934 returned back to Aronus. He lectured on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. And this was extraordinary at the time. Because only two years before in 1932 had he published as a scientist, as a psychologist, an article which was entitled The Hypothesis of a Collective Unconsciousness. And here two years later he's delivering a very powerful lecture on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. There's no more hypothesis. And there's a whole constellation of of archetypes.
In 1935 Jung lectured again at the Aronus lecture series. This time on dream symbols of the process of individuation. Coming back to the theme that he had in 1933. But coming back and this time focusing in on the dream process. And those have been coming to the series realized that he had done a whole seminar in English on dream analysis in the late 1920's up to 1930. And here he returns then in 1935 to this.
Then in 1936 when he returned to Aronus there was a major shift in Jung's thought. And the title of the 1936 lecture was The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy.
Those four years, those four Aronus lectures plot for us a turn, major turn, in Jung's work and in Jung's life. He began to realize, as he says, that alchemy was the process in forming the individual. Whether it was East or West. Those lectures were gathered together in the late 1930's and translated into English and published with a auxilary chapter, The Development of the Personality. And the book was The Integration of the Personality. Published in 1940. And this is the first indication that Jung is ready to commit all of his psychotherapy to an alchemical exposition. That is to say that alchemy would become the very form by which the process of individuation would symbolically be expressed. He's moving here clearly away from just using dream analysis quoi dreams. And using dream analysis as a prime to this pump to get down to a deeper level. Where there are visionary symbolic materials which are in the individual but which the individual has no contact with in their normal life. So that even though the dream world has become discoverable for his patients. Now Jung is going into a deeper level where there is a revelation. deeper than discovery a revelation.
Jung then, in The Idea of Eedemption in Alchemy, says that for the first time he understood that the symbols which come up from the psyche of modern men and women, which he had seen only before in the Gnostic writings of about the first or second century A.D., reoccur in a working process in alchemy. So that while there constellated in the Gnostics and re-constellated in modern Western human beings. They are dealt with in a process way by the development of alchemy. And that the apex of this development is in the 17th century. The 1600's. That some crucial watershed is reached at this time. And from that time on alchemy loses its symbolic amperage. And a split occurs. And in the split the material process becomes chemistry. And the wisdom understanding of what it was becomes a very arcane kind of a theology. Rosicrucianism. And then it becomes a very arcane kind of spiritualism.
And that by the 18th century, by the 1700's there is a split. Which very few people are able to bridge between them. And one of the last people who attempts to make this bridge between chemistry and the powerful wisdom tradition is Sir Isaac Newton. And Sir Isaac Newton spent the last 30 years of his life trying to understand symbolic prophetic visions. And his great work, which is very hard to find, we have a copy over at the Rolling Rainbow Library, is a comparative study of Ezekiel and Daniel. Because Ezekiel and Daniel in the Old Testament are are the great visions. Ezekiel's is the collective vision of the most arcane levels of the human psyche. And Daniels vision is the vision of the new integration. The first time it was ever seen and understood. Ezekiel's vision is about wheels within wheels within wheels. The mysterious cosmos. But Daniels vision is about the arcane man who comes out of the universe with hair like white wool and red eyes and a body that's like bronze lightning. Which he calls the anthropos. And Sir Isaac Newton spends the last 30 or 35 years of his life trying to reconcile these with what he knows about physics, chemistry.
And then it's it's gone. And for several hundred years there's almost no real connection. There's almost no one who knows the wisdom tradition who also knows the science. And conversely there's almost no one who knows the science was the least bit of interested in the wisdom tradition. And Jung says what's curious is that again and again, dozens hundreds, thousands of European and American men and women in the 20th century have these symbols come up naturally in the more extended deeper amplified levels of analysis.
So that Jung's whole interest in this is how can modern men find himself when essentially he is adrift in a realm which he does not even understand that he's adrift in. He not only has no chance to make some kind of orientation for himself but he doesn't even understand that he's adrift. Does not know that he's homeless in this most basic way.
These lectures brought together in The Integration of Personality were amplified with illustrations. And they appear in 1944 as the volume Psychology and Alchemy. It's the same book rewritten just a little bit and then illustrated. And if one goes through Psychology and Alchemy and looked at the illustrations we find more and more and more that they don't really illustrate the text. Why **sound drops maybe 2 words** whole encyclopedia of visuals in here. What he's talking about in the text is an intellectual understanding that we ourselves are in this process. That our very reality is dependent upon our finding an orientation in this process. And the illustrations are not so much to illustrate the text but to awaken the reader. That you too reader are not safe outside this situation. You too are involved. And if you will look at these illustrations you will begin to find in your own sensibility, in your own intelligence, in your own life that they ring some kind of bells. That they may be garbled in mysterious and odd and yet they appeal. In a very peculiar way. there's an odd flavor. And the more we go into it the more we realize that this is the image base that all of us must work with.
After Jung passed on they found a paper which was undated. Which they've included in the 1968 revised edition of Psychology and Alchemy. Jung wrote this for the English edition, "To the reader who knows little or nothing of my work a word of explanation may be helpful. Some 35 years ago I noticed to my amazement that European and American men and women coming to me for psychological advice were producing in their dreams and fantasies symbols similar to and often identical with the symbols found in the mystery religions of antiquity. In mythology, folklore, fairy tales and the apparent meaningless formulations of such esoteric cults as alchemy. Experience showed moreover that these symbols brought with them new energy and new life to the people to whom they came." That is to say they were effective. They were the healing agents. They were the energizing agents. That at certain depths and levels of therapy there was no progress until consciousness saw these symbols and understood them. Not just in the way that they had been understood but understood them in a personal way also. That the mind now, the psyche in its largest dimension, is indeed a mixing bowl, a crater. And our basic orientation towards wholeness is recapturing those primordial archaic and arcane elements in ourselves that have been split off by our culture. By our civilization. By our untrained mind. By our deadened sensibilities. That we can only live on a very mundane mediocre level without them. We can only live life as if it were an arcade of pinball machines. Anything much beyond that we begin to evoke and consolate this whole ecology of meaning. Because it is in us. we are of the very stuff.
And what's peculiar, Jung discovered, is that there is a basic change in the quality of the way in which human beings have organized themselves as individuals. At one time the ideal was the king. The king or the pharoh. Zeus says the king of gods, the Pharaoh as the head of Egypt. But that in our experience in the A.D. centuries, the King as an organizing symbol of the self has transformed its place. And instead the individual, the person has become paramount.
In Psychology and Alchemy he has an illustration from a very esoteric volume. Which I have not ever been able to see. It's attributed to Thomas Aquinas but it's from the 16th century, the 1500's. It shows three nude women who are goddesses. And a sleeping Paris, who is supposed to judge who's the most beautiful of these three goddesses. And of course Helen becomes the choice and precipitates the Trojan War. But the figure who is prodding Paris to wake up is Hermes. And Hermes when he's prodding sleeping Paris is carrying a king scepter in one hand and in the other hand he's carrying the globe. Which is also a sign of kingship. The king is trying to wake up the person to realize that there is a differentiation of the soul figure, of the anima figure, which is necessary. That he must wake up to make this differentiation. Can't sleep anymore. This is the very essence of alchemy. It is a peculiar quality of evoking from ourselves a kind of a double imagery. Where the first imagery seems to concern ourselves and then the deeper aspects seem to concern the whole universe. And that somehow in the process one has to come back to oneself. One has to go life, death, life again. One has to go individual, universe, individual again. And that this is a very arcane and peculiar process. Because it's a process of learning how to go deep in and open out to the nth degree. And then pull that nth degree back into oneself. And this is very difficult to do. Either of those steps is enough to kill you. Both together...
Let's take a break.
I because of my training in background and everything I always prepare a lecture for you. A classic academic lecture. And when I get here I never give it. I always speak to you and I tried to pick up how you are. It may be showmanship but it's honest showmanship.
**inaudible comment/question from the room**
Yeah I'm sure I'm trying to give, I'm trying to give enough of the material so that you can see that for yourself that if you went to it, you would find a lot there. It would open up.
These illustrations that I've drawn on the board are from Psychology and Alchemy. And it's from the second section. Which is a whole series of dreams. I've selected out two images which are reproduced in the book. And I'll just briefly try to give you a quick, what they call today in history of ideas, a quick trajectory of the series. The series was 400 dreams. And they were not dreams by a patient of Jung's but by a colleague of his. Actually a pupil.
Jung emphasizes that the context of intelligibility of the dreams is the series themselves. So that what is of most importance is the very first dream. And the first dream is very short. "The man dreams he is in company." This is Old Europe. "He is in company and then on taking his leave puts on a strange hat instead of his own." This is when people still left expensive clothes in expensive foyers and then picked them up on their way out. I don't know how many have foyers and so forth. But in the dream that's what the man had done. And actually the hat was a top hat. This image is the whole mandala of his wholeness but he does not know that. And the whole purpose of the series of the hundreds of dreams. Of using it, of Jung using it as a illustration of how the psychic development, the whole process of the psyche unfolds and why this is alchemical. All of that is bound up in that image of the hat. Someone else's hat going on his head. It's like the very center of the mandala is a point. And that point contains the entire **inaudible word**. That is to say the entire exfoliated pattern of the wholeness of his entire being. Not just his life but his true self and all his dimensions are presented there in that point. But he has no way to know that. And he has no language to make that intelligible to himself. And so the process of alchemy, of therapy, dream analysis, of individuation, the whole process is to open this up. To exfoliate it. Or as Mr. Hall used to say to unfold. Self unfold.
But that this unfoldment has to be done in a way that you maintain a kind of a symmetry. Because you're not just working indifferently with images that are out there. You're dealing with your own life energies. You're dealing with love and terror. which are real. and the only way that you can continue to go is by developing in a balanced way. And so there's a kind of a symmetry that has to be kept.
In the fifth dream, the first time he dreams of snakes, of serpents. And actually as soon as he sees the serpents he also sees a rooted tree. And the serpent and the tree go together. It's a, it's a mythological image. Sometimes presented in esoteric Gnosticism as a towel cross. As the t-shape cross with a serpent on the top. Our friend Bishop Heller uses that as his arcane symbol.
Much further down the whole series the man after dreaming of many other things. And a sort of a seeming hodgepodge. There comes a dream where he has a top hat and in some frustrated way he throws it against the wall. And when he sees it, he sees that where it has hit the wall its in this shape. A full circular shape. It's not there like a, like the drawing or photograph. It's there in a flit of intuition. That that's that point of contact. That which is not his which is someone else, which he has been wearing hitting the threshold of the confining context within which he is produces a self symbol. an eight-part wheel.
Then towards the very end of the whole sequence he dreams of the second image. There's a rectangle and in the center of the rectangle is a star. An eighth rayed star. And there are then extensions of each of the four sides squared off. And in each of those flaps as it were is a bowl. So that if you folded those flaps in the bowl would overlap all four of them and would make a bowl. Underneath which, behind this four part bowl is that a rayed star.
This is extremely difficult to understand. And Jung goes into it in quite a way.
**inaudible question/comment from the room**
Ummm. 184 in the Integration of Personality. And I'll get you the page number later in Psychology and Alchemy.
What's interesting, and Jung goes into this aspect, that going back to the first image the, the throwing of the hat. That the dreamer is not so much himself but that he's an actor. "Up to this point," says Jung "A particular fact in the personal life of the dreamer, up to this point he had maintained a certain fiction about himself. He always believed it." He had believed in this fiction about himself. That prevented him from taking himself seriously. It's not only that he had a certain conception of himself or a certain perception of himself. But he like in telling a lie you have to tell other lies to keep up with the lie. And he was all engrossed in that whole process about himself. The fiction no matter what it was. It doesn't matter what the content of the fiction was. But the fiction made an obfuscation so that he could not take himself seriously. On a very deep level he knew that no matter how concerned he was with himself, it wasn't his real self. And so there wasn't that kind, if we can use this term, that deadly seriousness which is required for the penetration. For getting into of the deeper part. So that he's constantly not getting to where the star is. Instead he's only seeing a kind of a, a projection of that inner star. As if it were diagrams or so forth. Which are then strange.
When he had dream number two. There was a tremendous tension he was telling the dream. And Jung writes, "There, there's a tremendous tension. Many people are circulating around a large rectangle in the middle and four small rectangles that are constructed on the sides of the large one." So there are people in here. It's crowded with people. "The circulation of the people goes leftward around the large rectangle. A lot around the large rectangle goes counterclockwise. And it goes rightward around the small ones.
Now this is very clear hermetic process. If you wish to symbolize this in a hermetic symbol. This double movement like this is like the infinity symbol. Or it's like a wheel within a wheel. And if you have them moving in opposite directions like that it creates energy. Great psychic energy.
"In each of the centers of the small, four small rectangles is placed a bowl containing water." This one has red water. Yellow water. Green water. And this one is clear. It's transparent. Colourless. Perhaps we shouldn't say transparent because that's misleading. It's colorless. Ain't no color. "The water rotates to the left. There arises a question which causes anxiety whether the water is sufficient. The anxious question." And this is the water of life. In alchemy it's called the aqua permanence. Is there enough water in order to reach the center.
Turn your cassette now and we'll commence playing again on the other side after a brief pause.
END OF SIDE 1
Is there enough water in order to reach the center? Notice now that there's been a shift. there's then, it's like a shift of gears from movement to water. In order to reach the center one has to go via the energy of the water not the energy of the movement. The movement is an archetypal form of the energy. But the water is an alchemical form of the energy. Which is accessible to the person. I don't know how to explain it except to say this, if you try and contact archetypal energy on that level you'll be electrocuted. It has to be mixed in the bowl first, with part of you so it's like you're inoculate. So you can take that energy in a personal form and deal with. Which is why baptism by water traditionally preceded the descent of the Holy Ghost. Baptism by fire. Without that kind of preparation it would just simply be too much.
Jung then makes a great deal, later on, about how quickly there was a great vision dream. And those have been coming realized now that, that the dream sequences often build to a threshold. Where there is a spectacular dream which contains material and imagery which has very little to do with the personal aspect. And is more of a vision than a dream.
"There is a vertical and horizontal circle having a common center. This is the world clock. It is supported by black birds. The vertical circle is a blue disc with the white edge. Divided into four times eight or 32 parts." Four eighths or eight forths. "On it revolves a pointer. The horizontal circle contains four colors. Upon it stand for little men with pendulums. And round it lies the ring that was formerly dark and now is golden. The clock has three rhythms or beats. It has a small beat, the pointer of the blue vertical circle advances 1/32nd. A middle beat, a complete revolution of the pointer. And at the same time the horizontal circle advances 1/32nd . And the great beat, thirty two metal beats make a revolution of a golden ring."
What's curious here when one gets into talking about the symbol of the world clock of this particular vision, is that the experience of the individual is completely outstripped by the meaning. In order to understand the meaning one has to go to a completely transpersonal, world-class historical civilized context. In order to piece together this material. What's interesting is that Jung finds a parallel to this in a writing which occurred around 1330. And he finds that a monk and his Cistercian monastery, writing about the time of Dante, describes a rural clock which is very similar to the one that the this man has seen in his great vision dream. And in this particular dream an angel says that there are three principal colors. Green, red, and gold or green, yellow and red. One asked then what about the fourth color? The missing color would be blue. The red and the green are polarities in color. And the gold and blue are likewise polarities in color. The blue is like a sky color. The gold is like a Sun color. What's missing here is the context of the Sun.
This particular mandala of wholeness has a consciousness, symbolic consciousness, of everything except the context. What is the context? The context is that person's psyche in which this symbol is occurring. He does not have any bridge to it. And so that aspect, that fourth part of the quaternary, is missing. It's colorless. By adding his recognition to it the blue would then be supplied. There would be, and there was, a feeling of grace. Of wholeness.
When he recognizes, when he was told about this Cistercian monastery dream and the correlation. And about the angel talking about the three colors. And about the missing color. And it turns out that the blue, the sky color, very much associated with the Virgin Mary. So that in this Monastic context of this dream it was like this celestial receptivity. Or the image of the celestial receptivity was missing from that monks mandala. And just so it was missing from this man. He did not have any kind of a sensitivity towards this deeper meaning.
Jung writes, "If the mandala theme is archetypal it should occur collectively. That is it should in theory befall everyone. Yet in practice is met within relatively few cases in a distinct form. But this in no way prevents its playing the part of a concealed pole around which everything turns in the last analysis. Every life is at bottom, the realization of a whole. That is of a self. So that the realization can also be called individuation. For all life is bound to individuals who carry and realize it. And apart from them it is unimaginable." That very often the missing piece is to supply one's own self into this process. That the process in fact is not happening outside but is occurring within oneself. And that in our increased receptivity we supply this element. This particular element, this receptivity is archetypally feminine. Which is why the conscious recognition of it has always been termed the anima. The soul. One's own soul. But that the anima, one's own soul, is not that ego which one deals with in consciousness. But is what Jung says is the self. Which occupies the center of the entire psyche not just consciousness.
But in this process of contacting them, one's own anima, we come against a guardian. And he writes it several times of saying that usually the first, the first thing that we come up against in alchemy as in personal development is the shadow. The shadow is the first archetypal figure. The first archetypal threshold that comes up, and it is the shadow which then being like a counter ego protects against some profane premature contact with the soul. And carries a very peculiar kind of eerie energy with it. It's exactly what we don't wish to come into contact with. Whatever it is. Whatever that is. It is exactly what we don't wish to come into contact with. So that we experience it as an unknown, a fearful unknown. So it always has this, this eerie kind of a quality. Different people have different images of this. But it always...that is to say its typal. Its typal quality is always recognizable. It is like a bad anxiety feeling that seems like it's going to overcome you. So that the feeling tone of consciousness is panic. Oh no, that sort of thing.
So that the whole aspect then, when one first begins this process, Jung says involved a ,what is called in alchemy a blackening. the Greek term is melonosis, a blackening. So that in the crucible the first thing that happens upon heating the elements is that they oxidize and they turn black. They turn dark. Without that image that one is working with, that would occur to you that it is you who is, and the term in Latin was putrifying. And you wouldn't go on with it. you would in fact do everything that you can to not get involved in any way in that process. So that in fact every time that this particular issue has come up in your life this is exactly what you repress. Exactly what you've skirted around. And by now at this particular stage where it's becoming insistent it has gained a kind of a compulsive compensatory all energy of its own. Because the more that it's been excluded, the more one also excludes in a kind of a nerotic way, avenues leading up to it. And possibilities which would contribute to those avenues which would lead up to it. Until eventually it has whole realms. Which are integrated by this very negative strategy. And they're all integrated around the shadow. So that the shadows become in fact extremely powerful like an alter ego. And knows exactly what you don't wish to know. And knows it with all the accuracy and detail.
And Jung says that in alchemy this is extremely difficult. That they that they mellonosis, the blackening, then would be almost intolerable. Except that the focus of the alchemist is not upon the blackening but upon the refining fire. That consciousness reminds itself that is because of my action of heating this that this has happened. In ideational terms there would be no oxidation if I didn't heat it. There would be no melononsis. There would be no putrefaction. There would be no rising up of the shadow and of this energy unless I myself did it. And so that I'm learning to cooperate with that unconscious energy that wants to come up despite my regard. And now I'm finding some way to channel it and focus it. And we don't have time tonight that will go into it next week about the very next process, the whitening. The lukosis
While Jung was publishing Psychology and Alchemy and The Integration of the Personality, in his work he was extremely taxed by the situation in Germany. He'd become the head of the International Psychiatric Association, Medical Association. Received all kinds of attacks upon himself for ostensibly being a sympathizer etc etc. and none of it was true. And all this while Jung was trying to find ways in which to help in the world. And he realized that the English language culture was not tainted by the German psyche epidemic. And so in the late 1930's you find a couple of times Jung making pointed but acceptances of taking speaking engagements in England or in the United States. And when he got to those destinations he gave extraordinarily concise and incisive lectures about the conditions of modern times. Of our own time. The English lectures are published and known as the Tavistock Lectures, 1935. The American lecture, they are the best by far, and were delivered at Yale University and are published and still available in a book called Psychology and Religion. Published originally this is 1938 edition. It's still in print it's been in print all this time.
There were three lectures. Just listen to the titles. The first lecture is The Autonomy of the Unconscious Mind. In other words the world situation is not just because those are bad people. or there are stupid people. Or there are greedy people. But that what is coming up has a energy of its own. Has a highly integrated strategic sense of its own. So much so that in more ancient times one would have said that this is demonic. this is the devil. This is the Satan. Because it isn't just evil in the sense that it's forgetfulness. Or it's not coming up to par. But it's like really conscious unconscious evil. It knows what it wants to do. And basic to the operation of this is a lowering of consciousness. A leveling out of human beings so that they are interchangeable.
And Jung goes into this in great depth. An expansion of this lecture was his English book The Undiscovered Self. So if you if you get a chance to read that little paperback. It's, it's the political implications of the unconscious.
The second one, the second lecture in 1938 at Yale was Dogma and Natural Symbols. Dogma as a formulaic understanding of archetypal structure. And natural symbols as those which come up naturally despite dogma. Or sometimes in connection with dissolving dogma.
The third lecture was The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol. And the natural symbol that he is talking about here is the self. And he brings alchemy in at this time. And in fact on page 80 he begins talking about the world clock. Which was in the section that I read to you. A little bit about from that dream sequence that's in Psychology and Alchemy. He also brings in Plato's Timaeus.
And then he begins talking about the development of alchemy. "If the historical roots of our symbols extend beyond the Middle Ages. They're certainly to be found in Gnosticism." So that one of the roots of alchemy is in Gnosticism. "It would not be altogether illogical, I admit, if a psychological condition previously suppressed should reassert itself when the main ideas of the suppressing condition begin to subside. In spite of the suppression of the Gnostic heresy it continued throughout the Middle Ages under the disguise of alchemy." That is to say, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. in the form of Gnosticism all these processes were conscious. As the development of dogma in the 3rd and 4th centuries proceeded to begin to dominate consciousness. Even though the processes were still going on they became repressed, forgotten, not talked about, not proper to speak about. And so they sank it became unconscious.
"But those processes continued to be expressed throughout the Middle Ages," And he's talking about the Middle Ages now is about a thousand years. "through alchemy. It's a well known fact that the latter consisted of two parts indispensable to each other. That on one side is the chemical research proper. And on the other the philosophy." And he uses the Aristotelian term theoria here. Aristotle said division was theory and practice. Theoria and practica. That as the, in the first century the two aspects go together. And he uses the Greek phrase here of ta physica kai mystico(sp?). Physics and mystery together. The two aspects went together.
"And that in the third century the writings of Zosimos, who was a gnostic, when we talked about that last week, gave us a cluster around a peculiar unclear idea. He could perhaps be formulated in the following way. The soul, there is a soul of the world. The anima mundi. And the Demiurge or the divine spirit that incubated the chaotic waters of the beginning. Remained in matter in a potential state in the primary chaotic condition persisted with it. Thus the philosophers or the sons of wisdom, as they called themselves at that time, took their famous Prima Materia to be a part of the original chaos pregnant with spirit. By spirit they understood a semi material, pneuma. A sort of subtle body which they also called volatile and identified chemically with oxides and other to soluble compounds. They called the spirit mercury which was chemically quicksilver and philosophically Hermes, the God of Revelation. Who is the arch authority of alchemy. Their intention was to extract the original divine spirit out of the chaos. Which extract was called quinta essentia or the aqua permanence."
So in the Gnostic conscious formulation, matter is a created world. But the created world is made out of a chaos. And this chaos has bound up with it the original of creative spirit. So that all physical things have this creative spirit in it, in them. If one pulls the creative spirit out one also pulls the chaos out. That is to say, psychologically if you're going for the soul, the anima, you're going to get the shadow also. It to understand the anima. To be able to see the anima, even though it's there takes a lot of development. It's like the hat in the point. It's like the star and the hat and the point. It's all there but one doesn't, is unable to see it. Unable to unfold it. it's too compact. One is not experienced in it. One is not conscious enough to let it play out in its fullness. So that what first comes is the chaos. What first comes is the shadow. Even though the soul is there with it, they always occur together. They they don't ever occur apart. This is very curious thing.
And actually I'll give you a little background on this. Jung doesn't mention it. He really didn't go into this material. But I'm gonna give you deep enough. You can find the prototype of but not in the gnostics. The Gnostics are actually using it second hand. The first, the first hand perception of this were in the disciples around Jesus. And in the Gospel according to Matthew. When you look at the last chapter of Matthew, the 28th chapter. Matthew is a quaternary. The 28 chapters are like a circle. And the first seven are a quarter and so forth. Those of you that are coming to my Tuesday night series about Alexandria recognize some of the structure.
But in the very last, in the 28th chapter, in going to the tomb early in the morning. The tomb is empty. And John and the Simon, Peter and Mary Magdalene all go to the tomb. Looking inside Simon and John see nothing. The tomb is empty and they run out looking to see where the body has been taken. But when Mary Magdalene looks in she sees two angels seated there on both sides of the empty wasn't a cot but it was like a stone ledge. They could not, they were men. They were very sophisticated men in a sense and yet they were psychologically not able to see as a spiritual woman sees. She could see the Angels and she talked to them. And she said where where is he. And as soon as she talks to the angels. And this is the progression in Matthew. As soon as she communicates with the angels and they communicate to her, she's able to notice that there's someone else in the tomb. And she turns in the tomb and she sees a man and she thinks it's the gardener. She can see the it's a man but she cannot recognize. And so she pours out briefly her whoa. You know they've taken the master whereever they have they taken him. And as soon as he says her name Mary then she can see that it's him. And she says rabboni which means master. And she's absolutely startled. Matthew presents it in this kind of an accumulated, penetrative, insight.
John and Peter cannot see anything in the tomb. It's empty. She can see the angels. And when she establishes communication she can see the other figure. And when she establishes communication there she can see that it's him. It's this kind of process thats the individuation process. And it's this type of exfoliation that alchemy graphically, symbolically displays for one. And displays in a context the crucible. The crator. The mind. The life of consciousness. So that by having this focus one can open up, adopt, into its symbol, into its whole meaning. And then bring that meaning into one's life. That it's like yes there is a four flow process. One is to recognize that what has begun. One has made the seed. And one has to nourish this so that the whole plant comes into being. And then nurture that plant so that the fruits come in to be. And then take those fruits and eat those fruits so that they become a part of your nutrition. It's that kind of a process.
And we'll see next week that Jung says of this, that this involves spirit in nature. That very much alchemy deals with the missing element. The earth moment. That what we often bring is thought and feeling and intuition but what we're missing is that radical conviction that it is true in our lives for us. It isn't a theory. It isn't a feeling of grace. it isn't an intuition of extraordinariness. But it comes to rest finally in the actuality that one is able to live this life in that way. And this is important. So that one could see that in every case an alchemical process is individual. From the beginning through the end. And that if anyone were to write up an alchemical process in any formulaic way it would be a fiction. It would not be alchemy. And of course you can see what a curious aspect this is because the development of chemistry as a science was all based on formulaic expressions which could be repeated impersonally in the labs. So the whole development of modern science, in a way, isn't impersonal anti-conscious activity. And yet it has connected with it in in the most basic way the very inner workings of our spiritual self.
And we'll see you next week with Spirit in Nature how Jung talks about the peculiarities of the earth. And how he mentioned somewhere in his writings, how one can even notice physiologically in the skeletons of Americans that American skeletons are beginning to approach the shapes of American Indian skeletons. And are veering away from European skeletons. And and how can this be that the very bones that show the taste of the land. And he says that the the mind, the psyche, is even more amiable than the skeleton and shows the impress. So that the quality of the land, the earth, where we are tinges the way in which the psyche expresses itself.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago, Jung said when a European goes to explore his unconscious it's like opening a door and having to go down to the cellar. When an American begins to explore his unconscious he finds that he falls several hundred feet before he lands anywhere. And where he lands is usually someplace where there are Indian ceremonials. Very curious.
We'll talk tomorrow some more about this next week.
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