Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-1956)

Transcript (PDF)

The Alchemical Core of C. G. Jung's Work (1916-1956)
Presentation 12 of 13

Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-1956), Part One: Structure and Nature
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 17, 1987

Transcript:

It's indispensable to understand what we're talking about here. I present on Tuesday nights and I'll leave the information up here on a sheet **inaudible few words**. And some of you have gotten interested in my early adventures in education. So I had typed up and xeroxed a course I ran at San Francisco State about 1966 concerning these materials. So I'll leave that up there for the curious.

I should ask are any of you professional analysts? Right. Professional analysts are above us. They do not need to inquire. They know. And therefore they charge. We do not know. And in our sophmoric ignorance we're still pursuing possibility that we might find out.

You know for Jung's 80th birthday they gave two celebrations. One in the morning where all the unknowns came. And he had a great time and he didn't want to leave and he was very uncharacteristic. But it was a bash and a half. And then in the evening all the higher ups got together. All the internationally famous people whose names are on letterheads. And he couldn't stand being there. And he was tortured and he left early. And Barbara Hannah asked him the next day about this. And he said the people in the morning are those who will carry on my work.

Let me just say this, the lecture last week on Aon was necessarily incomplete. Because I've been able been unable to get a copy of an indispensable book. His coworker from the early 1930's and she's still alive today. In alchemical matters, Marie-Louise von France, wrote a section of Aon. And in the swish..Swiss edition of Aon it was incorporated. but when they made the American translation for some reason, its not quite admissible that women be intelligent. I don't know why this is. So they did not translate her part of Aon. Left it out. and it was published separately years later in a small edition in Dallas Texas where no one would know. The name of the book title of it is The Passion of Perpetua. Perpetua was a a lady who undergoes a transformation of cycles. and without Marie-Louise's The Passion of Perpetua, the structure of Aon is not intelligible.

Just as the same for the Mysterium Coniunctionis which we look at tonight and next week. In the english translation they again left out the women's contribution. fortunately Jung insisted and it was published separately under the title of Aurora Consurgeons. And I'll lecture on that tomorrow night. The Aurora Consurgeons.

I do not understand the prejudices against women's minds. It's just a blind spot and a blur in contemporary situations. And hopefully it will just eventually go away. But without The Passion of Perpetua I could not present Aon in its structural consistency. However I will give you this tip, Aon is the first of a trilogy of works. Which were necessary for Jung to write before he could clear himself out to finish Mysterium Coniunctionis. the material in Mysterium Coniunctionis had circulated in him from at least the early 30s, consciously. It had gained momentum so that by the early 1940's he was ready to write it. In fact five of the six sections of Mysterium Coniunctionis were written before his grave illness of 1944. When he almost died. Only the sixth section of this book was written afterwards. All the other five were revised. But he could not bring himself to publish the book to, to finish it until he had cleared out of himself certain basic issues.

In Aon he tries to understand, as best he can, why it is that the philosophical stone should have a parallel in the figure of Christ. Why Jesus should be such a powerful self symbol. And why it should be so active in an occult way in the processes of alchemy. Why should this be so. And especially published...uh puzzled him because all the published material seemed to indicate that Western alchemy came out of Arabic alchemy. And there is no undue emphasis on Jesus whatsoever in Arabic alchemy. It just it simply isn't there. So it was a problem for Jung. Why is this so? And of course being an honest man intellectually, he kept expecting is only because I have limited material. When I have a larger collection, when I look at more material I'll see it in a different perspective and these examples will go away. Instead they proliferated and he came to see that it was a characteristic quality. So it became a problem. And the problem was this. Why ever is it that the self of Christ should be an alchemical operative, hidden and implicit behind the whole process?
So he wrote Aon to try and clear the decks from this material. And as soon as he had written Aon around the early 1950's he was seized, as it were, with a compulsion to write a very personal book. A book, a book in which Jung says he took the gloves off. in which Jung lashed out uncharacteristically, almost savagely at times. At an unspeakably denigrating position which God had put man into. And the title of that work was Answer to Job.

And no sooner had he written Answer to Job when at the very last Eranos conference in 1951 where he spoke. Jung had his final say in the third of the treatises, a work which we know now is Synchronicity: An A-causal Connective Principle. But the synchronicity lecture from the Eranos conference of 1951, which is included in one of those collections of the Eranos papers, is not the version to read. The version to read is the one which he enlarged and revised and published in a little book a year or two later. And the title of that book is The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. And I think it's so available in the Bollingen series. And Jung's synchronicity essay is juxtaposed here to an essay by very famous physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Who's collected works run to about six volumes in M.I.T. paperbacks. He's like a Werner Heisenberg. He's a thinker about the occult implications of physics. Because physics has come out of this field, is this fortuitous or is there something in this. And his essay in this book is The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler. And Kepler is extremely powerful intellect. Kepler is the first one to mathematically work out many of the celestial mechanics, many of the astronomical details of planetary movements, orbits and so forth. And it was on Kepler's mathematical data that Newton and Leibniz were able to think out the beginnings of physics.

What concerns us though is this triad, this sequence by Jung. The book Aon. The book Answer to Job. And the expanded essay Synchronicity and A-causal Connective Principle in the Nature and Interpretation of the Psyche. Only when those had been done and finished and published and out could he then bring himself to finish Mysterium Coniunctionis. So this work, which is his opus magnum, his greatest work really, is the fourth part of a quaternary. Which these other works furnish the three angles. So that one literally in order to read Mysterium Coniunctionis should go to Aon and then Answer to Job and then Sychronicity. And by puzzling over those three what do these three have in common? What kind of line of development of these three lead to that calls forth the need for what is expressed in Mysterium Coniunctionis. That this work is not so much an added element, another book in the series of 20 volumes of Jung's work. But this book is rather like a courtyard which is added to a dwelling which has three towers. This work is not itself a tower but as a courtyard which appends those three works.

In Mysterium Coniunctionis in Section four called Rex and Regina, King and Queen. about dead center in the middle of the book. Jung writes in this mode. And you can see him just stirring in his mind. And he's finally, he's had his say in several ways. And now he's having to say in a very pointed peculiar bluntness. He's talking about the philosophic stone which is the central fulcrum in alchemy. Once one has achieved the philosophic stone. Once one has followed the processes so that the lapis is formed then it's only a question of applying that. Of projecting that out. and making quote the gold.

Look how Jung writes. This is about 1953-54. "If the lapis were nothing but gold the alchemists would have been wealthy folk. If it were the panacea they would have had a remedy for all sickness. If it were the elixir they could have lived a thousand years or more. But all this would not oblige them to make religious statements about it. If nevertheless it is praised as the second coming of the Messiah one must assume that the alchemists really did mean something of the kind. Although they regarded the art as a charisma, a gift of the Holy Ghost or of the Sancti Deus. God as the throne of wisdom. It was still men's work to make this. And even though a divine miracle was the decisive factor the mysterious filius, the mysterious Sun was still concocted artificially in a retort. In the face of all this one is driven to the conjecture that medieval alchemy which evolved out of the Arabic tradition sometime in the 13th century. And whose most witness is the Aurora Consurgeons wasn't the last resort, a continuation of the doctrine of the holy ghost. Which never came to very much in the church. The Paraclete descends upon the simple individual who is thereby drawn into the Trinitarian process. And if the spirit of procreation and life in dwells in man then God can be born in him. A thought that is not perished since the time of Meister Eckhart." Who lived in the following century. From the 13th, he lived in the 14th century.
This is very strange talk. It's very tough talk. It's hard to hear. There are all kinds of resistances that come up to this because one gets a very eerie sense that Jung here is mixing, not only science with proto science. But mixing the proto science with theology. In fact it's like mixing science and theology. But in a very peculiar way. Its like mixing proto science with high theology. It isn't even like mixing proto theology with proto science. Its a very peculiar juxtaposition. No one can understand this without going into it for a really long time. Because it's an unsettling series of penetrative insights that finally yield the intelligibility of what he is talking about here.

The best that I can do is to suggest coming to the Tuesday night lectures for four or five months. And take take your turn in and see how easy it is for you. But let me summarise it somewhat like this. As we observed about a month ago or a month and a half ago, the classic text entitled In Translation a Testament of Alchemy, that showed how alchemy passed to the Arabs. The Western alchemical master who passed alchemy to the Arabs was named Morianus. And his first Islamic pupil was named Khalid. And this term pupil incidentally a significant term. the pupil is a student but a pupil also is the dark part of the eye. Isn't it Black Elk who said that men get lost in the dark of their eye. In Latin the pupa...the pupili is the figure of yourself that you see in the eye of the other person.

And it became a very profound inner image for Jung. So that when he was about 75 and he was adding on to his house. He was adding some material and making a courtyard to his house. A huge cubic stone arrived at Bollingen. Not the triangular stone he wanted for a lentil over a doorway in the wall. But he realized the stone had come to him. And in this stone Jung begin in his meditations to see something. And on one of the faces he thought he saw an eye. And so he carved a circle about the size of a hand around this area in the stone where he thought he saw an eye in the stone. And eventually he carved a little figure in there that had a hooded cape with a little lantern. And as he got that figure carved in the stone the words came to him. And he carved the words on the stone, engraved. But the name of figure was Telesphoros. And Telesphoros is one of the old Greek names of a companion, an occult companion to Asclepus, the god of healing. And we have, I think a translation here in Barbra Hanna of that. If I can find it. Of that full of quotation. here it is. He enscribed it in Greek on the stone. This is the English translation. "Time is a child. Play like a child. Play a board game. The kingdom off the child. This is Telesphoros who roams through the dark regions of the cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the Sun and to the land of dreams." And the words just came to him as he worked on the stone.

This whole quality of the child. Almost wanting to use the term which has become beaten to death, magical child. The child who is at once the small image of oneself in another. The image is in another. It's in the eye of another beholder. The image of oneself inside of the other person. That somehow has been able to be seen because one's addressing of one's perception has been honed to look into the eye of the other. So that there's something symbolic in this of an exchange from the interior of oneself to the interior of the other. So that in a very arcane way the hermetic understanding of a pupil was someone who had such a relationship to the teacher that at some juncture in the process of self unfoldment there came a time where the teacher and student exchange selfs. In a very colloquel way Socrates used to tell his young men in Athens, unless we can become companions together there's no way we can learn anything. We have to be able to understand each other, eye to eye as it were, before we can actually understand something outside of ourselves. The teacher outside of himself. The student outside of themselves. Something that's happening between us. That the education is happening between us. And that the situation then is all important. And the whole intelligibility of what one learns is contingent upon keeping the situation delimited. And so the great problem in alchemy was to keep the alchemical process intent. To keep on working with the same sphere of processes and material and so forth. So that one could see everything that you need is here it's just in the wrong form. Thus what you want to do is not to add other things or subtract but to transform what you have into its purified form. This is why transformation is so powerful in alchemy.

But the problem was is that this sphere of attention is very difficult to maintain. Because one is always drifting. And so the attention needs to be held. The process is even compounded. Because the very first thing that happens, the very first transformation is that happens is that whatever is there in the beginning go sour. Mortificio. It dies. It blackens. It decays. It decomposes. Things go from bad to worse. One deals with shadowy elements. One deals with the negatives. That's the very first thing that happens. So that if you're unsure yourself it's like an almost immediate compulsion to go somewhere else. Do something else. Or bring in help from someone else. Or bring in analogies from your experience from something else. So constantly in alchemy there is a pattern of confused babble which is the first line of defense against profanation of the sacred process.

The proliferation of the terms of the names is itself an indication that someone intelligently is defending this process from the profane. So that always when one runs across alchemical works the very first threshold you come to is the confused language. It always happens. And the key to it, the key, is that it always happens. There is never a single alchemical work which is straightforward. So that one has to set aside that expectation that there is evidently no formula. So that alchemy does not work with the formula at all. That in every case it's an individual process.

So that there's no such thing as a committee in alchemy. The closest that one has to fraternity is that one has a lineage of teachers, of masters. And that in the lineage of one takes clues. But as soon as you start your alchemical process that's it. You work with whatever is there. Jung says this is very akin to the therapy process. That the delimiting of the sphere usually is working with dreams and active imagination. And whatever you begin to work with that's what you work with. And the task of the analyst is to keep you coming back. Keep your insights feeding back into that. Keep the process coming back. So that in this retort of the experiencial mind. The person gets the benefit of the transformation. Because not only does the transformation have to take place, it has to be recognized. It has to be made conscious. That in fact the transformation will not happen unless there is consciousness present. That consciousness acts as a goal for the transformational medium to work. There's no such thing as transformational mediums working on automatic. Nothing happens. And if someone does not put their consciousness on the line nothing happens. If they are not really dedicated, nothing happens. Oh yes there are events and associations and they proliferate infinity to infinity. But nothing happens in the sense of a new stage of consciousness.
In that in every case Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis in every case there seems to be a pattern. That what consciousness is looking for in the first case, in the first transformation, is to unify itself. And that the term for this was the unio mentalis. Unio mentalis. And that what the alchemists who talked about the unio mentalis or talking about Jung says, they're talking about what I'm talking about when I use the term self. There's a lot of talk. That the self is the unity of all the capacities of your mind. Of, as one would say your psyche, conscious and unconscious. So that right away in the alchemical process there's an abstraction. A distillation from, purification from the body. So that the self when it forms forms with conscious and unconscious material. This kind of a polarity coming together into a unity. And that's the first stage in alchemy. And you don't have to look to other terms because that's what it is.

Difficult. Exasperating. Needing a refining fire. that if the fire is a little bit too much the fire will be a consuming fire. And you will end up regressed. Not regressed to some unpleasant past life but regressed to further fragmented conditions. And not too little because then the process will just simply fit around.

So the unio mentalis is really the goal as it were in the alchemical process at the very first. And that because of this abstraction the second stage is always a return. Always a bringing back. But instead of a bringing back of just what consciousness was when it was egotistical. It's a bringing back of the self with conscious and unconscious capacities united together to the body. That the reuniting of the unio mentalis with the body was extremely difficult. Even for those who could finally manage the unio mentalis because in bringing it back one brought back not any well-defined known self. But one brought necessarily a wide open. I would prefer to use the term because it's more easily thought of. I use the term for this the mysterious person archetype. That the self is oneself as a person with all of your mysterious and unknown capacities active. You don't know how much you can do. Never been tested fully.

But the problem is is that the body doesn't really want to accept this. It's like an immunological process. Body procedures are used to limited ego not used to this, this kind of energy. Doesn't want to accept this. Thinks this is transplant. So that the body has to be purified to accept this.

And Jung in his 1944 illness got a clue to the second stage because he had left the body. You can read it in Memories, Dreams and Reflections. He talked about how painful it was coming back. How blissful it was being out and gone and away. And how painful it was to come back. And how disorienting it was to come back. That the body is extraordinarily clumsy then. Not because the body is just clumsy but in comparison to the unio mentalis the body is extremely murky. All of its natural processes are really confused. It's used to living in a slovenly way. So that the body has to be purified. And this is a problem.

And then Jung talks about how once this process has been more or less achieved. And it was his contention that this has never fully achieved. That no one ever fully achieves this. Which then led to the projection of the idea that mankind as a whole is the only human vehicle in which the universal self of a human being can be fully explored.

But in Mysterium Coniunctionis he says that once the second stage of bringing the unio mentalis back in to the body is reached there is a desire then to unify this body with this soul of the world. Sometimes called the anima mundi. He used the term I think in this regard here is the unos mundis, the one world. So that the one mind, that is to say the organized mind, the self conscious and unconscious, is joined to the oneness of the world. The oneness of the universe. But that the medium, the threshold of the interface of joining this is the body. It is a very, very strange thing.

One would assume initially and in fact all the experience of the initial process is that the body is something which is a throwaway. It's in fact probably evil. It's in fact probably a resistance. And this is only confirmed by the fact that by trying to come back to it one experiences it's confusingness. If not its ugliness. And yet in the third process the realisation in retrospect recursively is that without the body none of this process could work. And that the body is sacred by virtue of it being the repository of the focus of all these processes. The body is sacred. It's not at all profane. It's not at all in the way.
And so the early alchemical statement by a woman, Maria the prophetess of Alexandria. She lived about 200 A.D. Her statement was that earth is the matrix for alchemy. Now this is kind of a play on words. The Greek word for whore is Maratrix. So that the use of the Greek word matrix is by saying that women are not whorish at all in their bodyness but that they are mothers. They are that, they are that sacred focus by which life becomes manifest in this cosmos. And that one has to understand this very, very profoundly. And that only in the very sophisticated last universal stages of alchemy does one understand this.

And so Jung when he was writing Aon around 1949-1950 was ecstatic when the Roman Catholic Church had the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary. The doctrine that was promulgated a papal bull that Mary has assumed into heaven. She is completely divine. And Jung said this is a great indication that alchemy is still alive in the world. In this worldwide process that the theological active imagination had made a cultmination. And that what was needed now was to link this up with science. That science had to come to this basic understanding. That the material universe the physical matter of this cosmos, mother-like is absolutely sacred and indispensable to what's going on. One cannot abstract oneself from this all the time. that is only a phase in the beginning stages of the process. And just because most people don't get beyond that phase is no need for those who are mature to live by adolescent codes of understanding. So that there's a very peculiar quality that's there in alchemy.

Jung then struggling with this tries to resolve this with what we were talking about earlier. Wisdom was always found in Hebrew or in Greek. Whatever language is feminine. Sofia.

The spirit, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Ghost in a very strange way seems to have originally been a feminine person. That is to say in terms of cosmic personages it...that was feminine. It's like the prototype in the human family is the father and the mother and the child. And one can hone in that prototype to say the mother, the father and the son. But in that prototype there's a very strange kind of relationship with the feminine. It's not apparent right away on the level of father and son. That the mother is sacred and necessary to the integrity of the cosmic nature of that relationship. So that it's only later recursively that this is recognized. It's only in the latter stages of sophistication that one comes to understand this.

The earlier archetype of the integration of the self expressed itself in terms then of a masculine father. And its most powerful rhetorical and symbolic expression was the king. The strongest that, that a man becomes. Or I guess we should use the term became. The strongest that a man became in millennia past was to become the king. If you want you can raise your imagination and think of the king of kings. Think of an emperor. Someone who then wears the crown which are like the Rays of the Sun. That's the divine king. He's the contact of man with divinity. The king is the symbolic expression of the archetype of the self. Was once upon a time. Was really once upon a time. And now for a long time has only been the case mythologically. Has not been the case psychologically for a very long time, a couple of thousand years. Even though there have been kings. Their basis has really been a mythological basis rather than a psychological basis. Because at some time, around 2200 years ago, the way in which the King used to express the archetype of the self lost its whole. Lost its attraction. And the king as a symbol of the self began to decay and as it decayed psychologically a new archetype for the self came up. And the new archetype for the self was what we would call the individual. Or what I'm calling more specifically the mysterious person archetype. That it to say the individual who has the ability to develop into cosmic capacities. To extend their capacities indefinitely through transformations.

So that this exchange or this displacement of the archetype of the King with the archetype of the mysterious person brought in a new perspective. Which alchemy then is the expression. Is the underground expression. So that operative in alchemy all the time is that none of these alchemical processes work without the alchemists them..himself or herself being involved to the depth of their symbolic self. Which is no longer as a king or a queen. But as the mysterious person.

END OF SIDE 1

It's hard to follow. and we'll take a break in just a minute. And let's see how this works.

So that the mysterious operation in alchemy was the hidden self in the alchemists. The unknown, unstop ummm...untapped cosmic nature of oneself. And that had to be brought into play. but the only way it could be brought into play was first of all to form some kind of limited theater. Some kind of limited sphere of attention. And to have the old structure of the self projected onto the materia in that sphere. And then have that materia undergo a decomposition, a dissolution. So that the alchemists would feel in their deepest unconscious self that they too were dissolving, unraveling. And that was the, the death which leads to a new life. It was this kind of initial process of course which stopped almost everyone except those who were foolhardy in their angelic compulsion. or as, as somebody wants to remarked only someone who has absolutely no other choice chooses to develop their spirit. And sometimes even then you refuse. Let's take a break.

Most of you know that I generally prepare an academic lecture and then don't give it. I used to once upon a time write them out. And I believed that I could write and people could read. But if you stir around in this for long enough you realize that a lot of it is problematical. And you learn to let things be. But I'll give you a taste of the problematical just to loosen up the humility of us all.

Right away in the second part of Mysterium Coniunctionis after the first part, which is entitled The Components of the Coniunctio. The second part is entitled The Paradoxa. The Paradoxa. Doxa in Greek meant opinion, meant a level of intelligence that opinion consulates. Para is beyond. So paradoxa is beyond common sense. That paradoxes occur and exist used to be taken as common sense proof that common sense was inadequate. But we, it's been a long time since we've been able to function at that level of truthfulness.

But in The Paradoxa in the very first section is entitled the arcane substance and the point. The arcane substance and the point. And the general understanding here and the reason that this is here right away is that the unio mentalis is the focusing together of all of the archetypal structures to a single point. So that the one mind is a single point. In sanskrit that's called Ecca Grata (sp?), one pointedness. This is a arcane. this is very difficult to understand. Especially when we complicate it by carrying the understanding to its dynamic fullness that the point vanishes in upon itself. And right away our associative governess thinks well does that mean that the self is a black hole in the psyche? And the answer is it probably is. But it doesn't do us any good to talk about it that way. Or to think about it that way. We just get nervous.

The classical understanding of that point is truly arcane. That it can be had. Let's try this almost everyone here at one time or another has been strained physically so that you see the little silver spots in front of your eyes. If you sneeze hard you can do it. If you try to lift a refrigerator drunk it will. There are all sorts of ways to encourage the physiological extremity to occur. Those little silver flashes of light. What are, what is that? When the psyche is strained, really strained, those little points of light occur but they're gold instead of silver. But instead of being out there in front of the eyes they're in the inner eye. That when the spirit is born in travail is a single, single gold spark like that. It's not an occurrence which is an imitation of anything in the world. The saying is is that it comes up from within. Where does that come up? And where within is it seen? The source is unknowing, unknowable. The occurrence is knowable and is the quintessence of what we would understand as existence.

In human expression the most classic way of talking about this is in Plotinus in The Enneads. Jung uses it in Mysterium Coniunctionis. It's a single reference but its extremely important. it's in book three of Plotinus. And it's in the first section of book 3. The title is On Destiny. and here's how, in English translation, here's how Plotinus expressed it about 265 A.D. in Rome. "All things that come into being and all things that really exist either have a cause for their coming into being. Or for their existence. or have no cause. All things which come into being have a cause but things which really exist have some of them a cause and some not. Well among the eternal realities it is not possible to refer the first of them to other things. Which are responsible for their existence just because they are first. But it must be admitted that all those which depend on the first realities have their being from them." And he goes on. And this is the classic statement that being is, existence is, very much a manifestation of reality. A reality if you like. But of reality which has no cause whatsoever.

Jung uses very peculiar phrase occasionally to explain this. He uses a Greek phrase which essentially means the first causeless primordiality. And in Mysterium Coniunctionis when he's talking about this he will he will use the term. and the first Greek word in the term is proton. Proton. And we understand proton from nuclear physics and it is the first person participle of protos. But in original greek protions word the lines going from the mast, the furthest four mast from the ship. If there were more than one or from the mast to the prow of the ship, those lines were the protionian, plural. so that the first existent substantiality is like the lines that lead to the beginning on one end and hook up to the very basis of the structure on the other. So the Greek understanding of primordiality is not like some kind of urge line layer. But is already a structural relationality which is essential. That you can't have the ship unless you have to mast and the prow linked together by these two. Jung uses the term proton and then he uses the Greek term for uncaused. Uncaused. That in the mainstays of being there's a reality which is uncaused. Which holds all together. Not by its being but by its causeless reality.

In alchemy this is discoverable in a very strange way. I was going to give you the full quotation from the alchemists Michelson Sendivogius. Which is the new chemical light and it's re-printed in the Hermetic Museum edited by A.E. Waite. And Jung refers to it continuously in. that basic illustration which I put on the board for you encapsulate what Sendivogius and Jung would have us understand here.

The four elements are quaternary in themselves. Earth, water, air, fire together are a quaternary. They're the quaternary of physicality. They're the quaternary of what we would understand as matter, the body. The materia. The universe in its materiality. They are complimented in some ways and paralleled in other ways by another quaternary. That other quaternary is a process of relationalities which lead the quaternary of physicality, link it back like those mainstays to the mast of the ship. To the reality behind the universe. Which isn't in being and also is not in the relationalities. Nevertheless occurs and is real.

The way it's discovered in the alchemical process. Quoting now, The Essence from Sendivogius and Jung has used this in Mysterium Coniunctionis. Fire working upon air. the element fire working upon the element air produces the alchemical relationality which we understand is sulfur. Air in its turn works as an element upon the element of water. And this produces in their relationality that alchemical mercury. And air or water working upon earth produces salt. So that the three alchemical elements sulfur, mercury and salt are functions of the relationalities of the four elements. So that earth, air, water and fire are like this stable materia and sulfur, mercury and salt are the alchemical relationalities. They're only three of them, not four. There's, there's either something missing for those three in some relationality to themselves call forth the fourth.

In alchemy the basic understanding was that mercury has a primordial ambivalence. Divine messenger if you like between heaven and earth. But has an ambivalence in that it can as a process afine itself with sulfur. In which case one gets a masculinity. And I'm reducing all this and abstracting it for expository purposes. But mercury may also, the very same mercury in its hermaphroditic ambidextrousness affinitizes itself with that which salt symbolizes and we get the feminine. And that the masculine and feminine, the outcomes of these affiniatides relationalities are able to join together. And it's out of that joining together that the unio mentalis comes. That the self becomes focused out of that. Which means that there is nothing physical here. There's not even anything relational here. There is only primordial metarelational interchange that yields the divine child, the mysterious person, self.

In no way was a king ever made this way. But in alchemical expression the mysterious person is made this way. The male and female elements are one self and one soul. Whatever sexuality one has one soul is they complement to it. this is alchemical talk. But what has to be able to refine one's self to the point that one can separate one's soul from one's body. So as to have that masculine feminine which is a kind of a heraclitian polarity. Which means that it can be brought together into a unity. It can then be brought back together into a unity. And because it has been brought back together as a unity, the unio mentalis. That unio mentalis has the characteristic of being able to be brought back together with the body. So the self, the mysterious personal archetype can be brought back into unity with the body in a very mysterious process. Because it has that nature. It has those kinds of qualities.

That inter-penetrative unity which male and female have between them does not occur in the elemental universe because there is no relationship. In the alchemical understanding earth does not act upon fu...fire. So the four elements are not linked together in an interchangeable cycle at all but are in the hierarchy. There's no way that one can then bring earth around to close up with fire. There's nothing comes out of that.

So that the new quatinary that is made, alchemically creates relations and the unio mentalis. So that the unio mentalis then, which is unified in itself the masculine and feminine, the soul and the and the self, works back through those three relationalities called sulfur, mercury and salt and is able to transform the material world. Because it has a security to the material world. The material world only exists in a hierarchical fashion whereas this other quaternary is now pneumatic it exists in a transformational way. And so the alchemist who has produced the unio mentalis in himself has command over these alchemical processes which is symbolically called sulfur and mercury and salt.

And of course the handle on that is is the mercury. Because it's the, it's the controlling factor in the way in which salt and sulfur become interpenetrable. Salt and sulfur by themselves would not act. They would mix but they would not collesque. it's the mercury, the spiritistus mercurius then, which is the vivifying agent in the transformative process. But can only be the vivifying agent when used by the unio mentalis. It's only under that peculiar special unique circumstance that the spiritus mercurius then is able to work and carry through the transformational qualities of this pneumatic quaternary to the physical quaternary. They then will transform. They will follow whatever structural pattern is brought to them. That's the nature of the material world. It's the repository. It's the manifestation repository of the directions of the processes. Carried by the high consciousness of the integrated self.

Is this a reversible process? It's eminently reversible. That's why one can carry it back. One can go back to the body. One can go back through that body to the cosmos. It has to be reversible. You have to be able to to bring this back. The eternal return as it, as it were. There's always a second coming. There's always a return. The spiritual maturity is in this coming back.

So that in the alchemical process there is a great deal of complexity at every single stage. And if one were to try to make a formulaic appropriation of it, the best that one could get would be a mental understanding. But the unio mentalis is not on a mental level. It is on a pneumatic level. If I may use the term for you, spiritual level. It is a spiritual focus. It's not so much meta psychic as para psychic. It's beyond.

Someone once said that when a Zen master draws he draws from about two feet behind his shoulder. Doesn't, doesn't draw with the hand. It's, it's that kind of thing a process. Which makes it then that the the self which has arisen, the mysterious person archetypal self that has arisen and comes into play. Comes into play with all of the energy structures unified. All of them. So that them to try to understand this by any aspect of the mind what one would get would be a confusion. if one could think clearly about that occurrence happening, the best that one could get would be a very bright golden blur. Because there is, there is no distinctiveness anywhere there other than the whole of it.

So that classically, the classic meditational image of this was whirling spirals of brilliant celestial white light in an infinite night of total darkness. This was the image that Dionysius the Areopagite had in his strongest meditation. That the mind receives the image of the numinous self at its best in only that form. That's about it.

So in The Alchemical Development Jung writes this. This is the epilogue to Mysterium Coniunctionis. "Alchemy with its wealth of symbols gives us an insight into an endeavor of the human mind which could be compared with a religious right. An opus divinium. The difference between them is that the alchemical opus was not a collective activity rigorously defined as to its form and content. But rather, despite the similarity of their fundamental principles, an individual undertaking on which the adept staked his whole soul for the transcendental purpose of producing a unity. It was a work of reconciliation between apparently incompatible opposites. Which characteristically were understood not merely as the natural hostility of physical elements but at the same time as a moral conflict. Since the object of this endeavor was seen outside as well as inside, as both physical and psychic the work extended as it were through the whole of nature. And its goal consisted in a symbol which had an empirical and at the same time a transcendental aspect."

So that one would always read in alchemy about the work. what was always important was that the work go on. Symbolized in itself by the refining fire. Because there was no way to understand where one was because there was no longer any hierarchical structure operative. There were only relationalities. But that the key to the comprehension of the relationalities was of its own nature and ambivalence. Mercurial. Trickster like if you like. So that the real quality that was called for was a spiritual courage. Which means keeping an open mind in a situation where every indication was that one was in dire jeopardy. As far as one could see every stage of the process involved a dissolution.

And we're going to talk next week about why the alchemist then needed to be religious. Not in terms of the church or any church. In fact it was quintessential that they not be affiliated with any given human structure of religious practice. The alchemist in every instance had to be out on a limb individual by themselves, alone. And not only that. Had to learn to be alone completely open to an infinity which gave every indication of being inimical to them. And it was only through this quality of courage left the self in its new way can be born. And we'll talk some more next week about that very quality.

END OF RECORDING