Stanton Marlan - Jung's Alchemical Philosophy
Stanton Marlan - Jung's Alchemical Philosophy
Stanton Marlan - Jung's Alchemical Philosophy
‘This edifying book has a double impact. The author is a philosopher and a
psychoanalyst, and his book is at once a philosophical psychology and a psychological
philosophy. In the first instance it reveals to its reader valuable and varied insights into
the history and imagery of alchemy, demonstrating why the philosophy of alchemy
has been crucial to the development of the theory and practice of psychoanalytic
therapy. But this is not all. Philosophers think about thinking, and philosophy, as the
book reminds the reader, is thought in the act of thinking about itself. So, in the second
instance, this book shows its reader how to think about psychology psychologically,
as opposed to thinking about psychology personalistically as medicine, science,
spirituality, or problem-solving for ego and its difficulties. The book’s doubleness
rewards the reader with provocative perspectives’.
David L. Miller, Watson Ledden Professor Emeritus, Syracuse
University, USA. Author: Gods and Games: Toward a Theology of Play
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Philo
sophy & Psychoanalysis Book Series
Jung’s Alchemical Philosophy
Stanton Marlan
Cover image: Jimlop collection/Alamy Stock Photo
First published 2022
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905
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For my children and grandchildren:
Dawn, Tori and Brandon
Malachi, Sasha, Zia and Naomi
Contents
List of figuresxiv
List of tablesxvi
Acknowledgmentsxvii
Prefacexviii
Introduction 1
Conclusion 262
Epilogue 265
Bibliography267
Index276
Figures
Cover: Hermes
Frontispiece: Tree of Life vii
2.1 The dual face of alchemy. 33
2.2 Sun and Moon, Rebis. 34
2.3 Mercurius as a uniting symbol. 36
2.4 Ouroboros, the tail-eater. 36
2.5 Mercurius turning the wheel which symbolizes the
alchemical process. 37
2.6 Mercurius as caduceus unifying the opposites. 38
2.7 Male/female coniunctio.46
2.8 The death-like state of the soul standing on the black
sun, a condition lacking differentiation. 47
2.9 Sol niger. The dark phase of the alchemical work. 48
2.10 King and Queen’s return to the prima materia.49
2.11 Energizing moisture. 50
2.12 Return to the prima materia.51
2.13 Energizing moisture. 52
2.14 Grain growing from the grave. 53
2.15 Grain growing from the corpse of Osiris. 54
2.16 A growing sense of vitality in the midst of darkness. 55
2.17 The monstrous hermaphrodite. 56
3.1 Extraction of the monster Mercurius and the raising of
the feminine image of Mary into the hierarchy. 65
3.2 These images of Abraxas show its strange composite and
monstrous form. 68
3.3 An image of the Mercurial monster. 70
3.4 Union of opposites as monstrosity. 71
Figures xv
In this book, I will consider the enigmatic and mysterious goal of the
alchemical process, the Philosophers’ Stone. The Stone has for the most
part been dismissed as a serious object of academic and scholarly stud-
ies and has been thought of as an illusory fantasy of the old alchemists
in their impossible quest to turn lead into gold. At best, the results of the
alchemists’ quest for the transformation of substances have been seen from
the perspective of the history of science as a naturalistic process and as
a precursor to the science of chemistry. From this perspective, many of
the religious and symbolic aspects of alchemical literature were passed
over or reduced to code names for material processes. For many historians
of alchemy, this approach left out or ignored important aspects of what
alchemy was about. Considered from the wider perspective of the history
of the human spirit, alchemy and its goal appeared not only as physical
processes leading to chemistry, but also as a religious discipline whose
goal was the transformation of earthly man into an illuminated philosopher.
The complex history of alchemy is a current and burgeoning field filled
with tensions and controversy that may reflect the historical divides within
alchemy itself and mirror what I will call a split in the alchemical imagina-
tion. For Jung, alchemy had a dual face. He saw it as both a quest to liter-
ally transform matter in the laboratory as well as a spiritual quest aimed at
the transformation of the soul and thus as a religious philosophy. Studying
alchemy from this perspective led Jung to see it not only as a precursor to
chemistry, but also as a historical counterpart to his developing psychol-
ogy of the unconscious. Jung’s psychological perspective on the symbolic
dimensions of alchemy opened a way of understanding the alchemical
process that revolutionized our understanding of alchemy. While Jung’s
perspective on alchemy continues to influence the field to this day, his
Preface xix
view has been challenged both from within and from outside the Jungian
tradition. I will claim that current challenges to Jung’s position take place
in the context of differing philosophical convictions. Therefore, I propose
that, along with natural scientific, religious, and psychological perspec-
tives, the alchemical philosophers should be considered as philosophers
working out a philosophical perspective. The goal of their work was the
Philosophers’ Stone – a philosophical substance. Placing the Philosophers’
Stone in this context opens up many philosophical issues and tensions
with regard to the study of the goal of alchemy, including the problem of
binary oppositions, splits and gaps that are seemingly impossible to close,
among them: chemistry and alchemy, scientific positivism and religious
esotericism, psychology and philosophy. Alchemy itself has been seen as
gold making, Self-making, and God making, and there are also the divides
between phenomena and noumena, limit and transcendence, mechanism
and vitalism, thought and being, image and idea, spirit and nature, soul
and spirit, ontology and history, absolutism and relativism. I will consider
these binaries in several contexts and among different thinkers and arrive
at the conclusion that none of these divides can easily, if at all, be resolved
into a simple unity or oneness.
Coming to terms with the idea of binaries and their resolution appears to
be both an ancient and contemporary philosophical struggle. The work of
many philosophers is relevant to this issue and lends itself to the concerns
of this book. The Philosophers’ Stone as the idea of the goal has been
understood as a unification of oppositions into a oneness that was not a
oneness mirroring the enigmatic dictum that the Philosophers’ Stone is
a “stone that is no stone.” The attempt to penetrate further into an under-
standing of the unity of the Stone requires that it be understood not as a
simple unity, but as a complex one. A philosophical way into this conun-
drum is an important focus of this book. In it I came to see what I consider
a modern philosophical rendering that can shed additional light on notions
such as the Self and the Philosophers’ Stone.
Introduction
The Philosophers’ Stone is considered the end product of the opus philoso-
phorum. It has been described in numerous ancient manuscripts with con-
siderable disagreement about its nature and appearance and about how it
was to be discovered or made. It was identified with the transformation of
matter and turning lead into gold, as well as philosophically identified with
the transformation of “the earthly man into an illuminated philosopher.”1
This miraculous Stone has a strange sort of complexity that once led
Jung to confess that he “regarded alchemy as something off the beaten
track and rather silly.”2 After an initial study of the images of the classical
Latin alchemical text Artis aurifera, volumina duo (1593), Jung declared,
“Good Lord, what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to understand.”3 Ech-
oing this sentiment, Jung wrote elsewhere, “What the old philosophers
meant by the lapis has never become quite clear.”4 And, in a similar spirit,
alchemical scholar Lyndy Abraham called the Stone the “arcanum of all
arcana.”5
While the Stone was often identified with the unus mundus, the prin-
ciple of one world, it has also been known by a variety of names, many
of which were collected by Gratacolle in his “The Names of the Philoso-
phers” (1652). Among the many names of the Stone, we find it referred to
as “Chaos, a Dragon, a Serpent, a Toad, the green Lion, the quintessence,
our stone Lunare, Camelion, . . . blacker than black, Virgins milke, radicall
humidity, unctuous moysture, . . . urine, poyson, water of wise men, . . .
Gold . . .”6 And the list goes on, disseminating itself into a continuing
complexity of images. The complexity reaches nearly absurd proportions
in Dom Pernety’s Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique, which lists about six
hundred synonyms for the Stone or related materials.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-1
2 Introduction
Despite the many names of the Stone, the alchemists stressed that it
personified unity and consisted in one thing and one thing only. Morie-
nus wrote: “For it is one Stone, one med’cin, in which consists the
whole magistery” – and the Scala philosophorum stated: “The Stone
is one: Yet this one is not one in Number, but in kind.”8
The play between unity and multiplicity, the one and the many, identity
and difference, manifests itself in many ways throughout the alchemical
literature.
The making of the Philosophers’ Stone was said to require an understand-
ing “of the laws of nature so that [the alchemist] can reproduce God’s mac-
rocosmic creation in the microcosm of the alembic.”9 To achieve this union,
one had to begin with the prima materia or “principal substance of the
Stone”10 which was known as philosophical mercury or, more accurately,
Mercurius, a substance philosophically different from the physical materi-
alism of chemical mercury. Within natural substances, the alchemists dis-
covered “living . . . seeds” “necessary for the generation of the Stone in the
dialectic of creation.”11 Just what is meant by these “living seeds”? “Jung
has written that by the fourteenth century it had begun to dawn on the alche-
mists that the Stone was something more than an alchemical compound.”12
Jung here was alluding to the psychic and spiritual components of material
reality discovered by the alchemical imagination. Abraham notes that
of both what Jung was after and as a way of moving beyond the limits of
Jung’s perspective. Likewise, Wolfgang Giegerich via Hegel went further
along this path by centralizing the notion of spirit and developing the idea
of the soul’s logical life. Each of these formulations has analytic and philo-
sophical implications and offers different views of the subject/self and of
human “nature” and “purpose.” As such, these are not only psychological
concerns but philosophical ones as well. These differing views, based on
self, soul, and/or spirit, have implications for how alchemy and the Philos-
ophers’ Stone are understood as well. Following these threads and tracking
the Philosophers’ Stone into its various historiographic and psychological
variations sets the stage for continuing philosophical reflection.
One of the major orienting concerns of Jungian psychology and of
alchemy has been the unification of opposites and the attempt to come
to terms with binaries. The notion of the Philosophers’ Stone and the
Self represent the goals of the alchemical and psychoanalytic processes
respectively. Such goals have been understood and symbolized in many
ways and refer generally to ideas of “wholeness.” Jungian psychology as
a modern discipline has contributed to our understanding of the process
and goal of alchemy. While doing so, it has also gained a great deal from
alchemy and has advanced our understanding of the psychology of the
unconscious as well as opening up interesting philosophical issues. As
noted above, Jung understood alchemy to be a philosophical endeavor and
though I consider the Jungian approach to be a “philosophically” oriented
psychology, I believe that further research into the philosophical meaning
of the goal of alchemy would continue to enhance our understanding of it.
Both Hillman and Giegerich challenged the philosophical parameters of
Jung’s approach and for both of them, though in very different ways, phil-
osophical understanding was implicitly and explicitly important in their
reflections. While many philosophical orientations influenced Jung, Hill-
man, and Giegerich, Jung’s notion of the Self was significantly influenced
by Asian philosophy, whereas Hillman’s idea of soul drew on neo-Platonic
influences, and Giegerich’s notion of the spirit was largely influenced by
Hegel.18
When read in a certain way, Hegel’s dialectic and his notions of “Abso-
lute Knowing” and “Absolute Spirit” can be useful ideas, helpful to con-
sider in connection with the idea of the Philosophers’ Stone, as a unity
that is complex and differentiated. While finding Hegel’s philosophy to be
relevant to my interest in the goal of alchemy, I have been suspicious of
Introduction 5
Casey writes: “Philosophy and Psychology – how will this strange twain
meet? Or have they not always already met – but in a way unknown to
each other?”22 For Casey, these fields appear alien and have strict bounda-
ries, but for him this aggravates the problem. Putting it otherwise, he asks
“how are we to join – or rejoin, or to see as already conjoined – spirit and
soul?”23 With this question, Casey addresses my own concern about phi-
losophy and psychology, as well as about the tension between image and
idea, spirit and soul. In Casey’s work, he finds a “place” where “spirit and
soul not only will meet but . . . already [have] met” and are held together
in meaning, imagination, and image, and in a linking between philosophy
and psychology.24
In the following chapters, I intend to think through the problems and
complexity of a number of divides in the history of alchemy and in the
alchemical imagination. In this book, I intend to deepen the process of
resolving these divides by turning to philosophy in ways that shed light on
the Philosophers’ Stone and Jung’s notion of the Self.
Hegel is one figure whose ideas can be seen to penetrate into the
dynamics of the Philosophers’ Stone and to a complex unification of
opposites that is resolved in his idea of Absolute Knowing and Abso-
lute Spirit. Hegel’s view of the Absolute is not best read as an ontologi-
cal conviction or abstract theory privileging idea over image, form over
content, syntax over semantics, and I will argue that while there is evi-
dence in Hegel’s work for privileging the first term of the above binaries,
there are many readings of his work that demonstrate the profound and
inseparable connection between image and idea, form and content, syn-
tax and semantics, and the timelessness of the Absolute and its relative
history in time and place. I believe it is this latter reading that deepens
our understanding of what has been called the Philosophers’ Stone and
it is this kind of Absolute Knowing that has continued to inspire inquiry
into the alchemists and into contemporary psychology and philosophy.
The concept of the Philosophers’ Stone is an ancient way of expressing
what Jung considered to be the Self. Both the Stone and the Self can be
given philosophical expression in terms of the notion of Absolute Know-
ing, but this knowing has been variously understood by numerous depth
psychologists and philosophers in alternate ways. Part of my work in
this book is to suggest that their alternative understandings can throw
new light on the Philosophers’ Stone, the goal of alchemy, and of Jung’s
psychology of the Self.
Introduction 7
Notes
1 Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 145.
2 Jung, Memories, 204.
3 Ibid.
4 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), §555.
5 Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 145.
6 Gratacolle, “The Names of the Philosophers’ Stone,” 67.
7 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14), §643.
8 Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 148.
9 Ibid., 146.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.; emphasis mine.
12 Ibid., 147.
13 Ibid.
14
“Calid had stated that ‘This Stone is to be found at all times, in everie place, and
about every man.” This tradition was inherited by the medieval alchemists and the
alchemists of Renaissance Europe. Many were aware of the fact that the Stone or
the matter for making the Stone was to be found in man himself. Ripley wrote:
“Every-ech Man yt hath, and ys in every place/ In thee, in me, in every tyme and
space, and Philalethes wrote that Morienus informed his pupil, the king, that he
must 'descend/ I Into himself the matter for to finde/Of this our stone.” Gerhard
Dorn likewise indicated that panacea was the truth to be found in man. Colson’s
Philosophia maturata states that the Stone “is generated between Male and Female
and lieth hide [sic] in Thee, in Me, and in such like things.” In the production of
the Stone, the alchemist was advised to employ his imagination as the major tool.
Arnoldus is cited in Zoroaster’s Cave: “Follow it with the Instance of Labour, but
first exercise thyself in a diuturnity of Intense Imagination: for so thou mayst find
the compleat Elixir; but without that never at all.” (Ibid.)
15 See Panisnick, “The Philosophical Significance.”
16 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), §365.
17 Ibid., §362.
18 It is interesting and perhaps not surprising since the goals of alchemy and analysis
are concerned with the unity of binary oppositions that Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit
and his Logic have been important to a number of contemporary scholars who bring
his work to bear on both the Freudian and Jungian traditions. In terms of the Freudian
tradition, see the work of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Jon Mills. For the Jungian
tradition, see Sean Kelly, Sanford Drob, and Wolfgang Giegerich.
19 Giegerich’s appreciation and interpretation of Hegel is important for today’s psychol-
ogy, however, he is only one of several thinkers who have come to similar conclusions.
Giegerich has brought Hegelian reflections to the work of Jungian psychology in The
Soul’s Logical Life and in Dreaming the Myth Onwards. Also see Mills, The Uncon-
scious Abyss; Žižek, Less Than Nothing.
20 Desmond, Beyond Hegel, xi.
21 Ibid.
22 Casey, Spirit and Soul, xi.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., xviii.
Chapter 1
Alchemy is a vast subject and the Philosophers’ Stone is one of its most
enigmatic ideas. The Stone was considered the ultimate achievement of
the “Great Work” of alchemy and the elusive goal of alchemical trans-
formation. The Philosophers’ Stone has been described in numerous
ancient manuscripts and in many recipes for its production, and with
considerable disagreement about its nature and appearance as well as
about how it was to be discovered and/or made. These disagreements
have followed the Stone throughout its history and alchemists have
argued with one another about the materials, procedures, and the reality
of the Stone. In spite of overlapping claims, many alchemical treatises
proclaim their own recipes as the correct one for the achievement of
alchemy’s sought-after goal. It was not unusual at the beginning of an
alchemical treatise for the writer to begin by mercilessly denouncing
other adepts, calling them charlatans, “puffers,” and fools. In the midst
of such controversy and confusion, the Philosophers’ Stone remained
shrouded in mystery.
Richard Grossinger has noted that “[a]lchemy is primeval. Those who
would give its origin must also realize: there are no origins.”1
Alchemy is a form that comes to us from the most ancient times. Its
survival bespeaks numerous redefinitions and rebirths, many of them
known to us from texts (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Christian, Euro-
pean, Islamic, Hindu, Taoist);2 but [he speculates] an equally large
number no doubt occurring in preliterate times and among unknown
people whose writings never reached us.3
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-2
Philosophical tensions in historiography 9
Philosopher George David Panisnick (1975) likewise states that the reason
why the Stone’s origin is so problematic is due to the supposition “that
it seems to have evolved out of a pre-alchemical consciousness which
was concerned with . . . lithic myths.”4 Mircea Eliade, the well-known
historian of religion, identifies a number of these myths, some of which
play an important role as background for the alchemical idea of the Phi-
losophers’ Stone. Two provocative mythologems include the idea that the
Stone generates and ripens in the bowels of the earth and that men are born
from stones.5 Alan Cardew amplifies these myths noting the living quali-
ties of what we now consider inorganic materials. In them he finds what
“were like veins of blood in animal life. . . [and] were akin to stars.”6 The
implications of such ideas point to a way of thinking in which man and
nature were intrinsically co-implicated and what Cardew calls a “dark her-
metic equivalence,”7 a way of imagining that is implicit in the well-known
alchemical idea “as above so below.” For Cardew, “[d]escending into the
black labyrinths of the earth and exploring caverns was a journey back to
the archaic, which was still at work with a daemonic magical force.”8 In
such a descent into our history one could learn to discover and read the
“primal plant . . . primal animal . . . and the primal stone (or Urstein)”
which, according to E.T.A. Hoffmann, mirror the “secrets which are hid-
den above the clouds.”9
It is hard for our modern consciousness to enter into such archaic and
mythical thinking, but for Eliade it is necessary to do so to gain some
sense of the worldview that lies behind many alchemical ideas, including
the Philosophers’ Stone. For Eliade, entering into the archaic and mythic
imagination gives us a glimpse of how early societies related to what we
now call “matter.” He writes that the purpose of his study was
Eliade points out that the idea of the modification and transformation of
substances is a key element of the alchemists’ “raison d’être.” In the world
of the alchemists, “nature” was animated by a natural telos and entelechy
that moved it toward its destiny and completion. The role of the ancient
10 Philosophical tensions in historiography
of matter. The alchemist on the other hand, is concerned with the “pas-
sion,” “the death,” the “marriage” of substances in so far as they will
tend to transmute matter and human life. His goals were the Philoso-
phers’ Stone and the Elixir Vitae.17
guide the way for the alchemists’ work, in themselves they cannot produce
the goal the alchemists sought. Eliade is quick to point out that in addition
to such virtues an initiatory process is necessary to produce philosophical
illumination and the attainment of the Philosophers’ Stone or elixir of life.
see it “as a uniform and constant monolith”33 that overlooks the differen-
tiations among the many different alchemies. They criticize Jung’s arche-
typal perspective largely on this basis and state that the aim of continuing
research is to “elucidate the spectrum of notions, attitudes, and pursuits
generally grouped under the wide umbrella of ‘alchemy’ and to portray it
as a vastly more dynamic field than has hitherto been presumed.”34
In a more recent publication, Principe makes the distinction between
alchemy and “alchemies” to underline his point that “the diversity and
dynamism within historical alchemy is sufficiently extensive that histori-
ans have now begun to group individual authors and practitioners within
‘schools’ and to see the differences among their practices and goals.”35
Principe’s work on the historiography of alchemy has been valuable and
has made an important impact on other researchers in alchemy, particularly
historians of science and chemistry. While Principe champions the impor-
tance of careful differentiations in the field, he does not seem to be aware
that his own point of view has a strong philosophical bias that is not uni-
versally accepted by other credible academic historians. Important aspects
of his perspective have been challenged by Hereward Tilton (2003), Florin
George Caliăn (2010), Wouter Hanegraaff (2012), Aaron Cheak, and oth-
ers. These researchers, while appreciating and accepting a number of
Principe’s and Newman’s contributions, also note their bias toward reduc-
ing alchemy to their own monolithic orientation of a “natural philosophy”
and an exclusively “natural scientific” perspective, to the exclusion of the
vital history of esotericism and other philosophical orientations.
I would consider this a brand of historical and scientific positivism,
though Principe and Newman are uncomfortable with this designation,
“because of the diffuseness of [the term’s] common use.”36 They differen-
tiate their position from the kind of “positivism” that imposes its current
scientific notions on the field of alchemy without sufficient interest “in
the historical and cultural context of those ideas.”37 They label the above
variety of positivism as “ ‘presentist’ or ‘Whig’ historiography,” meaning
projecting current views anachronistically back on the historical context of
alchemy, “which assigns relative importance to historical ideas based upon
their level of connection with or similarity to current scientific notions.”38
For them, such a position shows “insufficient interest in the historical and
cultural context of those ideas.”39
It is interesting, however, that Principe and Newman, while seemingly
open to the historical and cultural context of alchemical ideas beyond a “pre-
sentist” scientific perspective, seem singularly hostile and closed-minded
Philosophical tensions in historiography 15
Hereward Tilton
Tilton’s work on the historiography of alchemy is a far more balanced
study, which includes more informed and scholarly accounts of Eliade,
16 Philosophical tensions in historiography
Tilton points out, however, that though Dobbs followed Jung’s “distinc-
tion between a ‘scientific’ and a ‘spiritual’ alchemy . . . she did not believe
Jung’s work supported the notion of a radical discontinuity in the evolu-
tion of chemistry.”52
More critical of Jung’s historiography was Barbara Obrist, a French
historian of alchemy, who “lamented” that Jung’s perspective had taken
on “the status of a self-evident truth and was no longer questioned by
historians of alchemy.”53 For her, Jung’s mistakes were later reinforced by
Eliade. The two major views of Jung and Eliade that she criticizes were
the fundamental religiosity of the alchemists and their animistic vitalist
worldviews. Her work, which preceded Principe’s and Newman’s, argues
the same point: that there was no good evidence to presume that “labora-
tory workers of this time were engaged in a spiritual quest for selfhood.”54
For her, Jung “projected the Protestant myth of the solitary, interior search
into the Middle Ages.”55 She also claims that both Eliade and Jung simply
copied Hélène Metzger, who sought to distinguish alchemy from mecha-
nistic chemistry and instead saw it as having a vitalistic and organic view
of the cosmos.
Newman follows and develops this criticism citing both Obrist and
Robert Halleux as “serious” historians of alchemy who reject Jung. Tilton
takes issue with a number of methodological and factual errors of both
Principe and Newman. For one, he notes that Halleux holds no overt anti-
Jungian position. In fact, he points out that Halleux praises Jung for his
“scrupulous adherence to the fruits of erudition concerning the dating and
authorship of texts, and speaks of Jung’s ‘brilliant’ exegeses of certain
particularly ‘mystical’ texts such as the Hellenistic Egyptian Visions of
Zosimos.”56 Tilton shows that Halleux – contrary to Principe and Newman,
who use him to criticize Jung – is in fact more critical of Obrist.
Another problem with Principe’s and Newman’s characterization of
Jung is that they slant their language in a way to defame both him and the
esoteric tradition they dislike and apparently know little about. Demon-
strating this point, Tilton quotes Newman’s caricature of the Jungian inter-
pretation of the work of Philalethes. Newman, apparently in the service of
18 Philosophical tensions in historiography
mocking Jung’s position, states that Philalethes’ work is not “ ‘the product
of a disordered mind’ [i.e., projection of the unconscious] or the work of
‘an irrational mystic unable to express himself in clear English.’ ”57 New-
man misunderstands Jung’s notion of projection, contrasting it to his ide-
alized version of clear and distinct ideas, a Cartesian bias. Tilton notes,
“It matters little [to Newman] that ‘irrational mystics’ have given rise to
some of the finest literature in the English language.”58 For Tilton, what
is at stake here is the devaluation of the mystical and religious aspects of
alchemy. Tilton sums up:
Tilton recognizes that the so-called arbitrary symbolism is for the psycho-
analyst anything but arbitrary. Rather, there is an underlying imaginative
psycho-logical process at work in and through the chemical logic of the
material.
While Tilton remains open and balanced about Jung’s views, he still
maintains with other historians (Pagel, Dobbs, Halleux, Obrist, Princ-
ipe and Newman) a criticism of Jung’s treatment of “its symbolism as a
mythology of timeless origin in the collective psyche.”71 In holding this
position, he states that “Jung failed to give an adequate account of the
cultural matrix from which his own ideas emerged, and consequently
failed to recognize the bewildering diversity of endeavors that – for bet-
ter or worse – have been gathered together under the rubric of the term
‘alchemy.’ ”72
The status and development of Jung’s views of archetypes and the col-
lective unconscious is another matter about which there is much to say,
but this aside, Tilton makes an interesting connection between Jung and
modern esotericism. He cites Antoine Faivre’s “four fundamental charac-
teristics of modern esotericism” and links them to the characteristics of
Jung’s psychology: the “doctrine of correspondences and sympathies; a
belief in a living and revelatory Nature; an emphasis on imagination as
the means of revelation; and the practical objective of personal ‘transfor-
mation’ through such revelation.”73 Recognizing these characteristics sug-
gests to Tilton “we are no longer dealing with a doctrine that stands in the
realms of [natural] science as it is known today.”74 Jung was aware that his
ideas and work had a connection with the Freemasonic and Rosicrucian
traditions, but, if so, it also stood in relationship to the science of his day.
Jung stood at a crossroads.
However, Jung’s openness to the esoteric tradition led Principe and
Newman to follow the writing of Richard Noll, a figure who certainly has
been given little credence in Jungian psychology because of his extremist
biases.75 Tilton is aware of the poor historiography of Noll, an “ex-Jun-
gian,” in his attempt “to expose his former mentor as a dangerous right-
wing cultist and charlatan.”76 It is interesting that though Principe and
Newman emphasize a careful scholarly historiography of alchemy, when
it comes to Jung, they choose an “authority” who has a “well-established
predilection for sensationalism.”77 Tilton is also aware of the not-so-well-
known fact that Noll “published a number of articles in which he garnered
experiential evidence to support Jung’s conceptions of the archetype,
Philosophical tensions in historiography 21
basis for the alchemical hermeneutic proposed first by Silberer and then by
Jung.”83 Tilton follows Jung’s argument for a coherent “tradition,” rooting
and differentiating the historical contexts at their source, which was not
new with Jung. Historiographic matters continue to evolve in the history
of the alchemical tradition, but, as Tilton notes with regard to Jung, he
Tilton sums up his criticism of Principe and Newman with the following
statement:
Caliăn also rightly criticizes Principe and Newman, as noted above, for
asserting that “Jung was a kind of ‘victim’ of the occultism of the nine-
teenth century.”91 They appear to arrive at such a judgment by depend-
ing on “a bizarre book as their authority, that of Richard Noll, The Jung
Cult, which rather comes from tabloid literature than from the academic
world.”92 While Principe and Newman link Jung and Eliade to the esoteric
24 Philosophical tensions in historiography
school, they do not mention that Evola and Burckhardt respected Jung’s
psychological thesis which for them “somehow left alchemy without its
metaphysical components and placed it in the psyche, as a product of it.
Therefore, it is not esoteric knowledge that has its root in a transcend-
ent reality.”93 Caliăn notes that “[f]or religious and esoteric temperaments
Jung is too positivistic in approaching religion, and for the scientist he
is too spiritual in approaching the history of science.”94 As noted earlier,
Jung’s “psychology” seems to stand at the crossroads between disciplines.
Crossroads have traditionally been both dangerous and sacred places.
Caliăn notes that the efforts of Principe and Newman, the distinction
between “spiritual” and “physical” alchemy is still prevalent in serious
works on alchemy. He quotes historian of chemistry Bruce T. Moran whose
thesis is much like Eliade’s: through a change in its methods alchemy
“gradually lost its spiritual or religious aspect and became chemistry at the
time of the so-called scientific revolution.”95 What was lost in the trans-
formation to the material science of chemistry was precisely alchemy’s
spiritual dimension, that is, that “[t]he successful alchemist gained control
of life’s forces and uncovered secret wisdom – the essence of all truths and
religions.”96 While an exaggerated ideal, it is part of the fantasy of the Phi-
losophers’ Stone, an image that continues to haunt the religious esoteric as
well as the psychological idea of alchemy’s historical goal.
Caliăn also points to the fact that the divide between spiritual and labo-
ratory alchemy can be found in medieval alchemy and not only in the
nineteenth century as Principe and Newman suggested. Caliăn marshals
evidence for his thesis, which “supports the idea that alchemy had a dou-
ble character – it was a science (the mundane facet), but also a donum Dei
(a supernatural facet). In this context,” he notes, “Petrus connected lapis
with Christ, which means a lapis divinus.”97 The divide advances in the
Renaissance as the abundance of speculative alchemical works begins to
lose connections with laboratory alchemy. However, to reduce the whole
of speculative alchemy to only chemical research is patently wrong. There
are, as Caliăn shows, many spiritual alchemists who are seekers of a unio
mystica, including Villanova, Ripley, Fludd, Maier, and others; and, as Til-
ton has concluded, “there exists an ideological congruence in the history
of esotericism pertaining to matters of alchemy.”98
An important point made by Caliăn is that “there are differences in the
perception of the spirituality of alchemy.”99 He points out that “for Maier
alchemy is the ultimate speculative and spiritual discipline, for Böhme it
Philosophical tensions in historiography 25
is a tool to create analogies with his mystic theology, while Newton saw
in alchemy the possibility of understanding the divine plan.”100 While spir-
itual alchemy does not present a single vision, “it is sure that, in the light of
[the above differentiations] a pure empirical approach was insufficient.”101
Caliăn concludes his article by criticizing Principe and Newman’s labe-
ling of alchemy as a primarily scientific and positivistic inquiry, and states
that their criticism of Jung’s and Eliade’s spiritual views of alchemy relies
on unscholarly sources and assumptions. While Principe and Newman
totally reject spiritual alchemy and claim that Jung dismisses the scientific
perspective, in fact, Jung affirms both the spiritual and scientific views of
alchemy in their complexity. Rather, it is Principe and Newman’s thesis
which is one-sided and reductionistic.
The rejection of esotericism in the study of alchemy is untenable, and
the “dual face” of alchemy remains a viable and necessary component of
alchemical studies in the complexity of the field. While esoteric studies
have been seen in a negative light by many academics, the field is in the
process of academic revision.
Wouter Hanegraaff
The work of many recent scholars such as Wouter Hanegraaff has brought
esoteric studies to a high scholarly standard. Hanegraaff’s perspective on
esoteric studies is succinctly described as follows:
Hanegraaff, like Tilton and Caliăn, takes issue with the positions and
scholarship of Principe and Newman and, with regard to Jung, makes clar-
ifying differentiations about laboratory and spiritual alchemy. He notes
that in the heat of debate between critics and defenders of Jung, “both
sides tend to underestimate the differences between Jung’s original state-
ments and what we find in translations and interpretations by later follow-
ers.”103 Hanegraaff calls critical attention to Principe and Newman as well
as to Tilton. He notes that Principe’s arguments against Jung are based on
quotes from a 1940 English translation of Jung’s work by Stanley Hall
of an article that was originally published in the Eranos Yearbooks. On
the basis of this translation, one can assume Jung’s adherence to “spir-
itual alchemy.” Hanegraaff notes Tilton’s criticism of this interpretation by
pointing to a more accurate passage from Psychology and Alchemy (1940),
which reads: “In the alchemical work, we are dealing for the greatest part
not only with chemical experiments, but also with something resembling
psychic processes expressed in pseudo-chemical language.”104 Hanegraaff
points out that “neither Tilton nor Principe/Newman seem to have looked
at the original Eranos lecture, which undermines both their positions.”105
The Eranos lecture “begins with a statement that is remarkably negative
about a purely ‘spiritual’ understanding of alchemical symbolism.”106
Hanegraaff quotes Jung as saying:
Such statements serve to show that Jung in no way affirmed a position of the
spiritual alchemist over and against what the “chemist” was engaged with
Philosophical tensions in historiography 27
in the struggle with “matter.” “In other words,” for Hanegraaff “Jung calls
purely ‘spiritual’ alchemy a degenerate phenomenon!”108 For Hanegraaff,
“the absurd idea . . . that for Jung alchemy as a historical phenomenon was
essentially unconcerned with laboratory” practices was due to “defective”
English translations of his work, which was then taken up by his English
readers who were also unconcerned with the history of science.109 “It would
seem then that Principe’s and Newman’s criticism is applicable to the drift
of popular Jungian (mis)interpretations of alchemy . . . rather than to Jung’s
own work.”110 Hanegraaff links the “spiritual alchemy” that was dismissed
by Jung with the “spiritual alchemy” highlighted by Tilton, which for Jung
was “bombastic” and “empty of content.”111 I remain uncertain and reserve
judgment with regard to whether the spiritual alchemy Jung dismisses is
in fact equivalent to what Tilton highlights. However, if Jung was critical
of a disembodied spiritualization of alchemy, he was also critical of the
reduction of the “substances” of the alchemists to a preconceived literalist
understanding of the “material world.” Jung’s criticism raised the question
of just what the natures of “spirit” and “matter” are, and challenged the
presuppositions that are historically projected onto them. In any case, the
divide in the alchemical imagination and in its historiography continues to
struggle with this two-fold subject-object divide.
Aaron Cheak
Cheak attempts to avoid the divide, but notes that the tensions among dif-
fering orientations to alchemy was never easily resolved and that restric-
tive and reductive definitions and approaches to alchemy were, as we have
seen, characteristic of its historiography, in their attempt to define alchemy
as either/or material or spiritual in its authentic and primary nature. Cheak
notes that alchemy has “always been two-fold: chrysopoeia and apotheosis
(gold-making and god-making) – the perfection of metals and mortals.”112
Cheak emphasizes that the earliest works of alchemy were not mate-
rial and protoscientific, but ritualistic, and that alchemical practices were
considered to have been given to humanity by the gods. Alchemy was thus
“a divine art [and] a hieratikē technē.”113 Alluding to the earlier develop-
ment of alchemical practices in China, Cheak cites the two basic traditions
of internal neidan and external waidan. While these two traditions differ
in approach, one emphasizing oratory and the other the laboratory, they
were seen to be complementary and as ultimately having the same goal:
28 Philosophical tensions in historiography
of these perspectives draws fire from both sides of the divide, the center
of which Cheak calls an “alchemical mysterium.”122 I believe that Jung,
like Cheak, seeks to bridge the divide and is not content to understand the
enigmatic quality of alchemy or the Philosophers’ Stone by reduction of
them to either subject or object, inner or outer, material and real versus
spiritual and esoteric.
Notes
1 Grossinger, Alchemy, 195.
2 His description does not include Jewish alchemy, which has a significant history. For
more on that, see Patai, The Jewish Alchemists.
3 Grossinger, Alchemy, 177.
4 Panisnick, “The Philosophical Significance,” 100.
5 Eliade, Forge and Crucible, 43.
6 Cardew, “The Archaic and the Sublimity of Origins,” 111.
7 Ibid., 112.
8 Ibid., 111–112.
9 Ibid.
10 Eliade, Forge and Crucible, 7.
11 Ibid., 8.
12 Ibid., 9.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 11.
18 Ibid., 8.
19 Ibid., 11.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 158.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Dorn was a symbolically-oriented alchemist and was therefore important to Jung’s
interpretation of alchemy.
25 Eliade, Forge and Crucible, 159; brackets included in original.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 The story of how Jung’s interest in alchemy developed is described below in Chapter 2
and more fully elaborated in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
29 Thanks to Kevin Padawer at the Kristine Mann Library in New York City for the mas-
sive task of copying relevant passages from Jung’s Collected Works.
30 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 3; includes a phrase from Heym, “Review of Para-
celsica, Zwei Vorlesungen über den Arzt und Philosophen Theophrastus,” 64–67.
31 Pagel, “Jung’s Views on Alchemy,” 48; quoted by Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 4.
32 Pagel, “Jung’s Views on Alchemy,” 48; Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 5.
33 Principe and Newman, “Some Problems,” 419.
34 Ibid., 420.
35 Principe, “Alchemy I,” 13.
36 Principe and Newman, “Some Problems,” 415.
30 Philosophical tensions in historiography
37 Ibid., 415–416.
38 Ibid., 415.
39 Ibid., 415–416.
40 Ibid., 417.
41 Ibid., 418.
42 Ibid., 417.
43 Ibid., 417–418.
44 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 2.
45 Ibid., 2.
46 Ibid., 2–3.
47 Ibid., 3.
48 Ibid., 5.
49 Ibid., 6.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 7.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., 8.
54 Ibid., 9.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 10.
57 Newman, “Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language?,” 165, 188; quoted by Tilton,
The Quest for the Phoenix, 11.
58 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 11.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., 12.
61 Holmyard, Alchemy, 160; quoted by Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 255.
62 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 13.
63 Ibid., 13.
64 See Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 13, footnote 55.
65 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 14.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 14; includes a word quoted from Principe and New-
man, “Some Problems,” 407.
69 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 15.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 16.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., 17.
74 Ibid., 17–18.
75 Richard Noll has written two controversial books about Jung, The Jung Cult and The
Aryan Christ, both of which vilify Jung and have been strongly rejected by other schol-
ars, including Sonu Shamdasani who in his book Cult Fictions points to Noll’s lack of
critical scholarship.
76 Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 19.
77 Ibid., 20.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., 21, footnote 87.
80 Ibid., 20.
81 Ibid., 34.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 254.
Philosophical tensions in historiography 31
84 Ibid., 255.
85 Ibid.
86 Caliăn, Alkimia Operativa, 170.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid., 171.
89 Ibid., 173.
90 Ibid., 174–175.
91 Ibid., 175.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid., 175–176. See Caliăn’s excellent summary of these issues, 176–177.
94 Ibid., 176.
95 Ibid., 177.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid., 178.
98 Ibid., 253.
99 Ibid., 187.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, book jacket.
103 Ibid., 290.
104 Ibid. Italics added by Hanegraaff.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid., 291.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid.
112 Cheak, “Introduction,” 18.
113 Ibid., 19.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, 2.
117 Cheak, “Introduction,” 19.
118 Ibid., 20.
119 Ibid., 19.
120 Ibid., 20.
121 Ibid., footnote 5.
122 Ibid.
Chapter 2
For Jung, alchemical images and graphics were of great value in attempt-
ing to overcome our modern divide between the alchemical binaries and
to approach a center point. In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung published an
alchemical image taken from the frontispiece of Michael Maier’s Tripus
aureus.2 It is an image of what Jung called the “double face of alchemy.”3
The image is divided into two parts. On the right is a representation of
an alchemical laboratory with many alembics and laboratory instruments
hanging on the wall. Just below we can see a distilling apparatus, a table, a
shelf, and in the foreground a man partially clad in a short wrap, kneeling
on one knee. He appears to be tending the fire inside a circular athanor or
furnace. In his right hand is a hammer or ax-like instrument. There appears
to be chopped wood, perhaps kindling, and leaning against the furnace
is a pair of tongs and a bellows on its base, as well as instruments of the
laboratory.
On the left is what appears to be a library with walls lined with books.
In the foreground are three figures. Jung, following Maier, identified the
men as the abbot John Cremer, the monk Basilius Valentinus (a legendary
figure, possibly fictitious), and a layman, Thomas Norton. One of the men
appears to be pointing to the laboratory and possibly to what is going on in
the long-necked flask on a tripod sitting on top of the round furnace that is
central to the image. Inside the flask is the winged serpent or dragon that is
the inspiration for this reflection and whose perspective we will consider
shortly.
For the moment, let us notice a divide that has entered the contemporary
alchemical imagination. As some of us look at this illustration we tend
to identify with one side of the divide or the other. Some of us retreat to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-3
The eye of the winged serpent 33
Figure 2.1 The dual face of alchemy. From Michael Maier, Tripus aureus, frontis-
piece, 1618.
Source: Public domain.
our libraries, studies, or consulting rooms and others to our labs and spy-
geric and chemical experiments. We come like the two serpents, perhaps
instinctively emerging from one side or another, ontologizing spirit or
matter, from library or laboratory, sometimes hissing at one another about
who is the real alchemist and what constitutes real alchemy.
From the point of view of what is now called “spiritual alchemy,”
those who work on the practical level are often seen as retro-chemists or
proto-pharmacists, hopelessly trying to practice the art, often without a
clue about its subtle nature and without spiritual insight, while from the
point of view of the practical laboratory alchemist, spiritual alchemists are
merely abstract thinkers who reduce the real engagement with nature to
facile ideas. They are seen as disembodied spirits projecting psychological
principles back onto the real work of engaging and transforming matter. It
is nothing new for alchemists to both berate and undermine one another.
Jung cites the examples of Bernard of Treviso, a famous alchemist, as call-
ing the great Gerber (Jabir) “an obscurantist and a Proteus who promises
kernels and gives husks.”4
34 The eye of the winged serpent
From a Jungian point of view, one might imagine both the spiritual and
laboratory alchemists as projecting the shadow onto each other. For the
spiritual alchemist, who is not deeply grounded in the substance of the
work, he or she disparages and/or secretly idealizes the practical alche-
mist, who appears to literally be engaged with what is absent in his or her
own work. On the other hand, the practical alchemist may be defended
against spiritual transformation, avoiding it by focusing on literal matter to
the exclusion of its deep mystery. He or she disparages and/or idealizes the
spiritual alchemist who appears to have a real inner knowledge of transfor-
mation. In both cases, a lack precedes the shadow projection. There is no
sense of Mercurius duplex – and the hermetic complexity s/he embodies.
Figure 2.2 S un and Moon, Rebis. From Heinrich Nollius, Theoria Philosophiae
Hermeticae, 1617.
Source: Public domain.
The eye of the winged serpent 35
The dual face of alchemy is literalized and split into spiritual versus mate-
rial, and there is no insight into the one body of alchemy, which appears
with two heads.
Returning to our image of the dual face of alchemy, let’s notice how
the athanor or furnace stands between the two rooms, library and labora-
tory, as if to link them. As the flask is heated up, an odd creature appears,
a winged serpent or dragon within it. I imagine this creature as what
the alchemists called a monstrum, a premature conjunction on the way
toward a coniunctio of spirit and matter. The wings indicate the spiritual
aspect that raises up the instinctual, material dimension illustrated by
the serpent; the material, instinctual serpent grounds the winged ener-
gies. This circular and ouroboric play is a hint that we are approaching
the subtle body of Mercurius duplex. It signals a more primary unified
field. The image of Mercurius sits on a tripod and is as well a third pos-
sibility sitting in the flask between the split world, cooking and awaiting
realization.
Mercurius duplex
Abraham describes Mercurius as “the central symbol in alchemy,” who is
For Jung, the dragon combines “the chthonic principle of the serpent and
the aeriel principle of the bird.”6 The dragon is “a variant of Mercurius” as
“the divine winged Hermes manifest in matter.”7
In metallic terms, Mercury or “ ‘living silver,’ quicksilver . . . perfectly
expressed” is the dual reality of Mercurius, outwardly metal, inwardly “the
world-creating spirit.”8 Jung notes that “[t]he dragon is probably the oldest
pictorial symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It
appears as the [Ouroboros], the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which
dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend.”9
36 The eye of the winged serpent
Figure 2.4
O uroboros, the tail-eater. From the “The Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra,”
preserved in Codex Marcianus, 10th-11th century.
Source: Public domain.
The eye of the winged serpent 37
“Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the
one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting
its own tail.”10
In a footnote, Jung quotes the Rosarium from the Artis auriferae:
And again: “This magistery proceeds first from one root, which [root] then
expands into more things, and then reverts to the one.”12 “For this reason,” Jung
states, “the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel).”13
Here we see Mercurius turning the wheel symbolizing the alchemical
process. Mercurius “is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery,
poison yet healing draught,”14 a pharmakon, as Plato and French philoso-
pher Jacques Derrida would contend.
Figure 2.5 M ercurius turning the wheel which symbolizes the alchemical pro-
cess. “Speculum veritatis,” 17th century.
Source: Public domain.
38 The eye of the winged serpent
In the earlier image entitled the “dual face of alchemy,” two serpents
representing forces from opposite sides of the alchemical divide were seen
as crawling toward one another and in the flask above them was an image
of the Mercurial dragon representing an early and/or premature stage of
integration, what the alchemists call a monstrum. In the following image,
the serpents can now be seen to be interlocking, linking Sun and Moon,
King and Queen, representing a further integration of paired opposites, a
moving toward the greater coniunctio, a deeper level of integration. In this
circular process, what were the hissing serpents unite in a healing image
symbolized by Mercurius and the caduceus, uniting pairs of opposites.
If, for Cheak, the center between opposites is an alchemical mysterium
and must remain open, Jung attempts to give us a graphic and symbolic
Figure 2.6
M ercurius as caduceus unifying the opposites. From “Figurarum
Aegyptiorum secretarum,” 18th century.
Source: Public domain.
The eye of the winged serpent 39
view of this open center, looking into it to see what goes on between the
so-called opposites of the dual face of alchemy. The conjunction of oppo-
sites, as a mysterium coniunctionis, has been expressed through alchemi-
cal images of Mercurius duplex, the ouroboros, the rota or ever-moving
wheel of the alchemical process. These images of the conjunction of oppo-
sites as an ever-revealing process give us a glimpse of what has been called
the Philosophers’ Stone. In the alchemical text, the Aurora consurgens, the
Philosophers’ Stone speaks:
In this odd statement, the Philosophers’ Stone speaks, leaving the reader
with the ambiguity of whether the Stone reflects some human reality or
describes a vision of a natural cosmic process. This ambiguity captures
what we have been describing as the tension in the alchemical imagination.
The question itself reflects a taken-for-granted conviction, mainly a divide
between the human and natural world. It is precisely this supposition which
is challenged by the idea of a Philosophers’ Stone. As we have seen for the
alchemists, the “Philosophers’ Stone” is itself seen as a union of opposites.
“Philosophy, love of wisdom, is” identified as a deeply human and sentient
activity, while “a stone is a crude, hard, material reality.”16 Somehow, the
Philosophers’ Stone attempts to bring these two realms of reality together
as the goal of the alchemical process. For Jung, the Philosophers’ Stone
was a forerunner of the modern discovery of what he called the reality of
the psyche and the Self, which also cannot be reduced to a preconceived
model based on a complete separation of psyche from world.
For Jung, the literal reality of matter through “projection” created an
“admixture” of psyche and substance recognized by the alchemists as a
living symbolic reality such that for them it is not so strange to imagine the
Philosophers’ Stone as speaking and having a voice. For Jung,
Jung goes on to say that “The alchemical operations were real, only this
reality was not physical but psychological. Alchemy represents the projec-
tion of a drama both cosmic and spiritual in laboratory terms. The opus
magnum had two aims: the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of
the cosmos.”18 The move brought alchemy into the realm of Jung’s psy-
chology, but it remains to be clarified just what “a psychology of alchemy”
implies. On the one hand, Jung states,
Jung writes of his loneliness. He felt he could not speak to anyone about
these experiences for fear they would be misunderstood. He notes: “I felt
the gulf between the external world and the interior world of images in its
most painful form. I could not yet see that interaction of both worlds which
I now understand. I saw only an irreconcilable contradiction between
‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ ”21
It was a long time before Jung felt he began to emerge from the darkness.
One of the things that had helped him come to terms with his nearly over-
whelming experiences was that he began to draw small circular drawings in
a notebook every morning. He recognized such drawings as mandalas, which
seemed to correspond to his inner situation at the time. Jung notes: “With the
help of these drawings I could observe my psychic transformations from day
to day.”22 Only gradually did Jung feel that he began to understand what these
mandalas were. For Jung, these circular drawings came to be understood as
representing “the self, the wholeness of the personality.”23 Jung writes:
In his autobiography, Jung was aware that he was producing a great many
such drawings and at one point he asks himself “What is this process lead-
ing to? Where is its goal?”25 Jung realized he could not choose a goal
which gave the ego too much control. He felt he had to let himself “be
The eye of the winged serpent 43
Jung also linked the Self with the Hindu notion of Brahman/Atman. In
this view, it is relevant to note that the Atman reflects the microcosmic
self while Brahman its macrocosmic counterpart. From the perspective
of the macrocosmic level of understanding in Hinduism, the Brahman
is seen to have two aspects: Brahman with qualities (saguna) as “he”
appears in the time and space and Brahman without qualities (nirguna)
as “he” appears from the perspective of eternity. Ultimately from the
Hindu perspective, there is a “oneness” between these two aspects – a
linking of nirguna and saguna Brahman. This linking is described as
having the qualities of sat chit ananda (truth, consciousness, bliss) and
to represent the ultimate perspective of the ontological reading of the
Self, a term also widely used in the Upanishads. The Hindu model is use-
ful for recognizing that in Jung’s understanding of the Self both personal
and archetypal universal perspective make up a fuller understanding of
the “self.” In another place, Jung writes that the Self is also the goal of
life because it is the most expressive “of that fateful combination we
call individuality.” With the experiencing of the Self as something irra-
tional, “as an indefinable” being “to which the ego is neither opposed nor
subjected,” but is nevertheless in a relation of dependence, and around
which it rotates, much like the earth orbits the sun – then the goal of
individuation has been reached.37
In spite of what appears like confident statements about the Self, Jung
remained somewhat uncertain about his discovery. It was very personal
and emerged out of a deep struggle with his nearly overwhelming con-
frontation with the unconscious. The notion of the Self helped Jung feel
stabilized, through the experience of this superordinate center. Jung
came to feel that his notion of the Self was a “compensation for the con-
flict between inside and outside”38 and that the circular mandalas he was
drawing were symbolic expressions of the dynamic quality of the Self.
Jung wrote some years later, around 1927, that he “obtained confirmation
The eye of the winged serpent 45
of [his] ideas about the center and the self by way of a dream,” and
he referenced its essence in a mandala which he called “Window on
Eternity.”39
A year later, he painted another mandala “with a golden castle in the
center.”40 Jung believed the image to be Chinese in character, although it
is not apparent why he thought this. Strangely, not long after Jung painted
this image, he received a letter from Sineologist Richard Wilhelm along
with a Taoist alchemical manuscript called The Secret of the Golden
Flower, “with a request that [he] write a commentary on it.”41 This was
an important turning point for Jung. He notes that this book gave him an
“undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the cir-
cumambulation of the center.”42 This sense of a parallel between Jung’s
understanding of the Self and the mandala with Chinese alchemy gave him
a sense of affinity with others who had experienced something similar and
broke through his feeling of isolation. At this point, Jung was “stirred by
the desire to become more closely acquainted with the alchemical texts.”43
He soon acquired a copy of the Rosarium Philosophorum, a sixteenth
century alchemical text, but it was a long time before he “found [his] way
about in the labyrinth of alchemical thought processes.”44 It was in this
text that he noticed a number of strange phrases, including the lapis (the
Philosophers’ Stone), and he gradually felt that it was as if he “were try-
ing to solve the riddle of an unknown language. . . [that] gradually yielded
up its meaning.”45 Jung recognized that his psychology “coincided in a
most curious way with alchemy” and that he “had stumbled upon the his-
torical counterpart of [his] psychology of the unconscious.”46 Once Jung
discovered the symbolic meaning of alchemy he understood his confron-
tation with the unconscious in a new context and no longer needed The
Red Book as a “container” for his discoveries. Instead, alchemy provided
a new field of study that remained his passion for the rest of his life. With
the help of alchemy, Jung felt he could finally absorb and arrange “the
overpowering force of [his] original experiences.”47 Sanford Drob (2012)
elaborates on this:
As alchemy treated the symbols of chaos, the soul, evil, and the merg-
ing of opposites, Jung found a ready container for his Red Book expe-
rience and ideas. The alchemist’s efforts to bring about a union of
opposites in the laboratory and to perform what they spoke of as a
“chymical wedding” were understood by Jung as antecedents to his
46 The eye of the winged serpent
with the coniunctio, the goal of the work. This process requires a defeat of
the ego, a going under, a death and descent into hell, and ultimately a spir-
itual renewal, all of which Jung and Eliade see as essential to the alchemi-
cal process. This is illustrated by twenty images from the Rosarium, only
ten of which Jung refers to in his study of this text in “The Psychology of
the Transference.” The Rosarium portrays this process as progressive as
well as circular. An example of the unification or coniunctio of masculine
and feminine is graphically represented in the following image by a couple
in connubial union.
Jung wrote about this image that “The sea has closed over the king and
queen, and they have gone back to the chaotic beginnings, the massa con-
fusa.”49 The union early on in the process takes place in an unconscious
identity which he describes as a primitive initial state of chaos “where het-
erogeneous factors merge in an unconscious relationship.”50 As such, it is a
Figure 2.8 The death-like state of the soul standing on the black sun, a condition
lacking differentiation. From J.D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata, 1622.
Source: Public domain.
48 The eye of the winged serpent
Figure 2.9 Sol niger. The dark phase of the alchemical work. From Splendor solis,
16th century.
Source: Public domain.
The eye of the winged serpent 49
Figure 2.10 K ing and Queen’s return to the prima materia. From the Rosarium
philosophorum, Figure 6, 16th century.
Source: Photo courtesy of the author.
50 The eye of the winged serpent
Jung writes that when opposites unite at this stage “all energy
ceases. . . [or] So at least it appears, looked at from the outside. . . .”55
“Nuptial joy” gives way to a “stagnant pool . . . No new life can arise, says
the alchemists [sic], without the death of the old.”56 This death, the black-
ness of the nigredo, is also implicitly the ground of a genesis – putrefac-
tion, corruption are also fertility. Jung points out that the corpse left over
from the connubial union is already in a new body. Half of the body is
male and the other half female. For Jung, this hermaphrodite prefigures the
long-sought goal of the lapis or Philosophers’ Stone, symbolizing a “mys-
terious being yet to be begotten, for whose sake the opus is undertaken.
But the opus has not yet reached its goal, because the lapis has not come
alive.”57 Its differentiated quality is not yet conscious.
Figure 2.11
E nergizing moisture. From the Rosarium philosophorum, Figure 8,
16th century.
Source: Photo courtesy of the author.
The eye of the winged serpent 51
Rosarium. In it, one can see two heads attached to a single skeletal body
whose garments have been shredded, again an image of the prima materia
or of the undifferentiated state. However, the animal energies surround-
ing the figure anticipate the vitalizing moisture that does not emerge until
image 8 of the Rosarium. This moisture becomes explicit in her second
image in which a death-like skeletal figure sits in darkness, but the poten-
tiality of further development can also be seen in the images of a doorway
and a key.
This moisture, like the divine dew of alchemy, serves to energize the life
force that Jung relates to the spirit of Mercurius which “descends . . . to
The eye of the winged serpent 53
purify the blackness.”60 For Jung, the “divine” dew is a gift of “illumina-
tion and wisdom”61 and is linked to the anticipation of the Philosophers’
Stone. About the Stone, Jung states “the acquisition of the stone is better
than the fruits of purest gold and silver.”62
For Jung, the stage of movement beyond the darkness of non-differ-
entiation requires something more than abstract intellectual realization.
It requires the recognition of the importance of feeling. Jung states that
feelings open up a whole new perspective, even a whole new world. The
moisture signifies a freshness and animation of the deadness. “The black
or unconscious state that resulted from the union of opposites reaches the
nadir and a change sets in. The falling [moisture] signals resuscitation and
new light.”63 Alchemy is filled with such images that link death and new
life. The following image from the alchemical text The Hermetic Museum
illustrates this process, showing how grain grows from the grave symbol-
izing resurrection and new birth:
Figure 2.14 G rain growing from the grave. From D. Stolcius de Stolcenberg,
Viridarium chymicum, 1624.
Source: Public domain.
54 The eye of the winged serpent
Figure 2.15 Grain growing from the corpse of Osiris. E. A Wallis Budge, Egyptian
Ideas of the Future Life, 1900.
Source: Public domain.
picture, number 10, of the series Jung discusses, and is a first image of
the goal of the process.
It is a complex image described in many ways: as the alchemical filius
philosophorum, as the Rebis, as a Christ figure, and as a hermaphrodite (a
bisexual first man/woman, the Anthropos), and as the lapis or Philosophers’
Stone. The image represents “the culminating point of the work beyond
which it is impossible to go except by means of the multiplicatio.”68 It is a
figure that Jung identifies as “a higher state of unity,” a unity that is not a
unity but a complex unity hard to understand and describe.69 The lapis as the
“cosmogonic First Man” is called radix ipsius (root of itself) and according
to the Rosarium “everything has grown from this One and through this One.
It is the Ouroboros, the serpent that fertilizes and gives birth to itself, by
definition an increatum . . . .”70 For Jung, the creation increatum is an impen-
etrable paradox. In his view, anything unknowable can best be described in
terms of opposites, what Nicholas of Cusa regarded as antinomial thought.71
Jung states that it is not surprising that the alchemical opus ends with the
idea of a highly paradoxical being that defies rational analysis. The work
could hardly end in any other way since the complexio oppositorum can-
not possibly lead to anything but a baffling paradox. Psychologically, this
means that human wholeness can only be described in antimonies, which
is always the case when dealing with a transcendental idea.72 Jung, how-
ever, states that this paradoxical image of the goal holds out
With the idea of the “psychic reality” in mind, Jung returns to the com-
plex image of the goal of the Rosarium process in all its symbolic details.
This image is filled with contrasting and complex imagery that, Jung notes,
requires a study in its own regard. Jung suggests that the image of the her-
maphrodite shows an apotheosis of the Rebis, an elevation of the image to
a divine level. The image contains opposites such as male and female, the
sun and moon, in the vessel that the alchemists called the vas hermeticum.
The wings on the image suggest to Jung the qualities of both vitality and
spirituality, and the serpents and the raven point to the problem of evil
and its containment. The Mercurial and numerical play between three and
four is seen in terms of number symbolism both in its religious Trinitar-
ian aspects of the three serpents in one vessel and a fourth in another.
The additional serpent stands outside the Trinity and yet must be included
to complete the goal of the opus. The whole process is then reflected in
what Jung calls the philosophical tree, or arbor philosophica, with sun and
moon images depicting the coming to consciousness of the unconscious
process represented in the work of the unification of opposites. What Jung
finds most remarkable about the image is that “the fervently desired goal
of the alchemist’s endeavors should be conceived under so monstrous and
horrific an image.”75
In this chapter, I have attempted to show that alchemical and psycho-
logical work endeavor to overcome opposites and splits in the alchemical
imagination. It has become clear that efforts to move beyond the dual face
of alchemy cannot rest in a simple unification, that is, a unification with-
out differentiation. Such a unity is not a simple unity, but a complex one
bringing together contraries that appear from an ordinary everyday view as
impossible to join together: life and death, male and female, good and evil.
As such, this unification was called by Jung a mysterium coniunctionis,
a designation expressed in the image of the Philosophers’ Stone. For the
alchemists, such a goal was not simply a rational process, but required the
adept to see through the eye of the winged serpent Mercurius who unified
unity and differences in a single vision. Murray Stein has noted:
It is the genius of Mercurius that the many do not disappear into a sin-
gularity but rather retain their unique aspects and facets, diamondlike,
while joining the wholeness structure of the mandala. Thus, room for
diversity is preserved while unity is attained.
The eye of the winged serpent 59
This is the answer to the dilemma of “the One or the Many.” It has
often been discussed among Jungian authors: Is the personality multi-
ple and many, or is it one? Polytheism or monotheism? The answer is:
“both” – diversity in unity; unity in diversity. This is the only realis-
tic and sustainable goal for individuation given the complexity of the
human personality. And this is the net implication of the [Mysterium]
Coniunctionis in the title of the text: it is “unity” but it does not deny
or eliminate diversity and differentiation.76
Notes
1 This chapter is a modified version of a talk entitled “Archetypal Alchemy,” which was
originally given at the International Alchemy Conference, Las Vegas, NV, October 6,
2007.
2 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), 278.
3 Ibid., §404.
4 Ibid., §402.
5 Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 124–125.
6 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), §404.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., footnote 12(a).
12 Ibid., footnote 12(b); brackets included in original.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, 143.
16 Edinger, Anatomy, 216.
17 Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, 228.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 229.
20 Jung, Memories, 178–179.
21 Ibid., 194.
22 Ibid., 195.
23 Ibid., 196.
24 Ibid.
60 The eye of the winged serpent
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 197.
31 Ibid., 170–199.
32 Shamdasani, Introduction to The Red Book, 210.
33 Jung, Civilization in Transition (CW10), §24; quoted by Shamdasani, Introduction to
The Red Book, 210.
34 Shamdasani, Introduction to The Red Book, 210.
35 Ibid., 211.
36 Jung, Psychological Types (CW6), §706.
37 Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW7), §405.
38 Ibid., §404.
39 Jung, Memories, 197.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 204.
44 Ibid., 205.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Jung, The Red Book, 360.
48 Drob, Reading the Red Book, 257. The issue of “the unity of unity and difference” in
the work of Hegel is a related theme to be addressed in a later chapter and, like Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, Jung’s Red Book was called an “impossible book.” (Gieg-
erich, “Liber Novus,” 362).
49 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16), §457.
50 Ibid., §462.
51 Hegel, Phenomenology, 9, §16. “Hegel is only making a claim about Schelling’s cog-
nitive claim in his view of the so-called indifference point, but not about the origins of
nature, alchemy and so on.” (Rockmore, personal communication).
52 Fabricius, Alchemy, 103.
53 Henderson and Sherwood, Transformation of the Psyche, 162.
54 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16), §467.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., §468.
58 Ibid., §483.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., §484.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., §493.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., §492.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., §526.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., §527.
The eye of the winged serpent 61
71 Ibid., footnote 9.
72 Here Jung reveals the influencer of Kant’s idea of the antimonies. For a full account of
Jung’s relationship to Kant, see Brent, “Jung’s Debt to Kant.”
73 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16), §532.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., §533.
76 Stein, “Mysterium Coniunctionis.”
Chapter 3
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-4
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 63
The Red Book was ultimately Jung’s reaction to the creative urgings of his
imagination in response to personal and collective crises. He noted in The
Red Book:
I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still
another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of every-
thing contemporary. The spirit of this time would like to hear of use
and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this
way. But that other spirit forces me to speak beyond justification, use,
and meaning. . . . The spirit of the depths took my understanding and
all my knowledge and placed them in the service of the inexplicable
and the paradoxical.11
The hermaphrodite
British Jungian analyst Neil Micklem has noted that there is still a tendency
in reading Jung to pass over the shock and radicality of his vision.12 Mick-
lem emphasizes the importance of paradox rather than unity and notes that
paradox usually gets glossed over as our attention moves toward the more
attractive idea of the vision of the unity of the opposites. Micklem points
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 65
Figure 3.1 Extraction of the monster Mercurius and the raising of the feminine
image of Mary into the hierarchy. “Speculum Trinitatis,” from Hiero-
nymus Reusner, Pandora, Emblem 14, 16th century.
Source: Public domain.
and was for Jung the carrier of those psychological elements elided by
Christianity, serving as a counterbalance to it. In this figure, we see the
assumption of Mary into heaven and her coronation. In the lower part of
the picture one can see what Edinger calls the birth of a monster. What is
so shocking for Edinger is the juxtaposition of the spiritual image of the
assumption with “the image of the birth of the monster out of the lump of
matter.”13 The whole image reflects the struggle to integrate both the femi-
nine and the principle of materiality into the Christian vision.
The image is monstrous to the Christian eye and for Edinger the lower
image of birth from matter is humorously portrayed in the context of the
Christian Weltanschauung as analogous to “a cuckoo’s egg that’s been laid
in somebody else’s nest” and from which “something unexpected is going
to hatch.” French philosopher Jacques Derrida has likewise linked the mon-
strous with the future. For Derrida, “The future is necessarily monstrous:
The figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprisingly, that for
which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by a species of monsters.”14
Abraxas
Perhaps one of the most potent of such monsters appears in Jung’s Seven
Sermons of the Dead (1916). These Sermons have been considered to be
an expression of “what Jung went through in the years [of confronting
the unconscious] 1913–1917” and reflect “what he was trying to bring to
birth.”15 The Sermons contain “hints or anticipations of ideas that were
to figure later in his scientific writings, more particularly concerning the
polaristic nature of the psyche, of life in general, and of all psychological
statements.”16
In Sermon I, Jung sets up the Gnostic distinction between the non-
distinctive pleroma and the essence of man as distinctiveness. Jung says:
“When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from
the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinc-
tiveness. But still we have said nothing concerning the pleroma.”17 The
distinctions we must make are about us; Jung calls this the “principium
individuationis.”18 All we can do is attribute our polar categories to the
larger “reality.” Jung mentions:
While Jung clearly notes that man, due to his nature, distinguishes qualities
of the pleroma that are his own, he also speaks of these qualities as belong-
ing to the pleroma which, paradoxically, in reality, has no qualities. But
since he is also part of the pleroma and distinguishes qualities, one could
also say that the pleroma expresses these qualities as well. In this arcane
way, Jung links the finite with the infinite and the human with the divine.
In essence, he writes, “we have said nothing concerning the pleroma. . . .
However, it is needful to speak”20 and we must be true to this need. If we
do not make such distinctions, Jung says, we “get beyond our own nature”
and “fall into indistinctiveness” and give ourselves over to dissolution into
nothingness.21 This is death to our human essence and so we fight against
this “perilous sameness.”22 While Jung goes to some lengths to distinguish
man from the pleroma, he also links them, noting “As we are the pleroma
itself, we also have all these qualities in us.”23 Jung distinguishes how
these qualities are different as they exist in us and in the pleroma, noting
that in us these qualities “are not balanced and void, but effective. Thus
are we the victims of the pairs of opposites. The pleroma is rent in us.”24
In the pleroma, the opposites are balanced and void, but in us they are
not. What this means for man is that as we attempt to attain the good and
the beautiful, the evil and ugly are likewise implicitly a part of our human
experience. One side cannot be completely separated from the other. While
the pleroma in itself has no qualities, we create these opposites necessarily
by our thinking. Two fundamental opposites are God and the devil, what
Jung calls first manifestations of nothingness. In man, God and the devil
do not extinguish themselves, but stand against one another as effective
opposites. “God and the devil are distinguished by the qualities of full-
ness and emptiness, generation and destruction,” and effectiveness (the
generative principle of the opposites) stands above both, in essence, “is a
68 Benign and monstrous conjunctions
god above god, since in its effect it uniteth fullness and emptiness.”25 For
Jung, the radical and primeval living of the opposites as a demonic force
is a monstrous and divine reality he calls by the Gnostic name Abraxas.
Jung reasons if Abraxas is effectiveness, nothing stands opposed to it,
but the ineffective, so its effective nature freely unfolds itself. The inef-
fective is not. Therefore, it does not resist it, so one might imagine it as
a primal theory of action. Jung continues, calling Abraxas an “improb-
able probability, unreal reality”26 noting that if the pleroma had “a being,
Abraxas would be its manifestation. It is the effective itself, not any par-
ticular effect, but effect in general.”27 Abraxas is thus force and duration,
“the sun and at the same time the eternally sucking gorge of the void, the
belittling and dismembering devil. . . . What the god-sun speaketh is life.
What the devil speaketh is death. But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and
accursed word which is life and death at the same time.”28 This strange
confluence and interpenetration of what we think of as opposites renders
Abraxas “terrible” and a “monster.”29 Jung writes that Abraxas is “a mon-
ster of the underworld, a thousand-armed polyp, coiled knot of winged
serpents, frenzy.”30 It is like the hermaphrodite we have seen above and
Figure 3.2 These images of Abraxas show its strange composite and monstrous
form. (1) Magical amulet, green jasper, KM 2.6054. (Courtesy of the
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.)
(2) From Bernard de Montfaucon, L’antiquité expliquée et représentée
en figures, 1722.
Source: Public domain.
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 69
“of the earliest beginning. It is the lord of the toads and frogs, which live
in the water and go up on the land, whose chorus ascendeth at noon and
at midnight. It is abundance that seeketh union with emptiness. It is holy
begetting.”31
It is hard to come to terms with the implications of such a deity with what
Shamdasani describes as “the uniting of the Christian God with Satan.”32
“Abraxas himself is LIFE.”33 Such a characterization for Drob “invokes
comparison not only with the unconscious, but with the broad conception
of the . . . unforeseeable future.”34 Drob notes “Abraxas can be understood
as the awesome future that can neither be anticipated nor circumscribed
by words: ‘Before him there is no question and no reply.’ ”35 “Abraxas is
the ‘chaos,’ the ‘utterly boundless,’ ‘eternally incomprehensible . . . cruel
contradictoriness of nature.’ ”36 “ ‘Abraxas,’ we are told, ‘is the world, its
becoming and its passing.’ ”37
Mercurius
In the frontispiece to Jung’s Alchemical Studies, the spirit of Mercurius is
likewise represented as a monster.
For Jung, this image is one of the primal unconscious whose three extra
heads represent Luna, Sol, and a coniunctio of Sol and Luna on the far
right. The unity of the three is symbolized by Hermes, who represents the
quaternity “in which the fourth is at the same time the unity of the three.”
This image captures the quality of paradox and monstrosity stressed by
Jung, Micklem, and Edinger. It is a symbolic unification, but one not easily
assimilable by the ego. This image may well be considered an example of
a transformation going on in the God image of the Western psyche by vir-
tue of the alchemical process that has been inserted into it, a process that
gives birth to new possibilities. The new God image heralds the impor-
tance not only of incorporating the feminine and matter into our vision
of spirit, but also of “the discovery of the unconscious and the process of
individuation.”38
On a personal level, it also signifies all of the struggles of incarnated
existence, “[e]very hard disagreeable fact” of ordinary life.39 Edinger uses
the eloquence of Shakespeare to describe the painful facts:
Figure 3.3 An image of the Mercurial monster. From G.B. Nazari, Della tramuta-
tione metallica sogni tre, 16th century.
Source: Public domain.
If one is honest, these insults of life cannot simply be passed over in any
idealized transcendence. Such experiences hurt, sting, enrage, and some-
times depress and kill us, and yet they must be acknowledged, negotiated,
and made conscious if any real awareness of the Self is to take place.
Edinger notes, as Jung and Micklem have, that “[t]he living experience of
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 71
Figure 3.4
U nion of opposites as monstrosity. From Hexastichon Sebastiani
Brant, 1502.
Source: Public domain.
72 Benign and monstrous conjunctions
Figure 3.5 An alchemical image of two birds illustrating the spirit of antagonistic
opposition. From Theosophie alchimie, 1678.
Source: Public domain.
Figure 3.6 Two traditional images of the conflict between winged and unwinged
lions – spirit and body. (1) From Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens,
Emblem 16, 1617. (Public domain.) (2) From J.D. Mylius, Philosophia
reformata, 1622.
Source: Public domain.
74 Benign and monstrous conjunctions
from the grip of instructive sexuality [and aggression] where, for bet-
ter or worse, mere nature, unsupported by the critical intellect, was
bound to leave it. Nature could say no more than that the contribution
of supreme opposites was a hybrid thing.43
Jung speculates that the thing-like nature of the alchemists “unity sym-
bol” was due to the fact that the alchemists were not yet in a position to
see the implicit nature of consciousness in the midst of their images. The
question remained: “how is the profound cleavage in man and world to be
understood, how are we to respond to it and, if possible, abolish it?”44 Jung
notes that in the long course of the dialectical process the unconscious has
continued to produce images of the goal of the work.
In Psychology and Alchemy, Jung describes this process as it existed in
the work with a long series of dreams. These images were “mostly con-
cerned with ideas of the mandala type, that is, the circle and the quater-
nity”45 which represented images of the goal of the unity of opposites.
The cross, circle, and sphere, as well as the less frequent images of “the
luminous character of the center” or the image of a “superior type of per-
sonality,”46 the enlightened or illuminate adept, represented the idea of
unity and wholeness, the overcoming of warring opposites.
The linking of the opposites by the alchemist was imagined both as a chem-
ical procedure as well as a mental and geometric one. One classic example
of the benign conjunction is the image of the alchemist as a divine geometer.
In the example above, this task is depicted in an image of the alchemist as a
divine geometer who brings opposites together into a grand design represent-
ing the Philosophers’ Stone. The motto beneath the image states: “Make a cir-
cle out of a man and a woman, out of this a square, out of this a triangle. Make
a circle and you will have the Philosopher’s Stone.”47 The Stone is created by
harmonizing and containing masculine and feminine energies representing a
wide range of binary pairings, e.g., light and dark, spirit and matter, sulfur and
mercury. These “opposites,” expressed by the male and female images, are
contained in the diagram’s inner circle, which “represents the Hermetic vessel,
the cosmic egg in which the Stone is prepared.”48 The square surrounded by
the inner circle stands for the four elements and suggests the ancient enigmatic
idea of squaring the circle: an impossible task in terms of modern mathemat-
ics, but an essential condition for the preparation of the Stone. This “impossi-
ble” conjunction is then imagined to be contained in a triangle representing the
dynamic force of “the third,” the mystery of generative possibilities. Finally,
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 75
Figure 3.7
The alchemist and the lumen naturae. Frontispiece from C.F.
Sabor, Practica naturae vera, 1721.
Source: Public domain.
the entire process is enclosed within a larger macrocosmic circle. The impor-
tance of man’s contribution to the process is illustrated by the alchemist hold-
ing a giant compass with one point touching the inner circle and the other
resting on the outer sphere, thus linking the microcosmic unity of inner life
with the outer wholeness of the macrocosmic world and exemplifying the
famous adage, “as above so below.” The work of linking above and below
was a classic alchemical theme represented in numerous forms in alchemical
literature and in the images which illustrated it.
The variety of images of the conjunction and the Philosophers’ Stone
range from the very simple and benign to the very complex and monstrous.
76 Benign and monstrous conjunctions
Figure 3.8 The squaring of the circle as image of the Philosophers’ Stone. From
Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem 21, 1687.
Source: Public domain.
Some images portray a simple process or moment in the work while others
give us an image of the overall alchemical process.
For Jung, such grand images are attempts to express the complexity of
the Self and the individuation process. They aim to represent psyche’s
attempt to achieve order and wholeness and, like the “self,” to contain
and organize the wholeness of psychic reality. As such, they attempt to
grapple with what Edinger has called “a wild and luxuriant, tangled mass
of overlapping images that is maddening to the order-seeking conscious
mind.”49 In short, they maintain a sense of the monstrous which, for Jung,
in principle is “always just beyond our reach.”50
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 77
Figure 3.9
Four alchemical images depicting the linking of above and below.
(1) From J.D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata, 1622. (Public domain.)
(2) Maria the Jewess, famous alchemist of the 1st-2nd century A.D.
From Michael Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, 1617. (Public domain.)
(3) Hermes Trismegistos. From D. Stolcius de Stolcenberg, Viridarium
chymicum (1624). (Public domain.) (4) Engraving by Nicolas Bonnart.
From Nicolas de Locques, Les Rudiments de la Philosophie Naturelle,
frontispiece, 1665. (Public domain.)
Mysterium Coniunctionis
Jung continued to reflect on the problem of opposites throughout his life and
work. The fullest treatment of this issue was taken up in his final work enti-
tled Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthe-
sis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. In this work, he followed his original
78 Benign and monstrous conjunctions
Figure 3.10 Two images of the benign conjunction, in which we see the unifica-
tion of opposites in terms of the marriage of Sol and Luna. (1) From
Johann Conrad Barchusen, Elementa chemiae, Plate 503, Figure 9,
1718. (Public domain.) (2) From J.D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata,
Engraving 19, 1622. (Public domain.)
This work is difficult and strewn with obstacles; the alchemical opus is
dangerous. Right at the beginning you meet the “dragon,” the chthonic
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 79
Figure 3.12 Grand image of the alchemical process. Engraving by J.T. de Bry, from
Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, 1618.
Source: Public domain.
spirit, the “devil” or, as the alchemists called it, the “blackness,” the
nigredo, and this encounter produces suffering. “Matter” suffers right
up to the final disappearance of the blackness; in psychological terms,
the soul finds itself in the throes of melancholy, locked in a struggle
with the “shadow.” The mystery of the coniunctio, the central mys-
tery of alchemy, aims precisely at the synthesis of the opposites, the
assimilation of the blackness, the integration of the devil. . . .
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 81
Notes
1 Portions of this chapter were previously published as the “Foreword,” in Reading the
Red Book, ix–xv (Reused with the kind permission of Spring Journal, Inc).
2 Giegerich, “Liber Novus,” 362.
3 Hillman, at “Carl Gustav Jung & the Red Book.”
4 Giegerich, “Liber Novus,” 384.
5 Ibid., 383–384.
6 Ibid., 383.
7 Hillman, at “Carl Gustav Jung & the Red Book.”
8 Tarrant, “Carl Jung’s Red Book.” (Used by kind permission of the author).
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Jung, The Red Book, 229.
12 Micklem, “I Am Not Myself.”
13 Edinger, Mysterium Lectures, 134.
14 Derrida, “Passages,” 386–387. For more about Derrida and his idea of the monstrous,
see, for example, Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” 123; see also Derrida,
Benign and monstrous conjunctions 83
“Passages – from Traumatism to Promise”; Drob, Reading the Red Book, 289–290,
footnote 19.
15 Aniela Jaffé. Introductory comments to Appendix V of C.G. Jung, Memories, 378.
16 Ibid.
17 Jung, Memories, 380.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 380–381.
20 Ibid., 380.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 381; emphasis mine.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 383.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 384.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Shamdasani, Introduction to The Red Book, 206.
33 Drob, Reading the Red Book, 236.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. Includes quote from Jung, The Red Book, 350b.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Edinger, Mysterium Lectures, 135.
39 Ibid.
40 Although Edinger does quote this passage from Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1,
please note that this particular translation was retrieved from Project Gutenberg.
41 Edinger, Mysterium Lectures, 136.
42 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 193.
43 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16), §533.
44 Ibid., §534.
45 Ibid., §535.
46 Ibid.
47 Coudert, Alchemy, 58.
48 Ibid.
49 Edinger, Anatomy, 14.
50 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16), §536.
51 Jung, Memories, 221.
52 Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, 228–229.
53 Jung, Memories, 221.
Chapter 4
Classical development of
Jung’s ideas of alchemy and
the Philosophers’ Stone in
Von Franz and Edinger 1
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-5
Marie-Louise von Franz and Edward Edinger 85
Edward F. Edinger
If von Franz can be considered the pre-eminent follower of Jung’s in
Europe, few would argue against the same status for Edward Edinger in
the United States. For more than forty years, “in lectures, books, tapes and
videos, he masterfully presented and distilled the essence of Jung’s work,
illuminating its relevance for both collective and individual psychology.”5
Though Edinger wrote on a wide range of topics, including Moby Dick,
Faust, Greek philosophy, the Bible, the Apocalypse, and the God image,
like von Franz he had a special passion for alchemy. In the first issue of
Quadrant (spring 1968), the New York Institute announced its final spring
series of lectures by Edinger entitled “Psychotherapy and Alchemy,” and
the following issue contained a précis of Edinger’s lectures, “Alchemy as a
Psychological Process.” These lectures, given in New York and Los Ange-
les in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were serially published in Quadrant:
Journal of the CG. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology and later
collected for his book Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in
Psychotherapy (1985).
In these lectures and in his book, Edinger focused on seven selected
images, which he used to organize the typical stages of the alchemical
Marie-Louise von Franz and Edward Edinger 87
For him, as for Jung, the work of alchemy can be equated with the individ-
uation process, but the alchemical corpus exceeds any individual’s process
in richness and scope. In the end, for Edinger, alchemy was considered to
be a sacred work, one that required a religious attitude; and like von Franz,
he saw Jung’s work in alchemy as a development of the Christian myth.
Edinger’s examination of Jung’s work on alchemy continued with a num-
ber of texts carefully devoted to explicating it. While Anatomy of the Psy-
che (1985) is an overall look at alchemical processes and the symbolism of
88 Marie-Louise von Franz and Edward Edinger
On the basis of such statements, one can read Jung as holding a position in
which language and interpretation are separate from facts and, with such a
conviction, one can see Jung as coming from a fundamentally natural sci-
entific position. However, to emphasize such a position does not do justice
to the complexity of his position. Jung’s stance as a natural scientist was
often expressed when he was concerned about justifying his research to a
scientific community.
What Jung and Edinger called “facts” are both more and less than the
term is commonly understood to mean in a natural scientific perspec-
tive. This ambiguity continues throughout the development of the Jun-
gian tradition and in Edinger’s work. The strange ambiguity in Edinger’s
description is that every time he used the words “fact” and “objective,” he
italicizes the words as if to set them apart from our common understanding
of fact and objectivity. I believe he does this because, beyond the com-
mon and natural scientific use of these words, he recognizes as Jung did
that approaching psychic reality is not well understood within the simple
Cartesian binaries of subject and object. At the same time, however, he
holds onto the pre-phenomenological scientific and medical framework
in which he was trained as a physician and psychiatrist because he is still
struggling with a methodology which can do justice to the complexity that
psychic reality demands. In the spirit of science and the medical model,
Edinger writes about “facts” which he claims “go to make up an anatomy
of the psyche, which is at the same time an embryology, since we are deal-
ing with a process of development and transformation.”12 For Edinger, as
noted earlier, this anatomy of the psyche “is as objective as the anatomy
of the body.”
Edinger’s medical analogies link psyche to a natural scientific view of
reality, but he sees psychic reality as symbolic and expresses this side by
side with his medical frame of reference. He speaks as well of a “phenom-
enology of the objective psyche” by which he seems to mean “to bring into
visibility certain experiential modes or categories of the individuation pro-
cess. . . [which] serve to illustrate patterns and regularities of the objective
psyche.”13 He saw these phenomenological patterns and categories both
as facts that can be put into an ordered and objective frame of scientific
objectivities and, alternatively, as “facts” that can be put into a structured
90 Marie-Louise von Franz and Edward Edinger
Figure 4.1
M ortificatio/Putrefactio. From Edward Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche:
Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 146.
Source: Courtesy Open Court Books.
Figure 4.2
C oniunctio. From Edward Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical
Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 210.
Source: Courtesy Open Court Books.
diagrams are interrelated and that the constellations around the seven pro-
cesses change along with the central image, the process view of psyche is
richly enhanced. It is as if the psyche can be viewed in each moment through
the eye of the central image or from any point in the dynamic process. Ear-
lier we spoke of the eye of Mercurius in the clash between two serpents and
here we might imagine the possibility of multiple and changing viewpoints,
multiple eyes through which we might view psychic reality.
Marie-Louise von Franz and Edward Edinger 93
Each chapter of Edinger’s book then might be seen not simply as a linear
process that ends with the coniunctio and the Philosophers’ Stone, but also
as a circular, ongoing process with changing matrices showing an image
of the psyche at each moment from a central but changing standpoint,
with no Archimedean transcendental point outside psyche itself. Perhaps
this dynamic view of psychic reality is itself a way of imaging the Phi-
losophers’ Stone and the Self. While Edinger does not elaborate this view,
I believe it is implicit in his exegesis and that it sits side-by-side with his
translation of alchemical images into a “scientific,” medical, anatomical
frame of reference and into the language of classical Jungian psychologi-
cal categories. While this latter perspective seems to make alchemy more
understandable to modern consciousness, it also runs the risk of over-
simplification and static reification. When this occurs, the complexities
of alchemy, the Philosophers’ Stone, and “psychic reality” are translated
into a “psychology of alchemy” and the unknown monstrosities of ideas
like the Philosophers’ Stone are translated into the Jungian notion of “the
Self.” Put in this way, and in spite of my positive regard for both Von Franz
and Edinger, they at times too easily translate alchemy into a conceptual,
taken-for-granted framework of Jung’s psychology. Such a reductive read-
ing invites alternative readings and thus sets the stage for the revisionist
theories of James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich.
Notes
1 Sections of this chapter are a modified version of my entry Marlan, “Alchemy,”
263–295.
2 Kirsch, The Jungians, 11.
3 Von Franz, Alchemy, 273.
4 Von Franz, in Wagner, “A Conversation,” 15–16.
5 Sharp, “Tribute for E. Edinger,” 18.
6 Edinger, Anatomy, 14.
7 Ibid., 15.
8 Ibid., Preface.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 2.
11 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16), §537.
12 Edinger, Anatomy, Preface.
13 Ibid.; emphasis mine.
14 Ibid., 1.
15 Edinger, The Aion Lectures, 11.
16 Ibid.
17 Edinger, Anatomy, 15.
Chapter 5
If von Franz and Edinger were major classical disciples of Jung’s work,
James Hillman is an important revisionist of Jungian theory. From one
perspective, Hillman fundamentally revised Jung’s – and by extension Von
Franz’s and Edinger’s – thought, but from another he returns to its radical
essence, carrying its implications to a new level.
Hillman accuses traditional psychology of being blindly rooted in the
scientific paradigm and devoid of ideas, and complains that modern psy-
chology has “replaced ideas with nominalistic allegorical and disembodied
words. We count heads and make classifications, exchange information as
if we were thinking.”2 Such bold and iconoclastic statements “turn upside
down many ideas that people hold dear and unreflected.”3 Hillman’s style
is provocative and this can lead some to dismiss him, but as Moore notes
“he seeks to engage and enjoy polemics, persuasion and controversy”4 not
for their own sake but for the sake of reactivating imagination.
The imagination is fundamental to Hillman’s thought and “metapsy-
chology itself is one of the ways of the imagination proper to psychol-
ogy.”5 In Hillman’s hands, psychoanalytic concepts and ideas have to be
“deliteralized” and can be heard as expressions of the imagination. But his
notion of the imagination is not the one we imagine. Hillman re-visions/re-
envisions the imagination in a way that challenges the history of our West-
ern traditions and renders it secondary to conceptual thinking. He reverses
this pattern and reopens the question of the relationship of concept and
metaphor. His methodological reversal reminds psychology that “it too
is an activity of the soul”6 and that it is unpsychological to proceed with
concepts that have become hardened and unreflected. This hardening can
too easily become the bedrock dogmas of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-6
Innovations, criticisms, and developments 95
It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythol-
ogy and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not
every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this? Cannot
the same be said today of your own physics?
The question for Hillman is not a question simply of myth versus science,
but of the reification of single myths as opposed to a broad mythic aware-
ness. For Hillman, when a living myth hardens and becomes literalized,
we imagine it as fundamental and central, and we fall into a philosophi-
cally and psychologically monomythic mode.12 For Hillman, the Oedipal
tale has become such a central myth in psychoanalysis. As analysts,
He continues:
And, as Moore notes, “for Hillman, none of this is literally absolute, all
these emotions and configurations are ways in which we are remytholo-
gized, and that is why they carry such importance.”15 Hillman states “they
are doors to Sophocles and Sophocles, himself a door, their importance
rising not from historical events but mythical happenings that as Sallustius
said never happened but always are fictions.”16 Thus for Hillman “depth
psychology believes in myth, practices myth, teaches myth”17 and, I would
add, that it is no different for an archetypal psychology, except insofar as
being self-reflexive about its mythic practice it opens the door to a poly-
mythic sensibility, to a broad range of archetypal perspectives.
Instead of making a norm of singleness of soul, Hillman portrays the
psyche as “inherently multiple.”18 Hillman states that “we need a psychol-
ogy that gives place to multiplicity, not demanding integration and other
forms of unity, and at the same time offering a language adequate to a
psyche that has many faces.”19 The psyche is not only multiple, “it is a
communication of many persons each with specific needs, fears, longings,
styles and language.”20 The many persons echo the many perspectives and
mythic modes which archetypal psychology investigates.
A focus upon the many and different styles of thought provides arche-
typal psychology with a variety of ways of looking at the psyche. Mythi-
cal paradigms as well as analytic perspectives may suggest metaphoric
insight. A Jungian might now find himself in a Freudian or Adlerian meta-
phor to differentiate a psychic phenomenon. Hillman used the metaphor
of the bricoleur to describe this ready-to-hand activity and uses such an
Innovations, criticisms, and developments 97
the Golden Flower and [in Jung’s essay on] ‘The Philosophical Tree.’ ”31
Later, in 1968, while at the University of Chicago, Hillman continued his
lectures and “expanded [his] library research and collection of dreams
with alchemical motifs.”32 These lectures were given in an old wooden
chemistry hall and were entitled “Analytic work – Alchemical Opus.”33
His approach in these lectures was “to exhibit a background to analytical
work that is metaphorical, even preposterous, and so, less encumbered
by clinical literalism.”34 This theme runs through Hillman’s alchemical
papers beginning with his 1970 publication “On Senex Consciousness.”
In 1978 Hillman published “The Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Lan-
guage” which set the stage for his continuing reflections.
Unlike Edinger, Hillman’s approach to reading alchemy resists translat-
ing its images and language into the structures of any reductive rationalism
that leaves the image behind. He gives these examples:
White Queen and Red King have become [for Jung, Von Franz, and
Edinger] feminine and masculine principles; their incestuous sexual
intercourse has become the union of opposites; the freakish her-
maphrodite and uniped, the golden head . . . have all become para-
doxical representations of the goal, examples of androgyny, symbols
of the Self.35
For him, these are a move from “precision to generality.”36 Hillman chal-
lenges us to imagine the process of reading alchemy differently. For him,
sticking to the image recovers the point of Plutarch’s ancient maxim “save
the phenomena,”37 and allows us to speak imaginatively and to dream
the dream onward. Hillman is not simply suggesting that we replace our
concepts with “the archaic neologisms of alchemy” or take alchemical
language literally as substitutions for our own concepts. It is not the lit-
eral return to alchemy that he proposes, but rather a “restoration of the
alchemical mode of imagining.” For Hillman, this means the move from a
psychology of alchemy to an alchemical psychology rooted in the funda-
mental principle of the imagination and not in reified, fixed structures of
theoretical abstractions.
One might imagine Hillman here as making a revolutionary psycho-
logical and philosophical move beyond Jung and the classical Jungians,
or perhaps just emphasizing the fundamental importance of the primacy
of images and imagination, and resisting the further movement into what
100 Innovations, criticisms, and developments
the subtle changes in color, heat, bodily forms, and other qualities
refer to the psyche’s processes, useful to the practice of therapy for
reflecting the changes going on in the psyche without linking these
changes to a progressive program or redemptive vision.42
In short, alchemy’s curious images and sayings are valuable not so much
because alchemy is a grand narrative of the stages of individuation and
its conjunction of opposites, nor for its reflection on the Christian pro-
cess of redemption, “but rather because of alchemy’s myriad, cryptic,
arcane, paradoxical, and mainly conflicting texts [which] reveal the psy-
che phenomenally.”43
For Hillman, alchemy needs to be encountered with “the least possi-
ble intrusion of metaphysics.”44 He saw Jung, von Franz, and Edinger as
informed consciously or unconsciously by a metaphysical attitude, and
thus attempting to examine alchemy in a scholarly manner in order to
find objective meaning. He, on the other hand, saw himself as emphasiz-
ing the “matters” of alchemy as metaphorical substances and archetypal
Innovations, criticisms, and developments 101
with no static fixed end. Psychologically, this alters the heroic desire for
ever-continuing improvement – rather, the soul circles around itself in an
ongoing process, a ouroboric rotatio where beginning and end meet. Put
another way, Hillman states that
He goes on to say:
The rotatio also returns telos itself to its root meaning. Telos does
not simply mean end, goal, purpose, finis. “Instead,” says Onians,
“I would suggest that with this root notion of ‘turning around’ [telos]
meant ‘circling’ or ‘circle.’ ” The goal itself circles, because it is a
psychic goal; or, the goal is psyche itself obeying the laws of its own
motion, a motion that is not going somewhere else; no journey, no pro-
cess, no improvement. And so the images of the goal put to final rest
the subjective urge that has impelled the entire work from the start. We
awaken to the fact that the goal of the work is nothing else than the
objectification of the very urge that propels it.55
hearing a voice from an earlier dream that said directly to him: “You are
already in a Tibetan monastery.” Remembering this dream had a dramatic
effect on his thought process. The idea that the dreamer was already where
he wanted to be was more than a rationalization. It, in effect, opened him
to the recognition that what he valued in his study of the Tibetan Bud-
dhist tradition was the idea of the fullness of the present moment. The idea
was well known to him, but not deeply experienced. With the recollection
of this dream, the conflict began to subside since what was psychologi-
cally intrinsic about going to the monastery was the desire to live more
fully in the moment. In such a dream, the fantasy of the future returns to
the present and the dreamer experienced a feeling of greater completion.
In a sense, the telos of going forward returned to itself. The goal of his
intention was not simply out there in some “actuality” to be realized in
the future, but rather in the existential structure of the “moment.” In such
transformative moments, the psyche’s conception of temporality changes
from linear extension to a circular deepening – one might say, from an
“ego psychology” of a being-in-time to a “self psychology” whose being-
in-time is grounded in a larger sense of temporality. Put another way: “By
imagining the goal as feelings already familiar, we are . . . deliteralising
the goal by removing it from a temporal presence and activating it as an
idea already present in the human condition and intermittently available to
our feelings, spurring the desire for supreme values.”56 Hillman refers to
philosopher Edward Casey, noting that Casey has set forth “the idea that
imagination is so closely related to time, both psychologically and onto-
logically, that actual image-work not only takes time into soul or makes
temporal events soul events but also makes time in soul.”57
What is important for Hillman is that alchemical goals must be de-liter-
alized and that “alchemy’s images of [the goals], the hermaphrodite, the
gold, or the red stone” are not to be taken “as actualized events” in time or
even symbolic representations.58 It is this idea that motivates psyche into
the long process of the alchemical work. For Hillman, the motivation for
both work and life requires attractive goals that promise healing, redemp-
tion, fantasies, possibilities, and even beauty. In short, “An inflated vision
of supreme beauty is a necessary fiction for the soul-making opus we call
our lifetime.”59
For Hillman, “[t]he purpose of the work is purposiveness itself, not this
or that formulated purpose, which quickly degenerates into an ideology
and just as quickly loses effectiveness as motive power.”60 It is not what
Innovations, criticisms, and developments 105
can be attained that moves us toward our ends, but what is unattainable.
Hillman elaborates the difference between what he earlier called a spir-
itual approach and the soul approach noting that the spirit approach takes
alchemical fictions “as metaphysical realities, and measures progress
toward them in literal stages. The soul approach maintains the images as
supreme values but takes them always as fictions.”61
To hold fictions as a supreme value is a strange idea. In modern times,
there seems to be a tendency to devalue fiction, opposing it to truth, and to
value “reality” over what is called “fantasy” or “imagination.” However,
for Hillman, imagination is raised to the highest value. Hillman notes:
anima voice told him that his work was art.68 Hillman has noted that had
Jung entertained this anima voice more openly, the direction of his psy-
chology may have been very different. One way to imagine this difference
is to recognize that Hillman’s work has not only taken up this call to the
aesthetic and art, but also made it central to his own psychology, which he
so forcefully demonstrates in his alchemical psychology.
Jung’s and Hillman’s ideas are in turn criticized by another important
revisionist, Wolfgang Giegerich, whose philosophical orientation, strongly
influenced by the work of Hegel, challenges the fundamental place of
image in psychic life.
notes that we must move “beyond natural pictorial thinking and move on
to the abstract level of thought proper.”74 Contrasting imaginal imagina-
tion with thought proper, Giegerich states:
Image is a form in which what is actually (that is, “in itself,” but not
“for itself”) a thought or Notion initially appears in consciousness. As
long as it appears in the form of a symbol or image, the thought cannot
yet be consciously thought (past participle); it can only be “beheld” or
“contemplated,” as if it were an object or a scene and not a thought.
Because it is a thought “in visible [anschaulicher] form,” the form
of a pictorial representation, its thought character remains “invisible”
[unanschaulich] or unconscious, implicit.75
“nothing but” type of notion, merely intellectual, cut off from living
experience. Rather, it is the concrete Notion which, due to its genesis
from emotion and image, is still satiated with them, but now with them
in their form as sublated moments within thought. The sensual, emo-
tional and imaginal qualities have not been lost altogether. They have
been alchemically distilled and brought home from their alienation in
the initial crude, literal state in which they first were manifested.82
Giegerich’s alchemy 86
Just as Jung and Hillman found alchemy important for their psychology,
Giegerich likewise takes up alchemy as an important touchstone. His
major reflections on alchemy are found in his The Soul’s Logical Life,
particularly in the section entitled “Excursus: Alchemy’s Opus Contra
Imagination.” In addition, there are two papers dedicated to alchemy, one
entitled “Closure and Setting Free or the Bottled Spirit of Alchemy and
Psychology” and another entitled “Once More ‘the Stone which is Not a
Stone.’ Further Reflections on the ‘Not.’ ” In addition, Giegerich has also
made a number of comments about alchemy by personal communication
to this author and I have included some of these in my chapter entitled
“Alchemy” in The Handbook of Jungian Psychology.
In Giegerich’s personal comments to the author, he notes that alchemy
entered Jung’s psychology only as a topic or content. Giegerich objects
that Jung’s scientific/modernist metapsychology seems to remain the
same, maintaining a subject/object split, while at the same time making an
object of alchemical ideas that do not fit into these categories. Giegerich
believes that Jung reduces alchemical processes to events “in” the uncon-
scious or the interior of the personality. He notes that: “the individual, the
personality, the inner, and ‘the unconscious’ are our names for the ‘bottle’
in which the mercurial ‘substance’ had to stay firmly enclosed for Jung.”87
Giegerich continues his reflection by noting that “because Mercurius
remained enclosed in the above way ‘it’ had to stay a substance, an object,
and entity” and could not be true to its own nature as a spirit (something
intangible and unrepresentable). This interpretation sets the stage for the
fundamental thrust of Giegerich’s emphasis in The Soul’s Logical Life.
According to Giegerich, when Jung, and Hillman for that matter, stick
to “images” as fundamental, they are in fact objectifying the spirit of
alchemy. The image itself becomes objectified, while the true spirit of
alchemy aims at realizing the logical life of the soul, which is conceptual,
subtle, non-positive, intangible. Throughout Giegerich’s critique, he juxta-
poses images and a “pictorial form of thinking” which valorizes perception
and imagination against what he considers to be the true aim of alchemy,
which is to achieve the level of dialectical thought and logical expression
that he describes in The Soul’s Logical Life. For Giegerich, when Jung
opts to hold the image as fundamental, he steps over the goal of alchemy
to release the spirit from its container and ignores the “self-sublation” or
112 Innovations, criticisms, and developments
death that the alchemical process requires. In doing so he skips “over the
successive psychological development of several centuries.”88
Notes
1 The following section was previously published as Marlan, “A Blue Fire.”
2 Hillman, quoted by Marlan in “A Blue Fire,” 5.
3 Ibid.
4 Moore, quoted by Marlan in “A Blue Fire: The Work of James Hillman,” 5.
5 Hillman, quoted by Marlan in “A Blue Fire: The Work of James Hillman,” 5.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 6.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 7.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Hillman, Revisioning, 229.
30 Portions of this section were previously published in my entry Marlan, “Alchemy,”
263–295.
31 Hillman, “A Note for Stanton Marlan,” 101.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 102.
34 Ibid.
35 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 15.
36 Ibid.
37 Plutarch, On the Face in the Orb of the Moon, line 923A.
38 Ibid., 18.
39 Hillman, “A Note for Stanton Marlan,” 102.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 103.
114 Innovations, criticisms, and developments
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Hillman, “The Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Language,” 37, 39.
46 Ibid.
47 Hillman, “Salt,” 173.
48 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 96.
49 Ibid., 94; quoted in Marlan, “Colors of the Soul,” 73.
50 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 203; quoted in Marlan, “Colors of the Soul,” 74.
51 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 215; quoted in Marlan, “Colors of the Soul,” 74.
52 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 217; quoted in Marlan, “Colors of the Soul,” 74.
53 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 224; quoted in Marlan, “Colors of the Soul,” 74.
54 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 256.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 238.
57 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 27.
58 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 232. It would be interesting to explore Heidegger’s
notion of temporalizing and his “not yet” view of the future as amplifying Hillman’s
notion of telos returning to itself, but I cannot develop this theme here.
59 Ibid., 233.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 238.
62 Ibid., 239.
63 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 23 (From Giambattista Vico. Scienza Nuova. Napoli,
1744 [in translation: The New Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968]).
64 Ibid.
65 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 330.
66 Ibid., 329.
67 Ibid.
68 See Jung, Memories, 185–187, for the full story. In brief: at one point during his con-
frontation with the unconscious, as Jung was writing down some of his fantasies, he
heard a voice telling him that his work was “art.” (185) At first, he dismissed this
as an interference from “a woman . . . within,” “the ‘soul,’ in the primitive sense.”
(186) Eventually, he came to believe that it was essential to interact with this inner
figure in order “to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personify-
ing them, and at the same time to bring them into relationship with consciousness. That
is the technique for stripping them of their power.” (187) However, he also was con-
vinced that, in general, the anima was “full of a deep cunning” and if he had trusted her
and accepted that his work was “art,” he would have been “seduced . . . into believing
that [he] was a misunderstood artist” and that this could have destroyed him. (187) For
Jung, what was important was the question of philosophical objectivity and scientific
validity. He wanted to be seen as a serious thinker and to make a contribution to the
science of psychology.
69 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 11.
70 Ibid.
71 Giegerich, “Conflict/Resolution,” 8–9.
72 In light of this congruence with Hegelian thought, it would be interesting to ask in what
ways Giegerich’s ideas actually differ from Hegel’s in any significant way, but I will
not pursue this theme here.
73 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 23–24.
74 Ibid., 29.
75 Ibid., 47.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., 48.
Innovations, criticisms, and developments 115
78 Ibid.
79 Jung, Memories, 177; quoted by Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 48.
80 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 49.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.; emphasis mine. The importance of the intrinsic connection between Notion and
Idea, image and emotion, needs further elaboration, but is beyond the scope of this
work.
84 Ibid.; emphasis mine.
85 Ibid., 191–192.
86 Portions of this section were previously published in my chapter Marlan, “Alchemy.”
87 Giegerich, personal communication, 2000.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid. Yasuhiro Tanaka, a Japanese analyst, picks up on Giegerich's critique of “images”
and the limitations of an “imaginal psychology.” For him, if we remain one-sidedly
dependent on such a perspective “then we fall into the trap of remaining on the horizon
of surface-psychology rather than depth psychology” (Tanaka, personal communica-
tion, 2000). For Tanaka, as for Giegerich, “we psychologists living after Jung, have
to address the alchemical logic in analytical psychology.” His assessment of Jung is
that while Jung on a personal level perceived the logical, paradoxical, and dialectic
dimension of alchemy, he could not “interiorize it enough” or adequately apply it to his
psychology as a theory. Thus, for Tanaka, our work now is “not to fashion the bridge
between alchemy and our clinical practice” but to examine the theoretical limitations
of Jung's psychology: “Alchemy was not only [Jung’s] historical background but also
his logical background in the sense that for Jung it was none other than the theoria
for sublating his own experience into his psychology.” This then means it was Jung’s
theory that could dispel the massa confusa and it is to this that we must now give our
attention.
Chapter 6
The tension between recognizing that there is something about the mon-
strous complexity of alchemical images that remains essential (Hillman)
and holding that thought rather than images are essential (Giegerich) has
been seen as an important divide between Jung’s and Hillman’s versions
of an image-based psychology and Giegerich’s logical life of the soul. The
struggle of coming to terms with the unconscious often has been under-
stood as making the unconscious conscious, the unknown known, the alien
familiar, the darkness light, and so on. It is a process familiar to nearly
all forms of psychoanalysis and it has been seen as fundamental to the
healing process. In making this move toward “consciousness,” whether
in Freud or Giegerich, albeit recognizing their considerable philosophical
differences, both of these thinkers emphasize the translation from image
to thought. Hillman, on the other hand, radically reverses this tide, claim-
ing the resistance of the image to translation into what he calls conceptual
rationalism. Using dream life as an example, Hillman notes that Freud
called the dream
the via regia to the unconscious. But because this via regia in most
psychotherapy since his time, has become a straight one-way street of
all morning traffic, moving out of the unconscious toward the ego’s
city, I have chosen to face the other way. Hence my title [The Dream
and the Underworld], which is a directional signpost for a different
one-way movement, let us say vesperal, into the dark.1
This is a “move backwards from logos to mythos, [a] move against the
historical stream of our culture.”2 For Hillman, this move – similar to the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-7
James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich 117
Dreams are children of the Night, and we have to look at their brightest
dayworld image also through our selfsame smoky glasses. So we work
into the dream without forethoughts of Aurora consurgens, for Eos
(Dawn) prefers heroes and takes them up. [sublates them?] Instead:
the resurrection of Death. Instead of turning to the dream for a new
start and for foresight . . . there will always be going downward, first
with feelings of hopelessness, then, and the mind’s eye dilates in the
dark, with increasing surprise and joy.4
Here Hillman finds something in the dark that for Giegerich is an impris-
onment in matter. For Giegerich, this is an old attitude while for Hillman
this darkening of consciousness is on the verge of the monstrously new,
“so utterly foreign and incomprehensible.”5 For Hillman, this turn toward
the dark leaves Promethean consciousness behind, making consciousness
less visual and more auditory, far removed from therapies that aim to bring
things to light. The move toward the darkness is also a move toward sensing,
from eye to ear and then through the senses of touch, taste, and scent
so that we begin to perceive more and more in particulars, less and less
overviews. We become more and more aware of an animal discrimina-
tion going on below our reflections and guiding them.6
note that for Hillman the “image” is not simply based on what we think of
as natural sensations. Hillman writes:
Here we are numb, chilled. All our reactions are in cold storage. This
is a psychic place of dread and of a terror so deep that it comes in
uncanny experiences, such as voodoo death and the totstell reflex.
A killer lives in the ice.13
showing blood to a vampire or a shark; one will quickly be eaten alive. For
Hillman, the urge to warm the cold and melt the ice “reflects a therapeutic
effort that has not been able to meet the ice at its own level. The curative
urge conceals the fear of the Ninth Circle, of going all the way down” into
the cold.15 Hillman notes that there is a part of our soul “that would live
forever cast out from both human and heavenly company,”16 and contact
with this place is essential for any therapist who would truly work as a
depth psychologist.
If we take Hillman’s idea of the difference between the night sea-jour-
ney and the nekyia seriously – that it is only the hero who returns from
the journey in better shape for the tasks of life – what conclusion can we
draw within ourselves from those who have had the capacity to face such
cold-blooded experiences? Are we not better off for doing so as therapists
and human beings? Are we not able to engage life in a fuller way by con-
necting to our own psychopathic depths?
I would claim that we are, and I take Hillman’s division between the
night sea-journey and the nekyia to be a polemical strategy to reveal
something about the profound depths of psychic life that ordinarily remain
invisible or unconscious. His strategy is a one-way exploration, with “sin-
gleness of intent,” “a vesperal, into the dark,”17 as he calls it. It is a strategy
he used in The Dream and the Underworld and, in addition, in his essay
“Peaks and Vales.” In that essay, he again draws apart the polarities of psy-
chic life to reveal, by stark contrast in this case, the differences between
spirit and soul, puer and psyche, heights and depths. For Hillman this is
an act of violence, “urging strife, or eris, or polemos,” an imaginal act of
separatio (separation).18 Hillman hopes to clarify both spirit and soul as
separate ways of imagining. We recognize these ways of seeing by vir-
tue of their imaginary styles and language. He describes spirit as abstract,
unified, and concentrated, while soul is concrete, multiple, and imminent.
I believe that their separation is in part artificial and that ultimately there
is a need for accommodation between differences. In “Peaks and Vales,”
Hillman ultimately makes a move toward this accommodation in what he
calls the puer-psyche marriage.
The idea here is that the “opposites” of spirit and soul are in intimate
embrace. For Hillman, the soul or anima – the archetype of life – reflects
the endless mess of everyday life and its endless problems. Hillman spec-
ulates that perhaps “these very endless labyrinthine ‘problems’ are its
depth. The anima [soul] embroils and twists and screws us to the breaking
point.”20 For Hillman, bringing our spirit to the soul is a relationship of
perplexity and it is perplexity that “consciousness needs to marry.” Puer
and psyche, spirit and soul, need each other. The fruits of this marriage
transform the soul such that it
can regard its own needs in a new way. Then these needs are no
longer attempts to adapt to Hera’s civilizational requirements, or to
Venus’s insistence that love is God, or to Apollo’s medical cures, or
even Psyche’s work of soul-making. Not for the sake of learning love
only, or for community, or for better marriages and better families,
or for independence does the psyche present its symptoms and neu-
rotic claims. Rather these demands are asking also for inspiration, for
long-distance vision, for ascending eros, for vivification and intensi-
fication (not relaxation), for radicality, transcendence, and meaning –
in short, the psyche has spiritual needs, which the puer part of us can
fulfill. Soul asks that its preoccupations be not dismissed as trivia but
seen through in terms of higher and deeper perspectives, the verticali-
ties of the spirit. When we realize that our psychic malaise points to a
spiritual hunger beyond what psychology offers and that our spiritual
dryness points to a need for psychic waters beyond what spiritual
discipline offers, then we are beginning to move both therapy and
discipline.21
walled space, the thalamus or bridal chamber, neither peak nor vale,
but rather a place where both can be looked at through glass windows
James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich 121
or be closed off with doors. This increased interiority means that each
new puer inspiration, each hot idea, at whatever time of life in whom-
ever, be given psychization. It will first be drawn through the labyrin-
thine ways of the soul, which wind it and slow it and nourish it from
many sides (the “many” nurses and “many” maenads), developing the
spirit from a one-way mania for “ups” to polytropos, the many-sided-
ness of the Hermetic old hero, Ulysses. The soul performs the service
of indirection to the puer arrow, bringing to the sulphuric compulsions
of the spirit the lasting salt of soul.22
Table 6.1
Fundamental differences between James Hillman and Wolfgang
Giegerich.
1 Imaginal VS Logical
2 Images VS Dialectical thought/notion/concept
3 Semantics VS Syntax or logical form
4 Hesitancy VS Going all the way
5 Not making the cut VS Making the cut
Paying the price
Leave ego at the door
Cross the threshold into the abyss
No middle ground
6 Picture thinking. VS Logical thinking. Notion.
Even though image is not Images are not reducible to sense
something set before the impressions, but images are still
eyes or even before the reductive. Image has anima-like
mind, it is something into innocence.
which I enter and by which
I am embraced. Images hold
image sense.
7 Silvery image. VS Negativity of the image
Yellowing the image.
8 Metaphorical holding of VS Vaporizing images.
images. The liquification of images.
9 Image as imaginal psychic VS Image must be worked through to
reality, metaphor, play, the level of logical thought.
humor, aesthetic.
10 Sticking with the image VS Labor of concept
11 OK to hold different VS Not OK to simply stop with
philosophical convictions different convictions—positions
must be worked through. (At
other points, Giegerich appears
to agree that differences
are based on irreducible
philosophical convictions.)
12 Imaginal ego VS Logical subject
13 Thought opens to image VS Image gives rise to thought
14 Return to the gods and myth VS Ancient modes of myth and the
gods have been surpassed.
15 Historicality VS Historicity
The archetypal structure of History seen as developmental,
man’s existential condition, progressive, diachronic, Being-
man’s being as time. in-time.
Circularity Linearity
Notes
1 Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 1.
2 Ibid., 3.
3 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 140.
4 Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 191.
5 Ibid., 192.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 192–193.
9 Ibid., 1.
10 Ibid., 168.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 169.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 170.
16 Ibid., 169.
17 Ibid., 1.
18 Hillman, Blue Fire, 114.
19 Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” 66.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 68.
22 Ibid.
23 In personal communications to this author, Hillman many times told me that, in gen-
eral, he did not respond to critics of his work because he felt that this would be a dis-
traction from the work he still wanted to complete. Although he always tried to digest
criticisms, he preferred “to avoid the challenges of combat” in favor of accepting the
fact that he had a point of view that diverged from that of others, including his friend
Giegerich (Hillman, “Divergences” 6).
Chapter 7
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-8
126 Giegerich and the human-all-too-human
the “flap of Persephone.”9 Is it the case that both Hillman and Giegerich, in
their appreciation of Hecate and the underworld, see psychology as a one-
way trip to the shades or to dissolution? Hillman, like Giegerich, reacts
against the limitations of ego psychology and to its one-way traffic out of
the unconscious toward ego assimilation.10 As we have discussed, Hillman
proposes a reversal, another one-way movement into the underworld, “a
vesperal into the dark,”11 as he calls it, and Giegerich’s alchemy articulates
the cut that gets us there.
In this comparison, one can begin to see the limitations of strict opposi-
tions. If it is fair to characterize (though it is too simple) Hillman’s contri-
bution as an anima psychology and Giegerich’s as an animus one, can or
should the two of them be joined in an alchemical marriage, a circulatio,
with each moment leading in and out of one another? Logical psychology
would go beyond all the literal residues of the imaginal, and imaginal psy-
chology would continue to give flesh to the unseen and unseemly – solve
et coagula, say the alchemists, a dynamic and fundamental syzygy. For
me, the telos of Mercurius is not simply aimed at liquification or evapora-
tion. Mercurius is an odd and creative duplex, living on the edge of a trem-
bling ground of poetic undecidables, the site of a monstrous and unstable
coniunctio, and, as Jung noted, he/she is “sometimes . . . a substance. . .,
sometimes . . . a philosophy”12 or thought. Panisnick, following Ficino,
has commented, “Eros impels the spirit out of the corporeal and sensi-
ble world, but Eros also projects the spirit into that realm and it thereby
becomes a dynamic connective between the two worlds.”13
Giegerich appears to favor one dimension of Mercurius, and one aim of
alchemy, namely, the work of dissolution. When he cites the alchemical
operations, he omits coagulatio and he follows a linear view of history,
pointing out that alchemy properly undergoes dissolution. It remains a
question if alchemy and history are so progressive. Alchemy also remains
active and continues to die and be reborn in an eternal recurrence while
still emerging in the present in differing historical forms. All of its opera-
tions are archetypal, in an eternal play between solve et coagula.14 The
dialectic is more circular and requires an ongoing interplay between anima
and animus, the positivity of the soul and its ongoing dissolution, a syzygy
between anima and animus psychologies. However, to imagine a syzygy
between archetypal psychology and the logical life of the soul in this way
is also to do both an injustice. Each is more complex than I have as yet
indicated. Interior to both theories is an intrinsic relationship between
128 Giegerich and the human-all-too-human
anima and animus, soul and spirit – though overall one might characterize
each as leaning in one direction or another and as exhibiting an overarch-
ing archetypal pattern.
Giegerich further differentiates and characterizes these fundamentally
different patterns, namely, the standpoints of the anima, animus, and
syzygy. He observes that both the anima and animus points of view rely
on mythical figures or concepts of forces imagined as brought into union
by the syzygy above them. But, for Giegerich, psychology can and must
rise to the level of the syzygy itself. For him, bringing anima and animus
together is a Jungian fantasy based on mythological thinking, in which
the anima imagines the syzygical relation in the naturalistic imagery of
marriage. Anima and animus are seen from an outside view as images
or forces, entities needing to be combined or reconciled. For him, such
a relationship needs to be sublated to reveal the subtle structure of the
syzygy itself, no longer seen as above or encompassing the anima and
animus. As separate figures, they disappear and show themselves as sub-
lated moments, the syzygy. They no longer need to be imagined as yoked
together, no need for a yoga to connect them. They are already connected
dialectically in the movement of thought as a unity of unity and difference,
a notion we will return to in a later discussion of Hegel’s philosophy.
In this analysis, Giegerich not only moves beyond an ego and anima
psychology, but he pushes off from an animus psychology as well. In
so doing, he appears to follow the phenomenology of spirit beyond the
level of force and understanding to an even subtler level. From the logical
standpoint of the form of the syzygy itself, there is no longer a concern
with the intuition of contents. The work of sublation continues to cut away
at the coagulations and remaining positivities of the soul, freeing the spirit
for what appears to be a never-ending story, an endless march to Dionysian
freedom – but to what extent is such freedom possible? To what extent and
how should it be the goal of psychology?
If a true psychology in Giegerich’s sense is to be identified with the radi-
cal philosophical discipline of interiority and with an ongoing sublation,
is something left behind, unaccounted for – a residue surpassed, a shadow
that lingers and requires our attention if psychology is to be adequate to
its calling? Here I look into the margins of Giegerich’s own reflections
and into the development of his own concept of the soul. For Giegerich,
the goal of his true psychology is virtually identical with his understand-
ing of the alchemical philosopher’s achievement of pure gold, which he
Giegerich and the human-all-too-human 129
absolute defection from soul, because this emancipation from soul con-
versely occurs only within soul.”18
From here, this apparent contradiction/conflict continues to gain com-
plexity. Giegerich goes on to speak both about the individual soul and the
condition of soul in modernity, the condition in which we find ourselves
already thrown (perhaps in a Heideggerian sense) into the logical condi-
tion of psychologically-born man. For Giegerich, this is a condition in
which myth, metaphysics, gods, and God have become impossible – since
Modern Man is born out of the soul as an autonomous individual, a civil
man, an ego. It would appear that the emancipatory intentionality of the
soul has been successful in departing from its initiatory needs in the par-
ticipation mystique and anima identification. In fact, the initiatory needs of
the soul in modernity are now moving in harmony and support of its eman-
cipatory desires, to be born out of itself and into the world as subjectivity,
subjective mind, consciousness, and logical form.
The movement of initiation toward emancipation leads Giegerich to a
recognition of the soul’s need for historical development. Thus, for Gieg-
erich, modern man’s initiation now means the absolute negative interiori-
zation of the phenomenon, deepening into itself and thus releasing itself
into spirit and truth. It is in casting off his mythological garments that
modern man finds his human dignity. And, so, for Giegerich freedom from
soul today is irrevocable and total.
It would appear that the logical life of the soul has been a successful
march to freedom and human dignity – but then comes a major caveat and
exception – neurosis! For Giegerich, neurosis is the soul’s stubborn insist-
ence on somehow remaining linked to a mythic or metaphysical identity at
a time when the soul knows that such an identity has been historically sur-
passed. Giegerich submits then that the soul itself “invented neurosis for
itself both as an incentive and as a kind of springboard to push off from.”19
But such an emancipation does not come easily or naturally. It requires
a struggle against the fascinating pull exerted by myth and metaphysics.
Giegerich puts it this way: The soul
Only then has the full price been paid for the departure from a previous
stage of consciousness, while it is the soul itself that “emancipates itself
from itself” and then becomes “explicitly and for itself a born soul.” It
“is born as human consciousness and its infinite interiority.”21 This is all
the work of the soul, but at the same time, Giegerich notes, it is only the
human person who can push off from his or her neurosis and truly be freed
of it, and one does go through the utilization of “strictly analytic, concep-
tual thought. . . [by] uncompromisingly seeing through and critiquing the
neuroticness of the soul’s pervers[ity] . . . in all its practical details.”22
I’m not sure what to say about what the soul in itself is capable of, but
it is hard for me to imagine any human person who has achieved, or could
achieve, total freedom from neurosis, from all mythic and metaphysical
fascinations, as if there is in fact some other hard core “truth” that can
be known and that would set one totally free. Giegerich’s definition of
this freedom from neurosis is the achievement of infinite interiority, again
paying the full price, crossing the Rubicon to the point of no return. But
here I am reminded of Giegerich’s comment about “true gold,” and that
he had not achieved it with his work! I wonder if he would claim anything
different for the achievement of a total freedom from neurosis? It is for
him to answer, but I imagine it would be reasonable for him to tell us that
this is a semantic concern and as a “psychologist” he can think it all the
way through. Here there is a problematic distinction between the ordinary
human-all-too-human being and the psychologist. At the end of Chapter
Three of his book What Is Soul?, Giegerich tells us that as a private indi-
vidual, as a civil man, he does not confuse himself with the psychologist
he “hopes” he is.23 But what an odd divide this is from the point of view
of his psychology. Why hope? Is this the concern of the psychologist who
has not made the radical cut, worked this dialectic all the way through?
This hope cannot be the hope of the psychologist proper, but only the
hope of the human-all-too-human being, and the idea of hoping signifies
the divide between them. For Hillman, hope is a fantasy that distracts us
from the present and, in this case, from our human reality, and for that
reason he also sees it as the one last evil left in Pandora’s box before the
lid closes.24
So, does this mean that, as a private individual like the rest of us, Gieg-
erich remains neurotic – attached to myth and metaphysics, and hoping
to overcome them? Again, has he fallen back into semantics – or never
left it? Either way, there appears to be a continuing and unresolved binary
Giegerich and the human-all-too-human 133
between the private individual and the psychologist – and it is this private
man who is now invited into the consulting room so that by instinct and the
feeling function he can help the psychologist discern the actual needs of
the soul in each moment, while to the psychologist proper is left only the
“caustic analytic work . . . necessary” to cauterize the patient.25
I personally would like to think of the psychologist as capable of the
full range of clinical responsiveness, using his or her capabilities to dis-
cern whatever it is that the soul needs in the eachness of the moment.
I would imagine such a therapist as an analyst who is not totally identi-
fied with being a psychologist or with any method, and remembers his or
her humanity while offering what is possible in the clinical and human
encounter. With regard to this encounter, Giegerich has given the analyst a
refined understanding of dialectical and syntactic awareness. The shadow
of this contribution is that when it is absolutized and removed from the
human all-too-human, the never-ending quest for liberation, and the con-
tinuing need to push off from every initiatory connection that is not the
dialectic itself, it can be as neurotic as the attachment it tries to cure.
In Buddhism, the caustic work of sunyata, of the Vajra or diamond cutter,
reduces all attachment to nothingness, but nothingness itself needs to logi-
cally void itself, which returns the soul to the world in an ever-recurring
circle of life. Thus, liberation is not beyond or transcendent to the world of
samsara image and illusion. It is one with it or, as the Buddhists say, there
is not a hair’s-breadth difference between them (i.e., between samsara and
nirvana). Seen alchemically, this is a hermetic circle embodying the dual
aspect of Mercurius, which to my mind is not only the liquefying solvent,
but the coagulatory agent as well. The liquification of Mercurius is also
not a liquification in any literal sense, and the caustic work of analysis
need not be literally caustic. As it turns out, the psychologist is also not
a psychologist. Another turn of the dialectic reveals the psychologist as
human, all-too-human. Perhaps this is the case for Giegerich as well, as he
hopes to be a good psychologist, and, in so doing, reveals himself as a psy-
chologist who is not a psychologist and as a human being, human-all-too-
human. Is this the failure of the dialectic, its success, or both? In his work
on soul, Giegerich discovers what for me has been a missing remainder in
his work, the human being and his feeling function, and it is this that for
me exceeds, goes beyond, and complicates his work. In so doing, it returns
the debt to human feeling, the enigma of the unconscious, and the mystery
that is not vanquished by the spirit.
134 Giegerich and the human-all-too-human
Notes
1 This chapter is modified from a paper entitled “The Psychologist Who’s Not a Psychol-
ogist: A Deconstructive Reading of Wolfgang Giegerich’s Idea of Psychology Proper,”
presented at the International Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority
Conference, Berlin, Germany, July 24, 2012, and later published in “The Psychologist
Who’s Not a Psychologist,” 223–238.
2 Giegerich, “Psychology,” 251.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 254.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 254–255.
7 Based on language from Giegerich’s discussion of this in Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical
Life, 9–38.
8 Hillman, Blue Fire, 114.
9 Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 49.
10 Ibid., 1.
11 Ibid.
12 Jung, Aion (CW9ii), §240.
13 Panisnick, “The Philosophical Significance,” 201.
14 In all fairness to Giegerich, he responded to this criticism by noting:
It is true that I did not talk much about coagulation, although it is certainly part
of alchemy. But I think it is part of alchemy in a different sense from sublimation,
distillation, etc. I make a difference between the particular instantaneous operations
and the overall direction of the work. Coagulation is not essential as far as the over-
all purpose of the work is concerned. Beware of the physical in the matter, the stone
that is NOT a stone, vinum ardens, the freeing of Mercurius from the imprisonment
and Mercurius itself as QUICKsilver. These are a few indications of the goal of
Giegerich and the human-all-too-human 135
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The problem of the remainder 137
translation seemed adequate. While grappling with these images, she suf-
fered an aneurism of the anterior region of her brain and came close to
dying. She lost sight in one eye but survived.
The power of these clinical images left me with an experience of their
unassimilable monstrosity and an incapacity to dialectically move through
or beyond them. I began to research the image of the black sun and, sur-
prisingly, discovered many other instances of such images intimately
linked to the most literal and destructive experiences of narcissistic morti-
fication, humiliation, delusion, despair, depression, physiological and psy-
chological decay, cancer, psychosis, suicide, murder, and death. I found
these images were resistant to any kind of meaningful explanation or any
kind of process that would attempt to sublate them. Rather, the images
paradoxically seemed to be the archetype of negation itself, and I found
it impossible to bypass their dark aspects. In the face of such a monstrous
image of destruction, darkness, and negation, the question of how to come
to terms with the unconscious is problematized.
For Jung, this meant opening oneself to the depths of the unknown and
yet not abandoning the precious gift of the intellectual differentiation of
consciousness. Jung states in Psychology and Alchemy:
It is rather a question of the man taking the place of the intellect – not
the man whom the dreamer imagines himself to be, but someone far
more rounded and complete. This would mean assimilating all sorts of
things into the sphere of his personality which the dreamer still rejects
as disagreeable or even impossible.2
For Jung, this was no easy task and required facing the perils, threats, and
promises that often show themselves in the context of deep analytic work.
Part of this process Jung called “facing the shadow.” Facing the shadow
is one of the more important goals of Jungian analysis, a key aspect of the
overall work. “Coming to terms with the unconscious [shadow] means
calling into question the illusions one clings to most dearly about oneself,
which have been used to shore up self-esteem and to maintain a sense of
personal identity.”3 Confronting the shadow and confronting one’s illu-
sions are understandably painful and, at times, dangerous moments in
analysis. One danger is that the daimonic can become demonic. Stanley
Diamond differentiated the daimonic from the demonic by noting that the
demonic remains one-sided, frozen, locked into irrevocable ontological
138 The problem of the remainder
everything will eventually come out ok. Typical virgin’s milk fantasies are
often maintained emotionally in intellectually sophisticated and otherwise
developed people who unconsciously hold onto ideas that might include
sentiments like: God will protect and care for me like a good parent. Bad
things won’t happen to me because I have lived according to this or that
principle. I have been good or faithful, eat healthy foods, meditate and
exercise, regularly interpret my dreams, study hard.
When life does not conform to such ideas, the innocent or immature
ego is wounded and often overcome with feelings of hurt, self-pity, anger,
oppression, and feeling victimized. The injured ego can carry this wound-
ing in many ways. The darkening process can lead to a kind of blindness
and dangerous stasis of the soul that then becomes locked in a wound,
in hurt or rage, frozen in stone or ice, or fixed in fire. From an alchemi-
cal point of view, these innocent attitudes resist undergoing a mortificatio
process – and as the inevitable experiences of life cause wounding, the
soul enters the darkening process. Jacques Lacan likens facing such hor-
rific images to facing cancer, not necessarily manifested physically, but
psychologically, proliferating and often leading to humiliation, despair, or
depression. What is often not seen is what is happening under the surface –
the ripening of innocence that opens the dark eye of the soul.
of the psyche, and thus toward the unacceptable aspects of the Self and
of life. Moreover, the deepest recesses of the archetypal shadow may be
unredeemable, and we may need to relativize salvationist hopes or we will
be driven to do so. These images remind us that life at times can be tragic
and that the unconscious is not invariably benevolent.
Recalling my patient’s dream of the black sun, in its aftermath one real-
izes that there appear to be limits to what our efforts – religious, spiritual,
analytic – can accomplish, and this is sobering to our overzealous expec-
tations. In such instances, the analyst may be called upon to sit with the
analysand in and through loss, grief, despair, and the tragic experiences of
life, and be company on the ship of death and in silence be witness to the
limits of analysis and to the hopes and dreams of the human soul. And yet,
there will be moments when the “death” we face may turn out to be a sym-
bolic one, heralding an alchemical process of mortficatio and putrefactio,
which can lead to renewal and the opening to a deepened symbolic life.
Stein has noted that “[p]ersons in analysis are asked explicitly or implic-
itly to stay receptive to the unconscious – to the less rational, more ambig-
uous, and often mysterious side of the personality.”8 It is important that
the analyst as well be prepared to venture into the darkest recesses of the
shadow as a participant and guide with the capacity to sit still, stay pre-
sent, accompany and facilitate facing the darkest aspects of psychic life,
in so doing, the shadow figures may show themselves to compensate or
complement a one-sided conscious position, and facing them can lead to a
more integrated personality. Still, the question remains: how to face such
figures? And to what extent can we do so?
How can we take in what Hillman speaks of as broken, ruined, weak,
sick, inferior, and socially unacceptable parts of ourselves? For him, cur-
ing these shadow images requires love. He asks: “How far can our love
extend to the broken and ruined parts of ourselves, the disgusting and per-
verse? How much charity and compassion have we for our own weakness
and sickness? How far can we. . . [allow] a place for everyone?”9 Because
the shadow can be socially unacceptable and even evil, it is important that
it is carried by us, which means that we do not project our unacceptable
parts on to others and or act them out. This is an ethical responsibility.
The importance of refraining from creating scapegoats loaded down
with our own evils is particularly urgent in today’s world situation. For
Hillman, a moral stance toward the shadow is essential and cannot be
abandoned, but this is not enough: “At one moment something else must
142 The problem of the remainder
break through.”10 Facing the shadow and its cure requires a conjunction of
seeming opposites, a confrontation, and a paradoxical union of two incom-
mensurables: “the moral recognition that these parts of me are burden-
some and intolerable and must change, and the loving laughing acceptance
which takes them just as they are. . . . [o]ne both . . . judges harshly and
joins gladly.”11 Each position “holds only one side of the truth.”12 Hillman
gives an example from the Jewish mystical tradition of the Chassidim,
where “deep moral piety [is] coupled with astounding delight in life.”13 To
achieve such an attitude requires considerable psychological development,
but it still seems almost impossible to imagine taking delight in the deeply
heinous and virulent aspects of the shadow. How can we participate in the
implications of perversity, with Nazi images of the Holocaust, and with
the terrorist shadow? Did Job join gladly with the dark side of God, which
according to Jung required a moral transformation?
There hopefully is a moment where moral outrage turns to moral con-
viction and the moment where one challenges the gods – inner or outer –
and speaks out. One deep shadow of psychoanalysis is the danger of an
introverted bias, thus bypassing the atrocities of everyday life. But psy-
choanalysis has also taught us about the shadow of premature acting out in
the naïve name of the good, the “truth,” that righteously brings even more
darkness into the world.
We spoke above of the kind of love necessary to embrace the shadow. It
is difficult indeed to make real the cliché to love ourselves when our selves
contain not only the noblest but also the vilest aspects of our human con-
dition. It is too easy to fall into the clichés of love and self-acceptance –
residues of virgin milk may still be operative in the fantasies of wholeness
unification and oneness.
Jung early on spoke of this oneness as “a melting together of sense and
nonsense” – a complexio oppositorum or mysterium coniunctionis – but
such ideas can too easily become assimilated and intellectualized, thus
becoming clichés for a dark chaosmos that pushes the soul toward the
unthinkable and to the limits of mind and language bringing with it the
danger of being used by the powers we pretend to understand.
It is clear to me that Jung’s idea of the mysterium and Hillman’s idea
of love are no simple clichés. What both Jung and Hillman call for in the
name of love is an ability to endure and embrace the darkest and most
offensive and unacceptable parts of ourselves and to resist projecting
them on others. This requires a breadth and depth of soul and an ability to
The problem of the remainder 143
tolerate the tension of moral paradox. In “Silver and White Earth,” (Chap-
ter 6 in Alchemical Psychology) Hillman considers such a paradox as a
kind of “illuminated lunacy”14 and, in addition, he sees the work of psyche
as a return of the soul to the world, a reality that goes beyond insular sub-
jectivity and moral passivity.
The inexpressible mysteries of life remained with Jung throughout his
life and in his works from The Red Book to his final works on alchemy.
Jung’s vision of the unity of opposites was never a simple or benign cli-
ché, but, as noted above, there has been a tendency to pass over the shock
and radicality that Neil Micklem has called grotesque and monstrous. The
teleological future that Jung intends in his idea of the transcendent func-
tion that “unifies” opposites is indeed monstrous! Jacques Derrida like-
wise has noted that the future is necessarily monstrous – surprising – that
for which we are unprepared. And Casey, at the end of his book Spirit and
Soul: Essays in Philosophical Psychology has noted that “we must allow
ourselves to be surprised at every turn. We must, in Heraclitus’ trench-
ant fragment, ‘expect the unexpected.’ ”15 Like innocent Persephone, we
are sometimes drawn downward kicking and screaming into the depths, a
descent into darkness and to an underworld marriage with Hades. Whether
in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and Persephone, Ishtar and
Demuzi, all symbolize the potential for loss and the redemptive power of
darkness, and perhaps even more that at an archetypal level these poten-
tials are somehow linked together.
I believe this is the “mystery” of the black sun, an image that carries
both darkness and illumination. If, as noted earlier, we do not avoid the
monstrous paradox of the black sun and simply attempt to reach beyond it
to the light, we may notice that the archetype of negation itself is indeed
a sublated image – a darkness that negates itself not through an external
light that dispels darkness, but rather through what the alchemists called
the lumen naturae, an intimate intertwining that is called “the light of
darkness itself.” It is clear that, if indeed there is anything like a sublation,
the human-all-too-human element remains an ongoing presence never
simply transcended by any intellectual abstraction. The mess of our eve-
ryday existence is a never-ending remainder that is part of our experience
of otherness and of life itself and that shows itself in our neuroses and
in history. If we can tolerate or even learn to appreciate this differenti-
ated oneness, perhaps we can begin to free ourselves from virgin’s milk
and turn vinegar into wine, which may allow one to live on in the face of
144 The problem of the remainder
insult and loss, or as Shakespeare has put it, with “the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune.” Perhaps it is a recognition of such duplex images
that can catalyze a linking of soul and spirit and that can be instrumental
in the development of a more intimate relationship between psychology
and philosophy. It is this integration that leads us toward an understanding
of the Philosophers’ Stone as an initiatory experience involving both spirit
and soul and the fullness of life, which the philosophers have sought since
the earliest expressions of the alchemical imagination.
Notes
1 This chapter is a modified version of Marlan, “Facing the Shadow,” a chapter in Jun-
gian Psychoanalysis, 5–13.
2 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), §84.
3 Stein, “The Aims and Goal of Jungian Analysis,” 40.
4 See Diamond, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic, Chapter 3: The Psychology of Evil:
Devils, Demons, and the Daimonic.
5 Main, “Numinosity and Terror,” 163.
6 Sarton, “The Invocation of Kali.”
7 Vivekananda, In Search of God, 25.
8 Stein, “The Aims and Goal of Jungian Analysis,” 39.
9 Hillman, “The Cure of the Shadow,” 242.
10 Ibid., 243.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 125.
15 Casey, Spirit and Soul, 348.
Chapter 9
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-10
146 The alchemical stove
the goal, since the goal must be deliteralized from the beginning.3 While
the Stone has facticity and objectivity, duration and substantiality, it is too
complex to be described simply in senex metaphors. The Stone is also sen-
sual, soft, waxy, and wounded. It is tender and flexible, oily, rich, and fat.
It is vital and combustible and, though emotional, it has a kind of stability
and timelessness. It moves in a circular way, turning like a wheel, return-
ing telos to itself – “to the subjective urge that has impelled the entire work
from the start . . . the snake eats its own tail”4 – and the rotatio announcing
“that no position can remain fixed, no statement can be finally true.”5 It is
ultimately the objectification of our subjectivity, yet it oozes with libido.
It is Freudian, pagan, neo-Platonic, Greek, and Italian – a pleasurable pull
towards Beauty, toward Voluptas, rather than the “mediocrity of ataraxic
rationality.”6 Hillman’s patron saints, Corbin, Ficino, and Valla, among
others, stimulate a reddened psychology dripping with an Aphroditic lan-
guage, exalting, revivifying, and crowning matter. The goal is not growth,
health, development, or transformation “but seeking and searching of the
awakened mind . . . like a burning jewel in the stone.”7
As we noted earlier, a look inside the Giegerich vessel suggests the
need to refine the Stone further. Its inner essence emphasizes the logical
rather than the imaginal. The work of the adept, for Giegerich, would be
to liberate the Stone from the confines of “sensate intuition” and “picture
thinking.” With the dissolution of the imaginal and of sensate intuition,
one might be left imagining the Stone as colorless rather than colorful. If
Hillman’s tincture leans toward “coagula,” Giegerich’s move is toward
“solve” – toward the freeing of Mercurius through sublation, through the
dialectics of the Negative, the “NOT” or “ou” (from the alchemical saying
“lίthos ou lίthos,” that is, “the not-stone stone”).8 For Giegerich, the high-
est mystery of the whole work is the physical dissolution into mercury, a
movement out of the imaginal into the logical. Here I imagine Kundalini
shedding her skin and Thales remarking that all is water (liquidity). Gieg-
erich also notes that aqua permanens is “a solid ground that in itself is not
solid, not ‘ground’ at all, but rather liquidity, pure movement, that. . . is
nevertheless solid ground.”9
So, if Hillman emphasizes wax (the body of the image), Giegerich
thinks water (the solutio of its body). If Hillman finds soul in the valley,
Giegerich points to the peaks. If Hillman critiques sublation,10 Giegerich
considers it to be the elixir vital. If Hillman draws inspiration from the
Italians, Giegerich finds his in Hegel.
The alchemical stove 147
However, if one has read Hillman and Giegerich carefully, one soon
begins to see that all of the above caricatures are at best misreadings.
As we have seen in the last chapters, both thinkers are far more com-
plex than such sketches suggest and, while there are crucial differences
between them, there are also considerable overlapping themes that call for
further study. Placing the above ideas into a double pelican and reheating
the entire mixture will allow us to see their similar essences circulating
and rising up. Both thinkers emphasize the importance of “ideas,” and
both see that it is essential to go beyond the physical and the literal. Both
emphasize the intrinsic link between idea and image, peak and vale, solve
and coagula, and both officiate at the puer/psyche marriage, although the
way each tinctures his syzygy differs. And, most importantly for me, both
emphasize some version of the “death of the ego.” While both might be
seen as privileging one side of the syzygy over the other, neither can be
accused of disregarding the importance of that which is not given priority.
In order to understand their respective positions, it may be useful also
to compare some of their mutual misunderstandings. For example, when
Hillman critiques Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung, what he seems to have
in mind is the spirit detached from psyche, the puer drawn apart from
psyche, or anima separated from animus – a procedure that he uses as a
heuristic device in his essay “Peaks and Vales.” However, to read Hegel’s
or Giegerich’s notion of sublation in this way does not do justice to the
complexity of their ideas. Nor does it recognize that for both of them
sublation should never be understood as an either/or. Giegerich clarifies
his position on this by noting: “What I offer instead [of an either/or inter-
pretation] is a psychology of interiority. There are not two, but only one,
and this ‘one’ contains its own ‘other’ within itself.”11 In other words,
for Giegerich, thought is not an external other to the image, but the very
soul of the image itself. Put in this way, Hillman’s critique of sublation,
if it is understood as a “climb into the thin air of mountain peaks,”12 does
not hold. Giegerich’s notion of sublation already assumes a puer-psyche,
anima-animus syzygy. If his thought can be said to lean towards the ani-
mus, it is because Giegerich feels that “thought” has been underdevel-
oped under the weight of the image in imaginal psychology. Giegerich
makes it clear that his “pleading for ‘thought’ [an appeal Hillman makes
as well] is not a call to turn our backs on ‘image’ and on what archetypal
theorizing ha[s] accomplished, ‘but rather to continue it radically in an
attempt to complete it. . . .’ ”13
148 The alchemical stove
Stone and to the goal of the work. In considering the vision of the Stone
in Hillman and Giegerich, it is important to place Hillman’s most radical
view of image and of the Stone alongside Giegerich’s ideas of “absolute-
negative interiority, spirit, thought.”30 For Giegerich, the goal of both
alchemy and a “true psychology” is to go beyond a psychology rooted
in images and the imagination to a psychology rooted in the logical life
of the soul. Such a move, for Giegerich, is a true working through of
the hierarchical possibilities present in the dialectic and is superior to
a psychology that remains rooted in the flesh of images. Since Gieg-
erich does not propose that we eliminate images, the question remains
how to understand the similarities and differences between Hillman and
Giegerich in a way that moves beyond a side-by-side view of simple
difference.31
This brings us full circle to my image of the alchemical stove and to my
own side-by-side placement of differing views of the Stone. Is it adequate
simply to allow different views, perspectives, archetypal stances – or does
the “labor of the concept” demand that all views be subject to a dialectic
in which “Reason” will produce one position more developed than oth-
ers? Following Hegel, Giegerich notes that “items that are ‘simply differ-
ent’ (verschienden) are indifferent to the difference between them.”32 Here
I take Giegerich to be calling for an engagement of ideas versus simply
settling for alternative perspectives; for instance, holding that the fun-
damental basis of psyche is imagistic versus logical rather than working
through the two positions to a conclusion. He has done much to argue for
his well-worked-through positions, and his critiques of imaginal psychol-
ogy merit careful reading and consideration. Miller and Mogenson have
done a masterful job of giving us strong readings of Giegerich’s work and
of helping us toward a careful consideration of his ideas. What follows is
my beginning attempt to work through an interface between Hillman and
Giegerich and to raise a number of concerns about any move that relegates
images to a status secondary to thought. In opening up the problematic
of moving from image to thought, it is unclear whether, or in what way,
thought is more fundamental than image, particularly when the image is
understood in its most radical way. In addition, a number of philosophers
have resisted this move and raised critical questions that must be explored
before we can consider abandoning the primary place of image in the work
of Jung and Hillman.
The alchemical stove 151
an ultimate “No” to the ego, with what felt unassimilable. But now my
attention is turning from the black sun per se to the Philosophers’ Stone.
To bring the Stone into focus is not to leave the black sun behind, nor to
simply move to an albedo psychology. Rather, it is to pursue my suspicion
that the Philosophers’ Stone has been there all along in the shine of dark-
ness itself and that darkness will be there at the end as well, perhaps as
an indispensable caput mortuum, the dross or residue that remains in the
retort after distillation. In some philosophical and alchemical views, this
residue is ultimately eliminated, but my wager and anticipation is that the
Stone – whether in the language of revivification and Aphroditic pleasure
or in the sublation to pure mercurial liquidity – is always accompanied by
a remainder. This remainder, while not best understood as a Kantian thing-
in-itself, is nonetheless that which resists a consciousness that does not
account for its differentiation. At times, to accommodate this difference,
one can see the Stone described as “the unity of the unity and difference.”
Such a description attempts to address the monstrous complexity of the
Stone, but even the idea of “the unity of the unity and difference” privi-
leges unity, although at a higher “logical level.” The “unity of the unity
and difference” is still a tincture of the syzygy that emphasizes unity as
the major trope. The syzygy can also be tinctured to emphasize difference.
This would call out for the complementary idea of “the difference of the
unity and difference,” a difference that resists being lit up by conscious-
ness and which protects the remainder that emits a mysterious light of its
own as opposed to a light that consciousness would shine on it. This com-
plementary idea is itself similar to one of the stages of the logical dialectic
discussed by the Buddhist sage Nargarjuna. His formulation resists any
transcendent unification and reinstates a darkness, a void (sunyata) that
can also be said to shine.
My exploration here of the shine of darkness begins with two images of
sol niger. In the first, a skeleton stands on a blazing black sun; the image
reads “Putrefactio.”39 In the second, a black sun burns down on a primarily
desolate landscape in the alchemical text Splendor Solis (1582). These are
images of a place an adept must enter if anything is to be learned about the
light of nature and the Philosophers’ Stone. Jung writes about this light,
the lumen naturae, in his Alchemical Studies, where he calls it “the light of
darkness itself.”40 It is a light “which illuminates its own darkness. . . [and]
turns blackness into brightness.” It is a kind of light that the “darkness
comprehends.” This light is not the light of our day-world sun, but rather
The alchemical stove 155
the lumen naturae that shines in sol niger. It can be seen in the rising of
the black Ethiopian (also referred to as caput mortuum, nigredo, “matter
to be calcined,” “dragon,” “black faeces,” and “shadow stuff”41), whose
rebirth takes on a new name “which the philosophers call the natural sul-
fur and their son, this being the stone of the philosophers.”42 Likewise
this transformation is seen in the reconstituted Kali, and is cultivated in
Taoist alchemy. It shines in The Secret of the Golden Flower, and in the
filius philosophorum, imagined by Paracelsus as a luminous vehicle and
referred to by Jung as “the central mystery of philosophical alchemy.”43 It
is to this mystery, to this “luminous vehicle,” that we turn as we imagine
a move from sol niger to the Philosophers’ Stone. Just as this light is not
separate from darkness, so the Philosophers’ Stone is not separate from sol
niger but is intrinsic to it.
How can darkness shine? In my work on the black sun, it is the shining
that seems most enigmatic. Is it a question then of presence and absence,
or of a present absence, or of absence itself? The negation and presence of
light is at the heart of the archetypal image/idea of the black sun. The Sun
King is mortally wounded by darkness and in the negation of negation,
sol niger shines; a strange reversal takes place or perhaps is “logically”
present from the beginning.
One could say that sol niger, the black sun, is already a sublated sun,
a philosophical/psychological sun, a sun that is not a sun (as the alche-
mists say of their Stone). It is black and yet, at the same “logical” time, it
shines. What is the nature of such a shining, such a consciousness? Is it an
image, an idea, or both? Is consciousness too dull a word to express this
complexity? Philosophers and psychologists have often found difficulty
with words like consciousness, image, and idea, and have struggled to give
expression to their meanings in a way not encumbered by the metaphysi-
cal and metaphoric prejudices of their times – a seemingly impossible task
that on occasion has silenced the best of philosophers. How then to let be
manifest what is gathered into the shining?
In our postmodern world, our efforts have often left us with a virtual
apophatic orgy of dissemination, of a negation of master tropes (and, in
their place, sliding signifiers), and of neologisms that require another lan-
guage to follow the discourse. Yet our simple common language will not
do either. Our best efforts are marked by traces of darkness, perhaps pen-
etrating to the core of language itself, into a darkness that matters – and
still there is the shine. How then to speak of it, of what Roger Brooke has
156 The alchemical stove
called the “fertile and hospitable emptiness within which the things of the
world could shine forth?”44 To speak of the shining is not only to speak
in the context of the metaphor of light, but also to speak of the shining in
a way that aims at expressing an insight that goes beyond the traditional
divide between light and dark, and in a way that approaches a more pri-
mordial awareness closer to Jung’s more mature vision of the psyche, a
vision influenced by the alchemical tradition.
Sparks of reiteration
In The Black Sun I began a consideration of this shining and wrote of it as an
image of light at the core of ancient alchemical ideas. The aim of alchemy,
according to Paracelsus, was to discover this light hidden in nature. It is
a light very different from notions of light as simply separate from dark-
ness and by extension different from any conception of a consciousness
separate from its dark background. My strategy in The Black Sun was to
hesitate before this darkness, to pause and then to enter its realm of corpses
and coffins, of monsters and monstrous complexity, and to engage its most
literal and destructive demons. Such kinds of experiences can traumatize
and kill. They can also drive the soul toward the unthinkable, a condition
which archetypal defenses seek to avoid. To experience the above means
to be in the grip of the mortificatio, a condition the alchemists knew was
essential to reaching the depths of the transformation process. Through
illness and/or a shamanic-like initiation, the mortificatio drives the psyche
to an ontological pivot point, to a desubstantiation of the ego, and to what
Theodor Adorno might call an emaciated subject,45 leading to a gateway
that is both a dying and a new life.
The black sun is a complexity. Its “blacker than black” dimension shines
with a dark luminescence. It can open the way to some of the most numi-
nous aspects of psychic life and can give us a glimpse of the miracle of
perception at the heart of what Jung called the mysterium coniunctionis
and of the Philosophers’ Stone. I spoke above of such a vision in the
Tantric rites of Kali who was worshiped at the cremation grounds where
she copulates with her consort Shiva on the body of a corpse burning on a
funeral pyre. Kali worshipers enact ceremonials associated symbolically
and ritually with the annihilation of the ego. These rituals often depict the
death of the ego, out of which, it is said, the “human being arises shin-
ing.”46 How is it possible to embrace such a negative image? For Hegel,
The alchemical stove 157
“only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it,” is it pos-
sible that the negative can be “the magical power that converts death [and
darkness] into being.”47
For the Tantrics, if one’s worship is successful, if one is able to stay the
course open-eyed, to dance Kali’s dance, to welcome her, then her black-
ness is said to shine. This shining can be linked to the alchemical ideas of
whitening and silvering, with the proviso that we see this shining albedo
as part of the complexity of darkness itself and not simply as a literal phase
following blackness. From one perspective, the theme of renewal follows
from symbolic death, but from another, archetypally and logically, death
and renewal are at the core of sol niger, and this is expressed in the simul-
taneity of blackness and luminescence.
Mystical death
How can we further our understanding of this mystical death? How to
speak of it? The idea of ego death is a difficult one in the light of the
acknowledged importance of the role of the ego in relation to the uncon-
scious in our classical way of thinking. When we think of ego loss, our
thoughts immediately go to the problematics of a weak, impaired, or non-
functioning ego, to a concern with annihilation anxiety and the defenses of
the Self against it, as well as to psychosis. Ego psychology has a dominant
hold on our everyday psychological culture. Yet, the notion of ego death
is and has been in the margins of our tradition: in Jung’s idea that “the
experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego,”48 in Hillman’s “psy-
chotherapeutic cure of me,”49 in Rosen’s “egocide,”50 in Miller’s views
about the “no self,”51 in Giegerich’s “death of the ego,”52 and so on. Each
has contributed to our understanding of a psychology that relativizes and/
or dismembers the ego, and each has a stake in the transformation of our
psychological theory.
Giegerich, for example, states that “the Self is real only to the extent that
the ego has been negated, overcome . . . one might even say, it exists only
as a reality ‘over the ego’s dead body’53 . . . as one who has long died as
ego personality.”54 “The art of psychological discourse,” he continues, “is
to speak as someone who is already deceased.”55 Here Giegerich extends
the notion of ego death into the core of psychological discourse itself. For
him, this is a necessary step toward the achievement of a “true psychol-
ogy” and essential in understanding the goal of both alchemy and of a
158 The alchemical stove
psychological life. For Giegerich, as noted, ego death also signifies the
death of all positivity and serves as the gateway to a liquification of the
subject and thus allows entrance into the logical life of the soul. There is
a resonance between Giegerich’s reading of Hegel and poststructuralist
thought, both of which proceed toward if not a liquification of the ego, at
least a displacement of the subject from the center of philosophical, lin-
guistic, and theoretical activity.
Several postmodern philosophers have made this connection between
ego death and philosophical activity. For example, philosopher Geoffrey
Bennington has remarked that: “Taking something philosophically, then,
always involves this more or less hidden relationship with death. Or, by
a slightly violent contraction, whatever I take philosophically is death.”56
Surprisingly, Bennington ends his statement with an enigmatic image, but
one which captures his point: “The philosophers’ stone is an inscribed
head stone.” For Marla Morris, another postmodern thinker, what is true of
the Philosophers’ Stone is also true for the “psychoanalyst’s stone.”57 She
notes that for Bennington, at the end of the day, it is death that deconstruc-
tion is all about.
The philosopher Simon Critchley argues in a similar spirit, noting that
“ancient Ciceronian wisdom says that to philosophize [and, in light of
Morris’ comment, to practice psychoanalysis] is to learn how to die.”58
Critchley’s exploration echoes the theme of Sol niger in that it seeks to
“de-create narratives of redemption” and to “strip away the resources
and comforts of story, fable and narrative.”59 Here Critchley sounds like
Giegerich and, following the work of Samuel Becket, he seeks to under-
stand “the meaning of . . . meaninglessness,” what he calls “a redemption
from redemption.”60 He notes how Becket’s work “frustrates our desire
to ascend from the flatlands of language and ordinary experience into the
stratosphere of meaning”61 and comments:
Turning to stone
Ultimately for Jung “words and paper . . . did not seem real enough. . .;
something more was needed.”69 He had “to achieve a kind of representa-
tion in stone of [his] innermost thoughts and of the knowledge [he] had
acquired.” Or, to put it another way, he “had to make a confession of faith
in stone.” Jung’s need to substantiate was responsible for the building of
160 The alchemical stove
his tower at Bollingen where he felt he was “reborn in stone” and through
which he was able to express a concretization of his ideas.70
Jung carved his way to self-expression through architecture, sculpture,
and his focus on alchemical language and poetry, but even more one might
say that he opened himself to the call of stone – to its message and to the
way the world came to him. Jung reports the story of the cornerstone he
had ordered for his garden when he was building his tower at Bollingen.
When the stone arrived it was the wrong shape and measurements, and
the stonemason, furious, wanted to return it. However, when Jung saw the
stone, he claimed it as his stone. He felt he “must have it!”71 even though,
at the moment, he was not sure what he wanted to do with it.
In short, Jung welcomed whatever arrived unwanted and unexpected,
unlike Faust who murdered Baucis and Philemon. In other words, Jung
opened himself up to experiences the ego would often reject, seemingly
in good sense. As Jung contemplated the stone, a verse from the alchemist
Arnoldus de Villanova came to him and he chiseled it into the stone:
Jung was aware that this verse referred to the Philosophers’ Stone and,
as he contemplated it further, he saw in its “natural structure” a sort of
eye73 that looked back at him, a living other, who appeared to Jung as
“the Telesphoros of Asklepios,” the healing figure of a child who was
seen as roaming through the dark regions of the cosmos and glowing like
a star out of the depths, a shining “pointer of the way.”74 In this image
and in the stone, Jung captured something in the heart of darkness itself,
something that he found in the depths of inorganic matter, something
that looked back at him and made a stone a living stone, a Philosophers’
Stone that shines. For Jung, stones speak a shining truth and such a truth
touches the core of what we have come to call, inadequately, psyche and
matter.
Jung’s attempt to repair this split in his life and work led not only to stone,
but also to innovative formulations in the language of his psychology by
which he attempted to embrace both sides of a linguistic divide – subject
The alchemical stove 161
and object, spirit and matter – using terms such as “psychoid,” “synchro-
nicity,” and “unus mundus.”75 Such terms expressed Jung’s urge to go
beyond the subjectivity of words and paper in order to express psyche’s
need to substantiate and the need of substances to speak.
For Hillman, however, such words not only fall short of Jung’s goal,
but also actually “reinforce the splitting effect inherent” in the neurosis
of one-sided abstract language.76 If this was a problem for Jung, it is also
one which is deeply rooted in our collective, historical, cultural, and
linguistic consciousness. It is an issue that penetrates into the problem-
atics of perception and language, and into the archetypal psyche itself.
How then to express psyche’s need to substantiate and substances need
to speak?
In his book entitled simply Stone, philosopher John Sallis speaks of his
desire to substantiate, to find a way to articulate, philosophical ideas ade-
quate to the powerful stone monuments he is drawn to investigate, and in
and through which he finds a “shining truth.”77 In his book, he explores the
power of stone in “the various guises and settings in which stone appears”78 –
in monuments, the complexity of Gothic cathedrals, Greek temples, and
the tombstones of a Jewish cemetery in Prague; in fossils, stone houses,
and the power and beauty of wild nature in the mountains of Haute Savoie,
France. In his search, he attempts to give voice to the power he discovers
in these profound expressions of stone. Sallis writes:
One might imagine Jung, Hillman, Giegerich, and Sallis as such stonema-
sons, adepts who inscribe the materia of rock and word such that stone has
words and words matter. In these thinkers, we find stones that speak, liv-
ing objective stones that shine, modern day expressions of the alchemists’
quest for life in the heart of matter.
162 The alchemical stove
Although Jung actually worked with literal stone, his more enduring
corpus was what he produced through his imagination and with words and
paper, that is, his ideas. And, likewise, it is with ideas and the imagination
that Hillman finds a “rock-hard standpoint from above downward, just
as firm and solid as literal physical reality.”84 From this perspective, the
Philosophers’ Stone that is not a stone seems indestructible. It is solid, has
objectivity, thing-likeness, facticity, and duration. It is an example of phil-
osophical permanence. Yet, while its hardness wounds, it is also wounded,
easily affected. The Stone is complex and resists one-sided descriptions
and simple dichotomies. As David Miller has shown, “the course of wis-
dom consists in deferring one-sided judgment concerning meaning.”85 The
imaginatio is as much a part of what is imaged as the world is itself the
substance of imagination. Robert Romanyshyn makes a similar point:
neither the brilliance of the day [spirit] nor the darkness of night [soul], but
speaks simultaneously in light and shadow.”90
If the imagination can be seen to be the voice of things, then one might
also understand how “imaginal realities” exhibit a stubborn intractability.
The Philosophers’ Stone, as we have noted, exhibits facticity and thing-
ness. It refuses to be altered by the manipulating ego subject, and yet sub-
jectivity is part of its intrinsic reality, a subjectivity that appears as the ego
subject dies or is negated and relativized. It is a subjectivity that has been
touched by ego death and therefore is no longer subjective. It is a subjec-
tivity that is not subjectivity, a subjectivity in which the me-ness has been
“cooked out” and redeemed from essentialist narratives of meaning.
As Hillman, making reference to Miller, points out, the stone “does not
allow itself to be held in meaning”91 and generality. “It does not yield
to understanding.” For Hillman, the alchemical process of ceration is
“designed to obliterate a psychological episteme of . . . anything that would
rigidify the idea of the goal into categories of knowledge.”92 And yet, as
Sallis has noted, the stone exhibits a “shining truth,”93 a truth discovered
in a “suspension of the difference that otherwise separates the eidetic from
the singular, a peculiar suspension in that its very force requires that the
difference remain, in the moment of suspension, also intact.”94 If I under-
stand Sallis correctly, such singular yet eidetic moments of “shining truth”
recall the sheer “isness of things” discussed above, the metals, planets,
minerals, diamonds, pearls, stars and stones, the shining particularities that
are also oddly universal but which can “never simply be assimilated to the
purely eidetic.”95 Such singular moments of perception/imagination are
neither inside nor out and must show themselves, be exhibited like pearls
so as not to lose their luster, again to use Hillman’s metaphor.
The bringing forth of such particulars allows them to shine, and this
shine is for Hillman the revelation of Beauty, a term Plato used as well
for that “shining truth” which he considered “the most radiant, that which
most shines forth amidst the visible, in the singular things that come to
be and pass away.”96 Is the Philosophers’ Stone such a radiant truth, a
truth that must as well remain in touch with negativity, death and dark-
ness? It is “not enough,” Hillman reminds us, “to shine in the dark.”97 The
Philosophers’ Stone is linked intrinsically with sol niger, “no matter how
exalted the stage of any process in life, that stage lives within the context
of whatever despair and failure accompanied its creation.”98 Thus, it is not
surprising that Schwartz-Salant observes, in relation to the last image of
The alchemical stove 165
the Splendor Solis, that there are “two states – a created self and its puri-
fied consciousness . . . joined not only with life and body but also with a
history of despair and failure.”99
Likewise, as Hillman notes, in alchemical psychology “sorrow, solitude
and misery can break even the most indomitable spirit.”100 The Philos-
ophers’ Stone requires a relationship with the ongoing negativity of the
deconstructive principle of the black sun. Perhaps this recognition of sol
niger is related to why, for Giegerich, the imaginal requires continuing
negative interiorization. But if this is so, just as Giegerich deconstructs
the literal residues of the imaginal, so imaginal psychology continues to
give flesh to the unseen. Solve et coagula, say the alchemists. In Hillman
and Giegerich we have two moments of the Stone that not only can live
together but also belong together in the same living mosaic – or do they?
Jung has noted: “sometimes Mercurius is a substance like quicksilver
[image], sometimes it is a philosophy [thought].”101 To put it yet another
way, if Paul Ricoeur is correct that the symbol gives rise to thought, then
perhaps it is also the case that thought gives rise to symbol. What has pri-
ority may well be, as Giegerich has noted, a matter of personal and philo-
sophical conviction “of the psychology [and philosophy] that one has,”
“that one is,” “that one lives.”102 Perhaps in the end, thought and image
may best be spoken of in a variety of ways: as an alchemical circulatio, or
in a monstrous coniunctio, or as a trembling ground of poetic undecidables
(Derrida), or a unity of unity and difference (Hegel/Giegerich), or as the
difference of unity and difference (Marlan). Perhaps all of the above might
be thought/imagined as metaphors that attempt to speak the unspeakable,
an idea perhaps captured in the title of Paul Kugler’s latest book, Raids on
the Unthinkable. To struggle with these seemingly irreconcilable moments
is well articulated by Alain Badiou who gave expression to the importance
of attempting to speak the unspeakable when he stated:
Notes
1 This chapter is a modified version of my previously published paper entitled Marlan,
“From the Black Sun,” 1–30.
2 A more comprehensive outcome of these distillations, however, must await a longer
work still in progress. Here I can offer only a glimpse at the work emerging from the
alembics of my colleagues, each with his own ideas and his own compelling images of
the Philosophers’ Stone.
3 The description which follows is a condensation of Hillman’s ideas drawn from his
essay “Concerning the Stone” (Chapter 8 in Alchemical Psychology, 231–263).
4 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 260.
5 Ibid., 259.
6 Ibid., 262.
7 Ibid., 253.
8 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 111.
9 Ibid., 148.
10 For example, Hillman argues that the goal is “not the lifting, the Aufhebung, of mate-
rial worldliness, but the full realization of desire for the world that pulsates in the
materials of the elemental psyche, those substances that compose the stone and give its
enduring life . . .” (Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 261).
11 Giegerich, “Afterword,” 109.
12 Ibid.,
13 Ibid., 108.
14 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 107.
15 Hillman, “Image-Sense,” 130.
16 Ibid., 134.
17 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 107.
18 Miller, “The End of Ending,” 85.
19 Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth (Part Two),” 49; quoted by Greg Mogenson in
“Different Moments,” 106.
20 Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth (Part Two),” 49; quoted by Greg Mogenson in
“Different Moments,” 105.
The alchemical stove 167
21 Ibid.
22 This is a phrase used by Hegel and borrowed by Giegerich, and here refers simply to
the process of working through.
23 Mogenson, “Different Moments in Dialectical Movement,” 106.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 239.
27 Ibid., 240.
28 Ibid., 241.
29 Ibid., 240.
30 Mogenson, “Different Moments,” 106.
31 Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,” 115.
32 Ibid.
33 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 104.
34 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 38.
35 LaCapra, “Who Rules Metaphor?,” 15–28.
36 Kelly, “Atman, Anatta, and Transpersonal Psychology.”
37 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 213.
38 Alan Bass (translator) in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 19–20, footnote 23.
39 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), 85.
40 Jung, Alchemical Studies (CW13), §197.
41 Edinger, Anatomy, 21.
42 Melchior, quoted in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW12), §484.
43 Ibid., §162.
44 Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology, 99.
45 Kuspit, “Negatively Sublime Identity.”
46 Sinha, Tantra, 52.
47 Hegel, Phenomenology, 19, §32.
48 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14), §778.
49 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 259.
50 Rosen, Transforming Depression, xxi.
51 Miller, “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles!,” 15.
52 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 18–24.
53 Ibid., 18.
54 Ibid., 24.
55 Ibid.
56 Bennington, quoted in Marla Morris, “Archiving Derrida,” 44.
57 Ibid.
58 Critchley, Very Little, xvii.
59 Ibid., xxiii.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., xxiv.
63 Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man.”
64 Critchley, Very Little, xxiv.
65 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 252.
66 Giegerich, “The Ego-Psychological Fallacy,” 55.
67 Hillman, “Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Language,” 40.
68 Ibid., 41.
69 Jung, Memories, 223.
70 Ibid., 225.
71 Ibid., 226.
72 Ibid., 227. This carved stone became a monument for what his tower meant to him.
73 Ibid.
168 The alchemical stove
74 Ibid.
75 Hillman, “Therapeutic Value of Alchemical Language,” 41.
76 Ibid.
77 Sallis, Stone, 2.
78 Ibid., book jacket.
79 Ibid., 1.
80 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 241.
81 Sallis, Stone, Chapter 1.
82 Nathan Schwartz-Salant, personal communication, 2000.
83 Ibid.
84 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 239.
85 Miller, “The ‘Stone’ Which Is Not a Stone,” 116.
86 Romanyshyn, “Psychological Language,” 79–80.
87 Ibid., 73.
88 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139; quoted by Romanyshyn, “Psycho-
logical Language,” 73.
89 Romanyshyn, “Psychological Language,” 73.
90 Ibid., 79.
91 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 250.
92 Ibid., 255.
93 Sallis, Stone, 2.
94 Ibid., 4.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid., 2–3.
97 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 239.
98 Schwartz-Salant, The Mystery of Human Relationship, 216.
99 Ibid.
100 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 239.
101 Jung, Aion (CW9ii), §240.
102 Giegerich, “Afterword,” 108.
103 Badiou, Theoretical Writings, 241.
104 Roethke, “Fourth Meditation.”
Chapter 10
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-11
170 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
The point here is that it does not make any difference whether there
is a literal external referent or whether the “referent” has been totally
internalized into the structure of image or imaginal seeing itself so
that the image is now its own referent: the structure or form of rep-
resentation has not been overcome merely by overcoming the exter-
nally existent referent. The form of representation would be overcome
only with a transcendence of the form of image as such, that is, with
thought. Thought does not see or imagine; it thinks. Here one sees
how important it is to become aware of the dimension of logical form
or “syntax.” A merely semantic approach is naturally already satis-
fied with the difference between “image without external referent” and
“epiphenomenal representation of an external referent.”3
determine the validity of Hillman’s and my shared concern that there may
be an important loss if one goes too far beyond imaginal awareness. For
Hillman, that would lead to what he called a “poisonous state of splen-
did solar isolation.”5 Giegerich argues that for Hillman it is, in fact, the
impurity that gives his gold its qualitative reality, its phenomenality, and
saves it from that abstract isolation. Here Giegerich turns his concern back
toward Hillman’s point of view, noting that his own
For Giegerich, it is the fear of the poisonous isolation that he thinks is the
problem.
This is what makes consciousness shrink from going all the way for-
ward and instead makes it turn back again to what it was itself, after
all, intent upon leaving through its very move away from the physi-
cal in the material. It makes this move, but halfway there (namely
after having moved from the literal to the metaphorical), it stops. Of
course, the danger of splendid solar isolation exists. But the point is
that it must be met, not avoided. . . . If you avoid the danger, you have
psychologically succumbed to it unawares. You truly avoid it only by
facing it.7
Kant is not only a great philosopher, one of the very small handful
of truly great thinkers in the Western tradition; he is also a singularly
influential figure, whose position continues to impact on the later
debate, often in decisive ways. Like post-Kantian German Idealism
and German neo-Kantianism, central philosophical tendencies in the
nineteenth century, in different ways the main philosophical move-
ments in twentieth century philosophy are all responding to Kant.8
Kant’s philosophy has been important to both Jung and Giegerich, and like
Hegel both have pushed off from him, though, as Rockmore has noted,
“[w]e are still in the process of finding out Kant’s position [and] [t]here is
continuing controversy about how to best interpret it.”9
If, as has been suggested, Jung’s psychology can be interpreted in a
Kantian way, it likewise can be seen as moving beyond Kant. If Jung is
read as a Kantian, it is not surprising that his critics would evaluate him
from a post-Kantian position. I believe that both Hillman and Giegerich
have read Jung as Kantian and this reading is one basis of their criticisms.
Kant’s work, like Jung’s, is complicated and in the next section we will
explore this issue.
Figure 10.1 A ncient philosopher and eagle chained to a ground animal. From
Michael Maier, Symbola aureae mensae, 1617.
Source: Public domain.
While Kant’s critique of metaphysics was for the most part written in a
controlled if not burdensome way, his critique at moments waxes poetic, as if
to take a respite after surveying the ground that he has covered. He begins his
“Analytic of Principles” in a way that echoes Heraclitus’ earlier point about
strife and imagines Metaphysics as, “a vast and stormy ocean, where illusion
properly resides and many fog banks and much fast-melting ice feign new-
found lands.”21 “This sea,” he says, “incessantly deludes the sea fairer with
empty hopes as he roves through his discoveries, and thus entangles him in
adventures that he can never relinquish, not ever bring to an end.”22
Kant draws us back from this sea and points to dry land where every-
thing has its proper place, to a “land of truth,”23 and he appeals to his read-
ers, as if hesitating on the shoreline:
before we venture upon this sea, to search its latitudes for certainty
as to whether there is in them anything to be hoped, it will be useful
176 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
to begin by casting another glance on the map of the land that we are
about to leave, and to ask . . . whether we might not perhaps be con-
tent with what this land contains, or even must be content with it from
necessity if there is no other territory at all on which we could settle.24
The way both Kant and Jung deal with this unknowable x is filled with
seeming inconsistencies, complexity, and, perhaps most importantly,
ambiguity; but for Jung, Kant’s epistemic limits were essential in his own
theory of cognition. Jung cites Kant as the real basis of his philosophi-
cal education “insisting that whoever did not understand Kant’s theory
of cognition ‘cannot understand my psychology.’ He despaired that peo-
ple confused his psychology with metaphysics”28 and he continued to
claim that his thought never exceeded the limits imposed on our possible
knowledge by Kant. Kant’s considerable influence on Jung’s psychology
has been traced by Germanist Paul Bishop who notes that “Jung referred
to Kant nearly twenty times – more than any other philosopher” in his
published correspondence and “repeatedly [tried] to assimilate the fun-
damental notions of analytical psychology to the key concepts of critical
philosophy of Kant.”29
Bishop further states that in Jung’s letters he “frequently aligned himself
with Kant to defend the epistemological stance of analytical psychology.”
In a letter of 8 April 1932 to the aesthetician and philosopher August Vet-
ter, Jung wrote: “In a certain sense I could say of the collective Uncon-
scious exactly what Kant said of the Ding an Sich – that it is merely a
negative borderline concept.”30 In a letter dated 8 February 1941 to Josef
Goldbrunner, a Catholic theologian, “Jung declared himself to be episte-
mologically speaking a Kantian.”31
178 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
Here for Kant – as well as for Jung – a seemingly unbridgeable gap is opened
up between knowable phenomena and the unknowable thing-in-itself.39
This reading of Kant’s thing-in-itself stimulates metaphysical desire and
leaves the concept open to multiple fantasies or, in psychoanalytic terms,
180 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
suggests that while we may never know more than what the psyche
presents to us, we must assume a transcendental reality – a thing-in-
itself – which lies in back of and causes the phenomena which we
experience. “One must assume that the . . . ideas . . . rest on something
actual.”41
Kant also held that there was something “actual” or “real” behind phenom-
ena; the ontological question remained a continuing tension throughout his
work.
While Kant continued to maintain that we cannot know things-in-them-
selves, since knowledge is limited to possible experience, he also held that
a thing-in-itself can be thought, “provided that it satisfies the condition of
a possible thought which is not to be self-contradictory.”42 In the Prole-
gomena to Any Future Metaphysics, “Kant uses things-in-themselves syn-
onymously with noumena, namely in the application of pure concepts of
the understanding ‘beyond objects of experience’ to ‘things-in-themselves
(noumena),’ ”43 and in the Critique of Pure Reason he likewise speaks
of things-in-themselves “as potential ideas of reason, and speaks of ‘the
Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself 181
Ewing points to the paradox of claiming to know that there is in fact a real-
ity behind appearances or “that it was of such a nature that we could know
nothing about it without already inconsistently presupposing knowledge
of its nature.”51
Such inconsistencies multiply when what seems to be a common and
natural attitude comes up against critical philosophical distinctions. In
simply speaking of the “reality” or “existence” of a thing-in-itself, we
must apply Kant’s categories of the understanding beyond the phenom-
enal realm in which they are said to apply. Kant also inconsistently goes
beyond the idea of the mere existence of the thing-in-itself to imagining
it as the cause of appearances. Again in such moments Kant is “guilty of
extending the category of causality beyond the realm of appearances,” a
182 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
procedure which, on the one hand, “he had explicitly repudiated,”52 but on
the other, there is “textual support”53 for this in his writing.
The problem of causality continues to be debated in philosophical cir-
cles. For some scholars to apply causality to the thing-in-itself remains an
impossibility in Kant’s terms, while for others, such as Warren, it is essen-
tial to do so, and in his book, according to Watkins, he argues that
Kant’s text is filled with such tensions, and while for some modern
Kant scholars such contradictions are reduced by the fact that things-in-
themselves are not intuited but only thought,55 for others such distinctions
are still problematic. Perhaps it is the case that through such inconsisten-
cies and complexity Kant walks a thin line between sensibility and under-
standing, knowledge and faith, skeptical doubt and dogmatic affirmation,
between phenomenon and noumenon, limit and transcendence.
As noted earlier, Kant situated his work on the shoreline between dry
land and the raging sea, between sanity and madness. For the most part
Kant’s work is dry and obsessional, while at other less frequent moments it
takes flight as if on Plato’s “wings of ideas” and ventures forth beyond the
experienced world into that “empty space of pure understanding.”56 Still,
if Kant’s work is anything, it is the work of a philosophical genius which
for the most part keeps its balance by staying in the tension between the
opposites and hesitating to fly off in the traditional directions of “dogmatic
affirmation and skeptical doubt.”57 At one point in the Critique Kant hints
at bridging the gaps between “sensibility” and “understanding” by sug-
gesting the possibility that “[h]uman cognition has two stems . . . which
perhaps spring from a common root, though one is unknown to us.”58 By
hesitating before the unknown, Kant maintains his dualism, but holds out
a hint, for those after him, who might take up the perilous journey into
metaphysics.
Heidegger, though also claiming to avoid traditional metaphysics, finds
this common root (of sensibility and understanding) in the transcendental
imagination,59 and Jung, like Heidegger (whom he disliked), also leans
Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself 183
The psyche is the starting-point of all human experience, and all the
knowledge we have gained eventually leads back to it. The psyche is
the beginning and end of all cognition. It is not only the object of its
science, but the subject also . . . on the one hand there is a constant
doubt as to the possibility of its being a science at all, while on the
other hand psychology acquires the right to state a theoretical problem
the solution of which will be one of the most difficult tasks for a future
philosophy.61
most able thinkers believed his position was incomplete and needed
to be carried beyond Kant in order to complete the Copernican revo-
lution in philosophy. If this is his standard, then arguably the most
important later innovation, the biggest step in developing and com-
pleting Kant’s contribution, lies in the post-Kantian transformation of
the Kantian approach to knowledge from an ahistorical to a historical
conception.63
As Rockmore notes,
Movement from Kant to Hegel resonates with the aspects of Jung that
exceed Kant’s limitations with regard to the limits of knowledge. In the
next section I will examine Hegel’s struggle with what he considers the
mistake of stopping at the notion of the thing-in-itself which Hegel consid-
ers to be an error. Hegel’s philosophy is thus useful in understanding the
way that Jung also exceeds these limits and is also a post-Kantian.
difficult text that has been read in many different ways and there are end-
less commentaries about it. It was Hegel’s first great work and his Intro-
duction to this work is instructive with regard to Hegel’s departure from
the limitations of Kant’s epistemology and gives us a view of the direction
of post-Kantian thought.
One way of reading Hegel’s Introduction might be imagined in a Hege-
lian fashion; that is, that Hegel leaps into the midst of a philosophical issue
beginning with the thesis at the heart of Kant’s epistemology, then entering
into a dialectical engagement with it through a process of intense negation,
and finally by offering articulation that both preserves something of Kant’s
original project and goes beyond it to envision a new scientific project for
philosophy.
Hegel begins his Introduction by elaborating what he calls a “natural
assumption” in philosophy: that before we deal with cognition of what
is, an ontological concern, we must first understand cognition, the episte-
mological instrument or medium through which we can discover the goal
of philosophy as an object of knowledge. With Kant in mind and while
acknowledging the naturalness of the above procedure, Hegel also con-
fesses an uneasiness with Kant’s procedure and ultimately concludes that
it is unscientific. Hegel does not leap ahead to this conclusion, but, follow-
ing Kant, he acknowledges that cognition is a particular “faculty of . . .
kind and scope” and that “without a more precise definition of its nature
and limits, we might grasp clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth.”65
Hegel’s project is aimed at this “heaven of truth.”
Next, Hegel articulates the concerns of Kant in his Critique of Pure
Reason, noting that, without understanding the limits of Reason, one falls
prey to the Metaphysical fantasy that one has arrived at the knowledge
of a mind-independent reality, a “thing-in-itself.” For a time, it is diffi-
cult to discern exactly where Hegel is in agreement with Kant and where
he differs, but as the Introduction continues Hegel’s seemingly ambiva-
lent response turns to a scathing if thinly veiled critique of the outcome
of Kant’s philosophical position, noting that it is ultimately absurd to
assume an absolute boundary between cognition and the so-called mind-
independent object. For Hegel, what is absurd is that we “make use of a
means at all” ultimately putting into question the idea of cognition as a
medium.66 For Hegel, focusing on cognition as a medium is born of mis-
trust and, turning mistrust on itself, he asks “whether this fear of error is
not just the error itself?”67 What Hegel seems to have in mind is that, in
the grip of fear, our reflection focuses on a self-conscious concern with
186 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
the point that the distinction we have been concerned about – between the
in-itself and knowledge of it – is already inherent “in the very fact that
consciousness knows an object at all. Something is for it the in-itself; and
knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness,” characterizes
the very essence of consciousness as a free-flowing movement between
moments of its truth.84 It is on the basis of these moments as the move-
ment between them that the examination rests. If the comparison between
these two moments reveals that they do not correspond with one another,
it would seem that “consciousness must alter its knowledge to make it
conform to the object.”85
So, it would seem to be the case that even though both moments of con-
sciousness, knowledge, and object-in-itself are within consciousness, they
may well be out of tune with each other. Consciousness can mistake itself
for what it is not or can recognize itself accurately. For Hegel, it is also the
case that as knowledge is altered the object itself is altered as well: “as the
knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to
this knowledge.”86 In short, Hegel suggests that knowledge and object are
co-relative.
This recognition radically changes what was initially (by Kant) taken to
be an in-itself. What was previously taken to be an in-itself proves to be
not an in-itself, but rather an in-itself that is for consciousness. This change
of object is part of what Hegel considers the “dialectical movement” of
consciousness – “which affects both its knowledge and its object” in an
unfolding and developmental process “called experience.”87 Hegel rec-
ognizes that this movement shows the object to be ambiguous. The first
object, seen as in-itself, is altered, as a developing knowledge now recog-
nizes this object as an “in-itself only for consciousness.”88 This new object
is for Hegel the “True” object or “essence” and it contains the limiting
structure or “nothingness of the first.”89 It is now “what experience has
made of it.”90
This way of looking at what we know suggests that “something [is] con-
tributed by us, by means of which the succession of experiences through
which consciousness passes is raised into a scientific progression.”91 In
every case for Hegel the result of a former state or mode of knowing must
be seen as the ground out of which the new progression emerges. The
essence of the emergent object is now something different from what
appeared at the preceding stage. For Hegel, it is this fact that guides the
phenomenology of patterns of consciousness in a necessary historical
190 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
esoteric subjects. One might even conceive that certain of their texts are
really not unlike alchemical treatises in that they are difficult and obscure,
and aim at the transformation of a simple substance into a more differenti-
ated and complex one. In this regard, it is interesting that Glenn Alexander
Magee, a Hegelian scholar and controversial interpreter of Hegel’s work,
refers to Eric Voegelin as describing “the Phenomenology of Spirit as a
grimoire . . . as an alchemical manual, an Emerald Tablet for the modern
age.”101 In a similar spirit, Magee provocatively states that:
For Magee:
For Magee, Hegel’s claim to wisdom is “fully consistent with the ambi-
tions of the Hermetic tradition.”104 He finds many parallels between
Hegel’s thoughts and alchemy noting that “[a] systematic parallel can be
drawn between each aspect of the [alchemical] opus and Hegel’s philo-
sophical project.”105 The goal of working through Hegel’s philosophy is
for Magee what is necessary for the achievement of Absolute Knowing,
which like the Philosophers’ Stone “will constitute a perfected form of liv-
ing in the world; in the words of H.S. Harris [a Hegel scholar], ‘an actual
experience of living in the light of the eternal day.’ ”106 The achievement,
Magee notes, draws the adepts to the opus.
believes that knowledge of the “magic words” that evoke the Abso-
lute can empower the individual by reconciling him with the world.
Kojève defines the Hegelian wise man as the man of both perfect
self-consciousness and perfect self-satisfaction. Wisdom and self-sat-
isfaction do not consist, however, in ego-aggrandizement, but in the
transcendence of ego and identification with Spirit as such. Kojeve
writes: “For Self-consciousness to exist, for philosophy to exist, there
must be transcendence of self with respect to self as given.” H.S. Har-
ris notes that “In [Hegel’s] view we have to annihilate our own self-
hood in order to enter the sphere where Philosophy herself speaks.”107
the aim of this separation [then] was to free the mind of the influence
of “the bodily appetites and the heart’s affections,” and to establish a
spiritual position which is supraordinate to the turbulent sphere of the
body.115
194 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
Figure 10.3
I mage of the alchemical separatio. From Michael Maier, Atalanta
Fugiens, Emblem 8, 1617.
Source: Public domain.
Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself 195
The move to separate and purify soul and body has a long history. I will
follow Edinger here in quoting a long passage from Plato’s Phaedo:
“But does not purification consist in this, as was said in a former part
of our discourse, in separating as much as possible the soul from the
body, and in accustoming it to gather and collect itself by itself on all
sides apart from the body, and to dwell, so far as it can, both now and
hereafter, alone by itself, delivered, as it were, from the shackles of
the body?”
“Certainly,” he replied.
“Is this, then, called death, this deliverance and separation of the
soul from the body?”
“Assuredly,” he answered.
“But, as we affirmed, those who pursue philosophy rightly are espe-
cially and alone desirous to deliver it; and this is the very study of
philosophers, the deliverance and separation of the soul from the body,
is it not?”
“It appears so.”
“Then, as I said at first, would it not be ridiculous for a man who
has endeavored throughout his life to live as near as possible to death,
then, when death arrives, to grieve? Would not this be ridiculous?”
“How should it not?”
“In reality, then, Simmias,” he continued, “those who pursue philos-
ophy rightly, study to die; and to them, of all men, death is least formi-
dable. Judge from this. Since they altogether hate the body and desire
to keep the soul by itself, would it not be irrational if, when this comes
to pass, they should be afraid and grieve, and not be glad to go to that
place where, on their arrival, they may hope to obtain that which they
longed for throughout life? But they longed for wisdom, and to be
freed from association with that which they hated. . . . and shall one
who really loves wisdom, and firmly cherishes this very hope, that he
shall nowhere else attain it in a manner worthy of the name, except in
Hades, be grieved at dying, and not gladly go there? We must think
that he would gladly go, my friend, if he be in truth a philosopher;
for he will be firmly persuaded of this, that he will nowhere else than
there attain wisdom in its purity; and if this be so, would it not be very
irrational, as I just now said, if such a man were to be afraid of death?”
“Very much so, by Jupiter!” he replied.123
196 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
For Hillman as for Jung, in the condition of the albedo, in which purity is
attained by separation and rising above worldly matters, something is still
missing. Jung had noted that in the “state of ‘whiteness’ one does not live
in the true sense of the word.”124 The unio mentalis is an “abstract, ideal
state.”125
In order to make it come alive it must have “blood,” it must have what
the alchemists call the rubedo, the “redness” of life. Only the total
experience of being can transform this ideal state of the albedo into a
fully human mode of existence. Blood alone can reanimate a glorious
state of consciousness in which the last trace of blackness is dissolved,
in which the devil no longer has an autonomous existence but rejoins
the profound unity of the psyche. Then the opus magnum is finished:
the human soul is completely integrated.126
not the usual intellect, dried with concepts, abstracted, pulled away;
this is the fat intellect, physical, concrete, emotional, fermenting with
instinctual interiority, an unctuous passion. Having first been whit-
ened, its desire is not simple and driven, but desire aware of itself
through intellectual fervor – an intellectus agens – dawnings of the
winged mind, sure as gold. No longer that separation between mer-
cury and sulfur, between fantasy flights and dense emotional body.
In the carcass of the lion a new sweetness, thick and yellow and
sticking to all things, like honey, like oil, flowing like wax and gild-
ing as it touches. One’s nature goes through a temperamental turn,
a change in humors from choleric to sanguine, which the dictionary
defines as confident, optimistic, cheerful. So does citrinitas become
the reddening.134
For Hillman, before healing can take place, one must be able to see
through multiple eyes and from many perspectives. From one point of
198 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
view, the emergence of the white earth leaves the blackness behind, but as
we have seen in numerous ways, the terra alba and the darkness against
which it defines itself form an intimate and indissoluble relationship so
that the white earth “is not sheer white in the 1iteral sense but a field of
flowers . . . a peacock’s tail, a coat of many colors.”137
The idea of multiple eyes and colors is also imaged in alchemy as the
cauda pavonis, the peacock’s tail, an image associated with the Philoso-
phers’ Stone.
Hillman explains that the multiple eyes of the peacock’s tail reflect their
Ultimately, for Hillman, these colors are not the same as in the subjectiv-
ist philosophies of Newton and Locke or of Berkeley and Hume, where
colors are considered as only secondary qualities brought about by the
mind and senses of the observer. Rather, for Hillman, colors are something
more fundamental – a phainoumenon on display at the heart of the mat-
ter itself prior to all abstractions. For Hillman, with the emergence of the
rotatio and a Ouroboric consciousness,
Notes
1 Giegerich, “The Unassimilable Remnant,” 198.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 199.
4 Marlan, “From the Black Sun,” 7.
5 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 240.
6 Giegerich, “The Unassimilable Remnant,” 201.
7 Ibid., 202; emphasis mine.
8 Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake, 19.
9 Ibid., 168.
10 Kitcher, “Introduction,” xxv.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Kant, Prolegomena, 9.
14 De Voogd, “C.G. Jung: Psychologist of the Future,” 179.
15 Mendelsohn, quoted in Zweig, “Kant: Philosophical Correspondence,” 15.
16 Bishop, Syncronicity and Intellectual Intuition, 77; brackets in original.
17 Hillman, A Blue Fire, 155.
18 Ibid.
19 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 69.
20 Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, 37.
21 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 303.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 303–304.
25 Kitcher, “Introduction,” xxviii.
26 Bair, Jung: A Biography, 35.
27 Bishop, Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition, 179.
28 Bair, Jung: A Biography, 508.
29 Bishop, Synchronicity and Intellectual Intuition, 4.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 5.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 5–6.
35 De Voogd, “C.G. Jung: Psychologist of the Future,” 176.
36 Rockmore, Before and After Hegel, 20. See also Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake, 39–40.
37 Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake, 34.
38 Jung, Alchemical Studies (CW13), §82.
39 Rockmore, Cognition, 3. Rockmore notes that, “[i]n reaction to Kant, Hegel maintains
that a coherent account of the relation of an appearance to an independent external
object is impossible.”
40 Rockmore, Before and After Hegel, 21.
41 Nagy, Philosophical Issues, 149.
42 Caygill, A Kant Dictionary, 393.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 393. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 28, footnote 103 and Rockmore,
Before and After Hegel, 35.
48 Barker, “Appearing and Appearances in Kant,” 286.
202 Kant, Hegel, and the thing-in-itself
135 Ibid.
136 Ibid., 217. A criticism of Hillman’s view of yellowing is taken up by Giegerich in The
Soul’s Logical Life, 194–201.
137 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 114.
138 Ibid., 112.
139 Hillman, “Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis,” 41.
140 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 217.
Chapter 11
In my own earlier work The Black Sun, I refer to the visible presence of the
black in its depth as the light of darkness itself or the lumen naturae, the
light of nature. I do not believe that what the alchemists called the “light of
nature” is easily reducible to any metaphysical realism or notion of nature
as a mind independent reality, nor to a self-referential subjectivity. It is
both visible and invisible, present and absent. It is in its complexity both
the prima materia and the Philosophers’ Stone, another expression of an
ouroboric circle and so both at the beginning and end of the work. In this
way, the Black Sun/Philosophers’ Stone is another way of imagining what
we have earlier called one of the most enigmatic statements of the goal of
alchemy – the idea of the Philosophers’ Stone – as “a stone that is not a
stone.” If, for Jung, the Philosophers’ Stone is an expression of the Self,
then it is important to view the Self in an equally complex way, a self that
is not a Self. Such ideas are the height of paradox, linking and transcend-
ing what we think of as opposites in such a way that ordinary conscious-
ness is radically challenged and subverted.
In “Silver and White Earth,” (Chapter 6 in Alchemical Psychology)
Hillman speaks of such madness alchemically as a process in which solar
brilliance and moon madness are marvelously conjoined. The mysterium
coniunctionis then is an “illuminated lunacy.”2 In “Concerning the Stone:
Alchemical Images of the Goal” (Chapter 8 in Alchemical Psychology),
Hillman discusses the complexity of images and refuses to break them
into hard and fast binaries or opposites. The “grit and the pearl, the lead
and the diamond, the hammer and the gold are inseparable.”3 For Hillman,
“[t]he pain is not prior to the goal, like crucifixion before resurrection;”
rather, “pain and gold are coterminous, codependent, corelative. The pearl
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-12
206 On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self
is also always grit, an irritation as well as a luster, the gilding also a poi-
soning.”4 It is hard to keep these opposite dimensions of experience in
consciousness, but, for Hillman, such a description fits with life, “for we
are strangely disconsolate even in a moment of radiance.”5 Our golden
experience “again and again will press for testing in the fire, ever new
blackness appearing, dark crows with the yellow sun.”6
It was on such a basis that I proposed that the “light of darkness itself”
is such a complex image and that the idea of regeneration was better seen
in a deeper consciousness of this paradox than in a moving through and
beyond it. The paradox holds the “opposites” of light/dark, visible/invis-
ible, and self and no-self (or, as Fichte says, not-self) together, and in so
doing there is a “light,” an effulgence, or a “shine” that is hard to define or
capture in any metaphysical language or traditional binaries. In this sense,
if, with Hillman, we have ended in being out of our minds with lunacy, it is
only fair to say that it is a higher kind of lunacy. That harkens back to what
has been called Jung’s madness and his strange visionary experiences that
led him to write Seven Sermons of the Dead, an outcome of his confronta-
tions with the unconscious described earlier.
absent presence that we call the Self or no-Self? It has been challenging
for the ancient philosophers, religious mystics, and alchemists, as well as
for modern and contemporary post-structuralist philosophers and psycho-
analysts to grapple with expressing what is often felt to be inexpressible.
For poststructuralist sensibilities, one difficulty that is often expressed is
that in every attempt to name that absent presence, there remains a vestige
of metaphysical speculation, a transcendental signified (for our purposes
read as Self) that is not deconstructed.
Applying Heidegger’s idea of “sous rature” to the notion of the Self in
Jung’s psychology opens a way of imagining the Self as under erasure.
Imagining such a Self psychologically is an attempt to think about some-
thing that can never be simply identified with any one side of a binary
pair – light or dark, black or white, spirit or matter, masculine or feminine,
imaginary or real, conscious or unconscious – or with any hypothesized,
transcendental notion that attempts to supersede or lift itself up above
these oppositions as if language referred in some nominalist or substan-
tialist way to some literal “thing” or entity.
As we have seen, terms such as Self, Being, and God cannot be privi-
leged or given status outside the language system from which they have
been drawn. For Derrida, following twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure, these terms derive their meaning in a diacritical way, each
making sense only in relation to other signs in a synchronic system of
signifiers and having meaning only in relationship to other signs among
which none is privileged. Nevertheless, philosophy, psychology, and reli-
gion all have a long history of master tropes or metaphors that appear and
are understood to refer to something beyond the ordinary images of famil-
iar words, such as Being, God, and Self. These “words” are like arche-
traces that refer more to mystical than to literal reality and, like Hermes,
stand at the crossroads of “différance,” a neologism that Derrida coined
from the French word for “difference” and which carries the meaning of
both difference and deferral.21 What is continually deferred is the idea that
a word arrives at a literal destination, indicating a one-to-one correspond-
ence and representation of reality.
So, for example, the idea of the Self can never be separated from its
invisible counterpart, the No-Self, against which it derives its meaning.
Since an insight is marked by placing it under erasure, the line drawn
through the word Self indicates its negation, its shadow. This ensures that
212 On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self
an idea will not be taken literally and reminds us that ideas will continue
to disseminate throughout time and culture. No concept, master trope, or
metaphor can ever finally complete the play or totality of psyche, which,
like Mercurius, always escapes our grasp. The Self under erasure is always
in a process of continual deconstruction, and, like the Philosophers’ Stone
of alchemy, it slips away from our ability to grasp it. Hillman’s reading
of alchemy imagines the Philosophers’ Stone as soft and oily, countering
both those images that point to its strength, solidity, and unity and also our
tendency to crystallize the goal in terms of fixed positions and doctrinal
truth. For him, the Philosophers’ Stone is waxy and can “receive endless
literalizations without being permanently impressed.”22 Perhaps it is use-
ful to imagine the Self under erasure as a kind of contemporary Philoso-
phers’ Stone marking a mystery that has long been sought and continues
to remain elusive.
Contemporary poststructuralist thought has proceeded toward “if not a
liquidation [or solutio], then at least a displacement of the subject from the
center of philosophical or theoretical activity.”23 Lacan and philosopher
Paul Ricoeur speak of decentering the subject and Foucault of the erasure
of man “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”24 The removal
of the subject from the center of psychic life also resonates with Jung’s
displacement and relativization of the ego. For Jung, the structures of the
Self likewise transcend the individual, and its essence “lies beyond the
subjective realm.”25
Just as for Derrida the subject is an effect of language, so for Jung
the ego is the product of an all-embracing totality. In short, the “Self is
paradoxically not oneself.”26 However, insofar as Jung’s Self as a totality
rises above and beyond the subjective realm and is seen as constituted by
impersonal, collective forces, it is consistent with the poststructuralist con-
tention that the subject is likewise primarily an effect of larger collective
forces: historic, economic, or linguistic. The poststructuralist view of such
forces is quite different from the more mysterious idea about archetypes
and the collective unconscious, but for some philosophers (e.g., Levi-
nas) and some post-Jungian psychoanalysts (e.g., Hillman), the distanc-
ing from subjectivity has become problematic. The question remains as
to what extent such a subject is dissolved in structure and function, with
a loss of body and sensibility. In both Levinas and Hillman, the problem
of the body and sensibility remains an important theme in the constitution
On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 213
of the Self/soul and resists abstraction27 while, at the same time, paradoxi-
cally, it must move beyond the idea of a reified subject and/or an abstract
transcendence.
It is interesting that for the alchemists both the establishment and the
overcoming of the unio mentalis have been gruesomely symbolized by the
act of beheading. Jung writes:
Figure 11.1 Image of the skull as representing the mortificatio process in this use
of Eve. From the “Miscellanea d’alchimia,” 14th century manuscript.
Source: Public domain.
Philosopher’s Stone, the lapis aethereus or, as it was known to the Ger-
mans, der Stein der Weisen.”40 He notes that “[t]he place of transforma-
tion is represented in the Phenomenology as Golgotha, the Place of the
Skull (die Schädelstätte).”41 Magee further states that “the alchemical
retort was sometimes a skull, and the caput mortuum was symbolized by
the skull.”42
Hegel uses the term caput mortuum several times in both the Encyclo-
pedia Logic and the Philosophy of Nature. Edinger notes that the caput
mortuum “was used to refer to the residue left after the distillation or sub-
limation of a substance.”43 O’Regan notes that it refers to the “precipitate
that remains after spirit has been extracted.”44 This extract appears to cor-
respond with the unio mentalis. Hegel also uses the term caput mortuum
to describe what he calls Essence (unio mentalis?), but also points out that
Essence (like the unio mentalis) is still
As such, the Absolute becomes a “goal” of the process like the Philoso-
phers’ Stone. Hegel describes his idea of the goal in the Phenomenology
of Spirit:
The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has
for its path the recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and
as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation,
regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form
of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philo-
sophically] comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing
in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended History,
form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the
On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 217
The absolute
In a complex and difficult passage leading to “Absolute Knowing.” Hegel
writes:
Rockmore points out that in spite of the many ways Hegel uses the term
“Absolute,” that his position
ground or source of all being.”61 For Magee, it was this approach that was
present in the search for the archē. This search for absolute ground existed
“right from the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition in the
Pre-Socratic philosopher Thales who declared that ‘water’ is the source of
all that is.”62
For Rockmore, reading Hegel ontologically is “erroneous” and he rejects
it citing three reasons, the first of which is that the ontological reading is
“out of date.”63 Second, that an ontological reading of Hegel interpreting
“the absolute as a hidden cause of history implies that Hegel intended to
describe the world as it really is, what James calls the really real and Put-
nam calls the furniture of the universe.”64 For Rockmore, in our time we
can “no longer defend any reading of Hegel’s theory resembling a claim to
tell us about the world in independence of us.”65 Thirdly, Rockmore claims
that any ontological reading of Hegel
The inability to complete the circle between thought and being is also
held by noted Hegelian scholar Donald Phillip Verene. Verene notes that
“Once the world of the Idea is entered, there is no exit back to what is there
before and outside the Idea.” Nature will always lose its independence
and “remain a function of the Idea, no matter how cleverly the dialectics
of its reality are explained.”72 Verene focuses on one sentence of Hegel’s
corpus that for him remains suspect. “It is a sentence that has bothered me
since I first read it thirty-four years ago.”73 It is Hegel’s claim in the last
moments of the Science of Logic that
The passing over [of the Idea into nature] is thus to be grasped here in
this way, that the Idea freely releases itself in its absolute confidence
and calm.
Das Übergehen ist also hier vielmehr so zu fassen, daß die Idee sich
selbst frei entläßt, ihrer absolut sicher und in sich ruhend.
Or, as he puts it in the Encyclopedia Logic, the Idea resolves freely
to release out of itself . . . the immediate Idea as its reflection, or itself
as nature.
222 On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self
Die unmittelbare Idee als ihren Widerschein, sich als Natur frei aus
sich zu entlassen.74
For Verene, “[i]f light can be thrown on how the Idea becomes nature, the
whole of the system will be illuminated.”75 He thinks these sentences are
too often passed over by commentators and no commentary has solved
it to his satisfaction. He calls attention to two statements: namely, that
“Hegel says that something is for consciousness – namely, the in-itself –
and the knowing (Wissen), or the being (Sein) of the object for conscious-
ness, is itself for consciousness another moment.”76 For Verene, there are
simply two “objects” of consciousness and “there is no specifiable rela-
tionship or principle that can be used to describe the passage from one
moment to the other.”77 Verene struggles with this “twoness,” wanting to
speak of them together as a whole, but realizing that to do so does not
constitute a “unity.”78 He notes: “The object for consciousness, the object
with being-for-itself, is just as ambiguous because its being is immediately
transposed into a new in-itself.” A third thing, a moment that would truly
hold all together, is always just out of reach.79 For Verene, consciousness
lives in this kind of ambiguity which is in continuous motion. We live in
the fantasy that this ambiguity can be resolved. But such hopes, as we
learn from Hegel’s Phenomenology are in a continuing play between hope
and despair and we live with the illusion of wholeness. Then, for Verene,
comes the wisdom of absolute knowing.
For Verene, “[t]he achievement of absolute knowing is the realization
that all the stages up to it have refused to accept the ambiguity of experi-
ence.”80 Absolute Knowing then for Verene is the acceptance of ambiguity
that the conjunction of opposites, “the two-in-the-one, and the one” are an
equally necessary “andness.”81 For Verene, Absolute Knowing is thus an
“ironic and melancholic wisdom.”82
Verene then considers Hegel’s movement from the Phenomenology to
the Logic, a move “in which consciousness freely goes forth as thought.”83
The Logic attempts to be a pure science that overcomes the “and” and the
“two” “through the power of the Idea.”84 Verene asks: “Can the ‘and,’
if not overcome on the level of phenomena, be grasped in thought such
that the doubleness, the ambiguity that is present in experience, is sur-
mounted?”85 While the Logic seems to be an asylum for the philosopher
from experience, “there is still nature to worry about.”86 Verene notes
“that the movement from Idea to nature . . . is not ‘a process of becoming’
On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 223
For Verene, without this attitude which he sees as essential for wit, humor,
and irony, we could not understand Hegel.93
Without the sense of the incongruous, Hegel has no science. His dialec-
tic depends upon the presence of humor in the reader’s own existence.
Ingenium makes the incongruous congruous, without eliminating its
ambiguity. What I have called “doubling” is no mystery to anyone
224 On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self
For Verene,
For Jung, like for Hegel and Verene, the attempt to make the incongruous
congruous without losing ambiguity and real difference is found in his
notion of Mercurius duplex. Jung describes his view of Mercurius in the
following passage:
It would appear that the “dialectical” approach of both Jung and Hegel
each emphasized one side of the ingenium. However, for Drob, the con-
trast between Hegel and Jung is more complex. Drob turns to Hegel’s
Introduction to his “Lectures on Aesthetics,” where Hegel adopts a view
of the artistic image that comes quite close to Jung’s understanding of the
role of symbols and the imagination in the transcendent function. Drob
writes:
In the Lectures [on Aesthetics], Hegel holds that art expresses ideas in
sensuous, material form. Indeed, he holds that art expresses the Abso-
lute Idea of Geist (mind/spirit) alienating itself in nature (matter and
sensuous form) and then returning to itself self-consciously as spirit.
For Hegel, in art, as in religion and philosophy, mind comes to recog-
nize itself. However, while art expresses the Idea in sensuous form,
art cannot result from a conscious, “thinking” process. Hegel writes:
For Hegel, however, thought and reflection have moved us only beyond
art and a religious, mythological view of the world. “Hegel considers and
rejects the notion, later endorsed by Jung, that the life of the mind is ‘dis-
figured and slain’ by thought. . . ‘as the means of grasping what has life,
man rather cut himself off from . . . his purpose.’ ”101
For Hegel, “thought – to think – is precisely that in which the mind has
its innermost and essential nature. In gaining this thinking conscious-
ness concerning itself and its products, the mind is behaving according
to its essential nature. . . .
Drob concludes:
The idea of a circular rather than a linear dialectic is closer to what for me
remains a non-reducible function of the imaginal life. At the end of her
book Hegel’s Theory of Imagination, Jennifer Bates writes:
If I have interpreted Bates correctly, and I’m not sure I have or that she
would agree with me, her position would be close or parallel to Kathleen
Magnus.
Magnus states that “Hegel conceives of a wholly self-determining spirit
that is at once open to the difference of the ‘other,’ ”104 but “does not leave
its sensuous dimension behind as a mere preliminary stage to its fulfill-
ment; spirit actually incorporates the sensuous into its absolute dimension
through its various acts of symbolization.”105 In addition, the “symbolic
element remains in tension with the clarity of philosophical thought.”106
Paul Ricoeur had already noted that “Hegel fights against any concep-
tion of the Absolute which would ‘lack the seriousness, the suffering, the
patience, and the labour of the negative.’ ”107 For him as for Magnus, a
close reading of Hegel suggests the need for “mediation which entails
the dialectic between determinate shapes, the identifiable patterns, and
the flux which shatters all fixed forms. We have both to dwell in deter-
minate shapes and also accompany their dissolution into further differ-
ent shapes.”108 Ricoeur raises the question of whether it is “possible for a
human mind to ‘cease to think in pictures’ and to keep for philosophy the
inner thrust which projects figurative thinking toward speculative thought?
Such is the quandary that the philosophy of religion of the Phenomenol-
ogy left unsolved and that” Hegel took up in the Berlin Lectures “by fol-
lowing a less antagonistic stance as regards picture-thinking.”109 Ricoeur
understands
the last pages of the 1831 Berlin Lectures in this sense: becoming more
and more aware of the mutual relevance of religion and philosophy,
Hegel had to overcome his own distrust for picture-thinking in order
to secure the future of philosophy itself. Finally, absolute knowledge
228 On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self
Ricoeur notes that absolute thought “is less a final stage than” it is “the
process thanks to which all shapes and all stages remain thoughtful. Abso-
lute knowledge, consequently, is the thoughtfulness of picture thinking.”111
Is this what imagistically we earlier called the “light of darkness itself”?
At the end of my essay in Spring,112 I noted that, perhaps in the end, idea
and image may best be spoken about in a couple of ways: as an alchem-
ical circulatio or a monstrous coniunctio. Both might be thought of as
metaphors that attempt to speak the unspeakable. The need to attempt this
speech is a continuing historical process, a process undertaken by Hegel.
Absolute Knowledge, therefore, is not a supplement of knowledge, but the
thoughtfulness of all modes that generate it. “As a result, we have the pos-
sibility of reinterpreting the hermeneutics of religious thinking as an end-
less process thanks to which representative and speculative thought keep
generating one another.”113 This leads to a focus on “the inner dynamism
which keeps directing figurative thought towards speculative thought,
without ever abolishing the narrative and symbolic features of the figu-
rative mode.”114 For the sake of completing the circle, I would add that
speculative thought also always discovers metaphor in its midst.
It is this tension that continues to animate Hegel’s notion of Absolute
Knowing. For Ricoeur, as it was for Magnus, spirit never literally “reaches
the point of ‘simply being’ absolute.”115 Rather “[i]ts absoluteness lies
within its self-creating, self-determining act. Spirit becomes absolute,” but
the emphasis is on the dynamic of becoming.116 “It is never absolute ‘once
and for all.’ ”117 That is, it can never “sustain its absoluteness on the level
of immediacy, but must continually create and recreate, present and rep-
resent, itself. In other words, in order to preserve its self-identity, spirit
must remain in self-differentiating motion.”118 If one takes seriously that
Absolute Knowing is never literally absolute “once and for all” and always
remains in “self-differentiated motion,” then one must also conclude with
Rockmore that Absolute Knowing “points toward the historical nature
of the process of knowledge.”119 For Rockmore, Hegel’s understanding
and knowing is “a thoroughly historical conception of knowledge claims
indexed to time and place, hence to the historical moment.”120 “Claims to
know are always dependent on theories which are relative to the historical
On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 229
Notes
1 Portions of this chapter are modified from sections of my book, Marlan, The Black Sun.
2 Ibid., 125.
3 Ibid., 239–240.
4 Ibid., 240.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Jung, Memories, 379.
8 Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology, 99.
9 Miller, “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles!,” 15.
10 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14), §190; quoted by Miller, “Nothing Almost
Sees Miracles!,” 14.
11 Miller, “Nothing Almost Sees Miracles!,” 13.
12 Ibid., 15.
13 Kelly, “Atman, Anatta, and Transpersonal Psychology,” 188–199.
14 Ibid., 198.
15 Jung also uses the word “complementarity,” which for him was a bit too mechanical
and functional and for which compensation is “a psychological refinement.” (Jung,
The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche [CW8], §545, footnote 3).
16 Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, 207–208.
17 Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” 67.
18 Lacan’s petit a is a profoundly polyvalent concept and the subject of literally thousands
of pages of exegesis in Lacan’s work. That said, Bruce Fink discusses it in terms of
the residue of symbolization – the real that remains, insists, and ex-
sists after or despite symbolization – as the traumatic cause, and as
that which interrupts the smooth functioning of law and the automatic
unfolding of the signifying chain. (Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 83)
19 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14), §117.
230 On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self
20 Ibid.
21 Sim, Derrida and the End of History, 33.
22 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 253.
23 Critchley, “Prolegomena to Any Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity,” 25.
24 Foucault, Order of Things, 387.
25 Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul, 152.
26 Ibid.
27 Levinas, for instance, criticizes Heidegger’s transsubjective concept of Dasein by not-
ing that “Dasein is never hungry” (Critchley, “Prolegomena,” 30), and Hillman chooses
to rely on the word “soul” as opposed to Self because it retains a connection with the
body, with physical and emotional concerns above love and loss, life and death. “It is
experienced as a living force having a physical location” and is more easily expressed
in psychological, metaphoric, and poetic descriptions (Hillman, The Myth of Analysis,
207). Both Levinas and Hillman share a number of overlapping concerns. Both are
critical of the primacy of a theoretical model of consciousness in which the subject
maintains an objectifying relation to the world mediated through representation. Both
support a movement toward a re-envisioned subject as an embodied being of flesh and
blood, a subject who is fully sentient and in touch with sensation and who is “vulner-
able” and “open to wounding” (Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence,
15), filled with “jouissance and joie de vivre” (Critchley, “Prolegomena,” 29). In addi-
tion, both Levinas and Hillman share a unique, ethical sensibility. For Levinas, ethics
is fundamental, and the entire thrust of his Otherwise than Being is to "found ethical
subjectivity in sensibility and to describe sensibility as a proximity to the other"(Ibid.,
30). What this means for Levinas is very different from our usual understanding of eth-
ics. For him, “Ethics is not an obligation toward the other mediated through” formal
principles or good conscience: Moral consciousness is not an experience of values but
an access to exterior being – to what he calls the Other. From a psychological point
of view, this begins to sound like the capacity to see beyond our narcissistic self-
enclosure and to actually have contact with something outside of our own egos. The
subject is subject to something that exceeds us (Ibid., 26). The “deep structure of sub-
jective experience” – the responsibility or responsivity to the other – is what Levinas
calls Psyche (Ibid., 31). Likewise, the thrust of Hillman’s archetypal psychology is a
movement beyond the narcissistic enclosure in which the aim is a “psychotherapeutic
cure of ‘me,’ ” in which all the me-ness has been cooked out of our emotions (Hillman,
Alchemical Psychology, 255). This comparison of Levinas with Hillman is not meant
in any way to equate their thought. A real comparison of their work would require an
independent study of what each thinker means by terms they use in common.
28 See Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 13–38.
29 Ibid., 17.
30 Ibid., 18.
31 Ibid., 18–19.
32 Ibid., 20.
33 Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14), §730.
34 Edinger, Anatomy, 167.
35 Ibid.
36 Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, 22.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 26; emphasis of “in us” is mine.
39 Ibid.
40 Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, 211.
41 Ibid., 212.
42 Ibid.
43 Edinger, Anatomy, 167.
On the black sun and Jung’s notion of self 231
94 Ibid. For Verene as for others before him, humor remains a quality valuable for coming
to terms with Hegel. I cannot engage this issue in this context, but a fuller reflection
on this theme can be found in Flay, Hegel and His Critic. See particularly the essay
“Hegel, Derrida and Bataille’s Laughter,” by Joseph C. Flay with a Commentary by
Judith Butler, 163–178.
95 Verene, “Hegel’s Recollection,” 20; emphasis mine.
96 Jung, Alchemical Studies (CW13), §267.
97 Ibid., §268.
98 Drob, personal communication, May 12, 2014.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination, 153.
104 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 25; emphasis mine.
105 Ibid., 241.
106 Ibid., 242.
107 Ricoeur, “The Status of Vorstellung,” 81.
108 Ibid.; emphasis mine.
109 Ibid., 84.
110 Ibid., 86.
111 Ibid.
112 Marlan, “From the Black Sun.”
113 Ricoeur, “The Status of Vorstellung,” 86.
114 Ibid.
115 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 245.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid.
119 Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake, 169.
120 Ibid., 168.
121 Ibid., 169; emphasis mine.
122 Rockmore, Cognition, 216. Emphasis mine.
123 For a further discussion, see Rockmore, Cognition, 210.
124 Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit, 245.
125 Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” 62.
Chapter 12
Image and idea, spirit and soul, have been imagined in different ways and
in differing constellations. What has become clear to me is that they are
not clear-cut opposites. In the Introduction to Karin de Boer’s study of
Hegel, she notes that Hegel denounced
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-13
234 Spirit and soul
an agony before evil”2 and yet, for Hegel, and Desmond as well as for De
Boer, the “sway of the negative” demands further, if not continuing, reflec-
tion with regard to the tragic sides of life.3 De Boer writes:
For De Boer,
being.”7 Tarrying here has less the meaning of a temporal hiatus and more
of an archetypal principle of hesitancy of “being of two minds” which
should not be identified with stasis as such or with any fixed principle.
Without trying to elaborate the philosophical structure of tarrying or hesi-
tation, I would simply like to suggest that an attitude of hesitation enriches
the dialectical process and theoretical speculation. It also deepens interior-
ity and psychological space – which for James Hillman increases through
slowness. In accord with the alchemists, Hillman refers to “patience as
a first quality of soul.”8 Now this psychological recognition does not yet
address the fundamental place of tarrying or hesitation with the problemat-
ics of the dialectic raised by De Boer and others, but it is important to note
that “[w]e live in a time of rush.”9
“[C]ontemporary societies have little or no time for metaphysical pon-
dering. . . . even the privileged, academic philosopher is often caught in
the hurry, too harried by professional obligations to have enough time or
inclination to think.”10 Even philosophers have been infected by what Carl
Honoré has called the “cult of speed.”11 Honoré quotes British psycholo-
gist Guy Claxton who states: “We have developed an inner psychology
of speed, of saving time and maximizing efficiency. . . ”12 In his book, In
Praise of Slowness, Honoré describes his own life as having “turned into
an exercise in hurry” and notes that American physician Larry Dossey
“coined the term ‘time-sickness’ to describe the obsessive belief that ‘time
is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must peddle
faster and faster to keep up.’ ”13
Desmond notes that in our time philosophers
For Desmond, philosophy must acknowledge its own plurivocity. “It does
not just have one voice, say, that of a dominating univocal logicism.”15
Here Desmond is referring to his multiple reflections on Hegel and dia-
lectics in his book, but this plurivocity as well can be seen to refer to
the dialectical tensions implicit in both philosophical and psychological
dialectics – personal, cultural, and historical voices that, in their dialogue
with the philosopher or psychologist, slow the pace to reach ontological
convictions.
Following Jung and Hillman, plurivocity can be imagined as a daimonic
process, an engagement with what they have called the “little people” who
want their say and have a story to tell. Engagement with them is a complex
dialectic that drives one to the limits of one’s understanding and relativizes
one’s point of view, and in so doing continues to open new horizons and
broadens one’s vision. Such a dialogue challenges stale ideas and helps to
give meaning to what initially appears as nonsense. It opens a fertile abyss
and connects the subject to a larger world. Such dialogue provokes hesita-
tion and such tarrying can help us to reserve judgment and to resist quick
one-sided formulations. It may allow us to stand firm against the pressure
for clear and distinct ideas that devitalize our reflections and foreclose
an openness and ambiguity on the threshold of meaning that enriches us.
When this open space collapses, our theories can become stultified, and we
lose something essentially human.
For Desmond, there is no quick and easy solution to the conundrums of
philosophy. Philosophy requires patience and a resistance to any easy “uni-
vocal logicism.”16 While Desmond is very sympathetic to Hegel, he resists
seeing philosophy as standing over other modes of discourse in a hier-
archical fashion. Philosophy for Desmond has limits in the face of other
forms of discourse to which it must open itself beyond its own familiar
categories not reducing otherness “to its own categorial self-mediation.”17
For Desmond, Hegel is a master philosopher who takes the time to think
things through to the end, but as noted above there are many ways to read
Hegel. Desmond struggles with a reading of Hegel not unlike the ones Rock-
more criticizes, basically a reading that literalizes the Absolute and reduces
it to an ontology of spirit. For Desmond, this happens when spirit encom-
passes all other modes of thought and subordinates them to its own purpose.
Spirit and soul 237
Again, Desmond points out the singularity that can be found with a careful
reading of Hegel who “also believes that the other mediates the middle,”
but for Desmond there are many places
that this mediation from the side of the other invariably turns out to be
a penultimate, hence subordinate moment of a more ultimate process
of dialectical self-mediation . . . a mediation of the self in the form of
its own otherness, and hence not the mediation of an irreducible other
at all.40
active at a subtle level, it is also not the only process at work as a synthe-
sizing force. Imagination’s upward movement is matched by memory’s
downward movement from spirit to soul. “Memory brings spirit down to
feeling. . . [and] to its . . . troubled body that is re-membered in mind.”58
For Casey, “soul seeks its own substance.”59 The two operations of
imagination and memory, the upward and downward movement are not
the same. They are complimentary and both work as connecting princi-
ples and are necessary to each other. “[W]ithout the continual and conjoint
operations of imagination and memory human existence would indeed fall
apart into warring factions, divided against itself.”60
An interesting and important aspect of Casey’s description of imagina-
tion and memory is that they do not simply operate on an inward level. He
notes that in imagining and remembering we move out of simple interior-
ity extending beyond ourselves and “out of our skin and into places of the
world.”61 The notion of “place” is one of Casey’s creative contradictions
to both philosophy and psychology which I cannot further explore in this
context. However, with the idea of “place,” there is a movement beyond
the expression of either idea and image, spirit or soul – in separation. “The
twain between spirit and soul not only will meet but has already met in
the continual collusions of imagery and remembering, which, tied to each
other, tie soul and spirit together.”62
For Casey, this “co-constitution” and coherence “of spirit and psyche”63
are “held together in a bodily mode . . . above all, by the images which
imagining and remembering share.”64 Here “image” must be understood
not simply as a representation in mind of some outer physical reality, but
rather as “essential features of phenomena” or “structures of presenta-
tion.”65 For Casey, both imagining and remembering share images and
operate as “ ‘intentional threads’ by which a life comes to composition and
compresence with itself.”66 Casey notes:
alone in their insistence on the collective basis of image and word that
earlier modernists failed to acknowledge. They are joined by think-
ers as diverse as Lévy-Bruhl and Chomsky, both of whom also assert
the transpersonal foundation of imagination and language, whether in
the guise of collective representations or universally shared rules of
generative grammar. What matters, however, is not the history of the
trend, or who in particular belongs to it. What matters is the vision it
embodies. This is a vision that gives back to images, as it gives back to
words, a grounding in the spontaneous action of the psyche, which is
image as it is word, and, in being both at once, transcends the ecologi-
cal confines – in sign and copy – of the modernist conception of the
human self, a conception that renders the self incapable of the sym-
bolic activity of the psyche in its cosmic and collective dimensions.67
For Casey, “[i]mages also serve to specify. They occupy places in psy-
che. . . . It is with images, then, that the ultimate rapprochement is to be
made between” philosophy and psychology.68 More particularly the kind
of philosophizing and psychology that Casey has in mind and has been
concerned with is phenomenological philosophy and archetypal psychol-
ogy. He draws both “fields” together by virtue of their mutual concern
with “manifestation,” where what matters to both “is the manifest image
and the world in which it is set.”69 In both fields, the world as anima
mundi is a notion of world that goes out beyond “the entrapment of per-
sonalized consciousness.”70 Both fields “step into the light of place . . .
a diffusely lighted, amorphously luminous place whose proper name is
‘landscape.’ ”71 With this notion, Casey offers a philosophical setting “for
archetypes as well as for structures of presentation.”72 Casey imagines
the linking of phenomenological philosophy with archetypal psychology
as a three-sided discipline which he calls “arche-pheno-topology” and
which he sees as “a region within which philosophy and psychology
can commingle more fully and freely than they have allowed themselves
to do thus far in the modern and post-modern era.”73 In such a place,
Casey imagines images can play back and forth between imaging and
remembering.
they are the free play of their enactments. They also furnish the Spiel-
raum, the very play-space, for a psychology conceived archetypally
and a philosophy considered as phenomenology. Images allow these
244 Spirit and soul
Casey’s distinction between the gaze and the glance and his refusal to sep-
arate spirit from soul, psychology from philosophy, renders his thought
resonant with a number of contemporary interpreters of Hegel and sets
the stage for a non-traditional understanding of Hegel’s notion of Spirit.
For these interpreters of Hegel, Spirit itself must be intimately connected
with soul and the psychological ground important in an understanding of
the idea of the Absolute that is grounded in history, in time and place, and
is a complex unity. As such, it can serve as an important way to deepen
our understanding of the alchemical project of creating a unified vision
of the Philosophers’ Stone not split into the binaries discussed throughout
this work.
Spirit and soul 245
Notes
1 De Boer, On Hegel, 1–2; emphasis mine.
2 Desmond, Beyond Hegel, 230.
3 I cannot here adequately discuss the important challenges Desmond raises for spec-
ulative thought. See his chapter entitled “Dialectic and Evil,” 189–250, for a fuller
discussion.
4 De Boer, On Hegel, 2.
5 Ibid., 7.
6 Ibid., 4.
7 Hegel Phenomenology of the Spirit, 19.
8 Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, 94.
9 Desmond, Beyond Hegel, xi.
10 Ibid.
11 Honoré, In Praise of Slowness, 11.
12 Ibid., 4.
13 Ibid., 3.
14 Desmond, Beyond Hegel, xi.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 1.
18 Ibid., 2.
19 Ibid., 3.
20 Ibid., 4.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 5.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 6. Whether Desmond succeeds in going beyond Hegel or rather offers an alterna-
tive reading of Hegel’s dialectic requires further discussion.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 7.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 7–8.
41 Ibid., 8.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 9.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., 10.
48 Ibid.
246 Spirit and soul
49 Ibid., 11.
50 Ibid., 12.
51 Ibid.
52 Casey, Spirit and Soul, xv.
53 Ibid., xvi.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., xvii.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., xviii.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Here Casey alters his conjunction between “spirit and soul” to “spirit and psyche.”
I am unsure if he is using the term “psyche” as congruent with “soul” in this context.
64 Casey, Spirit and Soul, xix.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Casey, “Jung and the Postmodern Condition,” 323.
68 Casey, Spirit and Soul, xx.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid., xxi.
75 Morris, “Casey’s Subliminal Phenomenology,” 54.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., 56.
78 Ibid., 57.
79 Ibid., 61.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
Chapter 13
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-14
248 The self, the absolute, the stone
keeps the poles of this its self-contradiction apart and adopts the same
attitude to it as it does in its purely negative activity in general. . . . Its
talk is in fact like the squabbling of self-willed children, one of whom
says A if the other says B, and in turn says B if the other says A.8
which brings together the two thoughts which Scepticism holds apart.
Scepticism’s lack of thought about itself must vanish, because it is in
fact one consciousness which contains within itself these two modes.
The new form is, therefore, one which knows that it is the dual con-
sciousness of itself, as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identi-
cal, and as self-bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness
of this self-contradictory nature of itself.9
It is to this “new and brighter life” that we now turn to consider the further
unfolding of the individuation process and the development of Hegel’s
dialectic. The integration of the shadow and the move from stoicism to
skepticism with its unhappy consciousness sets the stage for the further
unfolding respectively described by Jung and Hegel. The journey of
The self, the absolute, the stone 251
consciousness toward its goal in the respective systems of Jung and Hegel
is long and arduous and, while the paths to their goals have many reso-
nances, they cannot be discussed here. However, we can consider some
possible parallels between the outcome of both systems, in terms of Jung’s
notion of the Self and Hegel’s Absolute Knowing.
So, what does it mean to come to an end in light of the notion of a cir-
cle? The Self and Absolute Knowing have been interpreted in static and
essentialist ways, but where is the end of a circle? Or, as Rockmore put
it, “[t]here is the problem of the absolute character of so-called absolute
knowledge.”19
An example of the problem is present in Magee’s book entitled Hegel
and the Hermetic Tradition. As we’ve discussed, Magee states that “Hegel
is not a philosopher. He is no lover or seeker of wisdom – he believes he
has found it.”20 To support his view, he quotes Hegel from the Preface of
the Phenomenology of Spirit: “to help bring philosophy closer to the form
of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title of love of knowing
and be actual knowledge – that is what I set before me.”21
For Magee, this aim is interpreted in the context of the Hermetic tradi-
tion in which Absolute Knowledge appears in gnostic, if not ontological,
fashion. He states: “If Hegel departs from the metaphysical tradition in
anything, it is in dispensing with its false modesty. Hegel does not claim
to be merely searching for truth. He claims that he has found it.”22 While
Hegel does say the things Magee emphasizes, interpretation of just what
Hegel has found remains at issue.
As noted earlier, Jung, like Hegel, has also been interpreted in gnostic
and ontological fashion on the basis of comments that might understand-
ably be interpreted in such a manner. As noted earlier, in an interview Jung
once stated when asked if he believed in God:
All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakable con-
viction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And
that eliminates believing. Therefore, I do not take His existence on
belief – I know that He exists.23
One can see how, on the basis of such statements, one might conclude
Jung was also a gnostic thinker and came to be interpreted metaphysically,
but this single statement is overshadowed by many others in which Jung
again and again demonstrates a far greater reserve. For example, in a typi-
cal self-assessment, Jung states: “I am and remain a psychologist. I am not
interested in anything that transcends the psychological content of human
experience.”24 He goes on to say:
oppositorum, and the whole history of religion, all the theologies, bear
witness to the fact that the coincidentia oppositorum is one of the com-
monest and most archaic formulas for expressing the reality of God.25
lithos, the “stone that is not a stone,” and as an expression not expressible –
manifest yet not manifest. Such paradoxes haunted the alchemists and the
Philosophers’ Stone was shrouded in darkness, but also continued to pro-
voke an ongoing dissemination of ideas and conundrums.
One such idea was Sol niger, the black sun, expressing itself in a single
gesture, both darkness and light. For the alchemist, the Stone as prima
materia was both at the beginning and end of the work. The realization
of the Philosophers’ Stone was not simply a move from darkness to light,
but a deepening into an illuminated darkness, the light of darkness itself.
As such, the work “begins” in chaos and disorder, and yet it ends in order,
illumination, and cosmos, but these two moments (order and disorder) are
not simply separate. Rather they represent a complex and integral order
that is named the Philosophers’ Stone. As we have noted, Jung tried to
account for such paradoxes with the idea of a complexio oppositorum,50 as
an attempt to describe for his psychology what appeared to be incompat-
ible dimensions of the Stone.
Jung writes: “In order to attain this union, [the alchemists] tried not
only to visualize the opposites together but to express them in the same
breath.”51 Hierosgamos, sacred marriage, chemical wedding, filius philoso-
phorum, Mercurius duplex, mysterium conuinctionis, Anthropos, Abraxas,
Adam Kadmon, coniunctio, lapis philosophorum, and so on, were Jung’s
attempts to render complexity and multiplicity in a single gesture.
In his Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung gives his late-life account of
grappling with these complexities. The subtitle of his book, “An Inquiry
into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy,” pre-
figures the focus of this work. Jung opens this book with: “[t]he factors
which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either
confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love.”52 It
has been traditional to treat Jung as privileging love over enmity, synthesis
over separation, convergence over divergence, and to see him as unifying
diversity into oneness, chaos into cosmos, and suffering into healing and
wholeness. As Jung states: “the desperately evasive and universal Mercurius –
that Proteus twinkling in a myriad shapes and colours – is none other than
the ‘unus mundus,’ the original, non-differentiated unity of the world or of
Being”53 or its “equivalent,” the Philosophers’ Stone.54
Jung spent a good part of his later life trying to describe this goal of psy-
chic life, but, despite all of his efforts, the coniunctio remains anything but
a simple unity. The entire Mysterium Coniunctio testifies to the complexity
The self, the absolute, the stone 257
of Jung’s vision, and what remains clear is that the unification of oppo-
sites requires continuing investigation. Despite all of Jung’s attempts to
see beyond the opposites and the plurality of psychic life, he recognized
that the idea of unity and the unus mundus remain a “metaphysical specu-
lation.”55 Elsewhere, he observed that, while the tensions between psychic
pairs of opposites “ease off” over time, “the united personality will never
quite lose the painful sense of innate discord. Complete redemption from
the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion.”56
The forces at work, according to the Mysterium, are enmity and love,
and it is important to realize that these “energies” are more than personal.
They are archetypal phenomena that do not simply give up their force.
Love and hate continue to be generators of psychic process, and they spur
continuing tensions and remain active in some form, even when relaxed
and refined in the production of the lapis. The lapis can then be seen to be
as much a multiplicity as a unity.
The symbols that attempt to capture what Edinger called “a transcend-
ent, miraculous substance”57 are multiple, wide-ranging, and diverse, and
as much harmonious as dissonant.
Jung’s struggle with unity and multiplicity had an historical and arche-
typal background. From the Presocratics to the postmoderns, in the philos-
ophies of the East and West, the perennial problems of unity and diversity,
the one and the many of monism and pluralism, continue to challenge us
to this day.
Notes
1 Rockmore, Cognition, 179.
2 Derrida, Positions, 77.
3 Edinger, The Mysterium Lectures, 17.
4 Kelly, Individuation and the Absolute, 3.
5 Ibid., 4.
6 Ibid.
7 Samuels et al., A Critical Dictionary, 138.
8 Hegel, Phenomenology, 125–126, §205.
9 Ibid., 126, §206.
10 Ibid.
11 Goethe, Faust, Retrieved from Project Gutenberg.
12 Ibid.
13 Rockmore, Cognition, 183.
14 Jung, Aion (CW9i), §355.
15 Jung, Two Essays (CW7), §404; quoted by Kelly, Individuation and the Absolute, 27.
16 Hegel, Phenomenology, 10, §18.
17 Ibid., 12, §22.
18 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 256.
19 Rockmore, Before and After Hegel, 102.
20 Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, 1.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 16.
23 Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, 251.
24 Ibid., 229; emphasis mine.
25 Ibid., 229–230.
26 Jung, The Symbolic Life (CW18), §1642.
27 Rockmore, Before and After Hegel, 101.
28 Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW16), §400.
29 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 256.
30 Mills, The Unconscious Abyss, 218.
31 Rockmore, On Hegel’s Epistemology, 64.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 65.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 66.
The self, the absolute, the stone 261
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-15
Conclusion 263
the circle and in more aesthetically pleasing images such as the “golden
flower,” “golden castle,” and “golden head,” reflecting the illuminated
philosopher. All of these images attempt to bring the opposites together
in some kind of harmonious integration and unity. An early expression of
this unity is found in the alchemical idea of the unio mentalis – yet, for
many alchemists, psychologists, and philosophers, none of these images
captures the dynamic and complex conjunction philosophically necessary
to do justice to the dynamics of the idea of the Philosophers’ Stone.
In alchemy, the unio mentalis was known as the white stone and, for
many alchemists, it represented a “lesser coniunctio” and awaited a more
differentiated goal called the “greater coniunctio.” To reach the “greater
coniunctio” meant achieving a fuller connection with the “redness” of
lived life. As Dorn has challenged his colleagues, “Transform yourself
from dead stones into living philosophic stones.” Along with Jung’s, Hill-
man’s, and Giegerich’s ideas of self, soul, and spirit, which unify oppo-
sites, Hegel’s idea of the “unity of unity and difference” approaches a more
complex and dialectical understanding of the struggle with opposites –
leading toward “Absolute Knowing.” The power of Hegel’s formulations
of the goal of Absolute Knowing added much to my attempt to understand
the goal of alchemy beyond the simpler formulation of the unio mentalis.
Taking up Hegel’s view of complex unity, I considered to what extent
it answers Dorn’s challenge and brings dead stones to philosophical life.
Here I have turned to Giegerich’s work, following Hegel’s notion of spirit,
which takes us beyond life, self, and soul, into what he called the “logical
life of the soul” or spirit. I found that to some extent his formulation leans
toward a formalism or ontologizing of syntax over semantics, thought
and idea over image, and at a subtle level interprets Hegel in a way that
leaves itself open to the charge of philosophical abstraction and to a fur-
ther refinement of the unio mentalis as an outcome of absolute negativity.
Common interpretations of Hegel consider his thought highly abstract and
intellectual, and read his view of Absolute Knowing as expressing an ontologi-
cal if not Gnostic view of knowledge. In my own early reading of Hegel and in
response to Giegerich’s binary leanings elevating pure spirit above and beyond
life, I, too, quickly resonated with postmodern criticisms of Hegel’s view of
spirit and Absolute Knowing. However, in re-reading Hegel and reconsidering
his thought as an expression of a complex rather than simple unity, I began to
see what I consider to be a modern philosophical rendering that can shed addi-
tional light on notions such as the Self and the Philosophers’ Stone. For me, this
264 Conclusion
Note
1 Hillman, Alchemical Psychology, 125.
Epilogue
This book has been a reflection on Jung’s alchemical work and on the
importance of philosophy as a way of understanding it. Alchemy has been
viewed in the context of the history of natural science as a precursor to and
primitive form of chemistry. Jung’s research has shown that this view was
far too limited and that a scientific approach to alchemy sheds little light on
its mythic, esoteric, and symbolic meanings, which are intrinsic to many
alchemical traditions and at the heart of the alchemical imagination. From
the broader perspective of the history of the human spirit, these neglected
aspects of alchemy can be seen as vital dimensions of the soul and impor-
tant for our understanding of alchemy and the Philosophers’ Stone. Jung’s
idea of the work was not simply the creation of a literal goal, but rather
the transformation of the adept into an illuminated philosopher and the
discovery of a new vision of the cosmos. Seeing alchemy in this way led
Jung to recognize it as a forerunner of his psychology of the unconscious
and as a symbolic process of individuation. Jung’s vision revitalized our
understanding of alchemy and opened the door to continuing study both
within and outside the Jungian tradition.
I have considered a number of classical followers of Jung as well as
revisionists, particularly James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich. They
each set in motion interesting and challenging philosophical and psycho-
logical juxtapositions between images and ideas, imagination and thought,
and they each consider one or the other term as primary. Hillman sticks to
the image and Giegerich absolutizes thought in the spirit of Hegel. These
leanings lead them to considerably different viewpoints.
In my own work, I have tended to emphasize the importance of images
and imagination. In the end, I have discovered a way of understanding
DOI: 10.4324/9781003215905-16
266 Epilogue
Hegel that is more compatible with my own orientation in which the imag-
ination is not surpassed by thought or spirit. Ultimately, I have come to
link image and idea together, prioritizing the ouroboric and mercurial play
between them. Images then give rise to thought and thought gives rise to
images – a circulatio and chasmos – at times a monstrous coniunctio and a
poetic undecidable, yielding not an absolute spirit rising above, but rather
a philosophical illumination essential to life and to the depths of the soul,
and resonant with the Philosophers’ Stone.
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Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table
on the corresponding page. Page numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate a note.
death 141; death-like state of the soul experience 11, 40, 54, 67, 189
standing on the black sun 47; of ego “Extraction of Mercurius and the
156, 157 – 158; mystical death 157 – 159; coronation of the Virgin” 65 – 66, 65
and new life, link between 53, 53 – 54;
power of 166 facing the shadow 137, 138, 140 – 142
de Boer, Karin 5, 233, 234, 264 “facts” 89
demons 68, 137 – 138, 156 Faivre, Antoine 20
Derrida, Jacques 37, 66, 143, 152 – 153, Farber, Eduard 16
211 – 212, 247, 258 fate 139
Desmond, William 5, 233 – 234, 235 – 240, 264 Figulus, Benedictus 196
Diamond, Stanley 137 – 138 filius philosophorum 57, 155
Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique Fink, Bruce 229n18
(Pernety) 1 Flay, Joseph C. 231 – 232n94
différance 211 Foucault, Michel 212
differentiated oneness 143 Freud, Sigmund 95
dissolution 127
Dobbs, Betty 16 – 17 gazing and glancing, differentiating
Dorn, Gerhard 11, 85, 193, 263 between 244
Dossey, Larry 235 Giegerich, Wolfgang 4 – 5, 7n19, 63, 116,
dream 103 – 104, 116 134 – 135n14, 135n24, 265; on alchemy
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (Kant) 174 111 – 113, 117, 127, 150; on anima and
Drob, Sanford 45, 69, 225 animus 128; archetypal psychology
122; and consciousness 117; criticism of
Eco, Umberto 23 Hillman 171; on death 157; dialectical
Edinger, Edward 65 – 66, 69 – 71, 76 – 77, approach of 172; on ego death 157 – 158;
84, 86 – 93, 257; alchemical operations on emancipation from soul 130 – 131;
101; alchemical process, study on on entrance problem 213; on fear of the
86 – 87, 88, 90; on beheading 214; poisonous isolation 171; on gold 149;
on caput mortuum 216; on cluster Hegelian influence 107; and Hillman,
thinking 90; coniunctio operation, on compared 121 – 124, 123, 146 – 150, 172,
92, 93; examination of Jung’s work 200; idea of sublation 170 – 171; idea of
on alchemy 87 – 88; on “facts” 89; on sublation and the Notion 109 – 110; on
Jung’s Mysterium 247; mortificatio/ imagination/image 108 – 109, 169 – 170;
putrefactio operation, on 90 – 92, 91; on modern life 107 – 108; on negation
phenomenology of objective psyche of ego 214; on neurosis 131 – 132; on
89 – 90; Philosophers’ Stone 196; on Philosophers’ Stone 146, 150, 153;
practical problem of psychotherapy 87; praise and criticism of Jung 106 – 107;
on Rosarium 88; on unio mentalis 194; on psychology 215; on psychology
view on Jung’s “reality of the psyche” informed by alchemy 125; on real
87, 88 – 89, 91 psychology 125 – 126; on Self 213,
ego 63, 122, 131, 153, 248 – 249; death of 214; on soul 133, 159; on soul’s dual
156, 157 – 158; injured 140; liquification intentionalities 130; on soul’s logical
of 158 life 106 – 110, 125, 263; on soul’s need
ego psychology 104, 121, 126, 127, for historical development 131; and
134, 157 sublation 147; on syntax and semantics
Eliade, Mircea 9 – 12, 15, 17 171 – 172; on thought 107 – 109, 148;
energizing moisture 50, 51, 52 – 53, 52 and true psychology 128 – 130, 134, 150;
entanglement 234, 264 on work of alchemy 125
entrance problem 213 – 217 goals 129, 216 – 217
esotericism 16, 20, 23 – 27 gods/God 138, 142, 211
ethics 230n27 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 174, 250
Evola, Julian 24 gold 1, 27, 53, 128, 149 – 150,
Ewing, A.C. 181 170 – 171
Index 279
matter 9 – 10, 21, 39 – 40, 100 – 101, 159; no-self 157, 206 – 211, 213
and nigredo 81 “not” 146, 152
memory 242 nothingness 67, 133, 186 – 187,
Mendelssohn, 174 206, 207
Mercurius 35, 58 – 59, 69 – 77, 92; as Notion 109 – 110, 187, 188, 217
caduceus unifying the opposites 38; noumena 174, 180
duplex 35 – 40, 224 – 225; liquification
of 133; as mediator 257 – 260; Mercurial objective psyche 87, 89, 183
monster 70; spirit of 52 – 53, 69; Obrist, Barbara 17
telos of 127; turning the wheel which oneness 44, 142, 256, 258, 262, 264
symbolizes the alchemical process 37, opposites 3, 119 – 120, 205, 206; divine
37; as a uniting symbol 36 geometry 74; of the dual face of alchemy
metaphysics 131, 175 – 176, 183 39; God and devil 67; incestuous
metaxological approach 239 – 240, 264 unification of 71 – 72; Jung on 43 – 44,
Metzger, Hélène 15, 17 50, 77 – 82, 143, 182 – 183, 257;
Micklem, Neil 64 – 65, 143 Mercurius as caduceus unifying the 38;
Miller, David 148, 150, 163, 207 and Philosophers’ Stone 39; and pleroma
Mills, Jon 253 67; unification of 4, 38, 39, 50, 71, 78,
mind-independent reality 185 143, 182 – 183, 257; see also coniunctio
Mogenson, Greg 148 – 149, 150 opus 58, 59, 193
monstrous coniunctio 266 opus contra naturam 130, 213
monstrous conjunctions see benign and O’Regan, Cyril 190, 216
monstrous conjunctions ouroboros 35, 36, 37, 39
monstrous hermaphrodite 55
monstrum 35, 38, 71 Pagel, Walter 13, 16
Moore 96 Panisnick, George David 9, 127
moral consciousness 230n27 Paracelsus, Philippus Aureolus 155, 156
Moran, Bruce T. 24 parallax gap 255, 264
Morienus 11 patience, and philosophy 235 – 236
Morin, Edgar 152 Paton, H.J. 173
Morris, David 244 peacock’s tail 81 – 82, 199, 200
Morris, Marla 158 perceiving and imagining, difference
mortificatio 141, 156; process 215; between 163
mortificatio/putrefactio operation, of periphenomenon 244
alchemy 90 – 92, 91 Pernety, Dom 1
multiple eyes 199, 258 personality 101
Mutus liber 12 Phaedo (Plato) 195
Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung) 58, 62, phenomena 174, 179 – 180, 186
77 – 82, 142, 156, 210, 247, 256 – 257 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel)
mystical death 157 – 159 184 – 185, 190, 216 – 217, 247, 252
myths 131 Philalethes 17
Philosophers’ Stone 1, 4, 6, 8, 145,
Nargarjuna 154 153 – 154, 264; achievement,
nature 9 – 10, 223 cosmological vision of 81; and black
negativity 152; absolute 234, 264; logical sun 165; characteristics of 162 – 163; and
234; tragic 234, 264 darkness 154, 234 – 235; divine geometry
neurosis 131 – 132, 138, 161 74 – 76, 76; and goal images 251; Hillman
“New Birth, The” 56 – 57 on 145 – 146; imagined as speaking 39; as
Newman, William R. 13 – 15, 17, 19, 21; an initiatory experience 144; linked to the
see also Principe and Newman’s thesis lumen naturae of sol niger 166; lithos ou
Nicholas of Cusa 57 lithos 2; lumen of 153; and peacock’s tail
nigredo 139; and matter 81; 199, 200; as prima materia 256;
undifferentiated state of 48, 50 prima materia Mercurius 2; problematic
Noll, Richard 20 – 21, 30n75, 190 origin 9; rotatio 146; and Self 6, 162,
282 Index
212, 258; and sol niger 155, 164 – 165, 157; imaginal psychology 105, 115n95,
213; squaring of the circle as image of 122, 147, 150, 165, 172; informed by
74 – 76, 76; as “a stone that is not a stone” alchemy 125; logical psychology 127;
205, 255 – 256; synonyms of 1; tarrying and philosophy 240 – 241; psychological
with the negative 234 – 244; thing, the reality 18, 40, 57; real psychology
159; as union of opposites 39; and white 125 – 126; re-visioning of 122; self-
stone 193 assessment as a psychologist 252 – 253;
Philosophia reformata of J.D. Mylius 12 spiritual psychology 121; traditional
philosophical tree (arbor philosophica) 58 versus modern 94; true psychology
philosophy 5; and imagination 241 – 242; 128 – 130, 134, 149, 150, 157 – 158; see
natural assumption of 185; and also archetypal psychology
psychology 240 – 241 Psychology and Alchemy (Jung) 137
picture thinking 170 psychotherapy 87
pigment 170 puer-psyche marriage 119 – 120
place 242, 244 pure aetherial consciousness 193
Plato 37, 195 purity 192 – 193
pleroma 66 – 67, 206 putrefactio 50, 90, 141, 154
plurivocity 236
positivism 14 radix ipsius (root of itself) 57
pre-alchemy Jung 40 – 46 Read, John 16
premature unity 71 reality: beyond appearances 181, 183; of
presentational images 90, 101 matter 39 – 40; mind-independent reality
prima materia: King and Queen’s return to 185; of psyche 87, 88 – 89, 91; psychic
49, 49; return to 51 reality 88 – 89; psychological reality 18,
Principe, Lawrence 13 – 15, 19, 21, 28 40, 57; see also psychic reality
Principe and Newman’s thesis: Caliăn on Red Book, The (Jung) 43, 45, 62 – 63, 64
23 – 24; Hanegraaff on 26; Tilton on reddening 196, 197
15 – 22 redness (rubedo) 196, 197
private individual, and the psychologist 133 religion 5, 11, 24, 207, 226, 237
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics remainder 134, 143, 151, 153, 154
(Kant) 174, 180 Ricoeur, Paul 151, 165, 212, 227 – 228
protoscience thesis 23 Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, Two of Wands 176
psyche 21, 40, 62, 87 – 91, 96, 248; and Ripley Scroll, of Sir George Ripley 12
albedo 102; and archetypal psychology Rockmore, Tom 5, 184, 201n39, 228 – 229,
96; and body 87, 89; Christian idea of 247, 251; on absolute knowledge 252,
redemption, distinguishing between 100; 253 – 254; on Hegel’s epistemology
and colors 102; and consciousness 90, 253 – 254; on Hegel’s ontological reading
112; and image 243; objective psyche 218 – 221; on importance of Kant 173; on
87, 89, 183; and puer 119 – 120; and Kant’s epistemology 178 – 179
spirit 242 Roethke, Theodore 166
psychic reality 58, 87, 91, 92, 93, 162; and Romanyshyn, Robert 163 – 164
image 88 – 89; multiple views of 198; Rosarium 37, 47, 49 – 52, 57
wholeness of 76 Rosarium Philosophorum 12, 45, 46 – 59
psychoanalysis, deep shadow of 142 rota 37, 39, 262
psychologist: and human-all-too-human rotatio 103, 146, 199
being, distinction between 132; and Ruska, Julius 19
private individual 133
psychology 5, 97, 116; alchemical Sallis, John 161, 162
psychology 98 – 106, 165; of alchemy samsara and nirvana, difference between
40, 93; archetypal psychology 96, 122, 133
148, 151, 230n27; complex psychology Sarton, May 140
208; depth psychology 159; ego sat chit ananda (truth, consciousness,
psychology 104, 121, 126, 127, 134, bliss) 44
Index 283
unity of the unity and difference 154 What Is Soul? (Giegerich) 129 – 130, 132
unknowable 180 white earth 82, 102, 159, 199
unknown 180 whiteness 102, 196
Upanishads 44, 207 wholeness 4, 57, 74, 222, 234, 240, 251,
260 – 263
Verene, Donald Phillip 5, 221 – 224, Wilhelm, Richard 45
231 – 232n94 winged and unwinged lions (spirit and
Vetter, August 177 body), conflict between 72 – 74, 73
Villanova, Arnoldus de 160 wisdom 191 – 192
virgin’s milk fantasies 139 – 140,
143, 193 yellowing 102, 196 – 197, 223
Vivekananda, Swami 140
Voegelin, Eric 191 Žižek, Slavoj 5, 254 – 255, 264
von Franz, Marie-Louise 84 – 86 Zucker, Wolfgang 190 – 191