Spent this Sunday afternoon re-reading and re-flecting on this great piece by Carl Jung: Alchemy had reached its final summit, and with it the historical turning-point, in Goethe’s Faust, which is steeped in alchemical forms of thought from beginning to end. The essential Faustian drama is expressed most graphically in the scene between Paris and Helen. To the mediaeval alchemist this episode would have represented the mysterious coniunctio of Sol and Luna in the retort; but modern man, disguised in the Faust, recognizes the projection and, putting himself in the place of Paris or Sol, takes [possession of Helen or Luna, his own inner, feminine counterpart. The objective process of the union this becomes the subjective experience of the artifex: instead of watching the drama, he has become one of the actors. Faust’s personal intervention has the disadvantage that the real goal of the entire process –the production of the incorruptible substance – is missed. Instead Euphorion, who is supposed to be the filius philosophorum, imperishable and ‘incombustible’, goes up in flames and disappears – a calamity for the alchemist and an occasion for the psychologist to criticize Faust, although the phenomenon is by no means uncommon. For every archetype, at its first appearance and so long as it remains unconscious, takes possession of the whole man and impels him to play a corresponding role, Consequently Faust cannot resist supplanting Paris in Helen’s affection, and the other “births” and rejuvenations, such as the Boy Charioteer and the Homunculus, are destroyed by the same greed. This is probably the deeper reason why Faust’s final rejuvenation takes place only in the post-mortal state, i.e., is projected into the future. Is it a mere coincidence that the perfected figure of Faust bears the name of one of the most famous of the early alchemists: “Marianus” or, in its more usual spelling, Morienus? By identifying with Paris, Faust brings the coniunctio back from its projected state into the sphere of personal psychological experience and thus into consciousness. This crucial step means nothing less than the solution of the alchemical riddle, and at the same time the redemption of a previously unconscious part of the personality. But every increase in consciousness harbours the danger of inflation, as is shown very clearly in Faust’s super-human powers. His death … is hardly a satisfactory answer. The rebirth and transformation that follow the coniunctio take place in the here-after, i.e., in the unconscious – which leaves the problem hanging in the air. We all know that Nietzsche took it up again in Zarathustra, as the transformation into the superman; but he brought the superman into dangerously close proximity with the man-in-the-street. By so doing he inevitably called up all the latter’s reserves of anti-Christian resentment, for his superman is the overweening pride, the hubris, of individual consciousness, which must necessarily collide with the collective power of Christianity and lead to the catastrophic destruction of the individual. We know just how, and in what an exceedingly characteristic form, this fate overtook Nietzsche, ‘as much ethical as physical’. And what kind of an answer did the next generation give to the individualism of Nietzsche’s superman? It answered with a collectivism, a mass organisation, a herding together of the mob, ‘as much ethical as physical’, that made everything that went before look like a bad joke. Suffocation of the personality and an impotent Christianity that may well have received its death-wound – such is the unadorned balance sheet of our time. Faust’s sin was that he identified with the thing to be transformed and that had been transformed. Nietzsche overreached himself by identifying his ego with the superman Zarathustra, the part of the personality that was struggling into consciousness. But can we speak of Zarathustra as a part of the personality? Was he not rather something superhuman – something which man is not, though he has his share in it? Is God really dead, because Nietzsche declared that he had not been heard of for a long time? May he not have come back in the guise of the superman? In his blind urge for superhuman power, Faust brought about the murder of Philemon and Baucis. Who are these two humble old people? When the world had become godless and no longer offered a hospitable retreat to the divine strangers Jupiter and Mercury, it was Philemon and Baucis who received the superhuman guests. And when Baucis was about to sacrifice her last goose for them, the metamorphosis came to pass: the gods made themselves known, the humble cottage was changed into a temple, and the old couple became immortal servitors at the shrine. In a sense, the old alchemists were nearer to the central truth of the psyche than Faust when they strove to deliver the fiery spirit from the chemical elements, and treated the mystery as though it lay in the dark and silent womb of nature. It was still outside them. The upward thrust of evolving consciousness was bound sooner or later to put an end to the projection, and to restore to the psyche that which had been psychic from the beginning. Yet, ever since the Age of Enlightenment and in the era of scientific rationalism, what indeed was the psyche? It had become synonymous with consciousness. The psyche was “ what I know”. There was no psyche outside the ego. Inevitably, then, the ego identified with the contents accruing from the withdrawal of projections. Gone were the days when the psyche was still for the most part “outside the body” and imagined “those greater things which the body could not grasp. The contents that were formerly projected were now bound to appear as personal possessions, as chimerical phantasms of the ego-consciousness. The fire chilled the air, and the air became the great wind of Zarathustra and caused an inflation of consciousness which, it seems, can be damped down only by the most terrible catastrophe to civilization, another deluge let loose by the gods upon inhospitable humanity. An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead. Paradoxically enough, inflation is a regression of consciousness into unconsciousness. This always happens when consciousness takes too many unconscious contents upon itself and loses the faculty of discrimination, the since qua non of all consciousness. When fate, for four whole years, played out a war of monumental frightfulness on the stage of Europe – a war that nobody wanted – nobody dreamed of asking exactly who or what had caused the war and its continuation. Nobody realized that European man was possessed by something that robbed him of all free will. And this state of unconscious possession will continue undeterred until we Europeans become scared of our “god-almightiness.” Such a change can begin only with individuals, for the masses are blind brutes, as we know to our cost. It seems to me of some importance, therefore, that a few individuals, or people individually, should begin to understand that there are contents which do not belong to the ego-personality, but must be ascribed to a psychic non-ego. This mental operation has to be undertaken if we want to avoid a threatening inflation. To help us, we have the useful edifying models held up to us by poets and philosophers – models or archetypi that we may well call remedies for both men and the times. Of course, what we discover there is nothing that can be held up to the masses – only some hidden thing that we can hold up to ourselves in solitude and in silence. Very few people care to know anything about this; it is so much easier to preach the universal panacea to everybody else than to take it oneself, and, as we all know, things are never so bad when everybody is in the same boat. No doubts can exist in the herd; the bigger the crows the better the truth – and the greater the catastrophe. What we may learn from the models of the past is above all this: that the psyche harbours contents, or is exposed to influences, the assimilation of which is attended by the greatest dangers. If the old alchemists ascribed their secret to matter, and if neither Faust nor Zarathustra is a very encouraging example of what happens when we embody this secret in ourselves, then the only course left to us is to repudiate the arrogant claim of the conscious mind to be the whole psyche, and to admit that the psyche is a reality which we cannot grasp with our present means of understanding. I do not call the man who admits his ignorance an obscurantist; I think it is much rather the man whose consciousness is not sufficiently developed for him to be aware of his ignorance. I hold the view that the alchemist’s hope of conjuring out of matter the philosophical gold, or the panacea, or the wonderful stone, was only in part an illusion, an effect of projection; for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious…. We are dealing with life-processes, which, on account of their numinous character, have from time immemorial provided the strongest incentive for the formation of symbols. These processes are steeped in mystery; they pose riddles with which the human mind will long wrestle for a solution, and perhaps in vain. Not for nothing did alchemy style itself an “art”, feeling – and rightly so – that it was concerned with creative processes that can be truly grasped only by experience, though intellect may give them a name. The alchemists themselves warned us: “Rend the books, lest your hearts be rent asunder”, and this despite their insistence on study. Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding. In the foregoing study of dream-symbols I have shown how such an experience looks in reality. From this we can see more or less what happens when an earnest inquiry is turned upon the unknown regions of the soul. The forms which the experience takes in each individual may be infinite in their variations, but, like the alchemical symbols, they are all variants of certain central types, and these occur universally. They are the primordial images, from which the religions each draw their absolute truths. From Epilogue ‘Psychology and Alchemy’ Volume XII Collected Works of C G Jung 1953
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 18:55:52 +0000
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