Der findet Ruhe—nicht wer ihnen nachgibt.”
Above I have compared the lion of the parable to the Sphinx of Œdipus, and on the other hand, it appears from later deliberation that it (the lion) must be the retrogressive element in men, which is to be sacrificed in the work of purification. Now I find several remarks of Jung (Psychology of the Unconscious) [pg 322] that mediate very well between both ideas. Even if I do not care to go so far as to see in the animal only the sexual impelling powers, but prefer to regard it rather as the titanic part of our impulses, I find the conception of the author very fortunate. The Sphinx, that double being, symbolizes the double natured man, to whom his bestiality still clings. Indeed it is to be taken exactly as a functional representation of the development of reason out of the impulses (human head and shoulders growing out of an animal body).
The homunculus motive would likewise have to be regarded in a new light. I have said that the mystic was his own father; he creates a new man (himself) out of himself with a merely symbolic mother, therefore with peculiar self-mastery, without the coöperation of any parents. That means the same thing as the artificial creation of a man. We recognize therefore the anagogic significance of the homunculus, the idea of which we found closely interwoven with alchemy in general. This connection also has not escaped Jung, though he takes it one-sidedly and draws a too far-reaching conclusion. He points to the vision of Zosimos, where, in the hollow of the altar he finds boiling water and men in it, and remarks that this vision reveals the original sense of alchemy, an original impregnation magic, i.e., a way in which children could be made without a mother. I must observe that the hermetic attempt to get back to Adam's condition has some of the homunculus phantasy in it. Adam was regarded [pg 323] as androgyne, a being at once man and woman, but sufficient in himself alone for impregnation and procreation. Welling says in his Opus mago-cabbalisticum, “This man Adam was created, as the scripture says, i.e., of the male and female sex, not two different bodies but one in its essence and two in its potentiality, for he was the earth Adamah, the red and white [Symbol: Sulfur] the spiritual [Symbol: Gold] and [Symbol: Silver], the male and female seed, the dust of the Adamah from Schamajim, and therefore had the power to multiply himself magically (just as he was celestial) which could not indeed have been otherwise, unless the essential masculinity and femininity were dissociated.” I am reminded in this connection that Mercury is also bisexual; the “materia” must be brought into the androgynic state “rebis.” The idea of hermaphroditism plays a well known, important part in mythology also.
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We have explained why phantasy creations carry two meanings, the psychoanalytic and the anagogic, apparently fundamentally different, even contradictory, and yet, on account of their completeness, undeniable. We have found that the two meanings correspond to two aspects or two evolutionary phases of a psychic inventory of powers, which are attached as a unity to symbolic types, because an intro-determination can take place in connection with the sublimation of the impulses. When we formulated the problem of the multiple interpretation, we were struck with the fact that besides the two meanings [pg 324] that were nominally antipodal in ethical relations, there was a third ethically indifferent, namely, the natural scientific. Apart from the fact that I have not yet exhausted the anagogic contents of our material and so must add a number of things in the following sections, I am confronted with the task of elucidating the position of the nature myth portion. That will necessarily be done briefly.
In the case of alchemy the natural scientific content is chemistry (in some degree connected with physics and cosmology), a fact hardly requiring proof. The alchemistic chemistry was not, to be sure, scientific in the strict modern sense. In comparison with our modern attitudes it had so much mythical blood in it that I could call it a mythologically apperceiving science, wherein I go a little beyond the very clearly developed conception of Wilhelm Wundt (Volkerps. Myth. u. Rel.) regarding mythological apperception, from a desire for a more rigid formulation, but without losing the peculiar concept of the mythical or giving it the extension it has acquired with G. F. Lipps. Alchemy's myth-like point of view and manner of thinking is paralleled by the fact that it was dominated by symbolic representation and the peculiarities that go with it. [The concept of the symbol is here to be taken, of course, in the wider sense, as in my papers on Symbolbildung (Jb. ps. F., II-IV).]
The choice of a symbol is strongly influenced by what strongly impresses the mind, what moves the soul, whether joyful or painful, what is of vital interest, [pg 325] in short, whatever touches us nearly, whether consciously or unconsciously. This influence is shown even in the commonplace instances, where the professional or the amateur is betrayed by the manner of apperceiving one and the same object. Thus the landscape painter sees in a lake a fine subject, the angler an opportunity to fish, the business man a chance to establish a sanitarium or a steamboat line, the yachtsman a place for his pleasure trips, the heat tormented person a chance for a bath, and the suicide, death. In the symbolic conception of an object, moreover (which is much more dependent on the unconscious or uncontrolled stimulation of the phantasy that shapes the symbol), the choice from among the many possibilities can surely not fall upon such images as are unsympathetic or uninteresting to the mind. Even if we consciously make comparisons we think of an example mostly from a favorite and familiar sphere; when something “occurs” to us there is already evidenced some part of an unconscious complex. This will become elaborated in the degree that the phantasy is given free play.
The raw product then, of the symbol-choosing phantasy of the individual (“raw,” i.e., not covered for publicity with a premeditated varnish) bears traces of the things that closely concern the person in question. (“Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh”—even without premeditation.) If we now start from a spiritual product which is expressed in symbols (mythologically apperceived), and whose author we must take to be not an individual [pg 326] man but many generations or simply mankind, then this product will, in the peculiarities of the selection of the symbol, conceivably signify not individual propensities but rather those things that affect identically the generality of mankind. In alchemy, which as a mythologically apperceiving science is completely penetrated by symbols, we regard as remarkable in the selection of symbols, the juxtaposition of such images as reflect what we have, through psychoanalysis, become acquainted with, as the “titanic” impulses (Œdipus complex). No wonder! These very impulses are the ones that we know from psychoanalytic investigations as those which stand above all individual idiosyncracies. And if we had not known it, the very circumstances of alchemy would have taught us.
The familiar scheme of impulses with its “titanic” substratum, which is necessarily existent in all men (although it may have been in any particular case extraordinarily sublimated) comes clearly to view in individual creations of fancy. It must be found quite typically developed, however, where a multitude of men (fable making mankind) were interested in the founding, forming, polishing and elaborating of the symbolic structure. Such creations have transcended the merely personal. An example of this kind is the “mythological” science of alchemy. That we are repelled by the retrograde perspective of the types residing in its symbols (and which often appear quite nakedly) comes from the fact that in the critic these primal impulse forms [pg 327] have experienced a strong repression, and that their re-emergence meets a strong resistance (morality, taste, etc.).
The much discussed elementary types have therefore insinuated themselves into the body of the alchemistic hieroglyphics, as mankind, confronted with the riddles of physico-chemical facts, struggled to express a mastery of them by means of thought. The typical inventory of powers, as an apperception mass, so to speak, helped to determine the selection of symbols. A procedure of determination has taken place here similar to that we might have noticed in the coincidence of material and functional symbolism in dreams. Here again appears the heuristic value which the introduction of the concept of the functional categories had for our problem.