4.5 The relationship between the ego, the Anima, the Self and the anima mundi

 4.5.1 The discrepancy between Carl Jung’s Anima and the anima mundi

I can clearly imagine that the reader is now rather disturbed by all these new terms and does not exactly understand their connections with the depth psychologist’s. Thus, I will clarify them in this section and show how they extend Carl Jung’s theory.  

If we briefly return to the above quote in section 4.4.3, we see that Jung makes us believe that his Anima and thus the alchemical queen should “not to be confused with the ‘anima’ of our mediaeval philosophers, which was merely a philosophical anima vegetativa, the ‘ligament’ between body and spirit.”  

In section 4.4.2 we have however seen that the Rosarium and the other Hermetic alchemical myths tell us that exactly in the state of the corruptio, of the “division into indivisible parts” (visio Arislei) in the womb of the queen, the sexual metaphor is replaced by a vegetative myth. The “atoms” of the king become now the seeds buried in the earth, where they die and awake then to new life. Like this the life essence of the king, the psyche “spirtualized” in the unio mentalis, in the first coniunctio, unifies with the alchemical matter, the “earth” to form the dew. The dew, the matter-psyche is symbolically equivalent with the atoms of the dying king that transform into the seeds in the earth. Like this the dead body or the “inanimate matter” are revived. This new life is however a vegetative life. In a modern language I call this “life essence” the matter-psyche. It is the soul of matter, and one of the most important aspects of the matter-psyche is the fact that the spirit of the Logos king stays outside it.  

I guess that the reader realizes now the discrepancy between Carl Jung’s Neoplatonic interpretation of the unio corporalis and the Hermetic aspect of the alchemical myth. In the depth psychologist’s interpretation the king or masculine god in the Heavens does not die but organizes a wedding with the queen, the latter reduced to a spiritual principle. We will later see that his interpretation of the unio corporalis as a merely spiritual myth approaches this idea very much to the Assumptio Mariae pope Pius XII declared in the year 1950. As a logical consequence, Carl Jung was completely fascinated with this dogma[1].  

The Hermetic alchemical myth means however a union of the still living substance of the dead king or god, of the psyche or life essence spiritualized in the unio mentalis, with matter. This union of the psyche with matter to form the matter-psyche means in modern terms that an energization has happened. The matter-psyche is the complement to the spirit-psyche and the other aspect of the bipolar energy term science does not accept, since it is not measurable with the help of physical tools. It is a vegetative energy and the background of the fact that the sexual myth described in the Rosarium and in other Hermetic myths transforms into a vegetative myth. Like this the substitution of the crude sexualism in picture # 5 becomes possible. This vegetative continuation of the myth is in fact – hidden behind a symbolical language – the looked-for deeper aspect of human/animal sexuality. This vegetative myth seems to belong to “the procreative nature of the Whole,” which is the background of “man’s procreative power,” mentioned by Carl Jung and quoted in Chapter 2. As we will see, this procreative power leads into a “new birth”[2], i.e., it creates “new living matter”. Thus, the Hermetic unio corporalis is a real incarnation process, whereas the Neoplatonic seems, if we believe in the conclusions of Wolfgang Pauli, to be infertile[3].  

 

 

4.5.2 Carl Jung’s exclusion of the Hermetic vegetative world soul (anima mundi)  

As I have shown in The Return of the World Soul (Chapter 5)[4], it was in the year 1953 – two years before the publication of the Mysterium Coniunctionis – in his discussion with Wolfgang Pauli that Carl Jung created the severe discrepancy of the two contradicting definitions of the Neoplatonic and the Hermetic aspect of the term psyche (see figure):  

On the one hand, for him the psyche is the Anima, the mediator between the ego and the Self, on the other, it is the vegetative world soul, the anima mundi, the vinculum amoris, the ligament of love between spirit and matter. We see now, that two years later, in the year 1955, the publication date of the Mysterium Coniunctionis I am quoting here, by interpreting the second phase of Dorneus’ opus in a regressive Neoplatonic way, he even represses one part of the anima mundi, the matter-psyche, since he is not conscious about the necessity of the energy’s bipolarity. Thus the matter-psyche is not a part of his God-image, of the (Logos) Self. Like this, also the vegetative myth described in Gerardus Dorneus’ unio corporalis and in image # 8 of the Rosarium is suppressed[5].