4.8 Summary  

4.8.1 The bipolarity of the energy term  

My modern interpretation of the alchemical Axiom of Maria Prophetissa shows us that the third is split into an ambivalent or bipolar twoness. Symbolically seen, the third is however equivalent to the energy term. Thus I conclude that for archetypal reasons science must accept the third principle as a bipolar energy term[1].

In picture # 8 of the Rosarium the water vapor transforms into the dew. I interpret the first stage of the coniunctio in the alchemical process – the production of water vapor as the air/water union and the second stage, the dew, as water/earth union. In modern terms I talk of the energetic bipolarity of the spirit-psyche and the matter-psyche. During the transformation of the water vapor into the dew the psyche abandons the spirit and unifies with matter. Thus, a transformation of spirit-psyche into matter-psyche has happened and in doing so the spirit aspect has been excluded.

Science as well as Carl Jung’s depth psychology is unfamiliar with the concept of the matter-psyche. I will therefore later show that matter-psyche is as well observable as is outer spirit-psyche, i.e., physical energy, and inner spirit-psyche, i.e., objective psychic energy (Carl Jung).

During the creation of the spirit-psyche in picture # 6, the unio mentalis, the body had died. In the unio corporalis the newly created matter-psyche unifies with the dead body and the latter is revived. Since all this happens after the death of the body, the result of this resurrection must be some sort of body for the afterlife, the subtle body. We see further that in the macrocosmic case the so-called inanimate matter also contains a potential life, a fact that could play a very important role in the explanation of the UFO encounter and abduction phenomena of today.

“…and out of the Third comes One as the Fourth; like this the Two become One.” The Axiom of Maria Prophetissa tells us further that the fourth is the reunion of the split parts of the third. Thus I had to describe a state and process, in which spirit-psyche and matter-psyche become one. The state is symbolically represented in the Seal of Solomon, the double triad equivalent to the alchemical lily and to the Radbild (wheel image) of Nicholas von Flue.

The process leading to this reunion is the so-called exchange of attributes necessarily belonging to the unio corporalis or (second) coniunctio. In it spirit-psyche transforms into matter-psyche – the process described in picture # 8. There must however also be a parallel process, in which matter-psyche transforms again into spirit-psyche. This process I will therefore describe below.

 

 

4.8.2 The alchemical template for the energetic transformation process  

The Hermetic alchemical template for the transformation of spirit-psyche into matter-psyche, described as the unio corporalis, the second coniunctio, was first constellated in the visions of the Hermetic alchemists and Paracelsists Gerardus Dorneus and Robert Fludd. In this Hermetic opus the death of the body or of matter is caused by the effect of psyche’s union with the spirit. Then a second death happens, the death of the “king of Heaven”, of the spirit-psyche.

This motif of the death-marriage is described in several myths. The king or the god has to come down from Heaven in order to unite with the queen who is rising up to meet him. They meet in an intermediate realm which is neither spirit nor matter. This archetypal event extremely constellated today, is further presented as the drowning king, as the king swallowed by the uterus of the queen and as the vegetative myth of the king's atoms becoming the seeds in the earth, where they release the beginning of the new life. The intermediary realm is symbolized by the Seal of Solomon, by the alchemical lily, the lapis (stone), the philosophical gold, and also by the Radbild (wheel image) of the Swiss mystic Nicholas von Flue.

The dying king is also described as the monocolus or uniped. During his descent into the earth an eclipse happens, which is itself a symbol of the coniunctio. The transforming king is now the sol niger, the black sun, also compared with Osiris, the god of the underworld, and with the Moor and the Ethiopian – all colored black. This transitory king is also marked by his black head that must be boiled. He is however always represented ithyphallically and thus ready for the sexual union with the goddess. Thus, in the Christian tradition this constructive cosmic god comparable with Pan and Mercury is reduced to the destructive devil ready to rape the virgin, a motif further developed in the Medieval myth of Merlin[2].

The black king must be decapitated. Like this his head becomes the so-called caput corvi, the Raven’s Head. It is said to be of great worth for magic. The Raven’s head, the black head, is round. It corresponds to another goal of the Hermetic opus, the so-called rotundum. This “round man” is the Anthropos or God-man and also the world soul. The very interesting aspect of this alchemical fantasy is that it is man who creates the parallel to Jesus Christ, the God-man. Thus we are not astonished anymore that for this task one needs magical procedures. With them, it seems, the rotatio of the rotundum synonymous to the birth of the infans solaris and the extraction of the red tincture or of the quintessence out of the lapis, can be initiated.

In this symbolic description we see that the unio corporalis has in fact two goals. The first is the “birth” of the lapis, the rotundum, the philosophical gold, the lily and the Seal of Solomon – all represented by a double triadic structure. This first goal contains a vegetative "life essence" the alchemist must help to be incarnated into our space and time bound world. Like this a second creation happens, the birth of the infans solaris or the extraction of the quintessence and of the red tincture. This life essence I will later translate with the term “spirit-psyche with higher negentropy”, and I propose that it is this “qualitatively improved spirit-psyche” that revives the dead body and/or inanimate matter.

The second coniunctio, the unio corporalis, is necessarily accompanied by two further processes, the exchange of attributes and the multiplicatio. The exchange of attributes corresponds to the twin process of the transformation of spirit-psyche into matter-psyche et vice versa. The multiplicatio is a “radiation” of the lapis, which transforms or even transmutates the whole surrounding of the stone, the whole world or even the whole universe. It is also symbolized as the philosophical gold that gilds everything around it. Also this radiation – Wolfgang Pauli compared it with the radioactive radiation! – is nothing else than an attribute of the second goal of the coniunctio, the effect of the extraction of the quintessence or of the red tincture.

With this description of the process differing from Jung’s interpretation, I have also shown the difference between the unio corporalis and the first coniunctio, the unio mentalis, with its liberation of the psyche out of matter and the former’s union with the spirit. The second conjunction happens not in Heaven but in the intermediary realm, which is “an invisible, potential form of reality that is only indirectly inferable through its effects.” (Wolfgang Pauli). The procedure seems further to have to do with magic and with the “darkening of the brain” “with very strong vinegar, or with the boy’s urine.” The necessary condition for this process is however the death of the king in the sky, of the masculine god called spirit-psyche in the Heavens. Only like this the transformation of the spirit-psyche into the matter-psyche, the exchange of the attributes of the coniunctio with its multiplicatio, a twin process I will describe in modern terms later, is possible.

 

 

4.8.3 Carl Jung’s unconsciousness of energy’s bipolarity and his reduction of the unio corporalis to the unio mentalis  

I have further shown how Carl Jung interprets the first two phases of the alchemical opus. First, he interprets, as we have seen in chapter 3, Active Imagination as a modern form of the unio mentalis, the liberation of the psyche out of matter and its union with the spirit (1^st coniunctio) represented in the pictures # 6 and # 7 of the Rosarium. He believes that it is the method for the integration of the personal shadow.

In picture # 8 we deal with in this chapter, the unio corporalis, the coniunctio in the true sense of the word commences. At the beginning of the interpretation of this picture Carl Jung comes close to the insight of a bipolarity of the energy term, since he quotes the decisive part of the Rosarium that shows us that the dew coming down from Heaven has something to do with the subtle body. Then however he interprets the subtle body in a Neoplatonic way. This means that he is not able to translate the symbolic image of the dew, the matter-psyche in my interpretation, into the meaning of an inner aspect of the alchemical earth, i.e., of matter and of the human body. Though he cites the twofold alchemical sublimation as the creation of the spiritual subtlety as well as of the quintessence, he cannot see that these sublimations belong to two different processes, the one in fact the Neoplatonic liberation of the psyche of matter and its union with the spirit in the Heaven, i.e., the unio mentalis accompanied by the death of matter and of the human body, the other however the Hermetic process, the creation of the quintessence, i.e., of the matter-psyche, the body-psyche or of the subtle body out of the gross body or of gross matter. The necessary condition for this second phase of Dorneus’ opus is the death of the king in Heaven, i.e., of the spirit-psyche.

Thus, Carl Jung does not follow the deeper meaning of the Hermetic opus. He interprets also the unio corporalis, the coniunctio of the king and the queen, of the god and the goddess, in a Neoplatonic way. Like this also the second phase of Gerardus Dorneus’ opus is translated into Active Imagination. It serves now the creation of the “spiritual subtlety” of an extended consciousness differentiated into the four functions presented in his work Psychological Types. Active Imagination begins thus with the help of the thinking function but is then extended to feeling, sensation and intuition. Sometimes the latter is however already assumed to be integrated in the beginning. The goal, the development of the quaternity of the functions, is the conscious complement to the quaternarian Self. The fourth conscious function is inferior, i.e., directly related to the unconscious. The Self on the other hand is defined as a “Trinity” of the masculine spirit-psyche plus a unity of feminine spirit-psyche, the Anima. Besides the unsymmetrical quaternarian ego the depth psychologist proposes thus also an unsymmetrical quaternarian God-image, i.e., a double quaternarian structure.

Not being conscious about the bipolar aspect of the third and of the energy term, Carl Jung defines the unio corporalis on the basis of the (unipolar) transcendent function. It connects the quaternarian consciousness with the quaternarian Self. The connection happens between the inferior function – in the depth psychologist’s case the feeling – and the Anima. With the help of this interpretation, the queen in the Rosarium still equivalent to the king is reduced to the Anima, a feminine spiritual-psychic thing between the ego and the Self. Thus, since matter is absent, the Self is in a Neoplatonic way defined “in Heaven”, i.e., as mere spirit-psyche with a (3+1) structure. Since the Anima is not extended to a “chthonic Trinity”, the real feminine principle, the anima mundi (world soul) is however excluded.

If we compare Jung’s interpretation with the original Hermetic alchemical structure and process, we see immediately that his Self is first quaternarian and not a double triad, and second that the union happens in Heaven. The modern opus proposed by him is not characterized by the sexual intercourse of the god and the goddess in the intermediary realm between Heaven and earth of Hermetic alchemy, but as a Platonic relationship between the sexes, between the masculine “Trinity” of spirit-psyche and the unitarian feminine spirit-psyche, the Anima, in the Christian Heaven or in the Empyreum. This is the deeper reason why Wolfgang Pauli unconsciously very deeply influenced by the Hermetic Seal of Solomon[3], caustically criticized the depth psychologist’s concept of the Heavenly quaternity. Also the Nobel laureate was however not yet conscious about the deepest reason for his criticism, the necessity of the bipolarity of the energy term.

With his Neoplatonic way of an interpretation of the unio corporalis as based on the (3+1) structures of the ego and of the Self on the one hand and of the process as Active Imagination on the other, the depth psychologist creates further some severe contradictions. It is obvious that a sensation, a feeling or an intuitive type should on the one hand first develop the thinking, but on the other, since the motto of the unio corporalis is “Rend the books lest your hearts be rent asunder,” Carl Jung must acknowledge the need for the sacrificium intellectus, the sacrifice of exactly the thinking function that is to be developed in the first place.

In a later interpretation, in his Mysterium Coniunctionis, the difference between the modern unio mentalis, i.e., Active Imagination, and the unio corporalis consists in the moral and intellectual judgement of the results. This means concretely that the procedure begins with a merely perceptive attitude and should change into a judging one. In his Psychological Types Carl Jung defines however thinking and feeling as judging functions, intuition and sensation as perceptive ones. Thus the implicit demand is the change from intuition and/or sensation to thinking and/or feeling – which is exactly contrary to the depth psychologist’s first interpretation of the four function's integration procedure.

Reading more of Carl Jung’s interpretation of the unio corporalis in the Mysterium Coniunctionis we realize further that he talks of the integration of the extraverted feeling and sensation. It seems that the integration of the introverted feeling and the introverted sensation do not have any place in this procedure.

We can thus conclude that the interpretation of the unio corporalis as the development of the spiritual subtlety, the realization of the quaternarian ego, becomes a very confusing concept of the depth psychologist. How such a procedure should further solve the transference/counter-transference problem, is also far from being clear.

My task was therefore to clarify this confusion by showing that the Hermetic alchemical quintessence of the unio corporalis, the last goal of the second sublimation above, does not correspond to a repetition of Active Imagination, but to a different procedure. The basic idea of this procedure proposed by me is the inclusion of the bipolarity of the energy term symbolized in the Seal of Solomon. This means further that we have to include the chthonic Trinity (W. Pauli), the matter-psyche not contained in Carl Jung’s spiritual-psychic Anima, for the definition of a consistent theory of the processes happening in the depth of humans’ body and soul. 

 

 

4.8.4 Anima versus anima mundi  

Before we were able to successfully address ourselves to this task we had however to clarify the development of Carl Jung’s theory and its contradictions further. Even before the interpretation of the unio corporalis as Active Imagination in the Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955), we find in the discussion with Wolfgang Pauli (1953) that the depth psychologist creates a further discrepancy, since he uses the term “psyche” for the Anima as well as for the anima mundi, the world soul. The former is however defined as the connection between the quaternarian ego and the Self and as the unitarian feminine part of the completely spiritual Self, the latter as an anima vegetativa (Carl Jung), the vinculum amoris, the band of love between spirit and matter. Thus the same term is used to describe two completely different facts and a great confusion develops.

In Jung’s concept the Anima is thus the connection between the ego and the Self. The Anima as well as the Self is defined as spirit-psyche. As the term tells us, Active Imagination is defined as an active dealing of the ego with the Self, which means mostly a verbal dispute. In the Hermetic unio corporalis however the procedure is about “being” with the vegetative anima mundi in which the king dissolves into “atoms” and enters the “earth”, where they become the seeds for new vegetative life. This “life essence” is in fact what I call the matter-psyche, the second aspect of the bipolar energy term. Thus, when Carl Jung excludes the anima mundi by regressively equating the unio corporalis with his completely spiritual Active Imagination, he excludes also the matter-psyche, the essential energetic aspect of the world soul.

In the Rosarium the goddess is however equivalent to the god. In a modern terminology based on symmetrical terms, this means that the world soul must be tripartite as well. Besides the “Trinitarian” spirit-psyche there exists therefore a “Trinitarian” matter-psyche, the “lower” or “chthonic Trinity” (W. Pauli). Since symbolically seen the term “three” means “energy”, this symmetrical definition means that we take into consideration the real feminine energy principle, and not only the spiritual defined as the Anima by Carl Jung. The “masculine energy” and the “feminine energy” together create then the Seal of Solomon, the first goal of the unio corporalis, equivalent to the lapis, the philosophical gold, the lily, the rotundum (the round man, the God-man) and the Radbild of Nicholas von Flue.

The double triad runs through the whole series of pictures in the Rosarium and is therefore the prima materia as well as one of the most important goals of the opus. Like this the starting substance and the ending substance fall into one. We can thus interpret this fact as the task of becoming conscious about the structure and the dynamics of the world soul of the Hermetic alchemists. For the latter the world soul was just a divine principle not further explainable; we however should try to understand what this world soul could mean on a more conscious level, i.e., by including the results of modern depth psychology and of physics of the 20^th century. Like this the preconscious fact, the anima mundi as the prima materia, is transformed into a realization and modern interpretation of the goal, of the world soul as the lapis.

Expressed in our modern terminology, for Medieval man the world soul was a wholeness that comprised spirit, psyche and matter, the part and the whole, as well as the inner and the outer world. Like this also the microcosm, the human being, and the macrocosm, the universe, were one and the same. What happened in the former had also happened in the latter, et vice versa.

The world soul was, like the Christian God, divine, i.e., not possible to clearly explain. This wholeness was first split when mathematics entered the philosophy of nature in the 17^th century, and second when Descartes reduced the world to the res cogitans and the res extensa. Because the res cogitans represents the inner conscious spirit-psyche and the res extensa the inanimate spirit-matter, the matter-psyche aspect of the world soul was repressed. Since then we believe in a materialistic universe, the “cheerless clockwork fantasy” (Carl Jung), only containing what I call the outer spirit-psyche, physical energy, and matter (spirit-matter in my terminology). We have therefore to find a way and a method to include the matter-psyche anew. This I will do in the following chapters.

The Seal of Solomon is the symbol of the anima mundi in a wider sense. It contains matter-psyche as well as spirit-psyche and symbolizes like this the king in the womb of the queen. It is thus the symbol for some sort of a pregnant world soul ready to give birth to the child, the infans solaris, the red tincture or the quintessence. As we will see this birth can be described as an observable singular quantum leap, analogous to the radioactive decay of one atom. The procedure I propose for this observation, the Body-Centered Imagination, is deeply vegetative, i.e., the concerning events are observable in the vegetative nervous system of our body. Theoretically spoken, during Body-Centered Imagination one observes the double transformation of spirit-psyche into matter-psyche et vice versa.

 

 

4.8.5 Active Imagination and Body-Centered Imagination  

Since Active Imagination deals with the spirit-psyche, Body-Centered Imagination however with the matter-psyche, i.e., with the real feminine aspect of the energy term and thus with the world soul, I propose the unio mentalis and the unio corporalis as the alchemical templates of two very different imagination procedures of today. The first is in fact Neoplatonic Active Imagination. It starts with the thinking function, and is thus the self-evident procedure for humans who have the same “personal equation” as Carl Jung, i.e., with thinking as the superior function.

With the help of the thinking function affects and emotions – containing preconscious knowledge – are verbalized, i.e., one challenges the Anima’s point of view. Like this the (Logos) ego becomes conscious about what is behind the affects and emotions, and thus their meaning, i.e., the spirit-psyche aspect of the affects, can be integrated into the consciousness.

I guess one cannot show the Neoplatonic aspect of Carl Jung’s Active Imagination better than through exactly this integrative procedure. Affects and emotions are instinctive expressions, i.e., belonging to the matter of our body, in Neoplatonic philosophy defined as the root of all evil. Their essence however is the intellectual insight, the good spirit extracted from evil matter.

A further goal of Active Imagination is the creation of the quaternarian consciousness structured in the way of Carl Jung’s personal typology. Since it is implicitly assumed that thinking is its main function, I call such a consciousness the Logos ego. I define it as thinking as the superior function, sensation and intuition as auxiliary functions, and feeling as the inferior function. If lived extravertedly, it is the consciousness natural science is based on. The introverted aspect of the Logos ego on the other hand is the necessary “tool” for Active Imagination, i.e., the relationship of the quaternarian Logos ego with the quaternarian Logos Self.

 

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The Hermetic unio corporalis I interpret as the method of Body-Centered Imagination, and like this I distinguish the latter from Active Imagination, the modern unio mentalis. It is a procedure proposed by me that deals with the body, and especially with the transformation of the gross body into the subtle body. I have given a short overview of this imagination method and shown that it corresponds to a Hermetic interpretation of the unio corporalis, i.e., the acceptance of the bipolarity of the energy term, consisting in spirit-psyche as well as matter-psyche, and in a transformation of the former into the latter et vice versa.

The necessary precondition for Body-Centered Imagination is the definition of the Eros ego. The necessity of the Eros ego, a complement to the Logos ego, is given because of the bipolarity of the energy term that leads on the one hand to an energetic bipolarity of the “unconscious”, i.e., to the bipolarity of the Logos Self – Carl Jung’s Self – and the Eros Self, the “chthonic Trinity” (W. Pauli). In a modern symmetrical terminology also the energetic aspect of consciousness must thus be bipolar; there must therefore be a complementary Eros consciousness. The Logos ego is able to relate to the Logos Self, the Eros ego to the Eros Self.

This complementary ego consists in introverted feeling as the superior function, introverted sensation and intuition as the auxiliary functions, and thinking as the inferior function. Expressed in a general sense Body-Centered Imagination is thus the relationship between the Eros ego and the Eros Self. During this imagination thinking is consciously repressed. Further the Eros ego is very vegetative, i.e., in a state of active passivity, the Wu Wei of Far-East philosophy. Like this the “inner aspect” of the body can express itself with the help of a vegetative language containing images sensated deeply corporeally, leaving the gross body and being connected to a very intensive introverted feeling.

In our modern Western society the Eros ego – the ego of Medieval ages – is deeply repressed. In the individual case the Logos ego must therefore first be transformed into the Eros ego. This means nothing else than the “death of the Logos king”. Like this the consciousness follows the Hermetic alchemical template of the death-marriage. Only like this the ego becomes able to observe the coniunctio processes in its own body and soul.

Since during the process of Body-Centered Imagination thinking is consciously repressed, it follows the alchemical model of the cutting off of the head of the monocolus (the uniped), and like this the “extraction” of the caput corvis, of the Raven’s Head is included into the procedure. This detail is insofar very important as in picture # 9 we will discuss in the following chapter, the ravens appear for the first time. One of them is even buried in the earth, and only his head is visible. It is the black head of Osiris, the sol niger, the head of the Moor or of the Ethiopian, one very important aspect of Wolfgang Pauli’s “stranger” or “magician”, the Eros aspect of the Self constellated in him.

The monocolus and his black round head belong to the rotundum, a further goal of the Hermetic opus. It is symbolically equivalent to the lapis and the Seal of Solomon, the first goal of the opus. In this case the second goal, the quintessence, the infans solaris and the red tincture, are symbolized by the so-called rotatio of the rotundum. The meaning of all these goals of the Hermetic unio corporalis I will show later. Already here I stress however the fact that these processes have to do with a modern form of magic different from Carl Jung’s and Wolfgang Pauli’s synchronicity principle.

During the Body-Centered Imagination the Eros ego is able to observe the rotatio of the rotundum, the birth of the infans solaris out of the intermediary realm between spirit and matter (Robert Fludd), the extraction of the red tincture out of the lapis (Gerardus Dorneus) or the creation of the quintessence out of the Seal of Solomon, the latter symbolizing the “pregnant world soul”. Like this the deeply introverted Eros ego becomes able to observe the exchange of the attributes and the multiplicatio, the intense radiation as the final products of the unio corporalis or the second coniunctio. It overcomes the split between inner and outer world, between the particle and the whole and between spirit, psyche and matter. Comparable with the goal of all true mysticism through the ages a human approaches like this the godhead, in our case the world soul giving birth to her children, and a real incarnation out of the unus mundus into our space and time bound world happens. I will explain all these alchemical/symbolic terms in a modern language including quantum physics and depth psychology, in the next chapters.

 

 

4.8.6 The matter-psyche and the anima mundi as the Eros Self, the shadow of Carl Jung’s Logos Self  

In the Body-Centered Imagination the four partly conflicting interpretations of the unio corporalis by Carl Jung – the integration of the shadow, the creation of the subtle body, the sacrificium intellectus and the solution of the transference/counter-transference problem unify, if we accept that such an imagination method deals with the shadow of the Self, the Eros Self. If we define the “chthonic Trinity”, the matter-psyche or the world soul in the narrower sense as the Eros Self, we see that Body-Centered Imagination is indeed dealing with the shadow, however not with the personal but rather with the shadow of the Logos Self, and like this observes the creation of the subtle body. Such an observation is only possible with the help of a sacrificium intellectus, the latter consisting in the transformation of the Logos ego into the Eros ego. Since like this the deeply introverted relationship of the Eros ego with the world soul, the Eros Self, becomes possible, also the projection of the world soul onto concrete women is withdrawn, and the transference/counter-transference problem can be solved. Since the latter is not only a deep problem of the therapeutic relationship but also of the relationship between man and woman in general – the battle of the sexes – we have found the solution to the crux responsible for destroying almost every relationship in the world today.