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With many thanks to Gregory Sova, Ph.D. (LA, CA) for translation assistance

8.The alchemical myth of God's transformation and redemption

8.The alchemical myth of God's transformation and redemption

8.1 The masculine Christian Trinity as the prima materia of the Opus

In part 1 we have seen that in the vision of my client the Phoenix is replaced by the dove, the symbol of the feminine spirit. The redemption of a divine female spirit from matter or from the human body, is itself part of the Hermetic alchemical myth of the God’s transformation and redemption by man. It is a matter of fact that this myth occurs more and more in the dreams and visions of modern people. Thus, we must ask ourselves what this today anew constellated myth could mean in the terms of our modern scientific language that implies the insights of depth psychology and quantum physics.  

The idea that God had to undergo a transformation was one of the central ideas the alchemists believed in. From the point of view of the Church this belief represents an outrageous heresy. Namely, the Church Fathers had defined God as eternally unchangeable, and this dogma is still preached today in the Roman Catholic Church. And yet people of the Middle Ages took the liberty to speak of the transformation of God. Many paid for this kind of belief at the stake.   

Because the alchemists therefore were forbidden to speak about the transformation of God, they used instead the picture of Rex, the king, who endured a transformation process. But if one reads the texts, one sees the deepest emotion of these alchemists and notices that with this change the transformation of God was meant.   

An important part of the alchemical work turns around this transformation of Rex, the god king. The alchemists were Christians, and many of them were also priests. Thus they knew the Christian teaching about the Holy Trinity. At the beginning of the alchemical meditative work was therefore the purely male God, the God of the Christian Trinity with God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit, represented by an upward pointing triangle (see also overview 2.1).

Overview 2: The Alchemical Myth of God’s Transformation and Redemption

8.2 The Descent of God into the womb of the Goddess

But now the first new and heretical content of the alchemical Opus appears: In a second stage this Christian God ages, becomes ill, dies, or dissolves and He sinks into the earth. In the symbolic language of the Hermetic alchemists, this aspect is described as the descent of the king into the womb of the queen (the Goddess) (see overview 2.2). In his work Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14), Carl Jung has described this process in chapter IV with many details.

This fact represents an example of an archetypal idea, which is suddenly, spontaneously and acausally constellated and like this can inundate the consciousness of human beings: The central idea of the Church Fathers, the dogma of the eternal unchangeability of God, becomes compensated by a different myth, His transformation.

In a modern language, Carl G. Jung called this process the death of the collective dominant. In Sigmund Freud’s terminology it would be the death of the Superego. It is exactly this process, which is constellated today. We cannot believe in an anthropomorphic God anymore, who looks like an old man with a long beard, and in his son, the eternal youth. As we have seen, already 500 years ago, this God-image was replaced in Nicholas von Flüe by the Radbild, the Wheel image, an abstract energetic principle rooting in the "nothing", in the hole in its center.  

However, the alchemists and the Christian mystics must have experienced a great shock, when they became conscious about the consequence of this new idea. As I already mentioned before, this was also the case with the Swiss mystic Nicholas von Flüe, who struggled life long with this new and extremely frightening idea.

8.3 The alchemist’s challenge in the task of the redemption of God

The next step of the alchemical God transformation represents a still more powerful revolution: In the alchemical opus all humans have the task to redeem the divinity from matter or from their own body during their earthly life (see overview 2.3).  

It was Carl Jung, who first had a hunch that the Opus must have to do with the redemption of God. He writes:

"Without knowing it, the alchemist carries the idea of the imitatio [Christi; RFR] a stage further and reaches the conclusion … that complete assimilation to the Redeemer would enable him, the assimilated, to continue the work of redemption in the depths of his own psyche." [CW 12, § 452]

And he concludes that the alchemist "had taken over the work of redeeming not man but God." [emphasis mine]

What the great depth psychologist was however not yet able to see, is the fact that this redemption of God must deal with processes in the human body or in the matter of the universe. This inability is also the deepest reason why he failed in finding a modern interpretation of the coniunctio, as he confessed himself in a letter of 1953 to Wolfgang Pauli:

"The problem of the coniunctio must be kept for the future; it is more than I can cope with, and my heart reacts if I exert myself too much along these lines. My essay on the ‚Der Geist der Psychologie’ [On the Nature of the Psyche] of 1946 [CW 8, § 343-442] resulted in a serious attack of tachycardia, and synchronicity brought on the rest." [AaA, p. 101]

Without this body-centered alchemical work, a redemption of the feminine aspect of the divine, of the Goddess or of the World Soul (see below) is however not possible. Further, we must accept that the realm of the World Soul, the unus mundus, is a layer behind or beyond the (Logos) Self, defined by Carl Jung. This realm I call the Eros Self, which is only observable by a renewed consciousness I define as the Eros ego (see section 10).

Since the year 1945 we know that this idea was also one of the most original in early Christianity. In that year, approximately 13 codices containing over fifty texts were discovered in Nag Hammadi in Egypt, which turned out to be original Christian Gnostic Gospels.

These texts, which are much older than the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, describe a very different Jesus Christ than the one we know today. Further, they show that an important part of the new religion’s belief consisted in the idea of self redemption: It was man’s most important task to redeem his soul – and by this procedure also the World Soul (see below) – out of matter or of his own body. Especially the Ophites, the original Gnostic sect founded by Simon Magus (the antagonist of Simon Petrus), were permeated with this idea.  

As Elaine Pagels (see part 1) has shown, such a self redemption was a very dangerous idea for the Church’s organization, because with its help the Gnostics were capable to do this work themselves, without the help of any priest caste. Therefore the Church decided to repress the Gnostics: In the year 170 all Gnostic Gospels were burnt under the auspices of the bishop Irenaeus of Lyon (FR). Since 1945, however, we could study these original Gospels again, but the Church yet represses the scientific occupation with them up until today.

In the belief of the Christian Gnostic system and their founder Simon Magus, the deity to be redeemed out of the body was a snake. This redemption was at the same time a spiritualization of deeply instinctive forces, and the transformation of the snake into the dove was the symbol the Gnostics used for this process.

On the right we see a modern example of such a phenomenon. It is a drawing a man educated in the Catholic Church was forced to make by the unconscious at the beginning of his analysis. Although he did not know anything about the Gnostic myth, the preconscious knowledge (Carl Jung) of the collective unconscious replaced Jesus Christ on the cross with a snake. Further we see, too, the symbolism of the Red Sea, which is a parallel to the so-called red tincture, one of the definite goals of the alchemical opus. Even the Seal of Solomon, the necessary structure for the transformation and redemption of the God-image is included in this deeply archetypal image (further explanations about the symbols see below)

A very similar idea we find in the Buddhist and Hindu Tantrism (see also Neotantrism and Body Centered Visualization). There, too, a snake in the body, at the coccyx, must be redeemed (see picture on the left). Therefore, the modern Neotantrism roots in the same Gnostic idea of the self redemption. This is the deepest reason why all these pseudo Tantric procedures became so important in the West. However, most people do not know that they continue unconsciously the almost 2000 years old Gnostic tradition at the end of the Christian eon.

At this point we need to recall the previously discussed Phoenix. If we parallel the burning of the body with a spiritualization of the instinctive forces, or in Gnostic mythological language with the transformation of the snake into the dove, we see that the redemption of God out of matter in the alchemical Opus corresponds of course to exactly this Phoenix myth and thus to the vision of my client.    

In this phase the Phoenix – in her case, the dove – i.e., the indestructible by fire is created. The prima materia for this goal are therefore the drives, i.e. especially the aggression, the sexuality and the exploration drive (see also Paracelsus and the Renewed Image of God).

This indestructible body was also represented by the gold the alchemist produced during the Opus. He however always stressed that this does not mean the worldly gold, but rather the so-called philosophical gold. 

In the vision of my client it is the dove composed of the ash of the body, which represents the indestructible and incorruptible "gold". This dove symbolizes however, as I already mentioned, on the one hand a spiritual principle, and on the other hand the goddess Aphrodite/Venus, thus a divine feminine spiritual principle, which has therefore very much to do with the Eros principle. As we will see, this divine Eros is related to the so-called World Soul (anima mundi) that was redeemed by the alchemists from matter or from the human body.

8.4 The unredeemed World Soul in matter

In the introverted Hermetic alchemical process, in which the human tries to help the divinity to transform and rise out of matter, something further happens, which merits the term revolution (see also overview 2.4): The Goddess, in whose womb the God descended, turns out to be the yet unredeemed World Soul, a principle that penetrates all matter and the whole universe (further explanations see section 9).  

Therefore we can conclude that it is matter, the human body and/or its instincts in which the unredeemed divine feminine principle is located. The resurrection of God culminates thus in the fact that His feminine aspect is redeemed out of matter or out of the human body. What such a transformation could concretely mean for our time we will see in sections 9 and 10.

8.5 The Goddess in matter as an Anti-trinity and an energetic and creative principle independent of the Christian God (creatio continua)  

Here, we will first deal with the structural and abstract aspect of the continuation of the redemption of the World Soul. Such a theoretical view is necessary because only with the background of such a theoretical knowledge can we make connections between the Hermetic alchemical process and modern developments in depth psychology and quantum physics.  

As an archetypal feminine principle, this Goddess is connected with matter or with the human body. Further, She has a triadic or Trinitarian nature like the masculine God, thus consisting of three elements or individuals, who form however a unit.  

This circumstance brings the feminine deity closer to the triadic heathen goddesses, for example the Celtic three-headed goddess, to the Greek triad of Demeter, Hecate and Persephone, or to the Hindu Shakti, the Trinitarian feminine aspect of the so-called Trimuriti (Trinity) of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Because as a feminine principle this Trinity is the opposite of the masculine, it is represented by a downward pointing triangle - an abstraction of the female basin (See overview 2.5) .  

Symbolically seen, number 3 means "energy" or "energizing": The necessary condition for the flow of an electrical current, for example, is a potential difference between a positive and a negative pole; the third is the current. The waterfalls need a difference of height, i.e., an upper and a lower part in the landscape, and so on.  

Therefore, the theological expression "Trinity" means "energizing." As Jung has shown in A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity (in CW 11), a God-image that is yet One is unrecognizable. In modern terms we would say that it is unobservable. As Jung shows further, a development from One to Three is the necessary condition for the recognition of the God-image. Because "Trinity" is symbolically equivalent to "energizing," this means that such an energizing is the necessary condition for the recognition of the masculine God-image as well as for the feminine.

The development from One to Three that the Goddess undergoes is therefore an absolutely important one. It guarantees that this feminine God-image can transform into an energetic principle, i.e. into a spiritual principle. Of course it is this development that is symbolically represented in the myth of the redemption of the archetypal feminine principle out of matter. We will see that in Taoism this "other Trinity", this different energy, is the principle of yin, therefore the differentiation into a Trinity is also the necessary condition for the transformation process {yang -> yin} and {yin -> yang}, which lead to the Tao. (See also Neoplatonic and Hermetic alchemy: Eternal infertility versus incarnation and The Seal of Solomon and the Unsolved Problem of Psyche's Complementary Incarnation)

Although this Goddess is a Trinity and therefore an energetic principle, it differs very much from the masculine God-image. After Paracelsus this Goddess is a second creative principle he called Venus/Melusine (see also Paracelsus and the Renewed Image of God). It is co-aeternum, i.e., as eternal as the Christian God. The logical consequence of such a definition is of course, that this feminine deity is a so-called increatum, i.e. not created by Him - what an incredible heretical thought of the Swiss physician.

The World Soul is therefore the origin of a creation principle in the universe that is completely different from the masculine. The latter principle is the so-called creatio ex nihilo – His "big bang". The symbolic image of this "Judeo-Christian big bang" is described in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. It is the archetypal background of the so-called clockwork fantasy, the idea of causality or determinism: The belief that if we find the initial conditions of a process, we can determine any later state of a system exactly. Philosophically seen, it is the horror vision of the freewill’s absence.  

In great contrast, the creation mode of the anima mundi, of the World Soul, is the so-called creatio continua. This principle describes the possibility of a spontaneous creation and incarnation at any time in any place. In a modern language we can say that the creation mode of the Goddess is acausal or indeterministic. This creation and incarnation process happens in matter as well as in the human body, and it is independent of the human will.  

Therefore we can compare the macrocosmic process with the decay of a radioactive atom, which follows the same mode. As I have found out, we can observe such a process also in the microcosm of our body – with the help of my Body Centered Imagination or Symptom Symbol Transformation (see section 10). Perhaps such a process happens just now in you…!  

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Let us briefly recapitulate what I have developed up to this point: In the alchemical opus the masculine God-image, the Christian Trinity, wants to be transformed and complemented by the feminine aspect. The necessary condition for this task is the descent of the Holy Trinity into matter, into the archetypal feminine principle. This development is symbolized by the descent of the alchemical king into the womb of the queen (the Goddess).  

Afterwards, the feminine principle, i.e. matter, develops from the One to the Three, to an Anti-trinity. Because "Trinity" means "energizing" and energizing means spiritualization, the differentiation into an Anti-trinity means also the spiritualization of the archetypal feminine principle, i.e. the redemption of the Goddess out of matter.

Of course, this redemption of the feminine aspect of the God-image completely contradicts the dogma of the Catholic Church. We have seen in addition that it is the human being, which has the challenge of this redemption. Therefore, in alchemy the Christian salvation process was turned around: The alchemist had to help the masculine divinity to descend into matter, to enter the feminine Goddess, i.e. matter or the human body, for the purpose of His and Her redemption and resurrection.  

Thus, the alchemists turned the tables: Each individual human must help, usually without the assistance of the theologians, God in His transformation – as I stressed, an incredible heretical idea, which, however, existed already in the Grail Legend of the 12^th century, in the symbol of the round vessel, a symbol of the feminine deity, which man must find in his life’s quest. We find this thought, too, in the Jewish Kabbalah of Isaak Luria, in which the idea of the redemption of God is even the thread running through the story.  

This old alchemical task will also be a substantial challenge of the modern mystic to fulfill. I hope therefore that I can demonstrate in this short lecture, how this process will be structured.

8.6 The Seal of Solomon as the necessary structure for the redemption process

The descent of God into the womb of the Goddess the Medieval alchemists described as the so-called coniunctio, the Holy Wedding or Hierosgamos. As we can clearly see, it is not a description of the profane sexual act between humans, because in the latter the penis enters the vagina and not the whole man into the womb of the woman. This difference shows us that all the sexual metaphors of this process – be it in Christian Gnosticism, in Medieval alchemy, in the Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism, in the dreams and visions of the Christian mystics, or in the spontaneous products out of the collective unconscious in modern humans – refer to this archetypal process. With the coniunctio we have therefore found the archetype behind the biological sexuality, the psychophysical root of the latter, which describes a future creation and incarnation. Because this realm and the processes are beyond the split in matter and spirit, this incarnation symbolizes not "only" a spiritual one, e.g., new ideas and inventions of mankind’s mind, but an incarnation that happens out of the microcosmic unus mundus of the physical body as well as out of the macrocosmic unus mundus of the material world, the universe.