— “The prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon.”– “Absorption into the instinctual sphere, therefore, does not and cannot lead to conscious realization and assimilation of instinct, because consciousness struggles in a regular panic against being swallowed up in the primitivity and unconsciousness of sheer instinctuality. This fear is…
You gotta hand it to the Norse myth-makers — a huge serpent eating corpses and gnawing at the root of the World Tree is a bit of a nightmare image. According to Jung, the beginning of psychological work starts with the alchemical stage of the nigredo, the “point of maximum despair.” In images, it is…
from Basil Valentine’s Azoth When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictorial symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in…
In alchemy the lion, the “royal” beast, is a synonym for Mercurius, or, to be more accurate, for a stage in his transformation. He is the warm-blooded form of the devouring, predatory monster who first appears as the dragon. Usually the lion-form succeeds the dragon’s death and eventual dismemberment. … The lion has among other…