The Inscriptions on the Stone at Bollingen In Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live “in modest harmony with nature.” Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote future. Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play are close together.In 1950 I made…
Link: Carl Jung: Eggs and Alchemy
Merlin Tutoring Arthur, 14th Century Merlin and Mercurius Merlin represents an attempt by the medieval unconscious to create a parallel figure to Parsifal. Parsifal is a Christian hero, and Merlin, son of the devil and a pure virgin, is his dark brother. In the twelfth century, when the legend arose, there were as yet…
From the University of Glasgow: “Rosarium Philosophorum” From Collected Works 16: The Mercurial Fountain This picture goes straight to the heart of alchemical symbolism, for it is an attempt to depict the mysterious basis of the opus. It is a quadratic quaternity characterized by the four stars in the four corners. These are the four…
Carl Jung talks about the alchemical Mercurius Many treatises define Mercurius simply as fire. He is ignis elementaris noster naturalis ignis certissimus, which again indicates his “philosophic” nature. The aqua mercurialis is even a divine fire. This fire is “highly vaporous” (vaporosus). Indeed, Mercurius is really the only fire in the whole procedure. He is…
“We would well to think of ego-conscious as surrounded by little luminosities.” The hypothesis of multiple luminosities rests partly,as we have seen, on quasi-conscious states of the unconscious contents, and partly on the incidence of certain images which must be regarded as symbolical. They are to be found in the dreams and visual fantasies…
The Rosarium Philosophorum is a sixteenth century alchemical treatise, with a series of twenty woodcuts. Jung’s comments on the first image, the image with the fountain, include the following: This fluid substance, with all its paradoxical qualities, really signifies the unconscious which as been projected on to it. The “sea” is its…
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always…
[soliloquy id=”7398″] Ensos and the Ouroboros “The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. The Ouroboros has been said to have a meaning of infinity or…