Mary Magdalene, Red Eggs and Easter Legend recounts that after the resurrection of Jesus, Mary Magdalene travelled to visit the Emperor Tiberius in Rome and greeted him with: “Christ has risen”, whereupon he pointed to an egg on his table and quipped, “Christ has no more risen than that egg is red.” The egg,…
[soliloquy id=”7295″] 1. The Philosophic Egg or Retort (From Adam McClean, creator of the Alchemy Web Site) In this series of elementary meditative exercises, no special postures are required but that in which one is most comfortable, nor are any special breathing rhythms used. Meditation should be undertaken when…
Figure 98, in Psychology and Alchemy C.G. Jung: Eggs in Alchemy “In alchemy the egg stands for the chaos apprehended by the artifex, the prima materia containing the captive world-soul. Out of the egg — symbolized by the round cooking vessel — will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately…
Ophic Egg (Jacob Bryant, 1774) The Philosophical Egg “The egg is a germ of life with a lofty symbolical significance. It is not just a cosmogonic symbol — it is also a “philosophical one”. As the former it is the Orphic Egg, the world’s beginning; as the latter, the philosophical egg of the medieval…
Image: Splendor Solis Emblem 8 Carl Jung on Self-Acceptance From Modern Man in Search of a Soul “The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my…
The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance…
Archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt in our most personal life. “The ‘squaring of the circle’ is one of the many archetypal motifs which form the basic patterns of our dreams and fantasies. But it is distinguished by the fact that it is one of…
“The alchemists saw it in the transformation of the chemical substance. So if one of them sought transformation, he discovered it outside in matter, whose transformation cried out to him, as it were, “I am the transformation!” But some were clever enough to know, “It is my own transformation-not a personal transformation, but the transformation…
(Jung is talking here about the Philosophers’ Stone) “The union of opposites in the stone is possible only when the adept has become One him/herself. The unity of the stone is the equivalent of individuation, by which [we are] made one; we would say that the stone is a projection of the unified self. This…