Le Quatrième Pentamètre

Battle with self

WON. 

***

The alchemist experienced the Anthropos in a form that was imbued with new vitality, freshness and immediacy, and this is reflected in the enthusiastic tone of the texts. It is therefore understandable that every single detail of the primordial drama would be realized in quite a new sense. 

The nigredo not only brought decay, suffering, death, and the torments of hell visibly before the eyes of the alchemist, it also cast the shadow of its melancholy over his own solitary soul. In the blackness of a despair which was not his own, and of which he was merely the witness, he experienced how it turned into the worm and the poisonous dragon. From inner necessity the dragon destroyed itself (natura naturam vincit) and changed into the lion, and the adept, drawn involuntarily into the drama, then felt the need to cut off its paws (unless there were two lions who devoured one another). The dragon ate its own wings as the eagle did its feathers. 

These grotesque images reflect the conflict of opposites into which the researcher's curiosity had led him. 

His work began with a katabasis, a journey to the underworld as Dante also experienced it, with the difference that the adept's soul was not only impressed by it but radically altered. 

Faust I is an example of this: the transformation of an earnest scholar, through his pact with the devil, into a worldly cavalier and crooked careerist. 

In the case of the fanciful Christian Rosencreutz the descent to Venus led only to his being slightly wounded in the hand by Cupid's arrow. The texts, however, hint at more serious dangers. Olympiodorus says: "Without great pains this work is not perfected; there will be struggles, violence, and war. And all the while the demon Ophiuchos instils negligence, impeding our intentions; everywhere he creeps about, both within and without, causing oversights, anxiety, and unexpected accidents, or else keeping us from the work by harassments and injuries." 

The philosopher Petasios (Petesis), quoted by Olympiodorus, expresses himself even more strongly: "So bedevilled and shameless is the lead that all who wish to investigate it fall into madness through ignorance." 

That this is not just empty talk is shown by other texts, which often emphasize how much the psyche of the laborant was involved in the work. Thus Dorn, commenting on the quotation from Hermes, "All obscurity shall yield before thee," says: For he saith, All obscurity shall yield before thee; he saith not, before the metals. By obscurity is to be understood naught else but the darkness of diseases and sickness of body and mind . . . The author's intention is, in sum, to teach them that are adepts in spagyric medicine how with a very small dose, such as is suggested by a grain of mustard seed, however it be taken, to cure all diseases indifferently, by reason of the simplicity of union effective in the medicine, so that no variety of the multitude of maladies may resist it. But manifold as are the obscurities of the weaknesses of the mind, as insanity [vesania], mania, frenzy [furia], stupidity [stoliditas], and others like, by which the spirit [animus] is darkened and impaired, yet by this single spagyric medicine they are perfectly cured. And it not only restores health to the spirit [animo], but also sharpens the ingenuity and mind of men, that all things may be miraculously easy for them in understanding [intellectu] and perception [perceptu], and nothing be hid from them which is in the upper or lower world. The sentence from the "Tabula smaragdina," "He will conquer every subtle thing," Dorn interprets as follows: the subtle thing is Mercurius, or the "spiritual obscurities that occupy the mind"; in other words it is spirit. Hence the darkness is a demon that possesses the spirit (as in Olympiodorus) and can be cast out by the work ("it expels every subtle thing"). Sickness is an imprinting of evil (impressio mall) and is healed through the "repression of evil by the action of the true and universal centre upon the body." This centre is the unarms or the One, in which the unitary man (unicus homo) is rooted. If, therefore, he is to recover from his bodily and spiritual sicknesses, "let him study to know and to understand exactly the centre, and apply himself wholly thereto, and the centre will be freed from all imperfections and diseases, that it may be restored to its state of original monarchy."[494] These passages from Dorn refer less to the dangers of the work than to the healing through the outcome of the work. But the means of healing come from Mercurius, that spirit of whom the philosophers said: "Take the old black spirit, and destroy therewith the bodies until they are changed." The destruction of the bodies is depicted as a battle, as in Sermo 42 of the Turba: "Excite war between the copper and the quicksilver, since they strive to perish and first become corrupt." "Excite the battle between them and destroy the body of the copper, till it becomes powder." This battle is the separatio, divisio, putre-factio, mortificatio, and solutio, which all represent the original chaotic state of conflict between the four hostile elements. Dorn describes this vicious, warlike quaternity allegorically as the four-horned serpent, which the devil, after his fall from heaven, sought to "infix" in the mind of man. Dorn puts the motif of war on a moral plane and thereby approximates it to the modern concept of psychic dissociation, which, as we know, lies at the root of the psychogenic psychoses and neuroses. In the "furnace of the cross" and in the fire, says the "Aquarium sapientum," "man, like the earthly gold, attains to the true black Raven's Head; that is, he is utterly disfigured and is held in derision by the world, and this not only for forty days and nights, or years, but often for the whole duration of his life; so much so that he experiences more heartache in his life than comfort and joy, and more sadness than pleasure . . . Through this spiritual death his soul is entirely freed." Evidently the nigredo brought about a deformation and a psychic suffering which the author compared to the plight of the unfortunate Job. Job's unmerited misfortune, visited on him by God, is the suffering of God's servant and a préfiguration of Christ's Passion. One can see from this how the figure of the Son of Man gradually lodged itself in the ordinary man who had taken the "work" upon his own shoulders. 

~ C.G. Jung, CW 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis, pars. 493f.