Mysterium Coniuctionis CW 14; Quotations

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Carl Jung and “Mysterium Coniunctionis” – YouTube

Carl Jung: CW 14 “Mysterium Coniunctionis”

Alchemy has performed for me the great and invaluable service of providing material in which my experience could find sufficient room, and has thereby made it possible for me to describe the individuation process at least in its essential aspects. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 792.

Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 258.

Any attempt to determine the nature of the unconscious state runs up against the same difficulties as atomic physics: the very act of observation alters the object observed. Consequently, there is at present no way of objectively determining the real nature of the unconscious. ~ Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 88.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. ~Carl Jung; CW 14; Para 147.

Egocentricity is a necessary attribute of consciousness and is also its specific sin.” ~Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 364.

The earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 28, note 194.

In the final analysis the idea of an unus mundus [one world] is founded, on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity … . Everything divided and different belongs to one and the same world …. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, pars. 767-770

Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 330.

Wisdom is never violent: where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 334.

… the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.” ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Par. 778.

Anthropos: Original or primordial man, an archetypal image of wholeness in alchemy, religion and Gnostic philosophy. There is in the unconscious an already existing wholeness, the “homo totus” of the Western and the Chên-yên (true man) of Chinese alchemy, the round primordial being who represents the greater man within, the Anthropos, who is akin to God. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, par. 152.

The third degree of [Alchemical] conjunction is universal: it is relation or identity of the personal with the supra-personal atman, and of the individual tao with the universal tao. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 762.

As Dorn says, you will never make the One unless you become one yourself. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 753.

It is a psychic fact that this fantasy is happening, and it is as real as you —as a psychic entity—are real. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 753.

But if you recognize your own involvement you yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions, just as if you were one of the fantasy figures, or rather, as if the drama being enacted before your eyes were real. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 753.

If we can successfully develop that function which I have called transcendent, the disharmony ceases and we can then enjoy the favorable side of the unconscious. The unconscious then gives us all the encouragement and help that a bountiful nature can shower upon a man. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 502.

Things are different with Luna: every month she is darkened and extinguished; she cannot hide this from anybody, not even from herself. She knows that this same Luna is now bright and now dark — but who has ever heard of a dark sun? We call this quality of Luna “women’s closeness to nature,” and the fiery brilliance and hot air that plays round the surface of things we like to call “the masculine mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 331.

The synthesis of the elements is effected by means of the circular movement in time (circulatio, rota) of the Sun through the houses of the Zodiac. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 7.

If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our pscyhic life are separated. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 163.

The Latin translation “serpent” for “witch” is connected with the widespread primitive idea that the spirits of the dead are snakes. This fits in with the offering of goat’s blood, since the sacrifice of black animals to the chthonic numina was quite customary. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Par 78.

If you prove receptive to this “call of the wild,” the longing for fulfilment will quicken the sterile wilderness of your soul as rain quickens the dry earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 190.

Love, in the sense of concupiscentia, is the dynamism that most infallibly brings the unconscious to light. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 199

Concepts are coined and negotiable values; images are life. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 226

But one is not a number; the first number is two, and with it multiplicity and reality begin. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 659

Only the mystics bring creativity into religion. That is probably why they can feel the presence and the workings of the Holy Ghost, and why they are nearer to the experience of the brotherhood in Christ. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 530

He [Man] is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 194

Only man as an individual being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 194

They [Patients] know, perhaps, what their faith ought to mean to them, but they have found to their cost how little can be achieved with will and good intentions if the unconscious does not lend a hand. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 751

In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 623.

Since the object of this endeavor [Alchemy] was seen outside as well as inside, as both physical and psychic, the work extended as it were through the whole of nature, and its goal consisted in a symbol which had an empirical and at the same time a transcendental aspect. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 700.

For desire only burns in order to burn its self out, and in and from this fire arises the true living spirit which generates life according to its own laws, and is not blinded by the shortsightedness of our intentions or the crude presumption of our superstitious belief in the will. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 192

The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fuhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 83

Nobody can know himself and differentiate himself from his neighbours if he has a distorted picture of him, just as no one can understand his neighbour if he has no relationship to himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 739

The one-after-another is a bearable prelude to the deeper knowledge of the side-by-side, for this is an incomparably more difficult problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 206

Naturally, modern ignorance of and prejudice against intimate psychic experiences dismiss them as psychic anomalies and put them in psychiatric pigeon-holes without making the least attempt to understand them. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 547.

If we now recall to what a degree the soul has humanized and realized itself, we can judge how very much it today expresses the body also, with which it is coexistent. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 544.

Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in “the chains” of Physis, and she desires “beyond physical necessity.” She must be called back by the “counsel of the spirit” from her lostness in matter and the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 472.

We must enter into our mind [mentem], which is the eternal spiritual image of God within us, and this is to enter into the truth of the Lord; we must pass beyond ourselves to the eternal and preeminently spiritual, and to that which is above us . . . this is the threefold illumination of the one day. ~St. Bonaventure; ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 505.

It would be a great step forward, in my opinion, if at least it were recognized how far the truth of dogma is rooted in the human psyche, which is not the work of human hands. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 489

The Sol who personifies the feminine unconscious is not the sun of the day but corresponds rather to the Sol niger. . . ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 229

Everything that happens, however, happens in the same “one world” and is part of it. For this reason events must have an a priori aspect of unity. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 662.

Transcendental background is as certain as our own existence, but it is equally certain that the direct perception of the archetypal world inside us is just as doubtfully correct as that of the physical world outside us. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 787

The ego, ostensibly the thing we know most about, is in fact a highly complex affair full of unfathomable obscurities. Indeed, one could even define it as a relatively constant personification of the unconscious itself, or as the Schopenhauerian mirror in which the unconscious becomes aware of its own face ~ Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 129.

All the true things must change and only that which changes remains true. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 503

Any attempt to determine the nature of the unconscious state runs up against the same difficulties as atomic physics the very act of observation alters the object observed. Consequently, there is at present no way of objectively determining the real nature of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 88

This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worthwhile, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 706

Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 258

Everything psychic is pregnant with the future. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 53

The creative mystic was ever a cross for the Church, but it is to him that we owe what is best in humanity. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 531

If Christian doctrine is able to assimilate the fateful impact of psychology, that is a sign of vitality, for life is assimilation. Anything that ceases to assimilate dies. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 455

Concepts are coined and negotiable values; images are life. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 226

And yet the attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave m.an victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 289

The unconscious has a thousand ways of snuffing out a meaningless existence with surprising swiftness. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 675

There are murderers who feel that their execution is condign punishment, and suicides who go to their death in triumph. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 149

Bodies die, but can something invisible and incorporeal disappear? ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 53

Man himself is partly empirical, partly transcendental . . . Also, we do not know whether what we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical or psychic. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 765

Unequivocal statements can be made only in regard to immanent objects; transcendental ones can be expressed only by paradox. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 715

Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 737

Beheading is significant symbolically as the separation of the “understanding” from the “great suffering and grief” which nature inflicts on the soul. It is an emancipation of the “cogitatio” which is situated in the head, a freeing of the soul from the “trammels of nature.” Its purpose is to bring about, as in Dorn, a unio mentalis “in the overcoming of the body.” ~Carl Jung, CW 14, para 730.

The aim of this separation was to free the mind from the influence of the “bodily appetites and the heart’s affections,” and to establish a spiritual position which is supraordinate to the turbulent sphere of the body. This leads at first to a dissociation of the personality and a violation of the merely natural man. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 671.

This preliminary step, in itself a clear blend of Stoic philosophy and Christian psychology, is indispensable for the differentiation of consciousness. Modern psychotherapy makes use of the same procedure when it objectifies the affects and instincts and confronts consciousness with them. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 672.

One naturally asks oneself what fear if fear it is prevents him from taking the next step, the transition to an attitude of judgment. There are sufficient reasons for fear and uncertainty because voluntary participation in the fantasy is alarming to a naive mind and amounts to an anticipated psychosis. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 755

The Stone was called “orphan” because of its uniqueness“it was never seen elsewhere”and it was said to be in the Emperor’s crown. It was “wine-coloured” and sometimes shone in the night, “but nowadays it does not shine [any more] in the darkness.” As Albertus Magnus was an authority on alchemy, he may have been the direct source both for Dorn and for Petrus Bonus.“Orphan” as the name of a gem may therefore mean something like the modern “solitaire”a very apt name for the unique lapis philosophorum. Apart from Dorn and Petrus Bonus, it seems that this name is found only in the Carmina Heliodori. There it refers to the(homeless orphan) who is slain at the beginning of the work for purposes of transformation ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 13

All these synonyms allude to the virginal or maternal quality of the prima materia, which exists without a man and yet is the “matter of all things.” Above all, the prima materia is the mother of the lapis, the filius philosophorum. Michael Maier mentions the treatise of an anonymous author Delphinas, which he dates to some time before 1447. He stresses that this author insisted particularly on the mother-son incest ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 14

Our starting-point for these remarks was the designation of the lapis as “orphan,” which Dorn mentions apparently out of the blue when discussing the union of opposites. The material we have adduced shows what an archetypal drama of death and rebirth lies hidden in the coniunctio, and what immemorial human emotions clash together in this problem. It is the moral task of alchemy to bring the feminine, maternal background of the masculine psyche, seething with passions, into harmony with the principle of the spirit truly a labour of Hercules! ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 135

Nothing in us ever remains quite contradicted, and consciousness can take up no position which will not call up, somewhere in the dark corners of the psyche, a negation or a compensatory effect, approval or resentment. This process of coming to terms with the “Other” in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted. ~Carl Jung, CW 14: Page 706

There are two offshoots from all the Aeons, having neither beginning nor end, from one root, and this root is a certain Power, an invisible and incomprehensible Silence. One of them appears on high and is a great power, the mind of the whole, who rules all things and is a male; the other below is a great Thought, a female giving birth to all things. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Page 136.

Woman’s consciousness has a lunar rather than a solar character. Its light is the “mild” light of the moon, which merges things together rather than separates them. It does not show up objects in all their pitiless discreteness and separateness, like the harsh, glaring light of day, but blends in a deceptive shimmer the near and the far, magically transforming little things into big things, high into low, softening all colour into a bluish haze, and blending the nocturnal landscape into an unsuspected unity. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 223

A Christian of today no longer ought to cling obstinately to a one-sided credo, but should face the fact that Christianity has been in a state of schism for four hundred years, with the result that every single Christian has a split in his syche. Naturally this lesion cannot be treated or healed if everyone insists on his own standpoint. Behind those barriers he can rejoice in his absolute and consistent convictions and deem himself above the conflict, but outside them he keeps the conflict alive by his intransigence and continues to deplore the pig-headedness and stiff-neckedness of everybody else. It seems as if Christianity had been from the outset the religion of chronic squabblers, and even now it does everything in its power never to let the squabbles rest. Remarkably enough, it never stops preaching the gospel of neighbourly love. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 257

Just as a man has a body which is no different in principle from that of an animal, so also his psychology has a whole series of lower stores in which the spectres from humanity’s past epochs still dwell, when the animal souls from the age of Pithecanthropus and the hominids, then the “psyche” of the cold-blooded saurians, and, deepest down of all, the transcendental mystery and paradox of the sympathetic and parasympathetic psychoid systems. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 279

One cannot and may not think about an object held to be indisputable. One can only assert it, and for this reason there can be no reconciliation between the divergent assertions. Thus Christianity, the religion of brotherly love, offers the lamentable spectacle of one great and many small schisms, each faction helplessly caught in the toils of its own unique rightness. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 786

That a psychological approach to these matters draws man more into the centre of the picture as the measure of all things cannot be denied. But this gives him a significance which is not without justification. The two great world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, have, each in its own way, accorded man a central place, and Christianity has stressed this tendency still further by the dogma that God became very man. No psychology in the world could vie with the dignity that God himself has accorded to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 789

The physical world and the perceptual world are two very different things. Knowing this we have no encouragement whatever to think that our metaphysical picture of the world corresponds to the transcendental reality. Moreover, the statements made about the latter are so boundlessly varied that with the best of intentions we cannot know who is right. The denominational religions recognized this long ago and in consequence each of them claims that it is the only true one and, on top of this, that it is not merely a human truth but the truth directly inspired and revealed by God. Every theologian speaks simply of “God,” by which he intends it to be understood that his “god” is the God. But one speaks of the paradoxical God of the Old Testament, another of the incarnate God of Love, a third of the God who has a heavenly bride, and so on, and each criticizes the other but never himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 781

If the demand for self-knowledge is willed by fate and is refused, this negative attitude may end in real death. The demand would not have come to this person had he still been able to strike out on some promising by-path. But he is caught in a blind alley from which only self-knowledge can extricate him. If he refuses this then no other way is open to him. Usually he is not conscious of his situation, either, and the more unconscious he is the more he is at the mercy of unforeseen dangers: he cannot get out of the way of a car quickly enough, in climbing a mountain he misses his foothold somewhere, out skiing he thinks he can negotiate a tricky slope, and in an illness he suddenly loses the courage to live. The unconscious has a thousand ways of snuffing out a meaningless existence with surprising swiftness. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 675

In the domain of pathology I believe I have observed cases where the tendency of the unconscious would have to be regarded, by all human standards, as essentially destructive. But it may not be out of place to reflect that the self-destruction of what is hopelessly inefficient or evil can be understood in a higher sense as another attempt at compensation. There are murderers who feel that their execution is condign punishment, and suicides who go to their death in triumph. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 149

Just as a lapis Philosophorum, with its miraculous powers, was never produced, so psychic wholeness will never be attained empirically, as consciousness is too narrow and too one-sided to comprehend the full inventory of the psyche. Always we shall have to begin again from the beginning. From ancient times the adept knew that he was concerned with the “res simplex,” and the modern man too will find by experience that the work does not prosper without the greatest simplicity. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 759

In general, meditation and contemplation have a bad reputation in the West. They are regarded as a particularly reprehensible form of idleness or as pathological narcissism. No one has time for self-knowledge or believes that it could serve any sensible purpose. Also, one knows in advance that it is not worth the trouble to know oneself, for any fool can know what he is. We believe exclusively in doing and do not ask about the doer, who is judged only by achievements that have collective value. The general public seems to have taken cognizance of the existence of the unconscious psyche more than the so-called experts, but still nobody has drawn any conclusions from the fact that Western man confronts himself as a stranger and that self-knowledge is one of the most difficult and exacting of the arts. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 709

The limitations of knowledge which leave so many incomprehensible and wonderful things unexplained do not, however, exempt us from the task of trying to understand the revelations of the spirit that are embodied in dogma, otherwise there is a danger that the treasures of supreme knowledge which lie hidden in it will evaporate into nothing and become a bloodless phantom, an easy prey for all shallow rationalists. It would be a great step forward, in my opinion, if at least it were recognized how far the truth of dogma is rooted in the human psyche, which is not the work of human hands. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 489

Although contemporary man believes that he can change himself without limit, or be changed through external influences, the astounding, or rather the terrifying, fact remains that despite civilization and Christian education, he is still, morally, as much in bondage to his instincts as an animal, and can therefore fall victim at any moment to the beast within. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para xviii

Only the living presence of the eternal images can lend the human psyche a dignity which makes it morally possible for a man to stand by his own soul, and be convinced that it is worth his while to persevere with himself. Only then will he realize that the conflict is in him, that the discord and tribulation are his riches, which should not be squandered by attacking others; and that, if fate should exact a debt from him in the form of guilt, it is a debt to himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 511

Disappointment, always a shock to the feelings, is not only the mother of bitterness but the strongest possible incentive to a differentiation of feeling. The failure of a pet plan, the disappointing behaviour of someone one loves, can supply the impulse either for a more or less brutal outburst of affect or for a modification and adjustment of feeling, and hence for its higher development. This culminates in wisdom if feeling is supplemented by reflection and rational insight. Wisdom is never violent where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 334

All the worlds that have ever existed before man were physically there. But they were a nameless happening, not a definite actuality, for there did not yet exist that minimal concentration of the psychic factor, which was also present, to speak the word that outweighed the whole of Creation That is the world, and this is I! That was the first morning of the world, the first sunrise after the primal darkness, when that inchoately conscious complex, the ego, knowingly sundered subject and object, and thus precipitated the world and itself into definite existence, giving it and itself a voice and a name. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 129

It needs a very moon-like consciousness indeed to hold a large family together regardless of all the differences, and to talk and act in such a way that the harmonious relation of the parts to the whole is not only not disturbed but is actually enhanced. And where the ditch is too deep, a ray of moonlight smoothes it over. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 227

The moon-nature is its own best camouflage, as at once becomes apparent when a woman’s unconscious masculinity breaks through into her consciousness and thrusts her Eros aside. Then it is all up with her charm and the mitigating half-darkness; she takes a stand on some point or other and captiously defends it, although each barbed remark tears her own flesh, and with brutal short-sightedness she jeopardizes everything that is the dearest goal of womanhood. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 228

The Sol who personifies the feminine unconscious is not the sun of the day but corresponds rather to the Sol niger. . .It is as void of light and charm as the gentling moonlight is all heavenly peace and magic. It protests too much that it is a light, because it is no light, and a great truth, because it invariably misses the mark, and a high authority, which nevertheless is always wrong, or is only as right as the blind tom-cat who tried to catch imaginary bats in broad daylight, but one day caught a real one by mistake and thereafter became completely unteachable. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 229

The view that good and evil are spiritual principles outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. Even a life dedicated to God is still lived by an ego, which speaks of an ego and asserts an ego in God’s despite, which does not instantly merge itself with God but reserves for itself a freedom and a will which it sets up outside God and against him. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 206

We do not devalue statements that originally were intended to be metaphysical when we demonstrate their psychic nature; on the contrary, we confirm their factual character. But, by treating them as psychic phenomena, we remove them from the inaccessible realm of metaphysics, about which nothing verifiable can be said, and this disposes of the impossible question as to whether they are “true” or not. We take our stand simply and solely on the facts, recognizing that the archetypal structure of the unconscious will produce, over and over again and irrespective of tradition, those figures which reappear in the history of all epochs and all peoples, and will endow them with the same significance and numinosity that have been theirs from the beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 558

Generally the proximity as well as the absence of women has a specifically constellating effect on the unconscious of a man. When a woman is absent or unattainable the unconscious produces in him a certain femininity which expresses itself in a variety of ways and gives rise to numerous conflicts. The more one-sided his conscious, masculine, spiritual attitude the more inferior, banal, vulgar, and biological will be the compensating femininity of the unconscious. He will, perhaps, not be conscious at all of its dark manifestations, because they have been so overlaid with saccharine sentimentality that he not only believes the humbug himself but enjoys putting it over on other people. An avowedly biological or coarse-minded attitude to women produces an excessively lofty valuation of femininity in the unconscious, where it is pleased to take the form of Sophia or of the Virgin. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 221

Just as a man has a body which is no different in principle from that of an animal, so also his psychology has a whole series of lower storeys in which the spectres from humanity’s past epochs still dwell, when the animal souls from the age of Pithecanthropus and the hominids, then the “psyche” of the cold-blooded saurians, and, deepest down of all, the transcendental mystery and paradox of the sympathetic and parasympathetic psychoid systems. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 279

Not only in the psychic man is there something unknown, but also in the physical. We should be able to include this unknown quantity in a total picture of man, but we cannot. Man himself is partly empirical, partly transcendental . . . Also, we do not know whether what we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical or psychic. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 765

The tendency to separate the opposites as much as possible and to strive for singleness of meaning is absolutely necessary for clarity of consciousness, since discrimination is of its essence. But when the separation is carried so far that the complementary opposite is lost sight of, and the blackness of the whiteness, the evil of the good, the depth of the heights, and so on, is no longer seen, the result is one-sided ness, which is then compensated from the unconscious without our help. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 470

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter’s nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 232

This split in the masculine psyche and the regular darkening of the moon in woman together explain the remarkable fact that the woman is accused of all the darkness in a man, while he himself basks in the thought that he is a veritable fount of vitality and illumination for all the females in his environment. Actually, he would be better advised to shroud the brilliance of his mind in the profoundest doubt. It is not difficult for this type of mind (which besides other things is a great trickster like Mercurius) to admit a host of sins in the most convincing way, and even to combine it with a spurious feeling of ethical superiority without in the least approximating to a genuine insight. This can never be achieved without the participation of feeling; but the intellect admits feeling only when it is convenient ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 332

The novilunium of woman is a source of countless disappointments for man which easily turn to bitterness, though they could equally well be a source of wisdom if they were understood. Naturally this is possible only if he is prepared to acknowledge his black sun [Sol niger], that is, his shadow ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 332

Encounter with the unconscious is almost by definition a wounding defeat. In Mysterium Coniunctionis we find one of the most important sentences that Jung ever wrote: “The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego” ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 778.

Nevertheless, we possess witnesses enough to the high esteem in which they held their science and to the wonderment which the mystery of matter instilled into them. For they discoveredto keep to sulphur as our examplein this substance, which was one of the customary attributes of hell and the devil, as well as in the poisonous, crafty, and treacherous Mercurius, an analogy with the most sacrosanct figure of their religion ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 147

They therefore imbued this arcanum with symbols intended to characterize its malicious, dangerous, and uncanny nature, choosing precisely those which in the positive sense were used for Christ in the patristic literature. These were the snake, the lion, the eagle, fire, cloud, shadow, fish, stone, the unicorn and the rhinoceros, the dragon, the night-raven, the man encompassed by a woman, the hen, water, and many others ~Carl Jung, CW 14 Par 147

This strange usage is explained by the fact that the majority of the patristic allegories have in addition to their positive meaning a negative one. Thus in St. Eucherius 168 the rapacious wolf “in its good part” signifies the apostle Paul, but “in its bad part” the devil ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 147

In order to attain this union, they tried not only to visualize the opposites together but to express them in the same breath. Characteristically, the paradoxes cluster most thickly round the arcane substance, which was believed to contain the opposites in uncombined form as the prima materia, and to amalgamate them as the lapis Philosophorum. Thus the lapis is called on the one hand base, cheap, immature, volatile, and on the other hand precious, perfect, and solid; or the prima materia is base and noble, or precious and parvi momenti (of little moment) ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 36

The materia is visible to all eyes, the whole world sees it, touches it, loves it, and yet no one knows it. “This stone therefore is no stone,” says the Turba, “that thing is cheap and costly, dark, hidden, and known to everyone, having one name and many names.” The stone is “thousand-named” like the gods of the mystery religions, the arcane substance is “One and All”.In the treatise of Komarios, where “the philosopher Komarios teaches the Philosophy to Cleopatra,” it is said: “He showed with his hand the unity of the whole.” Pelagios asks: “Why speak ye of the manifold matter? The substance of natural things is one, and of one nature that which conquers all” ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 36