Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.14)
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.
The Shulamite remains unchanged, as did the old Adam.
And yet Adam Kadmon is born, a non-Christian second Adam, just at the moment when the transformation is expected.
This extraordinary contradiction seems insoluble at first sight.
But it becomes understandable when we consider that the illumination or solificatio of the Shulamite is not the first transformation but
the second, and takes place within.
The subject of transformation is not the empirical man, however much he may identify with the “old Adam,” but Adam the Primordial Man,
the archetype within us.
The black Shulamite herself represents the first transformation: it is the coming to consciousness of the black anima, the Primordial Man’s
feminine aspect.
The second, or solificatio, is the conscious differentiation of the masculine aspect—a far more difficult task.
Every man feels identical with this, though in reality he is not.
There is too much blackness in the archetype for him to put it all down to his own account, and so many good and positive things that he cannot resist the
temptation to identify with them.
It is therefore much easier to see the blackness in projected form: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat”
holds true even of the most enlightened psychology.
But the masculine aspect is as unfathomable as the feminine aspect.
It would certainly not be fitting for the empirical man, no matter how swollen his ego-feelings, to appropriate the whole range of Adam’s heights and depths.
Human being though he is, he has no cause to attribute to himself all the nobility and beauty a man can attain to, just as he would assuredly refuse to accept the guilt for the abjectness and baseness that make man lower than an animal—unless, of course, he were driven by insanity to act out the role of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Par 647.
