Apart from its lunar wetness and its terrestrial nature, the most outstanding properties of salt are bitterness and wisdom.
As in the double quaternio of the elements and qualities, earth and water have coldness in common, so bitterness and wisdom would form a pair of opposites with a third thing between.
The factor common to both, however incommensurable the two ideas may seem, is, psychologically, the function of feeling.
Tears, sorrow, and disappointment are bitter, but wisdom is the comforter in all psychic suffering.
Indeed, bitterness and wisdom form a pair of alternatives: where there is bitterness wisdom is lacking, and where wisdom is there can be no bitterness. Salt, as the carrier of this fateful alternative, is co-ordinated with the nature of woman.
The masculine, solar nature in the right half of the quaternio knows neither coldness, nor a shadow, nor heaviness, melancholy, etc., because, so long as all goes well, it identifies as closely as possible with consciousness, and that as a rule is the idea which one has of oneself.
In this idea the shadow is usually missing: first because nobody likes to admit to any inferiority, and second because logic forbids something white to be called black.
A good man has good qualities, and only the bad man has bad qualities.
For reasons of prestige we pass over the shadow in complete silence.
A famous example of masculine prejudice is Nietzsche’s Superman, who scorns compassion and fights against the ”Ugliest Man”—the ordinary man that everyone is.
The shadow must not be seen, it must be denied, repressed, or twisted into something quite extraordinary.
The sun is always shining and everything smiles back.
There is no room for any prestige-diminishing weakness, so the sol niger is never seen. Only in solitary hours is its presence feared. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 246, Para 330.
