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An interpretation of the four wheels as the quadriga and vehicle of divinity is found in a window medallion by Suger, the twelfth-century maker of stained glass for the Abbey of Saint-Denis.
The chariot which is depicted bears the inscription “QUADRIGE AMINADAB,”referring to the Song of Songs 6: 11 (DV): “My soul troubled me for the chariots of Aminadab.”
God the Father stands on a four-wheeled chariot holding the crucifix before him. In the corners of the medallion are the four emblems of the evangelists, the Christian continuation of Ezekiel’s winged creatures.
The four gospels form, as it were, a quaternary podium on which the Redeemer stands.
It is evident that the speaker is the feminine personification of the prima materia in the nigredo state.
Psychologically this dark figure is the unconscious anima. In this condition she corresponds to the nefesh of the Cabalists.
She is “desire”; for as Knorr von Rosenroth trenchantly remarks: “The mother is nothing but the inclination of the father for the lower.”
The blackness comes from Eve’s sin. Sulamith (the Shulamite) and Eve (Hawa, earth) are contaminated into a single figure, who contains in herself the first Adam, like the mother her child, and at the same time awaits the second Adam, i.e., Adam before the Fall, the perfect Original Man, as her lover and bridegroom.
She hopes to be freed by him from her blackness.
Here again we encounter the mysticism of the Song of Songs as in the Aurora consurgens I.
Jewish gnosis (Cabala) combines with Christian mysticism: sponsus and sponsa are called on the one hand Tifereth and Malchuth and on the other Christ and the Church.
The mysticism of the Song of Songs196 appeared in Jewish-Gnostic circles during the third and fourth centuries, as is proved by the fragments of a treatise called Shiur Koma (”The Measure of the Body”).
It concerns a “mysticism only superficially Judaicized by references to the description of the Beloved in the Song of Songs.”
The figure of Tifereth belongs to the Sefiroth system, which is conceived to be a tree.
Tifereth occupies the middle position. Adam Kadmon is either the whole tree or is thought of as The black Shulamite in our text corresponds to Malchuth as a widow, who awaits union with Tifereth and hence the restoration of the original wholeness.
Accordingly, Adam Kadmon here takes the place of Tifereth.
He is mentioned in Philo and in the midrashic tradition.
From the latter source comes the distinction between the heavenly and earthly Adam in I Cor. 15 : 47: “The first man was of the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven, heavenly” (DV), and verse 45: “The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (DV).
Thus the original hylic psychic man is contrasted with the later pneumatic man. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 592
I must beg the reader’s indulgence for apparently splitting hairs and harping somewhat pedantically on this little defect in the style of a none too careful author.
But it is more than a question of a mere slip of the pen: a text that is riddled with ambiguities, that sets up the most unexpected relationships (Adam and the Shulamite!) and blends together the most heterogeneous situations, has unquestionable affinities with the structure of a dream and consequently necessitates a careful examination of its figures.
A cliché like “the old Adam,” which can have no other meaning, does not occur in a dream-text without a very good reason, even though the author might have excused it as a mere “slip.”
Even if—as seems to be the case here—he understood the “old” Adam as the “Ur-” or “original” Adam, he was compelled by some obscure intention to pick on “the old Adam,” which in this context is thoroughly ambiguous.
Had it occurred in a real dream it would be a technical blunder for the interpreter to overlook this ostensible slip.
As we know, these quid pro quos invariably happen at the critical places, where two contrary tendencies cross. ~Carl Jung, CW 14 Para 598
The “old” Adam, evidently, can “come forth again” from the Shulamite, the black mother, only because he had once got into her in some way.
But that can only have been the old, sinful Adam, for the blackness of the Shulamite is an expression for sin, the original sin, as the text shows.
Behind this idea lies the archetype of the Anthropos who had fallen under the power of Physis, but it seems doubtful whether our author had any conscious knowledge of this myth.
Had he really been familiar with Cabalistic thought he would have known that Adam Kadmon, the spiritual First Man, was an “Idea” in the Platonic sense, which could never be confused with the sinful man.
By his equation “old Adam” = Adam Kadmon the author has contaminated two opposites.
The interpretation of this passage must therefore be: from the black Shulamite comes forth the antithesis “old Adam”: Adam Kadmon.
Her obvious connection with the earth as the mother of all living things makes it clear that her son was the sinful Adam, but not Adam Kadmon, who, as we have seen, is an emanation of En Soph.
Nevertheless, by contaminating the two, the text makes both of them issue from the Shulamite.
The “old” Adam and the Primordial Man appear to be identical, and the author could excuse himself by saying that by “old” he meant the first or original Adam—a point which it is not easy to deny. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 600
The appearance of Adam Kadmon has characteristic consequences for the Shulamite: it brings about a solificatio, an illumination of the “inwards of the head.”
This is a veiled but, for the psychology of alchemy, typical allusion to the “transfiguration”(glorificatio) of the adept or of his inner man.
For Adam is “interior homo noster,” the Primordial Man in us.
Seen in the light of the above remarks, Eleazar’s text assumes a by no means uninteresting aspect and, since its train of thought is characteristic of the basic ideas of alchemy, a meaning with many facets.
It depicts a situation of distress corresponding to the alchemical nigredo: the blackness of guilt has covered the bridal earth as with black paint.
The Shulamite comes into the same category as those black goddesses (Isis, Artemis, Parvati, Mary) whose names mean “earth.”
Eve, like Adam, ate of the tree of knowledge and thereby broke into the realm of divine privileges—”ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” In other words she inadvertently discovered the possibility of moral consciousness, which until then had been outside man’s range.
As a result, a polarity was torn open with momentous consequences.
There was a sundering of earth from heaven, the original paradise was shut down, the glory of the First Man was extinguished, Malchuth became a widow, the fiery yang went back aloft, and the damp yin enveloped humanity with darkness, degenerated through ever-increasing wantonness, and finally swelled into the black waters of the Deluge, which threatened to drown every living thing but on the other hand could be understood more hopefully as an ablution of the blackness.
Noah, too, appears in a different light: he is no longer seen as someone running away from the catastrophe but as Lord of the Waters, the minister of the ablution.
This operation does not seem to be enough, however, for the Shulamite promptly gets herself into the opposite kind of pickle—into the dry desert, where, like the children of Israel, she is menaced by evil in the form of poisonous serpents.
This is an allusion to the tribulations of the Exodus, which in a sense was a repetition of the expulsion from paradise, since bidding farewell to the fleshpots of Egypt was quite as painful a prospect as the stony ground from which our first parents had to wrest a living in the sweat of their brows.
But even with this last extremity
the goal is not reached, for the Shulamite has still to be fixed to a black cross.
The idea of the cross points beyond the simple antithesis to a double antithesis, i.e., to a quaternio.
To the mind of the alchemist this meant primarily the intercrossing elements:
or the four qualities:
We know that this fastening to a cross denotes a painful state of suspension, or a tearing asunder in the four directions.
The alchemists therefore set themselves the task of reconciling the warring elements and reducing them to unity.
In our text this state is abolished when the distressing blackness is washed off with “wretchedness and vinegar.”
This is an obvious allusion to the “hyssop and gall” which Christ was given to drink.
In the oft-quoted text of Maier, “wretchedness and vinegar” stand for the melancholia of the nigredo, as contrasted with the “joy and gladness” of the redeemed state.
The washing with wretchedness and vinegar finally brings about the whitening as well as a solificatio of the “inwards of the head,” presumably the brain or even the soul.
We can only interpret this as meaning that the Shulamite experienced a transformation similar to Parvati’s, who, saddened by her blackness, was given a golden skin by the gods.
Here we must emphasize that it is the lapis or hermaphrodite which, as the god who is quartered or torn asunder or crucified on the Four, represents and suffers the discord of the elements, and at the same time brings about the union of the Four and besides that is identical with the product of the union.
The alchemists could not help identifying their Primordial Man with Christ, for whom our author substitutes Adam Kadmon.
Since sun and gold are equivalent concepts in alchemy, the solificatio means that the “inwards of the head”—whatever we are to understand by that—are transformed into light, or “Marez,” the precious white earth.
The Shulamite’s heart, too, will shine “like a carbuncle.”
From the time of the Middle Ages the carbuncle was regarded as a synonym for the lapis.
Here the allegory is transparent: as the head is illuminated, so the heart burns in love.
The difference between Parvati and the Shulamite is, therefore, that whereas Parvati is transformed outwardly the Shulamite is transformed inwardly.
Outwardly she remains as black as ever.
Unlike the Shulamite of the Song of Songs, whose skin is “swarthy,” our Shulamite declares that her blackness “clings” to her as if painted on, and that one has only to disrobe her to bring her “inner beauty” to light.
By the sin of Eve she is plunged, as it were, in ink, in the “tincture,” and blackened, just as in Islamic legend the precious stone that Allah gave Adam was blackened by his sin.
If the poison of the curse is taken from her -which will obviously happen when the Beloved appears—then her “innermost seed,” her “first birth,” will come forth.
According to the text this birth can refer only to the appearance of Adam Kadmon.
He is the only one who loves her despite her blackness.
But this blackness seems to be rather more than a veneer, for it will not come off; it is merely compensated by her inner illumination and by the beauty of the bridegroom.
As the Shulamite symbolizes the earth in which Adam lay buried, she also has the significance of a maternal progenitrix.
In this capacity the black Isis put together again the limbs of her dismembered brother-spouse, Osiris.
Thus Adam Kadmon appears here in the classic form of the son-lover, who, in the hierosgamos of sun and moon, reproduces himself in the mother-beloved.
Consequently the Shulamite takes over the ancient role of the hierodule of Ishtar.
She is the sacred harlot (meretrix), which is one of the names the alchemist gave his arcane substance.
The Black Shulamite’s reversion to type is not a stroke of genius on the part of our author, but merely the traditional alchemical view that “our infant,” the son of the Philosophers, is the child of sun and moon.
But in so far as he represents the hermaphroditic Primordial Man himself, the son is at the same time the father of his parents.
Alchemy was so saturated with the idea of the mother-son incest that it automatically reduced the Shulamite of the Song of Songs to her historical prototype.
We have paid due attention to the recalcitrant nature of the Shulamite’s blackness.
Now it is significant that the “old Adam” is mentioned at the very moment when the perfect, prelapsarian Adam, the shining Primordial Man, is obviously meant.
Just as the black Shulamite misses the final apotheosis, the total albedo, so we lack the necessary confirmation that the first Adam is changed into the second, who at the same time is the father of the first.
We cannot suppress the suspicion that, just as the blackness will not disappear, so the old Adam will not finally change.
This may be the deeper reason why the expression “the old Adam” did not worry the author but, on the contrary, seemed just right.
It is, unfortunately, far truer to say that a change for the better does not bring a total conversion of darkness into light and of evil into good, but, at most, is a compromise in which the better slightly exceeds the worse.
The complication introduced by the “old” Adam, therefore, does not seem to be merely fortuitous, since it forms a factor in an archetypal quaternio composed as follows:
This structure corresponds to the marriage quaternio discussed in the “Psychology of the Transference,” which is based on certain psychic facts and has the following structure:
Although this quaternio plays a considerable role in alchemy, it is not a product of alchemical speculation but an archetype which can be traced back to the primitive marriage-class system (four-kin system).
As a quaternity it represents a whole judgment and formulates the psychic structure of man’s totality.
This expresses on the one hand the structure of the individual, i.e., a male or female ego in conjunction with the contrasexual unconscious, and on the other hand the ego’s relation to the other sex, without which the psychological individual remains incomplete.
(By this I mean primarily a psychic relationship.)
But in this schema the idea of transformation, so characteristic of alchemy, is missing.
As a scientific discipline, empirical psychology is not in a position to establish whether the conscious ego ranks “higher” or “lower” than the anima, which, like the ego, has a positive and a negative aspect.
Science does not make value-judgments, and though psychology has a concept of “value” it is nothing but a concept of “intensity”: one complex of ideas has a higher value when its power of assimilation proves stronger than that of another.
The alchemical idea of transformation is rooted in a spiritual concept of value which takes the “transformed” as being more valuable, better, higher, more spiritual, etc., and the empirical psychologist has nothing to set against this.
But since evaluating and estimating are functions of feeling and nevertheless do play a role in psychology, value must somehow be taken into account.
This happens when an assertion or value judgment is accepted as an intrinsic part of the description of an object. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 606-613
The more critical view which I have outlined here on the objective basis of scientific psychology is, however, implied in the alchemical schema.
For even as the old Adam comes forth again and is present in the schema just as much as Adam Kadmon, so the blackness does not depart from the Shulamite, an indication that the transformation process is not complete but is still going on.
That being so, the old Adam is not yet put off and the Shulamite has not yet become white. Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 618
The critical point, namely the fact that the transformation is not complete, comes out in the text itself; the desired perfection is relegated to the future, “that she who is encompassed by many mountains shall be freed.”
For this a divine miracle is needed, the crushing and burning of Canaan, the tearing down of heaven, and the melting of mountains.
One can see from these tours de force the magnitude of the difficulties that have to be overcome before perfection is reached.
The reference to the mountains which encompass the Shulamite has a strange parallel in Parvati, whose name means “mountain dweller” and who was deemed the daughter of Himavat (Himalaya).
Grieving over her blackness, for which her husband Shiva reproached her, she left him and withdrew to the solitude of the forest. And in her loneliness and seclusion the Shulamite exclaims:
What shall I say? I am alone among the hidden; nevertheless I rejoice in my heart, because I can live privily, and refresh myself in myself. But under my blackness I have hidden the fairest green. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 621-622
Green signifies hope and the future, and herein lies the reason for the Shulamite’s hidden joy, which otherwise would be difficult to justify.
But in alchemy green also means perfection.
Thus Arnaldus de Villanova says:
“Therefore Aristotle says in his book, Our gold, not the common gold, because the green which is in this substance signifies its total perfection, since by our magistery that green is quickly turned into truest gold.”
Hence the Shulamite continues:
But I must be like a dove with wings, and I shall come and be free at vespertime, when the waters of impurity are abated, with a green olive leaf; then is my head of the fairest Asophol, and my hair curly gleaming as the end Job says (27 : 5), that out of my shall come forth blood.
For it is all as, shining red Adamah, mingled with a glowing.
Though I am poisonous, black, and hateful without, yet when I am cleansed I shall be the food of heroes; as out of the lion which Samson slew there afterward came forth honey.
Therefore says Job 28:7: Semitam non cognovit ille avis, neque aspicit earn oculus vulturis.
For this stone belongeth only to the proven and elect of God.
It is the hope of the dark Shulamite that one day, at “vespertime,” probably in the evening of life, she will become like Noah’s dove, which, with the olive leaf in its beak, announced the end of the flood and appeared as the sign of God’s reconciliation with the children of men.
The Song of Songs (2:14) says: “0 my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice . . .”
In our text her head will be of gold, like the sun, and her hair like the moon.
She thus declares herself to be a conjunction of the sun and moon.
Indeed, a golden head and “bushy” hair are attributes of the Beloved.
She is, in fact, mingled with the Beloved, from which it is evident that the perfect state melts sponsus and sponsa into one figure, the sun-and-moon child.
The black Shulamite, well matched by her “bushy locks, black as a raven,” becomes the moon, which in this way acquires its “curly-gleaming” hair. ~Carl Jung, CW 14 Para 624-625
After this digression, let us turn back once more to Eleazar’s text.
The golden head with the silver moon-hair and the body made of red earth mingled with fire are the “inside” of a black, poisonous, ugly figure, which is how the Shulamite now appears.
Obviously these negative qualities are to be understood in a moral sense, although chemically they signify the black lead of the initial state.
But “inside” is the second Adam, a mystic Christ, as is made clear by the allegory of the lion which Samson slew, and which then became the habitation of a swarm of honey-bees:
“Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”
These words were interpreted as referring to the corpus Christi, the Host, which Eleazar calls the “food of heroes.”
This strange expression and the still stranger conception of the “Christ” present in the Host are an allusion to the alchemical secret.
That is why the author can say with Job 28:7 that the way is unknown, “neither hath the eye of the vulture beheld it.”
It is shrouded in mystery, for “the stone belongeth only to the proven and elect of God.” Para 639
We may therefore suppose that in alchemy an attempt was made at a symbolical integration of evil by localizing the divine drama of redemption in man himself.
This process appears now as an extension of redemption beyond man to matter, now as an ascent of the , ‘spirit of imitation,’ or Lucifer, and as a reconciliation of this with the spirit descending from above, both the Above and Below undergoing a process of mutual transformation.
It seems to me that Eleazar’s text conveys some idea of this, as the transformation of the black Shulamite takes place in three stages, which were mentioned by Dionysius the Areopagite as characterizing the mystical ascent: emundatio , ‘purification’), illuminatio ( ), perfectio ( ).
Dionysius refers the purification to Psalm 51 : 7 (AV): “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow”; and the illumination to Psalm 13 : 3 (AV): “Lighten mine eyes.”
(The two heavenly luminaries, sun and moon, correspond on the old view to the two eyes.)
The perfection he refers to Matthew 5:48: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
Here we have one aspect of the approximation to divinity; the other aspect is exemplified by the image of the Apocalyptic Son of Man, described earlier.
The transformation of the Shulamite as described in the text can thus be conceived as the preliminary stage of an individuation process, rising unexpectedly out of the unconscious in symbolical form, and comparable to a dream that seeks to outline this process and for that purpose makes use now of religious and now of “scientific” images.
So regarded and looked at from a psychological angle, the following facts emerge.
The nigredo corresponds to the darkness of the unconscious, which contains in the first place the inferior personality, the shadow.
This changes into the feminine figure that stands immediately behind it, as it were, and controls it: the anima, whose typical representative the Shulamite is. “I am black, but comely”—not “hateful,” as Eleazar would have us believe, after having reconsidered the matter.
For since nature was deformed by the sin of Adam, her blackness must in his view be regarded as ugliness, as the blackness of sin, as the Saturnine initial state, heavy and black as lead.
But the Shulamite, the priestess of Ishtar, signifies earth, nature, fertility, everything that flourishes under the damp light of the moon, and also the natural life-urge.
The anima is indeed the archetype of life itself, which is beyond all meaning and all moral categories.
What at first struck us as incomprehensible, namely that the old Adam should come forth from her again, thus reversing the sequence of Creation, can now be understood, for if anyone knows how to live the natural life it is the old Adam.
Here he is not so much the old Adam as an Adam reborn from a daughter of Eve, an Adam restored to his pristine naturalness.
The fact that she gives rebirth to Adam and that a black Shulamite produces the original man in his savage, unredeemed state rules out the suspicion that the “old” Adam is a slip of the pen or a misprint.
There is a method in it, which allows us to guess what it was that induced the author to adopt a Jewish pseudonym.
For the Jew was the handiest example, living under everyone’s eyes, of a non-Christian, and therefore a vessel for all those things a Christian could not or did not like to remember.
So it was really very natural to put those dark, half-conscious thoughts which began with the Movement of the Free Spirit, the late Christian religion of the Holy Ghost, and which formed the life-blood of the Renaissance, into the mouth of an allegedly Jewish author.
Just as the era of the Old Testament prophets began with Hosea, who was commanded by God to marry another Shulamite, so the cours d’amour of René d’Anjou, the minnesingers and saints with their passionate love of God, were contemporaneous with the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
Eleazar’s text is nothing but a late echo of these centuries-old events which changed the face of Christianity.
But in any such echo there is also a premonition of future developments: in the very same century the author of Faust, that momentous opus, was born.
Adam Kadmon.
The ambiguity of this passage is too perfect for the author, who proves himself elsewhere to be a not particularly skilful forger, to have been conscious of it.
The coming to consciousness of Adam Kadmon would indeed be a great illumination, for it would be a realization of the inner man or Anthropos, an archetypal totality transcending the sexes.
In so far as this Man is divine, we could speak of a theophany.
The Shulamite’s hope of becoming a “white dove” points to a future, perfect state.
The white dove is a hint that the Shulamite will become Sophia, the Holy Ghost, while Adam Kadmon is an obvious parallel of Christ. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 644-648
There are, however, other forms of instinctive concupiscentia that come more from “hunger,” from wanting to possess; others again are based on the instinctive negation of desire, so that life seems to be founded on fear or self-destruction.
A certain abaissement du niveau mental, i.e., a weakness in the hierarchical order of the ego, is enough to set these instinctive urges and desires in motion and bring about a dissociation of personality—in other words, a multiplication of its centres of gravity.
(In schizophrenia there is an actual fragmentation of personality.)
These dynamic components must be regarded as real or symptomatic, vitally decisive or merely syndromal, according to the degree of their predominance.
Although the strongest instincts undoubtedly demand concrete realization and generally enforce it, they cannot be considered exclusively biological since the course they actually follow is subject to powerful modifications coming from the personality itself.
If a man’s temperament inclines him to a spiritual attitude, even the concrete activity of the instincts will take on a certain symbolical character.
This activity is no longer the mere satisfaction of instinctual impulses, for it is now associated with or complicated by “meanings.”
In the case of purely syndromal instinctive processes, which do not demand concrete realization to the same extent, the symbolical character of their fulfilment is all the more marked. The most vivid examples of these complications are probably to be found in erotic phenomenology.
Four stages of eroticism were known in the late classical period: Hawwah (Eve), Helen (of Troy), the Virgin Mary, and Sophia.
The series is repeated in Goethe’s Faust: in the figures of Gretchen as the personification of a purely instinctual relationship (Eve); Helen as an anima figure; Mary as the personification of the “heavenly,” i.e., Christian or religious, relationship; and the “eternal feminine” as an expression of the alchemical Sapientia.
As the nomenclature shows, we are dealing with the heterosexual Eros or animafigure in four stages, and consequently with four stages of the Eros cult.
The first stage—Hawwah, Eve, earth—is purely biological; woman is equated with the mother and only represents something to be fertilized.
The second stage is still dominated by the sexual Eros, but on an aesthetic and romantic level where woman has already acquired some value as an individual.
The third stage raises Eros to the heights of religious devotion and thus spiritualizes him: Hawwah has been replaced by spiritual motherhood. Finally, the fourth stage illustrates something which unexpectedly goes beyond the almost unsurpassable third stage: Sapientia.
How can wisdom transcend the most holy and the most pure?—Presumably only by virtue of the truth that the less sometimes means the more.
This stage represents a spiritualization of Helen and consequently of Eros as such.
That is why Sapientia was regarded as a parallel to the Shulamite in the Song of Songs. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 361
Still another source might be Honorius of Autun.
In his commentary on Song of Songs 61:1, he says that his “animalis vita” was troubled because the chariot signified the four evangelists.
It was this chariot that the apostles and their followers had driven through the world.
For Christ had said in the gospels: “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13: 3). And it was to him, Honorius, that the words were addressed: “Return, return, O Shulamite” (Song of Songs 6 : 13). ~Carl Jung, CW14 Para 267-268
Alchemy, too, has its doctrine of the scintilla.
In the first place it is the fiery centre of the earth, where the four elements “project their seed in ceaseless movement.”
“For all things have their origin in this source, and nothing in the whole world is born save from this source.”
In the centre dwells the Archaeus, “the servant of nature,” whom Paracelsus also calls Vulcan, identifying him with the Adech, the “great man.”
The Archaeus, the creative centre of the earth, is hermaphroditic like the Protanthropos, as is clear from the epilogue to the “Novum lumen” of Sendivogius:
“When a man is illuminated by the light of nature, the mist vanishes from his eyes, and without difficulty he may behold the point of our magnet, which corresponds to both centres of the rays, that is, those of the sun and the earth.”
This cryptic sentence is elucidated by the following example:
When you place a twelve-year-old boy side by side with a girl of the same age, and dressed the same, you cannot distinguish between them.
But take their clothes off and the difference will become apparent.
According to this, the centre consists in a conjunction of male and female.
This is confirmed in a text by Abraham Eleazar, where the arcane substance laments being in the state of nigredo:
Through Cham, the Egyptian, I must pass. . . .
Noah must wash me . . .
in the deepest sea, that my blackness may depart. . . .
I must be fixed to
this black cross, and must be cleansed therefrom with wretchedness and
vinegar, and made white, that . . .
my heart may shine like a carbuncle,
and the old Adam come forth from me again. O! Adam Kadmon, how
beautiful art thou! . . .
Like Kedar I am black henceforth, ah! how long!
O come, my Mesech, and disrobe me, that mine inner beauty may be
revealed. . . .
O Shulamite, afflicted within and without, the watchmen
of the great city will find thee and wound thee, and rob thee of thy
garments . . .
and take away thy veil. Who then will lead me out from
Edom, from thy stout wall? . . .
Yet shall I be blissful again when I am
delivered from the poison wherewith I am accursed, and my inmost seed
and first birth comes forth. . . .
For its father is the sun, and its mother
the moon.
It is clear from this text that the “hidden” thing, the invisible centre, is Adam Kadmon, the Original Man of Jewish gnosis.
It is he who laments in the “prisons” of the darkness, and who is personified by the black Shulamite of the Song of Songs.
He is the product of the conjunction of sun and moon. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 43-44
