Suzanne Gieser: Individual Dream Symbols in Relation to Alchemy
In the Terry Lectures, 1937, Jung addressed an academic audience for the first time about the importance of alchemical philosophy.
Here Jung chose to discuss Pauli’s dream of the reconstruction of the gibbon (no. 16) and the church dream (no. 17), which he had started to discuss at Bailey Island and picked up again for the beginning of the New York seminars.
He also discussed the dream of “The House of Gathering” (no. 54) and “The Vision of the World Clock” (no. 59), which were not covered in the seminars.
These were two dreams that occurred after Jung had taken over Pauli’s treatment from Erna Rosenbaum, and both were illustrated with pencil drawings by Pauli.
In the Yale lectures, Jung highlights the contrast between the principles of the Dionysian and Christian cults, as he does in the seminars.
He discussed the lack of the Dionysian element and ecstasy in connection with Pauli’s dream of the Catholic Church, a dream that Jung had started to discuss at Bailey Island.
The topic, which recurs in Jung’s work from his early reading of Nietzsche, pervades these seminars.
In Psychology and Alchemy, the interpretation of Pauli’s church dream is amplified with this theme of emotions and affect that find no suitable religious outlet in a Christianity that is too Apollonian.
In the 1937 seminars in New York, Jung employs twice as many references to alchemy as in the earlier seminars on Bailey Island.
He illuminates motifs such as the philosophical tree and the soror mystica, which are not to be found in the essay “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy,” in Psychology and Alchemy (even if they are concretely present in the illustrations).
In 1937, Jung was also absorbed in the visions of Zosimos.
He had just recently lectured at Eranos on the topic, which shows influences in the New York seminars.
References to Zosimos also find their way into the text of Psychology and Alchemy: the interpretation of vision number 6 of the veiled female figure on a staircase, and again the motif of the ladders in dream number 12.
In the New York seminars, Jung expanded on the alchemical idea of massa confuse, and this was added to the texts in Psychology and Alchemy.
In the published version of Pauli’s dreams in Psychology and Alchemy from 1944, launched with the title “Individual Dream Symbols in Relation to Alchemy,” are several new references that reflect Jung’s continued immersion in alchemical texts after 1937.
In 1952, Jung republished the book with a few minor changes, including passages derived from his trip to India in December 1937, during which time he was introduced to Lamaic mandalas.
Jung recounts that he was deeply occupied with Psychology and Alchemy in the summer of 1939 when he was giving his seminars at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) on the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.
At this time he beheld a fascinating but upsetting vision of a life-size Christ figure with a body of greenish gold on the Cross.
This introduced to him an analogy of Christ with the viriditas (greening) of the alchemists, the life spirit or anima mundi that animates the whole cosmos, that pours itself into everything, infusing even inorganic matter such as metal and stone.
After his seminars on Loyola he gave a lecture series on alchemy at the ETH starting November 8, 1940, and ending July 11, 1941.
These were the last lectures that Jung gave at the ETH, the culmination and finale of the ETH lectures series that he started in 1933.
In these lectures on alchemy, Jung starts with Pseudo-Demokritos, moves on to Zosimos, then addresses the Tabula Smaragdina, the Rosarium Philosophorum, and the axiom of Mary of Egypt.
He revisits the Kristine Mann case material that led him to alchemy, discusses the Turba Philosophorum, and the influence of alchemy on authors like Goethe and Meyrinck.
He covers several themes from alchemy such as the mountain, the treasure, the arcanum, the mysterium, and the secret language.
By the summer term of 1941 he discusses the concept of anthropos, the links to Eastern alchemy, the attitude of the alchemist, meditation, the concepts of scientia, sapientia, and the prima materia.
Jung also linked alchemy explicitly to the process of individuation.
But Pauli’s dreams are not mentioned at all in these lectures.
Another important step toward publishing Psychology and Alchemy was, in 1941, the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Paracelsus, on which occasion Jung was invited to give the keynote address in October at the Schweizerische Paracelsus Gesellschaft in Einsiedeln.
This prompted Jung to immerse himself in the teachings of the medieval doctor, and he discovered the extent to which Paracelsus was influenced by alchemy.
Jung states that it was through Paracelsus that he was finally “led to discuss the nature of alchemy in relation to religion and psychology or, to put it another way, of alchemy as a form of religious philosophy.”
The results of this exploration inform Psychology and Alchemy.
In the summer of 1942, Jung made studies of the spirit Mercurius that were published in the Eranos Yearbook and then revised during the period 1943–48.
During this time, Jung must have been working on Psychology and Alchemy in order to have it ready for printing during the autumn and winter of 1942.
Additions to the text “Individual Dream Symbols in Relation to Alchemy” reflect this.
The lengthy passage on the gibbon and the association of the dog-headed baboon to the Egyptian Thoth-Hermes is surely a fruit of these studies.
Jung added a passage concerning the evasive nature of Mercurius as cervus fugitivus (the fugitive stag) and the concentration required in alchemical work.
Connecting possibly to the case of Pauli, Jung linked this motif to the moral obligation to stop running away from and to face up to the questions of life.
He also introduced long passages on the transition from three to four and to the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, and on the idea of the anthropos as a representation of human wholeness.
Jung added references to the sixteenth-century German Christian mystic and theologian Jakob Böhme.
Jung read Böhme in his student days, and perhaps he rediscovered him during his “treasure hunt.”
He did not discuss Böhme in the 1936 and 1937 seminars, but now he included an illustration of a mandala taken from Böhme’s opus.
For some reason Jung chooses not to include this illustration in Psychology and Alchemy.
In an added passage in “Individual Dream Symbols in Relation to Alchemy” Jung compares the wheel as a recurring symbol for the circulating process in alchemy to the mystical role of the wheel in the opus of Böhme.
Jung emphasizes how much Böhme was influenced by the ideas of alchemy.
The idea of an impregnated jelly-like life mass, associated with glue or gum in alchemy, is also added.
Lions and wild animals indicating latent affects come as an addition.
There is a passage on the Fire Mountain and the seven stars that are more associated with Gnostic ideas added to the interpretation of the dream of “The Solemn House.”
The motif of the children’s play in alchemy as a symbol for cooperating with infantile forces has been added.
The phoenix or eagle emerging from the egg as a symbol for the liberated soul is new in “Individual Dream Symbols in Relation to Alchemy.”
To illuminate “The Vision of the World Clock” Jung adds a passage on the idea of the three regimina and the creation of quintessence, and the alchemical hermaphrodite is drawn on.
One paragraph is added in the 1952 edition in which Jung compares the thirty-two pulses of Pauli’s World Clock with number mysticism in the Kabbalah.
This is the last addition to a text that started out as a lecture on the emergence of one symbolic product in the individuation process, the mandala, and transformed over the years into the text “Individual Dream Symbols in Relation to Alchemy.”
This process of transformation is even more apparent in the third part of Psychology and Alchemy, in the revision of the text “The Idea of Redemption in Alchemy” into “Religious Ideas in Alchemy.”
Here the additions are so comprehensive as to render the original text unrecognizable.
For example, on the subject of Aurora Consurgens there is an approximately fifteen-page addition.
Jung had apparently already in 1942 planned for the publication of the full text of Aurora Consurgens translated by Marie-Louise von Franz, as he states in a footnote to the first edition of Psychology and Alchemy.
But when von Franz asked Jung to contribute a preface, he became so fascinated with the material that he asked whether she would mind if he wrote a whole book on it.
His preface swelled into an eight-hundred-page book, Mysterium Coniunctionis, to which Aurora Consurgens became a supplementary volume more than ten years later.
This work started before he suffered his myocardial attack in February 1944, and he is reported to have told von Franz that his illness, near-death experience, and visions had been necessary for him to fully “know” the reality of the mysterium coniunctionis.
Jung obviously decided to include Pauli’s dreams in Psychology and Alchemy, although in the beginning they were presented as an example of emerging mandala symbolism.
Nothing in the Pauli correspondence indicates that Pauli found it in any way strange to publish his dream material in the context of alchemy.
The first time Pauli mentions alchemy in his correspondence is on May 24, 1937, after Jung sends him his Eranos essay “Redemption Motifs in Alchemy.”
Pauli states that the essay is of great interest to him both as a scientist and in the light of his own personal dream experiences.
He also confirms the relevance of the link between concepts describing physical processes and psychological processes, saying that “even the most modern physics also lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes, even down to the last detail,” and after 1935 he refers to the role played by the “the radioactive nucleus” in his dreams after 1935 as a parallel to the philosopher’s stone.
Jung gradually amplified Pauli’s dreams more and more in the light of alchemy.
Jung’s thorough reading of Paracelsus and his discovery (or rediscovery) of Paracelsus’s concept of the lumen naturae—the light of nature, the divine spark buried in the darkness of matter, in the innate intelligence in animals and plants, and also in man—contributed to the decision to include the physicist’s dreams in Psychology and Alchemy.
Perhaps Jung considered it symbolically appropriate to include the dreams of Pauli as quantum physicist and modern alchemist, a man combining a deep knowledge of the mysteries of matter with a devout observation of his unconscious psyche.
Pauli embraced a similar idea in his historical work The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler.
Starting in 1946 after a compelling dream, Pauli studied the debate between the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the alchemist Robert Fludd, focusing on that point in history when the shift occurred from the older hermeneutic worldview to an emerging newer one characterized by a strict demarcation between subject and object, between soul and matter.
The older hermeneutic view included a feminine element in the form of the anima mundi (world soul) who stands in direct relation to the human soul, macrocosm to microcosm, connected.
What intrigued Pauli was not only quantum physics’ renewed interest in the problem of the demarcation between subject and object, but also his own differentiated identification with both parties in the historical debate: “I myself am not only Kepler but also Fludd.” ~Suzanne Gieser, Introduction to Individual Dream Symbols in Relation to Alchemy, Page 44-48
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