Marie-Louise von Franz: Final Resurrection as a Reunion of the Psyche with the Body
The principal part of the Komarios text continues as follows:
But when the dark, fetid spirit (pneuma) has been removed, so that no smell and no color of the darkness is perceptible any more, then the body is illuminated and soul, body and spirit rejoice that the darkness has retreated. And the soul calls back to the illuminated body: “Wake up from Hades and stand up from the grave and awaken from the darkness. For you have clothed yourself in spirituality and divinity.
For the call of resurrection has sounded and the medicament of life (pharmakon tes zoes) has entered into you.” Spirit and soul rejoice once again in the body which they now inhabit, and the soul, full of joy, hastens as quickly as possible to embrace the body and the soul embraces it. And the darkness no longer rules over it, for it has subordinated itself to the light and no longer permits itself to be separated from it in eternity, and it (the soul) rejoices in its house, because, after the body had been hidden in the darkness, (the spirit) found it full of light.
And the soul united with the body, since the body had become divine through its relation to the soul, and it dwelt in the soul. For the body clothed itself in the light of divinity, and the darkness departed from it, and all were united in love, body, soul and spirit, and all became one; in this the mystery is hidden.
But the mystery was fulfilled in their coming together, and the house was sealed and the statue (andrias) was erected, filled with light and divinity. For the fire had made and transformed them into one, and it (the one) has come forth out of its womb. In the same way, it has come forth out of the womb of water and air, which serve them (the bodies), and it (the air)1 has carried them out of the darkness into the light, from suffering to radiance, from weakness to health and from death to life.
And they have clothed themselves with the divine spiritual glory (doxa), which they did not have before, for therein lies the whole hidden mystery, for the divine cannot be changed.
But as a result of their active nature, the bodies penetrate each other and, coming out of the earth, they clothe themselves with light and divine glory, in keeping with their nature …. And this glory carried them to a unique unity, and the statue (or the image: eikon) was completed, having body, soul and spirit, and they became one.
For the fire was subordinated to the water and the earthly part2 to the air. In the same way the air with the fire and the earth with the water and the water with the earth and with the air. They, too, became one. Plants and sooty smoke (aithalon) became one and nature and the divine elements became divine. Natures ruled over natures and conquered them and natures and bodies changed thereby . . . for the fugitive has penetrated the non-fugitive and the strong the weak and they have all become one. 3
This passage is followed by other general remarks on the arrangement of the cosmos and the structure of the astrological “skypole.” Then the text continues:
And now I tell you that the sky is set to the movements of the four elements and never remains silent.
These (four elements) were planted in our Ethiopian earth, from which plants, stones and divine substances (somata) are taken, which God has planted (there) and not man. But the creator has implanted in each of them a power, in some a power to green, in others a power not to green, in some dryness, in others dampness, in some the power to remain fixed, in still others the power to separate, in some a power for possessing and in others for retreating. And in their encounters they conquer each other . . . and there is joy in the other which shines within it.
And the one nature comes into being which pursues and rules over all natures, and this same one conquers every nature, namely fire and earth, and it transforms all their powers. And I tell you what the goal (of the one) is: when it is completed, it becomes a deadly medicine which circulates in the body. In the same way that it enters its own body, (so) does it also penetrate the (other) bodies. In putrefaction and warmth (there is created) a medicine which penetrates every body, without hindrance. 4
What appears to be important here is the fact that the reunion of soul and body is no longer a union of opposites, since the body is no longer body but has become psyche as well, but of the one nature. It is therefore the body-soul which is being assimilated and integrated, not the coarse material body. This idea also appears in Petrus Bonus, who, in his Pretiosa margarita novella, says:
It was through their knowledge of the art that the old philosophers knew of the coming of the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead. Then the soul will be united with its original body for ever and ever. The body will become wholly transfigured (glorificatum), incorruptible, and from incredible luminosity and almost unbelievable subtility it will penetrate all solids. Its nature will be as much spiritual as corporeal. 5
It is not possible to interpret in detail every sentence of the obscure, indifferently translated and partially damaged Komarios text. I have therefore selected only the more clearly formulated motifs. However, one theme should be clear, namely, how closely the production of the alchemical elixir (a synonym for the philosopher’s stone) was, from the very beginning, associated with the motif of the resurrection of the dead.
What emerged at the end of the process was called, among other things, an andrias, a human-shaped statue—something solid and at the same time a deadly elixir which was actually a drug, a poison, a remedy that could penetrate all solids.
The process of resurrection as described in this part of the text consists of a reunion of pneuma, “spirit,” psyche (soul) and the purged, deified or transfigured body. The relatively analogous motif in Egypt would be the union of the ba with the ka and the mummy. The result was referred to as “this transfigured one [Ach].” At first, the deified body was still relatively dead or immobile, until ba and ka were united with it. 6 Only then did the deceased become an ach, a transfigured one, and was once again full of life.
The ba was a freely moving, nonstationary part of a man’s soul. It had the shape of a bird, thus emphasizing its spiritual nature, but it was also represented as a star or in the shape of a man. 7 In the hieroglyph for star, the ba’s affiliation with the heavenly sphere was emphasized.
Helmut Jacobsohn says that the ba represents the still unconscious individuality of man, the innermost center of his being (the “basic ground of the soul,” in the language of the Christian mystics). It reveals itself as an inner voice and is at the same time the quintessence of the natural inner man and a divine coincidentia oppositorum. 8
Unlike the ba, the ka (usually translated as “shadow”) seems to have a greater connection with man’s life force, potency, and skill. It is a kind of double image, which however usually lives within the body and “one captures him” after death, as it were, in the statue of the deceased. In Upper Nigeria and in the Volta region, similar ideas still exist today. 9
In the Komarios text the result of the union is called eikon (picture). In the Greek world of ideas the concept of soul (psyche) was also many-sided and flexible. 10 For Homer, psyche and eidolon (image) were originally the same, and at death they went to Hades. In addition, there was also the thymos, which one could interpret as “life impulse.” This was mortal. 11
The image (eidolon) was also understood as a kind of visible mask behind which hides the incomprehensible. According to Herodotus, the Greeks were influenced by the Egyptians in their view of the psyche as being immortal12 (for instance, with Pindar and Plato); and with Aristotle the soul became an entelechy which constructs its own body. But it also contains the immortal nous—the soul of reason—which belongs more to the purely divine realm of existence.
The Romans’ idea of the genius went through a similar transformation. The genius was first understood as the mortal essence of the being or of the identity of the individual. Later, under Graeco-Egyptian influence, it was referred to as the entity which survives death.
In Egypt, as previously mentioned, the mummy was called an “image.” The earth god Aker guards the “great image,” but at the same time the mummy is a “mystery,” because it is precisely on or in it that the transformation process begins anew. The ka—with the qualities the Romans attributed to the genius—remains close to the mummy or to a statue of the deceased, whereas the ba is also able to accompany the sun god in the upper world on his journey across the sky or joins the “never-setting” circumpolar stars. In the Komarios text, which is undoubtedly based on Egyptian ideas, pneuma, psyche and soma are once again united.
Pneuma most probably refers to the ba and psyche to the ka. Admittedly, one should not take such “translations” too literally, for even with the Greeks and Egyptians themselves these terms were applied to vague and flexible concepts. The third element in the Komarios text is the purified body, clothed in glory (doxa), which is the mummy after its reanimation through pneuma and psyche. This whole, newly animated corpse is also what the Egyptian texts often called the ach, the transfigured one.
Transfiguration is also described as the acquisition of a garment of light. In the Egyptian Book of Am-Tuat, Re says to the mummy gods in the eighth hour: “You are ornamented with your clothing, you are protected by your garments.” And in the Book of Gates, the reanimated mummies are addressed: “Hail to you, Achu (transfigured, blessed dead) . . . hail to you, underworld ones …. May you shine through your (white!) garments, may you be bright in the brilliance of Re.” In the Book of Caves, it is said that mummies are “dressed in the form of Osiris,” 13 in the same way that the Komarios text speaks of the body of the dead as being decorated “with divine glory” (doxa).
This motif of the doxa seems to me to point not only to Egyptian tradition but even more to the influence of Persian ideas, possibly through the mediation of Gnostic sources. The doxa reminds one of the Persian xvarnah which comes to meet the newly deceased and which is variously called “light of glory,” a “victory,” a “victorious fire.”
In the Mithraic cult this light-glory also meant the fulfillment of individual fate. It illuminates the dead, along with his daena—his other-worldly anima. 14 This imago gloriae “envelops” the entire soul of the dying man, like a “shining illumination by a spiritual fire which inflames the soul to ardor”; it is at the same time the light of healing knowledge. This same image is to be found in the Gnostic Acts of Thomas.
After the reunion, continues the Komarios text, the house was sealed and “the statue was erected, filled with light and divinity.” This probably refers to the end of the Egyptian burial ceremony, when the grave chamber is sealed and the so-called djed pillar is erected, along with the statue of the dead, in the serdab. The statue (andrias) is also called eikon, “image.” It consists of the four elements that have been united as one and it is also a medicine (elixir) which penetrates everything and is, at the same time, something solid.
The homunculus-priest who, in the visions of Zosimos, first tears himself to pieces is transformed eventually into a “man of gold.” The text continues:
In short, my friend, build a temple from a single stone, like to white lead, to alabaster, to Proconnesian marble, 15 with neither end nor beginning in its construction. Let it have within it a spring of the purest water, sparkling like the sun. . . . A dragon lies at the entrance, guarding the temple. Lay hold upon him; immolate him first; strip him of his skin and, taking his flesh with the bones, separate the limbs; then, laying (the flesh of the limbs) together with the bones at the entrance of the temple, make a step of them, mount thereon, and enter, and you will find what you seek.
The priest, that brazen man, whom you see seated in the spring and composing the substance, (look on) him not as the brazen man, for he has changed the colour of his nature and has become the silver man; and if you will, you will soon have him (as) the golden man. 16
In the same text it is also said of the homunculus-priest that “he makes the eyes clairvoyant, and raises the dead.” 17 The dismembering (and, in variants, the cooking) of the initial substance is also explicitly described as taricheia (mummification). 18 The sacrifice of the dragon is in some variants also a sacrifice of the priest himself. In the alchemical view, he represents the microcosmos or the monas, the initial matter, which also contains the goal of the work. His dismemberment signifies a new conscious ordering of his initial chaotic nature. 19
Important for us here is the monolithic temple, the temple built of a single stone, in which there springs a fountain of life, and “this is a hint that the production of the round wholeness, the stone, is a guarantee of vitality. Similarly, the light that shines within it can be understood as the illumination which wholeness brings. Enlightenment is an increase of consciousness.” 20 The golden man sitting on the stone represents the inner man who has gradually become the highest value. 21
The stone was already an important god symbol in the religion of ancient Egypt. In the sanctuary of the temple in Heliopolis (On), a mysterious divine stone called Benben was revered. Its name is connected with w-b-n, which means “to rise, to light up,” especially in connection with the sun or the stars.
The b-nw bird is also formed from the same verbal stem. Both the name for the phoenix, the Benben stone and the b-n-w bird were looked upon as outward forms of Atum, the highest of the gods, 22 and the stone was also an image of the primal hill which first emerged from the primeval waters and signified the beginning of the world. The phoenix later became a symbol of the ba. Benbenet was later also the name for the apex of a pyramid, and even later the dead received a small benbenet stone as a burial offering.
The dead king watched the sun set from the top of a pyramid, so the benbenet would seem to have a connection with resurrection or with an awakening of the dead to new consciousness. Jacobsohn has correctly pointed out an analogy between the Benben stone in Egypt and the alchemical “stone,” both of which symbolize psychic totality and a complexio oppositorum.
What the stone might mean to the postmortal condition can also be seen in a vision which Jung reports in his memoirs. In a near-death experience he seemed to be floating over the earth from a height of “approximately a thousand miles!” As he gazed around him he saw “a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite … floating in space.” Near an entrance in the stone sat a black Hindu who seemed to expect him. “Tiny niches” with “small burning wicks surrounded the door.” 23
Jung felt certain that he “was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom (he belonged) in reality.” There he would also understand what “historical nexus” his life fitted into. “I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing.” 24 At that moment he was called back to earth by the emerging image of his doctor.
The same stone, although in somewhat different form, appeared to Jung a second time a few days before his actual death. It was the last dream he was able to communicate:
He saw a great round stone in a high place, a barren square, and on it were engraved the words: “And this shall be a sign unto you of Wholeness and Oneness.” Then he saw many vessels to the right in an open square and a quadrangle of trees whose roots reached around the earth and enveloped him and among the roots golden threads were glittering. 25
The image of the temple made of a single stone also provides illumination here, as it does in the Zosimos visions. And in the image of the stone in Jung’s last dream, becoming whole is emphasized, as it is in the Komarios text.
Jung often remarked that it seemed to him that his individual ego life emerged like a rhizome (the underground root system of a plant, especially observable in mushrooms); he himself lived fleetingly above ground, but some kind of life lived on in the depths.
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. 26
In his last dream Jung returns to the rhizome—without any dissolution of his individual form, sheltered in the womb of the earth. The roots represent a spiritual process of development which lasts much longer than a human lifetime, “compared with which the individual is no more than the passing blossom and fruit of the rhizome.” 27
The vessels which surround Jung in the dream remind one of the Canopic jars in ancient Egyptian graves in which the entrails of the corpse, separated from the mummy, were preserved, and which had as lids the heads of the four sons of Osiris. According to the embalmment text, the four jars represent the limbs of the gods. Their “fat” or their “ointment” (psychic essence) penetrated the entrails of the corpse and “protected them,” that is, rendered them imperishable. 28
The motif of the stone also appears in the death experience of a man killed in the war, as reported by Hampe. In a state of unconsciousness, from which he awakened only briefly, he saw his mother and father, then wandered with them in the mountains through a blossoming landscape.
I found a large stone and turned it over; it was weightless. On the back of it there was a large number of the most beautiful mountain crystals. They were arranged together to form something resembling a cathedral. I felt happy about it. 29
In light of this amplification, the red stone that remained unblackened by fire in the dream given earlier takes on a fuller meaning. It is the symbol of that form of the dreamer’s existence which will survive his impending death. In Jung’s dream the stone appears as a temple, a much more differentiated image than those in the two other examples, probably because Jung was occupied, more than most people, with the Self, with his relationship to his inner totality.
We find the motif of an eternal house in the Beyond in many grave rituals. The Romans spoke of the grave as domus aeterna, a reflection back to Egyptian and ancient Oriental prefigurations. The graves were often completely and comfortably furnished and replete with household goods, 30 and there the deceased and his kin lived together forever. The Etruscans clearly marked the graves of women with a small house, those of men with a phallus.
The stupas of Buddhist cultures seem to have had a similar significance originally. As R. Mus has shown, they go back to ancient pre-Buddhistic burial customs in which the gravestone was supposed to represent “the world of the dead in miniature” and, at the same time, the universe in the form of purusha (primal man, cosmic man).
Mus stresses that the tomb is not so much a dwelling place for the dead as it is a substitute for the former transitory mortal frame of the deceased …. It is therefore a constructed body which represents the abode of the dead in the same way that his physical body did when he was alive. Although the teaching emphasizes that Buddha is no longer here—having gone into nirvana—popular belief has imagined such an eternal body of Buddha in the stupas.
A Japanese text even says quite simply: “The body of Buddha, seen from the outside, is a stupa.” Or the stupa is at least that part of Buddha himself which, after the parinirvana, has remained in this world. Ghandaran art, which has been influenced by Western antique art, has also created illusionary images of Buddha’s death, but it soon attempted once again to describe the non-reality of this death. Certain later teachings stated that after his death Buddha still possesses three bodies:
the dharma-kaya, his true absolute being; the “body of beatification,” through which he can still “be” somehow in nirvana; and thirdly, a shadow-body (nirmana kaya), through which Buddha knowingly helps other beings to attain nirvana. Whoever sees this shadow-body of Buddha has actually had only a subjective experience. 31
What is important for our consideration here is that the shrine, the stupa, was also looked upon as a substitute, stone body of the dead Buddha; the stupa, as we know, is a three-dimensional mandala. Thus the stone can also, therefore, be a house or a grave-temple. In this connection, Jung had an impressive dream two months before his death:
From an unknown place he had come to “his” Bollingen tower, which was all made of gold. He held the key to the tower in his hand “and a voice told him that the ‘tower’ was now completed and ready for habitation.” 32 What was most impressive for him was the complete loneliness (no human being was around) and the absolute silence of the place. “Then far below he saw a mother wolverine teaching her child to dive and swim in a stretch of water,” 33 something which it could not yet do by itself.
After Jung had built his tower in Bollingen, he often had dreams in which an exact replica of the tower stood on the “other shore of the lake.” He interpreted this to mean that his tower was actually just an earthly copy of its true form in the Beyond, i.e., the Self. His last dream of the tower says to him that now the other-worldly residence of the Self has been completed and is ready for him to move in. The animal motif at the end is a strange one.
It conveys the idea that, as Mother Nature adapts and accustoms her children to life through their instincts, so an instinct will likewise help us to adapt to altered conditions in the Beyond. 34 For Jung, the tower, in its earthly form, was already a vessel of the greater inner man or of the Self. He writes about this in his memoirs:
From the beginning I felt the Tower as in some way a place of maturation—a maternal womb or a maternal figure in which I could become what I was, what I am and will be …. At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. . . . At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go. 35
When Jung dreamed of the golden tower in the Beyond, the unconscious furnished him with a primal, eternal image, a copy of which he had built for himself on earth. The white stone in the Zosimos text, which houses both the “golden man” and the life source, provides a parallel to Jung’s dream. And the Eastern stupas seem to have a similar significance as a residence for the form of the Buddha which has remained on earth.
In the Komarios text the shining light of the unified nature of the “image,” that is, its illuminating quality, is also emphasized. This unification, this resurrection of the deceased, this andrias, corresponds in the Zosimos vision to the brazen man who first becomes silver, then gold. In other words, it represents a kind of living metal statue.
The dream series published by Edinger includes the following dream:
I was looking at a curiously unique and beautiful garden. It was a large square with a floor of stone. At intervals of about two feet were placed brass objects, standing upright, and looking very much like Brancusi’s “Bird in Space.” I stayed a long time. It had a very positive meaning but what that was I was unable to grasp. 36
Edinger amplifies the image of the metal pole (Brancusi’s “Bird in Space”), “thicker in its mid-region and tapering to a point at the top,” as a “phallic, striving, vertical thrust upward towards the upper spirit realm.” He cites as a parallel the Egyptian djed column, whose erection at the end of the burial ceremony signified resurrection.
This column corresponds also to the phallus on the graves of Etruscan men. In a certain sense it could also be compared with the dancing flame of life in the dream of J. B. Priestley cited earlier—an image of the creative life impulse which lives on and on. In the above dream, this figure is made of bronze. Metal, as Jung points out, 37 has a strange, unfamiliar coldness, which characterizes this symbolic figure. Its sense of a far-away origin in the realm of inorganic matter conveys a foreignness which is also characteristic of the alchemical stone.
Many alchemists equated their stone with Christ, but as Jung has shown, 38 it had for them a closer relation to the human body. The stone was something divine which was presumed to lie hidden in cosmic matter. Insofar as Christ “became flesh,” there exists an analogy to the lapis; but the latter is incarnated in every man and can be produced by everyone. That means that it can be made conscious inwardly. Thus the stone of alchemy does not really mean Christ but rather is a symbol that compensates for certain aspects of the figure of Christ. Jung writes:
What unconscious nature was ultimately aiming at when she produced the image of the lapis can be seen most clearly in the notion that it originated in matter . . . and that its fabrication lay at least potentially within man’s reach. These qualities all reveal what were felt to be the defects in the Christ image at that time: an air too rarified for human needs, too great a remoteness, a place left vacant in the human heart.
Men felt the absence of the “inner” Christ who belonged to every man. Christ’s spirituality was too high and man’s naturalness was too low. In the image of Mercurius and the lapis the “flesh” glorified itself in its own way; it would not transform itself into spirit but, on the contrary, “fixed” the spirit in stone. . . . The lapis may therefore be understood as a symbol of the inner Christ, of God in man. 39
The stone was considered to be the culmination of Christ’s work of redemption. It came not from spiritual-metaphysical realms as the official Christ figure does, but “from those border regions of the psyche that open out into the mystery of cosmic matter.” 40
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is a dogma still in a state of flux, inasmuch as Mary ascended to heaven with her body. So this is only a beginning answer to a question which has not yet been solved in Christian teaching. It is a question, however, which troubles modern man. It seems to me to be high time that we occupy ourselves with the symbolism of alchemy, where it is also true that, admittedly, no final answer is to be found, but where an answer seems nevertheless to be hinted at symbolically.
I lost my father when I was relatively young and, about six weeks after his sudden death, I had the following dream:
My father appeared to me, healthy, alive, but I knew in the dream that he was dead. He said to me in cheerful excitement, “The resurrection of the flesh is a reality. Come with me, I can show it to you.” He started walking toward the cemetery where he was buried. I dreaded to follow him but I did. In the cemetery he walked around and between the graves, observing every one. Suddenly he pointed to a grave and called out, “Here, for instance, come and look.”
I saw that the earth there had begun to move and I stared in that direction, full of dread that a half-decomposed corpse was about to appear. Then I saw that a crucifix was drilling its way upwards out of the earth. It was about one meter long, golden-green and shining. My father called out, “Look here! This is the resurrection of the flesh.”
In considering this dream, the expression “resurrected in Christ” naturally occurred to me, but what does this image really mean? It is a mystery that one cannot fathom. The essential image here seems to me to be the crucifix which was made of animated metal, like the statue in alchemy. The green gold as a motif alludes to alchemy. Jung reports in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that he once had a vision of a Christ figure made of green gold. He comments:
The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not only in man but also in inorganic matter. It is an expression of the life-spirit, the anima mundi or filius macrocosmi. . . . The emphasis on the metal, however, showed me the undisguised alchemical conception of Christ as a union of spiritually alive and physically dead matter. 41
My dream emphasizes the same double nature of the resurrected body as a union of opposites. The cross, on the other hand, signifies the suffering which results from unreconciled opposites. My dream implies, furthermore, that the resurrected body is at the same time the eternal inner man, not the ephemeral ego, even though this ego—that of my dead father in the dream—seemed to have been retained as an observer of the process. Obviously man’s complete wholeness is only attained with the union of the ego and the resurrected body.
An eighty-year-old woman dreamed, shortly before her death:
She saw a cross; at the center stood a radiating sapphire. She knew in the dream she was experiencing a moment of heavenly existence. 42
Here, too, the cross signifies the union of all opposites. In the medieval tradition the sapphire was considered to be the “foundation stone” of the Heavenly Jerusalem and an image of Christ.
Marie-Louise von Franz, Final Resurrection as a Reunion of the Psyche with the Body, Page 120-134
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