Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts

I have observed particularly fine cases of intro-determination in a series of experiments in basin divination (lecanomancy) which I have carried on for several years. Lecanomancy resembles crystal gazing, except that the gazer looks into a basin of water. In the visions of my subject, Lea, typical forms were pictured, which always recurred. Regarded as symbols they were, as subsequent analysis showed, almost all subjected to inward accentuation or intro-determination. Thus, for instance, a black cat appeared. At first it appeared as representative of Lea's grandmother, who was cat-like, malicious and fawning. Later the cat stood for the corresponding traits that she perceived in herself. Above all the cat is the symbol of her grandmother, so the grandmother (or cat) is a mental current of Lea. Frequently there appears in the image a Dyas, sometimes [pg 248] in the shape of a two-headed snake, of two hands, of two feet, or of a woman with two faces, etc. Above all, every antithesis appears to have some external meaning, two men who love each other, etc. So it becomes clear that the common element which finds its most pregnant expression in the double faced woman is the Dyas in itself and that it means bisexuality, psychic hermaphroditism.

More than that it is definitely certain that the deepest sense of the symbol means a complete dissociation of Lea's character into two different personalities, one of which may be called the savage and the other the mild. (Lea herself uses the expressions cynical and ideal personality.) In one of the later experiments Lea saw her cynic double vividly personified and spoke in this character, which is closely related to the “black cat.” The Dyas in the symbols has the value first of a representation of externals (two lovers, etc.), then as symbols of bisexuality. The sexual Dyas can again be conceived as a symbol or characteristic of a still more general and comprehensive dissociation of the ego. A further symbol and one still more tending towards intro-determination was death. Starting from connections with definite external experiences and ideas of actual death, the meaning of the symbol became more and more spiritual, till it reached the meaning of the fading away of psychic impulses. What died symbolically or had to die was represented by an old man who sacrificed himself after suffering all kinds of fortune. The dying of this old man signified, as [pg 249] analysis showed, the same thing that we call the “putting off the old Adam” (turning over a new leaf). The figure of the old man, originally Lea's grandfather, then her father, came to have this meaning only after a long process of intro-determination.

In many dreams of a woman analyzed by me (Pauline, in my treatise Zur Symbolbildung), a cow appears as a typical image. The alternation of this cow with more or less definite mother symbols leads to identification of the cow with the mother. Two circumstantial dreams that were fully analyzed showed, however, that the cow and other forms with which she alternated cannot be translated so correctly by the concept of mother as by that of the maternal authority and finally still more correctly by self-criticism or conscience, of which maternal authority is but a type. Children figure in Pauline's case as a result of various experiences, as typical of obstacles.

The climbing of an ascent, usually a symbol of coitus (hurrying upward which makes us out of breath), turns out often in a deeper relation as the effort to get from the disagreeable things of life to a place of retreat (lonely attics, etc.), inaccessible to other persons (= thoughts); and now we see that this deeper meaning appears without prejudice to the first, for even coitus, like all transport, is only [pg 250] a special case of flight from the outer life, one of the forms of spiritual oblivion. Hence in part the mythologically and psychopathologically important comparison of intoxication, intoxicating drink and sperm, soma and semen. Ascent = coitus is in this case a type for a quite comprehensive class of experience.

Other examples of types are the phallus, the sun and other religiously revered objects, if we regard them as does Jung (Wandl. u. Sym., Jb. ps. F., III-IV) as a symbol of the libido. [The concept of which is extended by Jung almost to Schopenhauer's Will.] The typical character of divine personalities is moreover quite clearly emphasized by Jung himself.

The snake, about whose significance as a “negative phallus,” etc. [developed in detail by Jung], we shall have more to say, can also be regarded as a typical image. Bull, cow and other animal forms are in mythology as in dreams typical transmutations, with unlimited possibility of intro-determination. Dogs are often in dreams the representations of animal propensities. The beast is often “la bête humaine” in the dreamer's own inner life. We have become acquainted with the terrible lions, the bears, etc., as father types; here we get a new perspective which makes clear the one-sidedness of our first conception.

Since psychoanalysis has found acceptation, many of its followers believe they are able to solve, with their work of analysis alone, all the psychological, esthetic and mythological problems that come up. We understand only half of the psychic impulses, as indeed we do all spiritual development, if we look merely at the root. We have to regard not merely whence we come but also whither we go. Then only can the course of the psyche be comprehended, ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically, according to a dynamic scheme as it were.

If we apply this fundamental principle to symbolism there develops therefrom the obligation to keep both visible poles in view, between which the advance of significance, the process of intro-determination is completed. (An externalization is also possible, yet the internalization or intro-determination must be regarded as the normal process.) [It corresponds namely to the process of education and progress of culture. This will soon be cleared up.] To the most general type belong then, without doubt, those symbols or frequently disguised images, concerning which we wondered before, that besides representing “titanic” tendencies, they are fitted to represent the anagogic. The solution of the riddle is found the instant we regard these images as types with a certain degree of intro-determination, as types for a few fundamental forces of the soul, with which we are all endowed, and whose typical symbols are for that reason of general applicability. [I will therefore call these types the human elementary [pg 252] types.] For example, if by psychoanalysis we deduce father and mother, etc., from some of the symbols appearing in dreams, we have in these representations of the psychic images, as the psychoanalyst calls them, in reality derived mere types whose meaning will change according to the ways of viewing them, somewhat as the color of many minerals changes according to the angle at which we hold them to the light.

The actual father or mother, the experiences that surrounded them, were the material used in the formation of the types; they were external things even if important, while later the father, etc., emerging as symbol, may have significance as a type of the spiritual power of the very person in question; a spiritual power to be sure, which the person in question feels to be like a father for otherwise the father figure would not be suited for the symbol. And we can go so far as to call this spiritual power a father image. That should not however, mislead us into taking that real person, who in the individual case generally (though not always) has furnished the type, for the real or the most essential. The innermost lies in ourselves and is only fashioned and exercised upon persons of the external world.

So then we get for the typical symbol a double perspective. The types are given, we can look through them forward and backward. In both cases there will be distortions of the image; we shall frequently see projected upon each other, things that do not belong together, we shall perceive convergences [pg 253] at vanishing points which are to be ascribed only to perspective. I might for brevity's sake call the errors so resulting errors of superposition. The significance of this concept will, I hope, come to have still greater validity in psychoanalysis. [This error of superposition C. G. Jung attempts to unmask, when he writes: “As libido has a forward tendency, so in a way, incest is that which tends backward into childhood. It is not incest for the child, and only for the adult, who possesses a well constituted sexuality, does this regressive tendency become incest in that he is no longer a child, but has a sexuality that really no longer can suffer a regressive application.” (Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious.) It may moreover be remarked that Freud also is careful not to take the incest disclosed by psychoanalysis in too physical a sense.] This error of superposition is found not only in the view backward but in the forward view. So what I, as interpreter of mystical symbolism, may say about the possible development of the soul will be affected by this error of superposition. It is not in my power to correct it.

In spite of everything, the treatment of symbolism from the two points of view must be superior to the onesided treatment; in order to approximate a fundamental comprehension, which to be sure remains an ideal, the different aspects must be combined and in order to make this clear I have added a synthetic treatment to the analytic part of my work.

Looking back through the elementary types, we [pg 254] see the infantile images together with those non-moral origins that psychoanalysis discovers in us; looking forward we notice thoughts directed to certain goals that will be mentioned later. The elementary types themselves thanks to intro-determination represent however a collection of our spiritual powers, which we have first formed and exercised at the time that the images arose, and which are in their nature closely related to these images, indeed completely united with them as a result of the errors of superposition—this collection of powers, I say, accompanies us through our entire life and is that from which are taken the powers that will be required for future development. The objects or applications change, the powers remain almost the same. The symbolism of the material categories which depends on external things changes with them; but the symbolism of the functional categories, which reflects these powers remains constant. The types with their intro-determination belong to the functional categories; and so they picture the constant characters.

That experience to which the suggestions of symbolism (brought to verbal expression by means of introversion) point as to a possible spiritual development, corresponds to a religious ideal; when intensively lived out this development is called mysticism. [We can define mysticism as that religious state which struggles by the shortest way towards the accomplishment of the end of religion, the union with the divinity; or as an intensive cultivation of [pg 255] oneself in order to experience this union.] It presents itself if instead of looking backward we gaze forward from our elementary types to the beyond. But let us not forget that we can regard mysticism only as the most extreme, and therefore psychically the most internal, unfolding of the religious life, as the ideal which is hardly to be attained, although I consider that much is possible in this direction. If my later examination carries us right into the heart of mysticism, without making the standpoint clear every time, we now know what restrictions we must be prepared for.

If I take the view that those powers, whose images (generally veiled in symbolism) are the elementary types, do not change, I do not intend to imply that it is not possible to sublimate them. With the increasing education of man they support a sublimation of the human race which yet shows in recognizable form the fundamental nature of the powers. One of the most important types, in which this transformation process is consummated and which refines the impulse and yet allows some of its character to remain, is the type mother, i.e., incest. Among religious symbols we find countless incest images but that the narrow concept of incest is no longer suited to their psychological basis (revealed through analysis) has been, among psychoanalysts, quite clearly recognized by Jung. Therefore in the case of every symbolism tending to ethical development, the anagogic point of view must be considered, and most of all in religious symbolism. The impulse corresponding [pg 256] to the religious incest symbols is preeminently to be conceived in the trend toward introversion and rebirth which will be treated of later. [Vid. note C, at the end of the volume.]

I have just used the expression “sublimation.” This Freudian term and concept is found in an exactly similar significance in the hermetic writers. In the receptacle where the mystical work of education is performed, i.e., in man, substances are sublimated; in psychological terms this means that impulses are to be refined and brought from their baseness to a higher level. Freud makes it clear that the libido, particularly the unsocial sexual libido, is in favorable circumstances sublimated, i.e., changed into a socially available impelling power. This happens in the evolution of the human race and is recapitulated in the education of the individual.

I take it for granted that the fundamental character of the elementary psychic powers in which the sublimation is consummated is the more recognizable the less the process of sublimation is extended in time. In mysticism, e.g., the fundamental character penetrates the primal motive because the latter wishes to lead the relatively slightly sublimated impulses by a shortened process to the farthest goal of sublimation. Mysticism undertakes to accomplish in individuals a work that otherwise would take many generations. What I said therefore about the unchangeability of the fundamental powers or their primal motive, is wholly true of its fate in mystical development.

The Mohammedan mystic Arabi (1165-1240) writes, “Love as such, in its individual life, is the same for sensuous and spiritual, therefore equally for every Arab (of an allegory) and for me, but the objects of love are different. They loved sensible phenomena while I, the mystic, love the most intimate existence.” (Horten, Myst. Texte, p. 12.)

The religious-mystical applications of the fundamental powers represented by the types, in the sense of a sublimation, does not manifest therefore in contrast to their retrospective form (titanic, purposeless form) an essentially foreign nature; the important novelty in them is that they no longer are used egotistically but have acquired a content that is ethically valuable, to which the intro-determination was an aid. This determination, whose external aspects we have noticed in the types or symbols, is only the visible expression of a far more important actual intro-determination whose accomplishment lies in an amplification of personality, and will later be considered in detail.

In the psychoanalytic consideration of the alchemistic parable it would appear that only the titanic impulses were realized there, e.g., to have the mother as a lover and to kill the father. Now it corresponds to a really significant intro-determination when we hear that in the alchemistic work the father is the same as the son, and when we understand that the father is a state, or psychic potentiality, of the “son,” whom the latter in himself, has to conquer, [pg 258] exactly in the same manner as Lea in the lecomantic study strove to put off the old man.

The alchemist Rulandus (Lex., p. 24) quotes the “Turba”: “Take the white tree, build him a round, dark, dew-encircled house, and set in it a hundred year-old man and close it so that no wind or dust can get to him (introversion); then leave him there eight days. I tell you that that man will not cease to eat of the fruit of that tree till he becomes a youth. O what a wonderful nature, for here is the father become son and born again.” Ibid: “The stone [that is in the anagogic sense, man] is at first the senex, afterwards young, so it is said filius interficit patrem; the father must die, the son be born, die with each other and be renewed with each other.”

As for the nature of the relatively unchangeable spiritual tendencies represented by the elementary types [That can also be called in mythological study primal motives] a simple examination of the essentials without any psychological hair splitting, brings us at once to an elementary scheme that will help us to understand the changes (intro-determination) that take place in accordance with the elementary types. We need here only to examine the simplest [pg 259] reactions of the individual, necessarily produced by rubbing up again the external world; reactions which become persistent forms of experience that are approximately as self-evident as the libido itself. The degree of egoism which is active in the elementary tendencies must, according to the experience of psychoanalysis, be considered very great. For this purpose I have selected in what follows an excessively egotistical expression for the “titanic” aspect, the retrospective form, of the tendencies; and this same excessive expression which would seem to be rather objectionable when applied to the basis of a religious development, enables us, thanks to the principle of intro-determination, to understand this development.

Starting from the libido in the most general sense we arrive first of all at the two phenomena, the agreeableness and the disagreeableness, from which results at once, acceptance and aversion. Obstacles may aggravate both activities, so that acceptance becomes robbery and aversion becomes annihilation. These possibilities can to be sure only become acts in so far as they prove practically feasible. In all cases they are present in the psyche, and in this crude primal form play no small part in the soul of the child. It is indeed only a blind sentimentality that can raise the child to an angelic status, from which it is as far removed as from its opposite. We should be careful not to regard the crude form of the impulse as crude in the sense of an educated humanity, which must see in the crudeness something morally inferior. In robbery and annihilation there [pg 260] exists on the primitive or childish level hardly the slightest germ of badness. There is much to be said about the psychology and morality of the child. I cannot, however, enter very deeply into this broad topic, interesting though it is.

The primal tendencies, when directed toward the persons in the environment, produce certain typical phenomena. I can unfortunately describe them only with expressions which, if the cultured man uses them, evoke the idea of crime. An ethically colorless language should be made available for these things. [The dream and the myth have found for them the language of symbolism.] The opposition of a fellow man against the working out of an impulse arouses a tendency to overcome this man, to get him out of the way, to kill him. The type of the obstructing man is always the instructor (father, eventually mother). That he is at the same time a doer of good is less appreciated because the psychical apparatus takes the satisfaction of desires as the natural thing, which does not excite its energy nearly as much as does a hindrance to its satisfaction. [Recognition of a good deed, thankfulness, etc., regularly presuppose sublimation; they do not belong to the titanic aspect. A form of appreciation of this kindness however comes to mind. Towards the mother there occurs on the part of the child, though it has been completely overlooked for a long time, very early and gradually increasing, a sexually-toned feeling, although the manifestations of this feeling are very dim and at times may completely [pg 261] disappear. In this “love” is contained a germ of desire, of erotic appropriation-to-self. Any woman in the environment and especially the mother must needs supply the ideal of the desired woman.

In so far as the father is perceived as an obstacle to the love towards the mother he must, in the elementary tendency, be killed to remove the obstacle, and there arises the murder impulse belonging to the Œdipus Complex. [The child has no clear idea of death. It is only a matter of wishing to have some one out of the way. If this primal motive appears to us subsequently as a “killing,” it is again only because of the error of superposition, just as in the later mentioned “rape.”] In so far as the mother herself does not meet the desired tenderness or in refusing, acts as a corrective agent, while carrying on the education, she, too, becomes an obstacle, a personality contrasting with the “dear” mother, a contrast which plunges the psyche in anxiety and bitterness. Anxiety comes principally from the conflict of psychical tendencies, which result from the same person being both loved and hated. The correlative to the denying action of the mother is to commit rape on her. Another cause of the attraction towards the mother besides the erotically toned one, is the desire for her care, called forth by the hardships encountered elsewhere in the world. It is an indolence opposed to the duties of life. The propensity towards ease is psychologically a very important factor. The home is in general the place of protection; the characteristic embodiment [pg 262] of this is preëminently the mother. We speak of maternal solicitude but less of paternal solicitude.

I have noted the solicitous mother type in the story of the three feathers, where the mother toad bestows the gifts from the big box. In so far as the solicitous person refuses the requests made of her and for reasons of necessity thrusts the child out into the world, or in so far as any other obstacles (demands of life) stand in the way of the gratification of the lazy, “feed me” state of mind, like the angel with the flaming sword before the entrance to paradise, so far the obstructing power appears as the type of the “terrible” mother, a picture whose terribleness is yet intensified by the working of the incest conflict. In this aspect therefore the otherwise beloved mother is a hostile personality.

To the process of education on the part of the parents, felt as pedantry by the child, or to otherwise misunderstood action, he opposes a well known defiance, and there results, as also from the attempt to change in general the rough path of life, the hopeful attempt to get a creative “improvement,” which I have already discussed. The wish to die sometimes occurs. Further the obstacles that stand in the way of the full erotic life in the external world, in so far as they are insuperable or are not overcome on account of laziness, lead to autoerotism. (That this is found even in early childhood is for the mechanism of the impulses, a side-issue. The scheme just given is not to be regarded as a historical or chronological development, but [pg 263] the tendencies are quite as intimately connected with each other as with the acquisition of the psychical restraints that are not generally brought to view; in separating them we commit something like an error.)

We have considered the following main forces: 1. Removal of obstacles. 2. Desire for the solicitude of the parents. 3. Desire for the pleasurable [especially of the woman]. 4. Auto-erotism. 5-6. Improvement and re-creation. 7. Death wish. The following scheme shows the retrograde (titanic) as well as the anagogic aspect of these powers, which later corresponds to an intro-determination of the types, and a species of sublimation of impulses.