4. “Rend the books lest your hearts be rent asunder” —Gerardus Dorneus’ unio corporalis and the matter-psyche as the shadow of the Self

   

4.2 Carl Jung’s Neoplatonic interpretation of the unio corporalis and the Hermetic quintessence  

4.2.1 Carl Jung’s Neoplatonic interpretation of the subtle body as the realization of the personal typology and the personal shadow  

Carl Jung wrote Die Psychologie der Übertragung (The Psychology of the Transference), the interpretation of the alchemical text Rosarium Philosophorum, in 1943 and published it in 1946[1]. It is a very interesting fact that in the interpretation of picture # 8 also the depth psychologist begins to interpret the unio corporalis in the way that  

"[the alchemist] undertakes to produce a new, volatile (hence aerial or ‘spiritual’) essence endowed with corpus, anima, et spiritus, where corpus is naturally understood as a ‘subtle’ body or ‘breath body’.”[2] [emphasis mine]  

With the supposition of the production of the subtle body – in my terminology: the observation of the creation of the matter-psyche or the body-psyche – , Carl Jung’s interpretation of the Rosarium accepts here implicitly that not only in the spiritual, but also in the physical or even in the psychophysical world a transformation happens. Thus, he is very close to the discovery of the two principles I call the bipolarity of the spirit-psyche and the body-psyche/matter-psyche.  

In the decisive § 486 he sets however the course for a Neoplatonic interpretation, i.e., he tries to explain the unio corporalis in the terminology of the energetics of the spirit-psyche alone. He writes that also the subtle body, though subtle  

“is grosser than anima [psyche or soul] and spiritus [spirit]”, and thus “a ‘remnant of earth’ necessarily clings to it, albeit a subtle one.”  

The Neoplatonic limitation means that he interprets now the term “the dew falls down to earth” with “bringing down to earth.” In Carl Jung’s depth psychology this symbolical term is always translated into “realization”, “concretization”. Thus, in our case this means the integration of the new cognitive contents extracted by the procedure of Active Imagination, into concrete life.  

Now, however, the question arises: What specific cognition should be realized and integrated? Carl Jung concludes as follows[3]: Since the modern form of the unio mentalis, Active Imagination, is a matter of cognition, i.e., knowable with the help of the thinking function alone, the integration of the earthly aspect of the subtle body means in a modern terminology the integration of the feeling and the sensation (and intuition) function explicitly defined in his typology into a renewed and expanded consciousness. We can therefore draw the following conclusion: In  the depth psychologist’s interpretation of the creation of the subtle body, the main challenge of the unio corporalis, the subtle body mutates into a process that creates cognition about the necessity of the integration of the conscious four function’s quaternity postulated by him in his work Psychological Types in the year 1921[4]. Like this, a conscious complement to his quaternarian Self,  the center of the collective unconscious, is created. Then, the conscious and the unconscious totality together build the well-known double quaternity of Jungian psychology.  

The implicit assumption of this argument is that the procedure for the integration of the functions begins with the thinking as the main function. Thus Active Imagination is essentially connected to Carl Jung’s “personal equation”, i.e., his personal typology with thinking as main and feeling as the inferior function. With its motto “Rend the books lest your hearts be rent asunder”[5] Gerardus Dorneus’ opus, however, calls for the so-called sacrificium intellectus. Thus, the depth psychologist interprets in the way that “the purely intellectual attitude must be abandoned.”[6]  

However, a further problem arises now. Since Active Imagination begins with the use of the thinking function (combined sometimes with intuition), we have to answer the question if for example for a feeling type this procedure is indicated. The reader will later see that I negate this question and propose a complementary procedure I call the Body-Centered Imagination based on a different consciousness, the Eros ego (the conscious matter-psyche).  

A decade after the interpretation of the Rosarium, in his work Mysterium Coniunctionis, Carl Jung surprises us with a different interpretation of his Neoplatonic “subtle body”[7]. He tells us that a further goal of the modern unio corporalis, compared with the unio mentalis, is the moral and intellectual judgement of the results of the Active Imagination. Concretely this means, after Jung, that the consciousness has to change from a merely perceptive attitude to a judging. We know however that the depth psychologist defines intuition and sensation as perceptive functions, thinking and feeling as judging[8]. Thus, it seems that the process of Active imagination starts with sensation and/or intuition and should then pass over to thinking and/or feeling.  

I guess not only I but also the reader is now completely confused. What Carl Jung tells us here, is the complete opposite of his interpretation of the integration of the subtle body in the Rosarium. There thinking must be abandoned[9] to reach the more subtle aspects of the typology. Here the integration of thinking (and feeling) is the goal. Because of these two contradicting interpretations, one cannot decide anymore what is subtle and what is gross here.  

But let us return to Carl Jung’s interpretation of the subtle body in the interpretation of the Rosarium. There, he equates the sensation with the “fonction du réel, i.e., sensation, the sensible perception of reality”[10]. Thus, it is obvious that he talks of the extraverted sensation, i.e., the sensation focused onto the outer world. Further, for the description of the feeling function the depth psychologist uses the example of Faust’s jailbreak out of his study room and into the subsequent living out of only the pleasure principle[11]. This means of course that also the feeling function is defined as being extraverted.  

 

 

4.2.2 The twofold aspect of the alchemical sublimation: The quaternarian consciousness and the Hermetic quintessence  

The alchemical template for this “subtilization” of the consciousness is the idea of the sublimation. Therefore, in a footnote, Carl Jung quotes the Rosarium, which explains this sublimation procedure[12]:  

“Sublimation is twofold: The first is the removal of the superfluous so that the purest parts shall remain, free from elementary dregs, and shall possess the quality of the quintessence. The other sublimation is the reduction of the bodies to spirit, i.e., when the corporeal density is transformed into spiritual subtlety.” [emphasis mine]  

Of course the “twofold sublimation” of the Rosarium is exactly what Gerardus Dorneus circumscribes as the first and the second phase of his opus. In the first, the unio mentalis, the caelum[13], the Heaven, the “spiritual subtlety”, i.e. the spirit-psyche is “produced”; in the second, the unio corporalis, however the dew, i.e., the matter-psyche, the alchemical quintessence equivalent to the red tincture or the infans solaris[14]. It is the fifth element, i.e. the qualitative state besides earth, water, fire and air and equivalent to the symbol of the lily[15], the latter so intensely constellated in the Swiss mystic Nicholas von Flue[16]. Because of its double triadic structure, the lily is symbolically equivalent to the Seal of Solomon. Though it might be a contradiction for us, for the alchemist the quintessence is thus symbolically equivalent to the lily[17] and therefore also to the Seal of Solomon.  

Since however Carl Jung is not yet conscious about the bipolarity of the energy term, he is neither able to see that the subtle body could perhaps not only have something to do with the refinement of the extraverted consciousness, i.e., with the Neoplatonic “sublimation” of the earthbound psyche into the Heavenly spirit-psyche, but also with the matter-psyche, the inner aspect of matter and of the body, the “inner shadow matter”. Like this the Neoplatonic “spiritual subtlety” above, the refined consciousness, would be accompanied by the quintessence, the second and last goal and parallel to the Hermetic alchemical subtle body, the infans solaris and the red tincture that I call the matter-psyche.  

We will however see later that the creation of the Hermetic alchemical subtle body is in a decisive way connected to the Eros consciousness, i.e., the consciousness created out of the introverted feeling, the introverted sensation and the introverted intuition. It is the consciousness indispensable for the Body-Centered Imagination proposed by me. One of its necessary aspects is the conscious repression of thinking  during the imagination process. Like this the ego abandons the Logos and enters the Eros principle.  

The definition of two different types of consciousness, the Logos ego with (mostly extraverted) thinking, sensation, intuition, and feeling as the inferior function, and the Eros ego with introverted feeling, sensation, intuition, and thinking as the inferior function, helps to disentangle the above confusion of the depth psychologist about the beginning and the development of Active imagination. We see now that Active Imagination is the tool for a Logos oriented consciousness, the Body-Centered Imagination however for a consciousness deeply connected to introverted feeling and the Eros principle.   

To enter the Body-Centered Imagination the ego has thus first to abandon the Logos and enter the (introverted) Eros. I developed this concept of the transformation of the Logos ego into the Eros ego two decades ago. It was thus a very exciting experience when I got an unexpected affirmation by the Hermetic alchemical opus of the Rosarium during the composition of the actual manuscript. 

Namely, it is obvious that in picture # 8 there exists an alchemical template, an archetypal model for such a transformation of the consciousness. An alchemist would circumscribe[18] such a process with the transformation of the water vapor into the dew, as described in section 4.1 (see Index of Contents). In this transformation the water abandons the air and unifies with the earth. In a modern psychophysical terminology this means that the conscious spirit-psyche, the Logos ego, leaves the realm of the thinking function and transforms into the conscious matter-psyche, the Eros ego. Without the hypothesis of the bipolarity of the psyche term such a transformation is however impossible. Since, as we will see, the “psychophysical dark matter” (the psychophysical matter-psyche) is only observable with the help of the introverted Eros consciousness, a breakthrough to the conscious observation of the creation of the subtle body in the Hermetic alchemical meaning was yet impossible for Carl Jung. This task remains therefore the challenge for the beginning 21^st century.