Aion Quotes

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.

The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls. (translation/paraphrase: Terence McKenna)

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

Aion is a child at play, playing draughts; the kingship is a child's.

Well, you're right. I'm a Freak." "Huh?" "I love being bullied. Being hit and kicked by others gets me totally excited. That's what kind of freak I am. Sorry if that bothers you.

It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided,

it is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, conscientiousness, patience, etc., are of great value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective selfcriticism are valuable on the intellectual side.

The more civilized, the more conscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature. Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work.

I want to be bullied. But in again and you'll pay." "She... wants to be bullied...?

Tiedän muutaman ihmisen, joitten kuolemaa aion juhlistaa kuohuviinillä. Aidon samppanjan arvoisia he eivät ole.

Psihopatologia ştie cu suficientă siguranţă ce îi poate face inconştientul conştiinţei.

Există mult mai mulţi oameni care se tem de inconştient decât ne-am aştepta. Lor le este frică de propria umbră.

În măsura în care simbolul provine la fel de mult din conştiinţă cât şi din inconştient, el poate să le unească pe amândouă.

The intellect is undeniably useful in its own field, but is a great cheat and illusionist outside of it whenever it tries to manipulate values.

When something—I must stress this with all possible emphasis—is traced back to a psychic condition or fact, it is very definitely not reduced to nothing and thereby nullified, but is shifted on to the plane of psychic reality,

Oltre il deserto, al di là del tramonto, nella città sacra ho lasciato il mio cuore. A Shangri-la, tempio di vita, dove la verità ha ancora un nome.

In mezzo alla nebbia ed a quei labirinti di orrore, la Cattedrale sorvegliava ed era il fulcro di tutto quanto, proprio come la sua padrona, Hel.

Acolo unde predomină materialismul raţionalist statele se transformă mai puţin în nişte închisori, cât în nişte ospicii.

Loss of roots and lack of tradi tion neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rational istic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.

the intellectual “grasp” of a psychological fact produces no more than a concept of it, and that a concept is no more than a name, a flatus vocis. These intellectual counters can be bandied about easily enough. They pass lightly from hand to hand, for they have no weight or substance. They sound full but are hollow; and though purporting to designate a heavy task and obligation, they commit us to nothing. The intellect is undeniably useful in its own field, but is a great cheat and illusionist outside of it whenever it tries to manipulate values.

Mateso yalishakuwa mengi, na Murphy alishakata tamaa. Kesho yake alitamani sana aione lakini hakukuwa na dalili yoyote ya maadui kumwacha hai. Walivyomning’iniza kama nyama ya kuokwa kwa kipindi kirefu, walichoka kupiga na kumkalisha katika kiti cha umeme na kumfunga miguu na mikono kwa machuma makubwa yaliyofanana na pingu.

Quando il mondo dorme nel ventre della notte solo il viandante conosce la strada, chi si è fatto nulla diviene allora il tutto e ciò che riempie la sua anima sarà la sua fulgida luce.

One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an “accidental lack of perfection”—it would sound like mockery.

That is why it is so extremely important to tell children fairytales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness, interpreted, and integrated. Failing this, their energy flows off into conscious contents which, normally, are not much emphasized, and intensifies them to pathological proportions

Llegará el día en que los barcos carecerán de tripulación, los aiones no tendrán pilotos, las fábricas serán gestionadas por robots, y los ordenadores contestarán el teléfono. ¿Qué será entonces de la gente? - Si los barcos no hubieran tenido tripulación cuando tu padre llegó a puerto, tu madre no habría sido una deshonra - Y yo no habría nacido - Y no habrías sido huérfana - Si no hubiera sido huérfana, nunca habría conocido a Pew - ¿Y eso habría supuesto algún cambio? - El cambio que establece el amor

Obviously evil can be represented as a diminution of good, but with this kind of logic one could just as well say: The temperature of the Arctic winter, which freezes our noses and ears, is relatively speaking only a little below the heat prevailing at the equator.

Myths and fairytales give expression to unconscious processes, and their retelling causes these processes to come alive again and be recollected, thereby re-establishing the connection between conscious and unconscious. What the separation of the two psychic halves means, the psychiatrist knows only too well. He knows it as dissociation of the personality, the root of all neuroses: the conscious goes to the right and the unconscious to the left. As opposites never unite at their own level (tertium non datur!), a supraordinate “third” is always required, in which the two parts can come together. And since the symbol derives as much from the conscious as from the unconscious, it is able to unite them both, reconciling their conceptual polarity through its form and their emotional polarity through its numinosity.

La tirò con sé nei meandri caleidoscopici del suo dominio, dove anche l'oscurità riusciva ad avere centinaia di sfumature diverse, dove persino le ombre avevano delle ombre, e dove la musica vibrante di quell'organo celato nelle profondità risuonava tra le arcate gotiche dell'antica cattedrale.

Whereas the cloud of “animosity” surrounding the man is composed chiefly of sentimentality and resentment, in woman it expresses itself in the form of opinionated views, interpretations, insinuations, and misconstructions, which all have the purpose (sometimes attained) of severing the relation between two human beings. The woman, like the man, becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus.

For the alchemists Paradise was a favourite symbol of the albedo40 the regained state of innocence, and the source of its rivers is a symbol of the aqua permanens.41 For the Church Fathers Christ is this source,42 and Paradise means the ground of the soul from which the fourfold river of the Logos bubbles forth.43 We find the same symbol in the alchemist and mystic John Pordage: divine Wisdom is a “New Earth, the heavenly Land. … For from this Earth grew all the Trees of Life. … Thus did Paradise … rise up from the Heart and Centre of this New Earth, and thus did the lost Garden of Eden flourish in greenness.”44

Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rational istic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.

La Cattedrale sembrava in grado di leggere nella sua anima, alcune dicerie sul fondo di Helheim sostenevano che quell'antica chiesa percepisse la disperazione e chiamasse a sé coloro che non avevano più nulla da perdere, facendoli entrare nella misteriosa corte della regina dal doppio volto, la suprema signora del crimine e delle tenebre, Hel.

Mă fascinează grecii antici – o mână de oameni care și-au luat viața în serios și au schimbat atât de mult înțelegerea lumii, încât nici până astăzi nu am putut depăși moștenirea lor. Scrierea le-a fost ca o pictură; limba ca o melodie, urca și cobora până la cvintă; gândirea, doar matematică și filozofie; civilizația, ca un panteon de zei întrupați.

The space-time quaternio is the archetypal sine qua non for any apprehension of the physical world—indeed, the very possibility of apprehending it. It is the organizing schema par excellence among the psychic quaternities. In its structure it corresponds to the psychological schema of the functions.93 The 3 : 1 proportion frequently occurs in dreams and in spontaneous mandala-drawings.

What, then, is this projection-making factor? The East calls it the “Spinning Woman”1—Maya, who creates illusion by her dancing. Had we not long since known it from the symbolism of dreams, this hint from the Orient would put us on the right track: the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element points unmistakably to the mother,2 that is, to the son’s relation to the real mother, to her imago, and to the woman who is to become a mother for him. His Eros is passive like a child’s; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him. No wonder the real world vanishes from sight!

This choice of symbol, too, is not arbitrary, but is documented by alchemical literature from the first to the eighteenth century. The lapis is produced, as we have already seen, from the splitting and putting together of the four elements, from the rotundum. The rotundum is a highly abstract, transcendent idea, which by reason of its roundness76 and wholeness refers to the Original Man, the Anthropos.

This passage is particularly interesting because it allows us to look deep into the world of obscure archetypal ideas that fill the mind of the alchemist. The author goes on to say that the steel, which is at the same time the “infernal fire,” the “key of our Work,” is attracted by the magnet, for which reason “our magnet” is the true “minera” (raw material) of the steel. The magnet has a hidden centre which “with an archetic appetite38 turns towards the Pole, where the virtue of the steel is exalted.” The centre “abounds in salt”—evidently the sal sapientiae, for immediately afterwards the text says: “The wise man will rejoice, but the fool will pay small heed to these things, and will not learn wisdom, even though he see the outward-turned central Pole marked with the notable sign39 of the Almighty.

A parallel conception is to be found in Plotinus, who lived a little later (c. 205–70). He says in the Enneads: “Self-knowledge reveals the fact that the soul’s natural movement is not in a straight line, unless indeed it have undergone some deviation. On the contrary, it circles around something interior, around a centre. Now the centre is that from which proceeds the circle, that is, the soul. The soul will therefore move around the centre, that is, around the principle from which she proceeds; and, trending towards it, she will attach herself to it, as indeed all souls should do. The souls of the divinities ever direct themselves towards it, and that is the secret of their divinity; for divinity consists in being attached to the centre. … Anyone who withdraws from it is a man who has remained un-unified, or who is a brute.”137

From the centre of the “perfect man” flows the ocean (where, as we have said, the god dwells). The “perfect” man is, as Jesus says, the “true door,” through which the “perfect” man must go in order to be reborn. Here the problem of how to translate “teleios” becomes crucial; for—we must ask—why should anyone who is “perfect” need renewal through rebirth?108 One can only conclude that the perfect man was not so perfected that no further improvement was possible. We encounter a similar difficulty in Philippians 3 : 12, where Paul says: “Not that I … am already perfect” (τετελείωμαɩ). But three verses further on he writes: “Let us then, as many as are perfect (τέλεɩoɩ) be of this mind.” The Gnostic use of τέλεɩoς obviously agrees with Paul’s. The word has only an approximate meaning and amounts to much the same thing as πνεʋματɩκóς, ‘spiritual,’109 which is not connected with any conception of a definite degree of perfection or spirituality. The word “perfect” gives the sense of the Greek τέλεɩoς correctly only when it refers to God. But when it applies to a man, who in addition is in need of rebirth, it can at most mean “whole” or “complete,” especially if, as our text says, the complete man cannot even be saved unless he passes through this door.

St. Thomas himself recalls the saying of Aristotle that “the thing is the whiter, the less it is mixed with black,”45 without mentioning, however, that the reverse proposition: “the thing is the blacker, the less it is mixed with white,” not only has the same validity as the first but is also its logical equivalent. He might also have mentioned that not only darkness is known through light, but that, conversely, light is known through darkness.

From this one should not jump to the conclusion that the world of religious ideas can be reduced to “nothing but” a biological basis, and it would be equally erroneous to suppose that, when approached in this way, the religious phenomenon is “psychologized” and dissolved in smoke. No reasonable person would conclude that the reduction of man’s morphology to a four-legged saurian amounts to a nullification of the human form, or, alternatively, that the latter somehow explains itself. For behind all this looms the vast and unsolved riddle of life itself and of evolution in general, and the question of overriding importance in the end is not the origin of evolution but its goal. Nevertheless, when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. When that happens, anamnesis of the origins is a matter of life and death.

It is the same problem as in Job. As the highest value and supreme dominant in the psychic hierarchy, the God-image is immediately related to, or identical with, the self, and everything that happens to the God-image has an effect on the latter. Any uncertainty about the God-image causes a profound uneasiness in the self, for which reason the question is generally ignored because of its painfulness. But that does not mean that it remains unasked in the unconscious.

I would like, in conclusion, to mention the peculiar theory of world creation in the Clementine Homilies. In God, pneuma and soma are one. When they separate, pneuma appears as the Son and “archon of the future Aeon,” but soma, actual substance (ούοία) or matter , divides into four, corresponding to the four elements (which were always solemnly invoked at initiations). From the mixing of the four parts there arose the devil, the “archon of this Aeon,” and the psyche of this world. Soma had become psychized (): “God rules this world as much through the devil as through the Son, for both are in his hands.”97 God unfolds himself in the world in the form of syzygies (paired opposites), such as heaven/earth, day/night, male/female, etc. The last term of the first series is the Adam/Eve syzygy. At the end of this fragmentation process there follows the return to the beginning, the consummation of the universe () through purification and annihilation

These utterances on the nature of the Deity express transformations of the God-image which run parallel with changes in human consciousness, though one would be at a loss to say which is the cause of the other. The God-image is not something invented, it is an experience that comes upon man spontaneously—as anyone can see for himself unless he is blinded to the truth by theories and prejudices. The unconscious God-image can therefore alter the state of consciousness, just as the latter can modify the God-image once it has become conscious. This, obviously, has nothing to do with the “prime truth,” the unknown God—at least, nothing that could be verified. Psychologically, however, the idea of God’s ἀγνωσία, or of the ἀνεννóητος θεóς, is of the utmost importance, because it identifies the Deity with the numinosity of the unconscious. The atman / purusha philosophy of the East and, as we have seen, Meister Eckhart in the West both bear witness to this.

With the dawn of the second millennium the accent shifted more and more towards the dark side. The demiurge became the devil who had created the world, and, a little later, alchemy began to develop its conception of Mercurius as the partly material, partly immaterial spirit that penetrates and sustains all things, from stones and metals to the highest living organisms. In the form of a snake he dwells inside the earth, has a body, soul, and spirit, was believed to have a human shape as the homunculus or homo altus, and was regarded as the chthonic God.26 From this we can see clearly that the serpent was either a forerunner of man or a distant copy of the Anthropos, and how justified is the equation Naas = Nous = Logos = Christ = Higher Adam. The medieval extension of this equation towards the dark side had, as I have said, already been prepared by Gnostic phallicism. This appears as early as the fifteenth century in the alchemical Codex Ashburnham 1166,27 and in the sixteenth century Mercurius was identified with Hermes Kyllenios.

As only that which works is real, so, according to St. Thomas, only good is real in the sense of “existing.” His argument, however, introduces a good that is tantamount to “convenient, sufficient, appropriate, suitable.” One ought therefore to translate “omne agens agit propter bonum” as: “Every agent works for the sake of what suits it.” That’s what the devil does too, as we all know. He too has an “appetite” and strives after perfection–not in good but in evil. Even so, one could hardly conclude from this that his striving is “essentially good.

From the lapis, i.e., from alchemy, the line leads direct to the quaternio of alchemical states of aggregation, which, as we have seen, is ultimately based on the space-time quaternio. The latter comes into the category of archetypal quaternities and proves, like these, to be an indispensable principle for organizing the sense-impressions which the psyche receives from bodies in motion. Space and time form a psychological a priori, an aspect of the archetypal quaternity which is altogether indispensable for acquiring knowledge of physical processes.

Once metaphysical ideas have lost their capacity to recall and evoke the original experience they have not only become useless but prove to be actual impediments on the road to wider development. One clings to possessions that have once meant wealth; and the more ineffective, incomprehensible, and lifeless they become the more obstinately people cling to them. (Naturally it is only sterile ideas that they cling to; living ideas have content and riches enough, so there is no need to cling to them.) Thus in the course of time the meaningful turns into the meaningless. This is unfortunately the fate of metaphysical ideas.

The development from the Shadow to the Lapis Quaternio illustrates the change in man’s picture of the world during the course of the second millennium. The series ends with the concept of the rotundum, or of rotation as contrasted with the static quality of the quaternity, which, as we have said, proves to be of prime importance for apprehending reality. The rise of scientific materialism connected with this development appears on the one hand as a logical consequence, on the other hand as a deification of matter. This latter aspect is based, psychologically, on the fact that the rotundum coincides with the archetype of the Anthropos.

The problems which the integration of the unconscious sets modern doctors and psychologists can only be solved along the lines traced out by history, and the upshot will be a new assimilation of the traditional myth. This, however, presupposes the continuity of historical development. Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism. Wherever the Marxist utopia prevails, this has already happened. But a predominantly scientific and technological education, such as is the usual thing nowadays, can also bring about a spiritual regression and a considerable increase of psychic dissociation. With hygiene and prosperity alone a man is still far from health, otherwise the most enlightened and most comfortably off among us would be the healthiest. But in regard to neuroses that is not the case at all, quite the contrary. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.

I have gone into the doctrine of the privatio boni at such length because it is in a sense responsible for a too optimistic conception of the evil in human nature and for a too pessimistic view of the human soul. To offset this, early Christianity, with unerring logic, balanced Christ against an Antichrist. For how can you speak of “high” if there is no “low,” or “right” if there is no “left,” of “good” if there is no “bad,” and the one is as real as the other? Only with Christ did a devil enter the world as the real counterpart of God, and in early Jewish-Christian circles Satan, as already mentioned, was regarded as Christ’s elder brother.

Since psychology is not metaphysics, no metaphysical dualism can be derived from, or imputed to, its statements concerning the equivalence of opposites.74 It knows that equivalent opposites are necessary conditions inherent in the act of cognition, and that without them no discrimination would be possible. It is not exactly probable that anything so intrinsically bound up with the act of cognition should be at the same time a property of the object. It is far easier to suppose that it is primarily our consciousness which names and evaluates the differences between things, and perhaps even creates distinctions where no differences are discernible.

The symmetrical complement of the serpent, then, is the stone as representative of the earth. Here we enter a later developmental stage of the symbolism, the alchemical stage, whose central idea is the lapis. Just as the serpent forms the lower opposite of man, so the lapis complements the serpent. It corresponds, on the other hand, to man, for it is not only represented in human form but even has “body, soul, and spirit,” is an homunculus and, as the texts show, a symbol of the self. It is, however, not a human ego but a collective entity, a collective soul, like the Indian hiranyagarbha, ‘golden seed.’ The stone is the “father-mother” of the metals, an hermaphrodite. Though it is an ultimate unity, it is not an elementary but a composite unity that has evolved. For the stone we could substitute all those “thousand names” which the alchemists devised for their central symbol, but nothing different or more fitting would have been said.

When, in treating a case of neurosis, we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptedness) of the conscious mind by adding to it contents of the unconscious, our aim is to create a wider personality whose centre of gravity does not necessarily coincide with the ego, but which, on the contrary, as the patient’s insights increase, may even thwart his ego-tendencies. Like a magnet, the new centre attracts to itself that which is proper to it, the “signs of the Father,” i.e., everything that pertains to the original and unalterable character of the individual ground-plan. All this is older than the ego and acts towards it as the “blessed, nonexistent God” of the Basilidians acted towards the archon of the Ogdoad, the demiurge, and—paradoxically enough—as the son of the demiurge acted towards his father. The son proves superior in that he has knowledge of the message from above and can therefore tell his father that he is not the highest God. This apparent contradiction resolves itself when we consider the underlying psychological experience. On the one hand, in the products of the unconscious the self appears as it were a priori, that is, in well-known circle and quaternity symbols which may already have occurred in the earliest dreams of childhood, long before there was any possibility of consciousness or understanding. On the other hand, only patient and painstaking work on the contents of the unconscious, and the resultant synthesis of conscious and unconscious data, can lead to a “totality,” which once more uses circle and quaternity symbols for purposes of self-description.15 In this phase, too, the original dreams of childhood are remembered and understood. The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the uroboros, the snake that bites its own tail.

The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a static quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self, and comparable to the carbon-nitrogen cycle in the sun, when a carbon nucleus captures four protons (two of which immediately become neutrons) and releases them at the end of the cycle in the form of an alpha particle. The carbon nucleus itself comes out of the reaction unchanged, “like the Phoenix from the ashes.”108 The secret of existence, i.e., the existence of the atom and its components, may well consist in a continually repeated process of rejuvenation, and one comes to similar conclusions in trying to account for the numinosity of the archetypes.

The analogy with physics is not a digression since the symbolical schema itself represents the descent into matter and requires the identity of the outside with the inside. Psyche cannot be totally different from matter, for how otherwise could it move matter? And matter cannot be alien to psyche, for how else could matter produce psyche? Psyche and matter exist in one and the same world, and each partakes of the other, otherwise any reciprocal action would be impossible. If research could only advance far enough, therefore, we should arrive at an ultimate agreement between physical and psychological concepts. Our present attempts may be bold, but I believe they are on the right lines. Mathematics, for instance, has more than once proved that its purely logical constructions which transcend all experience subsequently coincided with the behaviour of things. This, like the events I call synchronistic, points to a profound harmony between all forms of existence.

It is significant that Gnostic philosophy found its continuation in alchemy.29 “Mater Alchimia” is one of the mothers of modern science, and modern science has given us an unparalleled knowledge of the “dark” side of matter. It has also penetrated into the secrets of physiology and evolution, and made the very roots of life itself an object of investigation. In this way the human mind has sunk deep into the sublunary world of matter, thus repeating the Gnostic myth of the Nous, who, beholding his reflection in the depths below, plunged down and was swallowed in the embrace of Physis. The climax of this development was marked in the eighteenth century by the French Revolution, in the nineteenth century by scientific materialism, and in the twentieth century by political and social “realism,” which has turned the wheel of history back a full two thousand years and seen the recrudescence of the despotism, the lack of individual rights, the cruelty, indignity, and slavery of the pre-Christian world, whose “labour problem” was solved by the “ergastulum” (convict-camp). The “transvaluation of all values” is being enacted before our eyes.

The second of these quaternios is the negative of the first; it is its shadow. By “shadow” I mean the inferior personality, the lowest levels of which are indistinguishable from the instinctuality of an animal. This is a view that can be found at a very early date, in the idea of the προσϕύης ψʋχή, the ‘excrescent soul’32 of Isidorus.33 We also meet it in Origen, who speaks of the animals contained in man.34 Since the shadow, in itself, is unconscious for most people, the snake would correspond to what is totally unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious, but which, as the collective unconscious and as instinct, seems to possess a peculiar wisdom of its own and a knowledge that is often felt to be supernatural. This is the treasure which the snake (or dragon) guards, and also the reason why the snake signifies evil and darkness on the one hand and wisdom on the other. Its unrelatedness, coldness, and dangerousness express the instinctuality that with ruthless cruelty rides roughshod over all moral and any other human wishes and considerations and is therefore just as terrifying and fascinating in its effects as the sudden glance of a poisonous snake.

The development briefly outlined here seems to have been anticipated in medieval and Gnostic symbolism, just as the Antichrist was in the New Testament. How this occurred I will endeavour to describe in what follows. We have seen that, as the higher Adam corresponds to the lower, so the lower Adam corresponds to the serpent. For the mentality of the Middle Ages and of late antiquity, the first of the two double pyramids, the Anthropos Quaternio, represents the world of the spirit, or metaphysics, while the second, the Shadow Quaternio, represents sublunary nature and in particular man’s instinctual disposition, the “flesh”—to use a Gnostic-Christian term—which has its roots in the animal kingdom or, to be more precise, in the realm of warm-blooded animals. The nadir of this system is the cold-blooded vertebrate, the snake,30 for with the snake the psychic rapport that can be established with practically all warm-blooded animals comes to an end. That the snake, contrary to expectation, should be a counterpart of the Anthropos is corroborated by the fact—of especial significance for the Middle Ages—that it is on the one hand a well-known allegory of Christ, and on the other hand appears to be equipped with the gift of wisdom and of supreme spirituality.31 As Hippolytus says, the Gnostics identified the serpent with the spinal cord and the medulla. These are synonymous with the reflex functions.

Kircher’s system shows certain affinities with our series of quaternios. Thus the Second Monad is a duality consisting of opposites, corresponding to the angelic world that was split by Lucifer’s fall. Another significant analogy is that Kircher conceives his schema as a cycle set in motion by God as the prime cause, and unfolding out of itself, but brought back to God again through the activity of human understanding, so that the end returns once more to the beginning. This, too, is an analogy of our formula. The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail, and they made innumerable pictures of this process. Just as the central idea of the lapis Philosophorum plainly signifies the self, so the opus with its countless symbols illustrates the process of individuation, the step-by-step development of the self from an unconscious state to a conscious one. That is why the lapis, as prima materia, stands at the beginning of the process as well as at the end.113 According to Michael Maier, the gold, another synonym for the self, comes from the opus circulatorium of the sun. This circle is “the line that runs back upon itself (like the serpent that with its head bites its own tail), wherein that eternal painter and potter, God, may be discerned.”114 In this circle, Nature “has related the four qualities to one another and drawn, as it were, an equilateral square, since contraries are bound together by contraries, and enemies by enemies, with the same everlasting bonds.” Maier compares this squaring of the circle to the “homo quadratus,” the four-square man, who “remains himself” come weal come woe.115 He calls it the “golden house, the twicebisected circle, the four-cornered phalanx, the rampart, the city wall, the four-sided line of battle.”116 This circle is a magic circle consisting of the union of opposites, “immune to all injury.