Turning Our Repressions
into Alchemical Gold
There is a special passage in the visions of the Alchemist Zosimos, analyzed by Carl Jung, which will be useful for us to understand on the path of our psychological development.
This passage has to do with the expression of repressed contents of our unconscious.
Zosimos narrates the following fragment of his vision:
“I saw a man of copper who had in his hand a tablet of lead. He shouted while looking at the tablet: ‘I order those who are under punishment to stop and that each one take a tablet of lead and write with one hand, with eyes lifted up and mouth open until his tongue grows thick.’”
This apparently meaningless fragment contains one of the keys to Jungian therapy and has to do with the expression of our repressed unconscious content.
We will explain it shortly; first let us be clear that what Zosimos sees and what he calls a dream (and his predecessors a “vision”) seems to be a state of active imagination, that is, the interaction and participation of consciousness with contents coming from our unconscious. In such a state, although we are not asleep, we can visualize our unconscious in a lucid and visible way; this would be the explanation for the visions of the prophets.
Jung explains the meaning of the fragment of this vision of Zosimos:
“It could refer to a particularly convulsive opening of the mouth that is linked to a strong contraction of the pharynx. This contraction has the meaning of a choking movement that must represent the act of vomiting contents from within. The latter must be written on the tablets. They are inspirations coming from above which, in a certain sense, are received by the eyes lifted upward. It is presumably a procedure that can be compared with modern active imagination.”
What was Zosimos observing and why is it so important?
The visions of Zosimos are images of the process of psychological transformation expressed in the alchemical language of the late third and early fourth centuries.
The man of copper represents affectivity, eros, the equivalent of Mars and of relationship.
Meanwhile, lead is associated with the unconscious, with what is heavy, dark, and with our shadow.
The people who are under punishment are different psychological elements such as complexes, affectivities, non-integrated parts, unlived emotions, etc., which we usually see in dreams as crowds, and here they are under punishment because they have not been integrated.
The part that concerns us and from which we can extract true “alchemical gold” is Carl Jung’s interpretation, who refers to what happens in the vision as a movement of vomiting and choking. Psychologically, this would mean that there is something inside that must come out and become visible, and it comes out with difficulty, in a convulsive way like vomit.
The throat has to do with expression, while the lifted eyes are a kind of receptive attitude toward the divine/collective unconscious, which we must experience in order to materialize unconscious content—and this is what Carl Jung was doing in the manuscripts that make up his Red Books:
Mortificatio, the inevitable suffering on the path to transformation
No new life can arise, say the alchemists, without the death of the old one.
They compare the art with the work of the sower, who buries the grain in the earth: it dies only to awaken to a new life.
It is worth noting that Zosimos of Panopolis was a Greek-Egyptian alchemist who lived between the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. He is considered one of the first important authors of the alchemical tradition. He wrote numerous treatises in which he combined primitive chemical practices with a profound spiritual and symbolic vision. Jung placed special emphasis on him.
Today Zosimos will help us understand an inevitable and painful stage on our path to psychological realization that we all experience: the mortificatio.
That moment when everything collapses, when the path becomes truly painful, but which precedes transformation.
The Vision of Zosimos
Mortificatio is experienced as defeat and failure. Needless to say, such an experience is rarely chosen. It is usually imposed by life, whether from within or from without… Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
But before entering into the subject, it is necessary to know what the alchemist saw that so greatly interested Carl Jung. So I will present a rather condensed summary of the visions of Zosimos that Carl Jung selected on this occasion:
While asleep, Zosimos saw an altar in the shape of a patera (a type of dish used in antiquity to make sacred offerings) with several steps, upon which stood a priest who said his name was Ion, and who confessed to having been violently torn apart, flayed, and burned until he was transformed into spirit. Then Zosimos saw the altar filled with boiling water and a multitude of men who burned without dying, subjected to a maceration that also turned them into spirits. A man of copper appeared, who was at once sacrificer and sacrificed, who governed the process, ordering the punished to write while they were purified by fire. The alchemist is also asked to build a temple and sacrifice a serpent. In further visions, Zosimos attempted to ascend by steps, but lost his way and saw figures throwing themselves into the fire and being consumed: a man with a razor, a white old man called Agathodemon, and another led to sacrifice.
It is worth noting that while he was seeing these visions, Zosimos reflected on the alchemical process and tried to understand it. Carl Jung believed that the alchemist was trying to resolve the problem of psychological realization projected onto the alchemical work, and that this unfolded within the characteristic worldview of that era.
The visions of Zosimos are, in fact, revealing for the alchemist, for he reaches conclusions that are important for him and that help him understand the process.
For example, the following:
“For everything is done according to a method, according to a measure and according to an act of weighing the four elements. Without method the combination and the decomposition of all things and the connection of the whole do not occur. The method is natural (fusikhv), giving and taking away the breath and preserving its rules, increasing them and bringing them to their end. And all things agreeing through separation and union; if the method is respected, in a word, they transmute nature. For nature turned upside down turns upon itself. This is the nature of the art of the universe and its connection.”
Zosimos
In this way the alchemist understands the process of psychological realization projected onto the alchemical process. He understands the individuating forces (the natural method) and how to carry out the work. In other articles it would be worthwhile to delve deeper into these reflections because they are truly pure gold and are revealing; however, today the subject that concerns us is mortificatio.
Mortificatio, the painful dying in order to be reborn
“The vision of Zosimos symbolically describes the alchemical work as a violent sacrifice in which the matter (and the operator) must die, dissolve, and be dismembered in order to be spiritually reborn and transmuted from copper into gold”.
Carl Jung in his commentary on the Visions of Zosimos
Mortificatio is not necessarily a phase of the alchemical work, as would be the nigredo, the albedo, and the rubedo. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence that occurs when the alchemist begins to work with the matter, that is, in the stage of nigredo, primarily. In psychological terms, when the person begins to confront his unconscious.
The elements can react in unpredictable and chaotic ways when the alchemist begins to work and experiment upon them. The same happens when we begin to work on our psychological realization, when we concern ourselves with confronting our complexes, fears, hatreds, defects, or the dark sides of life. Although, as Jung says, life will most likely place us in such a situation, often in the most tragic way.
The same happens to the alchemist, since he does not seek chaos in the laboratory, but it occurs unexpectedly. In the same way, life places us before the situations we feared most for ourselves. However tragic it may seem to us, this process is not only inevitable, but also necessary. For as Jung would say in this same essay:
“Either the substances to be transmuted are tormented, or that which transmutes is tormented.”
This is how the theme of sacrifice probably arises in Zosimos’ vision, which shows a terrible and inevitable process, but from which a man of gold will be reborn, that is, the integrated Self.
The Importance of Mortificatio
“Everything is bound and everything is unbound. Everything is composed and everything is decomposed. Everything is mixed and everything is separated.”
Zosimos
Since Mortificatio has to do with death, the alchemist must inevitably “bring to completion” or at least experience the end of different states of the matter he works with, in order to transmute the elements into new ones. This inevitably leads to chaos.
In psychological terms, it means the death of the ego.
Our egos, together with the elements upon which they are sustained, must die in order to give life to new elements.
Jung says in this same essay, regarding the theme of Zosimos’ vision:
“The dramatization shows how the divine process is revealed in the realm of human understanding and how man experiences divine transformation as punishment, torment, death, and transmutation.”
Apparently human consciousness cannot integrate the divine without suffering, but it is not because suffering is a quality of the divine. What happens is that we constitute our egos in ways incompatible with wholeness, and in this way it is inevitable that the irruption of the divine / collective unconscious is experienced as punishment.
Jung later explains:
“The motif is, in a broader spectrum, that of the sacrifice of God, which has developed not only in the West, but also in the East and especially in ancient Mexico. There, the one who personifies Tezcatlipocâ (fire mirror) is sacrificed at the feast of Toxcatl”.
The psychoanalyst points out that Zosimos’ vision describes what the Aztecs already knew and brutally experienced in their sacrifices:
At the feast of Toxcatl, a man was chosen to personify Tezcatlipoca, the “smoking mirror” or “fire mirror,” that is, a divinity that reflects consciousness and destiny. For a year he lived as a god; then, at the culminating moment, he was sacrificed.
Thus we learn that the god who dies, is torn apart and transformed, is not an isolated case, but an archetypal image. It is the same symbolic structure that appears again and again when a culture attempts to think about how the divine is renewed and made effective in the world.
Jung places emphasis on this despite the little importance given to alchemy and the fact that in his time many dismissed it as nonsense. For this reason the psychoanalyst says the following phrase, with which we conclude this article:
“A ‘nonsense’ that captivated minds for almost two thousand years — and not minor minds (I refer, for example, to Goethe and Newton) — must contain something that will be of some use for the psychologist to know.”
What We Repress Possesses Us
“But if in consciousness there is no willingness to admit unconscious contents, then the energy of these contents is diverted to the sphere of affectivity, namely to the sphere of the instincts. From there arise emotional outbursts, irritability, moods, and sexual excitations by virtue of which consciousness usually suffers a profound disorientation. If the state becomes chronic, then a dissociation occurs, described by Freud as repression, with its well-known consequences.”
This explains why emotions can possess us, why harmful ideas become dictators of our behavior (even though deep down we logically know they are not correct), why the shadow can take control. It truly explains various psychological disorders and problems that can go far beyond a neurosis and reach madness.
What we repress, deny, or ignore does not disappear, but rather arises within us in an instinctive way, that is, in an automatic and uncontrolled manner. That is why Carl Jung explains that it goes to the sphere of our instincts. This is related to much of what Freud said about repressed sexuality.
In fact, going much further, for Jungian psychology one of the causes of schizophrenia is the inability of the individual’s ego to admit certain unconscious contents, and these then emerge into consciousness in an uncontrollable way.
Admitting unconscious contents is not simply a matter of knowing about them and taking them into account intellectually; it is having the willingness and disposition to live through everything that happens to us psychically, whether pleasurable or painful. That is, being with our emotions, fears, complexes, weaknesses, etc., without ignoring, avoiding, or denying them.
It is a kind of momentary renunciation of ego control.
How to Express in Order to Integrate Unconscious Contents?
Later Carl Jung says:
“Dorn calls the vessel the vas pellicanicum (pelican vessel) through which the essentia quinta (fifth essence) is extracted from the prima materia (prime matter). The same is stated by the anonymous author of the scholia on the Tractatus aureus: ‘This vessel, indeed, is the true philosophical pelican, and no other is to be sought in the whole world.”
The theme of the Vas hermeticum, the alchemical instrument in which the alchemist works with substances and obtains the fifth essence, is relevant here, since it symbolizes the capacity of consciousness to be receptive and to contain everything, even the strong polarity of opposites.
Symbolically, the Vas Pellican is an interesting version of this instrument. Its symbol is due to the belief that the pelican wounded its own breast and fed its young with its own blood. Alchemically, it symbolizes matter giving birth to itself.
The true challenge for modern men and women, whose lives are overwhelmed by problems of all kinds (not only psychological), is undoubtedly to achieve this hermetic vessel—to give priority to oneself in the realm of psychological as well as personal development. That is, to succeed day by day in seriously working on one’s psychological/spiritual development and obtaining from the unconscious the fifth essence (which I understand as union with the Self).
However, to achieve something as ambitious as that, the right path is to take ourselves very seriously, to take a courageous step, and to consider ourselves the most important project of our lives. In this way, our psychological realization moves to the forefront and we can truly begin to work on ourselves.
By the way, I confess that this proposal may be somewhat selfish, but such is individuation (Carl Jung acknowledged it in the Zarathustra seminars). However, the best gift we can give to others is to do the best for ourselves; it is to present ourselves as whole individuals.
From such devotion to our realization, we can begin to work with these contents through spiritual practices such as meditation and active imagination.
Also, why not?
By creating our own Red Book where the unconscious finds expression through writing and drawing.
Juan Duran
