Page 41 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

Union of Opposites

Jung finishes Psychology and Alchemy by suggesting that as the
condition of any unconscious content is potential, suspended between
the “polar opposites” of being and non being, a union of opposites must
play a decisive role in any kind of numinous uniting symbol (CW 12:
476-7).

Jung devoted his final, vastly complex, work, the Mysterium
Coniunctionis, to this question of the process of the union of symbols
which are “conceived as opposites” (CW 14: 3 emphasis added) within
the psyche, which is supposed to have a polar structure like all natural
processes (CW 14: xvi). Opposites “are the ineradicable and
indispensable preconditions of all psychic life” (ibid: 170). “There is no
energy without the tension of opposites” (ibid: 418). Sometimes these
opposites are opposites in terms of process, (the work of Luna is the
constellation of unconscious concepts, and the work of Sol is the
integration of these contents into life {ibid: 154}), and sometimes “the
opposites slumber side by side [in the unconscious]; they are wrenched
apart by the activity of the conscious mind” (ibid: 156). Jung remarks of
the marriage of opposites, that “we seldom find a high point of religious
feeling where this eternal image of the royal marriage does not appear”,
and “wherever this image is obscured [a person’s] life loses its proper
meaning and consequently its balance” (ibid: 166-7).

He opens the Mysterium with a section on the epigram known as the
Enigma of Bologna, which he uses to show that some alchemists
thought that texts which dealt with paradoxes where obviously
alchemical, thus trying to show the importance of opposites to alchemy.
Later in his commentary on Ripley’s Cantilena, he remarks that the
Conscious ego needs to separate opposites for clarity (discrimination is
its essence), but if the separation is so hard that the opposite is lost or
repressed (the evil is no longer seen in the good, the white in the black,
or vice versa) then we have one-sidedness, and the ability of the ego to
actually cope with, or extract meaning from, reality decays. As a result
the unconscious tries to compensate against this ego will which becomes
even more fanatical, until overturned in what he calls an enantiodromia
(CW 14: 333-4). Thus the process involving the symbol of the King in
the Ripley text shows this kind of structure (ibid: 355). Jung draws up a
table of this process (ibid: 371) and with slight modifications it looks
like:

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