Page 43 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

(CW 14: 465, parts between { } added by Jung).

Jung comments that mental union is not the cumulating point of the
work. The second stage is when the unity of spirit and soul, or intellect
and feeling, is co-joined with the body to make this first unity valid and
permanent (CW 14: 465-6). Jung quotes Dorn that “the mind is well said
to be composed when the spirit and the soul are joined by such a bond
that the body’s appetites and the hearts affections are restrained” (ibid:
471, n60). The spirit is a spiraculum (literally an air hole or vent) of
eternal life. The soul is the organ of spirit, and the body is the instrument
of soul. Jung argues that Dorn is suggesting we must separate mind from
body and join the opposites in the mind. This can be a relief for the
body, as it is previously subject to the soul’s appetites and wish-
fantasies. The separation withdraws these projections from the bodily
sphere, and allows the soul to discover its ‘goods’ and ‘evils’, under the
guidance of a less personal function of spirit - which here stands for
rationality, tradition and the archetypes (ibid: 472-3). Every such
operation, writes Jung, is a figurative death and, if not faced, could
become a real death (ibid: 474).

However, in the long term an insistence on the primacy of spirit
cripples life for most people, or lead to further pathologies (CW 14: 471-
2), and the insights gained must be reunited with the body, and with
one’s life (ibid: 476). Dorn states that when this second union takes
place the body resigns itself to and obeys the union of spirit and soul.
The body becomes spirit and the spirit body. Dorn writes:

Make the fixed volatile and the volatile fixed and in this manner
you have our Magistery… Make the unyielding body tractable,
so that by the excellence of the spirit coming together with the
soul it becomes a most stable body ready to endure all trials. For
gold is tried in the fire…… Learn not heaven… through the
earth, but learn the virtues of one by those of the other… [The
medicine which preserves] you can find nowhere but in
heaven… Thou wilt never make from others the One which thou
seekest except first there be made one thing of thyself (see CW
14: 481-2).

The unio mentalis is the ego coming to terms with its background,
the second stage concerns confrontation with the ‘shadow’, or personal
repressed, or the problem of how to confront reality while torn. This
stage represents, to some extent, an ascetic withdrawal. It allows the
removal of projections from the world and the integration of them into

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