In the introduction to Jung's Black books, Sonu Shamdasani refers to a letter written by Jung to his wife while he was serving in the army in 1917 near Château d'Oex. In this letter dated June 27, he states:
"Last night I had a remarkable mystical experience. A feeling of connection of several millennia. It was like a transfiguration."
It is very likely that this is the second mystical experience Carl Jung reached, the first being linked to his active imagination called MYSTERIUM in The Red Book. Of the precise content of his experience, nothing published has been written by Jung. But the signs that it occurred do exist and they are numerous, both in his personal life and in his written work.
That mystical experience changed the course of Jung's life, and he never stopped, afterward, talking about it or describing the steps to achieve it. You will probably think: where could he have talked about it if we know nothing about that mystical experience? He did so by using the alchemical terminology and the teachings of the Gnostics, both systems concerned with the phenomenon of mystical experiences. By his study of alchemical and Gnostic writings, Jung spoke to those who could understand him about the mystical experiences that he believed were induced by the individuation process.
In order to fully understand Jung's second mystical experience of 1917, it will be necessary to go through a few steps. Carl Jung spoke of mystical experiences or the conjunction of opposites in almost every one of his books, beginning in 1921 with The Psychological Types, where he used the terms uniting symbol, Pandora’s jewel, treasure in the lotus, symbol of union, the Grail, the divine service, the precious pearl and the treasure in the field in reference to the mystical experiences phenomenon. It was in AION, researches into the phenomenology of the Self (1951) that he explained thoroughly what he thought were experiences of the encounter with the archetype of the Self.
In AION, Jung used the Moses quaternio to talk about the combination of opposites that appears in mystical experiences. Those characters represent four families of symbols that are two pairs of opposites. The first pair is
- Moses: the consciousness and the hero
- Miriam: the unconscious and the anima
- Jethro: the parent and the sage
- Zipporah: the child and the pupil (CW 9ii, § 329)
The second mystical experience is better described with the symbols of the axis Moses-Myriam or ego-anima. It is experienced as if the whole world is in the psyche. The symbols of the second mystical experience, which is our principal interest here, have numerous correspondences which the most important or the most popular are:
Hero Anima
= King Queen
= Conscious Unconscious
= Ego Anima
= Sun Moon
= Spirit Matter
Those symbols must be used to grasp the second mystical experience. That experience is described as a conjunction of spirit and matter (king and queen in alchemy) which they called the stone or lapis philosophorum.
The conjunction of spirit and matter, as a mystical experience, is not easy to describe. It is lived as if the exterior world is in the psyche. This is an extremely numinous symbol of the conjunction of opposites. The best description that I have yet found is from Forrest Reid (1875–1947). He described his mystical experience as follows:
“It was as if I had never realized before how lovely the world was. I lay down on my back in the warm, dry moss and listened to the skylark singing as it mounted up from the fields near the sea into the dark clear sky. No other music ever gave me the same pleasure as that passionately joyous singing. It was a kind of leaping, exultant ecstasy, a bright, flame-like sound, rejoicing in itself. And then a curious experience befell me. It was as if everything that had seemed to be external and around me were suddenly within me. The whole world seemed to be within me. It was within me that the trees waved their green branches, it was within me that the skylark was singing, it was within me that the hot sun shone, and that the shade was cool.”
In 1956, Jung published his last major work Mysterium conjunctionis, the mystery of the conjunction. This title is not insignificant. It is important to note that this important book is devoted precisely to the study of mystical experiences. In it, he talks about the three conjunctions of opposites or mystical experiences in alchemy. In the second volume, he refers extensively to the writings of a 16th century physician-alchemist, Gerhard Dorn.
We need to state here that alchemy was not about the production of a material stone to achieve immortality or the process to change lead into gold. Those were symbols used by the alchemists to expose their method to reach mystical experiences in the shade of the Inquisition. Only ingenuous and naïve chemists tried to transform metals or produce the red stone. The authors of the alchemical texts were among the finest intellectuals of their generation and it silly to think that they literally meant what they wrote. The images they used in their grimoires were symbols of psychological processes and methods to achieve consciously mystical experiences.
As we have said, Dorn’s system is composed of three conjunctions of opposites or mystical experiences. The first conjunction is unio mentalis, the union of the spirit and the soul. The second conjunction is known as the Philosopher's Stone (lapis philosophorum) and consists in the conjunction of spirit and body (interior-exterior). From this experience comes the unified or integral man. The third conjunction is the rotundum and is a conjunction of the integral man with the unus mundus.
It is said that the Philosopher’s stone has a thousand names and here are some to help us understand Jung: lapis philosophorum (stone of the philosopher), filius sol et lunae (son of sun and moon where sun is a symbol of spirit and moon, of matter), hieros gamos (sacred or chymical marriage of mind and body or spirit and matter), conjunctio sol et lunae (conjunction of the sun and the moon), homunculus, hermaphrodite, filius regius (royal son), cauda pavonis (peacock’s tail). In AION, Jung precised:
“The “thousand names” of the lapis philosophorum correspond to the innumerable Gnostic designations for the Anthropos, whic Moh make it quite obvious what is meant: the greater, more comprehensive Man, that indescribable whole consisting of the sum of conscious and unconscious processes. This objective whole, the antithesis of the subjective ego-psyche, is what I have called the self, and this corresponds exactly to the idea of the Anthropos.” (CW 9ii, par. 296)
To Jung, the lapis philosophorum as the precious stone of the philosopher is a mystical experience that changes one view of the world:
“The alchemists sought for that effect which would heal not only the disharmonies of the physical world but the inner psychic conflict as well, the “affliction of the soul”; and they called this effect the lapis Philosophorum.” (CW 14, par. 674)
As we have said earlier, the hieros gamos as the mystical marriage of the mind and body or spirit and matter is experienced momentarily as if the whole world is inside the psyche or “everything is in me”. Jung linked that experience to the individuation process:
“Already in the sixteenth century, however, Gerard Dorn had recognized the psychological aspect of the chymical marriage and clearly understood it as what we today would call the individuation process.” (CW 14, par. 669)
Jung's extensive use of alchemy was his way to speak about mystical experiences to those who were able to read the second degree meaning of hos books. He always feares being tagged as a mystic. In response to Dr. Baur-Celio's question as to whether in the background of his works there was a secret knowledge, Jung replied on January 30, 1934:
"I have made experiences that are in some way "unspeakable", "secret" since it is really not possible to express them and no one can understand them (I don't know if I myself have understood them, even approximately), "dangerous", insofar as 99 % of the human beings would declare me mad if they heard me speak about them, "catastrophic" insofar as the prejudice created by expressing them would risk blocking to the others the access to a living and marvelous secret, "taboo" because it is an adyton protected by the deisidaimonia . (...) Who would dare to speak of a creed... where he knows how much belief is superfluous when one does more than "know", when the experience has even tackled you to the wall? It is no longer a mere creed, but the greatest and most incisive experience of my life, that this door - a side door and very discreet - opens first onto a narrow path, unsuspecting and easily escaping attention - narrow and inconspicuous because few feet have trodden it - and yet it leads to the secret of transformation and renewal."¹
For more, see
https://www.academia.edu/119327280/Carl_Jungs_Second_Mystical_Experience_2024c_
¹Translated from Perrot, Étienne et al. C. G. Jung et la voie des profondeurs. La Fontaine de Pierre. P. 103-104
