Doctoral Thesis
“Sol” and “Luna”, “Burn in water and wash in fire”
Some instances of Contraries at work in Blake’s “Four Zoas”, “Milton” and “Jerusalem” in the light of Jung’s thought and his alchemical understanding in “Mysterium Coniunctionis”.
Summary
The thesis sets out to show how William Blake and C.G. Jung are linked by Contraries - the Light love and Dark fire worlds of Boehme which interact dynamically - and by the collective unconscious represented by the water symbol. The alchemical Sol and Luna as an archetypal pair of Contraries, show how Sol’s sulphur provides the energy charge without which everything would remain in the unconscious and how Luna’s Sal, when a descent is made into her unconscious, allows Feeling to change Bitterness to Wisdom. Regina may be seen as the vessel into which the king must submerge in order to renew his ‘conscious dominant’. Inconsistent with this Blake gives her no separate existence of her own and it becomes apparent that although Blake does have much of Jung’s anima in his emanations and Jerusalem in particular, the feminine principle is in other ways neglected.
By the Assumption, the adding of the feminine four of Creation to the masculine Trinity of the Creator, Jung advocated the acceptance of matter. When likened to Blake’s four zoas his four psychological functions form the totality symbol of the cross. As elements in alchemy Blake’s four zoas must be opened and investigated by dreams. After a sacrifice in fire the alchemical Word can be extracted in the prophetic works as ‘Living Waters’, and despite his fiery activism, his emphasis is on Doing rather than Being and it is the water symbol which best describes the affinity between Blake and Jung.
Chapter One: The Nature of Contraries in Blake and Jung As Jung derived his idea of ‘individuation’ from an understanding of the alchemical union of opposites (and Blake’s Albion also is restored to unity), the alchemical influence in the comparison of William Blake with C.G.Jung is an important factor. Alchemy is also interesting in as far as it embellishes and reinforces ideas Blake already has.
Blake’s Contraries are forms of Reason and Energy. They are Boehme’s Light and Dark worlds. Blake moves from favouring the energy of the Tyger to the sacrifice of the Lamb. His Negation is a state which exists outside the interaction of Contraries. As it gives Evil an external existence we ask why does Blake not give Good a corresponding external existence? The final truth of the vigorous interaction and energy between contraries we see lies in a Third which is the Imagination of man, God ‘in’ man, and here Blake’s God is not Transcendent but Immanent. Blake and Jung may differ in this, but both aim to achieve the coming together of consciousness with the unconscious, ‘between above and below falls the waterfall’ with Boehme’s Dark Contrary being the source of a new consciousness - the Light Contrary. Revelations’ ‘two-edged sword’ shows tribulation and liberty to be another source of Contraries.
We will look at the ‘collective unconscious’ as the main link between Blake and Jung in three stages: in alchemy because it manifests the collective unconscious, in the psychological types both Blake and Jung were because they are characterised by their attentive ‘listening’ to the unconscious, and in the Book of Revelation because through it we can suggest that the Lamb side of contraries which wins through is the success of the collective unconscious symbolised by water. By choosing to follow the alchemic rather than platonic symbol for water we uphold Blake’s belief that ‘everything that lives is holy’.
Chapter Two: ‘Sol’ and ‘Luna’ In the alchemical ‘Sol’ and ‘Luna’ or the archetypal Sun and Moon as the most outstanding luminary symbols for Contraries, we can understand Contraries as powerful archetypes also within ourselves. Blake’s Sol can be found in his Sunflower that responds to the Sun as does man to God. Jung’s Sol is humanity’s consciousness, each person’s ego. It might therefore follow that as humanity as the sunflower aspires to the Sun and Sol to God, so consciousness (and reason) can aspire and be realised only in God.
In the winged disk figure of Uraeon (Bryant’s mythology) snakes are prevented from soaring back to the sun because the ancient mariner, in shooting the albatross, has destroyed the connection between head and heart. To reassert this connection the snake must have brilliant existence, darkness accepted. If not, a psychological disarray will ensue, as witnessed in the Four Zoas, with the darkest of attitudes, fear, ignorance and a mistaken ego, prevailing.
Sol in Blake is depicted by Los (Sol spelt backwards) who represents two suns: one inner the other outer. Los explores the (inner) recesses of the grave while Jung sees that it is by the inner sun, one’s own Sol, that we should explore the life of generated existence. The image of Uraeon and the lessons of Boehme teach that birth issues from darkness. It is within sulphur’s daemonic aspect (rather than in Swedenborg’s two suns) that the transformative substance which embraces all and accommodates this idea, can be found. The most dangerous water becomes the water which flows from the side of Christ. The power of sulphur resides within its energy charge without which everything would remain in the unconscious.
As Los is identified with Sol, so Enitharmon Los’ emanation, could be identified with Luna. But only if she had a will of her own. A descent into Luna can be understood as a descent into dead matter or into the unconscious from which it may give birth to psychological life. Both Blake and Jung have expressed Luna as the unconscious in man - Luna as the life-giving unconscious is expressed in Blake’s Jerusalem (when she has absorbed the dark Vala) – but have made less of a case for Luna as the consciousness in a woman. It is the very inconsistency of Luna that enables rebirth (the monthly cycle is of death and rebirth), and her animal appetite need only be feared where the unconscious life does not have solid foundation. By an acceptance of darkness, inconsistency, madness and chaos Luna allows Feeling, and it is within the capacity for Feeling that Sal (Sal is to Luna as Sulphur is to Sol) can change Bitterness into Wisdom. Sal, variously described as fire and water, is also Soul, an attribute which it shares with Jerusalem herself.
Chapter Three: Jerusalem The king as the ‘conscious dominant’ who needs to prevent his attitudes from becoming inflexible, must renew himself in the vessel of the queen, i.e. the unconscious. But because Blake’s androgynous being is only male, the possibility of this renewal is thwarted, for if ‘female’ does not have independent existence, how can her unconscious as the vessel of renewal have independence either? On one level Blake does use this symbolism: the rational zoa Urizen for instance is renewed within an irrational zoa, Los. Without an autonomous ‘female’ nor can there be an apotheosis of Queen Luna, the making of the unconscious conscious. Neither can the King as only one of the many sinking and rising archetypes, arise from her vessel.
In Job’s God as understood by Jung, I suggest that God is unjust because like the King, he is incomplete, lacking in Sophia’s self-reflection, her independent Wisdom. And that in Blake Jerusalem may represent an archetype for the Queen, for Wisom and Sophia.
In observing the shortcomings of Jung we see how such traditional identifications of woman with matter and Man with spirit, can produce damaging stereotypes which need re-examining. But in whatever way feminists and Jungians disagree on these points, they do agree that a certain dominance in Western culture needs to be challenged. Despite his shortcomings it has been noticed that in embracing the emotional alienation from which Western man seems to suffer, Jung does interact with sexism in its deepest form.
In this chapter we also look at the extent to which we can liken Blake’s Spectre and Emanation to Jung’s ‘anima’ and ‘animus’, seeing that neither Blake nor Jung have looked fully to the consequences of a suppressed ‘animus’ in a woman, or even the ascendancy of Luna in woman.
What of Jung’s anima in Blake? His suppressed anima is not a manifestation of Freudian guilt, but rather of the split he perceives in this world between the senses and the spirit. He is also opposed by Instinct, the character of his own mythology, Tharmas, and personifications of the anima in the prophetic works – in his Emanations and in Jerusalem - do proliferate.
Both Blake’s Jerusalem and Jung’s anima portray something of Boehme’s Sophia, the presence from the beginning of Darkness rather than Light, of Freedom rather than Being, of Nothing rather than Something. It is Sophia’s ‘completeness’, her balancing powers of darkness which are neglected both say by a world which prefers ‘perfection’.
Although contemporary women theologians might feel the cult of the virgin doesn’t indicate a more positive evaluation of women, Jung felt it did. Here for him, for whom the dogmatisation of the Assumption was crucial to individuation, the ‘feminine’ was given real existence. In a Protestant climate devoid of female representation it was not surprising he thought that there were so many visions of Mary.
Trace representations of the ‘female’ as vessel may be found in Blake’s ‘moony arc’, yet it only carries souls across a sea of Time and Space, and Beulah, a place of streams and rivers, dreams and the unconscious only represents his Three rather than fourfold vision.
How does Jungian psychology throw light on Jerusalem as a positive feminine archetype? By talking of feminine cultures as inclusive rather than intrusive; as renewable, possessing the capacity for rebirth essential to the nature of Contraries; and related, the quality of relatedness being inseparable from that of change. Yet no adequate outward form has been credited to this female mode of existence. Despite his empathy with Boehme’s idea of darkness or freedom preceding manifestation and his Enitharmon as Los’ fertilising power, Blake’s ‘fiery activism’ in Eden ensures that there is no room here for the vitality or nourishment of water or for Jerusalem the Soul.
Chapter Four: ‘Burn in Water and Wash in Fire’ In the transition from three to four, Creation is added to the Creator (shown for Jung by the Pythagorean tetrad), the feminine to the masculine, or matter to the metaphysical realm. This is expressed for Jung by the Assumption, the taking up of the dark feminine body (as anima) into heaven. Individuation was only possible for him through this acceptance of matter. Though we look at Blake’s addition of a fourth to the three in his ‘matrix’ idea we note how his fourfold vision does still not express the totality of Being. In addition we will look at the case for the three, the feminine can also be represented therein – and at the quintessence.
The four as functions and zoas have their basis in the cross which forms a totality symbol and points to the presence of God. In the positioning of his four zoas Blake echoes Jung’s idea of the psychological cross as a pattern for ‘individuation’ and we look then at how Blake’s four zoas correspond to Jung’s psychological types: Los to Intuition, Luvah to Feeling, Tharmas to Sensation and Urizen to Reason.
The four zoas are not only psychological functions but also elements. The elements must be separated (‘without separation is no mixture’) before the alchemical goal (the unity of true speech dependent upon the element Air, the Feeling function) can be achieved. The Four Zoas enact this separation and as the elements must be opened and separated so must man be looked at by the unconscious and dreams so that consciousness can react emotionally to things discovered in the unconscious, bringing forth God’s articulate speech. Feeling enables consciousness to communicate with the unconscious. Blake’s Luvah characterises Feeling, the element Air, and he enables Urizen, who characterises Thought, to communicate with Tharmas, Instinct. Milton must re-enter the world we suggest, in order to discover Feeling, this attribute of Air.
Fire is a quality of Jung’s mana personality (an extraordinary powerful archetype said to come into effect where the anima has been depotentiated), and Blake’s risen man lives in Fire. As mana can turn into crisis or spiritual achievement so Los represents that aspect of fire which is inner, spiritual, and Urizen journeying through undifferentiated fire, is at the end of Jerusalem differentiated, rehabilitated. After Fire’s action the pure salt of alchemic crystallization is extracted in the Word, Reason itself becoming the self-sacrifice of Boehme’s Light love world. In Fire ‘the Furnaces of Affliction’, Urizen loses his Selfhood. Then impurities are destroyed and Living Waters revealed.
Within the collective unconscious Fire and Water can be intermingled. In Water Sol is hidden like Fire. Fire destroys but salt (Sal) endures like the reality of the feminine principle which endures and changes within all things. Water, expressing the journey and goal of Jung’s individualism, lends itself to the harmonious movement that flows into the collective unconscious. Though there is a summarising case for Water in Blake (which we will see at the end of the Conclusion) Blake’s activism representing the world of Doing rather than of the Being world of Water, is sometimes at odds with what he intended.
The thesis
Summary
The thesis sets out to show how William Blake and C.G. Jung are linked by Contraries - the Light love and Dark fire worlds of Boehme which interact dynamically - and by the collective unconscious represented by the water symbol. The alchemical Sol and Luna as an archetypal pair of Contraries, show how Sol’s sulphur provides the energy charge without which everything would remain in the unconscious and how Luna’s Sal, when a descent is made into her unconscious, allows Feeling to change Bitterness to Wisdom. Regina may be seen as the vessel into which the king must submerge in order to renew his ‘conscious dominant’. Inconsistent with this Blake gives her no separate existence of her own and it becomes apparent that although Blake does have much of Jung’s anima in his emanations and Jerusalem in particular, the feminine principle is in other ways neglected.
By the Assumption, the adding of the feminine four of Creation to the masculine Trinity of the Creator, Jung advocated the acceptance of matter. When likened to Blake’s four zoas his four psychological functions form the totality symbol of the cross. As elements in alchemy Blake’s four zoas must be opened and investigated by dreams. After a sacrifice in fire the alchemical Word can be extracted in the prophetic works as ‘Living Waters’, and despite his fiery activism, his emphasis is on Doing rather than Being and it is the water symbol which best describes the affinity between Blake and Jung.
Chapter One: The Nature of Contraries in Blake and Jung As Jung derived his idea of ‘individuation’ from an understanding of the alchemical union of opposites (and Blake’s Albion also is restored to unity), the alchemical influence in the comparison of William Blake with C.G.Jung is an important factor. Alchemy is also interesting in as far as it embellishes and reinforces ideas Blake already has.
Blake’s Contraries are forms of Reason and Energy. They are Boehme’s Light and Dark worlds. Blake moves from favouring the energy of the Tyger to the sacrifice of the Lamb. His Negation is a state which exists outside the interaction of Contraries. As it gives Evil an external existence we ask why does Blake not give Good a corresponding external existence? The final truth of the vigorous interaction and energy between contraries we see lies in a Third which is the Imagination of man, God ‘in’ man, and here Blake’s God is not Transcendent but Immanent. Blake and Jung may differ in this, but both aim to achieve the coming together of consciousness with the unconscious, ‘between above and below falls the waterfall’ with Boehme’s Dark Contrary being the source of a new consciousness - the Light Contrary. Revelations’ ‘two-edged sword’ shows tribulation and liberty to be another source of Contraries.
We will look at the ‘collective unconscious’ as the main link between Blake and Jung in three stages: in alchemy because it manifests the collective unconscious, in the psychological types both Blake and Jung were because they are characterised by their attentive ‘listening’ to the unconscious, and in the Book of Revelation because through it we can suggest that the Lamb side of contraries which wins through is the success of the collective unconscious symbolised by water. By choosing to follow the alchemic rather than platonic symbol for water we uphold Blake’s belief that ‘everything that lives is holy’.
Chapter Two: ‘Sol’ and ‘Luna’ In the alchemical ‘Sol’ and ‘Luna’ or the archetypal Sun and Moon as the most outstanding luminary symbols for Contraries, we can understand Contraries as powerful archetypes also within ourselves. Blake’s Sol can be found in his Sunflower that responds to the Sun as does man to God. Jung’s Sol is humanity’s consciousness, each person’s ego. It might therefore follow that as humanity as the sunflower aspires to the Sun and Sol to God, so consciousness (and reason) can aspire and be realised only in God.
In the winged disk figure of Uraeon (Bryant’s mythology) snakes are prevented from soaring back to the sun because the ancient mariner, in shooting the albatross, has destroyed the connection between head and heart. To reassert this connection the snake must have brilliant existence, darkness accepted. If not, a psychological disarray will ensue, as witnessed in the Four Zoas, with the darkest of attitudes, fear, ignorance and a mistaken ego, prevailing.
Sol in Blake is depicted by Los (Sol spelt backwards) who represents two suns: one inner the other outer. Los explores the (inner) recesses of the grave while Jung sees that it is by the inner sun, one’s own Sol, that we should explore the life of generated existence. The image of Uraeon and the lessons of Boehme teach that birth issues from darkness. It is within sulphur’s daemonic aspect (rather than in Swedenborg’s two suns) that the transformative substance which embraces all and accommodates this idea, can be found. The most dangerous water becomes the water which flows from the side of Christ. The power of sulphur resides within its energy charge without which everything would remain in the unconscious.
As Los is identified with Sol, so Enitharmon Los’ emanation, could be identified with Luna. But only if she had a will of her own. A descent into Luna can be understood as a descent into dead matter or into the unconscious from which it may give birth to psychological life. Both Blake and Jung have expressed Luna as the unconscious in man - Luna as the life-giving unconscious is expressed in Blake’s Jerusalem (when she has absorbed the dark Vala) – but have made less of a case for Luna as the consciousness in a woman. It is the very inconsistency of Luna that enables rebirth (the monthly cycle is of death and rebirth), and her animal appetite need only be feared where the unconscious life does not have solid foundation. By an acceptance of darkness, inconsistency, madness and chaos Luna allows Feeling, and it is within the capacity for Feeling that Sal (Sal is to Luna as Sulphur is to Sol) can change Bitterness into Wisdom. Sal, variously described as fire and water, is also Soul, an attribute which it shares with Jerusalem herself.
Chapter Three: Jerusalem The king as the ‘conscious dominant’ who needs to prevent his attitudes from becoming inflexible, must renew himself in the vessel of the queen, i.e. the unconscious. But because Blake’s androgynous being is only male, the possibility of this renewal is thwarted, for if ‘female’ does not have independent existence, how can her unconscious as the vessel of renewal have independence either? On one level Blake does use this symbolism: the rational zoa Urizen for instance is renewed within an irrational zoa, Los. Without an autonomous ‘female’ nor can there be an apotheosis of Queen Luna, the making of the unconscious conscious. Neither can the King as only one of the many sinking and rising archetypes, arise from her vessel.
In Job’s God as understood by Jung, I suggest that God is unjust because like the King, he is incomplete, lacking in Sophia’s self-reflection, her independent Wisdom. And that in Blake Jerusalem may represent an archetype for the Queen, for Wisom and Sophia.
In observing the shortcomings of Jung we see how such traditional identifications of woman with matter and Man with spirit, can produce damaging stereotypes which need re-examining. But in whatever way feminists and Jungians disagree on these points, they do agree that a certain dominance in Western culture needs to be challenged. Despite his shortcomings it has been noticed that in embracing the emotional alienation from which Western man seems to suffer, Jung does interact with sexism in its deepest form.
In this chapter we also look at the extent to which we can liken Blake’s Spectre and Emanation to Jung’s ‘anima’ and ‘animus’, seeing that neither Blake nor Jung have looked fully to the consequences of a suppressed ‘animus’ in a woman, or even the ascendancy of Luna in woman.
What of Jung’s anima in Blake? His suppressed anima is not a manifestation of Freudian guilt, but rather of the split he perceives in this world between the senses and the spirit. He is also opposed by Instinct, the character of his own mythology, Tharmas, and personifications of the anima in the prophetic works – in his Emanations and in Jerusalem - do proliferate.
Both Blake’s Jerusalem and Jung’s anima portray something of Boehme’s Sophia, the presence from the beginning of Darkness rather than Light, of Freedom rather than Being, of Nothing rather than Something. It is Sophia’s ‘completeness’, her balancing powers of darkness which are neglected both say by a world which prefers ‘perfection’.
Although contemporary women theologians might feel the cult of the virgin doesn’t indicate a more positive evaluation of women, Jung felt it did. Here for him, for whom the dogmatisation of the Assumption was crucial to individuation, the ‘feminine’ was given real existence. In a Protestant climate devoid of female representation it was not surprising he thought that there were so many visions of Mary.
Trace representations of the ‘female’ as vessel may be found in Blake’s ‘moony arc’, yet it only carries souls across a sea of Time and Space, and Beulah, a place of streams and rivers, dreams and the unconscious only represents his Three rather than fourfold vision.
How does Jungian psychology throw light on Jerusalem as a positive feminine archetype? By talking of feminine cultures as inclusive rather than intrusive; as renewable, possessing the capacity for rebirth essential to the nature of Contraries; and related, the quality of relatedness being inseparable from that of change. Yet no adequate outward form has been credited to this female mode of existence. Despite his empathy with Boehme’s idea of darkness or freedom preceding manifestation and his Enitharmon as Los’ fertilising power, Blake’s ‘fiery activism’ in Eden ensures that there is no room here for the vitality or nourishment of water or for Jerusalem the Soul.
Chapter Four: ‘Burn in Water and Wash in Fire’ In the transition from three to four, Creation is added to the Creator (shown for Jung by the Pythagorean tetrad), the feminine to the masculine, or matter to the metaphysical realm. This is expressed for Jung by the Assumption, the taking up of the dark feminine body (as anima) into heaven. Individuation was only possible for him through this acceptance of matter. Though we look at Blake’s addition of a fourth to the three in his ‘matrix’ idea we note how his fourfold vision does still not express the totality of Being. In addition we will look at the case for the three, the feminine can also be represented therein – and at the quintessence.
The four as functions and zoas have their basis in the cross which forms a totality symbol and points to the presence of God. In the positioning of his four zoas Blake echoes Jung’s idea of the psychological cross as a pattern for ‘individuation’ and we look then at how Blake’s four zoas correspond to Jung’s psychological types: Los to Intuition, Luvah to Feeling, Tharmas to Sensation and Urizen to Reason.
The four zoas are not only psychological functions but also elements. The elements must be separated (‘without separation is no mixture’) before the alchemical goal (the unity of true speech dependent upon the element Air, the Feeling function) can be achieved. The Four Zoas enact this separation and as the elements must be opened and separated so must man be looked at by the unconscious and dreams so that consciousness can react emotionally to things discovered in the unconscious, bringing forth God’s articulate speech. Feeling enables consciousness to communicate with the unconscious. Blake’s Luvah characterises Feeling, the element Air, and he enables Urizen, who characterises Thought, to communicate with Tharmas, Instinct. Milton must re-enter the world we suggest, in order to discover Feeling, this attribute of Air.
Fire is a quality of Jung’s mana personality (an extraordinary powerful archetype said to come into effect where the anima has been depotentiated), and Blake’s risen man lives in Fire. As mana can turn into crisis or spiritual achievement so Los represents that aspect of fire which is inner, spiritual, and Urizen journeying through undifferentiated fire, is at the end of Jerusalem differentiated, rehabilitated. After Fire’s action the pure salt of alchemic crystallization is extracted in the Word, Reason itself becoming the self-sacrifice of Boehme’s Light love world. In Fire ‘the Furnaces of Affliction’, Urizen loses his Selfhood. Then impurities are destroyed and Living Waters revealed.
Within the collective unconscious Fire and Water can be intermingled. In Water Sol is hidden like Fire. Fire destroys but salt (Sal) endures like the reality of the feminine principle which endures and changes within all things. Water, expressing the journey and goal of Jung’s individualism, lends itself to the harmonious movement that flows into the collective unconscious. Though there is a summarising case for Water in Blake (which we will see at the end of the Conclusion) Blake’s activism representing the world of Doing rather than of the Being world of Water, is sometimes at odds with what he intended.
The thesis