In 1939 1 gave a seminar on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola.
At the same time I was occupied on the studies for Psychology and Alchemy.
One night I awoke and saw, bathed in bright light at the foot of my bed, the figure of Christ on the Cross. It was not quite life-size, but extremely distinct; and I saw that his body was made of greenish gold.
The vision was marvelously beautiful, and yet I was profoundly shaken by it.
A vision as such is nothing unusual for me, for I frequently see extremely vivid hypnagogic images.
I had been thinking a great deal about the Anima Christi, one of the meditations from the Spiritual Exercises.
The vision came to me as if to point out that I had overlooked something in my reflections: the analogy of Christ with the aurum non vulgi and the viriditas of the alchemists.
When I realized that the vision pointed to this central alchemical symbol, and that I had had an essentially alchemical vision of Christ, I felt comforted.
The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not only in man but also in inorganic nature.
It is an expression of the life-spirit, the anima mundi or films macrocosmi, the Anthropos who animates the whole cosmos.
This spirit has poured himself out into everything, even into inorganic matter; he is present in metal and stone. My vision was thus a union of the Christ-image with his analogue in matter, the filius macrocosmi.
If I had not been so struck by the greenish-gold, I would have been tempted to assume that something essential was missing from my "Christian" view in other words, that my traditional Christ-image was somehow inadequate and that I still had to catch up with part of the Christian development.
The emphasis on the metal, however, showed me the undisguised alchemical conception of Christ as a union of spiritually alive and physically dead matter.” Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Pages 210-211.
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