If he were included there would be, not a Trinity, but a Christian Quaternity. Here we have another of those well-known quaternities of opposites which are usually masked as a triad, just as the Christian Trinity is able to maintain itself as such only by eliminating the fourth protagonist of the divine drama. From all this we get the following schema: Furthermore, not only the dragon but the negative aspect of sulphur, namely sulphur comburens, is identical with the devil, as Glauber says: Verily, sulphur is the true black devil of hell, who can be conquered by no element save by salt alone.385 Salt by contrast is a light substance, similar to the lapis, as we shall see. This makes it clear that the dragon is analogous to the devil and the lapis to Christ, in accordance with the ecclesiastical view of the devil as an autonomous counterpart of Christ. Like the Trinity, the alchemical triunity is a quaternity in disguise owing to the duplicity of the central figure: Mercurius is not only split into a masculine and a feminine half, but is the poisonous dragon and at the same time the heavenly lapis. A subtle feature of the Sulphur-Mercurius-Sal formula is that the central figure, Mercurius, is by nature androgynous and thus partakes both of the masculine red sulphur and of the lunar salt.383 His equivalent in the celestial realm is the planetary pair Sol and Luna, and in the intelligible realm Christ in his mystical androgyny, the man encompassed by the woman,384 i.e., sponsus and sponsa (Ecclesia). Georg von Welling, the plagiarist of Johann Rudolf Glauber, still thought in 1735 that his triad of fire, sun, and salt381 was in its root entirely one thing.382 The use of the Trinity formula in alchemy is so common that further documentation is unnecessary. From the time of Paracelsus the most important triad was Sulphur-Mercurius-Sal, which was held to correspond with the Trinity. Usually, however, there was a division into three worlds to correspond with the Trinity: heaven, earth, hell.380 Triads were also known in alchemy. Owing to the theory of correspondentia, regarded as axiomatic in the Middle Ages, the principles of each of the four worlds the intelligible or divine, the heavenly, the earthly, and the infernal379corresponded to each other. This explains the length of the present entire chapter: extensive digressions are necessary in order to do justice to the various aspects of the unconscious that are expressed by salt, and at the same time to explain their psychological meaning. Since Luna symbolizes the unconscious, Sal, as one of its attri butes, is a special instance of the lunar symbolism. I have included the latter in the scope of my observations but not the symbol of the sea as such. In this section I shall discuss not only salt but a number of symbolisms that are closely connected with it, such as the bitterness of the sea, sea-water and its baptismal quality, which in turn relates it to the Red Sea. Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
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