Books: Critical Notices

Mysterium coniunctionis, by C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull. Collected Works 14 London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. pp. xix + 704. 525. 6d.

‘Do not be disturbed because you sometimes find contradictions in my treatises, after the custom of the philosophers; these are necessary if you understand that no rose is found without thorns.’ This good advice to any reader of Mysterium coniunctionis was given by an alchemist who compared his method of exposition to the paradoxical nature of Mercurius, whose end was also his beginning. Jung's book exemplifies the ‘roundness’ of alchemical thought in its ‘mystic peregrination’. In a circular journey through more than 550 pages, Jung puts into practice his method of circumambulation and amplification, by means of which the meaning of a symbol is intimated by viewing its overlapping, interpenetrating, and contradictory motifs from multiple standpoints. As images pile upon images, and analogies are compounded with ideas, the central theme (of separation and analysis which lead to synthesis and unity) emerges and re-emerges in ever-varying forms. Roses bloom in unexpected places, but the path is often a thorny one for an English empiricist who has been encouraged by the section headings to expect progress from a beginning to an end, only to find that as he goes forward he meets himself coming back.

The style and method of presentation evoke in the reader many visions of exciting possibilities, some arresting insights, not a few cathartic emotional experiences—and a good deal of frustration. A long compilation of extracts from obscure alchemical texts leads on to an interesting, important, and lucid argument. This is abruptly interrupted and is only continued forty pages later after a complex digression in which some aspects of the symbolism of trees and brother-sister incest are thrown together with pregnant hints about tomfoolery, the doctrine of the privatio boni, the secular movement in the Renaissance, the nature of lov