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Read books online » Psychology » Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Herbert Silberer (great book club books txt) 📖

Book online «Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Herbert Silberer (great book club books txt) 📖». Author Herbert Silberer



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are connected very easily with them because, going over into the regressive phase, they show their “titanic” countenances. I have with some daring, but not without right, just cited the Siddhi as the anagogic equivalent of autoerotism. The regressive phase, however, appears as soon as one indulges in the gratification of the Siddhi. It is not the Siddhi themselves that are the evil (I regard them indeed as anagogic), but the losing of oneself in them. They can be both divine and diabolic. That depends on one's attitude towards them.

In the result of introversion, the diabolic mysticism is opposed, as we saw, to the divine. The true mysticism is characterized by the extension of personality and the false by the shrinking of personality. We can also say, by an extension or shrinking of the sphere of interest that determines the socially valuable attitude. I say advisedly “sphere of interest,” for mysticism in the end will not merely fulfill the social law without love, but it labors for the bringing out of this very love. It is not satisfied with superficially tincturing the substance into gold (i.e., [pg 288] among other meanings, to get man to do good externally); but it would change the substance completely, make it gold through and through (i.e., to orient the entire impulse power of man for good, so that he desires this good with the warmth of love and therefore finds his good fortune in virtue). Only the good and not the good fortune is chosen as the leading star, as I must note in order to avoid a misconception about the hermetic procedure. Happiness arises only at a certain point, and seems to me like a fruit ripened in the meantime. The most subtle representatives of this doctrine among the alchemists are not so far, after all, from the Kantian ethics.

Alchemistic ethics presupposes that there is an education, an ennobling of the will. The person that wills can learn to encompass infinitely much in his ego. [Cf. Furtmüller (Psychoanalyse und Ethik, p. 15): “The individual can ... make the commands of others his own.” He quotes Goethe (Die Geheimnisse):

From the law which binds all being
The man is freed who masters himself.

The poles of shrinking and extension are the following: The magician and the pathological introversionist contract the sphere of their interest upon the narrowest egoism. The mystic expands it immensely, in that he comprises the whole world in himself. The person egotistically entering into introversion can preserve his happiness only by a firm [pg 289] self-enclosure before the ever threatening destruction; the mystic is free. The mystic's fortune consists in the union of his will with the world will or as another formula expresses it, in the union with God. [On the freeing effect of the merging of one's own will into a stronger cf. my essays Jb. ps. F., III, pp. 637 ff., and IV, p. 629.] This fortune is therefore also imperishable (gold). The reader must always bear in mind that the mystic never works on anything but on the problem of mankind in general; only he does so in a form of intensive life, and it may indeed be the case that the powers which introversion furnish him, actually make possible a more dynamic activity and a greater result. For my part I am strongly inclined to believe it.

On the extension of personality, some passages from the Discourses on Divinity in the Bhagavad-Gita:

Who sees himself in all being and all being in himself,
Whoever exercises himself in devotion and looks at all impartially,
Whoever sees me everywhere, and also sees everything in me,
From him I can never vanish nor he from me. VI, 29f.
Whoever discovers in all the modes of life the very exalted lord,
Who does not fail when they fail—he who recognizes that, has learned well,
For whosoever recognizes the same lord as the one who dwells in all,
Wounds not the self through the self, and travels so the highest road. XIII 27f. [pg 290]

These passages elucidate the progressive function of the idea of God in the “work.” Incidentally, I believe that the devotional doctrines (Yoga) which are theoretically based on the Samkhya philosophy that originated without a God, has for good practical reasons taken the idea of isvara (God) into its system. Concentration requires an elevated impalpable object as an aim. And this object must have the property of being above every reach of the power to grasp and yet apparently to seem attainable. God has furthermore the functions of the bearer of conflicts and hopes. At the beginning of the work indeed the obstructing conflicts still exist. A certain unburdening is accomplished by leaving the conflict to the divinity, and frees the powers that were at first crippled under the pressure of the conflicts. [Cf. Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious, Freud Kl. Schr., II, p. 131.]

Then throw on me all thy doings, thinking only on the highest spirit,
Hoping and desiring nothing, so fight, free from all pain. Bh. G. III 30.
Whose acts without any bias and dedicates all his activity to God
Will not be stained with evil [is therefore free from conflicts] as the lotus leaf is not stained by the water. V 10.

The idea of the education of the will has, of course, been familiar for a long time to ethical writers, even if it has at times been lost sight of.

Aristotle is convinced that morality arises from [pg 291] custom and convention. “As we learn swimming only in water, and music by practice on an instrument, so we become righteous by righteous action and moderate and courageous by appropriate acts. From uniform actions enduring habits are formed, and without a rational activity no one becomes good ... being good is an act. Good is never by nature; we become good by a behavior corresponding to a norm. We possess morality not by nature but against nature. We have the disposition to attain it ... we must completely win it by habit. As Plato says, in agreement with this, the proper education consists in being so led from youth upward, as to be glad and sorry about the things over which we should be glad and sorry. But if by a course of action in accordance with custom, a definite direction of the will has been secured, then pleasure and pain are added to the actions that result from the will and, as it were, as signs, that here a new nature is established in man.” (Jodl. Gesch. d. Eth., I, pp. 44 ff.) “The energy and the proud confidence in human power with which Aristotle offers to man his will and character formation as his own work, the emphasis with which he has opposed to the quietistic ‘velle non discitur’ (we cannot educate volition nor learn to will, as later pessimistic opinions have expressed it axiomatically) with the real indispensability and at the same time the possibility of the formation of the will; this contention is admirable and quite characteristic of the methods of thought of ancient philosophy at its height.” (Jodl., l. c., [pg 292] p. 49.) [Velle non discitur has been popularized by Schopenhauer.]

In Philo and the related philosophers there appears quite clearly the thought that gained such wide acceptance later among the Christian ascetics, that the highest development of moral strength was attainable only through a long continued and gradually increasing exercise, an ethical gymnastics. Philo, moreover, uses the word Askesis to describe what elsewhere had been described as bodily exercise. The occidental spiritual exercise corresponds to the Hindu yoga.

In the domestication of man through countless generations, social instincts must have been established, which appear as moral dispositions. I recall the moral feeling in Shaftesbury. The social life of man, for instance, plays with Adam Smith a significant rôle, and yet even with him the moral law is not something ready from the very beginning, not an innate imperative, but the peculiar product of each individual. The development of conscience receives an interesting treatment by Smith. There takes place in us a natural transposition of feelings, mediated through sympathy, which arouse in each of us the qualities of the other, and we can say “that morality in Smith's sense, just as Feuerbach taught later, is only reflected self-interest, although Smith himself was quite unwilling to look at sympathy as an egotistic principle. By means of a process that we can almost call a kind of self-deception of the imagination, we must look at ourselves with the eyes [pg 293] of others, a very sensible precaution of nature, which thus has created a balance for impulses that otherwise must have operated detrimentally. [Bear in mind what I have said above about intro-determination.] This transposition which sympathy effects we cannot escape; it itself appears when we know that we are protected from the criticism of another by the complete privacy of our own doings. It alone can keep us upright when all about us misunderstand us and judge us falsely. For the actual judgments of another about us form, so to speak, a first court whose findings are continually being corrected by that completely unpartisan and well informed witness who grows up with us and reacts on all our doings.” (Jodl., l. c., I, pp. 372 ff.)

The derivation of the moral from selfish impulses by transposition does not resolve ethics into egoism, as Helvetius would have us believe. It is “a caricature of the true state of things to speak of self-interest, when we have in mind magnanimity and beneficence, and to maintain that beneficence is nothing but disguised selfishness, because it produces joy or brings honor to the person that practices it.” (L. c., p. 444.)

The ethical evolution which takes place as an extension of personality demands, the more actively it is practiced, the removal of resistances which operate against the expansion of the ego. It cannot be denied that hostile tendencies, which are linked with pusillanimous views, are always on hand and create conflicts. If they were not, the moral task would [pg 294] be an easy one. Now as man cannot serve two masters, so in the personal psychical household, the points of view which have been dethroned, as far as they will not unite with the newly acquired ones, must be killed, and ousted from their power. Most of all must this process be made effective if the development is taken up intensively in the shape of introversion. It must appear also in the symbolism.

Already in the lecanomantic experiments we are struck by the dying of the figure (old man) that represents the old form of conscience that has been overcome. It is that part of Lea's psyche that resists the new, after the manner of old people (father type). In order that the new may be suppressed, it must be immolated; at every step in his evolution man must give up something; not without sacrifice, not without renunciation, is the better attained. The sacrifice must come, of course, before the new reformed life begins. The hermetic representations do not indeed always follow chronological order, yet the sacrifice is usually placed at the beginning, as introversion. In the parable the wanderer kills the lion, well at the beginning. He sacrifices something in so doing. He kills himself, i.e., a part of himself, in order to be able to rise renewed (regenerated). This process is the first mystical death, also called by the alchemists, putrefaction or the blacks. This death is often fused with the symbol of introversion, because both can appear under the symbol

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