Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 2

This is installment two in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series about Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, Murray Stein's book on how the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) applied his theory of the unconscious to healing the "mind" of the Christian Church. Jung felt the Church needed therapy as badly as any single patient on the psychoanalyst's couch.

Jung knew that the unconscious, whether of an individual or of a human institution such as the Church, places symbols into our dreams, myths, and imaginings, symbols that the conscious mind has then to interpret. Symbols were of primary importance to Jung. He described them as ways the mind formulates ideas whose referents cannot be clearly stated in plain language, and as psychological "tendencies whose goal is as yet unknown." Symbols are, in religious terms, prophetic.

Symbols populate human philosophies, too, not just dreams and myths. The associated philosophy of the medieval art of alchemy was shot through with symbols. One of these philosophical symbols was, in Latin, the mysterium coniunctionis, the mystery of conjunction.

Medieval alchemists sought to unite various material substances in ways that modern chemistry now knows to be impossible. Matter that was "low," such as lead and other base constituents, might be turned into a "higher" metal such as gold if the proper constituents could be mysteriously conjoined in just the right way.

Jung interpreted this alchemists' dream to turn lead into gold as symbolizing the overarching hidden goal of the human psyche: to have its unconscious parts brought fully and harmoniously into conscious awareness.


Bringing the unconscious mind into the field of conscious awareness was for Jung the way to God. He identified Yahweh, the God of the Holy Bible, with the archetypal "self."

To Jung, the archetypes of the "collective unconscious" — a hidden realm of the psyche whose contents are common to us all, both individually and in every one of our cultural institutions — served as the templates for symbols. For instance, if in a myth a mother appears, such as Leda in the classical tale of Leda and the Swan, it derives from our "mother" archetype. This archetype tells the human unconscious what to expect of a mother, either real or mythical. It is our inbuilt template for the idea of a mother.

Likewise, God/Yahweh is the symbol, in Jung's theory, of the inbuilt "self" archetype: the uniquely human idea of what a self is. Since it ultimately makes no sense to speak of any part of a person as "other," this source of all the other archetypes, the self archetype, represents our innate sense of wholeness or completeness.

Specifically, the "self" is the true center of the psyche. The conscious ego only pretends to be the center. When the psyche is centered on the ego, not the self, various pairs of archetypal opposites get split such that one of the opposites is fully present to conscious awareness, while the other is shoved into the ego's "shadow" and remains in the unconscious mind outside the field of consciousness.

For example, the male/female antinomy — an antinomy is a contradiction between two ideas that are in themselves equally valid — splits such that (in males) the male archetype reigns in the field of consciousness while the female archetype is relegated to the "anima," a structure hidden in the unconscious mind. For women, the female archetype is consciously in charge, while the male archetype feeds the unconscious "animus."

Splitting of this sort serves its purpose — it would be confusing for a young boy to try to come to grips early in life with his feminine side, for example — but ultimately it leaves the conscious mind less than whole. It is the principal goal of religion, Jung said, to take us past the splitting of our mind into favored vs. rejected pairs of opposites, one of which is relegated to the shadow. To Jung, the coniunctio or rejoining of the pairs of opposites is what must happen on our way back to God.


Jung saw the contemporary Christian Church as split in several ways. One obvious way was the schism of Western Christendom into Protestant and Catholic faith traditions some five centuries ago. The Church as a whole, while officially promulgating a doctrine of love thy neighbor, has been squabbling over theological differences ever since, often bloodily.

For any member of any group to hate any members of any other group, the hater must, Jung said, be identifying with the enemy's characteristics and attitudes certain capacities of the human mind which are really features in the hater's own unconscious shadow. This ability we all have of projecting our own shadow contents out onto others is responsible for most feuds and wars.

For Christianity's wounds to heal, Jung knew there would first have to be a coniunctio — a joining, a re-integration — between what was in effect the Church's traditional ego-consciousness and the contents of the collective unconscious that were present in its doctrinal shadow. These latter contents he was able to retrieve from the symbols of medieval alchemy, for he knew that the alchemical philosophy had been as if a dream telling of the early Church's repressions and splittings, and therefore foretelling the Church's future healing.

To a significant extent, Jung felt, that particular dream began to come true in 1950 when the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, issued a papal bull called Assumptio Mariae, the Assumption of Mary, declaring that the mother of Jesus has entered heaven intact, body and soul.

What possible connection did the dogma of the bodily assumption of Mary have with the alchemists' dream? For the answer to that, see my next installment in this series, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Part 3.