Prologue
We begin by offering tribute to the ancestors, by acknowledging the almost sixty years of devotion to an idea in which still lies a large measure of hope—that word is rare in my vocabulary—that the intellect of the human animal bears witness to the cosmos, and that the good of society requires both the courage of disciplined imagination and the courage of the imaginative disruption of discipline.
By ancestors I mean the dead whose spirits continue to protect our work and urge it onward. What we say is for them and to them, in hope that they be not displeased and that they return our gesture by blessing the spirit of the living, you, here, who have made your way to take part in this Tagung, offering the generosity of audience.
When the Eranos rituals of mind began in the thirties, the historical world was at the threshold of peril. Today the ecological world is in equal peril. However, neither the historical nor the ecological stand on their own; their perils and all the others we live amidst reflect the culmination in this century of the perils of the soul owing to the pathologies of the spirit, its bulimia called economic consumerism, its manic inflation called technological progress, its schizoid Wortsalat called information, its paranoia called interpretative meaning. The contrast between the dedication of the ancestors of Eranos to the passionate intellect and courageous imagination, my way of describing “spirit”—and the apathy of spirit among official bureaucracies of church, government, arts, and academia could hardly be more extreme. Spirit has become marginal, and only in the marginal, liminal, occasional moments such as Eranos can spirit return from its exile.
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I. Goals Our theme—the ideas and images of the alchemical goal—cannot be better introduced than by this statement from C. G. Jung: “The goal is important only as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a Iifetime.” [1] “The goal is important only as an idea” de-literalizes goals right at the beginning. We may not take alchemy’s images of the hermaphrodite, the gold, or the red stone as actualized events. Nor may we even consider these images, and the many others, to be symbolic representations of psychological accomplishments. Not the goal; the idea of goal; goal as idea.
We are thus obliged to inquire into the goal idea before we look at goal images, asking why the psyche invents these goals. What is the function of goal-thinking, goal-fantasying? What do goals do for the soul? Why does the psyche need them? Or does it? Are goals merely delusions, projections, overvalued ideas, or neurotic fictions as Alfred Adler said? Before we turn to some of the main images for the alchemical goal, we best make sure we have placed them in the acid bath so that not a trace of their actuality remains, that they are wholly recognized as fantasies, projects of the psyche, serving some pragmatic purpose. I read Jung to be saying the purpose of the goal-idea is to impel the psyche into the opus. We shall have extraordinary and marvelous goals, like gold and pearls, elixirs and healing stones of wisdom, because then we shall be motivated to stay the course, that via longissima called a lifetime. Were the goal not imagined as gold, the highest value possible, were the goal not healing, were redemption and immortality not promised in the image at the outset, who would risk the leaden despair, tortured mortifications, ageing putrefactions, the sludge, and the corrosive fires? An inflated vision of supreme beauty is a necessary fiction for the soul-making opus we call our lifetime.
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