Adam Kadmon as Anthropos

In Mysterium Coniunctionis, the “Adam and Eve” chapter reads the Kabbalistic Adam Kadmon — the heavenly Primordial Man, the androgynous totality before the Fall — as the alchemists’ image of the self. “The coming to consciousness of Adam Kadmon would indeed be a great illumination, for it would be a realization of the inner man or Anthropos, an archetypal totality transcending the sexes” (Jung 1955, §648).

The figure is double, as the self is double. “The solificatio of the Shulamite is not the first transformation but the second, and takes place within. The subject of transformation is not the empirical man, however much he may identify with the ‘old Adam,’ but Adam the Primordial Man, the archetype within us” (Jung 1955, §647). The old Adam — the reigning ego-attitude — must die; the second Adam, Adam Kadmon, is the crowned hermaphrodite of the Rosarium, the filius macrocosmi, the Christ-parallel whom the adepts named without yet being able to distinguish image from referent.

Jung’s reading does not conflate the Primordial Man with any empirical individual: “It would certainly not be fitting for the empirical man, no matter how swollen his ego-feelings, to appropriate the whole range of Adam’s heights and depths” (Jung 1955, §647). The Anthropos is archetype, not possession. To identify with it is inflation; to be related to it is individuation.

Relationships

• anthropos
• self
• coniunctio
• lapis-philosophorum
• self-as-paradox-of-totality

Primary sources

• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955, §§647–648, 653; chapter V, Adam and Eve)