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Anima–Mercurius Identity

Anima–Mercurius Identity

In the alchemical writings Jung identifies the anima with Mercurius — the volatile, ambiguous, trickster spirit that the alchemists sought to fix. Hillman gathers Jung’s scattered formulations: “Mercurius and anima have similarly shifty, flighty, iridescent, hard-to-catch, hard-to-fathom natures, a quality imaged by quicksilver in Mercurius and by the anima as elf and Melusine, and by the shimmering wings of psyché” (Hillman, Anima). Where Mercurius is called “the archetype of the unconscious” (CW 13, §299), the anima is called the archetype who “personifies the collective unconscious” (CW 10, §714). The identification is not incidental; the alchemical opus is the work on the anima under a different name.

Jung notes that the Chinese p’o — “written with the characters for ‘white’ and ‘demon,’ that is, ‘white ghost’” — “belongs to the lower, earth-bound, bodily soul, the yin principle, and is therefore feminine” (CW 13, §58). Before Wilhelm gave him the Chinese text, Jung had already arrived at the concept empirically: “affects are delimitable contents of consciousness… they partake of its character and can easily be personified.”

The alchemical identification recasts the anima-complex as an opus rather than a problem. The nigredo is her darkness, the albedo her whiteness, the rubedo her marriage. The man who works on his anima is working the alchemical matter under the name given it by Jung — and the matter is alive, resistant, personified, and cunning, as the alchemists had always said.

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