Archeus

The Archeus is, in Paracelsus, the inner cosmographer — the organizing principle in the body that is at once a microcosm of the four elements and a reflection of the “great Cosmos.” “He is therefore similar to man and consists of the four elements and is an Archeus and is composed of four parts; say then, he is the great Cosmos” (Paracelsus, quoted Jung 1967, CW 13 §168). Jung places the term in a nexus with Adech, homo maximus, and the “astral man”: “The true man is the star in us” (Paragranum, in Jung 1967).

The Archeus is Paracelsus’s figure for what the alchemical tradition elsewhere called the Primordial Man or Adam Kadmon — the inner anthropos who is at once the prima materia and the goal of the work. Jung traces the Paracelsian homo maximus to “the pre-Christian doctrine of the Primordial Man,” popularized in the fifteenth century by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. The Archeus is therefore not a private term but a node in the larger Hermetic-Neoplatonic vocabulary of the human being as a “small cosmos” whose health is measured by its correspondence with the whole.

For Jung this figure is the direct prehistory of the Self: a structuring center in the psyche that is not the ego, that is at once most interior and most cosmic, and whose recovery is the aim of individuation (see objective-psyche-as-inherited-neoplatonism). The Paracelsian language — “in the whole Ides there is but One Man, the same is extracted by the Iliastrum and is the Protoplast” — is, read psychologically, a statement of the Self as the inherited structural fact of the psyche.

Relationships

• microcosm-macrocosm
• anthropos
• self
• iliaster
• paracelsus

Primary sources

• alchemical-studies (Jung 1967)