Rebis

The Rebis — res bina, “the doubled thing” — is the hermaphroditic figure crowned at the end of the Rosarium Philosophorum picture series. Two-headed, winged, standing on the moon, bearing crown and scepters, the Rebis is the alchemical symbol of the completed coniunctio: “an image of archetypal unity… a realized union of the opposites masculine and feminine… the ‘fourth’ in this series. As a deity, the Rebis, like Aion, holds the opposites together in a single image of unity” (Stein 1998). In the tenth Rosarium picture “the conjoint body rises from the tomb, it reassumes some of the paraphernalia of royalty — a crown, a pair of scepters — which had been put aside during the bath. Still naked, it bestrides the moon and bears the wings of an angel. This is an image of culmination in the alchemical opus” (Stein 1998).

Jung reads the Rebis as the alchemical equivalent of the lapis-philosophorum: “the Rebis is described as the cibus sempiternus (everlasting food), lumen indeficiens” and “a symbol of transcendental unity” (Jung 1954, CW 16, §526). “Mercurius is the hermaphrodite par excellence” (Jung 1954, CW 16). The figure belongs to a long tradition — the androgynous Anthropos, the Platonic bisexual First Man, Christ as Anthropos — and is always a figure of what the individuating psyche approaches as the self. What the Rebis shows the opus is that wholeness is neither masculine nor feminine nor their cancellation but a third thing in which the opposites are held in productive co-presence.

Relationships

• coniunctio
• lapis-philosophorum
• self
• hierosgamos
• syzygy
• mercurius
• rosarium-philosophorum

Primary sources

• psychology-of-the-transference (Jung 1954, §§516–530)
• alchemical-studies (Jung 1967)
• stein-transformation-emergence-self (Stein 1998)