Rex and Regina

The personified polarity at the centre of the alchemical opus: the King and the Queen, Sol and Luna, the solar and lunar principles whose marriage, death, and rebirth organize the plates of the Rosarium Philosophorum and the body of Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis. The queen stands for the body and the king for the spirit, and the two remain unrelated without the soul: “The unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You’” (Jung, CW 16, §454).

In the Rosarium and in the treatises Jung amplifies, Sol and Luna are at once “the artificers, who in the symbolical realm are Sol and Luna, in the human the adept and his soror mystica, and in the psychological realm the masculine consciousness and the feminine unconscious (anima)” (Jung 1955, §181). The coniunctio of the royal pair is not a static image but a sequence: the old King sickens, dies, is devoured by the Queen, undergoes putrefaction and nigredo, and is reborn as the transformed King — the filius philosophorum, the crowned hermaphrodite, the anthropos.

Jung’s psychological reading is that the ruling conscious principle (“the old King”) must die into the unconscious to be renewed. The Queen is not merely the counterpart but the matrix of the transformation. The couple is therefore an image of the ego-Self relation at its most dramatic — the Self reconstituted through an integration the old ego cannot itself perform.

Relationships

• coniunctio
• hierosgamos
• anima
• syzygy
• anthropos
• rosarium-philosophorum

Primary sources

• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955, §§181, 654–665; whole of chapter IV)
• jung-cw16-practice-of-psychotherapy / CW 16 §§454–459