Sol and Luna

Sol and Luna — the alchemical royal pair, the red king and white queen — are the archetypal opposites whose union is the coniunctio. Jung’s reading in Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) and Psychology of the Transference (1954) identifies Sol with solar, generated consciousness and the masculine principle, Luna with reflected, changeable light and the feminine unconscious. Luna is “duplex and mutable like Mercurius” — in full radiance toward the observer, the other side is in total darkness — and for this reason the alchemists identified her with Mercurius the mediator. The Rosarium Philosophorum provides the pictorial sequence Jung analyzes: Candida mulier, si rubeo sit nupta marito — “white-skinned lady, lovingly joined to her ruddy-limbed husband.” The sacred marriage takes place in the water, the mare tenebrositatis, where “the sea has closed over the king and queen, and they have gone back to the chaotic beginnings, the massa confusa.” Their coitus is simultaneously coniugal and mortal: Beya rises over Gabricus, “embraced him with so much love that she utterly consumed him in her own nature and dissolved him into atoms.” Jung states the psychological equation: “Becoming conscious of an unconscious content amounts to its integration in the conscious psyche and is therefore a coniunctio Solis et Lunae.” The gendered assignment reverses in women (Sol = unconscious, Luna = consciousness); the structure is not anatomy but polarity. The product is the lapis — the rebis, the hermaphroditic double-being that is simultaneously quaternary and circular, corpus-anima-spiritus, and the symbol of the self.

Relationships

• coniunctio
• hierosgamos
• albedo
• rubedo
• lapis-philosophorum
• mercurius

Primary sources

• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955)
• jung-psychology-of-the-transference (Jung 1954)
• rosarium-philosophorum