Treasure Hard to Attain

The treasure hard to attain is the third term of Neumann’s dragon-fight. “The nature of this treasure, variously known as the ‘treasure hard to attain,’ the captive, the pearl of great price, the water of life, or the herb of immortality” (Neumann 2019, p. 152), is the yield of the hero’s victory over the uroboric dragon. The image is inherited from Jung, for whom the treasure is the symbolic anticipation of the self; Neumann places it at the structural apex of the mythological stage he calls the Transformation Myth — “the captive and the treasure” (Neumann 2019, contents).

The treasure is not a reward external to the fight. It is the differentiated ego consciousness itself, together with the first intuition of the Self that lies beyond the ego. To win the treasure is to complete the work of differentiation that the separation-of-the-world-parents began and that the dragon-fight consummated. In the second half of life, Neumann argues, the treasure is rediscovered in a new form as centroversion becomes conscious and the ego turns inward toward the self.

The cross-cultural range of the image — pearl, water, herb, captive virgin — signals, for Neumann, its archetypal status. The same structural operation, read across mythologies, recurs in each of them under a culturally appropriate symbol.

Relationships

• dragon-fight
• hero-myth
• self
• individuation
• erich-neumann

Primary sources

• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)