Original Man

The man formed out of clay was therefore Adam, who at that time was a symbol of the Self, or, one could say, the man who has just come from the hands of God, the unspoilt man, the man who has not yet passed through the process of corruption.

Von Franz identifies the pre-fallen Adam — Original Man straight from the hands of God — as the alchemical prima materia and as the psychological symbol of the Self in its uncorrupted wholeness.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis

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original man/Anthropos/Archanthropos, 200, 203, 208, 218n relation to creator and creatures, 189

Jung's own index entry for Aion explicitly equates the Original Man with the Anthropos and Archanthropos as a discrete conceptual cluster whose relation to creator and creature is extensively theorised in that work.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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Kaulakau means the higher Adam, Saulasau the lower, mortal man, and Zeesar is named the 'upwards-flowing Jordan.'

In Naassene Gnostic symbolism, Jung identifies the triadic structure whereby the higher Adam (Original Man) stands above mortal man and is associated with the upward, spiritualising movement of the cosmogonic Logos.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

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The Gnostics have a vast number of symbols for the source or origin, the centre of being, the Creator, and the divine substance hidden in the creature.

Jung frames the Gnostic proliferation of primordial-origin symbols — the ground from which the Original Man emerges — as amplifications of a single transcendental idea that psychology reads as the unconscious background of consciousness.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting

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the fourth, the Euphrates, is the mouth, 'the seat of prayer and the entrance of food' … it 'gladdens, feeds, and forms the spiritual, perfect man.'

Within Naassene cosmology, the fourfold structure of Paradise's rivers culminates in a figure of the 'spiritual, perfect man,' a functional cognate of Original Man as the integrated totality of psychic functions.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting

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I mean primitive man in the sense of man in his original condition, man still living in nature at a time when certain historically built-up sociological and religious superstructures did not yet exist.

Von Franz employs 'primitive man in his original condition' as a heuristic for the psychic layer that precedes cultural and religious overlay — a phenomenological equivalent to the depth-psychological Original Man.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting

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a return to the condition of the original Eden by way of man's resumption of the 'purity and integrity' of the mind of a child

Abrams traces the Romantic secularisation of the motif of Original Man as prelapsarian integrity, framing the redemption narrative as a philosophical return to Edenic wholeness through the purification of intellect.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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Here man, world, and God form a whole, a unity unclouded by criticism. It is the world of the Father, and of man in his childhood state.

Jung characterises the pre-critical unity of the 'world of the Father' — observed among the people of Mount Elgon — as an experiential correlate of the Original Man condition, a state of undifferentiated participation mystique.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958aside

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The imaginative leap that led to the vision of the Lord of Animals, part human, part god, part animal, we can rightly think of as a great religious event.

Bly positions the primordial vision of the Lord of Animals — a hybrid figure of ancient religious imagination — as an analogue to the depth-psychological Original Man in his undivided, pre-civilised wholeness.

Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990aside

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