waters
Water occupies one of the most densely layered symbolic registers in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as cosmological element, alchemical arcanum, psychological metaphor, and theological allegory. Jung’s extended investigations establish the aqua permanens — philosophical water, aqua mercurialis — as a totality symbol coextensive with the prima materia, the Self, and the unconscious itself: in Zosimos, ‘the water is wholeness.’ Von Franz extends this: water in clinical dream-work signals the extractio of unconscious contents, life-giving or destructive depending on context. Neumann situates water as the primordial womb of the Great Mother archetype — containing, nourishing, transforming — while Hillman, following Heraclitus, insists that for souls ‘it is death to become water,’ orienting aquatic dream imagery toward the underworld rather than the maternal. Abraham’s dictionary surveys the astonishing proliferation of alchemical water-names — aqua vitae, fiery water, water of the wise, poison, permanent water — attesting to water’s supreme versatility as an operative substance. McGilchrist reads Schelling’s identification of water with dynamic equilibrium as a philosophical metaphor for reality itself, aligned with Taoist images of flowing. Across Taoist, I Ching, and alchemical traditions, the tensions cluster around water’s double valence: life and death, dissolution and regeneration, spirit and matter.
the water is wholeness. It is the ‘silver water’ (= hydrargyrum)… Like them it is a totality image, and as the above Zosimos quotation shows, this was so even in the Greek alchemy of the third century
Jung establishes the alchemical aqua permanens as a totality symbol equivalent to the Self, demonstrating continuity from Hellenistic to Renaissance alchemy.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
water has to do with knowledge extracted from the unconscious, which can either be misused or used positively. In alchemy water was either the great healing factor, or poisonous and destructive.
Von Franz articulates water’s fundamental ambivalence in both alchemy and clinical psychology, equating it with unconscious contents that can vivify or overwhelm.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980thesis
‘Water is the living grace of the Holy Spirit’… ‘Flowing water is the Holy Spirit’… ‘Water is the infusion of the Holy Spirit’… Water is also an allegory of Christ’s humanity.
Jung documents the patristic and alchemical identification of water with the Holy Spirit and with Christ’s humanity, grounding the aqua permanens in Christian theological allegory.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
The mercurial water is known as the water of life (aqua vitae) which first kills the metal or matter for the Stone, and then revives and regenerates it.
Abraham catalogues the alchemical water’s paradoxical mortifying and regenerating functions, showing it as both destructive solvent and life-restoring principle.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
This containing water is the primordial womb of life, from which in innumerable myths life is born. It is the water ‘below,’ the water of the depths, ground water and ocean, lake and pond.
Neumann situates water as the archetypal vessel of the Great Mother — containing, nourishing, and transforming — that constitutes the primordial origin of life in world mythology.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis
‘To souls, it is death to become water…’ If we connect Heraclitus’ statements about water and death with the familiar alchemical motto—‘perform no operation until all has become water’—then the opus begins in dying.
Hillman, following Heraclitus, reframes water in dreams as a mortificatio threshold, aligning the alchemical dissolution with the death of the soul rather than maternal rebirth.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
‘Send forth thy Spirit, that is water…’ Arnaldus de Villanova says: ‘They have called water spirit, and it is in truth spirit.’ The Rosarium philosophorum says categorically: ‘Water is spirit.’
Jung assembles alchemical and scriptural authorities equating water with spirit and the pneuma, establishing the metaphysical identity of the aqueous and the spiritual.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis
the water from which everything originates and in which everything is contained, which rules everything, in which errors are made and in which the error is itself corrected. I call it ‘philosophical’ water
Jung cites the alchemical philosophical water as a universal solvent and origin-substance, the medium in which all transformation — including error and correction — occurs.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
Schelling clearly intuited that water was a potent metaphor or symbol for the nature of reality, as indeed it is in Oriental philosophy, especially Taoism, which constantly recurs to the image of flowing water.
McGilchrist reads Schelling’s and Taoism’s recourse to flowing water as a philosophical symbol for the dynamic equilibrium and relational nature of reality itself.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Spirit in alchemy almost invariably has a relation to water or to the radical moisture… The relation of spirit to water resides in the fact that the spirit is hidden in the water, like a fish.
Jung traces the alchemical fusion of spirit and water to the empirical origins of chemistry in cooking — steam as the first vivid image of metasomatosis — and identifies the hidden spirit in water as a fish symbol.
, Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907supporting
The aqua pontica (or aqua permanens) behaves very much like the baptismal water of the Church. Its chief function is ablution, the cleansing of the sinner
Jung parallels the alchemical aqua permanens with ecclesiastical baptism, establishing the purificatory function of water as shared between sacred ritual and the alchemical opus.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
Man’s descent to the water is needed in order to evoke the miracle of its coming to life. But the breath of the spirit rushing over the dark water is uncanny, like everything whose cause we do not know.
Jung interprets a Protestant theologian’s dream as exemplifying the natural symbolism of water as the psychic depths, accessible only through conscious descent and animated by an autonomous numinous wind.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
all chemical substances contain, in greater or lesser degree, the moisture, the water of the beginning that was brooded over by the spirit of God. This water was the prima materia.
Jung explains the alchemical theory of the humidum radicale, identifying the primordial water brooded over by the divine spirit as the universal prima materia latent in all matter.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting
Kerényi once wrote that ‘water is the most mythological of the elements.’ Why? And in what sense? Of course there was the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales, in whose cosmological speculation water came to be identified as the first principle of everything.
Miller invokes Kerényi’s claim of water’s supreme mythological status and traces it to Thales’s archê, situating alchemical aqua vitae within the oldest cosmological speculation.
, Achelous and the Butterfly: Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Humor, 1973supporting
The Naassenes considered Naas, the serpent, to be their central deity, and they explained it as the ‘moist substance,’ in agreement with Thales of Miletus, who said water was the prime substance on which all life depended.
Jung connects Naassene Gnostic serpent-theology with Thalean cosmology through the equation of the serpent with primordial moisture, illustrating water’s role as universal life-principle across traditions.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
Why this stress upon water for the dead? Because for plants and men water is life, life is water… The goddess goes down… ‘Pour upon the goddess Ishtar the water of life and send her away’.
Onians documents the ancient Near Eastern equation of water with life itself, including the water of resurrection poured upon Ishtar in the underworld, establishing water as the medium of regeneration for the dead.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
The water element represents the realm of deep emotion and feeling responses, ranging from compulsive passions to overwhelming fears to an all-encompassing acceptance and love of creation.
Arroyo maps the astrological water element onto the psychological domain of deep feeling and the unconscious, aligning it with intuition and the hidden motivational substrate of personality.
, Astrology, Psychology, and the Four Elements: An Energy Approach to Astrology and Its Use in the Counseling Arts, 1975supporting
Double water means water reaching from here to there… superior people consistently practice virtue and learn how to teach.
Liu I-ming’s Taoist I Ching commentary reads the hexagram of double water as an image of continuous moral cultivation, drawing on water’s inherent dynamism as a model for virtue.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
It is a water of death: no living creature, man or beast, can drink from it with impunity. Its destructive power is such that it shatters and punctures any receptacle made by the hand of man.
Vernant documents the Styx as a mythological instance of lethal water, illustrating water’s chthonic destructive pole within Greek cosmological and ritual thought.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
The first solution is… the reduction of it to its First Matter; the second is that perfect solution of body and spirit at the same time, in which the solvent and the thing solved always abide together
Edinger distinguishes two alchemical solutio operations — reduction to prima materia and simultaneous dissolution of body and spirit — implicating water as the medium of both stages.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting
The nature of water is moving. When water is moving, it is fresh and clean, and when it stops, it becomes stagnant and stale.
The I Ching commentary uses water’s natural dynamism — its need for movement and direction — as an emblem for social regulation and the principle of adjusting excess and insufficiency.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998aside
Schelling names oxygen and hydrogen, the elements of water, as the two principles of life in the animal body, acting as ‘weights on the lever of life’, the local disequilibrium of each allowing for the maintenance of life
McGilchrist cites Schelling’s early natural philosophy in which water’s constituent elements function as dynamic opposing principles sustaining organic life through productive disequilibrium.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
to the Holy Spirit is attributed Goodness, through whom earthly things become heavenly, and this in threefold wise: by baptizing in water, in blood, and in fire
Von Franz traces in the Aurora Consurgens a threefold baptismal schema — water, blood, fire — linking the alchemical solutio to the pneumatic transformation of earthly matter into the heavenly.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966aside