Sulfur is what drives you to read a passage like this and simultaneously what makes you want to put the book down. That double bind is not a metaphor — it is the thing itself. The alchemists were precise about this: sulfur is not an obstacle to the work, it is the work's own fuel turning against its refinement. Compulsion and will are not opposites seated in different rooms; they share a body, and that body is fat, oily, hot, obdurate — nothing weightless or aerial about it.

What Jung identified as the motive factor cuts against every fantasy of clean transformation. The soul does not want to be known. It wants, it burns, it resists sublimation not through weakness but through the same energy that makes sublimation appealing in the first place. This is why the alchemists could hold Devil and Christ in a single substance without collapsing the tension — both are forces of compulsion, one driving down, one driving up, and sulfur is indifferent to the direction. The impulse that carries you toward understanding and the impulse that makes you throw the book across the room are chemically identical. Psychology's peculiar difficulty is that its subject is also its adversary, and sulfur is the reason.