Two rivers split from a single source here, and the split matters more than either destination. The hieros gamos — the sacred marriage — was already old when Christianity received it, folding the bridal mysticism of the Song of Songs into the union of Christ and the Church. What Jung is tracking in this passage is what happened when that image refused to stay inside the sanctuary. Alchemy did not merely borrow the wedding motif; it dragged the conjunction down into matter, into the retort, into sulfur and mercury and the mess of actual bodies. The lapis philosophorum — the stone that is somehow also a person, also a medicine, also a god — emerged from that refusal to let the sacred marriage remain purely celestial. And then, astonishingly, the same symbolic pressure that produced the stone also produced the modern concept of chemical combination: what we now call a bond.

That second lineage is the one that tends to get lost. The scientific mind prefers to think of Lavoisier and Dalton as its ancestors, not of alchemists dreaming of a king and queen dissolving into each other in a bath. But Jung's point is that the drive to understand how two things become one thing — which is the whole question of chemistry — carries a symbolic inheritance it has not examined. Totality and combination are not opposites that modernity resolved; they are two translations of the same compulsion, one kept in the domain of meaning, one handed to the laboratory.