The idea of the coniunctio of male and female, which became almost a technical term in Hermetic philosophy, appears in Gnosticism as the mysterium iniquitatis, probably not uninfluenced by the Old Testament "divine marriage" as performed, for instance, by Hosea.35 Such things are hinted at not only by certain traditional customs,36 but by the quotation from the Gospel according to the Egyptians in the second epistle of Clement: "When the two shall be one, the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female."37 Clement of Alexandria introduces this logion with the words: "When ye have trampled on the garment of shame (with thy feet)...,"38 which probably refers to the body; for Clement as well as Cassian (from whom the quotation was taken over), and the pseudo-Clement, too, interpreted the words in a spiritual sense, in contrast to the Gnostics, who would seem to have taken the coniunctio all too literally. They took care, however, through the practice of abortion and other restrictions, that the biological meaning of their acts did not swamp the religious significance of the rite. While, in Church mysticism, the primordial image of the hieros gamos was sublimated on a lofty plane and only occasionally-as for instance with Mechthild of Magdeburg39-approached the physical sphere in emotional intensity, for the rest of the world it remained very much alive and continued to be the object of especial psychic preoccupation. In this respect the symbolical drawings of Opicinus de Canistris40 afford us an interesting glimpse of the way in which this primordial image was instrumental in uniting opposites, even in a pathological state. On the other hand, in the Hermetic philosophy that throve in the Middle Ages the coniunctio was performed wholly in the physical realm in the admittedly abstract theory of the coniugium solis et lunae, which despite this drawback gave the creative imagination much occasion for anthropomorphic flights.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung is tracing a pressure the Western soul has never been able to hold still: the drive toward wholeness that keeps shape-shifting across centuries, never settling into a single vessel. The Gnostics took the coniunctio into the body and then immediately fenced it off with abortion and restriction — a remarkable doubling, enacting union while containing its biological consequence, as if the rite required physical reality to mean anything at all but could not survive too much of it. The Church Fathers moved the other direction, spiritualizing the logion ("neither male nor female") into pure inwardness, evacuating the body so thoroughly that only someone like Mechthild — burning at an emotional temperature the orthodox tradition could barely tolerate — let the image back near the flesh. And then Hermetic philosophy tried a third path: keeping the language physical (sun, moon, chemical marriage) while making the entire operation abstract, theoretical, safely unembodied.
What Jung is showing is not three different solutions but three versions of the same refusal — the refusal to let the tension between above and below, spirit and matter, inside and outside remain unresolved. Each system found its own way to dissolve the charge before it could fully land. The image survives every attempt to domesticate it, which is perhaps the only honest definition of a primordial image: it outlasts its interpretations.
Carl Gustav Jung·The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious·1959