Jung is not cataloguing symbols here — he is making a structural claim about what alchemists were actually doing when they named things. The prima materia is not a substance that received poetic decoration after the fact; the proliferation of names is the evidence that no single name could hold it. Water, shadow, dragon, mother, chaos — each one true, each one insufficient, each one replaced by another because the thing being pointed at exceeds any stable designation. That excess is the point.

What the alchemists had found, and could only approach through metaphor-as-method, was the psyche's starting condition before the ego's organizing hand arrives: undifferentiated, saturated, carrying every possibility without having committed to any of them. The massa confusa is not a problem to be solved; it is the precondition without which nothing transforms. You cannot work on what has already been sorted and named and filed.

This is why the tradition's instinct toward clarity — toward reducing the initial situation to a concept, a diagnosis, a framework — so consistently forecloses what it promises to open. The cloud does not become gold by being called a cloud more precisely. It becomes gold by being entered, which requires tolerating that it is simultaneously mother, dragon, sea, and heaven, and that these are not metaphors for something simpler underneath.