Jung is trying to hold together what the alchemists themselves were trying to hold together — the conviction that the oldest, most unworked substance and the most complete human being are the same thing. The prima materia is not raw material waiting to be refined into something better; it is already whole. That is the alchemical scandal. What gets discarded at the beginning of the work — the waste, the damp, the undifferentiated — is what the work is finally about.

Notice what Jung's list of attributes does. Spherical: no hierarchy of up and down. Four-part: difference held inside wholeness, not resolved into it. Hermaphroditic: sexual division dissolved before it was made. Damp — psychic — not the dry clarity of spirit but the wet, heavy, difficult stuff of soul. Every attribute refuses the ascent that the pneumatic tradition made its career performing. The Anthropos is not a higher being; it is a prior one. Completeness is not what you achieve at the top of the ladder. It was what you stood on before the ladder was built.

That is why the self Jung is describing here resists the vocabulary of development and growth. Individuation, in this register, is not addition. It is recognition of what the first matter already contained.