---
slug: von-franz-death-56558bb9
title: "von Franz on Death"
author: "Marie-Louise von Franz"
work: "C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time"
section: ""
year: "1975"
tradition: post-jungian
themes:
  - death
fragment: |
  Death is the last great hieros gamos of the inner world-opposites, the sacred marriage of resurrection, which the ancient Chinese have called the “dark hieros gamos at the yellow sources.” According to them, man at death breaks up into his two psychic parts: a dark one, belonging to the Yin principle, the feminine part “p’o,” which sinks down to earth; and a bright “hun,” belonging to the Yang principle, which ascends to heaven. Both then continue their journey, the feminine part to the feminine divinity of the West, the other eastward to the “dark city” or to the “yellow source.” As “Mistress of the West” and “Lord of the East” they then celebrate the “dark hieros gamos” and in this hieros gamos the dead man arises as a new being, “weightless and invisible,” who can “soar like the sun and sail with the clouds.”
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  The Chinese cosmology von Franz describes refuses the Western habit of saving only one half of the soul. In most pneumatic arrangements — Platonic, Neoplatonic, Christian — the bright part ascends and the dark part is either redeemed into the light or simply abandoned. Here, neither half is sacrificed. The dark, feminine *p’o* descends to its own queen; the bright *hun* moves eastward to its own lord. Each travels to a proper home. The *coniunctio* happens not by the light absorbing the dark but by each finding its full destination and then meeting across that distance.
  
  What this asks of you is not comfort. The soul's dark portion does not get sublimated or spiritualized or quietly forgotten on the way up. It goes all the way down, to the feminine divinity of the West, and that descent is as necessary as the ascent. Von Franz is insisting that the new being — weightless, invisible, soaring — can only arise from both movements completing. The pneumatic imagination always wants to skip the descent. The Chinese schema makes it structurally impossible.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The image that carries the most weight here is not the marriage itself but the splitting that precedes it — the dead man breaking into two psychic parts, one sinking, one rising, each traveling toward its proper divinity before reunion. Von Franz is pointing to something the Western tradition tends to compress: that wholeness is not a starting condition but an achievement, and that the path to it runs through genuine separation. Hillman would recognize the descent of the p'o to earth as a katabasis the soul must complete on its own terms, not hastened. What the Chinese cosmology adds, and what makes it quietly radical, is that neither part is the "real" person — the new being emerges only from their conjunction at the sources. The self you carry into each day may already be mid-journey, one part of you still descending, another not yet arrived.
parent_id: vonFranz_1975_C.G._Jung_His_Myth_in__par0144
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Franz writes:

> Death is the last great hieros gamos of the inner world-opposites, the sacred marriage of resurrection, which the ancient Chinese have called the “dark hieros gamos at the yellow sources.” According to them, man at death breaks up into his two psychic parts: a dark one, belonging to the Yin principle, the feminine part “p’o,” which sinks down to earth; and a bright “hun,” belonging to the Yang principle, which ascends to heaven. Both then continue their journey, the feminine part to the feminine divinity of the West, the other eastward to the “dark city” or to the “yellow source.” As “Mistress of the West” and “Lord of the East” they then celebrate the “dark hieros gamos” and in this hieros gamos the dead man arises as a new being, “weightless and invisible,” who can “soar like the sun and sail with the clouds.”

— Marie-Louise von Franz

The Chinese cosmology von Franz describes refuses the Western habit of saving only one half of the soul. In most pneumatic arrangements — Platonic, Neoplatonic, Christian — the bright part ascends and the dark part is either redeemed into the light or simply abandoned. Here, neither half is sacrificed. The dark, feminine *p’o* descends to its own queen; the bright *hun* moves eastward to its own lord. Each travels to a proper home. The *coniunctio* happens not by the light absorbing the dark but by each finding its full destination and then meeting across that distance.

What this asks of you is not comfort. The soul's dark portion does not get sublimated or spiritualized or quietly forgotten on the way up. It goes all the way down, to the feminine divinity of the West, and that descent is as necessary as the ascent. Von Franz is insisting that the new being — weightless, invisible, soaring — can only arise from both movements completing. The pneumatic imagination always wants to skip the descent. The Chinese schema makes it structurally impossible.

---

Marie-Louise von Franz · *C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time* · 1975