Meaning of the rebis hermaphrodite

The Rebis — from the Latin res bina, "the doubled thing" — is the crowned hermaphroditic figure that appears at the culmination of the alchemical Rosarium Philosophorum: two-headed, winged, standing on the lunar vessel, holding serpents in each hand. It is simultaneously the most monstrous and the most exalted image in the alchemical corpus, and that paradox is not incidental. The monstrosity is the meaning.

Jung is direct about this in The Practice of Psychotherapy:

The alchemical hermaphrodite is a problem in itself and really needs special elucidation. Here I will say only a few words about the remarkable fact that the fervently desired goal of the alchemist's endeavours should be conceived under so monstrous and horrific an image. We have proved to our satisfaction that the antithetical nature of the goal largely accounts for the monstrosity of the corresponding symbol.

The Rebis is not a synthesis in the philosophical sense — not a third term that dissolves the tension between two prior terms. It is the tension held in a single body. Sol and Luna, King and Queen, sulfur and argent vive, spirit and body: these do not disappear into each other but remain visibly double, which is why the figure is two-headed. The wings signal volatility, the capacity for ascent; the lunar base signals the chthonic ground from which the figure rises. The serpents in the hands — one triple, one single — carry the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, the old alchemical riddle of three and four, one and many, which the Rebis does not resolve so much as embody.

The figure crowns the coniunctio Solis et Lunae, the sacred marriage of Rex and Regina that the Rosarium woodcuts dramatize across their full sequence. Jung reads this marriage as the reunion of the imperfect body with its soul, the anima as humidum radicale — the radical moisture — serving as vehicle for the spirit that permeates the watery solution through active imagination. The Rebis is what that reunion looks like when it is complete: not a purified spirit freed from matter, but a body that has become spiritual and a spirit that has become embodied. The alchemists called this the lapis philosophorum, the filius philosophorum, the hermaphroditus — the same reality under different figures, each emphasizing a different aspect of the same paradox.

Jung and Kerényi, working together on the mythology of the divine child, locate the hermaphrodite's persistence across cultures in exactly this function:

As civilization develops, the bisexual "primary being" turns into a symbol of the unity of personality, a symbol of the self where the war of opposites finds peace. In this way the primary being becomes the distant goal of man's self-development, having been from the very beginning a projection of unconscious wholeness.

This is the crucial move: the hermaphrodite is not a regression to undifferentiated primordial unity — not a return to the pre-conscious state before the opposites separated — but a goal, a forward-pointing symbol. It is what consciousness looks like when it has integrated what it previously split off. The figure is monstrous precisely because it refuses the clean divisions that consciousness prefers: male or female, spirit or body, above or below. The Rebis insists on the conjunction.

Psychologically, Jung maps this onto the structure of individuation. The coniunctio that produces the Rebis is the same process as the integration of the unconscious into consciousness — specifically, the encounter with the contrasexual figures, anima and animus, and their eventual reconciliation in the marriage quaternio. In Aion, Jung describes how the recognition of anima gives rise to a triad — masculine subject, opposing feminine subject, transcendent anima — and how the missing fourth element completes the quaternity that is the self. The Rebis is the iconographic form of that quaternary wholeness: the self as image, not as abstraction.

What makes the Rebis theologically charged is the parallel Jung draws explicitly in Aion and Psychology and Alchemy between the hermaphroditic stone and Christ — the lapis-Christus parallel. Both are described as trichotomus, having body, soul, and spirit; both are compared to the Trinity; both function as redeemers. The difference is that the alchemical redeemer is not transcendent but immanent — it arises from matter, from the prima materia, from the darkness of the nigredo. The Rebis does not descend from above; it is extracted from below. This is why Paracelsus spoke of the lumen naturae, the light hidden in the darkness of nature itself — a light the darkness comprehends, unlike the light from above that only makes the darkness darker.

The Rebis is thus the alchemical answer to the pneumatic temptation: not ascent out of the body into spirit, but the transformation of the body into a spiritual substance without abandoning its materiality. The winged figure stands on the moon, not above it.

  • Coniunctio — the alchemical sacred marriage of opposites that produces the Rebis
  • Lapis Philosophorum — the philosopher's stone as the completed opus, synonymous with the Rebis under a different figure
  • Rex and Regina — the King and Queen whose union and death drive the Rosarium sequence
  • James Hillman — on the syzygy as the archetypal structure underlying the hermaphroditic image

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1954, The Practice of Psychotherapy
  • Jung, C.G. and Kerényi, C., 1949, Essays on a Science of Mythology
  • Jung, C.G., 1951, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
  • Jung, C.G., 1976, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life
  • Abraham, Lyndy, 1998, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery