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Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
Aion — Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
Aion (CW 9ii) extends the self into its historical and symbolic phenomenology. Jung reads the Christian aeon — the two-thousand-year succession of the Piscean age — as a symbolic epoch in which the archetype of the Self appears in the specific figure of Christ, and alongside it the shadow the tradition could not fully integrate. The Gnostic and Hellenistic material is drawn upon throughout; Jung cites the Iliad directly in his apparatus — “I am going to the ends of the fruitful earth to visit Ocean, the forbear of the gods, and Mother Tethys” (Jung 1951, n.134) — situating the maternal waters of the quaternity in Homeric substrate.
Edinger’s later Aion Lectures and The Psyche in Antiquity read the same structural move backward through Plato: the quaternity is the form the triadic philosophical solution cannot hold (Edinger 1999). The axiom of Maria Prophetissa — “one becomes two, two becomes three, and from the third comes the one as the fourth” — is the figure in which the ancient, alchemical, and modern Jungian inheritances recognize each other.
The first half of Aion also compresses the analytic sequence — Ego → Shadow → Syzygy → Self — into its chapter structure: Jung’s most operational statement of the individuation arc.
Aion is the work in which the self becomes visible not merely as a psychological term but as a category by which two thousand years of Western symbolic life become readable.