The Dragon

I’ve been re-reading Jung’s last major work, his Mysterium Coniunctionis. He spent a decade gathering these insights from alchemy concerning the psyche. When I came upon the following passage I was struck how it acts as a portrait of the psyche:

“What remains below in the retort is our salt, that is, our earth, and it is of a black color, a dragon that eats his own tail. For the dragon is the matter that remains behind after the distillation of water from it, and this water is called the dragon’s tail, and the dragon is it’s blackness, and the dragon is saturated with his water and coagulated, and so he eats his own tail.” Carl Jung, CW XIV, par. 244

Wild, right? But it’s worth brooding over for a bit. Mapping the imagery leads to some interesting things regarding the emergence of contents from the unconscious, from the water. In this image of the uroboros, the eating it’s own tail, we sense that the contents of the unconscious, though emerging into consciousness, remain nourished and sustained by the unconscious.

The leap takes place when we can map our own ego as a content that has also emerged from the unconscious…