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| The King and the Queen |
A hint about the essay
Carl Jung wrote his essay The Transcendent Function in 1916 but it was not published in the following years. He only agreed to proceed to its revision and its publishing in 1958 when some students of the C. G. Jung Institute of Zurich discovered it. It should be an important indicator that the subject of the essay was too dangerous for Jung's career.
When one reads Jung's descriptions about that psychological function, one finds exactly what the word "transcendent" means: the function that produces a transcendent experience. Jung wrote
The transcendent function reveals itself as a mode of apprehension mediated by the archetypes and capable of uniting the opposites. By “apprehension” I do not mean simply intellectual understanding but understanding through experience. An archetype, as we have said, is a dynamic image, a fragment of the objective psyche, which can be truly understood only if experienced as an autonomous entity. (CW 7, p. 109)An archetype, as we have said, is a dynamic image, a fragment of the objective psyche, which can be truly understood only if experienced as an autonomous entity." (CW 7, p. 109)p>
To Jung, mystical experiences are signposts of a consciously performed individuation process. Those signposts are expression of the archetype of the Self. He added
"The transcendent function does not proceed without aim or purpose but leads to the revelation of the essential man. It is in the first place a purely natural process, which may in some cases pursue its course without the knowledge or assistance of the individual and can sometimes forcibly accomplish itself in the face of opposition. The meaning and purpose of the process is the realization, in all its aspects, of the personality hidden away in the embryonic germplasm; the production and unfolding of the original potential wholeness." (CW 7 p. 110)
The Transcendent Function and Alchemy
In The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious (CW 7), Jung gives the key to understand the transcendent function:
"This remarkable capacity of the human psyche for change, expressed in the transcendent function, is the principal object of late medieval alchemical philosophy, where it was expressed in terms of alchemical symbolism… The secret of alchemy was in fact the transcendent function, the transformation of personality through the blending and fusion of the noble with the base components, of the differentiated with the inferior functions, of the conscious with the unconscious." (CW 7 p. 219-220)
By linking the transcendent function to alchemy, Jung specifically says that it is related to mystical experiences. We have shown in other posts and articles that alchemy was primarily concerned with the production of the philosopher’s stone, a transcendent experience that is lived in consciousness as an extremely numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites. In the quote above, Jung argues that the transcendent function is the transformation of personality which stems from the blending or the fusion of opposites: noble with base components, differentiated with undifferentiated cognitive functions and consciousness with unconscious contents. That fusion of opposites is the autonomous production of a symbol by the psyche.
In alchemy, that symbol of conjunction of opposites is often represented as the rebis, both man and woman, king and queen, sun and moon, spirit and matter. It is also the uroboros, the snake that eats its tail, a symbol of the conjunction of the opposites spirit (head) and matter (tail). But above all, it is the philosopher’s stone, the mineral or the ore that must be mined from the unconscious. In the foreword of Mysterium Conjunctionis, Jung writes:
"It now appears that the “alchemistical” philosophers made the opposites and their union one of the chief objects of their work."
The goal of alchemy was to produce those experiences, and the overly symbolic terminology of their grimoires was their way to protect themselves from the Inquisition and the Church. We must remember that those alchemists were among the finest intellectuals of their time and none of them was interested in transforming lead into gold because they knew it was impossible. Their terminology were only symbols of a psychological experience akin to those of the Christian mystics. What distinguish Jung from the other interpreters of alchemy is that he was able to decipher their symbols based on his experience that mystical experiences were symbols of conjunction of opposites.
For more, see
Carl Jung's Transcendent Function: the Insight into Mystical Experiences