Recall from part 5 of the analysis that in his paper "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales" (from The Collected Works, Volume 9, part 1), Carl Jung says that the Holy Trinity has a counterpart consisting of a lower, chthonic triad. (The word chthonic is used here to denote things having to do, at least metaphorically, with the deities or spirits of the underworld, i.e., with those of Hell.) In the below, we make further use of "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales".
Beginning at paragraph 246, Jung says, "Between the [numbers/quantities] three and four there exists the primary opposition of male and female, but whereas fourness is a symbol of wholeness, three is not. The latter, according to alchemy, denotes polarity, since one triad always presupposes another, just as high presupposes low, lightness darkness, good evil. In terms of energy, polarity means a potential, and wherever a potential exists there is the possibility of a current, a flow of events, for the tension of opposites strives for balance. If one imagines the quaternity [quaternities typically represent wholeness] as a square divided into two halves by a diagonal, one gets two triangles whose apices point in opposite directions. One could therefore say metaphorically that if the wholeness symbolized by the quaternity is divided into equal halves, it produces two opposing triads. This simple reflection shows how three can be derived from four...In psychological language we [could] say that when the unconscious wholeness becomes manifest, i.e., leaves the unconscious and crosses over into the sphere of consciousness, one of the four [elements of the quaternity] remains behind, held fast by the horror vacui of the unconscious. There thus arises a triad which, as we know - not from [fairytales] but from the history of symbolism - constellates a corresponding triad in opposition to it - in other words, a conflict ensues."[a]
Top left: To see the fundamental nature of present-day evil in our society that has resulted from the formation of the opposing triads Jung speaks of, we start with the square, which has four sides (and four apices) and therefore represents wholeness. Top right: We then draw a diagonal to divide the square into two triangles, representing two triads. Above left: We move the lower triangle to the upper left until it overlaps the upper triangle. Above right: When we rotate the resulting figure forty-five degrees clockwise, we see that it is a Star of David with a disproportionate extension in the horizontal direction. Since the horizontal represents the conscious of the dreamer (Susan Robertson),[b] the symbolism here at a societal level is that our conscious minds are contaminated by 'evil Jewishness".
Continuing in the same volume of Jung from above, but now in the section titled, "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype", "When, in 1938, I originally wrote this paper [Jung is here writing in a 1954 revision], I did not know that twelve years later, the Christian version of the mother archetype would be elevated to the rite of a dogmatic truth. [Jung is here referring to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary] The Christian "Queen of Heaven" has, obviously, shed all her Olympian qualities except for her brightness, goodness, and eternality; and even her human body, the thing most prone to gross material corruption, has put on ethereal incorruptability. The richly varied allegories of the Mother of God have nevertheless retained some connection with her pagan prefiguration in Isis (Io) and Semele...[The] question naturally arises for the psychologist: what has become of the characteristic relation of the mother-image to the earth, darkness, the abysmal side of bodily man with his animal passions and instinctual nature, and to "matter" in general? The declaration of the dogma comes at a time when the achievements of science and technology, combined with a rationalistic and materialistic view of the world, threaten the spiritual and psychic heritage of man with instant annihilation. [Jung is here referring to the atomic bomb]...
"Understood concretely, the assumption is the absolute opposite of materialism. Taken in this sense, it is a counterstroke that does nothing to diminish the tension between the opposites [the opposites here are spirit and matter], but drives it to extremes.
"Understood symbolically, however, the assumption of the body is a recognition and acknowledgement of matter, which in the last resort was identified with evil only because of an overwhelmingly "pneumatic" tendency in man. In themselves, spirit and matter are neutral, or rather, "ultriusque capax" - that is, capable of what man calls good or evil. Although as names they are exceedingly relative, underlying them are very real opposites that are part of the energetic structure of the physical and of the psychic world, and without them no existence of any kind could be established. There is no position without its negation...The dogma of the Assumption, proclaimed in an age suffering from the greatest political schism history has ever known, is a compensating system that reflects the strivings of science for a uniform world-principle. In a certain sense, both developments were anticipated by alchemy in the [chemical marriage] of opposites, but only in symbolic form. Nevertheless, the symbol has the great example of being able to unite heterogeneous or even incommensurable factors in a single image. With the decline of alchemy the symbolical unity of spirit and matter fell apart, with the result that modern man finds himself uprooted and alienated in a de-souled world.
"The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious of present-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world and can base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor on the future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of the cosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven - the tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is described as the way of life itself, a growing into that which eternally is and does not change; which springs from the union of opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that union possible. It seems as if it were only through an experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own "existence" and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger."[c]
Putting all of this together with what was has been said earlier in the analysis, about the death of the Holy Spirit, and the mother-son-rebis triad, with the mother being a sort of chthonic Virgin Mary (essentially a whore), we see that this evil triad is to be completely unopposed by an upper one. What modern man needs to do is to restore a system of symbology, preferably alchemy, and ensure that the third stage, the citrinitas, is included in the overall four-stage process. For it is in this stage that the chemical marriage takes place, and without the chemical marriage, the Philosophical Mercury cannot be obtained, and thus, the final stage of the process (the rubedo) cannot take place, implying that wholeness cannot be achieved. If this symbolic reality (the chemical marriage) can be restored in its proper form, as a union between woman and man,[d] and accompanied by a restoration of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (all as archetypes) within our psyches,[e] there will come about a healthy quaternity, i.e., true wholeness, thereby helping save our society from destruction.
a. Jung, C.G. "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales" in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9, part 1. Princeton University Press, 1980. para. 426.
b. Jung links vertical height with the unconscious, and he links the horizontal (i.e., width) with the conscious: Jung, C.G. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 12. Princeton University Press, 1968. paras. 287, 291, Google Books. URL = https://books.google.com.
c. Jung, C.G. "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9, part 1. paras. 195-198. Emphasis in original.
d. "Chemical marriage" is the same thing as "chymical wedding." That Jung regards the chemical (i.e., chymical) wedding as a union between man and woman, is evident from his Psychology and Alchemy: "Here the supreme opposites, male and female (as in the Chinese yang and yin), are melted into a unity purified of all opposition and therefore incorruptible." (--Jung, C.G., The Collected Works, Vol. 12, para. 43.) A union between mother and son does not consist of supreme opposites, because the son has some of the mother in him; and similar reasoning applies to other forms of incestuous unions. Also, gay unions obviously do not consist of supreme opposites, nor do unions between transsexuals, since a person cannot be surgically or otherwise modified such that he or she acquires all of the traits and characteristics of the opposite sex.
e. These archetypes are within all of us; Kubrick isn't saying that the members of the public need to acquire a belief in the Christian Holy Trinity, or become religious, or anything of that nature. Kubrick himself is often said to have been an atheist. That Jung considers these archetypes to be universal is evident from his "Psychology and Religion": "[Christian] dogma owes its continued existence and its form on the one hand to so-called "revealed" or immediate experiences of the [religious knowledge] — for instance, the God-man, the Cross, the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, and so on, and on the other hand to the ceaseless collaboration of many minds over many centuries...[T]he Christian images I have mentioned are not peculiar to Christianity alone (although in Christianity they have undergone a development and intensification of meaning not to be found in any other religion). They occur just as often in pagan religions, and besides that they can reappear spontaneously in all sorts of variations as psychic phenomena, just as in the remote past they originated in visions, dreams, or trances. Ideas like these are never invented. They came into being before man had learned to use his mind purposively. Before man learned to produce thoughts, thoughts came to him." (--Jung, C.G., "Psychology and Religion" in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 11, Princeton University Press, 1969, para. 81.) In accordance with the foregoing, ideas such as the Trinity are effectively archetypes, i.e., they are elements of the collective unconscious, and as such, are shared among all human beings.
