Anthropos
To
some extent (King Arthur) embodies in himself the Anthropos – a visible
and collectively conscious aspect of human
totality – now become
visible. In this sense Arthur represents the idea of
wholeness as it was
conceived in the first millennium of the Christian era, his Round Table and
twelve knights clearly connecting him with Christ. TGL 55
As
the figure of Lady Charity represents the light, so the Melusine depicts the
natural, ambiguous nature of the
anima.
But she, too, the dark unconscious human
psyche with its
indwelling urge towards
individuation, aims at the heart of Christ. All the
pictures illustrate the tendency of the unconscious to transfer the highest
value away from the conventional aspects of Christ towards his essential quality
of Anthropos or the second Adam as being a more complete symbol of the Self.
TGL 101
In all of these movements a preoccupation with the problem of evil of
nature, of the feminine and of the divine in the individual, was manifested in a
form which sought to supplement those elements that until then had been lacking
in Christianity. The natural symbols of psychic wholeness, or
the Self,
do not fully coincide empirically with the traditional figure of Christ,
since the shadow is missing
in the latter or else appears split off into the contrasting figure of the
Antichrist. In alchemy, on the other hand, the image of the
Anthropos (or of the Son of Man) was
continually amplified since its earliest appearance and in the image of the
lapis and of Mercurius was expanded into a paradoxical symbol of the Self in
which the opposites were reconciled. TGL 102
The
fact that he is destined by a long line of ancestors to achieve the redemption
of the Grail Kingdom, together with the essential genuineness of his nature and
all the character traits of the fairy tale here which he has assimilated,
suggest that he himself should be interpreted as an Anthropos figure which, like
the Mecurius-lapis
of the alchemists, should compensate and amplify the Christ-image then
dominating the
collective consciousness. TGL 109