d of the past, Helen).

In Jacob Boehme (De Vita Mentali) the disciple says to the master, "How
may I attain suprasensuous life, so that I may see God and hear him
speak?" The master says, "When you can lift yourself for one moment into
that realm where no creature dwelleth, you will hear what God speaks." The
disciple says, "Is that near or far?" The master says, "It is in
yourself."

The hermetics often urge retirement, prayer and meditation, as
prerequisites for the work; it is treated of still more in the
hieroglyphic pictures themselves. The picture of death is already familiar
to us from the hermetic writings, but in the technical language there are
still other expressions for introversion, e.g., the shutting up in the
receptacle, the solution in the mercury of the sages, the return of the
substance to its radical condition (by means of the "radical" or root
dampness).

Similar features in our parable are the wandering in the dense forest, the
stay in the lion's den, the going through the dark passage into the
garden, the being shut up in the prison or, in the language of alchemy,
the receptacle.

Introversion is continually connected with regression. Regression, as may
be recalled from the 2d section of Part I, is a harking back to more
primitive psychic activities, from thinking to gazing, from doing to
hallucinating; a striving back towards childhood and the pleasures of
childhood. Introversion accordingly is accompanied by a desire for
symbolic form of expression (the mystical education is carried on in
symbols), and causes the infantile imagos to revive--chiefly the mother
image. It was pre-eminently father and mother who appeared as objects of
childish love, as well as of defiance. They are unique and imperishable,
and in the life of adults there is no difficulty in reawakening and making
active those memories and those imagos. We easily comprehend the fact that
the symbolic aim of the previously mentioned katabasis always has a
maternal character; earth, hole, sea, belly of fish, etc., that all are
symbols for mother and womb. Regression revives the OEdipus complex with
its thoughts of incest, etc. Regression leads back to all these relics now
done away with in life and repressed. It actually leads into a sort of
underworld, into the world of titanic wishes, as I have called them. How
far this was the case in the alchemistic parable, I have fully shown in
the psychoanalytic treatment of it. Here I need