e volume.]

I have just used the expression "sublimation." This Freudian term and
concept is found in an exactly similar significance in the hermetic
writers. In the receptacle where the mystical work of education is
performed, i.e., in man, substances are sublimated; in psychological terms
this means that impulses are to be refined and brought from their baseness
to a higher level. Freud makes it clear that the libido, particularly the
unsocial sexual libido, is in favorable circumstances sublimated, i.e.,
changed into a socially available impelling power. This happens in the
evolution of the human race and is recapitulated in the education of the
individual.

I take it for granted that the fundamental character of the elementary
psychic powers in which the sublimation is consummated is the more
recognizable the less the process of sublimation is extended in time. In
mysticism, e.g., the fundamental character penetrates the primal motive
because the latter wishes to lead the relatively slightly sublimated
impulses by a shortened process to the farthest goal of sublimation.
Mysticism undertakes to accomplish in individuals a work that otherwise
would take many generations. What I said therefore about the
unchangeability of the fundamental powers or their primal motive, is
wholly true of its fate in mystical development.

The Mohammedan mystic Arabi (1165-1240) writes, "Love as such, in its
individual life, is the same for sensuous and spiritual, therefore equally
for every Arab (of an allegory) and for me, but the objects of love are
different. They loved sensible phenomena while I, the mystic, love the
most intimate existence." (Horten, Myst. Texte, p. 12.)

The religious-mystical applications of the fundamental powers represented
by the types, in the sense of a sublimation, does not manifest therefore
in contrast to their retrospective form (titanic, purposeless form) an
essentially foreign nature; the important novelty in them is that they no
longer are used egotistically but have acquired a content that is
ethically valuable, to which the intro-determination was an aid. This
determination, whose external aspects we have noticed in the types or
symbols, is only the visible expression of a far more important actual
intro-determination whose accomplishment lies in an amplification of
personality, and will later be considered in detail.

In the psychoanalytic consideration of the alchemistic parable it would
appear