o far-reaching
conclusion. He points to the vision of Zosimos, where, in the hollow of
the altar he finds boiling water and men in it, and remarks that this
vision reveals the original sense of alchemy, an original impregnation
magic, i.e., a way in which children could be made without a mother. I
must observe that the hermetic attempt to get back to Adam's condition has
some of the homunculus phantasy in it. Adam was regarded as androgyne, a
being at once man and woman, but sufficient in himself alone for
impregnation and procreation. Welling says in his Opus mago-cabbalisticum,
"This man Adam was created, as the scripture says, i.e., of the male and
female sex, not two different bodies but one in its essence and two in its
potentiality, for he was the earth Adamah, the red and white [Symbol:
Sulfur] the spiritual [Symbol: Gold] and [Symbol: Silver], the male and
female seed, the dust of the Adamah from Schamajim, and therefore had the
power to multiply himself magically (just as he was celestial) which could
not indeed have been otherwise, unless the essential masculinity and
femininity were dissociated." I am reminded in this connection that
Mercury is also bisexual; the "materia" must be brought into the
androgynic state "rebis." The idea of hermaphroditism plays a well known,
important part in mythology also.

* * * * *

We have explained why phantasy creations carry two meanings, the
psychoanalytic and the anagogic, apparently fundamentally different, even
contradictory, and yet, on account of their completeness, undeniable. We
have found that the two meanings correspond to two aspects or two
evolutionary phases of a psychic inventory of powers, which are attached
as a unity to symbolic types, because an intro-determination can take
place in connection with the sublimation of the impulses. When we
formulated the problem of the multiple interpretation, we were struck with
the fact that besides the two meanings that were nominally antipodal in
ethical relations, there was a third ethically indifferent, namely, the
natural scientific. Apart from the fact that I have not yet exhausted the
anagogic contents of our material and so must add a number of things in
the following sections, I am confronted with the task of elucidating the
position of the nature myth portion. That will necessarily be done
briefly.

In the case of alchemy the natural scientific content is chemistry (in
some de