light of nature

Lumen naturae in philosophical alchemy and modern physics

Robert Fludd, (1574-1637) a respected physician and Rosicrucian from Oxford and a popular “occultist”, published in 1617 a folio titled Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia in which he writes:

The primitive darkness was more than mere privation of light and existed before light. The spirit of God, this light or fire, moving on the face of the waters, formed from them the three other elements, earth, air, and fire, which differed in density…The empyreum [the world of the spirits] was made by the spirit of God which cut out of the formless abyss a spherical universe by circling around it and forced it to the center the shadows of tenebrae, so that it left the highest heaven, the empyreum, free from shadows…

There was, however, a continual struggle between the light or fire and the cold or shadows. Some of the light penetrated too far, became entangled  and as it were, captured by the shadows. From the combination were produced stars, planets, animals, mineral, metals and even bodies of men….

After some light had been enclosed in matter, the force of other rays, together with the impulse inherent in the imprisoned light, raised its mass till it reached the crystalline sphere, to which it became attached by freezing. The opacity of this spot of shadow enclosing a modicum of light then reflected all future light and appeared to mankind as a star….[1].

Minerals and plants were both created on the third day from sparks of the weakest light enclosed in the tenebrae of the lowest heaven and from sparks of the secondary light enclosed in the shadows of middle heaven..[2]

Fludd’s account of light descending into matter bears similarities with some Gnostic mythologies of the first centuries of the Christian era. The Gnostics were obsessed with the question of evil and one of their myths tells of the origin of earthly evil, the story of the Light that fell into the darkness [3], and how the soul became caught in matter.

The Soul once turned toward matter, she became enamored of it, and burning with desire to experience the pleasures of the body, she no longer wanted to disengage herself from it. Thus the world was born. From that moment the Soul forgot herself. She forgot her original habitation, her true center, her eternal being.[4]

Fludd often mentions Hermes Trismegistus as one of his authorities. In the Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of writings first published together in the 14th century, but existing as individual texts prior to 500 A.D. ( and probably written in the 1-3rd centuries A.D.) ascribed to this school of neoplatonic Gnosticism, one finds in The Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus the following:

And Nature§, seeing the beauty of of the form of God* smiled with insatiate love of Man+, showing the reflection of that most beautiful form in the water, a form like his own, in earth and water, loved it, and willed to dwell there. And the deed followed close on the design; and he took up his abode in matter devoid of reason. And Nature, when she had got him with who she was in love, wrapped him in her clasp, and they were one, for they were in love with one another.

And that is why man, unlike all other living creatures upon earth is twofold. He is mortal by reason of his body; he is immortal by reason of the Man of eternal substance. He is immortal and has all things in his power; yet he suffers the lot of a mortal, being subject to Destiny. He is exalted above the structure of the the heavens, yet he is born a slave of Destiny.[5]

_______________

Notes as given in Scott:

§Nature = “downward tending Nature” is the personification of the force which works in the “downward tending elements, earth and water

*God means here Man who, since he bore the likeness of God, was seen by Nature [in the form of God]

+ This Man is the son of the Father, “Mind” and the “Life and the Light”. Here “Light” is equated with “Mind”. Thus “Light”, i.e. the mind, [or the psyche], gets drawn into Nature.

Paracelsus and Fludd unconsciously “rediscovered” an archetypal idea (or an archetype was trying to express itself through them) or some of the ideas in the Corpus Hermeticum (which, chances are, they had read) fit what they were trying to express. The Gnostics had differentiated hyle from pneuma and spirit and had explained the fascination with matter. But they were one-sided in their rejection of the material world, they were too “anti-matter” in their outlook. The alchemical tradition tried to rebalance the Christian and Gnostic one-sided attitudes towards matter eschewing the extreme ascetism of the Gnostics. A new psychological attitude was trying to emerge clothed in the images of light and matter.

In many pagan and later alchemical texts, psychological contents were projected onto matter in the form of the “anima mundi” (the world-soul[6]). Heinrich Khunrath (born 1560, studied medicine, took his degree in 1588 in Basel, and died 1605 in Leipzig) was influenced by Paracelsus and equated the anima mundi to the lumen naturae:

There are… fiery sparks of the World-Soul, that is of the light of nature, dispersed or scattered at God’s command in and through the fabric of the great world into all fruits of the elements everywhere.[7]

Khunrath also linked the Spirit Mercurius to lumen naturae:

And our Catholick Mercury, by virtue of his universal fiery spark of the light of nature…[8]

This Spirit Mercurius is the alchemical Godhead, so to speak, the androgynous, dark and light, symbol of the psyche in matter, “a dual being who was as much spiritual as material”.[9] Being a paradoxical uniter of opposites, Mercurius is psychologically a symbol of the Self. Jung says:

In a psychological sense Mercurius represent the unconscious, for this is to all appearances the spirit which comes closest to organic matter and has all the paradoxical qualities attributed to Mercurius. In the unconscious are hidden those “sparks of light” (scintillae), the archetypes, from which a higher meaning can be extracted. The magnet that attracts the hidden thing is the self, or in this case, the theoria or the symbol representing it, which the adept uses as an instrument. [10]

In an philosophical-alchemical sense, the lumen are the sparks in matter which are struck by the flint of Mercurius.[11] In this phrasing of Gerhard Dorn (a student of Paracelsus) Mercurius is differentiated, in other instances he is identified with the spark, or the lumen itself. If I were to attempt to put this into modern terms, I would say that the creative spirit behind the scientist working with matter is the Spirit Mercurius, and whatever he views in nature as having order or meaning, is the lumen.

M.-L. von Franz writes that:

The alchemical opus involves an inner experience and a numinous content, Wisdom (the anima), is the secret which the adept was looking for in the chemical substances.[12]

In the “Kore Kosmou”, (literally the “eye-pupil of the Universe”), another treatise contained in the Corpus Hermeticum , it is said that

A fair woman, Physis, proceeded from God’s voice, and God bade her be fruitful. Physis laughed, and obeyed the command; she bore to Ponos ..a daughter Heuresis [“finding” or “discovering”]; to her God gave the boon of knowledge, giving this boon he divided the things that were already there and filled them with stars (the things that were to be known); and he gave Heuresis the mastery with regard to them. [13]

M.-L. von Franz comments on this:

“Thus here too the “spirit of finding the truth” resides as it were in Nature herself, in the form of a divine feminine being who must reveal herself if Nature is to be known[14]

Is Physis Lumen?[15] One of the subthemes of these essays is to point out the evident difficulty in separating the study of matter from the study the (unconscious) psyche. Does this difficulty have its source in the fact that there are objective connections? Or is it because there are still-projected psychic contents that, not yet integrated or understood, are residing in archaic identity? Are the still-projected contents in matter statements of how the psyche works? Or are there psychic roots that are intrinsic to the understanding of matter so that the laws of physics would be incomplete without including psychological understanding?

The “soft” de-animation of matter, exemplified by Galileo, and Kepler, was “stiffened” by René Descartes’ (1596-1650) philosophical system that eliminated the spiritual and immaterial from the physical world (or at least tried to keep matter and spirit apart) and instituted a rational mathematical approach to study matter in motion.[16] One of the problems was that Descartes misunderstood the alchemical literature by taking everything concretely, so that his separation of matter and spirit was one-sided.[17] Descartes attributed light to be the passive pressure exerted by particles of dust or infinitesimal bits (which were luminous because of their speed) and round balls (created from the primordial whirl) upon one another as they continually strove to escape from the center (each part of matter revolved around its own center).[18] Descartes followed Aristotle and based his theory on the a priori axiom that a vacuum in nature is impossible. He also held that God was the first cause of both matter and motion.[19]

The major event in the continued mechanization of the world was the appearance of Newton’s Principia (first published in 1687). As shown by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, in her well-researched book on Newton’s alchemical studies, “in a sense the whole of his career after 1675 may be seen as one long attempt to integrate alchemy and the mechanical philosophy.”[20] He tried to produce the “philosophick mercury” and believed that one had only to decipher the ancient writers and redo their experiments to obtain it. (He was only partially successful at this). In the last (1730) version of his Opticks, Newton showed that mechanical explanations were not his only consideration and paid homage to the Light in Nature:

And if natural Philosophy in all its parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged. For so far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first  Cause[21], what Power he has over us, and what benefits we receive from him, so far our duty towards him, as well as that towards another, will appear to us by the Light of Nature.[22]

The alchemical difference

Newton’ attitude is come a long way off from the ancient Hindu, Platonic, (see Appendix I) Gnostic (Appendix II), and Christian traditions which sought to purify the soul of its descent and desecration in matter. Newton exemplifies a rational view of the philosophical alchemists of the 18th century who were trying to reinstate the value of matter. They felt that something in the total religious view of their day was missing; instead of being rejected, matter needed to be revalued, purified, and united with the spirit. Jung puts it succinctly:

The soul was drawn up by the spirit to the lofty regions of abstraction; but the body was de-souled, and since it also had claims to live the unsatisfactoriness of the situation could not remain hidden from him. He [the alchemist] was unable to feel himself whole, and whatever the spiritualization of his existence may have meant to him he could not get beyond the Here and Now of his bodily life in the physical world. The spirit precluded his orientation to physis and vice versa.[23]

However, as Jung points out, the alchemist did not (like many people today) switch over to a one-sided body-oriented, materialistic view. They “held fast to their Christian traditions and did not slip back to onto a more unconscious level.”[24] Thus they tried to remain true to a feeling that something was missing in the prevailing (anti-material) Christian dogma and that the arcanum (the “living stone”) had, besides a soul and spirit, also a physical nature.

This attitude of the alchemist to the wonder of matter is a remnant of the ancient feeling for nature. But this relationship was unconscious, consciously the alchemist was a Christian, and was therefore trying to free himself from the fascination of matter, but just because it was unconscious it was a compulsion, a passion, which expressed itself in the fact that many alchemist believed they could transform the ignoble, corrupt material world into pure gold. This is how the idea of the art of making gold arose, which was regarded as the greatest nonsense ever invented by man.[25]

As M.-L. von Franz often emphasizes, the alchemist were essentially trying to redress a one-sided and incomplete Christian outlook. The rejected fourth – the missing feminine principle in the masculine trinity – is linked via the great mother to matter. Being still unrecognized, the undervalued feminine elements (potentially representing a deeper feeling attitude, greater moral consciousness, and a relation to meaning as well as a relatedness to feminine values, nature, and therefore the environment) is compensated for by a compulsive materialism. von Franz says:

…matter is also a mysterious cosmic principle, as modern physics looks at it.. The great mother has been taken into the institution of the Church and has not been recognized as matter, so that there is a compensatory unconscious materialization of ideas.[26]

The alchemist thought that man was necessary to transform matter, he even tacitly raised man to God’s side in this task. If the alchemist was aware of this, he was not really inflated although he appears (to us) to make himself equal to God. He felt that he carried out the transformations, God (and nature) willing. A sense of this is hinted at in the quote above from Newton, and stated in a more emotional way by Paracelsus.

The Lumen in modern science

Psychologically the problem with the shadow is, with the help of dreams and analysis, supposedly well-defined. However, I am still left with a difficulty. What of the observations of nature, the discovery of laws which appear to fit nature, seemingly independent of my own psychic disposition, the state of awareness of my ego and shadow? Is there something in my wonder about nature that is objective – in the sense that it does not depend upon my own psychic state of development? Are the formulations of physical laws dependent on the collective disposition[27], the Zeitgeist? Jung writes:

…we have every reason to value symbol-formation and to render homage to the symbols as an inestimable means of utilizing the mere instinctual flow of energy for effective work. A waterfall is certainly more beautiful than a power station, but dire necessity teaches us to value electric light and electrified industry more highly than the superb wastefulness of a waterfall that delights us for a quarter of an hour on a holiday walk.[28]

A physicist describes light in a way which sounds like the beginning of a modern myth:

Light…is represented by a particle, the photon of rest mass 0, spin 1. The emission of light by an excited atom is represented as a result of a fundamental coupling, or process e ® g (e stands for an electron, g for a photon) meaning that there is a possibility (described more precisely by a mathematical quantity, an amplitude) that an electron may become an electron and a photon; the precise law of this coupling (how the amplitude depends on the directions of motion and spin of the particles concerned) is known very accurately… When an electron in an atom does this, light is emitted by the atom.[29]

Compare this with Newton:

The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations.[30]

Personally I am awestruck by nature, but I am also fascinated by the theories of the physicist. I am fascinated by the language that seems to be so mythological and to contain so much psychological information. To a part of me these characteristics seem to point to the idea that matter and psyche are somehow one. Herein lies my core fascination. I cannot back off, with cool objectivity, and say: “This is a projection”. I am somewhere convinced that psyche and matter are connected and that the research of Jung and von Franz have a parallel in moder physics. But how can I define and characterize this intuition?

From the point of view of both Jung and von Franz, physicists appear rather blind to the evidence that the unconscious is the source of their theories and that the psychic nature of our perceptions limits the objectivity of all theories[31]. If Charles Enz, (a close associate and biographer of Wolfgang Pauli) can be taken as representing the view of modern physicists, than Jung appears to be too little aware that the psyche is, at root, material[32] . However, I believe that Jung was fully aware of the material “roots” of the psyche (as quoted above) and feels no need to emphasize this. Rather Jung is compensating the collective overemphasis on material reality and stating what is too little understood; namely that the psyche is real, whether material or not.

Like Kukele’s vision of the snake as his solution of the benzene ring and Poincaré’s “coffee-trance”[33], the pieces of a problem suddenly seem to fit together in a miraculous way.

The Light of Nature in the body

In reading about modern discoveries in the natural sciences, I am often amazed at discoveries of a kind of natural intelligence displayed by some life processes. This “intelligence” can be more-or-less explained by Darwin and physical-chemical laws. For me, whether it can be explained or not, does not reduce its meaning. I wonder whether this intelligence is a manifestation of the “light of nature” that the earlier natural scientists were also trying to describe. I formulate this in terms of a question:

What is the relationship between that which appears to the natural scientist as the wisdom of nature and that which appears to the psychologist as the “wisdom” of the collective unconscious?

The transfer of genetic information within the organism may serve as an example of what I associate with the wisdom of nature according to the natural scientist. Modern biology assumes that all the information needed by the body (including, I presume, the psychic functions) is encoded in genetic material. How is this passed on?

The rational scientist in me has come up with another example; this time of a kind of “natural intelligence” displayed by certain life processes. The transfer of genetic information within the organism may serve as an example of that which I associate with what the natural scientist calls the “wisdom” of nature. Modern biology assumes that all the information needed by the body (including, I presume, the psychic functions in potentia) is encoded in genetic material. How is this passed on?

Gene expression involves four kinds of ribonucleic acid (RNA). Initially a messenger RNA precursor is transcribed from central double helix containing all the genetic information (deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA). The intermediate step involves a strand of “messenger” RNA made up of unnecessary material (called introns) and the critical information (called extrons). Recently small ribonucleoproteins have been discovered that “edit” the intron material out – they cut the strand of messenger RNA just at the right places and splice it back together – just at the right places. Without this, “nonsense” would be translated and the process would come to a standstill. The messenger strand enters the cell cytoplasm and is translated into protein by a ribosome. Transfer RNA eventually collects amino acids and builds them into a protein chain which then fights an infection or mediates the process of reproduction. [34]

The origin of this “intelligence” of transfer RNA can be (more-or-less) explained rationally by Darwin and physical-chemical laws. For me, whether it can be explained by biology,[35] quantum mechanics,[36] or the psychoid unconscious,[37] does not reduce the fascination.

As a practicing medical doctor Paracelsus may have formulated his concept of the light of nature also to describe the body’s own knowledge of how to heal itself. Referring to the above discussion, there appears to be more “knowledge” in the body, for instance, in the RNA-mediated information transfer of physiological information, than we possess in consciousness. Maybe the “light” is in the miracle of life. But then how do the “editing” ribonucleoproteins “know” where to do their precise cutting and splicing of the nonsense from the sense? I presume that they interact with the messenger RNA directly through chemical bonds or indirectly by means of protein intermediaries that also react by electron transfer. However, it is just these chemical bonds and electron transfer that are, in essence, quantum mechanical processes: the interaction of light and matter. Is this another aspect of the Lumen Naturae?

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[1]Note the modern-sounding technical terminology: “force of rays”, “inherent impulse”, “crystalline sphere”, “attached by freezing”, and “opacity of this spot”. These phrases show the influence of the contemporary fashion to state things “empirically”, observations of matter, and mental images. Such mental images that spring up when dealing with hitherto unknown phenomena, have been called “archetypal images” by C.G. Jung. The archetypes themselves are unknowable, they are the hypothetical ordering operators and image-formers (Pauli, The influence, p. 153.) which mediate sense-perceptions and all psychic phenomena (ideas, emotions, and mental images) cf a statement by Kepler with a surprisingly similar meaning: “For to know is to compare that which is externally perceived with inner images and to judge that it agrees with them” Kepler, Harmonices Mundei, Book IV (Frsich, V, p. 224) Latin and English text in Pauli, The influence, p. 162.

[2] Cited from Katherine B. Collier, Cosmogonies of our fathers, Octagon Books, New York 1968 (reprinted by Columbia Universty Press, 1934) (hereinafter referred to as Cosmogonies), p. 57, paraphrasing Fludd Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia pp. 133, 135, 137, 173-179, 205.

[3] cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd Edition, Beacon Press, Boston, 1963, p. 62ff.

[4] El Chatibi of the Harranites, quoted in Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p. 63.

[5]Scott, Hermetica , vol. I p. 121-3.

[6] “The anima mundi was conceived as that part of God which formed the quintessence and real substance of Physis, and which was to God – to use an apt expression of Isidore – as the “accrescent soul (prosšŠfnhs ynch, ‘pro theus psyche; grown-on’) was to the divine soul of man. This accrescent soul was a second soul that grew through the mineral, animal kingdoms up to man, pervading the whole of nature, and to it the natural forms were attached like appendages…” C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW vol. 14, p. 280.

[7]Von hyleaischen Chaos, quote in Jung, Mysterium, p. 55.

[8]Khunrath, Von Hyleaischen Chaos, quoted in Jung, Mysterium, p. 56, without page number (previous quote from Khunrath was from page 217), but referring reader to pp. 220f and 263f.

[9]Jung, Mysterium, p. 490.

[10]Ibid., p. 491.

[11] From a quote of Gerhard  Dorn in his Speculum Philosophicum (p. 307), cited by Jung, Mysterium, p. 54-55 (Latin original on p. 566).

[12] M.-L. von Franz, Aurora, p. 186.

[13] Scott, Hermetica, vol. IV, p. 450. The editor comments that it is evidently the upper world that must be put in order here.

[14] M.-L. von Franz, ibid.

[15] Or is she, as the “discover”, the collective anima figure and the spirit behind modern physicists?

[16] cf. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, in The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, (hereinafter called The Foundations) Cambridge, 1975, p. 100.

[17] See von Franz, Traüme, Daimon Verlag, Zürich, 1985, p. 204.

[18] In part iii, secs. 49-64 and 77 of his Principles of Philosophy, Amsterdam,1644

[19] This material from Collier, Cosmogonies, p. 34 -35.

[20]Dobbs, The Foundations, p. 230

[21]“…which is certainly not mechanical” Opticks, p. 369.

[22] Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks or a treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections & colours of light, Dover Publications, New York, 1952, based on the fourth London Edition, 1730. p. 405.

[23]C.G.Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 541.

[24]Ibid., p. 541.

[25]Jung, Lecture notes on Alchemy, p. 40.

[26] M.-L. von Franz: Apuleius’ ‘Golden Ass’, Spring Publications, Zürich, 1970, p. XI 16-17. These “ideas” may be the images or the theories associated with modern physics: the “laws” that every scientist assumes without question to refer to objective, matter and physical reality.

[27] Another daydream at this point: I must keep my head above the yellow muddy waters of a flooded wild river while swimming to my daughter.

[28] C. G. Jung, On Psychic Energy, in CW 8: The structure and dynamics of the Psyche, Routledge and Kegan Paul, LOndon, 2nd Ed. 1969, p. 47.

[29] R.P. Feynman, The theory of fundamental processes, Benjamin 1962, p.29. The interpretation, or the meaning of, the quantum mechanical amplitudes here mentioned are still a mystery – the subject of another possible essay.

[30] Newton, Opticks, p. 374

[31] For instance, that nothing can be stated or thought or “observed” outside the psyche. Admired today as an odd genius, Arthur Eddington said earlier this century that a purely objective world could not be observed and called the procedure of modern physics “selective subjectivism”, (in The Philosophy of Physical Science, Cambridge, 1939, p. 17), cf. discussion by von Franz, Number and Time, p. 54. An example of a phrasing more or less acceptable in today’s physics: “The simple fact is that no measurement, no experiment or observation is possible without the relevant theoretical framework.” D.S.Kothari, Some thoughts on Truth, Anniversary Address, Indian National Science Academy, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi, 1975, p. 5, quoted in Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos, Bantom Books, New York, 1984, p. 293.

[32]“In the course of his work Jung was gradually forced towards a less extreme view in his psychology of the unconscious by admitting non-psychical elements.” Charles Enz, W. Pauli’s Scientific Work, in: J. Mehra,(Editor) The physicists’ Conception of Nature, D. Reidel, Dordrecht-Holland, p. 790. As evidence, Enz cites the statement by Jung: “…my own theoretical rerflections…lead me to certain postulates which touch the domain of the atomic-physical conceptions, that is the space time continuum. Herewith the question of the trans-psychiocal reality is raised which is at the immediate basis of the psyche.” (Jung quoted by A. Koestler, Die Wurzeln des Zufalls, pp. 102-3). Enz credits this change of attitude to Pauli’s influence on Jung.

[33] H. Poincaré, Mathematical creativity, in James R. Newman, The world of mathematics, Torchbooks, New York, 1963, Vol. 4, p. 2044.

[34]The biochemical information in this paragraph was taken from Joan A. Steitz: “Snurps”, Scientific American, June 1988, pp. 36-38.

[35] Light might have been necessary for the emergence of conscious life. Or maybe the energy from the sun in the form of light was inherent in the miracle of life.

[36] Considering light as a purely energetic phenomena.

[37] Jung might call the body’s knowledge the “psychoid unconscious”, the unconscious psyche which is so much a part of physical processes that it can not be said to be matter or psyche alone.