In one respect we are therefore better off, but in another we are much worse off. For the matter in which we previously worked, the unconscious, remains approximately the same throughout great periods; the unconscious of the wanderer is in its fundamentals not very different from that of a man of to-day or from that of Zosimos. [Zosimos is one of the oldest alchemistic writers of whom we have any definite knowledge—about the 4th century.] It is the soul of the race that speaks, its “humanity.” Much more swiftly, on the contrary, does objective knowledge change in the course of time and the forms also in which this knowledge is expressed. From this point of view the conscious is more difficult of access than the unconscious. And now we have to face a system so very far removed from our way of thinking as the alchemistic. Fortunately I need not regard it as my duty to explain the parable so completely in the alchemistic sense that any one could work according to it in a chemical laboratory. It is much more suitable to our purpose if I show in general outline only how we must arrange the leading forms and processes of the parable to accord with the mode of thinking peculiar to alchemy. If I should succeed in doing so clearly, we should already have passed a difficult stage. Then for the first time I might venture further—to the special object of this research. But patience! We have not yet gone so far. First of all it will be necessary for me to draw in a few lines a sketch of how, in the most flourishing period of alchemy, the accomplishment of the Great Work was usually described. In spite of the diversity of the representations we find certain fundamental principles which are in general firmly established. I will indicate a few points of this iron-clad order in the alchemic doctrine. There is, in the first place, the central idea of the interaction or the coöperation of two things that are generally called man and woman, red and white, sun and moon, sulphur and mercury. We have already seen in Ibn Sina that the metals consist of the combination of sulphur and mercury. Even earlier the interaction of two parts were figuratively called impregnation. Both fuse into one symbol, and indeed so much the more readily, as it probably arose as the result of analogous thoughts, determined by a sexual complex. Also there occurs the idea that we must derive a male activity from the gold, a female from the silver, in order to get from their union that which perfects the mercury of the metals. That may be the reason that, for the above mentioned pair that is to be united, the denotation gold and silver ([Symbol: Gold] and [Symbol: Silver]) prevailed. Red and white = man and woman (male and female activity), we found in the parable also when studied psychoanalytically. In the “Turba philosophorum” “the woman is called Magnesia, the white, the man is called red, sulphur.”