7 or 8 years ago, as I sat reading Jung late into the night, around 3 am I found this quote. I remember thinking I know what he is talking about here. I feel this now more than ever. I was sleepy and went to bed and didn't put a post it note which I usually do in his books so that I can find it again. The next day I went to look for it and could not find it but I knew my unconscious would find it again. A few months later while reading Anatomy of the Psyche by Edward F. Edinger, there it was. He had referenced it.
— Carl Jung, Collected Works Vol. XX: Mysterium Conuinctionis, An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, par 622-623
“The reference to the mountains which encompass the Shulamite has a strange parallel in Parvati, whose name means “mountain dweller” and who was deemed the daughter of Himavat (Himalaya). Grieving over her blackness, for which her husband Shiva reproached her, she left him and withdrew to the solitude of the forest. And in her loneliness and seclusion the Shulamite exclaims:
What shall I say? I am alone among the hidden; nevertheless I rejoice in my heart, because I can live privily, and refresh myself in myself. But under my blackness I have hidden the fairest green.
The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvests. It is the alchemical benedicta viriditas, the blessed greenness, signifying on the one hand the “leprosy of the metals” (verdigris), but on the other the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things. “O blessed greenness, which generates all things!” cries the author of the Rosarium.
“Did not the spirit of the Lord,” writes Mylius, “which is a fiery love, give to the waters when it was borne over them a certain fiery vigor, since nothing can be generated without heat? God breathed into created things . . . a certain germination or greenness, by which all things should multiply . . . They called all things green, for to be green means to grow . . . Therefore this virtue of generation and the preservation of things might be called the Soul of the World.”
Green signifies hope and the future, and herein lies the reason for the Shulamite’s hidden joy, which otherwise would be difficult to justify. But in alchemy green also means perfection. Thus Arnaldus de Villanova says: “Therefore Aristotle says in his book, “Our gold, not the common gold, because the green which is in this substance signifies its total perfection, since by our magistery that green is quickly turned into truest GOLD.”
