In Jung’s view, [the story of “The Spirit in the Bottle”] “contains the quintessence and deepest meaning of the Hermetic mystery”: a powerful spirit is trapped in the earth beneath an oak tree, enclosed within “a well-sealed glass bottle.” Hearing the spirit cry “Let me out!” a passing youth opens the bottle, whereupon the spirit rushes forth, identifies himself as mighty Mercurius, and threatens to strangle his liberator. But the boy tricks the spirit back into the bottle, and the tamed Mercurius then promises that, if freed again, he will serve the boy in a beneficial way.

Jung relates the glass bottle of the Grimms’ fairy tale to the Hermetic vessel with the following words:

The bottle is an artificial human product and thus signifies the intellectual purposefulness and artificiality of the [alchemical] procedure, whose obvious aim is to isolate the spirit from the surrounding medium. As the vas Hermeticum of alchemy, it was “hermetically” sealed….It had to be made of glass, and had also to be as round as possible, since it was meant to represent the cosmos in which the earth was created.

In Jung’s interpretation, the Mercurial spirit represented to the alchemist the initially unconscious, wildly irrational power of instinct, of embodied nature.

(back to chapter 5)