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The Dream of Poliphilo: The Soul in Love
XXV of the Bollingen Series. A study and psychological interpretation of the HYPNEROTOMACHIA, a work of the early renaissance. Translated by Mary Bollinger, with a foreward by C.J. Jung. Spine bumped and slightly faded, dust jacket chipped at corners and ends of spine. xviii, 244 pages. two-tone cloth, dust jacket.. 8vo..
243 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1987
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January 27, 2026
Introduction
“…a work of the early Renaissance, published in Venice and ascribed to a Dominican monk, Francesco Colonna. The original work recounts that in a dream Poliphilo is guided by his beloved through a series of fantastic adventures which unfold in a legendary and heroic landscape. Polia, his guide, represents the materialistic spirit of the Renaissance, which frees him from his obsession with alchemy and the mediaeval concept of courtly love. He is led back into classical culture in search of a solution, and awakens transformed, indoctrinated with the humanism of the ancients.”
“…three conceptions are blended in one in the Hypnerotomachia: the humanistic conception of the revival of classical culture; the courtly conception of the love of women as a task; the alchemical conception of the transmutation of matter. These three ideas, which are simply three facets of the one religious principle of transformation or rebirth, appear in the book as three superimposed strata, the humanistic being the upper or outermost, the courtly the middle, and the alchemical the lower. This order, however, must not be taken too literally, for the various strata or spheres interpenetrate. This figure of a stratification gives no more than a general impression.”
“…the idea of courtly love is refined by the rule that fruition is difficult or impossible, the beloved woman becoming ever farther removed from the lover by circumstance or inward necessity. In this way the conflict inherent in the love relation is recognized as essential to it, and at the same time spiritualized. True, the real woman is still there, but she becomes more and more the pretext of an erotic and aesthetic exaltation. Thus a situation arises in which we are never sure whether the yearning is addressed to a real human being or to the phantom of an anima.”
“When our author was writing, it was far easier for a secret meaning to creep into a didactic work than it would be today. It was but a thin curtain which at that time separated consciousness from the unconscious. The various fields of knowledge interpenetrated, thought was tinged with religion, science with poetry. In the same way, heart was linked to head, and the background of things lay close to the foreground. That is why we sense the symbolism of the Hypnerotomachia, even though it was not meant as a symbolic work. We should be doing it an injustice in overlooking its symbolic character, just because it is an involuntary growth and therefore is the pure and genuine expression of the soul. On the other hand, it is all the more important to discover as definitely as possible what may have some rough distinction may be drawn between its foreground and the background which projects into it.”
Part I
“…the divinity of animal nature, which was manifest to the man of the early Renaissance in the classical acceptance of all things natural, contains the mortal danger (symbolized by the wolf) of complete self-loss.”
“Actually, the fundamental breach made by the division into two parts has nothing to do with the action of the dream but with its inner meaning, that is, with how Poliphilo the man comes to terms with his nymph-anima. From this standpoint, a first part has certainly come to an end and a second begins. Up to this point, his relationship to the nymph meant for Poliphilo a continuous transformation symbolized in his continual movement from place to place. Every transformation revealed a new goal, until the moment came when he could see that the nymph-anima was herself the goal, and could possess her as such. This manner of development by stages is by no means peculiar to Poliphilo's romance. On the contrary, it is characteristic of every man's experience of his anima. And the realization that the anima, and his union with her, is the goal must be so intense, or in other words so intimate, must penetrate to such depths, that only the symbol of the sexual act is adequate to represent it. But then the anima, as it were, is held in a strong and loving embrace, and the whole new development that follows ceases to be a transformation of the man's consciousness and becomes a transformation of the anima.”
Part II
“[Polia’s] disappearance symbolizes the fact that the anima is drained of all her contents and that, for the time being, her part is played out. She has now imparted to Poliphilo the knowledge of the unconscious. Her form is emptied, nothing tangible remains. Thus the departure of Polia symbolizes the phenomenon of the detachment from the anima, while at the same time a certain differentiation is hinted at.
To understand this, we must remember that the scene of Polia's assumption takes place by the grave of Adonis. Poliphilo is still standing in front of the unopened grave. When Polia floats upward, the female symbol is removed from the grave which, up to then, it had concealed. Thus the feminine is differentiated from the masculine symbol of Adonis, and as the female figure vanishes from the dreamer's sight, it becomes possible for the masculine symbol to emerge into visibility. The gaze can now detach itself from the heights left void by Polia's passing, and turn to the earth—namely the grave. But then divine love must be present, which can open the grave and take from it its strange, hidden contents.
The process of coming to terms with the anima forcibly constellates for the man the problem of the shadow and the inferior function. … The activation of the inferior function means that tears must flow, and that pain and suffering are inevitable. For when the inferior function is activated, an abyss opens. It draws consciousness down into the dark realm of the unconscious, compelling it to descend into Hades…”
“…a work of the early Renaissance, published in Venice and ascribed to a Dominican monk, Francesco Colonna. The original work recounts that in a dream Poliphilo is guided by his beloved through a series of fantastic adventures which unfold in a legendary and heroic landscape. Polia, his guide, represents the materialistic spirit of the Renaissance, which frees him from his obsession with alchemy and the mediaeval concept of courtly love. He is led back into classical culture in search of a solution, and awakens transformed, indoctrinated with the humanism of the ancients.”
“…three conceptions are blended in one in the Hypnerotomachia: the humanistic conception of the revival of classical culture; the courtly conception of the love of women as a task; the alchemical conception of the transmutation of matter. These three ideas, which are simply three facets of the one religious principle of transformation or rebirth, appear in the book as three superimposed strata, the humanistic being the upper or outermost, the courtly the middle, and the alchemical the lower. This order, however, must not be taken too literally, for the various strata or spheres interpenetrate. This figure of a stratification gives no more than a general impression.”
“…the idea of courtly love is refined by the rule that fruition is difficult or impossible, the beloved woman becoming ever farther removed from the lover by circumstance or inward necessity. In this way the conflict inherent in the love relation is recognized as essential to it, and at the same time spiritualized. True, the real woman is still there, but she becomes more and more the pretext of an erotic and aesthetic exaltation. Thus a situation arises in which we are never sure whether the yearning is addressed to a real human being or to the phantom of an anima.”
“When our author was writing, it was far easier for a secret meaning to creep into a didactic work than it would be today. It was but a thin curtain which at that time separated consciousness from the unconscious. The various fields of knowledge interpenetrated, thought was tinged with religion, science with poetry. In the same way, heart was linked to head, and the background of things lay close to the foreground. That is why we sense the symbolism of the Hypnerotomachia, even though it was not meant as a symbolic work. We should be doing it an injustice in overlooking its symbolic character, just because it is an involuntary growth and therefore is the pure and genuine expression of the soul. On the other hand, it is all the more important to discover as definitely as possible what may have some rough distinction may be drawn between its foreground and the background which projects into it.”
Part I
“…the divinity of animal nature, which was manifest to the man of the early Renaissance in the classical acceptance of all things natural, contains the mortal danger (symbolized by the wolf) of complete self-loss.”
“Actually, the fundamental breach made by the division into two parts has nothing to do with the action of the dream but with its inner meaning, that is, with how Poliphilo the man comes to terms with his nymph-anima. From this standpoint, a first part has certainly come to an end and a second begins. Up to this point, his relationship to the nymph meant for Poliphilo a continuous transformation symbolized in his continual movement from place to place. Every transformation revealed a new goal, until the moment came when he could see that the nymph-anima was herself the goal, and could possess her as such. This manner of development by stages is by no means peculiar to Poliphilo's romance. On the contrary, it is characteristic of every man's experience of his anima. And the realization that the anima, and his union with her, is the goal must be so intense, or in other words so intimate, must penetrate to such depths, that only the symbol of the sexual act is adequate to represent it. But then the anima, as it were, is held in a strong and loving embrace, and the whole new development that follows ceases to be a transformation of the man's consciousness and becomes a transformation of the anima.”
Part II
“[Polia’s] disappearance symbolizes the fact that the anima is drained of all her contents and that, for the time being, her part is played out. She has now imparted to Poliphilo the knowledge of the unconscious. Her form is emptied, nothing tangible remains. Thus the departure of Polia symbolizes the phenomenon of the detachment from the anima, while at the same time a certain differentiation is hinted at.
To understand this, we must remember that the scene of Polia's assumption takes place by the grave of Adonis. Poliphilo is still standing in front of the unopened grave. When Polia floats upward, the female symbol is removed from the grave which, up to then, it had concealed. Thus the feminine is differentiated from the masculine symbol of Adonis, and as the female figure vanishes from the dreamer's sight, it becomes possible for the masculine symbol to emerge into visibility. The gaze can now detach itself from the heights left void by Polia's passing, and turn to the earth—namely the grave. But then divine love must be present, which can open the grave and take from it its strange, hidden contents.
The process of coming to terms with the anima forcibly constellates for the man the problem of the shadow and the inferior function. … The activation of the inferior function means that tears must flow, and that pain and suffering are inevitable. For when the inferior function is activated, an abyss opens. It draws consciousness down into the dark realm of the unconscious, compelling it to descend into Hades…”
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