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In her classic book Puer Aeternus Marie-Louise von Franz discusses the archetypal background of Bruno Goetz's occult novel of 1919, Das Reich ohne Raum (The Kingdom without Space). The following summary paraphrases the author's words.
In this novel the hero of the story comes between two hostile parties: that of the divine boy Fo (=Buddha) and that of Herr Ulrich von Spät, who is pursuing him. Fo is accompanied by an ecstatic troop of boys who trigger upheavals and "liberational" mass eruptions of savagery in every city. Grapes, wine, Pan flutes, animals, roses, and fire are his elements. He proclaims an eternal change of forms through many rebirths, advocates abandoning oneself to life and death, seeking and wandering, dancing and ecstasy. Ulrich von Spät (Spät in German means "late"), by contrast, is the ruler, with his "glass lords," of a crystal-clear transcendental realm among the stars. Order, ethics, and pure spirituality are the goals he proclaims to humanity. Von Spät represents, as it were, the mighty pressure of tradition and the past, which, as Jung once said, "buries the gods in marble and gold." For the most part von Spät appears as a power-hungry sorcerer, but in his rare better moments, his face reveals itself as "the noble suffering face of a god." On account of this nobler aspect, the hero of the novel can never completely abandon him, although his heart belongs more to Fo and the boys.
The most apt mythological analogues to these two contending figures are to be found in the symbolism of alchemy: the chief-dictator-father spirit corresponds there to the arcane substance known as the "old king"; whereas the puer aeternus seems to correspond to the mercurius infans or filius regius, which is also sometimes personified as a winged youth, juvenis alatus. In Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung gives a detailed commentary on the figure of the old king, who represents the arcane substance and is usually portrayed by the alchemists at the beginning of the process as defective, unredeemed, rigidified, sick, or even evil. The defective quality corresponds to an intensified egotism and hardening of the heart that must be broken down in the alchemical bath. Power hunger and concupiscence often also ingloriously characterize the old king. On the other hand, the puer aeternus, understood as an alchemical image, is, vis-ā-vis the old king, the element that is destined to replace him. This is a symbol of the renewal of life or the reunion of separated opposites, the "new inner man," or the arcane substance resurrected, a more complete symbol of the self.
Seen in the light of alchemical symbolism and Jung's remarks on the subject, the father image of the old ruler and the winged son are not only not real opposites but have a single nature. Therefore the alchemists referred to their substance as senex et puer. Through the fusion that takes place in the alchemical opus, whether in the fire or the bath, through dissolution into chaos or mutilation, in one way or another the old man is transformed into the son.
However, in this regard Jung showed that the old king represents not only a tradition-bound, excessively egoistic, stick-in-the-mud principle of consciousness, but rather ultimately the collective God image itself. Therefore when it is said that the king is in need of transformation, it is ultimately our conception of the Divine that needs transforming, and it is clear that such a process is only possible within the psyche. In other words, the only thing we can do is orient ourselves towards the unconscious if we want to find out in what way our prevailing conscious dominants must change so that our image of the divine may once again be transformed, as Jung puts it, "into a real and workable whole, whereas before it had only pretended to wholeness."