Carl Jung: I doubt very much whether we of the Freudian school would be welcome guests.

To Auguste Forel

Dear Professor Forel, 12 October 1909

Unfortunately your letter of 26.VIII.09 came into my hands only shortly after my return from America.

Hence my delay in answering.

Naturally I sympathize with your project for the coalition of all psychotherapists, but, given the present irreconcilability of opposites, I doubt very much whether we of the Freudian school would be welcome guests.

Yours very sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 11

Carl Jung: The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul...

With Faustian indignation my patient will cry out:

This witch's quackery disgusts my soul!
Is this your promise then, that I be healed
By crooked counsel in this crazy hole,
In truth by some decrepit dame revealed?
Cannot you brew an ichor of your own?

To which I shall reply:

"Haven't you tried one remedy after another? Haven't you seen for yourself that all your efforts have only led you round in a circle, back to the confusion of your present life? So where will you get that other point of view from, if it cannot be found anywhere in your world?"

Here Mephistopheles murmurs approvingly, "That's where the witch comes in," thus giving his own devilish twist to Nature's secret and perverting the truth that the dream is an inner vision, "mysterious still in open light of day."

The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.

For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars.

All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night.

There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all ego-hood. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 304


The descent into the world, whether it is at the beginning of the existence of the human being, or whether it happens in the course of life after a phase of life in the unconscious, is always characterized by sacrifice.

Therefore people, when they are leaving analysis for a while often cling to certain things which they had better not cling to.

You know, one of the ordinary prejudices of people who have gone through a period of analysis is to think that the relation to the world and people consists in psychologizing things, they think that everything ought to be analyzed; whether they are going to a concert or taking a trip, they must have a dream about it.

But we analyze dreams not in order to learn about particular matters, but to learn about the relationship of the unconscious to these matters, namely, to learn whether certain conscious developments coincide with the collective unconscious, or what the reasons are for certain disturbances in the conscious.

It is not meant that you should live your whole life in a sort of superstitious dread of what the dream says about things, so that you cannot move unless the dream tells you to, that you must wait for a dream to tell you when to balance your household account, for instance.

I have seen the most amazing things in that line.

"But why the devil don't you do it?" "I have had no dream about it."

Such nonsense!

It is the same thing, you see, one clings to certain ideas and is completely lost without them.

That does not mean, however, that one should throw the whole thing out of the window, that would be quite wrong, for there are plenty of circumstances in life where one had better consider the dream, really problematical situations where the dream is needed.

But whether you should scrub your floor or buy a pair of new shoes when you need them are not problems.

People who upon leaving cling to the analytical style, insisting upon everything being discussed and analyzed, become exceedingly clumsy and boring.

This must be sacrificed, it is quite clear; this style is good for analysis but not for life.

And then it looks like a terrible sacrifice, inasmuch as people are inclined to think they have then entirely lost contact with the unconscious.

You must be able to lose contact, you can never gain anything new without losing something. So risk losing the unconscious.

You see it is quite ridiculous-to put it mildly-to be afraid that you could lose your unconscious; that clings to you so tightly that you may be just glad if you can sometimes cherish the illusion of having lost it.

The unconscious clings to you so tightly that you cannot get rid of it; no fear of losing contact with it, that is all illusion.

But it looks like that; the transition from a psychological atmosphere into the collective atmosphere of the world is a most painful procedure, no doubt, and a painful contrast, and therefore it is quite justified to symbolize it by a lot of sacrificial blood. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1356-1357

Ronald Hayman’s lack of scholarship and erroneous assumptions and assertions uncovered

In 1999, Ronald Hayman, another professional biographer, published his biography of Jung,

A Life of Jung. Hayman was the first biographer who was aware of the status of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and drew on the protocols of Aniela Jaffé’s interviews
with Jung.

Furthermore, he was the first biographer to draw on the Countway interviews, supplemented with some interviews of his own.

Of the biographers of Jung to date, Hayman devoted the most space, comparatively speaking, to giving summaries of Jung’s actual writings.

Also, he did not rely on existing translations of Jung’s works, and sometimes revised existing translations and supplied his own.

Like the previous biographers, Hayman did not consult the Jung archives in Zürich.

Like Stern, Brome and McLynn before him, Hayman presented his own retrospective analysis of Jung.

This is particularly marked in his account of Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious”, which he regarded as a breakdown.

Hayman employed Ellenberger’s rubric of the “creative illness”, but went further in stressing what he considered to be the psychopathological nature of Jung’s experiences.

In his reading of Jung’s Siegfried dream, Hayman contended that Jung’s “need to keep silent” about Sabina Spielrein stopped him from “writing honestly about this dream”, as
Siegfried obviously signified Spielrein’s Siegfried fantasy—a connection which had been posited by Wehr.

The assumption
that one knows what this dream “really meant” led to the claim that
Jung did not write honestly about it.

Like Brome and McLynn, Hayman saw Freud as the critical figure in Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious”. In his discussion of the figures of Salome and Elijah, he noted:

One factor in his disorientation was the loss of the people who mattered to him most—Freud and Sabina. Both Jewish, they could be both be associated with the Old Testament. Though he was to speculate at length about the meaning of Salome and Elijah—pointing out that in myth an old man is often accompanied by a young
girl who represents the erotic while he represents wisdom—he never made the obvious equations. . . . Like dissidents who have been eliminated in a Soviet purge and vanish from new prints of old photographs, they are mentioned in none of Jung’s accounts of his dreams and visions. It was as he had forbidden himself to think about them. . . . Perhaps he saw it but he did not dare to admit he was conflating Sabina with Lou Andreas-Salomé.

Nowhere is evidence provided for such claims.

Hayman’s interpretations are taken as facts, and he gives the impression of knowing the hidden content of Jung’s mind.

Regarding Jung’s own interpretations of his experience, Hayman argued that Jung “always tended to mythologise his experience, and now he was verging on psychosis, Gnosticism gave him a kind of licence”.

It is striking how many commentators have reinterpreted Jung’s fantasies in terms of people in his life, leaving to one side his own interpretations of them in terms of subjective tendencies or functions of his personality. Jung’s tendency to personification, such as in the figure of Philemon, Hayman read in terms of the tendencies
of schizophrenics.

He attributed “delusions of grandeur” to Jung.

Furthermore, central features of Jung’s work are attributed to such tendencies:

“His inclination to believe in what he called the independence of the unconscious is in line with his boyhood refusal to accept responsibility for such images as the giant penis and the divine turd.”

Psychobiography thus becomes a tool of criticism.

Jung becomes remade according to each biographer’s fixed ideas.

Critically, none of the biographies discussed in this chapter drew upon Jung’s extensive unpublished manuscripts and notes, nor on his voluminous correspondence at the ETH.

These are available for scholars to study upon application.

Nor did any of the biographers have access to the Jung family archives, which contains private materials, such as Jung’s correspondence with his wife, the Black Books, and the Red Book.

Thus, the most important unpublished materials remained unexamined.

Confronted by this situation, one could simply base oneself on what is known, and be careful not to overstep the bounds of the available documentation.

The works of Hannah and Wehr can generally be seen to fall into this category.

On the other hand, there is the danger of filling in the gaps of the available information with intreprefactions.

The works of Stern, McLynn, Brome, and Hayman at times fall into this category. ~Sonu Shamdasani, Jung Stripped Bare: By His Biographers Even, Pages 84-86

Carl Jung: Here it takes its rightful place as a symbol of individuation.

Here the vision ended.

Unfortunately I cannot see how I can make conclusively clear to the reader the extraordinarily interesting meaning of this vision.

The fragment is an excerpt from a long sequence, and one would have to explain everything that happened before and afterwards, in order to grasp the significance
of the picture.

At all events the unprejudiced reader will recognize at once the idea of a "mid-point" that is reached by a kind of climb (mountaineering, effort, struggle, etc.).

He will also recognize without difficulty the famous medieval conundrum of the squaring of the circle, which belongs to the field of alchemy.

Here it takes its rightful place as a symbol of individuation.

The total personality is indicated by the four cardinal points, the four gods, i.e., the four functions which give bearings in psychic space, and also by the circle enclosing the whole.

Overcoming the four gods who threaten to smother the individual signifies liberation from identification with the four functions, a fourfold nirdvandva ("free from opposites") followed by an approximation to the circle, to undivided wholeness.

Thisin its turn leads to further exaltation. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 267

Carl Jung: We may like to think that all psyches are single psyches,...

We may like to think that all psyches are single psyches, that no such thing as a collective psyche exists, in other words that the psyche is nothing more thanconsciousness, for consciousness is an individual phenomenon.

But can we really be so very sure of this?

Primitives, on the other hand, are not at all certain that they are distinct from each other or from their surroundings; when you are among them you hardly dare to kill a crocodile, for the primitive says: "I am also that crocodile."

It is only single illuminated points that we are clearly conscious of; the whole is dark. I am reminded of the savant who said : " If I knew all that Ihave forgotten I would b e the most learned of all men." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, 27 Oct. 1933.

Carl Jung: ...many poisonous or healing plants were discovered, not by experience but by the suggestion of the objects.

For instance, a native was carving his canoe with the utmost love and care, and he spent so much time on it that when he came to the stern of the boat, the bow was already rotten.

The boat said: "I want to be carved"; so he carved and carved, and in the meantime the parts he did first were decaying.

If he were the master he would surely be able to do just so much carving, he could do what he liked.

But no, the boat is his superior and tells him what he must do, so he goes on for years, and in the meantime the boat is gradually rotting away.

That shows what the animation of the object means.

I am convinced that primitive inventions were also made in that way, and that many poisonous or healing plants were discovered, not by experience but by the suggestion of the objects.

For when primitives say that the trees tell them this and that, it is apt to be the truth; perhaps not in one sense, but it is remarkable what the primitive unconscious can do when it is absolutely outside in the object.

One sees the same thing in mediums or in very sensitive people; they have one door still open, one part of their mind is not theirs, it is outside in an object and it knows what the object knows.

Such a fellow is able to produce one's own thoughts, as if he were in possession of one's goods, so to speak; and from such experiences one can draw conclusions about those early conditions where the human mind was still in objects.

Then man had only to perceive and apply what was suggested to him by the things themselves.

One hears similar remarks from artists even now, if they are a bit primitive-that certain materials suggest such and such forms or creations. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 453

[Image Courtesy of Craig Nelson]

Carl Jung: Therefore those mystery cults were all concerned with the hope of immortality.

Therefore those mystery cults were all concerned with the hope of immortality. It was the going back to the god, to eat the divine body and drink the divine blood-whatever the sacred drink or food may have been.

In that way they renewed and strengthened their own being so that they could stand life again.

It was a sort of spiritual bath and wasoften expressed in that form; one finds that in certain Dionysian cults, and the piscine of the early Christians was a bath really.

In another placewhich has been excavated in Pompeii, fish symbolism was found exactly like the Christian fish symbolism, the initiate being a fish in the water and then emerging renewed.

Being submerged under water meansgoing down into the unconscious, and there in the depths one is no longer single and separated, one is all-embracing, one is the creative godhimself.

This extraordinary experience is really the purpose in goinginto the unconscious, and that was a conscious act in the old mystery teachings.

With us it is obsolete; we can only understand it as a sort ofsentimentality unless one knows what such an experience really means. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 151-152

Carl Jung: The Self means the inmost uniqueness and oneness of this particular being, yet that is symbolized by a city.

Mrs. Crowley: But that is exactly what I meant. I have been mystified all the time you were reading about it.

Dr. Jung: Then women, thou art forgiven!

It is the light of consciousness, but it is a symbol of the consciousness which is not an ego consciousness.

That collective aspect of the city comes from the fact that a city is never one ego alone, but a multitude, so we are confronted with the most tremendous paradox.

The Self means the inmost uniqueness and oneness of this particular being, yet that is symbolized by a city.

This is an early Christian idea also. One finds it in those famous fragments of papyrus dating from the first century A.D., which were excavated at Oxyrhynchus in about 1904.

In a talk between Christ and the disciples, they ask him first how they shall get to the Kingdom of Heaven, and he explains in that wonderful passage about the animals leading them there.

Then he says: "Therefore strive ye to know yourselves and ye shall beaware that ye are the sons of the Father; and ye shall know that ye are in the city of God, and ye are the city."

You see that is absolutely in accordance with the Evangelical teaching that the Kingdom of Heaven is within ourselves.

It is our innermost nature and not in the least what certain theologians want to make of it, something between ourselves.

To say that the Kingdom of Heaven is in between people-like cement-is degenerate theology.

No, it is the entire man, the completeness, the wholeness of an individual, and that is not identical with the ego; the ego is never the Self, it does not include the whole man.

We always suffer from the fact that we are not conscious enough, that we do not cover what is within us.

Why have we neuroses?

The ego consciousness is too narrow.

Whatever that strange non-ego consists of, it is quite certain that our ego consciousness is not sufficient to cover the whole.

So the symbol for the Self is an idea of a totality that is not identical with the ego.

It is a consciousness which is not exactly our consciousness, a light which is not exactly our light.

That agrees with what I said formerly: that these visions are psychological processes which have nothing to do with the conscious ego life.

They are manifestations of the psychological non-ego.

It is a widening out of the ego consciousness into the vision, one might say, of absolute consciousness, or non-individual consciousness, that consciousness which is beyond man.

This sounds terribly abstract or metaphysical, but it is by no means metaphysical.

It simply means the development of a wider and more abstract consciousness, which relates to the other narrower, more concrete consciousness in exactly the same way as algebrarelates to ordinary arithmetic, for instance, or abstract thinking to ordinary matter-of-fact thinking.

So a higher consciousness is a more abstract and impersonal consciousness.

And our patient's vision of the city beyond the giant is an intuition of that consciousness which is beyond the actual ego consciousness, a more complete, a more perfect, a more detached consciousness.

For in the white city, one is surely in a state which is fortified against the surrounding destruction.

The city has always conveyed the idea of a fortified place, surrounded by walls and towers and moats, where inside one is protected.

But I don't want to say any more at this point about the Self as a collective symbol; our text here does not justify us in going so far.

The vision continues: "I said to the giant again: 'I must pass you,' but he only laughed."

Evidently this vision of the white city is not enough to help her.

"While he laughed many dwarfs sprang up from the earth and tore my clothes from me and I was left naked."

Where do the dwarfs suddenly come from?-what do they mean? ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 444-445

Carl Jung: It had a soul which lay in the darkness and it was their task to seek it there

Lecture III 16th May, 1941

In the last lecture we began considering the evidence, which is to be found in the writings of the old masters, as to the attitude which the art demands from its adepts.

We will continue this subject today.

The next passage is from the "BOOK OF KRATES, a text which has come to us through the Arabs, but which, judging by its subject matter, certainly dates back to Alexandrian times.

There is a dialogue between an adept and an angel.

Such dialogues are by no means rare in the alchemistic literature, the philosophical content is often depicted in the form of conversations.

There is even a famous classic, the "Turba philosophorum", which is written in the form of a supposed meeting of all the old Greek philosophers to discuss the secrets of the art.

In our passage from the "Book of Krates" it is an angel who is interviewed by an "artifex" (an artist) , that is, by a philosopher who, we are told, was a "pneumatikos" (a spiritual man).

He says in the course of his conversation with this angel:

"He who belongs to the spiritual people is bent on having books and seeks them, and he will make it his duty to strive with mind, soul and body to propagate the ideas which they contain. When he discovers something clear and precise in them, he gives thanks to God. When he meets a point which is obscure, he strives with the help of his studies to get an exact conception of it, in order to reach the goal which he has set himself, and to act accordingly."

The angel, smiling, answers Krates:

"Your intentions are excellent, but your soul will never decide to hand out the truth to the people, on account of the diversity of opinions and the wretchedness of ambition."

We hear in this text that Krates, the "pneumatikos", has the idealistic intention of preaching the truths that he has realised, of spreading abroad his philosophy among the people.

But the angel smiles in his superiority at this idealism, as if it were too optimistic, and says that, though the intention is excellent, Krates will never decide to spread abroad the truth among the people.

And this for two reasons:

I. Because of the differences of opinion: if Krates should announce his truth, such a terrible quarrel would break out, that his small amount of enlightenment would be torn in shreds during the discussion, and trampled in the dust.

II. Because of the wretchedness of ambition: when someone has picked up a little of this truth, he is tempted to adorn himself with borrowed plumes, to assume an air of importance and thus to deceive himself.

For the truth these philosophers are seeking is intended to change the philosopher himself in some way ; so that in reality there is no tendency to spread abroad formulations of the truth, because the philosopher is aware that in doing so he would simply be handing the task of transformation to other people, instead of facing it himself.

This text is very profound.

When Krates had finished this conversation with the angel, the latter vanished and refused to return, and the text goes on to tell us how Krates behaved in these circumstances; in other words: what a philosopher must do in order to induce his angel to return to him:

" . . . In order to induce God to send the angel again, Krates persists in contemplation, fasting and prayer."

This is a purely religious exercise as you see. This relationship to an "angel", as you will hear again later, occurs fairly regularly in old alchemy.

The old masters often speak of a "spiritus familiaris", a familiar or helpful spirit, who stood by them in their work.

You find such spirits being invoked in Faust, that genuinely alchemistic work, the spirit of earth, for instance.

The familiar spirit is called the "paredros" in Greek, the one who stands by.

The spirits of the planets are most often invoked, particularly those that dominate the alchemist's horoscope.

It was Saturn, above all, that could make men skillful in practising the art.

In another treatise, called the BOOK OF OSTANES, which also comes to us through the Arabs though it is of antique origin, we read that:

"It is only possible to work on the stone with resignation, science and intelligence "

It is remarkable that all these Arab authors (Abul Qasim and such people, for instance) lay a great deal of emphasis on intelligence.

Knowledge and intelligence are by no means identical, as you know; there are many people who know a great deal, who labour under loads of information, without being at all intelligent.

The next quotation is from the "Liber de compositione alchemiae" which is said to be of Arabic origin. It is in Latin and may possibly come from the eighth century.

An old alchemist, called Morienus, appears in this treatise, both his actions and words are recorded.

We read in this book:

"He who does not possess the gift of patience should leave this work alone.”

This work is concerned with a peculiar transformation of the soul, a strange psychical process, and these words of Morienus agree exactly with the well-known words of St. Ambrose:

"In patientia vestra habetis animas vestras." (In your patience you possess your souls.)

The man who applies himself to this work, if he can only have sufficient patience, will gain possession of that which is uncontrolled in other people.

Another old master (whom it is impossible to date accurately, though we find traces of him as far back as the twelfth century), ALPHIDIUS, says:

"If thou art humble thy wisdom will become perfect; if not, the disposition will remain concealed in thine innermost."

This sentence shows us that the origin of the alchemistic work is not in the substances used in the opus, but in the soul of the worker.

Alphidius says in another passage:

"Know thou, that thou canst not have this science, unless thou consecratest thy mind (mens) to God; that is, if thou dost not destroy all corruption in thine heart."

Here again a most earnest moral and religious attitude is strongly emphasised.

In the same text, on the same page, we read:

"I have left all pleasures behind me, and have besought God to show me the pure water (aquam mundam)."

This pure water is the chief instrument of the art of alchemy.

It is the water of life which, as you will remember, is a term also applied to Christ.

In another treatise, the so-called "Epistle of Aristoteles", we read:

"May divine providence help thee to conceal thy purpose. One should have foresight and recognise the devilish illusions, and protect oneself against them from the beginning, for the devil is fond of meddling in the chemical procedure."

We have another reference here to a special devil who meddles in the alchemistic opus, a chemistry devil, apparently particularly connected with the work, and who finds great pleasure in disturbing the serious alchemists while they are working.

In other words: the alchemists must expect to come into conflict with their own unconscious during this work, the unconscious will attack them, and cause exceedingly disagreeable emotional disturbances and even illusory visions.

We come now to one of the most curious texts in old alchemy, the AURORA CONSURGENS, which I have often mentioned before.

It has of local interest for us, in that we have a unique and most beautiful manuscript copy of it in Zurich, the Codex Rhenoviensis, a fourteenth century manuscript which comes from the monastery of Rheinau.

Unfortunately it is not complete, four chapters are missing, as I told you last Semester.

There is a more complete though later text (also a manuscript) in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

This work is extremely interesting, in that it teaches us a great deal about the psychology of alchemy.

The first part is written in a dreamy, ecstatic style, whereby a great quantity of psychological material gushes out like lava.

It is, however, very difficult to understand, and the text is in rather bad condition.

The beginning is extraordinarily different from the end; the second part is very objectively written, and it is possible that the two parts are by different authors, for the first part is certainly a kind of ecstatic avowal.

One often does not know who is speaking, it is as if many voices mingled.

The first part must have been written by a cleric, the sentences consist of one Vulgate text after another, but it contains ideas which are extraordinarily interesting as to the inner psychology of the alchemistic work.

The text is called: "AURORA CONSURGENS" or "AUREA HORA" (the rising dawn or the golden hour).

We read there:

"If thou wouldst conquer, learn to endure."

The virtues are speaking and patience says this .

Later the apostle says:

"Be patient for the Lord draweth nigh."

This is a paraphrase of James V. 8:

"Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh."

This means in other word : the fulfilment of the goal of the alchemistic opus (the production of the mysterious substance) can evidently be expressed as if it were the "drawing nigh" of God himself.

This reminds us of the Mass where we also find a passage, before the consecration, in which the Advent of the Lord is announced.

As the author is a cleric, it is not unlikely that he smuggled in certain contents of the Mass.

For the Mass itself is an "opus" (the Benedictines themselves use this term), it is a work of transformation, and is therefore similar to the alchemistic procedure.

Undoubtedly the Mass did directly influence the later medieval texts, we can easily prove this; but it is doubtful. to say the least of it, in the case of the older texts, because the liturgy of the Eucharist was not yet in existence.

The alchemistic opus is older than the Mass, just as the eternal water of alchemy is older than Christian baptism.

The divine water is mentioned in texts (which are Pagan and had no connection with Christianity) in the first century A.D..

We can hardly say that it is the author who speaks in the first part of the text, it is rather a most mysterious being, which could be described by the Latin term "spiritus absconditus" (concealed spirit): the spirit of Mercury or Hermes.

Hermes is the old Psychopompos, a mystagogue (teacher of the initiants), and the Poimandres (shepherd of men).

These terms are of pagan origin, but there is also such a figure in an early Christian text: "The Shepherd of Hermas."

This mysterious "spiritus absconditus" was the spirit which had entered matter and was concealed there.

This idea is founded on Gen. I . 2, where the "Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters", and as it moved it went down into the materia, and has been concealed there ever since.

The Gnosis expresses it in the following way:

Nous (the Pneuma) was looking down on the surface of the primal sea and his attention was attracted by the sight of his own reflection.

As he bent down towards it, the loving arms of the Physis, the materia, embraced him and drew him down; he blended with her, and remains her prisoner until freed by a process of redemption.

It is he who is imprisoned in the depths of matter. The "spiritus absconditus" is not really in the materia, that is only a projection, he is of course in ourselves.

It is the unconscious, which appeared to earlier, more naive people in the materia, in objects.

This still happens to us today, not, however, in the form of beautiful and great images but rather in silly little things.

When two people have a quarrel, for instance, they say to each other the things they should say to themselves.

We see the mote in our brother's eye but not the beam in our own, and these projections can happen with impersonal as well as personal images.

The way in which the "spiritus absconditus" speaks through the author of the first part of the "Aurora consurgens", reminds one of the spirit of earth in Faust: this spirit speaks to Faust, who writes down what it says.

The author of our text continues later:

"Turn to me with your whole heart and do not spurn me because I am weak and black, for the sun has changed my colour (A) and the depths have hidden my countenance, (B) and the earth is corrupted and infected (C) in my operations, because darkness had been laid upon it. (D) Because I am held fast in the mire of the deep (E) and my substance is not revealed, therefore I cried out of the depths and from the abysses of the earth doth my voice speak unto you."

This passage consists entirely of texts from the Vulgate: (A) refers to the "Song of Solomon" I:5 & 6:14 "I am black, but comely, 0 ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me . . . "

It is the loved one, the bride, who speaks thus in the Song of Solomon.

This "spiritus absconditus" is often represented as feminine, and in a very peculiar form: above she is a beautiful virgin with a crown, and below a snake, the so-called Edem, a Gnostic idea, and really that same Physis who caught Nous in her loving arms.

(B) refers to Jonah II: 3-6:

"For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me . . . The waters compassed me about, even to the soul : the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me forever . . ."

This is a very beautiful description of this "spiritus absconditus", the spirit which is concealed in the depths of the water, and which has sunk down into the darkness of matter.

(C) refers to Psalm 106

" . . . The land was polluted with blood. "

and (D) to St. Luke XXIII: 44

" . . . and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour . "

There is evidence in the text of the "Aurora Consurgens" itself, that it is really these Vulgate texts which are quoted indirectly, so the connection is no arbitrary one.

The author often says: "Jesaias dicit" (Isaiah says) or "Apostolus dicit", so that one then knows for certain that it is these passages which are meant. It is interesting that during the Crucifixion the darkness coincides with the death of Christ, that is the moment when Christ went into the darkness.

(E) refers to Psalm 69:2: " sink in deep mire where there is no standing" and

(F) to the famous verse in Psalm 130: 1-2 : "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, 0 Lord. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications."

The language of this text shows clearly that the work on their art was an entirely religious experience for these old philosophers.

They even sometimes felt that the language of the Bible was the most suitable language in which to express themselves, because the subject matter was so similar.

The baffling thing is that, although this whole world of images has nothing whatever to do with natural science, the two always appear together in the alchemistic opus.

But it is just here that we can realise what matter meant to these people, they experienced it in a mystical way.

It had a soul which lay in the darkness and it was their task to seek it there.

They were conscious of the fact that they could rescue the darkened God from the materia, or at least this is what they attempted to do.

We come now to a French alchemist of the fourteenth century: DE RUPESCISSA, who had a similar attitude:

"It is our purpose, with the aid of this book, to comfort and strengthen the poor preachers of the gospel (les pauvres hommes evangelisans), in order that their supplications and prayers should not be in vain where this work is concerned."

The alchemists are referred to here as "les pauvres hommes evangelisans", the poor people who make known the message, who preach the gospel.

The author draws another direct parallel here, between alchemy and the Christian religion.

We will now take a small leap forward in time, and come to the famous sixteenth century alchemist, H. KHUNRATH.

As I told you before, in common with the majority of medieval alchemists, Khunrath was a doctor and a very learned man.

On the subject of attitude, he says:

"It is not our avaricious design, self-will, activity devoid of vocation, diligent reading of worldly wisdom, study and slovenly experimenting on which it solely depends, but it is far more God's calling, his will and his grace. This is the reason why so few of you attain the art. It is impossible to reach this art through books alone, or by obstinate labour, or even by both at once and together, however diligently one tries, and whatever one's ability and desire."

We see here that the study of books and the work on the opus (both warmly recommended by all the alchemists) do not of themselves lead to the goal of the art.

Khunrath continues:

"Shouldst thou discover in thyself (with a true philosophical renunciation of all transitory things which the world values) a p articular inclination, a rightful passionate longing, a fervent love, a strong desire and an inner urge towards the chemical art - but not in order to heap up gold and riches or to accumulate great treasures after the way of Mammon, but rather with the hope of realising the Magnalia of the great God, and of using its fruits theosophically - then, without doubt, thou art conditioned, disposed, called and sent by God. Now pray and work as advised, and thy labour will not be in vain."

Such a man is an "electus", a chosen one, who is able to bring this art to its conclusion.

“To sum up: In this case, without the special support and assistance of Ruach Hhochmah-El, the god of divine wisdom, or of other sub-delegated go od spirits or angels sent by God, our theorising and practising are in vain."

Here again we are told, that the goal of this art can only be reached when a direct intervention of the Deity takes place, that is, through the Grace of God; God sends a delegate, an angel, to complete the work, to produce the stone.

Psychologically this means that, to reach the goal, a phenomenon must take place, of which one can only s ay that it is a personification, or an autonomous appearance, of the unconscious spirit.

The "spiritus absconditus" must, so to speak, appear "in figura", as the "paredros".

This is very difficult for us to understand, but such an idea presented no difficulty to medieval man, for he was completely convinced that the psyche was of an autonomous nature.

We are very vague about the psyche, we have a dim idea that it is a sort of vapour arising from the warmth of the brain or a mere result of psychological functions.

The modern attitude towards the psyche always reminds me of an old text book, for the medical corps of the Swiss army, which said that the brain was like a dish of macaroni.

Presumably the psyche was the steam rising from the macaroni!

According to the spirit of that time, the psyche was an epiphenomenon of the physical.

We should really b e willing to confess that we are quite ignorant of the nature of the psyche; though unfortunately we do know that it can act in a very independent and unexpected way and produce phenomena which are impossible to explain rationally.

With all our modern means of disinfection we cannot rid ourselves of our fears, and is not the history of the world made by factors far beyond man's conscious intentions?

The s e factors are of a psychical nature, yet we go on thinking that the psyche is a vapour.

To call the psyche an epiphenomenon, or to identify it with human consciousness, is equally foolish.

Consciousness is also a psychical phenomenon, but it swims on the great unconscious, as it were, and we shall never know what the unconscious is, for it is the unconscious, the unknown, the "spiritus absconditus".

With what could we comprehend it?

Only with itself, because we can never get outside the psyche.

For it is the Ouroboros, it always eats its own tail, it is an inescapable vicious circle.

We are always entirely dependent on what our psyche makes of a thing, on what our brain says about it.

Take cold and warmth as an instance: If we come from a temperature of 20 degrees below zero and touch this table it will seem warm, almost hot, whereas it is a cool surface for other people.

Psychical existence is the phenomenon par excellence, we cannot conceive of any other kind of existence.

Beyond the twelve categories of Kant is the "noumenon", "das Ding an sich" (thing in itself), the union of the opposites, the Deity.

How can we be sure, then, that anything is what it seems to us, for we are always dependent on a psychical image.

Everything that we touch is psychical; we make wonderful scientific instruments to discover the real nature of things, but in the e!!.d absolute objectivity is always defeated by the fact that everything is psychical.

Old Khunrath was aware of this fact in his own way.

He continues:

"Beloved, hearken to what the philosophers themselves said about their books.

Hortulanus says:

"Hortulanus was also an old master of the art.

" 'Oho dear reader, if thou knowest how to prepare our stone, then I have told thee the truth, but if thou art not capable of doing this, then I have told thee nothing.' Geber, Morienus, Lilium and others say the same, that only he who knows how to prepare the stone can rightly and truly understand the sayings of the philosophers."

So no one understands this art who does not know it already.

"It is therefore most necessary to entreat God, the Lord of Hosts, for the spirit of his wisdom, that he may dispel our darkness and enlighten us with the light of his knowledge and truth, that he may embrace us, overshadow us and fill us with his great goodness, that he may open to us the writings and other monumenta of the philosophers, interpret and expound them, and lead us to understand the light of nature; thus all is well: If thou hast made him"

The spirit of God's wisdom = the Holy Ghost.

"thy praeceptor familiaris"

The familiar spiritual teacher.

"then all obscure words and hidden things are clear and open to thee. For God from Heaven can reveal all hidden things. Of a truth this is so."

We see here that for Khunrath the culmination of wisdom is to realise that we know nothing out of ourselves, it must be revealed to us through a kind of miracle.

These old philosophers expected, through their preoccupation with the science, their meditation and contemplation, that they would entice the grace of God to come to them and bring them revelations.

Such an idea (as is often the case with superstition) was not at all stupid.

There is something in such ideas.

We know from experience, that when we are seriously striving to achieve something, all kinds of hunches come to us about it, and a hunch is a small revelation.

The right hunch in the right moment can even save one's life, and naturally a scientist or student can also get the right hunch at the moment when he is most perplexed.

In German the word for hunch is "Einfall" (dropping in), and we must notice the meaning of the words we use.

These "Einfiille", or hunches, are phenomena of a spontaneous nature, which we cannot control.

They rise of themselves from the depths of the unconscious, and, under certain conditions, bring us solutions or elucidations which are superior to our everyday consciousness.

And if someone tells us that he was enlightened at the critical moment, it is psychologically right, far more right than if he tells us, that at the critical moment he made the right hunch.

The latter is a definite lie, whereas the former is the truth.

When we say: "Thank God it just occurred to me in time", we don't think what we are saying, but psychologically we are right. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 153-160

Carl Jung: The union of the male and female in this figure, then, simply means beyond sex;

it is neither male nor female, it is something incomprehensible.

That is, the natural mind is no longer subject to a sexual point of view; it is neither a woman's nor a man's point of view, it is the point of view just beyond, and that accounts for its divinity.

Anything that is beyond the human is animal and divine, and neither animal nor divine: therefore the animal symbols for the divine, the Holy Ghost as a dove, for instance; all the antique gods have their animal counterparts.

So that natural mind is not a function of man; it is a part of nature, the mind of trees or rocks or water or the clouds or the winds, and so ruthless, so absolutely beyond man that it hardly takes him into account.

One always finds that the utterances of the natural mind have this quality of an almost animal ruthlessness, along with a strange kind of superiority which reaches far beyond man.

It contains a most fundamental truth which makes it superior, and because of that superiority it is also divine.

The natural mind is very apparent in prophetic women.

Tacitus says ofthe old Germanic women that they were reverenced for their wisdom and their gift of prophecy.

They were probably women who had the gift of realizing the natural mind.

About twenty years ago in the course of an excavation in Upper Egypt-I think it was in Aswan-an inscription was discovered which gave the list of the members of the household of a high Roman officer.

All the different offices were mentioned, and among the members of the staff was a slave whose name was unusual in that country, Walburga Sibylla.

Walburga is a typical German name, and the Sibylla was the prophetic woman of a household.

So she was probably a German woman who had been sold to a powerful man in Egypt for the guidance of his life, a woman analyst for his personal use.

It is tremendously interesting and the only case I ever heard of.

It seems that the Sibylla was a sort of profession, and this Walburga no doubt provided the household with her prophetic opinions and was consulted in all difficult situations. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 525.

Carl Jung: It is the kingdom of things that are not.

Mrs. Crowley: The two symbols together would perhaps suggest the Yin and the Yang.

Dr. Jung: That is true.

The bowl would be the female and the staff the male form, which means a union of opposites; the male and female are together in this poimen.

It also means neither male nor female.

That is expressed in the so-called Gospel according to the Egyptians, in the conversation of Jesus with Salome.

Salome asked Jesus when the prophecies would be fulfilled, and Jesus said: "When ye shall tread upon the vesture of shame, and when the two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor female. "

That is, when a thing is yea and nay, then it is neither yea nor nay, it is both and therefore beyond.

The unrecognizable and incomprehensible thing can only be expressed by a paradox; when we cannot understand a thing in its essence, when we cannot grasp it by our means of reasoning, we describe it in such a form.

For instance, the Buddhistic concept of nirvana is positive non-being, or being, non-being.

It is the kingdom of things that are not.

The beginning of the world, the creative point, the origin, is also described by a paradox: a completely empty fullness, or completely full emptiness.

And Jakob Boehme, that famous mystic and philosopher of the sixteenth century, said that the basis of the world is the nil, the Nichts, the non-being, and that it cannot be otherwise because the beginning is desire, longing, and only an absolute vacuum can have longing.

A vacuum, non-being, can by longing draw or attract into itself, while anything that is full already possesses and can desire no longer.

So this desire, and Schopenhauer's primordial will, is something exceedingly positive because it creates the world; and yet it is nothing, for only where there is nothing can something come to pass. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 524-525

Carl Jung: My exterior is in strange contrast to my spirit.

Dear Mrs. N., 4 January 1929

There is some likeness in the upper storey but the ensemble is not satisfactory.

Have you got some of the many snapshots Mrs. X. got of me through her niece?

They might be helpful.

My exterior is in strange contrast to my spirit.

When I am dead, nobody will think that this is the corpse of one with spiritual aspirations.

I am the clash of opposites.

That makes it so frightfully difficult to get me right.

Should my portrait be the reconciling symbol of your own contradictions?

The very best wishes for a happy New Year,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 59

Carl Jung: It is as if our consciousness were a continent, an island or even a ship on the great sea of the unconscious.

It was the anticipatory quality in dreams that was first valued by antiquity and they played an important role in the ritual of many religions.

It is impossible to put the conscious before the unconscious, for the latter exists before and after consciousness.

In childhood we are still contained in it and our consciousness slowly emerges from it as islands which gradually join together and form a continent.

It is as if our consciousness were a continent, an island or even a ship on the great sea of the unconscious.

The subject of the unconscious has been occupying philosophers for some time back and there are thousands of examples on every side which show how consciousness is fed from the unconscious; we are only able to speak if ideas flow to us from the unconscious part of the psyche, which is the mother of consciousness.

So we cannot judge dreams from the conscious point of view, but can only think of them as complementary to consciousness.

Dreams answer the questions of our conscious.

It is a primeval belief that questions can be put to the Gods and answered by dreams.

We are not far from the truth, in fact we are very near to primeval truth, when we think of ourdreams as answers to questions, which we have asked and which we have notasked. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, 23 November 1934

[Image courtesy of Craig Nelson]

Carl Jung: The inferior is your master, and you must adapt yourself to it.

Dr. Jung spoke of the inferior function being united to the collective: it is just a bit of nature and, as such, must first be accepted and adapted to .... The superior function is in your hands, and you can put it to your uses.

The inferior is your master, and you must adapt yourself to it.

Yet it is nature; there is life there.

The thing that wants to be born must first be found.

The form it is to grow into shall later be the object of search, and the search may be a long one .... ~Esther Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 8

Dr. Jung's dream of Hitler in 1939

Kusnacht, 8 June C G. came in, the old C. G., smiling, welcoming, with both arms outstretched.

He looked at us and said to Eleanor [Bertine] , "You have not changed."

And to me, "But you have changed." I said, "There has been a world cataclysm since I last saw you."

He himself is very little changed.

Older, yes, face a little thinner, with harder lines and planes, throwing the width and height of the head into greater prominence.

Hair a little thinner, softly wispy around his head.

He spoke of it, calling it his "feathers."

"Yes, my head is growing feathers. But the barber won't cut it."

I said, "Is it the same barber whom Zosimos tells of?"

But he evidently did not hear all I said, for he replied, "No, it is not the same one. We have one who lives just across the road."

We spoke of how glad we had been to get his letters from time to time, which had kept us in touch.

He said it had been very strange during the war in Switzerland, that little island of peace, how, in spite of the constant threat of invasion, he had not been really uneasy (putting his hand on his abdomen),
that he had always had a sense they would be left uninterferred with.

He told of their great anxiety in 1939 over the Hitler-Stalin pact, which made it look as if they would be swallowed up without doubt.

He said he had had a dream at that time:

He found himself in a castle, all the walls and buildings of which were made of trinitrotoluene (dynamite).

Hitler came in and was treated as divine.

Hitler stood on a mound as for a review.

C. G. was placed on a corresponding mound.

Then the parade ground began to fill with buffalo or yak steers, which crowded
into the enclosed space from one end.

The herd was filled with nervous tension and moved about restlessly.

Then he saw that one cow was alone, apparently sick.

Hitler was concerned about this cow and asked C. G. what he thought of it.

C. G. said, "It is obviously very sick."

At this point, Cossacks rode in at the back and began to drive the herd off He awoke and felt, "It is all right."

He emphasized that Hitler was treated as divine.

Consequently, he felt, we had to view him like that, that Hitler is not to be taken primarily as a human man, but as an instrument of 'divine' forces, as Judas, or, still better, as the Antichrist must be.

That the castle was built of trinitrotoluene meant that it would blow up and be destroyed because of its own explosive quality.

The herds of cattle are the instincts, the primitive, pre-human forces let loose in the German unconscious.

They are not even domestic cattle, but buffalo or yaks, very primitive indeed.

They are all male, as is the Nazi ideology: all the values of relationship, of the person or individual, are completely repressed; the feminine element is sick unto death, and so we get the sick cow.

Hitler turns to C. G. for advice, but he limits his comment to the diagnosis,

"The cow is very sick.

At this, as though the recognition of the ailment released something the Cossacks burst in.

Even before that, the herd had been disturbed and nervous as indeed the male animal is if separated too long or too completely from its complement, the female.

The Cossacks are, of course, Russians.

C. G. said he deduced from that that Russia-more barbaric than Germany, but also more directly primitive, and therefore of sounder instinct-would break in andcause the overthrow of Germany. ~Esther Harding, Conversations with Jung, Pages 12-13

Carl Jung: If we are conscious, morality no longer exists.

[Carl Jung on the “Single Animus Figure.]

I began the hour by telling Jung how something wonderful had happened to me yesterday, that his talk on the animus relationship had cleared things up, so that much had clicked into place, and that now I felt quite different.

I said that yesterday we were dealing with the negative relationship to the animus, but there must also be a positive relationship.

He replied that there certainly must-but that the important part of analysis was to get that negative point cleared, for that is the growing point of differentiation from the unconscious.

Until that is clear, the voice of the animus is as the voice of God within us; in any case, we respond to it as if it were.

When we are not aware of the negative aspect of the animus, we are still animal, still connected to nature, thereforeunconscious and less than human.

We need to reach a higher degree of consciousness, which must be sought at that point.

Then we discover a new country.

And it is our responsibility to cultivate it. ("To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.")

Also the legend of Christ and the man working on the Sabbath, to whom he said, "If thou knowest what thou doest, blessed
art thou! But if thou knowest not what thou doest, cursed art thou!"

If we are conscious, morality no longer exists.

If we are not conscious, we are still slaves and are accursed if we obey not the law.

He said that if we belong to the secret church, then we belong, and we need not worry about it, but can go our own
way.

If we do not belong, no amount of teaching or organization can bring us there.

Then I asked him about a single animus figure, and he said, "Many souls are young; they are promiscuous; they are prostitutes in the unconscious and sell themselves cheaply.

They are like flowers that bloom and die and come again.

Other souls are older, like trees or palms.

They find, or must seek, one complete animus, who shall perhaps be many in one.

And when they find him, it is like the closing of an electric circuit.

Then they know the meaning of life."

"But to have an animus like an archimandrite (M.E.H. had dreamt of an abbot, an archimandrite] , is as if to say,

You are a priest of the Mysteries.

And this needs a great humility to counterbalance it.

You need to go down to the level of the mice.

And as a tree, so great as the height of its branches, so deep must be the depths of its roots.

And the meaning of the tree is neither in the roots, nor in the uplifted crown, but in the life in between them."

Then I asked him how to get the mean between the two worlds, between the world of the unconscious and that of reality.

He replied, "You are the mediator.

It is in your immediate life that they meet.

In the pleroma they are merged -in nature they are one-and the primitive is always striving up against its oneness.

The glacier is always there.

Our civilization finds an adaptation that will satisfy these things for a while, and they are quiet.

Then they begin to come up again, and again we find a new adaptation, and they are quiet once more.

Today we are in a period of great transition, and they come up again.

Eventually they will swallow man, but it will not be the same again, for he has attained the union of the opposites through their separation.

Possibly, after man will come a period of the animal and then again the plant-who knows?-and who or what will carry on the lamp of consciousness?

Who knows? ~Esther Harding, Conversations with Jung, Pages 9-10

Dr. Jung Dreams of H.G. Baynes and Winston Churchill

He twice dreamed of Baynes after his death, each time in connection with Churchill, and each time when Churchill was actually in Switzerland, though C. G. did not know this at the time.

For instance, he dreamed that he was sitting at a dinner table with Churchill or Roosevelt when a group of English officers, among whom was Baynes, in civilian clothes, came in.

At this time Churchill had landed near Zurich for his plane to refuel on his way to Africa.

A second dream was similar to the first, except that Roosevelt was not there.

This time, Churchill was spending one night in Geneva on his way to Yalta.

He told us a lot about this visit and his contact with Churchill. ~Esther Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 13

Carl Jung: It seemed to me that my spookery struck you as altogether too stupid...

To Sigmund Freud

Dear Professor Freud, Burgholzli-Zurich, 2 April 1909

Worry and patients and all the other chores of daily life have beset me again and quite got me down for the first 2 days.

Now I am slowly coming to the surface and beginning to bask in the memory of the days in Vienna.

I hope you will have received my offprints in good time for Wednesday evening.

12.IV. After a 10-day interruption I have at last succeeded in continuing my letter.

From this interlude it appears that the above complaint was premature, because, as usual, worse was to follow.

Today I have put the last bad day behind me.

All during the Easter holidays, when other people were out walking, I was able to snatch only one day's breath of air.

On 15.IV I shall wrench myself free without fail and start my bicycle tour.

Since Vienna all scientific work has been out of the question.

But in my practice I have accomplished much.

At the moment a madly interesting case is stretching me on the rack.

Some of the symptoms come suspiciously close to the organic borderline (brain tumour?), yet they all hover over a dimly divined psychogenic depth, so that in analysing them all one's misgivings are forgotten.

First-rate spiritualistic phenomena occur in this case, though so far only once in my presence.

Altogether it makes a very peculiar impression. The patient is a man-slaying Sara, Raguel's daughter.

The case I told you about-evil eye, paranoiac impression-was cleared up as follows.

She was abandoned by her last lover, who is altogether pathological (Dem. praec.?); abandoned also by an earlier lover-this one even spent a year in an asylum.

Now the infantile pattern: hardly knew her father and mother, loving instead her brother, 8 years older than she and at 22 a catatonic.

Thus the psychological stereotype holds good.

You said the patient was merely imitating Dem. praec.; now the model has been found.

When I left Vienna I was afflicted with some sentiments d'incompletude on account of the last evening I spent with you.

It seemed to me that my spookery struck you as altogether too stupid and perhaps unpleasant because of the Fliess analogy. (Insanity!)

Just recently, however, the impression I had of the last-named patient smote me with renewed force.

What I told my wife about it made the deepest impression on her too.

I had the feeling that under it all there must be some quite special complex, a universal one having to do with the prospective tendencies in man.

If there is a "psychanalysis" there just also be a "psychosynthesis" which creates future events according to the same laws.

(I see I am writing rather as if I had a flight of ideas.)

The leap towards psychosynthesis proceeds via the person of my patient, whose unconscious is right now preparing, apparently with nothing to stop it, a new stereotype into which everything from outside, as it were, fits in conformity with the complex.

(Hence the idea of the objective effect of the prospective tendency!)

That last evening with you has, most happily, freed me inwardly from the oppressive sense of your paternal authority.

My unconscious celebrated this impression,with a great dream which preoccupied me for some days and which I have just finished analyzing.

I hope I am now rid of all unnecessary encumbrances.

Your cause must and will prosper, so my pregnancy fantasies tell me, which luckily you caught in the end.

As soon as I get back from Italy I shall begin some positive work, first of all for the Jahrbuch.

I hope you had a good Easter holiclay and feel the better for it.

N. Ossipow, head physician of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Moscow, has published a fine report on our affairs.

They seem to be working along our lines.

I have heard that Abraham with some others has issued a "psychanalytical questionnaire."

Let's hope it's a canard!

Cordial greetings,

Gratefully, JUNG ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 8-10

Carl Jung: Speaking of the foolishness of the wise...

Speaking of the foolishness of the wise, he said one must always recognize it but one does not know what a dream means, especially one's own dream.

For the unconscious always finds the chink in the wall of one's own theory or built-up system.

The unconscious wants to come through into consciousness, and when we build up a systematic body of knowledge we necessarily keep the unconscious out.

Nature is just what we do not know.

So, he said, in speaking of such things it is much better to use a symbolic way of speech, for that says much more-even what you do not know yourself.

If you limit yourself to known facts, what you say may be true of the thousand other cases, but just not of this one.

The truth escapes [people who] are always trying to systematize, and they have to use power to try to convince.

One must allow one's own foolishness, for Nature is naive; there is always the joke, the just-so.

[The user of] fat words cannot put it into simple language.

He is impressed with the powerful idea and tries to impress others with it.

If he were really impressed with its reality, he would stammer and get great feelings of inferiority before it.

Every true experience of the numinosum has this effect.

But such a man is afraid to show his littleness in face of the great idea.

He gets inflated and struts.

He would be shown to be really wise if he could admit that he could say nothing in the face of the great experience. (A man who is truly in love can
only stammer, "I love you.")

And yet, he said one must make a theory or system, especially for teaching purposes, only one must not take it as representing the facts.

As an illustration of the use and limitations of a formulated system, he said, it is as though you find an uninhabited island.

You must begin at once to orient yourself.

There is a mountain over there, a group of trees here, and the coastline along there.

The mountain is perhaps ten miles away, but it may be fifteen, then your calculations will be put out.

Also you do not know how high it is, so you cannot triangulate from it.

Or there may be a river between you and it that you cannot cross.

Yet you must say, "Here is a map of the island I discovered, but, for goodness sake, don't believe it!"

And you must say the same to students when you teach them the theory of analysis. ~E. Harding, Conversations with Jung, Page 15.

Carl Jung: "All that is outside, also is inside," we could say with Goethe.

"All that is outside, also is inside," we could say with Goethe.

But this "inside," which modern rationalism is so eager to derive from "outside," has an a priori structure of its own that antedates all conscious experience.

It is quite impossible to conceive how "experience" in the widest sense, or, for that matter, anything psychic, could originate exclusively in the outside world.

The psyche is part of the inmost mystery of life, and it has its own peculiar structure and form like every other organism.

Whether this psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever "originated" at all is a metaphysical question and therefore unanswerable.

The structure is something given, the precondition that is found to be present in every case.

And this is the mother, the matrix—the form into which all experience is poured. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Pages 101-102

Carl Jung's Visions Seminar Lecture I 15 October 1930

LECTURE I 15 October 1930

Dr. Jung:

Ladies and Gentlemen: My plan was to go on with the series of dreams that we have been dealing with these last two years.

But I have just given a course of German lectures about unconscious pictures, and as a consequence I have been asked to repeat that course here.

So I had to make up my mind to interrupt the Dream series and to give the same lectures in English which I have just given in German.

Now, naturally, I have been asked by only a few persons, and since we are living in a democratic country, I should much prefer to have you vote on this plan.

I must explain to you that the lectures are about the development, one might say, of the transcendent function out of dreams and visions, and the actual representations of those images which ultimately serve in the synthesis of the individual: the reconciliation of the pairs of opposites and the whole process of symbol formation.

(The Class voted for the pictures.)

I have not always applied that "picture method," as it is now sometimes called.

People always try to make a method of everything that seems to work, but I much prefer to treat the subject not as a method, but as a series of events which we observe, without drawing too many
and too far-reaching conclusions from it.

We don't know enough about it to call it a method, a word which in natural science means an absolutely certain way which must yield certain results.

It is not that. It is a point of view, a sort of hypothesis, and I don't even want to give the impression that it is a usual procedure.

As I said, I prefer to deal with that subject as just a case which we observe and on which we pronounce no opinion or judgment, whether the thing is advisable or not advisable.

It is certainly not a method in the sense of being a necessary procedure, that one ought to draw pictures.

People take it up because it is a natural expression, as when one's words do not suffice to explain a point under discussion, one makes a drawing or a diagram to explain it.

For there are certain happenings in the development of the human psyche where things become particularly confused and dark, and people become incoherent and cannot express themselves.

Situations come up in dreams which seemed to be very clear, but as soon as you are back in the conscious state, everything is blurred and you find it exceedingly difficult to describe what you actually experienced; you have no words to explain those intricate situations.

There are many thoughts which cannot be thought clearly; and there are many inner experiences which are apparent only to the inner eye or heart-whatever you like to call that organ.

It seems perfectly simple there, but human language is inadequate, and then people take to drawing.

Also, certain experiences in dreams or visions are so expressive, so full of color and plastic life, that they recommend themselves to the dreamer, and he naturally yields to the temptation to reproduce what he has seen.

So there are all sorts of reasons why people take to it.

Of course, when I see that the quality of my patients' experiences suggests representation, I encourage them, because I have learned through long experience-about fourteen years when to encourage the people

to whom it is useful. It helps them to concretize inner events.

For most people are suffering from the prejudice that they are not real because they cannot be handled, or even talked about in a logical way.

In such a case the drawing is invaluable.

It concretizes; it makes a statement so that other people can see it.

It is there in reality as if painted on the wall; they begin to think that it does exist.

You see, we are still so foolish in our psychology that quite intellectual people are unable to admit the reality of psychical facts.

I see that in practical analysis all the time.

For instance, a person speaks reverently about a venerable old man though he has a grudge against him and thinks he is a damned fool.

But he denies the thought, he insists that he would never say such a thing.

Then I ask: "But who has said it?"

We have not enough objectivity to admit that we have had a certain thought, that it has been present.

I am not speaking of idiots and liars, but of perfectly reasonable everyday people with good and logical minds.

I have to train people with logical minds.

I remember a professor of psychiatry who had a dream in which he showed tremendous emotion about a certain man-he was beating him up-and when he told it to me, I remarked th~t it was obvious from his dream that he had some personal emotion or resentment about Mr. So-and-So. "Oh no, I have not, I never had such a feeling."

Then I said: "Now tell me, have !had that dream?" But he could not acknowledge the fact that such a thought had been present.

It is as if a very strange bird should turn up in this room-a flamingo, for instance-and then fly out of the window again.

One might say that it was impossible that such a bird had been here; it was a hallucination.

But as a scientist I would say it was a fact that a certain vision had taken place, and there was no getting away from it.

People deny their thoughts and visions till they become so flimsy that they simply evaporate into thin air and it seems as if they had never existed.

Again and again, patients have had quite definite experiences, but they could not hold therri because they were inner experiences; they exposed them to conscious criticism, which poured in and lacerated those facts till after a while nothing was left.

I remember a case of compulsion neurosis, a man who ought to have taken up his studies again at the University.

We had made the agreement, after long and tedious work, that he would do so if the analysis showed that it was necessary.

The moment came when I said: "This is what you are to do, provided you can make up your mind." And he acknowledged it, he said it was perfectly logical.

Next day he came and announced that he had had an interesting dream that night.

I was about to ask if he had registered his name at the University when he told me the dream, which showed me that he had made a re-gression.

I said to him: "Tell me, are you not receding from something into the past?”

"Not at all," he said, "I feel perfectly all right." I said: "But what about our plan-we agreed to yesterday?" "What plan? I can't remember." It was all gone-entirely gone!

So I said: "Oh, if it goes as easily as that, then you go as easily as that-there is the door!" That case was finished.

No use continuing an analysis under such conditions.

What happened there was simply that he had submitted that psychological fact to the disintegrating process.

He allowed it to go on till no trace was left. And that happens all the time with inner experiences; they are disintegrated by actual facts and criticism.

But when such an experience is put into drawing and color, it is as if it had taken form.

It works like magic sometimes, as if it had been born into reality; people cannot deny it, having seen it externally.

For instance, if you tell a man that you have discovered a goldmine, he doesn't quite believe it; there is doubt in the background of his mind, and after a fortnight he thinks it was a funny illusion.

But if you pull out a handful of gold dust or nuggets of gold, that makes an impression on him, that convinces him.

We are as primitive as that. So in order to hold an inner experience, it is almost a necessity for certain people to see it expressed in external physical form.

That is such an important point that one really might be tempted to call it a method, but I do not feel quite safe because these things are very delicate and complicated.

You will see from the way I handle this case that I take it as facts which we observe.

And in order to see how such a procedure develops, I am giving you first a series of dreams in which the events that ultimately led to pictures are demonstrated.

Our patient is a woman of about thirty years of age.

She is highly educated, very intelligent, a typical intellectual, with an almost mathematical mind.

She is a natural scientist by education and exceedingly rational.

She has a great deal of intuition, which really ought to function but is repressed because it yields irrational results, and that is very disagreeable to the rational mind.

Such a case, a mental attitude of such a character, is likely to come up against a situation early in life where that attitude becomes useless.

If fate is benevolent, one soon gets into a tight hole. If fate is not benevolent, it allows one to live a long time with such an attitude, and so one loses a lot of opportunities in life.

This woman got into a hole at about thirty.

That is pretty decent; obviously her fate is benevolent, it has given her a chance at thirty.

Other people only have their chance at forty-five or fifty.

I have seen people even at sixty who finally discovered that they had seen only half of the world, that they had lived only half of their life, which is of course a very sad discovery at that age.

People with such a one-sided development of their thinking function have on the other side an inferior feeling function, because feeling is opposite to thinking.

The feeling is then archaic and has all the advantages and disadvantages of an archaic function.

The inferior function is generally characterized by traits of primitive psychology-above all by participation mystique-that is, it makes one peculiarly identical with other people or with other situations.

Our patient had the feelings that circumstances gave her.

She could think hypothetically, but she could not feel hypothetically.

As a matter of fact, her intelligence was so highly developed that she thought things that the people in her environment did not think; she even made it her ideal to be unlike other people.

And because her thinking was so differentiated and so different from other people's, it put her into a strange position with everybody.

There was no approach, no bridge to her.

She was secluded, a tour d 'ivoire, and she naturally suffered from that ice-cold isolation.

Now, her inferior feeling is in the foundations of that tour d 'ivoire and has secret passages, underground ways where it can escape, and because it is blind like a mole one does not know where it will turn up.

But you can be sure it establishes connections somewhere.

If you are absolutely isolated, like a lighthouse in the sea, so that nobody can approach, if you are perfect in your perfectly differentiated function, then underneath something escapes in the night.

It digs underground passages and bores into other people, perhaps.

This woman is rational, married, propagating the species, everything is quite all right, yet she is completely isolated.

Of course many people who are married are not particularly connected, and others who are not married are able to connect very well.

People often marry because it is an institution, it is the rational thing to do, but there is no real union.

So it is quite inevitable, when not living in relatedness, that feeling simply cannot climb to the heights of the head; it is overwhelmed by the intellect apparently and disappears, but reappears
projected upon a man who, of course, is not the husband.

That is a woman's case, and there are similar cases with men.

The lack of relatedness is then compensated by a sudden magic relationship, a fascination, a participation mystique.

Therefore it is usually love at first sight and the most compulsory form of love.

It is natural that our patient suffered from such a problem, which means the ultimate conflict between her rational thinking and primitive nature.

I omit personal details intentionally, because they matter so little to me.

We are all spellbound by external circumstances, and they make our minds deviate from the real thing, which is that we ourselves are split inside.

Appearance blinds us and we cannot see the real problem.

Quite naturally, being in such a red-hot conflict, this young woman did not know what to do.

She tried all the usual things, squashing it, insisting that it did not exist, trying to put the whole thing out of reality, and it did not work.

Naturally it would not work.

It became a moral conflict, conjuring the Ten Commandments and God knows what, but nothing would work, not even the wrath of God, because it was a superior fact which really was not a destructive element.

It was the very best thing that could happen to her, the kindness of nature that wanted to make a whole of her and not half an egg.

When she had made every attempt to squash what she understood to be the most amazing nonsense, she finally gave up and collapsed.

Then she heard of my existence and thought I might be a fellow who knew some magic word, so she came to me, very much in the attitude of the primitive woman who goes to the medicine man and says: "Here is a hen and a beautiful black pig as an offering, and now kindly perform your miracles upon me."

I had no trouble in showing her that such an attitude was a mistake. She was soon on the right track.

She understood that it was entirely up to her, and there was no question of a miracle.

I said: "I don't know what to do, I have not the slightest idea how to solve such a problem, I am an ordinary human being, and if ordinary human beings knew what to do, they would not have laws."

The law makes the statement that it is wise to keep within a certain row of poles-laws always make the impression upon me of a row of telegraph poles set out in the desert.

You can travel where you like, but you may go astray.

If you are not a perfect fool you will follow that line, a simple way marked out in chaos.

I can only say that millions and millions of human beings have most certainly gone through the same situation.

It is a typical situation-you know these love situations are most banal, and in every generation the conscious answers differ.

You would be terribly shocked at the way Luther solved the problem. "If your wife is no good," he said, "take your servant."

We have entirely different views now, but that was a holy man.

His friend Bugenhagens had three wives, all perfectly legitimate, and Luther himself had two; they still show his bedroom with the three beds.

That is what people in those days did. And there are old civilizations now where they have no trouble at all in knowing what to do in such a case.

Sure enough, that situation has repeated itself innumerable times, and man's mind or consciousness or psyche is a system of methods of adaptation, ways of dealing with the facts of life.

For instance, we have eyes because there is sun; our eyes and ears are systems of adaptation, and our psyche is exactly the same, adapted not only to exterior conditions but also to conflicts within.

Mythological motifs contain many typically human situations-such as the fairy-tale motif where a man is trapped somewhere or caught by dwarfs and put into a place where he cannot escape; then in the night a little mouse comes and tells him if he does so-and-so, he can get out.

This is the motif of the helpful animal intervening when all is lost and only catastrophe lies ahead; it is help out of a tight corner.

Now these animals in fairy tales are merely representatives of lower instinctive forces in man.

One might observe the flight of birds, for instance, in order to be shown where there is water.

Or a man might leave it to his horse to smell the water.

Or if there are no helpful animals around, he might take to magic-make a sand-drawing, or try a magic rod over the ground-and his unconscious will tell him where the water is.

Now these are facts, and I say, if the unconscious can help in such cases, why not in this woman's situation?

I am pretty sure that the unconscious contains a solution, so I propose to my patient to watch its activity as given through dreams.

For we do not make the dreams, they simply come up from the unconscious; we don't know whether they are true or not, and it is a matter of our experience to find out whether they are merely nonsense.

She agreed to this idea and so we started in with her analysis.

At first, as is usually the case, the dreams contained more personal stuff, all sorts of little resistances and wrong attitudes; but when all that was settled, they began to touch the fundamental things and to
prepare very carefully an attitude favorable for the production of the symbols which would bring about the solution of the problem.

We begin now with the dreams which occurred when the first part of the analysis, all the personal part, was practically over.

I was trying to play some music and all the different members of my family were interfering.

I was on a terrace looking out over the sea, when a rich Jew at the next table began to play also.

The music that he played was so beautiful that I stopped playing for a minute myself to listen to him.

This is a very simple dream. Do you know what the music means?

Mrs. Baynes: Feeling.

Dr. Jung: Yes, since she is very intellectual it is most probable that we would encounter most of her feeling in the unconscious.

The dream brings up that problem. She is playing with her feelings, compensating her chiefly intellectual attitude during the day.

Even in analysis she takes the whole thing chiefly from an intellectual viewpoint and uses her feelings very little, because they are not manageable, not disposable in reality.

Therefore she uses them in the dream.

For example, old Socrates was a very rational man, and he had a sort of humorous daemon that whispered very wise advice to him.

On one occasion he was walking through the streets of Athens in deep conversation with a friend, rationalizing the world as usual, when suddenly the daemon made him go into a side street; and no sooner was he there than a large herd of pigs came down the street he had left, trampling down every passerby (a nice light on the Athens of antiquity-herds of pigs on the main streets!) as he would have been trampled down had he not followed his daemon's advice.

Then on another occasion, probably after a strenuous night of rational talking, the daemon said: "Thou shouldst make more music, Socrates.

He couldn't get it, but after a great deal of thought he finally bought a flute!

I am not denying his justification in doing this, though to us it is funny.

Music in those days meant the Dionysian element, which was very much a feeling affair, quite the reverse of the usual rational attitude of Socrates.

So my patient was admonished to play music, but what is hidden in the unconscious does not exist in the conscious-or not sufficientlyand she observes that while she is trying to play, the members of her
family continually interfere.

Mrs. Wickes: The conventional family is interfering in the love life.

Dr. Jung: When she tries to play her feelings-use her own feelings-it suddenly becomes evident that the entire family is against it. "Such a terrible thing must not happen in our family!"

Yet despite this holy family, she insists upon playing. Then a rich Jew nearby plays very much better than she and therefore she gives up.

But how can these feelings develop if she cannot use them?

She must pathetically admit that she has to exercise them just to keep them alive, and naturally her family and everybody in her surroundings will be dead against it and advise her not to have any feelings.

But then something rather subtle happens: the opposition of the family does not kill her, but the fact that somebody plays better than she kills her.

Now just what the rich Jew means is a bit cryptic.

Do not forget that this woman is a Protestant of Puritan extraction.

We must go a little more deeply into the psychology of the Protestant religion.

Mrs. Norris: The Jew stands for authority.

Dr. Jung: Of course, anyone who plays better than she would have a certain authority. He might be a great artist.

Miss Sergeant: He stands for beauty and love of art.

Dr. Jung: Well, there is a far more immediate connection.

His religion is not the religion of the New Testament; he has never heard of St. Paul.

And in the unconscious of the Protestant one finds a Jew; the worldly success of the Protestant comes from the fact that he is a Jew inside.

For instance, my great-grandfather on my mother's side was a very pious Protestant, and he believed that the language spoken in Heaven was Hebrew.

Therefore he became a professor of the Hebrew language; he wanted to make ready, in order to be a sort of guardian angel who understood the language of that company.

On the other side he was a Jew.

That is the reason why children in those days were given Jewish names; it had nothing whatever to do with the New Testament.

So the whole mental makeup of the Protestant showed that he believed in authority, he worshipped the law, he did not worship the God of love, he did not believe in a God of tolerance.

There is no comparison between what is called Christian love in the Protestant church and what the Catholic church can do in that respect.

The Catholic church can stomach anything, but the Protestant church can stomach nothing.

The Protestant has a very hysterical stomach and easily gets upset; they are a terribly scrupulous lot.

That Jew is this woman's unconscious mind, the unconscious man in her.

I suppose everybody here knows about the animus in woman, namely, a figure personifying the opinionating of a woman.

I cannot put it better-unrealized, ready-made opinions spoken with authority.

I know women who have an opinion about everything; yet when I say yes, that is so, they are disappointed.

They want me to say no. But ifl said no, that unconscious man would come up and have a terrible row with me.

For that opinion in a woman is a man who wants to fight, who makes enemies; she is very often a victim of that unconscious figure.

Of course, a man has a corresponding female figure, the anima, but that manifests itself differently.

This Jew is an animus of great wealth, which means great power, great authority, and he is in possession of her feelings.

Naturally everything which falls into the unconscious of a woman is possessed by the animus.

He is there with open mouth and catches everything that falls down from the table of her consciousness, and the more she is unaware of the other side, the more powerful he is.

For instance, it is practically a rule of thumb in analyzing a woman that, after I have gotten along quite smoothly with her for a while, suddenly everything goes wrong; she begins to argue and everything has capsized apparently.

And it is all the work of the animus; suddenly the animus has overridden her and made a complete mess of the whole thing.

I ask how all this has come about, and she doesn't know.

So I say: "Well, your animus has been starved, he is very hungry, and he then becomes particularly attentive.

You were apparently not conscious enough, you didn't watch your treasures; you didn't watch a feeling, let us say, for a while. Some infinitesimal part of yourself has been left unconscious and instantly the animus seizes itand having eaten it, he is strong again and begins to argue."

For instance, it sometimes happens that a woman shows me her feelings in a particularly nice way-gives me flowers or something of the sort.

But then again, when such an expression suggests itself, up comes the thought, Dr. Jung knows so many women who have transferences and send flowers, so why should I?-and they let it go.

That is food for the animus.

It may be a very inconsiderable thing, a quantite negligeable, but they should have expressed a feeling, thanked me for something perhaps, and they neglect it. Instantly it turns round into the unconscious,
and that neglected little feeling duty develops into a most murderous discussion if one is fool enough to allow it.

The only thing a man can do is to agree with her opinions, to punish her by a disappointment.

Then she suddenly discovers that she has been the victim of an evil spirit.

There is a very nice German folk song about a little hunchback who follows a girl; everywhere she goes there he is, always saying something evil which spoils the pleasure, a sort of whispering ghost inserting his poison.

That is the animus.

In this dream, then, the subtle fact happens that she is not stopped in her music by actual obstruction through her relations or her ideas as expressed by her relations, but by a factor in herself-that figure who turns up playing far more wonderful music than she ever could.

That comes from the fact that psychologically she is not master of her inferior function, as a man with differentiated feeling is never completely in possession of his thinking, but is suddenly possessed by a thought.

A thought alights upon his brain like a bird, and it won't go away when he wants it to go away, and it won't come when he wants it to come.

The differentiated function is at one's disposal; it is identical with one's will and within one's reach.

But the inferior function is nature. It may partially obey one, but it is never entirely under one's control.

For instance, I may talk to this lady of her child, or of the books which interest her, and she has an identical feeling tone.

There the feeling is allowedinasmuch as it is guided by the intellect and feels in the right way.

But the feeling which is allowed in the conscious you could compare to that part of nature which is cultivated in your garden.

It is nature, but nature chosen by yourself, by no means the unrestrained, uncontrollable force of nature in a primeval forest.

The rest of the function, which is by far the most wonderful part really, is not under your guidance.

It belongs to nature, to the nature of the soul, to all those realms which you cannot possibly control, because they are unconscious and as if under the power of that mysterious figure.

The animus, or the anima, is felt by the primitive, or by an unprejudiced man who does not think intellectually, as a most powerful presence-like a daemon or a god.

So one could say that a god began to play in her, and therefore she had to stop.

But in using the word god I may arouse prejudice, for I am not using it in a particularly favorable sense-if you understand the word rightly, in the antique sense, it means a power.

She must make the attempt to play herself, and nothing should discourage her, even if the gods do it better.

And if the god, the power, takes the form of the animus, then especially she must not allow herself to be stopped, inasmuch as the interference of the animus here would be completely negative.

So if I am allowed to use the word god at all, I use it naturally in the antique sense which may be quite negative.

You see, the gods had too many scandalous love affairs, they made themselves ridiculous and lost their authority.

The primitive man could stand it because he only looked on and naively marveled.

As nowadays, when a white man gets into a tight corner, the natives just sit around and wonder what he is going to do next.

So the primitive man watched his gods, and if they did something particularly immoral, it was yet admirable; the greatest obscenity was regarded with awe.

But to a higher civilization, they were ridiculous when they became disreputable, so they finally collapsed and new gods entered the scene.

The new attitude of the patient ought to be that of the more civilized man.

She should criticize her animus, she should say it was outrageous that he should stop her playing, she should not allow him to stop her.

That is what I told her.

The next dream came the same night: I was going to see a doctor who lived in a house by the sea. I lost my way and desperately asked people to put me on the right path so that I could get to him.

Naturally when she dreams of the doctor, everybody is inclined to think he is myself; since she is under my treatment that must refer to me.

It is only funny that the unconscious does not say so more definitely.

Of course anybody who analyzes dreams according to Freud's point of view would say that it was I, but I am not so sure.

If the unconscious wanted to convey the idea that it was Dr. Jung, it would say so; the dream itself, which we cannot criticize, would have brought me in.

But the dream says a doctor who lived by the sea, and the lake of Zurich is not a sea.

Therefore there is some change in the whole situation, and we see that behind the impressions of daily life, behind the scenes, looms up another picture, covered by a thin veil of actual facts.

In order to understand dreams, one must learn to think like that; one should not judge dreams from realities only, because in the long run that leads nowhere.

The dream lives in an atmosphere which is not our atmosphere in this hard conscious world, where if one does not pay attention to realities as such, they simply drag one under.

But on the other side such realities mean little.

Sometimes the veils are so thin that one perceives at once the greater picture behind the veil of facts.

So what we call important here, the stupendous fact that she is now actually under my treatment, that I have a house on the bank of a lake where she comes almost daily to hear disagreeable news, all that becomes like a mist.

One can look through it to another picture, to that dream doctor whose house is by the sea-a different, big, sort of heroic landscape by the sea.

Here we have a view of a few miles, no view at all, but in the dream there is a tremendous horizon, the vastness of the ocean, an extraordinary view.

Also, a house placed on the shore of the sea is quite different from a villa on the bank of the lake of Zurich; one gets into an entirely different atmosphere.

Moreover, there is no question in reality of her losing her way.

She would not lose her way in finding my house; she has been two months under my treatment, and even if she lost her way there would be no desperate asking for it.

But if that house were a strange house, if that doctor were a strange doctor, then she might lose her way; it is vast country, and she might have to fight desperately to find the way to that place.

Now that is the kind of archetypal image which puts one right back into prehistoric ages. She is in terrible trouble, she feels cheated by a daemon or, say, by a hostile god.

In such an archetypal situation, under such conditions, what can she do?

What can a mortal do against the interference of the gods?

But primitives know that there are certain doctors, medicine men, who have mana, prestige, healing powerwhatever you like to call it-and are therefore supposed to stand between the gods and the ordinary crowd.

The medicine man is the guardian of all those unknown and uncanny things which ordinary people don't know about.

This woman is in the position of the primitive cave woman who is haunted by a hostile god, so she seeks the help of the medicine man who has been there since eternity.

Usually he lives alone and in an inaccessible place.

You find excellent descriptions of such men in Rider Haggard's stories, that famous big-headed man who lives in an uncanny gorge, for instance.

Not only is he himself a queer bird, but the place where he lives is queer, far away, magic and fascinating, which adds of course to his prestige.

Since the place chosen is expressive of his own psychology, the medicine man always chooses an extraordinary place, and the more· difficult to find the better, for of course the medicine man is never here, he is always in some strange corner of the world-beyond the seas.

For instance, we have perfectly good doctors here, but in a case of serious illness, we have a consultation with a doctor from abroad because good medicine is always far away.

In Africa, there were medicine men who were general practitioners, but in any extraordinary case they got an authority from Uganda.

He was the head sorcerer, because they assumed that the people living beyond the mountains had the authority, since great men are always living somewhere else.

People are so impressed by the ordinary quality of their surroundings that they never suspect that Mr. So-and-So is a great genius.

They can't imagine that he would live on such an ordinary street; that does not appeal to their feelings.

Of course, this fact is used by medicine men as a device to build up their prestige, as is done in all the countries of the world-like the academic diploma which a doctor must have for prestige. And successful doctors must have a certain cock-sureness, the patients expect it; otherwise it isn't good treatment.

Therefore also we have all those terrible words-we prefer the Latin language.

If a fellow is mad, one must say, "This is a paranoid form of schizophrenia."

I have known people to pay five hundred dollars for those words!

So this woman who is now seeking the great healer would make a great mistake to see the great healer in me.

To find the medicine man, she must travel far, she must toil, she must ask her way desperately to that far and unknown place.

Naturally her first leap was at me, but I said no, thank you, for she would hang me later on if things went wrong.

That doctor will most certainly be hard, very difficult; those primitive medicine men do terrible things, they torture people!

And then she will cry: ''You said you were the great Medicine Man-you led me on that way!"

So I don't make for that moment; right from the beginning, I decline the great honor of being called the medicine man.

If a dream should say that someone was going to Dr. C. G. Jung living on Seestrasse, Kiisnacht, then I would admit it referred to myself.

But if the police should ask her who that doctor was who had led her such a hell of a way, and she explained that he was the doctor who lived by the shore of the sea, they would never have heard of him, any more than I recognize myself from that description.

The problem is much greater than I, and it is wise to hold fast to the words the dream gives, because one cannot expect to be wiser than nature.

Freud would say wish-fulfillment-a resistance; she wishes not to find her way to you because things are getting disagreeable.

And that is the truth too, there are doubts in her; it is such a novelty to her that the unconscious should find a solution where she does not.

For we are bored by the unconscious, and we have tremendous pride and imagination about ourselves, about the power of our consciousness, because we really are efficient.

Who has built those powerful machines?

Our conscious of course, and so we believe in it, and we think of that unconscious self as nothing, a more or less disreputable appendix to the wonderful light up in our heads.

Therefore if I said to her: "Apparently you have great difficulty in getting to that doctor. What are your resistances?"

I would be on the wrong track.

For she would gladly accept that personal aspect, she would see a loophole, she would say to herself: "That man likes to assume the role of the Great Healer. I will hand all my stuff to him and if he does not succeed, woe to him!"

She would have somebody to make responsible if things did not turn out as they should.

So I have learned from painful experience to interpret dreams correctly.

The healer is again the animus.

This time he is no longer a musician, he appears in the guise of a doctor, and you will see later that he takes on many different forms.

Now on that occasion I explained to this lady what I understood about the animus, and the relation between the animus and the unconscious, as I explained it to you.

And it happened that when she went home she felt very sleepy and lay down, expecting to fall asleep. Instead, she merely got into a very drowsy condition and saw with her inner eyes two hypnagogic visions:

A beautiful peacock was perched on the back of a man, and the beak of the peacock was pointed at the man's neck.

Then this picture disappeared and another one came up where she was just seeing herself, she was looking down at a large hole in her shoe, and she thought that it was so worn that she could not wear it
any longer.

Now these two visions were her first ones, and they came quite spontaneously.

She happened to notice them, and naturally she did not understand them at all.

As the first picture, the peacock, was exceedingly symbolic, I asked for her associations, and she said it was a most beautiful bird when it spread out its tail, it had gorgeous colors, blue eyes, and all that. I felt what she meant; it is again an experience difficult to describe but if you have a feeling heart, you will understand.

When that marvellous beauty of color and form and light appears, you have a feeling of unfolding lines, and that is what the peacock stands for in the history of symbolism: the spring and the sunrise.

The idea was that his flesh was incorruptible.

In the early Christian church, and in the sermons of St. Augustine and St. Anthony of Padua, for instance, the peacock was a symbol of resurrection.

That was because with the approach of winter he loses his feathers and regains them again with the sun in the spring.

So he symbolizes regeneration, and as such he is depicted in the early church, meaning the resurrection of the soul.

He also symbolizes the Redeemer, because he brings back the divine childhood, rebirth.

In the East, the peacock plays a more unfavorable role.

It is a proud Lucifer kind of bird there, self-produced, and disobedient to the creator.

In the Kurd tribes there were so-called devil worshippers who worshipped the peacock as a symbol of the creative power, again the unfolding of spring.

They worshipped him for the same reason that the French peasants in the thirteenth century worshipped the devil: there was a prolonged period of black plague, wars, etc., and since their prayers to
the good God were perfectly useless, since he didn't help and disaster pursued them, they began to celebrate the Black Mass-they reversed the Christian rite for the worship of Satan.

That was the origin of the devil worship which still flourished in the eighteenth century.

Three times the Black Mass was said for Mme. de Montespan in order to keep the love of the king, and each time they sacrificed a living child.

The Mass was celebrated on the abdomen of a living woman, and the cross was reversed. Instead of wine, the blood of the slaughtered child was in the communion cup. It was the Evil One, Sheitan, the creative principle, whom they worshipped, and it was under the symbol of the peacock.

Naturally it is the same peacock, spring, the sudden vision of the unfolding of beauty and form.

All this material was of course not conscious to our patient.

She was vaguely aware that it had some religious meaning, but what it was she did not know.

In the fantasy, the peacock is perched on the back of a man, and the back always symbolizes the unconscious side.

The unconscious bounds our field of vision, and therefore the shadow becomes the symbol of man's unconscious.

The primitive man is always haunted by the feeling of a presence, as if someone were following him, and we can observe the same thing in ourselves. In the silence of the night on a lonely path you
feel that someone is surely following you, and you look behind to see.

And if you are quite alone in a house, after a while there is a noise, as if something had been said, and you get the feeling of a presence.

The primitives sought for the cause of that feeling and have expressed it by the idea of the living shadow behind one, and that shadow, that power behind one, became a precious idea.

The Greeks have a beautiful word for it: synopad6s, meaning the one that comes with me and is behind me.

But that is by no means what we would call shadow, a lack of light, but a living thing of great mana, great power.

Therefore if you tread on it, or if a shadow falls upon you, it is most dangerous.

If you are sitting in the sun and the shadow of a medicine man, walking past, falls upon you, you are dead in a fortnight.

There have been many cases where people were accused of having killed a child in that way, the fact being that the child was playing in the sun when a man inadvertently passed; his shadow fell
on the child and in two months, perhaps, the child died.

Although the shadow has the simplest causes, it is mysterious, it has different qualities-it has no body or weight, for instance.

Sometimes it reaches very far, from miles back, and sometimes it disappears altogether in a ghostlike way.

They describe it as a cool wind. Ghosts are shadows and Hades is the shadow world, the shadows dwell there.

It is also often symbolized as a bird that flies away.

The idea is that when we die, we become shadows and put on wings, feathered garments.

In the Gilgamesh epic there is a description of that sad place where souls wear feathered garments.

So here the peacock assumes the role of a sort of ghost that possesses the man.

We must always cling to our original hypothesis that this is again the animus, this is the man in her; and the vision now says that behind that man is a new principle that possesses him.

It is his genius that sits behind him like the king's hawk, or the eagle of Zeus; it is the peacock-ghost of unfolding, of beauty, of spring.

This is an almost prophetic vision and it is very difficult to translate.

Therefore I prefer to hold fast, quite naively, to the picture itself.

There is still one detail to which I call your attention-that the peacock is holding his beak to the man's neck.

There is a slight menace in it.

If the man should make a wrong move, the peacock might kill him from that position; he might stab him in a vital place, breaking his neck.

It suggests that this man is controlled from the unconscious by that powerful being, which means that the animus we saw expressed as the rich Jew, or the doctor, or anybody else, is not only the animus really.

The animus is himself controlled by something much greater, by the spirit of creation, or sunrise, or rebirth.

And that means, too, that if this woman maintains the right relationship to the man, she might attain rebirth through the realization of the magical spirit that controls her, the daimonion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 3-19