Carl Jung: Consider please that in the year 1960 we are still far from being out of the primitive woods.

To E . L. Grant Watson

Dear Watson, 8 August 1960

Thank you very much for the a mazing flood of material you have inundated me with. You know, an 85-year-old ruin of a formerly capable man cannot live up to it any more. Have mercy on us!

The interesting pictures of labyrinths are known to me.

They have presumably the fundamental significance of mandalas, i.e., places of refuge, sanctuary, rebirth, renewal, initiation, etc. like the Neolithic stone-circles.

You find very good comparative material in the book by John Layard: Stone Men of Malekula ( London, 1942).

It is clear that such formations, particularly under primitive circumstances, are more of anatomical than geo- metrical nature, i.e., organic cavities like uterus or brain or cranium, very much later also
heart.

Please don’t mix me up with your unconscious, which projects itself into everything obscure and unreasonable.

It is exceedingly difficult to find out how that unconscious looks which is really in the object. First of all one has to consider every kind of impression as of subjective origin.

Only then can one hope to be able to discover what belongs to oneself and what is objectively universal .

If you don’t discriminate enough I am on the best way to becoming a real Museum of Metaphysical Monsters. Consider please that in the year 1960 we are still far from being out of the primitive woods.

There are very few beings yet capable of making a difference between mental image and the thing itself.

This primitivity is poisoning our human world and is so dense a mist that very few people have discovered its existence yet.

My richly celebrated 85th birthday has left me a wreck, and this miserable summer we enjoy does not exactly support one’s optimism, not to speak of the political situation of the world which reminds me of the tower of Babel and its fate.

I think of the German poet Holderlin, one of Goethe’s contemporaries:

"But we are fated
To find no foothold, no rest, And suffering mortals Dwindle and fall
Headlong from one Hour to the next, Hurled like water From ledge to ledge
Downward for years to the vague abyss."

Sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 578-579

Carl Jung: I almost believe that the real history of the human mind is a rhizome phenomenon.

Dear Herr Kaegi, 7 November 1932

Thank you very much for kindly sending me your offprint.

I am glad you have drawn my attention to Walser.

As you are obviously well acquainted with Walser's writings, I would like to ask you whether Walser has also taken an interest in the Ipnerotomachia of Francesco Colonna.

I find that it gives us a key to the backdoors of the Renaissance.

It is strange that the broad, shining surface of things always interests me much less than those dark, labyrinthine, subterranean passages they come out of.

Civilizations seem to me like those plants whose real and continuous life is found in the rhizome and not in the quickly fading flowers and withering leaves which appear on the surface and which we regard as the essential manifestation of life.

Burckhardt mentions Colonna's work but for understandable reasons he sees nothing in it.

Of the more recent writers, it seems to be chiefly Luigi Valli who has ventured into the background.

I almost believe that the real history of the human mind is a rhizome phenomenon.

With best thanks,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 102

Carl Jung: I share your conviction that genuine religiosity is the best cure for all psyche suffering.

To Pastor Josef Schattauer

Dear Pastor Schattauer, 20 February 1933

I can only agree with you when you equate St. Francis with the essence of primitive religiosity, but even so a special illumination is needed for a person living in more highly developed centuries to become as simple again as a primitive.

Equally I share your conviction that genuine religiosity is the best cure for all psyche suffering.

The pity of it is that it is exceedingly difficult nowadays to inculcate into people any conception of genuine religiosity.

I have found that religious terminology only scares them off still more, for which reason I always have to tread the path of science and experience, quite irrespective of any tradition, in order to get my patients to acknowledge spiritual truths.

When you say that the Reformation undermined very many of them, I must add that modern science has undermined them still more thoroughly, so thoroughly that in the psyche of educated people today there is only a big black hole.

This has forced me to build up a psychology which will open the door again to psychic experience.

The Catholic Church must hold fast to what still remains from earlier times of living religiosity; I on the contrary must do pioneer work in a world where everything pristine has vanished.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung, Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 118

Carl Jung: I share your conviction that genuine religiosity is the best cure for all psyche suffering.

To Pastor Josef Schattauer

Dear Pastor Schattauer, 20 February 1933

I can only agree with you when you equate St. Francis with the essence of primitive religiosity, but even so a special illumination is needed for a person living in more highly developed centuries to become as simple again as a primitive.

Equally I share your conviction that genuine religiosity is the best cure for all psyche suffering.

The pity of it is that it is exceedingly difficult nowadays to inculcate into people any conception of genuine religiosity.

I have found that religious terminology only scares them off still more, for which reason I always have to tread the path of science and experience, quite irrespective of any tradition, in order to get my patients to acknowledge spiritual truths.

When you say that the Reformation undermined very many of them, I must add that modern science has undermined them still more thoroughly, so thoroughly that in the psyche of educated people today there is only a big black hole.

This has forced me to build up a psychology which will open the door again to psychic experience.

The Catholic Church must hold fast to what still remains from earlier times of living religiosity; I on the contrary must do pioneer work in a world where everything pristine has vanished.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung, Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 118

Carl Jung: If God is so powerful and so good that he can make good out of evil, what does he make evil out of?

To Wilhelm Bitter

Dear Colleague, 7 December 1960

Best thanks for kindly sending me the extract from your introduction to the report of the meeting.

As you rightly conjecture, I was particularly interested in the Dominican reaction to your question.

You have poked into a sleeping hornets’ nest, but we cannot be sure that the hornets have woken up.

I have taken special note of Augustine’s gem: Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus.

St. Thomas, as usual, gets out of it by begging the question.

I would like to ask: If God is so powerful and so good that he can make good out of evil, what does he make evil out of?

The world may have been perfect "sortant des mains de l’Auteur des choses," but it fell into an almighty suf- fering because of the division into particulars .

Who was responsible for this division?

It is the cause of all those mala et defectus which afflict the whole of creation. In view of the omnipotentia Dei the world cannot have fallen away from God.

He could easily have kept it in his hands, but according to the creation story, things were created in their differences by God himself, each "after his kind,:’ which even St. Thomas cannot deny.

Even the venerable Church Fathers had to admit that evil is not only unavoidable but actually necessary in order to avert a greater evil.

The modern approach to this question is one they would applaud. There is no clear dividing line between prostitution and crime.
The one is an evil like the other and is in some degree necessary, for a crimeless society would speedily go to rack and ruin.

In this respect our criminal justice stands on a weak footing; it punishes something that is a social necessity.

Understandably enough, such a dilemma is an occasion for syllogistic acrobatics, judicial as well as ecclesiasti- cal.

Punishment is also an evil and just as much a transgression as crime. It is simply the crime of society against the crime of the individual. And this evil, too, is unavoidable and necessary.

Psychology has the invidious task of rubbing the world’s nose into these truths. No wonder nobody takes to it or loses a wink of sleep over it.
And it never ceases to amaze me that theologians are incapable of drawing conclusions from their own premises. With cordial greetings and best wishes for your health,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 614-615