Showing posts with label Moon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moon. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Carl Jung Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture VIII 27 November 1929




LECTURE VIII 27 November 1929

Before we discuss further the cross and crescent symbols in their relative aspect, I want to demonstrate to you how symbolic facts leak out in families.

A little girl four or five years old has made a drawing of the things we have been talking about.

The mother is in the seminar.

Obviously she has not discussed symbols with her, yet that the child got it in a very extraordinary way is shown in this drawing.

It represents a mother's breast, and also a house, and up at the left is a crescent.

Inside is a woman, and here are windows depicted in a strange way though the mother tells me that she knows how to draw proper windows.

Evidently it is a combination of the cross and crescent symbols with the human mother figure crouching here in the centre.

It is not an ordered drawing, it still has the peculiar chaotic disorder of early psychic functioning.

The elements are there, but they are not in a cosmos or state of order, but in a primordial or cosmic chaos.

That expression is contradictory, however; we use the word "cosmos" for the universe, but one could think of the universe not as a cosmos but as a chaos, for this is the chaos in the collective unconscious of a child, the primordial chaotic condition where things are only beginning to take orderly shape.

In the child's mind this original chaos becomes projected into human figures.

In the adult mind, particularly in the second part of life, the cosmic figures, sun, moon, stars, etc., as well as other archetypes, begin to detach from the human being.

The human being becomes less important, depotentiated.

But the child, at first entirely non-personal, wakes up from the primitive chaos to the condition of relatedness, and this goes on till late in life, as the human being becomes increasingly more important.

Until puberty, the father and mother and family circle mean everything to the child.

The mother has the first place; it is as if all the suns and stars and moons had entered into the mother.

Then at puberty the detachment begins, first the social, and then the spiritual separation the last would only be at the time of the culmination of life.

I thought it quite worth while to demonstrate this case because it···shows-how such-things can leak out far more than personal secrets, for instance, which are unique and are not reinforced by collective figures.

The collective symbols are in the child, so he has the necessary foundation to receive that stimulus.

Personal secrets have less power-today they are most important, but tomorrow they may vanish, because they are not backed up by that terrific force of the collective unconscious.

An unconscious personal secret has a tendency to exteriorize itself; it has a piercing quality because contaminated by the collective unconscious; and as soon as it is conscious, it is likely to get out, for most people with a conscious secret can't hold their tongues, they babble.

Nature doesn't like secrets and forces us to talk, everything comes to light sooner or later.

Today our seminar will be devoted to the question of the interrelation of the cross and crescent symbols; we have discussed them separately so we have a certain idea of what they mean.

The sun is the main representation of the cross symbol.

One assumes generally that the cross expresses the sun, but I would put it the other way round, the sun expresses the cross.

The cross is that inexpressible background representation of unrecognizable forces of creativeness, and because that background or source is of an unrecognizable nature and expressed only through manifold representations, man has forever used that abstract symbol.

The moon is the same, it is a symbol, quite apart from its real existence.

For instance, the phallic symbol is a very definite thing, it is a symbol for generative power, but many other things represent that-a river, fruit, a tree, wind, etc.

There is no end to the symbols for generative forces. So the moon is one of the symbols, like the cross, for different psychological factors.

In all its different attributes it points to the collective unconscious, which can be expressed in many different ways-as the ocean, a lake, a jungle, a cloud, mist, the forest-all these symbolize one and the same thing, the unrecognizable collective unconscious.

Here again is the very interesting difference between the two symbols that we have remarked before.

The cross is definitely dynamic, and the moon is not; it is more a form into which one can pour one's contents.

Hence the definitely female quality of the moon.

It is linked up with the idea of the virgin and the harlot, or it is a receptacle for the souls of the deceased.

It is a passive receptacle and yet not merely passive, for no matter how dead and quiet it is, it always has a definite effect, the effect of forming and giving definite limitations to a thing.

It catches a dynamic element and solidifies it, transforms and crystallizes it, so that it has apparently attained almost a dynamic effect; it is merely that pouring certain contents into it gives it a different quality.

It is like a wine-glass: Pour a noble wine into a crystal glass with a red thread in its stem and you feel that it is in the right form, while to drink that wine from an earthen milk-jug is not right-it is no longer the same.

So the moon seems to be dynamic too because it has that formative effect upon the dynamic quality symbolized by the sun or cross.

The more we talk about the cross and the crescent, that is, the activity and the passivity of the collective unconscious, the more we approach certain concepts of Chinese philosophy expressed in Yang,
5, the male principle, and Yin, S?, the female principle.

The definite interrelation of the two symbols corresponds to the Chinese concept.

Yang is male, dry, active, fiery, creative, and is represented by the south side of the mountain, also by the dragon.

Yin is female, cool, nocturnal, humid, and is represented by the north side of the mountain.

It is the passive side of matter. (The words matter and mother are derived from the same word, materia, mater.)

Our idea of spiritual and material is exactly parallel excepting that Yang is not entirely spiritual nor Yin entirely material.

The Chinese philosophers project these ideas out into the universe and assume that the universe consists of these two agencies, the dynamic and the receptive, and that these constitute heaven and earth and all that is between.

Now, our Western idea would not be that exactly; that is not congenial to us.

We cannot grasp the Tao unless we have psychological understanding, so it is only psychology which opens up the concepts of Chinese philosophy.

But with this knowledge we can admit that there is an active and a passive aspect, a masculine principle which is generative and a female principle which is receptive.

These are understood as psychological factors, but when it comes to the physical universe, we meet great obstacles in our mental make-up.

Psychologically we can understand, and it doesn't seem entirely strange, so to us these symbols have something to do with the structure of our minds.

Those of you who are drawing and painting know that we are still reproducing those symbols over and over again, showing that they are still expressive and alive.
w
One discovers in analysis that they function in the same way as in the mystery religions and Chinese philosophy, only we do not as ·sume-thaHhey-are-world·principles; we merely assign psychological importance to them, we say that the crescent refers to one's feminine nature and the cross to one's masculine creativeness, without assuming that they are universal symbols at the same time.

But, as I said, we have the testimony of the old mystery cults and Chinese philosophy, which independently hold that they also have to do with the constitution of the world, not only with our subjective
prejudice concerning what the world consists of, and that they are responsible for the operation of the "Heavenly Laws," as they would say.

We should not consider such a statement as a metaphysical assertion, or as a fact of natural science, but as though it were the program of a party in a democracy.

It is a view and it may be wrong, yet if we want to solidify the state or put up a reasonable government, we must take into account that there are so many fools who hold these opinions.

A considerable number of people think in a foolish way.

That is what man is like, and we are human beings too, and we have to consider the fact that many people, and even our ancestors, also held the belief that man is only one case among many, in which these general laws manifest themselves.

Now we cannot scientifically prove that our functioning is coincidental with the functioning of the sun and the moon.

We observe the similarity between the periodicity of woman and the moon, but they do not coincide, it is merely the same rhythm.

So also, metaphorically, we could say that the active principle in man is like the sun.

In astrology we have another consideration, a bit uncanny and therefore particularly hated by scientists.

You remember my telling you that birthdates of important men tended to accumulate around the three points of the aerial trigon.

If this were confirmed, we might go further and make statistics about suicides, lunacy, epilepsy, etc.

That might lead to tangible results, and then astrology would be a very serious consideration.

I have suggested to astrologers that we should have more scientific statements.

Sometimes people without knowing one's birthdate can make remarkable guesses as to where one's signs are.

Twice it has happened to me, once in England and once in America.

I was told that my sun was in Leo and my moon in Taurus, Aquarius rising.

This made a great impression on me.

How the devil did they know? Did they see it in my face?

But when one once knows a little about these things, they do not appear so mysterious, and one can easily discover certain characteristics--anatomical, for instance.

Or sometimes things come out in-a negative way.

For instance, I think a certain man is quite certainly not Scorpio, and then I find that he is just that.

So I have often heard some one say, "Surely I will not marry that onel"-and then he does. Or a patient will say, "All that you say is true, but this is not true," and then I find it to be the closest truth.

Now that is where astrology is today.

It enables certain people to make verifiable diagnoses; and sometimes certain guesses, intuitive shots, are peculiarly adequate, quite astonishing.

For instance, I was in touch with an astrologer who knew my birth-date but nothing about my personal life, and I got reports from him occasionally-"on such and such a day you must have felt so and
so"-but always in the past, so that I could verify the truth of it.

Upon one of these occasions he wrote that on the 31st of March, let us say, two years ago, I must have had the feeling of being reborn, for such and such a planet passed over such and such a place in my nativity.

At that time I had in my psychological diary accurate records of everything that happened.

So I looked up that date and I had written, "To day I have a most unaccountable feeling of being reborn."

I could tell you other irrational facts, certain evidences. -But if one once takes it for granted that these things are true, one is confronted with the terribly serious question, what have we to do with the stars?

Is there any connection between our miserable little everyday condition and these stars, great Jupiter and Saturn travelling through incredible cosmic distances?

Moreover, the moment of birth is so accidental, the doctor is late, the midwife is clumsy, the mother is a little too impetuous.

How could one assume such a connection?

If you put it like that, it remains unanswerable.

Astrologers are influenced by theosophy, so they say, "That is very simple, it is just vibration!"

One astrologer after reading Psychology of the Unconscious wrote me, "Why do you bother about developing a libido concept? It is only vibration." But what is vibration?

They say it is light energy, perhaps electricity, they are not quite informed.

At all events the vibrations that could influence us have never been seen, so it remains just a word.

Now I will give you another wrinkle which is quite horrible.

I hope you will be able to follow.

You see, the astrologer says one was born when the sun was in such and such a degree of Libra, and the moon in such and such a degree of Scorpio, etc., and he bases the reading of one's horoscope entirely upon that position of the planets.

For instance, he says, "Today Jupiter is passing over its-own-place-in-your-nativity, therefore it is in the same degree in which it was at the moment of your birth."

You take your telescope and you find the zodiacal constellation and Jupiter is not there at all!

Then again the astrologer will inform you that the spring equinox is in zero degree Aries and you naturally expect the sun to be rising at six o'clock in the morning, precisely at zero degrees Aries.

But you find something entirely different, it is perhaps at 28 degrees Pisces.

In the spring equinox the sun doesn't rise in Aries.

You look it up in history and find that in 100 B.C. the sun left the constellation of Aries and went into Pisces.

Then the astrologer royal of Ptolemy said, "Now, we can't let that happen, we will fix that fact for always as it was in 2000 B.C. when the sun did the same thing-left Taurus and crossed over into Aries."

You see, the spring-point moves back, there is a regression.

That is the so-called precession of the equinoxes, moving 55 seconds each year, going back from the spring signs into the winter signs.

Now this astronomer stopped that. He simply made it consistent.

Otherwise the clocks would all go wrong each year by 55 seconds.

So since· 100 B.C. (Academy of Alexandria) we call the spring-point zero degrees Aries.

We have kept our astronomical faith, but the heavens have moved on and we are simply out of time with the universe.

If a man in 2000 B.C. said one was born in 25 degrees Sagittarius, it was true, but a hundred years later it was not quite true for it has already moved on 100 X 55 seconds and the horoscope is no longer
exact.

An astrologer perhaps says, "No wonder you have such a temperament, or such a royal gesture, because your sun is in the beginning of Leo; when the sun looked at you out of its own house at the moment of your nativity, naturally you were made into a little lion."

But it didn't look out at you from its own house, for in reality it was in Gemini.

Nevertheless you can prove that the man whose sun is said to be in Taurus gets the bull neck, or the woman in Libra gets the qualities of the sun from the heights of Libra, or the one whose sun is in Sagittarius has intuition, and you are quite right.

Yet the sun was not in those positions.

So that destroys any hope of vibration!

I told you of the statistics connected with the aerial trigon, and yet those men of superior mentality were not born when the sun was in those signs.

It is an extraordinary puzzle, and there are astrologers who don't even know it; they are theosophists and they say, "It is quite easy, it is just vibrations."

But, you see, when it comes to our Western mind, we must think.

How then do we account for the fact that our peculiar characteristics can be explained by our planets?

One says, "Venus is very clearly your sign."

How do you explain that as if when it is not?

Here is another paradox.

In order to solve that puzzle, we should say, the thing that matters is not the position of the stars, the thing that matters is time.

You can call time what you like.

It is quite indifferent whether you say the spring-point is zero degrees Aries or 28 Pisces; that is a convention; it is nevertheless the spring-point.

So you see, these old designations of time were not taken from the heavens, but given to the heavens.

Spring and winter, for example, were projected to the heavens. Man has created the constellations.

So obviously the constellations were not intended by the creator of the world to be an astrological text-book to us.

In different systems of astrology the constellations are differently arranged.

On the calendar stone of Mexico, or the famous Denderah stone in Egypt, the constellations are grouped in a different way.

We are even in doubt about the "Great Bear" or the "Wagon"; the ancients called it the "Shoulder of the Heifer."

There was a time when there were only four signs in the Zodiac.

The Romans had eleven. Libra originated in the time of the Caesars; because it was invented so late, it is the only one that is an instrument.

They made the scales by cutting off the claws of the Scorpion.

All the other signs are mythological creatures, or human. Man gives the names to the stars.

The lion does not look like a lion, but man called it that because the sun was really. at its culmination in that devastating time of the year when the heat is insupportable and everything is dried up and
burnt.

It is like a destroying power, so they said the sun was raging like a mad lion. This is the way the signs go:

Aquarius
Pisces
Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo

Five thousand years ago, 3000 B.C. when the sun was in winter, there were floods of rain. Aquarius walked about pouring his water out right and left.

Then the fish swam in the floods.

The little ram, the time of little shoots and buds.

The Bull, the great push of nature.

The fertility of man.

One seldom does better than twins.

A drawback, the summer solstice. The crab walking backward when the sun descends again.

After the first inkling of solstice it dawns on man .... that the sun will really be going, from the 22nd of July till the 21st of August, just when all is most glowing.

When man is roaring like a lion there is nothing better to tame him than a virgin.

She will cut the hair of the lion and make it short, like Samson and Delilah.

It is not nice, the whole symbolism is somewhat obscene.

But at that time of the year, the 15th of September in the Egyptian calendar, the left eye of the goddess is prepared to receive the god Ra, who is to walk into it.

The eye is a womb symbol.

The female element takes the lead. The god enters the womb of darkness,

Yang is under Yin. Woman is on top.

Libra
Scorpion
Sagittarius
Capricorn

The balance after the virgin has done her job.

The fatal self-sacrifice of the sun.

The sun gets cornered by the virgin and when the forces are equal (Libra), the sun commits suicide, and then comes a clear descent into the mother.

There is a legend that when the scorpion is surrounded by fire it kills itself.

The death of the sun.

Death is a sort of river or gap.

There is a life beyond, but one is here on this bank of the river and cannot get there.

Then comes the legend of the centaur, a good archer, who with his bow can send an arrow across.

It is a means of communication.

The archer Sagittarius with the arrow of intuition foresees new birth out of the unconscious.

This is the advent season, when ghosts begin to walk again, when the unconscious begins to manifest itself.

The goat-fish. (This was the imperial sign on the coat-of-arms of Augustus Caesar.)

After the dead man contained in the sea, the next sign is this goatfish.

He is half fish and half goat, meaning that at first, as the fish, he is deep down in the sea, out of sight in the unconscious.

Then he rises to the surface and climbs to the highest peaks and valleys.

This is the sun, the promise of the new year, so some astrologers call the time after Christmas the "Promise of the Year."

It is the time of the birth of Mithras, the birth of Christ, the birth of the new light, the whole hope of the coming year.

People born then have strong hearts. They are ambitious, but they have to work hard to achieve their ends.

But the new year has to be generated.

The sun generates the year in Aquarius. Aquarius pours out the waters of fecundity.

He is also shown as a phallic god like Priapus.

After the generating water the Fishes come again, and so on around.

This is how the Zodiac came into existence.

It is really a seasonal cycle with particular qualities of climate-winter, spring, summer, autumn, qualified by the fantasies and metaphorical imagination of the human mind.

And so man has called the stars that are synchronous with the seasons by names expressing the qualities of each particular season.

The active principle is obviously the time and not at all the stars, they are merely incidental.

If, at the time when astrology came into conscious existence, other constellations had been in the heavens, we would have had different groups of stars but they would have been called a lion or a man carrying a water-jug just the same.

They are not at all like their names, even the most striking constellations.

It is a tremendous strain for the imagination.

So, as I said, it is obvious that the active element is time.

People born at a certain time of the year may have certain qualities.

The relative position of the stars is only the means for counting time.

Then here is a new paradox. What is time? How can it be an active principle?

Time is an abstract conception of duration and is perfectly arbitrary at that; one could make an entirely different division.

A second might be half a minute, why is a minute sixty seconds?

It is not at all convincing, it is merely a conventional arbitrary conception.

Then if one tries to boil it down, one comes to the conclusion that time is the flux of things, like the water-dock or the sand-clock, it is the running down, dividing the day into four parts, each part being one quarter of that day, between sunrise and sunset.

To observe time, one observes the movement of things lasting a certain time, as the hands of a watch; it is the duration of a certain flux.

This is abstract; but the flux of things is not abstract, it is perfectly concrete and tangible.

That is what we term energy because nothing moves without energy.

One must wind one's watch or turn the hour-glass.

It takes energy to produce the flux, and what we measure is energy; and this is another abstract conception in so far as it means a changing condition of things.

When one says time is merely an aspect of energy, one makes it more tangible, because everyone can observe it and measure it.

Time and energy are correlated concepts.

If there is no energy nothing moves and there is no longer any time.

They are identical, a certain movement of time is a certain movement of energy.

When we observe energy we really observe time, because it is through energy that we measure time.

So I say, with no time there is no possibility of measurement.

Take a stone just before it rolls down hill.

It is in a particular position of energy, it will crash but it hasn't. It is latent energy, the energy of position, potential energy.

It may break loose at any time with terrific vigour.

Then it crashes down manifesting mechanical energy.

It lands in the valley, crashes, splinters, and then where is the energy?

It is in the warmth of the stone and the stone against which it hurled itself. It has been transformed.

This is a new movement of energy.

Now, you can describe that whole transformation in terms of time.

If nothing happens, there is no time.

Time begins when that thing gets loose.

There is a certain amount of time until the warmth is dissipated again, and then it becomes unobservable.

The specific warmth has completely vanished, so time is only between the breaking loose of the stone and the last trace of warmth of the splintered rock.

Energy was in three forms, latent energy, mechanical energy, and warmth.

You can translate this into the terms of water falling on a turbine and creating electricity.

As long as the process lasts, there is time, simply different moments expressed through different forms.

Now consider the universal energy of the world, the life energy.

It is unknown to us, but we must understand it under those terms.

It is not observable if nothing happens.

For instance, an egg is latent, nothing moves, but if it develops, time develops, age begins.

Now take the energy of the universe and the solar system.

In winter there is less radiation, in summer there is more.

So someone who was born at a certain moment of the year naturally has a certain quality, because his origin was in those conditions.

Nothing to be done about it, it is just so.

The peculiar thing is that one should be able to trace the age of a thing to the exact time of its origin.

There are certain archaeologists, for instance, who have such a refined sense of the age of an object that they can tell it within ten years, just as an antiquarian knows by the print, quality of the paper, etc.
of a book that it suggests a time between 1460 and 1470, let us say. So an etching can be traced.

The expert will tell you that it is of the French school but influenced by the Dutch.

He judges by the actual qualities of the materials used-the paper, the ink, the objects depicted, etc.

When you see an old man, white-haired and decrepit, you say he was born about 1850.

Often I guess age within two years.

One can do that without any trouble, it is the same as saying that one was born under Aquarius but a bit more accurate.

This is merely a technical method, like looking behind the screen of a clever antiquarian who has certain little helps-for instance, he knows when a certain varnish was introduced into Europe, or that
the first pipe is not older than the discovery of North America.

Astrology consists of all these little tricks that help to make the diagnosis more accurate.

So the astrologer, though he does not know the year or the month of your birth, may guess by your qualities.

Now, the unfortunate thing is that we can designate the condition of energy, universal energy, in no other way than by time.

Instead of saying the time of the falling stone, we say it was ten seconds ago that the stone has fallen.

We call this year 1929, because once upon a time we began counting, assuming that we knew when Christ was born-though there is a controversy about that, Christ may have been born 100 B.C.

Mead has written a very interesting book about that.

In China the years have names.

In Rome they were named for the consuls, reckoned from the beginning of Rome in 750 B.C.

After the French Revolution, they began to count the years as if it were the beginning of a new epoch.

We indicate the conditions of the times by a number.

For instance, 1875 might be called the time of crinolines, the first railways, newspapers twice a week with pages, corsets for ladies, top-hats for men, bad taste generally.

They knew nothing of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was the most recent news.

Chicago was then the most ridiculous little place, and imagine New York in 1875!

Four years after the Franco-German War, everything was moving in a different way, the way that was characteristic for that year, and nothing before or after will be like it.

So, in 1929, everything has the cast and brand of this year.

And the children born in this year will be recognizable as part of a great process and marked by a particular condition. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 401-412

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Carl Jung Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture VII 20 November 1929




LECTURE VII 20 November 1929

Today we will continue our discussion of the moon.

Since the problem is infinitely complicated I would like the individual members of this particular committee to tell us their impression of that subject.

Mr. Henderson: I studied the Greek material and found Selene was the original Greek goddess of the moon, but she never attained the rank of major deity. The Greeks seemed to find her too dim and were dissatisfied with her, so most of her power was usurped by Hecate, who was more useful, more of an entity. She was a more positive goddess and was in close relation with humanity in practical matters.

Dr. Jung: It is true that Hecate was more considered, but who was she in her own right?

Mr. Henderson: She had two functions, She :was the goddess of birth and fertility, but she was predominantly a witch, a goddess of black magic. Her cults were underground, and linked up with
Ishtar and Aphrodite, with infant sacrifices, and sacred prostitution.

Dr. Jung: You link her cult up with Ishtar and Aphrodite, but she is neither of these. What aspect would Hecate represent? How does she differ?

Mr. Henderson: She represents the destroying power of the moon.

Dr. Jung: Decidedly destructive.

And the name itself tells us something.

It means the one that reaches far, hits far, farther than an arrow.

The primitives believe that the magic causing of illness is worked by throwing out something substantial, like a pebble; certain American Indian tribes believe it is an icicle.

To sum her up then, you would say that she was chiefly destructive and so had to be particularly propitiated. But destruction was not her only quality, we must characterize her more closely.

Take all her qualities together:

She was a deity of black magic, of childbirth, and of the crossroads.

The main feature is the underground character, that gives you the picture.

She represents a psychic power, a factor that has all these connections--exceedingly mysterious, underground, helpful but at the same time destructive, uncanny, and working from the unconscious in a way man cannot understand.

This is a witchcraft particularity that is especially in woman's unconscious.

In a man one can see that his ray reaches far, it is a continuity; but in woman one simply can't account for it.

I want to give you a very interesting example.

A member of our seminar has given me permission to tell you this.

After our discussion of the cross and crescent symbolism, she went home, with the moon and the sun in her mind.

Her boy of seventeen was sick in bed, unoccupied, and she gave him his toothbrush to mark to prevent its being mixed up with his brother's.

She left him at work and was talking with her husband downstairs about everyday matters.

Then she became conscious that she was listening and had the feeling that something might be happening to the boy, so she went up to him and found that instead of signing his name, he had made
the following picture.

Look at it in the light of our seminar.

The mother had said not a word to the boy about it.

Reading it from the bottom up, there is first the cross, then the crescent, then "Tau," and he made the remark that it could just as well have been a cross like this X or a human body.

The star above we have not spoken of. It is from the collective unconscious, yet it is from his own unconscious just as well.

This is not merely a thought transference, it is a magic effect, a Hecate dream, the language of the collective unconscious.

It is the answer to the dream we are actually concerned with.

I make use of this particular instance to illustrate the effect.

It also shows you a most precious piece of of symbolism, and how things synchronize in a radius of several miles.

Perhaps the people upstairs or our neighbours over there are having queer dreams, we don't know.

This is a power centre, and they are within the radius.

This hieroglyphic writing explains the sequence of our thoughts.

We shall reach the same results that this

Of course we can't assume that it was insinuated by the unconscious of the mother; it was simply released by the mother's attitude.

It is the same conclusion that man always has reached and always will, and this process was released in him as in our dreamer.

If touched upon, it comes up.

Compare the fantasy material of the most different patients and see how they come to similar symbols and conclusions, of course with an enormous amount of individual variation.

I have hardly ever seen such a neat result as this, it is quite amazing.

Now this Hecate aspect of the moon, was that what impressed you most, then?

Mr. Henderson: No, the cult of Artemis-the predominantly productive goddess, the goddess of the fields and childbirth, the waxing moon-balanced the cult of Hecate.

Dr. Jung: Then you would explain Hecate as chiefly destructive, the waning moon.

And we found that there was some justification for this, things don't thrive under the waning moon.

Dr. Barrett: A friend of mine in the railway-tie business tells me that they will buy no wood cut under the waning moon.

The scientific explanation that he gave was that wood recently exposed to polarized light doesn't last as well.

Miss von Konig: In Sweden the wood cut in the waning moon is exposed to wood worms while in the waxing moon while in the waxing moon it is not.

Mrs. Sawyer: In France, before the Revolution, the forestry laws prohibited the cutting of wood except during the waning moon.

Otherwise it was so full of sap that it would not dry.

Dr. Jung: These are practical concrete evidences of the influence of the waning moon, which fit in with what we hear about planting in the waxing moon.

I know a man with a great estate in South Africa who, on principle, plants everything under the waxing moon because he has always observed that only so did they flourish.

I didn't just trust that notion, but all these primitive beliefs seem to be true somehow, although we do not understand them.

A meteorologist will prove to you that the weather does not change with the moon, and yet the idea keeps on occurring, so I am by no means convinced that the weather has nothing to do with it.

A rational explanation is no explanation.

We just have to wait till these things become confirmed through experimentation.

Astrology, for instance, presents amazing suggestions which would be important if verified, but that has never been done. They ought to work out their researches statistically.

A Frenchman, Paul Flambart, made an attempt to verify certain irrational statements.

He has done some scientific research work in connection with the so-called aerial trigone: If the whole zodiac is designed in sections of a circle, then the three points, the months represented by Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius, form the aerial trigon.

These are air-signs, and air means mind or spirit.

The old saying was that one born under these signs was apt to be spiritual or intellectual; that quality was given him at birth.

So Flambart took one hundred nativities of men remarkable for their intelligence, and he found that, though the birth-dates were everywhere on the circle, there was an extraordinary accumulation on each point of the trigon, so one could say that the majority of such nativities were associated with the corners of the aerial trigon, with intelligence.

This is of the nature of a scientific truth, but astrologers are proverbially reluctant to make such researches.

They prefer to swim in intuition.

To work scientifically is too much trouble; each horoscope would take three hours and one would need thousands of them.

Astrology is a dark science, a Hecate science.

Now we are emphasizing the waning moon. Have you anything more to say about Artemis?

Mr. Henderson: The two, Hecate and Artemis, were practically interchangeable, but Artemis was more the waxing moon with the idea of fertility. They supplanted Selene, who was not defined enough, so her cult was split up into the cults of these two goddesses, Artemis and Hecate, who were more practical and nearer to the people.

Dr. Jung: Yes, Selene is a bit dim.

The moon is exceedingly paradoxical, and so one has to split up the conception of its personality.

It is too upsetting to think in paradoxical terms.

That is the sign of a differentiated mind, only very advanced philosophers think paradoxically.

Few can stand it.

So the Artemis side of the moon goddess was bright and positive and the dark side hushed up; or the dark uncanny Hecate side was expressed and the good side hushed up.

It was as if poison might produce some very good effect; or, if God wouldn't help, surely the Devil would lend a hand.

I think you have here a valuable picture of the double character of the moon. What was your material, Mrs. Sawyer?

Mrs. Sawyer: What impressed me the most was the double meaning of the moon-on the side of life, and on the side of death.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and that coincides with what I know of primitives.

One sees this lack of definition especially in the central conception of mana that we were discussing.

Modern explorers are bewildered at their way of applying the terms mana and taboo.

No distinction exists to them, because their dreams are like reality and their reality like dreams.

Any concept is like any other concept.

In Egypt one finds contradictory myths in neighbouring villages, or even in the same temple about one and the same god.

Their way of thinking is utterly incomprehensible to us.

The primitive consciousness is so dim that they simply can't see differences, they are quite naive, they can only feel very keenly how they are affected.

So very different things become as one to them, because they produce the same effect.

They are astonished, for instance, with no reference to what astonishes them, the word "astonish" becomes a dynamic conception and they say it is astonishing, mulungu. I gave you such examples.

So we don't find differentiated views of the moon in primitive beliefs.

Later when we do find it in Greek mythology it represents the progress of the human mind through many thousands of years.

Mrs. Crowley: Did not moon worship precede sun worship in the Semitic religions?

Dr. Jung: Did you read the Babylonian literature?

There it is true that the worship of the moon goddess is exceedingly ancient, but I think that Shem2may be just as old.

Mrs. Crowley: I wondered if the moon was not very important to them because of their nomadic lives? The moon might be as important to nomadic tribes as the sun would be to agricultural people.

Dr. Jung: Yes, though that is difficult to confirm because nomadic tribes leave no culture and no temples.

The pre-Islamic cult was of the stars and the moon.

The nocturnal sky is exceedingly impressive to one who travels by night, as you say, but in the oldest Babylonian temples, one finds sun worship as well as moon worship.

One sees the sun god at one end of the temple against the wall, and a statue of the king of equal size just opposite.

Man and god opposite to one another, of equal value, it is very interesting.

In Egypt, also, Pharaoh is the equal of the gods and is depicted in the form of Osiris and of Ra, and identified with the sun.

Naturally, he wouldn't identify with the moon.

Mrs. Fierz: It struck me as strange from the point of view of development that first you have a dragon like Mummu-Piamut, or a heavenly cow, the mother of the moon goddess, who creates the world and eats it afterwards. Then later came the various different moon goddesses, and then in the course of development, comes a unifying principle again, as for example in the Golden Ass, 11th chapter. Again they are the same, they are unified. Even if the names are different, the meaning of these goddesses in all countries is the same. So in the late Roman times, they could take up the worship of any foreign goddess because the underlying meaning would be identical. I think that here is a parallel to individual psychology.

Dr. Jung: Your view has more to do with the psychology of the moon symbolism in general.

You would reduce the specific moon goddesses to the conception of an original world animal, a heavenly cow who produces and then eats the world.

Well, that is perfectly true, an extraordinary conception of something even back of the gods, something that is doing and undoing.

But this doesn't enter our actual discussion; we must keep to a differentiated concept of the moon deity.

If we go behind the moon, then we must go behind the sun; the story of the heavenly cow has no more to do with the moon than the sun, it is back of both.

It is a profound intuition similar to the idea of Osiris, Isis, and Nephtys in the same womb.

Osiris is the sun, Isis and Nephtys are the moon.

There is also the Egyptian idea of the primordial mother Nu or Nut, also called the primordial waters, in whose womb were the sun and the moon before any created thing.

That is still more primitive and also a more advanced idea.

Later perhaps humanity will see that these most primitive superstitions were the intuitive perception of a most accurate truth.

Scientific ideas are always transitory, because they are based on theory.

Modern physics is crumbling.

When I was a student "emanation," for instance, was ridiculed as completely absurd, but now we are coming back to it.

Here we are with the Einstein theory, which is understood as a sort of cosmic emanation.

Now, Dr. Draper, won't you tell us what you got from your researches about the moon?

Dr. Draper: The thoughts that were started by the researches were tinged by the mechanistic puzzle I have been in and so they took a biological trend. It seemed to me that there was an interesting analogy between the bisexual character of the moon and the bisexual character of animals. There are reversals of sex in the cock, fowl, and pigeon, as if things were adapted to self-fertilization in order to secure permanence, and that this suggests the means of overcoming death. I was also interested in the soma drink. The gods drank of it and revived.

Dr. Jung: Did you look up the Hindu material for that, Dr. Harding?

Dr. Harding: There are two sets of myths. In the moon there grew a soma-tree from which the gods extracted a drink which gave them immortality. And there is also the myth of Varuna, the moon who churned the cosmic ocean and produced the soma. Then there is a moon-tree that grows on the earth from which a drink is extracted called soma.

Dr. Jung: Yes, soma is a mythological drink in the Vedic religion, magical like the wine in the Christian sacrament, or in the -Dionysian mysteries.

It is a revivifying drink which is also intoxicating.

If I were a good Christian, I should be against the substitution of a non-alcoholic for a spirituous wine, for the touch of intoxication is absolutely indispensable.

If Christ, the founder, had intended that the wine should be non-intoxicating, he would have said to drink water.

In the Manichaean mysteries, the holy food was the melon.

The communion table was laden with gorgeous fruits, especially the melon, which was the sacrificial fruit because it demanded the sun in order to ripen and therefore contained the most particles of light.

So when man ate the melon, he was likely to assimilate an enormous amount of light, and then the black substance, the devil, was overgrown.

Christ chose wine, and the Catholic Church would never allow the wine to be non-alcoholic.

As they would not allow the communion bread to be of any other kind of flour than wheat.

And holy oil must be olive oil, and the candles must be made in a certain way.

But the war brought a change; because of the scarcity of olive oil, by a special permission of the Pope they were allowed to substitute little electric bulbs, but that was only because of the misery of the times.

The Catholic Church is very reasonable in such a case, but in the major things she would hold to tradition most faithfully.

The point is that when one modifies these things, when one protests, it becomes just heresy; the Protestants without knowing it upset tradition in its most essential points. That wine is the blood of the Lord.

When they let these beliefs go it means that they are on the point of disintegration; the Protestants are split up into more than four hundred denominations
as a matter of fact.

Catholicism, on the other hand, is linked up with the inviolability of such principles; it must be wine, it must have the touch of intoxication.

One of the oldest ideas of the intoxicating drink is the Vedic drink, soma.

The Rig-Veda is of an amazing age, it is supposed to go back to 5000 B.C., and the idea of soma already occurs there.

And now we hear that it is linked up with the moon; the moon tree provided a drink for gods and man.

This is very important symbolism.

Dr. Draper: Perhaps the exhilaration produced by the soma drink was the same as that which follows deep rapid breathing. The subjective effect of quick superoxygenation of the blood is almost the same as that which follows drinking alcohol. Is there some analogy here?

Dr. Jung: Yes, all these things have also a physical basis.

Primitives sometimes know things ahead of the scientists.

The modern theory of malaria was known by the natives in eastern Africa before the white man knew that it was the anopheles mosquito that caused it. So they had probably found out the connection between deep breathing, the accumulation of oxygen, and alcoholic effects.

Hatha Yoga has particularly to do with breathing exercises, they try to spiritualize themselves through deep breathing.

In Chinese Yoga there are rites where breathing is suppressed; there is a standstill of respiration, which is replaced by inner breathing.

Dr. Draper: The North American Negro is not happy unless he has a razor in one pocket and in the other the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit, caught in the light of the moon. Is it man's attempt to solve the death problem?

Dr. Jung: It is the animal instinct that they want, and the foot is part of the animal. That it must come from the graveyard means that it must be impregnated with the qualities, or the mana, of the
dead, so it is a charm that has to do with the whole complex of questions that we are concerned with under the heading of moon symbolism.

It is an apotropaic charm because it comes from the dead; if they inherit some amulet from their forefathers, for instance, it is good against spirits and against their own death.

Just as rain is produced by pouring water, or a wind by sailors' whistling or hammering the main-mast, making a noise like sails in a wind.

They say, "Stop your whistling, or there will be too much wind!"

Inoculation is the same principle, simply a piece of moon symbolism in practical application.

The soma drink is an apotropaic drink against death-when one drinks this, one cannot die; that medicine comes from the land of the dead, moonland, the moon-tree, it is the medicine of immortality.

Gilgamesh travels toward the Westland, to the land of the setting sun.

Then there is the myth of the Babylonian Utnapishtim, which antedates the Noah legend by a thousand years.

They both cross over a great flood and are removed to the Westland to live an eternal life.

They are seeking immortality in the land of the dead.

Anything that comes from death protects one from death.

So our holy communion wine comes from the dead; we eat the dead body of Christ and drink his blood, and it gives us life.

It is exactly the same as the primitive idea of soma.

Then there is the other side of the moon, the lunatic side, which Dr. Harding has mentioned, the moon madness which has to do with the moon as mind.

Intoxication is artificial madness.

A sma.ll dose is exceedingly important in order to bring up one's irrational side; a little madness is good-to be a bit upset-but more is dangerous.

In the soma ceremonies, if one gets very drunk one falls from grace.

St. Paul in writing to the Corinthians complained that they ate and drank too much; it was a terrible misuse of something sacred.

The temptation is to drink deep gulps.

In the asylums, the insane are permitted to take communion but they ask for a whole bottle full, and one has to rescue the chalice.

That middle line suggested by the mystery cults is exceedingly critical and delicate.

Drink more and one comes down into the flesh with a bump; drink too little and one is not irrational enough.

The purpose is to do away with our ordinary cramped consciousness.

Even the primitive is just as intent as we are on our daily habits, our routine.

The real purpose of the religious ceremonial is to revivify.

It was created to lift man out of the ordinary, to disturb his habitual ways, that he may become aware of things outside.

Many a man, from his accursed circle, has drunk to escape, and discovered the extraordinary beauty of the world and embraced the world, when ordinarily they are terrible beasts.

They have discovered the beauty of drunkenness and embrace wine for the divine quality of it, opening their hearts, opening up avenues to mankind.

One real moment like that may be a moment of revelation.

The primitives needed it as much as we do.

The original idea of the Agapes was a mild orgy, eating together, feasting, drinking the sacred wine, the blood of the earth.

They kissed each other in a brotherly and sisterly fashion, and this was also the reason why St. Paul had to complain.

They took it too literally-it lost some of its spiritual flavour.

But it was an attempt at real communion.

Now compare our communion with what it was originally.

It destroys the whole meaning to substitute non-alcoholic wine.

There should be a cult licence that, under the restriction of the taboo, one can do certain things otherwise impossible.

In the Agape one might kiss his neighbour's wife and feel like anything.

One could choose his place I suppose.

Otherwise it would be awful, so we have to allow for human nature.

People were doubtless as they are today--0ne is careful to lean to the right instead of the left.

It is really not blasphemous if we enter into the psychology of all these moon and soma ceremonials.

Those things were done in the light of the moon, it might have been very dazzling.

The nights of the dancing were relatively safe, and then, within the framework of a taboo, man could do what ordinarily he could not do.

For instance, the primitives in performing a ceremony do not do it as they would themselves, but as their ancestors might have done it.

They identify with those ancestors-the heroes-and perform ceremonies which were perhaps very obscene.

Then they would be normal citizens again-perfectly all right.

In our day, a certain Christian sect, I forget what they call themselves, nominate a board of trustees who are called evangelists and apostles, even angels and archangels.

They symbolize the heavenly hierarchy on earth and are in a wonderful new condition-Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith in the daytime and archangels in the evening.

I suppose they also identify with the heroes, one stage on the way to the very original carnival when they changed into animals, their totem ancestors.

In the cult of Dionysos, the Corybantes were a wild, orgiastic band of dancers.

They wore animal skins and goats' horns, to be as much like satyrs as possible, and the girls were nymphs in their lovely nakedness, like maenads, and then things really happened.

In Athens it was rather obscene; a huge indecent phallus was carried in the parade.

Even in Rome as Goethe saw it, during the carnival in the ecclesiastical state, the old Priapus god, in the form of Pulcinello, walked about disturbing the women.

This was in the eighteenth century, in the very heart of Christendom, and that symbol was intended to suggest animal increase, animal sexuality.

It was a survival of the old religious festivals though of course no longer connected with the church ....

But now only the intoxicating wine is left. In our rituals, even in the Catholic Church, no space is left for orgiastic licence.

Now, more than in any other time, man has no chance whatever in that respect.

We need that ceremonial licence.

When we get drunk, we become pigs and lose our respectability, we have no taboo-frame in which to do it.

We haven't served God, we have only been intoxicated.

In those days a man could keep his respecta6iiity and serve God a bit too much and then it was a grand thing;

I pity thepeople who don't know what wine means in that aspect.

There are no taboo forms under which we can get safely and religiously drunk, not to speak of kissing our neighbour's wife.

Well, I wanted to give you some aspects of the peculiar grotesqueness connected with the moon, a twisting of all the sacred elements.

It is more difficult to sum up the symbolism of the moon than of the sun. The moon has an extra twist. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 390-400

Friday, August 25, 2017

Carl Jung Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture VI 13 November 1929




LECTURE VI 13 November 1929

We will devote the seminar today to Dr. Harding's report about the moon.

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CRESCENT AND ITS PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANlNGS

Before reading this paper on the crescent I should like to make a few remarks on the nature of the problem that the group found themselves confronted with.

In the case of the cross, as we all realized when we listened to Dr. Barrett's paper, the problem was one of correlating an enormous mass of material.

The cross as a symbol is relatively easy to trace.

It appears everywhere, in almost every age and culture, in art and literature and on monuments.

There was no lack of material, and the task the group had to perform was to go after it and hammer it into shape.

The cross lends itself to this kind of treatment, for it symbolizes energy and is associated with the idea of weapons-the sword, the hammer, the axe.

This is the truly masculine way of dealing with a masculine symbol.

But the problem of the crescent is exceedingly different.

The material about it is relatively scanty.

Nowhere does it appear in art and literature in the obvious and prolific fashion that characterizes the cross material.

We found legends whose meaning was subtle, hidden, just as subtle and evanescent as the light of the moon herself.

We could not go at it hammer and tongs in the masculine, academic fashion.

So I ask for your indulgence if this exceedingly feminine subject is treated in an entirely feminine way.

Let us start with the reason for taking up the crescent symbolism at all.

The dreamer has come to a place where he fully realizes his dual nature.

On the one hand his intellectual and spiritual studies have left him in the air-they have proved quite sterile.

On the other, his pursuit of the sensual side has left him disgusted.

When he goes one way immediately the urge to go the other arises and he is at an impasse.

Then he dreams of the cauldron.

And in it are the symbols of two religious tendencies.

I say tendencies, for although today these symbols stand for two of the most dominant religions of the world, namely Christianity and Islam, yet they predate these manifestations by many centuries, and have held for mankind progressively throughout the ages the secret of a road by which man perchance might solve the problem of his dual nature.

For the problem of our dreamer is the great human problem, and for that reason it is of vital importance for each one of us to find if possible how a solution may be reached.

Man, by the very fact of becoming man and ceasing to be wholly animal, was precipitated into this predicament; he is still animal, but by becoming human he became also a conscious, that is, a spiritual being.

The problem that our dreamer is up against is exactly this problem.

It is the one that has concerned man from time immemorial; animal-spiritual-and somewhere man must find himself.

This is the problem of man throughout the ages.

He has seen in other spheres in nature incompatible forces at work, and there perhaps a solution has been reached which may for a little while give rest from this ever-recurring conflict.

And out of that outer happening he has culled a symbol, whose validity consisted in the fact that by taking the external happening as a picture of the internal psychological conflict, man could, by a sort of identification or mimetic magic, really gain release from his inner conflict, and by virtue of the symbol could reorganize his energies on a different plane, solving the problem as it were hypothetically,
Until bit by bit the energy released dby the solution of the conflict served to create a new self for the man, which contained elements derived both parts of his nature.

So that when our dreamer finds in the cauldron these two symbols which have repeatedly formed the nuclei of a whole series of religions from the earliest antiquity up to the present time, it is as though the dream would say: "

This is how the best and greatest of men in the past have found release from this conflict, the one group following the cross and the other the crescent."

But these symbols go opposite ways.

This man has been subjected to the influence of both, but neither holds for him that compelling power which, for other men and in other times, could solve the conflict and release them for life on a new plane.

For him the problem must be carried a step further.

But first he must discover for himself, and in his own terms, psychological, not magical, nor religious, what these symbols mean.

This was the problem that the members of the group put before themselves when they started on the task of studying the crescent and its symbolism.

One member of the group undertook to look up the primitive material; one the Hindu; another the religions of the eastern Mediterranean, with their cults of the Great Mother and moon goddesses; and so
on.

Then the group as a whole came together and attempted to correlate and if possible understand the large mass of material which had been accumulated.

The following notes give a brief summary of their findings only.

For the particulars of the material on which the paper is based I would refer you to the individual members of the group who went through the literature relating to the special field that they each individually took up.

But it seemed to us best, owing to the nature of the crescent symbol itself, not to attempt to give a detailed account of the ethnological material, but instead to approach the subject as it were from within, so that we might reach as true a subjective comprehension of its peculiar character as possible.

I. The Moon as a Man.

In the most ancient cultures, Iranian, Persian, etc., the moon appears as a man.

In the earliest form he is the mythical ancestor of the king. For instance, Genghis Khan traced his ancestry to a king who had been conceived by a moon-ray.

In a later form of the myth the moon is a god.

The typical story is that the moon-man begins his career by fighting the devil who has eaten his father, the old moon.

He overcomes the devil and reigns on earth, where he establishes order and agriculture, and is the judge of men.

In the end, however, he is again pursued by his enemy the devil, and dies by fragmentation.

He then goes to the underworld, where he exercises the function of judge of the souls in the underworld.

The story of the moon-gods follows the same pattern.

In their upper world phase they are beneficent, with the attributes of Truth, Justice, Constructiveness, and Fertility.

In their underworld phase they are destructive, they are also judges of the dead and mediators between man and the gods.

II. The Moon as Woman.

A goddess of the moon appears as the central figure in many of the ancient religions, in Babylonia, Egypt, and Greece.

She also appears in Rome under the guise of Diana, and in mediaeval Europe as the Virgin Mary.

We have taken a typical example the goddess Ishtar of Babylon.

Like the moon-gods, Ishtar had a two-fold character.

She is both the moon that rises in the sky and increases to fullness and the dark moon that creeps upon the full moon and overcomes it utterly.

She has many lovers, but is always virgin.

Her son Tammuz is a sun-hero.

He is also the vegetation of the whole earth.

He is the lover of Ishtar and is condemned by her to a yearly death.

There was a religious fast of lamentation when the annual death of Tammuz was celebrated.

Her later lover Gilgamesh reproached Ishtar for her fickleness, for she had loved in turn Tammuz, a bird, a lion, a horse, a shepherd, a gardener, and then himself.

She was early connected with springs, which are the source of life in the Arabian desert.

In her bright or upper-world phase Ishtar is worshipped as the Great Mother, bringing fruitfulness to earth.

She was known as "Queen of the dust, and Mistress of the Field."

She promoted the fertility of man and beast and was the goddess of wedlock and maternity, and the moral governor of men.

In her underworld phase she destroyed all she had created in her upper-world activity.

She is Goddess of the Terrors of the Night.

She is the Terrible Mother, goddess of storms and war. She plays all possible feminine roles.

She is invoked as "Virgin Mother, Daughter of thy Son."

Her rites were orgiastic.

She was served by priestesses who were also sacred harlots.

She was known as the "Ship of Life" who bears the seed of all living things.

She is related to the shape of the crescent resting on the water.

There was a Chaldean goddess, Nuah, who carried the seeds of all living things in an ark. (Compare the Hindu word arka, which means crescent.)

This links her to Noah and his ark, in which the animals were preserved, one pair of each species, when the world was destroyed by flood.

These animals carried the seed of life and from them the world was repopulated, as though they were the parents of all life on the regenerate earth.

III. The Moon in its Three Phases.

The moon appears in art and symbols in three forms: a) The crescent or waxing moon, where it is generally associated with a star.

This is the commonest form in art.

It is the symbol of the moon goddesses, is the form used in the Islamic religions, and also forms the national standard of Turkey and Egypt (Figs. 1 and 2),5

It was also found in early Christian catacombs as a symbol of the Land of Heaven (Fig. 3). (b)

The full moon is occasionally seen.

In certain Indian pictures it is on the left hand of the Buddha while the sun is on the right.

There is such a picture in Dr. Jung's library.

We have here a picture of a Chinese sage from the fifth century B.C.

He is shown as a learned doctor, with his bundle of scientific remedies, minerals, and herbs which he has gathered from all over the earth.

But still men die and his wisdom is not sufficient to save them.

In the picture he is seen struck by the sudden realization that if he could only obtain the wisdom of the moon also, he would be able to cure all disease and bring immortality to mankind. (c) The waning
moon.

In its waning the moon symbolizes the fear and inevitability of death.

We have illustrations of this in pictures of Time and Death, who are represented with the inverted crescent of the scythe.

IV. The Moon as Bringer of Ecstasy.

In the Vedantic Upanishad the moon is magical power, the mana which brings ecstasy.

The same idea is shown in the moon-tree, from whose fruit the gods extracted the soma drink which gave them immortality. Here is a picture (Fig. 4) of the Chaldean moon-tree.

The earthly counterpart of the legend is a tree or bush called the moon-tree.

From the fruits of this tree a drink is extracted which is called "soma."

This drink contains a drug which produces a state of ecstasy, for which purpose it is used in certain religious rites.

We find the same method of producing ecstasy employed in many other religions, for instance, wine in the Dionysian mysteries, and peyote, a drug used for the purpose in a particular cult in North America.

The moon is still said to have this effect. It is recognized today, albeit perhaps unconsciously, in the use of such words as lunacy, and in the superstition that if you sleep in the light of the full moon you may become crazy.

You may even hear lovers give as an excuse for their indiscretions that it was a moonlit night.

V. The Moon as the Dwelling Place of Spirits.

In Persian, Hindu, and Egyptian literature the moon is represented as the place where the soul goes after the death of man.

On the moon the soul is judged, and goes either to the upper world or back to the earth.

On the moon-barge the dead travel to the underworld and await their regeneration.

The moon is thus a place for birth, for death, and for rebirth.

VI. The Moon as Giver of Fertility.

In many primitive religions the moon is held to be the giver of children.

Offerings are made to her on this account by childless women.

Her aid is asked in childbirth. And on the other side it is considered dangerous for a young girl to sleep in the moonlight for fear of becoming pregnant.

The primitive people of Nigeria think that the Great Moon Mother sends the Moon-Bird to bring the babies.

This is perhaps related to our own myth of the stork. In this category belong the moon's relations to springs and the weather.

The moon is a giver of moisture, and rain charms are generally made in relation to the phase of the moon.

We still have the same idea when we associate the changes in the phase of the moon with changes in the weather.

VII. The Moon as Regulator of Time and Moral Governor of Men.

Moon time preceded sun-time by many centuries.

The religious calendar of the Jews and of Christendom is still reckoned on the basis of the moon.

For instance, Easter falls on the first Sunday following a particular full moon.

The tides were known quite early to be in some way related to the moon.

So that our saying, "Time and tide will wait for no man" is really an assertion of the dominating character of the moon order.

That the moon was thought of as the moral governor is interesting and accords exactly with the place that the Eros order does as a matter of fact take in the regulation of human affairs.

In all these myths and legends we find certain facts standing out.

First, the changing character of the moon struck man’s attention in its contrast to the sun.

The sun either shines or does not shine; it is either here or not here.

But the moon is not like that. The moon may be partly here, she changes continually.

From this come such ideas as that the moon is changeable, the fickle moon.

These are terms that are also applied to woman.

She also is said to be changeable and fickle, and from the man's point of view it is so.

That is the way her moon-like character appears to him, for it is hard for him to understand its nature.

But to a woman, that her life should flow in cyclic phases is the most natural thing in the world.

For her the life-force ebbs and flows not only like the tides, coming up and going down in a nightly and daily rhythm as it does for a man, but also in moon cycles-quarter phase, half phase, full moon, decline, and so round to dark moon.

During this cycle her energy waxes, shines fully, and then wanes again.

The change affects not only her physical life and her sexual life, but also her psychic life.

To a man this seems very strange. But he experiences the same law in his own inner life of the unconscious through his anima, and if he does not understand it, it irritates him and makes him moody.

Such a feeling may become so obsessive that the man may get completely out of touch with the external reality and present to the world only his moods, which are his reaction to his own subjective
inner reality.

But that is the extreme.

In the ordinary case where a man finds this strange unaccountable thing happening inside himself, he does not realize that he has to wait till the right phase of the moon comes round.

The ancients understood this when they said that certain things must be done at particular phases of the moon.

If a man wanted a love-charm or a rain-charm or an artistic inspiration, and the ritual prescribed that the rites or magic must be performed at the new moon or at the full moon, or perhaps even at the dark of the moon, the man must curb his impatience till that time arrived.

This is a lesson that a woman is compelled to learn.

She has to submit to this law of her nature whether she will or not.

But for a man it is much harder to submit.

It is his nature to fight for a thing he wants and strive to overcome all obstacles by force.

But when he comes to dealing with the moon, whether within himself as his own anima principle, or in the woman he is closely associated with, say his wife, he is compelled to submit to an order that is different.

His nature is like the sun.

In the daytime it shines, and man works and accomplishes.

Then at night the sun is not there and man goes to bed and is not there either.

But with the moon-sometimes when it is in the sky at night it is full moon, in a few days it has waned and gives only an uncertain light, or it may be completely dark.

A man meets a woman.

It is full moon with her, and he says, "Ah! At last a woman who is bright."

He meets her again a few days later and to his dismay he finds the moon has waned and she gives only a feeble and uncertain light, or it may be that she is completely the dark woman.

This is the bewildering fact.

He tries to extricate himself from the incomprehensible situation by blaming the woman, saying that it is she who is incomprehensible, fickle, unreliable.

But then the next phase of the problem comes and he finds that exactly the same thing happens in regard to his own feeling.

A man under the sun, in a world of reality, would expect his feeling to be stable, accountable, reliable.

He either likes a thing or he dislikes it; he either loves a woman or he does not love her, as the sun shines or it is night.

But he finds his feeling is as erratic and unreliable as a woman.

He finds he loves one day and is indifferent the next.

This is terribly disconcerting, and so he decides to get along without feeling, to disregard it, to base his conduct on those things that can be relied on acts, with no nonsense about them.

This disregard of the moon principle of relatedness through feeling has led to a great deal of conflict and unhappiness between men and women.

For the man disregards it, while it is the woman's basic principle.

On account of this disregard of feeling a man can live in the most unattractive surroundings.

So long as his furniture is solid and useful, he does not care if it offends the eye.

But for a woman this is exactly the thing that matters most.

If a chair or a table has a feeling value for her she will keep it even if it is most impractical, so that it is always being knocked over or is too delicate to be sat on.

But to her facts are of little importance when it is a question of the atmosphere of a room!

In the more direct matters of relationship between men and women even more havoc has been wrought by this disregard of the moon, or one might say of the Eros side, which is the principle of relatedness through feeling.

In our Western civilization we pay no attention to this.

In other civilizations, however, recognition has been given to this difference between men and women.

There is an old Persian book on the Art of Love, many hundreds of years old.

It contains much of the old lore on the subject of lovemaking, and great attention is paid in it to the correct ways of approaching the lady.

Regulations are laid down for each day of the moon.

Only by following these directions minutely could the lover hope to gain the favour of his beloved.

On one day of the moon a caress with the tips of his fingers on her right cheek was prescribed.

On another she should be kissed this way, on a third that, and so forth.

This old book contains a drop of profound wisdom.

In the ancient Persian ritual it was projected to the outer world, so that these regulations were referred to the moon in the sky.

But we must understand this psychologically.

A man should woo his own feeling with as careful a regard to the particular phase of his own inner moon as this Persian book prescribes.

Further he should observe as strict regulations about his approach to the woman.

For the phase of the moon that she happens to be under is not a matter that she can control, however willing she may be, but nevertheless it dominates the situation.

Closely associated to this aspect of the moon-symbolism is the difference in quality between the sun’s light and the moon’s.

The Sun’s light is bright, warm, glowing and dry, while the moon's light is soft and cold, giving warmth to no man; further the moon is moist, for on moon-light nights dew falls.

The sun shines by its own light, the moon but by reflected light, just as we hear the constant complaint that woman has no ideas of her own, she only reflects man's thoughts.

But the moon is and we have to reckon with it.

These characteristics of brightness, heat, and dryness on the one hand and coldness, darkness, and moistness on the other have been gathered up by the Chinese into their great concepts of Yang and
Yin, male and female.

One of the men members of the group writes, "The moon seems to me an especially feminine being.

This impression is produced by its smooth light and the fact that it is to be seen in the night, that is, in mystical circumstances."

This is a strange remark, for women are to be seen in the day just as much as men are.

Yet we all know what he means.

The thing that is peculiarly feminine does shine only in the night, that is to say when the light of the sun is removed, and man's work and activity are laid aside.

That is why it is so difficult to talk about the moon-symbolism.

For, as the Chinese sage Lao-tse said about Tao, "The Tao that is talked about is not the true Tao,"6so one might just as well say, "The feminine essence, when it is talked about, is no longer the true feminine essence."

As Dr. Jung once put it: "Yin is like a mother-of-pearl image hidden in the deepest recesses of the house."

The moon's light is cold.

But we are not accustomed to think of a woman as being cold and a man hot.

We generally think of a man as being relatively without feeling, that is, cold, and a woman warm.

But we have to remember that while a man can be cold and calculating on the thinking or business side, there is also a type of woman who can be terribly cold and calculating while apparently living on the feeling side.

It is relatively rare to find a man who is not touched to warmth on the erotic side, but there are whole classes of women who are as cold as icebergs and as calculating as stockbrokers even while they are living on the erotic side.

The moon symbolizes this aspect of woman which, in spite of its lack of warmth, is so terribly attractive to men.

The more the woman is outside the game oflove, playing it as a game, the more effectively does she play her role of siren, and the more likely is it that the man will get hopelessly enmeshed.

It was, of course, known from the most remote times that woman in her actual physical makeup is in some way related to the moon, with her mooncycles of menstruation.

Thus we find menstrual taboos that have been put upon woman throughout the ages.

Primitive man felt that at such times the woman was peculiarly under the influence of the moon and was therefore especially dangerous.

At that time even her shadow falling on a man's path could lure him away from his business.

So that it was said among the North American Indians that the shadow of a menstruating woman would destroy the efficacy of the war bundle, or cause food to go bad, or frustrate the object of a journey.

The taboo on women is carried to its greatest extreme under Islam, where the crescent moon stands as the symbol of the whole religious culture.

Here women are not only secluded during menstruation, but must live their whole lives behind the veil.

It is as though in the Islamic system woman is only known in her moon aspect and is therefore dangerous at all times.

In accordance with this we find that Islam teaches that woman has no soul of her own.

The Prophet says: "The woman is a man's garment."

That is, she is recognized only as the personification of the man's anima, and is accorded a place in heaven only as the spouse of her husband.

It is interesting to note further that, whether as cause or effect, women in seclusion in harems and zenanas do as a matter of fact live only for the erotic side of life.

The next quality of the moon that we notice is her ability to give men strange ideas.

She insinuates ideas, intuitions, and fantasies which are not at all in accordance with intellectual standards, but are strange, bizarre, and are filled with a peculiar emotion and intoxicating delight.

This is seen in the soma drink, which came from the moon-tree and caused intoxication, ecstasy, and fantasies of a compelling charm.

This is the Indian and Iranian form of the legend, but we have the same thing in our own language, where we speak familiarly of lunacy, or of being moon-struck, or of a thing being moonshine when it is the wildest fantasy.

In slang speech we even speak of moonshine liquor, a spirit which generally contains wood alcohol, whose chief characteristic is that it produces a crazy drunkenness which may even go on to actual madness.

So that besides standing for woman in her harlot aspect, the moon must stand also for that other strange kind of thinking, which is not to be controlled by man's rational laws.

For the moon, even as the sun, is high in the heaven and is not amenable to our commands.

This kind of thinking which goes of itself, which is not under the sway of logic, does not originate in a man's head.

Rather it rises from the lower depths of his being and befuddles his head, like the intoxicating drink, soma.

Such thinking comes from those centres in the abdomen which Dr. Jung was talking about in connection with the cauldron.

A man would say that such thinking is a sort of womanish thinking, and that that is the confused way a woman thinks most of the time.

But a woman would say that when she thinks this way she is likely to be right, while when she thinks in her head, the way a man thinks she is likely to be wrong or at all events unproductive.

But a man feels that when he thinks this way there is something awfully inferior about it, something uncanny and somehow not quite clean.

But these ideas, formed under the moon, have a power and compelling quality that ideas originating in the head rarely have.

They are like the moon, they grow of themselves, they demand an outlet, and if you do not give them a suitable one they may well produce moon-madness.

For the children of the moon must come to birth just as surely as physical children.

The next aspect of the moon that we must consider is her dual quality, which has already been brought out in the myths of the dark moon which replaces the light moon, and even more clearly in the stories of the moon goddesses, who on the one hand are the mothers of vegetation and all

living things, and on the other hand destroy their own productions with unfailing regularity and callousness.

This aspect is most clearly depicted in the many stories of the virgin mothers whose sons are their lovers and are condemned to die each year, often by the mother's own edict.

This dual quality is shown in certain old pictures, where we have the crescent moon, or a moon-goddess flanked by two animals, a pair of opposites, who are either worshipping her or fighting for her.

I will pass round a sketch of a Phoenician sacred moon-tree with its animal worshippers and its legend, "There is the home of the mighty mother who passes across the sky."

And to compare with it a reproduction of one of the Cluny tapestries.

There we see the Virgin or Diana with her animals all around and the two animals who attend her with their crescent standards.

The tapestries represent the senses, hearing, seeing, tasting, feeling, and smelling, and this one of which I show you the picture.

It is called "Mon seul desir" and obviously refers to the sixth sense, sexuality.

We get the same idea of the dual quality of the moon in a more metaphysical form in the various legends that the dead go to the moon when they die.

From there, in one form of the legend, the redeemed are carried on to the sun, from whence they pass in the eternal flame to the highest heaven, while those who are not accounted worthy are returned to earth for another incarnation.

In this legend the idea is expressed that man's judge will not be a reasonable logical Being, whom a man could trust.

On the contrary man will be judged by just this irrational, unaccountable factor that he strives so hard to ignore.

For man is not complete without that other side that is represented by the moon.

This has already been illustrated in the Chinese picture of the sage that I passed round at the beginning of the paper.

But to go back to the moon's dual quality.

She is dark and she is light; she is good and she is evil; she is source of all the earth and she is destruction of all; she brings health and she causes sickness.

As was said of Ishtar, "She is the divine Astarte, the strength, the life, the health of men and gods; and at the same time she is Evil, Death, and Destruction."

When we seek a modern interpretation of this material we recognize that the upper world ruled over by the white moon belongs to our conscious life, while the underworld where the black moon is queen is the unconscious.

The moon-gods and goddesses who move between the two worlds function as mediators.

Their two-faced qualities of fruitfulness and destruction, of justice and truth offset by fickleness and deceit, reappear today in the personifications of anima and animus described by Dr. Jung as functions of relatedness between the conscious and unconscious world of man.

But this is one aspect of the problem only.

For while to the man the moon may be considered as a symbol of his anima, who so often carries his Eros values, to the woman the moon represents her very inmost being.

So that we need to go a stage further in our attempt to interpret the meaning of the symbol.

For we should fall into the same error as the Mohammedans if we consider woman only as a personification of man's anima.

The majority of you will, I am sure, agree with me when I maintain that a woman has a life in her own right, and that, to herself at any rate, she is by no means only the reflection of man's unconscious qualities.

The Great Mother-Moon-Goddesses were all considered as the givers of sexual love. They were served in their temples by sacred harlots.

Their rites were dark and unspeakable, and were generally celebrated at midnight with orgies of intoxication and sexuality, and sometimes with infant sacrifices. To us this sounds anything but religious.

What were the ancients after? What did they mean by all this?

We catch a glimpse of its inner meaning when we turn to the mystics of Islam.

They took love in its various stages of Rida, Satisfaction; Shavq, Longing; and Uns, Fellowship or Intimacy, as the outwardly lived dramatic representation of Union with Godjust as we in our Christian ritual have sacraments of Baptism, Communion, yes, and even marriage, which are outwardly lived dramatic representations of the stages of initiation, whose goal is Union with God.

There was a great woman mystic of Islam, Rabi'a, who lived about the eighth century A.D.

She said in regard to the third stage of love, namely Intimacy:
"I have made Thee (God) the Companion of my heart,
But my body is available for those who desire its company,
And my body is friendly towards its guests,
But the Beloved of my heart is the guest of my soul."

This is the attempt to obtain transformation from the concrete, the material, into the unseen, the spiritual.

As the sacred book of the Chinese says in the homily on the Cauldron: "All that is visible must grow beyond itself, extend into the realm of the invisible.

Thereby it receives its true consecration and clarity and takes firm root in the cosmic order.

Here we see as it reaches its culmination in religion.

But this attempt to obtain transformation is made by the approach of the downward-going road, while the cross leads us by the upward-going road.

As Christ said: "If I be lifted up I will draw all men unto me." But this road of the crescent leads downwards.

Yet it also leads to transformation.

As has been said by the Gnostics: "To go up or to go down, it is all the same."

Or as William Blake said: "It matters little whether a man takes the right road or the wrong one, provided only that he follows it sincerely and devotedly
to the end, for either road may lead him to his goal."

So we see that the moon stands for the great principle of transformation through the things that are lowest.

Things that are dark and cold and moist, things that hide from the light of day and from man's enlightened thinking, hold also the secret of life, that renews itself again and again, until at last, when man understands, he may grasp the inner meaning which has been till then hidden within the very texture of the concrete happening.

In the past when a transformation of this kind was sought, the mystery religions prescribed a ritual of initiation.

In Egypt the initiate was ritually put to death and was reborn through the power of Osiris and proclaimed "Son of the Sun."

A similar transformation may take place under the moon, only here the rebirth is on the Eros side, not on the Logos side, and the initiate will be called "Daughter of the Moon."

I can give you two modern instances of this type of initiation, both cases of young men.

The first was a young man who dreamed that there was a crescent-shaped piece of land which belonged to his father and which had fallen back into a condition of wilderness.

The task was laid on him, in his dream, to redeem this piece of property.

He knew it would be an exceedingly difficult task as it was marshy land and the haunt of dangerous snakes.

He awoke with the sense of a weighty task ahead.

Before the end of the week he was suddenly stricken with a serious illness.

During his delirium he was continually concerned with the reclaiming of the piece of land.

He was also most anxious to be told about the phases of the moon during the three or four weeks that he lay at death's door.

There was as a matter of fact a new moon on the night he was taken ill.

When he finally recovered he had gained an entirely new attitude to life both on the erotic and creative side. This was his initiation under the moon.

The second example is illustrated by a picture. (On account of the difficulty of reproducing this picture,

Dr. Harding supplies this description.)

Above is a temple.

In the middle is the Holy Stone of the Highest, represented by a greenish square. Around it are the inscriptions of ancient priests, who formerly sacrificed in the temple.

A sacrifice has just taken place there, and the blood-stained fleece of the sacrificed animal is stretched on the ground before the altar.

Below is a dark cavern. "That is the place where no one goes."

On the floor is the blood-stained dagger with which the sacrifice was accomplished.

Below this is a river which leads to a deeper, unknown underworld.

The picture was drawn by a young man of who was in bed after a painful operation performed without an an aesthetic, which had caused a good deal of both physical and emotional shock.

In the days immediately after the operation his relation to his mother was quite peculiar.

It was almost as if he had become a little boy again.

He could not get on without her and clung to her for support in this rather terrible experience.

Then one day he asked for pencils and paper and made the drawing which I have just described.

He was quite naive about it. He did not know that it had any psychological meaning.

At first he would not talk about it, but later he gave the following explanation.

He said: "It is all inside a mountain. Above is a temple. A sacrifice has taken place there, and the fleece of the sacrificed animal is stretched on the ground before the altar. Below is a dark cavern, that is the place where no one goes."

After he had drawn this picture his relation to his mother underwent a complete change.

He came out of his regression and was himself again.

That was all he said about it.

But clearly the operation has appeared in the unconscious as a sacrifice.

While he himself is the victim.

He has been slain as a lamb and his skin is stretched out on the ground.

Psychologically that means he, as his mother's little lamb, has been slain.

This is his initiation into manhood.

From now on he can no longer take refuge behind her skirts, he is a man, she can no longer make excuses for him.

During the period when he was dead as it were, he went again into his mother's womb to be born.

This shows in consciousness as his regression to childlike dependence on her.

But what will be born out of this ritual death?

That we see in the depths of the mountain-the place where no one goes-the deepest levels of the unconscious.

Here we see a crescent moon arising, with the star between its horns.

That means that out of this initiation experience he will gain a new light in his sky, the light of Eros.

No longer will his mother carry all his Eros values and his anima-these he must seek for himself, individually, in his relations to women outside the family.

It is as though for him woman was born out of this experience.

And to himself there comes a single star, unity, the star that is between the sun and the moon.

The promise of the solution for him of the problem of man's duality with which we started this paper.

In the woman’s psychology the moon plays a somewhat different role.

Here the problem is not one of grasping by conscious effort and strife the Eros values projected in the outer world, but rather of accepting the moon principle within herself, and of being accepted as Daughter of the Moon.

It is a question of getting her own Eros principle into its rightful place as the ruler of life.

For in our Western civilization women are brought up under masculine laws and ways of functioning, while the moon and all she symbolizes has fallen into disrepute.

So that, with women, to be brought under the moon by initiation (or analysis) resembles a sort of re-crystallization of her whole being.

In this picture drawn by a woman you get the idea that her whole structure is changing into the direction of the moon rays,

which are passed through her almost like lines of force, so that for the future she will function as a moon-woman.

She will not try to solve her problems as a man does, after the pattern of the sun with its hours of conscious effort followed by hours of sleep and oblivion, but will accept the fact that even while the moon is there in the sky it may be only partly there, or even entirely dark.

So that her solution will always have something equivocal about it. It will be both dark and light.

She will solve the problem of duality in a fashion that differs from the man's solution, for she must make manifest in her own being the dual character of the dark-light moon.

Dr. Jung: Now that you have heard Dr. Harding's most interesting report, you can realize what an extraordinarily difficult chapter in our psychology the moon represents.

The last time, we dealt with the sun and reduced it to a positive principle.

Outwardly this symbol is embodied by the visible sun and inwardly by the cross, the most ancient vision of man.

Today in discussing the moon, we approach a sphere infinitely dark, not only figuratively, but really.

The moon is the ever-changing light of the night, the nocturnal sphere of human experience.

You remember that I told you last week of the African Negroes greeting the rising sun.

In the same way they salute the waxing moon, that first silver hemicycle in the evening sky.

They offer their souls to the waxing moon because that is also a hopeful sign, while the waning moon is the reverse.

Primitive man has a marked day-psychology and a night-psychology, as well as a religion of the day and a religion of the night.

Day is benign while the night is fraught with evil. In the majority of primitive religions, there is a pale deity of a beneficent kind, perhaps even a trinity, but that is a bit far away and usually there are minor gods, more humanized and closer to them.

Then, besides, there is always a nocturnal cult to which magic belongs.

The nocturnal element has sometimes been taken up into a very severe ritual form, as in the Catholic Church, where the "dark" magic is transformed into "white" magic.

Night is felt as dangerous and full or fears.

One sees nothing and cannot defend oneself.

The night is peculiarly animated by things that one only vaguely senses and that one would not feel in the daytime.

There are ghosts and witches and sorcerers about-nocturnal uncanny influences.

That fear of the dubious things in the darkness is to a certain extent banished by the waxing moon, which rises as the sun sets.

The night is illumined by the benevolent moon, milder and less impressive than the sun, but beneficent.

On the other hand, the waning moon is felt as unfavourable.

It predicts evil and destruction.

It is the time of ghosts, when all is dark, it is an opportunity for ghosts and fear.

It rises later and later, and the night sets in without light, so that everything undertaken under the waning moon is appointed to decay, it is sterile from the beginning.

One finds this feeling everywhere in the customs of the people.

The Swiss peasants won't plant their crops in the time of the waning moon because the seeds won't grow; seeds
must be put in under the waxing moon.

Even my mother never washed the mother of vinegar in the time of the waning moon, for then it would die: there must be a waxing moon for it to be favourable.

Rationally, all of this hangs together with the millions of years-old impression of primitive man that fear is banished by the rising moon.

While on the wane, it means extinction and death, a time when ghosts have power, and man is perfectly defenseless.

So, from the very beginning of time, the moon has had a double meaning, it is exceedingly ambiguous in character, while the sun has only the one meaning.

The moon has, then, both a beneficent and a malevolent aspect, as Dr. Harding has mentioned. It produces illness and healing, and it produces madness and healing of the mind.

And not only has it a good and a bad influence on the health, but it has a double sex character.

You see this duality in languages, it would be quite a study in philology to classify the moon as to sex.

In the majority of cases it is felt to be feminine, but there are a good many exceptions.

The masculine moon-god has a particular geographical distribution, he is found chiefly in Asia Minor, from the Black Sea down to Egypt, and also on the Greek islands.

There is evidence of one in Green in the third century B.C. but be had also feminine attributes he meant water, dew, rain, and moisture; he was the god of oracles, of ripening fruit, and also he was helpful in war, a healing god, ruling over health and disease.

There was a temple in Karon where the moon-god was worshipped and, connected with that, a medical academy under his patronage.

One of his functions was to gather souls after death.

He was termed "the gate of the soul after death."

These qualities are not only characteristic of the masculine moon-god but of all moon ideas, and it is interesting that, even in the etymology of the word "moon," some of these peculiarities come out in different languages.

The word is derived from three different roots:

euchten, to light; Latin luna, Iranian Zou, luan. men, as name for the moon-in Iranian mi; North Breton miz; Sanskrit mas, Greek mene.

3. men, a different root meaning "measure"-Gothic mena; Assyrian mano; Anglo-Saxon mono.

The German word for "month," Monat, comes from this root, as also the French le mois.

Here one sees something very characteristic of the moon, namely, we must assume that such root-words date from time immemorial, from primordial man, who connected the changes of the moon
with the idea of measure.

Primitive man connected the moon with mental activity also, and so he thought of the mind as coming from the moon.

The first notion of measuring time comes from the phases of the moon.

The solar measure came later.

We must think about this first connection between the moon and mind, which Dr. Harding has pointed out.

I would like to give you other instances.

Some light is to be found in Hindu and Sanskrit literature, where the old philosophers obviously found out about this peculiar connection.

There is a Sanskrit text: "Then in the centre, with 'This one, above, the mind'; above, doubtless, is the moon; and as to why he speaks of him as 'above,' the moon is indeed above, and as to why he says: 'the mind,' the mind doubtless is speech, for by means of speech everything thinks here. The moon, having become speech, remained above."

This is an example of the peculiarity of the ancient Hindu mind, which was always in doubt whether things were, or whether it thought they were.

They said: if you think a thing, it is.

The moonmind, in other words, creates; or, as Dr. Harding has put it very poetically, moon children are as real as real children. Man's mind today is not that at all.

We could say that our minds formulate, but we couldn't say that the products of the mind are facts, nor that something definite has been created because someone thinks something.

To a primitive, when he thinks a thing, then it is, or becomes.

His mind is not abstract, it is not yet differentiated.

Here is another Sanskrit text: "Now when that fire goes out, it is wafted up in the wind, whence people say of it, 'it has expired,' for it is wafted up in the wind. And when the sun sets it enters the wind, and so does the moon, and the quarters are established in the wind, and from out of the wind they issue again. And when he who knows this passes away from this world, he passes into the fire by his speech, into the sun by his eyes, into the moon by his mind, into the quarters by his ear, and into the wind by his breath, and being composed thereof, he becomes whichever of these deities he chooses and is at rest."

From these examples you can see that we are not just making a conscious analogy, even these early philosophers realized it.

Mrs. Fierz: What is "mind" in German?

Dr. Jung: Ah, there is a great difficulty. We have no word in German to express the equivalent of the English word "mind."

I often use "mind" when talking German.

The word Verstand does not render the meaning, that is not really Germanic, it is half a Latin word, it is the intellect.

There is no such word in the German language; to translate this word "mind," you must give a whole definition.

Our only help is the Latin mens, from which is derived the French mentalite.

Miss Wolff' The word Vernunft from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason?

Dr. Jung: That means reason, not mind.

Dr. Harding: One might say mind or consciousness on the ideational side.

Dr. Baynes: In mind there is a connotation of purposive activity.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is perhaps the best suggestion-the intellectual process, consciousness with purposive contents.

It is not emotional, nor mere imagery.

When you take the German word "Sinn" in its poetical form "Du hist im Herzen, du hist im Sinn," It gives the concept of the mind.

In dealing with psychological subjects, one gets into tough places with the meanings of words.

So in that connection of the moon with mind, one mustn't understand mind in the modern philosophical sense.

It is the mind purely in its original meaning.

We can use that hint of purposive content that Dr. Baynes has given us, Primordial man projected this upon the moon.

Now, this most important conception comes from the fact that man had the best opportunity to discover mind in the night when impressions of external reality vanished and when his own subjective
functions could manifest themselves unaffected by objective stimuli.

So the moon is naturally connected with fantasies, with lunacy.

Hence the old superstition that the poisonous rays of the moon pierce the brain, and one wakes up with a mad dream, or one is mad.

In the Middle Ages, the witches used a magic mirror.

They put it out in the moonshine for a certain number of nights that it might be impregnated by the moon's rays.

Then they gave it to some one whom they wanted to harm and the reflected evil rays drove him mad.

This connection of the mind with the moon is very puzzling and of extraordinary importance for our psychology.

I don't want to enter into it now, it is pretty complicated, but we can speak of other aspects, namely, the peculiar changes of the moon, which were most impressive to primitive man.

He attempted an explanation for the changes in the heavenly light, and sometimes these stories are quite interesting psychologically, though usually they have no value for us.

He was so impressed by the moon changes that he projected into the moon something in himself which is analogous, the anima.

But of course the concept of the anima is a very late and a highly abstract one, so we must try to go more to the primitive roots of these things.

I have here a picture of a woman standing in the moon's rays.

There is a tell-tale line of red reaching from the genitals to the head. It shows very well the connection of the moon's rays with blood, linking up the genital to the mental region.

And this picture has another peculiarity. What is that?

Dr. Draper: The curved rays of light.

Dr. Jung: Yes, also an irrational phenomenon. The sun's rays are always straight. What is the explanation?

Dr. Harding: Artistically, it carries out the curve of the moon.

Dr. Deady: It conveys force.

Mrs. Fierz: It suggests a wave.

Dr. Jung: That is right.

The moon permeates the being with a wave.

Now, what effect of the moon do we know that has that wavelike character?

Mrs. Baynes: The tides.

Dr. Jung: Yes, a fluctuation like the tides, which are an expression of the changes of the moon, a sort of tidal wave.

Now the woman who made that picture didn't associate her mystical experience with the waves of the sea, but nevertheless she produced a wave, like the effect of the moon's rays.

Man has a peculiar perception of waves within himself.

This is illustrated in an English metaphor, "a brain-wave" or "a brainstorm."

These are alternations of mood that have a wave-like character.

In French they are called les lunes, in German they would be Launen.

Mood is equivalent to mut in German, which means courage but gumut is the exact opposite opposite of what we mean by mind-today.

It is an emotional reacting mechanism, and so, if not etymologically, surely psychologically, it is linked up with the waves or tides of the moon, causing mental or emotional upsets, peculiar moods.

These are among the most original perceptions in man which he could compare to changes of the moon.

To the primitive man it was far more obvious than to us, and also he was more impressionable.

As to the relation of the moon to the menses in woman, we know that they no longer synchronize with the phases of the moon, although the period is a lunar month.

How that came to pass we don't know, unless we believe in astrology, which says that our structure is connected with the sun and the moon and the planets.

But that is an hypothesis which we cannot prove.

Why should women have a lunar period? An old teacher of mine, a distinguished professor of physiology, made desperate attempts to connect the periodicity of menstruation with the tides and the time
when all life was in the sea.

He went back to the amphibians who lived on the seashore and found very rich food at low tide and very little food in the high spring tide.

The connection was not too clear, and he always got into a bad mood when he was too closely pressed.

The moon was on top of him, he was not on top of the moon.

Science cannot explain this, but that shouldn't hinder us in following up the peculiar connection.

If we follow the idea a bit further, we find that astrology is the psychology of the ancients projected into the heavens, into the most remote bodies.

There are two main principles in a horoscope, the sun and the moon.

The sun has the psychological quality of man's active nature, the moon of man's reacting nature.

In his active nature one would designate his character as willed, voluntary.

In his reacting nature he is passive, merely responding to stimuli.

As a matter of fact, when you meet a man in his lazy hours, as he is at home, for instance, when merely reacting to circumstances, you find that he is quite different from the man in his business hours.

They are two different men; astrology would say that one was his sun character and the other was his moon character.

And the action of the sun and moon are determined by their position in the so-called "houses."

If the sun is in a warm fiery sign, the man is characterized by warmth, impetuousness, sudden anger-an especially vigorous active nature.

When the moon is in a strong position, it points to the more personal, the intimate and unguarded side of the person, it indicates one who is in a very passive condition.

So people's character or fate was read in a very literal way through the position of the sun and moon.

Of course, the more ancient the horoscope, the more projected it was.

Where modern astrology would say, "This man is violent, impetuous, heedless of danger, will plunge into all sorts of indiscretions and will regret it afterwards," the ancients would have said:
"This man will commit murder and his head will be cut off''-or make voyages and be drowned, or he is likely to be assailed by bad people. So what today is taken as a mere psychological factor, in
those days was held to be fate.

I have a collection of old fifteenth-century horoscopes written by the last professor of astrology at a German university, which today would be interpreted quite psychologically.

He made a record of what happened to the men whose horoscopes were drawn.

One was drowned trying to reach England, another was killed by pirates, and others murdered while travelling through a forest, etc.

In those days, a rash word led to manslaughter, but now we gather up our instincts until we have a great bunch of them and then we do something big with them-like a great war!

In former days, they gambled them away in drunken street fights.

We are much worse today as a matter of fact.

So from certain phases of the moon certain fates were derived, and these correspond to reacting attitudes in modern man.

People having such reactive natures are passive, they are parts of nature in mind or mood.

They play parts in which they are surely not the active leaders but more or less the victims, managed by circumstances or by other people, by external and internal stimuli.

They are not quite free.

They are under a dark law.

That is what man feels most in the night, so the moon became the exponent of that side of man's psychology, quite different from the sun psychology.

And because it is so difficult to deal with, the moon is an appropriate symbol; the contradictions and paradoxes of night.

Psychology fits in well with the moon.

As Dr. Harding has pointed out, it is exceedingly difficult to deal with this psychology in rational language, it seems to be violated by that approach.

It is as treacherous as moonlight in masking forms.

Such a psychology represents an indefinite, peculiar condition of mind where a thing may be so and not so at the same time.

All our attempts to define it refer to a condition that is semiconscious, nocturnal. In the night, when the sun goes down, another principle begins to work, and one's whole
psychology becomes influenced by factors not active in the daytime.

So when we speak of the unconscious in terms of the moon, we are really talking about the psyche in a semiconscious state, where things are unclear and contradictory, as unclear as objects seen in
the moonlight where a dog may be confused with a cat.

In the unconscious, opposite things are lying close together.

Peculiar tides are coming up and sinking down.

An approaching unconscious condition can be felt; I have known patients to be sea-sick when the unconscious was activated, or to have vertigo, because of what seems to be a strange wavelike motion, a moon-motion. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminars, Pages 367-389