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

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

Dr. Jung: Then women, thou art forgiven!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why have we neuroses?

The ego consciousness is too narrow.

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

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

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

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

They are manifestations of the psychological non-ego.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carl Jung: But the drama shows the proper function of the animus.

Well, they rode out into the desert till they came to a wigwam, where the Indian went to sleep. The wigwam is the right place for the Indian, he is among his own tribe where he belongs.

He is the natural mind, and instinct has taken him back into his natural conditions.

The animus is not meant to live in the depths of the unconscious, he is meant to live on the surface of the earth.

He must be connected with consciousness, one should always know wwhere he is; when he disappears, any- thing may happen.

That he is in the right place here is shown in the fact that when the dawn broke, he looked out if the tent and beheld three flaming crosses in the sky.

Here the animus functions in the proper way: he must have vision, he must see what is going on in the unconscious; he now informs the conscious that he has seen three flaming crosses, which the conscious does not see.

The vision is like a sort of story, because the conscious ego is still a mere onlooker and has no hand in the game; thus fare the animus and the animals are the active dramatis personae.

But the drama shows the proper function of the animus. It reveals the laws of the unconscious to the spectator.
I said, you remember, that a certain amount of disposable energy is used up in such a vision.

After a while the patient gets tired, and then the Indian goes to sleep, in spite of the fact that thre is still something in the end pointing to a future problem, as is often the case.

These three flaming crosses in the sky indicate that the problem of the Holy Ghost is not completely settled. What would you say about that symbolism? Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 134.

Carl Jung: The idea is that man is the representative of the whole of creation,…

You may remember that passage in St. Paul about the “apokatastasis,” which is this same idea that the whole of nature, all creatures, are expecting the revelation.

As we are expecting the manifestation as the children of god, a revelation of the Holy Ghost within us, so all creation, even the animals and the plants are waiting for it too; that spiritual miracle of redemption or completion which happens in n=man means the crowning of all nature at the same time.

So everything that has been fettered will be released with the liberation of the children of God.

The idea is that man is the representative of the whole of creation, and whatever happens to him happens in a magic way to the whole world.

One finds the same idea among very primitive people.

The members of a totem clan, for instance, undergo certain ceremonials in order to change themselves; and because of that change, the nature of the totem will change also.

The totem animal is also affected in a way; by their getting into a certain psychical conditions, the fertility of the totem animal is assured.

In the center of Australia the growth of grass is exceedingly important, so they have a variety of grass seed as their totem; they perform their rites and the grass-seed totem is responsible for the crops.

And there is a water totem in places where water is very scarce; they believe that through their ceremonies the water totem will secure enough rain and drinking water. So the primitive idea is also the idea of the “apokatasta- sis.”

It is an exceedingly mystical idea.

And as Paul thought, so the unconscious still thinks. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 144.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The natural mind is very apparent in prophetic women.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Jung: That is true.

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

It also means neither male nor female.

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

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

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

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

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

It is the kingdom of things that are not.

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

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

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

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

Carl Jung: People always have some scapegoat.

So for our patient to recognize her own condition is tremendous progress. Hitherto she had thought it was her husband or the devil or circumstances. People always have some scapegoat.

Perhaps it is the parents who dies twenty years before but are still working against one if only twenty years ago such and such a thing had not been said!

That is exteriorizing oneself, seeing the brain storm outside.

Therefore she goes inside, realizing that the storm is in the inner sea, and there makes the discovery that somebody else is sick.

She had always been sick before in a storm herself and lost her morale completely.

In this case seasickness means demoralization through the wrong psychology, the projection of one’s psychology into other people, for one then has no point of view naturally; one doesn’t exist, one is scattered.

In this dream for the first time she is not seasick, because she recognizes, as her action shows, that the storm is in herself.

So the eive conseuences do not touch her but a little boy in the arms of a nurse.

A little lamb was in her arms before, a female lamb, but now it is a little boy, and since the patient really has a little boy, he would symbolize what she has achieved or brought forth so far.

It is something new, and that attempt at a new form of life is seasick, which means that she is shocked, de- moralized.

She attempts to go to her own town, and on the way she receives a severe shock which makes the boy, her honest attempt, seasick.

For a while he is disintegrated; but she is not disintegrated, seasick.

She knows that she is simply checked for the moment, and that is the beginning of objectivity, of a higher quality of consciousness.

Therefore Schopenhauer says that the only divine quality in man is humor, because humor is a consciousness behind consciousness, an ego behind the ego, and observer on a different level who sees what you see and thinks what you think.

And she makes the hopeful statement that this is the first time that she has not been seasick in such weather-the first time she has not been demoralized in a brain storm-which means, as I said, tremendous progress. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 50-51

Carl Jung: The Animus impersonates the unconscious, as the Anima impersonates it in a man’s case.

Dr. Jung:

Yes, those black waters would be the deeper layers of the unconscious.

The animus impersonates the unconscious, as the anima impersonates it in a man’s case. Those figures are as if on the surface of the sea.
One could say the anima was the woman who emerges from the water, like Aphrodite arising from the foam of the sea in a shell.

And the animus is also in a way a spirit that hovers over the black waters and often represented as such; I have two pictures in my collection where the animus is depicted as a huge black bird hovering over the primordial waters.

As an impersonated of the unconscious, the natural function of the amimus here is to establish a communication between the conscious mind and the collective unconscious.

I admit it is somewhat difficult to have a clear idea of these matters, but I think if you find it in any way hard to understand it is on account of your conception of the collective unconscious.

You perhaps understand the collective unconscious intoo abstrace a sense, whereas it is extremely concrete. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 124-125.

Christiana Morgan

She [Christiana Morgan] created mythic visions chronicling her struggle with the feminine and masculine forces in her world.

Christiana Morgan-When Carl Jung met Christiana he considered her the manifestation of the perfect feminine, une femme inspiratrice whose role was to act as a muse to great men.

Jung conducted a seminar, called the "Vision Seminars", analyzing Christiana’s many drawings and dreams. She created mythic visions chronicling her struggle with the feminine and masculine forces in her world.
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Christiana Drummond Morgan (born Christiana Drummond Councilman) (1897–1967) was a lay psychoanalyst at Harvard University best known for her work co-authoring the Thematic Apperception Test, one of the most widely used projective psychological test.

She administered one of the earliest versions of the test to one of the first diagnosed anorexic patients in Boston.

She is mostly remembered as the lover of American psychologist Henry Murray.

The nude portrait statue of Christiana commissioned by Murray from Gaston Lachaise is now owned by the Governor’s Academy, Byfield, Massachusetts. Christiana committed suicide at 69 years of age.

There is some controversy over her death related to Henry Murray’s conflicting accounts, but it is mostly considered a suicide.

Christiana was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 6, 1897. She attended Miss Winsor’s school for girls in Boston from 1908 to 1914 and later a boarding school in Farmington, Massachusetts.

She came of age, a debutante in Boston society and met William Morgan, a young man enlisted to fight in WWI.

William went abroad to war and Christiana stayed behind and received a certificate as a nurses aid after completing a training program at the YWCA in New York City. She served as a nurse during the 1918 Influenza.

Christiana was an artist, writer, and lay psychoanalyst fascinated by the depth psychology.

Part of the Introvert/Extrovert Club in New York City in the 1920s, she traveled to Zurich to consult Carl Jung.

When Carl Jung met Christiana he considered her the manifestation of the perfect feminine, une femme inspiratrice whose role was to act as a muse to great men. Jung conducted a seminar, called the "Vision Seminars", analyzing Christiana’s many drawings and dreams.

She created mythic visions chronicling her struggle with the feminine and masculine forces in her world.

At Harvard University she played a vital role in inventing the Thematic Apperception Test, a way to elicit fan- tasy still used today. The test is considered the most used and researched projective psychological test.

In its early development, the test which consisted of a series of pictures shown to a patient who is asked to make up a story about each picture, many of Christiana’s own drawings were included.

Also, she was cited as co-author with Henry Murray in the first publication of the test. As it was further developed, Christiana’s pictures were taken out as well as her co-authorship.

This is sometimes attributed to her lack of professional credentials.

After a radical sympathectomy surgery for high blood pressure and years of excessive drinking, Christiana Morgan committed suicide at the age of 69 at Denis Bay, St. John, Virgin Islands on March 14, 1967.

She left a Conrad Aiken poem to be read over her grave.

"O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my blest beloved and I, Embrace us well, that we may rest forever, Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky."

Carl Jung: Transformation starts not with the knowledge of who but with what you are.

[Transformation starts not with the knowledge of who but with what you are.] Visions Seminars, C.G. Jung, page 321:

"She sees an old man on the other side of the wall. "I looked into his eyes and saw therein a great river full of writhing bodies.

A few men stood upon the bank and called with a loud voice to the struggling masses in the rushing water.

The water cast a few souls upon the bank. Then the men who stood there lifted them up and showed them a star and a sun.

This I saw in the eyes of the old man. The old man said, "you have perceived" and he sank into the earth. "

The bodies are the individual lives, twisting and turning and writhing themselves into a sort of pattern that dissolves and reforms again and again. It is the river time, of life, in other words.

The men on the bank are the people of detached consciousness, people who are conscious of themselves and of life. And that they call to the struggling masses in the rushing water produces the effect that a few souls are cast upon the bank, they wake up and leave the great river.

Then the men who stand there lift them up and show them a star and a sun.

The star is the individual fate, and the sun means the light of day, and it is also the symbol of the deity.

Consciousness of the individual life and of the deity is the idea."

Carl Jung: Insanity is such an explosion, for instance.

Dr: Jung: That is perfectly true.

The unconscious has no chance of coming into the conscious unless the conscious makes a hole for it to come through.

Prof Demos: Well, how does consciousness first appear?

Dr: Jung: By an explosion-that is the only thing I can imagine.

Insanity is such an explosion, for instance.

The walls of the cave burst and one is overcome by the unconscious.

I assume that through pressure, cracks are made in the walls of the cave through which volcanic vapors from the unconscious well up; that was probably the origin of consciousness.

But that is not the condition here.

Therefore the bird is shut in and cannot escape, although one might have expected her to be far enough advanced to allow the bird to escape.

Here her vision is centered upon the fire and she says: "I saw the fire create small snakes which disappeared."


Now that is why the Hindus call that coiled-up Kundalini snake the serpent fire; it is because of such facts, they have observed such visions.

And that woman, not knowing of Tantric philosophy at all, produces exactly the same mythology.

It is interesting that the phoenix comes out of the fire as well as the snakes, for snakes are decidedly lower, they belong to the earth, they are the opposite of the phoenix.

But we have evidence of that in the Persian version of the phoenix myth.

The bird Semenda was said to burn itself up, but out of the ashes a worm came forth which transformed itself into a bird again.

It is a sort of enantiodromia.

The bird and the snake are natural enemies, but out of the creature which is most unlike a bird, a bird develops.

That the bird cannot come up into consciousness is perhaps due to the fact that her conscious assumes that only snakes are down there, and snakes are supposed to be dangerous and venomous.

But you see the fire produces both; the snakes would be a counterbalance to the harmless bird.

Then she says about the fire: "It also created men and women."

It is an extraordinarily creative fire, it seems to be the creator of the world.

And that agrees exactly with the idea in Tantric philosophy that fire is the creator; out of the first living germ of fire came man and woman. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 410-411

Carl Jung: It seems as if one-half of the world had been made by an engineer and the other half by a foolish poet.

Dr. Adler: There is a custom in Germany of putting children in the rain in spring so that they may grow quicker.

Dr. Jung: Exactly. You see rain in popular superstition is used as a charm, it is magic, and that is not to be rationalized; it is an entirely psychological effect.

You can say that is only a poetic idea, but it is a fact, it is poetic mana.

It seems as if one-half of the world had been made by an engineer and the other half by a foolish poet.

So the giant is strengthening his hair by receiving that mana; it is like watering his flower beds, he is making it grow.

And what about the hair in itself?

Mrs. Deady: In the story of Samson, his hair was his strength.

Dr. Jung: Yes, when his hair was cut he lost his power.

Hair is supposed to be a sign of strength.

Therefore a person with very thick strong hair is assumed to be temperamentally strong, particularly passionate, or brutal, or a sexual hero.

Then the hair has much to do with the head, and therefore people, especially women, have always been very keen about hairdressing.

Primitive women sometimes arrange their hair in a very elaborate way, and not only women, but men also.

One sees in Africa astounding fantasies upon the heads of those people, built up with the aid of clay and wax and all sorts of things. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 313

Carl Jung: Then whatever you learn in analysis will happen to you in reality.

Miss Hannah: How much would it help the patient if she should get back into the body? Would she be able to understand it or would she have to begin all over?

Dr. Jung:

Anything experienced outside of the body has the quality of being without body; so you must experience the whole thing over again, it must come in a new way.

Then whatever you learn in analysis will happen to you in reality.

It must be like that, because you are the point of identity, you are the one that experiences analysis and the one that experiences life.

Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now.

If you just have a dream and let it pass by you, nothing has happened at all, even if it is the most amazing dream; but if you look at it with the purpose of trying to understand it, and succeed in understanding it, then you have taken it into the here and now, the body being a visible expression of the here and now.

For instance, if you had not taken your body into this room, nobody would know you were here; though even if you seem to be in the body, it is by no means sure that you are, because your mind might be wandering without your realizing it.

Then whatever is going on here would not be realized; it would be like a vague dream that floats in and out, and nothing has happened. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316.

Dr. : Jung:

Yes, the energy has passed out of the Indian again.

One could say that the generative power was exhausted at the end of the vision.

You should think of this series of visions as sort of spiritualistic seances.

The patient herself called her condition when seeing these images a trance.

Dhyana is the word applied to that state in the East, it has exactly thesame meaning.

You notice in spiritualistic seances that there is always a great deal of talk about a certain power created by thought, which is stored up and used by the spirits to manifest in moving physical bodies through space, as tables are lifted into the air, for instance.

That is all done by a strange power of an almost physical nature, which is supposed to be part of the medium as well as of other participants of the seance.

Very interesting experiments have been made in order to find out the nature of the power, but it is most mysterious, most elusive; though we have very definite facts, we are still far from understanding it.

We would say it was libido, a form of psychological energy.

Of course, psychological energy does not exist, it is a concept, but in the physical or phenomenal equivalent of energy in these conditions we find the same peculiarity,
namely, that this creative power is after a while exhausted, and then everything sinks back into the condition it was in before.

So only for a time can the Indian assume human form, say, or creative, autonomous activity, and then it dissolves.

At the end of the vision before, the bowing down to the ground might be just as well the disappearance into the ground, which means into the body; that generative power is again dissolved into the physiological process, as if it had never existed.

And then in the next dhyana or trance condition it comes up again in its animal form, as it was in the ram.

The ram is chthonic; it symbolizes the fertility of the earth.

The ram appears also in the Hindu system as the lord of the fire zone.

And according to old astrological tradition, it is associated with the planet Mars, which is supposed to be fiery and impulsive, manifesting suddenly.

That form was checked by the animus, but here the creative force is again appearing in the animal form.

This time it is a bird. What would that denote? ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 118-119

From now on the visions will be rather more like real experiences.

She will be more active in them, she is part of the mystery play, and this happens in the moment when the Indian comes down the hill and drinks the water.

Before, he was high up on the rock, but now he descends into the deeper layers of the unconscious until he comes to the spring of life, one could say.

He leaves the divine-mystery sphere and comes down to the sources of the libido, which are deep in the body.

He becomes almost physical and in that way he wakes her up; there he catches her-that was the key he inserted in drinking the water.

That is an old symbol: drinking from the magic well has a transforming effect; it bestows all sorts of magic qualities upon one.

By drinking from a certain well women became pregnant.

And you remember the symbolism of the well where the woman of Samaria came to draw water, and where Jesus offered the living water.

In this case, by going down toward the earth, down into the body, and drinking the water, the Indian establishes a moment of communication between the sources of life and himself, and so he brings her in.

You see, that would again be something like bringing the egg to the mother, and also like the grain that comes from the earth. For she now enters the mystery play, and apparently she is veiled. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 147

Carl Jung: The relation to the snake is a chthonic mystery.

[Carl Jung on the “Black Snake.”]

Dr. Jung:

Last time we were talking about the black snake.

Today we are going to look into its further fate.

After our patient had swallowed the snake, she emerged from the cave, which means that she came up from the darkness of the unconscious where that happened.

The relation to the snake is a chthonic mystery.

I told you a similar rite was celebrated at Eleusis where the initiate had to kiss the snake, and in the antique mysteries of Sabazios the snake was passed through the garment at the neck and pulled out below, symbolizing the same procedure-swallowing the snake, the descent of the snake through the body.

Now we are not sure what should happen to that snake, whether it should remain in the body, or whether it should be digested, pass through the body and come out again.

It would then be a sort of rebirth mystery such as is celebrated in India to cure a sick man: a cow is made of leather, and the man is pushed into the mouth of the cow and pulled through the belly and out again, so he is reborn.

It is like that sort of rebirth clinic which still exists in Cornwall: there are two menhirs standing about as far apart as the length of this room, and in between is a huge slab of rock with a manhole in it, big enough for me to just squeeze myself through.

And it still happens that in the night of the new moon, farmers draw their sick babies through the hole in order to cure them.

That is a rite of rebirth which is used as a cure, as sick people were given new names for that purpose.

And there was a case in north Germany where two trees had grown together in such a way that a Yoni-shaped space was in between them, through which a sick person was pulled.

Or he was pulled through a hole made in the wall at the head of his bed.

And to cure cattle disease, they drove the cattle between two oak poles that were on fire.

So the human individual might in this case be called the birthplace of the snake.

That black snake is the earth factor in man, and we might assume that it is seeking rebirth, or perhaps it penetrates the body as a sort of phallic demon in order to impregnate it, or to transform it.

There are several possibilities-we do not know how the thing will develop.

We cannot find out from Zarathustra because the shepherd did not digest the serpent.

But now we shall see what happened to the serpent in this vision.

She says: "I emerged from the cave, the goat and the white snake accompanying me. We came upon a brilliant disk of gold lying on the ground."

You remember we said that the disk or the pool of gold was presumably below the roots of the tree, sowe could assume that we are here somewhere near the tree.

You also remember that descent from the image of the deity down into the golden pool in the ground symbolizing the sun above.

This is the same golden disk and she says: "The black snake which I had swallowed leapt from my throat and fell upon the golden disk."

The snake comes out all by itself. She does not say that she intentionally vomited the serpent; it simply leapt out ofher and fell upon the golden disk
where, she says: "Instantly it was transformed into a handful ofashes."

Now what can we conclude from that concerning the nature of the golden disk?

~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 290

Carl Jung: ...the dead and buried Self that appears in the pyramid,...

Dr. Jung:

We have further contributions to the diamond symbolism today.

We said last time that the diamond was a carbon crystal, and Dr. Escher now says that it crystallizes in the cubic system, one of the simple forms being a double pyramid, the same above and below.

So the pyramid is really an analogy to the diamond, we were not far from the truth when we drew that parallel.

Then the word diamond-diamant in German and French-derives from the Greek adamas, which means the untamable or the invincible one, and that fits in beautifully with the symbolic meaning of the diamond.

Also it has peculiar magic qualities.

You know magic qualities have always been attributed to precious stones; the amethyst is a protection against drunkenness, for instance, and the diamond has the power of averting insanity and avoiding poison.

In the Middle Ages it was known as the pietra della reconciliazione, the stone of reconciliation,the peacemaker between husband and wife, a very good idea, and then after sixty years they celebrate the diamond wedding. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1351

Now we will go on with our text.

We were speaking last time of the sacrificed animus whose remains were on three sides of the pyramid.

There was the split face of a man, and the man lying face downward on the ground, and a knife from which blood was dripping.

Those are the three symptoms of a slaughter which has taken place, obviously the slaughter of the animus that was left behind.

And the Self that was left behind turned into matter, into a pyramid.

Mrs. Baumann: Does it mean then that the animus and the Self are buried together in the pyramid?

Dr. Jung:

Yes. It is quite certain that it is the dead and buried Self that appears in the pyramid, as the dead pharaoh appears in the form of the pyramid.

That is the last one sees of him because his mummy is walled up inside; the old Egyptians gave a human shape to the sarcophagus itself, the head and face and arms indicating as nearly as possible the shape of the king, and then they built that outward sign over him.

Evidently the animus does not enter the pyramid-shrine altogether, because those remains of him are still outside, but there is apparently very little life left in them, so we may assume that his life also is buried within the pyramid.

When the kind of relation to the Self which the patient has had



Those remains of the animus in the vision are still visible, then, because you cannot get rid of the animus, which means that you cannot get rid of your own opposite, the other voice; just as you can never get rid of mankind, or of the object, it is always there, whatever it is.

So our patient has to do something about it and she says:

I seized the knife and where the knife had been, appeared a human hand with blood dripping from the finger.

With the knife I cut off the hand.

Evidently the hand comes out of the pyramid-bad symbolism you see.

The living being to which that hand belonged is the animus.

Cutting off the hand is a great mutilation, so she mutilates whatever life is left in the form of the animus.

Now she says:

Then I struck the pyramid with the knife. It crumbled away and I saw, standing where it had been, a man.

There he comes!

The pyramid is the visible sign of the Self that once has been, or the king who once has lived, and she now destroys the pyramid.

It is obviously a magic act of destruction, and she does it with the knife.

That means what?

Miss Hannah: With the logos.

Dr. Jung: Logos is too beautiful, too ecclesiastical. I should say it was the intellect, the discriminating mind, an acute mind, sharp like a knife; she cuts in with her mind, and so she destroys the pyramid.

That is what we do; we have destroyed those things with our minds so they now mean nothing to us except historical remains.

And we have developed an almost morbid mania for preserving remains, as a compensation for their lack of meaning; we do not understand them, and instead we have a sort
of historic sentimentality and preserve them indiscriminately.

Certain archaeological collections are really ridiculous, they preserve old poles and God knows what.

There is a collection in Switzerland which contains the most absurd things; they did not know what they were, but I knew, having a good power of fantasy and having had the subject suggested by one of my old teachers.

You see, those things were connected with a serious question, as I learned when I went to Africa.

Suppose you come to the desert and nothing grows there but cactus and you have a human need, what can you do?

That was a great question in antiquity; they had no paper you see.

An old professor of Latin used always to put that question to us boys: what do you think they did about it in antiquity?

Did they use newspaper?

But there was no paper, only papyrus, and that was an exceedingly expensive substance which had to be fetched from Egypt and paid for very heavily.

Linen?

That was also expensive.

Leaves?

But in a town or in the desert there were no leaves.

What did they do then?

So he said they always carried a little bag filled with gravel; ordinary people had just ordinary gravel and the rich people had marble.

Of course that was his joke, but they did have little sticks for that purpose.

There is a place in Zurich where there were Roman barracks, half a legion was stationed there, and in the outlets for the drainage, they found any number of those little sticks and didn't know what they were.

And those things were preserved, along with old drainage pipes and old bottles and God knows what nonsense, in a museum two thousand years afterwards just because they were old. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1362-1363

Dr. Jung:

Yes, he takes root, he becomes one with the earth, as it were.

So he is in danger of becoming nothing but an earthbound being.

That comes from the fact that the patient is occupied all the time with the descent into the world, and the man she meets there is the same, her opposite is also growing into the earth and becoming formless.

He said:

"You have liberated me from the pyramid. Can you now give me my limbs? Can you free them and shape them?" I answered: "Wait." I went away from him and sat alone wondering how I could free the man. At length I arose and said to him: "I must sever you from the earth."

He cried out: "If you cut me off I will bleed to death."

You see, the idea here is that something ought to be done about it.

That man is about to grow into the earth, in which case he would be completely lamed, he would become a tree perhaps, unable to move from the spot. And she seems to feel a certain responsibility about it, that it should be prevented.

What is the danger? ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1364

Carl Jung: But I firmly believe in the natural magic of facts.

Mr. Baumann: It would be like the Augurs in ancient Rome who read portents and made prophecies from the entrails of the sacrificed animals.
When they met each other in the street, they smiled as if with a secret understanding.

Dr. Jung: On that higher level it would be cynicism, but on a lower level it would be an apotropaic gesture against the forces with which they were dealing.

You know the making of a medicine man is a very painful process, particularly among the Eskimos.

They hang him up by the feet in a leather sack for twenty-four hours, they do all sorts of things to drive him mad in order to force a hole for the unconscious to enter.

Medicine men are really deadly afraid of the unconscious, those unknown psychical powers, but in order to give themselves a certain professional feeling about it as if they were able to control those forces, they assume that the whole thing is nothing but bunk, quite easily dealt with.

Yet at the bottom of their hearts they are most hellishly afraid of the whole procedure.

This is merely one way by which the medicine man, by a sort of tour de force, screws himself up above the dangers of his profession.

One sees something very similar frequently in analysis, in the way certain analysts deal with the problem of the transference in Freudian literature, for instance. "Then comes the stage where the transference will be dissolved"-as if it would be.

Whoever has faced this problem knows that is all bunk, it is simply the smile of the medicine man.

We are allquite above that problem: "It is a perfectly simple thing, we just dissolve it, we know the twist, it is only a sort of tour de passe-passe. "

But that is all simply getting up courage before the other medicine man and oneself.

You see he believes secretly that I can do it, and I believe secretly that he can do it.

It is like the primitives who know that their own medicine man is very ordinary and can do little, so when anyone is seriously ill, they naturally call in the medicine man of the tribe beyond the mountain.

I know of a case where a white man who was inquiring about magic rituals was actually informed by the tribe that they were not good at magic, it was too difficult for them, but on that island over there they knew all about it.

So he went there and those people said the same thing, that the people on the first island were good at it.

And this happens in these most advanced minds of modern psychology, it is still the same old trick; nobody dares to admit how little he can do, and therefore he must say
that he can do quite a lot, that he can even dissolve a transference in order to raise his consciousness above the problem.

But his consciousness is by no means above it, it is in participation mystique, inasmuch as it is not in the least clear to him how it can be dissolved.

He knows very well that the thing cannot be done in the way he thinks it should be done; he simply makes a sort of doctrine about it that will lift his consciousness just one point above, fortifying it and fastening it there by a certain superior air, in order to defend himself against the difficulties and the dangers of the real problem.

In the second stage where there is more consciousness and therefore less participation mystique, it becomes impossible to work magic because one is no longer in contact with those powers.

That is the case with us, or with any other advanced civilization where people have discovered efficient ways of dealing with the problems of life-with the economic problems, or with disease, war, etc.

They then develop a sort of quiet certainty of consciousness; they live in an established civilization, where everyone with, so they allow themselves to be quite rational; and in the course of centuries, through following a certain routine, they really become so.

We discovered that it paid to be rational, so we got into a sort of positivistic and optimistic attitude which was characteristic of the nineteenth century.

Everything was all right, things were generally in a progressive condition, and as we progress naturally from the good to the better, so in the future things would become still better; we should uproot evil in every form, and even improve the criminal.

We aimed at a more or less perfect condition, it only needed time.

This is the unnatural rationalistic attitude which always develops in times when things seem to run smoothly.

But the moment the unconscious was shaken up so that problems came up which we could not deal with, as in the World War, we became uncertain of our ways, we were no longer so optimistic and we did not believe to the same extent in the powers of good.

And the subsequent events have shown us that there are even much greater powers which do not work for the good-the incredible fact of Soviet Russia, for instance; the incredible fact of the National Socialists in Germany; and the incredible fact that, with all nations wanting disarmament, they still could not make up their minds to disarm.

Nothing was done.

Then there is the utterly miraculous fact that people have learned nothing from the war.


They said, "No more war, we shall do something else, we want to be human," and now look at the damned thing!

We have now had such a series of miraculous experiences that our consciousness is quite different from what it used to be in the nineteenth century.

We begin-of course very slowly-to open our eyes to the fact that there really are powers of evil and that things do not necessarily progress to a better condition-they may regress to hell, and certainly will if we let them go.

So we have attained a higher consciousness, we have scored one point; we are no longer so certain in our convictions, we now allow the deep shadow of humanity to exist, and that means a certain progress; we have at least got our heads above the mist.

That suggests that we should not only manipulate the powers of good as we said before, but we might also manipulate the powers of evil by a superior consciousness, and thereby work some magic.

I do not believe in magic made by man, magic as made in Germany or in Great Britain or in America; it does not work.

But I firmly believe in the natural magic of facts.

I believe in the rain maker of Kiao Tchou-that one should do the right thing to oneself and by oneself, and wait until the rain falls.

Perhaps when that process of doing the right thing in an individual case has been repeated often enough and by as many people as possible, the rain will actually fall, a result will be reached which could not be reached in any other way.

Then another miracle might happen, disarmament might become possible.

But such a thing will never come to pass as long as one tries to work black magic, to pull the wool over one's eyes.

Then you cannot help believing that somebody else is doing it to you, for you could never be so foolish as to think that you are the only intelligent gambler in the world; there will be another one on the other side and he will be afraid too.

So well that other fellows are playing the same kind of game, so nobody trusts anybody and naturally they have to keep up their cannons and ammunitions and poison gases, in case it should become clear that the other ones want what they themselves are after.

The mere thought that one could raise oneself above humanity and pull strings is a black-magic thought which I would utterly discourage.

Put yourself below humanity, and see whether you are just as wrong as mankind in general; do the right thing by yourself and then something can happen, then the rain can fall. That would be the right procedure according to my conviction. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1202-1205

Carl Jung: For the animus when on his way, on his quest, is really a psychopompos, leading the soul to the stars whence it came.

"For the animus when on his way, on his quest, is really a psychopompos, leading the soul to the stars whence it came.

On the way back out of the existence in the flesh, the psychopompos develops such a cosmic aspect, he wanders among the constellations, he leads the soul over the rainbow bridge into the blossoming fields of the stars.

You see, the mythological idea was that man originally came down like a shooting star, a spark of fire, from the infinity of space, and fell into a created form and became a definite isolated little flame.

That gave rise to consciousness which is an isolated light in the night of the infinite spaces.

But when that creation of a human being is fulfilled, the animus does not press on to further generation or shaping of matter.

He begins to detach himself, to fall out again; he goes back to his origin, to the interstellar spaces where he once more walks among the stars.

We don't know whether there is any definite abode there, but according to mythology, the testimony of the consensus gentium, the heavenly mansions, the abode of the souls of the deceased are somewhere out in interstellar space.

It is therefore quite natural that even in very modern people one still encounters the same symbolism- whatever it means.

It is of course metaphorical, but we have no other than symbolic means to express such an idea." ~~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1229.

Carl Jung: First of all, individuation is not an intensification of consciousness, it is very much more.

Dr. Jung: Now here are questions from Mrs. Case. The first one is: "Will you please say a word about that intensification of consciousness which you all individuation?"

First of all, individuation is not an intensification of consciousness, it is very much more.

For you must have the consciousness of something before it can be intensified, and that means experience, life lived.

You can only be really conscious of things which you have experienced, so individuation must be understood as life.

Only life integrates, only life and what we do in life makes the individual appear.

You cannot individuate, for instance, by locking yourself up in a cell, you can only individuate in your concrete life, you appear in your deed; there you can individuate and nowhere else.

Real consciousness can only be based upon life, upon things experienced, but talking about
these things is just air.

It is a sort of conscious understanding, but it is not individuation.

Individuation is the accomplishment through life.

For instance, say a cell begins to divide itself and to differentiate and develop into a certain plant or a certain animal; that is the process of individuation.

It is that one becomes what one is, that one accomplishes one's destiny, all the determinations that are given in the form of the germ; it
is the unfolding of the germ and becoming the primitive pattern that one was born with. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 757-758

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Carl Jung: Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody.

Since the Omniscient looks into all hearts, and Yahweh's eyes "run to and fro through the whole earth," it were better for the interlocutor of the Eighty-ninth Psalm not to wax

too conscious of his slight moral superiority over the more unconscious God.

Better to keep it dark, for Yahweh is no friend of critical thoughts which in any way diminish the tribute of recognition he demands.

Loudly as his power resounds through the universe, the basis of its existence is correspondingly slender, for it needs conscious reflection in order to exist in reality.

Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody.

That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious.

And that is also why Yahweh needs the acclamation of a small group of people.

One can imagine what would happen if this assembly suddenly decided to stop the applause: there would be a state of high excitation, with outbursts of blind destructive rage, then a withdrawal into hellish loneliness and the torture of non-existence, followed by a gradual reawakening of an unutterable longing for something which would make him conscious of himself.

It is probably for this reason that all pristine things, even man before he becomes the canaille, have a touching, magical beauty, for in its nascent state "each thing after its kind" is the most precious, the most desirable, the tenderest thing in the world, being a reflection of the infinite love and goodness of the Creator. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Pages 372-373



Jung says:

The character thus revealed fits a personality who can only convince himself that he exists through his relation to an object.

Such dependence on the object is absolute when the subject is totally lacking in self-reflection and therefore has no insight into himself.

It is as if he existed only by reason of the fact that he has an object which assures him that he is really there.
And then on into the next paragraph where he makes the following remarks:

“Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious. And that is also why Yahweh needs the acclamation of a small group of people. One can imagine what would happen if this assembly suddenly decided to stop the applause: there would be a state of high excitation, with outbursts of blind destructive rage, then a withdrawal into hellish loneliness and the torture of non-existence, followed by a gradual reawakening of an unutterable longing for something which would make him conscious of himself.”

This is a magnificent description of a basic feature of the unconscious, namely its need to be seen.

This is the basic work of analysis: to pour attention into the unconscious so that it can be seen.

And as it is seen, it is appeased.

The outbursts of blind, destructive rage are assuaged when it is seen.

As was mentioned in the discussion period last time, this description is very similar to what's spoken of in clinical terms as narcissism.

In The Creation of Consciousness I report a dream that actually makes that connection explicit.

This is a dream a man had right after reading Answer to Job:

I see a huge ape-like man without a neck. His huge head is attached directly to his shoulders. He is naked and is looking lasciviously. ~Edward F. Edinger, Transformation of the God Image, Page 42

Carl Jung: The innermost substance is a microcosm, as every star is a microcosm.

Dr. Harding: She might cry with the psalmist: "Lead me to the rock that is higher than I."

Dr. Jung: Yes, we have already met such a rock in the vision, and what did we say about it?

You see, it is an overwhelming situation; perhaps the only thing to do is to cling to a passing log and try to keep afloat.

One is pretty desperate.

Now what do people do in such conditions?

Miss Hannah: She would try to find the Self of which she is the object.

Dr. Barker: People usually pray.

Dr. Jung: There you have it.

She says: "I wanted to pray.

Then I knew that I could only pray to my star."

The star is a symbol of her uniqueness.

As stars are unique units in the heavens, so individuals are in a way stars, they are unique units.

The innermost substance is a microcosm, as every star is a microcosm.

The earth is a microcosm in the great cosmos of the stars and we are ourselves microcosms upon the earth.

Each of us, every living being, is a small earth, one could say, because we are in intimate connection with the earth, we are partially earth, we are conscious of our
earthly body, for instance.

The star symbol means the center of a mandala, and the meditation on the Self or the meditation on the mandala is prayer; in many different religions that concentration upon a point outside of oneself, not identical with oneself, is called prayer.

One could not say that the ego was the microcosm because the ego is only the center or the focus of the individual consciousness, and consciousness reaches
only as far as the conscious material reaches.

It doesn't even cover the very important functions of the digestion, or the heart; for instance, there are enormous spaces of the psyche that lie beyond the conscious
sphere. So the totality of all that is not the ego-the ego is merely one part that belongs to a totality-the sum total is called the Self.

The center of that totality does not necessarily coincide with the ego system, just as the center of our galaxy of stars does not coincide with our sun, and the center of our solar system does not coincide with the earth; we cannot assume that our earth is the center of the universe.

It was discovered long ago that the earth is in the periphery of something bigger, it is an appendix of the sun, and even the sun is an appendix of a larger system,
a galaxy of unknown extent.

We cannot think of our earth as a sun, nothing is revolving round us except perhaps the moon; the ego is a little system like the earth with the moon, but it is by no means the center of the universe.

The Self is the center of the totality of the psyche in as far as we can measure it or have an intuition about it, or in as far as we have dreams about it, and surely beyond, for we cannot assume that we are informed through our dreams of everything that is happening in our psyche.

We cannot even be certain that it is our own psyche; it might be, but there are many things in our unconscious, and we are by no means sure whether they really belong to us or to somebody else.

It is quite sure that we are somewhere swimming in the same river with everybody else, and that certain contents are flowing and drifting in between individuals, so sometimes they are in me and sometimes they are in another.

Therefore in a desperate situation like this, the religious reaction is absolutely to the point; this woman must have something to cling to that lifts her out of the rush of the waters; otherwise she will be carried away.

If she wants to stop, to become reflective, if she wants to realize her inner vision, she must have a point d 'appui; she must have a point outside of the earth, where she can put in her lever.

And that is the Self, often symbolized as a star, the real center of the mandala.

Now she goes on: "I took it" (the star) "forth from my breast and laid it on the ground and knelt before it."

Here we learn that the star has been in her breast.

And with what was it identical there?

Mrs. Baumann: It is the flame in anahata. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

Carl Jung: The Gothic style is also in a way hysterical...

This story makes one understand the extraordinary feeling for the material in old Chinese sculpture: the material spoke to them.

And it seems as if the marble in old Greek sculpture told the artist what the figure or the column should be like that he was about to make, what the marble wanted to become.

Do you remember, for instance, the two figures of the barbarian slaves in the Boboli gardens in Florence?

I advise you, the next time you are in Florence, to go first to the tomb of the Medici and look at Michelangelo's marbles there, and then take a taxi,don't look out of the window, but drive straight to the Boboli gardens, and there you will see the difference.

Those two figures of the barbarians are suggested by the stone, the stone speaks, it is really the stone;

while in Michelangelo's figures the stone has just nothing to say; you get an hysterical impression, you feel that he did something with the stone which never should have been done.

I had a feeling of nausea; I said, "Now this is hysteria."

It is the beginning of the Baroque style, and that was certainly not suggested by the stone.

The Gothic style is also in a way hysterical because it is not true to the nature of the stone; the builders suggested wood into the stone, and therefore they made buildings which are like plants.

And in antiquity they made the living ornament, like ivy, clutching the stone, not being the stone itself.

We have got very far away from the antique activity of the stone, when the spirit was still in the
object and the object could suggest itself to the artists.

To the ancient artists or builders the material suggested a certain thing.

A goblet or a sword said: "You must decorate me in such and such a way."

Or the canoe said: "You must paint me, you must give me eyes, you must decorate me because I love you."

That was the relation, because the antiqueman was under the spell of the object.~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 452-453