H.G. Baynes on the Suicide of his Wife (Hilda)
Jung’s Apprentice: A Biography of Helton Godwin Baynes
Peter’s return from Africa brought him face to face with the terrible tragedy of his wife’s death. He speaks of being haunted by her spirit. ~Diana Baynes, Jung’s Apprentice, Page 195
She could not free her soul from the clutching fingers, which caught her out of the chaos of the past, by means of life.
Therefore she was forced to free herself by death.
Freedom she must have at all costs and I was merely part of the cost.
Life had proved too much for her and she had to give it up.
Her last word to me was her undying belief in Love …
Yesterday I stood beside her grave and wondered if her spirit was in the breeze that rustled the autumn leaves.
Throughout the year her spirit had been with me.
By negation of the body and its functions she went over almost completely to the life of the spirit so that the shedding of the body became an inevitable need for her cramped and tormented soul.
Thus she became a spirit of great power and constantly she affects me.
Whether this relation exists in the world or solely in my soul I cannot say, but for me her spirit lingers.
She is my guide, because her main preoccupation was religion. Religion seized her and ·broke her . . . only from the angle of religion does her life appear meaningful and intelligible.
Her religious instinct was her only paramount guide by which she held her precarious course.
Therefore like Pallas Athena, Hilda often assumes the guise of Mentor and stands beside me holding me to that same quest and striving in that same warfare.
But her spirit has gone through a transformation.
She has relinquished her personal and limited notions of truth … she has become an influence that is in a way personal in effect but celestial in intention.
Very like the influence which Pallas Athena exercised upon Ulysses. ~H.G. Baynes, Jung’s Apprentice, Page 195-196
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