As the horse is the brother, so the snake is the sister of Chiwantopel (“my little sister”). Rider and horse form a centaur-like unit, like man and his shadow, i.e., the higher and lower man, ego-consciousness and shadow, Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
In the same way the feminine belongs to man as his own unconscious femininity, which I have called the anima.
She is often found in patients in the form of a snake. Green, the life-colour, suits her very well; it is also the colour of the Creator Spiritus.
I have defined the anima as the archetype of life itself.
Here, because of the snake symbolism, she must also be thought of as having the attribute of “spirit.”
This apparent contradiction is due to the fact that the anima personifies the total unconscious so long as she is not differentiated as a figure from the other archetypes.
With further differentiations the figure of the (wise) old man becomes detached from the anima and appears as an archetype of the “spirit.”
He stands to her in the relationship of a “spiritual” father, like Wotan to The OHG. Brünhilde or Bythos to Sophia.
Classic examples are to be found in the novels of Rider Haggard. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 678
This part of the dream is a remarkable paraphrase of the Oxyrhynchus sayings of Jesus, in which the way to the kingdom of heaven is pointed out by animals, and where we find the admonition:
“Therefore know yourselves, for you are the city, and the city is the kingdom.”
It is also a paraphrase of the serpent of paradise who persuaded our first parents to sin, and who finally leads to the redemption of mankind through the Son of God.
As we know, this causal nexus gave rise to the Ophitic identification of the serpent with the Σωτήρ (Saviour).
The black horse and the black magician are half-evil elements whose relativity with respect to good is hinted at in the exchange of garments.
The two magicians are, indeed, two aspects of the wise old man, the superior master and teacher, the archetype of the spirit, who symbolizes the pre-existent meaning hidden in the chaos of life.
He is the father of the soul, and yet the soul, in some miraculous manner, is also his virgin mother, for which reason he was called by the alchemists the “first son of the mother.”
The black magician and the black horse correspond to the descent into darkness in the dreams mentioned earlier. ~Carl Jung, CW 91 , Para 74
Again and again in fairytales we encounter the motif of helpful animals.
These act like humans, speak a human language, and display a sagacity and a knowledge superior to man’s.
In these circumstances we can say with some justification that the archetype of the spirit is being expressed through an animal form.
A German fairytale relates how a young man, while searching for his lost princess, meets a wolf, who says, “Do not be afraid! But tell me, where is your way leading you?”
The young man recounts his story, whereupon the wolf gives him as a magic gift a few of his hairs, with which the young man can summon his help at any time.
This intermezzo proceeds exactly like the meeting with the helpful old man.
In the same story, the archetype also displays its other, wicked side. In order to make this clear I shall give a summary of the story: ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 421
The archetype of the spirit in this, be it said, by no means primitive fairytale is expressed theriomorphically as a system of three functions which is subordinated to a unity, the evil spirit, in the same way that some unnamed authority has crucified the raven with a triad of three nails.
The two supraordinate unities correspond in the first case to the inferior function which is the arch-enemy of the main function, namely to the hunter; and in the second case to the main function, namely to the hero.
Hunter and hero are ultimately equated with one another, so that the hunter’s function is resolved in the hero.
As a matter of fact, the hero lies dormant in the hunter from the very beginning, egging him on, with all the unmoral means at his disposal, to carry out the rape of the soul, and then causing him to play her into the hero’s hands against the hunter’s will.
On the surface a furious conflict rages between them, but down below the one goes about the other’s business.
The knot is unravelled directly the hero succeeds in capturing the quaternity—or in psychological language, when he assimilates the inferior function into the ternary system.
That puts an end to the conflict at one blow, and the figure of the hunter melts into thin air.
After this victory, the hero sets his princess upon the three-legged steed and together they ride away to her father’s kingdom.
From now on she rules and personifies the realm of spirit that formerly served the wicked hunter.
Thus the anima is and remains the representative of that part of the unconscious which can never be assimilated into a humanly attainable whole. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i , Para 434
It seems to me, frankly, that former ages did not exaggerate, that the spirit has not sloughed off its demonisms, and that mankind, because of its scientific and technological development, has in increasing measure delivered itself over to the danger of possession.
True, the archetype of the spirit is capable of working for good as well as for evil, but it depends upon man’s free—i.e., conscious—decision whether the good also will be perverted into something satanic.
Man’s worst sin is unconsciousness, but it is indulged in with the greatest piety even by those who should serve mankind as teachers and examples.
When shall we stop taking man for granted in this barbarous manner and in all seriousness seek ways and means to exorcize him, to rescue him from possession and unconsciousness, and make this the most vital task of civilization?
Can we not understand that all the outward tinkerings and improvements do not touch man’s inner nature, and that everything ultimately depends upon whether the man who wields the science and the technics is capable of responsibility or not?
Christianity has shown us the way, but, as the facts bear witness, it has not penetrated deeply enough below the surface.
What depths of despair are still needed to open the eyes of the world’s responsible leaders, so that at least they can refrain from leading themselves into temptation? ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 455
That is to say, just as Joachim supposed that the status of the Holy Ghost had secretly begun with St. Benedict, so we might hazard the conjecture that a new status was secretly anticipated in Joachim himself.
Consciously, of course, he thought he was bringing the status of the Holy Ghost into reality, just as it is certain that St. Benedict had nothing else in mind than to put the Church on a firm footing and deepen the meaning of the Christian life through monasticism.
But, unconsciously—and this is psychologically what probably happened—Joachim could have been seized by the archetype of the spirit.
There is no doubt that his activities were founded on a numinous experience, which is, indeed, characteristic of all those who are gripped by an archetype.
He understood the spirit in the dogmatic sense as the third Person of the Godhead, for no other way was possible, but not in the sense of the empirical archetype.
This archetype is not of uniform meaning, but was originally an ambivalent dualistic figure that broke through again in the alchemical concept of spirit after engendering the most contradictory manifestations within the Holy Ghost movement itself.
The Gnostics in their day had already had clear intimations of this dualistic figure.
It was therefore very natural, in an age which coincided with the beginning of the second Fish and which was, so to speak, forced into ambiguity, that an espousal of the Holy Ghost in its Christian form should at the same time help the archetype of the spirit to break through in all its characteristic ambivalence.
It would be unjust to class so worthy a personage as Joachim with the bigoted advocates of that revolutionary and anarchic turbulence, which is what the Holy Ghost movement turned into in so many places.
We must suppose, rather, that he himself unwittingly ushered in a new “status,” a religious attitude that was destined to bridge and compensate the frightful gulf that had opened out between Christ and Antichrist in the eleventh century. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 141
The antichristian era is to blame that the spirit became non-spiritual and that the vitalizing archetype gradually degenerated into rationalism, intellectualism, and doctrinairism, all of which leads straight to the tragedy of modern times now hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles.
In the old formula for the Trinity, as Joachim knew it, the dogmatic figure of the devil is lacking, for then as now he led a questionable existence somewhere on the fringes of theological metaphysics, in the shape of the mysterium iniquitatis.
Fortunately for us, the threat of his coming had already been foretold in the New Testament—for the less he is recognized the more dangerous he is.
Who would suspect him under those high-sounding names of his, such as public welfare, lifelong security, peace among the nations, etc.?
He hides under idealisms, under -isms in general, and of these the most pernicious is doctrinairism, that most unspiritual of all the spirit’s manifestations.
The present age must come to terms drastically with the facts as they are, with the absolute opposition that is not only tearing the world asunder politically but has planted a schism in the human heart.
We need to find our way back to the original, living spirit which, because of its ambivalence, is also a mediator and uniter of opposites, an idea that preoccupied the alchemists for many centuries. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii , Para 141
To complete the establishment of a living archetype, the historical proofs do not wholly suffice, since one can explain the historical documentation by tradition (whose beginnings, however, always remain unexplained).
That the archetype also manifests itself spontaneously outside tradition needs to be added to the evidence.
God as collective soul, as spirit of nature, eternally renewed, incorruptible, archetype of the spirit even in the form of the “Trickster,” pagan divinity, is encountered in ancient and medieval alchemy having nothing to do with the local tradition of Carmel.
The Deus absconditus of alchemy has the same compensating function as the figure of Elijah. Lastly—as is little known—the psychology of alchemy has become comprehensible to us thanks to the fact that we observe analogous compensations in pathological and normal individuals in modern times.
In calling themselves “atheists” or “agnostics,” people dissatisfied with the Christian tradition are not being merely negative.
In many cases it is easy to observe the phenomenon of the “compensating God,” as I have demonstrated in my most recent works. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 , Para 1531