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Among the carvings he produced in Bollingen in the severe winter of 1955-56 were three stone tablets.
On these, which were placed in the open courtyard, he inscribed the names of his paternal ancestors.
His family colors also came into their own, as the master of the house painted the ceiling with motifs from the family coats of arms of the Jung’s and the Rauschenbachs.
On this point Jung noted that his family had originally borne on its arms a phoenix, the motif that illustrated youthfulness and rejuvenation.
His grandfather, C. G. Jung the elder, the enthusiastic Freemason and Grand Master of the Swiss lodge, had changed the family arms, however, ostensibly out of resistance against his father.
The grandson mentioned this revision in order to point out the historical connection with his own life and thought.
In the Memories we read on this point:
“In keeping with this revision of my grandfather’s my coat of arms no longer contains the original phoenix.
Instead there is a cross azure in chief dexter and in base sinister a blue bunch of grapes in a field d’or; separating these is an estoile d’or in a fess azure.
The symbolism of these arms is Masonic, or Rosicrucian.
Just as cross and rose represent the Rosicrucian problem of opposites (“per crucem ad rosam”), that is, the Christian and Dionysian elements, so cross and grapes are symbols of the heavenly and the chthonic spirit. The uniting symbol is the gold star, the aurum philosophorum.”
Although the heraldic animal of the phoenix represented an essentially spiritual message, there is also no question that Jung was fully able to affirm the Masonic and Rosicrucian
symbolism-no doubt because it symbolized the goals and methods of his own work. ~Gerhard Wehr, Jung: A Biography, Pages 426-427
