What shall I do this whole long morning? I do not understand how Ammonius could have endured this life for even a year. I go back and forth on the dried-up river bed and finally sit down on a boulder. Before me there are a few yellow grasses. Over there a small dark beetle is crawling along, pushing a ball in front of it-a scarab. 61 You dear little animal, are you still toiling away in order to live your beautiful myth? How seriously and undiscouraged it works! If only you had a notion that you are performing an old myth, you would probably renounce your fantasies as we men have also given up playing at mythology.
The unreality nauseates one. What I say sounds very odd in this place, and the good Ammonious would certainly not agree with it. What am I actually doing here? No, I don’t want to condemn him in advance, since I still haven’t really understood what he actually means. He has a right to be heard. By the way, I thought differently yesterday. I was even very thankful to him that he wanted to teach me. But I’m being critical once again, and superior, and may well learn nothing. His thoughts are not
that bad at all; they are even good. I don’t know why I always want to put the man down.
Dear beetle, where have you gone? I can no longer see you. Oh, you’re already over there with your mythical ball. These little animals stick to things, quite unlike us-no doubt, no change of mind, no hesitation. Is this so because they live their myth?
D ear scarab, my father, I honor you, blessed be your work-in eternity-Amen.
What nonsense am I talking? I’m worshiping an animal that must be because of the desert. It seems absolutely to demand prayers. ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
In Synchronicity as a Principle of Acausal Connection (1952), Jung wrote:
“The scarab is a classical rebirth symbol. According to the description in the ancient Egyptian book Am-Tuat, the dead sun God transforms himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and as such mounts the barge at the twelfth station, which raises
the rejuvenated sun into the morning sky” (CW 8, §843). ~Red Book; Footnote 62.