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The term “archetypus” is used by Cicero, Pliny, and others. It appears in the Corpus Hermeticum, as a definitely philosophical concept: “Thou knowest in thy mind the archetypal form the beginning before the beginning, the unbounded” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 89
The main symbolic figures of a religion are always expressive of the particular moral and mental attitude involved. I would mention, for instance, the cross and its various religious meanings ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 107
Zeller says: “One is the first from which all other numbers arise, and in which the opposite qualities of numbers, the odd and the even, must therefore be united” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 179
The One claim number is an exceptional position, which we meet again in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages. According to this, one is not a number at all; the first number is two ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 180
In Plato the quaternity takes the form of a cube, which he correlates with earth. Lü Pu-wei says: “Heaven’s way is round; earth’s way is square” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 247
Grain and wine therefore have something in the nature of a soul, a specific life principle which makes them appropriate symbols not only of man’s cultural achievements, but also of the seasonally dying and resurgent god who is their life spirit ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 385
The vision, which in all probability has the character of a dream, must be regarded as a spontaneous psychic product that was never consciously intended. Like all dreams, it is a product of nature ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 405
The Mass, on the other hand, is a product of man’s mind or spirit, and is a definitely conscious proceeding ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 405
To use an old but not outmoded nomenclature, we can call the vision psychic, and the Mass pneumatic ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 405
The vision is undifferentiated raw material, while the Mass is a highly differentiated artifact. That is why the one is gruesome and the other beautiful ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 405
If the Mass is antique, it is antique in the best sense of the word, and its liturgy is therefore satisfying to the highest requirements of the present day ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 405
The Mass, on the other hand, represents and clearly expresses the Deity itself, and clothes it in the garment of the most beautiful humanity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 405
Gnosticism affords some very instructive examples of this. Neologisms tend not only to hypostatize themselves to an amazing degree, but actually to replace the reality they were originally intended to express ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 442
Our cancer case shows clearly how impotent man’s reason and intellect are against the most palpable nonsense. I always advise my patients to take such obvious but invincible nonsense as the manifestation of a power and a meaning they have not yet understood ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 26
Experience has taught me that it is much more effective to take these things seriously and then look for a suitable explanation. But an explanation is suitable only when it produces a hypothesis equal to the morbid effect. Our patient is confronted with a power of will and suggestion more than equal to anything his consciousness can put against it ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 26
In this prelcarious situation it would be bad strategy to convince him that in some incomprehensible way he is at the back of his own symptom, secretly inventing and supporting it. Such a suggestion would instantly paralyse his fighting spirit, and he would get demoralized. It is far better for him to understand that his complex is an autonomous power directed against his conscious personality. Moreover, such an explanation fits the actual facts much better than a reduction to personal motives. An apparently personal motivation does exist, but it is not made by his will, it just happens to him ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 26
Consciousness must have been a very precarious thing in its beginnings. In relatively primitive societies we can still observe how easily consciousness gets lost. One of the “perils of the soul,” for instance, is the loss of a soul. This is what happens when part of the psyche becomes unconscious again ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 29
Another example is “running amok,” the equivalent of “going berserk” in Germanic saga. This is a more or less complete trance-state, often accompanied by devastating social effects ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 29
Even a quite ordinary emotion can cause considerable loss of consciousness. Primitives therefore cultivate elaborate forms of politeness, speaking in a hushed voice, laying down their weapons, crawling on all fours, bowing the head, showing the palms. Even our own forms of politeness still exhibit a “religious” consideration of possible psychic dangers. We propitiate fate by magically wishing one another a good day. It is not good form to keep the left hand in your pocket or behind your back when shaking hands. If you want to be particularly ingratiating you use both hands. Before people of great authority we bow with uncovered head, i.e., we offer our head unprotected in order to propitiate the powerful one, who might quite easily fall sudden prey to a fit of uncontrollable violence. In war-dances primitives can become so excited that they may even shed blood ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 29
Protestantism, having pulled down so many walls carefully erected by the Church, immediately began to experience the disintegrating and schismatic effect of individual revelation. As soon as the dogmatic fence was broken down and the ritual lost its authority, man had to face his inner experience without the protection and guidance of dogma and ritual, which are the very quintessence of Christian as well as of pagan religious experience. Protestantism has, in the main, lost all the finer shades of traditional Christianity: the mass, confession, the greater part of the liturgy, and the vicarious function of priesthood ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 33
I must emphasize that this statement is not a value-judgment and is not intended to be one. I merely state the facts. Protestantism has, however, intensified the authority of the Bible as a substitute for the lost authority of the Church ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 34
My patient is now very curious how I shall set about getting at the contents that form the root of the obsession. I then inform him, at the risk of shocking him severely, that his dreams will provide us with all the necessary information. We will take them as if they issued from an intelligent, purposive, and, as it were, personal source. This is of course a bold hypothesis and at the same time an adventure, because we are going to give extraordinary credit to a discredited entity the psyche whose very existence is still denied by not a few contemporary psychologists as well as by philosophers ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 36
A famous anthropologist, when I showed him my way of proceeding, made the typical remark: “That’s all very interesting indeed, but dangerous.” Yes, I admit it is dangerous, just as dangerous as a neurosis. If you want to cure a neurosis you have to risk something. To do something without taking a risk is merely ineffectual, as we know only too well. A surgical operation for cancer is a risk too, and yet it has to be done ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 36
In any case my experience is in favour of the probability that dreams are the visible links in a chain of unconscious events. If we want to shed any light on the deeper reasons for the dream, we must go back to the series and find out where it is located in the long chain of four hundred dreams ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 53
Frequently the voice issues from an authoritative figure, such as a military commander, or the captain of a ship, or an old physician. Sometimes, there is simply a voice coming apparently from nowhere. It was interesting to see how this very intellectual and sceptical man [the patient] accepted the voice; often it did not suit him at all, yet he accepted it unquestioningly, even humbly ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 63
Thus the voice revealed itself, in the course of several hundred carefully recorded dreams, as an important and even decisive spokesman of the unconscious. Since this patient is by no means the only one I have observed who exhibited the phenomenon of the voice in dreams and in other peculiar states of consciousness, I am forced to admit that the unconscious is capable at times of manifesting an intelligence and purposiveness superior to the actual conscious insight. There can be no doubt that this is a basic religious phenomenon, observed here in a person whose conscious mental attitude certainly seemed most unlikely to produce religious phenomena. I have not infrequently made similar observations in other cases and I must confess that I am unable to formulate the facts in any other way ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 63
I have often met with the objection that the thoughts which the voice represents are no more than the thoughts of the individual himself. That may be but I would call a thought my own only when I have thought it, just as I would call money my own only when I have earned or acquired it in a conscious and legitimate manner. If somebody gives me the money as a present, then I shall certainly not say to my benefactor, “Thank you for my money,” although to a third person I might say afterwards: “This is my own money.” With the voice I am in a similar situation. The voice gives me certain contents, exactly as if a friend were informing me of his ideas. It would be neither decent nor truthful to suggest that what he says are my own ideas ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 63
dogma owes Moreover, its continued existence, and its form on the one hand to so-called “revealed” or immediate experiences of the “Gnosis “for instance, the God-man, the Cross, the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, and so on, and on the other hand to the ceaseless collaboration of many minds over many centuries ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 81
It looks as if they were not yet advanced enough to suffer a process of salvation and to submit to a deity who was made visible in the magnificent structure of the Church. There was, perhaps, too much of the Imperium Romanum or of the Pax Romana in the Church too much, at least, for their energies, which were and still are insufficiently domesticated. It is quite likely that they needed an unmitigated and less controlled experience of God, as often happens to adventurous and restless people who are too youthful for any form of conservatism or domestication ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 82
They therefore did away with the intercession of the Church between God and man, some more and some less. With the demolition of protective walls, the Protestant lost the sacred images that expressed important unconscious factors, together with the ritual which, from time immemorial, has been a safe way of dealing with the unpredictable forces of the unconscious. A vast amount of energy was thus liberated and instantly went into the old channels of curiosity and acquisitiveness. In this way Europe became the mother of dragons that devoured the greater part of the earth ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 82
Hence the present alertness of the Protestant conscience and this bad conscience has all the disagreeable characteristics of a lingering illness which makes people chronically uncomfortable. But, for this very reason, the Protestant has a unique chance to make himself conscious of sin to a degree that is hardly possible for a Catholic mentality, as confession and absolution are always at hand to ease excess of tension ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 86
If a Protestant survives the complete loss of his church and still remains a Protestant, that is to say a man who is defenceless against God and no longer shielded by walls or communities, he has a unique spiritual opportunity for immediate religious experience ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 86
The term “archetypus” is used by Cicero, Pliny, and others. It appears in the Corpus Hermeticum, as a definitely philosophical concept: “Thou knowest in thy mind the archetypal form the beginning before the beginning, the unbounded” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 89
With special reference to psychology we find this theory in the works of Adolf Bastian and then again in Nietzsche. In French literature Hubert and Mauss, and also Lévy-Bruhl, mention similar ideas. I only gave an empirical foundation to the theory of what were formerly called primordial or elementary ideas, “categories” or “habitudes directrices de la conscience,” “représentations collectives,” etc., by setting out to investigate certain details ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 89
I do not know why he should. I only know that this is not an isolated case; many others under my observation or under that of my colleagues have spontaneously produced the same symbolism. I naturally do not think that it originated three or four hundred years ago. That was simply another epoch when this same archetypal idea was very much in the foreground. As a matter of fact, it is much older than the Middle Ages, as the Timaeus proves. Nor is it a classical or an Egyptian heritage, since it is to be found practically everywhere and in all ages. One has only to remember, for instance, how great an importance was attributed to the quaternity by the American Indians ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 99
I have always been particularly interested to see how people, if left to their own devices and not informed about the history of the symbol, would interpret it to themselves. I was careful, therefore, not to disturb them with my own opinions, and as a rule I discovered that they took it to symbolize themselves, or rather something in themselves. They felt it belonged intimately to themselves as a sort of creative background, a life-producing sun in the depths of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 100
Though it was easy to see that certain mandala-drawings were almost an exact replica of Ezekiel’s vision, it very seldom happened that people recognized the analogy even when they knew the vision which knowledge, by the way, is pretty rare nowadays. What one could almost call a systematic blindness is simply the effect of the prejudice that God is outside man ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 100
Another main symbol is the Trinity. It is of exclusively masculine character. The unconscious, however, transforms it into a quaternity, which is at the same time a unity, just as the three persons of the Trinity are one and the same God. The natural philosophers of antiquity represented the Trinity, so far as it was imaginata in natura, as the three or “spirits,” also called “volatilia,” namely water, air, and fire. The fourth constituent, on the other hand, was, the earth or the body. They symbolized the latter by the Virgin. In this way they added the feminine element to their physical Trinity, thereby producing the quaternity or circulus quadratus, whose symbol was the hermaphroditic Rebis, the filius sapientiae ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 107
The quaternity in modern dreams is a creation of the unconscious. As I explained in the first chapter, the unconscious is often personified by the anima, a feminine figure. Apparently the symbol of the quaternity issues from her. She would be the matrix of the quaternity, aor Mater Dei, just as the earth was understood to be the Mother of God. But since woman, as well as evil, is excluded from the Deity in the dogma of the Trinity, the element of evil would form part of the religious symbol if the latter should be a quaternity. It needs no particular effort of imagination to guess the far-reaching spiritual consequences of such a development ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 107
But since nature has not bestowed the same blessings upon each of her children, some are more and others less gifted. Thus there are people who can just afford to live properly and respectably; that is to say, no manifest flaw is discoverable. They either commit minor sins, if they sin at all, or their sins are concealed from them by a thick layer of unconsciousness. One is rather inclined to be lenient with sinners who are unconscious of their sins ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 130
But nature is not at all lenient with unconscious sinners. She punishes them just as severely as if they had committed a conscious offence. Thus we find, as the pious Henry Drummond once observed, that it is highly moral people, unaware of their other side, who develop particularly hellish moods which make them insupportable to their relatives. The odour of sanctity may be far reaching, but to live with a saint might well cause an inferiority complex or even a wild outburst of immorality in individuals less morally gifted. Morality seems to be a gift like intelligence. You cannot pump it into a system to which it is not indigenous ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 130
This is a very serious problem for all those who are themselves in such a predicament or have to help sick people back to normal life. Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a remedy as beheading would be for headache ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 133
Religion is a relationship to the highest or most powerful value, be it positive or negative. The relationship is voluntary as well as involuntary, that is to say you can accept, consciously, the value by which you are possessed unconsciously. That psychological fact which wields the greatest power in your system functions as a god, since it is always the overwhelming psychic factor that is called “God.” As soon as a god ceases to be an overwhelming factor he dwindles to a mere name. His essence is dead and his power is gone. Why did the gods of antiquity lose their prestige and their effect on the human soul? Because the Olympians had served their time and a new mystery began: God became man ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 137
If we allow ourselves to draw conclusions from modern mandalas we should ask people, first, whether they worship stars, suns, flowers, and snakes. They will deny this, and at the same time they will assert that the globes, stars, crosses, and the like are symbols for a center in themselves. And if asked what they mean by this center, they will begin to stammer and to refer to this or that experience which may turn out to be something very similar to the confession of my patient, who found that the vision of his world clock had left him with a wonderful feeling of perfect harmony ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 138
Others will confess that a similar vision came to them in a moment of extreme pain or profound despair. To others again it is the memory of a sublime dream or of a moment when long and fruitless struggles came to an end and a reign of peace began ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 138
A modern mandala is an involuntary confession of a peculiar mental condition. There is no deity in the mandala, nor is there any submission or reconciliation to a deity. The place of the deity seems to be taken by the wholeness of man ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 139
The experience formulated by the modern mandala is typical of people who cannot project the divine image any longer. Owing to the withdrawal and introjection of the image they are in danger of inflation and dissociation of the personality. The round or square enclosures built round the center therefore have the purpose of protective walls or of a vas hermeticum to prevent an outburst or a disintegration. Thus the mandala denotes and assists exclusive concentration on the center, the Self. This is anything but egocentricity. On the contrary, it is a much-needed self-control for the purpose of avoiding inflation and dissociation ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 156
The enclosure, as we have seen, has also the meaning of what is called in Greek a temenos, the precincts of a temple or any isolated sacred place. The circle in this case protects or isolates an inner content or process that should not get mixed up with things outside. Thus the mandala repeats in symbolic form archaic ways and means which were once concrete realities ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 157
As I have already mentioned, the inhabitant of the temenos was a god. But the prisoner, or the well-protected dweller in the mandala, does not seem to be a god, since the symbols used stars, crosses, globes, etc.do not signify a god but an obviously important part of the human personality. One might almost say that man himself, or his innermost soul, is the prisoner or the protected inhabitant of the mandala. Since modern mandalas are amazingly close parallels to the ancient magical circles, which usually have a deity in the center, it is clear that in the modern mandala man the deep ground, as it were, of the Self is not a substitute but a symbol for the deity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 157
It is a remarkable fact that this symbol [the Self] is a natural and spontaneous occurrence and that it is always an essentially unconscious product, as our dream shows. If we want to know what happens when the idea of God is no longer projected as an autonomous entity, this is the answer of the unconscious psyche. The unconscious produces the idea of a deified or divine man who is imprisoned, concealed, protected, usually depersonalized, and represented by an abstract symbol ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 158
The symbols often contain allusions to the medieval conception of the microcosm, as was the case with my patient’s world clock, for instance. Many of the processes that lead to the mandala, and the mandala itself, seem to be direct confirmations of medieval speculation. It looks as if the patients had read those old treatises on the philosophers’ Stone, the divine water, the rotundum, the squaring of the circle, the four colours, etc. And yet they have never been anywhere near alchemical philosophy and its abstruse symbolism ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 158
From a psychological standpoint this view can be translated as follows: Christ lived a concrete, personal, and unique life which, in all essential features, had at the same time an archetypal character. This character can be recognized from the numerous connections of the biographical details with worldwide myth-motifs. These undeniable connections are the main reason why it is so difficult for researchers into the life of Jesus to construct from the gospel reports an individual life divested of myth. In the gospels themselves factual reports, legends, and myths are woven into a whole. This is precisely what constitutes the meaning of the gospels, and they would immediately lose their character of wholeness if one tried to separate the individual from the archetypal with a critical scalpel ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 146
“Whatever the wise seek is in mercury.” A very ancient formula, attributed by Zosimos to the legendary Ostanes, runs: “Go to the waters of the Nile, and there thou wilt find a stone that hath a spirit [pneuma].” A commentator explains that this refers to quicksilver (hydrargyron, mercury) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 151
This spirit, coming from God, is also the cause of the “greenness,” the benedicta viriditas, much praised by the alchemists. Mylius says of it: “God has breathed into created things a kind of germination, which is the viridescence.” In Hildegard of Bingen’s Hymn to the Holy Ghost, which begins “0 ignis Spiritus paraclite,” we read: “From you the clouds rain down, the heavens move, the stones have their moisture, the waters give forth streams, and the earth sweats out greenness” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 151
In the first dream, then, there was violent criticism of Church religion, followed in the second dream by the mandala vision of a world clock which is what a planetarium is in the fullest sense. In the sky the divine pair stands united, he white, she red, thus reversing the famous alchemical pair, where he is red and she is white, whence she was called Beya (Arabic al baida, the White One'), and he was called “servus rubeus,” thered slave,’ although, as Gabricus (Arabic kibrit, `sulphur’), he is her royal brother ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 164
The third person appears in the form of Ka-mute (“the bull of his mother”), who is none other than the ka, the procreative power of the deity. In it and through it father and son are combined not in a triad but in a triunity. To the extent that Ka-mutef is a special manifestation of the divine ka, we can “actually speak of a triunity of God, king, and ka, in the sense that God is the father, the king is the son, and ka, the connecting-link between them” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 177
In his concluding chapter Jacobsohn draws a parallel between this Egyptian idea and the Christian credo. Apropos the passage “qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine,” he cites Karl Barth’s formulation: “There is indeed a unity of God and man; God himself creates it. It is no other unity than his own eternal unity as father and son. This unity is the Holy Ghost” (P. 64 Barth, Credo, p. 70). As procreator the Holy Ghost would correspond to Ka-mutef, who connotes and guarantees the unity of father and son. In this connection Jacobsohn cites Barth’s comment on Luke 1 : 35 (“The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God”): “When the Bible speaks of the Holy Ghost, it is speaking of God as the combination of father and son, of the vinculum caritatis” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 177
The divine procreation of Pharaoh takes place through Ka-mutef, in the human mother of the king. But, like Mary, she remains outside the Trinity. As Preisigke points out, the early Christian Egyptians simply transferred their traditional ideas about the ka to the Holy Ghost. This explains the curious fact that in the Coptic version of Pistis Sophia, dating from the third century, Jesus has the Holy Ghost as his double, just like a proper ka ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 177
“Two is the first even number” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 179
“Three is the first that is uneven and perfect, because in it we first find beginning, middle, and end” (Zeller, A History of Greek Philosophy, I p. 429). The views of the Pythagoreans influenced Plato, as is evident from his Timaeus; and, as this had an incalculable influence on the philosophical speculations of posterity, we shall have to go rather deeply into the psychology of number speculation ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 179
Two is the first number because, with it, separation and multiplication begin, which alone make counting possible. With the appearance of the number two, another appears alongside the one, a happening which is so striking that in many languages “the other” and “the second” are expressed by the same word. Also associated with the number two is the idea of right and left, and remarkably enough, of favourable and unfavourable, good and bad. The “other” can have a “sinister” significance or one feels it, at least, as something opposite and alien. Therefore, argues a medieval alchemist, God did not praise the second day of creation, because on this day (Monday, the day of the moon) the binarius, alias the devil, came into existence ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 180
Two implies a One which is different and distinct from the “numberless” One. In other words, as soon as the number two appears, a unit is produced out of the original unity, and this unit is none other than that same unity split into two and turned into a “number.” The “One” and the “Other” form an opposition, but there is no opposition between one and two, for these are simple numbers which are distinguished only by their arithmetical value and by nothing else. The “One,” however, seeks to hold to its one-and-alone existence, while the “Other” ever strives to be another opposed to the One. The One will not let go of the Other because, if it did, it would lose its character; and the Other pushes itself away from the One in order to exist at all. Thus there arises a tension of opposites between the One and the Other ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 180
But every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the “third.” In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored. Unity, the absolute One, cannot be numbered, it is indefinable and unknowable; only when it appears as a unit, the number one, is it knowable, for the “Other” which is required for this act of knowing is lacking in the condition of the One. Three is an unfolding of the One to a condition where it can be known unity becomes recognizable; had it not been resolved into the polarity of the One and the Other, it would have remained fixed in a condition devoid of every quality ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 180
Three, therefore, appears as a suitable synonym for a process of development in time, and thus form a parallel to the self-revelation of the Deity as the absolute One unfolded into Three. The relation of Threeness to Oneness can be expressed by an equilateral triangle, A = B = C, that is, by the identity of the three, threeness being contained in its entirety in each of the three angles. This intellectual idea of the equilateral triangle is a conceptual model for the logical image of the Trinity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 180
The psychological datum consists of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. If we posit “Father,” then “Son” logically follows; but “Holy Ghost” does not follow logically from either “Father” or “Son.” So we must be dealing here with a special factor that rests on a different presupposition. According to the old doctrine, the Holy Ghost is “vera persona, quae a filio et patre missa est” (a real person who is sent by the Son and the Father). The “processio a patre filioque” (procession from the Father and the Son) is a “spiration” and not a “begetting.” This somewhat peculiar idea corresponds to the separation, which still existed in the Middle Ages, of “corpus” and “spiramen,” the latter being understood as something more than mere “breath.” What it really denoted was the anima, which, as its name shows, is a breath-being (anemos = wind). Although an activity of the body, it was thought of as an independent substance (or hypostasis) existing alongside the body. The underlying idea is that the body “lives,” and that “life” is something superadded and autonomous, conceived as a soul unattached to the body. Applying this idea to the Trinity formula, we would have to say: Father, Son, and Life the life proceeding from both or lived by both ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 197
The Holy Ghost as “life” is a concept that cannot be derived logically from the identity of Father and Son, but is, rather, a psychological idea, a datum based on an irrational, primordial image. This primordial image is the archetype, and we find it expressed most clearly in the Egyptian theology of kingship. There, as we have seen, the archetype takes the form of God the father, Ka-mutef (the begetter), and the son. The ka is the life-spirit, the animating principle of men and gods, and therefore can be legitimately interpreted as the soul or spiritual double. He is the “life” of the dead man, and thus corresponds on the one hand to the living man’s soul, and on the other to his “spirit” or “genius” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 197
We have seen that Ka-mutef is a hypostatization of procreative power. In the same way, the Holy Ghost is hypostatized procreative power and life-force. Hence, in the Christian Trinity, we are confronted with a distinctly archaic idea, whose extraordinary value lies precisely in the fact that it is a supreme, hypostatic representation of an abstract thought (two-dimensional triad). The form is still concretistic, in that the archetype is represented by the relationship “Father” and “Son.” Were it nothing but that, it would only be a dyad. The third element, however, the connecting link between “Father” and “Son,” is spirit and not a human figure ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 197
The masculine father-son relationship is thus lifted out of the natural order (which includes mothers and daughters) and translated to a sphere from which the feminine element is excluded: in ancient Egypt as in Christianity the Theotokos stands outside the Trinity. One has only to think of Jesus’s brusque rejection of his mother at the marriage in Cana: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John 2: 4), and also earlier, when she sought the twelve-year-old child in the temple: “How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 197
We shall probably not be wrong in assuming that this special sphere to which the father-son relationship is removed is the sphere of primitive mysteries and masculine initiations. Among certain tribes, women are forbidden to look at the mysteries on pain of death. Through the initiations the young men are systematically alienated from their mothers and are reborn as spirits. The celibacy of the priesthood is a continuation of this archetypal idea ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 197
The intellectual operation that lies concealed in the higher father-son relationship consists in the extrapolation of an invisible figure, a “spirit” that is the very essence of masculine life. The life of the body or of a man is posited as something different from the man himself. This led to the idea of a ka, or immortal soul, able to detach itself from the body and not dependent on it for its existence ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 198
In this respect, primitives have extraordinarily well-developed ideas about a plurality of souls. Some are immortal, others are only loosely attached to the body and can wander off and get lost in the night, or they lose their way and get caught in a dream. There are even souls that belong to a person without being lodged in his body, like the bush-soul, which dwells outside in the forest, in the body of an animal. The juxtaposition of a person and his “life” has its psychological basis in the fact that a mind which is not very well differentiated cannot think abstractly and is incapable of putting things into categories. It can only take the qualities it perceives and place them side by side: man and his life, or his sickness (visualized as a sort of demon), or his health or prestige (mana, etc.). This is obviously the case with the Egyptian ka. Father-son-life (or procreative power), together with rigorous exclusion of the Theotokos, constitute the patriarchal formula that was “in the air” long before the advent of Christianity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 198
But once the question is asked: “Whence comes the evil, why is the world so bad and imperfect, why are there diseases and other horrors, why must man suffer? “then reflection has already begun to judge the Father by his manifest works, and straightway one is conscious of a doubt, which is itself the symptom of a split in the original unity. One comes to the conclusion that creation is imperfect nay more, that the Creator has not done his job properly, that the goodness and almightiness of the Father cannot be the sole principle of the cosmos. Hence the One has to be supplemented by the Other, with the result that the world of the Father is fundamentally altered and is superseded by the world of the Son ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 201
This was the time when the Greeks started criticizing the world, the time of “gnosis” in its widest sense, which ultimately gave birth to Christianity. The archetype of the redeemer-god and Original Man is age-old we simply do not know how old. The Son, the revealed god, who voluntarily or involuntarily offers himself for sacrifice as a man, in order to create the world or redeem it from evil, can be traced back to the Purusha of Indian philosophy, and is also found in the Persian conception of the Original Man, Gayomart. Gayomart, son of the god of light, falls victim to the darkness, from which he must be set free in order to redeem the world. He is the prototype of the Gnostic redeemer-figures and of the teachings concerning Christ, redeemer of mankind ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 202
Leaving aside the so-called prefigurations in the Old Testament, there is not a single passage in the New Testament where the Trinity is formulated in an intellectually comprehensible manner. Generally speaking, it is more a question of formulae for triple benediction, such as the end of the second epistle to the Corinthians ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 207
Now the important point is not that the New Testament contains no trinitarian formulae, but that we find in it three figures who are reciprocally related to one another: the Father, the Son, begotten through the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost. Since olden times, formulae for benediction, all solemn agreements, occasions, attributes, etc. have had a magical, threefold character (e.g., the Trishagion) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 209
Although they [the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost] are no evidence for the Trinity in the New Testament, they nevertheless occur and, like the three divine Persons, are clear indications of an active archetype operating beneath the surface and throwing up triadic formations. This proves that the trinitarian archetype is already at work in the New Testament, for what comes after is largely the result of what has gone before, a proposition which is especially apposite when, as in the case of the Trinity, we are confronted with the effects of an unconscious content or archetype ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 209
From the creeds to be discussed later, we shall see that at the synods of the Fathers the New Testament allusions to the divine trio were developed in a thoroughly consistent manner until the homoousia was restored, which again happened unconsciously, since the Fathers knew nothing of the ancient Egyptian model that had already reached the homoousian level. The after-effects on posterity were inevitable consequences of the trinitarian anticipations that were abroad in the early days of Christianity and are nothing but amplifications of the constellated archetype. These amplifications, so far as they were naïve and unprejudiced, are direct proof that what the New Testament is alluding to is in fact the Trinity, as the Church also believes ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 209
Since people did not actually know what it was that had so suddenly revealed itself in the “Son of Man,” but only believed the current interpretations, the effects it had over the centuries signify nothing less than the gradual unfolding of the archetype in man’s consciousness, or rather, its absorption into the pattern of ideas transmitted by the cultures of antiquity. From this historical echo it is possible to recognize what had revealed itself in a sudden flash of illumination and seized upon men’s minds, even though the event, when it happened, was so far beyond their comprehension that they were unable to put it into a clear formula ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 210
Before “revealed” contents can be sorted out and properly formulated, time and distance are needed. The results of this intellectual activity were deposited in a series of tenets, the dogmata, which were then summed up in the “symbolum” or creed. This breviary of belief well deserves the name “symbolum,” for, from a psychological point of view, it gives symbolical expression to, and paints an anthropomorphic picture of, a transcendent fact that cannot be demonstrated or explained rationally, the word “transcendent” being used here in a strictly psychological sense ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 210
This creed is still entirely on the level of the gospels and epistles: there are three divine figures and they do not in any way contradict the one God. Here the Trinity is not explicit, but exists latently, just as Clement’s second letter says of the pre-existent Church: “It was spiritually there.” Even in the very early days of Christianity it was accepted that Christ as Logos was God himself (John 1: 1). For Paul he is pre-existent in God’s form, as is clear from the famous “kenosis” passage in Philippians 2: 6 (AV): “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. “There are also passages in the letters where the author confuses Christ with the Holy Ghost, or where the three are seen as one, as in II Corinthians 3: 17 (DV): “Now the Lord is the spirit. “When the next verse speaks of the “glory of the Lord,” Lord” seems to refer to Christ. But if you read the whole passage, from verses 7 to 18, it is evident that the “glory” refers equally to God, thus proving the promiscuity of the three figures and their latent Trinity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 212
It was, apparently, a Spanish bishop, Hosius of Cordoba, who proposed to the emperor the crucial word homoousia. It did not occur then for the first time, for it can be found in Tertullian, as the “unitas substantiae.” The concept of homoousia can also be found in Gnostic usage, as for instance in Irenaeus’ references to the Valentinians (140circa 200), where the Aeons are said to be of one substance with their creator, Bythos. The Nicene Creed concentrates on the father-son relationship, while the Holy Ghost receives scant mention ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 216
Here the Holy Ghost is given due consideration: he is called “Lord” and is worshipped together with Father and Son. But he proceeds from the Father only. It was this point that caused the tremendous controversy over the “filioque” question, as to whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father only, or from the Son as well. In order to make the Trinity a complete unity, the filioque was just as essential as the homoousia. The (falsely so-called) Athanasian Creed insisted in the strongest possible terms on the equality of all three Persons. Its peculiarities have given much offence to rationalistic and liberal-minded theologians ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 218
The sequence of creeds illustrates the evolution of the Trinity idea through the centuries. In the course of its development it either consistently avoided, or successfully combated, all rationalistic deviations, such as, for instance, the so-plausible-looking Arian heresy. The creeds superimposed on the trinitarian allusions in the Holy Scriptures a structure of ideas that is a perpetual stumbling-block to the liberal-minded rationalist. Religious statements are, however, never rational in the ordinary sense of the word, for they always take into consideration that other world, the world of the archetype, of which reason in the ordinary sense is unconscious, being occupied only with externals. Thus the development of the Christian idea of the Trinity unconsciously reproduced the archetype of the homoousia of Father, Son, and Ka-mutef which first appeared in Egyptian theology. Not that the Egyptian model could be considered the archetype of the Christian idea ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 222
Wherever we find it, the archetype has a compelling force which it derives from the unconscious, and whenever its effect becomes conscious it has a distinctly numinous quality. There is never any conscious invention or cogitation, though speculations about the Trinity have often been accused of this. But collective and, above all, manifestly archetypal ideas can never be derived from the personal sphere. If Communism, for instance, refers to Engels, Marx, Lenin, and so on as the “fathers” of the movement, it does not know that it is reviving an archetypal order of society that existed even in primitive times, thereby explaining, incidentally, the “religious” and “numinous” (i.e., fanatical) character of Communism. Neither did the Church Fathers know that their Trinity had a prehistory dating back several thousand years ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 222
Thus the history of the Trinity presents itself as the gradual crystallization of an archetype that moulds the anthropomorphic conceptions of father and son, of life, and of different persons into an archetypal and numinous figure, the “Most Holy Three-in-One.” The contemporary witnesses of these events apprehended it as something that modern psychology would call a psychic presence outside consciousness. If there is a consensus of opinion in respect of an idea, as there is here and always has been, then we are entitled to speak of a collective presence. Similar “presences” today are the Fascist and Communist ideologies, the one emphasizing the power of the chief, and the other communal ownership of goods in a primitive society ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 224
If we are to answer this psychological question, we must first of all examine the Christ-symbolism contained in the New Testament, together with the patristic allegories and medieval iconography, and compare this material with the archetypal content of the unconscious psyche in order to find out what archetypes have been constellated. The most important of the symbolical statements about Christ are those which reveal the attributes of the hero’s life ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 229
The life of Christ is on the one hand only a short, historical interlude for proclaiming the message, but on the other hand it is an exemplary demonstration of the psychic experiences connected with God’s manifestation of himself (or the realization of the Self). The important thing for man is not the and the (what is “shown” and “done”), but what happens afterwards: the seizure of the individual by the Holy Ghost ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 234
Here, however, we run into a great difficulty. For if we follow up the theory of the Holy Ghost and carry it a step further (which the Church has not done, for obvious reasons), we come inevitably to the conclusion that if the Father appears in the Son and breathes together with the Son, and the Son leaves the Holy Ghost behind for man, then the Holy Ghost breathes in man, too, and thus is the breath common to man, the Son, and the Father. Man is therefore included in God’s sonship, and the words of Christ “Ye are gods” (John 10: 34) appear in a significant light ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 235
The doctrine that the Paraclete was expressly left behind for man raises an enormous problem. The triadic formula of Plato would surely be the last word in the matter of logic, but psychologically it is not so at all, because the psychological factor keeps on intruding in the most disturbing way. Why, in the name of all that’s wonderful, wasn’t it “Father, Mother, and Son?” That would be much more “reasonable” and “natural” than “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” To this we must answer: it is not just a question of a natural situation, but of a product of human reflection added on to the natural sequence of father and son. Through reflection, “life” and its “soul” are abstracted from Nature and endowed with a separate existence. Father and son are united in the same soul, or, according to the ancient Egyptian view, in the same procreative force, Ka-mutef. Ka-mutef is exactly the same hypostatization of an attribute as the breath or “spiration” of the Godhead ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 235
This psychological fact spoils the abstract perfection of the triadic formula and makes it a logically incomprehensible construction, since, in some mysterious and unexpected way, an important mental process peculiar to man has been imported into it. If the Holy Ghost is, at one and the same time, the breath of life and a loving spirit and the Third Person in whom the whole trinitarian process culminates, then he is essentially a product of reflection, a hypostatized noumenon tacked on to the natural family-picture of father and son. It is significant that early Christian Gnosticism tried to get round this difficulty by interpreting the Holy Ghost as the Mother. But that would merely have kept him within the archaic family-picture, within the tritheism and polytheism of the patriarchal world. It is, after all, perfectly natural that the father should have a family and that the son should embody the father. This train of thought is quite consistent with the father-world ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 236
On the other hand, the mother-interpretation would reduce the specific meaning of the Holy Ghost to a primitive image and destroy the most essential of the qualities attributed to him: not only is he the life common to Father and Son, he is also the Paraclete whom the Son left behind him, to procreate in man and bring forth works of divine parentage. It is of paramount importance that the idea of the Holy Ghost is not a natural image, but a recognition of the living quality of Father and Son, abstractly conceived as the “third” term between the One and the Other. Out of the tension of duality life always produces a “third” that seems somehow incommensurable or paradoxical. Hence, as the “third,” the Holy Ghost is bound to be incommensurable and paradoxical too. Unlike Father and Son, he has no name and no character. He is a function, but that function is the Third Person of the Godhead ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 236
He [the Holy Ghost] is psychologically heterogeneous in that he cannot be logically derived from the father-son relationship and can only be understood as an idea introduced by a process of human reflection. The Holy Ghost is an exceedingly “abstract” conception, since a “breath” shared by two figures characterized as distinct and not mutually interchangeable can hardly be conceived at all. Hence one feels it to be an artificial construction of the mind, even though, as the Egyptian Ka-mutef concept shows, it seems somehow to belong to the very essence of the Trinity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 237
The Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as the Mother contains a core of truth in that Mary was the instrument of God’s birth and so became involved in the trinitarian drama as a human being. The Mother of God can, therefore, be regarded as a symbol of mankind’s essential participation in the Trinity. The psychological justification for this assumption lies in the fact that thinking, which originally had its source in the self-revelations of the unconscious, was felt to be the manifestation of a power external to consciousness. The primitive does not think; the thoughts come to him. We ourselves still feel certain particularly enlightening ideas as “influences,” “in-spirations,” etc. Where judgments and flashes of insight are transmitted by unconscious activity, they are often attributed to an archetypal feminine figure, the anima or mother-beloved. It then seems as if the inspiration came from the mother or from the beloved, the “femme inspiratrice” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 240
In view of this, the Holy Ghost would have a tendency to exchange his neuter designation for a feminine one. (It may be noted that the Hebrew word for spirit ruach is predominantly feminine.) Holy Ghost and Logos merge in the Gnostic idea of Sophia, and again in the Sapientia of the medieval natural philosophers, who said of her: “In gremio matris sedet sapientia patris” (the wisdom of the father lies in the lap of the mother). These psychological relationships do something to explain why the Holy Ghost was interpreted as the mother, but they add nothing to our understanding of the Holy Ghost as such, because it is impossible to see how the mother could come third when her natural place would be second ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 240
When Goethe says that the fourth was the one “who thought for them all,” we rather suspect that the fourth was Goethe’s own thinking function ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 244
As compared with the trinitarian thinking of Plato, ancient Greek philosophy favoured thinking of a quaternary type. In Pythagoras the great role was played not by three but by four; the Pythagorean oath, for instance, says that the tetraktys “contains the roots of eternal nature.” The Pythagorean school was dominated by the idea that the soul was a square and not a triangle. The origin of these ideas lies far back in the dark prehistory of Greek thought. The quaternity is an archetype of almost universal occurrence. It forms the logical basis for any whole judgment. If one wishes to pass such a judgment, it must have this fourfold aspect. For instance, if you want to describe the horizon as a whole, you name the four quarters of heaven. Three is not a natural coefficient of order, but an artificial one. There are four elements, four prime qualities, four colours, four castes, four ways of spiritual development in Buddhism, etc. So, too, there are four aspects of psychological orientation, beyond which nothing fundamental remains to be said ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 246
Ever since the Timaeus the “fourth” has signified “realization,” i.e., entry into an essentially different condition, that of worldly materiality, which, it is authoritatively stated, is ruled by the Prince of this world for matter is the diametrical opposite of spirit. It is the true abode of the devil, whose hellish hearth-fire burns deep in the interior of the earth, while the shining spirit soars in the aether, freed from the shackles of gravity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 251
I would like to call attention to Gerhard Dorn, a physician and alchemist, and a native of Frankfurt. He took great exception to the traditional quaternity of the basic principles of his art, and also to the fourfold nature of its goal, the lapis philosophorum. It seemed to him that this was a heresy, since the principle that ruled the world was a Trinity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 262
The quaternity must therefore be of the devil. Four, he maintained, was a doubling of two, and two was made on the second day of Creation, but God was obviously not altogether pleased with the result of his handiwork that evening. The binarius is the devil of discord and, what is worse, of feminine nature. (In East and West alike even numbers are feminine.) The cause of dissatisfaction was that, on this ominous second day of Creation, just as with Ahura-Mazda, a split was revealed in God’s nature. Out of it crept the “four-horned serpent,” who promptly succeeded in seducing Eve, because she was related to him by reason of her binary nature. (“Man was created by God, woman by the ape of God.”) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 262
The devil is the aping shadow of God, thein Gnosticism and also in Greek alchemy. He is “Lord of this world,” in whose shadow man was born, fatally tainted with the original sin brought about by the devil. Christ, according to the Gnostic view, cast off the shadow he was born with and remained without sin ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 263
It will have struck the reader that two corresponding elements cross one another in our quaternity schema (shown below). On the one hand we have the polaristic identity of Christ and his adversary, and on the other the unity of the Father unfolded in the multiplicity of the Holy Ghost. The resultant cross is the symbol of the suffering Godhead that redeems mankind. This suffering could not have occurred, nor could it have had any effect at all, had it not been for the existence of a power opposed to God, namely “this world” and its Lord. The quaternity schema recognizes the existence of this power as an undeniable fact by fettering trinitarian thinking to the reality of this world ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 264
The differentiated and differentiable functions are much easier to cope with, and for understandable reasons, we prefer to leave the “inferior” function around the corner, or to repress it altogether, because it is such an awkward customer. And it is a fact that it has the strongest tendency to be infantile, banal, primitive, and archaic. Anybody who has a high opinion of himself will do well to guard against letting it make a fool of him. On the other hand, deeper insight will show that the primitive and archaic qualities of the inferior function conceal all sorts of significant relationships and symbolical meanings, and instead of laughing off the Cabiri as ridiculous Tom Thumbs he may begin to suspect that they are a treasure-house of hidden wisdom ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 244
Just as, in Faust, the fourth thinks for them all, so the whereabouts of the eighth should be asked “on Olympus.” Goethe showed great insight in not underestimating his inferior function, thinking, although it was in the hands of the Cabiri and was undoubtedly mythological and archaic. He characterizes perfectly in the line: “The fourth would not come.” Exactly! It wanted for some reason to stay behind or below ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 244
They [symbols] are the remedy with whose help neurotic dissociations can be repaired, by restoring to the conscious mind a spirit and an attitude which from time immemorial have been felt as solving and healing in their effects. They are “représentations collectives” which facilitate the much-needed union of conscious and unconscious. This union cannot be accomplished either intellectually or in a purely practical sense, because in the former case the instincts rebel and in the latter case reason and morality. Every dissociation that falls within the category of the psychogenic neuroses is due to a conflict of this kind, and the conflict can only be resolved through the symbol ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 285
The synthesis of conscious and unconscious can only be implemented by a conscious confrontation with the latter, and this is not possible unless one understands what the unconscious is saying. During this process we come upon the symbols investigated in the present study, and in coming to terms with them we re-establish the lost connection with ideas and feelings which make a synthesis of the personality possible ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 285
This “inferior” personality is made up of everything that will not fit in with, and adapt to, the laws and regulations of conscious life. It is compounded of “disobedience” and is therefore rejected not on moral grounds only, but also. Or rather, this function does collaborate, not for the benefit of conscious, purposive intentions, but in the interests of unconscious tendencies pursuing a different goal. It is this fourth, “inferior” function which acts autonomously towards consciousness and cannot be harnessed to the latter’s intentions. It lurks behind every neurotic dissociation and can only be annexed to consciousness if the corresponding unconscious contents are made conscious at the same time. But this integration cannot take place and be put to a useful purpose unless one can admit the tendencies bound up with the shadow and allow them some measure of realization tempered, of course, with the necessary criticism ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 292
This leads to disobedience and self-disgust, but also to self-reliance, without which individuation is unthinkable. The ability to “will otherwise” must, unfortunately, be real if ethics are to make any sense at all. Anyone who submits to the law from the start, or to what is generally expected, acts like the man in the parable who buried his talent in the earth ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 292
Individuation is an exceedingly difficult task: it always involves a conflict of duties; whose solution requires us to understand that our “counter-will” is also an aspect of God’s will. One cannot individuate with mere words and convenient self-deceptions, because there are too many destructive possibilities in the offing. One almost unavoidable danger is that of getting stuck in the conflict and hence in the neurotic dissociation ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 292
Here the therapeutic myth has a helpful and loosening effect, even when the patient shows not a trace of conscious understanding. The felt presence of the archetype is enough; it only fails to work when the possibility of conscious understanding is there, within the patient’s reach. In those circumstances it is positively deleterious for the patient to remain unconscious, though this happens frequently enough in our Christian civilization today. So much of what Christian symbolism taught has gone by the board for large numbers of people, without their ever having understood what they have lost. Civilization does not consist in progress as such and in mindless destruction of the old values, but in developing and refining the good that has been won ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 292
The Host is lifted up towards the cross on the altar, and the priest makes the sign of the cross over it with the paten. The bread is thus brought into relation with Christ and his death on the cross; it is marked as a “sacrifice” and thereby becomes sacred. The elevation exalts it into the realm of the spiritual: it is a preliminary act of spiritualization. Justin makes the interesting remark that the presentation of the cleansed lepers in the temple was an image of the Eucharistic bread. This links up with the later alchemical idea of the imperfect or “leprous” substance which is made perfect by the opus. (Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, arte perficitur. What nature leaves imperfect is perfected by the art”) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 310
The fact that the Eucharist was also celebrated with water shows that the early Christians were mainly interested in the symbolism of the mysteries and not in the literal observance of the sacrament. (There were several other variants “galactophagy,” for instance which all bear out this view) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 314
Another, very graphic, interpretation of the wine and water is the reference to John 19: 34: “And forthwith came there out blood and water.” Deserving of special emphasis is the remark of St. John Chrysostom (patriarch of Constantinople, d. 407), that in drinking the wine Christ drank his own blood ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 315
The lifting up of the chalice in the air prepares the spiritualization (i.e., volatilization) of the wine. This is confirmed by the invocation to the Holy Ghost which immediately follows (Veni sanctificator), and it is even more evident in the Mozarabic liturgy, which has “Veni spiritus sanctificator.” The invocation serves to infuse the wine with holy spirit, for it is the Holy Ghost who begets, fulfils, and transforms After the elevation, the chalice was, in former times, set down to the right of the Host, to correspond with the blood that flowed from the right side of Christ ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 317
This, in the Roman Mass, is the climax, the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 322
Duns Scotus (d. 1308) remarks that, in the sacrament of the Last Supper, Christ, by an act of will, offers himself as a sacrifice in every Mass, through the agency of the priest. This tells us plainly enough that the sacrificial act is not performed by the priest, but by Christ himself. The agent of transformation is nothing less than the divine will working through Christ. The Council of Trent declared that in the sacrifice of the Mass “the selfsame Christ is contained and bloodlessly sacrificed,” although this is not a repetition of the historical sacrifice but a bloodless renewal of it. As the sacramental words have the power to accomplish the sacrifice, being an expression of God’s will, they can be described metaphorically as the sacrificial knife or sword which, guided by his will, consummates the thysia ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 324
The consecrated substances are lifted up and shown to the congregation. The Host in particular represents a beatific vision of heaven, in fulfilment of Psalm 27: 8: “Thy face, Lord, will I seek,” for in it the Divine Man is present ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 326
Taking up the Host, the priest makes the sign of the cross three times over the chalice, and says: “Through Him, and with Him, and in Him.” Then he makes the sign of the cross twice between himself and the chalice. This establishes the identity of Host, chalice, and priest, thus affirming once more the unity of all parts of the sacrifice. The union of Host and chalice signifies the union of the body and blood, i.e., the quickening of the body with a soul, for blood is equivalent to soul. Then follows the Pater noster ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 330
The prayer “Deliver us, O Lord, we beseech thee, from all evils, past, present, and to come” lays renewed emphasis on the petition made in the preceding Pater noster: “but deliver us from evil.” The connection between this and the sacrificial death of Christ lies in the descent into hell and the breaking of the infernal power. The breaking of the bread that now follows is symbolic of Christ’s death. The Host is broken in two over the chalice. A small piece, the particula, is broken off from the left half and used for the rite of consignatio and commixtio. In the Byzantine rite the bread is divided into four, the four pieces being marked with letters. The peculiar arrangement of the letters obviously represents a quaternity, which as we know always has the character of wholeness. This quaternity, as the letters show, refers to Christ glorified, king of glory and Pantokrator ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 331
This is the mingling of bread and wine, as explained by Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428?): “he combines them into one, whereby it is made manifest to everybody that although they are two they are virtually one.” The text at this point says: “May this mixture and consecration [commixtio et consecratio] of the body and blood of our Lord help us,” etc. The word `consecration’ may be an allusion to an original consecration by contact, though that would not clear up the contradiction since a consecration of both substances has already taken place. Attention has therefore been drawn to the old custom of holding over the sacrament from one Mass to another, the Host being dipped in wine and then preserved in softened, or mixed, form. There are numerous rites that end with minglings of this kind. Here I would only mention the consecration by water, or the mixed drink of honey and milk which the neophytes were given after communion in the Church Order of Hippolytus ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 334
The Leonine Sacramentary (seventh century) interprets the commixtio as a mingling of the heavenly and earthly nature of Christ. The later view was that it symbolizes the resurrection, since in it the blood (or soul) of our Lord is reunited with the body lying in the sepulchre. There is a significant reversal here of the original rite of baptism. In baptism, the body is immersed in water for the purpose of transformation; in the commixtio, on the other hand, the body, or particula, is steeped in wine, symbolizing spirit, and this amounts to a glorification of the body. Hence the justification for regarding the commixtio as a symbol of the resurrection 335
The mixing of water with the wine originally referred to the ancient custom of not drinking wine unless mixed with water. A drunkard was therefore called akratopotes, an `unmixed drinker.’ In modern Greek, wine is still called(mixture). From the custom of the Monophysite Armenians, who did not add any water to the Eucharistic wine (so as to preserve the exclusively divine nature of Christ), it may be inferred that water has a hylical, or physical, significance and represents man’s material nature ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 312
The mixing of water and wine in the Roman rite would accordingly signify that divinity is mingled with humanity as indivisibly as the wine with the water. St. Cyprian (bishop of Carthage, d. 258) says that the wine refers to Christ, and the water to the congregation as the body of Christ. As the water is an imperfect or even leprous substance, it has to be blessed and consecrated before being mixed, so that only a purified body may be joined to the wine of the spirit, just as Christ is to be united only with a pure and sanctified congregation. Thus this part of the rite has the special significance of preparing a perfect body the glorified body of resurrection ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 312
At the time of St. Cyprian the communion was generally celebrated with water. And, still later, St. Ambrose (bishop of Milan, d. 397) says: “In the shadow there was water from the rock, as it were the blood of Christ. “In the Church Order of Hippolytus (d. c. 235) the water chalice is associated with the baptismal font, where the inner man is renewed as well as the body. This interpretation comes very close to the baptismal krater of Poimandres and to the Hermetic basin filled with nousHere the water signifies the pneuma, i.e., the spirit of prophecy, and also the doctrine which a man receives and passes on to others ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 313
The priest makes the sign of the cross three times over the substances with the thurible, twice from right to left and once from left to right. The counterclockwise movement (from right to left) corresponds psychologically to a circumambulation downwards, in the direction of the unconscious, while the clockwise (left-to-right) movement goes in the direction of consciousness. There is also a complicated censing of the altar ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 318
The censing has the significance of an incense offering and is therefore a relic of the original thysia. At the same time it signifies a transformation of the sacrificial gifts and of the altar, a spiritualization of all the physical substances subserving the rite. Finally, it is an apotropaic ceremony to drive away any demonic forces that may be present, for it fills the air with the fragrance of the pneuma and renders it uninhabitable by evil spirits. The vapour also suggests the sublimated body, the corpus volatile sive spirituale, or wraithlike “subtle body.” Rising up as a “spiritual” substance, the incense implements and represents the ascent of prayer hence the Dirigatur, Domine, oratio mea, sicut incensum, in conspectu tuo [“Let my prayer, O Lord, ascend like incense in thy sight”] ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 319
The censing brings the preparatory, spiritualizing rites to an end. The gifts have been sanctified and prepared for the actual transubstantiation. Priest and congregation are likewise purified by the prayers Accendat in nobis Dominus ignem sui amoris [“May the Lord enkindle in us the fire of his love”], and Lavabo inter innocentes [“I will wash my hands among the innocent”], and are made ready to enter into the mystic union of the sacrificial act which now follows ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 320
The Suscipe, sancta Trinitas, like the Orate, fratres, the Sanctus, and the Te igitur, is a propitiatory prayer which seeks to insure the acceptance of the sacrifice. Hence the Preface that comes after the Secret is called Illatio in the Mozarabic riteand in the old Gallican liturgy is known as Immolatio (in the sense of oblatio) with reference to the presentation of the gifts. The words of the Sanctus, “Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini” [“Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”], point to the expected appearance of the Lord which has already been prepared, on the ancient principle that a “naming” has the force of a “summons” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 321
After the Canon there follows the “Commemoration of the Living,” together with the prayers Hanc igitur and Quam oblationem. In the Mozarabic Mass these are followed by the Epiclesis (invocation): “Adesto, adesto Jesu, bone Pontifex, in medio nostri: sicut fuisti in medio discipulorum tuorum” [“Be present, be present in our midst, O Jesus, great High Priest: as thou wert in the midst of thy disciples”]. This naming likewise has the original force of a summons. It is an intensification of the Benedictus qui venit, and it may be, and sometimes was, regarded as the actual manifestation of the Lord, and hence as the culminating point of the Mass ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 321
The best examples are to be found in the religion of ancient Mexico. Thus, in order to renew the moon-goddess a young woman was decapitated and skinned, and a youth then put the skin round him to represent the risen goddess. The prototype of this renewal is the snake casting its skin every year, a phenomenon round which primitive fantasy has always played ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 348
In our vision the skinning is restricted to the head, and this can probably be explained by the underlying idea of spiritual transformation. Since olden times shaving the head has been associated with consecration, that is, with spiritual transformation or initiation. The priests of Isis had their heads shaved quite bald, and the tonsure, as we know, is still in use at the present day ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 348
This “symptom” of transformation goes back to the old idea that the transformed one becomes like a new-born babe (neophyte, quasimodogenitus) with a hairless head. In the myth of the night sea journey, the hero loses all his hair during his incubation in the belly of the monster, because of the terrific heat ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 348
The custom of tonsure, which is derived from these primitive ideas, naturally presupposes the presence of a ritual barber. Curiously enough, we come across the barber in that old alchemical “mystery,” the Chymical Wedding of 1616. There the hero, on entering the mysterious castle, is pounced on by invisible barbers, who give him something very like a tonsure. Here again the initiation and transformation process is accompanied by a shaving ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 348
He was clearly a non-Christian Gnostic, and in particular so one gathers from the famous passage about the krateran adherent of the Poimandres sect, and therefore a follower of Hermes. Although alchemical literature abounds in parables, I would hesitate to class these dream-visions among them. Anyone acquainted with the language of the alchemists will recognize that their parables are mere allegories of ideas that were common knowledge. In the allegorical figures and actions, one can usually see at once what substances and what procedures are being referred to under a deliberately theatrical disguise. There is nothing of this kind in the Zosimos visions ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 344
Indeed, it comes almost as a surprise to find the alchemical interpretation, namely that the dream and its impressive machinery are simply an illustration of the means for producing the “divine water.” Moreover, a parable is a self-contained whole, whereas our vision varies and amplifies a single theme as a dream does. So far as one can assess the nature of these visions at all, I should say that even in the original text the contents of an imaginative meditation have grouped themselves round the kernel of an actual dream and been woven into it. That there really was such a meditation is evident from the fragments of it that accompany the visions in the form of a commentary. As we know, meditations of this kind are often vividly pictorial, as if the dream were being continued on a level nearer to consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 344
The later Arabic designation of Zosimos as al-‘Ibrî (the Hebrew) does not of course prove that he himself was a Jew, but it is clear from his writings that he was acquainted with Jewish traditions ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 350
The parallel between the Hebrew god and Saturn is of considerable importance as regards the alchemical idea of the transformation of the God of the Old Testament into the God of the New. The alchemists naturally attached great significance to Saturn, for, besides being the outermost planet, the supreme archon (the Harranites named him “Primas”), and the demiurge Ialdabaoth, he was also the spiritus niger who lies captive in the darkness of matter, the deity or that part of the deity which has been swallowed up in his own creation. He is the dark god who reverts to his original luminous state in the mystery of alchemical transmutation. As the Aurora consurgens [Part I] says: “Blessed is he that shall find this science and into whom the prudence of Saturn floweth” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 350
Throughout the visions it is clear that sacrificer and sacrificed are one and the same. This idea of the unity of the prima and ultima materia of that which redeems and that which is to be redeemed, pervades the whole of alchemy from beginning to end. “Unus est lapis, una medicina, unum vas, unum regimen, unaque dispositio” is the key formula to its enigmatic language. Greek alchemy expresses the same idea. Its symbol is the uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. In our vision it is the priest as sacrificer who devours himself as the sacrifice ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 353
This recalls the saying of St. John Chrysostom that in the Eucharist Christ drinks his own blood. By the same token, one might add, he eats his own flesh. The grisly repast in the dream of Zosimos reminds us of the orgiastic meals in the Dionysus cult, when sacrificial animals were torn to pieces and eaten. They represent Dionysus Zagreus being torn to pieces by the Titans, from whose mangled remains the(god) arises ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 353
Zosimos tells us that the vision represents or explains the “production of the waters.” The visions themselves only show the transformation into pneuma. In the language of the alchemists, however, spirit and water are synonymous, as they are in the language of the early Christians, for whom water meant the spiritus veritatis. In the “Book of Krates” we read: “You make the bodies to liquefy, so that they mingle and become an homogeneous liquid; this is then named the `divine water’” (Berthelot, La Chimie au moyen áge, III, p. 53). The passage corresponds to the Zosimos text, which says that the priest would “change the bodies into blood.” For the alchemists, water and blood are identical. This transformation is the same as the solutio or liquefactio, which is a synonym for the sublimatio, for “water” is also “fire” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 354
The “philosophical egg” is divided with the sword, and with it the “King” is transfixed and the dragon or “corpus” dismembered, the latter being represented as the body of a man whose head and limbs are cut off. The lion’s paws are likewise cut off with the sword ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 357
For the alchemical sword brings about the solutio, or separatio, of the elements, thereby restoring the original condition of chaos, so that a new and more perfect body can be produced by a new impressio formae, or by a “new imagination.” The sword is therefore that which “kills and vivifies,” and the same is said of the permanent water or mercurial water ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 357
The divisive and separative function of the sword, which is of such importance in alchemy, is prefigured in the flaming sword of the angel that separated our first parents from paradise. Separation by a sword is a theme that can also be found in the Gnosis of the Ophites: the earthly cosmos is surrounded by a ring of fire which at the same time encloses paradise. But paradise and the ring of fire are separated by the “flaming sword.” An important interpretation of this flaming sword is given in Simon Magus: there is an incorruptible essence potentially present in every human being, the divine pneuma, “which is stationed above and below in the stream of water.” Simon says of this pneuma: “I and thou, thou before me. I, who am after thee.” It is a force “that generates itself, that causes itself to grow; it is its own mother, sister, bride, daughter; its own son, mother, father; a unity, a root of the whole.” It is the very ground of existence, the procreative urge, which is of fiery origin. Fire is related to blood, which “is fashioned warm and ruddy like fire” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 359
It is clear from these remarkable statements of Hippolytus concerning the teachings of Simon Magus that the sword is very much more than an instrument which divides; it is itself the force which “turns” from something infinitesimally small into the infinitely great: from water, fire, and blood it becomes the limitless aeon. What it means is the transformation of the vital spirit in man into the Divine. The natural being becomes the divine pneuma, as in the vision of Zosimos ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 359
Simon’s description of the creative pneuma, the true arcane substance, corresponds in every detail to the uroboros or serpens mercurialis of the Latinists. It too is its own father, mother, son, daughter, brother, and sister from the earliest beginnings of alchemy right down to the end. It begets and sacrifices itself and is its own instrument of sacrifice, for it is a symbol of the deadly and life-giving water ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 359
In the still older “Tractatus Micreris,” dating perhaps from the twelfth century, we find the “fiery sword” in a quotation from Ostanes: “The great Astanus [Ostanes] said: Take an egg, pierce it with the fiery sword, and separate its soul from its body.” Here the sword is something that divides body and soul, corresponding to the division between heaven and earth, the ring of fire and paradise, or paradise and the first parents ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 361
From the human point of view, gifts are offered to God at the altar, signifying at the same time the self-oblation of the priest and the congregation. The ritual act consecrates both the gifts and the givers. It commemorates and represents the Last Supper which our Lord took with his disciples, the whole Incarnation, Passion, death, and resurrection of Christ ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 378
But from the divine point of view this anthropomorphic action is only the outer shell or husk in which what is really happening is not a human action at all but a divine event. For an instant the life of Christ, eternally existent outside time, becomes visible and is unfolded in temporal succession, but in condensed form, in the sacred action: Christ incarnates as a man under the aspect of the offered substances, he suffers, is killed, is laid in the sepulchre, breaks the power of the underworld, and rises again in glory. In the utterance of the words of consecration the Godhead intervenes, Itself acting and truly present, and thus proclaims that the central event in the Mass is Its act of grace, in which the priest has only the significance of a minister ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 378
The same applies to the congregation and the offered substances: they are all ministering causes of the sacred event. The presence of the Godhead binds all parts of the sacrificial act into a mystical unity, so that it is God himself who offers himself as a sacrifice in the substances, in the priest, and in the congregation, and who, in the human form of the Son, offers himself as an atonement to the Father ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 378
Although God the Father is of one nature with God the Son, he appears in time on the one hand as the eternal Father and on the other hand as a man with limited earthly existence. Mankind as a whole is included in God’s human nature, which is why man is also included in the sacrificial act. Just as, in the sacrificial act, God is both agens and patiens, so too is man according to his limited capacity. The causa efficiens of the transubstantiation is a spontaneous act of God’s grace. Ecclesiastical doctrine insists on this view and even tends to attribute the preparatory action of the priest, indeed the very existence of the rite, to divine prompting, rather than to slothful human nature with its load of original sin ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 379
This view is of the utmost importance for a psychological understanding of the Mass. Wherever the magical aspect of a rite tends to prevail, it brings the rite nearer to satisfying the individual ego’s blind greed for power, and thus breaks up the mystical body of the Church into separate units. Where, on the other hand, the rite is conceived as the action of God himself, the human participants have only an instrumental or “ministering” significance. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 379
Human consciousness (represented by the priest and congregation) is confronted with an autonomous event which, taking place on a “divine” and “timeless” plane transcending consciousness, is in no way dependent on human action, but which impels man to act by seizing upon him as an instrument and making him the exponent of a “divine” happening. In the ritual action man places himself at the disposal of an autonomous and “eternal” agency operating outside the categories of human consciousness parva licet componere magnisin much the same way that a good actor does not merely represent the drama, but allows himself to be overpowered by the genius of the dramatist ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 379
The dual aspect of the Mass finds expression not only in the contrast between human and divine action, but also in the dual aspect of God and the God-man, who, although they are by nature a unity, nevertheless represent a duality in the ritual drama. Without this “dichotomy of God,” if I may use such a term, the whole act of sacrifice would be inconceivable and would lack actuality. According to the Christian view God has never ceased to be God, not even when he appeared in human form in the temporal order. The Christ of the Johannine gospel declares: “I and my Father are one. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 10: 30, 14: 9). And yet on the Cross Christ cries out: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 380
And where would God’s wholeness be if he could not be the “wholly other”? Accordingly it is with some psychological justification, so it seems to me, that when the Gnostic Nous fell into the power of Physis he assumed the dark chthonic form of the serpent, and the Manichaean “Original Man” in the same situation actually took on the qualities of the Evil One. In Tibetan Buddhism all gods without exception have a peaceful and a wrathful aspect, for they reign over all the realms of being. The dichotomy of God into divinity and humanity and his return to himself in the sacrificial act hold out the comforting doctrine that in man’s own darkness there is hidden a light that shall once again return to its source, and that this light actually wanted to descend into the darkness in order to deliver the Enchained One who languishes there, and lead him to light everlasting. All this belongs to the stock of pre-Christian ideas, being none other than the doctrine of the “Man of Light,” the Anthropos or Original Man, which the sayings of Christ the gospels assume to be common knowledge ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 380
So in offering bread and wine man is in the first instance offering up the products of his culture, the best, as it were, that human industry produces. But the “best” can be produced only by the best in man, by his conscientiousness and devotion. Cultural products can therefore easily stand for the psychological conditions of their production, that is, for those human virtues which alone make man capable of civilization ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 383
As to the special nature of the substances, bread is undoubtedly a food. There is a popular saying that wine “fortifies,” though not in the same sense as food “sustains.” It stimulates and “makes glad the heart of man” by virtue of a certain volatile substance which has always been called “spirit.” It is thus unlike innocuous water, an “inspiriting” drink, for a spirit or god dwells within it and produces the ecstasy of intoxication. The wine miracle at Cana was the same as the miracle in the temple of Dionysus, and it is profoundly significant that, on the Damascus Chalice, Christ is enthroned among vine tendrils like Dionysus himself. Bread therefore represents the physical means of subsistence, and wine the spiritual. The offering up of bread and wine is the offering of both the physical and the spiritual fruits of civilization ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 384
sensible But, however he was of the care and labour lavished upon them, man could hardly fail to observe that these cultivated plants grew and flourished according to an inner law of their own, and that there was a power at work in them which he compared to his own life breath or vital spirit. Frazer has called this principle, not unjustly, the “corn spirit.” Human initiative and toil are certainly necessary, but even more necessary, in the eyes of primitive man, is the correct and careful performance of the ceremonies which sustain, strengthen, and propitiate the vegetation numen ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 385
The value of the gift is enhanced when it is the best or the first fruits. Since bread and wine are the best that agriculture can offer, they are by the same token man’s best endeavour. In addition, bread symbolizes the visible manifestation of the divine numen which dies and rises again, and wine the presence of a pneuma which promises intoxication and ecstasy. The classical world thought of this pneuma as Dionysus, particularly the suffering Dionysus Zagreus, whose divine substance is distributed throughout the whole of nature. In short, what is sacrificed under the forms of bread and wine is nature, man, and God, all combined in the unity of the symbolic gift ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 387
The act of making a sacrifice consists in the first place in giving something which belongs to me. Everything which belongs to me bears the stamp of “mineness,” that is, it has a subtle identity with my ego ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 389
When, therefore, I give away something that is “mine,” what I am giving is essentially a symbol, a thing of many meanings; but, owing to my unconsciousness of its symbolic character, it adheres to my ego, because it is part of my personality. Hence there is, explicitly or implicitly, a personal claim bound up with every gift. There is always an unspoken “give that thou mayest receive.” Consequently the gift always carries with it a personal intention, for the mere giving of it is not a sacrifice. It only becomes a sacrifice if I give up the implied intention of receiving something in return. If it is to be a true sacrifice, the gift must be given as if it were being destroyed. Only then is it possible for the egoistic claim to be given up. Were the bread and wine simply given without any consciousness of an egoistic claim, the fact that it was unconscious would be no excuse, but would on the contrary be sure proof of the existence of a secret claim ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 390
Because of its egoistic nature, the offering would then inevitably have the character of a magical act of propitiation, with the unavowed purpose and tacit expectation of purchasing the good will of the Deity. That is an ethically worthless simulacrum of sacrifice, and in order to avoid it the giver must at least make himself sufficiently conscious of his identity with the gift to recognize how far he is giving himself up in giving the gift. But since the gift represents myself, I have in that case destroyed myself, given myself away without expectation of return ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 390
What I sacrifice is my own selfish claim, and by doing this I give up myself. Every sacrifice is therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, a self-sacrifice. The degree to which it is so depends on the significance of the gift. If it is of great value to me and touches my most personal feelings, I can be sure that in giving up my egoistic claim I shall challenge my ego personality to revolt. I can also be sure that the power which suppresses this claim, and thus suppresses me, must be the Self. Hence it is the Self that causes me to make the sacrifice; nay more, it compels me to make it. The Self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice. Let us try for a moment to look into Abraham’s soul when he was commanded to sacrifice his only son. Quite apart from the compassion he felt for his child, would not a father in such a position feel himself as the victim, and feel that he was plunging the knife into his own breast? He would be at the same time the sacrificer and the sacrificed ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 397
Now, since the relation of the ego to the Self is like that of the son to the father, we can say that when the Self calls on us to sacrifice ourselves, it is really carrying out the sacrificial act on itself. We know more or less what this act means to us, but what it means to the Self is not so clear. But what does the Self gain? We see it entering into manifestation, freeing itself from unconscious projection, and, as it grips us, entering into our lives and so passing from unconsciousness into consciousness, from potentiality into actuality. What it is in the diffuse unconscious state we do not know; we only know that in becoming ourself it has become man ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 398
The gross concretism of the vision is so striking that one might easily feel tempted, for aesthetic and other reasons, to drop the comparison with the Mass altogether. If I nevertheless venture to bring out certain analogies, I do so not with the rationalistic intention of devaluing the sacred ceremony by putting it on a level with a piece of pagan nature worship. If I have any aim at all apart from scientific truth, it is to show that the most important mystery of the Catholic Church rests, among other things, on psychic conditions which are deeply rooted in the human soul ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 404
In contrast to this, the vision is archaic and primitive, but its symbolism points directly to the fundamental alchemical idea of the incorruptible substance, namely to the Self, which is beyond change. The vision is a piece of unalloyed naturalism, banal, grotesque, squalid, horrifying and profound as nature herself. Its meaning is not clear, but it allows itself to be divined with the abysmal uncertainty and ambiguity that pertains to all things nonhuman, suprahuman, and subhuman ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 405
What is the reason for the “punishment” of God? Despite the almost blasphemous nature of this question, we must nevertheless ask it in view of the obviously punitive character of the sacrifice. The usual explanation is that Christ was punished for our sins. The dogmatic validity of this answer is not in question here. As I am in no way concerned with the Church’s explanation, but only wish to reconstruct the underlying psychic process, we must logically assume the existence of a guilt proportionate to the punishment ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 408
If mankind is the guilty party, logic surely demands that mankind should be punished. But if God takes the punishment on himself, he exculpates mankind, and we must then conjecture that it is not mankind that is guilty, but God (which would logically explain why he took the guilt on himself). For reasons that can readily be understood, a satisfactory answer is not to be expected from orthodox Christianity. But such an answer may be found in the Old Testament, in Gnosticism, and in late Catholic speculation. From the Old Testament we know that though Yahweh was a guardian of the law he was not just, and that he suffered from fits of rage which he had every occasion to regret ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 408
In these explanations we find the natural logic we missed in the answer of the Church. God’s guilt consisted in the fact that, as creator of the world and king of his creatures, he was inadequate and therefore had to submit to the ritual slaying. For primitive man the concrete king was perfectly suited to this purpose, but not for a higher level of civilization with a more spiritual conception of God. Earlier ages could still dethrone their gods by destroying their images or putting them in chains. At a higher level, however, one god could be dethroned only by another god, and when monotheism developed, God could only transform himself ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 409
Because words are substitutes for things, which of course they cannot be in reality, they take on intensified forms, become eccentric, outlandish, stupendous, swell up into what schizophrenic patients call “power words.” A primitive word-magic develops, and one is inordinately impressed by it because anything out of the ordinary is felt to be especially profound and significant ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 442
Naturally, in order to survive, Christianity had to defend itself not only against its enemies but also against the excessive pretensions of some of its adherents, including those of the Gnostics. Increasingly it had to rationalize its doctrines in order to stem the flood of irrationality. This led, over the centuries, to that strange marriage of the originally irrational Christian message with human reason, which is so characteristic of the Western mentality. But to the degree that reason gradually gained the upper hand, the intellect asserted itself and demanded autonomy. And just as the intellect subjugated the psyche, so also it subjugated Nature and begat on her an age of scientific technology that left less and less room for the natural and irrational man. Thus the foundations were laid for an inner opposition which today threatens the world with chaos ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 444
To make the reversal complete, all the powers of the underworld now hide behind reason and intellect, and under the mask of rationalistic ideology a stubborn faith seeks to impose itself by fire and sword, vying with the darkest aspects of a church militant. By a strange enantiodromia, the Christian spirit of the West has become the defender of the irrational, since, in spite of having fathered rationalism and intellectualism, it has not succumbed to them so far as to give up its belief in the rights of man, and especially the freedom of the individual. But this freedom guarantees a recognition of the irrational principle, despite the lurking danger of chaotic individualism ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 444
By appealing to the eternal rights of man, faith binds itself inalienably to a higher order, not only on account of the historical fact that Christ has proved to be an ordering factor for many hundreds of years, but also because the Self effectively compensates chaotic conditions no matter by what name it is known: for the Self is the Anthropos above and beyond this world, and in him is contained the freedom and dignity of the individual man ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 444
Since an archetype always possesses a certain numinosity, the integration of the numen generally produces an inflation of the subject. It is therefore entirely in accord with psychological expectations that Goethe should dub his Faust a Superman. In recent times this type has extended beyond Nietzsche into the field of political psychology, and its incarnation in man has had all the consequences that might have been expected to follow from such a misappropriation of power ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 472
As human beings do not live in airtight compartments, this infectious inflation has spread everywhere and given rise to an extraordinary uncertainty in morals and philosophy. The medical psychologist is bound to take an interest in such matters, if only for professional reasons, and so we witness the memorable spectacle of a psychiatrist introducing a critical study of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Meditating upon this highly incongruous conjunction, I decided that I should best fulfil my obligations if I explained to the well-intentioned reader how and why the devil got into the consulting-room of the psychiatrist. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 473
Apart from common prayer and Holy Communion, the Protestant has no ritual ceremonies at his disposal, no spiritual exercises, rosaries, pilgrimages, etc., with their expressive symbolism. He is therefore compelled to take his stand on moral ground, which puts the instinctual forces coming up from the unconscious in danger of a new repression. Any sacral action, in whatever form, works like a vessel for receiving the contents of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 543
Puritan simplification has deprived Protestantism of just this means of acting on the unconscious; at any rate it has dispossessed the clergyman of his quality as a priestly mediator, which is so very necessary to the soul. Instead, it has given the individual responsibility for himself and left him alone with his God. Herein lies the advantage and also the danger of Protestantism. From this, too, comes its inner unrest, which in the course of a few centuries has begotten more than four hundred Protestant denominations an indubitable symptom of individualism run riot ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 543
There can be no doubt that the psychoanalytical unveiling of the unconscious has a great effect. Equally, there can be no doubt of the tremendous effect of Catholic confession, especially when it is not just a passive hearing, but an active intervention. In view of this, it is truly astonishing that the Protestant Churches have not long since made an effort to revive the institution of confession as the epitome of the pastoral bond between the shepherd and his flock. For the Protestant, however, there is and rightly so no going back to this primitive Catholic form; it is too sharply opposed to the nature of Protestantism ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 544
The Protestant minister, rightly seeing in the cure of souls the real purpose of his existence, naturally looks round for a new way that will lead to the souls, and not merely to the ears, of his parishioners. Analytical psychology seems to him to provide the key, for the meaning and purpose of his ministry are not fulfilled with the Sunday sermon, which, though it reaches the ears, seldom penetrates to the heart, much less to the soul, the most hidden of all things hidden in man. The cure of souls can only be practised in the stillness of a colloquy, carried on in the healthful atmosphere of unreserved confidence. Soul must work on soul, and many doors be unlocked that bar the way to the innermost sanctuary. Psychoanalysis possesses the means of opening doors otherwise tightly closed ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 544
But we cannot embark upon this ambitious enterprise until we have learned how to deal with our spiritual pride and blasphemous self-assertiveness. The Eastern attitude violates the specifically Christian values, and it is no good blinking this fact. If our new attitude is to be genuine, i.e., grounded in our own history, it must be acquired with full consciousness of the Christian values and of the conflict between them and the introverted attitude of the East ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 773
We must get at the Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious. We shall then discover how great is our fear of the unconscious and how formidable are our resistances. Because of these resistances we doubt the very thing that seems so obvious to the East, namely, the self-liberating power of the introverted mind ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 773
This aspect of the mind is practically unknown to the West, though it forms the most important component of the unconscious. Many people flatly deny the existence of the unconscious, or else they say that it consists merely of instincts, or of repressed or forgotten contents that were once part of the conscious mind. It is safe to assume that what the East calls “mind” has more to do with our “unconscious” than with mind as we understand it, which is more or less identical with consciousness. To us, consciousness is inconceivable without an ego; it is equated with the relation of contents to an ego. If there is no ego there is nobody to be conscious of anything. The ego is therefore indispensable to the conscious process ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 774
The Eastern mind, however, has no difficulty in conceiving of a consciousness without an ego. Consciousness is deemed capable of transcending its ego condition; indeed, in its “higher” forms, the ego disappears altogether. Such an ego-less mental condition can only be unconscious to us, for the simple reason that there would be nobody to witness it. I do not doubt the existence of mental states transcending consciousness. But they lose their consciousness to exactly the same degree that they transcend consciousness. I cannot imagine a conscious mental state that does not relate to a subject, that is, to an ego ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 774
The conscious mind is thus confronted with a new aspect of the psyche, which arouses a different problem or modifies an old one in an unexpected way. The procedure is continued until the original conflict is satisfactorily resolved. The whole process is called the “transcendent function.” It is a process and a method at the same time. The production of unconscious compensations is a spontaneous process; the conscious realization is a method. The function is called “transcendent” because it facilitates the transition from one psychic condition to another by means of the mutual confrontation of opposites ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 780
I know that yoga prides itself on being able to control even the unconscious processes, so that nothing can happen in the psyche as a whole that is not ruled by a supreme consciousness. I have not the slightest doubt that such a condition is more or less possible. But it is possible only at the price of becoming identical with the unconscious. Such an identity is the Eastern equivalent of our Western fetish of “complete objectivity,” the machine-like subservience to one goal, to one idea or cause, at the cost of losing every trace of inner life ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 785
From the Eastern point of view this complete objectivity is appalling, for it amounts to complete identity with the samsara; to the West, on the other hand, samadhi is nothing but a meaningless dream-state. In the East, the inner man has always had such a firm hold on the outer man that the world had no chance of tearing him away from his inner roots; in the West, the outer man gained the ascendancy to such an extent that he was alienated from his innermost being. The One Mind, Oneness, indefiniteness, and eternity remained the prerogative of the One God. Man became small, futile, and essentially in the wrong ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 785
The Churches, of course, continued to exist because they were maintained by the strictly religious needs of the public, but they lost their leadership in the cultural sphere. While the Church of Rome, thanks to her unsurpassed organization, remained a unity, Protestantism split into nearly four hundred denominations. This is a proof on the one hand of its incompetence, and, on the other, of a religious vitality which refuses to be stifled. Gradually, in the course of the nineteenth century, this led to syncretistic outgrowths and to the importation on a mass scale of exotic religious systems, such as the religion of Abdul Baha, the Sufi sects, the Ramakrishna Mission, Buddhism, and so on. Many of these systems, for instance anthroposophy, were syncretized with Christian elements. The resultant picture corresponds roughly to the Hellenistic syncretism of the third and fourth centuries A.D., which likewise showed traces of Indian thought. (Cf. Apollonius of Tyana, the Orphic-Pythagorean secret doctrines, the Gnosis, etc.) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 861
All these systems moved on the religious plane and recruited the great majority of their adherents from Protestantism. They are thus, fundamentally, Protestant sects. By directing its main attack against the authority of the Roman Church, Protestantism largely destroyed belief in the Church as the indispensable agent of divine salvation. Thus the burden of authority fell to the individual, and with it a religious responsibility that had never existed before. The decline of confession and absolution sharpened the moral conflict of the individual and burdened him with problems which previously the Church had settled for him, since her sacraments, particularly that of the Mass, guaranteed his salvation through the priest’s enactment of the sacred rite. The only things the individual had to contribute were confession, repentance, and penance. With the collapse of the rite, which did the work for him, he had to do without God’s answer to his plans. This dissatisfaction explains the demand for systems that promise an answer the visible or at least noticeable favour of another (higher, spiritual, or divine) power~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 862
European science paid no attention to these hopes and expectations. It lived its intellectual life unconcerned with religious needs and convictions. This historically inevitable split in the Western mind also affected yoga so far as this had gained a footing in the West and led to its being made an object of scientific study on the one hand, while on the other it was welcomed as a way of salvation. But inside the religious movement there were any number of attempts to combine science with religious belief and practice, as for instance Christian Science, theosophy, and anthroposophy. The last-named, especially, likes to give itself scientific airs and has, therefore, like Christian Science, penetrated into intellectual circles 86~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 3
Since the way of the Protestant is not laid down for him in advance, he gives welcome, one might say, to practically any system which holds out the promise of successful development. He must now do for himself the very thing which had always been done by the Church as intermediary, and he does not know how to do it. If he is a man who has taken his religious needs seriously, he has also made untold efforts towards faith, because his doctrine sets exclusive store by faith ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 864
But faith is a charisma, a gift of grace, and not a method. The Protestant is so entirely without a method that many of them have seriously interested themselves in the rigorously Catholic exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Yet, do what they will, the thing that disturbs them most is naturally the contradiction between religious and scientific truth, the conflict between faith and knowledge, which reaches far beyond Protestantism into Catholicism itself. This conflict is due solely to the historical split in the European mind. Had it not been for the-psychologically speaking-unnatural compulsion to believe, and an equally unnatural belief in science, this conflict would have no reason to exist. One can easily imagine a state of mind in which one simply knows and in addition believes a thing which seems probable to one for such and such reasons. There are no grounds whatsoever for any conflict between these two things. Both are necessary, for knowledge alone, like faith alone, is always insufficient ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 864
Yoga fulfils this expectation. Quite apart from the charm of the new and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good reason for yoga to have many adherents. It offers not only the much-sought way, but also a philosophy of unrivalled profundity. It holds out the possibility of controllable experience, and thus satisfies the scientist’s need for “facts.” Moreover, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its teachings and methods which cover every sphere of life, it promises undreamt of possibilities which the missionaries of yoga seldom omit to emphasize ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 865
I will remain silent on the subject of what yoga means for India, because I cannot presume to judge something I do not know from personal experience. I can, however, say something about what it means for the West. Our lack of direction borders on psychic anarchy. Therefore, any religious or philosophical practice amounts to a psychological discipline; in other words, it is a method of psychic hygiene. The numerous purely physical procedures of yoga are a physiological hygiene as well, which is far superior to ordinary gymnastics or breathing exercises in that it is not merely mechanistic and scientific but, at the same time, philosophical ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 866
In its training of the parts of the body, it unites them with the whole of the mind and spirit, as is quite clear, for instance, in the pranayama exercises, where prana is both the breath and the universal dynamics of the cosmos. When the doing of the individual is at the same time a cosmic happening, the elation of the body (innervation) becomes one with the elation of the spirit (the universal idea), and from this there arises a living whole which no technique, however scientific, can hope to produce. Yoga practice is unthinkable, and would also be ineffectual, without the ideas on which it is based. It works the physical and the spiritual into one another in an extraordinarily complete way ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 866
In the East, where these ideas and practices originated, and where an uninterrupted tradition extending over some four thousand years has created the necessary spiritual conditions, yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity that can hardly be doubted. They thus create a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness. The Indian mentality has no difficulty in operating intelligently with a concept like prana. The West, on the contrary, with its bad habit of wanting to believe on the one hand, and its highly developed scientific and philosophical critique on the other, finds itself in a real dilemma. Either it falls into the trap of faith and swallows concepts like prana, atman, chakra, samadhi, etc., without giving them a thought, or its scientific critique repudiates them one and all as “pure mysticism” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 867
It is said of the yogi that he can remove mountains, though it would be difficult to furnish any real proof of this. The power of the yogi operates within limits acceptable to his environment. The European, on the other hand, can blow up mountains, and the World War has given us a bitter foretaste of what he is capable of when free rein is given to an intellect that has grown estranged from human nature. As a European, I cannot wish the European more “control” and more power over the nature within and around us. Indeed, I must confess to my shame that I owe my best insights (and there are some quite good ones among them) to the circumstance that I have always done just the opposite of what the rules of yoga prescribe ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 868
The rich metaphysic and symbolism of the East express the larger and more important part of the unconscious and in this way reduce its potential. When the yogi says “prana” he means very much more than mere breath. For him the word prana brings with it the full weight of its metaphysical components, and it is as if he really knew what prana meant in this respect. He does not know it with his understanding, but with his heart, belly, and blood. The European only imitates and learns ideas by rote and is therefore incapable of expressing his subjective facts through Indian concepts. I am more than doubtful whether the European, if he were capable of the corresponding experiences, would choose to express them through intuitive ideas like prana 872
Yoga was originally a natural process of introversion, with all manner of individual variations. Introversions of this sort lead to peculiar inner processes which change the personality. In the course of several thousand years these introversions became organized as methods, and along widely differing lines. Indian yoga itself recognizes numerous and extremely diverse forms. The reason for this lies in the original diversity of individual experience. This is not to say that any one of these methods is suited to the peculiar historical structure of the European. It is much more likely that the yoga natural to the European proceeds from historical patterns unknown to the East. As a matter of fact, the two cultural achievements which, in the West, have had to concern themselves most with the psyche in the practical sense, namely medicine and the Catholic cure of souls, have both produced methods comparable to yoga. I have already referred to the exercises of Ignatius Loyola. With respect to medicine, it is the modern psychotherapeutic methods which come closest to yoga. Freud’s psychoanalysis leads the conscious mind of the patient back to the inner world of childhood reminiscences on one side, and on the other to wishes and drives which have been repressed from consciousness. The latter technique is a logical development of confession. It aims at an artificial introversion for the purpose of making conscious the unconscious components of the subject ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 873
This strange antithesis between East and West is expressed most clearly in religious practice. We speak of religious uplift and exaltation; for us God is the Lord of the universe, we have a religion of brotherly love, and in our heaven-aspiring churches there is a high altar. The Indian, on the other hand, speaks of dhyana, of self-immersion, and of sinking into meditation; God is within all things and especially within man, and one turns away from the outer world to the inner. In the old Indian temples the altar is sunk six to eight feet deep in the earth, and what we hide most shamefacedly is the holiest symbol to the Indian. We believe in doing, the Indian in impassive being. Our religious exercises consist of prayer, worship, and singing hymns. The Indian’s most important exercise is yoga, an immersion in what we would call an unconscious state, but which he praises as the highest consciousness. Yoga is the most eloquent expression of the Indian mind and at the same time the instrument continually used to produce this peculiar attitude of mind ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 911
Samadhi is `withdrawnness,’ i.e., a condition in which all connections with the world are absorbed into the inner world. Samadhi is the eighth phase of the Eightfold Path ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 918
Although it appears exceedingly obscure to the European, this yoga text is not a mere literary museum piece. It lives in the psyche of every Indian, in this form and in many others, so that his life and thinking are permeated by it down to the smallest details. It was not Buddhism that nurtured and educated this psyche, but yoga. Buddhism itself was born of the spirit of yoga, which is older and more universal than the historical reformation wrought by the Buddha. Anyone who seeks to understand Indian art, philosophy, and ethics from the inside must of necessity befriend this spirit. Our habitual understanding from the outside breaks down here, because it is hopelessly inadequate to the nature of Indian spirituality ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 933
I wish particularly to warn against the oft-attempted imitation of Indian practices and sentiments. As a rule nothing comes of it except an artificial stultification of our Western intelligence. Of course, if anyone should succeed in giving up Europe from every point of view, and could actually be nothing but a yogi and sit in the lotus position with all the practical and ethical consequences that this entails, evaporating on a gazelle-skin under a dusty banyan tree and ending his days in nameless non-being, then I should have to admit that such a person understood yoga in the Indian manner. But anyone who cannot do this should not behave as if he did. He cannot and should not give up his Western understanding; on the contrary, he should apply it honestly, without imitation or sentimentality, to understanding as much of yoga as is possible for the Western mind ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 933
The Eastern text skips over a psychic phenomenon that is a source of endless difficulties for the European. If a European tries to banish all thought of the outer world and to empty his mind of everything outside, he immediately becomes the prey of his own subjective fantasies, which have nothing whatever to do with the images mentioned in our text. Fantasies do not enjoy a good reputation; they are considered cheap and worthless and are therefore rejected as useless and meaningless. They are the kleshas, the disorderly and chaotic instinctual forces which yoga proposes to yoke ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 939
The Exercitia spiritualia pursue the same goal, in fact both methods seek to attain success by providing the meditator with an object to contemplate and showing him the image he has to concentrate on in order to shut out the allegedly worthless fantasies. Both methods, Eastern as well as Western, try to reach the goal by a direct path. I do not wish to question the possibilities of success when the meditation exercise is conducted in some kind of ecclesiastical setting. But, outside of some such setting, the thing does not as a rule work, or it may even lead to deplorable results. By throwing light on the unconscious one gets first of all into the chaotic sphere of the personal unconscious, which contains all that one would like to forget, and all that one does not wish to admit to oneself or to anybody else, and which one prefers to believe is not true anyhow ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 939
One therefore expects to come off best if one looks as little as possible into this dark corner. Naturally anyone who proceeds in that way will never get round this corner and will never obtain even a trace of what yoga promises. Only the man who goes through this darkness can hope to make any further progress. I am therefore in principle against the uncritical appropriation of yoga practices by Europeans, because I know only too well that they hope to avoid their own dark corners. Such a beginning is entirely meaningless and worthless ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 939
This is also the deeper reason why we in the West have never developed anything comparable to yoga, aside from the very limited application of the Jesuit Exercitia. We have an abysmal fear of that lurking horror, our personal unconscious. Hence the European much prefers to tell others “how to do it.” That the improvement of the whole begins with the individual, even with myself, never enters our heads. Besides, many people think it morbid to glance into their own interiors it makes you melancholic, a theologian once assured me ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 940
But a particular psychological condition which predominates for a certain length of time does not exclude the existence of other psychological conditions at other times, and these are equally capable of religious expression. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 60
The later views seem to cluster round the following central idea: The anima mundi, the demiurge or divine spirit that incubated the chaotic waters of the beginning, remained in matter in a potential state, and the initial chaotic condition persisted with it. Thus the philosophers or the “sons of wisdom” as they called themselves, took their prima materia to be a part of the original chaos pregnant with spirit. By “spirit” they understood a semimaterial pneuma, a sort of “subtle body,” which they also called “volatile” and identified chemically with oxides and other dissoluble compounds. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 160
In this sense, therefore, we can speak of the Mass as the RITE OF THE INDIVIDUATION PROCESS (in italics in actual text) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 414
The definition of the cross or center as, the “boundary” of all things, is exceedingly original, for it suggests that the limits of the universe are not to be found in a nonexistent periphery but in its center. There alone lies the possibility of transcending this world. All instability culminates in that which is unchanging and quiescent, and in the Self all disharmonies are resolved in the “harmony of wisdom” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 434
In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge, who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to be found in the cosmogonic jester of primitive peoples.) With the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an uneasy calm ensued, but the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the foreground. I would only mention Jakob Böhme, who sketched a picture of evil which leaves the privatio boni pale by
In Milton’s time these ideas were very much in the air, forming part of the general stock of culture, and there were not a few Masters who realized that their philosophical stone was none other than the “total man.” The Satan-Prometheus parallel shows clearly enough that Milton’s devil stands for the essence of human individuation and thus comes within the scope of psychology. This close proximity, as we know, proved a danger not only to the metaphysical status of Satan, but to that of other numinous figures as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 471
With the coming of the Enlightenment, metaphysics as a whole began to decline, and the rift which then opened out between knowledge and faith could no longer be repaired. The more resplendent figures in the metaphysical pantheon had their autonomy restored to them practically untarnished, which assuredly cannot be said of the devil. In Goethe’s Faust, he has dwindled to a very personal familiaris, the mere “shadow” of the struggling hero. After rational-liberal Protestantism had, as it were, deposed him by order of the day, he retired to the shadier side of the Christian Olympus as the “odd man out,” and thus, in a manner not unwelcome to the Church, the old principle reasserted itself: Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine. The devil remains as an appendix to psychology. Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 471
It was, indeed, a great problem to the Middle Ages, this problem of the Trinity and the exclusion, or the very qualified recognition, of the feminine element, of the earth, the body, and matter in general, which were yet, in the form of Mary’s womb, the sacred abode of the Deity and the indispensable instrument for the divine work of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 72.
Even among professing Christians there are very few who think seriously about the Trinity as a matter of dogma and would consider it a possible subject for reflection—not to mention the educated public. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 112.
Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 163..
There is no conflict between religion and science in the East, because no science is there based upon the passion for facts, and no religion upon mere faith; there is religious cognition and cognitive religion. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 768.
Psychic heredity does exist —that is to say, there is inheritance of psychic characteristics such as predisposition to disease, traits of character, special gifts, and so forth. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845
We believe in doing, the Indian is impassive being. Our religious exercises consist of prayer, worship, and singing hymns. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 911
The Indian’s most important exercise is yoga, an immersion in what we would call an unconscious state, but which he praises as the highest consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 911.
Yoga is the most eloquent expression of the Indian mind and at the same time the instrument continually used to produce this peculiar attitude of mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 911.
The goal of Eastern religious practice is the same as that of Western mysticism: the shifting of the center of gravity from the ego to the self, from man to God. This means that the ego disappears in the self, and man in God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 958
But, fortunately, the man [Wolfgang Pauli] had religio, that is, he “carefully took account of” his experiences and he had enough pistis, or loyalty to his experience, to enable him to hang on to it and continue it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 74.
I take his cancer to be a spontaneous growth, which originated in the part of the psyche that is not identical with consciousness. It appears as an autonomous function intruding upon consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 21.
If, therefore, in what follows I concern myself with these “metaphysical” objects, I am quite conscious that I am moving in a world of images and that none of my reflections touches the essence of the Unknowable. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 556
The psyche creates reality every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. Fantasy is just as much feeling as thinking, as much intuition as sensation. There is no psychic function that, through fantasy, is not inextricably bound up with the other psychic functions. Sometimes it appears in primordial form, sometimes it is the ultimate and boldest product of all our faculties combined. Empirical psychology loved, until recently, to explain the “unconscious” as mere absence of consciousness—the term itself indicates as much—just as shadow is an absence of light. Today accurate observation of unconscious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us, that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a mere shadow could never be endowed with. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 141
It is not denied in medieval ecclesiastical writings that a divine influx may occur in dreams, but this view is not exactly encouraged, and the Church reserves the right to decide whether a revelation is to be considered authentic or not. In spite of the Church’s recognition that certain dreams are sent by God, she is disinclined, and even averse, to any serious concern with dreams, while admitting that some might conceivably contain an immediate revelation. Thus the change of mental attitude that has taken place in recent centuries is, from this point of view at least, not wholly unwelcome to the Church, because it effectively discouraged the earlier introspective attitude which favoured a serious consideration of dreams and inner experiences. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 32
In our diagram, Christ and the devil appear as equal and opposite, thus conforming to the idea of the “adversary.” This opposition means conflict to the last, and it is the task of humanity to endure this conflict until the time or turning point is reached where good and evil begin to relativize themselves, to doubt themselves, and the cry is raised for a morality “beyond good and evil.” In the age of Christianity and in the domain of trinitarian thinking such an idea is simply out of the question, because the conflict is too violent for evil to be assigned any other logical relation to the Trinity than that of an absolute opposite: In an emotional opposition, i.e., in a conflict situation, thesis and antithesis cannot be viewed together at the same time. This only becomes possible with cooler assessment of the relative value of good and the relative non-value of evil. Then it can no longer be doubted, either, that a common life unites not only the Father and the “light” son, but the Father and his dark emanation. The unspeakable conflict posited by duality resolves itself in a fourth principle, which restores the unity of the first in its full development. The rhythm is built up in three steps, but the resultant symbol is a quaternity ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 258.
We are now reaping the fruit of nineteenth-century education. Throughout that period the Church preached to young people the merit of blind faith, while the universities inculcated an intellectual rationalism, with the result that today we plead in vain whether for faith or reason. Tired of this warfare of opinions, the modern man wishes to find out for himself how things are. And though this desire opens the door to the most dangerous possibilities, we cannot help seeing it as a courageous enterprise and giving it some measure of sympathy. It is no reckless adventure, but an effort inspired by deep spiritual distress to bring meaning once more into life on the basis of fresh and unprejudiced experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 529
Instead of the lost Olympian gods, there was disclosed the inner wealth of the soul which lies in every man’s heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 375
It is true that our religion speaks of an immortal soul; but it has very few kind words to say for the human psyche as such, which would go straight to eternal damnation were it not for a special act of Divine Grace. ~Carl Jung, C 11, Para 28
And Gerhard Dorn cries out, “Transform yourselves into living philosophical stones!” There can hardly be any doubt that not a few of those seekers had the dawning knowledge that the secret nature of the stone was man’s own self. This “self” was evidently never thought of as an entity identical with the ego, and for this reason it was described as a “hidden nature” dwelling in inanimate matter, as a spirit, daemon, or fiery spark. By means of the philosophical opus, this entity was freed from darkness and imprisonment, and finally it enjoyed a resurrection. It is clear that these ideas can have nothing to do with the empirical ego but are concerned with a “divine nature” quite distinct from it, and hence, psychologically speaking, with a consciousness-transcending content issuing from the realm of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 154.
The shadow and the opposing will are the necessary conditions for all actualization. An object that has no will of its own, capable, if need be, of opposing its creator, and with no qualities other than its creator’s, such an object has no independent existence and is incapable of ethical decision. At best it is just a piece of clockwork which the Creator has to wind up to make it function.
The center, as a rule, is emphasized. But what we find there is a symbol with a very different meaning. It is a star, a sun, a flower, a cross with equal arms, a precious stone, a bowl filled with water or wine, a serpent coiled up, or a human being, but never a god ~Carl Jung, CW 11. Para 136
In his human manifestation he is the hero and God-man, born without sin, more complete and more perfect than the natural man, who is to him what a child is to an adult, or an animal (sheep) to a human being. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 229
He [A Patient] simply could not “quench the fire” and finally he had to admit the incomprehensibly numinous character of his experience. He had to confess that the unquenchable fire was “holy.” This was the sine qua non of his cure. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 74
One can explain that matter was originally pure, or at least capable of purity, but this does not do away with the fact that matter represents the concreteness of God’s thoughts and is, therefore, the very thing that makes individuation possible, with all its consequences. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 252
Christianity had at one time to fight for its life against Gnosticism, which corresponded to another psychological condition. Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning. But if the historical roots of our symbols extend beyond the Middle Ages they are certainly to be found in Gnosticism. It would not seem to me illogical if a psychological condition, previously suppressed, should reassert itself when the main ideas of the suppressive condition begin to lose their influence. In spite of the suppression of the Gnostic heresy, it continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages under the disguise of alchemy. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 160
It is a well-known fact that alchemy consisted of two parts which complement one another on the one hand chemical research proper and on the other the “theoria” or “philosophia.” As is clear from the writings of Pseudo-Democritus in the first century the two aspects already belonged together at the beginning of our era. The same holds true of the Leiden papyri and the writings of Zosimos in the third century. The religious or philosophical views of ancient alchemy were clearly Gnostic. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 160
They called this spirit Mercurius, which was chemically quicksilver though “Mercurius noster” was no ordinary Hg! and philosophically Hermes, the god of revelation, who, as Hermes Trismegistus, was the arch-authority on alchemy. Their aim was to extract the original divine spirit out of the chaos, and this extract was called the quinta essentia, aqua permanens, or tincture. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 160
A famous alchemist, Johannes de Rupescissa (d. 1375), calls the quintessence “le ciel humain,” the human sky or heaven. For him it was a blue liquid and incorruptible like the sky. He says that the quintessence is of the colour of the sky “and our sun has adorned it, as the sun adorns the sky.” The sun is an allegory of gold. He says: “This sun is true gold.” He continues: “These two things joined together influence in us the condition of the Heaven of heavens, and of the heavenly Sun.” His idea is, obviously, that the quintessence, the blue sky with the golden sun in it, evokes corresponding images of the heaven and the heavenly sun in ourselves. It is a picture of a blue and golden microcosm, and I take it to be a direct parallel to Guillaume’s celestial vision. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 160
The miraculous liquid, the divine water, called sky or heaven, probably refers to the supra-celestial waters of Genesis 1:7. In its functional aspect it was thought to be a sort of baptismal water which, like the holy water of the Church, possesses a creative and transformative quality. The Catholic Church still performs the rite of the benedictio fontis on Holy Saturday before Easter. The rite consists in a repetition of the descensus spiritus sancti in aquam. The ordinary water thereby acquires the divine quality of transforming and giving spiritual rebirth to man. This is exactly the alchemical idea of the divine water, and there would be no difficulty whatever in deriving the aqua permanens of alchemy from the rite of the benedictio fontis were it not that the former is of pagan origin and certainly the older of the two. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 161
We find the miraculous water mentioned in the first treatises of Greek alchemy, which belong to the first century. Moreover the descent of the spirit into Physis is a Gnostic legend that greatly influenced Mani. And it was possibly through Manichean influences that it became one of the main ideas of Latin alchemy. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 161
The aim of the philosophers was to transform imperfect matter chemically into gold, the panacea, or the elixir vitae, but philosophically or mystically into the divine hermaphrodite, the second Adam, the glorified, incorruptible body of resurrection, or the lumen luminum, the illumination of the human mind, or sapientia. As I have shown, together with Richard Wilhelm, Chinese alchemy produced the same idea, that the goal of the opus magnum, the creation of the “diamond body.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 161
In this sense, therefore, we can speak of the Mass as the RITE OF THE INDIVIDUATION PROCESS (in italics in actual text) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 414
How can anyone see straight when he does not even see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries with him into all his dealings? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140
Study yoga you will learn an infinite amount from it but do not try to apply it, for we Europeans are not so constituted that we apply these methods correctly, just like that. An Indian guru can explain everything and you can imitate everything. But do you know who is applying the yoga? In other words, do you know who you are and how you are constituted? ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 234
It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore last but not least man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631
These intimations and prefigurations of the Incarnation must strike one as either completely incomprehensible or superfluous, since all creation ex nihilo is God’s and consists of nothing but God, with the result that man, like the rest of creation, is simply God become concrete. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631
In “Answer to Job” Jung makes a crucial observation about the value of human weakness: But what does man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defencelessness against the Almighty, he possesses a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 579)
Apart from the more subtle synchronicity, we can also observe in the instincts, for instance in the migratory instinct, a distinct synchronism. And since the parapsychological phenomena associated with the unconscious psyche show a peculiar tendency to relativize the categories of time and space, the collective unconscious must have a spaceless and timeless quality. Consequently, there is some probability that an archetypal situation will be accompanied by synchronistic phenomena, as in the case of death, in whose vicinity such phenomena are relatively frequent. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 94
He [the second Adam] is the spiritual man, Adam Kadmon, often identified with Christ. Whereas the original Adam was mortal, because he was made of the corruptible four elements, the second Adam is immortal, because he consists of one pure and incorruptible essence. Thus Pseudo-Thomas says: “The Second Adam from pure elements entered into eternity. Therefore, what is composed of simple and pure essence remaineth forever” The same treatise quotes a Latinized Arabic author called Senior, a famous authority throughout the Middle Ages, as saying: “There is One thing that never dieth, for it continueth by perpetual increase,” and interprets this One thing as the second Adam. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 94
He [the Holy Ghost] will be for the disciples what Christ was for them. He will invest them with the power to do works greater, perhaps, than those of the Son (John 14:12). The Holy Ghost is a figure who deputizes for Christ and who corresponds to what Christ received from the Father. From the Father comes the Son, and common to both is the living activity of the Holy Ghost, who, according to Christian doctrine, is breathed forth (“spirated”) by both. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 204
As he is the third term common to Father and Son, he puts an end to the duality, to the “doubt” in the Son. He is, in fact, the third element that rounds out the Three and restores the One. The point is that the unfolding of the One reaches its climax in the Holy Ghost after polarizing itself as Father and Son. Its descent into a human body is sufficient in itself to make it become another, to set it in opposition to itself. Thenceforward there are two: the “One” and the “Other,” which results in a certain tension. This tension works itself out in the suffering and fate of the Son and, finally, in Christ’s admission of abandonment by God (Matthew 27:46). ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 204
Although the Holy Ghost is the progenitor of the Son (Matthew 1:18), he is also, as the Paraclete, a legacy from him. He continues the work of redemption in mankind at large, by descending upon those who merit divine election. Consequently, the Paraclete is, at least by implication, the crowning figure in the work of redemption on the one hand and in God’s revelation of himself on the other. It could, in fact, be said that the Holy Ghost represents the final, complete stage in the evolution of God and the divine drama. For the Trinity is undoubtedly a higher form of God-concept than mere unity, since it corresponds to a level of reflection on which man has become more conscious ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 205
First: the homoousia or essential unity of a three-part process, to be thought of as a process of unconscious maturation taking place within the individual. To that extent the three Persons are personifications of the three phases of a regular, instinctive psychic occurrence that always tends to express itself in the form of mythologems and ritualistic customs (for instance, the initiations at puberty, and the various rites for birth, marriage, sickness, war, and death). As the medical lore of the ancient Egyptians shows, myths as well as rites have a psychotherapeutic value, and they still have today.
Second: the Trinity denotes a process of conscious realization continuing over the centuries.
Third: the Trinity lays claim not only to represent a personification of psychic processes in three roles, but to be the one God in three Persons, who all share the same divine nature. In God there is no advance from the potential to the actual, from the possible to the real, because God is pure reality, the “actus purus” itself. The three Persons differ from one another by reason of the different manner of their origin, or their procession (the Son begotten by the Father and the Holy Ghost proceeding from both procedit a patre filioque). ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 288-289
The homoousia, whose general recognition was the cause of so many controversies, is absolutely necessary from a psychological standpoint, because, regarded as a psychological symbol, the Trinity represents the progressive transformation of one and the same substance, namely the psyche as a whole. The homoousia together with the filioque assert that Christ and the Holy Ghost are both of the same substance as the Father. But since, psychologically, Christ must be understood as a symbol of the Self, and the descent of the Holy Ghost as the Self’s actualization in man, it follows that the Self must represent something that is of the substance of the Father too. This formulation is in agreement with the psychological statement that the symbols of the Self cannot be distinguished empirically from a God-image. Psychology, certainly, can do no more than establish the fact that they are indistinguishable. This makes it all the more remarkable that the “metaphysical” statement should go so much further than the psychological one. Indistinguishability is a negative constatation merely; it does not rule out the possibility that a distinction may exist. It may be that the distinction is simply not perceived. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 289
The dogmatic assertion, on the other hand, speaks of the Holy Ghost making us “children of God,” and this filial relationship is indistinguishable in meaning from the(sonship) or filiatio of Christ. We can see from this how important it was that the homoousia should triumph over the homoiousia (similarity of substance); for, through the descent of the Holy Ghost, the Self of man enters into a relationship of unity with the substance of God. As ecclesiastical history shows, this conclusion is of immense danger to the Church it was, indeed, the main reason why the Church did not insist on any further elaboration of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost. Its continued development would lead, on a negative estimate, to explosive schisms, and on a positive estimate straight into psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 289
Moreover, the gifts of the Holy Ghost are somewhat mixed: not all of them are unreservedly welcome, as St. Paul has already pointed out. Also, St. Thomas Aquinas observes that revelation is a gift of the spirit that does not stand in any clearly definable relationship to moral endowment. The Church must reserve the right to decide what is a working of the Holy Ghost and what is not, thereby taking an exceedingly important and possibly disagreeable decision right out of the layman’s hands. That the spirit, like the wind, “bloweth where it listeth” is something that alarmed even the Reformers. The third as well as the first Person of the Trinity can wear the aspect of a deus absconditus, and its action, like that of fire, may be no less destructive than beneficial when regarded from a purely human standpoint. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 289
In the sacrifice of the Mass two distinct ideas are blended together: the ideas of deipnon and thysia. Thysia comes from the verb’ “to sacrifice” or to slaughter'; but it also has the meaning ofblazing’ or `flaring up.’ This refers to the leaping sacrificial fire by which the gift offered to the gods was consumed. Originally the food-offering was intended for the nourishment of the gods; the smoke of the burnt sacrifice carried the food up to their heavenly abode. At a later stage the smoke was conceived as a spiritualized form of food-offering; indeed, all through the Christian era up to the Middle Ages, spirit (or pneuma) continued to be thought of as a fine, vaporous substance ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 302
Deipnon means meal.' In the first place it is a meal shared by those taking part in the sacrifice, at which the god was believed to be present. It is also a “sacred” meal at which “consecrated” food is eaten, and hence a sacrifice (from sacrificare,to make sacred,’ `to consecrate’) ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 303
The dual meaning of deipnon and thysia is implicitly contained in the words of the sacrament: “the body which (was given) for you.” This may mean either “which was given to you to eat” or, indirectly, “which was given for you to God.” The idea of a meal immediately invests the word `body’ with the meaning of ‘flesh’ (as an edible substance) ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 304
The idea of an eternal priesthood and of a sacrifice offered to God “continually” brings us to the true mysterium fidei, the transformation of the substances, which is the third aspect of the Mass. The ideas of deipnon and thysia do not in themselves imply or contain a mystery, although, in the burnt offering which is reduced to smoke and ashes by the fire, there is a primitive allusion to a transformation of substance in the sense of its spiritualization. But this aspect is of no practical importance in the Mass, where it only appears in subsidiary form in the censing, as an incense-offering. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 307
The mysterium, on the other hand, manifests itself clearly enough in the eternal priest “after the order of Melchisedec” and in the sacrifice which he offers to God “continually.” The manifestation of an order outside time involves the idea of a miracle, which takes place “vere, realiter, substantialiter” at the moment of transubstantiation, for the substances offered are no different from natural objects and must in fact be definite commodities whose nature is known to everybody, namely pure wheaten bread and wine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 307
Furthermore, the officiating priest is an ordinary human being who, although he bears the indelible mark of the priesthood upon him and is thus empowered to offer sacrifice, is nevertheless not yet in a position to be the instrument of the divine self-sacrifice enacted in the Mass. Nor is the congregation standing behind him yet purged from sin, consecrated, and itself transformed into a sacrificial gift. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 307
The ritual of the Mass takes this situation and transforms it step by step until the climax is reached the Consecration, when Christ himself, as sacrificer and sacrificed, speaks the decisive words through the mouth of the priest. At that moment Christ is present in time and space. Yet his presence is not a reappearance, and therefore the inner meaning of the consecration is not a repetition of an event which occurred once in history, but the revelation of something existing in eternity, a rending of the veil of temporal and spatial limitations which separates the human spirit from the sight of the eternal. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 307
This event is necessarily a mystery, because it is beyond the power of man to conceive or describe. In other words, the rite is necessarily and in every one of its parts a symbol. Now a symbol is not an arbitrary or intentional sign standing for a known and conceivable fact, but an admittedly anthropomorphic hence limited and only partly valid expression for something supra-human and only partly conceivable. It may be the best expression possible, yet it ranks below the level of the mystery it seeks to describe. The Mass is a symbol in this sense. Here I would like to quote the words of Father Kramp: “It is generally admitted that the sacrifice is a symbolic act, by which I mean that the offering of a material gift to God has no purpose in itself, but merely serves as a means to express an idea. And the choice of this means of expression brings a wide range of anthropomorphism into play: man confronts God as he confronts his own kind, almost as if God were a human being. We offer a gift to God as we offer it to a good friend or to an earthly ruler” ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 307
It [the cross] is, in fact, one of the prime symbols of order, as I have shown elsewhere. In the domain of psychological processes it functions as an organizing center, and in states of psychic disorder caused by an invasion of unconscious contents it appears as a mandala divided into four. No doubt this was a frequent phenomenon in early Christian times, and not only in Gnostic circles. Gnostic introspection could hardly fail, therefore, to perceive the numinosity of this archetype and be duly impressed by it. For the Gnostics the cross had exactly the same function that the atman or Self has always had for the East. This realization is one of the central experiences of Gnosticism. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 433
As the center symbolizes the idea of totality and finality, it is quite appropriate that the text should suddenly start speaking of the dichotomy of the universe, polarized into right and left, brightness and darkness, heaven and the “nether root,” the omnium genetrix. This is a clear reminder that everything is contained in the center and that, as a result, the Lord (i.e., the cross) unites and composes all things and is therefore “nirdvandva,” free from the opposites, in conformity with Eastern ideas and also with the psychology of this archetypal symbol. The Gnostic Christ-figure and the cross are counterparts of the typical mandalas spontaneously produced by the unconscious. They are natural symbols and they differ fundamentally from the dogmatic figure of Christ, in whom all trace of darkness is expressly lacking. Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 435
He achieved notoriety as the personification of the adversary or principle of evil, though by no means for the first time, as we meet him centuries earlier in the ancient Egyptian Set and the Persian Ahriman. Persian influences have been conjectured as mainly responsible for the Christian devil. But the real reason for the differentiation of this figure lies in the conception of God as the summum bonum, which stands in sharp contrast to the Old Testament view and which, for reasons of psychic balance, inevitably requires the existence of an infimum malum. No logical reasons are needed for this, only the natural and unconscious striving for balance and symmetry. ~Carl Jung CW 11 Para 470
In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge, who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to be found in the cosmogonic jester of primitive peoples.) With the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an uneasy calm ensued, but the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the foreground. I would only mention Jakob Böhme, who sketched a picture of evil which leaves the privatio boni pale by comparison. The same can be said of Milton. He inhabits the same mental climate. As for Böhme, although he was not a direct descendant of alchemical philosophy, whose importance is still grossly underrated today, he certainly took over a number of its leading ideas, among them the specific recognition of Satan, who was exalted to a cosmic figure of first rank in Milton, even emancipating himself from his subordinate role as the left hand of God (the role assigned to him by Clement). Milton goes even further than Böhme and apostrophizes the devil as the true principium individuationis, a concept which had been anticipated by the alchemists some time before. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 470
In Milton’s time these ideas were very much in the air, forming part of the general stock of culture, and there were not a few Masters who realized that their philosophical stone was none other than the “total man.” The Satan-Prometheus parallel shows clearly enough that Milton’s devil stands for the essence of human individuation and thus comes within the scope of psychology. This close proximity, as we know, proved a danger not only to the metaphysical status of Satan, but to that of other numinous figures as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 471
The permanent water (the ὔδωρ θεῑον of the Greeks) also signifies “spiritualis sanguis,” and is identified with the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side. Heinrich Khunrath says of this water: “So there will open for thee an healing flood which issues from the heart of the son of the great world.” Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 355
It was, indeed, a great problem to the Middle Ages, this problem of the Trinity and the exclusion, or the very qualified recognition, of the feminine element, of the earth, the body, and matter in general, which were yet, in the form of Mary’s womb, the sacred abode of the Deity and the indispensable instrument for the divine work of redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 72.
Even among professing Christians there are very few who think seriously about the Trinity as a matter of dogma and would consider it a possible subject for reflection—not to mention the educated public. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 112.
Arrangement in triads is an archetype in the history of religion, which in all probability formed the basis of the Christian Trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 113.
The medieval representations of the circle are based on the idea of the microcosm, a concept that was also applied to the stone. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 95.
The stone was a “little world” like man himself, a sort of inner image of the cosmos, reaching not into immeasurable distances but into an equally immeasurable depth-dimension, i.e., from the small to the unimaginably smallest. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 95.
Just as the alchemists knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could only happen “Deo concedente,” so the modern psychologist is aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life or of matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 296.
The statement that “the various names given to it [the Mind] are innumerable” proves that the Mind must be something as vague and indefinite as the philosophers’ stone. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 302.
Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 163.
That the imitation of Christ creates a corresponding shadow in the unconscious hardly needs demonstrating. The fact that John had visions at all is evidence of an unusual tension between conscious and unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Par 717.
Looked at theologically, my concept of the anima, for instance, is pure Gnosticism; hence I am often classed among the Gnostics. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 460.
It is certainly remarkable that my critics, with few exceptions, ignore the fact that, as a doctor and scientist, I proceed from facts which everyone is at liberty to verify. Instead, they criticize me as if I were a philosopher, or a Gnostic with pretensions to supernatural knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 461.
What, then, is yoga? The word means literally “yoking,” i.e., the disciplining of the instinctual forces of the psyche, which in Sanskrit are called kleshas. The yoking aims at controlling these forces that fetter human beings to the world. The kleshas would correspond, in the language of St. Augustine, to superhia and concupiscentia. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 912.
I have just said that we have developed nothing that could be compared with yoga. This is not entirely correct. True to our European bias, we have evolved a medical psychology dealing specifically with the kleshas. We call it the “psychology of the unconscious.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 941.
It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Par 522.
Only through the most extreme and menacing conflict does the Christian experience deliverance into divinity, always provided he doesn’t break, but accepts the burden of being marked by God. In this way alone can the imago Dei realize itself in him and God become man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 417.
The ego stands to the Self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the Self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The Self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 391.
Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 390.
What is meant [by the child archetype] is the boy who is born from the maturity of the adult man, and not the unconscious child we would like to remain. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 742.
Whatever man’s wholeness, or the self, may mean per se, empirically it is an image of the goal of life spontaneously produced by the unconscious, irrespective of the wishes and fears of the conscious mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 745.
If we go further and consider the fact that man is also what neither he himself nor other people know of him—an unknown something which can yet be proved to exist —the problem of identity becomes more difficult still. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140
Indeed, it is quite impossible to define the extent and the ultimate character of psychic existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140
Freud has made a courageous attempt to elucidate the intricacies of dream psychology with the help of views which he gathered in the field of psychopathology. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 41
My method, like Freud’s, is built up on the practice of confession. Like him, I pay close attention to dreams, but when it comes to the unconscious our views part company. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 875
For me the unconscious is a collective psychic disposition, creative in character. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 875
Freud’s procedure is, in the main, analytical and reductive. To this I add a synthesis which emphasizes the purposiveness of unconscious tendencies with respect to personality development. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 875
When Nietzsche said, “God is dead,” he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe. People were influenced by it not because he said so, but because it stated a widespread psychological fact. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 145.
All opposites are of God; therefore man must bend to this burden; and in so doing he finds that God in his “oppositeness” has taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.
It is quite right, therefore, that fear of God should be considered the beginning of all wisdom. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.
Both are justified, the fear of God as well as the love of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 664.
The East bases itself upon psychic reality, that is, upon the psyche as the main and unique condition of existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 770.
The West is always seeking uplift, but the East seeks a sinking or deepening. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 396.
The fact that the East can dispose so easily of the ego seems to point to a mind that is not to be identified with our “mind.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 775.
In the East, mind is a cosmic factor, the very essence of existence; while in the West we have just begun to understand that it is the essential condition of cognition, and hence of the cognitive existence of the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 768.
There is no conflict between religion and science in the East, because no science is there based upon the passion for facts, and no religion upon mere faith; there is religious cognition and cognitive religion. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 768.
With us, man is incommensurably small, and the grace of God is everything; but in the East, man is God and he redeems himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 768.
While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 969
The philosophy of the East, although so vastly different from ours, could be an inestimable treasure for us too; but, in order to process it, we must first earn it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 96
We believe in doing, the Indian in impassive being. Our religious exercises consist of prayer, worship, and singing hymns. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 911.
Holiness is also revelatory: it is the illuminative power emanating from an archetypal figure. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 225.
I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148.
It is also a fact that under the influence of a so-called scientific enlightenment great masses of educated people have either left the Church or become profoundly indifferent to it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 34.
Myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648.
It [myth] is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648.
What is ordinarily called “religion” is a substitute to such an amazing degree that I ask myself seriously whether this kind of “religion,” which I prefer to call a creed, may not after all have an important function in human society. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648
In my profession I have encountered many people who have had immediate experience and who would not and could not submit to the authority of ecclesiastical decision. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 76
Although the Catholic Church has often been accused of particular rigidity, she nevertheless admits that dogma is a living thing and that its formulation is therefore capable of change and development. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 10
That is the eternal, as distinct from the temporal, gospel: one can love God but must fear him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, § 733.
The paradoxical nature of God has a like effect on man: it tears him asunder into opposites and delivers him over to a seemingly insoluble conflict. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 738
What does man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defenselessness against the Almighty, he possesses, as we have already suggested, a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection; he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 579
God has no need of this circumspection, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 579
Yahweh’s decision to become man is a symbol of the development that had to supervene when man becomes conscious of the sort of God-image he is confronted with. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 740
In his striving for unity, therefore, man may always count on the help of a metaphysical advocate, as Job clearly recognized. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 740
The unconscious wants to flow into consciousness in order to reach the light, but at the same time it continually thwarts itself, because it would rather remain unconscious. That is to say, God wants to become man, but not quite. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 740
The conflict in his [God’s] nature is so great that the incarnation can only be bought by an expiatory self-sacrifice offered up to the wrath of God’s dark side. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 740
But God, who also does not hear our prayers, wants to become man, and for that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darkness—the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 746.
He [God] fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.
One should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes man. It means more or less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747.
At the time of the Creation he [God] revealed himself in Nature; now he wants to be more specific and become man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631
But in omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or of the divine nature of man. That is why, long before Genesis was written, we find corresponding testimonies in the ancient Egyptian records. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631
It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, that we are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least —man. This realization is a millennial process. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 631
Even the enlightened person remains what he is and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 758
No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must therefore take them as we experience them. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 167.
If, therefore, in what follows I concern myself with these “metaphysical” objects, I am quite conscious that I am moving in a world of images and that none of my reflections touches the essence of the Unknowable. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 556
Not nature but the “genius of mankind” has knotted the hangman’s noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 734
There is indeed reason enough for man to be afraid of the impersonal forces lurking in his unconscious. We are blissfully unconscious of these forces because they never, or almost never, appear in our personal relations or under ordinary circumstances. But if people crowd together and form a mob, then the dynamisms of the collective man are let loose—beasts or demons that lie dormant in every person until he is part of a mob. Man in the mass sinks unconsciously to an inferior moral and intellectual level, to that level, which is always there, below the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it is activated by the formation of a mass. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 23
Religion appears to me to be a peculiar attitude of mind which could be formulated in accordance with the original use of the word religio, which means a careful consideration and observation of certain dynamic factors that are conceived as “powers”: spirits, daemons, gods, laws, ideas, ideals, or whatever name man has given to such factors in his world as he has found powerful, dangerous, or helpful enough to be taken into careful consideration, or grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to be devoutly worshipped and loved. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 8.
The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness but comprehends it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 756
Only in the course of the nineteenth century, when spirit began to degenerate into intellect, did a reaction set in against the unbearable dominance of intellectualism, and this led to the unpardonable mistake of confusing intellect with spirit and blaming the latter for the misdeeds of the former. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 7
God wanted to become man and still wants to ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Answer to Job, Page 455.
Here we no longer have a problem deriving from the scholarly specialty of theologians. This is a universally human, religious nightmare. Though I am uninitiated in theology, I can bring a contribution to the treatment of this question; indeed, perhaps even I must. ~Carl Jung, Answer to Job, Page 144
If we say “God”? we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 360.
Christianity itself would never have spread through the pagan world with such astonishing rapidity, had its ideas not found an analogous psychic readiness to receive them. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 441.
Something which existed before the ego and is in fact its father or creator. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 263.
The Catholic Church is liberal enough to look upon the Osiris-Horus-Isis myth, or at any rate suitable portions of it, as a prefiguration of the Christian legend of salvation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 178.
Since the relation of the ego to the self is like that of the son to the father, we can say that when the Self calls on us to sacrifice ourselves, it is really carrying out the sacrificial act on itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Par 398.
Yahweh [God] must become man precisely because he has done man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he must regenerate himself. ~Carl Jung; CW 11, Para. 640.
So long as the self is unconscious, it corresponds to Freud’s superego and is a source of perpetual moral conflict. If, however, it is withdrawn from projection and is no longer identical with public opinion, then one is truly one’s own yea and nay. The self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine that it is psychologically possible to imagine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 396.
Every sacrifice is to a greater or lesser extent a self-sacrifice. The degree to which it is so depends on the significance of the gift. If it is of great value to me and touches my most personal feelings, I can be sure that in giving up my egoistic claim I shall challenge my ego personality to revolt. I can also be sure that the power that suppresses this claim, and thus suppresses me, must be the self. Hence it is the self that causes me to make the sacrifice; nay more, it compels me to make it. The self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift, the human sacrifice. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 397.
[From an early treatise]: “Thus it [the stone] comes from man, and you are its mineral (raw material); in you it is found and from you it is extracted, and it remains inseparably in you” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 53
One might almost say that man himself, or his innermost soul, is the prisoner or the protected inhabitant of the mandala ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 157.
Natural philosophers said that the miraculous substance, whose essential nature they symbolized by a circle divided into four parts, was man himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 153.
[The alchemist Gerhard] Dorn says, “In the body of man there is hidden a certain substance of heavenly nature known to very few ~Carl Jung, CW 11, page 93, note 47.
Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The Shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 286.
There is only one condition under which you might legitimately call the voice your own, and that is when you assume your conscious personality to be a part of a whole or to be a smaller circle contained in a bigger one. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 47.
Every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 497
The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me. ~Carl Jung, CW 11; Page 857.
Before the bar of nature and fate, unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse; on the contrary there are very severe penalties for it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 608.
The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 280.
What most overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. ~Carl Jung, CW 11; Paragraph 751.
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Para 260.
Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of the psyche. Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 163.
It is a privilege born of human freedom in contradistinction to the compulsion of natural law. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 158.
Through reflection, “life” and its “soul” are abstracted from Nature and endowed with a separate existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 158.
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 556.
Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. ~Carl Jung; CW 11, Para 802.
Whoever knows God has an effect on him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para. 617.
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. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Par. 575.
The future indwelling of the Holy Spirit amounts to a continuing incarnation of God. Christ, as the begotten son of God and pre-existing mediator, is a first-born and a divine paradigm which will be followed by further incarnations of the Holy Ghost in the empirical man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para. 693.
It does not seem to fit God’s purpose to exempt man from conflict and hence from evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.
The inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only of the creation of the world, but also of the pleromatic drama for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus. The two main climaxes are formed first by the Job tragedy and secondly by Ezekiel’s revelation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 686.
The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 746.
When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was “the true seat of anxiety,” he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 849.
The true history of the Spirit is not preserved in learned volumes but in the living psychic organism of every individual. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 56
The educated man tries to repress the inferior man in himself, not realizing that by so doing he forces the latter into revolt. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 136.
Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para. 146.
Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any insight at all into its inner meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 97.
The quaternity is the sine qua non of divine birth and consequently of the inner life of the trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 125.
In the initiation of the living, however, this “Beyond” is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind’s intentions and outlook, a psychological “Beyond” or, in Christian terms, a “redemption” from the trammels of the world and of sin. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paragraph 813.
One can never know in what form a man will experience God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 482.
One might almost say that man himself, or his innermost soul, is the prisoner or the protected inhabitant of the mandala ~Carl Jung, CW 11, par. 157.
Any theological treatment of the devil that is not related to God’s trinitarian consciousness is a falsification of the actual position. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Para 103.
It is the goal of our psychological development and in metaphysical terms amounts to God’s incarnation. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
The beauty of the ritual action is one of its essential properties, for man has not served God rightly unless he has also served him in beauty. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraph 379.
As a totality, the self is by definition always a complexio oppositorum [union of opposites], and the more consciousness insists on its own luminous nature and lays claim to moral authority, the more the self will appear as something dark and menacing. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 716.
Empirical psychology loved, until recently, to explain the “unconscious” as mere absence of consciousness-the term itself indicates as much-just as shadow is an absence of light. Today accurate observation of unconscious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us, that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a mere shadow could never be endowed with. Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 14.
The fact of God’s “unconsciousness” throws a peculiar light on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from his sins, even if he is baptized in the prescribed manner and thus washed clean, as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin, that is, from the wrath of God. Consequently, the work of salvation is intended to save man from the fear of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659.
Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 286
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 131
We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 132
As a rule those tendencies that represent the antisocial elements in man’s psychic structure—what I call the “statistical criminal” in everybody—are suppressed, that is, they are consciously and deliberately disposed of. But tendencies that are merely repressed are usually of a somewhat doubtful character. They are not so much antisocial as unconventional and socially awkward. The reason why we repress them is equally doubtful. Some people repress them from sheer cowardice, others from conventional morality, and others again for reasons of respectability. Repression is a sort of half-conscious and half-hearted letting go of things, a dropping of hot cakes or a reviling of grapes which hang too high, or a looking the other way in order not to become conscious of one’s desires. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 129
If the repressed tendencies, the shadow as I call them, were obviously evil, there would be no problem whatever. But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but—convention forbids. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 134
In reality, the acceptance of the shadow-side of human nature verges on the impossible. Consider for a moment what it means to grant the right of existence to what is unreasonable, senseless, and evil! Yet it is just this that the modern man insists upon. He wants to live with every side of himself—to know what he is. That is why he casts history aside. He wants to break with tradition so that he can experiment with his life and determine what value and meaning things have in themselves, apart from traditional presuppositions. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 528
Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a remedy as beheading would be for headache. To destroy a man’s morality does not help either, because it would kill his better self, without which even the shadow makes no sense. The reconciliation of these opposites is a major problem, and even in antiquity it bothered certain minds. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 133
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140
Our knowledge of good and evil has dwindled with our mounting knowledge and experience, and will dwindle still more in the future, without our being able to escape the demands of ethics. In this utmost uncertainty we need the illumination of a holy and whole-making spirit—a spirit that can be anything rather than our reason. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 267
It may not be quite clear why I call certain dogmas “immediate experiences,” since in itself a dogma is the very thing that precludes immediate experience. Yet the Christian images I have mentioned are not peculiar to Christianity alone (although in Christianity they have undergone a development and intensification of meaning not to be found in any other religion). ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 46.
My view comes very close to Koepgen’s lapidary formula, which moreover bears the ecclesiastical imprimatur: “The Trinity is a revelation not only of God but at the same time of man.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 74.
Consciousness does not create itself-it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, par. 935.
The suffering God-Man may be at least five thousand years old and the Trinity is probably even older. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 46.
But in omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or the divine nature of man. This realization is a millennial process. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 402.
Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 294.
The psyche is therefore all-important; it is the all-pervading Breath, the Buddha-essence; it is the Buddha-Mind, the One, the Dharrjiakdya. All existence emanates from it, and all separate forms dissolve back into it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 482.
I refrain from describing what would happen to Eastern man should he forget his ideal of Buddhahood, for I do not want to give such an unfair advantage to my Western prejudices. But I cannot help raising the question of whether it is possible, or indeed advisable, for either to imitate the other’s standpoint. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 483.
Just as a causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity to the Chinese mind, deals with the coincidence of events. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 593.
The irrational fullness of life has taught me, never to discard anything, even if it goes against all our theories. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 602.
The archetype is an irrepresentable factor, a “disposition” which starts functioning at a given moment in the development of the human mind and arranges the material of consciousness in definite patterns. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 148.
Psychologically the God concept includes every idea of the ultimate, of the first or the last, of the highest or lowest. The name makes no difference. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 455.
The Christian Church has hitherto [recognized] Christ as the one and only God-man. But the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many, and the question then arises whether these many are all complete God-men. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 470.
The Bardo Thodol began by being a “closed” book, and so it has remained, no matter what kind of commentaries may be written upon it. For it is a book that will only open itself to spiritual understanding, and this is a capacity which no man is born with, but which he can only acquire through special training and special experience. It is good that such to all intents and purposes “useless” books exist. They are meant for those “queer folk” who no longer set much store by the uses, aims, and meaning of present-day “civilization.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 858.
Everything now depends on man; immense power of destruction is given into his hands, and the question is whether he can resist the will to use it and can temper his will with the spirit of love and wisdom. He will hardly be able to do so on his own resources. He needs the help of an “advocate” in heaven. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 459.
If the historical process of world despiritualization continues as hitherto, then everything of a divine or daemonic character outside us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown man, whence it apparently originated. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 111
The original structural components of the psyche are of no less surprising a uniformity than are those of the visible body. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845
Matter is an hypothesis. When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-Weltanschauung, in contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 762.
It is the psyche which, by the divine creative power inherent in it, makes the metaphysical assertion; it posits the distinctions between metaphysical entities. Not only is it the condition of all metaphysical reality, it is that reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 856.
The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the pre-rational psyche. They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual’s life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 518.
The spiritual climax is reached at the moment when life ends. Human life, therefore, is the vehicle of the highest perfection it is possible to attain; it alone generates the karma that makes it possible for the dead man to abide in the perpetual light of the Voidness without clinging to any object, and thus to rest on the hub of the wheel of rebirth, freed from all illusion of genesis and decay. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 856.
The existence of ego consciousness has meaning only if it is free and autonomous. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 391
Often it is just as well that we do not know the danger we escape when we rush in where angels fear to tread. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 247
But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul, and the cause of the suffering is spiritual stagnation, or psychic sterility. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 497
He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140
Besides, where would the fear of God be if only good—i.e., what seems good to us—were to be expected from him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 291
The view that good and evil are spiritual principles outside us, and that man is caught in the conflict between them is more bearable by far than the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 530
What sort of philosophy would Plato have produced had he been his own house-slave? What would the Rabbi Jesus have taught if he had had to support a wife and children? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 264
It is normal for a man to resist his anima, because she represents the unconscious and all those tendencies and contents hitherto excluded from conscious life. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 75.
I want to make clear, that by the term “religion” I do not mean creed. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 30.
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 129
A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning. But all creativeness in the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul, and the cause of the suffering is spiritual stagnation, or psychic sterility. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 497
In the unconscious is everything that has been rejected by consciousness, and the more Christian one’s consciousness is, the more heathenishly does the unconscious behave, if in the rejected heathenism there are values which are important for life. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 713
Anyone who penetrates into the unconscious with purely biological assumptions will become stuck in the instinctual sphere and be unable to advance beyond it, for he will be pulled back again and again into physical existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11 Para 843
The original structural components of the psyche are of no less surprising a uniformity than are those of the visible body. The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the prerational psyche. They are eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual’s life, when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845
The usual mistake of Western man when faced with this problem of grasping the ideas of the East is like that of the student in Faust. Misled by the devil, he contemptuously turns his back on science and, carried away by Eastern occultism, takes over yoga practices word for word and becomes a pitiable imitator. (Theosophy is our best example of this.) ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 3
Great as is the value of Zen Buddhism for understanding the religious transformation process, its use among Western people is very problematical. The mental education necessary for Zen is lacking in the West. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Paras 901-902
Today accurate observation of unconscious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us, that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a mere shadow could never be endowed with. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 141
Simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ—all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea the very fiend himself—that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world, we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 520
Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. “Gnosticism.” ~Carl Jung, Footnote #13, CW 11, Page 45.
We can only rise above nature if somebody else carries the weight of the earth for us. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Pages 178-179.
But religious statements without exception have to do with the reality of the psyche and not with the reality of physis. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 464.
Although he is already born in the pleroma, his birth in time can only be accomplished when it is perceived, recognized, and declared by man. ~Carl Jung; CW 11, Page 462; Para 748.
You cannot be a good Christian and redeem yourself, nor can you be a Buddha and worship God. It is much better to accept the conflict, for it admits only of an irrational solution, if any. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 483.
In other words, we have to distinguish between the logical idea of the Trinity and its psychological reality. The latter brings us back to the very much more ancient Egyptian ideas and hence to the archetype, which provides the authentic and eternal justification for the existence of any trinitarian idea at all ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 196
If God is born as a man and wants to unite mankind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, he must suffer the terrible torture of having to endure the world in all its reality. This is the cross he has to bear, and he himself is a cross. The whole world is God’s suffering, and every individual man who wants to get anywhere near his own wholeness knows that this is the way of the cross. But the eternal promise for him who bears his own cross is the Paraclete. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 265
It was by recognizing these facts that medicine discovered the psyche, and it can no longer honestly deny the psyche’s reality. It has been shown that the instincts are a condition of psychic activity, while at the same time psychic processes seem to condition the instincts. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 495.
The “best” can be produced only by the best in man, by his conscientiousness and devotion. Cultural products can therefore easily stand for the psychological conditions of their production, that is, for those human virtues which alone make man capable of civilization. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 383
In confinio mortis and in the evening of a long and eventful life a man will often see immense vistas of time stretching out before him. Such a man no longer lives in the everyday world and in the vicissitudes of personal relationships, but in the sight of many aeons and in the movement of ideas as they pass from century to century. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 717
Civilization does not consist in progress as such and in mindless destruction of the old values, but in developing and refining the good that has been won. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 292
Side by side with the biological, the spiritual, too, has its inviolable rights. It is assuredly no accident that primitive peoples, even in adult life, make the most fantastic assertions about well-known sexual processes, as for instance that coitus has nothing to do with pregnancy. From this it has been concluded that these people do not even know there is such a connection. But more accurate investigation has shown that they know very well that with animals’ copulation is followed by pregnancy. Only for human beings is it denied—not known, but flatly denied—that this is so, for the simple reason that they prefer a mythological explanation which has freed itself from the trammels of concretism. It is not hard to see that in these facts, so frequently observed among primitives, there lie the beginnings of abstraction, which is so very important for culture. We have every reason to suppose that this is also true of the psychology of the child. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 79
Perfection is a masculine desideratum, while woman inclines by nature to completeness a man can stand a relative state of perfection much better and for a longer period than a woman, while as a rule it does not agree with women and may even be dangerous for them. If a woman strives for perfection she forgets the complementary role of completeness, which, though imperfect by itself, forms the necessary counterpart to perfection. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 620
It must be admitted that a fit of rage or a sulk has its secret attractions. Were that not so, most people would long since have acquired a little wisdom. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 619
The thing that cures a neurosis must be as convincing as the neurosis, and since the latter is only too real, the helpful experience must be equally real. It must be a very real illusion, i£ you want to put it pessimistically. But what is the difference between a real illusion and a healing religious experience? It is merely a difference of words. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 167
Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may. not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him. He does not know that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 870
There are many people who are only partially conscious. Even among absolutely civilized Europeans there is a disproportionately high number of abnormally unconscious individuals who spend a great part of their lives in an unconscious state. They know what happens to them, but they do not know what they do or say. They cannot judge of the consequences of their actions. These are people who are abnormally unconscious, that is, in a primitive state. What then finally makes them conscious? If they get a slap in the face, then they become conscious; something really happens, and that makes them conscious. They meet with something fatal and then they suddenly realize what they are doing. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 6
Every advance in culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness, a coming to consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an advance always begins with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become conscious of his distinctiveness. “Reflection” should be understood not simply as an act of thought, but rather as an attitude. It is a privilege born of human freedom in contradistinction to the compulsion of natural law. As the word itself testifies (“reflection” means literally “bending back”), reflection is a spiritual act that runs counter to the natural process; an act whereby we stop, call something to mind, form a picture, and take up a relation to and come to terms with what we have seen. It should, therefore, be understood as an act of becoming conscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 235
In the same way that the State has caught the individual, the individual imagines that he has caught the psyche and holds her in the hollow of his hand. He is even making a science of her in the absurd supposition that the intellect, which is but a part and a function of the psyche, is sufficient to comprehend the much greater whole. In reality the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and even the possibility of consciousness itself. It reaches so far beyond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily be compared to an island in the ocean. Whereas the island is small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep and contains a life infinitely surpassing, in kind and degree, anything known on the island—so that if it is a question of space, it does not matter whether the gods are “inside” or “outside.” It might be objected that there is no proof that consciousness is nothing more than an island in the ocean. Certainly it is impossible to prove this, since the known range of consciousness is confronted with the unknown extension of the unconscious, of which we only know that it exists and by the very fact of its existence exerts a limiting effect on consciousness and its freedom. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 141
The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 140
To gain an understanding of religious matters, probably all that is left us today is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience. It is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links between dogma and immediate experience of psychological archetypes, but a study of the natural symbols of the unconscious gives us the necessary raw material. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 148
Since the life of Christ is archetypal to a high degree, it represents to just that degree the life of the archetype. But since the archetype is the unconscious precondition of every human life, its life, when revealed, also reveals the hidden, unconscious ground-life of every individual. That is to say, what happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured and are expressed over and over again or once and for all. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 146
The so-called “forces of the unconscious” are not intellectual concepts that can be arbitrarily manipulated, but dangerous antagonists which can, among other things, work frightful devastation in the economy of the personality. They are everything one could wish for or fear in a psychic “Thou.” The layman naturally thinks he is the victim of some obscure organic disease; but the theologian, who suspects it is the devil’s work, is appreciably nearer to the psychological truth. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659
I have often been asked where the archetype comes from and whether it is acquired or not. This question cannot be answered directly. Archetypes are, by definition, factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a way that they can be recognized only from the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously, and presumably they form the structural dominants of the psyche in general. They may be compared to the invisible presence of the crystal lattice in a saturated solution. As a priori conditioning factors they represent a special, psychological instance of the biological “pattern of behaviour,” which gives all living organisms their specific qualities. Just as the manifestations of this biological ground plan may change in the course of development, so also can those of the archetype. Empirically considered, however, the archetype did not ever come into existence as a phenomenon of organic life but entered into the picture with life itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 222
In Christ’s sayings there are already indications of ideas which go beyond the traditionally “Christian” morality —for instance the parable of the unjust steward, the moral of which agrees with the logion of the Codex Bezae and betrays an ethical standard very different from what is expected. Here the moral criterion is consciousness, and not law or convention. One might also mention the strange fact that it is precisely Peter, who lacks self-control and is fickle in character, whom Christ wishes to make the rock and foundation of his Church. These seem to me to be ideas which point to the inclusion of evil in what I would call a differential moral valuation. For instance, it is good if evil is sensibly covered up, but to act unconsciously is evil. One might almost suppose that such views were intended for a time when consideration is given to evil as well as to good, or rather, when it is not suppressed below the threshold in the dubious assumption that we always know exactly what evil is. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 696
The educated man tries to repress the inferior man in himself, not realizing that by so doing he forces the latter into revolt. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 136
The fact that only a few people see the Risen One means that no small difficulties stand in the way of finding and recognizing the transformed value. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 149
Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 841
Ordinary giving for which no return is received is felt as a loss; but a sacrifice is meant to be like a loss, so that one may be sure that the egoistic claim no longer exists. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 390
What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 529
The externalization of life turns to incurable suffering, because no one can understand why he should suffer from himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 962
The so-called “forces of the unconscious” are not intellectual concepts that can be arbitrarily manipulated, but dangerous antagonists which can, among other things, work frightful devastation in the economy of the personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 659
Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 146
But since the archetype is the unconscious precondition of every human life, its life, when revealed, also reveals the hidden, unconscious ground-life of every individual. That is to say, what happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 146
It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757
God has indeed made an inconceivably sublime and mysteriously contradictory image of himself, without the help of man, and implanted it in man’s unconscious as an archetype, the archetypal light not in order that theologians of all times and places should be at one another’s throats, but in order that the unpresumptuous man might glimpse an image, in the stillness of his soul, that is akin to him and is wrought of his own psychic substance. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 661
“Reflection” should be understood not simply as an act of thought, but rather as an attitude. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 235
He [Man] is even making a science of her [Psyche] in the absurd supposition that the intellect, which is but a part and a function of the psyche, is sufficient to comprehend the much greater whole. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 141
In reality the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and even the possibility of consciousness itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 141
The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 608
The unconscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unrecorded. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 280
The gulf that Christianity opened out between nature and spirit enabled the human mind to think not only beyond nature but in opposition to it, thus demonstrating its divine freedom. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 261
Faith is a charisma not granted to all; instead, man has the gift of thought, which can strive after the highest things. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 170
Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 98.
Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious he is, the more the devil drives him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 255.
Psychic existence is the only category of existence of which we have immediate knowledge, since nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 769.
Individuation is an expression of that biological process – simple or complicated as the case may be – by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 144.
“One can love God and must fear him. “~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 733.
Whatever the metaphysical position of the devil may be, in psychological reality evil is an effective, not to say menacing, limitation of goodness, so that it is no exaggeration to assume that in this world good and evil more or less balance each other, like day and night, and that this is the reason why the victory of the good is always a special act of grace ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 253
From a psychological standpoint this view can be translated as follows: Christ lived a concrete, personal, and unique life which, in all essential features, had at the same time an archetypal character. This character can be recognized from the numerous connections of the biographical details with worldwide myth-motifs. These undeniable connections are the main reason why it is so difficult for researchers into the life of Jesus to construct from the gospel reports an individual life divested of myth. In the gospels themselves factual reports, legends, and myths are woven into a whole. This is precisely what constitutes the meaning of the gospels, and they would immediately lose their character of wholeness if one tried to separate the individual from the archetypal with a critical scalpel. The life of Christ is no exception in that not a few of the great figures of history have realized, more or less clearly, the archetype of the hero’s life with its characteristic changes of fortune. But the ordinary man, too, unconsciously lives archetypal forms, and if these are no longer valued it is only because of the prevailing psychological ignorance. Indeed, even the fleeting phenomena of dreams often reveal distinctly archetypal patterns. At bottom, all psychic events are so deeply grounded in the archetype and are so much interwoven with it that in every case considerable critical effort is needed to separate the unique from the typical with any certainty Ultimately, every individual life is at the same time the eternal life of the species. The individual is continuously “historical” because strictly time-bound; the relation of the type to time, on the other hand, is irrelevant. Since the life of Christ is archetypal to a high degree, it represents to just that degree the life of the archetype. But since the archetype is the unconscious precondition of every human life, its life, when revealed, also reveals the hidden, unconscious ground-life of every individual. That is to say, what happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured and are expressed over and over again or once and for all. And in it, too, the question that concerns us here of God’s death is anticipated in perfect form. Christ himself is the typical dying and self-transforming God ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 146
Hence the devil remained outside the Trinity as the “ape of God” and in opposition to it. Medieval representations of the triune God as having three heads are based on the three-headedness of Satan, as we find it, for instance, in Dante. This would point to an infernal Anti-trinity, a true “umbra trinitatis” analogous to the Antichrist. The devil is, undoubtedly, an awkward figure: he is the “odd man out” in the Christian cosmos. That is why people would like to minimize his importance by euphemistic ridicule or by ignoring his existence altogether; or, better still, to lay the blame for him at man’s door. This is in fact done by the very people who would protest mightily if sinful man should credit himself, equally, with the origin of all good. A glance at the Scriptures, however, is enough to show us the importance of the devil in the divine drama of redemption. If the power of the Evil One had been as feeble as certain persons would wish it to appear, either the world would not have needed God himself to come down to it or it would have lain within the power of man to set the world to rights, which has certainly not happened so far ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 252.
The more unconscious we are of the religious problem in the future, the greater the danger of our putting the divine germ within us to some ridiculous or demoniacal use, puffing ourselves up with it instead of remaining conscious that we are no more than the Stable in which the Lord is born. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 267.
If we disregard the specifically Persian system of dualism, it appears that no real devil is to be found anywhere in the early period of man’s spiritual development. In the Old Testament, he is vaguely foreshadowed in the figure of Satan. But the real devil first appears as the adversary of Christ, and with him we gaze for the first time into the luminous realm of divinity on the one hand and into the abyss of hell on the other. The devil is autonomous; he cannot be brought under God’s rule, for if he could he would not have the power to be the adversary of Christ but would only be God’s instrument. Once the indefinable One unfolds into two, it becomes something definite: the man Jesus, the Son and Logos. This statement is possible only by virtue of something else that is not Jesus, not Son or Logos. The act of love embodied in the Son is counterbalanced by Lucifer’s denial ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 254
Inasmuch as the devil was an angel created by God and “fell like lightning from heaven,” he too is a divine “procession” that became Lord of this world. It is significant that the Gnostics thought of him sometimes as the imperfect demiurge and sometimes as the Saturnine archon, Ialdabaoth. Pictorial representations of this archon correspond in every detail with those of a diabolical demon. He symbolized the power of darkness from which Christ came to rescue humanity. The archons issued from the womb of the unfathomable abyss, i.e., from the same source that produced the Gnostic Christ ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 255
A medieval thinker observed that when God separated the upper waters from the lower on the second day of Creation, he did not say in the evening, as he did on all the other days, that it was good. And he did not say it because on that day he had created the Binarius, the origin of all evil. We come across a similar idea in Persian literature, where the origin of Ahriman is attributed to a doubting thought in Ahura-Mazda’s mind ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 256
The dual aspect of the Father is by no means unknown to religious speculation. This is proved by the allegory of the monoceros, or unicorn, who symbolizes Yahweh’s angry moodiness. Like this irritable beast, he reduced the world to chaos and could only be moved to love in the lap of a pure virgin. Luther was familiar with a deus absconditus. Murder, sudden death, war, sickness, crime, and every kind of abomination fall in with the unity of God. If God reveals his nature and takes on definite form as a man, then the opposites in him must fly apart: here good, there evil. So it was that the opposites latent in the Deity flew apart when the Son was begotten and manifested themselves in the struggle between Christ and the devil, with the Persian Ormazd-Ahriman antithesis, perhaps, as the underlying model. The world of the Son is the world of moral discord, without which human consciousness could hardly have progressed so far as it has towards mental and spiritual differentiation. That we are not unreservedly enthusiastic about this progress is shown by the fits of doubt to which our modern consciousness is subject ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 259
We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the author, first for having brought Zen closer to Western understanding, and secondly for the manner in which he has performed this task. Oriental religious conceptions are usually so very different from our Western ones that even the bare translation of the words often presents the greatest difficulties, quite apart from the meaning of the terms used, which in certain circumstances are better left untranslated. I need only mention the Chinese “Tao,” which no European translation has yet got near. The original Buddhist writings contain views and ideas which are more or less unassimilable for ordinary Europeans ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 877
I do not know, for instance, just what kind of mental (or perhaps climatic?) background or preparation is necessary before one can form any completely clear idea of what is meant by the Buddhist “kamma.” Judging by all we know of the nature of Zen, here too we are up against a central conception of unsurpassed singularity. This strange conception is called “satori,” which may be translated as “enlightenment.” “Satori is the raison d’être of Zen without which Zen is not Zen,” says Suzuki. It should not be too difficult for the Western mind to grasp what a mystic understands by “enlightenment,” or what is known as such in religious parlance. Satori, however, designates a special kind and way of enlightenment which it is practically impossible for the European to appreciate ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 877
The occurrence of satori is interpreted and formulated as a break-through, by a consciousness limited to the ego-form, into the non-ego-like Self. This view is in accord not only with the essence of Zen, but also with the mysticism of Meister Eckhart ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 887
Satori corresponds in the Christian sphere to an experience of religious transformation. As there are different degrees and kinds of such an experience, it may not be superfluous to define more accurately the category which corresponds most closely to the Zen experience. This is without doubt the mystic experience, which differs from other types in that its preliminary stages consist in “letting oneself go,” in “emptying oneself of images and ideas,” as opposed to those religious experiences which, like the exercises of Ignatius Loyola, are based on the practice of envisaging sacred images. In this latter class I would include transformation through faith and prayer and through collective experience in Protestantism, since a very definite assumption plays the decisive role here, and not by any means “emptiness” or “freeness.” The characteristically Eckhartian assertion that “God is Nothingness” may well be incompatible in principle with the contemplation of the Passion, with faith and collective expectations ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 893
Thus the correspondence between satori and Western experience is limited to those few Christian mystics whose paradoxical statements skirt the edge of heterodoxy or actually overstep it. The koan is understood to be a paradoxical question, statement, or action of the Master. Judging by Suzuki’s description, it seems to consist chiefly of master-questions handed down in the form of anecdotes. These are submitted by the teacher to the student for meditation. A classic example is the Wu anecdote. A monk once asked the Master: “Has a dog a Buddha nature too?” Whereupon the Master replied: “Wu!” As Suzuki remarks, this “Wu” means quite simply “bow-wow,” obviously just what the dog himself would have said in answer to such a question ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 894
At first sight it seems as if the posing of a koan question as an object of meditation would anticipate or prejudice the end-result, and that it would therefore determine the content of the experience, just as in the Jesuit exercises or in certain yoga meditations the content is determined by the task set by the teacher. The koans, however, are so various, so ambiguous, and above all so boundlessly paradoxical that even an expert must be completely in the dark as to what might be considered a suitable solution. In addition, the descriptions of the final result are so obscure that in no single case can one discover any rational connection between the koan and the experience of enlightenment. Since no logical sequence can be demonstrated, it remains to be supposed that the koan method puts not the smallest restraint upon the freedom of the psychic process and that the end-result therefore springs from nothing but the individual disposition of the pupil ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 895
To the extent that the world does not assume the form of a psychic image, it is virtually nonexistent. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 769
“Physical” is not the only criterion of truth: there are also psychic truths which can neither be explained nor proved nor contested in any physical way. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 555
The complete destruction of the rational intellect aimed at in the training creates an almost perfect lack of conscious assumptions. These are excluded as far as possible, but not unconscious assumptions that is, the existing but unrecognized psychological disposition, which is anything but empty or tabula rasa. It is a nature-given factor, and when it [the unconscious] answers this being obviously the satori experience it is an answer of Nature, who has succeeded in conveying her reaction direct to the conscious mind. What the unconscious nature of the pupil opposes to the teacher or to the koan by way of an answer is, manifestly, satori. This seems, at least to me, to be the view which, to judge by the descriptions, formulates the nature of satori more or less correctly. It is also supported by the fact that the “glimpse into one’s own nature,” the “original man,” and the depths of one’s being are often a matter of supreme concern to the Zen master ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 895
Great as is the value of Zen Buddhism for understanding the religious transformation process, its use among Western people is very problematical. The mental education necessary for Zen is lacking in the West. Who among us would place such implicit trust in a superior Master and his incomprehensible ways? This respect for the greater human personality is found only in the East ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 902
Whatever happens in a given moment has inevitably the quality of that moment. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 970
According to the dogma she is only beata, not divine. Moreover, she represents the earth, which is also the body and its darkness. That is the reason why she, the all-merciful, has the power of attorney to plead for all sinners, but also why, despite her privileged position (it is not possible for the angels to sin), she has a relationship with the Trinity which is rationally not comprehensible, since it is so close and yet so distant ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 123
In Milton’s time these ideas were very much in the air, forming part of the general stock of culture, and there were not a few Masters who realized that their philosophical stone was none other than the “total man.” The Satan-Prometheus parallel shows clearly enough that Milton’s devil stands for the essence of human individuation and thus comes within the scope of psychology. This close proximity, as we know, proved a danger not only to the metaphysical status of Satan, but to that of other numinous figures as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 471
He [the fallen angel] is the fourth, “recalcitrant” figure in our symbolical series, the intervals between which correspond to the three phases of the trinitarian process. Just as, in the Timaeus, the adversary is the second half of the second pair of opposites, without whom the world-soul would not be whole and complete, so, too, the devil must be added to the trias as (the One as the Fourth), in order to make it a totality ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 290
Therefore Lucifer was perhaps the one who best understood the divine will struggling to create a world and who carried out that will most faithfully. For, by rebelling against God, he became the active principle of a creation which opposed to God a counter-will of its own. Because God willed this, we are told in Genesis that he gave man the power to will otherwise. Had he not done so, he would have created nothing but a machine, and then the incarnation and the redemption would never have come about. Nor would there have been any revelation of the Trinit, because everything would have remained One forever ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 290
The Lucifer legend is in no sense an absurd fairytale; like the story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it is a “therapeutic” myth. We naturally boggle at the thought that good and evil are both contained in God, and we think God could not possibly want such a thing. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 291
Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. When fate, for four whole years, played out a war of monumental frightfulness on the stage of Europe—a war that nobody wanted—nobody dreamt of asking exactly who or what had caused the war and its continuation. Nobody realized that European man was possessed by something that robbed him of all free will.
As the matrix, the vessel, the earth, she can be interpreted allegorically as the rotundum, which is characterized by the four cardinal points, and hence as the globe with the four quarters, God’s footstool. The mandala, according to the Tantric idea of the lotus, is feminine, and for readily understandable reasons. The lotus is the eternal birthplace of the gods. It corresponds to the Western rose in which the King of Glory sits, often supported by the four evangelists, who correspond to the four quarters ~Carl Jung, CW 11. Para 123
I have no doubt the satori experience does occur also in the West, for we too have men who scent ultimate ends and will spare themselves no pains to draw near to them. But they will keep silence, not only out of shyness but because they know that any attempt to convey their experiences to others would be hopeless. For there is nothing in our culture approaching these aspirations, not even the Church, the custodian of religious goods. It is in fact her function to oppose all such extreme experiences, for these can only be heterodox. The only movement within our culture that partly has—and partly should have—some understanding of these aspirations is psychotherapy. It is therefore not a matter of chance that this foreword is written by a psychotherapist. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 903
When I flowed out from God, all things declared, “God is!” Now this cannot make me blessed, for thereby I acknowledge myself a creature. But in the breakthrough I stand empty in the will of God, and empty also of God’s will, and of all his works, even of God himself—then I am more than all creatures, then I am neither God nor creature: I am what I was, and that I shall remain, now and ever more! Then I receive a thrust which carries me above all angels. By this thrust I become so rich that God cannot suffice me, despite all that he is as God and all his godly works; for in this breakthrough I receive what God and I have in common. I am what I was, I neither increase nor diminish, for I am the unmoved mover that moves all things. Here God can find no more place in man, for man by his emptiness has won back that which he was eternally and ever shall remain. ~Meister Eckhart, CW 11, Para 887
Everything requires for its existence its own opposite, or else it fades into nothingness. The ego needs the self and vice versa. The changing relations between these two entities constitute a field of experience which Eastern introspection has exploited to a degree almost unattainable to Western man. The philosophy of the East, although so vastly different from ours, could be an inestimable treasure for us too; but, in order to possess it, we must first earn it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 961
One could hardly expect the educated public, which has only just begun to hear about the obscure world of the psyche, to form any adequate conception of the spiritual state of a man caught in the toils of the individuation process—which is my term for “becoming whole.” People then drag out the vocabulary of pathology and console themselves with the terminology of neurosis and psychosis, or else they whisper about the “creative secret.” But what can a man “create” if he doesn’t happen to be a poet? This misunderstanding has caused not a few persons in recent times to call themselves—by their own grace—”artists,” just as if art had nothing to do with ability. But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 906
Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all its dubious aspects—truly a task that taxes us to the utmost. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 24
The cult of the dead is rationally based on the belief in the supra-temporality of the soul, but its irrational basis is to be found in the psychological need of the living to do something for the departed. This is an elementary need which forces itself upon even the most “enlightened” individuals when faced by the death of relatives and friends. That is why, enlightenment or no enlightenment, we still have all manner of ceremonies for the dead. If Lenin had to submit to being embalmed and put on show in a sumptuous mausoleum like an Egyptian pharaoh, we may be quite sure it was not because his followers believed in the resurrection of the body. Apart, however, from the Masses said for the soul in the Catholic Church, the provisions we make for the dead are rudimentary and on the lowest level, not because we cannot convince ourselves of the soul’s immortality, but because we have rationalized the abovementioned psychological need out of existence. We behave as if we did not have this need, and because we cannot believe in a life after death we prefer to do nothing about it. Simpler-minded people follow their own feelings, and, as in Italy, build themselves funeral monuments of gruesome beauty. The Catholic Masses for the soul are on a level considerably above this, because they are expressly intended for the psychic welfare of the deceased and are not a mere gratification of lachrymose sentiments. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 855
In the initiation of the living, “Beyond” is not a world beyond death, but a reversal of the mind’s intentions and outlook, a psychological “Beyond” or, in Christian terms, a “redemption” from the trammels of the world and of sin. Redemption is a separation and deliverance from an earlier condition of darkness and unconsciousness, and leads to a condition of illumination and releasedness, to victory and transcendence over everything “given.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 841
A great reversal of standpoint, calling for much sacrifice, is needed before we can see the world as “given” by the very nature of the psyche. It is so much more straightforward, more dramatic, impressive, and therefore more convincing, to see all the things that happen to me than to observe how I make them happen. Indeed, the animal nature of man makes him resist seeing himself as the maker of his circumstances. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 841
When psychology speaks of the motif of the virgin birth, it is only concerned with the fact that there is such an idea, but it is not concerned with the question whether such an idea is true or false in any other sense. The idea is psychologically true inasmuch as it exists. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 4
The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth—quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity. It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail. At the same time objective, non-psychic parallel phenomena can occur which also represent the archetype. It not only seems so, it simply is so, that the archetype fulfils itself not only psychically in the individual, but objectively outside the individual. My own conjecture is that Christ was such a personality. The life of Christ is just what it had to be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time. It is a symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather as if Job and Yahweh were combined in a single personality. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648
Although it is generally assumed that Christ’s unique sacrifice broke the curse of original sin and finally placated God, Christ nevertheless seems to have had certain misgivings in this respect. What will happen to man, and especially to his own followers, when the sheep have lost their shepherd, and when they miss the one who interceded for them with the father? He assures his disciples that he will always be with them, nay more, that he himself abides within them.
Nevertheless this does not seem to satisfy him completely, for in addition he promises to send them from the father another paracletos (advocate, “Counsellor”) in his stead, who will assist them by word and deed and remain with them forever. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 691
Despite the fact that he is potentially redeemed, the Christian is given over to moral suffering, and in his suffering he needs the Comforter, the Paraclete. He cannot overcome the conflict on his own resources; after all, he didn’t invent it. He has to rely on divine comfort and mediation, that is to say on the spontaneous revelation of the spirit, which does not obey man’s will but comes and goes as it wills. This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darknesses of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. The Holy Ghost is a comforter like the Father, a mute, eternal, unfathomable One in whom God’s love and God’s terribleness come together in wordless union. And through this union the original meaning of the still-unconscious Father-world is restored and brought within the scope of human experience and reflection. Looked at from a quaternary standpoint, the Holy Ghost is a reconciliation of opposites and hence the answer to the suffering in the Godhead which Christ personifies. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 260
The sending of the Paraclete has still another aspect. This Spirit of Truth and Wisdom is the Holy Ghost by whom Christ was begotten. He is the spirit of physical and spiritual procreation who from now on shall make his abode in creaturely man. Since he is the Third Person of the Deity, this is as much as to say that God will be begotten in creaturely man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 692
For that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darkness—the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels. The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 746
God has a terrible double aspect: a sea of grace is met by a seething lake of fire, and the light of love glows with a fierce dark heat of which it is said “ardet non lucet”—it burns but gives no light. That is the eternal, as distinct from the temporal, gospel: one can love God but must fear him. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 733
Since the Apocalypse we now know again that God is not only to be loved, but also to be feared. He fills us with evil as well as with good, otherwise he would not need to be feared; and because he wants to become man, the uniting of his antinomy must take place in man. This involves man in a new responsibility. He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures. Since he has been granted an almost godlike power, he can no longer remain blind and unconscious. He must know something of God’s nature and of metaphysical processes if he is to understand himself and thereby achieve gnosis of the Divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747
The light God bestrides the bridge—Man—from the dayside; God’s shadow, from the night side. What will be the outcome of this fearful dilemma, which threatens to shatter the frail human vessel with unknown storms and intoxications? It may well be the revelation of the Holy Ghost out of man himself. Just as man was once revealed out of God, so, when the circle closes, God may be revealed out of man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 267
Oddly enough the paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. Hence a religion becomes inwardly impoverished when it loses or waters down its paradoxes; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 18
If the spiritual adventure of our time is the exposure of human consciousness to the undefined and indefinable, there would seem to be good reasons for thinking that even the Boundless is pervaded by psychic laws, which no man invented, but of which he has “gnosis” in the symbolism of Christian dogma. Only heedless fools will wish to destroy this; the lover of the soul, never. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 168
If I have ventured to submit old dogmas, now grown stale, to psychological scrutiny, I have certainly not done so in the priggish conceit that I knew better than others, but in the sincere conviction that a dogma which has been such a bone of contention for so many centuries cannot possibly be an empty fantasy. I felt it was too much in line with the consensus omnium, with the archetype, for that. It was only when I realized this that I was able to establish any relationship with the dogma at all. As a metaphysical “truth” it remained wholly inaccessible to me, and I suspect that I am by no means the only one to find himself in that position. A knowledge of the universal archetypal background was, in itself, sufficient to give me the courage to treat “that which is believed always, everywhere, by everybody” as a psychological fad which extends far beyond the confines of Christianity, and to approach it as an object of scientific study, as a phenomenon pure and simple, regardless of the “metaphysical” significance that may have been attached to it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 294
Being “very man” means being at an extreme remove and utterly different from God. “De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine”—this cry demonstrates both, the remoteness and the nearness, the outermost darkness and the dazzling spark of the Divine. God in his humanity is presumably so far from himself that he has to seek himself through absolute self-surrender. And where would God’s wholeness be if he could not be the “wholly other”? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 380
People who merely believe and don’t think always forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worst enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping-stone to better knowledge. People who can believe should be a little more tolerant with those of their fellows who are only capable of thinking. Belief has already conquered the summit which thinking tries to win by toilsome climbing. The believer ought not to project his habitual enemy, doubt, upon the thinker, thereby suspecting him of destructive designs. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 170
What is needed are a few illuminating truths, but not articles of faith. Where an intelligible truth works, it finds in faith a willing ally; for faith has always helped when thinking and understanding could not quite make the grade. Understanding is never the handmaiden of faith —on the contrary, faith completes understanding. To educate men to a faith they do not understand is certainly a well-meant undertaking, but one runs the risk of creating an attitude that believes everything it does not understand. Dogmas fail on deaf ears, because nothing in our known world responds to such assertions. But if we understand these things for what they are, as symbols, then we can only marvel at the unfathomable wisdom that is in them and be grateful to the institution which has not only conserved them but developed them dogmatically. The man of today lacks the very understanding that would help him to believe. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 293
No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must therefore take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps to make life healthier, more beautiful, more complete, and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: “This was the grace of God.” No transcendental truth is thereby demonstrated, and we must confess in all humility that religious experience is extra ecclesiam, subjective, and liable to boundless error. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 167
God” is a primordial experience of man, and from the remotest times humanity has taken inconceivable pains either to portray this baffling experience, to assimilate it by means of interpretation, speculation, and dogma, or else to deny it. And again and again it has happened, and still happens, that one hears too much about the “good” God and knows him too well, so that one confuses him with one’s own ideas and regards them as sacred because they can be traced back a couple of thousand years. This is a superstition and an idolatry every bit as bad as the Bolshevist delusion that “God” can be educated out of existence. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 480
No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure, a thing that has become for him a source of life, meaning, and beauty, and that has given a new splendour to the world and to mankind. He has pistis and peace. Where is the criterion by which you could say that such a life is not legitimate, that such an experience is not valid, and that such pistis is mere illusion? Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about the ultimate things than the one that helps you to live? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 167
If we consider the fact that the idea of God is an “unscientific” hypothesis, we can easily explain why people have forgotten to think along such lines. And even if they do cherish a certain belief in God they would be deterred from the idea of a God within by their religious education. which has always depreciated this idea as “mystical.” Yet it is precisely this “mystical” idea which is forced upon the conscious mind by dreams and visions. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 101
The materialistic error was probably unavoidable at first. Since the throne of God could not be discovered among the galactic systems, the inference was that God had never existed. The second unavoidable error is psychologism: if God is anything, he must be an illusion derived from certain motives—from will to power, for instance, or from repressed sexuality. These arguments are not new. Much the same thing was said by the Christian missionaries who overthrew the idols of heathen gods. But whereas the early missionaries were conscious of serving a new God by combatting the old ones, modern iconoclasts are unconscious of the one in whose name they are destroying old values. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 142
I have been asked so often whether I believe in the existence of God that I am somewhat concerned lest I be taken for an adherent of “psychologism” far more commonly than I suspect. What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fact that I regard the psyche as real. They believe only in physical facts and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb. That is no less absurd than the assumption that a non-real psyche is responsible for it. God is an obvious psychic and nonphysical fact, i.e., a fact that can be established psychically but not physically. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 751
Owing to the undervaluation of the psyche that everywhere prevails, every attempt at psychological understanding is immediately suspected of psychologism. If, in physics, one seeks to explain the nature of light, nobody expects that as a result there will be no light. But in the case of psychology everybody believes that what is explained is explained away. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 749
It is, in fact, impossible to demonstrate God’s reality to oneself except by using images which have arisen spontaneously or are sanctified by tradition, and whose psychic nature and effects the naive-minded person has never separated from their unknowable metaphysical background. He instantly equates the effective image with the transcendental X to which it points. The seeming justification for this procedure appears self-evident and is not considered a problem so long as the statements of religion are not seriously questioned. But if there is occasion for criticism, then it must be remembered that the image and the statement are psychic processes which are different from their transcendental object: they do not posit it, they merely point to it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 558
If, for instance, we say “God,” we give expression to an image or verbal concept that has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty—unless it be by faith—whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 555
The very absurdity and impossibility of [religious] statements [are] the real ground for belief, as was formulated most brilliantly in Tertullian’s “prorsus credible, quia ineptum.” (The audacity of Tertullian’s argument is undeniable, and so is its danger, but that does not detract from its psychological truth.) An improbable opinion has to submit sooner or later to correction. But the statements of religion are the most improbable of all and yet they persist for thousands of years. Their wholly unexpected vitality proves the existence of a sufficient cause which has so far eluded scientific investigation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 379
If I know and admit that I am giving myself, forgoing myself, and do not want to be repaid for it, then I have sacrificed my claim, and thus a part of myself. Consequently, all absolute giving, a giving which is a total loss from the start, is a self-sacrifice. Ordinary giving for which no return is received is felt as a loss; but a sacrifice is meant to be like a loss, so that one may be sure that the egoistic claim no longer exists. Therefore the gift should be given as if it were being destroyed. But since the gift represents myself, I have in that case destroyed myself, given myself away without expectation of return. Yet, looked at in another way, this intentional loss is also a gain, for if you can give yourself it proves that you possess yourself. Nobody can give what he has not got. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 390
Fear of self-sacrifice lurks deep in every ego, and this fear is often only the precariously controlled demand of the unconscious forces to burst out in full strength. No one who strives for selfhood (individuation) is spared this dangerous passage, for that which is feared also belongs to the wholeness of the self—the sub-human, or supra-human, world of psychic “dominants” from which the ego originally emancipated itself with enormous effort, and then only partially, for the sake of a more or less illusory freedom. This liberation is certainly a very necessary and very heroic undertaking, but it represents nothing final: it is merely the creation of a subject, who, in order to find fulfilment, has still to be confronted by an object. This, at first sight, would appear to be the world, which is swelled out with projections for that very purpose. Here we seek and find our difficulties, here we seek and find our enemy, here we seek and find what is dear and precious to us; and it is comforting to know that all evil and all good is to be found out there, in the visible object, where it can be conquered, punished, destroyed, or enjoyed. But nature herself does not allow this paradisal state of innocence to continue forever. There are, and always have been, those who cannot help but see that the world and its experiences are in the nature of a symbol, and that it really reflects something that lies hidden in the subject himself, in his own transubjective reality. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 849
Consciousness is always only a part of the psyche and therefore never capable of psychic wholeness: for that the indefinite extension of the unconscious is needed. But the unconscious can neither be caught with clever formulas nor exorcized by means of scientific dogmas, for something of destiny clings to it—indeed, it is sometimes destiny itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 906
If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences, you can formulate it this way: They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events. This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 138
The highest value, which gives life and meaning, has got lost. This is a typical experience that has been repeated many times, and its expression therefore occupies a central place in the Christian mystery. The death or loss must always repeat itself: Christ always dies, and always he is born for the psychic life of the archetype is timeless in comparison with our individual time-boundness. According to what laws now one and now another aspect of the archetype enters into active manifestation, I do not know. I only know—and here I am expressing what countless other people know—that the present is a time of God’s death and disappearance. The myth says he was not to be found where his body was laid. “Body” means the outward, visible form, the erstwhile but ephemeral setting for the highest value. The myth further says that the value rose again in a miraculous manner, transformed. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 149
The three days’ descent into hell during death describes the sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order, and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity of consciousness. The fact that only a few people see the Risen One means that no small difficulties stand in the way of finding and recognizing the transformed value. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 149
Personality consists of two things: first, consciousness and whatever this covers, and second, an indefinitely large hinterland of unconscious psyche. So far as the former is concerned, it can be more or less clearly defined and delimited; but as for the sum total of human personality, one has to admit the impossibility of a complete description or definition. In other words, there is bound to be an illimitable and indefinable addition to every personality, because the latter consists of a conscious and observable part which does not contain certain factors whose existence, however, we are forced to assume in order to explain certain observable facts. The unknown factors form what we call the unconscious part of the personality. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 66
The intrinsically goal-like quality of the self and the urge to realize this goal are not dependent on the participation of consciousness. They cannot be denied any more than one can deny one’s ego-consciousness. It, too, puts forward its claims peremptorily, and very often in overt or covert opposition to the needs of the evolving self. In reality, i.e., with few exceptions, the entelechy of the self consists in a succession of endless compromises, ego and self laboriously keeping the scales balanced if all is to go well. Too great a swing to one side or the other is often no more than an example of how not to set about it. This certainly does not mean that extremes, when they occur in a natural way, are in themselves evil. We make the right use of them when we examine their meaning, and they give us ample opportunity to do this in a manner deserving our gratitude. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 960
The difference between the “natural” individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness but comprehends it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 756
It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these hints. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue. The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand the meaning of the numina that cross our path. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 746
Exceptional human beings, carefully hedged about and secluded, are invariably a gift of nature, enriching and widening the scope of our consciousness—but only if our capacity for reflection does not suffer shipwreck. Enthusiasm can be a veritable gift of the gods or a monster from hell. With the hybris which attends it, corruption sets in, even if the resultant clouding of consciousness seems to put the attainment of the highest goals almost within one’s grasp. The only true and lasting gain is heightened and broadened reflection. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 960
Experiences cannot be made. They happen—yet fortunately their independence of man’s activity is not absolute but relative. We can draw closer to them—that much lies within our human reach. There are ways which bring us nearer to living experience, yet we should beware of calling these ways “methods.” The very word has a deadening effect. The way to experience, moreover, is anything but a clever trick; it is rather a venture which requires us to commit ourselves with our whole being. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 501
Behind a man’s actions there stands neither public opinion nor the moral code, but the personality of which he is still unconscious. Just as a man still is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. The conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly of his conscious contents, and for the other and far greater part, of his unconscious, which is of indefinite extent with no assignable limits. In this totality the conscious mind is contained like a smaller circle within a larger one. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 390
The man who is only wise and only holy interests me about as much as the skeleton of a rare saurian, which would not move me to tears. The insane contradiction, on the other hand, between existence beyond Maya in the cosmic Self, and that amiable human weakness which fruitfully sinks many roots into the black earth, repeating for all eternity the weaving and rending of the veil as the ageless melody of India—this contradiction fascinates me; for how else can one perceive the light without the shadow, hear the silence without the noise, attain wisdom without foolishness? ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 953
The Indian can forget neither the body nor the mind, while the European is always forgetting either the one or the other. With this capacity to forget he has, for the time being, conquered the world. Not so the Indian. He not only knows his own nature, but he also knows how much he himself is nature. The European, on the other hand, has a science of nature and knows astonishingly little of his own nature, the nature within him. For the Indian, it comes as a blessing to know of a method which helps him to control the supreme power of nature within and without. For the European, it is sheer poison to suppress his nature, which is warped enough as it is, and to make out of it a willing robot. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 867
The extraverted tendency of the West and the introverted tendency of the East have one important purpose in common both make desperate efforts to conquer the mere naturalness of life. It is the assertion of mind over matter, the opus contra naturam, a symptom of the youthfulness of man, still delighting in the use of the most powerful weapon ever devised by nature the conscious mind. The afternoon of humanity, in a distant future, may yet evolve a different ideal. In time, even conquest will cease to be the dream. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 787
The wisdom and mysticism of the East have very much to say to us, even when they speak their own inimitable language. They serve to remind us that we in our culture possess something similar, which we have already forgotten, and to direct our attention to the fate of the inner man. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 963
Instead of learning the spiritual techniques of the East by heart and imitating them in a thoroughly Christian way—imitatio Christi! —with a correspondingly forced attitude, it would be far more to the point to find out whether there exists in the unconscious an introverted tendency similar to that which has become the guiding spiritual principle of the East. We should then be in a position to build on our own ground with our own methods. If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that “everything good is outside,” whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls. It seems to me that we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough without having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 773
The West is always seeking uplift, but the East seeks a sinking or deepening. Outer reality, with its bodiliness and weight, appears to make a much stronger and sharper impression on the European than it does on the Indian. The European seeks to raise himself above this world, while the Indian likes to turn back into the maternal depths of Nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 936
The Christian during contemplation would never say “/ am Christ,” but will confess with Paul: “Not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). Our sutra however, says: “Thou wilt know that thou art the Buddha.” At bottom the two confessions are identical, in that the Buddhist only attains this knowledge when he is an Atman, ‘without self.’ But there is an immeasurable difference in the formulation. The Christian attains his end in Christ, the Buddhist knows he is the Buddha. The Christian gets out of the transitory and ego-bound world of consciousness, but the Buddhist still reposes on the eternal ground of his inner nature, whose oneness with Deity, or with universal Being, is confirmed in other Indian testimonies. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 949
The Christian West considers man to be wholly dependent upon the grace of God, or at least upon the Church as the exclusive and divinely sanctioned earthly instrument of man’s redemption. The East, however, insists that man is the sole cause of his higher development, for it believes in “self-liberation.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 770
The manifestations of the spirit are truly wondrous, and as varied as Creation itself. The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men who proclaim it and in whom it lives. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean very little; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 537
One can, it is true, understand many things with the heart, but then the head often finds it difficult to follow up with an intellectual formulation that gives suitable expression to what has been understood. There is also an understanding with the head, particularly of the scientific kind, where there is sometimes too little room for the heart. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 935
I believe only what I know. Everything else is hypothesis and beyond that I can leave a lot of things to the Unknown. They do not bother me. But they would begin to bother me, I am sure, if I felt that I ought to know about them. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 79
Paradox does more justice to the unknowable than clarity can do, for uniformity of meaning robs the mystery of its darkness and sets it up as something that is known. That is a usurpation, and it leads the human intellect into hybris by pretending that it, the intellect, has got hold of the transcendent mystery by a cognitive act and “grasped” it. The paradox therefore reflects a higher level of intellect and, by not forcibly representing the unknowable as known, gives a more faithful picture of the real state of affairs. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 417
For a long time the spirit, and the sufferings of the spirit, were positive values and the things most worth striving for in our peculiar Christian culture. Only in the course of the nineteenth century, when spirit began to degenerate into intellect, did a reaction set in against the unbearable dominance of intellectualism, and this led to the unpardonable mistake of confusing intellect with spirit and blaming the latter for the misdeeds of the former. The intellect does indeed do harm to the soul when it dares to possess itself of the heritage of the spirit. It is in no way fitted to do this, for spirit is something higher than intellect since it embraces the latter and includes the feelings as well. It is a guiding principle of life that strives towards superhuman, shining heights. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 7
Bondage and possession are synonymous. Always, therefore, there is something in the psyche that takes possession and limits or suppresses our moral freedom. In order to hide this undeniable but exceedingly unpleasant fact from ourselves and at the same time pay lip-service to freedom, we have got accustomed to saying apotropaically, “have such and such a desire or habit or feeling of resentment,” instead of the more veracious “Such and such a desire or habit or feeling of resentment has me” The latter formulation would certainly rob us even of the illusion of freedom. But I ask myself whether this would not be better in the end than fuddling ourselves with words. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 143
If man were merely a creature that came into being as a result of something already existing unconsciously, he would have no freedom and there would be no point in consciousness. Psychology must reckon with the fact that despite the causal nexus man does enjoy a feeling of freedom, which is identical with autonomy of consciousness. However much the ego can be proved to be dependent and preconditioned, it cannot be convinced that it has no freedom. An absolutely preformed consciousness and a totally dependent ego would be a pointless farce, since everything would proceed just as well or even better unconsciously. The existence of ego consciousness has meaning only if it is free and autonomous. By stating these facts we have, it is true, established an antinomy, but we have at the same time given a picture of things as they are. There are temporal, local, and individual differences in the degree of dependence and freedom. In reality both are always present the supremacy of the self and the hybris of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 391
Each of us is equipped with a psychic disposition that limits our freedom in high degree and makes it practically illusory. Not only is “freedom of the will” an incalculable problem philosophically, it is also a misnomer in the practical sense, for we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshipped, not only by the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 143
Psychotherapy is at bottom a dialectical relationship between doctor and patient. It is an encounter, a discussion between two psychic wholes, in which knowledge is used only as a tool. The goal is transformation—not one that is predetermined, but rather an indeterminable change, the only criterion of which is the disappearance of egohood. No efforts on the part of the doctor can compel this experience. The most he can do is to smooth the path for the patient and help him to attain an attitude which offers the least resistance to the decisive experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 904
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow sufferer. I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve. But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 519
I take the dream for what it is. The dream is such a difficult and complicated thing that I do not dare to make any assumptions about its possible cunning or its tendency to deceive. The dream is a natural occurrence, and there is no earthly reason why we should assume that it is a crafty device to lead us astray. It occurs when consciousness and will are to a large extent extinguished. It seems to be a natural product which is also found in people who are not neurotic. Moreover, we know so little about the psychology of the dream process that we must be more than careful when we introduce into its explanation elements that are foreign to the dream itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 74
But when, you may rightly ask, is one sure of the interpretation? Is there anything approaching a reliable criterion for the correctness of an interpretation? This question, happily, can be answered in the affirmative. If we have made a wrong interpretation, or if it is somehow incomplete. we may be able to see it from the next dream. Thus, for example, the earlier motif will be repeated in clearer form, or our interpretation may be deflated by some ironic paraphrase, or it may meet with straightforward violent opposition. Now supposing that these interpretations also go astray, the general inconclusiveness and futility of our procedure will make itself felt soon enough in the bleakness, sterility, and pointlessness of the undertaking, so that doctor and patient alike will be suffocated either by boredom or by doubt. Just as the reward of a correct interpretation is an uprush of life, so an incorrect one dooms them to deadlock, resistance, doubt, and mutual desiccation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 189
Metaphysical assertions are statements of the psyche and are therefore psychological. To the Western mind, which compensates its well-known feelings of resentment by a slavish regard for “rational” explanations, this obvious truth seems all too obvious, or else it is seen as an inadmissible negation of metaphysical “truth.” Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.” For him the “soul” is something pitifully small, unworthy, personal, subjective, and a lot more besides. He therefore prefers to use the word “mind” instead, though he likes to pretend at the same time that a statement which may in fact be very subjective indeed is made by the “mind,” naturally by the “Universal Mind,” or even—at a pinch—by the “Absolute” itself. This rather ridiculous presumption is probably a compensation for the regrettable smallness of the soul. It almost seems as if Anatole France had uttered a truth which were valid for the whole Western world when, in his Penguin Island, Catherine Artemidorus offers this advice to God: “Donnezleur une ame, mais dune petite!” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 835
This process of becoming human is represented in dreams and inner images as the putting together of many scattered units, and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification of something that was always there. The speculations of alchemy, and also of some Gnostics, revolve around this process. It is likewise expressed in Christian Dogma, and more particularly in the transformation mystery of the Mass. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 399.
The spiritual man says to the worldly man, “Are you capable of knowing your soul in a complete manner? If you knew it, as is fitting, and if you knew what makes it better, you would be able to recognize that the names the philosophers formerly gave it are not its true names. O dubious names that resemble the true names, what errors and agonies you have provoked among men!” The names refer in turn to the philosopher’s stone. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, para 153.
[The dream voice] “utters an authoritative declaration or command, either of astonishing common sense or of profound philosophic import. It is nearly always a final statement, usually coming toward the end of a dream, and it is, as a rule, so clear and convincing that the dreamer finds no argument against it. It has, indeed, so much the character of indisputable truth that it can hardly be understood as anything except a final and trenchant summing up of a long process of unconscious deliberation and weighing of arguments.” ~Carl Jung; CW 11, Page 45.
Every psychic process is an image and an “imagining,” otherwise no consciousness could exist, and the occurrence would lack phenomenality. Imagination itself is a psychic process, for which reason it is completely irrelevant whether the enlightenment be called “real” or “imaginary.” The person who has the enlightenment, or alleges that he has it, thinks at all events that he is enlightened. What others think about it decides nothing whatever for him in regard to his experience. Even if he were lying, his lie would still be a psychic fact. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 889
Our symbol is a clock, symbolizing time. The only analogy I can think of to such a symbol is the design of the horoscope. It too has four cardinal points and an empty center. And there is another remarkable correspondence: rotation is often mentioned in the previous dreams, and this is usually reported as moving to the left. The horoscope has twelve houses that progress numerically to the left, that is, counter-clockwise ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 114
The cross has also the meaning of a boundary-stone between heaven and hell, since it is set up in the center of the cosmos and extends to all sides. The Tibetan mandala occupies a similar central position, its upper half rising up to heaven out of the earth (like the hemispherical stupas at Sanchi, India), with hell lying below. I have often found the same construction in individual mandalas: the light world on top, the dark below, as if they were projecting into these worlds. There is a similar design in Jakob Böhme’s “reversed eye” or “philosophical mirror” `Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 136
Prejudiced by historical analogies, we would expect a deity to occupy the center of the mandala. The center is, however, empty. The seat of the deity is unoccupied, in spite of the fact that, when we analyse the mandala in terms of its historical models, we arrive at the god symbolized by the circle and the goddess symbolized by the square. Instead of “goddess” we could also say “earth” or “soul.” Despite the historical prejudice, however, the fact must be insisted upon that (as in the “House of the Gathering,” where the place of the sacred image was occupied by the quaternity) we find no trace of a deity in the mandala, but, on the contrary, a mechanism ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 136
A dream or a vision is just what it seems to be. It is not a disguise for something else. It is a natural product, which is precisely a thing without ulterior motive. I have seen many hundreds of mandalas, done by patients who were quite uninfluenced, and I have found the same fact in an overwhelming, majority of cases: there was never a deity occupying the center ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 136
This “Self” was evidently never thought of as an entity identical with the ego, and for this reason it was described as a “hidden nature” dwelling in inanimate matter, as a spirit, daemon, or fiery spark. By means of the philosophical opus, which was mostly thought of as a mental one, this entity was freed from darkness and imprisonment, and finally it enjoyed a resurrection, often represented in the form of an apotheosis and equated with the resurrection of Christ ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 154
The circle takes the form, for instance, of a serpent, which describes a circle round the dreamer. It appears in later dreams as a clock, a circle with a central point, a round target for shooting practice, a clock that is a perpetuum mobile, a ball, a globe, a round table, a basin, and so on ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 109
The square appears also, about the same time, in the form of a city square or a garden with a fountain in the center. Somewhat later it appears in connection with a circular movement: people walking round in a square; a magic ceremony (the transformation of animals into human beings) that takes place in a square room, in the corners of which are four snakes, with people again circulating round the four corners; the dreamer driving round a square in a taxi; a square prison cell; an empty square which is itself rotating; and so on ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 109
In other dreams the circle is represented by rotation for instance, four children carry a “dark ring” and walk in a circle. Again, the circle appears combined with the quaternity, as a silver bowl with four nuts at the four cardinal points, or as a table with four chairs. The center seems to be particularly emphasized. It is symbolized by an egg in the middle of a ring; by a star consisting of a body of soldiers; by a star rotating in a circle, the cardinal points of which represent the four seasons; by the pole; a precious stone, and so on ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 109
With this we come back to our modern experiences. They are obviously similar in nature to the basic medieval and classical ideas, and can therefore be expressed by the same, or at any rate similar, symbols. The medieval representations of the circle are based on the idea of the microcosm, a concept that was also applied to the stone. The stone was a “little world” like man himself, a sort of inner image of the cosmos, reaching not into immeasurable distances but into an equally immeasurable depth-dimension, i.e., from the small to the unimaginably smallest. Mylius therefore calls this center the “punctum cordis” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 155
Hence very early, in Clement of Rome, we meet with the conception of Christ as the right hand and the devil as the left hand of God, not to speak of the Judaeo-Christian view which recognized two sons of God, Satan the elder and Christ the younger. The figure of the devil then rose to such exalted metaphysical heights that he had to be forcibly depotentiated, under the threatening influence of Manichaeism. The depotentiation was effected this time by rationalistic reflection, by a regular tour de force of sophistry which defined evil as a privatio boni. But that did nothing to stop the belief from arising in many parts of Europe during the eleventh century, mainly under the influence of the Cathars, that it was not God but the devil who had created the world ~Carl Jung, CW 11. Para 470
As the products of imagination are always in essence visual, their forms must, from the outset, have the character of images and moreover of typical images, which is why…I call them ‘archetypes’ ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845
They think they have to do with rational facts, whereas it entirely escapes them that it is and always has been primarily a question of irrational psychic phenomena. That this is so can be seen plainly enough from the unhistorical character of the gospels, whose only concern was to represent the miraculous figure of Christ as graphically and impressively as possible. Further evidence of this is supplied by the earliest literary witness, Paul, who was closer to the events in question than the apostles. It is frankly disappointing to see how Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 228.
Even at this early date (and not only in John) Christ is completely overlaid, or rather smothered, by metaphysical conceptions: he is the ruler over all daemonic forces, the cosmic saviour, the mediating God-man. The whole pre-Christian and Gnostic theology of the Near East (some of whose roots go still further back) wraps itself about him and turns him before our eyes into a dogmatic figure who has no more need of historicity. At a very early stage, therefore, the real Christ vanished behind the emotions and projections that swarmed about him from far and near; immediately and almost without trace he was absorbed into the surrounding religious systems and moulded into their archetypal exponent. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 228
He [Christ] became the collective figure whom the unconscious of his contemporaries expected to appear, and for this reason it is pointless to ask who he “really” was. Were he human and nothing else, and in this sense historically true, he would probably be no more enlightening a figure than, say, Pythagoras, or Socrates, or Apollonius of Tyana. He opened men’s eyes to revelation precisely because he was, from everlasting, God, and therefore unhistorical; and he functioned as such only by virtue of the consensus of unconscious expectation. If nobody had remarked that there was something special about the wonder-working Rabbi from Galilee, the darkness would never have noticed that a light was shining. Whether he lit the light with his own strength, or whether he was the victim of the universal longing for light and broke down under it, are questions which, for lack of reliable information, only faith can decide. At any rate the documentary reports relating to the general projection and assimilation of the Christ-figure are unequivocal. There is plenty of evidence for the co-operation of the collective unconscious in view of the abundance of parallels from the history of religion. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 228.
In these circumstances we must ask ourselves what it was in man that was stirred by the Christian message, and what was the answer he gave. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 228
Choir of saints, angels, and elders grouped round Christ (or God) in the center. Here Christ symbolizes the integration of the kings and prophets of the Old Testament As a shepherd he [Christ] is the leader and center of the flock He is the vine, and those that hang on him are the branches His body is bread to be eaten, and his blood wine to be drunk He is also the mystical body formed by the congregation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 229
These mythological statements, coming from within the Christian sphere as well as from outside it, adumbrate an archetype that expresses itself in essentially the same symbolism and also occurs in individual dreams or in fantasy-like projections upon living people (transference phenomena, hero-worship, etc.). The content of all such symbolic products is the idea of an overpowering, all-embracing, complete or perfect being, represented either by a man of heroic proportions, or by an animal with magical attributes, or by a magical vessel or some other “treasure hard to attain,” such as a jewel, ring, crown, or, geometrically, by a mandala. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 230
This archetypal idea is a reflection of the individual’s wholeness, i.e., of the Self, which is present in him as an unconscious image. The conscious mind can form absolutely no conception of this totality, because it includes not only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche, which is, as such, inconceivable and irrepresentable. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 230
It was this archetype of the Self in the soul of every man that responded to the Christian message, with the result that the concrete Rabbi Jesus was rapidly assimilated by the constellated archetype. In this way Christ realized the idea of the Self. But as one can never distinguish empirically between a symbol of the Self and a God-image, the two ideas, however much we try to differentiate them, always appear blended together, so that the Self appears synonymous with the inner Christ of the Johannine and Pauline writings, and Christ with God (“of one substance with the Father”), just as the atman appears as the individualized Self and at the same time as the animating principle of the cosmos, and Tao as a condition of mind and at the same time as the correct behaviour of cosmic events. Psychologically speaking, the domain of “gods” begins where consciousness leaves off, for at that point man is already at the mercy of the natural order, whether he thrive or perish. To the symbols of wholeness that come to him from there he attaches names which vary according to time and place. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 231.
The Self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a man postulates as being a greater totality than himself can become a symbol of the Self. For this reason the symbol of the Self is not always as total as the definition would require. Even the Christ-figure is not a totality, for it lacks the nocturnal side of the psyche’s nature, the darkness of the spirit, and is also without sin. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 232.
And despite its extraversions the West, too, has a way of dealing with the psyche and its demands; it has an institution called the Church, which gives expression to the unknown psyche of man through its rites and dogmas. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 778
The Catholic Church, the direct heir and continuator of historical Christianity, proves to be somewhat more cautious in this regard, believing that with the assistance of the Holy Ghost the dogma can progressively develop and unfold. This view is in entire agreement with Christ’s own teachings about the Holy Ghost and hence with the incarnation. Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 655
This [Creed] does not necessarily mean lifeless petrifaction. On the contrary, it may prove to be a valid form of religious experience for millions of people for thousands of years, without there arising any vital necessity to alter it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 10
Yet it is unquestionably true that not only Buddha and Mohammed, Confucius and Zarathustra, represent religious phenomena, but also Mithras, Attis, Cybele, Mani, Hermes, and the deities of many other exotic cults. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 10
As I am a doctor and a specialist in nervous and mental diseases, my point of departure is not a creed but the psychology of the homo religiosus, that is, of the man who takes into account and carefully observes certain factors which influence him and his general condition. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 10
What I can contribute to the question of religion is derived entirely from my practical experience, both with my patients and with so-called normal persons. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 11
In another case, the patient had recently undergone an operation for distention of the colon. Forty centimetres of it had been removed, but this was followed by another extraordinary distention. The patient was desperate and refused to permit a second operation, though the surgeon thought it vital. As soon as certain intimate psychological facts were discovered, the colon began to function normally again. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 15
As a matter of fact, the only form of existence of which we have immediate knowledge is psychic. We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 16
Even if a neurosis had no cause at all other than imagination, it would, none the less, be a very real thing. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 17
I even believe that psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics or earthquakes. Not even the medieval epidemics of bubonic plague or smallpox killed as many people as certain differences of opinion in 1914 or certain political “ideals” in Russia. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 17
Although the mind cannot apprehend its own form of existence, owing to the lack of an Archimedean point outside, it nevertheless exists. Not only does the psyche exist, it is existence itself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 18
What, then, shall we say to our patient with the imaginary cancer? I would tell him: “Yes, my friend, you are really suffering from a cancer-like thing, you really do harbour in yourself a deadly evil. However, it will not kill your body, because it is imaginary. But it will eventually kill your soul. It has already spoilt and even poisoned your human relations and your personal happiness and it will go on growing until it has swallowed your whole psychic existence. So that in the end you will not be a human being any more, but an evil destructive tumour.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 19
If a man is suffering from a real cancer, he never believes himself to be responsible for such an evil, despite the fact that the cancer is in his own body. But When it comes to the psyche we instantly feel a kind of responsibility, as if we were the makers of our psychic conditions. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 20
It is, to my mind, a fatal mistake to regard the human psyche as a purely personal affair and to explain it exclusively from a personal point of view. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 24
The change of character brought about by the uprush of collective forces is amazing. A gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 25
When in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh’s arrogance and hybris defy the gods, they create a man equal in strength to Gilgamesh in order to check the hero’s unlawful ambition. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 27
Gilgamesh, however, escaped the vengeance of the gods. He had warning dreams to which he paid attention. They showed him how he could overcome his enemy. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 28
The marvellous development of science and technics is counterbalanced by an appalling lack of wisdom and introspection. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 28
“For God is not constrained by such laws of time, nor does he await opportune moments for his operation; for he inspires dreams where he will, when he will, and in whomsoever he will” ~ Benedictus Pererius, CW 11, fn 12
For the sake of better understanding I have often felt tempted to advise my patients to think of the psyche as a subtle body in which subtle tumours can grow. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 36
“The dream is its own interpretation.” ~Carl Jung citing the Talmud, CW 11, Para 41
Everybody was astonished at the pagan tendencies of modern Germany because nobody knew how to interpret Nietzsche’s Dionysian experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 44
In the dreams of the Germans whom I treated then I could clearly see the Wotanistic revolution coming on, and in 1918 I published an article in which I pointed out the peculiar kind of new development to be expected in Germany. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 44
I never, if I can help it, interpret one dream by itself. As a rule a dream belongs in a series. Since there is a continuity of consciousness despite the fact that it is regularly interrupted by sleep, there is probably also a continuity of unconscious processes—perhaps even more than with the events of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 53
He [A Patient] was afraid he was going mad, whereas the man of two thousand years ago would have welcomed such dreams and rejoiced in the hope of a magical rebirth and renewal of life. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 56
But our modern attitude looks back arrogantly upon the mists of superstition and of medieval or primitive credulity, entirely forgetting that we carry the whole living past in the lower storeys of the skyscraper of rational consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 56
But I am not at all convinced that the unconscious mind is merely my mind, because the term “unconscious” means that I am not even conscious of it. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 64
Since we do not know everything, practically every experience, fact, or object contains something unknown. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 68
In other words, the psyche is no exception to the general rule that the universe can be established only so far as our psychic organism permits. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 68
My psychological experience has shown time and again that certain contents issue from a psyche that is more complete than consciousness. They often contain a superior analysis or insight or knowledge which consciousness has not been able to produce. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 69
It is true that an overwhelming majority of educated people are fragmentary personalities and have a lot of substitutes instead of the genuine goods. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 75
… I am fully aware of the extraordinary importance of dogma and ritual, at least as methods of mental hygiene. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 76
In order to answer this critical question I must first of all explain that, if I can help it, I never preach my belief. If asked I shall certainly stand by my convictions, but these do not go beyond what I consider to be my actual knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 79
Ideas like these are never invented. They came into being before man had learned to use his mind purposively. Before man learned to produce thoughts, thoughts came to him. He did not think—he perceived his mind functioning. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 81
Dogma expresses the psyche more completely than a scientific theory, for the latter gives expression to and formulates the conscious mind alone. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 82
Furthermore, a theory can do nothing except formulate a living thing in abstract terms. Dogma, on the contrary, aptly expresses the living process of the unconscious in the form of the drama of repentance, sacrifice, and redemption. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 82
The catastrophe of the first World War and the extraordinary manifestations of profound spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man’s mind. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 83
Now we behold the amazing spectacle of states taking over the age-old totalitarian claims of theocracy, which are inevitably accompanied by suppression of free opinion. Once more we see people cutting each other’s throats in support of childish theories of how to create paradise on earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 83
It is not very difficult to see that the powers of the underworld—not to say of hell—which in former times were more or less successfully chained up in a gigantic spiritual edifice where they could be of some use, are now creating, or trying to create, a State slavery and a State prison devoid of any mental or spiritual charm. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 83
But one thing is certain—that modern man, Protestant or otherwise, has lost the protection of the ecclesiastical walls erected and reinforced so carefully since Roman days, and because of this loss has approached the zone of world-destroying and world-creating fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 84
Look at all the incredible savagery going on in our so-called civilized world: it all comes from human beings and the spiritual condition they are in! ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 85
In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 85
Conscience, and particularly a bad conscience, can be a gift from heaven, a veritable grace if used in the interests of the higher self-criticism. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 86
The genius religiosus is a wind that bloweth where it listeth. There is no Archimedean point from which to judge, since the psyche is indistinguishable from its manifestations. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 87
The wisdom of God was often identified with the cosmogonic Logos and hence with Christ. The medieval mind finds it natural to derive the structure of the psyche from the Trinity, whereas the modern mind reverses the procedure. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 221
As the Logos, Son of the Father, Rex gloriae, Judex mundi, Redeemer, and Saviour, Christ is himself God, an all-embracing totality, which, like the definition of Godhead, is expressed iconographically by the circle or mandala. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 229
Once the indefinable One unfolds into two, it becomes something definite: the man Jesus, the Son and Logos. This statement is possible only by virtue of something else that is not Jesus, not Son or Logos. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 254
The uttering of the words of consecration corresponds to the incarnation of the Logos, and also to Christ’s passion and sacrificial death, which appears again in the fractio. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 336
In ecclesiastical symbolism the sword which comes out of the mouth of the Son of Man in the Book of Revelation is, according to Hebrews 4: 12, the Logos, the Word of God, and hence Christ himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 357
These psychological connections are seen most clearly in the ancient conceptions of the Original Man, the Protanthropos, and the Son of Man. Christ as the Logos is from all eternity, but in his human form he is the “Son of Man.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 400
As the Logos, he [Christ] is the world-creating principle. This corresponds with the relation of the self to consciousness, without which no world could be perceived at all. The Logos is the real principium individuationis, because everything proceeds from it, and because everything which is, from crystal to man, exists only in individual form. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 400
“I will be thought,” if evangelical at all, is an exclusively Johannine, post-apostolic speculation concerning the nature of the Logos. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 421
Man’s advance towards the Logos was a great achievement, but he must pay for it with loss of instinct and loss of reality to the degree that he remains in primitive dependence on mere words. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 442
This Sophia, who already shares certain essential qualities with the Johannine Logos, is on the one hand closely associated with the Hebrew Chochma, but on the other hand goes so far beyond it that one can hardly fail to think of the Indian Shakti. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 610
The use of the comparative method shows without a doubt that the quaternity is a more or less direct representation of the God who is manifest in his creation. We might, therefore, conclude that the symbol spontaneously produced in the dreams of modern people means something similar—The God within. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 101
The inclusion of the devil in the quaternity is by no means a modern speculation or a monstrous fabrication of the unconscious. We find in the writings of the sixteenth-century natural philosopher and physician, Gerard Dorn, a detailed discussion of the symbols of the Trinity and the quaternity, the latter being attributed to the devil. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 104
Scientific investigation of dreams is simply the old oneiromancy in new guise and therefore just as objectionable as any other of the “occult” arts. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 105
The natural philosophers of the Middle Ages undoubtedly meant earth and woman by the fourth element. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 107.
As history draws nearer to the beginning of our era, the gods become more and more abstract and spiritualized. Even Yahweh had to submit to this transformation. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 193
Since religion is incontestably one of the earliest and most universal expressions of the human mind, it is obvious that any psychology which touches upon the psychological structure of human personality cannot avoid taking note of the fact that religion is not only a sociological and historical phenomenon, but also something of considerable personal concern to a great number of individuals. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 1
As a matter of fact I believe that experience is not even possible without reflection, because “experience” is a process of assimilation without which there could be no understanding. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 2
The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migration and tradition. They are not made by the individual, they just happen to him—they even force themselves on his consciousness. This is not Platonic philosophy but empirical psychology. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 5
The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 6
We might say, then, that the term “religion” designates the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of the numinosum. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 9
Edward Maitland, the biographer of Anna Kingsford, relates in our own day an inner experience of the bisexual nature of the Deity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 47
The anima causes illogical moods, and the animus produces irritating platitudes and unreasonable opinions. Both are frequent dream-figures. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 48
The unconscious in itself has no such negative qualities. They appear only when it is personified by these figures and when they begin to influence consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 48
“As a shadow continually follows the body of one who walks in the sun … so our Adamic hermaphrodite, though he appears in masculine form, nevertheless always carries about with him Eve, or his feminine part, hidden in his body.” ~Dominicus Gnosius cited by Carl Jung, CW 11, fn 22
There is religious sentimentality instead of the numinosum of divine experience. This is the well-known characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 52
He [A Patient] had the great advantage of being neurotic and so, whenever he tried to be disloyal to his experience or to deny the voice, the neurotic condition instantly came back. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 74
With John’s doctrine of the Logos, Christ came to be regarded simultaneously as the Nous and the object of human thought; the Greek text says literally: (I will be thought, being wholly spirit). Similarly, the Acts of Peter say of Christ: “Thou art perceived of the spirit only.” ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 422
It is worthwhile to examine this text more closely. Wisdom describes herself, in effect, as the Logos, the Word of God (“I came out of the mouth of the most High”). ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 611
As the cosmogonic Pneuma [Wisdom] she pervades heaven and earth and all created things. She corresponds in almost every feature to the Logos of St. John. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 611
If Adam is thought of as a copy of God, then God’s successful son, who served as a model for Abel (and about whom, as we have seen, there are no available documents), is the prefigurate on of the God-man. Of the latter we know positively that, as the Logos, he is preexistent and coeternal with God, indeed of the same substance as he. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 628
As God he has always been God, and as the son of Mary, who is plainly a copy of Sophia, he is the Logos (synonymous with Nous), who, like Sophia, is a master workman, as stated by the Gospel according to St. John. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 628
No repetition of it was to be expected, any more than one could expect a further revelation of the Logos, for this too was included in the uniqueness of God’s appearance on earth, in human form, nearly two thousand years ago. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 655
The dogma of the Assumption is a slap in the face for the historical and rationalistic view of the world and would remain so for all time if one were to insist obstinately on the arguments of reason and history. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 754
A dogma is always the result and fruit of many minds and many centuries, purified of all the oddities, shortcomings, and flaws of individual experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 88
Since many unconscious contents seem to be remnants of historical states of mind, we need only go back a few hundred years in order to reach the conscious level that forms the parallel to our dreams. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 92
A man as introverted and introspective as Emerson could hardly fail to touch on the same idea [Essay Circles] and likewise quote St. Augustine. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 92
From the Latin treatises it is also evident that the latent demiurge, dormant and concealed in matter, is identical with the so-called homo philosophicus, the second Adam. He is the spiritual man, Adam Kadmon, often identified with Christ. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 94
We have historical documents which prove that dreams, visions, and even hallucinations were often mixed up with the great philosophic opus. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 95
We have, at last, to admit that the quaternity is something psychic; and we do not yet know whether, in a more or less distant future, this too may not prove to be a projection. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 95
Although the quaternity is an age-old and presumably prehistoric symbol, always associated with the idea of a world-creating deity, it is—curiously enough—rarely understood as such by those moderns in whom it occurs. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 100
The use of the comparative method shows without a doubt that the quaternity is a more or less direct representation of the God who is manifest in his creation. We might, therefore, conclude that the symbol spontaneously produced in the dreams of modern people means something similar—The God within. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 101
It would be a regrettable mistake if anybody should take my observations as a kind of proof of the existence of God. They prove only the existence of an archetypal God-image, which to my mind is the most we can assert about God psychologically. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 102
In reality the orthodox Christian formula is not quite complete, because the dogmatic aspect of the evil principle is absent from the Trinity and leads a more or less awkward existence on its own as the devil. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 103
In the Alexandrian philosophy that arose in the last century B.C., we witness not only an alteration of his nature but an emergence of two other divinities in his immediate vicinity: the Logos and Sophia. Together with him they form a triad, and this is a clear prefiguration of the post-Christian Trinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 193
It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits an archetypal idea which enters into immediate, visible manifestation whenever anyone sees a ghost. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 518.
For, just as the organs of the body are not mere lumps of indifferent, passive matter, but are dynamic, functional complexes which assert themselves with imperious urgency, so also the archetypes, as organs of the psyche, are dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life to an extraordinary degree. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 845
The dogmatizing of the Assumption does not, however, according to the dogmatic view, mean that Mary has attained the status of a goddess, although, as mistress of heaven (as opposed to the prince of the sublunary aerial realm, Satan) and mediatrix, she is functionally on a par with Christ, the king and mediator. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 754
The metaphysical process is known to the psychology of the unconscious as the individuation process. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 755
But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 755
It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 757
But since, in our experience, there are no psychic conditions which could be observed through introspection outside the human being, the behaviour of the archetypes cannot be investigated at all without the interaction of the observing consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 758
The Christian solution has hitherto avoided this difficulty by recognizing Christ as the one and only God-man. But the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many, and the question then arises whether these many are all complete God-men. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 758
Dr. Jung never said: “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
What Dr. Jung said was:
It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 391
