Carl Jung: CW 5 "Symbols of Transformation" - Quotations

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The same is true of the religious attitude: it must be fully conscious of itself and of its foundations if it is to signify anything more than unconscious imitation. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 106

As most people know, one of the basic principles of analytical psychology is that dream-images are to be understood symbolically; that is to say, one must not take them literally, but must surmise a hidden meaning in them. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 4.

We must begin by overcoming our virtuousness, with the justifiable fear of falling into vice on the other side. This danger certainly exists, for the greatest virtuousness is always compensated inwardly by a strong tendency to vice, and how many vicious characters treasure inside themselves sugary virtues and a moral megalomania. Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 221

The psychic health of the adult individual, who in childhood was a mere particle revolving in a rotary system, demands that he should himself become the centre of a new system. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 644

But anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live—in other words, he must commit partial suicide. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 165

That the highest summit of life can be expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact, for any growing beyond oneself means death. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 432

I do not take kindly to the argument that because certain working hypotheses may not possess eternal validity or may possibly be erroneous, they must be withheld from the public. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 685

I do not regard the pursuit of science as a bickering about who is right, but as an endeavour to augment and deepen human knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 685

The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 652

Fear of our erotic fate is quite understandable, for there is something unpredictable about it. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 101

Symbols are not allegories and not signs; they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 114

The dream, we would say, originates in an unknown part of the psyche and prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 5

One such successful interpretation has been, for instance, Mother Church, but once this form begins to show signs of age and decay a new interpretation becomes inevitable. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 351

The religious interest, which ought normally to be the greatest and most decisive factor, turned away from the inner world, and great figures of dogma dwindled to strange and incomprehensible vestiges, a prey to every sort of criticism. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 113.

One might expect, perhaps, that a man of genius would luxuriate in the greatness of his own thoughts and renounce the cheap approbation of the rabble he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His seeking and his finding, his heart’s cry, are meant for the herd and must be heeded by them. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 14

We quite forget that we can be as deplorably overcome by a virtue as by a vice. There is a sort of frenzied, orgiastic virtuousness which is just as infamous as a vice and leads to just as much injustice and violence. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 222

The wounding and painful shafts do not come from outside, through gossip which only pricks us only on the surface, but from the ambush of our own unconscious. It is our own repressed desires that stick like arrows in our flesh. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 438

Just as our bodies still retain vestiges of obsolete functions and conditions in many of their organs, so our minds, which have apparently outgrown those archaic impulses, still bear the marks of the evolutionary stages we have traversed, and re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 36

Therefore the sun is perfectly suited to represent the visible God of this world, i.e., the creative power of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to bring forth the useful and to bring forth the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad. ~Carl Jung; CW 5, Para 176.

It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted assumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 23

We have become rich in knowledge, but poor in wisdom. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 23

One cannot please everybody, therefore it is better to be at peace with oneself. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 911

It is “moral” repression that makes sexuality on the one hand dirty and hypocritical, and on the other shameless and blatant. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 295

The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 652

We shall all be as good as dead one day, but in the interests of life we should postpone this moment as long as possible, and this we can only do by never allowing our picture of the world to become rigid. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 700

It is hard to believe that this teeming world is too poor to provide an object for human love – it offers boundless opportunities to everyone. It is rather the inability to love which robs a person of these opportunities. The world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and beautiful. What compels us to create a substitute from within ourselves is not an external lack, but our own inability to include anything outside ourselves in our love. Certainly the difficulties and adversities of the struggle for existence may oppress us, yet even the worst conditions need not hinder love; on the contrary, they often spur us on to greater efforts. Carl Jung, CW 5, 253.

We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking. The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives. The one produces innovations and adaptation, copies reality, and tries to act upon it; the other turns away from reality, sets free subjective tendencies, and, as regards adaptation, is unproductive ~Carl Jung, CW 5, para. 20.

What he is describing here is the libido, which is not only creative and procreative, but possesses an intuitive faculty, a strange power to “smell the right place,” almost as if it were a live creature with an independent life of its own (which is why it is so easily personified). It is purposive, like sexuality itself, a favorite object of comparison. ~Carl Jung; CW 5, Para. 182.

The sun is not only beneficial, but also destructive; hence the zodiacal sign for August heat is the ravaging lion which Samson slew in order to rid the parched earth of its torment. Yet it is in the nature of the sun to scorch, and its scorching power seems natural to man. It shines equally on the just and the unjust, and allows useful creatures to flourish as well as the harmful. ~Carl Jung; CW 5, para 176.

Numerous mythological and philosophical attempts have been made to formulate and visualize the creative force which man knows only by subjective experience. To give but a few examples, I would remind the reader of the cosmogonic significance of Eros in Hesiod, and also of the Orphic figure of Phanes, the ‘Shining One,’ the first-born, the ‘Father of Eros.’ In Orphic terms, Phanes also denotes Priapos, a god of love, androgynous, and equal to the Theban Dionysus Lysios. The Orphic meaning of Phanes is the same as that of the Indian Kama, the God of love, which is also a cosmogonic principle. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, para. 198.

It is hard to believe that this teeming world is too poor to provide an object for human love—it offers boundless opportunities to everyone. It is rather the inability to love which robs a person of these opportunities. The world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and beautiful. What compels us to create a substitute from within ourselves is not an external lack, but our own inability to include anything outside ourselves in our love. Certainly the difficulties and adversities of the struggle for existence may oppress us, yet even the worst conditions need not hinder love; on the contrary, they often spur us on to greater efforts. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 253

Our civilization enormously underestimates the importance of sexuality, but just because of the repressions imposed upon it, sexuality breaks through into every conceivable field where it does not belong, and uses such an indirect mode of expression that we may expect to meet it all of a sudden practically everywhere. Thus the very idea of an intimate understanding of the human psyche, which is actually a very pure and beautiful thing, becomes besmirched and perversely distorted by the intrusion of an indirect sexual meaning. A direct and spontaneous expression of sexuality is a natural occurrence and, as such, never ugly or repulsive. It is “moral” repression that makes sexuality on the one hand dirty and hypocritical, and on the other shameless and blatant. This secondary significance, or rather the misuse which the repressed and suborned sexuality makes of the highest psychic functions, gives certain of our opponents an opportunity to sniff out the prurient eroticism of the confessional in psychoanalysis. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 295

An individual is infantile because he has freed himself insufficiently, or not at all, from his childish environment and his adaptation to his parents, with the result that he has a false reaction to the world on the one hand he reacts as a child towards his parents, always demanding love and immediate emotional rewards, while on the other hand he is so identified with his parents through his close ties with them that he behaves like his father or his mother. He is incapable of living his own life and finding the character that belongs to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 431

It is not possible to live too long amid infantile surroundings, or in the bosom of the family, without endangering one’s psychic health. Life calls us forth to independence, and anyone who does not heed this call because of childish laziness or timidity is threatened with neurosis. And once this has broken out, it becomes an increasingly valid reason for running away from life and remaining forever in the morally poisonous atmosphere of infancy. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 461

If we wish to stay on the heights we have reached, we must struggle all the time to consolidate our consciousness and its attitude. But we soon discover that this praiseworthy and apparently unavoidable battle with the years leads to stagnation and desiccation of soul. Our convictions become platitudes ground out on a barrel-organ, our ideals become starchy habits, enthusiasm stiffens into automatic gestures. The source of the water of life seeps away. We ourselves may not notice it, but everybody else does, and that is even more painful. If we should risk a little introspection, coupled perhaps with an energetic attempt to be honest for once with ourselves, we may get a dim idea of all the wants, longings, and fears that have accumulated down there—a repulsive and sinister sight. The mind shies away, but life wants to flow down into the depths. Fate itself seems to preserve us from this, for each of us has a tendency to become an immovable pillar of the past. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 553

For all these things have taken on shape, and all shapes are worn thin by the working of time; they age, sicken, crumble to dust—unless they change. But change they can, for the invisible spark that generated them is potent enough for infinite generation. No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that some will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 553

Nature has the primary claim on mankind, and only long after that comes the luxury of reason. The medieval ideal of a life lived for death should gradually be replaced by a more natural attitude to life, in which the natural claims of man are fully acknowledged, so that the desires of the animal sphere need no longer drag down the higher values of the spiritual sphere in order to be able to function at all. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 295

What aroused a feeling of horror in the Greeks still remains true, but it is true for us only if we give up the vain illusion that we are different, i.e., morally better, than the ancients. We have merely succeeded in forgetting that an indissoluble link binds us to the men of antiquity. This truth opens the way to an understanding of the classical spirit such as has never existed before—the way of inner sympathy on the one hand and of intellectual comprehension on the other. By penetrating into the blocked subterranean passages of our own psyches we grasp the living meaning of classical civilization, and at the same time we establish a firm foothold outside our own culture from which alone it is possible to gain an objective understanding of its foundations. That at least is the hope we draw from the rediscovery of the immortality of the Oedipus problem. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para i

People who strive to be excessively ethical, who always think, feel, and act altruistically and idealistically, avenge themselves for their intolerable ideals by a subtly planned maliciousness, of which they are naturally not conscious as such, but which leads to misunderstandings and unhappy situations. All these difficulties appear to them as “especially unfortunate circumstances,” or the fault and the malice of other people, or as tragic complications. Consciously they imagine they are rid of the conflict, but it is still there, unseen, to be stumbled over at every step. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 62

The essential thing is that we should be able to stand up to our judgment of ourselves. From outside this attitude looks like self-righteousness, but it is so only if we are incapable of criticizing ourselves. If we can exercise self-criticism, criticism from outside will affect us only on the outside and not pierce to the heart, for we feel that we have a sterner critic within us than any who could judge us from without. And anyway, there are as many opinions as there are heads to think them. We come to realize that our own judgment has as much value as the judgment of others. One cannot please everybody, therefore it is better to be at peace with oneself. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 911

All through our lives we possess, side by side with our newly acquired directed and adapted thinking, a fantasy thinking which corresponds to the antique state of mind. Just as our bodies still retain vestiges of obsolete functions and conditions in many of their organs, so our minds, which have apparently outgrown those archaic impulses, still bear the marks of the evolutionary stages we have traversed, and re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 36

It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted assumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past. Our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence. This means that we are just as bigoted in regard to new ideas, and just as impervious to them, as people were in the darkest days of antiquity. We have become rich in knowledge, but poor in wisdom. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 23

The world changes its face —tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis—for we can grasp the world only as a psychic image in ourselves, and it is not always easy to decide, when the image changes, whether the world or ourselves have changed, or both. The picture of the world can change at any time, just as our conception of ourselves changes. Every new discovery, every new thought, can put a new face on the world. We must be prepared for this, else we suddenly find ourselves in an antiquated world, itself a relic of lower levels of consciousness. We shall all be as good as dead one day, but in the interests of life we should postpone this moment as long as possible, and this we can only do by never allowing our picture of the world to become rigid. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 700

If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 737

In the same way one can withhold the material content of primitive myths from a child but not take from him the need for mythology, and still less his ability to manufacture it for himself. One could almost say that if all the world’s traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 30

The conscious mind must have reason, firstly to discover some order in the chaos of disorderly individual events occurring in the world, and secondly to create order, at least in human affairs. We are moved by the laudable and useful ambition to extirpate the chaos of the irrational both within and without to the best of our ability. Apparently the process has gone pretty far. As a mental patient once told me: “Doctor, last night I disinfected the whole heavens with bichloride of mercury, but I found no God.” Something of the sort has happened to us as well. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104A

The myth of the hero … is first and foremost a self-representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness. But consciousness, continually in danger of being led astray by its own light and of becoming a rootless will o’the wisp, longs for the healing power of nature, for the deep wells of being and for unconscious communion with life in all its countless forms. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 299

People often behave as if they did not rightly understand what constitutes the destructive character of the creative force. A woman who gives herself up to passion, particularly under present-day civilized conditions, experiences this all too soon. We must think a little beyond the framework of purely bourgeois moral conditions to understand the feeling of boundless uncertainty which befalls the man who gives himself over unconditionally to fate. Even to be fruitful is to destroy oneself, for with the creation of a new generation the previous generation has passed beyond its climax. Our off spring thus become our most dangerous enemies, with whom we cannot get even, for they will survive us and so inevitably will take the power out of our weakening hands. Fear of our erotic fate is quite understandable, for there is something unpredictable about it. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 101

Fear of fate is a very understandable phenomenon, for it is incalculable, immeasurable, full of unknown dangers. The perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to launch out into life is readily explained by his desire to stand aside so as not to get involved in the dangerous struggle for existence. But anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live—in other words, he must commit partial suicide. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 165

Flight from life does not exempt us from the laws of old age and death. The neurotic who tries to wriggle out of the necessity of living wins nothing and only burdens himself with a constant foretaste of aging and dying, which must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and meaninglessness of his life. If it is not possible for the libido to strive forwards, to lead a life that willingly accepts all dangers and ultimate decay, then it strikes back along the other road and sinks into its own depths, working down to the old intimation of the immortality of all that lives, to the old longing for rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 617

The sun, rising triumphant, tears himself from the enveloping womb of the sea, and leaving behind him the noonday zenith and all its glorious works, sinks down again into the maternal depths, into all-enfolding and all regenerating night. This image is undoubtedly a primordial one, and there was profound justification for its becoming a symbolical expression of human fate: in the morning of life the son tears himself loose from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle to his destined heights. Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself—a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down to the realm of the Mothers. His life is a constant struggle against extinction, a violent yet fleeting deliverance from ever-lurking night. This death is no external enemy, it is his own inner longing for the stillness and profound peace of all-knowing non-existence, for all-seeing sleep in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. Even in his highest strivings for harmony and balance, for the profundities of philosophy and the raptures of the artist, he seeks death, immobility, satiety, rest. If, like Peirithous, he tarries too long in this abode of rest and peace, he is overcome by apathy, and the poison of the serpent paralyses him for all time. If he is to live, he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past in order to rise to his own heights. And having reached the noonday heights, he must sacrifice his love for his own achievement, for he may not loiter. The sun, too, sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onward to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 553

When the libido leaves the bright upper world, whether from choice, or from inertia, or from fate, it sinks back into its own depths, into the source from which it originally flowed, and returns to the point of cleavage, the navel, where it first entered the body. This point of cleavage is called the mother, because from her the current of life reached us. Whenever some great work is to be accomplished, before which a man recoils, doubtful of his strength, his libido streams back to the fountainhead—and that is the dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life. For if the libido gets stuck in the wonderland of this inner world, then for the upper world man is nothing but a shadow, he is already moribund or at least seriously ill. But if the libido manages to tear itself loose and force its way up again, something like a miracle happens: the journey to the underworld was a plunge into the fountain of youth, and the libido, apparently dead, wakes to renewed fruitfulness. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 449

To the degree that the modern mind is passionately concerned with anything and everything rather than religion, religion and its prime object—original sin—have mostly vanished into the unconscious. That is why, today, nobody believes in either. People accuse psychology of dealing in squalid fantasies, and yet even a cursory glance at ancient religions and the history of morals should be sufficient to convince them of the demons hidden in the human soul. This disbelief in the devilishness of human nature goes hand in hand with a blank incomprehension of religion and its meaning. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 106

At a time when a large part of mankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it may be worth our while to try to understand why it was accepted in the first place. It was accepted as a means of escape from the brutality and unconsciousness of the ancient world. As soon as we discard it, the old brutality returns in force, as has been made overwhelmingly clear by contemporary events. . . . We have had bitter experience of what happens when a whole nation finds the moral mask too stupid to keep up. The beast breaks loose, and a frenzy of demoralization sweeps over the civilized world. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 341

The conflict between horse and snake or bull and snake represents a conflict within the libido itself, a striving forward and backwards at one and the same time.It is as if the libido were not only a ceaseless forward movement, an unending will for life, evolution, creation, such as Schopenhauer envisaged in his cosmic Will, where death is a mishap or fatality coming from outside; like the sun, the libido also wills its own descent, its own involution. During the first half of life it strives for growth; during the second half, softly at first and then ever more perceptibly, it points towards an altered goal. And just as in youth the urge for limitless expansion often lies hidden under veiling layers of resistance to life, so that “other urge” often hides behind an obstinate and purposeless cleaving to life in its old form. This apparent contradiction in the nature of the libido is illustrated by a statue of Priapus in the archaeological museum at Verona: Priapus, with a sidelong smile, points with his finger to a snake biting his phallus. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 680

“The demands of the unconscious act at first like a paralysing poison on a man’s energy and resourcefulness, so that it may well be compared to the bite of a poisonous snake. Apparently it is a hostile demon who robs him of: energy, but in actual fact it is his own unconscious whose alien tendencies are beginning to check the forward striving of the conscious mind. The cause of this process is often extremely obscure, the more so as it is complicated by all kinds of external factors and subsidiary causes, such as difficulties in work, disappointments, failures, reduced efficiency due to age, depressing family problems, and so on and so forth. According to the myths it is the woman who secretly enslaves a man, so that he can no longer free himself from her and becomes a child again.It is also significant that Isis, the sister-wife of the sun-god, creates the poisonous serpent from his spittle, which, like all bodily secretions, has a magical significance, being a libido equivalent. She creates the serpent from the libido of the god, and by this means weakens him and makes him dependent on her. Delilah acts in the same way with Samson: by cutting off his hair, the sun’s rays, she robs him of his strength. This demon-woman of mythology is in truth the “sister-wife-mother,” the woman in the man, who unexpectedly turns up during the second half of life and tries to effect a forcible change of personality. I have dealt with certain aspects of this change in my essay on “The Stages of Life.” It consists in a partial feminization of the man and a corresponding masculinization of the woman. Often it takes place under very dramatic circumstances: the man’s strongest quality, his Logos principle, turns against him and as it were betrays him. The same thing happens with the Eros of the woman. The man becomes rigidly set in his previous attitude, while the woman remains caught in her emotional ties and fails to develop her reason and understanding, whose place is then taken by equally obstinate and inept “animus” opinions. The fossilization of the man shrouds itself in a smoke-screen of moods, ridiculous irritability, feelings of distrust and resentment, which are meant to justify his rigid attitude. A perfect example of this type of psychology is Schreber’s account of his own psychosis, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 458

Any very intensive train of thought works itself out more or less in verbal form if, that is to say, one wants to express it, or teach it, or convince someone of it. It is evidently directed outwards, to the outside world ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 11

To that extent, directed or logical thinking is reality-thinking, a thinking that is adapted to reality, by means of which we imitate the successiveness of objectively real things, so that the images inside our mind follow one another in the same strictly causal sequence as the events taking place outside it ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 11

We also call this “thinking with directed attention.” It has in addition the particularity of causing fatigue, and is for that reason brought into play for short periods only ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 11

The whole laborious achievement of our lives is adaptation to reality, part of which consists in directed thinking. In biological terms it is simply a process of psychic assimilation that leaves behind a corresponding state of exhaustion, like any other vital achievement ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 11

The material with which we think is language and verbal concepts something which from time immemorial has been directed outwards and used as a bridge, and which has but a single purpose, namely that of communication. So long as we think directedly, we think for others and speak to others ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 12

Directed thinking or, as we might also call it, thinking in words, is manifestly an instrument of culture, and we shall not be wrong in saying that the tremendous work of education which past centuries have devoted to directed thinking, thereby forcing it to develop from the subjective, individual sphere to the objective, social sphere, has produced a readjustment of the human mind to which we owe our modern empiricism and technics ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 17

These are absolutely new developments in the history of the world and were unknown to earlier ages. Inquiring minds have often wrestled with the question of why the first-rate knowledge which the ancients undoubtedly had of mathematics, mechanics, and physics, coupled with their matchless craftsmanship, was never applied to developing the rudimentary techniques already known to them (e.g., the principles of simple machines) into real technology in the modern sense of the word, and why they never got beyond the stage of inventing amusing curiosities ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 17

There is only one answer to this: the ancients, with a few illustrious exceptions, entirely lacked the capacity to concentrate their interest on the transformations of inanimate matter and to reproduce the natural artificially, by which means alone they could have gained control of the forces of nature. What they lacked was training in directed thinking ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 17

The secret of cultural development is the mobility and disposability of psychic energy. Directed thinking, as we know it today, is a more or less modern acquisition which earlier ages lacked ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 17

Directed thinking operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting. It produces innovations and adaptation, copies reality, and tries to act upon it. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 20

History shows that directed thinking was not always as developed as it is today. The clearest expression of modern directed thinking is science and the techniques fostered by it. Both owe their existence simply and solely to energetic training in directed thinking. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 21

Our thinking then lacks all leading ideas and the sense of direction emanating from them. We no longer compel our thoughts along a definite track, but let them float, sink or rise according to their specific gravity. In Kuelpe’s view, thinking is a sort of “inner act of will,” and its absence necessarily leads to an “automatic play of ideas” ( Outlines, p. 448 ). William James regards non-directed thinking, or “merely associative” thinking as the ordinary kind ( Principles, II, p. 325 ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 18

We can supplement James’s definitions by saying that this sort of thinking does not tire us, that it leads away from reality into fantasies of the past or future. At this point thinking in verbal forms ceases, image piles on image, feeling on feeling, and there is an ever-increasing tendency to shuffle things about and arrange then not as they are in reality but as one would like them to be. Naturally enough, the stuff of this thinking which shies away from reality can only be the past with its thousand-and-one memory images. Common speech calls this kind of thinking “dreaming” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 19

Dreaming or fantasy thinking is effortless, working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives. It turns away from reality, sets free subjective tendencies, and, as regards adaptation, is unproductive ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 20

At the time when the forerunners of our present-day culture, such as the poet Petrarch, were just beginning to approach nature in a spirit of understanding, an equivalent of our science already existed in scholasticism ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 21

Scholasticism took its subjects from fantasies of the past, but it gave the mind a dialectical training in directed thinking. The one goal of success that shone before the thinker was rhetorical victory in disputation, and not the visible transformation of reality ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 21

The subjects he thought about were often unbelievably fantastic; for instance, it was debated how many angels could stand on the point of a needle, whether Christ could have performed his work of redemption had he come into the world in the shape of a pea etc., etc. The fact that these problems could be posed at all and the stock metaphysical problem of how to know the unknowable comes into this category proves how peculiar the medieval mind must have been, that it could contrive questions which for us are the height of absurdity ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 21

Nietzsche glimpsed something of the background of this phenomenon when he spoke of the “glorious tension of mind” which the Middle Ages produced ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 21

Scholasticism consisted essentially in a dialectical gymnastics which gave the symbol of speech, the word, an absolute meaning, so that words came in the end to have a substantiality with which the ancients could invest their Logos only by attributing to it a mystical value ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 22

The great achievement of scholasticism was that it laid the foundations of a solidly built intellectual function, the sine qua non of modern science and technology ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 22

All the creative power that modern man pours into science and technics the man of antiquity devoted to his myths. This creative urge explains the bewildering confusion, the kaleidoscopic changes and syncretistic regroupings, the continual rejuvenation, of myths in Greek culture ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 24

We move in a world of fantasies which, untroubled by the outward course of things, well up from an inner source to produce an ever-changing succession of plastic or phantasmal forms ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 24

This activity of the early classical mind was in the highest degree artistic: the goal of its interest does not seem to have been how to understand the real world as objectively and accurately as possible, but how to adapt it aesthetically to subjective fantasies and expectations ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 24

The naïve man of antiquity saw the sun as the great Father of heaven and earth, and the moon as the fruitful Mother. Everything had its demon, was animated like a human being, or like his brothers the animals. Everything was conceived anthropomorphically or theriomorphically, in the likeness of man or beast. Even the sun’s disc was given wings or little feet to illustrate its motion. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 24

Thus there arose a picture of the universe which was completely removed from reality, but which corresponded exactly to man’s subjective fantasies. It needs no very elaborate proof to show that children think in much the same way. They too animate their dolls and toys, and with imaginative children it is easy to see that they inhabit a world of marvels ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 24

This idea is not at all strange; we know it quite well from comparative anatomy and from evolution, which show that the structure and function of the human body are the result of a series of embryonic mutations corresponding to similar mutations in our racial history ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 26

The supposition that there may also be in psychology a correspondence between ontogenesis and phylogenesis therefore seems justified. If this is so, it would mean that infantile thinking and dream-thinking are simply a recapitulation of earlier evolutionary stages. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 26

Faced by the vast uncertainty of the future, the adolescent puts the blame for it on the past, saying to himself: “If only I were not the child of my very ordinary parents, but the child of a rich and elegant count and had merely been brought up by foster-parents, then one day a golden coach would come and the count would take his long-lost child back with him to his wonderful castle,” and so on, just as in a Grimms’ fairy-story ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 34

There was a time, however, in the ancient world, when the fantasy was a legitimate truth that enjoyed universal recognition. Hence the fantasy of our adolescent is simply a re-echo of an ancient folk-belief which was once very widespread ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 34

The fantasy of ambition therefore chooses, among other things, a classical form which at one time had real validity ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 34

The Judas legend is itself a typical motif, namely that of the mischievous betrayal of the hero. One is reminded of Siegfried and Hagen, Baldur and Loki: Siegfried and Baldur were both murdered by a perfidious traitor from among their closest associates ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 42

This myth is moving and tragic, because the noble hero is not felled in a fair fight but through treachery ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 42

At the same time it is an event that was repeated many times in history, for instance in the case of Caesar and Brutus. Through the myth is extremely old it is still a subject for repetition, as it expresses the simple fact that envy does not let mankind sleep in peace ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 42

This rule can be applied to the mythological tradition in general: it does not perpetuate accounts of ordinary everyday events in the past, but only of those which express the universal and ever-renewed thoughts of mankind ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 42

Thus the lives and deeds of the culture-heroes and founders of religions are the purest condensations of typical mythological motifs, behind which the individual figures entirely disappear ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 42

Why should the pious Abbé Oegger worry about the old Judas legend? We are told that he went out into the world to preach the gospel of God’s unending mercy. Not long afterwards he left the Catholic Church and became a Swedenborgian ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 43

Now we understand his fantasy: he was the Judas who betrayed his Lord. Therefore he had first of all to assure himself of God’s mercy in order to play the role of Judas undisturbed ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 43

Oegger’s case throws light on the mechanism of fantasies in general. The conscious fantasy may be woven of mythological or any other material; it should not be taken literally, but must be interpreted according to its meaning ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 44

If it is taken too literally it remains unintelligible, and makes one despair of the meaning and purpose of the psychic function ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 44

But the case of the Abbé Oegger shows that his doubts and his hopes are only apparently concerned with the historical person of Judas, but in reality revolve round his own personality, which was seeking a way to freedom through the solution of the Judas problem ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 44

Conscious fantasies therefore illustrate, through the use of mythological material, certain tendencies in the personality which are either not yet recognized or are recognized no longer ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 45

It will be readily understood that a tendency which we fail to recognize and which we treat as non-existent can hardly contain anything that would fit in with our conscious character. Hence it is mostly a question of things which we regard as immoral or impossible, and whose conscious realization meets with the strongest resistances ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 45

What would Oegger have said had one told him in confidence that he was preparing himself for the role of Judas ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 45

Because he found the damnation of Judas incompatible with God’s goodness, he proceeded to think about this conflict. That is the conscious causal sequence ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 45

Hand in hand with this goes the unconscious sequence: because he wanted to be Judas, or had to be Judas, he first made sure of God’s goodness ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 45

For him Judas was the symbol of his own unconscious tendency, and he made use of this symbol in order to reflect on his own situation its direct realization would have been too painful for him ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 45

There must, then, be typical myths which serve to work out our racial and national complexes. Jacob Burckhardt seems to have glimpsed this truth when he said that every Greek of the classical period carries in himself a little bit of Oedipus, and every German a little bit of Faust. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 45

The problems with which the simple tale of the Abbé Oegger confronts us will meet us again when we examine another set of fantasies, which owe their existence this time to the exclusive activity of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 46

One might describe the theater, somewhat unaesthetically, as an institution for working out private complexes in public ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 48

The enjoyment of comedy, or of the blissful dénouement of the plot, is the direct result of identifying one’s own complexes with those personified by the actors, while enjoyment of tragedy lies in the thrilling yet satisfying feeling that what is happening to somebody else may very well happen to you ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 48

The fantasies reveal the symbolic transition from sun to man in the third and last of her creations which she calls “Chiwantopel, A hypnagogic drama” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 251

It is hardly to be supposed that Miss Miller, who evidently had not the faintest clue as to the real meaning of her visions would be able to meet the next phase of the process, namely the assimilation of the hero to her conscious personality, with the right attitude ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

Miss Miller’s fantasies show Chiwantopel as the hero, or brother-beloved of the author, Miss Miller, i.e., as her animus. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 679

In order to do so she would have had to recognize what fate demanded of her, and what was the meaning of the bizarre images that had broken in upon her consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

That there was already some degree of dissociation is obvious, since the unconscious went ahead independently and kept on churning out images which she had not consciously produced herself and which she felt as strange and portentous ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

Their melancholy outcome is due largely to the fact that they break off at the critical moment when the threat of invasion by the unconscious is plainly apparent ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

To the objective observer it is perfectly clear that the fantasies were products of a psychic energy not under the control of the conscious mind. They were longings, impulses, and symbolic happenings which it was quite unable to cope with either positively or negatively ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

The instinctual impulse that was trying to rouse the dreamer from the sleep of childhood was opposed by a personal pride that was distinctly out of place, and also, one must suppose, by a correspondingly narrow moral horizon, so that there was nothing to help her understand the spiritual content of the symbols ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

Our civilization has long since forgotten how to think symbolically, and even the theologian has no further use for the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers. The cure of souls in Protestantism is in an even more parlous condition. Who ever would go to the trouble, nowadays, of patching together the basic ideas of Christianity from a “welter of pathological fantasies”? ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

For patients in this situation it is a positive life-saver when the doctor takes such products seriously and gives the patient access to the meanings they suggest. In this way he makes it possible for the patient to assimilate at least part of the unconscious and to repair the menacing dissociation by just that amount ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

At the same time the assimilation guards against the dangerous isolation which everyone feels when confronted by an incomprehensible and irrational aspect of his personality. Isolation leads to panic, and that is only too often the beginning of a psychosis ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

The wider the gap between conscious and unconscious, the nearer creeps the fatal splitting of the personality, which in neurotically disposed individuals leads to neurosis, and, in those with a psychotic constitution, to schizophrenia and fragmentation of personality ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

The aim of psychotherapy is therefore to narrow down and eventually abolish the dissociation by integrating the tendencies of the unconscious into the conscious mind ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 683

We know from analytical experience that the initial dreams of patients at the beginning of an analysis are of especial interest, not least because they often bring out a critical evaluation of the personality of the doctor or psychoanalyst which previously he would have asked for in vain ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 62

They enrich the patient’s conscious impression of the doctor, often on very important points, and they frequently contain erotic comments which the unconscious had to make in order to counterbalance the patient’s underestimation and uncertain appraisal of the impression ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 62

Expressed in the drastic and hyperbolic manner peculiar to dreams, the impression often appears in almost unintelligible form owing to the incongruity of the symbolism ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 62

A further peculiarity, which seems due to the historical stratification of the unconscious, is that when an impression is denied conscious recognition it reverts to an earlier form of relationship ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 62

That explains why young girls, at the time of their first love, have great difficulty in expressing themselves owing to disturbances brought about by regressive reactivation of the father-imago ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 62

I purposely give preference to the term “imago” rather than to “complex,” in order to make clear, by this choice of a technical term, that the psychological factor which I sum up under “imago” has a living independence in the psychic hierarchy, i.e., possesses that autonomy which wide experience has shown to be the essential feature of feeling-toned complexes. This is brought out by the term “imago” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 62

My critics have seen in this view a return to medieval psychology and have therefore repudiated it. This “return” was made consciously and deliberately on my part, because the psychology of ancient and modern superstition furnishes abundant evidence for my point of view ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 62

Since, psychologically speaking, the God-image is a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature, it must necessarily be regarded as representing a certain sum of energy (libido) which appears in projection ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89

In most of the existing religions it seems that the formative factor which creates the attributes of divinity is the father-imago, while in older religions it was the mother-imago. These attributes are omnipotence, a sternly persecuting paternalism ruling through fear (Old Testament), and loving paternalism (New Testament) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89

In certain pagan conceptions of divinity the maternal element is strongly emphasized, and there is also a wide development of the animal or theriomorphic element ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89

The God-concept is not only an image, but an elemental force. The primitive power which Job’s Hymn of Creation vindicates, absolute and inexorable, unjust and superhuman, is a genuine and authentic attribute of the natural power of instinct and fate which “leads us into life,” which makes “all the world become guilty before God” ( Romans 3:19 ), and against which all struggle is in vain ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89

Nothing remains for mankind but to work in harmony with this will. To work in harmony with the libido does not mean letting oneself drift with it, for the psychic forces have no uniform direction, but are often directly opposed to one another ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89

A mere letting go of oneself leads in the shortest space of time to the most hopeless confusion. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 89

I am of the opinion that, in general, psychic energy or libido creates the God-image by making use of archetypal patterns, and that man in consequence worships the psychic force active within him as something divine (fig. 258.05a) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 129

We thus arrive at the objectionable conclusion that, from the psychological point of view, the God-image is a real but subjective phenomenon ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para ¶ 129

As Seneca says: “God is near you, he is with you, he is within you,” or, as in the First Epistle of John, “He who does not love does not know God; for God is love,” and “If we love one another, God abides in us” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 129

To anyone who understands libido merely as the psychic energy over which he has conscious control, the religious relationship, as we have defined it, is bound to appear as a ridiculous game of hide-and-seek with oneself. But it is rather a question of the energy which belongs to the archetype, to the unconscious, and which is therefore not his to dispose of ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 130

To carry a god around in yourself means a great deal; it is guarantee of happiness, or power, and even of omnipotence, in so far as these are attributes of divinity ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 130

To carry a god within oneself is practically the same as being God oneself. In Christianity, despite the weeding out of the most grossly sensual ideas and symbols, we can still find traces of this psychology ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 130

The idea of “becoming a god” is even more obvious in the pagan mystery cults, where the neophyte, after initiation, is himself lifted up to divine status: at the conclusion of the consecration rites in the syncretistic Isis mysteries he was crowned with a crown of palm leaves, set up on a pedestal, and worshipped as Helios (fig. 258.06) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 130

This idea of becoming a god is age-old. The old belief relegates it to the time after death, but the mystery cults bring it about in this world. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 133

When man becomes God, his importance and power are enormously increased. That seems to have been its main purpose: to strengthen the individual against his all-too-human weakness and insecurity in personal life ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 134

But the strengthening of his power-consciousness is only the outward effect of his becoming God; far more important are the deeper lying processes in the realm of feeling ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 134

For whoever introverts libido, i.e., withdraws it from the external object, suffers the necessary consequences of introversion: the libido which is turned inwards, into the subject, reverts to the individual past and digs up from the treasure-house of memory those images glimpsed long ago, which bring back the time when the world was a full and rounded whole ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 134

First and foremost are the memories of childhood, among them the imagos of father and mother. These are unique and imperishable, and in adult life not many difficulties are needed to reawaken those memories and make them active ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 134

The regressive reactivation of the father and mother imagos plays an important role in religion ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 134

The benefits of religion are equivalent, in their effects, to the parental care lavished upon the child, and religious feelings are rooted in unconscious memories of certain tender emotions in early infancy memories of archetypal intuitions ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 134

The naïve intellect cannot help taking its autonomy into account and putting the dialectical relationship to practical use. It does this by calling upon the divine presence in all difficult or dangerous situations, for the purpose of unloading all its unbearable difficulties upon the Almighty and expecting help from that quarter ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 95

In the psychological sense this means that complexes weighing on the soul are consciously transferred to the God-image. This, it should be noted, is the direct opposite of an act of repression, where the complexes are handed over to an unconscious authority, inasmuch as one prefers to forget them ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 95

But in any religious discipline it is of the highest importance that one should remain conscious of one’s difficulties in other words, of one’s sins. An excellent means to this end is the mutual confession of sin ( James 5 : 16 ), which effectively prevents one from becoming unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 95

These measures aim at keeping the conflicts conscious, and that is also a sine qua non of the psychotherapeutic procedure. Just as medical treatment appoints the person of the doctor to take over the conflicts of his patients, so Christian practice appoints the Saviour, “in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins” ( Ephesians I:7 and Colossians I:14 ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 95

He is the deliverer and redeemer of our guilt, a God who stands above sin, who “committed no sin, no guile was found on his lips” ( I Peter 2:22 ), who “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” ( I Peter 2 : 24 ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 95

The conscious projection at which Christian education aims therefore brings a double psychic benefit: firstly, one keeps oneself conscious of the conflict (“sin”) of two mutually opposing tendencies, thus preventing a known suffering from turning into an unknown one, which is far more tormenting, by being repressed and forgotten; and secondly, one lightens one’s burden by surrendering it to God, to whom all solutions are known ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 95

Religious experience in antiquity was frequently conceived as bodily union with the deity, and certain cults were saturated with sexuality of every kind. Sexuality was all too close to the relations of people with one another ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 102

The Stoics called this condition Heimarmene, compulsion by the stars, to which every “unredeemed” soul is subject ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 644

The moral degeneracy of the first centuries of the Christian era produced a moral reaction which then, in the second and third centuries, after germinating in the darkness of the lowest strata of society, expressed itself at its purest in the two mutually antagonistic religions, Christianity and Mithraism ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 102

These religions strove after precisely that higher form of social intercourse symbolized by a projected (“incarnate”) idea (the Logos), whereby all the strongest impulses of man which formerly had flung him from one passion to another and seemed to the ancients like the compulsion of evil stars, Heimarmene, or like what we psychologists would call the compulsion of libido could be made available for the maintenance of society ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 102

There is no doubt this is one of the main causes of the singular melancholy that reigned all through the time of the Caesars ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104

It was not in the long run possible for those who wallowed in pleasure not to be infected, through the mysterious working of the unconscious, by the deep sadness and still deeper wretchedness of their brothers ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104

The old idea of a mediator in whose name new ways of love would be opened, became a fact, and with that human society took an immense stride forward. This was not the result of any speculative, sophisticated philosophy, but of an elementary need in the great masses of humanity vegetating in spiritual darkness ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104

They were evidently driven to it by the profoundest inner necessities, for humanity does not thrive in a state of licentiousness. The meaning of these cults Christianity and Mithraism is clear: moral subjugation of the animal instincts ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104

The spread of both these religions betrays something of that feeling of redemption which animated their first adherents, and which we can scarcely appreciate today. We can hardly realize the whirlwinds of brutality and unchained libido that roared through the streets of Imperial Rome ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 104

The world and its beauty had to be shunned, not only because of their vanity and transitoriness, but because love of created nature soon makes man its slave. As St. Augustine says ( X, 6 ): “they love these things too much and become subject to them, and subjects cannot judge” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 112

One would certainly think it possible to love something, to have a positive attitude towards it, without supinely succumbing to it and losing one’s power of rational judgment ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 112

But St. Augustine knew his contemporaries, and knew furthermore how much godliness and godlike power dwelt in the beauty of the world ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 112

Thus Lucretius extols “alma Venus” as the ruling principle of nature. To such a daimonion man falls an abject victim unless he can categorically reject its seductive influence at the outset. It is not merely a question of sensuality and of aesthetic corruption, butane this is the point of paganism and nature worship (fig. 001) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 113

Because gods dwell in created things, man falls to worshipping them, and for that reason he must turn away from them utterly lest he be overwhelmed. In this respect the fate of Alypius is extremely instructive ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 113

If the flight from the world is successful, man can then build up an inner, spiritual world which stands firm against the onslaught of sense-impressions ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 113

The struggle with the world of the senses brought to birth a type of thinking independent of external factors. Man won for himself that sovereignty of the idea which was able to withstand the aesthetic impact, so that thought was no longer fettered by the emotional effect of sense-impressions, but could assert itself and even rise, later, to reflection and observation ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 113

In the flight from the world during the first few centuries after Christ (cities of the anchorites in the desert), the Desert Fathers mortified themselves through spirituality in order to escape the extreme brutality of the decadent Roman civilization ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 119

Asceticism occurs whenever the animal instincts are so strong that they need to be violently exterminated. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 119

I believe that miscegenation makes rather for a coarsened joie de vivre. To all appearances the ascetics were ethical people who, disgusted with the melancholy of the age which was merely an expression of the disruption of the individual, put an end to their lives in order to mortify an attitude that was itself obsolete ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 119

His [Faust] equally importunate longing for the beauties of this world plunged him into renewed ruin, doubt and wretchedness, which culminated in the tragedy of Gretchen’s death ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 119

Faust’s mistake was that he made the worst of both worlds by blindly following the urge of his libido, like a man overcome by strong and violent passions. Faust’s conflict is a reflection of the collective conflict at the beginning of the Christian era, but in him, curiously enough, it takes the opposite course ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 119

Faust takes the opposite road; for him the ascetic ideal is sheer death. He struggles for liberation and wins life by binding himself over to evil, thereby bringing about the death of what he loves most: Gretchen ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 120

He tears himself away from his grief, and sacrifices his life in unceasing work, thus saving many lives. His double mission as saviour and destroyer had been hinted at from the beginning ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 120

Faust’s desire, like that of every hero, is a yearning for the mystery of rebirth, for immortality; therefore his way leads out to sea and down into the maw of death, that frighteningly narrow “passage” which signals the new day ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 417

Nature is beautiful because I love it, and good is everything that my feeling regards as good. Values are chiefly created by the quality of one’s subjective reactions ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 126

In the erotic sphere, it is abundantly evident how little the object counts, and how much the subjective reaction counts ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 126

The light and fire attributes depict the intensity of the feeling-tone and are therefore expressions for the psychic energy which manifests itself as libido ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 128

If one worships God, sun, or fire, one is worshipping intensity and power, in other words the phenomenon of psychic energy as such, the libido. Every force and every phenomenon is a special form of energy ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 128

Form is both an image and a mode of manifestation. It expresses two things: the energy which takes shape in it, and the medium in which that energy appears. On the one hand one can say that energy creates its own image, and on the other hand that the character of the medium forces it into a definite form ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 128

One man will derive the idea of God from the sun, another will maintain that it is the numinous feelings it arouses which give the sun its godlike significance. The former, by attitude and temperament, believes more in the causal nexus of the environment, the latter more in the spontaneity of psychic experience ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 128

The well-known fact that in worshipping the sun’s strength we pay homage to the great generative force of Nature is the plainest possible evidence if evidence were still needed that in God we honour the energy of the archetype ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 135

Religious regression makes use of the parental imago, but only as a symbol that is to say, it clothes the archetype in the image of the parents, just as it bodies forth the archetype’s energy by making use of sensuous ideas like fire, light, heat, fecundity, generative power, and so on ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 138

The phallus is the source of life and libido the creator and worker of miracles, and as such it was worshipped everywhere ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 146

Ikhnaton (Amenophis IV) achieved, by his reforms, a psychologically valuable work of interpretation. He united all the bull, ram, crocodile, and pile-dwelling gods into the sun-disc, and made it clear that their various attributes were compatible with those of the sun ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 148

But the striving for unity is opposed by a possibly even stronger tendency to create multiplicity, so that even in strictly monotheistic religions like Christianity the polytheistic tendency cannot be suppressed ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 149

The deity is divided into three parts, and on top of that come all the heavenly hierarchies. These two tendencies are in constant warfare: sometimes there is only one God with countless attributes, sometimes there are many gods, who are simply called by different names in different places, and who personify one or the other attribute of their respective archetype, as we have seen in the case of the Egyptian gods ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 149

We saw, however, that the snake is to be taken not only in the phallic sense, but as an attribute of the sun’s image (the Egyptian uraeus) and as a libido-symbol. It is therefore possible for the sun-disc to be equipped not only with hands and feet (cf.fig. 007) and (fig. 258.01), but also with a phallus. We find proof of this in a strange vision in the Mithraic liturgy: “And likewise the so-called tube, the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube” ( Dieterich, Mithras liturgie, pp. 6-7 ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 149

The Holy Ghost of the New Testament appeared to the apostles in the form of flames, because the pneuma was believed to be fiery ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 149

The Iranian conception of Hvareno was similar: it signified the “Grace of Heaven” through which the monarch ruled ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 149

This “Grace” was understood as a sort of fire or shining glory, something very substantial. We come across ideas of the same type in Kerner’s Seeress of Prevorst ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 149

The various attributes of the sun appear one after another in the Mithraic liturgy. After the vision of Helios, seven maidens appear with faces like snakes, and seven gods with the faces of black bulls. The maiden can easily be understood as a causative libido analogy ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 155

The bull is a notorious fertility-symbol. In the Mithraic liturgy, the bull-gods are called guardians of the world's axis,' who turn theaxle of the wheel of heaven’ ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 155

The serpent in Paradise is usually thought of as feminine, as the seductive principle in woman, and is represented as feminine by the old painters. Through a similar change of meaning the snake in antiquity became a symbol of the earth, which has always been considered feminine ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 155

The same attribute falls also to Mithras: sometimes he is the Sol invictus itself, sometimes the companion and ruler Helios; in his right hand he holds “the constellation of the Bear, which moves and turns the heavens round” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 155

The bull-head deities, sacred and valorous youths' like Mithras himself, who is also given the attribute,the younger one,’ are merely aspects of the same divinity ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 155

The chief god of the Mithraic liturgy is himself divided into Mithras and Helios both of whom have closely related attributes ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 155

Numerous fire- and light-symbols are attributed to the saints in Christian legend. The twelve apostles, for example, were likened to the twelve signs of the zodiac and were therefore represented each with a star over his head ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 163

The pictures in the catacombs likewise contain a good deal of sun symbolism. For instance there is a swastika (sun-wheel) on the robe of Fossor Diogenes in the cemetery of Peter and Marcellinus ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 163

The symbols of the rising sun bull and ramare found in the Orpheus frescoes in the cemetery of Domitilla; also the ram and peacock (a sun-symbol like the phoenix) on an epitaph in the Callistus catacomb ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 163

The power of God is menaced by the seductions of passion; heaven is threatened with a second fall of angels ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 170

If we translate this projection back into the psychological sphere whence it came, it would mean that the good and rational Power which rules the world with wise laws is threatened by the chaotic, primitive force of passion ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 170

Therefore passion must be exterminated, which means, in mythological projection, that the race of Cain and the whole sinful world must be wiped out, root and branch, by the Flood ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 170

That is the inevitable result of a passion that sweeps away all barriers. It is like the sea breaking through its dykes, like the waters of the deep and the torrential rains, the creative, fructifying, “motherly” waters, as Indian mythology calls them ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 170

Now [the waters] depart from their natural courses and surge over the mountain-tops and engulf all living things ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 170

If evil were to be utterly destroyed, everything daemonic, including God himself, would suffer a grievous loss; it would be like performing an amputation on the body of the Deity ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 170

Passion raises a man not only above himself, but also above the bounds of his mortality and earthliness, and by the very act of raising him, it destroys him ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 171

This “rising above himself” is expressed mythologically in the building of the heaven-high tower of Babel that brought confusion to mankind, and in the revolt of Lucifer ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 171

(In Byron’s poem [ “Heaven and Earth,” CW 5: par. 169 ], it is the overweening ambition of the race of Cain, whose strivings make the stars subservient and corrupt the sons of God themselves. Even if a longing for the highest is legitimate in itself, the sinful presumption and inevitable corruption lie in the very fact that it goes beyond the fixed human boundaries ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 171

Through excess of longing man can draw the gods down into the murk of his passions. He seems to be raising himself up to the Divine, but in so doing he abandons his humanity ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 171

There, where the deep fountains of the ocean are, dwells Leviathan; from there the all-destroying flood ascends, the tidal wave of animal passion ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 174

The choking, heart-constricting surge of instinct is projected outwards as a mounting flood to destroy everything that exists, so that a new and better world may arise from the ruins of the old ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 174

The sun’s the only truly “rational” image of God, whether we adopt the standpoint of the primitive savage or of modern science. (In either case the sun is the father-god from whom all living things draw life; he is the fructifier and creator, the source of energy for our world ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176

The discord into which the human soul has fallen can be harmoniously resolved through the sun as a natural object which knows no inner conflict ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176

The sun is not only beneficial, but also destructive; hence the zodiacal sign for August heat is the ravaging lion which Samson slew in order to rid the parched earth of its torment ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176

Samson as a sun-god. The killing of the lion, like the Mithraic bull-sacrifice, is an anticipation of the god’s self-sacrifice ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176

Yet it is the nature of the sun to scorch, and its scorching power seems natural to man. It shines equally on the just and the unjust, and allows useful creatures to flourish as well as the harmful ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176

Therefore the sun is perfectly suited to represent the visible God of this world, i.e., the creative power of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to bring forth the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176

The same is true of many other sexual images which are found not only in dreams and fantasies but in everyday speech. In neither case should they be taken literally, for they are not to be understood semiotically, as signs for definite things, but as symbols ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 180

A symbol is an indefinite expression with many meanings, pointing to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known. But the sign always has a fixed meaning, because it is a conventional abbreviation for, or a commonly accepted indication of, something known ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 180

The symbol therefore has a large number of analogous variants, and the more of these variants it has at its disposal, the more complete and clear-cut will be the image it projects of its object ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 180

The same creative force which is symbolized by Tom Thumb, etc., can also be represented by the phallus or by numerous other symbols which delineate further aspects of the process underlying them all. Thus the creative dwarfs toil away in secret; the phallus, also working in darkness, begets a living being; and the key unlocks the mysterious forbidden door behind which some wonderful thing awaits discovery. One thinks, in this connection, of “The Mothers” in Faust: ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 180

Here the devil again puts into Faust’s hand the marvelous tool [the key], as once before when, in the form of the black dog, he introduced himself to Faust as part of that power which would ever work evil, but engenders good. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 181

The “realm of the Mothers” has not a few connections with the womb with the matrix, which frequently symbolizes the creative aspect of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 182

This libido is a force of nature, good and bad at once, or morally neutral. Uniting himself with it, Faust succeeds in accomplishing his real life’s work, at first with evil results and then for the benefit of mankind ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 182

In the realm of the Mothers he finds the tripod, the Hermetic vessel in which the “royal marriage” is consummated. But he needs the phallic wand in order to bring off the greatest wonder of all the creation of Paris and Helen. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 182

The insignificant-looking tool in Faust’s hand is the dark creative power of the unconscious, which reveals itself to those who follow its dictates and is indeed capable of working miracles ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 182

This paradox appears to be very ancient, for the Shvetashvatara Upanishad (9, 20) goes on to say of the dwarf-god, the cosmic purusha: ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 182

The phallus often stands for the creative divinity, Hermes being an excellent example. It is sometimes thought of as an independent being, an idea that is found not only in antiquity but in the drawings of children and artists of our own day ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

So we ought not to be surprised if certain phallic characteristics are also found in the seers, artists, and wonder-workers of mythology. Hephaestus, Wieland the Smith, and Mani (the founder of Manichaeism, famous also for his artistic gifts), had crippled feet ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

The foot, as I shall explain in due course, is supposed to possess a magical generative power. The ancient seer Melampus, who is said to have introduced the cult of the phallus, had a very peculiar name Blackfoot, and it also seems characteristic of seers to be blind ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

Ugliness and deformity are especially characteristic of those mysterious chthonic gods, the sons of Hephaestus, the Cabiri, to whom mighty wonder-working powers were ascribed ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

Their cult was closely bound up with that of the ithyphallic Hermes, who according to Herodotus was brought to Attica by the Pelasgians. They were called, ‘great gods’ ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

Their near relatives were the Idaean dactyls (fingers or else Tom Thumbs), to whom the mother of the gods had taught the blacksmith’s art (“Follow it down, it leads you to the Mothers!”) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

They [Idaean dactyls] were the first Wise Men, the teachers of Orpheus, and it was they who invented the Ephesian magic formulae and the musical rhythms ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

The characteristic disparity which we noted in the Upanishads and Faust crops up again here, since the giant Hercules was said to be an Idaean dactyl. Also the colossal Phrygians, Rhea’s technicians, were dactyls ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

The two Dioscuri are related to the Cabiri; they too wear the queer little pointed hat, the pileus, which is peculiar to these mysterious gods and was thenceforward perpetuated as a secret mark of identification. Attis and Mithras both wore the pileus (fig. 020) . It had become the traditional headgear of our infantile chthonic gods today, the pixies and goblins ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 183

Cicero gives it a very wide meaning: will is a rational desire, but when it is divorced from reason and is too violently aroused, that is “libido,” or unbridled desire, which is found in all fools ( Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Gook IV, vi, 12 ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 185

Here libido means a want' or awish,’ and also, in contradiction to the will' of the Stoics,unbridled desire.’ Cicero uses it in this sense when he says:(“to do something from willful desire and not from reason”) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 186

The use of libido is so general that the phrase “libido est scire” merely means: I like,'it pleases me.’ In the phrase libido has the meaning of `urge’ ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 186

It can also have the nuance of `lasciviousness.’ St. Augustine aptly defines libido as a “general term for all desire” and says: There is a lust for revenge, which is called rage; a lust for having money, which is called avarice; a lust for victory at all costs, which is called stubbornness; a lust for self-glorification, which is called boastfulness. There are many and varied kinds of lust ( De Civitate Dei, XIV, xv. ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 186

For St. Augustine libido denotes an appetite like hunger and thirst, and so far as sexuality is concerned he says: Pleasure is preceded by an appetite that is felt in the flesh, a kind of desire like hunger and thirst ( De Civitate Dei, XIV, xv. ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 187

Libido is connected etymologically with: it pleases, gladly, willingly, to experience violent longing, excites longing, eager, love, hope, praise, and glory ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 188

We can say, then, that the concept of libido in psychology has functionally the same significance as the concept of energy in physics since the time of Robert Mayer ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 189

The term describes the Indian concept of tejas which denotes a subjective intensity, i.e., anything potent and highly charged with energy ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 238

Libido is symbolized by the human figure as demon or hero one that passes from joy to sorrow, from sorrow to joy, and like the sun, now stands high at the zenith and now plunged into darkest night, only to rise again in new splendor ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 251

Libido denotes a desire or impulse which is unchecked by any kind of authority, moral or otherwise. It appetite in its natural state ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 194

From the genetic point of view it is bodily needs like hunger, thirst, sleep, sex, and emotional states or affects which constitute the essence of libido ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 194

Like energy, the libido never manifests itself as such, but only in the form of a “force,” that is to say, in the form of something in a definite energic state, be it moving bodies, chemical or electrical tension, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 505

The libido expresses itself in images of sun, light, fire, sex, fertility, and growth ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 324

This leads to a conception of libido which expands into a conception of intentionality in general. We would be better advised, therefore, when speaking of libido, to understand it as an energy-value which is able to communicate itself to any field of activity whatsoever, be it power, hunger, hatred, sexuality, or religion, without ever being itself a specific instinct ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 197

Intricate overlapping’s of meaning can only be disentangled if we reduce them to a common denominator. This denominator is the libido ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 659

As a power which transcends consciousness the libido is by nature daemonic: it is both God and devil ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 170

As we know, an important change occurred in the principles of propagation during the ascent through the animal kingdom: the vast numbers of gametes which chance fertilization made necessary were progressively reduced in favor of assured fertilization and effective protection of the young ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 194

The decreased production of ova and spermatozoa set free considerable quantities of energy which soon sought and found new outlets ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 194

Thus we find the first stirrings of the artistic impulse in animals, but subservient to the reproductive instinct and limited to the breeding season ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 194

The original sexual character of these biological phenomena gradually disappears as they become organically fixed and achieve functional independence ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 194

Although there can be no doubt that music originally belonged to the reproductive sphere, it would be an unjustified and fantastic generalization to put music in the same category as sex ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 194

Such a view would be tantamount to treating of Cologne Cathedral in a text-book of mineralogy, on the ground that it consisted very largely of stones ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 194

According to Plotinus, the world-soul has a tendency towards separation and divisibility, the sine qua non of all change, creation, and reproduction. It is an “unending All of life” and wholly energy; a living organism of ideas which only become effective and real in it ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 198

The intellect is its progenitor and father, and what the intellect conceives the world-soul brings to birth in reality. “What lies enclosed in the intellect comes to birth in the world-soul as Logos, fills it with meaning and makes it drunken as if with nectar” (Plotinus, Enneads, III, 5, 9.) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 198

Nectar, like soma, is the drink of fertility and immortality. The soul is fructified by the intellect; as the “oversoul” it is called the heavenly Aphrodite, as the “under soul” the earthly Aphrodite. It knows “the pangs of birth.” It is not without reason that the dove of Aphrodite is the symbol of the Holy Ghost ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 198

Certain early Christian sects gave a maternal significance to the Holy Ghost (world-soul or moon) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 198

It seems as if the process of analogy-making has gradually altered and added to the common stock of ideas and names, with the result that man’s picture of the world was considerably broadened ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 203

Specially colourful or intense contents (the “feeling-toned” complexes) were reflected in countless analogies, and gave rise to synonyms whose objects were thus drawn into the magic circle of the psyche ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 203

In this way there came into being those intimate relationships by analogy which Lévy-Bruhl fittingly describes as participation mystique ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 203

It is evident that this tendency to invent analogies deriving from feeling-toned contents has been of enormous significance for the development of the human mind ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 203

We are in thorough agreement with Steinthal when he says that a positive overwhelming importance attaches to the little word “like” in the history of human thought ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 203

One can easily imagine that the canalization of libido into analogy-making was responsible for some of the most important discoveries ever made by primitive man ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 203

At the same time there develops in the motor sphere in general a pleasurable rhythmic movement of the arms and legs (kicking, etc.) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

With the growth of the individual and development of his organs the libido creates for itself new avenues of activity. The primary model of rhythmic movement, producing pleasure and satisfaction, is transferred to the zone of other functions, with sexuality as its ultimate goal ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

This is not to say that the rhythmic activity derives from the act of nutrition. A considerable part of the energy supplied by nutrition for growth has to convert itself into sexual libido and other forms of activity ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

The transition of libido does not take place suddenly at the time of puberty, as is commonly supposed, but only very gradually during the course of childhood ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

Sucking still belongs to the sphere of the nutritive function, but outgrows it by ceasing to be a function of nutrition and becoming an analogous rhythmic activity without intake of nourishment ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

At this point the hand comes in as an auxiliary organ. It appears even more clearly as an auxiliary organ in the phase of rhythmic activity, which then leaves the oral zone and turns to other regions. Numerous possibilities now present themselves ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

As a rule, it is the other body openings that become the main object of interest; then the skin, or special parts of it; and finally rhythmic movements of all kinds ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

In the course of its migrations the libido carries traces of the nutritional phase into its new field of operations, which accounts for the many intimate connections between the nutritive and the sexual function. Should this more developed activity meet with an obstacle that forces it to regress, the regression will be to an earlier stage of development ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

The phase of rhythmic activity generally coincides with the development of mind and speech. I therefore propose to call the period from birth up to the time of the first clear manifestations of sexuality the “presexual stage.” As a rule it falls between the first and the fourth year, and is comparable to the chrysalis stage in butterflies. It is characterized by a varying mixture of elements from the nutritional and sexual phases ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 206

They dig a hole in the ground, so shaping it and setting it about with bushes that it looks like a woman’s genitals ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 213

Then they dance round this hole all night, holding their spears in front of them in imitation of an erect penis. As they dance round, they thrust their spears into the hole, shouting:. Obscene dances of this kind are found among other tribes as well ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 213

In this rite of spring there is enacted a sacramental mating, with the hole in the earth representing the woman, and the spear the man. The hierosgamos was an essential component of many cults and played an important part in various sects ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 213

The tensions inside a primitive group are never greater than those involved in the struggle for existence of the group as a whole. Were it otherwise, the group would speedily perish ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 213

What does constitute a serious threat to the primitive group is the endogamous tendency, which has to be checked in order to exorcize the danger ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

The best means to this end seems to be the widespread custom of cross-cousin marriage because it keeps the endogamous (incestuous) and exogamous tendencies balanced ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

The danger that then threatens the group comes from the very advantages it has gained through checking the endogamous tendency [incest] to which the incest-taboo applies ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

The group acquires an inner stability, opportunities for expansion, and hence greater security. That is to say, the source of fear does not lie inside the group, but in the very real risks which the struggle for existence entails ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

Fear of enemies and of hunger predominates even over sexuality, which is, as we know, no problem at all for the primitive, as it is far simpler to get a woman than it is to get food ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

Fear of the consequences of being unadapted is a compelling reason for checking the instincts ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

Confronted with disaster, one is obliged to ask oneself how it is to be remedied. The libido that is forced into regression by the obstacle always reverts to the possibilities lying dormant in the individual. A dog, finding the door shut, scratches at it until it is opened, and a man unable to find the answer to a problem rubs his nose, pulls his lower lip, scratches his ear, and so on ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

If he gets impatient, all sorts of other rhythms appear; he starts drumming with his fingers, shuffles his feet about, and it will not be long before certain distinctly sexual analogies manifest themselves, such as masturbation gestures ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

Koch-Grünberg, writing on South American rock-paintings, tells us how the Indians sit on the rocks and scratch lines on them with sharp stones while waiting for their canoes to be transported round the rapids ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 217

Now when the libido is forced back by an obstacle, it does not necessarily regress to earlier sexual modes of application, but rather to the rhythmic activities of infancy which serve as a model both for the act of nutrition and for the sexual act itself. The material before us does not seem to preclude the possibility that the invention of fire-making came about in the manner suggested, that is, through the regressive reawakening of rhythm ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 218

If certain tribes can dance all night long to a monotonous tune of three notes, then, to our way of thinking, the play-element is entirely lacking: it is more like an exercise with a set purpose ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

This is in the fact the case, for rhythm is a classic device for impressing certain ideas or activities on the mind, and what has to be impressed and firmly organized is the canalization of libido into a new form of activity ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

Since the rhythmic activity can no longer find an outlet in the act of feeding after the nutritional phase of development is over, it transfers itself not only to the sphere of sexuality in the strict sense, but also to the “decoy mechanisms,” such as music and dancing, and finally to the sphere of work ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

The close connection which work always has with music, singing, dancing, drumming, and all manner of rhythms in primitive societies, indeed its absolute dependence on these things, is very striking ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

This [Music] connection forms the bridge to sexuality, thus giving the primitive an opportunity to sidetrack and evade the task in hand ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

Because diversions of this kind are a frequent occurrence, and are to be found in all spheres of culture, people have been led to believe that there is no differentiated achievement that is not a substitute for some form of sexuality. I regard this as an error, albeit a very understandable one considering the enormous psychological importance of the sexual instinct ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

The rhythmic tendency does not come from the nutritional phase at all, as if it had migrated from there to the sexual, but that it is a peculiarity of emotional processes in general ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

Any kind of excitement, no matter in what phase of life, displays a tendency to rhythmic expression, perseveration, and repetition, as can easily be seen from the repetition, assonance, and alliteration of complex-toned reaction words in the association experiment ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

Rhythmic patterns therefore offer no ground for assuming that the function they affect originated in sexuality ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 219

The psychological importance of sexuality and the existence of plausible sexual analogies make a deviation into sex extremely easy in cases of regression, so that it naturally seems as if all one’s troubles were due to a sexual wish that is unjustly denied fulfilment. This reasoning is typical of the neurotic ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 220

Primitives seem to know instinctively the dangers of this deviation: when celebrating the heiros gamos, the Wachandi, of Australia, may not look at a woman during the entire ceremony. Among a certain tribe of American Indians, it was the custom for the warriors, before setting out on the warpath, to move in a circle round a beautiful young girl standing naked in the center. Whoever got an erection was disqualified as unfit for military operation ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 220

The deviation into sex is used not always, but very frequently as a means of escaping the real problem ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 220

One makes oneself and others believe that the problem is purely sexual, that the trouble started long ago and that its causes lie in the remote past ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 220

This provides a heaven-sent way out of the problem of the present by shifting the whole question on to another and less dangerous plane. But the illicit gain is purchased at the expense of adaptation, and one gets a neurosis into the bargain ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 220

The checking of the instincts can be traced back to fear of the very real dangers of existence in this world ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 221

But external reality is not the only source of this instinct-inhibiting fear, for primitive man is often very much more afraid of “inner” reality the world of dreams, ancestral spirits, demons, gods, magicians, and witches ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 221

Although we, with our rationalism, think we can block this source of fear by pointing to its unreality, it nevertheless remains one of those psychic realities whose irrational nature cannot be exorcized by rational argument ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 221

There is a psychic reality which is just as pitiless and just as inexorable as the outer world, and just as useful and helpful, provided one knows how to circumvent its dangers and discover its hidden treasures ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 221

“Magic is the science of the jungle,” a famous explorer once said. Civilized man contemptuously looks down on primitive superstitions, which is about as sensible as turning up one’s nose at the pikes and halberds, the fortresses and tall-spired cathedrals of the Middle Ages ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 221

Primitive methods are just as effective under primitive conditions as machine-guns or the radio are under modern conditions ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 221

If there is an inhibition of sexuality, a regression will eventually occur in which the sexual energy flowing back from this sphere activates a function in some other sphere. In this way the energy changes its form ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

Let us take as an example the Wachandi ceremony: in all probability the hole in the earth is an analogy of the mother’s genitals, for when a man is forbidden to look at a woman, his Eros reverts to the mother. But as incest has to be avoided at all costs, the hole in the earth acts as a kind of mother-substitute ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

Thus, by means of ceremonial exercise, the incestuous energy-component becomes, as it were, desexualized, is led back to an infantile level where, if the operation is successful, it attains another form, which is equivalent to another function ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

It is to be assumed, however, that the operation is accomplished only with difficulty, for the primary instinct is composed of an endogamous (“incestuous”) tendency and an exogamous one, and must therefore be split into two. This splitting is connected with consciousness and the process of becoming conscious ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

The regression is always attended by certain difficulties because the energy clings with specific force to its object, and on being changed from one form carries something of its pervious character into the next form. So although the resultant phenomena have the character of a sexual act, it is not a sexual act any longer ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

In the same way, fire-boring is only an analogy of the sexual act, just as the latter often has to serve as a linguistic analogy for all sorts of other activities. The presexual, early infantile state to which the libido reverts is characterized by numerous possibilities of application, because, once the libido has arrived there, it is restored to its original undifferentiated polyvalency ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

It is therefore understandable that the libido which regressively “invests” this stage sees itself confronted with a variety of possible applications ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

Since, in the Wachandi ceremony, the libido is bound to its object sexuality it will carry at least part of this function into the new form as an essential characteristic ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

But the aim of the action is to bring forth the fruits of the field, and it is magical rather then sexual. Here the regression leads to a reactivation of the mother as the goal of desire, this time as a symbol not of sex but of the giver of nourishment ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 226

The libido, forced into regression by the checking of instinct, reactivates the infantile boring and provides it with objective material to work unfittingly called “material” because the object at this stage is the mother (mater) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 227

As I have pointed out above, the act of boring requires only the strength and perseverance of an adult man and suitable “material” in order to generate fire ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 227

Consequently, the production of fire may have originally occurred as the objective expression of a quasi-masturbatory activity analogous to the aforementioned case of masturbatory boring. Though we can never hope to advance any real proof of our contention, it is at least thinkable that some traces of these first exercises in fire-making may have been preserved. I have succeeded in finding a passage in a monument of Indian literature [the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad] which describes this conversion of libido into fire-making ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 227

The pleasure and satisfaction the baby finds in feeding is localized in the mouth, but to interpret this pleasure as sexual is quite unjustified. Feeding is a genuine activity, satisfying in itself, and because it is a vital necessity nature has here put a premium on pleasure ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 229

The mouth soon begins to develop another significance as the organ of speech. The extreme importance of speech doubles the significance of the mouth in small children ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 229

The rhythmic activities it carries out express a concentration of emotional forces, i.e., of libido, at this point. Thus the mouth (and to a lesser degree the anus) becomes the prime place of origin ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 229

According to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the most important discovery ever made by primitive man, the discovery of fire, came out of the mouth. As we might expect, there are texts which draw a parallel between fire and speech. The Aitareya Upanishad says: From the mouth came speech, and from speech fire ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 229

Tejas, therefore, describes the psychological situation covered by the word “libido.” It really denotes subjective intensity. Any thing potent, any content highly charged with energy, therefore has a wide range of symbolic meanings ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 238

Agni is the sacrificial flame, the sacrificer and the sacrificed ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 246

Just as Christ left behind his redeeming blood, a true pharmakon athanasias [drink of immortality], in the wine, so Agni is the soma, the holy drink of inspiration, the mead of immortality ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 246

Soma and fire are identical in Vedic literature. The ancient Hindus saw fire both as a symbol of Agni and as an emanation of the inner libido-fire, and for them the same psychic dynamism was at work in the intoxicating drink (“fire-water,” Soma-Agni as rain and fire). The Vedic definition of soma as “seminal fluid” confirms this view ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 246

The “somatic” significance of Agni has its parallel in the Christian interpretation of the Eucharistic Blood as the body of Christ ~Carl Jung, ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 246

Soma is also the “nourishing drink.” Its mythological characteristics coincide with those of fire, and so both are united in Agni. The drink of immortality, Amrita, was stirred by the Hindu gods like the fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 247

The Sanskrit word for fire is agnis (Lat. ignis), personified as Agni, the god of fire, a divine mediator whose symbolism has certain affinities with Christian ideas ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 239

Agni, fire, was worshipped as a golden-winged bird ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 271

The wise Diotima in Plato’s Symposium has a conception of the divine messenger and mediator. She teaches Socrates that Eros is “the intermediary between mortals and immortals a mighty daemon, dear Socrates; for everything daemonic is the intermediary between God and man” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 242

His function is to “interpret and convey messages to the gods from men and to men from the gods, prayers and sacrifices from the one, and commands and rewards from the other, thus bridging the gap between them, so that by his mediation the universe is at one with itself” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 242

He is neither mortal nor immortal; but on one and the same day he will live and flourish (when things go well with him), and also meet his death; and then come to life again through the force of his father’s nature ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 242

We read in the third chapter of the book of the prophet Daniel that Nabuchodonosor, the King of Babylon, caused three men to be placed in a glowing furnace, and that the king came to the furnace and looked in, and saw with the three a fourth, who was like the Son of God. The three signify for us the Holy Trinity of the person, and the fourth the unity of being. Thus Christ in his transfiguration signified the Trinity of the person and the unity of being ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 244

The fiery furnace, like the fiery tripod in Faust, is a mother symbol. From the tripod come Paris and Helen, the royal pair of alchemy, and in popular tradition children are baked in the oven ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 245

The alchemical athanor, or melting pot, signifies the body, while the alembic or cucurbita, the Hermetic vessel, represents the uterus ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 245

The “fourth” in the fiery furnace appears like a son of God made visible in the fire. Jehovah himself is a fire. Isaiah 10:17 (RSV) says of the saviour of Israel: “And the light of Israel will become a fire, and his Holy One a flame” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 245

A hymn of Ephraem the Syrian says of Christ: “Thou who art all fire, have pity on me.” This view is based on the apocryphal saying of our Lord: “He who is near unto me is near unto the fire” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 245

So far our exposition has been based on the pramantha component of the Agni sacrifice, and we have concerned ourselves with only one meaning of the word manthami or mathnami, namely with that which expresses the idea of rubbing ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 248

It is the custom in the Catholic Church to light a new fire at Easter. So, even in the Occident, fire-making is an element in a religious mystery, which testifies to its symbolical and ambiguous character. The rules of the ritual must be scrupulously observed if it is to have its intended magical effect ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 248

Speech and fire-making represent primitive man’s victory over his brutish unconsciousness and subsequently became powerful magical devices for overcoming the ever present “daemonic” forces lurking in the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 248

The blocking of libido leads to an accumulation of instinctuality and, in consequence, to excesses and aberrations of all kinds. Among them, sexual disturbances are fairly frequent, as we might expect ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 249

A particularly instructive example is the psychology of incendiarism: incendiarism is really a regressive act of fire-making, and in certain cases it is combined with masturbation ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 249

Schmid tells of an imbecile peasant youth who started numerous fires. On one occasion he aroused suspicion by standing in the door of a house with his hands in his trouser pockets, gazing with delight at the conflagration. Later, under examination, he admitted that he always masturbated while enjoying the spectacle of the fires he had started ( “Zu Psychologie der Brandstifter,” p. 80 ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 249

But there was always a tendency to prepare fire in a mysterious ceremonial manner on special occasions just as with ritual eating and drinking and to do it according to prescribed rules from which no one dared to differ ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

This ritual serves to remind us of the original numinosity of fire-making, but apart from that it has no practical significance. The anamnesis of fire-making is on a level with the recollection of the ancestors among primitives and of the gods at a more civilized stage ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

From the psychological point of view the ceremony has the significance of a meaningful institution, inasmuch as it represents a clearly defined procedure for canalizing the libido ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

It has, in fact, the functional value of a paradigm, and its purpose is to show us how we should act when the libido gets blocked. What we call the “blocking of libido” is, for the primitive, a hard and concrete fact: his life ceases to flow, things lose their glamour, plants, animals, and men no longer prosper ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

The ancient Chinese philosophy of the I Ching devised some brilliant images for this state of affairs. Modern man, in the same situation, experiences a standstill (“I am stuck”), a loss of energy and enjoyment (“the zestlibidohas gone out of life”), or a depression ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

One frequently has to tell the patient what is happening to him, for modern man’s powers of introspection leave much to be desired ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

If, even today, the new fire is kindled at Eastertide, it is in commemoration of the redemptive and saving significance of the first fire-boring. In this way man wrested a secret from nature the Promethean theft of fire. He made himself guilty of an unlawful intervention, incorporating a fragment of the age-old unconscious into the darkness of his mind. With this theft he appropriated something precious and offended against the gods ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

Anyone who knows the primitive’s fear of innovations and their unforeseen consequences can imagine the uncertainty and uneasy conscience which such a discovery would arouse ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

This primordial experience finds an echo in the widespread motif of robbery (sun-cattle of Geryon, apples of the Hesperides, herb of immortality). And it is worth remembering that in the cult of Diana at Aricia [Lake Nemi], only he could become her priest who plucked the golden bough from the sacred grove of the goddess ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 250

The pramantha, or instrument of the manthana (fire-sacrifice), is conceived under a purely sexual aspect in India ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 210

The fire-stick being the phallus or man, and the bored wood underneath the vulva or woman ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 210

The fire that results from the boring is the child, the divine son Agni. The two pieces of wood are ritually known as pururavas and urvasi, and, when personified, are thought of as man and woman ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 210

The fire is born from the genitals of the woman. Weber gives the following account of the fire-producing ceremony: ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 210

A sacrificial fire is kindled by rubbing two fire-sticks together ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 210

One of the fire-sticks is taken up with the words: “Thou art the birthplace of fire,” and two blades of grass are placed upon it: “Ye are the two testicles” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 210

The priest then places on them the adhararani (the underlying piece of wood), saying: “Thou art Urvasi,” and anoints the uttararani (uppermost piece) with butter: “Thou art the power” (semen) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 210

This is then placed on the adhararani, with the words: “Thou art Pururavas.” Rubbing them together three times the priest says: “I rub thee with the Gayatrimetrum: I rub thee with the Trishtubhmetrum: I rub thee with the Jagatimetrum” (Weber, Indische Studien, I, p. 197, cited in Kuhn, p. 71 ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 210

The sexual symbolism is unmistakable. We find the same idea and symbolism in a hymn of the Rig-Veda ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 211

These examples, coming from different periods of history and from different peoples, prove the existence of a widespread tendency to equate fire-making with sexuality ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 213

The ceremonial or magical repetition of this age-old discovery shows how persistently the human mind clings to the old forms, and how-deep rooted is the memory of fire-boring ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 213

The finest of all symbols of the libido is the human figure, conceived as a demon or hero. Here the symbolism leaves the objective, material realm of astral and meteorological images and takes on human form, changing into a figure who passes from joy to sorrow, from sorrow to joy, and, like the sun, now stands high at the zenith and now is plunged into darkest night only to rise again in new splendour ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 251

Hence the beautiful name of the sun-hero Gilgamesh, “The Man of Joy and Sorrow,” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 251

Just as the sun, by its own motion and in accordance with its own inner law, climbs from morn till noon, crosses the meridian and goes its downward way towards evening, leaving its radiance behind it, and finally plunges into all-enveloping night, so man sets his course by immutable laws and, his journey over, sinks into darkness to rise again in his children and begin the cycle anew ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 251

The symbolic transition from sun to man is easily made, and the third and last creation of the Miller Fantasies follows this pattern. She calls it “Chiwantopel, A hypnogogic drama” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 251

These, so far as psychological experience is concerned, are the archetypal contents of the (collective) unconscious, the archaic heritage of humanity, the legacy left behind by all differentiation and development and bestowed upon all men like sunlight and air ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 259

But in loving this inheritance men love that which is common to all; they turn back to the mother of humanity, to the psyche, which was before consciousness existed, and in this way they make contact with the source and regain something of that mysterious and irresistible power which comes from the feeling of being part of the whole ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 259

It is the problem of Antaeus, who could only keep his giant strength through contact with mother earth. This temporary withdrawal into oneself seems, within certain limits, to have a favourable effect upon the psychic well-being of the individual ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 259

The concrete reality of religious figures assists the canalization of libido into the equivalent symbols, provided that the worship of them does not get stuck at the outward object ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 259

But even if it does, it at least remains bound to the representative human figure and loses its original primitive form, even though it does not attain the desired symbolic form ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 259

Dreams are full of these theriomorphic representations of libido. Hybrids and monsters, like the one found here, are not at all infrequent. Bertschinger has given us a series of illustrations in which the lower (animal) half in particular is represented theriomorphically. The libido so represented is the “animal” instinct which has got repressed ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 261

It is therefore conceivable that my patient was damaging his instinct precisely through his manifest lack of sexual repression. His fear of my imposing some medical prohibition on him is reflected a little too faithfully in the dream for the latter to be altogether above suspicion ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 261

Dreams which repeat the real situation too emphatically, or insist too plainly in some anticipated reality, are making use of conscious contents as a means of expression ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 261

His dream is really expressing a projection: he projects the killing of the animal on to the doctor. That is the way it appears to him, because he does not know that he himself is injuring his instinct ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 261

The pointed instrument generally means the needle of the intellect, with which insects are pinned down and classified ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 261

He has “modern” ideas about sex, and does not know that he has an unconscious fear of my taking his pet theories away from him. This possibility is rightly feared, for if it were not in him he would hardly have had this dream ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 261

Thus the theriomorphic symbols always refer to unconscious manifestations of libido ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 261

Repression, as we have seen, is not directed solely against sexuality, but against the instincts in general which are the vital foundations, the laws governing all life ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 263

The regression caused by repressing the instincts always leads back to the psychic past, and consequently to the phase of childhood where the decisive factors appear to be, and sometimes actually are, the parents ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 263

But the inborn instincts of the child play a distinct role aside from the parents, as can be seen from the fact that the parents do not exercise a uniform influence on their children, who each react to them in a different way. They [inborn instincts] must, therefore, possess individual determinants ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 263

Yet, to the empty consciousness of the child, it must seem as if all the determining influences came from outside, because children cannot distinguish their own instincts from the influence and will of their parents ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 263

This lack of discrimination in the child makes it possible for the animals which represent the instincts to appear at the same time as attributes of the parents, and for the parents to appear in animal form, the father as a bull, the mother as a cow, and so on ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 263

If the regression goes still further back, beyond the phase of childhood to the preconscious, prenatal stage, then archetypal images appear, no longer connected with the individual’s memories, but belonging to the stock of inherited possibilities of representation that are born anew in every individual ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 264

It is from them [archetypal images] that there arise those images of “divine” beings which are part animal, part human. The guise in which these figures appear depend on the attitude of the conscious mind: if it is negative towards the unconscious, the animals will be frightening: if positive, they appear as the “helpful animals” of fairytale and legend ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 264

It frequently happens that if the attitude towards the parents is too affectionate and too dependent, it is compensated in dreams by frightening animals, who represent the parents just as much as the helpful animals did. The Sphinx is a fear-animal of this kind and still shows clear traces of a mother derivative ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 264

Oedipus, thinking he had overcome the Sphinx sent by the mother-goddess merely because he had solved her childishly simple riddle, fell victim to matriarchal incest and had to marry Jocasta, his mother, for the throne and the hand of the widowed queen belonged to him who freed the land from the plague of the Sphinx. This had all those tragic consequences which could easily have been avoided if only Oedipus had been sufficiently intimidated by the frightening appearance of the terrible' ordevouring’ Mother whom the Sphinx personified ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 264

It is evident that a factor of such magnitude cannot be disposed of by solving a childish riddle. The riddle was, in fact, the trap which the Sphinx laid for the unwary wanderer. Overestimating his intellect in a typically masculine way, Oedipus walked right into it, and all unknowingly committed the crime of incest. The riddle of the Sphinx was herself the terrible mother-imago, which Oedipus would not take as a warning ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 265

Echidna was a monster with the top half of a beautiful maiden, and a hideous serpent below ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 265

This double-being corresponds to the mother-imago: above, the lovely and attractive human half; below, the horrible animal half, changed into a fear-animal by the incest prohibition ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 265

Echidna was born of the All-Mother, Mother Earth, Gaia, who conceived her with Tartarus, the personification of the underworld ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 265

Echidna herself was the mother of all terrors, of the Chimera, Scylla, the Gorgon, of frightful Cerberus, of the Nemean lion, and of the eagle that devoured the liver of Prometheus ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 265

She also gave birth to a number of dragons. One of her sons was Orthrus, the dog of the monster Geryon, who was slain by Heracles. With this dog, her own son, Echidna incestuously begat the Sphinx ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 265

The act of naming is, like baptism, extremely important as regards the creation of personality, for a magical power has been attributed to the name since time immemorial ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 274

To know the secret name of a person is to have power over him. A well-known example of this is the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. In an Egyptian myth, Isis permanently robs the sun-god Ra of his power by compelling him to tell her his real name ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 274

Therefore, to give a name means to give power, to invest with a definite personality or soul. Hence the old custom of giving children the names of saints ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 274

The anal region is very closely connected with veneration. An Oriental fairy-tale relates that the Crusaders used to anoint themselves with the excrement of the Pope in order to make themselves more formidable ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 276

One of my patients, who had a special veneration for her father, had a fantasy in which she saw her father sitting on a commode in a dignified manner, while people filed past greeting him effusively ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 276

We might also mention the intimate connection between excrement and gold: the lowest value allies itself to the highest ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 276

The alchemists sought their prima materia in excrement, one of the arcane substances from which it was hoped that the mystic figure of the filius philosophorum would emerge (“in stercore invenitur”). A very religiously brought-up young patient once dreamt that she saw the Crucifix formed of excrement on the bottom of a blue-flowered chamber-pot ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 276

The contrast is so enormous that one can only assume that the valuations of childhood are totally different from ours. And so, indeed, they are ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 276

Children bring to the act of defecation and its products an interest such as is later evinced only by the hypochondriac ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 276

We can only begin to understand this interest when we realize that the young child connects defecation with a theory of propagation. This puts a somewhat different complexion on the matter. The child thinks: that is how things are produced, how they “come out” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 276

In popular humour excrement is often regarded as a monument or souveniran idea related to anal birth or creation by throwing something behind oneself ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 279

The two-horned derives from an Arabic term referring to the strength of the sun-bull. Alexander is often found on coins with the horns of Jupiter Ammon.This is one of the identifications of the legendary ruler with the spring sun in the sign of the Ram. There can be no doubt that mankind felt a great need to eliminate everything personal and human from its heroes so as to make them equal to the sun, i.e., absolute libido-symbols, through a kind of metastasis ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 283

Dhulqarnein brought his “friend” Khidr to the source of life, that he might drink of immortality. Alexander himself bathed in the stream of life and performed the ritual ablutions ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 288

There are, therefore, two figures who resemble one another but are nevertheless distinct ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 288

The analogous situation in Christianity is the scene by the Jordan, where John leads Christ to the source of life ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 288

Christ, as the baptized, is here the subordinate, while John plays the superior role, as in the case of Dhulqarnein and Khidr, or Khidr and Moses, and Khidr and Elias ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 288

The god, Tages, bore the epithet `the fresh-ploughed boy,’ because, according to legend, he sprang out of a furrow behind a peasant ploughing his fields. This image illustrates the Mondamin motif very clearly; the plough has the well-known phallic meaning, and the furrow, as in India, stands for the woman ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 527

Psychologically this image is a symbolical equivalent of copulation, the son being the edible fruit of the field ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 527

The Etruscan Tages, the boy who sprang from the freshly ploughed furrow, was also a teacher of wisdom. In the Litaolane myth of the Basuto, we are told how a monster devoured all human beings and left only one woman alive, who gave birth to a son, the hero, in a cowshed (instead of a cave). Before she could prepare a bed of straw for the infant, he was already grown up and spoke “words of wisdom” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 291

The rapid growth of the hero, a recurrent motif, seems to indicate that the birth and apparent childhood of the hero are extraordinary because his birth is really a rebirth, for which reason he is able to adapt so quickly to his heroic role ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 291

The journey of Moses with his servant Joshua is a life-journey (it lasted eighty years). They grow old together and lose the life-force, i.e., the fish, which “in wondrous wise took its way to the sea” (setting of the sun) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 291

When the two notice their loss, they discover at the place where the source of life is found (where the dead fish revived and sprang into the sea) Khidr wrapped in his mantle, sitting on the ground ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 291

Where the fish vanished Khidr, the Verdant One, was born as a “son of the watery deep,” his head veiled, proclaiming divine wisdom ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 291

They form a pair of brothers whose characters are revealed by the symbolic position of the torches. Cumont not unjustly connects then with the sepulchral Erotes, who as genies with inverted torches have a traditional meaning. One would stand for death, the other for life ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 294

There are certain points of resemblance between the Mithraic sacrifice (where the bull in the center is flanked on either side by dadophors) and the Christian sacrifice of the lamb (or ram). The Crucified is traditionally flanked by two thieves, one of whom ascends to paradise while the other descends to hell ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 294

The two dadophors are, as Cumont has offshoots from the main figure of Mithras, who was supposed to have a secret triadic character. Dionysius the Areopagite reports that the magicians held a feast in honor of(the threefold Mithras) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 294

As Cumont observes Cautes and Cautopates sometimes carry in their hands the head of a bull and of a scorpion respectively ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 295

Taurus and Scorpio are equinoctial signs, and this is a clear indication that the sacrifice was primarily connected with the sun cycle: the rising sun that sacrifices itself at the summer solstice, and the setting sun. Since it was not easy to represent sunrise and sunset in the sacrificial drama, this idea had to be shown outside it ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 295

We have already pointed out that the Dioscuri represent a similar idea in somewhat different form: one sun is mortal, the other immortal. As this whole solar mythology is psychology projected into the heavens, the underlying idea could probably be paraphrased thus: just as man consists of a mortal and an immortal part, so the sun is a pair of brothers, one of whom is mortal (the setting sun), the other immortal (the ever-renewing sun). Man is mortal, yet there is something immortal in us ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 296

Thus the gods, or figures like Khidr and the Comte de Saint-Germain, are our immortal part which continue intangibly to exist 296

The sun comparison tells us over and over again that the dynamic of the gods is psychic energy. This is our immortality, the link through which man feels inextinguishably one with the continuity of all life. The life of the psyche is the life of mankind. Welling up from the depths of the unconscious, its springs gush forth from the root of the whole human race, since the individual is, biologically speaking, only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 296

Both possibilities are found on a late Babylonian gem from Lajard’s collection. In the middle stands an androgynous deity. On the masculine side there is a snake with a sun halo round its head; on the feminine side another snake with a sickle moon above it ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 297

This picture has a symbolic sexual nuance: on the masculine side there is a lozenge, a favourite symbol of the female genitals, and on the feminine side a wheel without its rim. The spokes are thickened at the ends into knobs, which, like the fingers we mentioned earlier, have a phallic meaning ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 297

It seems to be a phallic wheel such as was not unknown in antiquity. There are obscene gems on which Cupid is shown turning a wheel consisting entirely of phalli. As to what the sun signifies, I discovered in the collection of antiquities at Verona a late Roman inscription ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 297

The symbolism is plain: sun = phallus, moon = vessel (uterus). This interpretation is confirmed by another monument from the same collection. The symbols are the same, except that the vessel has been replaced by the figure of a woman ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 298

Certain symbols on coins can probably be interpreted in a similar manner. In Lajard’s Recherches sur la culte de Vénus there is a coin from Perga, showing Artemis as a conical stone flanked by a masculine figure (alleged to be the deity Men) and a female figure (alleged to be Artemis). Men (otherwise called Lunus) appears on an Attic bas-relief with a spear, flanked by Pan with a club, and a female figure. From this it is clear that sexuality as well as the sun can be used to symbolize the libido ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 298

Sex being one of the most obvious examples of instinctuality, it is sex which is liable to be most affected by these sacrificial measures, i.e., through abstinence ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 299

Just as Attis unmans himself for the sake of his mother, and his effigy was hung on the pine-tree in memory of this deed, so Christ hangs on the tree of life, on the wood of martyrdom, the and mother, and ransoms creation from death ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 671

Attis also wears the pileus [or “Phrygian cap”] like Men, Mithras, and the dadophors ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 29

The hero himself appears as a being of more than human stature. He is distinguished from the very beginning by his godlike characteristics ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 612

Since he is psychologically an archetype of the Self, his divinity only confirms that the Self is numinous, a sort of god, or having some share in the divine nature ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 612

The hero is the protagonist of God’s transformation in man; he corresponds to what I call the “mana personality.” The mana personality has such an immense fascination for the conscious mind that the ego all too easily succumbs to the temptation to identify with the hero, thus bringing on a psychic inflation with all its consequences. For this reason the repugnance felt by certain ecclesiastical circles for the “inner Christ” is understandable enough, at least as a preventive measure against the danger of psychic inflation which threatens the Christian European ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 612

Heroes are usually wanderers, and wandering is a symbol of longing, of the restless urge which never finds its object, of nostalgia for the lost mother. The sun comparison can easily be taken in this sense: the heroes are like the wandering sun, from which it is concluded that the myth of the hero is a solar myth ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 299

It seems to us, rather, that he is first and foremost a self-representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness. But consciousness, continually in danger of being led astray by its own light and of becoming a rootless will o’ the wisp, longs for the healing power of nature, for the deep wells of being and for unconscious communion with life in all its countless forms ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 299

It is not man as such who has to be regenerated or born again as a renewed whole, but, according to the statements of mythology, it is the hero or god who rejuvenates himself. These figures are generally expressed or characterized by libido-symbols (light, fire, sun, etc.), so that it looks as if they represented psychic energy. They are, in fact, personifications of the libido ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 388

The hero is a hero just because he sees resistance to the forbidden goal in all life’s difficulties and yet fights that resistance with the whole-hearted yearning that strives towards the treasure hard to attain, and perhaps unattainable yearning that paralyses and kills the ordinary man ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 510

The hero is an extraordinary being who is inhabited by a daemon, and it is this that makes him a hero. That is why the mythological statements about heroes are so typical and so impersonal ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 536

The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself, new-born from the dark maternal cave of the unconscious where he was stranded by the introversion or regression of libido. Hence the Hindu fire-bringer is called Matarisvan, he who swells in the mother. The hero who clings to the mother is the dragon, and when the hero is reborn from the mother he becomes the conqueror of the dragon) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 580

He [the hero] shares this paradoxical nature with the snake. According to Philo the snake is the most spiritual of all creatures; it is of a fiery nature, and its swiftness is terrible. It has a long life and sloughs off old age with its skin. In actual fact the snake is a cold-blooded creature, unconscious and unrelated. It is both toxic and prophylactic, equally a symbol of the good and bad daemon (the Agathodaimon), of Christ and the devil. Among the Gnostics it was regarded as an emblem of the brain-stem and spinal cord, as is consistent with its predominantly reflex psyche. It is an excellent symbol for the unconscious, perfectly expressing the latter’s sudden and unexpected manifestations, its painful and dangerous intervention in our affairs, and its frightening effects ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 580

Taken purely as a psychologem the hero represents the positive, favourable action of the unconscious, while the dragon is its negative and unfavourable action not birth, but a devouring; not a beneficial and constructive deed, but greedy retention and destruction ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 580

The hero who sets himself the task of renewing the world and conquering death personifies the world-creating power which, brooding on itself in introversion, coiled round its own egg like a snake, threatens life with its poisonous bite, so that the living may die and be born again from the darkness ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 592

The hero is himself the snake, himself the sacrificer and the sacrificed, which is why Christ rightly compares himself with the healing Moses- and why the saviour of the Christian Ophites was a serpent, too. It is both Agathodaimon and Cacodaimon. In German legend we are told that the heroes have snake’s eyes ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 593

It is therefore understandable that the three mother-goddesses, Rhea, Cybele, and Diana, all wear the mural crown. The Old Testament treats the cities of Jerusalem, Babylon, etc. just as if they were women ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 303

The Boeotian city of Thebes founded by Cadmus received on that account the cognomen “Ogygian.” This cognomen was also applied to the great Flood, which was called “Ogygian” because it happened under Ogyges. We shall see later on that this coincidence can hardly be accidental ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306

The fact that the city and the wife of Ogyges both have the same name indicates that there must be some relation between the city and the woman, which is not difficult to understand because the city is identical with the woman ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306

There is a similar idea in Hindu mythology, where Indra appears as the husband of Urvara. But Urvara means the “fertile land.” In the same way the seizure of a country by the king was regarded as his marriage with the land ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306

Similar ideas must also have existed in Europe. Princes at their accession had to guarantee a good harvest. The Swedish king Domaldi was actually killed as a result of failure of the crops. In the Hindu Ramayana, the hero Rama marries Sita, the furrow ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306

To the same circle of ideas belongs the Chinese custom of the emperor’s having to plough a furrow on ascending the throne ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306

The motif of continuous cohabitation is expressed in the well-known lingam symbol found everywhere in Indian temples: the base is a female symbol, and within it stands the phallus (fig. 258.25) . This symbol is rather like the phallic baskets and chests of the Greeks ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306

The chest or casket is a female, i.e., the womb, a common enough conception in the older mythologies. The chest, barrel, or basket with its precious contents was often thought of as floating on the water, thus forming an analogy to the course of the sun. The sun sails over the sea like an immortal god who every evening is immersed in the maternal waters and is born anew in the morning ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306

Another form of the same motif is the Persian idea of the tree of life, which stands in the lake of rain, Vouru-Kasha. The seeds of this tree were mixed with the water and so maintained the fertility of the earth. The Vendidad, says that the waters flow “to the sea Vouru-Kasha, towards the well-watered tree, whereon grow the seeds of my plants of every kind” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 306

It is easy to see what the battle with the sea monster means: it is the attempt to free the ego-consciousness from the deadly grip of the unconscious. The making of a fire in the monster’s belly suggests as much, for it is a piece of apotropaic magic aimed at dispelling the darkness of unconsciousness ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 539

The bird probably signifies the renewed ascent of the sun, the rebirth of the phoenix, and is at the same time one of those “helpful animals” who render supernatural aid during the birth: birds as aerial beings, symbolize spirits or angels ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 538

Divine messengers frequently appear at these mythological births, as can be seen from the use we still make of god-parents ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 538

The sun-symbol of the bird rising from the water is preserved etymologically in the idea of the singing swan. Swan' derives from the root sven, likesun’ and `sound’ ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 538

This ascent signifies rebirth, the bringing forth of life from the mother, and the ultimate conquest of death, which, according to an African Negro myth, came into the world through the carelessness of one old woman: when the season of universal skin-casting came round again (for in those days people renewed themselves by casting their skins like snakes), she was absent-minded enough to put on her old skin instead of the new one, and in consequence died ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 538

The myth often spans a period of three-days. The “three-days” are a stereotyped expression for the “night sea imprisonment” (December 21-24). Christ, too, spent three days in the underworld ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 512

The myth is exemplified in the battle of Hiawatha with Mishe-Nahma, the fish-king.Mishe-Nahma is a monster fish who lives at the bottom of the waters. Challenged to battle by Hiawatha, he swallows the hero together with his boat 537

Just as Hera, in her role of the pursuing mother, is the real source of the mighty deeds performed by Heracles, so Nokomis allows Hiawatha no rest, but piles up new difficulties in his path, hazardous adventures in which the hero may be victorious, but may also meet with his death ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 540

Man with his consciousness is always a long way behind the goals of the unconscious; unless his libido calls him forth to new dangers he sinks into slothful inactivity, or in the prime of life he is overcome with longing for the past and is paralysed ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 540

A Polynesian myth tells how the hero, in the belly of Kombili, the King Fish, seized his obsidian knife and cut open the fish’s belly. “He slipped out and beheld a splendour. Then he sat down and began to think. `I wonder where I am?’ he said to himself” ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 311

In the light of these ideas we can understand the mythological statements about Ogyges: it is he who possesses the mother, the city, and is thus united with the mother; therefore under him came the great flood, for it is typical of the sun myth that the hero, once he is united with the woman “hard to attain,” is exposed in a cask and thrown out to sea, and then lands on a distant shore to begin a new life ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 312

The middle section, the night sea journey in the ark, is lacking in the Ogyges tradition. But the rule in mythology is that the typical parts of a myth can be fitted together in every conceivable variation, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to interpret one myth without a knowledge of all the others ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para312

The meaning of this cycle of myths is clear enough: it is the longing to attain rebirth through a return to the womb, and to become immortal like the sun. This longing for the mother is amply expressed in the literature of the Bible ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 312

The symbol-creating process substitutes for the mother the city, the well, the cave, the Church, etc. This substitution is due to the fact that the regression of libido reactivates the ways and habits of childhood, and above all the relation to the mother; but what was natural and useful to the child is a psychic danger for the adult, and this is expressed by the symbol of incest ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 313

Because the incest taboo opposes the libido and blocks the path to regression, it is possible for the libido to be canalized into the mother analogies thrown up by the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 313

In that way the libido becomes progressive again, and even attains a level of consciousness higher than before ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 313

The meaning and purpose of this canalization are particularly evident when the city appears in place of the mother: the infantile attachment (whether primary or secondary) is a crippling limitation for the adult, whereas attachment to the city fosters his civic virtues and at least enables him to lead a useful existence ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 313

In primitives the tribe takes the place of the city ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 313

The birds are soul-images, by which are meant the souls of the damned and evil spirits. Thus the mother becomes the underworld, the City of the Damned ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 315

In this primordial image of the woman on the dragon we recognize Echidna, the mother of every hellish horror ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 315

Babylon is the symbol of the Terrible Mother, who leads the peoples into whoredom with her devilish temptations and makes them drunk with her wine. Here the intoxicating drink is closely associated with fornication, for it too is a libido symbol, as we have already seen in the soma-fire-sun parallel ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 31

From water comes life; hence, of the two deities who here interest us most, Christ and Mithras, the latter is represented as having been born beside a river, while Christ experienced his “rebirth” in the Jordan ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 319

Christ, moreover, was born of the, the sempiternal fons amoris or Mother of God, whom pagan-Christian legend turned into a nymph of the spring ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 319

The spring is also found in Mithraism. A Pannonian dedication reads “Fonti perenni.” An inscription from Apulum is dedicated to the “Fons aeternus.” In Persian, Ardvisura is the fount of the water of life ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 319

Ardvisura-Anahita is a goddess of water and love (just as Aphrodite is the “foam-born”) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 319

In the Vedas, the waters are called matritamah, `most maternal.’ All living things rise, like the sun, from water, and sink into it again at evening ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 319

Born of springs, rivers, lakes, and seas, man at death comes to the waters of the Styx, and there embarks on the “night sea journey.” Those black waters of death are the water of life, for death with its cold embrace is the maternal womb, just as the sea devours the sun but brings it forth again ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 319

The projection of the mother-imago upon water endows the water with a number of numinous or magical qualities peculiar to the mother. A good example of this is the baptismal water symbolism in the Church ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 320

The maternal aspect of water coincides with the nature of the unconscious, because the unconscious (particularly in men) can be regarded as the mother or matrix of consciousness ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 320

Numerous myths say that human beings came from trees, and many of them tell how the hero was enclosed in the maternal tree-trunk, like the dead Osiris in the cedar-tree, Adonis in the myrtle, ecocar Jung, CW 5, Para 321

Hence when Attis castrates himself under a pine-tree, he did so because the tree has a maternal significance ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 321

Not only the gods, but the goddesses, too, are libido-symbols, when regarded from the point of view of their dynamism. The libido expresses itself in images of sun, light, fire, sex, fertility, and growth ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 324

In this way the goddesses, as we have seen, come to possess phallic symbols, even though the latter are essentially masculine. One of the main reasons for this is that, just as the female lies hidden in the male (fig. 258.29) , so the male lies hidden in the female ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 324

The feminine quality of the tree that represents the goddesses contaminated with the phallic symbolism, as is evident from the genealogical tree that grows out of Adam’s body. In my Psychology and Alchemy I have reproduced, from a manuscript in Florence, a picture of Adam showing the membrum virile as a tree Thus the tree has a bisexual character, as is also suggested by the fact that in Latin the names of trees have masculine endings and feminine gender ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 324

She was in a garden, where she found an exotic-looking tree with strange red fleshy flowers or fruits. She picked and ate them. Then, to her horror, she felt that she was poisoned ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 325

It is the tree of libido, which here represents the feminine as well as the masculine side, because it simply expresses the relationship of the two to one another ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 326

The various meanings of the treesun, tree of Paradise, mother, phallus are explained by the fact that it is a libido-symbol and not an allegory of this or that concrete object. Thus a phallic symbol does not denote the sexual organ, but the libido, and however clearly it appears as such, it does not mean itself but is always a symbol of the libido ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 329

Symbols are not signs or allegories for something known; they seek rather to express something that is little known or completely unknown. The tertium comparationis [the `third for comparison’] for all these symbols is the libido, and the unity of meaning lies in the fact that they are all analogies of the same thing. In this realm the fixed meaning of things comes to an end ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 329

The sole reality is the libido, whose nature we can only experience through its effect on us. Thus, it is not the mother who is symbolized, but the libido of the son, whose object was once the mother ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 329

We take mythological symbols much too concretely and are puzzled at every turn by the endless contradictions of myths. But we always forget that it is the conscious creative force which wraps itself in images ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 329

When, therefore, we read: “His mother was a wicked witch,” we must translate it as: the son is unable to detach his libido from the mother-imago, he suffers from resistances because he is tied to the mother ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 329

One of the simplest ways would be to impregnate the mother and beget oneself in identical form all over again. But here the incest prohibition intervenes; consequently the sun myths and rebirth myths devise every conceivable kind of mother-analogy for the purpose of canalizing the libido into new forms and effectively preventing it from regressing to actual incest ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 332

The effect of the incest-taboo and of the attempts at canalization is to stimulate the creative imagination, which gradually opens up possible avenues for the self-realization of libido. In this way the libido becomes imperceptibly spiritualized ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 332

The power which “always desires evil” thus creates spiritual life. That is why the religions exalt this procedure into a system. It is instructive to see the pains they take to further the translation into symbols ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 332

To the above, I would add that it is hardly possible to restrict this impulse to sexuality. It is primarily a question of primitive instinctuality, of insufficiently differentiated libido which prefers to take a sexual form. Sexuality is by no means the only form of the “full feeling of life.” There are some passions that cannot be derived from sex ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 332

(q)

It is not possible to discuss the problem of symbol-formation without reference to the instinctual processes, because it is from them that the symbol derives its motive power. It has no meaning whatever unless it strives against the resistance of instinct, just as undisciplined instincts would bring nothing but ruin to man if the symbol does not give them form ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 338

Vollers compares Khidr and Elias on the one hand with Gilgamesh and his primitive brother Eabani or Enkidu, and on the other hand with the Dioscuri, one of whom was mortal and the other immortal (Vollers, “Chidher,” pp. 234-84 ) ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 288