Carl Jung: CW 9ii “Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self – Quotations

With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

To Pierre d’Ailly the time of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) had already seemed significant. About the year 1189, he says, the revolutions of Saturn were once again completed (“complete anno Christi 1189 vel circiter”). He complains that the Pope had condemned a treatise of Abbot Joachim, and also the heretical doctrine of Almaricus. CW 9ii, Para 138

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason-in the realm of dogma he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where you make the mistake, for then you can do something about it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 424

The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 123.

Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention man would have been lost. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114

Psychology is an empirical science and deals with realities. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para . 98

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii. Para 17

Man knows only a small part of his psyche, just as he has only a very limited knowledge of the physiology of his body. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 253

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 429

Yahweh and Allah are unreflected God-images, whereas in the Clementine Homilies there is a psychological and reflective spirit at work. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 54n.

We need to find our way back to the original, living spirit which, because of its ambivalence, is also a mediator and uniter of opposites, an idea that preoccupied the alchemists for many centuries. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 141

For alchemy is the mother of the essential substance as well as the concreteness of modern scientific thinking, and not scholasticism, which was responsible in the main only for the discipline and training of the intellect. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 266.

The anima and animus have tremendous influence because we leave the shadow to them. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 53.

The splitting of the Original Man into husband and wife expresses an act of nascent consciousness; it gives birth to the pair of opposites, thereby making consciousness possible. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 320

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 43.

We can act differently, if we want to. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114.

The anima also has affinities with animals, which symbolize her characteristics. Thus she can appear as a snake or a tiger or a bird. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 358.
Animals generally signify the instinctive forces of the unconscious, which are brought into unity within the mandala. This integration of the instincts is a prerequisite for individuation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 660.

If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 423.

The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 191-192.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; Para 429.

All I have written is correct. . . . I only realize its full reality now ~Carl Jung; Jung His Life and Work; Page 279.

This primary substance [the chaos] is round (massa globosa, rotundum), like the world and the world-soul; it is in fact the world-soul and the world-substance in one. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 II: §376

[Uniting symbols] arise from the collision between the conscious and the unconscious and from the confusion which this causes (known in alchemy as ‘chaos’ or ‘nigredo’). Empirically, this confusion takes the form of restlessness and disorientation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 II, §304.

Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one . . . [is] singularly incapable of moral judgment. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii, par. 15.

This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 21

Emotion is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 15

The ego is the subject of all successful attempts at adaptation so far as these are achieved by the will. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; para 11

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 14

“Redemption” does not mean that a burden is taken from one’s shoulders which one was never meant to bear. Only the “complete” person knows how unbearable man is to himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 125

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. ~Carl Jung, CW 9 ii, Para 17

The final factors at work in us are nothing other than those talents which “a certain nobleman” entrusted to his “servants,” that they might trade with them (Luke 19:12 ff.). It does not require much imagination to see what this involvement in the ways of the world means in the moral sense. Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious s/he is, the more the devil drives her/him. . . . Only ruthless self-knowledge o the widest scale, which sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives of human action, offers some guarantee that the end result will not turn out too badly ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 255.

It is of the greatest importance that the ego should be anchored in the world of consciousness and that consciousness should be reinforced by a very precise adaptation. For this, certain virtues like attention, consciousness, patience, etc., are of the greatest value on the moral side, just as accurate observation of the symptomatology of the unconscious and objective self-criticism are valuable on the intellectual side. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 46.

Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the soul and not to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 50.

We can certainly hand it to Augustine that all natures are good, yet just not good enough to prevent their badness from being equally obvious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 95

Fishing is an intuitive attempt to “catch” unconscious contents (fishes). ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 137.

The causal factors determining his psychic existence reside largely in unconscious processes outside consciousness, and in the same way there are final factors at work in him which likewise originate in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 253

Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97

Sooner or later nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together as both of them, independently of one another and from opposite directions, push forward into transcendental territory, the one with the concept of the atom, the other with that of the archetype. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 412

In order to give our judgment.. on the character of wholeness, we must supplement our time-conditioned thinking by the principle of correspondence [between outer and inner events], or as I have called it, synchronicity.” C.G. Jung, Aion, para 409

No amount of insight into the relativity and fallibility of our moral judgment can deliver us from these defects, and those who deem themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of mankind, because they are twisted with the pain and fear of their own sickness. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Para 97

This subjective knowledge of the self [is what is meant by]: “No one can know himself unless he knows what, and not who, he is, on what he depends, or whose he is (or to whom or what he belongs) and for what end he was made.” This distinction . . . is crucial. . . . Not the subjective ego-consciousness of the psyche is meant, but the psyche itself as the unknown, unprejudiced object that still has to be investigated. . . . “What” refers to the neutral self, the objective fact of totality, since the ego is on the one hand causally “dependent on” or “belongs to” it, and on the other hand is directed toward it as to a goal ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 252.

Only with Christ did the devil enter the world as the real counterpart of God, and in early Jewish-Christian circles Satan was regarded as Christ’s elder brother. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 113

The shadow, the syzygy, and the Self are psychic factors of which an adequate picture can be formed only on the basis of a fairly thorough experience of them. Just as these concepts arose out of an experience of reality, so they can be elucidated only by further experience ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 63.

We know only a small part of our psyches. The causal factors determining [one’s] psychic existence reside largely in the unconscious processes outside consciousness , and in the same way there are final factors at work in [one] that likewise originate in the unconscious. . . . Causes and ends thus transcend consciousness to a degree that ought not to be underestimated, and this implies that their nature and action are unalterable and irreversible [to the degree that] they have not become objects of consciousness. They can only be corrected through conscious insight and moral determination, which is why self-knowledge, being so necessary, is feared so much ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 253.

Although its bases are in themselves relatively unknown and unconscious, the ego is a conscious factor par excellence. It is even acquired, empirically speaking, during the individual’s lifetime. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 5.

It [The Ego] seems to arise in the first place from the collision between the somatic factor and the environment, and, once established as a subject, it goes on developing from further collisions with the outer world and the inner. ~Carl Jung, Aion, Page 5.

Through the Christ crucified between the two thieves, man gradually attained knowledge of his shadow and its duality. This duality had already been anticipated by the double meaning of the serpent. Just as the serpent stands for the power that heals as well as corrupts, so one of the thieves is destined upwards, the other downwards, and so likewise the shadow is on one side regrettable and reprehensible weakness, on the other side healthy instinctively and the prerequisite for higher consciousness. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 255; Para 402.

Today humanity, as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 126

Who are we to imagine that “it couldn’t happen here”? We have only to multiply the population of Switzerland by twenty to become a nation of eighty millions, and our public intelligence and morality would then be automatically divided by twenty in consequence of the devastating moral and psychic effects of living together in huge masses. Such a state of things provides the basis for collective crime, and it is then really a miracle if the crime is not committed …. It has filled us with horror to realize all that man is capable of, and of which, therefore, we too are capable. Since then a terrible doubt about humanity, and about ourselves, gnaws at our hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 412

Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences? Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because we had a religious formula for everything psychic — and one that is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate experience. Though the Christian view of the world has paled for many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the passion for show and new clothes. What is more, these images — are they Christian or Buddhist or what you will — are lovely, mysterious, and richly intuitive. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 7-8.

The fact that individual consciousness means separation and opposition is something that man has experienced countless times. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 282

As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 29

Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions. Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity. Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam. . . . And on top of this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature’s business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 35

When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 90

Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya—and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 24

The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down. Instead, dogma is “believed”; it is hypostatized, as the Protestants hypostatize the Bible, illegitimately making it the supreme authority, regardless of its contradictions and controversial interpretations. (As we know, anything can be authorized out of the Bible.) Dogma no longer formulates anything, no longer expresses anything; it has become a tenet to be accepted in and for itself, with no basis in any experience that would demonstrate its truth. Indeed, faith has itself become that experience. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 276

Myths are miracle tales and treat of all those things which, very often, are also objects of belief. In the everyday world of consciousness such things hardly exist; that is to say, until 1933 only lunatics would have been found in possession of living fragments of mythology. After this date the world of heroes and monsters spread like a devastating fire over whole nations, proving that the strange world of myth had suffered no loss of vitality during the centuries of reason and enlightenment. If metaphysical ideas no longer have such a fascinating effect as before, this is certainly not due to any lack of primitivity in the European psyche, but simply and solely to the fact that the erstwhile symbols no longer express what is now welling up from the unconscious as the end-result of the development of Christian consciousness through the centuries. This end result is a true antimimon pneuma, a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, woolly-mindedness, criminal amorality, and doctrinaire fanaticism, a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods, spurious art, philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug, fit only to be fed wholesale to the mass man of today. That is what the post-Christian spirit looks like. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 6

Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapeutic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 14

Closer examination of the dark characteristics that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality 1~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 5

To become conscious of the shadow involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 14

Emotion, incidentally, is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 15

On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral judgment 1~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 15

Although, with insight and good will, the shadow can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 16

While some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without too much difficulty as one’s own personal qualities, in this case both insight and good will are unavailing because the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person. No matter how obvious it may be to the neutral observer that it is a matter of projections, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself. He must be convinced that he throws a very long shadow before he is willing to withdraw his emotionally-toned projections from their object ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 16

let us suppose that a certain individual shows no inclination whatever to recognize his projections. The projection-making factor then has a free hand and can realize its object if it has one or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power. As we know, it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 17

The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 17

The resultant sentiment d’incomplétude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions. A forty-five-year-old patient who had suffered from a compulsion neurosis since he was twenty and had become completely cut off from the world once said to me: “But I can never admit to myself that I’ve wasted the best twenty-five years of my life!” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 17

With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 19

What, then, is this projection-making factor? The East calls it the “Spinning Woman “Maya, who creates illusion by her dancing. Had we not long since known it from the symbolism of dreams, this hint from the Orient would put us on the right track: the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element points unmistakably to the mother, that is, to the son’s relation to the real mother, to her imago, and to the woman who is to become a mother for him ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 20

His Eros is passive like a child’s; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him. No wonder the real world vanishes from sight! ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 20

If this situation is dramatized, as the unconscious usually dramatizes it, then there appears before you on the psychological stage a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold cruel world which denies him understanding ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 21

Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying. You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 21

Where does the guilt lie? With the mother, or with the son? Probably with both. The unsatisfied longing of the son for life and the world ought to be taken seriously. There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world. But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift from the mother ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 22

The fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force. It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 22

For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother and undergoing the pain of relinquishing the first love of his life. The mother, foreseeing this danger, has carefully inculcated into him the virtues of faithfulness, devotion, loyalty, so as to protect him from the moral disruption which is the risk of every life adventure ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 22

He has learnt these lessons only too well and remains true to his mother. This naturally causes her the deepest anxiety (when, to her greater glory, he turns out to be a homosexual, for example) and at the same time affords her an unconscious satisfaction that is positively mythological ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 22

For, in the relationship now reigning between them, there is consummated the immemorial and most sacred archetype of the marriage of mother and son. What, after all, has commonplace reality to offer, with its registry offices, pay envelopes, and monthly rent, that could outweigh the mystic awe of the hierosgamos? Or the star-crowned woman whom the dragon pursues, or the pious obscurities veiling the marriage of the Lamb? ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 22

This myth, better than any other, illustrates the nature of the collective unconscious. At this level the mother is both old and young, Demeter and Persephone, and the son is spouse and sleeping suckling rolled into one. The imperfections of real life, with its laborious adaptations and manifold disappointments, naturally cannot compete with such a state of indescribable fulfilment ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 23

The real moral problems spring from conflicts of duty. Anyone who is sufficiently humble, or easy-going, can always reach a decision with the help of some outside authority ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 48

But one who trusts others as little as himself can never reach a decision at all, unless it is brought about in the manner which Common Law calls an “Act of God.” The Oxford Dictionary defines this concept as the “action of uncontrollable natural forces” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 48

In all such cases there is an unconscious authority which puts an end to doubt by creating a fait accompli. (In the last analysis this is true also of those who get their decision from an external authority, only in more veiled form) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 48

One can describe this authority either as the “will of God” or as an “action of uncontrollable natural forces,” though psychologically it makes a good deal of difference how one thinks of it ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 48

The rationalistic interpretation of this inner authority as “natural forces” or the instincts satisfies the modern intellect but has the great disadvantage that the apparent victory of instinct offends our moral self-esteem; hence we like to persuade ourselves that the matter has been decided solely by the rational motions of the will ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 48

Civilized man has such a fear of the “crimen laesae maiestatis humanae” [crime of high treason] that whenever possible he indulges in a retrospective coloration of the facts in order to cover up the feeling of having suffered a moral defeat. He prides himself on what he believes to be his self-control and the omnipotence of his will and despises the man who lets himself be outwitted by mere nature ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 48

But the psychic phenomenon cannot be grasped in its totality by the intellect, for it consists not only of meaning but also of value, and this depends on the intensity of the accompanying feeling-tones. Hence at least the two “rational” functions [thinking and feeling] are needed in order to map out anything like a complete diagram of a given psychic content ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 52

If, therefore, in dealing with psychic contents one makes allowance not only for intellectual judgments but for value judgments as well, not only is the result a more complete picture of the content in question, but one also gets a better idea of the particular position it holds in the hierarchy of psychic contents in general ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 53

The feeling-value is a very important criterion which psychology cannot do without, because it determines in large measure the role which the content will play in the psychic economy. That is to say, the affective value gives the measure of the intensity of an idea, and the intensity in its turn expresses that idea’s energic tension, its effective potential ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 53

The shadow, for instance, usually has a decidedly negative feeling-value, while the anima, like the animus, has more of a positive one. Whereas the shadow is accompanied by more or less definite and describable feeling-tones, the anima and animus exhibit feeling qualities that are harder to define. Mostly they are felt to be fascinating or numinous. Often they are surrounded by an atmosphere of sensitivity, touchy reserve, secretiveness, painful intimacy, and even absoluteness. The relative autonomy of the anima- and animus-figures expresses itself in these qualities ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 53

I am speaking here of the subjective feeling-value, which is subject to the more or less periodic changes described above. But there are also objective values which are founded on a consensus omniummoral, aesthetic, and religious values, for instance, and these are universally recognized ideals or feeling-toned collective ideas (Lévy-Bruhl’s “représentations collectives”) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 54

Collective ideals often have no subjective feeling-tone, but nevertheless retain their feeling-value. This value, therefore, cannot be demonstrated by subjective symptoms, though it may be by the attributes attaching to these collective ideas and by their characteristic symbolism, quite apart from their suggestive effect ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 54

The problem has a practical aspect, since it may easily happen that a collective idea, though significant in itself, is because of its lack of subjective feeling-tone represented in a dream only by a subsidiary attribute, as when a god is represented by his theriomorphic attribute, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 55

The first case we mentioned, where the collective idea is represented in a dream by a lowly aspect of itself, is certainly the more frequent: the “goddess” appears as a black cat, and the Deity as the lapis exilis (stone of no worth) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 57

This knowledge is an essential prerequisite for any integration that is to say a content can only be integrated when its double aspect has become conscious and when it is grasped not merely intellectually but understood according to its feeling-value 5~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 8

Intellect and feeling, however, are difficult to put into one harness they conflict with one another by definition. Whoever identifies with an intellectual standpoint will occasionally find his feeling confronting him like an enemy in the guise of the anima; conversely, an intellectual animus will make violent attacks on the feeling standpoint. Therefore, anyone who wants to achieve the difficult feat of realizing something not only intellectually, but also according to its feeling-value, must for better or worse come to grips with the anima / animus problem in order to open the way for a higher union, a coniunctio oppositorum. This is an indispensable prerequisite for wholeness ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 58

Finally the Self, on account of its empirical peculiarities, proves to be the eidos behind the supreme ideas of unity and totality that are inherent in all monotheistic and monistic systems ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 64

I regard these parallels [of Self, shadow, anima, animus] as important because it is possible, through them, to relate so-called metaphysical concepts, which have lost their root connection with natural experience, to living, universal psychic processes, so that they can recover their true and original meaning. In this way the connection is re-established between the ego and projected contents now formulated as “metaphysical” ideas ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 65

Unfortunately, as already said, the fact that metaphysical ideas exist and are believed in does nothing to prove the actual existence of their content or of the object they refer to, although the coincidence of idea and reality in the form of a special psychic state, a state of grace, should not be deemed impossible, even if the subject cannot bring it about by an act of will ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 65

One clings to possessions that have once meant wealth; and the more ineffective, incomprehensible, and lifeless they become the more obstinately people cling to them. (Naturally it is only sterile ideas that they cling to; living ideas have content and riches enough, so there is no need to cling to them.) Thus in the course of time the meaningful turns into the meaningless. This is unfortunately the fate of metaphysical ideas ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii,

“Good” is what seems suitable, acceptable, or valuable from a certain point of view; evil is its opposite. If the things we call good are “really” good, then there must be evil things that are “real” too ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97

It is evident that psychology is concerned with a more or less subjective judgment, i.e., with a psychic antithesis that cannot be avoided in naming value relationships: “good” denotes something that is not bad, and “bad” something that is not good ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97

There are things which from a certain point of view are extremely evil, that is to say dangerous. There are also things in human nature which are very dangerous and which therefore seem proportionately evil to anyone standing in their line of fire ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97

It is pointless to gloss over these evil things, because that only lulls one into a sense of false security. Human nature is capable of an infinite amount of evil, and the evil deeds are as real as the good ones so far as human experience goes and so far as the psyche judges and differentiates between them ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97

Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. Inside the psychological realm one honestly does not know which of them predominates in the world. We hope, merely, that good does i.e., what seems suitable to us ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97

Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 98

Psychology is an empirical science and deals with realities. As a psychologist, therefore, I have neither the inclination nor the competence to mix myself up with metaphysics. Only, I have to get polemical when metaphysics encroaches on experience and interprets it in a way that is not justified empirically. My criticism of the privatio boni holds only so far as psychological experience goes. From the scientific point of view the privatio boni, as must be apparent to everyone, is founded on a petitio principii, where what invariably comes out at the end is what you put in at the beginning. Arguments of this kind have no power of conviction. But the fact that such arguments are not only used but are undoubtedly believed is something that cannot be disposed of so easily ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 98

It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to “good,” and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable. So if Christian metaphysics clings to the privatio boni, it is giving expression to the tendency always to increase the good and diminish the bad. The privatio boni may therefore be a metaphysical truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience white and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 98

This elementary fact was correctly appreciated in the so-called Clementine Homilies, a collection of Gnostic-Christian writings dating from about A.D. 150. The unknown author understands good and evil as the right and left hand of God and views the whole of creation in terms of syzygies, or pairs of opposites ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 99

In much the same way the follower of Bardesanes, Marinus, sees good as “light” and pertaining to the right hand, and evil as “dark” and pertaining to the left hand. The left also corresponds to the feminine ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 99

Provided that one has an oomorphic God-image and every God-image is anthropomorphic in a more or less subtle way the logic and naturalness of Clement’s view can hardly be contested. At all events this view, which may be some two hundred years older than the quotations given above, proves that the reality of evil does not necessarily lead to Manichaean dualism and so does not endanger the unity of the God-image ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 99

As a matter of fact, it guarantees that unity on a plane beyond the crucial difference between the Yahwistic and the Christian points of view. Yahweh is notoriously unjust, and injustice is not good. The God of Christianity, on the other hand, is only good. There is no denying that Clement’s theology helps us to get over this contradiction in a way that fits the psychological facts ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 99

To offset this, early Christianity, with unerring logic, balanced Christ against an Antichrist. For how can you speak of “high” if there is no “low,” or “right” if there is no “left,” of “good” if there is no “bad,” and the one is as real as the other? ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 113

The dreamer was watching a Passion play in the theatre. On the way to Golgotha, the actor taking the part of the Saviour suddenly changed into a snake or crocodile ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 130

It is the navel of the world and at the same time hell. Bernard of Clairvaux apostrophizes Lucifer thus: “And dost thou strive perversely towards the north? The more thou dost hasten toward the heights, the more speedily shalt thou go down to thy setting” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 192

Here the dreamer awoke with a violent emotion: he decided there and then to study science, and he kept to this decision. I must emphasize that the dreamer was not under any psychological influence that might have suggested such an interpretation. The conclusion he drew from the dream was undoubtedly the right one, but it does not by any means exhaust the meaning of the symbol. The dream is archetypal a “big” dream ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 208

The wood that grows dusky and turns into a primeval forest means entry into the unconscious. The round pool with the jelly-fish in it represents a three-dimensional mandala, the Self: wholeness as the goal to which the “archetic appetite” points, the magnetic north which gives the traveller his bearings on the “sea of the world” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 208

His other synonym is Mercurius, whose heart is to be found at the Pole, and who guides men on their perilous voyage over the sea of the world ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 209

But the same note is struck by Meister Eckhart when he says that, on returning to his true Self, he enters an abyss “deeper than hell itself.” Scurrilous as it is, the alchemical idea cannot be denied a certain grandeur. What is particularly interesting, psychologically, is the nature of the image: it is the projection of an archetypal pattern of order, the mandala, which represents the idea of totality ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 209

(The centering of the image on hell, which at the same time is God, is grounded on the experience that highest and lowest both come from the depths of the soul, and either bring the frail vessel of consciousness to shipwreck or carry it safely to port, with little or no assistance from us. The experience of this “centre” is therefore a numinous one in its own right ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 209

Echeneis remora, is the common remora or sucking-fish. It belongs to the mackerel family, and is distinguished by a large, flat, oval-shaped sucker on the top of the head in place of the dorsal fin ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 217

By means of this it attaches itself either to a larger fish or to a ship’s bottom and in this wise is transported about the world ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 217

The alchemical fish symbol, the Echeneis, clearly derives from Pliny. But fishes also crop up in the writings of Sir George Ripley. What is more, they appear in their “messianic” role: together with the birds, they bring the Stone, just as in the Oxyrhynchus sayings of Jesus it is the “fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea and whatsoever is upon or beneath the earth” that point the way to the kingdom of heaven (motif of the “helpful animals”) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 224

In Lambspringk’s symbols the zodiacal fishes that move in opposite directions symbolize the arcane substance ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 224

All this theriomorphism is simply a visualization of the unconscious Self manifesting itself through “animal” impulses. Some of these can be attributed to known instincts, but for the most part they consist of feelings of certainty, beliefs, compulsions, idiosyncrasies, and phobias that may run directly counter to the so-called biological instincts without necessarily being pathological on that account ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 224

Wholeness is perforce paradoxical in its manifestations, and the two fishes going in the opposite directions, or the co-operation of birds and fishes, are an instructive illustration of this ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 224

The arcane substance, as its attributes show, refers to the Self, and so, in the Oxyrhynchus sayings, does the “kingdom of heaven” or the conjectural “city” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 224

The Echeneis exercises an attraction on ships that could best be compared with the influence of a magnet on iron. The attraction, so the historical tradition says, emanates from the fish and brings the vessel, whether powered by sail or oarsmen, to a standstill ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 239

I mention this seemingly unimportant feature because, as we shall see, in the alchemical view the attraction no longer proceeds from the fish but from a magnet which man possesses and which exerts the attraction that was once the mysterious property of the fish ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 239

If we bear in mind the significance of the fish, it is easy to understand why a powerful attraction should emanate from this arcane centre, which might aptly be compared with the magnetism of the North Pole. As we shall see in a later chapter, the Gnostics said the same thing about the magnetic effect of their central figure (point, monad, son, etc.) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 239

It is therefore a remarkable innovation when the alchemists set out to manipulate an instrument that would exert the same powers as the Echeneis, but on the Echeneis itself ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 239

This reversal of direction is important for the psychology of alchemy because it offers a parallel to the adept’s claim to be able to produce the filius macrocosmi, the equivalent of Christ Deo concedente through his art. In this way the artifex [alchemical artificer] or his instrument comes to replace the Echeneis and everything it stood for as the arcane substance. He has, so to speak, inveigled the secret out of the fish and seeks to draw the arcane substance to the surface in order to prepare from it the filius philosophorum, the lapis ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 239

The case in question is that of a young woman who had uncommonly lively and plastic dreams. She was very much under the influence of her father, who had a materialistic outlook and was not happily married. She shut herself off from these unfavourable surroundings by developing, at a very early age, an intense inner life of her own ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 236

The motif of the first coinciding with the fourth was expressed long ago in the axiom of Maria: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of third comes the One as the fourth” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 237

The dream sums up in condensed form the whole symbolism of the individuation process in a person who was totally unacquainted with the literature of the subject. Cases of this kind are by no means rare and ought to make us think. They demonstrate the existence of an unconscious “knowledge” of the individuation process and its historical symbolism ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 238

The content of this secret teaching is the real arcanum of alchemy: the discovery or production of the prima materia ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 240

The “doctrine” or “theory” is personified or rather, concretized as “Mercurius non vulgi,” the philosophical mercury. This conception is as ambiguous as the antique Hermes; sometimes Mercurius is a substance like quicksilver, sometimes it is a philosophy ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 240

Concerning the prima materia the adepts talk a great deal but say very little so little that in most cases one can form no conception of it whatever. This attitude is proof of serious intellectual difficulties understandably so, because in the first place no such material existed from which the lapis could be prepared, nor did anyone ever succeed in making a lapis that would have come up to expectations ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 240

Secondly, the names given to the prima materia show that it was not a definite substance at all, but rather an intuitive concept for an initial psychic situation, symbolized by such terms as water of life, cloud, heaven, shadow, sea, mother, moon, dragon, Venus, chaos, massa confusa, Microcosmos, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 240

First, those which refer to the extrapsychic chemical substance or its metaphysical equivalent, e.g., serpens mercurialis, spiritus, anima mundi, veritas, sapientia, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 246

Second, those denoting the chemical preparations produced by the adept, such as solvents (aqua, acetum, lac virginis) or their “philosophical” equivalent, the theoria or Scientia, which, when it is “right,” has miraculous effects on matter, as Dorn explains in his philosophical treatises ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 246

These two categories continually overlap: sometimes the arcane substance is apparently nothing but a chemical body, sometimes an idea, which today we would call a psychic content ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 247

the secret of the magnet’s effect lies in a salt prepared by the adept. Whenever an alchemist speaks of “salt,” he does not mean sodium chloride or any other salt, or only in a very limited sense. He could not get away from its symbolic significance, and therefore includes the sal sapientiae in the chemical substance ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 247

That is the salt hidden in the magnet and prepared by the adept on the one hand, a product of his art; on the other, already present in nature. This contradiction can be resolved very easily by taking it simply as the projection of a psychic content ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 247

But such knowledge has nothing to do with the ego’s subjective knowledge of itself. That is a dog chasing its own tail. The other, on the contrary, is a difficult and morally exacting study of which so-called psychology knows nothing and the educated public very little ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 251

The alchemist, however, had at the very least an indirect inkling of it: he knew definitely that as part of the whole he had an image of the whole in himself, of the “firmament” or “Olympus,” as Paracelsus calls it ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 251

An idea that reached its full development 200 years later in Leibniz’ monadology, and then fell into complete oblivion for another 200 years owing to the rise of the scientific trinity space, time, causality. Herbert Silberer, who was also interested in alchemy, says: “I would almost prefer to surrender entirely to picture-language, and to call the deepest subconsciousness our internal heaven of fixed stars” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 251

This interior microcosm was the unwitting object of alchemical research. Today we would call it the collective unconscious, and we would describe it as “objective” because it is identical in all individuals and is therefore one. Out of this universal One there is produced in every individual a subjective consciousness, i.e., the ego. This is, roughly, how we today would understand Dorn’s “formerly one” and “separated by a divine act of creation” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 251

It does not require much imagination to see what this involvement in the ways of the world means in the moral sense. Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious he is, the more the devil drives him ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 255

It is just because of [the outer unconsciousness of evil and] this inner connection with the black side of things that it is so incredibly easy for the mass man to commit the most appalling crimes without thinking 255

Only ruthless self-knowledge on the widest scale, which sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives of human action, offers some guarantee that the end-result will not turn out too badly ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 255

Beginning, roughly, with Christianity, alchemy gave birth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the age of science, only to perish, unrecognized and misunderstood, and sink from sight in the stream of the centuries as an age that had been outlived. But, just as every mother was once a daughter, so too was alchemy ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 267

Alchemy owes its real beginnings to the Gnostic systems, which Hippolytus rightly regarded as philosophic, and which, with the help of Greek philosophy and the mythologies of the Near and Middle East, together with Christian dogmatics and Jewish cabalism, made extremely interesting attempts, from the modern point of view, to synthetize a unitary vision of the world in which the physical and the mystical aspects played equal parts ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 267

Had this attempt succeeded, we would not be witnessing today the curious spectacle of two parallel world-views neither of which knows, or wishes to know, anything about the other ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 267

Hippolytus was in the enviable position of being able to see Christian doctrine side by side with its pagan sisters, and similar comparisons had also been attempted by Justin Martyr ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 267

To the honour of Christian thinking it must be said that up till the time of Kepler there was no lack of praiseworthy attempts to interpret and understand Nature, in the broadest sense, on the basis of Christian dogma ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 267

Faith lacked experience and science missed out the soul. Instead, science believed fervently in absolute objectivity and assiduously overlooked the fundamental difficulty that the real vehicle and begetter of all knowledge is the psyche, the very thing that scientists knew the least about for the longest time ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 268

It was regarded as a symptom of chemical reactions, an epiphenomenon of biological processes in the brain-cells indeed, for some time it did not exist at all ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 268

Yet all the while scientists remained totally unaware of the fact that they were using for their observations a photographic apparatus of whose nature and structure they knew practically nothing, and whose very existence many of them were unwilling to admit ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 268

Aside from the psychology of the unconscious, contemporary science and philosophy know only of what is outside, while faith knows only of the inside, and then only in the Christian form imparted to it by the passage of the centuries, beginning with St. Paul and the gospel of St. John ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 269

Faith, quite as much as science with its traditional objectivity, is absolute, which is why faith and knowledge can no more agree than Christians can with one another ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 269

The Creed is a “symbolum.” This comprises practically everything of importance that can be ascertained about the manifestations of the psyche in the field of inner experience, but it does not include Nature, at least not in any recognizable form ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 270

The word “dogma” has even acquired a somewhat unpleasant sound and frequently serves merely to emphasize the rigidity of a prejudice. For most people living in the West, dogma has lost its meaning as a symbol for a virtually unknowable and yet “actual” i.e., operative fact ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 271

Even in theological circles any real discussion of dogma had as good as ceased until the recent papal declarations, a sign that the symbol has begun to fade, if it is not already withered ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 271

This is a dangerous development for our psychic health, as we know of no other symbol that better expresses the world of the unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 271

More and more people then begin looking round for exotic ideas in the hope of finding a substitute, for example in India. This hope is delusory, for though the Indian symbols formulate the unconscious just as well as the Christian ones do, they each exemplify their own spiritual past ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 271

The Indian teachings constitute the essence of several thousand years of experience of Indian life. Though we can learn a lot from Indian thought, it can never express the past that is stored up within us. The premise we start from is and remains Christianity, which covers anything from eleven to nineteen centuries of Western life ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 271

I mention these facts in order to illustrate how thin is the wall that separates us from pagan times. Besides that, the Germanic peoples never developed organically out of primitive polydemonism to polytheism and its philosophical subtleties, but in many places accepted Christian monotheism and its doctrine of redemption only at the sword’s point of the Roman legions, as in Africa the machine-gun is the latent argument behind the Christian invasion ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 272

Doubtless the spread of Christianity among barbarian peoples not only favoured, but actually necessitated, a certain inflexibility of dogma. Much the same thing can be observed in the spread of Islam, which was likewise obliged to resort to [religious] fanaticism and rigidity ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 272

In India the symbol [dogma] developed far more organically and pursued a less disturbed course. Even the great Hindu Reformation, Buddhism, is grounded, in true Indian fashion, on yoga, and, in India at least, it was almost completely reassimilated by Hinduism in less than a millennium, so that today the Buddha himself is enthroned in the Hindu pantheon as the avatar of Vishnu, along with Christ, Matsya (the fish), Kurma (the tortoise), Vamana (the dwarf), and a host of others ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 272

Dogma no longer formulates anything, no longer expresses anything; it has become a tenet to be accepted in and for itself, with no basis in any experience that would demonstrate its truth. Indeed, faith has itself become that experience ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 276

This is not to contest the legitimacy and importance of dogma. The Church is not concerned only with people who have a religious life of their own, but also with those from whom no more can be expected than that they should hold a tenet to be true and confess themselves satisfied with this formula. Probably the great majority of “believers” do not get beyond this level. For them dogma retains its role as a magnet and can therefore claim to be the “final” truth ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 276

It may strike my reader as strange that a physician and psychologist should be so insistent about dogma. But I must emphasize it, and for the same reasons that once moved the alchemist to attach special importance to his “theoria.” His doctrine was the quintessence of the symbolism of unconscious processes, just as the dogmas are a condensation or distillation of “sacred history,” of the myth of the divine being and his deeds ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 278

If we wish to understand what alchemical doctrine means, we must go back to the historical as well as the individual phenomenology of the symbols, and if we wish to gain a closer understanding of dogma, we must perforce consider first the myths of the Near and Middle East that underlie Christianity, and then the whole of mythology as the expression of a universal disposition in man ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 278

This disposition I have called the collective unconscious, the existence of which can be inferred only from individual phenomenology. In both cases the investigator comes back to the individual, for what he is all the time concerned with are certain complex thought-forms, the archetypes, which must be conjectured as the unconscious organizers of our ideas ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 278

We meet these images and ideas in Gnosticism, to which we must now give our attention; for Gnosticism was, in the main, a product of cultural assimilation and is therefore of the greatest interest in elucidating and defining the contents constellated by prophecies about the Redeemer, or by his appearance in history, or by the synchronicity of the archetype ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 287

Unfortunately it is not possible for me to elucidate or even to document this statement [the synchronicity of the archetype] here. But, as Rhine’s ESP (extrasensory perception) experiments show, any intense emotional interest or fascination is accompanied by phenomena which can only be explained by a psychic relativity of time, space, and causality ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 287

Since the archetypes usually have a certain numinosity, they can arouse just that fascination which is accompanied by synchronistic phenomena ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 287

These consist in the meaningful coincidence of two or more causally unrelated facts. For details I would refer the reader to my “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 287

In a passage in the Acts (17: 30), Paul reminds the Athenians that they were “God’s offspring,” and that God, looking back disapprovingly on “the times of ignorance,” had sent the message to mankind, commanding “all men everywhere to repent” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 299

These utterances on the nature of the Deity express transformations of the God-image which run parallel with changes in human consciousness, though one would be at a loss to say which is the cause of the other ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 303

The God-image is not something invented, it is an experience that comes upon man spontaneously as anyone can see for himself unless he is blinded to the truth by theories and prejudices. The unconscious God-image can therefore alter the state of consciousness, just as the latter can modify the God-image once it has become conscious. This, obviously, has nothing to do with the “prime truth,” the unknown God at least, nothing that could be verified ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 303

Psychologically, however, the idea of God’s[unknownness], or of the [inconceivable god or god without conception], is of the utmost importance, because it identifies the Deity with the numinosity of the unconscious. The atman / purusha philosophy of the East and, as we have seen, Meister Eckhart in the West both bear witness to this ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 303

The name Prunicus means both carrying a burden' andlewd.’ The latter connotation is more probable, because this Gnostic sect believed that, through the sexual act, they could recharge Barbelo with the pneuma that was lost in the world ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 307

In Simon Magus it is Helen, the soul, who “descended to the lower regions and generated the inferior powers, angels, and firmaments.” She was forcibly held captive by the lower powers (Irenaeus, I, 27, 1-4). She corresponds to the much later alchemical idea of the “soul in fetters” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 307

The idea derives from Greek alchemy and can be found in Zosimos. In the “Liber quartorum” it is of Sabaean origin ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 307

In Chwolsohn, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus II, p. 494: The soul once turned towards matter, fell in love with it, and, burning with desire to experience bodily pleasures, was no longer willing to tear herself away from it. So was the world born ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 307

The king is male / female; from him come “father and mother;” he consists of three parts: the rational, the psychic, and the earthly. These three “came down together into one man, Jesus,” and “these three men spoke together, each of them from his own substance to his own,” i.e., from the rational to the rational, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 313

But the souls were “brought down from the blessed Man on high, the arch-man Adamas, into the form of clay, that they might serve the demiurge of this creation, Esaldaios, a fiery god, the fourth by number.” Esaldaios corresponds to Ialdabaoth, the highest archon, and also to Saturn ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 325

Ialdabaoth means “child of chaos”; hence when Goethe, borrowing from alchemical terminology, calls the devil the “strange son of chaos,” the name is a very apt one ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 325

He leads them to Oceanus and in the immortal words of Homer to “the doors of Helios and the land of dreams.” “He [Hermes] is Oceanus, the begetter of gods and men, ever ebbing and flowing, now forth, now back.” Men are born from the ebb, and gods from the flow. “It is this, they say, that stands written: `I have said, you are gods, and all of you the sons of the most High’” (Elenchos, V, 7, 37. Legge trans., I, p. 130) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 327

Here the affinity or identity of God and man is explicit, in the Holy Scriptures no less than in the Naassene teachings ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 327

The father of the “perfectus” is the higher man or Protanthropos, who is “not clearly formed” and “without qualities.” Hippolytus goes on to say that he is called Papa (Attis) by the Phrygians. He is a bringer of peace and quells “the war of the elements” in the human body, a statement we meet again word for word in medieval alchemy, where the filius philosophorum “makes peace between enemies or the elements” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 334

This “Papa” [Protanthropos] is also called(cadaver), because he is buried in the body like a mummy in a tomb ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 334

A similar idea is found in Paracelsus; his treatise De Vita longa opens with the words: “Life, verily, is naught but a kind of embalmed mummy, which preserves the mortal body from the mortal worms.” The body lives only from the “Mumia,” through which the “peregrinus microcosmus,” the wandering microcosm (corresponding to the macrocosm), rules the physical body ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 334

His synonyms are the Adech, Archeus, Protothoma, Ides, Idechtrum, etc. He is the “Protoplast” (the first-created), and, as Ides, “the door whence all created things have come” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 334

The Mumia is born together with the body and sustains it, though not to the degree that the “supercelestial Mumia” does. The latter would correspond to the higher Adam of the Naassenes. Of the Ideus or Ides Paracelsus says that in it “there is but One Man and he is the Protoplast” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 334

The spirit, he said, was a great danger, because Yama, the god of death, would instantly carry off these people (the “imperfecti”) if they trod the spiritual path directly, without preparation ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 339

The erotic sculptures were meant to remind them of their dharma (law), which bids them fulfil their ordinary lives. Only when they have fulfilled their dharma can they tread the spiritual path ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 339

The obscenities were intended to arouse the erotic curiosity of visitors to the temples, so that they should not forget their dharma; otherwise they would not fulfil it ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 339

Only the man who was qualified by his karma (the fate earned through works in previous existences), and who was destined for the life of the spirit, could ignore this injunction with impunity, for to him these obscenities mean nothing ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 339

That was also why the two seductresses stood at the entrance of the temple, luring the people to fulfil their dharma, because only in this way could the ordinary man attain to higher spiritual development. And since the temple represented the whole world, all human activities were portrayed in it; and because most people are always thinking of sex anyway, the great majority of the temple sculptures were of an erotic nature ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 339

For this reason too, he said, the lingam (phallus) stands in the sacred cavity of the adyton (Holy of Holies), in the garbha griha (house of the womb). This pundit was a Tantrist (scholastic; tantra = `book’) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 339

For this purpose we must first of all review the facts that led psychologists to conjecture an archetype of wholeness, i.e., the Self. These are in the first-place dreams and visions; in the second place, products of active imagination in which symbols of wholeness appear ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 351

A special variant of the quaternity motif is the dilemma of 3 + 1. Twelve (3 x 4) seems to belong here as a solution of the dilemma and as [twelve] a symbol of wholeness (zodiac, year) ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 351

Three can be regarded as a relative totality, since it usually represents either a spiritual totality that is a product of thought, like the Trinity, or else an instinctual, chthonic one, like the triadic nature of the gods of the underworld the “lower triad” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 351

Another variant is the wheel (rota). The former motif [the circle and quaternity] emphasizes the ego’s containment in the greater dimension of the Self; the latter [the wheel] emphasizes the rotation which also appears as a ritual circumambulation ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 352

The snake-symbol in alchemy points back to historically earlier images. Since the opus was understood by the alchemists as a recapitulation or imitation of the creation of the world, the serpent of Mercurius, that crafty and deceitful god, reminded them of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and therefore of the devil, the tempter, who on their own admission played all sorts of tricks on them during their work ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 371

Mephistopheles, whose “aunt is the snake,” is Goethe’s version of the alchemical familiar, Mercurius. Like the dragon, Mercurius is the slippery, evasive, poisonous, dangerous forerunner of the hermaphrodite, and for that reason he has to be overcome ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 371

The serpens Mercurii is a chthonic spirit who dwells in matter, more especially in the bit of original chaos hidden in creation, the massa confusa or globosa ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 371

This image is “My Lady Soul,” as Spitteler called her. I have suggested instead the term “anima,” as indicating something specific, for which the expression “soul” is too general and too vague. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 25

Of these I would mention the lion, snake (coluber, viper'), bird (devil = nocturna avis), raven (Christ = nycticorax,night-heron’), eagle, and fish. It is also worth noting that Lucifer, the Morning Star, means Christ as well as the devil. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 127

For the fish symbol, in the Near and Middle East especially, has a long and colorful prehistory, from the Babylonian fish-god Oannes and his priests who clothed themselves in fish-skins, to the sacred fish-meals in the cult of the Phoenician goddess Derceto-Atargatis and the obscurities of the Abercius inscription. The symbol ranges from the redeemer-fish of Manu in farthest India to the Eucharistic fish-feast celebrated by the “Thracian riders” in the Roman Empire. For our purpose it is hardly necessary to go into this voluminous material more closely. As Doelger and others have shown, there are plenty of occasions for fish symbolism within the original, purely Christian world of ideas. I need only mention the regeneration in the font, in which the baptized swim like fishes. Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 127

In view of this wide distribution of the fish symbol, its appearance at a particular place or at a particular moment in the history of the world is no cause for wonder. But the sudden activation of the symbol, and its identification with Christ even in the early days of the Church, lead one to conjecture a second source. This source is astrology, and it seems that Friedrich Muenter was the first to draw attention to it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 128

These astrological ideas are quite understandable when one considers that Saturn is the star of Israel, and that Jupiter means the “king” (of justice). Among the territories ruled by the Fishes, the house of Jupiter, are Mesopotamia, Bactria, the Red Sea, and Palestine. Chiun (Saturn) is mentioned in Amos 5:26 as “the star of your god.” James of Sarug (d. 521) says the Israelites worshipped Saturn. The Sabaeans called him the “god of the Jews.” The Sabbath is Saturday, Saturn’s Day. Albumasar testifies that Saturn is the star of Israel. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 128

In medieval astrology Saturn was believed to be the abode of the devil. Both Saturn and Ialdabaoth, the demiurge and highest archon, have lion’s faces. Origen elicits from the diagram of Celsus that Michael, the first angel of the Creator, has “the shape of a lion.” He obviously stands in the place of Ialdabaoth, who is identical with Saturn, as Origen points out. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 128

Above all it is the connections with the age of the Fishes which are attested by the fish symbolism, either contemporaneously with the gospels themselves (“fishers of men,” fishermen as the first disciples, miracle of loaves and fishes), or immediately afterwards in the post-apostolic era. The symbolism shows Christ and those who believe in him as fishes, fish as the food eaten at the Agape, baptism as immersion in a fish-pond, etc. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para147

At first sight, all this points to no more than the fact that the fish symbols and mythologems which have always existed had assimilated the figure of the Redeemer; in other words, it was a symptom of Christ’s assimilation into the world of ideas prevailing at that time. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para147

But, to the extent that Christ was regarded as the new aeon, it would be clear to anyone acquainted with astrology that he was born as the first fish of the Pisces era, and was doomed to die as the last ram (lamb) of the declining Aries era. Matthew 27 : 15ff. hands down this mythologem in the form of the old sacrifice of the seasonal god. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 147

In addition to the “pisciculi Christianorum,” the shepherd and the lamb play, as we know only too well, an almost greater role in Christian allegory, and Hermes Kriophoros (the “ram-bearer”) became the prototype of the “good shepherd,” the tutelary god of flocks. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 162

Another prototype, in his capacity as shepherd, was Orpheus. This aspect of the Poimen gave rise to a figure of similar name in the mystery cults, who was popularized in The Shepherd of Hermas (2nd century). Like the “giant fish” mentioned in the Abercius inscription, the shepherd probably has connections with Attis, both temporally and regionally. Reitzenstein even conjectures that The Shepherd of Hermas derives from the Poimandres writings, which are of purely pagan origin. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para162

Shepherd, ram, and lamb symbolism coincides with the expiring aeon of Aries. In the first century of our era the two aeons overlap, and the two most important mystery gods of this period, Attis and Christ, are both characterized as shepherds, rams, and fishes. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 162

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 18

Expressed psychologically, the two fishes which the devil found on the primeval waters would signify the newly arisen world of consciousness. The comparison of the fishes with a yoke of oxen ploughing merits special attention. Oxen stand for the motive power of the plough. [This reminds us of the cinedian fish, the motivating fish] Since olden times the plough has stood for man’s mastery over the earth: wherever man plows, he has wrested a patch of soil from the primal state and put it to his own use. That is to say: the fishes will rule this world and subdue it by working astrologically through man and molding his consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 230-231

Another text says that you should hide yourselves at the moment of Yahweh’s wrath, because we are warned by Him that at the moment of His unbridled irascibility, if a curse is uttered it will indeed be effective. In other words, you had better be very careful what you say, and what is said to you, at the particular moment when God’s wrath is kindled. Another text says, “God’s left hand dashes to pieces; his right hand is glorious to save” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 107.

My investigation seeks, with the help of Christian, Gnostic, and alchemical symbols of the Self, to throw light on the change of psychic situation within the “Christian aeon” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para ix.

Christian tradition from the outset is not only saturated with Persian and Jewish ideas about the beginning and end of time but is filled with intimations of a kind of enantiodromian reversal of dominants. I mean by this the dilemma of Christ and Antichrist. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para ix.

Probably most of the historical speculations about time and the limitation of time were influenced, as the Apocalypse shows, by astrological ideas. It is therefore only natural that my reflections should gravitate mainly round the symbol of the Fishes, for the Pisces aeon is the synchronistic concomitant of two thousand years of Christian development. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para ix.

In this time-period not only was the figure of the Anthropos (the “Son of Man”) progressively amplified symbolically, and thus assimilated psychologically, but it brought with it changes in man’s attitude that had already been anticipated by the expectation of the Antichrist in the ancient texts. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para ix.

`Because these texts relegate the appearance of Antichrist to the end of time, we are justified in speaking of a “Christian aeon,” which, it was presupposed, would find its end with the Second Coming. It seems as if this expectation coincides with the astrological conception of the “Platonic month” of the Fishes ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para ix.

The immediate occasion for my proposing to discuss these historical questions is the fact that the archetypal image of wholeness, which appears so frequently in the products of the unconscious, has its forerunners in history. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para x

These were identified very early with the figure of Christ, as I have shown in my book Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12: chapter 5). I have been requested so often by my readers to discuss the relations between the traditional Christ-figure and the natural symbols of wholeness that I finally decided to take this task in hand. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page x.

Another alchemical text mentions the “water from the rock” as the equivalent of the universal solvent, the aqua permanens. Khunrath, in his somewhat florid language, even speaks of the “Petroleum sapientum.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 143

According to Doelger, the Christian fish symbol first appeared in Alexandria around A.D. 200; similarly, the baptismal bath was described as a piscina (fish-pond) quite early. This presupposes that the believers were fishes, as is in fact suggested by the gospels (for instance Matt. 4:19). There Christ wants to make Peter and Andrew “fishers of men,” and the miraculous draught of fishes (Luke 5:10) is used by Christ himself as a paradigm for Peter’s missionary activity. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 145

It is nothing less than the counterstroke of the devil, provoked by God’s Incarnation; for the devil attains his true stature as the adversary of Christ, and hence of God, only after the rise of Christianity, while as late as the Book of Job he was still one of God’s sons and on familiar terms with Yahweh. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 77

Psychologically the case is clear, since the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it. It is, in fact, so one-sidedly perfect that it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 77

This inevitable opposition led very early to the doctrine of the two sons of God, of whom the elder was called Satanaël. The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction it is an inexorable psychological law whose existence, though unknown to the author of the Johannine Epistles, brought him a sure knowledge of the impending enantiodromia. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 77

Consequently he wrote as if he were conscious of the inner necessity for this transformation, though we may be sure that the idea seemed to him like a divine revelation. In reality every intensified differentiation of the Christ-image brings about a corresponding accentuation of its unconscious complement, thereby increasing the tension between above and below. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 77

The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter and master the world. This change became visible at the time of the “Renaissance.” The word means “rebirth,” and it referred to the renewal of the antique spirit. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 78

We know today that this spirit was chiefly a mask; it was not the spirit of antiquity that was reborn, but the spirit of medieval Christianity that underwent strange pagan transformations, exchanging the heavenly goal for an earthly one, and the vertical of the Gothic style for a horizontal perspective (voyages of discovery, exploration of the world and of nature). ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 78

The subsequent developments that led to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution have produced a world-wide situation today which can only be called “antichristian” in a sense that confirms the early Christian anticipation of the “end of time” ~Carl Jung, CW 9.2, Para 78

The other half [of the Self] appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the Self, except that he consists of its dark aspect. Both [Antichrist and Christ] are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 79

This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 79

Naturally there can be no question of a total extinction of the ego, for then the focus of consciousness would be destroyed, and the result would be complete unconsciousness. The relative abolition of the ego affects only those supreme and ultimate decisions which confront us in situations where there are insoluble conflicts of duty. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 79

This means, in other words, that in such cases the ego is a suffering bystander who decides nothing but must submit to a decision and surrender unconditionally. The “genius” of man [the Self], the higher and more spacious part of him whose extent no one knows, has the final word. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 79

It is therefore well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even though the Christian image of the Self Christ lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 79

Apart from the snake, the fish is one of the oldest allegories. Nowadays we would prefer to call them symbols, because these synonyms always contain more than mere allegories, as is particularly obvious in the case of the fish symbol. It is unlikely that [Ichthys] is simply an anagrammatic abbreviation of, but rather the symbolical designation for something far more complex. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 127

In Khunrath, magnesia is synonymous with “chaos” and “Aes Hermetis.” He calls it “A Catholic or Universal, that is, a Cosmic Ens or Entity, Three-in-One, naturally compounded of Body, Spirit, and Soul, the one and only true Subiectum Catholicon and true Universal Materia lapidis Philosophorum.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 291

In Michael Maier it signifies “the purity or homogeneity of the essence.” It is the “punctum solis” in the egg-yolk, which grows into a chick. In Khunrath it represents Sapientia in the form of the “salt-point”; in Maier it symbolizes gold. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 345

The woman, like the man, becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 32

The imago Dei imprinted on the soul, not on the body, is an image of an image, “for my soul is not directly the image of God but is made after the likeness of the former image.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 70

“The Word,” he [St. Augustine] says, “took on complete manhood, as it were in its fulness: the soul and body of a man. And if you would have me put it more exactly—since even a beast of the field has a ‘soul’ and a body—when I say a human soul and human flesh, I mean he took upon him a complete human soul.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 17

The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (“deformed”) and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descensus ad inferos, the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 72

You must not look upon God as the author of the existence of evil, nor consider that evil has any subsistence in itself. For evil does not subsist as a living being does, nor can we set before our eyes any substantial essence thereof. For evil is the privation of good. And thus evil does not inhere in its own substance but arises from the mutilation of the soul. Neither is it uncreated, as the wicked say who set up evil for the equal of good nor is it created. For if all things are of God, how can evil arise from good? ~Carl Jung [citing St. Basil], CW 9ii, Para 82

If the devil fell away from God of his own free will, this proves firstly that evil was in the world before man, and therefore that man cannot be the sole author of it, and secondly that the devil already had a “mutilated” soul for which we must hold a real cause responsible. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 85

I have gone into the doctrine of the privatio boni at such length because it is in a sense responsible for a too optimistic conception of the evil in human nature and for a too pessimistic view of the human soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 113

But there is still another reason why I must lay such critical stress on the privatio boni. As early as Basil we meet with the tendency to attribute evil to the disposition of the soul, and at the same time to give it a “non-existent” character. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114

This picture of the third sonship has certain analogies with the medieval filius philosophorum and the filius macrocosmi, who also symbolize the world-soul slumbering in matter. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 120

Barbells were sacred to Typhon, who is “that part of the soul, which is passionate, impulsive, irrational, and truculent.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 187

Ever since the Timaeus it has been repeatedly stated that the soul is a sphere. As the anima mundi, the soul revolves with the world wheel, whose hub is the Pole. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 212

The world-soul or, in this case, the world-spirit is a projection of the unconscious, there being no method or apparatus which could provide an objective experience of this kind and thus furnish objective proof of the world’s animation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 219

This idea is nothing more than an analogy of the animating principle in man which inspires his thoughts and acts of cognition. “Soul” and “spirit,” or psyche as such, is in itself totally unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 219

He who does not understand how to free the “truth” in his own soul from its fetters will never make a success of the physical opus, and he who knows how to make the stone can only do so on the basis of right doctrine, through which he himself is transformed, or which he creates through his own transformation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 248

This recalls the impressive opening sentence of Ignatius Loyola’s “Foundation”: “Man was created to praise, do reverence to, and serve God our Lord, and thereby to save his soul.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 252

Thus, in the course of the eighteenth century, there arose that notorious rift between faith and knowledge. Faith lacked experience and science missed out the soul. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 268

The connecting link here is the archetype of the God- man, which on the one hand became historical reality in Christ, and on the other, being eternally present, reigns over the soul in the form of a supraordinate totality, the self. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 283

Through this doctrine Jesus is related to the Original Man (Christ as second Adam). His soul is “of three parts and (yet) one”—a Trinity. As examples of the Original Man the text mentions the Cabiros and Oannes. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 313

Meister Eckhart, using a different formulation, says that “God is born from the soul,” and when we come to the Cherubinic Wanderer of Angelus Silesius, God and the self coincide absolutely. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 321

The times have undergone a profound change: the procreative power no longer proceeds from God, rather is God born from the soul. The mythologem of the young dying god has taken on psychological form—a sign of further assimilation and conscious realization. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 321

Hermes is a conjurer of spirits, a guide of souls, and a begetter of souls. But the souls were “brought down from the blessed Man on high, the archman Adamas, into the form of clay, that they might serve the demiurge of this creation, Esaldaios, a fiery god, the fourth by number.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 325

He [Plotinus] says in the Enneads: “Self-knowledge reveals the fact that the soul’s natural movement is not in a straight line, unless indeed it have undergone some deviation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 342

Here the point is the centre of a circle that is created, so to speak, by the circumambulation of the soul. But this point is the “centre of all things,” a God-image. This is an idea that still underlies the mandala-symbols in modern dreams. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 343

From various hints dropped by Hippolytus, it is clear beyond a doubt that many of the Gnostics were nothing other than psychologists. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 347

Thus he [Hippolytus] reports them [Gnostics] as saying that “the soul is very hard to find and to comprehend,” x and that knowledge of the whole man is just as difficult. “For knowledge of man is the beginning of wholeness, but knowledge of God is perfect wholeness.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 347

And Monoimos, in his letter to Theophrastus, writes: “Seek him from out thyself, and learn who it is that taketh possession of everything in thee, saying: my god, my spirit, my understanding, my soul, my body; and learn whence is sorrow and joy, and love and hate, and waking though one would not, and sleeping though one would not, and getting angry though one would not, and falling in love though one would not. And if thou shouldst closely investigate these things, thou wilt find Him in thyself, the One and the Many, like to that little point, for it is in thee that he hath his origin and his deliverance.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 347

This primary substance is round (massa globosa, rotundum, world and the world-soul; it is in fact the world-soul and the world-substance in one. It is the “stone that has a spirit,” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 376

According to the old view the soul is round and the vessel must be round too, like the heavens or the world. The form of the Original Man is round. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 377

Accordingly Dorn says that the vessel “should be made from a kind of squaring of the circle, so that the spirit and the soul of our material, separated from its body, may raise the body with them to the height of their own heaven.” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 377

The round Hermetic vessel in which the mysterious transformation is accomplished is God himself, the (Platonic) world-soul and man’s own wholeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 380

“The sulphurs are four souls [animae] which were hidden in the four elements.” Here the active principle (anima) is not fire, but sulphur. The idea, however, is the same, namely that the elements or states of aggregation can be reduced to a common denominator. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 394

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27

The individual may strive after perfection but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 123.

Indeed, it took the intervention of God himself to deliver humanity from the curse of evil, for without his intervention man would have been lost. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114

Psychology is an empirical science and deals with realities. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114

Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii. Para 17

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 429

Yahweh and Allah are unreflected God-images, whereas in the Clementine Homilies there is a psychological and reflective spirit at work. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 54n.

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 43.

We can act differently, if we want to. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 114.

The anima also has affinities with animals, which symbolize her characteristics. Thus she can appear as a snake or a tiger or a bird. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 358.

Animals generally signify the instinctive forces of the unconscious, which are brought into unity within the mandala. This integration of the instincts is a prerequisite for individuation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 660.

The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 191-192.

Emotion is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 15

The ego is the subject of all successful attempts at adaptation so far as these are achieved by the will. ~Carl Jung; CW 9ii; para 11.

Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving that experience has proved appropriate and useful. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 50.

We can certainly hand it to Augustine that all natures are good, yet just not good enough to prevent their badness from being equally obvious. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 95

Fishing is an intuitive attempt to “catch” unconscious contents (fishes). ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 137.

Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 97

Magnesia is rather the “complete or conjoined mixture from which this moisture is extracted, i.e., the root-matter of our Stone” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241.

The complicated procedure for producing the magnesia is described in the treatise “Aristoteles de perfecto Magisterio.” It is the whitened arcane substance ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241

Pandolfus says in the Turba: “I command you to take the hidden and venerable secret thing, which is the white magnesia” ~Carl Jung, Sermo XXI, CW 9ii, Para 241

The magnesia is feminine, just as the magnet is masculine by nature. Hence it carries “in its belly the sal Armoniacum et vegetabile,” meaning the arcane substance of the Stone. Even in Greek alchemy magnesia or “magnes” denoted the hermaphroditic transformative substance ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241

For the alchemists, magnesia is associated with “magnes” (magnet) not only phonetically, but also in meaning, as a recipe of Rosinus shows: ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241

Rosinus: Take therefore this animate Stone, the Stone which has a soul in it, the mercurial, which is sensible and sensitive to the presence and influence of the magnesia and the magnet, and [which is] the calaminary and the living Stone, yielding and repelling by local motion ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 241.

For behind all this looms the vast and unsolved riddle of life itself and of evolution in general, and the question of overriding importance in the end is not the origin of evolution but its goal. Nevertheless, when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. When that happens, anamnesis of the origins is a matter of life and death. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 279

No man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all languages of the world and always remains essentially the same. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Page 15

The will can control them [the impulses] only in part. It may be able to suppress them, but it cannot alter their nature, and what is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded with a resentment that makes the otherwise harmless natural impulse our enemy ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 51

I should also like the term “God” in the phrase “the will of God” to be understood not so much in the Christian sense as in the sense intended by Diotima, when she said: “Eros, dear Socrates, is a mighty daemon” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 51

The Greek words daimon and daimonion express a determining power which comes upon man from outside, like providence or fate, though the ethical decision is left to man. He must know, however, what he is deciding about and what he is doing. Then, if he obeys he is following not just his own opinion, and if he rejects he is destroying not just his own invention ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 51

Where there is an undervaluation of sexuality the Self is symbolized as a phallus. Undervaluation can consist in an ordinary repression or in overt devaluation. In certain differentiated persons a purely biological interpretation and evaluation of sexuality can also have this effect ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii Para 357

Any such conception overlooks the spiritual and “mystical” implications of the sexual instinct. These have existed from time immemorial as psychic facts but are devalued and repressed on rationalistic and philosophical grounds. In all such cases one can expect an unconscious phallicism by way of compensation. A good example of this is the mainly sexualistic approach to the psyche that is to be found in Freud ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 357

Just as the circle is contrasted with the square, so the quaternity is contrasted with the 3 + 1 motif, and the positive, beautiful, good, admirable, and lovable human figure with a daemonic, misbegotten creature who is negative, ugly, evil, despicable and an object of fear ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 9ii, 355

Like all archetypes, the Self has a paradoxical, antinomial character. It is male and female, old man and child, powerful and helpless, large and small. The Self is a true “complexio oppositorum,” though this does not mean that it is anything like as contradictory in itself. It is quite possible that the seeming paradox is nothing but a reflection of the enantiodromian changes of the conscious attitude, which can have a favourable or an unfavourable effect on the whole ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 355

The same is true of the unconscious in general, for its frightening figures may be called forth by the fear which the conscious mind has of the unconscious. The importance of consciousness should not be underrated; hence it is advisable to relate the contradictory manifestations of the unconscious causally to the conscious attitude, at least in some degree ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 355

But consciousness should not be overrated either, for experience provides too many incontrovertible proofs of the autonomy of unconscious compensatory processes for us to seek the origin of these antinomies only in the conscious mind ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 355

Between the conscious and the unconscious there is a kind of “uncertainty relationship,” because the observer is inseparable from the observed and always disturbs it by the act of observation. In other words, exact observation of the unconscious prejudices observation of the conscious and vice versa ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 355

Thus the Self can appear in all shapes from the highest to the lowest, inasmuch as these transcend the scope of the ego personality in the manner of a daimonion ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 356

The final factors at work in us are nothing other than those talents which “a certain nobleman” entrusted to his “servants,” that they might trade with them (Luke 19:12 ff.). It does not require much imagination to see what this involvement in the ways of the world means in the moral sense. Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious s/he is, the more the devil drives her/him. Only ruthless self-knowledge o the widest scale, which sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives of human action, offers some guarantee that the end result will not turn out too badly ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 255.

This subjective knowledge of the self [is what is meant by]: “No one can know himself unless he knows what, and not who, he is, on what he depends, or whose he is (or to whom or what he belongs) and for what end he was made.” This distinction is crucial. Not the subjective ego-consciousness of the psyche is meant, but the psyche itself as the unknown, unprejudiced object that still has to be investigated. “What” refers to the neutral self, the objective fact of totality, since the ego is on the one hand causally “dependent on” or “belongs to” it, and on the other hand is directed toward it as to a goal ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, para 252.

We know only a small part of our psyches. The causal factors determining [one’s] psychic existence reside largely in the unconscious processes outside consciousness, and in the same way there are final factors at work in [one] that likewise originate in the unconscious. Causes and ends thus transcend consciousness to a degree that ought not to be underestimated, and this implies that their nature and action are unalterable and irreversible [to the degree that] they have not become objects of consciousness. They can only be corrected through conscious insight and moral determination, which is why self-knowledge, being so necessary, is feared so much ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 253.

Who are we to imagine that “it couldn’t happen here”? We have only to multiply the population of Switzerland by twenty to become a nation of eighty million, and our public intelligence and morality would then be automatically divided by twenty in consequence of the devastating moral and psychic effects of living together in huge masses. Such a state of things provides the basis for collective crime, and it is then really a miracle if the crime is not committed. It has filled us with horror to realize all that man is capable of, and of which, therefore, we too are capable. Since then a terrible doubt about humanity, and about ourselves, gnaws at our hearts. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 412

Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions. Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity. Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam. And on top of this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature’s business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 35

Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much-needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya—and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 24

The arcane substance, as its attributes show, refers to the Self, and so, in the Oxyrhynchus sayings, does the “kingdom of heaven” or the conjectural “city” ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 224

Faith, quite as much as science with its traditional objectivity, is absolute, which is why faith and knowledge can no more agree than Christians can with one another ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 269

Carl Jung Depth Psychology

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Carl Jung: CW 9ii “Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self – Quotations

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