On the night when I considered the essence of the God, I became aware of an image:
I lay in a dark depth. An old man stood before me. He looked like one of the old prophets. A black serpent lay at his feet.
Some distance away I saw a house with columns. A beautiful maiden steps out of the door. She walks uncertainly and I see that she is blind.
The old man waves to me and I follow him to the house at the foot of the sheer wall of rock.
The serpent creeps behind us. Darkness reigns inside the house. We are in a high hall with glittering walls.
A bright stone the color of water lies in the background.
As I look into its reflection, the images of Eve, the tree, and the serpent appear to me.
After this I catch sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas.
Suddenly a door opens on the right, onto a garden full of bright sunshine.
We step outside and the old man says to me, “Do you know where you are?” ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 245.
Footnote 159: Black Book 2 continues:
“The crystal shines dimly. I think again of the image of Odysseus, how he passed the rocky island of the Sirens on his lengthy odyssey. Should I, should I not?” (P.74).
Eve / and the serpent show me that my next step leads to pleasure and from there again on lengthy wanderings like Odysseus.
He went astray when he played his trick at Troy. The bright garden is the space of pleasure. He who lives there needs no vision; he feels the unending.
A thinker who descends in to his fore thinking finds his next step leading into the garden of Salome.
Therefore the thinker fears his forethought, although he lives on the foundation of fore thinking. The visible surface is safer than the underground.
Thinking protects against the way of error, and therefore it leads to petrification. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 247-248.
Footnote 223: In Book II of the Odyssey, Odysseus makes a libation to the dead to enable them to speak.
Walter Burkert notes: “The dead drink the pourings and indeed the blood. They are invited to come to the banquet, to the satiation with blood; as the libations seep into the earth, so the dead will send good things up above” (Greek Religion, tr. J. Raffar [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987], pp. 194-95).