Carl Jung on the “Sea.” – Anthology
I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 268.
But for him who has seen the chaos, there.is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means. He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws. He knows the sea and can never forget it. The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.
When my soul fell into the hands of evil, it was defenseless except for the weak fishing rod which it could use, again with its power, to pull the fish from the sea of emptiness. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 289.
I wait, secretly anxious. I see a tree arise from the sea. Its crown reaches to Heaven and its roots reach down into Hell. Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 300.
However we may picture the relationship between God and soul, one thing is certain: The soul cannot be “nothing but. ” On the contrary it has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity. Even if it were only the relationship of a drop of water to the sea … Carl Jung, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 10.
The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives. Carl Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol.
The sea is like music, it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over. Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 369.
Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods or a bath in the sea. They shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them. It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods or laying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea are from the outside entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again. Carl Jung, Dream Analysis; Notes on a Lecture given 1928-1930.
As I see it, the psyche is a world in which the ego is contained. Maybe there are fishes who believe that they contain the sea. We must rid ourselves of this habitual illusion of ours if we wish to consider metaphysical assertions from the standpoint of psychology. Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies; Page 76, Para 51.
Like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing
Consciousness, no matter how extensive it may be, must always remain the smaller circle within the greater circle of the unconscious, an island surrounded by the see; and, like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of living creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming.
The circular see with no outlet, which perpetually replenishes itself by a spring bubbling up from its center, is to be found in Nicolas de Cusa as an allegory of God. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 366
This uterus is the sea.
6. Apollo
The primal water conceived as the womb, the breast of the -mother, and the cradle, is a genuinely mythological image, _a pictorial unit pregnant with meaning, packed with intuition and brooking no further analysis.
It crops up in Christianity as well, with especial clarity. in the so-called theological discussion at the Court of the Sassanides.
There it was said of the mother who was pregnant with the child-god, of Hera-Pegc-Myria, that she carried in her womb, as in a sea, a ship freighted a thousandfold.
“She has but one fish,” it is added-the same that is also called her ship.
The Christian allegory of the fish is a secondary phenomenon in the history of
the mythological fish-symbol; light will be thrown on this by mythologems still to be discussed.
On the other hand the primal water as the womb is, in combination with fishes or fishlike creatures, a scientific idea-not merely a mythologem but a “philosophem” as well.
As such it appears in both India and Greece.
Thales, the earliest Greek philosopher, asserted that everything came of water.
In this he was only saying what Homer did, who speaks of Oceanus now as the
“source of the gods,” now as the “source of all things.”
The same doctrine is held by Anaximander, the second Greek philosopher, but he applies it to living creatures and, according to a quotation from Censorinus, to mankind too: 2n “Fish or fishlike beings were born of warm water and earth.
In these beings mcn were formcd. The embryos remained in them till puberty.
Then the fishlike beings opened.
Men and women carne out, already capable of sustaining themselves.”
From a Greek compilation we also learn that these beings which arose “in the damp” were plantlilce as well as fishlike, and that they were protected by a sheath of acanthus leaves.
What are we to think of this account which transforms, as it were, the image of the Primordial Child born of a water-plant into scientil1c theory?
At the beginning of the last century Oleen, the romantic natural philosopher and scientist of Jena, propounded the same teaching.
He based himself neither on Anaximander nor all Censorinus, but 011 the scientific and philosophical knowledgc of his time.
According to him, the first man/imust have developed in a uterus much larger than tf€1mman one.
This uterus is the sea.
That all living things have come from the sea is a truth nobody will dispute who has occupied himself with natural history and philosophy.
Contemporary science disregards every other doctrine.
The sea has nourishment for the foetus; slime to be absorbed through its membranes, oxygen for these membranes to breathe; the foetus is not confined, so that it can move its membranes at will even though it should remain swimming about for more than two years.
Such foetuses arise in the sea by the thousand if they arise at all.
Some are cast up immature on the shore and perish; others are crushed against
rocks, others devoured by carnivorous fishes.
What does that matter?
There are still thousands left to be washed, soft and mature, on to the beaches, where they tear off their membranes, scratch for worms, and pull mussels and snails out of their shells.
Is this mythologem of Primordial Children intended seriously as science? In Oleen’s view unquestionably.
And yet the closest parallel to it, outside Anaximander, is the story which Maui, a child-god of the Polynesians, tells of his own birth.
Apart from the sea, he had a divine mother who bore him on the seashore, and prematurely at that.
“I was born at the side of the sea, and was thrown by you”-so he tells his mother-“into the foam of the surI, after you had wrapped me up in a tuft of your hair, which you cut off for the purpose; lhen the seaweed formed and fashioned me, as caught
in its long tangles the ever-heaving surges of the sea rolled me, f aIded as I was in them, from side to side; at length the breezes and squalls which blew from the
ocean drifted me onto shore again, and the soft jellyfish of the long sandy beaches rolled themselves round me to protect me.”
His divine ancestor, Tama-nni-ki-te Rangi, unwound the jelly-fishes and perceived a human being-Maui.
Oken himself betrays how fond he is of mythological images and above all those of the Primordial Child.
In his essay on the origin of the first man he speaks also of the evolution of animals from plants, and remarks:
“The animal, not merely poetically speaking but in actual fact, is the final flowering or true fruit of the plant, a genius rocked on the .flower. “
So that not only is his scientific thinking inadvertently mythological -the Maui parallel reveals as much-but he was also acquainted with the image of Prajapati, probably through the mythological studies of the Romantics.
There is no need to describe precisely how this happened.
It is enough to observe that an image like “This world was water, a single flood: only Prajapati could be seen, sitting on a 10ms-leaf” is resuscitated in Oleen’s science.
Besides the original god of the Hindus we could also mention Harpocrates, the Egyptian sun-child, who is often shown sitting on a 10tlls-blossom.
These ancient mythologems do not undergo a revival in Anaximander, they simply go all living.
In his age, the epoch of the great Ionian thinkers, the cosmic content that forms the nucleus of mythology passes over into Greek philosophy.
What had hitherto been a highly convincing and effective set of divine figures now begins to turn into a rational teaching. In order to find such images in the process of transforming themselves into more and more rational mythologems, it was not necessary for Anaximander to turn to Oriental or even Egyptian sacred legends.
His doctrines on the origin of man are ‘an echo of the basic mythological theme with which we are concerned here.
And, since we have a Greek “philosophem” before us, we must seek that theme first of all in Greek mythology.
Among the Greek gods we find Proteus, the everchanging god of the sea, whose name means “the first 34 Edward Moor, Tbe Hindu Pantbeon (London, 1810), had given many mythological images of the Hindus to the West.
Creuzer refers to him in his Symbolik und Mytbologie (2nd ed.; 1819). Cf. his illustrations, Plate XXI (Nam.yana) and XXIV (Vishnu and Braham). being.
The world of Oceanus and the world of Protcus, respectively primal water and sea, are as cognate as the Primordial Child and the new-born child; both are
symbols-or Gleicbnisse in the Goethean sense-of timeless birth and transformation.
In Greek mythology, however, Oceanus and the sea are the abode of an immense number of peculiar divinities, but the Primordial Child, who might well be the prototype of the childhood of the great Olympians, is not immediately
noticeable among them.
Also the distance that separates the timeless inhabitants of Olympus-the mighty
gods of Homer and Hesiod-from the world of being’ and becoming is far too great.
How could we expect the Olyn”lpians to feel at home in the liquid element?
All the more significant, then, is the fact that one of the Olympian children, Apollo, nevertheless has an affinity with the sca.
This affinity is not merely that his birth-place, Delos, was originally a Boating island, although this merits attention from a mythological point of view.
There is a deeper-lying affinity between Apollo and the sea, and this leads us to the classic Greek image of the connexions between sea and child.
Like the womb of the mother, boundless water is an organic part of the image of the Primordial Child.
The Hindus gave emphatic expression to this relationship.
In the sacred legend Matsya-purana (named after the fish: matsya), Manu, the first man, says to the fishbodied Vishnu: “<lHow’ did this world, shapeJ: ‘like 3.iotus;”~pri~gfrom your navel in the lotus epoch when you lay in the world-ocean? You lay sleeping in the lotus navel.
With your lotus-:navel; how did the gods and the host of seers arise in your lotus in those distant times, called forth by your powcr.
The Primordial Child, here called yish}1l1, is accordingly fish, embryo, and womb at once, something like Anaximander’s primal being. Precisely such a “fish,” which is simultaneously the bearer of children and youths and the changeling shape of a child-god, is known to Greek mythology.
The Greeks called it the “uterine beast” and revered it above all the denizens of the deep, as though recognizing in it the ocean’s power to bear children.
This creature is the dolphin (()EACP means “uterus”) ,30 an animal sacred to Apollo, who, in view of this relationship, is himself named Apollo Delphinios.
There is a whole series of Greek coins showing a dolphin carrying a boyar youth on its back:IO Eros is another such boyish figure, the winged child whom we shall be discussing soon.
Then we have Phalanthos and Taras, the last-named being the legendary founder and name-giver of the city of Tarentum.
The boy riding on a dolphin often wears a flower in his hair, and this seems to indicate a creature midway between fish and flower.
Another numismatic figure approximates very closely in type-though without being dependent on it-to the Indian picmre of a child asleep on a seamonster, and this is Palaimon, alias Melikertes, lying dead or asleep on a dolphin, a child-god who deserves special study from our point of view.
There are Greek legends, translations of the mythological theme into purely human language, which tell how dolphins rescued their mortal favourites or carried the dead safcIy to shore.
But the names of those favoured of the dolphins are oftcn unmistakably mythological, such as Koiranos (“Master”), or Enhalos (“he in the sea”).
The story of Arion the Singer, who was rescued from the clutches of pirates by a dolphin, is the best-known example of these legends, proving at the same time that
we are in the sphere of influence of Apollo, the lord protector of poets.
The second part of the Homeric hymn to Apollo, held by many to be a second hymn
on its own, relates the epiphany of Apollo Dclphinios.
In the form of a dolphin the god conducts his first priests to Krisa, the bay on which his shrine has just been founded. His epiphany is an epiphany on a ship: the delphiform Apollo makes ~ place for himself on the ship of his future priests-a proof that here as in the Oriental Christian text we quoted earlier “fish” and
“ship” are equivalent mythical images.
As variants of the same theme they mean the same when combined in one.
Apollo founds his Delphic shrine while yet a child.
Apart from Delos itself, the spot chosen forms a significant background for his childhood-the sea between Crete and the Greek mainland.
It was there that the dolphin-epiphany occurred.
No less significant is the seat of the celebrated oracle at Delphi.
And the meaning remains the same.
Just as the dolphin is the “womb” among animals, so Delphi is the womb among places: the name means that.
For the Greeks the rocky landscape symbolized what was itself symbolized by the
dolphin, the sea, the womb; it was a symbol of the uttermost beginning of things, of the not-being that came before being and the life that came afterwards;
of the original condition of which every symbol says something different and new, a primal source of mythologems.
To these mythologems also belongs the “mighty feat,” so typical of child-gods, that Apollo performed in Delphi, namely the destruction of the primeval monster.
But this would carry us too far afield, as would a mythological appreciation of the island of Delos.
It is enough to know what Ge and Themis, the first two Mistresses of Delphi who were worshipped along with Apollo, prove, or rather what the EarthMother
revered under these two names proves: that even a rocky landscape call appear in the mythology of the Primordial Child as the world of the Mother-the
maternal world. ~Karl Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, Page 63-70
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