[Carl Jung on why Fairy Tales and Religious Dogmas are so important.]
The treatise of Rosinus contains a parallel to Morienus:
“This stone is something which is fixed more in thee [than elsewhere], created of God, and thou art its ore, and it is extracted from thee, and wheresoever thou art it remains inseparably with thee. . . . And as man is made up of four elements, so also is the stone, and so it is [dug] out of man, and thou art its ore, namely by working; and from thee it is extracted, that is by division; and in thee it remains inseparably, namely by knowledge.
[To express it] otherwise, fixed in thee: namely in the Mercurius of the wise; thou art its ore: that is, it is enclosed in thee and thou holdest it secretly; and from thee it is extracted when it is reduced [to its essence] by thee and dissolved; for without thee it cannot be fulfilled, and without it canst thou not live, and so the end looks to the beginning, and contrariwise.]
This looks like a commentary on Morienus. We learn from it that the stone is implanted in man by God, that the laborant is its prima materia^ that the extraction corresponds to the so-called divisio or separatio of the alchemical procedure, and that
through his knowledge of the stone man remains inseparably bound to the self. The procedure here described could easily be understood as the realization of an unconscious content.
Fixation in the Mercurius of the wise would then correspond to the traditional Hermetic knowledge, since Mercurius symbolizes the Nous; through this knowledge the self, as a content of the unconscious, is made conscious and “fixed” in the mind.
For without the existence of conscious concepts apperception is, as we know, impossible. This explains numerous neurotic disturbances which arise from the fact that certain contents are constellated in the unconscious but cannot be assimilated owing to the lack of apperceptive concepts that would “grasp” them.
That is why it is so extremely important to tell children fairy tales and legends, and to inculcate religious ideas (dogmas) into grown-ups, because these things are instrumental symbols with whose help unconscious contents can be canalized into consciousness, interpreted, and integrated.
Failing this, their energy flows off into conscious contents which, normally, are not much emphasized, and intensifies them to pathological proportions.
We then get apparently groundless phobias and obsessions, crazes, idiosyncrasies, hypochondriac ideas, and intellectual perversions suitably camouflaged in social, religious, or political garb. ~Carl Jung, Aion, The Alchemical Interpretation of the Fish, Paragraphs 258-259
