To say ‘before Christmas’ is to say ‘before the sun rises again,’
To the psychiatrist E. A. Bennet, his friend and biographer, he recalled,
“At first he thought the ‘twelve dead men’ referred to the twelve days before Christmas for that is the dark time of the year, when traditionally witches are about.
To say ‘before Christmas’ is to say ‘before the sun rises again,’ for Christmas day is at the turning point of the year when the sun’s birth was celebrated in the Mithraic religion . . . .
Only much later did he relate the dream to Hermes and the twelve doves” (Meetings with Jung: Conversations Recorded by E. A. Bennet during the Years 1946- 1961 [London: Anchor Press, 1982/ Zurich: Daimon Verlag, 1985], p. 93).
In “On the Psychological Aspects of the Figure of the Kore” (1941) , Jung presented some material from Liber Novus (describing it as part of a dream series) in an anonymous form (“Case Z.”), tracing the transformations of the anima.
He noted that the dream recounted here “shows the anima as elflike, i.e., only partially human.
She can just as well be a bird, which means that she may belong wholly to nature and can vanish (i .e., become unconscious) from the human sphere (i.e., consciousness)” (cw 9, pt. 1, § 371). ~The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 17, fn 19