Bergson should have been discussed here long ago
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“The righteous base their intentions more on the mercy of God, which in whatever they undertake they trust more than their own wisdom.”
Well, Henri Bergson, I think there you have it-this is not less precisely the genuine and right intuitive method. 206
The reference to Bergson was not reproduced in LN. On March 20, 1914, Adolf Keller gave a talk on “Bergson and the Theory of Libido” to the Zurich Psychoanalytical Society.
In the discussion, Jung said that “Bergson should have been discussed here long ago. B. says everything that we have not said “MZS”, p. 57).
On July 24, 1914, Jung gave a talk in London, where he noted that his “constructive method” corresponded to Bergson’s “intuitive method” (“On Psychological Understanding,” Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, p. 399 ).
The work Jung read was L’ evolution creatrice (Paris: Alcan, 1907).
He possessed the 1912 German translation. ~The Red Books, Vol. IV, Page 206 fn 10
Dr. Jung: Yes, the god Pan is obviously a nature spirit,
Dr. Jung:
The original form of Pan was a petty, local field deity, like Priapus or Saturnus.
Priapus was a god of the fields, particularly of the boundary lines; instead of having stones to mark the beginning of a neighbor’s estate, they had phallic figures of Priapus, always made of the wood of the fig tree.
They still have such figures in Egypt, but there they have more to do with fertilization, and they look more like scarecrows.
Saturnus was also such a deity, a rather unimportant field demon for fertilizing and protecting the seeds, the growth of the wheat, etc., an agricultural god.
Later on he became identified with the Greek god Chronos, who was the god of creation, having exactly the meaning of what Bergson callsla duree creatrice.
So one could say that Bergson’s intuitive idea was only a recrudescence of that archetypal idea of creative time.
Then in Mithraism, there was the Aion, the god with the lion’s head encoiled by the snake, the snake’s head resting upon the head of the god; that figure was always standing in Mithraic temples somewhere near the altar, and it is identical with the Persian deity Zervan Akarana, which means infinitely long duration, and this is also la duree creatrice.
Proclus, the Neoplatonist, called Chronos the god of creation and said that wherever there was creation there was time; the creative god was always associated with light, fire, warmth, and time.
Perhaps the most ancient form of the idea is found in Heraclitus, the old Greek philosopher, a contemporary of Lao-tze; he called it pur aeizoon, meaning fire always living, which is exactly what Proclus called Chronos about nine hundred years later.
But Saturn us was originally something like Pan, who was a god of the meadows and the woods.
Pan’s flute created the panic fear of the shepherds.
The word panic comes from Pan.
He went about whistling or playing his pipe and frightening the shepherds.
The shepherd’s fear islike the stampede of the herds.
Occasionally a herd begins to stampede for no obvious reason, it is as if they were suddenly frightened by something.
That happens to us also; at certain moments in the midst of real nature one is suddenly seized with terror without knowing why.
Sometimes it is a particularly lonely and uncanny spot, but at other times one cannot say what it is, a kind of animal fear seizes one.
It is the great god Pan that causes the panic terror.
Then that nature demon became a great philosophical god on account of the transformation in the meaning of the name.
The Greek word pas means all, the whole, and pan, the neuter, means the universe; and that meaning became attached to the god as the universal nature spirit. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 580-581
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