Carl Jung: …it is a map of a part of the sky, of certain zodiacal signs.
LECTURE V
8 June 1932
Dr. Jung: I have something rather extraordinary to show you today.
This is not a map of America or Europe, it is a map of a part of the sky, of certain zodiacal signs.
We have come to this problem through the remark which Dr. Curtius made in our last seminar about the astrological implication in the symbolism of the Pegasus.
The patient was lifted up to the sky by a white winged horse, they flew among the stars till they came to the white city in the clouds, and there she found that other woman who was crucified, lying on the ground on a black cross.
And she saw that her breast was pierced by a spear and that there was a star on the other end of the spear, so that the picture looks, you remember, as if a shaft of light were descending from the star and piercing her heart.
Then standing as if in the air behind the cross, rather ghostlike, was that white winged horse, the Pegasus. Dr. Curtius asked whether this had not to do with astrology.
Now we have no definite indication from the text, nor do I know from the patient herself directly, whether she had any consciousness of such a relation.
As far as I know, if she had any knowledge at all of astrology it would be very superficial, enough perhaps to give a little information about the structure of a horoscope-it would be necessary to know about the sun and the moon, the planets, and the signs of the zodiac but not enough to give her any idea of the other constellations and their meanings.
The series of the zodiacal signs consist of a belt of constellations round the sky, which is characterized as marking the passage of the sun.
But besides these constellations there are others which are just as mythological as the zodiacal signs; besides Aries and Taurus and Aquarius and Pisces, for instance, there are the Corona Borealis, the Ursa Major, the Piscis Austrinus, and many more, which play apparently very little role in modern astrology, though originally they had a certain meaning.
For as the zodiacal symbolism was not written in the stars,but originated in the human unconscious and was projected to the sky, so naturally all the other constellation m the heavens have been produced and characterized by projection of unconscious contents.
Therefore if there is any kind of psychological mythology in the zodiac-and apparently there is-we must assume that the other constellations also contain psychological meaning.
It might turn out, however, that the human unconscious is to be found written only in the constellations of the northern hemisphere and not in the southern hemisphere.
From what may one recognize that possibility? What is the characteristic of the southern constellations?
Mrs. Baynes: I think they don’t lend themselves so readily to these pictures.
Dr. Jung: Human imagination can do a lot, but it is perfectly true that the southern constellations are far less impressive; one is really disappointed when one sees them.
The famous Southern Cross, for instance, is a pretty poor invention.
But of course that would be no reason why people should not make projections into them.
As a matter of fact they have names, but they are by no means mythological, they are chiefly technical, nautical technics or terms.
There is a compass, for instance, and a microscope, entirely modern designations invented by seamen who compared these constellations to certain instruments they used or knew about.
Apparently there is absolutely no mythology in the southern sky, which comes from the fact that all the civilizations which have influenced us have arisen in the northern hemisphere.
Though if we knew about Peruvian astronomy, for instance-which probably existed -no doubt we should discover a kind of mythological terminology similar to ours.
This map shows a part of the belt of the zodiac.
You see there are constellations above and below, taking the north as above, the region of the polar star.
We have the field of constellations above reaching down to the zodiac, and below, they approach the horizon and slowly die away below the horizon line.
The ecliptic is the way of the precession of the equinoxes, and upon that line is the so-called spring point, namely, the point where the sun rises on the 21st of March, where spring begins.
And that point, in the year 2200 B.C., was near the Pleiades-which is a group of stars here (A)-and then each year it receded. It is a sort of regression.
The sun always moves to the west, and Aries would be the first spring month, from the 21st of March to the 21st of April.
Then from the 21st of April to the 21st of May comes Taurus, the Bull.
But the spring point is receding every year by fifty-five seconds; so in 1000 B.C. the spring point was above Aries, the Ram, and in 100 B.C. the spring point was in zero Aries.
So in 2100 years the spring point receded for thirty degrees through the sign of Aries, and then entered the area which is designated as Pisces.
Usually one finds two Fishes as the zodiacal symbol, but this is a map of the real constellation, and you can see the group of stars which forms the first Fish into which the spring point entered.
By comparing it with the meridians leading to the zenith, you can see that this Fish is vertical, the head towards the northern point.
Then there is a series of stars called the ribbon or the commissura, leading to a second Fish which is horizontal. The spring point has now advanced through that sign, and our actual position is about here (B); it is still moving along in the field of the Fishes, it goes parallel to the second Fish, in its immediate vicinity but not exactly through it.
Now astrology suggests that anyone born under Aries, or in the age that is characterized by Aries, has some intellectual quality, a sprouting intelligence; if his rising sign is in Aries, he will have a certain kind of temperamental intellect consisting chiefly of a sort of intensity, an impulsiveness, which does not last very long.
There are always intellectual interests, yet, because it is a spring sign, they are of short duration, like the little shoots of grass in early spring.
Now, why it should be just intellect must be taken for granted, that is what astrology says.
Whether it is so or not does not matter, that is something else.
Then, anyone born under Fishes is easily influenced or overcome by certain atmospheric influences or currents, or by surrounding human influences; it is as if such people were always swimming in a sort of current.
There are also most contradictory things about the Fishes.
Instead of the astronomical position where one Fish is horizontal, in the astrological sign written in the symbolic form, one Fish is upright and the other upside down, and the commissura in between.
Of course the conventional sign is like this: )-( but the original sign is as I have drawn it, so there is a peculiar kind of contrast.
There is also a contrasting movement in the sign of Cancer, which is like this: §’ with a rather irrational sort of spring in between the two.
It is characteristic of everyone who is influenced by the Fishes that they are moved by paradoxical contradictory currents.
Now, a world month is the twelfth part of the so-called platonic year, which lasts twenty-six thousand years and which is based upon the movement of the spring point, or the precession of the equinoxes.
In other words, the movement of the spring point takes twenty-six thousand years to go round and return-only in twenty-six thousand years is that point reached again.
Each sign of the zodiac is a twelfth part of that platonic year, and one month lasts about two thousand one hundred and fifty years, sometimes more and sometimes less.
The idea that the epoch characterized by Aries would be a time in which the intellect developed is to a certain extent historically true.
In the age between 2200 and 100 B.C. human civilization and the human intellect advanced tremendously. ~Visions Seminars, Page 726
We know little of the time before-the age of Taurus-but it seems to have been chiefly a period in which the arts and crafts, and politics and strategy developed, which comes from the fact that everything influenced by Taurus is supposed to be artistic and of a very earthly nature, because Taurus is the Domicilium Veneris, which makes everything beautiful.
That time was characterized by earthly beauty and power, empire, great conquests, etc., all of a chthonic nature.
But Aries was of a different quality; it is quite true that the intellect developed then, it was an age of great philosophical development. Greek philosophy, and the Vedic philosophy-the Upanishads-and the great Chinese philosophy all arose at about that time.
There was a group of particularly brilliant stars towards the end of Aries (C), between Alpha Aries and Beta Aries, and that would be exactly the time between 600 and 400 B.C. which is characterized by the great schools of Athens, such as the school of Pythagoras and the Greek philosophers down to Plato; and in China, by Lao-tze and Confucius, down to Chuang-tze.
It was the time of the greatest unfolding of the human mind before our era. ~Visions Seminars, Pages 727-728
I have already told you of the two Fishes, and how Christ was called Ichthys, the Fish, and about the antichrist, the antithesis of Christ; also the chronology, the fact that the middle of the commissura corresponds to the year 1500 when the great schism occurred, the dissociation of the universal Catholic church.
That was the end of the old Christianity and the beginning of Protestantism. And then here (D) would be about 1720, the time of Diderot and the French Enlightenment, when Christianity became the object of criticism for the first time since the beginning of our time reckoning.
The French Revolution followed, the liberation of human reason, and after that the exodus of science out of the church.
Finally the complete reversal, the breaking away of a great part of the Eurasian continent, with the Russian Bolshevists violently destroying Christianity, and the churches entirely deserted.
All that fits in with astrological psychology, so there is something in astrology that holds water.
Now in studying the psychology of these projections we should pay attention to the neighboring fields, and there we shall see very interesting things.
For if we give any weight to this projected psychology, we must assume that the surrounding constellations are not merely accidental, they probably have a psychological connection with each other, forming a sort of meaningful tissue; so it is worthwhile to study them from that point of view.
I call your attention first to the constellations that are below, and that is a pretty simple affair.
The big constellation is Cetus, the whale.
The idea is that below the conscious sphere of man, which is given in the zodiacal signs, is an enormous whale.
As you know, the whale plays a great role in mythology, it is the great whale dragon.
One still finds the idea in Jewish cabalism, which is built upon very early premises, that a third of the sea is filled by one animal called the leviathan, the enormous whale monster.
A Japanese myth that the world is built upon the back of an enormous salamander is similar.
And all the legends of heroes that overcome whale dragons have probably to do with that huge monster.
For we always have the feeling that the unconscious-often called the sub-conscious-is below the brain somewhere or below our feet, just as we think of hell as below.
Since the two world months of Aries and the Fishes seem to have the character of consciousness above, it is quite possible that Cetus below represents the great monster of the unconscious, ever threatening to swallow the conscious world.
People were beginning to follow all sorts of conscious pursuits, but there was always the fact of the monster that might swallow the
whole world just coming into existence.
And Cetus, the sign of that condition, the enormous danger of the unconscious, extends practically to the point where we are now. ~Visions Seminars, Pages 728-729
We come now to the region above.
When we speak of things above, we mean, psychologically, a ruling principle, the eternal ideals above our heads, the good God above, the law, superior consciousness; all leading, or redeeming principles are thought of as being above.
Therefore, people often object to the idea that the unconscious is below, under the feet; they insist that there is something unconscious above, a sort of superior unconscious.
Of course to speak of the unconscious as under our feet is just a facon de parler, whatever is above is equally in the sphere of the psychological unconscious, only in a different role.
So we find above-up on the left of the map-the constellation of Perseus, the famous hero who killed the monster that was threatening Andromeda.
He was one of the old heroes of Greece, like Heracles and Theseus; they belonged to the very remote hero ancestors.
He was the son of Zeus and Danae, and he was created by a miracle; Zeus could not get to that girl because she was walled into an iron room, so he had to come in through the roof as a golden shower of rain, and in that form he impregnated Danae.
This son Perseus overcame all sorts of horrors, the Graeae, for instance, those three horrible women of fate, who had only one eye and one tooth between them.
Then he acquired a helmet which made him invisible like Siegfried, and a pair of winged soles and a diamond sickle like Hermes-all sorts of beautiful things.
He also rode a marvellous horse, and he killed the Gorgon and got the head.
Then comes the story of Andromeda, who was the daughter of a king and was destined to be a sacrifice to an awful sea monster.
She was fastened naked to a rock and the monster was making for her, when Perseus came walking through the air on his winged soles, holding in his hand the Gorgon’s head, and at the moment when the monster came out of the sea, Perseus confronted him with that head of Medusa, whereupon the monster became instantly transformed into stone.
You see, Perseus is the hero who was invented to fight this enormous monster in the sea, that always threatened to swallow the king’s beautiful daughter.
The motif of the sacrifice of the most beautiful girl to the monster repeats itself very often in myths. What is this beautiful daughter?
Miss Hannah: The Self.
Dr. Jung: Why should that be a beautiful girl?
I am quite certain that my Self is not a beautiful girl.
These were not fairy tales, they were really myths, they were sacred texts to be narrated for healing or magical purposes, and they were invented by medicine men, they are absolutely masculine.
Andromeda is his anima, his soul, who was to be captured by the monster in the sea, just spirited away.
By that fact, we know that the soul was always in the possession of the unconscious, even at a time when the intellect was beginning to develop; and only sacrifice could sever the connection and save mankind from its all-devouring and ever threatening power.
It was necessary to invent a myth of a hero to kill the monster, this formidable activity of the unconscious.
So the sign of Perseus leads directly to the sign of Andromeda; the hero who overcomes the dragon liberates the soul from the curse of unconsciousness.
Now the constellation of Andromeda is separated from the sphere of Aries by another little constellation, the so-called triangulum.
What is the triangle in comparison with Perseus and Andromeda?
It lies in the immediate vicinity, but a bit earlier than that group of stars which indicate the beginning of philosophy.
You see, it is an abstract symbol; if a triangle occurred in a dream, you would interpret it as an abstract thought.
Mr. Allemann: It is an intellectual concept.
Dr. Jung: Yes, an intellectual concept here becomes the leading symbol.
According to astrological reckoning, in about the year 1000 B.C. the intellect began to stir in man through the vicinity of the triangulum; abstract ideas appear, and philosophy ensues, projecting a sort of philosophical concept up into heaven as a guide.
It is no longer Perseus, the mystical hero, doing great deeds and liberating mankind from the leviathan in the sea; it is now philosophy, it is abstract human notions.
But they receive their light from the particularly brilliant stars of Andromeda, and that belongs to the field of the anima.
So one could say that wisdom was then influenced less by man-of course by man primarily, but chiefly through the anima.
And there, out of the anima, appears the figure of Sophia that one finds in the Gnostic development of the anima, also in the second part of Faust.
Moreover, as Aries would be under the masculine principle-the beginning of the intellectual predominance, of the abstract idea-the compensatory feminine principle then appears, and from that time on we have a world which is under the feminine principle.
The age of the Fishes begins here, and that is influenced until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries by the unconscious Virgo.
Fishes also symbolize little children, and one sees that influence in the Christian symbolism, the little lambs as well as the Fishes.
The Pope still wears a ring with the picture of the miraculous draft of fishes, meaning that he is pulling all the peoples of the earth into his net.
But the ruling principle of that part of Fishes would be feminine, it was most certainly the church, Ecclesia Mater, or the Virgin Mother, the Heavenly Bride, etc., and that would last up to about the sixteenth century.
Then begins a new period of time which is usually calculated from the Thirty Years’ War, or the Reformation-with great justification because that was the age when the great discoveries of the world took place, when the vertical position of the Fish came to an end and the horizontal extension began.
Until then the development of civilization was like a Gothic spire, our ancestors were all concentrated upon the narrow peninsula Europe, and beyond this very little of the world was known. ~Visions Seminars, Pages 729-730
Then the great voyages began, and the fact that the world was a globe was discovered.
That had been known in Greek times already, but it was forgotten in the meantime.
So an entirely new world was created.
It was at last realized that the earth was not the center of the universe, but that it rotated round the sun.
This was a great shock, which changed our whole outlook; it was really the birth of natural science.
Now here (E) we get under a new ruling principle which is no longer female, it is Pegasus, and as we had there a triangulum, we have here a quadrangulum, the square of Pegasus.
That would be the sign which now rules this meridian; it would begin a bit before 1900 and we are now in 1932, so Pegasus is the ruling principle at this time.
And people are now tremendously busy with squares as they were busy with the trinity before; all the old gods of India and Egypt and Greece were trinities.
The interesting thing is that Pegasus is entirely symbolic, it is no longer a human principle, it is not a hero, nor is it a female principle, it is quite decidedly the animal principle.
We would say that the horse was a libido symbol, representing the animal part of man, and by pulling himself up upon it, by riding it, it thus becomes winged and divine; it is not only an ordinary animal, it is a divine animal.
So it would mean a time in which man discovers that the real guiding principle is the living libido, and that would be represented by a square.
How the people of that time could ever imagine that Pegasus should be represented by a square is a miracle to me, but they actually did.
Now why that square?
Mrs. Sigg: It is the four functions.
Dr: Jung: One might say the four functions.
It is simply the tetraktys, the number four, which is characterized by Pythagoras as the creative essence, or the process of the world, as it were.
Now this four is peculiar; it might be a continuation of the three; Aries was an intellectual age, and Pisces a decidedly feeling age, therefore Christianity is a feeling religion.
But this is something else, it has a different influence, it appears in the time when the principle of the Fishes is reversed.
After all the originally good and positive spiritual influences, beautiful feeling, comes the reverse feeling, the bitter bad feeling, the evil aspect, and then this square appears.
If you take that as a psychological process in an individual, it would mean a feeling personality, a perfectly human, nice person who had always had very nice feelings, and then suddenly they change to bitter feelings, hostility, envy, all sorts of resentments.
And that condition would amount to a sort of neurosis; people in such a condition are neurotic because they cannot understand how they could have lost their beautiful feeling values, the ideas they believed in, and how they could be so repulsive and disgusting.
They become absolutely dissociated from themselves, they cannot accept themselves, and in such a neurosis the square would appear as a leading principle.
That is merely a logical deduction; from all that we have been saying, one could prophesy that the square would appear as a most helpful symbol.
As in the age when the conscious intellect of man was threatened by the monster in the sea, a hero who could cut off the Gorgon’s head would come in very handy; for ordinary people could do nothing against that huge monster, they always had to sacrifice a soul to it, so a hero-redeemer was needed to be the helpful principle in the bitter struggle of mankind against the terrible danger of the unconscious.
And so in a neurosis, where there was still the danger of the whale from below, this square would be most useful.
It is possible that our patient, in this symbol of Pegasus, might have really nosed up the astrological symbolism from her unconscious where all projections take their start.
All these names and terms, descriptions, myths, originated in the unconscious; they are actually buried in us, and if anyone falls into such an archetypal situation he is apt to nose out this knowledge from below.
Of course, there is no doubt about her knowing that the horse is Pegasus, but I am convinced that she never thought of it as an astrological constellation, nor that Pegasus would be the leading principle at about this time.
When you understand analysis as an honest attempt to overcome certain evils of our time, you are not astonished to find that one of the fundamental concepts of the system is the idea of half-divine and half-animal libido which is one in itself, and therefore the medicine for an age that is not one in itself, that is suffering from a tremendous dissociation.
Also it is an age when the old triangle values, the Trinity idea, is being reversed, adding the fourth function to the three.
The Trinity consists of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; and the fourth is God the devil.
That makes the square. You see, this whole astrological picture, this ensemble, is exactly like the tissue of the unconscious, like one of these fantasies, or a dream.
There is now only one thing to do, and that is to try to make out what will happen next. ~Visions Seminars, Page 731-733
We are out of the second Fish and are just approaching the borderline between Pisces and the next sign.
It will take us still about ten years to arrive there, and if we move a little farther on we come to a star (F) which is not very big but it seems to be particularly influential.
This is the first star of Aquarius.
Now Aquarius is the only human sign with the exception of Virgo.
Gemini doesn’t count because it refers only to children, but Aquarius and Virgo are adult human signs.
Aquarius is a male sign, and it is not just a question of currents-he has caught the water in the two jugs and he says: “Now I am going to show what currents are.”
The water itself no longer moves, and if there are fishes in it, he has also caught the fishes; he carries the jugs and pours out the water himself.
So he has acquired a certain superiority and it is an entirely human figure, above and below.
The old Egyptian symbolic sign for water is this: The lower line is the heavy sticky atmosphere that covers the surface of the earth, and the line above is spiritual, it belongs to the high heavens.
Aquarius represents the thing above as well as the thing below.
Therefore in semiantique representations of Aquarius-there is one most interesting old illustration in a codex of the seventh or eighth century-he is shown as an ithyphallic figure, like a very primitive god of fertility.
Miss Wolff: In medieval representations the sign of Aquarius often has a fish’s tail.
Dr. Jung: Yes, like a mermaid, but that is rather exceptional.
In the oldest representations it is always the man with the water jugs; he obviously has a double nature, but in one man.
Dr. Ott: Could we not correlate here the idea of transition from the static to the energic? We have had the three dimensions of space, and now we have added the concept of the fourth dimension, or time, which brings in the idea of energy.
Dr. Jung: That would all be contained.
The idea of the fourth dimension is a wonderful myth of our time, it is of the same nature.
Aquarius, then, is the sign of the man whose ideal is the union, the oneness, of animal and divine, and in the square the two things are brought together. And that fits in with our ideas perfectly, we have no argument against it.
Now below Aquarius we must expect something else, like that huge whale, as a basis or a threat, whatever it may be.
And coming out of Cetus the whale is a southern constellation, which is not visible with us and which is not a mythological concept.
It is called the Sculptor, the artist who produces.
On this map we can see only a corner of it, but it continues some distance to the right, and it is below the first half of Aquarius.
Then comes the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the southern Fish.
It is as if the age of the Fishes had sunk down into the unconscious when it vanished.
One can speculate about that, it is a most interesting conception.
Mrs. Baynes: I think it is a horrible fate to have to regird ourselves for another Fish. I am so sick of Fishes.
Dr. Jung: The Whale has produced the Sculptor, and then comes the Piscis Austrinus, and after that Capricorn, half fish and half mountain goat.
Now up to the present moment we had only the authority of Dr. Curtius for talking of the astrological implications of our symbolism.
Yet there is something in both the text and the picture which also gives us a certain justification for establishing this connection between an individual fantasy and the world of stars.
Dr. Reichstein: The patient said in the text that she flew up into the sky on Pegasus, and in the picture also Pegasus is in the sky.
Mrs. Sawyer: And the large brilliant star.
Dr. Jung: Yes, she is obviously somewhere in the neighborhood of the stars, so we are quite safe in assuming that the unconscious is indicating a situation in which human beings usually do not find themselves.
Down here on the surface of the earth one is in the thick atmosphere, but a mythological horse could carry one much further up into the air than any aeroplane or zeppelin could.
She is going up to the stratosphere like Professor Piccard, to an extra-mundane place, an abstract heavenly place, to the stars where there is a city that is foursquare.
The city within the four walls is the star in itself, and in the middle of the city is the open square.
So this is really an extra-mundane place where one would quite naturally encounter extra-mundane symbols.
Moreover a star penetrates the woman’s body, and we can take that quite naively as the leading star, the guiding principle-as one speaks of one’s star, one’s fate, one’s fortune, etc.
It is obviously her individual star, and in this picture it is an influence which penetrates her heart, the center.
This is such definite symbolism that we are quite safe in assuming that it is not only central insofar as her own personal psychology is concerned, it is also central in the cosmic sense, it is at the same time a universal human principle.
That individual relationship to the stars is a thought as old as mankind.
The primitives believed that the falling stars were really souls descending from heaven to embody themselves in human bodies.
They also believed that man was a fiery spark.
Even those much quoted central Australian aborigines believe that.
They are like paleolithic men, they have not yet invented clothes, they never hunt animals for their furs because they never thought of it, in spite of the fact that at times, towards morning, the temperature descends below zero; then they stand round fires and wait until the sun comes back to life.
Now those people believe that the soul of man consists of a little fiery spark, and when such a spark-they are very swift and cunning-is flying about and happens to enter the womb of a woman, she immediately becomes pregnant.
These fiery sparks, which they call by the Swiss-sounding expression maiaurli, are supposed to be the souls of ancestors and to live in particular rocks or trees, and any woman who passes must use special charms in order to ward off the maiaurli that jump out to impregnate her-they are always looking for a womb to enter.
There was a similar idea in certain Gnostic systems: they thought that the soul was a fiery spark which fell down into the sea, or the creative womb, and then became a human soul, building a body round itself.
It is a very interesting idea.
Later on, the stars were identified with the gods, who were supposed to be like human beings although at the same time they were stars; the planets Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, and so on were gods but they were also planets.
That they could be both comes from the fact that those old gods were temperaments or constituents in the character of human beings.
For instance, Mars personifies rage, a martial temperament is the warlike temperament, and in a horoscope Mars means a martial constituent.
And a jovial temperament is like an exceedingly blue sky, like Jove benevolently smiling, and Jove-or Jupiter-in an important position in a horoscope indicates a jovial character.
Venus means love or certain aspects of sex. Mercury is intellect.
And Saturn personifies gloom and all those manifestations which originate in the state of gloom or cause gloom; the Tempter and the Purifier are two of Saturn’s titles.
Now these character constituents in fairly primitive man are very often autonomous-a person’s temperament may be autonomous, for instance.
He may be pathologically jovial, jovial to such an extent that it is no longer a virtue but a vice.
Or he may be good in a most vicious way, so good that he destroys himself and everyone round him; being a little too good is most dangerous for one’s surroundings.
And it is the same with the so-called malefic planets, Mars and Saturn.
You see, the personification of those planets comes from the projection of such autonomous complexes and therefore they have been called gods.
When a woman says: “But I feel so and so about the matter,” it is most decisive, as you know, so one could call it a god.
As a man says: “It is not according to my principle.” I say: “Damn your principle, the situation is so-and-so.”
But his principle is a god to him, he would die rather than give up his most foolish principle, and this is simply based upon a fact of temperament, a deep-rooted emotional factor.
Those temperamental qualities were quite rightly called gods and therefore projected.
So here also is a link between man and the stars, his laws are found to be identical with the stars.
That this woman could project such a thing, then, was not merely a foolish fantastic invention, but has to do with the secrets of psychology.
We have discussed before the connection between time and astrology, and the fact that time has quality.
This moment is different from any other moment, and the next moment will have its particular stamp, and everything that originates in that moment will have that particular stamp.
If we are in a certain mood and, all together, write a letter to someone, the letter will have the quality of this moment and will retain
it; in ten thousand years that letter will have this stamp because it originated in this particular moment.
So if we could at this moment produce a child out of our collective consciousness-of course, we must not introduce the unconscious, the unknown factor-it would be exactly what the time is now; that the child was born at five minutes to one on such and such a day of such and such a year in such and such a degree of latitude and longtitude, would indicate what the child was. ~Visions Seminar, Page 734-736
The time moment may be expressed either by the memory we have of the moment, or simply by the watch, and the watch is regulated according to the position of the stars.
So the real connection with astrology is time, and therefore the most striking aspect of our connection with the stars is that of fate.
Fate evolves with time, and it is identical with time.
When one says the time has not yet come, it means that fate has not yet fulfilled itself; fate fulfills itself only in time, time being only another aspect of fate.
Fate and time are absolutely identical, fate being the more human aspect and time the more energic aspect.
And time is another aspect of energy, for without time there is no energy, and without energy there is no time.
Time is measured energy.
In winding up a clock, a certain store of energy is given it, so that it can run its course, and that is called the movement of time, because by that energic process as a measure, time can be appreciated.
Life is another aspect of time; it is fate, it is energy, and it is the movement of the stars.
It can express itself either by the watch, or by the course or position of the stars, or by the process of energy running down.
So there are really many reasons for the connection of our innermost psychology with the movement of the stars, and it is therefore almost to be expected that in just this moment an astrological picture would turn up.
You see, it is a matter here of a tremendous problem which has never been formulated before, the problem that is left over from the Christian era, the crucifixion of the earthly man.
And here we encounter another being that rides through the heavens on Pegasus, here they come together.
We only knew before that whenever our patient came to the white city, something was wrong, something would not work, the light was too glaring, or the white city was a black city.
But she always returns to that critical spot, and this time she sees why it is particularly unendurable; it is because she finds herself crucified in the square city and pierced by the star.
Now that penetration by the star expresses an achievement, a fulfillment; the star has reached her, it has finished her.
It is the spear of Longin us which pierced Christ’s side, proving his death.
That is the analogy, and we can take it here as having the same meaning.
She is nailed down, immobilized, completely done for, and no escape possible.
Therefore I call it an achievement or an accomplishment, something divine has penetrated.
Furthermore, she has to confront herself, and this explains why the white city, the idea of completion, of fulfillment, is a matter of such unendurable torment.
Now we should understand thoroughly what this woman crucified upon the black cross means, we should be able to trace that experience back to individual experience.
These visions are getting very awkward, very complicated, it needs much more painstaking work to bring them home, to trace them to their origin and see what they mean in the human being.
Otherwise there is danger of the whole thing losing itself in vapors and symbolism.
How would you formulate the actual condition?
We could understand the enlightenment, but now we should understand this enantiodromia.
There was first the glaring white city, and after some peripeties we came down to the black city, the counterpart of the heavenly city.
The blackness of the cross seems to be a remnant from Hades; it means death naturally and it appears now as connected with the white city.
How could one formulate this human sacrifice?
Mrs. Crowley: Perhaps she is not actually conscious of it, but I think it is probably a vision of the consciousness of two opposing forces within herself.
Dr. Jung: That is true.
This symbolism impresses her with that duality;
something above impresses her as being in the state of uttermost freedom and liberation from bodily weight, and the other part of her is being nailed down to the ground.
So it is an awareness of opposites.
Mrs. Crowley: There is consciousness below and above; the previous attitude was a swinging from one to the other, but this time there is an awareness of both.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the main virtue of this situation is that the two opposites are now coming together.
There is an equal awareness on either side,
an almost limitless freedom, and an equally limitless fixation.
Now how would that part which is perhaps more accessible to us express itself? The part of suffering?
We understood the liberation as a sort of enthusiasm, but what is the meaning of the crucifixion?
Mrs. Crowley: It is a dismemberment. She is being torn between the two forces, those two ways of realization.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but the conflict here is not in the woman that is nailed to
the cross, it is between the two figures; one assumes a third consciousness
that looks on, between the free spirit and the chained spirit.
What does the crucifixion mean psychologically?
Mrs. Sawyer: The sacrifice of the personal life for the impersonal.
Dr. Jung: What is the meaning of Christ’s intentional self-sacrifice? According to tradition he did it quite intentionally.
Frau Durler: To redeem mankind.
Dr. Jung: Yes, so it is really a sacrifice of the personal life for something else, whatever that may be; we see here only the suffering part of it, we see that she is undergoing the torment of the sacrifice of personal life, but we don’t know for what purpose. ~Visions Seminar, Page 725-738
