12 November 1930 Visions Seminar Lecture V
LECTURE V 12 November 1930
Dr. Jung:
We stopped last time with the dream of the black veil. The next dream was in the same night:
I found myself in a graveyard in the devastated area in France. The graves were made of red sandstone.
I saw people walking over a large grave where many soldiers were buried.
Someone said, “Look at this gravestone.”
It was a large tombstone and upon it was carved the figure of a saint and beside it the figure of a bull, and in spite of the fact that both figures were carved in stone, they were alive half dead and half alive.
I saw that the bull was gnawing the fingers of the saint.
I felt nauseated with horror and walked away, shaking my own hand as though to free it from the bull. (That shows her partial identity with the saint.)
Then we got into an automobile and drove down a very steep hill, and it seemed to me that the brakes of the car might not be strong enough. I felt very frightened and emotional, but at last we got down to the bottom of the hill in safety.
This dream consists of two different parts which only hang together through the meaning of the entire dream, not through the connection of the images.
The first part is the scene in a graveyard in France.
The locality is usually mentioned in the beginning of a dream, if it is mentioned at all, and it always has a specific value.
It is very important to make out what it is because it gives you the atmosphere in which the dream takes place.
For instance, when a dream begins in a railway station, or in a church, or in a study, or in a bedroom, you know at once its atmosphere its setting.
If a very intimate scene takes place in a railway station or in a public thoroughfare, you know that it is important and has a very collective meaning, despite the fact that it is so intimate; it is the collective aspect of such a situation.
Now this graveyard in France is a very particular situation which brings in a very particular atmosphere.
Here we must remember the dream of the veil-a black veil, which usually means mourning.
We did not speak of that aspect of the veil, the patient herself did not mention it, yet a black veil is connected with
mourning and in this next dream we find the graveyard.
What is the bridge which leads from the dream before to this dream?
We should reconstruct the connection between the locality of the second dream and the essential symbolism of the first.
To begin with, can you tell me anything about the meaning of that particular locality, a graveyard in the devastated area?
Suggestion: Does not the place where things are buried represent the unconscious? And the devastated area would symbolize the devastated unconscious?
Dr. Jung: That is not specific enough, because there is hardly anything under God’s sun that does not mean the unconscious-a forest, the sea, a river, a house, the mother, the aunt, a church-there are ten thousand things which express the unconscious.
Of course it has somehow to do with the unconscious, but we must insist upon the importance of the specific symbolism.
When the unconscious says a graveyard, it means something like a graveyard.
Dr. Baynes: The spiritual ghost world.
Dr. Jung: Yes, if there were any ghosts about, but there are no ghosts apparently.
Suggestion: Does it not refer to the Christian, the saint, who is buried there?
Dr. Jung: The saint certainly is connected with Christianity, though the bull that is eating his fingers is not so Christian.
But we must first get the mental or spiritual atmosphere of the locality in the dream, the particular atmosphere of that graveyard.
Dr. Baynes says the ghost world, which is an admissible idea because there are spooks in a graveyard, spirits hovering over their graves.
But since they are not mentioned in the dream, we must find something more specific.
Many of you have seen those graveyards in the devastated areas in northern France.
Now what is their atmosphere?
Prof Eaton: Destruction.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but why do you not say the memory of the Great War, that terrible upheaval of mankind?
That is the most obvious impression.
It is a specific atmosphere, and the background of innumerable problems all over the world.
The Great War is a psychological locality.
So the dream before must have touched something which was connected with the war.
Obviously it was the black veil, because black veils suggest mourning, and the next move is the graveyard, where they wear black veils.
Here we must go a bit deeper into the psychological reaction to the war, for it made an enormous impression on the mind of the white man; it was terribly significant.
Dr: Baynes: It meant the loss of civilized values.
Dr: Jung: Yes, people even say that it meant the end of European civilization.
Mr. Spengler has written a book about the sunset of Western civilization, meaning the end of the whole historical epoch. Other people have felt another kind of sunset.
Mrs. Sigg: The sunset of Christianity.
Dr: Jung: Yes, or rather, of the Christian church, because of its complete inefficiency.
Even the Pope could only wail, he could only send out a message to the world begging the naughty boys to stop.
He could do nothing else, he had no authority at all. Nobody could stop it.
There was no moral or religious authority oil earth that could have interfered efficiently.
It was obvious that the spiritual powers amounted to practically nothing against that infernal thing.
Man was just raging on like mad; nobody wanted to kill each other, yet they went right on killing.
One saw from the French, German, and English newspapers here in Switzerland how the atmosphere was poisoned by absolutely wrong information on this side as well as on the other side.
Naturally that has upset people. Their faith was shattered and they came down with a crash.
Many people came to me in those days saying that their Christian faith had been absolutely destroyed by the war, and asking what they should believe.
It is always a sort of faith that grips us and keeps us in form; we simply cannot live when we are not convinced. of certain principles or truths, even if we do not formulate them.
Perhaps a man is only convinced that next year he will get a better dividend, or a new car, or that he will have built a new wing to his house, or that he might have another child, or that his mother-in-law will die-anything which seems to improve his life-but even such a belief keeps him in form.
These are, of course, only rationalizations on the surface, but in analyzing them you get to a deeper layer where you will see that these are concretized expressions of certain philosophical convictions: that the ultimate purpose of the world
is good, for instance, that there is a power watching over us, leading us all to a happy end.
So our existence is meaningful because a certain kind power is guiding our steps towards a righteous goal.
Some such assumption is always there, even if it is never formulated. It is the cause of a sort of fundamental optimism or pessimism, and even a fundamental pessimism is a guide, such as: This world is a hell and all the people in it are
devils that should be boiled in oil, but I am one who sees that they are all wrong; I have done my best to open their eyes and they won’t see, but I have done my duty, so now I can die.
That is the guiding idea for many people, and such a pessimistic philosophy is guidance enough.
But all these convictions are now shattered, and one needs such fundamental formulas, one could call them vital formulas.
That Eastern word mantra, the word of power, designates it in a nutshell.
There is an excellent illustration of the psychology of the mantra in a book by Spitteler, one of our Swiss poets-I quoted him, you remember, in Psychological Types.
He refers to the “invisible whale on a pole.”
Whenever anybody wants to say something very convincing, to express his point of view which is really not convincing at all, he points to that invisible whale on the pole, and then everybody believes him.
All our abstract German nouns end with “heit” or “keit,” and therefore so do all our general concepts: for instance, if you say something is done for the liberty of the country, “Freiheit,” everybody believes it; that is Spitteler’s invisible whale.
In America “social service” is the mantra that is believed in.
Every country has such a whale, sometimes several. In France, “pour la gloire de notre patrie” carries. In Italy, under Mussolini, it is “Italy is at work.”
The most formidable nonsense goes under the cover of “heit” and “keit”; that is a mantra, a sort of slogan, like the great advertising slogan, “every man must have his own automobile,” which worked to a terrible extent-every man did have his own automobile.
Then came a standstill in the factories, and there was great discussion as to what should be the next slogan, and they couldn’t find one equally efficient, until a fellow, a son of God, got up and said, “Every man must have two automobiles,” and that carried.
Religious people often use such means when they want to raise money for some quite foolish charity, some enterprise
for which only they themselves are thankful.
Everybody thinks it is futile and a terrible bore and nobody wants to give the money, but they are told it is for their spiritual welfare, or that God himself wants it, and they have to give it.
A good salesman will use a slogan like: You cannot wear such a necktie with such socks, or: Nobody buys that stuff now,
everybody is buying such and such a thing, and instead of buying handkerchiefs you buy curtains.
So the slogan is like the Eastern mantra, a word of power, the magic concept, the general idea, and our lives are formed on such general ideas, formulated principles.
But very often they are not formulated in the individual mind, or the individual mind has perhaps forgotten them.
The famous man in the street talks about glory, in the name of the freedom of our country, etc.-the thing that catches-not knowing that it is his mantra.
The unconscious recognizes it however, or the mantra recognizes him, and instantly he collapses.
People cannot resist when they hear the word of power.
It is catastrophic, therefore, when a general idea is shattered, whether or not it is formulated in your mind.
Then a whole world falls down-even those people who rescued their Christian principles through the war and still go on believing that there is a particularly kind god watching over Germany, and on whom it has not yet dawned that an equally kind god is watching over the microbes, helping the good microbes to eat a man’s lungs, for instance, or that he is watching over the Frenchman just as kindly.
They still go on, apparently as before, but in reality they cannot go on as before because something in them has been killed.
There is a fundamental doubt in them, though it is only in their unconscious, so they are still in a state of blissful unconsciousness about the general conditions.
Yet here and there symptoms begin to show.
The Great War has worked its havoc economically and politically, but above all in our spiritual attitude, and we all suffer from these effects.
And when the dream refers to the graveyard of the Great War, it means more than the lives wasted there, or the destruction of northern France, or the economic devastation; it means the spiritual devastation.
I will give you an instance.
The theological students of the university here have asked me a very interesting question, namely, why do people prefer to go to the doctor when they have a psychical trouble instead of going to the parson?
They are apparently quite positive in their religious principles, yet they are confronted with the problem that everybody is now turning to psychology rather than to religion.
That is a small symptom, but the effects of the war show in such ways.
Numbers of people now come to consult me in matters which would have been the proper domain of theology before,
and the same thing happens when I go abroad-some body is always coming up and asking me in a hushed voice about metaphysical possibilities.
So you see the specific problem of our patient-which needs the veiling of the unconscious, the back of her head-is also an outcome of the war, for one of the most obvious aftereffects is a complete change in the moral point of view, not only in Europe but all over the white world.
Our position in regard to the sex question has completely changed, our taboos and convictions on that subject are entirely upset.
Look at Russia. And look at the extraordinary frequency of divorce.
In Zurich we have now reached the American percentage, we are quick in catching up.
In America one fourth of the marriages end in divorce, and here we have now exactly the American quota, two hundred and fifty thousand to a million.
People try to deny Judge Lindsey’s statements, but I know only too well how true they are; we could write books about similar conditions in Europe or even in this nice town.
I could tell you amazing stories, unheard-of things.
Even I have been shocked. And those are the aftereffects of the war. This woman is deeply affected.
She has not been hurt politically or economically, she has suffered no personal loss during the war-no one has been killed but her spirit has suffered: her Christian fundamental concepts have been blasted, she has been living in a world where she had no orientation whatever.
Now man cannot live like that, he needs reins, he likes the well-trodden path.
Not everybody is meant to be a pioneer, one who creates a road out of nothing.
Man needs a system of orientation.
So here it is as if our patient’s unconscious were expressing the situation through this dream, saying: all that is the aftereffect of the war, you are living in the postwar time, when things are beginning to change.
On the surface it may look as if the war had had no effect at all, as if it had taught man nothing.
Governments go on playing the same tricks as before.
The world is spending two and a half millions more in preparation than before the war.
Human psychology today is as if people had learned absolutely nothing. German psychology remains the same.
And look at Italy! It is as if she had not lost half a million young men.
They are propagating like rabbits down there, in preparation. It is the psychology of despair.
That is what Mussolini is doing. Everywhere it looks as if nothing had been learned.
Nevertheless such a thing cannot happen without affecting the processes of our psychology; it has left deep marks, but we are not psychological enough to link up our own individual difficulties with it.
The war accounts for the disorientation of the individual in our time.
The religious and moral and philosophical confusion, even the confusion in our art, is due to the World War.
This dream therefore conveys, in the statement about the locality, that the backwash of the Great War is the setting in which this particular thought is presented, and the thought is the figure of the saint with the bull.
Now what is the connection between the bull and the saint?
Dr. Baynes: It suggests Mithraism and Christianity.
Dr. Jung: My patient also thought that this must mean some sort of revival of Mithraism, because the central figure of the Mithraic cult was the bull.
The bull plays much more of a role in Mithraism than the lamb in Christian mythology.
The lamb merely figured in the cult of the sacrificial victim; it was led to the sacrificial stone and slaughtered, so it does
not mean much.
But the Mithraic bull means a great deal.
It is the creative power, the great world bull, the bull of the beginning; it is the bull god, most powerful and admirable.
And its death is the immediate cause of a sort of rebirth of nature.
His corpse changes immediately after death into all sorts of beneficial products of nature.
Out of the hairs of the tail wheat springs up; out of the nose, garlic grows; out of the blood comes wine; out of the horns, fruits, and so on.
The Christian sacrificial scene is represented in the same symmetrical setting that we see depicted in the Mithraic cult: in the middle is the sacrifice of the bull, the god Mithra killing him; and on either side is a figure, the so-called dadotit
phores, the torch-bearers.
They are like little erotes, those figures which really come from Greek tombstones; they wear the Phrygian cap, the
pointed pileus, which is like the Jacobean cap in the French Revolution, the cap which Liberty wears on French coins.
And at the side of the god killing the bull in the center, one of these little figures is holding the torch down, and the other is holding it up.
That is connected with the fact that on one side the moon is setting; and Helios in his chariot, with white horses, is driving over the heavens and rising on the other side.
So the altar picture in the Mithraic cult corresponds to the Christian idea.
In Christianity, one thief ascends with Christ to Paradise, and the other goes down to Hell: one is rising and one is descending.
And the Christian death is the culmination.
It is a kind of solstitial idea, the sun sacrificing itself at noon when it has attained the greatest height.
On 21 June, the summer solstice, the sun sacrifices its own power voluntarily; it goes down into the night of winter, expressing the idea that the god voluntarily sacrifices himself at the very summit of his power.
When he has attained his culmination he chooses death. So at the moment of his greatest success, the summit, Christ had a prevision of his sunset; the fundamental idea of the Christian dogma is that God in the human figure of Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily for the welfare of mankind.
And the idea in the Mithraic cult was that the god sacrificed the divine bull, his own libido, his own life-power and fertility, in order to increase the fertility of the earth, as a sort of blessing to the earth. From the standpoint of symbology, therefore, the Mithraic idea is very similar to the Christian dogma.
As a matter of fact the early Christian cult took over a good deal from the Mithraic ritual.
For instance: the little bells the boys ring at particular moments of the Mass really derive from the cult of Mithra; then, the Host with the cross marked on it is of Mithraic origin.
But in the Mithraic cult they drank water instead of wine, because it was a religion of severe discipline, suited to soldiers.
And there was the great difference that women were excluded; that is one of the reasons for its downfall.
But the moral quality of Mithraism was so impressive that Cumont, the greatest authority, said that if the conditions had been a bit more adverse to Christianity in the second century, the world would have been Mithraic.
Now our patient is a very educated woman and had probably read about Mithra, which might account for the fact that the bull turns up in her dream.
But I have ample evidence that the same symbolism may occur in the dreams of people who know nothing about it.
I once dreamed about the Mithraic mystery myself without knowing that it was Mithraic.
Of course, a dream about a bull is not necessarily derived from
the Mithraic cult by some unknown channel; it is merely the natural thought that was naturally expressed in the Mithraic cult originally.
I repeat, it is not a derivation from the Mithraic cult when someone in our day dreams of bulls.
This dream, for instance, is an autochthonous reproduction of the same thought; our minds think in the same way and
about the same things that man has thought in the past and will always think.
Therefore one finds bull worship, or the worship of similar animals, in all the most remote corners of the earth at the most different times.
That is because it is an archetype; the archetype is eternal, outside of time.
Any archetype may turn up in the human mind anywhere and at any time, today as well as in the minds of primitives ten thousand years ago.
So this is simply the reproduction of a thought which once received an almost philosophical elaboration in the cult of Mithra; it is essentially the same idea.
Now we see that the bull with that background of Mithraic ideas is eating the saint’s fingers, which means that it is beginning in a friendly way to devour the Christian saint.
And our patient naturally is all on the side of the Christian saint, a fact of which she is entirely unconscious.
If you should ask her, she would be shocked at your asking such a question, she would say that she loathed the idea.
Yet secretly she likes to be a Christian saint, she flirts with the idea without knowing it.
She does not sing Christian hymns, she does not go to church, and she holds blasphemous views about clergymen, so she is sure she is not a Christian.
But the point is that her attitude to her own problems, to her own world, is thoroughly Christian, and she cannot help feeling herself a sort of saint, because she is dealing with her own psychology in the way of a saint.
Now what would you call a saintly attitude?
Mrs. Crowley: Repression?
Dr. Jung: I would not characterize it from the side of repression, for you can live things in a saintly way without being considered especially repressed.
Dr. Baynes: Renunciation?
Mrs. Crowley: Martyrdom?
D1: Schlegel: Perfection?
Dr. Jung: Do you get the picture? Each one of you has given a true aspect of the saintly attitude, all the qualifications.
There is something absolute about it. For instance, suppose a poor man really needs your help.
If you say, I have just five hundred francs, take it with my blessing, that would be the saintly attitude of sacrifice, devotion, renunciation.
You renounce your money for the sake of the poor fellow.
Or if it is very cold, you cut your overcoat in half and give one-half to him, and if it is not so cold you give him the whole coat.
St. Martin only gave a half, but it was very cold then.
Or suppose you are going to a friend who has in his cellar an old and wonderful wine, a sacred wine.
You must be very careful in drinking that wine, you must drink it with great ceremony, with utter devotion, and exactly the right number of bottles.
Then you will have done it with perfection, in a saintly way; it was an achievement.
You sacrificed yourself to the cause, and you might even say it was good that you drank it, for then nobody else would poison themselves.
And it means great renunciation, for whoever pays for that wine pays at least fifty francs for each bottle.
That example is nonsense, of course, but people really do the most absurd things; with such an attitude everything is done in a saintly way.
People can live on raw carrots, or kill themselves with sports with a saintly attitude.
And it can even be applied to spheres of life where decent people could not exist, applied in the most risque situations, with such faith and renunciation that you just hold your head when they tell you such stories and ask how the devil they can live such a life.
“Oh well,” they say, “it is a great sacrifice to me!”
Outside they are swine, but they have sacrificed themselves.
It is the medieval saint attitude hanging over into our time, and naturally it is out of tune.
Now our dreamer is by blood, by birth, by virtue of the very air she breathes, a Christian, and her ideal is the ideal of the Christian saint.
She is a Protestant, so she would not dream of being a Catholic saint, yet that is what she is.
The Protestant is utterly unaware that he is a Catholic underneath; the more devotedly he lives as a Protestant, the more he is a Catholic.
I tell you, it is with the greatest difficulty that we extract ourselves from that illusion or delusion of saintliness.
It is hardly believable, but you can catch yourself time and again thinking what a great spiritual merit it is that you do such and such a thing-feeling terribly good and naturally there is a God in Heaven who keeps records of what you do and you will have such and such a reward.
You may not think that consciously, but you feel the accumulation of grace when you do things in the right way, and that is such a lure that you can hardly resist it.
I see it all the time in analysis: it is the most difficult thing to educate people out of the illusion of saintliness.
It is a sort of prejudice, the effect of early Christian ancestral ideas.
It has nothing to do with conscious convictions but it is the foundation of our whole mental atmosphere.
Our science, our art, our taste, our morality, are all formed on that pattern and, as I said, it does not matter what you believe; you will be like everybody else, you will fall into that same Christian attitude.
We overvalue the conscious tremendously.
In certain respects consciousness has no value, in other respects it has every conceivable value.
So when I depreciate it from certain aspects it does not mean that it should be abolished.
I know that consciousness is the greatest achievement of man, but that does not alter the fact that in certain cases consciousness is of no value at all. In certain spheres of psychology, we see that consciousness means nothing.
For instance, you have apparently convinced someone of a psychological truth, and he says, “Oh yes, I see.”
But the next day he comes back and it is as if you had said nothing; it is forgotten, because in the night he has given it away to the devils and they swallowed it.
He has stored it away and the unconscious digests it; it is as if it had never been.
So to think a thing consciously does not mean that it has necessarily reached you.
Most certainly, it has not reached you. If it had, there would have been a flash of lightning in that moment.
But since you do not realize it at all, you say: “Oh yes, I see. Excellent that!”
It is as If l said to a man: “You have a young cobra in your pocket,” and he just said quietly: “Is that so, how interesting.”
Such a man thinks he is aware, perfectly convinced, but in reality he would never put his
hand in his pocket if he realized what the cobra meant there.
And so it is in psychology when it comes to a basic attitude.
Our dreamer would most certainly have said: “Oh, I see exactly what you mean.”
Yet she would exactly not have seen it, because that prejudice is too strong.
A prejudice which reaches back one thousand years or more before her own individual existence is not easily removed; it is a long and formidable task to get to the bottom of such an attitude, to the point where you have really done with it.
Mrs. Crowley: Is not the essence of Christianity, the thing underlying the saintly attitude, something very much farther back than Christianity? Is it not also a terribly primitive thing, as in the medicine man? Does it not really go back to the primal time?
Is it not really more an idea of individuation?
It does not matter what the saint does because in all times he has stood for different things, but fundamentally it is an individual that stands apart and as such is distinguished from the herd.
As such, is it not an ideal? Does it not stand out psychologically as something different
from the connotation?
Dr. Jung: It is not as simple as that.
Sure enough, all those ideals, the medicine man, or the chief, all these mana personalities are of a primitive pattern.
There is no primitive tribe without that pattern, there is always one conspicuous individual, a man with mana.
But that merely happened like that, it is just there.
And the important thing about saintliness is that it is not a thing that happens, it is not just there.
It is a matter of training, or self-education; it is a cultural product, it is an ideal.
With the primitive it is not an ideal.
The medicine man doesn’t want to be a medicine man; he will do everything in order to avoid it.
Mrs. Crowley: He dislikes it but he has to accept it in the end if he is one.
Dr. Jung: Not necessarily, because it is merely a natural fact and by no means an ideal. It is very disagreeable.
The medicine man has a dangerous and unhealthy life; usually they kill him in the end.
He is not a saint, he is a perfect beast.
The primitive medicine man is quite unlike the Christian idea of the saint, despite the fact that they are of the same pattern.
It makes all the difference in the world whether a thing has grown naturally on the tree of life or whether it is the result of education and conscious intention.
The important thing, then, is that in Christianity the mana personality becomes an ideal.
Mrs. Crowley: In India?
Dr. Jung: In India the sage is naturally a product of education and it is very much the same in China.
Mankind is so linked together that at practically the same time they tried everywhere to produce greater consciousness, and so it was important that they developed that idea of saintliness.
Prof Demos: Different ideas suited different species.
Dr.Jung: Yes, the way in which it is realized is quite different, of course.
The Christian saint is entirely different from a Hindu or a Chinese sage; the common point is the intentional differentiation of that type.
They even work out the most complicated systems, like Yoga or the Christian rites, to bring about that type.
One sees in the lives of the early Christian saints that they took the most extraordinary pains to learn methods.
You know how certain saints traveled far in order to learn a particularly ascetic way of attaining greater saintliness.
They understood their life in the desert as a sort of sport-how long one could live alone away from civilization. It was a competition in saintliness.
That was the way the devil once caught St. Anthony.
He had been twenty years in the desert and the other saints did not have the same record; they lived just on the edge of the desert where the carriers could bring water and food, but he lived three days journey farther away, which was three days better than anybody in Egypt.
Then, after twenty years, in came a nice gentleman one evening.
St. Anthony thought he must be an angel who had come to honor him because he was such a saint.
The angel said to him, “You are a great saint, St. Anthony, but I know one who is even greater.” And St. Anthony, being very modest, said, “Oh, who is that?
Tell me the name of that man.” “I don’t know his name, but he is a shoemaker in Alex-
andria.”
So St. Anthony instantly took his staff and went to Alexandria to search for him.
Nobody knew him, but after several days he succeeded in finding the little shoemaker down in a hole somewhere, and he was not even a real shoemaker, he was only mending shoes.
St. Anthony said to him, “I hear you are a great saint.” “Why, I never heard of that, I am a shoemaker.”
“Nevertheless, you must be a great saint because an angel told me so. Now what is your method?”
“Oh, I am just mending shoes. I have nine children and a wife. I must earn some money or we would all starve.”
Then it dawned upon St. Anthony that the angel was the devil.
The angel must have been wrong because that method did not suit him.
So the differentiation of a saint is a training, a method, it is something like a technique; in other words, it is a conscious ideal, and of course the primitives have not that conscious intention.
A fellow who seems to be suitable for a medicine man is poisoned and tortured; he is driven half mad or completely mad.
For only when they have succeeded in tearing open a large hole in his unconscious does he become a medicine man; then he has partial access to the information which the collective unconscious yields.
The unconscious, having an extraordinary perception and an extraordinary knowledge of the conditions, can tell him things which his consciousness never could produce, so that technique is absolutely to the point.
But that is nothing like the differentiation of an individual; it means the destruction of the individual because the health of the individual consciousness must be destroyed in order to allow the collective unconscious to come in.
Now that is not the saint ideal; the saint is supposed to be a more perfect individual, to have more perfect health and a more perfect mind.
And the education of a saint, the technique by which a saint is produced, carefully excludes the collective unconscious.
There was a saint in Alexandria, for instance, who wrote very interesting instructions to the monks, and one sees from his admonitions that he strictly excluded the unconscious.
Anything that happened which was not in the line of their technique of exclusion, anything that came right out of the unconscious, must be of the devil, because the truth was to be found only in the Holy Scriptures.
So all written matter published by the Catholic church still excludes anything individual, anything spiritual working out in the individual.
In the course of a long conversation which I once had with a Jesuit father, I asked about his attitude toward dream analysis, and he told me that he considered it very dangerous.
Then I asked him what he was doing instead, and he replied: “Oh, we have the means of grace; we have the grace of confession, the grace of absolution and of exorcism, we have holy weeks, etc.”
The individual functioning is simply substituted by the forms of the church; those are
the old methods by which saints are produced, it is the attitude by which saints are produced.
So the figure of the Christian saint is quite different from the primitive medicine man, but he is not different from a disciple of Lao-tze, for instance, or a Hindu sage-only they have a somewhat different aspect.
In this dream it is a matter of that Christian product, that ideal of saintliness, which is particularly upset by the war.
For the central idea of the graveyard seems to be represented on that gravestone, the idea of the Christian saintliness devoured by the bull, the animal.
Now that is a very profound idea really.
You see when you boil down the psychology of war and ask yourself what produced it, and what psychological idea induced people to continue the war, you find that it was their idealism, that extraordinary devotion to their own cause.
When two are fighting, each one equally devoted to his own side, they just go on fighting.
They fought with the greatest faith, the greatest conviction, on either side, and so they continued the war.
If several of those powers, or even one, had had a less Christian attitude, which means a less ideal attitude, the war would have crumbled away.
One doesn’t hear much of the Portuguese army and their particular devotion because that was gone in no time.
The Russians broke down first because they are much closer to the animal than any of the other nations except the Portuguese.
So if the morale had not been so high, the war could not have lasted so long.
If that tremendous ideal of perfection-you can call it the sporting spirit or the religious attitude-had not prevailed, the war would have collapsed much earlier, probably after a few months, as it does with primitives.
The primitives never make war as we understand it.
For instance, there was a war between two big tribes which lasted three or four years,
and the casualties were enormous-just three men!
That was formerly true in China.
They advanced with their cannons and their flintlock guns, marching against each other, and then it began to rain and they went home again because the weather was not favorable; it was disagreeable to fight in the rain.
That is literally true. Warfare in the Middle Ages
lasted a fortnight and was a sort of bad joke. In Switzerland we had many such little wars. The last one was in 1847.
There was a battle in which about a dozen people were killed.
Quite a lot went home before the war was finished.
One man came home to his people, who looked surprised
and said: “We thought you were in the war!”
He said: “Well, I went, but I couldn’t stay because they were actually aiming at us!”
That is the primitive standpoint-the whole war finished with a few coups de canons-and
that was the type of medieval warfare in general, a great noise and then, if things were getting serious, it was better to desist.
Sometimes there is a terrible fight among primitives, but since most of them are not wars a grande distance, but between brother tribes, because they are most likely
to anger each other, they are usually not very bloody, not very important.
In primitive circumstances there is no devotion, no hero ideal; there is a lot of noise and a good deal of running away and boasting afterwards.
These terrible wars come about only when people have been whipped into form, when they have an ideal.
If anybody had asked me if I assumed that people would be able to carry on such a horrible war for so long a time, I would have said that that possibility was excluded, they have not such extraordinary devotion to an ideal.
So the Great War has given me a much better idea of people; it has shown that one can work miracles with them.
They are so valuable that they could stand it, they could carry it on.
There were many moments when men came out of the trenches and discussed it; they said to each other that this hell of a thing ought to be stopped, but they still went on.
There were too many good people who took those regiments out of the trenches and split them up in order not to distribute those vile ideas, because it was right to continue
the war.
It was one of the greatest tests of the goodness of humanity, of the real value of men.
But it worked terrible havoc.
All this shows you what that symbolism means-the bull eating the saint’s fingers.
For instance, there is a saying: “Don’t give a finger to the devil, or it will take the whole hand.”
The hand also symbolizes the activity of man, what he does with his hands; without hands he is inefficient, he cannot create.
So when the saint’s hands are eaten he cannot apply himself any longer.
The creative activity of that principle, or that saintly attitude, is being devoured by the bull.
Then the bull will have hands, the bull will become active.
The meaning of this dream is that against that saintly attitude is the animal attitude, and the animal attitude takes on apparently great importance.
Now that obviously means more than just the animal in man; it must mean more than animal unconsciousness, say, versus the spiritual consciousness of the Western man. There must be something special about that animal, it must be a divine animal.
The patient herself instantly associated it with Mithra, so we cannot assume that it is just an ordinary bull.
As the saint is divine, so the bull is divine; it is a divine principle set against another divine principle.
That, of course, makes a great difference. Now what is the meaning of that divine bull as opposed to the saint?
Mrs. Wickes: It is the instinctual attitude, more the course of nature, elemental.
Dr. Jung: But under what particular aspect?
Mrs. Wickes: Spiritual energy?
Dr. Jung: Well, by way of excluding the real animal, we can say that the divine bull is an abstract bull.
As in speaking of the force of instincts or the instinctual attitude, we would not mean by that an individual animal unconsciousness in someone, a slip.
It must be something on principle, as the word divine implies, something universal, just as good and even as efficient as saintliness.
Since the bull is eating the saint, an instinctual attitude must be meant that is equivalent to the Christian attitude; it must be another ideal, as, for instance, Mithraism was a different ideal from Christianity.
Christianity emphasized the principle of love, while in Mithraism discipline was insisted upon, an entirely different principle.
Here we have a similar clash: the saint as an ideal of perfection in contradistinction
to the bull attitude.
Now we must try to understand this instinctual attitude, and I add, an instinctual attitude on principle. Can you imagine what that means?
Dr. Baynes: Fecundity?
Dr. Jung: We hope it will be a principle of fecundity but for the time being it is eating the saint, which is an attitude that obviously undermines the Christian idea of saintliness. Now how do you understand that?
Answer: It is the strength of nature that comes by itself.
Dr. Jung: And how would you understand the strength of nature?
Answer: The thing that gives itself up.
Dr. Jung: But what is the difference between that and an individual slip?
Remark: Creative nature, something very big, could certainly devour the Christian saint.
Prof Demos: Materialism?
Dr. Jung: That is too abstract.
Mrs. Jaeger: It is an earth power, and in astrology the bull is also asymbol of the beginning of spring.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the bull is Taurus, the sign of May, the month of Venus.
It is not yet summer; it means the full blossoming of spring in astrology, and we can take it as such.
And we are justified in that assumption because we have already encountered spring symbolism in these dreams.
Prof Eaton: The spring lamb.
Dr. Jung: You are right, the Christian lamb, and what else?
Suggestion: The peacock?
Dr. Jung: Yes, the peacock is a spring symbol in Eastern rites, and it was regarded as such in antiquity.
So this bull could be understood as a sort of spring, a new manifestation, a natural power.
But supposing it to be a principle, that always involves a creed.
You see, you cannot make a saint by just telling someone to get efficient, you must always tell him what for, you must first make the point d’honneurin such a case.
If you are a member of a certain sport association, for instance, in order not to be despised by the fellow members, you must act in accordance with some idea; there is always some standard connected with it, like that “invisible whale.”
Perhaps it is the idea of having to renounce something, the idea: now this is a great sacrifice!
Often when a person is quite unwilling to do something, you only have to say that it would be a wonderful sacrifice, and it works instantly.
When you do a thing on principle you are strong; when you do it alone, as a private individual, it does not count; to be really efficient, it must be on principle.
Rockefeller, for instance, would never have accumulated all his money if he had not been absolutely convinced that it was for the benefit of mankind.
He was trying to create a standard price for oil all over the world, and if he did not succeed it was because they were evil people.
He said the Austrians were very bad because they made a separate agreement with Romania.
Rockefeller is a great saint in his way; he lives like a Christian saint.
Now against that attitude, the bull would be the instinctual attitude on principle, and it is very difficult for us to understand what that means, because the Christian attitude always condemns that as laisser faire, laisser aller, a system of individual disorganization.
There we stumble in our Christian mentality.
We forget that the animal is the most pious thing that exists, the one thing besides plants that really fulfills its destiny, that fulfills the superior will, the will of God.
We are of the devil because we are always deviating, always living something of our own.
Animals live exactly as they were meant to live. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars Page 72-88