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LECTURE IV 5 November 1930
After those three dreams which ended with the remark about the lunatic asylum, the patient had again several hypnogogic visions.
These new ones were very much like the other ones, very simple and fragmentary, sort of hieroglyphs.
The first one was an upraised hand.
The second was again a head with the nimbus, but this time it was not the same wheel, it was a real halo such as one sees in pictures of the saints.
The third vision was a fiery globe, as she called it, pierced by a black bar.
It was like a sun, and a black bar went somehow through it, disappearing in the globe or the radiance.
And the fourth vision was a flame, which she saw right in front of her face, and then it suddenly went into her mouth.
These visions are again rather too fragmentary to be easily explained.
I felt at the time that they were merely preparatory, that it was better to leave them and wait until they developed further.
Such symbols can be read, of course, through comparison with others.
For instance, this gesture, the raised hand, means several things.
It emphasizes first of all the importance of the hand, and, of course, this particular gesture suggests: Pay attention!
But it might mean attention to the usefulness of the hand, because a few weeks later, she began to draw.
The bust of a dark man with a halo is again the figure of the Poimen or the shepherd.
The fiery globe pierced by the black bar I leave for the present.
The last one, the flame that entered her mouth, is a sort of reminiscence.
She did not associate it with anything she knew, she was entirely unconscious of its connotation.
It is an initiation vision, like some that are reported in the Old Testament-the fiery coals, or the book brought down by angels, which the prophet has to swallow when he is initiated.
It simply means that fire, the creative principle, is entering her, either to devour things in her which must be devoured, or that she is filled with the divine fire, a sort of inspiration.
It has exactly the same meaning as those visions which always occur at the beginning of a prophetic trance or an ekstasis.
From such a vision we could expect that something would now begin to move, since she has overcome, more or less, the difficulties or resistances which were hindering her.
The dreams before spoke about these difficulties at great length: First, her fear that she had not petrol and oil enough to carry her through to her home.
Then the great storm at sea, the tremendous upheaval of her emotions.
And in the third dream, the fear of the lunatic asylum if she touched the unconscious, a fear that is very frequent and not without justification.
This vision, then, would indicate that the fire had entered her, and we may conclude that the development will take its course.
The next dream, which followed immediately after the hypnogogic visions the same night-was the following:
I was with a mole and a canary bird. I had cut their claws and was afraid I had cut them too short and caused them pain. Someone said the mole goes deep down into the earth. I took the canary out of its cage. It did not fly away. I had expected that it would.
Here we have two animals.
The mole is a nocturnal sort of animal that is always digging in the ground and lives under the ground.
The other is a bird, an inhabitant of the kingdom of the air.
So these two animals are exceedingly symbolical.
One would stand for a sort of instinctive unconscious tendency to move underground, below; and the other a similar
instinctive movement in the air above-it is a spiritual or thought symbol.
Everything that pertains to thought or spirit is air.
The word spiritus means breath. Animus, mind, means wind.
Pneuma means wind and spirit.
So birds usually symbolize thoughts, inspirations, enthusiasms, anything that is light or uplifting.
And the dark animals, like snakes, moles, mice, and the aquatic animals, symbolize the heavy dark things: they denote sexuality and all sorts of earthly desires or instincts or emotions.
The emotions are usually supposed to be located in a sphere below the brain, either in the heart or still lower down in the abdomen.
In primitive Negro psychology, for instance, the emotions and the thoughts, the whole psychical process, are supposed to be down below in the abdomen.
The Pueblo Indians locate the psychical process in the heart and think the Americans are crazy because they say they think in the head; happily, the Indian who told me assumed that I thought the same, knowing that I was not an American.
This is not a side issue, a bypath; it belongs to the theme of the subsequent events, namely, the psychical localizations in former periods.
When man was less developed than he is today, the psychical process was located in different centers, and we still bear the traces of them.
We believe the head to be the seat of thought and the reasoning processes, while our emotional processes are centered in the heart.
And we still have a feeling of a psychical center in the abdomen; certain reactions show quite clearly in the abdominal processes: disturbances of the stomach, for example, are very frequent in neuroses, and there is practically no case of hysteria without symptoms in the abdomen.
The stomach functions as if it were a psychical organ that expresses certain thoughts or emotions through certain disturbances.
So the mole represents a vital psychical function that moves down below, below consciousness.
While the bird flies above, it represents the sphere of the brain, as a thought flies like a bird; in thought we follow
the bird, we lift ourselves up into the air, leaving our bodies, our earth psychology, far behind.
It is interesting that the mole is a wild animal and the canary is most decidedly domesticated, always kept in a cage.
The dreamer is cutting the claws of those two animals.
You know that the claws of a canary bird kept in a cage always have a tendency to grow too long because it cannot use them properly.
But the mole never needs to have its claws cut because it uses them all the time for digging.
So it is ridiculous to cut off the claws of that wild animal.
Obviously our patient makes a mistake of handling the mole as if it were a caged canary bird.
We may draw the conclusion, then, that the thought function is with her the caged function, since the bird symbolizes the mind.
You see, the unconscious is quite free to speak of an eagle or any other uncaged bird, but in her case the mind is thoroughly domesticated, it is her differentiated function over which she has complete control.
It is absolutely at her mercy, a wild thing that has lost its wildness and is at her disposition in a cage.
But down below are the emotional things, or whatever the inferior function may be.
I use the word inferior for the function-in her case, feeling-that is the farthest from the differentiated function.
And inasmuch as her mind is of the scientific type, the intuitive part of her mind would be repressed, though not so repressed as her feeling.
The function following her thinking is probably sensation, which would give her an empirical mind.
The thinking would be up in the head; the sensation about on the level of the mouth; the intuition in the region of the heart; and then down below in the abdomen would be the feeling.
She would feel with the abdomen and not with the heart, and that is, of course, a particular kind of feeling.
The lower down you go in these psychical centers, the more you lose the consciousness of a separate self, the more you become collective, the more you are in a state of participation mystique, and when you arrive at the lowest center, you have lost the consciousness of yourself altogether and the ego is a name only.
There is then no individual consciousness or will power; one functions by tribal influences, one is part of a clan with
only the herd instinct.
Any function on the lowest level has these qualities: it is absolutely collective and undifferentiated in character, not discriminated from the functions of other people, and therefore always in a state of complete projection.
The feeling of this woman, for instance, would be as entirely in participation mystique with her surroundings as the
feelings of very primitive people.
She would never realize a feeling that was clearly her own, because it would not be her own-it would be the feeling that was prevailing in other people.
She is absolutely dependent upon the feeling atmosphere; if that is blue, she is blue, and she cannot help it; it is ungovernable, it is explosive, it is and is not.
She might have quite a nice feeling at one moment, and in the next it would be hopelessly lost and she wouldn’t know why.
She is full of emotion, fearfully strong, and she is either completely possessed by it or just as much possessed
by the lack of it.
She cannot bring it up at will, neither can she drive it away at will.
The inferior function is like a wild animal of superior strength, and you cannot knock a lion about because it might eat
you.
Now she handles those instinctual tendencies in her dream as if they were just alike.
The canary bird is an entirely domesticated function, and so the signs of autonomous growth shown in the claws may be cut to advantage.
But to cut the mole’s claws is a mistake, because that is a wild animal. In other words, the function that is wild should not be curtailed or it cannot function properly.
Her undomesticated, inferior function works best when left alone, it is a mistake to interfere.
She can blame her thinking function for thinking illogically, she can do what she pleases with her mind; but she cannot do what she pleases with her inferior function.
In order to establish any kind of connection with a wild animal you must adapt yourself to it, you must study its own habits and laws, and it is the same with the inferior function.
You should establish a connection with it since it has to do with you, but the connection should be along the lines of its own functioning.
This woman realizes here that she has perhaps cut the claws of those animals too short and caused them pain; the dream calls her attention to the fact that she must be careful about that.
Then somebody makes the remark that the mole goes deep down into the ground.
This seems rather unimportant, yet if the dream insists on the fact, it must have its particular point, which evidently is that the mole, the function which goes so deep down into the ground, is specially emphasized.
That is news to the patient. She has not realized it, or she would not have cut off the mole’s claws, thus hindering it from doing its job.
The idea is that something ought to get into action underground, since nothing is moving up above.
Although she opens the canary’s cage, it does not fly away.
That is the trouble with our differentiated function: it remains within reach, it is sterilized by domestication.
Such birds never soar away, they never function like Noah’s dove or Wotan’s raven, flying abroad and bringing back information from parts unknown.
So she cannot expect anything to come out of her mind.
But she can hope for something to come from her wild function, a primitive and inferior function down in the darkness where she cannot see; it needs the instinct of a mole to find anything there.
Obviously, the intention of the dream is to lay stress upon the function of the mole and upon the fact that she can expect nothing from her mind.
Hitherto our dreamer has been under the impression that analysis was all done through the mind, that the main job was a mental one.
Therefore my particular reluctance to explain things to her.
She always wanted things explained, and then they were put aside in a drawer-killed and nothing happened any longer.
We often misuse our differentiated function in order to protect ourselves, we use it to kill life when that threatens to become awkward. Up to a certain point it is valuable, but when you come to that moment in your life when the development of your personality becomes an inevitable problem, then you are no longer allowed to kill life, you must accept life.
In Hindu philosophy, one is taught about karma, fate.
In the beginning you must work against fate, against the family fate, for instance.
A child would be absolutely overcome by the inherited fate, the family curse; it would be suffocated from the very beginning.
So young people have to work away from it.
They must differentiate themselves in order to live; they must free themselves from the spell; they must tear away the veils of unconsciousness.
But having liberated yourself from the evil fate of family-your inherited sin-the moment will come in the middle of life when your task becomes difficult.
For the ultimate task of life, according to Hindu teaching, is that you take up your karma, that you work it out; otherwise it accumulates and you have it in the next existence-a hell of a time.
Fortunately you can now do something about it, you can take it up, accept it.
As a rule people are simply forced through the logical development of analysis to take up their individual fate, their particular situation with all its advantages and shortcomings.
You could call it individuation.
Now in this great pursuit of the working out of your particular pattern, you simply come to a dead end if you try to do it through your differentiated function.
That has served you well in liberating you from the original unconsciousness, from the past, so that you can establish
yourself in life as a separate social figure or unit.
But when the question of the totality arises, the rounding out of your personality, or the taking up of karma, you must listen to other functions as well and particularly to the inferior function.
You then discover that you cannot possibly deal with certain situations in life with one function only. Generally a person
with a differentiated thinking function will encounter a situation which he cannot solve by his mind alone; he will need feeling.
An intuitive will come to an impasse where his intuition serves him not at all; he needs sensation, the function of reality, in order to be able to continue his life; he has left too many situations unsolved, and finally he is overcome by them, nailed down by the unsolved problems, and only his reality function can help him.
And sensation types get into a hole which is just nothing but reality; they need intuition very badly in order to crawl out
of it, to have the feeling that life is really lived.
Our patient is in such a hole. Her scientific mind did not help her.
Differentiated feeling would have guided her, but she had only the feeling of a Negro or a very primitive man, and naturally that was not up to the situation either.
So the necessity has arisen of following the inferior function into its own realm, into the depths, to go down into the abdominal seat of the inferior function.
We shall presently come again to that motif of going down, which is the thing that seems to promise life, a solution of her problems.
The canary bird is hopeless. The next dream was in the same night:
I was in the midst of a great crowd; there was a medieval atmosphere.
Someone said, “You must try to see the woman with a child kneeling on her lap.” Then I saw a woman who seemed to be raised above the crowd. She was dressed in blue. On her lap a tiny child was kneeling. She was sheltering it in her arms.
Now, whatever happens in this dream must be considered in the light of the dream before.
After the dream where the mole has been emphasized, we may assume that this function will lead her down into the dark lower regions.
This does not mean that that world is necessarily dark.
Our eyes are obscured, but if we had the senses of the underground animal we would have far more perception in the darkness than we have naturally in using our eyes.
We are now following the mole, so we are coming to things which were dark to her before, and the first thing she is
aware of is that she is in a great crowd-thousands of people.
To be in a great crowd is to be in a collective situation, a situation where there are innumerable other individuals.
And to be on a collective level means that one is below, because differentiation is always thought of as being above the crowd.
The crowd is down in the region of the abdomen, and out of that the individual consciousness emerges in a sort of pyramidal spiral ascent to the head on top.
One can imagine it as a pyramid, and it is symbolized in that way in dreams.
Now that great crowd emanates a very medieval atmosphere, so this woman is not only going down on the social level but is also going back in time.
That the general collective level always lags several hundred years behind consciousness is another important fact.
We should never think we are living in modern times-we are living three or four hundred years behind our times, our feeling life is not up to date.
You see, when you travel down from this 1930 level in the head, then inch by inch you get back in time, it is like a sort of time machine.
Wells’s novel about the time machine is based on a psychological truth.
When your consciousness is up in your head, you are perhaps back a hundred years, and when it is in the heart you are back two or three hundred years, and the farther you go back the more rapidly the time motor goes back.
So when you are down in the abdominal region you are in the time of the caveman, you even get back into the primal furry time, you feel your feet gripping branches and perhaps a tail is growing.
Going down to the collective level always means going back in time.
The psychical life of the general collective level is a peculiar mixture of the caveman, say, with the psychology of the sixteenth century.
And you can still find the anthropological types of all these ages.
You step into a streetcar in Zurich and there is a Neanderthal man sitting right opposite you, his psychological level of humanity.
In the village where I lived as a child there was such a family. The mother was a typical witch.
She caught birds, they ate ravens and danced on the nights of the full moon.
They were not idiotic, only of a lower level; they belonged to the type of the primitive man who lived by hunting and fishing.
They lived in a sort of hovel, one room, with a hearth of stones on the floor where they cooked like cave people; it was not exactly a cave, it was an old abandoned house.
If you could have stuffed that family after their deaths, they would have made excellent specimens for an anthropological collection.
Their skulls were quite primitive.
So the lower forms of man are still living among us; they even have the psychology of the primitive man.
And we still, quite unconsciously, continue customs which are thousands of years old.
We celebrate with Christmas trees, for instance, which is an exceedingly ancient custom, reaching back through the ages, and as long as we continue these practices, we are in a way like the people who first expressed themselves through such rites.
Coming down to the collective level, then, means going back to former times, and our patient reaches now in her time-motor the medieval level, the Catholic Middle Ages.
She is of Protestant extraction, her ancestors have been Protestant for centuries, probably ever since the Reformation.
Therefore the time would be about the fifteenth century.
Let us assume that the culmination of the cult of Mary followed the time of the troubadours.
After the beginning of the thirteenth century the cult of Mary increased.
The most wonderful expression of it is the Lorettanian Litany, so called from the town in Italy, Loreto, in which was the famous Holy House where Jesus is supposed to have lived, brought there from Nazareth by angels.
This Lorettanian Litany dates from about the end of the fourteenth century.
It is one of the most impressive hymns to the mystical qualities of Mary, and therefore we may assume that the culmination of her cult would be in the fourteenth century, extending into the fifteenth.
Then the pendulum swings to the other side, to the witch persecutions, which are reactions against the cult of Mary.
The old laws of the Frankish kings before Charlemagne did not permit the burning of witches, but then came the tremendous increase of the cult of Mary, the reasons for which lie in the particular development of the higher
social order of that time, the time of the troubadours, the days of chivalry.
Then that period was followed by an increase of witch fear, and the witch burning began.
So we may assume that the level of our dreamer’s consciousness would now lie in the fourteenth century.
Here she reaches feeling, the tail of her feeling, as it were, which is at a level as low as, say, five hundred years back.
And she obviously reaches the feeling in the form of Mary with the Child.
Now why should she be impressed with that picture of the Madonna with the Child? How does that follow?
It is very important to see the logical sequence of the thoughts; otherwise we never get to their real meaning.
We should be able to develop the meaning of this dream out of the dream before and out of the general problem.
Prof Eaton: Is it not the same motif as taking up the lamb in the previous dream?
Dr. Jung: Exactly. And what does that denote? Who first took the sheep in his arms?
Prof Eaton: The shepherd.
Dr. Jung: The shepherd who was guiding her.
But there is no shepherd here; it is the Mother Mary, and instead of a lamb, it is a child, it is humanized.
It is obvious that she must have some connection with Mother Mary; the dream alludes very clearly to her maternal feeling.
In the first dream with the shepherd she was initiated; there it was shown to her, as is done in primitive initiations.
But there it was remote-it was early Christian psychology. Here it is later-there is progress.
It is as if, while she is going back in time, something from the depths of time were moving up to her.
There is an extraordinary autonomy and logic about these unconscious processes.
When she is far away from the realization of her unconscious, the unconscious is deep down in the ages-it is in ancient caves on the primitive level.
Then that is assimilated and she makes progress.
It is regressive progress, one could say, but the more she goes back in time, the more time comes to meet her.
It is as if she were approaching a mirror, and the nearer she approaches it, the nearer comes the image in the mirror.
Here the unconscious has arrived at the fourteenth century, with the result that she is somehow reached: she begins to realize.
As long as she sees only that picture of the shepherd with the sheep, it is rather difficult for her to realize the personal connotation, it does not get to her properly.
It has to be expressed at length to make her see it.
The only thing that touches her is that absolutely primitive compassion for the pregnant lamb, but that is too far away; it is difficult to realize a living connection with those contents.
But here her maternal feeling is touched, and moreover, she is naturally aware of the great emotional importance of
the cult of Mary, so it is quite easy for her to realize that specific feeling.
Obviously, if the unconscious had intended her to realize a different feeling, it would have presented a different picture.
So we must take it that the unconscious is conveying to her the value of the maternal attitude.
Now in respect to what?
Naturally, it could be reduced to the conscious situation; one could say she should have such a maternal attitude to her own child.
But that would mean nothing to her. It would make her sick because she knows all about that.
She is stuck, and that is as if a house were on fire and somebody mildly suggested that it should be put out.
Naturally, one would say: “Go to Hell! Put it out if you can!” She is in that situation.
She has already given enough love to her child, nothing can be done there, it would simply make a resistance against the child.
So this does not apply to the conscious situation. But where could she show her maternal attitude?
Miss Sergeant: To the inferior function.
Dr: Jung: Yes, to the pregnant lamb, and to this bambino.
This is the thing that is weakest in herself, that needs most attention.
The inferior function is not to be disregarded or condemned to death.
Her attitude to it should be like a mother sheltering a little child. Instead of looking down upon her own inferiority, she should accept it.
Now this is a Christian attitude, as when Jesus said that you should give refuge and sanctuary to the least of your brethren, the least of your brethren being yourself.
In the first century after Christ there were philosophers, like Harpocrates, s who already held that the least of your brethren, the inferior man, was yourself, who therefore understood the Sermon on the Mount on the subjective level.
Christ said: “If thou bringest thy gift to the altar and there rememberest that thou hast aught against thyself, leave then thy gift and go thy way; be reconciled to thyself and then come and offer thy gift. ”
That man was two thousand years ahead of his time.
It is a great truth, and it is most probably the real idea behind the Christian teaching, but the disciples were much too primitive.
They asked the most foolish questions; they were not up to it.
People are always astonished when I say that the inferior function should be cared for as if itwere a little child. It sounds all right, sentimental and wonderful, but when it comes to reality, it is another question, because your inferior function may suddenly take a course that you don’t like.
Now, in the same night she had another dream, a fragment: “I am sitting in a harvesting machine and cutting wheat.”
This symbol has also to do with the situation.
Here the trouble, the maternal care of the inferior function, has already begun, and then this dream comes up and
gives an answer.
Now what was her question, what was her doubt and worry, that needed such a reply?
Dr. Schlegel: She doubts if she is able to give the mother instinct, mother care, to the inferior function.
Dr. Jung: Well, it is quite obvious that the unconscious suggests a Mother of God attitude, and that child of Mary was particularly impressive.
That boy was a child of sorrow, he caused most terrible pain to his mother: he denied her; therefore Mary is always symbolized by her heart being pierced by a sword-“a sword will pierce your soul.”
Then they crucified him.
And she loved him probably most of all, not only with the maternal attitude of devotion to the absolutely miserable thing, but also with devotion to the incomprehensible thing.
How could a mother understand that son? Surely no mother would be up to that.
The man thinks and the mother loves him, but she cannot understand him, what he lives.
This dream suggests the Mater Dolorosa; it says: “That child you are going to care for is a child of sorrow and pain.” After such a dream one might well have a doubt, one might easily think: “But why should I play the role of the Mother of God? Is it worth all the worry?”
Mind you, this is a real American woman.
I don’t accuse the Americans of a particularly materialistic attitude-any one of us in Europe would ask if that game was worth the candle, if it was not a perfectly sterile fantasy.
But then one might answer: “You are harvesting a golden field of wheat, which is a beautiful symbol for earning your reward.”
The harvest is the reward for the early part of the year, so since time immemorial the miraculous child has been symbolized by the wheat.
That is the reason why the Host must consist of flour of wheat, why Osiris is symbolized by wheat, and why in the Eleusinian mysteries, when the priest in the epopteia announced the birth of the god, he showed to the people an ear of wheat.
He lifted before the assembled crowd the ear of wheat and he said: “Brimo has given birth to Brimos, the strong one has
given birth to the strong one”; which meant that the earth, the mother, had given birth to Iacchos, the god of wheat, the god supposed to be born in the winnowing fan.
So this idea of earning a reward for the pain and the labor is a very old one.
It means that if we do not submit to the pains of the task, we shall not reap our reward when the time of harvest is come.
But if we devote ourselves to the task, we shall harvest the wheat.
It is the eternal answer by which the unconscious has always replied to the doubts of man.
Prof Demos: Does not this dream of harvesting the wheat also mean that you are actually solving the problem? You are already engaged in the task?
Dr. Jung: Yes, if you have realized the meaning of the dream before.
If that keeps on working in you, if you are engaged upon that path, sure enough, there is a harvest.
Prof Demos: But I thought there was no “if” in the dream.
Dr. Jung: You are quite right; that is what we say, not the unconscious.
But it is quite possible that this woman might disregard the dream and choose another way, for we have a certain amount of freedom.
The whole thing might be dropped from her consciousness. In that case, however, it will in the end produce a neurosis.
When you choose the way which leads you astray or by another way, when you bar the unconscious, that is, you are then up against your unconscious.
It might be advisable sometimes, as otherwise we might be slaves.
But in the long run it doesn’t work, it is not good to be up against nature. Then we simply lose our grip.
We have to choose, we have to consider the way of the unconscious and adapt our will to it.
Inasmuch as this woman does that, she earns the reward at each step. That was true in this case.
After this dream, in the afternoon or evening of the following day, she realized a very positive feeling which she could not explain to herself.
I had not told her the meaning of the dream, so the feeling was quite inexplicable to her.
She said: “For the first time in my life I felt that people could no longer destroy me.”
As you know, she had an extremely intellectual mind, and on the other side her feeling was open to every collective
influence, she was absolutely vulnerable.
That is the typical condition; everything could reach her because she was open to every wind.
Therefore she felt that she must desperately cling to her intellect, for as soon as she dropped into feeling she ceased to exist.
When such people are forced to leave the calm sphere of intellectual raisonnement and use their feeling, they are just gone, dissolved; it is as if a drop of water fell on a hot iron and evaporated.
Anyone who could arouse an emotion in her made her evaporate, disappear.
The consequence of this dream of the wheat was that she had a positive feeling of existence, she seemed to have found a definite pied a terre.
Now how would you explain that? How would that be indicated in the dream symbolism?
Dr. Baynes: Is it not possible that the prejudice about the taking up of the inferior function would be a kind of egotism, and the dream of the wheat shows that it definitely comes from the thing of general value? Would not that establish her morale in what she was doing?
Dr. Jung: That is true, I am certain it would. I only question whether that would not be a too conscious thought if such a thing has happened in her.
I would be rather inclined to explain it along the lines of maternal feeling, which is of course a far more instinctual fact.
That would give her the feeling of indestructibility through the connection with the archetypal figure.
Dr. Baynes: She is reinforced by an indestructible archetype.
Dr. Jung: That is it.
The point is that she touches here upon the archetype of mother love, the mother with child.
That is the archetype which underlies the Christian idea.
As you know, Isis and Osiris were often taken for Christian symbols.
The analogy between the Horus-Isis myth and the Jesus mystery was so obvious that the Catholic church was really
forced to account for it by the official teaching that the whole Horus myth was a legitimate anticipation of the coming of Christ; God allowed that good news to filter through several thousand years before it actually came off.
It is most certainly archetypal, and whenever an archetype is touched the instinct is touched.
The archetype is absolutely indestructible because it is the instinctive store of energy in man.
By the contact with an archetype, one is reinforced, one gets the feeling of tremendous energy.
People pray to symbolical figures because they are the expressions of archetypes and therefore stores of energy.
So in every cult that ever existed on earth, there is a psychological system of myths through which the contact with archetypes is produced.
That is expressed by very primitive Australians in the churinga rite.
The churinga is a slab of wood or stone, analogous to the so-called soul stones which are excavated from caves in Europe, hidden away in rocks and hollows since prehistoric times.
The churinga serves a particular purpose: every man at initiation is given one, and that remains his own individual churinga, a sort of fetish.
The rite is very simple.
The man takes the churinga on his knees and rubs it a long time with his hands, and it is supposed that his bad health-power, his bad libido, will slowly filter into his churinga, so he can rid his system of everything that has gone wrong with him.
Then he stores the stone away in some secret place, in a hollow tree or somewhere in the ground, for instance, and
leaves it for months perhaps, or until he feels rotten again, and then instead of going to have a dream analyzed, he goes back to his churinga and again works all the rotten stuff off into the stone.
For in the meantime the churinga has got rid of it and is healthy again.
I have no theory as to how the churinga does that.
They simply state the fact that when they go back, it is fresh, the wrong stuff digested, and they can get the right stuff out of it again and so renew themselves.
That is the most primitive idea of contacting the archetype in order to be restored with new life power, mana, or libido.
The idea or the image of the archetype is a sort of instinct, not merely an abstract image.
For instance, you can find energy nowhere, energy does not exist, it is abstract; yet you can buy and sell energy, and it has always a specific form, as in a falling stone, in an electric spark, in a waterfall, in anything that moves.
And so it is possible to contact energy in an image.
That is really the fundamental idea in the worship of any idol.
The idol is the form or the picture of the power, and in worshipping that form you contact the power expressed in it and are able to establish a contact with the archetypal instincts again.
If a dream contains a powerful archetype, you are sure to have an effect afterwards.
A more primitive man would say: “I was in a terrible condition until such and such a powerful spirit appeared in my dream, and then everything went all right.”
And you frequently observe in your own case that you are entirely renewed, that the world has changed its face overnight, on account of an archetypal dream.
So this dream of the apparition of the Virgin and Child, the Mother of God, has had the effect of giving the patient the feeling of invulnerability.
In taking care of her own inferior function, she is lifted up to the likeness of the Madonna.
She is now the Mother of Pain and, at the same time, of the child; she is now that mystery, and therefore she is eternal,
indestructible, nobody can reach her there.
That is the reason why there are altars and sanctuaries and cloisters where such identifications can take place; they are simply the exteriorized or concretized expression of that inner function of renewal through contact with the archetype.
That is also expressed in the experiences of primitives, as I told you recently, in their identification with the Alcheringa ancestors: They are lifted up into the archetypes and live an eternal timeless life, an indestructible life; and then they come from that past, which is of course an eternal present, and enter ordinary life again, but still with that feeling of immortality.
The same idea is celebrated in the communion, where one eats the indestructible body.
It is symbolized in every form and in all cults, in the worship of saints, in rubbing against the tombs of the saints, for example, and everywhere it is the same idea of contacting the archetype.
People may even be destroyed by an archetype, their own existence wiped out forever.
In dementia praecox, for instance, it often happens that people are just blasted by an archetype, exploded.
They cannot resist it.
If they have an experience which the ordinary religious man would call an experience of God, instead of realizing it as such and thanking heaven for the grace, they think they are God or three times more than God.
The archetype has sucked them in and swallowed them.
The individual ego is far less resistant; it is futile in comparison.
Therefore the appearance of an archetype in our psychology is always a moment of the greatest danger as well as the greatest hope.
It is a manifestation of extraordinary power, and all religions, as I said, are organized efforts to procure the contact. In the rites of the Catholic church, one sees that again and again: by putting people into contact with archetypes they
produce the magic effect.
That is the idea in this dream, that is the way I would explain the very positive feeling experienced by this woman.
She takes the strength of the archetype into her own system. It is already the harvest.
Miss Wolff The effect of the connection with the archetype seems to me to be expressed in the dream of the harvesting machine.
For the harvest time was fixed by the Catholic church in the month of the birth of the Virgin, and furthermore, astrologically it comes under the sign of Virgo, which I suppose had to do with the fixing of the date by the church.
Also, harvest time is related to the Demeter and Kore myth, which you mentioned in connection with the Eleusinian mysteries.
So I think the dreamer, through having become identified with the archetype, is presented as a goddess of the harvest and at the same time a modern goddess, because she is related by the machine to the actual present time.
Then too the human element comes in because the machine was made by man.
Dr. Jung: That is perfectly true.
The harvest time comes under the zodiacal sign of Virgo, and the Virgin in herself is already the harvest.
That is again an archetype.
The next dream came just the day after: Someone was putting a black veil over my head. It seemed to me that I was meant to wear it always. I said, “This veil will always show.”
Someone answered, “No, it is thin, it is worn over the back part of the head, not over the face.”
What about this veil symbol, considering it in continuation of the line of the dreams? How does the veil come in here as a logical sequence?
Mrs. Crowley: It is always associated with the virgin.
Dr. Jung: In what way?
Dr. Baynes: In taking the veil.
Mrs. Crowley: Seclusion from the world.
Dr. Jung: Yes, they veiled the sacred virgins of history.
Mrs. Sigg: There are virgins with black faces, so this may allude to the dark side of the Madonna.
Dr: Jung: Presumably.
Those black virgins are occasionally black Isis figures, with the specific meaning of the black goddess, an allusion to the black earth.
In an early Christian manuscript, St. Augustine said that the Virgin Mary was really the black earth not yet fecundated by torrents of rain; he used that simile in one of his sermons.
And there was the identity of Mary and the earth in the Eleusinian mysteries, so the black Mary is a relic of the past. There is a black Virgin at Einsiedeln, though they say it is black from the effect of a fire, but they always say that!
The fact is that there are a number of black Isis figures made of basalt that have served as Madonnas in Catholic churches.
Mary was the earth, the dark principle, but since that was close to the chthonic cult of Demeter, it was absolutely denied by the church.
They were very careful to cut out awkward allusions to the past.
The sermons of St. Augustine would not have been particularly welcome a bit later on.
Nevertheless that relation exists. It is the indispensable condition for the wheat symbolism.
Without the blackness of the earth, no wheat could be grown.
But here it is not a black face, it is a black veil, and the veil is not meant to make her face black.
That all virgins should wear veils in order to hide their beauty from the cupidity of man is an old idea which turned up in early Christianity; there is an interesting old book about the veiling of virgins.
It is the veiling of the sex element, as, for instance, women are not allowed to show their hair in church. In certain rites they have a special cloth or veil to cover the hair, because that is a secondary sex indication; it would bring black magic into the church, evil elementals would appear.
And such evils could be conjured up by the beauty of the face, therefore that should be veiled.
Our dreamer has the idea apparently that she is to be veiled forever, as one of those virgins devoted to the cult of the Mother, who have to seclude themselves, to withdraw from the world of desires.
But the voice says: “Not over the face! “-let desires live and work!-“but over the back of the head.” (Just who is
speaking is always a question, but this must be a very superior fellow, for he knows the job very well.) Now why should the back of the head always be veiled?
Mr. Baumann: I think it is a direction from which she might be attacked. You said that she was always in fear on account of her inferior feeling, and in the back she is now sheltered.
Dr. Jung: Well, I don’t know whether a veil offers much protection.
It is more that it veils something that should not be seen, something concealed, as a secret is concealed.
So whatever is in the back of her head should not be seen.
Now what is the meaning of the back part of the head?
Dr. Baynes: The unconscious.
Prof Demos: Is it not the past?
Dr: Jung: Yes, but that is the unconscious.
Prof Demos: I thought it meant her previous life, which she has now left.
Dr. Jung: That is quite possible, but we always carry our past along with us, so I think it is a safe interpretation to assume that the unconscious aspect should be veiled, but the face should be visible.
Whatever one is conscious of may be shown, but what is in the unconscious should not be seen, it should not shine through.
This is very involved symbolism really.
When one thinks of veiling in the Christian sense, it means hiding the beautiful face from unclean eyes.
And if we apply that formula to the dream, it would mean veiling the back part of the head from the eyes of
desirousness, taking the object away from the desires or the curiosity of other people-as if the unconscious might offer something like the beautiful hair of a woman to arouse the sex instinct in man.
To show your face unveiled shows your conscious idea of yourself, you are not hiding what you know of yourself; but you cannot see behind your back, so veiling the back would mean veiling the unconscious.
As a matter of fact, people who are somewhat restricted in their consciousness, who have large areas of unconsciousness, show their unconsciousness in the most offensive fashion; they smear it all over the place, they leave a long trail behind them where one sees the most amazing and horrible things, shocking.
Certain aspects of the unconscious in men as well as women are most irritating and sometimes really devilish.
Therefore the dream would convey the idea: Be conscious-or as conscious as possible neither shirking the dangers of desirousness nor shrinking away from the problems you arouse.
With that conclusion, we reach a very important thought which unfortunately has disappeared from Christianity for many hundreds of years.
That is the idea of a different foundation of morality, more like the Gnostic morality.
We still have traces of it in non-canonical sayings, in the so-called logia, and it can also be seen in the Gospels, though not as clearly.
For instance, in that famous story of the man who was working in the fields on the Sabbath day, when Jesus and the disciples were out walking and met him.
Now that was a mortal sin.
No Jew should work on the Sabbath, and naturally the disciples were horrified.
But Jesus stepped up to the man and said: “If thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blest; but if thou knowest not, thou art cursed and a transgressor of the law.”
This is altogether different from church morality; it is an exceedingly individual morality.
There are still traces of that standpoint in the Catholic church, though they don’t like to speak of it; nevertheless, that the truth of it is used as a working principle has been confirmed to me by a Jesuit father.
The principle is that you have only to confess those sins which you feel to be sins.
If you do a thing which everybody else might condemn as a sin but which you yourself feel not to be one, then you need not confess it; then it is outside of the moral question, it is non-arrive, and the church assumes no authority over it.
Therefore so-called sins, particularly those of an erotic nature where one has no feeling of sin whatever, do not have to be confessed.
If a priest falls in love with a woman and lives with her but does not marry her, and if he sees that the thing makes sense as he most probably feels, if the relation is right from that point of view, then he does not feel that he has sinned.
For he is still living as a bachelor and has not broken the laws of the church, and the church says, non-arrive.
Only if he is fool enough not to veil his back, if he is fool enough to get caught, to make that technical mistake, will they come down on him.
Otherwise it is as if it had not happened.
Now that is the meaning of the veiling of the unconscious side: be wise as the serpent.
This is one of the sayings in the New Testament that points the way to the new morality, the Gnostic morality. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 53-71
